Sunday Reading

By John Ballard

[Most of the world doesn't know it, but Hoggers has a secret weapon named Kat. Her name is listed in the sidebar credits but the term "researcher" doesn't come close to what she does. She not only furnishes us with up to the minute links but grabs key quotes that make you want to read each one. In other words she's totally awesome. I guess this is what can be called "letting the Kat out of the bag." My discursive Sunday reading posts often derive from Katnips.]

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Earlier this week Michael Wade linked The War Against Suburbia by Joel Kotkin. Luddite that I am without an e-reader, I printed out the nine-page article, read it, knocked off a snarky comment at Wade's blog and tossed it in the trash. But this morning's NY Times spits out an editorial with this line about the suburbs.

A new study from the Brookings Institution tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs.

Maybe we do have a war against Suburbia. But I don't think it takes the shape that Mr. Kotkin suggests. If I understand correctly his take on Suburbia is that those are the fields where (to use Mrs. Palin's term) real Americans live and grow.

...For the better part of a century, Americans have been voting with their feet, moving inexorably away from the central cities and towards the suburban periphery. Today a solid majority of Americans live in suburbs and exurbs, more than countryside residents and urbanites combined.

� As a result, suburban voters have become the critical determinants of our national politics, culture, and economy. The rise of the Republican majority after 1966 was largely a suburban phenomenon. When Democrats have resurged�as they did under Bill Clinton and again in 2006 and 2008�it was when they came close to splitting the suburban vote.

It is true that suburban growth has been typical of the modern era not only in America but all over the world. The phenomenon we call "development" was no more than a euphemism for shifting from an agrarian to a business economy. Some places do it more successfully than others, but there is no question that urbanization is a global trend. Secondary to a population shift to cities is a mathematical reality that the circumference of a circle is bigger than its center.  Look at any city and notice there is more space in the perimeter than in the middle; hence suburbs are mathematically more populous than inner cities. That is precisely what is describe with a solid majority of Americans live in suburbs and exurbs, more than countryside residents and urbanites combined. His words, not mine. And he is correct. Bigger suburbs are what happens when populations move there from inner cities (where there is not enough space) and from the countryside, from whence the greatest number have arrived.

When I think of the growth of suburbs globally I have a mixture of images from gated communities and manicured estates to the grinding poverty depicted in Slumdog Millionaire. I think of riots in Parisian banlieues. And this week's Haitian tragedy underscores better than any image I can construct the catastrophic consequences of what happens when an agrarian society's economic foundation is taken away. This appeared on Philip Weiss' blog Monday.

As recently as 1949, Haiti had been the third-largest coffee exporter in the world, and the beans had been the main source of the foreign exchange the country needed to develop. Pierre Marcelin gestured out into the surrounding trees as dusk fell, and said: �There are still some coffee bushes out there. But we don�t bother harvesting them anymore.�

The Marcelins offered a comprehensive explanation, with several features. They got quietly but particularly angry when they reached one of their points. �We lost our pigs,� they said, and Milfort and I looked at each other with immediate understanding.
In the early 1980s, African Swine Fever was detected in Haiti, and the United States and other international aid agencies spent $23 million to eradicate nearly 1 million black Creole pigs. But Haitians, and others, still question whether the mass slaughter was necessary. The Haitian black pigs had survived for 500 years and become resistant to disease, and by the time the killing started in 1982 the local pigs had already stopped dying. Critics still argue that the United States was truly only concerned about protecting its own pig industry.

The destruction was devastating to millions of poor rural Haitians. One agronomist estimated the loss at $600 million � in a country where people are lucky to earn a few hundred dollars a year. Compensation was never adequate, and the dictatorship of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier passed little of it along to people like the Marcelins anyway. Creole pigs had been scavengers. The new replacement pigs from Iowa needed special food and medicine, far beyond what people like the Marcelins could afford. They did have a few of the newer pigs up the road � they offered to show us � but they complained the new animals were weak and prone to disease.

Creole pigs had also been a source of savings, which steadily appreciated as the pigs grew. All over the third world, farm animals serve the same function as a store of value. The mass pig slaughter was roughly equivalent to the collapse of American banks in the early 1930s, before federal deposit insurance, which cost many of our grandparents their life savings.

The destruction of the Creole pigs also had reduced coffee production, the Marcelins explained. They had used pig droppings, high in nitrogen, to fertilize their crops. The imported fertilizer they would need today costs 1000 gourds (about $25) a sack, which they cannot afford.

