New Geography

Tag: San Francisco

  • How About a Betty Ford Bottled Water Rehab Clinic in San Francisco?

    From late-night refrigerator raids to splurging on a new wardrobe, everyone is prone to the occasional overindulgence. For San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom, that overindulgence meant nothing more than a plastic water bottle.

    In June 2007, the mayor “issued an executive order directing city government to no longer purchase bottled water,” to cut down on waste in the city landfill and to utilize the pristine Sierra Nevada reservoir’s resources.

    Last year, Newsom also called on restaurants to stop selling bottled water to customers and has generally declined bottled water at most events.

    In something better suited to cushy celebrity gossip rags, an empty case of Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water was discovered in the mayor’s trunk of his car.

    While a spokesman for the mayor has assured the public that the water was for the mayor’s security detail, the Newsom camp also issued a statement that would be better suited for rehab-bound celebrity.

    “The mayor will be the first to admit that he occasionally indulges in bottled water,” said his spokesperson. “It’s not something he’s proud of.”

    During these bleak economic times, the public’s hyper-vigilant scrutiny of politicians seems zeroed in on busting them on seemingly inevitable examples of hypocrisy.

    Needless to say, Newsom will think twice before purchasing bottled water again.

  • Death of the California Dream

    For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.

    California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence — and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.

    The facts at hand are pretty dreary. California entered the recession early last year, according to the Forecast Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is expected to lag behind the nation well into 2011. Unemployment stands at roughly 10 percent, ahead only of Rust Belt basket cases like Michigan and East Coast calamity Rhode Island. Not surprisingly, people are fleeing this mounting disaster. Net outmigration has been growing every year since about 2003 and should reach well over 200,000 by 2011. This outflow would be far greater, notes demographer Wendell Cox, if not for the fact that many residents can’t sell their homes and are essentially held prisoner by their mortgages.

    For Californians, this recession has been driven by different elements than the early-1990s downturn, which was largely caused by external forces. The end of the Cold War stripped away hundreds of thousands of well-paid defense-related jobs. Meanwhile, the Japanese economy went into a tailspin, leading to a massive disinvestment here. In South L.A., the huge employment losses helped create the conditions conducive to social unrest. The 1992 Rodney King verdict may have provided the match, but the kindling was dry and plentiful.

    This time around, the recession feels like a self-inflicted wound, the result of “bubble dependency.” First came the dotcom bubble, centered largely in the Bay Area. The fortunes made there created an enormous surge in wealth, but by 2001 that bust had punched a huge hole in the California budget. Voters, disgusted by the legislature’s inability to cope with the crisis, recalled the governor, Gray Davis, and replaced him with a megastar B-grade actor from Austria.

    Yet almost as soon as the Internet bubble had evaporated, a new one emerged in housing. As prices soared in coastal enclaves, people fled to the periphery, often buying homes far from traditional suburban job centers. At first, it seemed like a miraculous development: people cheered as their home’s “value” increased 20 percent annually. But even against the backdrop of the national housing bubble, California soon became home to gargantuan imbalances between incomes and property prices. The state was also home to such mortgage hawkers as New Century Financial Corp., Countrywide and IndyMac. For a time the whole California economy seemed to revolve around real-estate speculation, with upwards of 50 percent of all new jobs coming from growth in fields like real estate, construction and mortgage brokering.

    As a result, when the housing bubble burst, the state’s huge real-estate economy evaporated almost overnight. Both parties in the legislature and the governor failed miserably to anticipate the impending fiscal deluge they should have known was all but inevitable.

    To many longtime California observers, the inability of the political, business and academic elites to adequately anticipate and address the state’s persistent problems has been a source of consternation and wonderment. In my view, the key to understanding California’s precipitous decline transcends terms like liberal or conservative, Democratic and Republican. The real culprit lies in the politics of narcissism.

    California, like any gorgeously endowed person, has a natural inclination toward self-absorption. It has always been a place of unsurpassed splendor; it has inspired and attracted writers, artists, dreamers, savants and philosophers. That’s especially true of the Bay Area—ground zero for California narcissism and arguably the most attractive urban expanse on the continent; Neil Morgan in 1960 described San Francisco as “the narcissus of the West,” a place whose fundamental asset was first its own beauty, followed by its own culture of self-regard.

    At first this high self-regard inspired some remarkable public achievements. California rebuilt San Francisco from the ashes of the great 1906 fire, and constructed in Los Angeles the world’s most far-reaching transit system. These achievements reached a pinnacle under Gov. Pat Brown, who in the 1960s oversaw the expansion of the freeways, the construction of new university, state- and community-college campuses, and the creation of water projects that allowed farming in dry but fertile landscapes.

