The Pizzashed

PBS has commissioned an amazing-looking documentary series called America Revealed (partially based on the popular BBC series "Britain from Above," from which I learned about the Teatime Deluge). In this segment, they attach a GPS device to Dominos Pizza delivery guys in Manhattan to animate the patterns of pizza delivery on a Friday night.

And then the camera zooms out, revealing the routes of the pizza shops' daily deliveries from a distribution center in northern Connecticut.

And then the camera zooms out more, to show the routes of satellite-embedded, refrigerated trucks moving across the continent, bringing dough, toppings, cheese, and tomato sauce from farms and food processing facilities to the distribution centers.

Behold, the American pizzashed:

Watch Pizza Delivery on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Foreclosure Farms

Growing food in abandoned city lots? That's so 2007. In the post-recession landscape, the edgiest agricultural trendsetters are growing cannabis in suburban foreclosures. 

"Houses that sold for $1 million before the crisis have been turned into grow houses, equipped with the high-intensity lights, water and air-filtering systems necessary to produce potent, high-quality marijuana," reported the New York Times in an article this spring.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the BBC reports that local police found over 7,800 cannabis farms in the UK last year.

A foreclosed house in Vallejo, California, where illegal wiring for grow lights caused a fire on the second floor. Photo by Jim Wilson for the New York Times.

It's the logical next step of the "urban farming" fad. Abandoned inner-city lots for growing vegetables are becoming increasingly difficult to find. So what's an aspiring inner-city homesteader to do?

Drive 'till you qualify. There's a bounty of abandonment beyond the city limits. Find a nice quarter-acre lot with a nice lawn and privacy from any nosy neighbors, a good school district where well-to-do students will pay top dollar for your product, and five spacious bedrooms for your grow lights.

Who says the American Dream is dead? It just needs some pharmacological assistance.

Ten thousand public bikes bloom in Manhattan

Later this summer, New York City city will roll out thousands of publicly-owned bikes parked at stations, spaced a few blocks apart across three boroughs, where visitors, workers, and neighborhood residents will be able to borrow a bike for short-term rentals.

Lots of other cities have already pioneered the bikesharing idea (even Houston, Texas managed to implement bikesharing before New York did, with a much smaller 3-station downtown network that opened this spring). With origins in Paris and Montreal, bikesharing has always had a tinge of utopian socialism to it, promoting the shared use of public property over privately-owned vehicles.

But it's a socialist idea that works brilliantly, thanks to mobile technology: users can use their smartphones to locate bikes and a station near their destination, while bikeshare managers can locate lost or broken bikes with GPS, and dynamically track which stations need more bikes due to high demand. Lots of new business startups seek to duplicate the same communistic idea of letting people share their private property (whether spare bedrooms or automobiles) in exchange for small rental payments. Bikesharing makes cycling in cities easier, cheaper, and more fun, resulting in more people riding bikes for short trips in the cities where it's been established.

Private property, it turns out, is a hassle to take care of. But new technology allows people to enjoy the communitarian benefits of shared property thanks to the capitalist accountability of credit card security deposits and rental payments.

New York City's state-owned bicycles wholeheartedly embrace this ironic marriage of utopian environmentalist socialism with hard-nosed capitalism. They've been named "Citi Bikes," after Citibank, which contributed a $41 million for the naming rights.

Wall Street quants riding to work like Maoist factory workers (although even Maoists own their own bikes) will do so astride bikes plastered with the Citibank logo, and pay at stations that prefer MasterCard, another corporate sponsor.

And so here is a photo, via Streetsblog, of three transportation policy wonks (from left: NYC Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, Alta Bikeshare CEO Alison Cohen, NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan) and three billionaires (Mayor Michael Bloomberg, MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit).

In a few more years, bikesharing stations will be as much a part of our stereotypical vision of the generic urban landscape as newsstands and bus shelters are today.

Occupy Heathrow

I've been meaning to write here about how the Occupy movement has brought an element of wilderness survivalism into the downtown districts of out largest cities. How corporate plazas in financial districts have transformed into undeveloped campsites.


Before I do, though, I'd like to show you how they're doing it in England. Earlier this fall, the New York Times ran an article about England's remarkable squatters' laws:

Currently, it is a crime to occupy a house where someone is living or plans to move in imminently. But squatting in an empty commercial property is a civil offense, and such squatters can be removed only by court order.

Homeowners are allowed to use “reasonable force” to get rid of squatters, though it is unclear what that means. Giles Peaker, a housing lawyer, said no one wanted to do anything that might provoke counterclaims of assault. Violence is out. No baseball bats, no pepper spray, no household weapons...

As for commercial owners, they cannot use any force, not even to break into their own property or muscle their way past the occupiers. Property owners say that the police are loath to intervene, except in the most blatant cases, without formal court orders.

Notwithstanding lurid tales told in the sensationalist British tabloids, having responsible tenants to take care of abandoned and foreclosed properties has generally been a good thing for England during these years of financial crisis. Without the squatting law, England would have more homeless, and more abandoned neighborhoods in terminal decline.

Think of it as an Occupy movement for the dross of the collapsed real estate market.

One prominent squatters' community mentioned in the Times piece is the Grow Heathrow encampment in the village of Sipson, just north of London's massive Heathrow Airport and in the path of a proposed runway expansion.


Citing British squatter laws, the community has successfully cleaned up an abandoned nursery, and turned its broken greenhouses back into functional (and beautiful) spaces for living, growing produce, and organizing activists against the airport expansion.

The proposed third runway at Heathrow has become a national issue in British politics. Ousted Labour leader Gordon Brown had been a supporter of expansion, but environmental activists - many of whom live at Grow Heathrow - have successfully delayed the proposal to the point where even airport executives acknowledge its unlikelihood.

One reason Brown and other political leaders had been pressing for a third runway is because the expansion had been seen as a necessity to preserving London's status as a global financial center.



In this light, Grow Heathrow and other opponents of airport expansion are not just fighting against airplane pollution. They're making a vital contribution to the Occupy movement, by inconveniencing Britain's bankers and hedge fund managers in their pursuit of global commercial domination.

All photos courtesy of Transition Heathrow's Flickr.

On the Radio: The Illusion of Rural Independence

My first-ever radio piece broadcast on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network last week. Have a listen:



A transcript lives here.

