In its continuing effort to promote the Connecticut economy at the expense of its own, the New York City Council decided to pass a $1.2 billion property tax increase. Clearly, someone has to pay for the 40,000+ new city employees added during Mayor Bloomberg's term, and it might as well be city's the property owners.
Continue reading "New York City to promote Connecticut economy" »
During the early twentieth century, Buffalo first challenged, and then surpassed, Minneapolis as a mill town, and the canal was the main reason. Since so much wheat flowed through Buffalo, it made sense to start milling it there and then to ship the flour onward. Almost half of Buffalo's wheat left the country, much of it sailing across the Atlantic to European markets. Over time, the city's water-based transportation advantages also encouraged heavy industrial development.
[...]
State and local government did little to improve Buffalo's chances—in fact, they worsened things considerably. First, New York's high taxes, burdensome regulations, and pro-union laws made Buffalo less attractive to employers than its more successful southern competitors. In 1975, the Fantus Legislative Business Climate rankings sorted the American states based on corporate taxes, workers' compensation laws, and many other rules. New York was the least business-friendly of the 48 states in the continental U.S. Being antibusiness might have been feasible when New York enjoyed strong natural advantages, but not after those advantages eroded. Despite 50 years of population loss, Buffalo has one of the steepest metropolitan tax burdens in the country—including one of the nation's highest local property tax rates, according to a 2003 study.
Kay Hymowitz argues that the seventy-percent illegitimacy rate among African-Americans might have some negative effect on black children's chances in life.
FP: Can you talk a bit about the effect the family upheaval has had on African-Americans?
Hymowitz: Given the legacy of slavery that made marriage impossible for blacks and Jim Crow laws that emasculated men, the unmarriage revolution was bound to hit blacks especially hard. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his controversial report "The Negro Family", he was warning the country about a 25% illegitimacy rate among blacks. In one chapter of my book, I tell the story of how black leaders and black and white academics accused Moynihan of every sin in the p.c. book. He was a racist who could not possibly understand "the strengths of the black family." He was a sexist who failed to appreciate the "strong black woman" and her "extended kinship networks." It became impossible to have an honest conversation about what was happening in the black community for the next twenty years even as black welfare rolls, crime rates, and teen births were soaring.
Well, now the rupture between marriage and black childbearing is just about complete. Seventy percent of black births are to single mothers. Seventy percent. This has had a disastrous effect on men, who have lost their major social roles as provider and father. It is also a tragedy for the country because it makes the goal of full black equality unachievable. Growing up in single parent homes, black kids are destined to stay behind.
Hymowitz: With all those horrific pictures from the Superdome and the ninth ward, Katrina briefly revived national interest in poverty, particularly black poverty. There was a rush of media chatter about what John Edwards calls “the two Americas.” What I try to show in my book is that there is no way to have this discussion honestly without introducing the subject of marriage. Thirty eight percent of single mothers are poor; compare that to fewer than eight percent of married couples in poverty - many of them recently arrived, low skilled immigrants, by they way. The median income for black married couples is just about the same as for white couples. Married couples amass far more wealth than their single counterparts; a study by a Ohio University economist reported that married couples increase their net wealth by about 16 percent per year; after 15 years they have 93 percent more net wealth than single and divorced individuals.
Heather Mac Donald on black crime rates. Clearly the statistics are the result of the inherent racism of American society.
After noting that more than half the people whom cops stop and frisk are black, Times reporter Diane Cardwell added: "City officials maintained that those stopped and searched roughly parallel the race of people mentioned in reports from crime victims." No, actually, there is no "rough parallel" between the proportion of stops and the proportion of alleged assailants: blacks aren't stopped enough, considering the rate at which they commit crimes. Though blacks, 24 percent of New York City's population, committed 68.5 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults in the city last year, according to victims and witnesses, they were only 55 percent of all stop-and-frisks. Of course, the Times didn't give the actual crime figures.
