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  • Spanish, Obama, and Cambio in St. Louis

    There are two definitive differences between St. Louis and Los Angeles: Autumn is better in St. Louis, and more people speak Spanish in Los Angeles. And, yeah, there’s the Mississippi River and the humidity and the beach and the film industry and the palm trees, but in terms of my own private geography and topophilia, autumn and Spanish are the differences that matter. I long for LA in every season but fall, and a part of my longing is, inevitably, a longing for Spanish.

    Let me be clear: my Spanish is not as good as it once was, as it should be, or as I would like it to be. At my best, I could read a newspaper, and now I struggle with verb conjugation as I try to teach my son a limited number of phrases. I had to correct my pronunciation of Sepulveda when I arrived in LA, and I had to constantly remind myself that Californians do not place the accent in Cordova on the first syllable as they do in my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. But during my time in California, the straining to understand when I rudely eavesdropped, the sorting of accents (Guatemalan, Mexican, Honduran), the delight in piecing together the history behind the names of the streets and the neighborhoods and the mountains – from Pico to Los Feliz to the San Gabriels – wrapped me in Spanish, and somehow made me feel comfortable with the constant struggle to comprehend a landscape written in a different language.

    I knew I moved through the city with a cloak of privilege. White Angelinos stereotypically treat Latinos, especially recent immigrants, as invisible workers. I tried to buck the stereotype, but my stumbling Spanish was usually no more than comic relief to native speakers. No one ever questioned (as they have some of my Latino friends) whether English was my first language. And when I was tired or distracted or just disinclined, I never had to speak Spanish to navigate the metro or read the paper or, even, to order at a restaurant. I’m willing to entertain the thought that my relationship to Spanish was no more than a condescending quest for local color, but I like to think it was more than that. I like to think that the city loved me in Spanish.

    It was in a spirit of perversity that, just as the leaves began to turn, the mosquitoes began to die, and the outdoors became bearable, I decided to accompany my husband to Cherokee Street in St. Louis for Mexican food. Cherokee Street has a burgeoning Latino community, boosting St. Louis’s Hispanic population to a whopping 2%. Nonetheless, undocumented residents perhaps double that number, and co-workers tell me they’ve watched St. Louis’s Latino population grow, especially within the Catholic community. For what it’s worth, I can’t stand on more than one street corner at a time, and from the corner of Cherokee and California it could almost have been LA. It was a hot, dry day. Dust actually blew past the furniture rental stores. Squint, and I could almost smell the Santa Anas. Our restaurant had a Spanish soap opera on the television, the waitress served the coke in a tall glass bottle. For a few minutes, it felt like the city loved me.

    Head west on Cherokee, and you will see a huge Obama poster with the word, Cambio – Change – written across the bottom, and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the corner. In these final days of the campaign, images of Obama seem more and more to reflect what their creators want to see. The poster is, arguably, a picture of St. Louis’s potential future: a majority black city with a growing Latino, especially Mexican, population. I look at the poster, up against St. Louis’s characteristic red brick, and hope that Latinos here will be visible in a new way. I remember a bumper sticker, “Rednecks for Obama,” that I saw recently in my neighborhood. I remember that St. Louis is no blank slate when it comes to race relations. I chastise myself for being naive. I note that the poster says cambio, not esperanza; change, not hope. I think about how to tell my son, in Spanish, where I’ve been that day.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • As Goes North Dakota…

    North Dakota is not a state known for supporting Democratic candidates in Presidential elections. In the the past 80 years, it has only backed the Democrat three times- Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

    Notably, these three elections mark the three largest popular vote landslides by Democrats during that period of time. In 1932, FDR won nationally by a margin of 18%, in 1936 he won by 24%, and in 1964, LBJ defeated Barry Goldwater nationally by 22%. No other Democratic presidential candidate has run up a double digit margin during that period, with FDR coming closest in 1940, winning by 9.9%. (And, it should be noted, losing North Dakota.)

    This year, however, North Dakota may be in play. While President Bush won the state in 2004, 63% to 35% over John Kerry, the most recent polls of the state, by Research 2000 and the Fargo Forum, place the 2008 race in a dead heat.

    This may be a reflection of a wider trend in rural areas. A survey of rural voters in 13 battleground states released in late October by the Center for Rural Strategies, showed Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain tied among rural voters. In September, similar polling by the center had shown McCain with a 10 point lead among rural voters. According to Reuters, in 2004, President Bush “won rural districts nationwide by 19 points.”

