tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49118547898338026042023-11-15T23:37:58.545-08:00Surly UrbanismDesign Will Not Save UsSurly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.comBlogger83125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-23030430058452477842016-02-09T11:00:00.002-08:002016-02-09T11:00:19.571-08:00Who Names the Black Left? Ta-Nehisi Coates has created a bit of a firestorm amongst multiple commentators over the past couple of weeks with his critiques of Bernie Sanders, in particular his rejection of<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-liberal-imagination/425022/"> reparations</a>. In a nutshell, Coates points towards what he sees as a general unwillingness of the “Left” in America to take white supremacy seriously and argues that this blind spot makes the American Left insufficiently anti-racist. In reply, Cedric Johnson, writing from <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/ta-nehisi-coates-case-for-reparations-bernie-sanders-racism/">Jacobin</a>, offers a fairly conventional Marxian reply to Coates that defends the universalist claims of more socialist, or social democratic, theorists and activists, and offers compelling historical evidence as to the efficacy of such policies in helping Black workers. Furthermore, he brings in, though does not go into great detail, the intra-racial class differences within the Black community and how ignoring these class distinctions have hurt working class Blacks over decades, if not close to two centuries.<br />
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While reparations is the policy choice on which this “debate” is held its clear that both commentators are arguing something much different and much greater. For what we have here in this first exchange of columns is not only a debate of which policy is more efficient but it is actually a battle of who gets to define what is the Black “Left” in this country.<br />
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It is on this ground, delineating the borders of a Black leftist political position, that Coates and Johnson are arguing but that neither necessarily dominates, and the question of reparations is a wholly inadequate policy position, in my opinion, to actually fight this battle because it falls into the easy trap of a homogenous Black body politic. Johnson admirably displays this by offering a neat counter to Coates’ mining of the plunder of the west side of Chicago’s Black community by predatory white real-estate actors by referencing the intense intra-racial conflict between landlords and renters on the city’s Southside. Unfortunately, he does not go far enough in more accurately tracing intra-racial class antagonism, instead assuming his readers are already well aware of such conflict. Instead of focusing of what class antagonism has meant historically and exploring legitimate Black class based politics he moves onto critiques of reparations as being managed by a Black managerial-technocratic class with no real take on what this means, or doesn’t, for Black working class folks.<br />
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In assuming that folks are aware and familiar with the idea of a Black class antagonism, Johnson misses the essential point of differentiation between himself and Coates- Coates is an avowed liberal (in the classical or more formal sense, not contemporary ideological sense, see <a href="http://www.demos.org/blog/1/21/16/political-valence-reparations">here</a> for more on this). Coates, ultimately, sees nothing wrong or dangerous within capitalism and its attendant social relations. In positing white supremacy as a wholly separate force (though one that interacts with other social processes) Coates is able to demand racial redress sans a greater critique of inequality and exploitation cemented in place by capitalism. It is on this point that Black leftists who disagree with Coates should focus and one where additional readings of history, something that Coates has shown a facility for, would offer many opportunities to demonstrate where Coates falls short in his political vision.<br />
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In particular, I think it is telling that Coates does not engage at all with the writings or thoughts of actual Black leftists who write about racism or historical groups of Black radicals. The history of Black leftist thought is as varied and differentiated as greater leftist thought but Black leftists have always had to explicitly engage with the “Race question” whether they conveniently dismissed it out of hand as secondary to class or centered it as the primary mechanism of capitalistic plunder, Black leftists, particularly Marxists and Communists, have never shied away from examining racism. So it is all the more curious to see Coates simultaneously paint the “Left” as insufficiently non-racist while naming himself the oracle to show leftists the proper way to liberation while ignoring the most fundamental critiques of leftists-black, brown, yellow, and white- since forever- that capitalism and its attendant social relations create the environment in which other forms of exploitation and inequality can flourish.<br />
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<b>Black Radical Traditions</b><br />
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A clearer critique, or re-examination, of Coates’ liberalism and understanding of leftist politics and theory should draw from the grand history of Black radical thought, particularly Black socialist and communist thought. It is telling that Coates cites no real Black Marxists and Johnson focuses primarily on Black trade union representatives (and brief aside to discuss the Black Panther Party) but he doesn’t actually explore Black working class radicals of the early or mid-20th century. I only recently became aware of this great repository on <a href="http://radicalblackwomen.com/required-readings/">Black women radicals</a> (props to @tressiemchphd for the link)but it is a treasure trove of histories and primary documents of great early 20th century Black women radical thought.<br />
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One of the women profiled on the site is Claudia Jones, a bad ass Trinidadian activist, journalist, scholar, and Communist who was one of the first true theorists that we would now call “intersectional”. In her <a href="https://radicalblackwomen.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/claudiajones.pdf">“End of the Neglect of the Negro Woman”</a> Jones succinctly lays out the hyperexploitation visited upon Black women by virtue of their sex, race, and class position. But even more than simply mapping out intersecting oppressions, Jones relates the history of the militancy of Black women and their central role in resisting not only racism but the injustices of capitalism ranging from leading sharecropper revolts to getting Black representatives elected to congress in the South. These were actions lead by Black women trade unionists, socialists, and communists who knew their true enemies were the managers, landlords, Jim Crow, and often, their own husbands and fathers. It is a radicalism that sought to smash all of the many -isms, but was always firmly planted in a material understanding of suffering and violence.<br />
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My goal is not to simply recite her essay but to try and show that the false choice that Coates presents, and that Johnson plays into, is that one must either be for racial-specific policy or one must be for universal policies, and that has never truly been the position of Black radicals of the past or present. Missing that essential point is to run around in circles accusing each other of being either insufficiently socialist or insufficiently anti-racist all the while ignoring the near century long Black radical argument that to be anti-racist one must be anti-capitalist and to actually be an anti-capitalist means that one must be anti-racist. Neither precedes the other, though the historical question of which came first remains fascinating, if not potentially unanswerable. We must pursue both. Anti-racism without a recognition of how capitalism provides the scaffolding for the plunder of Black property and labor is empty. And an anti-capitalism without anti-racism, especially in the West, is to doom whatever emancipatory project comes to be before it can ever be. Not only because Blacks, in particular Black women, have often been at the forefront of the American radical tradition, but because such a project ignores the material social relations that undergird racism in this country.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-37089298541983928192015-07-21T00:52:00.001-07:002015-07-21T15:22:10.896-07:00Maybe We Should Talk About Environmental RacismThe Oregon Environmental Council's twitter account (full disclosure: I sit on the emerging leaders board of the council, a major reason I decided to even talk about this) recently retweeted this piece from <a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/can-we-talk-heres-the-conversation-african-americans-need-to-have-about-climate-change/">Grist</a>. I saw the piece making its rounds at varied environmentalist sites and generally ignored it, but when I saw OEC tweet it out, I felt compelled to respond. I won't get into the details of the argument here, if you're curious you can probably find it still on my tl from last Saturday. My general critique was that the overall framing of the article, that black people need to talk about climate change and we need to move beyond "narrow" conceptions of environmental policy, was entirely incorrect. In the near 40 odd years that we've formally recognized environmental racism as a thing black communities have been at the forefront in fighting environmental degradation and demanding radical reformations of society that are not only environmentally sensitive but economically, socially, and politically just. This work has drawn attention not only to the racially discriminatory siting of unwanted land-uses (like coal power plants), but have also drawn attention to the existence of terrible health disparities, and the kinds of policies and institutions that continue to make black communities sick.<br />
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My critique was, and remains, that an environmental justice framework, remains a stronger, and more coherent, political and intellectual frame for understanding and fighting climate change than the way many traditional environmental orgs are currently going. Environmental justice advocates have spent years bringing attention to environmental health issues such as asthma (some examples <a href="http://www.epa.gov/epahome/sciencenb/asthma/HD_AA_Asthma.pdf">here</a> from EPA, <a href="http://www.nbejn.org/factsheets/AsthmaNBEJN-05.pdf">here</a> from the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and <a href="http://e360.yale.edu/feature/naacp_jacqueline_patterson_coal_pollution_and_fight_for_environmental_justice/2664/">here</a> on the NAACP's climate justice program). But beyond making a simple correlation between proximity and chronic disease, environmental justice organizations and scholars have worked to identify and subvert the underlying values of unchecked capital accumulation and racism that drive environmental degradation. In fact, what environmental justice advocates have said for years, and that is utterly ignored in the Grist piece, is that environmental degradation is fundamentally tied to the same systems of oppression that render black people disposable. Why worry about making a cleaner coal plant or moving away from coal at all when the only people who ever actually pay for it are poor or of color? We see this kind of attitude operate at multiple scales from the developed world's indifference to disappearing islands in the Pacific to the siting of regional recycling and power plants in poor and minority neighborhoods. As a result, the largest consumers of these resources are largely insulated from the ill effects of collecting and distributing them.<br />
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This indifference to these overlapping systems of oppression and focusing primarily on disparate impact follows a particular kind of liberal approach to race that is more obsessed with counting and tracking the various ways race determines an individual or community's fate without actually asking why or how this is the case. Sea level change is another issue that is often stripped of any real political force or analytical rigor by framing its ill effects as simply having disproportionate impacts on communities of color. The piece mentions how the people of the Ninth Ward suffered due to rising seas and more intense storms. That's all entirely true, but as Neil Smith so eloquently demonstrated that there are <a href="http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/">no such things as natural disasters </a>. Smith focused on how vulnerability is differentially distributed across space and shows how New Orleans's Jim Crow urban logics placed blacks in the most vulnerable, flood-prone areas of the city. In other words, vulnerability in the Ninth Ward was <i>produced</i>. Mainstream climate change advocacy has very little to say on this and, in turn, had very little to say to black folks from New Orleans before Katrina and certainly had <i>nothing</i> to say to folks after the hurricane hit. The massive appropriation of people's homes, the take over of the public school system, and other forms of revanchist urban policy are entirely impenetrable if one were to rely solely upon a mainstream climate change approach. But an environmental justice approach that logically links segregation with differentiated vulnerability has no problem extending this analysis to the state of people and institutions <i>after "natural" disasters</i>.<br />
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So, no, I categorically reject the notion that blacks somehow need to start talking about climate change. Hell, even Grist recognized as such <i>last year</i> when <a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/its-time-for-all-the-press-black-and-white-to-connect-the-dots-on-climate-change/">Brentin Mock</a> published this piece entitled "Yes, black people talk about climate change". What Mock effectively points out is that talking about climate change is hard precisely because it cuts so many ways and he feels a special responsibility to explain to other black people how the issues they're suffering <i>right now</i> are intimately linked to a changing climate. But where Mock falls short is that while he is able to identify the multiple disproportionate impacts suffered by black communities, he does not actually attempt to explain <i>how</i> this racially differentiated vulnerability is created in the first place.<br />
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The question of how is what we all should be focusing on because it is entirely possible for a world that miraculously averts a climate disaster that maintains multiple systems in place that expose blacks to premature death and suffering. It is time we stop assuming that a climate safe world means a climate just world. And it is time that we abandon a frame that is so intensely de-politicized (or even post-political) and truly embrace the challenge of creating an environmentally just world. <br />
<br />Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-48058148486445402162015-07-08T13:35:00.000-07:002015-07-08T13:35:02.612-07:00Landscapes of Predation: The Value in Poverty and RacismA few weeks ago Sarah Kendzior wrote a piece in the<i> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/09/us-payday-loans-crisis-borrow-100-to-make-ends-meet-owe-36-times-that-sum">Guardian</a> </i>on pay day loan establishments in Missouri. It stood out to me because not only is the issue of predatory lending an incredibly important, and criminally under-reported phenomenon, but that it reminds us that while poverty is indeed expensive (an idea that has been relayed constantly <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/opinion/charles-blow-how-expensive-it-is-to-be-poor.html">here</a>, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-expensive-to-be-poor/282979/">here</a>, and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053.html">here</a> are some examples) it is less common for journalists to call out the uneven geography of predatory servicers or to point out that many, many people make a lot of money off of the poor. So, if poverty is expensive then it stands to reason that someone is pocketing those expenses. But the other half of that equation is rarely discussed. <br />
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Kendzior's piece explores this dynamic by pointing to the many people trying to regulate payday lenders and seek restitution for exploited borrowers, but, for once, I once wished that a news article had more "data". She offers a series of pronouncements about payday lenders in the state that, to me, were screaming for some better data visualization and exploration or, at minimum, some sources. For example, Kendzior writes there are 958 <i>more</i> payday loan establishments than there are McDonalds in the state of Missouri. This number is a variation of some earlier numbers reporting more payday loan establishments nationally than there are McDonalds based on a 2014 St. Louis Federal Reserve <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/there-are-more-payday-lenders-u-s-mcdonalds-n255156">report</a>. It is not that I disbelieve payday loans are more numerous, it wouldn't surprise me at all. But nearly 1,000 more establishments in one state seems extreme and some source for the claim would be useful. It should also be noted that figure does not actually conform to what the state's survey of payday lenders <a href="http://finance.mo.gov/Contribute%20Documents/2015PaydayLenderSurveyReport.pdf">says</a>. Further, the author quotes reps from the state's Dept. of Finance on the targeting of poor populations in the state. But what does this actually look like and what are some indicators of the severity of the differences between the poor and non-poor, and in Missouri, the black and non-black?<br />
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In an attempt to try and answer these questions I downloaded the Starbuck's global map of 2013 from <a href="https://opendata.socrata.com/Business/All-Starbucks-Locations-in-the-US-Map/ddym-zvjk">Socrata </a>and I used Reference USA to grab every McDonalds in the state of Missouri (standard caveats apply as to the imperfect nature of such listings, but I am confident I have the vast majority of McDonalds in the state). The state of <a href="http://finance.mo.gov/licenseesearch/index.php?formPost=1&xpt=0&license_num=&name=&city=&zip=&type_code=500&B1=Submit">Missouri </a>provides a list of all registered payday lenders in the state. I then geocoded the McDonalds and payday locations. Finally, I grabbed some of the most recent 5-year ACS data at the census tract level for the state of Missouri and joined everything together in order to start to get an idea of the uneven geography of predation.<br />
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What follows are some preliminary results. I don't pretend to have all of the answers here, but I hope this little exploration can provide some clarification and to, ideally, make us all consider the differentiated social and economic landscapes we travel through every day.<br />
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<b>Finding 1- Yes, there are more licensed payday lenders than there are McDonalds and Starbucks combined</b><br />
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<b> </b>Yes, there are more payday lenders than there are McDonalds and Starbucks combined, according to my analysis. By my estimates, Missouri had 799 licensed payday lenders (I lost some due to bad addresses in geocoding) and a little less than 500 Starbucks and McDonalds. <br />
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<table class="tg">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th class="tg-qwab"></th>
<th class="tg-qwab">Total Establishments</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tg-qwab">Payday</td>
<td class="tg-qwc1">799</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tg-qwab">McDonald's</td>
<td class="tg-qwc1">334</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tg-qwab">Starbucks (2013)</td>
<td class="tg-qwc1">156</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
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By these estimates there are a third more payday lenders than MickeyDs and Starbucks with a combined difference of 309 establishments. Now, this is a still staggering number, but 958 is flat-out wrong if Kendzior is citing Missouri's numbers for payday lenders.<br />
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<b>Finding 2- Yes, payday lenders, on average, target poorer neighborhoods (census tracts)</b><br />
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Unsurprisingly, payday lenders tend to congregate in poorer census tracts. I created a dummy variable for the presence or absence of a payday loan location and looked at the poverty rate difference between the two. For those census tracts with a payday location their median poverty rate (I divided the census count of people in poverty by the number households they could determine poverty status for) was approximately 18% while for tracts without payday locations the median poverty rate was 14%.<br />
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An alternative way of visualizing this difference is a good old fashioned box plot where we can see a clear difference in the median poverty rate between tracts that do and do not have payday loan locations. <br />
<b> </b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjIGYX4a8XjIF-fjZbgXvr6qm0Md2vQ2ABebXMr9Uuv7yyPC94USDpKPOUSE8n0-aQSTkCyGO4ZroPUZYtbARPSNpNpbq-AFB_nGinryKocSKGE9olC1iXB3DtSd2ykm4_8Q2jfkU18Pw/s1600/payday_boxplot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjIGYX4a8XjIF-fjZbgXvr6qm0Md2vQ2ABebXMr9Uuv7yyPC94USDpKPOUSE8n0-aQSTkCyGO4ZroPUZYtbARPSNpNpbq-AFB_nGinryKocSKGE9olC1iXB3DtSd2ykm4_8Q2jfkU18Pw/s400/payday_boxplot.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<b> </b><br />
While the basic numbers and the boxplot show there is some difference between these two types of tracts is the difference <i>statistically</i> significant? One way to answer this is to use the <a href="http://www.r-tutor.com/elementary-statistics/non-parametric-methods/kruskal-wallis-test">Kruskal-Wallis</a> test. Not to get into too much depth but it's a way to test to see if the medians of some set of groups is different when their underlying data is not normally distributed. So, I ran this test and the poverty percentages between these two types of tracts was highly significant with a chi-square value of 42.12 and p < .001.<br />
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<b>Finding 3- PayDay Lenders ARE NOT targeting the most Black census tracts</b><br />
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This finding is the most interesting to me because it forces us to think about a spectrum of Black neighborhoods, something that too often is ignored in a lot of writing. Running the same tests as before I found no difference between the census tracts with and without payday loan locations in terms of the percent of the population that is Black.<br />
<b> </b><br />
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How can this be? My own theory is that the blackest census tracts are potentially <i>too poor</i> to be attractive targets for payday lenders.<br />
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Let's take another look at the data. The following plot is a scatter plot of census tract's percent white population and poverty share. There is a clear negative and significant relationship between the percent of a census tract that is white and poverty rates. Now, this is not to say that there are <i>no</i> white census tracts that are not poor. The figure places a lie to that assumption, but it is clear that there are a vast number of a census tracts that are almost entirely white with very little poverty.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXRJ7RbeFlMOTDt6BJhBx92OyFoi5oYCVU4EKmRmnliWPMX_D8fgu93Y10CTGBwK7ktyewOAPtLiX_taKVHO_svaKLCMhNgtS5BofESMx1uhk39ePnWOXQ2FdiK_Fr7gXiI4_bDZyQjJg/s1600/white_pov_scatter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXRJ7RbeFlMOTDt6BJhBx92OyFoi5oYCVU4EKmRmnliWPMX_D8fgu93Y10CTGBwK7ktyewOAPtLiX_taKVHO_svaKLCMhNgtS5BofESMx1uhk39ePnWOXQ2FdiK_Fr7gXiI4_bDZyQjJg/s400/white_pov_scatter.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Conversely, Black census tracts are overwhelmingly poor and get even poorer the Blacker the population. Notice this is nearly a mirror image of the plot above and a testament to the long lasting effects of entrenched racism and segregation within Missouri. But we should notice that there are many, many tracts with up to a quarter of their population identifying as Black that do no have terrible amounts of poverty. I don't want to belabor this point, but these figures are to show that there is a lot of variation with respects to poverty when it comes to Black census tracts even though the direction of the association between the two is terrible. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSgKoH5TSPmPv9XlsKZkaDsNph_vcD9Pkaf5eUS7t4WOkxe3KFAQR3mtuu-T3ArziDxYtc0MN3R8LWK9rhNMSv4K-QaJ_pgSnq7PEd52-Jfs50FLBfvzw_7dVj-iYbmo9Kym4YBFuJoZo/s1600/black_pov_scatter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSgKoH5TSPmPv9XlsKZkaDsNph_vcD9Pkaf5eUS7t4WOkxe3KFAQR3mtuu-T3ArziDxYtc0MN3R8LWK9rhNMSv4K-QaJ_pgSnq7PEd52-Jfs50FLBfvzw_7dVj-iYbmo9Kym4YBFuJoZo/s400/black_pov_scatter.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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But what does this have to do with payday loan locations? Payday establishments, like any business, even predatory ones, still require a viable customer base. And payday loan locations seem to show a clear preference for poor, but not too poor, areas. In other words, payday loan establishments seek to situate themselves in working class, or working poor, neighborhoods as opposed to the most destitute. This makes intuitive sense. Even within its own name we get a clue. Payday loans still require some guarantee of repayment and offer their services often times as a form of emergency bridge funding for precarious workers. So an optimal payday location is in an area where a lot of people are working, but they are working in low wage/precarious industries, but still make enough money to be worth the trouble.<br />
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As the figures above show, the blackest census tracts are some of the most impoverished census tracts in the state. Two following figures give a way to visualize this.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzyJ7sESfC6vXMs2Ce8HMBXOF2Ht6bFjpO6J8miGPFxKBx6fKvEp8kZHopoukpZajCI06tmtXnxm7EGry8qNTbb3dr5xDvGJjZPCKDNW6kX_DJj-e4wMsxLJMTut1sODMDXzsdAwR46iM/s1600/paydaylocations_poverty_alltracts.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzyJ7sESfC6vXMs2Ce8HMBXOF2Ht6bFjpO6J8miGPFxKBx6fKvEp8kZHopoukpZajCI06tmtXnxm7EGry8qNTbb3dr5xDvGJjZPCKDNW6kX_DJj-e4wMsxLJMTut1sODMDXzsdAwR46iM/s400/paydaylocations_poverty_alltracts.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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This figure shows the relationship between payday loan locations and census tract poverty for all census tracts. The fit line shows a fairly smooth curve that shows an increasing relation between poverty and the frequency of payday loan locations and then a decreasing tendency as poverty increases.<br />
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In order to get an even clearer picture let's focus only on tracts that have payday loan locations. Here the relationship is even clearer, though we see there is still an increase in the frequency of payday loan locations until leveling off and dropping at around a 40% poverty rate. Now, a 40% poverty rate is still tremendously high, but I would draw your eye to the more extreme values on the y-axis and we can see that where people are most exposed to payday loan locations are in less poor tracts. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEged2kvVY-ziOpbUN2VAcE2Kmv2WZaNmgtGiWn_Mfw5YrDDO-iufaGCOz_87CvuiY6_30mn5mUDOQo30aHwsj1QG90aEQtsQSTF7uy93Rfz9sBFbHMJYsbmv8-pyE1Z4qv-R0_u6KVGmLM/s1600/povertyandpayday_paydaytracts.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEged2kvVY-ziOpbUN2VAcE2Kmv2WZaNmgtGiWn_Mfw5YrDDO-iufaGCOz_87CvuiY6_30mn5mUDOQo30aHwsj1QG90aEQtsQSTF7uy93Rfz9sBFbHMJYsbmv8-pyE1Z4qv-R0_u6KVGmLM/s400/povertyandpayday_paydaytracts.png" width="400" /></a></div>
