Book Review: Rybczynski’s Last Harvest

Witold Rybczynski’s 2007 book Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town is truly a unique book: an accessible, detailed narrative of the process of real estate development. The book describes the construction of a subdivision named New Daleville in southern Chester County in suburban Philadelphia. Or exurban, rather, since the development is over 45 miles from downtown Philadelphia. (More on that in a bit) The subtitle, “Real Estate Development from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-First Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway,” suggests the second major component to the book. Interspersed with the story of New Daleville is variety of asides describing the history of residential real estate development and drawing upon Rybczynski’s extensive expertise on the topic. (He is also the author of a history of homes and biography of Frederick Law Olmsted.)

The book features an account of the wrangling with local officials over the subdivision’s site plan, trade-offs on architectural design, technical challenge of providing utilities in a rural area, and the ever-present developer’s bottom line. This rich detail makes it a particularly good introduction to the topic of land development, and it’s little wonder the author is one of the keynote speakers at the American Planning Association conference in Minneapolis this spring. I’ll leave further description of the book to the many reviews that have already been published, whether by the Where Blog, Business Week, or The New York Times.

Despite the good things about it, I have three main concerns about the conclusions it draws about American urbanism in the 21st Century.

First, the book falls victim to selection bias, presenting a distorted view of the American city and traditional neighborhood design. Although Rybczynski describes New Daleville as “neotraditional” and takes great pains to draw links with well known New Urbanist communities like Seaside, Florida or the Kentlands, Maryland, his subdivision shares little with these famous places. Miles from retail amenities, jobs, water and sewer infrastructure, and any of the myriad of other practical ingredients to actual traditional communities, New Daleville is nothing more than a glorified rural subdivision. It’s much-ballyhooed density (the plan was more dense that other area subdivisions) isn’t very impressive either — 125 homes on 90 acres. Although the developer has proven traditional neighborhood development credentials, this is not the project that embodies them. Furthermore, while I appreciate Rybczynski’s impulse to move beyond the over-studied urban core, he’s far overshot his mark. Located in a rural area far from any city, New Daleville is not characteristic of most residential development.

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Second, Rybczynski omits the powerful role of public policy in shaping the form of American cities. He claims the preponderance of single family homes in America reveal a cultural preference, citing neighborhoods with single-family homes around the world and a cultural tradition traced back to Britain and the low countries in Europe. While I agree that culture has played a role, our policies have shaped urban development in powerful ways. The Interstate Highway System (which at one time meant the federal government funded 90% of state’s cost of new interstate highways) made low-density suburbs an option for urban workers. The federal government single-handedly created the “plain vanilla” 30-year fixed rate mortgage. Before FHA subsidies enforced the type, commercial home mortgages required substantial down payments and short payback periods. The federal government also created the secondary market for mortgages, adding a further incentive for home ownership to the substantial tax benefits. An anecdote in Rybczynski’s chapter on Levittown illustrates this precise issue:

“… at the urging of local government officials, the Levitts offered a two-bedroom rental unit for sixty-five dollars a month. Since the monthly mortgage payment on a Levittowner was sixty dollars, there were few takers, and the so-called Budgeteer was soon discontinued.” (165)

He omits the reason the mortgage was cheaper: FHA insurance. I don’t intend to resolve the culture/policy chicken and egg problem, but a quick international comparison can show how policy can influence the form of housing. The U.S., Britain, and Australia are all relatively wealthy countries sharing historical and cultural ties. As we would expect, they share similar homeownership rates (around 66-69%). However, the profile of their housing stock is quite different: a whopping 31% of housing units in Britain are row homes or semi-detached units, compared to just 5.6% in the U.S. On the other hand, Australia outstrips the home-loving U.S. in its popularity of single-family homes. And the percentage of Americans living in multifamily buildings is a healthy 26.3%, so clearly single-family homes aren’t the full story. Here’s the full table:

These differences are the result of a range of forces: approaches to public housing, transportation policy, geography, environmental protection, and yes, culture.

Lastly, the location of his project means the only form of transportation is the automobile. Although it is true the car is king for most American transportation, the absence of any choice whatsoever is artificial. The American Public Transit Administration estimates only 20% of the country are without some form of public transit service. New Daleville’s residents fall into this minority.

