The tech world is getting bitch slapped with several CEO’s taking leave and a nice chunk of change as they head to the exit doors. But in reality what service are the providing? But this is the reality that we gloss these shiny bits into billion dollar businesses that have no long range plan or actual product. The case of Peloton was the singular exception but then again the price and cost were out of range of most consumers. But then again who cares!!! This is the article discussing the great resignation among said unicorns and like Adam Neumann they will be back. WeWork for renters, sounds scary.
I have long wondered the point of Pintrest and the Peloton craze is like all crazed things that happened during the pandemic, but now even I am sick of working out in my office. That said, I doubt I will ever set foot in a Yoga studio again as I love my virtual classes from Steadfast and True Yoga in Nashville, few real studios compare and my home practice has improved dramatically as you should in Yoga do so. Now I literally double down. But again there is something oddly sanctimonious and pretentious about Yoga studios and the entire way it is done that frankly given Covid and air transmission is a reason there to go no. But I do go to the gym in my building, open windows and manage to work at times when I have less crowds and in turn less breathing out. Well for men that seems to be some type of shitting/orgasm breath that they feel compelled to do when working out. It was explained to me that they have to given the weight they are pushing. Um, no if you are feeling that kind of discomfort you need to drop the weight up the reps and change your workout there, Jack LaLane.
And with that the remote work continues and how offices are created and for what purpose will also change the skylines and the cities that they are located. I for the first time was in Manhattan where I witnessed people actually leaving an office for end of day rituals and discussing work, commutes and it was a pleasant surprise if not a relief. Sadly that is still small in number but good to see regardless. I do think that is a double edged sword for many. It is a great deal for those who work at home and can be flexible with work times and family obligations. I get that now the work day can be 24 hours broken up into times that fit into schedules for other obligations like physical exercise and meals, this editorial discusses that very issue. But again really is this what we really want and need? For many workers it is yes and particularly disabled or POC and especially Women who are shut out of workplaces they can do the job and get paid without the extra bullshit that comes with it. I tried to imagine myself in an office workplace after 30 years and realized I could not do it unless I microdosed all day and kept myself away from well anyone. Man I really hate people. But I am not alone and with that this from the NY Times shares what the results were for some who did take advantage of the bullshit myth, the Great Resignation. But then again if you think working at home gives you some form of privacy and dignity, think again. This article is about the way employers are using data analytics to monitor performance and they do so using the very computer you work on, through flash photos, key movement and types of work produced. It is fun times folks, get used to it. You will never be free. Never.
So what is the future of work? I have no clue. I truly can say it is good to be old as this has little to no affect on me what.so.ever. But change is always good just for the better, I am not sure. And with that what will the “it” cities of NY and SF be like? Well they will be just fine, that I am sure.
What Twitter’s Move to Shutter Offices Signals for Big Tech
Companies are cutting costs by embracing remote setups, but what happens to the hubs they leave behind? This article in the NY Times discusses the sudden exodus of the cowboys behind the Unicorns they created.
Twitter executives can currently travel the world by globe-trotting among the company’s 38 offices, from San Francisco, Sydney, and Seoul to New Delhi, London, and Dublin.
But not for much longer. On July 27, the company sent a memo to employees saying that one office in San Francisco would be shuttered; plans for a new office in Oakland, California, would be abandoned; and the future of seven locations was being carefully considered as part of a cost-cutting measure. Five other offices globally would definitely be downsized. It’s all part of an attempt to prepare the company for purchase by Elon Musk and tighten expenditure as much as possible.
Twitter isn’t the first to cut down its office space. In early June, Yahoo was rumored to be getting rid of its 650,000 square foot San Jose campus, which was only completed at the end of 2021. Later that month, Yelp announced it was edging closer to being fully remote, and closing 450,000 square feet of office space across the United States. It was followed a week later by Netflix, who said it plans to sublease around 180,000 square feet of property in California as part of a broader company downsizing. That echoed Salesforce, which put up half of its eponymous San Francisco tower block for sublease in mid-July.
Twitter is likely to be one of many companies making the same decision, says Daniel Ismail, senior analyst at real estate research company Green Street. “Even for technology companies, which are some of the most profitable and valuable companies in the world, the office is still an expense—and one that may not be critical in the future.”
Big Tech companies have been at the forefront of some of the bigger issues that are throwing the future of the world of work in flux. From the ability to work remotely from anywhere, which Meta has embraced, to simply spending less time in the office and more time at home, Big Tech companies—by dint of the fact that they’re often developing the infrastructure and products that enable remote work—have been more willing to trial the concept ahead of traditional businesses. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that 27 percent of American workers in “computer and mathematical occupations” worked remotely at some point in the last four weeks. “The pandemic showed that remote working was not only quite viable for many companies, but also something many employees really like, and could be productive doing,” says Ismail. It’s having an impact not just on rank-and-file workers, but stretching all the way up to the upper echelons of management. On August 2, the Financial Timesreported that Instagram boss Adam Mosseri would be moving to London, away from Meta’s headquarters in California. Mosseri follows colleagues like Javier Olivan, who is spending more time in Spain since replacing Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer, and Guy Rosen, vice president of integrity, who had planned to move to Israel.
Phil Ryan, director of city futures and global insight at real estate advisors JLL, says that although many Big Tech companies are drawing down their workspace portfolio, others are continuing to buy, making it a mixed market. Those purchases are often coming outside the traditional homes for Big Tech on the coasts, moving inland to places like the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. However, Ryan does acknowledge that there has been what he terms a “rationalization” of office space among some larger companies. “There are a lot of companies, particularly in the Bay Area, with multiple locations in a specific metro area that will consolidate that space,” he says.
Consolidation has been particularly prevalent in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed estimates one in three workers who used to be in the city have now gone remote. According to JLL, the office vacancy rate in San Francisco stood at 22 percent at the end of the first quarter of 2022. In Dallas, where other tech companies have created outposts, more than one in four office spaces are vacant.
That has huge ramifications for the broader real estate market in the US and abroad. Tech companies account for between one fifth and one quarter of all activity in the office sector space, according to both Ismail and Ryan. Their departure leaves huge amounts of office space unoccupied, with knock-on effects on the broader city and services set up to support those workspaces. “If you think about the jobs themselves, it has a big impact on the local economy,” says Ismail. “Tech jobs tend to create more office jobs around them—so it’s quite important for many office markets to have a robust tech sector.” As businesses disappear, so does the vibrancy of a city, with knock-on impacts on everything from tourism to food, drink, and entertainment.
The tech industry contributes $516 billion to California’s economy alone, according to one analysis by the Computing Technology Industry Association, with 3.4 million people employed in the tech sector across the US to support the tech professionals who work on developing software and architecting networks.
And while Twitter says that its office shifts have “no impact” on jobs, that’s only true to a point. All those who support office workers, from cleaners to security staff to caterers, lose out. “It worries me that smart people can’t come up with a way to make hybrid working work, because other places seem to be doing it,” says one Twitter employee, who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the press. “It’s people who staff the perks that bring people to the office who are going to be hurt the most.”
Big Tech’s impact looms large over the rest of the world. “Over the span of at least a decade, tech has been the leading single driver of leasing activity throughout the US,” says Ryan. But that’s changing. While he’s still analyzing the data, Ryan suggests the second quarter data indicates that may be changing. “Tech and finance were basically tied,” he says, “which is a little unusual, and speaks to the fragility of the market that we’re still in right now.”
Ryan believes that Big Tech will continue to lease office space at significant levels, and will remain one of the major contributors to real estate activity for years to come. But it’ll be in markets that perhaps aren’t traditionally equated with the industry. “We’re going to continue to see this focus on places like River North in Denver, East Austin, Wynwood in Miami—not really traditionally corporate or even active areas at all that are becoming the biggest bright spots in the office market, and that’s almost entirely a result of tech-led investment,” he says.
That comes at the expense of the more traditional areas in and around Silicon Valley, which have historically relied on the tech sector. But rather than a one-and-done overhaul, Ismail equates the change in how we work to a “slow bleed.” “It won’t happen all at once,” he says. “It’ll happen over time—and that’s what we’re seeing as time goes on.”
I recently read an article in the Washington Post (a newspaper that now publishes opinion pieces and other light news as clickbait since the great Marty Barron retired) about how Thursday is now the official end of the week day when it comes to 8-5 workers. And while there has been a big push to shorten the work week to four days and change the structure of conventional workplace hours, the reality is that only about 40% of American workplaces are structured on the M-F 8-5 schedule. Most of our workers in the global economy work in less conventional hours and days. Retail, hospitality, manufacturing and warehouse work including a great deal of food processing, transportation and other assorted jobs/gigs do not. With that comes the rising tide of unfilled jobs, demand for unionization and rises in pay to circumvent the lack of consistency usually associated with these jobs. So when I read the poor boo hoo, “No one is here.” My response, “Too bad, so sad, just shut the fuck up.”
Then I read this piece from the local news in Nashville about a school that I was last in sometime in 2019 and walked out. Just walked out from the chaos in a room that left me actually beyond my normal tolerant level. I had not yet known I was leaving the city that came months later but Oliver Middle School, Wright Middle School were the two that finally broke the last straw. Wright was where I tried to high five a student and he nearly broke my wrist in return, to the point it was so loud and severe even another student commented and asked if I was alright. I met the overwhelmed Administrator when she asked if I would become a permanent Sub and of course I said sure and made sure I never pursued it with the HR department. I would have to be insane and immediately blamed HR when she asked me about why I had not shown up. I never went back. Oliver was one where I had to rent a car to get to but I enjoyed that area of the city and could do errands after so I went with that in mind the four or five times I did go. The special ed and reading contained classes were fine it was the Gen Ed class, Social Studies that led to my walkout. The discipline problems usually are one thing but it is a way the students conduct and carry themselves that add to that. And that is a problem throughout the Nashville Public School System, they are the most deranged and damaged children I have ever encountered. And yes we had the same in Seattle; however I have worked in the King County Jail and varying horrific alternative schools, but truly the most fucked up kids I recall came again from Gen Ed. Aki Kurose and Orca are two schools that stand out as the worst and they are literally within blocks of each other and within walking distance to where I live but South Seattle is full of schools in that area that are just horrific. But not to the level as Nashville, so you can say and call me a racist and such but I lived in the same community and took public transport so when you say that you really are reaching for an excuse. The schools in Seattle that were so tragic, grim and pathetic I just finally gave up going as it served no purpose. And that went hand in hand in Nashville. I have seen Teachers and Admins just raise up their hands, pretend to give a shit and others who actually try but most simply are there filling seats and hoping that this will end with the year and a new year bring a new broom. And by broom I mean Admin who will come in a change the dynamic. None to few do. The blogger at Seattle Schools Community Blog has spent the better part of a decade documenting the incompetence of Seattle Public Schools and the irony that this is a wealthy city in a very blue and liberal bastion is not lost. I have never seen or experienced more inanity than Liberals running amok over the next shiny key like I did in Seattle. If you wonder why Liberals don’t do well politically that is one of the many reasons, they say they love diversity, and that is true if you are the sad/poor/POC or whomever is the new alphabet person in which to pity. But if you are liberal and white and educated you better follow the script or be left on the outside looking in. Ask the former Mayor or any other Political aspirant in Seattle. The same for Nashville, but again the issue here is both Race and of course Religion. They love shiny keys but they give off a very red glow. The same bullshit, the same lies and the same do as little as possible, take as much credit as possible is the mantra. Welcome to the South, they invented passive aggressive, Seattle just perfected it.
So when I read about Oliver Middle School in Nashville and their recent exodus of staff, I laughed and felt relieved. One always does when one feels right but you often have to wait to see how it plays out. The Pandemic put much of this on hold and then what resulted was a runner who just took steroids or a car hitting the gas and going 0-90 in less than three seconds. I have seen quite a bit in the Jersey City Schools as they have long been under State mandate for reasons unclear but it does seem there is no driver in this school bus and I doubt the newly “appointed” Superintendent will be different. I am going back in September or October with the same plan – three days a week and a distinct plan to find things to do that will preserve my mental health. What that is right now I have no idea but I have time. I finally figured out that almost all my depression and resulting anger manifesting into self harm is centered around the job of Substitute. Having nothing to come home to and engage was a problem that I need to fix and have within that a wide choice or wait for recession when everyone will suddenly want the job and it will actually make it better as then my walking in every day will be one of many versus one of few. That truly makes a difference.
I have put the story about Oliver below. Nashville has a blogger like the one in Seattle, Dad Gone Wild, and his son goes to Oliver and he sings its praises and he sings few. As he can tell you the school is like many, one with problems but they are the NIMBY kind most often that resonate with families. The reality is that this is like all schools, you are fine with it if your child is fine with it, beyond that you have no skin in the game. Once your child moves on and up your connection and relationship declines and in reality again, you don’t give a flying fuck and why should you? The public school system shows how fucked up it is and in Tennessee it starts a voucher system this fall that will further decline their public schools and with the Governor Plumber aligning himself with the religious whack job from Hillsdale College who also runs charters further denigrates those who are active and involved in preserving what is left of public education.
Again Nashville is a particularly fascinating case as it has both a book, Making the Unequal Metropolis, and a podcast, The Promise, about the state of their schools. So when a fuckwit informs me I am wrong about my assessment I direct him to those and it shuts him the fuck up. And the irony is that he teaches in Jersey City’s version of an elite school, McNair, that is supposedly acclaimed in Jersey City. The reasoning – test results. Yes a school with no IB or Cambridge program or even a tough STEM one, it is largely relying on AP classes to reach that bar and that program alone. And that pinnacle of success in Jersey City is a low bar folks. You test to get in and that is one of the two schools that do and with that the rest of the schools are utterly bereft of any programs that require a student to be challenged or excel so competition is fierce and it is a false flag to assume that means it a better school, just better focused and academically inclined. Diverse yes in some ways and some ways not. Ask the numerous Immigrant families about how they propel and demand such results for their children. I would love to see the statistical breakdown of the test results by Gender and Race, that would give you all the info you need to know. The school is fine but folks in a pool of this scale it is hardly special. And irony again that in Seattle the current shiny key is that these type of special academics is Racist and Elitist so they are slowly curtailing many of them in the schools that were once also highly acclaimed, Roosevelt and Garfield. Again breakdown the composition of the students enrolled and it will tell you that like in fight in San Francisco at Lowell High School (again another Liberal bastion) over this very issue of being tested for entry, ended with the return of what? Testing. Immigrant families see this as the door to meritocracy and white families do what they do best pay for their kids to get into whatever program that will enable their precious snowflakes to do better in school and get to college. Varsity Blues anyone? We have done nothing and will do nothing for the majority, they are the ones who are not working 8-5 and likely never will. Meritocracy is bullshit.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – Several teachers have resigned from Oliver Middle School in the last year, citing poor leadership and communication. Some also claim the school does not follow proper safety protocols, specifically during lockdowns.
