I’m writing this in Montana, location of the Little Bighorn battlefield (which is why I’m here, no offense to the city of Billings, which is very nice). The Little Bighorn, of course, is the place where an experienced guide said to General Custer, “that’s the biggest Indian village I’ve ever seen,” to which Custer replied, “great, let’s split up and go in three different directions.”

But that was a simpler time, back when saying dumb things could actually have real consequences. This no longer appears to be true.

The other day in Washington, D.C., for example—and this is far from the worst recent example, but still—Sen. Mitch McConnell blamed President Obama for legislation that would let families of the 9/11 victims sue Saudi Arabia. Everybody wants justice for the 9/11 families, but many have argued that the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act is a really bad idea for policy reasons. That’s what the president has been arguing, in fact, and that’s why he vetoed the bill. But it became law last week anyway after Congress overrode his veto. So—

Wait a sec.

What?

You said McConnell blamed Obama for the law.

He did.

But Obama vetoed it.

Yes.

Which means he didn’t want it to pass, right?

Yep, that’s what it means.

So why would McConnell blame the president if they agree?

They don’t.

Well, they both voted against it.

No, McConnell voted to pass the bill.

Oh. But not to override, obviously.

No, he also voted to override and therefore pass the bill despite the president’s objection. In fact, the specific question was “Shall the Bill S. 2040 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?” He was one of 97 senators to vote yes.

And then he blamed … 

The president.

I’m confused.

Well, shut up then and let me finish, Mr. Bold Print.

Fine.

Fine.

What the bill did was create an exception to the doctrine of state sovereign immunity, which (generally speaking) means you can’t sue a foreign state in a U.S. court unless it did something to you here in the U.S. If you’re on safari and Vladimir Putin shoots off your hairpiece, for example, you might be able to sue Russia for that in Zimbabwe (or wherever it happened) or maybe in Russia (ha, is joke) but you can’t force it to defend in a U.S. court. We give other countries immunity not because we love them but because we don’t want their citizens suing the U.S. in their courts for whatever the U.S. might do around the globe. It’s called reciprocity, and the concern is that if we start making exceptions then other countries will too. (This excellent explainer at Vox has more details.)

Supporters of JASTA say, though, that people should be able to sue state sponsors of terrorism,  and everybody knows the alleged sponsor in question here is Saudi Arabia. But there’s already an exception for suits alleging injuries caused by terrorism, as long as the foreign state has been officially designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, and—oops! Saudi Arabia is not on that list for reasons known as “oil.” So JASTA adds another exception, this one for injuries caused in the U.S. by terrorism and an act of a state or its officials anywhere in the world. It then goes even further by authorizing “aiding and abetting” liability (a notoriously vague concept) for anybody who helps or conspires with the terrorist. And of course terrorism = bad, but the problem is that other countries can define “terrorism” however they want, and the broader we make the exception the more likely they are to reciprocate.

But you don’t have to take my word for it on this one. Just read this letter that 28 senators sent to the bill’s bipartisan sponsors after the override, pleading with them to do something about the risk that the new law would have the “potential unintended consequences” of subjecting the U.S. to private lawsuits in foreign courts, and asking them to help fix it. They—

Excuse me.

… Yes?

You said the Senate voted 97-1 to override.

Yes.

So these 28 senators—

—had all just voted in favor of the bill they were now complaining about, yes.

McConnell didn’t sign the letter, as far as I can tell, but he did blame the president for this terrible bill he had just voted to pass. “I hate to blame everything on him, and I don’t,” McConnell said, although neither of those things are true. “But,” he continued, “it would have been helpful had we had a discussion about this much earlier than last week,” he continued, meaning that the White House should have alerted Congress to the potential problem. (It did, repeatedly.) This meant that “[n]obody [in Congress] really had focused on the potential downside in terms of our international relationships,” McConnell said, accusing Obama of “dropping the ball.”

The short version, of course, is that everybody knew this was a bad idea but nobody wanted to vote “against” 9/11 families in an election year. So everybody voted for it and then immediately started looking for a way to undo what they had just done. A truly noble effort all around.

This summer, Routledge released Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation: Biking for All? The book's 18 essays explore marginalized communities and bicycle advocacy, planning, and policy. The editorial team consists of Aaron Golub (Portland State University), Melody Hoffmann (Anoka-Ramsey Community College and author of her own recent book, Bike Lanes Are White Lanes), me, and Gerardo Sandoval (University of Oregon). 

The Backstory
A little less than two years ago, editors Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman published a collection of essays called Incomplete Streets. The book argued that the “complete streets” policy and design trend could benefit from an environmental justice approach to social inclusion. It was right up my alley because at the time, in my day job as Equity Initiative Manager at the League of American Bicyclists, I felt caught in a gulf between the bike movement I’d been part of for years and the transportation justice field that had inspired me to work on race and sustainable transportation in the first place.

Practitioners in transportation justice, which has roots in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that made it illegal for federal funds to be distributed in a way that led to racial discrimination, tend to focus on public transit systems. Before I got into bike activism I’d been a member of Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union, a groundbreaking grassroots effort that has for decades made the case that transit systems like Metro need to do a better job of serving their majority people of color and low-income users. I thought that because I was aware that the bike advocacy world did not match the diversity of who actually rides, other people working in transportation knew about this gap too. But when I brought up bicycling in transportation justice circles, I was told to take my shilling for a white man’s pastime elsewhere.

I could see why bicycling seemed beside the point. For many families, bicycling for transportation is something that you work hard to get away from, rather than a desirable end in itself. When people have a hard enough time even gaining access to driver's licenses and dealing with the issue of tickets turning into debt, I can see why owning a car is still central to civil rights projects. I’d moved to D.C. because I thought that building a racially inclusive bike movement would help transform the symbolism of bicycling, making it something more positive for more people. But instead I grew to feel invisible within my own movement, where it was controversial to simply state that infrastructure couldn’t fix the vulnerability that different people face in our unequal streets.

There are plenty of people of color working in environmental professions who sit with me in this space between ecological commitment and knowing how hard our communities have worked to achieve middle-class consumerism. Wasteful living is a sign of success. Environmental movements still have a long way to go in co-creating visions for a better world that empathize with people scarred by the hatred of poverty and racism, rather than judging them for not “going green.”

When I learned that Zavestoski and Agyeman were also on the editorial team for Routledge's series on Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City and they wanted to include a book specifically about bicycling, I signed on to be an editor of what became Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation.

The Book
Our introduction explains the gap between transportation justice and bicycle advocacy, and how this gap contributes to the public’s association of bike infrastructure with gentrification. We make the case that situating bicycling within a transportation justice framework will require addressing the blind spots of what we call “organized bicycling.” To get away from the dehumanizing term “invisible cyclist,” we argue that most bicycling takes place outside of the advocacy movement and planning efforts to promote it. Differentiating bicycling in general from “organized bicycling” provides an alternative to othering people of color and/or low-income bicycle users. Then the project becomes expanding organized bicycling to encompass more kinds of users, rather than putting the onus on those users to make themselves visible to organized bicycling. In the second chapter, co-editor and transportation justice scholar Aaron Golub goes more in-depth about whether bicycling can be a civil rights issue.

Since it’s the first book to define bicycle justice, the collection goes in a lot of directions from there. The common thread (besides bicycling) is that we asked our authors to present solutions that would make sense for practitioners.

Major themes:

• The everyday vulnerabilities that overlooked bicycle users experience in their racialized bodies
• “Delivering In(Justice): Food Delivery Cyclists in New York City” by Do Lee, Helen Ho, Melyssa Banks, Mario Giampieri, Xiaodeng Chen, and Dorothy Le
• “No Choice but to Bike: Undocumented and Bike-Dependent in Rust Belt America” by Joanna Bernstein
• Bicycling in particular regional and cultural contexts 
• “Freedom of Movement/Freedom of Choice: An Enquiry into Utility Cycling and Social Justice in Post-Apartheid Cape Town” by the great thinker Gail Jennings
• “Rascuache Cycling Justice” by Alfredo Mirandé and Raymond L. Williams
• “Civil Bikes: Embracing Atlanta’s Racialized History through Bicycle Tours” by Nedra Deadwyler
• Barriers to inclusion embedded in emerging data tools 
• “Advocating through Data: Community Visibilities in Crowdsourced Cycling Data” by Christopher Le Dantec, Caroline Appleton, Mariam Asad, Robert Rosenberger, and Kari Watkins
• Grassroots programs such as rides and repair co-ops 
• “Aburrido! Cycling on the U.S./Mexican Border with Doble Rueda Bicycle Collective in Matamoros, Tamaulipas” by Daryl Meador 
• “Community Bicycle Workshops and ‘Invisible Cyclists’ in Brussels” by Simon Batterbury and Inès Vandermeersch
• Community tensions around bike planning 
• “Is Portland’s Bicycle Success Story a Celebration of Gentrification? A Theoretical Analysis and Statistical Analysis of Bicycle Use and Demographic Change” by Cameron Herrington and Ryan Dann
• “Community Disengagement: The Greatest Barrier to Equitable Bike Share” by James Hannig
• “Mediating the ‘White Lanes of Gentrification’ in Humboldt Park: Community-Led Economic Development and the Struggle over Public Space” by Amy Lubitow
• Scholarly analyses of traffic and social justice 
• “Advancing Discussions of Cycling Interventions Based on Social Justice” by Karel Martens, Daniel Piatkowski, Kevin J. Krizek, and Kara Luckey
• “Theorizing Bicycle Justice Using Social Psychology: Examining the Intersection of Mode and Race with the Conceptual Model of Roadway Interactions” by Tara Goddard
• Efforts to transform the bike movement 
• “Decentering Whiteness in Organized Bicycling: Notes from Insides” by yours truly
• “Collectively Subverting the Status Quo at the Youth Bike Summit” by Pasqualina Azzarello, Jane Pirone, and Allison Mattheis
• Bicycling programs as public health interventions 
• “No hay peor lucha que la que no se hace: Re-Negotiating Cycling in a Latino Community” by Martha Moore-Monroy, Ada M. Wilkinson-Lee, Donna Lewandowski, and Alexandra M. Armenta.

My chapter in the book chronicles the othering that I experienced while working in bicycle advocacy at the national level and suggests directions for changing the movement’s agenda to include more people’s perspectives.

Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation is a first step toward creating an interdisciplinary conversation about bicycling and inequality. I hope it can be a resource for students, scholars, and practitioners alike. Thanks again to all our authors who made it possible to get the collection out there on a really short timeline!

The single most frequently asked (possibly rhetorical but I’ve never let that stop me before) question in regards to the sweet recipes on this site is “How do you not eat all of these?” And I finally have an answer: They’re not rugelach. I love chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, I think snickerdoodles are wildly underrated, but rugelach — those impossibly flaky Central European crescent cookies — are the single item in the category of foods that are just not allowed to be here ever, because there’s something about the glorious harmony of it all (the salty cheese, the tart jam, the cinnamon aroma, the crunch, and if you love your people, the chocolate, gaaah) that it will not be safe with me. Or I will not be safe with it. Which is unfortunate, because I have an avalanche of rugelach in my apartment right now.

... Read the rest of pull-apart rugelach on smittenkitchen.com

---

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to pull-apart rugelach | 209 comments to date | see more: Cookie, Hanukah, Jewish, Photo

The Vancouver metro area has now reached the climax of a frenzy of orchestrated rage directed at its transit agency, TransLink.  Over 60% of voters have rejected a sales tax increase for urgently needed transit growth, largely due to an effective campaign that made the transit agency's alleged incompetence the issue.  

There's just one problem.  TransLink is (or was) one of North America's most effective transit agencies.   Parts of the agency had made mistakes, and of course TransLink was struggling to meet exploding demand in one of the world's most desirable metro areas.  Almost nobody defends TransLink's governance model either.  But TransLink is, or was, an effective network, run by a reasonably efficient agency.  For years I cited it all over the world as a model for good planning.  Whether it remains that depends on how much of it is now destroyed in the thrill of recrimination.

