dvar Torah- Pinchas
At the end of last week's Torah portion, Pinchas (or Phineas) kills a Hebrew who is apparently behaving in a disorderly manner and flaunting his sexual relationship with a heathen princess in a highly obnoxious way. At the beginning of this week's portion, God tells Moses that Pinchas and his descendants shall be granted some sort of covenant of peace and friendship(Numbers 25:12-13). The commentaries I have read differ as to whether this "covenant" is a reward for Pinchas's action or something else (perhaps a way to restrain Pinchas from further zealousness).

But regardless of what we think of the details of Pinchas's conduct, the whole story raises a broader question: has monotheism really been an unmixed blessing? Or has it led to religious intolerance, giving people an excuse to murder each other in the name of their God (or in the name of their particular way of worshipping God)? On the other hand, was paganism any better?

I got a partial answer to the last of these questions yesterday, when I visited the Cahokia Mounds, a set of mounds built by a Native American tribe around 900 years ago (roughly 1100-1200). According to this state of Illinois website this was the most sophisticated prehistoric civilization north of Mexico.

According to the state website, one of the mounds I visited contained:

"300 ceremonial and sacrificial burials, mostly of young women, in mass graves. The main burial appears to be a male ruler about 45 years of age, laid on a blanket of more than 20,000 marine shell disc beads. Near him were the remains of others sacrificed to serve him in the next life and a large cache of grave offerings. The skeletons of four men with their heads and hands missing were found near the largest sacrificial pit, which held the skeletons of 53 women between the ages of 15 and 25. Several other mass burials were also uncovered."

Evidently, the "good old days" of paganism weren't so good after all.

dvar Torah- Balak
This week's Torah portion includes the following phrase: "there shall come a star out of Jacob." (Numbers 24:17).

The "star" has often been understood to be the Messiah. For example, in 132 Simon bar Kosiba organized a Jewish revolt against Roman occupation of Israel. Rabbi Akiva, one of the great Torah scholoars of his time, thought that bar Kosiba was the Messiah because of his early military successes. Some called bar Kosiba "bar Kochba" - or "son of a star"- an allusion to the "star" in Numbers 24:17.

Despite Rabbi Akiva's Messianic dreams, Bar Kosiba's revolt was eventually a dismal failure. The Romans killed about half a million Jews, and leveled Jerusalem to deter further revolts. (For more info go here. Perhaps if no one had claimed that bar Kosiba was the Messiah, his rebellion would have died earlier and fewer Jews would have been slaughtered.

Unfortunately, bar Kochba was not the last false Messiah. In the 17th century, the Jewish world was rocked by the Sabbatai Zevi movement. (Just Google Sabbatai Zevi and you'll find plenty of commentary, or search for him in Jewish Encyclopedia. Zevi claimed to be the Messiah, and although did he did not lead a military uprising, he caused some Jews to impoverish themselves by getting rid of their property in preparation of his messianic reign.

Why were people so credulous? Partially because some fairly respected commentators believed that the Messiah was coming sometime around that time: For example, Kabbalist Moses Cordervero wrote: "Though not delaying the date of redemption, they [our sins] have hidden it so that its light is invisible until the appointed time. But none of these things will be later than the year 408 [1648], and some will occur earlier, such as the resurrection [of the dead] in the Holy Land." (From Scholem, the Mystical Messiah). Instead of getting a Messiah, Jews in the Ukraine got massacred in 1648.

(For a more complete discussion of Messianic predictions and the rationale for same, go here.

Indeed, throughout history Jews have speculated about (and predicted) Messianic deliverance. When times were good, good times were interpreted as a sign of upcoming redemption; when times were bad, persecution of Jews was interpreted as "the birth pangs of the Messianic age." Needless to say, all such predictions have (so far) been proven wrong by a Messiah's failure to emerge.

So whenever one of your friends (or enemies) tells you that Messianic deliverance is coming, smile politely and thank him for the information- but don't give away all your worldly goods just yet!

back to self-promotion
My city livability rankings have been updated to take into consideration 2004 crime statistics. As in the past, New York is no. 1 and various southern cities struggle for the cellar. The rankings are based on crime, public transit, and pedestrian life.

