Category Archives: urban affairs

Chinatowns gentrifying even across the Pacific

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I’ve written earlier on gentrification in U.S. Chinatowns (as with everything else, Manhattan gets more than its share of attention). Yet this is something new: gentrification (including, apparently, a shift to a whiter population) has occurred even in cities with large Asian majorities, like Honolulu, Vancouver, or even Singapore.

The broader context matters little: in these cities, Chinatown is the original ethnic neighborhood, offering vintage architecture (and, in both instances, unusually well-preserved) adjacent to the CBD. Just as in Los Angeles (where gentrification’s further along in Little Tokyo than in Chinatown), that proves an unbeatable combination for boutiquey businesses appealing to hip travelers or expats — who might find most local neighborhoods, with their preponderance of concrete apartments and enclosed malls, insufficiently “exotic” for their tastes.

Harlem “transition” missing the point

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Sheesh, white privilege can result in such blinders. A NYT article by Sam Roberts bears a headline proclaiming that blacks are now less than half of Harlem’s population. Oh really? I hadn’t noticed the last time I was at 125th & Manhattan Ave. The article has the usual “experts” talking about gentrification and white-black relations, and the photo shows a white guy on a brownstone stoop. Yet an accompanying set of graphs shows a clear black majority in “central Harlem” (the area most residents would call Harlem) and a shrinking — but already minority — black plurality in “greater Harlem.” The “greater” area, it turns out, includes Spanish/East Harlem and much of Morningside Heights, neither of which have ever been majority black. Even within “central Harlem,” the graph shows a steep drop in the share of black residents beginning in 1980, long before the white gentry ever got to the neighborhood. In short, the graphs say that this was a poor neighborhood undergoing steady ethnic succession (by no means a new phenomenon; indeed, it’s the story of urban America) — from native-born black to Latino (a not-obvious shift, since many Caribbean immigrants blend the two categories) — and that minor gentrification has taken place over the past few years.

Basically, it’s not news (and we don’t even pretend to notice) until white people get there. This in spite of the fact that class, not race, is the real issue here and with gentrification in general; that households and not population are really the units of gentrification.

I’ll quote Brad Smith, who left this comment:

The Times places a photo of a white family at the top to suggest the displacement is because of whites. And most of the article concerns the influx of whites, suggesting the same cause. However, the accompanying graphs show the uptick in white families to be rather small, with “Other” constituting the real source of the population shift. Presumably, those are Hispanics but there is scant mention of them in the article… The loss of “majority” status has nothing to do with the influx of whites or the development boom of the past 10 years. So why is a white family featured in the photo and why is the demographic change repeatedly portrayed as a function of the influx of whites when the statistics and timeline say something else? The article is rather misleading and suggests an agenda.

We do this because

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A recent conversation turned, as many do, to travel — but not so much the logistics thereof, about which any flyertalker can expound for hours, but rather what it is that we’re seeking away from home. Is it better weather, time with loved ones, a tastier cup of tea, or just that weightless sensation of being lost?

It seems that I like to see the world as a laboratory of urban policies. Untangling and uncovering the layers of human interventions that result in our built environment still interests me more than even the most stunning of natural settings. We can’t understand a decision without understanding the assumptions and the context surrounding it: how the rationales made sense at its moment in space and time. Steve Mouzon likes to repeat the line “we do this because” throughout his pattern books — although that genre typically tells you how to do things and how they’ve always been done, but rarely why. Such practices are meaningless if not grounded in a place and its history.

Similarly, it always troubles (and frankly astonishes) me when I meet small-c conservatives who apparently listened when the Wizard declares, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” To be blind to history, to accept that the world was evidently created just yesterday without any human intervention, to accept that the status quo shall always be such and that any attempts to change are futile, dangerous, and heavy-handed — this attitude strikes me as willful disbelief. When those with libertarian tendencies parrot this, it amounts to (to quote Sondheim) “keep the status quo permanently so!” For instance, I recently had occasion to point out that “making driving ‘as unpleasant as possible’ is no more heavy-handed an intervention than 80 years wherein government strove to make driving as pleasant & easy as possible.” A society’s attitude towards driving has nothing to do with economic freedom, either: by far the two most free economies in the world, Hong Kong and Singapore, have some of the world’s strictest policies discouraging car ownership — punitive registration taxes, high road tolls, and high gas prices. Why? Because they’re also the world’s two most densely urbanized economies, and mass car ownership — and the pollution and congestion that would ensue — would impinge on others’ freedom of movement, and damage the economy besides.

