 |
 | |
|
||
 |
|
|||||
|
Introduction | About Otis White Columns Cited in the Introduction
Make Your Own Raises We don’t endorse candidates, but there’s a good reason for non-residents to wish another term for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He may show cities everywhere how to do the seemingly impossible: Raise city worker salaries, improve services and, in time, lower taxes. Bloomberg’s secret: productivity. In his negotiations with city workers during his first term, the mayor has made a simple, consistent demand: You can have the raises you create by doing your work faster, better and with less labor. “The mayor has always been very strong in saying that [city] workers should be paid more,” one of Bloomberg’s aides told the New York Times. “We just need to find ways to pay them more. Given the fiscal realities, the only way to do that is focus on productivity.” Example: Bloomberg recently agreed to a 17 percent raise for sanitation workers over the coming four years and three months, the handsomest raise New York has agreed to in years. But the union had to agree to use one-person trucks for some pickups and stretch out other routes so that crews hauled more garbage. “The trick of this contract,” the head of the sanitation workers union told the Times, “was you had to generate your own wage increases.” Bloomberg has offered the same proposition to teachers, police officers and office workers: You can have the savings you create. (It is hoped that, in time, the taxpayers may enjoy some of these savings as well.) “Every deal that we have cut so far has had a productivity component with internal savings,” another Bloomberg aide explained. “The message is clear from the mayor: If you’re willing to come to the table and be flexible and creative and come up with some savings, you can get a terrific deal.” It helps, of course, that Bloomberg knows how to manage large, complex organizations. Before being elected mayor in 2001, he founded and managed a Fortune 500 corporation. As a result, this mayor came to office understanding the power of productivity: It allows companies to offer goods and services at lower prices, while paying higher salaries to employees and generating greater profits for shareholders. But few other mayors grasp the power of productivity or are as determined in demanding it in labor negotiations. Many city officials start out requesting work changes but cave if the unions are willing to settle for lower raises. Not Bloomberg. He wants to give higher raises, but only if the unions help create them through labor savings. Footnote: There are plenty of critics who think that, despite his emphasis on productivity, Bloomberg is settling for too little from the unions. And it’s true that the contracts he has approved haven’t always been paid entirely with savings. But the head of one city budget watchdog group remembers suggesting years ago that city raises should be financed with productivity savings. “People used to look at us like we’re crazy for saying that,” he told the Times. “Now it’s accepted that that’s how it’s going to be.” 11/1/2005 A Business That Operates Like a Government Let’s go over the arguments for privatizing government services: Businesses are more customer-focused, efficient and free of political influence. If that’s so, then somebody needs to tell United Water Services, which operates Atlanta’s water system. Since it took over in 1999, United Water has infuriated customers who complained about its unresponsiveness and lost a ton of money (accumulated debts so far: $47 million). Mayor Shirley Franklin was so concerned about the company’s performance, she ordered several audits. Latest finding: One reason United Water is losing so much money is because it isn’t collecting on overdue accounts. Since 1999, the company has failed to collect $33 million owed to it. Together with what was owed to the city before 1999, the total amount in arrears is $57 million, more than what the company has lost so far. In one 20-month period, the company shut off water to only 15 overdue accounts. Why such indifference to the bottom line? Company officials say the previous mayor, Bill Campbell, leaned on them not to pester the deadbeats. There was, one company official said, a “directive from the city ... not to collect in some circumstances.” He added, “We are very confident now that we have this new administration in place and it has requested we collect from everyone.” The affection isn’t returned. “When we put the heat on, they improve,” Mayor Franklin says. “I’m worried about a company that gets it right now but wasn’t before.” So much for efficiency: United Water is averaging 95 percent collections. When the city ran the system, government officials say, they collected 98 percent. 1/15/2003 Not Bad for Government Work What’s the stereotype of a government job? It’s a position that doesn’t pay well but has an important benefit: Once hired, it’s near impossible to be fired. Turns out, half of that stereotype (near impossible to be fired) is true, at least in Houston. The city of Houston has about 20,000 workers who’ve been on the job at least a year and are, therefore, past their probationary periods. How many of these workers were fired last year for attendance, attitude or just plain incompetence? Amazingly, just 84, according to the Houston Chronicle, which combed the city’s civil service records. And of the 84, only 19 were fired for poor job performance (26 were fired for behavior problems, 20 for not showing up for work and 19 for drug-test violations). People who deal with human resource issues in the private sector are amazed. “That’s phenomenal,” said one labor lawyer. “They either have an amazingly well-performing work force, or they’re not rooting out poor performers.” Almost certainly, it’s the latter. Take the case of the woman who spent 12 years on the city’s payroll, mostly as a 911 operator. Over the years, she amassed 10 written reprimands and 55 days of unpaid suspensions for a laundry-list of infractions (not showing up for work, sleeping on the job, lying to supervisors, insubordination, etc.). Surely she was fired, right? Nope. The cops transferred her to a job in the mayor’s office, where she answered citizen complaints. Only then was she fired for failing to meet “even the minimum threshold proficiency necessary to work unsupervised at her job.” Keep in mind: This was after 12 years of employment. The new mayor, Bill White, admits there’s a problem with a system where employees “can feel their jobs are secure regardless of their performance, except at the extreme.” Footnote: So why aren’t more fired for incompetence? It’s easier to palm off incompetents on another department than to go through the hassles of civil service reviews. Also, says the Chronicle, in such a second-guessing environment “many managers may be afraid of claims of harassment or discrimination.” 3/1/2004 The ‘Go-To Guys’ There’s a riveting corruption trial underway in Philadelphia, in which several members of Mayor John Street’s administration are accused of financial misdeeds. (The mayor himself is not charged with any crimes.) The amounts involved aren’t particularly large, but thanks to evidence introduced at the trial, the case has given us some new insights into how penny-ante corruption works in city halls. The trial revolves around a lawyer named Ronald White who died last year. White was, unfortunately, a familiar type in big-city government circles: a political insider who lived off his connections. As the Wall Street Journal explained in a recent article, White (who held no public office) was allowed by the former city finance director to have a say in who was given a shot at municipal bond deals and even allowed access to confidential city documents. Why? Because “Ron was a friend of the administration, and it was understood that if he was proposing someone who had the qualifications, that they should be included,” the finance director testified in court. (Not surprisingly, White got to be a friend of the administration by being one of the mayor’s top fund-raisers.) As one investment banker who did business with White said after the scandal broke, in big cities “99.9 percent of the time, there is a go-to guy” like Ron White at city hall. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the mid-1990s, the municipal securities industry tried cleaning its own house, by forbidding bond underwriters from making campaign contributions to elected officials who could influence bond work. Later, the industry extended its ban on contributions to consultants (presumably including people like Ronald White). But it hasn’t worked, and as the Journal noted, “traditions of cronyism and petty influence are alive and well” in city halls. Why? First, the influence peddlers have gotten smarter. White found lots of ways around the ban on consultants’ contributions. (In one instance, a client cut his firm in on legal work involving another city, so it wouldn’t look like he was being paid for his Philadelphia connections — which, of course, he was.) The larger reason: The opportunities for influence peddling are so vast. As the Journal pointed out, 80 percent of the $400 billion in municipal bonds issued each year involve negotiated deals with underwriters, as opposed to simply accepting the lowest bidder. And it’s in these “negotiations” that middlemen like Ronald White thrive. 4/1/2005 Palo Loco Looking to build a commercial building, a new house or just add a room on an old house? Then don’t go to Palo Alto, Calif., in the Silicon Valley. A new city auditor’s report pointed out what almost everybody there already knows: It’s a nightmare to build anything in this college town (home of Stanford University). How bad is it? It took more than seven months and eight separate hearings for a telecom firm to get permission to convert a warehouse into an Internet switching facility and more than a year and six hearings for an auto dealership to expand its showroom. “Palo Alto spends too much time on process and not enough on substance,” the auditor’s report said. “The process can be redundant, uncoordinated and wasteful.” Tell us something we don’t know, say developers. “It’s the disconnect, it’s the inconsistencies about what to do,” said one architect. He cited one couple who wanted to build a house with a porch on the second floor. Midway through the process, the city staff changed the rules about second-floor porches. No hearings, no notice. “[The clients] got so discouraged, they just stopped the process,” he said. “They just quit.” What’s the problem in Palo Alto? The residents are too smart for their own good. As the San Jose Mercury News explained, Palo Alto “values intellectual debate and the idea that everyone should have a chance — or many chances — to have his or her own say.” Case in point: The “individual review” process, which gives neighbors the chance to sound off on any house that’s two stories or more and can tie up simple projects for months. But the city government’s own processes are just as Byzantine and time-consuming. A builder can be steered into any of 15 different building review processes, the city auditor noted, each with its own mysterious appeal procedures. 10/15/2003 Rudy’s Legacy Time magazine named him its “Person of the Year,” New Yorkers will likely consider him their city’s greatest mayor ever, and the keenest memories will be of Rudolph Giuliani in front of microphones, the destroyed World Trade Center at his back. But what did Giuliani do as mayor that made him so great? Vincent J. Cannato argues in a New York Times article that Giuliani saved New York by narrowing its focus, “by making the public’s expectations for city government more realistic.” Before him, New York mayors acted like junior presidents, assuming responsibility for residents’ social needs. Giuliani focused instead on making public spaces safer, more attractive and orderly. “He believed that if people could see an improvement in the physical condition of the city, if they felt safer, if public order was restored on the streets and subways, then New York could once again prosper,” Cannato writes. “Sure enough,” he adds, “as crime declined and the city’s civic tone improved, New York soon regained its confidence.” 1/1/2002 What Works with the Homeless Homelessness is a destroyer of urban areas. If your city’s sidewalks are filled with sleeping men, drug abusers, the mumbling mentally ill and aggressive panhandlers, it’s in big trouble. Tourists won’t come, conventions will steer clear, downtown businesses will decamp, and residents won’t put up with the smells, sights and hassles; they’ll move to the suburbs. Cities know this and have tried two general approaches: coddling and criminalizing. Neither works. So, is there anything that does work, that actually moves homeless people into safe, clean environments and eventually to productive society? Yes, and the pioneer for this middle way is Philadelphia. As much as any big city, national experts say, Philly has solved its chronic homelessness problems. In the mid-1990s, it had 4,500 people living on its streets. Today, there are about 130. How did Philadelphia perform this minor miracle? By doing three hard things: It built enough supportive housing units to take care of its homeless population (supportive housing has services on demand for drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and other problems), created a central intake authority to assess and place homeless people into appropriate programs (and, importantly, track their progress), and launched an innovative outreach program to persuade — but not compel — the homeless to leave the streets. The outreach program may be Philadelphia’s greatest innovation. The city has 20 workers on the street around the clock, looking for homeless people. Some are welfare workers, others are police officers with special training. If a regular officer sees a homeless person sprawled on the sidewalk, he can call the outreach unit and within 20 minutes, a worker will be there to question the person and talk about life on the inside. What does this cost? Philadelphia spends $60 million a year on homeless services. While that’s not cheap, others spend more and get much less. San Francisco, for instance, spends $104 million a year on direct services and has one of the worst homeless problems in the country. Footnote: There are two additional keys to Philadelphia’s success, says Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has studied efforts to deal with homelessness around the country: Philly targeted the hardest cases, not just the easy successes, and stayed committed. That’s important because it took about four years to see dramatic improvements. “People have to realize a problem like this doesn’t go away in 12 months,” Culhane said, “and it won’t go away at all unless you have a real commitment by the city and the public. You have to keep your eye on the prize.” 7/1/2004 Sorry, We Can’t Afford You One of the great epiphanies in the civic life of many homeowners comes the day they realize that they aren’t financial assets to their community, but financial liabilities. That is, they consume more in government services (schools, police protection, roads, parks and so on) than they contribute in taxes. Homeowners are hardly alone in their ignorance. A surprising number of elected officials don’t know that when they approve a new subdivision, they’re creating a drain on the tax base. That’s why Jeffrey Dorfman has been so important to the fast-growing suburbs near Atlanta. A professor at the University of Georgia, Dorfman studies local tax bases and tells officials when they’re in danger of saying yes to too many money-draining uses (residential) and not balancing them with enough tax-base enhancing uses (industrial, retail and office). Thanks to his work, elected officials are smartening up. “Five or 10 years ago, if you went and talked to a bunch of county commissioners, you could have asked them, ’If you could take 200 acres of farmland and put 200 houses on it, would that be good for their county?’ ” Dorfman said. “All of them would have said it would be good.” In fact, unbalanced growth is not good, and Dorfman has the numbers to prove it. He estimates that homeowners pay about 70 percent of the costs of services they receive, while industrial and commercial developments pay much in taxes than they consume in services. For proof that Dorfman’s message is sinking in, visit Atlanta’s distant suburb of Paulding County, which has exploded with growth in recent years. (Since the 2000 census, the county has grown by 12 percent.) Alas, the growth is overwhelmingly residential, but the county commission is fully alert to the danger and is scrambling to bring in industrial and commercial uses. “We know the [tax base] bomb is ticking, and we have to head it off,” said the commission chair. How unbalanced is Paulding’s tax base? Seventy-one percent of the county’s property tax base is residential and only 12 percent is industrial or commercial. Compare that to Fulton County, where the city of Atlanta is located. Fifty-three percent of Fulton’s tax base is residential and 39 percent is industrial or commercial. 12/15/2004 Let’s Hold Hands This just in: The most densely populated metropolitan area in the country is ... Los Angeles? Really, it is. What’s more, nos. 2 and 3 are also in spacious California. If this seems hard to believe it’s because no place is more thoroughly identified with urban sprawl than L.A.. But something happened there, beginning in the early 1980s: The L.A. area grew very little physically while adding millions more people, shoehorning them into houses perched on tiny lots all across the region. Result: There are now an average of 7,068 people per square mile in the L.A. metro area, a quarter more on average than in the New York area. There are more surprises in the Census Bureau’s statistics on density, the Washington Post reported recently: 10 of the 15 most densely populated metro areas are in the West — and all of the top three. (Besides L.A., they’re San Francisco with 7,004 people per square mile and San Jose with 5,914. New York is fourth, with 5,309.) “If you want elbow room,” one demographer told the Post, “move to Atlanta or Charlotte or the countrified suburbs of Washington. You probably aren’t going to get it in the West. There, if you and your neighbor lean out of your windows, you can hold hands.” How can this be? Because, unlike most places in the East, western cities face serious physical restraints: mountains, deserts and, most critically, a lack of water, so there’s a physical limit on sprawl. L.A. started facing these limitations in the 1980s and that’s when density levels began climbing there. This doesn’t mean that L.A. looks like Manhattan; it is still a remarkably far-flung, low-rise place. What it means is there are now houses squeezed into spaces that, 20 years ago, no one would have imagined a house could fit on. The Brookings Institution calls it “dense sprawl.” Footnote: L.A.’s density levels have climbed dramatically since 1950, from less than 5,000 people per square mile to more than 7,000. What happened in other places in the same period? In the Washington, D.C., area, density levels declined from more than 7,000 people per square mile to 3,400, and in the Atlanta area from just under 5,000 to 1,783. 8/15/2005 The Welcome Mat Is Not Out There’s a mystery in the rise of urban housing prices. Since the 1970s the cost of housing has risen much faster than economics can explain. That is, we assume that the cost of a new house equals the price of land, construction and builder’s profit. But in the past three decades or so, it’s clear that there’s a fourth element that’s pushing up housing costs. What could it be? You guessed it, it’s the government. First, a short course in economics. Prices rise for all kinds of crazy reasons, from sudden scarcities in raw materials to bizarre fads (think Beanie Babies). But over time, competition moderates these swings. How? Because if something surges in price, others will rush in to supply it — and reap the high profits, at least temporarily. This economic model works in everything from laptop computers to blue jeans. Prices go up, suppliers come in, prices go down. Everything, that is, but urban housing. As a recent paper by three economists, Edward L. Glaeser and Raven E. Saks of Harvard and Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania, explained, housing used to follow the normal economic model. “Even in the most expensive metropolitan areas,” they wrote, “[the cost of the] structure appears to have represented almost all of the cost of housing in 1970 and earlier years.” But by 2000, they continued, “there were 27 metropolitan areas in which structure [costs] could account for no more than 60 percent of total house value.” (You can find the paper by clicking here.) Something new was pushing up the cost of housing — something that the usual economic counterweight (more builders rushing in to take advantage of high prices) could not overcome. Was it a spike in construction costs? No, building costs have declined slightly over the period. A surge in population in some cities? Well, that could temporarily run up housing prices, but fast-growing cities attract builders, so supply and demand should catch up at some point. Here’s a clue: We’re not building nearly as many new houses as we were in the past. In the 1950s, 40 percent of houses in large metro areas were 10 years old or newer. By 2000, only 14 percent were — and in high-cost places like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles the percentage was much lower. So what’s the answer? Government restrictions on new construction. Simply put, cities aren’t granting as many building permits or making as many zoning changes as the housing market demands. Why? The authors look at various explanations (restrictive court rulings, changes in housing quality, perhaps even a decline in builders’ ability to bribe local officials) but the one that seems most plausible: Neighborhood associations are demanding that governments restrict new housing. And why would they do that? The authors don’t speculate, but it could be as simple as a desire by existing homeowners to make sure their housing values keep rising. Whatever the reason, the paper is an important insight into urban sprawl. Sprawl isn’t the work merely of grasping suburbs. Cities, too, have had a hand in pushing people outward by not permitting enough housing construction to keep prices affordable. 9/1/2005 Don’t Mess With Taxes The property tax is the most unpopular tax in the U.S., polls show. But it’s also the best way to finance local governments. Here’s why: It links what cities have the greatest power over (land use) to their own financing base. Do a good job of land use and property values rise. If property values rise, government revenues increase. If revenues increase enough, governments can offer more services and even cut the tax rate. Everybody wins. Alas, most homeowners don’t see it that way, and this had led to numerous attempts to curb property tax increases, mostly with disastrous effects. Good example: Michigan’s Proposal A, passed in the early 1990s, which forbade governments from increasing homeowner assessments by more than the rate of inflation or 5 percent a year, whichever was less. What about places where property values were skyrocketing? Local tax assessors could track those valuations, but as long as the homeowner stayed put, it wasn’t reflected in his tax bill. Sell the house, though, and the new homeowner would be assessed on the full value, which could result in a tax bill thousands of dollars greater than the previous owner was paying. It has taken awhile, but this system of punishing new homeowners is starting to cause big problems. First, there’s the discontent of newcomers, who realize they’re paying more than the old-timers next door. (The average homeowner in Michigan now pays about 78 percent of he would if he’d just moved in, according to a state research organization. This gap is widening over time.) Second, there’s the “pop-up” tax (the tax on the true value of the house), which hammers newcomers right after they move in, dramatically pushing up their escrow payments. Finally, there are the trapped old-timers, many of them senior citizens who’d like to sell their homes and move to smaller houses or condos but can’t. “People want to downsize, but their property taxes are as high or higher on smaller houses,” a Detroit-area real estate executive said. So how to fix this mess? One state representative has an idea: Make it an even bigger mess by extending the assessment cap to anyone living in the same community for three years. Footnote: So whose lousy idea was Proposal A? It was championed by then-Gov. John Engler but lobbied for by the Michigan Association of Realtors. Today, some real estate executives realize they blew it. “I had my doubts then,” said one. “But now I’m sure it was a mistake.” 