    If the recent 2008 polling proves accurate, Tuesday night may be an unhappy evening for McCain supporters, with Sen. Obama facing the possibility of winning by a healthy margin, potentially bringing rural states such as North Dakota along for the ride.

  • BenW_CityParks

  • Obama and Chicago: Saying Yes to Power?

    With Barack Obama possibly becoming the next President, it’s time to look at the Senator’s hometown. The Senator may have talked a great deal about change as a candidate, but to a large extent he has worked closely with what may be one of the most corrupt political cultures in America.

    Of course every politician has his or her skeletons – McCain for example with Charles Keating and his assorted scandals. But with Chicago, Obama has links to an entire cemetery of corruption. It’s not surprising, for example, that the FBI has its largest public corruption squad located in its city limits. This is the ultimate one-party city: Chicago has had a Democratic mayor since 1931, something of a record for a major city. Today, 49 of the city’s 50 Aldermen are Democrats. Things like the skyline and demographics change in Chicago, but not the politics.

    A a result of this one party system, the city has one of the most expansive and expensive governments in the country. Recently, Chicago’s sales tax made national news because, at 10.25 %, it is the highest in the nation. A major reason taxes are so high: corruption is costly.

    This is not a hard case to make.

    Chicago’s Aldermen have a felony conviction rate that would shock outsiders. Since 1973, 27 Chicago Aldermen have been convicted by U.S. Attorney of the Northern District of Illinois. This includes former Alderman Fred Roti whose amazing criminal career helped turn Chicago’s City government into a racketeering enterprise.

    Roti was a Chicago Alderman from 1968-1991. At the time of his indictment in 1990, Roti was Chicago’s longest serving Alderman. Here’s a description of Roti by the Justice Department, “ Fred Roti was convicted of RICO conspiracy, bribery and extortion regarding the fixing of criminal cases in the Circuit Court of Cook County, including murder cases involving organized crime members or associates and was sentenced to 48 months’ imprisonment.” At Roti’s sentencing, federal judge Marvin Aspen reminded everyone of the danger of Alderman Roti. “But there is a bigger victim, and that’s the whole democratic process. When you have the courts of law that are fixed, when you have a city government that is fixed, what are doing, really, is attacking the core of democracy. You’re saying that this democracy…is the same as any other banana republic or corrupt regime.”

    During his time as an elected Alderman, Roti effectively controlled Chicago’s legislative branch. The Chicago Tribune wrote, describing his tenure at Chicago’s City Council, “It’s often said that roll calls could stop after Roti votes-the outcome is already known. Roti, an affable fellow, controls the Chicago City Council with an iron fist.”

    In August of 1999, the Justice Department named Alderman Fred Roti as a “high ranking made member” of the Chicago Mob. Roti’s mission was to hijack the political system and load up Chicago’s government and labor unions with friends, relatives, and Chicago Mob associates. Roti succeeded in his mission. Today, in 2008, Roti’s friends and relatives still make the news for their ability to get caught up in scandal.

    Chicago political corruption is not merely a colorful historical artifact. Alderman Roti’s friends and relatives remain at the forefront of recent political scandals. Chicago’s Hired Truck program, under which private trucks were hired to do city work, lead to several felony convictions. Many of the trucks hired did no work but were paid taxpayer dollars. The Chicago Sun-Times reported 17 trucking companies in the Hired Truck program had ties to the Roti family. Roti relative Nick “the Stick” LoCoco was the boss of the program. Nick LoCoco was a Mob bookie in charge of the $40 Million a year program.

    Alderman Roti’s prolific criminal legacy includes getting Chicago Police Officer William Hanhardt appointed Chief of Detectives. Hanhardt was the Chicago Mob’s long term plant on the force. With Hanhardt as Chief of Detectives, the Chicago Mob had a person who could promote corrupt cops and control criminal investigations. Before and after leaving the Chicago Police force in 1986, Hanhardt ran the most successful jewelry theft ring in United States history which he ran until he was indicted in 2000.

    U.S. Attorney Scott Lassar described Hanhardt’s operation,“Hanhardt’s organization surpasses, in duration and sophistication, just about any other jewelry theft ring we’ve seen.” John Kass of The Chicago Tribune recently described the Hanhardt legacy as an illustration of what he called “the Chicago way.” U.S Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald reminded everyone when Hanhardt pled guilty in 2001 of the danger of William Hanhardt, “It’s remarkable that a person who was chief of detectives of the Chicago Police Department admits to being part of a racketeering conspiracy.”