One teacher spoke to us anonymously because she’s been transferred to another MNPS school and said she fears retaliation by the district.
A former Oliver Middle School teacher said she poured her heart into the school for more than a decade.
“It means a lot,” the teacher said. “It is very emotional.”
She left about a year ago, claiming things went on at the school that violated MNPS policies and cites a toxic environment created by the administration in the last few years.
“Teachers are being bullied,” the teacher said. “They are not being treated equally, and they are not being treated fairly.”
MNPS said since the start of the 2021 school year, 29 teachers and staff have left OMS. The turnover rate is alarming parents who voiced their concern at a school meeting Thursday. “I want specifics on how you plan to regain our trust and be an effective leader knowing you have lost over half your teachers,” parent Christi Mayo said during the meeting.
MNPS said most of the positions have now been filled. There are currently five vacancies. District spokesperson Sean Braisted explained the departures Thursday. “Some are for personal reasons,” Braisted said. “Some are for promotions. Some are for other reasons.
The district followed up and told us Friday that some of the reduction in teachers is due to budget cuts as a result of enrollment losses during the pandemic. The district said Oliver is projected to see a decline of 80 students in the upcoming year as there are more students moving on to high school and less students coming in.
“Our population has naturally dropped since Oliver has started to unravel,” the teacher said.
We obtained 13 teacher statements. 12 of them have resigned. In the statements, teachers describe the school as an “environment of chaos”. Teachers detail how it is “impossible to feel safe at my place of work.” The letters criticize the school’s handling of an incident in April where a student brought a loaded gun to campus, saying “even after the lockdown incident, safety measures at Oliver did not change.”
We asked the former teacher if she would still send her kids there today. “Knowing what I know just about that incident, their safety is on me if I send them,” the teacher said.
Teachers and parents claim turnover has been nowhere near this in previous years. We asked MNPS how many resignations there were in previous school years dating back to 2017 for context, but the district has not provided those numbers.
“The last school year has been hard for educators across the country, and that is true too at Oliver. Staff who wanted to find new opportunities through the district have had the chance to do so, and now we are focused on supporting the administration of Oliver to fill any remaining vacancies and build a team focused on the success of the students.”Sean Braisted, MNPS communications
In a statement, the district said:
“We appreciate any constructive feedback from current and former employees on ways to improve the culture and climate of the school, and we encourage any staff of our schools who have concerns to bring those to the district to be investigated appropriately.”
** just a note on that.. no, no they don’t. Trust me no exit interviews are ever given and if you note many said they would not be quoted on record for fear of retaliation. That folks is Education across the spectrum. Never met an Administrator I trusted or respected and I doubt I ever will. ***
I live for public transit. I am constantly learning my way among trains and subways to make traveling across the City and State and across State lines in which to expedite and in turn travel safely and cheaply. I don’t mind renting a car but with the price of fuel it is not worth the hassle to worry about it, parking and the rest. I grew up taking the 5 Phinney in Seattle and when you grow up using public transit you realize the convenience and affordability it offers. And then you read about the Subway stabbings, shootings and other problems that are a secondary plague affecting mass transit across the country. For the record, this is not new it is just expanded as the homeless, the deeply mentally ill have found themselves literally stranded in cities across the country in search of, well I have no clue what brought them to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, Seattle, New York and the city of Denver which this story is about. I do not believe they got there and in turn found themselves unable to be employed, find housing and/or went on a binge of drugs and alcohol to the point they have lost all functioning. This is a slide that starts out slow, out of a crisis and then over time (a time frame that can be weeks to days to months to years) they finally collapsed into the heap you see on your local corners, under freeway underpasses and anywhere they can lay their head.
Yesterday I read of another recall effort in San Francisco regarding their current City Attorney, the job VP Kamala Harris had during her time there which she frankly did not better than the current job she has. I am not a fan of Ms Harris, style over substance and with that I will move on. But the City has always been a haven for many. There is a strong Asian population, the Latin community of the Mission district, of course the Gay Community and many other Bohemian types drawn by the liberal politics and the stunning beauty this city of 49 square miles brings. And with it there are many good memories I have of the area, having lived in Berkeley and Oakland as well over the course of a decade. But like my home of Seattle, I am done with the West Coast and am fine with that decision. There is a passive aggressive nature to the persona of the Coastal Elites that make the passive aggressive behavior of Southerners seem almost quaint if not just a quirk of the region. And trust me the South invented it but Seattle perfected it. And yes it exists here but it is more in a sense of entitlement and arrogance that makes sense if you lived here. Like corruption it is just an accepted part of the way of life. I find it highly entertaining on most days. Think Chris Christie and Bill DiBlasio if they were Gay and Anna Delvey was their daughter and they came to your Pride Party and were the last to leave. You would reconsider having another party next year or at least the guest list.
San Francisco the last time I visited was four years ago and it was already descending into madness. The amount of Tech companies that have moved in and up were making The City (and btw that is how the pretentious in San Francisco refer to the city as “The City) unaffordable if not undesirable. The Pot Shops were aplenty and of course the cool food spots and hipster hangouts were everywhere now as opposed to just a few locales. The great funky hotels almost gone, other than my favorite The Phoneix in the Tenderloin which is where I always stay as it has a pool, great food and is the last of the era in a city that struggles to balance the past with the present. I would not stay there now it is simply not safe enough to walk alone if at all. With that now what was confined to spots and some blocks has permeated the City and made it all unsafe and utterly filthy. The City already recalled some of the School Board Members this last year and now the City Attorney is finding himself the target of ire of those sick of what is across every city today – crime. It is why NYC elected the moron Eric Adams as Mayor as he was a former Cop and promised he would not defund the Police and with that crime is still a major problem. Go figure. He is a moron. Utterly hilarious but still a walking moron. Okay a swaggering moron. They will not recall him as people don’t here, we either wait for a scandal that forces them to quit or wait to vote them out. Our Mayor here in Jersey City wisely keeps crime data under lock and key so the allusion of safety is here despite I am sure is not safe. Our Mayor is invisible if not inaccessible as frankly he is busy planning running for the Governor’s office and opening up a pot shop in Hoboken. Well, a good back up plan is always essential. He ran unopposed and the pandemic enabled that to do so with ease as most of our residents are largely Immigrants and likely unable to vote, have no real vested interest in local politics and with that it makes keeping the status quo just that. People fear, well everything, but change is on the list as well.
But as you read the story below about the Denver Bus Driver her story is not a new or unique story. It is, again, a major problem everywhere. But the sheer level of her coping strategies, her own determination to succeed is impressive. I feel the same way when I work in the schools. I am invisible, alone and spend hours just sitting there and if I don’t get abused I consider it a good day. Imagine going to work, no one knowing your name, addressing you with common courtesy and the endless parade of troubled individuals coming in and out of your workplace, be that a classroom or a bus, which you have to account for and handle. I will never forget that Bitch Admin at Ferris and the way she spoke to me those times that led me to call the suicide hotline, that was when I realized I had the power to never set foot in that school again. And as the year ends I have not. We will see in the fall. But the coping strategies of the Driver I get, I walk, I cry, I find healing through alternative means and I get up and do it again with the belief that this is another day. Not a bad one nor a good one, just another one. And we are the invisible work force and the same goes for the homeless, the unhoused, the troubled, the mentally ill and the many who are simply on the fringes. We all share that sense of not being seen and in turn acknowledged nor respected for any of that which we do, but what we are seen for is for what we FAIL to do.
And while we can recall our Politicians and demand them to do something, we really have no clue what is to be done. We are fine with the clutching of pearls and hands and we can navigate around it until it encroaches now to our doorstep, then suddenly it does become our problem. And then we again demand those we elected to fix “it” be “it” guns, homeless, drugs etc. What we don’t realize that the Pol has already made the call to move onto a new house, a bigger job and the can will get kicked down the road. When I lived in San Francisco, the Governor Gavin Newsom was the Mayor. Kamala the City Attorney. Then it was his campaign of “Care not Cash” to stop the tide of vagrancy and tragedy that existed on the streets. It was the same as it is now just different. They now live in bigger houses with bigger jobs. The reality is that we are the ones who must do something and that is perhaps accept that what was then is not now. The same things that drew you there are not the reasons others are there. Sex, drugs and rock and roll have a place but maybe in memories not in the streets. The Folsom Street fair a bizarre weekend festival of kink and debauchery should not happen anymore or move it indoors with better control and less visability. The San Francisco annual run with carts and nudity needs to end. And with that accept that those drawn there now may not have the same values or beliefs but may be exploiting or in turn harming others with their presence. It was the same during the Floyd Marches how quickly professional criminals used the cover of them to do damage and with that the BLM idea became associated with that not its actual cause. See how the memory plays games and selectively picks the issues that triggers the most base of emotions, FEAR.
So what is the solution? Well we can start to rethink what it means to massively house and treat those who refuse to be treated. We called them Institutions for the Mentally Ill. They were horrible but that was then and this is now. Can we not find ways today in which to improve them? Use the failures of the past as a teaching lesson in which to learn and grow? Uh no, that is hard and shit. We also need to start mental health assessments much early on. By Grade 5/6 all children should be assessed for not only intellectual capability’s and/or learning disabilities but for mental health disorders. And with that we need fully funded mental health clinics in schools with again referrals to behavioral issues that perhaps are a signal of a larger crisis. Wonder why 18 year old boys are taking to the streets with guns, that may answer some of those questions. Oh we cannot do that, its too hard. Or are we afraid we will find out the truth? This story about a young woman’s quest to get a mental health clinic at her school brought all the angry afraid parents to the yard to protest. Me thinks one doth protest too much.
I believe John Oliver sums up the ways schools are funded and of course the move to Police up and Militarize the schools will go well. And this is America – AFRAID and in turn utterly immobile. So nothing will change.
With that I reprint the story of the Number 15. Ride safe.
Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15
As American cities struggle to recover from the pandemic, Denver’s problems spill over onto its buses
By Eli Saslow June 6, 2022 The Washington Post
19 minDENVER — Suna Karabay touched up her eye makeup in the rearview mirror and leaned against the steering wheel of the bus to say her morning prayers. “Please, let me be patient,” she said. “Let me be generous and kind.” She walked through the bus to make her final inspection: floor swept, seats cleaned, handrails disinfected, gas tank full for another 10-hour shift on the city’s busiest commercial road. She drove to her first stop, waited until exactly 5:32 a.m., and opened the doors.
“Good morning!” she said, as she greeted the first passenger of the day, a barefoot man carrying a blanket and a pillow. He dropped 29 cents into the fare machine for the $3 ride. “That’s all I got,” he said, and Suna nodded and waved him onboard.
“Happy Friday,” she said to the next people in line, including a couple with three plastic garbage bags of belongings and a large, unleashed dog. “Service pet,” one of the owners said. He fished into his pocket and pulled out a bus pass as the dog jumped onto the dashboard, grabbed a box of Kleenex, and began shredding tissues on the floor.
“Service animal?” Suna asked. “Are you sure?”
“What’d I tell you already?” the passenger said. “Just drive the damn bus.”
She turned back to face the windshield and pulled onto Colfax Avenue, a four-lane road that ran for more than 30 miles past the state capitol, through downtown, and toward the Rocky Mountains. Forty-five years old, she’d been driving the same route for nearly a decade, becoming such a fixture of Denver’s No. 15 bus line that her photograph was displayed on the side of several buses — a gigantic, smiling face of a city Suna no longer recognized in the aftermath of the pandemic. The Denver she encountered each day on the bus had been transformed by a new wave of epidemics overwhelming major cities across the country. Homelessness in Denver was up by as much as 50 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. Violent crime had increased by 17 percent, murders had gone up 47 percent, some types of property crime had nearly doubled, and seizures of fentanyl and methamphetamine had quadrupled in the past year.
She stopped the bus every few blocks to pick up more passengers in front of extended-stay motels and budget restaurants, shifting her eyes between the road ahead and the rearview mirror that showed all 70 seats behind her. In the past two years, Denver-area bus drivers had reported being assaulted by their passengers more than 145 times. Suna had been spit on, hit with a toolbox, threatened with a knife, pushed in the back while driving and chased into a restroom during her break. Her windshield had been shattered with rocks or glass bottles three times. After the most recent incident, she’d written to a supervisor that “this job now is like being a human stress ball.” Each day, she absorbed her passengers’ suffering and frustration during six trips up and down Colfax, until, by the end of the shift, she could see deep indentations of her fingers on the wheel.
Now she stopped to pick up four construction workers in front of “Sunrise Chinese Restaurant — $1.89 a Scoop.” She pulled over near a high school for a teenager, who walked onto the bus as she continued to smoke.
“Sorry. You can’t do that,” Suna said.
“It’s just weed.”
“Not on here,” Suna said. The girl tossed the joint onto the sidewalk and banged her fist into the first row of seats, but Suna ignored her. She kept driving as the bus filled behind her and then began to empty out after she passed through downtown. “Last stop,” she announced, a few minutes before 7 a.m. She was scheduled for a six-minute break before turning around to begin her next trip up Colfax, but when she looked in the rearview mirror, there were still seven people sleeping on the bus. Lately, about a quarter of her riders were homeless. The bus was their destination, so they rode until someone forced them to get off. “Sorry. Everyone out,” Suna said again, speaking louder, until the only passenger left was a man slumped across two seats in the second row. Suna got up to check on him.
