History > 2011 > USA > Towns, counties, cities (I)

Los Angeles Vote

to Decide on Condoms

in Sex Films

December 28, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — Come June, voters here will have a chance to cast their ballots in the presidential primary. Along with their presidential preferences, they will be asked to decide whether actors in pornographic films should be required to wear condoms.

For several years, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation has been lobbying state, county and city lawmakers to enact legislation that would force adult film performers and makers to use condoms and charge a fee to pay for inspections to make sure that they comply.

Growing frustrated in its efforts, the group moved this summer to get the issue placed on the city ballot.

“All politicians have treated this as a hot potato issue,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “The city punts to the county, the county punts to the state, and the State Legislature has punted. We’ve taken it to the voters as a last resort, and that is testimony to the lack of leadership on the issue.”

Los Angeles County officials have said that it would be too difficult to monitor the pornography industry through the health department and that it is a matter for the State Legislature. But Mr. Weinstein said that the group had not been able to find any state lawmaker willing to introduce the bill.

The group collected more than 70,000 signatures, nearly double the 41,000 needed to get the measure on the ballot. The city clerk certified the signatures this week, but the measure still faces legal challenges. The city attorney, Carmen Trutanich, filed papers in court saying that it appeared that voters in the city did not have the legal authority to adopt the measure and that only the state could mandate such regulations.

Under current regulations issued by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, actors are required to use condoms. But the agency can act only after it receives a complaint, and it has issued few fines on the matter.

Officials have said that they believe the city could legally require its own inspections, as the proposal seeks.

“We believe that cities and counties can regulate under their police power unless specifically restricted by something else,” Ellen Widess, the director of the state division, wrote to city attorneys last week.

Mr. Weinstein said that with its limited resources, there was little the agency could do to force filmmakers to comply with the current regulations.

Steven Hirsch, a pornography industry veteran and the founder of Vivid Entertainment, said that even if the measure was passed, it would be nearly impossible to enforce.

“It’s unrealistic to think that a city can regulate how movies are being shot,” Mr. Hirsch said. “People will just film elsewhere and take the jobs with them. And what are they going to do, have condom police out and about patrolling the set?”

    Los Angeles Vote to Decide on Condoms in Sex Films, NYT, 28.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/us/los-angeles-to-vote-on-condoms-for-pornography-actors.html

Stars Flock to Atlanta, Reshaping a Center of Black Culture

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

ATLANTA — Cynthia Bailey, arguably the most glamorous of the “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” shivered in a sleeveless red shift, microphone in hand.

It was oddly cold, but the intrepid model carried on. She had a job to do: interviewing the talent that swaggered down the red carpet for the Soul Train Awards.

All along the police barriers that closed down Peachtree Street, fans screamed and elbowed one another for a better view. Those lucky enough to have tickets slipped into the Fox Theater, all glittery and prepared to party.

This was celebrity black Atlanta at its best.

A few years ago, the city probably would not have been able to pull off such a show. But fueled by a generous entertainment tax credit, the migration of affluent African-Americans from the North and the surprising fact that even celebrities appreciate the lower cost of living here, this capital of the Deep South is emerging as an epicenter of the black glitterati.

“It’s so ripe with African-American flavor and talent,” said Stephen Hill, an executive vice president for Black Entertainment Television, which will show the awards Sunday night.

“Atlanta is home to our core audience,” he said. “I’m trying not to make it a racial thing, but Atlanta is our New York, our L.A.”

To be sure, Atlanta has long had a high concentration of well-connected, affluent blacks. But the Atlanta area is now home to such a critical mass of successful actors, rappers and entertainment executives that few would argue its position as the center of black culture. Tyler Perry and his movie and television empire are based here. Sean Combs has a house in a suburb north of the city. The musicians Cee Lo Green, Ludacris and members of OutKast call it home. So does the music producer and rapper Jermaine Dupri.

Gladys Knight, an Atlanta native who was honored at the awards, which were taped Nov. 17, runs a chicken and waffle restaurant here. And it is not unusual to spot Usher at one of the city’s better restaurants.

“It seems like everything is happening here now,” said Dave Hollister, an R&B singer who spends a lot of time in Atlanta. “It feels like New York used to feel with a little more nicety.”

Atlanta’s A-list evolution was driven in part by the state’s 2008 Entertainment Industry Investment Act, which gives qualified productions a 20 percent tax break, said Warrington Hudlin, president of the Black Filmmaker Foundation, which is based in New York.

Producers who embed a Georgia promotional logo in the titles or credits can take another 10 percent off the tax bill. In the last fiscal year, $683.5 million worth of production — music videos, television shows and movies — was staged here.

“Atlanta is really becoming the black Hollywood,” Mr. Hudlin said. Because many black filmmakers are working on tighter budgets than white filmmakers, they need to save money and Georgia helps them do that, he said.

And producers of films and shows like the Soul Train Awards can find a variety of people to fill sets and seats. “This is one of our strengths, the diversity of people in Atlanta,” said Lee Thomas, director of the state’s Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office. “It’s something we have over, say, Canada.”

The growth has also been fed by a decade of migration of blacks from the North. Nearly a quarter of a million blacks moved to the greater Atlanta area from outside the South between 2005 and 2010, making it the metro area with the largest number of black residents after New York.

More than a third of the new migrant households made more than $50,000 a year. One of the newcomers is Jasmine Guy, the actress whose most famous role was Whitley Gilbert on the sitcom “A Different World.” She was raised in Atlanta but spent 30 years in New York and Los Angeles.

She moved back three years ago, largely because she finds Atlanta offers an easier, gentler life for her family.

“At first I thought, how am I going to work?” she said. “But I have not stopped working since.”

In addition to acting, she directs and teaches younger actors. Like others in Atlanta’s black elite, she likes the fact that she finds herself among the majority at art museums and sophisticated restaurants.

And an added bonus? Paparazzi activity is at a minimum, but stars still get to feel like stars.

“They get the love and attention here like they wouldn’t get in New York,” said Kelley Carter, a pop culture journalist who has worked her share of rope lines and writes for publications like Ebony and Jet. She recently moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles herself.

It also doesn’t hurt that real estate here costs much less than in New York or Los Angeles.

“You can stretch a dollar more here,” said Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played Theo in “The Cosby Show” and has been in Atlanta shooting a new sitcom, “Reed Between the Lines,” for BET.

“Atlanta affords you a different kind of vibe,” he said. “A little more warmth.”

But like several people interviewed, he’s not ready to say that Atlanta can best New York or Los Angeles.

Lance Gross is a star in the Tyler Perry constellation who spends part of his time in Atlanta. “A lot of people come through here,” he said, “but I can’t give it to Atlanta yet.”

Ms. Bailey, the “Housewives” star, still takes monthly trips to New York for what she calls a culture fix.

But she is investing in Atlanta, and recently opened the Bailey Agency — School of Fashion to help connect Atlanta’s most promising models with power players in the fashion world.

“Atlanta in two or three years is going to be perfect,” she said.

Maybe. The comedian Cedric the Entertainer, who hosted the Soul Train Awards, said Atlanta had always been a black mecca and continues to be one. He used to travel to the city when he was growing up in St. Louis. The city just keeps improving, he said. The talent pool gets bigger every day, which makes it easy to stage shows here.

“You can make some quick calls and say, ‘I had a fall-out. Let’s see if Ludacris can stop by,’ ” he said. “You have the real down-home love and you have a lot of transplants who give it a real sexy, young progressive energy.”

But, he said, Georgia will always be Georgia.

“It’s serious business down here but at the same time they’re still country,” he said. “I mean, sweet tea don’t go with everything.”

 

Robbie Brown contributed reporting.

    Stars Flock to Atlanta, Reshaping a Center of Black Culture, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/atlanta-emerges-as-a-center-of-black-entertainment.html

The Death of the Fringe Suburb

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER B. LEINBERGER

Washington

DRIVE through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces. These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers. And that’s because the demand for the housing that once supported commercial activity in many exurbs isn’t coming back, either.

By now, nearly five years after the housing crash, most Americans understand that a mortgage meltdown was the catalyst for the Great Recession, facilitated by underregulation of finance and reckless risk-taking. Less understood is the divergence between center cities and inner-ring suburbs on one hand, and the suburban fringe on the other.

It was predominantly the collapse of the car-dependent suburban fringe that caused the mortgage collapse.

In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs. Some of the most expensive neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas are Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio, and Logan Circle in Washington. Considered slums as recently as 30 years ago, they have been transformed by gentrification.

Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.

The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.

Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.

The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey. This lack of demand all but guarantees continued price declines. Boomers selling their fringe housing will only add to the glut. Nothing the federal government can do will reverse this.

Many drivable-fringe house prices are now below replacement value, meaning the land under the house has no value and the sticks and bricks are worth less than they would cost to replace. This means there is no financial incentive to maintain the house; the next dollar invested will not be recouped upon resale. Many of these houses will be converted to rentals, which are rarely as well maintained as owner-occupied housing. Add the fact that the houses were built with cheap materials and methods to begin with, and you see why many fringe suburbs are turning into slums, with abandoned housing and rising crime.

The good news is that there is great pent-up demand for walkable, centrally located neighborhoods in cities like Portland, Denver, Philadelphia and Chattanooga, Tenn. The transformation of suburbia can be seen in places like Arlington County, Va., Bellevue, Wash., and Pasadena, Calif., where strip malls have been bulldozed and replaced by higher-density mixed-use developments with good transit connections.

Reinvesting in America’s built environment — which makes up a third of the country’s assets — and reviving the construction trades are vital for lifting our economic growth rate. (Disclosure: I am the president of Locus, a coalition of real estate developers and investors and a project of Smart Growth America, which supports walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented development.)

Some critics will say that investment in the built environment risks repeating the mistake that caused the recession in the first place. That reasoning is as faulty as saying that technology should have been neglected after the dot-com bust, which precipitated the 2001 recession.

