Maimonides’ Ladder

So this CityLab/SF SPUR article has been making the social media rounds recently. It argues that the San Francisco’s crisis of housing supply and affordability has been caused by the failed policies of 70s and 80s SF progressives, either by intent or a tragic set of unintended consequences (i.e., either SF progressives are mean and nasty or stupid).

The question, though, that this line of reasoning can’t answer is this: why is it that at roughly the same time, in roughly the same shape, with roughly the same consequences, this pattern of housing crisis appeared not just in cities up and down the west coast from Vancouver to San Diego, not just in major US cities across the country, but globally?

And given that, how is it possible to explain a genuinely global phenomenon by way of very local, place-based political decision-making? The fact is, I think, that local housing markets have been internationalized, at least in terms of the flow of money across borders. This is a new reality, a function of neoliberalism as pernicious as any other – and the traditional theories and conventional wisdom about how local housing supply and demand functions – hence the policies that ought to be followed (not to mention who gets the blame) no longer makes sense.

That’s Jim Russell’s point here. Before we all join in a chorus of blaming a few local policies and people for what’s really a global systemic failure, his argument about what’s causing our troubles needs to be brought into the debate. Read the rest of this entry »

John Paton, Digital First Media’s CEO, announced this week that Alden Global Capital, DFM’s hedge fund owner, is considering selling their newspapers holdings. DFM has newspapers from Vermont to California, including historically important metro outlets like the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Besides the Merc, it also owns a dozen other local Bay Area papers managed through the Bay Area News Group, including my hometown paper, the Marin Independent Journal.

Ken Doctor, who’s been following the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the newspaper trade for years, figures that Alden will sell the papers region by region. It’s easy to imagine an investor group looking to buy the papers with an eye on short term ROI (which was Alden’s strategy all along, anyway). But if the papers end up being sold to an owner with that approach, it spells more death spiral for local newspapers (that’s how the News Guild sees it, too).

Instead, the Bay Area could be the model for how to turn a decaying, declining, near dead newspaper system into something beautiful and powerful.  For that to happen, it’ll take a smart team and smart money to figure out how to reverse the trend. This could be an opportunity for the nonprofit journalism world to take the lead – but only if we look beyond our constraints and limitations (self-imposed and otherwise) and begin to act on a bigger stage. Call me crazy, but how else will local journalism survive and thrive?

Read the rest of this entry »

Maya Angelou’s ‘When Great Trees Fall’

Mother Jones started life in March, 1975, as a project of a non profit entity called the Foundation for National Progress (FNP).  Headed up by Adam Hochschild, direct marketing pro Bill Dodd, business wiz (and now Harvard professor) Richard Parker, and anti-nuke activist Paul Jacobs, the magazine flourished, growing rapidly (it had the largest circulation of any progressive magazine of the time) and being recognized with awards for its pathbreaking mix of investigative journalism and progressive culture coverage. Mark Dowie‘s piece on the exploding Ford Pinto pretty much ensured no advertising from the auto companies (the mag didn’t take another ad from Ford until 2006), and its special report on tobacco industry lobbying inside the Beltway put the kibosh on that revenue source, too. Read the rest of this entry »