Coal: (undermining) America's Power

Here's a funny thing. If I write a blog post about coal, the medieval energy technology that gives us cancer and bakes our atmosphere to the point of incurring massive extinctions, etcetera, you will probably see, at the very end of the post, some kind of ad that promotes "Fossil Fuels Part of a Cleaner Energy Future" or some such B.S. that anyone who reads this isn't going to fall for.

However. If you were to click on those ads, and submit your eyes to Clean Coal America's Power facts about keeping energy cheap and old-fashioned, the funny thing is that you'd then be forcing the Fossil Fuels and Clean Coal public relations machines to spend some of their money on me, who hosts this advertising space, and on Google, which places those ads and also invests the revenue into efforts to make fossil fuel industries obsolete through clean tech venture capital investments.

I think that this is kind of a delicious irony. So please support our advertisers, below and at right, and learn all about how CLEAN and AMERICAN it is for us to take a deep hit of coal and mainline its juices into our nation's sclerotic arteries of commerce.

The Economist Rends A Hole In the Very Fabric of the Space-Time-Economic Continuum

There's an old joke about the economist who walks over the $20 bill on the sidewalk without picking it up because, if the $20 were really there, someone else would have already picked it up, so therefore, the $20 bill does not really exist, Q.E.D.

Here's a more detailed explanation of the joke if you don't get it, but don't worry too much about it, as it is not funny. Instead of calling it a joke it might be better to call it a basic illustration of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, one of the cornerstones of classical economics.

Just like classical economics itself, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is really more of a gross oversimplification that makes messy economics easier for the dimwitted than something you'd actually want to apply to real life, lest you end up denying the existence of free money lying on the ground. Nevertheless, some poor saps do take it seriously.

One of the places I've seen the Efficient Market Hypothesis occasionally spouted as a real-world Theory is in the Economist, where you'll still find, every now and then, a journalist whose undergraduate econ coursework resurfaces in ill-advised editorializing on behalf of Classical economic silliness.

So, here's a question for the remaining acolytes of Milton Friedman who remain at large in the newsroom of my favorite weekly newspaper:

SIR - Please explain how these two separate subscription offers came to be delivered to the exact same address (mine) on the exact same day from your enterprise, which, like all enterprises, must be classically efficient?



Because, SIR, to me it looks as though The Economist has simultaneously entreated me to buy the same product for $51 or $69 - my choice. Which is kind like finding an unexpected $18 in my mailbox.

And yet, according to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that $18 couldn't possibly exist there because if it did, The Economist would have picked it up and pocketed it before the ink was even dry on the mailing label, and saved itself the postage to boot. Or, conversely, if it actually wanted me to have the $18, it would have saved itself the trouble of sending me the second mailing, right?

It would appear that The Economist has inadvertently created a dangerous paradox - A PARADOX THAT MAY WELL THREATEN THE VERY FABRIC OF THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM. I hope they'll stop diddling around with the Euro crisis long enough to address this urgent matter.


Footnote: It's funny how the "BEST RATE" renewal offer kind of pales next to the less-impressive-sounding "RETURNING SUBSCRIBER DISCOUNT". Economist subscribers, take note: it pays to let your subscriptions lapse, and make them beg to take you back.

Creative Destruction

"The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises..."

- Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

"New York, you're perfect
Don't please don't change a thing

Your mild billionaire mayor's
Now convinced he's a king

So the boring collect
I mean all disrespect

In the neighborhood bars
I'd once dreamt I would drink."

- LCD Soundsystem, "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down"

We live in a nation that no longer makes things, and maybe that's why we're so foggy-headed when it comes to discussions of wealth, class, or even of basic entrepreneurial instinct. How can we hope to understand wealth when "luxury" is pitched to us as a shoddily-built McMansion, and twenty years' worth of retirement savings can disappear in a stock market crash? What does it mean to speak of labor when work is a mind-numbing interval in a cubicle?

Maybe this economic existentialism is also why it's so popular to talk about the "creative economy" these days. Creative industries hold the last vestiges of America's tangible economic output - our last chance to make anything for ourselves.

Like many other cities, my hometown of Portland, Maine is gung-ho about its "creative economy," even though they haven't even finished building the "Biotechnology Park" left over from the last economic development fad.

On the surface, this seems like a positive thing - who wouldn't want more creativity? After chasing smokestacks for decades, City Hall is bringing a long-overdue focus on the small businesses and vibrant neighborhoods that really make our cities welcoming and attractive.

And yet (if the fad comment hasn't already tipped you off) it's beginning to feel like a lot of bullshit to me.

The germ of my ambivalence came from a real estate development proposal in my neighborhood. A billionaire hedge fund manager (and the husband of our congresswoman) owns a pied-à-terre apartment a few blocks away from us, and wants to transform several of the area's working-class tenement buildings that are in his portfolio into a newly renovated cluster of live-work spaces for quote-necessitated-because-I-don't-really-trust-a-billionaire-hedge-fund-manager's-use-of-the-word-unquote "artists".

So. I have some issues with said hedge fund manager's imposition of his aesthetic values on the landscape of our neighborhood, and on the creative output of local artists vis-a-vis the terms of their rental agreements. That's one thing and it might be entirely unjustified.

But I feel more nervous - and more certainly justified in this unease - about how the hedge funded artist colony is going to affect the larger creative environment of the city at large.

His proposed development is located on one of the last working-class neighborhoods of the city. It was part of Portland's Little Italy, and it's one of the few immigrant neighborhoods that wasn't demolished during the urban renewal purges of the 1960s and 1970s.

Photo by @MRobbinsPhoto, via Unseen Portland

At one end of the street is the city's friendliest dive bar; at the other end is a day labor agency. It happens to be a pretty great place for artists to live and work right now, as it is. But it's also a great place where teachers, hotel workers, office cleaners, and dozens of other working-class families can still afford to live, within walking distance of downtown's jobs and services. Why would we want to kick those people out?

Simultaneously (and potentially relatedly), a number of the city's economic development professionals and business leaders have recruited ArtSpace, a nonprofit developer of affordable buildings for artists, to investigate the possibility of their developing a project in Portland (possibly on Hampshire Street, and possibly elsewhere).

