Undercover of the Blight

Read this editorial in the Strib - "Bush and the Cities/Setback for Urban Renaissance" - and tell me it's not Nick Coleman.

It has all the usual Coleman touchstones.

Clue One: the Noble Wage Serf

Always a "she", always anonymous, always plucky...:

She pours your latte in the morning and sends you off with a smile. But you don't know the rest of her day.

...whose problems over the next few paragraphs pile up like John Cleese's serial frustrations in an episode of Fawlty Towers...:

Driving from the coffee shop to her second job in the suburbs. Struggling with the rattletrap car she bought after they discontinued the midday bus. Getting home too late to deal with the children who, without help from their absent father, are drifting toward trouble. Worrying about whether to pay the rent, fix the TV or buy shoes for the kids.

It's a cartoon. Let's call her Poor Penelope Poverty.

Oh, she's no cartoon to me. I've known a lot of these people. For a time, I was one of them, in ways Nick Coleman (or whichever even-less-excusable writer) can't possibly understand.

And I sympathize with these characters (for that is indeed what they are, in these sorts of columns - cynical caricatures) in ways Nick Coleman or the rest of the Strib editorial board, snug in their Crocus Hill victorians or North Oaks mcmansions or Northeast insta-gentritopias can't possibly.

Which is why it pisses me off that the Strib and so many of its writers treat such people as caricatures to be mined, cynically, for such trite fare.

Clue Two: Big, Bad, Republicans

The Strib continues:

Now, just as she's trying her hardest, President Bush and his junior partner, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, propose to make her life tougher.

It's personal! Big Bad Bush and Terrible Tim want poor Penelope Poverty to roil in pain!

Of course...:

Trips to the doctor for herself and her kids are in jeopardy.

Fact: "MinnCare" entry thresholds, even after the proposed budget cuts, are higher than in any of our surrounding states.

So are food stamps.

Ditto

Clue Three: The Big Cheeses Get The Payoff

Life is a panjandrum of gathering horrors in a Coleman column:

Day care costs may rise. Rent may go up as supplies of affordable housing decline. Fewer cops -- and more drug dealers -- would patrol the streets.

"May".

Her dreams about training for a higher-paying job? Getting a better apartment? Saving for the kids' college? Forget about it. Rich people out in the suburbs need to keep their tax cuts. End of story.

That's how the president's budget looks from the street corners in Minneapolis, St. Paul and many other big cities. That's how it looks to us.

Remember how the article started - with a declaration of an "urban renaissance?"

We'll come back to this:

But the impact runs far beyond a simple assault on the working poor. It stretches to wealthier urban neighborhoods, where, if the president's budget survives intact, it's likely there will be more streets and parks in disrepair, less neighborhood revival and more upward pressure on property taxes -- as federal and state budgets push more costs onto hard-pressed local governments.

So what on earth caused this "urban renaissance", anyway?

Was it massive government subsidy and endless programs? No, we had plenty of them during the nadir of the city - indeed, the programs, which tended to warehouse the poor and the crime-prone in the inner cities, triggering the "white flight" and the throwing up the barricades around the 'burbs in the first place. Superhighways gutted neighborhoods; the poor and crime-prone were warehoused in the gutted shells of the old 'hoods; crime and blight skyrocketed; illegitimacy was subsidized, creating generations of bored, on-the-edge-of-desperation people painstakingly-yet-inadvertently trained to abjure effort and seek the easy path out.

Which drove down property values, which drove out the sort of people who actually invest in communities rather than are warehoused there by a bureaucracy that finds it more convenient to keep them there.

Clue Four: Half The Story

If there's a story that misses slews of key facts - well, you fill in the blanks.

Because you have to:

"There's no way we could do Excelsior-Grand under these conditions," said Hennepin County Commissioner Gail Dorfman, referring to St. Louis Park's heralded remake of an aging suburban strip.

Now, the whole story. The "aging strip", a series of dowdy strip malls and meat-market bars, is located in the middle of some of the most desirable real estate in the Metro area, five miles west of downtown Minneapolis. The market would have taken care of it before long...

...but the developers didn't want to wait. They used eminent domain to gut the whole strip of less-than-desirable but successful businesses, to create a renaissance in Saint Louis Park right friggin' NOW!.

Now, what this has in common with the following:

Indeed, the remake of other corridors -- Phalen, Lake Street, West Broadway -- will be less likely if Bush succeeds in collapsing a bundle of community block grants that, since Richard Nixon's presidency, have formed the foundation for a public/private urban renaissance.

Ah, there it is. The Urban Renaissance.

Question: Would this "renaissance" happen without massive government subsidy? Does subsidy create renaissance?

If it did, downtown Saint Paul would be a magnet - the place has sucked up endless public and private subsidy.

Where has such subsidy worked? When there were other, market-driven factors; North and Northeast Minneapolis' cheap, fascinating housing stock and proximity to downtown; West Lake's proximity to Uptown, the Lakes and the thriving boho scene in the Wedge; the Wedge's supply of cheap, funky housing -and on and on.

More half-stories?

The White House says that current development grants "cannot sufficiently demonstrate their measurable impact." That's true in some places. But Minneapolis used federal block grants to launch a city-county drug task force that makes 70 percent of the state's seizures. It used similar funds to turn the Phillips neighborhood remarkably around, reducing crime, creating jobs and showing a substantial return on investment. Now, as it refocuses on jobs for a North Side that's suffering an uptick in gang/drug violence, the White House wants to yank the program.

Yank it? Re-title it? Make it more accountable?

Notice the subtle misdirection: After spending the first part of the article invoking the usual emotional strawmen - Penelope Poverty, the noble, plucky, single-mother-with-two-jobs-and-the-bastard-boyfriend-who-done-her-wrong-who-can't-make-ends-meet, we get to the part that really works: money for cops to put the scum who prey on the rest of the city's residents in jail.

Clue Five: The Party Plug

Would you believe...:

Here's how worried the cities are: Both mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis are open to higher taxes to pay for police -- in an election year.

DFLers promising to raise taxes? What'll they think of next?

Clue Seven: Nonsense

Tell me what this bit means:

Unlike Mayor Randy Kelly of St. Paul, most urbanites didn't vote for Bush in the last election. He won only 21 percent in Minneapolis and 26 in St. Paul. But how will the nation and state benefit by disproportionately punishing these cities and the people who are trying the hardest to hold them together?

Did that make any sense?

Kelly endorsed Bush, so the Feds are punishing Plucky Penelope Poverty?

So we have seven clues on the one hand, and actual figures on the other.

Team effort, maybe?

Posted by Mitch at February 14, 2005 07:36 AM | TrackBack