Daniel Wolff's Blog, page 4
February 23, 2013
NOLA UPDATE 5: THE FIGHT GOES ON
The fight for home is still being fought in New Orleans, more than seven years after Katrina. And it’s in full-swing in the New York metropolitan area, months after Sandy.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently announced he wanted to use $400 million in federal funding to buy “beachfront homes” to “reshape the New York coastline.” The stated goal is to make the region “better prepared for storms like Hurricane Sandy.” With that money, the government would pay homeowners pre-storm values, raze their houses, and leave the land as “open space.” More than ten thousand homes would qualify, with notable exceptions. According to the New York Times, “The program is not targeted at the most expensive waterfront homes; it would cap the payments for houses at around the median home value in a given neighborhood.”
So, who’s going to have their homes razed? Middle and low-income owners. Thanks to historic zoning patterns, many of these live in waterfront flood plains: maritime industrial areas like Red Hook and Staten Island’s North Shore. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the shoreline was where businesses were put: to make it easier to move products and pipe out pollutants. One estimate puts six hundred thousand people in these zones, many of them minorities. That’s who’s likely to feel the major effect of the state’s buy-out-and-raze plan.
If you want to know how it might feel, talk to the people of New Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagin’s first plan after Katrina was to “green dot” areas that weren’t “viable.” Owners and renters were going to be prevented from returning, their lots turned into “green space.” Examine Nagin’s map, and almost all the green dots were in low income, black neighborhoods. Part of the story of my book, The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back, is how those neighborhoods resisted this kind of recovery and how, facing an election, the Mayor backed down.
Still, lots of that land remains empty, the owners unable to rebuild. New Orleans has fewer black and poor people today, even as authorities continue to hail its renaissance. Last week, after the current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, called the Super Bowl his city’s “biggest global moment,” the CEO of the Building Council proclaimed New Orleans “the world’s newest ‘boutique city.’” The Building Council works with the city council to develop “deteriorated” land, and this CEO is also a real estate developer spearheading a plan called “Reinventing the Crescent.” It aims to take six miles of the city’s riverfront, move industry and mid to low-income housing out, and put high-end shops and condominiums in. The developer insists a boutique city “has nothing to do with boutique hotels or clothing boutiques. A boutique city stands for something. It’s original. It’s authentic. It’s one-of-a-kind.”
For an example of what it might stand for, look at a recently revealed plan for part of the city’s Holy Cross neighborhood. Those who managed to make it back to Holy Cross – like the family profiled in Jonathan Demme’s documentary I’m Carolyn Parker – still face almost an hour’s ride to get to the closest grocery store or medical facility. After Katrina, the Holy Cross School – private, predominantly white -- took the opportunity to vacate its campus in this predominantly black, predominantly low-income area. That left a key sixteen-acre parcel open for development. Knowing something would be built, the neighborhood endorsed (by a close vote) a zoning change that would allow seventy-five foot buildings. Last week, the planners charged through that opening with a plan for two thirteen-story apartment buildings including over a hundred and eighty units. One of the developers explained, “In order to preserve green space, there’s only one way we could go, and that’s up.”
There’s nothing wrong with “green space” or “reshaping the coastline.” But these goals too often mask plans for urban development and a gentrified, boutique city. I wrote The Fight for Home hoping that the story would be useful looking forward: to avoid making the same mistakes again. Someday, it may be read as simply a document about a barely remembered hurricane named Katrina. But right now, it’s disturbingly relevant.
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came BackDaniel Wolff
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently announced he wanted to use $400 million in federal funding to buy “beachfront homes” to “reshape the New York coastline.” The stated goal is to make the region “better prepared for storms like Hurricane Sandy.” With that money, the government would pay homeowners pre-storm values, raze their houses, and leave the land as “open space.” More than ten thousand homes would qualify, with notable exceptions. According to the New York Times, “The program is not targeted at the most expensive waterfront homes; it would cap the payments for houses at around the median home value in a given neighborhood.”
So, who’s going to have their homes razed? Middle and low-income owners. Thanks to historic zoning patterns, many of these live in waterfront flood plains: maritime industrial areas like Red Hook and Staten Island’s North Shore. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the shoreline was where businesses were put: to make it easier to move products and pipe out pollutants. One estimate puts six hundred thousand people in these zones, many of them minorities. That’s who’s likely to feel the major effect of the state’s buy-out-and-raze plan.
If you want to know how it might feel, talk to the people of New Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagin’s first plan after Katrina was to “green dot” areas that weren’t “viable.” Owners and renters were going to be prevented from returning, their lots turned into “green space.” Examine Nagin’s map, and almost all the green dots were in low income, black neighborhoods. Part of the story of my book, The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back, is how those neighborhoods resisted this kind of recovery and how, facing an election, the Mayor backed down.
Still, lots of that land remains empty, the owners unable to rebuild. New Orleans has fewer black and poor people today, even as authorities continue to hail its renaissance. Last week, after the current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, called the Super Bowl his city’s “biggest global moment,” the CEO of the Building Council proclaimed New Orleans “the world’s newest ‘boutique city.’” The Building Council works with the city council to develop “deteriorated” land, and this CEO is also a real estate developer spearheading a plan called “Reinventing the Crescent.” It aims to take six miles of the city’s riverfront, move industry and mid to low-income housing out, and put high-end shops and condominiums in. The developer insists a boutique city “has nothing to do with boutique hotels or clothing boutiques. A boutique city stands for something. It’s original. It’s authentic. It’s one-of-a-kind.”
For an example of what it might stand for, look at a recently revealed plan for part of the city’s Holy Cross neighborhood. Those who managed to make it back to Holy Cross – like the family profiled in Jonathan Demme’s documentary I’m Carolyn Parker – still face almost an hour’s ride to get to the closest grocery store or medical facility. After Katrina, the Holy Cross School – private, predominantly white -- took the opportunity to vacate its campus in this predominantly black, predominantly low-income area. That left a key sixteen-acre parcel open for development. Knowing something would be built, the neighborhood endorsed (by a close vote) a zoning change that would allow seventy-five foot buildings. Last week, the planners charged through that opening with a plan for two thirteen-story apartment buildings including over a hundred and eighty units. One of the developers explained, “In order to preserve green space, there’s only one way we could go, and that’s up.”
There’s nothing wrong with “green space” or “reshaping the coastline.” But these goals too often mask plans for urban development and a gentrified, boutique city. I wrote The Fight for Home hoping that the story would be useful looking forward: to avoid making the same mistakes again. Someday, it may be read as simply a document about a barely remembered hurricane named Katrina. But right now, it’s disturbingly relevant.
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came BackDaniel Wolff
November 12, 2012
The Debt We Owe Katrina
Published in NY Times online, November 9, 2012
NYACK, N.Y.
NEW YORK, New Jersey and the Northeastern seaboard owe a debt of gratitude to Hurricane Katrina.
The lesson of the Gulf Coast disaster was the failure of government at every level — federal, state and local — and across party lines. Towns were unprepared; Louisiana’s Democratic governor was slow to mobilize troops; the Republican president oversaw a Federal Emergency Management Agency response that was an almost complete fiasco. Evacuation orders were either not issued or not followed, and many who wanted to get out couldn’t, because public trains and buses weren’t made available. The legacy of Hurricane Katrina was as simple as the Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared.” And, to a large extent, the Northeast’s response to Hurricane Sandy seems to have reflected that.
Many local governments issued evacuation notices and, unlike the New Orleans Police Department, managed to enforce them. State officials prepared early and cooperated, both within and across departments. FEMA aid arrived quickly this time, and in large quantities. Death and destruction were minimized by studying the response to Katrina — and doing the exact opposite.
