I was not just cited, but quoted in a Times-Union editorial yesterday.  The editorial is at

 http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/122706/opi_6072543.shtml

Posted by lewyn at 10:09 PM EST

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https://lewyn.tripod.com/carfreeinjacksonville

 The last words of the URL pretty much describe the site.

Posted by lewyn at 10:08 PM EST

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The long-awaited Conservative rabbinic papers on homosexuality are at   http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/law/new_teshuvot.html 

The papers that got enough votes to matter (i.e. that individual congregations may adopt) are the Roth, Levy and Dorff papers.  The most liberal paper is the Dorff paper; the others are more traditional.

Posted by lewyn at 9:22 AM EST

Updated: Sunday, 17 December 2006 9:26 AM EST

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There was a story in today's NY Times about science test scores in urban schools. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/education/16reportcard.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Most of the story parroted the conventional wisdom about how awful city schools are. 

But the story contained something a little different: a table breaking down the results by race.  And when the results are broken down by race, big city schools don't always do worse than the nation as a whole.

For example, in Atlanta white 4th graders outperformed the national average for whites; they were at the 86th percentile nationwide, while white 4th graders nationally were at the 62nd percentile. 

Nationally, 28% of white students were at the "below basic" level in science; but in four of nine big cities listed, the percentage of white students with below-basic scores was lower.  The major exceptions were cities with large white working class populations (e.g. Cleveland, Boston).

Urban blacks did a little worse relative to national scores, but even there most city systems were pretty close to the national black average.    Nationally, 73% of blacks were below basic; in 7 of 10 cities listed, the black "below basic" average was within five points of that (that is, no more than 78% of blacks were "below basic").

We don't have a problem with city schools.  We have a problem with race and schools- which, of course, doesn't make it any less difficult.  

Posted by lewyn at 9:48 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, 16 November 2006 11:40 AM EST

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I. Gerrymandering 

Conventional wisdom was that the Republicans had a "firewall" through gerrymandering.

 It looks right now like the Dems will have around 52.4% of the national House popular vote (the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate says the Dems have 36.5 million, the Reps have 33.2 million, so do the math yourself).  Assuming that the nine undecided races break in favor of the candidate who is winning, the Dems will have about 232 seats (or 53% of the seats).  So the gap between the Dems vote share and their seat share will be at most around 0.6%- pretty unusual in a single-member system.

In the last couple of elections, did Rs do any better? Not much.  In 2004 there was a 2% gap (Rs got 51.4% of national House vote, 53.3% of seats); in 2002, the first post-redistricting year, they got 52.4% of the vote and 52.6% of the seats.  So redistricting doesn't seem to create a system that favors Republicans per se very much  on the national level. 

Having said that, seats/votes gaps are much narrower today that in the 1990s.  Let's look at two elections after the 1990 redistricting:

 1992 Reps gave 47.3% of the votes, only 40.5% of the seats- a 6.8% seats/votes gap.

1994 Reps got 52.8% of votes, 53% of seats- basically no gap.

In 1990s, Dem gerrymanders clearly favored Ds, giving Ds a big surplus before 1994, and limiting their 1994 losses.

In 2000s, results much more ambiguous, so there's no reason to believe that gerrymandering consistently favors Republicans. 

At most, it may be the case that bipartisan gerrymanders, by limiting the number of swing districts, limited seat swings to either party, essentially creating a floor of 200 or so seats for each side.

II.  Exit polls

After 2004, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about exit polls and their D bias.  I compared the early evening exit polls (off wonkette.com) with actual results. 

Surprisingly, there wasn't a clear pro-D pattern.  In Senate races polled, Republicans did more than a point better than exit polls in Virginia (47% poll, almost 50% on Earth), Montana (46% poll, 48% Earth) and Arizona (50% poll, 53% Earth), worse in Maryland (46% poll, 44% Earth) and within a point of the exit poll showing in RI, Pa, Ohio, NJ, and Mo- and exactly at the exit poll showing in Tenn.

 Looks like the kinks may be out of the exit poll system.

Posted by lewyn at 10:43 AM EST

Updated: Tuesday, 14 November 2006 1:11 PM EST

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Governorships:  D 29 R 21.  A VERY good year for Democrats; voters are less partisan in gubernatorial elections than in congressional elections, so states that would never elect a Dem for Senate (e.g. Wyoming) have Democratic governors and states where Republicans are in trouble (e.g. Rhode Island) are going to reelect R governors by wide margins.

 (NOTE AFTER ELECTION: I got this almost 100% right; the only govenror's race I missed was Minnesota, where a R gov won 51-49 instead of losing 51-49 as I expected).

Senate: R 52 D 48  A few days ago I thought this would be 50-50 at worst for the Dems.  But the Dems only have two guaranteed gains (Ohio, Pa).