Finally, what is the actual strength of these associations? To try and answer this I ran three logistic regressions where I regressed the presence or absence of a payday loan location within a census tract against the share of the tract population that's black, that is in poverty, and an interaction term that is the multiple of the percent black of the population and a dummy variable for the median value of the tract population in poverty. The interaction term, because 1 is for all tract with a poverty rate greater than the median (approx. 14.6%) should give us the relationship between the odds of a payday location being in a particular tract that is both black and low income.<br />
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<table style="text-align: center; background-color:#FFFFFF"><caption><b>Logistic Regression Results for Pay Day Locations</b></caption>
<tbody>
<tr><td colspan="4" style="border-bottom: 1px solid black;"></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td colspan="3"><i>Dependent variable:</i></td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td colspan="3" style="border-bottom: 1px solid black;"></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td colspan="3">pd_dummy</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td>(1)</td><td>(2)</td><td>(3)</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="4" style="border-bottom: 1px solid black;"></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;">blackshare</td><td>-0.170</td><td>-0.951<sup>***</sup></td><td>0.004</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td>(0.240)</td><td>(0.279)</td><td>(0.801)</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;">pov_share</td><td></td><td>3.257<sup>***</sup></td><td>1.930<sup>**</sup></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td></td><td>(0.553)</td><td>(0.781)</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;">pov_dummy</td><td></td><td></td><td>0.511<sup>***</sup></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td></td><td></td><td>(0.184)</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;">blackshare:pov_dummy</td><td></td><td></td><td>-0.990</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td></td><td></td><td>(0.850)</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;">Constant</td><td>-0.848<sup>***</sup></td><td>-1.314<sup>***</sup></td><td>-1.376<sup>***</sup></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td>(0.067)</td><td>(0.107)</td><td>(0.121)</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="4" style="border-bottom: 1px solid black;"></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;">Observations</td><td>1,393</td><td>1,388</td><td>1,388</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;">Log Likelihood</td><td>-844.750</td><td>-825.247</td><td>-821.290</td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;">Akaike Inf. Crit.</td><td>1,693.500</td><td>1,656.493</td><td>1,652.580</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="4" style="border-bottom: 1px solid black;"></td></tr>
<tr><td style="text-align: left;"><i>Note:</i></td><td colspan="3" style="text-align: right;"><sup>*</sup>p<0 .1="" sup="">**<!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--><!--0--></0></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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These three models repeat what the figures ahead already told us, but now we have an idea about the direction and strength of some of these variables. First, note that the percent black variable is quite unstable jumping from significance back to non-significance and even changing signs. But take a look at the poverty share variables. In terms of more easily understandable odds ratios, for every unit change in poverty a census tract is nearly <i>7 times more likely</i> to have a payday loan location.<br />
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We know from our graphs that this effect is moderated at the most extreme ends of impoverished neighborhoods but there is a clear strategy here.<br />
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<b>Where to go from here?</b><br />
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These tests are by no means definitive, but they do challenge us to think deeply about the different ways that the landscapes we navigate every day are constructed in drastically different ways depending on who lives where. Missouri also shows us just how perverse racial segregation is. We are all now well aware of a smaller kleptocracy like Ferguson that is seemingly built upon subjugating its black residents, but it also shows up in how we have to think about something like payday loan locations.<br />
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Blacks are incredibly concentrated in the state, isolated in three major cities/metro areas. Not only are they isolated in those cities but even within those cities racial dividing lines are stark. As such, it becomes easy for people, including social scientists and commentators, to sloppily lump all Black people together as living in one giant, unmitigated ghetto when that is clearly not the case. There are many census tracts with sizable Black populations that are not incredibly poor, but it is an absolute fact that the blackest census tracts are all poor whereas the whitest tracts in the states are the least poor.<br />
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This is not to relieve payday lenders of their responsibility in targeting Black neighborhoods but we potentially miss the mark if we see their strategy as solely, or even predominately, as a racial one and not a class/income based one. The problem here is poverty. It is just that in Missouri, and the rest of the US, poverty remains so terribly <i>racialized</i> and Black peoples are still widely seen as uniformly poor and culturally deficient that we cannot imagine landscapes where one's Blackness is not the principal reason why some external institution would seek to exploit you.<br />
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<b>Bonus!!</b><br />
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If you managed to make it thus far, thank you. I truly appreciate it. But as a minor reward here is a map of the payday loan locations I made. I hope it can prove useful.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="520" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" src="https://jamgreen.cartodb.com/viz/70768702-1877-11e5-b265-0e0c41326911/embed_map" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="100%"></iframe>
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<!--0--><!--0-->Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-12637600496122402792014-09-22T17:15:00.002-07:002014-09-22T17:25:36.615-07:00Of Cabs and Capital: What are we liberating again?In a recent piece making the twitter rounds, Reihan Salam of the <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/388471/why-los-angeles-liberating-its-cabs-reihan-salam">National Review</a>, argues for the re-scaling of certain regulating bodies from cities to the states for the sake of greater urban economic growth. He uses the example of Uber in Los Angeles, regulated by California's Public Utility Commission, as opposed to the city Taxi Commission, as a sterling example of how de-regulation and the embrace of "disruptive" technologies and practices can improve the experiences of city residents and help grow the local economy.<br />
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Salam continues down this track by arguing that zoning, traditionally the domain of local powers in the US, should likewise be re-scaled to the state level. Just as Taxi Commissions have captured local political interests and have artificially restricted the supply of available cabs, local governments, captured by local homeowner and developer interests, artificially cap the supply of available housing in many urban and suburban communities. This, of course, exacerbates the ever-increasing housing costs we see in the country's hottest urban real-estate markets. Shifting zoning responsibilities to the state level, or even the federal level like in Japan as Salam mentions, would free cities of the parochial interests of its residents and open up our cities for greater economic growth.<br />
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What Salam is describing is not particularly new, but his approach is novel in explicitly connecting the "disruptive" actions of firms like Uber with that of liberalizing zoning in order to disrupt "dysfunctional" housing markets for the sake of greater economic growth. The under-current of both arguments is that of the emancipatory potential of de-regulation or, more appropriately, re-regulation at different scales, assuming a lack of capture will rationalize local markets. But Salam and many de-regulation proponents are never quite explicit about <i>who </i>exactly is liberated or what this new liberation looks like.<br />
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In the case of Uber, Lyft and other contract-worker providers, we are witnessing the rise of an entirely new sector of labor market intermediaries who claim that their services are not only convenient for their customers, but are, in fact, liberating, and even fun for their employees. But what we see is a much more complicated picture that shows Uber, and its ilk, not as agents of an emancipatory urban life or even workplace, but simply the latest in a long line of exploitative employers that are leading in our continued turn towards greater contingent work relations and the return of piecework. But unlike capitalists of the past these new firms want their workers, and more importantly their customers, to love them and to believe they offer true liberation through disruption.<br />
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Susie Cagle (@susie_c), writing in <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/uber-sharing-economyunionstaxis.html">Al-Jazeera</a>, covered the growing movement of Uber drivers seeking better pay and representation through organizing themselves in a union-like structure. I say union-like because as independent contractors, Uber drivers in many states are not allowed to collectively bargain, and Cagle highlights how Uber drivers are making something entirely new that isn't necessarily seeking to revisit the trade unions of the past. These driver associations are demanding better treatment from Uber and for the radical privilege of simply being labeled as "employees" that do no have every single expense and risk, such as added vehicle insurance, uncertain shifts, and commission fees, outsourced onto them.<br />
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Such responses and organizing tactics are increasingly necessary, and will continue to be so, for as long as we continue to extol the virtues of the "gig/peer2peer/sharing/new economy" from the viewpoints of firms and an incredibly well-off minority of staff engineers and business owners that make their money off of being middle-men between well-off customers and an ever-growing precariat. It should be noted that this is a <i>feature</i> and not a bug of the kind of economy that these "new" economy boosters are constantly pushing. By definition, these firms push for greater flexibility and the disruption of traditional industries, and their attendant social and political relations, and quite often the easiest way to do that is to simply sever the connection between the employer and employed.<br />
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Whether these firms "employ" <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/silicon-valleys-contract-worker-problem.html">homeless individuals</a> to clean houses or champion the freedom to <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3027355/pixel-and-dimed-on-not-getting-by-in-the-gig-economy">make your own work</a> by stringing together different tasks, all while they take their cut of course, much of the peer-to-peer economy is based on the time-honored practice of contracting out, shifting expenses on to workers themselves, and disavowing any and all substantive relationship with those that work for you. Ironically, such practices are not limited to those of us unable, or too stubborn, to learn how to code but to theivery workers Silicon Valley needs to function. Recently, Judge Lucy Koh rejected a <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/08/judge-koh-rejects-the-silicon-valley-324-5m-wage-theft-settlement/">settlement</a> proposed by Apple, Intel, Google, and Adobe to the tune of $350 million dollars for engaging in a wide-ranging conspiracy to rob tens of thousands of current and former employees of their wages in an infamously competitive labor market. And these are the people that these companies feel important enough to hire on and claim as their own! This does not include the thousands of contracted security <a href="http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/apple-security-contractors-protest-working-conditions-in-sf/Content?oid=2856540">workers</a> at Apple and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-security-guards-protest-wages-2013-6">Google</a> and other lesser-skilled employees, now organizing protesting their working conditions, that are necessary to keep these companies, and their recognized employees, happy and safe.<br />
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Nothing about such practices are particularly new or egregious in comparison to how poorly corporations have always treated their employees. But it is precisely the fact that these companies that base so much of their identity on breaking the mold of past practices, and assiduously cultivating explicitly progressive-seeming missions or goals, play the same old games and engage in the same disenfranchising tactics as the robber barons of old that should give us pause as to why we decide to to de- or re-regulate different areas of our lives.<br />
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This is not a defense of the status quo in our workplaces or our cities. The status quo, after all, exists in the midst of a massive contingent turn in work relations that sees the rise of temporary and contract work as not only smart business but intrinsically virtuous. Our most popular cities, and suburbs, are in many ways captured by parochial interests that are served by high housing costs either for their own personal enrichment, as is the case for local home builder interests, or as a means to protect the "character" of exclusive neighborhoods. These relations, by all accounts, <i>should</i> be disrupted, but they should not be disrupted purely because we wish to unlock economic growth that is built upon the further degradation of workers and that is deaf to the needs of low-income households desperately seeking affordable housing in good neighborhoods. So, yes, let's look at moving zoning to the state level and even breaking up the cartels of local taxi commissions, but let us replace them not with the nastier forms of contemporary capitalism that places justice solely at the foot of economic growth, but with an ethic centered on just-relations built upon human dignity and democracy.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-42139638256841956372014-07-24T14:01:00.004-07:002014-07-25T10:09:57.448-07:00The Highway Trust Fund and Local Control: Why? Just...Why?I am not one to automatically reject contrarian views--this blog is, in large part, a collection of contrarian musings and polemics. But recent calls to disinvest or abandon the highway trust fund, and federal funding of transportation, in general (<a href="http://portlandtransport.com/archives/2014/07/actually-lets-bother-fix-federal-transportation-funding.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/7/24/some-perspective-on-the-gas-tax.html#.U9EfF1a0bwJ">here</a>), are a bit too cheeky for their own good, and end up parroting the same confused, pseudo-libertarian policies that many urbanist commentators eagerly embrace. The basic argument is that federal gas taxes, and federal transportation spending generally, is perversely geared towards the irresponsible growth of fiscally unsustainable transport systems (primarily through sprawl encouraging highway expansions). The proposed solution is to get the federal government out of the transportation policy and taxation business, in general, and decentralize such decision making to states and local government because they know best how to prioritize projects and are also more likely to give better support to bicycle and pedestrian advocates.<br />
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There are quite a few issues here but I want to highlight two issues that immediately jumped out to me: the invocation of "subsidiarity", by calling upon the ghost of Jane Jacobs even, and how such views always flirt with the "local trap"; second, such arguments show an ignorance of the role the federal government has historically played and currently influences, guides, and legitimizes urban and regional planning.<br />
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<b>The Everpresent Local Trap</b><br />
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Fiscal sustainability aside (this is an apt observation and there is desperate need for budgetary reform), the notion that states and local municipalities should be responsible for funding and prioritizing projects because they happen to "know better" what their needs are fetishizes scale. In a now-classic <a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/jper.pdf">piece</a>, Mark Purcell talks about the dangers of professing essentialist political or moral qualities to scale.<br />
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The first issue with such arguments of radical decentralization and "local" control is the hard task of defining what is "local" in a rigorous way. So you decentralize transport funding to the state level, is it now the job of the state to play the role the federal government currently does and add a variety of strings and restrictions to access to that money, thus dictating what priorities "local" governments should have in regards to their own growth? Is the local now the state? The region? The county? The municipality? Not that such definitions matter too much, the federal government dictates at what scales funding and planning is issued to in different ways and state governments would conceivably do the same, but a more radical conception of local control challenges the notion of state control over these priorities. In other words, I am curious, what makes you think the state, as opposed to federal or even local level is an appropriate scale of such policy?<br />
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A second issue arises around the sloppy essentialism of calls for local control. By essentialism, I mean the assumption that "local" control is somehow more efficient, just, or effective than federal control of such funding. For example, the idea that bike and ped activists stand to gain from the decentralization of such control is not supported by evidence, but on the idea that somehow state legislatures are somehow more rational than federal executive offices or congress. While it is not hard to be a more functional institution than congress right now, the glee with which some state governments willingly let themselves be captured by interested parties (in particular fracking interests, some stories <a href="http://powersource.post-gazette.com/powersource/policy-powersource/2014/07/22/DEP-Oil-and-gas-endeavors-have-damaged-water-supply-209-times-since-07/stories/201407220069">here</a> and <a href="http://powersource.post-gazette.com/powersource/policy-powersource/2014/07/19/Corbett-administration-agrees-to-halt-new-natural-gas-leases-under-state-parks-and-forests/stories/201407190031">here</a>).<br />
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Additionally, such fetishized notions of scale ignore the violent histories that come to actually define the "local" in many areas. From the genocide of indigenous peoples to the rise of sundown towns, de jure and de facto segregation, discriminatory housing policy, and environmental racism, the definition of place and the construction of the local is often built upon systemic violence and exclusion. This is not to say that all calls for decentralized control will inevitably descend into parochialism, but to not recognize the very real violent history of claims of "local" control and "states' rights", especially around issues of urban and regional planning, is too cavalier in dismissing history and all-too-current issues of cries for "local" control as excuses for the exclusion of the poor, persons of color, and queer folks.<br />
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<b>The Feds and "mandates" to plan</b><br />
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My second critique of such calls of radical decentralization of transport funding authority is that such calls either ignore or fundamentally misread the importance of the federal government in the history of urban and regional planning. Succinctly, we would not have wide-ranging planning, or conceivably even a field/profession of urban planning, without the federal government. The federal government's role in this rests in two fields: mandating planning in exchange for funding; and providing support for planning to municipalities through technical assistance and regulatory assistance.<br />
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Yes, the federal government may have incorporated terrible incentives in their transportation funding schemes, but the federal government also required that in order for states and municipalities to gain access to such funding that they must show explicitly what they plan on doing with such funding by <i>creating plans</i>. Even within the context of the mandate to plan the federal government was, and remains, quite sensitive to <i>local priorities</i> as set forth by plans. Urbanists love to decry the terrible abuses of mid-20th century urban renewal as examples of federal overreach and modernistic overzealousness while conveniently forgetting that actual urban renewal plans and implementation were all determined <i>at the local scale</i>. What the federal government did have a huge influence over in these schemes is that they actually required plans, in the first place, as opposed to simply handing over pots of money to development corporations or not participate in urban development at all.<br />
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This is an incredibly common thread in US urban planning history. The federal government has a pot of money that is available for some issue and local and state governments ask for funding and, in turn, the federal government requires that these municipalities have a plan so that the federal government knows what they will do with the money. If not directly linked to available funding, federal regulations have also required states and municipalities to provide a variety of reports and plans in response to the violation of federal regulations. Of course, the EPA and the Clean Water and Air acts are probably the best examples of such regulation spurring further monitoring and planning at the local and state level. In fact, one could argue that the entire field of environmental planning would not currently exist were it not for such legislation.<br />
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It also goes without saying that pretty much any attention to racial, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation discrimination in housing and education is almost entirely due to the federal government. As ineffective as it may be in meeting its goals, HUD and the courts have been central to the opening up of housing markets to marginalized groups and leading arguments for expanding the supply of affordable housing and housing, in general. Again, history and current events, lead us to the conclusion that decoupling major infrastructure funding from federal oversight increases the likelihood of local regulatory capture, removes many anti-discrimination protections including social and environmental impact assessments, and continued mandates to plan and strengthen the legitimacy of urban and regional planning as essential public services.<br />
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<b>What is the goal here?</b><br />
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Finally, I would ask such proponents of radical decentralization just what exactly are there goals and to ask more explicitly how decentralization actually addresses them? If fiscal sustainability of state DOTs is the goal, then decentralization may be one of many potential policy responses, but if you are concerned about getting people out of their cars, growth control, increased use of active transportation etc. then I am hardpressed to see how decentralization at all helps. It is telling that the greatest encouragement of regional planning in the past 60 years has not been the growing popularity of cities like Portland that brag about their urban growth boundaries, but the <a href="http://www.sustainablecommunities.gov/">Sustainable Communities Initiative</a> lead by HUD, EPA, and DOT to, again, mandate that regions <i>plan</i> collectively for the issues facing them in the future. This grant, which incidentally METRO got rejected for twice due to its inability or unwillingness to seriously tackle the issue of fair housing in the region, has the potential to steer regional development in many areas in positive ways unimaginable a decade ago. If states or local municipalities had such interest in encouraging such policies, then they would have done so long ago. Let's leave the dangerous essentialism of local control behind us and think about better ways to reform and work within a system of federalism that has actually been pretty effective at institutionalizing planning and moving us forward.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-75315521613199788272014-07-14T15:53:00.001-07:002014-07-14T18:58:13.822-07:00Sure it's Pseudoscience if You Don't Read It Right: Jacobs, Knowledge, and Urban Growth<b>EDIT:</b> James Russel (@burghdiaspora) hit me up on twitter and said he does not conflate labor mobility and migration, but was trying to show how the two are connected and clarify existing urban economic theory.<br />
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In two recent pieces, <a href="http://www.psmag.com/navigation/business-economics/pseudoscience-jane-jacobs-innovation-districts-84902/">James Russel </a>and <a href="http://thisbigcity.net/jane-jacobs-why-urban-plannings-legendary-heroine-is-famous-for-a-reason/">Drew Reed</a> spar over the legitimacy of Jane Jacobs' observations of city life and contemporary claims around the development of walkable urban places as centers of innovation. Russel is aiming, albeit widely, at recent justification for the planning of "innovation districts" and rightly questions the reasoning that supposedly undergird the policy choices of cities and institutions rushing headlong to redevelop whole sections of cities in order to, quite literally, bottle up innovation through a particular physical form. But both commentators fundamentally misunderstand the determinants of urban growth and what Jacobs had to say. As a result, they are boxing with the imperfect translations of Jacobs by, frankly, unqualified hustlers and, in turn, push their own fallacies regarding social science and knowledge formation and misreading two centuries of economic geographic thought.<br />
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Reed's response, while energetic, is as unconvincing to me as Russel's broadside on Marshallian agglomerative theory and "Jacobsian spillovers". Reed cannot actually muster the evidence to defend the claims others make of Jacobs' work (something neither Russel or Reed actually explore is what Jacobs actually wrote, but that's another issue) and, instead takes offense at Russel's use of the term "pseudoscience" to describe the sloppy application of Jacobs' writings and basically calls Russel a hurtful bully for attacking a woman who helped to, supposedly, resuscitate the idea of cities as positive places to be. Neither response is particularly profound, but the former deserves a bit of exploration before diving into more important questions of urban growth and agglomeration.<br />
