Spending, Pardons and GOP 2010

I do what I want. from motherpie's flickr.

Clinton spent his last months giving out pardons to felons and friends, but in the last few months of the Bush Administration, executive branchers spent trillions and trillions of dollars setting up shady loan deals with the people that ruined the US economy.  The real upshot from these deals will be hemming in the incoming administration financially with a near criminal excess of unaccounted-for and unauthorized loan programs.

At this point, the Bush folks see the writing on the wall and want to do their best to restrain the new government by running up deficits then demanding budget ballancing in the next Congress.  The military plays the same game with the defense budget, bloating requests for new spending to require cuts and then pigeonhole Obama as someone weak on defense.  With Bush functionally out of office, and all eyes on the incoming administration, no doubt these problems will look like an Obama problem, which will be the first step to a planned GOP resurgence in 2010.

Home Ownership Isn’t a Housing Policy

closed door. from shootamins' flickr

The mortgage-driven economic crisis brings into question the longstanding goal of the US government to keep home prices high and encourage home ownership says an article in the Boston Globe by some fancy professor at Harvard.  Making homeownership a national priority doesn’t make a whole lot of sense – encouraging home ownership does not equate to housing more people, but it does mean encouraging more lending from banks, more teardown/buildup of cheap housing by construction companies, and more people flocking to the far-exurbs.

Encouraging ownership at the expense of renters was a centerpiece of post World War Two racist FHA loan policies that led to white-flight from urban centers, and the national obsession with ownership came back around to hurt minorities again when banks used another kind of redlining to issue variable rate mortgages primarily to black and latino borrowers.

More ownership of homes does not mean more people housed.  Acquiring a stand alone structure with a lawn, garage and shitty public transportation in the suburbs doesn’t make sense for everybody, and national housing policy should reflect the diversity of needs of everyone, even if those needs don’t feed the interests of banks and builders

MTA Agrees: “Yes We Can”

who is giving what in this picture? from wallyg's flickr photostream

The problem with McCain-style spending freezes is that some things really truly should be fully funded by the government. Privatizing or relying on user fees for essential transportation infrastructure amounts to a flat/regressive tax on the poor – be it roads and cars, which force folks to pay for gas to get to work, or MTA’s latest attempt to raise fares yet again. Yes, they can, and probably will.

Space should not be a commodity sold off to the rich who can afford the convenience of proximity, nor should money determine access to urban space. More MTA fare hikes amounts to a further privatization of urban space, part of the process of wholesale gentrification and up-scaling of the City that Bloomberg et al promote. There’s a reason folks advocate against progressive taxes and for budget cuts – because it runs parallel with a larger project of upper class warfare against the poor.

“Redistribution of Wealth” – the Final Leg

It seems like the McCain campaign is burning through a book of epithets working backwards from now (Celeb ads) to the 80s/90s (Big Government), to the 60s (Bill Ayers) all the way back to the good ol’ Red Scare 50s (this bullshit).  I’m kinda digging the old school flavor.

Anyways – the argument against Obama from the right apparently peaked when they went after Bill Ayers.  Now, folks are going after a radio interview from 2001 of Obama talking about how to interpret the Constitution.  (Srsly, as if the Constitution still mattered)  This is really the end of the line – picking through old radio clips about Constitutional Law in the hopes that it proves something about Obama’s un-Americanness.

It seems petty, but I guess the only really appeal of the clip is the tone, with Obama sounding like the elitist college professor type that folks pigeonhole him for – it might be dangerous to his campaign because it keeps him from sounding like the ‘common man’.  I suspect his is an ‘above the fray’ moment for the campaign and you’ll hear nothing more of it from Obama.

Doomed doomed doomed.

Mayor Mike – Haven’t I Seen this Before?

the patron saints of civic billionaires

A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires assembles to agree to provide themselves flexibility and a little less oversight.  An agreement reached not quite in secret, but rather obscurity.  Money changes hands?  The rules change.  Public announcements and verbal handshakes follow.

We’ve seen this before.

Despite the fact that Bloomberg would like to run again on the platform of economic expertise in a time of crisis, his last few weeks of public appearances during the developing economic crisis focused almost entirely on himself.  As everything went to hell yesterday, he hosted a meeting in the mayor’s mansion to discuss extending term limits – not the city’s finances, not the impact of the depression on tax revenue, not the housing crisis from mortgage defaults – his own re-election.  I suspect this is a sign of things to come in a third Bloomberg term, where economic security rhetoric will continue to serve as a thin mask for overt self interest.  Look: these people didn’t get to be billionaires out of benevolence or civic interest.

