Half Changed World

KaBOOM!

I knew about KaBOOM! as the folks who come in and help people build new playgrounds, but now they're doing something a little different.  They want people to submit info about playspaces in their neighborhoods -- descriptions, ratings, and photographs -- which they're mashing with Google Maps, so that wherever you are, you can search for a playspace* to visit.

I'm doing this as part of a MomCentral blog tour, but I really do think it's a great idea.  As I've written before, there's a lot that goes into a successful playground, and a lot of the factors that go into it won't ever show up on a city's website.  So being able to tap into real people's experiences can make a big difference.  Some of the parenting bulletin boards capture some of this info, but they're not linked to maps.  Oh, and you can win prizes by entering new playspaces, and Julianne Hough is donating $1 per playspace to JumpStart.  They're trying to get 100,000 sites identified in 100 days.

I'm on the late side posting this because I wanted to include photos of our local playground, but I haven't gotten out with my camera yet.  It's the playground at Mason District Park, and they just redid it this fall.  They've got some great equipment now, including a climbing volcano and drums.  And there's some cute details, like dinosaur "bones" molded into the underside of the playstructure.  And there's a pond nearby where you can see turtles and fish.  The only negative -- no coffee.

*"A playspace can be a field, skatepark, horseshoe pit, roller hockey rink, disc-golf course, playground, lake, dog park, community center, basketball court or ice rink - any public place where anyone can engage in unstructured play either for free or for a nominal fee."

cities and suburbs

I get a variety of pitches for stories in my inbox, most of which I can delete just from the subject.  One that did catch my eye enough to open the message was headed "everyone wants to life like Friends and Seinfeld, not the Sopranos."  The trick was that it was a pitch for the merits of the urban life of Friends and Seinfeld, versus the suburban life of the Sopranos.  I clicked through, glanced at the article, and then moved on.

Then, yesterday, I read David Brooks' column in the NY Times, where he claims that most Americans prefer the suburbs.  So, which is true?

I went back to the blog post at the Infrastructurist and found that Leinberger's argument was actually far more complicated than the trick headline.  What he actually said is "Gen Xers and Millennials want a lifestyle closer to Friends and Seinfeld (that is, walkable and urban) than to Tony Soprano (low density and suburban)."  Brooks agrees that "Cities remain attractive to the young. Forty-five percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 would like to live in New York City."  But Leinberger implies that the preference for urban living is a permanent characteristic of this cohort, while Brooks suggests it's something they will age out of: "cities are profoundly unattractive to people with families and to the elderly."  Neither one provides evidence for their hypothesis.

Leinberger goes on to say "It’s not that nobody wants Tony Soprano. About 50 percent of Americans actually do want that configuration. But if we’ve built 80 percent of our housing that way, that’s the definition of oversupply. The other 50 percent of Americans want walkable urban arrangements and yet that’s just 20 percent of the housing stock."

I'm not sure where those numbers come from.  The Pew study that Brooks' article cites (although the Times still doesn't include links) says that "Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area."  If the small town and city figures are combined as part of a "walkable lifestyle" you get about 50 percent, but that's sort of a stretch.

There's also an issue about whether people are talking about cities as they are, or cities as they might be.  If I could live in the world of Friends where people who aren't investment bankers can afford huge Manhattan apartments, sure, I'd be interested.  In the real world, I'm unlikely to move back to NYC unless I win the lottery.  Do people with kids say that they don't want to live in cities because they think yards are essential to childhood, or because they assume the schools will be bad?

ACORN and housing

In the comments on yesterday's post, Sue asked about the claim "that ACORN had been part of some issues with the subprime mortage crisis."   The short answer is no, not really.  But the full answer is important, so I'm giving it its own post.

Promoting homeownership for low-income families is certainly one of the things that ACORN has worked on over the years.  They've done this both through legislative work, primarily the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and through direct work with families.  Let's look at both of these.

CRA was a response to many banks' historic practice of redlining -- of refusing to make ANY  home loans within certain areas, defined both on the basis of income and of race.  I'm not 100 percent clear on the exact requirements, but the intent was to force banks that wanted things from the government (mostly approvals of mergers and acquisitions) to meet standards with respect to the number (or share?) of loans made in low-income and underserved communities.  And from 1977, when it was passed, to the early 2000s, it caused a slow and steady increase in such loans.

