The Power and the Money

Make Canada Greater: What would change if New York joined Confederation?

I am reading “Divided We Fall” by David French. He may be the first thoroughly mainstream commentator to seriously posit that the American federation may break up under the weight of our political differences. Cheery reading for another happy election day, or not.

Even a mutual breakup of the United States would be a tragedy, but not because of American exceptionalism or any such thing. No, any collapse of a political union is a tragedy. It means that differing peoples could not share a fate or manage a common endeavor. It means shrinking horizons and cramped futures. Even when divorce is better than the realistic alternatives, it is still a tragedy. 

But there is one way that the American federation could break up and avoid such a tragedy! Instead of retreating into smaller polities, blue American states that wanted out (or were being thrown out) could replace one expansive continental dream with another. They could link their fate with their better-governed neighbors to the north!

Such a move would also be amazing validation of the Great White North—for Canadians to reject it would show a lack of confidence and a fear of dreaming big. Canadians should have confidence and dream big! (Yes, I thought Maximum Canada was a great read, why do you ask?)

One Canadian certainly has no fear of success: the Prime Minister invited American states to join as new provinces!

But enough with the blather. Let’s say something happened to crack the American federation. What would a switch entail in practical terms? In order to get my mind off the damn election (and grading exams) I decided to take a preposterous idea seriously. What would happen if New York State became the Province of New York?

The name

Well, first, NYS would not need to rename itself. Canadian law can handle a province that calls itself a “state” as easily as the U.S. constitution handles states that call themselves “commonwealths.” But let’s call the new jurisdiction “New York Province” anyway, just to make things easier.

Integrating the judicial systems

The biggest issue isn’t the one you’d think. (Although I’m getting there.) The biggest issue is that under current Canadian law, state criminal law will be replaced by the Canadian federal criminal code. The transition would be tough. State judicial elections would go out the window. I think you could continue to elect the Attorney General, but her authority would shrink considerably. You could probably continue to have elections for sheriff, but it would also be a departure from Canadian norms. The Canadians would also have to decide how much leeway to give New York in its civil codes. If they mandate that New York conform to the Canadian system, then civil courts will lose much of their power and many trials that were previously decided by juries will switch to judges.

Integrating the two systems would be a major headache for judges and lawyers. I have no idea how long it would take them to adapt. One year? Two? Ten? Canada would have to agree to long phase-in period during which the New York court system would be linked to Canada’s but not integrated into it. During this time every lawyer in New York State will have to effectively retrain. Law schools would also have to revamp their curricula.

Alternatively, the Canadians could work out an exception for the new province(s). Conceptually, such an exception would be relatively easy to implement and administer. (Australia and the United States do it and New York allows certain municipalities to create their own criminal offenses.) It would be a departure for Canada but it would not mean that the federal criminal code would cease to apply to New York. Rather, it would mean that New Yorkers were subject to two (or three) separate criminal codes, much as they are today.

Business ownership

In some industries, American companies operating in the state that weren’t locally owned would be required to pull out and sell their assets in that state to a Canadian company. (Canada would of course now include New York and any other states that made the switch.) These industries are pretty broad, including transportation, airlines, railways, shipping, publishing, financial services and telecommunications.

Telecoms and airways are pretty straightforward. U.S.-owned airlines would need to divest their operations for point-to-point flights between New York and other parts of Canada. Ditto, telecoms companies would need to sell or spin off their New York operations. Canada has been pretty liberal with allowing foreign ownership of transportation companies, so there shouldn’t be major problems for trucking or railroads. Some retail chains might want to spin off their New York operations, but that won’t be that difficult.

Some banks with equity of $8 billion or more and large demutualized insurance companies would need to be restructured. Canadian law requires that no person may own more than 20 percent of any class of voting shares or 30 percent of any class of non-voting shares. In addition, a majority of the board of directors and the CEO of every bank or federal insurance company would need to be Canadian residents.

Publishing is a weird one. Existing operations would only need to sell their operations to Canadian buyers if they intended to acquire an existing Canadian company. But it’s equally likely that you’d have big New York publishing houses would not qualify for Canadian subsidies or be able to acquire smaller Canadian competitors. It would probably get weird very quickly, but there shouldn’t be any constitutional problems. The Canadian government could continue to protect small Canadian operations against large New York-based Canadian operations. Of course, how long that would last once the New York representatives from the federal branch of the Working Families Party entered the Canadian parliament is a different question …

Unions

New York employers are going to be unpleasantly surprised. Most New Yorkers are going to love it. Of course, a lot depends on what the politicians in Albany do with their liberation from the strictures of American labor law.

Gun laws

There may be some disquiet in parts of upstate (as there is in rural Canada) but most New Yorkers are going to love this as well.

Fiscal federalism

Canada channels significantly fewer resources through its federal government than does the United States. Gross federal spending in New York (sans interest payments and direct purchases of goods and services) came to 13.2% of state GDP; the equivalent number for Ontario was only 10.9%. (The high level of direct purchases in Ontario is due to the fact that the federal government is based in Ottawa.)

Let’s take each category in turn. For retirement spending, the transition would be smooth. Canada could take over Social Security payments for existing retirees without much problem while transitioning younger workers into the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security.

For other transfers (not including medical care) the Canadian federation is about as generous as the United States, giving a bit more directly to individuals and a bit less to the governments of rich provinces like Ontario. (The whole thing is actually distorted by Alberta’s oil money, but let’s leave that for now.) On the margin, New York Province will receive a bit less non-health federal aid than New York State.

Federal spending and taxation as a % of jurisdictional GDP

	Retire-ment	Medical care	Revenue sharing	Individual transfers	Goods and services	Total spending	Gross federal taxation	Surplus to Feds
Ontario	5.1%	1.7%	1.8%	2.2%	4.0%	14.8%	(18.2%)	(3.4%)
NY State	4.6%	4.7%	2.5%	1.5%	1.4%	14.7%	(16.3%)	(1.6%)
NY Province	4.6%	1.1%	1.6%	2.2%	1.4%	10.9%	(18.2%)	(7.2%)

But health care … oh boy. A back-of-the-envelope calculation (using 2014 numbers, so at the beginning of Obamacare) shows that public and private entities in New York state spent about 8.4% of GDP on covered medical services. That’s more than most Canadian provinces, since health care is more expensive in the USA, but not prohibitively so: the Province of Ontario spent 7.1% of GDP in 2014.

New York is going to have a problem under the Canada Health Act. Medicare and Medicaid transfers from the U.S. federal government will dry up, and here (somewhat perversely) the United States is way more generous than the Canadian confederation. New York will lose Medicare and Medicaid money worth 4.7% of GDP. The Canadian Health Transfer (CHT) would come to only 1.1% under the current formula, blowing giant holes in the New York provincial budget. New York State currently spends about 2.0% on Medicaid, but adding the Canadian Health Transfer to that leaves a minimum budget hole of 5.3% of GDP (8.4% covered spending that will need to be made free – 2.0% existing spending – 1.1% CHT.)

And that figure of 5.3% is a minimum since Medicare and Medicaid are (again, perversely, I know) more generous than Canadian health care, even though they require co-pays. (More generous for the minority of people that they cover, that is.) You can’t tell seniors that they are going to be worse off now that they are Canadian, can you? That would be thoroughly un-Canadian!

New York Province could fill the hole with a VAT rate of 12% on top of existing sales taxes, or a tripling of state income taxes, or some combination thereof. That’s not an impossible thing. In this world where the U.S. peacefully divorces passing some version of Medicare-for-all should be popular. But it would be very expensive. Add to that the fact that the province would be passing upwards of 7% of GDP to Ottawa and becoming Canadian looks like a bad deal, even with all the benefits from being part of a big continental federation. 

Only there is here the outline of win-win deal for everyone involved, which is simply that New York Province is going to be a huge net payer into the Canadian federal budget.

The Canadian federal government could sign a Medicare Accession Grant Agreement (MAGA) with New York Province that would kick back, say, half the cost of establishing single-payer system. New York would get a federal tax point transfer worth 4.2% of GDP, and the Canadian taxpayers would still come out ahead with a net transfer of 3.0% of New York’s GDP. Win-win for everyone!

TLDR: Joining confederation would be a headache and New York would lose some fiscal revenue from the federal government. But if Ottawa is willing to be flexible it could be a win-win for everyone involved. 

I leave the effect on Canadian politics as an exercise for the readers ...

Candidate Obama was right about health care back in 2008, mostly

Obamacare is back in the news because of this insane ruling by this judge in Texas. I am not going to talk about that. What I am going to talk about, however, is the argument between Obama and Clinton over health care back in 2008. Short version: once elected, President Obama decided that Candidate Obama was wrong and health care reform needed a mandate. But he was actually right back then, as shown by the fact that Congressional repeal of the mandate has not dented the law’s success.

The long version has to do with the putative results of a 1993 health insurance reform in New York. To the right is a picture of a great place to eat in New York, but given the kind of food they serve I would recommend having health insurance should you choose to eat there often.

Back during the 2008 campaign, Senator Obama claimed that you could use private insurance to provide universal coverage without a mandate.

Senator Clinton argued the opposite. Her plan to expand health care rested on three prongs: (1) community rating, so nobody faced higher premiums due to pre-existing conditions; (2) a mandate, so that healthy people would not refuse to buy health insurance; and (3) subsidies, so that everyone could afford to comply with the mandate. She argued that New York State had tried (1) without (2) and triggered a death spiral that killed the market for individual health insurance in the state. 

The logic was as follows: community rating meant that insurers could not charge people who were more to people who were more likely to use medical care. Everyone had to be charged the same. That meant, however, that healthy people had to pay more than they had before. So some healthy people decided to drop health insurance. That left more sick people in the pool, so insurers had to raise rates. But higher rates drove even more healthy people to drop insurance. So rates rose even more, in a death spiral. 

Candidate Obama argued that this was malarkey. People wanted health insurance. People will buy it if they can afford it even without a mandate. If you make insurance cheap enough, then there will be no death spiral. 

