Tag Archives: city

The Rent Is Too Damn High in San Francisco, and It’s Putting People on the Street

by BridgetteKesteve Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new report shows that San Francisco is still struggling to house its homeless. According to the 2015 Point in Time Count—an in-person tally conducted in cities around the country every two years—the city’s homeless population has remained roughly constant over the past decade, even as the numbers of chronically homeless people continue to decline. This shift, homeless advocates say, points to a disturbing link between homelessness and the skyrocketing cost of housing in the city.

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From 2013 to 2015, San Francisco’s homeless population increased by around 200 people to a total of 6,686. The number of chronically homeless has, however, decreased by 12 percent since 2013 and has fallen close to 60 percent in the past six years. (Chronically homeless refers to those who have spent more than a year on the streets, often with a disabling condition like mental illness or substance abuse.) Close to half of the homeless people surveyed by the city said they lost their housing because they could not afford rent; an additional 17 percent said they could not find housing.

“Housing instability is a trend we have been hearing a lot about nationwide, particularly in high-cost areas like San Francisco,” says Elina Bravve, a Senior Research Analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), an advocacy and research organization. After the recession, she explains, more people began renting. Now higher-income renters are driving up demand and price. “That puts a lot of pressure on the low-income market,” she says. “It is definitely a problem that will continue over the next few decades.”

According to a NLIHC report released earlier this year, a person needs to make more than to $31 an hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city and around $40 an hour for a two-bedroom. At $12.21 an hour, the local minimum wage is higher than average but it doesn’t even come close. The problem isn’t limited to expensive cities. The same NLIHC report finds that the 2015 national “Housing Wage” for a two-bedroom apartment is $19.35—more than double the federal minimum wage and far out of reach for renters earning the average wage of $15.16.

The Obama administration has set a goal of eradicating chronic homelessness by 2017. But Bravve says fixes for the non-chronic homeless population are subject to the ebbs and flows of political will, especially when budgets are tight and most federal and local programs don’t target this population. In Los Angeles County, for example, rental prices have risen more four times faster than wages since 2000. The LA Times reported in January that city funding for affordable homes had fallen by $82 million between 2008 and 2014. In May, the county’s count found a 12 percent increase in its homeless population. It also found an 86 percent spike in numbers of tents, makeshift shelters, or people sleeping in vehicles, which it attributed in part to housing affordability.

Chronic homelessness is declining largely because of the effectiveness of “Housing First” programs that provide permanent housing to individuals who need the most (and most expensive) services. The strategy, which enabled Utah to house nearly all of its chronically homeless people can also provides a huge boon to local budget, saving around $43,000 a year per person.

However, this strategy isn’t designed to help low-income people who are not chronically homeless. Housing First’s savings start to dry up when it comes to housing people who don’t require the same level of services. This is one reason why analysts like Bravve emphasize the need for cities to invest in affordable housing. In San Francisco, she says, that doesn’t just mean increasing the supply of housing but “preserving what already exists and making sure that it doesn’t end up turning into condos.” The Housing Balance Report, released last week, showed that even though the city built thousands of new affordable housing units between 2004 and 2014, it only had a net gain of more than 1,100 new affordable units.

Just south of San Francisco, Santa Clara County has made housing affordability a priority—and it has paid off. Like San Francisco, the home of Silicon Valley has one of the most expensive rental markets in the nation. The wages necessary to rent a typical one-bedroom are close to three times as much as the local minimum wage. San Jose, like San Francisco, ranks among the top ten cities with the highest numbers of homeless people.

But this year, San Jose saw a 15 percent drop in its homeless population. “San Jose has been a leader in building affordable housing over the past 15 years,” says Ray Bramson, the homeless response manager for the San Jose Department of Housing. “We have 17,000 units in our portfolio and we have great low-income housing for working families and folks who need support in the community.” With more than 6,500 people still on the streets, he says the city remains committed to creating more affordable housing.

This year the county has issued 1,000 project-based vouchers that provide funds for contractors to produce affordable housing units, is working to convert more hotels and motels into low-income housing, and is looking into models like temporary tiny homes to house people coming off the streets, while more units are being built. It also invested $91.5 million in on housing and homeless services, and an earmarked an additional $6.7 million specifically for permanent supportive housing.