Admittedly, I have a personal angle on this, because I worked inside TransLink's planning department for two long stints, for a year in 2005-6 and for six months in 2011.  (I have assisted them as a consultant since, but I have no contracts with TransLink now and no expectation of one.)  It was, I thought, an unusually forward-thinking and principle-driven transit planning department.  I assumed this was an expression of Metro Vancouver's unusual culture of intentional, strategic, controlled urban development. It also reflected an era of leadership that created the space for these thoughts to occur, as opposed to the crisis-by-crisis lifestyle that too often prevails in transit management.

The conversations that were happening at TransLink -- especially about the difficult question of how a regional transit agency can form a reality-based relationship with its constituent cities -- were extremely sophisticated and respectful.  How should a large regional agency interact with city governments when it holds the technical expertise about transit that city governments mostly lack? For example, when a city government demands something that is geometrically impossible, how can the transit agency's response avoid appearing overbearing?  Much of what I now know about this relationship, and the unavoidable forces operating on it, I figured out while helping with policy development there.  

Today, those issues are at the core of my practice, as the relationship between city governments and transit authorities becomes an urgent issue almost everywhere. 

Special-purpose regional governments are vulnerable creatures.  The marquee leaders of an urban region -- usually major mayors and state/province leaders -- influence them but don't control them directly enough to feel responsible for them.  Blame is easily shifted to them by the more powerful governments all around them.  

All this is even more true when the product is transit, for four reasons.

First, transit somehow looks easy, in a way that water and power and regional land use planning do not.  Many reporters have no factual frame for thinking about transit, and treat anyone with a simplistic answer as an expert.  (Tip: my book can help provide that frame.)

Second, transit's success is utterly dependent on municipal actions around land use and street design, so regional transit agencies that are thinking strategically must form an interest in those municipal decisions.  This is easily characterized as interference with municipal sovereignty.  (I always advise transit agencies to respect local right to make decisions but to clearly describe the transit consequences of those decisions, in advance.)

Third, everyone is now screaming at transit agencies to innovate, and yet voters have zero tolerance for risk.  Some of TransLink's failures are arguably innovations that didn't work out.  If you expect everything your agency does to be successful, then quit telling them to innovate, because failure is intrinsic to innovation.  

Fourth, transit, when considered in isolation as in Metro Vancouver's referendum, cannot avoid generating a ferocious difference in opinion across different parts of an urban region.  In any region, maps of votes on transit referenda are mostly maps of residential density (Vancouver, Seattle), and for good reason.  Transit demand rises exponentially with density: doubling density makes it more than twice as urgent.  So of course the average core city dweller views transit as existential while the average outer-suburbanite on a cul-de-sac views it as unimportant.  Giant regional transit agencies will continue to be pulled apart by these forces until we stop having regional transit debates and start having regional transportation debates.  (The other important trend, in response to this basic math, is that core cities must exert more leadership, and funding, on their own transit issues.  More on that below.)

What is amazing, then, is not that regional transit agencies are having political problems, but that so many of them are doing so well, considering.  Many regions are moving forward with strong regional transit strategies, supported by working majorities of voters.  Many are also making tough choices, like the painful shift in priorities that underlies Houston's new network.

Hating your transit agency is easy and fun.  You don't have to understand your regional politics, in which the real power to fix transit is usually not held by the transit agency.  You can also have the thrill of blowing up a big institutional edifice, as Metro Vancouver voters may now have done.

But a lot that's good will also be destroyed.   In Metro Vancouver, amid all the recriminations, TransLink has lost the credibility it needs to lead reality-based conversations about transit.  Maybe some other agency will step into that role.  (Indeed, core cities for whom transit is an existential issue must develop that capability.)  Or maybe there will just be many more years of blame shifting among the elected officials who really control transit in the region.

If you look at transit from the point of view of a state or province leader, you can understand why so many politicians are terrified of the issue.  Everyone is screaming at them about it, pushing simplistic solutions, and the issue is polarizing on urban-suburban lines.  Some huge problems, like equipment failures due to deferred maintenance, are curses laid upon us all by our parents' generation.  What's more, most elite leaders are motorists, and need help finding their feet in the geometric facts of transit where a motorists' assumptions lead them astray.  So they panic, shift blame, and leave transit agencies appearing to have more power to solve problems than they actually have.  If you've never been a political leader, don't be sure you wouldn't do the same in their place.

Be patient.  Breathe.  Resist the desire to see your transit agency in smoldering ruins.  Then, demand leadership.  Demand state/provincial leadership that looks for solutions instead of pointlessly stoking urban-suburban conflict.  (One possible solution is to spend more time on regional transportation debates instead of just transit debates, because regional transportation plans can look more balanced than transit plans can.)  And yes, if your transit agency is being given dysfunctional direction by the region's leaders, demand a better system with more accountability to an elected official who will have to answer for outcomes.

Finally, if you live in a major city that cares about transit, demand that your city leaders look beyond blaming the transit agency, and that they do everything they can themselves to make their transit better.  Remember, your city government, through its powers of land use planning and street design, controls transit at least as much as the transit agency does.  Ask them: What is their transit plan?  Tell them to follow the work of cities that are investing in transit themselves, beyond what their transit agency can afford, like Seattle and Washington DC., or for that matter transit-ambitious secondary cities like Bellevue, Washington, who have their own transit plans to guide the city's work.  No regional or state transit authority -- beholden to state or regionwide government that is dominated by less urban interests -- is going to meet all of the transit needs of a dense, core city that has chosen to make transit a foundation of its livability.  Their staff may well be doing what they can with the direction that they have, but they need your city government's active support, involvement, leadership, and investment.  

Sorry, transit is complicated.  It's fun to blow things up, as Metro Vancouver's voters probably have.  But the solutions are out there, if we all demand leadership, and offer it.

This is so important!  Crosspost of an essay by Daniel Kay Hertz,  from the excellent City Observatory blog, where it was titled "Urban residents aren't abandoning buses: buses are abandoning them."  

 

“Pity the poor city bus,” writes Jacob Anbinder in an interesting essay at The Century Foundation’s website. Anbinder brings some of his own data to a finding that’s been bouncing around the web for a while: that even as American subways and light rail systems experience a renaissance across the country, bus ridership has been falling nationally since the start of the Great Recession.

But it’s not buses that are being abandoned. It’s bus riders.

The drop in bus ridership over the last several years has been mirrored by a decline in bus service, even as transit agencies have managed to resume increasing frequency and hours on all types of rail lines - heavy, light, and commuter.* (In this post, "service" means vehicle revenue miles - literally, multiplying a city's bus or rail vehicles by the number of miles they run on their routes.) After a post-recession low in 2011, by 2013 rail service had increased by over 4% nationally in urban areas of at least one million people. Light rail in particular has continued its decade-plus boom, with a service increase of more than 12% in just two years. By contrast, bus service - which already took a heavier hit in the first years of the recession - was cut an additional 5.8%.

  And it turns out that when you disaggregate the national data by urban area, there’s a very tight relationship between places that cut bus service between 2000 and 2013 and those that saw the largest drops in ridership. If you live in a city where bus service has been increased, it’s likely that your city has actually grown its bus ridership, despite the national trends. In other words, the problem doesn't seem to be that bus riders are deciding they’d rather just walk, bike, or take their city’s new light rail line. It’s that too many cities are cutting bus service to the point that people are giving up on them.

  Admittedly, this is a crude way to demonstrate a very complicated relationship. To rigorously test the impact of bus service on ridership, you’d want to take into account all sorts of other things: the presence of other transit services; population density; gas prices; demographics; and so on.

Fortunately, we don't have to do that, because researchers at San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute just did it for us. And they found that even if you control for those other factors, service levels are still the number one predictor of bus ridership.

Still, I can imagine two big objections to the idea that cuts to bus operations are behind ridership declines. First, a lot of cities have opened new rail lines since 2000 - many of which, if not most, replaced heavily-trafficked bus routes. In those cases, cities are adding rail service and reducing bus service, but it obviously wouldn’t be right to say that those bus riders are being abandoned.

But while that has surely happened in some places, it just doesn’t match the overall data. Rail service, including new lines, has been booming since long before the recession - but up until about 2009, bus service was growing, too, or at least holding steady. If rail expansions were driving bus cuts, you’d expect to see those cuts all the way back to the beginning of the data. But you don’t. Instead, cuts to bus routes appear right as transit funding was hit hard by the recession.

Second, you might argue that service and ridership are linked, but the other way around: as ridership declines, agencies cut back on hours and frequency to match demand. Teasing out which way the causation runs would be difficult - and the answer would almost certainly include at least some examples in both directions. One quick-and-dirty way to get an idea, though, is to compare ridership changes from one year to service changes in the next year. If agencies cut service because of earlier ridership declines, then you’d expect to see that places with larger drops in ridership in “Year One” tend to be the places with larger cuts to service in “Year Two.”

  But, again, they don’t. In fact, just 3% of the variation in service cuts is explained by ridership changes from the year before.

So while that’s hardly ironclad - and I look forward to further research that sheds more light on this problem - it does appear that a major part of the divergence in bus and rail ridership is a result of a divergence in bus and rail service: since the recession, transit agencies have cut bus service year after year, while returning service to rail relatively quickly.

Why did they do that? I don’t know. But I can speculate that it has something to do with the fact that bus transit supporters are not always the same kinds of people as rail transit supporters. Even though more people take buses than trains in nearly every metropolitan area in the country, train riders, on average, tend to be wealthier and whiter. Not only that, but many civic and business leaders who don’t use transit at all are heavily invested in rail service as an economic development catalyst for central city neighborhoods. In other words, rail tends to have a more politically powerful constituency behind it than buses.

As a result, when the recession blew a hole in transit budgets around the country, it may have been politically easier for local governments to fill those holes by sustaining cuts to bus lines, rather than rail.

To be clear, the problem here has nothing to do with whether transit agencies are running more services that are rubber-on-asphalt or steel-on-tracks. As Jarrett Walker has eloquently argued, the technology used by a particular line matters far less than the quality of service: how often it runs, how quickly, for how much of the day.

But there are at least two problems here. First, because of the spread-out nature of even relatively dense American cities, it will be a very, very long time before rail transit can connect truly large numbers of people to large numbers of jobs and amenities. When Minneapolis opened the 12-mile Blue Line light rail in 2004, for example, it was a major step forward for Twin Cities transit - but still, only 2% of the region’s population lived close enough to walk to one of the stations. For everyone else, transit still meant taking the bus, even if they were taking the bus to a train station.

And even in places with well-developed rail networks, those systems are usually oriented to serve downtown commuters. Especially in outer neighborhoods, crosstown trips in places like Chicago, Boston, or DC are heavily reliant on buses. Abandoning buses means abandoning those trips, and the people who depend on them.  

 Boston's T reaches both Dorchester and Jamaica Plain, but a bus is by far the easiest way to get from one to the other on transit. Credit: Google Maps

Second, there are serious equity issues with shifting resources from bus to rail - again, not because of anything inherent to those technologies, but simply because of who happens to use them in modern American cities. In most cases, shifting funding from bus to rail means shifting funding from services disproportionately used by lower-income people to ones with with a stronger middle- and upper-middle-class constituency. And while transit ought to be viewed as much more than just a service for the poor, we can’t ignore the equity impacts of transit policy.

In light of all this, we have to stop talking about America’s bus woes as a ridership problem. All the evidence suggests that when service is strong, and buses are a reliable way to get to work, school, or the grocery store, people will take them. Instead, the problem is that fewer and fewer people have access to that kind of strong bus line. If we care about ridership, we need to restore and enhance the kind of transit services that people can rely on.

 

* “Heavy rail” includes traditional subways and elevated trains found in cities like New York, Washington, and Chicago. “Light rail” includes many newer systems, with smaller train sets that are sometimes designed to run on streets as well as in their own right of way. Rail lines in Seattle, the Twin Cities, and Dallas are typical of light rail. “Commuter rail” services generally reach from central business districts far out into the suburbs, and are meant almost exclusively for peak-hour workers.

Cairo is a dense megacity, without the infrastructure such cities require for high living standards. The city proper, according to Wikipedia, has 10 million people, living at a density approaching 20,000 per km^2, and the metro area has 20 million. With a subway system fit for a city a tenth its size, Cairo is heavily motorized for its income level, congested, and polluted. Despite high construction costs, urgent investment in public transportation is required. Ignoring this need, the current military government has just announced plans to build a new capital outside the city, eventually to house 7 million people, with all the public monuments of a planned city, at a cost of $300 billion (exchange rate dollars, not PPP), about the same as Egypt’s annual GDP. The first phase alone will be $45 billion.

