The Mayor’s Office

Every city has a mayor.  Some are quite admirable.  Others are jerks.  As we’ve been visiting different US cities here in the Back Road Café this summer, I’ve been noticing mayors.  What do they do exactly?  So let’s stop by a few cities today – Minneapolis, New York, San Diego, Carmel, and at the end, my favorite mayor - and say Hi! to the mayors. 

Mayors try to make a city work, to be both livable and lovable.  Mayors also do ceremonial things; they welcome conventioneers, cut ribbons, perform weddings.  Some do this well.  Others screw up.  A city can bask in its mayor’s success, or survive in spite of them.   For example:

 * R. T Rybak, Mayor of Minneapolis, officiated at 46 weddings on August 1, starting at midnight, for 7 hours straight, after the law went into effect making Minnesota the 13^th state to legalize gay marriage.  Earlier this summer, when the bill passed, he had shouted into the euphoric crowd that he’d marry any and all who came to City Hall August 1.   All night, each couple walked, or ran, down the five flights of the neoclassical City Hall, serenaded by the Gay Men’s Chorus, for their ceremony, the mayor beaming.  Right next to the large nude sculpture of a giant water god symbolizing the Mississippi.  Photos well worth looking at. Later that day a sleepy mayor was interviewed by National Public Radio while riding his bike home from work – so Minneapolis.

 * When New Yorkers elect a new mayor in November, it might be the guy who goes by the on-line alias “Carlos Danger.” Candidate Anthony Weiner, for our purposes only a mayor-wannabee, has twice in the last couple years been caught sexting with much younger women, posting sexually suggestive photos of himself on line, and having phone sex with women other than his wife (who happens to be Hillary Rodham Clinton’s close aide and friend).  Each time he has denied it, delayed, and then admitted, apologized.  Refusing to bow out of the race, he said this week, “Quitting is not how we roll in New York.”  If that’s a 9-11 reference (“Let’s roll”) he has even worse taste than I thought.

Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York TimesNew York always has colorful mayors.  Think Fiorello LaGuardia or Ed Koch (“How’m I doin’?”)  Its two most recent mayors are likewise larger than life, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.  For a progressive city, it’s remarkable that both these men are Republicans; New York hasn’t had a Democratic mayor since 1989.  This year voters  have 12 candidates to choose from.  Their photos paint a New York picture:

 * San Diego Mayor Bob Filner has been accused of sexual harassment in recent weeks by numerous local women, including a San Diego State University dean, a school psychologist, a retired Navy rear-admiral and his own communications director.  The women gave detailed descriptions of groping, slobbering, propositioning, and what is called “the now infamous Filner Headlock.”  The mayor has ignored the widespread calls by local and state officials to resign, admitting only that he has some “problems” and will take a two-week leave to get “intensive therapy” and then return to office.

* Here in my hometown on California’s Central Coast, a new young mayor of Carmel, Jason Burnett, formed an alliance with the mayors of five other Monterey Peninsula cities and solved a 50 year old water supply challenge - how to get, store and divide up fairly enough water from the short Carmel River for a growing population, tourists and farmers.  He got a diverse group of stakeholders to agree, including the for-profit Cal-Am water company, local business coalitions, small and big farmers and the Sierra Club.  Burnett is new to politics and his style is both collaborative and goal driven.  Where 5 decades of in-fighting and dysfunction have paralyzed the area, Burnett thought regionally, built trust, persisted, and won deep concessions from the German owned water corporation.

“I want to be mayor” is how Thomas Friedman titled a recent New York Times column about the new book The Metropolitan Revolution.  He writes,

“If you want to be an optimist about America today, stand on your head. The country looks so much better from the bottom up — from its major metropolitan areas — than from the top down. Washington is tied in knots by Republican-led hyperpartisanship, lobbyists and budget constraints. Ditto most state legislatures. So the great laboratories and engines of our economy are now our cities. This is the conclusion of an important new book by the Brookings Institution scholars Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, entitled: “The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy.”