    Yet success also spoiled the state, incubating an ever more inward-looking form of narcissism. Even as the middle class enjoyed “the good life” — high-paying jobs, single-family homes (often with pools), vacations at the beach — there was a growing, palpable sense of threats from rising taxes, a restless youth population and a growing nonwhite demographic. One early expression of this was the late-1970s antitax movement led by Howard Jarvis. The rising cost of government was placing too much of a burden on middle-class homeowners, and the legislature refused to address the problem with reasonable reforms. The result, however, was unreasonable reform, with new and inflexible limits on property and income taxes that made holding the budget together far more difficult.

    Middle-class Californians also began to feel inundated by a racial tide. This was not totally based on prejudice; Californians seemed to accept legal immigration. But millions of undocumented newcomers provoked fear that there were no limits on how many people would move into the state, filling emergency rooms with the uninsured and crowding schools with children whose parents neither spoke English nor had the time to prepare their children for school. By 1994, under Gov. Pete Wilson, the anti-immigrant narcissism fueled Proposition 187. It was now OK to deny school and medical services to people because, at the end, they looked different.

    Today the politics of narcissism is most evident among “progressives.” Although the Republicans can still block massive tax increases, the predominant force in California politics lies with two groups — the gentry liberals and the public sector. The public-sector unions, once relatively poorly paid, now enjoy wages and benefits unavailable to most middle-class Californians, and do so with little regard to the fiscal and overall economic impact. Currently barely 3 percent of the state budget goes to building roads or water systems, compared with nearly 20 percent in the Pat Brown era; instead we’re funding gilt-edged pensions and lifetime guaranteed health care. It’s often a case of I’m all right, Jack — and the hell with everyone else.

    The most recent ascendant group are the gentry liberals, whose base lies in the priciest precincts of San Francisco, the Silicon Valley and the west side of Los Angeles. Gentry liberalism reflects the narcissistic values of successful boomers and their offspring; their politics are all about them. In the past this was tied as much to cultural issues, like gay rights (itself a noble cause) and public support for the arts. More recently, the dominant issue revolves around environmentalism.

    Green politics came early to California and for understandable reasons: protecting the resources and beauty of the nation’s loveliest landscapes. Yet in recent years, the green agenda has expanded well beyond that of the old conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt, who battled to preserve wilderness but also cared deeply about boosting productivity and living standards for the working classes. In contrast, the modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a “cancer” that needs to be contained. By their very nature, the greens tend to regard growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.

    You can see the effects of the gentry’s green politics up close in places like the Salinas Valley, a lovely agricultural region south of San Jose. As community leaders there have tried to construct policies to create new higher-wage jobs in the area (a project on which I’ve worked as a consultant), local progressives — largely wealthy people living on the Monterey coast — have opposed, for example, the expansion of wineries that might bring new jobs to a predominantly Latino area with persistent double-digit unemployment. As one winegrower told me last year: “They don’t want a facility that interferes with their viewshed.” For such people, the crusade against global warming makes a convenient foil in arguing against anything that might bring industrial or any other kind of middle-wage growth to the state. Greens here often speak movingly about the earth — but also about their personal redemption. They have engaged a legal and regulatory process that provides the wealthy and their progeny an opportunity to act out their desire to “make a difference” — often without real concern for the outcome. Environmentalism becomes a theater in which the privileged act out their narcissism.

    It’s even more disturbing that many of the primary apostles of this kind of politics are themselves wealthy high-livers like Hollywood magnates, Silicon Valley billionaires and well-heeled politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown. They might imagine that driving a Prius or blocking a new water system or new suburban housing development serves the planet, but this usually comes at no cost to themselves or their lifestyles.

    The best great hope for California’s future does not lie with the narcissists of left or right but with the newcomers, largely from abroad. These groups still appreciate the nation of opportunity and aspire to make the California — and American — Dream their own.

    Of course, companies like Google and industries like Hollywood remain critical components, but both Silicon Valley and the entertainment complex are now mature, and increasingly dominated by people with access to money or the most elite educations. Neither is likely to produce large numbers of new jobs, particularly for working- and middle-class Californians.

    In contrast, the newcomers, who often lack both money and education, continue in the hierarchy-breaking tradition that made California great in the first place. Many of them live and build their businesses not in places like San Francisco or West L.A., but in the increasingly multicultural suburbs on the periphery, places like the San Gabriel Valley, Riverside and Cupertino. Immigrants played a similar role in the recovery from the early-1990s doldrums. In the ’90s, for example, the number of Latino-owned businesses already was expanding at four times the rate of Anglo ones, growing from 177,000 to 440,000. Today we see signs of much the same thing, though it often involves immigrants from the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Mexico or South Korea. One developer, Alethea Hsu, just opened a new shopping center in the San Gabriel Valley this January — and it’s fully leased. “We have a great trust in the future,” says the Cornell-trained physician.

