237: Regime Change

Ira Glass

It's This American Life from WBEZ Chicago distributed by Public Radio International. A couple weeks ago, one of the producers of our show, our senior producer Julie Snyder, was out with a bunch of friends. And they ended up in a conversation where they stumbled on this thing that had happened to all of them, though they never realized how universal it was. For all of them, back they were kids, back in the '80s, their parents got divorced and then remarried. And they all agreed the re-marriage was way harder than the divorce.

Ira Glass

It's not the divorce that kills you, it's the re-marriage. Just like it's not the war that's so difficult sometimes, it's the reconstruction after-- trying to build something new, trying to put a new regime in place, even if the old regime wasn't so great. New people are jockeying for power. It's unclear who gets what, who'll get their way on a 1,000 little issues. It's hard even if everybody really wants it to go well.

Ira Glass

Well today in our program, regime change. Like charity, regime change begins at home. We have three stories of the new people coming in, shaking things up, doing things their way. Forget about doing it in a foreign country with over 20 million people who don't speak your language and share your religion, even in the smallest possible setting, it's daunting.

Our program today in three acts, act one, unconquerable. In that act, the story of that one store, that one place on the corner. You know what I'm talking about. Every neighborhood has one. Where the new owners come and go. New businesses come and go. And none of them can make it work, none of them can make a profit or stay very long.

Act two, or give me death. The story of a political party that wants to take over a state, impose their will on the locals, and what happens when they show up in a state that they're thinking of conquering, Vermont, and meet the natives for the very first time. Act three, the heart is a lonely junta. The story of a man reluctant to accept a very, very local regime change. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one-- unconquerable. There's this storefront in Washington DC, it's got location, location, and location. The neighborhood is gentrifying. Property values are high. There's lots of money everywhere. It's right by a bus stop. It's 10 minutes from the subway in the most densely populated neighborhood of the city, a place called Adams Morgan. By all rights, it should succeed. Yet every business that goes in there fails. Like some colonial country that throws off every conquering nation that tries to take it. Katie Davis has lived a block away from that storefront since she was 10 years old and decided, once and for all, she was going to look into it.

Katie Davis

Everybody in the neighborhood talks about it. What's wrong with 1801 Columbia road? It's weird. The storefront straddles the biggest intersection we've got with huge wraparound windows. But they're always dark. Eight businesses have tried this space in 35 years, eight.

In 1968 there was Eddie Leonard's-- incredible steak and cheese sandwiches. Then--

Katie Davis

And it became Al's Supreme, exact same menu.

Katie Davis

Next, the Long John Silver's opened and never did well.

Katie Davis

So for a while, it was a Latino disco with pink walls and mirrors And then a place called Cosmos.

Katie Davis

And here it gets a little fuzzy. No one can remember the name of the next place.

Katie Davis

Then there was a Boston Market, and a kebab place that never took. And finally, a Chinese restaurant tried its luck.

Katie Davis

Chinese Restaurant Number One is what the sign said. But they took it down.

Katie Davis

I went to see the old-timers about the store, people who've been here forever. Mr George Dravillas holds court in the wood paneled real estate office he opened in 1953, just a half block from the storefront in question. Mr. Dravillas fingers through a withered school notebook pasted with tiny, I mean, minuscule real estate ads that go back decades. He's had his name on at least half the leases and deeds in the neighborhood, but Mr. Dravillas has never handled any transaction at 1801 Columbia Road. He has a simple explanation for why any business there is doomed.

Katie Davis

Constantine Stavropoulos has a different theory. He owns two successful restaurants in the neighborhood, and he's the head of our business association. When Constantine arrived five years ago, the neighborhood myth was that there was no daytime business. And then he opened his coffee shop, Tryst. People sat on the lumpy sofas and made it a hang-out. Pretty soon, Constantine opened a 24-hour diner just two doors down, same whomping success.

So the guy has instincts along with his MBA. And when Constantine had a chance to open his diner at 1801 Columbia Road, those instincts told him, stay away. 1801 only looks like a good location, he says. Really, it's a mirage. People are at that intersection but never on that corner.