But there were other lessons from the Gulf Coast disaster, slower to emerge and longer lasting. Here in the Northeast, there has already been talk of starting over, building better and coming back stronger.
As benign and uplifting as this may sound, in New Orleans “building better” was often code for a political agenda. It meant attempting to rezone low-lying areas as “nonviable” — and then turning them over to large-scale developers: a post-flood, backdoor route to old-fashioned urban renewal.
Low-income residents were discouraged from returning to their neighborhoods — in part because they were often the last to get power, water and other services. Damaged schools were permanently closed, providing opportunities to replace them with privatized alternatives. Hospitals dedicated to the care of low-income patients were never reopened; instead, plans were made to replace them with higher-end, more profitable facilities that would price out the poor. In New Orleans, specifically in the most impoverished areas, flooding and wind damage offered an opportunity to “solve” those problems by getting rid of the affected population.
The areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy should be prepared for similar kinds of opportunism. Take the Jersey Shore town of Asbury Park. For over 50 years, the city has had run-down housing, declining schools and increasing crime. Time and again, it has tried to solve those issues by building an economy based on tourism. But focusing on its mile-long beachfront has meant neglecting rampant poverty across the tracks on the town’s West Side.
Asbury Park was attempting a recovery before Hurricane Sandy, having sold most of its prime real estate to a single developer, Asbury Partners (part of the larger entity Madison Marquette), who promised to build high-end condominiums and town houses. Progress had been slow. Instead, the areas that had bounced back had done so mainly thanks to private homeowners and entrepreneurs rebuilding historic homes and opening restaurants and other businesses.
Hurricane Sandy brought the oceanfront three blocks inland. It ripped up sections of boardwalk and sent hundreds of people to shelters. Like New Orleans seven years ago, Asbury Park is now at a crossroads. Does it sweeten the sweetheart deal the developers already have, use eminent domain to condemn and raze low-income housing on the West Side, and lay the groundwork for a “boutique city”? Or is there a way to use Hurricane Sandy’s leveling of so many buildings to also level the city’s playing field: to bring it back as a multiracial, mixed-income city?
Similar questions will face many of the towns and municipalities in Sandy’s wake, including New York City. Much of the five boroughs’ low-income public housing is situated in flood zones. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg estimates that 30,000 to 40,000 residents of public housing complexes have been moved out and are now homeless — living in shelters or elsewhere. Will they come back to the same, better or worse conditions — or come back at all? Will the destruction of private clubs and residences along the New York and New Jersey shorelines lead to rebuilding that includes more public access — or less? And will the rebuilding itself, with its potential of billions of dollars in infrastructure repair and redesign, produce big paydays for out-of-state firms (as it did in New Orleans), or create more local jobs that will help lower regional unemployment?
As I hand wrote this essay on a yellow legal pad, all computers down, the house cold and the refrigerator starting to give off an alarming smell, my first concern was the immediate restoration of power.
But if Katrina is any model, we have to think long-term as well — and make sure we’re forging not just a speedy but an equitable recovery.
Daniel Wolff is the author of “The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back” and “4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/opi...
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
NYACK, N.Y.
NEW YORK, New Jersey and the Northeastern seaboard owe a debt of gratitude to Hurricane Katrina.
The lesson of the Gulf Coast disaster was the failure of government at every level — federal, state and local — and across party lines. Towns were unprepared; Louisiana’s Democratic governor was slow to mobilize troops; the Republican president oversaw a Federal Emergency Management Agency response that was an almost complete fiasco. Evacuation orders were either not issued or not followed, and many who wanted to get out couldn’t, because public trains and buses weren’t made available. The legacy of Hurricane Katrina was as simple as the Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared.” And, to a large extent, the Northeast’s response to Hurricane Sandy seems to have reflected that.
Many local governments issued evacuation notices and, unlike the New Orleans Police Department, managed to enforce them. State officials prepared early and cooperated, both within and across departments. FEMA aid arrived quickly this time, and in large quantities. Death and destruction were minimized by studying the response to Katrina — and doing the exact opposite.
But there were other lessons from the Gulf Coast disaster, slower to emerge and longer lasting. Here in the Northeast, there has already been talk of starting over, building better and coming back stronger.
As benign and uplifting as this may sound, in New Orleans “building better” was often code for a political agenda. It meant attempting to rezone low-lying areas as “nonviable” — and then turning them over to large-scale developers: a post-flood, backdoor route to old-fashioned urban renewal.
Low-income residents were discouraged from returning to their neighborhoods — in part because they were often the last to get power, water and other services. Damaged schools were permanently closed, providing opportunities to replace them with privatized alternatives. Hospitals dedicated to the care of low-income patients were never reopened; instead, plans were made to replace them with higher-end, more profitable facilities that would price out the poor. In New Orleans, specifically in the most impoverished areas, flooding and wind damage offered an opportunity to “solve” those problems by getting rid of the affected population.
The areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy should be prepared for similar kinds of opportunism. Take the Jersey Shore town of Asbury Park. For over 50 years, the city has had run-down housing, declining schools and increasing crime. Time and again, it has tried to solve those issues by building an economy based on tourism. But focusing on its mile-long beachfront has meant neglecting rampant poverty across the tracks on the town’s West Side.
Asbury Park was attempting a recovery before Hurricane Sandy, having sold most of its prime real estate to a single developer, Asbury Partners (part of the larger entity Madison Marquette), who promised to build high-end condominiums and town houses. Progress had been slow. Instead, the areas that had bounced back had done so mainly thanks to private homeowners and entrepreneurs rebuilding historic homes and opening restaurants and other businesses.
Hurricane Sandy brought the oceanfront three blocks inland. It ripped up sections of boardwalk and sent hundreds of people to shelters. Like New Orleans seven years ago, Asbury Park is now at a crossroads. Does it sweeten the sweetheart deal the developers already have, use eminent domain to condemn and raze low-income housing on the West Side, and lay the groundwork for a “boutique city”? Or is there a way to use Hurricane Sandy’s leveling of so many buildings to also level the city’s playing field: to bring it back as a multiracial, mixed-income city?
Similar questions will face many of the towns and municipalities in Sandy’s wake, including New York City. Much of the five boroughs’ low-income public housing is situated in flood zones. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg estimates that 30,000 to 40,000 residents of public housing complexes have been moved out and are now homeless — living in shelters or elsewhere. Will they come back to the same, better or worse conditions — or come back at all? Will the destruction of private clubs and residences along the New York and New Jersey shorelines lead to rebuilding that includes more public access — or less? And will the rebuilding itself, with its potential of billions of dollars in infrastructure repair and redesign, produce big paydays for out-of-state firms (as it did in New Orleans), or create more local jobs that will help lower regional unemployment?
As I hand wrote this essay on a yellow legal pad, all computers down, the house cold and the refrigerator starting to give off an alarming smell, my first concern was the immediate restoration of power.
But if Katrina is any model, we have to think long-term as well — and make sure we’re forging not just a speedy but an equitable recovery.
Daniel Wolff is the author of “The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back” and “4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/opi...
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
September 6, 2012
NOLA UPDATE 4: UNDERWATER POST-ISAAC
The Fight for Home tries to put post-Katrina New Orleans in the larger context of what’s been going on nationally. Perhaps no joke was more biting than the city’s flooded-out residents discovering that, thanks to the mortgage crisis, millions of American homes are now considered “under water.”
Since the publication of the book a month ago, the situation in New Orleans continues to change, as does what’s happening nationally.
