Lodging in Public

In which Tommi Mecca goes off righteously.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 06:35:00 +0000

Queer housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca gets eloquently angry over the class gap in understandings of public space at the ostensibly welcoming corner of Market and Castro.

"Stop Pollution: Eat Garbage," and other reasons not to pine for the 1970s

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:13:00 +0000

Just ran across this depressing collection of 1970s kids' artwork about the future from the Smithsonian (via The Rumpus).

It reminds me of the little-remembered Kids for Ecology magazine, which was almost as depressing. Kids for Ecology explained environmental devastation and activism, in that order, to very young children. Weirdly enough, it was one of my very favorite things at ages approximately 5 and 6.

Here's an essay that I wrote mostly a couple of years ago about Kids for Ecology and reasons why the nasty twenty-first century still isn't as bad as us Gen-X kids were led to fear. It's longish, so I've placed most of it on a side page here.

---

There were advantages to being a child in the American 1970s.

We went to public schools that had money. We had art and music and language study programs. Most schools had functioning roofs and windows. Most of their drinking fountains had running water. One of the elementary schools I attended had television cameras.

We grew up in a culture that valued children and the childlike: rainbows-and-unicorns decor in primary colors, and popular songs like "Yellow Submarine," and important simple questions that, in those days of clumsy spin control, had the power to freeze bureaucrats in mid-polysyllable. Better yet, a fad in educational theory suggested young children should be treated almost like people.

Except it wasn't all happy flowers.

People my age -- in our forties now -- were warned so fiercely about the future that we'll go on being pleasantly surprised by real life until it gets seriously bad.

We were warned especially against nuclear war and the repeatable horrors of World War II and environmental disaster. Especially environmental disaster. Maybe environmental problems were easier to explain to young kids without digging directly into the problem of evil. Anyway what we seemed to hear most about was Pollution.

Recently, going through old family stuff, I found a reminder of the way those grim warnings came to us in chewable kid-sized portions.

Ever heard of Kids for Ecology magazine? (more...)

How would you raise $75 a month?

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:44:00 +0000

Suppose you had no job, no credentials, no benefits, no savings. Where would you find seventy-five dollars and how would you pay for it?

A HUD bill now before the House calls for a new rule fixing minimum rents in all subsidized housing at $69.45 per month. President Obama's budget goes slightly worse, calling for $75 a month. I guess that's because the President can't look too soft on destitution or someone might accuse him of being a Democrat. Or just because the gov't. needs every widow's mite it can collect. After all, there are contributors' earmarks to fund.

Oh, but anybody can scrounge $75 in a month, right?

Well, maybe, but how?

We're talking about a minimum charge that would be socked against tenants with *zero income*. That is, people who aren't getting welfare or disability or unemployment or wages or *anything*. People who might therefore, incidentally, get uncomfortable questions about how they did manage to raise the money at all.

- The last I heard, which was several years back, illegal loan sharks tended to charge 100% interest for a one-month loan. Some legal "payday lenders" are much worse.

- Earlier this month, scrap copper was fetching about $2.20 to $2.65 a pound, average price $2.40. That is, with a decent bounce in prices and not too much gouging, you could raise a month's "minimum rent" by finding and turning in 30 pounds of copper. That sounds difficult to do legally. (By the way, this train of thought led to a fascinating blog on the sociology and criminology of metal theft.)

- Handworker? Take a look at this discussion on Etsy about setting prices for knitted items. Some sellers say they try to price by the time an item takes, at $15 to $25 per hour. Sounds nice, but others say they can't find buyers at those prices so they multiply the cost of materials by three or four. Handbag crocheting specialist Shelly Johnson, who mentions on her catalog page that she is chronically ill, wrote this at 4:17 a.m. last November 16:

"Some of the things I crochet take 20-30 hours. I can't even pay myself $5hr for those. And then I see people in Eastern Europe price things at a level that woudn't even cover my costs. It feels like I can't win. So I use the material cost multiple and hope to gradually raise my prices, at least on the high-end intricate work."

- Blogger? That's a joke. Over the past year, ads on this blog have earned a grand total of four dollars and fourteen cents.

Seventy-five dollars isn't nothing. I'm just saying.

"Telegraph Road" and second chances at the Cottonwood Mall

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:36:00 +0000

Remember Dire Straits' "Telegraph Road"? "...the other travelers came walking down the track/and they never went further, they never went back..."

So, OK, Knopfler's guitar is the best part of that song. The lyrics are all but cribbed from Springsteen, and they give a problematically unproblematic account of Anglophone westward expansion, and a few of the couplets go clunk in that way only Dylan can ever pull off -- but "Telegraph Road" does nail a certain inland American nostalgia dead-on. Especially with that opening on a quiet high note. It's the sound of a whistling industrial fan keeping people awake in a gritty downtown on a summer night...

Among other places, the travelers who didn't go back stopped in Holladay, Utah. Holladay's General Plan gets cited in a HUD feature on second chances for dead shopping malls. The HUD folks link to, and were probably inspired by, this NY Times article about dead malls being turned into small-scale old-fashioned neighborhoods. Design expert Ellen Dunham-Jones told the paper, “The idea is to demolish a dead mall and build the downtown area a suburb never had."