Katie Davis

At this point, it might help if you picture the corner. 18th and Columbia Road has wide roomy streets and bus stops on three sides. There's a bank and a McDonald's that's always busy. To the south, there are 60 businesses crammed into the first and second floors. All of this feeds into the intersection. Just a few steps to the north, though, all retail stops, taken over by somber row-homes, a dead zone merging into dead space. Which brings us to the whole chicken and egg problem of how to explain this corner. Do businesses fail because there's no foot traffic? Or is there no foot traffic because the businesses are crummy?

Katie Davis

Mention the failed storefront to Sid Drazin at Comet Liquor and Deli and be prepared to stick around for a while as he launches into his business-according-to-Sid talk. He paces behind the register, lecturing, ringing up a turkey on rye. He says, remember the guys who leased the storefront back in 1995 and opened a Boston Market franchise? They were sure roasted chicken would draw a crowd.

Katie Davis

The Boston Market guys didn't listen to him. Sid's been four doors down from the corner for 22 years, and they didn't listen. They opened and folded after two years and two months. As we talk about this, Sid sighs, over and over. Look, he says, the only way you'll draw people to that store is if you make it a designated corner.

Katie Davis

Let me take one of those. Here's the problem with shoe repair. The rent at 1801 is about $10,000 a month. High for the neighborhood, but not unheard of. Shoe makers charge $25 for a new leather sole. You'd have to have 400 come in every month with an old shoe just to make the rent, not to mention taxes, insurance, and a couple of employees.

Or you'd have to do what Sid does at Comet Liquor and Deli. There's nothing in the store you can't get at other places in the neighborhood. He sells bagels to the yuppies, truffles to old ladies, and pint-sized bottles of vodka to the guys who drink on the corner. And there's a copy machine that's broken most of the time. It's a store held together by sheer force of personality. People come for Sid.

Katie Davis

The bosom theory makes sense to Mary Godwin, although she differs on what it takes to hold the community close. She says, she used to march into 1801 Columbia Road and tell the owner.

Katie Davis

Mary was a neighborhood star back in the 1950's when she was a champion roller skater, and then tended bar down at Millie & Al's. Mary always wanted to own a pub with regulars. She always wanted to put it at 1801, but whenever it came up for lease, she never had the cash. If only though, if only Mary had gotten that lease, her husband Tony would have worked the door. They would have called it Bailey's.

Katie Davis

There was a time that storefront flourished. It was in the early 1970's when it was Eddie Leonard's, a sandwich shop owned by an ex-boxer.

Katie Davis

I never saw lines out the door, but I was at home being 12. I know my mom went there after bar-hopping. My friend, Reggie, had a few years on me, and he made 1801 Columbia Road home base, ordering a $0.10 Coke and hanging out for hours on the orange plastic chairs. He says, by 3:00 in the morning, everyone in the place was drunk, high, or trying to get high.

Katie Davis

Back then 1801 was a destination, an open house for the neighborhood. Women clicked through the door in their heels, Afros and beehives jutting up. Men in popcorn shirts and platform shoes, gamblers, bouncers, dancers, they all came in. Reggie says that the night pizza-man at 1801 was a 17 year old everyone called by his childhood nickname, Stinky.

Katie Davis

No one said this to Stinky's face though. He was six foot five, 230 pounds and already hard from 22 juvenile arrests and reform school. People steered clear of Stinky. He carried a gun, and he robbed people, sometimes a half block from that corner where he worked.

Katie Davis

In the end, the building gave Stinky up. He stood right in the windows of 1801 twirling pizzas wearing that baseball cap. Police made the connection, and stinky got 37 years to life. Just a couple years later when the sandwich shop closed, the string of failures started.

Even people who don't know the real story will tell you, a murderer worked there, and that's what went wrong. The local weekly once wrote a story about the corner and headlined it, "The Curse of Stinky." Nearly everyone I spoke with eventually got around to the idea of a curse. Here's Mr. Dravillas when he was trying to explain the problem with the door at 1801 Columbia Road.

Katie Davis

Or here's Mark Winstead checking a rim up the block at City Bikes.

Katie Davis

And this is Pat Patrick, another big real estate broker.