Cairo itself is already suffering from neglect and disinvestment. There are 2 million cars in the city. This is enough to cause so much traffic congestion it costs Egypt 4% of its GDP. Cairo’s air pollution is legendary: pollution levels are akin to smoking a pack of cigarettes per day. At least as of 1997, lead pollution caused by cars using leaded gasoline reduced Cairene children’s IQ by 4 points. The poor transportation options have led to a housing crunch, forcing half a million people to live in a historic necropolis as squatters.

The Cairo Metro would be a solution to these problems to a large extent, but is very small relative to Cairo’s size: it has 3 lines, totaling 78 route-km. Other cities of comparable size have many hundreds of route-km of urban rail, with a handful of exceptions infamous for their sprawl (such as Los Angeles) or pollution (such as Sao Paulo). Despite its small size, the Cairo Metro gets about 1.6 billion passengers per year, by far the highest number of passengers per route-km in the world, nearly twice as high as on the legendarily overcrowded Tokyo subway. Cairo has high construction costs, but in exchange rate dollars they only amount to about $130 million per km; a fully underground expansion of the subway to 400 km, somewhat more than the length of New York’s subway lines and less than that of Beijing and Shanghai’s, would cost about $40 billion, less than the cost of the new capital’s first phase alone. This is on top of all other possible infrastructure investments Egypt should consider: sanitation, sewage, water treatment, electrification, hospitals, schools, the Suez Canal. I bring up the Metro since so many of Cairo’s pressing problems would be substantially reduced if it had the capacity to transport a large share of the city’s population.

The problem is that the Egyptian government’s first priority is not to serve the needs of the Egyptian population. It is an authoritarian military government; it is not accountable to the broad public. I bring this up, because it’s a necessary check on things I have said in the past, attacking local American governance as authoritarian. Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie have the power to overrule useful spending bills and cause traffic jams in cities run by political opponents. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has the power to jail political opponents without trial, and execute them by the hundreds after show trials.

Autocrats love planned cities, for two reasons. First, planned cities are monuments to their greatness, lasting long into the future. The people the autocrats trample will be forgotten. Tourists visit the Taj Mahal, and not museums commemorating the churches and temples Shah Jahan destroyed. They visit the Great Wall of China, and not any commemoration of the million-odd people who died in its construction. They visit the Old City of Jerusalem, while nobody commemorates any of the locals Herod taxed to build its monuments – even Judaism only commemorates the destruction of the Temple and the beginning of the Diaspora, generations later. Autocrats know this. Even in antiquity, they knew monuments would make them more famous. And even in modern democratic regimes, politicians like signature initiatives that have their names on them; going back to Andrew Cuomo, his proposed Queens convention center is a typical example. But Cuomo still faces some democratic checks and balances. Sisi does not.

And second, planned cities can be built in ways that enhance social control. City Metric compares the new planned capital with Naypyidaw, Burma’s capital, built in the era of military rule to replace Yangon. Purpose-built capitals can be (and are) built around the needs of the national elite, keeping the poor out of sight. They have street and building design plans that make it easy to bring in the military to quell riots: wide streets, buildings that do not touch, no central square where protests could happen. They also disallow squatters, without going through the difficult and controversial move of evicting squatters from the preexisting city. One rhetorical question I have seen on Twitter is, where will this city’s Tahrir be? An article on Cairobserver doesn’t make this exact argument, but does note that this plan disinvests in what will still remain Egypt’s largest city, and could only come about as a result of Egypt’s complete lack of democracy.

One of the bigger influences on my views of democracy is Brad DeLong and Andrei Shleifer’s paper from 1993, Princes and Merchants. I do not fully agree with the point they make, but one of the key components of it, on the spending priorities of an absolute ruler, is crucial to understanding the benefits of democracy. Per DeLong and Shleifer, absolutism chokes economic growth, since the absolute ruler will overtax the economy to maximize revenue. One may ask if actually, hereditary rulers would want to stimulate more economic growth in order to bequeath a stronger kingdom to their heirs. DeLong and Shleifer answer that no: even with clear rules of inheritance, succession wars are so common that kings have to constantly be on the guard against rebellion to make sure their heirs get to inherit anything.

For Sisi, it is perfectly rational to spend so much money building a capital city that would make an uprising against him less likely. The money is not going to come from his pocket, but from the pockets of people he need not care about too much – the Egyptian people. The personal benefits to Sisi are invaluable: Sisi’s two predecessors, Mohamed Morsi and Hosni Mubarak, were both overthrown and immediately charged with crimes, for which they were guilty (under Sisi’s influence, Mubarak was exonerated from most). Why not remove himself and the apparatus of the Egyptian state from the city where they were overthrown?

When I talk of infrastructure democracy in democratic first-world countries, I complain about (much) smaller versions of this exercise. One could reason with a democratic Egyptian government that there are better uses of the money in Cairo itself. One cannot reason this way with a military government. The same is true of the soft authoritarianism found in governments with a democratic deficit, from the European Commission to local American governments. Their power is ultimately limited by other layers of government, which are more transparent, and they are incapable of killing off political opponents, but they still do not have to listen to the people they impact, leading to decisions that are at times obviously ridiculous. Egypt’s new capital is this autocracy, taken to its logical end. A dictator, of the kind who the infrastructurists might praise as someone who can cut through the red tape and gets things done, is spending the country’s annual GDP on a plan to disinvest in the capital and build a monument to himself and his regime from scratch.

Prologue:

In 2015, reading just isn’t what it used to be. With the advent of tablet readers and ebooks, we can all escape the banality of our lives with a good book and not even break a spine in the process.

Tablets are not the only way that book reading has gone digital. Even the very act of getting together with friends and discussing a book has become more technologically savvy. Gone are the days where you call everyone up on the phone to plan it. Who leaves a voicemail anymore, anyway? Research has shown that using Trello, instead, is highly advantageous.

Michelle Earhart is a Support Specialist, distant cousin of Amelia Earhart and, most notably, a member of the illustrious Unnamed Book Club (don’t judge a book club by it’s title). She graciously took time out of her Florida vacation to expound upon the virtues of using Trello to manage her book club. Here are the cliff notes:

Chapter 1: Lists and Voting

The lists are pretty basic: “Suggestions,” “Current Book,” and “Done.” Everyone puts books they’re interested in reading in the “Suggestions” column, so when it’s time to choose the next adventure it’s simply a matter of scrolling through the list. Each book suggestion is its own card.

It’s also possible to enable the Voting power up, and allow your book club members to vote on the cards in the “Suggestions” list. This provides an objective way to politely tell that one person in the club that Fifty Shades simply isn’t going to happen.

Once it is clear which book is next on the docket, drag that card to the “Current Book” list, assign everyone to the card, and commence bookworm mode.

Chapter 2: Labels

Add labels to each card to indicate a book’s genre. Michelle explains that her club started by just using the standard “Fiction,” and “Non-fiction” labels, but that quickly became too general. Now their board boasts a genre for every label color, including “Memoir,” “Fantasy,” and “Literary,” to name a few.  If your group uses the color labels, you’ll be able to get a quick visual overview of the book trends, and maybe inspire everyone to switch it up a bit.

“Hey guys, it seems like we’re really going overboard with magic realism, perhaps we should consider switching to Harlequin romance this month.”

Chapter 3: Discussion

One of the most useful features about using Trello for book clubs is the ability to carry on a discussion without ever sending an email. Whether it is setting or changing a meeting time, passing thoughts on what you’re reading, or even posting relevant links, all of this communication can exist on the back of the card:

So when the casting for the upcoming movie/HBO series/Lifetime biopic adaptation are announced prior to your meeting, everyone can compare notes on whether the actor matches the description they formed in their head. It’s kind of a nerve wracking thing, honestly.

Chapter 4: Due dates

Adding due dates to cards lets members know when the next get together will be. Everyone on that card will receive a notification 24 hours before its due, which helps give them that little push needed to finish reading before the meetup.

For the chronically organized one in the bunch (and, there always is one), enable the Calendar powerup and plan out meetings farther in advance. Press the “Calendar” button and see a detailed schedule of your next five literary liaisons. Oprah would be proud.

Epilogue:

Book clubs are a great way to get new people acquainted with using Trello. So if you’re the technophile (as well as bibliophile) in the group, encourage everyone to communicate via Trello cards instead of email. It’s a fluid way to not lose any important communication and a great way to enrich discussion outside of the meetup.

We made a sample book club board with Trello staff picks that you can copy, and believe you us, we have excellent taste in books:

Trello book club sample board – Copy me!

Special thank you to Michelle Earhart for sharing how her book club is using Trello.

Are you a writer, reader, publisher, or otherwise literary fanatic using Trello? We would love to hear from you! Email us at Content@Trello.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, or in the comments below.

If you're John Green, you try to make it right. I'm a casual vlogbrothers fan but never thought I'd be writing about them here. However, the video linked above concerns an interesting copyright situation.

In the piece, Green describes how a particular quote - from a book he wrote seven years ago - is widely attributed to him. In fact, he doesn't remember writing that line but then again he doesn't remember writing a lot of the lines. He talks about being on the set of a movie being made from his book and asking the director why something happens, only to be told "because it's in the (your) book."

But then something surprising happens - a claim is made that the quote in fact does not appear in the book. Curious, Green downloads the illegal torrent of the published work in order to be able to search it. You could write a whole column about how broken that is - the DRM on his own e-book prevents him from searching it - oh, wait, Cory Doctorow has already written that column, many times.

Searching the file, Green comes to realize that he did not in fact write this quote. Further research shows that it was written by a commenter, a fan. Meanwhile, Green's organization has been selling posters using this quote and there are hundreds or thousands of places scattered all over the Internet claiming that this is Green's quote. Probably nothing can be done about those, though the video should serve as an authoritative reference for people who want to argue about it. But something can be done about the appropriation, even though it was inadvertent. In the piece, Green describes how they've gone back and figured out how much likely should be owed to the person who originated it, and how it's been paid. That itself is pretty awesome.

This incident serves as a jumping-off piece for Green to note just how "messed up" our copyright system is, a topic that I'm hoping to hear him go on about at some length through his free online education series, Crash Course. Stay tuned for Crash Course: Intellectual Property.

Over the past two years, our firm has worked as a member of a diversely skilled team to help Houston METRO comprehensively redesign the city's transit system (look back to this post for the backstory). Houston is a dynamic, fast-growing city, where despite a reputation as a place where one must own a car to live, many areas have developed land-use characteristics indicating a large, untapped market for quality transit. This project has sought to design a transit network which can deliver the type of mobility outcomes current growth patterns demand, through a extensive Frequent Network grid. 

Today, we are proud to share the news of the unanimous passage of the final plan by METRO's Board of Directors, with implementation on track for August 2015. In the history of transit in North America, top-to-bottom transit network redesigns are very rare, particularly for a city of the Houston's size and national importance. This is a great day for Houston, and will be a fascinating case study for transit in North America.

The final approved map (click here for the detailed pdf):

Recently I made the switch from support to social media manager at Trello.  While making the transition I took over the @trello Twitter handle, came up with tips in silly poetic verse, and made some fun (if not entirely useful) videos.  As marketing grew, I leapt at the opportunity to become the full time social media manager.  I had already come to love the community of Trellites during my time in support. In my social role, I am still able to engage with our users, except now I get to flex some of my more creative muscles. How could it get any better?

Of course, as with any new position I was excited, yet still nervous, about making the change. I wondered if my social media skills were up to snuff.  There was one thing, however, that I realized from day one: my time spent in the support queue was invaluable for my new role in marketing.  Support provided me with a knowledge of the product, knowledge of our customers, and allowed me to forge a deep bond with the entire Trello team.  The following are a few reasons why I believe that everyone in marketing should spend some time closing support tickets before they send their first tweet or launch their first campaign.

Know The Product

Unless you wrote all of the code and pushed every pixel into place in your app, there is probably no one that knows a product better than your support team.  From direct customer interaction, to help documentation and bug reproduction, they get asked about every imaginable use case under the sun and are adept at providing clear and concise answers to users’ questions.

