We. Need. Transit.

Two great editorials on transit in Sunday's Free Press. The first explains the critical need for a "comprehensive national transportation policy" and the second brings the article closer to home, emphasizing how badly our region needs a major transit success story.

The editorials are part of an excellent, ongoing series in the Free Press "on the nation's glaring lack of an agenda for cities and viable solutions to the problems affecting our most populated regions." Previous editorials discussed the critical importance of cities, the problem of urban poverty, and the need to fight urban crime. The whole series is online at http://www.freep.com/cities.

Robert Kennedy's speech on MLK

Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed forty years ago today in Memphis, Tennessee. That night, Robert Kennedy gave an impromptu speech on King's passing before a black and white audience in Indianapolis. The speech is brief, beautiful, and moving, and I post it today in King's honor. The transcript may be read here.

Cory Booker interview

This past week Bill Moyers interviewed Cory Booker, Newark's remarkable young mayor. He is both fiercely idealistic and committed to pragmatic change, a combination I would welcome in any Detroit leader.

I discussed Booker before after reading an excellent New Yorker article that examines the mayor in the context of racial politics in America.

Securing our cities

The Free Press has another powerful editorial in favor of a renewed urban agenda at the national level. This time the focus is on five key steps the federal government can take to reduce crime and violence in major cities:

• The next president must increase support for local law enforcement programs that work, especially to those cities that have a plan for collaborative, community-wide crime prevention programs. Such assistance should include innovative new programs, such as a national campaign to ensure all city streets are well lit.

• Second, the president ought to strengthen the federal government's commitment to prisoner re-entry programs that help hundreds of thousands of offenders adjust to their communities. In Michigan and other states, such efforts are reducing crime and recidivism. The Second Chance Act passed by the U.S. Senate earlier this month is a good start.

• Third, the next administration must make gun control legislation a priority, as virtually all big-city mayors and police chiefs have urged. At least, the president and Congress ought to renew the assault weapons ban, establish a national data base for guns and gun owners, and require background checks for gun show purchases.

• Fourth, Washington should encourage local rules that require police officers to live in the cities they serve. It could do so by making only cities with such residency rules eligible for certain grants.

• Finally, the federal government must do more to prevent crime. The good news is that, over the last 15 years, the U.S. Justice Department has started to focus on street violence, as well as white-collar and organized, crime. The best federal programs have partnered with local law enforcement agencies and community-based groups.

Public transit under attack

The Washington Post has a must-read article this week on the Bush administration's approach to transit policy. This is something we should all be aware of and worried about.

Bush appointees at the Department of Transportation are working to reduce traffic congestion by converting roads into privately-operated, for-profit toll roads. At the same time, the agency is reducing funding for mass transit, denying funds to new light rail projects, like the one proposed for Woodward in Detroit. Most fundamentally, the agency itself is being starved of funds. The gas tax has not been raised since 1993; assuming annual inflation of 3%, the tax rate today is therefore effectively 64% of what it was in 1993. The administration supports the continued reduction of the agency's budget because it will force the further privatization of transportation.

The nation needs an urban policy

The time has come to declare a new war on urban poverty. The Free Press makes the case in an ongoing series:

Presidents define what's important for the nation. A president who would visit a poor central-city neighborhood, or talk about the problems of the people who live there, would end a 40-year silence and, once again, focus the nation's attention and political will on ending poverty. With private sector support, a fraction of the $10 billion a month the United States spends in Iraq would go a long way toward reducing poverty at home.

Urban ghettos, segregated by class and race, have helped create a so-called underclass that undercuts the nation's economic progress and tears its social fabric. Bringing disenfranchised people into the economic mainstream is the right, and smart, thing to do. Cities offer the best opportunity to do that.

A reformer in Newark

There's a great profile of Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, in the Feb. 4th edition of the New Yorker. Unfortunately, only a synopsis is available online, but the conservative City Journal covered similar ground in a profile of Cory Booker from Spring 2007.

Booker is not a conventional Newark politician. Young, black, Ivy-league educated, and raised in the suburbs, he is fighting to reduce crime, overturn the corrupt political establishment, and bring in outside investment to transform the city. He "considers himself as part of a new paradigm of 'people who are trying to make their governments engines of economic opportunity and judge them not by how many jobs they can provide but by how much wealth they can create and how efficiently they can deliver services within their own city.'"