Banks objected to the CRA, because they believed that they couldn't possibly make money by issuing home loans in low-income areas.  But CRA forced them to look at their criteria and do their best to distinguish between moderate-income people who were bad credit risks and ones who were actually pretty good.  This is where the second part of ACORN's work came in.   They did a lot of financial education for their members, and negotiated with deals with banks where they'd provide reduced points, or other lower fees, for people who completed these courses.  The banks benefited because it helped them make loans that met their CRA requirements, and because the people who were willing to complete the courses were in fact better risks than similar people who didn't.  ACORN benefited because these courses were a way to recruit members.  And the low-income people benefited, because they were able to buy homes.

So, what happened in the 2000s?  For one thing, people were convinced that home prices were only going to go up.  So it didn't really matter if people were bad credit risks, because if they defaulted, the banks thought they'd get houses that were worth more than they had loaned.  For another thing, banks had come up with all these fancy ways to resell the mortgages they made, so they believed that they had made the risk go away.  Suddenly, there was a ton of money to be made making loans to poor people.  And lots of institutions rushed in -- including things that weren't "banks" and so weren't subject to CRA.

My sense is that ACORN had pretty mixed feelings about this.  On the plus side, lots of people were able to buy houses.  But on the negative side, they could see that a lot of people were being given crappy high cost loans.  But as a little nonprofit -- and one that made people jump through hoops before helping them get loans -- they had a lot of trouble competing with the sleazy mortgage brokers who were promising people easy loans and low monthly payments.

So, in the sense that banks experience under CRA taught them that it was possible to make loans to low-income people without losing money, I suppose you could argue that it "contributed" to the subprime mess.  But that's like saying if agriculture had never been invented, we wouldn't have to worry about the spread of obesity.

But don't take my word for it.  Here's Ellen Seidman's explanation of why CRA isn't the cause of the subprime mess.  She ran the Office of Thrift Supervision under the Clinton Administration, among other things.

car free dc

So today was Car Free Day in the DC area.  Most of the time I drive to the metro, but I decided to give it a try.   I was a little concerned that it would mostly prove that public transit couldn't handle a 10% increase in usage...

In the morning, I missed the express bus to the Pentagon, but caught the local that comes 10 minutes later.  Got to the Pentagon, and discovered that there was a disabled car between Foggy Bottom and Rosslyn.  So I took the Yellow line up into DC, then changed over to the Blue/Orange line.  If  I had gone my usual route, I would have been stuck on the Orange line until the bottleneck cleared.

In the evening, I was busily working when I realized that I should have left 20 minutes earlier if I wanted to catch the express bus from the Pentagon.  Ran out, saw the bus that goes from near my office to Columbia Pike, so hopped on it, and promptly got stuck in traffic.  Got home a good 40 minutes later than usual, although I did get to read all of both the Economist and Cookie magazine.  (Yes, I subscribe to both.  Take that micro-demographers!  But what I'd really like to know is why I've started receiving Field & Stream...)

ethical lines

There's a good discussion about H1B visas going on in the comments of my last post, with some interesting perspective provided by Jen, who actually hires programmers.  But I wanted to pick up on a different aspect of the discussion.

GoriGirl commented that I was missing the point by focusing on inequality within the US -- she suggested that by employing workers from poorer countries, it would reduce worldwide inequality.  I'm not convinced that's necessarily true about the H1B visa program as currently implemented, but I'm willing to concede the claim that I'm more concerned about the displaced American workers than I am about the upwardly mobile workers from other countries.  And I'm not sure how there's a moral basis for that.  I certainly can't come up with one based on either utilitarianism or Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance." 

We've recently been having some mice in the kitchen, so I bought some traps.  The kind that bash their little mousie brains out.  And within the first 24 hours, we caught two mice.  And I feel badly about it, and sorry for the little pathetic things.  On the other hand, I don't feel the least bit guilty or sorry about squashing mosquitoes.  And, while I could try to find an ethical basis for the distinction (the mosquitoes I kill are generally in the act of biting me, while the mice are just taking food), the truth is that I think I feel badly about killing the mice because they're cute and furry. Aesthetics, not ethics.

Last night I was reading a collection of short stories by Orson Scott Card, and a few of them are set in Mormon communities, and so he explains in a background essay a bit about the system of "wards" that are an organizing structure of Mormon communal life.   It made me think about whether it's an inherent part of human nature to value your fellow citizens over citizens of another country.  I think it's natural to value your family members, and your neighbors, but I'm not sure about anything much larger than that.  I do think that it's part of American ideology to say that people have a claim on us because of fellow citizenship, rather than ethnic origin, or race, or religious.

Conservation and savings

We've been in this house for a bit more than a year now, so now we're able to do same month year-to-year comparisons of our energy use.  We've been steadily working on making the house more energy efficient, so I've been curious to see what the impacts are.  We've replaced the windows, one of the toilets, clothes washer, dryer, boiler, fridge, dishwasher, and stove.  Basically, the only things left to do are the hot water heater and the air conditioner...

