Category Archives: Standard of Living

The Future Of Menial Jobs

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From THE BOSTON GLOBE
Monday, July 10, 2000
BY ALEX MARSHALL

PARIS — If you’re hankering to watch a movie after midnight here, you don’t search for an all-night video store. You walk down the street to the nearest Cinebank, a machine carved into a wall that, similar to an automatic teller machine, dispenses movies instead of cash.

Slip in your credit card, scroll through some movie titles, press a button, and presto: out from a slot emerges the latest Depardieu, Schwarzenegger or Julie Roberts flic.

Such machines haven’t hit the United States yet. And with our low labor costs, they may never. In this country, it may always be cheaper to pay someone to man a late-night video store, rather than pay to set up the machine and develop the technology that makes it possible.

This small example illustrates a big point: Western Europe is probably far more advanced than us technologically on a day to day level, in part because its higher labor costs push employers to innovate more.

Although France, Germany, Sweden lag behind us in computer and Internet use, they are ahead of us in the day-to-day mechanization of life in ways that weed out the more boring and simplistic jobs. Indeed, some Europeans say America appears almost Third-worldish because the continued presence of jobs whose skills consist mostly of standing around.

It isn’t just video clerks that machines are replacing in Paris. Steer your car into a French parking garage, and you will never see a parking lot attendant. A machine handles it all. In one system, a machine dispense a code that will raise the bar for exit after you have paid the cash for the time spent in the garage.

Other types of automation have become ubiquitous in much of Europe. Hand-held credit card processors are standard in many restaurants. Some gas stations are completely automated. The newest subway line in Paris has no operators at all.

Why this greater prevalence of automation in Europe? Because quite simply, they have better things for their people to do than to sit all day in a booth in a parking garage. Employer costs are much higher in most of Western Europe. Wages, health care contributions, pensions, family leave and general taxes all add up. This pushes employers to automate — which in the long run makes economies more productive and efficient.

These high labor costs also push up unemployment. But the relationship is not absolute. Germany had lower unemployment than the United States in much of the 1970s and 80s, even while having far higher labor costs.

In the United States, a healthy dose of social benefits, higher minimum wages and other pro-labor policies might actually improve our nation’s competitiveness, by pushing companies to modernize.

Although we boast of an admirably low-unemployment rate, the Brazilification of our economy continues. We may have already entered a new Gilded age where the Internet millionaires think of ways to spend their money, while the nameless hordes collect the parking payments for their BMWs.

Europe is desperately trying to copy the entrepreneurship and flexibility of the American economy. Here in Paris in government and business circles, the talk is all of privatizing, marketizing and facilitating Europe’s entry into “The New Economy.”

But astute observers recognize that economics are like lapel sizes and hem lines — different flavors go in and out of fashion with the times.

“There is no superior system,” said Robert Boyer, a French analyst in Paris and author of the 1999 paper “The Diversity and Future of Capitalisms.” “Each system has its strength and its weakness. According to the international economy, the strengths or weakness will pop out.”

So while Europe is busy imitating the United States, we might pause in our orgy of self-congratulation and begin imitating Europe, before the next fashion in economics hits and we are out of step. A strong dose of social protection and higher wages would moderate income inequality and boost productivity by discouraging businesses from using low-skill, low-pay jobs as an integral part of their business plans.

Europe will probably never achieve American-style, free-wheeling capitalism, and America will probably never achieve the equality and harmony of European social democracy. But a lean in the direction of the other by each might help each enormously.

———————-

Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken.

A Tale of Two Towns

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Kissimmee versus Celebration and the New Urbanism
[Excerpt From Chapter One]

“When you’re building your own creation,
Nothing’s better than real than a real imitation.”
-Lyrics from the song “Frankenstein,” by Aimee Mann

On the edge of two lakes about twenty miles south of Orlando are two small southern Florida towns. Both have old-fashioned main streets, with stores, restaurants, and a movie theater that open onto their sidewalks. Both have old-fashioned homes with front porches set on streets which lead into their downtowns. Both have parks that wrap around their lakes, where you can stroll and take in a sunrise or the night air. They both lie off a road called U.S. 192, and are just a few miles from each other.

But one of these towns is struggling. Its homes are not selling for much, and its storefronts have trouble staying full. The other town is a wealthy place, with homes that cost up to $1 million. Its downtown has rich boutiques and pricey restaurants.

The struggling town is called Kissimmee. It was founded in the mid-nineteenth century and grew as a shipping port and then a railroad and cattle town. But people stopped using the big lakes for shipping, and railroads became less important as well, and the town suffered.

