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  • Bush: A Disaster to Those He Held Most Dear

    You always hurt the one you love
    The one you shouldn’t hurt at all
    You always take the sweetest rose
    And crush it till the petals fall
    You always break the kindest heart
    With a hasty word you can’t recall

    — Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher

    Like the 1944 pop standard says, President George W. Bush has hurt the most all those he professed to love the most — from the conservative ideologues and born-again Christians to the free-market enthusiasts, energy producers and red state political class. Perhaps no politician in recent memory has done more damage to his political base.

    The most obvious recent equivalent, Richard Nixon, did cause harm to the conservative cause, but that damage was short-lived. It reflected his deviousness more than his policies. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s many personality flaws weakened the Democrats’ hold on the White House, but inflicted no permanent harm to liberalism.

    In contrast, the Katrina-scale disaster that has been the Bush presidency may leave his ideological backers in the wilderness for years to come. Over the past eight years, Bush has done more to undermine conservatism than all of the country’s college faculties, elite media and Hollywood studios put together.

    The late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater — whose memory remains far more cherished than that of either President Bush — nurtured the modern brand of conservatism. Nixon employed some of these tenets, but they flourished most fully under Ronald Reagan.

    Conservatism’s core values rested on notions of a strong national defense and free market economics. Bush has punctured these ideas in a way that transcends the effects of historically anomalous scandals such as Watergate or Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Bush has not only dinged the conservative car, he has totaled it.

    Start with the great core issue of national defense. Arguably, Bush’s one success lies in his reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing lack of follow-up terrorist attacks on the homeland. Yet a series of other blunders, notably the war in Iraq, has blemished this enviable record.

    Despite the great efforts of the military, particularly in recent years, to calm that rich but cantankerous country, it is hard to see how it has been worth the cost in life, treasure and international reputation.

    The shoes thrown in Iraq and celebrated around the world epitomize not only ill manners but also the fact that even our supposed friends there don’t like us very much. If history is any guide, Iraq will end up as an authoritarian state with strong anti-American (as well as anti-Israel) leanings. The farther our sons and daughters get away from those ever-scowling people, the better most Americans will feel.

    One unintended part of the Bush legacy will likely be a weaker, highly stressed military. The influential Democratic Netroots will be able to hound the military establishment — whatever President-elect Barack Obama’s intentions. Congress may be reluctant to commit troops to almost anything short of a Chinese invasion of San Francisco, which many Americans — and perhaps some progressive natives — might consider a blessing anyway. Support for new weapons systems, needed or not, will dissipate.

    Bush’s legacy for the cause of free market capitalism may be even worse. Our first MBA-holding president has turned out to be the worst economic manager since Herbert Hoover.

    The bailouts of Detroit and — much worse — the vile Wall Street profiteers now open the door to an unprecedented expansion of invasive welfarism throughout the economy. It’s hard to call proposals that build tennis courts in yuppie towns or subsidize performance artists in Flint, Mich., wasteful after the billions Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has lavished on his compadres in Richistan.

    In the coming years, the only legitimate opposition to the bipartisan pro-Wall Street policy will come from the scruffy populists of both parties, many based in the heartland regions of the country. Bush may even make quasi-Marxism respectable again. Hearing about $20 billion in new bonuses for government-subsidized Wall Streeters this year should be enough to bring out the hidden Bolshevik in even rational people.

    Ironically, the only people who should be thanking Bush — the environmentalists, the urban gentry, the welfare staters — are the very ones who have despised him the most. Now that he has helped put them in power, perhaps they could host a celebrity fundraiser for the new Bush library in Dallas. Serenaded by Barbra, scolded by St. Al, with a short film by Michael Moore, the program — hosted by Whoopi Goldberg — could help consecrate a lavish new sarcophagus that Bush has prepared for the conservative movement.

    This article originally appeared at Politico. White House Photo by Paul Morse

    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 and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Moving to Flyover Country

    As the international financial crisis and the US economy have worsened, there have been various reports about more people “staying put,” not moving from one part of the country to another. There is some truth in this, but the latest US Bureau of the Census estimates indicate the people are still moving, and in big numbers.

    In the year ended June 30, 2008, 670,000 people moved between states. This is down substantially from the peak years of 2005 to 2007, when housing prices in California and its suburbs of Nevada and Arizona, Florida, the Northeast and the Northwest reached record heights never seen before. In those years, people could elicit considerable and unprecedented financial gain by moving to parts of the country where the housing bubble had not visited or had done less damage. A household could buy in Indianapolis, Dallas-Fort Worth or Atlanta and save more than $1,000,000 in purchase price and mortgage payments compared to a comparable house in San Diego, Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area. In 2006, net domestic migration between states peaked at 1,200,000.

    Still, despite the reduction from the most extreme bubble years, last year’s interstate migration numbers still exceeded those of 2001, 2002 and 2003 and nearly equaled 2004. Lost in the discussions of the decline has been the continuation of a seemingly inexorable secular trend: the continued migration to the “Flyover County” that many of the coastal urban elites tend to dismiss as insignificant and even unlivable. What residents of Elitia reject, millions are embracing.

    Can 3,500,000 Movers be Wrong? The new data shows a strong trend of domestic migration to Flyover Country. Between 2000 and 2008, 3,500,000 residents moved to Flyover Country. This is roughly equal to the movement of the entire population of the City of Los Angeles. Moreover, the trend has been accelerating. In the last four years, the number of people relative to the population leaving Elitia’s promised lands has increased by 60 percent.

    The Lost Empire: New York has lost residents at a rate exceeding that of any other state or the District of Columbia. Not even the destructive winds of Katrina and Rita, the malfeasance of the Army Corps of Engineers or even mis-governance – from Washington to Baton Rouge and New Orleans itself – could drive people out as effectively as the Empire State. New York has lost 1,575,000 domestic migrants since 2000, nearly equal to the population of Manhattan.

