The Financial Times recently made note of the biggest drop in commodity prices in 28 years. This, of course, is a fall from record highs and some analysts are continuing bullish forecasts. The Reuters/Jeffries CRB index has continued its decline the past few days:
It’s a trend to keep an eye on.
There is reason to think again about the now-current idea of dispersing the population of poor folks in the Skid Row district of downtown Los Angeles and similar precincts in other cities across the U.S.
There’s cause to pause over notions such as mixing “affordable housing” that’s priced in the range of working-class or poor folks alongside spiffy market-rate units.
There’s some research going on that combines data analysis in the law-enforcement profession with efforts in the social sciences, and it’s far enough along to raise questions about some commonplace assumptions among policy makers.
One questionable assumption is the notion that it’s best to do away with old-fashioned, densely developed centers of subsidized housing – places such as Skid Row, or the many areas of cities across the U.S. known as “the projects.” Conventional wisdom currently holds that such clusters on the low end of the socio-economic scale are best relegated to history and replaced with scattered sites.
Here’s a simpler way of putting it: Recent years have seen government authorities ditch the old “projects” model – literally blowing them up, in some cases – in favor of programs that shift poor residents from the inner city to residences in outlying areas. They don’t bunch the poor folks together, at least not in the cheek-by-jowl way of the old neighborhood. The idea is to mix things up and put a relatively small number of poor folks into any given middle-class neighborhood that is safer and has better schools. The presumption is that spreading poverty out will give the poor a greater chance to work their way up the socio-economic scale.
Such thinking bears a similarity to efforts by some public officials in Los Angeles who aim to make similar shifts possible based on regulations requiring builders to subsidize lower rents for certain numbers of units in their developments.
It’s not exactly the same, and you can argue the finer points. But the truth is that the efforts to change the residential patterns of poor folks – and the talk of dispersing the social service agencies that serve low-income residents of neighborhoods such as Skid Row – aim for a goal that’s similar to the top-down approach of blowing up the projects and moving folks to places beyond the city’s center.
Also similar is the reason behind some of the efforts to move poor residents out of the downtown areas of many cities: gentrification. Cities want to spruce up their historic cores. They want new retail and residential developments that will generate more tax revenue than any densely populated housing project or collection of low-rent residence hotels will ever provide. Public officials have often presented such efforts with a two-birds-with-one-stone argument – poor folks get to go off to nicer, safer neighborhoods and the city gets a shiny new trophy in a redeveloped downtown.
There’s an article in the current issue of the Atlantic that looks at recent developments in Memphis, Tennessee, where sociological researchers have been comparing law-enforcement data on crime trends to recent programs to relocate poor folks from the inner city to outlying areas. Some of the findings have the researchers leaning toward a different two-birds-with-one-stone argument on subsidized housing. They think it might just be that both the folks who were shifted from those hard-pressed areas and their new neighbors far away from the inner city are worse off for all the manipulations.
The research has not reached any definitive conclusions, and there are plenty of variables that must be considered with care. Still, there seems to be enough to raise serious questions about a trend in urban planning and public policy that has gone nearly unexamined for some time.
The Garment & Citizen yields to the Atlantic on this matter, urging anyone who is interested to give careful consideration to the piece, “American Murder Mystery.”
We also urge all involved in the debate to ask themselves a few questions:
What is a neighborhood? Do common economic circumstances bring a sense of community that is necessary to any neighborhood? Is a poor neighborhood necessarily a bad neighborhood? If so, why?
Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen.
How high urban housing costs and income inequality have exacerbated urban poverty
A few years ago, on a drive from New York to Washington, I turned off I-95 in Baltimore to see H.L. Mencken’s home. Abandoned row houses lined the street, some boarded up with plywood, others simply gutted. Signs offering fast cash for houses and a number to call for unwanted cars outnumbered pedestrians. It was a landscape of rot and neglect with few signs of renewal and investment.
Writers have expended vast amounts of ink about the recent resurgence of cities, yet pockets of great poverty like West Baltimore have proven disturbingly resilient. Maryland has one of the nation’s lowest poverty rates, but is one of eight states where 70 percent of the poor are concentrated in one city. In most of the city’s schools, close to 50 percent of students qualify for federally assisted meals.
