Tag Archives: city

Instead of Trashing Homeless Camps, This City is Providing Them With Trash Pickup

by LauriElliot Posted on January 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s cleaning time at one of the several encampments set up in the shadow of the elevated MacArthur Freeway in West Oakland, California. More than two dozen tents in various states of repair sit in the musty space beneath the stark overpass. Axel, a black man in his late 40s who lives along the camp’s outskirts, pushes a broom across the sidewalk that serves as a front porch for his tarp-draped tent. After a few minutes of sweeping, the trash he has arranged into a neat pile is collected by Abby Harrison, who places it into one of the five shiny Waste Management trash cans circulating in the camp. In a little while, the cans will be arranged on the street bordering the camp’s southern edge, where they will wait to be emptied by a garbage truck.

The cleanup continues by the camp’s two portable toilets, where a man is gathering used toiletries for disposal and clearing the path for a pumper truck to back in. The truck arrives a few minutes ahead of schedule, and the driver hops out to quickly clean and service the porta-potties. The driver is gone after a few minutes of pumping and wiping, much to the relief of another man patiently waiting to use the facilities.

In many respects, this homeless encampment is like hundreds of other camps that have mushroomed in cities across America, especially in the West. But what distinguishes the camp beneath the 580 freeway is that rather than being targeted for removal, it’s receiving public services from the city of Oakland. Instead of razing the encampment, Oakland and Alameda County policymakers set up a pilot program that offers basic services to some unsheltered residents. This includes not just waste pickup and porta-potties, but a mobile health clinic and the placement of large concrete barriers to protect the camp from traffic. Oakland has also directed its social services and relief employees to work with the residents of the MacArthur Freeway camp to help them find permanent housing. Since the pilot started in October, city officials report that 17 of the camp’s 42 original residents have moved into stable living situations.

Garbage cans sit by an encampment beneath the MacArthur Freeway in Oakland. Matt Tinoco

This approach is unique, especially as many cities double down on anti-camping laws and controversial “sweeps”, often conducted under the guise of protecting public health. The process is familiar: Homeless people set up a camp, bringing with it trash, human waste, and sometimes crime. Neighbors complain, and, before long, the local government serves the camp’s residents with a notice to vacate. The camp is cleared, but it either moves or returns after a few weeks.

San Francisco’s municipal authorities cleared out a large camp of 250 people from beneath one of the city’s freeways earlier this year. In November, the city’s voters passed Proposition Q, which prohibits assembling a tent on a public sidewalk. As Supervisor David Campos explained in a September statement, “encampments are not a solution to homelessness. They are unhealthy for homeless people, and they are unhealthy for residents and businesses around them.” Yet homelessness advocates note that clearing out camps is often little more than a cosmetic solution.

Like Oakland, other cities have also experimented with an approach that moves away from simply removing homeless people. Though sweeps still occur in Seattle, the city has set up a partnership with religious organizations that allows some homeless people to live on the organizations’ property. (Nevertheless, 2015 motion that would have authorized city services like waste pickup at encampments died after Seattle residents objected.) Santa Barbara, California, has a “safe-parking” program that allows people who live in vehicles to park in public parking lots without threat of citation.

The Oakland pilot project is based on the understanding that if unsheltered residents have, at the very least, a reliable and sanitary place to pitch their tents, they can devote more time and energy to finding a more stable place to live. “Breaking camps apart takes them farther away from permanent housing,” says Alex Marqusee, a legislative analyst for City Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney, the chief sponsor of the project in Oakland. “It’s opposite of the direction we want to go.”

“It’s like, where am I going to go?'” says Harrison, a black woman in her early 40s who lives under the MacArthur Freeway. “When I have to move it messes everything up. I get them people up in their nice houses not wanting to see any of this. I don’t want to see this. But I need to live, and it’s not like I want to live here.”

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Instead of Trashing Homeless Camps, This City is Providing Them With Trash Pickup

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Portland says no way to new fossil fuel infrastructure.

by MarionAwe7 Posted on December 15, 2016

Oregon’s largest city became the first in the nation to ban the building of major fossil fuel terminals and the expansion of existing ones after a unanimous city council vote on Wednesday.