The opening lines of Joseph Conrad's Il Conde: A Pathetic Tale, published in A Set of Six in 1920.
The first time we got into conversation was in the National Museum in Naples, in the rooms on the ground floor containing the famous collection of bronzes from Herculaneum and Pompeii: that marvellous legacy of antique art whose delicate perfection has been preserved for us by the catastrophic fury of a volcano.
Sam Roberts in the New York Times reports that NYC is losing black population for the first time since the Civil War draft riots.
The reasons for black middle-class flight sound like the same reasons for white middle-class flight: high cost of living, fear of the underclass.
It could be that if the socialist regime in New York City pursued pro-bourgeois policies, as City Journal never tires of suggesting, it might stem the city's black middle-class flight as well as its white middle-class flight. Just an idea.
Edward Glaeser analyzes the economic fates of Boston and New York, two interesting cities.
PDF file: Urban Colossus: Why is New York America's Largest City?
PDF file: Reinventing Boston: 1640-2003
Alejandro A. Alonso, "African-American Street Gangs in Los Angeles"
By the 1940s, such exclusionary practices made much of Los Angeles off-limits to most minorities (Bond 1936; Davis 1990:161,273; Dymski and Veitch 1996:40). This process contributed to increasing homogeneity of communities in Los Angeles, further exacerbating racial conflict between whites and blacks, as the latter existed in mostly segregated communities. From 1940 to 1944, there was over a 100 percent increase in the black population of Los Angeles, and ethnic and racial paranoia began to develop among white residents. Chronic overcrowding was taking a toll, and housing congestion became a serious problem, as blacks were forced to live in substandard housing (Collins 1980:26). From 1945-1948, black residents continually challenged restrictive covenants in several court cases in an effort to move out of the dense, overcrowded black community. These attempts resulted in violent clashes between whites and blacks (Collins 1980:30). The Ku Klux Klan resurfaced during the 1940s, 20 years after their presence faded during the late 1920s (Adler 1977; Collins 1980), and white youths were forming street clubs to battle integration of the community and schools of black residents.
In Huntington Park, Bell, and South Gate, towns that were predominately white, teenagers formed some of the early street clubs during the 1940s. One of the most infamous clubs of that time was the Spook Hunters, a group of white teenagers that often attacked black youths. If blacks were seen outside of the black settlement area, which was roughly boundaried by Slauson to the South, Alameda Avenue to the east, and Main[5] Street to the west, they were often attacked. The name of this club emphasized their racist attitude towards blacks, as “Spook” is a derogatory term used to identify blacks and “Hunters” highlighted their desire to attack blacks as their method of fighting integration and promoting residential segregation. Their animosity towards blacks was publicly known; the back of their club jackets displayed an animated black face with exaggerated facial features and a noose hanging around the neck. The Spook Hunters would often cross Alameda traveling west to violently attack black youths from the area. In Thrasher’s study of Chicago gangs, he observed a similar white gang in Chicago during the 1920s, the Dirty Dozens, who often attacked black youths with knives, blackjacks, and revolvers because of racial differences (Thrasher 1963:37). Raymond Wright was one of the founders of a black club called the Businessmen, a large East side club based at South Park between Slauson Avenue and Vernon Avenue. He stated that “you couldn’t pass Alameda, because those white boys in South Gate would set you on fire,”[6] and fear of attack among black youths was not, surprisingly, common. In 1941, white students at Fremont High School threatened blacks by burning them in effigy and displaying posters saying, “we want no niggers at this school” (Bunch 1990: 118).
Nicole Gelinas, "Will New Orleans Recover?" City Journal, 31.08.05
New Orleans teems with crime, and the NOPD can’t keep order on a good day. Former commissioner Richard Pennington brought New Orleans’ crime rate down from its peak during the mid-1990s. But since Pennington’s departure, crime rates have soared, to ten times the national average. The NOPD might have hundreds of decent officers, but it has a well-deserved institutional image as corrupt, brutal, and incompetent.
