Owing to other projects, we won't be posting further updates at Cities on a Hill, but the archives will remain accessible and there are plenty of interesting links to browse.

Posted by Fred Siegel at 10:57 AM | Permalink |

Given the reconsideration of Robert Moses' legacy over the last several months, it's worth taking a look at Moses' little-remembered 3,500 word response to Robert Caro's portrait of him in The Powerbroker, which can be found in full here.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 11:37 AM | Permalink |

The Washington Post offers a mostly favorable look at D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's first four months in office. The mayor, they report, has been quick to take charge of both long-term problems (taking control of the city's public schools) and breaking situations (pledging millions of dollars just hours after a fire devastated Eastern Market). While they criticize him in passing (and in their headline) for stepping on toes, the article portrays a man who gets things done, in a city where too often nothing is.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 06:13 AM | Permalink |

The Journal has a front page dispatch today on Youngstown, Ohio, a former steel mill city that after decades of population loss and spreading blight is taking "an unusual approach: Allow such areas to keep emptying out and, in some cases, become almost rural. Unused streets and alleys eventually could be torn up and planted over, the city says. Abandoned buildings could be razed, leading to the creation of larger home lots with plenty of green space, and new parks."

It's a new tact—instead of fighting decline, Youngstown is attempting to manage it.

Even as the population has halved to about 80,000 since 1950, the city still has the same physical footprint to maintain, and the better-off suburbs have little interest in taking on the city's neighborhoods, so the question for Mayor Jay Williams has become how to manage change. Much of this entials laying claim to abandoned properties, which can be a legally tricky business, and clearing out areas that have hemmoraghed residents. In short, creating a less dense city, especially as residents are concerned that any new housing will be for the very poor, and destabilize the city's remaining stable neighborhoods.

There's a good deal more to the city's troubles, including five prisons in the metropolitan area, a problem with organized crime, and of course the conviction of former House Rep. James "Beam Me Up" Traficant on racketeering charges.

On his grim album, the Ghost of Tom Joad, Bruce Springsteen has one song called Youngstown, about the city's decline:

From the Monongahela valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story's always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world's changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

Posted by Harry Siegel at 11:58 AM | Permalink |

New York has an ambitious plan to remake Willets Point, Queens, best known as home of the Mets' Shea Stadium (which will come down after two more seasons). The 14-block area has no residents to speak of, and is made up mostly of low-end and frequently shady auto parts and repair businesses. The city, though, has a plan to bring in two to three billion dollars in private investment, "including one million square feet in retail space, a hotel, and a convention center." The Times reports that "Mr. Bloomberg said it would not be hard for the city to make a case for acquiring the privately owned land through eminent domain."

The area is blighted, though, because its infrastructure is shot. Incredibly, the city hasn't connected most of its properties with the sewer system. In short, the mayor is threatening to use eminent domain to force out business owners whose properties are blighted because the city has failed to provide adequate services—and he'd do so on behalf of new private owners, who'd be expected to pay out the actual settlements to the current area residents who'd be forced to vacate.

…

The way the game of building anything of scale built in New York these days—and nearly everything that's built is aimed at the middle of the market and up—is to throw in some form or another of subsidizing housing that can be labeled affordable, which placates both the Bloomberg administration, which frequently touts the number of subsiddies units that have gone up under its watch, and the affordable housing advocates, who after 60 years of endless crisis and subsidy continue to insist that the problem could be solved if only more money were thrown at it.

There's an accidentally hilarious quote in a Times article on the plan from one such activist, who seems utterly unaware (as do the writer and whatever editors saw the piece) that there are literally no residents in the neighborhood, only businesses—

But Mercedes Narciso, a senior planner at the Pratt Center for Community Development in Brooklyn, said the proposed redevelopment “has the potential to generate growth in an equitable manner.” She said the city needed to make sure that at least half of the housing units were for people of moderate and low incomes and that the community benefited from hiring guarantees.

It appears the mayor agrees that in order to save the community, first it must be evicted, a point Jarrett Murphy made last year in this worthwhile dispatch on the area in the Village Voice.

…

To be sure, Willets Point could and ought to put much more into the city's coffers, and there's no good reason for such small-scale businesses to occupy such potentially valuable land. Why doesn't the city, then, fix the pothole-ridden roads and connect it to the sewage system? Presumably, this would attract new owners and more arguably presentable and certainly profitable businesses.

The question is the same as with affordable housing: Why not let the market work?

Posted by Harry Siegel at 06:14 AM | Permalink |

The EU, once the basis of projecting French power beyond its punching weight, has become a threat to the French bureaucrats who helped create it. Not many French pols understand—and even fewer will publicly explain—why it is that 93% of French émigrés are satisfied with their lives abroad, and one in four are willing to tell a pollster they never plan to return.

Anne Applebaum sees Europe, in the absence of a unifying Big Idea, becoming more like America—if there's no job in Buffalo, you move to Phoenix. And "Sarkozy is the first European politician to appeal directly to these new Europeans."

Consider his speech in London earlier this year, where he called it a "town that seems more and more prosperous and dynamic every time I come here," and "one of the greatest French cities," where tens thousands of Frenchmen live because "they are risk-takers, and risk is a bad word" in their homeland.

