housing prices+


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NullspacePittsburghers know that the times are out of joint. Somehow they're expecting the prosperity to blow up in their faces.
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We'll come back to this in the fall. But again, I think all these congressional races are soon to be impacted by reapportionment that will happen following the 2010 Census. Could be some pretty big changes in the shapes of these districts even if Pennsylvania loses just one congressional seat which is the conventional wisdom. Thus one of the reasons the current and next cycles of state legislative races are so important is because who controls Harrisburg in just a few years will determine how that redistricting goes.
Related trivia on that: if Pennsylvania goes from 19 to 18 congressional seats it will put the Pennsylvania delegation at exactly half of the largest delegation it ever sent which was made up of 36 congressional districts during the 1910's.
Not a new book, but for a lot of history on one of those moved/consolidated congressional districts locally is in:
So people who registered heading into the election and who showed up to vote can't possibly have exceeded 1% of everyone who voted. That includes everyone who had registered over the previous 12 full months, so some may have been more interested in the primary election. You have to figure some (most?) of that 1% was just natural steady state new voter registration flow, not people motivated by the fall election in any particular way.
Note that there were many more people who registered to vote over the previous year, things like motor voter and other registration processes ensure that, but those who recently registered and actually voted gets you nothing more than that 1%. I tried to find some pattern in the new registrants who made up that 1%, but nothing stood out. They are pretty diffuse by age, by area of the city, and spread out across the year in terms of when they registered.
So did either of the mayoral campaigns include any new registration efforts at all? I doubt it because if they did they failed pretty completely. Even without explicit efforts to seek out new voters you would think the media attention itself would have spurred greater interest than that.
"The downgrade likely means Ambac will not underwrite any more business, said John Flahive, director of fixed income for BNY Mellon Wealth Management. "Fewer suppliers of bond insurance can only be bad news for the pricing and thus for the consumers of bond insurance, consumers like the city. As Fester points out as well, impending balloon payments in the city's existing debt schedule will eventually necessitate refinancing. It will be at that point that the turmoil in the muni bond insurance market will be an issue.
"At the very minimum the troubles of the insurers will drive up borrowing costs of cities and other local entities at a time when many are strained by weaker tax revenue, said John Atkins, a fixed-income analyst at IDEAGlobal.com."
maybe for the blog deprived city employees: disgruntledenebriatedcityemployee.blogspot.com
Speaking of (former) city employees... I think Sophie should start a blog. Maybe something like sophiespeaks.blogspot.com?
any other notional blog ideas out there? We need to make sure we are not caught in an inter-regional blog gap.
...the Pittsburgh region's future depends to such a major extent upon retaining and attracting highly qualified and professional and technical people and business enterprisers, who are in demand everywhere and who command a high standard of residential amenity and cultural and professional opportunities.
With news of some agreements reached for a Community Benefit Agreement regarding the HIll District and the new arena being built, it is a good time to review where this all really started. Readers here have heard me say this before, but for anyone new.... or anyone who thinks that anything going on up on the Hill started last week, last month, or even last year or decade: I think everyone in Pittsburgh ought to read Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It, by Dr. Mindy Fullilove of Columbia University.
As disclosure, my review of the book was printed in the PG. That review was really overshadowed by some emotional photos from the PG's own archives which they ran alongside the text. Unfortunately those photos are not online. But I will repaste the text of that review below:
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This is a book that many in Pittsburgh have no need to read. An account of the demolition of the Lower Hill District in the 1950s, it is a history many Pittsburghers experienced firsthand. Yet the book by Columbia University psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove is much more than a book about Pittsburgh. The author investigates the massive renewal projects that were intended to save urban America after World War II.
By documenting the profound loss of community that resulted from these projects, it's a scathing indictment of urban policy in the United States, past and present.
The uprooted communities -- the author estimates there are more than 1,600 across the country -- were concentrated in the African-American communities of America's large cities.
The consistent theme is that the wholesale displacement of neighborhoods had an impact more traumatic and longer-lasting than is understood. "Root shock ... ruptures bonds, dispersing people to all the directions of the compass," Fullilove writes. It caused the destruction of the interconnections that "were essential to the survival of the community."
Pittsburgh was not alone as a victim of massive urban renewal efforts run amok. The author focuses on three areas, balancing the saga of the Lower Hill with that of the Central Ward of Newark, N.J., and the smaller Virginia city of Roanoke.
They might seem to have been vastly different communities, but the analogies between their experiences with urban renewal outweigh their dissimilarities.
The book is about the destruction of housing yet not about housing at all. Fullilove points out that urban renewal was really no more than "contagious housing destruction."
The truth is these projects often did not include new housing at all, or provided housing only after decades, long after the original residents had moved on.
The legacy of many such projects was to leave vast "urban prairies" in their wake.
The implications of such widespread and systematic neighborhood destruction go far beyond the specific communities affected. "Root shock ... disabled powerful mechanisms of community, leaving the black world at an enormous disadvantage for meeting the challenges of globalization," Fullilove says.