How will New Orleans’ economy recover from Katrina? Apart from some pass-through oil infrastructure, the city’s economy is utterly dependent on tourism. After the city’s mainstay oil industry decamped to Texas nearly a generation ago, New Orleans didn’t do the difficult work of cutting crime, educating illiterate citizens, and attracting new industries to the city. New Orleans became merely a convention and tourism economy, selling itself to visitors to survive, and over time it has only increased its economic dependence on outsiders.
Joel Kotkin, "Commentary," Wall Street Journal, 01.09.05
Carthage, purposely destroyed and planted with salt by its Roman conquerors, later re-emerged as a prominent urban center, becoming the home of St. Augustine, author of "City of God." Modern times, too, offer examples which can inspire New Orleans residents. Tokyo and London rose from near total devastation in 1945. Perhaps even more remarkable, albeit on a smaller scale, has been the successful rebuilding of Hiroshima into an industrial powerhouse and one of Japan's most pleasant seaside cities.
Americans, too, have shown how to improve their cities after natural disasters. The 1905 San Francisco earthquake and fire leveled most of that city, leading some to believe that the future center of the region would be across the bay in Oakland. Yet the ingenuity and ambition of its citizens would not allow this to happen. Led by A.E. Giannini, founding father of the Bank of America, a somewhat overgrown gold rush Deadwood emerged by the 1920s as something closer to the "Paris of the Pacific."
And then there's L.A. Although the 1994 earthquake caused $16 billion in damages, the city, under the leadership of Mayor Richard Riordan, managed the temblor with remarkable efficiency. Perhaps most remarkable, the very city that suffered the worst urban rioting in American history two years earlier managed the post-earthquake chaos with little lawlessness and political discord.
Nicole Gelinas, "A Perfect Storm of Lawlessness," City Journal, 01.09.05
Katrina didn’t turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This week’s looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans’ murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murders—compared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) ...
During the mid-1990s, New Orleans made some progress in cutting down its murder rate from its one-time peak as the Murder Capital of America. With the help of the feds, the city weeded out the worst of its police force (including two murderers) and implemented some new policing techniques borrowed from successful cities like New York, including COMSTAT. But New Orleans—and the state judicial system—has never cemented a sustainable institutional infrastructure to build on early progress, and the murder rate had risen perceptibly again.
New Orleans, first off, doesn’t have the middle-class or affluent tax base to afford the professional police or prosecution force it needs—crime has created a vicious cycle, pushing out taxpayers who fund the police. Nor have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors need to do their jobs.
In New York, the mayor, police, and prosecutors know that taking one killer off the streets means preventing more killings, because a murderer frequently murders again. In New Orleans, killers and other violent criminals remain free, because in many cases, they aren’t arrested or tried; conviction rates remain abysmal. The lawlessness these criminals create in pockets of the city breeds more killers and more lawlessness. Witnesses and crime victims in the inner city fear to come forward: they know that even if a criminal winds up arrested, his associates will be free to intimidate them.
On a normal day, those who make up New Orleans’ dangerous criminal class—yes, likely the same African-Americans we see looting now—terrorize their own communities. Once in a while, a spectacular crime makes headlines—the shooting death of a tourist just outside the French Quarter, or the rape and murder of a Tulane student. But day in and day out, New Orleans’ black criminal class victimizes other blacks. Churches put up billboards in the worst neighborhoods that plead: “Thou shalt not kill.” The inner-city buses shuttle what look like hundreds of war veterans around the city—young black men, many of them innocent victims, paralyzed in wheelchairs.