The irony is that I think Rybczynski knows all this, describing in chapter nine in detail why many wouldn’t consider New Daleville “smart growth,” concluding “for hardcore, transit-first, rebuild-the-center-city, regional planning advocates of smart growth, New Daleville is merely more of the same, what they don’t want.” (89) He immediately follows this with a description of how the form of the neighborhood will encourage socialization, reduce stormwater runoff, encourage walking, protect open space, and include shared play areas and public space. These attributes, he writes, “will be small reminders to the people living there that they are not only private homeowners but also members of a community. That will be smarter growth indeed.”

In his 1987 book, historian Robert Fishman described suburbia as “bourgeois utopias,” arguing their cultural origins lay with evangelical Christian men in 19th century London who sought to combine proximity to the city’s jobs with an idyllic, urban residential life free of urban vice. Fishman argues the modern movement of jobs and industry to the periphery has meant the end of true suburbs under his definition. Perhaps Last Harvest is part of the suburban tradition: holding up an idealized, rural, economically unsustainable lifestyle as the best way to live, even if the reality of American cities tells a more complex story.

Fishman observes, “the bourgeois utopia rested on a frighteningly unstable economic base. The bourgeois utopia depended for its survival on market forces that even the bourgeoisie could not control.” It is on this note that emeritus urban planning professor David R. Godschalk closes his generally positive review of Last Harvest in last October’s Urban Land:

It is ironic that Rybczynski, with his magisterial grasp of American development history, did not anticipate fully the impact of the current development downturn. Perhaps the five years that he devoted to studying the project blinded him to the cruel force of the boom-and-bust cycle, especially on vulnerable rural subdivisions remote from an urban real estate market. Today, according to Web and news reports, Ryan Homes is offering a cash-back bonus and up to 60 percent off chosen options, and New Daleville is only about half built out with prices halved to get homes off the market.

In the end, these criticisms aside, Last Harvest opens up the largely mysterious process of land development to a popular audience, laying bare the complex factors that produce urban space. By provoking a dialogue and explaining the contrasting viewpoints of the story’s different actors, Rybczynski does urbanists a service and elevates the conversation around residential development. If it provokes an urban planner to build on the work started by Christopher Leinberger in The Option of Urbanism and pen an equally complex and compelling accessible book in reply, so much the better. That at least is the view of this, “transit-first, rebuild-the-center-city, regional planning advocate of smart growth.”

> Amazon.com: Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville

Review: A Better Way to Zone

I have mixed feelings about zoning, which may explain my thoughts about Donald Elliott’s new book about it, A Better Way to Zone. A land use law consultant in Colorado, Elliott’s book is dedicated to making “simplicity and understandability not just an aspiration but a guiding principle in zoning.” While I agree with much of the sentiment of the book, I’m not sure he’s struck upon the new way to zone he seeks.

Organized around the goal of making zoning “better, more efficient, and more understandable,” the book contains a brief history of zoning, a critique of the current system as used by most big cities, a discussion the legal framework and values of good governance, and finally a discussion of “ten principles” to improve zoning. Filled with lists of reasons, lessons, principles, and cross-references, this book is obviously the work of an order-oriented legal mind.

Elliott’s concise accounts of the origins and logic of most cities’ “Euclidean Hybrid Zoning” would serve as a good primer on the subject for students or citizens new to the field. Convinced that “almost no one outside of city government, zoning lawyers, and very committed citizen activists can explain how the system works” Elliott passionately argues “zoning ordinances should not be understandable only to lawyers or zoning staff; they should be understandable to average homeowners.” I think the mantra about simplicity is the most important part of the book, and completely agree with Elliott that “the more the public knows, the better they can participate at the policy- and rule-making level.” Let’s hope his call for simplicity and transparency is heeded.

The book’s “10 principles for more livable cities” will come as no surprise to informed readers: 1. more flexible uses (simplifying the number and type of uses regulated), 2. the mixed-use middle (simplify number of zones, create mixed-use zones at the heart of the code), 3. attainable housing (reduce regulatory barriers to affordable housing), 4. mature area standards, 5. living with nonconformities (legalize some nonconforming uses), 6. dynamic development standards, 7. negotiated large developments, 8. depoliticized final approvals, 9. Better use of the internet (he oddly uses the word “webbing” for this section, which I’ve never heard used this way), 10. scheduled maintenance.