 Five more seats are more or less tossups- Montana, RI, Virginia and Missouri (all with R incumbents), Maryland (D open seat).  I think the Dems only win two of the five- if I had to guess, holding Maryland and winning one of the four GOP seats.

(AFTER ELECTION NOTE: Of course, the Dems won all five!  I thought that there would be a Republican surge that didn't happen; the same explains my error re the House, where the Dems look like they will have around 230).

 House- 219 D 216 R.  I think the Rs are closing fast and usually perform better than polls suggest in House races (for a wide variety of reasons).  I think the chances of the Ds winning the House are still slightly better than 50-50 (but only slightly, and only because a bunch of R seats are in trouble due to scandals).

Posted by lewyn at 5:40 PM EST

Updated: Tuesday, 14 November 2006 10:43 AM EST

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AN AL CHET FOR ALL OUR POLITICIANS (Atlanta Jewish Times, 11-1-02)

It is appropriate that the political campaign season begins around Yom Kippur and ends with Election Dy since politicians have a lot for which to repent.
After watching a particularly reprehensible TV ad, I created a prayer to remind politicians of their campaign-season errors. Its modeled on the Al Chet prayer we say on Yom Kippur.
The politicians Al Chet would begin with the traditional opening for that prayer, which includes: Hide not Thyself from our supplication, for we are neither so arrogant nor so hardened as to say before thee, O Lord our God and God of our predecessors, `we are righteous and have not sinned; verily, we have sinned.
Then the politicians prayer would focus on sins commonly associated with liberals and those commonly associated with conservatives.
For the sin we committed by buying votes with taxpayers money, and for the sin we committed by putting future generations in debt to cut taxes today;
For the sin we committed by idolizing government, and for the sin we committed by making government the enemy;
For the sin we committed by comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted;
And for the sin we committed by afflicting the middle class to make ourselves feel better;
For the sin we committed by pandering to the middle classs desire to cut its commutes by a few minutes while ignoring the working poors interest in health insurance and decent bus service;
and for the sin we committed by pretending that government could help the poor by forcing everyone to pay each other higher wages;
For the sin we committed by pretending schools could be saved by throwing money at them,
and for the sin we committed by ignoring differences between rich and poor schools;
For the sin we committed by unchastity, and for the sin we committed by focusing on our opponents personal lives;
For the sin we committed by veiled appeals to racism and [for the sin we committed by] frivolous accusations of racism;
For the sin we committed by letting government support illegitimate childbirth and the sin we committed by pretending all government spending goes to unpopular programs like welfare and foreign aid;
For the sin we committed by refusing to acknowledge that an embryo in a test tube is different than an already born human, and for the sin we committed by refusing to acknowledge that a fetus with arms, legs and a heart is different from an embryo in a test tube; For the sins we committed by ignoring the environment;
For the sin we committed by war-mongering and by using patriotism to justify every war,
For the sin we committed by spurning the insights of religion, and for the sin we committed by using religious issues to distract voters from issues that their daily lives;
For the sin we committed by accepting bribes disguised as campaign contributions,
For the sin we committed by reckless partisanship and slandering our opponents,
For the sins we committed by pandering to labor unions; and for the sins we committed by pandering to business;
For the sins we committed in the name of liberty, and for the sins we committed in the name of equality;
For all these, O God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

And to all candidates, I say what I say to myself as the gates of prayer close: Please try to do better next year.

Posted by lewyn at 1:36 AM EDT

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One thing that has always troubled me against the question of urban growth boundaries around cities. It seems to me that the regions where growth boundaries are most necessary and least likely to be harmful are precisely the regions where they are least likely to be tried.

How so?  Because in a slow growth, Buffalo/Cleveland type region, the costs from growth boundaries are low.  Due to slack real estate demand, it is unlikely that growth boundaries in such a region will lead to inflated
housing prices.  And because the city may die without growth boundaries, the benefits of growth boundaries are high.

By contrast, in a growing region such as Portland or Seattle, there are enough affluent people for city and suburb alike, so even without growth boundaries the core city will be moderately prosperous (at least compared to most Rust Belt cities).  Thus, the major benefit of growth boundaries(i.e. preserving the core key and its older suburbs as decent places to live*) are smaller in a growing region.

And where thousands of people are moving into the region every year, there is a fairly significant risk of growth boundaries causing housing price inflation. Thus, the costs of growth boundaries are higher in a Seattle or Portland than in a Buffalo or a Cleveland.

And yet it is precisely the fast growth regions where growth boundaries and similar experiments are most feasible politically.  Why?

*See my article on growth boundaries (available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=816885 ) which points out that Portland's growth boundaries have been more successful in improving the core city than in solving other problems such as traffic congestion.