They still have a long way to go—more than 6,500 people are still without homes. But Bramson says the numbers show that the strategies are working. “I think if we can show that we can create affordability in a community like San Jose and areas of Silicon Valley,” he says, “we have great potential to house people anywhere in this country.”

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The Rent Is Too Damn High in San Francisco, and It’s Putting People on the Street

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Today’s Proposal In Legislative Transparency: You Amend It, You Own It

by MargieIGTj Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week Wisconsin Republicans tried to sneak language into a budget bill that would have gutted the state’s open records law. Sadly for them, they got caught and had to withdraw the proposal—which, Gov. Scott Walker hastily assured us, “was never intended to inhibit transparent government in any way.” Uh huh.

This kind of sleazy behavior is hardly uncommon, but there’s one bit of it that’s equally common and even sleazier:

State Republicans have refused to disclose who inserted the language into the budget legislation, which was approved late Thursday evening. Before dropping the provisions entirely, the governor’s office said Friday it was considering changes to the proposals concerning public records law, but would not comment as to whether Walker was involved in the proposals in the first place.

Here’s my proposal for transparency in legislating: every change in every law has to be attributed to someone. There’s no virgin birth here. Someone wrote this language. Someone asked that it be inserted. Someone agreed to insert it. You have to be pretty contemptuous of your constituents to clam up and pretend that no one knows where it came from.

This kind of puerile buck-passing is way too common, and it needs to stop. Maybe if they knew their name was going to be attached, legislators would think twice before inserting egregiously self-serving crap like this.

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Today’s Proposal In Legislative Transparency: You Amend It, You Own It

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There Are Things That Erode Public Trust in Science. Primordial Gravity Waves Aren’t One of Them.

by EliseRussel Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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I had to laugh just a little when I read this last night:

Jan Conrad, an astroparticle physicist, claims that “The field has cried wolf too many times and lost credibility,” and he worries that false discoveries are undermining public trust in science. He lists some dubious results which have caused a stir amongst physicists and the general public over the past couple of years, including the faster-than-light-neutrinos that weren’t, the primordial gravitational waves that are probably just dust, and several Dark Matter candidates which remain shrouded in uncertainty and contradiction.

When nutritionists constantly change their minds about what’s good or bad for us, that undermines public trust in science. This is because everyone eats, and stories about diet and nutrition are plastered all over TV, social media, blogs, magazines, newspapers, and every other form of human communication.

But those primordial gravitational waves that are probably just dust? I’m here to assure you that 99.9 percent of the world doesn’t give a shit. Most people have never heard of it. Most of the ones who have heard of it don’t understand it. And almost by definition, most of the ones who do understand it have a pretty sophisticated understanding of the conditional nature of delicately measured new results in fields like astrophysics.

So put me in the camp with Jon Butterworth, who wrote the linked article, and Chad Orzel, who argue that the very fact of releasing preliminary results and then correcting them if they turn out to be wrong is what distinguishes science from pseudoscience. Nor, as Butterworth points out, would it help to keep results under wraps until everything is neat and tidy. “As I said at the time regarding the false faster-than-light neutrinos, imagine the conspiracy claims if the data had been suppressed because it didn’t fit Einstein’s theory.”

All true. But really, the most important thing is simply that controversies on the bleeding edge of physics are of interest to only a tiny fraction of humanity, and most of them already know when and how to be skeptical. As for the rest of us, we just turn on our cell phones every day and marvel at how cool science is. Nothing about neutrinos or gravitational waves is going to change that.

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There Are Things That Erode Public Trust in Science. Primordial Gravity Waves Aren’t One of Them.

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How smart meters are helping California save water

by Arielle8806 Posted on June 16, 2015

How smart meters are helping California save water

By on 15 Jun 2015commentsShare

“The sprinklers were running so hard at a McDonalds in Long Beach, California, recently that water was pooling up and running into the streets,” noted tattletale Wired reported earlier today. It’s not clear what running “so hard” means in the context of sprinklers — perhaps just that they were on for a long time when they didn’t need to be? Regardless, McDonalds: Relax. No one’s going there for the grass.