Most of the people in The Fight for Home remained in the city for Hurricane Isaac; there was no flooding and no forced evacuation. Pastor Mel’s parents went to Atlanta and returned safely; his bride, Miss Clara, came and went, too. But Mel and the men and women of Bethel Colony South stayed. Half the roof came off one of their buildings, and Mel’s home lost some shingles. Repairs have begun. Malik helped neighbors board up for the storm, then rode it out in Algiers. And Holy Cross saw high winds, but most folks stayed. During the five days they went without power, Carolyn watched a burglar try to climb in a next door window and get arrested in the process. A lot of refrigerated food went bad; some trees fell.
If there was a lesson learned from the Katrina experience, it seems to have been: stay home; keep fighting. [See my op-ed piece for Bloomberg View http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08...]
Meanwhile, a recent Huffington Post article outlines our continuing national situation:
“Only one in four homeowners who applied for government-sponsored loan modifications got help. Less than ten percent of the $50 billion promised to homeowners as part of the bailout has been disbursed. And the federal agency overseeing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has refused to consider a basic demand of everyone from housing activists to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- reducing the principal on underwater mortgages. Meanwhile, nearly one in three borrowers owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.” [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anjali-...]
If the result is, as this article states, that homeownership has become an American fantasy, what are our alternatives? What kind of a national recovery is possible if it’s not driven by home construction and sales? What’s a more stable economic future look like? How do people find decent housing, affordable health care, sustainable and non-destructive jobs?
I hope the stories New Orleanians relate in my book offer a way to consider these questions from a bunch of different angles. And in the process, highlight how the fight for home is larger than one city; it’s about a nation struggling to rise from underwater.
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
Since the publication of the book a month ago, the situation in New Orleans continues to change, as does what’s happening nationally.
Most of the people in The Fight for Home remained in the city for Hurricane Isaac; there was no flooding and no forced evacuation. Pastor Mel’s parents went to Atlanta and returned safely; his bride, Miss Clara, came and went, too. But Mel and the men and women of Bethel Colony South stayed. Half the roof came off one of their buildings, and Mel’s home lost some shingles. Repairs have begun. Malik helped neighbors board up for the storm, then rode it out in Algiers. And Holy Cross saw high winds, but most folks stayed. During the five days they went without power, Carolyn watched a burglar try to climb in a next door window and get arrested in the process. A lot of refrigerated food went bad; some trees fell.
If there was a lesson learned from the Katrina experience, it seems to have been: stay home; keep fighting. [See my op-ed piece for Bloomberg View http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08...]
Meanwhile, a recent Huffington Post article outlines our continuing national situation:
“Only one in four homeowners who applied for government-sponsored loan modifications got help. Less than ten percent of the $50 billion promised to homeowners as part of the bailout has been disbursed. And the federal agency overseeing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has refused to consider a basic demand of everyone from housing activists to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- reducing the principal on underwater mortgages. Meanwhile, nearly one in three borrowers owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.” [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anjali-...]
If the result is, as this article states, that homeownership has become an American fantasy, what are our alternatives? What kind of a national recovery is possible if it’s not driven by home construction and sales? What’s a more stable economic future look like? How do people find decent housing, affordable health care, sustainable and non-destructive jobs?
I hope the stories New Orleanians relate in my book offer a way to consider these questions from a bunch of different angles. And in the process, highlight how the fight for home is larger than one city; it’s about a nation struggling to rise from underwater.
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
August 6, 2012
NOLA UPDATE 3: WHAT CAN I DO?
One of the reactions I’m already getting to “The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back” is “What can I do?”
That’s pretty quick since the official pub date is today.
But it’s a good question with lots of answers. One of them is you might support the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, which does an amazing job getting health care to the city’s musicians.
Before, during, and after the flood, NOMC has been providing basic services to a group of residents who mostly don’t have insurance or other resources. That’s about to get harder with Governor Jindal making (what I see) as a partisan decision to decline the Medicaid help available through Obamacare.
Musicians aren’t that different from their fellow residents and others across the country: often infrequent and low-paying work, poor health, trouble accessing what services there are. The Musicians’ Clinic is making a difference.
Think of it as a place to start writing a new ending to “The Fight for Home.”
Check it out at:
http://www.neworleansmusiciansclinic....
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
That’s pretty quick since the official pub date is today.
But it’s a good question with lots of answers. One of them is you might support the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, which does an amazing job getting health care to the city’s musicians.
Before, during, and after the flood, NOMC has been providing basic services to a group of residents who mostly don’t have insurance or other resources. That’s about to get harder with Governor Jindal making (what I see) as a partisan decision to decline the Medicaid help available through Obamacare.
Musicians aren’t that different from their fellow residents and others across the country: often infrequent and low-paying work, poor health, trouble accessing what services there are. The Musicians’ Clinic is making a difference.
Think of it as a place to start writing a new ending to “The Fight for Home.”
Check it out at:
http://www.neworleansmusiciansclinic....
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
July 31, 2012
NOLA UPDATE2: Semmes
In “I’m Carolyn Parker,” the documentary film directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by Jonathan and myself among others, the Semmes school is a hulking presence. Standing in ruins on a block in Holy Cross, it’s pointed out as a landmark, its roof put on by Carolyn’s last true love with the help of their daughter, Kyrah.
In my about-to-be-published book, “The Fight for Home,” Semmes school is a regular, haunting presence. Named after a segregationist, Civil War-era lawyer, Semmes casts a dark shadow. Over five years, while neighbors struggle to rebuild their nearby homes – some successfully moving in, others forced to sell and raze their homes – Semmes stands there rotting: its windows broken, its interior half-gutted, its playground overgrown.
This week – too late to be included in ether the movie or the book – we begin to understand why this particular blighted property has stayed blighted.
• Semmes school is owned by a not-for-profit called the Ninth Ward Housing Development Corporation (Ninth Ward)
• Ninth Ward is controlled by Jon Johnson, a New Orleans City Councilman.
• After Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) offered disaster relief funds for private non-profits, and in 2006 Ninth Ward received about $140,000 for gutting and removing debris from the school.
• According to the United States of American v. Jon Johnson, filed in a US District Court this July, 2012, Johnson created “false and fabricated invoices,” and the FEMA money went, instead, to pay for his 2007 campaign for the Louisiana Senate.
• Immediately after the indictment, Johnson abruptly resigned from the City Council and pled guilty to charges.
Meanwhile, Carolyn Parker and her neighbors live next to a three-story abandoned school in a neighborhood where such buildings are regularly used by drug users and thieves. In the fall of 2010, a man sprung out of a nearby abandoned building and raped a 16-year old schoolgirl. A block in the other direction, a woman was found dead in her home under mysterious circumstances.
It’s been a long, excruciating recovery for neighborhoods like Holy Cross. Seven years after the floods, blocks are still a patchwork of occupied and abandoned homes. That’s partly due to a governmental response so slow that it borders on the criminally negligent. But beyond the institutional neglect, Semmes school offers an example of a more personal kind of corruption.
As Carolyn and Patsy and Mark put in years of work trying to resurrect their block, the politician they elected to represent their interests is accused of using public money not to improve the neighborhood, but for his personal gain.
Next time you’re asked why the recovery of New Orleans has taken so long, you might start here.
“I’m Carolyn Parker” will be screened in exclusive theatres over the coming month and broadcast on PBS TV’s POV series in September. http://imcarolynparker.com/
“The Fight for Home” will be published August 6th, 2012. http://www.amazon.com/The-Fight-Home-...
