Month: July 2009

Chefs and Downtown Pretensions

Lisa Schweitzer

It is no secret that I live in downtown Los Angeles, which, like every downtown with boosters, has Pretensions with a capital P. It is a truism in the world of politics (and in markets) that perceptions are more important than reality. But so far in real estate, pretension has worked out for downtown Los Angeles. For example, last night on our way back from a dinner party in Venice, Homey elected to drive up Main Street. South Main Street in Los Angeles at 10 o’clock at night on a Saturday is utterly, utterly devoid of human life, full of litter—a craphole to be vulgar. A mere block away in my building, somebody is offering their 1,800 square-foot loft for sale for $900,000.

Nine. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. For 1,800 square feet that places you in without a doubt one of the lousiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Say what you want about Compton, at least there are people on the street during the evening, other than the ones looking for a discreet storefront they can use for a urinal.

Somebody needs to explain this to me. Explain to me why you would spend nearly a million for a small place in a crappy neighborhood when for the same money you could live on the lavish and truly lovely westside of Los Angeles. Class envy on my part notwithstanding, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Brentwood–these are amazing, amenity-filled locations, including proximity to the beach. My part of downtown has only just gotten a restaurant or two that stays open past lunchtime and it is an hour drive to the ocean, and a two-hour bus ride.

Nine. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars.

We are engaging in the pretense that Los Angeles is the next New York, with our sky-high downtown real estate prices, even though Los Angeles is not New York for good reasons.

I am ranting about this today because of the cupcake incident yesterday. My mild-mannered husband and I went to Bottega Louie, one of downtown LA’s newest pretense-laden places. In general, it’s quite good, and the renovation is lovely. However, poor Andy sat, ignored, in front of their service counter for about five minutes while one of their staff arranged their cupcakes so that she could take a picture of them with her iPhone. She caught his eye, and then purposely ignored him, going back to her cupcake arrangement, saying nothing.

Later, one of their stellar, friendly wait staff did actually come to take Andy’s order, and this person explained that the other staff was a chef and therefore did not wait on patrons.

Can we just get over ourselves for a fracking second here? You’re a chef–a chef in charge of cupcakes, for heaven’s sakes, one of your easier baked goods to master–and you are willing to potentially lose a customer for your team because you are too good to stop fiddling with your cupcakes to say “I”ll find somebody to help you here–just give me a sec.” Making pie dough? Stretching strudel dough? Sure, I’ll let you concentrate. Taking poor-quality digital images of your cupcakes? I think this is a task that one maybe might be safe to interrupt for the sake of acknowledging your fellow man’s existence and putting a good face on the business that employs you. I’m not one of those people who thinks that wait staff need to be hyper-friendly, but yo.

Oh, and by the way….the cupcakes aren’t that good, so boo boo nyah.


Friends in High Places

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

Raphael Bostic, one of my favorite colleagues at USC, was confirmed yesterday as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Raphael is one of the reasons why I always laugh at the evil/petty/egotistical professor characters that inevitably show up on tv. Raphael is the whole package: he’s brilliant, hard-working, funny, and generous. I hope they appreciate him at HUD because we miss him around these parts.


Animals and dogfighting in the sustainable society

Lisa Schweitzer

“The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), History of England

One wonders if in this regard the Puritans weren’t right. To delight in cruelty, especially when the cruelty is enacted over those with less power than you, and who are dependent upon you, portends a degradation of the human spirit that transcends the Puritan’s godly distrust of ungodly pursuits . You wish to prove your mettle and courage? Go join a cage fight your own self, don’t send your charges into one for you. You can try all the “this is my culture” excuses you want: finding entertainment or profit in another’s pain is sociopathy, no matter how dressed up.

One of my favorite books on the subject of animal-nature ethics was edited by my former colleague Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel:

Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. Published in 1998 by Verso.


Cities and the Stimulus

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

One of my fantastic students from Virginia Tech, Eric Howard, posted this piece from today’s New York Times on Facebook. The NYT author argues that:

Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, home to the nation’s worst traffic jams and some of its oldest roads and bridges. But cities and their surrounding regions are getting far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money.

The reporter goes on to quote outrage from mayors. They also get information from one of my favorite experts, Rob Puentes at Brookings. As usual, Rob has a very good point here: this package isn’t just about business as usual revenue allocation–which has always had a strong rural bias due to the structure of the Federal representative system (as Owen D. Gutfreund points out). This rural strength made way more sense 150 years ago than it does now.

So, of course all of these smart people are right in that cities aren’t treated very well in the stimulus, as they aren’t treated very well in Federal politics in general.

