CityLedes: On the Border Front

CityLedes is a weekly roundup of urban-related news happening across the country and globe, as compiled by Mark Bergen, Harry Moroz and David Sparks.

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CityLedes is a weekly roundup of urban-related news happening across the country and globe, as compiled by Mark Bergen, Harry Moroz and David Sparks.

The Lede: The lines between Oakland and Piedmont, its posh neighbor, are pressed, as are those cutting through D.C. schools. Lines are drawn on teachers evaluations in Los Angeles. Boston is leaky, ‘Cisco is buggy, Florida cities are still flooding. And New Jersey mayors are busy. Infrastructure plans move forward in Argentina and Colombia. The budget morass moves forward in Detroit. Homeless initiatives make progress in Houston and San Francisco. n+1 visits the Lone Star capital council. Clegg calls for garden cities. The twin real estate playgrounds of Miami and Panama City. D.C. has a rooster problem.

Click to jump to a topic:
Economy and Development
Education
Energy, Environment and Health
Transportation and Infrastructure
Housing
Public Safety
Mayors and City Councils
Budget
Labor
Immigration
International
Culture and Other Curiosities

Economy and Development

The town of 11,000 has its own schools, parks, police and fire departments, and it’s not keen on sharing. Oakland residents are charged extra for permits to walk their dogs within Piedmont borders, and it’s been decades since an Oakland child – or at least one whose parents don’t work for the district – has been allowed to attend Piedmont schools.

Several casino proposals have been offered, while other trial balloons have been shot down. A new state gaming commission with broad oversight of the law has held dozens of meetings and won praise for transparency, but it has yet to appoint an executive director or finish writing key regulations. Western Massachusetts — and Springfield in particular — has been a hotbed of casino interest, but competition has been slow to take shape in other parts of the state. Plans for a tribal casino envisioned under the law are in limbo.

The bottom line is that casino licenses are unlikely to be awarded until early 2014, and it may well be 2017 before gamblers are actually placing bets in sparkling new resorts. For some, that’s too long to wait for the estimated $400 million in annual state revenue and thousands of temporary and permanent jobs the casino industry could bring.

  • For economic development, St. Paul goes creative. Nipping the old bud: Emanuel ends long practice of TIF donations funneling to charity founded by former Mayor Daley’s wife. The shifting geography of Chicago jobs.
  • Boost for Keynesians, headache for urbanists: new research shows high spending grants had a multiplier of 2.

Education

  • L.A. teachers seem supportive of the new teacher evaluation system, but administrators feel overwhelmed:

Teachers are ranked on a scale on instruction, lesson plans, classroom environment and dozens of other criteria. A highly effective teacher, for instance, will be able to intellectually engage all students and prompt them to lead their own discussion topics. An ineffective teacher will generate all questions and most answers, involving just a handful of students.

During observations, administrators type notes into their laptops and later rate each of 61 skills. Principals and other administrators conducting the observations must pass a test to ensure they are fairly and accurately scoring instructors. Conferences with teachers before and after the classroom visits are required.

The method is meant to make observations more useful, uniform and objective, using evidence rather than opinions. But it’s an elaborate process and has provoked widespread criticism that it takes too long for principals who are already overwhelmed with increasing workloads. And those who can’t type well take even longer, administrators say.

  • D.C. prepares for a brawl over school boundary and feeder pattern changes. A group in Columbus pushing to end the seclusion of disables children in classrooms takes their fight to state courts.
  • Virtual schools expand their reach in Georgia. The best-known charter school chains won’t likely be among the first to open in Washington State.

Energy, Environment and Health

Natural gas is escaping from more than 3,300 leaks in ­Boston’s underground pipelines, according to a new ­Boston University study that underscores the explosion risk and environmental damage from aging infrastructure ­under city sidewalks and streets.

The vast majority of the leaks are tiny, ­although six locations had gas levels higher than the threshold at which explosions could ­occur. Although there have been no reports of explosions in ­Boston from any of the leaks, the study comes three years ­after a Gloucester house exploded probably because of a cracked and corroded gas main dating to 1911.

  • San Francisco will require exterminators to report bedbug infestations. Big Green Cans improve Providence’s recycling rate.
  • A map of Sandy’s New York City flooding.
  • Flooding continues in Ft. Lauderdale and Miami Beach.

Transportation and Infrastructure

By the time the FBI started snooping around in September 2011, raiding Traffic Court offices and judges’ homes, the court had an established, shadow ticket-fixing bureaucracy.

Routine ticket-fixing involved all seven judges active at the time, and was so ingrained that patronage employees viewed political favors as “part of their job responsibilities.”

The Sun’s investigation found that the city continued to operate a camera on Cold Spring Lane, months after learning it had issued an incorrect speed reading. The Sun also showed that city judges routinely toss out tickets for deficiencies and that the city has long ignored the state’s narrow definition of a “school zone,” in which most cameras are supposed to be placed. Nearly 6,000 tickets have been deemed invalid by the city, The Sun found. Baltimore also has implemented what a top Maryland judge called a “bounty system,” which rewards speed camera vendors with a cut of each fine the system issues.
  • Overtime put in by bus drivers and police officers for Atlanta’s MARTA raise safety concerns. The Charlotte City Council hopes the third time’s a charm to reach consensus on how to pay for a streetcar extension.
  • D.C. officials implement new parking rules as part of a city-wide strategy to improve residential parking and discourage driving. Happy 50th, Dulles Airport.
  • Miami sees its largest-ever expansion of new cruise ships.

Housing

[T]he results confirm that homeowners are more trusting of their neighbors than renters, but are no more likely to trust strangers, shopkeepers, coworkers, or the police. While initial models reveal spillover effects into neighborhoods with high homeownership rates, further analyses suggest that median neighborhood income is the more salient predictor of neighborhood-level social trust.