My urban photos site now includes pictures of my new apartment in Washington and of what I saw when I walked to shul in Carbondale.

the only thing I have to say about the last act of terrorism (the bombing in London)
I share in the condolences, etc. echoing through cyberspace. Beyond that, all I can do is find a quote I liked:

"I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun... The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache: it is our nature."

C.S. Lewis, quoted by Andrew Sullivan.

May we continue our metaphysical arguments, jokes, and mathematical theorems this coming Shabbos and every Shabbos, in war and in peace - but hopefully more in peace.

Dvar Torah- Chukat
In this Torah portion, Moses strikes a rock to bring forth water, and shortly thereafter (for reasons not obvious from the text) God tells Moses that he and Aaron will die before entering the land of Israel (Numbers 10:12).

The commentators are divided as to what exactly Moses did wrong - whether he should have spoken to a rock instead of striking it, or whether his tone in addressing the people should have been milder.

But what grabbed me this week was Samson Raphael Hirsch's comments about the matter: "Precisely by making even Moses and Aaron expendable for further progress . . . God demonstrates the sanctity of His absolute greatness, whose objectives are not dependent on any outside factor and to which even men like Moses and Aaron are not indispensable."

Just as no one was indispensable 3300 years ago, none of us are indispensable today. In the words of Charles de Gaulle, "the cemeteries are full of indispensable men." (And no doubt, indispensable women).

Congress gets it right, Pelosi misunderstands Constitution
Last week, the House voted to prohibit federal bureaucracies from subsidizing the use of eminent domain for profit-making projects. In other words, local governments can still take your property and give it to developers (as long as they pay just compensation as required by the Kelo ruling), but they can't do it with federal money. (See story here).

Nancy Pelosi demurred, asserting "This is in violation of the respect for separation of ... powers in our Constitution."

Dead wrong. The Supreme Court didn't say that local governments HAVE to take property for eminent domain when developers want them to- just that the Constitution does not preclude this option. So if local governments don't want to use eminent domain they don't have to- and similarly, if the state and federal governments don't want to subsidize such eminent domain they don't have to either.

In fact, I think Congressional action might just give us the right balance between public interest in redevelopment and the public interest in protecting private property- eminent domain that is (as President Clinton once said about abortion) safe, legal and rare.

The case for levity
A Talmudic Tale: Rabbi Beroka, upon coming upon Elijah the Prophet in the marketplace, inquired whether anyone there was worthy of the world to come. Elijah at first says "No" but then points to two men.

"What is your trade?", asked Rabbi Beroka.

They replied, "We are jesters. When we see someone depressed, we cheer him up."

- Raphael Jospe et. al., Great Schisms in Jewish History, p. 135 (noting that Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, liked this story)

From his mouth to God's ears
Mickey Kaus asserts that Bush should appoint a conservative who will stir up some Democratic opposition to distract public opinion from Social Security and Iraq, proposing as follows:

Under this theory, Bush doesn't want to appoint someone so wildly conservative that he or she would be the judicial analogue of invading Iraq or privatizing Social Security. But he certainly doesn't want to appoint someone so moderate that Democrats won't mount a massive, cacophonous blocking effort. ... An honorable, undiluted conservative with strong doubts about Roe but no Lochneresque private-property enthusiasms would seem to be what is called for.

Exactly what I want on the merits- a conservative who actually believes in judicial restraint, the kind who is more interested in reversing the Warren/Burger Courts' socially liberal activist decisions than in rolling back the New Deal.

Unlike Kaus, I doubt that's what we'll get; I'm not sure that my type of conservative will be any more confirmable than a libertarian, and in any event most younger scholars (and, I suspect, most younger judges) tend towards the latter end of the spectrum.

dvar Torah- Korach
This week's Torah portion, Korach, describes the attempts of Korach to seize power from Moses. Korach asserts that Moses and his brother Aaron are hogging power (Numbers 16:3). Moses responds by challenging Korach to a test: Korach and Moses will burn incense, and God will decide by accepting one sacrifice or the other (Id., 16:6-7). God responds by causing the earth to swallow Korach (Id., 16:33-34).

What's so awful about Korach's conduct? So he stirred up a little controversy, and the Earth swallows him up?

