New Geography

Tag: Obama’s America

  • Don’t Mess With Census 2010

    The announcement last week that Congressional Black Caucus members plan to press President Obama to keep the 2010 census under White House supervision, even if the former Democratic Governor of Washington, Gary Locke, is confirmed as Commerce Secretary, brought back memories of a movie I’d seen before — a bad movie.

    The statement came from Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., the caucus’ leading voice on the census, and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform panel, which has jurisdiction over the decennial count. His assertion that the White House needs “to be hands-on, very much involved in selecting the new census director as well as being actively involved and interested in the full and accurate count,” suggests that the partisan gap about what the census should accomplish is no closer to being closed than it was ten years ago when we last undertook the constitutionally mandated exercise in counting everyone living in America. The gap was so big last time that it helped bring about the complete shutdown of the United States government.

    When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House he decided, in his own paranoid way, that Bill Clinton and the Democrats would use their executive authority to produce a biased census whose over-count of minorities would shift, in his opinion, twenty-four House seats from the Republicans to the Democrats after the 2000 census. Of course, it was ludicrous to think such an outcome would occur, since legislative boundaries are drawn by the party in power in each state. Whatever numbers the census produces in our decennial exercise can be manipulated to produce any outcome each state’s ruling party desires, as Congressman Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican cronies proved a few years ago. Nevertheless, Gingrich was determined to use the Congressional appropriations process to undercut any attempt by the Democrats to overstate minority populations in the several states.

    The method by which this nefarious plot was to be carried out, in the Republican party’s opinion, was by the use of a large sample of Americans to be surveyed at the same time as the actual count, or enumeration, required by the Constitution was taking place. In response to concerns about previous census inaccuracies — both overcounts and undercounts — the National Academy of Sciences had recommended that the Census Bureau use survey sampling techniques to validate not just the overall count but the individual demographic sub-groups that the census’s enumeration process would identify. But this was a hugely expensive undertaking. To gain statistical accuracy, about 1.3 million Americans would have to respond to a lengthy survey that would cost about a half a billion dollars to execute. And it was this expenditure that Gingrich refused to appropriate. When he and Clinton came to the ultimate showdown on funding the government Gingrich blinked.

    As part of the budget settlement that reopened the government after the shutdown, Clinton forced him to reinstate funding for the sample survey. But despite having established the primacy of the White House in the conduct of the census, matters actually got worse for awhile. When I became Director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) under Vice President Al Gore, I was asked to monitor the implementation of the census to be sure it was done as effectively and as efficiently as possible. But the first idea on how to accomplish that came straight out of the same White House partisan playbook that is now being invoked by the Congressional Black Caucus.

    In order to assure that the process was “bi-partisan,” it was suggested that a commission be established made up of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats who would oversee the activity on behalf of the Congress. Since the commission was to be equally divided, the Clinton White House wanted to make sure that only the most partisan Democrats — those who would never concede an inch to their Republican counterparts on issues such as funding and methodology — were selected. Names like Harold Ickes, Supervisor Gloria Molina, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters were discussed as representative of the type of Democrat who would make sure the use of sampling to confirm the accuracy of the count was preserved. Fortunately, thanks to the eloquence of Rob Shapiro, the Undersecretary for the Department of Commerce who had the actual authority to supervise the Census, cooler heads in the Vice President’s office were able to prevail over their White House counterparts, and the Commission notion was abandoned.

    But that didn’t stop the two parties from continuing their warfare over the value of a sample supplemented census vs. a straight enumeration. Republicans sued the Census Bureau in federal court, demanding that only the actual count of residents as provided in the Constitution be used for any Congressional redistricting by the states. The Federal Appeals court dismissed the Republican lawsuit as none of the Court’s business. Foreshadowing the outcome of Gore v. Bush in 2000, the Supreme Court surprisingly took up the case and overturned the Appeals court ruling. As a result, all subsequent redistricting efforts have used only the enumeration count from the 2000 census. On the other hand, formulas used to allocate federal funds based on population characteristics were unaffected by the ruling and could have used the sampling process, had it not met an untimely and unnecessary death.

    As soon as George W. Bush was elected and the incredibly professional Director of the Census Bureau, Ken Prewitt, was removed from office, the Commerce Department’s new partisan Secretary, Donald Evans, determined that the sample that had been prepared over the strong objections of Congressional Republicans was not useable. Sampling, as originally conceived, was never implemented, and the country ended up relying on a very strong effort to count households and those living in them for its 2000 census. This method tends to overcount families with two houses, who respond to the census form at both of their addresses, and college students who generally answer the form from their dorm room while their parents report them as still in their household back home. And, of course, it tends to undercount less affluent populations with fewer physical ties to a specific dwelling, particularly Native Americans, and to some degree Hispanics and African Americans.

    Despite these problems, a sampling approach could not be used to help correct inaccuracies in this year’s census, even if Rahm Emanuel himself were to oversee it. We are too far along in the process to recreate it. There is, however, a substitute available that should alleviate the concerns of all but the most stubborn partisans on both sides of the issue. Under the Gore reinvention initiative, the Census Bureau conceived of a concept now known as the American Community Survey. It was designed to survey a vast quantity of households over time to acquire the kind of detailed demographic data that was usually obtained from the subset of the population, about one in ten, who were asked to complete the “long form” of the census questionnaire every ten years. Republicans hated this form and the type of questions it asked; they saw it as an unlawful intrusion on the privacy of families by the federal government. Those of us in charge of reinventing the federal government thought the ACS could be a much more scientific and efficient way of collecting this essential data, but our challenge was to keep it from becoming a political football in the partisan warfare over the census.

    Finally, it was agreed that the Clinton administration budget proposals would include a continuing increase in funds for the ACS. In order to garner Republican support, ACS would be justified as a way to eliminate the long form by 2010. The budget request was forwarded by the head of ACS directly to the Vice President’s office, which made it a priority each year, but which never publicly acknowledged any interest in the concept. The ruse worked and the project became a reality. The long form will not be used in the upcoming census because the ACS has gathered, over time, sufficient data on the demographic details of America’s population as to make it unnecessary.

    Given the existence of the ACS, those now waging a battle over sampling vs. enumeration are truly guilty of fighting today’s war with yesterday’s weapons. In this new era, those who have a legitimate interest in as complete and accurate a census as possible should instead direct their efforts to the neighborhoods where the accuracy of the count will actually be determined. During the last count, the Census Bureau formed hundreds of thousands of partnerships with community groups interested in making sure that everyone they knew got counted. Today, these programs, as well as projects such as former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer’s “Nosy Neighbors” campaign, are the best way to ensure an accurate outcome.

    The responsibility for America’s next census does not and should not rest with the White House. But President Obama’s experience does offer some direction: neighborhood organizing is key. Let’s hope that community leaders will follow the advice to ‘pick yourself up and dust yourself off’… and undertake the huge task of ensuring that every person is present and accounted for in America’s next census.

