The Bull in Full

Alston Ave., housing inspections, and a sad interlude between

Normally when I get "come to council to support _____" e-mails, they're for Monday night full council meetings, not for the Thursday afternoon work sessions.  So in a way, it was doubly odd that I got the "come support" e-mail from two different groups.  The first came from Aidil Collins at Uplift East Durham, who asked us to come support, as she termed it, a "Friendly Alston Ave.".  Now, this wasn't a hard issue for me to support, considering Gary Kueber and I wrote an op-ed for the Herald-Sun about the same issue over a year ago.  Aidil deserves all the credit in the world for doing the hard legwork of rallying people, shaping the message, and meeting with some local groups that had previously expressed support for the project, to form a set of compromise concerns.   All that legwork meant that Aidil could step to the mic yesterday and truthfully say that her proposal represented the consensus of every community group with any standing.  Given the acrimony over the project early, that's quite an accomplishment.

No vote took place, however, and what exactly will happen when a vote does come before the council was the subject of much discussion between Mark Ahrendsen (who also deserves enormous credit for his work here) and the council.  Yours truly added to the confusion when he stepped to the mic to ask for clarification on what I thought was the status of the law at this point -- that unless the council acted, NCDOT's plan would move forward.  I was immediately corrected by several members of council, and only got a full explanation after the meeting from Ahrendsen.  Aside from the fact that one should get ones facts straight before stepping up to speak at a council work session, here's what I learned from all of the discussion:

The Council doesn't have any real direct authority over NCDOT's projects.  The power they do have comes from the Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO), in this case, the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro MPO (DCHCMPO), which consists of members from the three town councils and the two county boards of commissioners, which do have some approval power over the projects.  And, as Ahrendsen noted yesterday, the other MPO members will generally defer to the council in whose jurisdiction the project falls.  However, the process isn't even that simple (is it ever?).  Also, note that I've already been significantly wrong on the facts here once, so take what follows with a grain of salt.

Like the council, most of the MPO's actual power comes in more of an advisory role.  Between our local DOT Board rep (Ken Spaulding) and the MPO, the community gets a very strong voice in what happens inside DOT and what projects are put forward on each three year Transportation Improvement Plan.  However, the only real actual voting power the MPO has is to accept or reject the entire TIP, which boils down to veto power for every state-funded road project in the two counties over the next three years.  As Ahrendsen phrased it to reject it at that point is a bit like holding a gun to your own head and threatening to shoot yourself.  Sure, it's a potent threat in the worst of situations, but it's not one you really want to ever have to use.

Still, here's the good news: the community consensus that Aidil has forged has pushed the Mayor to become an advocate for the design changes.  In this way, she has managed to turn the Mayor from one of the more problematic obstacles to actual progress on Alston to a valuable (if not terribly enthusiastic) ally.  To digress for a moment, I'm not sure I've ever seen an issue highlight the Mayor's strengths and weaknesses more fully.  His apparent selective hearing, lack of imagination when it comes to alternatives to suburban-style development, unwillingness to appear out of step with the dominant power structure, and a generalized aloofness were all on full display as we tried to get anything at all to change with regards to the NCDOT design.  At the same time, once the community came to consensus, it wasn't inhis nature to blow against the wind.  And at that point, there's not many other city leaders I'd rather have stepping into a room full of NCDOT staffers to say, "come on, just do the right thing," and getting the right deal out of it.  At this point, moreso than at any point previously, I have some hope that we'll get something less than a disaster on Alston.

- - -

The other e-mail I received about Thursday's work session came from the Durham CAN housing team, which I'd sort of met with once, and if I weren't so bogged down with other community and job related stuff, I'd probably be making more of an effort to attend.  CAN was calling for support for their proposal to allow city inspectors to inspect any house without complaint, and to shorten the time period the city must wait before taking action from a year to six months.

When I saw this come across the the wire, it caused me a good bit of consternation.  I've in the past spent a fair bit of electronic ink on the PAC2 list supporting a rental registration program in Durham.  In theory, I'm firmly behind the CAN proposal -- a city government ought to take the action needed to enforce its minimum housing code. 

