Jeffery

In search of Recession Culture. I think we sort of see it with the new libertarian right (AKA "Tea Party", as a sociocultural movement). From the left is this article from AlterNet on a modern day salons. I dont really buy this since I dont see it happening around me, so maybe more of a "coastal" phenomenon: For all the cautionary tales of cyber-stupidity and Internet solipsism spouted by media pundits, people in New York, San Francisco and other cities are attending intellectual get-togethers at unprecedented numbers. Yes, everyone feels overwhelmed, whether by mounting bills, political uncertainty or natural disasters. Yet, more and more people are drawn to public venues of discourse and conviviality to think, engage with others, flirt, organized political actions and add something meaningful to their lives. They are 21st century version of the classic salon, venues where ideas matter. And, from 2009, this cartoon from NY Magazine on Recession Culture in New York. Yet...this stuff is sort of the yuppie/histper/lefty interpretation. By people who still have jobs. Im thinking that maybe Barbara Eherenreich is more on the money about how things are becoming more 'social' in in a different way, for the great unwashed. Americas' Tragic Decline " But the truth is, here’s what’s happening. More and more people are having to crowd into smaller spaces to live. This is since—this has been going on for a lot of people, you know, for many years. But since the recession, since the financial crisis in '07, you find more and more families—you can have one family per bedroom and somebody, a couch surfer, on the couch in the living room. There's nothing comfortable about that. You know, one of the things that really woke me up to how bad things were was in '09 when a family member of mine suddenly needed money to pay her mortgage or her home would be taken away. I was able to help, but when I found out the real facts, I was horrified. Her home was a trailer home. Not only that, it's a dilapidated trailer home. She lives in it—a single-wide trailer home—along with her daughter and two grandchildren. Now that’s getting down to, you know, third-world levels of poverty, when you crowd that many people into such an inadequate dwelling." ...this probably explains why we arent seeing more hobos or people living on the street. They are couch surfing or doubling-up.

One thing that is really different between the Great Recession and the Great Depression. People joined unions back then (amazing to me, still, considering the hard time) but they despise them now. State of the Unions ...of course this is good news to some. But unions are fairly irrelevant in the private sector at 7% of the workforce or some such number. They arent below 5% yet, but, lets work on that, huh? In a landmark 1984 study, the economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff showed that there was a strong connection between the public image of unions and how workers voted in union elections: the less popular unions were generally, the harder it was for them to organize. Labor, in other words, may be caught in a vicious cycle, becoming progressively less influential and more unpopular. The Great Depression invigorated the modern American labor movement. The Great Recession has crippled it.

Hah, you have to explain that last pix! And yeah, as usual good pix. Makes me want to go back to Indy (always say that, but instead I feel what the heck, go the distance to Chicago).

Yeah, that same dreary brick postmodern spec office stuff you see around here. It just looks dated. BTW, this was announced, sort of, by the RG spokesman at the D B-J confab at that little airport last year..they had a 'whats up' meeting featuring some of the Austin road development players. The RG spokesman said "we're not building sprawl, we're building infill" . It is to laugh

Part two is headlined US At Risk for Double Dip Recession ...with a header entilted "US Heading for Banana-Republic Status". Something I've always said to myself but never saw in print before. Theres a good blurb in there about China and how they did a stimulus (vs how we did), but how things are slowing there, too, which of course is concerning Germany, since Germanys export economy is now linked to the Chinese market.

Tschermans! On das Ekonomy! Der Spiegel on the impending global economic crisis Is the World Going Bankrupt The longer the Western debt crises smolder on, the darker the outlook for the global economy. Because the US economy is collapsing, American consumers are buying fewer goods from China and India. And because investors are piling out of euro and dollar investments, supposed islands of stability are starting to look shaky as well. In recent weeks, the Swiss franc and the Brazilian real have appreciated so strongly that exporters in those countries have been virtually unable to sell their products abroad. And so the world is at risk of sliding into a downward spiral. The debt crises are weakening economic growth, and the declining momentum in turn is making it even harder to escape the debt crisis. ...note they are already saying that "...the US economy is collapsing..."

Looks like they are planning another "The Greene" at Austin Road: New Austin Plan Explored MIAMI TWP., Montgomery County — RG Properties and Miami Twp. are negotiating an agreement for a more than $60 million proposed retail and residential village development at Austin Landing. In exchange, RG Properties would commit between $50 million and $81 million to develop a the village on 120 acres on the northwest corner of Ohio 741 and Austin Boulevard by 2014... ....The village would include 70,000 square feet of retail space; 186 apartments; a 14-screen movie theater; a four-story, 120,000-square-foot office building; a 106,000-square-foot retail store; and a second 520-space parking garage, according to the agreement. Rendering at the link.

