HOT05: Monorails & Sunbeams
The year is winding down & I’m not in my feelings about it but I could be if you want.
In September, I published an essay in The Believer (preemptive R.I.P.) about potential next Mayor India Walton and the the fiscal challenges she’ll have to navigate if she wants to fund big social policies. I had actually been thinking through a version of this essay even before India Walton won Buffalo’s democratic mayoral primary and before I knew who she was. I was interested in writing about a a trend where big city mayors allow luxury housing and top-down economic development to run amok largely as a way to boost city coffers and fund social programs. It’s something Sam Stein writes about in “Capital City” and which P. E. Moskowitz touches on in “How To Kill A City.” The idea is basically that federal disinvestment leads most big city mayors, regardless how putatively “progressive” they frame their agenda, into a neoliberal bind where market forces appear to be the only viable option to fund social programs.
When India won her primary, I immediately started thinking about how she could navigate that bind. Can any American mayor really be socialist when the job has essentially devolved into boosterism for private capital projects and new fines? In digging into Buffalo’s finances, however, my thesis was complicated, mainly because what I thought was an intractable neoliberal bind was actually a set of wildly ineffective policies driven by groupthink that were actually making all these financial problems worse. As a policy researcher I spoke with pointed out to me, Buffalo’s predatory fines and fees, which grew to $2.8 million a year in revenue, were still not offsetting the massive growth in the city’s police department budget, which grew by $53 million over the course of 14 years. Similarly, a tax subsidy meant to build new housing actually raised rents, and an economic development tax subsidy cost $800 million and net 800 jobs. It’s as if Buffalo mayor Byron Brown and the city’s council were so desperate to plug their revenue gaps that they anxiously signed off on any bizarre and overpriced dotted line that was put in front of them. Anyway all of this is probably better explained by the monorail episode of the Simpsons. Or maybe that episode would better explain former Governor Cuomo’s stalled AirTrain to Laguardia airport, which would have cost billions of dollars to go the wrong way.
Cities with financial problems and even cities that appear flush with cash but are going through a periodic downturn tend to sign off on their own versions of the monorail - fancy, expensive projects that wreak havoc and don’t do any of the things they promise, like bring in jobs, increase the tax base or make anyone happy ever.
Speaking of groupthink that leads cities to pour large sums of cash into a blast furnace, I wrote a piece for Slate about the narratives surrounding the current crisis on Rikers Island. The spate of deaths this year have been attributed in news articles to a “staff shortage” or more vaguely to a “staffing crisis.” I demonstrated using publicly available data as well as math that this makes little sense, because the jail system’s staffing ratio has been at or near a thirty-year peak during all of 2020 and 2021. This is true even accounting for historic levels of absenteeism - 2000 people a day calling in sick for several months. Notably, I was in touch with the city’s Department of Correction throughout the writing of this article and they were aware of its publication. When it ran they did not request any corrections, likely because it is all correct.
The city is never the less set to hire 600 new corrections officers, which will likely just make the crisis worse in the long-term.
Here’s my original last paragraph for this article, which was cut for space: “Any local jail population is the result of myriad place-specific disinvestments and failures of imagination, and the current crisis on Rikers is no different. Mostly this crisis is the story of a city that took coordinated measures to reduce its jail population and then, out of fear, tried to return to business as usual while a pandemic was still raging. But it was not caused by underfunding a corrections budget that is extravagant by any measure.”
I’m hoping that reporters who read this article ask deeper questions about what is happening on Rikers, since a lot of articles have condensed the problem into the term “staffing crisis” without including the context of mismanagement and record-high staffing ratios.
Here’s what else I’m up to: I started writing the “Backyard” housing newsletter for Next City, which you can subscribe to here. Every Thursday I’ll publish a rundown of the country’s housing news - big picture policy stuff and also short memos of visionary projects around the country. Every other week I’ll also publish a longer reported piece, beginning with this piece on basement flooding in Queens resulting from Hurricane Ida.
Articles I have been reading:
This piece in Gothamist about redlining, overdevelopment and disinvestment that led a block in Queens to flood during rainstorms for decades.
