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The limits of aspirational society

The more I reflect on opening night of the Democratic Convention—at times tear-eliciting inspiration at others hair-pulling frustration—the more convinced I become that we desperately need stories and leaders to help us navigate the challenges of being a mature, aspirational society.

It is paradoxical that so much anger and despair exists in our society today, despite compelling evidence suggesting that these are some of the safest and most affluent times in human history. To be sure, there is no shortage of problems and challenges and imperfections that we still face, both here in the United States and around the world. Yet, as emphasized in President Obama’s brilliant state-of-the-union address in January, when we step back and survey the big picture, it becomes apparent just how good we have it and how lucky we are to be alive at this time.

This same spirit of appreciative aspiration was even more evident in the First Lady’s beyond-brilliant speech last night, so eloquently captured in her humble observation that the Obama family today wakes up each morning in a house built by slaves. This is a powerful testament to just how far we have come as a nation and of how much more we are able to achieve when we unite together.

It will please my conservative friends to know that, yes, I believe the United States of America is an exceptional, if imperfect, country. It is and always has been great, and we do a tremendous disservice to all those who have come before us and built the American Dream to ever greater heights when we fail to acknowledge their hard work and sacrifice. Our duty is to pay it forward, to continue to build on this legacy of progress.

While this theme was more obviously on display in the Democrats’ speeches, it really was the theme, too, of the Republicans’ speeches last week, just with a much different, much angrier tone. This different tone was also heard last night from Bernie Sanders’ most defiant supporters, and it stems from the fact that tales of achieved progress ring hollow when they run contrary to personal experience. While Lord Tennyson may have been right that it is “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” I think my own personal favorite poet (Bruce Springsteen) presents a more timely sentiment when he asks, “Is a dream a lie when it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”

This is our conundrum. Yes, we must continue to dream and to pay it forward. We are capable of preserving (much of) what we have, restoring (much of) whatever we may have lost, and adding (much of) whatever we may want in our efforts to build a better society for ourselves, our children, and beyond. But those parenthetical limitations are important. Not only do we face the “inconvenient truth” of a planet that is limited in terms of the natural resources and environmental services that it is able to provide us, but not all of our personal dreams can be realized, at least not in full nor as we originally envisioned. Not every “revolution” succeeds, and even those that do, have a tendency to yield some very perverse results. So Sarah Silverman was spot-on when she pointed to petulant Bernie-or-Bust delegates and told them that they were being “ridiculous.” Or, to cite another classic lyric from twentieth-century rock, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well you just might find, you get what you need.” 

To accompany and balance our bold and tenacious spirit of hope, we must also cultivate a less inspiring but no less important spirit of humble acceptance. Otherwise, our dreams, and our revolutions, really will lead to something worse.

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Trying to Understand Turkey

Confused about the chaotic and violent events in Turkey Friday night? Congratulations, you are doing it right. If you find yourself struggling to figure out which side proponents of liberal democracy and human rights, and of stable and secure society governed by the fair and just rule of law, should support, you are most assuredly not alone. Indeed, can we even speak of “sides” to be straightforwardly chosen in Turkey these days, given the fluidity and multiplicity of the country’s peoples, institutions, and alliances?

Perhaps the only certain claim we can make about Turkey is that it matters. A lot. As summarized in the short three-year-old video below from Stratfor, a Texas-based consultancy, Turkey sits at some of the most important geopolitical intersections in the world.

Amidst the rapidly changing situation on the night of July 15–16, Stratfor issued an early assessment of the attempted coup’s apparent failure. In doing so, Stratfor analysts provided a brief overview of the profoundly fractured political context that led up to the coup and will no doubt echo for a long time to come:

As we saw in Turkey’s 2015 elections, ... the country is deeply polarized among secularists, Islamists, Kurds and nationalists. Turkey has a number of fault lines that breed opposition to Erdogan’s Islamist-leaning political agenda and neo-Ottoman foreign policy direction, but on the other side of those splits are a substantial number of supporters who legitimately support the president. Moreover, there are many Turks who are anti-Erdogan yet also anti-coup, and who remember the deep economic and political instability of Turkey’s coup-ridden past.

The Guardian’s Patrick Kingsley provided a more complete report of the night’s events. Now the world watches with great interest and uncertainty about what happens next, and given Mr. Erdogan’s history and early post-coup statements, it is hard to disagree with Ranj Alaaldin’s assessment that “darker days lie ahead for Turkey.” (See also the only slightly more optimistic summaries of what the failed coup did and did not represent by Constanze Letsch and Andrew Finkel.) Even as the night was still unfolding, the irony of the Turkish President taking to social media to call on the public to assemble in the name of defending democracy was not lost on many observers.