In my about-to-be-published book, “The Fight for Home,” Semmes school is a regular, haunting presence. Named after a segregationist, Civil War-era lawyer, Semmes casts a dark shadow. Over five years, while neighbors struggle to rebuild their nearby homes – some successfully moving in, others forced to sell and raze their homes – Semmes stands there rotting: its windows broken, its interior half-gutted, its playground overgrown.
This week – too late to be included in ether the movie or the book – we begin to understand why this particular blighted property has stayed blighted.
• Semmes school is owned by a not-for-profit called the Ninth Ward Housing Development Corporation (Ninth Ward)
• Ninth Ward is controlled by Jon Johnson, a New Orleans City Councilman.
• After Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) offered disaster relief funds for private non-profits, and in 2006 Ninth Ward received about $140,000 for gutting and removing debris from the school.
• According to the United States of American v. Jon Johnson, filed in a US District Court this July, 2012, Johnson created “false and fabricated invoices,” and the FEMA money went, instead, to pay for his 2007 campaign for the Louisiana Senate.
• Immediately after the indictment, Johnson abruptly resigned from the City Council and pled guilty to charges.
Meanwhile, Carolyn Parker and her neighbors live next to a three-story abandoned school in a neighborhood where such buildings are regularly used by drug users and thieves. In the fall of 2010, a man sprung out of a nearby abandoned building and raped a 16-year old schoolgirl. A block in the other direction, a woman was found dead in her home under mysterious circumstances.
It’s been a long, excruciating recovery for neighborhoods like Holy Cross. Seven years after the floods, blocks are still a patchwork of occupied and abandoned homes. That’s partly due to a governmental response so slow that it borders on the criminally negligent. But beyond the institutional neglect, Semmes school offers an example of a more personal kind of corruption.
As Carolyn and Patsy and Mark put in years of work trying to resurrect their block, the politician they elected to represent their interests is accused of using public money not to improve the neighborhood, but for his personal gain.
Next time you’re asked why the recovery of New Orleans has taken so long, you might start here.
“I’m Carolyn Parker” will be screened in exclusive theatres over the coming month and broadcast on PBS TV’s POV series in September. http://imcarolynparker.com/
“The Fight for Home” will be published August 6th, 2012. http://www.amazon.com/The-Fight-Home-...
July 17, 2012
"How many years does it take them to do something?"
The temptation to keep updating my new book, “The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back,” is overwhelming. But since it’s due to come out August 6th from Bloomsbury, I’ll have to be content to send addendums your way.
Here’s one. Seven years after Katrina, the city is still three-quarters its former size with many former residents unable to return. Homelessness remains epidemic with the number of public housing units below what there were before the floods.
Yet here’s a story about 5100 abandoned building lots, some with buildings, that the city is paying some $86 million to hold onto while they decay:
http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf...
“The Fight for Home” weighs in at 342 pages. It tells the story of how this came to be. I could keep adding to it but ….
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
Here’s one. Seven years after Katrina, the city is still three-quarters its former size with many former residents unable to return. Homelessness remains epidemic with the number of public housing units below what there were before the floods.
Yet here’s a story about 5100 abandoned building lots, some with buildings, that the city is paying some $86 million to hold onto while they decay:
http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf...
“The Fight for Home” weighs in at 342 pages. It tells the story of how this came to be. I could keep adding to it but ….
The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back
November 9, 2009
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in and out of Chicagoland
A week in the mid-west, doing readings and having discussions, reconfirms that this is the real pay-off from writing a book: the talk that follows, the agreements and disagreements, the issues raised. It’s like the book continues to be written – in public – person by person.
There was the school teacher, a veteran of twenty-plus years in the public system, who asserted (grey hair, pink cheeks, thick glasses: the picture of the teacher you remember): “Schools were designed to create factory workers. And there aren’t any factory jobs left.”
There was the quiet in Winnetka, a rich suburb north of Chicago, when I’d finished a talk on Abigail Adams and John Kennedy: how they illustrated that America’s wealthy have always been able to buy a “better” education. Quiet, and then one woman asked what my qualifications were for writing “How Lincoln Learned to Read.” Good question. My qualifications are mostly curiosity but include having been a student and the parent of students and a citizen. But her larger question was really what we need to know to discuss education. Do people need to be schooled to discuss school? And if we’re trying to have a democracy, where does that leave the “unqualified” -- who are, after all, the majority of us?
There was the drive south to Springfield, Illinois to speak at the Lincoln Museum. Mile after mile of yellow-white corn with the occasional green John Deere reaper, the occasional orange sugar maple. It was as man-made a landscape as any city block. It made me think of Emerson’s declaration: “The farm the farm is the right school.” These farms were hundreds of acres cut into squares, further divided into straight rows, then planted with a single crop to be harvested by men in machines. So when I arrived and spoke about Lincoln to a large, eager crowd -- his hunger to learn, to stop being a hunter/farmer and settle down -- it was colored by this glimpse of what we’ve settled into. The 21st century farm is the right school for what? Teaches which values? And what are the consequences to the family, the land?
There was the evening class full of adults trying to get back into the educational system – most of them black, all of them low income. They started raucously debating what a “good” education might be. Whether the “best” schools taught you how to survive in South Chicago or the tough sections of Madison, Wisconsin. Where and how books fit into a life of single mothers, food stamps, and working at McDonalds. We went from shouting to laughing: the question of what we need to know hot and personal.
There was the early morning University of Wisconsin lecture hall – three hundred undergrads – being asked why they were here: what did they expect to learn? How they looked up sleepily from their laptops and grinned. It struck them as a funny question: asked in the middle of a recession, in the middle of a term, in the middle of a class that would segue into the next and eventually turn into a diploma. Then they talked about the maze of college, what sustained them, the music they loved. And later – at a local bookstore – the U of W education majors who wanted to talk about alternative schools and seemed to bloom at the idea that we might learn what we need to know both in and outside of the classroom. How to set up an educational system that recognized and somehow credited that? How to hash out the implications on a local level?
There was a quick chat after a reading in Hyde Park, where a middle-aged white man described dropping out of college and spending a season on the ore boats in the Great Lakes. Then coming back to school and for the first time in his life being hungry for knowledge, needing to know how the world worked.
I’m leaving some out: the radio interviewer describing how he tries to give his five year old time to just wander around, to look at rocks and flowers, and how hard that is – how strongly he feels the pressure to “educate” her instead. The discussion about how schools fit into present day capitalism: that they offer the Horatio Algier hope that education can help anyone (everyone?) succeed! And how people don’t much want to hear if that’s not true.
And then there was the “failed” reading in Milwaukee: a single, elderly woman surrounded by empty chairs. And her explaining that both her boys had dropped out of high school. And how she attributed it to the elementary school teacher who had refused to hang her son’s drawing because he’d made the grass red, not green. “He never forgot it,” she said, not bitter. And both sons are doing fine, thanks.
It was a great pleasure to meet these people, introduce them to W.E.B. DuBois, Lincoln, Rachel Carson and others from “How Lincoln Learned to Read,” and then listen to the dialogue – no, the debate really; the wrestling match – that followed.
How Lincoln Learned to Read Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
There was the school teacher, a veteran of twenty-plus years in the public system, who asserted (grey hair, pink cheeks, thick glasses: the picture of the teacher you remember): “Schools were designed to create factory workers. And there aren’t any factory jobs left.”
There was the quiet in Winnetka, a rich suburb north of Chicago, when I’d finished a talk on Abigail Adams and John Kennedy: how they illustrated that America’s wealthy have always been able to buy a “better” education. Quiet, and then one woman asked what my qualifications were for writing “How Lincoln Learned to Read.” Good question. My qualifications are mostly curiosity but include having been a student and the parent of students and a citizen. But her larger question was really what we need to know to discuss education. Do people need to be schooled to discuss school? And if we’re trying to have a democracy, where does that leave the “unqualified” -- who are, after all, the majority of us?