However, we have to ask ourselves: would it really be sensible to hand out this money on a per capita basis either? The main argument for cities and against suburbs and small towns is an economy of scale argument. Those arguments underpin the “costs of sprawl” research. Urbanization and density of human settlement lower the cost of providing infrastructure because of all the sharing we city folk do: the same sidewalk can serve thousands per day instead of a handful of people per day, as in a low-density settlement.

Thus, cities should somewhat expect to receive less per person than other places. The key point is just how much less per person should we expect urban infrastructure to cost, given all this sharing. The problem with sharing, of course, is that sharing leads to congestion after a certain point in population growth, thereby raising costs for everybody and requiring either dispersal of population or additional infrastructure.

While planning and planners are hard-wired to think in terms of increasing density, building duplicate systems (ie increasing capacity) in congested areas is only one means of cost sharing: the other, more macro-scale approach is to direct more growth to areas with excess capacity or price congested facilities and shift more of the revenue generation burden back onto users instead of looking for Federal funds.
This latter approach is, I think, where we are ultimately heading with infrastructure finance in the new urban world. Do we have compelling arguments for why the Federal government should be involved in urban infrastructure if all they going to do is return revenues to source (the per capita/population distribution argument). Anti-federalists can and do make strong arguments for local funding of intracity systems, like metro rail systems, while Federal dollars should go to intercity and interstate projects.

So while the NYT and urban mayors are probably right in that this distribution of funding is skewed, they haven’t really told us what the right distribution would look like, other than to say that cities are important and they need more money. Of course they are and they do, but it isn’t as though some of the poorest places in this country aren’t places like the Central Valley rather than places like Los Angeles, and it’s not as though Boston doesn’t depend on connectivity between rural Florida and Boston for all parts of the freight and US food system.


A New Green Transport Blog

Lisa Schweitzer

Alexene Farol, one of the extremely gifted students in PPD at USC, has started up her own blog on transportation, “Lex Rail.” The young are so adventurous! She’s already posted about high-speed rail, which I haven’t worked up to.

Alexene is wonderful for a bunch of reasons, and the fact that she might might be becoming one of us—the transport crowd–is doubly thrilling to me for selfish reasons. I taught her in a class that is basically an intro to the city, and you have to accept in teaching that class that you will get students from real estate only marginally interested in the city and students in management who are adamantly (proudly) a-spatial and think urban planning is simply a derivative of their much more lofty aspirations to “manage.” Let’s just put it this way: Alexene opted to read Milton Friedman for the class, and she really read it and worked at it.

With that class, I always want my brightest students–and Alexene is one of the brightest I’ve ever had–to become planners, largely because I worry that my field is clogged with ideologues and solutions advocates and not thinkers. This is a problem she hints at with this post. Planners are well-intended, and some are very gifted thinkers indeed. These are the best of us, these philosopher-kings. Other of us are merely king wannabes, who think that if planners shape cities we will change human behavior and human society like clay in the hands of potter, and they follow various city “recipes” like they can create utopia through sidewalks.

To some degree, they are right: the material life of the city, just like the material environment of your home, is important to how you use and enjoy the space. So sure, let’s put in some sidewalks, that would be lovely, but we probably shouldn’t conclude based on this that we’ve taken millions of car trips off the road or prompted somebody to lose 100 pounds. Providing a place to walk, while not as heroic-sounding as “saving the planet” or “fighting the war against obesity,” is actually probably accomplishment enough. Sidewalks are good.

But social and environmental change is complicated. It requires not just a vision of an artful streetscape and colored pencils but an understanding of science, managing money, social change and sometimes adversarial human interaction, and all of these require leadership. So yah, for bright people in planning, among whom Alexene is one.

If Alexene actually stays focused on transport, though, that’s even better. It’s not like there aren’t bright people in transport. This particular part of planning has not suffered from a wont of analytical capacity–if anything, it has sometimes suffered from the unity of its vision. Having bright, analytical, creative people like Alexene join the field is just wonderful when it happens because she has the whole enchilada: she’s a good and creative thinker, a good writer, a strong sense of social commitment, and leadership charisma. And, as her grappling with Milton Friedman suggests, she’s not afraid to work.

So I am keeping my fingers crossed.


Car-Free Downtowns: Green-ness and/or Economics or Both?

Lisa Schweitzer

Kat Martindale sent me a link to this story about Sydney’s bid to take cars out of the CBD. Like the Times Square plan, this makes perfect sense from an economics standpoint: the land is too valuable to have space taken up through space-intensive modes like cars. Other very large, very congested cities who don’t regulate often go the same way through individual market sorting, with people taking to foot, bicycle, and scooter to slither through the cars sitting in gridlock.