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Reed takes offense at the application of Jacobs' work as pseudoscience and attempts to sidestep the critique by saying that social science can never be as certain as the natural or life sciences and it is impossible to determine what amount of evidence is actually necessary to test a social scientific claim. This argument, essentially, says that <i>any</i> social scientific claim can basically be taken as legitimate because the causal mechanisms are always messy and testing is nigh impossible. Such a position is profoundly dangerous because it destroys any meaningful reason for the existence of social science if social science is to actually clarify the whys and how of social phenomena. While social phenomena are rarely mechanistic and regular, the best social science seeks to clarify and sketch out particular causal <i>mechanisms</i> and the <i>conditions</i> by which those mechanisms arise or work themselves out (admittedly, I am drawing from the realist school here, in particular, Andrew Sayer).<br />
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While this is not the space to dive deeply into questions of the varied ontologies and epistemological approaches of social science, the schools that have trained me are quite clear that social science allows for the testing of claims, the weighing of evidence, the delineation of causal mechanisms etc...that make it possible to definitively reject certain conceptions and theories. The abandonment (though it is still applied in some areas) of early Chicago School human ecological notions of the city are no longer considered valid, though they are making a comeback through the uncritical application of ecological metaphors from some commentators. So Reed's claim that we cannot come up with a way to garner enough evidence to test the claims made by certain innovation proponents holds little weight. This does not that Russel's waving of one paper discussing labor mobility between firms is enough evidence to either convince us to move away from the Jacobs-inspired commentators or accept his notion, but it is certainly one piece of evidence that we should be considering.<br />
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On to Russel's claims concerning growth. If Russel were merely critiquing the application of Jacobs' observations about walkable places and innovation, then I do not think there would be any serious issue. Even if you are a die-hard Jacobs acolyte, such crude applications and insistence of the physical determinism of certain physical arrangements of buildings and infrastructure and economic development should offend anyone who thinks deeply on cities and economics. But Russel seeks to extend the critique by attacking the notion of Marshallian industrial districts, Porter's cluster theory, and the general idea of external economies and agglomerative forces, in general. While cute, it is a step too far and exposes some confusion on his part, even within his own arguments.<br />
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The problem with Russel's view rests on a few parts, but due to space limitations I will focus mainly on the question of scale, a particularly fruitful area, I think, as Russel is a geographer. The problem is that Russel smashes all scales together, a cardinal sin in geography where scale and space are central to how the field understands disparate social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena.<br />
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Russel thinks he has hit upon a gap in the understanding of economic and urban geography, but it is a misreading of the literature and more progressive economic development policy. It becomes clear when Russel conflates migration and labor mobility a la the paper he cites on labor movement among firms and its ties to innovation. Because Russel does not distinguish between scales he combines migration, both inter-regional and international, and labor mobility between firms. Specifically, a region could have extensive mobility among firms without necessarily relying on external migration and still innovate or, more likely, such innovation would then encourage greater growth and migration from those looking to take advantage either through entrepreneurial concerns or working for growing firms. Such a model encompasses both the importance people, from individual entrepreneurs to common labor pools, while recognizing the different scales and times at which these operations can occur. The essential unstated aspect of this firm mobility still rests on the co-location of similar firms, the pooling of a labor supply, and the existence of a set of supporting firms. In other words, the same essential aspects that Marshall first pointed out and that economic geographers have elaborated upon since in different ways.<br />
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This one particular illustration is not novel, by any means. It is, actually, a fairly common way that economic geographers, planners, and economists actually conceive of urbanization growth and external benefits of co-location. While Marshallian industrial districts may be too restrictive to understand the rise of the polycentric urban form that characterizes the spatial organization of advanced economies in later capitalism, it is also equally simplistic to dismiss the existence of agglomeration and urbanization economies that rest upon spatial propinquity. This does not give a magical power to place, per se, but the "people aspects" that Russel points to as essential to innovation still must occur <i>somewhere</i> and it is that question of where that remains that Russel does not contend with. Now recognizing co-location and propinquity as important to economic development and innovation does NOT mean that innovation only occurs in specific areas or with specific spatial configurations. But in seeking how to sketch out the causal mechanisms and the conditions necessary for that innovation to occur it is nonsensical to throw out over two centuries of economic and geographical thought that have shown quite clearly that agglomeration and urbanization economies exist, and that urban-regional areas are hotbeds for innovation precisely due to the combination of a constant influx of people, concentration of similar firms, and ancillary firms that provide essential support services from legal and financial services to equipment leasing.<br />
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The question, then, is not one of people versus place but of the unique combinations of people and the organization of space that results in different places. The existence of true megapolitan and regional agglomerative economies show the lie of the "innovation district" boosters that insist that certain innovations are so neatly geographically circumscribed or that they can increase innovation through the "accidental bumping" of people in a place. A kind of Brownian motion theory of industrial development that does, in defense of Russel, rest firmly in the realm of pseudo-scientific reasoning.<br />
<br />
I would like to end by actually coming to the defense of Jacobs and something that both Russel and Drew did not do in their posts-engage with what Jacobs actually wrote. Commentators using Jacobs to justify "innovation districts" or the economic impacts of walkable places actually fundamentally misread what Jacobs actually wrote on the economy of cities (no, really, she has a book called <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Economy_of_Cities.html?id=TNi-QgAACAAJ">"The Economy of Cities"</a>) and nowhere in her descriptions and theorizing of how cities grow and how cities operate economically does she say anything as facile as "walkable" places beget innovation. In fact, Jacobs builds on scholars like Chinitz(a truly classic <a href="http://urbanpolicy.berkeley.edu/pdf/chinitz_contrastinagglomeration.pdf">paper</a> in the field), and other mid-century economists and geographers, to give an elegant set of descriptions on how entrepreneurship, increasing industrial specialization, increasingly sophisticated divisions of labor, and local institutional variations seed urban economic growth. Her description of urban economic development as the creation of "new work", an explicit nod to innovation both of the disruptive and non-disruptive kind, is still an elegant way to describe the mechanics of urban economic growth.<br />
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The question of how to encourage innovation is one that is at the forefront of policymakers minds and we certainly need a much better understanding of the actual work that's been done on the topic. "Innovation districts", as they stand, will likely be relatively expensive boondoggles that were good excuses for cities to blight and redevelop poor neighborhoods near universities, but will likely not have the kind of massive impact boosters promise. But their willful misreading of Jacobs and ignorance of the last forty years of economic geography is not at all an indictment of the theories of agglomeration and urbanization economies nor of Jacobs' own work. We can debate just how exactly "spillover" benefits operate (is it some magical property of space or labor mobility?) but the fact that innovation, the kind of innovation people write so many books and articles about, happens repeatedly in similar places means that the question is not whether space matters, clearly it does, but how does it matter?Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-75275592336554943282014-06-05T11:36:00.001-07:002014-06-05T11:59:32.215-07:00No Room for Halfway Crooks- The Case for Black Reparations<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">*this is a slightly more extended meditation on a series of tweets I made earlier which can be found <a href="https://storify.com/surlyurbanist/rejecting-a-race-neutral-reparations?utm_source=t.co&utm_content=storify-pingback&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter&awesm=sfy.co_eiex&utm_campaign=">here</a>. Because of the tweet foundation this piece may seem a bit more disjointed. I apologize, in advance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Conor Friedersdorf has a new piece in the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/more-radical-justice-than-reparations/372197/">Atlantic</a> responding to the now famous Ta-Nehisi Coates piece <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">"The Case for Reparations"</a>. Friedersdorf seeks to advocate for what he calls a set of "race neutral" reparations policies. The kernel of his argument is that seeking race neutral policies to alleviate or compensate for past injuries, in this case housing discrimination, are better than race-based policies because they will compensate more people, thus alleviating more injustice, and prevent racial resentment. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is, singularly, the greatest piece of <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concern_troll">concern trolling</a> of all time. I have many, many issues with this piece, but I will try and cover some of my main annoyances, starting with factual/historical miscues and work into larger issues. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Timid, Unimaginative Policies</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Friedersdorf offers a variety of different policy recommendations to universally compensate injured parties in a variety of areas, but once you look beyond the fact that the policies are novel, it becomes quite clear that they are incredibly conservative nature and not at all transformative. I am not looking for the dissolution of capitalism, but he can do better.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">He first offers a series of modest policies in response to redlining, including federal grants or waiving property taxes, to expanding public transportation and access to school vouchers. Absent the obvious point that many victims of redlining and "slum" clearance no longer own those properties and may no longer own any property and therefore could not be compensated through property tax exemption, these recommended policies are decidedly NOT novel or even that aggressive. School voucher movements and the rise of charter schools are well advanced in many urban areas to where <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-new-orleans-traditional-public-schools-close-for-good/2014/05/28/ae4f5724-e5de-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html">New Orleans </a>school district is now entirely made up of charters. And advocating for decent public transit that serves traditionally disinvested areas? Look, I'm all for it, but to make it seem like this is some grand compensation for past wrongs as opposed to simply how a public transportation should be run is laughable. If this is how you justify providing transport for the transit-dependent, fine, but recognize that comes from a position that believes such public goods should not be geared to serve the most vulnerable AND lets transportation planners, past and current, off of the hook for their racist and anti-poor policies. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A more radical, or even imaginative, set of policies might have included fundamentally restructuring how public schools are funded by decoupling their funding from local property taxes. Or, as Sandy Darity mentioned the other night on twitter, all public and private pre-Civl War institutions should offer free tuition to the descendants of slaves as their endowments universally benefit from the legacies of chattel slavery. Or, if we want to keep policies universal as Friedersdorf prefers, we should make ALL public higher education free. Ever-increasing student debt and <a href="http://www.cepr.net/documents/black-coll-grads-2014-05.pdf">disproportionate Black underemployment</a>, even for Black college graduates, shows that access to education should not be limited to those who can pay.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And one set of policies entirely unmentioned that would do some of the most good and be universal would be the vigorous enforcement of existing Fair Housing statutes and the passage of stronger fair housing laws and the re-adoption of public housing in the US. Housing discrimination is a persistent, universal, ongoing problem for millions of people in America, in particular, for people of color. Demanding that HUD more vigorously pursue Fair Housing complaints (and giving them the funding to do so) and encouraging the construction of new housing for low-income folks through a combination of zoning loosening, greater subsidy, and the immediate halt to public housing demolition are policies that would immediately change the nature of our urban landscapes and open up space for a real discussion of disproportionate impact of current and historical decisions. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Americans are racist. Americans are ignorant. Americans are racist and ignorant. </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Beyond advocating for "universal" policies, Friedersdorf also attacks Coates's demand for a congressional study on reparations stating that any such study would invariably be politicized and that people are already well aware of the effects of housing discrimsination and slavery. There's a lot in these statements so I'll give you the block quote for better context:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This is the passage in the essay that least persuades me. In part, that's because my faith that Congress would sponsor a rigorous, non-politicized inquiry into reparations approaches zero. Nor do I think that a congressionally sponsored inquiry would confer any more popular legitimacy on the recommendations than a historian's book or a magazine writer's reported feature. There is, too, a hint of presumptuousness here: that if masses of America rigorously studied and fully confronted the history that Coates highlights so powerfully—as if that's going to happen—the result would be a transformation of how they view America. At the top of this article, I linked a number of thoughtful intellectuals who examined history exactly as Coates sees it and made good faith efforts to grapple with his insights and arguments. None of them had their consciousness "revolutionized" by the exercise.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">That's not how people or ideas work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">First, the fact that such a study on
reparations would be "political" is precisely the point. The topic
itself is political and deal with the longstanding racial politics and policies
of the US government. The Kerner Commission's report on the "urban crisis"
of the late 60s is a useful example here. The commission called out, in print,
the racist practices of government at all levels for encouraging and defending
segregation and ghettoization and how that lead directly to the riots and
recommends immediate redress. It doesn't get more political than that! That's
the entire point of such commissions, really. So, the inability of congress to
not be political is an absurd level to place such a story. Second, the supposed
presumptuousness of Coates's wish for Americans to be fully informed on these
issues and thereby transformed assumes Americans are already knowledgeable
about these things, and it is obvious they are not. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
I am a PhD student and I have had the fortune to attend good to excellent
schools my entire life. And NEVER have I been in a classroom whether it was at
my DC prep school, a seminar at UNC, or a lecture here in Portland, where
someone has not expressed surprise at the outright nastiness of American racial
history, in particular to urban policy. Americans are largely ignorant of the
LOOOONG history of urban race riots, residential segregation, the outright
exclusion of Blacks from varied arms of the progressive movement, the harms of
urban renewal, and the current neoliberal turn in urban policy that is based
primarily on mass incarceration, the withdrawal of welfare supports of all
kinds, and displacement through gentrification. A commission on reparations or
even one on the current state of urban America that focused on race would
expose a system that is still virulently anti-black and a set of policies that
serve only existing economic and political elites. Coates may indeed be
presumptuous as to the effect such a commission could have on the collective
American conscience, but we haven't even gotten far enough to test the
assertion. Friedersdorf advocates for keeping Americans in a comfortable
ignorance that can only be expressed through a confused advanced white-guilt
complex from progressives and callous indifference from conservatives. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>No One Actually Thinks the Federal Government is Blameless</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This next section goes after Friedersdorf most nakedly (wrong) libertarian
argument of the entire piece: that the federal government is largely
responsible for housing discrimination and it complicates the way we view the
federal government and its role in racial discrimination. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The logic goes something like this: the federal government enters into vigorous
housing policy in the 1930s, culminating in the Federal Housing Acts
culminating in the Housing Act of 1949 that set the stage for urban renewal for
the next three decades; realtors using the lending guidelines and infamous
redlining maps of the Homeowners Loan Corporation redlined many areas of
cities, in particular black neighborhoods, and jumpstarted mass housing
discrimination and displacement; if the federal government had not entered
housing policy black communities would not have been harmed; this connection
shows that the federal government is not the benevolent giver of civil rights
as loony progressives would have you believe.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Such a chain of logic is absurd on the face of it, but also shows a terrible
misreading of history or total ignorance about the history of housing and
planning policy in this country at the federal and local levels. Part of this
comes from the oft-mentioned, yet mistaken, notion that the Homeowner's Loan
Corporation (HOLC) mandated redlining and started the onslaught of
disinvestment of poor and black neighborhoods.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=cplan_papers">Amy
Hillier</a><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>has done some great
analysis to show that HOLC had actually little to do with the classifying of
neighborhoods as redlined for local real estate agents in most cities. The HOLC
maps were carefully guarded and were largely made from pre-existing market
analyses and racist logics. In other words, black neighborhoods were already de
facto redlined by local real estate agents. Thomas Sugrue and other urban
scholars make similar points when they point towards the warehousing of blacks
in certain parts of cities, in Sugrue's case, Detroit, and starving those areas
of funds while preventing blacks from leaving. These were entirely local
policies built around keeping blacks segregated. HOLC, in many ways, simply
documented the areas that were already largely seen as no-go zones by local
real-estate interests.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is not to absolve the federal government in this. HOLC did not challenge
the racist policies of cities and the locking out of blacks from federally
subsidized mortgages sped up white flight and ghettoization. The federal
government is entirely culpable in these areas. But to say that the lack of
federal government intervention in the housing market would somehow have
lessened the negative impacts on blacks is preposterous. While the federal
government has done many messed up things in regards to housing its entryway
into the market from the construction of public housing to fair housing
legislation have absolutely benefited blacks, not to mention lifting
discriminatory lending practices in relation to federally subsidized loans. In
a country where blacks in many places were expressly forbidden from purchasing
property, where cities attempted explicit racial zoning policies, and placed
multiple barriers to blacks living anywhere except for their designated places
by local authorities, the federal government has been absolutely central in
opening up space for blacks to live. Such an argument also arbitrarily draws a
hard historical line somewhere between 1934 and 1960 as the culmination of
federal housing action and ignores ALL of the work the federal government has
done since then to try and defend the right of people to live where they can.
Not to mention how even drawing such an arbitrary line still ignores policies
like public housing that were incredibly helpful for poor populations, both
black and non-black alike. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Its this arbitrary drawing lines that allows Friedersdorf to conveniently
ignore the Fair Housing Acts, the de-fanging of George Romney's HUD (examined,
in depth, in this great<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law"><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>piece<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></a>from Nikole Hannah-Jones) that has
crippled Fair Housing to this day, and multiple other policies that federal
government has attempted to enact precisely to mitigate and reverse the
devastating effects of residential segregation. But who have been the primary
opponents of these changes? The same local jurisdictions with long histories of
enforcing segregation in the first place! The federal government, as with many
times in our history, has been a primary mover, if not always benevolent or
perfect, for the advancement of civil rights of African-Americans. To say
otherwise is either myopic or patently dishonest. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>You Can't Recognize Racial Injury and Argue for Racial Neutrality</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Beyond these questions of history and policy, important on their own, lies a
larger issue with Friedersdorf's argument that must be addressed. There are two
parts here.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
The first issue is his valiant effort to make the argument that even as he
recognizes in his piece that racism and discrimination in the housing market
uniquely injured blacks that our policy prescriptions should not be addressed
specifically towards black people. He claims that "universal"
policies seeking redress for past behavior will simultaneously help blacks, and
the greater population, and also not engender racial resentment. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The first claim, on addressing a greater number of wrong parties, is a strictly
utilitarian one. On pure welfare grounds it is hard to ignore, but it
contradicts his recognized point that blacks have been uniquely penalized in
the housing market compared to other groups. Such an utilitarian approach then
subsumes the legitimate, unique injury claims made of blacks by equating them
with the injury claims made by other groups. To whit, if you're a white Irish
person and your neighborhood was redlined in the late 40s, you would have as
equal a claim as a black person whose property may also have been redlined. But
what such a point does not recognize is that that white Irish family could draw
on private and public funding for new home loans, they had access to
residential areas made expressly forbidden to blacks by law, had access to
work, at levels of the labor market, traditionally barred from blacks and on
and on and on. The claims are entirely incommensurate and to think you could
evenly compensate the two is absurd.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The second claim that universal policies will adequately address black injuries
is ridiculous. The argument for reparations is fundamentally one based on a
rejection of utilitarianism and instead is one based on notions of
re-distributive justice and that is precisely why Freidersdorf cannot connect
the two. A unique claim of discrimination and injustice means you have to make
specific policies to respect those claims. That does not preclude compensating
folks who were displaced by urban renewal. By all means do so, but the claims
made by blacks are STILL unique because of ongoing anti-black racism that forms
the foundation of American existence and policy. Liberalism, especially more
libertarian strains, are entirely incapable of accepting a world where justice,
accompanied by redistribution, is a legitimate action of the government and not
an affront to individual liberty. The liberal ethic, best understood from Rawls
as the "primacy of the (political) right over the good" precludes
real, radical redistribution of resources. This is Friedersdorf initial policy
recommendations are so unimaginative, because he wants to feel as if he's
actually doing something without having to give anything up. There is no
recognition that non-blacks have gained wealth, influence, and power at the
expense of blacks and in virulently non-black institutions since the inception
of the nation, and that continuing discrimination ranging from housing
discrimination to mass incarceration disproportionately affects blacks and
benefits non-blacks, particularly whites. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The second part feeds directly from this lack of awareness and that is
Freidersdorf's, and many other commentators in the wake of Coates's piece,
utterly shallow understandings of race and its role, not only in history, but
in contemporary settings. It is incredibly disheartening that after building up
such a great case and set of examples, that Coates's critics only choose to
focus on what they frame as a purely historical racist regime as opposed to
connecting such de jure racist policies with ongoing de facto racist policies currently.
