I thought of this recently while hanging around [...]]]> New Orleans    As we fight to regain population in the wake of Katrina and so many other demographic struggles over the last half-century, New Orleans in the NBA/NFL world is a “small market city,” which means we often find that we are living in a very small world.

I thought of this recently while hanging around some Regional Transit Authority employees that our union represents and over hearing folks talking in the hallway about how the 1% and old money and prerogatives really work in the Crescent City still.  The RTA has been installing automatic ticket machines in several high bus traffic locations in the city, which is a good idea.  One location right downtown is at the corner of Canal Street and Carondelet.  2000 people a day catch buses or streetcars at that location, so it was an ideal location for the City to locate a standup shelter with a ticket machine and route maps obviously.  RTA went through all of the formalities and won approvals from the Vieux Carre Commission, Downtown Development, Historic Landmarks, etc.  They dug the hole, spent the money (about $40,000), and were ready to put up the shelter, but…

This location was in front of Adler’s Jewelers, the long time, iconic location for uptowners, the Carnival Club crowd, members of the Pickwick Club nearby, and others to buy their jewelry and get their watches fixed.  Late in the construction process, the senior member of the Adler family started coming out from time to time to observe the work.  He didn’t say much, just looked from time to time.   Suddenly, a call came to RTA from the Mayor’s office cancelling the entire project!  Adler claimed they hadn’t realized what was happening in front of their store, despite all of the hearings and notices.  Turns out, if you serve the 1% in New Orleans, it’s not what you know, but still “who you know.”  RTA covered the hole and pulled away the trucks leaving working people stuck like chuck.

Quelle shock!  That’s how “we roll,” I guess?

Ps.  One person who heard the story said, “at least they haven’t moved all of their stores to the suburbs.”  We’re even abused as consumers, much less citizens, it seems.

There are two ways to approach looking at these numbers around the country, and both perspectives can offer some insight to US political views.

On the one hand it lends some vague sense of [...]]]> New Orleans  The Times ran a story that tried to put a face on the 1% and encourage us to embrace our inner percentage.

There are two ways to approach looking at these numbers around the country, and both perspectives can offer some insight to US political views.

On the one hand it lends some vague sense of understanding of why such whacky percentages of Americans sometimes respond that they are richer than anyone factually might believe them to be or in other words why so many modest income American families still identify with the rich.  There are some people who might look at the household income figures in their communities where $200000 or $300000 or even $400000 might indicate the upper elite of the 1%, and say to themselves and to others like pollsters and Republican politicians, “hey, I can get there too with some luck or a break or two.”

On the other hand people like me are amazed that that the real meaning of such numbers proves how widespread relative poverty is in these same communities.  If you can be a one-percenter in Laredo at hardly $200,000, since it is a percentage that means people on the whole are desperately poor in Laredo and something should be done about it!  In my New Orleans $362,000 puts you there, and that’s a lot of money, and I’m not sure how folks would be making that here.  Little Rock is only a bit over $300,000, similar to Billings, Montana or Albuquerque or Boise or Panama City, all of which speaks a bit to the slightly more populist nature of some (much?) of the South and West.

The real story is not in the shading of the percentages but in the gap as the Times story indicates, as well as advantages that come from both chance (birth) and structural rigidity (access to job networks):

The top 1 percent of earners in a given year receives just under a fifth of the country’s pretax income, about double their share 30 years ago. They pay just over a fourth of all federal taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center. In 2007, they accounted for about 30 percent of philanthropic giving, according to Federal Reserve data. They received 22 percent of their income from capital gains, compared with 2 percent for everybody else.   Most 1 percenters were born with socioeconomic advantages, which helps explain why the 1 percent is more likely than other Americans to have jobs, according to census data. They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99 percent to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed. Married 1 percenters are just as likely as other couples to have two incomes, but men are the big breadwinners, earning 75 percent of the money, compared with 64 percent of the income in other households.

As interesting to me was playing with the formula that allowed a family to find their “place in the percentage.”   For example $100,000 family income puts a family in the top 21%, and if that family were fortunate enough to be living in New Mexico, where I have long thought about living such a family could be in the top 12% or in Montana, where we like to camp and wet a line, you would be in the top 14%.  Of course you still have to figure out how to bring $100,000 into your family, but I’m just saying…

When I left ACORN in 2008, starting wages were about $26,500 for a field organizer, which even today in 2012 would put an organizer ahead of the bottom 25%.  If they were living with another organizer or bunking in and sharing household costs, boom, they would have been in the top 50%!  We always would hear about how low our wages were, but mostly we were hearing from funders who lived in places like New York, where more than a half-million puts you in the 1%, or San Francisco where that starting wage would have put you in the bottom 17%, or Boston in the bottom 20%.