The city council used zoning codes to enact the ban, which will go into effect in January, and will prevent the construction of any new terminals for transporting or storing coal, methanol, natural gas, and oil. Other West Coast cities made similar moves earlier this year: Vancouver, Washington, banned new oil terminals and Oakland, California, banned coal terminals.

In the wake of the Trump election, it’s clear that the federal government won’t be taking climate action, so environmentalists are increasingly looking to cities to adopt climate change–fighting policies — and those cities might want to follow Portland’s lead.

“What we’ve done in Portland is replicable now in other cities,” Portland Mayor Charlie Hales told InsideClimate News. “Everybody has a zoning code.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is also encouraging cities to take action. “Mayors and local leaders around the country are determined to keep pushing ahead on climate change,” he wrote recently, “because it is in their interest to do so.” It’s also in all of ours.

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Portland says no way to new fossil fuel infrastructure.

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How Good Is Flint’s Water These Days?

by Porfirio07K Posted on November 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week a federal judge in Michigan ordered the state to deliver four cases of bottled water each week to families in Flint that need it. On Thursday, the state asked the judge to stay his order, arguing that the court order would “require a ‘Herculean effort’ equivalent to a large-scale military operation and cost the state at least $10.45 million a month, or $125 million annually.” This prompted a reader to ask me what was up. Is Flint’s water still unsafe to drink?

I haven’t checked in on Flint since June, so I figured maybe it was time for an update. I brought up the latest testing results and created a new data point for the past two months, and then added the data point to my old chart using the same metric as always. Here it is:

That’s…not bad.1 Using a different measure, it turns out that about 6 percent of Flint homes were over the EPA’s “action limit” of 15 ppb and 1 percent were way over. That’s not great, obviously, but not catastrophic either. The catch is that presumably these measurements were all taken with water filters in place, and the judge’s ruling applied only to homes without filters:

The city is not required to deliver water to residents whose homes have properly installed and working filters, are unoccupied or decline the service. Judge Lawson also ordered that officials provide information in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hmong, to residents about lead levels of city water and how to install filters that properly reduce the contamination.

….Flint had fought the request for deliveries of water, arguing that residents had sufficient access to clean water from distribution centers throughout Flint and at home using filters that the city provided. Judge Lawson disagreed. Residents struggled to properly install the filters because of language barriers, old age, cognitive barriers or a lack of necessary tools, the judge said. Others struggled to retrieve water even from the distribution centers.

I guess I’m a little puzzled. If Flint is getting good results even though lots of homes don’t have working filters, then its water is in pretty good shape and the judge might be overreacting. However, if it’s getting these results because most homes do have working filters, then the judge’s order wouldn’t be all that burdensome and it’s not clear why the state is fighting it. Perhaps someone with deeper knowledge of what’s going on will weigh in on this.

1There’s a broader measure of blood lead levels that looks oddly high, but the entire state of Michigan looks oddly high. I’m not sure what to make of it.

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How Good Is Flint’s Water These Days?

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Long Haul Truck Drivers Are Scarily Close to Being Put Out of Business

by UnitedCashLoans Posted on October 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, a self-driving truck delivered 50,000 cans of Budweiser from Loveland to Colorado Springs. This was obviously meant as a big FU to Coors, since the route “coincidentally” took all this frosty Bud right past Coors headquarters in Golden, Colorado. Most people, however, are interpreting this event as merely technological: it represents the dawn of the era of self-driving trucks. Tim Lee comments:

According to Otto’s blog post on the trip, “our professional driver was out of the driver’s seat for the entire 120-mile journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system from the sleeper berth in the back.”

But this doesn’t mean the nation’s truck drivers need to start working on their résumés. Technology like this may eventually displace human truck drivers, but the tech is several years away from causing mass unemployment. The key reason is that Otto’s self-driving technology is initially limited to highways. When the truck reaches ordinary city streets, it hands control over to a human driver to handle tricky traffic situations. This means that even after a truck is outfitted with Otto’s self-driving technology, it will still need a human driver in the truck.

Hmmm. “Several years” sounds ominously near-term, so truck drivers might want to start worrying about their jobs right now. Beyond that, there’s a way this could put truckers out of business well before that. Here’s how.