Looking at data from the 2006 US Census American Community Survey, many urban cities have poverty rates that far exceed the national level of 13.3 percent. Bronx County tops the list at 29.1 percent. The city of St. Louis and Baltimore as well as Philadelphia, Wayne (Detroit), Kings County (Brooklyn) and Denver counties all have poverty rates hovering between 19 and 27 percent.
The poverty in these communities testifies to a widening schism of income inequality distressingly common across America but most pronounced in the nation’s cities. Cost of living in cities is one key factor. The federal poverty threshold for a family of four in 2004 was only $19,157, but this number does not make an adjustment for the high rents that low-wage workers must pay to live in an urban environment.
Deborah Reed of the Public Policy Institute of California found that the poverty rates in wealthy cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles were actually significantly higher than the official rate. In San Francisco, the poverty rate was 19 percent adjusted for housing costs compared to the official ten percent; Los Angeles had a 20 percent poverty rate with the factored adjustment compared to the 16 percent official number.
Furthermore, numerous studies have documented the “high cost of being poor” in many urban areas. Low-income neighborhoods like Compton in Los Angeles (where one third of the residents are in poverty) or the Tenderloin in San Francisco suffer from a paucity of services that are plentiful in surrounding communities. Manhattan Beach has one bank for every 4,000 residents. Residents of Compton, on the other hand, can access barely one for every 25,000. Residents must make do with corner stores that sell inferior food goods at higher prices and check cashing outlets that often deduct three percent of the customer’s paycheck.
What is all this leading to? The unsettling contrasts between rich and poor of John Edwards’ “Two Americas” narrative is all too real in many American cities. Walking down Minna Street in San Francisco this week, I saw a homeless man drying his socks in the sun, just twenty yards from restaurants with $30 entrees and nightclubs so discrete in their hipness they need only signify their sign with a small letter.
And although often more startling in affluent, white-collar havens like San Francisco, this contrast exists in almost every city. In Baltimore the gap between high-earning skilled professionals living in gentrified neighborhoods with waterfront view and a procession of hard-pressed, violence-plagued communities nearby is equally striking.
The celebratory accounts of gentrification of small parts of cities like Baltimore – or large parts of sections of San Francisco or Chicago – needs to be balanced with a far greater concern with creating upward mobility for those large populations left behind. These lower income populations need to be treated as potential assets that will require investments in skills training and childcare subsidies, all the while nurturing high wage blue collar industries and improving basic public infrastructure.
In the past, poverty reduction never stuck around long enough to become a major issue in the presidential campaign, partly because voter turnout in these communities is low and, as we suggested earlier this week, there is little doubt which party will win urban voters.
But there is some reason, perhaps, to feel more optimistic this year. Senator Obama’s community organizing background in Chicago’s South Side has led him to adopt a broad anti-poverty platform targeting greater federal resources for working parents and low-income children. The presumptive Democratic nominee also proposes tripling the popular Earned Income Tax Credit that supplements low-income workers and supports pegging the minimum wage to the cost of living. Interestingly, Obama has also voiced support for creating a White House Office of Urban Policy.
Coming from a party skeptical about increasing poverty spending, McCain has supported tax credits being used to attract businesses to low-income neighborhoods and also favors increasing childcare subsidies for low-income families.
Mencken once wrote that his house in Baltimore “is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it I’d be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg.” However, given its current condition, it is highly unlikely today he would linger in his old neighborhood for long. Hopefully, after November, there may be reason to reassess that assumption.
Andy Sywak is the articles editor for Newgeography.com.
What Dayton can tell cities about staying competitive in the global economy
Few people would recognize Dayton, Ohio of 2008 as the industrial powerhouse it was less than one hundred years ago. Once a beacon of manufacturing success, Dayton claimed more patents per capita than any other U.S. city in 1900. Its entrepreneurial climate nurtured innovators such Charles Kettering, inventor of the automobile self-starter and air travel pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright. As the U.S. economy took off after World War II, Dayton was home to the largest concentration of General Motors employees outside of Michigan.
The city also nurtured companies that would became stalwarts on the Fortune 500, including National Cash Register (NCR), Mead Paper Company, business forms companies Standard Register and Reynolds and Reynolds, Dayco and Phillips Industries. To put this in context, just 14 U.S. cities could claim six or more Fortune 500 headquarters in 2007. Not a bad performance for an urban area that peaked as the 40th largest city in the U.S. in 1940.