You would be amazed at the things people use your app for that no one on the development team dreamed of and no one on your quality assurance team thought of testing (boards with a zillion cards, animated gif card covers, a scanner attached to your garbage can that adds a new card to a grocery list board whenever you throw something away). Between reproducing and documenting the myriad of bug reports that come in and the feedback on friction points in the user experience, the support team gets to know every nook and cranny between all those ones and zeros.

Having such a deep understanding of Trello allows me to provide faster and more efficient responses through social media and also proves valuable when sharing tips and features with the Trello user community.  I feel good knowing that I can save our busy support team from some of the minor support questions, so that they can dig deeper into more technical questions. I also find that my knowledge of Trello makes me a better marketing team member, since I can provide input from both the product and user experience when we are developing new campaigns and content.

Know The Audience

Let’s face it, if you’re in marketing you are basically the voice of the product. If you are going to start talking to people, don’t you think it’s a good idea to know who you’re speaking to?  Cultivating a voice for your product starts by talking to the people who are actually using your product, and there is no better way to hear from and engage with your users than in support.

The support queue is where I learned all kinds of things about our amazing users: empower cyclists in NYC, roadmap game development on public boards, and they organize volunteer efforts to better the world. Whether they are a new signup or a power user, they love that new feature or they’re stressed about an issue, you can learn so much about who is using the product, the way they want to engage with the product and the team, and best practices for communicating with a wide variety of individuals.

At Trello we aim to make getting things done fun and we carry this tone in our messaging as well as in our support interactions.  Witnessing the warm response to our voice and friendly engagement when talking to our users one on one has allowed me to develop and pursue that voice with our entire user base.  Feeling confident about who you are talking to is essential for having a positive experience with your community of users. It will improve all avenues of engagement whether it is on social media, email outreach, or your next big holiday campaign.

Know The Team

Something that I cherished most while working in support was that it gave me the opportunity to get to know every single member of the Trello team.  Whether it was lunchtime chats with our developers, Slack discussions with designers, or conversations with our CEO around the aquarium (yes, we have Nemo in our office), there was always one ticket or another that would create a situation where I could engage with another member of the team. These conversations were invaluable when it came to reporting a bug, sharing user input, or learning more about the Trello roadmap.

Through these interactions I have been able to form lasting bonds that have helped me channel the voice of the entire team into our marketing and engagement efforts.  I have been able to better understand the past decisions that have real time effects on how Trello is currently being used, and where we will be going in the future.  All of this has enabled me to be more honest, direct and transparent with our users. (Yes, we’re working on better offline support, no we will not be working on a Windows Phone app anytime soon. Sorry, just wanted to be honest.)  Also, an added bonus of forging great relationships with all of the people working with and around you is that they are all extremely smart and creative people. Where else do you think I get half of my ideas? (Thanks everyone!)

Now It’s Your Turn: Step Up and Step In

Having a role in support was critical for my development as a social media manager.  Support is one of the rare roles that lets you engage with every aspect of the product.  Of course not everyone is going to be in the position of having a support role before they transition into marketing, but there are still many ways that you can get involved with the support team and learn some of their secrets.

Start by asking your support team if you can jump into the email queue every now and then to work on some cases with them.  You will be amazed what you can learn from just a few days in support. Next, grab some lunch or a cup of coffee with members of the support team and talk to them about their customer interactions, what works and what doesn’t, and what can be improved to create a cohesive voice for the company.

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask for ideas, opinions, and criticism from the support team when launching a new marketing campaign, or looking to better engage with your followers on Twitter. After all, they’re in the know!

Usually, the barrier to new development in a neighborhood is NIMBYism: connected local community members do not want the project, saying “not in my backyard.” There’s a wealth of literature about NIMBYs’ role in restrictions on development; William Fischel’s work is a good start, and the short version is that opposition to development is local, based on fear of the risk of decline in property values. Urbanists take it for granted that decisions made with regard to regional rather than local concerns will be more pro-development: Let’s Go LA has examples from Los Angeles, and Stephen Smith explains Toronto and Tokyo’s lax rules on new development based on their high-level decisionmaking (at the provincial level in Ontario and national level in Japan). In this post, I would like to discuss the opposite problem, which I call NITBYism – “not in their backyard.”

In certain circumstances, opposition comes from people living in other areas, who are aghast that an area they don’t live in is getting so much investment. This is more likely to happen when there’s heavy public involvement in development, but, since upzoning an area is a public decision (as opposed to unthinkable across-the-board zoning abolition), opposition can sprout anytime. One common thread to NITBY opposition campaigns is that NITBYs view housing as a good thing, and want it redirected to their areas. Another is that they self-perceived as ignored by the urban elites; this is common to both right-wing populists and left-wing ones. Since the process is heavily public by assumption, the price signal telling developers to build in the center of the major city is irrelevant, and this encourages the government to build more low-value peripheral projects.

The first example of this is when the process actually is public: subsidized affordable housing. As discussed by Daniel Kay Hertz, in Chicago, affordable housing regulations require developers to pay a fee to a dedicated affordable housing fund, which then uses the money to develop or buy housing and rent it out at subsidized rates for moderate-income residents. To minimize the cost per affordable unit, the fund builds the units in the cheapest neighborhoods, i.e. the poorest ones, exacerbating housing segregation. As Payton Chung explains, the low-income housing community networks in Chicago support this arrangement, because they are based in the neighborhoods where this affordable housing is built. This is not as self-serving as the examples I will include below, since the community groups want to see the most number of housing units built at a given cost; but a common feature of NITBYism, namely that the NITBYs view housing as a good rather than as a burden imposed by outsiders, is present here.

In Israel, NITBYism does not have the cost defense that it does in Chicago. Zoning in Israel is prepared by municipalities but must get approved by the state. This means that it is geared not only toward providing services to Israelis (such as cheap and orderly housing) but also toward national goals of Judaization. The worst NITBYism is not affecting Tel Aviv, but Arab cities, where the state refuses to approve zoning plans; since independence, not a single new Arab city has been built, except to house Bedouins who the state expelled from their villages after independence, and plans to build the first new Arab city are controversial on segregation grounds. This is while the state has built many new Jewish cities from scratch, often in peripheral areas in order to ensure a Jewish majority.

However, NITBYism afflicts housing in Tel Aviv, too. Although the state could if it wanted declare a housing emergency and force upzoning in Tel Aviv, it does not. There are few permits for new apartments in the Tel Aviv District (though more new housing sales): only 5% of the national total (including settlements), as per the pie chart on page 17 of the Ministry of Construction and Housing’s report and the more complete (in English) data on page 49, compared with a national population share of 16%; the Center District, consisting of Tel Aviv suburbs (though not the richest and most expensive, such as Ramat HaSharon, which are in the Tel Aviv District), has 22% of national permits, about the same as its share of the national population. This is not just NIMBYism in Tel Aviv, although that exists in abundance. Local politicians from peripheral towns demand local construction, and view Tel Aviv construction as something useful only to outsiders, such as foreign speculators or the urban elite. During the housing protests of 2011, there was widespread debate on the left about what solutions to offer, and people representing the ethnic and geographic periphery were adamant that the state build and preserve public housing in peripheral towns and not concentrate on Tel Aviv, which they identified with the secular Ashkenazi elite. A common thread in housing and infrastructure debates to both working-class Jews from the periphery and Arabs is the demand for a policy that would create jobs and housing in their hometowns, rather than build infrastructure that would put them in the Tel Aviv orbit.

Of the above examples, in Chicago the NITBYs self-identify as leftists, and in Israel, the NITBYs who want local housing rather than Tel Aviv housing either identify as leftists or identify as economic leftists and support the right on security and ethnic identity issues. However, the populist right is not immune from this. Right-wing supporters of suburbs who oppose cities for what they represent (diversity, usually left-wing politics of the kind they associate with the liberal elite) may also oppose urban upzoning. The best example of this kind is Joel Kotkin’s opposition to upzoning in Hollywood, which sounds like a criticism of government projects until one realizes that upzoning simply means developers are permitted to build more densely if they’d like. Now, Kotkin is pro-immigration, setting him apart from the main of right-wing populism, but in all other aspects, his paranoid fear of urban liberal elites imposing behavioral controls on ordinary people would be right at home at the UK Independence Party and its mainland European equivalents. Kotkin is also just one person, but his views mirror those of Tea Party activists who equate dense urbanism with an Agenda 21 conspiracy, to the point of conflating a phrase that means building new suburbs with a plan to forcibly relocate suburbanites to central cities.

I do not know Japan’s regional patterns of politics well, but I know Ontario’s. In Ontario, there is not much us-and-them politics regarding Toronto. There is such politics regarding the inner parts of Toronto – Rob Ford was elected on the heels of an outer-urban populist backlash to David Miller’s urbanism, including the perception that Miller was fighting a war on cars. But there’s none of the hatred of the central city and all that it represents that typifies politics in both Israel and the US. Hatred of the city in the US is right-wing (though within the city, hatred of the gentrified core is often tied to left-wing anti-gentrification activism), and hatred of Tel Aviv in Israel is generically populist, but in both cases, the us-and-them aspect encourages NITBYism.

In the most expensive American cities, this is not a major problem. Anti-urban populism does not have enough votes to win in New York and California, so state control of zoning in those states would not produce these problems. The Tea Party disruption of zoning meeting I brought up above happened in San Francisco suburbs, but did not have an effect on planning; I brought this example up to show that this political force exists, even if in that specific locality it is powerlessly weak. In those areas, local NIMBYism is a much bigger problem: many New York neighborhoods were actually downzoned in the Bloomberg era by local request. The primary problems that would plague state-level decisionmaking are corruption and power brokering, in which politicians hold even straightforward rule revisions hostage to their local pet projects. The us-and-them politics of Upstate and Downstate New York contributes heavily to power brokering, but Downstate’s demographic dominance precludes ideological choking of development.

Within the US, the risks of NITBYism are different. First, in the cost tier just below that of New York and California there are city regions in more moderate states, for examples Philadelphia and the Virginia suburbs of Washington, or possibly Miami (where the county-made rules have allowed aggressive new construction, mostly urban, which Stephen Smith credits to the political power of Cuban immigrants). And second, zooming in on different neighborhoods within each expensive city, the Chicago example suggests that if New York and other expensive cities begin a major program of public housing construction, the community organizations and the populists will demand to spread construction across many neighborhoods, especially poor ones, and not in the neighborhoods where there is the most demand.

As I noted two posts ago, there is a political economy problem, coming from the fact that the politically palatable amounts of construction are not transformative enough to let the working class live in market-rate city-center apartments, not in high-income major cities. Israel could semi-plausibly double the Tel Aviv housing stock; even that requires housing forms that Israelis associate with poverty, such as buildings that touch, without side setbacks. This would allow many more people to live in Tel Aviv, but they’d be drawn from the middle class, which is being priced out to middle-class suburbs or to working-class suburbs that it gentrifies. The working class in the periphery would be able to move into these closer-in suburbs, but this cascading process is not obvious. Worse, from the point of view of community leaders, it disrupts the community: it involves a churn of people moving, which means they end up in a different municipal fief, one with leadership the current suburb’s leaders may be hostile to.

For essentially the same reasons, subsidized housing in the center produces the same problems. If Israel builds a massive number of subsidized or rent-regulated apartments in Tel Aviv, there will be immense nationwide demand for them. Few would serve the residents of a given peripheral suburb, and there is no guarantee anyone would get them. On the contrary, in such a plan, priority is likely to go to downwardly-mobile children of established residents. At the 2011 protests, the people who were most supportive of plans to lower rents in Tel Aviv specifically were people from Tel Aviv or high-income suburbs who wanted to be able to keep living in the area. The community disruption effect of offering people the ability to live where they’d want would still be there. Thus, all the incentives line up behind periphery community leader support for building public housing in the periphery, where there is little demand for it, and not in the center. Even when housing is universally seen as a benefit and there’s no NIMBYism, politics dictates that housing is built in rough proportion to current population (since that’s where political power comes from) and not future demand.

Abolishing zoning is one way to cut this Gordian knot; it is also completely unpalatable to nearly everyone who is enfranchised in a given area. Allowing more private construction is the more acceptable alternative, but leads to the same problems, only on a smaller scale. It really is easier for community leaders to twist arms to demand veto rights and local resident priority than to push for sufficient citywide upzoning to alleviate the price pressure. But in an environment with weak NIMBYs and few NITBYs, fast growth in urban housing is possible.