The cities and inner-ring suburbs that will be the foundation of the recovery require significant investment at a time of government retrenchment. Bus and light-rail systems, bike lanes and pedestrian improvements — what traffic engineers dismissively call “alternative transportation” — are vital. So is the repair of infrastructure like roads and bridges. Places as diverse as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Charlotte, Denver and Washington have recently voted to pay for “alternative transportation,” mindful of the dividends to be reaped. As Congress works to reauthorize highway and transit legislation, it must give metropolitan areas greater flexibility for financing transportation, rather than mandating that the vast bulk of the money can be used only for roads.

For too long, we over-invested in the wrong places. Those retail centers and subdivisions will never be worth what they cost to build. We have to stop throwing good money after bad. It is time to instead build what the market wants: mixed-income, walkable cities and suburbs that will support the knowledge economy, promote environmental sustainability and create jobs.

 

Christopher B. Leinberger is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

and professor of practice in urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.

    The Death of the Fringe Suburb, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/opinion/the-death-of-the-fringe-suburb.html

After Taking In Refugees for Years,

a New Hampshire City Asks for a Pause

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MANCHESTER, N.H. — This city has long been a resettlement site for refugees, sent here by the State Department for a chance at a better life. More than 60 languages are spoken in the school system, with Somalis, Sudanese, Iraqis and other recent arrivals mixing with children whose ancestors came from Quebec to work in the mighty textile mills along the Merrimack River.

But this year, after decades of taking in refugees, Manchester said, “Enough.”

In a highly unusual move, Mayor Ted Gatsas and the city’s Board of Aldermen asked the State Department in July to halt resettlements here for now. A tide of more than 2,100 refugees over the last decade — most recently, Bhutanese families coming from camps in Nepal — has been more than the city of 109,500 can assure jobs and decent housing for, Mr. Gatsas said.

“We’re just saying, ‘Let us catch our breath,’ ” he said last week in an interview at City Hall. “This is about giving people the opportunity for a better life, and until I can get that person working and gainfully employed and getting to learn the language, I can’t do that.”

The mayor, a Republican who just won a second term, says he has nothing against refugees. His problem is with the International Institute of New England, a nonprofit agency based in Boston that brings them to Manchester and helps them adjust for several months, providing cash and other assistance.

Mr. Gatsas, a former businessman whose grandfather immigrated here from Greece a century ago, said the institute had consistently refused to seek the city’s advice, most recently on its plan to bring 300 more refugees to Manchester in the current fiscal year.

His effort to stanch the flow of newcomers from other countries is different, of course, from the battles raging against illegal immigration in other corners of the nation. Refugees come here legally, through a carefully planned process that brings them from hard-luck camps in some of the world’s most troubled regions to some 200 cities and towns where local nonprofit groups help them settle in.

Two other cities have restrictions in place, according to the State Department: Detroit, where refugees can be resettled only if they have friends or family there already, and Fort Wayne, Ind., where only refugees with close relatives there can go. But while others have raised concerns about resettlement during the economic downturn, none have asked to stop it altogether, said Larry Bartlett, director of the State Department’s Office of Refugee Admissions.

“It’s very rare,” Mr. Bartlett said of Manchester’s request. “Despite the challenges that accompany refugee resettlement and helping people remake their lives, I think it’s such a core national value that communities find a way to continue even despite the poor economic times or other problems they may be experiencing.”

For the International Institute, which has been resettling refugees in New Hampshire for decades, the moratorium request came as a shock, said William J. Gillett, chairman of the agency’s board. Although the agency has resettled 844 refugees in Manchester over the last three years — almost as many as the 984 it has resettled in Boston, a city with almost six times as many residents — there has been no indication of trouble, he said.

“We did not believe the numbers we were suggesting were in any way inappropriate,” Mr. Gillett said. “We didn’t see any evidence of undue strain on city resources.”

Although refugees are also resettled in other New Hampshire cities, including Concord and Nashua, far more come to Manchester, the largest city in northern New England, because it has more jobs, affordable housing and public transportation.

“It’s one of the most fabulous places in the world to resettle,” said Carolyn Benedict-Drew, the institute’s president and chief executive.

But the institute admits that affordable apartments have sometimes proved unacceptable. In 2009, a bedbug infestation at a former mill building that houses refugees grabbed headlines and raised awareness of the squalid conditions some were living in. Patrick Long, a Democratic alderman who voted for the moratorium, said the institute “just wasn’t there to help” with the bedbug problem, which led to a city task force that came up with recommendations for improving refugee housing, education and other needs.

“The apartments they were putting them in were shabby,” he said, “and their employment numbers were misleading.”

On housing, Mr. Gillett said, “We do the best we can within the price constraints we have.”

The institute says most refugees who are capable of working land jobs relatively quickly. But that number is misleading, Mr. Gatsas said, because it includes seasonal jobs that might last only a few weeks or months. And while Manchester used to have plenty of work for people who did not speak English, he said, those jobs are harder to find as the economic base shifts from manufacturing to high tech. A meatpacking plant that used to employ refugees closed in 2004, and a manufacturing company that employed others in nearby Merrimack closed soon after.

And with state and federal budgets being cut ever more sharply in the downturn, Mr. Long said, there is less aid to refugees than ever.

“We’re just starting to see more needs with the new arrivals,” he said. “As the years go by we’re going to be seeing a lot less federal money, a lot less state money, so what do we do? We take a proactive step now, so three, four, five years from now we’re not saying, ‘We’ve got 1,200 people who are out on the street.’ ”

Mr. Long and Mr. Gatsas said a number of refugees had expressed support for a moratorium. But in interviews last week, while several did express concerns about the job market and housing conditions, most said the proposal was upsetting. Some, like Hari Niroula, 25, who arrived here last month, said they had relatives still languishing in refugee camps and feared they would be blocked from coming to Manchester.

Suraj Budathoki, a Bhutanese refugee who came here in 2008 after 18 years in a refugee camp, said that while refugees might struggle in Manchester, life here was preferable to the conditions they put up with in camps.

“I stayed in a camp and I know every single minute there is terrible,” he said. “The life here in Manchester is far better, 110 percent better, than the life in a refugee camp.”

Mr. Bartlett said that after hearing the city’s concerns, his office had decided to send some 200 refugees to Manchester this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, instead of the 300 proposed by the International Institute. While the State Department often tinkers with the numbers proposed by resettlement agencies, he said, “this was probably a more significant reduction than we would normally make.”

A moratorium would make no sense, he said, partly because virtually all refugees scheduled to arrive in Manchester this year have family here and would likely end up in the city even if they were initially sent somewhere else.

Meanwhile, leaders of the International Institute said they would try harder to work with the city. Michael McGandy, who started in March as the institute’s site manager in Manchester, said high staff turnover and the intense demands of helping refugees over their first three months had perhaps kept the agency from communicating with the city as much as it should.

“We could do a better job with outreach to the community and dispelling myths and making sure people know the facts,” he said.

But Mr. Gatsas said that he was not pleased with the compromise and that he would persist with another tactic: lobbying the state’s Executive Council, which disburses federal money, to table grants for some of the institute’s programs. Should that fail, he said, Mr. Gatsas might try to rally mayors in other resettlement cities to his cause. He has made a point of describing the situation to the Republican presidential candidates who have filed through his office in recent months in hopes of drawing more attention to it.

“If we don’t get the outcome we’re looking for, trust me, I might have a few hundred of them up here to have that discussion,” he said. “I think people will tell you I’m pretty tenacious on an issue. I’m not going to stop.”

    After Taking In Refugees for Years, a New Hampshire City Asks for a Pause, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/manchester-new-hampshire-seeks-halt-in-refugee-resettlement.html

A Community of Survivors Dwindles

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND

ONE thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own.

For Sophia Goldberg, change has meant the end of a way of life.

On a recent morning Ms. Goldberg sat in her tidy seventh-floor living room, surrounded by needlepoint portraits stitched by her own hands, and sighed over the changes immediately around her.

Ms. Goldberg, 98, lives in a 19-story apartment house in Flushing, Queens, one of two neighboring buildings that were erected for survivors of the Holocaust. When she moved there in 1978, she said, her neighbors formed a tight community of predominantly Jewish refugees like her who had fled to the United States from Austria or Germany.

“We had parties,” Ms. Goldberg said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We had card games. It was our people. We had Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in our apartment.”

Now, she said, “It’s completely changed — I have no neighbors here.”

For Ms. Goldberg, the transformation has been steady and overwhelming. Of the 326 residents in her building, now only 31 are Holocaust survivors, and only 7 of them are German or Austrian.

The new neighbors are friendly enough. But she said: “We do not talk. We say hello, goodbye. But that’s it. They don’t speak German. They don’t speak English. They speak Russian and Chinese. Sometimes they just shake their heads.”

The Martin Lande House in Flushing, where Ms. Goldberg lives, was the second of six apartment houses built by Selfhelp Community Services, a nonprofit group started in 1936 to help refugees from Nazi Germany resettle in the United States. When it built its first residence for elderly Holocaust survivors in 1965, Flushing was a logical location, said Elihu Kover, vice president for Nazi victim services, because the neighborhood was largely Jewish and Italian.

The residents came mainly from Germany and Austria at first, then later from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. Many had ties to Flushing. They knew the merchants and synagogues. At the organization’s first senior center, which opened in 1975, they played cards and celebrated birthdays and Jewish holidays along with other older adults from the neighborhood. It was their place.

On a recent visit to the Benjamin Rosenthal-Prince Street Senior Center, which is attached to the original residential building, it was plain that this mix had been replaced by a group that reflects the neighborhood now, which is overwhelmingly Chinese and Korean. Though no one complained openly about the change, for some it had not been easy.

“It’s hard for them,” said Stuart Kaplan, Selfhelp’s chief executive, speaking of the Holocaust survivors. “You’ll hear, ‘Look at what has happened to our senior center.’ On a practical level they understand, but I don’t think they accept it readily or are happy about it. Their thinking is, ‘We used to be the people who are throughout this building.’ ”

MS. GOLDBERG lost her whole family in Germany, and more than a half-century later she agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that she not be asked about the Holocaust. Her friends — she has a regular group of eight women — declined to talk even under that condition.