Katie Davis

On the other hand, maybe for a neighborhood to be in balance there has to be an accursed storefront, the one corner that everyone rolls their eyes at, the problem child. It brings people together, and it gives us something we can all agree on.

So Starbucks, that's the latest. Starbucks signed a lease at 1801. They're going to load in a bunch of Sumatra beans and Kenyan blend, put cushy chairs in the windows and offer wireless access. How, you might wonder, how can 1801 Columbia Road trip up Starbucks? They've got 4,000 stores. They've got to have the formula down pat, know exactly what makes people walk in and order a Frappuccino.

Katie Davis

Starbucks regional marketing director, Shannon Jones, stands in the doorway of 1801. She offers the track record. Starbucks has 35 stores in Washington DC and has never closed one.

Katie Davis

She says this, and I want to say, which stars are you talking about? Think about it though. Starbucks has a product that's physically addictive, and enough money to wait forever for the store to turn a profit. The neighborhood's full of office workers, freelancers, dot-commers, and consultants. Shannon Jones says, what ruins other businesses is often what works for Starbucks. Take the lack of parking, not a problem.

Katie Davis

At the end of the interview, I have to say I'm sold. Starbucks will be the one that makes it. When I float this, Pat the realtor predicts Starbucks will last 13 months, no longer. And Sid, well, Sid can't help himself. He just double, double dares them to try.

Katie Davis

The truth is though, many people will cross their fingers for the new Starbucks. They've been waiting for someone to light up those windows. Because as entertaining as it is to project all this drama onto that corner, it would be a relief to see someone figure out what works there. Every time it goes dark, you get this feeling that the dead space is gaining power. That it's swallowing up projects, life savings, and dreams. You start to use the other side of the street.

Ira Glass

Katie Davis in Washington DC. Coming up, casing the state of Vermont before you try to take it all. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, regime change in everyday life. Stories of the new people coming in, taking over, full of hubris. And how hard it is to win over the locals even in the most mundane of settings.

We've arrived at act two of our program, act two, or give me death. Libertarians, you've probably heard of them, right? Maybe you aren't exactly sure what they stand for. All right, here is a short list: no gun laws, no restrictions on drug use, no income tax. And I'll say that one again, no taxes. They'd like to make government as small as humanly possible. Maybe you also know, they almost never get elected to office, any office. Last year a guy named Jason Sorens came up with a plan to remedy that. His plan, gather up some 20,000 libertarians, move to a state, a small state, vote the friends into office, and then slowly take over. Sarah Koenig got herself invited to a recruiting meeting of The Free State Project.

Sarah Koenig

The meeting was in College Park, Maryland at a restaurant designed to look like a French farmhouse. About 35 people were waiting for Jason to arrive. I thought they were going to be sort of like republicans, only more so but that wasn't quite it. There was something at once bookish and eager about them, like people in love with an idea and happy to chat about it if you show the least amount of interest. This is Nixie Chesnovitch. She looks nothing like my libertarian stereotype. She's young and hip and has cropped purple hair.

Sarah Koenig

Tyranny might sound a bit extreme coming from these people; they hardly seem oppressed. They have multiple degrees, good jobs, some with the government, families, and they like where they live. So what's their big complaint? It's not only that there are too many tax laws and too many gun laws. There are too many laws period. They all have this injured feeling that it wasn't supposed to be this way. As if the promise of American freedom born in 1776 was made to them personally, and 227 years later everyone but them has forgotten.

Sarah Koenig

She's from rural Tennessee.

Sarah Koenig

Jason Sorens arrives. It turns out the leader of this revolution is 26 years old and looks about 19. He's wearing a white turtleneck, pale-blue jeans, and resembles a dark-haired Macaulay Culkin. I wonder if maybe this is all part of some experiment for his doctorate, which he is getting in political science at Yale. It isn't. He stands in front of the gathering while they order food-- mostly burgers and curly fries-- and lays out the plan.

Sarah Koenig

Hearing him talk, you feel not so much as if you're in the presence of a political rabble browser, but a supremely intelligent and gentle rabbit. The initial goals of the Free State Project, he tells them, would be to get rid of taxes, privatize all public schools, and abolish eminent domain and zoning laws.