These early industrialists were more than just business men. They were also visionaries. The founder of NCR, John H. Patterson, is widely credited with laying the foundation for the first modern factory system, pioneering the basic principles that still drive much of modern advertising, and redefining the relationship between labor and management.
NCR may also have been America’s first truly global business. “The cash register,” writes Patterson biographer Samuel Crowther, “is the first American machine which can claim that on it the sun has never set.” Even as Patterson was toiling away in a little shop in Dayton, cash “registers were being sold in England and Australia.” The company’s first non-US sales office was established in England in 1885 and its first European factory was established in Germany in 1903.
It’s difficult to underestimate Patterson’s influence on American industry. By 1930, an estimated one-sixth of all U.S. corporate executives had either been an executive at NCR or been part of Patterson’s management training programs. Among NCR’s alumni were IBM’s visionary CEO Thomas Watson as well as the presidents of Packard Motor Car Company, Toledo Scale, Delco (now Delphi) and dozens of others.
What may separate men like Patterson to their equivalents today in places like Silicon Valley was their intense civic involvement. Patterson was one of the first business leaders to try to apply scientific management to local government, testing out his ideas in rebuilding the city after a disastrous flood ruined downtown Dayton in 1913. He also helped create the Miami Conservancy District, one of the nation’s first flood control districts that still manages a system of low-level dams and levies that keep downtown flood-free to this day. Perhaps one of Patterson’s most prescient civic innovations was bringing the city manager form of local government to the first large city in the U.S.
As significant as Patterson was as an individual, he was not alone. The Dayton area benefited from the entrepreneurial drive and civic commitment of hundreds of businessmen that built large companies, many publicly traded. Patterson was the most iconic of the icons.
Dayton’s Economic Descent
Today one would not expect such vision in Dayton, and you would be unlikely to find it. Since the early 1970s, nearly 15,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared at NCR. Automobile plants cut payrolls as the economy restructured toward services, and foreign competition outsold domestic manufacturers. As late as 1990, five General Motors plants employed more than 20,000 people regionally. Now, fewer than 12,000 work in these factories and Delphi is on the cusp of closing two more plants. NCR’s world headquarters employs fewer than 3,000 people. Mead Paper Company has merged with a competitor, becoming MeadWestvaco and its corporate headquarters has moved to Richmond, Virginia.
As the economy has tanked, the city has shrunk. After peaking at more than 260,000 people in 1960, the city is barely clinging to a core city population of less than 160,000. In the 2000 census, Dayton ranked 147th in size nationwide. Its metropolitan area is now ranked 59th.
Meanwhile, the suburbs have grown. Nearly 74 percent of Montgomery County’s population lived in Dayton in 1930. The growth of suburban cities shrunk that proportion to less than a third by the mid 1980s. Now, less than 20 percent of the metropolitan area’s population lives in the city of Dayton.
Lessons for Other Cities
Dayton’s early dependence on traditional manufacturing, with a particular emphasis on assembly line work, put the region at a competitive disadvantage as growing international trade and dramatically reduced transportation costs allowed for the global dispersion of factory work.
Yet perhaps most remarkable is not the region’s decline, but its resilience. Despite the ongoing decline of manufacturing sector, the metropolitan area still knits together a population of over one million people. What accounts for this?
First, the regional economy has diversified. Now, as in other metropolitan areas, the growth in employment is in services. Two local major health care networks – Premier Health Partners and Kettering Medical Network – employ 15,300 in facilities that are nationally recognized for their quality of care. Wright Patterson Air Force Base is a center for scientific research and development and employs another largely civilian workforce of 21,000.
Second, some of the large industrial companies of the past have evolved to meet the needs of an information economy. NCR, while its presence has diminished, is now a high tech company. Reynolds & Reynolds, a former business forms manufacturer, now provides software in niche markets such as auto sales. The region is also home to the legal information services provider Lexus/Nexus, now a division of Reed Elsevier but originally a division of the Mead Paper Company’s investment in data management services.
Third, core parts of the traditional manufacturing base literally retooled to become globally competitive. In the early 1980s, more than 600 machine shops employed nearly 20,000 people. As the 1990s unfolded, this number had fallen by half. As the 21st century got its start, the number of tool and die shops had revived and employment was rebounding close to 15,000. The shops remain small, but they are deeply invested in global trade. Productivity is up along with incomes.