President Obama then changed his mind based on what his advisers thought that the CBO would say about it. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it raises the question: was the CBO right? There were reasons to believe in 2009 that it was not. Back in 1999, Thomas Buchmueller and John Dinardo (both at U.C. Irvine) found that there was no evidence of a death spiral in New York.

A 2012 report called the “The Impact of Guaranteed Issue and Community Rating Reforms on State’s Individual Insurance Markets” concluded that Buchmueller and Dinardo were wrong and New York did in fact hit a death spiral ... only the report’s own figures show no such thing!! Here is the data from New York that they used to conclude that there was a death spiral:

It shows that the number of people under-65 who bought individual insurance in New York fell below the national average and stayed there. Now, they do not have pre-reform data, but the results is indicative, right? A death spiral!

Or maybe not. Unlike most New Yorkers, I have absolutely nothing against New Jersey. I like New Jersey. New Jersey is a fine place. So let’s look at the data from New Jersey:

New Jersey saw the same fall, even though it did not have a reform. And the above charts come from the report!! How the authors concluded the opposite is unclear to me.

In other words, there was no evidence that New York had experienced a death spiral back when the Democratic candidates were talking about this back in 2008, and there was no evidence that New York had experienced a death spiral when SCOTUS ruled on the mandate back in 2012. 

Now Congress has repealed the mandate and Obamacare is doing surprisingly fine. Candidate Obama was correct: make insurance affordable enough and healthy people will buy it. 

President Obama should have stuck to his guns. Would a no-mandate reform have attracted more GOP support? Sadly, I doubt it. But it is always nice to stick to your campaign promises.

Vox congratulates The Deuce on attention to detail under a big picture showing the opposite

So, Vox wrote a good review of the new HBO series, The Deuce. And it does sound like a good show. But then they reviewer blows up their credibility. With a caption reading  “The series’ attention to detail is impressive,” they then show this picture:

The mistake, it jumps out at you if you lived in or regularly visited Manhattan during the 1970s (or much of the 1980s, for that matter), and it is not forgivable. Attention to detail my ass.

Schneiderman ain’t playing

We called it. Robert Mueller has announced that he is teaming up with Eric Schneiderman, the NYS attorney general. Right now the cooperation is about Manafort but we expect future announcements.

As we pointed out, President Trump can only pardon people for federal offenses. So if Mueller finds evidence of violations of New York laws, Schneiderman and he can threaten the perpetrators with state prosecution unless they cough up more evidence. 

A related question: can it really be true that Arpaio has broken no state laws? I know there have been multiple civil suits; did he comply with all of them?

Lifted from October 2016: You can go home again ...

... even if the New York Times tells you that you can’t.

Picture the morning. Start by playing with the kids. Then pickup the newspaper to peruse the news. (The news is weird this morning.) End with this:

Step into the lobby of AVA DoBro, a rental building at 100 Willoughby Street, and you are transported from the uninspired streetscape of Downtown Brooklyn to the epitome of the Brooklyn hipster brand — with its requisite mural on a brick wall, reclaimed wood and polished concrete floors. The adjoining cafe, AVA Brew, with mismatched furniture and Pushcart Coffee, doubles down on the vibe.

But wait. Maybe you bristle at the idea of a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf stacked with volumes in various shades of yellow; it’s not for everyone. We can’t all have man buns and tattoo sleeves.

Maybe that other new Brooklyn speaks to you instead. You know the one. It’s urbane and shiny and has sprouted like tall weeds of glass and steel overtaking Downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg and Prospect Heights.

First, aaaaaaauuuuuugh! Prospect Heights? Caray. I remember the 1980s, when I was looking for a word to describe Vanderbilt Avenue, and JKR came up with the perfect one: “seedy.” That was a long time ago.

Second, so that’s it now? Those are the two versions of Brooklyn out there in the popular mind? Global cool or the Upper East Side? Well, if I have to choose, I choose the Upper East Side. And both of them are ridiculous, with two-bedrooms at $3,995 a month and up. 

But seriously, there is this whole swathe of the borough that is neither hip nor cool. Even in Williamsburgh itself. For example, you can still find a two-bedroom co-op for an all-in monthly payment of $2,000. Or three bedrooms for $2,600. I am sure the places suck, and the neighborhood is closer to the 1980s than the 2010s, but hey. Heres one in East Williamsburgh, no maintenance listed, but probably all-in for around $3,000. It is about the same size as the apartment I wasted my teenage years in. Or go buy y’self a damn house in Canarsie for a mortgage of less than $1,600.

This is not to say that New York does not have a housing shortage. By God, it does. But most of Brooklyn is still Brooklyn.

The power of propaganda

We may be in Mexico, but sometimes you get pulled back into discussing home.

Donald Trump just gave two very disturbing speeches. In one, he portrayed Long Island as an embattled paradise turned hellscape by violent Latino immigrants. In the other, he called for more police brutality. It is a continuation of a theme he started during the campaign.

What’s crazy is that Long Island is safer than it’s ever been. If you look at juvenile homicide arrests, you get basically nothing save for three in 2014, another one in 2016 and six this year. It is true that MS-13 recently carried out some horrific crimes in Suffolk. But that is not a crime wave.

So how does Trump get any traction? Sadly, I know the answer. I have family on Long Island and in South Florida.

These places are similar, heavily populated by the descendants of white Ellis Island immigrants, the generation of people who shaped America’s liberal version of itself. Jews, Italians, and Irish all turned into Americans by the melting pot. Yet current segregation, presidential propaganda, and the folk memory of the genuine crime explosion of the 1960s and 1970s, combines to make them all ready to believe things that just ain’t so.

Consider two anecdotes. I was in Broward County with my daughter at an outdoor zoo, where save for the bear and panthers the kiddos can walk around and interact with the animals. At one point, my daughter sprints out of the bathroom after we wash her hands. I’m not worried, not least because I’m there with family: her cousin, uncle and great-uncle are all outside. But this older white guy next to me, he says, “You ought to get one of those child leashes.” I say nah, why? 

“Crime. It’s crazy out there. Worse than ever.”

Me: no, not really, I grew up in New York in the 1970s and it was far more dangerous.

“I’m from New York too! Really, you think it’s safer now?”

Me: I know it. Look at how the city has changed, look at how Miami has changed. And then I show him some graphs (available at the Marshall Project). And he gets sort of quiet, as if he never expected a middle-aged white guy to take issue with what seemed to him to be an anodyne comment about an obvious truth.

Then the same conversation happens with my (very liberal) brother two days later.

With my brother, I showed him news stories from the 1980s when he lived in Miami that drove the point home. He was a little abashed: despite his own experience regularly travelling to neighborhoods that would have given him pause 20 years ago, despite his own daughter living in a formerly n0-go part of Plantation, and despite his knowledge of overall crime trends the incessant propaganda of the past two years had convinced him of something that just was not true.

Maybe the internet really has made the creation of alternate facts easier than in the past, but the alternative fact of “American carnage” has been created by just a presidential soapbox combined with the predilections of white people to believe the worst about their non-white neighbors. 

In short, as long as that predilection exists, demogogues will be able to make hay by making stuff up. The internet has affected American politics for the worse. But this is not one of the ways.

President Trump cannot pardon himself out of trouble

The Trump presidency is different, as I note when I am outside the United States. Back during the Bush administration, foreigners would often (and without prompting) verbally criticize traveling Americans for the actions and policies of our President. And when that happened to me, which was often, I often felt an emotional need to defend President Bush, no matter how terrible a president I actually thought he was.

With the Donald, though, not so much on either tip. Oh, he certainly comes up all the time, far more than President Bush ever did. But nobody — not in the Netherlands, not in Uruguay, not in Argentina, and not in Mexico — has ever put on an accusatory tone. It is more pity, sometimes shaded with incredulity. That may be why I have never felt any urge to defend the Trump administration ... but I suspect that even should I hear a vicious hostile angry attack on his presidency my reaction would be, “Well, yeah.”

The worst that has happened to anyone I know is the American daughter of a good friend, who got a nasty note in her Mexico City school calling her a “Trump lover.” (Both the friend and his daughter are also Mexican citizens, but kids don’t care about that.) Considering what has been happening in U.S. schools, that is small beans. And compared to the Bush administration, it is nothing.

It is something to have Mexicans pity you for living under a corrupt president. In Mexico, one of the biggest problems that officials seem to be immune from prosecution. They cannot be indicted while in office and it is damnably hard to prove anything once out.

Which brings me to the recent news that the Trump administration is considering issuing pardons for the president and his family. Such pardons would be unprecedented in American history, but it is not clear that they would be unconstitutional. I certainly think that it would have been ridiculous for the framers to have given the president the power to pardon themself, but the question is open.

Except it might not matter! Donald Trump is a resident of New York State and the owner-proprietor of 500 different partnerships, LLC’s, S-corps, and pass-through proprietorships forming the Trump Organization business collectivity domiciled in New York. Trump’s business activity occurs in New York State as a consequence of his residency and offices located in New York, and his financial transactions, insofar as the financial entities within which those transactions take place are under New York State supervision and regulation, are subject to New York State law.

Imagine that the Mueller investigation uncovers some sort of financial chicanery. Well, I talked to Dave Greenbaum, a lawyer from Trump’s home borough (not pictured above!), and as you might expect any such evidence would be admissible in New York courts and give Eric Schneiderman all the ammunition he needs to go after the President. (At least once he is out of office; beforehand is less clear.) 

The easy stuff: misstated income and fraudulent income tax returns. If Trump has been using his labyrinthine corporate structure to hide income, he is liable for New York income tax fraud under Tax Laws 1805 and 1806, which would be felonies. Even if he pardoned himself for the federal income tax evasion, he would still be liable for state tax evasion.

Getting harder: securities and business entity fraud under GBL 23-A-352 and 353, aka the Martin Act. If Trump has been using his business entities to shuttle debt and conceal liabilities from lenders, limited partners, and other persons, he is potentially liable for felony misrepresentation under identical elements as SEC rule 10b-5. (Misrepresentation or Omission, and Materiality). A federal SEC violation would be chargeable under New York law, as long as New York had jurisdiction, and since Trump is a New York citizen and most of his business happens in New York, despite choice of law clauses, New York would have jurisdiction.

