Andrea

This is how things go in the US, where law enforcement is treated like a favored religion and everyone who isn't on the inside is just grist for prosecution mills. Here's the setup, via Matt Pearce.

A Baton Rouge police officer was arrested Friday on a count of negligent homicide, accused of going 94 mph in a Corvette when he caused an off-duty crash on Airline Highway that killed an infant and injured six others.

The officer, Christopher Manuel, 28, was driving north in a 2007 Chevrolet Corvette shortly after 8 p.m. Oct. 12 on Airline Highway when it struck a Nissan at the intersection at Florline Boulevard that was occupied by four adults and three children.

All of the occupants of the Nissan were taken to the hospital. One of those passengers, a 1-year-old baby, Seyaira Stephens, later died.

The van made a left turn in front of the off-duty officer. Both vehicles had a green light. The speed limit on this road was 50 mph. The speed the officer was traveling was verified by his Corvette's black box. Here's the positive news:

Manuel, of 8508 Greenwell Springs Road, was booked into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison on a count of negligent homicide and speeding, Sgt. L'Jean McKneely, police spokesman, said.

The officer was booked and made bond. So far, so good. Here comes the avalanche of bad news.

Manuel, who has been on paid administrative leave since the accident, will remain on paid leave until after an internal investigation is concluded, McKneely said.

Due process, I suppose, even if it was clear the officer was traveling at nearly twice the posted speed limit. Much of the information needed to conclude the investigation was already in his department's hands, thanks to the Corvette's airbag control module, which recorded this data at the time of impact.

But if there's going to be any justice done, it's going to be severely delayed.

That investigation will not begin until he recovers from his injuries and is released to work by a doctor.

That's the sort of thing never extended to lowly civilians. No officer has ever told an injured arrestee to heal up before worrying about answering questions. No law enforcement agency has backburnered an investigation simply because its subject can't move around on their own yet.

But these investigations took no time to complete. No one at the Baton Rouge PD waited around for victims of the officer's reckless driving to be fully healed before they began their arrests.

Just weeks after a Baton Rouge police officer was arrested on negligent homicide and accused of causing a crash that injured several people and killed a baby, the child's mother was also arrested on the same charge because police said she failed to properly secure the baby's car seat.

Brittany Stephens, 20, was arrested Tuesday after police found that her daughter's car seat was not secured and the straps were not adjusted correctly for the child's height, according to her arrest report. Police said the "lack of securing the seat to the vehicle and the loose straps are a contributing factor in the death" of the child and "show gross negligence" on the mother's part.

Ah, the healing power of criminal charges, brought against someone involved in an accident that was no fault of her own. She (and her daughter) were just passengers in the van. Not to worry, the police issued citations to everyone else in the vehicle the officer hit. But the mother of the infant the cop killed is facing the same charges he is. And she's not going to be given a chance to rest up before the police move forward with their investigation. The PD has already wrapped this one up and forwarded charges to the DA's office.

East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III said Tuesday his office has not yet determined whether Stephens or Manuel will face charges, but prosecutors "will review all reports, charges and arrests and make the appropriate decisions based upon facts and law."

There is nothing right about this, not even technically. The reckless driving performed by the officer should nullify the culpability of the people in the car he hit. While Officer Manuel may have had the right of way, his excessive speed changed the contours of the incident. In a case involving law enforcement officers manufacturing a reason to stop a car, a court pointed out unsafe driving by officers nullifies moving violations performed by other drivers.

[T]he Court finds as a matter of fact and law that Defendant did not fail to yield to the cruiser because the cruiser was not proceeding in a lawful manner. Rather, the cruiser was itself speeding on a dark, rainy night at low visibility further compromised by road glare. By proceeding in such a reckless manner – and in violation of both state and local law – Ofc. Davis forfeited the preferential status afforded a lawful driver under the right-of-way statute.

This isn't apples-to-apples (the court making this declaration was in Ohio, not Louisiana, where this accident took place) but it's a good rule of thumb. If someone is driving 44 mph over the speed limit, they've effectively forfeited their right-of-way status. A left turn taken in front of a speeding officer should give the officer zero preferential treatment in the eyes of the law. The officer should be 100% culpable for the damage and loss of life. Arresting a mother who lost her infant to an officer's reckless actions is needlessly cruel and serves zero deterrent purpose. Her daughter can't be killed again.

The way the Baton Rouge PD is handling this ensures Officer Manuel's eventual conviction will also have zero deterrent value. It shows officers the PD is willing to arrest victims of their unlawful actions and give them all the time they want -- with pay! -- to heal up before they're forced to confront the results of their recklessness. If the DA is smart, the charges against the mother will vanish and the cop will be rung up for his negligent actions.

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Both the State House and Senate have passed a bill clarifying the legal status of electric-assisted bicycles on streets, sidewalks and trails. The bill (SB 6434) now heads to Governor Jay Inslee’s desk for a signature.

If signed into law, the new rules will help the burgeoning e-bike industry grow by aligning state regulations with existing Federal rules. Until now, there were too many gray areas about when an e-assist bike should be treated like a bicycle and when it should be treated like a motor vehicle. The outdated rules failed to account for modern e-assist bike technology that follows a more nuanced three-class system:

E-assist bikes have huge potential to expand access to bicycling to more people, so it is good for communities across the State of Washington if the e-assist bicycle industry succeeds here. But uncertainty and legal gray areas are no good for business.

Washington Bikes worked hard to advocate for this bill, and they deserve some serious props for getting it through on the first try. It passed 44-2 in the Senate and 86-12 in the House.

Great news! @WAbikes ‘ priority legislation (SB 6434) has passed the full House floor 86-12. Next stop, Governor’s desk! pic.twitter.com/zX0yzSRpRu

— Washington Bikes (@WAbikes) February 28, 2018

Big thanks to prime sponsors Sen. Rolfes and @StateRepKilduff for their leadership and support in bringing e-bike legislation to final passage! #waleg #wabikes #ebikes pic.twitter.com/oDkfKkFDzP

— Washington Bikes (@WAbikes) February 28, 2018

One major practical change here for e-bike users is that Class 1 and 2 bikes will be allowed on sidewalks and shared-use trails, unless otherwise prohibited by local laws.

Bikes powered beyond 20 mph (“Class 3”) are now clearly prohibited from sidewalks and trails “unless there is no alternative … to travel over a sidewalk as part of a bicycle or pedestrian path.”

The rules also remove the age restriction for Class 1 and 2 bicycles. I’m pretty sure nobody knew this, but the previous law required e-bike riders to be 16 or older. You still need to be 16 to ride a Class 3 bike.

Local jurisdictions can still make their own rules, and the state law does not pre-empt existing rules. So unfortunately, rules like King County’s e-assist ban on all trails still need to be changed individually. But now that state law has set a precedent, perhaps it will be easier to get local governments to align their rules with state laws.

King County Parks rules (see 7.12.295) use an overly broad definition of “motorized vehicle” that clumsily groups all e-assist bikes with “automobiles, golf carts, mopeds, motor scooters, and motorcycles.” The rules should be updated to allow Class 1 and 2 e-assist bikes the way the new state law does, at least for trails that are paved or gravel.

The new state bill does take a pretty hard stance against e-assist bikes on mountain bike trails. Many mountain bike proponents feel strongly that no motors should be allowed on mountain bike trails at all. I am not a mountain biker, and I cannot claim to have a full understanding of this part of the issue. At this point, both sides make some sense. I can understand the fear that mountain bike trails would become low-power motor sports parks if e-bikes were allowed. On the other hand, perhaps e-bikes could expand access to mountain biking for more people. For now the state says no, but the new bill does allow local jurisdictions to make their own rules if they choose to. Something tells me the e-MTB debate isn’t over yet, especially as more and more people buy e-assist mountain bikes.

Another interesting provision in the new state law is that local jurisdictions cannot make new restrictions to a section of a trail that passes through unless the rules are changed for the whole length of the trail (rules that existed before 2018 are exempted). This makes a lot of sense. Imagine, for example, if e-bikes were allowed on the Burke-Gilman Trail in Seattle and Kenmore, but not in Lake Forest Park. That would be absurd.

I don’t love that the new bill limits bike motor power at 750 Watts. This puts state law in alignment with Federal regulations, so this beef is really with the Federal rules. But motor Wattage just seems arbitrary to me. I’m much more concerned about the speed of these bikes. If the goal is to limit bike acceleration (which I understand), there must be a better way to achieve that goal. But the power needs of a cargo or family bike are much higher than the needs of a personal bike. What if a company wants to innovate bigger cargo bikes for replacing vans and trucks making local deliveries but are stymied because the 750-Watt rule won’t get them up steep hills? Or what if a cargo bike company innovates a minivan-replacing bike for big families? Or e-bike-powered buses? Don’t laugh, it could happen. This e-assist bicycle thing is just getting started, and we have no idea what innovations are ahead. I bet the Watt limits are the first part of this law to become outdated.

But for now, it’s worth congratulating WA Bikes on getting this bill through both chambers. It’s a big step for legitimizing the e-assist bikes in our communities.

The U.S. House of Representatives just passed H.R. 620, also known as the ADA Education and Reform Act, which changes a major provision of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to make life easier for … businesses that aren’t complying with that law. 

You honestly can’t make this garbage up.

The ADA currently requires that business comply with its provisions proactively. Just as with federal laws against gender and race discrimination, businesses are expected to understand and apply the tenets of the ADA simply because it’s the law. However, under H.R. 260, anyone who wants to sue a business for not being accessible would first have to provide the business with written notice that it was breaking the law. After receiving that notice, the business would then have 60 days to come up with a plan to fix the problem, and 120 days to actually take action to fix it.

As the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD), a coalition of approximately 100 disability rights organizations, observed, this bill would make it so that disability rights are treated fundamentally differently from other rights. If I sue my company for gender discrimination, I don’t have to first give them a warning letter explaining what sexism is and how they’re guilty of it. It’s my employer’s responsibility to understand the law and comply with it.

H.R. 260 flips this paradigm. Instead, it’s now the responsibility of people with disabilities to understand their rights and advocate for them. In their letter of opposition, the CCD laid out the absurd injustice of this proposal: “The bill’s proponents purport to protect business owners from the burden of understanding and complying with rules designed to ensure that people with disabilities could access public accommodations, on the ground that this burden is too heavy for businesses. Yet people with disabilities are expected to shoulder this burden and to provide businesses with information about the specific legal obligations that they are violating – after those individuals have been denied the access rights that Congress gave them decades ago.”

“We know of no other law,” the letter continues, “that outlaws discrimination but permits entities to discriminate with impunity until victims experience that discrimination and educate the entities perpetrating it about their obligations not to discriminate. Such a regime is absurd, and would make people with disabilities second-class citizens.”

I do not personally have a disability that affects my life in any substantive way, so I’m certainly not the best person to speak about this. But I’ve lived in European countries which don’t have an equivalent of the ADA, and the difference in the prevalence of wheelchair ramps, elevators, and other accommodations is astonishing. Undercutting the core tenet of the ADA – that people with disabilities have rights which must be respected, period – will remove incentives to comply and result in a less accessible world.

One the most disappointing and disturbing thing about this bill? According to ADAPT, it only passed because 12 Democrats voted for it. Shame on them.

Thanks to a minority of Democrats, the disastrous #HR620 bill passed. If the Democrats were unanimous, HR 620 would have been defeated. #HandsOffMyADA

— NationalADAPT (@NationalADAPT) February 15, 2018

Just as the Senate rejected the House’s repulsive 20-week abortion ban, they must reject this cruel and discriminatory bill. Call your senators.

(via The Washington Post; image: Shutterstock)

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Editor’s Note: Read more of The Atlantic’s Winter Olympics 2018 coverage.

Shortly before getting on the ice at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, Canada, during the 2010 Winter Olympics, the U.S. national champion figure skater and high-school senior Rachael Flatt was writing a paper on Pride and Prejudice for her AP English Literature class. Though it was her first time competing in the Olympics, Flatt had been training vigorously for years; she knew that every spare moment had to be put toward maintaining good grades. She had a way of overthinking her skating routines anyway, and concentrating on Jane Austen before taking to the ice was a helpful distraction. When the time to perform arrived, Flatt executed her triple toe loops and double axels without error, finishing seventh overall. On her essay, she received an A.  

“My parents told me that if my grades suffered, my skating would be postponed,” Flatt said. Though she missed three months of classes leading up to and during the Olympics, she graduated from high school on time and was admitted to Stanford. “I didn’t have much social life that year,” she recalled. Flatt continued to train up to eight hours a day while in college and graduated in four years.

Even with her superior education, Flatt struggled after retiring from skating in 2014. “Leaving a sport feels like a divorce: You’re cut wide open and have a gaping hole,” she said. But neither U.S. Figure Skating (the national body that governs the sport) nor the U.S. Olympic Committee (the entity that coordinates Olympic activities for U.S. athletes) had much to offer in the way of post-retirement support, Flatt said, emphasizing that the USOC’s mission is simply to win as many Olympic medals as possible. “Once they’ve retired, athletes can feel like they’re an afterthought,” Flatt explained. “If you don’t have an education or training to guide you, you’re kind of out of luck.”