As the summer wears on, future events unfold, and as my own time allows, I might add some follow-up posts, particularly with an eye toward adding deeper historical context. For now, I’ll add just one more complication: Pakistan. Like Turkey, this South Asian giant sits even further beyond the margins of the Arab world but very much at the heart of global Islam. Pakistan, too, is an old Cold War ally of the United States and NATO that has seen its relationship with the trans-Atlantic West become increasingly complicated in the 21st Century. And Pakistan has one more thing in common with Turkey: a modern history of military coups d’etat. Coincidentally, today’s New York Times features this article, on the recent appearance of political posters in the country calling for General Raheel Sharif’s army to oust the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Needless to say, there are a lot of anxiously attentive eyes watching the world today from its various state houses and foreign ministries.

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The California Drought

Jay Lund, from UC-Davis, shared an interesting blog post today on the impacts of our recent drought in California, and like his blog in general, I think it is well worth a read.

Rather than the usual doom and gloom, Lund’s perspective is more optimistic.  It’s not that he sees the drought itself being any less severe than it was or has been. And it’s not that he is forecasting a miraculously wetter climate in the future. Instead, he makes a pretty good case that California’s economy—including its agricultural sector—is able to cope with even the most severe and extended of droughts in a rather resilient way. This does not mean that we can avoid all economic pain for all actors in all places, but Lund argues we do have the capacity to shift scarce water resources to activities that are most valuable and most necessary. As long as we are smart about it, and don't allow irrationally wasteful, low-value uses and users to block such shifting and rationing, we should be OK.

With the last sentence above, I’ve made explicit a concern that is largely implicit in Lund’s post, because I think that's a really important qualifier. Likewise, I’m not sure if Lund fully accounts for how dependent we have been in the last few years on record-breaking, unsustainable groundwater withdrawals—a lifeline that very well might not be available to us in the future, at least not to the same degree. Still, I generally share Lund’s “We Can Do It (if we’re smart about it)” attitude.

Lund describes the situation very much in aggregate. For an alternative, but I think complementary, point of view, give a listen to a pair of episodes from last fall of the BBC radio program, Global Business, hosted by Peter Day.  Like all of his episodes, this one is built around interviews Day made with local players—in this case, several farmers and water officials in the San Joaquin Valley around Fresno. Here are the links:

Part One: The California Drought

Part Two: A Tale of Two Farms

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With this short two-minute video on “the ingenious ways Lagos copes with blackouts,” The Guardian kicks off its week-long focus on Nigeria’s sprawling megacity—arguably the “shock city” of 21st-Century urbanization. 

The video is simultaneously serious and light-hearted, and it’s a refreshing change from the polarized view of Africa that we often get, featuring either heart-tugging “poverty porn” or romanticized celebration of a colorful, exotic “other”. More than anything, this video is human. There are many things that make us human, including, to be sure, our boundless capacity to hope and dream. Yet, perhaps the quality I’ve long admired the most—the heart of the human spirit—is our remarkable ability to cope, to get on with our lives with dignity and maybe even a fair amount of happiness, even when we know things could and should be better.

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Refugees and Europe

Thanks to some striking images from Budapest and from the Turkish coast, the continuing plight of refugees seeking asylum in Europe has grabbed the world’s attention this week. This is a story that has been building for several years, but at least from a European perspective, it is the story of 2015, rivaled only by the continuing saga of Euro-zone fiscal crises, particularly in Greece. What follows is a collection of reports that I’ve bookmarked--some just this week, some earlier this year--which provide a variety of perspectives on the refugee crisis.

Attention this week has centered on Syrian refugees, for good reason. But Syria is far from the only source country sending to Europe desperate people displaced by political and/or economic catastrophe. Back in May, when the center of attention was on people trying to cross the Mediterranean into Italy, The Economist compiled a nice graphical overview of the situation:

These graphics accompanied another summary from The Economist. The Guardian, meanwhile, provided a moving human perspective on the migrants’ desperate situation. More recently, Foreign Policy and The Independent have compiled their own graphical overviews of the situation. The official website of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees also maintains an ongoing summary. Looking at all of these sources, the primary takeaways are:

Syria accounts for about half of the refugees arriving in Europe by sea, but as many as a dozen other countries throughout northern Africa and the Middle East are significant sources, too. When the overland route is also included, then the large number of asylum seekers from Kosovo reminds us that the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s continue to reverberate today.

While usually not the desired final destination for refugees, Greece and Italy receive the great bulk of the people arriving by sea. In terms of absolute numbers, Germany stands out as the primary country of ultimate asylum. Compared to the countries’ respective resident populations, however, one might argue that other EU states, such as Hungary and Sweden, actually are shouldering a larger relative burden.

Three quarters of the refugees are men--young men typically--although the significant numbers of women and children among the refugees do much to make this a front-page news story around the world and to engender sympathy among the European public.

The flow of refugees was significant in 2014 (and before), but the summer of 2015 has seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of people crossing the Mediterranean.