It may seem counter-intuitive, but even if we did create a walled garden for artists here - and it matters little whether it's built by a hedge fund manager or a nonprofit institution - the experiences of numerous other cities and neighborhoods before us forebodes that the wealth it brings in pursuit of "creative" entertainments will jeopardize the neighborhood's affordability and diversity, and thus undermine the fertile conditions that generate the very creativity we value.

Look at New York City: wealth drove out artists first from SoHo into the Lower East Side, then into Williamsburg, and now deep into Bed-Stuy. If the southeastward exile continues, in thirty more years all the artists will be drowned in the waters of Jamaica Bay.

Forty years ago, Donald Judd tried to escape it by moving from Manhattan to live among ranchers in a miniscule town in west Texas. Today, even that miniscule town is itself losing its identity with the influx of more and more wealth.

The Marfa Prada, a half-joking commentary on "Judd-effect gentrification", on the plains outside of Marfa, Texas. Photo via eartharchitecture.org.

And I saw it happen firsthand in Portland, Oregon, at the turn of this century:

In 1999, I set off to go to college in Portland, Oregon — then known only as a rainy mid-sized city with scenic parks. In the five years I spent out there, I saw the city morph into a self-satisfied model of progressive hedonism. But, as I found after graduation in 2003, and as thousands of other young people have found since then, it’s awfully hard to land a decent job there, and it’s getting harder all the time to find an affordable place to live. (source)

A creative economy requires creative people, and creative people seek out the frisson of affordable, diverse city neighborhoods, where it's easy to discover and interact with new ideas and with people who possess a diversity of cultural and economic backgrounds.

Creative people also require capital: they need affordable places where they can live and create things. But creativity, after all, is fun to be around: it attracts wealth, which ends up competing for the same resources that the creative people need. Thus, to paraphrase Marx, the accumulation of creative capital sows the seeds of its own destruction.

Sure, you can create protected islands of creativity amidst the sterile ruins of luxury condos and fusion restaurants. That's what the hedge fund manager and Artspace want to do, and I suppose that in some circumstances that might be the best option. But how creative can such a place really be, in its isolation? And aren't we declaring defeat prematurely by pursuing that option so soon, while our neighborhoods are still fairly egalitarian and diverse and functional just the way they are?

More importantly, is the exile of creative people from the neighborhoods they make great inevitable? Is the "creative economy" just the post-industrial manifestation of Marx's inevitable creative destruction?

Admittedly, the track record from places like New York isn't great. But I think there are two reasons to be optimistic.

I often think of Houston, where I lived for a year, as one of the most creative places I've lived (it certainly had Portland, Oregon beat). Sure, miles and miles of the city were dead zones of strip malls and cul de sacs. But for every time someone bulldozed a historic edifice to build a Wal Mart, someone else was doing something amazing in a vacant rice factory or shotgun house they bought for dirt cheap. That city thrived on constant change. From the outside, the city might look monstrous, constantly consuming itself and spreading out larger and larger. But on the ground, there was always something new.

If we lose Hampshire Street to a bunch of navel-gazing painters who are condemned to mediocrity because they never meet anyone or anything that challenges their assumptions, then I'll be sad, not least because that's my very own neighborhood that will become a more boring place.

But we live in a city, and cities are meant to change. Creative destruction, after all, is still creative. If one neighborhood becomes boring, another will become interesting. House shows will spring up in unexpected places; empty warehouses or abandoned big-box stores will become artists' squats. If we, as a city, embrace change (and Portland, to own the truth, has some issues with this, a few hang-ups with its nostalgia for the status-quo), then creativity has a way of surviving.

Still, I'd still rather let it thrive. And that brings me to a second reason to have some hope, because here we have a billionaire who wants to do right by downtrodden artists, and it seems churlish to complain about his methods when the impulse carries so much possibility.

If I ever had the chance to meet my billionaire neighbor, this is what I would tell him.

Portland's neighborhoods aren't ruined yet - they're still by and large egalitarian, and affordable, and authentically creative. Even better, a lot of the wealth that might threaten those neighborhoods' creativity is possessed by people who actively want to support a creative environment.

You and the other creative economy boosters want to do the right thing by carving out a refuge for artists - but you haven't yet considered the consequences of how that kind of project could exile dozens of other people who may not make art per se but are nevertheless vital to maintaining the conditions of a creative city.

May I suggest instead diverting your considerable resources toward finding ideas and investments that make the city more equitable and affordable to all people, not just for "artists"? If we can accomplish that, then the entire city stands a better chance of fostering the ideal conditions that generate more and more creative places.

Instead of relying on an institution to build us one Artspace, we could build hundred of Artspaces for ourselves, on our own terms, to our own standards. Sounds good - am I right?

Postscript: I've started writing a biweekly column in a small local paper, the Portland Daily Sun, and I wrote on this subject last week. But 800 words wasn't enough to fit in all the nuances of my mixed feelings about the "creative economy" business, hence this elaboration.

Tea Party Pity Party

Here's an entertaining story in today's Portland Press Herald:

PORTLAND - Eric Cianchette plans to sell the Maine Wharf on the city's central waterfront, saying he's tired of trying to come up with a mixed-use development plan that Portland officials will approve.

"I remember my father telling me, 'You can't just go through life saying what you don't want. At some point, you have to tell people what you do want,"' Cianchette said, and city officials "really don't want anything."

Eric is wrong - just like he was wrong about the inflated real-estate value of the wharf when he was suckered into buying it in 2004.

City officials most certainly do know what they want to have on our waterfront. They want successful marine-oriented businesses. They want a prosperous fishery. They want wharf buildings and businesses that take the fullest advantage of Portland's valuable deep-water harbor.

These kinds of businesses aren't easy to grow. They're challenging. They demand smart entrepreneurs who can think creatively.

By his own self-pitying words in this article, I can come to only one conclusion: Eric Cianchette isn't one of those creative businesspeople.

He bought a wharf. He proposed a formulaic, played-out business model instead of doing something challenging and entrepreneurial. And then he got fleeced when the real estate bubble popped. And now - he's blaming City Hall for his problems?

Give.

Me.

A.

Break.

I'm not a hard-assed business guru, but if I were, I'd probably say that this guy needs to stop looking for sympathy, and start looking for success.