Posted by Fred Siegel at 09:54 AM | Permalink |

The latest in Philly involves Frank Keel, publicist for the plugged-in (and, we're told, voter intimidation-inclined) electrician's union, interrupting a press conference by the mute Tommy the Loan Shark and his talking friend in which the two semi-pro harassers of mayoral candidate Tom Knox were accusing the electrician's union of sending thugs to harass them. Keel comes in and claims that the man and shark so harassed are in fact paid operatives of rival candidate Bob Brady, which turns out to be true, as a Brady operative has since resigned after admitting to setting up the 527 to fund the Knox-knocking to the tune of a million dollars.

And why was Keel sharing this information by confronting a man in a shark suit in the middle of a press conference? Surely, to maintain the dignity of this election.

It gets better. Keel also claimed the man behind the shark mask is a member of the Pagans motorocycle gang, a member of the electricians' rivals in the carpenters union and, most stunning, from New Jersey.

One blogger has an excellent summary—"Basically, the mayor's race today has now included references to the following: An anthropomorphic shark, the Pagans, $500 under the table payments, thugs and a mysterious gray van following the shark mascot's handler. I love Philadelphia."

Here's the audio, filled with lines considered but rejected for a second-rate noir. It begins with the shark's talking friend going after Knox and claiming he's been harassed by shady union characters while innocently smoking cigars outside of his apartment, and really gets going once Keel shows up at about the four minute mark. Keep in mind there's a man standing in a shark suit as all this goes on, and that once Keel asks him to take off the mask, the reporters are holding microphones up to the shark.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 09:20 AM | Permalink |

I spoke briefly with New York Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff yesterday following his New School presentation on New York's sweeping new PLANYC 2030. [More on our take on the plan here.]

Doctoroff had a very different take on the impact the of the $21 fee for trucks to enter the city between 6 pm and 6 am than what we wrote earlier this week. He expects the fee to have a minimal effect on number of trucks in the city during the day, mostly because tolls are deducted from the fee, meaning it will cost most trucks little if anything to enter Manhattan. Instead, he thinks this element of the plan will mostly help reduce traffic in Long Island City (in Queens) and Downtown Brooklyn, where trucks go out of their way to take untolled routes to the city, creating oft-times huge delays at the crossings. It's an interesting idea, though we're still not convinced that functionally replacing all Manhattan tolls with a flat price for entering the city, regardless of route (at least during the congestion pricing hours) makes much sense at all. We'll see, though, if the administration can sell this logic to the outer boroughs.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 08:28 AM | Permalink |

When a French presidential candidate talks about the need for a rupture with the policies that have produced economic stagnation and repeated riots in France, it’s hard not to be reminded of Rudy Giuliani’s call during the 1993 mayoral campaign for a break with the policies that “guaranteed failure.” New York like France had been beset with repeated riots and a lagging over-regulated and over-taxed  economy that was lagging behind its competitors. In both New York and France, the civil service and the bureaucracy had inordinate power over the direction and not just execution of policy. And in both, organized interests insulated themselves from the costs they imposed on the larger society, even while talented people exited the swamp of local stagnation.
       
Sarkozy, almost unique among French politicians for being philo-American, shares a similar temperament with Giuliani. Both are hard-edged, inner-directed men who are willing to be unpopular to advance what they see as essential reforms. Giuliani and Sarkozy met in the summer of 2002 when Giuliani had been invited to France to provide advice on how to combat the rising crime rate. Subsequently Sarkozy began to talk Giuliani like about zero-tolerance and by way of COMSTAT the need to develop a meaningful metric for policing.  More recently Sarkozy has been talking of American style welfare reform that requires the able-bodied to take available jobs

The similarities go beyond policy.  Sarkozy is running not only against the Socialists, but against his own President Jacques Chirac.  Without mention Chirac by name, Sarkozy has called for reversing the economic policies associated with his presidency.  If Giuliani wins the GOP nod in 08, he will similarly have to distance himself from the Bush foreign policy legacy without directly criticizing the president.    

Posted by Fred Siegel at 07:46 AM | Permalink |

Three weeks before the Democratic primary that had been expected to effectively determine which of the five Dems running will be the city's next mayor—while likely winning with the support of well less than 35% of the primary vote—comes a new twist. Three-time candidate Sam Katz—who nearly beat John Street while running as a Republican in 1999, and waged another competitive race in 2003 until an FBI investigation of corruption involving Mayor Street and his inner circle perversely united much of the electorate around the incumbent—has taken steps to set up a belated fourth run, this time as an independent, which makes sense in a city where no member of the GOP has ever been elected mayor, and many voters fear their arms might fall off if they were to pull a Republican lever. And Philly law would allow him to also run on the Republican line, for those Philadelphians without such fears of ideologically-caused amputation.

Still, it's hard to see a three-time losing candidate running in part on the Republican line beating any of these Democrats. But lightning does strike every so often, and it's clear that Katz who as late as Friday was blogging on the race for Philadelphia Magazine, doesn't think much of the field. In his last post, Katz called this "as listless a campaign as any I can remember… So if you’re wondering why this election has seemed as significant as a cup of warm spit, you probably need look no further than the campaigns our candidates are waging. If there were a law against political malpractice, these five would all be breaking it."

