CityLedes: An F for AAA

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: Don’t be homeless while sitting, lying, standing or smoking. Online shopping is changing urban retail. Municipal elections mean change for party politics in Brazil. Sheriff Mirkarimi holds onto his job, but scrambles progressive politics in San Francisco. A deep dive into the debate about privatizing Amtrak. Block grants are blunt. Swim to work. Soda sues Bloomberg. Urbanization and allergies. Honolulu can’t make up its mind about light rail. Baltimore tries out a new teacher evaluation system and Chicago tries out a new schools chief. St. Petersburg bans nocturnal screams. Pre-loaded traffic violations and training for bike delivery people. So much for triple As. Triple A gets an F.

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

Public Safety

  • A AAA study of yellow lights at stop lights with red-light cameras is bogus:

For an organization that claims to be in favor of red light cameras, AAA New York has a funny way of showing its support.

“In concept, we believe in red light cameras,” said spokesperson Robert Sinclair. But over the weekend, backed only by scant anecdotal evidence, the group claimed that traffic signals with red light cameras in New York City had yellow lights that were too short, and called for changes to how the cameras are used.

  • Oakland may double the number of red-light cameras.
  • The New York City Council considers legislation to increase oversight of the NYPD. Portland misses the Dept. of Justice’s deadline to reach a settlement on needed police reforms.
  • King County, Wash. intends to use overtime savings to hire more sheriff’s deputies. Pot arrests have cost Washington State (potentially the first state to legalize marijuana sales) over $300 million in the past 25 years. Houston patrolmen have been using “default settings” which pre-load standard traffic violations (which don’t always get deleted) to speed up motorist stops (see also: the proliferation of Albanians in Merced County). D.C. homicides are hard to solve and prosecute.

Economy and Development

So in each case, the decision-making is biased toward less concern about jobs and housing and more concern about parking availability than it would be if the decision was made at a higher level. Which means that citywide we have too little working class employment and too little affordable housing. But there’s ample parking! And you can get a permit for just $35.00!

Hsieh’s plan for Las Vegas is idealistic, ambitious, and controversial, but most of all it rests upon a great irony: Zappos has perfected a business model that undermines physical retail and thus helps to erode the vitality of many American downtowns. The clearest example of this is Amazon’s impact on bookstores. If you live in New York or San Francisco you might not understand how much a Borders could matter to a city’s downtown, but many smaller cities with fewer cultural assets depend more on whatever they’ve got. In many cases, “what they’ve got” has been a chain bookstore like Borders (which can remain vacant for years after the tenant goes away — I’ve seen it happen). While Zappos has not affected shoe stores as drastically as Amazon has affected bookstores, the company has certainly captured plenty of revenue that shoppers previously spent in their own city’s commercial districts. The basic economic reality that Zappos represents and Hsieh’s high-profile, symbolic intervention in downtown Las Vegas are seemingly at odds: the latter putting a band-aid on a wound the former is currently making worse.

But block grants are hardly the answer. For instance, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has argued, block granting a program like SNAP (food stamps) would effectively mute its responsiveness to changes in the economic cycle, exacerbating poverty in a downturn and removing the broader economic stimulus the program provides. Moreover, block grants can end up re-creating the same fragmentation and inefficiency that currently exists, just at a lower level of government. For MacDougal, it’s as though block grants are a hammer, and every problem with anti-poverty programs looks like a nail.

  • The Buckeye capital is best for working moms.
  • North Miami is luring businesses away from Little Haiti. Officials have yet to provide the Portland City Council with an analysis of the long-term financial risk of a proposal for the city’s urban renewal agency to take over long-term management of Veterans Memorial Coliseum:

Officials for both the Portland Development Commission and Portland’s Office of Management and Finance already have conceded the proposed deal is risky and in jeopardy. But the city is looking for management options that will provide certainty for the Portland Winterhawks junior-league hockey team, which is willing to kick in $10 million toward a $30-million-plus renovation, provided the team receives a long-term agreement with the city.