The lesson of the economic crisis needs to be that accountability and democracy not only make sense as moral imperatives, but that they also protect against the failures of government.  Bloomberg cannot or will not resolve the root causes of the economic fallout from Wall Street’s collapse: he is a friend and peer of the CEOs whose companies keep imploding, trusting his economic wisdom at a crucial turning point for New York is like trusting your retirement funds to the golden boys of economics who ran Lehman, Bear Stearns and Merill Lynch.  The faith we place in Mike’s type of expertise necessarily implies a loss in faith in the democratic checks we need to keep everything from going totally fucking haywire – and it probably means more of this bullshit.

Where Did My City Go? Gentrification on the Creek and the NYC Connection

I love Austin Texas. In ways I can’t quite say. Perhaps my favorite part of Austin is the Shoal Creek bike path, which runs North-South through Central Austin from the river to 38th street or so, meandering along the creekbed through parks and nature areas.

Every time I go home, I find another change: last year condos began rising next to the creek as the waters rose during a wet summer; in the winter I returned to taller but still visibly incomplete buildings, and a creekbed filled with trash and dams blocking the browning water to allow access to construction vehicles. When I went back this time, the trash was gone, but the condos stood complete, lording over the downtown skyline they now dominated.

Unlike New York, Austin has never had serious residential density in downtown. Austin has always been a low-rise city, with the exception of State Government buildings and the occasional glossy business tower. In the last 3-5 years, luxury condos filled into downtown and nearby neighborhoods: driving from the airport, I counted at least 6 new high rise condo developments – a big number considering the total lack of residential infrastructure downtown (schools, laundromats, parking, etc. etc.), and groundbreaking nature of the developments, pioneering an previously totally commercial area.

Generally, I’d like to applaud badly needed high-density development in a sprawling city (Austin and San Antonio – 100+ miles away – increasingly look like a single city), but everything about these developments make me uncomfortable. For one, they sell the urban fabric of Austin as a nightlife city of artists and musicians, but sell-out the people that make that fabric possible. Artists moved to Austin because cheap rents allowed a critical mass of people to agglomerate and make a self-sufficient ‘industry’ out of themselves. Austin could have continued to support that industry, while remaining a center for government (ATX THE CAPITAL CITYYYY) and a home to the University of Texas, and done just fine for itself – there’s a solid tax base for social services, a sense of community, all is well.

Instead, the music and alt-hip-bohemia became a selling point to non-creative industries, primarily high-tech and chip manufacturing. City government got fancy new digs and started heavily promoting the moniker “Live Music Capital of the World,” even to the point of theming the city’s new airport on the slogan.

The problem is that these new industries have been gradually leaching out the people and places that made Austin feel like home. Downtown, the center for bars and shows, feels increasingly like the West Village – bohemia under glass, reliving its glory days in cruel simulacra of an authentic creative environment. The city has flooded with high-tech yuppies that raise the cost of living, and eventually rents, for everyone else.

Equally pressing, chip manufacturing is particularly dangerous in a place like Austin. The city sits on the recharge zone for the immense Edwards Aquifer, which provides excellent drinking water for about half of Texas. Silicon chip manufacture requires immense amounts of water and creates ungodly amounts of acidic waste. AMD, Samsung and Motorola have sucked water from the aquifer at the cost of lower-flowing springs (including Barton Springs, perhaps the best place in the world – see picture above), and ever-drier creeks that used to be all-access swimming pools in the hot summer months.

With every urban overhaul, someone benefits. Without a doubt, real estate interests have cashed in to huge payoffs, as the city dons its new, glossier finish. The point I’d like to make is that the changes occurring in Austin closely follow those in New York, and elsewhere: economic elites are filling out city centers, at the cost of lower class folks that make the city run in the first place. (A service-economy driven urban core in Austin would be particularly unsustainable for the folks working in it, considering the city’s shiiity public transit and rising gas costs)

Found in Austin. A sign of the times.

These changes are happening everywhere. They also feed off each other – the advertising-entertainment of shows like Sex in the City in New York become the model for urban living elsewhere. The surest sign that my old home has become an over-priced yuppie urban oasis? Realtors have started naming themselves after the swankiest of the swanky neighborhoods in New York, with the hope of that New York glitter rubbing off on their new downtown developments:

Yuppies are Out, Welcome to the Age of Yupres

Won't be so hard anymore. From Pak Gwei's Flickr photostream

Jess’s post over at NY Magazine and the recent spate of yuppie death threats in the East Village put me to pondering about the condition of urban life in New York. Specifically, the condition of yuppie-ness, and what it means to be a young New York-er these days.

