David Erik Nelson

In abstract, my monthly column is about money – how money is a way that we signal our values, the way we track our interest, and the trail left by our investments of time and attention.

Last month I wrote about the stuff I do to earn money. This month let’s talk about something I do that can’t conceivably ever earn me a damned dime: The Workantile.

The Workantile is a business-like entity on Main Street in Ann Arbor [1]. In contrast to pretty much any other “business” on Main Street, we sell neither goods nor services.

Our business is maintaining a space where a community of independent workers can sit together and work on their own things. Our space is around 3,000-square-feet, and has lots of rolling tables and chairs (so that the space can be reconfigured in any way that interests the members and serves their ends), as well as a kitchenette, a clean and commodious bathroom, a couple of phonebooth-esque things, a couple of conference rooms, some lockers and bike racks, and an awesome printer/scanner/copier.

We also have half of an ancient, homebrew quadrophonic stereo hooked up to a wifi bridge which, combined with our brick walls, high ceilings, and hardwood floors, means that we have a pretty sweet-ass dance hall sound system, too. [2]

Some of our members work together formally – either for the same employer with home offices in some distant and exotic place (usually California), or on projects of their own devising. But mostly we work separately, tapping away on our keyboards with headphones on.

We work on our own without having to work all alone. It’s nicer than a coffee shop, because there’s no milk-steamer roar, no awkward break-up happening at the next table, and no creepy old dudes leering at your sandaled feet. Our doors lock, so the crazies are limited to those who stay current on their membership dues (i.e., me).

You can go to the bathroom without worrying that someone is going to steal your laptop or rifle your purse. Also, when clients meet you in a coffee shop, they think, “Ugh. I guess this is how we have to do business in the 21st Century.” When clients meet you at Workantile — with our industrious brick walls, antiquey tin ceilings, and huge windows — they think “I can’t believe this gal isn’t charging me more!”

That, my friends, is an excellent thing for your clients to think.

So, to dispense with the hard sell: Come down today (or any other weekday) for a tour and a FREE Day Pass!!!

But, believe it or not, Workantile hasn’t been kept up and running since 2009 in order to furnish freelancers with hardwood floors and a kitchenette. Most of us already have those in our actual houses, conveniently located near our actual beds. Heck, several of our members have other downtown offices already, in addition to home offices. For these folks, we’re sort of their third place workspace.

There are scads of things our members love about the place – the Social Thursday lunches, the liquor tastings, having smart folks in other industries to bounce ideas off of, the shockingly fast and stable Internet connection, the classy downtown digs so close to so much damned good food – and none of them are our most vital offering. But these are our easiest-to-enumerate offerings, because things like conference rooms and Zingerman’s coffee and a kegerator are really easy to see and touch and understand, while our vital offering is obtuse and confusing and abstract.

The Wily American Freelancer

The thing we’re here to provide our members is a need that otherwise goes unmet:

Workantile exists to mitigate risk for independent workers.

How many “independent workers” are there in the U.S. workforce? [3]. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), as of 2010 just shy of 11% of the U.S. workforce was “self-employed” That accounts for 15.3 million people. A more recent study puts this number up near 17 million for 2012 – but is sort of a macintoshes-galas comparison to the 2010 BLS number.

However many millions of Americans are “self-employed,” we all agree it’s a diverse crowd: It includes graphic designers and plumbers; it includes me, and also includes Warren Buffet. I’m told Warren is a rad dude, and I’ve met plenty of plumbers who I’d gladly call brother, but just to be clear: Workantile doesn’t have room to store Roto-Rooter machines, and doesn’t exist to help mitigate Warren Buffet’s risk. We serve the interests of much smaller fish.

Meanwhile, folks like the Freelancer’s Union (who have a very similar mission to Workantile, albeit with an entirely dissimilar execution) currently estimate that about one-third of the American workforce is composed of freelancers of the kind Workantile serves. That’s up from one-quarter a few years ago. [4]

Business Risk

Even at the absolute low-ball of 10% of the workforce, that’s still a healthy chunk of workers, and like all workers from sea to shining sea, they’re likely to get screwed by their employers. But there are some idiosyncratic ways that freelancers get screwed – ways that take advantage of the psychological isolation that traditionally goes hand-in-hand with freelancing.