Pick a route that has a lot of truck traffic. Let’s say, Chicago to Cleveland. Outside of each city, you build a big truck depot and dispatch center. In Chicago, teamsters drive the trucks from the city out to the depot. Autopilots drive the trucks to the Cleveland depot, where a driver gets in and takes the truck to its destination. Rinse and repeat. The job of a truck driver is to drive back and forth from destinations in the city out to the depot, which they can do five or six times a day. Trucking firms save a ton of money even though the autopilot is designed for highway driving only.

Building the depots would be cheap and easy, since you don’t really need much there. It’s basically just a dispatch center. You could pretty easily have hundreds of them dotted across the country near all of our biggest cities. The only thing that would stop this from happening is the knowledge that they’ll only last a few years before they’re put out of business by fully automated trucks that can go from dock to dock with no human intervention. Either way, truck drivers are in big trouble.

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Long Haul Truck Drivers Are Scarily Close to Being Put Out of Business

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An alternative timeline of what the Clinton-Trump debates could have been.

by JamilaChery743 Posted on October 20, 2016

Lower-income communities are getting shut out from bike-sharing programs, and New York City is an especially bad culprit.

The problem with Citibike, New York City’s program, is that it’s largely inaccessible in low-income neighborhoods, writes Noah Zuss on City & State New York, a local politics and policy website.

You can’t find Citibike stations in vast swaths of the city. The Bronx, the country’s poorest urban county, has none. Most of blue-collar Queens is also ignored, as is Manhattan’s least-affluent portion north of 110th Street.

The other problem is cost. Citbike runs $12 per day. It’s $14.95 a month for an annual membership, but you need to have a credit or debit card to sign up, which excludes many low-income New Yorkers. Even Citibike’s discount program for public-housing residents requires a credit or debit card.

It’s a similar story in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Denver: Bike-sharing programs are disproportionately used by affluent white people. Cities have responded with subsidized discount memberships for lower-income residents without much success yet.

What’s the solution? Last month, a report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials suggested month-to-month memberships and cash payments to make bike-sharing more accessible.

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An alternative timeline of what the Clinton-Trump debates could have been.

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Gary Johnson has an out-of-this-world plan to save us from climate change.

by CarmineLawler84 Posted on September 26, 2016

This week, cities mark World Car-Free Day, an annual event to promote biking, walking, mass transit, and other ways to get around sans motor vehicles (Solowheel, anyone?).

Technically, World Car-Free Day was Thursday, September 22, but participating cities are taking the “eh, close enough” approach to get their car-free kicks in on the weekend. Said cities include Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Brussels, Bogotá, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Paris, where nearly half the city center will be closed to vehicle traffic on Sunday.

But going car-free, municipally speaking, is becoming more of a regular trend than an annual affair: Mexico City closes 35 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday; the Oslo city government proposed a ban on private vehicles in the city center after 2019; and in Paris, the government is allowed to limit vehicles if air pollution rises above health-threatening levels.

But even if your city isn’t officially participating in World Car-Free Day, you can be the change you want to see in your own metropolis. And by that, we mean: Just leave your keys at home. Horrible, no good things happen in cars.

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Gary Johnson has an out-of-this-world plan to save us from climate change.

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These Stats Show Why Milwaukee Was Primed to Explode

by FredricSkeats Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Milwaukee’s mayor imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on Monday and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker activated the National Guard in response to weekend rioting sparked by Saturday’s fatal police shooting of an armed black man, 23-year-old Sylville Smith. The unrest, in which protesters torched multiple businesses and police cars and at least one person was shot, was the second wave of major protests since December 2014, when a county prosecutor declined to file charges against police in the fatal shooting of another black man, Dontre Hamilton. But while anger over such police shootings may have set off the mayhem, decades of unemployment, segregated housing, substandard schools, and racist policing set the stage for Milwaukee to blow. Indeed, the city has earned itself a reputation as the worst place to be black in America. Here’s why:

Concentrated poverty: Milwaukee is one of the nation’s most segregated cities, with black residents—40 percent of the population—living almost exclusively on the city’s north side. Milwaukee is also America’s second poorest major city, in a state that in 2014 had the nation’s highest black unemployment rate. A third of its black residents live in “extreme poverty,” defined as a household with an income less than half that deemed appropriate by the federal government for a family of its size—and 40 percent live below the poverty line. This is partly because the region’s jobs are concentrated in three white suburbs that are all but inaccessible by public transportation. The WOW counties, as these suburbs are known, are at least 94 percent white, and just 1 to 2 percent black.

Failing schools: Milwaukee’s public schools are doing a poor job of educating their students. During the 2013-14 academic year, Milwaukee had the nation’s largest black-white gap in graduation rates, and K-12 test scores were abysmal.

Most black kids in Milwaukee attend highly segregated public schools. According to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Mark Levine, roughly three out of four attends a high-poverty institution where 90 percent of the students are black. And when those kids misbehave, schools are quick to dole out suspensions. In 2011-12, Wisconsin led the nation in suspending black high schoolers, thanks largely to excessive suspension rates in Milwaukee. (If you want to understand why suspensions are bad, and how children can be disciplined more effectively, read this piece.)

Mass incarceration: Black men in Milwaukee are incarcerated at the highest rate in the nation. In 2013, according to UW researchers, one in eight were locked up, and by the time the men hit their 30s and 40s, more than half have served time. Two-thirds of the incarcerated men came from six of the city’s poorest zip codes, including those for Sherman Park, the neighborhood where the most recent police killing took place. Another of the zip codes (53206) has the highest black male incarceration rate in America—62 percent, according to another UW study. (A documentary on that community is due out later this year.) So many Milwaukeeans have criminal records, one ex-offender told NPR, that police routinely ask the people they pull over whether they’re on probation. Wisconsin spends more on corrections than on higher education. And to top it off, just 10 percent of black men with a criminal record in Wisconsin have a valid drivers license—which makes it tough to secure jobs and services. (The sheriff of Milwaukee County recently called the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization.)

How it got this bad: Black people moved to Milwaukee in large numbers beginning in the 1960s—later than many blacks who left the South inhabited other Rust Belt cities such as Chicago and Detroit during the Great Migration. White immigrant communities in Milwaukee fiercely resisted integration in housing and schools, and when the city’s manufacturing industry collapsed shortly after blacks arrived, massive racial disparities sprang up in employment, housing, and education. Milwaukee also was hit harder by globalization and by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs than other major urban centers, an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found. Black men suffered a drop in employment during this period that was more than twice what the nation endured during the Great Depression. White residents fled to the suburbs, taking their resources with them, and little has improved since. Decades of tensions between police and the city’s black communities helped fuel this latest flareup.

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These Stats Show Why Milwaukee Was Primed to Explode

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Flint’s lead-poisoned water cost the city nearly 100 times as much as it was supposed to save

by LupeWhitelegge Posted on August 9, 2016

I’ve Made A Huge Mistake

Flint’s lead-poisoned water cost the city nearly 100 times as much as it was supposed to save

By on Aug 9, 2016Share

The Flint water crisis wasn’t just terrible for the thousands of its residents who were exposed to lead. It’s also been bad for the city’s coffers — really bad.

According to Peter Muennig from Columbia University’s School of Public Health, switching the water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint river — a move that was intended to save the city $5 million — will actually cost the city nearly $460 million.

That figure doesn’t just cover emergency water and medical care — it includes social costs, including “lower economic productivity, greater dependence on welfare programs, and greater costs to the criminal justice system,” as James Hamblin points out in The Atlantic.

Young people are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, which has serious consequences on developing brains and can result in intellectual disabilities and anti-social behavior. And state officials have advised that all children under six in Flint – an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 kids – should be treated as though they’ve been exposed.

Two years after the lead crisis started, the water in Flint is still unsafe to drink without a filter.

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Flint’s lead-poisoned water cost the city nearly 100 times as much as it was supposed to save

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Extreme heat is exhausting and expensive

by EarnestTrumbo Posted on July 21, 2016

cool it

Extreme heat is exhausting and expensive

By on Jul 21, 2016Share

It’s July, the month where the whole world collectively reaches for the nearest chilled beverage. Work be damned: Hordes of city-dwellers are relocating to the seaside, celebrities frolic in Ibiza, and most of us in the continental United States are tethered to the air conditioner right now.

Just kidding — first-world problems are the least of our worries in the middle of this 14-month global heat streak. It turns out that increasingly hot summers are going to wreak total havoc on some countries’ GDP, as excessively high temperatures make working during peak daylight hours impossible.