    New York’s net domestic migration loss is equal to 8.1 percent of its 2000 population, compared to Louisiana’s 7.1 percent loss. New York has even outdone that perpetual exporter of residents, the District of Columbia, which lost a mere 7.6 percent through domestic migration.

    From Golden State to Fool’s Gold State: Then there is California, which has added more people over the past 50 years than live in Australia. How things have changed. Early in the decade, the Golden State was suffering somewhat modest domestic migration losses. But by 2005, with house prices escalating wildly relative to incomes, California won the race to the bottom. Each year since then, California has driven away more people than any other state.

    What’s Right with Pennsylvania: There are anomalies, however. One of the leading parlor games is “what’s wrong with Pennsylvania” stories. From the Philadelphia Inquirer to Washington’s Brookings Institution, there has probably been more hand wringing about Pennsylvania than about all other states combined. Yet things have changed materially, and largely for the better. Although Pennsylvania continues to lose domestic migrants, the rate has been far less than elsewhere in the Northeast. Between 2000 and 2008, Pennsylvania lost less than 50,000 domestic migrants. Its neighboring states – New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Ohio (Delaware and West Virginia have had small gains) – have lost more than 2,300,000 domestic migrants or nearly 50 domestic migrants for every one leaving Pennsylvania. Among states with more than 10,000,000 population, only Florida and Texas have done better in domestic migration than Pennsylvania.

    That’s pretty good company for a state so many have declared to be on life support. Indeed, it is time to ask “what’s right about Pennsylvania?” One answer might be that Pennsylvania home prices did not explode relative to incomes (a distortion avoided because of Pennsylvania’s generally more liberal land use regulations). The American Dream – at least for those who are aspiring to achieve it – has shifted from New York, New Jersey and Maryland to Pennsylvania. This is evident from the housing construction on the west bank of the Delaware River and just over the Maryland line in York, Adams and Franklin counties.

    Florida: A Changing Story: Flyover Country’s gains are impressive. Florida has attracted the largest number of residents from other states, at 1,250,000 since 2000. This amounts to a 7.6 percent increase compared to the state’s 2000 population. However, things are changing. As the state’s housing became unaffordable, domestic migration dropped and then stopped. By 2007, domestic migration fell more than 80 percent from average of earlier years. Then, Florida slipped into a loss of 9,000 domestic migrants in 2008.

    Southern Gains: The rest of the South generally avoided the worst of the housing bubble. Texas has added 700,000 domestic migrants since 2000. The state displaced Florida as the leading destination for domestic migrants and has held that position since 2006. North Carolina has added 580,000 domestic migrants; Georgia added 525,000, South Carolina 270,000 and Tennessee 240,000. Even Arkansas and Alabama, although held in low esteem on the coasts, gained more domestic migrants than any state in the Northeast.

    Escaping from California: Nevada has been a big draw for domestic migration, adding 365,000 new residents. This is 18.3 percent of its 2000 population, the highest rate in the nation. Arizona added 700,000, or 13.7 percent of its population. Much of this growth has been driven by Californians fleeing out of control housing prices, though their own more recently developing bubbles have probably contributed to somewhat reduced domestic migration gains In recent years.

    Basket Cases in Flyover Country: However, not all is well in Flyover Country. Michigan lost 109,000 residents to other states in 2008 alone, for the deepest percentage loss in the nation (1.1 percent). Since 2000, Michigan experienced a 4.7 percent domestic migration loss, equal to the decline in Massachusetts. Further, based upon current rates, Michigan next year will probably be the first state to ever drop from above to below 10,000,000 residents. Illinois and Ohio have also suffered substantial domestic migration losses, at 4.6 percent and 3.0 percent respectively.

    Where from Here? It is, of course, impossible to tell whether these trends will continue. Domestic migration could fall even more precipitously if economic times continue to worsen.

    We cannot predict whether seemingly unlikely trends, such as net in-migration to South Dakota and West Virginia, will continue in the longer run. Will Florida’s losses continue or intensify, or will it resume its position as a magnet for residents of other states? Has the magnet of California truly lost its attraction? Will the improving trends in the Midwest begin to make up for half a century of migration losses? Only time will tell.

    Resource: State Population & Migration: 2000-2008 (http://www.demographia.com/db-statemigra2008.pdf)

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • I am glad to be a citizen of the Republic of the United States of America. I like geography.

  • Stop The Wall Street Bonuses

    These are tough times for Michael Bloomberg’s free-spending “luxury city.” High-end condominium speculators – long considered impervious to the mortgage crisis – are shivering in the bitter cold this winter. Four billion dollars in building projects have been postponed or canceled outright, in large part because Wall Street’s bonus babies are getting a tad less than they are accustomed to.

    Despite this, I would suspect most of America thinks Wall Street, and New York’s financial community, has not suffered enough. Industry bonuses are still expected to total well over $20 billion – small compared to last year’s stupendous $33.2 billion, but not an insignificant New Year’s present for the very people who have played a crucial role in wrecking the world economy.

    By one calculation, this sum breaks down to $137,000 per banker. For middling executives with eight years on the job, bonuses could average $625,000, 15 times the average income for American households. Without the infusion of taxpayer cash, it seems certain that these numbers would have been significantly less. Feel better now, America?

    True, some high-profile top executives wary of facing Congress have announced they will not be taking their stupendous bonuses this year. But these people should be able to scrape by with the tens of millions they bagged last year.

    However, some of the biggest losers – such as bailout-owed insurer AIG – seem to lack even a basic sense of shame. It appears AIG is handing out bonuses ranging from $92,000 to $4 million to some 168 employees. It wouldn’t shock me if some of these fall into the pockets of the same folks whose actions have proven an unmitigated disaster for both shareholders and the country.