The successful town is called Celebration. It is a new place, founded in 1994. It is, in reality, not a town, but a subdivision, built by the Disney corporation in conscious imitation of towns like Kissimmee. It sits next to a freeway and an exit ramp. Its homes are being bought by the Orlando upper classes, and its stores are being filled with tourists. It is an example of a much-heralded design philosophy called New Urbanism.

In learning why one town is struggling, and the other prospering, we can learn what people value, compared to what they say they value. We can also learn about what makes towns, and subdivisions, tick. We also learn about the concept and practice of community, which Celebration’s owners say they are reviving. By looking at Kissimmee, we can learn about Celebration, because Kissimmee is the thing Celebration is pretending to be–a small, Florida main-street-style town. What does it say when the imitation of something is worth more than the thing itself?

Comparing Kissimmee to Celebration shows where Disney has chosen to imitate the design of a small town, and where it has not. In some aspects, like front porches, Disney has chosen to exactly copy Kissimmee. In other aspects, like the way the towns govern themselves, it has chosen not to. What we find is that Celebration is a contemporary automobile suburb pretending to be a nineteenth-century town. And that pretense, like most pretenses, has a price.

By looking at Kissimmee and Celebration, we can learn about the general thrust of the design philosophy the latter represents, New Urbanism. It is probably the most heralded design movement of the last half-century. It has been embraced as a way out of the problems of sprawl. Celebration closely resembles other New Urban developments, both in the structure of its streets and the structure of its management, although it does differ in some respects. By looking at Celebration, and the thing it is imitating, Kissimmee, we start to see just where this New Urban path, as it has generally been configured, leads.

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Mrs. Mac’s versus Max’s

We can glimpse the distinctive characters of the respective “main streets” of Kissimmee and Celebration by looking at two eatery proprietors offering simple fare there. Kissimmee has a small restaurant on Main Street, called “Mrs. Mac’s,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. Celebration has a restaurant on Market Street, called “Max’s Cafe,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. One is a magical realist version of the other.

Mrs. Mac’s on Main Street in Kissimmee has Formica-topped tables that you might find in your kitchen, a nondescript floor, and a wooden checkout counter with a noncomputerized cash register. The menu is simple. Two grilled pork chops with three vegetables for $5.95. Steak for $6.95. Homemade chili for $1.50. At lunch, I watched a nonpicturesque group of people eat there: a fat woman struggling to control her three children, a businessman here and there. The food was austere but good.

Max’s Cafe in Celebration is to cafes what Celebration is to small towns: a fantasy version of a small Southern cafe. Max’s has venetian blinds with thick louvers in the windows, booths inside with metallic piping, and a long soda fountain. It’s really quite beautiful, although it comes at a price.

A bowl of chili at Max’s costs $5.95, compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A piece of pie costs $4.95 compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A cheeseburger is $7.50 compared to $2.70 at Mrs. Mac’s. And we don’t even want to get into the entrees. But the differences between the two places go deeper than the prices and decor.

The proprietor of Mrs. Mac’s in Kissimmee opens or closes when she pleases. Like the other property owners or lessors in Kissimmee, she is not under the thumb of a common management. The property under Max’s, however, is owned by Disney. Every store in Celebration serves at Disney’s pleasure and was handpicked by it. Celebration’s management is that of a shopping mall, not a town. Disney can adjust “the mix” of the stores to optimize profits, or character, or anything it chooses.

So why do the respective characters, not to mention prices, of these two main streets differ so remarkably?

Kissimmee’s Main Street was once its center, because the town itself was once a business and transportation center. It was natural for people to shop as they went to work, or got off the train, or took a boat down the lake. When the region’s center shifted away from the town, its Main Street dried up.

Celebration’s Market Street is no more of a center than Kissimmee’s Main Street is now. But it does do a better job of fostering that illusion, for reasons I will come to.

The business district of Celebration is a curious animal. To some extent, Celebration has succeeded in overcoming what has been the Achilles heel of New Urbanism, which is establishing a commercial center within a residential subdivision. Retail is an area where fictions are exposed. Successful retail establishments have basic needs, like traffic or pedestrian counts, that cannot be dressed up or swept aside.

New Urbanists blame zoning for the segregated uses embodied in the mall, the subdivision, and the isolated schools no one can walk to. But this puts the cart before the horse. Zoning, like most regulation, usually only tidies up decisions the marketplace and the physical infrastructure dictated. Neighborhood business districts were created by the necessity to have services within walking distance of one’s home. Before the nineteenth century, this was because feet were basically the only transportation for most people. To buy something, you had to walk there.

