Speakers raise tough issues at Coe MLK celebration

Issues of diversity and inclusion were front and center in a day-long celebration of Martin Luther King Day at Coe College. Featured speakers included Geneva Williams, a local civil rights attorney who used the 1955 murder of Emmett Till to frame contemporary race relations; and political scientist Rebecca Stonawski, who discussed civil rights aspects of immigration issues.

Geneva Williams

Williams argued today's racial issues exist in the context of (and in spite of) substantial progress since the 1950s, including the end of legal disenfranchisement and the election of a President of color. She characterized today's problems as primarily economic disenfranchisement, as well as a "culture that dehumanizes each other." It is harder for events like the several 2014 shootings of unarmed black males to touch "our collective conscience," and easier to blame victims like Eric Garner when "we no longer see ourselves in the other."

She commends voting and inter-racial dialogue as means of healing this breach. During the Q-and-A section, she quipped that it's "harder to talk about race than to have the sex talk." I think there are two huge obstacles to dialogue, and one to voting:

• In an America marked by widening economic inequality (which is principally class-based but has strong racial elements) and sprawling metropolises, it is unusual to have acquaintances that cross race and/or class lines. Acquaintance creates the opportunity for dialogue that may not occur all at once. If I greeted a black person with "So, what's it like being black in Cedar Rapids?" or "Bummer about Tamir Rice, huh?" they would justifiably dismiss me as a presumptuous lunatic. Only contact over time can create the context for productive dialogue, and American society is designed to avoid rather than facilitate that contact.
• Whites have swung in a generation or two from obliviousness if not outright offensiveness to great fear of offending. I know I have. Perhaps this is true of blacks, too? We can't manage dialogue if we're so self-censored we sound like politicians under investigation. Similarly we can't expect anyone to talk candidly to us if we seize on the slightest offense. New York police union leader Patrick Lynch's rejection of any criticism of police tactics gets points for loyalty, but has done real damage to American race relations that were not in great shape to begin with.
• Voting is an obvious solution in towns like Ferguson, where neither the City Council nor the Police Department is close to representative of the town's population. But beyond that, it's not clear to me there are readily-available policy solutions to the problems of the under-employed, much less political candidates advocating them. So what's a poor black voter to do?

Rebecca Stonawski

Stonawski commendably took on the challenge of explaining immigration policy issues and terminology, culminating in the current stand-off in Washington. She described the current administration policy as [a] providing a path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants currently in the country, with a reprieve from deportation in the meantime; [b] strengthening enforcement both at the border and workplaces; and [c] clearing the backlog of visa applications, which according to travel.state.gov has now exceeded 20 years for Mexican applicants. The proposals face uncertain prospects in Congress, with the House last week voting to block funding to implement Obama's interim executive order and the Senate likely to follow. [Incidentally, Obama would be the third straight president to have immigration proposals blocked by Congress, suggesting the institutions are playing out learned roles. My amateur transactional analysis won't get us to a solution, though.] Stonawski urged students and others in attendance to inform themselves further and then to become actively involved on behalf of your preferred solution.

No one, as far as I know, supports the current immigration situation. People have very different goals, of course, but that doesn't need to be a barrier to a solution that advances all of their different interests. (Obama's, or George W. Bush's, proposals could serve as the basis for such a solution.) The major obstacle is that many people who are already actively involved in the debate over this policy are unwilling to acknowledge two truths which I think are unavoidably true: [1] immigrants currently in this country illegally are drawn primarily by job opportunity, and play an integral role in our economy i.e. to expel them all and prevent their entry is a fantasy; [2] no country can admit everyone who wants to live there i.e. even a liberalized policy is still going to exclude people. One of the most compelling sections of King's Washington speech was the vision he described of a future of racial harmony.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.... I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!

Of course there were those who saw that vision as morally repugnant. But there had to be others who heard those words and thought it described a way more appealing world than the one they inhabited, and decided: "Let's do it! It's way past time for this shit to stop."

Until someone paints a similarly compelling vision that incorporates the realities of immigration, of "come heres" and "been heres" working side-by-side and treated with dignity, we are going to be stuck with the current policy stalemate, mired as it is in (depending on your perspective) idealism or rigidity. And we're going to need executive action to keep the situation on the ground from completely breaking down.

OLDER POSTS

"Strength Through Diversity (II)," 9 March 2014
"Strength Through Diversity," 1 March 2014
"The Race Card Project," 12 February 2014
"Race Matters, Damn It," 16 April 2013

ALSO A GOOD READ:
Sarah Goodyear, "White Privilege, On a Bicycle," City Lab, 18 January 2015
Allen Vandermeulen, "Sermon: Making Room," The Here and the Hereafter, 18 January 2015

New Year's resolutions

Source: sunshinereflections.wordpress.com

One goal of mine this year is to engage in more public discussions of urbanism, particularly its role in local public policy. I think this will require more focus than I'm used to blogging. I like being able to choose subject matter, and to ignore news distractions like partisan politics, scandals, and kerfluffles-of-the-moment (like the current bleating about whether President Obama should have gone to the march in Paris). That still gives me a lot of topics to hop between, and being from and of liberal arts education I do enjoy hopping between topics. But somehow I doubt that variety is the spice of productive meetings.