Harder still: New York no longer has a treason statute, but any foreign payments structured so as to defraud co-owners or partners or secured parties would serve for bank fraud or Martin Act charges. And New York has a conspiracy law just as strong as 18 USC 371. Plus, in New York you can be charged for attempting financial crimes, even if you fail to pull it off.

Barely possible: New York has two relevant laws on obstruction of justice: NYPL 195.05 and  NYPL 205.50 et seq. 195.05. “Obstructing govt. admin in the second degree” consists of affirmative action to prevent a public servant from carrying out their official duties and it is a Class A misdemeanor. 205.50 is “hindering prosecution,” which can range from a Class A misdemeanor to a Class E felony. That law could conceivably be used to prosecute the Bharara firing, given that Bharara was working with the New York attorney general to trawl Trump payments through New York banks, but it would be hard to argue that it really obstructed government administration or hindered prosecution in New York State.

Basically impossible: payoffs that take the form of capital investments in Trump businesses unless there is an obvious quid pro quo or you can use them to charge conspiracy to commit tax fraud. It is barely possible that if Trump uses a vehicle as a conduit for a payment that he only partially owns, he could be charged with a Class B misdemeanor for ripping off a co-owner.

In short, if the Mueller investigation uncovers untoward things in the President’s business dealings,it is highly likely that the State of New York will come after him. It will not be as effective as a federal prosecution, but even if he pardons himself and Congress fails to remove him, he will still be in no small legal peril.

¿Viva Nueva York?

When Trump goes Noo Yawk, heads roll and things get real

Normally, President Trump displays this weirdly constrained body language, with his torso rigid and his arms making stiff chopping motions. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say “weird.” Just weird for a native New Yorker, certainly for a white guy from the outer boroughs of Trump’s age. (Or most non-white guys of any age.)

But then came this clip.

In it, Trump looks almost normal. The open arms at the start and the brief three-finger salute at second 11. He could be from Bay Ridge. You know, normal. ☺

I post this not because the President looks almost normal, but because anyone from the five boroughs or Long Island could and should have known immediately that Comey’s days were numbered. Trump could not keep up his act.

I guess it gives you something to look for if you’re worried that the President is about to do something rash. The minute you can imagine Victor Rasuk playing him in a film, then something bad is about to happen. 

New York accents and social class

I am finishing Chris Hayes’ A Colony in a Nation. It’s quite good, but the parts that really resonated were his descriptions of growing up in the New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. It turns out he grew up in Norwood, moved to Riverdale as a teen, and went to a private school Hunter College High School around 96th Street on 94th Street in Manhattan. He then went to Brown University.

This, for no particular reason, is a picture of Brooklyn:

Anyway, I mention Hayes’ sojourn in Riverdale and his educational pedigree because they explain his complete lack of a New York accent. And I mean complete. Hayes has nothing, not the nasality, certainly not the /ɔː/ → [ɔə~oə~ʊə] “low back chain shift.” (That shift is what Russell Crowe keeps getting glaringly annoyingly wrong in all of this otherwise spot-on portrayals of white working-class New Yorkers. See minute 1:12. But why? It ain’t hard.) 

He doesn’t even have the watered-down but clearly New York speech of Harry Enten. Or me. Or the President.

But it is no surprise that Chris Hayes has a general American accent: of course somebody with that education — and who lived in Riverdale and hung out on the Upper East Side — would speak television!

But then I discover that the famous Robert Caro grew up on the Upper West Side and was educated at Horace Mann and Princeton. Yet he has a pronounced New York accent. It is frankly impossible to imagine somebody from a rich family in that neighborhood and with that education sounding like Robert Caro today.

So one of three things must be true:

1. Robert Caro is the honey badger. Robert Caro just don’t care. 
2. Robert Caro is a mensch but it was just harder to lose a Noo Yawk accent back then. This I do not believe for a second.
3. New York accents had less stigma attached to them in the 1950s than they did in the 1990s. 

The regional accent is not dead yet, especially in its latest form (or in New Jersey) but it ain’t what it used to be. 

On Cuban immigration, escalators, and helicopter parents

OK, time for me to vent.

President Obama did wrong by suspending the wet-foot Cuba policy. The United States and the Cuban Republic have a special relationship. Seriously, we do. Our histories have been intertwined more than any random pair of neighboring countries since at least 1898, and maybe earlier. Our intervention created Cuba; our internal politics kept it from becoming part of the United States; our intervention propped up governments; and our 1959 divorce was contentious and angry and contentious on both sides in ways that make no sense from purely economic or strategic standpoints. 

It makes perfect sense for the U.S. to treat Cuban migration differently than migration from, say, the Dominican Republic or Mexico or anywhere else. Cuba is, to coin a phrase, “domestic in a foreign sense.”

Sure, yeah, I understand, it was a quid-pro-quo to get Castro on board with normalizing relations. Still was wrong.

FWIW, I am not of Cuban descent and have no family in Cuba.

The London Underground did wrong by forcing people to stand on escalators. It may speed things up for the standees, but their own study showed that it raised times for walkers by 28%. If you’re too goddamned lazy to walk up a bloody escalator, then the extra time is what you should pay.

How about making everybody walk, huh? 

Middle-class parents in the DMV are weird by refusing to let their kids walk around by themselves. Seriously, it is weird. Somehow they have convinced themselves that all of America (let alone the Western world) is like them. But no. Frex this photo of kids scooting with no adults in sight on the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn:

Or these kids playing handball in Long Island City:

Or this pic from a playground in the Fairmount section of Philly, ditto, at least for the two older kids in the pic, who (gasp) walked five blocks unsupervised to Roberto Clemente park to play with our bambini:

Seriously, you people. Do what you want with your kids, but don’t kid yourself. It’s weird, out-of-ordinary, strange to hover over a seven-year-old like they were four, let alone somebody nine. Let the kids walk, scoot and bike without you! And do not get me started on the proper age to ride the subway alone ...

The Trump wall keeps getting shorter, another guide for New Yorkers

Man, at first the Trump Wall was 60-feet high. That was a wall! A tenement-high wall. You could be impressed by that.

But now the specs are calling for prototypes between 18 and 30 feet tall. Dude. That is not tall. Thirty feet would make it shorter than the row of taxpayers behind me in this photo:

 

Sad! Come on. If we are going to go stupid, we should go stupid bigly. I say 80 feet!

By the way, for those of you who are curious, those taxpayers are where they are because the zoning will not allow anything higher on that corner. That is ironic, since they were tossed up in the first two decades of the 20th century as placeholders awaiting a skyscraper boom that took ten decades to arrive. Now that it is here, you cannot build there. Also sad!

How high is the Trump Wall? A guide for New Yorkers

OK, the President claims that the wall will be 60 feet high. If I had to bet, I would bet that it is not going to be built, but who knows? If I were in Congress, I would vote for the boondoggle in exchange for leaving Obamacare alone. 

Still, how tall is sixty feet? It is not a height that you would normally reference. So I am here to tell you! A “standard” six-story NYC new law tenement rises about 66 feet. (I lived in one for a few years as a teenager, a building completed in 1910.) The below picture shows my boy (in the blue jacket) playing jump rope in front of a row of new law tenements in Manhattan. 

The proposed wall would be about six feet shorter than the row of buildings in the middle of the picture. Here is another view of similarly-sized structures:

Just imagine that this was South Texas and those buildings were the wall! Easy.

Of course, the President has also said that he wants the wall to be eighty feet tall. That would make it the height of the building with the watertower in the background (77 feet) of this picture from last May:

And now you know! I will admit that if we are going to blow billions on a pointless monument across the southern border, I kind of hope we go all out and build it eighty feet tall. Our grandchildren in the 2060s will zip over it in their flying cars and marvel at our folly. If you are gonna be stupid, be impressively stupid! 

ADDENDUM: And expensive! For those of you who want an idea of the cost, a good calculator is here. An 80-foot high 18-inch thick barrier built over a little more than half the border (1,000 miles) clocks in around $28 billion. Another calculator, which uses higher cost assumptions, gives $45 billion.

NIMBY from renters is not crazy, but it is still likely wrong

I have been involved in urban real estate markets, in addition to my own house. (Details to come.) As a potential owner, what was my response to a declaration that an eight-story building was going up that would block part of the view from the unit? One guess would be, “That is terrible, it will block part of my view.”

That would be wrong. So another guess might be, “That is great, it will lower housing prices!” That statement would be logically correct, but does not really capture why I was not dissuaded by the loss of the view. My real response was:

“That is great, this crappy neighborhood I grew up in is going to become way more valuable. People want to build unsubsidized luxury housing here.” 

And this is what drives renters to be NIMBYs in high rents cities. Here is a description of the logic from Michael Hankinson (Harvard) in his recent paper:

Imagine you are a renter in a city with high housing prices, living in one of the few remaining affordable neighborhoods. On your street, a new condominium is proposed, to be rented at market-rate, defined as the unsubsidized or ‘typical’ price for housing that renters are willing to pay. Generally, you believe that new supply helps to mitigate rising prices. However, this one condominium is a minuscule addition to the overall supply, making it unlikely to appreciably lower prices citywide. Meanwhile, the new building may signal to other developers that your neighborhood is an undervalued investment. Your landlord may see the new building and consider renovating her own, leading to your eviction. In the end, while the new condominium may marginally ease prices citywide, it may also attract demand locally, driving a spatially localized rise in rent. To you, the long run benefit of lower citywide prices is eclipsed by the immediate, short run cost of displacement.

That said, I am not sure that the logic Hankinson describes is correct. Consider my mental model. The construction of the eight-story building is confirmation that the neighborhood is becoming more desirable. But does said construction actually make the neighborhood more desirable on its own? Not at all. I would be as happy to know that a luxury four-story building were under construction. In fact, I would happier to learn that an upscale restaurant were opening with no additional units, at least as far as my property values were concerned. 

(I would actually not be thrilled about any of the above for I am not in this market to maximize my returns, although I would prefer to minimize my opportunity cost as regards other potential investments. So bring on the building.) 

