dogtown commons

In the quest for high page-view numbers, newspaper websites often break an article into two or more pieces. This is usually nothing more than a mild annoyance, and there is often a “single-page” option, but sometimes this practice gets downright ridiculous. The final “page” of an old Frank Rich column at the New York Times website contained only two sentences — 23 words!

I’m sure that they use some automated algorithm to divide articles into pages, so it’s unlikely that anyone intentionally chose to make the final two sentences of the column a separate “page,” but they might want to re-visit whatever algorithm they use. Maybe this is just a pet peeve, but when I click to a page that has only one paragraph on it, it irritates me — and more importantly from the newspaper’s point of view, it makes me less likely to click on “next page” links in general, so it may end up hurting the website’s advertising revenue in the long run. (In case anyone’s wondering, I was browsing through old Frank Rich columns to remind myself of what he was writing during the lead-up to the Iraq war, in order to explain why he seems to detest Clinton and her inner circle so much.)

When the Grand Lake Guardian sounded the alarm two weeks ago that a thrift store chain — Out of the Closet, which supports healthcare for AIDS patients — might take over the vacant GapKids storefront on Oakland’s Lakeshore Avenue, the forces of nimbyism and “progressive” hypocrisy were mobilized. Commenters on the article were almost comical in their self-involvement and fear of the unwashed masses, writing things such as “As a homeowner in this neighborhood, I would like to see the Gap Kids store replaced with something I would actually shop in” and “I have no issue with reuse of goods, but out of the closet usually has a goodwill image.” (A “goodwill image,” in case you can’t read between the lines, means poor and trashy, certainly not the kind of refined clientele that we want in our neighborhood).

While many of the concerns raised are euphemisms like “not a good fit for the neighborhood,” the distaste for poor people is hardly concealed. Local eminence Pamela Drake is quick to distinguish between a used-clothing boutique (desirable) and a thrift store (undesirable), and she says explicitly that she likes thrift stores, as long as they are not in her neighborhood: “As a former owner of a consignment store, there is a big difference between a Goodwill and a consignment shop like Maribel. They are not really in the same category though both promote reuse. I often shop at the Alta Bates Thrift and like it. However, Lakeshore/Lake Park is a very small shopping district. Having a very large store full of dollar bins and possibly junk could tip a delicate balance and discourage new small businesses from investing.”

To be fair, there are a number of commenters who welcome the idea of a thrift store, and who seem to appreciate that vibrant urban neighborhoods depend on socio-economic and lifestyle diversity. Maybe the homeowner quoted above won’t shop in a thrift store, and that’s her prerogative, but did it cross her mind that other people who live in the neighborhood might never shop at a GapKids?

City Council member Pat Kernighan, always responsive to the needs of her constituents, has leapt into action. She wants “a more desirable store” to come to that space. She calls for community meetings and mobilization among citizens to fend off the looming thrift store menace. She informed the site owner’s representative that “a thrift store would not be welcomed by the majority of area residents” (apparently she believes this because she has heard from “15 neighbors” opposed to Out of the Closet, but only “3 neighbors” who support the idea — a very unreliable survey, given that the vast majority of neighborhood residents probably have no idea yet that a thrift store might come to the location). She called representatives of Out of the Closet and says that she “explained that Lakeshore is trying hard to attract more shoppers with disposable income to keep all the stores in business and that a thrift store would lead in the other direction.”

There you have it. Kernighan dispenses with the euphemisms about Out of the Closet not being “a good fit” for the neighborhood, or its “goodwill image,” and she gets to the heart of the matter in no uncertain terms: Thrift stores mean poor people, and “Lakeshore” is trying hard to attract rich people, not poor people. Give her points for being candid about it, at least. The “Keep Oakland Economically Segregated” lobby seems to be as strong as ever.

Oakland, California and Newark, New Jersey have a lot in common; in some ways they are like mirror images of each other on opposite sides of the country. They are both mid-size cities that crouch in the shadow of a larger and more glamorous neighbor across the water. They are both major regional ports. They are both former industrial powerhouses that have suffered in the last half-century as jobs disappeared and many residents fled to suburbs or other cities. They are both known for their social strife and high crime rates. They are both in the middle of major revitalization efforts, especially around their downtowns. And they both have relatively new mayors, Ron Dellums and Cory Booker, who talk idealistically about working with citizens to turn their cities into models for the nation.

So how do Oakland and Newark differ? Well, nobody who currently lives in Oakland will find this description in Friday’s New York Times at all familiar:

NEWARK — Thursday night’s State of the City speech was the annual occasion for Mayor Cory A. Booker to highlight his accomplishments and broadcast his grand plans, but for many here — including, to a significant extent, Mr. Booker himself — the actual state of the city can be summed up in a single digit: 2.