    You see some of the same thing among other California immigrants. More than three decades ago the Cardenas family started slaughtering and selling pigs grown on their two-acre farm near Corona. From there, Jesús Sr. and his wife, Luz, expanded. “We would shoot the hogs through the head and sell them off the truck,” says José, their son. “We’d sell the meat to people who liked it fresh: Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans and Hispanics…We would sell to anyone.” Their first store, predominantly a carnicería, or meat shop, took advantage of the soaring Latino population. By 2008, they had 20 stores with more than $400 million in sales. In 2005 they started to produce Mexican food, including some inspired by Luz’s recipes to distribute through such chains as Costco. Mexican food, notes Jesús Jr., is no longer a niche. “It’s a crossover product now.”

    Despite the current mess in Sacramento, this suggests some hope for the future. Perhaps the gubernatorial candidacy of Silicon Valley folks like former eBay CEO Meg Whitman (a Republican), or her former eBay employee Steve Wesley (a Democrat), could bring some degree of competence and common sense to the farce now taking place in Sacramento. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who’s said to be considering the race, would also be preferable to a green zealot like Jerry Brown or empty suits like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom.

    But if I am looking for hope and inspiration, for California or the country, I would look first and foremost at people like the Cardenas family. They create jobs for people who didn’t go to Stanford or whose parents lack a trust fund. They constitute what any place needs to survive: risk takers who are self-confident but rarely selfish. These are people who look at the future, not in the mirror.

    This article originally appeared at Newsweek.

    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.

  • Housing Prices Will Continue to Fall, Especially in California

    The latest house price data indicates no respite in the continuing price declines, especially where the declines have been the most severe. But no place has seen the devastation that has occurred in California. As median house prices climbed to an unheard-of level – 10 or more times median household incomes – a sense of euphoria developed among many purchasers, analysts and business reporters who deluded themselves into believing that metaphysics or some such cause would propel prices into a more remote orbit.

    Yet gravity still held. A long-term supply of owned housing for a large population cannot be sustained at prices people cannot afford. Since World War II, median house prices in the United States have tended to be 3.0 times or less median household incomes. This fact should have been kept in mind before – and now as well.

    By abandoning this standard, California’s coastal markets skidded towards disaster. Just over the past year, house prices in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose metropolitan areas have declined at more than three times the greatest national annual loss rate during the Great Depression as reported by economist Robert Schiller.

    But the re-entry into earthly prices is just beginning. In the four coastal markets, the Median Multiple has plummeted since our third quarter 2008 data just reported in our 5th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. The most recent data from the California Association of Realtors would suggest that the Median Multiple has fallen from 8.0 to 6.7 in San Francisco, in just three months. In San Jose, the drop has been from 7.4 to 6.3. Los Angeles has fallen from 7.2 to 6.2 and San Diego has slipped from 5.9 to 5.2.

    Yet history suggests that there is a good distance yet to go. California’s prices will have to fall much further, particularly along the coast. Due largely to restrictive land use policies, California house prices had risen to well above the national Median Multiple by the early 1990s, an association identified by Dartmouth’s William Fischel. During the last trough, after the early 1990s bubble and before the 2000s bubble, the Median Multiple in the four coastal California markets fell to between 4.0 and 4.5. It would not be surprising for those levels to be seen again before there is price stability.

    Using this standard, I expect median house prices could fall another $150,000 to $200,000 in the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas. The Los Angeles area could see another $100,000 to $125,000 drop, while the San Diego area could be in store for a further decline of $50,000 to $75,000.

    Is there anything that can stop this? Yes there is – the government. This is the same force that caused much of the problem at the onset. Now with the passage of Senate Bill 375 and an over-zealous state Attorney General more intent on engaging in a misconceived anti-greenhouse gas jihad, it may become all but impossible to build the single-family homes that, according to a Public Policy Institute of California survey, are preferred by more than 80% of California. Instead we may see ever more dense housing adjacent to new transit stops – exactly the kind of housing that has flooded the market in recent years. Many of these units, once meant for sale, have been turned into rentals. Many others lay empty.

    In the short run, however, even Jerry Brown’s lunacy will have limited impact. The continuing recession will continue to reduce prices even though the supply remains steady. The surplus of dense condominium units will expand the swelling inventory of rentals, as prices continue to drop towards a 4.0 to 4.5 Median Multiple or below.

    The one place which may benefit from this will be some of the less glamorous inland markets, that are suddenly becoming far more affordable. Sacramento earns the honor of being the first major metropolitan area to reach a Median Multiple of 3.0, as a result of continuing declines. Riverside-San Bernardino is close behind, and should be in this territory within the next year.

    But many other overpriced markets have yet to experience this kind of pain. Prime candidates for big reductions include New York, Miami, Portland (Oregon), Boston and Seattle. These areas may not have suffered the extreme disequilibrium seen in California, but their prices have soared. As the economies of these regions – New York and Portland in particular – begin to unravel, prices will certainly fall, perhaps precipitously.

    This may not make Manhattan or Portland’s Pearl District affordable for the middle class but could drive prices to reasonable levels in the outer boroughs, Long Island or the Portland suburbs. This may be a disaster for the speculators, architects, developers and some local governments, but for many middle class families it may seem like the dawning of a new age of reason.

    HOUSING AFFORDABILITY RATINGS UNITED STATES METROPOLITAN MARKETS OVER 1,000,000
    Rank Metropolitan Area Median Multiple
    AFFORDABLE  
    1 Indianapolis 2.2
    2 Cleveland 2.3
    2 Detroit 2.3
    4 Rochester 2.4
    5 Buffalo 2.5
    5 Cincinnati 2.5
    7 Atlanta 2.6
    7 Pittsburgh 2.6
    7 St. Louis 2.6
    10 Columbus 2.7
    10 Dallas-Fort Worth 2.7
    10 Kansas City 2.7
    10 Mem[hios 2.7
    14 Oklahoma City 2.8
    15 Houston 2.9
    15 Louisville 2.9
    15 Nashville 2.9
    MODERATELY UNAFFORDABLE  
    18 Minneapolis-St. Paul 3.1
    18 New Orleans 3.1
    20 Birmingham 3.2
    20 San Antonio 3.2
    22 Austin 3.3
    22 Jacksonville 3.3
    24 Phoenix 3.4
    25 Sacramento 3.5
    26 Tampa-St. Petersburg 3.6
    27 Denver 3.7
    27 Hartford 3.7
    27 Las Vegas 3.7
    27 Raleigh 3.7
    27 Richmond 3.7
    32 Salt Lake City 3.8
    33 Charlotte 3.9
    33 Riverside-San Bernardino 3.9
    33 Washington (DC) 3.9
    36 Milwaukee 4.0
    36 Philadelphia 4.0
    SERIOUSLY UNAFFORDABLE  
    38 Chicago 4.1
    38 Orlando 4.1
    40 Baltimore 4.2
    41 Virginia Beach-Norfolk 4.3
    42 Providence 4.4
    43 Portland (OR) 4.9
    SEVERELY UNAFFORDABLE  
    44 Seattle 5.2
    45 Boston 5.3
    46 Miami-West Palm Beach 5.6
    47 San Diego 5.9
    48 New York 7.0
    49 Los Angeles 7.2
    50 San Jose 7.4
    51 San Francisco 8.0
    2008: 3rd Quarter  
    Median Multiple: Median House Price divided by Median Household Income
    Source: http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf

    Note: The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey is a joint effort of Wendell Cox of Demographia (United States) and Hugh Pavletich of Performance Urban Planning (New Zealand).

    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.”

  • Corporate Sponsorship of the Golden Gate, the Ultimate Sign of Failed Infrastructure

    The most anticipated tourist attraction in the city where I live, The Golden Gate Bridge, is a testament to the lasting utility of a well executed infrastructure project. The world’s most famous suspension bridge still serves as the critical artery connecting San Francisco to the bedroom communities of Marin County to the north, where much of the city’s workforce resides. Remarkably, this marvel of engineering was completed in the late 1930s – a time when the U.S. was coming out of the Great Depression.

    The New Deal brought about an expansion of infrastructure that should inspire us. Yet nearly 70 years after its completion, the sobering reality remains: it’s difficult to imagine a project of that moxie being constructed today.

    One indicator of the distance between then and now can be seen in the story of Doyle Drive – the one-and-half mile southern approach to the Bridge. In 1993, USA Today reported that the elevated portion of Doyle Drive is the 5th most dangerous bridge in America. After years of EIR studies and bickering amongst a myriad of stakeholders and governmental agencies, San Francisco voters in 2003 finally passed Proposition K, a sales tax increase ensuring the city’s funding for an upgrade of Doyle Drive.

    Sales tax revenue generated from Proposition K is slated to cover only $67.9 million of the $1.045 billion estimated cost of the project. State and Federal funding has also been committed for the project, yet there is still $414 million of cost yet to be accounted for. Along with hopes of securing additional funding from the Fed, The Golden Gate Bridge District is responsible for providing $75 million for the Doyle Drive retrofit. To meet the cost of this and other projects, such as the addition of a suicide-prevention net, the Bridge District is seriously considering soliciting corporate sponsorship of the world-famous span.

    The appalling fact that corporate sponsorship is on the table for one of the most iconic pieces of infrastructure in the modern world confirms the failure of the public sector in regards to maintaining an aging infrastructure. For the past few years, politicians at all levels of the government seeking office have beaten the drum of tax reductions in order to secure votes, only to find themselves with budget crises on their hands once elected. With city and state budgets strapped, local politicians often look to the federal government in order to help pay for repairing roads and other basic services, not to mention the huge pensions of public employees.

    The other place local governments look for money to balance the budget is from the private sector. In many cities across America, elected officials have responded to these kinds of crises by partnering up with private enterprise to generate jobs and sales tax revenue by developing ‘convention and retail districts’. Oftentimes these developments will also include hotels, luxury condominiums and even sporting or arts venues. Even before the recent economic downturn, many of these developments were representing white elephants, sitting empty while the issues of sustained job creation and infrastructure repair remain unresolved.

    Examples of infrastructure from the past, such as the ruins of Roman Aqueducts on the Iberian Peninsula and the dams of the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, remind us of the great lengths societies will go through in order to function more efficiently. Although today the concept of infrastructure is primarily associated with industrial economies and modernization in the developing world, the truth is that ever since the earliest agrarian communities humans have been building physical systems that harness the powerful forces of nature and make life more convenient.

    Years from now, the built environment of America will provide one of the primary measurements for historians seeking to quantify 20th Century achievements. Today the vast networks of roads, bridges, ports, airports, power plants and water lines built in the U.S. over the past 150 years remains the standard for nations undergoing industrialization. Yet while other countries are busy catching up to the American paradigm, the U.S. system is falling behind. Entropy is setting in, and repeated policy failures prevent retrofitting and repair to take place at a mass scale.

    With all the current hubris surrounding the “New New Deal” proposed by the incoming Obama administration, discussion about the fundamental role of infrastructure seems to be missing from the conversation. Primary focus about the infrastructure package remains on rapid job creation rather than long term economic health. New Orleans remains a grim reminder of how infrastructural failure can destroy an economy for good, and misplaced investments in convention centers and other ephemera have limited impact.

    There has also been much press about a ‘green revolution’. While looking for cleaner alternatives to powering our society is an important issue, there is almost no acknowledgment that the most sustainable approach lies in fixing and updating what is already in place. Already, speculators are foaming at the mouth at what will end up probably being the next bubble – clean tech.

    In the coming days, it will be critical that careful attention be paid to a basic approach to ensure that stimulus money is not squandered on pork. As state and local governments – as well as big business and special interests – vie for handouts from Papa Fed, the United States government must seek ways to allocate funds for maximum investment in future generations.

    This is not to say such investments should not be bold and even beautiful. I know it’s possible every time I look at, or cross, the Golden Gate.

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

  • Skepticism Towards Congestion Pricing in San Francisco

    If there’s one place in America most likely to adopt congestion pricing, you would think it would be San Francisco. The combination of affluence, deep-seated environmentalism and a tradition of progressive politics would lend itself to adopting the program. But even residents there are skeptical.

    Congestion pricing is the practice of charging commuters a fee for driving through a congested downtown area during peak commute times. In San Francisco, they are discussing a payment of between 50 cents and $5 to be assessed to drivers who commute between 6–9 a.m. and 3–6 p.m. The argument is that by doing so, you reduce congestion and raise public coffers to be poured into public transportation. In London, traffic was reduced 21% and public transit increased 36% when congestion pricing was adopted (it’s also been adopted in Singapore and Stockholm).

    But SF is no London when it comes to public transportation. Anyone who has ever stuffed themselves into a city bus headed for points westward after work knows it is not nearly as reliable or as comfortable as “the tube.” It seems like there would have to be a rise in the standards of public transportation there to really make it effective – and money for that would not be available for some time given California’s budget circumstances.

  • “Milk” Puts New Attention on San Francisco’s Castro District

    The Castro District of San Francisco has found itself thrust into the national spotlight by recent events. With the premiere of Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” across the country and the continuing controversy over Proposition 8, the neighborhood so instrumental in the gay rights movement is receiving a new surge of attention – and more importantly respect – for its rich history. Yet the Castro is not a museum district; it is a living, breathing neighborhood that is changing and facing significant challenges in a down economy.

    Clearly the area has not lost its huge symbolic political role. The brouhaha over the passage of Proposition 8 – which barred gay marriage in California – sparked marches and protests. To many it appears that the battle that began with Harvey Milk all those years ago has just entered a new phase that many Castro residents are anxious to continue.

    Situated in the heart of the city, just east of Twin Peaks – a large golden hill which beats back the fog from the neighborhood – the Castro is beloved for its colorful Victorians, vintage European streetcars, and eclectic shops and restaurants. It is the site of Harvey Milk’s famous camera shop. The triumphs (and recent setbacks) of the gay rights movement are on display at the large LGBT Center at Octavia and Market streets and in a new small exhibition, “Passionate Struggle,” that was just opened by the GLBT Historical Society at 18th and Castro streets (in one of its last acts, the space for the exhibition was donated by Washington Mutual for a year).

    The neighborhood has been changing in recent years – shopkeepers report a surge in strollers in the neighborhood. Professional couples and their children who may not be able to land a place in Noe Valley over the hill (aka “Stroller Valley”) have slowly been moving into the “gayborhood” (as it is affectionately called). Tour buses have been stopping at the busy intersection of 18th and Castro streets where tourists have been known to get out and, not always out of respectful curiosity, snap photos of two men holding hands to show their aunt in Peoria.

    Local merchants are hoping that all this recent attention can translate to the bottom line (I challenge someone to find an area of a large American city with more neighborhood and merchant groups than the Castro). Though known for technology, tourism is one of the largest industries in San Francisco and business has been lackluster of late. A huge vacancy where Tower Records used to sit at Market and Noe streets still lies empty after nearly two years. The building used to house a large Finnish baths when the area was populated by so many Norwegians, Swedes and Finns it was known as “Little Scandinavia.” One retailer, All American Boy, recently closed its doors after 32 years, and Suri – one of my favorite restaurants – will close for good on December 6th.

    Although the neighborhood has successfully positioned itself as the historical home of the LGBT community, many wonder if that legacy will be continued by a younger generation of gays who came out in a more tolerant era. They may take for granted what was fought and even died for by Harvey Milk and many others.

    Talk to longtime Castro residents and you hear concern in their voices that the neighborhood has lost its knack for experimentation and zaniness. The nearby Mission and South of Market districts now appear more triumphant in terms of “edginess” – a quality that is so important to San Franciscans’ identity. A friend of mine surprised me when he told me that he much preferred the gay culture in his home city of Atlanta over the Castro. The bars, he explained, were “more happening” than those here.

    Today many younger gays often prefer to venture to the city’s uberhip South of Market district where the bars and clubs are larger. Many complain about the narrow and sometimes dirty sidewalks as well as the lack of a large public space in the neighborhood.

    Of course, the neighborhood does not always feel as modern in its look as the glass towers South of Market. But still the Castro continues to be a busy area with numerous cultural events, including the neighborhood’s greatest resource, the peerlessly beautiful Castro Theatre which showcases so many great festivals throughout the year. With numerous events, parties and festivals year-round, the Castro has retained much of its original flair and taste for experimentation even as gay culture and the economy have changed. “Milk,” and Sean Penn’s amazing performance, do not only testify to this historical iconoclasm but speak of its staying power.

    Andy Sywak is the publisher of the Castro Courier neighborhood newspaper.

  • San Francisco and the Meltdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • No More Urban Hype

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • A New Model for New York — San Francisco Anyone?

    From the beginning of the mortgage crisis New York and other financial centers have acted as if they were immune to the suffering in the rest of country. As suburbs, exurbs and hard-scrabble out of the way urban neighborhoods suffered with foreclosures and endured predictions of their demise, the cognitive elites in places like Manhattan felt confident about their own prospects, property values and jobs. So what if the rubes in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tampa and Riverside all teetered on the brink?

    Now only a deluded real estate speculator — or a flack for Mayor Michael Bloomberg — could deny that the mortgage crisis wolf is now at Gotham’s door. Having underwritten and profited obscenely from the loans that launched the crisis, Wall Street is now reeling from the collapse of several of its strongest linchpins, including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, while Merrill Lynch has become little more than an annex to Charlotte-based Bank of America. AIG has been forced on the federal teat and other giants, even Citibank, could be next.

    With perhaps tens of thousands of high-paying jobs about to evaporate, and with them the rich bonuses that fueled Mayor Bloomberg’s grandiose vision of a “luxury city,” New Yorkers should brace themselves for hard times. Bloomberg’s brave talk about media, tourism, bioscience or the arts making up the difference should not be taken too seriously. In reality New York has never been more dependent on Wall Street than it is today, in large part because most other middle class sectors, like manufacturing and warehousing, declined massively over the past seven years.

    As a result, nearly one out of four dollars earned in New York — although accounting for less than five percent of all jobs — are tied to the financial sector. Overall job growth has been slow in finance, and stood well below historic highs even at the crest of the boom, and are now dropping radically. This means, as a result, a group of relatively few big earners are more and more important as overall employment in finance declines.

    Tourism certainly cannot make up the balance since it is a notoriously low wage sector and may soon be subject to a major decline in visitors due to higher airline prices and a growing downturn in Europe. New York has a decent bioscience sector, but Gotham is far as dominant here as in finance or media. There’s strong competition from a host of places, notably St. Louis, Houston, Boston, San Diego and Silicon Valley.