Part of their bond, Ms. Goldberg said, arose from not having to discuss what they all knew. Speaking of their get-togethers, she said: “I try not to talk about it. I talk about what it was like before that time. We still talk about that.”

As Ms. Goldberg spoke, in clipped phrases often repeated by her aide, what she described was a community built on a relationship to memory: how to manage it collectively and individually, how to preserve the past without being overwhelmed by it. As that community has faded, Holocaust survivors face not just a single loss but a “constellation of losses,” said Carmen L. Morano, an associate professor at Hunter College who has studied survivors.

“There are parallel processes going on,” Dr. Morano said. “There are the losses that all aging adults experience as they watch their social networks dwindling. And there’s the loss of community created by the trauma they experienced.

“And there’s the sense that as they near the end of their lifetime, what happens to the memory? We all experience loss, but this is quite a constellation of losses.”

Dr. Gary J. Kennedy, the director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, said survivors’ experiences made it particularly difficult to form intimate relations with the new neighbors, and made the loss of others like themselves more acute.

“That goes back to the occupation experience,” he said. “Who could you trust? People like you. That’s a strength, but it’s also a vulnerability.”

Many were further stigmatized in the United States, he added, by people who told them “to suppress the past, to roll up your sleeves and build a new life.”

“We’ve moved away from that in the mental health community and as a society,” Dr. Kennedy said. “But these individuals don’t forget the threat, even with dementia. The old memories remain.”

 

TO a great extent, the changes in the buildings are simply part of the aging process. Friends die or go to nursing homes, and strangers take their places; any new bonds can never be as strong as the old bonds.

“It’s because the buildings are for elder people,” said Vladimir Pozdnyakov, who escaped from Byelorussia when the Nazis occupied it, and has lived in a Selfhelp building in Flushing since 1997. “There’s one way to go only.”

Though he gets along with his new neighbors, he said, speaking through an interpreter because he does not speak much English, he cannot feel close to them — in part because of the language barrier, but also because of the nature of his experience.

“It’s very difficult to express how we feel,” he said. “Who didn’t live through it doesn’t understand. Like the 25 million people who don’t have food in Africa now, but who understands? Only someone who had this experience. It’s like that.”

But there are also more bureaucratic reasons for the shift in population. With the growth of fair-housing legislation in the mid-1970s and the rise of public financing for housing for the elderly, Selfhelp stopped giving preference to Holocaust survivors, instead making apartments available to all low-income people over age 60. When a resident left, the next resident was chosen by lottery. And as the population of Flushing changed, so did the applicants in the lottery system.

“The residents have a saying that when an original resident passes away, it’s a Korean or Chinese couple who moves in,” said Mohini Mishra, program director for the buildings.

The differences echo throughout the buildings. There is still a synagogue on the ground floor of Ms. Goldberg’s building, but attendance fell to about 70 or 75 for this year’s Yom Kippur services, from highs of around 200 in the past.

“They can’t get a minyan together,” Ms. Goldberg said, referring to the quorum of 10 men required for traditional Jewish services. “If they didn’t have the Russians, they wouldn’t have a synagogue.”

ON another afternoon, Fira Schwarzman, who lives downstairs from Ms. Goldberg, took stock of the changes in their building. “There’s been a lot of renovation, new cabinets, new windows,” she said, brightly.

Of the transformation among her neighbors, she said she saw different ethnic groups living together without fighting — a vast difference from the experience of her youth.

“I say, the Chinese people are people too,” Ms. Schwarzman said. “If the American government approved them to come to this country, it’s O.K. You have to respect everyone. People say, ‘Why did the Chinese people come here?’ I say, ‘Why did you come here?’ It’s amazing how people can say, ‘I’m a refugee.’ Maybe they are refugees, too.”

Ms. Schwarzman, 84, was a teenager in Moldova when the Nazis came in 1941. Her mother took her and her sister to the Caucasus, and then to Central Asia when the Nazis invaded there as well. Her father refused to leave their home. He was killed, along with 13 family members.

Unlike Ms. Goldberg, Ms. Schwarzman said she regularly discussed her experiences during the war, however painful.

“Ten years from now, no more survivors will be,” she said. “But we have to teach young people what it was. The Holocaust cannot be again. It should not be again.”

She added that she was still trying to make sense of her memories. “I talk every time with survivors about the harsh time that it was,” she said. “My brain cannot accept how it was, how I survived to be 84.”

The difference between the two women points to a division among Holocaust survivors, one of many, said Mr. Kover of Selfhelp.

Survivors often draw a “hierarchy of suffering,” he said, distinguishing their hardships from others’. Even in a diminishing community, there is a tendency to divide into subgroups: Russians from Germans, adult survivors from child survivors, people who survived concentration camps from those who fled ahead of the soldiers.

For the survivors in Flushing, this has meant a change within their community in addition to the one without. Russian-speaking survivors, mostly Soviet émigrés from the 1980s and 1990s, are now a majority. Compared with the buildings’ original German and Austrian residents, the Russian-speaking survivors are younger, poorer, newer to the United States and less likely to speak English. Of 71 total survivors in six Selfhelp buildings, only 9 are from Germany and 3 from Austria.

For Ms. Goldberg, this churn has added to her sense of loss. “We used to have card games,” she said. “Now the Russians have card games, but not with the Germans. It’s not that they’re unfriendly. They’re friendly. But they’re their own people. They have their own experiences.”

In spring, Mr. Kover said, the Russian survivors tend to celebrate V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe, and the Germans commemorate Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance and mourning for Holocaust victims.

 

ABOUT half of America’s remaining Nazi victims — defined as people who lived in a country under Nazi rule and who directly suffered persecution — or 38,000 people, live in the New York area, down from 55,000 in 2002, according to projections made by Selfhelp from a 2002 survey conducted for the United Jewish Appeal.

Selfhelp projects that the number will drop to 30,000 by 2015 and 19,000 by 2025. In 2002, half of these lived in Russian-speaking homes, a share that is most likely increasing.

For all of these, Mr. Kover said, old age presents unique difficulties, both for survivors and for people around them. “Behaviors that helped you to survive are now detrimental,” he said. “It’s like a seepage of a toxin. It eats into all their relationships. Screaming and being strong was how you survived. Try screaming in a Medicaid office.”

Survivors often resist care, he said, because during the Holocaust to admit weakness was to invite death.

As the buildings’ demographics change, the survivors risk becoming isolated, a major danger in any elderly population, said Betsy Smith, managing director of senior communities. “And we encourage assimilation in everyone,” she said.

Whenever groups mix, sensitivities are high. The staff learned not to use yellow tablecloths or decorations because the color reminded some survivors of the yellow star they had to wear decades before. “Same with the Chinese,” Ms. Mishra said. “Using white is the color of death, so our snowflakes are all blue or silver.”

 

ROBIN HU, 78, who lives above Ms. Goldberg, is a regular at the senior center, where he enjoys ballroom dancing twice a week, largely with fellow Chinese speakers.

“The Russian people don’t go there — I don’t know why,” he said. “My impression is that they’re not very joyful or active. I think maybe they experienced a very sad past. I don’t know the details, because it’s not a pleasure to be asked about the sad past.”

Mr. Hu speaks a few Russian words, and he knows the history of the Holocaust. But having a substantive conversation with his neighbors — about who is Jewish; about painful past experiences — lies outside a language barrier. He said he had invited neighbors to his apartment to sing Russian-language songs with his karaoke machine, but so far none had come.

“We don’t know why the Russian people came here,” he said. “And they don’t know why the Chinese people came here. Because they can’t ask us questions. We say hello. What next? There’s no next step. So you don’t get close.”

Dr. Kennedy from Montefiore said the barriers were exaggerated because the residents were all seniors, rather than a mix of generations. To a Jewish Holocaust survivor, a 5-year-old Chinese child in an elevator is a surrogate grandchild, not a cultural stranger, he said. “You provide security but rob them of the role of grandparenting,” he said. “Children are icebreakers. Natural impulse is if there’s a kid in the elevator, you’re drawn to the child, whether he looks like you or not.”

Some residents said they wished there were more opportunities to get to know one another. At this year’s communal Passover Seder, the building staff distributed explanations of the ceremony in Chinese and Korean, and encouraged everyone to attend; at the recent party for Chinese New Year, the staff provided explanations in Russian and German.

But everyday encounters, the sort of interdependency that creates healthy communities, remain a challenge, made harder by history as well as language.

Sofya Brayer, 82, said she participated in many of the building activities but did not feel close to any of her Chinese neighbors. What their experiences were, how they came to Flushing — she had no idea.

“Probably we need an organized discussion with other people who can tell us about their life,” she said.

Though materials distributed by the building discuss the experiences of Holocaust survivors, other residents’ backgrounds remain largely unnoted. “It’d be good for us because we don’t know about their life,” Ms. Brayer said.

For others, though, getting to know strangers might only codify their sense of loss. The old neighbors were gone or going. The new neighbors would never be the same. As Ms. Goldberg said, “I miss the crowd.”

    A Community of Survivors Dwindles, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/nyregion/community-of-holocaust-survivors-dwindles-in-queens.html

Low-Tax Cigarettes, Made in Store, Draw City Lawsuit

November 21, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as Freud supposedly said, but when is a cigarette a cigarette?

The city filed suit last week against a “roll your own” cigarette shop in Chinatown and a related one on Staten Island, where a pack of cigarettes can cost less than $5, because the stores are not collecting cigarette taxes. The stores, both called Island Smokes, do not sell packs of Marlboros and Newports. Instead, they sell loose tobacco and cigarette papers, and have machines that let customers fabricate their own cigarettes.

Such stores operate in a legal gray area, arguing that because they do not sell prepackaged cigarettes, they are subject only to taxes on loose tobacco, which are far less. But according to the city, the shops are effectively selling cigarettes and should be forced to charge the full state and city taxes — currently $5.85 per pack, which has pushed the cost of most packs in New York City to more than $10.

