The girl upstairs

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[update: this made Best Of]
The world has long needed a place to post anonymous but open letters. “Missed Connections” has long seen many of the “I just wanted to say you’re beautiful” sort, but rarely anything along these lines:

Hey neighbor! It�s me, the guy who lives one floor below you. We�ve traded brief hellos in the stairway or vestibule, but not much more than that… [I]t wasn�t only the girl-sex that piqued my curiosity, it was the apparently prominent role that your vacuum cleaner, or some other mechanical device, played in your Sapphic encounters. That and the fact that you both seemed to rile yourselves up by chasing each other around the room, rearranging the furniture, or some combination of the two. Now, as a hetero guy, I don�t claim to know the first thing about lesbian arousal… So I just assumed that you�d be turned on by the very same things that turn most people on — like, say, the sight of your partner naked, well-executed oral sex, the occasional dirty word, and so on. But the vacuum cleaner?! What, I ask, the fuck was up with that?!

Either/or, and/both

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[exchange on CCM list]

…apparently that animals have rather wasteful metabolisms–not
just the animals we eat, but we humans, too. Indeed, we have extravagantly
wasteful metabolisms from an getting-around-efficiently point of view; all
those brains sure suck up a lot of energy, as do those nimble hands. (Then
again, we also start with less energy-dense food than cars do.) That point
would be moot if the comparison were between BICYCLING and driving, since
bicycling is so incredibly goshdarned energy efficient.

Also, I would argue with the characterization in the “Sierra Club Script For Arguing Against Carfreedom” subject heading. The
Sierra Club is NOT “against carfreedom,” and the script on the site actually
calls carfreedom “commendable.” Instead, the Sierra Club seems to be against
taking strident, oppositional stands on environmental issues. I mostly agree
with Sis on substance, but not on style, and that’s what I took away from
reading the Sierra exchange.

As dopey and half-assed as it might seem, a 5% increase in fuel economy
would have the same clean-air benefit as a tenfold increase in cycling. But
you know what would be better than one or the other? BOTH! I would encourage
everyone who wants better cities, cleaner air, safer streets, and more open
space to fight for both improved fuel economy (ideally through price
incentives, but MPG standards can also work) and more safer, better cycling
routes, instead of roundly attacking one another for not being perfect
enough.

The bottom line should not be “I’m right and you’re wrong,” as satisfying as
that may be, but that the impacts of our various actions on the environment
are complex, overlapping, and not easily quantifiable. Compare organic
produce from California vs. conventional produce from Michigan: the organic
creates fewer toxics and less water pollution but takes more land (and
potentially water) to grow and needs to be trucked long distances. In the
end, there’s no way to quantify which has the greater environmental impact:
you’d have to assign values to unquantifiable things like “habitat loss” or
“aquifer drainage,” and that’s difficult if not impossible to do.

And no, I’m not a right-wing status-quo auto-industry shill, and anyone who
says otherwise is itching for a fight.
– pc, 80% vegetarian, 100% carfree, Sierra Club member and volunteer,
professional environmentalist

Businesses way out in front of administration

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Man, we really are going to have to be dragged into this kicking and screaming. Even as an industry-backed “National Commission on Energy Policy”:http://www.energycommission.org agrees to mandatory caps on greenhouse gases and stricter fuel economy, the White House won’t budge one bit from its faulty logic:

bq. Dana Perino, spokeswoman for the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, which coordinates environmental matters, said the administration opposes the plan because it would raise energy costs and push “industries to move jobs overseas, and that does not result in the environmental benefit all of us are seeking.”

from the “WaPo”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45176-2004Dec7.html

Then and now

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Fellow pedaling photographer Luke Seemann found a great archive of historic color photographs of Chicago’s Loop and near south, west, and north sides, dating from 1938-1968, then traveled to see what’s there now. The results, especially in the “renewed” south and west sides, are astonishing.

The Boston Globe’s Sunday magazine runs (ran?) a weekly feature of just this sort of “then and now” photos; somehow, it’s more understandable that a city would disappear and reappear over the course of two hundred years. But just forty years?