As thousands of families left homeless by Hurricane Sandy struggle to find lodging, New York City and federal officials are pushing ahead with plans to develop a new line of temporary housing that could be rolled out quickly for future disasters. Those plans, city officials said, call for using shipping containers, or other types of modular units, that — unlike trailers — could be stacked high to maximize space in a city with little real estate to spare.

The city’s disaster housing plan, which has been under development for five years and was reported Monday by The New York Observer, would not affect those currently displaced by the storm. They have been scattered across the city in hotels, friends’ homes and vacant apartments.

Fueling the price increases: Strong demand for rental units and the growing popularity of the downtown and Brickell areas as new restaurants and entertainment spots help mold an urban core that is attractive to young professionals and students but also to an increasingly diverse crowd.
  • Houston Mayor Parker and the Houston Housing Authority gives the city’s homeless priority for 1,000 units of permanent housing. The D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue needs to stop reducing property tax assessments based on factors other than market value, according to a report.

Public Safety

  • Arrests over Bayou Classic Weekend increase in New Orleans. The Portland police union president claims that officers are getting hurt because they are reticent to use force due to the city’s settlement with the Department of Justice.

Mayors and City Councils

  • This week in New Jersey mayors: The Trenton City Councils fails to cut the salary of Mayor Tony Mack, who is facing potential indictment by a federal grand jury. Mayor Cory Booker caused a near-riot in Newark, as he took advantage of parliamentary rules to place his favored candidate on the City Council. Folks are saying the move makes Booker look “too political.” Booker will also live on food stamps for a week. New Jersey mayors will testify before the state Senate about Sandy.
Outright racism is no longer the problem with the City Council; the problem is that its members still answer to Austin’s business interests and disproportionately favor them over neighborhood concerns and small businesses. The problems of minority residents, particularly in the historically Hispanic neighborhoods on the East Side, are not a priority for councilors. This is the true legacy of the gentlemen’s agreement, and it’s nowhere more apparent than in the city’s unprecedented growth over the last decade, especially downtown.

For almost a decade, starting in 2000, the majority of the Board of Supervisors was split into two camps: progressive liberals aligned with labor and tenants, and the moderates allied with business and pro-development forces. Over the past few years, those distinctions have blurred, and when a new Board of Supervisors convenes in January, they may be all but erased.

It’s not that there aren’t shades of progressives and moderates left on the 11-member body. But observers expect an overall more centrist tone – at least by San Francisco standards – in which votes are more dictated by individual issues than ideological alliances. That will make the outcomes of big projects before the board next year, including the Golden State Warriors arena and California Pacific Medical Center deal, more difficult to calculate.

  • The Miami-Dade County Commission is poised to reinstate opening prayers to its meetings, thanks to a year and a half of work put in by the Christian Family Coalition. Portland city leaders take a lot of vacation time.
  • D.C. could revamp its liquor laws:
    In the first rewrite of alcohol regulations in a decade, council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) is pushing an omnibus bill that redefines neighborhood standing to contest liquor licenses, opens the door to Sunday carryout liquor sales, creates a city “noise hotline” for complaints about loud establishments, authorizes “wine pubs,” and legalizes 64-ounce “growlers” that bars and grocery stores can fill with beer for consumption elsewhere.

Budget

The next 30 or so days likely will show just how dire Detroit’s fiscal plight is as Mayor Dave Bing’s office pores over plans to make up millions of dollars in bond money the city failed to get from the state.

Unpaid furlough days are scheduled to resume in January and Bing has said he would seek other cost-savings to offset the loss of $10 million that was due last Tuesday and possibly $20 million more slated to be released to the city next month.

The actions have become necessary after the City Council didn’t approve a $300,000 contract required under Detroit’s reform program with the state. The Miller Canfield law firm contract is one of several milestones under the reforms. The firm would advise Bing on financial matters.

Labor

  • The Port of Portland avoids a potentially disastrous strike.

Immigration

  • Advocacy groups in Houston and nationwide ramp up efforts to encourage green card holders to complete the naturalization process.

International

  • Female taxi drivers in Madrid press for changes to prevent discrimination. Madrid Mayor Ana Botella, under pressure for deaths at a large party at a city building, exerts her authority over the investigation.
  • Buenos Aires will use a variety of measures, including higher tolls and gas taxes, to finance its subway system. Confusion about municipal boundaries complicates Bolivia’s census. Colombia begins an infrastructure push.
  • Britain’s opposition leader proposes new “garden cities”:
More than 30 years after the last major new settlement was built, Mr Clegg will say it is unacceptable that young families are “condemned” to live in the smallest homes in western Europe. The Chancellor’s forthcoming Autumn Statement will include a pledge of £225 million to underwrite housing developments providing almost 50,000 new homes. In a speech to developers, the Deputy Prime Minister will say that this is a “first step” to encouraging a new generation of “garden cities and suburbs”.
  • China publishes an official map of Sansha City, a newly established city in an island chain involved in territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
  • Panama City’s shifting real estate market reflect trends in Miami:
Approaching this Central American capital from the air, the first thing a traveler notices is a skyline on steroids — gleaming towers jutting skyward like so many pickets on a fence. There’s even a Trump high-rise here — the sail-shaped 72-story Trump Ocean Club International Hotel & Tower. And it’s not uncommon for those active in Miami real estate and development circles to try their luck in Panama or move back and forth between the markets.

Culture and Other Curiosities

  • British cathedral cities at war over Christmas.
  • Mini-libraries pop up in Seattle.
  • A boom in backyard chicken coops in D.C. leads to a glut of roosters.

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Tags: infrastructurepublic transportationeconomic developmentmayorshealthcareimmigrationpublic safetyunionscity councils

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