My friend, the writer, DJ and curator Aisha Mirza writes an advice column at Gal Dem for queer & trans BIPOC people called Queeries. This column on how to deal with ecological grief is beautiful, thoughtful, compassionate & a must-read for all organic life. Here’s a quote: “It may seem counterintuitive to lean even further into the greens of the planet at the same time you’re mourning them, but isn’t it instinctually the only answer? It’s sus that so many of us have come to see nature as something outside of us, something that we can choose and control, as if we aren’t all guests here?”
This year was the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, and I think everyone should read the demands written by the prisoners who staged the uprising - who wanted services, to be treated humanely and for their physical and mental health to be prioritized.
This long read by Anand Gopal in the New Yorker on the war in Afghanistan, told through the experiences of one woman in a rural part of the country, is really instructive on how morally deranged the war in Afghanistan has been since its beginning. Warlords who predated the Taliban were empowered by the U.S. government, which turned a blind eye to their atrocities and that of the Afghan military and of course, the U.S. military committed its own atrocities. In this context the drone strike that killed 7 children while targeting an aid worker seems to be fairly consistent with the U.S. legacy there.
In Jewish Currents, Hannah Black wrote about the connection between uprisings against anti-black police violence in Minneapolis last year and the Palestinian freedom struggle. I like that she goes into the evolution of political solidarity among pre-civil rights Black writers and leaders, who did not all side with the Palestinian struggle.
Cartoonist and artist Sloane Leong wrote this interesting essay in Apex Magazine on the way that science fiction futures either ignore the natural world or envision ways to manipulate and control it, which Leong associates with the harmful colonialist project that has led to climate change. Leong calls for a sci fi that shows reverence and stewardship for nature, pointing to Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy as an example.
Judith Butler wrote about global anti-trans movements and the way they cloak themselves in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist language while hiding the fact that they are fascist, ie. are used to stoke nationalism and authoritarianism.
Albums I have been Listening To:
JPEGMafia - LP! (2021)
Rachika Nayar - Fragments (2021)
Dawn Richard - Second Line (2021)
Wil Bolton - Cumulus Sketches (2021)
Advance Base - Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write (2021)
J Balvin - Jose (2021)
OHYUNG - Protector (2020)
RaFia - Leave Me Alone (2021)
Videos:
I love Dawn Richard’s album Second Line and this video for the Disco-futuristic “Boomerang” is hypnotic.
L’Rain’s “Fatigue” is easily one of the best albums of 2021 and this video for “Find It” made from archival footage is joyful and made me feel things in my heart.
I have been watching Dominican rapper Tokischa’s videos almost every day - she is so funny and weird, her videos all feel unhinged in the best way, but I think this one might be my favorite. I also like physically have to dance whenever I hear this song? My body won’t let me not. Do you think she will be my friend
Books I’ve Been Reading:
On a Sunbeam - Tillie Walden - A really beautiful queer science fiction romance comic, I think this satisfied a set of narrative needs I’ve had for the past year or so. When the pandemic started and I was isolated I went really in my head and had a hunger for weird, escapist fantasy in a way that I haven’t since I was maybe a kid. I’ve been looking for something to read that is emotionally-driven, uses sci fi tropes but is not necessarily sci fi - or at least not hard sci fi and more of a fantasy with sci fi imagery - and I wanted to read something focused on interpersonal relationships, something not bleak or cruel or cynical in tone. This satisfied all those desires and had pretty art. I got choked up at several parts. I plan to revisit it if I write a big weird touching sci fi comic.
Porochista Khakpour - The Brown Album - I am enjoying Porochista’s fun, conversational, wry, wistful examinations of Iranian-American identity told through the experience of her family, who fled Iran after the revolution in ‘79. One thing I liked about Didion’s “White Album,” the title of which this book playfully references, is that Didion’s essays rarely come to hard conclusions and often settle on painful & irresolvable sentiments. Khakpour’s essays here do something similar, but where Didion can be cold and detached, Khakpour laughs and gossips with you along the way.
That’s all for this month’s episode. Tune in next time when other things will happen in some kind of order.
xoxo
Roshan