Multifamily’s appeal

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Two articles in the Trib’s real estate section recently point out mild unintended consequences of recent planning interventions:

Of the 98 low-income homes built since 2002 under a controversial affordable-housing ordinance, most “are younger, first-time home buyers who are yet to start a family,” a recently released analysis shows. Nearly 60 percent live alone. Although the city hasn’t tracked buyers’ race, officials believe a substantial number are white. (reported by Christine Tatum, originally in the Denver Post)

This problem plagues many well intentioned affordable housing programs; especially when creating affordable for-sale housing, many of the most qualified buyers are going to be white-collar folks who would have bought homes anyways, albeit on less favorable terms.

(The reported statistics certainly should give affordable housing advocates some pause; in some cases, policies like inclusionary zoning may not be an effective way to spend political capital on their largely low-income base’s behalf — and, in some cases, may even exacerbate gentrification if off-site inclusionary units sited in currently affordable neighborhoods end up with yuppie tenants. On the other hand, these programs potentially expand the political constituency for affordable housing programs to capture more of the powerful middle class.)

[A Des Plaines real estate agent] handled some transactions recently where couples downsizing from houses bought brand-new suburban condos only to discover that they felt cramped. Yes, they liked not having to mow the lawn, but to not have a lawn was, well, too much too soon. So, they sold the condo and moved to a home in Sun City in Huntley. (reported by Wayne Faulkner)

The article makes ample note of the suburban condo boom’s many upsides: more vibrant downtown retail, better utilization of existing transportation infrastructure, and an enhanced sense of community for seniors and for the whole town. Yet I’m sure that someone’s missing a market opportunity here: dense infill housing somewhere between single-family and high-rise. Rowhouses, courtyard houses, stacked rowhouses, and low-rise flats have historically appealed to young families (if they were built at all) due to the number of steps involved, but if Sun City can do ’em, so can downtowns. Cheaper residential elevators might also make these building types more practical for empty nesters.

(Elsewhere in the paper on the same day, another real estate industry source indicated that attached housing this year will account for more than half of all new home sales in the Chicago region. I know that the same is now true of most West Coast metro areas, where denser sprawl has long been the norm, but this is potent ammunition against those “lawn = American Dream” propagandists.)

[items picked up from the Campaign for Sensible Growth mailing this week.]

Oh, and I have 100+ photos to sort through from recent travels. They will get posted eventually.

The Western bus

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Someone sent along a CTA document tracking bus ridership from 2002 to 2004. One interesting highlight: ridership in the Western Avenue corridor has grown appreciably, even on weekends. The 49B is among the most productive routes in the system, and the 22,861 riders on the 49 on Saturdays (perhaps influenced by the lack of X49 service on weekends) actually surpasses the 19,748 on weekdays.

(Now, why do we still have the 49, 49A, and 49B? Rumor has it that the old cable cars could only go so far without having to turn around, so line extensions were built at the north and south ends — line extensions which persist to this day. The distinction is particularly maddening when attempting to, say, have lunch on Devon; it should be a single bus ride up Western from Wicker Park, but isn’t.)

Also instructive is the contrast between the 81 Lawrence, easily the city’s most productive route (72.9 passengers per platform hour), and the 21 Cermak or 18 16th-18th. Both serve dense, vibrant, ethnic neighborhoods, but while Lawrence is almost completely lined with retail, Cermak and 16/18 pass through large sections of marginal retail or industrial land. As a result, service on the latter two are threatened with extinction.

Awash in colors

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True, the 2000 election’s mass coverage of red states, blue states, and Green Party may have oversimplified matters, but the literal blossoming of color in American politics may stick in the lexicon. Triumphant blue-state liberals in Oregon have BlueOregon, and the “dog” coalitions of the Democratic party have gained new currency. Yellow dogs, those old Southern creatures, have largely disappeared from speech, and their Blue Dog opponents are threatened both by the identification of blue with liberalism and by their own inability to compete within a more polarized system. Meanwhile, two competing uses of Green Dog have arisen: progressives fond of the “green” have claimed the term, while at least one wag likes its blend of yellow and blue.

Canadian consumer typology

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Find out more about our neighbors to the north with PRIZM CE, a consumer segmentation system devised by Claritas and Environics Analytics. Canada, while a tenth as populous as the US, apparently deserves just as many consumer clusters — partially because of its greater ethnic and linguistic diversity, as Qu�be�ois, Chinese, Sikh, and aboriginal populations get their own clusters. More-urban Canada also merits more urban and fewer suburban clusters.

One interesting cluster tidbit: cluster 43, Urban Spice, is described as “a collection of immigrant gateway communities… ranking highest among all cluster in working for a political party or candidate,” quite a contrast to young, immigrant, urban populations in the US.