    Morley Winograd is co-author, with Michael D. Hais of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics, now available in paperback. Both of them are fellows with NDN, a progressive think tank, which is also home to his blog.

  • Urban Inequality Could Get Worse

    President Obama’s stated objective to reduce inequality, as laid out in public addresses and budget plans, is a noble one. The growing income gap – not only between rich and poor, but also between the ultra-affluent and the middle class – poses a threat both to the economy and the long-term viability of our republic.

    But ironically, what seems to be the administration’s core proposal, ratcheting up the burden on “rich” taxpayers earning over $250,000, could have unintended consequences. For one thing, it would place undue stress on the very places that have been Obama’s strongest supports, while providing an unintended boost to those regions that most oppose him.

    At the heart of the matter is the age-old debate about who is “rich.” If you define wealthy as $250,000 a year for a family of four, that means different things in different places. America is a vast country, and the cost of living varies widely. What seems a princely sum in, say, red state Oklahoma City is barely enough to eke out a basic middle-class life in blue bastions like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco.

    In the recent study on the New York middle class that I conducted with Jonathan Bowles at the Center for an Urban Future, we compared the cost of a “middle class” standard of living in New York and other cities. The report found that Manhattan is by far the most expensive urban area in the country, with a cost of living that’s more than twice the national average. (This is according to a cost of living index developed by the ACCRA, a research group formerly known as the American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Association.)

    But even Queens, the city’s middle-class haven and the only other borough included in the ACCRA analysis, suffers the eighth highest cost of living in the country.

    What does that mean? An individual from Houston who earns $50,000 would have to make $115,769 in Manhattan and $81,695 in Queens to live at the same level of comfort. Similarly, earning $50,000 in Atlanta is the equivalent of earning $106,198 in Manhattan and $74,941 in Queens. (See “New York Should End Its Obsession With Manhattan.”)

    The cost of housing constitutes one critical part of the difference. Average monthly rent in New York was $2,720 in the fourth quarter of 2007, by far the top in the nation. That total was both 55% higher than the second place city, San Francisco, where average effective rents are $1,760, and nearly triple the national average of $975.

    Even in relative boom times, such high costs have been driving many out of New York, and now it could get worse. During tough times, people’s incomes drop, so they are less able to absorb high costs and taxes, which are rising in many blue cities and states. Imposing more taxes on some label-rich New Yorkers or Angelenos, who earn $250,000 a year, won’t make them more likely to stay.

    Perhaps even worse, higher taxes probably won’t help the inequality issue. True, historically and to this day, the greatest levels of inequality occur in low-tax areas like the Mississippi Delta, the Rio Grande Valley and Appalachia. But, increasingly, this unsavory distinction is shared by big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In contrast, the most egalitarian states are generally deep red places – such as the Dakotas, Alaska, Nebraska and Wyoming.

    Higher costs – manifested in everyday expenses like sales taxes and energy bills – now contribute in a large way to growing inequality even in the richest, most elite cities. When housing and other costs are factored in, notes researcher Deborah Reed of the left-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, deep-blue mainstays Los Angeles and San Francisco rank among the top 10 counties in America with respect to the percentage of people in poverty. Only New York and Washington, D.C., do worse.

    Worst of all, the rise of inequality in these high-cost blue cities seems to be connected to policy decisions. High taxes and strict regulations have expelled relatively well-paying blue collar jobs in manufacturing and warehousing from expensive urban areas. Without them, an extremely bifurcated economy and society forms because no traditional ladders for upward mobility remain; they are critical to a successful urbanity.

    Back in the 1960s, Jane Jacobs predicted that Latino immigrants to New York, mainly from Puerto Rico, would inevitably make “a fine middle class.” Yet four decades later, in the Bronx, the city’s most heavily Latino county, roughly one in three households lives in poverty – the highest rate of any urban county in the nation.

    At the other extreme, in Manhattan, where the rich are concentrated, the disparities between socioeconomic classes have been rising steadily. In 1980, the borough ranked 17th among the nation’s counties for social inequality; today it ranks first, with the top fifth of wage earners earning 52 times that of the lowest fifth, a disparity roughly comparable to that of Namibia.

    To an old-fashioned Truman Democrat like me, this is bad news. But some modern-day “progressives,” like Richard Florida, celebrate the concentration of rich people. They see them as guarantors that places like New York will be the winners of the post-crash economy. The losers? Goods-producing regions of the Great Plains, the industrial Midwest and, of course, those unenlightened, suburban middle-class people.

    Yet it seems more and more likely that raising taxes for urban middle-income workers will, over the long term, add to the flood of people fleeing to less costly locales with lower taxes. This will be particularly true for the growing ranks of information economy “artisans” who might find critical write-offs for home offices and other business expenses cut from their next tax return.

    None of this is necessary. The “creative destruction” resulting from the downturn might actually prove a boon to these big cities – by making them more affordable for the urban middle class. This help would be accelerated if city governments – as in Los Angeles, New York, Houston and even San Francisco during the early 1990s – nurture local businesses.

    But “growth” – a word not widely embraced in this greenest of administrations – does not seem to be a priority in either Washington or in most city halls. There are murmurs that investment in high-cost, subsidized alternative energy will create vast numbers of new jobs, but this is likely just wishful thinking for everyone but Al Gore’s business partners.

    This is not to say cities’ policies need to return to Bush-style Republicanism. Tax breaks for big-time investors and real estate speculators do not make a sustainable urban policy either. What’s needed is something closer to lunch-bucket liberalism, which focuses on productivity-enhancing initiatives and sparking entrepreneurial growth. America – its cities in particular – could do with more private-sector stimulation and a lot less high-minded social engineering.

    With policies geared toward the latter at the expense of the former, one of the great ironies of the Obama era will continue to unfold.

    By targeting the urban middle class to pay for its deficit and new social programs, the president’s plan could end up draining wealth – and boosting inequality – from our nation’s great cities, where he currently draws overwhelming support, to its hinterlands. Not exactly what the White House had in mind, no doubt, but, sadly, it’s a distinct possibility.

    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.

  • Democrats Could Face an Internal Civil War as Gentry and Populist Factions Square Off

    This is the Democratic Party’s moment, its power now greater than any time since the mid-1960s. But do not expect smooth sailing. The party is a fractious group divided by competing interests, factions and constituencies that could explode into a civil war, especially when it comes to energy and the environment.

    Broadly speaking, there is a long-standing conflict inside the Democratic Party between gentry liberals and populists. This division is not the same as in the 1960s, when the major conflicts revolved around culture and race as well as on foreign policy. Today the emerging fault-lines follow mostly regional, geographical and, most importantly, class differences.

    Gentry liberals cluster largely in cities, wealthy suburbs and college towns. They include disproportionately those with graduate educations and people living on the coasts. Populists tend to be located more in middle- and working-class suburbs, the Great Plains and industrial Midwest. They include a wider spectrum of Americans, including many whose political views are somewhat changeable and less subject to ideological rigor.