All of which has me thinking about setting priorities. This means developing a short list of ways the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area could move towards urbanism, defined most succinctly on the wise North Bay Design Kit blog as building and operating communities in ways that make them "fiscally viable and environmentally sustainable." What follows are the results of the first round of brainstorming. Note that I'm torn between processes that I understand (like metropolitan government) and goals that I value but am not sure how to achieve (like improving career opportunities for the poor). Still not ready to focus completely, I guess.

New condo development, 100 4th Av SW (Google Streetview 2016)

 

1. Develop a 24-hour downtown. Downtown and the New Bohemia area to its south have come a long way since the 2008 flood, with more attractions than they previously had. Their development should continue in ways that include all income levels; include residential as well as commercial property; welcomes bicycles and pedestrians as well as cars; and radiates outward to connect with the working-class "core" neighborhoods. A city center that is vital around the clock is more safe, more economically successful, more interesting in a variety of ways, and more environmentally sustainable. Particularly, it provides a base for both economic opportunity and arts-entertainment life that are essential in retaining talented young people.

But young people eventually age. So we need more than condos.

The city should favor economic development that builds connections and creates career opportunities

2. Include the poor. Those in or near poverty have suffered most from the recent economic downturn, but also didn't benefit from the long periods of economic growth that preceded it. Communities need to build connections to them. Mostly I think this means not excluding them, physically or economically, from participating in the development of the city. (There are pockets of poverty in Cedar Rapids, on Johnson Avenue SW or Pioneer Avenue SE for example, that are so remote from economic activity as to be absurd.) I think it probably should also mean considering, at each stage of the city's development, how specifically any project supports connecting the economically vulnerable to jobs and eventually careers.

Cedar Rapids has a number of important services aimed at lower-income citizens, including food banks, free clinics and housing options. These are helpful, even crucial, to people in poverty. But they don't get people out of poverty. That requires, in the words of Michael Dukakis's infamous presidential campaign, "good jobs at good wages."

Route 9, from crtransit.com

3. Improve public transportation. The metro area has an earnest bus system that stops running at 6:20 p.m., and runs looping routes out of downtown that all take exactly an hour. It's hard to say whether the town is over-served or under-served. My hunch is that rationalizing routes and schedules--running buses from where people are to where they want to go, at times they need them--might be revenue-neutral, or even revenue saving. Right now that's not an issue, as the system is mainly funded by federal grants, but that shouldn't be our main consideration.

Intercity rail is on hold as long as Terry Branstad is governor--he's rejected federal rail funding, and in last week's Condition of the State address advocated infrastructure improvements, by which he exclusively meant roads and bridges--but we might at least think about what we'd need to do to prepare for this possibility.

Dlask's Grocery, swiped from Erin McNamara-Ankney via Pinterest

4. Neighborhood stores, preferably locally-owned. Economics seem still to favor gigantism, with Wal-Mart the extreme though certainly not the only example. It would be nice if most neighborhoods had stores people could walk to (grocery, hardware, e.g.), with doors open to the street and parking lots behind. The stores would carry a modest selection of core goods at reasonable prices i.e. not the mark-ups common to convenience stores, New Pioneer and Fresh Market. It would be advantageous if we could somehow favor local entrepreneurship instead of relying on chain stores (and restaurants, to a considerable extent).

The Regional City argues for empowering metro regions as well as neighborhoods

5. Regional governance. Revenue sharing, a no-poaching (of each other's businesses) agreement, and maybe an urban growth limit for the communities in the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area might not immediately affect the landscape, but would have important long-term effects on area density as well as government finances. Residents of Cedar Rapids and the surrounding towns share interests in the metropolitan economy, traffic, parks and museums, among other things. There should be a shared level of government that represents those interests.

The future of religious spaces

Grace Episcopal Church in Carthage, Missouri, pictured above (from its website), has a small, lovely sanctuary that dates from 1890. It's small, dark and cozy, with well-crafted woodwork and stained glass windows. When I visited there last fall, I felt immediately that I was in a sacred place. But that's the perspective of a late-middle-aged, lifelong church-goer, who admires the Episcopal liturgy (though I'm not sure I could do it every week). As times and expectations change, sacred places across America face change as well.