Election wrap

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I brought a stack of post-election papers to read on the plane. Some highlights:

The New Republic, 29 November:

…the neoconservatives and their fellow traveler liberal hawks have yet to come clean with the American people about the potential costs of democratizing and liberalizing the Arab world — in lives, dollars, civil liberties, and cultural freedoms. They have yet to come clean about the likelihood of a general draft and the possibility that many thousands of young men and women in Generation Y will die for the baby-boomers’ crusade. They have yet to come clean with the already struggling, indebted Generation X, which will see its taxes rise to pay for the multitrillion-dollar cost of the wars (on top of the already $50 trillion-plus shortfall for boomer entitlements). They have yet to come clean with all generations of Americans about the inevitability of further erosions of our civil liberties and freedoms of expression. And they have yet to come clean about the full costs of a U.S. empire. Kenneth Hempel, Nevada City, Calif.; letter

The Financial Times, 5 November:

“If I had one wish for US policy in the next four years it would be a steep rise in taxes on petrol. It would promote cleaner air, reduce global warming, help cut the budget deficit and diminish political dependence on the Middle East. Any one of these benefits would be sufficient to justify a big increase in petrol prices. Taken together the case is overwhelming. A prescription of required treatment is helpful even when early implentation is unlikely.” Samuel Brittan, commentary

Nice to know that someone else besides the now-sacked Greg Mankiw is willing to go on the record for the most obvious policy panacea of our time. (Update 5 Dec: or, as Friedman quotes Michael Mandelbaum from Hopkins on energy independence: “This is not just a win-win. This is a win-win-win-win-win.”)

The US now needs $2.5bn of capital inflows daily to fund its domestic savings shortfall. I would hope our international bankers did not expect us to pay this back without letting the dollar go lower against other currencies. The only decisive result in the Bush victory is the absolute certainty that the president will not admit the economic imbalances our country faces. Paul Corrigan, letter

So, we Americans are outliving our means to the tune of almost $9 per person per day. Charming.

As the extent of Republican victory sinks in, corporate America is realising that it has not only escaped a series of Democrat threats to its freedom but that it enjoys the prospect of driving through reforms it could only dream of in George W. Bush’s first term.
Quite apart from the short-term correction in share prices that caught attention on Wednesday, an air of euphoria has begun to creep into boardrooms and Washington’s lobby offices, tempered only by the recognition that there is a lot to cram in…
Thomas Reynolds, who chaired the Republican congressional campaign committee, was asked on Wednesday whether the Republican party needed to be careful not to overplay its hand. “No, I think there’s green lights in America,” he said…
But with the re-election of Mr Bush and the Republicans’ increased control over Congress after Tuesday’s elections, both business lobbyists and their opponents say the next four years could tilt the political landscape in favour of corporate America more dramatically than at any period in modern US history.
Industries as diverse as manufacturing, financial services, energy, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals are hoping to see the passage of measures that have repeatedly been blocked by the Democrats, particularly in the Senate.
“This is about as good as it might ever get for any of these industries,” says Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity… “This is really nirvana for these folks…”
“Business has invested a lot of money in the Republicans, and really wants the payback,” says [Joan] Claybrook, [president of Public Citizen].Dan Roberts & Edward Alden, “Foot to the pedal: US business expects a clear run from a second Bush term”

Given all this, it’s no wonder at least one columnist mentioned the serious potential of a human capital drain from the US. Some are already betting on it.

I’m glad

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Seen on the train today:
Advertisement headline was “I’m glad I got tested for / syphlis. You will be too.”
Someone cut out “I’m glad I got… syphilis” with a knife, apparently to take home. Oddly enough, this wasn’t all that noticeable; it’s easy to see where someone’s taken a marker or white paint to an ad, but the backlighting on subway ads means that a cut-out doesn’t provide that much contrast (provided the rest of the ad isn’t a dark background, which would be rare).

However, it would have been much funnier (for the public, at least) if the vandals had cut out “tested for.” The result: “I’m glad I got… syphilis. You will be too” — a subversion both of the original text and of the premise of most advertising in general.

Of course, this is not to say that I don’t think sexually active people should get tested for syphilis and other diseases. Ideally, we wouldn’t need public service adverts for this kind of thing, since universal health care would ensure that everyone had regular access to health services.