Author Archive for audreyl

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Off the Rails: Why do Conservatives Hate Trains so Much?

Published on March 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From David Weigel, Slate

In the movie version of Atlas Shrugged, there is a scene in which Ayn Rand’s libertarian heroes defy all odds, deploy some untold amount of private funding, and launch the fastest high-speed train in history over rails of experimental metal. “The run of the John Galt Line is thrilling,” wrote the libertarian federal judge Alex Kozinski. “When it crossed the bridge made of Rearden Metal, I wanted to stand up and cheer.”

That’s in the fantasy world. In the real world, libertarians aren’t cheering for high speed rail but rather trying to stop it from being built. They are succeeding. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich campaigned against a high-speed rail line funded by the stimulus, got elected, and turned down the funding. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker did the same thing, only more so—his anti-train campaign even had its own Web site. In Florida, the state Supreme Court has just approved Gov. Rick Scott’s decision to reject $2.4 billion of federal funds to build a Tampa-Orlando rail line; the state was being asked to contribute only $280 million to finish it off. The funding was originally agreed to by Charlie Crist, one of the Tea Party’s archenemies, so Scott’s victory could hardly be any sweeter.

But it could hardly make less sense to liberals. What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what? Why did President George W. Bush try to zero out Amtrak funding in 2005? Why is the conservative Republican Study Committee suggesting that we do so now? Why does George Will think “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”?

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Atlanta’s Pittsburgh Neighborhood: Building the Sustainable Urban Community

Published on March 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Mtamanika Youngblood and Harold N.. Barnette, Shelterforce

The bursting American housing bubble is shattering long-standing assumptions about the role of housing as a driver of the national economy and as a basic source of wealth creation for families. The unprecedented nature of current housing market conditions, a frozen financial sector, and the uncertain direction of national housing policy makes things even more difficult. Yet with mounting foreclosures and job losses that are, in turn, producing growing numbers of families struggling to get or keep a roof over their heads, access to affordable shelter will only become more important in years to come.

There are ways to redefine affordable housing goals and urban revitalization methods in light of these current housing market realities. Those methods, however, require significant levels of innovation.

The challenges and opportunities in revitalizing the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Atlanta, and some of the directions the neighborhood is choosing to go in response, provide a good case in point, with implications for many other neighborhoods in similar positions.

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Dubai on Empty

Published on March 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair

The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn’t real. It’s a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it’s a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste. Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun. It’s a holiday resort with the worst climate in the world. It boils. It’s humid. And the constant wind is full of sand. The first thing you see when you arrive is the airport, with its echoing marble halls. It’s big enough to be the hub of a continent. Dubai suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest. This includes their financial crisis.

Outside, in the sodden heat, you pass hundreds and hundreds of regimented palm trees and you wonder who waters them and what with. The skyline, in the dusty haze, looks like the cover of a dystopian science-fiction novella. Clusters of skyscrapers lurch out at the gray desert accompanied by their moribund cranes, propped up with scaffolding, swagged in plastic sheeting. Dubai thought it was going to grow up to be the Arab Singapore—a commercial, banking, and insurance service port on the Gulf with hospitality and footballers’ time-shares, an oasis of R&R for the less well endowed. But it hasn’t quite worked out. The vertical streets of offices are empty. A derelict skyscraper looks exactly the same as one that’s teeming with commerce. They huddle around the current tallest building in the world—a monument to small-nation penis envy. This pylon erected with the Viagra of credit is now a big, naked exclamation of Dubai’s fiscal embarrassment. It was going to be called Burj Dubai, but as Dubai was unable to make their payments, they were forced to go to their Gulf neighbor, head towel in hand, to get a loan. So now it’s called Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler, who coughed up $10 billion to its over-extended neighbor.

Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai.

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China’s Empty Trains… & Other Unintended Consequences

Published on February 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Ben Schulman, newgeopraphy

In a technical sense, the economy has been in recovery since June of 2009. A year and a half into the rebound though, a general cloud of economic malaise continues to cover the nation. Fears of a diminished America are perpetuated from our political and punditry classes. We are told that our collective lack of preparation, education, innovation, industry, and of infrastructure are all setting us up to fall further. Economic indicators may reflect a bounce-back, but structurally, America is waning. It is China that is increasingly emerging as the world’s bright spot in terms of development. With its 10% annual growth rate, an economy poised to become the world’s largest, and a strategic smart-growth development plan, resplendent in renewable energy splendor and high-speed rail, the nascent superpower is aimed ever upwards.