Coincidentally, the policy recommendations from the paper jibe with the lack of pushback in this particularly neighborhood to new developments: for reasons particular to the city and locality, many of the residents are either protected against displacement or owners.

But the overall point holds: renters oppose new development in overheated markets because they believe that such developments create “positive” externalities that will raise their housing costs and drive them out. If you want to change the political economy of urban growth, then you need to address that belief.

An article that begs for historical fisking

On bad days, I really do think that modern communications technology really has ushered in something completely new. And maybe it will! But right now, this claim in The Atlantic that it the Internet has created a meaningless post-everything world, with pointless Harambe references divorced from the original context as proof, is just begging for a social historian to come along and demolish it.

Begging. Come on now. Go at it. I mean, the existence of Snake Plissken (or this movie) should be enough to show that post-everything meaninglessness is not exactly new, but I want to see a professional do this one. 

You say Cuba, I say Cuber, an if you disagree go f@$€ y'self

 So, we are in the hunt for South Bronx real estate. And what do you know? An advertisement declaring that the area is one of the most “sort after” in NYC! 

NYC stands for “Noo Yawk City,” obviously. Who says the accent is dead?

Andrew Cuomo can make New York City better

Senate Bill S5469 has made it out of the legislature in Albany and awaits the Governor’s signature. Hooray!

And what does this bill do? Well, right now, state law prohibits buildings with a floor-area-ratio (FAR) greater than 12 unless they have at least six operating elevators. That makes it really expensive to build anything taller than 12 stories but shorter than a skyscraper. In addition, the law means that if you want to build higher, you need to buy the air rights from an adjoining lot.

(A FAR of 12 means that a building that covers the entire lot cannot rise higher than 12 stories.) 

The bill now gives New York City an exception. Since midtown Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn have no city-imposed height limits, it will now be much easier to build tall. And building tall means that affordable-housing requirements will kick in, forcing developers to include 20% affordable housing. 

It is not the millenium, but it is a good move. 

Washington drivers have to stop with the goddamned honking

 We have bemoaned the honking around this city here and here. Now comes Dr. Gridlock at the Washington Post with confirmation. A reader writes in with exasperation to tell her fellow DMV residents to “Stop honking, you are not in New York.”

Dr. Gridlock tells her, “I’m from New York City, and had a New York driver’s license for more than a decade. Never heard as much car honking there as I have in the land of Southern hospitality.”

Damn skippy.

More on the mystery of Maryland drivers

 I’m in New York City without my pen-and-paper journal, so I suspect I’ll post some musings about the trip over the next few days. Why not? Reading over this blog, I like some of the early travelogues the best.

But until then, a brief thought about Maryland drivers, courtesy of a senior traffic engineer who worked in both the District and Prince George’s County. His explanation for the disregard given pedestrians is simple: “Maryland has no cities and therefore no municipal laws about pedestrian safety. Therefore, drivers are not sensitized by local regulations.”

It is strange that the urban counties around D.C. have not passed such laws, but they haven’t. The explanation does have the benefit of comparing like-with-like. 

There is one other possibility: the District, unlike, say, New York or Chicago, has gone out of its way to suburbanize traffic signals. For example, streets that look just like someplace in downtown Brooklyn will force pedestrians to wait for left turn signals ... even from one-way streets. Cars with D.C. plates (to further cite my traffic engineer friend) are likely driven by relatively upper-income people who also spend much time as pedestrians; they will therefore be more respectful than suburban drivers who (unlike somebody from Long Island driving into Queens) neither spend much time on foot nor have to adopt a different driving style when in the city.

I admit to a preference for non-cultural explanations, because they are falsifiable, so I like this one.

I also asked him about all the honking in the DMV. The difference with New York is striking. For three days I have been driving all over the counties of New York, Kings, Queens, and Nassau, plus the trip here and a long stop in Philly. Since leaving the Beltway the only horn sounds I have heard since then was (a) at a turnpike exit in New Jersey; (b) directed at me; and (c) thoroughly deserved. 

So why the honking?

Well, that, he says, is cultural. “That is the District and Virginia too. People scoring self-importance points. Drives everyone nuts.”

A victory for Brooklyn south of the Diehipster Line

 Sadly, Die Hipster the blog is no more. But today South Brooklyn scored a victory over the new cool whatever not-Brooklyn Brooklyn with the restoration of express service on the F Train. That hasn’t existed since I was in high school! So, good. 

Me, though, I’m more concerned with the Red Line these days. Hopefully, they’ll do the accelerated rebuilding, rip the band-aid off, and give me a subway train that I can use on evenings and weekends. My neighbors, they talk of these mysterious far-off times when you could count on the Metro after 8pm and on weekends, to which I simply marvel. 

The problem with San Francisco is ...

 No points for guessing!

This essay (hat tip: Jon Rabinowitz) is a great read. Yes, the econometrics are pretty basic. Sure, the data is a little less-than-robust. (The guy collected rent data for S.F. back to 1949, but did not adjust for quality.) But the basic conclusion seems pretty good: letting development rip will at best hold back the tide. 

I would add two points, however.

First, I worry about the model, simply because San Francisco is part of a metropolitan housing market. It really needs to include suburban development. Of course, the Bay Area has slammed suburban building shut even further than the County of San Francisco, but it is easier to imagine doubling the number of housing units in San Mateo and Alameda than it is to imagine doubling them in S.F. proper. Surely that would have a major effect.

Second, S.F. may be setting itself up for a major recession some day. I suspect not, to be honest: a gilded metro area looks depressingly plausible, particularly for the center of the computer industry. But a combination of a tech boom bust combined with an exhaustion of the supply of skilled people willing to live in the world’s first gilded metro area will kill the place dead. 

At that point, New York will get another filip and the people who didn’t buy in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx when it was still relatively cheap will regret it. You know who you are. It isn’t too late. 

Jane Jacobs was wrong

 Hillary as president, big burst of traffic. Mexico shows the amazing advance of solar power, something that may save the planet even if You-Know-Who is elected, meh. Oh, well.

Anyhoo, I just saw this email from Randy McDonald: “I’d be pretty curious to see your reaction to Jacobs on the blog. I know you’re a Moses fan, but that’s it.”

So, at his request, I’ll talk about Jane Jacobs. I did not intend to say anything, because why speak ill of the dead? I’m sure that she was a very nice person.

But my short version is: Death and Life of Great American Cities is bullshit. 

Now, bullshit is a technical term. Bullshit is basically truthiness by another name. And Jacobs was truthy. She made claims about social cohesion coming from architecture for which she had no evidence. She refused to acknowledge that the pathologies of American cities in the 1960s were due to racism, not construction. She blasted entirely functional and pleasant “towers in the park” buildings but ignored the way well-intentioned traffic engineers were making suburbs unnecessarily unpleasant. 

In fact, you can see how much bullshit she wrote from her defenders. Here is an essay Randy linked to called  “Was Jane Jacobs right?” The dude manages to contradict himself. First, he claims that Torontonian neighborhoods have gentrified and become full of retail monocultures because of too much construction. Well, that is the purest form of bullshit: as Randy has documented, rising rents are creating such monocultures in old neighborhoods. Then he confuses typology for hypothesis testing, by showing us that dense districts in Milan are more dense. (No, really. That is what he shows.) 

In a normal world, I might like Jane Jacobs. I am by no means ideologically averse to regulations that drive up housing costs. (Frex, requiring first-floor retail on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn.) She was right about highway building. (I like that Moses built stuff; I am less convinced that he built the right stuff, although really do wish the Cross-Brooklyn existed.) She was certainly right about most urban planning of the time, and her arguments apply to modern suburban planning quite well.

But we do not live in a normal world. We live in a world where Jacobite (Jacobin?) ideology means that everyone thinks it is entirely okay that the law protects cute streets like mine from the scourge of high rises. (Calling Eric Moore!) Hell, from the scourge of triple-deckers. 

We live in a world where people can pretend that filtering does not exist. (The link goes to a study of the California housing market. Theory here.) And while the worst problems are in fact in the suburbs, where I suspect Jacobs would be fine with replacing quarter-acre plots with “missing middle” construction, the fact that we have decided to preserve our older neighborhoods in amber is creating just as many problems.

In short ... I usually do not buy slippery slope arguments, but it seems to me that the United States slid all the way down the goddamned slope that Jacobs greased back in the 1960s. If we need to bulldoze the West Village to get back to a normal housing market that serves all Americans (while making our cities greener in the process) then so be it. 

Jane Jacobs caused none of that, of course. But she was emblematic. Her ideas have enabled much of the horror show that is the current American economy. Ironically, Canadian cities are doing (slightly!) better (in the face of worse pressure) because they are less beholden to her ideas than American ones. 

Hasta la vista, cuteness. Bring on more buildings! 

I hope that changed your mind, Randy! And even if it didn’t, when are you coming to D.C.?

In which I respectfully differ with a Bronx native

  In an otherwise excellent article, Bronx native Ben Wallace-Wells dents his credibility with the following statement:

As a Bronx native I’ve spent the campaign quietly weighing Donald Trump’s New York accent against that of Bernie Sanders. I can declare a split decision. Trump has the better vowels: His yooge obliterates Sanders’s yooge, the perfect measure of dismissiveness without dwelling on itself. But Sanders has the better consonants: when he says speculation, each syllable is a saliva receptacle. What is especially great about both of these accents is that no New Yorkers speak like that anymore, not even in deepest Canarsie. The city is too diverse; its population changes too constantly. Accents so extreme could only be preserved in environments where their bearers did not regularly interact with other New Yorkers: Burlington, Vermont, in one case, and a quartz penthouse in the other.

What? Dude. First, there is a logical inconsistency: what is so magical about interaction with other New Yorkers as opposed to, you know, the good people for Burlington? Being in Vermont is supposed to make it easier to preserve a Brooklyn accent of the older type?

Second, this young man displays unfortunate historical ignorance. (Actually, I have no idea how old he is. He could be fifty. I know from nothing about that.) What, everyone in Bernie Sanders’ Brooklyn was identical? Come on now. They were mostly white back then, but that category meant people who called each other s____, m____, p______, b______, s_______, g______, not to mention the w____ and all the other now-forgotten slurs that white people older than me used to refer to other white people. So the causal model does not make sense: Bernie’s Brooklyn accent was not the accent of some small isolated homogenous rural tribe.