“By selling illegally low-priced cigarettes,” said the city’s lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, “defendants not only interfere with the collection of city cigarette taxes, they also impair the city’s smoking cessation programs and impair individual efforts at smoking reduction, thereby imposing higher health care costs on the city and injuring public health.”

Jonathan Behrins, a lawyer for the companies that own the shops, said Monday that the stores were not obligated to charge cigarette taxes because “we are not producing cigarettes for resale.”

“We are selling the contents that produce the cigarette,” he said, “and it’s up to the user to make them.”

Mr. Behrins acknowledged that employees sometimes assist customers by “demonstrating” the equipment, but likened the whole process to “making your own beer.”

The city offered a much different analogy.

“When you go to a salad bar, they sell you a salad, not a salad assembly process,” said Eric Proshanksy, deputy chief of the corporation counsel’s affirmative litigation division. “When customers walk out of these stores, they have finished cigarettes and they bought them in those stores. The stores also have signage that calls them a discount cigarettes shop.”

Inside the Island Smokes on Eldridge Street in Chinatown, plastic bins contain different styles of loose tobacco — menthol, double menthol, ultra light and more. More than a dozen machines are spread out in two rooms.

On Monday an employee showed a first-time buyer how the machines work. The customer attaches an empty paper tube to the machine and punches a “load” button; after the cigarette is full, it must be placed in another machine resembling an electric pencil sharpener that seals the ends. The pack cost $6, including the small tin box that holds the finished cigarettes; a refill is $4.50.

One man entered and asked if he could buy a pack of Newports. When told that Island Smokes sold only its own tobacco and that customers had to roll their own cigarettes, the man promptly left.

Customers who were rolling cigarettes swore by the shop’s products, which are advertised as “all natural.”

“It’s such a better, cheaper alternative,” said Veronica Raccuia, 20. The store says its tobacco does not contain additives found in premade cigarettes. “You don’t taste all the chemicals,” she said.

Customers were frustrated to learn of the city’s lawsuit against the shop, saying it was simply another measure intended to regulate people’s lives.

“The government is so money-hungry they’ll do anything to get rid of whoever they’re not getting money from,” Ms. Raccuia said.

“Just leave people alone,” she added. “In this economy, no one can barely afford food, let alone a pack of $15 cigarettes.”

 

Tim Stelloh contributed reporting.

    Low-Tax Cigarettes, Made in Store, Draw City Lawsuit, 21.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/nyregion/roll-your-own-cigarette-shops-sued-by-new-york-city-in-tax-dispute.html

Facing Cuts, a City Repeals Its Domestic Violence Law

October 11, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

TOPEKA, Kan. — The startling vote came up at a City Council meeting here on Tuesday, provoked by a run-of-the-mill budget dispute over services that had spun out of control: decriminalize domestic violence.

Three arms of government, all ostensibly representing the same people, have been at an impasse over who should be responsible for — and pay for — prosecuting people accused of misdemeanor cases of domestic violence.

City leaders had blamed the Shawnee County district attorney for handing off such cases to the city without warning. The district attorney, in turn, said he was forced to not prosecute any misdemeanors and to focus on felonies because the County Commission cut his budget. And county leaders accused the district attorney of using abused women as pawns to negotiate more money for his office.

After both sides dug in, the dispute came to a head Tuesday night.

By a vote of 7 to 3, the City Council repealed the local law that makes domestic violence a crime.

The move, the councilors were told, would force District Attorney Chad Taylor to prosecute the cases because they would remain a crime under state law, a conclusion with which he grudgingly agreed. The Council also approved negotiations to resolve the impasse.

Several victims of domestic violence spoke against the proposal at the meeting, questioning whether it would succeed in forcing the district attorney to resume prosecutions. “It is your responsibility to protect these people, and you’re failing,” said Matthew Agnew, 24, one such victim.

Eighteen people have been arrested on domestic violence charges since September and released without charges because no agency is accepting new cases. That has raised concerns among advocates for victims of domestic violence, some of whom gathered Tuesday outside government buildings to express outrage over the gamesmanship.

“To have public officials pointing fingers while victims of domestic violence are trying to figure out who will protect them is just stunning,” said Joyce Grover, executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.

Though Kansas and its capital city have fared better than much of the country in this struggling economy, they are not immune to fiscal strains. The district attorney’s budget of $3.5 million was cut by 10 percent, which would force about a dozen layoffs. Meanwhile the office is dealing with what Mr. Taylor describes as a “recent uptick in violent crime,” which he attributed to increased gang activity.

“At the end of the day, I feel like my office and public safety are a priority,” Mr. Taylor said.

But the decision by Mr. Taylor to respond to the budget cut by immediately refusing to prosecute misdemeanors in Topeka — though the cuts do not go into effect until next year — caught people off guard, especially given that he had written that the city “does not have the staff or infrastructure to provide victims of domestic violence with the level of service they have come to expect.”

But Mr. Taylor said the county “forced my hand.”

Shelly Buhler, chairwoman of the Shawnee County Commission, said she did not expect Mr. Taylor to actually go through with his threat to stop prosecuting domestic violence.

She said that all departments were asked to propose 10 percent cuts and that he asked for an increase. “We had hoped that he would not put that group of victims at risk, that he would find some other way to absorb the cuts,” she said.

Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said that around the country, prosecutors are being forced to prioritize certain types of cases, but that these decisions are rarely discussed in public.

“Usually no one comes out and says that starting today I’m not going to prosecute that crime, which sends a message of failure and tells the community you’re free to commit that crime,” he said.

The city, which had already completed its budget, would have to spend $1 million more to pay for the additional prosecutions, said Dan Stanley, the interim city manager. “Its wholly inappropriate for him to lay it at the lap of the county,” he said.

Under the current arrangement, the district attorney is still responsible for prosecuting misdemeanors in the rest of the county as well as all felony domestic violence cases. Almost half of the misdemeanors that were prosecuted last year — 423 cases — are domestic battery cases, and most of the rest are shoplifting, drugs and assault.

Some critics pointed out that even as local governments are cutting deeper into important services, Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, is preparing a sweeping tax cut plan.

Becky Dickinson, a program director with the Y.W.C.A., which is the primary provider of services for victims of domestic violence in the county, said there was concern that the lack of charges for those being arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence — which could include verbal threats, pushing or slapping — would encourage retaliation.

“Our biggest concern is the safety of the victims,” she said. “We need to get this resolved as soon as possible.”

Even those who agreed that the district attorney’s office was better positioned to handle such cases worried about the symbolism of a city that decided to decriminalize domestic violence, if only symbolically, rather than prosecuting the offenders.

Michelle Moorman, 21, a college student at the nearby University of Kansas who showed up to protest the cuts with her roommates, said she was surprised and embarrassed by the standoff.

“Budget cuts are totally understandable, especially today,” she said. “What’s upsetting is this game of chicken between the city and the county.”

    Facing Cuts, a City Repeals Its Domestic Violence Law, NYT, 11.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/us/topeka-moves-to-decriminalize-domestic-violence.html

Data Show County’s Pain as Economy Plummeted

September 22, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

GREENWOOD, S.C. — The Greenwood Mills Matthews Plant once employed three generations of Frances Flaherty’s family. Her grandmother, father and brother made textiles there — denim for jeans and khaki for military uniforms.

But it all but closed in 2007 when the economy soured, pitching dozens of workers into the ranks of the unemployed, and the plant now functions mainly as a bleak backdrop to Ms. Flaherty’s restaurant, the Southside Cafe, where diners gaze out at its red brick walls.

“It’s what held this town together, all the mills,” Ms. Flaherty said, watching another thinly attended lunch hour go by. “They just slowly but surely dwindled out.”

The falloff of the economy of Greenwood County, a district of almost 70,000 people that once pulsed with busy factories and mills, was the steepest in the country by two counts.

According to an analysis of Census Bureau figures made public on Thursday, its poverty rate more than doubled to 24 percent from 2007 to 2010, the largest increase for any county in the nation.

The decline also engulfed the middle class. Median household income plunged by 28 percent over the same period, shaving nearly $12,000 off the annual earnings of families here during the recession, according to the analysis, by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College.

The numbers tell the story of a painful decade in Greenwood, which began with poverty levels that were close to the nation’s, and ended far above — after layoffs in textile mills, a foundry, restaurants and construction companies pummeled the county’s residents.

The number of workers in manufacturing alone fell by a quarter in the county from 2005 to 2009, according to a census survey of employers.

Those new facts are just sharp reminders to people here about what they have lived through.

“There just aren’t any jobs in Greenwood anymore,” said James Freeman, 58, a former textile mill worker. “My son can’t even get a job flipping burgers.”

Mr. Freeman worked for years in the textile mills, including the Matthews plant. He lost his last mill job in 2007 and was unable to find another. The work at one of the mills that employed him went to Argentina, he said, because the fabric was cheaper to produce there. Those workers were paid less, he was told, and got no benefits.

“That made me feel kind of bad,” said Mr. Freeman, who now collects disability. The mill’s closing “hurt a lot of people here in Greenwood.”

Disappointment like Mr. Freeman’s has welled up in areas of deep economic decline, infusing this election season with a blend of exhaustion and bitterness.

“Until we bring the companies back from overseas and stop protecting the world, we’re not going to be anything,” said Sam Stevenson, a retired construction worker, who could summon only expletives when asked about President Obama’s job plan.

In many ways, Greenwood is a typical American county. More than a quarter of its residents had at least some college education in 2009, roughly the same as the 27 percent nationally. It has a public university, which grants four-year degrees, a museum and a shopping mall.

But education has not seemed to ease the economic pain in an area whose fortunes were tied so closely to the textile industry that is now in such steep decline. Signs with the words “space available” are posted outside vacant factories on the road between here and Columbia, 80 miles to the east.

A red brick Baptist church on the outskirts of town commanded on its marquee, “Have your tools ready, and God will find you work.”

Apache Pawn and Gun, a pawn shop in town, is packed with items sold by people trying to make ends meet. Televisions, chain saws, bicycles and guitars are stacked from floor to ceiling. Chris Harris, the owner, said more middle-class people had come in to buy since the recession began.