If there is a war against suburbia it is as ephemeral as the war against terror, a shape-changing menace with magical qualities like the sword fight in the branches of bamboo in Crouching Tiger. The thrust of Mr. Kotkin's article is that suburbia is being not simply being neglected by the Obama administration but is in fact the target of aggression. We can almost hear teabaggers hollering in the background as we read this.

Suburbanites may not yet be conscious of the anti-suburban stance of the Obama team, but perhaps they can read the body language. Administration officials have also started handing out $300 million stimulus-funded grants to cities that follow �smart growth principles.� Grants for cities to adopt �sustainability� oriented development will reward those communities with the proper planning orientation. There is precious little that will benefit suburbanites, such as improved roads or investment in other basic infrastructure.

But ultimately it will be sticks and not carrots that planners hope to use to drive de-suburbanization. Perhaps the most significant will be new draconian controls over land use. Administration officials, particularly from the EPA, participated in the drafting of the recent "Moving Cooler� report, which suggested such policies as charging tolls on the Interstate Highway System, charging people to park in front of their homes, and steering some 90 percent of all future development into the most dense portions of already existing urban development.

Of course, such policies have little or no chance of being passed by Congress. Too many representatives come from suburban or rural districts to back policies that would penalize a population that uses automobiles for upwards of 98 percent of their transportation and account for 95 percent of all work trips.

But the president�s cadres may find other ways to impose their agenda. New controls, for example, may be enacted through the courts and regulatory action. There is already precedence for this: As EPA director under Clinton, current climate czar Carole Browner threatened to block federal funds for the Atlanta region due to their lack of compliance with clear air rules.

Such threats will become more commonplace as regulating greenhouse gases fall under administrative scrutiny. As can already be seen in California, regulators can use the threat of climate change as a rationale to stop funding�and permitting�for even well-conceived residential, commercial, or industrial projects construed as likely to generate excess greenhouse gases.

These efforts will be supported by an elaborate coalition of new urbanist and environmental groups. At the same time, a powerful urban land interest, including many close to the Democratic Party, would also support steps that thwart suburban growth and give them a near monopoly on future development over the coming decades.

I am intrigued at how articulate this sounds if I listen through a tea bag. He is only one step away from being a modern Thomas Paine. Did you catch that little climate change dig? Very persuasive. All that is missing is for him to call for government to just get out of the way and let Adam Smith's invisible hand work its magic. As Reagan said, government is not part of the solution, government IS the problem and this was published by the American Enterprise Institute, the gold standard for American conservatism.

But this week's Supreme Court decision (applause line here for free enterprise) grates horribly against this otherwise prescient analysis by Mr. Kotkin in Newsweek.  In a short piece last March with the fascinating headline Anger Could Make Us Stronger (sounds like a Tea Party slogan, doesn't it?) he says...

The notion of a populist outburst raises an archaic vision of soot-covered industrial workers waving placards. Yet populism is far from dead, and represents a force that could shape our political future in unpredictable ways.

People have reasons to be mad, from declining real incomes to mythic levels of greed and excess among the financial elite. Confidence in political and economic institutions remains at low levels, as does belief in the future.

The critical issue facing the new administration is finding useful ways to channel this disenchantment. We know popular anger can also be channeled in unproductive ways. It can serve to further a narrow political agenda�for example, Karl Rove's cynical exploitation of the "culture wars"�or stir up a witch hunt against both real and perceived "threats," as occurred during the McCarthy era. If this were Russia, there would be show trials and executions. We do not and should not do that�but we can still use populist anger to reshape our nation and make it stronger.

In this respect, the Obama administration, criticized justifiably as too radical on some issues, has been far too timid. It has squandered much of the stimulus effort on maintaining fundamentally corrupt, even sociopathic, institutions like AIG or Citigroup. By taking direction from establishmentarians like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, one of the original architects of the Bush financial bailouts, the current administration has seemed as complicit in condoning and even rewarding Wall Street's transgressions as the last one.

Populist rage creates the political support for taking far bolder steps against Wall Street. A good first step would be to allow the TARP-backed giant banks to come under some sort of federal control, or bankruptcy process, effectively wiping out the holdings of the financial malefactors and decimating any hopes for future bonuses. The public could then sell the remaining assets to the many well-run community and regional banks that invest in local businesses as opposed to the arcane paper favored by the Masters of the Universe.