For generations, they write, we held the view that “the feds and states are the adults in the system, setting direction; the cities and the metropolitan areas are the children, waiting for their allowance. The metropolitan revolution is exploding this tired construct. Cities and metropolitan areas are becoming the leaders in the nation: experimenting, taking risks, making hard choices.” We are seeing “the inversion of the hierarchy of power in the United States.”

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Munchinland MayorCan you name the mayor of your city?  Is he or she a scoundrel, a champion, a cipher?  I leave you with one of my favorite mayors:

“As mayor of the Munchkin City, in the County of the Land of Oz, I welcome you most regally….”

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Poor Plainfield

Get your motor running….our Back Road Café summer road trip travels this week down historic Rt. 22 to Plainfield, New Jersey. After our visits to Atlanta, Denver, San Diego and Detroit, I thought we’d slow down and cool off in a smaller, gentler town, with happy memories of my own birth and childhood years there.  Nice try – it’s New Jersey in the summer!  Get out the bug spray and crank up the air conditioner.  Better yet, turn the lawn sprinkler on and invite over the neighborhood kids.  It’ll be fun to sit on the porch and count the twilight fireflies. 

You say you’re from New Jersey and people either pity or scorn you.  Fellow natives simply ask, “Which exit?” (There are lots of freeways.)  Ever since the popular TV shows The Sopranos or Jersey Shore, many folks assume New Jersey is just mob bosses and bimbos.  The so-called Garden State actually does have a long history of crime and corruption.  With one of the greatest shores in the world it does attract its share of beach bimbos.   But, like those shows, our residents are flawed but lovable.  And good for a laugh.

Sometimes you get the kind of reaction I got from a friend, a wealthy woman who retired to ritzy Pebble Beach here in California after she made a fortune running a chain of dry cleaners in Central New Jersey. She had lived in a town near my home town, Plainfield; “Poor Plainfield, how far it has come down.”

My parents bought a house in Plainfield in 1950 and I was born a year later.  For the next 25 years my father walked to the train station each morning and commuted an hour to Manhattan and Wall Street.  As in a lot of suburban feeder towns for New York, our house had a big yard with old trees.  We had a great tree house.  The neighborhood kids came to our house most days for kick the can and twilight firefly counting.  We swam and played tennis at the Plainfield Country Club.

When my friend says “Poor Plainfield” she means those days are over.  Because Plainfield is now a predominately black and Hispanic town.

As a kid, I assumed all of Plainfield was like my neighborhood, white and upper middle class.  Our neighborhood, our schools, our church, our parks, our stores - all white.  The big houses and big lawns – that was Plainfield.  I knew blacks lived in other parts of town, but in my idyllic childhood I was barely aware of poverty, and it never struck me as odd that there were no black members in the country club. 

But after that Poor Plainfield comment I checked out the population stats for Plainfield, then and now, and discovered to my surprise that in the 60’s the town was actually 40% black.  How ironic, that I can be so very quick to scorn the South, those racists of the 60’s, and of today, for their white denial.  But how oblivious was I, were we, to almost half the residents of my town, who lived a very different life, fewer choices and many challenges.

Things changed in the late 60’s, as African Americans all over the US began resisting and protesting segregation and racism, with frustration and anger sometimes spilling over into riots, especially in hot summers.   Plainfield had its own riot, in the hot summer of the 1967.  In nearby Newark there had been a week of race rioting and looting, which left 26 dead.  A fight about race broke out in a Plainfield restaurant, leading to a couple nights of crowds of angry young people and damage to commercial property.  Then a white motorcycle gang, the Pagans, from outside the area, came into town looking for a fight.  A police officer caught in the middle of the melee fired a shot that wounded a black youth.  An ensuing mob brutally attacked the officer with a shopping cart and eventually he was killed with his own revolver.