Posted by lewyn at 12:21 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 20 September 2006 12:29 PM EDT

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"Five Myths About Sprawl" (a review of Robert Bruegmann's Sprawl: a compact history) at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=931251

"Planners Gone Wild" (a review of Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking) at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=931255

Posted by lewyn at 3:09 PM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 19 September 2006 3:12 PM EDT

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The URL is http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/090606/opl_4787662.shtml

(I added brackets because there are a couple of places where I think there may have been typos- ML) 

A recent article [in a neighborhood newspaper] praised the widening of Riverside Avenue just south of downtown to six lanes.

Says one local executive, the widening will make Riverside "the new gateway to Jacksonville."

Similarly, a local economic development official speculates that Brooklyn, a nearby residential area, might soon have "people who work in the area, live in the area, and take pride in the area."

In other words, our local businesspeople and planners seem to think that turning Riverside Avenue into a six-lane speedway will help developers turn Brooklyn into a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood.

But does anyone really want to walk across a six-lane street?

I certainly don't. When I have visited the six-lane part of Riverside Avenue, I don't feel particularly comfortable.

I feel like I am in a place that is made for cars rather than for people, and I feel like I have to be very careful before crossing the street. By contrast, I feel much more comfortable walking on the narrower streets in residential areas.

Narrower streets are more pedestrian-friendly for two reasons. First, a wide street takes longer for pedestrians to cross, thus increasing pedestrian commutes and increasing the amount of time a pedestrian is exposed to traffic.

Second, wide streets encourage cars to drive faster, thus increasing the frequency and severity of pedestrian injuries.

A motorist driving at high speeds has more difficulty paying attention to the surrounding environment: The faster you drive, the harder it is for you to slow down in time if you see a pedestrian in front of you.

And car crashes are more lethal as cars go faster:

Posted by lewyn at 10:47 AM EDT

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I've seen the argument made that sprawl doesn't increase commuting times because jobs follow people to suburbs, and so suburbanites have shorter commute times than they would if their jobs were in the city.

 But this article in today's Washington Post suggests otherwise. 

The article notes that in metro DC, residents of DC and Arlington had the shortest commutes (29 and 26 minutes respectively).  By contrast, residents of exurban Prince William County had the longest (41 minutes).   Other suburbs had in-between commuting times.

What's going on?

First, Prince William is not one of the more job-rich suburbs.  To the extent "job sprawl" benefits commuters, it benefits only the ones who live in the job-rich suburbs (in DC, Loudoun and Fairfax Counties more than Prince William).  If you live in a less job-rich suburb, your commute might be longer than if you worked downtown.

Second, even if moving to a job-rich suburb to follow your job reduces your commute, other people in your household may still have a downtown job- which means the increase in that person's commute cancels out the decrease in yours. 

For example, suppose my wife and I live downtown; my job is 8 miles out in suburbia and hers is a few yards away, so we have a total commute of 8 miles.

A year later, we move to suburbia, 2 miles from my job and 10 miles from my wife's downtown job.  I am better off, but our total commute is 12 miles- far worse than when we lived downtown.

Posted by lewyn at 5:14 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 30 August 2006 5:45 PM EDT

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The prophet Zechariah states "Old men and old women will yet sit in the streets of Jerusalem."

R. Soloveitchik interprets this statement to mean that after the final redemption of the Jews, "Jerusalem will be densely populated, even by elderly men and women. A young man likes to be on the street, but an old man likes to be home. But the city was going to be so populous that there would be no room for the elderly at home, so they will have to sit on the street."

The Lord is Righteous in All His Ways, p. 47

Evidently, Messianic deliverance means MUCH more compact development!

Posted by lewyn at 1:56 PM EDT

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some of my friends think that Americans have become less healthy due to junk food and pollution.

But a recent story in yesterday's NY Times suggests otherwise. (link at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/health/30age.html?ref=health )

Money quotes:

The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.

Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person's chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years.

The proposed reasons are as unexpected as the changes themselves. Improved medical care is only part of the explanation; studies suggest that the effects seem to have been set in motion by events early in life, even in the womb, that show up in middle and old age.

"What happens before the age of 2 has a permanent, lasting effect on your health, and that includes aging," said Dr. David J. P. Barker, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southampton in England.

Each event can touch off others. Less cardiovascular disease, for example, can mean less dementia in old age. The reason is that cardiovascular disease can precipitate mini-strokes, which can cause dementia. Cardiovascular disease is also a suspected risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.

The effects are not just in the United States. Large and careful studies from Finland, Britain, France, Sweden and the Netherlands all confirm that the same things have happened there; they are also beginning to show up in the underdeveloped world.

Of course, there were people in previous generations who lived long and healthy lives, and there are people today whose lives are cut short by disease or who suffer for years with chronic ailments. But on average, the changes, researchers say, are huge.

Even more obvious differences surprise scientists by the extent of the change.

In 1900, 13 percent of people who were 65 could expect to see 85. Now, nearly half of 65-year-olds can expect to live that long.