Finally, there is a new New York accent, as I have pointed out on many occasions, which is very similar to the old but not identical. While New Yorkers of all races do speak it, it is relatively rare among NYC-raised non-Hispanic whites (who have, outside of Staten Island, lost the most distinctive parts of the old accent) and so Mr. Wallace-Wells may not have recognized it. The most prominent politician with the accent is this guy: 

Congressman Jeffries does not sound exactly like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. But he has a New York accent of the modern type, shared by hundreds of thousands of New York-raised people under age 30. C’mon, Ben! Take it back.

Oh, and here is Congressman Jeffries in full Noo Yawk awesome:

Misleading headline award: American business do not face a “culture gap” with Cuba

 Despite the criticism, the New York Times is better than it has ever been. And it is still the best newspaper on the planet in any language that I read. (Which would, if you insist, cover English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. I do not understand spoken French.) But its headline writers have been falling down on the job lately.

First they suggest that Nicaragua is fighting an insurgency. But when you read the article, it becomes immediately clear that is not what’s going on. 

Now we learn that “Culture Gap Impedes U.S. Business Efforts for Trade With Cuba.” Fascinating! I would have imagined that the U.S. would have had the smallest possible culture gap in the world with Cuba. After all, we have Florida! And they have baseball. Perhaps they are talking about some Communist mentality? Fascinating! After all, Cuba experienced one the few genuine Communist revolutions not imposed by the Red Army. It might have altered the mindset deeply! In fact, it almost certainly did. So I started to read with fascination.

Only to learn that the problem is that “threading the needle between Cuba’s rigid rules and the restrictions that the United States continues to impose is tricky.” They do toss in one paragraph about Americans baffled by slow Cuban official decision-making.

Uh ... legal problems and a slow bureaucracy do not a culture gap make, fellows. 

Some thoughts on the untimely death of Antonin Scalia

 First, we are sadly unlikely to ever again see New York accents so dominate the nation’s highest court.

Second, I have no idea what impact the vacancy will have on the 2016 general election or on the various Senate races. But I do think that it will help Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. As my friend Doug Hoff said, “I can see Obama playing this one well to HRC’s benefit — anything that takes attention away from Sanders’ pet issues probably helps out Clinton.” Add his point to the fact that a SCOTUS vacancy will raise the salience of concerns about electability and I think this puts some serious weight on the scales for Secretary Clinton over Senator Sanders.

Third, the Clean Power Plan just got a lot more likely to survive! An affirmative action case from which Kagan is recused also just got a little more likely to see a liberal decision. But only a little. And the odds that Deferred Action to Parents of Americans will be stopped did not change: if SCOTUS deadlocks 4-4, then the lower court decisions stand and it goes down.

Fourth, it seems to me that the Republicans have little reason to confirm anyone under any Democratic president. 4-4 beats 5-4. Plus, there is always the chance that Justice Ginsberg might pass away, in which case the conservatives would have a 4-3 majority.

Sure, refusing to nominate anyone would be unprecedented. But a lot of unprecedented political things have been happening lately. Why would the inauguration of a new Democratic president in 2017 change the calculus? Is there a reason for the Republicans to confirm any Democratic nominee to replace Scalia?

Finally, if President Obama really wants to troll the Republicans, then he should nominate Richard Posner to the high court. Oh, the Senate will never confirm him. But it would be fun!

Why would Bloomberg run?

 Blogging has been light. Blogging here is always light! But it has been light because we have been enjoying Snowzilla.

There is no “Winter Storm Jonas.” That’s a Weather Channel marketing term. The proper term for the recent storm is “storm.” Or Snowzilla!

Anyway, among other things, I just learned that Mike Bloomberg is thinking about running for President. I am sure that many others have pointed out that he can’t win and would likely throw the race to the Republicans.

My question is, why would he bother? What is the raison d’être for his candidacy? Hillary Clinton isn’t friendly enough to Wall Street? Bernie Sanders would insult rich people? Insufficient citizens are frisked by police?

I kid, but the question is serious. What in the name of God could possibly be driving Mr. Bloomberg to even think about such a thing? I don’t understand, and not just because this blog was not a huge fan of his mayoralty. Oh, he wasn’t a terrible mayor. The bureaucracy was efficient. PlaNYC was pretty cool, if a bit overrated.

But what is a Bloomberg presidency supposed to bring to America that a Clinton administration wouldn’t?

I am left with the possibility that he would run solely to spite Bernie Sanders, in the still unlikely event that the Senator from Vermont should get the nomination. That seems ... petty. And it is contradicted by the fact that he really does seem to be thinking about running against Hillary as well.

Help me out here. Why is he even thinking about this? What does he think he brings that she does not?

Unpublished post from August 22, 2013: The GOP, Latinos, and Chris Christie

There is a bit of a controversy over the GOP and immigration reform. Mitt Romney did terribly among Latinos, as do Republican candidates in general. The question is why. Many observers, including many Republicans, ascribe it to Republican immigrant-bashing, also known as racism. “Self-deportation” and all that.

There is a counter-argument, advanced by both liberals and conservatives, that the problem lies in other GOP policies. To get Latinos to vote Republican, either the internal demographics of Latinos would have to change or the GOP would need to alter core political stances other than their incessant dog-whistling to white nationalists. In that view, then, the dog-whistling is a pure plus: it gets white votes that might otherwise go uncast without losing many Latino ones.

I go back-and-forth on this. On the one hand, I know a lot of Latino conservatives who are put off by GOP insanity. On the other hand, I also know a lot of non-Latino conservatives who are put off by GOP insanity.

So ... one test case is New Jersey. There, Governor Christie leads among white voters, but is slightly behind among Latinos, 41-43 against Barbara Buono.

Thing is, Governor Christie has not engaged in any racist dog-whistling. And his persona goes over well with Latinos. This above picture is me in front of Mr. Otero’s house in Queens. Mr. Otero has told me that he likes Governor Christie. But ... I have trouble believing that he would vote for the man. (And no, not just because he does not live in New Jersey.) Why? Well, look at this picture of the house, without me taking up space:

Close-up:

You see a lot of those stickers in Queens.

Immigration reform? A good thing. And probably a net gain for the GOP. But I am not sure that it would drastically change much of anything. The party has other problems.

Two Wednesday links

 Department of accents: Cockney is leaving London, replaced by something horribly called “London Multicultural English.” I don’t mean that it sounds horrible: not at all. I mean that the name is horrible. The transition strikes me as much the same as the way that the very misnamed New York Latino English is replacing the old-style New York accent. Misnamed, of course, because the accent is not spoken only by Latinos (in fact, in my experience, New Yorkers of Latin descent are more likely to preserve the old-fashioned accent) but has clear links with the old accent. For good examples of the new New York accent go to this BBC link and scroll down to the second video, labeled “Eyewitness accounts of NY crash.” Or listen to this.

Department of Donald. If you do a third-party run, sir, do it right. Fund people for Senate and Congress. Go on, do it. “You’re a man of vision, Mr. Trump, so I know you won’t be content to preside over a government controlled by your opponents. You’re also a man with vast monetary resources at your command, so I know that you can recruit and fund 469 congressional candidates while running an independent presidential campaign. You probably won’t win them all — you may not win any of them — but you ought to be able to draw enough votes away from the Republican candidates to cost most of them their seats, and that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To make the GOP sorry for how unfair they have been to you. Because that’s the kind of man you are.”

Boston has monsters, which is a reason to dislike New Jersey

 Found scribbled on a notepad in my backpack (at least the parts in quotes):

“I was born in Brooklyn!”

You were?

“I was born in Boston and there were monsters in Boston. Mommy and Daddy had to protect me from the monsters in Boston.”

So you must not like Boston.

“I don’t like New Jersey.”

Why not?

“When I was in Boston I saw a monster coming to eat Tima and me.”

That sounds scary, but I don’t see the connection to New Jersey. Which state is your favorite?

“My favorite states are Trinidad and New York and Aper. Aper is a big city with a lot of people it doesn’t have no train. It has a train track. Trains drive on that train track. And it doesn’t have no station. And it doesn’t have no subway! You can go on the train tracks to New York. It just drives outside.”

Apparently, I did not follow up. Or I ran out of paper. This Aper sounds like an interesting place. (Unless he means Delaware.) And what is wrong with New Jersey? He must have overheard his parents complaining about the endless quality of the eponymous turnpike when we thought he was asleep. 

He is completely correct that Trinidad really should be a state.

Uber in Archiebunkerland

 So Uber and the NYC government have been battling it out. I will admit to having sympathy with the government. Not because I support the taxi monopoly: reader JKR, if he would be so kind, will attest that I railed against it at somewhat annoying length as far back as the 1980s. Rather, it is because of my general fear of a “gig economy” in which social insurance is still tied to employment ... only in which the “gigs” are not counted as employment. 

But I come to praise Uber, not to bury it. When I go to New York, I tend to stay either in Midwood, Brooklyn, or more-often in the beyond-the-subway reaches of Queens. LIRR service from Queens Village is usually hourly, so it usually makes more sense to go to the main LIRR station at Jamaica, where trains run at subway frequencies. Except Jamaica is several miles away. Now, the recent creation of the green taxis that do pick-up only in the boroughs means that it is easy to get a cab from Jamaica. But calling a cab to take you to Jamaica (or the airport, for that matter) has always been nearly hopeless. Half-hour waits and disappearing cars were the standard.

But then came Uber! And now, we have never waited more than ten minutes and we have only once had a cab agree to come and then cancel. (Yes, that happens with Uber in Queens. It’s still Queens. We walked down to Jamaica Avenue and caught a dollar cab instead.)

(Parenthetical comment inside a parenthesis: in Queens, the dollar cabs are fixed-route taxis. They ply a major street, picking up and letting off people along the way. They are cars, not vans, and often, but not always, painted black.)

So while not perfect, this Uber-financed study passes the smell test. The service really has improved taxi service in the outer boroughs beyond the subway, even if it costs about the same.