Some people do remain nostalgic for Holladay's former Cottonwood Mall. (Who knew, it even has its own page on a site called DeadMalls.com.) Apparently the mall building is mostly gone already: it was demolished to build a mainly-retail thing called a "lifestyle center" as of mid-2008, but then of course the financial bottom fell out.

The General Plan section on the Cottonwood Mall site, which seems to be Appendix F, doesn't explain what's going on at the site now -- it only explains what new development ought to happen. So I'm guessing the HUD people chose to mention Appendix F for its poetry rather than its specificity.

There really is poetry in Appendix F. Lyrical, yearning praise for a smaller-scaled America with real town centers. The writer of Appendix F has been dreaming of Jimmy Stewart. She (I want to say it's a "she") has been waking up in tears for a Main Street that never was.

In this part especially (transcript lightly proofed):

"Within a few years after the first settlers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley a short-cut of sorts was established from the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon to Salt Lake City. A portion of that route, County Road (Highland Drive), crossed the bed of Cottonwood Creek where it fanned out creating a natural stream crossing for horse and wagons. Here the route intersected the main east-west route from Murray to the settlement of Holladay on the banks of Spring Creek. This intersection became a natural business center... the first general store, called the Big Cottonwood Cooperative, opened in 1869 and was built by an association headed by LDS Church bishop David Brinton. Mr. Brinton purchased most of the surrounding land from the original settlers and established a blacksmith shop on the southeast corner..."

Development proceeded from there. Draining of swamplands in the 1950s. Then the mall's grand opening in 1962. A theater in 1967 "and a traffic light was approved at the north entrance". Remodel in the early '80s. But in the '90s, competition from "new freeway oriented mall developments across the Salt Lake Valley," and decline. In the undertow of which, our anonymous writer concludes that "Smaller, human scale places are desired and vast oceans of asphalt are no longer enticing or justified." There's talk of "a pedestrian oriented streetscape," and "public gathering places," and even restoration of Cottonwood Creek. "The new neighborhood should include street-front shopping, offices, and the opportunity for walking along tree lined streets, through gardens, plazas, and along a creekside trail." Also "cottages and single family homes that face tree-lined streets and greens on the perimeter."

Eh, probably Cottonwood Creek wasn't any great paradise even before Bishop Brinton set up his forge by the swamp. I don't suppose small-town neighbors ever live fully wonderful lives even in towns that have satisfyingly central Main Streets with multistory stone office blocks and affordable apartments with ground-floor retail and all the Jane Jacobs etceteras. People do leave towns like that, and never go back, for good and sufficient reasons.

But it's something to see official encouragement behind the Appendix F author's real hunger for towns with neighborly centers. Could be leading somewhere good.

Or maybe my taste in official dreams is as soft-centered as my taste in 1980s guitar.

Fine, I'll be harder-edged in the next post, OK?

Seeking work still not a crime per Supremes

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 04:33:00 +0000

Looks like the Supremes have declined to botch up that good Redondo Beach day laborers case from the Ninth Circuit. It's still not a crime to seek employment in public. Bob Egelko has the analysis. Including a mention of some uncharacteristically narrow-minded carping from the Ninth Circuit's ordinarily learned, impartial and very relaxed Alex Kozinski.

A good site on ranked-choice voting

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:41:00 +0000

Last weekend's rant in this space about the not-so-confusingness-after-all of ranked-choice voting brought in a note from programmer and activist Chris Jerdonek of SFBetterElections.com. Nice collection of coverage and defenses of ranked-choice voting.

Thing about ranked-choice voting: when powerful people argue loudly that something is too complicated for you to worry your pretty head about it, it's worth knowing why.

SF unpublic public spaces (shoes, please...)

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 05:46:00 +0000

Nice to see the SF Chronicle honchos defending public access to ostensibly public spaces. They've been editorially backing architecture critic John King in his insistence on noticing certain zoning-mandated public areas of high-rise buildings. Areas whose managers are not deeply eager to have them noticed, let alone, used. King is, for example, irritated that the newer Federal Building's "Skygarden" terrace -- reportedly nice -- is reached through a security screening to the extent of shoe removal.

Odd, given the paper's abiding interest in chasing visibly poor members of the public out of public spaces. Who qualifies as "the public"?

Why the Santa Monica hot tub rent control case makes me mad

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:52:00 +0000

Oh, man, is this one ever bad for rent-controlled tenants. Sadly, it's the fault of two rent-controlled tenants in Santa Monica who could not quit while they were ahead.

See, these two women were already paying respectively $1214.25 and $1440.23 per month for two-bedroom, two-bath apartments, each with half again more square footage than your basic Berkeley bungalow, with shared access to Jacuzzi and a sauna.

And then they complained that, heavens, the landlord had turned down the daytime temperatures on the Jacuzzi and had shortened the (repeatable) toasting time on the sauna's control knob from an hour to 25 minutes.

The Santa Monica Rent Control Board foolishly backed them up.

So of course the board's decision was slamdunked on appeal.