The quarterly publication Faith and Form is out with their 2014 religious art and architecture awards, which is as good an occasion as any to take stock of sacred space in America. Religion, mainly Christianity, has been part of the American landscape since the earliest permanent settlements of Europeans in the 16th century. Most towns of any size have a number of churches, and perhaps a temple or mosque, in prominent locations in their downtown areas. They are typically, in my unsystematic observation, buildings of beauty--sometimes simple, sometimes ornate--that are compatible with their surroundings.

John Kenneth White (Protestant Worship and Church Architecture, Oxford University Press, 1964) states that houses of worship have two basic functions: (1) to provide a location for group religious expression; and (2) to inspire individuals with a sense of the presence of God. The first could be fulfilled by any physical space, though White argues at length the structure of that space says a lot about hierarchies as well as expectations of individual participation. What makes for a sense of sacred place varies with the individual, but often involves features like apart-ness from the everyday world, peace and quiet, beauty and majesty. The common element of sacred space is, to quote Roger W. Stump (The Geography of Religion, Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), a "manifestation of the cosmos defined in [believers'] world views" (p. 301).

There might be other functions White doesn't highlight: the prominent physical presence of churches states a claim of social importance. Think of Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chicago's Magnificent Mile, or century-old First Lutheran and Immaculate Conception Churches planted opposite each other on one of Cedar Rapids's busiest intersections.

These days churches face a number of challenges that would have been unthinkable to my parents and grandparents, not to mention the 19th century founders of my town.

• Worship attendance is decreasingly a social norm. It has decreased so much, in fact, that one could argue the norm is not to attend worship. This is not the world in which my grandfather preached. Church members who might pride themselves on welcoming visitors and new members are nonetheless ambivalent about actively recruiting new adherents.
• As members age and the economy putters along, many religiously-active people have fewer resources on which to draw for donations to churches, synagogues and mosques. Giving USA reported last summer that religious donations have been unusually slow to bounce back from the Great Recession. It would be interesting to compare religious donations as a percentage of GDP over time (currently it's 1.9 percent); does anyone know if such data exist?
• Concurrent with these revenue challenges, religious houses confront some rather imposing cost burdens: energy costs fluctuate wildly, maintenance costs probably accelerate with age of building, and in prosperous areas opportunity costs undoubtedly beckon. As a result of all these factors, two lovely and historic downtown Cedar Rapids churches have fallen to the wrecking ball in the last five years. Other churches have moved in order to accommodate actual or anticipated growth, leaving buildings in urban neighborhoods for campuses on the edge of town with gigantic buildings and parking lots.
• In some areas, religion is seen as a regressive force. From the inside, a doctrine on birth control or homosexuality that has long since passed its expiry date can be seen as something we hope to see change. From the outside it's just ugly. It's not my tradition or culture, but the public face of Islam today can hardly be attractive.
• Social needs may take priorities over institutional needs, even for loyal members, and surely do for outsiders. "Jon," a commenter on the Religious News Service article I linked to above, argues: Giving to religious houses of worship is not charitable giving. We’ve seen time and again that a tiny fraction of that money goes to actual charities, while nearly all of it goes to the house of worship itself – salaries to paid employees, the building, etc. Without knowing Jon's perspective, it seems fair to argue he'd rather donate to food banks, schools and environmental groups instead of maintaining an awe-inspiring sanctuary. But places that evoke a sense of sacred immanence aren't free.

The upshot is that the qualities of sacred space that are highly valued by core members are likely to be irrelevant, or even off-putting, to the unchurched. Moreover, in many cases they may not be affordable.

In the face of all this, the Faith and Form report indicates considerable vitality. Their 2014 contest received 134 submissions, and made 32 awards in nine categories: new facilities, restoration, renovation (I'm enough of an amateur not to know the difference between those two), liturgical/interior design, liturgical furnishings, visual arts, ceremonial objects, sacred landscape, and student work. Journal editor Michael J. Crosbie noted that religious art and architecture are flourishing throughout the world, and that artists, architects, liturgical designers, students, and others are exploring ways to balance tradition with new demands of religious practice. The landscape of sacred space is changing, along with dramatic shifts in organized religion.

One clear winner in all this is what White years ago called the "church of light," reacting against 100 or so years of dark sanctuaries (which I find cozy, but that's just me). Light, lots of light, usually natural light, literally pours into a lot of these pictures.

Proyecto Clamor de Paz, Honduras, swiped from faithandform.org

Most of the pictures are outdoor shots, so it's hard to gauge the worship atmosphere, but I really like the simple style of this renovated Massachusetts church, as well as how it fits with the surrounding buildings.

Christ Church, Cambridge MA, swiped from faithandform.org

To me that front door screams accessibility, but is that enough to get strangers to enter?