So, the envelope please...

• Electricity -- Dominion Virginia Power has a handy-dandy button on its site that generates various comparisons for you once you've logged in.  It shows how much you paid in a given month compared to the previous month and the same month the year before, and divides the change out among different temperatures, different number of days in the billing cycle, change in prices, and "customer-controlled use."  So, we paid $71.20 in May 2008, down from $95.02 a year previously.  And the rates went up in that period, so they claim that customer-controlled use saved us $27.28.  So, a decent percentage savings, but not that impressive in absolute dollar amounts.  Even with the forthcoming 18% rate hike, it's going to take us a long time before the improvements pay for themselves.  (Obviously, the energy savings were not the primary reasons we made these changes, so we're not upset by this.)

• Gas -- Washington Gas doesn't offer this kind of comparison, so I have to sort of eyeball things.  We used 13.2 therms last month, versus 63 therms a year ago.  That's because it took us a while last year to figure out how much energy our old boiler was using keeping water hot even when it wasn't sending any into the baseboard heaters.  Once we figured out that we needed to shut the boiler off in the summer, it dropped down to 32 therms. (The remainder is for the clothes dryer and water heater, both of which are gas-powered.  Our new stove is also gas powered, but you'd have to work really hard to spend more than a few dollars that way...)  The more impressive comparison is February to March, when our use dropped from 258 therms to 151 when we installed the new boiler.  That improvement clearly is cost-effective, since our February bill was close to $400.*

• Water -- We get billed quarterly for water, and haven't paid more than $100 per quarter.  While the washer and dishwasher use less water than the old ones, I don't expect it to make a noticeable difference on our bills.  We put in a low-flow showerhead but I'm guessing that it impacts the gas bill more than the water bill.

Dominion is making a big deal out of their new conservation plan, but I'm pretty skeptical.  Based on my results, my guess is that just showing people how much their energy use costs won't significantly affect usage unless they also adopt variable rate pricing, where electricity costs a lot more during peak usage times. (Dominion does not appear to be doing that, since their demo says you'd be entering the rates from your bill.)  I think this is mostly an attempt to convince politicians to give them approval for the transmission lines and coal-burning plant they want to build.

* When I see stories like this one about people with $400 monthly electric bills, I have to assume that they have electric heat, and very poor insulation.  I'm not sure I could run up a $400 electric bill in this house even if I ran the air conditioning with the windows open.

Cross-posted to my home blog.  Also, note the new "Environment" category -- I'll go back when I get a chance and add the tag to some of my older posts. 

Brutal commutes

The Metro Orange line has been a mess all week -- several serious delays, and terrible overcrowding even when the trains are running.  When I got to the station yesterday morning, the platform was so crowded that they had to stop the escalator to make sure no one was pushed onto the tracks.  And the air conditioning in my car seems to be dead, so I'm soaked in sweat by the time I get home.  It's only taking a little longer than usual, but it's really taking the stuffing out of me.

The scary thing is that it's only going to get worse if the price of gas makes more people switch to the train.  They can buy some more cars to run more 8-car trains, but that only adds a limited amount of capacity.  I can work from home sometimes, but usually not more than once a week.  Maybe I should talk to my boss about working 7-3.30 or something.

The Giant Pool of Money

It's clear that when I don't have the energy to post, I should put up something about housing costs, and then my commenters will take it from there. 

I've been listening to the This American Life's piece about the housing bubble and crash, and it's fascinating.  As suggested by the title of the episode, The Giant Pool of Money, it focuses on the supply side of the mortgage business, how it was in everyone's business to keep generating loans and not to ask questions about whether they were really good risks.  It's nearly an hour, and if you didn't grab the podcast already, you need to stream it, but it's worth listening to anyway.

Homeownership rates

When I posted about whether young people are "falling behind" their parents, almost all of the commenters agreed that a big part of the reason that even relatively affluent young adults *feel* poor is that homeownership seems so out of reach (even with the declining market).  This made a lot of intuitive sense to me.

But my dad then sent me a ton of Census data on homeownership rates by age, going back to 1982.* (Yes, I come by my geekery honestly.)  And his point is that households under age 35 were just about as likely to own homes in 2008 (41.7 percent) as in 1982 (41.2 percent).   Homeownership rates for this group hit a low of 37.3 percent in 1993-1994, and then rose to 43.1 percent in 2004, before falling off slightly.