    So where can a plutocratic Mayor look for inspiration for the future? He may not like it but arguably the best model for New York may be San Francisco. More than any American city, San Francisco epitomizes one possible future for American urbanism of the “luxury” variety.

    The parallels between San Francisco and underlying trends in New York, and to some extent Chicago, are striking. Like New York on a smaller scale, San Francisco was once a corporate headquarters town and a powerful financial center. But starting in the 1980s and 1990s that all started to change. Corporations fled for the suburbs, or got merged with firms located elsewhere. It started with the exodus of Crocker Bank. In 1998 its most important company, started by an Italian immigrant in the city, the Bank of America, fled to North Carolina. Like New York, it has flushed away virtually its entire industrial sector and lost ground as a port.

    Yet through this all, San Francisco managed to reinvent itself. First it anchored itself to Silicon Valley, becoming the playground, advertising and media center for the nerdistan to the south. Then, after the collapse of the dot.com bubble, the city fell back on its intrinsic appeal as a place, relying largely on tourism and its ability to attract high-end residents.

    This discreet charm has allowed San Francisco to enjoy a reasonable economic comeback, not so much as a corporate or economic center, but as a high-end destination for the nomadic rich, the culturally curious and the still adolescent twenty and even thirty somethings. Many of this last group have strong skills sets and remain a powerful asset to the city.

    You can see the changes just by walking the streets. Three decades ago, when I worked in the City, San Francisco was still in large part a city of suits and blue-collar workers; today it’s black-garbed cool and casually elegant. There are more wealthy residents and decidedly less minorities, even Hispanics, and ever fewer children.

    This pattern could represent the future — and even the present — in parts of New York and even on the fringes of Brooklyn. We have seen that the “baby boom” in Manhattan does not last much past age five. When Wall Streeters lose their ability to pay for nannies, summer camps, private schools, etc, many affluent families may not be able to hang out that long.

    But then again there are those residents there will not lose their jobs. These include those tied to “luxury” industries, media, and non-profits. Not to be ignored also are the growing ranks of trustifarians, wealthy people living off their parents or grandparents’ labor. These are not the prototypical New Yorker on the make, like Charlie Sheen in “Wall Street,” but they have spending power, connections and often political influence.

    None of these groups are likely to disappear because of a mere trifle like a financial system collapse. These are committed denizens of the urban pleasure dome, content either to live minimally or (for the time being at least) pursue such generally non-remunerative activities like working in the arts or making documentary films.

    Of course, cities like New York and Chicago, also likely to be hard hit by the securities industry meltdown, may not be able to live as richly in hard times like San Francisco. Parts of Manhattan and Manhattanized Brooklyn might endure a metropolitan recession, but it may be tougher on the mostly minority, poor and working class residents who inhabit the outer reaches of the outer boroughs . These residents will suffer from the inevitable cutbacks in city services as well as the loss of retail, hospitality and construction jobs.

    In contrast, “The City,” as San Francisco likes to be known, is both small, compact and surrounded largely by affluent, low-density suburbs. It effectively has no real analogue to the outer boroughs. To see the dark side of America’s urban reality, you increasingly have to go east across the Bay to the crime-infested streets of Oakland, where the once proud dream of civic renaissance appears to be slowly fading.

    Of course, New Yorkers may reject this vision of their future. San Franciscans, have long prioritized joie de vive over imperial visions. In contrast, New Yorkers derive much of their civic self-esteem from their city’s role as the “capital of the world.”

    But if New Yorkers want to keep this slogan to be more than a marketing jingle, they will have to transcend the lame “luxury city” zeitgiest. Spending nearly four billion on new sparkling sports stadiums, and even Bloomberg’s media mastery, won’t get it done. It will take hard work, a commitment to infrastructure and broad-based job growth.

    It’s hard to know if New York still has the stomach for this kind of hard work. As someone whose familial roots in the city span over a century, I hope so. New Yorkers are a resilient lot, as they have shown many times in the past. But if they have lost their appetite for hard struggle, well, they can always consider becoming the next San Francisco.

    Joel Kotkin is Executive Editor of NewGeography.com

  • Are Housing Declines Evenly Spread? – An Examination of California

    To read the popular press, one gets the impression that the collapse of the housing market is concentrated largely in the suburbs and exurbs, as people flock back to the cities in response to the mortgage crisis and high gas prices. A review of mortgage meltdown “ground zero” California indicates the picture is far more nuanced.

    California’s metropolitan areas have seen the greatest median house price decreases in the nation. Each of the four largest metropolitan regions, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego and Sacramento have experienced median house price decreases of more than 25 percent over the past year (see Methodology Notes below). These decreases have not been distributed in a way that belies much of the ‘Back to the City’ hype.