There was the drive south to Springfield, Illinois to speak at the Lincoln Museum. Mile after mile of yellow-white corn with the occasional green John Deere reaper, the occasional orange sugar maple. It was as man-made a landscape as any city block. It made me think of Emerson’s declaration: “The farm the farm is the right school.” These farms were hundreds of acres cut into squares, further divided into straight rows, then planted with a single crop to be harvested by men in machines. So when I arrived and spoke about Lincoln to a large, eager crowd -- his hunger to learn, to stop being a hunter/farmer and settle down -- it was colored by this glimpse of what we’ve settled into. The 21st century farm is the right school for what? Teaches which values? And what are the consequences to the family, the land?
There was the evening class full of adults trying to get back into the educational system – most of them black, all of them low income. They started raucously debating what a “good” education might be. Whether the “best” schools taught you how to survive in South Chicago or the tough sections of Madison, Wisconsin. Where and how books fit into a life of single mothers, food stamps, and working at McDonalds. We went from shouting to laughing: the question of what we need to know hot and personal.
There was the early morning University of Wisconsin lecture hall – three hundred undergrads – being asked why they were here: what did they expect to learn? How they looked up sleepily from their laptops and grinned. It struck them as a funny question: asked in the middle of a recession, in the middle of a term, in the middle of a class that would segue into the next and eventually turn into a diploma. Then they talked about the maze of college, what sustained them, the music they loved. And later – at a local bookstore – the U of W education majors who wanted to talk about alternative schools and seemed to bloom at the idea that we might learn what we need to know both in and outside of the classroom. How to set up an educational system that recognized and somehow credited that? How to hash out the implications on a local level?
There was a quick chat after a reading in Hyde Park, where a middle-aged white man described dropping out of college and spending a season on the ore boats in the Great Lakes. Then coming back to school and for the first time in his life being hungry for knowledge, needing to know how the world worked.
I’m leaving some out: the radio interviewer describing how he tries to give his five year old time to just wander around, to look at rocks and flowers, and how hard that is – how strongly he feels the pressure to “educate” her instead. The discussion about how schools fit into present day capitalism: that they offer the Horatio Algier hope that education can help anyone (everyone?) succeed! And how people don’t much want to hear if that’s not true.
And then there was the “failed” reading in Milwaukee: a single, elderly woman surrounded by empty chairs. And her explaining that both her boys had dropped out of high school. And how she attributed it to the elementary school teacher who had refused to hang her son’s drawing because he’d made the grass red, not green. “He never forgot it,” she said, not bitter. And both sons are doing fine, thanks.
It was a great pleasure to meet these people, introduce them to W.E.B. DuBois, Lincoln, Rachel Carson and others from “How Lincoln Learned to Read,” and then listen to the dialogue – no, the debate really; the wrestling match – that followed.
How Lincoln Learned to Read Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
September 28, 2009
Speculating on Education
The Charter Schools Gamble [originally at counterpunch.org:]
By DANIEL WOLFF
"We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools.
Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments?
It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR), buys real estate nationwide, with its total portfolio worth about $2.6 billion. Over half of that is in megaplex movie theaters. EPR’s stated goal is to be "the nation's leading destination entertainment, entertainment-related, recreation and specialty real estate company."
So why charter schools?
According to EPR's website: "We understand that education is among the most vital experiences of life. Movie theatres and charter schools are very different in many ways, but they are alike in this respect: People choose to patronize them. Our experience in financing specialized real estate enables us to capitalize on properties that people choose to visit."
Huh?
EPR, based in Kansas City, Missouri, consists of sixteen full-time employees. David Brain, President and CEO, says his favorite part of the job is: "solving problems and crafting a deal, and creating something really new." The deals that EPR crafts follow corporate policy: their tenants must sign a long-term mortgage or something called a triple-net lease where they (the tenants) pay "substantially all expenses associated with the operation and maintenance of the property." EPR’s charter schools have these triple-net leases. EPR is the landlord; the tenant pays for maintaining the buildings and running the classrooms.
In this case, the tenant is a charter-school operator called Imagine. Founded in 2004, it now runs 74 schools from New York to Arizona involving some 36,000 students. Imagine says its goal is “giving the families quality educational choice” by establishing “independently operated public schools.”
Charters are public schools in that the funding comes from state and local school taxes. Imagine gets a certain amount of money for each of its charter students based on the home district’s per-student expenses. The more kids Imagine enrolls, the more money it gets (and the less goes to traditional public schools.) Over the last few years, charters have been successfully attracting more and more students: in central Ohio, for example, Imagine’s budget doubled in 2005-06 and doubled again the next year.
The money pays for teachers, supplies, maintenance, etc. But the problem charter schools have is getting the capital to buy or lease buildings. The vice-president of policy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools calls it “the biggest challenge.”
What Imagine did was start a real estate arm: Schoolhouse Finance LLC. In central Ohio, for example, this financial arm purchased a building for $1.5 million with a $4.6 million mortgage. But tying up their money in property ends up limiting how much charter schools can expand. So Imagine turned around and sold its buildings as part of a larger sale-lease transaction with a company called JER Investors Trust Inc. This brought in $5.6 million over Imagine’s original purchase price.
Imagine did a similar deal in Indiana, where its real estate arm made $2.6 million on an old YWCA it bought for $1.9 million. In fact, real estate plays a key role in Imagine’s charter school operations: its investments in buildings went from $19 million in 2005 to $297 million in 2008 -- suggesting that charter schools can turn the challenge of finding classrooms to their advantage.
But why does a company like JER think charter school buildings are a good investment?
JER’s founder, Joe Robert, made his killing in the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980's. Through his connections with the Federal Savings and Loan Association, Robert was awarded the largest contract ever at the time ($120 million in assets) to manage and sell the government’s “troubled” properties. He cleaned up, moving from there to handling assets for himself and other investors. By 1986, he was managing a portfolio worth some $7.5 billion.
Soon, JER was working with Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group. Its profits only increased with the various mortgage and investment arrangements that helped create the real estate bubble. As a Washington Post reporter put it, "In those days … it was not unusual for Robert to double and triple his money, sometimes within a matter of months."
A high-flying investor, then, who spent some $77.5 million buying into charter schools. A November 2008 story from Las Vegas helps explain why.
Imagine ran a Nevada school called the 100 Academy of Excellence, which -- based on the local per-student cost -- received about $3 million from the state each year. Half of that, the story reports, went to running the school and half went back to the operator, Imagine. Of the $1.5 million Imagine got, it paid almost all of it -- $1.4 million -- to Joe Robert’s company to cover its lease.
That’s an enormous percentage of your budget to pay for classrooms. (And Imagine has high leases in other schools, like Fort Wayne’s MASTer Academy.) But Imagine is a start-up company. It needs classrooms to draw students -- to expand its brand name until it can become truly profitable.
Meanwhile, it added up to a first-rate investment for JER. The tenant (Imagine) had a dependable source of income through school taxes – and, in the Nevada case, was willing to use most of its revenue to pay the lease. The only catch in the formula is the charter has to educate its students on about half what the state spends per-student.
Imagine makes clear on its website how it expects to deal with this. The corporation demands what it calls “economic sustainability” from all its schools. “Each school must spend less each year on school operations than it receives in revenue from the government and other sources.”
