The economics behind why my college house is a complete mess, always

Last year as a sophomore I lived with seven other guys.  We had one main central trash can in the kitchen and it was implied that it was everyone's responsibility to take out the trash when it was necessary, yet our trash can was always spilling over with old banana peels, pizza boxes and scrap paper.   One roommate of ours had especially poor trash emptying abilities and to test him we quietly refused to take out the garbage until he would.  After a week there were trash piles on the floor and one day he burst into the common room—to empty his personal trashcan into the main one—balancing his pieces of trash onto the existing piles like stacking blocks so they wouldn't topple.  "Someone really needs to take out this trash" I remember him saying.  Yes, someone does need to take out this trash I thought.  Now I live in a house off campus with eleven other guys and this same basic problem still exists.  In fact it is much much worse.  Our house is a filth pit, enough said.  Why is there this problem? Simple economic theory has an answer: the free rider problem.  A free rider is someone who benefits from a service (in this case a clean house) without paying for the cost of the benefit (in this case the effort to clean the house).  My friend I mentioned was the ultimate free rider.  Why should he take out the trash if he knows someone eventually will take it out?  (And yes, eventually we all gave up on the experiment and just took out the damn trash)  He got all the benefit without any of the cost.  Of course if everyone thinks this way what we get is a house my mother would cringe at.  And that is exactly what my house is today.  A complex supply and demand analysis to support my theory:

Beacon Hill's Charles Street Meeting House—History with Functionality

A piece I wrote for...whatever reason. Get your daily fix of history here:

Take a casual stroll through Boston’s neighborhoods and you are likely to discover Boston’s rich, layered history tucked away somewhere amongst the high rises, sports bars and local shops and businesses.  Boston is a living scrapbook, with each block a reminder to the bustling crowds of locals, businessmen and students that Boston goes back…way back.   Perhaps no other city in America has integrated its history into the workings of a modern functioning city more so than Boston.  And there is no better example of this than Beacon Hill’s Charles Street Meeting House. 

             The Charles Street Meeting House was completed in 1807 for the Third Baptist Church.  It was built along what was then the bank of the Charles River—long before the Back Bay began to be filled in—so that baptisms could be conveniently performed.  In 1836 the church’s segregationist seating arrangements, which kept blacks confined to the gallery, were challenged by a white abolitionist, Timothy Gilbert, who invited black friends to sit with him in his pew.  Gilbert was expelled from the church and he, along with fellow abolitionists, would go on to found the first racially integrated church in America, the First Free Baptist Church in Boston.  In subsequent years, the Third Baptist Church would change their position on slavery and the Charles Street Meeting House prior to the Civil War would become a locus for abolitionist activity.  Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass all spoke there.  The Church would undergo a series of transformations, first into the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1876 and then into the Charles Street Meeting House Society in 1939.  Conservations efforts began in 1949, although the structure would remain fully functional as a Universalist experimental church until 1979. 

            The real success of the Charles Street Meeting House has been its adaptive reuse into an office space for local Beacon Hill businesses.  The Meeting House has never stopped serving the Beacon Hill community since the final brick was laid in 1807, but at the same time it has not allowed people to forget its iconic role in Boston’s history—It is now a National Historic Site and a part of Boston’s Black Heritage Trail.  If you walk by the Meeting House this summer, or maybe grab a pastry from the downstairs Café Vanille (they’re good, real good), you might find businessmen taking a break right alongside tourists snapping a photo of the structure’s octagonal cupola.   Business and history both thrive here.   Inside, the Meeting House has been adapted to accommodate three levels of office space and acts as host for a diversity of respected, local, Beacon Hill companies such as Argopoint a management consulting firm.  After the transformation of the Meeting House to accommodate these office spaces, The American Institute of Architects conferred the Charles Street Meeting House in 1984 with an Excellence in Architecture award for its renovation and reuse.  

            The Charles Street Meeting House both serves and reminds.  It is a perfect example of how Boston has been able to showcase its special place in American history and continue to progress as a world-class, modern city.  On your next stroll down Charles Street, stop to appreciate the architecture and all of the years of history bound up in the bricks of the Charles Street Meeting House.  And did I mention the pastries?    

Information gathered from iBoston.org, and the National Park Service at NPS.gov

You will undoubtably be wasting your time by reading this blog, I assure you.  And I am undoubtably wasting my own time writing this blog.  But the damage will be limited I'm sure, this blog is tucked away under the most obscure folds of the internet.  I am merely speaking to myself for the most part, thought exercise I guess.  Blogs are silly things aren't they?  So why am I writing one?  Trust me, I never would if it were completely up to me.  So here, in my introductory post I have given you proper warning and as for what this blog will actually be about, well, that's not very clear either.  I promise not to just tell my day-to-day, because God knows there's enough of those out there.  Let's just see where this goes.