Dana Goldstein

Cut From the Stimulus: Neighborhood Development?

Right now, not many people know the details of exactly which programs, of those initially supported by House Democrats, have been cut from the stimulus package in negotiations with the Senate. But Politico is reporting that in addition to school construction funds, neighborhood preservation funds have been "slashed."

The program originally included in the House version was quite innovative: It provided $4.1 billion to be distributed by HUD for the purpose of buying and redeveloping foreclosed properties, thus preventing neighborhood blight. But instead of funneling the money through state and city governments, HUD would have created a bidding process through which local and national non-profits could have competed with municipalities for the dollars. One of Obama's campaign platforms was to better integrate the entrepreneurial non-profit sector into the workings of government, and this program could have provided an important model.

Predictably, part of the Republican opposition to the plan was that ACORN -- yeah, remember them? -- would have been eligible to apply for the funds.

I'll follow up when I learn more details about what happened to the neighborhood preservation programs in the final version of the bill.

--cross-posted at TAPPED

Update: Mike Lillis reports that the neighborhood development program has been preserved in the stimulus package, although it has been cut in half to $2 billion.

Gillibrand on Transit

After being sworn in as New York's junior senator yesterday, Kirstin Gillibrand laid out several policy objectives, one of which was making sure that the final economic stimulus bill includes funding for mass transit, such as high-speed and light-rail trains. Politico calls the move "upstatey," but actually, as I reported for the print magazine in November, New York's upstate Democrats have often scuttled smart transportation plans. So Gillibrand's stance is likely to earn her some new support in New York City and its environs.

Obama's original stimulus proposal was a disappointment to transit advocates, as its infrastructure focus was on roads and schools, not rail, cycle lanes, streetcars, or express bus service. And the plan did not authorize the federal government to grant transit funds directly to cities instead of to states, where "upstatey" politicians and bureaucrats often withhold money for the most pressing urban transportation projects that would benefit the most people.

So Gillibrand is sticking her neck out here on behalf of urban concerns. That's a good thing, because today, as Streetsblog reports, the full House will vote on an amendment to add $3 billion in transit funding to the economic recovery bill.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Living at the Mall

Providence Place Mall, Providence, R.I.

No, I'm not talking about your holiday season returns. Matt Yglesias has an interesting post today about bringing urban style living to the suburbs by constructing housing attached to malls. I myself would find living inside or in close proximity to a shopping mall pretty dispiriting. In college, I wrote a magazine article about a group of artist-activists in Providence, R.I. who were protesting that city's construction of an immense shopping mall smack in the heart of its dilapidated downtown. Next door were new, mall-branded luxury apartments and condos, which I regarded with the deep aesthetic disdain only a college student can feel. But a visit back to Providence this October forced me to reconsider my assumptions about the mall and its impact on the city. Rather than putting mom and pops out of business, as had been the earnest liberal fear in the 1990s and early part of the current decade, the mall, by attracting suburbanites to Providence, has spurred the rehabilitation of downtown. The side streets, once rife with empty store fronts, are now home to more than a handful of locally-owned clothing boutiques, bookstores, furniture shops, and the like. The mall actually accomplished everything its neo-liberal defenders promised it would, revitalizing urban life in Rhode Island.

But the same cannot necessarily be promised in the suburbs, where malls really do shut down local businesses and detract from street life. Housing in or near the mall will provide a walkable lifestyle to those who can afford it, but the larger community won't be granted the same benefits, because towns of 30,000 people are usually too small to support both a mall and a downtown shopping district, especially if they are a little further afield from the city than are the Bethesdas or Silver Springs Matt writes about. Most suburbs, after all, are not contiguous with cities. So is living at the mall a large-scale solution to suburban driving culture, and one that is sensitive to the economic needs and sustainable development of smaller communities? I don't think so.

cross-posted at TAPPED

image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Mr. Ducke

An Introduction to Obama's Urban Czar

Adolfo Carrion, the Bronx borough president and former Hillary Clinton supporter, is rumored to be Obama's pick as director of the White House Office of Urban Policy. Carrion was one of Mayor Bloomberg's foremost outer-borough partners in the failed fight for congestion pricing in New York City. A former city council member rumored to have mayoral ambitions, Carrion has brought environmentally sustainable affordable housing to his borough. But his highest-profile role was as a leader of the successful effort to build a new, commuter rail-accessible stadium for the Yankees. The new stadium, built essentially "across the street" from the old one (the street is a major highway), is seen in some camps as a boondoggle. But environmentalists and streets reformers hoped the transformation of Yankee stadium into a transit hub would mean that suburban fans would leave their cars at local train stations on their way to the game, improving quality of life in the Bronx and promoting the MTA in the larger region.

Those hopes were dashed last year, when the New York State Assembly subsidized, to the tune of $70 million, the construction of three new parking garages for the stadium, bringing thousands of additional spaces to a neighborhood already blighted by bumper-to-bumper traffic. That means although the new stadium is smaller than the old one, it will be serviced by all the old stadium's parking garages, plus three new ones. A parking bonanza. For more on the controversy, check out the reporting at Streetsblog.