Take, for example, the “design contest.”

Here’s how you run this con – pardon me, I meant “totally legitimate business practice.” Let’s say you run a company and need a new logo. You could hire a graphic designer, negotiate a fair rate with him or her, and launch into the process of developing and executing a design. In the end, you’d wind up with all of the “assets” you need (e.g., a high-resolution image of the logo, files in all the various graphical formats and sizes you need, maybe a stripped down mini black-and-white version for business cards, etc.) and the designer gets paid.

But that sorta smacks of effort – all that placing ads and interviewing people! – as well as risk: Once you invest the time in finding candidates, narrowing them to the most promising, and hiring someone, what if he or she flakes out, or produces nothing you like? What if you misread the relationship, and it’s just not a good fit? Your big company might lose a small sum of money! Heaven forefend! There’s got to be a better way!

Well, there is! Instead of hiring a freelancer, why not run a “contest”? Ask graphic designers to come up with a new logo for you – for no fee, promised or implied – and submit it. Once you see some things you like, you can ask these “finalists” to make the revisions you want, and the best logo – the one you decide you want – is the “winner.” What’s the prize? Well, duh, getting paid the fee you earned, silly artists! [5]

But what about all the other artists who did the same amount of work at your behest (resulting in a final product that no one but you would conceivably buy)? Doesn’t their labor deserve remuneration? Nope! They’re losers! Only the winner gets money – because this isn’t payment; it’s a prize!

I’m going to level with you: Lots of freelancers are “fine” with spec work like this. If you want to work for free, they say, then you should do so. On the other side, lots of freelancers get really lathered about this, since injecting free labor into the pool drives down the value of everyone’s work.

I have opinions on both of those takes, but none of them are germane here – because my beef isn’t with the payment model [6], it’s with the risk.

A larger entity can always absorb more risk. If AT&T hires me for $10,000 to design a logo and I botch the job, then someone has egg on their face, but it isn’t gonna sink AT&T  [7]. On the other hand, if I invest $10,000 worth of time into working with AT&T and they decide I’m not the Big Contest Winner, I lose my house.

The Psychology of Isolation

“Fine,” you might say, “It’s a free country; you shouldn’t do spec work if you can’t afford it.”

To which I generally say “Amen!” – because there are times where working on spec is totally reasonable and appropriate. The “corporate logo contest” isn’t one of them, but that doesn’t mean that legit on-spec situations don’t exist.

The problem is that isolated independent workers – isolated humans – are so easily manipulated. We’re social animals, and social animals will tend to agree with a unanimous majority, even when the thing we’re agreeing to is absolutely outlandish. [8]

This, to me, is what makes something like the Workantile superior both to public, quasi-social workplace stopgaps (like coffee shops) and to “virtual” communities like this or that forum, Facebook Group, Tumblr coven, or even the Freelancer’s Union.

The problem with the “on spec contest” is not that we don’t know that it’s a fool’s wager. The problem is that in the moment when we’re asked to work for free, we feel outvoted. When a bunch of people (albeit all on the same “team”) are telling you it’s a good idea to do something that’s in their interest (and not in yours), it’s devilishly hard to hold the line.

But when we sit together day after day with fellow travelers – even if they are from “outside our industry,” and even if we do so mostly in silence – we draw strength from the knowledge of their existence, from our confidence that they share our view. When you go to the negotiation chamber, these coworkers are with you in spirit, and when someone asks you to give up something for nothing, the still little flame in the center of your brain whispers: “Fuck that noise! Trek or Bill or Sarah would never agree to that bullshit!” And so you don’t, either.

We don’t second guess ourselves as much, because we have a tribe, too, and that tribe is a powerful thing.

When we talk about “independents” and “coworking” and the new migratory workers and the spaces to accommodate them, we always mention the hardwood floors and the wifi and the ping-pong tables, or whatever.

But none of that matters. What matters is that this hidden nation of wandering workers is finally finding a way to locate each other and gather around the same fires, to put the gloom to our backs and see our vital connection.

My Shameless Hard Sell

And here we come back to the hard sell: Maybe the thing we do down at Workantile (118 S. Main Street, in the heart of sunny Ann Arbor!) is a thing you need to be doing, too. Come down for a free Day Pass, and see if working with us works for you.