The opinion from California's Second District sounds morally sensible. It interprets the Santa Monica ordinance to find that "A reduction in recreational services may be considered on a rent decrease petition, but where, as here, the reduction is a minor adjustment in the hours of luxury spa services, no rent decrease may be ordered without evidence that it resulted in excessive rent or an unjust return on the landlord's property."

But here's the thing: as judges do, these judges responded more to the facts than to the principles involved. Because they had a stupid whiny complaint to respond to, they ended up eroding the worthy principle that tenants are entitled to keep getting what they bargained for when they moved in.

Their decision could sooner or later hurt tenants in slumlord buildings that have full-on problems like broken windows and pigeon crap in the light wells and unmaintained hundred-year-old elevators.

It could also hurt, well, me.

We're rent-controlled here in San Francisco. We have a good deal by many standards. It's not as good as the one in the Santa Monica case. Probably because San Francisco has always had vacancy decontrol (landlords can raise the rent when they change tenants), whereas until 1999, Santa Monica rent control just kept rents down forever, while the "finder's fees" charged to new tenants went up and up and up.

We have a modest one-bedroom apartment. It has some wood rot and peeling paint and no vent over the stove (we therefore rarely use the oven) and a dishwasher that we're afraid to use because it has not been started since we had the mouse problem a dozen years ago. Yesterday we discovered a vine had started to grow inside one of the window sashes. Because we are rent-controlled we'll be trimming that out ourselves. We do a lot of our own pruning here.

Over fifteen years we have paid other prices of rent control, to our landlord's advantage. We defended our end of the block against condo developments that would have been worse neighbors without our effort. We helped to armor the back of our unit after a burglar held us up in our own bed. We custom-ordered and paid for window screens to deal with mosquitoes. We endured a year of ugly vapors and night alarums caused by serious drug dealers moving in on an addict neighbor downstairs. After the drug people were gone at last, several of us organized a half-jokey "exorcism" to reboot our sense of community. Incidentally preserving value for the landlord.

Sometimes it's also part of the price of rent control that we have to insist on repairs and replacements to get them. Just this past year, the Rent Board had to be mentioned in a discussion leading our landlord to replace the decaying garden benches in our courtyard.

This is why I'm a little personally mad at tenants who would push a complaint all the way to state appellate court over frevvinsakes, a hot tub? They not only make the rest of us rent-controlled tenants look bad, they've created bad appellate case law for us all.

The next time we and our neighbors have something like a garden bench problem, this case could get thrown in our faces. I think our bench situation is distinguishable because the court in the hot tub decision noted that some problems with recreational facilities really could be part of a valid complaint. Having a courtyard that is not barren concrete, but has plants and usable benches as it did when we moved in, is way more basic than having a suitably toasty Jacuzzi to come home to in the daytime and not "merely" at night, or having to turn the start knob on a sauna twice rather than once in an hour. I still don't like having this hot tub case out there to deal with.

It's not just hard cases that make bad law. It's also cheesy cases, cases where by majority human standards the complaining party shouldn't complain.

The case is Santa Monica Properties v. Santa Monica Rent Control Board, Cal. Second District Court of Appeal Case No. B227868, filed February 16, 2012.

This is just funny: Newt vs. West Hollywood

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:44:00 +0000

I cannot resist linking this although it has zip to do with housing as such: Newt Gingrich's bus breaks down in West Hollywood. Wonkette and commenters get hold of the news. Rude blue hilarity ensues re: Under the Bus, Spare Tires, the Dread Homosexual Activities of West Hollywood, and "Of course in no time, Newton cold ditched the bus for a younger, prettier and less sick bus."

Some of the Callista slams are a little raw. The rest is priceless.

Hey, SF: ranked-choice voting is no mystery.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:41:00 +0000

Why, yes, C.W. Nevius Is Wrong On The Internet yet again. I'm starting to think the SF Chron consciously maintains that man as a troll to draw traffic from people trying to set him straight. So I guess I'm being a sucker in answering him back. But today someone just has to.

Today the man is professing mystification at our really quite simple system of ranked-choice voting (also known as instant-runoff voting). His poor mind can't grasp it, let alone the vastly feebler minds of mere voters... Come on, Chuck, you're not stupid, you're playing dumb yet again.

Ranked-choice voting, just three choices deep, is too confusing? Tell it to the street sweeper I met one election morning in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1980s. He stood there on the curb with his broom and explained fluently, without hesitation, his number-one through number-nine City Council ranking choices and his strategic reasons for each choice. Those reasons had to do with the special workings of Cambridge's Hare System ranked-choice ballot: he knew x would get in anyway, so he was putting y in the number-one spot to give him a boost, and so on down the line. Then he went back to sweeping the street by hand.

So, yeah, any guy like that who had scored a city job in a patronage-heavy place like Cambridge would have had special personal reasons for knowing and following local politics. Maybe he was more aware of politics than the average student or immigrant voter. But he likely didn't have a whole lot of formal education and that didn't stop him from understanding the Hare System, which is way more complicated than anything we have in San Francisco.

