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‘Soul Food Junkies’ digs into African American food history and habits

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 14, 2013

‘Soul Food Junkies’ digs into African American food history and habits

By Susie Cagle

Is soul food “the bane of African American health,” or is it a cuisine with a long and complex cultural history?

What if it’s both?

Filmmaker Byron Hurt’s documentary Soul Food Junkies premiering tonight on PBS aims to tell the history of soul food and contextualize collards, peas, and cornbread in the contemporary fight for food justice in communities of color, communities we often call “food deserts.”

Food deserts are by definition low-income communities without supermarkets or grocery stores, where fresh food is a rarity and people suffer from obesity, diabetes, and other health problems. We often blame food deserts themselves for those health problems, but that label can obscure culinary history, not to mention some basic facts. Many poor urban neighborhoods aren’t actually food deserts at all — they’re closer to food swamps full of ready-made and relatively cheap processed items. The “nutritional timberline,” as Karla Cornejo Villavicencio coins it at The New Inquiry, is a real thing.

In Hurt’s film, he interviews a woman who is upset that her local grocery only carries vegetables “that look like they’re having a nervous breakdown.” From PBS:

The idea is that if healthy choices are available, people will buy them. And that works to an extent. But old habits die hard. A 15-year longitudinal study found that upping the number of grocery stores in low-income areas didn’t result in people automatically buying healthier food.

“Just because you build it, doesn’t mean you will change people’s behavior,” study author Barry Popkin, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a Time magazine article. “Price, quality, accessibility, incentives, they matter too. Every community is different, but new efforts or supplementing existing infrastructure works if they’re accompanied with affordable prices, education, promotion or community collaboration.”

Efforts that only increase the availability of nice organic lettuce don’t do anything to address the personal food culture that drives mealtime choices in these communities. And let’s face it: A lot of food justice work in these communities is done by well-meaning but kind of patronizing white people.

Hurt hopes his film “will be used widely as a discussion starter in communities of color around food consumption, health, wellness, and fitness.” In an interview with the Smithsonian’s Food & Think blog, Hurt said, “I think the film is really resonating with people, especially among African American people because this is the first film that I know of that speaks directly to an African American audience in ways that Food, Inc., Supersize Me, King Corn, The Future of Food, Forks over Knives and other films don’t necessarily speak to people of color. So this is really making people talk.”

Soul Food Junkies airs tonight at 10 p.m. on PBS.

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The 32 most alarming charts from the government’s climate change report

by olikellopas Posted on January 14, 2013

The 32 most alarming charts from the government’s climate change report

By Philip Bump

Just reading about the government’s massive new report outlining what climate change has in store for the U.S. is sobering. In brief: temperature spikes, drought, flooding, less snow, less permafrost. But if you really want to freak out, you should check out the graphs, charts, and maps.

For the more visually oriented bunker builders out there, here are the 32 most alarming images from the 1,200-page draft report. (Click any of them to embiggen.)

Things will be different.
Analysis suggests that temperatures could rise as much as 11 degrees by the end of the century. On this chart, note the lines labelled SRES A2 and SRES B1. Those are the two greenhouse gas emission scenarios used as worst- and best-case scenarios in many of the charts that follow.

It’s possible that sea levels could only rise eight inches. It is also possible that they could rise over six-and-a-half feet.

Over the past 30 years, we’ve already seen hundreds of billion-dollar weather disasters — heavily centered on the South and Southeast.

We will be hot.
Over the past century, temperature changes have varied by region.

Depending on the emissions scenario, we could see an average of four degrees of temperature increase — or 10 degrees across the country.

Under the worse-case emissions scenario, annual days over 100 degrees will spike in the Plains, Southwest, and Southeast.

The whole country will see more frost-free days — but particularly in the Southwest.

We will be wet.
Precipitation has been increasing across the country …

… but that increase isn’t uniform.

We will also be dry.
Under a higher-emissions scenario, the southwest will see far less rain.

Drought will increase significantly …

… and we’ll see significant increases in water withdrawal.

Very heavy precipitation — far bigger storms — will increase dramatically in the Northeast.

Flooding in the northern Plains and Northeast will increase.

We will be itchy and sneezy and diseased.
Carbon dioxide increases will lead to more pollen, exacerbating allergies.

The natural range of ticks will expand.

Alaska will become a totally different state.
Under the higher emissions scenario, Alaska could see temperature increases of nearly 12 degrees.

That increased warmth will mean faster thawing of the permafrost, which is very, very bad news.

We will need boats, if we live on the coast.
The U.S. has seen huge population growth on its coasts, which is bad news.

Sea-level rise will affect different areas to different degrees — but note the map at lower right. On the Georgia coast, “hundred year” floods could happen annually.

In New York, which has seen sea rise quickly …

… the boundaries suggesting where a hundred year flood would stop will keep moving inland.

North Carolina will see rising whatever-they-call-its, too.

Across the country, airports built near the ocean, often on fill, will become more subject to flooding.

Power plants in California will be threatened by flooding.

Seattle will see huge areas of the city made vulnerable to flooding and surge. (You can read the details here.)

Or, in summary:
Here’s what you can expect depending on where in the country you live.

If you really want to sleep poorly tonight, open the full report and search for your state. If the temperature is only expected to go up five degrees, consider yourself lucky.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Beijing air pollution goes off the charts as electricity use climbs

by BayalaHillesland628 Posted on January 14, 2013

Beijing air pollution goes off the charts as electricity use climbs

By Philip Bump

Allow me to translate the information above. According to the air pollution sensor atop the U.S. embassy in Beijing, the amount of particulate matter (soot) in the air on Saturday at 8 p.m. local time was indescribably bad. At 886 micrograms per cubic meter, the level was “Beyond Index,” past the end of a scale that goes from “Unhealthy” to “Very Unhealthy” to “Hazardous.” Then: “Beyond Index.”

Once, the system got creative. From the New York Times:

One Friday more than two years ago, an air-quality monitoring device atop the United States Embassy in Beijing recorded data so horrifying that someone in the embassy called the level of pollution “Crazy Bad” in an infamous Twitter post. That day the Air Quality Index, which uses standards set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, had crept above 500, which was supposed to be the top of the scale. …

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, levels between 301 and 500 are “Hazardous,” meaning people should avoid all outdoor activity. The World Health Organization has standards that judge a score above 500 to be more than 20 times the level of particulate matter in the air deemed safe.

In online conversations, Beijing residents tried to make sense of the latest readings.

“This is a historic record for Beijing,” Zhao Jing, a prominent Internet commentator who uses the pen name Michael Anti, wrote on Twitter. “I’ve closed the doors and windows; the air purifiers are all running automatically at full power.”

Other Beijing residents online described the air as “postapocalyptic,” “terrifying” and “beyond belief.”

One broadcaster provided a visual representation of the pollution. He is not sitting in front of a yellow backdrop.

The BBC has a gallery of similarly murky images.

In an attempt to ameliorate the problem, the city has cracked down on causes of soot pollution. From the Los Angeles Times:

A prolonged spell of air pollution across a large area of China has led to the cancellation of flights and sporting activities and the closure of highways, factories and construction sites. …

As an emergency measure, the Beijing Environmental Protection Ministry announced Sunday that factories and construction sites had agreed to reduce or stop work entirely until the air cleared up. …

“The air pollution is unprecedented. This is the first time in China’s history we have seen it this bad,’’ said Zhao Zhangyuan of the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences.

The health effects have been immediate. From Bloomberg:

Hospitals were inundated with patients complaining of heart and respiratory ailments and the website of the capital’s environmental monitoring center crashed. Hyundai Motor Co.’s venture in Beijing suspended production for a day to help ease the pollution, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Official measurements of PM2.5, fine airborne particulates that pose the largest health risks, rose as high as 993 micrograms per cubic meter in Beijing on Jan. 12, compared with World Health Organization guidelines of no more than 25. It was as high as 500 at 6 a.m. today. Long-term exposure to fine particulates raises the risk of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases as well as lung cancer, according to the WHO. …

Exposure to PM2.5 helped cause a combined 8,572 premature deaths in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xi’an in 2012, and led to economic losses of $1.08 billion, according to estimates given in a study by Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health published Dec. 18. The burning of coal is the main source of pollution, accounting for 19 percent, while vehicle emissions contribute 6 percent, the report said.

The link between coal power and pollution is clear to some Chinese residents, despite official news agencies downplaying the choking air as “fog.” Last year, one Chinese village protested a planned coal power plant in their area, worried about the health effects.

But isolated protests haven’t slowed coal power. Earlier today, Chinese stock indices spiked on good economic news — including an increase in electricity consumption. From Business Insider:

Business Insider

[O]n the real economy side of things, there was a very nice reading in Chinese electricity consumption, which correlates nicely to GDP. Per Nomura (which made the chart below) electricity consumption in “secondary industries” grew over 7% yearover-year, which is a strong sign.

The word “nice” in the paragraph above should be understood to refer to economic benefits, not health ones. The description you choose might be different. We recommend: “Crazy Bad.”

NASA

The massive swath of pollution on Saturday covered Beijing (blue circle) and extended south and east.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Silicon Valley’s ‘unbuilt Manhattan’ is best left unbuilt

by gerdi Posted on January 11, 2013

Silicon Valley’s ‘unbuilt Manhattan’ is best left unbuilt

By Susie Cagle

Over the past two decades, an influx of tech money has sent rents in San Francisco skyward. It’s the fastest growing rental market in the country, with the East Bay’s Oakland coming in second. Last year, landlords in San Francisco used the “Ellis Act” to evict three times as many tenants as they had in 2011, in order to circumvent rent control.

Ken Layne at The Awl harkens back to a simpler time when you could rent a studio in SF for less than $2,400, and compares that to now:

In 2013, the bigger tech companies are still in Silicon Valley, but the people working there—from Mark Zuckerberg to the newest $100K hires straight out of college—want to be in San Francisco. Zuckerberg is a part-timer, with a fancy apartment in the Mission. The rest are part-timers in Silicon Valley, commuting to and from work on immense luxury buses run by Google, Apple, EA, Yahoo and the rest. This has caused problems, notably for San Francisco residents unlucky enough to survive on less than a hundred-grand starting salary. Talk of raising the city’s skyline is met with anger. People argue endlessly over the appropriate comparisons to New York. Is Oakland the Brooklyn to SF? What about Berkeley, or Marin, or the Outer Sunset? And what does that make Bayview or Burlingame?

All of this assumes that urban San Francisco equals Manhattan. It does not. San Francisco, with its leafy parks and charming row houses and distinct villages and locavore restaurants and commuters fleeing every morning to work, is the Brooklyn to an as-yet-unbuilt Manhattan.

To some extent, this is true. Many parts of San Francisco have become bedroom communities for tech workers who take company-sponsored shuttles or hellish Caltrain routes to work many miles south, to a place where rents are cheaper, but the living is decidedly suburban. The youngs making six figures at start-ups seem to prefer the hell of Caltrain to the hell of Silicon Valley suburbia.

Nobody wants to move to the Bay Area for work and then discover they actually have to live in a completely different climate an hour’s drive (without traffic) from the actual bay. The magical part of the Bay Area is really confined to the Bay Area, with its relatively green hills and foggy mornings and cool ocean air.

So Layne proposes building dense, walkable, appealing neighborhoods in the bleak, sprawling stretch between San Francisco and Silicon Valley some 40 miles to the south. “[I]n the post-automobile era, where else would you look to expand your metropolitan area other than the underused sections in the middle of your metropolitan area?”

[T]he areas around and in between the tech giants of Silicon Valley are mostly ready to be razed and rebuilt. There are miles and miles of half-empty retail space, hideous 1970s’ two-story apartment complexes, most of it lacking the basic human infrastructure of public transportation, playgrounds, bicycle and running and walking paths, outdoor cafes and blocks loaded with bars and late-night restaurants. This is where the new metropolis must be built, in this unloved but sunny valley…

With local light rail at street level and express trains overhead or underground, the whole route could be lined with native-landscaped sidewalks dotted with pocket parks and filled on both sides with ground-floor retail, farmers markets and nightlife districts around every station. Caltrain already runs just east of Route 82, and BART already reaches south to Millbrae now.

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic calls this “a wisp of a suggestion, an opening statement, perhaps,” but a “fascinating” one.

But as Layne himself notes, people don’t move to the Bay Area because they want to live an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. Even if we brought a Robert Moses-style urban reckoning upon Silicon Valley (an idea that does have its appeal!), why assume the techies would move there?

This is an aggressively naive idea for a region with a dire housing shortage and a serious cultural bias against density. Instead of a Silicon Valley raze-and-rebuild, how about infilling in San Francisco and East Bay cities where young tech workers already want to be anyway? How about rezoning and remaking Oakland and Berkeley’s desolate, unused industrial brownfields along the waterfront? If it can’t be done in the bigger cities, how likely is it to get done in the many suburbs of Silicon Valley? Not likely at all. Much of the Bay Area doesn’t even want more public transportation, let alone more housing density.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of taking a wrecking ball to empty strip malls. But as a Bay Area resident wishing on a star for the region to grow smarter and denser, I see many more worthy routes to take besides bulldozing the ‘burbs, however delicious the thought.

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Happy 25th anniversary, San Jose’s useless light rail!

by donnajansen Posted on January 11, 2013

Happy 25th anniversary, San Jose’s useless light rail!

By Philip Bump

For part of the time that I lived in San Jose, Calif., my apartment was downtown, across the street from a light rail station. I used to take the train to work, which was great for the first 80 percent of the ride: The car was almost always near-empty as it chugged along down the middle of streets, passing dozens of automobiles at each stop light. When I reached the stop closest to my office, I’d get off — and start the 20-minute walk in, having to either walk well out of my way or, if I was in a hurry, dash across a busy highway with no crosswalk. It was an hour’s journey, easily, for a trip that took 10 minutes by car without traffic.

My friend Michael and I took to calling the light rail “the Buzz,” both because it sounded confusingly like “the bus,” which amused us, and because it implied a speedy, futuristic system, which the light rail very much is not. A guy I knew who worked with the union that represented bus and light rail operators called it the “ghost train,” since you’d often see it passing by at night, lit up and empty.

pbumpSprawl in Silicon Valley.

The Atlantic Cities’ Eric Jaffe has a good look at the light rail as it celebrates its 25th anniversary. From his article:

Less than 1 percent of Santa Clara County residents ride [Valley Transportation Authority] light rail; the per-passenger round-trip operating cost is $11.74 and taxpayers subsidize 85 percent of costs — third and second worst in the country, respectively. There are problems with measuring costs per passenger mile on light rail, but ouch. …

In November, [the Mercury News‘ Mike] Rosenberg reported that a VTA plan to extend a light rail line 1.6 miles to Los Gatos, home of Netflix, will cost $175 million while drawing only about 200 new riders. Back in May, a local news station found a culture of fare evasion on VTA that gives the system a rate of 7.2 percent — highest in the region.

Jaffe has a series of quotes from people nearly as dismissive of the light rail as I am above. But one word is curiously missing: density. The problem with the light rail is that it serves a county that is home to one of the least-dense cities in America; San Jose, the nation’s 10th largest city, is not in the top 125 in people per square mile. Offices and strip malls and housing complexes are scattered around the valley floor, the result of City Manager Dutch Hamann‘s ’50s-era small-town-incorporation spree. San Jose contains land extending far beyond what even its now 1 million residents have use for, making a skeletal light rail system like platform sidewalks in a massive bog — barely providing access to anything.

I tried to be a good resident. I tried to give the light rail my business in part because I liked the aesthetic of it. Step out of my apartment and hop the train to work. It’s what I’d do now in hyper-dense Manhattan, if I didn’t work from home. But in San Jose, it didn’t work.

So I did what everyone else does. I got a car.

Source

Silicon Valley Can’t Get Transit Right, The Atlantic Cities

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Big 50-year plan could make Detroit greener and healthier

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on January 10, 2013

Big 50-year plan could make Detroit greener and healthier

By Susie Cagle

Detroit’s city leaders, backed by deep-pocketed foundations, have laid out a new plan for remaking Motor City into a thriving and sustainable metropolis. From Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson:

[P]rops to Mayor Dave Bing and the Detroit Works project he has championed for telling Detroiters the truth about their limited options for redeeming Michigan’s largest city — and reminding them how quickly those options will narrow if Detroit’s elected leaders fail to seize the moment.

The Detroit Future City report unveiled Wednesday is best understood as a municipal triage plan. Squarely confronting the chasm between residents’ expectations and the city’s capacity to meet them, the report’s authors have done their best to apportion the city’s dwindling resources across a sprawling landscape of deprivation. …

Nobody will be forced to move … But if implemented, the Future City plan would codify the tale-of-two-cities scenario that already exists, formalizing the boundary between neighborhoods that retain critical mass and the more sparsely populated hinterlands where the amenities associated with urban living are generally unavailable.

The new Detroit Works Project 50-year plan for the city is sprawling and ambitious, but unlike a lot of huge strategic plans, it actually doesn’t seem completely insane. Put together after hundreds of meetings, thousands of surveys, and tens of thousands of snippets of community input, the 350-page “Detroit Future City” report is full of big, green ideas.

The plan’s recommendations for a future Detroit include building “blue and green infrastructure” to help address water and air-quality issues, creating new open space networks, including local wildlife habitat, and diversifying the city’s public transportation modes. The W.K. Kellogg, Kresge, and Ford Foundations have pledged millions to help the plan become reality.

“This is the most comprehensive framework ever established for an American city,” said Toni Griffin, director of the Technical Planning Team at the Detroit Works Project.

The report calls for adding new, large areas of greenspace, but it’s also emphatic about the need to reuse old buildings (whereas other shrinking cities have taken the approach of knocking them down en masse). From the report:

Vacant land and buildings are among Detroit’s most valuable assets for its future … Turning vacant land from burdens to assets will take more than changes in specific policies and practices. ALL PUBLIC AGENCIES—WHETHER CITY, COUNTY, OR STATE—WILL NEED TO CHANGE HOW THEY THINK ABOUT LAND, AND MAKE EQUALLY FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES TO THE WAY THEY ACQUIRE, MANAGE, AND DISPOSE OF LAND AND BUILDINGS, AND THE WAY OTHER PUBLIC AGENCIES REGULATE THEM. Without such a change in thinking and practice, the inventory of vacant land and buildings in its current condition will not only fail to become an asset, it will continue to act as a roadblock to the implementation of creative strategies for land use, environmental restoration, economic growth and neighborhood revitalization.

Yeah, I’ll get behind any strategic plan for reuse and sustainability that yells at backward-thinking public agencies in bold, all-caps.

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Congress to act on Sandy aid — but grudgingly, late, and with a fraction of what’s needed

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 4, 2013

Congress to act on Sandy aid — but grudgingly, late, and with a fraction of what’s needed

By Philip Bump

Jenna Pope

Within a few hours, the House is expected to finally address aid for Sandy victims, after GOP leadership broke a promise to deal with it on Wednesday. But, true to form, the House is doing as little as possible. And, true to form, because of ongoing inaction, the government will end up losing more money on the deal than it should have.

CNN reports on today’s vote:

The House is poised to vote Friday on a $9.7 billion Superstorm Sandy aid package after delays over fiscal cliff bickering and a warning from federal officials that funds are running out. …

Lawmakers are expected to pass the first portion Friday and weigh in on the remaining $51 billion in broader aid on January 15.

When the House first began poring over the president’s aid proposal, Republicans sniffily insisted that it was too large, that they could only in good conscience allow about half of the $60 billion Obama wanted. You know, because fiscal watchdogs and screw the liberal East Coast and so on. Now, the brand-new 113th Congress will vote on only a fraction of that amount, $9 billion or so to pay flood insurance claims.

The reason that the House is even doing this little is that FEMA is about to go broke. From Reuters:

FEMA has told Congress that unless its borrowing ceiling was raised, “funds available to pay claims will be exhausted sometime around the week of January 7, 2013,” the agency said in a one-sentence statement.

The FEMA program is essentially the only U.S. flood insurer for residences. It has a $20.8 billion ceiling for borrowing authority.

FEMA estimated Sandy-related flood losses of $6 billion to $12 billion in November, far beyond its cash and $3 billion in untapped borrowing authority.

Today’s vote, then, is an emergency step to ensure that FEMA has the money to pay existing claims. As I said: as little as can possibly be done.

But the irony is that, had Congress acted sooner on addressing climate change, FEMA wouldn’t be as strapped as it is. Had Congress years ago addressed the urgent need to update flood insurance premiums, it might not have to take emergency action today, because FEMA would be more appropriately funded.

Last summer, Congress finally approved premium updates, meaning that those in high-risk areas would start paying higher rates. As I wrote at the time:

[G]iven the well-documented rise of sea levels (or whatever the incorrectly political term is), adjusting insurance rates to account for likely flooding will save the government money over the long run.

I’m only good at predicting super-obvious things.

FEMA’s risk map for the hardest-hit area of Staten Island.

Those new, higher rates only kicked in on Tuesday — and, understandably, those whose houses were gutted by Sandy aren’t excited about the prospect.

While many homeowners are beginning to rebuild without any thought to future costs, the changes could propel a demographic shift along the Northeast Coast, even in places spared by the storm, according to federal officials, insurance industry executives and regional development experts. Ronald Schiffman, a former member of the New York City Planning Commission, said that barring intervention by Congress or the states, there would be “a massive displacement of low-income families from their historic communities.”

After weeks of tearing debris from her 87-year-old, two-story house on the bay side of Long Beach, N.Y., Barbara Carman, 59, said she understood the need to stabilize the flood insurance program, but she compared coming premium increases to “kicking people while they’re down.”

Which is lamentable. But it’s also an example of an external cost — the government absorbing the loss when a house is predictably destroyed by a flood — being internalized by the person who chose to live in the high-risk area. Ms. Carman is one of the unfortunate people caught in the transition.

Had Congress acted years ago, however, updating FEMA maps and the concomitant insurance rates, it would have not only lessened the effects of Sandy for people like Barbara Carman, but it would have provided FEMA with more funds to pay out in response. Forethought is not Congress’ forte.

Current American politics being what they are, even today’s small, crucial step is spurring predictable reactions from conservatives, like the troglodytic reactionaries at the anti-everything Club for Growth, who urge Congress to vote no on the proposal.

The House (and then the Senate) will finally take action on Sandy relief today. It will be too little, too late, at a loss, and over inane opposition. Which I probably could have predicted as well.

Update: As expected, it passed the House. The bill will go to the Senate next.

Update: The Senate passed it, too.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Did removing lead from gasoline cause crime rates to plummet?

by olikellopas Posted on January 3, 2013

Did removing lead from gasoline cause crime rates to plummet?

By Philip Bump

Researchers have proposed many theories to explain the huge drop in crime that started in the early 1990s. Some cite the legalization of abortion. Some think maybe it was cell phone use. Rudy Giuliani credits Rudy Giuliani.

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum presents a strong case for another contender: lead.

stevendepolo

The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn’t paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early ’40s through the early ’70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the ’60s through the ’80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early ’90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

Mother Jones

Your first reaction to this may be similar to mine (and to Jess Zimmerman’s) — those graphs are a rough correlation, not a surefire link between lead and crime. Drum addresses that concern by citing research that isolated lead legislation and abatement, sometimes down to a city-block level.

Sure, maybe the real culprit [behind the crime drop] in the United States was something else happening at the exact same time, but what are the odds of that same something happening at several different times in several different countries?

[Economist Rick] Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn’t fit the theory. “No,” he replied. “Not one.”

Just this year, Tulane University researcher Howard Mielke published a paper with demographer Sammy Zahran on the correlation of lead and crime at the city level. They studied six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the ’50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. “When they overlay them with crime maps,” he told me, “they realize they match up.”

Drum then goes one step further, noting that the areas of the brain that lead affects are those that one might associate with criminal behavior: aggressiveness, impulsivity. With that, he rests his argument.

The argument isn’t a new one; we covered it in 2011. The argument presented by Drum is more robust, even if still not entirely persuasive.

The most important point comes last. Lead, in its various forms, is still a widely present pollutant, one that significantly impairs cognition and bone strength, particularly in pregnant women and young children. Regardless of how strong the link between crime and lead, there is a massive health benefit in reducing exposure. There’s an urgent need to curtail ongoing lead pollution.

A decade ago, I worked with a team that did lead abatement, repainting walls covered in lead paint and clearing the dust and chips that had flaked off. Even these small measures were considered to be crucial for the health of the often-low-income kids living in the homes.

Did cutting lead in gasoline spur a huge drop in crime? Possibly. Whether it did or not, there’s nonetheless huge value in removing lead from our environment.

Source

America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead, Mother Jones

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Did removing lead from gasoline cause crime rates to plummet?

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NYC public housing claims it’s going green, but stymies residents’ green efforts

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 3, 2013

NYC public housing claims it’s going green, but stymies residents’ green efforts

By Philip Bump

To its credit, the New York City Housing Authority (popularly known as NYCHA) launched an effort five years ago to “go green.” “NYCHA is going green,” its website announces, by focusing on recycling, energy efficiency, and community gardens.

HLIT

An apartment tower in Ft. Greene.

And the website is about all the help NYCHA is offering to public-housing residents. But as The New York Times reports, “many residents say the agency has failed to follow through. The agency, they say, has not been supportive of residents’ efforts and has in some circumstances stood in their way.”

Residents are encouraged to recycle, but:

[M]ore than half of the 334 public housing projects in the city have no recycling bins, according to agency documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request. That may help explain why the recycling rate is so low in neighborhoods with a large number of public housing projects — in the South Bronx, home to 14 projects, the rate is just under 5 percent.

Margarita López, a New York City Housing Authority commissioner who leads the agency’s environmental initiatives, said the collection rate was low because in most projects it was easier to throw recyclables in the regular trash.

The agency “has chutes in every floor where people put their garbage through that chute, and they do not separate the recycling material,” Ms. López said. “We have no choice but to encourage people to bring the recycling down to the first floor of buildings. We have no choice but to tell people that this is something you must do for the quality of life and for themselves.”

They’re allowed to start gardens, but:

On a recent Saturday, Ashley Paniagua walked down a brick pathway that snaked between the towering Manhattanville Houses in Harlem, and headed toward a small garden she had helped plant months earlier. But the gates to the gardens were locked — the government worker who opened them every morning had yet to do so.

“It’s a lot of politics,” Ms. Paniagua, 26, said. “You’ve got to go through so many people, just to get something simple done.” …

In 2009, when Ms. Paniagua decided to plant gardens on the lawns at the Manhattanville Houses, she said, she had no idea that the process of getting permits and financing would take almost three years.

One resident puts the concerns eloquently:

Nova Strachan, who lives in the Union Avenue Consolidation houses in the Bronx, said that when the agency set up its Web site on environmental sustainability, it installed 178,000 energy-efficient light bulbs throughout the city. Ms. Strachan said she had hoped the agency was beginning to tackle the backlog of repairs and sustainability at the same time. Now, she said, her enthusiasm has waned.

“The whole green thing feels like it was a buzzword,” she said. “It feels like it’s fading out.”

The agency’s “green” page suggests another way in which its efforts haven’t come to fruition. A May 2011 entry is titled, “Rockaway Residents Learn How to Weather the Storm,” emphasizing how to prepare for bad weather. As the response to Hurricane Sandy showed, NYCHA didn’t exactly back up that information, either.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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NYC public housing claims it’s going green, but stymies residents’ green efforts

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Fiscal-cliff deal ups tax benefit for transit riders

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 3, 2013

Fiscal-cliff deal ups tax benefit for transit riders

By Susie Cagle

FISCAL CLIFF TRIGGER WARNING! Obviously there’s a lot to be annoyed about in this deal, but there are a few bright spots that aren’t getting much attention. Renewed tax credits for wind energy are cool, and even more people will benefit from a near-doubling of a tax benefit for transit riders.

The benefit is basically a tiny tax shelter for the dollars you’re spending on public transportation, available if your employer participates in a federal program. On Dec. 31, 2011, that shelter was shrunk from $230 a month to $125, while the benefit for people who drive to work and pay for parking was increased from $230 to $240 — meaning the government was incentivizing people to drive instead of take public transit. Now, thanks to the fiscal-cliff deal, tax benefits for transit takers and car parkers will be equalized — both will get a benefit of up to $240 a month.

From Transportation Nation:

Transit advocates hailed the legislation. “We’ve been pushing for transit equity for months,” said Rob Healy, vice president of the American Public Transportation Association. “From our perspective, we felt it was very, very important that the federal tax code not bias one mode versus another.” He added: “You shouldn’t be making your choices based on a tax code which treats parking better than it does transit.”

This should take a bit of the sting out of new fare hikes going into effect for transit systems (at least if you have a job …). That is, it’ll take the sting out for 2013. Because here’s the bad news, transportation lovers: This is only a one-year extension, set to expire on Dec. 31 unless it’s renewed.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Fiscal-cliff deal ups tax benefit for transit riders

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