Shlomo Riskin notes:

"I believe that the answer to our questions lies in the two legitimate definitions of the Hebrew word for controversy, mahloket: does it mean to divide, (lehalek) or to distinguish (laasot hiluk), to make a separation or a distinction; the former suggests an unbridgeable chasm, a great divide which separates out, nullifies, the view of the other, whereas the latter suggests an analysis of each side in order to give a greater understanding of each view and perhaps even in order to eventually arrive at a synthesis or a dialectic of both positions together!

With this understanding, the initial comment of Rashi on the opening words of this week's Torah portion, "And Korah took", becomes indubitably clear: He took himself to the other side to become separated out from the midst of the congregation. { } Korah made a great divide between himself and Moses . . . he was interested in nullifying rather than in attempting to understand the side of Moses. On the other hand, when the Talmud (B.T. Eruvin 13b) describes the disputes between Hillel and Shammai, it decides that "Those and those (both schools) are the words of the living G-d. If so, then why is the normative law decided in accord with the school of Hillel? Because they are pleasant and accepting, always teaching their view together with the view of the school of Shammai and even citing the position of Shammai before citing their own position?."

In other words, the ideal debater (Hillel) is fair-minded: understanding his opponent's position, having some respect for his opponent's position, perhaps even learning a bit from his opponent.

Korach, by contrast, wanted to (metaphorically) bury his opponent- and got (literally) buried himself!

So when you hear people blathering on the talk shows or on the Sunday morning public affairs shows, ask yourself: are they being fair-minded like Hillel? Or are they trying to bury their opponent like Korach?

Last week, I skimmed through a book at the latter end of the spectrum. The book, written in the 1970s, complained that mid-20th century Jewish leadership (Federation bureaucrats, etc.) wasn't doing enough to promote Jewish day schools - at first actively opposing day schools, and later doing very little to support day schools. Obviously, the author had a point, and his view is conventional wisdom today.

But his tone towards Jewish leadership was consistently insulting; he attacked them for being obsessed with blending into the majority culture and for opposing government support of religious schools, but made no effort to explain why they thought as they did. Not surprisingly, the author's book fell into obscurity, and he is known today less for his foresight on this issue than as an all-around lunatic. Why? Partially because like Korach, he just wasn't fair-minded. He didn't see why his adversaries' point of view, though wrong in the long run, might have seemed reasonable at the time.

more on Kelo
I noticed quite a bit of hooting and hollering in the blogosphere on how awful the Kelo ruling is. (See Volokh for interesting points of both sides). I'm not going to get into the merits of the argument in detail, but I just want to point out that Kelo isn't any more pro-government than prior case law.

In Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 467 U.S. 229 (1984), a case cited in Kelo, the government of Hawaii took the land of large-scale landowners and gave it to tenants, in order to "reduce the concentration of ownership" - in other words, a naked land redistribution scheme. The Court upheld Hawaii's actions because a taking is for a public use (as required by the Takings Clause) as long as the state legislature "could rationally have believed that [the taking] could promote its objective." In other words, as long as the government isn't stark raving mad (and of course, compensates the landowners) it can take land.

Do I approve of cases like Midkiff and Volokh? I'm not sure. I'm enough of an originalist to care what the Framers' generation thought, and unfortunately don't know anything about what the Framers thought about the meaning of the term "public use" - that is, whether public use means government ownership or merely a broader public purpose.

Assuming for the sake of argument that originalism provides no clear answer here, I instinctively lean towards the majority's view. I realize that often, politicians will go overboard in using the eminent domain power - maybe more often than not. But having said that, it seems to me that sometimes the public does benefit from the exercise of the eminent domain, and that the public benefit is not automatically greater when government rather than, say, Hilton Hotels, is the ultimate owner of the land. And I would prefer judicial deference to elected legislators to judicial micromanagement of elected legislators.

Now of course you might argue "But the government shouldn't take our land at all, whether it is the ultimate buyer or not." As a policy matter, you might be right - and you have every right to lobby your city council to stop taking property, or to lobby Congress to amend the Takings Clause. But the Constitution as written allows takings as long as the government compensates owners for the land taken.

discussing law stuff for once- Supreme Court rules in Kelo
Since I teach and write about land use regulation, I thought I would mention that the Supreme Court just issued a ruling in the Kelo case.