Physical Salary

What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? How much would you need to make to be in real trouble?

Julia Anderson, Albuquerque, NM

First, let's think about coins.

The US federal minimum wage in the US is \$7.25/hour, which is about \$15,000/year for a full-time job. If you earn the minimum wage, you make a penny every 5 seconds during work hours, or every 20 seconds if you average it over your whole week.

Someone making minimum wage in pennies would earn about 30 lbs of pennies per workday. Two weeks' worth of pay in pennies would fill a small carry-on suitcase. At 150 lbs, the suitcase would probably be too heavy to pick up. However, if they were paid in quarters instead of pennies, two weeks' pay would only weigh about 3 lbs.

If paid in a typical mix of loose change,[1]The makeup of a "mix of loose change" depends on your spending habits. Lots of people have calculated this to estimate the amounts of change in a jar. One of the more careful theoretical calculation I've seen, which considers prices and sales tax, comes from Dan Kozikowski.

Since I've spent way too much time on this question over the years, for the record: If you're ever trying to guess the value of coins in a jar, my suggestion would be \$13.05/lb and \$468/gallon if the person doesn't use quarters for laundry or parking, \$9.53/lb and \$336/gallon if they do, and \$16.75/lb and \$611/gallon if they discard pennies. the US federal minimum wage is about one plastic water bottle full of coins per workday, and the median household earns three or four water bottles per workday.

A CEO of a large company might make \$40,000 per workday. Assuming an 8-hour workday, that's 130 pennies per second. If paid in a mix of loose change, the CEO would earn about a water bottle of coins per minute, and a duffel bag full of loose change every hour, or 600 water bottles per workday:

If you're a CEO working in a 300 ft² office, the change would accumulate on the ground at a rate of about only half an inch per day. (If it were pennies, it would be more like 3" per day). It would mean frequently getting up to adjust your desk so it stayed on top of the pile, and I can't imagine your chair would be too stable, but it seems like it might be manageable.

Lugging those 150-kg duffel bags to CoinStar every hour would be a hassle. If we allowed paper money, things would get easier. A dollar bill has a volume of about 1.55 mL, which means that a CEO paid in dollar bills would only need one large-ish duffel bag for a day's pay.

If paid in \$100 bills, a CEO would only need a couple of duffel bags to carry home their year's salary.

In either case, at 60-70 lbs, a duffel bag full of bills would be a little on the heavy side.

Now, there are people who make a lot more than "typical CEOs".

Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates all made in the neighborhood of \$10 billion in 2013. During the workday, that's a duffel bag full of \$100 bills every half-hour.

Going back to our earlier metric, that's 25 water bottles full of change—one minimum-wage worker's daily salary—per second of the workday.

If randomly dispensed from the ceiling in the form of loose change, Mark Zuckerberg's income would pile up at an inch every minute. There would be so many coins hitting the ground per second that it would meld into white noise.[2]The Mark Zuckerberg Money Pump would require over a kilowatt of power just to hoist the coins up to his ceiling and drop them. But that's not a problem. Even a penny is worth enough to pay for the electricity to hoist itself several thousand miles upward. The downward force from the coins falling on Mark's head and shoulders would certainly be annoying, but not debilitating. It would be possible for him to walk around, but if he sat still for an hour, he'd be buried.

It does sound awful.

There is a lot of confusion out there about Park-and-Ride.  Is it necessary for ridership?  Are motorists entitled to it?  Can it last forever?

Let's start with the basic math.

• Really great transit generates high land value around stations.  
• Free parking presumes low land value around stations.  

It's a contradiction.  

When a transit agency provides free or underpriced parking at a station where the land value signals that there is a higher use, it is subsidizing motorists in two ways.  First, it is forcing a low-value land use to prevail over a high value land use, and second it is making a much bigger investment in access by motorists than it makes in access by people who get to the station in other ways.  I am using the word subsidy in exactly the same sense that any other artificial limit on price is a subsidy.

Obviously the problem is much worse where the rapid transit is of the highest utility and quality and where the ambient land value is therefore higher.  This is why free Park-and-Ride is much harder to justify on high-frequency metro systems than on infrequent outer-suburban commuter rail in most metro areas.  

Low-cost Park-and-Ride can make great sense where a station area is undevelopable (floodplains etc).  There's also an important role for distributed, small-scale Park-and-Ride created by sharing existing spaces.  Transit agencies often make deals to share parking with land uses that peak on weekends and evenings, such as houses of worship and entertainment venues. These are great ways of providing some car access at very little cost to the public.    

But the law of supply and demand generates some facts about free Park-and-Ride that many people don't want to hear, but that we really can't protect them from:

• Free parking at a high-utility rapid transit station is a price subsidy, exactly the way the Soviet Union's caps on retail prices were.  It has the same effect, which is to cause problems of supply: Empty shelves in Soviet grocery stores, Park-and-Rides that fill up at 7 AM. If a commodity is priced too low in a condition of high demand, its supply will be exhausted, making it unavailable.

• A Park-and-Ride that fills up at 7 AM is effectively one that doesn't exist over much of the time period when it's supposedly needed.  This loss of utility for people who travel later is a direct consequence of the price subsidy, as the artificially low price prevents the transit agency and its customers from reaching a market equilibrium where supply and demand of parking are in balance.  (This equilibrium, of course, would be optimal for both ridership and revenue.  Parking that fills up too soon drives away riders as effectively as no parking would.)
  
  
• The claim that Park-and-Ride is needed to attract riders is true only in the earliest phases of development, or on transit services with limited utility like peak-only express service.   Once land value rises in response to transit access, the highest source of ridership is also the economically highest use of the land: dense, transit-oriented development around the station combined with good provision for the space-efficient forms of access (i.e. everything but Park-and-Ride).  This is why Park-and-Ride is often a logical interim use of land, but not one that you should plan on having forever.  Once a city has grown in around a transit system, there may be little Park-and-Ride left at rail stations, and only massive, distorting subsidies will make it free.
  
  
• Preventing high-value dense development on naturally expensive station-area land forces that development to locate away from the rapid transit system instead, creating a less sustainable urban structure in which more people and businesses lack excellent transit options.

• People who take buses or bikes or their feet or Kiss-and-Ride to a rail station are being mathematically correct (and fiscally conservative) when they object to free Park-and-Ride at high-demand stations, especially if the agency is not offering a corresponding subsidy to their own preferred modes of access, which all use scarce space more efficiently.  
  
  
• All of these problems around Park-and-Ride can be resolved only by charging a fair market price for the rental of expensive, publicly owned real estate.  Once parking is priced that way, it can remain the best use of valuable land.  As always, the problem is not parking, per se.  The problem is the market distortion arising from the subsidy. 

It's easy to feel entitled to a free Park-and-Ride space.  But nobody can repeal the law of supply and demand, and that's what we're dealing with here.

Photo: Park and Ride at Auckland's Constellation Station, Auckland Transport

The question of the effects of the supply restrictions in zoning on housing prices has erupted among leftist urbanist bloggers again. On the side saying that US urban housing prices are rising because of zoning, see anything by Daniel Kay Hertz, but most recently his article in the Washington Post on the subject. On the side saying that zoning doesn’t matter and the problem is demand (and by implication demand needs to be curbed), see the article Daniel is responding to in Gawker, and anything recent by Jim Russell of Burgh Diaspora, e.g. this link set and his Pacific Standard article on the subject.

This is not a post about why rising prices really are a matter of supply. I will briefly explain why they are, but the bulk of this post is about why, given that this is the case, cities need to apportion the bulk of their housing via market pricing and not rent controls, as a matter of good political economy. Few do, which is also explainable in terms of political economy.

But first, let us look at the anti-supply articles. Gawker claims that San Francisco prices are rising despite a building boom. We’ll come back to this point later, but let me note that in reality, growth in housing supply has been sluggish: Gawker links to a SPUR article about San Francisco’s housing growth, which shows there was high growth in 2012, but anemic growth in previous years. The Census put the city’s annual housing unit growth last decade at 0.8%. In New York, annual growth was 0.5%, as per a London study comparing London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo. In contrast, Tokyo, where zoning is relatively lax, growth was 2%, and rents have sharply fallen. The myth that there is a building boom in cities with very low housing unit growth is an important aspect of the non-market-priced system.

Jim’s arguments are more interesting. He quotes a Fed study showing that housing vacancies in the most expensive US cities have not fallen, as we’d expect if price hikes came from lack of supply. (In San Francisco, vacancies went up last decade, at least if you believe that the Census did not miss anyone.) This is too not completely right, because in Los Angeles County, as noted on PDF-page 18 here, vacancies did recently fall. But broadly, it’s correct that e.g. New York’s vacancy rate has been 3% since the late 1990s, as per its housing surveys. But I do not think it’s devastating to the supply position at all. The best way to think about it is in analogy with natural rates of unemployment.

Briefly: it’s understood in both Keynesian and neo-classical macroeconomics that an economy with zero employment will have high and rising inflation, because to get new workers, employers have to hire them away from existing jobs by offering higher wages. There is a minimum rate of unemployment consistent with stable inflation, below which even stable unemployment will trigger accelerating inflation. In the US, this is to my understanding about 4%; whether the recession caused structural changes that raised it is of course a critical question for macroeconomic policy. A similar concept can be borrowed into the more microeconomic concept of the housing market.

There’s also the issue of friction, again borrowed from unemployment. There’s a minimum frictional vacancy, in which all vacant apartments are briefly between tenants, and if people move between apartments more, it rises. For what it’s worth, the breakdown of 2011 New York vacancies on pages 3-4 by borough and type of apartment suggests friction is at play. First, the lowest vacancy by borough is 2.61%, in Brooklyn, not far below city average. Second, the only type of apartment with much lower vacancy than the city average is the public housing sector, with 1.4% vacancy, where presumably people stay for decades so that friction is very low; rent-stabilized units have lower vacancy than market-rate units, 2.6% vs. 4.4%, which accords with what I would guess about how often people move.

So if high rents are the result of supply restrictions, and it appears that they are, the way to reduce them should be to relax zoning restrictions. If this is done, then this allows living even in currently expensive areas without spending much on rent. Urban construction costs are lower than people think: New York’s condo average is $2,300 per square meter, and London’s is not much higher, entirely eaten by PPP conversions; Payton Chung notes the much higher cost of high-rises than that of low-rises, but the cost of high-rise apartment buildings is still only about $2,650/m^2 in Washington, and (using the same tool) about $3,100 in New York, and at least based on the same tool, mid-rises are barely any cheaper. For US-wide single-family houses, construction costs are 61.7% of sale prices, but the $3,100 figure already includes overheads and profit. Excluding land costs, which are someone else’s profit, construction, profit, and overheads are 92.5%; so let’s take our $3,100/m^2 New York high-rise and add the rest to get about $3,300, which is already more than most non-supertall office skyscrapers I have found data for in other major cities. The metro area appears to have a price-to-rent ratio of about 25, and with the caveat that this may go down slightly if the city gets more affordable, this corresponds to a monthly rent of $11 per square meter, at which point, a 100-m^2 apartment, sized for a middle-class family of four, becomes affordable, without subsidies, to families making about $44,000 a year and up, about twice the poverty line and well below the median for a family of that size. If we allow some compromises on construction costs – perhaps slightly smaller apartments, perhaps somewhat lower-end construction – we could cover most of the gap between this and the poverty line.

But given that demand for housing at prices that match construction costs, there has to be a way of allocating apartments. Under market pricing, they’re allocated to the highest bidder. If there is a perfectly rigid supply of 2 million housing units and a demand for 4 million at construction costs, the top 2 million bidders get housing, at the rent that the 2 millionth bidder is willing to pay.

I do not know of any expensive city with low home ownership that uses market pricing: too many existing residents would lose their homes. High home ownership has the opposite effect, of course – Tel Aviv may have rising rents, and high price-to-income ratios, but since home ownership is high, the local middle class is profiting rather than being squeezed, or at least its older and slightly richer members are.