This began a decade of white flight from Plainfield.  I was away at college, and not aware of people leaving.  My parents moved away a few years later for other reasons, the family grown and gone, longtime plans to build on property we owned farther out in the country.  But maybe also because of the changing demographics.  We never spoke of that.  There was a lot we didn’t speak of.   It was that kind of town; we stuck with our own kind and ignored a lot.

By the end of the 70’s Plainfield was 60% black.  Today it’s about half black, lots of Hispanics, 25% white.  The mayor and other city leaders are black. I went by my old house a few years ago and met the current residents, a black family.

Other changes; the downtown shopping area, heavily damaged in those riots still has many vacant stores. The hospital I was born in was bought by a multinational, for profit health care chain and then a few years later it was closed and shuttered.  

Of course all towns change.  You can’t go home again.  I am sad for the loss of some old stores.  But they might have failed anyway; lots of stores do.  Or they move to the malls.  The town’s population is up, as is the average income. My old church is now integrated.  My old house, according to Google street view and a real estate virtual tour, looks pretty good.  They added a deck; why did we never think of that?

Last week a group in Plainfield called YOU, Youth Organization for Unity, held a candlelight protest of the Trayvon Martin verdict.  A circle of a hundred people, mostly black, calmly stood in front of city hall and decried our nation’s continuing racial injustice.   There was no violence.  In other cities, like Oakland here in California, there were some nights of looting after the verdict, but much less than folks expected or feared.  I’m not sure what that means.  I do commend President Obama’s moving and thoughtful comments on the case.  

Maybe I’m too optimistic or naïve, but I can’t say, “Poor Plainfield.”  I actually feel more scorn and sadness for what I now know it was really like in the 60’s, a city of fear and denial.  It’s not poor today, it’s real.   I just say, “Yes, I grew up in Plainfield.  Good town.  Good memories.  Good people.  Good luck.”

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Two Tough Cities: Detroit and New Orleans

Today on our summer road trip we stop by two tough cities, Detroit and New Orleans.  You’d think most folks would be speeding away from these two hotspots of disaster, but tourism is up in both cities, as are many bright young entrepreneurs who call these “frontier cities”…

Detroit was in the news this week, the largest US city to declare bankruptcy, $19 billion in debt.  The Motor City was once the 4^th biggest city in the nation, 2 million residents, the icon of American industrial might.  Now it’s 700,000 folks, can’t fund its public employee pensions.  Only 40% of its street lights work.  It takes an hour for police to respond.

What happens to a big city when disaster strikes?  Who stays, who leaves?  How do they rebuild?  Who else cares?

I remember right after 9/11 Mayor Guiliani encouraged, begged people to visit New York.  “We’re here, the theaters and museums and restaurants are open, come spend money.”  My husband and I answered the call, had a fantastic, moving time.  Locals talked with us in new personal and vulnerable ways. 

Dear New OrleansDear New OrleansAfter Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans our nation turned its lonely eyes to the Big Easy. The city was literally underwater.  In the next few years 25% of its population moved away.  But then a remarkable influx of college educated young entrepreneurs came back to town: the brain drain became a brain gain.  “Dear New Orleans” captured on people’s hands thousands of messages of hope and creativity.  Brad Pitt raised $30 million for creative new homes in the Ninth Ward.  I can name 100 people I know from California alone who went there on church mission trips to rebuild homes, and who came home transformed.

Who will visit Detroit?  Does America care, as they did about NYC and New Orleans?

Dear New OrleansActually, 19 million tourists already visit the Detroit area every year.  That’s more than twice the number of visitors to New Orleans.  That statistic surprised me.  Who would want to visit a bombed out, dangerous, racially tense, non-functioning city?  Oh, people who like great amusement parks (some of the best in the country), who like to gamble (the city has put a lot of money into hotel casinos), who like car shows (the International Auto Show,) who like the city’s four professional sports teams (only 12 US cities have 4 professional teams), who like the art and culture and fun a city can offer. 

Even financially struggling cities don’t roll over and die.  It’s hard to kill a city.  And Americans do like to party.