Isaac Asimov’s easiest prediction for 2014

 A while back, we went over Isaac Asimov’s  1964 predictions for 2014. In the penultimate comment, Damien RS points out that Boston-Washington has not merged into a single city.

But who the hell knows what Asimov was talking about! He predicts that the corridor will have a population of 40 million by 2014. That is a pretty easy prediction to make, considering as it had a population of 37.2 million in 1960. (It hit 51.8 million in 2010.)

Moreover, the place was already almost an unbroken streak of urban areas, using the standard definition of 1,000 people per square mile. (Definition on page 3.) 

The map is from page 6 of Megalopolis, published in 1961. Maybe Asimov meant to predict: “By 2014, there will be a bunch of suburbs built in Harford and Cecil County, MD, central New Jersey, coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island.” 

To be frank, I would call this an even bigger fail than Damien did, because it shows that Asimov had basically no clue about geography or demography. This is in fact pretty obvious in Caves of Steel, where a world population of only 8 billion has somehow forced everyone to live in super-dense urban arcologies. Ditto the Foundation novels, where Asimov somehow predicted that a population of 40 billion on an Earth-sized world would require a planet-spanning structures hundreds (or thousands) of feet high. Predicting that an urban area would grow 7½% over 40 years is sort of less than perspicacious ... let alone stating that a 7½% population increase would imply the creation of a single city where one did not yet exist.

A little bit crazy about these things, Asimov was. Anyone know why?

I hate Brooklyn, part 2

 One day, I hope, Brooklyn will no longer stand for anything other than a large urbanized area in the southwestern corner of Long Island, hopefully still with the funny accent. But until that day, I give you Bushwick, 2015.

Brooklyn? Like I tell people, I’m from Fort Lee, New Jersey. Now, what’s the name of the junior high in that town?

Peer pressure and the police

 My wife and I have relatives in the NYPD. (This should not be a surprise.) So we called a couple to ask about the cops turning their back on Mayor De Blasio during the funeral service. We were told that the protests were unplanned, word just went out in the crowd. We were also told that the police were mad because the mayor “took sides.” We asked what that meant. “He took sides. That was horrible what happened in Staten Island, but a jury found him innocent, but the mayor didn’t accept that.” Our relative went on to say that the mayor would not win re-election with the police against him.

For what it’s worth, since I’m not in NYC, the police seem to have taken leave of their senses. To the point that when I first learned of the statement put out by the retired cops who flew the above banner over the city, I thought it was a satire:

It is our opinion that Mayor deBlasio’s dangerous and irresponsible comments about his and his wife’s concern for their son’s safety at the hands of the NYPD fueled the flames that led to civil unrest, and potentially to the deaths of PO Wenjian Liu and PO Rafael Ramos, as well as the continued threats against NYPD personnel.

My take? Three things. First, I got the impression that the ire against the Mayor, as related by my cousin, comes more from peer pressure than deep-felt grievances. He did not mention the “irresponsible comments” listed in the above statement. I can imagine how hard it would be to not turn your back in a situation like the funeral when all your friends and colleagues are doing so.

Second, it really amazes me how joining an organization can make people have selective memories. Someone ask my cousin about the bicycle-ticket incident with his friends in Queens, over a decade ago. It really is better to be a young white person, even in New York City.

Third, the mayor may lose re-election, but it will not be because of his relationship with the NYPD.

I am glad that I am not Mayor De Blasio, because at this point I would be going to war with the department, and that is certainly not a wise thing to do. 

$50,000 homes in Palo Alto?

 Courtesy of Alex Harrowell, here is an interview Larry Page gave to the Financial Times. The interview is full of a lot of blather and show Page’s resolute determination to avoid thinking about the negative consequences of technological unemployment. Most of the interview should make you a little angry, even if you agree with his contention that there is not enough innovation around making cheaper goods and physical services.

But not all of the interview is content-free. At one point, Mr. Page says: “Even more than technology, he puts this down to policy changes needed to make land more readily available for construction. Rather than exceeding $1m, there’s no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, shouldn’t cost $50,000, he says.”

Alex asks, “Does anyone know what Larry Page means by this?” In comments, Alex adds, rightly, “He’s [Larry Page] confusing incremental and order-of-magnitude changes, which is actually a very un-codery thing to do.” 

That’s true, but Page isn’t being crazy. He’s off-base, likely by a factor of two, but acceptably so for an offhand comment in a general interview. Consider:

Imagine the city allowed as-right floor-area-ratios above ten for the whole city, with no setbacks other than the sidewalk right-of-way and no parking requirements. Multifamily 4-7 story housing in the less-regulated parts of the Sunbelt costs about $150 per square foot. In suburban Miami, basic modular construction (no frills, but in code) can go as low as $100. The reason construction costs are higher in California is not fully understood but much is due to the cost of planning delays — you need to line up financing in order to get a building permit. The more uncertain the planning, the higher the costs. So also imagine that the planning delays were gone.

In Brooklyn in the 1980s the Nehemiah Housing fund put up 1150-square-foot rowhouse for a cost (in 2013 dollars adjusted using the average wage index) of $93,100 ... that’s about $81 per square-foot for a block-long row of small homes. That gets you a small apartment for $50,000; one upstairs and one downstairs. Later houses went up in Brooklyn for about $110 which is the ballpark for the $133 all-in unsubsidized cost for housing that went up in East New York in 2009.

Assuming a cost of $150 gets you a 300-square-foot efficiency for $50,000. (At $81 you get 625.) You could push the cost down to $80 by building to five stories and eliminating elevator requirements. For example, I was a teenager in a 670-square-foot three-bedroom one-bath apartment in a Manhattan walkup. You could build a similar unit pretty cheaply today. It would just happen to be illegal.

Land costs are an issue for Palo Alto and there are overhead costs. Land runs north of $3.9 million per acre, or $90 per square foot.  Google bought land for $75 per square foot. At a floor-area-ratio of five (e.g., five-story buildings covering the entire lot) that’s about $18 per square foot of interior space. And then there’s financing, sales cost, and profit … that will boost costs by 24% above development costs.

The total comes to $80 (construction) + $18 (land) + $23 (overhead) = $119 … or one small 420 square foot efficiency for $50,000. Assumes external staircases and corridors. Not a pretty building, no, but remotely possible. 

Now, I doubt that there’s enough demand to cover downtown Palo Alto with cheap five-story modular walk-ups filled with tiny efficiency apartments. So the claim that average costs in Palo Alto should be $50,000 is silly. But the claim that you should be able to buy an efficiency for $50,000 within a short commute is not. And you could cover Palo Alto with East New York-style rowhouses at a cost of $264,000 per unit for two 800-square foot units, including land. ($207,000 for the 2,321 square-foot lots; $133 per square foot construction for 1,640 square feet of building; 24% overhead.) Not bad. Hell, not bad at double that cost and maybe even doable for $202,000 at $80 construction cost and half the profit margin.

Eventually you can build this:

Which would look like this as you sped past on Highway 101 in your robocar:

That is completely awesome! I would live a couple blocks from that. Wait, I live Friendship Heights in D.C. near the city line with a certain part of Bethesda ... I do live a couple blocks from that! Too bad the local governments keep the development bottled up even where I live. 

Am I wrong? Did I make a math mistake? If not, a cheap Bay Area is possible! Hell, it’s easy. $50,000 efficiencies, here we come!

But I am a pessimist and doubt that it will ever happen. No two-story rowhouses, no five-story buildings. Be prepared for America’s first gilded metro area! 

How to convince a New Yorker to shave

 So I have a cousin, married with children, a professional who lives near the Queens-Nassau border. (Which side and which profession are being kept secret at the request of his wife.) He grew this long beard, which had relatives telling him to shave it off.  “You looking like the effing Taliban,” said one.

“Or a Red Sox fan, which is worse,” I added.

Results to follow.

Louis C.K. hates third-grade math but I am completely lost as to why

 Louis C.K. put up some tweets blasting the math homework that his third-grade girls need to do in the New York public schools. You can find a list of them here.

He is an awesome comedian, a brilliant man, but this I just do not understand. The pictograph question was weird, but it seemed that some key words had been cut off. The other math problems seemed entirely reasonable for the third grade. What am I missing?

I hate Brooklyn

I will not curse on this blog, but I would not be unhappy to discover that seven of the ten places listed at the below link had been burned down in the night by angry employees.

Read it and weep.

The exceptions? First, the place in Russia. That is where ukelele-playing belongs. AFAICT they make no claims to Brooklyn; it’s a bad sign about America that the blog-writers somehow pinned faux-nostalgia-ukelele music as having something to do with the county of Kings.

Second, the Brooklyn Cafe in Glasgow. “What??” you ask? Well, consider. They serve a Brooklyn Cheese Steak. Which I can only call an honest — and completely hilarious — mistake. Props.

Finally, the bagel place in Australia. Yes, it sounds terrible. But unlike the rest, it actually has some connection to the culture of the borough as it existed before the emergence of this weird new “brand.” 

The rest of the list use the Brooklyn name but have nothing to do with the uneasy mess  of Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, African-American and West Indian laid over a Protestant substrate that actually, you know, made Brooklyn into Brooklyn from pretty much the moment that the eponymous bridge was built until, I dunno, sometime around 2005.

This would not have happened if you coulda just built big ugly buildings instead of pricing everyone normal out of the place.

Anyway, I know a good red sauce place in Fort Lee, my new pretend home town. Above is the view from my aunt’s living room in 2005. That is a real New York ambience for you.

Brooklyn needs buildings, lots of tall buildings, and Bloomberg was bad for America

For those of you who don’t know, Junior’s is a bakery near the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn. My relatives swear by it, although I don’t quite grok their enthusiasm. Still, it’s pretty good.

And it’s closing, but not for good. Rather, they’re going to build a tall residential building! Yes, it will be a luxury development, but that’s all right: rich people will live there instead of bidding up lower-quality but well-located existing housing. Then the restaurant will reopen on the ground floor.