He thinks the 20,000 and their allies could start to win local elections by the year 2010. By 2020 they'd have state offices. A governor and a sympathetic state supreme court by about 2025. The project is about freedom, so bigots and homophobes need not sign up. And yes, they have a mascot. A cartoon porcupine because Jason says, it's cute and not aggressive, but you wouldn't want to mess with it.

Later Jason tells me how it all started. Libertarians have been derisively called the party of 2%, because there's so few of them. Jason thought, well there are fifty states, each is 2% of the Union, why not all move to one?

Sarah Koenig

Libertarians have tried other projects, some have sounded like sci-fi: a long term rental of a valley in Somalia, or building a city on pylons somewhere off the coast of Honduras. By comparison Jason's plan seems eminently sensible. Before he knew it , he was in charge of a somewhat ragtag internet movement, one he now works on practically full-time. The website, which Jason created, includes statistical analyses of each state under consideration. Prospective members learn encouraging facts like that the cheapest place to mount a political campaign is North Dakota, and that Alaska has the lowest state and local taxes.

Sarah Koenig

Jason's not like anybody I've ever met. He's so steeped in theory that even when the tape recorder isn't rolling it's hard to get him to talk like an ordinary person, like someone who isn't say, actually participating in the Constitutional Convention.

But no one at the meeting seems fazed by this. Maybe it's just his elegant posture and impossibly clear skin, but Jason has this quiet charisma. He seems selfless, and so completely motivated by his idea that when you're around him, you wonder if this is someone you'll talk about some day and say, I met him when he was 26, before anyone had heard of him. People ask him questions about his favorite state on the list, but as the leader, he demurs.

One guy asks about states with long coastlines and the s-word. And for a minute I have no idea what he's talking about.

Sarah Koenig

Then I realize he's talking about secession. Consider this, more than 3,000 people have already pledged to move. When the list reaches 5,000, they'll choose a destination from the 10 states. Jason expects that to happen this year. One of the candidate states is Vermont. Yes, Vermont, the only state that elected a socialist to Congress. Jason gets invited to Vermont to talk to a property-rights group about his project, and I go along.

Sarah Koenig

It's in a Best Western conference room in the town of Waterbury. About 40 people show up, mostly conservative Republicans wearing sensible winter boots and carrying mugs of coffee from home. This is a good crowd for him. What he calls, liberty friendly. We learned that adding 20,000 people to the state could actually swing some local races. The only libertarian in the state legislature just lost reelection by 127 votes. David McCullough is an eighth generation Vermonter, and a former state rep.

Sarah Koenig

We took a quick poll of the room. About five people said they'd be interested in signing up for the project. One of them is Bill Sayre, a lobbyist for the forestry industry and a dead ringer for Ted Koppel. He tells Jason how encouraging it is to see someone so young with such promising new ideas about liberty. And then he signs the pledge.

Sarah Koenig

It could happen, people at the meeting tell us. It happened before. And then they talk about the so-called liberal takeover of Vermont. Back in the '70s, the demographics of the state began changing. Outsiders were moving in, a mixture of city-people, and hippies, and back-to-the-land types. And they were liberals. They elected other liberals to office, and left-leaning state policy followed. Vermont is now the only state to legalize civil unions of gays and lesbians for instance.

And the explanation that made the most sense to a lot of people was that there had been a conspiracy. Almost everyone we talked to brings it up. They mentioned, darkly, an article in Playboy magazine that supposedly incited the movement. The article exists, April 1972. A writer named Richard Pollak found two students at Yale, Jason's school, who proposed moving all the like-minded anti-war liberals to one state, basically Jason's plan plus hippies.

None of our interviewees had actually ever met anyone who'd crossed state lines because of Playboy magazine. Still if liberals could take over Vermont, why not libertarians?

The next morning we drive to Burlington to have breakfast with the mayor, Peter Clavelle, a Democrat. I notice, a little warily, that the mayor has actually prepared for this meeting by reading the Free State Project website. He's printed out a copy of Jason's essay called "Vermont Report" and highlighted various phrases like hippie-takeover. The mayor orders an omelet, and we ask him to draw a map of Vermont showing where Jason might get support for the project.