I also love the grandeur of this Colorado sanctuary, which received an award for visual arts. It's clearly among the churches of light, and the pipes at left suggest potential for great liturgical music. (My church, as it happens, has organ pipes that are purely decorative i.e. they're not attached to an actual organ.) But now I'm wondering about their heating bills.

Our Lady of Loreto Catholic Parish, Foxfield CO, swiped from faithandform.org

On the other hand, this church doesn't appeal to me at all. It's showy, conspicuously expensive, and sprawling. I bet it's not within walking distance of anything, and that its parking lot is big enough to land planes.

Watermark Community Church, Dallas TX, swiped from faithandform.org

I am being snarky here, which is hardly called for, but I did just look them up on Bing and I'm right. On the other hand, if they're attracting members in this day and age, who am I to carp at them?

At the same time that this energetic construction and reconstruction is occurring, other religious institutions are dealing with change by retrenching: shrinking congregations are cutting services, merging or just closing down. Maybe the buildings can be re-purposed, but in the process the sacred element of the place is frequently lost. In the same issue, Crosbie reports on a group called Partners for Sacred Places, which has a program to match cash-strapped churches with non-profit groups who need space. I don't know how much revenue those arrangements might generate, but it has the obvious up-side of bringing people into the building who might not otherwise get there. In time they may come to value the space for its sacred qualities as well as for its utility.

FEATURED REFERENCES
Michael J. Crosbie, "Scattered Treasures," Faith and Form 47:4 (2014), http://faithandform.com/editorial/scattered-treasures/

Michael J. Crosbie, "2014 International Awards Program for Religious Art and Architecture," Faith and Form 47:4 (2014), http://faithandform.com/feature/2014-international-awards-program-religious-art-architecture/

SEE ALSO

Timothy W. Martin, "Window Pains: Stained Glass Faces Dark Days," Wall Street Journal, 22 December 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/window-pains-stained-glass-faces-dark-days-1419295927

EARLIER POSTS ON THIS SUBJECT

"Homes, Church Homes and Hometowns," 15 September 2014
"Sacred Space," 27 April 2013

Book review: "The New York Nobody Knows"

One of the most fascinating books I've read recently is a sociologist's study of an American city in which I've spent exactly four days. It says a lot about our cities and how we relate to them.

Helmreich, who teaches at the City College of New York as well as the City University Graduate Center, is a lifelong New Yorker whose love of exploration through walking was instilled in him by his father. So he was already very familiar with the city when he began, a few years ago, the project of walking every block of its streets. The book is not the story of those walks, but is informed by them: the chapters deal with typical topics of urban sociology like gentrification, immigration, economic life and safety. His anecdotes are lively, but with qualitative data his conclusions are cautious: When all is said and done, gentrification is a complex issue.... By observing it on the ground, it becomes possible to see these complexities from different angles, many of them positive, some not necessarily so (pp. 294-295). Those looking for the answer to gentrification issues will be frustrated, but those who are willing to walk with him (mentally, at least) will find their understanding of the issues enriched.

One aspect of New York that Helmreich openly challenges is that most outsiders' concept of the city is primarily Manhattan, and Lower Manhattan at that. (I'm probably guilty there, or at least I was before I read this book: all four of my days in New York were spent on the island. Mets tickets that might have at least gotten me into Queens were useless because the players were on strike. At the same time, I wonder how accurate are the mental maps even of city residents?) Tourist attractions, Greenwich Village, Central Park and the 1990s TV series Friends are hardly ever mentioned, as Helmreich walks us around the other boroughs, into neighborhoods that are as uncharted to Midwesterners as, say, the Bowman Woods subdivision of Cedar Rapids is to New Yorkers. An encounter with an Orthodox Jewish worker at Meal Mart in Kew Gardens Hills gets him and the students with him invited to the gentlemen's succah. He talks gentrification with residents of Dumbo/ Vinegar Hill. He literally stumbles upon a parade in honor of St. Theresa in Pelham Bay, and chats up parade-goers. "Are you kidding? Do I look rich?" he says as he laughs off a man trying to shake him down in Red Hook.

After reading this book, I have a lot of admiration for Helmreich, both as a person and as a writer. He makes social science research readable, which I can say from personal experience is not as easy as it might appear, and using qualitative research (which a lot of social scientists look down their noses at) speaks intelligently to social problems. His keystrokes make the whole city live, and I'm determined to get out of Manhattan next time I'm there. I might stay out of Red Hook, though.

Beyond New York, The New York Nobody Knows has a number of points to make to those interested in urban issues and improving their cities.

1) Look at the whole city. I think there's a lot to be said for focusing on downtown, an area which is (or should be) common to all city residents, and the core around which the city will contract if necessary. If you can't solve all problems at once, it makes sense to start here. Yet this shouldn't blind us to other parts of the city that might be interesting in any number of ways. My concept of my own city consists, admittedly, of predominantly residential areas occasionally interspersed with shopping plazas. But who knows what hidden gems some serious exploration might uncover?

