The Left’s Burning Cities

By David French

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

In Baltimore, as the National Guard steps in, curfews are imposed, and business owners pick up the pieces from their burned-out, looted stores, let’s not forget why one more American city has been torn apart by racial violence. Blue America has failed at social justice. It has failed at equality. It has failed at accountability. Its competing constituencies are engaged in street battles, and any exploration of “root causes” must necessarily include decades of failed policies — all imposed by steadfastly Democratic mayors and city leaders.

Are the riots caused by the Baltimore Police Department’s “documented history” of abuse? Which party has run Baltimore and allowed its police officers to allegedly run amok? Going deeper, which American political movement lionizes public-employee unions, fiercely protecting them from even the most basic reform? Public-employee unions render employee discipline difficult and often impossible. Jobs are functionally guaranteed for life, and rogue officers can count on the best representation money can buy — courtesy of Blue America.

Are the riots caused by inequality? Orioles’ owner Peter Angelos’s son, John, made waves on the left with his “tweetstorm” stating that his “greater source of personal concern, outrage, and sympathy” was not with “one night’s property damage” but with a litany of economic outrages that he claims have “plunged tens of millions of hard-working Americans into economic devastation.” Mother Jones summed up his message by declaring, “At the end of the day, it comes down to social and economic inequality.”

So let’s examine inequality. It turns out that the more “blue” a city is, the greater its level of income inequality — inequality compounded by a lack of affordable housing. This chart, from The Atlantic, is telling:

Translation: As a city gets increasingly blue, its housing gets increasingly unaffordable.

    There is a deep literature tying liberal residents to illiberal housing policies that create affordability crunches for the middle class. In 2010, UCLA economist Matthew Kahn published a study of California cities, which found that liberal metros issued fewer new housing permits. The correlation held over time: As California cities became more liberal, he observed, they built fewer homes.

Are the riots caused by an expansive government, which uses police officers as the tip of the spear to enforce social reform? The expansive regulatory state criminalizes everything from legitimate crimes to selling “loosies,” the individual cigarettes that triggered the New York City police’s fatal encounter with Eric Garner. In a powerful post the very liberal Tah-Nehisi Coates (who is presently condemning calls for nonviolence in Baltimore as a “ruse”) decried “the belief that all our social problems can be solved with force.” Coates continued:

    Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, “You deal with this.” . . . Was Walter Scott’s malfunctioning third-brake light really worth a police encounter? Should the state repeatedly incarcerate him for not paying child support? Do we really want people trained to fight crime dealing with someone who’s ceased taking medication? Does the presence of a gun really improve the chance of peacefully resolving a drug episode? In this sense, the police — and the idea of police reform — are a symptom of something larger. The idea that all social problems can, and should, be resolved by sheer power is not limited to the police. In Atlanta, a problem that began with the poor state of public schools has now ending by feeding more people into the maw of the carceral state.

The regulatory state necessarily creates more interactions between armed law enforcement and citizens. It fosters resentment. It creates the possibility for confusion, mistakes, and petty acts of violence and vengeance. Yet the Left never seems to learn. Even now deep-Blue Hawaii wants to raise the legal smoking age to 21. How long before there’s a tragic incident tied to confrontation between a police officer and a 19-year-old smoker?

For decades, the Left has ruled America’s great cities, presiding over often-unaccountable police departments, denying access to affordable housing, and dramatically increasing the state’s intrusion into citizens’ lives. In fact, the Left’s diverse urban centers are at the heart of the so-called coalition of the ascendant that will allegedly guarantee liberal domination for years to come.

Yet now one part of that coalition is throwing rocks and burning cars, and another part of that coalition is locking shields and wielding pepper spray. And a third segment — the urban intellectual elite — can’t decide whether to justify or condemn the riots. It’s blue versus blue in America’s cities. Their one-party rule has failed.

Lack of ‘Investment’ Is Not the Problem in Baltimore

By Ian Tuttle

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

For a sense of the neighborhood in which Freddie Gray grew up, and which has been set partly ablaze over the last several days — the plot of West Baltimore known as Sandtown-Winchester — one need only read the relevant portion of the Baltimore City Health Department’s 2011 Neighborhood Health Profiles.