So how is it possible that homeownership can feel so out of reach to almost everyone I know, even as the homeownership rate didn't decline at all?  Well, part of the answer is that I live in an expensive housing market, so the "everyone" I know is a biased sample.  (The readers of this blog are more diverse, but I think are still disproportionately living in large urban areas, compared to the country as a whole.)   Also, a whole lot of condos were built in the 1990s, so if by "homeownership" you mean "owning a single family detached home," the homeownership rate probably did decline somewhat.

But it's also true that a lot of people -- at all age groups -- bought homes only by extending themselves to their limits.  There was this credit bubble that you might have heard about... (Supposedly in 2005, half of all loans made in DC were interest-only.)  And there was this dreadful fear that if you didn't jump in right away, even if you couldn't really afford it, you'd be priced out forever.  So, the people who didn't buy houses felt like they were falling behind because they couldn't afford a home, and the people who did felt like they were falling behind because they couldn't afford anything else.

*The Census table is only online as a text file -- if you want my Dad's Excel spreadsheet, I'm happy to send it on.

is housing a positional good?

I left off yesterday with Robert Frank's hypothetical question of which would you prefer, World A, where you live in a 4,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 6,000 square foot house OR World B, where you live in a 3,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 2,000 square foot house.

He argues that most people would prefer B.  I'm not sure whether that's true, and to the extent it is true, how much it's driven by the correlation between housing prices and school quality.  I think I'd choose B, but my reasoning is that in world B, there would probably be nicer parks and other public spaces. 

The NY Times this week had an interesting article on people who were rejoicing in Bear Stearns' downfall, and more generally in the possibility of a setback to the Wall Street types who have driven up the cost of living in New York.

Not trapped

Based on a few posts that looked interesting from the TPM Cafe bookclub, I requested Daniel Brook's The Trap.  I got it last week, and spent about an hour skimming it today, but couldn't really get into it.  The online discussion is far more interesting.

Brook's overall thesis is that the high cost of living in desirable urban areas, the cost of college and health care, and the very high salaries paid to workers in certain professions (big law, investment banking, management consulting), makes it harder for idealistic college grads to follow their dreams.  I think that's probably true, but am not sure it's the major crisis he portrays. 

Two quick points:

1)  As several of the commenters at TPM Cafe pointed out, Brook is wildly overstating the case when he suggests that the only alternatives are selling out and being a "saint" destined for poverty.  And by overstating the case, he actually makes it easier for people to sell out.  In reality, I know plenty of people who have darn good lives on public and nonprofit sector salaries.  By and large, they don't have second homes and they don't expect that their kids will make it through college without taking out student loans, but they're not living on ramen noodles either.

2)  When I wrote about the cost of living last of week, the comments were running pretty strongly against the "just move" idea.  And I agree that you shouldn't have to move time zones in order to make ends meet.  But I don't have a lot of sympathy for recent college grads who feel like they're entitled to live in hip urban neighborhoods and don't want roommates.

On a related note, my team at work is hiring a Research Assistant.  I'm not sure exactly what they're offering for salary -- probably not enough to live in Dupont Circle, even with a roommate -- but the benefits are excellent, they take work-life balance seriously, and it's a terrific group of people. 

cost of living

Laura at 11d and Megan McArdle are going back and forth about child care subsidies today.  The comment that struck me was this one from "buffpilot" at Megan's blog:

"We don't need to give a subsidy to anyone, but making a means-tested welfare, would be fine with mean. But base it on the income needed in Mississippi - since you can move! If you want to live in NYC make the money, don't have kids, or move. Its YOUR choice. But don't ask me to give you money so you can live your lifestyle without making any sacrifices. That's what you want."

Similarly, when Bitch PhD posted last month about how unaffordable housing is, even given that her family has a good income, she got lots of "that's what you get for living in California" type comments.

I really don't have a good answer for the public policy question of how to handle cost of living disparities.  As has been pointed out repeatedly during the SCHIP discussion, a family in NYC living on $60,000 is in a fundamentally different situation than a family in Iowa with the same income.  But at least some of that difference is a matter of choice.  Are you willing to tax an Iowa family with a potentially lower income level to help that New York family?  Or do you tax the New York family more?  In spite of the federal tax deduction for state income and property tax payments, richer states -- with higher costs of living -- tend to pay more in federal taxes than they get back.  This is justified in the name of progressivity. But if you you take the cost of living argument seriously, progressivity might cut in the other direction.

Home repairs

Posts like this one, at Corporate Mommy, intimidate the heck out of me.   Geez, they did that all themselves?  I can paint a room and replace the flappy part of a toilet, and that's about the limit of my home improvement skills.  Come on, I grew up in an NYC apartment -- when something broke, you called the super.  So I liked the article in this Sunday's Washington Post magazine about a woman who bit the bullet and learned to do some electrical work around her house.