People learn things when they see reasons to know them. People throw up their hands and profess confusion about things that they don't see a reason to learn or things that they don't want to have understood.

I doubt that Nevius or anyone else in SF politics is honestly flummoxed by ranked-choice voting. It's just that ranked-choice tends to push political systems into new shapes. With ranked-choice still relatively new, we're in a transitional period of pushing, stumbling and reorganizing. Nevius and our local conservatives are pointing at the confusion as though it were a permanent condition. Really they're trying to kill ranked-choice voting before tenant-side progressives get wise to the new rules. Because once progressives do adjust, they'll start to win. This town has more tenants than landlords.

Ranked-choice voting works best for groups that build early, solid coalitions to back consistent slate endorsements. The good part is it helps candidates who emphasize their shared positions -- for example, support for rent control -- rather than their differences.

Unfortunately, last fall, San Francisco progressives didn't learn this lesson in time. By the closing weeks of campaign season they were catching on, with candidates dickering for reciprocal second-choice endorsements and printing ranked slates on campaign mailers. But they couldn't agree sufficiently to present widely shared, consistent three-name slates to the voters. They didn't drum up the type of urgency that used to build during runoff elections here before ranked-choice came in. They didn't figure out how early a single progressive mayoral candidate had to take the lead in order to have a chance. So of course the turnout was crap. So of course progressives sprinkled their votes haphazardly. So of course Ed Lee, the downtown machine's candidate, won in November.

There are some good examples of local political systems that have matured in response to ranked-choice voting. With time it shouldn't be hard for San Franciscans to emulate the political tactics used there.

Cambridge, Massachusetts is the ranked-choice example I know best. I don't want to drone on about it too much, but there's an astute if conservative blog about Cambridge politics here, some Council election results here, sample ballots from 2001 here, more on the Hare System here.

I think a lot of principles carry over from Cambridge to San Francisco, but you do have to make allowances for the big difference that Cambridge uses the slightly weird Hare System and uses it for multi-seat at-large elections. All nine Cambridge City Council seats are filled by a single set of voters' rankings. The street sweeper who gave his first choice to weaker candidate y knew that, under the Hare system, if x had already received a qualifying number of votes by the time his particular ballot was counted, then, if he had placed x first, his ballot would simply be set aside, with x's name crossed out, until all the number-ones had been tabulated and it was time to count the number-twos, at which point his vote for y might be counted, unless y by then had also gotten in.... Like I said, Cambridge is complicated.

You can win a Cambridge City Council seat entirely on second-choice votes. You can't win a San Francisco mayoral or district Supervisorial election that way but I think it would help San Francisco campaigners to learn Cambridge-style coalition work. (See the FairVote "How to campaign under Ranked Choice Voting" guide for details.)

I remember how Ken Reeves, now one of Cambridge's senior progressive stalwarts and a former mayor, started his Council career in the '80s. He went around asking left-liberal groups for second-place endorsements, meanwhile throwing his own first-choice support to Cambridge Civic Association leader David Sullivan. That's how Reeves got on the Council -- not on the first try. After a while, he moved up.

Running admittedly for second place that way wouldn't win you anything in San Francisco. But the point in any kind of ranked-choice voting is that second and third choices do matter, so slates matter, so political coalitions have to hang together or hang separately. In particular they have to convince the outlying single-issue and neighborhood-favorite voters that, even if they make long-shot first choices, their second choices should at least be pragmatic.

In the next San Francisco election, one way or another, our progressive politicos will have done their early coalition-building. They may be fractious but they're not stupid. Next time they could win. Unless, of course, ranked-choice voting gets defeated first because "it's just too complicated."

Don't laugh at service dogs

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:29:00 +0000

Here goes SF Chron columnist C.W. Nevius again, applying the presumptions of a well-adjusted suburbanite to irregular people in an urban environment. This time he's irritated by service dogs.

The occasion being, Safeway doesn't like dogs in the supermarket. OK, that I can see. But Nevius, being Nevius, treats a genuine quandary about "Labradoodles in the produce aisle" as a jumping-off place for a gratuitous rant about people who say their dogs are "service animals" who, he suggests, are somehow lying. Worse, the Chronicle, being the Chronicle, illustrates with a photo of a scruffy dog owner wearing a soul patch and baggy clothes -- your basic current icon of Punks These Days Who Have No Respect.

Here's the thing: neither C.W. Nevius nor you, dear reader, nor anyone else, can know when a service dog is the only reason why any given person in the produce aisle is hanging on to the stable side of the proverbial edge.

There was this big brassy red-haired Vietnam veteran named Ray who worked for the Coalition on Homelessness in the '90s. He had been through some difficult times. He said he had spent a couple of years enduring worse than the shelter or RV kind of homelessness: "living in a bush" right out there on the ground.

When I first knew Ray he had a big black Lab named Bear who was his emotional support dog, who went everywhere with him and kept him going. This was before they had the brass medallions: he just had a reduced-fare disability transit ID with a picture showing his own smiling face next to the dog's. He would hold up the card and explain, "This is my service dog." The bus driver would say, "You're not blind." He would say, "I don't have to tell you what my disability is, this is my service dog." I'm sure conversations like that angered a lot of citizens who thought a big functional-looking person like him had no special need for a dog's help. They didn't know what was going on in Ray's head. I'm thankful that I didn't know either.