As #DroughtShaming has made clear, overwatering is a cardinal sin in California these days, which is why McDonalds’ own employees reported the burger pusher to the city of Long Beach (a tip of the visor to you, brave insurgents). But as Wired reports, so-called smart meters that track real time water use could help cities catch irresponsible users in the act without having to rely on third party informants:

After employees reported McDonalds for water usage violations, the Water Department installed a meter at the restaurant that reports water usage over the web every five minutes. Not only did this provide the city with the proof it needed to fine the restaurant, it also provided McDonald’s with data it could use to clean up its act.

McD’s isn’t the only one in Long Beach getting an upgrade. Since April, the city has installed about 225 smart meters at both residential and commercial locations, Rachel Davis, an operations analyst at the Long Beach Water Department, said over the phone. The meters record data every five minutes and send a report of the day’s readings out once every night, Davis said. The hope is that this constant stream of data will help people conserve water and spot leaks better than they could using old analog meters. Here’s more from Wired:

Traditional water meters essentially provide a running tally of how much water a customer has used. Your bill is based on your current total, minus last month’s total. The utility has no idea how much water you actually use on a day-to-day basis, let alone what time of day you use the most water. But to enforce water restrictions, utilities need to know exactly that. The Long Beach Water Department is one of a small but growing number of utilities turning to electronic “smart” meters to solve the problem.

These smart meters seem like a no-brainer for utilities that might otherwise send workers around to check meters manually, but the required infrastructure can make the shift intimidating. Long Beach found a way around that problem:

For its pilot program, Long Beach turned to a smart meter company called T2. The company’s meters are powered by batteries the company claims can last at least ten years, saving utilities from having to run electricity to the meters. They communicate wirelessly over Verizon’s cellular data network, which means utilities don’t have to install network infrastructure. And the company provides a web-based analytics service to both utilities and customers that allows them to visualize their water usage. The City of Long Beach didn’t need to write code, or even buy servers, since the whole thing is hosted on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.

Still, transitioning to a smart meter system is expensive. The actual meters stay the same, Davis said, but replacing the analog “meter register” on top of the meter to a digital one that can connect to the wireless network costs about 300 dollars.

It’s too early to report any overall changes in water use since installing the meters, Davis said, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they can help people conserve water. One woman, for example, cut her water bill by more than 80 percent after uncovering a massive leak beneath the foundation of her house, Davis said.

Not to rain on Long Beach’s parade (although I’m sure they’d appreciate the water), but California golden child San Francisco is already way ahead of the curve on this one. When San Fran’s water meters were due for an upgrade six years ago, the water department decided to go all in on smart meters. According to Greentech Media, the new system cost about twice as much as the old system, but the city can now collect water use data every few hours, and if an abnormality shows up for more than three days, the city will call and send a postcard to the source, warning of a possible leak (they hope to eventually make this alert system automatic and digital).

So far, only about 6 percent of customers in San Francisco actually use the web portal that allows them to track real-time consumption. “Even so,” Greentech Media reports, “the water agency credits the portal with being one of the tools that helped San Francisco achieve an additional 8 percent water savings last summer, on top of about 20 percent in the past decade.”

According to Wired, severe blackouts in the early 2000s led to the widespread use of smart electric meters throughout California, so maybe this drought will do the same for smart water meters.

That said, a note to all the underpaid and miserable employees of California: If you get a chance to rat out your employers for wasting water, do it now before smart meters ruin everything!

Source:
Smart Meters Snitch on Water Wasters in a Drought


, Wired.

Smart Water Meters Gain Traction in Drought-Ridden California

, Greentech Media.

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How smart meters are helping California save water

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What if we banned street harassment? Buenos Aires might

by IvanTribolet Posted on June 11, 2015

What if we banned street harassment? Buenos Aires might

By on 11 Jun 2015commentsShare

Perhaps you have thought to yourself, after the eighth time in one week that a rando on the street loudly shared how he felt about your ass: It would be nice if there were a way to remedy this situation — even better if it does not involve me losing my mind and shoving this man into oncoming traffic! Here’s some good news: There are two proposed bills in Buenos Aires that would make catcalling illegal.