Notes

[0] Some number of readers might have tuned in for the next installment in Dave’s Meandering Exploration of Guns in America. This is not that. You’ll get more guns next month – if The Chronicle can finish making whatever pie charts Nelson needs. But if you need to read something about guns right now, you can head over here and read Nelson’s thoughts about the hoopla surrounding Defense Distributed’s 3D-printed “Liberator” pistol.

[1] It may seem like this column is shaping up to be an advertisement for a business in which I have an investment interest. That is indeed the case. But fret not, for while I’ve invested thousands in Workantile, the way our operation is structured (and our cripplingly low membership dues) almost guarantee that I’ll never see a dime of profit. Heck, here’s my K-1 from 2012; please note those negative signs.

[2] These “coworking spaces” are increasingly common throughout the developed world. When we were founded in 2009-ish, there were a few dozen across the United States. Today there are around 800 (and more than 1000 worldwide) – which would seem to make us one of the oldest coworking spaces in the nation, if not the woooorld. Score!

[3] The term “independent worker” is tricky. The classic division is to say that anyone who receives a W-2 is an “employee” (since these are issued by employers to report wages and tax withholdings), while folks who received 1099s are “independents” (since this is what companies issue to independent contractors) – often called “freelancers.”

But there is lots of overlap here: I’ve had plenty of years where I’ve received at least a half-dozen W-2s and 1099s by April. And there’s also folks left out of the Venn Diagram entirely. For example, we rarely think of lawyers or financial advisors as “freelancers” – although many essentially are – and many one-person shops are actually organized as LLCs (“limited liability companies”). Many authors I know, for example, do so, and are essentially employees of a company for which they are also the owner. These might traditionally be thought of as “sole proprietorships” – that is, “businesses” owned and operated by a lone individual who basically draws no distinction between his or her business and personal assets.

On the other side of the coin, the workforce is increasingly populated with folks who look like freelancers, but are actually full-time employees with benefits and everything (so-called “remote workers”). But beware of that term, as it is also sometimes used to lump together both benefits-receiving W-2 employees who work from home with off-site temps and contractors.

All of these “independent workers” share the same “lifestyle risks” and “business risks,” but the key business risk I’m about to describe disproportionately falls upon the freelancer-like “non-employee independent workers.”

[4] I have no clue where they’re getting these numbers. I’ve been told on several occasions by third parties that this is based on the number of Americans filing at least one 1099. If so, then that number is pretty insanely inaccurate. For example, back when I was a fully employed teacher – and absolutely no one’s idea of a “freelancer” or “independent worker” – I regularly filed 1099s for tutoring work, as well as articles and stories I sold to periodicals.

[5] Big points to my dear pal Morgan Johnson for bringing to my attention this company whose entire business is running such “contests,” and thus screwing legions of earnest, well-meaning, inexperienced freelancers. 

[6] Although, just to shoe-horn this in, ethically speaking you should always be willing to pay people for work you ask them to do. Just sayin’. If they want to make a gift of the work, that’s their call, but it strikes me as gauche to ask – or even demand – someone give you a gift. We, in fact, have words for situations where the strong demand gifts from the weak. Those words are not flattering.

[7] $10,000 flushed down the toilet from trusting a graphically crippled guy like me to come up with your next logo would be essentially a rounding error to the Big Blue Death Star: AT&T saw $126 billion in revenue in 2012, up three billion from the year before. Even if you multiplied the graphic designer’s $10,000 fee by one million, it would still amount to less than 10% of AT&T’s revenue for one year.

[8] I know, I know: You’re a unique snowflake who knows his mind and no one’s the boss of you. You’re never swayed by groupthink. Please go read about the Asch Conformity Experiments.

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From left to right: indoor phone booth, tiny house, and a crosswalk.

I attended this program, in part, at the invitation of a friend who lives in Toledo – because I am an architect, and I am working on the design of a small bunkhouse for their summer cottage in Ontario.

Architecture is about creating meaningful spaces and about communicating that meaning to the occupants and users of those spaces. For me, the Small Worlds exhibition triggered a series of thoughts about elements of physical culture in Ann Arbor and whether that culture is successfully serving its purpose in the city.