Fourth, the region remains at a strategic logistical and demographic location in the Midwest. The city of Dayton is at the cross roads of two major interstate highways – the major east-west link I-70 and the north-south connector of I-75. Combined with access to three major airports, the Dayton region can easily benefit from and tap into economic growth in nearby metropolitan areas such as Columbus, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. Ironically, many of the highway improvements some believed would “empty” the downtown – the interstates plus a partial beltway, I-675 – ended up tying the city and suburbs to other larger urban areas and enhanced the region’s geographic importance.
Dayton’s economy may no longer provide the flash and glitter of 20th century economic leadership, but the region has demonstrated a remarkable robustness that holds lessons for other cities striving to remain competitive in a global economy. All cities or economic regions pass through periods of growth and decline. The real question is whether they can adapt to changing economic circumstances.
Dayton survived by building on the secrets of its past success. Its innovative manufacturing base has become more tech-centric and service-oriented. New areas of vitality such as health services have been enhanced. The city may no longer be what it was at its peak a century ago, but its future is far from grim.
Sam Staley, Ph.d., is director of urban and land use policy at the Reason Foundation and teaches urban economics at the University of Dayton. He is a fourth generation native and current resident of the Dayton area.
One of the most enduring urban myths suggests that most jobs are in the core of metropolitan areas, making commuting from the far suburbs more difficult. Thus, as fuel prices have increased, many have expected that people will begin moving from farther out in the suburbs to locations closer to the cores. Indeed, in some countries, such as Australia, much of the urban planning regime of the last decade has been based upon the assumption that urban areas must not be constrained because the residents on the fringe won’t be able to get to work.
Like many myths, this one has limited conformity with the truth. This can be seen even in New York, the New York metropolitan area (the combined statistical area), which is home to the second largest central business district in the country and by far the most well-developed transit system in North America. Yet, despite this, a close examination of work trip data from the 2006 U.S. Census American Community Survey shows a pattern of shorter work travel times for many of the most far-flung areas while those located closer to the core often experience longer commutes.
These findings parallel earlier Newgeography.com reports about Chicago and Los Angeles, which indicated a somewhat similar pattern. Although white-collar workers close to key job centers – such as downtown Chicago or west Los Angeles – enjoy relatively short commutes, those living in the close in, but less high-end districts tend to suffer the longest commutes.
So, somewhat surprisingly, workers who live in the outer suburbs of New York have the shorter work trip travel times, at 29.8 minutes than the New York metropolitan average of 32.9 minutes. Workers living in the inner suburbs spend 30.7 minutes getting to work. Those living in the outer boroughs of New York City have the worst commute times at 41.5 minutes. This contrasts sharply with the 30.1 minute average for workers living in the core borough – Manhattan, home of more than 2.2 million jobs.
One possible conclusion here is that the best way to balance jobs and housing is not to concentrate employment or residences in any one place. High levels of centralization are extremely convenient for those who can afford to live near the Manhattan core – where there are nearly 275 jobs for every 100 resident workers. But it is far less a good deal for those who live in the outer boroughs with only 68 jobs for every 100 resident workers. Richmond (Staten Island) has the largest deficit of jobs, with 56 per 100 resident workers, while Kings County (Brooklyn) has the lowest deficit, with 73 jobs per 100 resident workers.
In contrast, and somewhat contradictory to conventional assumption, jobs and housing are mostly in balance in New York’s suburbs. Among the inner suburban counties, there are 97 jobs for every 100 resident workers. The inner suburban counties also demonstrate a balance among themselves. The largest deficit is in Hudson County, with 89 jobs per 100 resident workers – a figure well above any of the four outer New York City boroughs. Bergen County has the highest surplus, with 102 jobs for every resident worker. Virtually all other outer suburban counties for which there is data have jobs-housing balances superior to all of the New York City outer boroughs.
A similar pattern persists in the outer suburbs where there are 93 jobs for every 100 resident worker in the outer suburban counties. Mercer County, which contains three large employment draws, the New Jersey state capital (at Trenton), Princeton University and the Route 1 information technology corridor, has 126 jobs for every resident worker (only Manhattan is higher).
The extent to which jobs have become dispersed around the metropolitan area is illustrated by the work trip travel times to job locations, rather than by residence location. The average worker commuting to Manhattan, the ultimate American business district, travels 48.5 minutes one-way to work. This is approximately double the national average. Workers commuting to the outer boroughs of New York City spend 36.9 minutes. The situation is much better in the suburbs. For jobs in the inner suburban counties, the average one-way work trip travel time is 29.3 minutes. Perhaps surprisingly, people working in the outer suburban counties spend the least amount of time getting to work, at 24.8 minutes, roughly the national average.