According to the department (which included in its analysis the adjacent neighborhood of Harlem Park), the 10,000-person neighborhood, which is almost entirely black (97 percent), had a median household income of $22,277 as of 2011– 40 percent below Baltimore City’s average. One in five residents age 16 or older were out of jobs, compared with one in ten in Baltimore City. Almost one in three families were below the poverty line, half of eighth-graders were not “proficient” readers, and a quarter of ten- to 17-year-olds could expect to end up in handcuffs.

By nearly any criteria, Sandtown-Winchester is among the worst neighborhoods in Baltimore. But it is not for a lack of trying to turn it around.

Throughout the early 1990s, Sandtown was Ground Zero of one of the largest, most closely watched urban-reinvestment projects in the country. Having done much to help revamp Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, mayor Kurt Schmoke, elected in 1987, turned his attention to Sandtown. The neighborhood was the preoccupation of one of his campaign’s key organizational supporters, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a West Baltimore–based community-action group under the umbrella of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Schmoke raised almost $30 million in federal and state grants and private funds to construct 210 new housing units and overhaul 17 others. For a nonprofit partner, Schmoke hit on the Enterprise Foundation (now Enterprise Community Partners), founded by real-estate magnate and Marylander James Rouse, who created Baltimore’s Harborplace and had turned his attention to low-income housing needs.

With the help of significant subsidies, those 200-plus houses, which each cost $83,000 to build, were sold at $37,000 apiece. Three hundred more units were planned for a federally funded “Homeownership Zone” nearby. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded the city $5.2 million for that purpose.

It was little surprise that HUD smiled (repeatedly) on Mayor Schmoke. He had close ties to department officials — too close, it now seems. In 1998, the inspector general of HUD announced that he was launching an investigation to determine how Baltimore had wasted $24.6 million in federal housing aid. The investigation, eventually shut down by HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, never implicated Schmoke personally, but the embattled mayor declined to run for a fourth term.

But all of that was far in the future when, in 1992, former president Jimmy Carter visited, spending a day pounding nails alongside other homebuilders. During his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton also visited, bringing national attention to the “urban laboratory” of Sandtown.

Yet by June 1997, when he entertained some 400 Sandtown residents in what he thought would be an adoring meeting at Gilmor Elementary School, Schmoke was chagrined to discover that Sandtown residents were not happy. They saw little progress.

And the residents were largely correct. By 1998, Schmoke had channeled approximately $60 million into revitalizing Sandtown, but almost all of it was devoted to housing construction and rehabilitation. And, as Barry Yeoman wrote in a 1998 article for City Limits, “Left Behind in Sandtown,” there was a problem with that strategy: “Nobody . . . was looking at demographic trends to see if they could fill 600 additional units of housing.” The city and its partners somehow failed to take into account that Baltimore’s population was not growing, but shrinking — and, in fact, had been shrinking, sometimes rapidly, since 1950. Between 1970 and 1980, a staggering 13 percent of the city’s population moved away. Frustrated by an increasingly hostile business climate, employers left. And, exhausted by rising crime, so did residents. By 1999, 10 percent of the city’s population was drug-addicted, and there had been almost a murder a day through much of the 1990s. In the 2000s, the trend continued.

In 2001, aid from the state and federal government accounted for a full 40 percent of Baltimore’s budget. The Abell Foundation, which targets problems in low-income communities in Baltimore City, estimates that $130 million (private and public) was pumped into Sandtown-Winchester through 2000, before the city’s money and attention were focused elsewhere under new mayor Martin O’Malley.

In his impromptu remarks on Tuesday about Baltimore’s riots, President Obama called for increased investment in urban America. House minority whip Steny Hoyer echoed his recommendation later in the day: “We’re going to have to as a country invest, if we’re going to have the kinds of communities we want.”

Insanity, it is said, is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Taxpayers have invested heavily in Baltimore, and in Sandtown-Winchester, for decades, and it has availed them little. Perhaps it is time to try something different.

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Wrong About The Baltimore Riots

By Jack Millman

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an article that does not quite praise the Baltimore riots, but cannot quite find a way to condemn them. It makes a compelling case for why people are angry. It discusses all of the terrible things the Baltimore police have done. And then it sort of falls apart.