In the recent book For the Love of Cities, author Peter Kageyama compares Detroit and New Orleans, calling them “two tough cities.”  In the past decade they’ve both suffered a devastating crisis, lost 25% of their populations, had to do the city equivalent of the First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous: admit publicly they were powerless, their cities were unmanageable, they needed help. 

Americans do feel bad for both cities.  They rushed to help New Orleans.  But it feels like we’re more embarrassed by Detroit.  Maybe it’s easier to sympathize after a natural disaster than one that seems self inflicted, the result of mismanagement and denial about changing times.  If my AA analogy has any truth to it, are we sending New Orleans to the emergency room, but Detroit to rehab?

Kageyama has some interesting things to say about both cities.  I’ve never visited either, so I simply rely on his impressions.  I like his general idea that cities need to be not just liveable, but loveable.  Basic needs of safety and functionality are not enough.  Loveable cities, he says, should also be comfortable, convivial, interesting and meaningful.  He has some great stories about such cities.  

ProsperUSHe is hopeful about Detroit and New Orleans because in both places their crises have created a sense of frontier - openness, possibility, craziness and chaos.  Less of an  entrenched ruling class of politicians or business.  Some open land and less red tape.  You can buy a house in Detroit for $100, or turned an abandoned house into an art project.  He quotes one Detroit entrepreneur:

“This region, this city is not a place to come and be at ease,” says Eric Cedo.  “It’s not a place to come and just be one of many to blend in….The people that do choose to stay, can make an immediate impact….You don’t go to New York feeling like, ‘I am going to leave my imprint on New York.’ I am not going to New York to make New York.  I am going to New York to make me.

“In Detroit you feel differently.  I go to Detroit because I want to have an impact on Detroit.  I want to build.  I want to create.  I want to make something of the city.  Not just make something of my life, but I want what I make of my life to be a part of something bigger than myself.”

Rebuilding DetroitHe’s a bit more hopeful about New Orleans than Detroit; their disaster was sudden and cleared out some old structures and leadership.  Detroit’s pain (this was written a couple years ago) he calls a death of a thousand cuts.  The public impression is, like mine above, of a wasteland with no jobs.  Wrong, Kageyama says; there may be few manufacturing jobs, but lots of others.  As the Financial Times wrote approvingly in this past week’s editorial, corporate headquarters are returning to Detroit, alongside lots of those entrepreneurs.

New Orleans is more welcoming of these “co-creators” as Kageyama calls them.   He quotes Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters: 

“New Orleans has, in fact, become a kind of frontier town, with all the opportunities (for good and bad), the unpredictability (good and bad), the violence, and the sense that one’s own actions might conceivably have an effect on one’s environment.  Like any frontier, it attracts adventurers, profiteers, romantics, desperados, and those who want to remake themselves in some way, to rewrite the map of possibility.   It has also been attracting a startling number of idealistic and touch people from around the country, mostly young, but not exclusively so, who see a chance to make a difference.”

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Last thought:  I think it’s no accident that these reviving cities have amazing music; nothing says unique American more than New Orleans jazz and Detroit Motown.  When we sing American, we sing “When the Saints Go Marching In” with a jazz brass band beat.  We know “There Ain’t No Mountain High Enough to keep me from getting to you.” 

Let’s hope these cities keep singing.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Prisonville USA, Population 2.2 Million

The Back Road Café is on the road this summer, heading to different American cities across the nation. Today we travel to our nation’s fourth largest city, just behind Chicago’s 2.7 million folks and slightly ahead of Houston. But this city is hard to visit. Unless you’re in trouble.

Welcome to Prisonville USA. Population 2.2 million. That’s the number of US adult men and women behind bars. It’s a different kind of city, almost futuristic, like a series of pods spread across the nation, connected by an underground infrastructure, in this case fed by racial hatred and fear, unemployment, drug addiction and the prison industrial complex. Sounds pretty American to me.