Beyond that, such blindness also prevents these commentators from recognizing
how incredibly central racial identity is to America's understanding of itself,
primarily because these commentators are too frequently unable to view
themselves, read: white people, as themselves raced individuals. If you are
able to frame American's development, economic, political, and cultural as one
built upon anti-blackness and the expansion of the porous borders of whiteness,
then it is impossible to accurately link historical discrimination with current
black want and contemporary institutional and structural racism. Blackness
remains a heavy barrier in ALL aspects of American life and even moreso
historically. If you cannot see the formation of American identity as one of
separating one's group from blackness, then you cannot see how utterly absurd a
claim of "race-neutral" reparations really is. Because the
assimilation project of other ethnic groups in this country, to this very day,
is a project of separating one's identity from those of blacks, blackness, and
a black politics.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The story of what Adolph Reed calls "benign ethnic succession" that
punctuates so many histories of different ethnic groups in our cities has never
applied to black Americans. Blacks garnered large municipal power, and even
then only temporarily, primarily due to the abandonment of cities by other
non-black groups and the forced enclosure of black people in central cities.
The projects of ethnic assimilation like the settlement house movement were
explicitly barred to blacks. Political machines and trade unions, traditional
paths of urban ethnic power grabbing and social mobility, were also forbidden
to blacks. The advancement and whitening of other ethnic groups, is built upon,
requires, the exclusion of blacks over and over again throughout our history
and continues to this day. Not understanding the role race, and really what I
mean is anti-blackness, plays in this means that commentators can only ever
point towards seemingly "universal" policy prescriptions that act
only as band-aids on the gaping chest wound that is America's relationship with
the descendants of its slaves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>To Conclude...</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, and if you've made it this far, I thank you for your patience, I would
say that there is no room for those who would wish to try and straddle this
logical divide over reparations. You can argue against them, and I can respect
your view, but what I cannot abide is for someone to recognize that blacks
indeed have been, and continue to be, uniquely injured by American policy and
that this requires a set of policy prescriptions, and then have the temerity to
say that blacks should not be given special consideration within said policies.
It's a contradictory position that cannot hold. One must take the honest
position that either we must do more and it should targeted towards blacks,
even as we seek more universal solutions, or one must stand firm on the ground
of Rawls and other liberals and say that while the history is wrong and blacks
may have a unique claim is too heavy a cost to individual liberty to do
anything substantive about it. That may be unjust, but at least it is honest.</span></div>
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Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-20099180290645127942014-02-25T08:59:00.001-08:002014-02-25T08:59:11.964-08:00Whitlock and the Politics of BlacknessJason Whitlock loves black people. He unapologetically loves blackness and embraces it without hesitation. In a country, no world, predicated upon the disposability of the black body such an open and unguarded expression of love for black peoples is a radical proposition. But, contrary to shallow, saccharine representations of MLK and Gandhi, love, even a radical love of self, is not a political platform, though it is a powerful political statement.<br />
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It is this common misunderstanding, mistaking for a love for self and "community" (however you define it) as a self-contained that obscures not only trenchant political critique but also a coherent, actionable, and, dare I say, radical program.<br />
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Whitlock's most recent <a href="http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/10493720/whitlock-price-perfection">column</a> shows the pitfalls that arise from a politics centered on loving blackness instead of challenging anti-blackness. This politics of blackness, which I would say is different than a black politics, plays with a dangerous essentialism that not only threatens to turn the black community into an undifferentiated mass, but also displaces the object of black political concern away from anti-black racism, the liberal logics of unfettered property rights and individualist politics, and instead becomes a project of intra-racial disciplining. The result is an inverted pedagogy of the oppressed that seeks not to counter the conventional wisdom of the day, a wisdom that is always liberal, capitalist, and anti-black, but instead seeks to accommodate it and turn the supposed failures of the black community back onto itself.<br />
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Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are vital institutions for black Americans. Most HBCUs were founded in the immediate period after the Civil War in states with large black populations (read: former slave states) and were tasked with educating a nascent black elite. They have a long and proud history of producing black leaders and intellectuals. Until very recently, HBCUs were still responsible for producing the majority of black college graduates. But for-profit colleges like University of Phoenix, Everest College and countless locally serving for-profit secondary institutions have surpassed HBCUs in producing degreed black Americans. This shift reflects many things, the desire to be more economically competitive in slack job markets through gaining credentials, the desegregation of higher educational institutions that removed a good proportion of the captive student body HBCUs could draw from, and a concerted campaign of disinvestment from both the state and federal government over the past decades to choke the life out of these schools.<br />
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Something we can definitely agree on, though, is that the decline of HBCUs is not principally due to a lack of alumni giving or black Americans not caring for "our own institutions". Whitlock ignores the structural contexts of HBCU existence, again a context that is first and foremost virulently anti-black, and instead seeks to scold and discipline black people for insufficiently loving ourselves and our institutions. In other words, he attacks black people for being insufficiently in love with their own blackness, instead of recognizing the external attacks on black people and black institutions.<br />
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His column's most eloquent expression of racial disciplining is best exemplified in his comparison of Grambling State University and Notre Dame. Whitlock uses the example of Notre Dame and wonders whether the,"...well-to-do white catholics-- would flee their prized institution and let the football program rot from neglect, indifference, and a desire to make non-white Catholics love them?" This is in reference to the Grambling football team and its many trials over the past two decades. But what one should focus upon here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the context in which Notre Dame exists and the accusation of insufficient blackness as the primary driver of Grambling's issues.<br />
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Notre Dame is an elite private Catholic institution. It was started by and is still partially supported by the Holy Cross brotherhood of the Catholic Church. It has an endowment of over six BILLION <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Notre_Dame#Endowment">dollars</a>. It draws upon not only the private wealth of its esteemed alumni but also the support of the Catholic Church. A 2000 year old institution that is its own sovereign nation and is present in almost every country across the globe. And I would be remiss if I did not remind folks that some proportion of the wealth of the Church comes from the benefits of black and indigenous slavery and the wealth benefits that white Catholics have gained over the years in profiting off of an economic system built upon the exploitation of black labor and the expropriation of black wealth.<br />
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Grambling State University is a public HBCU founded in 1901 in Louisiana for the purpose of educating black residents of northern Louisiana. The land on which the school was founded was donated by a local white lumber king. It has an endowment of nearly five MILLION <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grambling_State_University">dollars</a> to serve approximately 5,000 students. Grambling has always depended upon the support of the state and Louisiana's governor, Bobby Jindal, has supervised a constant <a href="http://deadspin.com/whats-behind-the-grambling-football-teams-protest-1447273282">campaign of disinvestment</a>, most recently cutting over $50 MILLION dollars of support. Grambling's decline is not due to the depraved indifference of a blind population obsessed with white acceptance, but is the inevitable result when states and the federal government disinvest from their own institutions. It should go without saying that the donated income of a few successful alumni will not be able to fill the gap made not only by more consistent external funding but centuries of accumulated wealth that black Americans have never had access to.<br />
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And this is what Whitlock's politics of blackness misses. It is not a radical proposition to retreat into the doctrine of "self-help" as the solution to black America's ills. This embodies what Adolph Reed Jr. calls a "politics of capitulation" that does not seek to demand that black Americans be afforded the same rights, privileges, and supports that non-blacks have, but instead turns away from "external" critiques and limits its critique at the racial line. Thus black disadvantage must <i>primarily</i> (because Whitlock and others will recognize racism's existence) due to black folks' unwillingness to properly support black people. This is the politics of blackness in its most pure manifestation. It is always a politics that rests upon a monolithic black particularity and is measured by one's racial authenticity and stated love for black people as opposed to actually representing or advocating for the interests of blacks. It not only abandons structural critique, but also subsumes intra-black difference by assigning a common political identity based upon racial identity as opposed to recognizing that black people, like any other group of people, is made up of a multiplicity of interests that cannot be boiled down to racial identity.<br />
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If black politics is to move forward, then it is time to abandon the politics of blackness that places responsibility for black community advancement squarely at the foot of black people as opposed to the racist state in which we live, and that equates black political success with the isolated success of black elites. Such a focus excuses someone like Barack Obama from concerted and vocal black critique due to a defensive posture that assumes that the criticism of one of us is a criticism of all of us. As long as Obama and other black political leaders support policies that contribute to increasing poverty in black neighborhoods, the imprisonment of black peoples, and, ultimately, the early death of black people, then we will never move towards a more responsible and radical black politics.<br />
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<br />Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-35709719212588634812013-12-29T21:25:00.003-08:002013-12-29T21:25:56.531-08:00You Can't Eat Respect<a href="http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/redistribute-wealth-no-redistribute.html">Noah Smith</a> has a recent blog post reflecting on the differences between Japanese and US society and their conceptions of equality and liberty. In particular, the difference between Japanese notions of respect, and personal and social conservatism regarding overt displays of wealth, contrasted with America's, admittedly, more egalitarian (using the American habit of addressing people by their first names as an example) traditions that lack an overall conception of "respect". Smith places this idea of "respect" as a fourth pillar of equality to add toward's Smith's descriptions of American conceptions of equality: equality of outcome, attributed to "true" communists and socialists; equality of opportunity, championed by centrist liberals; and equal rights under the law, championed by conservatives and libertarians.<br />
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"Equality of respect" in this assemblage of rights can ameliorate the dissatisfaction of those at the lower ends of society by demonstrating that they are, well, respected and, in turn, valued. The use of honorifics in communicating with a humble sushi chef demonstrate that his or her work is valued and their skill recognized. Smith admits to lacking evidence of a respect gap in US culture and politics, but nonetheless attempts to make the case that both conservative/libertarian and progressive/radical critics erode the idea of respect that rests at the core of American ideals. According to Smith, conservatives have too often insisted upon the intrusion of market institutions to guide social life and sponsored a hyper-competitiveness that makes many service workers embarrassed of their jobs while progressive and radical critics have focused too narrowly on income measures of welfare that overplays material inequity absent other cultural aspects, namely "respect".<br />
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In fairness, Smith recognizes the vagueness of these thoughts and one cannot expect a fully formed political theory in a blog post of a few hundred words. But I think it necessary to address some of these preliminary thoughts now such that we can move beyond a discussion that, I feel at least, will not benefit our understanding of history, politics, or equality. I'll try to address my concerns in three areas: the first is Smith's characterization of respect as a potentially lost or fading attribute of American society has little basis in US history; second, focusing upon moving away from material measures of equality risks reifying unequal social relations and political institutions as well as blunting analytical space for examining inequality in any useful way; and third, Smith's utter indifference to towards race makes for an unnecessarily confusing and sloppy bit of analysis.<br />
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Smith's lament over the loss of a more casual egalitarian US as embodied in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the raucous inaugural party of Andrew Jackson rest in a history that stands as a testament to profound inequity. Succinctly, America has never been as egalitarian as it thinks it is and it is arguable that America is somehow less egalitarian now than it was in the 1830s! The abolition of slavery, the destruction of Jim Crow, women's suffrage, and queer rights are all testaments to a growing egalitarianism and respect under the law. To somehow posit that Americans from the 1830s until the last 30 years or so were more egalitarian, as in all human beings are afforded the same moral status (as defined by Gray in <i>L<a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Liberalism.html?id=Sh7YGQQ4d7MC">iberalism</a>),</i> than they are now is profoundly ahistorical. America has never really had a good run of such a pure egalitarianism even in its early years. Jefferson may have espoused the virtues of the yeoman farmer, but he also helped to better develop the immense plantation system in the deep south that not only further stitched slavery into American society, but also redoubled inequality between a small, yet immensely powerful, white plantation ruling class and poorer white farmer/laborer class. Thus one can see that particularly American paradox where the poor and ethnic minorities, in particular black Americans, where material well being improved with industrialization and urbanization, but egalitarianism, as in being perceived as equal in moral status to everyone else, remained static. The passage of the Civil Rights Acts may truly where we may legitimately start to speak of an egalitarian age in the US not in the streets of Philadelphia in the 1760s and certainly not in the raucous quarters of the White House in the 1830s to a slave-owning president responsible for the Trail of Tears.<br />
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The critique that progressives focus upon material inequity, particularly income or wealth inequality, to the detriment of other values that in turns reinforces a kind of crass cultural materialism is a contradictory and fundamentally conservative position that Smith can't even keep straight himself. This confusion comes from a refusal to recognize social and economic inequality manifest themselves in many material ways that often end up doing real harm to people. This is where Smith could have fruitfully used Japan as a comparative case to show that while Japan may have higher income inequality than some European countries (though less than the US) it is also has a bevy of social programs designed to blunt the negative material consequences of economic inequity. In particular, Japan has had <a href="http://www.wpro.who.int/health_services/service_delivery_profile_japan.pdf">universal healthcare</a> since the 1930s. Considering the massive health disparities in this country, largely tied to income inequality, such a comparison would have added an interesting aspect to his observations. But in trying to separate economic inequality from other forms of material inequity, the most dramatic of which includes black American <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/us/efforts-to-combat-high-infant-mortality-rate-among-blacks.html">infant mortality rates</a> as twice that of whites, and the disparity persists even when controlling for income. Such an issue would seem to partially support Smiths contention that income is not the only factor when discussing issues of disparity and inequity, but he entirely ignores the need for greater redistributive policies and the obliteration of racism and instead stands upon this idea of "respect" and a shallow egalitarianism.<br />
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Smith, ultimately, does not seem all that interested in thinking deeply about inequality as a real force in peoples' lives nor is he interested in theorizing what it means for such stark material inequality and disparity to be essential parts of the organizing logic of our country. This gap speaks to either a relatively shallow understanding of what income and social inequality mean for those at the bottom of society or it speaks to how many self-described liberals are seemingly incapable of seriously contemplating questions of social justice in contemporary contexts.<br />
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Finally, Smith could have avoided much of the muddled reasoning on this if he seriously considered the existence of black people in the US. The history of slavery, abolition, civil rights and ongoing battles for racial justice and fairness under the law place the material, social, and political effects of income inequality and racism in stark relief. If we are to critique progressive critics for primarily focusing upon income inequality, then the proper critique is not to say that progressives should demand more "respect" from economic elites, but to show how other social factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation all interact to reinforce and exacerbate social injustice.<br />
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To conclude, Smith misrepresents American history in order to claim the US has become less egalitarian, in terms of a potential loss of "respect", even as the past 240 odd years of this country's history has been a slow, bloody, unsteady march towards greater egalitarianism. Second, Smith's inability to connect social inequality to greater material disparity leaves a confused reasoning that does not leave space for demands for greater social justice and potential redistribution because of an inability or unwillingness to connect inequality to real disparities in life outcomes or to connect continued to inequality to directly to the lack of "respect" he claims to care about. Ultimately, this is part of a popular project of seemingly reasonable, progressively oriented folks who worry about inequality but are profoundly uninterested in actually substantively transforming material benefit in our society. It is a politics devoid of any substantive positions of dealing with injustice outside of wishing for some greater cultural transformation that simply seeks to mollify those at the bottom of the social pyramid.<br />
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<br />Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-10544102566417961652013-12-17T12:24:00.000-08:002013-12-17T12:24:26.607-08:00The Inadequacy of "Good" UrbanismRun a google search for the term “good urbanism” and you run into a bevy of blog posts, articles, and even books all proclaiming to know the secret to making good places through adhering to the principles of “good urbanism”. Invariably, the recommendations touted are almost all design-based or centered on modifying the urban form. The interventions offered usually focus on making cities “human scale”, encouraging multiple modes of transit etc...what’s wrong with this? It misses an essential facet of cities; they are the physical representations of social relations. Buildings, blocks, transportation systems represent the political, economic, and social relations of the time of their construction. Nothing about that statement is novel or particularly deep but it seems that many mainstream “urbanists” seem to elide over or entirely forget that cities are not solely objects but a set or array of social relations.<br />
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<a href="http://plt.sagepub.com/content/10/1/6.abstract">Roy (2011)</a> has a piece where she says that the central role for planning theorists is to take seriously the question of the production of urban space-- or urbanism. She then goes on to introduce the four processes that make up urbanism, at least in the studies she is introducing. The first process she identifies is the role that capitalism and the flow of capital plays in the production of space and how capitalist market relations play upon issues of neoliberal style urban development and governance and post-colonialism. The second focuses on the struggle over urban space. Succinctly, highlighting the multiple contradictions and conflicts that play out everyday as different people go about living and creating urban space. The third aspect is that of urbanism as a “constituted object” that is produced through planning-- i.e. the built environment and how this built environment embodies, bolsters, or conflicts with the other processes. Lastly, she observes that urbanism is a global process that is manifested through the uneven flows of global capital, migration, and massive urban growth in the Global South. That calls for recognizing these new, incredibly large and increasingly powerful cities that exist in entirely different historical, economic, and political contexts than Western cities requiring a new theorization of cities founded upon a serious study of urbanism-- or the production of urban space.<br />
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I find these four aspects of urbanism to be incredibly enlightening. Specifically, Roy points to the physical ordering buildings through planning as one of at least four aspects of urbanism. More importantly, she instructs us to examine the many relations that they embody within space. Planning here speaks directly to the three processes, but it does not dominate. This is something that many mainstream urban commentators seem to forget or do not adequately explore. To say that a certain kind of development embodies “good urbanism” versus “bad urbanism”, often framed as idealized dense central city living vs a more sprawled suburban design or lifestyle, is an absurd statement. The central city and the suburb both embody a set of social relations that dictate how that area came to be developed and how people currently live within it and create their own spaces. There’s nothing a priori better about the social relations in a central city than one found in the suburbs. Both areas can be sites of oppression, exploitation, sinks or sources of capital or, conversely, sites of liberation, fulfillment conflict etc...<br />
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We can critique certain building patterns as being inefficient in terms of budgetary restraints, ecological impact, concentrating poverty etc but those are all results of a particular set of social and political relations that stand semi-independently of the built environment. The essential point is that a particular configuration of buildings is neither “good” nor “bad” in absence of a serious examination of the social relations responsible for the construction of those buildings and the greater social processes that continue to shape the greater community in which those buildings exist. In other words, urbanism is not about an object, but about a set of overlapping, constitutive processes that produce a wide range of physical forms. The physical form is largely a reflection of these greater processes and forces.<br />
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Insisting on ascribing a particular physical configuration with the moniker of “good urbanism” or, even worse, labeling individuals and institutions as good or bad urbanists based primarily on their physical design decisions obscures and depoliticizes the processes of the production of urban space, rendering critique to now-repetitive laments over building decisions. Commentators are more concerned over developers and corporations being good neighbors than giving a more full review of not just office placement and design, but in trying to situate the process in a fuller context of urban redevelopment and planning, regional and global economic change, and eternal conflicts over the claims to certain spaces.<br />
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To this end, it is absurd some of the more recent laments we have seen over the role of tech companies as “good” urbanists as demonstrated by how they re-shape neighborhoods. Such a label would assume that these companies are engaging in actions that are out of the ordinary or contrary to the goals of, at minimum, city and regional planners and policymakers. But a cursory reflection over how our cities, in the US at least, have grown not just in this past decade but over the past century, shows us the folly behind such assumptions. Urban development largely follows the dictates of social and economic elites, is based around uneven development, and exclusion. In a country with stubborn racial segregation, increasing economic segregation, and increased income and social inequality that is, in turn, reinforced by our city and regional governments uncritical embrace of economic growth as the only viable solution, why are we surprised that for-profit corporations act like for-profit corporations? And, more important for folks who proclaim to study and love cities, how are you so unfamiliar with the pattern of urban development, in the first place?<br />
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Let us stop the limited, and unproductive framing of “urbanism” as an object to be judged based principally on design and let us, in the spirit of Ananya Roy, see urbanism as the confluence of multiple processes in the production of urban space. This can move us beyond facile laments over twitter’s seeming lack of community engagement and show us how absurd it is to expect values not rooted in profit and accumulation to be expressed by profit seeking tech firms.<br />
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<br />Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-19288944126431123832013-11-19T09:35:00.000-08:002014-08-25T12:41:51.812-07:00Affordability Index: Who is this for, exactly?The new <a href="http://www.locationaffordability.info/lai.aspx">HUD </a>housing/transport location tool has made a minor ripple in the urbanist blogosphere. The hope, as stated by HUD is to,"...to provide the public with reliable, user-friendly data and resources on combined housing and transportation costs to help consumers, policymakers, and developers make more informed decisions about where to live, work, and invest." There have already been a couple of blog posts at sites like <i><a href="http://nextcity.org/equityfactor/entry/find-out-just-how-affordable-your-neighborhood-is">Next City</a></i> and <a href="http://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/11/12/hud-and-u-s-dot-embrace-housing-transportation-metric-to-determine-affordability/">DC Streetsblog</a> that have played with the tool and speak on its functionality. I don't wish to reproduce this work, but to ask a more fundamental question: Who is this exactly for and what are we trying to show here?<br />