I’m going to wrap a lot into this notion of physical culture – from pedestrian amenities, to accessory dwelling units, to a phone booth. The phone booth is something I’m planning to add to the physical culture of my own workspace – at Workantile on Main Street in Ann Arbor. So that’s where I’ll start, with something tinier even than Jay Shafer’s 65-square-foot house.

Inside Work

Workantile, a co-working community at 118 S. Main St., is housed in a large, open office space in an old storefront where independent workers can work in the company of others, rather than in solitude. Chronicle editor Dave Askins and I are both members. On any given day, a handful to more than a couple dozen people might be at work throughout the space, all focusing on their own projects. And life in the 21st century means that people get phone calls and need to have conversations that they don’t necessarily want to share.

One of several indoor phone booth design concepts by Philip Proefrock.

The open, unbroken space of Workantile, with its hardwood floors and exposed brick walls, makes it very acoustically “live.” The space can be very quiet even when there are a dozen people all working on their own projects, and the ring of a cell phone, or the subsequent talking, can carry through the space. A small “phone room” – a closet with a glass door – provides one bit of acoustic privacy.

If that space is taken, members have learned to use other nooks, such as the landing down the back steps, or a corner by the kitchenette, to avoid intruding on other members. But there are times on busy days when several people all need to talk on their phones at the same time, and there aren’t enough corners for everyone. So I am working on the design of an indoor phone booth.

Workantile members using their phones will have some additional privacy for their conversations, and other members will have less of a noise distraction.

The phone booth will be a tiny place, more a piece of furniture than a room, and it won’t even include the amenity that phone booths have traditionally offered – a phone.

Instead, it will indicate through its physical attributes that it’s the place you go to use your phone. It’ll look like a phone booth, and the sides will be transparent, so when Workantile members use it, it’ll be clear what they’re doing in there – using their phones.

A view from inside Workantile onto Main Street. The telephone-shaped object hanging on the wall does not denote that it's a good place for making a phone call. It's a luminary that was constructed at one of the workshops in preparation for the FoolMoon celebration on Friday, March 30.

The current “phone closet” already offers the functionality that the phone booth will. But for a visitor or a new member, the intended use of the phone closet is not self-evident. It looks and feels like a very tiny office, with a door like any other door in the Workantile. You can’t see what people are doing in there. We could put a sign next to it to identify it as a place for phone calls. But that would not convey as clearly and as intuitively, even from 40 feet away, a basic fact about the Workantile community: The phone booth is a good place to take phone calls, and generally we try to be considerate of other people working.

Once it’s built, new members won’t have to ask where they can go to have a phone conversation. The physical form of the phone booth will serve to define and reinforce the intended activity. And it will do that with less confusion and conflict between different users who are sharing a single space.

Outside Travel

Most Ann Arborites are not Workantile members, so they do not need to worry about how to share indoor space cooperatively by using their phones in the right places. But outdoors, we share space with each other throughout the city – as phone users, pedestrians and motorists.

I recently had a near encounter with a young woman (likely a student, given her apparent age and proximity to campus) who, while talking on her phone, walked out in front of my vehicle in the middle of a block, emerging from between two parked cars. She crossed the street with the seeming certainty that the law gave her the right to cross wherever was most convenient. There are those who think that a new city ordinance gives pedestrians carte blanche (and that the city’s laws take precedence over the laws of physics).

Seventh & Washington in Ann Arbor looking northwest. The crosswalk includes an island in the middle of the street as well as a "local law" sign.

Many of the pedestrian/vehicle crossings in Ann Arbor offer little beyond some road paint, and a tiny local law sign in some instances. These don’t do a particularly good job of encouraging pedestrians to cross at particular points, nor do they help manage the interaction between pedestrian and vehicle. Establishing ordinance language coupled with enforcement does not necessarily encourage the main behavior we’d like to see motorists and pedestrians display: caution. Instead it encourages people to think in terms of “rights.”

What we have, then, are crossings where pedestrians have a legal right-of-way, but little more than crosswalk markings and signage to distinguish the point. Pedestrians (if they want to be safe) must still play a waiting game to see if traffic will slow stop before they can venture into a cross walk. Motorists must estimate whether someone standing in the general vicinity of a crosswalk intends to cross, or perhaps is merely waiting for a bus at an immediately adjacent bus stop.