T's a bit more skilled than I am, but not as much as I sometimes think he should be.  Not because he has a Y chromosome, but because his father is pretty handy.  But he had bad experiences "helping" his father as a teenager.  That said, he's become a fair hand with a solder iron since we bought the house.  His father showed him how to do one and the first one he did took him about 3 hours, but since the house had essentially no grounded plugs or GFCIs when we got it, there were lots of opportunities to practice.

Fundamentally, those are the two elements that you need to learn most hands-on skills -- someone to show you how to do it, and the opportunity to practice.   In general, we don't have either for home improvements, which is why we've spent the last two months sending emails back and forth with the guy we're trying to get to do our bathroom.  (One of the lighting fixtures fell out of the ceiling tonight, so I'm hoping that we can expedite this process a bit.)  I didn't learn how to do crafts as a child, either, and have mostly self-taught those, but the difference is that I don't really mind having a sloppy quilt where none of the corners quite line up stuffed into a closet.  I don't want to live with a kitchen where the cabinets don't line up for the next 20 years.

See also: The Simple Dollar on The Do It Yourself Dilemna

CityCars

Sunday's Post had an article about how Fairfax county is looking into the possibility of CityCars -- little two seater electric cars that could be used for short hops, say between your house and a metro station (they only go 10 miles between charges).  They don't exist yet, but the concept is very neat -- they stack together like grocery carts, so you can fit six of them in the space that it takes to park one regular car.  (See the third picture from the left here.  Aren't they cute?)

The Post article mostly discusses the safety issues of mixing CityCars with either pedestrians or cars.  I think that a lot depends on how fast they go -- if their maximum speed is, say, 30 miles per hour, that's too slow to be safe on the roadways, too slow to be safe on the sidewalks.

But I'm more interested in the logistics of how they'd be rented  The idea is that individuals would not own CityCars but they'd be stored at metro stops and other central locations, essentially like car rental programs (e.g. ZipCar and FlexCar).   I think that's because the nested parking only makes sense if each person takes the frontmost car, rather than having to shuffle them all around to get at your personal car.

The Post article suggests that you could pick them up at the airport, then return them the next day.  But that doesn't make sense to me, since someone would have to follow you back to the airport to give you a ride home.  (Similarly, while I have a FlexCar membership, I can't use it to borrow a car to come home from the metro, since you have to return it to the same place where you picked it up.)

CityCars seem to make a lot more sense for daily commuters, assuming that it wasn't prohibitively expensive to keep them overnight.  I'd certainly be happy to take a CityCar to the metro, especially if there were guaranteed parking for them.  And given that the parking lots at metro stations fill up by 8 am or earlier, it seems like a lot of other people would be interested.  And they'd also work for people who work at surburban locations that are just a bit too far from public transportation to walk, which would help inner city residents who don't own cars.

But you'd have to have enough of them that everyone who wanted one could be confident of getting one, because it wouldn't take getting stranded a whole lot of times to make people give up on the program.   And the smaller the program, the higher the percentage of "excess" cars you'd need to ensure that you didn't run out.

Walking

Someone on one of my email lists posted a link to WalkScore which is a google maps based site that attempts to measure how walkable a neighborhood is, mostly based on the proximity of various places you might want to go (stores, schools, parks, etc).

Our new house scores a 25 out of 100, right between not walkable and driving only.  I think that's probably fair, although my subjective rating is mostly based on the things that didn't make it into their scoring system.  There are a bunch of things we go to that are within a mile, and they seem to assume that people won't walk that far.  I'm happy to walk that far, but I'm not willing to cross Columbia Pike other than with a stoplight, even when there's a marked crosswalk.  D's elementary school is about 1/2 a mile away, but there's no sidewalks for part of it, so the county provides a bus.  Lots of things are in biking distance, although I'm not sure I'd be willing to bike the places I won't walk, and the hills are brutal.

Our old house scores an 83, which I think is about right, maybe a bit low.  The first time I entered the address in NYC where I grew up (a week or so ago), it gave me a 97 or 98, which seemed like proof that you couldn't get a 100 using their algorithm.  But I just tried again, and it spit back a score of 100, so I guess they fixed that glitch.

I'd love to see some analysis of the distribution of the population of the US across their index.  My guess is that no more than 5 to 10 percent of the US lives in places that score as very walkable (70 or higher), and that probably 1/3 of those who do live in New York City.