Radical financial reforms represent only part of the opportunity. China is using its stimulus to increase its competitiveness globally. So far, the Obama administration's economic strategy, if it has one, has been selling the public on the chimera that highly subsidized "green jobs" and good intentions will save the economy. It has also rewarded what my old teacher Michael Harrington called "the social-industrial complex," the massively growing education, health and social-service bureaucracy. President Obama needs to spend less time in photo ops at "green" factories and figure out how to drive the transformation of whole industries, like autos, steel, electronics and aerospace.

In this sense, of course, the New Deal�particularly the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps�provides some models. These programs used the unemployed to create new dams, electrical-transmission systems and bridges that boosted the nation's productive power. Critically, such a program would target blue-collar workers�mostly male and heavily minority�hardest hit in the recession. As conservatives rightly note, the New Deal construction projects did not end the Depression, but they did give people purpose and skills as well as hope, while leaving us with a remarkable legacy of productive structures that inspire us with their affirmation of our national destiny.

Sadly, the political operatives running the White House today may prefer to use the popular mood primarily to service their key political constituencies and boost their poll ratings. If they do so, they will have squandered a unique opportunity to implement changes that would benefit both the country and the middle class for decades to come. Public outrage is a terrible thing to waste.

Excuse me.
Did I just read something about using the strong arm of government to exercise more federal intervention?
Public ownership of financial institutions?
What about that Reagan thing about government IS the problem?
And how is the salvation of General Motors and Chrysler importantly different from intervention in financial institutions?
Or FDR's programs, for that matter?

I'm having a fit here of cognitive dissonance. If the economic crisis, together with the health care and insurance reform issue have done nothing else they illustrates how dysfunctional are our politics and our economy have become. For the first time in my lifetime we have a president whose two biggest mistakes were leaving politics to elected representatives and economics to financial institutions. And in both cases we are witnessing train wrecks.

And in both cases the blame is being directed not at the sources of the problems but at the president.

Kotkin's article concludes with this summary.

Ultimately, the war against suburbia reflects a radical new vision of American life which, in the name of community and green values, would reverse the democratizing of the landscape that has characterized much of the past 50 years. It would replace a political economy based on individual aspiration and association in small communities, with a more highly organized, bureaucratic, and hierarchical form of social organization.

In some ways we could say forced densification could augur in a kind of new feudalism, where questions of land ownership and decision making would be shifted away from citizens, neighbors, or markets, and left in the hands of self-appointed �betters.� This seems strange for an administration�and a party�whose raison d��e ostensibly has been to widen opportunities rather than constrict them.

Imagine that. Someone is advancing the notions of organization and control instead of benign neglect that have led first to the Kelo decision and this week's Citizens United blockbuster.

Sorry, folks. We can't have it both ways. Either the government will have to step in and correct problems or the problems will simply grow like cancer, some slow and others aggressive. Which brings me to a final point, that contrary to what Mr. Kotkin would have us believe, I am under the impression that the administration is focused on solving ALL our problems, not just those plaguing the inner cities but suburbia as well. He makes this accurate observation:

The anti-suburban impulse is nothing new. Suburbs have rarely been popular among academics, planners, and the punditry. The suburbanite displeased �the professional planner and the intellectual defender of cosmopolitan culture,� noted sociologist Herbert Gans. The 1960s counterculture expanded this critique, viewing suburbia as one of many �tasteless travesties of mass society,� along with fast and processed food, plastics, and large cars. Suburban life represented the opposite of the cosmopolitan urban scene; one critic termed it �vulgaria.�

Liberals also castigated suburbs as the racist spawn of �white flight.� But more recently, environmental causes�particularly greenhouse gas emissions as well as dire warning about the prospects for �peak oil��now drive much of the argument against suburbanization.

Damn right, Mr. Kotkin. I'm one of those Liberals and I did leave the inner city for suburbia after living there for a decade. (I know about white flight, btw, and I know it's over.) I did so for a variety of reasons but mainly because of access to better schools. I was also pleased and shocked to see how much bang you get for your buck the further you move away from town.  Land is more plentiful, lots are bigger (Did I mention how much bigger the circumference of a circle is than the middle?) and if you move to the right place the lifestyle is like those on TV. I could go on, but I have also encountered first hand a level of ignorance and indifference in suburbia to match anything I experienced in town. I've lived here now for the last thirty years but I remember my life in town as exciting,  enriching and alive. Looking around me I came to the sad conclusion years ago that some people are simply not fit to live in town. That's just as well since there is not enough space anyway.

Leaving all that aside, however, this Brookings report about the growth of poverty in suburbia over the last decade is the real reason for my screed today.