While most of the topics discussed under these headings are sensible and needed reforms, all together they don’t add up to anything close to a “new” way to zone. In fact, Elliott is convinced our strange combination of conventional Euclidian zoning, planned unit development regulation, and form-based zoning, will continue. While some communities have implemented the form-based SmartCode, I agree with Elliott it doesn’t appear likely it will totally replace the existing tools in most communities.

This brings us to my mixed feelings about zoning in general.

On the one hand, zoning has caused lots of problems. Its separation of uses has encouraged driving and low-density development. Its parking requirements cover the land with impervious parking lots. It has been used as a tool of racial and economic exclusion in communities across the country. When used to require low density development, it consumes land and worsens global warming. Worst of all, it has often failed to achieve one of its original impetus: to separate polluting industries from residences.

On the other hand, just because a tool has been used poorly doesn’t mean the tool itself is flawed. It is the most important source of power for urban planners, and it can be used to sculpt the public realm, create affordable housing, and genuinely improve cities.

The problem with A Better Way to Zone is the book is mostly unaware of such nuance. In a discussion about an alternative to conventional zoning, the author observes that there may be parts of the city suitable for experimentation, but “in and around stable middle- and high-income neighborhoods, there will still be a demand for zones that produce more predictable development.” The reasons or implications for this go undiscussed. There exists an intellectual chasm between historians who observe zoning has been a highly effective tool of exclusion to the detriment of our cities and types like Elliott who are generally sanguine on its basic foundations. The book’s central strength — its focus on making zoning with simple, efficient, and understandable — is also its central flaw. After all, a simple, efficient, and understandable zoning code may not necessarily achieve a desirable, just, or sustainable outcome. For those we must turn elsewhere.

> A Better Way to Zone: official website, purchase from publisher
> Amazon.com: A Better Way to Zone: Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities

Review: Leinberger’s The Option of Urbanism

Reviewing some of the best known books about urban topics by American authors is something like walking through an intellectual house of mirrors: each author’s view is strangely distorted, making it hard to discern the objective reality discussed.

Some are critics, crafting harsh polemics against our Suburban Nation, decrying our Geography of Nowhere, or providing us a Field Guide to (our) Sprawl. Historians want to help us uncover the Origins of the Urban Crisis, but are only now beginning to write a New Suburban History. Some are one-dimensionally obsessed with one topic, describing the High Cost of Free Parking or How to Build an Urban Village. Still more are modern day utopians, sketching bold visions of the Sustainable Urbanism the future could (or should) hold.

Perhaps that’s why when a friend asked me to recommend a good book to introduce her to the field or urban development I struggled to come up with a title to suggest: It’s a rare book indeed that displays a sophisticated understanding of the forces that shape our cities in an engaging and accessible way.

This is the primary strength of Christopher B. Leinberger‘s new book The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream. A readable synthesis of history, planning, and real estate, the book is not yet another polemic about How We Should Live, but an informed and realistic argument about future growth and what choices we face along the way. A visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, Leinberger is also a developer in his own right and Director of an academic program in real estate at the University of Michigan. Recently he has stirred debate in Washington by suggesting the city should re-visit its height limits on buildings.

The past sixty years in American history, Leinberger argues, has been a break from the past 5,500 years of human city building. Equipped with a vision of a “drivable sub-urban” (as he insists on calling it) American Dream, a booming economy, and a powerful auto industry, Americans created the low-density auto-dependent city we know so well. His terse re-telling of the criticisms of this sprawling type of development (Chapter 4) could no doubt be criticized for including or excluding some reason or another, but is impressive for its clarity. This section’s description of the financial forces driving recent growth was perhaps the most unusual. He argues the real estate industry’s overheated growth of the 1980s caused the Savings and Loan crisis, arguing the crisis was “the defining moment of the past half century for the U.S. real estate industry.” He describes how Wall Street subsequently stepped in to provide loans to the industry through Real Estate Investment Trusts, and how the forces of global capital encouraged the commodification of real estate into nineteen generally single-use “product types,” categories like the “neighborhood retail center,” “urban high density apartments” or “move-up housing,” generally developed at low quality for short-term returns.