    In the post-World War II era, the gentry’s model candidate was a man such as Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee who lost twice to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stevenson was a svelte intellectual who, like Barack Obama, was backed by the brute power of the Chicago machine. After Stevenson, the gentry supported candidates such as John Kennedy – who did appeal to Catholic working class voters – but also men with limited appeal outside the gentry class, including Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas and John Kerry.

    Hubert Humphrey, a populist heir to the lunch-pail liberalism of Harry Truman (and who was despised by gentry intellectuals) missed the presidency by a hair in 1968. But populists in the party later backed lackluster candidates such as Walter Mondale and Dick Gephardt.

    Bill Clinton revived the lunch-pail Democratic tradition; and the final stages of last year’s presidential primaries represented yet another classic gentry versus populist conflict. Hillary Clinton could not match Barack Obama’s appeal to the gentry. Driven to desperation, she ended up running a spirited populist campaign.

    Although peace now reigns between the Clintons and the new president, the broader gentry-populist split seems certain to fester at both the congressional and local levels – and President Obama will be hard-pressed to negotiate this divide. Gentry liberals are very “progressive” when it comes to issues such as affirmative action, gay rights, the environment and energy policy, but are not generally well disposed to protectionism or auto-industry bailouts, which appeal to populists. Populists, meanwhile, hated the initial bailout of Wall Street – despite its endorsement by Mr. Obama and the congressional leadership.

    Geography is clearly a determining factor here. Standout antifinancial bailout senators included Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Jon Tester of Montana. On the House side, the antibailout faction came largely from places like the Great Plains and Appalachia, as well as from the suburbs and exurbs, including places like Arizona and interior California.

    Gentry liberals, despite occasional tut-tutting, fell lockstep for the bailout. Not one Northeastern or California Democratic senator opposed it. In the House, “progressives” such as Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank who supported the financial bailout represent districts with a large concentration of affluent liberals, venture capitalists and other financial interests for whom the bailout was very much a matter of preserving accumulated (and often inherited) wealth.

    Energy and the environment are potentially even more explosive issues. Gentry politicians tend to favor developing only alternative fuels and oppose expanding coal, oil or nuclear energy. Populists represent areas, such as the Great Lakes region, where manufacturing still plays a critical role and remains heavily dependent on coal-based electricity. They also tend to have ties to economies, such as in the Great Plains, Appalachia and the Intermountain West, where smacking down all new fossil-fuel production threatens lots of jobs – and where a single-minded focus on alternative fuels may drive up total energy costs on the farm, make life miserable again for truckers, and put American industrial firms at even greater disadvantage against foreign competitors.

    In the coming years, Mr. Obama’s “green agenda” may be a key fault line. Unlike his notably mainstream appointments in foreign policy and economics, he’s tilted fairly far afield on the environment with individuals such as John Holdren, a longtime acolyte of the discredited neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, and Carol Browner, who was Bill Clinton’s hard-line EPA administrator.

    These appointments could presage an environmental jihad throughout the regulatory apparat. Early examples could mean such things as strict restrictions on greenhouse gases, including bans on new drilling and higher prices through carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade regime.

    Another critical front, not well understood by the public, could develop on land use – with the adoption of policies that favor dense cities over suburbs and small towns. This trend can be observed most obviously in California, but also in states such as Oregon where suburban growth has long been frowned upon. Emboldened greens in government could use their new power to drive infrastructure spending away from badly needed projects such as new roads, bridges and port facilities, and toward projects such as light rail lines. These lines are sometimes useful, but largely impractical outside a few heavily traveled urban corridors. Essentially it means a transfer of subsidies from those who must drive cars to the relative handful for whom mass transit remains a viable alternative.

    Priorities such as these may win plaudits in urban enclaves in New York, Boston and San Francisco – bastions of the gentry class and of under-35, childless professionals – but they might not be so widely appreciated in the car- and truck-driving Great Plains and the vast suburban archipelago, where half the nation’s population lives.

    If he wishes to enhance his power and keep the Democrats together, Mr. Obama will have to figure out how to placate both his gentry base and those Democrats who still see their party’s mission in terms that Harry Truman would have understood.

    This article originally appeared at Wall Street Journal.

    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.

  • Chevy Chase Circle Fountain: A Call To Rededicate A Memorial To Racism

    On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, C-SPAN watchers nationwide saw an especially poignant symbolic moment. Assembled on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda, along with House and Senate members, were hundreds of guests. Behind every speaker stood the marble statue of Abraham Lincoln, bending benignly, holding in his outstretched hand a folded Emancipation Proclamation.

    When the speaker’s spot was taken by the current occupant of Lincoln’s office — a black man, an African-American — President Obama spoke in honor of the Great Emancipator. The fruition of Lincoln’s sacrifice stood, proven and achieved, before the statue of the murdered President.

    Symbols — statues, plaques — matter. Sprinkled about our cities, they come into being as the result of contemporary interests and priorities. But who can tell, as time flows on, whether history will welcome their enduring presence, or wish to wipe them out?

    One such memorial that ought to be wiped out is a monument to a man who stood against everything Lincoln stood for. It is a memorial that disgraces the City of Washington, the capitol of the nation: A memorial fountain that honors the perniciously racist U.S. Senator Francis G. Newlands. The current Majority Leader of the Senate, Harry Reid – who was on the speaker’s platform at the celebration, and who spoke after President Obama did – holds the seat that Newlands once held.

    The fountain, built and dedicated in the mid-1930s, is not located in some obscure spot where few stumble upon it. No, it is positioned at one of the major commuter entrances to the City, right at the border, on Connecticut Avenue at Chevy Chase Circle. I live not far away, and I know that every day, tens of thousands of people see it; not only commuters, but those who come into the city from Interstate 95 and the Beltway.

    The circle is an urban design whose symbolic function is to create a visual focal-point. Those entering or leaving the City must make-way, defer, bend aside to accommodate whatever the planners of the city choose to place there. This particular circle is one of only four circular entrances into the Capital. One of those circles honors Lincoln. Another honors Robert F. Kennedy. A third is vacant. And the fourth honors the racist Newlands.

    Newlands was a U.S. Senator who died in office in 1917. He openly called, as late as 1912, for amending the constitution to strip the vote from African-Americans. His segregated land development plans established a precedent for segregated suburbs that spread across America. He openly called for African-American education to be limited to education for domestic and menial work. A leading contemporary African-American newspaper editor put Newlands on the same lowest level of dishonor as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina and “Great White Chief” Jim Vardeman of Mississippi. But Newlands, who as a young man started his career in California and was elected from Nevada, could not even make the feeble excuse, as they might have, of being the product of a people historically conditioned to race prejudice.

    Newlands’ race bigotry was the product of greed and ambition, not upbringing, and it encompassed animosity towards Asians and everyone else not of the white race. He saw racism as a means of winning votes, and of making money. Lots of money.