Because urban renewal efforts were concentrated in traditionally African-American neighborhoods, the impact on the entire African-American community was magnified.
Fullilove is a social psychiatrist, but her book crosses many disciplines. It is hard to say whether the book is more about history, architecture, sociology, urban planning or psychiatry.
Arguably it is difficult to follow the thread that ties together all of these perspectives. Yet, to have written a more narrowly focused book would have oversimplified a complex issue. The multifaceted nature of the problem eschews labeling and needs a multidisciplinary synthesis such as Fullilove's.
The author and her husband, Robert E. Fullilove III, spent 1998 and much of 1999 in Pittsburgh as Falk Fellows at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health's Center for Minority Health.
That firsthand knowledge comes through as she often seems to be writing about the experiences of her most personal friends. The author is sometimes the compassionate caregiver dispensing advice to the community as a whole. At other times she is a more dispassionate observer documenting what are the most traumatic events of many lives.
What comes across most vividly are the real and palpable losses suffered by the individuals and families forced to leave their homes.
Just as the book seems to be focusing on just the history of urban renewal, the author reminds the reader that past can be prologue. Even, or especially, today the desire to improve urban neighborhoods overlooks the displacement of the residents.
The book's ultimate contribution may be asking the simple question: "What was it like before urban renewal?" Because "we cannot understand the losses unless we first appreciate what was there."
Apologists of failed renewal projects often point out the unknown of the counterfactual, or what would have happened without the projects. The unspoken premise is that what was there before was not worth saving in the first place.
Fullilove makes a clear argument that the essence of a community is irreplaceable.
"This is Pittsburgh, it's the other places that are strange."However.. If you want to experience Pittsburgh's inner Sartre, you have to go see Pittsburgh's Squonk Opera. The reprise of Pittsburgh: The Opera begins this Thursday at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in the very heart of East Liberty (not the intersection of the Friendship and Shadyside Arts Corridor's as it is sometimes called).
As an update... there is a lot of coverage of this foreclosure article/map in the Atlantic Magazine. (h/t to the marginal revolution and others). I took the liberty of blowing up the midatlantic region and in particular the Ohio/PA border which gives you this rather stunning map:
It may not be fair to pin the statewide number on a singl candidate, but when you run saying you are doing so because you are upset at the number of women in office you have to wonder about the timing of the decision to go home. It may be true that there is some strong female candidate out there about to run for this seat, but if not she has more than likely enabled the candidates who were already planning to run against her.. and those were mostly men I am pretty sure. Remember, its now less than two weeks to put in your application to be considered for the ACDC endorsement. It's not what you would want to do if you wanted to help another women fill this seat and by getting out this way the seat may not be filled by a woman for years to come... but we will see.
But there is a bigger issue that people don't like to talk about. Is a female candidate always the best candidate to support women's issues. The race between Pistella and Bennington is a good case in point. It's clearly true that Pistella had overstayed his welcome and after a tenure in office measured in decades one ought to find something else to do. With apologies to Senator Byrd, but after 30+ years if you are still in office they ought to be naming buildings for you if you stick around.
Yet somwhere in there Pistella did do things they were almost always supportive of women's issues. One of the disadvantages of a large legislature is that you cant have big headline successes for all 253 of them day in and day out. A lot of things don't make the news yet are pretty important. Once it was explained to me by a completely unpolitical source that Pistella had been instrumental in getting some insurance laws changed to allow the Children's Home here in Pittsburgh to offer some more services to disabled infants. Important for women? Important period? Do things like that make it into the public discourse? All rhetorical questions . That was just one example and you can look up his record on women or family issues yourself. Lots of little things like that had endeared Pistella to lots of local voters. He was known as a big support of elderly issues for sure and who makes up most elderly in the US: women.
Committee name District Total
Expenditures
(cycles 1,2 and 3)
Friends of Senator Jubelirer Committee 30 $1,400,398
BRIGHTBILL, DAVE FRIENDS OF SENATOR COM 48 $1,002,414
Friends of John Perzel 172 $864,289
VEON, MIKE COM TO ELECT 14 $823,187
FUMO, VINCENT FOR SENATE 1 $571,283
John Perzel Victory 2006 172 $483,069
WHEATON, HEIDI PA PATRIOTS FOR 36 $334,581
DEWEESE, BILL CAMPAIGN COM 50 $316,686
Baker for Senate 20 $290,346
Friends of Mike Brubaker 36 $266,424
EICHELBERGER, JOHN - I LIKE EICH 30 $254,509
DOLAN, MIKE LEADERSHIP FUND 30 $254,316
GRABOYES, TERRY FRIENDS OF 175 $220,069
WHEATON, HEIDI F. 36 $218,836
HAGGERTY, JIM FOR SENATE 20 $212,089
Evans, John Friends of 5 $208,822
O'Donnell Brian for State Representative 121 $208,302
GANNON, TOM COM TO ELECT 161 $178,578
MATTA, GEORGE FRIENDS OF 35 $178,012
FUMO FOR STATE SENATE COMMITTEE 1 $167,731