dogtown commons

Last Friday, Governor Schwarzenegger used his veto power to cut funds for AB 2034, known as “Integrated Services for Homeless Adults with Serious Mental Illness,” which pays for local programs that provide services to California’s large number of mentally ill homeless people. AB 2034 has by most accounts been valuable and effective, and the elimination of funding (saving $55 million, and helping appease GOP legislators who supported the budget only after the governor agreed to make $700 million in cuts) has been appropriately criticized.

In the wake of Schwarzenegger’s cut, the recently released report on the Virginia Tech massacre is worth paying attention to. Here are two of the 21 major findings:

2. During Cho’s junior year at Virginia Tech, numerous incidents occurred that were clear warnings of mental instability. Although various individuals and departments within the university knew about each of these incidents, the university did not intervene effectively. No one knew all the information and no one connected all the dots.

5. Virginia’s mental health laws are flawed and services for mental health users are inadequate. Lack of sufficient resources results in gaps in the mental health system including short term crisis stabilization and comprehensive outpatient services. The involuntary commitment process is challenged by unrealistic time constraints, lack of critical psychiatric data and collateral information, and barriers (perceived or real) to
open communications among key professionals.

This is not to suggest that massacres like Virginia Tech will become commonplace under the new budget. But as programs for the mentally ill are reduced, the criminal justice system inevitably picks up much of the slack. While $55 million sounds like a lot of money, the consequences of cutting programs for the mentally ill homeless may in fact be far more expensive. With less outreach and services available to an at-risk population, it is a certainty that some untreated people will become entangled in an already-overwhelmed criminal justice system. So rather than simply saving money, the elimination of AB 2034 essentially transfers the cost to the budgets of police departments, courts, and the department of corrections. Those added costs won’t show up as a line-item in the annual budget, but they are there nonetheless. To put the numbers in some perspective: AB 2034 cost $55 million; the total budget is over $145 billion, including almost $10 billion for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Aside from the strictly financial costs, there are social costs to cutting services for the homeless and mentally ill. And aside from all costs, financial and social, there is simple morality. Few segments of the population are more vulnerable than the mentally ill homeless. If we cannot set aside a small piece of an enormous budget to help people with no homes, a serious mental illness, and (often) little or no support from family or friends, then how can we justify spending much more money to, for example, protect the homes of people who have chosen to live next to a large fire-prone forest? I’m not suggesting that we stop fighting fires, but I am suggesting that we also fight the fires that rage inside some people’s tormented minds.

This passage from a Washington Post article speaks volumes:

Unlike federal highway funds, which states receive based on a formula and may spend as they wish, money for new transit projects is awarded at the discretion of the FTA. The agency doesn’t have much to dole out. The FTA has proposed spending about $1.4 billion on new transit projects next fiscal year, compared with $42 billion that states will receive for highway maintenance and construction, according to federal figures. More than 100 transit projects across the country are expected to compete for federal money in coming years, according to a federal report.

In deciding which projects deserve funds, FTA officials consider primarily which would attract enough riders and save them enough time to be worth the investment. They also consider the state and local governments’ ability to help pay for construction, maintenance and operating costs. Other considerations include impact on air quality, development around stations and the ability to move lower-income workers to jobs.

FTA evaluations can take years, because it rates a project — and grants permission for it to move forward — at several different points, controlling it from preliminary engineering through construction. The process has grown so complicated and time-consuming that, across the country, many local officials have begun to forgo federal money if they can secure enough local or private funds to build a project, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

So not only does the federal government fund highways at 30 times the rate that it funds transit projects, but they add so much red tape to the transit funding that some local officials don’t even bother to apply for it. Meanwhile, the highway money just gets doled out to all states regardless of merit, with no strings attached and regardless of the environmental impact. Because everyone knows we need more and more highways, right? And everyone knows that existing highways need to be made wider and wider to accommodate all the drivers who choose to live 40 miles away from their workplaces, right?