The remainder of the book contains a typology of the alternative, what he dubs “walkable urbanism” (like Ballston, Virginia, to the right), a discussion of some of its consequences (housing affordability and corporate chains are discussed), and the five steps he thinks are needed for the full emergence for this, “next American Dream.” The steps described are: new zoning, changes to real estate finance, ending subsidies favoring sprawl, investing in (mostly rail transit) infrastructure, and good management of the new urban districts.

While Leinberger’s views would fit well with advocates of both Smart Growth and New Urbanism, he skips a strong affiliation with either of these groups, opting instead for his own nomenclature. Most of all Leinberger is a realist. His blunt assessment of the income inequality of American cities remind me of Bill Rankin’s provocative 2006 City Income maps, that seem to offer a visual proof to Leinberger’s description of the “favored quarter” where investment and wealth is concentrated. He sees the coming trend of walkable urbanism independent from the inequality and segregation in our cities, and even not necessarily tied to increased use of transit (which he’d prefer). This frank grounding of his argument in actual places (Washington, D.C. is featured prominently) and first-hand knowledge of the real estate industry’s inner workings helps relate the general concepts of walkable urbanism into a concrete understanding of what’s built and why.

Leinberger’s book offers the novice a readable introduction to some of the debate surrounding the American city, and the veteran a lively respite from the house of mirrors. With well-selected references that provide a good jumping-off point for further reading, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the book to my students or friends looking for a fresh take on the form and future of our cities.

> Amazon.com: The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream

Reviewing The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington metro

Zachary M. Schrag’s recently published book The Great Society Subway has been on my “to read” list for quite some time now.

Since the first time I visited Washington, D.C. I was captivated by the city’s Metro system, which I first began to explore in earnest when I lived in the city without a car for the summer in 2001. The system was surprising to me for two reasons: it’s big and relatively new. In a country where a car is required to get around virtually every city, Washington D.C. had a massive new subway reaching far into the surrounding region. While I heard plenty of people complain it didn’t go enough places, it was clear to me the system was much better than most other American cities. In fact, it’s the second-busiest subway system in the country, behind New York.

As I began to study 20th century urban history in earnest in college, the system seemed even more the marvel. Since WWII, a combination of federal and local policies and personal choices meant America would be a country of autos, freeways, and suburban growth. When I heard about Dr. Schrag’s book I was of course interested: How had Washington’s massive rapid transit system come to be?

The answer, I discovered, is that it was created much like sausage: however functional the end result, its manufacture wasn’t pretty. In its early days subway proponents had to fight against the overwhelming support for highways, and cobble together a fragile coalition between the region’s diverse political jurisdictions. Once authorized Metro had to face down a stubborn Republican Representative hell-bent on forcing the District of Columbia to construct freeways and not rail. When construction costs and inflation spiraled out of control in the 70s the system had to win emergency financing from Congress. While reading Schrag’s story I was sometimes amazed the entire system was actually completed.

Who is responsible for Metro? Was it a small group of city fathers who began discussions about a potential transit system during friendly lunches in the 1950s? Was it citizen activists who filed lawsuits and staged protests to prevent freeways from slicing up their neighborhoods, pushing a subway as an alternative? Was it lobbying and patronage by three presidents and their pro-rail appointments to important federal posts? Was it the residents of several suburbs who voted on massive bonds to help pay for a system? Was it a D.C. Council, which in its first year of existence voted to turn over their highway funds to pay for the construction of the system in lieu of highways? Was it Jackson Graham, the retired general recruited to push through much of the system’s construction?

In Schrag’s telling, all of these people played a role and more: the disabled lobbied for elevators to every station, the influential black minister and civic leader Rev. Walter Fauntroy championed a “mid-city” line to serve African American neighborhoods, and even the now-defunct Commission on Fine Arts played a role, insisting on the dramatic, if expensive, station design.

Yet these actors aside, beyond all the system can attribute its existence to the U.S. Federal Government. First, their legions of downtown workers guaranteed ridership, and a policy of locating federal facilities near transit ensured the pattern would continue. Second, repeated and lavish political and financial patronage ensured the systems survival when it faced dire financial or political challenges. Schrag acknowledges at the start of his book the exceptional nature of Washington, and thus also its transit system. Yet I believe the system’s intertwined history with the government means it should primarily be understood as an artifact of the capital city, not an American city. This caveat aside, it’s a hell of a story and Schrag tells it well. His book contains chapters ranging from the the architecture of the system, the freeway revolt, construction, and even the system’s impact on the surrounding suburbs. While it would be all too easy to reduce the history of Metro as a bureaucratic or technological story of a machine, Schrag has resisted the temptation and instead crafted a holistic narrative about not just a system but the physical and social history of a region. This is the book I was hoping for.