The advent of the streetcar and other forms of mass transportation changed that dynamic only somewhat. In their effects, streetcars and subways were to cities what guns are to violence: they were force multipliers. They made it possible for even more people to live in one place, and congregated businesses around streetcar lines and subway stops. Once they got home from work, people still walked to shop, visit a friend, or have a drink. They had to.

The car and the highway changed that. While mass transit systems were magnets, gathering people and businesses around central points, cars and highways were antimagnets, spreading things out as much as possible. Businesses that relied on customers with cars needed parking lots, which ate away at the street-based retail around them. Eventually, stores moved to the suburbs, where their parking lots could be as big as their owners liked. Stores got bigger and bigger because people could drive to them. So far, the country has not seen an end to this centrifugal dynamic, where businesses get larger and larger, and more and more isolated and spread out.

New Urban communities attempt to change this by resurrecting the old form of retail which existed prior to the automobile, or which was left over in its first few decades. They try to do this, however, without actually resurrecting the old transportation systems that made the old business districts possible and necessary.

To survive, retail needs an astonishingly large potential customer base, much larger than might be intuitively thought. The huge, 200,000-square-foot warehouse-style stores, like a Wal-Mart Supercenter, can require a customer base of a half million households within a twenty-minute drive.3 But even a small restaurant or pharmacy requires high traffic volumes, whether it be by foot or car. Traffic volumes depend on transportation systems. Wal-Marts are located around key freeway interchanges because it allows them access to a regional population base. A small store can succeed in an urban neighborhood, but it requires a lot of people going by its front door, the same as such a store in a strip shopping center out on the highway. To produce those traffic volumes, an urban storefront seems to need at least 10,000 families within walking distance, which means a gross density of at least ten homes an acre. Ghent, the century-old neighborhood in Norfolk where I live, has a gross density of close to twenty homes to an acre. Some individual blocks in Ghent, with larger apartment buildings, have double and triple this density. And Ghent still has difficulty supporting a retail street. In general, the denser the distribution of stores, the denser the distribution of people. Manhattan can support retail in almost every block because it can pack 10,000 people into one block.

This point has always confused architects. Retail is not their strong point. Le Corbusier, the modernist giant of the twentieth century, imagined that shops could be put into his tall towers and persisted even after it was shown that their population was not nearly enough to support the shops.4 Duany conceives of small shops within his low-density, neotraditional subdivisions even though they also lack the necessary population and density.

Celebration, even at buildout, has a density of less than two per acre. The densest part of Celebration is the Garden District, which has about five homes to an acre. These are the special, lower-priced homes, starting at $150,000, and so are off to themselves so they won’t contaminate the more-common $400,000 and $1 million homes in the rest of the community. The Garden District homes, which are 1,350 to 2,200 square feet, are often only six feet apart.5 At five homes to an acre, the Garden District has a crammed-together feel to it. I wouldn’t want to live there. I bet turning into your driveway at night could be a real operation. Yet the density here is still nowhere near high enough to support a business district.

So how is Celebration able to support a downtown?

In a book about the making of the Macintosh computer, Insanely Great,6 Steven Levy described the “reality distortion field” that workers said Apple founder Steve Jobs was able to create around him by the sheer force of his personality. Disney is able to create a similar reality distortion field around Celebration. Through the force of its marketing muscle, it is able to reverse the normal laws of retailing that demand that retail be placed around principal transportation arteries, be they suburban highways or subway lines. In the suburbs, this means placing retail on a heavily traveled main artery and putting big parking lots there to scoop the traffic off of it.

With Celebration’s downtown, you have to drive a mile on a winding access road off U.S. 192. This should kill any attempt at retail. But Disney is able to surmount this with the sheer force of its name and presence. Tourists and sightseers are being pulled off U.S. 192 by the publicity generated by the press and advertising. Disney has heavily advertised Celebration on local television as a place to go shop. Celebration also has its own exit sign on Interstate 4. It’s already listed on the one-page, low-detail maps that you get from the rental car companies.

All this is enough to bring a steady stream of traffic into Celebration to both look at the homes and walk around this novel creature, a “downtown” inside a subdivision. The tourist traffic is a twofer, for the tourists both support the stores and look at the model homes. (This has obviously caused some tension in the neighborhood. Many homes have small signs on them that say they are occupied, not a model home.)