These findings suggest that much of the conversation about convenience and location between suburbs and cities has been distorted. The notion of suburbanites, particularly in the outer ring, enduring long commutes needs to be re-examined as should the efficiency of high dense employment centers. The greatest advantages to concentrated employment in New York, it seems, devolves to those who can afford to live closest to the central core, something increasingly out of reach for most New Yorkers. For those who can’t afford a nice apartment in Manhattan, it’s not necessarily the best of all bargains.
For details see Demographia New York Employment & Commuting: 2006.
Even in the best of times, Sacramento tends to be a prisoner to low self-esteem. The region’s population and economic growth have been humming along nicely for the past decade, drawing ever more educated workers from overpriced coastal counties, but the region’s leaders have often seemed defensive about their flourishing town.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that the mortgage meltdown, which has hit the area hard, has sparked something of an identity crisis. Yet in trying to cope with hard times, it’s important that the region not lose its focus on what paced Sacramento’s past success: its ability to offer affordable, high-quality, largely single-family neighborhoods for middle class families.
Sadly, the dominant narrative among many planners, politicians and developers in Sacramento today is to try to shed the family-friendly image. There’s a growing consensus that low-density neighborhoods are passé and that the region’s future success lies in retrofitting the region along a high-density, centralized model. Suburban areas like Rancho Cordova or Elk Grove, some believe, are destined to become the “the next slums” as middle-income homeowners, fleeing high gas prices, flock to the urban core.
Although a healthier downtown with reasonable density is good for the entire region, the high-density focus does not make a good fit for a predominately middle class, family-oriented region such as Sacramento. Unlike an elite city like San Francisco, Sacramento’s growth has been fueled by an influx of educated, family-oriented residents – the populations that have been fleeing such high-priced places where the housing supply is constrained.
Long-term demographic trends, and perhaps common sense, suggest that most people do not move to Sacramento to indulge in a “hip and cool” urban lifestyle. If someone craves the excitement, bright lights and glamorous industries of a dense city, River City pales compared with places like San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles.
The fact Sacramento has fared far better than these cities over the past 15 years suggests the region’s recent problems lie not in a lack of downtown condos and nightlife, but with a housing market that, as in much of California, has been totally out of whack. Once a consistently affordable locale, by the mid-1990s Sacramento’s housing prices jumped almost nine times income growth, an unsustainable pace seen in a few areas such as Riverside, Miami and Los Angeles.
As a result, the refugees from the coastal counties who had been coming to Sacramento for affordable housing stopped arriving. Net migration to the region, more than 36,000 in 2001, fell to less than 1,000 in 2006.
Ultimately only a housing market correction will again lure the people who have come to Sacramento seeking single-family houses – the type of home favored by about 80 percent of Californians – back to the region. Evidence that these people, or current suburbanites, might flock back to the core city is thin at best. The failures of such high-profile projects as The Towers and the region’s stagnant rental market do not suggest a seismic shift toward denser living.
One key reason has to do with patterns of job growth. Since 2000, suburban communities in the largest metropolitan areas have added jobs at roughly six times the rate of the urban cores.
This pattern has had profound and often counterintuitive effects on commuting distances. Planners and journalists tend to think of cities in traditional concentric rings, with distance from the core as the key measurement of distance from jobs. But in most regions, the vast majority of employment is outside the core. Even in Sacramento, a state capital, only about 1 in 10 jobs are in the city center. Exurban employment growth since 2000 has been the fastest regionally, expanding at nearly twice the rate for Sacramento County.
This means commuting distance – and thus exposure to higher gas prices – reflects more than proximity to the central core. In such diverse regions as Los Angeles and Chicago, the shortest average commutes exist both in the affluent inner-city neighborhoods and those suburbs and exurbs, where much of the employment growth has clustered. People who live in Irvine or Ontario in Southern California, or in the western suburbs of Chicago, for example, actually have shorter commutes than those residing in the barrios around downtown Los Angeles or in the Windy City’s fabled South Side.
These trends suggest a radically different response to high gas prices than the knee jerk downtown-centric approach now widely supported. Instead of cajoling people downtown, perhaps it would make more sense to accelerate employment growth in those suburban and exurban areas where the region’s skilled work force is increasingly concentrated.