“They’re saying, ‘Why should I buy a new chain saw when I could buy a used one?’ ” Mr. Harris said.

Ms. Flaherty said her cafe —its walls adorned with black-and-white photographs of mill workers and residents from happier times —is barely making it. When she opened in 2007, lunch used to bring lines out the door from workers at the plant and other businesses. Now it draws only a few diners. On Wednesday around 1:30 p.m., there were two.

And while housing prices have picked up — now a median of about $120,000 for the current listings compared with $109,000 in 2009 — the economy this year does not seem to be getting any better.

“It’s been bad this year,” said Kathy Green, owner of the Garden Grill, who said business was down significantly since the start of the recession. People order less, she said, and come in for the specials — $6 for a hamburger, fries and a drink.

Ms. Green said, “People just don’t have the money anymore.”

 

Barclay Walsh contributed reporting from Washington,

and Anne McQuary from Greenwood.

    Data Show County’s Pain as Economy Plummeted, NYT, 22.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/us/greenwood-sc-had-steepest-economic-decline-in-us.html

In Small Towns,

Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious

September 19, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

MOUNTAIN GROVE, Mo. — In the small towns nestled throughout the Ozarks, people like to say that everybody knows everybody’s business — and if they do not, they feel free to offer an educated guess.

One of the established places here for trading the gossip of the day is Dee’s Place, a country diner where a dozen longtime residents gather each morning around a table permanently reserved with a members-only sign for the “Old Farts Club,” as they call themselves, to talk about weather, politics and, of course, their neighbors.

But of late, more people in this hardscrabble town of 5,000 have shifted from sharing the latest news and rumors over eggs and coffee to the Mountain Grove Forum on a social media Web site called Topix, where they write and read startlingly negative posts, all cloaked in anonymity, about one another.

And in Dee’s Place, people are not happy. A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination.” And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger.

His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post titled “freak,” he said, which described the mother of two as, among other things, “a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS.” Not a word was true, Mr. and Ms. James said, but the consequences were real enough.

Friends and relatives stopped speaking to them. Trips to the grocery store brought a crushing barrage of knowing glances. She wept constantly and even considered suicide. Now, the couple has resolved to move.

“I’ll never come back to this town again,” Ms. James said in an interview at the diner. “I just want to get the hell away from here.”

In rural America, where an older, poorer and more remote population has lagged the rest of the country in embracing the Internet, the growing use of social media is raising familiar concerns about bullying and privacy. But in small towns there are complications.

The same Web sites created as places for candid talk about local news and politics are also hubs of unsubstantiated gossip, stirring widespread resentment in communities where ties run deep, memories run long and anonymity is something of a novel concept.

A generation ago, even after technology had advanced, many rural residents clung to the party line telephone systems that allowed neighbors to listen in on one another’s conversations. Now they are gravitating toward open community forums online, said Christian Sandvig, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“Something about rural culture seems to make people want to have conversations in public,” said Mr. Sandvig, who has studied the use of social media sites in rural areas.

Topix, a site lightly trafficked in cities, enjoys a dedicated and growing following across the Ozarks, Appalachia and much of the rural South, establishing an unexpected niche in communities of a few hundred or few thousand people — particularly in what Chris Tolles, Topix’s chief executive, calls “the feud states.” One of the most heavily trafficked forums, he noted, is Pikeville, Ky., once the staging ground for the Hatfield and McCoy rivalry.

“We’re running the Gawker for every little town in America,” Mr. Tolles said.

Whereas online negativity seems to dissipate naturally in a large city, it often grates like steel wool in a small town where insults are not easily forgotten.

The forums have provoked censure by local governments, a number of lawsuits and, in one case, criticism by relatives after a woman in Austin, Ind., killed herself and her three children this year. Hours earlier she wrote on the Web site where her divorce had been a topic of conversation, “Now it’s time to take the pain away.”

In Hyden, Ky. (population 365), the local forum had 107 visitors at the same time one afternoon this month. They encountered posts about the school system, a new restaurant and local arrests, as well as the news articles and political questions posted by Topix.

But more typical were the unsubstantiated posts that identified by name an employee at a dentist’s office as a home wrecker with herpes, accused a gas station attendant of being a drug dealer, and said a 13-year-old girl was “preggo by her mommy’s man.” Many allegations were followed with promises of retribution to whoever started the post.

“If names had been put on and tied to what has been said, there would have been one killing after another,” said Lonnie Hendrix, Hyden’s mayor.

Topix, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is owned in part by several major newspaper companies — Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy — but has independent editorial control. It was initially envisioned as a hyperlocal news aggregator with separate pages for every community in the country. But most of its growth was in small cities and towns, and local commenters wanted to shift the conversation to more traditional gossip.

Mr. Tolles acknowledged the biggest problem at the site is “keeping the conversation on the rails.” But he defended it on free-speech grounds. He said the comments are funny to read, make private gossip public, provide a platform for “people who have negative things to say” and are better for business.

At one point, he said, the company tried to remove all negative posts, but it stopped after discovering that commenters had stopped visiting the site. “This is small-town America,” he said. “The voices these guys are hearing are of their friends and neighbors.”

Mr. Tolles also said the site played a journalistic role, including providing a place for whistle-blowing and candid discussion of local politics.

He noted that the Mountain Grove Forum, which had 3,700 visitors on a single day this month, had 1,200 posts containing the word “corruption,” though it was unclear how many of them were true. One resident used the site to rail against local officials, helping build support for a petition-driven state audit of town government.

Topix said it received about 125,000 posts on any given day in forums for about 5,000 cities and towns. Unlike sites like Facebook, which requires users to give their real name, Topix users can pick different names for each post and are identified only by geography. About 9 percent are automatically screened out by software, based on offensive content like racial slurs; another 3 percent — mostly threats and “obvious libel,” Mr. Tolles said — are removed after people complain.

After a challenge from more than 30 state attorneys general, Topix stopped charging for the expedited removal of offensive comments — which Jack Conway, the attorney general for Kentucky, said “smacked of having to pay a fee to get your good name back.”

Despite the screening efforts, the site is full of posts that seem to cross lines. Topix, as an Internet forum, is immune from libel suits under federal law, but those who post could be sued, if they are found.

The company receives about one subpoena a day for the computer addresses of anonymous commenters as part of law enforcement investigations or civil suits, some of which have resulted in cash verdicts or settlements.

But at Dee’s Place, Jennifer James said she did not have enough money to pursue a lawsuit. And even if she did, she said, it would not help.

“In a small town,” Ms. James said, “rumors stay forever.”

    In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves-to-the-web-anonymous-and-vicious.html

Alabama County Averts Bankruptcy

September 16, 2011
The New York Times
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

The governing board of Alabama’s most populous county voted Friday to accept an agreement in principle on how to restructure more than $3 billion of debt, avoiding for now what would have been the biggest municipal bankruptcy filing in American history.

The terms of the agreement call for Jefferson County, which includes the city of Birmingham, to shed about $1 billion of the debt, the majority of which is held by J.P. Morgan. The agreement also offers the county several tools to lower its interest rate on the roughly $2 billion of new debt that will be issued to replace the current warrants.

“It’s been an agonizing process; it’s been going on for three and a half years,” said one Jefferson County commissioner, Joe Knight, explaining why he voted in favor of the agreement. “Today we’re going to take a step. It’s time for a resolution of this lingering debacle.”

Mr. Knight and others on the five-member commission said they were pleased that the framework agreement called for the governor to call a special session of the state legislature this fall, where lawmakers would look for ways to help Jefferson County close a $40 million budget gap. The deficit became apparent over the summer as the commission struggled to with what to do about its giant debt, infuriating residents of the county.

Until this year, state officials had refused to help the county straighten out its finances, saying it had made its own problems and should solve them on its own.

County Commissioner Sandra Little Brown said that since the state had finally offered some help, “it would really be a slap in the face to the governor and the legislature” not to give the agreement in principle a chance. She noted that the agreement gives the county a chance to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy court protection if the state’s efforts to help prove fruitless.

Jefferson County’s debt grew out of a flawed effort to refinance bonds it sold years ago to raise money for court-ordered sewer improvements. Chapter 9 became something of a battle cry in the county, as previous restructuring talks yielded proposals that included big increases in sewer rates. The current agreement-in-principle also calls for sewer rate increases, but smaller ones than in the past.

The one commissioner to vote against the agreement, George F. Bowman, read part of a letter he received from a county resident who urged him “not to accept the extraordinarily damaging terms,” particularly annual rate increases that could go on for as long as 40 years.

    Alabama County Averts Bankruptcy, NYT, 16.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/business/jefferson-county-averts-bankruptcy.html

Cities Report Surge in Graffiti

July 18, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Fresh blotches of graffiti decorate the backs of street signs here near the ocean. Tags have popped up on guardrails along the dirt trails near Griffith Park across town. There are, almost daily, fresh splashes on walls in the San Fernando Valley, on downtown Los Angeles buildings and on billboards along the highways.

And Los Angeles does not appear to be alone in grappling with a recent upsurge in graffiti, which is turning up in some unlikely places. A bumper crop of scrawls is blossoming in many modest-size communities across the country — in places like Florence, Ala.; Bernalillo County, N.M.; Taylors, S.C.; and in larger cities like Nashville and Portland, Ore. — even as major cities like Chicago, Denver, New York and Seattle say vigilant antigraffiti campaigns have spared them thus far.

“It’s popped up all of a sudden in the last six months,” said Tim Sandrell, the owner of Safari Adventures in Hair in Florence. “I’ve been downtown for 10 years, and I’m really disappointed that we are seeing this kind of activity. We have a beautiful city and an historic city, and it’s really upsetting to me seeing this going on.”

The upturn has prompted concern among city officials and renewed a debate about whether glorifying such displays — be it in museum exhibits, tattoos or television advertisements — contributes to urban blight and economic decay. But it is also stirring a debate about what is causing this recent surge and whether it might be an early indicator that anxiety and alienation are growing in some struggling urban areas in the face of stubborn unemployment and the lingering effects of the recession. The latest statistics from Los Angeles, where the unemployment rate was 11 percent in May, attest to a widening problem: the city removed 35.4 million square feet of graffiti for the fiscal year that ended June 30, an 8.2 percent jump over last year, city officials said.