Of course it’s not really the federal government’s fault. The funding discrepancy is just a reflection of the perverse incentives and feedback loops that have been built into our entire system, in which people are lured to ever-more distant suburbs with promises of cheap home ownership, safe “neighborhoods” and small backyards of their own. As the housing tracts and strip malls metastasized, and large swaths of our cities become poorer, politicians naturally responded to the new reality and catered even more to the richer, more politically connected suburbs while neglecting the depressed urban cores. The criminal neglect of the people of New Orleans is just the most dramatic example of a decades-long and nationwide phenomenon.

With gas prices rising and commuters realizing that spending 90 minutes in a traffic jam every day is no fun, even in a climate-controlled SUV, perhaps interest in sensible transit is growing again. In California, the recent construction of light rail and subway lines in Los Angeles, the plans for expanded BART service in the Bay Area, and the nascent plans for high-speed rail are signs of revived attention in sustainable transportation alternatives. The Post article notes that federal funding are “rooted in outdated thinking”:

Transportation experts say the disparities between highway and transit-system funds — and how money is awarded — are rooted in outdated thinking. Highways have traditionally received more federal money because they have been viewed as connecting the country, while transit systems have been seen as serving individual cities.

“There’s still a lack of understanding of how fundamentally broken the transit program is,” said Robert Puentes, a Brookings Institution fellow.

Meanwhile, competition for that money is increasing rapidly. Many booming areas — including such traditional highway-loving cities as Phoenix, Denver and Houston — are turning to transit to curb air pollution and control their car-dependent sprawl.

“The demand for transit has never been higher,” Puentes said. “At the same time, the federal government substantially underfunds transit, so it’s very competitive to get those funds.”

Just can’t get enough talk about transportation, land use and climate protection? Or just want a free lunch?

Bay Area on the move
Connecting transportation, land use and climate protection
A forum joining ABAG’s Fall General Assembly with discussions on MTC’s Transportation 2035 Plan
October 26, 2007 • 8:30 a.m - 2:00 p.m.
Oakland Marriott City Center

About the Conference
Bay Area residents will review some of the major decisions anticipated as part of an update to the metropolitan Transportation Commission’s long-range transportation policy and investment blueprint, known as Transportation 2035. The Association of Bay Area Governments also will showcase results of its FOCUS effort to identify priority development areas.

Highlights
* Prominent local and national leaders
* Sessions on transportation, land use, and the link to pricing, equity and climate protection
* Keypad-style electronic voting by participants

Who Should Attend?
Everyone who cares about the future of the Bay Area! Join elected official, community and business leaders, planners, and transportation and smart growth advocates in this lively regional dialogue.

Lunch and refreshments will be provided

Details here at the ABAG website.

Frances E. Kuo at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has done some remarkable studies on the social benefits of trees in urban settings. In a Chicago housing project, she and her colleagues compiled interviews and statistics on buildings surrounded by trees compared with nearly identical buildings in the same housing project that did not have any trees nearby. Among the findings are the following:

Trees reduce crime:

In fact, compared with buildings that had little or no vegetation, buildings with high levels of greenery had 48 percent fewer property crimes and 56 percent fewer violent crimes. Even modest amounts of greenery were associated with lower crime rates. The greener the surroundings, the fewer the number of crimes that occurred.

Trees build community:

residents of buildings with more trees and grass reported that they knew their neighbors better, socialized with them more often, had stronger feelings of community, and felt safer and better adjusted than did residents of more barren, but otherwise identical, buildings.

Most people intuitively sense that trees are an asset to a neighborhood, but I never would have expected the benefits to be so quantifiable and dramatic. The findings aren’t lost on everyone, however — the Alliance for Community Trees is a nationwide umbrella organization for groups like Urban Releaf, which was set up in 1998 to plant trees in barren neighborhoods of Oakland and Richmond. The urban agriculture movement, which is quite large and still growing in Oakland and surrounding areas, focuses mostly on food, but it dovetails nicely with the tree-planting projects. In a 2003 paper, Kuo emphasizes the parallels between natural ecosystems and what she calls the “social ecosystem”:

In urban communities, arboriculture clearly contributes to the health of the biological ecosystem; does it contribute to the health of the social ecosystem as well? Evidence from studies in inner-city Chicago suggests so. In a series of studies involving over 1,300 person–space observations, 400 interviews, housing authority records, and 2 years of police crime reports, tree and grass cover were systematically linked to a wide range of social ecosystem indicators. These indicators included stronger ties among neighbors, greater sense of safety and adjustment, more supervision of children in outdoor spaces, healthier patterns of children’s play, more use of neighborhood common spaces, fewer incivilities, fewer property crimes, and fewer violent crimes. The link between arboriculture and a healthier social ecosystem turns out to be surprisingly simple to explain. In residential areas, barren, treeless spaces often become “no man’s lands,” which discourage resident interaction and invite crime. The presence of trees and well-maintained grass can transform these no man’s lands into pleasant, welcoming, well-used spaces. Vital, well-used neighborhood common spaces serve to both strengthen ties among residents and deter crime, thereby creating healthier, safer neighborhoods.

(Photo above was taken in 1884 by Moses Chase, and shows an oak tree at 5th and Clay Sts. in Oakland, CA. More information on the photograph can be found here)

UPDATE later Friday evening: The site is back up. So the paragraph below is now moot.

I was planning to email Paul Cobb to ask about the future of the Oakland Post last night, but www.postnewsgroup.com was leading to an error page. It is still leading to the same error page. That address was working as of a couple weeks ago. If anyone knows anything about this, or has an alternative web address that works, I welcome information in comments below, or by email to dc(at)dogtowncommons.com. As I said in last night’s post, it would be a shame if the paper was shut down. I hope the website problem isn’t an ominous sign.

A blogger named David at All I Wanted Was a Room! says maybe not, after a conversation with Oakland Post publisher Paul Cobb in downtown Oakland. It’s an awful fact that threats, intimidation, and violence often have their desired effects. It would be a shame if the murder of Chauncey Bailey, and any related threats, succeeded in silencing anyone, but who could blame Paul Cobb if he really is considering calling it quits?

That’s not a photo of Bob Dylan — it’s a photo of Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan in a new Todd Haynes / Harvey Weinstein movie. It’s all explained in this NYTimes article.

Like a lot of people, I think Blanchett is one of the best actresses around. She steals movies even when her role is pretty minor (The Talented Mr. Ripley, for example). And I admire actors who challenge themselves instead of resting on their laurels or playing the same sort of character over and over. There’s always a danger, though, that the urge to challenge oneself, and to show one’s virtuosity, will come to overshadow the underlying talent. Let’s hope that’s not the case here — playing Dylan seems very hard for any man to do well, never mind a woman.

For a smarter, lighter take on the same issues Michael Skube made a fool of himself discussing, see this Joel Achenbach column in the Washington Post.

The LATimes ran a pretty silly column by Michael Skube in Sunday’s about bloggers versus traditional reporters. While Skube was arguing (correctly) that most blogs are all opinion and no original reporting, the column itself was notable for being long on opinion, and short on reporting. For example:

One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background — these would not seem to be a blogger’s trademarks.

The language itself (”uneasy sense,” “seem”) is a tip-off that the author probably hasn’t done much actual research into the matter. Indeed, Skube apparently got that “uneasy sense” without bothering to spend much time learning about blogs. His column included the following passage:

And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. “No man but a blockhead,” the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, “ever wrote but for money.” Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers — Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post — are insistent partisans in political debate.

The four people named — Sullivan, Yglesias, Marshall, and Huffington — in fact do not write for free. Even worse, when Josh Marshall emailed Skube to point out that unlike most blogs, Talking Points Memo actually contains a decent amount of original reporting, Skube emailed back saying that an editor had added Marshall’s name to the piece. More damningly, he noted that, “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt.”

So in a column criticizing blogs for not doing any original reporting, the author didn’t bother to check out one of the bloggers who was being accused by name under his byline. But it’s worse than just sloppiness — Josh Marshall’s blog is one of the most prominent blogs around. The LATimes itself had a well-reported article in March about Josh Marshall and the hard work his team had done to pursue the US Attorney story when the rest of the press were ignoring it. By admitting that he “hasn’t spent any time on” Talking Points Memo, Skube is essentially admitting that he is ignorant of the very subject he opined about in print. How ironic, given the accusations against bloggers that he makes in the column.