10th anniversary post: Laudato si'

Pope Francis, who died earlier this year

One of them, an expert in the law, asked [Jesus] a question to test him: "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" Jesus said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself." On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22: 35-40)

Way back in 2005, when Benedict XVI became Pope after the death of John Paul II, I expressed ambivalence to a friend about the new Pope's reputation for orthodoxy. The friend responded something to the effect that the Roman Catholic Church has its own imperatives, and since I'm not Catholic (true), it's really not my business.

I don't remember much from Benedict's eight-year papacy, but the emergence of his successor as a world leader of the first rank showed something I at least was not seeing in Benedict. Ten summers ago I eagerly devoured Laudato si' (Praise Be to You), Francis's second and best known encyclical, and later would read The Name of God is Mercy (Random House, 2016), which accompanied his declaration of 2016 as an International Jubilee of Mercy.

The revolutionary nature of Francis's papacy can certainly be overstated, as indeed can Benedict's orthodoxy. What made Francis such a consequential figure for Catholics and non-Catholics alike was not a shift in doctrine but a shift in emphasis, away from rules and towards caring. He spent many of the early sections leading up to a declaration that God has a "loving plan in which every creature has its own value and significance" (para 76). Each human has a duty of care to every other human and to the natural world. None of his recent predecessors, whom he cites along the way, would have disagreed with that proposition, but by centering it in his ministry Pope Francis became such a consequential figure.

Pope Francis also centered the quality of mercy in his ministry; in calling for a Jubilee of Mercy, Francis argued that mercy is the paramount value of the Christian faith, and the major way in which God's followers manifest God in the world. 

(In my home state of Iowa this week, we're seeing quite a different approach from Republican U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, who invoked her "Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" while advocating massive cuts in Medicaid, the federal health care program for poor people (Henderson 2025, Alfaro 2025).)

Becoming Pope brings the opportunity to speak globally as the leader of a substantial body of Christians. No other Christian has a similar position; the fragmented and fractious Protestants have a collective action problem, as for that matter do Muslims. Unfortunately, for many years the loudest Protestant (and Muslim) voices have been angry and prejudiced and clannish, hardly a good witness for a merciful God. (Hence we have Senator Ernst, as mentioned above, or Vice President J.D. Vance claiming that St. Augustine advocated caring less about people not in your immediate family.) 

What Francis was able to do as Pope was to be that good witness for Christianity, often loudly. This is not to be naive about the institutional failings of the Catholic Church, with which Pope Francis struggled, not always successfully. But the overarching message of his papacy was a constant challenge to treat each other well, not overlooking how we design our places. Indeed, among his statements in Laudato si' was this urbanist nugget:

Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape. (para 153)

Subtract Francis's voice from the last 12 years, and who is filling that role, so prominently and consistently and persistently?

So, from this non-Catholic, thank you to Pope Francis for twelve years of world leadership, and much joy in whatever the afterlife brings.

Pope Leo XIV (Wikimedia commons)

To the new Pope, Leo XIV, you have big shoes to fill, as I don't need to tell you. May your ministry, in spite of all administrative demands, continue to center love and mercy in your message to the world! And may your hometown White Sox return to winning ways soon.

SEE ALSO: Willemien Otten, "A New Pope, A New Dawn," Sightings, 29 May 2025

Don't blame trans people for Dems' loss

 

Dr. William Barber is one of the premier prophetic voices in America today
(Source: breachrepairers.org)

Having said my peace on this year's elections, I was anticipating a return to issues affecting our local communities. But a disturbing trend has emerged in the frustrated post-election expressions by Democrats and their liberal allies that I think needs addressing.

To start with, the 2024 election results were, despite all the weirdness of the campaign, rather "normal," in the sense that a typical electoral response to stressful times is to vote the other party in. It happened after World War II in a number of countries including the United States and Britain, and happened again this year after worldwide struggles with the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant economic dislocation. As in 1945-46, Britain and the United States changed legislative majorities, with the British going from right to left, and the Americans going from left to right. Go figure.

That said, many on the left criticize the Biden administration and the Harris campaign for ignoring the economic concerns of working people. There's a lot to be said for that argument, given that the decades-long trend towards greater concentration of wealth continues to gallop along. On the other hand, Biden proved adept as a crisis manager, and his deficiencies certainly don't explain why the answer was to turn the government over to a self-absorbed chaos agent with an actual policy record that promotes that greater concentration of wealth. Again, go figure. Maybe the explanations tentatively offered in my last post can help explain that.

Two commentators I greatly respect, Nicholas Kristof and Fareed Zakaria, take that critique farther to argue that Democrats in the Biden years lost working class support because they prioritized other issues. Kristof, who has written movingly of the struggles of his small Oregon town, has trouble explaining what could have been done to reverse its condition:

I think Democrats have far better policies for working class Americans than Republicans do. It was Democrats who backed labor unions, who raised minimum wages, and who under President Biden crafted a strategy to create manufacturing jobs and slash child poverty. Trump talks a good game about manufacturing, bui... Biden so far has seen an increase of 700,000 manufacturing jobs. (Kristof 2024)

So what's the problem? "Democrats increasingly are the party of university-educated elites, and they have an unfortunate knack for coming across as remote and patronizing scolds" (Ibid). What?!? This barely qualifies as analysis. (I scolded.)