“Sir?” she said, tapping his shoulder. He had an open wound on his ankle, and his leg was shaking. “Sir, are you okay?”
He opened his eyes. He coughed, spit on the floor, and looked around the empty bus. “We make it to Tulsa?” he asked.
“No. This is Denver. This is the 15 line.”
The passenger stumbled onto his feet. “Do you want me to call you an ambulance?” Suna asked, but he shook his head and started limping toward the doors.
“Okay. Have a good day,” Suna said. He held up his middle finger and walked off the bus.
Five days a week she drove back and forth on the same stretch of Colfax Avenue, stopping 38 times each way, completing every trip in a scheduled time of 72 minutes as she navigated potholes by memory and tried to make sense of what was happening to her passengers and to the city that she loved. She’d started reading books about mental illness and drug abuse, hoping to remind herself of what she believed: Addiction was a disease. Homelessness was a moral crisis. The American working class had been disproportionately crushed by covid-19, rising inflation and skyrocketing housing costs, and her passengers were among the victims. She thought about what her father had told her, when she was 19 years old and preparing to leave her family in Turkey to become an immigrant in the United States. He’d said that humanity was like a single body of water, in which people were made up from the same substance and then collected into different cups. This was her ocean. It was important not to judge.
And for her first several years in Denver, that kind of compassion had come easily to her. She felt liberated driving the city bus, which Muslim women weren’t allowed to do back home in Ankara. She loved the diversity of her passengers and built little relationships with her regulars: Ethiopian women who cleaned offices downtown, elementary-school children who wrote her thank you notes, Honduran day laborers who taught her phrases in Spanish, and medical students who sometimes asked about her heart ailment. But then the pandemic closed much of Denver, and even though Suna had never missed a day of work, many of her regulars had begun to disappear from the bus. Two years later, ridership across the city was still down by almost half, and a new wave of problems had arrived in the emptiness of urban centers and public transit systems, not just in Denver but all across the country.
Philadelphia was reporting an 80 percent increase in assaults aboard buses. St. Louis was spending $53 million on a new transit security plan. The transportation union president in Tucson said the city’s buses had become “a mobile refuse frequented by drug users, the mentally ill, and violent offenders.” The sheriff of Los Angeles County had created a new transit unit to keep passengers from having to “step over dead bodies or people injecting themselves.” And, meanwhile, Suna was compulsively scanning her rearview mirror, watching for the next crisis to emerge as she began another shift.
Two teenagers were burning something that looked like tinfoil in the back of the bus. A woman in a wheelchair was hiding an open 32-ounce can of beer in her purse and drinking from it with a straw. A construction worker holding a large road sign that read “SLOW” sat down in the first row next to a teenage girl, who scooted away toward the window.
“This sign isn’t meant for me and you,” the construction worker told the teenager, as Suna idled at a red light and listened in. “We can take it fast.”
“I’m 15,” the girl said. “I’m in high school.”
“That’s okay.”
Suna leaned out from her seat and yelled: “Leave her alone!”
“All right. All right,” the construction worker said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. He waited a moment and turned back to the teenager. “But do you got an older sister?”
Suna tried to ignore him and looked out the windshield at the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the high-rises of the city. She hadn’t been downtown on her own time since the beginning of the pandemic, and lately, she preferred to spend entire weekends reading alone in her apartment, isolating herself from the world except for occasional phone calls with her family in Turkey. “I used to be an extrovert, but now I’m exhausted by people,” Suna had told her sister. Increasingly, her relationship with Denver was filtered through the windshield of the bus, as she pulled over at stops she associated mostly with traumas and police reports during the pandemic.
There was Havana Street, where, a few months earlier, a woman in mental distress had shattered the windshields of two No. 15 buses, including Suna’s, within five minutes; and Billings Street, where, in the summer of 2021, a mentally unstable passenger tried to punch a crying toddler, only to be tackled and then shot in the chest by the toddler’s father; and Dayton Street, where Suna had once asked a man in a red bikini to stop smoking fentanyl, and he’d shouted “Here’s your covid, bitch!” before spitting in her face; and Downing, where another No. 15 driver had been stabbed nearby with a three-inch blade; and Broadway, where, on Thanksgiving, Suna had picked up a homeless man who swallowed a handful of pills, urinated on the bus, and asked her to call an ambulance, explaining that he’d poisoned himself so he could spend the holiday in a hospital with warm meals and a bed.
“Hey, driver! Hit the gas,” a passenger yelled from a few rows behind her. “We’re late. You’re killing me.”
She stared ahead at a line of cars and checked the clock. She was two minutes behind schedule. She inched up toward the brake lights in front of her and tried to focus on a mural painted on the side of a nearby building of a woman playing the violin.
“Hey! Do you speak English?” the passenger yelled. “Get your ass moving or get back to Mexico.”
She kneaded her hands into the steering wheel. She counted her breaths as they approached the next stop, North Yosemite Street, which had been the site of another episode of violence captured on security camera several months earlier. An intoxicated and emaciated 57-year-old woman had jumped out in front of a moving No. 15 bus, shouted at the driver to stop, and then pushed her way onboard. She’d started cursing at other passengers, pacing up and down the aisle until a man twice her size stood up in the back of the bus and punched her in the face with a closed fist, slamming her to the floor. “Who ain’t never been knocked out before?” he asked, as the woman lay unconscious in the aisle, and then he stood over her as the other passengers sat in their seats and watched. “Here’s one more,” he said, stomping hard on her chest. He grabbed the woman by the ankle and flung her off the bus, leaving her to die of blunt-force trauma on the sidewalk. “We can keep riding though,” one of the other passengers had told the driver, moments later. “We got to go to work, man.”
Now, Suna pulled over at the next stop and glanced into the rearview mirror. The belligerent passenger was out of his seat and moving toward her. She turned her eyes away from him and braced herself. He banged his fist into the windshield. He cursed and then exited the bus.
Suna closed her eyes for a moment and waited as three more passengers climbed onboard. “Thanks for riding,” she told them, and she shifted the bus back into drive.
Each night after she finished making all 228 stops on Colfax, Suna went home to the silence of her apartment, burned sage incense, drank a calming herbal tea and tried to recover for her next shift. Meanwhile, many of her passengers ended up spending their nights at the last stop on the No. 15 route, Union Station, the newly renovated, $500 million gem of the city’s transportation system and now also the place the president of the bus drivers’ union called a “lawless hellhole.”
The station’s long indoor corridor had become the center of Denver’s opioid epidemic and also of its homelessness crisis, with as many as a few hundred people sleeping on benches on cold nights. The city had tried removing benches to reduce loitering, but people with nowhere to go still slept on the floor. Authorities tried closing all of the station’s public bathrooms because of what the police called “a revolving door of drug use in the stalls,” but that led to more people going to the bathroom and using drugs in the open. The police started to arrest people at record rates, making more than 1,000 arrests at Union Station so far this year, including hundreds for drug offenses. But Colorado lawmakers had decriminalized small amounts of drug possession in 2019, meaning that offenders were sometimes cited with a misdemeanor for possessing up to four grams of fentanyl — enough for nearly 2,000 lethal doses — and then were able to return to Union Station within a few hours.
The city’s latest attempt at a solution was a mental health crisis team of four clinicians who worked for the Regional Transportation District, and one night a counselor named Mary Kent walked into Union Station holding a small handbag with the overdose antidote Narcan, a tourniquet and referral cards to nearby homeless shelters.
“Can I help you in any way?” she said to a woman who was pushing a shopping cart while holding a small knife. The woman gestured at the air and yelled something about former president Barack Obama’s dog.
“Do you need anything? Can we help support you?” Kent asked again, but the woman muttered to herself and turned away.
Kent walked from the train corridor to the bus platform and then back again during her shift, helping to de-escalate one mental health crisis after the next. A woman was shouting that she was 47-weeks pregnant and needed to go to the hospital. A teenager was running naked through the central corridor, until Kent helped calm her down and a transit police officer coaxed her into a shirt. During a typical 12-hour shift, Kent tried to help people suffering from psychosis, schizophrenia, withdrawal, bipolar disorder, and substance-induced paranoia. She connected many of them with counseling and emergency shelter, but they just as often refused her help. Unless they posed an immediate threat to themselves or others, there wasn’t much she could do.
An elderly man with a cane tapped her on the shoulder. “Somebody stole my luggage,” he said, and for a few minutes Kent spoke with him and tried to discern if he had imagined the suitcases or if they had in fact been stolen, both of which seemed plausible. “Let’s see if we can find a security officer,” Kent said, but by then the man no longer seemed focused on the missing suitcases, and instead, he asked the question she got most of all.
“Where’s the closest public bathroom?” he said.
“Oh boy,” she said, before explaining that the one in Union Station was closed, the one in the nearby public park had been fenced off to prevent loitering, the one in the hotel next door had a full-time security guard positioned at the entrance, and the one in the nearby Whole Foods required a receipt as proof of a purchase in the store. The only guaranteed way to protect a space from the homelessness crisis was to limit access, so Union Station had also recently approved a plan to create a ticketed-only area inside the station to restrict public use starting in 2023.
Kent walked outside onto the bus platform, smelled the chemical burn of fentanyl, and followed it through a crowd of about 25 homeless people to a woman who was smoking, pacing and gesticulating at an imaginary audience. A few security officers walked toward the woman, and she moved away and shouted something about the devil. Kent pulled a referral card from her bag, went over to the woman and introduced herself as a clinician.
“What can we do to support you right now?” she asked.
“Nothing,” the woman said. She walked to the other end of the platform, threw a few punches at the air and boarded the next bus.
The job, as Suna understood it, was to drive and keep driving, no matter what else was happening to the city, so the next morning, she pulled up to her first stop at 5:32 a.m. and then made her way along Colfax, stopping every few blocks on her way downtown. Billings Street. Havana Street. Dayton. Downing. Broadway. She finished her first trip and turned around to start again. A woman with an expired bus pass yelled at her in Vietnamese. Two passengers got into an argument over an unsmoked cigarette lying on the floor. Broadway, Downing, Dayton, Havana, Billings. She shifted her eyes back and forth from the rearview mirror to the road as she made her second trip, her third, her fourth, her fifth, until finally she reached the end of the line at 4:15 p.m. and turned around to begin her final trip of the day. She stopped at Decatur station to pick up three women, closed the doors, and began to pull away from the stop.
“Hey!” a man shouted, standing outside at the bus stop. He wore a basketball jersey and a backward cap. He banged on the bus and Suna stopped and opened the door. “Hey!” the man repeated, as he climbed onboard, cursing at her. “What the hell are you doing pulling away? I was standing right there.”
“Watch your language,” she said. “Where’s your bus fare?”
He paid half the fare and then cursed at her again. He walked to the first row of seats, sat down and glared at her.
“What are you staring at?” he yelled. “Go. Drive the damn bus.”
“I’m not your pet,” she said. “You don’t tell me what to do.”
She pulled out from the bus stop and looked away from the rearview mirror toward the mountains. She counted her breaths and tried to think of what her father had said about humanity being a single body of water. She’d dealt with more difficult passengers during the pandemic, including some earlier that same morning, but that was 11 hours and 203 stops ago, and as the passenger continued to rant, she could feel her patience beginning to give way.
“You’re so stupid,” the passenger said, and she ignored him.
“You idiot. You’re just a driver,” he shouted, and she pulled up to an intersection, hit the brakes, and turned back to him. “Why are you calling me names?” she asked. “F-you. F-that. You don’t know a single good word.” She told him to get off the bus or she would call the police. “Go right ahead,” he said, and he leaned back in his seat as she picked up her phone and gave her location to the officer. She hung up, squeezed the steering wheel, and continued driving toward her next stop.
“You dumb ass,” he said. “You bitch.”
“Just shut up!” she shouted. “You can’t talk to me that way.” Her hands were shaking against the wheel and she could feel the months of exhaustion and belittlement and anger and sadness welling up into her eyes, until she knew the one thing she couldn’t do for even a moment longer was to drive. She pulled over to a safe place on the side of the road. She turned off the ignition and put on her hazard lights. She called a supervisor and said that she was done driving for the day, and that she would be back for her next shift in the morning.
She opened the exit door and turned back to the passenger. “Get off,” she said, blinking back tears, pleading this time. He stared back at her and shook his head.
“Fine,” she said, and she stood up from her seat and walked off the bus
The idea that a Police Officer is being tried for murder of an individual who was either under arrest or identified as a suspect is a rare occasion and even rarer – a conviction. This goes back to Rodney King and even earlier when in the 60s during Lady Bird Johnson’s visit to San Francisco, a young black youth in Hunter’s Point that led to riots never led to any investigation into Police violence regarding the death Matthew Johnson, Jr. And that story has been pushed into a multitude of others at the time over the same issues that continue to this day, so what has changed? Well this. But Radley Balko who has written on the subject for decades is less optimistic about what the outcome will mean overall and there is this essay below that also weighs in on the subject.
When police kill people, they are rarely prosecuted and hard to convict
The footage has played multiple times inside the downtown Minneapolis courtroom where Derek Chauvin is on trial for murder, showing George Floyd, a Black man, gasping for air under the White police officers knee.
That video is the centerpiece of the case against Chauvin, which prosecutors emphasized by urging jurors to “believe your eyes.”
But prosecutors face a steep legal challenge in winning a conviction against a police officer. Despite nationwide protests, police are rarely charged when they kill someone on duty. And even when they are, winning convictions is often difficult.
Between 2005 and 2015, more than 1,400 officers were arrested for a violence-related crime committed on duty, according to data tracked by Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University. In 187 of those cases, victims were fatally injured in shootings or from other causes. The officers charged represent a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of police officers working for about 18,000 departments nationwide.
Police charged with committing violent crimes while on duty were convicted more than half the time during that period. In the most serious cases — those involving murder or manslaughter — the conviction rate was lower, hovering around 50 percent.