It seems to say that one cannot condemn the actions by the Baltimore police, then condemn the rioters for their destructive and misguided actions and advocate for non-violent protests, because this would be “the right answer to the wrong question” and hypocritical. But the riots raise a simple question: should one riot in response to the Baltimore police’s actions and other societal problems and, if a riot occurs, should one condemn it? It should yield simple answers: one should not riot, and, yes, we should condemn violence.

Coates would rather not address these questions, but keep the focus on the wrongs those in power have done. But the question of when violence can be an appropriate political tactic is a serious question people should not ignore. And it has been eloquently addressed by various people throughout American history, from the founding fathers to Martin Luther King Jr to Malcolm X.

Difficult questions exist about the moral righteousness of violence, how oppressed or locked out of the political system the oppressed are, whether change within the system is possible, and whether violence is an effective tactic for those seeking redress. One reason I think Coates wants to avoid this debate, and these questions, is because the case for violence in Baltimore is so weak.

Try Thinking It Through Next Time

Coates recognizes that these riots are not wise, and that pleas for non-violence by politicians are well intended, then spends most of the article describing various incidents of police brutality, making his “case against the Baltimore police, and the society that superintends them.”

Then what, exactly, is Coates saying? That riots cannot be condemned until their causes are addressed? He gives no guidance about how much they need to be addressed before it’s time to address rioting. Do we need to talk more? Do we need to institute certain programs or reforms—and, if so, which ones? Do we have to wait until they work?

Perhaps Coates is saying that because people in power can be hypocrites we should not listen? Yet one can be a hypocrite and still be right. And it is not just those in power who recognize the harm these riots are doing and call for peace. Freddie Gray’s family, among others, have also called for peace. I hope Coates would not accuse them of answering the wrong question. They, like many others not “in power,” rightly anticipate the negative consequences of violence.

Why Rioting Deserves Condemnation

We should not forget that the people who will suffer the most from this rioting will be the poor and minority citizens of Baltimore. This rioting will do nothing but harm the very people rioting. It will be their jobs that will disappear, their property values that plummet, their schools that worsen, their businesses and the businesses that serve them that suffer, and their neighborhoods that will be even more unsafe.

The wealthy will be fine, as they have insurance and those who live in the city can leave. One can look at the 1968 riots to see their negative effects on inner-city neighborhoods. In some cases, those cities have yet to recover, almost 50 years later. The community’s relationship with the police will certainly deteriorate further, making it more difficult to fight the crime that harms poor neighborhoods, and to repair an already broken relationship.

The rioting can also, and should be, condemned for moral reasons. Violence as a response to perceived and actual past wrongs is rarely justified, and this is not one of those rare cases.

Some might respond, as Coates seems to, by saying this focuses on the wrong thing—the behavior of the rioters rather than the behavior of the police and those in power. Yet one can accept everything he says about society being racist and the police being out of control, and still think that rioting has terrible consequences and should be condemned and discouraged. One can accept that calls for non-violence from politicians may be hypocritical, and yet still be correct. One can understand the causes of a riot, and still find they do not justify violence, will harm the cause of those rioting, and should be condemned for moral reasons, as well as for their bad consequences. Just because one group identified as privileged has committed wrongs, does not mean people should encourage any action by the less privileged.

Are Riots Predetermined?

Coates then tries to compare rioting to a forest fire, as if it simply just occurs, but then promptly undermines his flawed analogy. He immediately says the riots have a point, and that point is disrespect. Forest fires generally don’t have points, but of course rioting often has purposes. Again, I struggle to see Coates’s point. One can accept that showing disrespect to hypocrites in power is the purpose of the riots, and still condemn the riots on moral and practical grounds.

Perhaps Coates believes the riots are the result of larger social forces and have just popped into existence, like a forest fire. Of course, if one takes this deterministic view, the same (deeply flawed) argument would apply to the Baltimore police. They just acted based on larger social forces, and since they lacked agency we cannot condemn them. Of course, this argument would be rightly dismissed. Almost everyone (including Coates) has been condemning the Baltimore police. They should be condemned, and should change their behavior. Just like the rioters.