However, as I pointed out in an e-mail to Durham CAN staff, this isn't a generic city government we're working with.  Gary has spent the past two years repeatedly documenting cases where the actions of the city's Neighborhood Improvement Services department have repeatedly not only contributed to the demolition of some beautiful historic properties that were nowhere near beyond repair, but have also had a demonstratively negative impact on efforts to maintain or revitalize many of Durham's older neighborhoods.  The staff responded by noting that Durham's Latino residents who live in substandard housing are particularly vulnerable to predatory landlords, and that better action from the city is needed to address the problem.

Because CAN is fundamentally about working together, coming to consensus, and supporting each others aims for social change, I showed up in support of the proposal.  Still, if we're going to keep this action from becoming an authorization for NIS to knock down buildings whenever its heart desires, there's a lot of work to be done. 

And sadly, we didn't have to wait long for an example of just what can happen under the current NIS administration. 

No sooner had Council passed the CAN-backed resolution, than an elderly retired nurse wheeled herself to the microphone to read a statement.  I won't get all the details right, but essentially, here's the story:

She owned three houses in the Southside area which she had long rented out as rental properties.  NIS had cited her for $32,000 in code violations which she claimed she could not pay.  Her plea to council was that she wanted to sell her properties to the city for rehabilitation, or for help in selling the building to someone who would preserve it.  Now, I read Endangered Durham enough to know that this can be a stalling tactic, but there were moments when the owner was pleading to not have one of her houses in particular demolished, by whatever way could be managed, even if she didn't profit from it (other than to remove the civil penalties). 

Oddly enough, what she was proposing wasn't all that out of line with some of the alternatives to just the "repair or demolish" orders that Gary has talked about so much.  Unfortunately, the city's attorney had to step in and point out that in the mediation of code disputes, the council had delegated its authority to the city housing appeals board, so in essence, short of passing substantial new law, the  council's hands were tied.

But this is hardly an excuse.  Last year, we were promised a demolition and code enforcement "summit," that would open the lines of communication between the city and neighbors, so that we could all work towards a better solution.  Unfortunately, with NIS running it, the entire affair turned into little more than a series of stern lectures from various staff members on how enlightened the process was, and how any quibble with it must be due to a failure by community members to understand it.  Afterwards, we were all given time to "comment," in the usual two-minute, haphazard format, with no responses and no discussion.  It was, quite simply, both ridiculous and insulting. 

Patrick Baker then promised a continuing dialog with the community, but unless there have been discussions I haven't heard about, the issue has effectively died.  (I suspect the impending city elections may have had something to do with this, but I don't know that for certain.)  Still, outside that particular process, the continual response from the leadership at NIS has been one of zero interest in alternative solutions, with what appears to be an underlying assumption that all community members expressing concern must be troublemakers who are best locked out.

This, combined with the general stammering of NIS's top staff members at the meeting Thursday left me with the indelible perception of a rudderless department more interested in territoriality and insularity than in actually trying to, you know, help improve neighborhoods.  My first impulses are always to give people the benefit of the doubt, particularly with the number of exceptional staff members I've met inside Durham city government over the years.  However, when a departments policies are both poorly implemented in their current form and badly limited by outdated ordinances, yet the department's top staff members show little to no interest in either improving services or drafting better code, it's time to start looking at that favorite buzzword of all city critics -- accountability.
 

State of Confusion

At work, running low on sleep, and not having blogged in a while, this post at Barry's got me thinking:

By the way, Wichita KS is in Sedgewick County, not Wichita County, which can be confusing, at the least.

For all the talk about merging city and county governments here (which I continue to think is a ridiculous idea -- hopefully more on that soon in my primary election post), one reason it actually could work is that the city of Durham, NC is actually in Durham County, NC.  Oddly enough, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule in NC.  This is an attempt to come up with all of the oddly mismatched city/county names in the state.  I'm sure I'm going to miss an awful lot. 

I've listed the cities and the counties they're in, along with the counties and their county seats.

Asheville -- Buncombe County
Asheboro -- Randolph County
Ashe County -- Jefferson

Alexander -- Buncombe County
Alexander County -- Taylorsville

Graham -- Alamance County
Graham County -- Robbinsville

Greensboro -- Guilford County
Greenville -- Pitt County
Greene County -- Snow Hill
Pittsboro -- Chatham County

Beaufort -- Carteret County
Beaufort County -- Washington
Washington County -- Plymouth

Henderson, NC -- Vance County
Hendersonville, NC -- Henderson County

Franklin, NC -- Macon County
Franklin County -- Louisburg

Cherokee, NC -- Swain County
Cherokee County -- Murphy

Jacksonville, NC -- Onslow County
Jackson County -- Sylva

Waynesville, NC -- Haywood County
Wayne County -- Goldsboro

Yanceyville, NC -- Caswell County
Yancey County -- Burnsville

What have I missed?

