If you missed it, it’s worth catching up on the brilliant Emily Badger’s Upshot column in the New York Times that appealingly focuses on cities scared of becoming Manhattanized, or San Franciscoed, or Seattleified. These cities create a great deal of wealth and tens of thousands of jobs that pay six figures. But they are all unaffordable, afflicted with homelessness, and strangled by traffic. Wealth needn’t come at so high a price. The cities and their high-paying … [Read more...]
Can Amazon Be . . . Gasp . . . Good for New York?
“Stop Amazon!” is increasingly the mantra of activists in New York, referring to the new $5 billion campus the company is slated to develop in Long Island City, Queens. With righteous rage, city council members at a hearing demanded the company stop cooperating with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement on facial-recognition software and end their union-resisting stance. Progressives have made stopping Amazon a cause. They're gentrifiers! (Sorry, that ship has sailed...) They exploit … [Read more...]
Questions for Brett Kavanaugh
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will no doubt be subjected to detailed questioning this week about his substantial record as a jurist. Kavanaugh has been groomed through the equivalent of a far-right judicial finishing school, and has reliably reflected those very conservative views of the law. Indeed, the farthest he seems to have strayed from Washington, D. C. and Bethesda, where he grew up, is Yale where he obtained both his undergraduate and law degree. I think most of us, whatever … [Read more...]
Tax Plan to Cities: Drop Dead
You may have paid little attention to the tax plan rushing headlong through Congress. It has been advertised as a middle-class tax break and an inducement to business to create jobs through a dramatically lowered corporate tax rate. Pay attention, especially if you live in a city or suburb, as most of us do. Media and opponents of the plan have focused on the elimination or possible reduction in the deduction for state and local taxes and a possible $500,000 cap on deduction … [Read more...]
Disaster Recovery Secret Weapon: Neighborhood Groups
In a year of extraordinary disasters, the sheer scope of recovery and rebuilding can seem mind boggling. We’re tempted to turn away in horror at buildings with roofs ripped off in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, the pancaked structures in Mexico City, the piles of debris in Houston front yards. Government and private aid groups are well versed in the delivery of food, blankets, and other donated items, but whether recovery restores neighborhoods to health or leaves them with boarded-up houses … [Read more...]
In a Summer of Subway Hell, Learning from London
New York subway delays became epidemic this summer and emergency repairs at Penn Station snarled commuter traffic. A recent column by the NYT’s Michael Kimmelman ruminated on these transit woes and . . . Brexit. The column looked at London’s Crossrail—a $20-billion expansion of the city’s crowded transit system that is a heroic feat of engineering and said to be the largest infrastructure project in Europe. It’s an important story for Americans, who simply cannot competently build complex … [Read more...]
Housing for Shelter, Not Investors
First it was billionaires. Now the so-called Creative Class and its Millennial progeny are deemed responsible for The New Urban Crisis, which is what Creative Class guru Richard Florida has dubbed enormous inequality in cities, the concentration of extreme poverty, and the tsunami of gentrification that displaces lower-income people. (His book by that name, which I have read about—but want to read—arrives in April.) Is there a New Urban Crisis? No. Though income inequality permeates the … [Read more...]
Why You’ll Never Get a Raise under Trump
I am no labor expert but all the things I know much more about —and usually write about—from climate change to transportation and architecture—were held hostage in this election to voters who wanted a dramatic change in their economic prospects—i.e., a raise in wages to be orchestrated by the self-anointed business genius (but serial bankrupt) Trump. The rage at Trump and his actions is enormously heartening and powerful to a point. The energy is too scattered and inchoate now. It’s time to … [Read more...]
You Can Stop Trump’s Disastrous Cabinet
The Republican Senate is attempting to rush hearings for President Trump’s cabinet choices. Everyone has to act now to insist that Congress follow established procedures and law for vetting ethics and conflicts of interest. Several candidates with many interests involving the government have yet to file the paperwork necessary to show how they will separate their businesses from their work in government, led by the President himself who appears determined to skirt rules that should apply to … [Read more...]
Can We Fall in Love Again with Atlantic City?
At the beginning of summer, when people head to carefree destinations, I went to …. Atlantic City. That's where four of the 12 ocean-front casinos went bankrupt in 2014 leaving thousands of empty hotel rooms and acres of abandoned gaming space. The city itself has been on the brink of insolvency since at least 2010. Economic-development officials turn to gambling as an economic quick-fix, even as Atlantic City has for decades been the poster child of gaming-industry failure. Atlantic City was … [Read more...]
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