There's a lot in common between Eric Cianchette's super sad story and the whole Tea Party zeitgeist of economic frustration. They're all fond of blaming the government. But when I look at those guys, I see a whole lot of failures who are bitterly trying to pin their shortcomings on politicians, instead of owning up to the pathetic reality of their circumstances.

Take, for instance, T.P. Governor LePage's resigning PR flack, Dan Demeritt, a man who made hay by defending businesses against "government regulation," only to succumb to bigger businesses when banks foreclosed on a number of his rental properties earlier this month.

And the Tea Party isn't just failing in business: it's also failing in governance. Just like Eric Cianchette's luxury hotel, the Governor's proposals are going nowhere fast. And true to form, even though he's the Governor now, the government's chief executive, he is STILL blaming the government: "I went on vacation last week because I had nothing to do," the Governor said last week at a Chamber of Commerce speech reported by the Sun-Journal's Steve Mistler. "Because I'm waiting. I'm waiting for legislation. I cannot do anything until the Legislature acts."

These are your tax dollars at work: a vicious cycle of finger-pointing. Who needs leadership when you've got scapegoats?

These guys act as though they hate government. But they need the government more than anyone. If the government weren't there, whom could they blame for their failures? Nobody but themselves.

The bottom line is this: business in Maine can't thrive until losers like these guys get out of the way. But for the time being, at least Eric Cianchette is getting out of Portland's waterfront.

Factory Nostalgia

Photo courtesy of tabism.com

Near the turn of the last century, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote his famous "frontier thesis": the idea that the frontier was what made Americans exceptional and unique - "the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history."

As many colonialist and racist problems as there are with Turner's frontier fetish, the idea still resonated. And that's probably because so many ordinary people behaved as though they agreed with Turner, whether or not they'd actually heard of him. For the entire subsequent century, Americans flooded into new frontiers of their own making: into suburban communities, into "ranch" homes on half-acre lots, into the nation's newly-dedicated national parks and forests.

America didn't start celebrating the wild frontier in earnest until it was already gone.

And now, at the turn of another century, we finally have something new - and newly lost - about which we can wax nostalgic: our industries.

Photo by flickr user Kyota.

In Japan, an increasing number of charter bus tours and cruises are taking tourists on “kojo-moe” (工場萌え), or "factory love" tours of the country's remaining industrial areas. At a time when an intransigent recession and cheaper competition from developing nations are taking their inevitable toll on Japanese industry, tourist groups are kindling their nostalgia for the country's mid-century industrial boom, and getting sentimental over the steel and concrete landscapes that built their nation.

Yokkaichi oil refinery. Photo by flickr user Kyota.

And why should kojo-moe be limited to the Japanese? Isn't our cultural fascination with Detroit and all of its magnificent industrial ruins essentially the same thing? All the Japanese have done is come up with a name for it. "Factory love," the nostalgia that the 21st century feels for the 20th.

You can find many, many more "factory love" photos tagged on Flickr, here.

Hedging for the End of Civilization, Part II

While we're talking about the collapse of the global economy, and civilization in general, I should also mention that there are a lot of people who do expect something along these lines to actually happen. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of them can be found talking about it on the internet.

For instance, there's Wendy, the Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs blogger, who lives and writes from somewhere near me in southern Maine, and is trying to transition her family to a more "self-sufficient" lifestyle.

Architect Andres Duany thinks that peak oil and escalating food prices should convince real estate investors to build hobby farm collectives instead of golfing communities. For a million-dollar investment, your post-collapse future can look just like Tuscany! From "New Urbanism for the Apocalypse," by Greg Lindsay for Fast Company.

And there are high-rolling "New Urbanist" planners trying to convince real estate developers to bankroll bourgeoisie agrarian communes for an resource-scarce future.

And I'm especially fond of the Urban Self-Sufficientist in Atlanta. He raises rabbits and grows veggies in the backyard of his in-town bungalow, but the best posts are about practicing falconry in local parks in order to enjoy homemade, free-range squirrel stew.

It's interesting how these different people pursue "self-sufficiency" in different ways. Wendy, for instance, makes much of growing her own food, but she still lives in a suburb where she's forced to pay for two cars and their fuel in order to acquire basic necessities. How's she going to find enough refined oil to fill her cars' tanks after civilization collapses?

Meanwhile, the Urban Self-Sufficientist takes an opposite tack, living in the middle of an urban neighborhood. If gasoline disappears, he won't be too put out - but won't his neighbors start taking an unsavory interest in the fruits of his backyard farm?

And architect Duany talks up economic collapse even while he tries to get real estate investors to build his planned communities, which will presumably be financed by 30-year mortgages. At least he's talking with people who ought to be experts in economic failure.

So even people who are planning for disaster clearly have different expectations of what it's going to be like: different people hedge for the end of civilization in different ways. Some believe that through the wreckage we'll figure out some way to keep our cars; others believe that we'll figure out a way to maintain a financial system.

I have my doubts on these counts - you're going to put more faith in American car culture than in America itself? - but then again, I also don't think it's much worthwhile to plan for any kind of collapse. Even if it does happen, it's going to be unpredictable.

Besides, I'm not much interested in self-sufficiency for its own sake. I'd rather rely on my neighbors for some things - there are plenty of people who are better farmers than I am, for instance, and I'd rather let others do the things they do well rather than try to do everything half-assed by myself. Specialization of labor is one of the innovations that got humanity out of the stone age, and even if civilization did collapse, I would hope that we wouldn't need to leave that idea behind - that we'd still be able to rely on our neighbors, families, and friends to help each other out.

Still, I do enjoy how the idea of self-sufficiency leads people to think about the places and the resources that provide their necessities for living. It's a roundabout way of thinking about our day-to-day relationships and dependencies on the natural resources that sustain us, and for some (like the falconer in Atlanta) it's a way to bring a little wildness home with us, even if we live in the middle of the city.

Self-sufficiency will not be any fun if it's forced on us. But as long as it's an elective activity, these bloggers make it clear that it can be a rewarding pursuit.

Hedging for the End of Civilization, Part I

Tell me, would you trade 22 pounds of gold for this shoddily-built suburban confinement unit?

(creative Commons-licenced photo by David Shankbone, via his Flickr page).

Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, when our mirage of real estate wealth dissolved faster than a mold-infested McMansion, and thousands of major employers looked into their bank accounts and realized that they wouldn't meet the weekend payroll without a bailout, it's become apparent to most people that "money" is only as valuable as everyone else thinks it is.