Access road
“It is amazing to go out to the end there, look around, and wonder just why they did this.” (Jack Hartray was speaking of Wacker Drive, pre-Lakeshore East, which resembled this Indiana steel-mill viaduct.)

In the past, I’d study these things more closely here in North America: it’s easier to sell an idea once it’s been tried somewhere with a substantially similar legal or cultural background. Besides, it’s also substantially easier and cheaper to get to. And yet it’s sometimes more interesting to stumble across a great public policy idea implemented amidst greater odds. It’s humbling, for instance, to see carefully built public infrastructure (like TranSantiago’s efficient prepaid bus stops) in countries much poorer than the US, land of the affluent society.

So anyways, here are some highlights from the past few months of wandering about:
– Of course, I walked The High Line in July. It was, indeed, pretty magical to be suspended over the city, but plenty enough’s been written about that.
– I’ve written about Liberties Walk [full set of photos] before, a small-scale pedestrian mall flanked with townhouses over independent shops in scruffy Northern Liberties, Philadelphia. Another, much more ambitious phase recently opened, called the Piazza at Schmidt’s, and the Walk itself has been extended two more blocks. Future phases will add more multistory buildings, notably including one building fronting Girard (an adjacent arterial) with a supermarket and parking. (That phasing strategy is notably offbeat: usually you’d lead with the supermarket anchor to build traffic and then follow up with specialty shops, but this has proceeded in exactly the opposite manner.) The architecture might seem aggressive at first glance, but its weight and massing do strike a balance between industrial buildings on the east and residential on the west. The public spaces themselves are pretty sparse, which works for the narrow Walk but not the broad Piazza. Critics have weighed in on the Piazza, notably Philly Skyline and the Inquirer’s Inga Saffron.
– I’m always intruiged to see other instances where off-street retail has been introduced to an urban neighborhood, so two examples from Santiago de Chile caught my attention: the block-sized Patio Bellavista complex on Pio Nino, and the tiny but elegant Plaza del Paseo Barrio Lastarria.

Where there were no bad schools

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Well, this is disappointing. I’ve always been proud of the fact that I went to integrated public schools in a Southern inner city — especially since moving up north and seeing the damage that de-facto school segregation wreaks upon city and suburbs alike. What seemed normal as a kid was, as it turned out in my social-policy classes, a national model of how to do the right thing.

The magnet-school system in Raleigh not only provided remarkable education opportunities (my high school offered three orchestral programs, multivariate calculus, and Latin), but left me with enough street smarts to easily and respectfully navigate multiethnic city life. Getting bused across town for school also, in a way, taught me about educational opportunities across the entire city — museums, other libraries, the university. Although half of my peers lived in the lower-income, mostly African American neighborhoods of southeast Raleigh, nearly 90% of us went on to college. All this despite spending some 30% less per student than failing urban schools in the North.

The school system’s strong commitment to integration — suburban and city schools merged long after the courts had shifted away from forced busing — means that there are no bad schools, no schools worth fleeing or closing or “reconstituting,” in a county just shy of one million residents. Indeed, in Raleigh it’s the city schools which are better. This fact arguably played a huge role in making Raleigh one of the best-educated, most prosperous, fastest-growing cities in America:

For comparison’s sake, imagine that instead of merging in 1976, the Raleigh and Wake school systems had continued to be separate. And not only that, but Raleigh was one school district and every other town in Wake County had a separate school district of its own, like Wayne County [suburban Detroit]. Would Raleigh today be affluent? Or would the affluent people of Raleigh have long since moved to Cary, Apex and the rest of the suburbs, leaving a poor inner-city school system behind? [Bob Geary, Independent Weekly, writing about Gerald Grant’s new book Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh]