Speeding, broken windows, panhandling, and all that

Busy day today, but I can't let this topic go without commenting.  Kevin today tag-teams off of one of Barry's posts earlier this week about the hesitancy of the Durham Police Department in going after speeders.  I meant to get to Barry's post earlier, but I can't let yet another one on this topic go by without commenting on it.

My master's thesis was on crime in Durham and various location-based strategies for addressing crime, and what their results are.  In the process, I did a pretty extensive review on the criminology literature surrounding order maintenance policing, better known as the "broken windows" theory, based on an article of the same name that James Q. Wilson and William Kelling wrote in the Atlantic in 1980.  Back in early '06, when I was in the thick of finishing the thing, we got into quite the conversation on the PAC2 mailing list about the panhandling ban, and whether it represented an effective "broken windows"-style approach to crime prevention.  I thought it was not, and put forward, oddly enough, residential speeding as something that the police should crack down on instead.

This message came in the middle of a conversation, so it refers to e-mails written by Chris Sevick and Ken Gasch previously.  I think it's still pretty apparent what's going on, and this post laid out my case for how broken windows applies to Durham better than I think I could write now.  And since I don't have a whole lot of time, I'll just quote the thing in its entirety below the fold, edited slightly for formatting:

STAC releases transit plan

I've been sitting on the idea for a blog post for a couple of months now that I've never gotten a chance to write, because I never feel like I have the whole story.  But Bruce Siceloff at the N&O just broke the story of the Special Transportation Advisory Committee for Durham, Wake, and Orange counties releasing its recommendations for how to go forward with transit in the Triangle, and based on one article, it looks like a home run.

The original TTA plan centered around the plans and developments under the Clinton administration, under which cities around the country got seed money to plan new public transportation infrastructure, with the understanding that any reasonably good proposal would have a good shot at funding.  These funds emphasized getting the first lines built, which always cost the most, so that future lines could grow off of those.  Like in so many cases, however, the Bush administration had other ideas, and gutted funds for the plans, and made up for the loss by increasing the bar on the projected operating efficiency from day one.  That moved the bar from where TTA had been aiming to a level it couldn't reach, particularly with all sorts of idiotic nonsense from Norfolk-Southern and the North Carolina Railroad about right of way uses, as well as intransigence from senior officials at Duke wanting to protect the bucolic charm of the Erwin-Fulton intersection.  The result, of course, was that TTA had to give up on federal funds.

The new plan takes a much different tack.  It still looks for federal funds, but instead of counting on them for over 60% of the cost, the way TTA originally did, it calls for local funding sources, in the form of a half cent special sales tax increase and a $10 increase in the car registration fee (the latter of which is sure to make heads explode at the John Locke Foundation).  This would pay half the cost of a massive $2 billion plan, with the remainder coming in the form of 25% from the state and 25% from the feds. 

And for that matter, the plan looks much better to begin with.

Kyoto and "The Death of Environmentalism"

The Indy from last Thursday runs an article, commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, by Bill McKibben on his memories the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change 10 years ago.   I certainly enjoye the piece, but I found it impossible ot read it without my view of it being colored by the rather provocative piece put out by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in 2004 with the rather incendiary title, the Death of Environmentalism.  I was drawn to this book after hering Nordhaus speak at the AAG conference earlier this year, in a panel with a bunch of political ecologists.  Unlike what the name might imply, this isn't some know-nothing piece of right wing triumphalism.  Schellenberger and Nordhaus have spent their careers in the environmental movement, and the piece focuses on their frustrations with the leading environmental organizations' political strategies, the way they conceive of their collective mission, and their inability to learn from the failures of the past two decades.  The article ranges over a number of topics, but the one thing they hold up as emblematic of the failure of contemporary environmentalism is its response to global warning, and in particular, Kyoto.