Zakaria goes farther to blame the administration's failures on immigration, and a penchant for identity politics. This too is unsatisfying. Immigration is hard, and Trump was different less on outcomes than on the retributive excess of his approach. Zakaria's examples of identity politics are use of the term "Latinx"--by the administration? I'm not remember that)--and support for the transgendered. "One of Trump's most effective ads," he notes, "on trans issues, ended with the tagline: Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you" (Zakaria 2024). Aside from the fact that the ad itself is a flagrant example of identity politics, Zakaria is suggesting that transgendered people, like Mexican immigrants, are too unsympathetic to merit attention from a campaign that wants to win an election. (And has Zakaria forgotten that Biden lost a bipartisan immigration bill in Congress this year when Trump told Republicans to nix it?)

Look, I know plenty of people who agree with me on issues, but are so insufferable about their politics that I almost wish they didn't. And I find quarrels over terminology to be baffling and distracting. But that's no reason to treat anyone as less than fully human. We can't let everyone in the country who wants to come, and we can't give everyone everything they want, but we can treat everyone with human dignity. Kristof dings liberals for disdaining religion, but fundamental to the major religions of the Western world is the idea that we are all children of God. I'm not seeing that in the Trump immigration-mass expulsion policy.

Thankfully, we have with us one of the most passionate and cogent advocates of common life, the Rev. William Barber, who among many other things is co-director of the Poor People's Campaign. Barber too argues that Democrats in the administration and presidential campaign failed to address fundamental injustices in the American economy, and attributes the election loss precisely to that (cf. Goodman 2024). Yet he also sees a unity across issues, as he told a class he teaches at Yale University:

When people sit down across the lines that have tended to divide us – race, geography, sexuality – and then take an honest look at the politics of extremism,” he says, “they figure out that the same people who are voting against people because they are gay are also blocking living wages. ("Meet the Religious Leaders" 2024)

He concludes:

What are the major tenets of religion as it relates to the public square?” he asks. His answer is a litany his repeats often: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least of these, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. Look at this piece of legislation. How are these policies affecting people? How is it affecting their living and their dying? (Ibid.)

We don't have to dump the imprisoned in order to help the sick. Common life is not easily arranged, and Democrats have a diverse and fractious coalition, whose members compete for scarce resources and issue space. But as we push forward, or in the direction we hope is forward, we should remember the quotation attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "We must hang together, or assuredly we will hang separately."

10th anniversary post: "Inequality for All"

 

 

Ten years ago this month, I saw the documentary film "Inequality for All," produced by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and longtime advocate for progressive economic policies. In the film Reich argued that increasing economic inequality in America, driven by globalization and technology, was exacerbated by governmental deregulation; that it limited economic opportunity for many Americans; and that it was solvable only by shifting money from the rich to the middle class. 

Reich's film came out three years before Donald Trump stunned the world by getting elected President on a campaign fueled almost entirely by resentment. While analysts debate the source of Trump's sustained appeal, it surely draws to some degree on insecurity brought by economic inequality, as well as cultural nostalgia. Trump, an extraordinarily wealthy man who inherited his fortune, has sharp words for "elites," but of course it is the most vulnerable who suffered the most under his rhetoric and policies.

What has been the story of inequality in the eleven years since the film? FRED, the wondrous economic dashboard created by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve, provides data on the Gini Index going back to 1963. By this measure, inequality declined through the 1960s and 70s, before rising from the mid-30s to around 40 in the early 1990s. It's hovered there ever since, declining a bit when recessions hit upper incomes. At the time "Inequality for All" came out, the single-year high was 41.4 in 2006; it recovered to 41.5 in 2014, and stayed around there through 2019 before COVID hit. It was 39.7 in 2021, the last year for which there are data. I'll lay odds it's back to at least 41.5, if not higher.

As of 2016 our Gini score of 41.1 was the highest in the developed world, with only Israel (39.0) within five points of it (The CIA World Factbook 2023-2024, p. 1007) . The UK scored 34.8, Canada 33.3, Japan 32.9, Germany 31.9, and France 31.6. So it's definitely a choice to be as unequal as we are.

Thomas Piketty's data go back farther, though he prefers to look at income shares rather than the Gini Index (see Piketty 2013: 266-267) the post-1963 pattern is virtually identical. At the time he published Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap-Harvard, 2013), the share of US national income going to the top 10 percent had reached levels not seen since the 1920s (cf. Figure 1.1, p. 24, and Figure 8.7, p. 299). Moreover, those high shares were already sustained longer than they had been in the 1920s, and now of course have been sustained even longer. (The same can be said of the share of national income going to the top 1 percent, viz. Figure 8.8 on p. 300.)

So we're at historical levels of inequality in America. Reich concluded his film on a hopeful note: "History is on the side of positive social change." Certainly we can point to past examples of positive social change, and there's surely no point in being hopeless. But it's hard to see this story ending well without a sharp change of course. Right now the main available business models are far from inspiring: either to sell luxury items to the rich, or cheap crap to the poor. That leaves us with sprawl, unstable employment, unaffordable housing, stressed parents, vehicle gigantism, deaths of despair, and less opportunity for small business starts. And where does that take us? Social fragmentation, threats to democracy, violent outbreaks... the mind reels.

I guess the one thing I would say in 2024 is it's too bad more people didn't listen to Robert Reich back then instead of Donald Trump and his ilk. Positive social change is never easy, but community-building is always worth it.

