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  • Hypocrisy? Conservative Anti-government Folks are Also at the Public Trough

    Frequent news stories tell of folks who protest and rant about “socialism” and government handouts, especially recently in the “debate” over health care reform, but who turn out to live on social security and depend on Medicare, and sometimes don’t even know they are public programs! This likely tells us about the astounding power of the religious right and of the economic illiteracy of much of the population.

    Statistics of possible interest and value include data on the balance between federal tax receipts and federal outlays for the states and variation in “dependency” or the shares of unearned income/transfer payments by states (social security, public assistance, etc).
    Is there any evidence of more “liberal” Obama-voting in states which actually pay more in taxes than they get back, or which have lower rates of dependency?

    Yes, but the relations are not strong, because there are some very confounding factors, like size of state, age of the population, or presence of federal institutions.

    Still, here is a list of states that support the hypocrisy argument about the balance of receipts versus outlays.

    Get/Give Ratio Share of Obama Vote Get/Give Ratio Share of Obama Vote
    State Low High   State High Low
    NV 65 55 MS 202 43
    NJ 66 57 AK 184 38
    CT 69 61 LA 178 40
    NH 71 54 WV 176 45
    MN 72 54 AL 166 39
    IL 75 62 SD 153 45
    DE 77 62 KY 151 41
    CA 78 61 MT 147 47
    NY 79 63 AR 141 39
    CO 81 54 OK 136 34
    MA 82 62 SC 135 45
    WI 86 56 ID 121 36
    WA 88 57 AZ 119 45
    MI 92 57 KA 112 42
    OR 93 57 WY 111 33

    But some states are exceptions, notably the following group with both high outlays relative to receipts and high concentrations of Obama voting:

    Get/Give Ratio Share of Obama Vote
    State High High
    NM 203 57
    VA 151 53
    HI 144 72
    ME 141 58
    MD 130 62

    Except for Maine, these states have a large federal presence.

    Now is there evidence of states with higher shares of the populace depending on unearned income and transfer payements voting more Republican? Again, yes, but even less strongly, and the dependency share are never really very high.

      Dependence Obama State Dependence Obama
    States High Low     Low High
    OK 7.3 34 MD 4.1 62
    AL 7.2 39 MA 5.0 62
    AR 8.3 39 IL 5.2 62
    KY 7.5 41 CT 4.9 61
    MS 7.7 43 CA 4.8 61
    ND 7.5 45 WA 5.3 57
    WV 10.5 45 NJ 4.9 57
    MT 7.9 47 NV 5.2 55
    NH 5.1 54
    MN 5.1 54
    CO 4.0 54

    But some states are exceptions, coming in high in both categories or low in both categories, notably:

    Dependence Obama State Dependence Obama
    States High Low     Low High
    RI 6.7 63 TX 4.8 44
    VT 6.5 67 UT 4.8 34
    HI 6 72 AK 3.2 38
    ME 7.3 58 GA 4.5 47
    NM 6.8 57
    PA 7.5 54
    IA 7.3 54
    FL 7.8 51

    These “high high” states have very high shares of the elderly.

    States on both lists supporting the hypocrisy theory include the Republican voting states sitting at the trough: WV, AL, KY, MT, AR and OK on the one side, and Democratic voting states showing less dependency on various federal sources: MA, NV, NJ, CT, NH, MN, IL, CA, CO and WA on the other. HI and ME are contrary on both lists. Note that most of the other states have around average values and show no consistent patterns. They are mapped but not discussed.

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

  • AlaskaKen

  • The New Radicals

    America’s ”kumbaya” moment has come and gone. The nation’s brief feel-good era initiated by Barack Obama’s stirring post-partisan rhetoric–and fortified by John McCain’s classy concession speech–has dissolved into sectarian bickering more appropriate to dysfunctional Iraq than the world’s greatest democratic republic.

    Yet little of the shouting concerns the fundamental economic issue facing the U.S. today: the decline of upward mobility and income growth for the working and middle classes. Instead we have politicos battling over two versions of ”trickle down” economics.

    The Democrats seem bent on installing a permanent ruling mandarinate alongside a small financial aristocracy. The Republicans, meanwhile, simply want to help the rich hold onto as much of their money as possible.

    Neither approach will improve prospects for the vast majority of Americans. The Bush Administration policies of low taxes–for the upper classes–and less regulation helped engender a massive asset bubble unsupported by economic fundamentals. This ultimately drove up both the current account and federal deficits and led to the severe Great Recession.

    The Obama ”trickle down” is, sadly, not all that different from the Bush-Paulson strategy. Like its predecessor, it endorses the bailout of giant financial institutions as the linchpin of its economic policy. It is, simultaneously, profoundly anti-democratic and anti-capitalist.