Interestingly enough, while McKibben's piece forms the keynote of the Indy/AAN treatment, they also ran responses from other "American notables," among them -- you guessed it-- Nordhaus and Shellenberger.  Rather than try to sum up all of their arguments about Kyoto in DoE and their new book, Break Through, I'll just quote their two paragraph summary from the Indy:

Kyoto failed for reasons having nothing to do with the absence of U.S. involvement. The developed nations that ratified the agreement saw their emissions go up, not down, by 4 percent between 2000 and 2004. Even if Kyoto was perfectly implemented, the emissions reduced would be one-seventh the amount of the emissions China alone will produce over the next three decades.

Kyoto was based on the wrong models of past efforts to regulate pollution. A better model is the creation of the European Union after World War II through shared investments in coal and steel. A post-Kyoto effort should bring down the price of clean energy as quickly as possible through massive public-private investments into technology innovation and infrastructure. Together the U.S., Europe and Japan should invest $100 billion-$200 billion per year, which could stimulate $60 billion-$120 billion in private capital. This commitment would bring down the price of clean energy while strengthening economic ties between these countries. To achieve this politically, the next president must sell the agenda as the only way to free ourselves from oil while establishing American leadership and creating jobs in the fast-growing and high-tech clean-energy markets.

I confess that I haven't had a chance to get to Break Through yet, but I can't recommend Death of Environmentalism strongly enough to anyone who cares about how the environmental movement organizes itself to face global warming.  The actual text is just a little under 30 pages of nice large type, and is very readable, engaging, and absent any dense academic language.  Their central thoughts on the issue -- that a global warming strategy can't be focused on saving the environment alone, but must focus on how our solution to reducing carbon emissions must also focus on how to have a strong economy that creates good jobs -- has greatly changed the way I think about environmental problems.

And with any luck, I'll be getting to one such example tomorrow... or soon now...

A Response to Friedman's "Generation Q"

As an Iraq war opponent and a geographer, I've already got two things against Thomas Friedman, whose errors include his support for the war and continual suggestion of giving it "six more months," along with his rather deranged book on economic geography, The World Is Flat.  His latest op-ed in the New York Times, entitled "Generation Q," isn't on the same level of the previous ones, but it's pretty maddening in its own right. 

Friedman's argument is effectively that the current generation of 20-somethings (and I have to say that while I'm a border case in regard to the big official generation definitions, I tend to identify with the younger set than the "Gen X" crowd I'm on the tail end of) do not lack for idealism, activism, or altruism, but that we're way too quiet about it.  The radix of Friedman's article lies here:

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That's what twentysomethings are for -- to light a fire under the country. But they can't e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won't cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Honestly, while someone had brought the op-ed to my attention, I basically blew it off.  There's nothing in Friedman's piece that's particularly new, although he hits a vaguely more interesting rhetorical tone than the standard, "these kids today don't care about anything!  (with their hair and their clothes...)"  My least charitable response would be that there are elements of the boomer generation who honestly thought they were going to change the world and bring about the Age of Aquarius and all that, and they're both bitter that it didn't happen, and indignant that the current generation isn't following their lead.  (And in Friedman's case, he might also be avoiding the fact that he was a vocal cheerleader for what my generation is most outraged about, the Iraq war.)

A much better response (hat tip to AS) comes from American Prospect columnist Courtney Martin:

We are not apathetic. What we are, and perhaps this is what Friedman was picking up on, is totally and completely overwhelmed. One of the most critical questions of our time is one of attention. In a 24-7 news climate, it is all but impossible to emotionally engage all of the stories and issues you are taking in, and then act on them in some pragmatic way. So instead, young people become paralyzed. (It seems that all of us are a bit paralyzed. After all, what are Friedman's peers really doing? And aren't his peers the ones with the most straightforward kind of power?)

My generation tries to create lives that seem to match our values, but beyond that it's hard to locate a place to put our outrage. We aren't satisfied with point-and-click activism, as Friedman suggests, but we don't see other options. Many of us have protested, but we -- by and large -- felt like we were imitating an earlier generation, playing dress-up in our parents' old hippie clothes. I marched against the war and my president called it a focus group. The worst part was that I did feel inert while doing it. In the 21st century, a bunch of people marching down the street, complimenting one another on their original slogans and pretty protest signs, feels like self-flagellation, not real and true social change.

