"The city’s going after families who have pigs as companions."

"Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s daughter has a pig in Gracie Mansion and no one mentions it’s illegal."

The powerful think the rules don't apply to them. But that's not an argument in favor of pigs in the city. No pigs in the city!

"And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where... the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for 'hipsters welcome.'"

From the second paragraph of a NYT style article titled "Creating Hipsturbia" about NY suburb such as Hastings-on-Hudson. That bird business called to mind this segment from the TV show "Portlandia":



Anyway, the article is interesting and amusingly written, even if you don't worry about how suburbs can adapt to the tastes of "the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city."

"Hipsturbia" is a good portmanteau word (if "good" includes making people who are trying to feel good about something feel bad).

To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives... and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques.

How are they supposed to ward off nagging senses with the NYT dogging them like this? Don't these people know they are never ever ever supposed to leave the city — not for fresh air, not for adequate housing at a remotely decent price, not for good enough public schools, not for anything? If you leave you will be punished. You may try to get something that reminds you of the Real Life that can only be had in Brooklyn, but you will be pleasuring yourself with antlers.

"With Gov. Scott Walker hinting that he may move to end the city's longtime residency rule for public employees..."

"... Mayor Tom Barrett went on the offensive Friday, saying he's certain property values would drop if the requirement goes away."

"People in [the southwest and northwest sides] of the city are concerned about their property values," Barrett said. "They should remember when their property values go down that it was Governor Walker who did that to them if he proposes this. I'm still hoping he doesn't propose this."

Isn't that the wrong reason for requiring residency? You want to use people — deny them free choice — in order to bolster the real estate market? I can see not wanting the city to hollow out as people escape to the suburbs. You don't want Milwaukee to turn into Detroit, but what about the real people who work for the city? If they want to live too far out in the suburbs, their only option is to give up their jobs?

Note the big effect on who teaches the schoolchildren of Milwaukee. And then one of the reasons you might not want to live in Milwaukee is that you don't think the schools are good enough. A vicious circle there, no?

From the comments at the link:

I am considering moving out of Milwaukee. I own a $200,000 house and my taxes are almost as much as my mortgage. How can you even consider making someone pay almost $7K year for a $200k house and I can't even send my kids to the public schools. Don't even get me started on crime.... clean up the city and you won't have to hold employees hostage!

On the other side, also from the comments:

If you draw a city paycheck, the city has every right to require you to contribute to the local tax base by living there. If that's simply too much to bear, there are other places to work. No one is forcing anyone to work for the city of Milwaukee.

"See? You can be messy on the inside, and no one knows."

Step inside a 400-square-foot apartment space, transformed by elaborate built-ins:



The quote I've used for the post title appears about midway and marks the spot where my mood began to shift from delight to despair. What do we think of this man, who is promoting what seems to be a simplified, de-cluttered way of life, but who is, himself, in a business, promoting expensive merchandise, the machinery of compression. Do we want to be compressed thusly? It's one thing to live like this on board a cruise ship, but permanently? For a certain type of person — perhaps this man, or the man he pretends to be — it's a fine, joyful existence. Would he ever really have a dinner party for 10 in this space, as we see enacted at the end? It's not a real party, because it's an on-camera demonstration of the space. Watch closely and notice how the women are responding. There is something they do not love, and it is visible even in this crisply edited production. I felt empathy with these women and resistance to the man's sales pitch. And I remembered the gutted space shown at the beginning of the video, and thought that I could be happy, living in SoHo, in that 400-square-foot space as it looks right then. Just do the kitchen and the bathroom, nice and modern and constrained into a modest space, and let me put in some normal furniture — a good-sized table near the window for my work and eating space (that can be cleared off if anyone needs to come over for dinner) and I'll order a sleeper sofa from Design Within Reach. Spare me all those insane, ever-encroaching built-ins, and those crazy pop-up extra beds for guests. Guests to the city can get a hotel room or sleep on the floor or I'll add sleeper chair. By the end of the video, I felt paranoid that the government had a plan to shift us into smaller and smaller pods with evil corporations getting rich fitting them out with soul crushing storage bins. Mayor Bloomberg! Who fixed your ducts? Huh? Fixed your ducts, all right. I told you before - they fixed themselves. Oh, yeah? Then where did this come from, eh? Out of your nostril? Eh? Nostrils, eh? Central Services. They don't take kindly to sabotage. Sabotage, huh? Jesus, this place is in a terrible state. Just a minute! You're not gonna leave it like this, are you? Why not? All you gotta do is blow your nose and it's fixed, innit?

"Jeffrey has his own life, and he has chosen that life, but he knows that our hearts and home are always open to him."

"He knows that, he’s well aware of that."

"Natasha graduated with top honors from high school at 14 and was offered a full scholarship by Mannes College the New School for Music in New York."