As more motorists conform to the requirement that they yield to pedestrians, other motorists are confronted more frequently with stopped or slowing vehicles ahead of them. A stopped or slowing vehicle by itself is sometimes not a sufficient cue to an inattentive following motorist – and that can result in a rear-end collision. I’ve seen the aftermath of at least one such incident like this along Plymouth Road.

Seventh & Washington in Ann Arbor. The signal is flashing yellow. The camera caught it between flashes. Recently, pedestrian-activated rapid flashing beacons were installed with additional signage – look for the horizontal bar just below the yellow diamond. The two pedestrians here did not activate the flasher – but when they'd alighted on the center island, the motorist yielded.

Changes to physical culture that go beyond road paint and signs can convey meaning to pedestrians and motorists alike – and provide additional cues that their behavior needs to accomodate a special circumstance. Take for example Ann Arbor’s relatively new HAWK pedestrian crossing signal and the very new rapid flashing beacons. The HAWK has been installed along Huron Avenue just west of downtown, and the rapid flashing beacons  have been installed at crosswalks along Plymouth Road and at Seventh & Washington.

Such signals invite pedestrians to do something more than just stand there – they’re meant to press a button to activate the signal. And the signals provide an unambiguous indication to motorists of a pedestrian’s intent. The flashing lights provide an additional cue to following motorists, to alert them to a possibly slowing or stopped car ahead.

However, meaning-laden physical infrastructure need not take the form of signalization. An example of a simple, meaningful infrastructural element – that conveys the same message as a blinking yellow light or a sign that reads “SLOW” – can be found in a residential street in Bloomington, Ind. (pointed out to me in a conversation with Chronicle publisher Mary Morgan). On South Lincoln Street where it crosses Dodds Street, the curbs are bumped out into the roadway on both sides.

Northbound South Lincoln Street at Dodds Street in Bloomington, Indiana. (Image links to Google Streetview)

Motorists and bicyclists need to exercise added caution to navigate through the narrower space. And a pedestrian who’s crossing Lincoln Street can venture into the roadway by the width of the bump-out, to get a clear view of traffic that might be approaching. It’s also clearer to oncoming motorists what the intention of such a pedestrian might be. The bump-outs also reduce the width of roadway that pedestrians must cross – reducing their potential risk of being struck by a car.

Of course you don’t have to travel to southern Indiana to see bump-outs. They’re also a part of the Fifth and Division streetscape improvements that were undertaken in downtown Ann Arbor over the past year.

The bump-outs are consistent with an idea that’s been tried in several European cities – completely removing signage and signals.

The distinct lack of all traffic signs conveys meaning – that everyone needs to proceed with care and be fully aware of their surroundings; no traffic light or street sign will tell you what to do or who has right of way. In these cases, drivers have to adapt and be more considerate of other drivers and pedestrians.

Example of an intersection in Drachten Holland with little signage and no signalization. Photograph by Jerry Michalski.

Everyone using the space, drivers and pedestrians alike, have equal rights. They pay attention to what is going on around them. They also work more cooperatively, because everyone instinctively understands that two people or vehicles can’t occupy the same space at the same time. People who are given no external cues at all tend to work together to get through each encounter with a minimum of disruption to all. And the rate of accidents and of injuries to pedestrians has been reduced where this approach has been tried.

As Matthias Schulz notes in writing about cities without traffic controls, “Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What’s more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.”

Physical Limits

It was the use of physical limits on space, and the extreme example of Jay Shafer’s tiny houses, that first got me thinking about physical culture. The initial drive to create a tiny house came from Shafer’s belief in a lifestyle that does not require a large number of possessions. The tiny house movement may just be a counterpoint to the inflation in house sizes that has occurred over the last half century. Instead of pushing to add space to a house because, “we’ve got too much stuff,” opting for a tiny house is a choice that requires more materially-limited living.

This Tumbleweed Tiny House model is called the Walden, offering 117 square feet.

It would be possible to attempt a simpler lifestyle living in an average-size house. But one of Shafer’s tiny houses creates a physical limitation on the occupant that enforces a simple lifestyle requiring only a few physical possessions. It is much easier to live a life with just a few possessions if your home offers only 65 instead of 2,700 square feet. That latter figure was the average-sized American new home in 2009 – more than 40 times the size of the XS Tumbleweed house.