“We’ve seen the amount of graffiti go up yearly,” said Paul Racs, the director of the Office of Community Beautification.

Tim Francis, a supervisor for the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, said there had been a rash of tagging on park signs, underpasses and the parkway. Rangers have set up surveillance, but the length of the highway in Mr. Francis’s jurisdiction — 165 miles, stretching from Boone to Cherokee — and the furtiveness of the graffiti writers makes catching them daunting.

“We are seeing tagging anywhere and everywhere,” Mr. Francis said. “Summertime, kids are out of school. Idle hands.”

In Bernalillo County, which includes Albuquerque, graffiti complaints in June jumped to 300, from 84 in April.

“It just keeps coming up, little by little,” said Bobby Velasco, the county’s graffiti supervisor. “We’ve covered more this year so far than we did last year.”

A metal recycling center is a favorite target, Mr. Velasco said.

“We clean it up every week, and every week they always come back and put up ‘Welcome to L.A.,’ ” he said.

In Portland, officials said taggers from other communities were defacing their property. “We’re arresting more people from out of town,” said Marcia Dennis, the city’s graffiti abatement coordinator. “For every one we get cleaned up, something else takes its place.”

The upsurge comes as cities like Los Angeles, struggling with budget cuts, have trimmed graffiti fighting programs; the $7.1 million budget for graffiti eradication last year was cut 6.5 percent in the budget that took effect July 1. But cities like Santa Monica have not cut back, and have still had an upsurge, suggesting other factors are at play.

Some officials, like Mr. Francis, say it is a symptom of summer recess, a tough economy that has left many teenagers out of work and a general sense of anxiety and malaise. “People know the cops aren’t around or they are working on other stuff,” said Bobby Shriver, a member of the Santa Monica City Council.

Neighborhood leaders and law enforcement officials also blamed what they call a glamorization of graffiti, reflected by a new graffiti exhibit at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood, even after an earlier furor over a full-fledged graffiti exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

“It’s because of the pop culture,” said Ramona Findley, a Los Angeles police detective who heads the department’s graffiti task force. “It’s very interesting; with your violent crime going down, it seems like your mischievous crime is going up. The art world has accepted it. People make money from graffiti T-shirts. I was in Wal-Mart on Easter, and I saw graffiti Easter eggs.”

Ms. Dennis, in Portland, described graffiti as “addictive behavior,” adding: “The rush is addictive, and these guys don’t quit. They all think they’re going to end up being fabulously wealthy graffiti artists like Marc Ecko or Banksy or Shepard Fairey.”

Several officials said they were concerned the graffiti had extended beyond gang markers to others who consider more of their community a canvas. “The areas where we’ve seen the biggest increase are areas where we haven’t had a problem before,” said Mr. Racs of the Los Angeles beautification office. “It’s not gangs. It’s primarily just taggers. They are just cruising around on their skateboards.”

And the problem, he said, has become more national. “I get calls all the time from little cities in Iowa and Indiana that have never had a graffiti issue before,” Mr. Racs said.

The surge has prompted new efforts to combat it, including a graffiti-recognition database in Los Angeles and a reinstitution of foot patrols in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Portland.

“We will have four or five people starting out once a week around dusk walking the neighborhood with a graffiti cleanup kit,” said Michael O’Connor, the head of the Brooklyn Action Corps in Portland.

The rise in graffiti has stirred concern among officials who already feared budget cuts would threaten eradication efforts.

“Cities don’t have the budgets they once had for cleanup,” said William J. Bratton, who served as police commissioner in New York and Los Angeles. “Police forces don’t have the resources they once had for enforcement.”

 

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

    Cities Report Surge in Graffiti, NYT, 18.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/us/19graffiti.html

Emanuel Triumphs in Chicago Mayoral Race

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and EMMA GRAVES FITZSIMMONS

CHICAGO — Rahm Emanuel, a former congressman who worked for two presidents, was elected mayor of Chicago on Tuesday, marking a new path for a city that has, for 22 years, been led by a singular, powerful force, Richard M. Daley.

Mr. Emanuel, who will take office in May, won 55 percent of the vote against five other candidates. That allowed him to avoid a one-on-one runoff election in April that had been seen by some opponents as their best chance to defeat Mr. Emanuel. With 95 percent of precincts reporting, his closest competitor, Gery J. Chico, a former chief of staff to Mr. Daley, got 24 percent of the vote.

“Tonight we are moving forward the only way we truly can — together as one city with one future,” Mr. Emanuel told a crowd at a union hall west of downtown.

Mr. Emanuel, 51, is known to nearly everyone here — less, perhaps, for his years as a congressman from the North Side than for his ties to President Obama, a fellow Chicagoan whom he served as White House chief of staff. Mr. Obama congratulated Mr. Emanuel on Tuesday evening, saying, “As a Chicagoan and a friend, I couldn’t be prouder.”

Some voters here have viewed the connection as both an affirmation to support Mr. Emanuel and as a potential advantage for Chicago in its future dealings with Washington.

As the next mayor of this city, the nation’s third largest, Mr. Emanuel faces significant obstacles. He must cope with staggering unfunded pension liabilities, as well as a budget deficit around $600 million, by some estimates. Easy fixes — like the proceeds of privatization deals of the city’s parking meters — have already been used. Meanwhile, the city’s population of 2.69 million is smaller than it was a decade ago, unhappy news for a new mayor who would wish to see a growing tax base.

“There are no more rabbits to pull out of the hat,” said Joe Moore, an alderman from the North Side for the last 20 years, referring to the city’s budget of about $6 billion. “What is left for the next mayor and the next City Council is a series of bad choices — cutting services, perhaps raising taxes and fees.”

A Daley (the current mayor or his father, Richard J., who operated with a similarly tight control) has run this city for 42 of the past 55 years, and Mr. Emanuel, the city’s first Jewish mayor, is likely to be compared with that family’s legacy at every turn.

Among the questions certain to arise: How does he now handle the city’s 50 aldermen, some of whose political careers were owed to the current mayor and others who pressed for Mr. Emanuel’s opponents? How may he push to change city workers’ pensions, a system he has described as unsustainable? And how does he soothe differences that arose during a tense campaign — differences with public-sector unions that endorsed Mr. Chico and with African-American leaders who backed Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman in the United States Senate?

City voting officials said the election had drawn a smaller turnout than they had anticipated. Along with Mr. Chico and Ms. Braun, who was winning 8.8 percent of the vote Tuesday night, Mr. Emanuel defeated Miguel del Valle, the city clerk, who got 9.4 percent; Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins, 1.6 percent; and William Walls, 0.9 percent.

Mr. Emanuel — who has spent plenty of time working behind the scenes for other politicians, including Mayor Daley and President Bill Clinton — has long been known for his tough-guy methods of negotiating, his harsh, blunt retorts, and his use of four-letter words. But over the last five months, in his own campaign, Mr. Emanuel showed a far more reserved side. That left some here wondering which Mr. Emanuel — fierce or muted — may next appear, with the campaign over and the governing ahead.

Mr. Emanuel had long suggested that he would love to be the mayor of Chicago, his birthplace. But his immediate road to City Hall began last September, when Mayor Daley stunned this city and announced he would not seek a seventh term. That meant the first mayoral election in 64 years without a sitting mayor on the ballot, and a huge crop of would-be candidates emerged from seemingly every political rank.

In October, Mr. Emanuel left his post as White House chief of staff to return to Chicago for a run, and the number of candidates quickly began shrinking. In the months that followed, he would raise some $13 million and campaign at more than 100 neighborhood L stations, 229 neighborhood stops and 20 schools.

In the end, the effort — far more elaborate and expensive than his five opponents’ — spared him from a runoff in April. Some opponents had viewed that second race — a head-to-head race with only one candidate — as the only chance of defeating Mr. Emanuel.

After Mr. Chico spoke on the telephone to Mr. Emanuel on Tuesday evening, Mr. Chico told his supporters that he had pledged his support, from here on out, to Mr. Emanuel’s efforts for Chicago. “Let’s all work together to get behind the new mayor,” Mr. Chico told a subdued group during his brief concession speech, “and make this the best city on the face of the earth.”

At points in the campaign, Mr. Emanuel’s inevitability faltered over a seemingly simple question: Was he really a resident of Chicago? Critics challenged him, saying his time at the White House meant he failed to meet a requirement that candidates live in Chicago for the year immediately before Election Day. The Illinois Supreme Court found that he was allowed to run — he had never lost legal residency at his North Side home, the justices found — but not before the issue became a major drama here, with election workers, at one point, urgently halting the printing of ballots.

If the residency battle ultimately drew sympathy to Mr. Emanuel, it also raised a question that his opponents had quietly pressed on all along: Was he a true, die-hard Chicagoan the way Mr. Daley — an avid White Sox fan and a constant, if gruff cheerleader for his city — was a Chicagoan? Mr. Emanuel spent part of his youth in the northern suburbs, in addition to his working time in Washington — details regularly noted by his critics.

But voters who chose him on Tuesday seemed to dismiss the question. “Who cares if he lived on the North Shore?” said Ben Fogel, a social worker who said he was voting for Mr. Emanuel. “I have family there, and it is close enough.” The distinction was silly now, his supporters said, a nonissue in a post-Daley world.

    Emanuel Triumphs in Chicago Mayoral Race, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/us/chicago-mayor-election.html

One More Job Lost in the Recession: The Mayor’s

February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — These are trying times for the people of Central Falls, a city so close to fiscal collapse that the state seized control of City Hall last summer. Taxes have risen nearly 20 percent to help solve the immediate crisis, unions have agreed to givebacks and the city of 19,000 — all 1.29 square miles of it — seems tinged with defeat.

But to hear Mayor Charles D. Moreau tell it, his suffering may be worst of all.

