May 2008

  • Diverse Workplaces Work, Why Not Neighborhoods?

    To continue the collective efficacy discussion, I want to throw the work of Professor Scott Page, author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies, into the mix. While Robert Putnam’s more recent research may be depressing on the subject of diversity, Page’s is exactly the opposite. He argues that in terms of workplaces and other groups trying to solve problems together, more diverse ones (and by diverse he means not just race, gender, and class, but also age, politics, and different ways of thinking) are actually more productive and better problem-solvers. And he has mathematical models to prove it. From a New York Times interview with Page: People from different backgrounds have varying ways of looking at problems, what I call “tools.” The sum of these tools is far more powerful in organizations with diversity than in ones where everyone has gone to the same schools, been trained in the same mold and thinks in almost identical ways. The problems we face in the world are very complicated. Any one of us can get stuck. If we’re in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place. It seems to me that if we could tap into those strengths in neighborhoods, they would have similar positive effects. But of course in a workplace we’re forced, more or less, to work together. In neighborhoods we’re not. Still, Page provides an optimistic perspective: There really is explicit value in getting over that hump and learning to collaborate with people different from us. more

  • N.Y. Legislators: Don’t Sleep on Foreclosure Prevention

    It seems surreal, or like a nasty joke. How can Americans be so far into the foreclosure crisis and still not see any significant foreclosure prevention legislation from their lawmakers? As The New York Times commented last week: In responding…

  • A Good-News Economic Story for the Disabilities Community

    Lost in the endless political campaign and Iraq news is an emerging success story. The Real Economic Impact Tour conceived and sponsored by the National Disability Institute has seen a 10-fold increase in the past three years in assisting people with disabilities to receive Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC). EITC is the single most significant federal tool in helping more than 5 million Americans escape poverty. This is especially significant given that there are 54 million Americans with disabilities, and a large number of these individuals are low-income. REI provides free services to people with disabilities to both receive EITC refunds and asset-building services and products. In 2007, 54 cities participated in REI, with 36,275 tax returns totaling $32.6 million. The final results are not yet in for the 63 cities that participated in 2008, but more than 80,000 returns were prepared with more than $70 million in income to one of America’s poorest populations. This is an exciting model that can reach hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities and help them move forward on the road toward economic independence. Targeting individuals with disabilities has become embedded in the growing community tax coalition approach that now serves more than 3 million individuals. more

  • You’ve Seen One Hussein, You’ve Seen ‘Em All

    I’ve been thinking about democracy a lot lately. It happens every time there’s an election. Every time I start getting bombarded by mailers for candidates and propositions. Every time I realize how susceptible people are to propaganda. Week before last,…

  • Leadership Afraid to Cling to Immigration

    While lots of us fired up the grill over the Memorial Day weekend, a story came out Saturday in The New York Times about the previous week’s prosecution of 270 undocumented workers, arrested May 12 at an Iowa meat-packing plant.…

  • Golf Course Wars in Benton Harbor

    Golf courses have been lightning rods and symbols for class struggle around the world, as in Morelos, Mexico, where a golf course sucking up the town of Tepoztlan as water led to deadly violent clashes in 1996. Golf courses are…

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    Do New Yorkers Need an Emerald City?

    The “Christian Science Monitor reported a few days ago”:http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/05/22/going-‘green’-has-willets-point-seeing-red/ on the Bloomberg administration’s plans to redevelop the Willets Point industrial area of Queens (just east of Shea Stadium) as a mixed-income development with 5,500 units of housing and a new convention center. The Monitor largely fell for the administration’s claims that this would be NYC’s “first green neighborhood.” But the current plans are more “emerald city” than sustainable community development. more

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    “Let’s Refuel America”

    According to a report in The New York Times Monday, auto sales are down by more than a million compared to 2007’s 16.2 million cars sold. Auto lenders are less likely to lend to customers with less-than-stellar credit, and home…

  • “Nation’s Poorest 1% Now Controls …..

    Two-Thirds Of U.S. Soda Can Wealth,” so reads a headline from the latest issue of The Onion, my favorite source of political commentary. The article goes on to talk about the “growing and possibly unbridgeable gap between the rich and the mega-poor.” Indeed, the distribution of wealth in the U.S. (including, interestingly enough, soda can wealth) is extremely skewed. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now own 34 percent of the nation’s private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent. Economic inequality in the U.S. is at its highest since the Gilded Age of the 1880s. According to Robert Reich, Not since the days of the robber barons of the 19th century have we seen this much wealth concentrated in so few hands. From 1979 to 2005, a period during which national output had nearly doubled, the after-tax real income of the bottom one-fifth increased by only 6 percent, that of the middle fifth increased by 21 percent, while that of the top fifth increased by 80 percent. For the top 1 percent, this income more than tripled, increasing by 228 percent. According to economists Emmanuel Saez (University of California, Berkeley) and Thomas Pikkety (Paris School of Economics), much of the phenomenal gains for the top class are the result of huge increases in salaries at the top, especially executive compensation packages for top management, which started to rise in the 1970s, and grew rapidly in the 1990s. more

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    Countrywide CEO’s Cyberblunder

    We hear it a lot these days, the Dante Alighieri quote that declares that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality. And of course we’re all down with that, but… doesn’t it seem right there should be some fiery little side-pit for the likes of an arrogant piece of work like Angelo Mozilo? Mozilo, of course, is the CEO of Countrywide Financial, the mortgage lending giant that gorged for years on sub-prime loans — read: loans loaded with points and extra fees and often double-digit interest rates — before the present meltdown may yet drag the entire economy into the dumper. The 70-year-old Mozilo is considered the point-man of Countrywide’s conversion from a more conventional lender to a majority subprime loan vendor. In 2007, Countrywide lost $704 million and laid off 11,000 employees. Mozilo collected $132 million in salary and cashed-out stock options. Borrowers, stockholders, and former employees all got so angry, they stormed Countrywide and rode Mozilo out on a rail. Ha ha — not really! Of course they didn’t! more

  • Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum”: Part of the Story

    A few weeks ago I had the chance to spend a weekend on a tiny island in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay that has just enough room for 700 year-round residents. Maybe it was because I knew a few people there, but…

  • Countrywide Is Not On Your Side

    Angelo Mozilo, the Countrywide financial chairman who is arguably the poster child for the current subprime meltdown, just learned the difference between e-mail reply and forward. A beleaguered Countrywide customer, Daniel Bailey, Jr. had sent Mozilo (and various other Countrywide execs) a “hardship letter” e-mail requesting modifications to the terms of his loan, which had recently reset. Bailey is hoping to remain in his home of 16 years. Bailey used language in his email that he found on LoanSafe.org, a Web site that offers advice to troubled borrowers. Finding the message in his inbox, Mozilo had a classic “oops” and fit-of-pique moment. He fired off a message to his staff. “This is unbelievable. Most of these letters now have the same wording. Obviously they are being counseled by some other person or by the Internet. Disgusting.” Instead of forwarding, he replied directly to Bailey, who went public. Gee, some of us might use that same word to describe Mozilo’s $130.6-million profit from 2007 Countrywide stock sales. And in the unintended effects department, guess that little loan counseling Web site saw a big uptick in clicks over the last 24 hours. more

  • Putting Our Heads Together vs. Knocking Heads

    Read Rob McKay and Ori Brafman’s recent post at Huffington Post and you’re likely to feel your pulse race over the transformative possibilities of grass-roots action. “Progressives are forming more and more community circles. They are beginning to organize around…

  • Measuring the Millennials’ Ups and Downs

    It’s still the most popular show on television, but “American Idol” has seen its ratings plummet this season. While a record number of Idolators texted or phoned in their votes in last night’s epic David-off — the season finale contest…

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    Sustainability’s Bottom Line

    Are our presidential candidates (yes, including vice presidential candidate Clinton) thinking about sustainable initiatives for environmental improvement, city vitality, and sound fiscal order? Or is the sustainability movement still regarded by the mainstream as a pie-in-the-sky set of objectives advanced…

  • Collective Efficacy: Who’s in the Collective?

    Kari Lydersen’s post on the challenges of mixed-income communities yesterday reminded me of some things I’d wanted to bring up regarding the conversation Alice was starting on collective efficacy. I do think the end goal of mixed-income communities is a…

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    Signs of the End Times

    The end of attack politics, that is. Could it be? Ask Mark McKinnon, who resigned from the McCain campaign Tuesday, fulfilling a vow he’d made last year not to help John McCain in a battle against Barack Obama. more

  • Divided We Subsidize Agribusiness

    Does anyone else feel a little like we’ve entered the Twilight Zone? Today we have Bush — yes, that same Bush whose gall in blatantly supporting corporate and wealthy interests over those of regular citizens has seemed to know no…

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    Thrown into the Mix

    “Mixed income” is the hot phrase in housing developments and neighborhoods across the country these days. It is the bedrock of the Hope VI plan for redevelopment of public housing nationwide. And it is the goal of private developers and…

  • Senator Kennedy’s Awful Diagnosis

    Oof—Bad sucker punch from the cosmos on Tuesday. We all saw the worrisome weekend news about Senator Edward Kennedy’s seizure, but it was followed by the more soothing follow-ups—those oh, people-often-get-seizures-and-we-just-don’t-know-why-reports, along with accounts of the senator’s good spirits as…

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