The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment states that property may only be taken by government for a "public use." In Kelo, the issue was whether, if the government takes someone's property and gives it to a private company for redevelopment, that taking is for a "public use." The Court held, by a 5-4 vote, that a "public use" existed, because the taking served the broad public purpose of redeveloping a depressed neighborhood.

Justice Kennedy wrote a separate concurrence; because he was the swing vote, his concurrence is probably entitled to more weight than the majority opinon. He wrote:

"My agreement with the Court that a presumption of invalidity is not warranted for economic development takings in general, or for the particular takings at issue in this case, does not foreclose the possibility that a more stringent standard of review than that announced in Berman and Midkiff might be appropriate for a more narrowly drawn category of takings. There may be private transfers in which the risk of undetected impermissible favoritism of private parties is so acute that a presumption (rebuttable or otherwise) of invalidity is warranted under the Public Use Clause. Cf. Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel, 524 U. S. 498, 549-550 (1998) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment and dissenting in part) (heightened scrutiny for retroactive legislation under the Due Process Clause). This demanding level of scrutiny, however, is not required simply because the purpose of the taking is economic development.

This is not the occasion for conjecture as to what sort of cases might justify a more demanding standard, but it is appropriate to underscore aspects of the instant case that convince me no departure from Berman and Midkiff is appropriate here. This taking occurred in the context of a comprehensive development plan meant to address a serious city-wide depression, and the projected economic benefits of the project cannot be characterized as de minimus. The identity of most of the private beneficiaries were unknown at the time the city formulated its plans. The city complied with elaborate procedural requirements that facilitate review of the record and inquiry into the city's purposes. In sum, while there may be categories of cases in which the transfers are so suspicious, or the procedures employed so prone to abuse, or the purported benefits are so trivial or implausible, that courts should presume an impermissible private purpose, no such circumstances are present in this case."

It seems to me that Justice Kennedy is focusing on intent: normally economic development takings are OK, but if the stench of political favoritism exists maybe not.

Opinions are at findlaw.com.

back to Jewish stuff- dvar Torah on Shelah Lekha
Now that I'm not traveling every week,* I am going to try something different: doing a dvar Torah** online (not necessarily something original mind you-often just highlighting someone else's good work).

This week's Torah portion contains one of the Torah's more well-known stories. Moses sends 12 spies to visit the land of Canaan (aka "Israel" or "the Promised Land") and report on it. 10 of the spies say the land is dangerous and that the Hebrews should stay out, while 2 (Caleb and Joshua) disagree. The people go along with the majority and are punished for their lack of faith in the Divine promise that the Jews shall settle tbe Promised Land. The 10 faithless spies die, while Joshua and Caleb live long enough to enter the Promised Land.

An essay in this week's Forward
points out an interesting wrinkle: at first, only Caleb contradicts the anti-Israel majority (Numbers 13:30). Joshua does not endorse settlement in the Promised Land until the people threaten to dump Moses and return to Egyptian slavery (Numbers 14:4).

What's going on here? Perhaps Joshua initially shared some of the 10 faithless spies' misgivings- but once he realized that the majority was out of control and wanted to do crazy things like return to Egypt, he flip-flopped and stood with Moses.
As a result, he is richly rewarded- not only does he live to see the Promised Land, he becomes the leader of the Hebrews in the Promised Land. What can we learn from Joshua?

1. Sometimes it's OK to flip-flop.

2. More particularly, it's OK to flip-flop when your "side" gets out of control. During the 70s and 80s, once-liberal intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick*** became Republicans because they thought the Left was out of control; the liberal agenda had changed so radically that it was no longer their agenda. In the 1950s, liberalism had meant support for the New Deal and staunch opposition to Communism, while in the 1970s liberalism meant opposition to the Cold War. Just as Joshua abandoned the majority when its agenda turned into return to Egyptian slavery, Kristol et. al. abandoned liberalism when liberals turned wishy-washy about Communist slavery.

Similarly, today a few conservative intellectuals are beginning to think the Right is out of control- that under the Bush Administration, the conservative agenda has changed so much that their beliefs are no longer their agenda. While conservatives once stood for balanced budgets and a relatively lean government, this Administration has expanded the government and the deficit. Other conservatives have broken with this Administration's warlike foreign policy. Though most conservative pundits/intellectuals are still behind Bush, a few (like Andrew Sullivan and Steve Chapman) endorsed Kerry, and others (like Pat Buchanan) supported Bush but with grave reservations.

Of course, the dissenters are not always on the side of history. Some conservative Democrats (like 1928 Democratic nominee Al Smith) abandoned FDR over the New Deal- but the dominant American historical tradition in America has favored the New Dealers' side of that argument.

May we have the courage to switch sides when our "team" is out of control, and the wisdom to know when this is the case.



*Staying in Carbondale for next few weeks, moving to DC in mid-July.

**That is, a brief essay on this week's Torah portion.

***I would use the term "neoconservatives" but since the Iraq war started that term has acquired a very different meaning (i.e. some war opponents seem to think anyone who supported the war is a neocon).

Now Playing: Some of the more interesting and unusual books I've read over the past month or so
Saadia Gaon, Book of Opinions and Beliefs
Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration
Azriela Jaffe, Two Jews can Still Be A Mixed Marriage
Bruce Katz et al, Redefining Urban and Suburban America
Robert Bullard et al, Highway Robbery

To read my reviews of these and other books go to amazon.com and search for the books in question.

more photos online
My photos of Buffalo, Cleveland and Philadelphia (as well as Atlanta and Carbondale) are now online at my photopic album.

fun facts from Brookings
The Brookings Institution recently issued some collections of essays, entitled "Redefining Urban and Suburban America" about the 2000 Census. I just read Volumes 1 and 2 of these books. A few interesting facts:

*80 of America's 100 largest cities actually gained population in the 1990s. Many of them gained not only singles, but married-couple families: not just sprawling Sun Belt cities that grew through annexation, but even denser, more singles-oriented cities like New York City (11% growth) and Portland (17% growth).

*But despite constant media caterwauling about gentrification, most of this growth was due to working-class, usually Latino, immigration rather than to an invasion of upscale whites. Many allegedly gentrifying cities (e.g. NYC, Chicago) gained population, but lost non-Hispanic whites. And though poverty rates declined slightly in many cities, most cities still had poverty rates far higher than their suburbs. For example, Chicago had a 19.6% poverty rate, as opposed to its suburbs' 5.6%. Even the residents of more prosperous cities like San Francisco and Portland were more likely to be poor than suburbanites; in both places, city poverty was 11-13% and suburban poverty 6-8% (Portland having slightly higher numbers in both categories).

*Similarly, cities had fewer higher-income households than their suburbs. In the 100 largest American cities, only 16.6 percent of households had incomes in the top quintile nationally (that is, top 20 percent)- and that number includes some "cities" that are really suburbs, such as Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Again, even some fairly prosperous cities did not reach the 20 percent mark, such as Portland (16.4%) and Boston (15.0%). By contrast, suburbs consistently contained a disproportionate share of high income households- in the average metro area, 25.5% of suburban households were in the top 20% of earners nationally.

*Poverty was less concentrated than in the 1980s; the number of very poor city census tracts (i.e. 40% poverty rate or below) declined by 21% in the 1990s.

*Within cities, varying patterns emerged. Downtowns gained population in most cities, even some declining ones. But in many cities, inner-city neighborhoods near downtown lost population while outer-ring neighborhoods near suburbia were more successful (especially in cities with undeveloped land at the fringes, the latter in built-out cities). For example, Philadelphia has a very prosperous residential downtown surrounded by some very bad neighborhoods, which in turn are surrounded by some not-so-bad neighborhoods at the city's fringes (e.g. Chestnut Hill, Manayunk, Roxborough) which in turn are surrounded by suburbs.

*In all but the most fast-growing areas, some suburbs are not in such great shape. Nationally, about a quarter of suburbs lost population in the 1990s.

