New Geography

Author: Andy Sywak

  • Mexicanizing oneself in Los Angeles

    Working on a construction crew back in college with a few workers each from Mexico and Guatemala, I was amazed at the animosity between the two groups. They would joke, not good-naturedly, about how much cheaper the prostitutes were in the neighboring country or how stupid the other’s politicians were. I traveled in Central America a few years later and found the same thing.

    This great article from earlier in this week’s LA Times shows the economic and cultural effects of these nationalist tensions in the U.S. It chronicles how immigrants from El Salvador have to assimilate to the existing Mexican power structure in Los Angeles for jobs. Since the dominant Latin culture in LA is Mexican, and there is a strong nationalistic bias in some communities, El Salvadorians are changing their accents and even adopting their cuisine and mores to fit in.

    The reverse is true in other cities. When one of the Mexican construction workers I knew flew out to D.C., he entered a taqueria in the Adams-Morgan area. Upon hearing his accent, the cashier from another Central American country promptly said, “The Mexicans eat over there.” Looks like you better choose your adopted city carefully if you’re a Central American immigrant.

  • Foundations and Non-Profits Stepping up to Create Playing Fields

    There is no city I am aware of that seems to have the amount of parks and green space it wants. This paucity is particularly glaring when it comes to parks for children and most prevalent in large, dense urban areas. And this is why non-profits like San Francisco’s City Fields Foundation are stepping in to upgrade existing parks because public funds are not available in the quantities demanded by the public.

    On Saturday in San Francisco, the group held a ribbon-cutting for three refurbished soccer fields in the Crocker-Amazon neighborhood. The new fields will add approximately 12,358 hours of playtime on the soccer fields per year.

    In Great Britain, the National Playing Fields Association has been doing this for over 70 years. Just goes to remind you, that when it comes to building any sort of infrastructure, there seems to be a great organizational advantage to having some sort of centralized body.

  • Creating the Next American System

    Michael Lind of the New America Foundation has just published an excellent and inspiring article in Democracy Journal about the need for a new financial and physical infrastructure.

    “One of the goals of reforming and regulating finance is to ensure that American industry and American infrastructure have access to the private and public investment they need,” Lind writes. “Industry, infrastructure, and finance form a system—an American System. And a new American system, well-designed and well-implemented, will be crucial in revitalizing American economic prosperity in the twenty-first century.”

    Lind talks about previous “American systems” of finance and organization that were adopted over time to adjust to the economic realities of the age and how today, we are in dire need of creating a new system that reacts to the new realities we face.

    Some of these ideas include the creation of a National Investment Corporation and a National Research & Development Bank and the creation of a Department of Infrastructure that merges some of the transportation agencies together. These are bold ideas explained in clear prose with illuminating historical examples.

    Many of his ideas lend themselves towards centralization and thus remind me of the New Deal a bit. The existence of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration was one of the rare times in American history when infrastructure finance was centralized. It was also one of the most prolific times in our history for the construction of vital and long lasting public infrastructure that still stands today.

  • Rethinking the American Alley – Examples from Baltimore and L.A.

    Dark, narrow and usually neglected, the alleyway is not one of the more beloved landscapes of the American city. Out of sight and mind, the “dark alley” is the unseemly home to noir nightmares and urban misdeeds in the popular imagination – the sort of place where Batman surprises his criminal victims.

    And yet, planners across the nation are beginning to rethink the alley, re-imagining it as urban parkland. The LA Times ran a piece today about the attempts of academics and planners to recreate trash-and-graffiti strewn alleys as green space. The slide show from the article shows this better than the prose.

    In Baltimore, where alleys and murder are more plentiful, gating alleys to decrease crime and increase public space has won public money. Groups like Community Greens are helping to lead the charge.

    An interesting union of groups here: gardeners, academics and neighborhood activists.

  • Milken’s List of Top-performing Cities Heavy with Small Metro Areas

    The Milken Institute just released its report about the country’s top-performing cities. The list is heavy with the names of small and mid-size cities and also has a good deal in common with Inc.’s Best Cities list which came out a few months prior. The list of the top ten with last year’s ranking is below:

    1. Provo-Orem, Utah (8)
    2. Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina (10)
    3. Salt Lake City, Utah (18)
    4. Austin-Round Rock, Texas (20)
    5. Huntsville, Alabama (16)
    6. Wilmington, North Carolina (2)
    7. McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas (7)
    8. Tacoma, Washington (50)
    9. Olympia, Washington (37 in the 2007 ranking of small metros)
    10. Charleston-North Charleston, South Carolina (12)

    Newgeography has run several articles about the advantages of small cities. “Why Small Cities Rock” and “Sprawl Beyond Sprawl: America Moves to Smaller Metropolitan Areas” are two of them. For an entire list click on the “Small Cities” tab on the home page.

  • Young, Educated and Living in Indianapolis

    Here’s an article from the Indianapolis Business Journal that discusses how the city attracts young, educated married couples but not singles.

    Never known for edgy culture, “Cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Denver trounce Indianapolis on attracting young singles.” However, it’s the shorter commutes and housing affordability that separate Indiana’s metropolis from the crowd. “I’ve got a house and a yard and a 10-minute commute. Try that in Chicago. You can’t,” says one recent Indy transplant.

    A good article to see how young people change when they get married and how their preferences on place change as well.

  • New York City Backyards

    There’s a very pretty slide show in this recent article in the New York Times showing different backyards throughout the city’s boroughs. No matter how small the area, there resides an amazing level of appreciation for having one’s own area of greenery.

    Though many planners call for increased density, many neighborhoods are in favor of “down-zoning.” You flip through this slide show and it’s easy to see why.

  • Los Angeles & Chicago’s Summer Homicide Numbers

    With 84 homicides, Los Angeles just recorded its lowest number of summer homicides since 1967. Overall, numbers are down this year compared to last year – which saw the fewest homicides in the city in 40 years. Made infamous by Rodney King just over 15 years ago, the LAPD is rising to the task of stemming violent crime.

    Contrast this with Chicago, a city with a million fewer people than LA, which saw 123 murders this summer. What gives?

  • Asian Pollution Hitting West Coast

    Looks like there is a cost to all those cheap industrial goods made in China after all. This article from McClatchy discusses the problem of pollution from Asia hitting the West Coast:

    “By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the U.S. annually.”

    That’s a hard number to visualize. It does, however, bring home the global problem of pollution.

  • Silicon Valley’s Working Class Walks Tightrope

    It may be home to Google, Cisco, Oracle and the other gleaming companies of the New Economy, but times are tough for the Silicon Valley’s working class.

    “Working people in Silicon Valley are walking an economic tightrope, and any unexpected medical bill or even a car breakdown can push them over the edge.”

    What happens to a community like this when the working class can no longer afford to live there?