Thursday, June 25, 2009

Taking the Amtrak Between NY and Washington Washington Reveals America’s Crumbling Infrastructure and Forgotten Neigborhoods

Taking the Amtrak Between NY and Washington Washington Reveals America’s Crumbling Infrastructure and Forgotten Neigborhoods

Dr Mark Naison

Fordham University



Early this week, I took Amtrak down to Washington to interview Frank Synder, Pensylvania State director of the AFL-CIO about labor’s campaign for Obama in Pennylvania in the 2008 Presidential election, which was one of the most important, grass roots efforts to confront the “race” issue head on in modern American history

Normally when taking Amtrak, I sleep or read, but because of the terrible crash on the Washington Metro late Monday afternoon, which=2 0took place when I was on the very same Metro Line only four stops away, I was too rattled to do either, so I found myself looking out the window the entire ride back to New York 0A

What I saw filled me with sadness.

From Baltimore right through Newark, I saw the remnants of of America’s crumbling industrial infrastructure revealed right before my eyes, along with the damage done to once proud working class neighborhoods in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Camden, Trenton, Elizabeth and Newark

It was not just the hundreds abandoned factories I saw along the route, some of them a quarter of a mile wide, their windows broken or boarded up, their walls covered with graffiti, their yards filled with garbage and rusting trucks, it was the physical conditions, and atmosphere of the neighborhoods adjoining the factory that was equally depressing

Here, especially in Baltimore, Wilmington and North Philadelphia, I passed block after block of two story attached row houses with porches, a distinctive form of housing built for the local working class when these three cities buzzed with industry and enterprise. Once, these modest houses were regularly painted and spotlessly clean, the sidewalks in front of them swept daily by working class men and women proud that a job in a nearby factory allowed them to purchase their own home. Now, what houses were still left, many of them boarded up, or in advanced states of disrepair, stood on blocks where weed filled vacant lots took up as much place as the homes. These neighborhoods once had vital commercial districts, but the few stores left, their entrances protected by gates and their walls covered with graffiti, looked like they were under siege. At the speed we were traveling,20which was 20-30 miles an hour ( there were stations in each of these cities and the train would slow down when approaching) I could only get a glimpse of the people on the streets, on porches or in backyards, but the one thing that leaped out at me was that the vast majority of the m were Black and Brown. These once pr oud working class communities, deprived of unionized, living wage jobs in steel mills, shipyards, metal fabricating works, chemical and electrical plants and truck and railroad depots, had become holding pens for poor people, many of them trapped in intergenerational poverty, whose labor was no longer valued or needed in a post industrial American economy.

Significantly, the one institution along the tracks that I didn’t see boarded up were the prisons. I passed at least six prison structures along the Amtrak route, easily identified by the windowless walls, their turret like towers ( if they were more than 40 years old) and the barbed wire fencing &nb sp;that surrounded them. I had seen this before in declining industrial cities. When I visited Youngstaown Ohio ten years ago, where a five mile stretch along the Mongahela River was filled with the remnants of once bustling steel mills, the only new bu ilding in the city was a spanking new federal prison.

But if anything, the sight of the prisons along the Amtrak route depressed me even more. Once scene in particular reminded me of the profound inequalities, both racial and economic, that deform the American social structure. Just before the train pulled into the station at Newark airport, when it was moving ten miles an hour, I got a glimpse of what had to be prison yard on the West side of the tracks. There I saw a group of forty or fifty black men, most of them in their twenties, playing basketball, or standing around talking, while in a corner two very tough looking fort y year old white men with cut off sleeves stood observing. This was not a scene from OZ, it was real life, but I doubt if anyone else on the train noticed. What made it all the more eerie was that the people getting off and boarding the train at Newark Airport, were predominantly white and middle class. Here you had two different Americas, side by side, as separate and uneq ual as anything we had during the days=2 0of legal segregation, only race alone was not the criteria. Now it was race AND class that separated those left in decaying stretches of industrial towns and cities, from those living in middle class suburbs and upscale and gentrifying urban neighborhoods

Even before this current economic crises, significant portions of the American population were living in Depression like conditions. Bruce Springsteen, who knows the world along Amtrak very well, tried to remind us of the tragic consequences of deindustrialization in songs like “Born In the USA,” but how many of us heard his message?

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go

Forty years of union busting, factory closing and prison construction have taken a terrible toll, not only on the lives of tens of millions of people, but on American democracy as a political ideal and a lived reality. Unless we do something to empower the people an d revive the communities that adjoin Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor- and places like it all around the nation-, large portions of the American population will remain locked out of the American Dream.

Mark Naison
June 24, 2009

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Don’t Be Disappointed in President Obama, Be Disappointed in Yourselves

Don’t Be Disappointed in President Obama, Be Disappointed in Yourselves
Response to Former Student Distressed by the Slow Pace of Change in the New
Administration.


Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

Yesterday, one of my favorite former students wrote an email to my alumni listserv expressing his extreme disappointment with Barack Obama’s presidency and arguing that if one looked at how the administration has dealt with three key issues- health care, the environment, and foreign policy- Barack Obama was indistinguishable from Hilary Clinton and perilously close to becoming “George Bush Lite.”

As a concerned citizen who has followed the Obama administration’s economic policies very closely, and as an historian who has spent many years studying the Great Depression and the New Deal, I would like to respectfully dissent from this assessment of the Obama presidency

In my judgment, Barack Obama did not ascend to the presidency with a clear mandate to overhaul the nation’s health care system, radically revise its environmental policies and steer a dramatic new course in foreign policy. The Republicans and Independents who rallied to Obama during the last two months of the campaign did so because they wanted a president to prevent the nation from falling into a catastrophic Depression and to make sure that victims of the current economic crisis receive government aid

In the first six months of his presidency, that is exactly what Barack Obama has done. He has prevented the banking system from collapsing and restored commercial lending, taken emergency measures to rescue the automobile industry, and funneled hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments to allow them to continue functioning without massive layoffs and cuts in services. The Stimulus Package alone has staved off incalculable hardship. According to my wife, an elementary school principal in New York City, hundreds of thousands of dollars of stimulus money have flowed into every public school in New York City, preventing what otherwise would have been massive teacher layoffs and dramatic increases in class size. Health care institutions throughout the nation have also been able to avoid dramatic reductions in staffing because of an infusion of federal funds. When all is said and done, the Obama administration can be credit with helping save a capitalist system gone mad with its own excesses, while saving millions of public and private sector jobs that might have disappeared if Bush Administration economic policies had continued

As for health care, environment and foreign policy, where are the grass roots social movements marching in the streets, and besieging congress, to demand progressive change in those areas?

During the 1930’s Franklin Roosevelt was elected to office in amidst massive political unrest. In every part of the country, there were strikes, hunger marches, eviction riots, and armed resistance to farm seizures by banks. Some portions of this unrest, particularly hunger marches and eviction protests, eased after the emergency measures of the “First Hundred Days,” but some portions of it, especially labor organizing, actually escalated in intensity right up through the 1936 Presidential election, putting pressure on Roosevelt to make far more dramatic changes in economic policy than he had originally intended to do. It was continuous “pressure from below” that led to the passage of the Social Security Act, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, and other measures which created a safety net for America’s workers and retirees.

If we want the Obama administration to implement radical changes in America’s health care system and environmental policies, to begin dismantling the prison industrial complex and to reduce the size of the American military and its role in shaping foreign policy, than we will have to fight for those policies in the streets and the halls of Congress, day in day out, for many, many years.
Changes of that magnitude cannot be implemented by a sitting president without popular movements fighting the entrenched interests that support current policies

It’s time to take the scrutiny off the President and put it on ourselves.

If key policy areas remain immune to reform, it is our own inaction, not the President’s, that is largely to blame.

Mark Naison
June 20, 2009




Response to Former Student Distressed by the Slow Pace of Change in the New
Administration.


Yesterday, one of my favorite former students wrote an email to my alumni listserv expressing his extreme disappointment with Barack Obama’s presidency and arguing that if one looked at how the administration has dealt with three key issues- health care, the environment, and foreign policy- Barack Obama was indistinguishable from Hilary Clinton and perilously close to becoming “George Bush Lite.”

As a concerned citizen who has followed the Obama administration’s economic policies very closely, and as an historian who has spent many years studying the Great Depression and the New Deal, I would like to respectfully dissent from this assessment of the Obama presidency

In my judgment, Barack Obama did not ascend to the presidency with a clear mandate to overhaul the nation’s health care system, radically revise its environmental policies and steer a dramatic new course in foreign policy. The Republicans and Independents who rallied to Obama during the last two months of the campaign did so because they wanted a president to prevent the nation from falling into a catastrophic Depression and to make sure that victims of the current economic crisis receive government aid

In the first six months of his presidency, that is exactly what Barack Obama has done. He has prevented the banking system from collapsing and restored commercial lending, taken emergency measures to rescue the automobile industry, and funneled hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments to allow them to continue functioning without massive layoffs and cuts in services. The Stimulus Package alone has staved off incalculable hardship. According to my wife, an elementary school principal in New York City, hundreds of thousands of dollars of stimulus money have flowed into every public school in New York City, preventing what otherwise would have been massive teacher layoffs and dramatic increases in class size. Health care institutions throughout the nation have also been able to avoid dramatic reductions in staffing because of an infusion of federal funds. When all is said and done, the Obama administration can be credit with helping save a capitalist system gone mad with its own excesses, while saving millions of public and private sector jobs that might have disappeared if Bush Administration economic policies had continued

As for health care, environment and foreign policy, where are the grass roots social movements marching in the streets, and besieging congress, to demand progressive change in those areas?

During the 1930’s Franklin Roosevelt was elected to office in amidst massive political unrest. In every part of the country, there were strikes, hunger marches, eviction riots, and armed resistance to farm seizures by banks. Some portions of this unrest, particularly hunger marches and eviction protests, eased after the emergency measures of the “First Hundred Days,” but some portions of it, especially labor organizing, actually escalated in intensity right up through the 1936 Presidential election, putting pressure on Roosevelt to make far more dramatic changes in economic policy than he had originally intended to do. It was continuous “pressure from below” that led to the passage of the Social Security Act, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, and other measures which created a safety net for America’s workers and retirees.

If we want the Obama administration to implement radical changes in America’s health care system and environmental policies, to begin dismantling the prison industrial complex and to reduce the size of the American military and its role in shaping foreign policy, than we will have to fight for those policies in the streets and the halls of Congress, day in day out, for many, many years.
Changes of that magnitude cannot be implemented by a sitting president without popular movements fighting the entrenched interests that support current policies

It’s time to take the scrutiny off the President and put it on ourselves.

If key policy areas remain immune to reform, it is our own inaction, not the President’s, that is largely to blame.

Mark Naison
June 20, 2009

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Building New Housing Without Youth Centers and Stores Doesn’t Create Community- Reflections on a Walking Tour of Morriansania

Building New Housing Without Youth Centers and Stores Doesn’t Create Community- Reflections on a Walking Tour of Morriansania

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University




Last Wednesday, I led a walking tour of Morrisania for 25 interns from a community legal services organizations called “The Bronx Defenders.” The group, mostly consisting of law students, was young, sharp, and keenly observant. The tour is one of my favorite events, as it gives me a chance to talk about Morrisania’s unique history as one of the nation’s most racially and cultural integrated communities in the US from the late 1930’s through the early 1960’s and to boast of its unmatched legacy of musical creativity The tour also gives me a chance to talk about the arson and abandonment cycle which hit the neighborhood in the late sixties and lasted through the late seventies, leading to a loss of nearly half the neighborhoods housing stock, and nearly sixty percent of its population, between 1970 and `1980

Despite the tragic events the tour covers, it usually ends on a somewhat upbeat note because of the wave of new housing construction taking place in Morrisania. Each time I do the tour, it seems that another vacant lot is being filled with two or three family townhouses, or six to eight story apartment buildings, to the point where there are almost no vacant lots left. Even during the current economic crisis, the rebuilding of Morriansania’s housing stock has continued unabated, with new construction being initiated someplace in the neighborhood almost weekly.

But though this wave of new construction is certainly gratifying, especially to someone who lived in the neighborhood, or who visited it regularly during those terrifying years when huge stretches of Morrisania and nearby Hunts Point offered a depressing vista of garbage filled lots, abandoned cars, and wild dogs roaming the streets, there were some critical things missing amidst what some people would consider a miracle of urban revitalization
One of these is youth centers. During our three mile walk through Morrisania, going through the neighborhoods major thoroughfares ( Stebbins Ave, Prospect Ave, Boston Road, 163rd Street) as well as many side streets, through we saw what had to be several thousand new units of affordable housing , but not one new gymnasium, Boys and Girls Club, PAL Center, or YM/ YWCA

To many members of my tour group, this seemed like an example of incredibly poor planning. Bringing thousands of new residents into a neighborhood, many of whom are young immigrant families with children, without making any provision for indoor recreation space, or organized sports leagues, for children and adolescents was a virtual invitation to these youngsters to spend their leisure hours in the street. In a community which already had a serious gang problem and a thriving drug economy, this was a prescription for disaster. Several people we met in the neighborhood, especially longtime Bronx youth worker and neighborhood advocate Hetty Fox, said that the absence of constructive youth activities had created a vicious cycle of drug related violence, and brutal, often indiscriminate police harassment that made life in Morrisania extremely dangerous and stressful for neighborhood adolescents, especially adolescent males. She spoke of the “genius of youth” being wasted in her community and called the destruction of human potential taking place in the Bronx as just as bad, if not worse, as the destruction of the borough’s housing stock that took place in the 1970’s.


Shaken by Hetty Fox’s comments, our group looked at all the newly built housing we passed, with more cynical eyes, and noticed something else missing- stores and commercial space. Frankly, this was something I had never noticed before on my walks through the neighborhood, but the group’s observation was right on point. There large portions of Morrisania, most notably along Stebbins Ave ( now Rev James Polite Place) where scores of new multiple dwellings had been erected without so much as a single grocery store being opened to serve what were probably thousands of new residents. The same was true of new housing built along Home Street, Union Avenue, and other secondary thoroughfares. Not only did such an absence of commercial development make shopping more time consuming and inconvenient for Morrisania residents, it missed an opportunity to spur the creation of small businesses, which among other things, promote sociability among old and new residents, provide an outlet for ethnic enterprise and create legal job opportunities for neighborhood youth.

By the time we had finished our Morrisania tour- at a great neighborhood small business called Johnson’s BBQ which had been in the same location for over fifty years- we were all feeling that a huge opportunity had been missed to recreate the nurturing atmosphere and community spirit that Morrisania had once possessed during the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s. In their rush to fill the city’s desperate need for affordable housing, city officials and local community groups had neglected to provide room in their plans for two critical components of a healthy city neighborhood- youth programs and small businesses. The result was a neighborhood which, on the surface looked healthy and dynamic, but was plagued with drug problems, police problems and a sense of trepidation among many residents about what would happen to their children when they reached adolescence.

It’s time we start doing the kind of wholistic planning that my good friend Leroi Archible ( known throughout the Bronx as “Street Man”) has been recommending for years, and start building youth centers, ballfields and strip malls in every portion of the Bronx marked off for “redevelopment.” Throwing up housing without other services and amenities is a poor prescription for creating community

Mark Naison
June 16, 2009