2) Emotional intelligence helps. Helmreich seems able to strike up a conversation with almost anyone, anywhere. It's important to note that, completist though he may be, this project was about more than covering territory. You can learn something about a place by walking it, but you can't learn what it's like to live there unless you talk to people who do. Gulp. For Pete's sake, isn't there an app for that? Helmreich cannot teach us how to be as cool as he is, but he does advise: I never began an interview with a standard: "Excuse me, could I ask you some questions about this community?" Instead, I would say something like: "How come you're dressed like this?" or "Is this neighborhood safe?" or "What's a horse doing in that guy's backyard?" (That really happened, in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn.) (pp. 4-5)

3) You can't beat walking. Driving through, or even biking through, occurs too quickly to acquire deep knowledge. As Helmreich cautions: You need to walk slowly through an area to capture its essence, to appreciate the buildings, to observe how the people function in the space, and to talk with them. Driving gives you nothing more than a snapshot. More to the point, it creates a physical wall between you and the neighborhood. (p. 10)

4) The elements that make neighborhoods succeed are similar. In describing the renaissance of the city since the 1970s and 80s, Helmreich repeatedly returns to the fact that most areas of the city have seen a substantial decline in violent crime. That's worth celebrating, but it's a little disturbing that many people have opinions on why that occurred, but there's little definitive to go on. So we hope the trend will continue, but can't appropriately predict with confidence that it will. Besides safety, all-day activity, residential stability, access to transportation, economic prospects and things to do are hallmarks of successful neighborhoods that come across throughout the book.

Helmreich's book is a landmark, not because it breaks new ground in how we think about cities, but because it adds so much raw material to the conversation.

THE BOOK

William B. Helmreich, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City (Princeton, 2013)

SOMEWHAT RELATED BLOG POSTS FROM CEDAR RAPIDS

"The 'New Normal' Economy and Place," 20 November 2013, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-new-normal-economy-and-place.html

"Taylor Area Neighborhood," 14 August 2013, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2013/08/taylor-area-neighborhood.html

"Walking Down to the Edge of Town," 2 August 2013, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2013/08/walking-down-to-edge-of-town.html

Merry Christmas from Saudi Claus?

Gasoline prices across American have plummeted recently, plunging right through what I've come to call the "Gingrich threshold." (Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich promised during his 2012 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination that his policies would drop pump prices to $2.50 a gallon.) Now, even without the bumptious Pennsylvania native in the White House, some places are seeing prices 20 percent below that. I've seen some pro-Democratic sites add this to the list of achievements by President Obama, but that's reaching. The most we can say is that Obama's energy policies, such as they are, haven't prevented prices from dropping.

But we're not about politics or personalities here. We want to know: Why did this happen? Is this a good thing? And should I now buy a house in a subdivision in the cornfields?

Oil prices have been volatile since the turn of the millennium, which mostly have been due to fluctuations in supply. (An exception was the drop in prices in late 2008, when the economic slowdown caused a drop in demand.) Economic development in Asia, particularly in China and India, has increased demand, and exerted a steady upward push on prices. Once a certain price was reached, it became economical for companies to extract oil from difficult places, like shale deposits in America and the Canadian tar sands. The increased supply could exert a steady downward push on prices.

That didn't answer the question, did it? The forces I've described in the previous paragraph could explain a cycle of mild ups and downs in gasoline prices, but is not as convincing an explanation for why oil prices have fallen by 50 percent in the last six months. So, what's going on? Commentary runs to two explanations: [a] manipulation by the Saudis, who continue to control the largest amount of traditional oil reserves, and have some motives to drive supplies up and prices down; or [b] it's really markets i.e. the supply increase from American and Canadian production has generated unstoppable momentum. That one also requires Saudi involvement, however, because they could have counteracted the price drop by decreasing their own production, which they did not. They did try that during the 2008 downturn, only to have other producers make up the difference, which is probably why they're not doing it now. They're wealthy enough for the price hit they're taking not to be painful, while other oil-producing countries who are not their friends--like Iran and Russia--are hurting.

Many commentators feel American oil production is likely to be resilient, although costs of extraction costs are much higher here than in Saudi Arabia. Eric Smith of Tulane University's Energy Institute told NPR's Marketplace that American producers could keep going with prices where they are now, in the mid 50's per barrel. “You’d probably go down to $30 before somebody shuts in a well. They might not drill a new one. But they wouldn’t stop producing the old one until the price got below that cost.” The Economist notes the financial vulnerability of American oil firms, but suggests that low prices would only pause shale production. "There is always a new set of investors" said one of their sources, ready when price incentives to produce return, possibly with better technology.