    If only autoworkers, unemployed real estate agents and most of the rest of us, who are struggling to make our mortgage payments, had it so good. More important still, this state of affairs is not likely to encourage much faith in the capitalist system here or abroad. If free enterprise is worth anything, it should be about performance, risk and reward. By that standard, there is no justification for any bonuses on Wall Street this year.

    “It’s hard to believe they are still getting bonuses after wrecking so many lives,” marvels Susanne Trimbath, a financial analyst at STP Advisors. “This no longer has anything to do with performance but has become an entitlement.”

    Critically, Trimbath reminds us, we need to remember that some of these same bonus babies are primarily responsible for the housing meltdown that helped undermine the rest of the economy. It was Wall Street’s slicing and dicing of mortgage securities – not just McMansion-hunting suburbanites – that created the financial bases for the sub-prime loans and other excesses in the first place.

    The whole bonus mania, Trimbath adds, contributed to the problem. It encouraged investment bankers to “push the [mortgage securities] crap out the door, because that’s how they could earn bigger bonuses.”

    In the end, the remnants of Wall Street’s legions are still richly rewarded for their handiwork in unraveling the economy. This scenario turns Milton Friedman’s excellent point about the “social responsibility” of business on its head. Friedman correctly suggested that a businessperson’s primary obligation was not to serve some conjured-up idea of the public good but rather to make money for their shareholders and investors.

    One wonders what the late Nobel laureate would say to the same Wall Streeters who are desperate to get props for being green or socially enlightened but have no shame about devastating their investors.

    This spectacle could have long-term consequences for Wall Street’s future as an icon of capitalism. Someone in Congress (presumably not from New York) is sure to call for hearings once people learn of the big bonuses being doled out at bailed-out firms like Goldman Sachs. The class bent to enrich themselves with public largesse, it turns out, includes more than sleazy Chicago politicians.

    A populist rube from the Atlanta exurbs or the Great Plains might even come up with the bright idea to stamp out new bonuses and expropriate some of the ill-gotten gains made in previous years.

    The biggest push back will likely come from Robert Rubin disciples like Timothy Geithner, who will soon take over the Treasury, and the new National Economic Council chief, Larry Summers. Rubin will surely see the logic of Wall Street’s compensation system, since apparently he made over $115 million at Citigroup (where he serves on the board) while the firm has lost more than 70% of its value.

    Along with Bloomberg and Sen. Charles Schumer – aided, perhaps, by the star power of their proposed puppet Caroline Kennedy – these worthies will fight off any attack against the bonus babies. No doubt they will argue such action would harm New York’s economy. Think of what smaller or no bonuses will mean to the dog-walkers, toenail painters, personal trainers and high-end travel and real estate agents of Manhattan.

    ProPublica’s frequently updated map of financial bailout recipients reflects a massive transfer of money from the rest of the country to New York. A few other places – Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco – also have licked clean the seemingly bottomless federal ice cream bowl. What about the rest of the country?

    Even New Yorkers should consider whether bailing out Wall Streeters is so great for them in the end. Once among the most recession-proof economies in the country, the Big Apple’s dependence on financial bonuses has made it increasingly subject to the market’s boom and bust cycles.

    Indeed, the perverse effects of the bonus economy may well do more harm to New York than its political leaders let on or even realize. For one thing, it doesn’t create many new high-end jobs; even before the meltdown, industry employment from the last “boom” never reached peak levels hit in 2000.

    What these bonuses foster, instead, is an ultra-expensive environment inhospitable to more middle-class employment, although it does create a boom market for low-end service workers. The cost of living in Manhattan is the nation’s highest, standing at twice the national average.

    Once a city of capitalist aspiration, New York’s economy has devolved into a plutonomy where, in 2007, financial services employees gained a remarkable one-third of all income, much of it in the form of bonuses.

    Meanwhile, the city’s middle-class ranks shrink. The Big Apple now has the smallest percentage of middle-class residents – barely half – of any major urban center. Perhaps even worse, the flow of bonus checks has persuaded successive city governments that it’s not necessary to diversify the economy or cut exorbitant costs.

    Maybe it is time to end the whole way Wall Street operates – for the good of America, New York and indeed the reputation of capitalism. An insane system that overly rewards a few for being in the right place at the right time has outlived its usefulness. A more reasonable way of rewarding performance – and punishing missteps – needs to be put in its place.

    I hope the financial industry takes the lead in making these reforms. If not, change will come anyway – likely in the ham-fisted way that comes naturally to Washington.

    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 and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Georganne Chapin

  • How Detroit Lost the Millennials, and Maybe the Rest of Us, Too

    The current debate over whether to save our domestic auto industry has revealed some starkly different views about the future of manufacturing in America among economists, elected officials, and corporate executives. There are many disagreements about solutions to the Big Three’s current financial difficulties, but the more fundamental debate lies in whether the industry should be bent to the will of the government’s environmental priorities or if it should serve only the needs of the companies’ customers and their shareholders.

    But there’s something more at stake: the long-term credibility of Detroit among the rising generation of Millennials. These young people, after all, are the future consumers for the auto industry and winning them – or at least a significant portion of them – over is critical to the industry’s long-term prospects in the marketplace and in the halls of Congress.

    The enormous investments the federal government has been making in private enterprises, including the auto industry, will test the ability of private sector executives to meet the expectations of this very civically minded generation. Sadly, so far, it’s a test many business leaders seem likely to fail.

    In the case of the American auto industry, this failure has deep roots. Over the past few decades the leaders of the Big Three repeatedly have failed to move their industry in new directions, even when the opportunity to do so has plainly been put before them.

    Attempts to nudge Detroit into producing more fuel-efficient vehicles have been going on since the 1973-4 Arab Oil embargo, which led Congress to establish Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFÉ) standards for cars and light trucks. The target was for cars to meet an average of 27.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 1985. On Earth Day, 1992, Bill Clinton proposed to raise that standard even further to 45 mpg after he was elected President.

    When Al Gore was asked to join the ticket, auto industry executives, terrified at the prospect that the man who had called for the abolition of the internal combustion engine might become Vice President, implored the leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to meet with the candidates and bring them to their senses. The lobbying effort worked. Under pressure from Owen Beiber, then UAW president, and Steve Yokich, who was his designated successor, and the powerful Democratic Congressman from Dearborn, Michigan, John Dingell, Clinton agreed to delay the adoption of higher CAFÉ standards until it could be proven that such goals were attainable.

    This formulation opened the door for what came to be known as the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles or PNGV. Reluctantly supported by the Big Three, PNGV provided approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in government research funds to demonstrate the feasibility of producing a midsize sedan that could get 80 mpg. Often called “the moon shot of the 90s,” each car company was to make a prototype of such a vehicle by the politically convenient year of 2000 and begin mass production by 2004, another presidential election year.

    After a few years of technological research, reviewed by the independent National Research Council (NRC), the partnership settled on the combination of a hybrid gasoline and electric powered propulsion system as the most promising approach. But by 1997, the car companies were resisting development of even a prototype for such a vehicle.

    Vice President Gore, who had been in charge of the PNGV program since its inception, decided to meet with the Big Three CEOs to make sure they did not forget their past commitments. The answer from Detroit was emphatic: profits were coming from SUVs and heavy-duty trucks, not cars. Gore suggested they deploy a 60 mpg hybrid passenger sedan in 2002 rather than waiting for an 80 mpg version in 2004. Ford’s Peter Pestillo and his UAW ally, Steve Yokich, quickly replied, “no way.” Pestillo maintained, “we need much more time than that to make them cost competitive.” Gore could have, but didn’t, embarrass his host by pointing out that Toyota’s Prius was already delivering 55 mpg.

    Not all executives were blind to the challenge. General Motors’ Vice-Chairman, Harry Pearce had been the driving force behind GM’s ill-fated EV1 electric car experiment. Despite a bout with leukemia that took him out of consideration for CEO of the company, he and his allies within GM exerted powerful influence on the company’s CEO, Jack Smith. He also won over an influential ally at Ford, the Chairman of its Board of Directors, William Clay “Bill” Ford, Jr., great grandson of the company’s founder.

    At the Detroit Auto Show in January, 1999 Bill Ford personally introduced a new line of electric cars, under the brand name, THINK. Even though Honda and GM had abandoned the concept of an all electric vehicle by then, Ford said he thought there was still a niche market for such a car. Tellingly, Jac Nasser, Ford’s newly installed CEO, demonstrated his attitude toward these ideas by treating the visiting Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater, to a personal trip in a new Jaguar Roadster with the highest horsepower and worst gasoline mileage of any car at the show.

    Right after that display of internal differences at Ford, Harry Pearce personally presided over the public introduction of General Motors’ PNGV hybrid prototype car, which delivered 80 mpg fuel efficiency, while seating a family of five comfortably. He then surprised everyone by revealing GM’s real vision of the future – a hydrogen fuel cell powered car called the “Precept” that got 108 mpg in its initial EPA tests. He grandly predicted that such cars would be on the road by 2010.

    Clearly the industry was at a critical fork in the road. At a 2000 meeting at the Detroit airport, almost exactly one year to the day since their last meeting, Vice President Gore suggested to auto company executives that developing these products could enhance both the industry’s image and each company’s individual brands. Gore reminded his listeners, “It’s not just the substance of the issue you need to consider. You also need to think about the symbolism of the decision. Putting SUVs into the PNGV project would change the public’s perception of where you are going in the future.”

    Jac Nasser wanted to know if such a commitment would change the dialogue between the industry and government. Gore suggested he would put his personal reputation behind such an agreement, which would garner the auto industry a great deal of positive press and appeal to the growing ranks of environmentally minded consumers.

    But when it came time to put their reputation on the line, the auto executives blinked. The CEOs were not ready to commit to any specific production goals. This less-than-clarion call for a green automotive industry future made it only to page B4 of the Wall Street Journal the next day and was otherwise ignored by the rest of the public that the participants were hoping to impress.

    Today, only Ford, the one American auto company not to ask for a bailout in 2008, is ready to offer a car that meets the original Clinton target. In showrooms in 2009, its Fusion Hybrid five-passenger sedan uses the hybrid technologies first explored in the PNGV to get 45 mpg in city driving, more on the highway, and costs about $30,000. As a result, Ford is in a much better position today to weather the whirlwind of change in consumer tastes and financial markets, even without the support of the federal government.

    Unfortunately for America, General Motors, the largest of the Big Three, went in almost the opposite direction. Rick Wagoner, who became General Motors’ CEO in June 2000, chose to pursue an SUV-centered strategy that won big profits for a brief period. Since then, however, GM stock has plunged 95%, from $60 per share to roughly $3 in late 2008. General Motors, which lost $70 billion since 2005, has seen its market share cut in half. Having failed to embrace a public partnership with a sympathetic government, Wagoner was forced to beg for a federal bailout with onerous conditions. Seven years after the fateful auto summit with Al Gore, when asked what decision he most regretted, Wagoner told Motor Trend magazine, “ending the EV1 electric car program and not putting the right resources into PNGV. It didn’t affect profitability but it did affect image.” [emphasis added]

    Had the auto industry taken Gore’s lead a decade ago and built a positive image among the very environmentally conscious Millennial Generation, it might have built a constituency to support the government’s bailout. Instead, the companies’ brands, particularly GM’s, have taken such a beating that the President-elect recently reminded the car companies that “the American people’s patience is wearing thin.” In contrast to young Baby Boomers buying songs by the Beach Boys celebrating the Motor City’s products, the country seems ready to drive their “Chevy to the levee” and tell the company “the levee is dry.”

    But that is not the right answer. Millennials bring not only an acute environmental consciousness to the country’s political debate, but a desire for pragmatic solutions to the nation’s problems that promote economic equality and opportunity. To secure Millenials’ support, however, the domestic automobile industry needs to be seen as a contributor in ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and improving our environment. Not only would such an approach assure the industry’s future profitability, it would also remake its image in a way that will appeal to both their future customers and the politicians they support.

    Morley Winograd, co-author with Michael D. Hais of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), served as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Gore where he witnessed the events described in this article. He and Mike Hais are also fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

  • Current Policy Overlooks the New Homeless

    San Francisco: A Chevron employee is forced to move his family of four into their Mitsubishi Gallant after being laid off…

    Atlanta: Jeniece Richards moved from Michigan to Atlanta a year ago, but despite her best efforts, and two college degrees, remains homeless. She is living in temporary housing with her two children and younger brother…

    Denver: As Carrie Hinkle’s hours dwindled, she was forced to choose between paying rent or buying food for her daughter. The two are now working with local agencies towards permanent housing, again…

    These stories, plucked from the headlines of the past months are more than the typical holiday coverage. They show faces of the newly homeless, growing as the economy crumbles and opportunities fade.

    Facing layoffs and deep cuts in working hours, many in fragile circumstances could no longer afford their mortgage. More commonly, they were renting from a landlord who foreclosed on their residence. Healthy, hardworking and addiction-free, the new homeless are closer in demeanor and behavior to our neighbors than the overly-typified street drunk.

    Homeless resource programs across the country have been reporting record requests for assistance. A recent report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that, of 21 cities surveyed, 20 reported an increase in requests for food, with 59 percent coming from families. Nationwide, increased food stamps claims – a clear indicator of rising poverty – reached a record 31.6 million in September, up more than four million in a year according to the New York Times.

    California, which has had a homeless problem for decades, has become the epicenter for the newly homeless. The state’s unemployment rate rose to 8.4 percent in November from 5.4 percent in 2007, making it the third highest in the nation. Compounding the homeless problem is the state’s high foreclosure rates (third in the country, according to RealtyTrac data). Homeless programs from San Francisco to San Diego are reporting record numbers, mostly from newly homeless residents impacted by the housing crises or falling economy.

    Sadly this surge in homelessness comes just after a period when the problem was finally getting under control. One study by the Interagency Council on Homelessness found a 12 percent decrease in overall homelessness when comparing 2005 to 2007 data. That same time period also reveals a staggering 30 percent decrease in chronic homelessness (defined as being homeless for either over a year or for multiple stints).

    In 2000, the National Alliance to End Homelessness crafted their landmark Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness. With successful bipartisan funding, 355 Ten Year Plans have been put into action nationwide.

    Such plans, and a strong economy, accelerated the recent gains in the fight against homelessness. But the surge in newly homeless and shrinking budgets now threatens to reverse the progress.

    New York City’s municipal shelter systems have seen record-setting increases over the past three months, according to the City’s Department of Homeless Services, but deep cuts loom ahead. Already, the city’s current budget includes a 3 million dollar decrease in outreach funding.

    Denver plans to slash nearly a fourth of its funding for homeless initiatives at a time when the city reports a 38-percent increase in homelessness over the past year (Denver Post).

    This situation will get much worse. A 20 percent increase of urban homelessness has been projected by the Interagency Council on Homelessness for 2009. Escalating homelessness and looming funding cuts create conditions for a renewed homeless crisis.

    In the past debate has focused on the mentally ill and substance abusers, but the new homeless represent different phenomena. President-elect Obama has the responsibility to increase assistance to the degree that reflects the expanding problem. Washington seems all too willing to prop up the corporate players of the American economy, but let us not forget about the hardest hit by these times. Swift action must be taken to assure that the problem of the new homeless becomes no more than a historical footnote – to assure that we as Americans can look back with pride knowing that even during our hardest hour, all were cared for.

    Ilie Mitaru is the founder and director of WebRoots Campaigns, based in Portland, OR, the company offers web and New Media strategy solutions to non-profits, political campaigns and market-driven clients.

  • Class and the Future of Planning

    Economic segregation may be a foregone conclusion, as studies have long suggested. For one thing, our first tendency is to buy the best place we can afford, intentionally locating to those parts of a region that appeal to others with similar buying power. Secondly, we tend to buy something most suitable to our tastes, which steers us into areas populated by those with similar viewpoints.

    The implications for contemporary planning processes are profound, especially since current best practices revolve so much around form and style and take so little measure of economics, choice, and consequence. It troubles me that my own decisions purchasing houses in the past – made after careful scrutiny of what evidence I could gather about the people living in the neighborhood – showed me that even a planner aware of attempts to integrate could choose segregation.

    But if planning is anything, surely it is the idea that what seemed inevitable can be bypassed with careful consideration, sequencing, and reorganization of inputs. Why plan for a different future if the results are the same as when you started? The idea of inevitable segregation narrows the planning options considerably.

    As a result, planners and community developers have focused not on enlarging the pie, but on figuring out how to appeal to those residents who show up for meetings. Whether these groups are affluent NIMBYs or poor advocates for low-cost housing, the status quo remains completely undisturbed.

    There are two main ways I’ve seen this occur. First is through the comprehensive planning process. The comprehensive planning process attempts to bring together connected but distinct elements – housing, transportation, the environment, the economy – and reassemble them into a cohesive, publicly vetted whole. But what really happens during such efforts?

    Planning staff assembles data. The contours of the process get articulation. Citizens get to describe their vision of their community. Flavor of the day ingredients dominate the discussion – pedestrian malls, node development, open space, wetlands preservation, smart growth, and now green collar jobs, sustainability, and social equity (whatever that is).

    The strong neighborhoods show up in force, working the system to their advantage. They often transform any land use or zoning issue into a referendum on the impacts on property values. The water treatment facility gets sited far away from such neighborhoods. Low-income housing becomes an articulated virtue, so long as its located elsewhere. This occurs in supposedly enlightened and ‘progressive’ neighborhoods like mine – Rosemont in Alexandria, Virginia – and places like Kensington near Berkeley, or in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where addressing homelessness is a rising priority – if it’s handled in Bridgeport and not Danbury or Shelton or Norwalk. Planning nearly always yields good results for neighborhoods like mine.

    In contrast, residents of struggling areas are skeptical of processes that have not benefited them very much in the past. In places like low-income parts of Norfolk, Virginia, “planning” has come to mean either 1950s style urban renewal or 1990s style gentrification. New Urbanism in Norfolk has often meant the very opposite of practical economic inclusion for low-income working households. The very idea that real change could both come and be beneficial to them is laughable. Their issues are not about landscaping with native plants: their concerns are jobs, crime, services, and housing affordability. Astute (cynical) planners soon discover that “respect” is also in play in these neighborhoods; merely listening with sincerity becomes a stand in for actual change. Listening requires no real work, certainly not compared to the heavy lifting of actually improving these areas for their current residents. Planning rarely adds much to these places.

    Middle-class neighborhoods want to preserve what they have. They don’t want their small claim on prosperity threatened by those from the troubled areas in town. They want nothing more than to preserve their safety and the small patch of grass they mow on the weekends. For families in these neighborhoods, the suburbs have for decades been a bastion from a changing urban setting that appears to always grant the rich a pass and provide unearned opportunity to the poor.

    Unable to migrate into the ranks of the upper middle class and penetrate the neighborhoods of lawyers and accountants and physicians, middle neighborhood residents often simply leave and form a place of their own. Plumbers and carpenters dislodged from Del Ray (an old blue collar neighborhood in Alexandria, VA) drive their pick-up trucks to Springfield, where they have a mall and plenty of ranch houses, and where they can safely raise their family while holding a job that does not require a college education.

    Planners generally dismiss these areas since they often come from the upper echelons and maintain a theoretical concern for the poor. But there are consequences when these middle income residents leave. Indeed the migration of these households out of the urban core and inner ring suburbs may be the most pressing social challenge facing planners. Unsexy as the housing concerns of the plumber may be, they are often the critical ones in terms of maintaining strong neighborhoods.

    Take a look at what has happened in the City of Geneva, New York, which is emblematic of so many communities in the middle of a city-county struggle for the middle class. The City’s pre-war manufacturing and agricultural history was sufficient to build a sophisticated infrastructure going into World War II. The arrival of the Depot and Naval Base in nearby Seneca brought overcrowding and congestion and triggered something of a building boom to Geneva. When the base closed, the city’s middle class left for newer housing and retail outside the city.

    As middle income residents have fled, the city itself has become a place of many have-nots and a few haves. Rather than invest to engender pride, safety, and a sense of community in the city’s neighborhoods – the small unstylish work of organizing – the doctrine sought to make downtown attractive, livable and appealing by applying the “edifice complex” or the “Field of Dreams theory”: if you build it they will come. Then the planners and developers get to stand around and wonder why downtown still feels empty.

    Along the way the city opened its doors to a raft of social service providers, inviting them to locate their business and clients downtown. The middle class watched, grew frustrated, and left for the periphery. Despite some of the most glorious – and reasonably priced – architecture in America, the middle class has left, taking with them much of the urban tax base. This creates a hole out from which few cities emerge.

    This is not at all unique to Geneva, as any planner and community developer knows. Its the case in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia and in neighboring Arlington where programs do an admirable job of enabling some of the working poor to remain, while the middle has found greater comfort in leaving for other counties.

    There may be a way out of this dilemma. The central aim of community development should be to work the system in ways that generate wealth-building probabilities – both for individual households and for neighborhoods. The central aim of our work should be to expand the zone of acceptable and livable neighborhoods: to make more places more worthy of affection, not some extremely worthy and others barely so.

    Planning efforts must concern themselves less with process and more with outcome. Every block in every city can be objectively scored in terms of livability, as defined locally. In this approach, the community development process may be judged a failure if in service of a few individuals concentrated poverty and economic segregation grows. Marin County would no longer be able to balance its affordable housing ledger on the backs of Marin City and a few parts of San Rafael. Montgomery County, Maryland would no longer be able to use Prince George’s County as its de facto affordable housing policy. And genuinely struggling places like Ontario County, NY would not be able to look to the City of Geneva as their repositories of poor families and the hub of the area’s social service network.

    In the last thirty years, planners have reduced our field of vision. We have fostered an exodus of our middle class and focused on creating environments for the rich and poor. If we really want social equity, growing the middle is the best place to start.

    This means we have to change our priorities. We should stop trying to reinforce concentrations of wealth. Poor neighborhoods should not be defined solely as places and people who primarily “need” and never exercise choice. Instead our priority should be to help plan for an expanding middle class – even if it ruffles the feathers of some gatekeepers in both poor and affluent neighborhoods.

    Charles Buki is principal of czb, a Virginia-based neighborhood planning practice.

  • Scrap Zoning; Legalize Great Places

    Crisis offers opportunity. With real estate in a freefall, there is an opportunity to lay the foundation for a more prosperous and sustainable American landscape.

    If only there is the vision and political will.

    What is the single most significant change that can be made in every town and city in America? One that would aid economic development, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, foster healthier lifestyles, reduce dependence on foreign oil, protect open space and wildlife habitats, and reduce wasteful government spending?