The most troubling words come in the final paragraph. Coates argues that calls for nonviolence by those engaging in violence are hypocritical and a ruse. He compares the situation to a “war with the aggressor calling time out.” Does this mean the citizens of Baltimore are in a war with the police? Would we be asking the wrong question if police officers were shot and killed as part of all this, and we tried to condemn those actions as morally wrong? Would it all just be part of an expression of disrespect that we oppressors should not condemn, lest we fail to be deemed lacking understanding or addressing the “real problems?” His article raises a lot of these questions and provides very few satisfactory answers.

Why California’s Drought Was Completely Preventable

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, April 30, 2015

The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those of 1929–34, 1976–77, and 1987–92 — are more likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures.

What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought — well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s. Much of the growth is due to massive and recent immigration.

A record one in four current Californians was not born in the United States, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Whatever one’s view on immigration, it is ironic to encourage millions of newcomers to settle in the state without first making commensurately liberal investments for them in water supplies and infrastructure.

Sharp rises in population still would not have mattered much had state authorities just followed their forbearers’ advice to continually increase water storage.

Environmentalists counter that existing dams and reservoirs have already tapped out the state’s potential to transfer water from the wet areas, where 75 percent of the snow and rain fall, to the dry regions, where 75 percent of the population prefers to reside.

But that analysis is incomplete.

After the initial phases of the federal Central Valley Project and state California Water Project were largely finished — and flooding was no longer considered a dire threat in Northern California — environmentalists in the last 40 years canceled most of the major second- and third-stage storage projects. To take a few examples, they stopped the raising of Shasta Dam, the construction of the Peripheral Canal, and gargantuan projects such as the Ah Pah and Dos Rios reservoirs.

Those were certainly massive, disruptive, and controversial projects with plenty of downsides — and once considered unnecessary in an earlier, much smaller California. But no one denies now that they would have added millions of acre-feet of water for 40 million people.

Lower foothill dams such as the proposed Sites, Los Banos, and Temperance Flat dams in wet years would have banked millions of acre-feet as insurance for dry years. All such reservoirs were also canceled.

Yet a single 1 million acre-foot reservoir can usually be built as cheaply as a desalinization plant. It requires a fraction of desalinization’s daily energy use, leaves a much smaller carbon footprint, and provides almost 20 times as much water. California could have built perhaps 40–50 such subsidiary reservoirs for the projected $68 billion cost of the proposed high-speed rail project.

California’s dams and reservoirs were originally intended to meet four objectives: flood control, agricultural irrigation, recreation, and hydroelectric generation. The inevitable results of sustaining a large population and vibrant economy were dry summer rivers in the lowlands and far less water reaching the San Francisco Bay and delta regions.

Yet state planners once accepted those unfortunate tradeoffs. They would never have envisioned in a state of 40 million using the reservoirs in a drought to release water year-round for environmental objectives such as aiding the delta smelt or reintroducing salmon in the San Joaquin River watershed.

No one knows the exact figures on how many million acre-feet of water have been sent to the ocean since the beginning of the drought. Most agree that several million acre-feet slated for households or farming went out to sea.

There is more irony in opposing the construction of man-made and unnatural reservoirs, only to assume that such existing storage water should be tapped to ensure constant, year-round river flows. Before the age of reservoir construction, when rivers sometimes naturally dried up, such an environmental luxury may have impossible during dry years.

Agriculture is blamed for supposedly using 80 percent of California’s storage water and providing less than 5 percent of the state’s GDP in return. But farming actually uses only about 40 percent of the state’s currently available water. Agriculture’s contribution to the state’s GDP cannot be calibrated just by the sale value of its crops, but more accurately by thousands of subsidiary and spin-off industries such as fuel, machinery, food markets and restaurants that depend on the state’s safe, reliable and relatively inexpensive food.

The recent rise of Silicon Valley has brought in more billions of dollars in revenue than century-old farming, but so far, no one has discovered how to eat a Facebook page or drink a Google search.

Stanford University, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley do not sit on natural aquifers sufficient to support surrounding populations. Only privileged water claims on transfers from Yosemite National Park, the Central Sierra Nevada Mountains, Northern California, or the Colorado River allow these near-desert areas along the coastal corridor to support some 20 million residents. Much of their imported water is used only once, not recycled, and sent out to sea.

A final irony is that the beneficiaries of these man-made canals and dams neither allowed more water storage for others nor are willing to divert their own privileged water transfers to facilitate their own dreams of fish restoration. Nature may soon get back to normal — but will California?