The paper bills we carry in our wallets are ultimately just paper. But they're valuable to us as a convenience of modern society: a means of exchange whose value we all agree on by consensus.

A few weeks ago, This American Life broadcast another great show from the economist-reporters at Planet Money all about the fiction of money. It made the point that money's value is a collective act of faith: we all trust that every store, bank, and employer will be more or less in agreement about the value of our dollar bills.

But societies have lost faith in the value of their currencies before - many, many times. When it happens, people are forced to rely on theft and barter in order to feed themselves. Faith in money is closely bound with the cohesion of civilization itself. If people can't trust their neighbors to value their currency, then they are less likely to trust their neighbors in general.

So far, because money is convenient and civilization is important to people, societies have invariably come back to trust money once again - no matter how badly it burned them before. It helps that, for the last century, the United States Dollar has lorded over everything as the world's papal currency. It's been the one kind of money that everyone could have faith in and rely on. Even when pesos and rubles collapsed, Argentines and Russians could still use tattered U. S. dollar bills as a trusted means of exchange.

But recently, the world has been questioning even its faith in the dollar. Which is not to say that anyone is losing faith in money: they're just looking for a new idol. And guess what it's made of?

In the past five years, the price of gold has more than doubled. Right-wing radio propagandists are making "money" hand over fist by sowing doubt in their followers' faith in dollars, and selling them overpriced gold as a "safe" alternative.

Gold has always been used as currency. It's compact, relatively rare, and impossible to counterfeit. It's still widely used as a reserve for the world's national treasuries - here's a great field report on Manhattan's Federal Reserve Bank gold vault, where 7,000 tons of gold are stored under the streets of the financial district in order to shore up our faith in the financial stability of national governments.

But if we're questioning our faith in the value of dollars, shouldn't we also question our faith in the value of gold? At the end of the day, it's just a shiny metal. Gold can't feed anyone, or generate energy. Just like paper bills, it's only valuable if lots of other people think that it's valuable. And if we really come to a circumstance where the dollar collapses and the world's economy comes crashing down, I can't see how a gold brick is going to do anyone a damned bit of good, unless you're using it to smash windows in a looting spree.

I don't consider that a realistic possiblity by any means, but it's an interesting thought experiment to consider what kinds of currencies would actually be valuable in that kind of situation. How about solar panels? If the dollar collapses, then utilities would lose the means to buy up supplies of natural gas and other fuels from overseas. Blackouts could become widespread. Homegrown electricity would be more valuable than gold in such a situation.

So if there's a real risk of that happening, then solar panels should be very, very valuable for anyone who's hedging their investments against the end of civilization, right?

Well, that's not happening: solar panels are actually getting less expensive, largely thanks to improved technology.

This tells us two things:

1. The market doesn't seriously expect civilization and the dollar to collapse. And, as a corollary: the price of gold, which has more than doubled in four years, is an asset bubble just like McMansions and stock in Pets.com. Instead of a real estate craze or an internet craze, we're going through an Apocalypse craze.
   
2. Glenn Beck's listeners would be much better off if they started buying bought renewable energy while it's still cheap, instead of overpriced gold coins.

The Colors of Abandonment

Greenfields: former agricultural lands laying in fallow. Greenfields proliferated during the early 20th century, as agribusiness consolidated and small farms were abandoned.

Brownfields: former industrial lands, frequently with pollution hazards. Brownfields proliferated during the late 20th century, as manufacturing businesses moved overseas and firms abandoned domestic factories.

Redfields: former middle-class neighborhoods, frequently characterized by strip malls, tract housing, and other properties that are now "in the red" and owned by absentee financial institutions. Redfields have proliferated in the first decade of the 21st century, in the wake of the real estate bubble, as the suburban middle class succumbs to crushing debt and poor access to economic opportunity.

Photo credits (from top): GeoFX on Flickr, Das_A on Flickr, and The Bollard.

Occupy Heathrow

I've been meaning to write here about how the Occupy movement has brought an element of wilderness survivalism into the downtown districts of out largest cities. How corporate plazas in financial districts have transformed into undeveloped campsites.


Before I do, though, I'd like to show you how they're doing it in England. Earlier this fall, the New York Times ran an article about England's remarkable squatters' laws:

Currently, it is a crime to occupy a house where someone is living or plans to move in imminently. But squatting in an empty commercial property is a civil offense, and such squatters can be removed only by court order.

Homeowners are allowed to use “reasonable force” to get rid of squatters, though it is unclear what that means. Giles Peaker, a housing lawyer, said no one wanted to do anything that might provoke counterclaims of assault. Violence is out. No baseball bats, no pepper spray, no household weapons...

As for commercial owners, they cannot use any force, not even to break into their own property or muscle their way past the occupiers. Property owners say that the police are loath to intervene, except in the most blatant cases, without formal court orders.

Notwithstanding lurid tales told in the sensationalist British tabloids, having responsible tenants to take care of abandoned and foreclosed properties has generally been a good thing for England during these years of financial crisis. Without the squatting law, England would have more homeless, and more abandoned neighborhoods in terminal decline.

Think of it as an Occupy movement for the dross of the collapsed real estate market.

One prominent squatters' community mentioned in the Times piece is the Grow Heathrow encampment in the village of Sipson, just north of London's massive Heathrow Airport and in the path of a proposed runway expansion.


Citing British squatter laws, the community has successfully cleaned up an abandoned nursery, and turned its broken greenhouses back into functional (and beautiful) spaces for living, growing produce, and organizing activists against the airport expansion.

The proposed third runway at Heathrow has become a national issue in British politics. Ousted Labour leader Gordon Brown had been a supporter of expansion, but environmental activists - many of whom live at Grow Heathrow - have successfully delayed the proposal to the point where even airport executives acknowledge its unlikelihood.

One reason Brown and other political leaders had been pressing for a third runway is because the expansion had been seen as a necessity to preserving London's status as a global financial center.



In this light, Grow Heathrow and other opponents of airport expansion are not just fighting against airplane pollution. They're making a vital contribution to the Occupy movement, by inconveniencing Britain's bankers and hedge fund managers in their pursuit of global commercial domination.