An analysis of the location of poverty in America, particularly in the nation�s 95 largest metro areas in 2000, 2007, and 2008 reveals that:

• 
  By 2008, suburbs were home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Between 2000 and 2008, suburbs in the country�s largest metro areas saw their poor population grow by 25 percent�almost five times faster than primary cities and well ahead of the growth seen in smaller metro areas and non-metropolitan communities. As a result, by 2008 large suburbs were home to 1.5 million more poor than their primary cities and housed almost one-third of the nation�s poor overall.


• Midwestern cities and suburbs experienced by far the largest poverty rate increases over the decade. Led by increasing poverty in auto manufacturing metro areas�like Grand Rapids and Youngstown�Midwestern city and suburban poverty rates climbed 3.0 and 2.2 percentage points, respectively. At the same time, Northeastern metros�led by New York and Worcester� actually saw poverty rates in their primary cities decline, while collectively their suburbs experienced a slight increase.


• In 2008, 91.6 million people�more than 30 percent of the nation�s population�fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. More individuals lived in families with incomes between 100 and 200 percent of poverty line (52.5 million) than below the poverty line (39.1 million) in 2008. Between 2000 and 2008, large suburbs saw the fastest growing low-income populations across community types and the greatest uptick in the share of the population living under 200 percent of poverty.


• Western cities and Florida suburbs were among the first to see the effects of the �Great Recession� translate into significant increases in poverty between 2007 and 2008. Sun Belt metro areas hit hardest by the collapse of the housing market saw significant gains in poverty between 2007 and 2008, with suburban increases clustered in Florida metro areas�like Miami, Tampa, and Palm Bay�and city poverty increases most prevalent in Western metro areas� like Los Angeles, Riverside, and Phoenix. Based on increases in unemployment over the past year, Sun Belt metro areas are also likely to experience the largest increases in poverty in 2009.
  

Over the course of this decade, two economic downturns translated into a significant rise in poverty, nationally and in many of the country�s metropolitan and non-metropolitan communities. Suburbs saw by far the greatest growth in their poor population and by 2008 had become home to the largest share of the nation�s poor. These trends are likely to continue in the wake of the latest downturn, given its toll on traditionally more suburbanized industries and the faster pace of growth in suburban unemployment. This ongoing shift in the geography of American poverty increasingly requires regional scale collaboration by policymakers and social service providers in order to effectively address the needs of a poor population that is increasingly suburban.

There is trouble in paradise, alright. But that trouble did not start with or become worse as the result of national policies. It may be the unintended consequences of national policies (NAFTA, wars abroad not paid for, a failed "war on drugs," the unfettered growth of global free enterprise and commercial investments, and Madoff-like schemes to create wealth out of nothing). But it is more the result of policy neglect and indifference than intervention.

Mr. Kotkin is a very smart analyst. He makes excellent observations. But he is missing the forest for the bamboo branches trees. I would like to understand better why American suburbia has not proved to be the pot at the end of the Reagan rainbow it was thought to be, and why policies of benign neglect that characterized the last decade have worked against the American dream. The Reagan Revolution is over. I have seen the future and it doesn't work.

(And don't anyone bring up that foolishness about a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/ CRA virus started a global financial pandemic. That's in the cherchez la femme column. Adults don't blame others for their own stupid decisions.)

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In other news, I came across this story from yesterday.

Quake Survivor Lived On Beer For 11 Days

11:04am UK, Sunday January 24, 2010
Damien Pearse, Sky News Online

A shop worker buried in the Haiti quake has been pulled alive from the rubble after 11 days - and told how he survived on beer and cookies.
Dozens of onlookers cheered as Wismond Exantus emerged smiling from a deep tunnel drilled by rescuers.

His brother had alerted a Greek rescue team after hearing a voice 20 feet beneath the surface rubble of a hotel grocery shop in the capital Port-au-Prince.
Mr Exantus had initially survived by diving under a desk when the rubble started to fall around him as the quake struck.
The 24-year-old found himself trapped in a tiny space but discovered a few select groceries within arms' reach - beer, biscuits and cola.

Speaking from his hospital bed he said: "I was hungry. But every night I thought about the revelation that I would survive.
"I would eat anything I found. After the quake I didn't know when it was day and when it was night.
"It was God who was tucking me away in his arms. It gave me strength."

The survivor then turned to his family and said: "When you are in a hole I will try to reach out to you, too."
Brother Jean Elit Jean Pierre said Mr Exantus worked as a cashier in the store on the ground floor of the Hotel Napoli.