Shafer doesn’t try to satisfy all possible needs within a small house. Instead, he believes in living in the larger community. The town becomes your living room, with all of its amenities to choose from; the local restaurants serve as part of your kitchen, which help supplement the lone hotplate in a Tumbleweed house.

Legal Limits on Space

If living in a tiny house means living in the larger community, part of that includes putting your tiny house on some land somewhere in the physical space of that larger community. Most communities have laws that govern how land may or may not be used – zoning laws. Zoning laws define, among other things, what kinds of buildings may or may not be built on a particular piece of property, and where a building can or cannot sit on the property.

When Shafer lived in Iowa, where he built the first model of the tiny house, he originally had it on a piece of property six miles outside of town. But he wanted to reduce his travel distance into town, to align better with a lifestyle of reduced material consumption. When he went about moving his house into town, he found that the house was smaller than the minimum allowable building size. What he wound up doing was buying the cheapest house in town and moving his tiny house into the back yard of that lot. He then lived in his tiny house while he rented out the “main” house to others.

Of course, Ann Arbor has done its own dance around the issue of tiny houses. That’s taken the form of a conversation about whether to allow the construction of an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) or so-called “granny flat,” a detached building, usually just a one-bedroom apartment, on the same lot with a house. ADUs might be a bit larger than the Tumbleweed tiny houses, but they’re still generally no more than a few hundred square feet.

Although the city of Ann Arbor planning commission has looked at the issue of accessory dwelling units several times over the last decade or so, the matter has never been brought before the city council for consideration. That’s because it has been a focus of vocal opposition from some quarters.

Currently, the only kind of “accessory apartments” allowed in Ann Arbor are those that are attached to the principal dwelling and are less than 600 square feet. Additional requirements include: The principal dwelling must be owner-occupied, and the occupant of the accessory apartment must be a relative of the owner. The special exception use for accessory apartments has been sought only twice since it was added to the zoning regulations for residential properties in the 1980s.

A Tumbleweed tiny house parked in an Ann Arbor backyard could not meet the conditions of the special exception accessory apartment use. But as a detached accessory dwelling unit, a tiny house, whether a trailer-mounted Tumbleweed house or a site-specific small accessory building, could offer great benefit to those who would like to have a family member live on the premises, but not necessarily under the same roof – such as an elderly parent or a teenager who needs a bit more private space.

And a tiny house could offer an older homeowner the option of having a tenant who could also help with some chores as part of a rental agreement. But that arrangement would also fail to meet the current standards of a special exception accessory apartment use.

Allowing detached ADUs on appropriately-sized lots with less strict conditions on occupancy arrangements would provide immediate benefits to property owners. And it would permit an incremental increase in total population density over time. Even if such an ordinance revision were to be approved by the city council, it would likely take a number of years before many homeowners added such buildings to their property.

Concluding Thoughts

Using the physical environment to express a rule and to enforce a concept is nothing new. We’re familiar with the idea that keeping people off the grass is more effectively achieved with a security fence, not just a sign that reads “Keep Off the Grass.”

But security fences aren’t necessarily pretty. A border of flower beds might just as effectively keep people from trampling on a lawn. As we think about building a physical environment that helps shape our interactions, I think it’s worth focusing on making those physical elements attractive as well as functional. Too often, a design gets focused on serving just one function or achieving one goal, and it may accomplish that end adequately, but it’s not terribly attractive.

HAWK signals and rapid flashing beacons are examples of a functional way that physical infrastructure can help support the goals of a pedestrian-friendly city. But they are not things of beauty.

It’s not hard to imagine a more attractive way to manage the interface between cars and pedestrians, even though I’m not a traffic engineer and have no expertise in designing aesthetically-pleasing traffic infrastructure. But I do know something about designing indoor spaces for people to inhabit, even if it’s just for the brief time required to take a phone call. I’m hoping to complete the first version of the phone booth in a couple of months.

If you’d like to see it in person, stand outside the door at 118 S. Main and peer inside. For a member of the Workantile community, your standing there will convey meaning. And someone will likely come open the door for you.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of local columnists like Philip Proefrock. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!