I wrote a pair of pieces very sympathetic to Katz during his last run (this one in the Weekly Standard, and this one in the Post), but in some ways the same traits that would have made him an appealing mayor are what have made him a less appealing candidate.

Back in 2003, Katz's team gave me a good number of press releases and research paper pertaining to voter fraud, with some very striking allegations, including one district that consistently produced more votes than it contained voters. That tidbit was somewhere around page 40 of the paper it was in. I can't imagine many reporters waded that far in. I bring this up only because the campaign in some ways seemed to be built—and built well—for governing, with the candidate and his team offering analysis and ideas that were serious and substantial, but frequently none-too-sexy. To riff on Mario Cuomo, it seemed to me that Katz was campaigning in prose.

My sense at the time was that Katz had the stuff to make a very good mayor, but that while hard-working, he was a less than compelling candidate. If he does enter this race, though, it would mean that he'd be running against a candidate most primary voters had opposed, and he'd have nearly six months to redefine himself and his narrative.

Still, there's little downside I can see for the city in a Katz run. At the least, it would make for the more substantial, serious and focused campaign that the city badly needs, and is yet to have.

Drudge has yet another headline today linking to a story on the city's skyrocketing murder rate, which is up to one a day (put another way, more murders than New York City, with one-sixth the population), while the mayor, the Philadelphia Daily News, the New York Times and several of the candidates prefer to blame gun control laws, the economy, demographics, and other factors outside of the city's control. The city needs to come to terms with its problems, and Katz running a reasonably competive general election challenge should help make that happen, and do a fair amount to draw members of the electorate past Democratic primary voters into the conversation.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 06:05 AM | Permalink |

We've long been for congestion pricing, if skeptical of the motives and the horse-sense of many of its proponents. Mayor Bloomberg's Earth Day proposal to, among other things, charge drivers $8 to enter Manhattan lines up with our sense that both environmental and fiscal concerns compel us to begin charging rationally for road usage.

While the plan fits neatly into the mayor's pattern of targeting behaviors with hidden social costs, as with his cigarette tax hike and partially hydrogenated oil ban, it seems odd to introduce a big idea that the state must approve—and will do so, if at all, only after much kicking and screaming—just a year and a half before leaving office, especially as it pushes mayoral candidates of good will to stake out contrary positions in the quest for outer borough votes. Then again, the timing makes a lot more sense if considered in terms of Bloomberg's still not ruled-out run for the presidency.

Meanwhile, the plan so far as we've seen it seems to be largely modeled on London's, and to be over-broad in its present shape. That the price would be the same throughout the day, instead of shifting with demand, seems needlessly inelegant. And by discounting tolls entirely from the $8 fee, he eliminates the incentive not to use these roads, which until now have represented an important resources to outer borough people willing to pay a price to enter the city quickly, or at least less slowly. Even as he's trying to rationalize pricing within Manhattan, that is, he's making pricing entering Manhattan less sensible.

We also hoped that a congestion pricing scheme might particularly go after the cabs and trucks that generate a great deal of the island's traffic, chaos, din, smog and snarl. For instance, charging trucks a high fee for entering the city during certain hours, or reducing the number of cabs on the street by reforming the corrupt medallion system would both have as great an impact on traffic as the mayor's necessarily regressive plan, which mostly goes after the civilian drivers, as it were, and not the pros. [Red-faced update-the mayor's plan charges trucks $21 to enter Manhattan during extended business hours.]

Still, this is no easy political lift, and a plan in need of refinement is superior to a continuation of what all parties agree is an untenable status quo.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 03:25 AM | Permalink |

After declaring himsef a "f•ing steamroller," new governor Eliot Spitzer's honeymoon ended with his first budget negotiation, which he proved inexplicably ill-prepared for, especially given that he'd spent 18 months running, and never faced a competitive challenger. (Full disclosure—I was the policy director for his opponent in the Democratic primary, Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi). My gut is that with all the voices in his ear during and after the election, the paramount importance of the budget was over-looked. Whatever the reasons, while he's given himself a perfect score for his first 100 days, even sympathetic observers were taken aback by his inability to keep what nearly everyone agrees is an entirely unsustainable level of spending, especially now that the real estate market seems to be cooling, and threatening to impact Wall Street.

Spitzer, who's taken heat for his less-than-sterling record as Attorney General in pursuing Medicaid fraud (despite spending more on the program than California and Texas combined, Spitzer's office consistenly recovered less than the offices of either of those states), launched an aggressive campaign to cap spending and reform the program, even spending rolled-over campaign funds on TV ads touting his agenda. The health care union, though, ran ads of their own, which proved considerably more effective than those of Jimmy Siegel, a Madison Avenue executive whose campaign ads for Spitzer were widely praised for cinematic value and high-mindedness, and who's now hooked up with Hilary Clinton. As I said, though, the election was not competitive, but the fight with 1199 was, and, unsurprisingly, Siegel's work proved considerably less effective this time, and Spitzer saw his popularity drop nearly 20 points, despite his spending on tv spots.