And yet there are others who inexplicably see such policies as failures, who insist that geography should be destiny. A small minority, likely drawn to Raleigh by its reputation for great schools, has consistently railed about the constant churn of school reassignments — necessary for a district that opens several costly new schools every single year. Maintaining integration has become more difficult as sprawl marched farther afield and as patterns of socioeconomic segregation ossified. (In this regard, the spread of suburban poverty and inner-city gentrification have actually helped to maintain some integration.) The usual right-wing hue and cry over “socialist social engineering” (never mind the right’s continual insistence on deeply interfering with private lives) becomes double-speak for perpetuating segregation. One school board member wants to have his cake and eat it, too — disband the magnets and somehow offer their programs at every single school, while decrying the “high cost” of busing. (Is there demand for AP Latin at every school? Even if there were, who could afford it?) Yet busing costs much less than trying to rescue failed schools with vast infusions of cash.

I’m only writing about this since, of course, the fringe has won a crucial battle: apparent control over the Wake County school board. NC Policy Watch argues that only 3% of voters — just over half, largely in the suburbs, in a poorly attended election — have come to dominate the debate, and that the considerable achievements should be better marketed; “the school system itself could do a better a job telling its impressive story and acknowledging the work it must do to address its problems.” I can only hope from afar that Wake County doesn’t turn its back on one of its few progressive policy achievements.

quick hits

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Every once in a while, I try to remember that currency is the currency of the internet — and therefore that quick blog posts are just as worthy as detailed thoughts — but I still get hung up on doing justice to good ideas. Anyhow.

1. Good riddance, Olympic mania. A prime example of the worst possible “project planning” (to use Roberta Brandes Gratz‘s term) — for a temporary event, no less. What annoyed me most was that the organizers not only suckered local corporations and foundations out of millions of dollars (which did not, btw, fall from heaven but was ultimately taken from the pockets of other local charities), but that they sold some magical expectation that the Olympics would somehow magically solve the CTA’s woes. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only did the Bid Book explicitly state* that no transit improvements were planned (and you can’t get what you don’t ask for!), but even the most optimistic figures about what sort of money could indeed fall from the sky (i.e., the feds) fell far, far short of the region’s eye-popping $50 billion in unfunded transit capital needs. (If the broad outlines of what’s being discussed in Congress for TEA4 happen, we might have a good start on getting that funded — without the hassles of the Olympics.) Besides, if there really is money falling from the skies, let it fall upon Brazil — they need it more than we do.

* the comments on that story are actually pretty on-topic. Too bad that disillusionment didn’t spread as far as the implied lies did.

2. Proposition 13 really is a tax on newcomers and the young, according to research by Dowell Myers. Senior homeowners get an average of $1,000 a year, paid for by homeowners under 45.

3. Daimler’s car2go offers one-way car sharing, which sounds like an intriguing concept. That’s possible for bike sharing systems only due to their ubiquity; is that also the intent here?

4. Phoenix wants to be carbon neutral? “Dementia.”

5. Most of the examples of “circle lines” (circumferential rapid transit lines) that I’ve seen distribute passengers through sprawling downtowns from commuter rail terminals that, due to imperial dictate, have been located outside the CBD. (This is the pattern in Buenos Aires, London, Moscow, Paris, and Tokyo.) As I’ve argued before, the proposed CTA Circle line does not fit this model, and thus becomes “an expensive solution in search of a problem.” Even the Illinois Medical District isn’t that focused an employment center (the Longwood Medical Area packs twice the employees into half the space, and the Boston Urban Ring is projected to be a BRT project. It also won’t work as a Metra connector, since most Metra trains will never stop at the Circle Line — most Metra customers will continue to the downtown terminals. (The line also has limited TOD potential since it runs through many built-out neighborhoods; arguably, the Clinton subway has greater TOD bang for the buck.) The line also wouldn’t serve many circumferential trips well; changing from a single bus-rail transfer (or a single rail-rail transfer one mile down the line) to a double rail-rail-rail transfer wipes out any potential time savings.

One exception I found: in Santiago, L4/L4A (which require a transfer) link the Providencia-Las Condes business district, via a peripheral freeway median line, to the high-density southern suburbs — laden with Pinochet-era public housing. Not a great example.

