Tenant’s rights, gentrification
“Scientist Studies”, Death Cab for Cutie, We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes
Cold skin and bones and this latitude/We ain't paying ‘til the heat comes through/so you slept in a stocking cap and wool scarf
The Los Angeles Tenants’ Union - I don’t agree with all of their politics, but they’re pretty good on tenants’ rights.
“Cashout”, Fugazi, The Argument
On the morning of the first eviction
They carried out the wishes of the landlord and his son
Furniture's out on the sidewalk next to the family
That little piggy went to market
So they're kicking out everyoneEvicted, by Matthew Desmond. (2016) I’ll admit to only having read some shorter articles he wrote on the subject, but this book, the result of an anthropological study in Milwaukee, is the new standard bearer on the topic of eviction in America, including “informal” evictions that don’t show up in official counts.
“Don’t Get Captured”, Run The Jewels, Run The Jewels 3
Snow on The Bluff showed up
With the slums in the city blown up
Now the white folks showed up
Everything bought sold up
Niggas assed out, niggas po'd up
Politicians so corrupt, sold our black ass out
Really ain't color, my brother
Here in Cabbagetown they put they white-ass outThe Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, by Suleiman Osman. (2011) Another modern standard that I haven’t read. I got about a chapter and a half in, but it’s more dry and academic than I was led to believe. I was also frustrated that he said he wouldn’t give a definition of gentrification; there are a few different things people mean by the word, I’ve found.
Heard but not Seen: Black music in white spaces, by Tre Johnson in Slate.
Not long after some new homes were built near Broad and South streets, new neighbors started complaining about the live reggae music that’s long been featured in the backyard of the Jamaican Jerk Hut, a city staple. Not long after, summer beer gardens started popping up around the city, with one of the first built flush against the Jerk Hut. On summer nights you can now hear hip-hop with your craft beer, as suddenly loud music’s no longer an inconvenience and Center City continues to hollow itself out.
Suburbia, white flight, isolation
“Black History Month”, Death From Above 1979, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine
Do you remember a time when this pool was
A great place for waterwings and cannonballs
A nice place for astrologists and blow up dolls
And on, and on...
Hold on, Hold on...children...
Your mother, your father are leavingThe Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein. (2017) This book goes into great detail about how government-funded programs and laws contributed crucially to racial segregation in the built environment. This is something of a corrective to the widespread idea that “white flight” was just a phenomenon on the level of individual households expressing their racist preferences to escape mixed neighborhoods. Who funded developing the suburbs, but only with racially exclusionary covenants in place? Who guaranteed the mortgages, but only in segregated neighborhoods?
“A Different City”, Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica
I wanna live in the city with no friends and family/I wanna look out the window of my color TV
Bowling Alone, by Robert D. Putnam. (2000) The title comes from the observation that in the 90’s more people were bowling than ever before, but bowling league membership was down considerably. Another one I haven’t read, but referenced pretty much whenever discussing modern-day American isolation.
Palaces for the People, by Eric Klinenberg (2019) A call for more “social infrastructure” to combat some of the very problems Putnam identified. It even opens discussing a (Wii) bowling league. If you didn’t already love libraries, you will after reading this. Somewhat ironically comes from an author that wrote a book on the appeal of living alone.
“Sprawl I (Flatland)”, Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
Let’s take a drive through the sprawl
Through these towns they built to change
Then you said the emotions are dead
It’s no wonder that you feel so estrangedThe End of the Suburbs, by Leigh Gallagher. (2014) A breezy look at several trends indicating a shift away from the sprawling auto-dominated modern suburbs towards, if not a full on urban environment, then at least a compact, walkable, and social streetcar suburb feel. Unfortunately discounts the role of land use policy in maintaining sprawl and making such neighborhoods illegal to build most places.
cars, parking
“Alpha Beta Parking Lot”, Cake, Prolonging the Magic
Breathing in the fumes from so many idling cars/right beneath the sign with the dusty yellow stars
I don’t like putting more than one song from the same artist on a playlist, but “Convenient Parking” by Modest Mouse from The Lonesome Crowded West would have fit right in here. This bullet point is a cheat!
The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup (2005, updated 2011) I have my limits, and I don’t even intend to read this 800-page beast. But it’s that big for a reason; free parking has probably the highest ratio of personal attachment to benefit for society of anything I can think of, so you have to hammer the point home that it’s Really Bad, Actually, to get people to even consider it. I’ve seen the man speak, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Old Town Pasadena and Westwood Village (two of his main examples), I get the rough idea. (I discovered while writing this that his personal website has the address www.shoupdogg.com, which is pretty great.)
“Always Crashing in the Same Car”, David Bowie, Low
Every chance/every chance that I take/I take it on the road
“Understanding in a Car Crash”, Thursday, Full Collapse
I can see the headlights coming/They paint the world in red and broken glass
The Vision Zero Network: “Vision Zero is a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all.” This may sound ambitious to you, but it’s quite achievable. Most countries in Europe have per-capita traffic death rates less than half of ours. Oslo, Norway (about the size of Portland) had one traffic death all of last year, a driver that slammed into a fence. Europe hasn’t secretly received a roll-out of autonomous cars, so you don’t need to wait for those to drastically reduce the number of deaths by car. It can be done now, and the Vision Zero Network has a lot of materials if you want to find out more about how.
“Cars Pass in Cold Blood”, The Faint, Blank-Wave Arcade
There's a fire in the road where a frame is burnt
And other automobiles are slowing down around the fire
Lanes are backed up and people get all anxious inside
They've got a schedule to keep and don't want life to slip byTraffic, by Tom Vanderbilt (2009) This is a nice exploration of many different aspects of traffic. Not just the technical road design factors that affect it, but also the psychological aspects of how we experience it, the biological factors that make driving fundamentally difficult but also difficult to attend to fully, the cultural differences one can see in road behavior, and so on. If anything, by the last couple of chapters I was a little tired.
public transit
Straphanger, by Taras Grescoe (2012). Each chapter of this book is about a different city, and what it’s like getting around without a car. It’s not a comparative analysis of transit systems, but more a series of essays on unique aspects of getting around each city. Moscow’s subways are grand palaces deep underground, built in the early days of communism by unpaid manual labor. Paris’ rail system is operated by an ostensibly private company that spun out of the government. Los Angeles was built around a streetcar network that is being revived in light rail form as we speak, a county-wide project to transform people’s relationship to the city. My kind of travelogue.
“Downtown Train”, Tom Waits, Rain Dogs
The downtown train is full/with all those Brooklyn girls/they try so hard to break out of their little worlds
“The Bus Song”, Jay Som, Everybody Works
Why don't we take the bus?
You say you don't like the smell
But I like the bus
I can be whoever I want to beTake the bus or a train. Marvel at the other people around you, think about the lives they’re living, even if they’re just commuting like you, each one a part of your life in that moment and you a part of theirs. Even when it’s smelly, even when someone is yelling, even when the train is delayed, marvel at how you’re all navigating things together, how you’re part of a community in a place rather than a single person nowhere in particular, just the inside of a car which is the same everywhere it goes. Live a life between destinations, don’t just drive.