    Other aspects of the Obama policy seem likely to prop up Wall Street traders at the expense of the rest of us. The administration’s big ”cap and trade” proposals could prove more advantageous to well-heeled ”carbon traders” than to the environment. The other big winners may be Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who– increasingly bereft of their own ideas for making money–hope to cash in on Washington-subsidized energy schemes.

    Of course, not all Democrats have sold out. Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and John Tester, D-Mont., have expressed opposition to bailing out ”too big to fail” institutions. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been fearless in unveiling the enormous Wall Street bonuses–over $32.6 billion last year– handed out as firms suffered $81 billion in losses and almost drove the world economy to ruin.

    Unfortunately, these are exceptions. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin recently admitted that the banks remain ”the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill,” adding that they ”frankly own the place.”

    So far in 2009 the Democrats have netted nearly 60% of all campaign contributions that have come from the financial industry, now the largest sector in terms of donations. The biggest donations have gone to such influential Democrats as Sen. Charles Schumer and his sidekick, newly appointed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, from New York; Sen. Chris Dodd D-Conn., and Majority Leader Harry Reid D-Nev. Schumer, the Street’s leading vassal in Congress, has emerged as the rising star in the Democratic leadership. If Majority Leader Reid loses his seat–as is now possible, according to polls in Nevada–Wall Street’s main man could well end up a future Majority Leader.

    Some Democrats try to have it both ways, playing populists for the peanut galleries but getting cozy with the industry when it matters. Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, the House Financial Services Chairman, talks tough but has a history of friendly relations with financial powerhouses. One of Frank’s own top assistants, Michael Pease, just went to work for the biggest winner since taking TARP bucks, Goldman Sachs. As left-winger blogger Glenn Greenwald put it recently: ”The only way they can make it more blatant is if they hung a huge Goldman Sachs banner on the Capitol dome and branded it onto the foreheads of leading members of Congress and executive branch officials.”

    In the end the faux populist Democrats end up with policies that make Ronald Reagan’s ”trickle down” seem downright Leninist. Harry Truman once quipped that ”There should be a real liberal party in this country, and I don’t mean a crackpot professional one.” Sadly, it’s increasingly the latter.

    The hypocrisy should open a path for the Republicans as wide as the Grand Canyon. But the ill-named Party of Lincoln still seems to think that the path to power lies in the tired old formula of ultra-patriotism, guns, abortion and religious rectitude. Screaming ”socialism” may awaken the spirits of some on the old right, but it’s hard to make a convincing case when George Bush socialized banking and grew the deficit.

    You certainly can’t trust big-business conservatives to stop bonuses for the TARP babies, particularly the 25 financial firms deemed ”too big to fail” by the likes of Ben Benanke. Give GOP big-business leaders higher stock prices, and they will follow you anywhere. Only a few–such as Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa,–have shown they are truly serious about the free market or defending the interests of the regular taxpayer.

    Given this sad political picture, the best hope now is to build an alternative perspective that focuses on the basic economic issues. This would not be the media celebrated movement of moderates–Democrats-lite and Republicans-lite–who seek kumbaya through compromise. It would, instead, require a radical third tendency–neither strictly left or right–that would draw on long-term American priorities and values.

    These new radicals would focus on basic issues like improving infrastructure, and primary education and bolstering the nation’s productive economy. Their inspiration would come from a long tradition of federal successes–from the Homestead Act and the WPA to the Interstate Highway and the space program. They would view the financial crisis not as an imperative for protecting the well-connected but for financial reform, decentralization and innovation.

    Such an approach would address what the British author Austin Williams calls our ”poverty of ambition.” Americans historically have rejected a future constrained by entrenched hierarchies. Most, I believe, would support spending money and paying taxes, if it was spent to achieve big things that would lead to a greater, more widespread prosperity and opportunity.

    Just imagine if the upward of $1 trillion spent guaranteeing Goldman Sachs and Citigroup executives giant paydays had instead gone into roads, bridges, subways, buses, port development, skills training, energy transmission lines and basic scientific research. And imagine if instead of protecting Citigroup and Bank of America, we encouraged stronger local banks and solvent financial entrepreneurs to fill the breach left behind by gross failures.

    Such an approach may seem extreme, but it might have wide appeal. We know, for example, that the TARP bailout is widely unpopular. Indeed, according to one survey taken earlier this year, Americans oppose continuing bailouts for banks by better than 2 to 1.