    In July of 2006, the Justice Department convicted top Daley administration officials for running a massive illegal political patronage operation. Robert Sorich , one of Mayor Daley’s top aids, was convicted of running a massive political scheme in which favored political patronage workers were placed on Chicago’s payroll. As The New York Times reported, “the scheme involved sham interviews, falsified ratings forms and the destruction of files to cover it up.”. One of Alderman Roti’s nephews, Bruno Caruso, was the second most successful individual in terms of getting people jobs. In 1999, according to The Chicago Sun-Times, the FBI named Bruno Caruso as a “made member” of The Chicago Mob.

    The people who run Chicago today still have a soft spot for mobsters

    Six weeks after being named a high ranking “made member” of the Chicago Mob, Roti died. One of the first orders of business when the City Council met on September 29,1999 was to honor his life with a resolution supported by the two most important political figures in Chicago, Mayor Daley and Alderman Ed Burke. The resolution called “Fred B.Roti, a committed public servant, a cherished friend of many and good neighbor to all, will be greatly missed and fondly remembered by his many family members, friends and associates” and Roti “is remembered as a kind, considerate person, who had great love for his family and community.”

    In the summer of 2007, the Justice Department brought one of their largest Mob trials in years. It was dubbed the Family Secrets trial for charging the mob with 18 unsolved murders. This historic trial indicted the entire Chicago Mob as a racketeering enterprise. Not only did Alderman Roti‘s name come up at the trial, but the name of his nephew Fred Barbara also surfaced. Fred Barbara was accused of taking part in bombing a business. Barbara was described by The Chicago Sun-Times as “a close friend of Mayor Daley’s”.

    Senator Obama’s relationship with Tony Rezko is much more significant than his association with a bunch of radicals. Obama decided joining the status quo in Chicago was an excellent career move. Tony Rezko’s ties to the Chicago’s establishment are the basis of a major Justice Department investigation titled Operation Board Games. As Rezko’s career shows, Chicago remains a town very much cast in the spirit of Alderman Roti.

    This machine has had far more to do with the rise of Barack Obama’s political career than Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright and the equally unseemly radicals who so unnerve some right-wingers. In contrast, the implications of his close ties to the Chicago machine may tell us more about the man, and the kind of people he might bring into the highest offices.

    Except for an occasional article on Tony Rezko, Obama’s ability to work with, and to nurture his own place within one of the most corrupt regimes in nation has not been a major political issue. Some of this may reflect the press’s infatuation with the man and his well-crafted image; it also suggests the incompetence of the McCain campaign.

    But those of us who will be living with a President Obama for the next four years should consider the implications of his Chicago connection. At very least, his ability to cohabit with the machine says something of his deft ability to talk one way – as a change agent – and to walk another.

    It does not mean that Senator Obama himself is corrupt or even intellectually dishonest. And perhaps his ability to work with the machine suggests a skill that may be useful in dealing with the many thugs who run powerful regimes around the world. Yet it also suggests that, when push comes to shove, he could be more likely to say ‘yes’ to power rather than speak truth to it.

    Steve Bartin is a resident of Cook County and native who blogs regularly about urban affairs at http://nalert.blogspot.com. He works in Internet sales.

  • Why can’t Wall Street be more like Ghana?

    For the past week an irritating little tune has bounced into my head unexpectedly every time I turned to news about the financial collapse. The melody would then remain at the edge of my consciousness for hours at a time like a buzz or a hum in my ear. Though I couldn’t make out the lyrics, I could distinguish the distinct nasal whine that Rex Harrison affected in the musical My Fair Lady. Still, I couldn’t pin down which song was playing on an endless loop in my head. Instead, as I made my way through the Kotokuraba Market in Cape Coast, Ghana, this past week, I found myself absentmindedly substituting my own lyrics to the Frederick Loewe score. At first I sang the line “If only Lehman Brothers was more like the Man! Know Thyself Pharmacy,” and then “If only AIG could be more like Is Not By Might Alone Construction.” Though my feeble attempt did not come close to scanning, I knew immediately that I was onto something. There was a nugget of truth there that I could never have reached through ordinary means of logical analysis. I began to rattle off all the financial behemoths who have crashed or have nearly crashed or will potentially go belly up in the coming months, giants like Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Wachovia, Washington Mutual—the list seems to grow with every passing day.