All photos courtesy of Transition Heathrow's Flickr.

History Repeating

NPR's Morning Edition reported today that gasoline and oil prices are on a steady rise once again. Though the US remains mired in a recession, many other large countries (like Brazil and China) are demanding more energy, while the supply for oil is flat or shrinking. The cost of crude oil is creeping towards $100 a barrel again.

When this happened in March 2008, forecasters correctly predicated that gasoline would soon be $4 a gallon. Over the summer, more and more suburban homeowners could no longer afford both to fill up their tanks and to pay their mortgages. And we all know what happened then.

But when all this transpired two years ago, people still had jobs and credit. That's not the case anymore - Americans have less purchasing power, which means that $4/gallon gas is going to hurt a lot more this time around.

One financial analyst quoted in the story brought up an interesting statistic: "A $10 increase in the price of oil is like a $200 million tax on the economy a day," said Gary Taylor, a principal with The Brattle Group. That's $1 billion every workweek.

Luckily, we have new government leaders coming in who are gung-ho to cut our taxes. I look forward to seeing how they'll set us free from the $1 billion/week oil dependency tax.

The global economy's kyūsho is in Denmark, Maine

The Japanese word kyūsho means vital point, or tender spot - the place where one applies the legendary "death touch" in kung-fu movies.

If you've been reading the news lately, you might be aware that a growing scandal over fraudulent foreclosures is consuming the entire global credit market in uncertainty. I was listening to a report on all this on NPR's "Marketplace" last night, and it occurred to me that, somewhere, there was a family that had been foreclosed on erroneously, fought the bank, and set into motion the events that are bringing credit markets to their knees once again.

In other words, somewhere out there was a single house that was powerful enough to shake the global credit markets to their very core. A kyūsho for the global economy.

And this morning, I found it, via the New York Times. Funnily enough, the house happens to be in the rural municipality of Denmark, Maine, just a few miles from where I grew up.

Photo by Matt McInnis for The New York Times.

The Times reports:

Nicolle Bradbury bought this house seven years ago for $75,000, a major step up from the trailer she had been living in with her family. But she lost her job and the $474 monthly mortgage payment became difficult, then impossible.

It should have been a routine foreclosure, with Mrs. Bradbury joining the anonymous millions quietly dispossessed since the recession began. But she was savvy enough to contact a nonprofit group, Pine Tree Legal Assistance, where for once in her 38 years, she caught a break.

The story goes on to tell of how attorney Thomas Cox found and deposed the bank employee who had signed the foreclosure order. During that deposition, this employee "casually acknowledged that he had prepared 400 foreclosures a day for GMAC [the lender] and that contrary to his sworn statements, they had not been reviewed by him or anyone else."

The rest is more or less history. "Robo-signers" who approved hundreds of foreclosures a day without even looking at them were exposed nationwide, and foreclosures have now been frozen in 23 states.

This tiny $75,000 house in rural Maine is a lot like Bruce Lee's one-inch punch: we see the mighty banks knocked down, but it's damned hard to see how it happened. Mr. Cox and Ms. Bradbury are like Bruce Lee on the right, and the GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is the sad sack on the left:

The entire story is extremely worth reading for anyone who wants to relish some schadenfreude at the expense of bankers and their lawyers, and as a case study for the lack of humanity in the financial system. Reporter David Streitfeld also tells us that Mr. Cox, the lawyer, had previously worked at a bank to call in loans on small businesses, often taking business owners' homes as collateral when they couldn't pay. The job ruined his mental health and his marriage, and he's since volunteered to work on behalf of borrowers "to make amends." I hope that this story redeems his conscience - it certainly ought to.

Ms. Bradbury's case deserves to make her a hero of modern times. It's already set a precedent that's letting thousands of families stay in their homes at the expense of negligent banks. And maybe someday, her humble house in the woods of Denmark will be memorialized as the place that finally foisted honesty on the banking system.

P.S. Pine Tree Legal Assistance, the group that Mr. Cox is volunteering for, is a nonprofit law firm. A judge ruled that GMAC would pay the legal expenses for Mr. Cox's work, but Pine Tree serves a good many clients who can't afford to pay, and here's how you can help them.

How the Last Big Oil Spill Helped Create the Credit Crisis

My last post casually mentioned credit default swaps, a fancy financial trick that helped create the credit crisis of 2008 (Planet Money did an amazing reporting series on credit default swaps for NPR back while the crisis was happening).

What I didn't know when I started writing that post was that the Exxon Valdez oil spill actually inspired the invention of credit default swaps. In a way, the loan for restoring Prince William Sound was the first-ever subprime mortgage- the ultimate fixer-upper.

Here's how it happened. In the first court judgment against Exxon Mobil for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, an Anchorage jury awarded the defendants $5 billion in punitive damages. This was in 1994.

Fool's Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall Street Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe
by Gillian Tett

Author Gillian Tett, a financial writer who possesses a valuable background in social anthropology, describes what happened next in her book "Fool's Gold," a detailed history of the financial innovations and machinations that led up to the credit crisis. John Lanchester provides a succinct summary in his June 2009 New Yorker review:

Exxon needed to open a line of credit to cover potential damages of five billion dollars... J. P. Morgan was reluctant to turn down Exxon, which was an old client, but the deal would tie up a lot of reserve cash to provide for the risk of the loans going bad. The so-called Basel rules, named for the town in Switzerland where they were formulated, required that the banks hold eight per cent of their capital in reserve against the risk of outstanding loans. That limited the amount of lending bankers could do, the amount of risk they could take on, and therefore the amount of profit they could make. But, if the risk of the loans could be sold, it logically followed that the loans were now risk-free; and, if that were the case, what would have been the reserve cash could now be freely loaned out. No need to suck up useful capital.

In late 1994, Blythe Masters, a member of the J. P. Morgan swaps team, pitched the idea of selling the credit risk to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. So, if Exxon defaulted, the E.B.R.D. would be on the hook for it—and, in return for taking on the risk, would receive a fee from J. P. Morgan. Exxon would get its credit line, and J. P. Morgan would get to honor its client relationship but also to keep its credit lines intact for sexier activities. The deal was so new that it didn’t even have a name: eventually, the one settled on was “credit-default swap.”