People even look different today. American men, for example, are nearly 3 inches taller than they were 100 years ago and about 50 pounds heavier.

"We've been transformed," Dr. Fogel said.

What next? scientists ask. Today's middle-aged people are the first generation to grow up with childhood vaccines and with antibiotics. Early life for them was much better than it was for their parents, whose early life, in turn, was much better than it was for their parents.
....Scientists used to say that the reason people are living so long these days is that medicine is keeping them alive, though debilitated. But studies like one Dr. Fogel directs, using records of of Union Army veterans, have led many to rethink that notion.

The study involves a random sample of about 50,000 Union Army veterans. Dr. Fogel compared those men, the first generation to reach age 65 in the 20th century, with people born more recently.
The researchers focused on common diseases that are diagnosed in pretty much the same way now as they were in the last century. So they looked at ailments like arthritis, back pain and various kinds of heart disease that can be detected by listening to the heart.

Skip to next paragraph
The New Age
Older and Better
This is the first article in a series looking at the science of aging. Other articles will explore the genetics of aging, body image and frailty, and who ages well and why.

Multimedia

Video: The New Aging

Graphic: People Today Have Fewer Chronic Illnesses

Graphic: Longer Lives, Larger Bodies
Related
Living Large and Healthy, but How Long Can It Go On? (July 30, 2006) The first surprise was just how sick people were, and for how long.

Instead of inferring health from causes of death on death certificates, Dr. Fogel and his colleagues looked at health throughout life. They used the daily military history of each regiment in which each veteran served, which showed who was sick and for how long; census manuscripts; public health records; pension records; doctors' certificates showing the results of periodic examinations of the pensioners; and death certificates.

They discovered that almost everyone of the Civil War generation was plagued by life-sapping illnesses, suffering for decades. And these were not some unusual subset of American men - 65 percent of the male population ages 18 to 25 signed up to serve in the Union Army. "They presumably thought they were fit enough to serve," Dr. Fogel said.

Even teenagers were ill. Eighty percent of the male population ages 16 to 19 tried to sign up for the Union Army in 1861, but one out of six was rejected because he was deemed disabled.

And the Union Army was not very picky. "Incontinence of urine alone is not grounds for dismissal," said Dora Costa, an M.I.T. economist who works with Dr. Fogel, quoting from the regulations. A man who was blind in his right eye was disqualified from serving because that was his musket eye. But, Dr. Costa said, "blindness in the left eye was O.K."

After the war ended, as the veterans entered middle age, they were rarely spared chronic ailments.

"In the pension records there were descriptions of hernias as big as grapefruits," Dr. Costa said. "They were held in by a truss. These guys were continuing to work although they clearly were in a lot of pain. They just had to cope."

Eighty percent had heart disease by the time they were 60, compared with less than 50 percent today. By ages 65 to 74, 55 percent of the Union Army veterans had back problems. The comparable figure today is 35 percent.

The steadily improving health of recent generations shows up in population after population and country after country. But these findings raise a fundamental question, Dr. Costa said.

"The question is, O.K., there are these differences, and yes, they are big. But why?" she said.

"That's the million-dollar question," said David M. Cutler, a health economist at Harvard. "Maybe it's the trillion-dollar question. And there is not a received answer that everybody agrees with."
...Common chronic diseases - respiratory problems, valvular heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and joint and back problems - have been declining by about 0.7 percent a year since the turn of the 20th century. And when they do occur, they emerge at older ages and are less severe.

The reasons, she and others are finding, seem to have a lot to do with conditions early in life. Poor nutrition in early years is associated with short stature and lifelong ill health, and until recently, food was expensive in the United States and Europe

...Dr. Fogel and Dr. Costa looked at data on height and body mass index among Union Army veterans who were 65 and older in 1910 and veterans of World War II who were that age in the 1980's. Their data relating size to health led them to a prediction: the World War II veterans should have had 35 percent less chronic disease than the Union Army veterans. That, they said, is exactly what happened.

Skip to next paragraph
The New Age
Older and Better
This is the first article in a series looking at the science of aging. Other articles will explore the genetics of aging, body image and frailty, and who ages well and why.

Multimedia

Video: The New Aging

Graphic: People Today Have Fewer Chronic Illnesses

Graphic: Longer Lives, Larger Bodies
Related
Living Large and Healthy, but How Long Can It Go On? (July 30, 2006) They also found that diseases early in life left people predisposed to chronic illnesses when they grew older.

"Suppose you were a survivor of typhoid or tuberculosis," Dr. Fogel said. "What would that do to aging?" It turned out, he said, that the number of chronic illnesses at age 50 was much higher in that group. "Something is being undermined," he said. "Even the cancer rates were higher. Ye gods. We never would have suspected that."

Men who had respiratory infections or measles tended to develop chronic lung disease decades later. Malaria often led to arthritis. Men who survived rheumatic fever later developed diseased heart valves.

And stressful occupations added to the burden on the body.

People would work until they died or were so disabled that they could not continue, Dr. Fogel said. "In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85," he said. Now the average age is 62.

A century ago, most people were farmers, laborers or artisans who were exposed constantly to dust and fumes, Dr. Costa said. "I think there is just this long-term scarring."

Searching for Answers

Dr. Barker of Oregon Health and Science University is intrigued by the puzzle of who gets what illness, and when.

"Why do some people get heart disease and strokes and others don't?" he said. "It's very clear that current ideas about adult lifestyles go only a small way toward explaining this. You can say that it's genes if you want to cease thinking about it. Or you can say, When do people become vulnerable during development? Once you have that thought, it opens up a whole new world."

It is a world that obsesses Dr. Barker. Animal studies and data that he and others have been gathering have convinced him that health in middle age can be determined in fetal life and in the first two years after birth.

His work has been controversial. Some say that other factors, like poverty, may really be responsible. But Dr. Barker has also won over many scientists.

In one study, he examined health records of 8,760 people born in Helsinki from 1933 to 1944. Those whose birth weight was below about six and a half pounds and who were thin for the first two years of life, with a body mass index of 17 or less, had more heart disease as adults.

Another study, of 15,000 Swedish men and women born from 1915 to 1929, found the same thing. So did a study of babies born to women who were pregnant during the Dutch famine, known as the Hunger Winter, in World War II.

That famine lasted from November 1944 until May 1945. Women were eating as little as 400 to 800 calories a day, and a sixth of their babies died before birth or shortly afterward. But those who survived seemed fine, says Tessa J. Roseboom, an epidemiologist at the University of Amsterdam, who studied 2,254 people born at one Dutch hospital before, during and after the famine. Even their birth weights were normal.

But now those babies are reaching late middle age, and they are starting to get chronic diseases at a much higher rate than normal, Dr. Roseboom is finding. Their heart disease rate is almost triple that of people born before or after the famine. They have more diabetes. They have more kidney disease.

That is no surprise, Dr. Barker says. Much of the body is complete before birth, he explains, so a baby born to a pregnant woman who is starved or ill may start life with a predisposition to diseases that do not emerge until middle age.

The middle-aged people born during the famine also say they just do not feel well. Twice as many rated their health as poor, 10 percent compared with 5 percent of those born before or after the famine.

"We asked them whether they felt healthy," Dr. Roseboom said. "The answer to that tends to be highly predictive of future mortality."

But not everyone was convinced by what has come to be known as the Barker hypothesis, the idea that events very early in life affect health and well-being in middle and old age. One who looked askance was Douglas V. Almond, an economist at Columbia University.

Dr. Almond had a problem with the studies. They were not of randomly selected populations, he said, making it hard to know if other factors had contributed to the health effects. He wanted to see a rigorous test - a sickness or a deprivation that affected everyone, rich and poor, educated and not, and then went away. Then he realized there had been such an event: the 1918 flu.

The flu pandemic arrived in the United States in October 1918 and was gone by January 1919, afflicting a third of the pregnant women in the United States. What happened to their children? Dr. Almond asked.

He compared two populations: those whose mothers were pregnant during the flu epidemic and those whose mothers were pregnant shortly before or shortly after the epidemic.

To his astonishment, Dr. Almond found that the children of women who were pregnant during the influenza epidemic had more illness, especially diabetes, for which the incidence was 20 percent higher by age 61. They also got less education - they were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. The men's incomes were 5 percent to 7 percent lower, and the families were more likely to receive public assistance.

The effects, Dr. Almond said, occurred in whites and nonwhites, in rich and poor, in men and women. He convinced himself, he said, that there was something to the Barker hypothesis.

Posted by lewyn at 10:01 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 31 July 2006 10:11 AM EDT

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1. Hirsch Chumash

2. Breyer, Active Liberty

3. Hoffman et. Al. My People’s Prayer Book: vol 7, Shabbat at Home

4. Hirsch, Nineteen Letters

5. Epstein, A Conspectus of the Public Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Solovetchik

6. Diamond, And I Will Dwell In Their Midst

7. Astren, Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding

8. Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State

9. Daniel Schiff, Abortion in Judaism

10. Robert Bruggeman, Sprawl

11. Crooks/Arsenault, Jacksonville

12. Bartley, Keeping The Faith: Race, Politics and Social Development in Jacksonville, 1940-70

13. Soloveitchik, Festival of Freedom

14. Roth, The Halakhic Process

15. Fishkoff, The Rebbe’s Army

16. Breuer, Modernity within Tradition

17. Ginzberg, Students, Scholars and Saints

18. Steinsaltz, We Jews

19. Grant, The Jews in the Roman World

20. Kranzler, Hasidic Williamsburg

21. Solomon, Global City Blues

22. Sacks, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

23. Ortiz, Eva Peron

24. Kellner, Must A Jew Believe Anything?

25. Cowley, What Ifs of American History

26. Feagin, Free Enterprise City

27. Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine

28. Queenan, Queenan Country

Posted by lewyn at 9:27 AM EDT

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Kotkin had another weird piece on Newsweek that I thought deserved a good whack. My responses are in italics.

July 3-10, 2006 issue - Sorry, city sophisticates, but the metropolis of the future may prove far less intensely urban than you hope. For all the focus on trendy downtowns and skyscrapers, the real growth in jobs and population is likely to take place on the periphery. The new urbanism, built around downtown revival and beloved by the celebrated starchitects, will cede pride of place to the "new suburbanism." And not only in the land of free-ranging suburbs, America.

Me:The claim that new urbanism is "built around downtown revival" is a misrepresentation.  There are quite a few new urbanist developments in small towns and suburbs (such as Seaside and Celebration).  In fact, some pro-urban commentators (Alex Marshall comes to mind) denounce New Urbanists for being willing to build in suburbia. 

Very clever of Kotkin to use the term "starchitects" to make New Urbanists seem out of touch with reality.  When you can't win the argument, fight with epithets.

In contrast to the powers who fight "sprawl," advocates of the new suburbanism focus on ways to make the periphery work better.

Me: again, see Celebration (and for that matter, other New Urbanist developments like Kentlands and King Farm), all New Urbanist attempts to make the periphery work better.  

It's about bringing business and jobs, not just bedrooms, to the outer rings, and reviving main streets in smaller towns and cities, not just in major urban centers. In some senses, the new suburbanism seeks to recover the ideals of early advocates of decentralization such as the early-20th-century British visionary Ebenezer Howard, who proposed dispersing populations into largely self-sustaining "garden cities."

Me: There you go again.  We've tried decentralizing jobs for 50 years, and all we've gotten for it are commutes that get longer ... and longer ... and longer.  Even though the average commute has increased only slightly, the number of 90-minute commutes has nearly doubled since 1990.  (See  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_08/b3921127.htm ) What Kotkin fails to realize is that if the boss moves to northern suburb X and then moves the company along with him, that's great for the boss.  And its even great for the other workers who live in northern suburb X.  But the workers who live in the southern suburbs are worse off than if they worked downtown, because they have to travel twice as many miles.  And the workers who live in the city might as well be dead.  The major reason they moved to the city may well have been to be close to work and have a less car-centered life.  And instead they have to buy a car and drag themselves to northern suburb X every day.  And if they are too poor to afford a car, they have a 90 minute commute on two or three buses if the job is on a bus line, and are out of work if its not.

Correcting the problems of suburbia is an international imperative. Almost everywhere, cities tend toward sprawl, more like much-maligned Los Angeles than like Manhattan, the urbanist's heaven.

Me: Define "tend."  In Tokyo, 70% of the commuters get to work through transit, biking or riding - in Stockholm, 69%, in Munich 62%.  I don't see a tendency towards sprawl there.

This pattern owes largely to the preference of the middle and working classes for privacy and space—choices ridiculed as boringly bourgeois by urban theorists. "L.A. is the realization of every immigrant's dream—the vassal's dream of his own castle," observed the Italian-born, Los Angeles-based urbanist Edgardo Contini in the 1960s. "Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home." Today, surveys find that 70 to 80 percent of Americans prefer a single-family home and only 15 percent, an apartment in a dense urban area.

These preferences are increasingly universal. In Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia, growth is spilling out of urban centers, even in places that boast extensive mass-transit systems. In London, the center has been losing population since at least the 1960s.

Me: Wrong.  Inner London lost population for many decades - but like New York City, it has been regaining population for the past two decades.   See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_London

In fact, Inner London is doing slightly better than outer London.  Inner London's population has increased from 2.5 million to 2.9 million since 1980 (about a 15% increase)- the population of Greater London as a whole increased from 6.8 million to 7.5 million (about 10%).  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London )

 As H. G. Wells predicted a century ago, much of southern and central England is a vast suburb of the capital. In Frankfurt, the suburbs now reach out as far as 80 kilometers and in Paris, the center is losing about 1 percent of its population annually as businesses and the middle class move out past the heavily immigrant banlieues. In Japan, too, high prices and congestion have propelled an exodus: between 1970 and 1995, 10 million people settled in suburbs around the main cities of the Kanto Plain, including Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki.

Me: Wrong again. Tokyo is following the same path as London- some depopulation, but increased population in the last couple of Censuses. http://www.chijihon.metro.tokyo.jp/english/PROFILE/OVERVIEW/overview3.htm

And the repopulation of Tokyo and London is a lot more noteworthy than population increases in the USA.  The USA has had about 17% growth since 1990 (from 250 million people to 293 million) - so with a tide rising that fast a lot of votes will be lifted.  Due to plunging birth rates, Japan's population grew by about 3% (from 123 million to 127 million) and Britian's by about 5% (from 57 million to 60 million). 

The impulse of many authorities is to try to stop sprawl and the problems (particularly overdependence on cars and malls) it brings. Planners in cities from Sydney to Portland, Oregon, have imposed "anti-sprawl" strategies that attempt to force people back into dense concentrations. Sydney's strict land-use regime, now under attack from both the political left and right, is helping drive up home prices—and drive young families to less highly regulated Australian cities. In Portland, a similar campaign is pushing development beyond the reach of city planners, across the Columbia River to Washington state.

Me: Sydney's population has increased by about 20% since 1991 (from 3.5 million to 4.2).  See http://www.citypopulation.de/Australia-Agglo.html  

I don't know my way around Australian census data well enough to focus on "young families" specifically.  But given Kotkin's error-filled discussion so far I doubt he knows more than I do. As far as Portland goes, the city of Portland's population grew from 368,000 in 1980 to 533,000 in 2004- not exactly a place where development is being "pushed" to suburbia.  Does Mr. Kotkin think Detroit or St. Louis (both of which have lost over 20% of their 1980 population) are more successful?

In contrast, the new suburbanism seeks not to fight market forces, but to address the problems. Many of the brightest ideas can be found in planned communities, often modeled on Howard's garden cities, such as Valencia, California; the Woodlands, outside Houston; Reston, Virginia, or Marne La Vallée outside Paris. They are not mere bedroom communities with malls but boast well-developed business parks, town centers and, in some cases, notably the Woodlands, a large amount of well-preserved, natural open space. Other successful models are being developed in older suburbs. Fullerton, California, and Naperville in Greater Chicago have revived abandoned core districts as centers for entertainment, dining and community events. Naperville has also developed a lovely riverside park that attracts strollers, hikers and bicyclists.

Such patterns of enlightened suburban development could be applied around the world.

Me: The only one of these places that I've been to is Reston. It struck me as a not very well done version of the New Urbanist developments that Kotkin sneers at- a nice little pedestrian-friendly shopping area ringed by a moat of sprawl streets that a pedestrian would be highly unwise to cross.  And outside the shopping area its the usual sprawlscape isn't it?

I do think Kotkin actually has a point here.  It is important to improve suburbia; but it takes more than just a shopping district to get it right.

 Many nations still get it wrong, building anonymous tracts 30 to 50 kilometers from the closest jobs or town center, mainly as bedroom communities for a big city. A leading example of enforced centralization is Seoul, where the average density of more than 14,000 people per square kilometer is three times London's, five times L.A.'s and 10 times that of growing U.S. cities like Houston or Phoenix.

Me: I don't even know what he's saying here.  Is Seoul an example of "anonymous tracts 30 or 50 miles out" or an example of "enforced centralization."?

Greater Seoul, in short, is almost hostile to human life, a widening ocean of high-rises with a shrinking number of traditional Korean houses.

Me: If its so hostile to human life, how come 10 million people live there? 

 Suh Yong-bu, a Korean expert in business demographics, notes that high housing prices and cramped spaces have helped send Korea's birthrate into free-fall, down 30 percent since 1993;

much the same problem is felt in other ultra dense urban societies like Japan and China. "The same patterns can be found throughout Asia," notes demographer Phil Longman, author of the "The Empty Cradle," a study of world population trends. "Once everyone is forced into a small city place, there's literally no room left for kids."

Me: Let's run some numbers (from our friendly US Statistical Abstract, not any fancy shmancy foreign web sites):

                 Population density      Birth rate per 1000

                 per square mile 

South Korea    1277                     10.1

Japan              835                     9.6

UK                  646                     10.9 

Germany          609                      8.5

Italy               511                       9.1

China              361                      13.0

France             287                      12.3

Spain             209                        10.1

The above table compares Kotkin's unholy trinity (China, South Korea, Japan) to five affluent European countries. 

South Korea, the only nation that really is much denser than the rest, has a birthrate that is higher than two of the European countries, the same as Spain, and only slightly lower than Britian and those of France).  Japan is also ahead of two of the five. 

China has a somewhat higher birth rate- but then again, China isn't even "ultra dense", so here Kotkin flat-out doesn't know what he is talking about.  Maybe birth rates have more to do with affluence than density.

Certainly, the history of the United States bears this out.  American cities were much denser 60 years ago; St. Louis, for example, had more than twice its current population in 1950.  But were birth rates really lower?

Um, no.  The American birth rate plunged from 24 per 1000 in 1950 to 14 per 1000 today (Statistical Abstract, Table 72).