    I continued to substitute the strange names for businesses that Ghanaians seem to prefer for those of the failing financial industry. After my initial amusement of replacing Lehman Brothers with Man! Know Thyself, I realized that the way businesses are named in Ghana speaks to core values that perhaps would have kept the Wall Street CEOs in check. Ghana is a country steeped in the oral tradition of proverbs. The ancient Akan religion is full of proverbs and sayings about how to live a moral and upright life. Surprisingly, most of these Akan tribal proverbs correlate directly to Christian proverbs despite the fact that they existed long before Europeans introduced Christianity to the region. As a result, these sayings have remained a vital part of the culture and often crop up in conversation in a kind of abbreviated shorthand. On the street conversation is peppered with such statements: “But, I have forgiven you, let us not bite one another,” “So you strike fire among us ever,” “Oh great ancestors, our blood relation chain will never break apart,” “Till death ladder, together we climb to rest,” among scores of others. Since Ghana is a public and communal society unlike Western cultures which are more private and personal, these sayings and expressions of philosophies and beliefs tend to affirm a responsibility toward others.

    I’ve been particularly moved by the name of a small hardware store, “But Like A Chain Ventures,” which is an abbreviation of the Akan proverb “But like a chain, we are linked both in life and death with our people, because we share common blood relations.” As I reflected on the implications of Lehman Brothers being named “But Like A Chain Investment Bank,” I tried to tease out the implications of such a dramatic change in the strategy of naming businesses in most of the Western world. American businesses appear to emphasize ownership, especially in advertisements and product names employing the notion “this is mine”, rather than their moral and ethical relationship to customers and the community. In recent years this has played out intricately in such marketing strategies as “branding.” For Ghanaians, business names are more a form of moral or ethical expression. Names are an opportunity to publicly articulate a belief or philosophy. Because Ghana is such a public and communal society, the way you present yourself is much more important than the product you are offering. Customers are drawn to businesses that express the mores of the community first, and then they determine whether the business offers what they are looking for. In a community where politeness is primary, knowing the kind of person you are doing business with first is a determining factor greater than price, location, or variety.

    With this in mind, I now wonder if such a name would not have stopped this fallen bank’s former CEO Richard S. Fuld Jr. and his brethren from pursuing personal gain to such a degree that the entire globe was at risk. Would the message printed on the stationary and on the front of the building have been sufficient to caution their recklessness? Probably not, but it is nice to consider such a possibility.

    On October 9th, 2008, the Washington Post reported that even the International Monetary Fund, the world’s cheerleader for world markets, has now qualified its support. “Obviously the crisis comes from an important regulatory and supervisory failure in advanced countries […] and a failure in market discipline mechanisms,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s managing director, told the Post. She emphasized that African countries with the least free market openness are more prepared than most to survive a major global recession.

    Like most African economies, Ghana is primarily a cash society. The average person on the street, even if he or she has a job, cannot get credit and would never consider attempting to get a loan. No one has a Visa card here because no businesses accept them. When my friend, the playwright Victor Yankah, had to pay his middle son’s college tuition at the beginning of September, he took out a six inch thick stack of ten and twenty cedis from his bank account to pay the university’s 5,000 Ghana cedi fee. As the economic crisis intensifies, Yankah feels prepared because he has diversified the African way. His wife Betty Yankah owns a small dry goods stall in the local market. In addition to being head of the Department of Theater Studies at the University of Cape Coast, Yankah also owns a small orange grove that supplies fruit to local markets as well as a fish hatchery along the Volta River. He has positioned himself to “think globally and act locally.” He hopes that by staying close to the ground he and his family will weather whatever dire economic times lie ahead.

    As I play with renaming the failing titans of finance, the reference I have been trying to remember finally comes to me. The song I am thinking about is “A Hymn to Him,” a solipsistic and misogynist diddy asking, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” I can imagine Lehman’s fallen CEO Fuld Jr. singing a similarly written ode to free market capitalism and self-aggrandizement. To which, I would counter: Why can’t Wall Street Be More Like Ghana? And this verse scans.

    Laban Carrick Hill is a visiting professor at University of Cape Coast in Ghana and the author of more than 25 books, including the 2004 National Book Award Finalist Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. His most recent book America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the 60’s recently won the 2007 Parenting Publications Gold Award.

  • Election 2008: Hardcore Republican and Democratic versus Balanced Areas

    It’s interesting to look at 2000 presidential election results from some extreme counties, contrasting the most Republican and the Democratic areas, and compare them to some areas that voted 50:50 in 2004. I’ll look at 7 counties of each kind, illustrating the peculiar geography of American partisanship. The Republican and the Democratic areas will not change much, but it will be fascinating to see what happens to the even split areas of 2004. Do look them up in your road atlas and on the web for more detail!

    Ultra Republican counties
    The most extreme are all in the Great Plains or the Mountain West – not in the east. All are almost entirely white, most have more men than women (unusual in the US), have very high levels of traditional families, and most have fairly low levels of income inequality, reflective of cultural homogeneity.