That still left Spitzer's approval rating at over 55 percent, and having already taken the hit, the new governor had every reason to reap the rewards for doing the right thing. Instead, he became suddenly concerned with passing an on-time budget, which he'd previously claimed wouldn't be a priority, and mostly capitulated on out-of-control spending on Medicaid and throughout the budget. Given his nearly 70% approval rating upon taking office, it's unlikely he'll ever again have more political capital than he's just squandered. Given what he'd committed to getting things right in his first 100 days (the mantra was, "On Day One, everything changes") It's the equivalent of folding a $50 pot to a 50 cent bet.

Whatever his reasons for backing down, Spitzer's come out of his first real fight with his reputation damaged. Still, he's got at least three and likely seven years to turn things around, and has something of a track record of doing so. Few still remember that he'd originally intended to make his name as A.G. on gun control, and it was only after suffering several embarrassing defeats on this front that he set his sights on Wall Street, and established the reputation as "Sheriff of Wall Street" that he leveraged into the governorship.

For all the fuss about Medicaid fraud, which according to the New York Times may cost billions, though, the real issue is willful waste. Spending on the program exploded under Governor Pataki, mostly owing to a unique funding formula in which the state split its share of Medicaid costs with the counties, and so came to see dollars spent on the program as nearly free money, since each dollar so spent generated one from a county, and two from the federal government. The result has been a health care system that does triple duty as a political power base and as a incredibly inefficient job subsidy. It's also resulted in a politically potent union that gains more power over the state government each time that same government ensures its income and membership increases, making reform that much more difficult with each year's new spending spike.

All this was brought to mind, but the undue focus on fraud, which has became an issue largely owing to the Times dispatch, which generated national headlines, its potential efficacy as a campaign issue for Spitzer's opponents. The Times has continued on the fraud beat, with a new A1 dispatch (also picked up by Drudge) on the $50 million New York spends on just 500 addicts who continually enroll in Medicaid-sponsored rehab programs.

To be sure, it's crucial to pick such low-lying fruit, but this coverage seems to come at the expense of any broader look at how New York ended up spending so much more per person on Medicaid than any other large state, with no discernible improvement to the quality of healthcare. The focus on fraud has conveniently kept attention from the larger issue of the program's profound and purposeful inefficiencies. Medicaid spending is an awfully inefficient and especially inelegant way for the state to create or maintain jobs.

Spitzer has a year now to get his budget priorities in order, and there's every reason to believe that next year he'll come to the table in a weaker negotiating position than where he just was, as a new governor who'd won with an overwhelming mandate for change. Here's hoping he'll play his hand better, no matter the cards, the next time around.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 03:50 AM | Permalink |

—Would Chicago be better off letting some of its history go? Tribune architectural critic Blair Kamin on what's wrong with preserving facades.

—Fred Siegel in the new number of City Journal on Nat Glazer's new book and the architecture of repulsion.

—Springfield legislators seems unwilling to put their money where their mouths are for Chicago's 2016 Olympics bid.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 10:09 AM | Permalink |

The Times takes a look at Philly's soaring murder rate, and blames gun control laws that have stayed the same even as shootings have gone up. In an exceptionally dishonest bit, the piece opens:

In a hospital emergency room, a young man winces as doctors try to determine how badly he has been injured.

His name is Karim Williams, he is 27, and he is this city’s latest shooting victim. He says he was hit around 12:30 a.m. by a shot fired while he was walking from his girlfriend’s car into a bar.

…

In some ways, Mr. Williams is a typical patient at the trauma unit: young, mildly intoxicated and apparently with no idea why he was shot.

It's not until the 16th paragraph that Williams is mentioned again, when we're told that our unlucky victim "was looking for work after a past in which he served jail time for crimes including car theft and drug dealing." Our out of work ex-con's claim of being randomly shot is never held up to any questioning, though.

Rather, he's used to offer a resonant opinion on what's causing the problem: "'You’ve got to have jobs for the people that need them,' [Williams] said from his gurney. 'You have to keep people occupied. Without jobs, all you can do is resort to violence.'"

Having steered shy of Williams' background also means the article is unable to get to the heart of the matter—the extent to which these shootings result from high-crime pockets the police have been both unable and unwilling to go after, which in turn leads to still more crime, and a culture of lawlessness that's just brutal for the civilians who live in these areas.

Instead, the Times offers only two equally half-baked explanations for why the murder rate was up 22% from 2004-2006, and is on the rise again this year—lax state gun control laws state law compels the city to abide by, and poverty.

We wrote at some length about crime in Philly last week—suffice that a city with more murders than New York City and a sixth the population, and a mayor and police commissioner who prefer to blame the rise from 288 killings in 2002 to 406 last year on state laws and environmental causes they're powerless to change, is in bad need of a new direction.

The good news is that in the first Democratic mayoral debate on Saturday [video here], several of the candidates took a far more honest look at crime than the Times, or Mayor Street, has proven capable of taking.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 10:48 AM | Permalink |

I'm headed to Philly for a look at this year's mayor's race. In the meantime, take a look at the trailer below of The Shame of a City, a much bezzed-about documentary look at the 2003 contest, and how the "discovery" (likely after a tip the police commissioner's FBI-agent son) of a FBI-planted bug in the office of corrupt and content mayor John Street actually inspired voters to rally around him.

I wrote about the bizarre, Barry-esque dynamics of the race at the time here and here. Given the buzz director Tigre Hill's film has generated (one mayor candidate has attended a screening, and another has hosted one), it's clear the issue stil resonates.