    Anyone who looks at urban residential patterns sees the de facto racial segregation of neighborhoods. But only students of the history of urban and suburban development recognize that these segregated patterns were not the result of mere happenstance.

    In the decades after the Civil War, the newly-freed slaves may nominally have held legal rights, but whites still held all the money and all the land. Before Newlands began his political career, he was the manager and trustee of a vast fortune made by his wife’s family in western gold and silver, and he used that fortune to buy vast tracts of what is now the northwest section of Washington D.C.

    In the 1880s and 1890s, Rock Creek Park was set-aside, nominally as a region of recreation, but also as a barrier to racial integration. East of the park might be integrated, but not West. From Florida Avenue north, Connecticut Avenue and the neighborhoods surrounding it are all Newlands’ creation, all the way past the District Line several miles into Maryland. Newlands instituted racist policies over all this land, including at the fancy Chevy Chase Club which he founded and of which he was the first President. (Chief Justice Roberts recently joined that racially-insensitive institution, and I see it as a telling “freudian slip” that Roberts would strike the one false note at the historic inauguration’s key moment.)

    The Newlands’ land extended west all the way to Wisconsin Avenue. Today, anyone can log-on to Google Earth and see the line of expensive shops along the east side of Wisconsin Avenue, north of Western Avenue. Those shops – promoted by the still-operating company that Newlands founded, the Chevy Chase Land Company – call themselves the “Rodeo Drive” of the East Coast.

    The land under every single one of those shops would be owned by African-Americans, and not by Newlands’ legacy company, were it not for Newlands’ racism. In 1909, when Newlands discovered that the sub-developer to whom he had sold the land intended to develop it as residences for African-Americans, Newlands sued the developer for fraud and got the land back. Rather than let African-Americans live near whites, the company left the land largely unused for almost 100 years.

    Newlands’ segregated approach became a model for racist land development nationwide. White Americans who look with fear on the poverty and danger of many African-American urban neighborhoods can blame developers like Newlands and his progeny, who, by creating white enclaves, necessarily also created black enclaves.

    The fountain at Chevy Chase Circle is the legacy of Newlands’ land development efforts. His widow paid for it, and her friends lobbied for it. It was not the work of anyone from Nevada who might have wanted to honor their Senator. It was merely an effort to beautify a suburban development. No one knew in the mid-1930s that Connecticut Avenue would become a major thoroughfare into the City.

    To honor Lincoln and Robert Kennedy, city planners may justly ask the citizens to “bend aside” at a traffic circle, but not to honor Newlands. We are fortunate that the memorial is not a statue, but a fountain. A statue cannot be renamed; it looks like the person it originally honored. But a fountain can be renamed with the stroke of a pen and the replacement of a plaque. The Chevy Chase Circle fountain instead should honor one or more notable and historically significant African-Americans whose lives stand for the achievement of equal rights and for human dignity for all.

    The matter should ultimately be in the hands of the people’s elected officials. But I have proposed that a woman born enslaved in the District, who attained a college degree and became a leading educator – Fanny Muriel Jackson Coppin – should be one person honored. Another should be, not the obvious choice of Frederick Douglass (who is already honored in several places), but his oldest son, Lewis Henry Douglass, who was a heroic sergeant in the Colored Troops who fought in the battle immortalized in the motion picture Glory, and who, as a legislator for the District during the short-lived period of Reconstruction, authored the District’s first anti-discrimination law.

    When Congress restructured the District government and abolished the seat Lewis Douglass once held, the new government conveniently “forgot” Douglass’ anti-discrimination law, by leaving it out of the statute-books. But in the 1950s a diligent researcher re-discovered the law. The DC prosecutor applied it, and the Supreme Court affirmed it.

    The racism of Newlands, however conveniently hidden, has also been rediscovered. A people that has just elected the first African-American US President should no longer need to suffer this embarrassment. Action is necessary to strike Senator Francis G. Newlands from the roster of Americans honored in our capital city.

    Edward Hawkins Sisson is a Washington D.C.-based attorney. See The Chevy Chase Fountain for an album of photographs and documents. Selected Sisson papers available at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

  • What Does “Age of Hope” Mean in the Mississippi Delta?

    It was during the inaugural days that an article appeared in The Washington Post about the predominantly black Mississippi Delta going for Obama – no surprise! But juxtaposed in the same time period there appeared in a Kentucky newspaper the story of predominantly white Menifee County, my birthplace – deep in the heart of Appalachia – defying the red sea of Kentucky all around it and also going for Obama.

    Quite a pairing of places. It caused the logical mind to go quickly to work. What did they have in common? The likely answer was a common thread of hope – in two places very different yet alike. Two places long left behind as programs have come and gone. Did this present them with their chance?

    It is easy to say – as I said to a group of automotive middle managers hit hard both emotionally and in the pocketbook by the feared demise of the U.S. auto industry – buck up and get over it. The world has changed. It is time to read What Would Google Do? and reinvent yourselves and your industry. So, too, the business of moving people from point A to point B will always be with us – just how to do that will be left to inventive minds which should include all of us.

    But the auto industry is not alone. Neither are Menifee County and the Mississippi Delta. We do not yet know how to grow legs under this thing called “Obama hope” for communities like those of the Delta or Menifee County. Maybe it’s easier if you’re a college student in California, Manhattan or Chicago to take pride in the greater articulateness and ‘vision’ of our new President.

    Beyond “hope”, an intrinsically ephemeral thing, what are we doing for places like the Delta and Menifee County? It is clear the world has changed. October taught us that, yes indeed, we are globally interdependent. Expertise doesn’t lie in the likes of Greenspan and CEOs and senators and representatives. Finally, government has a role to play – we humbly acknowledge after years of bashing it.

    So, what makes Obama so different and what can he do to live up to his reputation? He gave hope perhaps because he is so different, with an exotic name and so deliciously diverse ethnically that he appears to be out of central casting. Like Superman or Spiderman, he has an edge because he is not exactly like the rest of us.

    We wait and see. There is a major debate over whether places like the Delta or Menifee County can be saved…or should be saved. President Obama can be counted on to focus on other places – like San Francisco, Manhattan and, of course, Chicago – where his most intense supporters live and where the media clusters.

    The Delta and Menifee may have voted for him, but are they on the Presidential view screen? These places are not on the beaten path of interstate highways. They are not part of so-called “metro” or “hot” spots. They are small places with small towns. They are places of strong religious values. They won’t attract the creative class seeking nightclubs and outdoor cafes.

    Yet these places do have their positive attributes – Menifee lies near a lake and people looking for affordable second homes. The land is of great beauty and there are people there who know – as Wendell Berry speaks in reverence – every nook and cranny of every precious inch. So too it is with the Delta, a place full of history, folklore and the richest American musical traditions.

    There is some palpable evidence that these kinds of places may be more attractive than we may have thought prior to the October financial collapse. If you can’t live well in New York for under $500,000 a year, perhaps smaller, more nurturing places can provide a higher quality of life for far less money.