"Her mother worried about a deficit of soul in New York."

“There is no time for vision! People are just struggling to survive, like in Moscow,” Natalie said — to which her daughter replied, “Vision is how I survive.” In those early New York days, Natasha and her mother spoke by phone constantly. Nonetheless, Natalie said, “that was my present to her: I gave her her own life.”

One paragraph from an article about child prodigies.

And here's a quote from further down: "If Beethoven were sent to nursery school today, they would medicate him, and he would be a postal clerk." And:

Half the prodigies I studied seemed to be under pressure to be even more astonishing than they naturally were, and the other half, to be more ordinary than their talents. Studying their families, I gradually recognized that all parenting is guesswork, and that difference of any kind, positive or negative, makes the guessing harder.

"Whether it's providing a warm place to visit for a cup of coffee or simply charging your electronic devices..."

"... we are here to help in any way."

An email "Message to Our Customers" from Saks Fifth Avenue (intended mostly to be received in New York City). It's nice for the posh store to invite folks in to charge their electronic devices. Let's take note of the businesses that were kind to the powerless.

"Who would willingly choose to live in something with the footprint of a parking space (8x10x16 feet)?"

"In cities where space is at a mind-boggling premium, McCormick’s idea of taking up residence in a parking space — in what he refers to as a 'Houselet' — isn’t all that far-fetched...."

“When you ask people to consider spaces smaller that what they’ve normalized to,” says McCormick, “I think it tends to trigger elemental associations of constriction and claustrophobia. I think you have to find ways around all those acculturated and visceral reactions, and observe that we’re usually O.K. with that for certain times and purposes.”

Tim McCormick isn't an architect or an interior designer. He's a communications consultant. Hmm. That means this isn't about design. It's about the manipulation of the human psyche. Get ready!

Quite aside from whether I'd be willing/able to live in a repurposed parking space — after our cars are taken away — I'm resistant to the brave new world that has such communications consultants in it. He's an expert at language and he's talking about the spaces we've "normalized to" and "elemental associations of constriction and claustrophobia."  "Elemental associations of constriction and claustrophobia"... AKA claustrophobia. Man, I was getting claustrophobic within the word-clutter of that sentence of his. Now, go away Mr. Communications Consultant. I'm going to stick with my own acculturated and visceral reactions feelings.

Biden "will surely take it to Ryan on... his statement yesterday that inner-city kids need to be taught 'good discipline' and 'character.'"

Writes John Cassidy, in The New Yorker, observing that tonight's VP debate is high stakes.

Cassidy doesn't link to the Ryan statement, which — I found on my own — is part of the video that made the rounds the other day, the one that supposedly showed Ryan being "testy." (We talked about it here.) Anyway, let me put the "good discipline" and "character" remark in context. Ryan was asked the question "Does the country have a gun problem?" Ryan took the position that the problem is crime, not guns, and that we already have enough "good, strong gun laws," which we ought to enforce better.

But the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society, that's what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another, make sure they realize the value in one another.

Let's try to understand why people like Cassidy think that's outrageous (as opposed to platitudinous).  Here's Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

What you don’t often hear spoken (out loud, anyway) is that the real problem with gun violence in America is the “character” and “discipline” of people in the “inner cities,” a very specific delineation from other city folk...

Apparently, crime in our cities has nothing to do with poverty, and systemic failures, fueled by generations of institutionalized racism, but with the character of those people. So says Paul Ryan, and so says Mitt Romney. If you’re poor, it’s because your culture is inferior.

Ryan’s assessment of “inner city” people is of a piece with the not-at-all subtle (and even out-and-proud overt) attitudes of the leading lights in the Republican Party, best exemplified by racism decoder-ring Newt Gingrich, who helpfully singled out black people as the Food Stamp-satisfied people we already knew they were talking about, and who echoed Ryan’s chatter about the low character of the inner city denizens who “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

We already knew who the “those people” Romney and Ryan were talking about were, but thanks for the hint, all the same.

In this frame of mind, Ryan was talking down to black people — to use a phrase once aimed at Barack Obama himself. And let's take another look at Obama's 2007 speech to a predominately black audience:

We can’t expect them to have all the skills they need to work. They may need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office. We have to help them get there.

Unlike Ryan, who looked to "civil society... what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another," Obama thought there should be federal government programs to teach poor (black?) people to "act appropriately." The difference between conservatives and liberals is about how to solve what they are perceiving as a problem. Pointing out that there's a problem is a sensitive matter, so sensitive it might be better not to point it out at all, as Jesse Jackson's famous open-mike pushback showed.

Will Biden "surely take it to Ryan" on this issue? He might, but it's treacherous. Ryan should be prepared with something elegant to say, but I predict it won't come up because Biden's the one who's gaffe prone, and you don't want to make a gaffe about race.