    These can be grouped into three sets:

    1. Madison and Franklin, ID, and Rich, UT, (all close together);
    2. Grant, NE, and Garfield, MT; and
    3. Ochiltree, TX, and Beaver, OK, (also close to each other).

    The Idaho and Utah counties are similar in many ways, but the key characteristic is the dominance of the Mormon Church – no cultural ambiguity here! Rexburg, in Madison County, has a branch of Brigham Young University. Garfield and Grant typify the extremely low density and declining farm counties of the Plains and interior West, with a fiercely independent “western” image. Ochiltree and Beaver are in the Panhandle and also low density oil and gas and range economies. These are the rural, culturally conservative small towns that Sarah Palin would consider “real” America. Conspicuously absent are any counties that we would associate with the traditional image of rich suburbia and exurbia!

    Ultra Democratic Counties
    The extreme Democratic counties are not quite so extreme as their Republican counterparts. These counties are comprised of two somewhat distinct types – the cores of giant metropolitan areas, exemplified here by New York City, San Francisco and Washington, DC, and then the areas of very high concentrations of minorities.

    Claiborne, MS, (in the Mississippi delta) and Macon, AL (home of the Tuskegee institute), are highly Black. Menominee, WI, has a high concentration of Native American Indians, while Prince George’s County, MD, is both a large metropolitan suburban county (of Washington DC) and is majority Black. In contrast to the ultra Republican counties, these are all rather low in non-Hispanic whites, low in traditional families, but high in singles and partners. Most have high inequality, with societies bifurcated between the rich and the poor.

    The 50:50 balanced set is more complex and diverse. Some are in the South, with their fairly high minority shares balancing their likely cultural conservatism – Tensas, LA, (Mississippi delta), and Bladen, NC, (SE, food processing industry).

    Three are small city or small metropolitan Midwestern counties with diverse economies – rich agriculture, urban industry: Peoria, IL, Winneshiek, IA, and Nicollet, WI.

    Similarly, Monroe, PA, (Pocono mountains, tourism and exurban living), and Rensselaer, NY (Troy, Rust Belt, but some recovery) have both traditional conservative rural-oriented residents and liberal who have moved in from the New York Megalopolis. They tend to be intermediate between the very Republican and very Democratic areas in household structure, degree of inequality, with perhaps a little higher portion of the population engaged in manufacturing.

    These sample areas reinforce the conventional wisdom of a polarization, at the extremes, between a metropolitan Democratic base, high in minorities, and a rural-small-town Republican base of traditional “values”. The small city, small metropolitan belt, mainly across the North, is amazingly balanced, and not surprisingly, the major battleground in this election. Big cities may talk a lot about diversity, but it’s largely in these smaller towns, as well as some exurbs and suburbs, where the real political debate about our future now takes place.

    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)

  • Itinerant Geogapher

  • San Francisco and the Meltdown

    Initially San Francisco and the Bay Area market seemed to be immune to the financial meltdown resulting from the mortgage crisis. After all, the City and its accompanying affluent suburbs had not suffered drastic drops in home prices as seen in many other regions of the country. Yet as the mortgage crisis has snowballed into a complete meltdown of the worldwide financial system, the poster child of the ‘new economy’ now appears less and less immune from the turmoil dominating our news headlines.

    The region that consists of the City by the Bay and the adjacent Silicon Valley is no stranger to drastic market corrections. Silicon Valley was front and center of the dot-com bubble burst at the early part of the decade. As it became abundantly clear that the dot-com frenzy was unsustainable, the region retracted as investment in internet startup companies waned severely.

    This time the crisis is different. The current economic realignment is not limited by region but affirms the global interdependence of financial systems. The Bay Area may sit atop the economic food chain more than most regions, but its vulnerability to the crisis is not necessarily less than that of less elite areas.

    Initially, much of core San Francisco’s resilience to the current economic conundrum can be attributed to the fact that the majority, approximately 65% of the city’s residents, are renters. But the greater Bay Area is being affected in other ways as a result of the financial crisis. As large banks fail, credit gets tighter and consumer confidence slows, business in sectors unrelated to real estate is beginning to be impacted. Case in point is Silicon Valley giant EBay recently laying off 10% of its workforce. Yahoo!, another large Bay Area employer, has also announced a significant reduction in staff. Even more troubling are moves by venture Capital Firms such as Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital to force companies in which they are stakeholders to ‘cut costs significantly’. With VC Firms tightening their belts, technology start-up companies, a primary driver of the Bay Area economy, are also likely to cut spending and employment.