While the refugee crisis is larger than Syria, that is very much where the news has been focused this week. Given that the war in Syria is hardly new, The Guardian addressed the question this week, “Why now?” What, if anything, has changed to so raise the profile within Europe of the Syrian refugee crisis? Besides those provocative images mentioned at the top of this post, the answer seems to rest on a snowballing sense among displaced Syrians that their old homes are gone forever; rather than wait any longer for the war to end and a chance to return home, many are concluding that their only option is to begin to build a new life in Europe. In addition to the pull of Europe, there is also the push of a rapidly deteriorating situation at the refugee camps in Turkey and other Syria-adjacent countries. Furthermore, the dynamics of chain migration seem to be kicking in as stories and money from earlier Syrian migrants to Europe are making their way back to friends and family who now find it easier and more desirable to follow in their footsteps.

The European University Institute provides a good overview of the Syrian refugee crisis from a European perspective. And in his distinctively engaging style, Dr. Hans Rosling of Gapminder.org reminds us in the following video that the refugees entering Europe are just the tip of a much larger iceberg of Syrians uprooted from their homes by conflict.

Whether arriving by boat, truck, or train, from Syria, Kosovo, or Eritrea, refugees have been receiving a mixed reception in Europe. The perspective from Germany is especially interesting, given the country’s recent history and its position as one of the EU’s largest and most affluent member states. Germans, after all, find it very easy to sympathize with people fleeing war-torn regions, with their own long recovery from the near-total devastation of World War II still a very salient historical memory. Germans also tend to see themselves as champions of the progressive, integrative EU project, with the post-Cold War reunification of East and West central to that story. 

Of course, Germans are no different than other peoples around the world who react with smaller or larger amounts of angst at the social and cultural change that large-scale immigration can bring. The challenge of integrating immigrants whose native languages and religions seem so foreign to a traditional Germanic identity has been a major theme throughout the postwar era, as seen in the work of the Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin, among others. For many Germans, such challenges are just too great, and they constitute a burden and a threat that must be actively resisted. Thus, following the likes of Front National in France, UKIP in Britain, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Germany has seen its own rise of anti-immigrant, EU-skeptical, right-wing politics. For the last year, such thinking has been associated primarily with Pegida, a political movement whose name is a German-language acronym that translates as “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West”. More disturbingly, 2015 also has seen a rash of horrific, violent attacks against refugee hostels in Germany. 

In a recent cover story, Der Spiegel describes such anti-immigrant actions as “Dunkles Deutschland” (Dark Germany). But in a country that is so sensitive to its image abroad, recently stung by the criticism of its role as the primary enforcer of austerity in the Euro crisis and perpetually under the shadow of its Nazi past, the German public has been quick to respond to the rise of this “dark” version of themselves with an impressive counter-response. The same Der Spiegel article describes this other side of the country as “Helles Deutschland” (Light Germany), and this light has been shining brightly this week. First, over the weekend, fans all across the top division of German soccer, the Bundesliga, coordinated a series of stadium displays strongly voicing their support of the idea: “Refugees Welcome”. The soccer clubs themselves have joined in, providing not only free match tickets to refugees but financial and other assistance as they begin the arduous process of building a new life in a foreign land. Then, as attention shifted this week to Germany-bound trains from Hungary filled beyond capacity with asylum seekers, the people and authorities of Munich responded with an amazing show of generosity and kindness, donating food, diapers, clothing, and spare rooms in their homes, to the thousands of refugees entering the city.

The humanitarian crisis in Syria and elsewhere is so entrenched and so severe that the story of refugees entering Europe promises to be significant for a long time to come. As it has already, the crisis will test not only the generosity and the integrative capacity of Europeans, it will test the very idea of Europe itself. Just as the future of a multinational economy built around a common currency has come under some doubt, so, too, are questions being asked of the well-established freedom of international, intra-EU travel known as the Schengen Agreement. In short, this story of refugees, and of immigration more generally, promises (and threatens) to reshape the European project. What the EU is, and what it might become, will largely be determined by how the member states of Europe and their citizens respond.

[brewinggeographer]

La Crescenta Against the Mountains: In the Footsteps of John McPhee

Last month, I had a couple of weekend hours to kill while in the general vicinity of the Crescenta Valley, in metro L.A.’s northern foothills. It’s an area I had driven through many times on the 210 freeway, but otherwise did not know very well, at least not in any sort of locally specific way. Except for one suburban street and the somewhat famous house that sits at its base. (Follow this link to Google Maps to virtually explore the location on your own.)

That Pine Cone Road and the Genofile house are known by me, or to any extent beyond its local Pinecrest neighborhood, is due to the frightening events that took place one February night in 1978, and to the fact that one of the country’s most prominent essayists so prominently featured these events in one of his most prominent publications. Since its initial publication in 1988, John McPhee’s account of what happened on Pine Cone Road has become a staple of presentations on the hazards of debris flows (aka “mudslides”) specifically, on the challenges of living in naturally hazardous environments more generally, and on the complexities we face even more generally in managing our people-environment relationships. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of story that geographers such as myself love to tell.