So, definitely good for drivers, companies that have energy-intensive production or high transportation costs, and consumers that buy their products. Mixed news for American oil producers (and their investors), and bad for the autocratic rulers of Iran, Russia and Venezuela, as well as their client states like Cuba. Sounds like a win so far! But what are the impacts of lower gasoline prices on our common life? Here there's some good news, too: Lower energy prices stimulate the economy, which might give our four-year-old recovery the kick in the pants it needs to do some serious job creation at last. Jobs that pay well? Well, maybe.

On the other hand... until recently high energy prices were working together with changes in how people want to live, shaky government finances, and developing concerns with pollution and climate change to produce a society-wide rethink of our car-centered economy. The combination has produced, for example, the changes in American living arrangements documented by Leigh Gallagher in The End of the Suburbs. If we decide all of a sudden that cheap gasoline--relatively speaking, of course, because it was under a dollar a gallon as recently as 2001--is here to stay, those other issues aren't going to go away. But the compulsion to address them might.

If we decide all of a sudden that gasoline is going to be cheap, and then the price bounces back up--analyst John Michael Greer calls this current phase a "fracking bubble"--things might get ugly around here.

SOURCES

Historical data on oil prices from TradingCharts.com: http://futures.tradingcharts.com/chart/CO/18

Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013)

John Michael Greer, "Deja Vu All Over Again," The Archdruid Report, 17 December 2014, http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/12/deja-vu-all-over-again.html

Mitchell Hartman, "Oil Prices Scrape Bottom of the Barrel," Marketplace, 18 December 2014, http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/crude-economy/oil-prices-scrape-bottom-barrel

"In a Bind," Economist, 6 December 2014, 81-82

Joe Nocera, "Shale and the Falling Price of Oil," New York Times, 23 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/opinion/joe-nocera-shale-and-the-falling-price-of-oil.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

The latest bad news and our common life

Protesting Eric Garner verdict in Chicago (ABC7 Chicago, used without permission)

Those of us who expressed loud relief at the conclusion of the late election season ought to have been careful for what we wished. We are most of us used to election-year bloviating, after all, and eventually it goes away, and we move on with our lives. The news that has replaced all the campaigning this year, however, has dealt a series of body blows to our quest for a common life. It's enough to make you nostalgic for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-California) and his rumors of ISIS agents carrying Ebola germs over the Mexican border.

The grand jury decision not to seek indictment in the case of Eric Garner gave new life to restiveness about police treatment of blacks. The latest chapter began in August with the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August. Garner, like Brown, was unarmed; he died of suffocation this past July while being physically restrained by a New York City police officer, and his last words were the now-famous phrase "I can't breathe." A 42-year-old man with a wife and children, he made a more sympathetic figure than the 18-year-old Brown, who had just come from robbing a convenience store. While sorting out facts and causation in specific incidents is difficult, the two men's deaths have symbolized a broader theme of problematic relations between police departments and blacks. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People produced a list of 76 unarmed people of color who have died in police custody since 1999. Maybe Michael Brown is easy to dislike, and maybe the 12-year-old boy in Cleveland was extremely foolish, but it's more difficult to claim that all 76 killings were justified. Or to claim that racial disparities in sentencing, or the amazing proportion of African-American men who are under control of the justice system, are all due to individual irresponsibility.

This restiveness gave rise to a series of protests throughout the fall of 2014 and into the winter, including one December 9 at Coe College, where I teach. Police response in different communities has varied, from charm offensives to bemusement to circling the wagons. The NYPD publicly asked Mayor Bill DeBlasio to stay away from officers' funerals after remarks by DeBlasio--whose wife is black and son is dark-skinned--upon the Eric Garner verdict that they considered insulting (Ruud). I certainly understand the inclination to react defensively: As a college professor, I sometimes take personally stories of student loan debt or excessive classroom ideology. But this is entirely the wrong reaction. We need effective policing, because no matter how successful we are at creating a common life there will always be some crime from which society needs protection. Policing, though, remains effective if and only if the police are seen as serving the whole community. If African-Americans perceive that the police are not there to serve and protect them, how can we live together? If white Americans rely for protection from blacks on aggressive policing--or, heaven help us, vigilantes like the delusional George Zimmerman--common life is impossible.

The same day of the Coe student protests brought the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on "enhanced interrogation" of terror suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency in the middle years of the last decade. The report--based on an extensive review of CIA records--details what most of us already knew, at least vaguely: that American agents practiced a variety of psychological torture techniques at secret prisons in countries like Poland and Romania. The program's defenders--including former Vice President Dick Cheney and current CIA director John Brennan--claim valuable intelligence was gained from these practices ("Cheney Defends," Baker and Mazzetti), albeit details of the benefits aren't forthcoming and the report itself debunks some of those claims. More than 20 percent of these prisoners were found to have no links to terrorism at all, and many others were not connected to 9/11, which ought to give people pause before arguing what "they" did to us justified whatever our agents did to "them."