As a former resident of Buenos Aires, I can confirm that street harassment in the city is relentless and inescapable. The Spanish word for catcalls — piropos — sounds really fun and cute! But in practice, piropo culture victimizes women on the streets of their own city, and its effects are very, very real. I do not exaggerate when I say that I did not once walk outside of my apartment without having a stranger let me know, in no uncertain terms, exactly what he thought of my body. On the plus side, I got a crash course in Spanish dirty talk — ask me what quiero romperte la concha means (or don’t)! — but on the downside, I felt angry and helpless pretty much all the time!

From CityLab:

If passed, the new city laws would create a framework for women’s complaints about sexual harassment in public places to be taken seriously, according to lawmakers. They would apply a wide-ranging definition of verbal sexual harassment; one of the proposals targets lascivious looks, whistles, kisses, honking car horns, panting, indirect sexual comments, and photographing intimate body parts without consent.

Including all these possible piropos is critical to understanding such behavior and allowing women to legally fight back, said city lawmaker Gabriel Fuks, who co-presented one of the bills. He emphasized the importance of creating a protocol for the city’s police to process such reports, which will obligate officers to respond less skeptically than they do now, he said.

There’s been some discussion of outlawing street harassment in some cities in the United States (Kansas City, Mo. passed an ordinance against it last fall), against which there are essentially two arguments: 1) Outlawing catcalling infringes upon the right to free speech; and 2) Criminalizing catcalling doesn’t actually do anything to address a culture that condones the objectification of women. To which I say: 1) Fuck you (that’s my right to free speech!); and 2) That’s true, but it’s a step in the right direction to punish something that has a detrimental effect on a community.

For the Spanish-speakers out there (¡hola!), this is a fantastic bit on street harassment from the Argentine sketch comedy group Cualca:

Source:
Buenos Aires Wants to Outlaw Street Harassment of Women

, CityLab.

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What if we banned street harassment? Buenos Aires might

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Editor of Leading Conservative Magazine Declares That "Some Black Lives Don’t Matter" to Activists

by SamualDRDlzfqmb Posted on May 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rich Lowry, editor of National Review magazine, has a plan for restoring stability to America’s currently troubled inner cities: Arrest and imprison more black people. It’s basically a long-running conservative argument, but can we get real for a minute about how he’s making it?

Here’s the profoundly cynical and callous way that he’s decided to tweak some social media language to argue in Politico that the #BlackLivesMatter movement is “a lie.” Its supporters, he suggests, are opportunistically anti-police and don’t otherwise care about inner city deaths that don’t make national news:

That high-octane trolling is accompanied by an equally cynical take on the underlying problem. Baltimore reportedly saw an uptick in murders in recent weeks, which Lowry blames on police “shrinking from doing their job” in the wake of upheaval over Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. The city’s “dangerous, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods,” he writes, “need disproportionate police attention, even if that attention is easily mischaracterized as racism. The alternative is a deadly chaos that destroys and blights the lives of poor blacks.”

Never mind that a rising awareness of policing problems in America may also have something to do with acute underlying socioeconomic ills, which, you know, destroy and blight the lives of poor blacks.

Rich Lowry. National Review Online

Lowry’s theme ignores the reality of what many Americans have found so outrageous about the cases that have drawn national media attention. Say, the fact that the white cop who instantly shot a 12-year-old black kid and then watched him bleed out on the pavement without providing any first aid still hasn’t been questioned by investigators six months after the killing. Or the fact that a black woman whose family called 911 in need of mental health assistance for her ended up dead from police use of force less than two hours later.

Perhaps Lowry should spend a little time watching these 13 videos from the past year that show mostly white cops killing mostly black men who were mostly unarmed. They are a kind of vivid, disturbing evidence that may well bring some different hashtags to mind.