But if the district determines how much it costs to educate a child – and sends money to Imagine based on that formula -- how can the charter school do it for less? In the case of the 100 Academy of Excellence, the principal told a state official that money was saved by letting go veteran (read expensive) teachers and increasing class size (read cost saving).
That guaranteed that the rent got paid. But it didn’t guarantee the quality of the education. 2006-07 test results from the 100 Academy of Excellence fell below national standards and put it on the state’s “Watch List” for failing schools.
The academy’s landlord, JER, didn’t need to bother about such matters. Or about Imagine’s profitability. In fact, though Imagine brought in $131 million in the 2006-07 school year, it ended up losing $2.3 million. But JER hadn’t bought Imagine; it had bought the real estate: the school buildings with Imagine as the tenant. As long as the tenant lived up to its lease, JER had a sweet deal.
It might have continued, except the real estate bubble burst. In two years, JER’s publicly traded stock went from $23 a share to zero – and was “delisted” from the New York Stock Exchange. Robert started selling off his assets, including the charter school buildings. That’s when Entertainment Properties stepped in, buying the properties complete with triple-net leases.
“The charter public schools,” says EPR’s David Brain, “offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It’s a very desirable equation.”
So it has been. Nationally, the number of students choosing charter schools has quadrupled in the last decade. In EPR’s words, “people chose to visit them” -- just like mega-theaters. That will continue as long as parents are disappointed in traditional public schools, and operators like Imagine successfully market their brand of “quality” education.
But what if charters don’t provide better test results (as some recent studies have shown)? What if families decide they don’t offer a better choice? Then the numbers will decrease, and the per-student revenue stream will start to dry up.
Other scenarios could also affect revenue. What if tax-payers revolt against their money being used to make a profit for private companies? What if the economy doesn’t recover quickly? Or, using less drastic possibilities, what if the states’ educational funds continue to be strapped: what a director of the National Education Association calls the current “lack of funds overall”? Even with the current stimulus money, many school districts are having to tighten their budgets. And that stimulus money will soon disappear.
It’s easy to imagine what happens once charters fail or start to shrink. The flow reverses: public schools are flooded with returning students. But now veteran teachers have been driven from the system. Young educators working with over-sized charter classes have burnt out. Plus, having shrunk their physical operation, public schools will suddenly have to find classroom space.
If the recent failure of the economy has taught us anything, it’s that all investment is speculation. We’ve seen the supposedly guaranteed income of everything from retirement funds to home prices collapse. In the face of these kinds of reversals, investors like EPR could probably recoup some of their losses (as JER did) by selling off their school buildings.
But should the speculation that is charter schools fail, where does that leave the nation’s educational system? And our kids?
Daniel Wolff lives in Nyack, N.Y. His newest book is How Lincoln Learned to Read. His other books include "4th of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land." He is a co-producer of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary about New Orleans, "Right to Return."
By DANIEL WOLFF
"We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools.
Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments?
It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR), buys real estate nationwide, with its total portfolio worth about $2.6 billion. Over half of that is in megaplex movie theaters. EPR’s stated goal is to be "the nation's leading destination entertainment, entertainment-related, recreation and specialty real estate company."
So why charter schools?
According to EPR's website: "We understand that education is among the most vital experiences of life. Movie theatres and charter schools are very different in many ways, but they are alike in this respect: People choose to patronize them. Our experience in financing specialized real estate enables us to capitalize on properties that people choose to visit."
Huh?
EPR, based in Kansas City, Missouri, consists of sixteen full-time employees. David Brain, President and CEO, says his favorite part of the job is: "solving problems and crafting a deal, and creating something really new." The deals that EPR crafts follow corporate policy: their tenants must sign a long-term mortgage or something called a triple-net lease where they (the tenants) pay "substantially all expenses associated with the operation and maintenance of the property." EPR’s charter schools have these triple-net leases. EPR is the landlord; the tenant pays for maintaining the buildings and running the classrooms.
In this case, the tenant is a charter-school operator called Imagine. Founded in 2004, it now runs 74 schools from New York to Arizona involving some 36,000 students. Imagine says its goal is “giving the families quality educational choice” by establishing “independently operated public schools.”
Charters are public schools in that the funding comes from state and local school taxes. Imagine gets a certain amount of money for each of its charter students based on the home district’s per-student expenses. The more kids Imagine enrolls, the more money it gets (and the less goes to traditional public schools.) Over the last few years, charters have been successfully attracting more and more students: in central Ohio, for example, Imagine’s budget doubled in 2005-06 and doubled again the next year.
The money pays for teachers, supplies, maintenance, etc. But the problem charter schools have is getting the capital to buy or lease buildings. The vice-president of policy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools calls it “the biggest challenge.”
What Imagine did was start a real estate arm: Schoolhouse Finance LLC. In central Ohio, for example, this financial arm purchased a building for $1.5 million with a $4.6 million mortgage. But tying up their money in property ends up limiting how much charter schools can expand. So Imagine turned around and sold its buildings as part of a larger sale-lease transaction with a company called JER Investors Trust Inc. This brought in $5.6 million over Imagine’s original purchase price.
Imagine did a similar deal in Indiana, where its real estate arm made $2.6 million on an old YWCA it bought for $1.9 million. In fact, real estate plays a key role in Imagine’s charter school operations: its investments in buildings went from $19 million in 2005 to $297 million in 2008 -- suggesting that charter schools can turn the challenge of finding classrooms to their advantage.
But why does a company like JER think charter school buildings are a good investment?
JER’s founder, Joe Robert, made his killing in the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980's. Through his connections with the Federal Savings and Loan Association, Robert was awarded the largest contract ever at the time ($120 million in assets) to manage and sell the government’s “troubled” properties. He cleaned up, moving from there to handling assets for himself and other investors. By 1986, he was managing a portfolio worth some $7.5 billion.
Soon, JER was working with Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group. Its profits only increased with the various mortgage and investment arrangements that helped create the real estate bubble. As a Washington Post reporter put it, "In those days … it was not unusual for Robert to double and triple his money, sometimes within a matter of months."
A high-flying investor, then, who spent some $77.5 million buying into charter schools. A November 2008 story from Las Vegas helps explain why.
Imagine ran a Nevada school called the 100 Academy of Excellence, which -- based on the local per-student cost -- received about $3 million from the state each year. Half of that, the story reports, went to running the school and half went back to the operator, Imagine. Of the $1.5 million Imagine got, it paid almost all of it -- $1.4 million -- to Joe Robert’s company to cover its lease.
That’s an enormous percentage of your budget to pay for classrooms. (And Imagine has high leases in other schools, like Fort Wayne’s MASTer Academy.) But Imagine is a start-up company. It needs classrooms to draw students -- to expand its brand name until it can become truly profitable.
Meanwhile, it added up to a first-rate investment for JER. The tenant (Imagine) had a dependable source of income through school taxes – and, in the Nevada case, was willing to use most of its revenue to pay the lease. The only catch in the formula is the charter has to educate its students on about half what the state spends per-student.
Imagine makes clear on its website how it expects to deal with this. The corporation demands what it calls “economic sustainability” from all its schools. “Each school must spend less each year on school operations than it receives in revenue from the government and other sources.”
But if the district determines how much it costs to educate a child – and sends money to Imagine based on that formula -- how can the charter school do it for less? In the case of the 100 Academy of Excellence, the principal told a state official that money was saved by letting go veteran (read expensive) teachers and increasing class size (read cost saving).
That guaranteed that the rent got paid. But it didn’t guarantee the quality of the education. 2006-07 test results from the 100 Academy of Excellence fell below national standards and put it on the state’s “Watch List” for failing schools.