6. Two impressions that I gathered from a quick look at Dallas:
– Ample illustrations of the problem with putting the right thing in the wrong place. Victory and West Village might have looked fine on the drawing boards, but in practice they’re difficult to reach from anywhere else (except by driving, of course). West Village, in particular, would be exactly the sort of development to place next to DART — not a few blocks away.
– The boom/bust cycle of Texas development results in some interesting half-built stuff. Local developers hitch on to the latest planning fads with great enthusiasm (and the local “BEAN: Build Everything, Anywhere, Now” planning culture encourages it), but the market collapses before anything actually gets completed. With proper phasing, you could have a few good blocks here and there, but no.

7. A scale comparison: HOPE VI spent $6 billion in total. The Livable Communities Act bill introduced by Sen. Dodd authorizes over $4 billion over the next 3-4 years. This could have a significant impact.

8. Filed under “fun endeavors that I wish I’d thought of”: Will Cycle For Charity, creators of events that exercise people and brains, while building goodwill for cycling and raising charitable donations.

crossover appeal

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Another one of those “oh gosh, is it a good thing that a good idea has crossed over to the commercialized, suburban mainstream?”: Darden Restaurants, more famous for Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and Capital Grille, is seeking to take its Seasons 52 “local, seasonal” concept national. New locations in suburban Chicago and Philadelphia will join 11 existing locations, mostly in Florida.

Not as cosmopolitan as one might think

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A rebuttal to two common conceits about NYC vs. Chicago, in an attempt to clarify.

1. “Chicago is more segregated than New York.”

From CensusScope analysis of 2000 Census data, this is false. The usual measure of segregation is called the dissimilarity index; an index of 100 implies total segregation between two groups. The New York PMSA in 2000 had a black-white dissimilarity index of 84.3 and a Latino-white dissimilarity index of 69.3. Chicago’s comparable indices are 83.6 for black-white and 64.8 for Latino-white.

2. “You only find Midwesterners in Chicago. New York draws from all over the country.”

An admittedly dated (from 1999, using 1990 Census data) analysis by USC professor Dowell Myers [PDF, pp. 934] found that a similar proportion of New York and Chicago region residents* were born within their respective tri-state areas. 57.6% of New Yorkers were born in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut; 60.5% of Chicagoans were born in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin. For all its claims to be a national draw, only 18% of New Yorkers moved from other states/territories, while 24.8% of Chicagoans moved from outside its region (but within the country). By comparison, in the Washington, D.C. region, “long believed to be a region of transient residents who came to town for short tours as students, military officers or federal workers” (as the WaPo wrote in 1991), only 34.5% of residents were born within D.C., Maryland, or Virginia.

This particular complaint is often levied against the Lincoln Park area, with its “Big 10 frat party” feel, although fewer than 1 in 120 Chicago region residents live there. Yet the New York region’s white population is even more provincial than the Chicago region’s: fully 73.4% of New York’s white residents were born within the tri-state area, vs. 71% of the Chicago region’s.

Far more of New York’s population was born abroad (24.5% vs. 14.7%), although Los Angeles easily beats both with 30.1% of its residents being foreign-born — which, in turn, pales against Toronto’s 46%.

* Over 25.

A hundred years later

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[Oh, wow, I’ve been seriously delinquent about blogging. I have dozens of links for a link dump, but in the past few months my life has gone topsy-turvy in quite a few ways. I apologize. Here was one neglected but substantially complete post that I’d saved as a draft.]

[A follow-on to Twenty Years]

Philip Nobel, writing in Metropolis in March 2007, banishes “all arguments based on ‘authenticity’… to the postmodern echo chamber” based on a comparison between two widely known examples of “fake places” and one of the world’s most-visited “authentic” places:

There’s really nothing wrong with Santana Row. There should be, of course: we’ve all been bred to hate malls, and what could be more hateful than a mall masquerading as a chic, vaguely European town? […]

It was visiting [Santana Row and Easton Town Center,] those two sprawl-patching hot spots within a few months last year that began to erode my knee-jerk aversion to malls: fake places, captive minds, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah… in San Jose and exurban Ohio, there is scarcely a center to mourn, and the “malliers” should be credited for responding to a human urge that looks as if it will easily survive the decentralizing effects of multiuser gaming and Netflix[:] people like to gather and not just to shop…

Walking around the center of Munich for several days last winter, I found it increasingly untenable to prefer one form of regulated commercial experience to another, to damn the American solution and reflexively embrace the European.