Watch the trailer >>

Posted by Harry Siegel at 07:03 AM | Permalink |

Constance Miller, a D.C.-based pubic policy consultant on youth issues, writes in with a look at how new mayor Adrian Fenty's plan for mayoral control is playing out so far:

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And if it’s really, really broke – replace it.

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty was swept into office last November on his promise to take control and accountability for reforming the district’s failing school system. No more passing the buck for school failure. Actually, a lot of bucks: D.C. spends more per student than any urban school district, yet is besieged by shockingly low student performance rates and substandard school facilities.

While Fenty hit the ground running, seeking input nationwide as he fleshed out his plan, D.C. city council’s new chairman Vince Gray was creating a key role for the council. Aware that all members would want a piece of the education action, he created a committee-of-the-whole for education which he would chair. The Mayor needed buy-in from a majority of the council to make school reform a reality; he couldn’t do it by fiat.

The chairman, who is widely respected, convened the committee, which then held hearings with youth, parents, community members, experts in the field, the mayor and his senior staff and other officials (Mayor Bloomberg included). Subsequently, the mayor and his deputy mayor for education met with individual council members where concerns and issues were raised.

On the bill’s first reading earlier this month, it passed 9 to 2; it is scheduled for a final vote on April 19. Under the plan, the council takes over line-item budget control from the current school board.

Fenty’s plan has its critics and has generated lots of discussion, which is good. During the Mayor’s race, several council members and candidates were opposed to or openly skeptical of of his plan, as were a vocal minority of constituents. In part, these objections were based on the claim that mayoral control undercuts true representative democracy in the district. But other than using this hot-button issue as an organizing tool, it's hard to see how mayoral control endangers representative government.

One claim is that the Mayor’s plan “emasculates” the board. But, how can you emasculate a gelding? When has it made any difference who’s elected to the board, which obviously has had minimal impact on the district’s Kafkaesque central office? (I bet that most district residents don’t know the name of their school board representative, let alone the names of one or two others. I don’t.)

Someone must be held accountable for an education system that “does right” by the city’s children, parents, dedicated teachers and principals. Now there will be – and everyone knows his name.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 01:12 PM | Permalink |

Here's our latest featued essay, from Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill—

Over the last decade there has been a great focus on the movement of educated people between regions. In trying to understand where these populations are headed, various people have constructed different models stressing everything from the “agglomeration effects” of particularly high end industries to the concentration of artists, bohemians and gays.

Our analysis of the 2000 Census and the 2005 American Community Survey makes one thing clear: the strong net “brain gain” of places such as Boston, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles over the past 40 years appears to have been reversed in most of the premier “knowledge” regions since the mid-1990s. The San Francisco Bay Area and Minneapolis have both suffered especially dramatic reversals from net in-migration of educated people to a strong out-migration over the past 15 years.

Continued here.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 08:04 AM | Permalink |

In Philadelphia, the Democratic mayoral primary that will almost certainly determine the next mayor is just five weeks off. I'll be writing in from Philly later this week with an extensive look at the race. Meanwhile, here's a look at crime in the City of Brotherly Love, which more than 70 per cent of likely Democratic voters in the latest poll rate as their foremost concern, with no other issue cracking double digits. What's more, a majority of those voters (56 per cent) want the return of tough on crime former Giuliani deputy and then Philadelphia Police Chief John Timoney, who's now heading the Miami department, and more than three-fifths favor an increase in stop and frisk policing.

The Philadelphia Daily News, though, has a different view of crime—one that holds the city harmless for its 97 murders through March, as against 84 in New York City. That's a more than 600% difference in the murder rate. in a news article entirely devoid of opposing opinions, the paper—and the city's top cop—however, prefer to blame environmental factors than concede that a new mayor and police chief could do better:

It may have more to do with New York's world-class status than its crime-fighting techniques, professors and police officials argued yesterday. A healthy job market and a chance at a decent education influences crime statistics more than a police department, they argued. "Philadelphia is not New York," said Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, who was not too pleased with the comparison. "You have to look at the economy and demographics. There are many factors involved with homicides other than the police."

…

Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of Philadelphia's 2006 murder victims were African-American, according to police statistics. And juvenile gun violence has reached a five-year high, with teenage boys as the targets.

"Idleness among youth is extremely high and extremely dangerous," said economist Dr. Neeta Fogg, of Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies.

"The world of work is so foreign to them, and the world of crime is right there. They don't have any other options."

Fogg warned: "You are losing all your kids. This is the future workforce."

What might be done about this, the article doesn't say. The point, though, is clear: it's not on us. Here's hoping Philadelphians know more than their newspaper and their police chief.