    As I travel the country, I find anger is deepest among business owners who find securing loans increasingly difficult nearly a year after the original bailout. Even as the economy slowly recovers, this anger will become more pronounced with the coming bonuses doled out to those at bailed-out firms. As Sen. Grassley puts it: ”My people ask, ‘When are these people going to be put in jail?”’ Instead we’re paying for them to stay at the Ritz.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin early next year.

  • California Disease: Oregon at Risk of Economic Malady

    California has been exporting people to Oregon for many years, even amid the recession in both states.

    Indeed, the 2005 American Community Survey report shows that California-to-Oregon migration was 56,379 in 2005, the sixth-largest interstate flow in the United States. The 2000 census showed a five-year flow of 138,836 people, the eighth-largest over that time period. Until two years ago, Oregon was managing to absorb this population with mixed results, but generally as part of an expanding and diversifying economy. But that pattern has ended, at least for now.

    So now what will Oregon do with a suddenly excess population? California, at least, can say its emigres over time will reduce unemployment and reduce out-of-whack property prices. The immediate net benefits for Oregon are harder to discern.

    California’s massive economic collapse — which has resulted in 926,700 jobs lost from July 2007 through June 2009 and an unemployment rate of 11.6 percent — is now becoming Oregon’s problem. As Californians, largely for lifestyle and cost reasons, head north across the border, they have helped swell Oregon’s ranks of both unemployed and, perhaps equally important, underemployed.

    Our analysis of California migrants has shown a gradual reduction in their earnings over what they were earning in the Golden State. There also are less quantifiable impacts. Portland, a city attractive to many unemployed and underemployed younger Californians, could well be becoming the “slacker” capital of the world.

    There’s another major problem with the continuing California migration. Along with young people, newcomers to the state also include large numbers of the retired and semi-retired. These people generally have little interest in economic growth, whether for longtime state residents or their fellow, often younger emigres. Instead what they bring with them are political attitudes that could slow down the state’s economic recovery.

    Some might call this California disease. This refers to a chronic inability to make hard decisions as well as a general disregard for business and economic activity.

    California’s inability to plan or create new public infrastructure affects every part of the state’s economy. California was once a leader in building infrastructure, but that was in Pat Brown’s gubernatorial administration in the 1960s when California last planned a major infrastructure project.

    There are consequences to California’s inability to deal with infrastructure. Its freeways are parking lots. Its water problems are threatening the viability of Central Valley agriculture, one of the key drivers of the state’s economy. Its electrical system is so bad that every summer brings the fear of interruptions in the supply of electricity. Its universities are in decline. Its prisons are overcrowded.

    Another symptom of California disease is regulation and red tape that increases the uncertainty for any project and raises the cost.

    California projects can be in planning for years, and at the end of that planning process they may still be denied. The long delays are expensive. And as many would-be California developers will tell you, the uncertainty is a strong detriment to economic activity and development.

    We also see symptoms of California disease in tax policy. California no longer has the United States’ highest income tax rate. Big deal. With a top income tax rate of 10.3 percent, sales taxes that can reach 10.25 percent and a 33.9 cents-per-gallon gas tax, its total taxes are among the highest in the country.

    California’s regulatory climate also reflects the disease. Even as the state endures its most brutal recession in decades, it persists in unilaterally imposing new regulation, making the state less competitive with other states.

    In short, California is whistling past the graveyard, hoping that its economy will rebound, “because it always has.”

    Key symptoms of California disease are forgetting that quality of life begins with a job and negative domestic migration.

    With all the influx of Californians, it’s not surprising that Oregon shows some signs of California disease. It recently increased its tax rates so that Oregon’s highest-income taxpayers face marginal tax rates that match Hawaii’s for the highest in the nation. Oregon’s land-use planning had been extremely centralized for some time. Indeed, Oregon’s land-use planning may be the most centralized in the United States. This makes it harder for communities to control their own destinies, whether they want to grow or not.

    If Oregon does have California disease, the malady is surely not as advanced as it is in California. Oregon has lower gasoline taxes and lower property taxes than California. Oregon, in contrast with California, enjoys net positive domestic migration. It is also a good sign that a significant percentage of the people moving to Oregon from California are young folks. While it seems to many that the typical California immigrant is a wealthy aging baby boomer, the data show that he (or she) is still most likely a young person in his 20s or 30s, and often married with children. They are people who, if the economy grew, could have something to contribute to the economy as well as the cultural development of the state.

    But Oregon’s relationship with California remains a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Oregon has benefited from the inflow of cash and skilled workers. On the other hand, Oregon’s relationship with California has led to the current situation where at 12.2 percent for the month of June, Oregon has one of the highest unemployment rates in the United States.

