(Untitled)

[motive_nuance]

Reading this Times piece about a freegan commune in Buffalo reminded me of Amsterdam. In one sense, it's a handful of people squatting in the ruins of a once-mighty civilization - a port city now bypassed and forgotten. But they can still sustain a non-impoverished lifestyle from the table scraps of the world that took its place. (In this case,

Comments

[the_macnab]

Oh yes. Newark has been rotting for more than forty years, even as other parts of the greater New York area--Hoboken, Bayonne, Jersey City--have enjoyed some of the gentrification that spilled over from Manhattan's appreciating rents. The city has a very high crime rate, one of the nation's highest childhood-poverty rates, vast swaths of abandoned buildings and several highways carved through what once was the downtown. It also saw virtually all of its industry disappear. Newark is smaller than Detroit but it shares that city's near-total collapse. And there's also the history of the race riots--Newark and Detroit had the two worst of any northern cities in 1967. Those solidified white flight and shunning of the city for a generation.

(Per that article, the single biggest problem with his metrics is that he automatically assumes that density is a bad thing. In fact someone pointed this out in a letter to the editor the following month, and Louis responded by saying that it was absurd to think that density could be a good thing, because "overcrowding" is "the root of almost all urban problems." This is classic modernist city-planning talk, straight out of the 1910s. That thinking was what helped create suburban sprawl and gutted so many American city centers. It's also a large part of why, say, San Jose and Tulsa rank so high in his list.)