For a telling counterpoint, take a look at Broken Windows pioneer George Kelling's look at why Newark's murder rate continues to rise even as the overall crime rate goes down, and what can be done to bring it down in a city where nearly all murders stem from corner dealing culture, and who shoots and who gets shot is mostly "the luck of the draw":

Research conducted by Rutgers Police Institute reveals what is going on in Newark: a relatively small number of African-American young men, with lengthy delinquency and criminal histories, are carrying guns, dealing drugs, draping themselves in gang colors, and settling disputes -- many trivial -- by shooting each other. While many shootings appear gang related -- in that the shooter and victim are gang members in name -- relatively few are gang motivated. Gang membership, except for relatively small groups of hard-core individuals, is largely symbolic. Who shoots, and who gets shot, is almost literally determined by the "luck of the draw." We had a shooting victim last month, for example, who had 34 arrests and 19 convictions, mostly for weapons possession and drug sales. This time he was the victim, but he could have easily been the perpetrator. Further complicating matters, many who survive shootings know who shot them but won't tell the police -- planning instead to settle the matter themselves and continue the cycle of violence. Witness intimidation is widespread.

A cynic might say this is a whole different category of victimless crime, but Kelling and co-author Michael Wagers prefer to look at how Newark Police Director Garry McCarthy might be able to repeat the success he had as precinct commander for New York's Washington Heights, then the drug dealing capital of the city, and home to a riot following the shooting of a known drug dealer that helped elect Giuliani mayor after Dinkins immediately went to the hospital room of the fallen thug:

Like Newark today, Washington Heights in the 1980s and early '90s was a major drug distribution center that suffered from high levels of violent crime. In 1991, there were 119 murders in Washington Heights, which is approximately the size of Newark. Under McCarthy's leadership as commander of the 33rd precinct, murders in Washington Heights fell to just 15 by 1998, an incredible 87 percent drop.

How did McCarthy accomplish this? In three phases: first, he targeted and dismantled the entire wholesale and retail drug organization in the neighborhood. This was not just a few "buy and bust operations." Forty top-level dealers were arrested, prosecuted, and handed stiff prison sentences.
Second, to ensure that the vacuum that resulted from the first phase did not attract other drug organizations, he increased police presence through foot patrol and aggressive vehicle and pedestrian stops, which were conducted under clear legal guidelines.

Third, police closely collaborated with other city agencies to improve and maintain the quality of life in the neighborhood. Police also mobilized the community by helping organize block watches, youth councils, and landlord and tenant associations. Even when McCarthy gradually cut the police presence, the initiative's full impact remained. Police and newly-empowered community leaders have prevented disorder and crime from returning.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 10:21 AM | Permalink |

The Weekly Standard signs on to the prison reform movement with a look at the problems with California's powder keg jails, which are so over crowded the state has resorted to exporting prisoners to privately operated out-of-state prisons.

Tough-on-crime sentencing enhancements, less discretion for trial judges, and the switch from indeterminate to fixed sentencing have resulted in a 600 percent increase in California's prison population between 1980 and 2006. Designed to hold 81,000 inmates, California's 33 prisons now house close to 174,000 men. Crowding is so intense that 16,000 convicts sleep in hallways, classrooms, and other areas not intended for habitation. Projections indicate that 23,000 additional inmates will be added within five years, which could prompt a corresponding jump in a suicide rate that already is twice the national average for prisoners.

…

Twenty California counties have court-ordered population caps on their jails. An additional 12 counties have imposed population caps on themselves to avoid costly litigation. These population caps mean that someone must be released when a new inmate is admitted to a full jail. As a consequence, 233,388 individuals avoided incarceration in 2005, or were released early from county jail sentences, because of a lack of space.

And one note-worthy positive development:

For Harris Wood, life in prison changed dramatically two years ago when he arrived at the Lancaster State Prison and discovered the Honor Program. Organized by inmates and open to prisoners without discipline problems, the program allows prisoners who promise not to fight or use drugs and agree to disavow racism to live together away from the gangs.

The program has produced an 85 percent decline in violence and 88 percent reduction in weapons-related incidents, according to state senator Gloria Romero, who chairs the California Assembly's Senate Public Safety Committee. There have been cost savings of $200,000 from the reduction of staff time needed to document violent incidents.

More in this Times dispatch from last year.

Posted by Fred Siegel at 08:16 AM | Permalink |

John McWhorter argues that ensuring ex-offenders can find work today's civil rights movement:

It is a myth that no one will hire an ex-con.

He might conclude otherwise if he tries to get a job by using the wanted ads in a paper. What he needs, instead, are people who know where to send him — say, an organization specializing in connecting ex-offenders with work.

A couple of decades ago, the good fight was breaking down the walls of segregation. Today, the civil rights movement is more about helping the distracted and the misled of the poor, black people and how they can join the America that the civil rights pioneers created for us.

That is what organizations bringing ex-offenders into the mainstream are doing. They deserve the attention of anyone seriously interested in today's version of what used to be called the Struggle. Serious interest here means letting go of utopian rhetoric about a perfectly level socio-economic playing field and dealing with the world as it is.

Posted by Fred Siegel at 11:00 AM | Permalink |

BoKok, Ikea's pre-fab apartment house comes to Britain.

The D.C. Council gives preliminary approval for mayoral control of the public school system.

L.A. Police Chief Bill Bratton formally announces he'll seek a second term. Given his success in reducing crime and his support from the mayor and several members of the Police Commission, he should become the first police chief to serve a second term since the City Charter was changed in 1992 to limit the position to two five-year appointments. Council Member Bernard Parks, Bratton's predecessor as police commissioner whose removal from office helped bring down Mayor James Hahn, is likely to make this good theater, at least.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 09:34 AM | Permalink |

We'll be off tomorrow for Passover, so here's a new featured essay to take in between now and then. Comments as always welcome.