Instead, cities give preference to people who have lived in them for the longest time. Rent control, which limits the increase in annual rent, is one way to do this. City-states, i.e. Singapore and Monaco, have citizenship preference for public housing to keep rents down for their citizens. Other cities use regulations, including rent control but also assorted protections for tenants from eviction, to establish this preference. Instead of market pricing allocation, there is allocation based on a social hierarchy, depending on political connections and how long one has lived in the city. People who moved to San Francisco eight years ago, at age 23, organize to make it harder for other people to move to the city at this age today.

Going to market pricing, which means weakening rent controls over the next few years until they’re dead letter, is the only way to also ensure there is upzoning. Although rent control and upzoning both seem to be different policies aimed at affordability, they’re diametrically opposed to each other: one makes it easy for people to move in, one makes it hard. As I mentioned years ago, rent-controlled cities tend to have parallel markets: one is protected for long-timers, and for the rest there is a market that’s unregulated and, because so much of the city’s housing supply is taken off it, very expensive. In exchange-rate dollars, I pay $1,000 for a studio of 30 square meters, of which maybe 20 are usable, the rest having low sloped ceilings. In PPP dollars it’s $730, still very high for the size of the unit. If I put my name on a waiting list, I could get a similar apartment for a fraction of the price; to nearly all residents, rents are far lower than what I pay, because of tight rent controls. Stockholm at least has a relatively short waiting list for rent-controlled apartments, 1.5 years, for international visitors at my university; American cities (or perhaps American universities) never do foreigners such favors.

The problem here is entirely political. Cities have the power to zone. Thus, supply depends entirely on whether local community leaders accept more housing. This housing, almost invariably, goes to outsiders, who would dilute the community’s politics, forming alternative social networks and possibly caring about different political issues. It’s somewhat telling that ultra-Orthodox Jews in the New York areas support aggressive upzoning, since the new residents are their children and not outsiders; Stephen Smith has written before about the Brooklyn Satmars’ support for upzoning, and the resulting relatively low prices. In the vast majority of the first world, with its at- or below-replacement birth rates, this is not the case, and communities tend to oppose making it easier to build more housing.

There is a certain privilege to being organized here. We see the pattern when we compare how US minorities vote on zoning to what minority community leaders say. In San Francisco specifically, activists who oppose additional development have made appeals to white gentrification in nonwhite neighborhoods, primarily the Mission District. Actual votes on the subject reveal the exact opposite: see the discussion on PDF-pp. 13-15 of this history of Houston land use controls, which notes that low-income blacks voted against zoning by an overwhelming margin because of scare tactics employed by the zoning opponents. (Middle-income blacks voted for zoning, by a fairly large margin.) Polling can provide us with additional data, less dependent on voter turnout and mobilization, and in Santa Monica, Hispanics again favor new hotel development more than whites. In areas where being low-income or nonwhite means one is not organized, low-income minorities are not going to support restrictions that benefit community leaders.

The result is that organized communities are going to instead favor zoning, because it gives them more power, as long as they are insulated from the effect of rising prices. In suburbs with high home ownership, they actually want higher prices: my rents are their property values. In cities with low home ownership, rent controls provide the crucial insulation, ensuring that established factions do not have to pay higher rents. Zoning also ensures that, since the developers who do get variances can make great profits, community groups can extort them into providing amenities. This is of course the worst in high-income areas: every abuse of power is worse when committed by people who are already powerful. But the poor can learn to do it just the same, and this is what happens in San Francisco; TechCrunch has a comprehensive article about various abuses, by San Franciscans of all social classes, culminating in the violent protests against the Google shuttles, and in many cases, the key to the abuse was the community’s ability to veto private developments.

The risk, of course, is displacement. As the gap between the regulated and market rent grows, landlords have a greater incentive to harass regulated tenants into leaving. This is routine in New York and San Francisco. Community groups respond by attacking such harassment individually, which amounts to supporting additional tenant protections. In California, this is the debate over the Ellis Act. The present housing shortages are such that supporting measures that would lower the market rent has no visible short-term benefits, and may even backfire, if a small rent-controlled building is replaced by a large unregulated building.

So with rent controls, community groups have every incentive to support restrictive zoning, and none to support additional development. With market pricing, the opposite is the case. What of low-income city residents’ access to housing, then? Daniel mentions housing subsidies as a necessity for the poor. To be honest, I don’t see the purpose, outside land-constrained cities like Hong Kong and Singapore. If it is possible through supply saturation to cut rents to levels that are affordable to families making not much more than the poverty line, say 133% of the US poverty line, the Medicaid threshold, then direct cash benefits are better. In the ongoing debate over a guaranteed minimum income, the minimum should be slightly higher than the US poverty line, which is lower as a proportion of GDP per capita than most other developed countries’ poverty lines, as seen in the government programs with slightly higher limits, led by Medicaid.

Leftists have spent decades arguing for state involvement in health care and education – not just cash benefits, but either state provision, or state subsidies combined with some measure of cost control. There are many arguments, but the way I understand them, none applies to housing:

1. Positive externalities: Ed Glaeser has noted that if some people in a metro area get more education then there is higher income growth even for other people in the area. In health care, there are issues like herd immunity.

2. Very long-term benefits: if college is as expensive as it is in the US today, it takes many years for graduates’ extra incomes to be worth the debt. With health care, the equivalent is preventive care. When benefits take so much time to accrue, first some people face poverty traps and don’t have the disposable income today to invest in their own health and education, and second, the assumptions of rational behavior in classical economics are less true.

3. Natural monopolies outside large cities: hospitals, schools, and universities have high fixed capital costs, so there can only be sufficient competition in very large cities. The same is of course true of rail transit.

4. Asymmetric information: students and parents can’t know easily whether a school is effective, and patients face the same problem with doctors; short-term satisfaction surveys, such as student evaluations, may miss long-term benefits, and are as a result very unpopular in academia.

With housing, we instead have competitive builder markets everywhere, no appreciable benefits to having your neighbor get a bigger or better apartment, and properties that can be evaluated by viewing them.

The only question is what to do in the transition from the present situation to market pricing. This is where a limited amount of protection can be useful. For example, rent controls could be relaxed into a steady annual gain in the maximum allowed real rent. While market-rate housing remains expensive, public housing is a stopgap solution, and although it should be awarded primarily based on need rather than how long one has lived in the city, a small proportion should be set aside to people in rent-controlled small buildings that were replaced by new towers. None of this should be a long-term solution, but in the short run, this may guarantee the most vulnerable tenants a soft landing.

What this is not, however, is a workable compromise. Community organizations are not going to accept any zoning reform that lets in people who are members of out-groups. They have no real reason to negotiate in good faith; they can negotiate in bad faith as a delaying tactic, which has much the same effect as present zoning regimes. What they want is not just specific amenities, but also the power to demand more in the future; it’s precisely this power that ensures the neighborhoods that are desirable to outsiders are unaffordable to them. What they want is a system in which their political connections and social networks are real resources. A city that welcomes newcomers is the exact opposite. Expensive housing is ultimately not a market failure; it’s a political failure.

Today is a weird, sad day in social medialand and also with various life stuff and brain chemistry stuff and street harassment. To be honest, I have been crying or on the verge of crying off and on for the last 20 hours with occasional breaks for sleep and a much needed breakfast and movie (a movie …that made me cry) with a friend this morning. I almost started crying in the Apple Store a little while ago when I thought I’d have to pay $80 for a new power cable, and then I really cried when it was under warranty and it was free and this big bear of a man was so nice to me and didn’t call attention to the crying and just gently handled my transaction. Crying is good, btw. It’s better than numbness, avoidance. But this question is well-timed.

I realized last year that even when they face a problem that is evidently about city services, city governments prefer to go for monuments that glorify their leadership. The most blatant example then was Cornell NYC Tech, the city-backed university whose campus construction alone is several times as expensive as the CUNY system per student. Since then I’ve tried to collect examples of power brokers proposing similar schemes, of which the worst is Larry Summers’ proposal to solve US inequality by spending public money on airport improvements. These are, to be frank, analogs of what American transit activists have to deal with routinely, with agencies preferring expensive iconic stations to ordinary capital and operating improvements in service.

The argument for Cornell NYC Tech is that New York needs tech entrepreneurs of the kind that Silicon Valley has, and that for that it needs its own Stanford. Instead of investing in STEM education across the CUNY system, or in its dedicated technological campus at the New York City College of Technology, it decided to start a private university from scratch, inviting other universities to bid on it. The city wanted Stanford to win the bid, but instead the winning bid was a joint effort by Cornell and the Technion, Israel’s technological university. The Technion was never run this way; it was started as a German-style technical university and is now a public university, funded and run on the same terms as the other Israeli public universities.

For Cornell NYC Tech, the city has lined up $2 billion in public and private funds for campus construction, expecting 2,000 students in 2037, which at 4% interest is $40,000 per student-year; annual capital and operating spending together, from all sources including tuition, is $16,000 per full-time equivalent student at the CUNY senior colleges and $11,000 at the CUNY community colleges (see PDF-page 65 of the budget request). This is the educational equivalent of airport connectors, which cities routinely spend several times per rider on as they would on ordinary subway extensions.

Summers’ proposal for airport improvements is in a way more frustrating, and more telling. He did not propose it as part of an independent infrastructure plan, but as a way to build public works to reduce US inequality, on the grounds that JFK is “an embarrassment as an entry point” and “the wealthiest, by flying privately, largely escape its depredations.” The proportion of people who fly privately is tiny; an income level at the bottom of the US top 1%, $400,000 per year, will buy you a lot of intercontinental business-class travel or some first-class travel, while affording a late-model Learjet requires an annual income of many tens of millions of dollars. Since poor people don’t fly as much as rich people, the users of JFK skew richer than the general city public.

My frustration comes from the fact that Summers is not trying to derail the conversation: he previously wrote about inequality as a problem and proposed standard center-left solutions, including raising taxes on capital gains and inheritances, supporting unionization, and (by implication) investment in public education. He clearly cares about the problem. He just seems to think that airport investment benefits the poor more than the rich. Most likely, this comes out of years of insider schmoozing with people so rich that they do own private jets, and generalizing to the considerably broader class of rich people.

In both cases, even on its stated merits, the proposal misses key facts about the situation. Silicon Valley began around Stanford, but once the initial tech cluster formed, it became independent of the university, so that even companies formed by people with no affiliation with Stanford or the Bay Area, such as Facebook, relocated to the area. New York is not going to grow its tech industry to the proportion of Silicon Valley’s by building an enterprise university any more than the Bay Area can become a world financial center by building affiliate universities for Columbia and NYU, from which many finance workers are recruited. As for JFK, like many of its users, when I arrive my first experience is the immigration line, a humiliating experience that involves fingerprinting and standing in line possibly for hours, depending on what terminal I use and what time I arrive. Public works will not solve that.

The problem with making even the merit-based argument is that public monuments are never truly merit-based projects. The decision-making process goes in the other direction: first the city elites (or, in case Summers’ proposal makes it into a national jobs bill, national elites) decide on something they want to see built, usually with the adjective world-class thrown in: a world-class university, a world-class airport, a world-class train station, a world-class office tower. The image of a world-class monument is more important than whether it works at its stated goal, such as improving education or transportation or fulfilling a need for class A office space.

Witness all the problems involving World Trade Center, which is being built entirely for prestige value, at enormous cost. The associated PATH station is $4 billion, almost as much as Second Avenue Subway, and about the same as 20 kilometers of subway in an average first-world city. One World Trade Center cost about $12,000 per square meter. I am not aware of any office tower in the world that is this expensive outside the WTC area and Hudson Yards; the tallest recent tower built in New York excluding 1 WTC, Bank of America Tower, cost about $5,500 per square meter in 2012 dollars, while the range I have seen for office towers in the 200+ meter range is about $2,500-6,000. Meanwhile, the WTC site struggles to find tenants: 1 WTC is almost half empty.

The sentiments after 9/11 ensured WTC would be rebuilt taller, regardless of actual demand in Lower Manhattan. Viewed through this lens, 1 WTC is not really about office space, but about proving a point about the power of US and New York to come back and not surrender to terrorism. This is why the transit spending went mainly to the PATH station and not to bringing the LIRR to Lower Manhattan, as proposed by the Regional Plan Association and studied officially in subsequent years: the LIRR project would’ve been about Lower Manhattan in general, without enhancing the specific prestige of WTC, while the billions poured into the WTC site and its PATH stations are all about the prestige.