Poverty and cars

Via Laura at 11d, I read this thread on cities vs. suburbs at Matthew Yglesias' blog.  One comment jumped out at me:

"What's with this "suburbia is cheaper" claim? Where I live, suburbia is more expensive (which is why low income people live in cities and older suburbs)."

I'm not sure overall which is cheaper.  It's certainly true that far-out suburbs are cheaper than close-in suburbs (at least in the DC area, I think elsewhere too.)   That's why Prince William county just passed a harsh anti-illegal immigrant measure -- lots of immigrants have moved there, because a bunch of people can share a house for a lot less than renting small apartments close in.  And there's lots of evidence that everything from food to bank fees to insurance costs more for residents of poor inner city neighborhoods.

So why don't more poor people move to the suburbs?  The US Department of Housing and Urban Development did an experiment called Moving to Opportunity where people who lived in public housing were divided into 3 groups, one that was offered Section 8 housing vouchers that could be used anywhere they chose, one that was offered special vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods, and one that was not offered vouchers, but continued to live in public housing.  This was a voluntary program, so everyone in it had said that they wanted to move.  One of the interesting findings is that the majority of the people who used the unrestricted vouchers moved into neighborhoods that were still high poverty -- not as high as the public housing they came from, but still more than 20 percent.

Under the voucher program, what you pay is based on your income, not the rent, and you can rent any house up to what HUD calls the "fair market rent" for the metro area.  So why did the voucher recipients stay in high poverty neighborhoods?  If the researchers asked this, I haven't found the report that says it.  But I can take some guesses: Because those are the neighborhoods that they knew, where their friends and family lived, where they knew how to navigate the transportation system and which grocery store had the best deals.  Because landlords discriminated against them -- or because they were afraid that they might.  Because they didn't have cars, and the upfront cost of buying a car is obvious, while the added costs of buying food in inner-city neighborhoods is hidden.

All this is mostly a long way of saying that I'm not sure that the fact that poor people live in inner cities proves that they're cheaper than suburbs.

So, Yglesias argues that the suburbs are only so cheap because the roads and other infrastructure are so heavily subsidized.  Lisa Margonelli says that it's a myth that people will drive less if gas prices get high enough.  She argues that high gas prices have hit the poor the most.  I think this is probably right -- if people's driving is responsive to gas prices, it's clearly only in the very long run, as people choose where to work and live.  Somewhat less plausibly, Richard Brodsky claims that Bloomberg's proposed congestion pricing plan for driving in Manhattan would be regressive, hurting poor and middle-income drivers the most.  I'm pretty dubious about the idea that many poor New Yorkers own cars.

But outside of New York, I think the evidence is overwhelming that helping low-income families own cars is a highly cost-effective anti-poverty strategy.  (We've actually just donated our old car to Vehicles for Change, an organization that does this.)  It opens up a world of job opportunities, lets people shop at lower-cost stores, go to church and doctor's offices and more.  In an ideal world, you could do all these things by public transportation, but in most of the US you can't. 

So, how do we help the environment without penalizing low-income families?  I still think that some version of Pay at the Pump auto insurance would be a good thing.  It would convert a big part of the fixed cost of owning a car into a variable cost of driving it, so would both make car ownership more affordable for the poor, and discourage driving at the margin.  School reform isn't usually thought of as part of an environmental agenda, but if you could improve urban schools to the point that they seemed like a reasonable alternative for families who have options, more of them would choose to live in cities.

TBR: Arlington Park

I can't say that I liked the first book I read by Rachel Cusk, her memoir A Life's Work.  While I thought her prose was remarkable, I found it incredibly infuriating that as intelligent a woman as Cusk clearly is, would do something as irrevocable as having a child with so little forethought about how it would affect her life.  It's one thing to hate the tediousness and isolation of parenting a newborn; it's another thing to be surprised to discover that caring for a newborn can be tedious and isolating.

But her writing was powerful enough to make me pick up her new novel, Arlington Park, when I saw it at the library. The good news -- Cusk still writes some extraordinary sentences.  The bad news -- Cusk doesn't feel compelled to have any plot at all.   The book is just about a group of women who live in a suburb of London, and what they do one rainy day -- drop children at school, drink coffee, go shopping, take care of children, go out to dinner.  But when I say it like that, it sounds something like Mrs. Dalloway.  So imagine Mrs. Dalloway if the author didn't have any affection for her subject, and you'll have something like Arlington Park.

Here's a paragraph chosen pretty much at random to illustrate what I mean:

"'Gypsies,' Maisie said.  She shook her head.  'What a place to have to live.  Right where people come to pick up their sofas.'