Transportation and Infrastructure

In the plan, subway and commuter rail riders would pay a full 50 percent of the operating budget — the “50” in the “25-50-25” plan — for mass transit, excluding bridge and tunnels. (The “25“s refer to the percentages that would be covered, respectively, by government subsidies and tolls and fees on drivers.)

Right now, they pay less — about 39 percent, by the commission’s calculations.

To achieve the 50 percent goal, subway fares would have to rise to as much as $3 a ride, and a monthly MetroCard would have to cost about $140.

“The supposed offender would have a mechanism to create electronic evidence of her/his driving behavior. How? Basically, by asking the surrounding vehicles to act as electronic witnesses,” explains José María de Fuentes, of UC3M’s Computer Science Department.

The tried and tested method of precast concrete construction is fast and relatively inexpensive, making it possible to design, permit and build a multi-story garage on a tight budget in a matter of months.

But the assembly of heavy beams, columns and floor slabs must be choreographed and balanced precisely. Because the structure remains potentially unstable until the pieces are permanently connected, typically by welding or bolting them together once they’re all in place, experts say the process requires close supervision from contractors and engineers.

One false move, they say, and the whole thing can come tumbling down in a deadly domino effect, although such catastrophic collapses are uncommon.

  • Atlanta acknowledges a potential conflict of interest raised by a consulting firm’s study with regard to an airport shuttle contract.

Housing

There’s been a sharp uptick in the past year in the number of cities passing ordinances against doing things on public property such as sitting, lying down, sleeping, standing in a public street, loitering, public urination, jaywalking and panhandling, said Neil Donovan, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

“It definitely is more pervasive and it is more adversarial. I think in the past we found examples of it but it’s not simply just growing, but it’s growing in its severity and in its targeted approach to America’s un-housed,” said Donovan, who compared it to a civil rights issue.

  • Newark breaks ground on an affordable housing complex with ground-level retail. Traverse City, Mich. ponders wet houses for recovering alcoholics.

Foreclosure remains a huge problem in Milwaukee and continues to be a fiscal drag on the city. As of last month, there were 2,329 bank- and city-owned foreclosures. And there are an estimated 4,300 properties where a foreclosure action has been initiated, but a sheriff’s sale has not occurred.

The problem has been most severe for the past four years. Between 2008 and 2012, there were more than 20,000 foreclosure actions initiated against properties in Milwaukee. City officials estimate that about half of those end up going to a sheriff’s sale.

Energy, Environment, and Health

  • Oakland is suing the DOJ over the shut down of its medicinal marijuana facilities.

Budget

Richard Riordan, Los Angeles’ millionaire former mayor, plunged deeper into the fray over public pensions Friday, announcing he is finalizing language for a ballot initiative that would move newly hired workers into 401(k)-style plans and freeze retirement benefits for existing workers…

The announcement set the stage for a ground war between Riordan, who has warned that retirement costs would push the city into bankruptcy, and an array of employee unions influential in city decision making. Riordan would need nearly 255,000 signatures to get the measure onto the May municipal election ballot, according to the city clerk’s office. Labor leaders want to keep that from happening.

The $615.6 million plan represents a slight decrease in spending from last year, but does so with less than a third of the state transitional aid the city received in 2011. It also keeps spending relatively flat even as health care and pension costs continue to rise.

The transitional aid, initially slated for $24 million, was cut by Christie to $10 million earlier this month, after Newark found it had an $18 million surplus from last year.

The city will still take about $101 million in state grants for everything from food programs for the hungry to environmental remediation to homeland security.

While every city department will be sustaining cuts again this year, Business Administrator Julien Neals said, “No layoffs are occurring in 2012 and none are contemplated for 2013.”

Education

  • Catalyst Chicago has the rundown on the city’s new schools chief:

In contrast to Brizard, Byrd-Bennett is seasoned and comes with a list of credentials leading complicated bureaucracies. She led Cleveland public schools for eight years and was chief academic and accountability manager for Detroit Public Schools at a time when it was being run by the state of Michigan. Byrd-Bennett also worked as a teacher, principal and administrator in New York.