His efforts have engendered fierce resistant, both for his politics and his background. In his first bid for mayor, the incumbent accused him of not being authentically black, saying, “You have to learn how to be African-American, and we don’t have time to train you.” He has been attacked for appointing outsiders, many of whom are white, to his administration, and many in the city oppose his policy positions, including support for school vouchers.

His experience is thought-provoking, especially in the context of Detroit, which itself so badly needs enlightened leadership. Booker's heart certainly seems to be in the right place, reflecting the perspective of a new generation of idealists who hope to reform and revitalize Rust Belt cities through pragmatic policy that transcends traditional divisions pitting white against black and city against suburb. But ultimately intentions count for naught. The real test is whether his administration can successfully reduce crime and bring jobs to the city.

More so than ever, a nation of immigrants

According to the New York Times, the United States is becoming truly cosmopolitan: In 2020, 1 in 7 People in U.S. May Be Foreign-Born:

[T]he Pew Center projects that in 2050, 19 percent of Americans will be foreign-born; that the share of Hispanic residents will more than double to 29 percent from 14 percent in 2005; and that the proportion of Asians will almost double, from 5 percent to 9 percent.

Business minded philanthropy

The Free Press reports that United Way is changing its funding formula, demanding measurable results from the non-profits it sponsors. For example, providing services to the poor will not be enough; organizations must show they've made an impact by reducing poverty rates in an area.

This trend is a national one. Two weeks ago the New Yorker noted, for example, how business principles have transformed medical philanthropy in "Buying the Cure".

The creative class in the Rust Belt

Two finds from today's Metromode:

• The News talks about Detroit's burgeoning hipster image, citing Cafe D'Mongos' success at attracting the "creative class."

• This week's guest blogger at Metromode is Sarah Szurpicki of Great Lakes Urban Exchange (GLUE). GLUE is "an online networking and journalism effort to build regional identity and share information among young urban leaders from cities around the Great Lakes region." There's not too much on their website yet, but my interest is piqued and their principles are sound: urbanism, regionalism, storytelling, and building networks.
  

Tightening the belt

According to the New York Times, the age of easy credit may be passing:

With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling, the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means.

Increased saving should be good news: Americans are finally being responsible. But our economy is so consumer driven -- GDP is 70% consumer spending -- that this cutback could easily cause or deepen a recession. We'll be better off in the long run, but saving more will cost jobs in the present -- an ironic result made possible by our dependence on frivolous spending for our longterm prosperity.

Paczki Day!

My favorite local holiday has begun. Thanks to Hamtramck, the historically Polish city-within-the-city, Metro Detroiters will eat thousands of paczki -- delicious, high-calorie donuts -- before the traditional fasting of Lent. I don't plan to fast, but I will nevertheless indulge.

It's also Super Tuesday, an unprecedented near national primary when 24 states will hold primaries and caucuses. Far a political junkie like myself, that's far more exciting than Sunday's Super Bowl. I'll be eagerly watching the returns to see whether Obama can ride his rising tide of support to victory against frontrunner Clinton.

All in all, an exciting day.

Will the Fed save the day?

The New York Times Magazine profiles Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who is trying to contain inflation without letting the economy sink into recession. Today he advocated immediate government intervention to boost the national economy.

Meanwhile, the News reminds us that Michigan's unemployment continues to rise.

Recession: Now a national trend

According to the Free Press, Michigan's economy may finally recover in 2010, but then again maybe not. The New York Times reports that the national economy may already be in recession, which should keep us just where we are economically. Hoorah.

Creative destruction

David Brooks, conservative columnist for The New York Times, lists the best magazine essays of the year here and here.

One of his selections discusses the economist Joseph Schumpeter and his concept of creative destruction:

The essence of capitalist economies was, as Marx had recognized before him, the entrepreneur and the innovator: the risk taker who sets in motion new and more-efficient ways of making old or new products, and so produces an economy in constant change. Marx saw that the coming of capitalist economies destroyed all feudal, traditional, and patriarchal relationships and orders. Schumpeter saw farther: that market capitalism destroys its own earlier generations. There is, he wrote, a constant "process of industrial mutation — if I may use that biological term — that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in, and what every capitalist concern has got to live in."

Capitalism is in constant flux. New innovations create wealth and propel the economy forward, but at the same time they render old industries obsolete. Economic loss is the necessary consequence of economic gain. Detroit, once at the forefront of technology, is now suffering the destructive consequences of capitalist innovation itself.

Also worth noting: a New Yorker article from April on the psychology and economics of long-distance commuting and an article from the New York Review of Books on the immigration debate. I haven't read either yet, but they look good.