10th Anniversary Post: The Gentrification Conundrum Revisited

Census tract 27: Row houses built in 2017 with appraised
values of $400,000+

Ten years ago this month, Holy Mountain looked at gentrification, the value of diversity, minimum wage laws, the city's new strategic plan Envision CR, as well as Indian Creek Nature Center's annual Maple Syrup Festival--which happens again in a couple weeks! We will be there to cover every sticky bite, of course.

The piece on gentrification, driven by the middle class's return to cities, surveyed an array of literature both pro and anti. (For other surveys of that array, see Cortright 2014a, Cortright 2014b, and Kaplan 2015.) It also introduced me to Chicago artist Theora Kvitka, whose cartoon I got permission to use at the top of the post.

Gentrification at its worst involves under-invested urban neighborhoods receiving a sudden influx of middle class residents that dislocate the people already living there, who are often working class people of color. (In Alyssa Cole's novel When No One is Watching [Temple Hill, 2020], the newly-arrived whites in a New York City neighborhood not only displace the black residents and yuppify their stores, they capture the blacks and use them for scientific experiments.) But as Joe Cortright has argued, the alternative to gentrification for most neighborhoods has not been humble stability but concentrated high poverty. So, the goal for policy makers should be to encourage investment without blowing up places where people are already living.

I wrote in 2014:

For the older neighborhoods in Cedar Rapids, such as Wellington Heights and the Taylor Area, I've advocated "gentle gentrification," of which I'll admit I have only the very vaguest concept. But this much is certain: We don't build diverse communities by pricing people out of the homes they own. It's difficult enough to overcome habits of class prejudice and segregation without adding a financial hit.

Cedar Rapids is not New York City or D.C. or Denver, but we too have seen changes. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Communities Survey bear out some of those impressions, and although it's not clear how much of these changes are due to movement in and out, there are new poor areas developing at the edges of town.

Several census tracts exist mostly in core neighborhoods, although they do not correspond exactly to neighborhood boundaries.

Census tracts in the center of Cedar Rapids
(Sources: census.gov)

Data are from the 2000 U.S. Census, and the American Community Survey's five-year estimates published in 2014 and 2022 (so the data center on 2012 and 2020). See table at bottom of post for raw numbers. Note that none of these tracts became whiter between 2000 and 2020.

HARD HIT: Population DOWN, Income DOWN, Poverty UP

Census tract 19: Downtown, with portions of Mound View and Wellington Heights

Population -22.5%, Median Family Income +6.9%, Poverty Rate +69.3%

There's been some condo development downtown, with more under construction, which may account for the jump in income since 2010 (though to keep pace with inflation since 2000, median income would have to be about $47000). There are also some rooming houses in the MedQuarter, and some older housing stock in the neighborhoods in areas that remain poor. The low poverty rate from 2000 relative to today surprises me, because what housing stock we've lost was rickety (around Coe College, for example).

Of the six tracts studied here, this tract has diversified the most, going from 80.2 percent white (not Hispanic or Latino) in 2000 to 62.7 percent in 2018-22.

GENTRIFICATION COMING? Population DOWN, Income STEADY, Poverty UP or DOWN

Census tract 12: including Time-Check

Population -46.7%, Median Family Income +84.7%, Poverty Rate +114.9%

Census tract 26: including Czech Village 

Population -30.2%, Median Family Income +171.4%, Poverty Rate -33.8%

These areas lost much of their housing after the flood, with the city buying out property owners and leveling the houses between C Street SW/Ellis Boulevard NW and the Cedar River. Now that flood protection is being built on the west side of the river, expect construction to begin in earnest. It will be interesting to watch this over the next several years. Note the contrast with nearby tract #22 to the north in terms of economics away from the river.

 

These were the two whitest tracts in 2000, with over 92 percent white (not Hispanic or Latino). Tract #12 remains 87.5 percent white, while tract #26 has diversified somewhat to 77.8 percent white.

GENTRIFICATION STARTED? Population and Income STEADY, Poverty UP

Census tract 22: most of the Taylor Area including Kingston

Population -6.2%, Median Family Income +35.4%, Poverty Rate +124.1%

Coming to tract #22: apartment/condo development at Kingston Yard

This area has almost made back the population lost to flood displacement. The jump in income results from burgeoning condo development near the Cedar River, which before the flood was mostly older shops with some housing. (Note, however, incomes still lag inflation, which was +50 percent nationally from 2000-2020.) Because of the flood, this area was mostly vacant in 2010-14, so any displacement had already happened before the new residents arrived. The high poverty rate is probably located in the blocks farther from the river; its persistence is striking, suggesting that area has not shared in the prosperity brought by recent development. Why it is so much higher than 2000, I do not know.

Census tract #22 has diversified considerably, from 86.5 percent white (not Hispanic or Latino) in 2000 to 63.6 percent in 2018-2022.

LOOKS LIKE GENTRIFICATION: Population STEADY, Incomes UP, Poverty DOWN

Census tract 17: including most of Wellington Heights

Population -3.4%, Median Family Income +107.3%, Poverty Rate -45.0%

Census tract 27: most of Oak Hill Jackson including New Bohemia

Population +5.8%, Median Family Income +113.9%, Poverty Rate -10.6%

Wellington Heights, largely untouched by the 2008 flood, has seen some housing investment since 2010, but I still can't explain that phenomenal jump in income or decline in poverty. The eastern border of Wellington Heights is 19th Street SE, but the census tract extends another half-mile farther to Forest Drive, taking in a considerable portion of a well-to-do area (including the home base of Holy Mountain). Maybe that explains the numbers, or maybe it is indeed an indicator of gentrification of the older area.