So the new "credit default swap" allowed Exxon borrow on more attractive terms than it otherwise would have gotten, while J.P. Morgan got to export the risk of the loan to Europe, and free up more of its own money to lend to other borrowers.

To draw a more familiar analogy, Exxon was like the shady homebuyer who might lose his job at any moment, and J.P. Morgan was the mortgage broker who nevertheless assured him that he was still completely qualified to borrow. And the oil-soaked Prince William Sound was the fixer-upper whose cleanup costs were on the bottom line. Thanks to the credit default swap, the actual responsibility for that mess - like the actual responsibility for millions of underwater mortgages today - wouldn't really be owned by anyone.

The irony is that this first-ever credit default swap actually worked out well for its players: Exxon merged with Mobil and the new company, ExxonMobil, now makes around $40 billion in profits in a typical year. The $5 billion punishment was also recently rejected by the Supreme Court. So needless to say, the risky loan never defaulted, and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development kept its money.

J.P. Morgan, meanwhile, was able to offer more and more credit default swaps, and merged with Chase bank in 2000. By 2008, when it became evident that many of those credit default swaps were tangled up in a worthless house of cards, the company was one of the nation's four largest banks deemed "too big to fail," and received a $25 billion bailout from the federal government.

Most people would agree that ExxonMobil still hasn't served justice for the Exxon Valdez spill, but look at it this way: the company made $45 billion in profits in 2008, but a year later, it pulled in less than half that amount, thanks in large part to the global financial crisis. By seeking a cheap loan to cover its ass and pass the buck back in 1994, the corporation helped invent the financial device that inadvertently brought the world's economy (and the world's thirst for oil) to its knees. ExxonMobil still cleared almost $20 billion last year, though, so the schadenfreude is admittedly dim.

It's more interesting to think about how BP and the global financial markets will cope with the cleanup bill for the much larger Deepwater Horizon disaster. Suddenly, the multi-trillion dollar business of drilling for oil miles below the surface of the ocean looks a lot riskier. But it's still an extremely lucrative enterprise, which means that the world's bankers will inevitably invent new contortions and pyramid schemes to cover those risks and finance more wells.

So what will become of our economy and society when those schemes, like the underwater wells they're designed to finance, inevitably fail one more time?

Related:

Pelicans Meet the Markets

The ExxonMobil Arena/Disaster Shelter

Pelicans Meet the Markets

The Planet Money podcast - which continues to be excellent, even now that we're (maybe?) out of the economic apocalypse and there's no longer a pressing need to explain what a credit default swap is - takes a crack at tallying the price tag for dead pelicans in the Gulf:

This is a practical problem right now as we figure out how much we should fine BP for its spectacular oil spill. What's a fair price to put on the damage? In some cases, that's pretty easy to figure out: we can multiply the x tourists who won't be visiting oily beaches this summer by the y dollars they might have spent at seaside hotels and beach towns, and then we can add in the loss of p tons of commercial seafood, which would normally sell for q dollars per pound.

But how do you calculate the value of rescuing an oily pelican? Unlike shrimp and hotel rooms, there's no market for most of the Gulf's wildlife.

One strategy is to ask people how much they'd be willing to pay to save one pelican. Animal rescue groups, for instance, are spending about $500 on each bird they save. That tells us that each pelican is worth at least $500 among bird enthusiasts, who may well be willing to pay even more than that. But presumably most people aren't ready to cough up that much money to save one bird.

Broadening this approach gets into the economic method of contingent valuation, which was first employed on a large scale to figure out the damages caused from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. In this method, economists deliver surveys to a broad swath of the population - including people who will never see a pelican in the flesh - to ask them if they would be willing to pay $X dollars to save one bird. As with any product, values will differ: some people will say "no" to paying $2, while others will say "yes" to paying $100. But with enough responses, economists can construct a demand curve, and figure out the equilibrium where the marginal cost of saving one more bird is just equal to society's marginal benefit.

So, if there are 20,000 people in the world who say they're willing to pay at least $500 to save one pelican, and it costs $500 to save each pelican, then BP should pony up $10 million to save 20,000 pelicans.

This method, too, is controversial. Its biggest problem is that it's too abstract - it's easy to tell a survey-taker that you'd pay $500 to save a pelican, but if the opportunity actually presented itself, would you really postpone your credit card payments to save one bird?

Even for environmentalists, it's a problematic question. Most would probably argue that we, as a society, should spend $10 million to save birds, right? But what if that means that we, as a society, will no longer be able to afford to spend $10 million on a solar energy project, or to conserve a wilderness area from development? Is the immediate plight of few thousand pelicans in the Gulf more important than shutting down a coal plant, or preserving a wild forest?

When I studied environmental economics in college and administered contingent valuation surveys about Oregonians' values of wild salmon in a seminar with Dr. Noelwah Netusil, there were a number of campus activists in my classes who bristled at any notion of putting an economic value on wildlife. Preserving the environment was a moral imperative, in their view, and it needed to be done without regard to the cost. They also criticized its anthropocentrism: how dare we impose our human values, and the structures of a social science, on a natural system that had been around for billions of years before Adam Smith?

That's a nice sentiment, and it may even be an honest reflection of their personal values - they may well have been willing to sacrifice everything they owned for wild salmon.

But it's not realistic for society as a whole. Economics is about managing scarcity, and dedicating our limited resources to achieving the best outcomes. Homo sapiens isn't the only species that practices economic calculations. A wolf makes hunting decisions based on whether the expected value of a meal is worth the cost of running to catch it; plants allocate energy and resources to roots or leaves depending on the respective values of nourishment from the soil or from the sun.

In the 21st century, environmentalists have no shortage of demands on their time and money, and our time and money are scarce resources. The view that everything in nature is sacred and has infinite value is not productive. It's preventing individuals and organizations from setting priorities and winning victories.

At some point, we'll need to stop worrying about the pelicans and start paying those workers to build solar panels and public transit lines, instead of using toothbrushes to get oil out of feathers.

Hot Days Incinerate Oil

If you're an electric utility, you don't take the dog days of summer lying down. No, when it's 95 degrees outside, that's when you want to burn millions of gallons of oil in your oldest, least efficient power plants. Beat the heat by starting a thousand-degree inferno.