Those other projects – various overrated transit schemes such as airport connectors, but also Cornell NYC Tech and Summers’ JFK proposals – are the same. They are not about what people living in, working in, or visiting the city need. They are not even about what they want. Whereas there was a citywide impulse to rebuild WTC taller after 9/11, there is no equivalent impulse to build an exclusive technical university, except among the power brokers. They are entirely about being able to say, “we have our own ___” and “I got that build.” It looks like development, but at best provides a fraction of the advertised value, and at worst provides nothing.

Whenever an urban project is proposed, the most important question to be asked is “what problem is this solving?”. Often, the problem is real, but there are much cheaper and less glamorous solutions. At other times, the project is a solution in search of a problem, and this is often detectable when proponents tout many unrelated benefits, almost as if the project can solve every major problem.

Compare this with solid public transit projects. Consider the lines I think North American cities should be focusing on, and the lines proposed in comments, especially as the Vermont subway in Los Angeles. In every single case, there are strong arguments for why the ridership of those lines would be high relative to the cost, and why existing subway lines (if any) and surface transit options are inadequate. The problem being solved is underserved neighborhoods with high transit demand, or in the case of the crosstown lines underserved origin-destination pairs in high demand. For other lines, not listed, there might be a separate argument regarding transit-oriented development: American cities tend to oversell TOD, as the problems with Hudson Yards show, but there do exist cases in which extending a subway line can allow dense development, or the construction of a new business district. But this involves figuring out where the development comes from – for example, the housing market may be very expensive, signaling high demand, or there may be projections of high future metropolitan population growth.

Usually, support for prestige projects to the exclusion of providing public services is the hallmark of moderates, along a broad arc from the center-left to the center-right. In the last few years, Republicans too far right to be called center-right have prioritized cutting taxes and spending and weakening the unions; signature projects conflict with their opposition to government spending. Conversely, urban leftist activists tend to oppose these prestige projects, on such grounds as gentrification, displacement, and private-sector involvement in public services.

The people in between those two ends are the ones most guilty of this kind of thinking. They are usually neo-liberal enough that they believe the government should champion market solutions and oppose industrial policy, and yet what they do is in many cases exactly industrial policy: Cornell NYC Tech is an attempt to curry favor with the technology industry. They are not so conservative as to believe government is always the problem, but the role they envision for government is to partner with the private sector to build public projects, which they tend to choose on grounds of what looks good rather than what provides the best public service. They know the buzzwords of urban politics well: for example, they’ll happily argue climate change to push a desired agenda that is usually only partly related to the problem, but lack the urgency of actual environmentalist activists and often also build roads and other dirty projects.

As with most bad things in politics, it’s a result of weak democratic institutions on the local level. American mayors tend to be elected dictators, and the opposition to them tends to be based on personality rather than ideology. In this non-ideological framework, the role of government is not to balance market and state solutions based on the voters’ preferences, but to aggrandize the leaders. Signature initiatives must appeal to the broad spectrum of non-ideological voters, so they can’t involve merely increasing spending on a chosen priority like education or transportation. Doing nothing is not an option – something has to be passed to remind people that the government still exists and has a purpose. The political incentives are against any incremental improvements that lead to tangible results, and for white elephants.

In all of the recent conversations about male privilege, violence against women, and misogyny, there’s been a lot of debate about “not all men.” When guys are confronted with the many ways in which men hurt, harass, and abuse women, it’s a pretty common response for us to say, “I’m not like that.” Many of us want to be one of “the good guys,” the ones who don’t act like jerks, who don’t harass women or commit assault. Other people have explained why it doesn’t make sense for women to assume good intentions, and of course, some men jump to say that they aren’t like that and deserve better.

I get it. I really do. For more than half my life, I’ve been having women tell me that I’m not like most of the other men they know. I’ve never really fit into the standard definitions of masculinity and I’ve been like this ever since I was a kid. I’ll admit that there was a time when my ego enjoyed the positive reinforcement, especially since it helped me feel better about the fact that I wasn’t like most guys. But then I realized something important.

While I might be less capable of physically forcing someone to do something than many men are, I can exert male privilege in a lot of other ways. I can assume that my opinions are more valid than the woman I’m speaking with with, I can talk over her, interrupt her, or ignore her, and a lot of people won’t even notice. I can harass someone, not take no for an answer, whine and cajole her in order to make her feel obliged to comply with my demands. I can slut-shame someone for having sex, call her a prude if she turns me down, and I have much more freedom to have sex without repercussions. I can safely assume that in most occupations, I’ll be paid more. I can walk around at night with a lot less fear. I can take up more space than women, both physically and energetically, and usually get away with it. There are dozens of ways in which I can benefit from being a cisgender man, whether I want to or not.

It’s those last six words that make all the difference to me. There are ways in which I don’t have choice about the privilege that accrues to me, and in those cases, there’s not much difference between other men and me. There are also ways in which I have some influence about the privilege I receive. In those situations, as soon as I start believing that I’m not like those “other men,” I’ve taken the first step down a very steep, slippery slope. Once I begin thinking that I could never be like those guys over there, it becomes much more likely that I’ll act exactly like them. Saying that I’m not like that would allow be to become complacent about my privilege and my internalized sexism and misogyny. Recognizing that I could act like that gives me the room to make the ongoing decision to act differently.

When we say that “I’m not like that,” we render those guys as other. Rather than seeing our shared humanity, we demonize them. Rather than seeing the ways in which sexism is trained and shamed into each of us, we call them evil and stop looking at ourselves. And rather than reaching out to them to help them move in a positive direction, we discard them so that we can be “not like them.” I don’t see how that does anything other than perpetuate the cycles that I so passionately want to stop.

I refuse to be one of “the good guys” because I know that I have to keep making choices about how I want to act. I refuse to be one of “the good guys” because I know that I’ve said and done things that I’m not proud of. I refuse to be one of “the good guys” because I don’t want to widen the chasm between me and the men who have the potential to change. And I refuse to be one of “the good guys” because I know that I will make mistakes and it’s so much harder for me to be accountable and make amends when my identity is challenged. It’s a lot less difficult to move forward when I’m not weighed down by the need to rethink who I am.

Men will often try to protect themselves from women’s anger by trying to minimize it or make it go away. We do that because we’re scared of it, because it triggers us, because it brings up our fear and our shame. But it almost always sends the message that we don’t think that women’s anger is valid or reasonable. For most men, it takes a lot of practice to be able to hold space for women’s anger without getting lost in our reactions, especially since many of us were never taught the skills of emotional self-regulation and shame resilience. But when we try to make women’s feelings disappear, we make things worse. When we learn how to listen to them with fierce compassion instead of defensiveness, we make things better. As a relationship coach, I’ve seen this over and over. (And no, that’s not limited to women’s emotions, but that’s the focus of this post.)

So when I hear a woman make a sweeping statement about men, I try my best to hold space for her feelings and her experience without telling her that she’s wrong, or that she’s crazy, or that I’m not like that. I don’t always manage it, especially in online interactions, but I’m getting better at it. And part of how I work on it is by not letting myself fall into the trap of thinking that I’m one of “the good guys.”

So don’t call me a good guy. Just let me work on being the best person I can be, with all of my flaws and limitations. And when I don’t live up to my expectations or when I do something that hurts you, let me know so I can fix it. Trust me- it’ll be a lot easier for you to do that if you’re not caught up in thinking that I’m one of “the good guys,” too.

 

---

The post, I Refuse To Be One Of “The Good Men”, is from Charlie Glickman's website.

The fleeting pink and white blossoms cover the city. Sun shines and spring breezes blow. Families and field trips congregate on our sidewalks. And hey, how about those tour buses! Yes, it’s cherry blossompalooza in Washington, D.C.

In previous years I dreaded this scenario. But thanks to my regular midday runs that have exposed me to this sudden, yet annual, increase in activity I figured out a system to keep me moving (mostly) calmly.

As a self-confessed rule follower and righteous city dweller, I have held tightly to the believe that we all should follow certain rules. Walk on the right side of the sidewalk. Don’t run or walk in the bike lanes. Walk two abreast at most and single file in crowded zones.

Personally, I think these are really good rules. However, while I have not done any studies of the issue, few others seem to agree with me. Groups crowd the entire sidewalk, moving like schools of fish from point A to point B. Small children, and even grown ups, love walking at odd angles. They’re like human lightning bolts.

One day I was out on a run, weaving through the midday chaos, when I realized the rules I thought everyone should follow were maybe nice ideas, but mostly unrealistic.

I let go of my rigid views about space. I sidled in and out and around. I paused. I flowed like water.

Learning to move like this slowed my frustrations at those around me not adhering to what I perceived as the rules of the road and sidewalk.

Now I try to flow like water every time I step outside, be it on my bike or on my two feet. It’s totally changed how I look at my environment.

While more people than not make a half-hearted effort to operate in a predictable manner based on the rules of the road and sidewalk, it cannot be expected to occur all the time.

People may drift inadvertently into your path. Somebody might shoal you at a light. A tour bus may stop to unload all of its passengers at the exact moment that you are trying to pass it.

Flow like water.

Touch the brakes, dodge where need be, and if someone gets in your space, slow down or change course. Try not to sweat it. As Felkerino likes to say, it’s all just pavement.

Sounds obvious, no? Not for me. It’s taken 10 years of commuting and more than a year of weekday runs on the National Mall to finally begin to relax my stance on the rules I was sure we all should follow. Finally, I’m unlocking the mysteries of how to flow like water.

 

Filed under: Commute Reflections, Commuting & Utility Cycling, DC Commute Scenes

When I first saw the online poll at Education Next, I said a lot of dirty words.

A lot.

See, I’ve been here before. Rather, people like me have been here before. But, I get ahead of myself.

Thanks to a policy recommendation from the fine folks at the Brookings Institute there is an honest-to-God debate about requiring poor college-bound students to pass a “college readiness” test to get a Pell grant.

Pell is a need-based federal grant for college tuition. Students receive an amount based on a needs formula and issued on a sliding scale up to $5,785.

If you think that doesn’t sound like much relative to the cacophony of media accounts about the rising cost of college tuition, you are right.

But, like need, aid is relative.

$5,785 may not do much for you at Duke where tuition exceeds $50,000 a year. But, it can put a serious dent in the tuition at Durham Tech Community College (approx. $13,000). With some state aid, institutional aid, and some luck a student might be able to get some of that workforce training everyone from the President of the United States and all the captains of the private sector claim we need.

Pell grants help poor students overcome the consequences of choosing to be born to parents without means.

For almost the entire history of higher education in this country, college was for the sons (and much later the daughters) of wealthy families. The GI Bill created a national model for distributing aid to students without the benefit of inter-generational wealth to go to college.

But, the GI Bill was not evenly or fairly distributed. Despite the disproportionate number of black men and women who served in the military two decades after it was integrated, black folks had a hard time getting the aid they’d been promised.

Ira Katznelson calls the massive state building that created the white middle class after WWII, the era when affirmative action was white. A combination of sectionalism in national politics, disinterest in challenging the power of the Southern political block, and outright racism at the state level (who were given near unilateral discretion to distribute the money according to the embedded racial violence of the region) circumvented black income mobility during the nation’s greatest period of economic expansion.

When the Pell  grant was created in the 1980s, it promised to reverse the racialized patterns of the GI Bill. There’s a reason it became the “cornerstone” of African American higher education aspirations and achievement. Slavery, apartheid and cultural redlining means black folks tend to not have a lot of that wealth that makes college-going much easier.

The Pell grant turned back a history of building mechanisms for statistical discrimination into a government aid program. Instead of relying on shady state middlemen or congressional dealmaking, individuals can get Pel  regardless of ability or upfront means. That matters. If you know the history of poll taxes and literacy tests, you may realize that the social construction of “ability” has been a critical tool in structural violence against almost every group except wealthy white men. Poll taxes and literacy tests to “qualify” for the vote were a means of social control. Ability could mean whatever those in control of the process wanted it to mean, in accordance to whatever goals they wanted to achieve at the moment.

The idea of attaching ability to a program designed in the shadow of the history of racism, federal benefits, and educational access is to bathe in the post-racial kool-aid.

If you know the kind of racialized, gendered and classist segregation that defines who is and who is not “college ready” AND you concede by ideological imperative that knowledge is a type of capital, then what is a readiness test, exactly?