Thus, until I read more about D.C. and have more time to digest what the book does and does not include, I have but a few complaints. His chapter “The Bridge,” which contains a re-telling of the dramatic struggle between proponents of freeway and rapid transit which was symbolized by the never-build three sisters bridge, the activists portrayed are one-dimensional and the focus is on elite discussions and not citizen activism. The Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis, a grassroots organization bridging diverse neighborhood communities is given short shrift, and Shrag falsely, I believe, implies many of the freeway opponents also turned out to be Metro opponents. (As a whole, the bus system )which serves many more passengers, is almost wholly ignored – but this is not a book about buses, after all.) Scrag freely admits these faults in the introduction (“This book is not an encyclopedia history of Metro … it only brushes against such topics as labor relations, bus operations,a nd maintenance …”) and his book provides a thorough framework for future study.

Most persuasive and intriguing, I think, are his discussions of the impact of the system on the region. In Montgomery County he discusses planners who carefully and deliberately planned for the growth so familiar with us at Friendship Heights and Bethesda. In Fairfax, he observes county leaders unable or unwilling to match the system with the Tyson’s Corner area where most growth has occurred. And in Downtown D.C. the system has, he argues, sparked a real estate revival still playing out. Through these examples he concludes transit-oriented development is “dependence on political leadership and will,” and not a natural, organic process. The system has become a backbone, he argues, which is only now starting to be fleshed out.

This is, at its core, a book about big people making big decisions and building a big subway system. In his view, the system is itself a physical manifestation of the Great Society, which viewed public works like a transit system not simply as a means to move people but to unify and uplift the city. “Metro has been championed by people who believe that public things need not be mean, utilitarian, or even quantifiably cost-effective.” Schrag concludes, “Rather, its advocates have argued that public things should be grand, just, and enduring.” Schrag has ventured into uncharted historical territory of recent history and his book, while far from definitive, will surely prove a standard in understanding 20th century Washington.

> Amazon.com: The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Creating the North American Landscape)

Review: Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder

Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder is one of those books I had heard obliquely mentioned so many times I decided, finally, to read it. Published in 1970, it has aged curiously. Labeled “sociology” by the publisher, the books’ oddly diverse jacket endorsements suggests the stew of ideas contained — the front cover claims it a “defense of anarchism” while some on the rear claim it to be “radically relevant to the current urban crisis.”

So what is it? One part psychology, one part pop sociology, one part anarchism, above all the books makes a psychological argument about American cities. If his thesis has not stood the test of time, it certainly interesting as a counterpoint to the urban discourse of today. Fundamental to his argument is the assumption casually tucked into page 73 that there are no “mechanistic explanations” for the wrenching changes underway in American cities in 1970 — urban rebellions, freeway construction, massive suburbanization by the middle class, etc, etc.

This is, of course, a remarkable claim to a contemporary urban observer like myself. However, we must remember 1970 was years before any serious discussion of the true nature and impact of FHA home loans on the city, the true power of freeways, and before many important dissections of urban racial inequality and segregation. Sennett places blame for the state of American cities on the high modern practitioners of urban planning. While perhaps idealistic to a fault, I’m afraid the planners are perhaps just as idealistic as we will find Sennett.

However, instead of simply locating his criticisms to a misunderstanding of traditional urbanism as Jacobs does in her The Death and Life of Great American Cities, he seeks a deeper explanation, the psychology of Western Man. (and it is Man, save two generic female examples) Animating the planners’ desire to rational urban space Sennett finds Americans who have an immature psyche, who desire to minimize the “contact points” between people to create pure, conflict free relationships. In the process this Man seeks to create intense nuclear families and simplify all other encounters. To Sennett this “voluntary slavery” is the choice of a generation of Americans who have been enabled to act on this previously dormant desire due to unprecedented affluence in the society. In Sennett’s mind, the desire to avoid conflict deprives the modern Man from experiences which would ultimately be good for him and help him become a more mature adult. The city as psychological broccoli, if you will.