    These cuts will hit San Francisco proper, but far less than the Peninsula, where the vast bulk of the tech-related work takes place. In contrast, San Francisco is increasingly a ‘museum city’ for those wealthy enough to afford a vacation home. This will help keep local businesses in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries somewhat strong.

    The problems in the global, national and regional economy have touched off some alarms at the local level in San Francisco. Last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his own version of an ‘economic stimulus plan.’ Under this plan, the city will lay off some government workers and continue to enforce a hiring freeze. The plan also calls for encouraging more foreign investment to the city. Capitalizing on a drop in lavish vacation spending by local residents, the Mayor is also looking to Bay Area dwellers to consider ‘staycations’ by spending time and money in the city rather than traveling outside the region. In a somewhat encouraging measure, the stimulus plan mentions reducing fees for local business and fast-tracking $5.3 billion worth of capital projects – both steps in the right direction.

    San Francisco’s relative buoyancy in the dire economic situation also can be attributed to the fact that the city has lost much of its once powerful financial sector. In addition, the one financial giant that remains headquartered in the city, Wells Fargo, happens to be one of the U.S. banking institutions faring quite well due to its careful avoidance of subprime home loans. The ongoing strength of Wells Fargo means that more people who work in the San Francisco financial services industry will be able to hold onto their jobs.

    Yet for all the relative good news, it is critical to realize that San Francisco remains an anomaly within the United States and should by no means serve as an economic model for other American cities. Most cities do not have the stunning geography and postcard-worthy locations needed to sustain a tourist economy. The unfortunate reality of San Francisco is that the gap between rich and poor residents continues to grow as the city’s middle class dwindles. Many of the city’s hospitality and retail workers are commuters from outside the city.

    In fact, the situation in San Francisco reveals a growing irony: wealthy, sometimes very liberal bastions often have the least equality. As one of the most unaffordable places to live in the nation, the Bay Area has developed an economy that has little room for the middle or working class. It may have become far less vulnerable to the nation’s economic crisis, but in a manner that neither solves society’s broader problems nor provides a model for the vast majority of American communities.

    Adam Nathaniel Mayer is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised in the town of Los Gatos, on the edge of Silicon Valley, Adam developed a keen interest in the importance of place within the framework of a highly globalized economy. He currently lives in San Francisco where he works in the architecture profession.

  • No More Urban Hype

    Just months ago, urban revivalists could see the rosy dawn of a new era for America’s cities. With rising gas prices and soaring foreclosures hitting the long-despised hinterland, urban boosters and their media claque were proclaiming suburbia home to, as the Atlantic put it, “the next slums.” Time magazine, the Financial Times, CNN and, of course, The New York Times all embraced the notion of a new urban epoch.

    Yet in one of those ironies that markets play on hypesters, the mortgage crisis is now puncturing the urbanists’ bubble. The mortgage meltdown that first singed the suburbs and exurbs, after all, was largely financed by Wall Street, the hedge funds, the investment banks, insurers and the rest of the highly city-centric top of the paper food chain.

    So, now we can expect some of the biggest layoffs and drops in income next to be found in the once high-flying urban cores. In New York alone, Wall Street has shed over 25,000 jobs – and the region could shed a total of 165,000 over the next two years.

    Not surprisingly, the property crisis once seen as the problem of the silly, aspiring working class and the McMansion nouveaus has now spread deep into the bailiwick of the urban sophisticates. For the first time in years, many Manhattan apartments are selling for well below purchase price, something unheard of during the boom. In Brooklyn, a 24% drop in sales over the last three months even has boosters talking of an imminent “Brownstone bust.”

    Even San Francisco – arguably the most recession-resistant big city due to its large concentration of nonprofits and “trustifarians” – is seeing prices drop for the first time in years. Far more vulnerable are fledgling neo-urban markets like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Oakland, Calif., San Diego, Memphis, Tenn., Miami and Dallas. Sales are down in most of these markets, as are prices.

    Signs of the times: desperate developers offering goodies to buyers. One downtown Los Angeles property owner has even offered to buy a Mini Cooper for anyone bold enough to buy a loft. Others, in Oakland, Boston and Atlanta, are resorting to auctions to offload their product. Foreclosures have taken place in several other markets, including Charlotte, N.C., and Philadelphia.

    Not surprisingly, many new projects conceived at the height of the bubble are being canceled, and some newly minted condominiums converted into rentals. The rental option makes immediate sense but does not help create the ambiance of luxury so coveted by wannabe cool cities. High-end buyers generally do not covet the idea of having a bunch of college-student renters enjoying a similarly granite-counter-topped unit next door. This is not necessarily good news for expensive restaurants or boutiques either.

