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Monthly Archives: June 2008

Eight Reasons Journalists Should Learn Economics

By | | News commentary
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A writer for MarketWatch.com, which is part of the Dow Jones-Wall Street Journal group — has penned one of the most smugly ignorant articles about our economy I could imagine. The article is titled Eight Reasons You’ll Rejoice When We Hit $8 a Gallon Gasoline.

His reasons include:

1. RIP for the internal combustion engine

2. Economic stimulus

3. Whither the Middle East’s clout

4. Deflating oil potentates

5. Mass transit development

6. An antidote to sprawl

7. Restoration of financial discipline

8. Easing global tensions

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Why “Progressive” Should Be Politically Incorrect

By | | Follow up
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Certain political terms, such as communist, Nazi, and even socialist, have become politically incorrect in the sense that they have been so successfully demonized that calling someone one of these terms is about equal to using the “n-word” or other derogatory ethnic terms. On the Internet, for example, if someone compares you with Nazis, you can declare yourself the winner of whatever debate you are in.

It is time for the progressive philosophy to join this list of politically unacceptable beliefs. At the moment, many people view “progressive” in a positive way that is not in keeping with its history or the beliefs of many of its current practitioners.

As the Antiplanner noted yesterday, it is ironic that the cities that have promoted policies that make housing unaffordable and push low-income people out like to call themselves progressive. This is only ironic because progressives love to pretend they care about minorities and low-income people. History, however, shows otherwise.

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Let’s Talk about Gentrification

By | | City planning, News commentary
38 Comments

The New York Times has a love affair with Portland, but a recent article points to a dark side of Portland that the Antiplanner has commented on before: it is (as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser once put it) a “boutique city catering only to a small, highly educated elite.”

That means there isn’t much room in Portland for chronically low-income blacks. The black “ghetto,” as we called parts of Northeast Portland when I was growing up there, has been gentrified by yuppies who can’t afford homes elsewhere in the region’s urban-growth boundary. This has pushed blacks from rental housing in those neighborhoods, leaving just a scattering of blacks who owned their homes.

What is left “is not drug infested, but then you say, ‘Well, what happened to all the black people that were in this area?’ ” Margaret Solomon, a long-time black resident told the Times. “You don’t see any.” As California writer Joseph Perkins put it, “smart growth is the new Jim Crow.”

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