"Best hipster neighborhoods" identified...

... using somewhat square criteria (I mean, most of this stuff is also nice for middle-aged professional women):

We assessed each area’s walkability according to Walkscore.com; the number of neighborhood coffee shops per capita...; the assortment of local food trucks (and their ranking according to Zagat’s); the number and frequency of farmers markets; the selection of locally owned bars and restaurants; and the percentage of residents who work in artistic occupations. We also factored in Nextdoor’s Neighborhood “Hipness” Index, which is based on how often words associated with hipness (for example art, gallery, designer, musician) appeared on each Nextdoor neighborhood’s site pages, and Nextdoor conducted a survey in which members sounded off on their communities.

The big winner is Silver Lake in L.A. I was there, taking pictures, in 2008:



Anyway and obviously, the neighborhoods that get identified this way are targeted to be taken over by the middle-aged professional types who like arty ambiance and coffee and booze too. I mean, this list is in Forbes.

Renting... at $60,000 a month.

"Will they get any takers? Especially when the undulating window design by the starchitect Frank Gehry lets you see and be seen by your penthouse neighbor, and possibly even by a neighbor below?"

“There is the whole vertical living thing here,” said MaryAnne Gilmartin, an executive vice president of the Forest City Ratner Companies, the building’s developer (and the developer of The New York Times building). “There are a lot of social connections in the building. There are little pieces and slivers of the building where you are looking into other units.”

To each his own, but to me that seems the biggest downside of the Gehry penthouses, along with interior finishes that, while supposedly designed by Mr. Gehry himself, don’t seem quite up to the standard of the top-flight condo buildings Ms. Gilmartin says they are competing with.

Ouch!

Gallery-goers eat rats at the art show "Tomorrow We Will Feast Again on What We Catch."

And the NYT gives the show 2-pages of glowing description (and warnings that — ooh! — you may be disgusted).

Twenty people, mostly friends of [the artist Laura] Ginn or the gallery owner, [Allegra] LaViola, nibbled on goat cheese bruschetta topped with rat leg tenderloin, and rat-pork terrine encircled with beef fat, prepared by a chef after much trial and error with his proteins. The rats were shipped from a United States Department of Agriculture-approved West Coast processor that supplies pet owners with humanely killed, individually flash-frozen rodents, in classifications ranging from “jumbo” to “fuzzy.” Seventy five rats were skinned and cooked — and broiled and smoked and grilled — for the dinner, and most guests paid $100 each to attend, signing a liability waiver, some not entirely willingly.

“If I see an entire carcass, I might throw up,” said Clifford Owens, a performance artist. Mr. Owens, who had an exhibition at MoMA PS1 this spring, invoked the daredevil spirit of the performance artist Marina Abramovic, to get himself through the evening. “This is about risk,” he said.

It's like a Tony Robbins fire-walking event... for the sophisticated, arty crowd.

“I don’t care about it as art,” [said "artist and video editor" Timothy Hutchings.] “I care about it as something that makes me a more interesting human being.”

So another artist doesn't care about it as art. He cares about it as something that makes him a more interesting human being.

But isn't that what art is all about? Being the artist who is the most interesting human being? I can just imagine what was reeling through the brains of the artists who submitted to Ginn's art performance — and what's still reeling now that there's this drooling write-up in the New York Times. Why her?! Why not me! Look how interesting I am. This is all about me displaying myself as a more interesting human being. It can't be that she played me into her getting the recognition as more interesting.

I don’t care about it as art.

The average rent in Manhattan is $3,778, up 9% in a year.

And for a studio, it's $2,569 — up 18.8% in the past year.

Real-estate agent Josh Lichy, 27, appreciated the rental crunch first-hand when he and his girlfriend were hit with a $300 increase, from $3,000 to $3,300 for their 750-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment at 160 Riverside Drive. “It’s too much. We want to have money to spend so we’re not rent-poor,” he said.

Rent-poor. That's derived from house poor, but quite different. If you're house poor, you're building wealth in the form of equity (unless prices fall). But a rented apartment isn't a repository of money set aside for the future. It's as gone as if you'd blown it on a European vacation.

As for small apartments in NYC, we've been talking about Mayor Bloomberg's competition for designing tiny apartments called "micro-units." Well, here's a NYT article about furnishing your micro-unit. It's bizarrely — mockingly — unhelpful, suggesting a chewable toothbrush, a very small dog, and growing plants on your wall in some doodad that hangs over the fireplace. Hello? Get a normal toothbrush. Don't keep any pets. And you won't even have a fireplace. But I love the idea — in the photo at the NYT link — of putting your handgun right there next to your objets on one of the étagères that flank the fireplace that you won't have in your micro-unit.