Rather than tell that whole story here myself, let me share a portion of McPhee’s version:

Kimberlee Genofile called to her mother, who joined her in [brother] Scott’s room as they looked up the street. From its high turnaround, Pine Cone Road plunges downhill like a ski run, bending left and then right and then left and then right in steep christiania turns for half a mile above a three-hundred-foot straight-away that aims directly at the Genofiles’ house. Not far below the turnaround, Shields Creek passes under the street, and there a kink in its concrete profile had been plugged by a six-foot boulder. Hence the silence of the creek. The water was not spreading over the street. It descended in heavy sheets. As the young Genofiles and their mother glimpsed it in the all but total darkness, the scene was suddenly illuminated by a blue electrical flash. In the blue light they saw a massive blackness, moving. It was not a landslide, not a mudslide, not a rock avalanche; nor by any means was it the front of a conventional flood. In Jackie’s words, “It was just one big black thing coming at us, rolling, rolling with a lot of water in front of it, pushing the water, this big black thing. It was just one big black hill coming toward us.”

In geology, it would be known as a debris flow. Debris flows amass in stream valleys and more or less resemble fresh concrete. They consist of water mixed with a good deal of solid material, most of which is above sand size. Some of it is Chevrolet size. Boulders bigger than cars ride long distances in debris flows. Boulders grouped like fish eggs pour downhill in debris flows. The dark material coming toward the Genofiles was not only full of boulders; it was so full of automobiles it was like bread dough mixed with raisins. On its way down Pine Cone Road, it plucked up cars from driveways and the street. When it crashed into the Genofiles’ house, the shattering of safety glass made terrific explosive sounds. A door burst open. Mud and boulders poured into the hall. “We’re going to go,” Jackie thought. “Oh, my God, what a hell of a way for the four of us to die together.”

- Excerpt from John McPhee, The Control of Nature, as presented by the U.S. Geological Survey’s online student guide, “Land and People: Finding a Balance.” Like the book’s other two chapters, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains” was originally published in the New Yorker in September and October 1988. Several contemporary news stories covering the 1978 debris flows were collected and reprinted in the October 2009 newsletter of the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley.

above: The Genofile’s buried home in February 1978 (Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley)

Fortunately the Genofile family survived that terrifying night, and they were able to share their story with McPhee a decade later, as well as with a local Crescenta Valley audience more recently. It’s a story that never loses its very tangible local relevance, for the threat of violent debris flows at the foot of Southern California’s mountains is perennial. Residents of foothills communities are especially on edge at the beginning of any winter rainy season following wildfire on the chaparral-covered slopes above. Such was the case for Pinecrest in the Fall of 2009, after that summer’s Station Fire burned more than 160,000 acres—the largest in L.A. County’s recorded history—and left Jackie Genofile and her neighbors anxiously awaiting what winter storms might bring. “Everyone was pretty panicky,” she told the L.A. Times.

Upon visiting the site of such geological drama about which I had read so much, I was immediately struck by two things. First, on a lazy but not atypical Saturday morning, it’s quiet in Pinecrest. Not suspiciously quiet, but peacefully quiet. McPhee describes the neighborhood as “serene”, but since his story revolves around the dramatic hazards associated with living on the margins of where the city meets the mountains, it’s easy to lose track of just how beautiful and peaceful this neighborhood is. As Reyner Banham, another outside observer of L.A., noted in his widely read architectural history of the metropolitan region, the foothills provide a stunning refuge from the traffic and the noise of the “Plains of Id” that lie below. Reading McPhee’s essay almost inevitably leads one to question, “Why would anyone want to live there?” But to actually visit the Pinecrest neighborhood just as inevitably leads one to oppositely ask, “Why would anyone not?”

above: The rebuilt Genofile house, now with a second story to (hopefully) stay above any future mud and debris, and in the meantime, to provide enhanced city and mountain views.

The second thing that immediately caught my attention during my visit is that the slopes of the Pinecrest neighborhood are steep! I used to be a competitive cyclist, and I still harbor middle-aged delusions of conquering the great climbs of the Alps and Pyrenees, but McPhee was spot on when he used another sport for his choice of metaphor. Pine Cone Road is just a few feet of snow away from being a candidate for the Downhill ski course at the Winter Olympics. This was apparent even while I was still in the car, repeatedly and nervously checking my brakes. Getting out of the car and walking only confirmed that these otherwise tame suburban streets could indeed serve as good training ground for climbing Mount Whitney.

above: Looking down upper Pine Cone Road, with Shields Creek behind the fence in the channel to the right, before crossing under the street near the utility pole. Behind a moderate layer of haze in the background stand the skyscrapers of Downtown L.A..

above: The reverse view of the previous photo, looking back up at Upper Shields from near the utility pole, with Shields Creek now on the left.

above: Looking down lower Pine Cone Road, around the last sweeping bend before reaching the Genofile house at the bottom. For the reverse view looking back up the hill from the Genofile house, alongside the same debris-filled view in 1978, see this post on the website of the Crescenta Valley Weekly.

above: Not far above the bend from which the previous photo was taken, Pine Cone Road gets really steep.