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Editor of Leading Conservative Magazine Declares That "Some Black Lives Don’t Matter" to Activists

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This Is the Degrading Bullshit Nail Salon Workers Put Up With Every Single Day

by MariamO55vkb Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Scoring a cheap manicure or pedicure, particularly in New York, is incredibly easy. After all, nail salons abound on seemingly every other city block and thus keep prices low in order to compete. It all comes at a steep price, however. The New York Times has published an in-depth investigation looking into the disturbing culture of exploitation, racism, and low-wages salon workers endure throughout the New York region. Here are the most shocking bits:

Some workers are paid as little as $1.50 an hour. In Manhattan, where the average price for a manicure is $10.50, salons compensate for such low prices by severely underpaying workers and oftentimes hitting employees with surprise charges just to work there. On slow days, some worker aren’t even paid at all.

Among the hidden customs are how new manicurists get started. Most must hand over cash — usually $100 to $200, but sometimes much more — as a training fee. Weeks or months of work in a kind of unpaid apprenticeship follows.

Ms. Ren spent almost three months painting on pedicures and slathering feet with paraffin wax before one afternoon in the late summer when her boss drew her into a waxing room and told her she would finally be paid.

Race often determines how well a worker is paid.

Korean workers routinely earn twice as much as their peers, valued above others by the Korean owners who dominate the industry and who are often shockingly plain-spoken in their disparagement of workers of other backgrounds. Chinese workers occupy the next rung in the hierarchy; Hispanics and other non-Asians are at the bottom.

…

Many Korean owners are frank about their prejudices. “Spanish employees” are not as smart as Koreans, or as sanitary, said Mal Sung Noh, 68, who is known as Mary, at the front desk of Rose Nails, a salon she owns on the Upper East Side.

Workers are frequently subjected to physical abuse.

…the minichain of Long Island salons whose workers said they were not only underpaid but also kicked as they sat on pedicure stools, and verbally abused.

Salons rarely go punished because language barriers prove too difficult.

When investigators try to interview them, manicurists are frequently reluctant to cooperate, more so than in any other industry, according a Labor Department official involved who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not permitted to talk with reporters. “It’s really the only industry we see that in,” the person said, explaining that it most likely indicated just how widespread exploitation is in nail salons. “They are totally running scared in this industry.”

In all, the story paints a deeply disturbing portrait of income inequality literally an arm’s length away. To read the investigation in its entirety, head to the Times.

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This Is the Degrading Bullshit Nail Salon Workers Put Up With Every Single Day

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Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

by MercedeCoburn Posted on May 4, 2015

Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

By on 4 May 2015commentsShare

Boston’s Logan International Airport has decided to go green, an ambitious task given that the airport generated about 1.3 billion pounds of climate-changing carbon dioxide in 2013 alone. Here’s the scoop from the The Boston Globe:

The airport plans to cut its carbon emissions 40 percent and energy consumption by 25 percent below 2012 levels by 2020. Officials also plan to curb the amount of waste produced by passengers by 2 percent every year by 2030, reduce water use by 1 percent every year over the next 10 years, and increase the recycling rate by 60 percent by the end of the decade.

Well great! But there’s just one problem: The airplanes. A round-trip ticket from Boston to Seattle, for example, comes with a 1.68-metric-ton CO2 price tag. So an airport saying it’s going to clean up its act is kind of like an elementary school bully saying he’s going to keep stealing your money but won’t shove you into lockers anymore. It’s like, thanks, man, but you’re still kind of a dick.

Logan released a 40-page report that, according to The Globe, lacks specifics on how it plans to meet its goals but does point out some low-hanging fruit. It can, for example, ask that planes use just one engine while taxiing around aimlessly, as planes are wont to do. This sounds good, but it also begs the question: if planes only need one engine to torture their victims — er, passengers — this way, why don’t they already do this all the time?! 

Airport officials also touted their new “environmentally friendly” rental car center, which has cut shuttle bus trips down from 100 per hour to 30 per hour. But let’s be honest: There’s nothing green about a place that hands out cars to loads of people, who will undoubtedly drive around the city in the most inefficient and infuriating way possible.

Nonetheless, one of the report’s authors, Brenda Enos, assistant director of capital and environmental programs at Massport, had this to say: “For the first time, we have actual goals and measurements against those metrics. I think it holds our feet to the fire.”