I couldn't help myself.
My first thought was a similar account from a few years ago that is bitterly, eerily similar. Please forgive me in advance for this inappropriately timed link.

Man urinates his way out of avalanche
By Lester Haines in Bootnotes, 31st January 2005

Hot on the heels of the tremendous news that beer can help fight cancer, we are delighted to report that a Slovak man trapped in his car by an avalanche urinated his way to freedom after working his way through 60 half-litre bottles of beer.

According to Ananova, Richard Kral was off on holiday when the snow swallowed his Audi in the Tatra mountains. Initially, he tried to dig his way out via the car's window, but soon realised that the snow would fill the vehicle long before he could break free.

Mercifully, he had stocked up on essential supplies of alcohol and quickly formulated a cunning plan: "I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I'm glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there."

Rescuers eventually found Kral staggering drunk on a mountain path four days after his ordeal began.

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Speaking of suburbia, my tour of duty in Korea (1966-7) de-provencialized me in a good way. (Is deprovencialize a word? If not, it should be.) I was prepared for being in a foreign country but not for the impact of so many people living together in one place. Essays about suburbia tend to overlook how most of the world's population lives in very cramped quarters. Writers tend to glance at statistics about population density and other metrics of humans per square whatever and move on, never stopping to reflect on what the numbers mean.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I learned in Korea how three people can use a single shovel. Using a rope tied near the scoop end, two stand left and right while the third operates the handle. As the operator jabs the shovel into the ground with his foot, the other two rhythmically jerk the business end of the shovel to toss the load aside. In this way three people can work smoothly together, moving a large pile of dirt without tiring as quickly. Same principle as two people sharing the weight of carrying a single bucket of water. But I digress...

Mr. Kotkin is free to malign close quarters and enjoy the pleasures of his leafy back yard, but I prefer to look at the upside and beneficial offshoots of crowding. (Is it possible that anti-immigrant sentiment derives from fears of overpopulation? Especially if they don't talk English. Just asking....)

A few years ago the Japanese -- efficiency experts they -- figured out that they could keep employees at their desks instead of having them go out for lunch. Business environments could same a lot of lost work time, not to mention wear and tear on the elevators, hence the origins of the bento box, a very efficient way to drop a ready-to-eat lunch at every work station when it is time to eat. Like any other standard, the boxes are uniform, stackable, recyclable and easy to manage. Here is a link to a Times article about how bento boxes are also aesthetically pleasing. By now even people who can't tolerate the thought of ingesting raw fish have seen their cousins, sushi boxes, in the local super market. 

I was reminded of binto boxes by another of Kat's links, Dabbawalas who keep army of businessmen fed to be honoured in parade.
"What's a Dabbawala?"
Glad you asked. They are delivery men.

Each day 5,000 dabbawalas deliver about 200,000 home-cooked meals, mostly to the commercial district of Mumbai. Each meal is packed in a tiffin tin and transported via bicycle, railway and handcart from the customer�s home to his workplace.

The practice was initiated by the British, who did not trust the local cuisine, more than a century ago.

They have one of the lowest error rates by any service industry in the world: only one mistake in every six million deliveries. The feat rests on the use of a colour scheme that indicates which railway stations a tiffin must pass through on its way to a customer.

The method, developed because most dabbawalas are illiterate, has been studied in business schools and admired by entrepreneurs including Sir Richard Branson. For the dabbawalas their inclusion in the Republic Day parade is the highest honour yet.

�Many of us have never stepped outside Maharashtra [the state that Mumbai is in]� Raghunath Medge, the head of the dabbawala union, Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers� Charity Trust and Association. �The parade will be a momentous occasion.�

Perhaps, though, it is President Patil who should be most honoured. The dabbawalas, who earn up to 4,000 rupees (�55) a month, are travelling half-way across the sub-continent to see her.
When the Prince of Wales wanted to meet them in 2003 he had to work around their schedule.

More details at the link, including "For the first time the dabbawalas of Mumbai, a band of delivery men
who have won global renown for distributing the lunches of office
workers with military precision, are to march alongside troops at the
Republic Day celebrations [joining] representatives of the Indian
armed services as they make their way from the presidential palace in
the heart of Delhi... in front
of Pratibha Patil, the Indian President."

Suburbia is so much more desirable than down town areas. I wonder why holiday parades always seem to be down town instead of suburbs. Somebody call Macy's and the Rose Parade people.