Mr. Moreau, a Democrat serving his fourth term, has not set foot in City Hall since July 19, the day that a state-appointed receiver took control. The state police knocked on his door that morning, he said, demanded his city-owned car and cellphone and keys to City Hall and handed him a letter announcing that his salary of $71,736 was being cut to $26,000. His role was now advisory, he was informed.

“I was told they’d call if they needed me,” Mr. Moreau said recently in a rare interview. “They haven’t called since.”

Across the nation, cities and states are trying myriad ways of righting their fiscal ships as the recession plods on. But locking the mayor out of City Hall is generally not one of them.

A number of local governments are so financially distressed that states have assumed an oversight role. Several cities in Michigan have emergency financial managers appointed by the state, for example, and in New York, a state board seized control of Nassau County’s finances last month. But in those cases and others, local elected officials have retained some role.

“The circumstances that have led to the difficulties in Central Falls may actually be widespread,” said Christopher W. Hoene, director of research for the National League of Cities. “But not very many cities are in that dire straits.”

Mr. Moreau, 47, is suing the state, asserting that the law allowing the takeover of financially troubled cities violates his constitutional right to due process, among other things. He appealed to the Rhode Island Supreme Court after losing the first round and is awaiting a ruling. Meanwhile, the blunt-talking mayor is working at his brother’s real estate office, down the street from City Hall, and stewing about the situation he finds himself in. He has rebuffed calls to step down and, in fact, said he was already planning his 2013 re-election campaign.

“My bumper stickers are ready to be printed,” he said. “I’d win re-election with 90 percent of the vote if the election was today.”

His confidence seemed striking, in part because Mr. Moreau is the subject of a state and federal corruption inquiry involving his hiring of a friend to board up dozens of abandoned buildings in town for about $2 million. The friend, a contractor, also installed a new furnace in the mayor’s house in 2009, according to The Providence Journal, possibly charging less than it was worth.

Mr. Moreau, a factory worker’s son and former restaurant owner known around town as Chuckie, would not discuss the investigation except to call it “all political” and “all nonsense.” He said he had done nothing wrong.

Mr. Moreau’s administration took the state by surprise by declaring fiscal insolvency last May. The city became the first in Rhode Island history to seek state bankruptcy protection, citing a deficit and retiree benefit obligations so profound as to seem insurmountable.

That alarmed the state, which feared that other beleaguered cities would follow suit, and bond rating agencies, which downgraded Central Falls’s debt to junk status. So the legislature swiftly enacted a law allowing indefinite state oversight, a measure Mr. Moreau initially supported.

The receiver, Mark A. Pfeiffer, a retired state judge, did not move into Mr. Moreau’s office when he arrived on the job, laying claim to a conference room instead. The office remains locked, a curtain over the door.

Mr. Pfeiffer said he saw no choice but to demote Mr. Moreau to advisory status.

“You couldn’t have somebody come in and perform the duties of the mayor and have somebody else being the mayor,” he said. “It doesn’t work very well, and particularly it doesn’t work well in a distressed community.”

Mr. Pfeiffer tried to build a relationship with the City Council, but within months it deteriorated and he reduced its members to advisory status. He went to court in September to stop the mayor and the Council from making new appointments, and soon after, Mr. Moreau sued. He said he had hired lawyers with his own money; Mr. Pfeiffer said he had refused to authorize city funds.

The suit calls the receivership law “undemocratic,” saying it violates the separation of powers doctrine by giving Mr. Pfeiffer executive and legislative powers.

“Obviously here the people have been completely disenfranchised,” said Michael Kelly, Mr. Moreau’s lawyer. “We have what I would suggest is a form of dictatorship.”

A Superior Court judge upheld the law as constitutional in October, partly because the receivership was temporary, although without a specific term. The law is not without precedent — Massachusetts put the city of Chelsea under receivership in 1991, removing the elected mayor and reducing other officials to advisers.

At oral arguments before the Supreme Court this month, some justices appeared skeptical of Mr. Kelly’s reasoning, with one saying of Mr. Moreau and the City Council, “Those were the people in charge when the ship hit the shoals.”

Yet the justices also questioned the state’s lawyer aggressively, asking what was to stop Mr. Pfeiffer from unilaterally changing city policies, like zoning, that had nothing to do with finance. They also questioned whether anyone would run for office if the city remained under receivership, with Justice Francis X. Flaherty, a former mayor himself, asking, “What do you run for? Advisory mayor?”

His status notwithstanding, Mr. Moreau said he still talked to the city’s police chief and public works director daily, met with constituents and pursued economic development projects. Asked whether other city officials and residents still addressed him as mayor, he cracked, “They’d better.”

Mr. Moreau is known around town as a bare-knuckled politician who rewards allies — often, critics say, with city jobs — and punishes enemies. Early in his tenure, he made waves by ordering a search of computers at the city library for campaign materials that favored a political opponent. Later, he championed the expansion of a detention center, cracked down on street violence and easily won re-election.

Mr. Moreau said he had not bothered reading a lengthy report that Mr. Pfeiffer submitted to the state in December with recommendations for averting fiscal collapse, including the possibility of merging the city with neighboring Pawtucket. The report said the city’s problems were rooted in more than a decade of elected leaders’ approving generous union contracts without figuring out how to pay for them.

The troubles worsened because of state aid reductions and inaccurate budget assumptions. For example, the city anticipated $1.2 million in revenue from the detention center in 2009-10 and got none. The city has started paying its bills again, but Mr. Pfeiffer warned that Central Falls, with an annual budget of about $18 million, faced annual deficits of $5 million and combined pension and retiree health benefit obligations of about $80 million.

“I think it’s all nonsense,” Mr. Moreau said of Mr. Pfeiffer’s recommendations.

Mr. Moreau also said he was galled by Mr. Pfeiffer’s salary of $200 an hour, and while at one point he said his court battle was “not about the money,” he also lamented that his wife had been forced to return to work and his youngest child to enter day care.

“This was not my family plan,” he said.

Some residents clearly share the mayor’s outrage, while others are hopeful about the receivership or indifferent. Sparky Chippis, a restaurant owner and Moreau ally who has known the mayor since childhood, described Mr. Moreau’s situation as “an injustice.”

“The guy was elected by people,” Mr. Chippis said. “He had the trust of the people to be in the office over there.”

But James Diossa, the only Council member who did not join Mr. Moreau’s lawsuit, said many residents appreciated the change. “The prior administration didn’t do a great job as far as keeping the community informed, and the community really lost faith,” said Mr. Diossa, who heads an advisory council to the receiver.

Mr. Pfeiffer said few citizens had complained to him, but Mr. Moreau said that was because people were afraid. “They should be marching in the streets as to what’s been done to me,” he said.

Mr. Pfeiffer stepped down earlier this month; his term was up and the new governor, Lincoln D. Chafee, an independent, wanted to appoint “a trusted adviser,” a spokesman said. With the pick, Robert G. Flanders Jr., a former State Supreme Court justice, in charge, Mr. Moreau said he was hoping to get a call.

“I will send him a letter and be very frank with him that I’m here to help,” he said.

Jen McCaffery contributed reporting.

    One More Job Lost in the Recession: The Mayor’s, NYT, 21.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22mayor.html

Smaller New Orleans After Katrina, Census Shows

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — When Hurricane Katrina hit and the murky waters rushed through levee breaches, even the facts were drowned.

Official documents were destroyed, years of photographs were ruined, and a city’s ability to know itself was lost. Answers to basic questions like how many people lived here, where they lived and who they were could not be easily answered.

Now there finally are some numbers, and they show that the city is 29 percent smaller than a decade ago.

The Census Bureau reported on Thursday that 343,829 people were living in the city of New Orleans on April 1, 2010, four years and seven months after it was virtually emptied by the floodwaters that followed the hurricane.

The numbers portray a significantly smaller city than in the previous census, in 2000, though it should be said that New Orleans had been steadily shrinking even then. In 1990, it was the 24th-biggest city in the country, in 2000, the 31st, and now it has surely dropped from the top 50.

The latest figure is lower than estimates cited widely by many here in recent months. It is lower, by roughly 10,000, than the official census estimate in the summer of 2009.

“It’s not an unqualified good thing to have big numbers,” said Mark VanLandingham, a professor at Tulane University who has expressed frustration with frequent calls from local officials, sometimes successful, for the Census Bureau to raise the city’s population estimate. “It made it very difficult to figure out what was actually going on.”

The census findings reveal some other changes in the population, as well.

According to Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist who analyzed the census results for The New York Times, the city has roughly 24,000 fewer white residents than it did 10 years ago, though the proportion of the white population has grown to 30 percent.

The city has 118,000 fewer black residents. New Orleans, once more than two-thirds black, is now less than 60 percent black.

There are 56,193 fewer children, a drop of nearly 44 percent.

The movements in the region can be seen with some clarity as well. St. Tammany Parish, a suburban refuge for many New Orleanians after the storm, grew by nearly a quarter. St. Bernard Parish, which is downriver from the city and was almost completely overwhelmed by the floodwaters, shrank by nearly half.

The Hispanic population of neighboring Jefferson Parish, home to many of those who came to fill the city’s ravenous appetite for construction labor, jumped by 65 percent.

Some may yet challenge these figures, arguing that the count overlooked people living in abandoned houses or moving in with one relative after another as they wait for rents to come down or houses to be rebuilt. There is no question such people exist in New Orleans; whether they were all counted is another matter.

Emily Arata, the deputy mayor for external affairs , said the city was not planning to challenge the numbers, in part because such challenges do not traditionally succeed but also because it was satisfied that the figure fell within 3 percent of the 2009 estimate.

The numbers have consequences, of course. Many of them will play out in the heated political battle to come in March when the State Legislature meets to discuss redistricting.

Louisiana has lost a Congressional seat, something that was possible even without the storm, given the state’s anemic population growth in the first five years of the decade. But while the loss itself may not be a result of the floodwaters, its effect will be.

With such a significant drop in New Orleans’s black population, will the state’s majority-minority Congressional district remain centered in the city? Will it snake upward from New Orleans, along the Mississippi to East Baton Rouge, now the largest parish in the state?