Psst! Climate change was already holding your feet to the fire. Case in point: In addition to cutting emissions, airport officials are also planning for sea level rise. From the Globe:

With sea levels expected to rise 2 feet to 6 feet by the end of the century — and as much as an additional 5 feet during the heaviest storms — airport officials plan to spend $9 million over the next five years on flood doors and barriers, coastal management, and portable pumps to keep the airport running in the event of a major storm surge. Within 10 years, they plan to spend millions more to move all critical equipment and upgrade systems to be able to withstand the worst storms.

Well, that sounds like a very sensible thing to do. Come to think of it, all of this sounds pretty sensible, which is why I’m not going to pat Logan on the back for this. Airports are where we go to participate in one of humankind’s greatest achievements — flight — but they’re also shameless hubs of pollution, waste, consumerism, and all around misery. So this non-specific, 40-page report is important — but also way overdue.

Source:
Logan Airport drafts climate change plan

, The Boston Globe.

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What’s the greenest megacity? Hint: Not NYC

by WayneLaver Posted on May 1, 2015

What’s the greenest megacity? Hint: Not NYC

By on 1 May 2015commentsShare

Take Paris’s transportation system, Tokyo’s water infrastructure, Moscow’s combined heat and power supply, and Seoul’s wastewater services, and you’ve got yourself a pretty sustainable megacity. Sorry, New York — turns out you don’t bring much to the table, except maybe that can-do attitude.

That’s what a group of researchers found when they analyzed how energy and materials flow through the world’s 27 megacities (metro areas with populations of 10 million or more people). As of 2010, these sprawling metropolises housed more than 6 percent of the world’s population, and they’re only expected to grow in number and size. So in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers were all like, “Hey! Unless we want to end up with a bunch of bleak, garbage-filled dystopian wastelands, we should probably greenify these puppies.”

Here’s the big picture:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA

The takeaway? Megacities consume a lot of resources. That’s not too surprising, given how much they contribute to global GDP. Still, when the researchers looked at each city’s unique “metabolism,” they found plenty of room for improvement.

Let’s start with New York, which definitively sucks when it comes to energy use, water use, and waste production:

Click to embiggen.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA

“The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days. When I saw that, I thought it was just incredible,” the University of Toronto’s Chris Kennedy, lead researcher on the study, said in a press release.

This might come as a surprise to those of us in the U.S. who have come to know the city as somewhat of an urban sustainability darling, thanks to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That’s because New York the megacity is much different than New York the city. When you account for the sprawling suburbs, Kennedy said over the phone, “New York has a completely different face to it.”

We already knew that suburban sprawl led to more energy consumption due to increased transportation demand, but Kennedy and his colleagues found another reason to dislike the ‘burbs: Electricity consumption per capita strongly correlates with land use per capita. It’s pretty intuitive, when you think about it — a house in the suburbs is going to require more electricity than a tiny apartment in the city. That wouldn’t be so bad if all that electricity was coming from clean, renewable sources, but it’s usually not.

And then there’s the issue of wealth. “”Wealthy people consume more stuff and ultimately discard more stuff,” Kennedy said in the press release. “The average New Yorker uses 24 times as much energy as a citizen of Kolkata [formerly Calcutta, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal] and produces over 15 times as much solid waste.”

The researchers report that the Tokyo metropolis, meanwhile, has a better public transportation system and is better designed for energy efficiency. The largest megacity, with a population of about 34 million people, Tokyo also has a remarkably efficient water supply system with leakages down to about 3 percent. (Rio de Janiero and Sao Paolo have leakage rates at around 50 percent.)

Moscow (pop. 12 million) stands out for its central heating system that harvests waste heat from electricity generation and uses it to service most of the buildings in the city — a more efficient way to heat a city than having a bunch of smaller systems.

London stands out as the only megacity to reduce electricity consumption as its GDP has grown. The researchers attribute this to a 66 percent increase electricity prices.