Chauvin’s case is different from many of the most high-profile police prosecutions in recent memory, in part because it centers on an officer who never fired his gun, experts say.
There are a few reasons it is hard to convict a police officer, according to legal experts and attorneys who have worked on such trials: Police have considerable leeway to use force, can cite their training and are typically trusted by juries and judges.
“The law favors the police, the law as it exists,” said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert in policing.
“Most people, I think, believe that it’s a slam dunk,” Harris said of the case against Chauvin. But he said, “the reality of the law and the legal system is, it’s just not.”
Attorneys who have worked both sides of these cases say they invite heightened scrutiny and raise a host of issues about the authority police have, the force they are allowed to use and the dangers they could confront on the job.
“It’s fundamentally different than handling any other kind of case,” said Neil J. Bruntrager, a St. Louis-based attorney who has represented officers in high-profile cases.
A key element that experts say factors into many of the cases is the Supreme Court’s 1989 Graham v. Connor decision, which found that an officer’s actions must be judged against what a reasonable officer would do in the same situation.
“A police officer can use force, but it has to be justifiable,” Bruntrager said. “And what the Supreme Court has told us is we have to see it through the eyes of the police.”
Officers charged in fatal shootings
According to the Police Crime Database, 130 officers have been charged in a fatal shooting between 2005 and February 2021. About 46 percent of officers whose cases have been adjudicated have been convicted.
Chauvin’s case is unlike thosein key ways, experts say. “It’ll be much harder … for Mr. Chauvin to claim the usual justification of self-defense than it is when there are shooting deaths,” said Kate Levine, a professor at Cardozo Law. “It’s very hard for him to say, ‘I was in fear for my life when I knelt on this man’s neck.’ ”
When police shoot and kill someone, the officers’ descriptions of what they saw and felt — and accounts of the danger facing them or someone else — can be a major part of the defense, experts say.
“In many of the shooting cases, the officer will say, ‘I perceived a threat in the form of reaching for a gun, or an aggressive move towards me,’ ” said Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “It is difficult for the state to disprove the perception of that threat.”
In this case, Harmon said, “there’s not the same kind of ability to claim a perception of a threat.”
Chauvin’s attorney argued in his opening statement that the officers charged in Floyd’s death felt the “growing crowd” at the scene was threatening. But Chauvin’s core defense, as presented in legal filings and his attorney’s remarks in court, appears focused on something else: making a case that he didn’t actually kill Floyd.https://e7a44a9ff57a8c9a8deafd8753241cbf.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Debates over causation have come up in other cases not involving gunfire, including when people die behind bars or after being stunned by Tasers, said Craig B. Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor and director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. In those cases, he said, the argument is often made that “other contributing factors,” such as drugs in someone’s system, played a role.
The invocations of Floyd’s drug use in Chauvin’s trial also echo previous cases in another way, Futterman said.
“One of the standard strategies in the playbook that I’ve seen, when police officers are accused of misconduct, are charged with killing someone, is putting the victim and the victim’s character on trial,” he said.
But it’s unclear how that might play out in an evolving environment, in which attitudes on how police use force have changed, Harmon said.
“One of the things that’s really shifted in the public debate over use of force is that many people think that there’s too much force even against people who committed crimes, and may use drugs, and may have problems in their lives,” Harmon said. “The public tolerance for the argument that the victim of misconduct or victim of police use of force has done something wrong is less broad than it once was.”
Another key shift observers said may impact these cases going forward is the changing way people mayview police officers.
Juries have typically been inclined to trust officers, who come to court with no criminal record and experience testifying, experts and attorneys said. But, they said, recent years might have chipped away at that, due to repeated viral videos of police shootings and other uses of force.
“It’s not an easy place to be in a position where you’re defending police officers who are charged these days,” said Bruntrager, the defense attorney, who represented former officer Jason Stockley in St. Louis and former officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo.
Wilson’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a Black 18-year-old, fueled widespread unrest in 2014 and helped lead to a years-long nationwide focus on how police use force. Before then, Bruntrager said, if police “had any kind of credible defense, people wanted to believe that … police were following the law.”
“Now it is the reverse,” he said. “Now it is a situation where you start out with the idea where people believe police officers are violating the trust.”
But prosecutors still worry about convincing juries to convict on the most serious charges.
When Joseph McMahon, the former Kane County state’s attorney in Illinois, was preparing to try a Chicago police officer for murder, his team contacted other prosecutors who had charged officers — often unsuccessfully.
These prosecutors had spoken to the juries after their cases. Again and again, McMahon said, they reported hearing the same message about the officers from jurors: “‘We were convinced what he did was wrong. But we weren’t convinced what he did was murder.’”
McMahon and his team were preparing a case against Jason Van Dyke, who fatally shot Laquan McDonald, a Black 17-year-old. Video footage of the shooting, which showed the officer firing 16 shots at the teenager, set off intense unrest when it was released in 2015. Van Dyke was charged with murder the same day the video was released.
After speaking to other prosecutors who said jurors in their cases could not bring themselves to convict the officers of murder, McMahon said he had Van Dyke charged with another 16 counts of aggravated battery, one for each gunshot.
“I didn’t want my jury to be faced with an all or nothing decision,” said McMahon, who was named special prosecutor in the case.
If the only option facing jurors involved the word “murder” in it, McMahon said, he was worried one or two jurors might be unwilling to sign off on it. Jurors get instructions about the legal definitions of specific crimes, he said, but people might still walk in with preconceived notions of what murder is and not think an officer’s actions fit the bill.
It wound up being unnecessary, he said. The jury convicted Van Dyke on all counts in 2018, including second-degree murder.
Chauvin, who was fired after Floyd’s death, is charged with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death, and the judge in the case reinstated a third-degree murder charge during jury selection.
Attorneys representing police in controversial use-of-force cases have defended them by saying that they can use force and often have to make split-second decisions in tense, potentially dangerous moments.
Police officers are only human and can get “scared like everyone else” during stressful situations, said Dan Herbert, the Chicago attorney who represented Van Dyke. “The fact of the matter is that the law recognizes that police are allowed to use force, including deadly force, in a number of situations,” he said.
Herbert said it is “probably naive” for the defense in Chauvin’s case to hope it can convince a dozen jurors to vote to acquit.
Instead, Herbert said, Chauvin’s defense will likely aim to “pick off one or two of those jurors and possibly hang the case” by having the jury deadlock. The defense’s best chance heading into the trial, he said, was likely its attempt to break the chain of causation and argue Chauvin didn’t actually kill Floyd.
Prosecutors sought to combat the defense’s claims of an overdose by having Floyd’s girlfriend testify about his struggles with substance abuse, a testimony aimed at establishing his tolerance for opioids.
The defense’s argument on that front could potentially appeal to someone inclined to blame Floyd, rather than the police, for what happened, said Harris, the law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Chauvin’s team doesn’t have much else to work with, he added.
But while the prosecution must convince every juror to vote to convict him, the defense just needs “one juror who feels a little funny about convicting a police officer,” Harris said.
“You have the law leaning in the direction of, give police the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “That seems a difficult thing to do with this video. But if somebody had that inclination, deep down, here’s your way to exercise it.”
For a man in the news business he is one ignorant twat. His exchange with Dr. Sanjay Gupta regarding people walking, running and how dare they, holding hands on the Embarcadero in San Francisco mid lockdown was histrionics at best, paranoia at worst.
Let’s examine some of the bullshit being spouted by old Jakey boy:
Tapper was the first to react to the images from San Francisco, visibly unsettled by the waterfront’s level of activity. Meanwhile, Gupta chuckled wryly and shook his head in apparent disbelief. “First of all, we see a whole bunch of people here who are not distancing,” Tapper said. “They’re holding hands and walking down the street. Normally I’d say bravo, but this is actually kind of enraging. “My dad is turning 80 this month, you know?” Tapper said. “People out there who are millennials or younger and thinking, ‘Well, if you’re 80 years old, it only affects people who are in their 70s and 80s,’ which isn’t true, although obviously the people in their 60s, 70s and 80s are most vulnerable to it. What are you saying? That my 80-year-old dad, therefore, is fair game? “Who the hell are you to be walking around just giving this to old people and you just flippantly dismiss it?” the anchor later asked.
Now for the record Jake does not know these people or their relationships or health status nor does he or to my knowledge his father live in San Francisco. And again while this draconian measure may be overkill there was no lockdown of the city with regards to the shelter in place and if you are healthy should you not exercise in which to maintain said health and holding hands with one’s partner, with consent of course, is exactly your business how? No one should be having sex right now too right Jake? Of course in lockdown what else is there to do. The porn industry is going to clean house, metaphorically, in this situation. And what old people are these people giving their non diagnosed case of Corvid too. If they are sick why are they out at all?
And exactly how does this affect Jake’s father? Are any of these people living with him, catering him and why isn’t Jake doing it? Jake lives in NYC and well then step it up and practice what you preach and never leave your house either, we will be better for it.
And given that Jake is a “journalist” and Dr. Gupta is a Doctor then how come this story from Al Jazeera is not making the rounds. Oh that is right we can’t panic the population if we do.
In China, life returning to normal as coronavirus outbreak slows
Draconian measures, which appear to have quelled the outbreak in China, are gradually being relaxed. by Shawn Yuan Al Jazerra March 17 2020
Chongqing, China – “Look! What a big fish!” Ding Shijiu exclaimed in joy after catching a carp from the lake where he normally goes fishing.
Sitting under a tree full of spring blossoms on a warm day, Ding is finally able to catch up with old friends over a few fishing sessions – something he has been unable to do since the coronavirus pandemic started to sweep across China in January, prompting a major lockdown of cities and provinces across the country.
“The last two months felt surreal and, trust me, I’m almost 70 years old, and I’ve seen a lot of things,” Yang said while pointing at his friends, unable to contain his excitement of seeing them again.
“But we’re all still alive, and I’m just so happy that the worst has passed.
“This is the first time I came back fishing at this lake since Lunar New Year – I’m very happy,” Yang said with a smile, before trying to reel in another fish.
Like many people in China, Yang has spent nearly all of the last two months at home as the central government imposed unprecedented quarantine measures across the country in a drastic bid to contain COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. The central province of Hubei and its capital Wuhan, where the virus was thought to have originated, were completely sealed off.
As the number of COVID-19 cases confirmed overseas daily have surpassed those within China, the draconian measures that appear to have quelled the outbreak domestically – particularly outside Hubei – are gradually being relaxed.
Chongqing, Yang’s hometown bordering Hubei, has had more than 500 confirmed cases since the disease started to spill into the municipality. But now, there have been no cases in the city for several days.
The slowdown is not only in Chongqing. Across the country, 13 out of 34 provinces in China have cleared their remaining cases, and approximately 69,000 of 81,000 confirmed cases have been discharged.
Pressure easing
Even in Hubei, where some 10,000 cases remain, the pressure on front-line medical workers has eased. On March 17, the first batch of nearly 4,000 medical workers who were parachuted into Wuhan to help control the outbreak were able to leave.
With so many provinces having downgraded their emergency response levels, China is slowly – and cautiously – returning to normal life.
Classes are gradually resuming after most students spent the last month or so at home and studying online. In provinces classified as “low risk of infection,” including Guizhou, Qinghai, Tibet and Xinjiang, local governments have allowed educational institutions to resume classes this month.
“I couldn’t really focus while taking courses online, and I can’t afford to waste any more time because the college entrance examination is in a few months,” said Ouyang Yanjiang, a student in Guiyang, referring to the highly competitive national exam that determines which college students can attend. “I’m glad that we are going back to school.”
Meanwhile, factories that were ordered to suspend operations are also starting to pick up their assembly lines after what many small business owners who spoke to Al Jazeera described as something akin to a “near-death experience” for their companies.
According to the latest report released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, in January and February, the peak of the outbreak in the country, the industrial output of the world’s second-largest economy plummeted to the lowest point since 1998, and the unemployment rate soared to more than 6 percent, the highest on record.
The suspension has pushed many businesses to near-bankruptcy, but as the quarantine measures have been loosened, many are preparing for a rebound in production.
Cities that have a high density of manufacturing industry, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the south, are organising their employees’ return to work and pushing for the resumption of long-suspended business.
For example, the production line of Woniu, a Guangzhou-based kitchenware factory, came to a halt on January 20 – the day the government confirmed human transmission of the virus.
The head of the factory told Al Jazeera that, with their income near zero for the last two months, they had been on the brink of closing down the facility for good. But on March 9, their proposal to reopen was accepted by the government, and they are now back in business.
“It’s still high pressure to just break even, but at least we are now back to work,” Liu Lufei told Al Jazeera over a chat session on Taobao, the online shopping site under Alibaba. “Dear God, that was a difficult time.”
The harsh toll the outbreak took on people’s lives also appears to be easing.
Chengdu, famous for its hotpots and foodie culture, now has only a dozen cases remaining and the provincial government has said no new ones have been detected over the past three weeks.
That has allowed a gradual reopening of restaurants, although people remain cautious.
In videos shared online, restaurant patrons line up in front of the city’s many hotpot restaurants – wearing masks and keeping a safe distance from each other.
During the peak of the coronavirus outbreak, residents of Chengdu told Al Jazeera that the first thing they planned to do when the emergency ended was to go to a restaurant, “eating hotpots with friends and family”.
For a city whose soul is “hotpot flavoured”, as some playfully describe it, the reopening of Chengdu’s hotpot restaurants gives residents an almost unparalleled reassurance that the worst of the outbreak has indeed passed.
“We are only allowed to accept 50 percent of our restaurant’s maximum capacity for dine-in guests, and that’s the rule for all restaurants in Sichuan (the surrounding province),” Xiao Ma, a waiter at Shudaxia, a famous hotpot restaurant in Chengdu, said. “But in the last few days, we have been hitting that line almost non-stop.”
“People’s taste buds have been pent up for too long,” Ma jokingly said. Travel gradually being allowed
Apart from dining out, people are also gradually regaining their ability to travel. Many provinces and cities have steadily resumed their public transportation, including inter-provincial long-distance buses that were suspended across the country days after Wuhan was sealed off on January 23.