When she left Cleveland in 2005, Byrd-Bennett was making $278,000. She was criticized for micromanaging and using private money for first-class travel and meals at expensive restaurants, according to a report on governance and urban school improvement by The Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers University.

But the main reason she left was that she failed to convince Cleveland voters to approve two tax levies. This led to a $30 million deficit and the elimination of many of Byrd-Bennett’s programs, according to the report.

All 6,000 Baltimore educators will take part this year in testing a new teacher evaluation system that ties their effectiveness more closely to student performance, school officials announced this week. This system, tested in the city last year for 309 teachers, comes as preparation for the state’s implementation of more rigorous evaluations next year.

Two areas of the evaluations — both used to measure student performance — will account for 50 percent of a teacher’s score: student growth and schoolwide factors called the school index. The remaining three areas, used to measure professional practice, are student surveys, classroom observations, and professional responsibilities, officials said during a presentation to the city school board Tuesday.

Officials said that in these tests, all teachers will be examined in at least one of these areas. But no single area will account for more than 35 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, chief accountability officer for the city schools. And pay or job security will not be at stake.

  • A North Carolina charter school and UNCC team up to create a national program to help struggling urban students. Seattle teachers make extra money sharing class materials with colleagues on curriculum sharing sites. Florida’s new student achievement goals, which vary according to race, income, disability, and English proficiency, receive criticism. New value-added data exposes uneven academic growth across Atlanta Public Schools.

It might seem to be a less-than-realistic plan: Put nearly 200 preteens in one large classroom space and expect each of them, with the help of laptops and a few teachers, to learn math at his or her own pace.

But that arrangement is at the core of a new instructional approach that one of the District’s lowest-performing middle schools adopted this fall.

  • L.A. schools improve according to state, but not federal, measures. Oakland schools want better kitchens. Milwaukee public schools are losing students to virtual charters.

Immigration

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is pushing a plan to create an official city photo identification card that could double as a prepaid ATM card and help immigrants get access to banking services.

Mayors and City Councils

  • D.C.’s chief tax appraiser resigns amid controversy over a series of settlements that lowered the proposed assessments of hundreds of commercial properties by $2.6 billion. Audits find significant security lapses in the District’s Office of Tax and Revenue in the five years since a mid-level manager was caught embezzling tens of millions of dollars.
  • The District’s election officials are preparing for high turnout and confusion.

Labor

International

  • The government of Reggio Calabria is disbanded because of ties to the mafia. Parties allied to former President Lula da Silva win in municipal elections throughout Brazil, but the Socialist Party gains and represents a challenge to Lula’s allies. Sustainable and affordable architecture and protests are Madrid’s new reality. No legal obstacles remain for legal abortion, albeit still in restricted cases, in Buenos Aires.

We in London have this month launched a “Housing Covenant”, an understanding between government and middle-income groups who work so hard, that we will put £100 million into building the good-quality homes that they need, and that they can buy.

Of course, Labour will object, and complain that every penny of subsidy should go to “affordable” homes for those, often on benefits, who cannot afford to buy at all. My answer is simple: this plan would help the very “squeezed middle” that Ed claims to espouse. We desperately need more housing not just for the poor, but for this vast and economically crucial group who are the motor of the London (and therefore of the UK) economy.

Culture and Other Curiosities

  • St. Petersburg considers banning nocturnal screams:

The draft bill, which was passed on Wednesday in its first reading by St Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly, would also outlaw “whistling, the moving of furniture, singing and the playing of musical instruments, as well as any other actions that disturb the peace and quiet at night.”

  • A federal court throws out Seattle’s restrictions on yellow pages distribution.

“The only thing that rivals us must be a crap game somewhere in the city,” Mr. Koch said.

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Tags: new york cityinfrastructurechicagodetroitseattlenew orleanslight railenergybaltimorehouston

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