When Friedman was young and people were taking to the streets, there were a handful of issues to focus on and a few solid sources of news to pay attention to. Now there is a staggering amount of both. If I read the news today with my heart wide open and my mind engaged, I will be crushed. Do I address the injustices in Sudan, Iraq, Burma, Pakistan, the Bronx? Do I call an official, write a letter, respond to a MoveOn.org request? None of it promises to be effective, and it certainly won't pacify my outrage.

Few of the responses I've seen to this sort of charge have ever hit the nail on the head as squarely as this column.  Interestingly, this touches on a topic that came up over dinner with my mother at Thai Cafe the other night.  At one point I brought up a particularly irritating bumper sticker, which Friedman, perhaps unintentionally, paraphrases in his piece:

. . . if they are not spitting mad, well, then they're just not paying attention.

Righteous outrage is, to be honest, quite a lot of fun.  There's an emotional rush to it that can be rather intoxicating.  But, in the end, it tends to turn itself into something more about narcissism and less about
actually doing something about the source of the outrage, which is why most modern protests, demonstrations, and marches seem to be more about a glorified self-expression and experientialism than any manner of pragmatic change. 

However much the current state of the world might call for it, one simply cannot live ones life in a state of perpetual outrage.  (Or rather, those that do seem to end up ineffective and self-absorbed.)  And while it is true that in my lifetime I will face challenges and events beyond the imagination of my grandparents, to somehow believe that these problems require a greater challenge than those before is nothing but either unhinged hyperventilation or a cynical attempt to abuse fear and outrage towards some specific end.  The current administration may be the most recent and most egregious violators of this, but the left is not without fault here.  I recall from childhood growing up and reading the endless direct mailings from hard working, well-meaning groups like the Sierra Club and Handgun Control telling how some recent bill or executive order could cause untold gloom and doom.  After a while, however true those mailings were, one gets numb.  This sort of perpetual outrage doesn't lead to change -- it leads to an overwhelming desire to lose oneself in a video game, where repeated mashing of buttons will eventually solve the problem.  Or worse, it leads to the election of a president who says he can cut taxes and raise spending, and that everything will be alright, because it's "morning in America." 

As Martin's piece points out, Friedman shouldn't look at the quiet activism of his "Generation Q" as some sort of failing; rather he should be encouraged that they have rejected the self-centered politics of the past thirty years, and started focusing on what they might be able to do.  My way of coping has been to turn almost all of my focus as an activist towards the very local, and after nearly a decade of casting about, it seems that yes, one of the best ways I can contribute is by writing and blogging.

Solving the mess in Iraq and dealing with global warming will not be easy.  But then again, as Leslie Marmon Silko noted (and I'm so fond of quoting), it has never been easy.

The geographic critique of RTP-style public investment and economic development

In the past couple of weeks, I got into a bit of an online spat with my neighbor Chris Sevick in the comments section of Kevin's blog, particularly following this post and this post.  I have to confess, this is not the first time Chris and I have crossed words in an online forum, and I should probably know better by now.  Anyway, Chris has the tendency to jump into online discussions, and try to challenge the dominant conversational paradigm by bringing what he terms "philosophical" objections.  My problem with this is that, while I think Chris is a rather clever guy in person, I frequently find these objections (which I would term more theoretical than philosophical) rather unchallenging and reductive. 

But rather than get even deeper into the weeds there, the whole affair reminded me of something i've been meaning to link to for about six months.  (I haven't before because I keep meaning to write a detailed response and it keeps not happening.  So I'm giving up and just writing a brief thing here.)  I found it linked from, of all places, Richard Florida's website.  Florida is the academic who coined the term "creative class," and who has subsequently dubbed RTP as one of the top places supporting a "creative economy."  On the other hand, I do not know much about Brian Holmes, other than that despite his rather anglican name he writes significantly in French, and that his articles clearly show some serious chops in radical and critical geography.  (Given that critical geography was not my focus at UNC, it's possible a good number of my colleagues would recognize him.)  I don't know if he's a professor or just one of those "pro bono philosophers," but I found his article called "Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle" incredibly fascinating, enlightening, and rather disturbing, both from a practical, theoretical perspective, and from a more personal perspective.  A warning, though, for those about to click on it: it gets into some pretty hard core abstract theoretical geography.  Definitely not for the faint of heart.  (And for those reading further, I'm about to go off on some minor wonkery of my own...)