Despite the razzle-dazzle and romance that surround the Olympic games, elite athletes competing on U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams historically have had few educational and employment opportunities outside of their respective sport. Other nations with robust Olympic teams often provide their athletes with more substantial support: In Canada, for example, top athletes receive an annual income of up to $18,000 as well as a subsidized college education.* By contrast, the U.S. adopts a hands-off approach to its top athletes. “We [Americans] emphasize individualism and individual responsibility more than any other country in the world, so we leave it up to the athletes to figure things out for themselves,” said Jay Coakley, a sociologist and the author of Sports In Society.

Internal USOC surveys of former Olympic and elite athletes reveal their concerns about the future: 38 percent said they were mentally unprepared to end their athletic careers, only 16 percent of those still competing reported having done any planning for life once their athletic careers were over, and 43 percent of those who had retired from sports found entering the workforce difficult.

This might be changing. Unlike most of their predecessors, the cadre of U.S. Olympians now competing in Pyeongchang will have access to programs and tools to help them sort through their post-athletic options. The Athlete Career Education program, adopted by the USOC in 2013, aims to rectify some of the oversights that athletes like Flatt endured once their athletic careers ended.

Leslie Klein leads the ACE program. A former Olympic kayaker, Klein said that most athletes competing in the Olympic and Paralympic Games who go on to retire right afterwards are “absolutely not” prepared for what’s to come. That’s in part because their education experiences are “all over the map,” she said. Most of the athletes have at least the equivalent of a high-school diploma, and some have undergraduate and graduate degrees. Many athletes’ college options are determined by whether their sport is sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and whether higher education would provide the opportunity to compete at the highest levels (which is not true for all sports). With swimming, volleyball, and track and field, for example, college is the natural route because they can compete as students at the school. “Almost all [athletes in these sports] get a degree and go on to an elite athletic career,” Klein said, acknowledging that it may take them more than four years to complete their schooling. (Klein herself graduated from Middlebury College, where she also competed in cross-country skiing and swimming, in six years.)

But for athletes whose sports aren’t common on college campuses, or for those whose route to the elite level is outside the NCAA system—like skating, gymnastics, and ski jumping—obtaining an education requires improvisation and hustle. Access to a quality education also varies depending on all kinds of factors. Expense is one. According to Flatt, competitive skating—with all the travel and coaches and costumes and equipment—costs up to $100,000 per year, and athletes without sponsorships often must work part-time to cover expenditures. “The first thing to go is their education,” Flatt said. A sport’s culture matters, too: The skating world, for example, values academic achievement, Klein said, whereas that for boxing doesn’t. In some cases, “athletes have to pick education or sport,” she added. The family’s emphasis on academics and an athlete’s own drive to learn also affect how much education she’ll pursue.

Another difficulty for some retiring Olympic and Paralympic athletes is a lack of professional work experience. Given the hundreds of hours spent training, competing, and traveling to competitions, full-time work is impossible for most of the athletes who compete internationally, Klein said. An internal 2012 USOC poll found that almost half of all active Olympians worked, and half of these for 20 hours a week—with half again of these making less than $6,000 per year. A dearth of professional work experience and income, as well as unease about falling behind people their age, prompts some otherwise robust athletes to retire, Klein said. Some then “un-retire,” she added, because the sport is all they know.

But what’s toughest about retiring from competitive sports, according to Klein, is the emotional adjustment. “The biggest problem is the identity transformation that an athlete has to go through, from being on top of the world in their sport, with media attention, and turning around to face the real world without skills or relationships,” she said. The Olympic champion Michael Phelps’s tumultuous adjustment to life after elite swimming exemplifies the struggle; he told an audience at a mental-health conference this year that he had collapsed into depression after the Olympics, even considering suicide.

The USOC was pushed to create ACE after an internal working group concluded that athletes needed and deserved more assistance in acquiring an education and finding work. Though the USOC had offered ad hoc career and athletic programs for at least 20 years, the athletes themselves were largely unaware of them. USOC supports were “non-integrated,” and provided help only on an “as-available and as-requested basis,” the working group reported. Further, just three USOC staff were devoted to helping athletes with their educations and careers, and almost 60 percent of current or retired Olympians did not use even these staffers’ support. The report included seven broad recommendations that would establish the USOC as a leader in providing “holistic” support for athletes; the committee’s Board of Directors promptly adopted all the suggestions.

Under ACE, the USOC now provides a variety of centralized services to current and former Olympians and Paralympians who apply to and are accepted into the program: career counseling, mentoring, specialized training to help retiring athletes adjust to their new identities, sponsorship for online degree programs at the for-profit DeVry University, a two-week training program at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, tuition grants, and “fellowships” with corporations in which athletes are eased into jobs like interns. Once accepted into ACE, athletes have access to a private online platform where they can connect with other Olympians and potential employers—“kind of [like] Facebook meets LinkedIn,” Klein explained. ACE also plans to offer workshops on tax preparation, public speaking, and brand management, and to host a three-day post-Olympic Games welcome-home ceremony in Washington for all current and former athletes.

“We are able to take each individual situation and work to provide an array of programs and opportunities based on need,” Klein said. Plus, she added, offering this support sends the signal to athletes that the USOC cares. So far, roughly 1,700 athletes have used ACE services, including more than 50 from this year’s Olympic team.

What limits ACE are its size and funding. It’s not clear how much money ACE receives from the USOC—a USOC representative said the organization does not release the budget of each department—but its staff is relatively small: Klein runs the program with three career coaches and two administrators. Though athletes applied for $1.6 million in college tuition grants, ACE could only afford to give out $237,000—“a big gap,” she said, between what athletes want and what ACE provides.

The athletes themselves question how helpful this new endeavor will be. Han Xiao, who heads the Athletes’ Advisory Council—a group made up of elite athletes whose purpose is to represent and safeguard their interests to the USOC—said that the resources devoted to ACE are significant but probably insufficient. And according to Xiao, the opacity surrounding ACE funding makes it impossible to evaluate its actual value to athletes.

Access to these services also is restricted. While all retired Olympians and Paralympians qualify, athletes who are currently competing need approval from their sport’s national governing body to use the ACE programs. There are 55 such bodies in all—each representing one or more of the sports played in the Olympic, Paralympic, or Pan American Games—and each body decides which of its athletes qualify for the educational and career programs. Depending on the sport, this can mean that just a fraction of competitive athletes qualify. And again, every athlete needs to apply to be considered at all for services.

Allysa Seely learned about the ACE programs a few months before competing in the 2016 Paralympics in Rio.  She went on to earn a gold medal in the triathlon, surging past the top woman during the last leg of the event, and winning by more than a minute. It was exhilarating, she said, but a little disorienting afterwards. “It’s something you train for every day for years, so when it’s over you think, ‘what’s next?’” she said. Seely attended some ACE workshops and consulted with a career coach there who helped set her up with a flexible part-time job. She’s decided to aim for the next Paralympic games, and devotes about 30 hours a week to running, swimming, cycling, lifting, and miscellaneous maintenance. When her athletic career ends, she’ll go back to ACE and use their services to go back to school to study medicine, she said: “I make a point to push myself.”  

---

* This article initially stated that top athletes in Canada receive a monthly rather than annual income of up to $18,000. We regret the error.

The urbanist community spit-taked last week reading a glib op-ed in The Seattle Times that railed against a project planned for Fremont which includes small efficiency homes. The author (who lives in an ample Fremont townhome likely priced around $800,000) said living in a small efficiency is akin to “steerage” in a ship. Besides someone being wrong on the internet and the Seattle Times Opinion page, the “too small” argument–which is one plenty of housing opponents make–illuminates a contradiction in narratives.

One day earlier anti-housing ringleader John Fox had argued against tearing down Sheridan Apartments in his blog Outside City Hall because the studios within are relatively affordable at $1,170 per month. Fox failed to mentions the one-bedrooms seem to be renting for $1500 per month. Nevermind that the Sheridan has a very similar range of apartment sizes (at 340 to 525 square feet) as the project proposed for Fremont. But new housing opponents decry the Fremont project trying to replicate the Sheridan’s success at the same time as they rally to block the 440-apartment tower literally replacing the Sheridan (the exterior of the building will be retained). It seems like the common denominator here is opposing new projects–not preserving affordability.

Futhermore, we wrote about how John Fox’s infamous naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) surveys were heavy on apartments that A) weren’t actually that affordable and B) were relatively small studios. Ironically, many of these same folks oppose creating new small efficiency homes. By doing so, we’re creating a can’t-win situation. Mandating big home and lot sizes is a major reason why Seattle is on a Titanic-like course cleaving on an iceberg of massive inequality and displacement. We need the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) to keep this ship from going under. Yet apparently, some think we should try more of the same as we take in water. Seattle has led the nation in housing price increases two straight years.

Deconstructing Sheridan Concerns

It’s a similar story for the Sheridan. Fox says we’re losing 56 “affordable” homes. And we are, but since they were market-rate units only affordable by some combination of temporary landlord generosity or deferred maintenance, we couldn’t count on these NOAH units in red-hot Belltown to remain affordable for long without intervention. Fox estimates HALA’s Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program will only replace 18 of these affordable units, but in actuality he’s comparing apples and oranges.

For one, the Seattle Office of Housing (OH) estimates that MHA funds leverage investments three or four times over since they are matched with other state, federal, and philanthropic funds. If OH leverages MHA funds 4:1 with other sources, then the 56 currently-affordable units would be replaced. Additionally, MHA units will be guaranteed affordable for 75 years at 60% to 80% of area median income. The Sheridan has no such guarantee. Nonetheless, folks who should know better, like two-time Seattle City Council candidate Jon Grant, amplifed Fox’s misleading claims. And they are misleading: Fox’s claim that 1:1 replacement of affordable units was previously mandated under incentive zoning is misleading since incentive zoning was previously optional.

We should seek to create more family-sized homes, and dedicate more housing levy and MHA funds to doing so. However, for plenty of Seattlites small efficiency homes work quite well and we shouldn’t belittle them by saying they live in steerage and insinuate there should be a law against living the way they do–which is one of the few ways they can afford to live in Seattle period. The other popular way to survive Seattle while of modest income is renting larger spaces and living with roommates, but classist concerns can be found for that arrangement too.

A Newbie Joins a Great Fremont Homeowner Tradition

Angela Elson, who penned the op-ed, made a show of checking her privilege. She acknowledged she’s wealthy, a “square,” and only moved to Fremont a year ago. She knows she’s not in the upper echelon of Fremont get-off-my-lawn homeowner cranks who’ve been agitating for decades against change in their neighborhood while their home values have doubled and tripled. But complaining about the new project down the block couldn’t be more conventional as far as Fremont and Wallingford homeowner activism goes. Couching those claims in concerns for the poor could not be more par for the course. Is she really concerned for people living in “steerage” or for herself having to live near said “steerage.” Street parking might even get a little tighter. Oh the horror!

She’s really a quick study, but the reality is these alligator tears are useless to Seattle’s rent-burdened masses. Give us more housing. Spare us the sob story about neighborhood character.

About 3959 Fremont Ave

A closer look at the Fremont small efficiency project hardly reveals the boogie man that Elson portrays. Will people have to take a slight detour or a steep scamble to reach Fremont Avenue? Yes, they will. Will people still happily choose to live there? Yes. Hills are kind of what people signed up when they moved to Seattle, yet Elson seems flabbergasted:

The kicker is that the hillside complex does not include access down to Fremont Avenue, which would force anyone differently abled to detour three or more blocks to access a main road. If you’ve ever walked up the steep slope of Fremont Avenue — or, God forbid, ridden a bike — I’m sure you can appreciate this undertaking.

Whether or not this site includes a private stairway to Fremont Avenue, people who can’t use the public stairs at N Bouduin St or N 40th St would conceivably still need to detour N 41st St to reach Fremont Avenue and a Route 5 bus stop–a three minute trip as a pedestrian. This holds true whether it’s built as townhomes or efficiencies. So is this a legitimate reason to block an efficiency project, or yet more concern trolling?

In contrast to Elson’s claims that the project is not well thought out, Neiman Taber Architecture has a reputation for designing livable small efficiencies. Microhousing is one of the firm’s specialities. The early design guidance proposal suggests a project well intergrated to the neighborhood and nestled between trees. Small balconies break up the facade and provide some outdoor space for tenants.

Architects will refine the early design ahead of the project’s Recommendation design review meeting. Even at this early stage, it’s clear that the 29 homes would make a positive impact on the Fremont neighborhood regardless of what you read a Seattle Times Opinion page.

Doug Trumm shared a tiny microhousing unit with a roommate while a college student like most other students, and he survived to tell the tale. In fact, he came away with almost exclusively fond memories. He shares a 500 square foot apartment with his spouse and his cat–less than 200 square feet for each of them–and by George they like it.

It's so cold in PyeongChang that Italy reportedly advised their Olympic team "to skip the entertainment portion of the ceremony" due to the subzero temperatures. It would not be like the Italians to take their fashion cues from us Americans, but perhaps in this case they ought have; Team USA is being kept toasty courtesy of the self-heating battery-powered parkas they've been provided with.

The water-repellent, fully washable, down-filled jackets feature an American flag printed on the back--the inside of the back, that is. This flag is not meant as conspicuous badging, but is printed using conductive ink. A removable, rechargeable battery can be stored in a pocket and plugs into the jacket, and the resultant juice heats up the flag. There are three different power settings, and on the lowest the flag with stay warm for up to 11 hours.

Although the jacket is branded Polo Ralph Lauren, the company makes it very clear that it was created via collaboration between multiple design firms and manufacturers.

Delaware-based DuPont noted that "Other heated garments are available, but they are heavy and full of stiff wires;" to avoid this they developed the conductive ink. They then worked with Pittsburgh-based precision printing company Butler Technologies to apply said ink.

Massachusetts-based apparel manufacturer 99Degrees, which specializes in both sewn and bonded sportswear, was contracted to attach the heating system to the jacket's lining.

The battery pack--which features buttons that can be operated while wearing thick gloves, naturally--was designed by Maryland-based design and engineering firm Key Tech, which focused on "user interface design, material selection and finish, power management, electrical safety and design for manufacturability."

For the all-important connection point between the battery and the jacket, NYC-based consultancy Principled Design's ConnexI/O e-textile connector interface was used. As with Key Tech's contribution, design for manufacturability was a key concern here: "Key to ConnexI/O is our 'snap-and-latch' technology," Principled writes, "which allows our connector to be integrated on the apparel factory floor, requiring no soldering, opening up new opportunities for the seamless integration of electronics into a variety of e-textile substrates."

And finally, the jacket itself is manufactured by New-Jersey-based garment manufacturer Better Team USA.

Alas, all of this American design, engineering and manufacturing prowess have been offset by another American quality: Greed. The jacket was offered for sale to the general public and sold out immediately; originally costing $2,495, they are now being flipped on eBay for up to six grand.

To counter this, PRL will not offer future production runs for sale online. Anyone who wants to be put on a waiting list has to call their store in SoHo.

Last week one of my art teachers suggested I ‘dial down the feminism.’ Today I showed him my newest piece: pic.twitter.com/VrnB4oJ8Cz

— AlexBertulisFernande (@alexbertanades) February 7, 2018

London-based artist Alex Ruth Bertulis-Fernandes is currently “studying for a Foundation Diploma in Art & Design, specialising in Visual Communication and Moving Image” according to her website. A mere cursory glance at her work will reveal how unapologetically feminist she is. Most people might consider a strong point of view an asset in an artist. Not Bertulis-Fernandes’ art teacher, apparently.

As you can see in the tweet above, one of her (male, obvi) teachers suggested that she “dial down the feminism” in her work. She created the above piece in response. Because, here’s the thing, artists are supposed to say stuff. If you “dial down” the thing you’re trying to say … you’re not being an artist anymore.

One would think an art teacher would be aware of that. Dude, don’t prove the (wildly inaccurate) saying, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach,” right.

While it’s surprising that an art teacher would have a response like that to feminist work, it’s less surprising that the internet would. Since, as we all know, feminism (like being anti-racist) is a “political opinion” (and not, as some extremists would have you believe, a sign of being a decent human being), there were many out there in the Twitterverse calling for a more “balanced” approach to Bertulis-Fernandes’ work and views.

(fixed) I think this is what your art teacher meant pic.twitter.com/ZKwIaH86fy

— Aidan Wolf (@Aidan_Wolf) February 7, 2018

Um, there is no being a “compassionate human being” without being a feminist. There just isn’t. If you don’t believe that women are equal to men, you’re not compassionate. Full stop. Also, believing women are equal to men isn’t a “political ideology” the same way as being fiscally conservative or liberal is. We’re talking about whether or not a certain group should be treated like full human beings. If you’re thinking of feminism as a “political ideology” as opposed to just a desired state of being, you don’t get to claim compassion.

Good to see that there is a middle between the extremes.
Pity not enough people go there as it is usually when the best results happen.

— John Vilnis (@JohnVilnis) February 8, 2018

Except that there’s no going “halvsies” on rights. You either have them, or you don’t. You’re either a full human being and citizen, or you’re not. “Middle grounds” are for arguments about literature, not arguments about the subjugation of human beings.

Lol Oh god, it’s already started. Let the MEMES begin! pic.twitter.com/SiKvHojmgH

— Miles Andy Thatch (@TheConceptBoy) February 8, 2018

Hey Miles, there’s nothing “rational” about not being angry about sexism. Unless, of course, you’re a sexist. Then it makes absolute sense.

*sigh*

Thankfully, there were plenty of people on Twitter who totally get it:

pic.twitter.com/g0i38p5giG

— Lilly Leadbeater (@mintyhiggins) February 7, 2018

*sigh* It has two settings, because you can’t just “dial” feminism down. You’re either a feminist or you’re not. Do you *really need this explained this explicitly?

— Paula (@astro_noms) February 7, 2018

And my personal favorite:

pic.twitter.com/54m2VEzilO

— Brenda (@mckenzieave) February 7, 2018

And now, I will close this out with one of Bertulis-Fernandes’ other unabashedly feminist pieces that is relevant to our other interests here at TMS:

Inspired by ‘The Advantages Of Being a Woman Artist’ by @guerrillagirls. #feminism #hollywood #timesup #feminist #equality #genderequality #acting #actress #actresses #actresslife #paygap #diversity #askhermore #guerrillafeminism

A post shared by Alex Ruth Bertulis-Fernandes (@alexattempts) on Feb 7, 2018 at 2:27pm PST

Thank you for your art, Ms. Bertulis-Fernandes. And by all means, you keep that feminism turned up to eleven.

(via The Daily Dot, featured image: Tumana/Shutterstock)

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—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

A month before turning 34, I received an unexpected birthday gift: a cloud-connected pacemaker. It sits in a tiny pocket in the left side of my chest, just above my heart. Silently and diligently, the device emits electrical pulses to make sure my heart rate never again plummets below 25 beats per minute.

The idea of a battery-equipped, internet-connected device living forever inside my chest both terrifies and fascinates me. When people say, “I’ll die if I lose my iPhone,” they never mean it literally. But I really might die without this smart gadget. I’m also at risk in other ways. A wireless pacemaker can be hacked, or, as recently happened in Ohio, become legal evidence that incriminates its user.

There is a crucial difference between my device and more ubiquitous digital technologies: I never made the choice to implant the pacemaker in my body. I’m grateful to the hardworking doctors who minimized my pain and helped me get better. At the same time, the device they installed raises questions that now haunt me. It’s not clear who might have access to data about my pulse, my health, and possibly my whereabouts—data generated by a device inside me.

* * *

Arriving at the ICU with a dangerously slow pulse, I was alarmed to find out I was suffering from a life-threatening condition called complete heart block. Learning that treatment would require a permanent pacemaker was no less of a surprise. I have nothing in common with the 76-year-old poster boy of pacemaker research, the former vice president Dick Cheney. Like Cheney, who survived five heart attacks, most pacemaker users are elderly—not grad students in their early 30s.

This might explain why the manufacturer of my pacemaker, the large medical-device company Medtronic, boasts that the device can be monitored remotely by health-care providers or worried family members. This tracking capacity could assuage anxiety, but it also raises some concerns about privacy and longevity.

Since the pacemaker was approved for Medicare reimbursement in 1966, there has been a sharp rise in the number of medical conditions that might lead to its installation. In 1984, treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology called pacemakers at least a “reasonable” tool for treating 56 heart conditions. By 2008, the list had expanded to 88. Between 1993 and 2009, nearly 3 million Americans had pacemakers implanted.

Despite the growing number of pacemakers, not to mention the recent introduction of wireless cardiovascular devices like mine, their long-term effects, risks, and proprietary design are rarely discussed with new patients or their family members. Lior Jankelson, a physician at New York University’s cardiac-electrophysiology center, told me that every new pacemaker implanted in the United States is cloud-connected. “As a result,” Jankelson explains, “there are at least tens of thousands of Americans with cloud-connected devices that could be monitored from afar.” First, let’s save your life, the medical establishment might surmise, and later we can chitchat about how having a wireless, subdermal implant for the rest of that life might expose you to hacking, infections, and other health hazards.

My tiny device constantly collects data, which is automatically sent to my bedside monitor whenever my doctors schedule a remote-monitoring appointment. During these appointments, which take place every four to six months, the monitor sends my metrics to a secure server. A doctor examines the transmitted data and notifies me by phone if any further action is needed. The patient manual explains it like this: “Sending heart-device information using wireless technology does not require you to interact with your monitor. The process is silent and invisible. Clinics typically schedule the automatic process to occur while you sleep.”

That language is meant to reassure me that living with a wireless pacemaker is an effortless endeavor. But to me, the idea that my hidden chest box “talks” to others in my sleep is the stuff of nightmares. What is the device sending to the cloud, and what is the cloud sending back to it? It is impossible to know for sure whether my data is protected. As the security researcher Marie Moe recently wrote in Wired, “Part of the problem with doing security research in this field is that the medical devices appear as black boxes. How can I trust the machine inside my body when it is running on proprietary code and there is no transparency?”

Moe mentions that in 2008, a group of researchers at the University of Michigan proved that it is possible to extract sensitive personal information from a pacemaker—or even to threaten the patient’s life by changing the pacing behavior or turning it off. Other medical devices are also vulnerable. In 2011, Jay Radcliffe, an independent security researcher, revealed a security vulnerability in a Medtronic insulin pump that could allow an attacker to take control of it.

Aware of these alarming scenarios, in 2013 Cheney told CBS’s 60 Minutes that his doctors disabled his wireless pacemaker to thwart hacking and to protect him from possible assassination attempts. Riffing on a fictional assassination by pacemaker depicted on the TV show Homeland, Cheney stated that he found the plotline to be “an accurate portrayal of what was possible.”

* * *

Health providers can review my data from afar, and unauthorized hackers might have access to it, too. But it proved surprisingly difficult to access these medical records myself. After calling both Medtronic and the hospital in which my pacemaker was implanted, I was told I would have to sign a release form and wait for its approval before the data could be sent to me (via postal mail, no less). The process might take several weeks, and I would have no way of knowing whether the delivered data would be partial or complete. Just as Google or Facebook retains more data than it reveals, so even gadgets inside one’s body are gradually shifting control of personal information from users to corporations.

Any downsides to this trend are repeatedly denied by the medical-device manufacturers and cardiologists I spoke with. When I asked a Medtronic representative if I had to take the monitor with me for a two-week trip to the Middle East, he tried to convince me to “sign up to our new mobile app, which lets you download the data via a small, handheld monitor.” It’s a relief that I can travel safely around the world, but the long-term risks of connected monitoring systems are not part of the doctor-patient conversation. My phone conversation with Medtronic reminded me of routine conversations with my internet or cable providers, when overworked and underpaid representatives desperately tried to sell me “our brand-new package” for a “once-in-a-lifetime deal.”   

The potential threats posed by hackers are distressing, but so is the notion that my pulse has been monetized. Medtronic is a public company with 84,000 employees in about 160 countries, serving more than 50,000 patents. The company, which moved its headquarters from Minnesota to low-tax Ireland in 2015, defines making “a fair profit” as one of the goals in its official mission statement. With revenues totaling $10.5 billion from cardiac and vascular devices in 2017 alone, it seems to be succeeding.

Data monitoring is threatening because those subject to it don’t know what information is being collected, for what reason, and by whom. And unlike iPhone or Amazon Echo users, I cannot just choose to stop using my connected pacemaker. In a way, my heart is no longer entirely mine: I share it with both Medtronic and with the U.S. hospital in which it was implanted. As an immigrant in America at a time when foreign status is uncertain, I can’t help but wonder if my pulse might one day betray me. Might it show I visited a place I was not supposed to, or dared meet someone from a hostile country?

* * *

Alongside privacy and security, other concerns are equally frightening but more macabre. At 34, my biggest fear is that my pacemaker will stubbornly continue to beat my heart after my brain ceases to function. As the writer Katy Butler movingly described in a New York Times piece about her father’s final years, “If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s Fantasia, it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up, or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath.”

As Butler reported, the Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association have issued guidelines declaring that “patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device.” Deactivating a pacemaker, the groups concluded, amounted neither to euthanasia nor assisted suicide. And yet, the notion of not being able to choose when to die haunts me. Even if a medical professional can non-intrusively deactivate my pacemaker, the thought that this decision might be left to my loved ones is heartbreaking. The connected nature of my device makes this fear even darker. Will my body continue to send data to the cloud even if my brain ceases to function? In the future, will it be possible to “deactivate” me from afar?

Given all the questions, an open, honest conversation about the real and possible impacts of connected medical devices is needed. Transparency from cardiologists, computer scientists, medical companies, and law makers is especially crucial since legislation on the matter has languished. Writing in Modern Health Care, Rachel Z. Arndt recently warned that cybersecurity vulnerabilities in networked medical devices could “wreak havoc” on health systems. Faced with growing security threats, many in the medical industry now call for a “software bill of materials” that would list all the software components in any wireless device.

Despite a 2014 bill requiring government agencies to get a complete list of the software components for new products, these efforts have not yet been implemented. Instead, according to Arndt, “the FDA recommends that manufacturers take cybersecurity into account when designing devices and continue to do so after the devices have been introduced.”

In the meantime, patients are left without answers. I woke up to a life that depends on a fancy metronome and the invisible infrastructure sustaining it: replaceable batteries, bedside monitors, secure servers, Wi-Fi connectivity. There are millions more people who depend on wireless medical implants, our bodies talking constantly to medical companies and data brokers. If our bodies can talk to them, it shouldn’t be outlandish to imagine they might return the favor.

Motherboard reports that a university professor created an app that detects net neutrality violations -- that is, when service providers block, throttle, prioritize or otherwise interfere with legal internet use. It's like a speed-test app, same as all the others, but with more detail and a serious research goal in mind. Apple, sadly, finds it contains "objectionable content" that lacks "direct benefits" to its users, unlike utilitarian AppStore mainstays such as iFart: The Original Fart Sounds App and Thump Trump.

An Apple App Store reviewer told Choffnes that “your app has no direct benefits to the user,” according to screenshots reviewed by Motherboard. According to Apple’s reviewer, the app contained “Objectionable Content,” a catch-all for apps that Apple doesn’t want to let into its App Store. Apple is blocking the app and no one is quite sure why, including Choffnes; neither Apple nor Verizon responded to requests for comment for this article.

Wehe is is designed to be part of Choffnes’s research work to determine geographic and carrier-related differences in video throttling. When you open the app, you are presented with a consent form that “invites you to take part in a research project.”

Can't imagine why deep academic research, performed by the general public at the app layer when the Senate is one vote from enshrining Net Neutrality in law and permanently undermining the federal regulator that ISPs spent years capturing, might set off alarm bells in the walled garden at the world's most profitable phone company

As long as you have the right shoes, you’ll soon no longer need a ticket to ride on Berlin’s subway.

Starting January 16, Berlin transit authority BVG will release its own limited edition line of sneakers, a project that’s the first of its kind anywhere in the world. A collaboration with Adidas Originals, the sneakers’ tie-in with the subway will be immediately apparent to any Berliner: the heel counters feature the unmistakable seat upholstery pattern featured on the city’s public transit fleet.

The sneaker’s tongue will include a feature that’s arguably more striking—a fabric version of the annual BVG season ticket. That means the wearer gets free travel on subways, trams, buses, and ferries anywhere within Berlin public transit zones A and B— which cover almost all of the city—from January 31st to the end of the year.

It’s a nearly irresistible offer. The Berlin subway’s seat upholstery isn’t something you forget easily; a sort of psychedelic camouflage print, its multi-colored squiggles are so designed to make it harder to tag with graffiti. It’s somewhat disappointing that this pattern is confined to only a small portion of the new sneaker, although such a large patch of the pattern’s hyperactive, wriggling colors would likely be dizzying. To complement the sampling of the seat fabric, the sneakers will also include fat laces in yellow and black, the standard external colors for Berlin’s subway trains. Combined with a simple black and white pattern on the rest of the upper, the result is quite attractive.

Then there’s the price, which is a snip at €180 ($215) a pair. That makes them more expensive than the average sneaker, but much cheaper than a traditional annual transit pass, currently €728 ($869) for the same zones. Such is the good value offered by the shoe that it’s no wonder BVG is keeping their numbers low. Only 500 pairs will be for sale and they’ll only be available at two Berlin shops, which will no doubt see lines round the block before opening.

The good value of this deal should override the obvious inconvenience of having to wear them whenever using public transit until next January 1. And while their value will deplete swiftly over the year (at least as a travel pass, if not as a collector’s item), one might be a little wary of flashing them around too much on a late night train in case someone’s tempted by the possibility of prizing something worth over $800.

The obvious answer to this would be to bring them along in a bag—or even strung around your neck as a set of chunky pendants. A BVG ticket inspector, however, might insist on seeing both parts of the pair as proof, to make sure that the bearer using them to ride hasn’t lent the matching shoe to someone else to ride with.

Right now, exactly how these 500 pairs of shoe-passes will work seems a little hazy. If the plan works well, there’s no telling what kind of functional fashion+transit authority collaborations await.

A class action suit by some of the 3,500,000+ Wells Fargo customers defrauded in the company's fake account scam was foundering in Utah, thanks to the company's insistence that its binding arbitration clauses also applied to the accounts it fraudulently opened (that is, by agreeing not to sue the company for defrauding you over the accounts you opened, you were also agreeing not to sue them if it opened a bunch more accounts and forged your signature on the papers). (more…)

The following article by Strong Towns member Joe Cortright is republished from his site —City Observatory — with permission.

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The dominant approach to automobile safety has, for many years, been the quintessential technical fix. Some combination of new technologies (anti-lock brakes, collapsible steering columns, crush zones, multiple air bags, etc) will make cars safer and safer (well, at least for their occupants).  And soon, self-driving cars will (it is hoped) eliminate human errors that produce most crashes. 

Still the humble pedestrian remains under-engineered for this brave new world of technologically assured density. But that’s changing.

Some months back, I noted on City Observatory that Google unveiled drawings of a novel plan to coat the exterior of self-driving cars with a special adhesive that would cause any pedestrians the vehicles struck to adhere to the car rather than being thrown by the impact.  Now, Automotive News is sharing reports of a new General Motors patent that would put airbags on the outside of cars to deflect errant pedestrians.

Whether it would be better to find oneself stuck to the car that struck you, or being pushed aside by an exploding airbag, is far from clear. But let it not be said that automotive engineers and major corporations are the only ones who can come up with such far-fetched ideas! At City Observatory, we’ve come up with our own concepts for, if you will, lessening the impact of cars on pedestrians. In the interest of safety and advancing the state of the art, we’re putting our ideas into the public domain, and not patenting any of them.

Personal Airbags

Airbags are now a highly developed and well-understood technology. Most new cars have a suite of frontal impact, side curtain and auxiliary airbags to insulate vehicle passengers from collisions. The next frontier is to deploy this technology on people, with personal airbags. Personal airbags could have their own sensors, inflating automatically when the pedestrian was in imminent danger of being struck by a vehicle.

Rocket Packs

While a sufficiently strong adhesive might keep a struck pedestrian from flying through an intersection and being further injured, perhaps a better solution would be to entirely avoid the collision in the first place by lifting the pedestrian out of the way of the collision in the first place. If pedestrians were required to wear small but powerful rocket packs — again connected to self-driving cars via the internet — in the event of an imminent collision, the rocket pack could fire and lift the pedestrian free of the oncoming vehicle.

We offer these ideas partly in jest, but mostly to underscore the deep biases we have in thinking about how to adapt our world for new technology.  Let’s be clear: while these are labeled “pedestrian safety” technologies, they are really about making the environment better for cars and driving. Like crosswalks and electronic “Walk/Don’t Walk” signs, these are not technologies that are needed in pedestrian-only environments. No matter how crowded, no mall, stadium, or concert hall has stoplights for pedestrians.

It has long been the case with private vehicle travel that we’ve demoted walking to a second class form of transportation. The advent of cars led us to literally re-write the laws around the “right of way” in public streets, facilitating car traffic and discouraging (in some cases, even criminalizing) walking.

We’ve widened roads, installed beg buttons, and banned “jaywalking,” to move cars faster, but in the process, we've made the most common and human way of travel more difficult and burdensome, and made cities less functional, too. At some point, the existence of these kinds of “pedestrian protection” technologies become a basis for rationalizing making the physical environment even more hostile to actual humans. The ultimate objective of much engineering practice seems to be to exterminate walking (if not walkers). As one Washington State engineer bluntly described Seattle’s 1950s era transportation plan: “Pedestrians, who are a constant hazard to city driving, are entirely removed.”

Everywhere we’ve optimized the environment and systems for the functioning of vehicle traffic, we’ve made places less safe and less desirable for humans who are not encapsulated in vehicles. A similar danger exists with this kind of thinking when it comes to autonomous vehicles; a world that works well for them may not be a place that works well for people.

Not all of our problems can be solved with better technology. At some point, we need to make better choices and design better places, even if it means not remaking our environment and our communities to accommodate the more efficient functioning of technology.

Thanks to Matt Cortright for providing the diagrams for our proposed pedestrian protection devices.

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He owns a car company. And his favored solution for traffic in Los Angeles is to build tunnels for pod travel under the city.

So, really, no one should be surprised that Elon Musk thinks transit is beneath him. In fact, the tech billionaire hates rubbing elbows with scary commoners on buses and trains! He said this week in an exchange covered by Wired:

I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.

It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.

This is a guy who’s theoretically competing for a project to build express transit to Chicago O’Hare.

Despite a lot of other good reporting at Wired, when it comes to Elon Musk, it’s basically a fanzine, promoting his brand as a celebrity smart guy. When media outlets treat Musk’s every utterance about transportation as a news event, the cumulative impact does real damage.

Actual city and state governments are granting permits and seeking partnerships with Musk and his affiliated transport ventures. But the whole Hyperloop concept would have been laughed into oblivion if not for the aura of genius that surrounds its chief promoter.

Listen to the words Musk says, and it’s clear he has a very superficial understanding of the dynamics of transportation systems. “People like individualized transport,” alright. Until they all want to go the same way at the same time in big clunky cars and get stuck in traffic. The frustration of a traffic jam is something Musk is quite familiar with, and yet he seems oblivious to the fact that his own individualized transport solutions will end in the same congestion.

Driving in Los Angeles (or any big city) will never be the effortless dream Musk would prefer, and neither will getting flung around in underground pods. People are looking for a smart guy savior, but the answers are already in front of us and they’re aren’t high-tech. Move large numbers of people around a big city is a geometry problem that only large shared vehicles, a.k.a. transit, can solve.

Correction: This article originally stated Musk made these comments to Wired. He made them at a tech conference. 

The Providence Gamelin House opened its doors in Seattle in 2005. It was built to offer safe, affordable housing for low-income seniors in Seattle’s Rainier Vista neighborhood. To occupy any of the facility’s 77 units, residents must be ages 62 and older and earn below 50 percent of the area median income for King County in Washington. Most of them earn far below it: The average annual income for Gamelin House residents is $11,000.

For more than a decade this permanent supportive housing facility has served low-income residents of south Seattle. It’s their home. But the Providence Gamelin House only came into its own at the end of 2017, when an architectural rendering of the project was compelled into service as a meme. Specifically, as a housing meme, which is its own bucket for signifiers of our slide into late capitalism.

The meme surfaced wherever memes surface and spread however memes spread—idk. Eventually it found its way to the desk of Timothy Zaricznyj, director of housing for Providence Supportive Housing, the person who now oversees this alleged gentrification nightmare. (In fact, he manages 16 affordable-housing developments in Washington, Oregon, and California.) Zaricznyj was not exactly tickled. “They chose the wrong project, if they want to slam developers,” he says.

He’s right: The meme was a total self-own by whoever came up with it. (Although not as sick of a self-own as being born during the Carter administration and writing a meme explainer.) The fact that this meme depicts modest affordable housing—not penny-pinching, developer-driven Fast-Casual architecture—even inspired a meta-meme backlash.

This is my favorite meme because I get the point but also the photo is of affordable public housing lmao pic.twitter.com/tgFxT3lcqt

— Josh Kuh 🌹 (@JoshKuh44) October 24, 2017

Zaricznyj says that he gets the point, too. The original meme is a vague critique of “architecture by bean-counters” (of which Seattle does not lack for examples) and developers’ thirst for transitional neighborhoods. The Gamelin House was the work of Michael Fancher, an architect who designed affordable housing across the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and ‘90s. But don’t blame Fancher: Affordable housing is subject to severe restrictions and even worse funding shortfalls.

Rainier Vista was never designated an arts district. But between 1999 and 2010, the area was subject to a redevelopment master plan to remake it as a mixed-income community. The city spent $240 million on the effort, including a $35 million Hope VI Revitalization grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. These were funds assigned to demolish distressed public housing and build something better in its place.

“The image that you see in this meme is obviously a tiny fraction of a master site development that extends blocks in every direction. Rainier Vista has its own vernacular. Part of that extends to its own color palette,” Zaricznyj says. In fact, when the Seattle Housing Authority recently repainted the Gamelin House, the powers that be left the color palette as is. “The final form of that development, right down to the color, was imposed by the master site.”

The Providence Gamelin House was built using funds from another HUD program, Section 202, which provides capital for building affordable housing for the elderly. Yet Section 202 added another regulatory wrinkle: Projects developed with these funds were subject to caps not just on dollars spent per square foot, but on the amount of common area built altogether—restrictions meant to drive development costs way down.

As even meme-lords now realize, federal-ugly Gamelin House is a problem most cities should be lucky to have. That’s not to say the HUD programs that gave rise to affordable housing in Rainier Vista worked out everywhere. Police dragged people out of their homes in Chicago’s Cabrini–Green projects under the authority of Hope VI. (Congress stopped funding the program in 2010.) Section 202, the program that builds housing for the elderly, may see its funding slashed by 10 percent or more under budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration.

So, lessons learned:

Is  a e s t h e t i c  always lost in affordable or permanent supportive housing? Handsome examples of low-income housing can be found in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. For sure, cheap corporate architecture is everywhere. You, an intellectual, might point out that lifting residential zoning restrictions would result in better design and more affordable housing.

Can HUD still fund affordabois like Gamelin House? Not if the Trump administration’s plan for tax reform passes Congress, since it could diminish the power of Low Income Housing Tax Credits and (at least in the House version) wipe out tax-exempt private activity bonds—both instruments that are crucial to building new affordable housing. Even if the worst doesn’t come to pass, sequestration has already decimated housing aid. The market can’t build deeply affordable housing without public subsidy.

Should I refrain from ever, ever writing about memes again? Absolutely—💯.

A Brooklyn judge has ruled that because the New York Police Department (NYPD) used a cell-site simulator, also known by the brand name Stingray, to track down a murder suspect without a warrant, some evidence against the suspect will be thrown out. A...

In the wake of all the recent sexual harassment and assault allegations in Hollywood and beyond, there’s been one disturbing idea lingering in the conversation. Some men have gotten it into their heads that the only reason women are coming out with these allegations is that the perpetrators aren’t hot. That if it were more attractive dudes doing the molesting, these women would be singing a different tune. Here’s why that’s a pile of horse shit.

Someone in my personal circle began a Facebook post regarding the sexual harassment allegations against Louis C.K. with this a couple of days ago: “I’m not saying Louie CK’s actions aren’t disgusting.. I’m just saying, if this were Channing Tatum, they wouldn’t be so angry about it.. Case in point, Louis was not asked to be in Magic Mike for obvious reasons. If Mr. Tatum were as creepy, I doubt anyone would complain.”

This line of thinking followed me into today, when I read something by John Ziegler over at Mediaite about “media’s new standards” following the Harvey Weinstein expose in The New York Times that recently opened the floodgates of women coming forward.

In an opinion piece that cares way more about male careers that have “been ruined” (passive voice, because men never ruin their careers through their own actions) than about female victims of confirmed sexual harassment and assault, Ziegler feels the need to mention that “Literally dozens of high-profile, almost exclusively unattractive white-male members of the Hollywood/Media elite, have been accused of various forms of heinous sexual abuse.”

Why does it matter that these men are “almost exclusively unattractive,” at least, according to the average-looking straight men describing them? Because seriously, it’s not women who are pointing out that these men are unattractive, it’s other men.

I have a theory: average-looking men see these men being accused as extensions of themselves. Just as, when anyone brings up sexism, there’s a contingent of men that will insist #NotAllMen, there are some men who see these serial harassers going down and think There, but for the grace of God, go I. Because they’re not seeing the behavior of these harassers and assaulters as very different from what they might do.

It’s why you’re hearing a lot of men asking lately “how are we supposed to flirt now?” Or, “should I just never tell any woman I’m attracted to her?” They genuinely see no difference between flirting and whipping your dick out to masturbate in front of someone while making it difficult for them to leave. If they did see the difference, there wouldn’t be so much confusion about what they should do right now.

The ever-brilliant Laurie Penny tackles this in a piece she wrote on Longreads recently called “The Unforgiving Minute,” about how men are going to have to get used to being uncomfortable for a little while, because they’re finally being forced to reckon with the consequences of behavior that was never okay, but that they’ve simply never been punished for in the past.

She writes:

“Sex is not the problem, but for some people sexism itself has become eroticized, and that, yes, is a problem. ‘It’s not flirtation that any of us take issue with,’ said my best friend, late one night after another round of exhausting emotional work trying to shore up the shuddering self-image of the men we know so they don’t collapse on top of us. ‘It’s entitlement. Projection. Objectification. We know when we’re being dehumanized. Good flirting is the kind where they see us. They won’t know how to flirt the right way until they start unlearning how to look at us.’

“Many of the men I have talked to about this have begun of their own volition to speak about ‘no longer objectifying women.’ To wonder whether they should just stop looking at pretty women at all, if the act of desiring another person is itself violent. It’s very sad that that confusion has arisen; it should be possible to want someone without dehumanizing them. But we have apparently created a world where it is incredibly difficult for a man to desire a woman and treat her as a human being at the same time.

“So no, we are not trying to outlaw sexuality. We are trying to liberate it. You ask how the species is going to survive if we have to constantly check for consent before we get to the means of reproduction, but I promise you that the species has more pressing problems than that.”

I think this line bears repeating: We have apparently created a world where it is incredibly difficult for a man to desire a woman and treat her as a human being at the same time.

We raise boys and encourage men to value The Hunt. If a woman pursues him, or offers up sex, she’s desperate, ‘crazy,’ or immoral. But if you’re a man, feel free to be persistent and badger and push a woman into sex, That’s totally cool.

I’ve experienced both. I’ve flirted with dudes in bars and been like “hey, wanna get to it on the couch back there?” or some equivalent, and the dudes are like Whoa, no. They get all nervous and don’t know what to do with themselves. But when they want sex, when I’m minding my own business, they won’t leave me alone. My interest or desire, or that of any woman, doesn’t really factor into the equation. Obviously, they eventually want a woman to be interested, but they want the game first.

Men value what “doesn’t come easy” and that’s the ultimate problem. We teach men to treat women like prey. It’s all about conquest and power. They’re taught not to desire consent. Women are taught not to give it too easily. And then we wonder why we’re hearing so many stories about sexual assault and why we’re living with rape culture.

Men are very, very confused, because they see far too much of themselves in those accused. Which is why, when they see men like Weinstein or Louis C.K. being confronted with allegations of sexual misconduct that have been corroborated by several other victims and sources, to them it looks like “a witch hunt,” whereas to anyone else, and under any other circumstances, this kind of a tipping point confirms evidence of a serious, systemic problem.

To straight men, the worst thing in the world is women not wanting to sleep with them. To women, the worst thing in the world is being sexually harassed, assaulted, or abused by men. Hardly a fair or equal trade.

But no man wants to be seen as a harasser or rapist, and so they need an excuse to justify why these men, who are not really doing anything “that bad” are being persecuted so hard right now. And since most men are of average attractiveness (which is why it’s called ‘average’), it’s very easy for them to look at more attractive men and wallow in their own insecurities:

If I were THAT guy, I’d have it much easier. I mean THEY would. I mean, WEINSTEIN and C.K. would have it easier. Because we’re totally not talking about me. We’re talking about THOSE guys. But I’m just saying if I they looked like Channing Tatum, the ladies would totally WANT me to masturbate in front of them at the office, or not let them leave the room while I tell them my sexual fantasies, or ask them to give me a massage while I’m naked during a business lunch. 

Here’s the thing all you average-looking men out there need to understand about women who are attracted to men (oh yeah, and you need to remember that there are plenty of women who aren’t). Ready? Being desired by attractive men does not trump our desire to be treated like human beings. Being desired by men, period, is not the be-all and end-all of our existence, and hotness is not the free pass you think it is.

Because it isn’t just old, white men who have been accused of sexual harassment or assault: Casey Affleck, Kobe Bryant, Ben Affleck, R. Kelly, (any more Afflecks? No, but there’s a) Nate Parker, Ed Westwick. These are all men who are younger than Weinstein and C.K, and all have been considered “attractive” by women. Yet, we’re equally enraged and disgusted by their treatment of women. Go ahead and search their names in the search bar above. We’ve written several articles on most of them talking about how horrible, disgusting, and criminal they are for the things they’ve done.

Consider appropriateness. Are you at work, or at a social gathering? Do you have authority over her in her job or otherwise? Have you already asked her out once, and she said she wasn’t interested, but you’re having the sudden urge to try again? Not every situation is great for flirting, women don’t want to be flirted with in every moment, and there are some women that you should just leave alone entirely.

You are not entitled to women’s sexual attention. It is ours to give or not give, just as your sexual attention is yours to give or not give. You may ask (preferably in a way that doesn’t imply a negative outcome for us if we say no), but you need to respect whatever our answer is as legitimate, because we are human beings who have a right to our own desires and feelings.

It’s that very sense of entitlement, fueled by very similar feelings of insecurity, multiplied by a powerful position that has made these men do what they’ve done. Because as my Facebook friend said, “Louis was not asked to be in Magic Mike for obvious reasons.” True. He’s built his entire comedy career on the fact that he’s a schlub. But he hates it. He hates it so much that he needed to exert sexual dominance over as many women as possible to make himself feel better.

Mens’ desire is not more important than a woman’s safety or autonomy. As we continue to shine a light on sexual misconduct that has, for too long, been hidden, men should take this opportunity to figure out how else to handle their feelings of insecurity and fear. Because guess what? Women have them too, but we handle our shit.

We are not collectively responsible for being the receptacles for mens’ feelings. Women don’t exist for you.

(image: Sony)

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—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

Benjamin Von Wong, a viral photographer turned environmentalist, has released a new project to raise awareness about “toxic laundry” that is full of plastic. An estimated 94% of American tap water contains invisible plastic fibers, and Von Wong felt compelled to do something about it.

“By 2025, the world’s synthetic fiber production will double – so too will the amount of microfibers in our water supply,” says Von Wong.

Since there’s no real solution in the pipeline at the moment, Von Wong is hoping to spread awareness of this issue to drive companies to do something about it. After all, constantly ingesting plastic can’t be a good thing.

Convincing companies with little interest in being eco-friendly is a daunting task. However, Von Wong had another idea.

“What seemed realistic was challenging environmentally conscious corporations positioned to make a difference. All we had to do was attract their attention and ask them to #FixToxicLaundry.”

To create the images, a team of over 30 volunteers was pulled together to create the models and get the set ready for the shoot.

“After many days of trial, error and iteration our final designs started to emerge with inspirations drawn from the angler fish, the creepy tendrils from Stranger Things, and some simple snakes.”

The lighting in Von Wong’s shots is particularly impressive and combines creativity and skill.

“Small flashes were placed inside various monsters to give them the eerie glow that would bring them to life.”

A projector was used to create the words “beware,” rather than relying on post-production work. The team also used a variety of other techniques to decorate the set.

“Cotton balls were dipped in red food coloring, torn up and glued to wire created the creepy veins that we needed,” Von Wong says.

Here are some more images that show the shoot unfolding:

This is a behind-the-scenes video that shows how the shoot came about:

You can find out more about the project on Von Wong’s website, including how you can help spread the word about the #FixToxicLaundry campaign.

Visit the High Line this fall and you’ll see a bright tangle of tubes weaving through the brambles at the northern terminus of New York City’s elevated rail park. Like an inscrutable children’s field-day game, it radiates tentacles of Playskool yellow, orange, red, blue, and green along the tracks. Matching these colors in the middle distance is the luxury construction of Hudson Yards, the largest private real estate development in U.S. history.

The match is no accident. High Line Art commissioned the installation, “Hop, Skip, Jump, and Fly: Escape From Gravity” (2017), from Sheila Hicks, and the artist dutifully crafted a work that calls attention to “the ballet of construction vehicles at the Rail Yards; the multitudinous interwoven layers of construction mesh that cover buildings, scaffolding, and streetscapes.”

This scene reflects the strange malfunction of our urban dream of reclamation. The High Line and its artworks exemplify the middle-class cultural objects that have emerged to obscure the ills of a new Gilded Age. If you’re like me, you love the park. Maybe you visit with your family and friends to see conceptual sculptures and eat little ice cream sandwiches as the sun descends over Frank Gehry's igloo on the old West Side. But maybe you also notice the neighborhood’s grotesque luxury glut. Even as these objects delight us, they also remind us of the public space we’ve lost and the social inequality they’ve yielded.

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The High Line, of course, was conceived with high ideals. Its founders promised us a little utopia in the sky, blending Manhattan's rough industrial past with pristine textures of public art and prairie grass. That’s pretty much what they gave us. The social geographer David Harvey theorizes a “right to the city,” the idea that citizens deserve a voice in the way public space gets shaped. “[T]he question of what kind of city we want,” Harvey argues, “cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.” At first blush, the High Line can feel like a true expression of that right.

Born as a passion project, it became a branding experiment. “We started actually trying to promote the idea of a High Line neighborhood, a High Line district,” writes Robert Hammond, the park’s co-founder, reflecting fondly on the revelation that it would return millions in tax revenue. The project has in fact grown up to generate billions in private investment and tax revenue, displacing longtime residents and launching others on hero journeys to preserve affordable housing. What felt like a moral victory has become a symbol of the movement to remake American cities as gated communities for the rich—and a prototype for cities across the globe seeking lucrative uses for artifacts of urban decay.

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There’s no slyer emblem of this problem than the public artwork that lines the 1.45-mile track. A late-capitalist chimera, the High Line may have the head of a park, but it’s a museum from the neck down. Alongside Hicks’s work stands “Mutations,” a group exhibition that Cecilia Alemani, the park’s curator, commissioned from contemporary artists including Larry Bamburg, Dora Budor, Marguerite Humeau, Guan Xiao, Max Hooper Schneider, Joanna Malinowska, C.T. Jasper, Jon Rafman, and others. Ostensibly about “how the boundaries between the natural world and culture are defined, crossed, and obliterated,” it’s full of the kinds of artworks people characterize as “playful.”

But, compelling as its images are, the exhibit’s postmodernist practitioners almost reflexively evoke the High Line’s “mutating” neighborhood. Near the shockingly green lawn at W. 23rd Street, for example, visitors shuffle around a sculpted ouroboros, Jon Rafman’s “The Swallower Swallowed” (2017). Rafman’s work, much of it mildly magical, elicits the numb unease of our consensual everyday surveillance—a theme at home on the High Line, where bulging eyes in the sky observe us. This piece, a pastel-splattered hybrid of man and beast, wants to say something about humanity’s place in the “speculative food chain” of a changing world. Surrounded by glittering towers garlanded with LUXURY RENTALS banners, it mostly conjures the social food chain devouring community space.

Overlooking the lawn is a mural—“the floaters” (2017) by Henry Taylor—that spans the entire side of an apartment building. Like Rafman, Taylor is an artist of unflinching social vision. He’s known for his portraits of black communities, some ultra-mundane and others ultra-confrontational. Here we get a large-scale self-portrait of the sunglassed artist with a faceless white friend in a Palm Springs swimming pool. A pool noodle, like one of the bright limbs of Hicks’s sculpture, supports Taylor in “a moment of pure, leisurely happiness.” It’s an image of a buoyant black middle class, precisely the kind that visits the High Line, and it presents a reassuring multicultural scene. But Taylor’s smile is ironic, his veiled gaze a challenge. In a park that’s “overwhelmingly white,” and a neighborhood that’s getting paler by the year, any reassurance of diversity proves deceptive.

At a glance, the art on the High Line calls to mind Harvey’s demand for urban spaces that embody the “aesthetic values we desire.” No question it’s a seductive high-culture attraction—and a palliative for the pains of post-industrial decline. But it winks at us even as it soothes us, calling our attention to the dislocation the park itself has animated.

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This season’s collection is no anomaly. The marquee pieces on display last year pulled the same trick. Tony Matelli’s deeply creepy “Sleepwalker” (2014) was a hyperrealistic sculpture of a middle-aged white man clad only in baggy Hanes briefs, mouth slack and arms thrust forward in zombified catatonia. Surrounded by selfie-dazed visitors, the sleepwalker mostly evinced us, the visitors walking the park from end to end, insensate to the human toll of the neighborhood’s new amenities. On the building where Taylor’s piece now shows, a mural by agitprop master Barbara Kruger bludgeoned us with a revised quote from postcolonial philosopher Frantz Fanon: “BLIND IDEALISM IS REACTIONARY SCARY DEADLY.” At a site that so many regard with blind idealism in a district that is, in no subtle sense, being colonized, how could you read those revolutionary words without irony?

Autophagy. Blindness. Somnambulance. Maybe we don’t always register those unflattering themes, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine that Alemani doesn’t. I’ve begun to think the High Line’s art is trolling us. That it’s not so much playful as self-regarding—and deliberately unkind. You could be forgiven for reading the art as a message to less-than-opulent New Yorkers: You’ve lost your place.

What exactly is the point of this provocation? You can imagine a claim to “social commentary.” But its position on the High Line dissolves that contention. The art is part of the High Line’s brand, just as the High Line is part of the neighborhood’s. Far from the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere, where “public opinion can be formed” and “[a]ccess is guaranteed to all citizens,” it’s largely an ad for the development that surrounds it.

By this sleight of hand, contemporary capitalism plods on, dominating our cultural imagination even as it insults and dispossesses us. I think this is all backwards.

***

Early in September, High Line Art hosted “Threshold,” an “ongoing action” by Alexandra Pirici (in other words, a temporary performance piece). On the walkway above the northern rail yard, its personae spread silently across the tracks. It was all very 1970s, what with its feeling of an Allan Kaprow “happening.” Pirici’s work is about smearing boundaries. Her performers’ bodies, diverse as a Benetton ad, form a “porous” barrier that visitors transgress.

It called to mind other boundaries blurred, those between public and private space. “[A]ttempts to create new kinds of urban commons can all too easily be capitalized upon,” Harvey writes. “In fact they may be designed precisely with that in mind.” The High Line he dismisses summarily: “this kind of public space radically diminishes rather than enhances the potentiality of commoning for all but the very rich.” The High Line has changed our imagination of what urban public space can be. But, in the end, it’s not the public space we think it is. Despites its gestures at softening the cultural boundaries that divide us, it exists to serve the city’s true project: planting surplus money on a fertile terrain.

The sun glared down over the corseted construction of Hudson Yards. As visitors wandered through the performance, the performers sang “Ain’t Got No,” from the musical Hair:

I ain’t got no home, ain’t got no shoes

Ain’t got no money, ain’t got no class

They sang:

Yeah, what have I got

Nobody can take away?

They sang:

I’ve got life, I've got my freedom

In their mouths, it sounded like hollow propaganda—something like Orwell’s prole songs from 1984. We don’t need affirmations of our “life,” our “freedom.” These were ours to begin with. Nor do we need more gilded objects in a gilded neighborhood. What we need is community spaces where we can work and gather, live and create. These days, though, we’ll take what we can get.

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Minutes after King County released its first batch of election results Tuesday night, the Seattle police officer once assigned as security to former Mayor Ed Murray slipped out the back door of the Westin conference room to begin his new job: Escorting Seattle’s next chief executive, Jenny Durkan.

Durkan overwhelmed her opponent Cary Moon by more than 20 points, according to the preliminary vote count. Moon did not concede, holding out a thread of hope that enough late-arriving ballots could tilt the results back in her favor. But while Moon is likely to narrow the large gap in the coming days, it will almost certainly fall short, making Durkan, the 59-year-old former U.S. Attorney, Seattle’s first female mayor in 89 years, victorious after picking up the broad labor and business backing accrued by resigned Mayor Ed Murray. For a play by play of how the night unfolded, check our live blog.

“We will build a better city, we will build a better future and we can be proud of it,” said Durkan in what was essentially a victory speech. “We really can show what it looks like when we put progressive values into action. And can I just say to Donald Trump: Keep your hands off Seattle.”

Moon, in a Pike Place Market brewery, acknowledged that it did not look good for her, but added, “Seattle late voters may surprise everyone. We’re not out of this yet.”

Seattle’s other election results were equally convincing: Labor leader Teresa Mosqueda trounced Democratic Socialist Jon Grant, also by well over 20 points, for a City Council seat. Incumbent Councilmember Lorena González easily won a second term in City Hall. And City Attorney Pete Holmes crushed former Murray advisor Scott Lindsay.

On the Eastside, in the highly watched race for control of the state Senate, Democrat Manka Dhingra leads Republican Jinyoung Lee Englund by 11 percentage points, handing the Democrats control of both houses of the state Legislature.

Among King County’s highest profile races, only the race for sheriff was a surprise: Incumbent John Urquhart trailed challenger Mitzi Johanknecht, a stunning turnaround amid sexual abuse accusations against the sheriff.

As the rest of the country watched a minor wave of Trump backlash sweep states like Virginia and New Jersey, in Seattle, those who ran on upending the status quo — Moon, Grant, Murakami, Lindsay — were shown the door.

Durkan, an attorney with a long and successful career, both in the lucrative private sector and in government as the country’s first openly gay U.S Attorney, stood out early in the marathon election season as the heir to former-Mayor Murray’s legacy. She declared her candidacy just days days after Murray, facing sexual abuse allegations, announced that he would not run for reelection. She would poach many of Murray’s supporters, donors and, eventually, business and labor endorsements.

While Durkan has criticized Murray’s “top-down” leadership style, her positions on housing, homeless and policing — all under the microscope for voters — read as continuations of policies begun under Murray. The company she kept Tuesday night reinforced this narrative: Guests at her gathering included former Murray allies such as current Mayor Tim Burgess, Councilmember Sally Bagshaw, labor bigwig David Rolf, venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and King County Executive Dow Constantine.

In an enormous field of 21 candidates in the primary, Durkan was often painted as the bogeyman — a member of the so-called “establishment” who was too cozy with business. The tag followed her as Amazon, Comcast and other corporations poured money into her campaign.

But Durkan’s experience as U.S. Attorney was an easy sell to voters, one she effectively cast as a warmup for the pace and executive management in the mayor’s office. By contrast, Moon could never quite shed the cloud of her resume, which, as she described, was a “weird” collection of advocacy and urban planning. Although neither candidate had served in elected office before, Durkan had long offered her legal services to elected officials and could at least point to a stint in government. Moon could not.

On Capitol Hill, Teresa Mosqueda, a longtime labor advocate, currently serving as the Political and Strategic Campaign Director for the Washington State Labor Council, celebrated her dramatic advantage over Grant — a lead she accrued despite losing the endorsements of both The Seattle Times and The Stranger to her socialist opponent. “This election shows in order to win in Seattle you must stand with labor,” Mosqueda told the crowd. “We didn’t know this was going to be a 60 plus percent team tonight!”

“This campaign was about making sure more of us who live here, who work here, can afford to stay here,” she said. “This is what it looks like when you have people who stand up and fight for greater shared prosperity.”

In South Seattle’s Hillman City, Grant said he felt good early in the evening. “I think we set out to do everything we accomplished in this campaign,” he said early in the evening. But it would turn out to not be enough. While he would not concede, his deficit appears insurmountable.

“We don’t know which way the results will go in the coming days so we’re hanging tight to keep an eye on upcoming ballot drops,” he said in a statement. “Regardless, this campaign has been a success for the most marginalized in our community.”

The most remarkable local race of the evening, however, was likely that for King County Sheriff. Sheriff John Urquhart left his own re-election party just before news broke of the first round of the results, which revealed that he trails competitor Mitzi Johanknecht, 51 to 48 percent.

When Urquhart returned, he again began mingling with the crowd gathered at Shawn O’Donnell’s American Grill and Irish Pub. It took some time before he would directly address the reporters at the party.

“Of course I’m disappointed,” Urquhart finally said. But he added, there’s an “awful lot of ballots left to be counted.”

When asked about whether he had any regrets about how he had run his campaign or how he had handled allegations of sexual assault, Urquhart said he didn’t want to talk about the allegations but that he was “proud of the job I did as sheriff.” He added: “I did this for the voters of King County.”

Urquhart did say he would likely spend the next few days analyzing this election. He then spent the rest of the night talking and drinking with a small crowd of family, friends and supporters, looking more relaxed than he had earlier in the evening. 

In the race for City Attorney, Scott Lindsay conceded to Pete Holmes. “I want to congratulate [Holmes] on earning a third term,” he tweeted. “I have called Pete to congratulate him and I wish him all the best going forward.”

Election night in Seattle and King County was good for women candidates, a fact that did not escape national organizations. 

“I think tonight has been about remembering where we were at this point last year, and knowing that we marched, we have been fighting,” said Tiffany Hankins with NARAL. “We voted and now look where we are. Women are coming up.”

For Durkan and Mosqueda, the new additions to Seattle City Hall, the transition to office will be quick: Because of the chaos around Murray’s resignation, their swearing-in date is more than a month earlier than it would otherwise be. Durkan especially will have little time to rest from the exhausting campaign.

And then, with housing prices through the roof, homelessness still growing, a clogged transportation system and a president antithetical to everything Seattle City Hall believes in, she begins her new job.

Reporters Mason Bryan, Lilly Fowler, Lizz Giordano contributed to this report.

For years, Barbara Simons was the loneliest of Cassandras—a technologist who feared what technology had wrought. Her cause was voting: Specifically, she believed that the electronic systems that had gained favor in the United States after the 2000 presidential election were shoddy, and eminently hackable. She spent years publishing opinion pieces in obscure journals with titles like Municipal World and sending hectoring letters to state officials, always written with the same clipped intensity.

Simons, who is now 76, had been a pioneer in computer science at IBM Research at a time when few women not in the secretarial pool walked its halls. In her retirement, however, she was coming off as a crank. Fellow computer scientists might have heard her out, but to the public officials she needed to win over, the idea that software could be manipulated to rig elections remained a fringe preoccupation. Simons was not dissuaded. “They didn’t know what they were talking about and I did,” she told me.

She wrote more articles, wrote a book, badgered policy makers, made “a pain of myself.” Though a liberal who had first examined voting systems under the Clinton administration, she did battle with the League of Women Voters (of which she is a member), the ACLU, and other progressive organizations that had endorsed paperless voting, largely on the grounds that electronic systems offered greater access to voters with disabilities.

Simons was called a Luddite. At times, she was treated as just short of raving. At a League of Women Voters convention, she took a turn at the microphone to challenge the league’s president. The moderator tried to yank the mic from her hand.

Simons is not grappling for mics anymore. In late July, at the annual Def Con hacker conference, in Las Vegas, she addressed an event called the Voting Village—a staged attack on voting machines. “I lose sleep over this. I hope you will too,” she told the hackers who had packed into a windowless conference room at Caesars Palace.

Four voting machines had been secured for the event, three of them types still in use. One team of hackers used radio signals to eavesdrop on a machine as it recorded votes. Another found a master password online. Within hours of getting their hands on the machines, the hackers had discovered vulnerabilities in all four.

For much of the afternoon, Simons was in the pressroom, surrounded by reporters eager to hear her make the same points she’d been making for years. “Anything that’s happening in here, you can be sure that those intent on undermining the integrity of our election systems have already done,” she told a reporter from USA Today.

Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election have reversed Simons’s fortunes. According to the Department of Homeland Security, those efforts included attempts to meddle with the electoral process in 21 states. At the same time, a series of highly publicized hacks—at Sony, Equifax, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management—has driven home the reality that very few computerized systems are truly secure.

State officials now return Simons’s calls. Like many of her former adversaries, the League of Women Voters no longer insists on paperless voting. In September, after years of effort by Simons and the nonprofit she helps run, Verified Voting, Virginia abandoned the practice. I asked Simons how it felt to be vindicated. “It sucks,” she said. “I would much rather have been wrong.”

Evidence has yet to emerge that Russia successfully manipulated voting systems in 2016, and most of Russia’s probing appears to have been aimed at databases of registered voters, not the machines that record votes. But Simons believes that the failure to heed her warnings has left states in grave danger, with too many potential weak points to shore up before hackers do succeed in altering an outcome. It is not a theoretical vulnerability, Simons told me. “Our democracy is in peril. We are wide open to attack.”

“It’s not that I don’t like computing or I don’t like computers. I mean, I am a computer scientist,” she said. “Many of the leading opponents of paperless voting machines were, and still are, computer scientists, because we understand the vulnerability of voting equipment in a way most election officials don’t. The problem with cybersecurity is that you have to protect against everything, but your opponent only has to find one vulnerability.”

