Month in Review, June 2009: Part 2, not busted
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
[Previous Months In Review available here: May 09, Apr 09, Mar 09, Feb 09, Jan 09]
Although yesterday’s half of the June review included nothing but bad news of valuable innovations broken or disrupted, the month also included stories showing that Schumpeter was right: some things deserve to be broken.
Too bad for you who deserve to be broken
One of them is poverty-concentrated family high-rises with direct public ownership, as explored in End of an error: Part 1, demolishing the inessential past, and Part 2, envisioning the essential future:
Remarkably, wonderfully,
Now,
Amazing how much inaccurate oversimplification can be packed into a single phrase. Allow me to explode it:
Taking it apart takes it to pieces
Long. Yes. Demolishing
Divisive. By definition, I suppose, anything that lacks unanimity could be seen as divisive. In my experience, demolition of obsolete and decrepit public housing is divisive only in that some few people – residents, some resident advocates – raise a ruckus, or express a litany of conditional doubts, views we’ll see echoed throughout the Times’ article.
Reduce poverty. Wrong – that’s not why public housing is deconcentrated – indeed, it’s not the raison d’etre of public housing at all. Public housing exists to house the poor in decent, safe, and sanitary accommodations, to create the opportunity for poverty reduction but not to do it directly. The purpose of deconcentrating public housing is simply to move people out of unacceptable housing into better housing, better neighborhoods, with better schools.
Beyond Schumpeter, things break not solely by accident by occasionally through deliberate action under the banner of progress, or what the ruling authorities deem to be progress.
Is that progress behind you a mushroom cloud?
One such hanging in the balance is the grim case of Kashgar and the Chinese government in Creative destruction, or destructive creations? Part 1, out with the old?, and Part 2, in with the new? :
Shades of the slums inside, in
What will remain of old Kashgar is unclear. Mr. Xu said that “important buildings and areas of the
No archaeologists monitor the razings, he said, because the government already knows everything about old Kashgar.
Nice to be omniscient.
Trust me, I have your best interests at heart
Rusticity is attractive when you can go home to your gleaming downtown hotel, your ceramic bathroom, and your piping hot shower.
In Mr. Xu’s view, demolition will give the Uighurs a better life and spare them from disaster in one fell swoop.
All that said, there is a certain aura of forcible eviction about the demolition, an urgency that fear of earthquakes does not completely explain. The city is offering cash bonuses to residents who move out early — about $30 for those who vacate within 20 days; $15 if they move in a month.
By itself, that’s not so terrible, even if it smacks of the self-fulfilling blight creation of which the developer of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards property has been accused.
[Editorial note for Atlantic Yard junkies: Mr. Oder continues to be on a roll. Check out these posts. – Ed.]
Homes are razed as soon as they become empty, giving some alleys a gap-tooth look.
We’ve seen before that Chinese developers have what we would consider a cavalier attitude to property rights, changing facts on the ground to erode the political and topographic support for the status quo.
From sixteenth to twenty-first century: Kashgar at twilight
Although all decisions involving housing are inherently place-based, land being housing’s least-changeable element, physical configuration is next in importance, and extremely enduring, as explored in Retrofitting informal housing, together with other speculations on the relationship between configuration, affordability, and livability in The Model T house?, Little boxes, little boxes, and I hope you’re not what you live in!:
If we want to make housing affordable, shouldn’t we be looking at inexpensive construction materials? That’s the premise of a short Climate Progress article, Shipping containers provide affordable housing, from the Center for American Progress’s “It’s Easy Being Green” series.
There’s an emerging and innovative solution to the environmental, economic, and housing concerns we face around the globe: shipping container homes.
Few shipping containers come with nice large portholes – not cheap!
It turns out reusing the old containers is an inexpensive, efficient, and environmentally friendly way to build homes that can be used by low-income residents or as temporary housing following a natural disaster.
(Readers must make due allowance for the credulous gee-whiz writing, which flits lightly over numerous practical problems, as we’ll see.)
And that’s how you turn tin cans into homes!
Looking beyond the
In yesterday’s blog post, we heard from Jamaican columnist and developer/ architect Carlton Cunningham, whose his mid-April Gleaner column describes his successful housing development, Old Harbour Glades, that has apparently replaced “the bad lands of Succaba Settlement”:
“Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail in shanty town”
His summary of how it was done, and why it worked, reads like extracts from an AHI manual of successful mixed-income affordable development in the global South:
[1] There was a master plan which included well-designed drains, high-quality central sewage treatment (tertiary level, meaning the effluent is clean water) and abundance of potable water from a dedicated well.
There ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure, and government must lead by creating an enabling rather than disabling environment:
[2] To counter the negative connotations of the squatter settlement and its strong correlation with crime and disorder, regular plots with full access to services were allocated to the poor and to the squatters.
The term of art is ’sites and stands,’ and we’ve seen it around the world
New construction public housing,
A regular grid of dirt roads.
[3] The next mission was to make the serviced plots affordable, through creative finance.
‘Creative’ is here a synonym for ‘efficiently subsidized’ … but that’s okay, affordable housing always costs money.
How much housing can I afford?
Late in the month, I laid out not only a prediction but also its evidence in Why Larry Summers won’t be the next Fed chairman:
Mr. Orszag can be gracious, having one his turf skirmish of the right of access.
“He enriches any discussion he participates in, which is particularly valuable given the complexity and importance of the challenges currently facing us.”
Translation: We cannot dump him now, since he’s enthroned and is better inside the tent pissing out.
Point it away from me, okay?
Mr. Summers, the only top economic adviser with a West Wing office, sees the president more than the others and controls the daily economic briefings. By all accounts he has worked hard to disprove early talk that he would not be good at the job, even poking fun at himself.
Just one big happy family, with Summers as the funnyman?
But, Mr. Geithner said, that trait makes Mr. Summers a good director of the economic council because “he is better than anybody else on the planet at framing the case for and against any particular issue and reducing something to a set of concrete options.”
Framing the case for and against? Doesn’t sound like a Fed Chairman to me, sounds like someone the President wants to keep on a close leash.
Somebody doesn’t want Mr. Summers to be Fed Chairman. Maybe that somebody is the President.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
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