Not only does he not have much evidence people were willing a purified life in the suburbs (and not, perhaps good schools and lower housing costs) the argument is didactic and obsolete. His public policy proscriptions are not much better — at one point he suggests citywide land use zoning should be abolished and replacing it with direct conflict (no joke!) in the neighborhoods. I am unsure whether he hopes for us to take seriously or if it is merely a point of discussion, but they are altogether wildly idealistic and impractical, especially when considered with Ms. Jacobs’ quite pragmatic suggestions.

Despite these shortcomings I do think some element of the book can be relevant today. It is precisely the individual, psychological reality of the modern city that has fueled so much of the discourse of American urbanism“ from Hoppers’ lonely figures, Chaplain’s micromanaged factory worker in Modern Times, to Wolfe’s alienated characters of the 1980s. Perhaps we can learn something from Sennett’s book today, in an era when when many young affluent whites like myself are seeking neighborhoods of intense urbanity for profoundly psychological reasons. Perhaps in grandiose discussions of gentrification, suburbanization, and segregation, it is good to remember that the thoughts, desires, and even unconscious play a role in how the city evolves and operates. Despite his many shortcomings Sennett reminds us urbanity is at some level a state of mind, itself a powerful force in shaping the city and a force deserving renewed attention by the contemporary urban observer.

> Amazon.com: The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life

Checking Out The Failures of Integration

I just finished Sheryll Cashin’s book The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream. Although I won’t attempt a proper book review I will offer a few thoughts. A longtime resident of Washington, D.C. (Cashin clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, served in the Clinton White House, and now works as a law professor at Georgetown University) she makes extensive use of the Washington, D.C. area for examples as she makes her argument about patterns of economic and racial segregation in housing and public schools. A reluctant intergrationist, Cashin argues after taking a hard look at census data she has concluded that not only is the country’s neighborhoods and schools quickly becoming re-segregated, the new separatist order only serves the interests of few.

Evaluating black suburbanization she argues that black suburbanites cannot make the same assumptions as their white counterparts about the neighborhoods they move to. Evaluating the experience based on five assumptions that whites expect and generally receive, ranging from an assumption they can escape poverty to the availability of good public schools, low crime, reasonable property taxes, good government services, and convenient options for shopping and dining out. Assessing well known black suburbs including Washington, D.C.’s Prince George’s County, she concludes that although majority-minority suburbs can provide a physiological salve in a world where blacks may face hostile work environments, ultimately the choice comes with heavy costs and cannot measure up to white, middle class suburbs.

She also describes white families’ scramble to buy their way into the privileged communities arguing whites must pay upwards of $300,000 above market prices to find housing in desirable communities. She also repeats arguments made elsewhere by the polarizing impact of residential segregation on political debate, and how the isolation of both communities feeds distrust and public policy choices based on racialized stereotypes. She ultimately concludes “everyone’s quality of life is degraded by separatism. Worse, through separation and segregation we are institutionalizing and perpetuating inequality, to our national detriment,” (p. 298) arguing “The idea that society would be ordered so as to benefit the lucky few rather than the diverse masses, and the missed opportunity of a rich mixing of people from various cultures and classes, could seem just as backward to future generations as slavery does to us today.” (p. 304)

In the course of her argument she pays close attention to the handful of communities which have bucked the national trend of increasing residential segregation observing the communities that have been most successful are either vibrant commercial districts (Such as some parts of Portland, Oregon or Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C.) or instead communities where residents deliberately sought to bridge divides and preserve a racial mix.

Interestingly, Cashin identifies one census tract from Washington’s 2000 census “that came close to bring a true melding of the races.” The tract, number 50, includes the “rapidly gentrifying Logan Circle neighborhood” was 26 percent white, 36 percent black, and 29.5 percent Latino. It turns out my house where I rent now is located in Census tract 49.01, is about 12% white, 78% black, and 5% Hispanic.

By comparison, when I lived in the Glover Park neighborhood I lived in Tract 3 was 89% white, 3% black, and 7% Asian. Cashin herself has chosen to live in Shepherd Park, a middle class majority-black neighborhood in Northwest she was “surprised” to discover was 72 percent black and 21 percent white (she had thought it was closer to 60-40).

She also profiles extensively people who she calls “accidental” or “ardent” integrationists who either intentionally or unintentionally find themselves straddling social divides but decide to make the best of it, going against the grain of American society. After describing in sweeping terms the collective costs of separatism, what is her proscription for change? What visionary ideas are contained in her penultimate chapter, titled simply “What to Do About It” Community coalitions.