Oak Hill Jackson has made back the population lost to flood displacement, and a little extra, though the U.S. as a whole gained nearly 18 percent during this period. The surge in income results both from burgeoning condo development near the Cedar River and middle class influx into the working class area farther in. Of the four neighborhoods this looks the most like stereotypical displacement accompanying gentrification, although the poverty rate remains high so not all the poor have been displaced. 

Census tract #27 was the most racially diverse of the six tracts in both 2000 (65.9 percent white not Hispanic or Latino) and 2020 (59.8 percent white). Tract #17 has diversified from 78.6 percent to 67.7 percent white.

Kristen Jeffers (from theblackurbanist.com)

Planner Kristen Jeffers, who blogs at The Black Urbanist, just produced an hour-long video called "Six Ways to Defy Gentrification." She describes gentrification, with decidedly negative connotations, as both an economic process ("typically accompanied by displacement") and a cultural process by which neighborhoods become more "respectable" (because previous residents were considered "unwealthy or unworthy" or both). Three of the six pieces of advice, directed at those experiencing gentrification from a less powerful perspective, are:

1. have faith in yourself (30:00): "you are worthy, you are valid, no matter what your rent is"
2. ground yourself by cultivating your art (32:00), particularly cultures and folkways like music, fabric or other visual art, gardening, teaching, &c., as well as cultivating your community and your resources
   
3. ground yourself through finding every way to make life convenient for yourself (33:45) by inhabiting your neighborhood: walking to the local grocery store, doctor's office, school, &c.

For gentrifiers, she commends:

1. care about the people around you (41:00), "be that person" who contributes to a diverse community by working and playing together
2. infrastructure (42:55), including public transportation and pedestrian plazas, but particularly housing that is affordable/accessible for everyone
3. access (46:15) for people with mobility needs, including everyone in those conversations
   

Cedar Rapids is growing slowly enough that we ought to be able to manage gentle gentrification, increasing investments in core neighborhoods without dislocating existing residents. I think everybody ought to live as close to the city center as they can, and that services ought to be available within a reasonable distance that makes walking, wheeling, cycling, and public transit viable alternatives. I also think there should be room for everyone, and that the fate of those with fewer resources and/or socially marginalized is the concern of everyone. I see things we're doing right--two-way streets, park development, zoning reform, a flurry of apartment and condo construction in the core--and things we're doing wrong--drive-to urbanism and big "game-changer" projects that don't serve everyday needs or leave room for everyday lives. Could we be doing all this better?

SEE ALSO: 

Pete Saunders, "Rethinking the Affordable Housing Crisis, Part III," The Corner Side Yard, 6 March 2024

Steven Thomson, "As 'Gentrification' Turns 50, Tracing Its Nebulous History," Curbed, 5 November 2014

DATA:

POPULATION

TRACT          2000          2012         2020      00-20 12TimeCh 3215 1362 1715 -46.70% 17Wellingtn 7137 6598 6891 -3.40% 19Downtwn 3359 2850 2603 -22.50% 22Kingston 2779 2259 2606 -6.20% 26CzechV 3012 2725 2101 -30.20% 27OHJ 1797 1591 1902 5.80% POVERTY        TRACT         2000         2012         2020     00-20 12TimeCh 0.087 0.179 0.187 114.90% 17Wellingtn 0.149 0.103 0.082 -45% 19Downtwn 0.225 0.375 0.381 69.30% 22Kingston 0.116 0.293 0.26 124.10% 26CzechV 0.154 0.174 0.102 -33.80% 27OHJ 0.282 0.368 0.252 -10.60%

MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME

TRACT                   2000        2012            2020            00-20 12TimeCh            40451        38365          74722          84.7% 17Wellingtn          55613        72639        115293        107.3% 19Downtwn          31182        28188          33333            6.9% 22Kingston           37946        33304          51364          35.4% 26CzechV             42703        58100          73185          71.4% 27OHJ                  27115        40543          58004        113.9%

Anniversary post: Taylor Area Neighborhood

 

Humble cartography of the Taylor Area, August 2013

Ten years ago, I crossed the Cedar River to examine the Taylor Area neighborhood on the southwest side. Complaints about crime had drawn attention to the neighborhood; ten years later, I can't say what was going on, much less whether it's gotten better or worse. (Crimegrade.org gives the Taylor Area an F grade, but I can't speak to its reliability or how old the data are.)

This much remains true:

The Taylor Area is one of Cedar Rapids's oldest neighborhoods. It is named for Taylor Elementary School, 720 7th Av SW; its official definition is coterminous with the school attendance area, which runs from the Cedar River to 15th Street, and from 1st to 16th Avenues. It has suffered a number of insults over the years: loss of [employers], the routing of Interstate 380 through the neighborhood, and most recently the 2008 flood which affected nearly the entire neighborhood and destroyed the school. (It has since been rebuilt and reopened.)

Eight blocks from the river!
2008 flood marker at school

The most notable changes in the Taylor Area since 2013 have occurred between the river and I-380, where in the wake of the flood has emerged Kingston Village, named for the town of Kingston which existed there before it merged with Cedar Rapids back in the day. 