Two recent reports on the greater Boston economy, one from The Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research and one from MassInc and Brookings, point to a disturbing trend—so-called superstar cities are having less and less effect on regional economies. The trickledown, that is, is drying up.

As an undergrad, I attended Brandeis, located in Waltham, Mass., a city of just under 60,000 sometimes called the Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, where Francis Cabot Lowell built America’s first cotton-to-cloth textile mill. Waltham was also the home of the once-world famous Waltham Watch Co., which manufactured the first fully mass-produced (also the first fully-American made) watches. The company moved to Switzerland in 1957, and the factory ceased producing timepieces altogether after more than a century and a half of continuous operation in 1994, when ownership moved operations to the cheaper climes of Ozark, Alabama. The city continues to identify with what’s gone—businesses include The Watch City Brewing Co., Watch City Cigar, and at least a dozen other Watch City businesses.

Waltham doesn’t quite fit the model of Boston’s reduced impact on its orbit. It’s a mere eight miles west of Beantown, just off of the I-95/Rt. 128 artery that’s become an office space destination for information- and knowledge-based businesses looking for low rents in close proximity to Boston. That, along with Brandeis and a downtown restaurant row that’s become something of a destination, has kept the tax rolls from suffering too much with the loss of Waltham’s defining industry.

Just blocks from the downtown dining, though, are unused factories and abandoned properties, a secession of shady and aimless characters peopling the 24-hour stores. In short, a state of dilapidation that few take as opportunity, even as new construction by the highway to house the companies escaping Boston’s still-supercharged real estate market swells Waltham’s tax rolls.

Continued here.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 08:02 AM | Permalink |

Juan Gonzalez thinks the record number of subprime defaults in New York result from what he calls reverse-redlining.

Mayor Bloomberg thinks borrowers also bear blame—

"Yes, people have been borrowing monies that they can't pay back," Bloomberg said. "It's a process that's been going on a long time.

"You can blame the subprime lenders. You can blame the people that borrowed the money without having any reasonable expectation of ever paying it back."

"This is the marketplace at work and people should not try to live beyond their means," he added.

And in our latest featured essay, Howard Husock warns that bills to let lenders off the hook may augur a return to redlining–

Thursday’s Wall Street Journal makes clear that subprime mortgage delinquencies are not just a problem for the bond markets and homeowners—they’re a special problem for cities. The maps and tables of Where Subprime Delinquencies are Getting Worse show that subprime defaults are geographically concentrated and that much of that concentration occurs in cities. In Oakland, 12 percent of all subprimes are delinquent for 60 days or more; in Sacramento, 14 percent, Boston, 15 percent, Minneapolis 16.5 percent and Detroit, 24.6 percent. Any delinquency reflects personal hardship, but such concentration can also mean neighborhood problems. If one’s neighbors are behind on mortgage payments, it’s not likely they will paint or do roof repairs either. Such are the ways neighorhoods—and tax bases—go downhill.

One might call this the “default and delinquency belt” phenomenon. I first saw it several years ago on the near-South Side of Chicago, where a community organizer (not Barack Obama) took me on a tour of the Back of the Yards neighborhood. He’d painstakingly assembled data on mortgage defaults—and could point out which houses on which blocks were in trouble. It wasn’t hard to tell. Some had been abandoned and taken over by drug gangs. Blue collar neighbors understood their life savings, tied up in their homes, to be at risk.

The questions arise, however, as to why such urban delinquency belts, as mapped by Journal, have come to be, and what, if anything can or should be done about them?

Continued here

Posted by Harry Siegel at 09:25 AM | Permalink |

Over at Governing, Zach Patton misses the point of the "HELP WANTED: Stop the Killings in Newark Now!" billboards paid for by the Newark Teachers Union, and the Newarker sets him straight. The ads are a shell game, of course, saying in effect that if crime is high, then Booker has no right to reform the schools.

Staying in Newark, John McWhorter asks what's to be done with the ex-offenders flooding back to the city—"There is, of course, a certain diversity among those returning to Newark, New Jersey, just not enough that matters. Ten percent are not men. An even smaller percentage are not black. There are few who read above the sixth-grade level. About one in five do not have a drug addiction problem, and about one in 20 had some vocational training behind bars. Three years after they return from prison, only one out of three will not have been arrested again."

Paul Howard argues that the debate over prisoner re-entry "will be a replay of the debate over welfare reform," a case also made by Peter Cove here at Cities on a Hill in his essay Can Recidivism Reform Do For Men What Welfare Reform Did For Women?

Posted by Harry Siegel at 10:19 AM | Permalink |

—Deja Vu All Over Again. The good news for Boston's Big Dig is that the money the project is suing to get back from contractors may help make up for $110 million more in new cost overruns. The official price tag, then, will remain $14.625 billion, up just a bit more than 700% from the original estimate of $2 billion.

—Aging El. Chicago's rail system is in need of serious repair, and some think the problem is Daley's crony-fied control of the CTA. Then again, see the Big Dig item above for the perils of rule by public authority.

—Boggled Viaduct. Planetizen posts a podcast on what's next in Seattle, following an advisory referenda in which voters rejected two bad plans for replacing the Alaskan Viaduct, a key waterfront highway that's been in need of replacement since sustaining damage in a 2001 earthquake.