While McPhee listed the steepness of these San Gabriel slopes as one of several factors contributing to the severity of their natural hazard, he failed to note that this severe topography isn’t entirely natural. Or to state it a bit more precisely, the twentieth-century city was not at all humble in extending its sprawling reach well up onto those mountain slopes, into a setting that might be deemed, well, unnatural for urban living.

The photo above comes from the collections of the Glendale Public Library. It’s a view of the Crescenta Valley, circa 1916, looking northward toward the San Gabriels’ Mt. Lukens from a vantage point across the valley in the adjacent Verdugo Mountains. La Crescenta Avenue runs through the middle of the photograph toward the manicured clearing at the base of the mountains. This was Harvey Bissell’s “Hi-up Ranch”, a Crescenta Valley landmark throughout the first half of the 20th Century. In the postwar years, after serving for a short while as Alexander Markey’s “New Life Center”, the property was developed by local architect Webster Wiley into the Pinecrest neighborhood of today. In addition to its celebrated mid-century modernism, Wiley’s development is noteworthy for its substantial reconfiguration of the foothills topography. Rather than the gently sloping alluvial fan on which Bissell’s ranch largely sat, Pinecrest was extended much higher up the slopes as a series of terraced building platforms. Pine Cone Road cuts across this terraced grain, terminating at Upper Shields Basin, near the approximate location pointed out by the red arrow I have added to the photo.

above: Great views from these terraces.

above: As the city extends into the mountains, the “natural” hazards include more than just fire and floods.

Providing current Pinecrest residents with a little peace of mind is the knowledge that the County has redoubled its efforts to protect foothills homes from the debris-flow hazard. In addition to strategically positioned sandbags and concrete K-rail barriers whenever there’s threat of flood and flow, the local debris basins have been significantly upgraded. Today’s structure at Upper Shields—the one that protects the Genofile home—is far more substantial than what was in place in 1978. 

above: Upper Shields Debris Basin

above: Lower Shields Debris Basin

above: Guardrails along Markridge road are more to catch falling debris than wayward automobiles—although much of the debris crashing into the Genofile home in 1978 were actually neighbors’ cars swept up with the boulders and the mud.

Despite the improved fortifications, and greater community awareness of the debris-flow hazard thanks to the historical memory of long-term residents such as the Genofiles, and to the work of writers such as John McPhee nationally and Mike Lawler locally, the questions that McPhee at least implicitly asked back in 1988 remain valid today: Are these defenses enough? Is it safe, in whatever relative sense one uses that word, to live at the bottom of Pine Cone Road? Safe or not, is it wise to live there? Should society limit, or simply not facilitate through publicly funded infrastructure and maintenance, such amenity-rich urban living on the margins of the city? And especially in those gray spaces between the urban and the rural, the domestic and the wild, the artificial and the natural, how much control should we expect to have over the forces that potentially endanger, and/or enrich, our lives? 

Like McPhee, I won’t be so bold to try to answer these questions myself. Nor do I particularly resent, as a taxpaying resident of L.A. County, the notion that a certain portion of my hard-earned tax dollars are being used to support someone else’s lifestyle full of serene city and mountain views. After all, my own lifestyle is deeply dependent upon the implicit generosity of fellow taxpayers, and the risks that my family and I bear within our own local neighborhood are different, but not necessarily less, than those faced by the Genofiles and the rest of the county’s residents. This is not to suggest that society is structured equally—far from it. But it does seem to me that of all the arguments one might raise to question the wisdom of life in a place like Pinecrest, the selfish, miserly, myopic argument about keeping one’s tax dollars for themselves is by far the least compelling.

High-resolution version of all of my original images above, as well as a few others, are available via my Flickr site.

If you’re interested in reading additional reflections on metropolitan Southern California’s defenses against its eroding mountain backdrop, see the Friends of the Pleistocene’s much more extensive recent tour of the region’s debris basins. And if you’re in L.A. and have the time and energy, you may wish to walk (or bike) the 10.6-mile tour at the “Top of the City of Los Angeles” that accompanied the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s 2006 exhibit, “Dissipation and Disintegration: Antennas and Debris Basins in the San Gabriel Mountains”

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Housing affordability, Airbnb, Levittown, segregation, Baltimore, and more

A product of a week in which I stumbled upon a number of stories that intersect in a web of interrelated issues, this post perhaps tries to cover too much ground. Rather than try to map out all of the interconnections, I’ll simply list these different reports and summarize how they might be strung together as a set of conceptual stepping stones. The common thread is housing and the perennial challenge of putting an affordable roof over the head of an entire urban society—a challenge that has become more of an acute crisis in California, much of the rest of the country, and other parts of the world as well.