Someplace Like America ...by the UC Press.

Dale Maharidge & Mike Williamson are back with a new book. Mahardige has an Ohio connection and wrote, along with photographer, Williamson, "Journey to Nowhere", back in the early 1980s, when he was working for the Sacramento Bee. I remember him from the back then, back when I moved to Sacramento, as I was in a slightly similar place to the people he wrote about back then. Now and his photographer have published "Someplace Like America, Tales from the New Great Depression", sort of about current hard times but what has happened to people since the early 1980s "structural adjustment": Heres an excerpt from a review in the Sacramento News & Review: Flash-forward three decades: There is mourning in America. The middle class is an endangered species. The new American underclass includes families, working people who rely on food banks. “We did not meet working homeless when we started this [in the 1980s],” Maharidge said. “Working homeless is so common now it’s like, ‘What else is new?’ You go down to the food bank in Sacramento and you’re gonna find people who have full-time jobs, who budget well and who, [on] the last week of the month, they’re hungry.” When I last spoke to Maharidge in early 2010, I’d called seeking advice for a personal story I was writing about being a jobless food critic living on food stamps. This time out, I was armed with more insight into his work; I’d spent most of the past year homeless, living in my car and looking for work. I guess this book starts to answer my question about "Great Recession Culture"...how society and culture is addressing the problems we are in. Maybe we'll see more books and stuff like this (apparently Mahardige and Williamspn are also going to be doing a documentary movie, too).

This North Central neighborhood is basically our own miniature version of Detroit with a few blocks that only have a home or two left standing. North Central and the Parsons Avenue corridor on the South Side. The "unseen Columbus". Yet, I wonder if this North Central area was ever really built-out. It seems like it was an area that was the edge of town during the Model T era, but never filled-in. That would be different than "Little Detroit", which means a close in heart-of-the-city area that is mostly open space. Not quite the same here, no?

Pittsburgh, btw, ranked a full five points higher on walkscore than Cincinnati (64 to 59), Ohio's most walkable big city, despite the industrial collapse that hit their economy and didn't exactly leave them with bundles of money for urban revitalization. Yeah, Pittsburgh really does defeat expectations of being an urban wasteland. If that doesn't prove that we're not doing as much as we could in this state, I don't know what would. Sitting around and saying everything is just fine as other cities in our own region surpass us in desirable walkable environments is not going to make them less walkable and less attractive alternatives. If I recall right one of the purposes of this board was to be a more positive online space for urban Ohio..or people wanting a more urban Ohio, and was not to be one of those "city vs city" things.

Cleveland has the same problem. So does Dayton! In fact the city was hasseling a recent coffee shop project over parking limitations. The building (and surrounding neighborhoods) was built in the 1870s or 1880s for Chrissake! How can you possibly apply modern auto parking standards in an environment like that? This pops up quite a bit in discussion about why its so tough to get things started...fighing zoning and permitting bureaucracies.

I like that..."Open & Smart". That's the vibe I get from the place. Open, Smart, ...and Young. Compare this to the Dayton areas two competing (or are they complimentary?) brands: Get Midwest (for the region, which, for me, conjures up images of Gopher Prairie, Spoon River, and American Gothic, and relentless flatness...the nail that stands out must be driven down as flat as the landscape). or Dayton, Patented/Originals Wanted (for the city) (which is nostalgic for the days when a lot things used to be patented in Dayton, and since they are so dull they need "originals"...hence "originals wanted"). Now Columbus...Columbus sounds fresh...open....open to possibilities, open as in tolerant and accepting, open to new ideas.....smart...highly educated, clever, etc. And thats what I feel when Im there, too. I'm usually pretty dismissive of this branding thing so its sort of funny to see these branding results do sort of reflect their communities, whether for good or (unintenionally) ill.

When do you think it was built? The auditor site says 1880 but that could be wrong. Yes, it looks pre-Civil War being more federal/mid-atlantic vernacular in style (like youd see downriver in Madison). I dont trust the auditor files either as I know in Dayton they sometimes date things later than they really are (I verified this via Sanborns and directories vs dates on the auditor files). Yes...I am a sucker for these very old things. I think they are sort of precious since they are so rare and also examples of how our cities were first built, building blocks from another time, allowing one to imagine what the urban fabric or built environment might have looked like.