This week, this entrenched criminal class has freely roamed the streets—and terrorized everyone. On Monday, New Orleans still had food and water stocked in stores across the city, but young looters began sacking stores, trashing the needed food and stealing TVs, DVDs, and other equipment. If the uncoordinated, understaffed New Orleans police had even a prayer of keeping order, it was Monday. By Tuesday, the looters had armed themselves with ample weapons supplies available in stores all across the city; by Wednesday, the armed gangs, out of food and water like everyone else, were not only viciously dangerous but desperate, hungry, and thirsty.
But while the looters have reportedly killed police offers and have shot at rescue workers, they’re mainly victimizing, as usual, other poor blacks. The vicious looters aren’t the face of New Orleans’ poor blacks. Their victims are: the thousands of New Orleanians who made their way to shelter before the storm, and who rescued others and brought them to shelter during and after the storm—but who now cannot get the help they desperately need.
Joel Kotkin, "A New New Orleans," Los Angeles Times, 04.09.05
There is no law that says a Southern city must be forever undereducated, impoverished, corrupt and regressive. Instead of trying to refashion what wasn't working, New Orleans should craft a future for itself as a better, more progressive metropolis.
Look a few hundred miles to the west, at Houston ― a well-run city with a widely diversified economy. Without much in the way of old culture, charm or tradition, it has far outshone New Orleans as a beacon for enterprising migrants from other countries as well as other parts of the United States ― including New Orleans.
Houston has succeeded by sticking to the basics, by focusing on the practical aspects of urbanism rather than the glamorous. Under the inspired leadership of former Mayor Bob Lanier and the current chief executive, Bill White, the city has invested heavily in port facilities, drainage, sanitation, freeways and other infrastructure.
At least in part as a result of this investment, this superficially less-than-lovely city has managed to siphon industries ― including energy and international trade ― from New Orleans. With its massive Texas Medical Center, it has emerged as the primary healthcare center in the Caribbean basin ― something New Orleans, with Tulane University's well-regarded medical school, should have been able to pull off.
... [Fred Siegel] collects bright details like a magpie, and he remembers damning facts with the stern impartiality of Rhadamanthus, judge of the underworld. He has seen the clowns tumble, and he knows where the bodies are buried. The Prince of the City can be read as Plutarch's Lives of the Ignoble New Yorkers. Who, in the grotesque political culture of this great city, is most memorable? Is it Judge Leonard Sand, who made a First Amendment defense of bums: "It is the very unsettling appearance and message conveyed by the beggars that gives their conduct its expressive quality" (stinking and shouting--the new Federalist Papers)?... Or is it former city councilman Rafael Colon, "indicted on 706 counts of larceny and fraud ... accused of beating his ex-lover, owing child support for his eight children by four different women, putting a dead cousin on his payroll, and, like many Bronx council members, living outside the city"?
Having already paid homage to Philadelphia (glancingly) and Berlin (repeatedly) in constructing the present canon of culturally vigorous/vibrant/stimulating and yet crucially/indispensibly also cheap cities, herewith I need to round out their cohort with other key examples of the type. Other nominations are highly welcome.
I am happy to have pictures from both these places:
According to The Economist's Big Mac Index, a Big Mac costs $1.64 in Argentina (compare $1.75 in Sri Lanka, $1.84 in Moldova, and $1.88 in Bulgaria) and $2.31 in Estonia ($2.41 in Taiwan, $2.53 in Chile and $2.70 in Jamaica).
By comparison, a Big Mac costs $5.05 in Switzerland, $6.06 in Norway, and $6.67 in Iceland. Also recommended:
WEARING a Paul Green School of Rock T-shirt, his bangs plastered to his forehead in the summer heat, Laris Kreslins pulled in front of a handsome brownstone on Rittenhouse Square, the priciest neighborhood in the city, and hopped out of his car.
"We're going to show you what a real Philly apartment looks like," he said, unlocking the door to reveal a spacious one-bedroom flat sparsely decorated with CD's and copies of music magazines. "As you can see, it has hardwood floors, lots of light and very high ceilings," he said. Then Mr. Kreslins paused and delivered what he knew would be the kicker: "Rent is $800 a month. Heat and electricity included."