Yet another report came out this week outlining the scale of California's affordable-housing crisis. Amplifying trends that exist in many other cities, rents have increased dramatically in metro LA since the beginning of the century, while the incomes of renters have actually declined. Thus, despite being one of the most affluent regions of the country, we also have one of the highest poverty rates here in LA, especially when the cost of housing is factored into our definition of poverty. While it’s possible to approach this issue from the demand side via policies that “control” or subsidize rents (e.g. Section 8), much of the recent attention has been on the supply side—namely, the inability of housing construction to keep pace with population growth, especially at the more affordable end of the market.

A relatively new complicating factor, which is especially salient in a major tourism magnet such as Southern California, is the diversion of a growing share of the housing supply to short-term vacation rentals, now made much easier by the likes of AirBnB. Thus, the City of Santa Monica has recently banned such vacation rentals. I have my doubts this will make much of a dent in terms of housing affordability, but it reflects the many political manifestations of our housing crisis. (Thank you to my student, LeAnn Bogart, for calling my attention to this story!)

As I note above, housing-affordability concerns are not unique to California or the USA, and the construction of new housing tends to be a thorny political issue that few seem willing to take on seriously. That at least appears to be the case in Britain, where The Economist argues that housing is perhaps the most important issue not being addressed by any party during the current national election campaign.

Now back to the United States, as well as back in time to the middle of the 20th Century, where and when the model for providing affordable housing to the masses was Levittown—the quintessential postwar suburban development on Long Island, New York. Earlier this week, The Guardian posted a nice profile of this “prototypical American suburb” . Like the ongoing series of which it’s a part, “A History of Cities in 50 Buildings,” this short piece is a good primer for any student of the urban world.

One of the biggest flaws of the suburban, Levittown model was the explicitly racist segregation that it imposed, and while the social ills of segregation are many, perhaps none registers so strongly in the present as the profound inequality in household wealth between Whites, who long have been able to access the Levittown-styled American Dream, and Blacks and others who long were not. Several good summaries of this story of segregation and wealth inequality have appeared in recent years. They include Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerfully argued “Case for Reparations” last year; a 2011 Pew Research Center report on household wealth gaps by race; and the hour-long third part of an excellent Newsreel documentary on the concept, history, and social-economic significance of race in the United States. (This three-part documentary can be rented online for a modest fee, and you can also read a transcript of Episode 3 for free.)

Then there is Baltimore. Needless to say, there is a tangle of issues both broad and deep that underly the violent unrest we have witnessed this week, just the latest chapter in our country’s longest-running and most shameful tragedy. But as Ben Jacobs argued in The Guardian, we can only understand the turmoil in Baltimore by appreciating the context of residential segregation and housing-related economic inequality that provides the stage for the contentious relationship between the citizens of Baltimore (and numerous other cities) and their police. And almost to come full circle, it is striking to note how much vacant housing and abandoned urban space exist in the city’s central neighborhoods; perhaps the tradeoff discussed in Britain and elsewhere, between supplying more housing versus preserving rural “greenbelts”, is a tradeoff we really don’t have to make?

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We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath – [Robert] Clive.

William Dalrymple, “The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders,” The Guardian (4 March 2015)

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Agrarian Civilization, Patriarchy, and Eunuchs

Two items recently appearing online speak directly to the social stratification that accompanied Neolithic agricultural revolutions and, even more so, the subsequent rise of agrarian civilization and its concomitant urban and mining revolutions. Both online items highlight the concentration of power—reproductive power in particular—among a relatively small set of men, and in doing so, these two items illustrate how the rise of patriarchy in the agrarian era involved the marginalization of much of the male population as well as of women.

The first of these online items is the publication of a new study by genetic researchers of the inferred ancient ancestry of people living today. Examinations of the male, Y chromosone not only support the idea of a series of “Out of Africa” migrations starting less than 250 thousand years ago (kya), and concentrated around a pronounced wave of such migrations about 50 kya, but they also point to a time, much more recently, when the number of distinctive, surviving male-ancestry lines plummeted. This genetic “bottleneck” occurred 5 to 10 kya in the midst of the neolithic agricultural revolution and rise of agrarian civilization, and it is unique to patrilineal chains of descent; that is, no such bottleneck is apparent for the female lines of ancestry that we can infer from matrilineal markers in mitochondrial-DNA. At its most extreme, from roughly 4000 to 8000 years ago, only one line of direct male ancestry survives today for every 17 female lines that survive from the same time period. What this suggests is that, while Bronze Age men presumably retained their sexual freedom—unlike their female contemporaries (see below)—the chances that their sons, and their sons’ sons, and their sons’ sons’ sons, would be able to continue passing on their specific Y-chromosome markers indefinitely to future generations were radically reduced by agrarian societies that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a relative few.