These suburban nodes, both in and outside of Sacramento County, may very well become more important in the near future. With the state facing a perpetual budget deficit, state government – the dominant employer in the central city – may not expand and even could contract in years ahead. Perhaps a wiser approach would be to focus on the biotech, electronics and other firms, many concentrated in suburban areas, as the region’s best hope for the creation of new high-wage jobs.
Does this mean the region should invite unbridled, uncontrolled growth to the periphery? Not in the least. Successful suburban communities – think of Clovis outside Fresno or Irvine or Valencia in Southern California – provide a high quality of life to their residents. This suggests the need for greater investments in such things as developing lively town centers, expansive parks, wildlife and rural preserves, as well as maintaining good schools, which are often the key factor for families deciding where to live.
This vision focuses not on one selected geographic area but on a broad spectrum of places across the region. It concentrates not exclusively on dense urban neighborhoods but on fostering a series of thriving villages from close-in city neighborhoods to places like Folsom, Roseville and even Elk Grove. Ultimately the suburb needs not to be demonized, but transformed into something more than bedrooms for a central core.
In terms of reducing vehicle miles driven, a greater emphasis on telecommuting, including by state employees, would likely also do more than an expanded, very expensive light-rail system. Although more than 12 percent of commuters to and from downtown take transit daily, less than 2 percent of those commuting elsewhere do so. Given the structure of the suburban regions, with multiple nodes of work and a weak bus-feeder system, notions of turning Sacramento into a transit mecca like New York or even San Francisco are far-fetched at best.
The central city will continue to maintain important functions, not only as a state capital but as a physical and cultural hub. But there needs to be recognition that “hip and cool” dense urbanity does not constitute the core competence of this region. For the foreseeable future, Sacramento’s advantage against its coastal competitors will lie in providing affordable and highly livable modest-density neighborhoods for California’s increasingly diverse middle class.
Sacramento is a city on the verge. Over the last 20 years, I have watched it emerge from a “cow town” lassitude. This has been viewed as a well earned epithet by newcomers from either coast and a fond trademark to many long time Sacramento traditionalists. Although there was evidence of hyperbole in both camps, the city’s lack of cultural and intellectual activities, its dependence on an economy driven by agricultural and state government has contributed to creating an often torpid local environment.
But much has changed in recent years. The city has grown both up, constructing several notably lofty skyscrapers, and out, growing ganglion like suburbs up and into the hills. The affordability of its housing has attracted entire towns of more cosmopolitan immigrants from the San Francisco area and beyond. This and a rising world class university at Davis have much enriched Sacramento society at all levels. Such emerging influences as the headquarters of Calpers and Calsters suggest a possible path to ascendancy as a serious financial capital of the west coast. Parallel to this, various other segments of the community, most prominently business, have taken a leadership role on land use, flood prevention and civic elevation in general.
Recently, the area’s housing market, along with much of that for inland California, has gone bust. This ultimately may be beneficial, in that the rapid run up in housing prices threatened to subvert one of the region’s core competencies — affordable housing.
What will make the difference will be whether Sacramento successfully capitalizes on its assets as an affordable, economically dynamic place. Quite simply, this is largely a matter of local leadership. All the other ingredients are present to achieve the region’s ascendancy. But this can not happen without a substantial change in the local economic and political leadership.
Frank Washington is the Chairman/CEO of Tower of Babel LLC, which owns KBTV-CA, channel 8 in Sacramento, a multilanguage programming service carried throughout California’s Central Valley. He is also a past Chair of the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce and KVIE, Sacramento’s public TV station.
Yesterday, an article appeared in the SF Chronicle by C.W. Nevius about an Internet salesman who lives in a tent in Golden Gate Park because housing costs are too high. He works by day at a cafe and pitches his tent at night getting up before dawn when the police do raids to evict illegal campers.
With much of the new development in SF geared towards the flush Web 2.0 crowd, there are fewer and fewer places for the lower middle-class to live. The resident hotels in SF are not pleasant places to live or even visit (I went voter canvassing in a few three years ago).
What is the housing solution for the Tom Sepas of the world? If we ever start seeing 21st Century Hoovervilles, they could be populated by people like him.
A very sobering tale that shatters the popular vision of the everyman Internet worker as some high-flying urban hepcat.