NewGeography.com blogs

Recently, I saw Clint Eastwood’s extraordinary new film, 'Gran Torino' in Hollywood. Set in a declining Detroit neighborhood, the movie chronicles the unlikely relationship retired auto worker Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) forges with his new Hmong neighbors.

Walt is cranky, surly, and bigoted while still possessing a certain rough-edged charm. His dialogue is laced with racist terms and stereotypes that would mandate a lengthy “sensitivity training” seminar if he came of age in a different era.

And yet, the audience laughed and laughed loud. Here, in one of the nation’s most multi-ethnic cities with a history of racial tension, blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos were chuckling as Walt bemoaned “gook food” and cringed at his neighbor’s ways. Twenty years ago, Walt’s language would have appeared less ironic, perhaps being interpreted as a sign of how a sizeable percentage of white Americans viewed minorities. To laugh at Walt then would appear to be laughing with him rather than at him.

But in 2009 America, on the cusp of a black president arriving in the White House, a character like Walt feels safely anachronistic – his views seem fringe like. What seemed funny to the audience is that people like Walt still exist. What is so satisfying about 'Gran Torino' is how it eschews political correctness and decides to speak to an audience that it figures will laugh at Walt rather than with him. It assumes that Americans watching the film are smart and tolerant enough to get the joke. And they do.

I’d be curious to know how audiences reacted to the movie across the country.

A guest-post from Bill Steigerwald in Pittsburgh:

If the New York Times went to Berlin in 1936 to write a story about how that city was "Depression-proof," would it forget to mention that Germany was being run by a bunch of Nazis? If it went to Pyongyang tomorrow would it go ape over that city’s tidy orderliness without noting that North Korea was a totalitarian hellhole? If the Times bureau in Moscow reported on wheat production in Ukraine in 1933, would it overlook the government-designed famine that was killing - oops, sorry, let's not go there.

Seriously, is it too much to ask for a little Journalism 101 from America’s Rag of Record?

On Wednesday the Times, following a similarly lame piece of Chamber of Commerce journalism done by the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Nov. 23, did a glowing Page 1 story ("For Pittsburgh, There's Life After Steel" by David Streitfeld) about the Pittsburgh region's alleged imperviousness to the national recession.

You see, cities that have pioneered deindustrialization, shed huge chunks of population and shifted to service economies that run on curing sick people, college kids and government bureaucrats, as the former Steel City basically does, are now recession-proof, the rationalizing goes, because they’ve essentially been in low-grade recessions for decades.

Anyway, the Times – like the Plain Dealer and the parade of other national media that periodically traipses to this great town to gawk and glorify Pittsburgh’s many natural and man-made assets – forgot to tell its trusting readers that the city of Pittsburgh (where the Steelers and young Mayor Luke Ravenstahl play) is bankrupt and essentially in state receivership.

Nor did the Times note that Pittsburgh’s ever-dwindling, ever-aging, relatively poor and under-educated population (down in the city to 310,000 from 650,000 about 50 years) is subjected to crippling high taxes and deprived of basic city services like reliable snow-plowing.

Nor did it note that Pittsburgh's city schools spend more than $20,000 per student per year yet are hemorrhaging students annually.

Nor did it note that the city has wasted scores of millions of tax dollars on failed Downtown retail redevelopment schemes, subsidized professional sports stadia and a series of mass-transit boondoggles like our under publicized “Tunnel to Nowhere,” a 1.2-mile, $435-plus-million light-rail tunnel under the Allegheny River.

It's tragic enough that the Times’ national editors think that an over-taxed, chronically mismanaged city that has been deindustrialized, depopulated and abused by its political rulers for 70 years is favorably situated to deal with recession.

But to not devote one paragraph to the shameful failings and idiocies of Pittsburgh's public sector is a journalistic felony. Somebody please show the Times' editors how to Google the word "Potemkin."

Our friend Tory Gattis pointed out yesterday at Houston Strategies that conventional wisdom (and the US DoT Federal Highway Administration) are wrong. Quoting a recent report by New Geography contributor Wendell Cox:

In fact, this data is incorrect. The FHWA 2006 data indicates that the Houston urban area has a population of 2,801,000. According to the United States Bureau of the Census, the population of the Houston urban area was 4,353,000 in 2006.... Actually Houston’s driving is about average: If the urban area population is corrected to agree with the Bureau of the Census data, per capita driving in the Houston area is slightly below the national average for large urban areas. Houston would rank 19th out of 38 urban areas, with daily per capita driving of 23.2 miles, compared to the national average of 23.9 miles.

Even if you're not interested in Houston or that potential gaffe, check out Wendell's report for a table of per capita vehicle miles driven for 38 urbanized areas over 1,000,000 population.

If there’s one place in America most likely to adopt congestion pricing, you would think it would be San Francisco. The combination of affluence, deep-seated environmentalism and a tradition of progressive politics would lend itself to adopting the program. But even residents there are skeptical.

Congestion pricing is the practice of charging commuters a fee for driving through a congested downtown area during peak commute times. In San Francisco, they are discussing a payment of between 50 cents and $5 to be assessed to drivers who commute between 6–9 a.m. and 3–6 p.m. The argument is that by doing so, you reduce congestion and raise public coffers to be poured into public transportation. In London, traffic was reduced 21% and public transit increased 36% when congestion pricing was adopted (it’s also been adopted in Singapore and Stockholm).

But SF is no London when it comes to public transportation. Anyone who has ever stuffed themselves into a city bus headed for points westward after work knows it is not nearly as reliable or as comfortable as “the tube.” It seems like there would have to be a rise in the standards of public transportation there to really make it effective – and money for that would not be available for some time given California’s budget circumstances.

Today's latest release of the Standard and Poor's Case-Shiller Housing Price Index indicates a continued price free fall across the board. Hyper-inflated markets such as Miami, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, San Diego, and Las Vegas continue to come back to earth. Check out the chart.

Even Charlotte, Denver, Dallas, and Atlanta, which seemed to be holding their own after never seeing a huge price escalation, seem to be sliding again since July. Cleveland seems to have stabilized, but Detroit continues its drop into a black hole. Home prices in Detroit have fallen to almost 14% below levels in early 2000.

Follow this link for a bigger version of the chart.