Sorry that my travelog this week is a bit of a downer. No funny stories as in previous weeks about John Denver and Rocky Mountain High. Prisonville simply is: it’s huge, growing, dangerous, wasteful, ugly, expensive, and mean.

The US prison industrial complex is just that, complex. It’s peopled not only by millions of inmates, but millions of employees, working on acres of infrastructure, in most counties, every state. Add in the family members of all these people and the number of people closely connected to our punitive criminal justice system could make a megalopolis.

Some numbers:

• 25% - of all the world’s prisoners are in US prisons. (We are 5% of world population.)
• 743 – people per 100,000 US population who are in prison. (.7%) (Russia: 557. England and Wales: 154. Canada: 117. Japan: 59 per 100,000.)
• 1 in 32 – Americans are in the justice system: jail, prison, parole, probation.
• $24,000 – cost per US prisoner per year.
• $60.3 billion – annual prison expenditures (including $5.1 in new prison construction.)
• 500% - increase in California prison population since 1982.

(Source: Wikipedia article “US Incarceration Rate” – read it and weep.)

It’s hard to talk with the residents of this prison city, if you’re looking for the (literally) “inside” story. News is hard to come by, and communication within this “city” of all US prisoners is pretty limited.

So it’s all the more amazing that 30,000 prisoners in California’s federal prisons went on a hunger strike this week.  It’s the largest prison strike in the state history. Almost one-fifth of all California prisoners are refusing to eat, and a smaller number are refusing to work. They are demanding changes in policies around solitary confinement for prisoners. 10,000 of California’s 160,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement. Strikers are demanding a reduction in so-called security housing units (cells where prisoners are held in solitary for up to 23 hours a day). A change in the way prison gangs are punished, improved nutrition, construction programs for those in solitary, and an end to rewarding those who inform on others.

I’m no romantic about prisoners. I’d rather mass murderers were off the streets. But the sheer numbers are an embarrassment for our supposedly civilized country, not to mention the inconsistencies and inequalities in sentencing and treatment.

GuantanamoAnd there’s Guantanamo. Another American prison, on a US Naval base in Cuba, which the Bush administration established to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists from Iraq and Afghanistan. Also to commit massive amounts of torture and abuse. Worse than in US “regular” prisons? Probably so,  but in the same way stabbing is worse than slicing; there’s blood and pain in both.

More numbers; at one time there were almost 800 detainees at Guantanamo. Now it’s down to 166, but Obama or Congress or something makes it impossible to carry out Obama’s repeated pledge to close it entirely. In its five separate prisons a staff of 2,000 federal employees – Army guard, Navy medics, contract cooks and intelligence analysts, keep an eye – and a heavy hand – on those 166 people.

They too have been on a hunger strike. That seems to be one of the few ways to get the public’s attention when you in prison. But some of them quit the strike this week, it was reported, because of Ramadan. They wanted to be able to eat and pray together during the holy month, and if you refuse to eat you are put in solitary confinement. A new more lenient policy allows some hunger strikers, if they are well behaved, six hours a day of communal time. 

This policy does not apply to the 45 captives who are considered so malnourished from months of hunger strikes that they are being force fed.

There are no plans yet to force feed the California prison hunger strikers. It’s only been a week. And while the publicity of the Gitmo forced feedings is bad, California would be worse.

And in one last bit of criminal justice news; George Zimmerman was found innocent yesterday of murder or manslaughter changes after killing unarmed Florida black teenager Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman said Martin looked suspicious, and under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, Zimmerman, a private security guard, could kill if he felt nervous or threatened. 

Zimmerman escaped jail time, for now at least. But he has been in hiding for month because of the negative publicity around his case. One wonders if he will ever escape the prison-like effect of public threat and scorn. Maybe some prisons do have value.  Keep George Zimmerman running in fear, and out of my life. Guys like that I do want locked up. 