450 1st Street SW, November 2008
(Google Earth screen capture)

450 1st Street SW today
(Swiped from hobarthistoricrestoration.com)

A lot of condos and bars have been built, and it plays host to the exceptional social service agency Matthew 25, as well as one of the core's most popular coffeehouses.

120 3rd Ave SW, June 2012
(Google Earth screen capture)

120 3rd Ave SW today
(swiped from dashcoffeeroasters.com)

The casino planned for a key block on 1st Avenue has been replaced by a multi-use building featuring apartments, a hotel, a brewery, and pickleball courts (Pratt 2022). This is way, way better. I've heard the casino may be attempted again a few blocks north of 1st Avenue, though.

The transformation of Kingston is reflected in American Community Survey data for census tract 22, to which it imperfectly corresponds (see map below): from 2010 to 2020, the percentage of college graduates increased from 8.1 to 12.9 percent, and the percentage of those aged 20-24 jumped from 7.1 to 16.2 percent. Median household income has increased from $30423 to $51500.  The percentage of elderly residents dropped from 9.0 to 6.0 percent. At the same time, Blacks increased from 9.6 to 21.2 percent.

Census tract 22 (from the sadly defunct density.website)
1st Avenue is blue, I-380 is yellow

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, change has been less perceptible. Census tract 24, which covers most of the rest of the Taylor Area, has also become more racially diverse; here, however, median household income has marginally declined, from $47031 to $44897. Taylor School has been reinvented as a magnet school, Cedar River Academy, which specializes in sustainability. According to their website they have 241 students, which would be down quite a bit from earlier years. 

Sustainability in action: Garden at Cedar River Academy

Sustainability in question: Bike rack at Cedar River Academy

The Taylor Area has the ventral location and good bones you'd expect in a core neighborhood, though connections could be improved. 3rd Avenue has been restored to two-way traffic, as has 2nd Avenue below 6th Street, but 15th and 16th Avenues remain one-way thoroughfares. Bus route 10 now runs every 45 minutes throughout the day, both ways along 1st Avenue and Williams Boulevard to Edgewood Road--not optimal frequency, but an improvement in convenience for this area. 

Even within the neighborhood, getting around is not always as easy as it could be. A lot of the side streets are broken up by the railroad and the interstate, pushing pedestrians and bikers as well as cars onto the thoroughfares. It's clear transit service could be improved by greater frequency through the day, and I still think there would be benefit from a direct bus connection across the river from, say, 8th Avenue SW to Mt. Vernon Road SE. 

Walkability would be improved by more options for basic services like grocery and drug stores, but mostly by calming traffic on the major thoroughfares (1st Avenue, 15th/16th Avenues, and 6th Street). For example, 526 7th Avenue SW is a duplex, built in 2020 on a vacant lot by my friend Eric Gutschmidt, across 6th Street from Reed Park and Taylor School. 

526 7th Avenue SW (Google Earth screenshot)

The WalkScore for that address is an impressive 77, compared to 34 for the city as a whole. Yet sending small children from Eric's duplex across the four lanes on 6th street to play at the park by the school would make me anxious, given the speed of auto traffic.

That playground in the picture above is
on the school campus, so access is limited

Looking forward to 2033, will the prosperity of Kingston Village spread to the rest of the Taylor Area? Can Taylor School serve as a base for neighborhood persistence? If prosperity does spread from Kingston Village to the rest of the Taylor Area, will it spread it a way that includes current residents, or will they be displaced? Will the 20-24 year olds in those new condos still be around when they're 30-34? Can we find children a place to play before 6 p.m.?

SEE ALSO: Matthew 25 video "Transform Week 2023" (2:55) filmed in Taylor Area and Time-Check neighborhoods

Also 10 years ago: the new downtown library opened

Review essay: Urbanism for all?

 

Alex Krieger, City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Belknap/Harvard, 2019).

Stacy Mitchell, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (Beacon, 2006).

A few years ago, I began a talk on urbanism by reading from the excellent novel The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (Harper, 2013). The author describes in detail the golem's first encounter of late 19th century New York City, full of energy and community and poverty and garbage. I told the group that urbanism was more or less an effort to recapture the energy and community Wecker describes without the yucky stuff.

It seems urbanism is not the first movement in American history to try to pull this off. Most of Alex Krieger's prodigious book is a chronicle of hope, as a succession of dreamers takes advantage of the vast American continent, as well as ever-improving technology, to leave whatever mess they were in to seek economic and social opportunity (chs 1, 9, 12, 16, 18), contact with nature (chs 2, 6, 7, 13), better communities (chs 4, 5, 14, 15), or just some fresh air. These (predominantly white) Americans had big ideas of how they could somewhere produce a mode of living that provided the best of both worlds--be those individualism/community, culture/nature, stimulation/security, e.g.--without the yucky parts of existing arrangements. Existing cities were typically perceived as anti-nature, rushed, stressful, crowded, dirty, noisy, corrupt, and full of disease and poverty and crime. Also difference (ch. 3). 

Las Vegas's wide streets are for people who are going places

So successive generations of dreamers struck out for a new start, either individually or in like-minded communities. Krieger covers a bunch of urban design trends over the centuries, as well as profiles of indicator cities like Washington (ch. 10), Chicago (ch. 11), and Las Vegas (ch.16). He is gentle and sympathetic in his portrayals, dismissing reflexive snobbery (of the "what they wanted was stupid" variety) and cynicism ("it was stupid to want/hope for that"). He pays some but not a whole lot of attention to the continental vastness being dependent on ignoring the presence of Native Americans, or to the nonwhite minorities and poor whites who suffered the impacts of whatever actions were taken towards the next utopia.