All good! Well, there’s a fly in the ointment, which is that the city, idiotically, puts in an as-right height cap in that area of 20 stories. Fortunately, in New York nearby properties can sell their unused air rights to allow for buildings to exceed the cap. J.P. Morgan owns a two-story landmarked building nearby and is willing to sell its rights. The end result? The building could go up to 50 floors, which is around the point where high-rises stop being economical and become pure prestige projects.

Excellent!

Only not to these pendejos, who are bad for Brooklyn and bad for America. Brooklyn Magazine is bad.

Gah. Don’t ask me, I tell people I’m from New Jersey these days.

Honestly, though, it isn’t the hipsters. It’s everyone. In 2005, Bloomberg downzoned the part of Brooklyn that Tony Manero would still find familiar. And that came after a 1978 downzoning that already made no sense, insuring only that “white flight” from the declining parts of the city would wind up in the suburbs. It is true that he allowed residential development in industrial areas, but his mayoralty can be blamed for allowing the current housing crisis to develop. Details here.

Still, the mayor was not approving changes in a vacuum. Consider my cousin Ray, who lives in Brooklyn and is not remotely hipsterish. He opposes tall buildings that you can’t possibly see from Midwood, let alone ones in Midwood.

And the madness continues.

The American housing crisis

I am beginning to think that the United States is facing a terrible housing crisis. The fact that we are is pathetic. We know how to build high-density housing in inexpensive ways. But we do not allow it. So places that boom in the northeast and California see little housing growth. But they see price explosions.

We are moving to Washington this summer. Our rent on a two-bedroom apartment (big enough for two adults and two small children) is $2525. When we moved in back in 2009 it was $2300. That is an increase of only 1.9% per year. In real terms, no change.

But the owners want to charge the new tenants $3200 for the same unit. That is an increase of 6.8% per year: well over inflation and a clear indication that something is off the rails in the Boston housing market.

The ultimate problem, of course, is that you simply can’t knock down the short buildings on this block and build more high-rises like the one in the background. It’s ridiculous. We are less than a quarter-mile from a T station; residential buildings here should reach 20, 30, 40 stories. But you can’t build them because, uh, Franklin Street is just so pretty as-is.

WTF? What in the name of God is wrong with Brooklyn? Build Brooklyn here! And for those of you in Brooklyn, go build Manhattan over there. Manhattan is great!

Here is my proposal for a tough tight restrictive zoning code.

1. Adjacent units shall not lose more than two hours of sunlight on the shortest day of the year unless their current occupants so agree.
2. Monthly rents on a third of the units in any new rental buildings shall not exceed 0.003% of the median household income in the municipality per square foot. The price of one-third of any new for-sale units shall not exceed 2.5% of the median household income in the municipality per square foot.
3. New developments must at least double the number of units of any housing structures demolished in their construction.

And we’re done! No parking requirements, no height restrictions, nada. Just the above. And truth be told, I would prefer to replace clause (2) with a tax on luxury units. Calling Bill de Blasio! (Or Muriel Bowser.)

Note that this is an incredibly restrictive code. Just less so than the bullshit we currently have. Historical preservation is stupid, un-American, and contributes to income inequality.

Massively. How much of the increase in income inequality is due to changes in housing costs? I suspect it is large; someone should do the decomposition.

The New York accent is dead, long live the New York accent

The traditional New York-New Jersey accent seems to be fading. (Do not be fooled; they are the same!) Then again, it seems to have been fading for a long time. Governor Al Smith was reknowned at the time for his accent; some even said it contributed to his loss in the 1928 presidential election.

Except, well, all the audio of him seems to show somebody with a barely-discernable accent. Compared to the parade of New Jersey accents appearing on MSNBC these days, Al Smith sounds like he is from Ohio. In the below clip I guess there is a little bit of an accent buried in there somewhere, but not really. He sounds like a deeper-pitched Matt Yglesias.

Smith did have an accent that emerged on occasion. The above clip is from 1933. In this 1928 clip, though, you can hear a very faint “ey” sound instead of “er.” That’s an iconic but archaic marker of NYNJ speech. The archaic accent, however, makes the modern content of the speech rather ironic: consider the studious avoidance of sexism at the end. (Also note the pretense at very high ethical standards. Do not be fooled into thinking that closing bridge lanes would not have sunk a candidate back in 1928.)

Back to the point: the markers of NYNJ speech do not depend on the now-defunct “ey” sound or the rarely-heard “youse.” I took the dialect quiz at the New York Times four times, and each time it pegged me as being from New York, Jersey City, or Yonkers. This despite giving honest answers about my use of “catty-corner” (a phrase I distinctly remember learning in California) and “you all” or “y’all” rather than “youse.”

The accuracy was slightly spooky, in fact. Is this just a New York phenomenon, or can such a short quiz really peg all Americans with such precision?

Being a parent is much more fun than being a not-parent

I probably shouldn’t write this down, but I’ve already copped to the fact that I’m reading Slate on this sunny morning in Queens instead of working on how to solve Albania’s energy problems. So why not?

There is a story in Slate by a self-described childless woman suggesting that the current trend of parents making parenting seem bloody awful just might have gone to far. She turns serious on page 2, pointing out how American culture has become less tolerant of true bad parenting (perhaps to dysfunctional extremes) while celebrating upper-class “bad” parents whom are actually quite good at it.

So let me say that I am really enjoying fatherhood. Now, there is a caveat: being married to a wonderful woman and able to afford good day care enables me to enjoy fatherhood: depending on the week, I get three to five days in which to sit at my computer and Get Stuff Done. (Well, get a little bit done, anyway.) And it really helps to live so close to the Island of Long where there really is a village.

Finally, I have to add that our apartment building in Cambridge has (out of 30 units) about 12 with families, so a “play date” means having Caesar from down the hall bang on the door or going down to the first floor to horse around with Mafalda.

And maybe we just have a great toddler.

Most of his shenanigans just reduce us to helpless laughter. Maybe that will change when his sister comes along. But thus far, with day care and have a partner I love, I haven’t come across any reasons not to have kids. And those aforementioned life-changes? They consist mostly of not getting drunk very often and no more cigars on the balcony. Both of those are good changes.

My only regret? That I didn’t find somebody as marvelous as my wife and who was willing and able to be a mother with me 15 years ago. And maybe that I have had to buy a whole new cheap wardrobe, considering all the gunk I get all over myself and the fact that the half-life of unripped knees is down to sixteen weeks. But while I miss wearing fancy creased pants and nice jackets every day, I very much like getting stuff all over and ripping the knees of my new ever-changing cheaper wardrobe.

Traveling for work is no longer as much fun, since I miss el Boy. I will likely never take another year to go to a combat zone, like Afghanistan, and will only go to non-combat-zones if my family is able and willing to come.

But that is a loss because I do not want to travel, not because I cannot travel. With the day care my wife is perfectly happy to have me take off for a few days. Maybe too happy ...

Seriously, go for it! Being a parent has been, for me, much better than not being a parent.

A request for a restaurant review

Somebody who should know tells me that the Sembrado taco place on 432 East 13th Street is very good. And like the ones in Mexico. The menu looks good: at least it has cebollitas and gringas. It has to be better than the NYC taquería mentioned here and which is now closed. But I am picky about these things and I have my doubts about anyplace in Manhattan or hipster-Brooklyn these days.

Any info?

The island of Long

OK, the holidays are over. Actually, they have been for a while: my recent sojourn to Houston was not a vacation. But the vacation that we did have was very very nice.

We did not go to the isle of Long. (Rather, we visited the island of Trinidad.)

But we have been to three of the elongated island’s four counties quite a lot over the past year! It gave the boy a chance to meet many of his cousins on all sides of his multidimensional family.

And it let me imagine life in the promised land! If only I had a job that would let us live in Queens or Nassau.

The above pictures are from a more temperate time, but the boy has been living in Boston, and cold weather does not phase him. But this block of not-quite-ice that blew in from somewhere (ah, the Island of Long) was quite confusing:

Note the damage from Hurricane Sandy in the background, most obvious behind him to the viewer’s left. There used to be a lot more trees. Of course, me being me, I think their disappearance (or loss of branches) is an improvement. Why would you want to live beneath a dark and depressing green canopy?

If anyone out there has fond or less-than-fond memories of trips-to/living-in/passing-through the Great Stretched Out Insular Territory, you know, the one south of Connecticut that goes from the Not-Island of Coney though the Counts’ Fiefdoms of Male and Female Monarchs all the way out to the Sub-Island of Shelter, I would be absolutely delighted to hear about it.

Could a computer get into Stuyvesant?

There was a terrifying article in the New York Times the other day. It appears that Professor Noriko Arai is trying to program a computer to pass the Tokyo University admissions exam.

If she succeeds, it would be a very big deal. Right now, the computer is stumped by natural language questions and historical context. But those might be automatable. If they are, then the implication is that huge swathes of human activity will lose their market value.

The corollary would seem to be that if a computer can pass the Tokyo University entrance exam, then that exam is no longer a useful measure of human merit.

Admission to New York City’s specialized high school is based on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. You can find a description and sample exam at this link. To this lay reader, the scrambled paragraphs and reading sections seem like they would be very hard to program, the math seems trivially easy to computerize (even with natural language questions), and the logical reasoning somewhere in between.

But I do not know! How long do we have before Watson’s progenitors can ace the exam? (I would hope that the answer is “never.” I do not think that it is.)

And in a slightly-less science-fictional vein, how good does the test appear as a metric of a student’s ability-to-benefit from a specialized high school? One problem is that the scoring is bizarrely non-linear: it would be better to do very high in one section and poorly in another than to do well in both. In practice, that weighs the math section over the verbal ones.

The article about the test at the link quotes experts as unanimously warning against the use of only a test in admissions. Boston Latin, for example, does not rely only on a test; nor do any elite universities. I am still unclear as to why so many of my high school compatriots argued that admissions requirements could not be changed.

Abolish Stuyvesant

One of the reasons I shut down my Facebook page was a ridiculous argument among my peers about the fact that Stuyvesant High School admits almost no black or Latino students. Many of my fellow graduates believed that the admissions test was a perfect and obvious metric of merit that could not be bettered. They also believed that Stuyvesant saved their lives; there was no way they would have turned out as well as they did had they gone elsewhere.