Even in Hubei, the provincial epidemic prevention and control command has allowed “low and middle risk” areas, such as Xianning and Yichang, to begin operating public transport again
News coverage of the outbreak has also eased. In late January and February, it was difficult to turn on a television or use a mobile phone without constantly being exposed to news about the coronavirus – but with the epicentre shifting to Europe, many entertainment shows are reappearing on Chinese TV.
“Now I’m able to watch something on TV that is not about coronavirus, and that was unimaginable last month,” Zeng Yunru, a Wuhan resident, said. “It’s funny that all of us seemed to have forgotten what our life was like before the virus.”
Barbershops reopening, parks welcoming tourists again, migrant workers making their way back to their jobs – the calamity that disrupted China’s society so completely seems to be receding steadily.
As life begins to return to normalcy, however, experts worry that there is still an underlying risk. There are worries that as soon as the expansive quarantine measures are lifted, China will be a hit by a second wave of infection, especially as the coronavirus is now a global pandemic and imported cases outnumber local ones.
China reported only one new domestic coronavirus case on Monday, in Hubei. Twenty other cases were of travellers arriving from overseas. “I don’t think anyone is saying the outbreak is over – only the worst seems to be over,” Zeng said when asked about her concerns. “What we can do is still exercising social distancing and slowly driving our lives back to normal.”
There is the reality, curtailing travel, following a protocol and yes that means getting tested, early and getting isolated from others, and still following said protocol for the next few months as we ease back into a level of “control.”
Today I went to Home Depot where they were only allowing 50 customers at a time, the same for BJ’s Wholesale and the panic buying there demonstrated a great deal of largely poor and faces of color stocking up on water, toilet paper and cleaning items. There is no logic or sense in all of this. I bought my foaming bleach bath cleaner and some other minor hardware and went to Bed Bath and Beyond to get bags for my Miele and in turn saw shelves in utter disarray and more evidence of panic shopping. Really this is not helping anyone and what is the point? Are we shutting down the pipeline of transportation?
And here is where a rational head and strong leader would emerge but again watch CNN and the Cuomo brothers debate who Mother loved best, Jake Tapper become histrionic and hysterical scolds and listen to fear mongers as they do little to actually establish calm and reassurance that this is all going to be controlled as long as we have some cooperation and compliance with restrictions that include unnecessary travel, large gatherings, staying home if sick and getting medical care asap and that testing will soon be available on a large scale. But nope. Crickets or as I call that Ethan. (I name idiotic behaviors after people I know as a private joke)
We again have a disparate cohort of Governors and Mayors jockeying for the biggest dick and in turn coming up with one shitty idea after another that ensures more panic, builds fear and creates the hoarding mentality including buying guns. Again I have said that this will not end well.
I heard that in San Francisco those who make 100K or under are struggling and considered low income. Can I say so fucking what? Seriously this is your bed and you can make it with Frette sheets or not. Where this income discrepancy matters is to the working class professionals and working poor that do the heavy lifting in the region. These are the Teachers, the Bus Drivers, the Maintenance workers and all the service staff that drive the trains to keep their latte’s hot and their craft cocktails cold. I can see why they are keen in the Valley to get those robots up and running soon, cheap, obedient and always available. Yes that is why they love AI as slave labor takes on new meaning. And yes slave labor still exists it is just rebranded and called forced labor and that is the real problem with regards to human trafficking not just the sex industry.
And labor issues define the American economy and in turn the issue surrounding Immigration. To be frank a reduction in immigration contributes to this from the low paying sector with regards to staffing restaurants but it includes finding school bus workers, support aids in schools and hospitals; And that too expands into Nurses, Teachers to Bus Drivers and other professions that require education, licensing, training and certification that costs money and places them into the idea that these are middle class jobs and elevate them to supposedly a better quality of life on the rung of life’s ladder. No they are now the working poor and the poor are just poor and they are those cab drivers, bussers, cooks, cleaners and others relegated to the invisible sides of service providers.
Nashville is having massive problems with the latter as that is the biggest driver of the community when it comes to generating money, the largest employer however is Vanderbilt in the private sector and the largest in the public sector is the Municipal Government of Nashville which includes Teachers, Police Officers, Parks etc. In other words all those jobs that enable a city to run efficiently and that may be why Nashville was listed as 111th worst run city by WalletHub.
This was in the Tennessean and the only thing that shocked me was that the median wage has risen and that has to be incorrect as wages are utterly stagnant here and no one in the city has gotten any rises due to the 35K deficit and there is no imperative to raise service gig ones past the minimum as that is a major issue here and across the country regarding costs and profit in a low margin industry as hospitality, and lastly the lack of education and credentials across the city enable wages to remain low. So I am simply guessing that this increase is due to an uptick in private sector jobs that are related to the medical and entertainment executive gigs that are the white collar jobs here. What about your city? Where do you stand or fall in line with the reality of being working poor?
What does it cost to live comfortably in Nashville? Sandy Mazza, Nashville Tennessean Published July 24, 2018
With 50 percent of Millennials living from paycheck to paycheck, owning a home is a daunting financial commitment. Your new property comes complete with a load of maintenance costs, taxes and bills. So how do you know you if you’re financially ready
Nashville’s tourism and development explosion hasn’t been easy on wallets.
The annual price of living comfortably in Music City soared to $80,548 this year, according to a new analysis by personal finance management website GoBankingRates.com.
Nashville, the priciest city in the state, is home to Tennessee’s most expensive real estate values. It costs an average of $745,800 for a home in the city’s most expensive 37215 ZIP code, including Green Hills and Forest Hills addresses.
For average residents, the cost of living has skyrocketed since last year by nearly 15 percent. In 2017, GoBankingRates.com estimated that residents should earn at least $70,150 annually.
Actual median household income lags far behind, at $49,891.
In contrast, the national median income is $55,300, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
GoBankingRates.com surveyed residents in the 50 largest U.S. cities to estimate monthly living costs for mortgages and rents, car payments, groceries, clothing and household expenses.
The price of living in Nashville was found to be higher than in New Orleans. There, residents earn a median income of just $37,488 but need $70,413 to be comfortable.
Here are how other cities compared:
Minneapolis median income: $52,611. Cost of living: $77,512.
Portland, Oregon, median income: $58,423. Cost of living: $79,397.
Raleigh, North Carolina, median income: $58,641. Cost of living: $69,656.
Philadelphia median income: $39,770. Cost of living: $73,005.
San Francisco median income: $87,101. Cost of living: $123,268.
Washington, D.C., median income $72,935. Cost of living: $90,811.
The only city where residents earned more than the estimated cost of living was in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Average annual income there was $67,719, while residents needed $67,568 to live comfortably.
But costs are rising quickly in Virginia Beach, too. The city was identified as one of the top 20 cities with the fastest-rising costs of living in June. Topping that list are Colorado Springs, Colorado; Austin, Texas; and Columbus, Ohio.
Real jobs need real wages and the reality this is larger scale problem than those in the “it” cities. It is everywhere and why the concentration of population may end up confined to eight states. There is some density for you. Why Real Wages Still Aren’t Rising
By Jared Bernstein Mr. Bernstein is an economist and a former adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. New York Times Opinion July 18, 2018
The United States labor market is closing in on full employment in an economic expansion that just began its 10th year, and yet the real hourly wage for the working class has been essentially flat for two years running. Why is that?
Economists ask this question every month when the government reports labor statistics. We repeatedly get solid job growth and lower unemployment, but not much to show for wages. Part of that has to do with inflation, productivity and remaining slack in the labor market.
But stagnant wages for factory workers and non-managers in the service sector — together they represent 82 percent of the labor force — is mainly the outcome of a long power struggle that workers are losing. Even at a time of low unemployment, their bargaining power is feeble, the weakest I’ve seen in decades. Hostile institutions — the Trump administration, the courts, the corporate sector — are limiting their avenues for demanding higher pay.
Looking at the historical relationship between working-class wages and unemployment, wage growth should be rising about a percentage point faster than it is right now. In June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, wages were growing at a yearly rate of 2.7 percent before inflation.
While wages have failed to accelerate, consumer prices have climbed. In 2015, inflation was close to zero. When price growth is zero, a dollar extra in your paycheck means a dollar more real purchasing power. Real hourly pay grew at a healthy pace of about 2 percent that year.
But price growth is back to more normal levels now. Over the past year, for example, consumer price inflation was 2.9 percent, just about the same rate as hourly pay. Data released on Tuesday show that real weekly earnings for full-time, middle-wage workers hasn’t grown at all since early 2017.
Barring an unforeseen shock to the system, I expect the jobless rate to continue to fall, probably to rates we haven’t seen since the 1960s. The Federal Reserve forecasts unemployment of 3.5 percent by the end of this year.
Unemployment at such a low level should force up wages, but it may not be enough to generate consistent, real gains.
That’s because the trade war may push inflation higher, so it will take faster nominal wage growth to keep pace with prices. Thus far, the impact of the tariffs has been minimal, because of the small share of imports affected, and because “final products”— things that consumers buy versus intermediate materials used for production — have thus far been spared. But if President Trump follows through on his threat to place 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of imports from China, including many consumer goods, prices could get a nudge.
Even before the trade war, the Federal Reserve was well into its campaign to raise the benchmark interest rate it controls, and it has suggested it may raise rates a bit more quickly than previously planned. Higher rates are intended to cool down the hot labor market, and this too could dampen the pace of wage growth.
G.D.P. has sped up and may clock in at around 4 percent in the second quarter of this year, but not enough of that growth is reaching workers. This is, of course, the defining characteristic of high inequality. Since the early 1980s, G.D.P. growth has failed to consistently increase working-class incomes.
Still, in earlier periods, tight labor markets were able to deal a blow to inequality. The last time unemployment was at 4 percent, in the latter 1990s, the share of national income going to paychecks was 3 percentage points higher than it is today. In other words, even with the economy now near full employment, profits are squeezing paychecks.
Slow productivity growth is another constraint on wages. When companies are able to produce more efficiently, they can absorb higher labor costs without sacrificing profit margins. But such gains have been elusive in this recovery, so businesses are increasing profits at labor’s expense.
More than ever, the dynamics of this old-fashioned power struggle between labor and capital strongly favor corporations, employers and those whose income derives from stock portfolios rather than paychecks.
This is evident in the large, permanent corporate tax cuts versus the small, temporary middle-class cuts that were passed at the end of last year. It’s evident in the recent Supreme Court case that threatens the survival of the one unionized segment of labor — public workers — that still has some real clout.
It’s evident in the increased concentration of companies and their unchecked ability to collude against workers, through anti-poaching and mandatory arbitration agreements that preclude worker-based class actions. And it’s evident in a federal government that refuses to consider improved labor standards like higher minimum wages and updated overtime rules.
Even if workers’ real wages do pick up, their gains may be too short-lived to make a lasting difference. The next recession is lurking out there, and when it hits, whatever gains American workers were able to wring out of the economic expansion will be lost to the long-term weakness of their bargaining clout. Workers’ paychecks reflect workers’ power, and they are both much too weak.
Irony or by intent that the Nashville NFL Team is called the Titans. As I have said in numerous posts the odd conundrum that exists living in the buckle of the belt of the Bible. The amount of money generated by tourism and booze is not lost all in the shadow of Churches. The amount of Churches rival any Starbucks for their presence on every corner and the rising tide of Opioid addiction while struggling once again to allow Medical Marijuana and sale of wine on Sundays.
Then you have the designation of the “It” City best perpetuated by the starfucking former Mayor who did more than that with her “bodyguard.” Then we have serious sports hysteria with the Predators and the push for Soccer as again sports is the drug we need to generate money and in turn build the City reputation all while ignoring housing and affordability via wages and job security in a state that is right to work. Funny how sports teams all have unions and representation to secure their jobs.
Of course the public infrastructure system is horrific, from buses to sidewalks/crosswalks to a public transit system that is being sent to the 20% or so who vote in any election and that has set this city on a tear debating the value of such. Add to this a public school system that in debt with little explanation or justification from the Director of Schools who is so busy hiring crony’s and in turn firing them or doing whatever it takes to prove that notion of the Carpetbagger.
Then you have the medical industry that dominates the city but the public hospital is on life support. And the health and overall wellness as well as possessing health insurance is again a contradiction. Those who are healthy and less in need possess insurance and that is linked to again Education and Employment, which only 40% possess such jobs that enable this. The songs sung in Honky Tonk’s ring of sad times, bad times, good times, drunk times is another oxymoron with 53% of the population Evangelical. I find that the songs they sing similar be they in the pews or at bar stools very as they very much explain the endless martyrdom and oppressiveness akin to a veil over a Bride’s face; One is never sure if that is to either hide her fear or shock her groom, either way no one is quite a virgin when it comes to the reality of what waits for you at the end of the line in God’s country.
I often compare Nashville to Seattle but in reality Seattle has always been a bookend to San Francisco and that is the city in which it has always aspired. Nashville’s bookend is Boston, religious, led by cultural mores, surrounded by schools, a sense of import and history and one divided by class and race in the same way Nashville is. It is one’s family, one’s roots and where one is from that dominates the culture. The way one speaks is the moniker for identity and says to those around you who you are and in turn enables those to judge and in turn label you. All of this is the same in the South. It is just again the beverage of choice that marks the difference – Tennessee Whiskey or Irish – the culture of the past is very much the culture of the present.
The West Coast is very much a part of America that has always lived in the moment. Cities in the West are defined by its people and they define the City. What once made San Francisco the city of “hip” is now the City of Tech and the same with Seattle. But they share a liberal leaning that in turn leads to oversharing, overtalking and pearl clutching. The Seattle process marked by endless circle jerking and repeating the same talking points that is marked by the infamous Seattle Freeze. The South too claims to be “nice” or hospitable but that is simply having manners and avoiding eye contact. As for Boston I cannot truly comment as I went once and let’s just say once was enough. I could not tell the difference between the weather and the people – cold with a heavy chill.