8/1/2004 It’s the Policies, Stupid Build two identical houses, one in Dallas, the other in San Jose, Calif. Put in three bedrooms, a two-car garage, nice kitchens and 2,200 square feet of living space. The one in Dallas will sell for under $200,000, the one in San Jose for over $660,000. Why? The San Jose Mercury News asked that question recently, and it came up with several reasons. Labor is more expensive in San Jose. And the impact fees developers pay are more expensive, about $30,000 in San Jose vs. about $5,000 in Dallas. Profits are higher for San Jose developers (nearly $100,000 or about 15 percent vs. $9,900 or 5 percent in Dallas) because the approval process is longer and more uncertain, meaning there’s greater risk in developing. But the main reason housing is so much higher is because land costs so much more there ($232,000 for a 2,400-square-foot lot on which to shoehorn the house vs. $29,000 for a spacious 6,000-square-foot lot in Dallas ). And for that, blame 30 years of anti-growth policies, the newspaper says, from urban growth boundaries to California’s disastrous Proposition 13 of the 1970s, which decimated the property tax on homes. Result: Cities won’t approve the building of much new housing. “New housing doesn’t bring in as much in taxes and fees for a city as it costs the city to provide police, fire and other services, unlike commercial development, which generates sales tax revenue for the city,” the newspaper says. One upshot is that in the late 1990s the Bay Area (including San Francisco and Oakland) built one house for every six new jobs, making the competition for new housing fierce — and propelling the cost of housing into the stratosphere. 8/15/2002 ‘Two Fat Kids Fighting’ How unseemly has the competition for tax base gotten among cities? So unseemly that the mayor of Gilbert, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, said of one episode that it looked to him like “two fat kids fighting over a single piece of chocolate cake.” And consider this: Gilbert was one of the fat kids. Cities everywhere do this, of course — try to lure or annex developments that promise a boost in the tax base — but it seems to have gotten out of hand in the Phoenix area lately, as cities offer big incentives to Wal-Marts and strip malls to come inside their jurisdiction and bring their sales tax revenues. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, for one, thinks it ought to stop, and he has a way of dampening the competition, by municipalities agreeing to share revenues. “The city that gets the retailer gets the overhead for police [and] fire, and then the rest of the money is split 50-50 or per capita,” he proposes. Some mayors agree. “I think [the tax-sharing idea] needs to be explored more,” said the mayor of Chandler, the other “fat kid” in the dispute. “The need to do this and play down the competition is critical. It’s getting to the point where these border battles threaten to undermine business.” But the mayor of Gilbert is skeptical. “The question I ask is, with [whom] and under what circumstance do you share? It’s way more difficult than it looks,” he said. Footnote: So what were the fat kids fighting over? A pair of auto dealerships. In the end, they agree to allow one dealership to be built in Gilbert, the other in Chandler. 9/1/2004 Shakeup in San Fran The most important moment in San Francisco’s recent history didn’t last much longer than that, John King says. It was the 15-second Loma Prieta earthquake on Oct. 17, 1989. And only now, 15 years later, can we fully appreciate how much the earthquake changed the city — and, surprisingly, how much it changed things for the better, says King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Of course, the earthquake itself was a terrifying and terrible event. Twelve people died in San Francisco; across the bay in Oakland another 42 died when a single freeway collapsed. But ultimately, says King, the earthquake had a good effect: “Loma Prieta shattered the status quo,” including the political stalemate between developers who wanted to build big things and neighborhood activists committed to stopping anything big. Suddenly, with two freeways damaged (the disliked Central and loathed Embarcadero freeways), San Francisco was faced with decisions it couldn’t evade. Build back the freeways or tear them down? If you tore them down, what should be done with the land nearby? And how would these changes, particularly along the waterfront, affect the entire city? In the years to come, says King, the city made nearly all the right decisions. It is replacing the Century Freeway with a tree-lined boulevard, which King calls “a roadway designed to improve rather than tear apart neighborhood life — and the first of its kind built in urban America in 50 years.” But the critical decision was to demolish the Embarcadero, which had blocked the city from its waterfront for half a century, and create a master plan for the area. Sure enough, once the freeway was down, the liberated waterfront sprouted new developments, the most obvious of which is a baseball park for the Giants. But the genius, says King, lay in the plan itself, which balanced commerce with public access. In every case, the city allowed good developments to go forward but demanded something in return for the public: a waterfront walkway, a plaza or some other open space. And it isn’t just the waterfront that has benefited. Once citizens grasped that big needed not be brutish and that there could be something in new development for them, the forces of creative redevelopment were unleashed. Result: The Union Square retail district is expanding, museums are investing in bold designs, and the lovely but neglected area around city hall has been renovated. “And the most stunning change lies ahead,” King writes. “A city that fought high-rises for decades will now see a residential neighborhood of towers rising in an area near the Bay Bridge once slashed apart by freeway ramps.” 11/1/2004 Waiting for a Train For a couple of decades at least, city planners have understood the critical link between public transit and land use. And they’ve also understood that the best land use for transit is the kind that allows lots of people to walk to train and subway stations. Makes sense. Once people get behind the wheel of a car, many would just as soon drive to work as stop, park and wait for a train. So why has it taken so long for cities to produce such transit-oriented developments, given this abundance of knowledge? Charles Smith, a writer who specializes in housing and urban design issues, tackled this question recently in a long article in the San Francisco Chronicle. His conclusions: Local governments have undermined themselves by their inability to work together, but a greater problem has been a failure of imagination. Simply put, we have problems thinking outside the traditional suburban box, which separates housing from commerce and keeps densities low. Which is odd, Smith says, because lots of people love neighborhoods with mixed uses and medium or high densities, from Paris’ 16th arrondissement to San Francisco’s Noe Valley; they just can’t imagine themselves living like that. Why? Says one urban planner who is helping design transit-oriented developments in the Bay Area, it’s because “the term ’density’ ends up being a somewhat misunderstood measure, because of perceptions of what is regarded as ’high density.’ ” In truth, the planner goes on, most transit developments fit nicely into existing neighborhoods by increasing density levels as you move from existing houses toward the transit stop. Translation: If you noticed the changes in density at all, they’d seem appropriate. But that’s not the only thing that has held back transit-oriented developments. Transit systems don’t work particularly well with city governments — or vice versa — even they’re committed to the same goal. Smith notes that one Oakland transit development took a decade of planning and the assembling of 30 different public and private funding sources before it could break ground. “Given this maze of hurdles,” he adds, “the wonder isn’t that it’s taken so long for alternatives to suburban sprawl to arise, but that any have arisen at all.” 8/15/2004 What’s Needed for Transit In a fascinating article that’s floating around the Internet (to view it, click here), writer Daniel Sweeny traces the history of transportation revolutions, from the taming of horses to the rise of the automobile. Along the way, Sweeny lays down some conditions that new modes of travel must meet in order to be considered revolutionary. One is that they must change more than a way of travel, they must change the way people live, work and interact with the world around them. And that, Sweeny says, is the problem with today’s public transit systems. Unlike the streetcars and subways of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modern light rail systems haven’t changed the structure of their cities, Sweeny writes. “”And the reason they have not is that they have been imposed upon established communities rather than spearheading the formation of new residential and commercial developments,” he says. “... They are simply seen as solutions to a small set of problems such as traffic congestion or air pollution, and not as agents for changing the very nature of housing, lifestyle, leisure and the markets for manufactured goods — in a word, everyday life.” In fact, Sweeny says, it’s almost a rule that such government-designed transportation systems “are neither self-sustaining nor endowed with their own growth dynamics.” The sole exception, he adds, was the federal interstate highway system, which he points out was promoted by powerful business interests (car makers and homebuilders mostly) and not “the result of some government edict.” So where does this leave public transit today? If Sweeny’s right, in need of a serious dose of capitalism. If transit is to work, it must attract the profit-making ingenuity of real estate developers, shop owners, restaurateurs, large corporate employers, the news media, entertainment establishments, bar owners and cultural venues — the institutions, in other words, that shape cities. Are there any signs of this? A few faint ones — some apartment developers and employers are showing greater interest in being near transit stations in highly congested cities like Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles. But mostly these scattered developments point up what’s lacking: the sudden, widespread realization among businesses that they can make more money by orienting themselves to transit stations than by stringing their stores, offices and apartment complexes along the interstate highway. And that, Daniel Sweeny might say, is the revolution that’s awaiting transit. 5/1/2005 OK, Then, How About a Yugo for Everybody? You’ve probably heard someone say, in a debate over rail transit, that these systems are so expensive and poorly patronized, it’d be cheaper to give every passenger a free car instead. Humorist P.J. O’Rourke made that claim recently in a Wall Street Journal column. O’Rourke’s target: Minneapolis’ new $700 million light-rail line, which he said was so extravagant, the city “could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for [every] commuter at about the same price.” But is that right? One reader ran the numbers. Saying that he recognized O’Rourke was trying to be funny (although other, more serious writers have made similar claims), Janek Kozlowski suggested taking O’Rourke’s offer at face value. Would taxpayers have been better served by giving every one of Minneapolis’ 15,500 transit riders a BMW SUV? Well, said Kozlowski. leases for that many BMWs would cost $44 million a year, with leasers paying another $2,800 a year in gas, maintenance and so on. But, of course, that gets you only a car in the driveway. To get to work, Kozlowski said, the displaced commuters would have to drive on a highway. Highways cost about $20.6 million per mile to build, with interchanges averaging $100 million apiece. To replace the Minneapolis rail line, then, figure 12 miles of new freeway and two interchanges, which comes out to $440 million, not including annual maintenance, he said. But that’s not all. The commuters need a place to park their Bimmers when they get to work. If all 15,500 could park on cheap surface lots, the lots would cost someone (businesses, the city) another $31 million to build. That’s bad, but worse is the impact on the city treasury, since parking lots generate a fraction of the tax revenues of a commercial building ($3 a year per square foot vs., conservatively, $50 for office space). Results of turning over nearly 2 million square feet of downtown land to surface parking: The city would lose $91 million a year in revenues. So how do the two options compare when all the costs are taken into consideration? Assume that the BMWs, freeway and parking lots would last 50 years each (as rail lines do, on average). Assume, too, that you could amortize their capital costs over that period. Then add in the operating costs for the BMWs and maintenance for the freeway and parking lots (and keep in mind that fares provide nearly $10 million of the $13 million it costs to run Minneapolis’ rail line each year). Finally figure everything at present-day costs (not including inflation). Ka-ching: Transit costs taxpayers a little more than $17 million a year. And what the Bimmers, highway and parking lots? “Taxpayers would have to dish out $166 million per year,” Kozlowski concluded. Footnote: So who is Janek Kozlowski? He’s a military officer and engineer with a master’s in business administration, who managed the engineering for all ground-force logistics for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 4/15/2005 The New Power Structure Forty years ago in most metro areas there were small groups of business leaders who were involved in nearly every major civic project, from building airports and universities to designating where interstate highways ought to go. The name some gave to these civic leaders was “the power structure.” In the years since, these homegrown leaders have mostly faded away. Now, though, it’s possible to see a successor to the power structure in a set of organizations that, like the business leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, seems to be involved in every major civic undertaking. Best example: the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. The Atlanta Chamber is largely responsible for two new regional bodies, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, which controls transportation funding in the Atlanta area, and a similar body for water projects. Latest chamber cause: changing the way the state allocates transportation spending. Specifically, the chamber has identified 17 transportation bottlenecks that it says endanger the region’s economy. It wants the state to change the way it identifies and funds high-priority projects. This is a political minefield, involving billions of dollars and a jungle of interests, but because of the chamber’s success in other areas, many observers think it’ll win this one too. Says one, “They don’t take many initiatives on ... and they’ve been very successful in limiting their focus to things that can be important to quality of life.” The head of the Georgia Conservancy, an environmental organization, agrees, adding that the chamber’s power is that it doesn’t just complain. It comes with well-researched answers. “My view is that what the chamber is doing is really important,” he said. “Non-governmental entities in the transportation debate are going to have to bring solutions to the table.” 