But if you have a micro-unit, you may want to compensate by getting a gun.

Mayor Bloomberg, stimulating the development of micro-units.

For single folk, in New York City. Here's a useful graphic:

 

I love the picture of the diminutive mayor, standing in a life-size floor plan of the imagined apartment, alongside the Commissioner of City Planning, Amanda Burden, who has this ineffable we-know-what's-good-for-the-little-people look on her face.

Who is Amanda Burden?

Born Amanda Jay Mortimer, she is the daughter of socialite Babe Paley (1915–1978) and her first husband, Stanley Grafton Mortimer, Jr. (1913–1999), an heir to the Standard Oil fortune. She is a descendant of the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, and a granddaughter of Dr. Harvey Cushing, the "Father of American Neurosurgery" and Pulitzer Prize winning author.... In 1947, her mother married William S. Paley, the son of a successful immigrant entrepreneur who built a family acquisition into CBS. Her stepmother, Kathleen Mortimer (born 1917), was a daughter of railroad heir and United States ambassador Averell Harriman.

Wow. So...  that's how you get a look like that for your face as you let people know about how micro a living space can properly be. I thought she looked really elite, but I was still floored by that bio.

Who should be doing a city's planning, I wonder?

"We Built Way Too Many Cultural Institutions During the Good Years."

Did we? And who are "we"? "We" are all those cities across America who think we can be Bilbao, that if we build it, they will come.

Per capita, the biggest total spenders on cultural projects during this period were Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont region of California, Appleton and Madison, Wisconsin, and Lawrence, Kansas....

We seemed to buy into that Richard Florida/"Rise of the Creative Class" theory "that if we have cultural amenities, we’ll have better, more creative populations."

The biggest arts building boom in fact occurred in the South, a potential sign of cities there trying to catch up with the rest of the country. 

Look! We're not as backward as you think!

"These projects are very much emotional, they’re projects that have a lot of passion in them.... A lot of the rationality that goes into running a business sometimes doesn’t go into these projects."

Hey! That's a nice summary of the problem of letting government do anything.

The grossly underenforced zoning law that preserves loft space in SoHo for artists.

The effort to get the law changed involves revealing how many property owners are in violation of the law.

At issue is a 1971 zoning change that allowed artists to legally live in lofts they had converted from industrial space in SoHo. Technically, much of the neighborhood is still zoned to permit manufacturing, and a condition has been placed on the old industrial buildings: Each loft must have at least one artist or successor, and the use of retail spaces must be wholesale without a special permit.

Technically....

Untold numbers of owners have sold lofts to wealthy non-artists, and SoHo has become one of the city's premier commercial retail centers, with boutique shops occupying the area's high-ceilinged, cast-iron buildings....

The owners' committee said it wants to legitimize what has already happened: SoHo's loft spaces are no longer just for artists, and their current residents and owners shouldn't have the uncertainty of being at odds with city zoning law hanging over their heads.

"In all fairness to the 99% of people who are here illegally, now is the time and the problem must be solved," said Ms. Baisley.

What about fairness to all the people who have refrained from doing things that are against the law? You operated in a market that was affected by this law, free of competition from law abiders, and now you want it all legal, which would allow you to profit hugely by selling to all these late-comers to the market. Shouldn't the excess profit be factored out and put into a fund to support artists — the people you pushed out?

"To get rid of [the law] will destroy SoHo," said Mimi Smith, a feminist painter and sculptor, who bought a loft in 1973. "It's a real-estate ploy. They want more money for their lofts."

Does she still own that loft? Or did she cash out early? Anyway, the SoHo of the 1970s was destroyed long ago. Presumably, there are remnants of artiness left, not that you can tell from street-level nowadays.

Camden...

... in ruins.

"The 20 Best Small Towns in America."

Compiled by Smithsonian, placing "one quality above others: culture."

If you're like me, you'll go through the list looking for one in your state. And there is one in Wisconsin: Menomonie!

"High school students who don't feel like walking to school in the cold are causing a spike in car thefts on the north side of Milwaukee..."

... say police.

"What we see probably more than anything, generally around this time of year, is around high schools... Kids that have to walk to school, they'll walk through the alleys. They'll find somebody that's got their car running left unattended. It's just a quick, easy way to get to school. They'll leave the car within a block or two of school."

It's just a quick, easy way to get to school.

Are you part of "the technocrati generation that uses the city as its living room and kitchen..."

"... and goes to practically a dorm room to crash at the end of the day"?

In cities, modules can be stacked to make a new generation of efficient buildings. At Zeta headquarters, architect Taeka Takagi rolls out a blueprints with one of Zeta's prototypes.

"It is a micro studio," she says. "The units are under 300 square feet."