Outsiders looking in. West Coast does not tie its identity to teams, they do but not in the way the East and South do. There are few shops that sell Nativist wear that have the city or state name on them and no one I have ever known calls themselves a “Seattleite” or ‘”San Fransiscan” they are simply “from” there. People ask where you went to school as if to determine your value or worth or simply to be curious but I never had any discussion about being an Alumnus of the University of Washington in the same ways they do in other parts of the country. Identity comes from your team, from your school, from your family line and the church you belong. Truly when it comes to looking at why our country is divided I think you need to simply look at the city and the history and the culture. They are more homogeneous, parochial and conservative than you are led to believe. Most people in America are very provincial and that is the basic foundation of the American dream but as that dream becomes more tenuous and more fragile it explains why we all hate each other in ways that are like game day. They are the enemy, they want to win, you want to win and you will do it at great cost as no one wants to be the loser. All of it is much like sports, run by rich white men who make sure the players do what they want when they want and if they take a knee be forewarned that they may Tonya Harding you to the other.
Welcome to the clash of the Titans. It’s game day everyday in America and we are always on offense or defense. It explains the brain injuries as how else can you stop playing the game.
East-West Culture Clash? Boston, San Francisco See Happiness Differently
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed up at a meeting with Wall Street investors in May wearing a hoodie, his sartorial choice sparked a flurry of headlines contrasting Silicon Valley’s laid-back culture with the East Coast’s insistence on formality.
Now, new research finds that this West Coast-East Coast culture clash isn’t just media stereotyping. In fact, people living in the east coast city of Boston closely link their overall life satisfaction with how content they are with their own social status. In San Francisco, residents don’t make the same connection, reflecting a more individualistic, free-to-be-me culture.
“Our ideas about who we are and how we should feel are shaped in quite dramatic ways by our local environment,” said study researcher Victoria Plaut, a social and cultural psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. Broadly speaking, Plaut told LiveScience, the stereotypes are true: “If you examine the local world, you’ll find that the East is more old and established, and the West is more new and free.”
A tale of two cities
Plaut and her colleagues are interested in how interactions between a person’s environment and their own individual characteristics affect their well-being. While your own personality, education, finances and relationships all make a difference in how happy you are, Plaut said, “they might matter in different ways in different places.” [7 Things That Will Make You Happy]
The researchers wanted to go in-depth, so they picked two cities that are similar on many levels but differ in historical and cultural ways. Boston and San Francisco are both waterfront, politically liberal cities with similar economies and lots of well-educated residents, Plaut said. But while Puritans founded Boston in 1630, San Francisco didn’t boom until the gold rush era of the 1840s, when thousands of hopeful miners flooded California, hoping to get rich quickly.
Even today, the makeup of the cities is different. About 60 percent of Bostonians are natives of Massachusetts, and only 16 percent of city residents are originally from other countries. In San Francisco, 38 percent of residents originally come from California. Nearly a third of San Franciscans are foreign-born.
Tradition vs. freedom
The attitude differences between the Boston metro area and the San Francisco Bay Area could be summed up in the marketing copy, or viewbooks, of the regions’ prominent universities, Plaut and her colleagues wrote online Sept. 13 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Stanford University in California opens its 2009 viewbook with the words, “The wind of freedom blows,” and refers to “forward-looking, forward-thinking people” looking for “the freedom to be themselves.”
Harvard University, on the other hand, opened its 2008 and 2009 viewbook by discussing the school’s “tradition of excellence” since 1636 and talking up the community of students and faculty.
The researchers wanted to find out if this freedom versus tradition schism was widespread in each metro area. First, they surveyed an online sample of Bostonians and San Franciscans, asking them their own perceptions of social norms in their cities. They found Bostonians perceived the culture in Boston to be much more rigid than San Franciscans viewed Bay Area norms.
“Bostonians are more likely than San Franciscans to believe that there are clear expectations for how people should behave in their city,” Plaut said. “Whereas San Franciscans are more likely than Bostonians to believe that in their areas people have the freedom to go their own way.”
Next, the researchers analyzed the “cultural products” of each city — newspaper headlines and the websites of hospitals and venture capital firms. (Health care and venture capital are major industries in both cities.) They found that the Boston Globe refers more often to communities and groups than the San Francisco Chronicle, which favors stories about innovation, creativity and notable individuals. While the Globe might lead with a headline like, “Church Struggles to Keep Its Voice,” the Chronicle might go with “Wheelchair Athlete Sets High Goals.”
Likewise, Boston venture capital firms were more likely to tout their reputation and experience, while San Francisco firms emphasized their pioneering spirit. Accel, a San Francisco firm, epitomized this attitude with marketing copy like, “We partner with entrepreneurs around the world who have unique, breakthrough ideas and the courage to be first.”
Even local hospitals reflected their city attitude. Boston hospitals tried to lure patients with a focus on their facilities, skilled community of physicians and long histories. San Francisco hospitals were more likely to mention alternative medicine and individual patient empowerment.
Happiness differences
Next, Plaut and her colleagues looked beyond the marketing patter to the city residents themselves. They surveyed 3,485 Boston and San Francisco residents about their satisfaction with their finances, family, community, education and work, as well as their overall satisfaction with themselves. In Boston, overall satisfaction was contingent on satisfaction with all five of these factors, while in San Francisco, only work satisfaction was correlated with overall satisfaction.
In another survey, the researchers asked 403 riders of public transportation in Boston (the MBTA) and San Francisco (CalTrain) questions about things that made them happy(daily uplifts) and daily hassles. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]
They found that Bostonians are at their happiest when relieved of daily hassles, especially those related to family and work relations — again emphasizing the community-based nature of the city, Plaut said. In San Francisco, happiness was more closely tied to the number of everyday uplifting experiences a person had.
“The bottom line is that in Boston, people feel the social pressure more than in San Francisco,” Plaut said.
The findings don’t suggest that every Bostonian loves tradition and community while San Franciscans are all wild and free creative types, Plaut said. The differences are on a citywide scale, not an individual one. Nor does the study suggest that one city is happier than the other, just that residents of each city might find their happiness in different ways.
The trend is likely driven both by the cities’ history and natives as well as by outsiders drawn by each town’s reputation, Plaut said.
The findings are useful for understanding how cross-regional interactions — like Zuckerberg’s hoodie incident — can go wrong, Plaut said. They may also matter to businesses trying to break into new markets or move employees from one city to another. Transferring to a city that doesn’t share your values can be very disorienting, Plaut said.
“That can even cause unhappiness and anxiety. It can cause people to experience a lack of belongingness,” she said. “Understanding the source of that disorientation is an important first step in addressing it.”
I just returned from my pot tour of San Francisco, city I lived in for a decade but have not truly spent any time in that same frame of time, so to return to the City and to see an entire city undergo gentrification to the level San Francisco has it was interesting in a way that when asked about how I like Nashville and respond, “It’s interesting” is a phrase that means I am unsure of what I mean or what to say.
I am not a nostalgic individual and I very much live in the moment. During my walks I found my old apartment and the area is virtually untouched for a small radius and then not. I walked the same paths I had with my beautiful pup and realized that same journey would be quite different today given the amount of buildings and living spaces crowding out old industrial businesses and shoving against tightly knit older units. Ferry Plaza is the same and more vibrant and alive than before; However, the Tenderloin despite it all is still resistant to the emerging change and my favorite dive The Phoenix Hotel still stands surrounded by junkies and homeless where daily the sidewalk is hosed down and the street cleaned for needles but even too that seemed out of place in this ever changing city. The Hotel Management has changed but the ambiance is still trashy chic but as I walked down Eddy and toured the hood, I stepped over both human and dog shit and passed one after another individual whose torments have long won the battle for their soul and mind. And as they thrash and wretch in pain a Mercedes pulls out of a garage and pulls away as if to say this is the new City and begone with the old. And this is a City that its entire existence is change but spare change is seemingly all that is offered to the endless requests for food, money, aid. It is painful to watch but that balm of CBD aids in calming the spirit.
On Sunday sitting in Blue Bottle Coffee at the Mint I sat next to the new San Franciscan who took endless photos of their food to obviously post on Social Media while talking with words largely comprised of superlatives and vacuous thoughts that comprised conversation. It was the norm that led me to finally acknowledge I am old and truly don’t give a flying fuck about Millennial’s. These group are truly the most self indulgent ignorant shits that have enabled guns, drugs and other social issues to magnify in their pursuit of wealth. For this generation they make YUPPIES (my cohort) seem utterly boring in their duplicity of their social class that they wrapped in irony and satire but was just that a replication of their own personal history and culture. This is the self entitled indulgent class that defines spoiled
I use the world “culture” as it defines ones tastes, belief system and social identification. It enables a group think and a sense of belonging that enables one to find one’s tribe and sense of self. Funny how that worked out that out of that came two individuals who defined a generation of boomers – Michelle and Barack Obama – and yet I cannot think of two more stronger people that show the power of identity that is rooted in diversity that frankly I don’t see today. The lines and divisions are more stratified and defined in ways that my generation fought to erase. Know your place and that place is a safe place with trigger words and stifled speech, a collapse of free press, a democracy under threat and wealth and money are the only idols we worship. Take a look in the mirror MeMe’s and ask yourself if you know who you are and frankly I doubt you could truly answer the question as the answer would be, “I’m different like everyone else.”
I turn to the kids, the children of Parkland to lead us. We need someone as clearly we have no one as I made this observation when in San Francisco when buying a newspaper the clerk queried if there was anyone running our Government and my response was a definitive no.
San Francisco is being run by adult children and currently the dorm like residences they are now creating, another version of the cell blocks that comprised the last fad of two years ago and the weird WeWork domiciles that are some hybrid of the factories we hear about in Asia where you live where you work and make 30 bucks a day until it burns down. The New York Times in a desperate attempt to generate some readers to their paper have one series after another about this to the point I feel that they forget that social news is not news and their groundbreaking work is what brings eyes to page, the narcissism of the MEME generation despite the pandering will not change the fact that these morons do not read – anything. Not true they read social media and hence that makes it easier for anyone with an agenda to inform and misinform without recourse. I do also think that this is the first generation of testing bots and it shows as their ability to critically think and analyze is nearly non-existent and why they have no imagination other that duplication and repetition. How may Apps are there that largely do the same thing – walk your dog, clean your house, run errands or have someone drive you in their car?
What I did find interesting is that San Francisco has now priced itself out of its own marketplace. You can only charge outlandish rents when salaries are sufficient to cover said rents, hence the dorms, but then one day you want to grow up and then where do you go? The suburbs and the push for transit in the Bay Area show that it is again an issue but that housing prices to even purchase are so absurd that at one point you ask if that 3M shack that will cost millions in upkeep is going to be worth it. And the rich like to stay that way and when salaries cut into profits finding ways to reduce them means relocation and hence the Seattle push until it too hit the ceiling means that the heartland is the new horizon it appears but as we know appearances are deceiving.
I will always have memories of San Francisco, some fond, some not, but that is what comprises a decade of living. I don’t think I will hit that mark here in Nashville and right now if I hit three years and can find even a small percentage of good ones I will be relieved. I will know that Nashville has hit peak idiocy when we start dorm housing. We have cell blocks coming across the street which I don’t think will be replicated elsewhere as frankly we are hitting the wall here with housing in ways that are not reflecting the reality here with jobs and incomes. There is ASperations and DESperation that are the two major factors of what it is like to live in the South.
Where will the next Silicon Valley be? Where else? Silicon Valley its not going anywhere as that requires work and stuff and the MEME class are not doing that anytime soon.
Silicon Valley Is Over, Says Silicon Valley
Kevin Roose THE SHIFT THE NEW YORK TIMES MARCH 4, 2018
“Oh my god, this is so cute!”
Robin Li, an investor with the San Francisco venture capital firm GGV Capital, was standing in the lobby of the Madison building in downtown Detroit. Built in 1917 as a theater and refurbished several years ago as a tech co-working space, the Madison checks all of the aesthetic boxes of hipsterdom: reclaimed wood, exposed brick walls, pour-over coffee served by tattooed baristas.
“This is nicer than San Francisco,” Ms. Li concluded.
Last month, I accompanied Ms. Li and roughly a dozen other venture capitalists on a three-day bus trip through the Midwest, with stops in Youngstown and Akron, Ohio; Detroit and Flint, Mich.; and South Bend, Ind. The trip, which took place on a luxury bus outfitted with a supply of vegan doughnuts and coal-infused kombucha, was known as the “Comeback Cities Tour.”
It was pitched as a kind of Rust Belt safari — a chance for Silicon Valley investors to meet local officials and look for promising start-ups in overlooked areas of the country. Photo The tour making a stop in Youngstown, Ohio. From left, Mayor Jamael Tito Brown of Youngstown and Mayor William Franklin of Warren, Ohio, with Mr. Ryan. Credit Andrew Spear for The New York Times
But a funny thing happened: By the end of the tour, the coastal elites had caught the heartland bug. Several used Zillow, the real estate app, to gawk at the availability of cheap homes in cities like Detroit and South Bend and fantasize about relocating there. They marveled at how even old-line manufacturing cities now offer a convincing simulacrum of coastal life, complete with artisanal soap stores and farm-to-table restaurants.
“If it weren’t for my kids, I’d totally move,” said Cyan Banister, a partner at Founders Fund. “This could be a really powerful ecosystem.” Continue reading the main story Related Coverage
These investors aren’t alone. In recent months, a growing number of tech leaders have been flirting with the idea of leaving Silicon Valley. Some cite the exorbitant cost of living in San Francisco and its suburbs, where even a million-dollar salary can feel middle class. Others complain about local criticism of the tech industry and a left-wing echo chamber that stifles opposing views. And yet others feel that better innovation is happening elsewhere.
“I’m a little over San Francisco,” said Patrick McKenna, the founder of High Ridge Venture Partners who was also on the bus tour. “It’s so expensive, it’s so congested, and frankly, you also see opportunities in other places.”
Mr. McKenna, who owns a house in Miami in addition to his home in San Francisco, told me that his travels outside the Bay Area had opened his eyes to a world beyond the tech bubble.