Sarah Koenig

And so it begins. They start debating drugs, housing, taxes, and the big one, public schools. Jason wants to eliminate them. He explains, that since taxes would be next to nothing in libertarian Vermont, people could afford to pay tuition or home-school their kids. The mayor doesn't buy it.

Sarah Koenig

Then Jason does something I've never seen him do. He drops the economic theory and tells a personal anecdote. It occurs to me, this is the first time he's ever been in a situation where he had to persuade nonbelievers, liberals, or people who just don't care.

Sarah Koenig

The public school he went to was terrible, Jason says. The private school was good. So disadvantaged kids like he was might be better off without public schools, which he considers a state-run monopoly. Pretty soon, the mayor has to go to church, and Jason talks to other people in the diner. For about 20 minutes Jason debates with one guy, who keeps saying he just can't see how it would all work.

Sarah Koenig

By the end of it, Jason has held his own, but he's sweating. Several people we meet warn Jason about the logistical problems his plan would invite. Among them is Anthony Pollina. He's a Progressive who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor last year.

Sarah Koenig

Then there's the car situation.

Sarah Koenig

When we leave, Jason seems downcast by what he's heard.

Sarah Koenig

We walk around downtown Burlington, and I ask Jason to give me a tour. I tell him to pretend it's the year 2050 and libertarians have been in control for 30 years. I want to know what will be different.

Sarah Koenig

He tells me private companies would pick up the cigarette butts and styrofoam cups from the streets. On Sundays you could buy scotch and visit a brothel. Roads would also be owned by private companies, which would set speed limits and solicit billboard advertising. Zoning would disappear, so McDonald's could open up next to your house, which you could paint any color you wanted. And everyone has more money, because no one pays taxes. We cross a street to a snow covered park.

Sarah Koenig

So this is how Jason wants to live. The free market would dictate everything and not big corporations, he says, since without big government support, they wouldn't exist. But individual business people, free to thrive in a regulation free world. What's a little weird about this vision is not that it's necessarily wrong. After all, the Founding Fathers probably would be shocked at how much power the federal government now has. It's that these fights have already been fought, and the libertarians lost.

Sarah Koenig

Jason's hopeful anyway. As he frequently points out, seemingly stranger things have happened in America. Look at the Mormons, they basically took over a state. And there have been other historical migrations-- the pilgrims, freed slaves who fled north after the Civil War. So why not 20,000 libertarians agitated about the state of modern capitalism? Why not a group of people inspired by the anti-federalists Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry?

Sarah Koenig

The problem for Jason is that people were mad about the Stamp Tax. But, it's safe to say, the vast majority of Vermonters are not mad about the fact that they have public parks and public schools and zoning laws. Jason doesn't see this, or if he does, he doesn't mind. After all, if he were the sort of person easily intimidated by rotten odds, he wouldn't be leading this movement. As he's waiting for his flight at the Burlington airport, I ask him whether, after everything he's heard, Vermont has moved up or down on the list of takeover states? He thinks for a second, and then says, cheerfully, up.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun.

Ira Glass

Act three, the heart is a lonely junta. So what if you didn't want the regime change? What if you didn't see it coming? Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown found himself in that position in his personal life. He was writing this book-like comic about his love for his girlfriend. If you've seen this, it's these scratchy little drawings, hundreds of pages of them. Here is a typical page.

Ira Glass

Jeffrey Brown, his comic book novel is called Clumsy. It's available at TheHolyConsumption.com.

Ira Glass

Well our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and Starlee Kine. Senior producer Julie Snyder, David Kestenbaum, Jonathan Goldstein also worked on stories in today's show. Production help from Tom Bachman Katie O'dunn. Katie Davis's story was from her ongoing series, Neighborhood Stories, which gets funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Special thanks today Chris Babcock, Hugh Hamrick, Patricia Pyle and Susan Burton.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia.

He says that if all those new programs that are now on public radio: Tavis Smiley, On The Media, The Next Big Thing, they want to move into that store on the corner. Go ahead, just go ahead and try.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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