Transport Chicago conference
This weekend I went to the Transport Chicago conference in (as you might guess) Chicago. Most of the attendees were staffers at Chicago transit agencies so from a networking perspective it was a bust. But a couple of the presentations I listened to were interesting. In particular:

*Payton Chung of CNU used the Chicago city budget as a case study of how local government subsidizes driving. He pointed out that the costs of city street network spending and of car-related police work exceed revenues from car-related taxes, thus rebutting the common claim that roads "pay for themselves". This sort of argument has been rebutted by environmentalists in the context of state and federal spending, but Chung's presentation is the first I have seen that focuses specifically on local spending.

*There was a panel on airport siting in which representatives of the Milwaukee and Gary airports asserted that they were "Chicago's third airport." The Gary airport now has minimal passenger service. However, that airport has ample political support in Indiana, ample runway space (and room for more because the airport is in an industrial wasteland), and has its own independent market in Chicago's Indiana suburbs (which aren't very close to Midway, let alone O'Hare or Milwaukee). The Gary presentation was an example of how sprawl works in the airport context: build an airport close to downtown and you have community resistance from neighbors understandably concerned about airport noise- build it in the middle of nowhere and you can expand to your wallet's content.

the child shortage in SF, Portland, etc.
In recent weeks, I've read numerous stories about how various cities (most notably San Francisco and Portland) are suffering a shortage of children- the evident message being that even the most attractive cities will never be attractive to parents, I guess.

So I decided to dig up Census data to try to compare SF and Portland to other cities. The most obvious statistic one might use is percentage of people under 18: but that statistic runs head-on into the fact that poor people tend to have a lot more children than rich people. So for example, 14% of SF residents are under 18 as opposed to 31% of residents of the city of Detroit- but surely no one is dumb enough to suggest that Detroit is more child-friendly than SF.

My ideal statistic would measure the number of children in a city but control for social class; since I couldn't find such a statistic (at least not tonight), I decided to try to use race as a surrogate (admittedly an imperfect one - but whites ARE richer than everyone else on average).

The statistic I used: percentage of white, non-Hispanic persons over 3 who are in K-12 schools (public OR private) (you can find it as Table P147 in Census SF3 data set, divided into kindergarden, 1-8, high school). Here are some numbers:

REALLY BIG CITIES

# of whites # of whites % of whites
over 3 in K-12 who are kids
LA 1,065,529 122,910 11.5
NYC 2,719,644 334,931 12.3
Chicago 884,116 87,602 9.9

VERY PROSPEROUS CITIES

San Francisco 332,958 17,537 5.3
Portland 387,725 51,522 13.2
Seattle 373,281 32,383 8.6

CITIES WITHOUT SUBURBS (Cities that have grown by annexing everything that is not nailed down)

Oklahoma City 315,531 48,584 15.3
Indianapolis 507,788 82,748 16.2
San Jose 310,224 46,370 14.9
San Diego 586,683 69,152 11.8

TWO-CLASS CITIES (upscale white population, mixed black population)

Washington 155,557 8759 5.6
Atlanta 127,291 9429 7.4

AGING, TROUBLED INDUSTRIAL CITIES (with large working class white populations)

Philadelphia 629,602 86,040 13.6
Buffalo 147,609 20,785 14.1
St. Louis 145,205 17,894 12.3
Cleveland 179,557 26,773 14.9
Hartford 21,189 1749 8.2

SOME OTHER CITIES THAT DON'T FIT ANY OF THE ABOVE CATEGORIES (median household incomes are $44-47,000, far below SF/DC/Atlanta, far above industrial cities which start at Philadelphia's $37K a year and then go down from there)+

Denver 280,537 24,620 8.7
Boston 284,322 21,285 7.5



Some thoughts:

1. Portland got a bum rap. San Francisco didn't. But even SF isn't significantly more child-free than DC.

2. There's pretty much zero correlation between the number of children in a city (white or otherwise) and its overall prosperity, etc. If anything, relatively safe, prosperous places have fewer children.

3. No real correlation between density and a low number of white children. Some high density cities (DC, Boston, SF) have a low child %, but others (NYC, Philly) less so. Atlanta is a very low density city with a low child %.