    Scrapping zoning codes.

    Take any great place that people love to visit. You know, those lively tourist haunts from Nantucket to San Francisco. Those red hot neighborhoods from Seattle’s Capital Hill to Miami Beach’s Art Deco district. Those healthy downtowns from Portland, Oregon to Chicago, Illinois to Charleston, South Carolina. What do they all have in common?

    The mix of uses that gives them life are outlawed by zoning in virtually every city and town in all 50 states.

    Widespread adoption of zoning is a legacy of Herbert Hoover. As Commerce Secretary, he pushed zoning regulations to cure “the enormous losses in human happiness and in money, which have resulted from lack of city plans which take into account the conditions of modern life.” He championed the “Standard Zoning Enabling Act” to address “the moral and social issues that can only be solved by a new conception of city building.” After the Supreme Court upheld zoning in 1926, zoning — and sprawl — spread from sea to shining sea.

    The high court based its decision on the need to protect health and safety by “excluding from residential areas the confusion and danger of fire, contagion and disorder which in greater or less degree attach to the location of store, shops and factories.” The quite sensible idea that people shouldn’t live next to steel mills was used to justify a system of “zones” to isolate uses that had lived in harmony for centuries. Suddenly, new neighborhoods were segregated by income, and commerce was torn asunder from both customers and workers. Timeless ways of creating great places were ruthlessly outlawed.

    This coincided neatly with the rise of the car industry, and the systematic dismantling of America’s electric streetcar network. Today, we look back nostalgically on the “streetcar suburbs” and the booming cities of turn-of-the-century America when we sing:

    City sidewalks, busy sidewalks
    Dressed in holiday style
    In the air there’s a feeling of Christmas.
    Children laughing, people passing,
    Meeting smile after smile
    And on every street corner you’ll hear. . .
    Silver bells, silver bells
    It’s Christmas time in the city.

    But zoning, cars, and suburban development put an end to such “contagion and disorder,” replacing busy “city sidewalks” with enclosed malls, parking lots, and traffic congestion.

    Today, almost everyone admits the environmental and social devastation caused by sprawl, though some still defend it as a response to the consumer market. But “The American Dream” of single-family tracts, shopping centers and business parks owes more to zoning mandates than to market economics. Zoning was imposed on the American landscape by an unholy alliance between Utopians preaching a “modern” way of life and hard-headed businessmen who profited from supplying that new model, including an auto industry steeped in the ideology that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

    Politicians at every level bought into sprawl, playing both sides of the zoning game to harvest votes and campaign cash. It’s no coincidence that the rocket-fueled career of Vice President Spiro Agnew began at a suburban zoning board. He would have succeeded Richard Nixon as president if criminal charges for taking bribes from developers hadn’t caught up to him and forced his resignation first.

    For a long time, support for zoning was impregnable. In the only country on earth to organize its urban form around Crayola colors on a map, those who questioned zoning were treated like the lunatics who denounce paper money.

    Until now, perhaps. Younger Americans are turned off by the devotion of Baby Boomers to the landscape of “Leave it to Beaver.” Environmentalists are slowly realizing that, in protection of the environment, cities aren’t the problem, they are actually the solution. A movement of post-modern planners, architects, developers, transit advocates and historic preservationists has emerged under the banners of “smart growth,” “new urbanism” and “green building.” And at the local level, citizen activists (and even elected officials) are finally pushing to reverse suburban sprawl. A new vision has emerged around building compact and energy-efficient communities for the future.

    What’s been lacking is the tool for producing that outcome, and for supplanting zoning at the local level. If “zoning” is the DNA of sprawl – the coding that endlessly replicates the bleak landscape of autotopia – then what is the DNA of livable communities?

    It is found in timeless ways of building, updated for the 21st Century, including the need to accommodate cars. It regulates incompatible uses without the absurdities of conventional zoning. It is calibrated for new buildings to contribute to their context and to the larger goal of making a great place. It does so primarily by regulating the form of buildings, since that is what determines the long-neglected public realm of streets and sidewalks. It does that by regulating setbacks, heights and the physical character of buildings.

    It exists, and it’s quietly spreading.

    Where it’s been tried, it’s been a success. Seaside, Florida, the poster town for “new urbanism,” was “coded” rather than zoned, and ended up on the cover of Time magazine. In 2003, Petaluma, California scrapped its zoning regulations and adopted a new code for 400 underdeveloped acres in their Downtown, producing more than a quarter billion dollars in new investment. Miami, Florida is the first major city in America to embark on replacing zoning citywide.

    Unfortunately, this promising alternative is currently saddled with two competing names, both of them unsatisfactory if the movement is truly to catch fire.

    “Form-based codes” is the cumbersome term popular amongst planners. It is a literal tag that captures the emphasis on regulating the “form” of buildings, rather than the obsession with their “use” that is common to all zoning codes. But Americans suffer collective amnesia about why the form of cities determines their character; so while it addresses the “how” of coding, it fails to convey the “why.”

    It clearly lacks the appeal of “No Child Left Behind” or “Homeland Security” as a marketing tool for reform.

    Recognizing this, Seaside’s designer, Andres Duany, coined the term “smart codes.” The advantages of replacing a “zoning code” with something called a “smart code” are pretty obvious: “smart” is much better than “dumb,” which is why “smart growth” has caught on as a slogan. The obvious tool for promoting “smart growth” would be “smart codes.”

    But the problem with the term “smart codes” is the same as the problem with the slogan “smart growth.” Pretty soon, everybody starts calling their codes “smart,” even if they aren’t. This has actually happened with lots of really atrocious developer schemes that have masqueraded as “smart.”