Simons is slight of build, with short auburn hair. She walks and speaks at a breakneck speed that suggests her urgency of purpose. On a recent weekday, she touched down at Los Angeles International Airport wearing knee-high suede boots. She was in town for a meeting with the television star turned activist Alyssa Milano, one of many high-profile figures now eager to tap Simons’s expertise.

Milano wore her own boots, in metallic gold. Sitting at a conference table in the monumental headquarters of Creative Artists Agency, Simons addressed the actor and her entourage in typically blunt fashion. “I’m scared shitless,” she said.

Simons told Milano what she’s been telling state officials from Rhode Island to California: We have a single technology at our disposal that is invulnerable to hacking—paper. Verified Voting’s goal is to get paper ballots in every state. Where the organization meets resistance, it funds local activist groups and hires lobbyists; where it finds a sympathetic ear, it provides technical expertise and a road map for creating a secure system.

By Verified Voting’s count, 13 states, including populous ones such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, still have paperless voting. Given the thin majorities in Congress, that leaves more than enough machines to allow hackers tremendous power to influence American politics. And all 50 states use computerized scanners for vote counting—few of them with sufficient postelection auditing to detect manipulation. Mandatory audits, in the form of hand counts of randomized samplings of ballots, are essential to protect against invisible vote theft, Simons believes. In an unaudited system, malicious code could easily go unnoticed. “It’s not rocket science,” she said. “Any halfway-decent programmer could do it.”

Barbara Simons is one of the original figures in a movement of perhaps three dozen people who have been fighting for paper ballots for nearly two decades. None are yet accustomed to being taken seriously. When Verified Voting first started working in Virginia, it was seen as “kind of out there,” admits Edgardo Cortés, the commissioner of Virginia’s Department of Elections. Now “they’re on the top of the list of who we call.”

Leading up to September’s unanimous, bipartisan decision by the Virginia board of elections to decertify the state’s remaining touch-screen voting machines, Simons was in the thick of the debate, emailing back and forth with election officials as they sought to assess the vulnerability of paperless machines. Cortés remembers that Simons “butted heads with a number of election officials over the years.” But, he adds, “I think her passion to keep pushing the issue over time—to just continue—it’s had results. It really changed things.”

What needs changing is a system that took root after 2000, when the presidential election hinged on the infamous chads left behind by Florida voters. Computer voting was still novel at the time, but it seemed like an improvement on the antiquated punch-card systems used in places like Broward County. If not properly maintained, those machines produced less-than-clean punches and ambiguous (“hanging,” “pregnant”) chads. “The takeaway was that paper ballots weren’t any good,” Simons recalled.

In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, and suddenly states were awash in money to invest in new systems—and fearful of becoming the next Florida. Security was a secondary concern—even though many of the new machines had wireless features and left no paper trail. They were viewed as easier to use, and seemed to have little downside. Each state “wanted to get the newest and greatest shiny object,” said Simons. It was “a gold-rush mentality.” She still has a League of Women Voters statement supporting the paperless revolution in which “hacking”—rendered in scare quotes—is quickly dismissed as a concern.

At the peak of the electronic-voting revolution, in 2006, some 40 percent of registered voters used paperless machines. Verified Voting worked to stem the tide, but found little receptiveness for its dark visions of compromised machines. Kevin Shelley, California’s secretary of state from 2003 to 2005 and a supporter of paperless voting, reluctantly took a meeting with Verified Voting. The group he’d dismissed as “crazy activists” made a compelling case, backing it up with data and reports on the insecurity of paperless machines.

Shelley changed his position, and California became an early, important victory for the group. Thanks in part to California’s shift, enthusiasm for electronic systems abated elsewhere, but not before thousands of machines were ensconced across the country.

Verified Voting supports some machine systems—hybrid models that ink paper ballots and can help people with disabilities to vote—so long as the results are audited. But Simons stubbornly prefers pen and paper, which she believes is the simplest, most idiotproof system. Of course, all voting systems must contend with the grubby realities of democracy—design and function have a way of diverging when millions of people enter the equation. Douglas Jones, a computer scientist who co-authored a book on voting history with Simons, notes that a surprising number of Americans insist on exercising their franchise using glitter pens.

What paper boasts—and no existing computer system can rival—is a solution to the confounding logic problem at the heart of our electoral system. The secret ballot presents a paradox: How can the validity of each vote be confirmed without being traceable to any individual voter? Ballots must be “anonymous and yet verifiable, secret and yet accountable,” says Eric Hodge of CyberScout, a security-services company that advises states and counties.

Paper, Simons said, is the best answer to this riddle. Marked clearly and correctly, it’s a portable and transparent record of voter intent, one that voters themselves can verify, at least while the ballot is still in their possession. It’s also a permanent record, unlike computer memory, which can always be overwritten. “There’s no malware that can attack paper,” Simons said. “We can solve this. We know how to do it.”

The promise of practical results—of solvable problems—is one of the things that first lured Simons to computer science, in the early 1970s. She was one of just a few women in UC Berkeley’s doctoral program. She concentrated on a programming challenge called “scheduling”—the mathematical sequencing of tasks. She was certain that she could solve the problem she set before herself in writing her thesis, and she did, after two years of intensive research.

Repairing America’s voting system has been less hermetic work, and the results have been more mixed. A few weeks after her victory in Virginia, Simons fought, unsuccessfully, against a measure in California that rolled back audit requirements she’d wanted to strengthen. But Simons has come to see politics and persuasion as essential to her discipline. “The technical community has a responsibility to inform policy makers of the limitations as well as the benefits of technology,” she said. “That is part of engineering.”

King County Assessor John Wilson says there is “entirely” enough underused land in Seattle to shelter 1,000 homeless people a year. “I’ve become more and more convinced that we have adequate land capacity to solve the housing problem in this county,” he says. “It’s a question of, ‘Do we have the will?’”

Shortly after his 2015 election, Wilson ordered a map of every vacant or underused parcel of government-owned property inside the city limits. The effort was spurred out of conversations with his longtime friend, Seattle City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw, who has long believed the city has available land to address the region’s homelessness crisis. 

Seattle’s Office of Housing has tracked property owned by the City of Seattle before, concluding that, while there is some surplus property, very little can address the housing crisis.

But Wilson’s map goes further, cataloging property owned by the City of Seattle, King County, the State of Washington, University of Washington, Washington State University, the Port of Seattle, Sound Transit and all other government-owned land within Seattle. The map identifies more than 300 spaces that are larger than 20,000 square feet and are located within a quarter-mile of transit. 

There are hurdles to using these parcels, some of which are likely insurmountable, such as contamination or terrain that is, for example, too steep to build on.

Additionally, there are two significant bureaucratic obstacles to potentially using the land: First, under state law, surplus utility land must be sold at market rate prices, even to a city department; and second, the city’s zoning and permitting processes make it difficult to construct shelters on some underused lots.

But Wilson thinks these obstacles are surmountable. Since receiving the map, he’s been in talks with State House Speaker Frank Chopp to pass legislation making utility land more accessible. Chopp is supportive and is researching the issue, he told Crosscut.

Wilson also believes the State of Emergency declared by former Mayor Ed Murray and King County Executive Dow Constantine could be used more liberally to get around zoning issues. Murray said the declaration would allow for speedier construction of shelter in areas not currently zoned for that. But Wilson argues, “I’m not sure that that’s how it’s been acted on.”

Wilson has blunt words for Murray, saying he received enthusiastic feedback on the map from the former mayor’s staff, but that Murray himself didn’t weigh in before leaving office. “Hopefully the next mayor, whoever she is, will take a look at this and hopefully work with us and realize that there is the potential here in the city. ‘How do I drive that forward and drive it faster?’”

In an email, Julie Moore with the Department of Finance and Administrative Services said the city appreciated Wilson’s work and is continuing to search for usable land.

In 2015, the City of Seattle identified 210 under-used city-owned lots but found only 33 of them usable. Although Wilson’s map expands that inventory to all government-owned property, the same barriers exist.

Under state law, property owned by utilities, like Seattle City Light, Seattle Public Utilities or the Seattle Department of Transportation, must earn market-rate prices for land, a sort-of fiduciary bind between the companies and the ratepayers. According to the Office of Housing, there are 45 such properties owned by Seattle; Wilson could not say exactly how many his map tagged.

“It’s part of what’s maddening,” says Wilson. “There was a parcel we identified up on Capitol Hill that’s owned by City Light. It’s been sitting there vacant for some time now. They’re not making any money off it. We approached City Light and they said, ‘Sure you can use it for modular housing,’ and they said, ‘That’ll be $91,000 a year.’”

The requirement hasn’t precluded all use of utility land, but it comes at a cost: the Human Services Department is paying market-rate prices to Seattle City Light for an encampment in Interbay, said Moore with the Department of Finance and Administrative Services.

In some cases, it’s been a direct barrier to using vacant areas for housing, including at several large plots of SDOT land in South Lake Union that were not used for housing, according to Curbed Seattle.  

Speaker Chopp says, if and when the property is sold, the high cost makes it less likely private developers will build affordable housing. When asked if the market-rate requirement might speed the sale of public land to private owners, Chopp says, “Yeah, obviously.”

After several meetings with Wilson, Bagshaw and others, Chopp is interested in drafting legislation to allow cities to lease utility land for as little as $1 if it’s for the “public benefit” — housing, early childhood education or park space. “We think they should have the option of getting these lands and putting them back into public purpose,” he says.

The upcoming session in Olympia is a short one and Chopp says he’s determined to finish on time. But he says initial advice from lawyers is that the rule does not interfere with the constitution and can be changed through a statute change. 

Zoning restrictions are another reason development on underused lands can be difficult. Wilson wishes the State of Emergency was used more freely to get around this, especially because Murray said at the time of the declaration he would do so.

But this question of how far the city can go under a State of Emergency is ill-defined. The mayor’s office and city council have been in conversation with the City Attorney’s Office about the declaration’s limits and therefore the City Attorney could not comment due to attorney-client privilege, according to spokesperson Kimberly Mills.

Hugh Spitzer, a professor of Law at the University of Washington, says it’s very unclear how much latitude the State of Emergency declaration gives to the city or county. “From a practical standpoint, if the mayor and the county executive were to make modest adjustments that were not very much but kind of helped things along, it might not be challenged and might be upheld,” he says. “On the other hand, if the mayor were to attempt to ignore fair, clear permitting processes, it might be challenged and then the city would have to show that this is really the kind of emergency that those state laws, the charter and this ordinance are meant to address.”

There are currently seven sites in Seattle reserved for tiny homes — 96-square-foot sheds with a bed, shelves and heating. These “tiny home villages” are scattered from Othello to Ballard. Each has a communal kitchen and shared bathrooms as well as security.

Tiny home villages could be more easily situated on the identified vacant land parcels because space and siting requirement for tiny homes are more flexible. “Our housing models for providing low-income or mixed-income housing have tended to focus on, ‘I need a chunk of property that big,’” says Wilson. “And you realize that in some cases that’s not the size you’ve got. That’s in part why you look at tiny houses where you go, ‘Alright, but could you do something that is smaller or more compact but we could still house a number of people?’”

Sharon Lee, Executive Director of the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) that administers Seattle’s tiny house villages, wants her organization to double the number of residences — a goal she sees as achievable if given the land to do it. “We’re hoping that the new mayoral administration will be more generous and expansive in use of city property,” she says.

On a lot once zoned for a single-family house in Seattle’s Central District, 14 tiny homes form a community for 22 people and 5 pets. It’s on church property and LIHI pays $200 a month to lease the land. Many of the sheds — about the size of a horse’s stall — were built by different organizations, so their designs vary: a pop-up roof that serves as a sleeping loft; burnt-cedar siding; a third painted in Seahawks colors. There’s a communal kitchen housed beneath a tent, its shelves lined with cans of beans.

Each tiny residence cost $2,200 to build, $2,500 if built off-site and moved here. It was established in 2015 out of a collaborative effort between Nickelsville, which advocates for people with homes, and LIHI. 

Harley (who did not give his last name) has lived here since June, after living in several other homeless encampments nearby. He arrived in Seattle recently from Colorado, where he’d spent 13 years in prison. “Nobody I knew was out here,” which is a good thing, he says about why he moved to the Pacific Northwest.  

This tiny home lot is “peaceful,” he says. He can’t remember the last time he felt so stable; he’s now interviewing for jobs. “It’s kind of like a little community,” he says of the village. “It has the same dynamic as a family.”

There’s debate over whether tiny home villages can be a permanent solution to homelessness. But there is widespread support for them among elected officials as an alternative to unsanctioned encampments — so-called tent cities — including from both Jenny Durkan and Cary Moon who are running for mayor.

On Wednesday, council members Bagshaw and Kshama Sawant found themselves in a rare moment of agreement that the city should add more tiny homes. Sawant is proposing an additional $500,000 for encampments, although she would like up to $2.2 million to double the number of tiny house villages.

Bagshaw agreed, saying she’d like to see 150 new beds in each of the seven Seattle neighborhood districts — a goal that tiny home construction could hasten. She also said she’s asked the King County Council to set a similar goal, which she thinks could result in 2,000 new beds within six months.

Prioritizing vacant land for housing was one of the many 2015 recommendations to come out of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda. But Wilson believes there hasn’t been enough communication between the different government agencies to fully understand what’s available. He says many institutions simply don’t know what they have. “To one degree or another it’s, ‘We still have that?’ and ‘Oh yeah, we still own that.'” 