Ray was doing pretty well during those years. For a while he was even trying to organize a peer-counseling detox program for other veterans.

I did a little work on his veterans' idea as a class project during law school, figuring out how much hassle it would be for him to set up a nonprofit. The idea fizzled. That was partly because the McKinney statute's promise of surplus federal property for the homeless turned out, as usual, to be a mirage. The main parcel "available" in San Francisco then was a geologically unstable slope running down the bluff to the ocean from Fort Miley -- a place where you couldn't actually put a building. Then there was some other place that seemed more physically practical but it had all kinds of restrictions... Actually I don't remember the details except that they were depressing. That was almost twenty years ago.

But anyhow, the fizzle wasn't Ray's fault. Or, OK, maybe he was a little impractical, but he was being a good citizen, trying to make things better for people who had been through kinds of hell like his own.

Then I was out of town for a couple of years. When I got back Ray wasn't around any more. Or I think I did see him once but he was a lot smaller than I remembered. Someone told me what happened: Bear was dead. Ray fell apart, collapsed into addiction, and died too.

That's a dog story I feel OK about telling. There are some other stories I was close to as a lawyer that I can't tell here, that strengthen my respect for dogs as therapeutic helpers. Stories that make me sad and a little upset to see this columnist, whose whole shtick is championing the normals against the oddballs, trying to make life more difficult for oddballs who get through life with help from their dogs.

Another thing: Nevius thinks grocery stores ought to be able to demand official brass "service animal" medallions. He's unhappy with learning that "the Department of Justice is adamantly opposed, feeling it stigmatizes the disabled."

OK, but there's a thing about service dog medallions: people steal them because they are valuable for the very reasons Nevius describes. Someone will walk up to an owner with dog, make a show of lovingly petting the dog, and remove the brass tag in the process. They're hard to replace, in fact last I heard, Animal Control would only replace them once in a given dog's life. Dog owners therefore sometimes don't have the tags to which they're entitled. After getting burned or warned, they sometimes keep the tags on their keychains, not on the dogs' necks.

So, OK, at least, props to Nevius for calling and quoting Susan Mizner of the Mayor's Office on Disability, who is one of the more sensible people anywhere on disability accommodation rights. (Disclosure: I used to work with her ages ago. But I'd say that regardless.) She brings the grocery store issue back to the actual accommodation in question, not the penumbra of social prejudices surrounding it. He notes she's "trying to focus on behavior. If dogs are barking, aggressive or not in control, the dog must leave, service animal or not."

Well, yes. That's the sensible attitude to take. No need to throw a hissy fit about it, and no need to question the honesty of people who may be getting through their days with difficulty, whose animals may be holding them together.

Rainy Day Recovery

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000

O'Hollern has a vivid post at BadAttitudes (also at Donkey Mountain) about the proto-post-Soviet levels of “laggard, slumping despair” among his neighbors and the gallows comedy they find in “Hey, cheer up, we’re in a recovery!”

What he's saying chimes ominously with this report from a think-tank outfit called the Corporation for Enterprise Development. (Found, like many things, via HAC News). It says we're doing worse by the year on "asset poverty," which they define as lacking savings or resources for a rainy day -- that is, enough to cover three months' basic expenses in case of layoff or similar. It says the description now fits a quarter of U.S. families (presume that means households). Worse, they've come up with a "liquid asset poverty" category to consider that assets like a family house may be hard to sell in a hurry. By this measure, "43 percent of households nationwide are “liquid asset poor” with little or no savings to fall back on if emergency strikes."

BTW, highlights in the "Assets and Opportunity" report include a national chart with the most striking Mason-Dixon line break I think I've seen between greater and lesser prosperities.

Are you an Affordable Artist?

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:26:00 +0000

Yeah, yeah, only permanent bellyachers like me would find something not to like in this official HUD writeup captioned "Affordable Artist Housing in Downtown Elgin, Illinois."

Per the article it would seem that the amenities of metropolitan Elgin include "the second-largest orchestra in the state" but "downtown Elgin has not always been the premier arts and entertainment destination it is today..." That is, the cultural cred and property values of thrilling downtown Elgin could both use a little plumping up.

In aid of same, a lucky subsidized developer has produced 55 live/work units "serving low-income artists who earn 60 percent or less of the area median income."

But that's perfectly nice, isn't it? Some nice dedicated creative types will have nicer, cheaper places to live than otherwise, in a community where happy cross-pollinations might ensue. Isn't that great? I'm sure it is in many ways.

However, what's bugging me is this, or rather, these: assumptions that "artists" are definable creatures who will benefit from transplantation (segregation?) into a colony of creatures who, being also artists, must be like themselves. Artists as colonists. Artists explicitly deployed as cannon-fodder in what sounds like a transitional neighborhood. Artists licensed as bona fide genyu-wine artists, accept no substitute. (Which implies there's a contrasting, equally definable social category of People Who Are Not Artists.) Artists who will ipso facto raise the tone of the neighborhood.