Eventually, Krieger's tone turns critical. Late in this exhaustive history of American approaches to place design comes this hint at the author's overall message: When Thomas More coined the term Utopia, the U came from the Greek words for "good" and "no" (p. 336). By chapter 18, on the back-to-the-city movement of "yuccies" and younger retired people in the early 21st century, he is scoring what the utopians have produced: swaths of environmental destruction, isolation or displacement of less powerful poor and nonwhite groups, and hoarding of goods and opportunities. He cities a number of critics of gentrification, including Joel Kotkin and Peter Moskowitz, contrasting their findings with a 1931 quote from James Truslow Adams, who defined the American Dream as a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (The Epic of America, pp.214-215, quoted on p. 344). Boy, is this ever not happening. (See Piketty 2014, Reeves 2017).

Finally, in chapter 19 ("Postscript"), he turns cautiously hopeful again. We can and must do better, as we've already striven to do, though not by leaving places and people behind to build a new city on a new hill. Rather, we must our places and their people get better. Like Richard Florida in The New Urban Crisis (Basic, 2017), he has a to-do list: 

1. sharing access to the abundance of America
2. minimizing inequality, especially by careful public policy investment choices
3. stewardship of the environment, especially by curbing excessive consumption
4. responsibility to a broad idea of common purpose/good

Now, that's my kind of urban idealism! It stands in contrast to displacement-by-gentrification, or to urban renewal (ch. 14).

Stacy Mitchell's occasionally anachronistic but still powerful argument describes another American would-be utopia: the massive "big-box" stores operated across America by massive chains like Home Depot, Target, and the empire that is Wal-Mart. (Frequent mentions of Borders, Blockbuster, and K-Mart are jarring, but the arguments remain current in the age of Amazon.) The chains' promised paradise is one of large quantities of low-cost consumer goods, which would be nirvana to people who identify primarily as consumers. Local governments are attracted to the promise of single-shot job creation. In chapter 2, she tackles "the jobs mirage," including a study by Kenneth Stone of Iowa State University that found Wal-Mart's first ten years in Iowa (1983-1993, at the end of which there were 45 superstores) corresponded with statewide losses of "555 grocery stores, 591 hardware and building-supply dealers, 161 variety stores, 88 department stores, 291 apparel stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drugstores, 111 jewelry stores, and 94 lawn and garden stores," and all their jobs with them. The low costs that attract consumers (ch. 5) are illusory, too, based on loss leaders and temporary cuts to drive out competition. These putative consumer paradises come at costs to local tax bases, domestic manufacturing, local and global wages, the landscape, the environment, and so on.

Mitchell is one of America's foremost advocates for locally-owned small businesses. Happily she concludes on hopeful notes: how communities have (sometimes) successfully fought back against chains, and how small businesses have banded together to make themselves stronger. Her evidence is thorough, yet her writing remains passionate, which is a difficult combination for any writer. Any observation of the American landscape, however, will show the lessons of all the research she details have been imperfectly learned.

 

Marion, IA, Black Friday 2019

 

Philanthropy vs. the racial wealth gap in Chicago

Can philanthropic giving be focused to combat the racial wealth gap? The Chicago Community Trust, at 104 years old the 4th oldest community foundation around, is going to try. Jennifer Axelrod of the Trust's new learning and impact division presented a sneak preview last week at Loyola University's Center for Urban Research and Learning.

Source: Lumen Learning

The Trust recently adopted a new vision statement pointing towards "a thriving, equitable and connected Chicago region where people of all races, places and identities have the opportunity to reach their potential." While they work with a variety of donors and causes, Axelrod says they hope to "draw them towards" addressing the racial wealth gap, because it is at the root of so many of the social ills they combat.

Race by census tract, Chicago

 (Source; Folded Map Project)

Axelrod cited a 2017 study by the Metropolitan Planning Council concluding that Chicago's economic growth would be 2.5 percentage points higher if the metropolitan area were less segregated. Nationally, median family wealth for whites is ten times that of blacks, eight times that of Latinx; according to the Federal Reserve Board whites held 89 percent of the $87 trillion of wealth in the United States, compared to 3 percent each for blacks and Latinx. [I know it's greater than that in Washington, D.C., and probably is less here in Iowa, where we have lower incidence of great wealth.] There were a lot of data to show the connection between the racial wealth gap and myriad social problems:

• liquid asset poverty: 65 percent of black and Latinx Chicagoans are "living on the financial edge" i.e. would be below the poverty line if they lost three months' income, compared to 28 percent of whites
• Chicago people of color live in communities where more than 50 percent of debt is delinquent, 40 percent of loans are subprime, and 20 percent are unbanked. They are thus at the mercy of payday lenders, who charge average annual interest rates of 404 percent.
• people of color lag far behind whites on all kinds of assets, particularly homeownership, which is the most common source of individual wealth. 35 percent of black and 43 percent of Latinx Chicagoans own their own homes, compared to 54 percent of whites. Much of this is due to the legacy of contract buying in Chicago decades ago, which disproportionately affected blacks; because contract borrowers lose their entire equity when they miss a payment, this arrangement cost blacks as much as $4 billion in assets.
• people of color have differential health outcomes, too, particularly infant and breast cancer mortality

Audience members added different parent-teacher interactions, food deserts (even comparing different stores in the same chain), school quality, access to public transit, and greater police presence. One community member plugged the Folded Map Project, where residents try to meet those with similar coordinates--in his case, 4900 N/S 9000 W--on opposite sides of the city.