Copyright 2013 Deborah Streeter

The Supreme Court is for the Birds

Racism is over in the US, said our Supreme Court last week.  (Well, five of the six men voted that way.  The women weren’t buying it.)  

Gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act, they ruled that historically exclusionary states like Texas and Georgia, with their systemic history of keeping minorities away from the polls, no longer needed federal oversight of voting procedures.  States could go ahead and enact restrictive voting laws all they want.  Bring on the literacy requirements, ID laws, moving polling places and limiting hours, and redistricting, all to confound minority voters.

But it wasn’t only those racist Southerner legislatures who are now freed from the annoying attention of the feds on behalf of African- Americans. 

The justices had their eyes also right on my own hip Monterey County, Central California.  For the past 40 years we too have had to check with the Justice Department before every election.  Some isolated counties, such as ours, alongside the Southern states, have been found to have patterns of voting irregularities so egregious that the feds have been keeping an eye on us.

Our Back Road Café Summer Road Trip travels back north this week.  With the stark images of the San Diego-Tijuana border vivid in our minds, we came home to see more clearly the Latino-Anglo tensions in our own back yard.  Consider the coastal agricultural town of Pajaro.

Monterey Country’s two major industries are agriculture and hospitality/tourism.  Is it any surprise that our county is 56% Latino and only 32% Anglo? (California is 37% Latino, the nation is 16%. By far most Latino folks are citizens, but our county has the state’s highest percentage of undocumented workers, 13.5%).  Who else wants to pick those strawberries and make those beds?

Pajaro, CaliforniaPajaro is a small underserved community of 3000, one mile square, 94% Latino.  Adjacent to larger Watsonville, it’s not such a drastically visible shanty town as parts of Tijuana we visited last week, but its citizens do have to buy bottled water because of nitrates in the well water from agricultural fertilizers.  The community was badly flooded in the 90s before any decent drainage and culverts were put on the adjacent Pajaro River, which has nice fancy levees on the Watsonville side.

I don’t see any big electrified wall, but I sure am reminded of my border trip last week.

Back to voting.  Before the 2004 election, county voting officials abruptly closed the only Pajaro polling place and required voters to go to Aromas, 10 miles away.  No public transportation available.  Last minute notice.  Many seniors and non-English speakers in Pajaro.  Notices not always in Spanish, as required by California law (after more nudging from those obnoxious voting rights feds.) Pajaro residents notified the Justice Department, who had the authority, (gracias a la Voting Rights Act) to order a change, and last minute, back to voting in Pajaro.

Pajaro means “bird” in Spanish.  This kind of treatment of anyone, let alone US citizens, is for the birds.

But thanks to the old birds on the Supreme Court, voting officials can do what they want now.  Even here is enlightened California.

Supreme CourtThe day after they ruled against the Voting Rights Act, the Court ruled in favor of Marriage Equality.  As we predicted last March, when the case was argued, they found (by 5-4 margins again) that the Defense of Marriage Act, violated the due process clause of the 5^th Amendment.  The court, as predicted, punted on a legal technicality on California’s Prop. 8, which nontheless did restore marriage equality to the state.  Justice Kennedy, whom I (and many others) knew would hold the deciding vote, did indeed vote for, and wrote the decision on marriage equality.  Curiously, he also voted against the Voting Act.  He was consistent on granting states more power to make laws than the federal government.

I saw our friend Ed Kilgore in church the Sunday before the rulings.  It was the Court’s last week in session so we knew we were in for a lot of news.  I offered prayers, in our sort of conservative church, for our nation and for the court as we awaited these decisions.  Afterwards Ed said he was not so anxious about the marriage equality rulings, since the tide has turned so dramatically on that issue in our nation’s public opinion; even the courts can’t change that.  But, Georgia native that he is, he was very concerned about the Voting Rights Law, and with good reason.  Californians were thrilled (mostly) with the marriage equality rulings, but less aware of the implications right here of the Voting Rights action.  We’ll need to do not just a lot of praying, but hard working on that one, in the south, and here in California.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter