Gimme Shelter, Gimme Critique, Gimme Protests
This Week -There’s No Place Like Home — with Laurie Goldman, Mayor Joe Curtatone, Steven Meacham, Richard Florida, Richard Sennett and lots of fine Somervillians. Listen today at 2pm or anytime on our website.
Somerville is our stand-in for Williamsburg, Austin, Oakland or any other city where working class and middle class Americans are being driven out of their homes by real estate developers and landlords chasing rents that only well off hipsters and tech workers can afford.
For a century and more, Somerville has been a working-class neighborhood bordering Cambridge, with a dense mix of blue-collar workers and recent immigrants living together in red-brick and clapboard three-decker housing. In the past, Tufts, Harvard, and MIT students lived there affordably alongside artists, writers, and radicals, but the whole complexion of the place is changing with the aftershocks of the biotech boom and “the knowledge economy” rippling out from post-rent-control Cambridge.
Chris, Conor, Zach and Becca hit the mean streets of Union Square this week to illustrate a local story playing out nationally, specially now that the Amazon sweepstakes have narrowed to include Boston among 19 other finalists.
The politics in Somerville also make this story interesting as well. Voters last fall elected a super-majority of progressives and skeptics to the Board of Aldermen, who ran on housing and development issues. So the passion of Somervillians on all sides of this story are noteworthy; still, you’re left feeling the whole thing is a bit hopeless. One of the bright spots is the recently elected Ward 2 alderman, democratic socialist, and small business owner (what a combo!), JT Scott, whose queer- and trans-friendly Crossfit gym sits at the center of the proposed Green Line extension project. Scott was part of the OurRevolution-backed progressive wave which swept the local Somerville elections last year. He was also one of 15 elected candidates across the country who received national endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America. Ben Ewen-Campen, elected alderman in neighboring Ward 3, was also endorsed by the local Boston DSA chapter. (You can read more about DSA’s new electoral strategy here)
One of Scott’s big initiatives is to push for community land trusts in Somerville. As he explains on his website:
A Community Land Trust is a non-profit organization set up to help people buy homes affordably in their community. The way it could work here is that a potential purchaser works with the Community Land Trust to make an offer on a property. The purchase is split: the new homeowner will buy the structure itself, and the Community Land Trust purchases the land underneath it.
In Somerville, this would mean a dramatic reduction in the cost of housing and enable many people who are currently renters to become homeowners …the homes still sell at market rate — the owner doesn’t lose anything in the sale.
The homes go to working class people who can now afford to stay in Somerville..
Laurie Goldman, a Tufts urban policy professor and organizer for Union United, progressive housing group in the neighborhood, also highlighted some of the victories organizers have already won in Union Square:
Somerville’s city administration and elected officials have responded to this long-term organizing and diligence of the community about these strategies. The following are all examples of how organized groups of diverse residents influenced municipal decisions. So it’s a result of efforts of both community members and elected officials and the committed staff of municipal departments.
- The Citizen’s petition to board of Aldermen to increase Inclusionary Zoning to 20% — which highest in the country.
- Citizen’s petition to Board of Aldermen to promote highest feasible Linkage Fee — passed by Board of Alderman: $10.00 for affordable housing; $2.46 for Jobs Linkage.
- Cross neighborhood grassroots effort to establish a Neighborhood Council and to self elect a diverse body of 15 board members — with over 700 voting in election. This will be the group that negotiates a Community Benefits Agreement with primary developers.
- Community coalition to promote and pass the Community Reinvestment Act
Still, despite these small local victories and initiatives, the national picture is pretty bleak. Developers have the upper hand over cash-strapped cities and towns. Are there any good examples of places that have managed this we kept asking? Frankfurt and Medellin, our guest Richard Sennett said; places where government is assertive and where the private realm doesn’t rule over the public. Chris posed the question this way: can public investment exist with social stability? Maybe not. There’s a clear analogy with the health care debate: most people believe in affordable housing, but the fixes around the edges — community land trusts, inclusive zoning, right-of-first-refusal laws—just don’t deal with the underlying symptoms and causes. The obvious answer — universal rent control and serious regulation — stays off the table.
Revisiting Blyth
Our Mark Blyth show, which rang in the New Year of Open Source programming, has gotten a lot of attention and a lot of comments. An enterprising content-maker even uploaded the audio from the program onto an independent YouTube channel and racked up more than 30,000 views. We’ve also received a ton of comments about the show on our site and over email.
But some feel that Blyth’s generational “blame the boomers” framing elides too many real divisions of race and class in the conversation. His quick dismissal of “identity politics” as an a easy gimme for the Bannonites also miffed some listeners. One of the more sustained critiques of the Blyth show came this week from one of our regular listeners and interlocutors on twitter, Tom O’Keefe. As Tom writes (in this twitter thread):
[Mark Blyth] led off by establishing the episode as a #WhitePrivilegeSpace suggesting that liberal coastal elites (LCEs) were up in arms in 2017 about DT, but that “nobody died” and the world wasn’t burning. Umm, Mark, what about Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Niger, Burma, the US-Mexico border, airports post-Muslim Bans, the sites of many instances of police violence? Mark did eventually mention Charlottesville… Mark talks at length about the 2016 Election. At no point does he mention the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the disenfranchisement of ~ 6MM felons, extensive voter suppression efforts nationwide, and old-fashioned Jim Crow tactics being employed in places like Michigan. In Mark’s analysis, it’s all about the disgruntled white working class who’ve been eating McDonald’s and want to throw a monkey wrench in the LCE’s machine. He claims that “Republican men” aren’t talking to “their families” about #MeToo, and “that’s half the country”. Uhh, if Republican men of voting age are 20% of the country, I’ll be surprised. When Mark claims that the erstwhile head of a certain right wing media site “always wins” because of “identity politics”, he looks a touch less foresighted than when he “predicted” DT and Brexit. One need not be paying much attention in America to see that things aren’t alright & that the suffering — of opioid crisis, precarity, debt, poverty, mass shootings, incarceration, etc — is not limited to white working class or so-called heartland.
It’s a good critique and one that’s well taken. While it’s true that we cannot cover every injustice that factored into the 2016 election or every atrocity that’s been committed in its wake, we shouldn’t be glib about the issues on either end. Similarly, we shouldn’t retreat back into a simplistic class versus identity politics dualism—a binary which has been deftly broken down by so many great writers over the last year (see Robin Kelley, Assad Haider, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, David Roediger, and most recently, Brandon Terry in his Boston Review retrospective on MLK.)
Still, without reifying grand ideas about a mythical white working class as dreamt up by coastal pundits, we can still take seriously the idea that people were already pissed off and disillusioned with the system—particularly in the so-called fly-over states. Some of the most important stories to revisit now, a year after the inauguration, aren’t necessarily stories of rage, but instead, of quiet apathy. The New York Times ran a haunting piece just after the election on why so many eligible voters in Milwaukee, black and white, chose not to vote and didn’t regret it when Trump won. Another noticeable study which still hasn’t gotten much attention focused on the possibility that Clinton lost in PA, WI, and MI because she was seen as pro-war in communities with high rates of military casualties. When Tom raises the question of unconsidered instances of violence before and after the election, these communities should also get some consideration.
At any rate, we’re planning to host another convo with Blyth soon, possibly as a live event at a local pub. So send us your qs and critiques, and we’ll make sure to listen.
Lest We Not Forget…2017
2018
You’ve come a long way, Baby! Rebecca Traister on the other women’s march on Washington. You can read about our local Cambridge-Boston March here in The Dig. Producer Zach Goldhammer was also out there snapping pics.
Our friend and photographer Michael J. Lutch also sent in this postcard from the streets of New York yesterday:
RIP Joe Frank
A one-of-a-kind radio genius. Listen to some of Joe’s work and you’ll see what a safe space most public radio is nowadays.
RIP Delores O’Riordan
See: The Phantom Thread
For the couture alone, not to mention DDL’s final performance. See it twice.
Listen: Slow Burn
Our friend Leon Neyfakh has jumped into the podcast game with a terrific eight-part series on Watergate- “everything you never knew about the greatest American political scandal of the 20th century.” Relive all the fun or experience it for the first time.
Misc. links
Elena Ferrante’s first column for the Guardian. Chip McGrath scores a Philip Roth interview. RIP The Awl. To Be or Not to Be by Masha Gessen. Laurie Penny on the #metoo backlash. Nathan Robinson on how Facebook’s new algorithm is killing independent media.
Til next week,
The Open Source Architects,