Here is another wrinkle, showing how totally amoral we have become when it comes to unemployment: Employers Wont Hire the Unemployed ...so being unemployed means you might as well have big scarlet letter tattoed on your forhead....L....for LOSER. I'm sure this is all hunky-dory for defenders of the status-quo.

True, that goes without saying but the thing is if we have 1 million open positions and 7 million applicants what about the balance? It means that this is a very competetive job market. Which might be a good arguement for lowering the minimum wage, or not having one at all.

Paul Krugman on why we are not really in a recovery: The Wrong Worries In particular, when employment falls as much as it did from 2007 to 2009, you need a lot of job growth to make up the lost ground. And that just hasn’t happened. Consider one crucial measure, the ratio of employment to population. In June 2007, around 63 percent of adults were employed. In June 2009, the official end of the recession, that number was down to 59.4. As of June 2011, two years into the alleged recovery, the number was: 58.2. These may sound like dry statistics, but they reflect a truly terrible reality. Not only are vast numbers of Americans unemployed or underemployed, for the first time since the Great Depression many American workers are facing the prospect of very-long-term — maybe permanent — unemployment.

Supposedly the Germans are able to compete in this global marketplace somehow, with wages higher than Chinas. Wonder how they do it? Some form of protectionism or do they make high-end specialty stuff and export it? ...this is a good point. Maybe housing and food prices will come down to Chinese/Asian levels for US workers? BTW, the Chinese seem to have industrialized and urbanized without turning their cities into gigantic shantytowns like they have in Mexico.

I agree that outsourcing and offshoring have had a big play in destroying work. There's enough evidence of that here in the Dayton area. That's why all these Delphi plants shut down...the work was sent to Mexico or overseas. ...the shrinking of category killers was written about somewhere. The disappearance of places like Borders and Circuit City, etc. That sales are concentrating into just a handful of big retailers. I think local stuff sort of survives as boutique retail, specialty store things or specialty shopping where people conciously shop local as a choice or 'statement'. Sort of an expansion of the "Localvore" foody thing, but into other types of products. ...this is sort of an upper middle class or middle class lifestyle choice thing, though.... @@ But yeah it looks like we are heading into a second slowdown with these leading indicators that Ragerunner has posted. It should also be noted that the jobs that are (were?) being created are fairly low-paying ones, so not much boost for the consumer economy or housing market that way...

I think the "Panic of 1873" lasted pretty much through much of 1870s? Or did you have another financial collapse in mind. The 1870s saw complaints about the "army of tramps"...possibly the mass unemployed of that era on the road and rails looking for work. We might have been in a long term slow recovery in the 1940s & early 1950s, too, if not for the stimulus of WWII.

Milwaukee apparently is going to build a streetcar...but with funding constraints... Milwaukee Streetcar Approval Comes with Spending Limits.... (I had a chance to ride the Milwaukee bus system last weekend...interesting to see the little differences in the way systems operate). Anyway, looks like the GOP everywhere is out gunning for mass transit. I figure with the budget deal we'll see even less funding for mass transit, since that is part of the discretionary budget they are cutting.

If they are having such a tough time collecting sigs does it mean poor organization or lack of support (or apathy towards) the anti-streetcar cause?

I see Cincinnati is also on that list, as is ....Detroit & Pittsburgh. Pbgh we could expect but you dont hear of Detroit as a tech center. Otherwise, looks like urban Florida is well-represented. SLC has been a tech growth area for awhile, now, too...

From that other city with the big "German" heritage... Milwaukee Streetcar Approval Comes with Spending Limits.... ...looks like they have had a big controversy, too, but it was resolved in favor of the streetcar project. Interestingly, the current governor opposed it when he was in county government (he apparently has a big anti-rail track record)., but hasn't said too much now that he's the guv... Why is Walker mum on Streetcar? Interesting is that activists in Milwaukee turned the transit issue into a civil rights issue, and got a favorable decision that allowed the funds to go to their streetcar proposal. Not sure if there are any lessons for Cincy in the Milwaukee experience....

Yup..now there is a big excavation site on the riverfront (not a particularly good site, either, due to I-64) with empty space behind two historic facades. Yet is there not some provision that requires the developer to restore the site (ie backfill the excavation?). Unlike most here I think MP would have been neat. The escalator tubes and the skybox art musuem would have been cool to experience.