January 2009
Transforming the market for development location
One of the most popular tags on the blogging site of my organization, NRDC, is “market transformation.” I’m a believer. Not everything we need for sustainable development can be accomplished through policy initiatives (the current feeding frenzy at the trough…
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CDCs Must Recognize Changing Conditions
It was announced this week that new home sales dropped 15 percent in December. This follows a year of similar news. Earlier in the week everyone was pleasantly surprised by sales of existing homes, but in general sales in that…
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Fighting Wage Theft
Monday brought the announcement of a record 70,000-plus jobs lost worldwide, from drug companies to automakers and everything in between. Meanwhile each year millions of Americans who still have jobs are having their wages stolen from them, an under-recognized epidemic…
A Stimulus Package We Can Believe In
Author and columnist Tom Friedman described the nation’s current predicament as when Roy Scheider’s character from Jaws gets his first glimpse at the shark, goes to the captain’s cabin and declares: “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” Policy makers…
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A Sobering Economic Roundup
It was quite a day today: American Express Earnings Drop 79 Percent Sprint Nextel to Cut 8,000 Positions Caterpillar to Cut 20,000 Jobs Home Depot to Cut 7,000 Jobs And the grand finale: 62,000 Jobs Are Cut by U.S. and…
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Television: The Drug of the Public Realm
I have been constantly astounded since I moved back to the city last summer at the extent to which television has penetrated our public spaces. I don’t mean out in parks or on the streets, (although our children certainly have…
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My Berlin Wall Moment
It took me a couple of days after the extraordinary evening of President-elect Obama’s victory on November 4 for the impact to really sink in. The election was an unprecedented opportunity on so many levels, and made me realize that…
The Inauguration: View from a Chicago Diner
At the risk of sounding cliché, hope was in the air as thick as the smell of grilling bacon and the steam from oatmeal and grits in a small diner on Chicago’s west side crowded with customers watching the inauguration festivities on a small T.V. Luke Bowman, a 36-year-old cook, was bubbling with excitement, shouting out Obama’s name and stepping up to the T.V. between each flip of a pancake or egg thrown on the grill. “White people better watch out!” he cried, but not in a divisive way, rather in a warm and light-hearted tone that included the joint’s few white customers in the joke. “I’m not white, I’m Italian,” shot back one of them. What Bowman meant was he felt the decades of slavery, oppression and marginalization suffered by black people in the U.S. will quickly start to melt away thanks to Obama’s move into the White House and the fact that so many Americans of all races had voted for him. more
Watching History On The Big Screen
So much of this country’s history has been watched on television — lunar landing, Beatles on Sullivan, Dwight Clark’s “The Catch” from Joe Montana in the 1982 NFC Championship Game (had to throw that in) — that I didn’t feel…
To The New First Family: Welcome To My Hometown
What an exciting time to be a DC resident. In this historic and wonderful week, the Obamas are moving not only to a new job but also to a new home. I’ve written before about how the real city of…
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This Land Is Your Land
What was the best event at the inaugural celebration? Watching Barack Obama take the oath of office, of course, but the next best moment was watching Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen lead the nation in singing “This Land is Your Land” at Sunday’s “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Seeger is the legendary American folk singer and long time radical activist who contributed mightily to the folk and protest movements of the 50s and 60s and has continued his activism with his environmental organization, the Clearwater group, which he founded in 1966. “This Land Was Your Land,” written in the shadow of the Great Depression by Woody Guthrie, captured the hurt and hunger endured by ordinary Americans as well as the push back by workers and farmers who organized across the country. more
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Are You An Advocate?
“Isn’t it true, Dr. Squires, that you are an advocate?” As an occasional expert for plaintiffs in fair housing lawsuits this is a question I almost always get during depositions. The implication, of course, is that as an advocate I…
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Foreclosure Mitigation, Abandoned Properties, What’s Missing?
At an upcoming housing summit in New Jersey, there are promising presentations for anyone who sees the grave danger associated with the foreclosure crisis and the subsequent effects on neighborhoods, but does it go far enough? While the conference will…
Parks For Revitalization
The image in this post, which photographer Bill Lim has made available to us through the wonder of the Creative Commons, is of the beautiful Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial water sculpture in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens. As we…
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Keep Single Family Homes in Mind
I enjoyed looking at the examples of smart growth in NRDC’s new online feature, Picturing Smart Growth. Thanks to Kaid Benfield for bringing this great resource to everyone’s attention! I was pleased to see three of the examples, in Miami,…
All Aboard, America
The weekend before Barack Obama and Joe Biden take the oath of office, I can’t help but remark on the seeming missed opportunity for these two change agents as they make their symbolic whistle stop tour on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor…
Visions for Transforming America
President-elect Obama will take office next week vowing to fight climate change, tackle oil dependency and revive the U.S. economy. NRDC believes that smart growth and transit are a big part of the solution. As New York Times columnist David…
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It’s a Dirty Job…
For the first 38 minutes, it almost sounded like the Senators pitied him. The Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs spent nearly 40 minutes of the two-hour confirmation hearing warning President-elect Obama’s HUD secretary nominee Shaun Donovan that…
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Tough Economy, Slashed Services
Planner and Rooflines blogger David Holtzman pointed to the potential effects of diminished funding for fire companies as the economy continues to slide, and sadly, this is not the only area where we are likely to see reductions in municipal…
Obama’s Challenge: Encourage Social Movements and Other Lessons From FDR and the Great Depression
As Obama prepared his economic recovery plan, he read Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment, (Simon and Shuster, 2006) about FDR’s rise to the presidency and his first 100 days. Although Alter’s engrossing and readable book was not intended to give advice to the incoming president, it is very helpful for understanding Obama’s upcoming challenges and his approach to change. Alter’s historical account brings to mind some uncanny similarities between Obama and Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency. Roosevelt had to overcome a devastating disability — polio. Obama had to overcome the disadvantage of racial and ethnic discrimination. Alter shows how Roosevelt’s agonizing triumph over polio led him to bond with fellow sufferers and helped him discover “traits that would prove instrumental to the presidency” — a good-natured easy friendliness and an empathy for the oppressed. Obama has developed a similar openness and compassion gained through a searching self-discovery as he grew up in two different worlds as well as the frustrating efforts he faced when he organized the poor in Chicago. Like Roosevelt, Obama exudes a hard-to-understand confidence, only partly explained by their mothers who raised them to be self-confident. And of course, when Roosevelt took office, the Depression had hit, banks were shut down, the stock market had crashed and unemployment was soaring. Obama is taking office in the worst economic crisis the nation has faces since the Depression. more
National Housing Institute