Remarkably, national Republicans have closed ranks around the program, to the extent of refusing even to participate in the preparation of the report. This is too bad. President Obama, a Democrat, while anti-waterboarding, has hardly been out front on the issue. But the most eloquent, moving contribution to this debate came from U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), who knows a thing or two about torture from his long years in Vietnamese prisons:

Sen McCain, swiped from nytimes.com

I have long believed some of these practices amounted to torture, as a reasonable person would define it, especially, but not only the practice of waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture. Its use was shameful and unnecessary; and, contrary to assertions made by some of its defenders and as the Committee's report makes clear, it produced little useful intelligence to help us track down the perpetrators of 9/11 or prevent new attacks and atrocities.

I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored. (McCain; see also Rosenthal)

Outgoing U.S. Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) has also been forcefully articulate.

The debate on torture tends to conflate two distinct aspects of the issue: effectiveness (was this the best way of getting good information?) and morality (were these torture techniques good or evil?). The CIA itself had concluded as long ago as 1989 that the techniques were not very useful, and there has been an impressive pile of evidence to that effect. But even if some usable intelligence was obtained, should the U.S. have tortured? From early settlers looking to build a "city on a hill" to international leadership on human rights since the 1970s, the United States of America has always had a moral component to it. If we treat people in our custody cruelly, if we use the actions of terrorists as the standard by which to judge our own actions, we are nothing more than any other country, except for being more powerful. If right makes might, the CIA actions have made us less powerful as well as less exemplary. (Now I'm conflating, aren't I?) I'm reminded of a pivotal moment in the play "A Man for All Seasons" by Robert Bolt about Sir Thomas More, the 16th century English chancellor who defied King Henry VIII:

ROPER. So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE. Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

 ROPER. I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE.  Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down--and you're just the man to do it--d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake. (p. 66)

Paul Scofield (left) as Sir Thomas More; swiped from theguardian.com

Finally, and less violently, Congress and the President agreed on a continuing resolution to keep the government (excepting the Department of Homeland Security, due to controversy over Obama's executive order on immigration) open through September. This is good, because we need the national government, at least for some things, but some of the riders needed to pass the resolution were obscene. Some were out-and-out giveaways to the well-connected: weaker regulation of financial services, environmental reporting exemptions for agribusiness, a travel promotion program for Las Vegas (cf. Pear). If anyone wants to make the unfortunate case that the government in Washington is about the powerful helping themselves at the expense of ordinary people, this budget deal provides plenty of grist for their mill.

How to respond to all this, to defend the notion of a common life? Well, maybe after seven paragraphs of lamentation I feel my work here is done. Beyond that, have the widespread protests any value? I argue they do. As a middle-class white American male, I am chagrined to admit that much of what I've described above has been done on my behalf. So, like it or not, I own these messes, so it behooves me to cry out against them: "Not in my name!" [The only time I've ever brought up something political in a church service was back in the bad old days of the Northern Irish troubles, to complain about a particularly egregious action by Protestant militants. Not that Catholics didn't have egregious militants of their own, but as a Protestant I felt more responsible for Protestant violence.]

 

Protest at Coe (from Coe College Facebook page)

So, protest is not a bad first step. But it doesn't repair the breach in our common life. What then is step two?

EARLIER POSTS:
"Are We All Ferguson?," 19 August 2014
"Race Matters, Damn It," 16 April 2013

SOURCES

Peter Baker and Mark Mazzetti, "Brennan Draws on Bond With Obama in Backing C.I.A.," New York Times, 15 December 2014, A1

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts (New York: Random House, 1962)

"Cheney Defends CIA Interrogation Techniques, Calls Senate Report 'Deeply Flawed,'" FOX News, 11 December 2014, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/12/11/cheney-defends-cia-interrogation-techniques-calls-senate-report-flawed/

John S. McCain, "Sen. McCain's Full Statement on the CIA Torture Report," USA Today, 9 December 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/09/john-mccain-statement-cia-terror-report/20144015/

Robert Pear, "In Final Spending Bill, Salty Food and Belching Cows Are Winners," New York Times, 15 December 2014, A1, A15

Andrew Rosenthal, "John McCain: The Anti-Cheney on Torture," Taking Note, 16 December 2014, http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/john-mccain-the-anti-cheney-on-torture/

Candice Ruud, "NYPD Union Asks Mayor de Blasio Not to Attend Officers' Funerals," Newsday, 12 December 2014, http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/nypd-union-asks-nyc-mayor-bill-de-blasio-not-to-attend-fallen-officers-funerals-1.9709927

Obstacles to gentle gentrification

Can the MedQuarter...