It’s not looking good for the Young Urban Professional. The NY Times pointed out that the Wall Street yuppie variety is under particular stress these days, setting off cries of glee from a few places. It’s not like the other quintessential “New York” industries are doing so well for themselves either – the media industries started saying that ‘flat is the new up‘ (meaning they have no idea how to keep making money), and traditional news companies are so deep in shit it hurts. Jesus, even the real estate market has hit the brakes.

So, if the ‘yuppie’ enters decline, what takes its place as the keystone species of the urban ecosystem? What makes the new-New York economy go round?

Introducing: the “Yupre” – the Young Urban Pre-Professional.

What makes this the age of the Yupre? First, New York has become a college town. As I pointed out in a previous post, 600,000 college students call New York (temporary) home. Even more post-grad 20-somethings come here trying to make their way in the New York industries – fashion, media, finance, etc. Many of these new and temporary arrivals will never achieve full employment while in New York, taking a series of internships, volunteer positions and part time jobs to make ends meet before shuffling off to middle America, suburbia or Los Angeles. Despite this, they define the (cultural) economy of New York.

Economically – As a student at NYU pursuing a career in the ‘media industry,’ I’ve been subjected to a barrage of shitty employment offers. Here’s a sample:

“amNewYork is looking for journalism students for fall internships. Applicants will be required to write both news and feature stories, copy edit and do fact checking. This is an unpaid internship…”

“We are looking for interns to help us with the daily publishing duties associated with ForbesAutos.com. This includes writing and reporting, web production, article research, fact-checking, and proofreading. Ideally, applicants should have an interest in new media, and we are looking for someone with a fine eye for detail along with a solid foundation in writing. Since we are a car website, knowing the difference between a Porsche 911 GT2 and Porsche 911 GT3 is also a plus, but not required. This is an unpaid internship, and we’d like someone who can come in at” least two days a week for a few hours, or possibly the whole workday.”

“Men’s Vogue is looking for an editorial intern for the spring semester. The internship must count for credit, and interns would be asked to work 2 full days a week. Internship opportunities and responsibilities include: writing original content for our website; scouting theater, music, film, art, and book releases; researching potential story ideas for editors; and some administrative tasks.”

Job descriptions for internships read like the descriptions for real jobs; the only differences are the employees (students) and the pay (shit). Anyone taking these positions would be subject to the same demands placed on employees (producing original content, editorial work, etc), and their work would generate income in some form, yet often their only hope for advancement comes in the form of a rec letter or a resume bullet.

CAVEAT: I’ve taken some fuckin’ sweet internships, where my boss took a genuine interest in my education, and took the time to help me improve as a writer and journalist; I’ve also worked places in line with my political beliefs, where I essentially worked as a volunteer, but with the privileges of being an employee. In some cases, free labor makes sense, but in many more instances, employers will treat their interns as human resources in the most cynical sense, making extreme demands on their time and energy and then disposing with them.

Here’s the point: major industry in New York relies on free, temporary labor supplied by young people, primarily students, creating a new class of urban resident: the Young Urban Pre-Professional.

Culturally – Paradoxically, many Yupres live a relatively decent lifestyle – moving to New York is no cheap endeavor, and recent college grads sometimes have the backing of their parents. As for college students, few NYU students (at least) face eminent starvation if left unemployed (although some go without housing, and many many more take on massive debt).

The free time endowed by parental stipends and loose employment gives Yupres the space and energy to engage in the creative activity which (as Elizabeth Currid explains in The Warhol Economy), makes the New York economy go round. They’re the ones starting and discovering new bands, critiquing and making the art in New York’s galleries, and dreaming up new web ventures. Admittedly, they also homogenize and gentrify, filling NYU’s dorms in the East Village and clog Williamsburg with and eerie hoard of skinny hipster clones every weekend, but the creative zeitgeist remains.

Still, the average Yupre saga will most often end in some disappointment, either emotionally or financially. Middle America will never run out of kids with dreams of striking it big as writers, Wall Street-ers or artists, which means that New York will never run out of free or cheap labor from fresh faced 18-21 year olds willing to sell their soul for a break (or, as Jess put it “give blowjobs for bylines”). Forever at the service of their cultural and economic masters, the ever circulating Yupre class will define and shape New York for decades to come.