    Oregon may be at a crossroads. The state is richly endowed with many of the components of a high quality of life. People want to live in Oregon, and they are moving to Oregon even in hard times. Yet as the population swells, there’s no concurrent growth in businesses and employment. Over time, this could pose serious problems. Remember, quality of life begins with a job, preferably a rewarding, well-paying job.

    However, Oregon must avoid making many decisions that led to California’s current situation. The costs of California disease are more than those reflected in the economic statistics. Devastated communities and families, and wasted opportunities, could infect this fair state for years to come.

    Joel Kotkin is author of “The City: A Global History.” Bill Watkins is director of the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting at California Lutheran University.

  • Woodstock Generation Going Up the Country

    They might not have known it but Canned Heat’s classic Going Up the Country at the now 40 year-old festival was prognostic – at least in terms of where the Woodstock generation would be moving in the 2010s. John Cromartie and Peter Nelson’s recently released USDA report – Baby Boom Migration and Its Impact on Rural America – says that the baby boomers have already shown more affinity for moving to rural and small town destinations than older or younger cohorts. As many boomers end child-rearing duties, enter peak employment earnings and ponder retirement options they are now poised to significantly increase the population of 55-75 year olds in rural and small town America through 2020, with major social and economic implications for their chosen locations.

    Between 2010 and 2020 boomers will make more than 200 million residential moves, most being within or between metro regions, where 80 percent of this cohort now reside. However, net migration to core metro counties is projected to decline by 643,000 during the 2010s, a dramatic shift from a population gain of 979,000 during the 90s. In the countryside the population of 55-75 year olds will increase two-thirds, from 8.6 million to 14.2 million between 2000 and 2020.

    The big winners of course are those rural places with high levels of natural amenities and affordable housing that are already popular as second-home destinations. For these areas the economic future looks good as a potential influx of spending power and seasoned, footloose talent boosts development prospects.

  • The New Industrial City

    Most American urban economic development and revitalization initiatives seek to position communities to attract high wage jobs in the knowledge economy. This usually involves programs to attract and retain the college educated, and efforts to lure corporate headquarters or target industries such as life sciences, high tech, or cutting edge green industries. Almost everything, whether it be recreational trails, public art programs, stadiums and convention centers, or corporate incentives, is justified by reference to this goal, often with phrases like “stopping brain drain” and “luring the creative class”.

    The future vision underpinning this is a decidedly post-industrial one. This city of tomorrow is made up of people living upscale in town condos, riding a light rail line to work at a smartly designed modern office, and spending enormous sums – with the requisite sales tax benefits – entertaining themselves in cafes, restaurants, swanky shops, or artistic events.

    In contrast the factory has no place in this future city. Indeed industry is considered a blight that needs to be eliminated or repurposed. What were once working docks are to be converted to recreational waterfront parkland. Warehouses and small factories become the site for developing lofts, studios, or boutiques. This urban economy is based almost solely around intellectual work and services, not physical production.

    But there is a problem with this equation. In almost any city, the bulk of the people do not have college degrees. According to Brookings, the average adult college degree attainment rate for the top 100 metro areas is only 30.6% In the many years it will take to raise this, what are the rest of the people supposed to do for a living? Younger cohorts are better educated than their grandparents, so this will improve over time. But better educated for what? Not everyone is cut out, or wants to be a stock-trader or media consultant. We have to think about those who would rather work with their hands, or are better suited for that kind of work.

    The vision touted by too many urban boosters is that of an explicitly two-tier society. There are elite, well paid knowledge workers in industries like finance, law, and technology, and then there is everybody else. Programs designed to boost knowledge industries turn out to be subsidies to cater to the most privileged stratum of society. The public is called on to pay for urban amenities for the favored quarter of the intelligentsia, with the benefit to the rest of the people assumed.

    But little thought is given as to how everyone else will get by, other than working in low wage service occupations catering to the privileged. In the Victorian era, they called this going “into service”. Today we might think of them better as globalization’s coolie class.

    Beyond this, can we as a country prosper if we don’t actually make things anymore? Some of the fear of manufacturing decline is overblown. Despite large scale job losses in the manufacturing sector, the US has continued to set industrial production records outside of recessions. However, as the chart below from the Federal Reserve shows, industrial production growth flattened significantly in the late 1990s.

    Sadly, manufacturing has been hammered in this Great Recession. There will certainly be a cyclical upturn in output, but restructuring in the automobile industry portends a permanent reduction in domestic output in that sector among others. Unless carefully handled, increasing regulation of carbon emissions, along with the associated energy price rises, will encourage further offshoring to countries with few climate change obligations, such as China, India, Brazil and other developing nations.