...and New Wellington attract needed investment without pricing out current residents?

The week-long series of reports on gentrification by the excellent public radio program "Marketplace" makes at least three things abundantly clear: [a] gentrification is occurring all over the country; [b] gentrification rarely if ever occurs without clear winners and losers, not to mention a lot of bad feelings; and [c] the reputation of gentrification is so broadly negative that the word itself carries a negative connotation. (It's what the rhetoric scholar S.I. Hayakawa called a "snarl word.")

Yet I maintain that the future of America, particularly urban America, requires gentrification. We need a little gentrification, right this very minute. Granted, it must be done right. It must be done gently. But it must be done.

Gentrification means the resettlement of the middle class in urban areas. It means the undoing of two generations of moving to suburbs ever farther away from the city center, leaving urban areas filled with working class and poor people, with fading economic prospects and crumbling infrastructure, and with historic connections slashed apart by interstate highways and commercial "stroads." Gentrification is essential because:

1. Society cannot afford to maintain urban sprawl. A spread out population requires a lot of roads, pipes and other infrastructure that look great when they're new, but costs more to maintain than most state and local governments can afford. To be fiscally sustainable, metropolitan areas need to contract, an urgency reinforced by the impact of all that driving on the environment, public health and energy supplies.
2. Urban areas need investment. You can't eat character, and you can't eat history. Middle class people and businesses bring badly-needed investments into communities that have for a long time suffered a lack of jobs, crime and struggling schools.
3. We must hang together, or we shall hang separately. This quote, attributed to Benjamin Franklin during the U.S. War of Independence, applies to the various challenges of the 21st century. America can't face those challenges if Americans are variously huddled in enclaves based on similarity of race and class.

Urban gentrification is particularly urgent in our metropolitan areas that are physically large, like Atlanta, Los Angeles and Phoenix; and those centered on older industrial cities like Cleveland and Detroit. But to some degree it's needed everywhere, even in smaller cities like Cedar Rapids. Just because we're neither as physically large nor as populous as Atlanta doesn't mean we can afford to keep spreading out. The keys to the future of Cedar Rapids lie in our core neighborhoods and our downtown, not with the super-suburb that will supposedly be created by the extension of Highway 100.

Gentle gentrification means infusing urban neighborhoods without pushing out long-time residents. It means adding to the historic character of the neighborhood instead over overturning it. And there are very few examples of gentrification occurring gently--certainly not the Highland Park area of Los Angeles profiled by "Marketplace," or the Mission District of San Francisco, or... you name it. There are a number of reasons why gentrification is so hard to do gently. I hope you will be so impressed by the power of my analysis that you will overlook the fact that I don't have the slightest clue how to address them.

1. There are no effective mechanisms to bring this about. Gently gentrifying a neighborhood requires a great deal of nuance and balance. Economic markets can be good at nuance, but lately supply seems to work in a binary fashion: high-end goods aimed at the well-off, or cheap goods aimed at the not-well-off. You're either Bloomingdale's or Wal-Mart, but not a mix of both, nor anything in between. Government tools, whether incentives or regulations, are of necessity based on uniformity and hence are terrible at nuance.
2. Difference makes us terribly uncomfortable. There are a lot of facets to the recent tragedies involving Eric Garner, Michael Brown and others, but this one theme clearly emerges from the national discussion. Some feel guilty or frustrated with the lingering divisions, a few are proud of being unlike the other. More broadly, people who can afford it are willing to pay a premium to live away from people who can't. A truly diverse neighborhood begins with many points of tension. This is unfortunately exacerbated by...
3. Lack of confidence in our political and economic institutions. Wage growth has not responded to four years of economic growth. It's about the last indicator to respond anyway, but the future of employment is far from certain, and everyone knows that. Public lack of confidence in our public officials could not have been helped by the disgraceful campaign of 2014. I don't have data on local officials, but my hunch is that they're less exempt from this attitude than in previous years. Bottom line: there's widespread feeling that the economic deck is stacked against "us" (whoever "we" are), and that government is only responsive to a faction that isn't us, either.

Gentle gentrification means neighborhood diversity in every possible respect, instead of the "come heres" outbidding and then pushing out the "been heres." It's a tall order, a very tall order indeed, but maybe possible once more people realize that sprawl and enclaves are unaffordable luxuries. Spread the word.

SEE ALSO:
"Issues of Privilege in Walkable Cities," 23 June 2014, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2014/06/issues-of-privilege-in-walkable-cities.html
"The Gentrification Conundrum (II)," 21 March 2014, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gentrification-conundrum-ii.html
"Gentrification in the Mission District," 4 December 2013, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2013/12/gentrification-in-mission-district.html
"Downtown, Where All the Lights Are Bright?," 10 November 2013, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2013/11/downtown-where-all-lights-are-bright.html