    Perhaps it will take more than government “programs” and outsiders coming in as saviors. Perhaps it will take the people of those regions coming together in some way to tout their regional rural attributes – perhaps their local culture and microentrepreneurship – with some obviously needed but as yet undefined help from “higher-ups.”

    Will local folks be willing to step up to that challenge? Let’s listen to Mayor Will Cox of Madisonville, Ky. and his “on-the-street reassurance” of his constituents through Facebook and his iPhone during the catastrophic Kentucky ice storm of ‘09. He didn’t fan flames of anger but rather was honest and straightforward and ultimately soothing. At the end of the day he got the power back on. “Obama hope” will not stoke the fire or feed the kids, but perhaps it can inspire us to do more for ourselves.

    I await spring with a little more enthusiasm this year. My father hails from Menifee County. He says to plant your corn when the tree buds are the size of squirrel ears. He is a plain old man and loves that place. We are a patchwork country with many differences, but we’re more alike than we think. Just ask the folks in the Delta and Menifee County, poor whites and blacks who opted for the same President. It’s time to grow legs under hope and act with some new thinking.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.

    Photo courtesy of Russell and Sydney Poore

  • A Washington, D.C. Arts & Innovation District: “Sonya’s Neighborhood”

    A recent widely-read piece in the Washington Post, “The Height of Power,” noted the great prospects of Washington’s rise to the top, not only in politics but in publishing, media, business and the arts. In this way, it said, Washington’s evolution will follow the pattern of other great capitals like London, New York, Paris or Tokyo.

    As a seventh-generation Washingtonian, born here and baptized in the National Cathedral, this is a prediction I am delighted to hear. I spent almost ten years producing avant garde experimental theater in the US and on tour in Europe, but I was based in San Francisco, not in Washington; my Washington artistic presence consisted of my last production, Actual Shō, playing the Kennedy Center Opera House in 1988. As an MIT bachelor of science graduate (in architecture), I know and greatly appreciate the spirit of innovation and experimentation that is at the core of America’s entrepreneurial, adventurous approach to life.

    There are many reasons why America needs Washington to enter the first rank of innovative cultural centers. Dearest to me is that playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, and all the artists who take on the portrayals of politicians, politics, and power will become part of the same milieu as the political leaders. The result will be that members of each group develop a more sophisticated understanding of the other.

    The key to transforming Washington into a center of cultural and scientific innovation is to establish a stimulating neighborhood, such as New York city’s SoHo/Tribeca, that attracts creative people who cross-fertilize each other, and who become part of the everyday social circle both of the political leadership and of the city’s African-American core community.

    Where should Washington build the creative, innovative neighborhood it needs to accomplish this? I know just the place: A parcel of some 100 acres, now occupied by wholesale grocery and souvenir warehouses, light industry, a federal Park Service truck maintenance yard, and little-used, dilapidated municipal facilities. Its bare, windswept hilltop is the last unoccupied “commanding height” in the city. It doesn’t have any residences (and thus no residents to oppose the project), yet it’s within just a mile of the Capitol Dome.

    I’m a member of a family that has been present in Washington for more than 200 years. Our family lands included this property, which was a large woodland estate, started in about 1800. It included all the land west of today’s Gallaudet University to the railroad tracks (plus some land on the other side of the tracks), north of Florida Avenue, and, on the north, included not only the ground on which today New York Avenue lies, but also the railroad yards north of New York Avenue.

    Just south of New York Avenue, the land rises steeply to a hilltop, and then falls away gently. This hilltop is now home to a National Park Service maintenance yard and the Brentwood Reservoir, but from about 1811 to 1915 it was the site of a mansion built by Congressman Joseph Pearson (Federalist – NC) for his second wife, Eleanor, daughter of the first mayor of Washington, Robert Brent. From the 1820s through the 1880s the Brentwood Mansion was a social center of Washington, scene of many a dinner and ball as horse-drawn carriages conveyed the wealthy and powerful up the hill, through the well-kept forest to the mansion. For aficionados of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it was the closest thing Washington ever had to the fictional Pemberly of Mr. Darcy – and it was built in precisely the era of Jane Austen. Now the site is strewn with rusting machine parts and Park Service dumpsters. Sic transit gloria mundi (“so passes worldly glory”).

    As the city grew it surrounded the estate, but the estate itself was never developed. The city took pieces of it, built New York Avenue over part of it, and put railroad tracks on one side. As the city developed, the isolated, aging mansion never gained access to modern utilities, and the family moved away and neglected it. Eventually, in the early 1920s, my grandfather developed a wholesale food market and managed the land until his death in 1948. One of his brothers died in 1951; a third lived far away; the fourth tried to manage the property from his home in Connecticut but gave up and sold it all.

    This large parcel that once was our family land is now again in disrepair. The city government and owners of various pieces of it are hoping to develop it: the usual mix of office-buildings and townhouses, with no particular theme or vision of a unique, exciting neighborhood.

    What I propose is to develop this entire large area – not just the parts subject to the present plans, but almost all of the former family property, including the mix of federal and DC-government land – as a neighborhood specifically dedicated to be stimulating and exciting for creative people. The property offers an ideal place to create an “arts and innovation district,” a kind of SoHo or San Francisco in DC. It’s large, contiguous, and self-contained. It already has an institution of higher learning, Gallaudet, along one side, and a Metro stop at one corner.

    Since the property is south of New York Avenue, I think of it as SoNYA = Sonya = “Sonya’s Neighborhood,” which sets the tone for the concept as personal and human, rather than the bureaucratic feel of calling it a “district” or “zone.” This large-scale project would be a major job-generator, exactly in-line with the new Stimulus Bill, and the existing federal and DC-government ownership means that it is an ideal public-works project for President Obama and Mayor Adrian Fenty to promote.

    The fact that the site includes a prominent hilltop gives the project a glittering opportunity to achieve instant national and international status. If you fly into Washington, you will see a prominent hilltop gothic cathedral, the National Cathedral. It symbolizes the importance of religion in American life. And, of course, anyone coming to Washington sees the Capitol Dome, which symbolizes democratic government, and sees the monuments to the Presidents – Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson – that symbolize the importance of history.

    The hilltop where the family mansion stood is a place where Presidents, Senators, Cabinet Members, Justices, and Representatives dined, drank, and danced long ago. It should now be the site of a highly-visible, signature building of innovative design to serve as an Arts & Innovation Center. The ground is at an elevation of 175 feet above sea level. Any tall building placed on this “commanding height” not only will have commanding views down across the city, it will also “be seen” from many places around the city, as are the National Cathedral, the Capitol, and the Washington Monument. This prominent building will symbolize the importance to America of innovation and creativity. As core tenants, I propose the federal agencies the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, who would move their headquarters from the Old Post Office. The building could also house a Washington branch of the new Singularity University based in Silicon Valley (see http://singularityu.org/.)

    This building would serve as the keynote for the entire development, which would spread-out to the south on the slope below it, down towards Florida Ave. “Sonya’s Neighborhood” should be mixed-use, residential and office, with the ambience of New York’s SoHo or of San Francisco’s denser neighborhoods, and a feel similar to Venice, Italy – lots of narrow pedestrian-only streets, with bistros, art galleries, clubs, etc. – a place where creative people like to hang out.

    A local surface transit system can connect from the Metro stop through all of the development up to the hilltop Arts & Innovation Center building. It could extend into the Gallaudet campus, and to the nearby Ivy City neighborhood as it is redeveloped.

    There is much more to the proposal, including relocation of the grocery and souvenir wholesalers, and the Park Service maintenance facilities, to a new facility built overtop of the railroad yard north of New York Avenue (as in Manhattan, where Park Avenue is built overtop of railroad lines running to Grand Central Terminal). I encourage anyone who is interested to contact me via e-mail at sissoed@hotmail.com (no “n” in “sissoed”) to learn more.

    Edward Sisson is a Washington D.C.-based attorney. If there is sufficient interest in developing the Arts & Innovation Building and Sonya’s Neighborhood, he expects to take a leading role as “producer” of that exciting project, utilizing his unique background in Washington, in architecture, in the arts and the sciences, and in law to solve the many hurdles and obstacles that will confront the project.

  • A Sober Look at the New Year for Obama

    Personal experience made me a skeptic about racial progress. When I was 8, I was upset when our Japanese neighbors in Los Angeles were sent off to internment. In 1963, I traveled across the Deep South, awed by the totality of poverty, segregation and discrimination.

    But the election of Barack Obama restored a degree of faith in the American experiment, and hope for an economic and social turnaround. I was inspired by the inauguration and am encouraged by initial and intended actions. I’m reasonably sure that significant reforms will occur.

    But my skepticism about more fundamental change remains strong. The Democratic Party is of the intellectual rich, not of the worker, and not very inclined to deep change. The most critical political story of the election was the 12 to 15 percent shift of the rich, educated and suburban to the Democrats, offsetting the shift of about 6 percent of the less educated or professional, but more religious and rural to the Republicans.

    Karl Rove’s strategy of combining affluent economic conservatives and social conservatives ultimately failed. He thought tax cuts would keep the rich loyal, but they defected. But at the same time, the shift of the affluent has, in my mind, weakened the historic mission of the Democratic Party.

    By far the greatest issue before us, one barely on anyone’s agenda, is the astounding degree of economic inequality, perhaps approaching the levels of 1929 or even 1913. This obscene outcome, an astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich, is a consequence of market failure – the capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power over the economy, and whose tax cuts and deregulation contributed to the current financial crisis and deepening recession.

    Not unrelated to this process are deindustrialization, over-globalization and overdependence on other nations for resources, products, and credit. The story of the rise of the United States to world power was based on production. Our success over Germany and Japan depended on massive production of war materials (yes, from the likes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) and our capacity to destroy the productive capacity of the enemy. Now we are willing to bail out the bloated financial and service sectors, and let industry die. Trade is overall beneficial and it is in our interest to aid in the economic development of all countries, but it is irresponsible and false savings to outsource basic production (and increasingly, even services). It is absurd to believe that we can safely prosper by trading, packaging, moving, storing, advertising, insuring, selling, brokering information, but not MAKING STUFF!

    This system of import dependence has accentuated our growing class divide. We create high-end jobs for some, but very few of the middle class opportunities long associated with production. Production also creates a wide range of higher end service-related jobs. When you are selling things made in China, much of the non-production value added is also exported.

    The increased bifurcation of our society can be seen in other fields. While the United States may have the “finest” education at the top, the general level of education is amazingly mediocre with astounding prevalence of ignorance and superstition, especially about science, economics and geography. I do not see even a hint of a turnaround here.

    I suspect the power of the medical insurance and hospital sectors are sufficient to prevent serious reform of the dysfunctional health system. Nor are we close to abandonment of the hopeless war on drugs, or to real reform of criminal justice, and – despite the election of Barack Obama – the integration of millions of Black males into mainstream society. Do the ivory tower economic theorists, Democratic as well as Republican, have a clue about the disaster potential of 100,000 more unemployed workers in Detroit? Does no one remember the race riots in Detroit or Watts, and the long history of labor unrest in America?

    This sad economic and social restructuring began around 1976. Believe it or not, the lowest level of economic inequality in US history was 1974 in the Nixon administration. Those of us at the top surely believe we earned our way there, but are in denial about the immense cost to the majority left behind.

    I just hope I’m as wrong about prospects for real reform as I was about the election!

    P.S.
    A guy (Obama) who could do the Bump with a 9 year old girl at maybe his 10th inaugural ball is so cool that perhaps I’ll raise my optimism level!

    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)

  • Obama’s Friends: Enemies of the American Dream?

    President Barack Obama has rightly spoken positively about the American Dream, how it is becoming more expensive and how it needs to be reclaimed. But to do this, he may have to disregard many of those who have been among his strongest supporters and the dense urban centers which have been his strongest bastion of support.

    Indeed, the American Dream has been achieved by countless millions of households, though many have been left out of this expansion that began following World War II. Home ownership has risen from little above 40 percent to nearly 70 percent. Automobile ownership has become nearly universal, making it possible for urban areas to grown to unprecedented size. The Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute and others have published studies showing that people in low income households are far more likely to find and hold employment if they have access to cars.

    All of this has been associated with a democratization of prosperity that has never before occurred. Per capita income is now 3.5 times its 1950 level in the United States (see 1929-2007 inflation adjusted data).

    Yet, the American Dream is under serious threat – and this predates today’s faltering economy. A key component lies in the machinations of an urban policy and planning elite contemptuous of the comfortable lifestyles achieved by so many Americans. Instead they propose creating an environment in which households would have to pay more for their houses and spend more of their lives traveling from one place to another.

    Most of those who wish to create this situation come from the political left and consider themselves to be “friends of Obama.” They have achieved positions of power in some urban areas, such as throughout California, Portland, Seattle and a host of other areas. As early as 2007 some saw Obama as the dream candidate – what one called “a smart growth President”.

    This elite group starts by demonizing the very foundations of America’s inclusive prosperity. Having declared “urban sprawl” a scourge, they seek to stop further development on the urban fringe and want virtually all development to be within already developed urban footprints. These and other overly stringent regulations have served to strangle urban land markets, forcing land prices and housing prices higher, in those region where they have been imposed.

    Over fifteen years ago William Fischell at Dartmouth University demonstrated that California’s overly restrictive land use policies had made that state more expensive than elsewhere. Since 2000, with the wider availability of mortgage credit, the new demand drove prices to double or triple historic norms in areas with restrictive regulation. Price reductions have lowered prices, but they are still well above historic norms. This means that fewer households still are able to own their own homes in areas with restrictive land use regulations. Once normal prosperity is restored, the higher house prices of the restrictive land use areas can be expected to resume their increase relative to the rest of the nation.

    This is a problem for some regions now. But many planners are enthusiastic about Obama in part because he is thought to be sympathetic to recreating these conditions throughout the entire country.

    ###

    The automobile plays the role of the Great Satan in this morality play. The goal of many ‘progressive’ urbanists is to force people into transit and stop road building. Transit, of course, has its place. There is no better way to get to your job south of 59th Street in Manhattan, to Chicago’s Loop or to a few other of the nation’s largest downtown areas. But the stark reality is that transit can not substitute for the automobile for the overwhelming majority of trips, except for these niche markets. Further, failing to expand highways to keep up with traffic growth increases traffic congestion (and air pollution) and reduces economic productivity (read: “increases poverty”).

    Higher costs for home ownership and slower commutes to work – and they will be slower because transit commutes average twice as long as automobile – impose significant burdens on people. Fewer people will have houses and fewer will have jobs. Forcing a single parent to take longer to navigate from home to the day care center to the job, whether by transit or by car, makes life more difficult – and for no rational reason. It is the equivalent of forcing people to work harder for nothing.

    Of course, this way of thinking has been around some parts of the country for decades. The new drive to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has extended its reach. The typical formulation now is that in order to reduce GHG emissions, Americans need to be crowded into dense urban areas and give up our cars.

    ###

    In reality, nothing of the kind is required. “Green” houses are being developed that can make it possible to substantially reduce GHG emissions while Americans continue their favored suburban life styles (the lifestyles, by the way, also favored by Europeans and Japanese). Hybrid and other advanced car and fuel technologies can make it possible for the personal transportation sector to achieve massive long term GHG reductions. The answer is regulating emissions, rather than people.

    But the planning and urbanist lobbies may not fundamentally be driven by the perceived need to reduce GHGs. They would rather regulate people, just as was the case well before climate change was even on the political agenda.

    Of course, the planners don’t see their strategies as nightmarish. They have worked them all out theoretically in their heads. The problem is that the theory is not and cannot be translated into reality. There is no more comfortable place to live in the world for people – particularly those past their youthful and single years – than the American suburb. There are no metropolitan areas of similar size in the world where people spend less time traveling to and from work than in America. Take Hong Kong, which is by far the world’s most dense large first-world urban area. No other metropolitan area of its size should have such theoretically short trips, because everything is so close together. Yet, average travel time to work is almost double that of Dallas-Fort Worth, with a similar population. Indeed, even in “gridlocked” Los Angeles, so often ridiculed for its automobile-oriented “sprawl,” work trip travel times average nearly 40 minutes less per day than in that ultimate of urbanization, Hong Kong. That adds up to about a week’s worth of extra commuting time each year.

    Rather than trying to constrict the dream, President Obama should work on ways to expand it. This will not be easy. Today, less than 50 percent of African-American and Latino households own their own homes. At the same time, Anglo home ownership is about 75 percent. No program to extend the American Dream can be based on policies that unnecessarily increase the price of housing.

    For the new President, there is a clear choice. He can cast his lot with those whose strategies would extinguish the aspirations of millions of Americans, or he could make it easier for more households in the nation to achieve the American Dream.

    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.”

  • The Dawn of a New Age in the War on Poverty

    An article published in the Chicago Tribune on June 29, 1992 is entitled “The Great Society’s Great Failure.” It profiles the Inez, Kentucky family that appeared in the famous front porch photo that launched LBJ’s War on Poverty in 1964. Suffice it to say without revealing the particular gory details of their thwarted lives, the family’s fate was as dismal as the outcome of the War on Poverty. Mike Duncan, an Inez banker and now chairman of the Republican National Committee – battling to retain his position – put it mildly: “The War on Poverty did not succeed.”

    In 2009 where do we stand with America’s War on Poverty? Inez and the rest of Martin County were described in the article as “one of the poorest counties in a poor state. Of its 12,526 people, all but 27 are white.” The image stuck and Inez has been digging out ever since.

    The community’s lack of progress over the past several decades has been particularly ironic: until recently, the rest of America has been experiencing one of the greatest economic expansions in history.

    Now we have elected our first African American to the office of the presidency, a man who cut his political teeth working among the black poor of Chicago’s Southside. Barack Obama’s election has no doubt raised hopes around the Southside and other predominately African American distressed communities. But can the same be said for the more numerous, equally intractable neglected communities – labeled poor, white, aging, and rural (PWAR) – like Inez?

    This line of thinking has become even more popular as evidenced by the racial overtones, masquerading as satire, included on a CD released by a challenger of Mike Duncan for the RNC chair position. Politicos say there is a divide within both of the major political parties – appeal to the PWAR and die or reach out to gather more under the tent. PWARs are rarely spoken of in the media except in pejorative terms

    So far, there is little evidence that poor rural whites – epitomized by Appalachia – have any strong advocates in the new administration. There is not a single cabinet officer from anywhere in the deep or mid-south nor any important figure in the majority party from the region.

    So, what happens to the fortunes of the regions – the South in particular – in the new order? Will the battle of red versus blue gain new ground or will other rivalries and labels rise up? Will a region whose economy revolves around coal have a chance in a “new green world?”

    Right now places like Kentucky – decidedly red – could well be marginalized. The media enjoys painting our citizens as ignorant rubes (how else could they have voted against Obama?) This was implied in the mainstream news. (CNN had particular fun with it while profiling Clay County, Kentucky before the election and conducting a trailer escapade in Carlisle, Kentucky after the election).

    Seventeen years after the Tribune’s article, Inez and the rest of Martin County have chosen to declare their own war to overcome the endemic national stereotype that the War on Poverty placed upon them. This new spirit of localism was born first among the community’s young professionals who left Inez as high school graduates and have now returned as educated professionals seeking to earn their own piece of the American Dream. Their hope has been burnished in the fire of experiences gained as they saw and experienced the rewards of hard work and determination in other places. They concluded that Inez and Martin County could be something different, and they have returned to make it so.

    It is clear that President-elect Obama has a choice: be a great president and a uniter, or not. They say FDR was great because he reached out to those who were not for him. The times now are eerily similar. One hopes that a man who grew up as an outsider might realize that the “hill” people of Appalachia or the deep South aren’t all pathetic as portrayed in the news media; perhaps they don’t understand the message of hope because they have been betrayed before by “outsiders” attempting to convert them to the “mainstream.” The failures of the ‘war on poverty’ are still well remembered here.

    Not all 100 or more million new Americans who will be here by 2050 will head for the eight supercities. The vast majority won’t find work that will allow them to settle in the so-called “creative” hotbeds. Many will head for small to mid-sized towns with more affordable lifestyles, and perhaps more durable values. Perhaps others will begin to believe in the old adage that we can live and work anywhere and will do so, taking the opportunity to bring change to our communities.

    For its part, Inez, Kentucky has decided to rewrite its story and believes it can do so. As an Appalachian native, I believe it too. Their story is one of grit, determination, and sheer willpower to change the course of the future in a positive way. At a recent public meeting, an African American woman who had moved to Inez from D.C. stood up and provided a testimonial of faith and belief in her newfound home. She hoped others would come and begin to appreciate the lifestyle of a small town in hill and coal country. I had to ask afterward – is she for real? “Yes” came the reply, “she is very real.”

    A recent Esquire magazine feature called on “natives” to describe each of the 50 states. Actor Harry Dean Stanton, in the midst of philosophical ramblings, said: “There’s no answer to the state of Kentucky.” I don’t believe that’s entirely true.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.

  • Obama Family Values

    For a generation, conservatives have held a lock on the so-called “values” issue. But Barack Obama is slowly picking that lock, breaking into one of the GOP’s last remaining electoral treasures.

    The change starts with the powerful imagery of the new First Family. The Obamas seem to have it all: charming children; the supremely competent yet also consistently supportive wife, and the dynamo grandma, Marian Robinson, who serves as matriarch, moral arbiter and babysitter in chief.

    The new president’s focus on family reflects an increasing emphasis among African-American leaders on the importance of parental values. Many prominent black activists initially scorned Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report linking poverty among African-Americans to the decline of intact family units. But today, when roughly half of all black children live with single mothers, it is widely accepted that strong families represent the most effective way to reduce “the racial gap” in incomes.

    When it came to family, the last Democratic White House residents – the highly entertaining but also obviously dysfunctional Clintons – embodied persistent conflicts among baby boomers over sex and social roles. Remember Hillary’s resentful comments about “baking cookies”?

    By contrast, the focused and disciplined Obamas epitomize the aspirations most Americans hold for their own personal lives: caring fathers, strong mothers and an involved extended family.

    These ideals may be particularly appealing for Americans under 40, whose support has been instrumental in the president’s rise to power. Younger Americans are proving to be more family-oriented, in part because close to half come from divorced homes.

    Surveys reveal that people born between 1968 and 1979 place a considerably higher value on family, and a lower value on work, than their baby-boomer counterparts. Women in the former age cohort are actually having more children than their predecessors and, particularly among the college-educated, they appear to be working somewhat less.

    And this family-friendly shift is likely to continue throughout the next wave of child-rearers. As Morley Winograd and Michael Hais suggest in their book, Millennial Makeover, the Millennial generation, born after 1983 and twice as numerous as Generation X, also enthusiastically embraces the notion of a strong family.

    Indeed, three-fourths of 13- to 24-year-olds, according to one 2007 survey, consider time spent with family the most important factor in their own happiness, rating it even higher than time spent with friends or a significant other. More than 80% thought getting married would make them happy. Some 77% said they definitely or probably would want children, while less than 12% said they likely wouldn’t.

    What’s more, the current state of the economy is likely to strengthen ties among family members. One-fourth of Generation X-ers, for example, still receive financial help from their parents, as do nearly one-third of Millennials. As many as 40% of Americans between ages 20 and 34 now live at least part-time with their parents, an option that will only become more commonplace in areas where home prices are particularly high and employment opportunities are sharply limited.

    Yet even if family values are in ascendance, how they are expressed sharply diverges from the norms and attitudes typically associated with the Religious Right. In fact, on a host of issues – including gay rights, interracial dating and stem cell research – millennials trend more toward liberal views than earlier generations, Winograd says.

    “They are more tolerant as well as more conventional,” he notes. “They follow the social rules – they don’t want to be rebellious. They want a basically conventional suburban family life.”

    Attitudes concerning religion – the other critical part of the “values” issue – reveal a similar fusion of conventionality and pragmatism. Like other Americans, Millennials are far more religiously oriented than their counterparts in other advanced countries. Fully one-fourth of Americans in their 20s and 30s, observes Princeton sociologist Robert Wurthnow, consider themselves “very spiritual,” even if they rarely attend church. A 2003 UCLA study found roughly three out of four college students deem their spiritual or religious views important, but most see their (older) professors as largely indifferent to such concerns.

    Yet this spiritual orientation does not imply a shift toward any retrograde “moral majority” conservatism. Upward mobility among evangelicals and fundamentalists, as well as the increased racial integration within churches, has lessened the once-glaring gaps between conservative Protestants, particularly in the South, and the rest of American society. This liberalization is particularly acute when it comes to issues like homosexuality and censorship, but also extends to the role of women and the teaching of religion in public schools.

    I’ve observed this shift firsthand teaching at Pepperdine, a school associated with the conservative Church of Christ, and Chapman University, which has a more liberal Christian orientation. Students embracing fundamentalist or evangelical creeds usually oppose both abortion and gay marriage, but they appear remarkably tolerant and accepting of homosexuals, racial minorities and Jews – attitudes that might shock the more insulated liberal landsmen.

    My more religious students also tend to be ecumenical in their views. Like the Obamas, many are seeking the right mix of spirituality and social activism. Wade Clark Roof, the author of Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, describes such people as ‘grazers.’ They often meet their spiritual needs through different channels – online Bible study, meditation and even Buddhism.

    Obama seems to be honing his appeal to precisely this demographic. Tapping Orange County evangelical minister Rick Warren for the inaugural invocation opens an important avenue to a new generation of spiritually oriented young people.

    Warren should concern the increasingly marginal hard-right Christian conservatives, who face potent competition for the political loyalties of their younger congregants. With economic issues pushing the middle class to the left, Democratic progress among the so-called “value” voters could leave the already bedraggled Republican ranks even more seriously diminished.

    Also threatened are those on the cultural left, some of whom expressed outrage about Warren’s appointment. Some Democrats see it as part of a conscious strategy to subordinate their social agenda for a more mainstream, family-centered one that holds broader political appeal. “It’s good for him to let the bed-wetters go,” scoffs one well-connected Southern California labor organizer. “They are the ones who have made it difficult to get a majority for the really important things.”

    In reality, though, Obama’s jettisoning of the cultural left is relatively risk-free. No matter how offended they might be, feminist, gay-rights and ultra-secularist activists are not likely to become Republicans. Even if Obama is not as perfect as they imagined, he will be far more amenable to their causes than George W. Bush.

    Overall, Obama is playing an exceedingly smart game of cultural politics. Most Americans, particularly youth, no longer relate to the vintage 1950s sitcom Ozzie and Harriet, an illustration of the lifestyle embraced by conservatives. Too many women now work outside the home and have friends or relatives who practice “alternative lifestyles.” Demonizing “deviants” is increasingly difficult, after all, when many if not most Americans have loved ones who are gay or otherwise outside the historical mainstream.

    Yet at the same time, there is a growing rejection of the highly secularized, self-absorbed lifestyle many boomers embrace. As a result, when it comes to today’s values, the role models seem to be socially hip and strong families like the Huxtables from The Cosby Show. Or perhaps, just maybe, the Obamas.

    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.

    Image courtesy flickr user Vargas2040