To his credit, Carrion dissented, claiming that local authorities weren't consulted in the process of approving the parking plans. Nevertheless, the kind of big-box developments Carrion has championed are ripe pickings for urban powers-that-be, chief among them the parking and corporate real estate industries. So I'd say Carrion's record is mixed; he's done a good job spurring construction in a borough stereotyped as broken-down and poverty-stricken, yet he hasn't completely earned the trust of local merchants and residents concerned that the redevelopment of the Bronx is benefiting Manhattan business interests more than the old neighborhoods.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Are Guns a Feminist Issue?

SCOTUS' decision in D.C. v. Heller aside, I've always felt that the presence of a gun in one's home just significantly raises the probability of someone getting shot. When I had a particularly creepy landlord during my senior year of college, I told my small-town Ohio-bred roommate (hi Lauren!) that I simply didn't think the solution was for her to keep a shotgun under her bed. She rolled her eyes.

Suffice to say, feminists can have differences of opinion on this topic. Yesterday Megan McArdle said guns are a feminist issue, and indeed, they are -- but not because they equalize power between men and women. In actuality, in a physical altercation the stronger of any two people is more likely to gain control of any weapon that is present. As the Violence Policy Center reports, homes with guns are clearly more dangerous homes for women:

A 1997 study that examined the risk factors for violent death for women in the home found that when there were one or more guns in the home, the risk of suicide among women increased nearly five times and the risk of homicide increased more than three times. The increased risk of homicide associated with firearms was attributable to homicides at the hands of a spouse, intimate acquaintance, or close relative.

Granted, correlation does not imply causation. But it's a lot easier for a violent, abusive, anger-prone man (or woman) to kill his partner with a gun than without one.

cross-posted at TAPPED

A Long Way to Go on Transit

Paul Krugman has a chart showing that 77 percent of American commuters drive to work alone, and less than 5 percent nationwide use public transportation. But because of sky-rocketing gas prices, mass transit ridership is up about 5 percent in large East Coast cities such as New York and Boston, and up as much as 10 to 15 percent in Southern and Western cities such as San Francisco, Nashville, Denver, Houston, and Salt Lake City.

I've just returned from a reporting trip to Phoenix, AZ, where Gov. Janet Napolitano is trying to convince voters to support a ballot initiative that would raise the sales tax by a penny in order to fund a transportation package that provides about $7 billion for mass transit, and would include a light rail line between Phoenix and Tuscon. Indeed, I was shocked and appalled by the rush hour conditions of the highways circling Phoenix -- the traffic really does impose a "time tax," as Napolitano calls it. Nevertheless, her proposal is an incremental one; highway funding accounts for over $24 billion of the $42 billion package, almost three times what will be spent on trains and buses. Of course, had the plan been more progressive in terms of prioritizing mass transit, it's unlikely Napolitano could have convinced Arizona's powerful homebuilders to support it -- which they did. After all, the continued exurbanization of America depends on the car.

I'll have more on all this in an upcoming TAP print feature looking at Gov. Napolitano and the political and physical landscape of Arizona.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

"Free Range Kids"

Via Newsweek, I've just been alerted to a dust-up in the world of upper middle class parenting: Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, penned a column in early April describing why she allowed her 9-year old son to travel by himself from Bloomingdale's department store on Manhattan's Upper East Side to their home in Midtown West. (It's not a very long trip.) She wrote, "[F]or weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call. ... Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence."

Predictably, this anecdote garnered joyous cries of support, as well as rabid calls for Skenazy's head. The writer appeared on television and radio to defend herself against cries of "bad mother!" and even coined a catchphrase for the kind of parenting she supports: "Free Range Kids" -- complete with a new blog, of course. At first, I figured the backlash was in part suburban and exurban parents' horror at the idea of allowing a child to roam New York City alone. People don't realize that New York's crime rate is similar to that of Boise, Idaho. New York ranks number 136 in crime among the nation's 182 cities with populations over 100,000.

But in a follow-up column and podcast, Skenazy recounted her correspondence with parents nationwide, which proved that hovercraft parenting knows no geographical boundaries. A dad in Park Slope, Brooklyn won't let his 9-year old cross the street to go to the playground. An Atlanta mother doesn't allow her daughter to walk alone from the front door to the mailbox. A suburban lawyer makes his 11-year old call home immediately after walking one block from her own home to a friend's house. All this despite the fact that we now know "stranger danger" pales in comparison to the violence and sexual and emotional abuse too many children suffer at the hands of adult family members or acquaintances. And that the number of child abductions has been falling steadily for years.

I'm only 23 and my own childhood was quite different. My friends and I wandered our safe (but unfortunately sidewalk-less) neighborhood after school until dusk. We walked to the local Carvel ice cream shop. We rode our bikes to the library, where I once went wearing mismatched sneakers. We played in the woods. A good time was had by all.

There is simply no way for us to protect our loved ones from every tragedy that might befall them. Many of us learn this lesson in the most difficult way. But it's sad to think that American childhood has become a time of anxiety, instead of a period of exploration. To the parents out there -- do you think Lenore Skenazy is a heroine, or is she misguided?

cross-posted at TAPPED

Urban Issues: Too Hot to Handle?