Jennifer Axelrod and Dan Tollefson talk to audience members after the presentation

The racial wealth gap originated in slavery, of course, but as horrible as that was, it has been exacerbated over the years by Jim Crow laws, redlining and exclusion from housing programs, and the decline of labor wages. Today, an American child's life prospects are heavily determined by the circumstances into which they are born, and to the extent that people of color are identified in the public mind with poverty and crime, the racial wealth gap gets replicated for each new generation. The case for reparations may rest on the history of slavery (Myers 2019), but the urgency rests in injustices since then, and the inequalities they have perpetuated.

The CCT plans "to engage donors more thoughtfully," with the intent of addressing critical needs (services as well as long-term systemic change), building coalitions and networks, and promoting community driven investment. Those are ambitious goals, as much at the engagement stage as at the more outcomes-based stages. (Are donors ready to be talked into this?) There is the ever-present danger of unintended consequences, such as when better transportation services facilitates displacement by gentrification. But if ten years from now they have helped achieve "real integration," however incrementally, they'll have made yeomanlike contribution towards our common life.

Inequality, neighborhood and our common life

(Source: huffingtonpost.com)

Shounak Bagchi, "The Psychology of Poverty," Medium, 28 August 2018

The terrible effects of poverty on individuals are vividly described by Shounak Bagchi in an online essay published last week. Bagchi follows the daily struggles of two women as they juggle low-wage work, bills and children. The stress level is so high that one of his interviewees reports locking herself in a closet and crying at work. The damage wrought by toxic stress is well-documented, but Bagchi's article brings to life the breadth of his subjects' task loads, their power and determination as they plow through it, but also how they are inexorably worn down by it all. Only a monster could fail to feel compassion for their struggle.

Taking a wider view may induce even more despair. The winner-take-all economy that has characterized the last 40-plus years of U.S. history has been documented both statistically (see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century [Belknap/Harvard, 2014]) and anecdotally. Greater economic inequality and lower mobility means poverty is typically perpetuated across generations. This also perpetuates historic inequities across racial, gender and geographic divisions.

In a white middle-class enclave it is easy to regard the stress-packed lives of the poor in the abstract. Their struggles do not impact our lives unless we choose to engage in acts of charity or advocate for ameliorative public policies. We also have the luxury of choosing, like the priest and the Levite in St. Luke's story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37), not to engage.

In an early essay on this blog, I asked about the consequences to the person who defines neighborhood--the obligation to care--too narrowly. I was particularly interested in observable, tangible consequences. "Are there practical consequences," I asked then (emphasis in the original), "for drawing the circle too small? If some part of a city or metropolitan area isn't flourishing, does that materially impact the rest of it? If Detroit is dying does that affect Grosse Pointe? Does it matter to the rest of Cedar Rapids if people in Wellington Heights or the Taylor Area aren't thriving?"

Reflecting on Bagchi's essay, I find it easier to see that the lives of the most vulnerable do affect the rest of us. Because here's the thing about toxic stress: it isn't contained within the suffering individual, consuming them but then dying along with its host. Like a fire, it spreads unless it's put out.

People suffering toxic levels of stress drive cars, hold jobs (remember the woman crying in the work closet), and live near other people. Any of these can occasionally be frustrating, even to the most placid of us. They can buy guns, which will soon outnumber people in this country, if they don't already--and ammunition is easier to buy than cold medicine. As we in the city find ourselves negotiating our way through our days in any number of ways, pre-existing stress is priming some of the people who cross our paths to over-react to the most mundane of routine annoyances. This can have, it should be obvious, tragic outcomes.

Source: US CDC, via Wikipedia

People suffering toxic levels of stress are often raising children. (That's the case with both of Bagchi's case studies.) That stress gets passed on to the next generation, in all manner of unappetizing ways. As Jonathan F.P. Rose discusses in chapter 10 of his brilliant The Well-Tempered City (HarperWave, 2016), adverse childhood experiences (ACE) can be as toxic as environmental toxins like lead. He cites studies connecting children's toxic stress to weaker immune systems, decreased cognitive capacity, and lower social trust. Over time the body's response to stress gets locked "on," altering a person's very genes. The financial costs alone to society are staggering: $124-$585 billion from one year's confirmed cases of abuse, according to a study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [NOTE: The link to the study, both in the book and on the CDC web page, is currently broken.] The human costs exceed the purely financial, of course.

The community can mitigate the effects of toxic stress. Rose (2016:332-335) suggests starting with improving access to housing, building walkable cities with good parks so there opportunities for routine exercise, teaching meditation for mindfulness, and--last but not least--building social networks. (How is it that I, a 30-year resident of my town, can walk about a mile to work and know so few of the (few) people I encounter on the way?) These don't come free, but neither does drawing lines and building walls. Expanding drawing the circle of care makes for a stronger, safer, more prosperous community.

The Republicans' tax revolt

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) celebrates passage (swiped from nytimes.com)

There can be no more caviling about the accomplishments of the Republican-led federal government in 2017: the tax bill that cleared December 20, and was signed by President Donald J. Trump two days later, represents major policy change. Unfortunately, in addition to achieving some legitimate objectives the bill pushes policy in some very dubious directions.