That is how many murders there have been in Newark so far this year, down from 12 at this time last year. And, as Mayor Booker exulted, 109 fewer people were shot last year than in 2006, earning Newark plaudits from a national police executives’ organization.

Mayor Booker, like Mayor Dellums, uses plenty of inspirational rhetoric. Some examples from the Times article are: “In 2007, we kept our focus, we kept our momentum and we continued to march toward what I believe to be Newark’s certain destiny: to be America’s leading city in urban transformation” and “We believe that we will create miracles in our sacred city. Let the world watch us rise.” The Newark Star-Ledger reports that he finished his speech with “I believe, I believe, I believe in Newark.”

But unlike in Oakland, there are signs — preliminary, but real — that Booker might be earning the right to boast. And if the comments on the Star-Ledger’s report are any guide, many Newark residents are feeling pretty optimistic that things really are getting better. Contrast that with the comments on the San Francisco Chronicle article about Dellums’s State of the City address, which are dominated by pessimism and calls for his recall or resignation.

I don’t want Dellums recalled myself, but instead of spending his time chasing Federal funds and campaigning for Hillary Clinton, I wish he would take a close look at what cities like Newark are doing that Oakland isn’t. No one expects miracles or instant results, but more than a year into his term, it would be nice to see something to give Oakland residents a reason to believe.

Check out the fitting byline on this New York Times story:

Beach Toll Road Plan Rejected in California

By WILL CARLESS

Published: February 8, 2008

DEL MAR, Calif. — After a marathon public hearing in which hundreds of people spoke, the California Coastal Commission voted late Wednesday to deny approval for a toll road through a popular beach state park.

The 8-to-2 vote against the road, which would bisect California’s fifth-most-visited state park, San Onofre State Beach in north San Diego County, was seen as a significant victory for the region’s environmental movement and a major setback to a 20-year-effort to ease traffic congestion in the increasing sprawl of southern Orange County.

(Will Carless still has nothing on Dog Davis when it comes to cool bylines. Unfortunately, Dog Davis seems to have left journalism.)

For those wondering how California polls in the past few days can be so all over the place, and how the Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina polls could have done such a bad job of predicting the results, I suggest thinking about this article in the LA Times:

The audience, admittedly, was captive. But in a year of record turnouts for the presidential primaries, perhaps no place saw a bigger uptick in voter registration than Los Angeles County jails.

At least 917 inmates registered to vote over the last month, said sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore. Of those, 881 filled out applications to vote by absentee ballot in the California primary.

The jailhouse registrations marked a sharp increase in voting levels for inmates.

For the congressional elections two years ago, Sheriff’s Department records show only 16 inmates were registered to vote. In 2004, the year of the last presidential contest, 121 inmates were registered after a get-out-the-vote effort by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“People have the legal right to vote if they [have not been convicted] and have no prior felony convictions,” Whitmore said. “We look at it as part of the process, part of the inmate services we provide.”

This is a good example of why it’s hard to apply estimates about turnout and “likely voters” to the current campaign — not only are more people voting than in previous primaries, but also different people are voting than in previous primaries. Demographic groups that had previously been underrepresented — for example, inmates awaiting trial in county jails — are voting in unprecedented numbers. It’s no wonder that pollsters are having trouble predicting results, when no one really has any idea how many people — or which people — will end up voting, given the heightened attention and enthusiasm we are seeing this year, especially on the Democratic side.

If you take this from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

There’s one guarantee I can make right now about tonight’s results. They are going take make either Zogby or SurveyUSA look like complete fools. Which one I’m not completely sure, but definitely one of them.

Consider this spread. Zogby has his final California number as Obama 49%, Clinton 36%. SurveyUSA has Obama 42%, Clinton 52%.

…and combine it with this from the Zachary Coile at the SF Chronicle’s politics blog:

Want to know who will win the California primary? You’ll probably be waiting until Wednesday morning — and maybe longer.

“The East Coast is going to tune in the next morning and we are still going to be counting,” said Stephen Weir, the president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials and the top election official in Contra Costa County.

…then it sounds like things could be uncertain for quite a while. Let’s hope they figure out the results of the California primary quicker than they figured out the results [sic] of the 2000 election in Florida.

Of course, if the spread does end up being as wide as Zogby or SurveyUSA are predicting, rather than falling somewhere in the middle, then it’s possible that exit polls and early precinct results will produce a clear popular vote winner in California by this evening. But I wouldn’t expect to know what the delegate breakdowns will be until sometime tomorrow, since most delegates are awarded based on proportions within congressional districts, rather than proportion of statewide vote. If the vote is close, we could end up with a situation akin to the 2000 general election — one candidate could win the popular vote in the California Democratic primary, but the other candidate could come away winning more delegates.