    Los Angeles: In the broader Los Angeles metropolitan region, the smallest house price declines have been in the inner suburbs — generally those jurisdictions between 10 and 20 miles from downtown. The inner suburbs have seen a median house price decline of 20 percent. These include wide swaths of employment-rich areas like West Los Angeles, the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

    Somewhat surprisingly — particularly given the hype — the central areas of LA have suffered a somewhat higher rate of decline, at 22 percent. This includes areas close and around downtown Los Angeles, which has been among the ballyhooed “renaissance areas.” These numbers, significantly, do not include the many new units that were supposed to become condos but, due to lack of qualified buyers, have been thrown onto the rental market.

    It is true, however, that, if the condo-to-rental trend is left out, an even higher decline has taken place in the outer suburbs, at 30 percent. The outer suburbs include eastern Los Angeles County, eastern Ventura County, much of Orange County and the Riverside-San Bernardino area. The largest declines of 34 percent were in the “exurbs” — areas generally far from LA’s archipelago of employment centers and often over mountain ranges. The exurbs include the Antelope Valley, southwestern Riverside County, and the desert areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

    San Francisco Bay Area: The situation is somewhat different in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to one of the nation’s most vibrant urban cores, the city of San Francisco. House prices declined less than five percent in the city, a remarkable affirmation of the place’s continued appeal for affluent people.

    Overall, the central area — generally within 10 miles of San Francisco City Hall — experienced a median house price decline of 15 percent. However, central areas outside San Francisco experienced a price decline of 24 percent, which is only marginally less than in either the inner or outer suburbs. The inner suburbs, which include much of the East Bay, including Oakland and most of the peninsula, experienced a decline of 28 percent.

    Outer suburbs — those beyond 20 miles from city hall, including eastern Contra Costa and Alameda counties and Santa Clara County — experienced the second lowest decline, at 26 percent. Overall, the largest decline was in the exurbs — the counties in the San Joaquin Valley to which so many households had fled seeking affordable housing. There, the decline was 44 percent.

    San Diego: The San Diego area indicates a fairly constant rate of decline, regardless of distance from downtown. The lowest decline was in the inner and outer suburbs, at 26 percent, while the central area experienced a median house price decline of 27 percent.

    Sacramento: Sacramento indicates the most unexpected results, with the central area experiencing by far the largest house price declines, at 42 percent. The lowest house price declines were one-half that rate, in the outer suburbs (generally more than 10 miles from downtown), at 21 percent, while the inner suburbs experienced a decline of 29 percent.

    Overall, within the central areas, inner suburbs and outer suburbs of the major metropolitan regions, price declines have been consistent, all at minus 26 percent. The major exception has been the city of San Francisco. However, it is well to keep in mind that the city represents barely 10 percent of its metropolitan region population and is a unique case.

    What does all this indicate? Perhaps most of all, it is a further demonstration of the growing irrelevance of what economist William T. Bogart calls the pre-Copernican view of the cities. Most people no longer work in the urban core and living in the suburbs does not necessarily mean longer commutes. This was evident in our previous analysis of metropolitan New York, where the greatest jobs-housing balances are in the suburbs. In fact, the price declines throughout the principal urban areas making up California’s largest metropolitan regions have not been materially different.

    Things have been tougher n the far flung exurbs, where the greatest price declines have occurred. This was to be expected. These are places that people fled to find lower-cost housing that had often been precluded in the over-regulated jurisdictions in the principal urban areas. Many such households bought their houses in the most recent cycle, largely because of the unprecedented relaxation of credit standards. The difficulties in the exurbs been exacerbated by the fact that employment bases there have not yet had a chance to catch up with their residential gains.

    Notes on Methodology: The data is calculated based upon the change in median house prices from July 2007 to July 2008, based upon data published by DQNews.com. Sector medians are is weighted by the number of house sales. All jurisdictions or geographies are included that had 25 or more house sales in July 2008. Generally, the data is based upon municipal jurisdiction, except in the city of Los Angeles, where geographical data is available and in the case of counties wholly within a zone (central, inner suburbs, outer suburbs or exurban).

    The central areas of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area are considered generally to be located within a radius of 10 miles from downtown, the inner suburbs are between 10 and 20 miles from downtown and the outer suburbs are more than 20 miles from downtown. The exurban areas are described in the sections on the particular areas above. In San Diego and Sacramento, which are considerably smaller, smaller geographic radii are used. The central areas are up to 5 miles from downtown, the inner suburbs from 5 to 10 miles from downtown and the outer suburbs are more than 10 miles from downtown. Because of their smaller geographic sizes, exurbs are not considered in this analysis for San Diego and Sacramento. The city of San Diego is excluded from this analysis because major parts of it are in each zone.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris since 2002. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

    Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002).