This echoes, of course, the way elite Manhattanites nostalgically whine about the “Suburbanization of New York.” It’s only fitting, of course, that the city which rose as the United States coalesced from regional to a national economy — and which has long economically colonized the rest of the U.S. — should now feel threatened as the tide runs the other way. (Of course, it always has, as [for instance] regional food brands were replaced with national ones; it’s just that retail brands are that much more visible in everyday life. And don’t New Yorkers see Macy’s or Subway whenever they leave NYC? Oh yes, I forgot: they don’t.)

New Urbanists are often criticized for creating places which look “realistically urban” but feel antiseptically suburban. This criticism misunderstands the new urbanist intent: the intent is not to create an instantly authentic city, an impossible task since layers of human history and diverse interpretations thereof need to be laid down to create a city. (Honestly, think about it: creating instant authenticity would necessarily require exponentially more frightful social engineering.) What New Urbanists seek to do is to create places that will be able to ride the tides of history, to age well and to adapt to the necessarily shifting sands of urban history. Indeed, quite a few of today’s shining examples of urban authenticity were once themselves Planned Communities of a sort, relics of an earlier era of town planning which, at the time, must have seen more than a little contrived but which have grown into their roles with age.

October link roundup

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Relatively quick link roundup. I’ve been busy admiring the Republican party’s implosion and planning for a month of travel — I’ll be away for four of the next five weeks. If I wait much longer, though, some of these election-related links will be pointless.

  1. Jeffrey Ball in the WSJ notes some counter-intuitive findings from corporate carbon footprinting projects. Note that such analyses only consider the carbon impacts of products, not the whole ecological footprint. Major surprise: transportation is often not the biggest contributor to a product’s carbon footprint:
    – shipping shoes from China vs. making cowhide (or polyester)
    – powder detergent is lighter/easier to ship vs. the process energy of making liquid into powder
    – chilling beer at the store vs. trucking beer cross-country
    In all three cases, it turns out that manufacture (or storage, for beer) is still more carbon-intensive than transportation.
  2. How does “clean coal” work? Eric de Place from Sightline explains, in one word: unicorns!
  3. Compare: earlier this year, California advocates (Environment California) urged merely slowing VMT growth “by roughly half between 2008 and 2030” — getting existing residents to stop driving more after 2010 and getting new, post-2010 residents to drive 20% less (consistent with how people in TODs live, and thereby assuming that new population growth will be steered to TODs).

    The Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group, on the other hand (the formal state policy advisory board) actually goes much further in its land use/transportation recommendations, aiming for a 15% reduction in existing per-capita VMT — and explicitly adopting the “three-legged stool” metaphor (vehicle efficiency, low-carbon fuels, and less driving) from “Growing Cooler.”

  4. Arlington has proposed a “bike station” for an indoor/outdoor transit plaza site outside the Ballston metro. Shades of the Polish Triangle?
  5. It was bound to happen: the GOP’s post-Joe-the-Plumber hysteria over “redistributive” “socialism” have, well, socialists scratching their heads. Katherine Marsh asks Brian Moore, running for president on the Socialist ticket, about it at TNR, while the Trib’s Rex Huppke (forever “that bald guy Daley made fun of“) went and talked to honest-to-god people from CPUSA, DSA, and Brookings (!). Timothy Noah, in Slate, goes and resurrects, um, Teddy Roosevelt.

    The shocker? Redistribution isn’t particularly “socialist” (as if that were a bad thing), it’s what our current tax code does, and the Obama plan goes no further than to restore Clinton-era marginal tax rates — which still resulted in astonishing economic growth, although arguably growth was even better under the 160%-higher-than-today upper-income tax brackets of the Eisenhower years.