    The magnitude of the problem may trump the limitations of the current names for the solution. While some still claim that the real estate meltdown is only a nasty cyclical slump, that’s just whistling past the graveyard. The model is broken. Building and financing generic products (class A office; suburban housing tract; grocery-anchored strip center; business park, etc.) through globally marketable securities has become radioactive. By the time supply and demand right themselves, the un-sustainability of the whole underlying system will be laid bare.

    Of course, one can never underestimate what historian Barbara Tuchman called “the march of folly.” Perhaps in the interest of “stimulus” to the moribund economy, we will be willing to spend trillions more to subsidize sprawl. But in the end, as economist Herbert Stein pointed out, “That which cannot go on forever, won’t.”

    Before that day comes, we can save untold environmental, economic and social damage by the widespread adoption of coding that respects human scale, restores the proximity of complimentary uses, and repairs the damage done to the American landscape and our rich (but abandoned) tradition of creating fine neighborhoods, towns and cities.

    Scrap zoning. Adopt coding. Legalize the art of making great places that people cherish, that produce economic value, and that leave a lighter environmental footprint on the land.

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • Obama’s First Touchdown: Blue States Take Lead in Bowl Games

    What does college football’s schedule of bowl games tell us about American politics?

    Here are some unscientific musings on what it all means — figure any football or political point spreads on your own.

    Let’s start with this fact: The bowl season would have remained an overwhelming “Red State” affair if Barack Obama had not pulled off his successful raids on Republican territory during the recent presidential election.

    Several key college football states flipped from traditional spots in the Red column and went blue November. Indeed, a majority of the bowl games that are set for locales around the U.S. between December 20 and January 8 will be played in Blue states — the first time that’s happened since the color-coded terminology became a popular point of reference for Democrats and Republicans.

    It’s a narrow advantage for the Democrats, with Blue states hosting 17 bowl games to 16 for the Red states, and one in Canada. That’s just under 52% of the contests scheduled in states that went to Obama, about a percentage point less than his share of the popular vote in the general election.

    Obama’s electoral breakthroughs in several previously Red states accounted for a shift in the landscape of bowl games that appears similar to the shakeup he brought to the Electoral College. A big reason for the shift on bowl games can be traced to Obama’s win in Florida — sound familiar? That’s because the Sunshine State hosts the most bowl games, with seven on the schedule from Miami to Jacksonville this year.

    Obama also turned New Mexico, Nevada and North Carolina from Red to Blue, picking up much-needed electoral votes in November, along with one bowl game in each of those states. It turns out that Red states would have held a bowl-game advantage of 23-10 if John McCain had just held Florida. GOP wins in New Mexico, Nevada and North Carolina would have given the Red States a 26-7 advantage.

    A review of the participants in this year’s bowl schedule shows again that Obama’s 50-state electoral strategy is playing out on the field, too. Blue states hold a 38-30 edge among the 68 college teams that will play in everything from the San Diego County Poinsettia Bowl to the FedEx BCS National Championship Game. It’s clear, too, that those numbers also would have gone to the Red states in dramatic fashion — 47-21 — without Obama’s success in flipping Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. Those states represent a shift of 17 teams from Red to Blue. Florida once again leads the way, with five college squads making bowl appearances, followed by four schools in North Carolina; two each from Colorado, Indiana and Ohio; and one apiece in Nevada and Virginia.

    The schedule offers a clear warning for any Republican honchos who are still thinking about Sarah Palin as red meat for hungry Red Staters: The Blue state advantage in this year’s football fiestas should put all the emphasis needed on Obama’s success in poking holes in GOP’s traditional stronghold in the Sun Belt, where warm weather has always been a big draw for bowl-game promoters.

    GOP elders should also keep in mind that the bowl-game landscape is quite astonishing in light of campaign critiques of Obama as “too urban,” “too cosmopolitan,” and “too-exotic” — or any of the rest of the terms many commentators used when they wished to avoid the subject of race. Republicans should recall that Obama — who is set to become the first genuine urbanite to occupy the White House in 100 years or so — brought the Blue states to the bowl-game lead without any heavy advantage from the coastal metropolitan centers deemed central the Democratic Party’s success.

    The fact is that the roster of 68 teams playing in bowl games includes few schools that can be assigned to either the Atlantic or Pacific — only 15 or 20 out of the 68 bowl participants are near the coasts, with the rest from inland areas or southern sections with political kinship to the interior. There are some judgment calls in that count, counting a number of campuses as inland even though they’re in states that do have a coastline. Take North Carolina State, whose Wolfpack made the Meineke Car Care Bowl. Yes, the Atlantic Ocean laps at North Carolina’s land, but North Carolina State is located in Raleigh, more than 100 miles from saltwater’s edge. This analysis also puts schools near the Gulf Coast in the inland category as a matter of spirit rather than geography. The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg is only about 70 miles from the Gulf Coast, but the political climate there is closer to the inland regions that have made big portions of the middle of the country Red on a consistent basis. In other words, Hattiesburg is still more like Hannibal than Haight-Ashbury, regardless of its proximity to the Gulf Coast.

    Large metropolitan areas don’t hold much sway in terms of the bowl-game landscape, either. There are some judgment calls here, too. How do you consider the University of Wisconsin, located in the Dairy State’s capital city of Madison? Not exactly a big city, but it’s a good-sized metropolitan area in a mid-sized state, and plenty vibrant to boot. A number of the bowl-game participants come from similar territory, and with a little give and take for such circumstances you’ll see that roughly half of the schools are located in major metropolitan areas and approximately half reside in secondary markets or exurban locations.

    Take a look, have some fun, use the Red State-Blue State breakdown to guide your picks for the office pool.

    All we can know for certain is that Obama’s campaign proved to be a game-changer in more ways than one — and just 12 days after the last bowl game is finished we’ll see if our new president can play defense.

    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)