9/1/2002 The Right Stuff In early February, a performing-arts gem opened on the west side of downtown Baltimore. The Hippodrome Theater, a vaudeville house that long ago had been converted into a movie theater before being shuttered in 1990, was reopened as a stunning new venue for Broadway plays. Cost of the renovation: $63 million. But forget about the theater itself. The story behind the theater is much more interesting because it’s an example of how things get done in cities these days. The new Hippodrome is a public-private partnership, but that actually understates things. There are many publics involved in renovating the theater (the state, a sports authority, the city of Baltimore, the county) and many privates (numerous corporate and private donors, as well as Clear Channel Communications, which manages the venue and books the shows). And importantly, the city’s foundations stepped up, including one that contributed $5 million at a critical point in the venue’s long road to opening night. Did we say long? It took 15 years from the decision that the Hippodrome was the right place for Baltimore’s Broadway series until opening night. About 30 people worked tirelessly during this time, but two were critical: a banker and a former legislator, who shook the money trees. (The banker raised the private money, the former legislator sweet-talked the politicians.) Even then it took a lot of luck. The Hippodrome was in a bad part of town, but it was a neighborhood that others had their eyes on as well, including the University of Maryland-Baltimore, which was looking to expand there, and some private developers, who wanted to do mixed-use projects in the area. Each project gave confidence to the others, which was, in turn, a key to unlocking contributions for the Hippodrome. Today, looking back on the decade and a half it took to take the project from idea to reality, volunteers are overwhelmed by their accomplishment. “To sit down and create a strategy and to implement that strategy,” says one, “there’s nothing more satisfying for a person who works in public policy.” Another who was involved tipped his hat to the local foundations: “This is a prescription for a successful project. Baltimore doesn’t have the deep-pocket corporate base to do this by itself, so the fact that the [foundations] were there says an enormous amount.” 3/1/2004 A New Source of Leadership As former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young has noted, corporate leadership of cities is at an all-time low. Reasons: Business consolidations swallowed many of the locally owned banks and newspapers that once called the shots in cities, and globalization has so broadened the horizons of surviving companies that they’ve lost interest in their hometowns. “The world has gotten too complex for the kind of CEO leadership that built this town,” Young said of Atlanta recently. But nature — and power — abhor vacuums, so as CEOs step back from leadership, others are stepping forward. One new group: philanthropists. You can see this in Atlanta, where Bernard Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, is using his fortune to build a gigantic aquarium downtown. The idea, Marcus says, is to create an attraction so compelling that convention-goers will stay an extra day in Atlanta to take it in. Marcus’ former partner at Home Depot, Arthur Blank, used his money to buy the local NFL franchise, the Falcons, promote the arts and serve as chamber of commerce chairman, even though he’s no longer actively in business. An even better example of philanthropy as leadership, though, might be found 35 miles due east of Atlanta in the charming town of Covington. There, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described in a recent article, a local foundation is almost single-handedly turning the town into a showplace for new urbanism. In a big city, the $19 million (in assets) Arnold Fund wouldn’t carry much weight. (The nation’s largest foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle, has more than $26 billion in assets.) But in a town of 13,000, the Arnold Fund is a giant. And it’s a giant with a vision: It wants to preserve the small-town flavor of its hometown, even as Covington is drawn into the Atlanta suburbs, and it sees new urbanism as the way to do that. At every opportunity, then, the Arnold Fund is promoting new-urbanist thinking in Covington, from bringing in planning gurus like Andres Duany and underwriting a local preservation center to actually developing its own new-urbanist subdivision. “We want to create a place that survives us,” explained the foundation’s chairman. And where did the Arnold Fund’s money come from? From the estate of Robert O. and Florence Turner Arnold, who grew up in Covington, made a fortune from their investments and textile mills and died without heirs. The foundation is run by relatives, most of whom have lived in Covington all their lives. Footnote: If you saw Covington, you might find it strangely familiar. That’s because it served as filming locations for two Southern-as-sweet-tea television series, “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “In the Heat of the Night.” 4/1/2005 ‘That Does It!’ Every successful city has somebody like Dede Wilsey, and if it’s lucky it has several of them. Who is Dede Wilsey? A relentless volunteer fund-raiser who’s the person most responsible for the rebuilding of the de Young art museum in San Francisco. Safe to say that Wilsey isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Her stepson published a memoir recently savaging her role in his life. (His stories are untrue, she says.) But she’s clearly intense. “Dede is more dedicated and focused on things she cares about than almost anybody I’ve ever met,” former Mayor Willie Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle. But it takes a tough person to build a great museum or any other major civic undertaking, and Wilsey is that. She’s also determined to leave her mark on San Francisco, and she intends to do it with the new de Young. Background: The old de Young Museum was a classical pile in Golden Gate Park that was severely damaged in the 1989 Bay Area earthquake. But even before it was damaged, the de Young was something of a mess. While it had some decent collections, it also had some bizarre ones. (One exhibit was a two-headed snake in a jar.) When Wilsey got involved in the museum rebuilding effort, she determined two things: The new building would change the way people thought about architecture in San Francisco, and the collection inside would be equally as challenging. There were setbacks along the way, including two failed attempts to get voters to approve public funding for the museum. After the second defeat, she told the Chronicle, “I thought, ’That does it. This is chickens--t. I’m going to get this museum built.’ ” She spread museum plans on the floor of her house, wrote the names of potential donors on pink sticky notes and placed them on various galleries. “Kind of like a Reese Witherspoon movie,” the newspaper noted. Then she started calling the names on the notes. It helped that Wilsey herself was rich (she kicked in $10 million), but she was also terribly persuasive. She describes how she talked one investment firm CEO into giving far more than he intended. “I ratcheted him up,” she told the Chronicle. “I sold him a $5 million gallery.” (Translation: She persuaded him to donate $5 million in order to have his name on the gallery.) In the end, Wilsey raised more than $190 million of the $202 million needed to build the new museum. Will the de Young have the impact she intends on San Francisco? Well, as the new building is opening to the public, it’s being intensely debated. Some hate the modern design; others love it. (To listen to a National Public Radio report on the new museum, click here.) Not that Wilsey worries too much about the criticism. She grew up in Washington, D.C., the daughter of a U.S. diplomat, and said, “I lived in a city where everybody took potshots at everybody else, and I got sort of thick-skinned about it.” Thank goodness for San Francisco, Dede Wilsey brought her thick skin to the world of civic work. 10/15/2005 An Election in the Naked City Some cities have strange elections, but others have elections that are just plain bizarre. Take the New York suburb of Jersey City, N.J. What happened in this fall’s Jersey City mayor’s race? You name it. It happened. Campaign signs were torn down, vicious “push-polls” were launched (this is where people call voters ostensibly to conduct public opinion surveys but actually to spread damaging rumors), and then there were the dead animals. Dead animals? Somebody kept leaving dead animals on the doorsteps of one candidate’s campaign offices. But the most bizarre incident of all was when photographs of one of the candidates appeared on the Internet — naked, on his front porch, apparently inebriated, at 3 a.m. Photographs like these might doom candidates in other, more sensitive places. But not Jersey City. (One longtime political observer there said, “I think it’s pretty much standard for a Jersey City mayoral election.”) The candidate who was photographed on his front porch admitted he was the one in the pictures. His explanation: He’d been to a party and was undressing for bed when he heard a noise outside. He went out to investigate and fell asleep — naked, on his front porch, at 3 a.m. (A neighbor snapped the pictures.) It took a while to name the winner of this close contest, but a winner was named and said the right things. “It’s time to put the backbiting and infighting of the past year in Jersey City and Hudson County behind us,” the new mayor said. “It’s time for all of us to stand together and unite.” Footnote: And who was the winner? The naked guy, of course. 11/15/2004 ‘Let’s Go to the Replay!’ We told you recently about the bizarre politics of South Gate, a suburb of Los Angeles, where in what may be the ultimate example of pork barrel politics, the city raffled off a house. It was an effort to curry favor with voters on the part of the mayor, city treasurer and two council members who were facing a recall election. (People were also offered free garbage pickup, rent subsidies and, in a separate raffle, a free TV.) Didn’t work. The officials were booted from office, but they didn’t go quietly. At her final city council meeting, the mayor slugged a rival council member with what the Los Angeles Times described as “an overhead right.” The standing-room-only crowd in the council chambers erupted in boos and chants of “Arrest the mayor! Arrest the mayor!” (Nearby police officers cited the mayor for misdemeanor battery.) One person noticed that some in the crowd had video cameras. He started yelling, “Let’s go to the replay!” Even in a city as accustomed to political antics as South Gate, the punch in the council chambers shocked observers. Said one off-duty cop, “Unbelievable. Did you see that? She just popped him.” “It’s crazy,” agreed the city’s finance director. “Just when you thought you’d seen it all.” Footnote: Once the recalled city officials were gone, South Gate’s council meetings went from fistfight to love fest. A mayor of a neighboring city sent the new council members bouquets of flowers, and speaker after speaker praised the city’s “new democracy.” “This is our first meeting of a free and honest South Gate,” one state legislator said. “I’ve got to tell you, I feel good.” 2/15/2003 Don’t Play Well With Others There are terrible behavior problems in the Pittsburgh school system: yelling, profanity, threats, name-calling. Unfortunately, it’s happening on the school board. School board meetings have deteriorated so badly that three area foundations announced they are withholding $3.5 million in grants to the school system until the board and Superintendent John Thompson start behaving themselves. Mayor Thomas Murphy is going further, creating a task force of financial experts, corporate executives and college administrators to look into the school system’s finances, educational programs and governance and make recommendations for change. What’s going on? Basically, a majority of board members like to meddle in the system’s administration. Thompson tried to curb the micromanagement and the war commenced. Pittsburgh isn’t the only place with terrible school board politics — Dallas, Miami and suburban Washington, D.C.’s Prince Georges County, Md., have had recent bouts of school board dysfunction. But only in Pittsburgh have funders backed away in dismay. The effect on the school board? In their first meeting after the foundations’ announcement, the superintendent and board were on best behavior — until they retreated into private session. There, according to reporters listening at the door, they began berating each other again. At one point, the board president, Jean Fink, was heard yelling at another board member, “Should I dump this water on your head to get your attention?” Maybe not a bad idea all around. 8/1/2002 Comin’ Through Not long ago, New Yorkers knew how to walk: eyes focused, head down, long strides and fast, fast, fast. But apparently, those basic rules are not being followed by people who visit the city, and longtime New Yorkers are steamed. “People no longer know how to walk on the sidewalk,” complains one TV producer. What’s the problem? According to the New York Times, people are stopping suddenly, causing pedestrian pileups, walking too slowly (natives call these people “meanderthals”), stepping on the heels of those in front and yakking on their cell phones. “Typically I think of a cell phone talker as a guided missile,” said one. But there’s particular bile for what some call “mall walkers,” people who walk two-, three- or four-abreast. “They make me so mad,” said one woman. “When you are around a group of mall walkers, you have to find a way around them.” People who study cities says there’s something to all this kvetching. “I think it is all part of this trend away from being comfortable as a pedestrian,” said one expert. Actually, it could be that New York — particularly Manhattan — is simply more crowded, the Times says. There are 1.5 million residents, mixing with 800,000 commuters and millions of tourists and visiting business people. In 2000, 37 million people visited the city, many of whom picked up their walking habits at shopping malls. 8/1/2002 Order Is Restored These have been anxious times, and many explanations have been offered for our angst: a poor economy, the war in Iraq, government deficits at all levels. But we have a simpler explanation of what’s made us feel bad lately: New York’s pizza slice-subway fare connection had been broken. But cheer up. With a recent subway fare increase, the connection is being restored. The pizza slice-subway fare connection was first noted in 1964, when a reader pointed out to the New York Times that a slice of pizza cost precisely the same as a subway token, and that when one rose in price, the other followed. In 1964, a ride on the IRT cost 15 cents, same for a slice from a sidewalk pizzeria. Over the years, the connection held true. In the mid-1970s, both were 60 cents, a few years later, both were 85 cents, and so on, in lockstep. But as the New Yorker magazine noted, the pizza slice had inched ahead in recent times; most slices cost $1.75 or $2 now while a ride on the IRT lagged at $1.50. “The discrepancy was troubling,” the magazine added, “because it forced New Yorkers to wonder if pizza, like coffee and college, had become a ripoff.” Not to worry. The Metropolitan Transit Authority has raised subway fares to $2, forging again the connection between pizza slices and subway fares and bringing the planets back into alignment. 