I can remember starting ACORN in Arkansas and finding that 70% of the people made less than $7500 in 1970.   Now to get to that 70% for household income, you would be knocking on the doors of families making about $100,000 around the USA.  A lot has changed in 40 years, and it’s not just inflation.

As I say, embracing your “percentage,” really depends on where you stand and how far up or down you gap is huge and growing, and the distribution is way out of plumb.

Ps.  Want to figure your place in the percentage?  Here’s the link to the calculator.

Reading the hometown paper in New Orleans, there was an item a week [...]]]> New Orleans Ideologues with chips on their shoulders about the nation’s public school systems seem committed to doing everything possible to make sure there’s no level playing field to allow comparison of charter school performance as opposed to regular school district performances.

Reading the hometown paper in New Orleans, there was an item a week ago about $28 Million over the next 5 years going largely to the KIPP and First Line charter networks with $2.5 Million the first year.  This means something in New Orleans since the Katrina disaster allowed policy makers and public school system haters to use our city as ground zero in the remaking of a school system with charters.  KIPP is taking over Fredrick Douglass High School across the street from me, one grade at a time.  I watched some Saturday’s ago as they held a “fair” in the yard past the McCarty Square Arch to try to juice up recruitment with games, pizza, and whatnot.  You can really do some nice things, if you have the money and no limits on how to use it.  The folks giving the money to the charters claimed that they did so because the “test scores” seem to be improving more rapidly in the KIPP charters than in the Recovery School District.  The reports I have seen often contradicted this claim, but hey….

A national study by Western Michigan University researchers found that KIPP received significantly “more taxpayer dollars per student than regular public schools…” and “also noted that KIPP receives substantial amounts of private philanthropic money.”  I’ve met some of the founders of the KIPP network.  We invited one from Houston to come over and speak to the entire assembled family of ACORN organizers four or five years ago.  People were skeptical, pushed him hard on their anti-unionism, but no one questioned his passion or his sincerity.  I think he would be the first to admit that it’s a world easier to run 99 schools in 20 states from here and there than the tens of thousands of schools that make up the public charge of free education in America.

It also helps if you can spend more money.  The Western Michigan researchers found a 10% difference per pupil at the KIPP schools with a spread of $12,000 to $11,000 over public and a $3000 spread over other charters and when they estimated the private donor largesse then it bumped up another $5000 over that which meant that a KIPP school would have almost 50% more to spend per pupil that a regular public school.  Wow!   The KIPP people denied all of that, though reading the Times-Picayune, I had trouble believing them frankly, and furthermore, it’s not as if the KIPP network or any charter operation is as transparent as elected school board having to account for the millage are required to be.

Charters are getting a big bounce in resources and promo, but despite the unfair competition in resources and even performance, they still have a lot more to prove to establish that they are worth the money and are producing 50% better with their 50% advantage.  We need to be careful before buying this bridge across the Mississippi.

Waste Land was an Audience Award Best Documentary (Waste Land Trailerat the prestigious 2010 Sundance Film Festival focusing on a powerful confluence of art and poverty and the lives of waste pickers in one of the world’s largest landfills, Jardim Gramacho, outside of the magical [...]]]> New Orleans This had to be a hot ticket!

Waste Land was an Audience Award Best Documentary (Waste Land Trailerat the prestigious 2010 Sundance Film Festival focusing on a powerful confluence of art and poverty and the lives of waste pickers in one of the world’s largest landfills, Jardim Gramacho, outside of the magical city of Rio de Janeiro. Given ACORN International’s work in organizing the same kind of recyclers in the Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, Delhi, and elsewhere, I could hardly wait to see how the catadores might be different than our cartoneros in Buenos Aires or rag pickers in India, so I jumped at a notice in the paper that the movie was showing at Zietgiest, a film center in downtown New Orleans.

It turned out I was crowded in with 7 other stalwarts in a cold and cavernous warehouse space on Aretha Haley (old Dryades Avenue) right off the CDB, but so what…it was wildly worth it in some strange ways that were surprising to me.