Me, I dunno. I had a lot of friends from George Washington High School; they went on to become Boeing executives, Marine officers, professors of psychology and sanitation workers. I would not have gone to G.W.; I would have likely gone to Manhattan Center or Murry Bergtraum. Would I have turned out differently? I doubt it. Things were violent then: take this story from 1986, featuring a Bergtraum student who was shot dead on Halloween, one of four in the city. One of the other three, however, went to Stuyvesant.

In other words, I am not convinced that my high school did much for me in particular. I had a few good teachers (thank you, Mrs. Ferrara!) but one incredibly awful guidance counselor, who tried to steer me to midlevel universities, you know, places a “street kid” [his words] could handle. Kind of a wash, although I made many good friends when I was there; it was great to catch up with some of them at the 2008 reunion.

Given that, you should not be surprised that I believed that it was a bad thing that Stuyvesant was down to nine black students and it would be a good thing to alter the admission criterion. (There was, in fact, a contradiction in my position. None of them pointed it out, however. I will explain on request.)

My fellow graduates got really mad at me for believing that Stuyvesant should change its admissions criteria, even if it meant that we would not have gotten in. It got kind of ugly, in a mildly ridiculous way. It was not the reason that I shut down the Facebook page; it wasn’t even the silliest or ugliest argument there. But it was the last one.

And now New York Magazine is on the case! In a great article about helping to make New York City affordable again, the magazine included a portion about improving the public schools. In it, they suggested: “We could abolish the specialized high schools — like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech — and distribute those talented kids back into the general population (studies show selective schools have little effect on achievement).”

Is that true? They provided no links. I immediately thought that there would be an easy way to test the hypothesis: look at students right around the test cutoff. With that idea in mind, I started to see if I could get a fellow academic interested in doing that study ... and whaddaya know! It turned out that Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer have done the work.

The abstract:

This paper uses data from three prominent exam high schools in New York City to estimate the impact of attending a school with high-achieving peers on college enrollment and graduation. Our identification strategy exploits sharp discontinuities in the admissions process. Applicants just eligible for an exam school have peers that score 0.17 to 0.36 standard deviations higher on eighth grade state tests and that are 6.4 to 9.5 percentage points less likely to be black or Hispanic. However, exposure to these higher-achieving and more homogeneous peers has little impact on college enrollment, college graduation, or college quality.

But there’s more! Page 2: “The impact of exam school eligibility on college enrollment or graduation is, if anything, negative. Students just eligible for Brooklyn Tech are 2.3 percentage points (approximately 3.0 percent) less likely to graduate from a four-year college. Students eligible for Bronx Science and Stuyvesant are neither more or less likely to graduate — the 95 percent confidence interval rules out impacts larger than 2.8 percentage points (approximately 3.4 percent) for Bronx Science  and 2.5 percentage points (approximately 3.0 percent) for Stuyvesant. The results are nearly identical when examining college enrollment, enrollment in more selective institutions, or enrollment in a post-baccalaureate program.”

Now, there are two lacunae in their study. First, as they admit, they are looking at the marginal admit: there may be big effects on high-flying test scorers. (They try to adjust for this, it is not convincing, and I am a sympathetic reader!) Second, they do not break out effects by race: it is quite plausible to me that marginal black students might benefit more from the change in peer effects than marginal white or Asian students. (My wife never ceases to tell me that I would have made a terrible black man, by which she means that a black teenager with my idiot bravado winds up in quite a bit more trouble and with rather less salubrious teenage friends.)

If either of those hypotheses are true, then we should keep Stuyvesant and the like around. (New York has expanded the number of elite schools from three to six, and I should admit that I like the ideas behind two of the new specialized schools: Brooklyn Latin and American Studies.)

But we should also then change the admission criteria.

And if neither is true, well, pfffft.

Prohibition and violence in Chicago

I was watching Boardwalk Empire, and I idly wondered to myself if the Prohibition era was really all that violent. So I dug up a paper by Leigh Bienen and Brandon Rottinghaus on homicide in Chicago. (We all know that the Atlantic City of the series is fictionalized, so I didn’t bother.)

Answer: a first amateur glance the data says maybe.

Chicago was violent even by modern American standards. The below chart shows homicide rates for the whole city hitting 20 per 100,000 by 1928. That is high. For context, homicide peaked in Chicago in 1991 around 32 per 100,000, declined to around 16 by 2011 and jumped back to 20 last year.

If you look at the red line (for total homicides) it seems to have increased a bit faster after Prohibition starts in 1920 than it had been earlier. But the jump is not that dramatic.

Except it is! Just not for the population as a whole. The blue line shows the homicide rate per 100,000 for white victims only. It continues to increase, but at the same rate as before Prohibition.

The implication is that the victimization rate for non-white Chicagoans must have skyrocketed.

And it did. Right after Prohibition.

In short, violence rose under Prohibition. But it rose more and more-suddenly among a racially marginalized population than in the city as a whole.

What about New York? Homicide rates were generally lower than in Chicago. They were also, unlike Chicago, generally stable in the decades before Prohibition. Homicide rates rise after Prohibition, but later than in Chicago: non-white victimization rates do not jump until rather late in the decade.

I would not ascribe causality; this is all amateur hour.

But there is a sad familiarity to this story, much the same our modern prohibition has destabilized black communities much more than white ones.

I am really not a big fan of Brooklyn anymore

 So, a bunch of twee little selfish nits has decided that Greenpoint does not need new buildings, because you know, they got theirs. In order to make their point, they redid the picture on the right to look like the picture on the left. In their words, “Ours was to express the brutality.”

Well, in my wife’s favorite expression, sheee-it. The whole thing still looks awesome, even with the rotting-meat color. And Greenpoint, I will point out, is ugly. Greenpoint has always been ugly. JKR and I used to marvel at its ugliness, wondering why it survived when intrinsically beautiful neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights were full of bombed-out buildings. (This was back when you could use “Brooklyn” and “Cleveland” in the same sentence with no sense of irony.)

The old Brooklyn would be happy to tear all that ugly vinyl-covered crap down. Manhattan on the other side of the East River? Hell, yeah! But this new weird place? Meh. Yeah, it is nice that the “grey zones” full of abandoned buildings that used to separate neighborhoods are gone. It is excellent that white mobs don’t kill black people any more. And Barclays Center shows some byootiful bad taste!

I was just with my wife and boy in a part of Brooklyn (Vanderbilt Avenue, if you must know) where I have not been for about two decades. I was stunned at the changes: back in the day, I remember someone describing Vanderbilt as “seedy.” And it was! Some abandoned buildings, some bodegas that were fronts for drug sales. (See the picture to the right.) It is much nicer now.

But even the nicer Vanderbilt Avenue manages to be nicer in an irritating where the hell am I kind of way, albeit thankfully not yet up where it hits Atlantic Avenue.

Ever since the place turned into a brand I have not got a whole lot to like about the borough. Gimme Queens any day. Heck, gimme New Jersey. Go Hackensack! Rock on, Union City! Artisanal pickles and European tourists whatever. Nobody takes a tour bus to Union City, even though it is a perfectly nice place.

GET OFF MY LAWN!! Damn kids.

I was wrong about Ecuador and Mr. Snowden

This just in: Edward Snowden finds the perfect place of asylum!

No matter where I move on this great globe, I will be a Jets fan until the very end. And do not be thinking that I might give up the Yankees! Not within the American League at least. That is all.

The hipsters are coming for Ridgewood, but why should I care?

Ridgewood, Queens, is a place I was going to blog about until I suddenly realized that I was confusing it with Woodhaven. I went to Woodhaven all the time in the 1980s. The reason was a girl. It was, I think, the first time I was called “Tony Manero” and the only place I think it was meant as an insult.

Anyway, it turns out that some young fool blogger who never knew Brooklyn when he would be scared to wander around at night now says that the hipster thing is bleeding into Ridgewood. I read that as Woodhaven and had a WTF moment. A long blog post composed itself in my head ... but then I realized my mistake.

I dunno if I have ever even been to Ridgewood. (I used to go to a diner in Maspeth with JKR, but that might as well be Rhode Island.) So hipsters, whatever.

New York in the 1940s, in hi-def living color! And hats!

Back around, oh, 1992, I said to a friend, “I’m a child of the seventies.” I don’t remember the context, but she replied with a laugh, “No, you’re a child of the forties.”

And in some ways she’s right! And so, a great great video from what was not the New York City of my young adulthood, but which very many people think should have been. (Me, I am kinda happy to avoid racism and polio, although I am fond of newspapers and the draft.)

Oh, Miami, and an arrest in New York

You are probably aware that a woman in Miami named Filomena Tobias flipped off Joakim Noah after last night’s game against Chicago. Ah, Miami. You may not, however, be aware that ... oh, just click the link. It’s fun, trust me.

In other news, the NYPD arrested a man in Astoria, Queens, for firing a plastic pellet gun and then handing it off to his kids.

The law against realistic toy guns is a good one and it should be enforced. When I was a boy, we would shoot BB guns down by what  is now called Dumbo or across the bridge on Wards Island. We would also sometimes take them into buildings or on city streets in Brooklyn or, even more stupidly, Stanley Isaacs and 1199 Plaza in Manhattan. In 1994, that very game resulted in death when a police officer shot a boy holding a toy gun. 

I strongly support the law banning realistic toy guns.

And I double-support keeping BB guns out of parks: they can hurt people! This guy was letting his three year son and five-year-old daughter point a loaded pellet gun at other people. That is a recipe to blind somebody. (I have every intention of going target shooting with my boy and letting him learn all about firearms. I have no intention of letting him fire even low-velocity projectiles in crowded areas.) I am glad that other parents stopped this moron before anyone got hurt.

There is, however, something confusing. The story says that the other parents quickly realized that it was a toy. One went up to the guy and told him to stop. According to the news, he did so and left the park.

Why then did they call the police? Or did somebody else call the police?

Anyway, this guy was pretty damn stupid. I will cut 10-year-olds in 1980 some slack. A 54-year-old in 2013, not so much.