    In addition, just if anyone is checking, even at the peak of gas prices, there remains virtually no evidence of any massive movement of the bourgeoisie back into the burghs. One assumes that the now plunging oil prices will not hurt suburban commuters.

    In reality, what we have is a market that is stuck in almost all geographies. Rather than shift people into the urban cores, or vice-versa, the mortgage crisis is simply stopping everyone in their tracks. Even if people wanted to move into the core cities, they could not sell their suburban houses to make the down payments.

    Nor is there ample reason to believe the urban migration will pick up in the near future. Crime has soared in some cities such as Oakland and Chicago. (“Obamastan” has suffered more murders this year than much larger New York and Los Angeles.) Overall, urban crime remains three times that of suburbs; a suddenly rising instance of mayhem threatens many urban recoveries.

    And in the end, it’s really all about the economy. The looming massive layoffs in many key urban markets – notably New York, Chicago and San Francisco – cannot possibly help. Finance has remained one industry that has continued to cluster in core cities, even as most others moved to the suburbs and smaller towns.

    Moreover, it is not just New York. Now, as the butcher’s bill for mortgage mania comes due, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco are all facing large-scale layoffs. The office market in the Windy City, for example, is being decimated by cutbacks at JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Wachovia, as well as at the commodity exchanges. So far, the less finance-dependent suburban market appears less impacted.

    A recent visit to Chicago confirmed these trends. The once ballyhooed Trump Tower, once seen as the nation’s tallest luxury condominium, remains incomplete, with a massive crane still perched at its top and troubled by persistent rumors of failing financial support. Another hyped project, Santiago Calatrava’s 2000-foot, 150-story Chicago Spire, is stuck in the ground because the developer has stopped paying his “starchitect’s” bill. All this is not too surprising, given a reported 73% drop in downtown home sales for the first half of the year.

    For a decade or more, city leaders have kept thinking that something from outside – demographic changes, high fuel prices or changing consumer tastes – would create a revival for them. This allowed them to avoid doing hard, nasty things like cutting often-outrageous public employee pensions, streamlining regulations, cutting taxes levied on businesses or improving often-dismal schools and basic infrastructure.

    Maybe the current downturn can be a wake-up call for city boosters. Overall, since 2000, the average job growth in cities has averaged less than one-sixth that of suburbs, according to research by my colleagues at the Praxis Strategy Group. This has been particularly notable in higher-paying blue collar positions in manufacturing and warehousing, but increasingly applies also to higher-end business services.

    Cities should start realizing that their biggest problem is not a shortage of cultural venues and performance artists but a chronic lack of decent, middle class jobs. And to be sure, older cities do possess critical advantages such as already existing, if often tattered, transportation systems and the best strategic locations. Their old industrial districts possess an existing infrastructure and, in some cases, a residual pool of skilled labor and some decent job-training facilities. If properly prodded, local universities could also become part of the solution by seeding new entrepreneurial ventures.

    But such a return to basics may be nullified by the prospect of an urban Democrat coming into the White House and a Congress dominated by the likes of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel and Barney Frank. This will revive hope that largely suburban middle-class taxpayers will now bail out bloated city budgets and often-absurd projects (convention centers, stadia and associated nonsense).

    City leaders and land speculators may also play the Al Gore card of combating “global warming” to block new roads, single-family housing estates and even the transfer of jobs to the supposedly energy-inefficient suburbs. However, over time, the suburban-exurban majority is unlikely to support this approach. To experience a real renaissance, cities need to learn how to make themselves more congenial again to those – industry, entrepreneurs and the middle class – who have found themselves forced to head to the fringes for almost a half century.

    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.

  • New Urbanism’s Economic Achilles Heel

    By Richard Reep

    Whether one believes that form follows function or that function can follow form, a town or a city needs three key elements to be healthy. Firstly, a sense of place that includes the sacred is important to people to provide a basis for spiritual involvement. The city must then be able to reliably deliver safety and security to its inhabitants in order to grow and mature. And lastly, a city must provide the means of employment for its inhabitants.

    New Urbanism, in its quest to dictate the physical form of an urban development, has ignored the last key element. An examination of New Urbanism in developments in Central Florida shows a glaring lack of employment, raising questions about their sustainability and long-term viability.