“Every single person in San Francisco is talking about the same things, whether it’s ‘I hate Trump’ or ‘I’m going to do blockchain and Bitcoin,’” he said. “It’s the worst part of the social network.”
The tour through the Midwest was organized by Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat who represents northeastern Ohio. Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, came along for the ride, as did J. D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy.” (Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist who now seems to magically appear every time the words “Midwest” and “manufacturing” are spoken aloud, has also been leading his own whistle-stop tours of the region.)
Recently, Peter Thiel, the President Trump-supporting billionaire investor and Facebook board member, became Silicon Valley’s highest-profile defector when he reportedly told people close to him that he was moving to Los Angeles full-time, and relocating his personal investment funds there. (Founders Fund and Mithril Capital, two other firms started by Mr. Thiel, will remain in the Bay Area.) Mr. Thiel reportedly considered San Francisco’s progressive culture “toxic,” and sought out a city with more intellectual diversity.
Mr. Thiel’s criticisms were echoed by Michael Moritz, the billionaire founder of Sequoia Capital. In a recent Financial Times op-ed, Mr. Moritz argued that Silicon Valley had become slow and spoiled by its success, and that “soul-sapping discussions” about politics and social injustice had distracted tech companies from the work of innovation.
Complaints about Silicon Valley insularity are as old as the Valley itself. Jim Clark, the co-founder of Netscape, famously decamped for Florida during the first dot-com era, complaining about high taxes and expensive real estate. Steve Case, the founder of AOL, has pledged to invest mostly in start-ups outside the Bay Area, saying that “we’ve probably hit peak Silicon Valley.”
But even among those who enjoy living in the Bay Area, and can afford to do so comfortably, there’s a feeling that success has gone to the tech industry’s head.
“Some of the engineers in the Valley have the biggest egos known to humankind,” Mr. Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman, said during a round-table discussion with officials in Youngstown. “If they don’t have their coffee and breakfast and dry cleaning, they want to go somewhere else. Whereas here, people are hungry.”
This isn’t a full-blown exodus yet. But in the last three months of 2017, San Francisco lost more residents to outward migration than any other city in the country, according to data from Redfin, the real estate website. A recent survey by Edelman, the public relations firm, found that 49 percent of Bay Area residents, and 58 percent of Bay Area millennials, were considering moving away. And a sharp increase in people moving out of the Bay Area has led to a shortage of moving vans. (According to local news reports, renting a U-Haul for a one-way trip from San Jose to Las Vegas now costs roughly $2,000, compared with just $100 for a truck going the other direction.)
For both investors and rank-and-file workers, one appeal of noncoastal cities is the obvious cost savings. It’s increasingly difficult to justify doling out steep salaries and lavish perks demanded by engineers in the Bay Area, when programmers in other cities can be had for as little as $50,000 a year. (An entry-level engineer at Facebook or Google might command triple or quadruple that amount.)
When you invest in a San Francisco start-up, “you’re basically paying landlords, Twilio, and Amazon Web Services,” said Ms. Bannister of Founders Fund, referring to the companies that provide start-ups with messaging services and data hosting.
Granted, California still has its perks. Venture capital investment is still largely concentrated on the West Coast, as are the clusters of talented computer scientists who emerge from prestigious schools like Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. Despite the existence of tools like Slack, which make remote work easier, many tech workers feel it’s still an advantage to be close to the center of the action.
But the region’s advantages may be eroding. Google, Facebook and other large tech companies have recently opened offices in cities like Boulder, Colo. and Boston, hoping to attract new talent as well as accommodating requests from existing employees looking to move elsewhere. And the hot demand for engineers in areas like artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles has led companies to expand their presence near research universities, in cities like Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor. Then there is HQ2, Amazon’s much-ballyhooed search for a second headquarters, which seems to have convinced some tech executives that cities between the coasts may be viable alternatives.
Venture capitalists, who recognize a bargain when they see one, have already begun scouring the Midwest. Mr. Case and Mr. Vance recently amassed a $150 million fund called “Rise of the Rest.” The fund, which was backed by tech luminaries including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Alphabet, will invest in start-ups throughout the region.
But it’s not just about making money. It’s about social comfort, too. Tech companies are more popular in noncoastal states than in their own backyards, where the industry’s effect on housing prices and traffic congestion is more acutely felt. Most large tech companies still rate highly in national opinion surveys, but only 62 percent of Californians say they trust the tech industry, and just 37 percent trust social media companies, according to the Edelman survey. So you can start to understand the appeal of a friendlier environment.
During the Akron stop of the bus trip, while the Silicon Valley investors mingled with local officials over a dinner spread of vegan polenta pizza and barbecue sliders, Mr. McKenna, the San Francisco venture capitalist, told me that he felt a difference in people’s attitudes in cities like these, where the tech industry’s success is still seen as something to celebrate.
“People want to be in places where they’re the hero,” he said.
I had to leave Seattle for reasons I have explained in the last few blog posts but it was also becoming increasingly expensive in which to live and work. The dental reconstruction that while expensive hre is nowhere near the costs there where it would be the equivalent of a small luxury car. The wages for Substitutes were 127 dollars a day and I was at 150 a day with a buy in to cheaper health care. We were unionized and growing up most jobs including Retail, Waitress among other working class gigs from Boeing Manufacturer to Bus Driver were all well represented by Unions. Then tech arrived.
What had been a largely middle class economy, insular and well preserved due to Boeing, Fishing and Timber, Microsoft changed the equation. Then came Amazon and that is a hell of a river in which to fight upstream. It has made the city a corporate one in every sense of the word with about 85% of the city real estate owned and/or managed by Amazon. With that comes a wage war and class war and turf battle that like all things Amazon, they win. Unions were already a thing of the past, Boeing had extorted money from the State to retain the little manufacturing it had. Timber was long gone and smaller in scope and scale and Microsoft was and always be what it is but they used to their advantage the idea of stock options, contract 1099 employees and the infamous H1B1 visas that rule in the tech industry. It should not be shocking that the land of tech and Silicon Valley would be the rival to Seattle when it comes to income inequity.
When I left San Francisco it was on the cusp of the real estate boondoggle and many were in retreat. I saw then the writing on the wall with wealthy tech to the South buying property that was inflated and indebted up north with ease. They had the cash and the banks needed it. It shows now with the mass gentrification and exodus of those who once made San Francisco diverse less so. California has always been a State of confusion when it comes to labor, relying on Immigrants or undocumented workers to pick up the heavy lifting, the film industry for the glamour and the idolization of Tech which truly makes the Golden State gold.
I live in Tennessee, a right to work state. The City of Nashville is desperate to be Atlanta as that is closer in scope and scale. I have no idea what goes on in Atlanta and I doubt anyone in Nashville does either but I do know Tyler Perry has his film industry located there so good enough! But like all things in the South they are obsessed with money. The Chamber of Commerce endlessly repeats the quote or bizarre statement that 100 people a day here as some proclimation that wages can be low as there is tons of competition and in turn people who are willing to work for the federal minimum. And as the hospitality trade rules that is the bare minimum.
The City of Seattle to try to circumvent this changed the minimum wage. In 2015 the wage ordinance went into effect with the idea of gradually increasing wages by January 1, 2018 to $15/hour and higher with adjustments for inflation and some exceptions.
And while there are exceptions for said wage it was fought vigorously by one of the largest most well known Restauranteur, Tom Douglas, as a “job killer.” Funny it now seems insufficient given the current state of affairs. The money from legal marijuana has not been quite the beamoth that it is in Colorado and the revenue generated at this time is about 730 million out of the 42 million needed to run the State. And that may be due to any number of reasons but Seattle does not quite market nor produce nor even tax the weed in the same way. Colorado is successfully using the funds to improve schools and while Seattle now has record number of homeless leading to a crisis point and in turn the amount of homeless children attending public schools in Seattle is equivalent to the same number in New York.
Seattle has always been the bookend to San Francisco and now it can truly say it is the biggest of the two, a dream that Nashville aspires to as well. Our local Business Journal documents each wealthy zip code and area of town with residents net worth as if they are documenting a study on economics. It is hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic. They do this with each construction project and announcement by any business looking to build or add a facility here. I have watched people repeatedly tell me the 100 people a day nonsense, watched multi family units being built at record pace with record rents not commensurate with wages, and in turn more people pushed to the outlying areas relying on cars to transport them to work in the city core adding further congestion to already outdated highways. There is a desperation here that I find tragic and worrisome if this all doesn’t come to fruition. There is just something not right about most of the development as little centers on jobs that demand degrees, education and experience all needed qualities for wage growth. Seattle gets that and their obsession with the public schools and being well educated shows in the numbers, here not so much. Though “bless ’em” they try.
But careful what you wish for. Urban sprawl, low wages, lack of adequate wages, infrastructure issues and of course the real issue – racial strife – will only back door in what neither Seattle nor San Francisco has had to deal with when it comes to race and hence that is also why its rich bitch. And while Atlanta and Miami may be more diverse than the other cities on the map defining top and bottom earners, there is more to the story that would show a clear divide among race and class much like here.
Seattle hits record high for income inequality, now rivals San Francisco
In short, the rich are getting richer in Seattle. The top 20 percent of income earners took home more than half the city’s total income — and the richest saw a $40,000 pay raise in 2016.
The Seattle Times By Gene Balk / FYI Guy Seattle Times staff columnist November 17, 2017
Some records you don’t want to break.
In 2016, Seattle hit an all-time high for a commonly used measure of income inequality, known as the Gini index. And if you’re worried about Seattle turning into the next San Francisco, this won’t set your mind at ease: Last year marks the first time we’ve matched the City by the Bay for this particular statistic.
The U.S. Census Bureau has been calculating the Gini index for every place in the nation since 2006. The index is expressed as a number from 0 to 100, with a higher number indicating a more unequal distribution of household incomes.
For example, a place with perfect equality — if such a place existed — would score 0, meaning every household had the exact same income. Conversely, an index of 100 would mean total inequality — one household earned all the income.
Seattle’s Gini index had always been between 48 and 49, without much change from year to year. And, in fact, it had seemed to be trending slightly downward since 2011.
But in 2016, it shot up to 50.4, a jump of nearly 3 points from 2015. Among the 50 largest U.S. cities, that’s the second-biggest increase, slightly behind Fresno, California.
This also marks the first time Seattle had a Gini index higher than 50. Income inequality here is now on par with San Francisco, with an index of 50.3 last year.
What’s behind the hike in Seattle’s Gini index last year? The answer will surprise no one: The rich got richer.
The average income for the top 20 percent of Seattle households — that’s about 64,000 households — shot up by more than $40,000 last year, hitting $318,000. They took home 53 percent of all the income earned by city residents, up nearly 3 percentage points from 2015.
Meanwhile, the bottom 20 percent of households, along with households in the middle, saw their share of the total income decline.
This may sound like the poor got poorer — or, for that matter, that Seattle’s move toward a $15 minimum wage isn’t helping those households at the bottom. But that’s not what the data show. Household incomes at the bottom remained unchanged last year. There were also slight increases in income for middle-earning households.
The reason income inequality got worse is that the gains made by high-income households were so big that the gap between the rich and everyone else widened.
The situation is hardly unique to Seattle.
“What you’re seeing in Seattle is consistent with what we have seen in this country for virtually the entire period since the 1970s,” said Heidi Shierholz, policy director for the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank.
In the post-World War II period, income inequality was declining. But at some point in the 1970s, wage stagnation set in for lower- and middle-income workers, while the top tier of earners began pulling away from everyone else.
Economists point to a variety of reasons for this. Shierholz believes none is more significant than the decline of unions, and not just because union jobs have higher pay and better benefits.
“When you have a high share of workers who are unionized, that also helps nonunion workers,” she said. “If an employer knows their workers could go to a union job and get better wages, they actually have to improve the wages in their own workplace.”
Shierholz said that improving labor laws and standards, and better enforcement of them, is key to reducing income inequality nationally. Seattle, she noted, has taken one such step at the municipal level by increasing the minimum wage.
She also applauds the city’s ongoing attempt to institute an income tax on high earners. “We’ve seen this rising inequality in pretax income,” Shierholz said, “but as the tax code has become less progressive, it’s increased even further the post-tax inequality.”
Legislation creating the tax was passed by the City Council in July, but several lawsuits have been filed to block its enactment.
With last year’s big increase in its Gini index, Seattle now ranks 18th for income inequality among the 50 largest U.S. cities. That’s a big jump from 2015, when we ranked 31st.
Even so, we’re still far behind the city with the worst income inequality, and a Gini index of 57.5: Miami.
I have watched city after city I have lived in gentrify. First it was Oakland and the improvement were I lived was tied to Ikea. Once it came the rest followed. When Jerry Brown was elected Mayor West Oakland began to change with the change in businesses, small hair salons, restaurants and coffee shops. The conversion of the old Sears building and new mixed use housing also changed the dynamic. East Oakland still to my understanding struggles. But the change made Oakland less affordable and more genial, also more white. The cost of the Bay Area has dramatically changed the composition of both color and income thanks to the tentacles of Silicon Valley.
Then came Seattle and the pirhana of the Amazon and now Seattle is what San Francisco is, diverse by color not by profession. The tech sector has more diversity than one thinks with regards to ethnicity – Indian, Asian ,White and male. There you go.
And now Nashville. I am not sure what the make up is but this is the South and if you are a person of color and there are many colors here, figure out where your kind are and go there. This is not a blue city in a red state it is a pink city in a deep red state. The industries here that headquarter here are two major automotive companies – Bridgestone and Nissan – the rest are home grown businesses – Dollar General, Trucking Businesses, Hospitality Trade, Medical Trade and my personal favorite the Private Prison Industry. The average minimum wage is just that for many employed by these businesses and as a result the median wage has gone above the state average by 10K and is now 57K. It has met the level of wages from the recession of 2008. The peak was in 2007 with 58K . The cost of living however has not and it is estimated that one needs 75K annual income to own a home and live in the Nashville city limits. Hence fewer and fewer do and the congested roads and highways reflect that.