That's exactly what's happening across the northeastern United States this week, as record temperatures are also breaking records for electrical consumption. It's the first law of thermodynamics writ large: as millions of office buildings, supermarkets, and houses work their AC units to stay cool, the region's utilities need to put massive amounts of heat into the system, and they fire up every power plant they have at their disposal to meet the demand.

Wyman power plant.

Most utilities keep a handful big power plants in reserve, maintained year-round just to operate a handful of times a year when the grid needs to call in the cavalry. Many of these plants tend to be old and relatively inefficient: they're not economical to run on a daily basis, but they're maintained in running condition for the handful of days each year when they might come in handy, and when spot-prices for electricity rise high enough to justify their high costs of operation.

One such power plant is located right on the edge of scenic Casco Bay, visible from Portland's Eastern Promenade Park and from thousands of other waterfront vistas in greater Portland. Wyman Station, about which I've blogged previously here, is a 1970s-vintage oil-fired power plant capable of generating more electricity (over 800 megawatts) than any other plant in Maine. It's old, it's inefficient, it burns expensive fuel, and it occupies extremely valuable coastal Maine real estate. But it's still there for those few times when a million air conditioners ask the grid to turn the juice up to eleven, and pay for the privilege.

In 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, Wyman Station, in spite of its sporadic use, still managed to produce 2860 tons of sulphur dioxide, 155 tons of carbon monoxide, and 736 tons of nitrogen oxides (source: US EPA). According to the US Energy Information Administration, burning a thousand gallons of heavy oil in a typical boiler yields about 47 pounds of nitrogen oxides, so a little math tells us that Wyman burned somewhere on the order of 30 million gallons of oil in 2005.

In SI units, that is 1.3 shit-tons of filthy fuel. Imagine the Deepwater Horizon oil leak spilling into Casco Bay for 7 days, and you'll have a rough idea of how much oil Wyman burns every year. Go ahead, imagine it.

As I said before, this is for a plant that's only run for a few days each year. So here's the good news: every New Englander who turns off the lights in their office, or shuts down their computers during the hottest mid-afternoon hours to do some old-fashioned analog work, can help save a few gallons of oil from going up in smoke. Many utilities are giving large customers a price break if they do this on the hottest days, since asking your customers to turn off the lights can be cheaper than running expensive diesel backup generators. Right now, this is all done with polite phone calls, but in the near future, appliances will develop a hive mind to communicate with the electric grid, take turns sucking down scarce juice, and keep places from Wyman Station from starting fires on hot days. Others have argued that the situation calls for more solar panels, which tend to generate the most electricity on these hot and sunny summer days.

In the meantime, consider giving your appliances - and your local power plant - a break on these hot afternoons. With or without futuristic "smart grid" technology, if a few thousand New Englanders manage to cut back their consumption on hot days, we could shut places like Wyman Station down for good.

Portland's Unemployed Waterfront

My home city, Portland, Maine, takes great pride in its "working waterfront," and so do I. While most other cities have given over their central waterfront districts to luxury condos, hotels, and outdoor malls, Portland still reserves most of its downtown waterfront for lobster pounds, marine chandleries, and fish wholesalers.

The city has managed this by brute-force zoning laws: when the first tacky condos went up on Chandlers Wharf (pictured) in the 1980s, the city reacted quickly and viscerally to outlaw any non-marine activities on Portland's wharves. This kept rents low for the city's remaining marine businesses and let them continue doing business without fear of offending new neighbors.

But the 1980s, when kitsch like these condos and the "Dimillos Floating Restaurant" were introduced, was also the last time that the waterfront's creaking wharves attracted any real investment. Rental income from fishermen and other marine businesses alone isn't enough to maintain the docks and pilings, and after over two decades of the working waterfront protections, many piers are in dire need of repair and serious investment. Besides that, most of Maine's fisheries have collapsed, and there just aren't enough marine businesses operating anymore to fill up Portland's three-mile harborfront coastline. As a result, one gorgeous 19th-century brick warehouse has had its windows plugged with cinderblocks to be used for storage.

And on the western end of the waterfront, beyond the Casco Bay Bridge, is a mile-long stretch of waterfront that's been abandoned entirely for decades now:

A wrecked wharf and early-successional birch forest on the former Maine Central railroad yards of West Commercial Street, Portland.

This month, pier owners are lobbying the city to loosen its restrictive zoning, to make the business of operating a working waterfront a bit more feasible. Some of their suggested changes are productive: doing away with the requirement to set aside valuable waterfront real estate for parking, for instance. But others seem to be aimed at allowing hotels and other tourist catnip to replace the bait shacks and warehouses.

As many people have noted, though, the fishing piers and marine warehouses on the waterfront are a big part of what define's Portland's sense of itself - even if it isn't a huge part of the economy anymore. If those places get replaced with Hard Rock Cafe franchises and hotels, what's to distinguish our city from Baltimore or Boston or San Francisco or any other of the numerous cities that have auctioned off their historic waterfront districts to transform them into cheesy shopping malls?

The pier owners say that non-marine land uses are necessary to preserve what's left of the working waterfront. But five-star hotels and office buildings for lawyers are almost certain to drive up rents and displace what's left of the city's waterfront marine industries. The pier owners are telling us that in order to save the working waterfront, they need to kick out the working waterfront.

I'm not sure that the choice has to be such a stark distinction, between dilapidated piers and strict, industry-only zoning on the one hand, and Disneyfication on the other. On the one hand, I agree with the premise that the pier owners need their businesses to be more profitable than it is now so that they can repair their wharves and keep them from falling into the ocean. But I also agree that zoning can have a productive role in maintaining a place for struggling marine industries in the midst of development pressure from high-rent offices and hotels.

I've written here before about what I believe the solution would be: allow any kind of development on the city's waterfront wharves and piers, as long as a substantial portion of the ground level of those developments are constructed to be useful and adaptable for marine industrial tenants. Go ahead and build that hotel, on the condition that 3/4 of the ground level will be fitted out for lobster pounds and marine repair shops. The city could also dedicate a portion of new tax revenue from new developments to economic development programs for marine industries, in order to keep that ground-level space occupied.

Sure, we can make room for new development on the waterfront. But that doesn't mean we can't also preserve space for the marine industries that are already there.

This week, March 2nd and 3rd, the City will host (yet another) pair of public discussions about the working waterfront, in advance of a discussion about zoning changes. Details here.