First, the good news. The bill includes a long-overdue overhaul of corporate taxation. The U.S. relies to an unusual degree on business taxes, and the complex provisions of the tax code had pushed the top rate (which nobody really pays) far above that of other advanced democracies. The current bill closes some loopholes and reduces the top tax rate from 36 to 21 percent, making American business taxation more transparent and possibly more internationally competitive. Some advocates expect this to result in more hiring with higher wages. (I'm dubious, given that corporate profits have already been doing well for most of this decade, far outpacing wages.) The provision is not revenue-neutral, but could have been offset with higher individual rates. (It wasn't.)

I'm also fine with what's happened to the home mortgage interest deduction: the amount of debt on which interest is deductible was reduced from $1,000,000 to $750,000 for homes purchased after 2017, and nearly doubling the standard deduction drastically reduces the amount of people who will take it. This provision of the code has inflated prices, encouraged communities to sprawl and individuals to over-build (see Zuegel 2017 and Williamson 2017); the presumption that homeowners make better citizens was dubious from the start.

Other positives: Using chained CPI to make year-to-year adjustments should more accurately reflect the impact of inflation on taxpayers, even though it will mean lower benefits from, say, the Earned Income Tax Credit.... The child allowance has been increased for the first time in awhile, to $2000, albeit offset by eliminating personal exemptions. For low income filers, $1400 of that credit can be refunded in a sort of "negative income tax"... And some ideas got removed from earlier versions: reducing or ending tax credits for historic preservation, as well as provisions affecting higher education like taxing tuition benefits for employees of colleges and graduate student fellowships. (Maybe those last are neutrals rather than positives, since nothing was changed.)

If the bill had gone only that far, it might have been more widely supported, in and out of Congress, although that's hard to say given Washington's toxically partisan divide. But the sponsors had to go and:

• skew the individual cuts to the wealthy. In part that's because the wealthy pay most of the income taxes in America, but that's not true of all taxes. (ITEP 2017 shows the distribution of tax payments by income level, and how that would have been affected by an early version of the 2017 tax bill.) This exacerbates an already-widening income and wealth gap in America. The skew does appear worse if you include the expiration of individual cuts after ten years, which was included to make the bill fit under budget caps, so a lot of opposition analysis focuses on 2027 numbers. In fact those cuts may or may not expire, but if they don't, they will clearly worsen the bill's impact on the deficit (discussed below.)
• double the estate tax exemption, which was absurdly high even before Republicans tried to end it in their 2001 tax cut. The ability of the very rich, some but not all of whom got that way by doing socially-productive things, to pass on huge fortunes to their heirs, all of whom got that way simply by coming out of the right vagina, is absolutely contrary to an opportunity society. We're making the world safe for aristocracy, pure and simple. And since whites got several centuries' head start on making money, this approach does racial harm as well.
• expand pass-through provisions, by which individual income can be taxed at the lower business rate. This option is not available to typical working people, of course, only to those in a position to declare themselves independent contractors. A special provision related to real estate partnerships will provide substantial benefits to the Trump family as well as Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), a late convert to the yes column, all of which is giving cynics a field day.
• retain the obscene carried interest loophole, whereby the income of financial wizards is taxed as capital gains rather than income, and therefore at a much lower rate. This has cost the government $18 billion over the last ten years, besides which it irrationally favors financial wizardry over any other work. Hello-o-o, 1 percenters!
• run as much of a deficit as they legally could claim. The official estimate of revenue loss, $1.4+ trillion over 10 years, assumes a substantial economic stimulus effect, which as I said may or may not result, and steady and considerable economic expansion throughout the period. Otherwise the impact on the deficit is substantially worse. Fiscally stimulating the economy at all in the eighth year of a bull market with the country at or near full employment is hard to justify. The capacity of the federal government to deal with future events (natural disasters, security threats, economic downturns, funding for retirement and health care programs, maintaining infrastructure), not to mention regular disruption in our high-tech economy, has been damaged, which is inexplicable. In the near term, higher deficits would trigger funding cuts for Medicare and Medicaid.
• add legislative matters to the bill. Republicans have repeatedly attempted over the years to repeal the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act and open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, without success. Both are included in this bill. The ACA change cuts health care policy off at the knees--"We have essentially repealed Obamacare," President Trump proclaimed Wednesday--roiling individual insurance markets, without any recourse for the most vulnerable.
• do all this in an all-fired hurry, without so much as a committee hearing. Senator John S. McCain (R-Arizona) complained last summer about his leadership's abandonment of "regular order" in considering legislation. This bill was a most egregious example, but he supported it anyway.

The tax bill does some good, but considering its effects on vulnerable individuals as well as American society as a whole, it does a lot more bad.

DATA STUDIES
Tax Policy Center: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/distributional-analysis-conference-agreement-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act/full
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy: https://itep.org/finalgop-trumpbill/

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah et al.: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3089423

American Planning Association: https://www.planning.org/blog/blogpost/9140260/
US Treasury Dept: https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Documents/TreasuryGrowthMemo12-11-17.pdf 

SEE ALSO:
William G. Gale and Leonard Burman, "Congress Missed an Opportunity to Reform the Corporate Tax," Up Front, 26 December 2017
Alejandro Ortiz and Kathleen Powers, "So, What's in the Tax Bill?" Vote Smart, 13 December 2017