I recently had an argument with a fellow New Yorker about the merits of Mike Bloomberg. We both agreed his presidential aspirations were too ridiculous to be discussed. But then we began to debate Bloomie's record as Mayor.

"I could never, ever support a former Republican, the man who brought the Republican National Convention to New York City and endorsed George W. Bush," my friend said.

"Okay," I replied. "But what about Bloomberg's reformist record on education, his support for congestion pricing, and his experimental anti-poverty and safe sex programs? Sure, Bloomberg wasted time and money on an ill-fated Olympic bid, and he supports some neo-liberal development projects that New York progressives loathe. But he's been a force for some important positive change in New York City."

Yesterday the New York Times weighed in with an important editorial about the lack of focus on urban issues in the presidential race. The problem, of course, is exacerbated by the front-loading of rural states in the primary schedule, and also by the electoral college, which gives disproportionate weight to the minority of Americans who neither live nor work in a city. By harping endlessly on the challenges of rural areas while hardly ever speaking publicly about cities, Clinton, Obama, and McCain not only cede expertise on urban issues to self-promoters like Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, but they also ignore crucial solutions to our major policy challenges: For example, what role should public transportation play in solving our global warming crisis? What public health measures should be taken in Washington, D.C., where 1 in 20 adults are estimated to be infected with H.I.V? As a nation, are we comfortable with the ever-increasing racial segregation of our urban and suburban schools, or do we want to promote integration as a social good?

These are some of the toughest, most intractable problems in American politics, so in part, it's no surprise our politicians aren't running to tackle them. Histories upon histories have been written about Americans' love-hate relationship with our cities; there's no doubt that culturally, we still sometimes stereotype cities as dens of crime and drugs, even though they remain the engines of our economy, producing 75 percent of our GDP. Indeed, in conservative politics, the diversity and tolerance of urban life are still pointed to as aberrant and abhorrent -- think of right-wing reactions to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's decision to marry gay couples, or outrage over some cities' decisions to fundamentally ignore unworkable federal immigration statues.

There isn't a domestic political problem in America that can be solved without serious attention being paid to urban issues. If there's a presidential candidate who gets this, it's probably Barack Obama, who once worked as a community organizer on the troubled South Side of Chicago. Especially in the last month, Obama has drawn upon that experience as evidence of his ability to bring people together to solve economic problems such as joblessness. But we haven't heard much more talk of cities from Obama than we've heard from any other candidate. A lot more is needed.

D.C. Most Walkable City in America?

That's the verdict of a new Brookings Institution study that ranks the most walkable American cities in a counterintutive way: Instead of counting the number of daily chores or recreational activities a person can complete in their neighborhood without the use of a car (as other surveys have done), this study counts the number of supposedly "walkable" neighborhoods in a city, and then ranks cities according to how many walkable areas they boast per capita. But neighborhoods where development is boosted by government subsidies aren't included, meaning there's a bias here toward upper-income, white areas. In Washington, D.C., for example, Dupont Circle, Georgetown, the West End, Adams Morgan, and Capitol Hill are called "walkable," but not Mt. Pleasant, U Street, or Columbia Heights, which are all, in my daily experience, equally walkable, but are less affluent. Another flaw, recognized by the author, is that the report also doesn't consider the relative size of walkable neighborhoods. Therefore, midtown Manhattan is counted as one "area," as is Reston town center in suburban north Virginia, a fauxhemian "planned community."

In my mind, New York, which ranks #10 on this list, will always be more walkable than Washington for one simple reason: Your local supermarket will deliver your groceries in New York! You shop at the store, your food is bagged, you pay $5, and an hour or so later, an employee of the supermarket delivers your groceries to your home in exchange for a tip. This beats picking your produce over the Internet. And it makes life without a car much more pleasant.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

Show vs. Tell

Yesterday I saw "Manufactured Landscapes," a Canadian documentary expanding upon the breathtaking photography of Edward Burtynsky, whose work captures the transformation of human environments by industrial processes, whether mining, consumer products manufacturing, ship construction, or oil rigging. The film mostly follows Burtynsky in China, where he visits villages decimated by toxic landfills of "e-waste" (our old computers); the Three Gorges dam project, which has displaced 1.2 million people and submerged 11 former cities under water; the immense factory compounds that employ thousands of young Chinese men and women under military-like expectations of order; and burgeoning Shanghai, where high-rises and suburban plots are replacing shantytowns.

"Manufactured Landscapes" is so starkly different from popular American political documentaries such as "Sicko" and "An Inconvienant Truth" that it almost qualifies as a separate genre. Neither fast-paced nor polemic, the film is less like a feature-length op-ed column than a magazine photo essay. Devoid of much narration or even analysis (tall apartment buildings are presented solely as displacers of the poor, for example, but they are also far more environmentally-friendly), you won't necessarily win a political argument with what you'll learn from this film. But you will have a more complete idea of how our consumer culture is made possible by and starkly affects the livelihoods of people in far-off parts of the world.

Photo courtesy of edwardburtynsky.com.