According to a just-released United Nations study, poorer workers and manual laborers are especially affected by heat stress. In developing countries, fewer working hours can translate into serious economic strain. In Southeast Asia, heat is already cutting work hours by 15 to 20 percent. By 2050, that number could be as high as 40 percent.

“It’s a whole working month that would be lost because it’s so hot you can’t work,” the report’s coauthor Tord Kjellstrom told the Washington Post. If global warming continues at its current rate, extreme heat could cost global economies $2 trillion by 2030.

Though excess heat primarily affects poor or middle-income countries, the report also notes that more prosperous countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Russia could see their working hours impacted by extreme winters.

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Extreme heat is exhausting and expensive

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North Carolina Doesn’t Want You to See Footage From Its Police Body Cameras

by ToniaR25ivfco Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Amid a resurgence of nationwide protests sparked by smartphone videos of police shootings of black men, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law on Monday a bill that will severely restrict public access to footage from police body camera and dash cams.

House Bill 972 requires a court order before any such footage may be released to journalists or members of the public, which also means that police departments cannot voluntarily release footage without a judge’s approval. Under the new law, police chiefs get the final say on whether or not people caught on camera—or their lawyers—will be allowed to view the relevant footage. If the chief says no, the subject will have to successfully sue the department to gain access.

The law’s passage is sure to rankle some Black Lives Matter activists, who have repeatedly called for even greater access to police video footage in the wake of disputed police shootings of black subjects. Gov. McCrory said he signed the bill to “ensure transparency,” and that while recordings of police interactions with the community could be helpful, they can also “mislead and misinform.” In drafting the bill, McCrory added, lawmakers grappled with how technology “can help us, and how can we work with it so it doesn’t also work against our police officers.”

Susanna Birdsong, director of the North Carolina ACLU, believes the new law will hurt—not help—transparency in policing. “There really should be some minimum guarantee of access to the recordings by someone other than the police,” she told me.

People involved in incidents recorded by the police, as well as their attorneys, should be able to view the footage without exception, Birdsong says. And law enforcement agencies should have protocols in place for the timely release of footage when it’s in the public interest—for example, in cases in which officers use physical force to subdue a person. The process, she adds, should not require any court’s approval.

The law, Birdsong adds, could have consequences for reporting on law enforcement. Before, a news organization could go directly to a local police department to request access to footage or put pressure on city officials to make it happen, but now “that avenue is foreclosed.”

The bill’s primary sponsors were Reps. John Faircloth, Allen McNeil, and Pat Hurley. (Faircloth is a former police chief while McNeil was once a sheriff’s deputy.) The legislation was crafted at the urging of the Legislative Committee on Justice and Public Safety, a bipartisan panel convened earlier this year to consider criminal justice issues. The committee heard from civil rights groups, community organizers, and law enforcement before announcing its findings in June. Among the recommendations: The state should pass an act providing that police camera footage is not part of the public record.

The bill’s authors, according to Birdsong, were lobbied by law enforcement groups, including the North Carolina Sheriffs Association and the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police. And while the advisory committee heard from the ACLU and others who opposed such a recommendation, the authors consulted with few nonpolice stakeholders on their bill’s language. “The language in the bill very much reflects that,” Birdsong says. (None of the bill’s key sponsors responded to requests for comment.)

New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Louisiana also recently passed laws restricting public access to police body-cam footage. But many jurisdictions provide reasonable access to such recordings, Birdsong told me. Consider Chicago’s new effort in transparent policing, created in the wake of heavy criticism of city officials for their handling of police videos. In May, the city’s police review board launched a database of audio and video recordings, police reports, and other documents related to more than 100 open investigations into misconduct by officers. The database, which is accessible to the public, includes more than 300 videos from body cameras, police dash cams, and cellphones.

At least one North Carolina police chief thinks his state’s new law is a bad idea. “I would rather let our video tell the story—good, bad or indifferent—than someone who has a cellphone who has the opportunity to edit it,” Fayettevile police chief Harold Medlock told the Charlotte Observer. “Sometimes we do ourselves a great disservice by not disclosing as much information as we can.”

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North Carolina Doesn’t Want You to See Footage From Its Police Body Cameras

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