Mr. Kreslins isn't selling real estate. He's selling Philadelphia....
Philadelphians occasionally refer to their city - somewhat deprecatingly - as the "sixth borough" of New York, and with almost 8,000 commuters making the 75-minute train ride between the cities each weekday, the label seems not far off the mark. But Mr. Kreslins and Ms. Gaeta are a new breed of Philadelphia-bound commuters, those who come from New York by train or the popular Chinatown bus for a weekend and then come back, with a U-Haul, to stay.
They are the first wave of what could be called Philadelphia's Brooklynization...
Link: A portal to the new Berlin (Christopher Knight, L.A. Times)
Despite these problems, Berlin's contemporary art life has been transformed since reunification. Currently, four cities stand atop the globalized art-world heap — New York and Los Angeles in the United States, and London and Berlin in Europe. New York and London are commercial centers, where art old and new is principally bought and sold. L.A. and Berlin are production centers for new art, drawing a steady stream of young artists eager to work there, even if the collector base tends to reside elsewhere.
Like L.A., where scores of diverse neighborhoods are too large to gentrify, Berlin is a multicultural sprawl, but here relatively inexpensive studio space can still be found. The tottering German economy, cut-rate housing in the former East and overbuilding from reunification have contributed to making Berlin the most affordable capital in Europe.
Established and emerging artists, both European and North American, live and work here. Some German artists, such as Hamburg's Daniel Richter and Dresden's Eberhard Havekost, keep studios in two cities, recognizing the importance of a presence in Berlin. Kids move here from all over, in the way they no longer do to the expensive environs of central London or Manhattan. These generational layers keep pumping life into a place already stressed by a modern network of social and artistic fault lines, which chart histories at once horrible and remarkable, glorious and grim.
Within a few blocks of the enormous blue and gold dome of Mitte's New Synagogue, left in ruins in the wake of Kristallnacht and Allied bombing but now restored as a history museum, several dozen galleries have opened shop. The once-scruffy neighborhood around Auguststrasse has been likened to New York's East Village in the 1980s. But, with fashionable eateries and design shops stuffed with as much Lucite furniture, shag carpeting and lime-and-orange knickknacks as a Palm Springs consignment store, it's more like "instant Soho," fueled by streams of cash from Moscow and Cologne.
Link: How to empty the room in one minute - signandsight.
No label exists without musicians, and Berlin is certainly spoilt for choice. Berlin is in. More and more musicians from all over the world are moving to the city, such a concentration of creative musical talent exists nowhere else. In electronic music, this is a great asset: no hierarchy and lots of cooperative projects. The most recent prominent newcomer is the producer and DJ Richie Hawtin, who came over with some musicians from the USA and has founded an offshoot of his label m-nus in Berlin. Like jazz in the old days, the electronic genre in the USA is strictly marginal. Europe's sales markets, concerts and recognition draw the musicians here. And then there are the "soft" factors. The lack of a curfew, and breakfast at any time of the day or night. "It's really tolerant here," says English singer Jamie Lidell. "You can go to a stylish restaurant looking like a fucked-up hippy, and normally nobody cares." Ellen Allien, DJ and label boss, describes the atmosphere in her home town: "Berlin lets everyone breathe." Berlin's trump card is the cheap cost of living. Out of London, Paris or San Francisco with their unaffordable rents and into a huge apartment in Neukoelln, Friedrichshain or Kreuzberg. Most established musicians hang onto a place in Berlin and spend most of their time on tour. For newcomers, more interested in making music than profit, Berlin is a chance to live cheap. There's even space for a studio within your own flat. It wins time to develop, to work up to a major release.
Interactive digital maps are among the wonders of the internet. No wonder we always feel so disoriented! Such maps of Berlin are available from:
I haven't decided which one is best, though. In the USA, Google Maps are in general the best.
Recent Comments