I mean, when powers that be disapprove of artists it's bad enough, but when they approve of artists for the purpose of domesticating them for deployment in an urban recolonization scheme, that's really depressing.

I can't find a copy of Mike Newirth's "Zoned Bohemian" article in the old Baffler but think it covered some of this trouble. This is the best link I can find describing it. Go dig it up if you can.

Urban armoring, eensy by eensy

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:25:00 +0000

There's a corner store in a warehouse building off Eighth and Howard Streets in our neighborhood. Next to the store is a disused loading dock with a lip at the level of a low truck bed. People coming out of the store with refreshments (O.K., malt beverages) used to sit on the lip of the loading dock. For a decade or more, the owners tried to stop the drinkers from sitting there. Finally, this winter, they covered the ledge.

I don't blame them in the short run. Some of the sitters had attitudes. But one less place to sit makes the corner a skitch less cheerful.

Some good HUD stuff, OK

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:37:00 +0000

OK, we have this neighbor who keeps saying that away from the hot-button issues, the Obama Administration keeps on getting things right. Not sure I agree but credit where credit is due:

- New policy makes it tougher for local housing authorities to tear down projects. Further explanation over here -- the new notice is PIH Notice 2012-7.

- The Obama Admin's genuine willingness suddenly to pay attention to gay rights at HUD plays out further with a new nondiscrimination rule that covers not only programs like public housing but also FHA-insured mortgage eligibility.

- BofA pays up $1 billion over the Countrywide mess, not that more wasn't lost.

OK, now let's see a response to the publicly subsidized disability complex in Des Moines where management deals with complaints by announcing that "Gossip is the devil's radio."

Small blessings: Five Seattle camping spots, one San Francisco condo

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:15:00 +0000

After seven years, five households get to live in vehicles in a church parking lot in Seattle.

In other news, a dear childless woman in San Francisco left her condo to "the homeless." But now the city won't even think of letting a homeless person or couple live there. Chron writer Rachel Gordon just rolls over and repeats the Dept of Human Services line that it "can't become a homeless shelter" and therefore has to be sold to be useful. Presumably to spend the money on something more institutional and temporary than an actual unit of housing. Because low-income housing just isn't proper low-income housing unless it involves lots of conduct rules and washable tile surfaces.

Sad old world. I hope that lady's ghost comes back to haunt City Hall.

Bad stuff at Santa Rita

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:37:00 +0000

The SF Bay Guardian is reporting cruel treatment of Occupy Oakland arrestees in Alameda County's main Santa Rita jail. These stories sound worse than what I remember hearing about mass arrests in the 1990s. Beatings with police batons within the jail, medical neglect, untended injuries, prisoners with allergies offered only food that they could not eat, access to toilets denied, hands gone blue for hours in tight plastic cuffs, overcrowding, no relief from pepper spray and tear gas on clothing...

These aren't even American stories from 1970 or 1999. They're American stories from 1920. And, sadly, many of the sneering comments below the story are American jingoisms from 1920.

You should be distressed by the signs of civic regression in these reports no matter what you may think of the confrontational turn the Oakland demonstrations have taken -- and personally I am not in fact crazy about it. The point squarely in front of us is, if we believe in the civilized rule of law then we are against corporal and extrajudicial punishment of anybody, no matter what they are alleged to have done wrong.

The way to prove a system is better than its critics is to treat the critics scrupulously well, not badly.

Overseer of the Poor

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:59:00 +0000

Maybe someone at the San Francisco Chronicle has a sense of historical irony. Or maybe bad old phrasing reappears naturally when the bad old days come creeping back. Unfortunately I'm betting on the latter to explain a dismally resonant word choice in Friday's Chron and Examiner.

The Chron report is trumpeting a scoop so it probably appeared first and set the tone. Here's the header:

"Dufty will oversee homeless"

Here's the headline on the Ex version:

"Mayor hires Bevan Dufty – former campaign opponent – to oversee homeless"

Here's the lede in the Chron:

"Mayor Ed Lee has hired former mayoral candidate and Supervisor Bevan Dufty to oversee San Francisco's homeless policy efforts and some housing issues, sources told The Chronicle Thursday."

And, slightly worse, in the Ex:

"The City’s seemingly endless homeless issue will come closer to an end, Mayor Ed Lee said Friday as he announced the appointment of former Supervisor Bevan Dufty to a new position overseeing poverty in San Francisco."

"Overseer," huh? Quite a history to that term.

I come from a part of Western Massachusetts where each town had "Overseers of the Poor" to run social services. Their terminology and methods were adapted from the old English model. Early poor relief in many towns entailed "pauper auctions", in which unsupported people were handed off, case by case, to whichever farmer would accept the smallest annual stipend for each one's support. The paupers were then expected to labor for either the farmer or the town depending on the system -- so it was maybe not exactly slavery, but bad enough. In the nineteenth century our town had a Poor Farm, a mixed workhouse/asylum where unwanted people were put to work supporting themselves. It was rebuilt after a not-so-crazy resident burned it down in 1882 but I'm not sure how long it lasted after that.