    Yet to remain both a prosperous and fair society, the United States must remain a manufacturing power. Manufacturing still provides the traditional route to middle class wages for those without college degrees. It also alone employs 25 percent of scientists and related technicians and 40 percent of engineers and engineering technicians.

    Of course, the next wave of manufacturing will differ greatly from the past. Improvements in productivity and global competition mean a bleak future for large scale, low value-added, routinized production. The era where an assembly plant provided thousands of good jobs at good wages is a thing of the past other than for the lucky few. And where there are new factories, they are often in greenfield locations like the new Honda plant in Greensburg, Indiana – halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati – not urban centers. Polluting heavy industry like primary metals and refining really are incompatible with neighborhoods. So what is to be done?

    One answer is to build a new industrial city focusing on small scale craft and specialty manufacturing with high value added. We’re seeing a precursor to this in the rise of organic farming and artisanal products of all kinds. TV shows featuring hip young carpenters renovating homes or gearheads tricking out cars and motorcycles make these professions seem glamorous. Magazines targeted at the global elite like Monocle scour the world in favor of the finest handcrafted products from old school workshops, building demand for these products. The New York Times Magazine recently did an article making the case for working with your hands, and also noted how digitally oriented designers are rediscovering the use of their hands. Perhaps it is no surprise that sociologist Richard Sennett turned his attention to the idea of the craftsman. In short, making things, craftsmanship, and quality are back in fashion.

    The challenge for urban economies is to develop this and put it on a sound industrial and economic footing. One key might be to inspire people to start these craft oriented businesses by tapping into people’s desire to purchase ethical and sustainable products. We increasingly see with foods and other items that people want to understand their provenance, to know who made them, how, with what, and under what conditions. Often today businesses catering to this desire are small scale “Mom and Pop” type operations, but there is no reason they can’t be done at greater scale, or expanded into areas like organic food processing, not just organic farming. American Apparel has done just that by manufacturing low cost, stylish clothing “Made in Downtown Los Angeles. Sweatshop Free.” at scale, for example.

    Beyond craft products, reinvigorating small scale, specialty fabrication and other businesses, to rebuild an American version of Germany’s Mittlesand, creates another, often ignored option for urban economies. Quality, flexibility, responsiveness, and a willingness to do small runs are keys. These businesses can also underpin product companies higher in the value chain. They start building an ecosystem of local companies and expertise that can be useful for related or spin-off businesses. Jane Jacobs, and before her the great French historian Fernand Braudel, noted how cities could incubate many new enterprises because all the diverse products and services they needed were available locally. If you need to scour the globe looking for custom parts and services, it can quickly overwhelm a small business. That’s one reason American Apparel started in Los Angeles, which already had a network of garment producing firms and expertise to draw on. What’s more, these firms might be ideal candidates to take over empty strip mall or other space in decaying inner ring suburbs, helping to solve the “graybox” problem. Even Main St. locations could potentially benefit from businesses beyond traditional boutiques.

    Today these types of specialty firms are often found in America’s largest cities, so they stand to benefit most from this. Smaller cities also need to figure out how to build this ecosystem. The culture needs to change too. Particularly in the Midwest/Rust Belt area, industrial labor has tended towards low skill, repetitive work in larger scale mass production industries. Retraining will be needed for these newer types of businesses, but this is vocational or skill training, not necessarily a college degree. It is a much more tractable problem.

    Not only could this new manufacturing base be a source of urban middle class jobs for the non-college degreed, it would do something arguably more important. It links the fortunes of the new upscale urban residents, the people who are both the customers for many of these products and potentially also the entrepreneurs making them, with that of their less educated neighbors. For many owners, managers, and workers, it might bring into daily contact people who might not otherwise ever interact if one group worked in an office and another in a warehouse. Rebuilding that sense of community and commonwealth, that we are neighbors, fellow citizens, and all in this together, is critical to building a truly sustainable, well-functioning and broadly prosperous society.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs based in the Midwest. His writings appear at The Urbanophile.

  • gezbrady

  • Nice Houses for Ducks

    During the long hot summer of the expenses scandal in British politics, one of the most bizarre stories concerned a Conservative MP who claimed from the public purse for a second home: a place for his ducks. It wasn’t any old duck house, however, but a ‘Stockholm’ floating model, valued at over £1,500. It is over 5 feet high.

    If only two ducks lived in the duck house, with its prime waterside location and spectacular views of the gardens beyond, their living space would be on a more generous specification – measured by their weight – than the hundreds of thousands of new homes that have been built in Britain in recent years. For one of the lesser-commented upon hypocrisies of the expenses scandal has been the chasm between those with two or more houses, and the many thousands who have just bought a home to find they couldn’t swing a duck around in it, let alone a cat.

    The BBC recently reported some of the new homes are so small that they have been rejected by the housing associations: these are the agencies that have taken over a great deal of the rented housing in Britain since the Conservatives abolished council house building in 1980. Housing associations are empowered to purchase some homes from the private market for rent to their tenants, or for shared ownership schemes.

    Good housing for those who cannot afford private ownership should be welcomed, and the housing associations congratulated for dismissing the smallest new dwellings. But the key question is: why should so much of the new housing seem to be built for birds, not people?

    British new housing today is rapidly becoming a scandal, at least for those who have to live in it. The BBC report found that in some new dwellings valued at over £200,000 ($326,000), rooms were tiny, and many basic construction faults were to be found. And Britain is now building the smallest new homes in the developed world: in Holland the average size of a new build home is 115 square metres, and in Japan it is 92.5 square metres. In Britain a paltry 76 square metres is common. (BBC News, New Homes Rejected for Social Housing (16 May 2009))

    The causes of this cramped and unhappy state of affairs cannot completely be laid at the door of New Labour. During the 1980s the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher terminated the obligation of private builders to construct new homes according to the Parker Morris standards set out in the report of the same name in 1961. The Toryism of Thatcher may have been more stridently in favour of the aspirational home owner than the more ‘one-nation’ Conservatism of Harold Macmillan, who legislated them, but these guidelines should not have been revoked. Whatever their faults, those standards laid down decent room sizes, and allowed for more generous interpretations of internal uses of space. Council tenants and private home owners benefited from both.

    Now, following the abolition of Parker Morris, it was possible to build new dwellings with a double bedroom that was marginally bigger than a double bed. This tendency to cram became commonplace, however, under Labour, whose housing policies mindlessly follow the idea that, when it comes to housing, tiniest is next to godliness.

    This brilliant approach arose in the 1990s as part the notion that creating higher densities in British cities would stimulate urban renewal. The formula was simple, or rather simplistic, and was best articulated by the leading architect Lord Rogers of Riverside. ‘Let’s cram our city centres’ he wrote provocatively. Of course, this was not for his usual clients for whom he designed spacious office blocks and sizeable swanky houses.

    Rogers was appointed as Head of the Urban Task Force, commissioned by the New Labour government. Its report entitled Towards an Urban Renaissance (1999), called for flats to populate the city centres at high densities. And as for those sprawling suburbs around the outskirts of town, so popular with English home owners, they were to be retro-fitted to utilise existing green spaces for housing.

    So much for verdant England. Even little parks and large private gardens are now vulnerable to development. Interestingly, the first illustration in Towards an Urban Renaissance is a photograph of the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who, of course, has two homes and more than one car. Needless to say, he welcomed the recommendations in the report since he likely never saw it applying to him or his friends.

    Environmentalism has further accelerated the trend for the shrinking of the British home. The emphasis upon the Rogers-style compact city has been trumpeted by the Green Party and other environmental lobby groups because higher densities and small build theoretically cause less carbon emissions and use up less non-renewable sources of energy.

    Yet let the obstreperous commoner be a bit put off by the high priests of cramming. Some of the most outspoken advocates of environmentalism come from wealthy patrician backgrounds, for example Jonathan Porrit and Prince Charles. Buckingham Palace and High grove House are hardly exercises in low-density living.

    All this leads to some doubts about the democratic future under the influence of our feudalist betters. A recent article in Regeneration and Renewal magazine by Sir Peter Hall draws attention to research led by Marcial Echenique at Cambridge University. Echenique and his team compared the ‘Richard Rogers-style compact city’ with ‘market-led dispersal, US fashion’. Their findings raise some profound questions in an urban democracy:

    The compact city cut carbon emissions by just 1 percent; but there were higher economic costs in outer areas where people still want to live, and where demand was greatest. Also, any social aspects of the compact city were to some extent undermined by crowding, exposure to noise and the crush on facilities.

    American style sprawl by contrast raised energy use and CO2 emissions by almost 2 percent, but engendered lower house prices, less crowding and less road congestion. (Hall, Sir Peter ‘Planners may be wasting their time’, Regeneration and Renewal, 6 July, 2009)

    None of this has yet created the momentum for a radical push back on housing policies, but it should. Conservative, Liberal and Labour MPs are now guiltily paying back their sums for using their expenses to buy their own often lavish second homes. It is striking how they have enjoyed a privileged access to accommodation which they, through legislation, would make all but unaffordable to millions outside the wealthiest classes.

    Once upon a time our political class understood that they ignored the hopes of less-well-off owner occupiers at their peril. Labour’s spectacular victories in 1997 and 2001 owed much to the votes of those who wanted to get on the housing ladder, or who had just clambered onto it, and naturally wanted the best home for their money. Before then, under Thatcher, the Conservatives successfully garnered the support of the same class.

    Now lamentably all the parties display little interest in the aspirations of working-class, lower middle-class and immigrant wannabe homeowners for a decent space. Instead they are to be treated like water fowl by those who generally have access to one or more homes. Some may do it in the name of being “green” but there’s a better term for what they are doing: hypocrisy and class privilege.

    Mark Clapson is a social historian, with interests in suburbanisation and social change, new communities in England and the USA, and war and the built environment.

  • The Edges of the Map

    There be dragons!

    That’s what they used to say at the edges of the map, where the known world became Terra Incognita.

    I find map edges intriguing – I want to turn the page, find out what is on the other side, see what is just over the horizon.

    In 1996 I visited Germany, and my favorite memento from that trip is an ADAC Street Atlas (ADAC is the German equivalent of the AAA). It is 211 pages of Germany, starting in the north where the Danish border meets the North Sea, and ending in the southeast, at Berchtesgaden and the Austrian border. Everything in between is depicted at a scale of 1:200,000 (1 cm = 2 km).

    And not just Germany! Neighboring countries are shown as well, at least as far as necessary to include all of Germany. Thus it includes a sliver of Denmark, a slice of Poland, chunks o’ Czech & Austria, half of Luxemburg, etc.

    A westernmost salient of Germany juts into the Netherlands to within a few kilometers of Nimjegen. Indeed, for a kilometer or two, the main street (literally: Hauptstrasse) of the German hamlet of Wyler constitutes the border. To the west (in Germany) it is called Nimwegerstrasse (loosely: “on the way to Nim”), and to the east it’s titled Oude Kiefsebaan.

    To include this salient on the map, the ADAC atlas also must include the cities of Nimjegen and Arnhem. But the map does not cover Arnhem’s western suburbs. I have no other map of Holland at anything approaching the same scale, so my knowledge of Dutch geography mostly ends at Arnhem. Beyond that, there be dragons!

    The border with Holland is anything but simple. It twists and turns, includes this farm but not the other, this hamlet but not its neighbor, goes to the center of that canal, but only the west bank of another. It seems irrational, but what it lacks in rationality, it keeps in precision. For the names are all Dutch on one side, but German on the other. I have found only one exception: the Dutch border village of Millingen a.d. Rijn. In Holland, the Rhine River is known as the Waal. Millingen sounds German to me, and it is pointedly not Millingen a.d. Waal. There must be some history there.

    I think of Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox named Babe, who straightened the roads of Michigan. He did so by hitching Babe up to one end of the road, who then pulled mightily untangling all the curves. It’s too bad Mr. Bunyan didn’t travel to Germany to straighten out their borders – it would have saved the world no end of difficulty. (Even if he had thought of it, it probably wouldn’t have worked: borders are imaginary lines on a map, not something tangible like a road that you can hitch a blue ox to.)

    And yet, something has straightened German borders – and that something likely is war. There is a district in Hamburg named Altona. Altona never sounded German to me, so I asked my folks (who live there) where the name came from. They said it was Danish, and that Denmark used to own much of what is now the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. The border has since moved northward, but unlike the Dutch border it is relatively straight. I don’t know the history, but apparently the border has moved back and forth over the centuries, and has now settled on the current truce line at the 55th parallel. Good fences make good neighbors.

    Of course, since 1945 Germany’s eastern frontier has been severely rationalized. The border with Poland is now along the Oder-Neisse line. That line follows the Oder to just south of Frankfurt-Oder. The Oder veers off to the east, but the tributary Neisse goes almost to the border of the Czech Republic. The last few kilometers parallel a road, with said road on the Polish side of the line. Such a boundary has the advantage that it is easily defined, but it also divides communities that were formerly single metro areas. But as everybody on the Polish side is a refugee I guess that doesn’t matter.

    There has been war between Germany and Holland – twice in the last century. So why haven’t the Dutch “rationalized” the border in their favor? The Belgians certainly did: the district of St. Vith is Belgium’s German-speaking area, and it became part of Belgium after WWI – the fruits of Flanders Fields. But while the Germans have occupied all of the Netherlands, the border has apparently never been disputed. The precision shows – and why fix something if it isn’t broken? Good neighbors make good fences?