Celebration’s downtown will only succeed if it is able to be not a neighborhood business district, but a regional shopping center. That is working so far. Most of their customers, store owners tell me, are tourists and home lookers. But because of this, the stores in the downtown are nothing like one would choose for a neighborhood shopping street. There are a fancy dress store, and upscale souvenir shops. There are restaurants, a grocery store, and a movie theater, but all extremely upscale. The Goodings market, a luxury chain in Florida, is a gourmet store. The manager says it originally tried to have a full produce and meat section. But the stuff wouldn’t sell. So it scaled back the produce and eliminated the fresh meat. What you have left is a fancy store that is convenient if you forget the bottle of wine, but is not for everyday grocery shopping.

The point is that the residents of Celebration are still utterly dependent on U.S. 192, and always will be. They drive there to shop for groceries. They drive to the Wal-Mart to buy some lawn furniture. They drive to the mall to buy a computer, a lamp, or almost anything essential.

Guns Don’t Kill People; Cars Do. Or At Least Not As Many

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On Foot Or On Wheels, Facing The Threat

Whether you walk, drive or bicycle on your daily rounds, are you more in danger of getting killed from a bumper of a car or a bullet from a gun? It depends on where you live, although the stats suggest that overall, the mean metal of a car is more dangerous than that from a gun, simply because speeding cars are so much more prevalent than speeding bullets.

The New York Daily News started out this somewhat morbid train of thought of mine with its news series this month examining pedestrians killed by vehicles. The series noted that from 2000 to 2002, 580 pedestrians were killed. The news campaign, entitled Save a Life, Change the Law, is an excellent example of advocacy journalism. It informs the reader of a fact — a lot of people on foot are killed by cars — and then forcefully presents a possible remedy, in this case, making it easier to charge drivers with criminal penalties if they kill a pedestrian. If more drivers were charged with criminal penalties for reckless behavior, drivers might think twice before speeding through an intersection.

The good news is that both the murder rate and the killing of pedestrians by vehicles have been steadily dropping over the last decade. In 1990, 365 pedestrians were killed and an amazing 2,606 people were murdered. In 2002, only 195 pedestrians were killed and only 575 people were murdered. If the murder rate keeps up its swift descent, walking across a dangerous intersection will be riskier than walking through a bad neighborhood.

Eric Monkkonen, an urban historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, studies both crime and urban planning. He is the author of Murder in New York City (UCLA press 2001), and America Becomes Urban, (UCLA 1988). Both are excellent. He said New York City’s murder rate has always gone up and down over the centuries, but was unusually high in the last generation.

“New York has always been safer than other American cities, so the crime rate could go even lower.” Monkkonen said from his office in California. “The question is how to get it there. I wouldn’t trust anyone who has a simple answer.” Moving back to pedestrian deaths, Transportation Alternatives, in several excellent recent reports available at its web site www.transalt.org, reported that the number of pedestrians has continued to drop in 2003, with only 102 pedestrians killed in the first nine months of the year. It appears we are heading for a record breaking year in safety. T.A. credits the transportation department with a series of traffic calming measures that have significantly made things safer for pedestrians.

But only if you are satisfied with not dying.

Transportation Alternatives also reports that in 2002, 15,000 pedestrians and 4000 cyclists were injured, about the same as in past years. Also in 2002, 16 cyclists were killed, a rate that has been pretty consistent for the past decade.

How do we fare if we move from the urban streets of New York City to the more suburban ones of New Jersey? Not so well, at least if we are walking or driving.

Drivers in the Garden State killed 184 pedestrians last year, an alarming 37 percent increase, it was reported recently. Pedestrian deaths in New Jersey had been dropping, and the increase is so large that it begs some specific explanation. New York has 8 million people; New Jersey has about 8.4 million.

Given the similar populations and the similar pedestrian death rates — 184 in New Jersey versus 198 in New York City — seems evidence that it’s more dangerous to walk in New Jersey, simply because so many more people walk regularly in New York City.

It’s not only more dangerous to walk, it’s more dangerous to drive. In 2001, New Jersey had 747 traffic fatalities, at least double the number of those in New York City.

This statistic matches with the work of William Lucy, a professor of urban planning at the University of Virginia, who made headlines consistently in the 1990s with his studies showing one was more at risk living in a traffic ridden suburb than a crime ridden inner city. Several of his studies showed that a prosperous Northern Virginian or Richmond suburb was less safe to live in than Washington DC or Richmond, which then vied for the highest murder rates in the land. The reason was surprising but obvious from the data.