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First, the tool is an excellent visualization application. The display is clean, the controls fairly intuitive and you can get a lot of information in a simple format. Kudos to HUD and its partners for making this available. But I also feel that this tool is supposed to provide a service that does not accurately reflect how people make housing decisions. I get it, this is a visualization application. It's not a policy or an office, but the stated goal of the tool does, in fact, hold a particular political orientation.<br />
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Succinctly, the tool, in holding up housing options for people as largely a rational exercise in cost tradeoffs, does nothing to interrogate the ways in which we construct housing or provide transit infrastructure. In framing housing choices as basically a rational choice exercise without also recognizing that most households, including all low to moderate income households, actually have an incredibly restricted set of choices based on market power, the tool subtly shifts the onus of housing affordability onto potential residents. This is not to say that this tool is part of a greater insidious project to disenfranchise marginalized populations, but it does show that the framing around this tool's use is based on a rational consumer in a depoliticized landscape of housing and transportation costs that are simply presented.<br />
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More specifically, while the tool offers a set of idealized populations you can map with that can offer some rather stark comparisons (the first image is a map of Portland's affordability index for a "region typical" household making around 56k a year):<br />
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It's clear your "region typical" household basically has their pick of spots. This may be the closest one can get to an idealized decision structure for a household. There are clear tradeoffs to be seen, at least for the rental market. When taking home ownership into account the decisions change drastically (again for "region typical" household):</div>
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We see a large jump in prices. This is largely a reflection to the really tight housing market we have in the region right now and you can identify some of the areas in the city and outer parts of the region that are still affordable and, in the case of Portland proper, is quickly being converted bought up by better off households.<br />
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Now, what does this same market look like for the "low income" category?<br />
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The difference is there in stark relief. Low income renters, on average, are looking to spend 54% of household income on housing and transit. More recent rental market changes are especially evident in this map. Northeast and central east Portland are now areas where most low income households can be expected to pay nearly half of their income on housing and transport even though these areas are central to the region. For low income homeowners or prospective homeowners the difference is even more stark:</div>
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Uhhhhh...so....yeah. Nothing much to say here, really. If a low income household is able to buy a home (an unlikely proposition given still-tight lending standards and the hot market in PDX) this household can expect to 80% of its income on housing and transit. </div>
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It's clear that low income households, both renters and homeowners, have a much more restrictive set of "options" available to them in terms of housing and transportation. This is to be expected in a system where housing provision is primarily left to market forces. There's nothing really <i>new</i> here, but it's always good to be able to visualize such stark disparity in simple ways. But if this affordability index tool is designed for policymakers and planners, then I'm wondering what this actually adds to planning or policy practice? Planners <i>already</i> know that housing and transportation are large costs and that these costs are borne more heavily on low income households. I don't know if this tool is telling us anything new or unique. If this tool is showing planners something new, then those planners don't deserve the title.</div>
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The obvious rejoinder to this observation is that this simply a tool and planners and policymakers can use it different ways. As a visualization tool it can display disparity in stark, unmistakeable terms that can help when engaging with elected officials or the public. Its simple interface allows for folks outside public planning agencies and government to make similar arguments as long as they have access to a decent computer and internet access (a barrier, but one that is being slowly broken down). In this way, it can potentially be useful as a tool for a particular political project, but as an actual analysis tool it is lacking. </div>
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One gap, an entirely understandable one given model constraints but still big, is that you cannot disaggregate households on different demographic characteristics (see methodology <a href="http://www.locationaffordability.info/lai.aspx?url=methodology.pdf">here</a>). For example, you cannot separate households by race and compare. Why is this important? Because household income varies widely among different racial/ethnic groups. In Portland, for example, median household income by race (ACS 5yr-2011) taken from <a href="http://www.socialexplorer.com/">Social Explorer</a>:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbVLXJXKtarnEcyvDVVBfNVkOuNn-47jaKHH4PrZjKrcjyM9AgIVUqcdO8gDMOcPlZkC4kjUjb0oFsda0wcjloWbkdlQD68GIaY4c-bdPSEyB9BnHghI-KxEHkwrZ6kRqXTvIr1hse4Zs/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-11-19+at+9.06.56+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbVLXJXKtarnEcyvDVVBfNVkOuNn-47jaKHH4PrZjKrcjyM9AgIVUqcdO8gDMOcPlZkC4kjUjb0oFsda0wcjloWbkdlQD68GIaY4c-bdPSEyB9BnHghI-KxEHkwrZ6kRqXTvIr1hse4Zs/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-11-19+at+9.06.56+AM.png" height="233" width="400" /></a></div>
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The regional typical household for Portland makes around 56k a year for the HUD tool. But we can see that the only racial group that comes close to being a "typical" household is that for White households. Admittedly, this is a very White region compared to others, but this difference here is still striking. Planners and policymakers can see that if they're planning for households other than White ones, then they need to really focus on making housing available more generally to low-income populations, in particular Black households. But the tool, as offered, can't show planners that kind of detail or difference. This severely limits its potential as an actual tool of <i>analysis</i> for planners. As offered, the tool does not really give an accurate representation of housing or transport costs except at the most general of levels. </div>
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For equity oriented planners, or for planners who want to be able to better track, analyze and display difference within their cities, this tool obscures much more than it can potentially display. I recognize the limits of creating a standalone web mapping tool, let alone one that is as easy and kind of fun to use as this one, but I have a hard time seeing the upside here. At least when it comes to planners making use of this. Add to that the implicit rational choice orientation of the tool that depoliticizes and obscures the role the market and market actors play in restricting housing to those who can afford it and the tool loses even more value. </div>
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Overall, I give this tool a C- in terms of utility for planners or policymakers looking for analysis. It can maybe help planners to ask some deeper follow up questions on distribution, but, in my opinion, they should already be asking those questions. I'm inclined to give it a B or B+ for visualization in a simple, easy to use web format. What say you all? Is this a move forward? Does it potentially move HUD's mission forward? Does it help planning or planners? </div>
<br />Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-60012342845698190462013-10-14T18:41:00.002-07:002013-10-14T18:41:50.726-07:00A Question of Legitimacy? Public Health and PlanningI had an interesting exchange on twitter earlier with @AlexKarner regarding the difference in the awareness of social injustice and advocating on behalf of the marginalized between public health professionals and, in particular, transportation planners. While I agree that public health, as a field, is much more open and honest not only about the corrosive effects of poverty on individual and societal health but also has a much more vigorous history of advocacy on behalf of the marginalized, I started wondering what were some of the structural, disciplinary, and political differences between the fields that allowed public health the rhetorical space and political capital to engage in such advocacy. These are by no means finished thoughts, but sketches of thoughts, and I invite comment and critique on this. I think this is a potentially useful discussion, though, especially as public health professionals and researchers make a more vigorous foray into aspects of physical planning.<br />
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<b>Theoretical Consistency and Legitimacy</b><br />
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This is not to imply that research in public health is monolithic or one dimensional. Nor should anyone think I'm implying that there are not vigorous critiques of dominant research paradigms and approaches coming from practitioners and researchers as well as health activists. Even a cursory history of public health initiatives show a strong history of debate, protest, and contestation ranging from innovative community health programs in response to medical racism by the Black Panther Party to the direct action of gay activists in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Of course, these traditions continue today with the field of public health being pushed from multiple levels. That being said, public health is able to rest on a relatively coherent and consistent epistemology that's firmly rooted in medical science. There are certainly challenges to the hegemony of positivist legitimacy and exploration, but public health researchers, practitioners, and activists can all reference shared notions of disease (though this can also be areas of intense contestation as in labeling homosexuality as a mental disorder) and a shared understanding that there are clear social determinants of disease in addition to physiological conceptions of disease. In turn, public health can also use the social position of "science" as widely construed as a platform of legitimacy, even in the face of historical and current abuses like forced sterilization and exposing children to lead in homes.<br />
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I think, above all else, this is what allows for the kind of message that allows public health practitioners to more fully explore and critique social determinants of disease. While we can argue over the social construction of diseases and their relational characters, public health scholars and activists can point to a child that has asthma, a pertussis outbreak, or widespread lead poisoning as clear and direct threats to public well being. But beyond having a political orientation towards the "public" (however you define that) it is the ability to express and formulate those problems that offer a foundation from which public health practitioners can not only collaborate but also critique other claims. The social realm becomes a much more legitimate arena of critique and exploration when everyone can point to some kind of disease incidence and say,"This is a clear problem and purely physiological/environmental causes are inadequate to explain these problems away."<br />
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Planning, on the other hand, lacks such consistency. Yes, planning largely adheres to a rationalist, post-structural set of theories that can encompass a wide array of knowledges, but this foundation is much more shaky and contested than public health's. Planners have a hard time truly formulating what are pressing problems that they can potentially address and serve. Ultimately, this is due to the inability of the field to adequately answer the questions,"Just what is it that planners do?" But part of why we can't answer such questions is because of our lack of a shared theoretical foundation. Calls for the rationalist, scientific city are widely discredited (though they are re-emerging with the obsession with smart cities) and planning has never been able to recover a foundation from which we can move forward.<br />
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This tension may be best illustrated by planning's continuous tension between process and outcomes. How do we balance our desires for democracy and representation with the priorities of a large city or even a region? The scalar questions alone are enough to tie you in theoretical knots for years. But a large reason why we even have such debates is that planning, and by extension planners, have little to no legitimacy in the greater public realm. We attempt to claim legitimacy through claims of technical expertise, position within a greater bureaucracy, or sometimes even as advocates, but planners in most of our cities and regions do not speak with the power and confidence that public health professionals can.<br />
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Planners cannot claim legitimacy because we have no widely accepted epistemological tradition to claim and draw upon and eventually extend into more radical areas. The result is a field where, academics at least, constantly tear each other's theories down and we move no closer to answering the essential question for the field of,"What do planners do?" This, in turn, feeds into the alienation we see between practicing planners and academic planners, whereas the public health field seems to have pretty decent relationship in terms of research from government and academic institutions reaching practitioners and being considered and used. Whereas planning practice seems to dominated by a small set of elite urban-oriented popular thinkers, sometimes academics but sometimes not, that cycle through eras of dominance. The durability of Jane Jacobs' critiques, the dominance of Florida's creative class thesis implicit in contemporary obsessions with attracting "millenials", and the new dominance of "sustainability" are all things that practicing planners draw from but can hardly be called a coherent theoretical base as opposed to a series of observations, interests, and practices at varied stages of popularity. Sustainability offers the closest to a coherent theoretical position that planners can work with, but the way it is often presented and acted out in practice is shallow and tends to favor policies that reinforce social inequity and represent the interests of social and political elites. That's a political critique, but we can also see that sprawl, while slowed down, continues on, fracking continues to despoil our water tables, biodiversity continues to suffer, and poverty and social inequity go unexamined in popular treatises in planning and quite often in published plans.<br />
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The result is a series of fads paraded as "best practices" repeated by the same cadre of consultants, journalists, and super-star urbanist academics until the next big thing comes along. All the while, the shiny new edifices planners are trying to build remain upon a foundation of sand consisting theoretical inconsistency, a lack of empirical support, and a lack of structural or institutional change that would cement the radical changes in urban governance that could actually bring about something like durable sustainability.<br />
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That's all I've got for now. I have some further thoughts also on the difference in political exposure and position within the greater economy between the two fields but I would love to hear from you all on this.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-20479097938066416792013-10-02T13:32:00.002-07:002013-10-02T13:32:36.429-07:00Why #MetrosDontShutDown is not only dumb but harmfulBrookings is running a social media publicity campaign under the <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2013/10/02-government-shutdown-metros-katz">#MetrosDontShutDown</a> campaign to publicize their work on the rise of metropolitan areas and to highlight the kinds of policies they at Brookings seem to generally support. From the new parks construction agenda of Rahm Emanuel in Chicago to a STEM worker attraction project in Houston, Brookings is highlighting the ways cities work while the federal government fails and that metro areas are where "real" change gets done.<br />
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Bullshit. </div>
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Forgive the profanity, but this campaign is emblematic of what's very wrong with the way popular urban commenters view cities/metro areas and their relationship with the rest of the country and world. Allow me the space to offer a few reasons why this kind of campaign is harmful and disingenuous to the point of being offensive.</div>
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<b>The Literal Approach- Cities/Metros Do, in fact, Shut Down</b></div>
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I appreciate a pithy hashtag as much as the next twitter user, but the hashtag itself is just wrong. Metros do shut down. In fact, there are multiple metros right now that are functionally shut down. Here's a post from <a href="http://www.governing.com/gov-data/municipal-cities-counties-bankruptcies-and-defaults.html">Governing </a>magazine covering recent municipal bankruptcies that forced city governments to sell off assets, cut essential services, or, in some cases actually dissolve. Yes, there are the expected cities on that map like Detroit but a quick glance at the map shows that the problem of actual governments shut down because they are incapable of meeting their obligations is very much a real phenomenon that has afflicted cities of ALL sizes. </div>
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Some metros(in case you don't want to click the link provided) that have field for bankruptcy or have defaulted in the past couple of years:</div>
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<li>San Bernadino, CA (population: 210,100)</li>
<li>Stockton, CA (population: 289,926)</li>
<li>Detroit, MI (population: 738,223)</li>
<li>Harrisburg, PA (population: 49,499)</li>
<li>Central Falls, RI (population: 19,360)</li>
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That's a little over 1.3 million people that live in cities that cannot meet its obligations to its creditors, employees, or citizens. And that's within the last few years! </div>
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<b>What are you actually trying to say?</b></div>
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Something that puzzles me about this position that Katz and Brookings have been pushing pretty consistently for a few years now is the basic question of why? Metro areas really don't need much more positive press extolling their economic might, their cultural influence, or as pockets of progressive, or at least daring, policy opportunities. So, what does it gain you to try and constantly parallel metropolitan governance to federal governance?</div>
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There's a curious politics here and I'm not entirely sure what it is. Is this more a libertarian call for radical decentralization of power and authority from the federal government to metro areas? Is this a call for a resurrected system of independent city-states al la Italy before the unification? What's your damn point?</div>
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<b>The Quiet Hypocrisy or Brookings is just being dishonest</b></div>
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Something interesting about the way the so-called "metro revolution" is framed often by Brookings and other urban boosters is that there's little recognition or a begrudging admission that our metro areas exist in a federalized system that means that different scales of political organization and governance are dependent upon every other scale. This means that while metro boosters sneer at congress (and it is deserving of sneers) they should also take a look at their and themselves and their dependence upon federal resources.</div>
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For example, did you know that 10% of <a href="http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget.pdf">NYC's revenue</a> (h/t to @xenocryptsite for this link) collected for its budget is federal grants and aid? All of our cities and metro areas, ESPECIALLY the largest metro areas depend on the federal government to provide multiple essential services or to offer money for the city to operate those services. This interdependence means that urban boosters like Brookings need to not celebrate the fact that, supposedly, metros don't shut down, but instead they should look at how the shutdown of the federal government exposes their own weaknesses and how metro areas can navigate those weaknesses until House republicans pull their heads out of their asses. </div>
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And, of course, I gotta point out the obvious contradiction of metro boosters championing and comparing metro areas with federally supplied data. Literally, the primary means by which these folks can say that metro areas are even engaged in a revolution is because the federal government gives them the data necessary to make that assertion. City and metro agencies that deal with a lot of federal data from environmental departments, to public health agencies, to city planning departments ALL depend quite heavily on current federal data in order to do their work. The shutdown of the census website is many ways a disaster for these departments and for the people they serve. </div>
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<b>Austerity as Shutdown or "It's About the Governance, Stupid"</b></div>
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Something that a cursory reading about the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/30/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-about-how-the-government-shutdown-will-work/">"government shutdown"</a>makes clear is that this isn't really a total shutdown of the government. "Essential services" and employees are still in operation, although who counts as essential is a heated topic. Law enforcement is still in full effect but the vast majority of employees at the EPA, CDC, and NIH are no longer working.<br />
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While this is a tragedy this is not a total government collapse or a shutdown. This is a particular form of austerity politics played out in real time. It's open knowledge that the republicans are using this as a negotiating chip for future debates on the debt-ceiling. The direct cutting of federal jobs, limiting environmental regulation, freezing scientific research, and hobbling the nation's public health agency just happens to coincide with traditional targets of conservative ire. They couldn't cut out the EPA through direct debate so they use the shutdown. This is a particular articulation of right-wing governance. We should examine the policies conservatives in congress have called for before and what they say openly they want with their current shenanigans. That's a much more subtle job than simply pointing to a shutdown and simply citing "gridlock". This isn't about paralysis, this is about a group that seeks to impose a particular set of austerity-based policies that involve cutting environmental regulation, limiting civil rights, and increasing social inequality by favoring social elites.<br />
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Why does this matter? Because we see our metro areas engage in the same kind of austerity politics that are hostile to environmental regulation and exacerbate social and economic inequity. This is where Brookings performs a neat trick of selectively highlighting policies that fit its narratives around metropolitan policy leadership, particularly around encouraging exports, while ignoring issues around gentrification, other forms of displacement, poverty, and the increasing social inequity that now largely define many of our urban areas. For example, one of the programs breathlessly reported by Brookings is a new parks funding program in Chicago. While it is an ambitious program this is also the same mayor that signed off on closing nearly 50 schools, primarily in poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods, against the protests of teachers, parents, and students in neighborhoods, that due to decades of racial and social segregation and disinvestment, where schools were vital community centers. It is telling that the policies highlighted deal only generally with "economic development" and don't mention pressing issues around social justice, housing affordability, jobs-first policies, poverty reduction etc...<br />
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So...even if metros did not shut down, though they do, we still need to recognize the selective, shitty politics that Brookings seems hell bent on co-signing, both at a national and metro level by engaging in these antics. And I, for one, am tired of it. </div>
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Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-24415611336026760052013-09-27T12:01:00.001-07:002013-09-27T12:01:06.165-07:00What's Good for the Goose...Integrative Thought GapsInitially, this was going to be a response primarily aimed towards Kaid Benfield's new post on the <a href="http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/kaidbenfield/179881/city-sustainability-about-environment-even-when-it-isnt">Sustainable Cities Collective</a> site (I also contribute there on occasion). But I realized my annoyance with this post rested upon a greater critique of "sustainability" (as popularly commented upon) and other topical areas that fall under sustainability oriented science. This idea? Integration.<br />
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I don't mean integration as popularly understood, at least in the US, but the idea of "integrative" thought. The idea that everything matters and effects everything else. It's an idea largely taken from systems science and, in many, many ways, is an incredible powerful idea and basis for analysis. This is especially so for those who are concerned about our environment. An integrative approach allows us to sketch the connections between our policies, like housing subsidies that encourage suburbanization, and link them to the negative environmental effects of sprawl. What's not to love?<br />
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Well, there's plenty to take issue with, and, of course, it comes down to a particular set of values and politics. Frankly, the integrative approach, as called upon by many environmental commentators, especially in relation to questions of urban development and planning, represent the interests of those whose interests are already well represented and catered to. This group is the ever mobile, amorphous "middle class family". This focus is in many ways a logical one. The older, experienced commentators of the mainstream environmental movement are middle aged family types who left the cities years ago and are excited at the opportunity to return. Even younger environmental activists crow about the return to the cities, the millenial preference for urban living, and the social dead spaces that are the suburbs.<br />
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And just as Kaid points out in his piece, good urban policy is, in fact, good for the environment. But "good" urban policy seems to be curiously built around fulfilling the desires of the relative newcomers to these urban spaces. And this is where the "sustainability" paradigm and integrative thinking meets its own politics and shows, at least to me, its remaining yawning gaps. Kaid's analysis is built upon cities making themselves attractive to those "with the choice of where to live". Of course, this leaves out a large proportion of the population, those with few, if any, choices on where to live. And it also performs the neat, historical trick of erasing DECADES of urban history and politics centered around those people who COULD NOT leave, who DID NOT have choice, and had to actually live through those periods of disinvestment and decline that Kaid reminds us many new urban residents observed from the confines of their suburban enclaves (myself included, I'm a suburbs kid).<br />
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And that's the point. Ultimately, urban policy among the sustainability cognoscenti has the same goal as it is for the political elites and growth machines in this city- bringing the middle class back, not creating a city that actually serves everyone. It's a city that ultimately serves them. And as I've written about time and time again on this space and in others, such policies fuel displacement or place what social and environmental disamenities that still exist on those folks the cities aren't interested in serving. This is how sustainability discourse can be used/co-opted/targeted/abused in the name of urban development at the expense of the poor or people of color.<br />