All this is to say that megacities are complicated beasts that should learn from one another. This is especially true for cities in developing countries, which have much lower “metabolisms” than their developed world counterparts due to poverty and resource shortages. These cities will surely grow. The question is: Can they get greener as they go?

Unfortunately, Kennedy said, no megacity has a master architect. “You can never start from scratch. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got and adapt and change.”

Kennedy and his colleagues plan to put out a followup paper later this year with specific recommendations for how megacities can do just that. In the mean time — Hey, NYC, you might want to glance up from your climate action plan for a minute. The suburbs are making you look bad in front of all your megacity friends.

Source:
Megacity metabolism: Is your city consuming a balanced diet?

, Eurekalert.

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What’s the greenest megacity? Hint: Not NYC

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White People Could Learn a Thing or Two About Talking About Race From the Orioles’ Manager

by BessieHatley Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, after the Baltimore Orioles trounced the Chicago White Sox in front of over 48,000 empty seats at Camden Yards, Orioles’ manager Buck Showalter offered a blunt assessment of the ongoing protests happening just beyond the stadium gates.

More coverage of the protests in Baltimore.


Eyewitnesses: The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think


Obama: It’s About Decades of Inequality


Rand Paul: Blame Absentee Fathers


What MLK Really Thought About Riots


Photos: Residents Help Clean Up


Orioles Exec: It’s Inequality, Stupid


These Teens Aren’t Waiting Around for Someone Else to Fix Their City


Ray Lewis: “Violence Is Not the Answer”


Bloods and Crips Want “Nobody to Get Hurt”

When a Baltimore resident asked what advice Showalter would give to young black residents in the community, the manager explains emphasis added:

You hear people try to weigh in on things that they really don’t know anything about. … I’ve never been black, OK? So I don’t know, I can’t put myself there. I’ve never faced the challenges that they face, so I understand the emotion, but I can’t. … It’s a pet peeve of mine when somebody says, ‘Well, I know what they’re feeling. Why don’t they do this? Why doesn’t somebody do that?’ You have never been black, OK, so just slow down a little bit.

I try not to get involved in something that I don’t know about, but I do know that it’s something that’s very passionate, something that I am, with my upbringing, that it bothers me, and it bothers everybody else. We’ve made quite a statement as a city, some good and some bad. Now, let’s get on with taking the statements we’ve made and create a positive. We talk to players, and I want to be a rallying force for our city. It doesn’t mean necessarily playing good baseball. It just means doing everything we can do. There are some things I don’t want to be normal in Baltimore again. You know what I mean? I don’t. I want us to learn from some stuff that’s gone on on both sides of it. I could talk about it for hours, but that’s how I feel about it.

Fans watched from outside the stadium gates after demonstrations in response to the death of Freddie Gray forced the team to play the first game behind closed doors in Major League Baseball history. At Wednesday’s press conference, outfielder Adam Jones, who related to the struggles of Baltimore’s youth as a kid growing up in San Diego, called on the city to heal after the unrest.

Jones goes on to say:

The last 72 hours have been tumultuous to say the least. We’ve seen good, we’ve seen bad, we’ve seen ugly…It’s a city that’s hurting, a city that needs its heads of the city to stand up, step up and help the ones that are hurting. It’s not an easy time right now for anybody. It doesn’t matter what race you are. It’s a tough time for the city of Baltimore. My prayers have been out for all the families, all the kids out there.

They’re hurting. The big message is: Stay strong, Baltimore. Stay safe. Continue to be the great city that I’ve come to know and love over the eight years I’ve been here. Continue to be who you are. I know there’s been a lot of damage in the city. There’s also been a lot of good protesting, there’s been a lot of people standing up for the rights that they have in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, and I’m just trying to make sure everybody’s on the same page.

…

It’s not easy. This whole process is not easy. We need this game to be played, but we need this city to be healed first. That’s important to me, that the city is healed. Because this is an ongoing issue. I just hope that the community of Baltimore stays strong, the children of Baltimore stay strong and gets some guidance and heed the message of the city leaders.

Like team exec John Angelos, Showalter, Jones and the rest of the Orioles organization get it.

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White People Could Learn a Thing or Two About Talking About Race From the Orioles’ Manager

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