To compare Seattle is peaking at 75K and costs are equivalent to 100K in which to maintain living in the City limits. Seattle, however, has better (not great) public schools, a better infrastructure and a real downtown core with massive activities that are not just booze related. That and the liberal political environment and legal weed enable a community to rely less on minor crime in which to fund resources. That said Seattle has a debtor’s style penalty tied to criminal prosecutions and have had a Police Department under Judicial degree. So Nirvana is still the band.
That said the thriving International District and Central District that was the Black Community for decades had dissipated and in turn moved further South in the County. The cost of this leads to a loss of history and in turn cultural experience that is necessary if we are ever to rid ourselves or at least discourage the racist leanings that are currently on the rise across the country.
Nashville fears public transit and regardless of where one sits on the economic scale the idea of buses, light rail, etc send chills down the spine of many. Some fear they will be pushed out by rising property taxes, some by buy outs and other means to drive ones from their homes. Rising rents and the push to multi units on a single lot also contribute – the “tall skinnies” or coffin boxes that permeate here and in Seattle. And here in Nashville we are finally getting the cell block single units that have been en vogue in Seattle and San Francisco. Density is great if in fact you have a structure in place to manage. Nashville does not. With few sidewalks or crosswalks, minimal bike lanes and no real urban style services to meet the needs as in Grocery Stores, light Hardware, etc you have all hat no cattle as they say.
The push for affordable housing is smoke and mirrors and that crosses the board in Seattle as well. As this from the Nashville Scene mentions the reality behind said projects:
Most of our workforce can’t afford the housing we’re building
The Nashville Business Journal’s Adam Sichko was tweeting about The Pearl, the new development near Watkins Park.
And I laughed, because it’s yet another sleight of hand that people who care about affordable housing in Nashville need to watch. Out here in the real world, when we hear the term “workforce housing,” we think “this must be housing for service workers — waitstaff, hotel workers, the people you need to keep the city up and running, but who notoriously don’t make a lot.
The problem of the server is easy to understand. For a server job to be attractive, the server must make enough at her job to cover her bills and pay her rent and leave her some left over for fun. If she can make, say, $30,000 a year being a server downtown, but she has to pay $12,000 in rent, then a job out in, say, Dickson, where she might make only $26,000 a year, but only has to pay $6,000 a year in rent leaves her ahead.
If service industry people can’t afford to live in Nashville, they can get jobs where they live. And I think this goes without saying, but I’ll say it — with as many chips as we as a city have placed on the tourism industry, losing our service workers would be catastrophic. And we already see hints that this is a looming problem — job fairs going unattended, big “Help Wanted” signs out front of hotels, etc. Service workers literally cannot afford long commutes, and with our thriving suburbs, they don’t have to.
But the “workforce housing” trend isn’t focused on those people. They all use phrases like “teachers” and “firefighters,” and it’s true that Nashville’s pay rates for those professions would allow them to spend $1,000 a month on rent. But those salaries also allow them to go out to Mt. Juliet or Gallatin and get a house for that and commute in. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are teachers who would love to live in town if they could afford it, and we should find ways to make that happen.
But the sleight of hand I’m talking about is pitching these feel-good projects as if they are helping the whole of our workforce, when, really, they’re designed to help a minority of the workforce. And no one’s stepping in to help find housing for the people who make less than them.
Gentrification is a way of pushing in. Getting those with high and stable incomes to move back into the city. Then in turn pushing those out to the suburbs with the dying malls and in turn less desirable commute times all in the name of greener environments. Gosh you can’t have green suburbs? Well you can but to improve the schools, roads, etc you need a tax base that can support the growth and low income, low cost housing does not.
Much of the push back I believe is bound in racism and the reality is that it matters. Like likes like. We don’t want to live next to people who are not like us. We profess the idea but we live in the reality.
Gentrification is sweeping through America. Here are the people fighting back
In Atlanta, a neighborhood is resisting the use of eminent domain, which allows government to take private property for public use
by Cliff Albright UK Guardian Friday 10 November 2017
Walk into the home of Robert and Bertha Darden, and you are immediately surrounded by memories. Like many African American couples who have reached a certain age, the front room of their house is full of photos – of the Dardens in their youth, of their happy children and smiling grandchildren.
Many of the moments reflected in the photos were captured during their 28 years spent in their Atlanta home. In the midst of all of these stands a plaque. “I received this when I retired after 29 years of working for the city of Atlanta,” Mr Dresden says.
He’s an Atlanta man. Beaming with pride, he tells me he had started working for the Atlanta’s sanitation department in 1969, and later transferred to the department of transportation where he remained until his retirement in 1998.
But now the city is aggressively trying to take their house.
The process the city is attempting to use to take ownership of the house is known as “eminent domain” – the power for governmental entities to take private property for public use.
The city claims it needs the house, along with others on the same block in the Peoplestown neighborhood, in order to build a park and pond that will help with street flooding.
Meanwhile, community members suspect the flooding is being used as a pretext to facilitate private development in the neighborhood.
This process is replicated throughout the US. If successful, eminent domain could become the newest tool that local and state governments could use to accelerate the gentrification and displacement that is already affecting low-income black and brown communities.
‘The most powerful tool in the gentrification arsenal’
Eminent domain has a long history in the US and also exists in other countries where it is known by many names including compulsory purchase, compulsory acquisition and, perhaps most appropriately, expropriation.
The US constitution acknowledges the government’s power of eminent domain and imposes two limitations: the taking of property must be for public use, and it must include just compensation. Determinations of what constitutes public use have traditionally been left to each state, and the US supreme court has been increasingly expansive over the years.
In Georgia, land cannot be taken and handed over to private developers to increase revenues. However, land can be taken for a public redevelopment project, such as a facility or park to help deal with flooding issues.
And that is exactly what the city says it intends to do in Peoplestown. According to a press release issued by the city, “Once completed, the neighborhood will have a Japanese garden, gazebos for community gatherings, several detention ponds, and bio retention areas to treat stormwater.”
Tanya Washington, a professor at Georgia State University, lives on the same street as the Dardens, and like them, she is in a legal battle to keep the city from taking her home.
According to Washington, the city’s rationale is problematic because it uses the symptoms of the neighborhood’s systemic neglect to become a reason for displacing families.
“What I’m concerned about is cities trying to use that crumbling infrastructure as a justification for exercising eminent domain because it provides a basis for arguing public necessity,” she says.
Complicating the battle is the fact that cities are given a presumption of public necessity, placing the burden of proof on the homeowner. As a result, the state court hearing the initial case ruled in favor of Atlanta’s government, but Washington and the Dardens are appealing against the decision.
If allowed by the courts, that built-in justification could become the most powerful tool in the gentrification arsenal.
It would allow almost any city to use the legacy of institutional racism and systemic neglect to further advance the displacement of low-income black residents.
In theory, the rationale for using eminent domain could include street flooding, high quantities of lead in city water systems, or even high crime rates in certain neighborhoods.
The latter is not unimaginable: crime actually was part of the justification for the city demolishing all of its public housing.
Atlanta’s decision to get rid of it eventually became a model for other cities. Its use of eminent domain could be next.
When ‘urban renewal’ means pushing black residents out
In the late 1950s, Atlanta embarked on its first attempt at “urban renewal”, which for many people at the time translated to “negro removal”.
Hundreds of homes were demolished by the city, and thousands of black families in three neighborhoods (Summerhill, Peoplestown and Mechanicsville) were separated from each other when three interstates were constructed through the heart of their communities.
The problem worsened in the mid-1960s when the city decided to build a new stadium to house a professional baseball team. A significant portion of the Summerhill neighborhood was wiped away. Whatever sense of community and connection had survived was reduced even further as business left and schools closed.
Decades later, in preparation for the 1996 Olympics, an estimated 30,000 low-income Atlanta residents were displaced from their homes in order to make room for the new Olympic Stadium. Landlords in the area sought to raise rents to take advantage of proximity to the Olympic venues which meant many had no choice but to leave.
In the process, 1,195 public housing units were gone, and by 2000, only 78 of the families from the former public housing were rehoused in the shiny new development – a mere 7% of the pre-Olympics population. Moreover, the project launched a new agenda that ultimately resulted in Atlanta becoming the first US city to completely demolish all of its housing projects, eliminating 17,000 units of public housing.
The Dardens understand these negative side-effects all too well. Such projects tend to place extreme demands on the pre-existing infrastructure, whether in the form of increased traffic or other environmental concerns. Mrs Darden recalls that as the new Olympic Stadium was being constructed, the city had to build a tunnel that could handle water drainage from the stadium.
“The tunnel was supposed to go through Grant Park,” she said, referring to a nearby neighborhood where residents are predominantly white with higher incomes. “But Grant Park residents refused to let them bring the tunnel to that neighborhood, so they stopped it in our back yard.”
As a result, the Dardens and their Peoplestown neighbors say they have had flooding issues ever since Olympic Stadium was built. These issues led to significant flood damage in 2006 and 2012 after heavy rains, and several residents, including the Dardens, eventually sued the city for failing to address the hazard.
Several street drains on their block often become clogged with tree limbs, garbage and other debris. “If the city had just cleaned out the drains the way they should have, the flooding never would have happened.” Instead, ever since 2006 Mr Darden has taken it upon himself to periodically clear the street drains, especially when heavy rain is expected.
One could argue that despite his retirement, at the age of 67 he continues to work for the city more than the city works for him.
‘Why don’t y’all just move back to the country?’’
In 2005, the city of Atlanta proposed the Atlanta Beltline Project: a 6,500-acre ring of parks, open space, light rail transit and mixed-use development along a 22-mile industrial rail line that circles the core of the city.
Given the previous experience with major development projects in the city, the not-for-profit organization Georgia Stand-Up commissioned a study to explore rising home prices in areas adjoining the proposed Beltline path and to offer recommendations to avoid displacement. Even at this early stage, the 2007 report highlighted troubling increases in property values that did not bode well for low-income renters and owners on the city’s south side.
Unfortunately, not enough was done by the city to address those concerns. The project’s affordable housing effort was underfunded, and many of the affordability requirements were either too weak, too temporary or both. The trend towards gentrification increased. A more recent Georgia Tech report shows that prices in neighborhoods bordering the south side of the Beltline increased by 40% from
The Dardens have seen the impact first hand. “Some of our friends were renting, and when it came time to renew their lease, the landlords wouldn’t renew and sold their properties to developers instead,” she said. “Some neighbors say the rents went up so much they couldn’t afford it. It doubled or even tripled. We have a lot of senior citizens on fixed incomes who can’t afford that.”
And it’s not just renters. Her aunt used to come by on Sundays to pick up one of the neighbors who attended the same church. The neighbor lost her house because she couldn’t afford to pay the increasing property taxes.
Mr Darden mentions the house right across the street. “The owner got sick and sold the house. Not sure how much, but a developer bought it, remodeled and just finished it a few months ago. They put it on market for sale, I believe asking $469,000. And that’s just a wood frame house, not even brick like ours.” A house two blocks away recently sold for $515,000. And just a few houses down the street from the Dardens, a house that recently sold for around $100,000 is now listed for around $300,000 after remodeling.
Mrs Darden recalled an experience at a town hall meeting last year. “During the public comments, my husband was speaking about some of the issues, and a new white neighbor who had moved here about a year earlier called out, ‘Why don’t y’all just move back to the country?’”
To the Dardens, the translation was clear. “Get out.”
Not all of the new residents share that attitude. Washington, the professor at Georgia State University, is a relatively new resident of Peoplestown, having moved there in 2011. From her perspective, the main reason she moved there was because she appreciated the neighborhood the way it was and valued her neighbors.
“I love to be able to sit on the porch and talk to some of the older neighbors,” she said. “I wasn’t looking to replace, neutralize or change them.” She respected the neighborhood association that was in existence, and didn’t feel like she needed to start a new one.
But some new residents, particularly white ones, felt differently.
“When folks decide to start their own associations, it sends a message. The imposition of an us versus them, new versus old, resident versus buyer perspective is not healthy for a community,” Washington said.
“It has produced harsh feelings on behalf of long-term residents who feel slighted and disrespected. And it impedes building a common platform and demanding representation of the whole community. Part of the community invites development because they don’t feel threatened by it. Part of the community is scared to death of it because of decades of past experience.”
Such a split often paves the way for other interested parties such as developers to pursue “divide and conquer” strategies, and as the most recent promise of development began to take shape, the community was vulnerable.
Carla Smith, the city councilwoman who represents Peoplestown and Summerhill, argues that the community was able to participate in a Livable Centers Initiative (LCI) that resulted in a robust planning document. “No one will argue that the LCI is not a good product; everyone was involved in that,” she said.
The owners and developers of the property announced signing an “agreement” which incorporates concepts from the LCI, stating, “We are deeply committed to making the community safer, stronger, healthier and more stable.”
However, Washington highlights that none of it is enforceable.
‘We have to give a damn’
As frustrating as the fight has been for Washington, she remains optimistic and she knows that other cities have found ways to resist gentrification.
“But the first thing you have to do is you have to name it and call it what it is. It’s not a question of can we do it … There are lots of policy practices, tax incentives and laws that can be put in place. So there’s no lack of capacity, but there’s a lack of political will. We have to give a damn. We have to give a damn about people staying in their home. We have to give a damn about poor and working-class folks, and about seniors who want to spend their sunset years in the homes that they know and love. We have to care, and our policies will follow our compassion.”
Atlanta voters will soon have an opportunity to influence how much the city government cares about these issues.
The current mayor is unable to seek re-election due to term limits and on Tuesday the city voted for a new mayor and city council. “Lots of people running are touting their long record of service and how many years they’ve been in public positions,” Washington says. “For some of them, their record is their indictment. Because this [gentrification] happened on your watch, and not only did you not stop it, you facilitated it.”
Mrs Darden agrees about the current lack of political will and the need for new leadership. “We need new city council people and a new mayor that has a heart for the people.”
As for Mr Darden, he believes the battle is about faith. “I still trust God, and I won’t doubt him. We’re not gonna bow to the city.”
Off the Rack Publishing 