—Yesterday's Train of Tomorrow, Today.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 10:20 AM | Permalink |

Through [the old Penn Station] one entered the city like a God. Now one scuttles in like a rat. —Vincent Scully

The old Penn Station

Senator Pat Moynihan spent much of his last years fighting to create a new point of entry worthy of New York City, and now the proposed Moynihan Station has taken a big step toward becoming a reality.

This good news makes it a perfect day for our latest featured essay, in which John Norquist, the Mayor of Milwaukee from 1988 to 2004 and now the President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, takes a look at Nat Glazer's new From a Cause to a Style.

A rendering of Moynihan Station

Posted by Fred Siegel at 11:13 AM | Permalink |

Kim Hendrickson, political science professor at George Washington University, writes in with a look at new D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty:

More reminders from the District of Columbia that, in the words of the Godfather of Soul, sayin' and doin' it are two different things. Mayor Fenty’s first State of the District Address last week was a grab bag of things he’d like to do as mayor, things he plans to do as mayor, and things he’d like to get some credit for as mayor even if he’s not responsible for them and nobody really cares—“we've inspected almost 40,000 vehicles and adjudicated almost 45,000 traffic tickets… bought backup generators to keep important traffic lights running even when the power goes out, [and] opened registration for summer camp.” In other words, there are reasons his predecessors waited a year before informing the public of their accomplishments.

But no matter. The most interesting aspect of his speech, or at least the thing our local press has emphasized, is not what he said but where he said it—at a senior citizens’ center in long-suffering Ward 8, ground zero for the city's most pressing social problems. It's interesting to note, then, what issue the Mayor highlighted to bring hope to a poverty-stricken ward and to encourage community action. ??In terms of mitigating Ward 8’s pain (double digit unemployment and a poverty rate hovering around 30 percent), Fenty mentioned a library here, a wellness center there, a grant from FannieMae, but the rhetorical climax was a demand for full House representation (the lack of which he characterized as “shameful” and “unjust”). He ended his speech with an exhortation to the seniors to march on the Capitol, “where we'll demand our freedom.”

After the blandness of the Williams years, I have no objection to a little rhetorical excess, but this portends badly for the future. Marion Barry’s pre-mayoral claim to fame was more freedom for the District—a cause he continued to champion as mayor, even as he destroyed all semblance of order in our neighborhoods. District residents, one would hope, have had their fill of voting rights as a vehicle of self-promotion, or the blaming of Congress for problems of our own local government’s doing.  Further, the mayor’s characterization of a thorny Constitutional issue as a clear cut civil rights cause doesn’t suggest a mind or temperament ready for the complications of city politics. And once again, Ward 8 suffers the most from the distraction of protest politics.

Posted by Fred Siegel at 10:27 AM | Permalink |

Jay Weiser writes in with a look at the disruptive effects of power subsidies:

Iran is driving itself into the ground with oil subsidies that drive the price of gas down to 35 cents a gallon. Iranian consumers pig out on the gas, and have no incentive to conserve, which (fortunately for the U.S.) is likely to cause economic problems for the Ayatollahs down the line. 

The U.S. is doing the same thing, though on a smaller scale, through subsidized hydropower. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft, Yahoo and Intuit all want to build computer data centers in 5,300 person Quincy, an agricultural town in eastern Washington State. Why build electricity-hogging data centers in the middle of nowhere, causing an infrastructure crisis in tiny Quincy? Because the townn has below-market hydropower, with rates as low as 2 cents a kilowatt-hour, as compared to a market rate of as high as 9 cents. The high-tech firms are chasing subsidies, distorting the market and inefficiently using power in a way that would globally warm the heart of Al Gore, and his 20-room Nashville mansion. 

Much hydropower is wasted this way. The New York Power Authority under former Republican Governor George Pataki proudly used cheap-to-produce Niagara-Mohawk power as a tool of industrial policy, strewing subsidies to favored companies while the rest of the state groaned under exorbitant energy prices. The TVA, FDR's experiment in socialism, still boasts of its below-market rates. If we dumped the hydropower subsidies and let all electricity costs rise to market, there would be more conservation, more efficient use, and less global warming.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 07:01 AM | Permalink |

—Ethnic cleansing? One take on Latino-on-black crime in L.A.

—USA Today hops on the mayoral control of education bandwagon in an exceptionally uncritical cover story. Azi Paybarah looks at the backlash against mayoral control in New York here, and Diane Ravitch sides with the critics here.

—An old Reagan hand thinks that class-action litigation is dragging down Wall Street. (hat-tip: Point of Law).

—Over at Room 8, Larry Littlefield makes a case for land near transit stations as the new beachfront property, and Ben Smith posts a work unfriendly video of a customer meltdown at the Kensington Post Office in Brooklyn, which just may be the worst government institution I've ever set foot in.

Posted by Harry Siegel at 06:18 AM | Permalink |

The competition for supremacy in the financial markets between New York and london has become a hot story, with the current issue of New York Magazine dedicated to it, a lengthy New York Sun series comparing the cities, and the requisite Drudge link posted today. We've been posting on this for months now (here, here and here, for starter