As a disclaimer I should admit that the documentary produced by our friends in Mumbai called Waste which follows a couple of ACORN International’s waste pickers is my personal favorite, but I’m open minded. The work is hard and it couldn’t be easier than to see it sitting in New Orleans no matter where, rather than schlepping down to Rio and walking the turf with the pickers.

My first reaction was one that I’m sure few would have: I couldn’t believe how good the pickers had it in Rio! They were gloved up, well shod, and easily visible to the truck drivers with their bright vests. They reportedly made between $25 and $30 USD per day, which also makes them the crème de la crème of the world’s waste pickers. In India our pickers make $3 to $5 and winning gloves and protection of any kind has been a struggle everywhere.

I might also be the only viewer who sat up straight and was ready to roar and applaud when I could see their association t-shirts and realized that the main character of the movie (other than the artist of course!) was one of the co-founders and leader of the association of pickers of Jardim Gramacho! The documentary was straightforward and respectful of the organization, which had undoubtedly been the driving force hopefully winning the protections I had noticed so vividly.

I guess I should admit that the movie is not about any of this and I dare say, if it were, it would not have been such a big winner and audience favorite, but it was nice to see that they didn’t blink stutter, or step back. The real theme was that a hotshot photographer/artist named Vik Muniz, a decent and talented guy with a riveting tale of his own journey from lower income Sao Paolo to a nice studio that looked like it was in the Williamsburg area and definitely in Brooklyn, decided to combine his art with an agenda of raising money and making some life changing differences in a few lives. Taio, the head of the union, became one of the half-dozen pickers paid to come out of the dump for a couple of weeks to pose and finish portraits of themselves in classic art book poses decorated with recyclable materials from Jardim Gramacho. The pickers were almost unreal in the sense of how physically beautiful they were, as if anyone could even wander into the heart of one of the worst garbage dumps in the world and find models. In London at the auction of some of the finished art, Muniz kids Taio at one point of looking like Lenny Kravitz, if you get my drift. This is art taken from life, not life coming to art.

Nonetheless, the movie is less about poverty than having poverty as the backdrop. It is about transformation and seeks to tell a story of how the process of producing this unusual art changed their lives in some cases forever. So though the association was also part of the background for the documentary, there was no pretense that anyone’s lives were changed, or perhaps modified, by the experience and the transcending gift of copies of their own portraits and art, than these half-dozen, and that was OK. The film pretended no different. Muniz and his art raised $250,000 the final credits said and the exhibit in the Rio museum was seen by a million Brazilians, and that’s some powerful art joining with social change. Furthermore, the money seems to have gone to the work of the Association in trying to find a future for other pickers since the land fill is projected to close in 2012.

It’s a movie. It’s not organizing.

But it’s a great movie merging art and organizing and an artist without much pretense who loves the life he’s build and brings joy and hope to the enterprise. \

Waste Land deserves to have a big audience not a handful here and there, and I hope it finds one, while I try to figure out how to use these tools to build the work and the art of organizing.

New Orleans        Having been on extended home-leave of almost a month before I hit the road again soon for Toronto, New York City, and DC, it’s been interesting taking the new measure of my neighborhood in New Orleans.  Bywater has morphed from what the New York Times called a “working [...]]]>

Bywater's McCarthy Square Arch

New Orleans        Having been on extended home-leave of almost a month before I hit the road again soon for Toronto, New York City, and DC, it’s been interesting taking the new measure of my neighborhood in New Orleans.  Bywater has morphed from what the New York Times called a “working class neighborhood” several miles east of the French Quarter to something they now describe as “bohemian.”  What to make of all of this?
Some of it is actually true.  Some of it is even a good thing.  Not all of it, but definitely some of it.
A couple of days I tagged along with my daughter and a bunch of her gal-pals to something called a “pizza speakeasy.”  Basically a couple of fellas had built a big adobe looking oven in their backyard, cleared out the first couple of rooms in an old house in the hood for benches and a band, built a campfire surrounded by plastic chairs in the backyard, flung swirling dough high into the naked branches of their one tree, sold pizzas for $12 with some simple drinks, and packed the place out.  Interestingly, the hometown paper had reported on new Mayor Mitch Landrieu eating at a similar pizza speakeasy called “Pizza Delicious” at the end of last year without qualms or hesitation.  License?  Don’t’ ask anyone about a “stinking” license in the post-Katrina young hipster magnet the greater Bywater area had become.  This was a party-scene pure and simple, not a health department concern.  A couple of guys make their rent and groceries for one night of long work over a hot fire for a night, and a 100+ twenty-somethings warded off the cold with weak drinks, a small fire, and two-hour waits for pizza that was at best “fair.”