The academy’s landlord, JER, didn’t need to bother about such matters. Or about Imagine’s profitability. In fact, though Imagine brought in $131 million in the 2006-07 school year, it ended up losing $2.3 million. But JER hadn’t bought Imagine; it had bought the real estate: the school buildings with Imagine as the tenant. As long as the tenant lived up to its lease, JER had a sweet deal.
It might have continued, except the real estate bubble burst. In two years, JER’s publicly traded stock went from $23 a share to zero – and was “delisted” from the New York Stock Exchange. Robert started selling off his assets, including the charter school buildings. That’s when Entertainment Properties stepped in, buying the properties complete with triple-net leases.
“The charter public schools,” says EPR’s David Brain, “offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It’s a very desirable equation.”
So it has been. Nationally, the number of students choosing charter schools has quadrupled in the last decade. In EPR’s words, “people chose to visit them” -- just like mega-theaters. That will continue as long as parents are disappointed in traditional public schools, and operators like Imagine successfully market their brand of “quality” education.
But what if charters don’t provide better test results (as some recent studies have shown)? What if families decide they don’t offer a better choice? Then the numbers will decrease, and the per-student revenue stream will start to dry up.
Other scenarios could also affect revenue. What if tax-payers revolt against their money being used to make a profit for private companies? What if the economy doesn’t recover quickly? Or, using less drastic possibilities, what if the states’ educational funds continue to be strapped: what a director of the National Education Association calls the current “lack of funds overall”? Even with the current stimulus money, many school districts are having to tighten their budgets. And that stimulus money will soon disappear.
It’s easy to imagine what happens once charters fail or start to shrink. The flow reverses: public schools are flooded with returning students. But now veteran teachers have been driven from the system. Young educators working with over-sized charter classes have burnt out. Plus, having shrunk their physical operation, public schools will suddenly have to find classroom space.
If the recent failure of the economy has taught us anything, it’s that all investment is speculation. We’ve seen the supposedly guaranteed income of everything from retirement funds to home prices collapse. In the face of these kinds of reversals, investors like EPR could probably recoup some of their losses (as JER did) by selling off their school buildings.
But should the speculation that is charter schools fail, where does that leave the nation’s educational system? And our kids?
Daniel Wolff lives in Nyack, N.Y. His newest book is How Lincoln Learned to Read. His other books include "4th of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land." He is a co-producer of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary about New Orleans, "Right to Return."
June 2, 2009
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in the Northwest Part 2
Mid-day, we drive up into the Columbia River Gorge, just outside of Portland. It rains hard, off and on. Great strands of white waterfalls tumble off the basalt walls on the Oregon side of the river. They pull tourists in: parking lots and asphalt paths let us walk right up, throw back our heads, and try to see the source high in the mist. It’s wet on wet: drizzle and mist watering ferns, little maples, beds of lush moss.
Farther upriver is the Bonneville Dam: an astonishing testament to the species’ ambition, ingenuity, stubbornness. The Columbia rages past, white and black from a season of rain. It easily takes down huge Douglas firs and whips them away, but humans have somehow forced it to pass through this massive concrete structure. It’s beyond me how the first abutment was laid, never mind the turbines and gates rising out of the boil.
Homo sapiens, seeing the power of the water, felt the urge to use it, to tame it. And learned the skills to do so. It’s a giant, roaring library, this dam – storing all kinds of knowledge, good and bad.
Meanwhile, in the basement of its visitors center, through thick plate glass, you can make out the shapes of steelheads and Chinook salmon, fighting their way upstream against the fierce yellowish current (or, up the fish ladder, really). They seem to be all muscle. Which is all desire. Which is all instinct, we’re told. The drive to spawn.
That drive doesn’t involve learning, right? Just checking on how we view the world from the basement of a huge, man-made impediment: an electricity maker that the fish have to swim around. What the steelheads feel as an urge to get upstream is not what humans feel seeing the rush of the Columbia, right? Our impulse to harness the energy, to do something with it, is a thought, right? Not an instinct? Not a drive up against the force of the world?
**
The reading that night at the University Bookstore in Seattle is on University Avenue, which has a string of bars, Vietnamese restaurants, tattoo parlors, and students on bikes. My audience is older: 40 and up.
There’s a couple in their sixties out of South Carolina who took two buses across Seattle to get here this evening. They checked How Lincoln Learned to Read out of a local library and decided to keep it, paying the cover cost. Later, they talk about a radical past – an involvement with the civil rights movement when it was dangerous for Southern whites to take that stand. They’re reading Lincoln as a kind of instruction manual: studying history to learn how we messed up and, maybe, can make things better.
A woman in her 40’s asks questions based on her research of the Seattle school system. She cites its history of busing and private schools, the exodus out of the city and out of public education, the high incidence of home-schooling.
An older guy who listens hard says he picked this reading over a city school board meeting that was also tonight. At the meeting, they were voting on a new teaching method, Discovery Math, which he clearly thought was bogus. He’d rather be here, trying to get some larger perspective on the issues, than seeing whatever adjustments the system was making to curriculum. I hope Lincoln helped.
And there was a grandfather whose “extended family” was doing a lot of home-schooling, and it made him curious about how and where we learn. A home-schooled niece had just put on a student version of the musical, “Wicked,” from scratch. When he declared she seemed to be getting a good education, another woman in the audience said recent statistics were showing home-schoolers excelling in all areas.
There’s a definite feel out here in the Northwest that to ask the question Lincoln asks – how do we learn what we need to know – is to enter the discussion of alternative education, of kids learning from parents and other kids outside of formal school. I haven’t heard nearly as much about that in the Northeast.
**
There are only a couple of people waiting in the funky bookstore in Olympia, Washington. I talk anyway, trying to describe how the history of learning that Lincoln traces includes a history of how we treat the environment: from New England farmers “mining” the soil with corn crop after corn crop to Rachel Carson’s childhood in the industrial Allegheny River valley and her need for nature as a kind of curative.
The store clerks love it, and both buy a copy! I sign a handful of others. It seems like a silly pursuit in a world full of burning issues: talking to a couple of people on a cool, damp evening in a little college town off Puget Sound. The orange-brown Douglas Firs stacked on the loading docks seem more important – more solemn, certainly – than the thin, wood-pulp pages of a book.
On the other hand, driving the wet valley between Portland and Seattle, I heard an interview on the radio with Pete Seeger; it’s his 90th. He declared all real change came about through a series of small, incremental shifts and adjustments. If so, mebbe this little bookstore and the few people inside are part of that. I fly home the next morning.
Farther upriver is the Bonneville Dam: an astonishing testament to the species’ ambition, ingenuity, stubbornness. The Columbia rages past, white and black from a season of rain. It easily takes down huge Douglas firs and whips them away, but humans have somehow forced it to pass through this massive concrete structure. It’s beyond me how the first abutment was laid, never mind the turbines and gates rising out of the boil.
Homo sapiens, seeing the power of the water, felt the urge to use it, to tame it. And learned the skills to do so. It’s a giant, roaring library, this dam – storing all kinds of knowledge, good and bad.
Meanwhile, in the basement of its visitors center, through thick plate glass, you can make out the shapes of steelheads and Chinook salmon, fighting their way upstream against the fierce yellowish current (or, up the fish ladder, really). They seem to be all muscle. Which is all desire. Which is all instinct, we’re told. The drive to spawn.
That drive doesn’t involve learning, right? Just checking on how we view the world from the basement of a huge, man-made impediment: an electricity maker that the fish have to swim around. What the steelheads feel as an urge to get upstream is not what humans feel seeing the rush of the Columbia, right? Our impulse to harness the energy, to do something with it, is a thought, right? Not an instinct? Not a drive up against the force of the world?