Well, when those who won’t need Pell grants to send their kids to college are defining all the terms and conditions, “college readiness” is just a poll tax by another name.

Perhaps you can see why the very idea of student aid paternalism doing what’s best for poor kids who “shouldn’t be forced to go to college” doesn’t sit right with me.

If you are concerned about the massive structural volatility that constrains the options of too many then talk about the constraints. I have. I don’t think everyone should HAVE to go to college to make a living wage, get healthcare and age with dignity. That’s why I support raising the minimum wage and instituting federal jobs programs so that those most likely to need a Pell can choose between college and work, like the sons and daughters of wealthy families.

There should be no debate about a college readiness poll tax for one of the few anti-poverty measures still available without a pee test or a moral marriage requirement.

So, I cussed.

I hope you do, too.

google tags: sectionalism, systemic racism, structural violence, poll taxes, literacy tests

One Saturday last April, my family made a pilgrimage to two places from our past. The first site lay in the San Bernardino foothills, near the old settlement of Verdemont. Here we met some local history buffs at the foundations of what was once the family home, where Otto and Vera Frances Meyer lived with Lawrence and Kathryn, their two children. Kathryn was my grandmother. After Otto died in 1929, Vera sent the children to stay with her mother while she worked as a housekeeper and eventually remarried. The family rented out the house until it burned down decades ago.

Slowly over the next decades, Vera's land would be parceled off and sold to developers. The ranch house foundations today are on a suburban cul-de-sac, but more rugged-style for horse lovers.

We traveled up from the ranch house into the chaparral foothills to look for the grave of Julius Meyer, Otto's grandfather, who died in 1912. We knew it was somewhere within a few acres, but we didn't know the exact location because the current owners of the land did not want the verified existence of human remains on the site to add another barrier to their development plans. The friendly neighbor who had brought us up here in ORVs explained that this developer planned to build over 400 single family homes on these scrub hills. I was shocked to hear that, considering we were in a region known for its wildfires and water shortages and in foothills fissured by the San Andreas fault.

In addition to the seismic and climatological reasons not to develop on this land, we were nowhere near a source of employment. The nearest metropolis was San Bernardino, where we'd walked several miles that morning through the deserted downtown before finding an open restaurant.

In that time we also saw a woman walking down the street clad only in underwear and a top, being led by a fully clothed man. Any development in those hills will be dependent on jobs and water obtained elsewhere.

We fanned out looking for evidence of a grave site, but found nothing conclusive.

Our next stop was a local history museum, where we saw pictures of our family members hanging on the walls. The Meyers had been a prominent family in the area. Then we headed to a site related to the other side of my mother's family, in Riverside. My other great grandfather, Lawrence Holmes Sr, had emigrated from Norway with his family at age 8 in 1881 as Lars Jensen. He became an actor and inventor. He designed and manufactured space-saving wall beds, which I've heard about all my life but did not see until I walked into a friend's studio apartment in Portland last summer and saw my great grandfather's name on an old metal bed frame.

Lawrence appears to have been one of the early twentieth century utopians who saw in California a better future through experimental agriculture. He introduced carob cultivation to Riverside, and his ranch drew the interest of the Metropolitan Water District that wanted to expand water flowing into the region. He fought eminent domain for as long as he could, but he lost the case and his fortune. His land has been sitting underwater since the 1940s, and my great uncle, his last surviving child, who still holds mining rights to the land, in recent years revived that struggle through mineral tests.

That April day we had the opportunity to visit the reservoir and see the water sparkling over the once carob ranch. It was a heavily guarded facility, understandably, as the water laying before us served millions of suburban homes in Orange County. We were joined by some women who had co-authored a local history book that mentioned my great grandfather's struggle with the MWD.

The heat of the day was starting to get to me, exacerbated by the usual stress of traveling with a caravan of people. I'd been concerned that I would feel trapped on this automotive excursion, and the news of the development plans for the Meyer Ranch didn't help. Then the very friendly employee, who had connected with my sister and given up his day off to picnic with my family on the bluff overlooking the reservoir, gave the company line that justified the flooding of this land, and the senseless development that has driven California to today's water crisis. I felt like I was entering the twilight zone. It was development opportunity, not populist survival, that led to these mega water projects, but he said that our great grandfather had sacrificed his land so that millions of people could live on the water funneled from the Colorado River to this reservoir.

The acre feet filling the depths of the valley below us were framed not as a great human folly that turned this land into an exurban machine generating profits for a few at the cost of millions of others, but as a laudable symbol in our right to survive wherever we choose.

I started hyperventilating and crying, and my mother rescued me and drove me to a train station. There I could head back into my sustainability bubble, return to the rail corridor that reassured me that not all is lost, that there are some shreds of reality in Southern California.

I have not lived in California since 2011, and the major reason I have not returned is the water crisis. I miss the state. It is a place that I feel viscerally connected to, by living family and by my time in Los Angeles, but also because there are buried in the ground once beautiful women I loved, my grandmother facing the sea and my great grandmother facing the foothills.

Will California wake up? Our land of dreams has been renewed over and over with new fantasies, in the American era starting with the health dream that brought people on the first rail lines, and the oil geysers, and the government subsidies that built the postwar nuclear dream homes, and the surf style that went far beyond those who actually learned to ride the waves, and the hippies, and the cultists, and the people who hate the immigrants who care for their children, prepare their food, and clean their homes. All of this makes it seem like it is not Californian to confront delusion; it is Californian to produce it.

Two days before that Saturday expedition into my family's past, I gave a talk at UC Riverside, followed by a dinner with some faculty and the man who ran the college's sustainability demonstration garden. He gave me two ripe grapefruits.

I hope this can be the end of a blind era and the beginning of adaptation to the region's underlying ecosystems. Is it really so terrible to envision cacti landscape instead of lawns, greywater systems instead of water loss, built environments that allow rainwater to seep back into the ground instead of flushing it off the concrete into the waterways?

The pungent scent of the chaparral softened by the dewy air; for all their stucco subdivisions they've yet to overpower it.


Pete Seeger - Little Boxes by jolysable

A first-person account of race and yoga is making the social media rounds. In it a self-described thin white woman notices a black woman in yoga class and has an existential crisis about envy, big bodies, and race. It’s one of the oddest autoethnographic attempts I’ve read in some time. The title is sensationalist but having been around the bend, I know that writers rarely choose the title. So, I’ll leave that alone. The content of the essay, over which the writer has total control, has enough to consider without dithering over the title. It all starts when a black woman walks into a yoga class:

A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and nervous.

The writer immediately recognizes this woman’s body and eyes for what they are — an emotional albatross:

At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.

There’s a reflection on how the writer embodies an unachievable ideal for the heavy black woman:

I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined.

And, then, there are tears. The inevitable wet, wet tears:

I got home from that class and promptly broke down crying. Yoga, a beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments in over six years of practice, suddenly felt deeply suspect.

It’s a sad little thing, really. Almost too sad to comment on. But, better writers and thinkers than myself have taken what is worth commenting upon to task. Some of it uses humor brilliantly (which, I’ve said before, is for me humor’s highest form).

There are a few things here. I’ll comment on them briefly for a few reasons. One, I’m short on bandwidth these days. Two, I’ve said almost all of this before. Three, others have said much of it better. Four, because Jesus I cannot live in this constant cycle.

Let’s put aside that you could do a search+replace for “Miley Cyrus” in my thoughts on race and beauty, subbing this essay’s author, and the argument would barely change a bit. Let’s also put aside that often people simply aren’t up to the task of what they’re trying to write. It happens to all of us. Some of us simply have better supports and/or self-editing mechanisms.

Despite all this, I thought it was worth adding a few empirics to the debate. At the heart of this writer’s crisis is her deeply-held belief about how black women envy her body, for its thinness and its whiteness.

Do black women want to be white women?

That struck me as an empirical question.

Melissa Milkie went after this question with her study of black and white teenage girls and their body image. Teen mags like Seventeen have been taken to task for idealizing and perpetuating white beauty ideals. As the infamous doll studies have shown, at a young age non-white children project higher human qualities onto white dolls that do not look like them. Does that extend to young adults? Does the near total white wash of teen magazines define beauty so narrowly (pun, intended) and whitely that black girls have no choice but to hate themselves and envy white girls as a matter of course?

Milkie asked black girls how they engage white teen magazines. And the black girls won’t having none of your envy thesis. The black girls in her sample were less likely to read teen magazines than were white girls, across class (she divides them between urban and suburban schools, a kind of class construct). When asked why they weren’t interested the black girls said, “maybe if there were more of us in there…” but since there were so few black girls in the mags, the black girls had enough sense to determine that the mag wasn’t talking to them or about them. In contrast, the white girls mostly accepted the images in the magazines as an ideal reference group for matters of beauty, fashion and behavior.

Ten of the 11 black girls in the survey said, “unequivocally that they did not want to be like these [white] girls” with only one mixed-race girl saying she sometimes did. Instead the black girls in this sample said they read Essence and Ebony, remixing a counter-narrative of beauty piecemeal from various media and cultural products (which is not at all without problems, but more on that later). The point is, even young black girls who presumably are at a critical developmental stage of identity formation expressed a vocabulary and awareness that clearly rejects the idea that they envy white girls their thinness or whiteness.

In “Black in a Blonde World”, Lisa Duke follows up on Milkie’s study (and similar ones on race and beauty images). It’s the naughts and maybe things done changed. Media has certainly sped up. It can stand to reason that maybe black girls just didn’t know enough to properly envy white girls until there was an app for that.

The black girls in Duke’s sample did not read the teen mags looking for themselves in white beauty ideals. Instead, they seem to scan white media looking for reflections of themselves through the rare occurrence of a black model (again, still a model so still problematic but follow me here). Duke finds that “black girls do not particularly admire or seek to emulate models — instead, they pointed to the more infrequent images of African American performers and athletes”. One black girl said, “white people perceive beautiful in a different way than we do.” The white girls are transfixed by the images of thinness but across class the black girls most often described the same images as “sick looking” or otherwise non-ideal. One black girl explains, “I don’t have the mindset like I got to be perfect…there isn’t one specific way a black girl has to be.”  That’s some powerful articulation of resistance and hegemony from a fairly young girl.

Makkar and Strube go experimental design and grown in their study of race, beauty, and self-esteem among adult women. I won’t get into the methods but basically race and racial self-consciousness significantly moderated the effects of white beauty images on the self-esteem of adult black women.

But what of the powerful import of white beauty ideals that so many black scholars (including myself) have theorized and articulated? Don’t we say that lifting up blonde, blue-eyed women as the ideal feminine archetype oppresses black women? Well, this hinges on some tricky theoretical turns. I’ll try to take you through them but I’m not perfect here. I may fail.

There is the common problem of conflating individuals with structure. When many of us critique the pervasiveness of white beauty norms we are not critiquing beautiful white women. There is you, and there is a thing bigger than you, and almost all the time critiques about race and beauty are not at all about you. Normative beauty ideals diminish black women not by making us hateful, envious spiteful persons but by excluding us from meaningful social interactions and resources. It matters less that you think my fat black body is gross in yoga class and matters a great deal more that because fat black female bodies are viewed as undisciplined, they are more likely to be policed and sanctioned. The difference is instructive for how we center whiteness in dialogues about race and gender and class.

Like the black girls in the samples, I do not much envy white women. I do occasionally think what seems to come with being a type of white women is kind of nice. But that’s not about sports bras and abs. That is about assortative mating, racist social welfare narratives, and WHY THEY DON’T MAKE JEANS FOR THICK THIGHS! Sorry, that last one is a personal thing.

The point remains that a structural analysis can rarely be done through personal emotional management of white women without some honest attempt to link the “personal troubles of milieu” to the “public issues of social structure” (borrowing from C. Wright Mills).

So, there isn’t much evidence that black women go around envying the thinness or whiteness of thin white women. There is evidence that thin white bodies benefit from material and cultural resources that heavy brown bodies do not. But that is not about yoga or the tearful epiphanies of one thin white woman.

Socially situated so much closer to the benefits of thinness and whiteness, the bigger question from all of this may be: why would a thin white woman so desperately need a fat black woman to envy her that she concocted an entire narrative around it?