The second item recently appearing online reminds us of another dimension of agrarian civilization and how its social stratification was reflected by and embodied in patterns of reproduction. An episode last month of Melvyn Bragg’s BBC-radio program, In Our Time, discussed a practice that was common to pre-industrial civilization across multiple world regions but is so strikingly foreign to modern sensibilities that we have difficulty recognizing it for the rather “obvious solution to an obvious problem”—to quote one of Bragg’s guests—that it was: eunuchs. For empires seeking to preserve the genetic purity of a ruling family, particularly within the male line, having castrated males as servants and officials working within the inner circles of power made a lot of sense. Eunuchs thus were common to numerous civilizations across the full geographical breadth of the Afro-Eurasian world. Bragg’s guests do an especially nice job of describing how rational the practice was within its historical-geographical context, not just for the emperor seeking control but, in many cases, for the eunuchs and their family members (parents, siblings) seeking upward social mobility. There is perhaps no better example of the potential power held by an imperial eunuch than the story of Zheng He (1371-1433)—a Muslim descendant of the Mongol Empire, who was captured by the Ming Dynasty from his boyhood home in southern China’s Yunnan province, castrated, put into service of the Prince of Yan, and subsequently rose to become a trusted advisor of this future emperor and one of the greatest naval Admirals that the world has ever known.

The stories of eunuchs and of a bottleneck in male ancestry during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages remind us that one of the hallmark features of agrarian civilization is social hierarchy and the unequal reordering of society along several different dimensions, not the least of which is gender. The label we typically use to describe such a gendered social structure is “patriarchy”—quite literally the rule of our fathers. It is helpful, and quite reasonable, to start any definition of patriarchy with a rather straightforward notion of male-vs.-female hierarchy, as Geraldine Pratt has done in the Dictionary of Human Geography (5th ed., p. 522): “A system of social structures and practices through which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.” But a fuller understanding of how patriarchy works, particularly when viewed in context of the many other kinds of stratification that characterize ancient and modern societies (e.g., class/caste, age, race/ethnicity), is no simple task. In recognizing the rule of our “fathers” we also need to recognize that those fathers not only exclude women, but an awful lot of men as well.

This notion that men, as well as women, should be keenly interested in understanding the origins and operations of patriarchy, so that we can work together to dismantle it in pursuit of a more just and equal world, was one of the core ideas that drove the work of the historian Gerda Lerner (1920-2013). In her landmark study, The Creation of Patriarchy, Lerner argued that agriculture initially privileged women’s position in Neolithic society, since women—as foraging’s primary gatherers—almost certainly played a more central role than men in the domestication of plants. But as Neolithic villages transformed into the cities of agrarian civilization, new surplus-yielding systems of farming replaced earlier systems of subsistence-oriented horticulture, and with the corresponding transition from the digging stick to the animal-drawn plow, agriculture became a more male-focused and male-dominated activity. More importantly, a entire new structure of gendered social power emerged with the urban revolution, touching everything from work, and law, and governance, to matters of family and religion. As Lerner explained in a more recent interview, the origins of patriarchy also overlap with the origins of slavery, in a context where wealth and power are acquired through both agricultural surplus and warfare:

Now, the enslavement of men and women was made possible as a result of the agricultural revolution. You can’t keep slaves as long as you don’t have enough foodstuffs to support an added population. But with the Bronze Age and plow agriculture, there was an increase in agricultural production that made it possible to amass enough surpluses so you could keep prisoners of war alive. But for a long time the warriors, who had just fought hand to hand with enemies from maybe the next village or the next mountain range ... they could [not] conceive of how they could bring that man home in chains and hand him a bronze hoe and say to him, “You’re now my slave. Work in the ground,” and not take the risk that that man at night would brain them all, the master and the mistress and the children. But they did know, through previous marriage arrangements, through exogamy—the habit of marrying women from outside of one’s tribe—that you could bring women into your family and marry them, make them pregnant, and they would become part of your group. And so they tried it on the conquered women, and only after decades, and in some cases maybe a hundred years, of doing that with the women, did they learn how to enslave the men. Now, this is a very important fact, because it shows the close connection between the suppression of women, the subordination of women, and hierarchy, and the subordination of people of other tribes and other races. So racism and sexism are very closely connected. And if you remember that the first class distinctions were the distinctions between those who owned slaves and those who did not, then you see that class and race and sex, from the inception, were very closely linked.

In short, new Bronze Age tools to both produce an agricultural surplus and to protect it—or, alternatively, to take it away from someone else—created an historic-geographic context favorable to the rise of patriarchy:

the Bronze Age had the effect on the one hand of creating agricultural surpluses, and on the other hand of intensifying warfare enormously. It was a tremendous technological advance in terms of the ease with which you could conquer other people. And so the people of those regions lived at that time, lived then, in a very unstable situation, and it was advantageous for women, if they wished to have protection for themselves and their children, to ally themselves to a man who promised to give them that protection. And that in effect was the initial underpinning of patriarchy. Women gave up their sexual freedom, in the sense of sexual promiscuity and the opportunity to select partners, and all that, in exchange for security in a war-torn world.