    Believe it or not, there is one German border that hasn’t seen a war in at least 1000 years: the frontier with Switzerland. And a more embroidered, intricate boundary probably exists no place else on earth (though lines between Indian states must come close). Germany, France and Switzerland meet at Basel in a region known as the Dreiländereck (three-country-corner). The Rhine, which to the north forms the border with France (German place-names on both sides), now veers to the east and “should” form the border with Switzerland. But the city of Basel is on both sides of the river, and there is a salient of Switzerland that looks more like the Caprivi Strip than any rational boundary. Who knows where that comes from?

    The Swiss canton of Schaffhausen sticks up north of the Rhine like a polyp, only 5 km wide at the base, but widens from there. Indeed, it gets so wide that it ultimately surrounds a bit of Germany – and here my two sources disagree. To drive to the German village of Büsingen am Hochrhein you must drive through Switzerland – ADAC helpfully labels it as a Swiss Customs Area. Yahoo maps show the district as a true exclave – a bit of Germany completely surrounded by Switzerland. The ADAC Atlas, however, is different: to the east of Büsingen am Hochrhein, both banks of the Rhine are shown as Swiss territory, but the river itself is part of Germany. By this reading, the area is not an exclave but is accessible from Germany by boat.

    I have no idea what the truth is. Let’s just say that Paul Bunyan would be flummoxed.

    And as for those dragons that be west of Arnhem? I’ve never seen one myself, but I have it on authority that they really are Dutch dragons.

    They wear wooden shoes.

    Daniel Jelski is Dean of Science & Engineering State University of New York at New Paltz.

  • Glimpsing the Good in Police Chief Bratton’s Goodbye to L.A.

    Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Chief William Bratton’s pending departure makes now a good time to give him credit for a habit that draws scant attention amid talk of his traveling ways and unapologetic ego: The guy works very hard at every aspect of his duties.

    It’s a habit that can touch other lives as a matter of course. It touched me one morning at the Los Angeles Police Academy. Bratton had invited me there to address a graduating class with a reading of a column I had written about the challenges of policing our city. I sat on the main dais with my wife, while some of my other family members were in a front row to the right, where the sun soon drew a bead on them.

    At one point Bratton had finished an inspection of the graduates arrayed on the greensward and was returning to the main dais when he stopped smartly and told my family members to feel free to move back a row or two for some shade.

    It was a considerate gesture amid a precisely timed ceremony – made all the more so because Bratton had no way of knowing that one of my sisters had recently been treated for skin cancer. This is a younger sister of mine, and it’s been some time since she’s needed me to look out for her, but I still do in small ways.

    I took Bratton’s courtesy personally, as a helping hand. It was one of those moments when someone extends themselves without knowing the full effect of their effort. It was the residue of a solid work ethic. It was the by-product of a constant dedication to the protocol that helps inform a sense of duty.

    Bratton has it – and he will be missed.

    There are also plenty of very public reasons to regret Bratton’s departure. Crime has gone down consistently on his watch. Relations between LAPD and the city’s ethnic communities are better than ever, although there’s still work to be done. In any case, the agency has seen broad reform and earned a release from federal oversight.

    Yet there’s an opportunity to be found in taking a break from the intensity Bratton brings to his work. This is a fellow who comprehends much more than the core of policing, taking pains to understand anything that could have a significant bearing on the job, including technology and statistical analysis. Lately he’s talked about using those disciplines in something called predictive policing, an effort to pinpoint who is likely to commit crimes, at what times, and in which locations.

    I think we should all appreciate the fact that substantial individuals are dedicated to an exhaustive pursuit of new tools for law-enforcement.

    We should also remember, however, that Bratton is a cop who views the world from a cop’s perspective. That is altogether appropriate for him — and it leaves us with the responsibility of considering whether a hard-charging chief who is intrigued by predictive policing could hold the potential to bring serious erosion to our civil liberties.

    It’s true that we have elected officials and a judicial system to stand guard against incursions on our civil liberties, adding more than a cop’s view to the debate.

    That’s a bit shaky, though, given political trends of recent years.

    Bratton adds to my worries because he’s as good at politics as any politician in our city. I worry about having a police chief who not only has the ability and drive to get a grasp on something like predictive policing but might also have enough political skill to sell the notion in a way that bypasses healthy debate.

    Perhaps Bratton’s departure will provide time for Mayor Antonio Villaragiosa and others at City Hall to ponder the balance of liberty and security – and to consider how much of one we are willing to trade for the other.

    I thank Bratton for his dynamic approach to reshaping law enforcement in our city, and I certainly don’t intend to diminish his success at fulfilling the mission he took on in Los Angeles.

    I address my concerns to our elected officials, all of whom should recalibrate their relationships with the sort of authority figures who possess the ability to make folks feel safe.

    It could be downright unsafe to get in the habit of relying on a top cop to handle the whole job.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)