Speeding cars killed a lot more people in the suburbs than they did in the inner city, where the cars tended to travel more slowly and accidents tended not to be fatal.

Here in the Tri State Region, it would be nice to have the best of all worlds. If we make it safe and most of all pleasant to walk and bicycle in the city or suburb, we will have safer and more pleasant communities all around.

–Alex Marshall, an Independent Journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA

Mergers Or No Mergers, It’s Time To Re-Regulate The Airlines

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I write this from the terminal of the Boston International Airport. I am about to board a small prop plane to Harrisburg, Pa, the state capitol. Given the plane’s small size, and my largish one, the ride will be uncomfortable. Not only will my 6’7′ frame be crammed into a tiny seat, but the propellers will sound like an electric shaver next to my ear for an hour and a half. Winds will bat the plane around as heavy seas do a rowboat.

For the privilege of this unpleasant ride, I am paying US Airways $851. Luckily for me, the taxpayers of Pennsylvania are reimbursing me, because their state legislature is flying me to Harrisburg to give my views on highways and suburban sprawl.

It has been more than 20 years since President Jimmy Carter and Alfred Kahn, chairman of the now defunct Civil Aeronautics Board, began deregulating the airlines. It is time to face facts about this experiment: It has failed. Every single aspect predicted by the advocates of deregulation has gone the opposite way. Competition, the theory went, would increase the number of airlines, increase the number of direct flights, make ticketing easier, and bring simpler, and lower fares.

At first, the theory seemed true. In the early 1980s, low-cost carriers like People Express offered short- to long-distance flights for pocket change. But in the ruthless consolidation that followed, these carriers were driven out of business. Now, a handful of oligarchic airlines reign over the skies like despots. Many smaller markets, like Harrisburg, have seen their air service, something vital to their economic health, ruthlessly extorted by one or two airlines. Flying has become unpleasant, uncomfortable, unpredictable and expensive. Passengers have no guarantee what they will pay, or under what conditions they will have to pay it.

The recent proposed merger between US Airways and United Airlines would do nothing to address these problems. It would probably make them worse. As it happens, these two airlines are already the only ones flying to Harrisburg from Boston. Their already vicious level of competition — I could have flown United and paid $856 — has not exactly produced affordable service. The problem with the airline industry is not mergers or no mergers, but the relative freedom airlines have now to engage in predatory capitalism with their customers.

A few weeks ago, I watched that classic movie from the early 1970s, The French Connection with Gene Hackman. At one point, the local New York villain suddenly decides to fly from New York to Washington to meet the mysterious Frenchman. The film shows the bad guy walk up to the Eastern counter at the airport, and say, ‘One ticket to Washington, please.’ The clerk says, ‘That will be $40, please.’

And that’s it.

Can you imagine something so simple nowadays? Forty dollars to fly from New York to Washington, at the last minute. Even with inflation, that’s pretty good. And consider what the villain did not do. He did not call seven, 14 or 21 days in advance to get this price. He didn’t have to stay over on a Saturday night. He wasn’t required to pay $75 if he changed his return date, or buy a whole new ticket at full-fare if he changed his departure date. He bought the ticket from ‘Eastern,’ one of many defunct airlines. That flight now to Washington from New York would cost $311. And that’s a bargain, considered what is being charged to smaller cities like Harrisburg.

Airlines executives frequently state that average ticket prices have declined in the last 20 years. But, as Robert Kuttner showed in his book Everything For Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets, prices declined even faster during the era of regulation. And average prices don’t take into consideration the economic costs of unnecessarily extending stays through a weekend to get a lower fare, or not being able to easily change one’s schedule. Nor do average prices consider that fares have increased enormously in some markets.

There is a way out of this mess: Reregulate the airlines. Reestablish the Civil Aeronautics Board, or some newer equivalent, which would set routes and fares. We would once again have a reasonable, stable system of air travel. Although Sen. John McCain and others have introduced passenger ‘Bill of Rights,’ few have contemplated complete re-regulation. They should.

People often forget that private airlines depend on a system of publicly financed, publicly-maintained airports. In giving these over to airlines to use as they will, it’s as if we had given over our public highways to a handful of taxicab fleets, who were allowed to charge whatever they wanted, and on whom we were completely dependent.

Americans have fallen in love with the idea that competition makes everything cheaper and better. This is not always true. With air travel, it’s time we returned to the days, like in those old movies, when the nation’s air travel system served its passengers, rather than only the profits of a dwindling number of airlines.

Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken. He writes frequently on transportation.