During most of the years when "Overseers of the Poor" served in Massachusetts, an "overseer" in the South was a literal driver of slaves. Yes, the term could also refer to any directorial kind of person, as with Harvard's still-existing "Board of Overseers." Still, not good connotations.

A look around online finds that some people are still well aware of these usages of "Overseer." For example, there's a 2001 book by John Gilliom, a Midwestern political science professor, titled Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy. It seems to be a case study of the surveillance state as exemplified, nastily, by the Ohio welfare system. Which makes the title a fine mordant use of the old phrase.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid Mr. Dufty's new "overseer" status will be a non-ironic return to the old function of "overseeing poverty" without expecting or helping poor people to become anything else but poor. Despite pro-forma promises of change, it's a status-quo kind of appointment. Before serving as a San Francisco county supervisor, Dufty was the homelessness fixer for Mayor Willie Brown. And here, in Dufty's recent campaign site, are some of the approaches we can expect. Some good ideas in there, like the social worker at SF Public Library, but a lot of punitive poverty-as-pathology and poverty-as-nuisance stuff too.

By the way, I think the choice of "oversee" is the Chronicle's fault. The press release from the Mayor's office doesn't use it.

And as usual I wish these papers wouldn't treat "homeless" as a non-count noun, like "sheep" or "rabble", which it properly isn't. "Homeless" is an adjective describing the fully reversible condition of lacking dependable housing. Why is that so difficult to remember?

Human Faces Installed Here

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:25:00 +0000

OK, I'm banging my head against an old problem of journalism: you can't move the public to fight a problem unless you can get them to sympathize with a compelling individual story. To tell the story you have to exploit someone who's hurt by the problem who has the story to tell.

They say, "put a human face on it." It means, get the public to see the problem as more than abstract, as a thing that happens to real people. For that you have to subject someone to the indignity of being a poster child.

That's problematic, no?

Yeah, yeah, I know, necessary collateral damage, don't be squeamish, etcetera etcetera.

But, so help me, I have trouble with this promo: "Photography exhibition gives voice and a face to the homeless epidemic."

Ick and double and triple ick. For one thing, people have their own voices and faces already. For another thing, "epidemic" is an ugly word to choose, implying contagion. And then the "epidemic," if any, is one of homelessness, not of "homeless". Saying "epidemic of homeless" is like saying "plague of frogs". When ferchrissakes anyway the problem is "apartments that cost too much" and/or "perfectly good housing that stands empty for no honest reason."

I'm sure the exhibition does its best to limit the discomfort of displaying recognizable local faces under a label for unpopular people. The photographer is Joe Ramos, and he's a good portrait artist. He worked in connection with Project Homeless Connect, ex-Mayor Newsom's one-stop-shop service program, which is not universally loved but, OK, does a lot of good.

[P.S. Bay Guardian writer Ali Lane says the photos and their presentation are in fact unusually respectful.]

Ick, however. "Give a human face"? Don't people always keep their own faces, no matter what else they might lose?

There was another one like this in December. The SF Chron, on the right side for once, helped shake loose $500,000 in benefit concert boodle that had been sitting unused in the mayor's office when it could have been used to house homeless families. It was to be used after all, alongside a larger gift from Benioff family of Salesforce. The self-congratulatory news story paraphrased Dept. of Human Services chief Trent Rohrer this way: "He said when [t]he Chronicle story put a human face on the city's problem of homeless families and the Benioffs offered to donate $1.5 million, the decision was made to use the fund."

Wot, nobody had noticed family homelessness until the Chronicle gave them permission to see? Really? So, OK, that could be literally true for some readers. But is it necessary to imply that real human beings aren't visibly real unless a licensed journalist "puts a face" on the faces they already have?

Newts On the Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:37:00 +0000

Here's an odd one in Places to Live:

Newt Gingrich is calling for a U.S. base on the moon. He's talking about "...commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism, and manufacturing..." and the day when 13,000 Americans living on the moon could petition to become a state.

It sounds like something out of Megan Prelinger's Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957 - 1962. I don't imagine he's been reading her book. On the other hand, he does mention a fascination with Sputnik. Probably these daydreams he's feeding us are original vintage stuff of his own.

Those dates in Megan's title are just about the time when a man like Newt, born in 1943, would have last been detached enough from personal ambition to feel a little unselfish gee-whiz. Now he sets out to show the public he has a sincere sense of wonder, and he has to dig down through sixty years of bullying and grandstanding to find it. Poor man.

Fine line here between Jumping The Shark and Mad Scientist. Either way, not promising for the terrestrial republic we've got.

[P.S. Slashdot goes to town on the Mars stuff.]

[P.P.S. And "Women of the future will make the Moon a cleaner place to live."]

In San Francisco, more proposed sumptuary laws for public space

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:07:00 +0000

The San Francisco attempt to close public space to the non-shopping public continues. Now we have a proposal from Supervisor Scott Wiener for new laws whose majestic authority would forbid the rich as well as the poor from "sleeping at any time in the plazas; prohibiting camping, cooking or creating any kind of shelter; banning the selling or bartering of any merchandise without a permit; and prohibiting four-wheeled shopping carts. Also, plaza goers couldn’t smoke."