Ah, democracy — ain’t it grand?

So, Jack Nicholson called me last night. Unfortunately, I wasn’t home, and he forgot to leave a number where I could call him back. He doesn’t call me very often, so it was nice to hear from him. I guess he wants me to vote for Hillary Clinton today or something.

I can think of few celebrities I would be less likely to take voting advice from. The guy’s a Lakers fan for chrissake! What kind of judgment does that show?

Now, if I had gotten one of the Scarlett Johansson calls, that might be a different story — never mind Barack Obama, she might be able to get me to vote for Pol Pot if she asked nicely enough.

Is your dream to be surrounded by enormous dwarfs with booze-reddened noses, dwarfs so big and scary that a little girl has to cover her face with fright? If so, then go live your dream at Disneyland!

If you haven’t seen this piece of art (or is it theater?) filmed at Grand Central yet, it’s great stuff:

If you need an example of the mindset that public transportation supporters are up against, all you have to do is look at today’s San Francisco Chronicle article on parking around city schools. The gist of the story is that teachers and school staff around many SF schools park in public spots on streets near the school, and since most of those parking spaces are in one-hour residential-parking zones, they end up running out to their cars between every class, moving their cars to new spots, and then running back in time for the next class. Many end up getting tickets because they don’t move their cars in time.

Everyone seems to recognize that this is completely insane, yet the only solution anyone takes seriously is increasing the availability of parking, by distributing more city permits which allow teachers to park all day in residential zones for a small annual fee. Public transportation is mentioned only once in the article, in this paragraph reproduced in its entirety:

City and school officials encourage everyone to take public transportation, walk, ride a bike or carpool whenever possible. Teachers said that such options are often impossible or inconvenient with bags full of lesson plans, books, students’ homework and art supplies.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. It might shock the Chronicle reporter to hear this, but there are many teachers in cities all over the country — and in San Francisco — who get to work just fine without cars, lesson plans and all. And I would bet that a lot of the students in these San Francisco schools also get to school just fine without cars, often carrying more than a fifth of their body weight in textbooks on their back. Yet in two short sentences, the notion of mass transit, walking, or bicycling is dismissed as “often impossible or inconvenient” for teachers.

To get an idea of what lengths people will go to in order to avoid “inconvenient” public transit, here is one choice bit from the article:

On a recent morning, Buena Vista school secretary Judy Diaz abandoned the phones and the photocopier to run out to her van - again.

She stopped in her tracks just outside the building’s front doors.

“Where did I park?” she mumbled to herself before seeing the vehicle up the hill.

She then drove down up and down side streets where there are a limited number of all-day spots, but every one was taken. Some teachers arrive by 6:45 a.m. to get one of those spots before they fill even though classes start at 9:30 a.m.

Diaz grudgingly pulled into another one-hour space around the corner and checked the time.

Think about that: Some teachers arrive by 6:45 a.m. to get one of those spots before they fill even though classes start at 9:30 a.m. Yet these same teachers think that carrying homework and lesson plans on a bus or a bike would be too inconvenient? And Judy Diaz (who as a secretary probably doesn’t need to schlep lesson plans, art supplies, or homework to work with her) would rather run to her van and search in vain for a better parking spot several times a day, instead of finding an alternative to driving?

I don’t mean to pick on the teachers or other staff in San Francisco schools. They are surely no sillier than anyone else when it comes to transportation alternatives, and that is the most depressing aspect of this. No one — not the teachers, not the reporter who wrote the article, and not the city officials quoted in the article — seems to be able to break out of the mindset which assumes that the only possible solution is to increase the availability of parking, rather than to reduce the need for it.

This lack of imagination about transit options actually manages to take an advantage of urban life and twist it into something negative. For example:

School board members admitted this is a long-standing problem with no easy solution.

“In a neighborhood with crowded parking, we can’t expect them to put the teachers’ interests above all others,” said board member Jill Wynns. “This is just an ongoing problem of an urban school district. It’s a conundrum.”

This is exactly backwards. It is precisely in urban school districts where parking should be less of a problem, because unlike in suburban or rural areas, people in urban districts have access to buses and trains, or may be able to live close enough to walk or bike to work. One task that proponents of mass transit must work on is to reframe discussions over transportation, so that urban density is seen as an opportunity to eschew use of cars, rather than a problem of where to park them. The lack of vision shown by every single person involved in this Chronicle story demonstrates just how tough that task will be. If these teachers in San Fransisco can’t comprehend the possibility of getting to work without cars — and the benefits, personal and global, that would ensue — then the odds of getting people in most other parts of the country to leave their cars behind seem long indeed.