    As we enter the second decade of Celebration, it is useful to look at this city and its influence on the surrounding region. Opened in 1996, Celebration incorporated much of the design philosophy that was formulated around the idea that a city should have a certain “look.” This design philosophy was promulgated to the general public in Suburban Nation, a book that lashed out at the current suburban form and proposed a new form based on a nostalgic notion about a golden age of American town-making, generally in the first decades of the last century.

    By regulating the specific architectural form of a new development, the New Urbanists proposed to improve the blandness, placelessness, and lack of character that is the lot of most contemporary suburbs. Celebration, sponsored by Disney, opened to white-hot press acclaim nationwide. Phase 2 was opened ahead of schedule due to demand for new homes. Market values of homes rose quickly beyond the norm for Central Florida. Developers took notice.

    Soon, other spawn of Celebration began to show up in Central Florida, and today we have several New Urbanist communities that aspire to the same level of success. Baldwin Park, funded by Chicago’s Pritzker family, is a smaller scale version of Celebration located in the City of Orlando and convenient to downtown. Avalon Park, in the southeast corner of Orange County, is accessed from the perimeter highway that is turning Orlando into a mini-Atlanta. Horizon West, the youngest of these, is due west of Downtown Orlando, and offers another New Urbanist antidote to subdivisions, adhering to the same formula of “live, work, and play.” All of these, including Celebration, are coping with the housing crisis, foreclosure crisis, and various other current market conditions just like the rest of us.

    Sadly the “live, work, and play” slogan, which comes from New Urbanist literature, does not bear out in reality. The notion is fine enough: that people can reduce commutes by living and working in the same community. During the supposedly halcyon days of pre-auto, early 20th century America, this was the reality for many Americans. One’s life could occur within a small, walkable radius, reinforcing itself and reinforcing the social bonds of a community.

    But the early 21st Century is very different than the early 20th and New Urbanist attempts to travel backwards in time have met with limited success. To work near where you live, there needs to be employment down the street. None of these communities have employment opportunities – jobs – down the street from the residences. The dwellers of all these communities get in their cars and drive to their jobs off-campus. New Urbanism thus becomes an after-6pm-and-weekend lifestyle choice, not a new way of life.

    In Celebration, many of the early residents were Disney executives; only 4 or 5 years after opening did Disney develop office space in Celebration for some of their offices. Baldwin Park, approximately 2 miles from Downtown Orlando, never pretended to capture the employment aspect, instead selling itself (to many Celebration residents who rushed to this newer, hipper version of their town) as a downtown commute. And neither Avalon Park nor Horizon West have employment opportunities within their town centers. What they do have is easy access to the area’s ring road – ensuring vehicular congestion outside of their New Urbanist communities.

    What is in their Town Centers? Ironically, you find only a small shopping district and the ubiquitous Publix, Florida’s home-grown grocery store chain. The formula of “live-work-play” must stick in the craw of those who are employed in these stores, because the Publix employees, Starbucks baristas, dry cleaner cashiers, and others who do work in these Town Centers can not possibly afford the New Urbanist real estate. Rather than a social continuum (as was more common in the idealized version of America), there is a new social schism, with the New Urbanist underclass forced to commute to the New Urbanist communities from more affordable but less trendy housing nearby.

    In contrast, the region’s native communities have been thriving throughout the same growth period. Communities like College Park, adjacent to Orlando’s downtown, offer something that New Urbanist communities do not: diverse housing, from garage apartments and rental communities up to stately mansions, all within walking distance of each other. They offer an idiosyncratic mix of sacred places, playgrounds, schools, and shops in what the Philadelphia architect and theorist Robert Venturi calls “messy vitality.” No overarching body dictated the form, developed transects, or rigidly controlled the distance between the front porch to the street to achieve these vibrant, socially cohesive, and proud neighborhoods.

    New Urbanists claim to reduce the need for cars, but Orlando’s New Urbanist communities make the car more necessary than ever. Built on the periphery of the metropolitan area, they require a vehicle to complete the circle of functions necessary for a healthy society. Orange County planners have been submissive to the New Urbanists – especially after Celebration – but increasingly recognize that they do not solve the problems they claim to solve and instead invent more: higher traffic, less affordable housing near city centers, and lumpy development sprawl.

    The lesson for Orlando is to refrain from being seduced by the beauty contest that New Urbanists proclaim, and instead integrate all the key deeper social values such as safety, security, sacred places, and employment together. This is basic stuff recognized by greater minds – think of George Mitchell at the Woodlands or Victor Gruen in Valencia – who understand that employment constitutes a critical component to building a successful new community. Until New Urbanists learn this basic economic lesson, their contribution to our communities will remain sharply limited.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.