This tidy narrative that the doom-chatterers both envy and fear is being dented by a number of recent stories concerning Chinese rail initiatives. As Tsinghua University’s Economics Professor Patrick Choavec writes, China’s high-speed rail is “expensive both to build and to operate, requiring high ticket prices to break even. The bulk of the long-distance passenger traffic, especially during the peak holiday periods, is migrant workers for whom the opportunity cost of time is relatively low. Even if they could afford a high-speed train ticket — which is doubtful given their limited incomes — they would probably prefer to conserve their cash and take a slower, cheaper train. If that proves true, the new high-speed lines will only incur losses while providing little or no relief to the existing transportation network.”

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The Still Elusive “Return to the City”

Published on February 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Wendell Cox, newgeography

Metropolitan area results are beginning to trickle in from the 2010 census. They reveal that, at least for the major metropolitan areas so far, there is little evidence to support the often repeated claim by think tanks and the media that people are moving from suburbs to the historical core municipalities. This was effectively brought to light in a detailed analysis of Chicago metropolitan area results by New Geography’s Aaron Renn. This article analyzes data available for the eight metropolitan areas with more than 1 million population for which data had been released by February 20.

Summary: Summarized, the results are as follows. A detailed analysis of the individual metropolitan areas follows (Table 1).

  • In each of the eight metropolitan areas, the preponderance of growth between 2000 and 2010 was in the suburbs, as has been the case for decades. This has occurred even though two events – the energy price spike in mid-decade and the mortgage meltdown – were widely held to have changed this trajectory. On average, 4 percent of the growth was in the historical core municipalities, and 96 percent of the growth was in the suburbs (Figure 1).
  • In each of the eight metropolitan areas, the suburbs grew at a rate substantially greater than that of the core municipality. The core municipalities had an average growth from 2000 to 2010 of 3.2 percent. Suburban growth was 21.7 percent, nearly 7 times as great.  Overall, the number of people added to the suburbs was 14 times that added to the core municipalities.

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Haunting Images Of Detroit’s Decline

Published on January 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Nicole Hardesty, The Huffington Post

A new book called Ruins of Detroit displays Detroit’s downtown landmarks in decay: Abandoned hotels, houses and schools line the streets as a reminder of the city’s economic downfall over the past century. The devastation takes on an eerie beauty, as captured by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

The photographs show once-lively structures of an American city, now remembered by its remains.

While Detroit’s official unemployment rate has rebounded to 12 percent from a high of 15.7 percent in October of 2009, the state’s economy is nowhere near healed. As the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, the state’s jobless rate is falling at the fastest pace in the nation — but that doesn’t equate to job growth. A state agency told the WSJ the decline “primarily reflected a reduction in the number of unemployed individuals seeking jobs.”

The entire collection of photos can be found in the Ruins of Detroit book, or at Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre Photography

To see the Pictures….

Garden Party: The City’s New Nature

Published on January 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set

A magnificent thing has been happening outside my window in Brooklyn. This past summer, I noticed vegetable gardens and fruit trees overwhelming the once-empty hull of yard behind my building. The paved patios have been blasted up and turned into thriving miniature farms. Gardens are being grown on the rusty fire escapes and tended by my young, overall-clad neighbors. Everything is getting greener, and leafier. Everything seems more… alive. A month ago, before the present frost hit, a gaggle of speckled birds I have never seen were casually tearing at the round fruits of a new tree. I’ve lived in my Brooklyn apartment for 14 years, long enough to turn from tenant to witness, so you’ll believe me when I tell you the change is considerable.

The results of the urban gardeners’ efforts are delightful and alluring. Even I — who managed to murder a prepackaged Chia herb garden I once received as a gift — am finding myself walking along New York’s streets with an overwhelming urge to plant. Green walls, green floors, moss-covered chairs, bathtub vegetable plots, milk carton pots.