6/1/2003 Thar She Blows! Some homeowners in Miami are getting the shocks of their lives: Toilets that suddenly erupt with water that shoots two feet in the air — with all the unpleasantness you might imagine. “The sewage wet everything, and it stunk to high heaven,” said one woman who was awakened by a geyser in her bathroom. She looked outside and spotted the culprit: a county crew cleaning out a sewer line with high-pressure hoses. “I threw on a gown, ran outside and yelled at workers until they stopped,” she said. This isn’t one-time problem. “It’s like Russian roulette,” said a water and sewer department official. “We don’t know when, where or why. It just happens.” What’s going on? The crews are cleaning the pipes so they can run a camera along them checking for leaks. The high-pressure cleaning clears out rocks and other sediment, giving the cameras a better angle, but if there’s a blockage in a nearby residential pipe, it can deliver a most unwelcome surprise to homeowners. “The sewage drains by gravity, because the pipes are at an angle,” says the manufacturer of the high-pressure equipment. “If sewage is settled, when the water hose comes by it, it’ll force the stuff back up in the house.” How often does this happen? The county doesn’t know, because most homeowners assume the problem must be with their plumbing and end up replacing perfectly good pipes, rather than complaining to the government. Even so, the county paid $7,500 last year in clean-up costs to residents who figured out real source of their problems and raised a stink about it. 9/15/2003 Trouble Sleeping? Next Time, Catch BART People work hard and party hard in San Francisco, and they deserve a good night’s sleep. Which they’re getting. Unfortunately, many are sleeping on the regional transit system, BART. This is not necessarily a problem — it’s not illegal to sleep on a train — but it becomes a problem after midnight, when the system shuts down. Nearly every evening, dozens of riders sleep past their stations and end up at the last stop on the system, in distant places like Bay Point, Dublin, Fremont and Millbrae, with no way to get home. So what happens when the train reaches the last station? A BART transit officer walks through the cars, waking up people. At Bay Point, the riders have several options, none of them good. They can call a friend, they can catch a cab (fare to Oakland: $60) or they can huddle outside the station and wait until 6 a.m., when the system starts up again. There are no late-night buses at cold and windy Bay Point; there’s not even a convenience store. Most who wake up there are a little tipsy, embarrassed and confused. “The best ones,” said a transit officer, “are the guys who fall asleep and then tell us, the train never went to my station. Well, it didn’t go around it.” 10/1/2003 Last Call in Margaritaville Every city has problems. San Francisco wrestles with its homeless problems, Detroit with housing abandonment, Atlanta with sprawl. Then there’s St. Petersburg, Fla. Its problem: It’s running out of beach bums. Not the touristy kinds, who spend a week baking on the sand, but the real, 365-day beach bums who devote a minimum amount of their time to working and a maximum amount to perching on bar stools. Guys like Jay Crawford, who the St. Petersburg Times held up as one of the last of his breed. Credentials? “He gave up his cell phone, has no job and, most importantly, has lived on the beach long enough to be able to walk into any local bar and have his beer in front of him before he sits down,” the Times says. Still not impressed? Crawford, 58, showed up when a movie was casting extras for a beach bar scene. He was picked instantly. When he asked about wardrobe, the casting director said, “Wear what you have on.” So what makes the Jay Crawfords of St. Petersburg an endangered species? “Habitat destruction mostly,” the Times says. “It’s really not affordable out here anymore,” Crawford explains. “They’re tearing down the cute little houses and putting in condos.” Actually, Crawford is one of the lucky ones. He inherited some money a few years ago and used it to buy a house, but few beach bums can raise that kind of money. One of his friends is so down on his luck that he showed up at Crawford’s house with an unusual request. “He asked if he could sleep underneath my house,” Crawford said. “I said OK, but for one night only. I can’t make a habit of it.” Footnote: It makes good songs for Jimmy Buffett, but living in Margaritaville is no paradise. Crawford has been in and out of drug and alcohol rehab, taken chemotherapy for lung cancer and done a short stretch in jail for marijuana possession. He has also been married three times. The last marriage came undone, he said, over an incident in which he dumped a pitcher of beer on his wife’s head and she ran him down with a car. “I didn’t prosecute,” Crawford said, “because it was kind of half my fault.” 5/15/2004 Just Another Fast-Paced Day in My Multiethnic Ward Thinking about running for the city council in your community? Then you might want to read Los Angeles Council Member Eric Garcetti’s online diary (to view it, click here). If this doesn’t dissuade you, nothing will. It’s not just the dizzying pace that’s so discouraging (according to Garcetti, he’s constantly on the move: “I jump into the passenger seat....” “I rush off the City Hall....” “I run downstairs....” “I race over to the Walt Disney Concert Hall....”) or the slightly claustrophobic nature of his endless meetings or even the fact that he apparently has little time for studying serious issues. And most people can live with the small hypocrisies of public life. (Example: Garcetti says the one of the things he likes most about local government is the public comment sections of council meetings. Then he goes on to describe the oddballs who show up at council meetings, including one “middle-aged woman whose tirades of impassioned non sequiturs might be characterized as ’colorful.’ ... Today she accuses George Bush of stealing her credit card.”) No, it’s Garcetti’s granular pandering that’s so wearying. Granted, he represents a very diverse part of a very diverse city, but does he have to mention the ethnic background of everyone he bumps into? Take his appearance at a routine ribbon-cutting for a grocery. “India Sweets and Spices is a Los Angeles institution,” he writes, “a combination of grocery store, Bollywood DVD center and food counter, but this is its first outpost in Atwater Village. Within a few blocks, there will be Indian, Armenian, British, Italian, Dutch, Cuban, Mexican and Filipino cuisine, a truly global food court.” In case you didn’t get the message, he adds, “As a half-Mexican, half-Jew with an Italian last name, I feel right at home.” He also mentions several times that he drives a hydrogen-powered car, gardens and raises fruit trees (”the pomegranates look particularly promising this year”) and sometimes rides a bicycle to work, at least on official “Bike to Work” days. Occasionally he finds time to reflect at the end of a long, long day. “On the way home, I stop at the Hannam grocery to pick up some bulgogi to cook.... As I drive home, I sense the calm beauty of the dark city. The air smells almost sweet as it blows through my car.” Careful, Council Member Garcetti. It could be a hydrogen leak. 6/1/2004 Column archive by subject and metro area Travis Foster illustration
|
| ||||
Urban Notebook content © 2008, Civic Strategies Inc. Governing.com and Governing content © 2008, Congressional Quarterly Inc. Reproduction without permission prohibited.