“The one thing that people need to realize about these numbers is that everything is on the table,” said Norby Chabert, a Democratic state senator from Houma, south of New Orleans. “The political assumptions that have been bedrock for however many years now are out the window.”

Far more is at stake than political representation.

Certain to be a contentious topic at the legislative session in March are the scores, if not hundreds, of laws on the Louisiana books that exempt New Orleans from a variety of state rules. These exemptions, which go back decades, coyly apply to any city in the state of more than 400,000 people, a description that no longer applies to New Orleans.

“There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” predicted Emile Bruneau, a former legislator who represented a district in New Orleans.

In an e-mail, James Perry, a former mayoral candidate and the executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, called the city’s population figure “likely devastating,” and raised concerns that it could lead to drops in federal financing for housing, infrastructure and public health efforts, as the city is still steadily pushing forward in recovery.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying that “accurate census estimates in future years will ensure that city government and local nonprofit organizations will have the federal funds necessary to provide our growing population with important services.”

But he and officials like Ms. Arata emphasized that the city’s recovery should not be judged by census data but by the reforms under way now, many of which are addressing problems that have plagued the city for years. The mayor, in his statement, mentioned the overhaul of the city’s schools and the broad and ongoing redesign of its troubled criminal justice system. Indeed, as the census numbers were trickling out, the City Council was voting to build a new, and smaller, jail.

There are some who say it is premature, even wrong, to focus only on the 343,829 people who are here (compared with 484,674 in 2000). “I think it does point to that we have a problem with a large percentage of displaced people,” said Lance Hill, the executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, which is based at Tulane.

Dr. Hill described shortcomings in housing programs, particularly in initiatives meant to restore the city’s rentals, that disproportionately affected black residents. Such failings may have been a reason why so many former residents have not returned.

The 2010 census tracked people’s current locations, not their past homes nor future intentions. And indeed, it is difficult if not impossible to know how many of the New Orleanians of 2000 who are not here still want to return. It is not even known where they are. But nonprofit rebuilding groups say their waiting lists are long.


Matthew Ericson contributed reporting from New York.

    Smaller New Orleans After Katrina, Census Shows, NYT, 3.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04census.html

Bit by Bit, a City’s Attention Returns to Mundane Matters

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and CARLI BROUSSEAU

TUCSON — The talk around town this week has been about the weather.

The high made it only into the upper 30s on Thursday, largely relegating the shorts and flip-flops of last week to indoors — at least until Sunday, when the temperature is expected to climb back up to the accustomed 72-degree range.

And basketball, too, has crept into conversations. At the McKale Memorial Center, where on Jan. 12 President Obama urged the country to do better, crowds wearing red and blue have been unself-consciously cheering a University of Arizona team ranked in the Top 25 for the first time since 2007.

Tucson, synonymous a month ago with a deadly shooting rampage at a political event, is beginning to move on.

Representative Gabrielle Giffords, struck by a bullet in the head on Jan. 8, spent two weeks at Tucson’s University Medical Center but is now in a rehabilitation program in Houston.

Jared L. Loughner, 22, the man accused of shooting Ms. Giffords and 18 others — including six who died — is in federal custody in Phoenix, two hours to the north.

For the city, the pain has lingered but diminished.

“I was depressed for 10 days after it happened, but eventually it lifted,” said Hector Lovemore, 70, a retired mining executive. “It felt like a kick in the gut.”

But despite Tucson’s having become the center of a national conversation about civility, politics and gun violence, Mr. Lovemore said his love for his adopted hometown had not changed. “I expect, in a year from now, this will be in the background,” he said. “It’s time to move on.”

Toward that end, on Friday the city will dismantle three makeshift memorials to the victims and collect the hundreds of tiny American flags, candles, bouquets of flowers, photographs and tiles with handwritten notes people have left behind. The items will be saved until decisions are made about a permanent memorial.

A sign at the largest of the three, at University Medical Center, asks people to stop leaving mementos, and instead to donate to their favorite charity.

“We’re trying to transition out from these temporary memorial sites to starting to understand what the expectations for a permanent memorial are,” said Stephen Brigham, the hospital’s director of capital planning and projects. “We at least have the start of a community process.”

The memorial at the site of the shooting, the parking lot of a Safeway supermarket on North Oracle Road, will also be boxed up. Business there does not appear to have fallen off, and shoppers said it did not feel strange to be buying peanut butter and milk near what had recently been a bloody crime scene.

“I think it pretty much could have happened anywhere, so the place doesn’t seem to matter,” said Charles Cusack, 67, an aviation consultant.

At the Loughner family home, Mr. Loughner’s parents, who neighbors say have never been particularly social, have begun to venture out. The family has released a note expressing shock and regret about the shootings, but has not spoken about their son in public.

Mr. Loughner’s father, Randy, sits for long stretches in the dark inside his old white pickup truck. His mother, Amy, has not returned to work at the Parks Department.

People drive slowly by the house, partly hidden by a cactus garden, to gawk. A mesquite tree drips sap onto the driveway.

George Gayan, who lives next door, said that he had seen Mr. Loughner a couple of times since the shooting, but that they did not speak. That is as it should be, though, Mr. Gayan said, given that the two have not spoken in some 25 years.

Perhaps the most comforting sign of normalcy for the city’s residents has been the return of the Tucson Gem, Fossil and Mineral Shows. The event, now in its 57th year, is one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions and hotel room rates that had been less than $100 a night now hover around $200.

Rock and fossil dealers from all over the Southwest have pitched tents and set up a hodgepodge of tables around the city displaying large crystals, dinosaur bones and jewelry for sale.

Even though Tucson is returning to normal, residents say that memories of the shootings and the continuing recovery have had a galvanizing effect on their town.

“I think it’s really brought Tucson closer,” said Sharon Algar, 73, a retired nurse. “I live at a senior center, and it really takes something to get some of those people there talking to each other. This did it. We just keep praying and praying.”


Joseph Goldstein contributed reporting.

    Bit by Bit, a City’s Attention Returns to Mundane Matters, NYT, 3.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04arizona.html

The Bright Side of Blight

January 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DIANA LIND

Philadelphia

EVEN in Philadelphia, with its 40,000 vacant properties and a quarter of its population living below the poverty line, the Kensington neighborhood still shocks. On a frigid afternoon, a prostitute lingers in the shadow of the elevated train tracks, waiting restlessly for customers. Husks of long-closed factories stand amid thigh-high winter wheat. Streams of garbage flow down the streets, as if both the people and the city government had agreed to forsake the effort of propriety.

In recent months, this neighborhood has also been terrorized by a killer who choked and raped his victims in the area’s ubiquitous abandoned houses and vacant lots. If only these deserted places could be charged as accomplices to the so-called Kensington Strangler’s three murders and two sexual assaults, and for aiding and abetting the drug use and prostitution that have caused so many of the neighborhood’s problems. But the empty lots with their discarded furniture and ghetto kudzu and the weather-beaten houses with boarded-up windows won’t be going anywhere soon.

It’s been nearly 30 years since James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published their broken windows theory, positing that the torn social fabric that allows for vandalism also encourages other kinds of crime and disinvestment in a neighborhood. The theory validated the inclination to improve the built environment first, in the hopes that once a sense of confidence has been restored other aspects of an engaged community will follow. And in places on the cusp of gentrification or economic recovery, like certain New York areas in the ’90s, quality-of-life campaigns have been proven to clean up the streets and reduce crime.

Indeed, as gentrification has slowly crept northward in Philadelphia, Kensington residents have gained some hope from a newly branded arts corridor, a few rejuvenated parks and street improvements, all thanks to the efforts of an invaluable local community development corporation. But this scattershot approach has failed to create the kind of holistic change needed in this neighborhood — or its counterparts in St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore.

Many cities have also sought to transform undeveloped lots into green space and urban agriculture. It’s a natural fit and, again, in Kensington a full city block has been converted from an industrial brownfield to an admirably active farm. But land-based strategies that try to reinvent this vacant lot or that blighted ground do little to stem the larger social trends that created the spatial problem in the first place.

Philadelphia, like many Rust Belt cities, was so deeply hurt by the loss of manufacturing that began in the 1950s that it has yet to recover. Gone were the jobs that even high-school dropouts could leverage to achieve stable lives, and with them went the housing stock. Today, we are left with a city where the number of jobs requiring postsecondary education has grown, while more than 60 percent of Philadelphia’s adults read at a sixth grade level or below, creating a miserable mismatch that leaves both employers and the unemployed in need.

That’s why any plan to mitigate the vacant property crisis must not only include innovative urban planning, but also try to restore employment opportunities. We need to literally build jobs on neglected and undeveloped land.

There are a number of organizations in Philadelphia that provide models for dealing with vacancy and joblessness as intertwined problems. For example, the Job Opportunity Investment Network, a public-private partnership, supports workforce training programs that have a hyperlocal impact.

One such program is the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative, which provides low-skill residents with intensive education and then matches graduates with jobs at the prestigious universities and medical centers within walking distance of their homes. While the jobs help people leave poverty behind, they ensure that the new wealth created remains in their neighborhoods, helping stabilize these downtrodden communities.

Roots to Re-Entry enrolls convicts in a horticulture vocational and life-skills training program that, upon their release, leads to landscaping jobs. Part of the training includes growing organic food that is donated to Philadelphia’s neediest, showing how this work can nourish impoverished neighborhoods.

Such programs can teach residents the skills they need to reimagine the urban voids they encounter every day. Cities, in turn, should partner with neighborhood groups to determine the most suitable abandoned buildings and lots for development, luring companies and projects that would employ newly retrained residents.

Strategies that deal with vacant spaces by generating new paths to employment aim to do more than fixing broken windows ever could. They seek to change the dynamics of the local economy by creating better communities, not just prettier ones, where abandoned properties are viewed as job sites rather than crime scenes waiting to happen.

Diana Lind is the editor at large of the magazine Next American City

and a 2011 Van Alen Institute fellow.

    The Bright Side of Blight, NYT, 25.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25lind.html