Say what?

Yes, she calls for grassroots coalition building “based on actual self-interest is the only possible path to a truly inclusive society” to build a constituency for “revolutionary” change in our laws and society. As someone who walks a fine line between pessimism and optimism I found her prescription a bit hard to swallow, however found I warmed up to the argument when I was again reminded of the limited successes of metropolitan regions who have begun to address problems of housing, education, and quality of life from a metropolitan perspective. Her thinking here is influenced by Myron Orfield whose innovative scholarship has focused on how aging, inner-ring suburbs can create political majorities if they align themselves with the city instead of the urban fringes.

Revealing herself to be not too far removed from the eminently inspirational yet pragmatic Bill Clinton (for whom she reserves plenty or criticism elsewhere in the book) her analysis contains elements of two strands of thinking I have seen elsewhere and find useful. The first is a decidedly geographic orientation to analyzing society. Such an orientation can quickly dissolve the mythology of meritocracy. How can we believe if hard data shows most jobs are way out in the lilly-white suburbs like Fairfax where poor blacks are concentrated in ghetto conditions? This precise fact is why I think many ideologically adrift modern-day liberals find themselves drawn to metropolitan thinking and the discipline of urban planning, and why citizen organizations (precisely of the type she calls for) have sprung up across the country advocating for “smart growth,” inclusionary zoning, better public transit, and other policies which would address geographic logic which fails to serve the needs of both the working class and also the affluent, who find their aggressive pursuit of suburban purity has priced out many of the people they depend on to teach their kids, pump their gas, and work in the stores they like to visit.

Second, Cashin discusses potential solutions from the perspective of increased choices for all people. Although she is a good deal more pragmatic in her analysis of school vouchers (they really aren’t sound public policy if they provide opportunity for a few at the expense of all) she does embrace the broader ideology of school choice, so long as it provides opportunity for all. This type of thinking can be extremely useful when paired against an analysis that says the current approach provides little opportunities for the majority of people except the most wealthy.

Will Cashin’s book spark the sort of sea change in our society she so strongly desires, or contain any revolutionary public policy proscriptions? Probably not. However, I think the book plays a key role in the evolving public debate about how metropolitan regions should approach persistent inequality and segregation. I also strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region from the perspective of someone who isn’t afraid to ask hard questions and delve deep into the logic of the area’s white and black residents.

> Listen to an NPR story about Cashin’s book
> Read Sheryll Cashin’s Op-Ed “A Tale of Two Schools” on AlterNet
> Amazon.com: The Failures Of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream

Reading The Power of Many … One Year Later

Last weekend I read Christian Crumlish’s The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life. Instead of learning any major revelations, I mostly discovered just how much of a geek I have become, but luckily I know who to blame.

While I won’t say much about the content of the book (It provides an entry-level summary of what Crumlish defines as the “living web� — innovative applications that fully utilize the web’s unique power to allow users to interact and contribute information. He discusses Meetup, Upcoming, Flickr, and blogs in general. Interesting, there’s not much here about online citizen journalism, for that see Dan Gillmore’s We The Media. Crumlish is an unapologetic Deaniac and draws heavily of the successes of the Howard Dean presidential campaign to briefly achieve front runner status by using the web to mobilize volunteers and raise money.), I will say that one of the most interesting parts is exactly how much the book shows its age in just over one year. (It was published September 28, 2004) Most notably in the last year MySpace, Upcoming, and Flickr have all been purchased, and Crumlish’s “Living Web� has been at the core of another internet goldrush. Also, his commentary about social networking talks a lot about Orkut, a social network started by a Google engineer that had lots of buzz in 2004, but doesn’t mention current powerhouses MySpace and TheFaceBook, due no doubt in part to those services’ meteoric growth in the past year.

Alas, such is the nature of writing a book about cutting edge technology. It turns out that Crumlish is still maintaining the book website over at ThePowerOfMany.com, where most recently he posted about being sought out as an expert on Wikipedia for a segment on Canadian TV about the recent scandal about a Wikipedia prank gone awry. Should you read it? Only if you want to feel like you’re back in September 2004, or you’d like someone to explain to you the significance of RSS.