Christine pondered the caravans and tried to work out what Maisie's remarks signified.  It wasn't the nicest thing to have a pack of Gypsies staring at you when you came to collect your sofa, she could admit, but it wasn't the end of the world either."

Ultimately, for a book like this to work, I think you need to enjoy the company of either the author or the characters, and I was left quite cold about both.

Agreement in principle

The seller got back to us this evening with a counterproposal.  We've agreed on general terms, but her lawyer made some changes to the contract, so we want to run them by our lawyer.  So I can't quite say we've bought a house, or even that we've got a contract do so, but we're getting awfully close. 

I'm simultaneously excited and exhausted, and totally overwhelmed by the amount of work that we have to do over the next few months.  We've agreed on 60 days to close, but I'd like to get our current house on the market well before then.

Instead of obsessing here all the time, I'm starting a new blog, Feels Like Home, to post about the process of actually buying the house, selling this one, and moving.  It's probably going to be fairly boring to anyone except those  -- like Jackie-- who are also going through the process (or plan on doing it soon).  But I think it will help me stay aware of the progress we're making, not just the list of things that remain undone. 

I do promise to post some pictures.

Moving?

As I indicated a couple of weeks ago, we may be moving.  We made an offer this evening.  We gave the seller 48 hours to respond, but I expect that she will accept: it's a fair offer in a buyer's market, and she likes us.  If she accepts, posting may become very erratic for the next month or so while we deal with all the logistics and get this house ready to put on the market.

Everyone we talk to seems to be assuming that we're moving because we're unhappy with the local school.  It's certainly a factor, but not the only one.  Overall, I'd say that D's had a pretty good year at school.  He's learned to read (to the point that I find myself having to explain newspaper headlines), to count up to a thousand or so, to color between the lines.  He considers almost all of his classmates to be his friends, and was heartbroken last week when he was too sick to go to school to perform his role in the Black History Month skit.  (He was supposed to be the manager who hires Jackie Robinson.)

But we do have some frustrations with the school.  D's teacher has been out sick for two extended periods.  That's not something that the school can control, but it would be nice if they had sent a letter home saying something about it, rather than leaving me to interrogate D each day about whether she was back.  When I commented to the principal that it was hard on the kids for her to miss yet another day for training right after she had been out for 3 weeks, the principal got all defensive about it, instead of agreeing that it was unfortunate.  None of the kids in D's class got awards (other than attendance) at the first honors assembly, because the teacher had been out and hadn't submitted them, so the principal said that they'd have a separate assembly just for that class.  It didn't happen.

I'm also frustrated by the lack of community.  Only a very few kids ever play on the playground after school.  The PTA is essentially inactive.  And in spite of D's popularity -- kids rush up to him at school to give him hugs -- he's been invited to exactly one playdate and one birthday party by kids from school.  (My guess is that this is a class thing -- as Lareau discusses, working class and poor kids are far more likely to play with the kids next door than to go to an arranged playdate.)  And this might be ok if there were other neighborhood kids for the boys to play with, but there doesn't seem to be much of that either.  T and I finally figured out that, having chosen a place to live based largely on its convenience and access to the metro, we're surrounded by other people who chose a place to live largely on its convenience and access to the metro.  And our attempts to build community through drop-in-dinners have been a flop.

We're also bursting at the seams a little bit.  I feel more than a bit silly and self-indulgent saying that, given that my parents raised 3 children to adulthood in an apartment smaller than this house, not to mention the vast majority of people in the world who live in smaller spaces.   But the idea of having a place to put the boys' bikes that isn't in the middle of the living room is really appealing.

Wish us luck.

TBR: The Failures of Integration

Today's book is The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining The American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin.  (I had actually requested it from the library, but not started it, when Bitch PhD wrote about it.  Dorcasina is also reading it.)  It's a very interesting book, but ultimately one that left me somewhat frustrated.

The first section of the book simply reviews the facts about residential segregation in the United States.  Little of this section is new research, but Cashin lays out the facts in a readable conversational tone.  She points out that much of what we consider "integration" consists of small number of well-off minorities living in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, as well as of neighborhoods that are in transition.    Very few whites -- and even fewer whites with children -- choose to live in neighborhoods that have a significant black presence, let alone that are majority black, even when such neighborhoods are less expensive than comparable majority-white neighborhoods.  (Cashin mostly discusses race in terms of black and white, although she notes that one type of stable integrated neighborhood is the multi-ethnic urban center.)  Cashin also notes that a significant number of blacks who could now afford to live in majority-white neighborhoods have chosen to live in majority-black communities where they are "more comfortable."