**
The reading that night at the University Bookstore in Seattle is on University Avenue, which has a string of bars, Vietnamese restaurants, tattoo parlors, and students on bikes. My audience is older: 40 and up.
There’s a couple in their sixties out of South Carolina who took two buses across Seattle to get here this evening. They checked How Lincoln Learned to Read out of a local library and decided to keep it, paying the cover cost. Later, they talk about a radical past – an involvement with the civil rights movement when it was dangerous for Southern whites to take that stand. They’re reading Lincoln as a kind of instruction manual: studying history to learn how we messed up and, maybe, can make things better.
A woman in her 40’s asks questions based on her research of the Seattle school system. She cites its history of busing and private schools, the exodus out of the city and out of public education, the high incidence of home-schooling.
An older guy who listens hard says he picked this reading over a city school board meeting that was also tonight. At the meeting, they were voting on a new teaching method, Discovery Math, which he clearly thought was bogus. He’d rather be here, trying to get some larger perspective on the issues, than seeing whatever adjustments the system was making to curriculum. I hope Lincoln helped.
And there was a grandfather whose “extended family” was doing a lot of home-schooling, and it made him curious about how and where we learn. A home-schooled niece had just put on a student version of the musical, “Wicked,” from scratch. When he declared she seemed to be getting a good education, another woman in the audience said recent statistics were showing home-schoolers excelling in all areas.
There’s a definite feel out here in the Northwest that to ask the question Lincoln asks – how do we learn what we need to know – is to enter the discussion of alternative education, of kids learning from parents and other kids outside of formal school. I haven’t heard nearly as much about that in the Northeast.
**
There are only a couple of people waiting in the funky bookstore in Olympia, Washington. I talk anyway, trying to describe how the history of learning that Lincoln traces includes a history of how we treat the environment: from New England farmers “mining” the soil with corn crop after corn crop to Rachel Carson’s childhood in the industrial Allegheny River valley and her need for nature as a kind of curative.
The store clerks love it, and both buy a copy! I sign a handful of others. It seems like a silly pursuit in a world full of burning issues: talking to a couple of people on a cool, damp evening in a little college town off Puget Sound. The orange-brown Douglas Firs stacked on the loading docks seem more important – more solemn, certainly – than the thin, wood-pulp pages of a book.
On the other hand, driving the wet valley between Portland and Seattle, I heard an interview on the radio with Pete Seeger; it’s his 90th. He declared all real change came about through a series of small, incremental shifts and adjustments. If so, mebbe this little bookstore and the few people inside are part of that. I fly home the next morning.
May 11, 2009
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in the Northwest Part 1
My prologue to the readings in the Northwest is a weekend stay up on the Olympic Peninsula. A walk down the beach facing the Juan de Fuca Strait reveals sea otter, bald eagles, loons, seals, grebes. Drawn by this wilderness, the folks I meet are in the middle of a re-education. They’re convinced the car-driven, oil-dependent, energy-wasteful culture is suicidal, and they’re trying to figure out another way to go. Public transportation, composting, grow your own food, used clothes, intense awareness of energy use, and a local focus that leaves the rest of the continent – from the news to the pop culture – blurry. Call it a re-Americanization: the thirty-something guys in their beards and flannel shirts, women in gore-tex and hiking boots, are like immigrants to a new, green land. They’re in the middle of inventing the language, the values, the customs.
So it makes some sense, later in the week, when the discussion of the good-sized crowd at Powell’s heads in the direction of alternative ways of learning. There’s the woman in the first year of home-schooling her 15 year old son; she talks about how he’s not only more curious but physically healthier. (Are pale, acned adolescents a product of fluorescent lights and history class?)
A soft-spoken, gray-haired guy wonders why, after all these years, our schools still can’t manage to teach the basics. A middle-aged woman behind him answers that the circumstances keep changing: both the present world and the imagined, future world kids are being prepared for. So, the basics keep changing, too. How we read and what we read shifts – or the emphasis shifts. We aren’t teaching for the farm anymore. (I wonder if 21st century green living will mean going back to educational basics, too?)
A woman up front makes a point about what she calls reverse discrimination. She has four kids, the youngest is mixed race, and that one is offered a richer variety of programs in high school. Because she’s part Hispanic the woman says.
A high school student a couple rows back answers her. Her honors program is mixed race. As are lots of the school’s programs. And, the teenager adds, what’s wrong about home-schooling is you lose that diversity.
The discussion zips back and forth, me adding some anecdotes from How Lincoln Learned to Read. One guys talks about his “a-ha!” moment in middle school when he stays up all night to finish a paper and realizes he likes learning. A librarian wonders what libraries have to do with early American learning, and we talk about Ben Franklin borrowing books, Abigail Adams holed up in her grandparents’ library.
Afterwards, the talk is more personal. One former elementary school teacher is now helping doctors with their handwriting. She sighs; penmanship has been a lifelong struggle. Another has self-published a book on the scripture. A guy wants to talk about the role of Free Masons. It’s a lovely, slightly loony conversation.
At the end, a man in his early 60’s with thick glasses and a gentle voice describes how college wasn’t very good for him: he never learned the skills he needed. It was too “de-individualized.” “Only now,” he says and looks to the ceiling, “-- what is it? May? --so five months ago, I realized what it is I need to know to do the things I want to do.” He pauses. “I believe in life-long learning,” he says and hopes his son turns out the next night when I’m reading at the University of Washington bookstore.
So it makes some sense, later in the week, when the discussion of the good-sized crowd at Powell’s heads in the direction of alternative ways of learning. There’s the woman in the first year of home-schooling her 15 year old son; she talks about how he’s not only more curious but physically healthier. (Are pale, acned adolescents a product of fluorescent lights and history class?)
A soft-spoken, gray-haired guy wonders why, after all these years, our schools still can’t manage to teach the basics. A middle-aged woman behind him answers that the circumstances keep changing: both the present world and the imagined, future world kids are being prepared for. So, the basics keep changing, too. How we read and what we read shifts – or the emphasis shifts. We aren’t teaching for the farm anymore. (I wonder if 21st century green living will mean going back to educational basics, too?)
A woman up front makes a point about what she calls reverse discrimination. She has four kids, the youngest is mixed race, and that one is offered a richer variety of programs in high school. Because she’s part Hispanic the woman says.
A high school student a couple rows back answers her. Her honors program is mixed race. As are lots of the school’s programs. And, the teenager adds, what’s wrong about home-schooling is you lose that diversity.
The discussion zips back and forth, me adding some anecdotes from How Lincoln Learned to Read. One guys talks about his “a-ha!” moment in middle school when he stays up all night to finish a paper and realizes he likes learning. A librarian wonders what libraries have to do with early American learning, and we talk about Ben Franklin borrowing books, Abigail Adams holed up in her grandparents’ library.
Afterwards, the talk is more personal. One former elementary school teacher is now helping doctors with their handwriting. She sighs; penmanship has been a lifelong struggle. Another has self-published a book on the scripture. A guy wants to talk about the role of Free Masons. It’s a lovely, slightly loony conversation.
At the end, a man in his early 60’s with thick glasses and a gentle voice describes how college wasn’t very good for him: he never learned the skills he needed. It was too “de-individualized.” “Only now,” he says and looks to the ceiling, “-- what is it? May? --so five months ago, I realized what it is I need to know to do the things I want to do.” He pauses. “I believe in life-long learning,” he says and hopes his son turns out the next night when I’m reading at the University of Washington bookstore.