Welcome to my Bywater, 2011 version!
Yesterday an itinerant barber was giving haircuts in the sun on my patio for $20 a pop, carrying his tools like a jornalero.  The same day a big time developer who built his house on the corner of the next block, one-hundred feet away from me, was featured in the paper’s Saturday real estate section showing off his place and its many unique features, many from Mexico and the East, as well as the two voodoo altars.  None of that was a radical as his saying that this wildly expensive Bywater mansion had been built without air-conditioning.  Now that is radical in New Orleans!  He finished the story by saying he liked looking out his window at our street sometimes and seeing something like a clown riding a high-seated bicycle up the street.  Maybe he can make it here after all?

After Katrina the hip coffee spot was the “Sound Cafe,” but it was actually across the Press Street railroad tracks in Faubourg Marigny, closer to the Quarter.   Now, it’s Satsuma Cafe on Dauphine serving eggs and sandwiches as well with a long, well behaved lines and great service but a slow kitchen that the youngish customers don’t seem to mind as part of the price of the new Bywater scene.  Even Elizabeth’s has finally gotten it right again after a couple of bad post-Katrina years, and once again, the crowd there is also a smattering of the new neighborhood and the old standbys like me enjoying a cheap hamburger steak with onions.  Add in the new barbeque place “The Joint” on Poland and the suddenly wildly popular Bachannal wine bar on the same street, and we’re what’s happening!

It’s not exactly gentrification, because hardly anyone can afford to buy in the neighborhood since Katrina proved how high and dry we are.  Property taxes and insurance have both doubled and tripled since the storm as well, and rents are still two and three times what they suddenly were after the storm.  But it is gentrification in the sense that it’s all whiter-than-rain in the Bywater now, compared to the almost statistically pure racial balance that existed here more than 30 years ago when I moved back to the city.  The younger set is willing to “camp out” in $1000 unit rentals, each pitching in their share, in a way that the usual service-sector working family just can’t afford.

Even the affordable rental housing being built from old warehouses in the neighborhood by the new neighbor developer are not straight up section 8’s, but “art lofts” for the Richard Florida crowd, and hugely white in this still majority black city.  An item in Saturday’s paper recorded a $1.2 M real estate transaction for more Art Lofts expansion across the street on Dauphine in this area that was one of the scenes in John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and the site of a textile workers strike led by my old friend Bill Becker before he ended up in Arkansas for years as president of the state’s AFL-CIO.

The neighborhood library, a half-a-block from me, is filled with young black students early on a Saturday morning doing homework and projects but by the afternoon is hipsters, tattoos, piercings and nose rings, using the computers to check emails and surf the net.  All good!

On the other hand a warehouse fire in recent weeks was the most lethal in 40 years, killing 8 people and a couple of dogs, almost all in their 20’s, and mostly train hoppers and pan handlers at stoplights in the area.  A cold night and an open fire seem to have been the death sentence for the squatters, but this is also part of the bohemian magnet of the Bywater area now in a city desperate for new blood and new people and without the infrastructure or resources to be too prissy and delicate about any of this.
The streets are safer now in a weird way.  Dog walkers are about on Burgundy at all hours of the night and day.  Bicyclers are the same way moving up and down the street to service jobs or friends’ places or whatever all of the time.

I should have known we were knocking on Greenwich Village’s door when I stopped and listened to the lies of the bicycle tour guide at the McCarty Square Arch the first time I saw them.  The tourists ate it up and he wove fact and fantasy about the neighborhood together, hardly noticing that they had to walk around the arch to see the names of the “colored” soldiers memorialized for their service in WWI on the back side while the white soldiers occupied the front.  Now, when I’m around I will see four or five bike tours  at the Arch, the only difference is whether or not they ride with or without helmets, otherwise they give the same stories in the city of tall tales.
We’ve crossed over into a new, strange, disturbing and exciting place in the evolution of Bywater.  Better to be growing than dying, but who knows what this chapter will really end up meaning.