If the city is going to wrap its arms around the homelessness crisis, he argues, something needs to change. “Simply doing what we’ve done before won’t get us there. It won’t get us to the thousand new beds a year. It won’t get us to a point where we have sufficient housing, where we have people living in the streets needlessly and it won’t get us to a point where people who work in this city can afford to live in this city.”

If you’re like many other humans on this planet, winter’s shorter days may get you feeling a bit down from lack of sunlight. But some folks in the state are on a mission to reclaim one hour of daylight, with a campaign to get Massachusetts to leave the Eastern Time Zone.

One member of a Massachusetts state commission that’s currently looking at whether or not the state should move to the Atlantic Time Zone — and thus, opt out of Daylight Savings Time — said he started his quest when he moved from Washington, D.C., to Massachusetts.

“I knew I was moving north, but I had no idea how far I was moving east, and so you can imagine my horror when in December the sun was setting” at 4:11 p.m., he told NBC News.

If Massachusetts does move time zones, it would be an hour ahead of the rest of the East Coast for roughly four months each year.

In September, the state commission released a draft report [PDF] that found Massachusetts “could make a data-driven case for moving to the Atlantic Time Zone year-round.”

The commission’s report notes that year-round DST would positively impact consumer spending, which could help the state attract and retain more talented workers; would increase residents’ productivity and cut down on both the number and severity of on-the-job injuries; and improve public health in general.

A second draft will be voted on Nov. 1, and if approved could go on to lawmakers.

Massachusetts isn’t the only state to consider such a move, the commission notes: Four of the other five New England states have also looked into year-round DST. In Maine, a bill that would’ve prompted such a change in the state if Massachusetts and New Hampshire also participated was passed by both legislative chambers before it was laid aside.

Another bill in New Hampshire passed the House but was voted down in the Senate, while bills establishing year-round DST were also filed in the Connecticut and Rhode Island legislatures. Elsewhere in the country, legislators have introduced bills in Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

King County contains multitudes, including the city of Seattle, the widely despised website Amazon dot com, the widely beloved website Grist dot org, Ben Gibbard, and now, maybe a new coal mine.

In 2011, the Pacific Coast Coal Company first filed a proposal to reopen the John Henry mine, a small, long-dormant coal mine near the town of Black Diamond in southeastern King County. That year, the proposal was placed on administrative delay pending an environmental assessment. In 2014, a number of environmentalists led by Fuse Washington protested the project, and the delay was renewed again in 2016.

But now that environmental assessment is complete, courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Its findings? That the John Henry mine should have no significant impact on the surrounding area. Hmm!

Leaving aside for the moment how likely that is, let’s just note that the Pacific Coast Coal Company has not engaged in any mining activity since 1999, and the state of Washington currently has zero active coal mines.

The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement has not yet issued a permit to reopen the mine, as it still needs to review the public comments, but the entire proposition feels extremely … retro.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline It’s 2017 and someone wants to reopen a coal mine 30 miles from Seattle. on Oct 23, 2017.

Last month, after six months of construction, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority reopened the first of three rehabbed Brooklyn stations. It had new USB charging stations, large-screen digital maps, countdown clocks, and even a new mosaic.

But what really caught straphangers’ attention was the leaning bar. A slanted wooden slab set against the wall at about the height of a person’s rear end, the bar was meant to give passengers a way to take some weight off their feet as they waited for the next train. What it was not, however, was a bench.

“Are they trying to tell us something? Is this even for humans?” asked one incredulous Twitter user. “Is leaning the new sitting?” tweeted another. “With all the walking in NYC you need to sit occasionally.”

The first Cuomo Station opens in Bay Ridge, 53rd St. biggest changes - leaning benches, charging ports, digital screens pic.twitter.com/QMTIXPToM2

— Dan Rivoli (@danrivoli) September 8, 2017

leaning benches are a huge scam, i paid taxes for a real bench https://t.co/ckREJksA6M

— Anthony V. (@fascinated) September 10, 2017

In an email to CityLab, MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz called the leaning bar “the result of a review of best practices in transit systems around the world.” Bars take up less floor space than benches, he wrote, and serve as another option for transit riders. “They didn’t replace traditional seating in the station,” he wrote; “they supplement it.”

Despite the MTA’s protestations, some New Yorkers saw the bar as the latest salvo in what could be called the War on Sitting. As cities around the world tear out benches in an effort to deter homeless people from sleeping and drug dealers from hovering, or to force loiterers to move along, pedestrians and transit users may find fewer and fewer places to sit down and take a load off, or hang out and watch the world go by—and that’s bad news not only for tired feet, but for city life itself.

In the past few years, benches have disappeared from Uptown Chicago bus shelters (city officials cited concerns about loitering) and downtown Cincinnati (because “lewd and lascivious behavior” was allegedly occurring behind them). In San Francisco’s Castro, the local business association pulled seating out of Harvey Milk Plaza. The benches, it said, were being used as a “loophole” by people who wanted to avoid violating the city’s law against lying on sidewalks. In D.C., George Washington University pulled up seating outside a campus 7-Eleven after university police received complaints about panhandling and harassment. “If there are benches there, there are homeless people there,” an officer told the student paper.

Earlier this year, the London Borough of Islington installed new “smart” benches with Wi-Fi, solar panels, and phone charging stations—but soon after the borough council announced it would remove them, due to a lack of planning permission and concerns that the benches presented “an opportunity for thieves travelling past to snatch phones and iPads.”

Anaheim got attention in July because of officials’ decision to remove benches from bus stops near Disneyland, leading some people to assume that the theme park requested homeless people be evicted for the sake of its squeaky-clean image. City spokesman Mike Lyster said that was incorrect—the benches were not pulled out at the theme park’s behest.

“We got into a situation where bus riders were losing access to the benches—people were basically occupying them 24 hours a day,” he said. “This at least restored the shelters for bus riders.”

Lyster noted that the city has an outreach program to connect homeless people with social services that can get them into housing; since 2014, some 800 people have found homes, he said. “But it’s a long game, and the problem grows.” Meanwhile, the bench removals had their intended effect, he said. While people slept on the sidewalk for a while, eventually, they moved on.

No one seems to be keeping statistics on the disappearance of street seating, but G.W. Rolle, who sits on the board at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, places the trend within the greater context of so-called hostile architecture—features such as spikes to prevent people from sitting on ledges and segmented benches that don’t allow them to lie down—and anti-vagrancy laws, which criminalize sleeping in public, sitting on sidewalks, and loitering. The center, which tracks laws that affect homeless people, found in a recent survey of U.S. cities that nearly half have laws barring lying down or sitting in certain places, a number that has climbed more than 50 percent over the past decade.

“A physical object must occupy physical space,” says Rolle, who was himself homeless for several years. “But wherever you sit, you’re vulnerable to vagrancy citations. They don’t want homeless people to have any peace.”

Rolle is now a pastor and advocate for homeless people in St. Petersburg, Florida, a city that was once famous for its distinctive green benches. Today, St. Petersburg has one of the highest concentrations of homeless people in the U.S., and those benches have all but disappeared.

“It hasn’t solved homelessness, and the people they put the benches there for still need them,” Rolle says. “It would make the city look better if they put them back. It’s a beautiful city, surrounded on three sides by water, and more people would walk, more people would go downtown, more of the elderly would come out of their buildings, if they had somewhere to sit.”

Rolle’s observations are consistent with findings of the New York-based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces. “Removing benches also removes some of the positive activity,” says Ethan Kent, the group’s senior vice president. “It sends a message of fear: This is a place to move through quickly. People disengage. … The most effective way to deal with ‘undesirable’ activity is to make the place friendlier for everyone else. So the bench becomes the battle line, the turning point for cities either welcoming people or designing out of fear.”

While many communities are taking away benches for fear of illegal or undesirable behavior, something else suggests keeping or even adding more of them: our country’s (and the world’s) aging population. In 2007, the World Health Organization published a guide to “Global Age-friendly Cities,” which noted, “The availability of seating areas is generally viewed as a necessary urban feature for older people.” Some older people surveyed for the guide expressed concern about “antisocial” elements occupying public benches. To mitigate that, the WHO recommended that outdoor seating be abundant, well-maintained, and regularly spaced.

Today, more than 500 communities worldwide are working, to various extents, on meeting the WHO’s guidelines. Surprisingly enough, the home of the infamous leaning bench—New York—has been among the most ambitious.

Ruth Finkelstein was the original director of the Age-Friendly NYC Commission, which launched in 2007. (She is now an assistant professor of health policy and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.) To begin with, Finkelstein says, her group held town-hall-style meetings with thousands of older people in each borough, listening to their concerns about everything from sidewalk maintenance to gaps in the city’s healthcare system.

“Benches came up a lot,” Finkelstein says, “both people talking about the fact that it made it difficult to do their errands if they didn’t have a place to sit, and also people just saying they want to sit out in their neighborhood and watch the world go by.”

Some of the older citizens’ desires were beyond the means of the initiative, but it seemed simple enough to add more benches—especially with money from the federal government’s 2009 stimulus package available. So Finkelstein’s group worked with the city’s Department of Transportation (a separate entity from the MTA) to put benches at bus stops and at other locations with higher concentrations of older people. Then they came up with a simple form that let anyone request a bench. To date, DOT has installed 1,500 benches, with another 600 planned by 2019.

“They just started popping up all over the place,” Finkelstein says. “People love them. People use them. And there’s nothing about them that makes them only for old people. It’s an important way of creating a town square. Old people sit on them, young people sit on them, and sometimes old people and young people sit on them together and—God forbid—talk to each other.”

New York is not the only city that, in recent years, has both given benches and taken them away. Wichita, Kansas, recently floated a plan to remove seating from one downtown park in an effort to drive out homeless people. But as part of its own age-friendly initiative, the city also built a new “Grandparents Park” with plenty of seating to accommodate older people. Boston claimed that removing benches near one of its main train stations had reduced drug activity, but elsewhere, City Hall is proudly rolling out MIT-designed smart benches with phone-charging stations.

Local governments evidently remain conflicted. But the grumbling that ensues when benches are taken away—and the positive press when new ones are installed—suggest a stalemate in the War on Sitting, for now.

Last weekend, 1-year-old Neallie Junior Saxon III was playing with other neighborhood kids in their front yards in Broward County, Florida, when he did what young kids do and went after a ball, into the street.

The driver of a Hyundai Santa Fe SUV hit Neallie and did not even slow down until she reached a stop sign, at which point, onlookers dragged her out and beat her, according to the Miami Herald.

“He was my pride and joy,” Neallie’s grief-stricken mother wrote on Facebook. “You will always be loved and missed. Mommy and daddy are being as strong as we can be.”

The identity of the driver wasn’t released, but as is common in this kind of story, she is already being absolved by the police and the media. The Herald reports:

The toddler, who would have been 2 in December, was shorter than the bumper of the 2007 four-door Hyundai Santa Fe SUV. Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies said it was unlikely the woman driving would have seen the little boy, especially with all the other kids running around in the road.

There’s a lot to unpack in that passage, but one of the more striking questions it raises is this: Why are companies allowed to sell mass market vehicles with such a huge blind spot in front that children are rendered invisible? Where are the regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration?

The specific dangers of SUVs have been out in the open for a long time, and it’s no secret that pedestrians are at particular risk.

In 2015, researchers at the University of Michigan determined that pedestrians are more than three times as likely to be killed when struck by an SUV than when struck by a regular passenger vehicle. The critical design factor is the high, blocky front end, which pushes people below the wheels instead of over the hood.

Clay Gabler, a mechanical engineer who researched pedestrian safety in SUV collisions for Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, was warning about the front end design of SUVs back in 2003.

Why are big square-nosed SUVs still everywhere? Because they sell. Those front end features that kill and maim pedestrians are popular with consumers.

Keith Bradsher, a former New York Times Detroit bureau chief, wrote a scathing account of the production and marketing of sport utility vehicles in 2002, “High and Mighty.”

SUV drivers are similar to minivan drivers demographically, but they are more “self-oriented” psychologically, Bradsher reported. They are more fearful of crime, less likely to be involved in their communities, and less committed to their families, he wrote.

In 2000, DaimlerChrysler Director of Market Research David Bostwick told Bradsher that for consumers, ”It’s not safety as the issue, it’s aggressiveness, it’s the ability to go off the road.” Research also showed that SUV owners drive faster and place a lower value on being courteous on the road.

SUVs are designed specifically to appeal to this psychological profile, executives admitted:

DaimlerChrysler has chosen high-riding designs even for the two-wheel-drive versions of its sport utilities, even though they are unlikely to be driven over rough terrain and are therefore unlikely to need to ride higher, said David C. McKinnon, DaimlerChrysler’s director of vehicle exterior design. Mr. McKinnon said the company’s highest executives had told him repeatedly to ‘get them up in the air and make them husky.’

Up in the air, where drivers can’t see little kids like Neallie Saxon. For no reason other than style.

When the New Scientist published Gabler’s research 14 years ago, it carried a warning:

But in the US, pedestrians are losing the safety battle. “Despite over 4000 pedestrian deaths a year, there are no pedestrian impact safety regulations under serious consideration in the US,” Gabler says.

Since then pedestrian deaths have increased nearly 50 percent. Lives like Neallie’s are the price we pay to satisfy consumer preferences and maximize automakers’ profits.