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Kaid's piece is an excellent example of how this still occurs. He simultaneously critiques the frivolousness of Park(ing) day as not really helping the environment but simultaneously extols the virtues of "free, sidewalk libraries" as a "community building" exercise. In light of disinvestment of public libraries in our cities, libraries that low income folks use to access any variety of services from access to the internet to community spaces, cheering these "sidewalk libraries" is just as laughable as claiming Park(ing) day is some revolutionary environmental transformative act. But those "sidewalk libraries" help to make areas more charming and do what Kaid and others like him really want, for middle class families to find cities attractive and move in. This is little different than any other attraction strategy and it's been a constant call for years by more urban oriented mainstream environmentalists. Improve city schools so families will return, improve transit so middle class residents can navigate cities better and so on and so forth. What these arguments never cover is that you should do these things anyway because there are THOUSANDS of families with kids in these cities that have dealt with god-awful schools, insufficient transit systems, degraded social safety nets, and no job opportunities for DECADES.<br />
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Ultimately, the call for urban policy to be centered around attracting these desirable families, incidentally the goal that cities have been pursuing in earnest since the 1950s, doesn't offer anything really new for those who have actually been in the cities this entire time. And this is the primary issue in a lot of urban sustainability policy. In trying to make itself palatable to existing power bases and structures it routinely ignores the ever-neglected "third leg" sustainability- the social. There's nothing "socially sustainable" about supporting policies that reproduce current discrimination, encourage displacement, and don't even attempt to address issues of poverty.<br />
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I'll end with this. I could not care less about carbon mitigation, sprawl, biodiversity or whatever ecocentric concern you may have if it means that people who like me still suffer disproportionately from poverty, premature death, displacement, and discrimination. Let's stop assuming that making a city attractive for the middle class in any way implies benefits for the least powerful or for those traditionally marginalized. To insist on that connection is too insist on a trickle down sustainability that we know does not work. What's "good for the environment" may not be all that good for me. Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-44906468249612926782013-07-25T13:16:00.001-07:002013-07-28T06:14:27.350-07:00Moving from an "urban land ethic" to social justice<div class="p1">
Steward Pickett has a blog post on <a href="http://www.humansandnature.org/urban-land-ethic---steward-pickett-response-76.php"><span class="s1">humans and nature </span></a>responding to the question,"How is nature critical to a 21st century urban ethic?" Pickett argues that there such an ethic does not yet exist and that we should be focused on building one. He cites voices like Leopold's andd Carson's as examples of the kinds of environmental ethical voices absent from the social justice concerns of urban activists and scholars. While he does mention the environmental justice movement, he largely dismisses it as being too ecologically naive or ignorant. His solution is a combined "urban-natural" ethic that can better guide decisions and policies for cities that are trying to survive and grow sustainably. Pickett, like many ecologically-oriented thinkers and activists, has reversed the causal chain of environmental degradation because he ignores political-economic and social relations' role in mediating peoples' relationship with nature.</div>
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This inability to recognize the influence of these varied socio-political forces on our conceptions of nature explains why Pickett can blithely dismiss the nearly 40 years of environmental justice scholarship and activism, along with the radical critiques of political ecologists. Environmental justice and political ecology have drawn explicit links between the way society is structured, how nature is produced within these societal relations, and people relate to nature and natural processes. In other words, Pickett still places and artifical separation between the "social" and the "natural" that environmental justice scholars and political ecologists have long rejected. Their research has shown us that people, especially in urban areas, have a relationship with nature that is more complicated than a simple "land ethic" that comes from spending time in not-obviously modified natural spaces. Nature, especially in our cities, is simply more noticeably modified than out in our hinterlands and the institutions and practices that dictate our relationship with nature are more obvious. So, a love of green space, a particular charismatic species, or water quality concerns are more clearly linked to current governmental and non-governmental institutions, economics, and politics. Park land provision, for example, is less about neighborhoods not desiring green space or nature but is more intimately tied to historical decisions over placing amenities in our cities. Thus poorer, heavily minority, sections of citieis often have much less park space available because past administrations deliberately kept park space from the neighborhoods of undesireables. A neighborhood filled with landfills, incinerators, and other toxic land uses does not sigal that the residents are indifferent to the natural environment but is often a reflection of their lack of power in dictating where such toxic facilities can go in the first place.</div>
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Local activism, well covered in the environmental justice and political ecology literature, speaks to a fierce desire of people to live in a healthy environment Their form of environmental stewardship goes beyond a simple land ethic because they recognize that they live fully <i>within</i> their natural environment. It is a recognition of a more intimate, nested understanding of nature than is encapsulated by an urban land ethic. In this way, nature is <i>produced</i> by a particual set of socio-political relations even as those relations, in turn, exist in a greater ecosystem. There is a circularity of relations here, but the important thing to remember is that nature, the nature you and I experience every day, is intimately shaped by the social context in which we live. </div>
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A <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/world/asia/garment-trade-wields-power-in-bangladesh.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0"><span class="s1">recent article</span></a> in <i>The New York Times </i>on the garment manufacturers association in Bangladesh is an excellent example of the nested, circiular relationship people have with nature everywhere, but especially in our cities. The article focuses on the garment association's headquarters that sits in the middle of Dhaka's lake system. It is technically an illegal settlement that the association could build built due to a combination of official indifference and corruption. The result, a dramatically transformed local hydrological system that exacerbates flooding in a city that suffers terrible f<a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/in-bangladesh-more-shelter-from-the-storms/"><span class="s1">loods and cyclones</span></a> on a nearly yearly basis. How could this happen? Do Dhaka residents, and Bangladeshi's, in general, simply not care about their envronment? No. The story is much more complex and is tied, ultimately, to Bangladesh's position in the global economy.</div>
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The garment trade has a near unbreakable grip on the reigns of power in Bangladesh and Dhaka. Bangladesh is a poor country and Dhaka is often viewed as a prototypical example of and ungovernable South Asian megacity dominated by slums and terribly polluted. Garment manfucaturing is the country's leading industry and the garment manufacturers association is a de facto government agency, responsible for tracking, managing, and regulating the production of garments in the country. In a word, they are nearly untouchable. The same power that allows this association to largely escape new regulation after horrific <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/world/asia/bangladesh-factory-fire-caused-by-gross-negligence.html"><span class="s1">factory fires</span></a> that kill hundreds of low income workers is the same power that allows them to build their headquarters in the middle of the sensitive wetland ecosystem that is vital to Dhaka's drainage. Additionally, the construction of that tower is tied to the way that Dhaka goes through its own increasing urbanization and growth. It all rests on the outsized power of a particular industry group in a poorer country that does not yet have the institutions in place to fully control it. In this way, we can see how flood control and water quality issues are intimately connected to global economic relationships and their links to local processes of urbanization that encourage the construction of ecologically destructive illegal settlements of a powerful trade group.</div>
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An "urban land ethic" as called for by Pickett does nothing to address these concerns or relegates it purely to a question of environmental justice concerns that need to be more explicitly connected to ecology. But what it misses is that our ecology is produced by these greater political economic contexts. It's this nested, or integrative, view of nature and society that environmental justice scholars and political ecologists have articulated for years. It is precisely this lack of an integrative view of nature and society that has befuddled "traditional" environmentalists and their organizations when they've decided to enter cities and find that their calls for a conservation-led ethic fall on deaf ears. This does not mean that we can't use a more sophisticated understanding of how ecology plays out in different ways in our urban areas. The rise of ecosystem services has opened up new ways to imagine and discuss the benefits we receive from our surrounding natural resources, both within and without the city. But we must also recognize that nature is not separate from the urban or from society. We don't need a new urban-natural ethic if we're serious about actually protecting our natural environment and valuing it in our cities. What we need is to recognize is that the forces of capitalism and racism that have shaped our (American) cities are the same ones that have shaped our relationships with nature. The question is not one of bringing about a new urban land ethic, but of taking social and economic justice seriously, because a city that respects everyone's humanity and that seeks to make space for everyone to live and prosper will also be more sensitive to its effects on the surrounding environment such that everyone can benefit from nature's bounty.</div>
Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-91188800842052526212013-07-07T19:18:00.002-07:002013-07-08T10:28:18.463-07:00From the Fugitive Slave Act to COINTELPRO: The Racial Surveillance StateI stole the "Racial Surveillance State" from one of my twitter compatriots, @davidforbes, concerning a recent dustup between Tim Wise and some of his followers regarding some ad hominem attacks he aimed at Glenn Greenwald and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden">Edward Snowden</a>. I don't have a link to the meltdown Wise had on his timeline, unfortunately, but I wanted to speak to the critique he clumsily attempted to make. Wise was trying to point out the hypocrisy of many white people, white social media folks/bloggers and mainstream media organizations (primarily run and populated by white people) who express surprise and dismay over the discovery of the NSA's massive surveillance programs given the fact that people of color, particularly Blacks, have been subject to systematic, large scale surveillance for a LONG time (read: since before the founding of the US). But Wise got bogged down in his mistaken statements regarding Greenwald and got appropriately shouted down for it.<br />
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That being said, I am sympathetic to what Wise was trying to say, and I to am incredibly unimpressed with the reactions around these discoveries about the NSA. And I do think if there is not a hint of hypocrisy here, then there is at least a strong contradictory note to the current mania over surveillance that ignores the very long history of race-based surveillance in this country and our large cultural indifference to its existence. Beyond that, I would also argue that this racial surveillance state has not only hurt black people but has also been targeted at <i>white</i> people at the same time. In this way, we can theorize on the myriad ways that racism hurts both the oppressed and the oppressor (though the victimization is <i>nowhere</i> near even).<br />
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Succinctly, the US has engaged in a near-continuous operation of surveillance on multiple groups of people, particularly Black people, for the purpose of control and economic exploitation. It is only until fairly recently that we can MAYBE claim such efforts exist simply because Blacks are naturally considered suspicious in a country built on white supremacy. So...you know...progress!<br />
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Black Americans have been under surveillance and control since before the inception of the US as a country. Slavery required an extensive surveillance network centered on watching and controlling Black bodies, but something we forget is that slavery also required an entirely new set of social relations, practices, and differing levels of surveillance for ALL people, especially since Blackness was a state determined by ancestry as much as physical appearance (the infamous "One Drop" rule and varied mixed-race classifications are a testament to this). But the larger point is that Black Americans have always been surveilled, monitored, and extensively policed and that these systems were also unevenly applied on greater populations. This history should expose the ridiculousness of current mania over discovery of NSA surveillance as some manifestation of new, dark turn our federal government has with its citizens. This policy is simply an extension of surveillance practices that were traditionally aimed at the US's problematic populations, of whom Blacks are a founding and permanent member (honorable mentions go to the Irish and Jewish folks for making it out!).<br />
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Not recognizing this history is not only fairly sloppy and indicative of how white privilege makes the lived experience of non-white people invisible, but it also obscures the true <i>structural</i> foundations of surveillance, as practiced by the US government (and its states and local governments). Cries over the transformation of the US from a free country to a "police state" ignores the fact that for many people in this country they are born into a police state and are often killed by it while others can walk worry-free, snug in the tattered, threadbare blanket of liberty that is Whiteness in America.<br />
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Because you cannot talk about the history of surveillance in this country without talking about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes">slave codes.</a> You cannot talk about a police state if you do not talk about how poor white men were seen as suspicious by well off planters and were often victimized and killed for the crime of being suspiciously friendly to slaves. You cannot talk about the creeping police state if you don't talk about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850">Fugitive Slave Act of 1850</a> (yes it was highly contested but it was upheld by the Supreme Court and it still demanded Northern complicity and expanded Black surveillance formally).<br />
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Beyond that, such positions ignore the heavy-handed surveillance and social control required to make the Jim Crow South and heavily segregated North run efficiently. De jure and de facto segregation in housing and in industry is still about control over Black bodies and fortune. In the South it was viscerally apparent and open, but in the North we still had riots over Blacks demanding fair housing, "hate strikes" (check out Sugrue's <i><a href="http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1447">Origins of the Urban Crisis</a> </i>for more detail) by White unionists who wanted to keep their shops and plants Whites only, and a police force designed to control and contain Blacks in specific parts of a city or county. The edifice of White supremacy, ultimately, is built upon the vigilance of individuals and institutions to always be aware of non-White, particularly Black, bodies.<br />
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Indifference towards police treatment of Black Americans is what emboldens police forces, like the NYPD, to engage in a mass surveillance program like Stop-and-Frisk or to monitor mosques in secret because their jobs have largely been based on managing and controlling non-White people for the better part of three centuries. Suspicion over Black American agency and calls for freedom set the entire workings of the federal government against civil rights activists and laid the foundation for full counter-intelligence and monitoring programs like the notorious <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO">COINTELPRO</a> program aimed at disrupting the Black Panthers and other radical Black groups. Ultimately, this long suspicion and desire for control over Black Americans encourages the application of state and state-sanctioned violence when surveillance is not enough, ranging from the lynchings of the late 19th and 20th centuries, to the <a href="http://monthlyreview.org/2009/12/01/the-assassination-of-fred-hampton-by-the-fbi-and-chicago-police-forty-years-later">assassination of Fred Hampton</a> and other Black radicals by the police in the '60s and '70s, to the hundreds of innocent Black people killed by police every year, to the hundreds of thousands of Black people incarcerated in this country.<br />
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This is why we cannot reasonably hope to attack or defeat surveillance or the "creeping" police state without looking at the history and current practices of unevenly applied surveillance and policing of our problematic populations.<br />
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Because if we were able to tear down all illicit NSA programs tomorrow and guarantee they wouldn't spy on US citizens, I, as a Black male, would still be part of the essential problematic of America. I would still be more likely to go to prison, be discriminated against at my job or potential choice of housing, and be more likely to be killed by a police officer for the egregious crime of being Black in America on a day ending in "y". And if you aren't talking about when talking about surveillance of US citizens then you're missing a good part of the issue and you'll come back a decade from now when a new program is leaked and still be surprised as to why these things continue to happen.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-40609859822776916952013-06-09T10:00:00.004-07:002013-06-09T10:00:59.401-07:00The bikes were never about them...The urbanist/planning internet world has been taken over by the recent activation of NYC's bikeshare program, CitiBike. Folks on twitter breathlessly report growing enrollment and already are asking if it is time to expand the system. Tweets, blog posts, and articles in traditional media have explored this new system in a staggering amount of ways, ranging from the <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/venn-diagram-why-conservatives-hate-citi-bike.html">snarkily celebratory</a>, to <a href="http://gothamist.com/2013/06/06/whats_really_wrong_with_citi_bike.php">considered technical critiques</a>, to <a href="http://gothamist.com/2013/06/01/video_conservative_who_represents_m.php">outright winguttery</a>. More recently, though, a new discussion point concerning bike share programs, and cycling in general has arisen. The basic question being,"What do we do about poor people and people of color?"<br />
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The relationship between cycling and poor and minority communities is one that is simultaneously simple and complex. A recent report from the American League of Cyclists and the Sierra Club, covered in Atlantic Cities <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/05/surprising-diversity-american-cycling-community/5737/">here</a>, puts some numbers challenging the "racial stereotype" of cyclists in America. This report has further spurred more commentary, again from <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/06/biggest-obstacle-cyclings-egalitarian-aspirations-distance/5784/">Atlantic Cities</a> on how communities of color and low income communities are not well served by "cycling's egalitarian aspirations". <br />
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Bike share programs are the perfect targets for these columnists and thinkers to express their racial and class anxiety concerning the fraught combination of race and class that is cycling in the US. Commentators accurately point out that the lack of infrastructure is a major impediment to getting low income communities excited about cycling and recent attention paid to the continued "suburbanization of poverty" speaks to a major spatial mismatch between those communities that could be best helped by safe bicycling infrastructure and programs or services designed to help folks bike. <br />
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But where these commentators fall short is that they take an implicit stance that this situation has just "developed" naturally over time as opposed to being produced. So, the questions surrounding cycling and communities commonly perceived to be disinterested in cycling often end up being some distillation of,"How do we get poor/POC onto bikes/using [insert corporate bikeshare name]?" When the question really should be,"What do these communities need/want?"<br />
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And this is my point/theory...bicycling's growing popularity over the past decade or so is due to the fact that a preferred demographic has now pushed for it. I had an extended conversation on twitter the other day around this idea where I semi-jokingly said that the forces that destroyed black and poor neighborhoods with highway construction from the 40s to the 60s are the same ones now pushing bike lanes. There are clear differences, urban renewal was a federally funded program (though locally controlled and the identification of "blighted" areas was often a pure racial clearance project) and transparently "elite" driven. Highways to downtowns were built in a vain attempt to draw new suburban residents back into cities to shop and work. We know the general story, segregated suburbanization continued uninhibited for decades, exacerbating sprawl, accelerating the disinvestment of central cities and intensified ghettoization. <br />
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But isn't everything different now? Young, "creatives" flock to central cities to work in high-tech firms and to enjoy the culture of cities against the banality of suburban living. And they bike! How is this a bad thing? Well, it's not a bad thing. But we need to step back and ask whose interests are being served. The return to the city of these folks are largely based on long campaigns of displacement and gentrification. Neighborhoods that were left to rot for decades are now sites of "revitalization" and are seeing the rise of new commercial services, infrastructure, and attention from city officials. But these are also the same neighborhoods that have asked for better transit service, safer streets, better schools, and opportunities to develop community-serving businesses and generally have been ignored or underserved. And yes, even these neighborhoods before the influx of new gentrifiers had people who cycled, but it was never the goal of the city to support these small, poor cyclists with essential infrastructure or to even encourage the activity in poorer neighborhoods. We can blame some of this on a "car culture" and bicycle stigmatization, but as Grabar's piece correctly points out, these areas have always been underserved.<br />
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My point is this, the same forces that sought to serve elite interests and encourage redevelopment of center cities through highway construction are the same ones that now see bikes, and their attendant infrastructure, as a way to spur redevelopment and to attract a new preferred class. Any statement from a mayor or urbanist commentator that speaks about bike lanes as a way to attract young professionals is part of this plan. It's simply the new infrastructure du jour designed to steer capital into formerly disinvested areas. This does not mean that bike lanes cause gentrification or that you can't build bike infrastructure anywhere for fear of displacement. But we should take a step back and truly ask,"Who are we serving?" and, "Why are we building?" It is telling and sad that we can recognize the spatial switch of our regions, now with more wealthy centers and poorer suburbs (a great adaption of the European model), and yet still puzzle over a lack of enthusiasm on the part of poorer neighborhoods and individuals for bikes. People aren't stupid. They know that their cities rarely, if ever, do anything to actually help them and the last 15-20 years in many areas has seen nothing but a race for cities to accelerate displacement through selective investments in formerly disinvested neighborhoods. Bike lanes are just yet another indicator of a city building something for a potential inhabitant rather than the folks already there. <br />
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To conclude...ask yourself about any plan or project,"Who does this serve? Why are we doing it? Who wins? Who loses? Who pays for it?". Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-64605277326187991012013-04-29T11:40:00.002-07:002013-04-29T14:55:04.226-07:00Kotkin stays trollingJoel Kotkin has a new piece out in the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/29/the-triumph-of-suburbia-despite-downtown-hype-americans-choose-sprawl.html">Daily Beast</a> repeating his now well-worn shtick on the unqualified preference for single-family homes for the majority of Americans and the defeat of tyrannical "retro-urbanists" who want to impose an urban lifestyle on innocent Americans. The thing with Kotkin is that I can't disagree with him on some really basic facts, but like Randal O'Toole (who's vociferous criticism of transit boondoggles like Portland's Streetcar are fairly spot on) <span style="font-family: inherit;">he has such </span>a visceral hatred for planning and the city represents that it drowns out decent points. And because he's so hell-bent on taking down folks like Richard Florida and the entire field of urban planning, he loves to stretch arguments out too far and basically turns into one of many trolls we find with an outsized voice. A few reasons why we should ignore 90% of what Kotkin ever says (while keeping the last 10%)...<br />
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<b>Suburbs are growing but not all suburbs are the same...</b><br />
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Kotkin is entirely correct when he talks about consumer preferences for "suburban" living. Ignoring the idea that the "preference" for certain suburban living may be partially constructed due to marketing and that we have subsidized suburban construction while neglecting the upkeep of our central urban areas, it's not unreasonable to recognize that a lot of people would like a single-family home of their own. But this assumes a rather uniform style of suburban development.<br />
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Look, not all suburbs are the same, just as not all cities are the same. Urban oriented commentators don't pretend that Houston and New York are the same thing even though they're both large cities and central to their MSAs. We recognize that they have dramatically different forms but still call them "cities". Kotkin, like other "pro"-density urbanists are falling into a rhetorical trap here that seeks to impose one manner of development on a highly heterogeneous array of settlement patterns. The fact is that there is no clean break between the "suburb" and the "city". Yes, we've seen massive sprawl over the past 60 years but we are also seeing a return not only to the "city" but also to inner-ring suburbs and a densification of suburban areas through the development of edge cities and other areas. Frankly, the development of suburbia is much more complex than an undifferentiated spread of cul-de-sac fueled development.<br />
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<b>We really don't try to house everyone in the city who'd like to be...</b><br />