  6. Brian Vickers, a Carolina-born NASCAR star, becomes a car-free urbanite on weekends. Dave Caldwell in the Times: “It’s also near a subway stop. This stock car driver does not keep a car in New York, and he hates the city’s ultra-heavy traffic. He does own a sturdy black bicycle, which he has used to explore Manhattan from tip to tip. ‘This city is so big, with so many neighborhoods,’ he said, ‘and until you get here, you don’t really understand that.’ “
  7. HOPE VI: the play, coming soon.
  8. Via Crain’s, Foreign Policy has an actually useful and competently researched city ranking: the 2008 Global Cities Index.
  9. I was skeptical when I got a call regarding this feature, but Nara Schoenberg’s “Greenest Chicagoan” pick (Ken Dunn) makes sense — and is backed up by actual analysis. Of course, Ken’s greatest contribution to minimizing his ecological footprint isn’t through his personal choices, but in what he does for a living — keeping tons of waste out of landfills through reuse, compost, or recycling.
  10. James Kotecki discovers that he, too, is “Living in Fake America” after a McCain adviser says that NoVa is apparently not “real Virginia.” Sure, American anti-urbanism is as old as Jefferson and Thoreau, but it makes little sense for politicians to insult and alienate the 84% of Americans who live in metro areas. The Philly Daily News takes issue with Palin’s “we believe that the best of America is in these small towns… in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation” speech: “the culture war between small towns and big cities… isn’t a war you can win… [Ben Franklin] also said that we must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. Think about that next time you dis our cities.”
  11. Michael Pollan’s latest Times Magazine slow-food polemic apparently reached its intended audience: presumed President-elect Barack Obama, who already has demonstrated an affinity for the locavore Rick Bayless’ food. (Bayless claims to raise most of his restaurant’s salad greens at his home, a few blocks from mine.) More heartening: Pollan’s critiques address the complex policy interlockings behind the food system (to name just one complex system), and the candidate (smart guy that he is) gets it!

Pick your perfect place

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Travel + Leisure magazine’s America’s Favorite Cities online feature lets you choose your most-desired urban traits from an extensive list of 45 (ranging from “attractive people” to “plenty of vintage markets,” all ranked by 125,000 voters) and generate a list of matching cities. My usual beef with “Ten Best” lists, having grown up in and fled a place which too-regularly leads such lists, is that they rarely account for the vast differences in what people want out of a place.

Even most of the online “find your city ranking” calculators I’ve found — expressly intended to allow people to weight their own factors — still obsess over ways to objectively measure a host of subjective factors. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then what use is counting up performances and venue capacities to rank cities’ music scenes? Such things are better determined subjectively, and without concern for the strictures and vagaries of Census geography.

My five must-have factors — Cafés/coffee bars, Noteworthy neighborhoods, Public parks and access to the outdoors, Public transportation and pedestrian friendliness, Environmental awareness — yielded Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Not far off the mark.

Even less

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Even less Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Hey there! Long time no blog. Well, I was away for about a month and such.

The U.S. government is about to spend $1,000,000,000,000 or so buying up "toxic sludge," much of which finds its physical form (in however convoluted a manner) as now-worthless suburban sprawl. What if the nation had, ten years ago, decided that we spend a trillion dollars along these principles instead? Would we be better off today? Now, just how efficient are markets at optimally allocating capital again?

(This poster is on the side of the Denver Dry Goods building, an early rehab completed by Jonathan Rose Companies.)

Cross purposes

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The Twin Cities have an image problem. A national survey conducted by FutureBrand on behalf of the corporate community — facing the prospect of a critical labor shortage in a “creative class” economy — found that Americans have a fairly negative perception of the area. In particular, respondents “describe the area as quite conservative,” ranking it second most conservative, second least liberal, and last on an array of positive attributes like sophisticated, cultural and artistic, unique, multicultural, livable, youthful, economically vital, flourishing and vibrant, alive, fun and exciting, when compared to six peer areas (the others being Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Denver and Seattle). So, the corporations looked to the area’s large advertising industry to help with a comprehensive branding campaign, “aiming to change perceptions of our community, attract and retain talent as well as visitors.” Little & Company provided some fresh-looking, if somewhat predictably boosterish, creative to introduce the brand as Minneapolis Saint Paul: More to Life.

Looking up

Ironic, then, that the exact same ads which attempt to dispel “too conservative” prejudices by trumpeting the area’s performance artists (among other things) are being used as talking points for media covering… the Republican National Convention. Someone [h/t Wonkette] even amateurishly pasted an elephant into several of the spots in an effort to make the campaign relevant to the right-wing hoohah.