It isn’t just in Brooklyn. There’s a Frenchman named Patrick Blanc who has been designing vertical gardens that loop up hotel walls and germinate across shopping mall interiors in Paris, Kuwait, Bangkok, and Gdansk. From his headquarters in Sweden, Folke Günther developed a vertical growing wall to promote more efficient and ecologically sound urban farming. He has named it the “Folkewall,” after himself, but vertical gardens are also being called “growing walls” and “living walls.” (I like “breathing walls” myself). Arbo-architects Ferdinand Ludwig, Oliver Storz and Hannes Schwertfeger call their work “building botany.” They make building structures that are a fusion of trees and steel pipes. The two intertwine such that organic and inorganic become a single being. Essentially, they want to make living, breathing, growing houses.

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The Rigging Crew

Published on January 19, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Paul Clemens, n +1

Though the rigging crew comprised a rotating cast, the characters ran to form. Mostly, the crew was made up of men who had banged around a bit and who had landed, however briefly, at Budd—ex-UAW guys, roofers, plumbers, electricians, a vending machine deliveryman, a repo man, an Iraq war veteran, a Bosnian immigrant, a strip club bouncer, assorted jacks-of-all-trades. The collection called to mind a critic’s description of the crew of the Pequod—men who had “come sulking away, address unknown, from howling creditors, accusing wives, alert policemen, beggary on shore.” They almost all drove trucks; after a time, I’d identify guys by their Dodge Ram, Ford Ranger XLT, Chevy 1500, or Ford Custom F-150. These trucks tended to be dilapidated but basically dependable. Bumper stickers memorialized Dale Earnhardt. Some guys greeted me the same way, day after day. Switching their cigarettes to their left hand, they’d extend their right, then quickly retract it, inspect it for grease and grime, and—after succeeding in wiping away none of it on their work pants or plaid flannel—re-extend the hand with a shrug, to say: your call. Beards, mustaches, and stubble of various stages were near universal. A clean shave would have clashed with the surroundings.

For a short time, the crew had two black workers, one of whom was also the crew’s only female worker, a young black woman whom everyone liked and called Z. Such exceptions aside, an entirely male and predominantly white crew took apart a plant in an almost entirely black city. The relative lack of blacks in the plant had less impact, behaviorally, than did the almost complete absence of female observation and oversight. You didn’t need to shave, shower, brush your teeth, or wash your clothes before work; you didn’t need to worry about your beer breath, your BO, your black eye, your smoking, your burping, your farting, your constant fucking cursing. Pretty much anything your body could do, you could do with impunity in the plant, which made its own sounds and smells, masking yours. The plant felt like a frat house, but of a peculiar, contradictory kind—one for men who had never set foot on a college campus.

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Mapping America: One Block At A Time (Yours Included)

Published on December 23, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Jamilah King, ColorLines

We’ll just admit it: Maps make us happy. Regular readers probably already know this. A while back we highlighted Eric Fischer’s work on racial segregation in American cities. Then we got our hands on Bill Rankin’s maps on racial density. Boil it down to us being big ole’ nerds who love finding new ways of visualizing racial data. And it looks like we’re in luck again. The New York Times chalked up Census data from the years 2005-2009 and put together an interactive map showing the distribution of racial and ethnic groups on every block in America. You should try it. Just enter your zip code to find out how things look near your house. A few staffers at ColorLines mapped our neighborhoods, which you can see below. So go ahead and nerd out with us. It’s fun, we promise.

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A Matter of Optics

Published on December 21, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Warren Breckman, Lapham’s Quarterly

In the evening, “with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers,” Kublai Khan despairs of ever knowing or understanding the empire he has built. And in the dusk, the Venetian Marco Polo tells the great Khan of the unknown cities he rules. So begins Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, that mystifying, illuminating, bedazzling compendium of fantastical places. Among these imagined cities, Polo tells the emperor of Irene. “Irene is the city visible when you lean out from the edge of the plateau at the hour when the lights come on, and in the limpid air, the pink of the settlement can be discerned spread out in the distance below…Those who look down from the heights conjecture about what is happening in the city; they wonder if it would be pleasant or unpleasant to be in Irene that evening. Not that they have any intention of going there (in any case the roads winding down to the valley are bad), but Irene is a magnet for the eyes and thoughts of those who stay up above.”

People love vantage points from which they can take in the city. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary does not observe Rouen from the street, but from a hilltop, where seen from above, “the whole landscape had the static quality of a painting.” William Wordsworth paused on Westminster Bridge in 1802 to observe London laid out before him:

This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

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