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Probably the most egregious set of comments in the piece that best show Kotkin's disdain for planners and really for poorer folks, in general. Here's the quote:<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Suburbs have never been popular with the chattering classes, whose members tend to cluster in a handful of denser, urban communities—and who tend to assume that place shapes behavior, so that if others are pushed to live in these communities they will also behave in a more enlightened fashion, like the chatterers. This is a fallacy with a long pedigree in planning circles, going back to the housing projects of the 1940s, which were built in no small part on the evidently absurd, and eventually discredited, assumption that if the poor had the same sort of housing stock as the rich, they would behave in the same ways.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yes, planning has a dark history around environmental determinism and assuming physical planning tools will instantly solve social problems through either disciplining a population or demonstrating a better way of living through design. But this is a total mischaracterization of the push for greater access to housing in cities and pathologizes the poor in a way that is, frankly, indefensible. The fact is that since before the 1940s, going all the way to back to slum and tenement reform programs, planners, public health advocates, social workers, labor unions, and neighborhood groups have called for more housing in urban areas that was not hopelessly deteriorated and ill-maintained. That call still goes on today. The fact is that because this country doesn't actually have a coherent affordable housing policy the poor have consistently lived in older, more dilapidated housing stock. The recent observations around the "suburbanization of poverty" only reinforce this idea as poorer folks have moved into poorer, older inner ring suburbs who's housing stock is quickly approaching obsolescence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The fact is that this country still does not make legitimate attempts to integrate its population with each other, preferring to let segregation by income and race be dominant factors in settlement patterns and relying on housing "filtering" to substitute for building good housing for all. It's dishonest for Kotkin to not even engage with this and its patently offensive that he'd sit there and just say that poor people can't have nice housing.</span><br />
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<b>Supply</b></span><br />
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Kotkin adamantly refuses to address the question of the supply of housing because it adds a wrinkle of complexity and ambiguity to the argument and that is what are the primary motivations that push or pull people to the suburbs. Yes, it is widely recognized that construction of suburbs and even exurban areas is starting to recover and that we saw a massive bit of building before the recession. But why were builders building out in the suburbs at such high rates?</span><br />
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Consumer preference for suburban living is certainly a large part of this. But we must also simultaneously recognize that it is still incredibly difficult to build housing in urban areas. This is an area where I fall with many market-oriented urban planners and economists who decry density restrictions in many of our growing cities. There is a real push of potential development outside of our city borders because it is not possible for developers to make any money off of relatively low-density development in already built up areas. Combine that with a non-existent social housing policy and there are very few people building any units in our cities that are accessible to folks of all income classes. The result is that a lot of housing development goes to cheaper pastures and people follow that.</span><br />
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A similar idea must be broached when we discuss "job sprawl". Kotkin, correctly so, points out that job growth has been and continues to grow outward and that people are moving to follow, but the same questions regarding housing supply are open here. Job sprawl has been a constant thing in American cities for nearly 70 years. Detroit had to deal with the suburbanization of industry back in the 1940s and was never able to adequately recover its lost central city industrial sites, much to the chagrin of its planners. But the question here, again, is who leads this? In the case of Detroit, at least, according to "Redevelopment and Race" by June Manning Thomas, industry lead the way in suburbanization and residential suburbs grew up in response to industrial decentralization. Frankly, the dynamics of regional expansion are never so neat as to simply ascribe consumer residential preference as the primary factor. We see waves of decentralization, some industry led, then residential, then industry...there are cycles and historical contexts to suburbanization that call into question the assumptions we have about the preference for them (on both sides of this "debate").</span><br />
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<b>"Lifestyle" and the kid question...</b></span><br />
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My friend and colleague, @tressiemcphd, made a sharp observation about this Kotkin piece. She said that probably the biggest blindspot urbanists have is that kids change everything. Her point, for my urbanist colleagues who may not see it, is that even if we take all of the celebratory commentary of the "return to the city" and the preference for urban living by millenials, that all changes when these millenials reproduce.Let's be real for a second....people want the best for their kids. Because people want the best for their kids they will often do their utmost to provide that, including moving from cities to the 'burbs. The point is not to question the values of these folks but to see why they feel it is necessary to move out of our cities. Some things we can't really do much about, like guaranteeing a big yard for everyone in the central city. We simply don't have the space and the vast majority of folks couldn't afford a house with such an amenity in most cities anyway. But a major reason why people do move is the schools and perception of safety. These are things city-leaders can, and admittedly are trying, to address. But uncritical urbanists will continue to be mystified by demographic and economic trends that show a robust demand for increasingly segregated suburbs if they don't start seriously examining the schools.</span><br />
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The trick here is to actually try to provide folks with the services necessary for them to live and grow without them leaving. It's especially grating that this concern is now being taken up by the usually design and development-oriented urbanist set because they don't want to lose the precious millenial population they believe makes up their cities while ignoring the millions of poor and working class, largely minority, communities that have clamored for better schools for years. All of this is to say that Kotkin is right to point out lifestyle preferences as driving residential choices, but we should be seriously asking ourselves what people find in some suburbs as opposed to central cities or denser areas of our metros?</span><br />
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<b>To Conclude: On the one hand...</b></span><br />
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All of this space has been to try and say that, as with most things involving human settlement, the "truth" is much more complicated than either Kotkin or some non-reflective urbanists would have us believe. Last year I wrote a piece warning people that the vaunted <a href="http://surlyurbanist.blogspot.com/2012/04/sprawl-is-not-dead.html">"Death of Sprawl"</a> was grossly immature and largely based on folks not moving as much due to the economic recession and a misunderstanding of the census designation of "urban areas". My point then is the same way I have now except I now aim it both at doctrinaire urbanists and trolls like Kotkin. And that is always to show me the data and give me a good theory to help explain it. Though Kotkin mocks many urbanist commentators, he suffers from the same weakness they do, creating a convenient narrative from cherry-picked data. The competing narratives are basically the same in that they both ascribe a near-universal qualitative preference for either city-living or suburban-living. Neither theory is correct or even widely applicable in most cases.</span><br />
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So, on the one hand, Kotkin is a troll. On the other hand, he makes some good points that planners and some urbanists absolutely have to think about. But on the other-other hand, both sides tend to ignore or gloss over the heterogeneity of our urban areas and both sides often don't try to parse out the push and pull factors that operate differently in many of our regions. This "debate" could be more fruitful if everyone were just more honest and recognized not only the messiness of the real world, but stopped trying to fit one solution onto everyone else. Suburbia is not the answer. But neither is the "city". I am close to rejecting the entire discussion because we have drawn a too-sharp, false distinction between the two that not only limits our own imagination on how to deal with our increasingly unruly regions, but it also does not accurately reflect the current dynamism and differentiation that exists in our metro regions.</span>Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-21970298964455335072013-04-04T12:21:00.003-07:002013-04-04T12:31:07.758-07:00Don't Weep for Richard Florida<br />
I was not going to write on the recent spate of critical articles targeting Richard Florida and his creative class theory/evangelism because, frankly, the arguments are not very compelling and they recycle (poorly) the critiques of economic geographers and planning scholars from the early 2000s. I have always been clear on my distaste for Florida's creative class thesis and its perverse politics, but a recent article at <a href="http://rustwire.com/2013/04/03/the-backlash-against-richard-florida-is-overblown-insidious/">Rustwire</a> has forced me to respond.<br />
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The gist of the Rustwire post is that current attacks on Florida are overblown for the following reasons:<br />
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1. Florida never claimed to be a poverty researcher therefore we should not attack his theory if it doesn't alleviate poverty.<br />
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2. There is only one recent study that challenges the benefits of creative class development and it does not focus on the other potential benefits of "talent agglomeration" on the poor and that the empirical evidence on “talent agglomeration” is well supported.<br />
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3. Economic development policy was largely restricted to ineffective industrial attraction schemes and Florida changed the game up (a policy disruptive or paradigm shifting argument)<br />
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4. Florida's detractors are playing a cynical "class resentment" game<br />
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5. Florida's ideas are based on the benign wish to make cities "inviting" places to live.<br />
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I shall try to respond to these reasons in a relatively concise fashion in order to show why these reasons are not only foolish, but just an apologia for current urban development trends that many scholars and commenters, including yours truly on this blog and in other outlets, have critiqued harshly for exacerbating the worst excesses of American social inequity.<br />
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<b>Florida never claimed to be a poverty researcher...</b><br />
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This may be the weakest argument of the list because it is the least accurate and relevant. I say least accurate because it would be rude to call it dishonest. Yes, if we take Richard Florida's direct quotes as gospel, then MAYBE you can claim that he has never positioned himself as a “poverty researcher” but this would favor a narrow set of statements against a decade of actions that clearly demonstrate the opposite.<br />
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Florida has spent the better part of a decade traveling around the country, and the world, advising city leaders on the benefits of a “talent attraction” strategy. A unique sub-class of cities he's visited, at least in the US? Declining Rust Belt cities. This 2009 article from the <a href="http://prospect.org/article/ruse-creative-class-0">American Prospect</a> gives only a very small sample of cities Florida advised: Baltimore, Youngstown, Cleveland, Toledo, Des Moines, Roanoke etc...Florida may not sell himself as a “poverty researcher” but many of the cities that he has consulted, at great personal profit, have huge impoverished populations and economic development policy is poverty alleviation policy. Claiming Florida never willingly took on the formal title is absurd on the face of it. You do not go to Youngstown or comment on Detroit or any number of smaller, declining cities and pretend that you aren't talking about poverty because these cities are largely defined by entrenched poverty.<br />
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<b>Evidence on “Talent Agglomeration” and its Benefits</b><br />
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This critique is more subtle, and potentially legitimate, but it rests upon an ignorance of the body of work that not only precedes Florida's creative class thesis (itself a repackaging of human capital economic theory) but the large body of theoretical and empirical work developed in the past decade that support and challenge Florida's conclusions. This is largely academic, but this is an example where academic arguments and social science processes are incredibly important because Florida's approach to urban policy is the dominant policy framing of the day.<br />
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Empirically there is still an open question as to whether Florida's creative class thesis is correct (some recent papers <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01048.x/abstract">here</a>, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00343400600928285">here</a>, and <a href="http://cjres.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/1/71.full.pdf+html">here</a> demonstrate the rather mixed results of the thesis). I'm gonna get a little in the weeds here but only to demonstrate that the evidence for the creative class thesis is decidedly mixed and that part of the reason for the mixed results is that the creative class is a sub-theory of human capital theory and is not well operationalized. Simply put, human capital theory states that long term economic growth is possible thanks to the increasing returns of scale due to human knowledge. Knowledge is unique in that is inexhaustible and can combined and recombined in an infinite array. Policies built around human capital theory include subsidies for R&D, subsidizing eduation for city or regional residents, or even technological outreach programs and extension programs.<br />
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Florida goes beyond the basic human growth theory and traditional policy programs built around human capital theory. His defintion of “creatives” as those who add economic value to a city is a large step from human capital theory and he goes even further by focusing upon a set of occupations he dubs “creative” as essential to economic growth. Human capital theory is relatively agnostic on certain occupations and certainly does not posit direct growth measures to a specific set of occupations or attempts to link growth due to “creativity”. In addition, Florida also posits that the co-location of “creatives” is adequate to enable economic growth. This differs from other innovation or human capital theories that focus upon the interplay of the co-location of educated people and institutional forms necessary to convert their ideas into products. This is a little nitpicky, but it is important because it frames the decisions city leaders make and the infrastructure they decide to invest in. Basically, the creative class is an extension (some would say an overly ambitious extension) of human capital theory but it is empirically ambiguous due to the fact that there is a large overlap between variables used to measure traditional human capital variables and those that measure the creative class. This is an important point because the policy implications between following a more traditional human capital approach and a creative attraction approach are drastically different. Again, and I can't repeat this enough, human capital theory is a largely recognized and tested theoretical approach but the evidence for economic growth due to the co-location of “creatives” and basic policy around attracting these creatives through forming a portfolio of attractive urban amenities is not remotely settled. (For more on this please read this excellent review by <a href="http://www2.lse.ac.uk/geographyAndEnvironment/whosWho/profiles/storper/pdf/Rethinking%20Human%20Capital.pdf">Scott and Storper</a>).<br />
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<b>Economic Development was only concerned with industrial attraction before Florida showed us the light</b><br />
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This observation is one that is simply incorrect. Economic development policy has indeed by dominated by industrial attraction (and it still goes on, much to my chagrin) but industrial attraction and convention center construction are considered pretty old school economic development techniques that practicing economic developers. I won't go into deep detail on the history of economic development but there is an absolutely essential paper on by <a href="http://blakelycitytalk.squarespace.com/storage/Third%20Wave%20Economic%20Development.pdf%7C">Bradshaw and Blakely</a>. This paper (from 1999, by the way) talked about current economic development policy, at the time, being focused not on industrial attraction but the use of public-private partnerships, industrial clusters, human resources and human capital strategies, and is characterized by state governments moving away from expensive incentive programs and focusing uponbuilding strategic advantages within industrial clusters. This is a paper from 1999 and shows economic development practice, even then, was dynamic, imaginative and had moved beyond industry and convention center attraction as a primary form of economic development policy. Florida certainly helped to switch the economic development game up but to say economic development policy was still primarily promoting policies that were largely sidelined over a decade ago is either incredibly sloppy or dishonest.<br />
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<b> CLASS WAR!!</b><br />
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Frankly, this argument is pure neoliberal, trickled-down economics. Thirty years of local, state and federal policies that have favored the interests of economic and political elites have shown us that simply assuming that the success of one group will help others is wrong. Amenity-based development, “placemaking” projects, the varied accoutrements of the sustainable city like farmers markets and bike infrastructure, the intense redevelopment of central cities, the conversion of industrial land, and any other array of city or regional policy decisions and priorities are NOT value neutral or apolitical and have a disparate impact on city populations.. Let me repeat: city and regional policy decisions and priorities are NOT value neutral or apolitical and have a disparate impact on city populations. The way many of these policies have been rolled out in American cities have seeded and exacerbated displacement, gentrification, housing affordability crises, and increased income inequality. To say that the interests of “creatives” and the poor or communities of color implies an overlap that in many cities simply does not exist. There are legitimate trad off decisions and real winners and losers when it comes to policy and planning decisions and we should honestly interrogate the disparate impacts of amenity-based planning strategies instead of effacing the real conflicts and decisions that undergird creative class policy.<br />
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<b>He wants livable cities, though!</b><br />
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This argument is a good intentions argument. I'll be honest, I don't care if Richard Florida wants livable cities. If his concept of the livable city is synonomous with the creative city, then he can have it. Livability, like his own version of creativity, are not immune from political challenge or analytical critique. If livability is dependent upon the displacement of poor people and communities of color, then I will fight livability as it is presented with every fiber of my being and any planner or urbanist who is concered with social justice should be skeptical of livability discourse claims that do not deal with poverty or social inequality explicitly. The risk of perpetuating already incredibly unequal social relations is simply to great.<br />
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<b>Don't weep...</b><br />
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Richard Florida is still one of the most influential urban thinkers in the world. Whether you agree with his theories and policy recommendations or not, his influence is absolutely undeniable. He dramatically changed how planners and economic developers plan and set policy and has made an ungodly amount of money from consulting, writing multiple bestsellers, and his own research center at the University of Toronto. This current “backlash” may be unfair or biased in some instances (Kotkin's critique is based on a visceral hatred of cities and astrong aversion to planning), but Florida's work needs to be tested and critiqued. The empirical weakness of his conclusions should be shouted from the rooftops because planners set their policies based on unfounded claims. The political questions around creative class planning should be challenged because they have helped to accelerate displacement of poor communities around the country and shift city government priorities away from poverty alleviation to amenity development. So, don't weep for Richard Florida. Ask wy there's such a backlash in the first place.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-89930448118039872742013-03-18T17:19:00.002-07:002013-03-18T17:19:26.382-07:00Austerity Planning? Land Sell-Off in NYCA recent article in the<i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/nyregion/public-agencies-needing-money-give-up-land-and-buildings.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20130318">New York Times</a></i> caught my eye. The article describes the conversion of a series of public-properties, primarily old libraries and schools, into new residential towers that would include replacement space for the lost civic institutions. I don't wish to get into the disruption of students' lives or the fact that existing neighborhoods will be without convenient library services, in some cases, for multiple years. These are quite serious impacts and should not be ignored, but there are many better education and library writers who could probably do justice to those topics.<br />
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What I am intrigued about is the approach certain offices in the city are taking-selling city land to the highest bidder for repair or renovation costs. There are a LOT of overlapping factors here that I have neither the time not the skill to fully delve into but I think we should question a second as to why it is necessary for these sites to be sold. For example, the schools that are being sold off are managed by the <a href="http://schools.nyc.gov/community/facilities/ecf/default.htm">Educational Construction Fund</a>. The Fund, since the 1960s, has been tasked with developing new school space through mixed-use development to help support construction. The Fund has done this primarily through the issuing of bonds and leasing the land to developers. The Fund has a variety of projects listed on its page, although many seem to be older than ten years old.<br />
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I think the next question to be made here, at least in the case of Fund, is why the desire to sell-off these properties? This especially confusing when the city's Housing Authority is leasing land on existing parking lots to new residential developers to the tune of $60 million.<br />
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The city is approaching this question of redevelopment, renovation, and amenity provision in a variety of ways, but I am incredibly curious as to why the Fund, an organization with a history of leasing and bond management, has decided to sell off this land, thus losing any claim to future gains land value and control? I could not find details on the contracts between the Fund and these developers, but I am always concerned with the sell-off of public amenities, especially during times of fiscal distress/austerity. It's quite clear that NYC's libraries and schools are hurting for revenue, but the sell off of precious assets to act as one-time payments does absolutely nothing to fix the structural funding gap that exists. Since the late 1970s/early 1980s the sell off of public assets has been a central strategy that cities and nations have made in the face of structural adjustment programs imposed by financial institutions like the WorldBank. Of course, the most famous example in the US may have been Ford's mythical declaration to New York City to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/nyregion/28veto.html">"Drop Dead"</a> in 1975 when NYC was on the verge of defaulting. While Ford eventually got Congress to approve a set of federal loans to the city, the repayment of those loans involved a series of painful cuts to <a href="http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/95/notes/v3n1.pdf">city services</a> including the imposition of fees on what was once the free CUNY system. We see a similar set of events now in Detroit with the imposition of a state emergency manager to tame the city's debt. The expectation, of course, being that Detroit will see even more cuts on worker pay, available city services like fire and police, and the potential sell-off of public assets.<br />
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This is not to defend the mismanagement of city finances, but to point out that varied financial crises both domestic and abroad have been used as a way for the private sector to extract huge gains at the expense of the public sector. We should not question the efforts of cities to raise more funds to meet their financial and social obligations but we should look at the policies that cities choose to get there. Selling off land, even with a promise to rebuild the library, should be seriously analysed, especially given the strong history and ability of the city to lease land to interested developers and more fully recoup gains on land redevelopment.<br />
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The overriding question in all of this should be what is the actual problem these varied city agencies are trying to solve? If the city feels its landholdings are legitimately bloated, then selling some properties for a high return can be a solid strategy. But in the case of a persistent, structural funding gap, like in the case of the libraries and schools, it is irrational to sell off assets as a primary means of funding. What they need is a consistent stream of funding that will cover renovations and repairs and that can only be handled through policy that increases funding in order to cover capital costs or it could be done through a longer-term leasing arrangement that the schools and libraries could draw from and set up vehicles for consistent capital cost financing.<br />
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I am not privy to the political and financial dealings of the varied New York City agencies, but this current path that the schools and libraries are on seems terribly short-sighted. Only time will tell us whether this strategy will help make these agencies more solvent and support the surrounding communities.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-46065858735869462262013-02-15T17:54:00.002-08:002013-02-15T17:54:26.594-08:00Gentrification is a dirty word...as it should beThe title of this piece is borrowed from Neil Smith's <i>The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City</i> where he tracks the spread of gentrification across New York, particularly the Lower East Side from the late 80s to the early 90s. He talks about the political, cultural, and economic aspects that drive gentrification and gives a strong critique of the forces that wipe the working class and poor from our cities.<br />
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Smith interrogates the policies of New York, from anti-homeless campaigns designed to sanitize certain neighborhoods for developers seeking "safe" neighborhoods for investment, to the subsidization of major luxury developments against the wishes of community groups and activists. He even draws upon the way development interests use art, from galleries and artist housing, as development beachheads, preparing target neighborhoods for further development by creating new edgy, trendy arts districts in former no-go zones for the well off.<br />