4. Some (but not 100%) negative correlation between housing values and number of children.
Here's median home values for Anglo households, together with Anglo child % above:

Home value (in thousands
of dollars) Child %


SF 471 5.3
San Jose 425 14.9
Washington 380 5.6
Atlanta 327 7.4
LA 303 11.5
Seattle 274 8.6
San Diego 262 11.8
NYC 239 12.3
Boston 207 7.5
Denver 185 8.7
Chicago 164 9.9
Portland 157 13.2
Indianapolis 103 16.2
Hartford 98 8.2
Oklahoma City 85 15.3
Cleveland 78 14.9
St. Louis 73 12.3
Philadelphia 73 13.6
Buffalo 64 14.1

I had no idea Martin Luther King wrote about transportation, but evidently he did
"Urban transit systems in most American cities, for example, have become a genuine civil rights issue- and a valid one- because the layout of rapid-transit systems determines the accessibility of jobs to the black community. If transportation systems in American cities could be laid out so as to provide an opportunity for poor people to get to meaningful employment, then they could begin to move into the mainstream of American life. A good example of this problem is my home city of Atlanta . . . The system has virtually no consideration for connecting the poor people with their jobs."

MLK, quoted in Highway Robbery (Robert Bullard, ed.), p. 17

Thoughts from PolicyLink conference
I am just finishing a PolicyLink conference on regional equity and smart growth. Made some interesting contacts, learned a little. A few of the high points:

*David Rusk , speaking on regionalism, pointed out that the issue of property rights is not necessarily one that favors sprawl. Conventional pro-sprawl wisdom is that attempts to restrict suburban development are an attack on the property rights on developers. But Rusk pointed out that sprawl affects the property rights of people who own land in distressed urban centers; as cities decay, property values nosedive. And when state and county governments support sprawl through new suburban infrastructure etc., they are reducing the value of urban land just as growth controls might reduce the value of rural land.

Is there a legally cognizable takings claim? Possibly not, given the difficulty of showing exactly how much of an urban neighborhood's decline is due to a given public policy. But certainly there is a claim worth noticing in the political arena.

*Robert Bullard spoke about making transportation investments more equitable. Conventional pro-sprawl wisdom is that roads are good and transit is bad because roads pay for themselves and transit doesn't. Bullard pointed out a flaw in this argument: the state highway system is full of cross-subsidies from one group of drivers to another. For example, in Georgia metro Atlanta drivers pay 40% of the gas tax revenues, but metro Atlanta receives a much smaller proportion of transportation spending (I think Bullard said 17%).

*Ray Suarez talked about public opinion and had a great story. Once upon a time in the 80s, Suarez was conducting "man in the street" interviews, asking people what they would do with some vacant land in downtown Chicago. The most common answer was "a park would be kind of nice around here." After a few of these responses, he started asking people if they would feel safe walking through the hypothetical park after dark, or if they would enjoy the park during a Chicago winter. As you might guess, support for the park option nosedived. Lesson: what we think at first glance might not be what we think after mature consideration.

*Lots of material on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping and new ways to find out data on neighborhoods, etc. Links to follow in a later post.

Some things that distressed me too. To a much greater extent than the Congress for New Urbanism conference , this was a gathering of lefties working for nonprofits. So naturally some things were said that were not quite my cup of tea.

For example, there was a session on framing issues where one of the speakers recommended a loony left comic book as an example of framing. The comic book, though ostensibly about sprawl and regionalism, contained a lot of Reagan-bashing, Pentagon-bashing, etc. Would it work in Berkeley? Yes. Would it work for anyone to the right of Dennis Kucinich (let alone the 50.7% of Americans who voted for Bush)? I doubt it.

There was a session on housing affordability, and a couple of people agreed that developers in the District of Columbia should be weighed down by all sorts of inclusionary zoning and affordable housing requirements. I can understand the logic behind these programs in prosperous cities like San Francisco. But DC is a city that is still losing population and still has a 20% poverty rate- lower than some cities, but higher than the nation and region as a whole (See Census Quick Facts for more information. DC is not in as desperate shape as some cities- but I still think it has a lot more in common with Baltimore or Cleveland than with San Francisco.

Cute phrase
"In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data"

- Prof. David Hyman of U. Illinois Law School, speaking at SIU today