In seeking to explain why patriarchy emerged on the heels of agricultural and urban revolutions, Lerner was not trying to naturalize or legitimize the dominance of men over women. Indeed, her purpose was to do just the opposite, to historicize patriarchy and its origins precisely so that we can recognize it and dismantle it as the unjust and destructive system that it is. Moreover, as Lerner notes above, patriarchy always has been part of complex social structure that concentrates power in the hands of not all men, but of a relatively select few.

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In the Silicon Valley, a new elite is forming that wants to determine not only what we consume, but also the way we live. They want to change the world, but they don't want to accept any rules. Do they need to be reined in?

A good read. True to my cynical, X-generation roots; true to my grounding in the "dismal science" tradition of political economy; true to my modest biases that trust institutions a little bit more than individuals and the organic a little bit more than the mechanical; I lean pretty strongly toward the skeptical, critical side of this story. This is especially true because just about everything I love about Santa Clara "Silicon" Valley--the region, the place--has nothing to do with the silicon. I love the oak-covered hills and redwood-draped mountains with summer fog spilling over them; I love the remarkable whimsy (insanity?) of Sarah Winchester's old mansion, as well as other surviving beauties of the Victorian age; I love the old orchards and walkable town centers in places such as Campbell; and I love the diverse mosaic of communities created by generations of immigrants from the rest of the country and the rest of the world who were simply seeking to create a modestly better life for themselves and their families, without any pretension of "changing the world". That said, I do like playing with new technological toys, too.

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Place and space matter, and the setting provided by Hong Kong is more distinctive than most. The Atlantic's Bourree Lam explains how the geography of the ongoing protests in the former crown colony turned Special Administrative Region not only represents a departure from Hong Kong's usual routine of occasional public assembly, but it also makes it less likely that events will unfold in the manner of an "Asian Spring" or "Tiananmen II". A violent outcome certainly remains possible, but without a large central square for either protesters or police to target, any such violence will be diffuse and difficult to contain. Whether this is cause more for optimism, or concern, remains to be seen.

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More evidence that Germany just isn't that into Twitter—even in one of its greatest moments of national achievement during our global, information age. As The Economist discussed back in December, the reason for otherwise tech-savvy Germans generally shunning Twitter is ambiguously cultural, maybe tied to language but much more likely linked to Twitter's extremely un-private nature.

Germany’s frankly unbelievable 7-1 dismantling of Brazil on Tuesday understandably saw a fair few records set. It was Brazil’s biggest ever World Cup loss, the biggest defeat in World Cup semifinal victory, and Miroslav Klose became the highest ever World Cup goal-scorer; and that’s just to name a...

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Adorable in any format, I love the animated-gif presentation. The full video is on YouTube (linked above), but the storyboarded gifs allow this moment to be suspended in time, indefinitely, like a still photograph.

This ability to provide reflective pause long has made me prefer photo to video. And it is this ability to display animated gifs that makes me prefer Tumblr to Facebook. Well done, Internet.

When a dad found out he was going to be a grandpa.

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And here are some views of the building constructed to replace this old beauty, courtesy of Google Maps.

from above

street view from Spring Street

street view from Temple Street

I generally like modern architecture, but in this case, I wouldn't exactly call  this progress.

The old Los Angeles County Courthouse, with City Hall in the background, late 1920’s. The Courthouse - seriously damaged in the Long Beach Earthquake of ‘33 - was demolished in 1936.

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Stanford University linguist, Asya Pereltsvaig, provides an overview of the many possible seams along which central Eurasia could rip apart in the aftermath of Russia's annexation of Crimea. Whether we see this as a new wave of post-Soviet partition, or as an aggressive move of Russian irredentism, or as a return to old-school Mackinderian geopolitics, the prospects for lasting peace on the margins of Europe and Russia have become quite a bit bleaker.

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Secretary Kerry and Company turn up the public diplomatic heat on President Putin.

President Putin's Fiction: 10 False Claims about Ukraine

1. Mr. Putin says:  Russian forces in Crimea are only acting to protect Russian military assets. It is “citizens’ defense groups,” not Russian forces, who have seized infrastructure and military facilities in Crimea. The Facts:  Strong evidence suggests that members of Russian security services are at the heart of the highly organized anti-Ukraine forces in Crimea. While these units wear uniforms without insignia, they drive vehicles with Russian military license plates and freely identify themselves as Russian security forces when asked by the international media and the Ukrainian military. Moreover, these individuals are armed with weapons not generally available to civilians.

2. Mr. Putin says:  Russia’s actions fall within the scope of the 1997 Friendship Treaty between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The Facts:  The 1997 agreement requires Russia to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, which have given them operational control of Crimea, are in clear violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

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My post over the weekend focused on the Volga Tatars. Here is a primer on the Crimean Tatars, a distinct but historically related group that is much more directly impacted by the crisis in Ukraine.

Primer: Everything you need to know about the Crimean Tatars.