Out of that list, per the SF Chron, Jen Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness is against "Pretty much everything... Except the smoking." (But, Jen, poor people are more likely to smoke, too...)

I would add that most of those acts (except for smoking outdoors and certain narrowly defined forms of sleeping) are already against the law in San Francisco one way or another anyhow, so the proposal is probably meant as some kind of PR point.

Naturally, “Wiener said the legislation isn’t anti-homeless at all, but is just setting up basic rules for the plazas. 'Everyone is welcome here,' he said.” So he doesn't even admit what he's up to.

Where's Anatole France when we need him? Plus ça change...

Meanwhile, up in the castles...

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:23:00 +0000

The NYT reports on hospital suites at the top end of the scale. With butlers.

Via one Chris N. Brown on the William Gibson twitter feed.

What the man says -- "The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."

Or maybe skip the "yet".

Eviction by Big Gov't - whose meme is it?

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:55:00 +0000

Texana Hollis, age 101, first hit the national news in September because HUD foreclosed on her reverse mortgage and evicted her. They also trashed a lot of her possessions, though many were recovered.

Now HUD is saying she still can't move back in because, according to HUD's eternally silver-tongued spokesman Brian Sullivan, the house isn't "safe" or "sanitary". Also, he says, it's damaged, and per Sullivan "the damage already done in the house 'far exceeded what could've occurred that day'." So I guess we should feel comforted that HUD's own trashing is only part responsible for making the place unlivable.

Fortunately, Ms. Hollis is taken care of for the moment. A kind friend with the wonderful name of Polly Cheeks is hosting her while this all plays out. But the Detroit News does not relate whether HUD is paying her for her assistance, which it damn well should be. Because this means that, as far too usual, a woman with a culturally instilled sense of responsibility is compensating, at her own expense, for a failure of public services, and greedheads are profiting from her kindness.

So here's my question: the left has a long history of objecting to foreclosures on old ladies, but how do right-wingers feel when Big Government does the foreclosing?

I mean, when the evicting authorities are banks, it's the right-wing party line to blame debtors for irrationally believing what the TV ads and loan officers told them, right? But if the evicting authority is HUD, then is it OK for Republicans to object? Because this is Big Government in action against a little old lady, right? If the eviction was by eminent domain they'd be howling their heads off, right?

Of course in actual fact the eviction of Texana Hollis seems to have been a public-private partnership. HUD almost certainly will have gotten involved in this case as the public insurer backing up a private lender's reverse mortgage. And I'm sure the folks who are actually in the business of lending, collecting and evicting don't see any deep moral difference between the lender and the insurer on this loan. But for the ideologues who insist on hating big government and loving big business, what happens to their brains when it's obvious the two are colluding in an outrage?

I've just been wandering some odd corners of the Internet on a search for "Texana Hollis" with "Big Government", and nobody on the right really seems to be running with her story. But I wonder about some other case. Maybe if it was a matter of saving a farmstead in the Plains States instead of a bungalow in Detroit?

For the lexicon: "Self-Sufficiency Improvement"

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 05:26:00 +0000

They call it the "Affordable Housing and Self-Sufficiency Improvement Act of 2011" and, yes, it does mean less affordable housing and more of leaving people to shift for themselves. Which is, yes, where the "self-sufficiency" comes in. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has the grim details of this bill, which is headed for full Financial Services Committee markup some time in February:

"One of the bill's most problematic provisions (along with its minimum rent provision, discussed below) incorporates without modification the proposal circulated in October by Rep. Miller to sharply expand HUD's deregulatory initiative, the Moving-to-Work demonstration. As we've explained in recent analyses, a sharp MTW expansion would effectively convert the Section 8 voucher and public housing programs to block grants, risking deep funding cuts over time. In addition, MTW has resulted in fewer families receiving housing assistance per dollar of federal funding on average compared to non-MTW agencies and at some agencies has unnecessarily exposed low-income families to rent increases and other harmful policies. An open-ended MTW expansion would be so damaging that it would be better for Congress not to enact AHSSIA at all than to enact the bill with the current MTW provision."

Oh, and "Moving to Work" means several nasty things. Most immediately, rent increases. Possibly for half a million households. In Atlanta in the mid-oughts it meant evicting the unemployed. Coming soon, perhaps, to a neighborhood near you.

"Modern Justice"? Yeah, it kind of is.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Bridegam) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:50:00 +0000

Arrestingly creepy headline in the NH&RA lobby group's HousingOnline newsletter: "Modern Justice: Former Federal Courthouse Is Renovated Into Workforce Apartments in Kansas City". The article is behind a paywall but anyway it's the headline I want to talk about.

"Workforce housing"? How can people in a democracy get used to a policy buzz word that finds places for citizens according to their economic functions? It's a totalitarian phrase, "workforce housing," whether it applies to American company-town cottages or Soviet steel-town apartment blocks or for that matter even a courthouse conversion project that for all I know is perfectly nice, in fact it probably is.

Anyway, feh.