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The central lesson of this and other more radical critiques of gentrification is that none of this is accidental or "natural". Cities put policies in place to encourage development while ignoring the needs of existing residents. Developers systematically target neighborhoods and engage in a variety of tactics to encourage landlords to sell and to remove residents from target buildings. These are explicit strategies that are geared towards one thing- profit maximization.<br />
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This is why articles like this from <i><a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112422/gentrifications-real-problem-monotony#">The New Republic</a> </i>are incredibly problematic. The author laments the kind of social cleansing that is part and parcel of the gentrification process but then throws up her hands and simply walks away confused but not troubled by the apparent irony of the situation. Never does she ask the question as to why city redevelopment must inevitably lead to gentrification. In fact, the author conflates the two. It is truly sad that many of our urban commentators, from professors to practitioners, assume that gentrification is the <i>only</i> way to redevelop our cities. Such sentiment is best encapsulated by the false binary choice that many commentators offer where they posit that the only alternative to gentrification was the continued disinvestment and crime that characterized these neighborhoods before redevelopment. Never is the question of redevelopment without displacement ever seriously addressed. The reason for this, as these commentators know but hate to admit, is that these projects are rarely, if ever, actually about helping poorer residents escape poverty as opposed to filling up city coffers with fresh tax expenditures and encouraging more consumption by new residents. We can debate over whether this is a legitimate goal of cities, but before we can debate it we have to at least be honest about how cities have approached the questions of redevelopment and revitalization.<br />
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Unfortunately, the current mainstream commentary and even academic discourse around gentrification has largely moved away from the trenchant, unapologetic critiques embodied by Smith's work in the 90s. In a 2006 piece, "The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research" (hat tip to my man RJ for this piece) , <a href="http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/tslater/">Tom Slater</a> tracked the abandonment of more radical critiques of gentrification and the rise of gentrification research pieces that rejected materialist critiques gentrification and instead pushed an "emancipatory discourse" of gentrification. This discourse focused on the return of middle classes to the city as a rejection of suburban drudgery and monotony. This, of course, is <i>the </i>dominant discourse around the boosterish nature of urban development commentary today as lead by established scholar/consultants like Richard Florida of "creative class" fame and relative newcomers like Mike Lydon and his "tactical urbanism". Both commentators represent the kind of thinking that many mainstream urban commentators engage in that celebrate the "return to cities" by young, creative professionals and ignore the lived experience of poorer and working class folks.<br />
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Why does this matter? It matters because our cities, like the rest of the country, have become increasingly unequal. Income inequality has increased, poverty remains stubbornly high as well as heavily racialized and gendered (the rates of poverty among single mothers of ALL races is a national tragedy) and these factors are further compounded due to their <i>spatial</i> organization. It is not that people are poorer but that the poor are increasingly concentrated in smaller areas of our cities and in some cases pushed out. If we truly care about addressing profound social inequity as part of a greater call for a more inclusive, humane, and sustainable society, then we must forcefully reject the assumptions that dominate our popular understanding of urban redevelopment and gentrification. We cannot blindly celebrate the "return to the city" and the role of young urban, creatives in this urban renaissance without questioning who wins and who loses in this new equation. Recent articles, like this piece from Susie Cagle in <a href="http://grist.org/cities/fallacy-of-the-creative-class/">Grist</a>, are a great way for those of us who care about a holistic conception of sustainability to challenge the inequitable, and ultimately sustainable, development of our cities.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-72404911508827898672013-02-11T07:32:00.000-08:002013-02-11T07:32:04.843-08:00The Permanence of GeographyI ran into an interesting article on the magic twitter machine from the Sustainable Cities Collective entitled <a href="http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/jim-russell/121516/end-geography?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=hootsuite_tweets">"The End of Geography"</a>. Russel's thesis is that geography, specifically economic geography, no longer matters because,"People develop, not place." His evidence for this is the rise of developing countries, including Turkey and the BRIC nations, and the seeming reverse of their relations with traditional, dominant developed countries like Spain, Germany, or even the US. The reversed flows of people and remittances from the core to the periphery heralds the end of geography and speaks to the dominance of global talent.<br />
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This argument selectively picks from a wide range of urban geographical and planning theories, most notably from the global cities work of <a href="http://www.saskiasassen.com/PDFs/publications/The-Global-City-Brown.pdf">Saskia Sassen</a> that speaks to the transformed nature of global economic relations from being primarily dominated and directed by nation-states to a collection of powerful city-regions that go into the organization and control of a global economy around the interests of global corporate actors. Within the global city framework we also come to the question of international "talent". This human capital focus is largely influenced by the likes of scholars like Ed Glaeser and Richard Florida that preach the importance of attracting and retaining such talent. This class of professionals are the technically skilled workforce that man the corporate towers of the regional control centers of capital. They are managers, research scientists, human resource specialists, accountants, legal specialists etc that all are focused on better managing the increasing complexity of the global economic system and to manage incredibly complex, deep supply chains that span the globe. This group is different from the vaunted "young creatives" that American urbanism is so enamored with but the two groups are not entirely distinct. The only difference between the global city manager and the "creative professional" is that the "creative professional" couldn't land that big job at Goldman Sachs out of school.<br />
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Where Russel moves away from Sassen and from most geographers and planning theorists is in claiming that the reversal of economic fortunes between the developed and developing world signals the end of geography-- the death of space and place. On this I could not more vehemently disagree. We can again turn to Sassen here. While she notes the similarity of many global cities in how they are organized, look, and the social relations that seem to predominate she is adamant in the position that this serves as a "re-territorialization" of global economic relations, not the obliteration of the importance of such territories. The nation-state may play a less central role (the degree to which this is the case, if at all, is still a lively area of debate) in these relations but that does not negate the importance of space or place.<br />
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Moving a little beyond Sassen a bit, the thesis that geography no longer matters in light of global talent migration entirely ignores the reason for this global talent demand--the management of a globalized production system that takes advantage of cost and political differences of different places. The existence of global supply chains speaks to the centrality of geography in corporate decision making and strategy. The massive global manufacturing complexes in developing countries until very recently were producing a variety of goods, both finished and intermediate, designed for developed nations' consumption. For example, the dominance of southeast Asian textile production was not simply due to cost differential but the conscious decisions of firms from Western countries to re-locate their production facilities in an attempt to capture cost-reductions and to better control local political conditions in light of labor intransigence and falling profits back home. This shift was only helped by the increased sophistication of transportation and communications technology.<br />
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So, while this shift may have signalled the ever-diminishing importance of distance (and with increasing carbon emission concern we may see distance become a more key variable) it actually increased the importance, or better illustrated the yawning difference, between different <i>places</i>. Thus we see the kind of increasing uneven development that is evident between rich and poor countries that is reflected in our own city regions by increases ethnic and income inequality and segregation.<br />
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The current rise or durability of the economies of the Global South do not signal that economic geography does not matter, but that current investment has simply shifted. This reversal of fortunes speaks to the incredible opportunism and adaptability of capitalism in light of ongoing crisis. In fact, the observation that there is a difference in economic outcomes that is largely <i>spatially</i> defined speaks to the inherent absurdity of declaring an "end to geography". <br />
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<br />Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-10112663086293644102013-01-04T10:09:00.001-08:002013-01-04T10:09:08.001-08:00When the TL's cross: Wrestling with Black Gentrification Part 2I wrote earlier this <a href="http://surlyurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/01/when-tls-cross-wrestling-with-black.html">week</a> in response to a piece in Atlantic Cities on the Bronzeville neighborhood in Chicago and perceptions of "non-white gentrifying neighborhood". Check that post for the background of the case as I'm going to in a different direction here, but know that the idea was precipitated by that piece and by some timely retweets from @metroadlib and @tnopper (both essential follows), and a challenging post from Kenyon Farrow (@kenyonfarrow).<br />
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The post I'm referring to (found <a href="http://kenyonfarrow.com/2011/03/22/notes-on-a-confession-of-a-so-called-black-gentrifier/">here</a>) in response to a Washington City Paper <a href="http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/40564/confessions-of-a-black-dc-gentrifier/full/">article</a> by a woman reflecting on being a "Black gentrifier". Farrow passionately (and correctly) attacks the notion of gentrification being primarily a notion of "privilege", a term he describes as obscuring or denying issues of underlying racial and economic injustice. But I think his call for a more historical framing of the Black middle and upper classes and their roles as primarily victims of violent displacement and continued racial discrimination (as reflected in household wealth and the fact that Blacks are still unwelcome in many mixed neighborhoods) mean that Blacks cannot be gentrifiers.<br />
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It is here where I respectfully disagree, but only to a matter of degree. Citing my earlier definition of gentrification from <a href="http://neil-smith.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/newglobalism-new-urbanism.pdf">Neil Smith</a> it is clear the gentrification is intimately tied to displacement and dramatic neighborhood character change. In the case of the fearful "Black gentrifier" in the City Paper column such a concern over displacement and social domination is legitimate. In that particular area, gentrification is a project primarily lead by Back people-- IF there is displacement. As I said in my earlier post, simply bringing new people in or having some neighborhood development redevelopment does not equate to gentrification. I think that if we are to challenge the idea of "Black gentrification" it is not to say that due to historical and current racial discrimination that middle class and upper class Blacks cannot be gentrifiers, but to actually see as to whether we're seeing the kind of wholesale displacement and social domination that accompanies what we commonly understand to be gentrification. I would charge that in the vast majority of situations given the precariousness of the Black middle class and the decimation of household wealth in the past recession that areas of so-called "Black Gentrification" are not gentrifying at all if we are to compare income, household wealth, and displacement risk factors. But that does not mean that Blacks cannot be gentrifiers just that given current socioeconomic contexts there is simply not enough pressure to warrant the label.<br />
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Farrow does point to a larger issue of the label and what he calls obsession with the "Black gentrifier" is used as a term that deliberately distracts middle and upper class blacks from the violence visited upon their communities by attempting to shift blame. It's a provocative thought and one that holds a bit of weight. My only counter would be that this is not unique to Black folks but it is a large undercurrent of progressive critique of gentrification and many urban development issues. Gentrification is often separated from larger development decisions and the vagaries of the market and politics of urban development. Gentrification is often referred to or situated as a natural, but unfortunate situation in which the participants have little power. It's grossest form, as cited by Farrow and Tamara Nopper (@tnopper, if you didn't guess), is in the self-serving question of,"where can white people go in the city?" deflecting attention from greater forces that encourage disinvestment then reinvestment and expulsion of blacks and poor people into a framing where gentrifiers can throw up their arms and say it's not their fault. My point is that such narratives are not unique in being leveled at Black people but it has multiple incarnations throughout our cities. Blacks may be more sensitive to such charges and there may be a disproportionate attention paid to it, but that also follows larger media narratives that highlight Blacks' negative issues and portray them as dominant.<br />
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In other words, stronger critiques of gentrification are needed, in general, and these narratives are not only leveled at Black people. Although, we make more entertaining targets because the idea of class differentiation within the black community is still wild to many white people. So, I wrote all of this to say that I believe that Black people can indeed be gentrifiers, but that the evidence right now does not point to some new wave of "Black on Black gentrification". But Farrow, Nopper, and other critical race and urbanist scholars are ENTIRELY correct when they note that the way we discuss gentrification and other urban development issues obscures the greater economic and political mechanisms that encourage gentrification, in the first place. These range from disinvestment and abandonment of neighborhoods by city government, intense and concentrated poverty, massive unemployment, large-scale redevelopment dependent upon resident expulsion, and "economic development" strategies built around real-estate development and the expansion of unequal, bifurcated labor markets that turn the poor into the servant class of the preferred "creative" resident.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-66642429217872274552013-01-02T09:34:00.001-08:002013-01-02T09:34:31.505-08:00When the TL's Cross: Wrestling with "Black Gentrification" Part 1I had a fascinating experience this past weekend on the magic twitter machine when my timeline became all aflutter over a recently published a <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/12/how-black-gentrifiers-have-affected-perception-chicagos-changing-neighborhoods/4233/">post</a> by Emily Badger over at Atlantic Cities looking at the Bronzeville, an historically black neighborhood, in Chicago and its ongoing gentrification due to a large influx of middle class black residents. What was unique was that this post made its way over to my particular section of "black twitter" precipitating two parallel conversations on my timeline that were quite fascinating. I hope to try and add another voice to this and maybe, if successful, better synthesize some of the disparate threads of the conversation.<br />
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Badger's post compares the perception of Bronzeville's change with that of the Pilsen neighborhood, a gentrifying primarily Mexican neighborhood that has become something of a city destination known for its colorful "Latin culture" and fun atmosphere. Bronzeville, conversely, has not become a city destination and seems to be largely invisible to many non-black residents, even though it is "gentrifying".<br />
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Badger cuts to the heart of the issue when she observes that Bronzeville's blackness makes the neighborhood less "marketable" than Pilsen and discusses how black neighborhoods have difficulty not uniformly being seen as violent ghettoes. She also makes an interesting statement that developers in Bronzeville have marketed the neighborhood to middle class blacks partially to keep the black character of the neighborhood but also due to anxiety that white residents would not be interested in living in a black neighborhood.<br />
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The post offers some interesting points but it is a bit scattered. Its biggest gap lies in its ambiguous definition of gentrification. This looseness in definition I think obscures some of the points Badger was trying to make. Gentrification has many meanings and and interpretations depending on who you talk to, but there are some commonly held understandings that should be mentioned whenever you write on gentrification. First, gentrification is more than the economic development of a neighborhood or an influx of new residents who happen to be of a higher socioeconomic class, and those who insist on a "pure" economic definition of gentrification fundamentally misunderstand the term. <a href="http://neil-smith.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/newglobalism-new-urbanism.pdf">Neil Smith</a>, citing Ruth Glass the creator of the term, defines gentrification explicitly as a process of displacement and the wholesale transformation of the social character of the target neighborhood/district. Displacement is <i>the</i> central characteristic of gentrification. Badger, unfortunately, does not actually mention whether or not there has been significant displacement of residents from Bronzeville and she gives conflicting or contradictory accounts of the neighborhood as still suffering from intense vacancy and a desire of existing residents to bring in new residents. Highlighting stubborn vacancy and the desire of existing residents to bring in newcomers without mentioning neighborhood opposition or displacement pressures leads me to believe that Bronzeville should not be called a gentrifying or gentrified neighborhood. Or if it is gentrifying, then highlighting vacant, developable land and resident desires for more people to come in is not a great way to bolster this argument.<br />
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Assuming that Bronzeville is gentrifying, the comparison to Pilsen and examining Bronzeville's "blackness" offer some other interesting ideas, but I fear Badger does not go far enough in her critique. Pilsen is apparently a favored destination for many white residents from other parts of Chicago to come to and consume the Mexican culture of the neighborhood. Lively cafes, Mexican bakeries and entertaining music all combine to help make Pilsen one of the destinations in the city. Badger contrasts this with the fact that Bronzeville, which has a rich black history concerning the blues and multiple literary and cultural figures, seems unable to attract the kind of attention that Pilsen does. She cites a study in <i>Urban Affairs</i> that says that Bronzeville's invisibility compared to Pilsen's is because the neighborhood has been and continues to be majority black and has a history of poverty and violence. Badger gives some quotes from different white residents across the city that speak of Bronzeville as a literal black hole in the city that they never think about or see. The neighborhood is invisible.<br />
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While the invisibility of black life and black neighborhoods is certainly not new in America, the statements that Bronzeville's "blackness" somehow overwhelms the positive aspects of the neighborhood plays into a frankly racist narrative of neighborhood identity. Bronzeville's blackness does not overwhelm anything. The insistence of white people to ignore black neighborhoods is the only thing that makes Bronzeville "invisible". Linking white resident disinterest in the neighborhood to some overwhelming blackness naturalizes incredibly troubling unequal social relations and leads to uncomfortable conclusion that Bronzeville needs to overcome this blackness handicap in some way as opposed to saying that maybe white people should hold such racist notions. Second, the idea that neighborhood value is, at least partially, based upon the desire of other (read:white) residents to visit your neighborhood and voyeuristically consume your culture is incredibly limiting for a variety of reasons, but two big ones stand out to me: it encourages developing neighborhoods not for the betterment of residents but for the consumption of a preferred outside spending group, it does nothing to address existing unequal social or economic relations but instead turns responsibility back onto target neighborhoods (i.e. Bronzeville's blackness somehow overwhelming its positive neighborhood characteristics).<br />
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We can discuss non-white gentrification. I think this will be a growing concern in some larger, historically blacker metropolitcan areas and the issues that arise from it will test traditional political relations in cities with large black populations and can potentially exacerbate existing social divides of many ethnic groups. But using Bronzeville and Pilsen as comparative examples obscures these deep issues. Bronzeville, whether gentrifying or not, is invisible because many white Chicagoans could not give a damn about the lives of black people. And I, for one, say that if white Chicagoans ignore a growing, positive neighborhood because they're too racist to care, then let's do what we black folks have always done, survive, prosper and enjoy our own company.<br />
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As always, keep it surly.Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911854789833802604.post-5978357738804853522012-11-27T11:19:00.000-08:002012-12-02T20:16:08.837-08:00Tortured Calls for Civic UnityI ran into an interesting blog post from the good folks at <a href="http://globalurbanist.com/2012/11/27/diversity-is-not-enough">globalurbanist.com</a> by Daniel London. Now I have read other pieces by London on globalurbanist and find his calls for a better historicized study of cities and activism to be refreshing and incredibly necessary. He has a clear passion and deep understanding for the role that good historical analysis and study has in speaking to the concerns of our urban areas today. This is unambiguously a good message.<br />
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However, I must take exception with his most recent post calling for a broader "civic unity" using the settlement house and social center movements as inspiration. I fully agree with him that we need to work on creating effective, diverse urban coalitions that can collectively act to address greater urban issues. But I would caution that commentators should be <i>very</i> careful in drawing out historical examples of "progressive" intervention, especially from US history.<br />
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The settlement house movement was certainly a grand example of US urban progressivism from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, but we should be honest about the rhetoric its proponents engaged in, the techniques it used, and the people it purported to serve.<br />
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While London highlights that settlement house workers lived among the poor of many urban cities and worked with them, we should remember that the mission of settlement houses was largely that of assimilation and this assimilation was largely a project of <i>whitening</i> new European immigrant populations. Khalil Gibran Muhammad in "The Condemnation of Blackness" speaks about how settlement house pioneers like Jane Addams explicitly critiqued the abuses and inequities of industrial capitalism and how it exploited new immigrants. The problem, according to these early activists, was not that the Irish, Italians, or Jews were naturally inferior or criminal but that social and economic inequality were dehumanizing and forced people into squalor and crime. Simply, settlement house activists advocated that the full humanity of these new immigrants be recognized, and that they be accorded every opportunity to improve themselves. Muhammad points out, though, that while activists in the settlement house movement like Addams made calls for the common humanity of immigrants and "traditional" Americans they either ignored or contributed to pathological arguments around black Americans. So, while immigrants were embraced and called to be full citizens, African-Americans were highlighted as culturally deficient and segregation was recommended as a preferred policy choice.<br />
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Such differences were made even more stark when we compare the treatment of potential African-American settlement house workers. Black social work organizations and settlement houses were continually under funded and those that were well-funded often had to contend with the racist assumptions of the white philanthropists that controlled their purse-strings.<br />
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My point here is not to say that London is wrong or a racist, but that if you are going to call for a historically-contextual approach to current urban problems, then you should try and take as holistic an approach as possible. This is not to say that we should not see the positive in the settlement house movement or their progressive mission, but it is HIGHLY selective to not point towards the greater historical context in which the movement arose. It's suspect to me that London is comfortable talking about the plights of new immigrants but ignores the racist anti-black politics that was central to the assimilation project lead by progressive organizations like Hull House and other settlement houses.<br />
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Why bring this up? Is it not unfair to point to the racist policies of these groups when we know that current activists are (supposedly) beyond issues regarding segregation? Am I saying the entire enterprise is bankrupt? Of course not. But I think that selectively highlighting such programs as an example of "civic unity" and using them as a model is not sound because it refuses to recognize legitimate <i>conflict</i>. The call for trying to move beyond diversity and create a united "civic unity" often erases legitimate political conflict. There are legitimate reasons why we see conflict between different racial and ethnic groups within urban areas. There are historical reasons why we still have intense spatial segregation, poverty that is disproportionately racialized, and an urban politics that pits these groups against each other. We can celebrate OWS neighborhood groups that are now encouraging dialogue, but that also ignores the hard work of community development groups and community organizers that have been trying to do such work for DECADES but historical issues of mistrust, racism, and conflict limited such efforts and they remain.<br />
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Succinctly, I'm not impressed by calls for "civic unity", especially those using historical institutions like settlement houses as an example, that do not take seriously a fuller examination of historical and current politics regarding social movement or organization. It's telling that the National Urban League and NAACP spent much of their early years refuting and attacking the racist assumptions and policies pushed by white progressive organizations. Not talking about these tensions or efforts to bridge them leaves us with an empty call for unity that renders existing struggle and conflict illegitimate. Ultimately, seeking to erase diversity in such a context is profoundly ahistorical because it seeks to erase differences that are much <i>real</i> and <i>current</i>. Embrace the conflict.<br />
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<br />Surly Urbanisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01801153194586886826noreply@blogger.com0