In the second section, Cashin makes a case that most of society is worse off because of the persistence of race and class segregation.  The ways in which poor urban minorities suffer have been well documented.  Cashin argues that middle-class whites also suffer because they have to spend more than they can afford and/or put up with horrible commutes in order to guarantee safe neighborhoods and decent schools for their kids.  (These sections echo some of the arguments from Perfect Madness and The Two-Income Trap.)  And for me, the most novel part of the book was Cashin's discussion of how the problems of urban areas follow middle-class blacks into majority-black suburbs.  She spends a lot of time discussing Prince George's County, MD, and why it still has mediocre schools and few retail shops, even though it is the most affluent majority-black county in the country. 

I found the third part of the book, in which Cashin discusses her hopes for the future, the weakest.  Cashin doesn't really have much of a solution to offer to the problems she's identified.  She calls for better enforcement of housing anti-discrimination laws, which I agree is a necessary, but not sufficient first step.  She supports school choice in the form of charter schools, but not vouchers, and talks approvingly of Raleigh's busing scheme, but doesn't directly address the issue that busing was a significant factor in pushing white families out of urban school districts.    She bewails our polarized political environment and the focus on suburban swing voters, but doesn't discuss how gerrymandering penalizes communities that are geographically scattered. 

I like where Cashin's aiming at; I just don't see how we get from here to there.

Update: I really want to encourage anyone who is reading this in a feedreader to click over to the comments on this post and the next one.  If you're only reading my posts, you're missing out.

Growing up in the big city

The NYTimes ran a bunch of letters in response to the article about childless cities.  One of them wrote:

"As someone who lived in San Francisco with two small boys, I think I know why there are few children in that city: It just isn't a great place to be a kid.

My oldest son couldn't learn to ride his bike on the hilly and congested streets. We didn't have a backyard. And our neighborhood was barren on Halloween. (We drove to a friend's suburban neighborhood to trick-or-treat)."

I grew up in the heart of Greenwich Village.  It was an amazing place to be on Halloween (the parade was over the top even then, and a 30 story apartment building is heaven for trick-or-treating), but overall it wasn't a great place to be a small child (or to be the parent of a small child).  It's true that someone always had to be with me if I wanted to go out to play, and I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was an adult.

But it was a terrific place to be a teenager, because you could get anywhere without a car.  I started taking the subway to school in 7th grade.  I totally took for granted a diversity of people, of languages, of foods, of experiences.   Firefighters and drag queens were equally likely to be waiting on line in front of me at the supermarket.  And yet it was also a real community, where the butcher would have my parents' order out for me without my saying my name.

One summer at camp, a kid made fun of me because I called McDonald's "McDonald's" rather than "Micky D's" or "the Golden Arches."  I thought he was an idiot.  McDonald's just wasn't important enough in my life to warrant a nickname. Instead, I could make a passionate argument for why the Ray's across the street from Jefferson Market library was the only one worth going to (inch-thick layers of toppings) and could go out to dinner in Chinatown with my Chinese-American boyfriend's family without totally humiliating myself.

I have nothing against backyards.  I enjoy puttering around trying to grow tomatoes in our postage stamp of a backyard, and am sometimes envious of my friends who have yards big enough for swingsets or impromptu t-ball games.  But to say that San Francisco or New York is a bad place to be a kid because you won't have a backyard displays an awfully limited view of childhood.

The call of the suburbs

The New York Times had an article Thursday on the disappearance of families with children from otherwise thriving urban areas.

This topic certainly resonates around the blogs I read, from 11d to finslippy.  Lots of people have either moved out of cities or are struggling with the decision.  Between the cost of housing, and the low quality of many urban school systems, many sworn city-dwellers start to hear the call of the surbubs after a kid or two.

Res Ipsa wonders "is it necessarily a problem if there are neighborhoods or communities where there aren't a lot of children?"

It certainly matters to those of us who value city living and who have kids.  I know I feel a stab of pain every time I see a family with young kids moving out of our neigbhorhood.  Their moving is one less family to advocate for the quality of the schools, one less family using the playgrounds and keeping them safe and clean, one less family with which my kids can spontaneously play. 

If you think (as I do) that our dependence on gasoline is a threat to both the world environment and to our national security, anything that forces people into suburban sprawl is a bad thing.

I also think it's probably better for the education of poor kids in urban school systems when there are also middle-class kids in the same school systems, even if they rarely attend the same schools.  Having middle-class kids in the system brings both attention and money.  Affluent childless singles and empty-nesters may pay income and property taxes, but they tend to ignore the schools and -- if anything -- fight for lower tax rates.