Oddly, we may not know ultimately the environmental effect of these car-free zones. WHAT? ARE YOU STUPID, Dr. Schweitzer??? Anything that gets rid of cars is good, right? Well, we don’t know that these types of car-free zones actually get rid of cars and trucks, or whether the zones simply divert vehicles elsewhere, re-routing them and thus adding to VMT, idling, or just slower speeds–all of which can add emissions as easily as they can subtract them. Eliminating car trips isn’t as simple as disallowing them in various parts of the city. There will be local benefits to air quality and a bunch of other things, but we don’t know what happens for global or regional emissions.

There’s a nice manuscript, by researchers I respect immensely, on how Paris’ car suppression strategies have had mixed results for air quality:

Bouf, Dominique and David A. Hensher, The dark side of making transit irresistible: The example of France, Transport Policy, Volume 14, Issue 6, November 2007, Pages 523-532, ISSN 0967-070X, DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2007.09.002.

Link in ScienceDirect.


Marketing Fast Food in the US

Lisa Schweitzer

I’m home with Andy finally, watching the Dodgers go into extra innings (due to a very bad 9th inning performance from Broxton, yoikes). This allows me to watch lots of commercials, and it occurs to me: Carl’s Jr. seems to have given up entirely on marketing to anybody that isn’t a 12 to 22 year-old male, given the unabashed misogyny of their commercials. It makes me wonder if the strategy has worked out for them in terms of market share. Other fast food retailers have responded to the public health exposes of the fast food industry by offering salads and the like. But Carl’s seems to be going for a niche of risk-takers instead.

I’ll have more real stuff to share soon, as I am unfortunately handling a number of deadlines the same way that Broxton handled the 9th inning.


There’s no crying in national politics

Lisa Schweitzer

Sarah Palin’s resignation is getting an odd amount of attention here in the land of sausage and pastry. While I don’t study national politics, that doesn’t stop me from holding Very Important Opinions on the subject. It’s hard to buy the pundit’s line that she is quitting mid-term for a presidential run–there’s nothing about quitting which might give her a leg up unless she also stars in several successful barbarian movies in the interim. Leaving office marginalizes her from a platform, which you need in a campaign.

Instead, I suspect she’s tired of it; she had a mawkish start on the national stage (compared to that Barack Obama back in 2004), and she’s done a lot of hinting and complaining about how “mean” people and “the media” (like Fox News?) are to her because of her positions–an attitude you don’t get indulge in high-level public office.


Roundtable on the Stimulus

Lisa Schweitzer

A Roundtable Discussion on Social and Economic Impacts of Federal Economic Stimulus and Transportation Legislation Reauthorization: Identifying Research Needs

Location: Sheraton Seattle Hotel
Date: Monday July 20, 2009
Time: 10:00‐11:45am (immediately following the ADD20 Committee Meeting)

Participants:
Thera Black, Chair, ADA20 (Metropolitan Policy, Planning and Processes Committee)
Marc Brenman, former‐Executive Director, Washington State Human Rights Commission
Richard Marcantonio, Managing Attorney, Public Advocates, Inc. (San Francisco)
Tom Sanchez, Chair ADD20 (Social and Economic Factors of Transportation)

“States are receiving federal funding for infrastructure projects to stimulate economic recovery. These projects were identified as those being “shovel ready”, meaning that they can commence construction immediately and provide much needed jobs and economic activity.

The White House believes that expediting this process is critical to the U.S. economy and well‐being of workers and their families. The Federal Transportation Bill will be another opportunity to make much needed infrastructure investments with stimulus effects.

One issue of concern is that in the haste to stimulate the economy, the projects being selecteddo not necessarily consider wider socio‐economic consequences and needs, including equity measures. For example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 directed billions to transit capital (primarily road) projects, but left out critical funding needed to operate and extend transit systems upon which millions of low‐income people depend for daily mobility. Others point to stimulus funding availability for costly rail expansion projects at the expense of funds to maintain existing bus service. Has the focus on creating construction jobs job creation been at the expense of fundamental system needs and broader social objectives?

This roundtable will bring together a range of perspectives including representatives from the US DOT, state DOTs, Metropolitan Planning Organizations and advocacy groups to discuss economic stimulus in terms of social equity, job generation, accountability, inclusiveness, and implementation. In particular, the discussion is intended to identify future research needs to evaluate these transportation investments in the larger socio‐economic context. The product of the roundtable will be a research needs statement outlining questions specific to outcomes at the metropolitan, state, and federal levels.”