Now it may be that there is a birth rate problem in big, dense cities.  But Kotkin sure hasn't made the case.

We now see the beginnings of a battle over the future of the suburbs. In Britain—where suburbs are home to roughly half the population, but the bias of most planners and politicians is still toward the city—there's a growing movement to bring arts, from galleries to symphonies, to smaller villages. The increasingly high cost of city living may help pro-suburban forces from Britain to Japan, where the government also fights sprawl with limits on megamalls and other measures.

Perhaps the ultimate test will come in the fastest-growing major economies, India and China. Mall developers like Aeon Co. Ltd. (the same people now being told to back off in Japan) are rushing to build suburban homes and shopping areas in India, outside Mumbai, and in China outside Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Beijing. Many of them are following American, Australian or Canadian models. There's one Chinese development named "Orange County," named after the famous southern California suburb. To hip urbanites, of course, that will sound like a bad joke. To the world's aspiring majority, it sounds like a bright promise.

Me: First of all, how does Kotkin know what the "world's aspiring majority" thinks?  Has he polled the hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians?  And doesn't the existence of these suburban developments have something to do with the fact that governments are essentially subsidizing these developments with highways?  (See http://www.china.org.cn/english/2004/Jun/99324.htm - Chinese highway system has doubled since 1980; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highways_Development_Project - India planning major highway expansion).

Posted by lewyn at 4:18 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 6 July 2006 10:17 PM EDT

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 Most surprising facts (on p. 10): though most cities gained both rich and poor, most cities gained a lot more poor than rich since 1970.

For example, Atlanta experienced a 22% increase in the number of very low income (50% of regional median or less) areas, and only a 9% increase in high income areas (150% or more of regional median).  And Atlanta was the most gentrifying city (of twelve listed) in this respect.  By contrast, Baltimore experienced a 26% increase in very low income areas, and only a 1% increase in rich areas.

Conclusion: the extent of gentrification is clearly overrated.  For every neighborhood that has "flipped" towards wealth, two or more have "flipped" towards poverty.

I realize that these numbers would look a little different if they were calculated only on a 1990-2000 basis (when cities generally did better than in previous decades). Nevertheless, the basic concern underlying complaints about gentrification (that cities are running out of poor neighborhoods) is just rubbish. Most cities have far a more bounteous supply of poor neighborhoods than they did before 1970, let alone before 1950.

Posted by lewyn at 3:07 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 6 July 2006 3:53 PM EDT

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“there is so much bad in the best of us, and so much good in the worst of us, that it hardly pays for any of us to talk about the rest of us.”

From Arnold Goodman, one of my former rabbis

Posted by lewyn at 3:05 PM EDT

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(Cross-posted to property professors' blog, see Barros blog in list of blogs to left) 

In my experience, most people who discuss the relationship between urban decay and crime treat the relationship as a one-way street: city crime causes people to leave cities, period.

But in Nicole Garnett's review of Bruegmann's and Joel Kotkin's new books (posted on SSRN, and referred to in a post on this blog a few days ago) she suggests that lower urban densities might induce crime by making cities less "busy" and more deserted- and thus that (to oversimplify the point into a sound bite) that sprawl might even cause crime in a sense.

I'm not sure there's any way to prove or disprove the theory- but if the argument is verifiable, it certainly leads to some interesting results.

Let's go back to the 1930s, when the FHA started to bribe people to move to suburbs with mortgage subsidies and all levels of government were beginning to make suburban commutes easier through road-building.  A few people leave the (now safe) cities.  Over the next few decades, a few city neighborhoods here and there become less busy and thus more dangerous, and the most risk-averse people start to trickle out.  This causes neighborhoods to become even less busy and more dangerous which cause even more people start to trickle out, and eventually we have a vicious circle on our hands- a vicious circle that spirals out of control in the 60s (when for reasons unrelated to urban policy, crime increases everywhere in the United States).

And depopulation causes other problems that independently might increase crime.  A city without a large middle and upper class might support more lenient policing policies which in turn might lead to more crime - another respect in which sprawl (or more accurately, the type of sprawl that depopulates cities, as opposed to sprawl in growing regions where there is enough population growth to build up city and suburb alike) might increase urban crime.

Two caveats:

1.  All of this is pretty speculative.

2.  I think it is easy (but mistaken) to assume that crime is a problem that can be resolved solely through more enlightened city government.  Even if you assume for the sake of argument that the criminal justice system has a major effect on crime (as opposed to, say, liberal morality, economic inequality, or family breakdown), criminal justice is more of a federal and state responsibility than a local responsibility.  Cities may hire police, but states decide whether to build enough prisons to house the people arrested by city police, and both federal and state courts set the rules that decide how crowded those prisons can be and how easy it is to convict people arrested by the city police.   

Posted by lewyn at 3:19 PM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 27 June 2006 3:20 PM EDT

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