atlas(t)

obama's urban policy agenda

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it's all here, folks: Obama's urban policy agenda. Ain't it purty?

Main points below (you can see the explanation on the agenda page):

• Strengthen Federal Commitment to our Cities
  • Create a White House Office on Urban Policy
  • Fully Fund the Community Development Block Grant
  • Do No Harm
• Stimulate Economic Prosperity in our Metropolitan Regions
  • Support Regional Innovation Clusters
  • Support Job Creation
  • Enhance Workforce Training
  • Increase Access to Capital for Underserved Businesses
  • Create a National Network of Public-Private Business Incubators
  • Convert our Manufacturing Centers into Clean Technology Leaders
• Strengthen Core Infrastructure
  • Improve Access to Jobs
  • Invest in a Skilled Clean Technologies Workforce
• Housing
  • Lower Interest Payments by Creating a New Mortgage Interest Tax Credit
  • Increase the Supply of Affordable Housing throughout Metropolitan Regions
• Poverty
  • Establish 'Promise Neighborhoods' for Areas of Concentrated Poverty
  • Increase the Minimum Wage
  • Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit
  • Help Low-Income Workers Enter the Job Market
• Livability of Cities
  • Build More Livable and Sustainable Communities
  • Control Superfund Sites and Data
  • Use Innovative Measures to Dramatically Improve Efficiency of Buildings
  • Foster Healthy Communities
• Urban Education
  • Support Teachers in Urban Schools
  • Expand Early Childhood Education
  • Reduce the High School Dropout Rate
• Crime and Law Enforcement
  • Support Local Law Enforcement
  • Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Supports
  • End the Dangerous Cycle of Youth Violence
  • Address Gun Violence in Cities
• Homeland Security
  • Allocate Funds Based on Risk
  • Prepare Effective Emergency Response Plans
  • Improve Interoperable Communications Systems
  • Safeguard Mass Public Transportation
• Families
  • Provide a Tax Cut for Working Families
  • Strengthening Fatherhood and Families
  • Support Parents with Young Children
  • Expand High-Quality Afterschool Opportunities
  • Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit
  • Cap Outlandish Interest Rates on Payday Loans and Improve Disclosure
  • Encourage Responsible Lending Institutions to Make Small Consumer Loans

Well my first -- and perhaps only -- comment is: wow, Obama's a man of his time, isn't he? Or maybe: Obama's a man of my time. And that is a time of general, upper-middle class fascination with geography, urbanism, city planning, and the trappings of such. I've said it before and I'm saying it now. And let me add: this fascination is now officially shaping national domestic and foreign policy.

Go to the agenda area of his White House website and have a look through it. "Urban policy" is (tied with "Homeland Security") hands down the longest, most departmentalized, and most detailed policy category, and that includes "foreign policy." ("Technology" and "Women" tie for second -- this is by feel, by the way. I didn't actually count lines or bullet points.)

This is because he's filtering all city-related issues through the lens of urban policy, and not splitting them off by themselves. Yes, there are separate agenda sections on economy, poverty, education, families, and homeland security, but each of these addresses these issues in a different way from how they are addressed in the urban policy section. This, my lovelies, is how a community organizer from Chicagoland sees the world. I can't wait until somebody comes up with an Obama map of the United States.

I'll be updating as Da Prez starts issuing commands and making good. This ought to be interesting.

"considering an alternate san francisco"

how do we protect San Francisco's Presidio so that, in the future, Starfleet can build its headquarters there?

Life Without Buildings has an awesome post about that topic, addressing Star Trek's "Starfleet" architecture, the failure of sustainability, and bad proposals for modern art museums. Check it out.

Via.

prop 8 map mashup

i've blogged about implicitly threatening map mashups before (somewhere ...), and here they come, back around. Once again, this one is about same sex marriage -- in this case, who donated money to the Proposition 8 campaign. Somebody has done a Google Maps mashup to locate the addresses of Prop 8 donors on a map. Of course, these addresses are always available to the public under sunshine laws, and anyone can go and plug them into Google Maps themselves -- one by one -- if they want to see it on a map.

But of course, no one is going to go that extra step. The mashup accomplishes two things, actually:

1. It is mildly, implicitly threatening. It goes the extra step, removes the extra layer, to make it possible to see instantly where all the donors live on a map. It takes away the slight inconvenience that would prevent most people from seeing these addresses on a map ... and maybe doing something about it. It's all the more threatening because there are so few donors in San Francisco (pull back on the map and you'll see a lot more dots in the East Bay and the Central Valley.) Someone could potentially do an action with every single one of these addresses.
2. It gives us a better demographic feel for who is supporting Prop 8 and why. You'll notice, of course, almost nothing in the hipster Mission or the gay district, The Castro. This is something that you really need to map out the addresses to be able to see. This is one of the virtues of mapping.

So one informative, and one mildly antidemocratic purpose.

While transparency in political donations is essential, and demographic information is useful, I don't see what purpose it serves to have the name and street address of individuals donating to a particular cause shown on a map, expect to intimidate them. Why not have an ambiguous dot, with no name-labeling, hovering over the blocks of their houses without pointing out the exact house? That will give you the virtue of demographic information without the intimidation factor. Because frankly, if I knew that pro-life groups had my location on a map showing people who had donated money to Planned Parenthood, and were broadcasting it to their crazy fire-bombing fringes on the internet, I might think twice about making that donation.

On the other hand, Prop 8 supporters trying to overturn the 1974 California donor sunshine Proposition 9, is not the right response. You don't throw the application out with the mashup. Just make public map mashups using donor or voter names illegal, or even just unethical, and this stuff will stop. People will still be able to get lists and look the names up one by one. Orgs will still be able to mashup maps and use them internally, especially for research. But this kind of public encouragement of ... whatever ... won't be possible anymore. And I think that's enough.

What do you think?
Via.

baby name wizard namemapper

i can't believe I haven't posted about this before.

One of my favorite sites is the Baby Name Wizard site, where you can find out neat stuff about American baby names. Yes, I know, it sounds boring, but it's really not. First of all, the site features the Namevoyager, a widget that contains the 1000 most popular baby names in the US of each year since 1880. You can type a name into the voyager and see the progress of the name's popularity over the past 130 years. (Yes, go there immediately and type in your name. It's a trip. Here's where I blogged about my name. Turns out I was named at the absolute nadir of my name's popularity.)

But the fun doesn't end there. Wizard Laura Wattenberg keeps a blog (she's written books on this stuff. She's an expert) in which she analyzes the current naming trends, comments on celebrity names (like Track and Trig), and talks about stuff like regional naming patterns. In fact, she's come up with a map of the naming regions of the United States. Look:

(Are you sure I haven't posted about this before, Google blog search?) You can get a partial explanation here, but I think the rest is in her book.

The blog is some of the best cultural analysis I've seen in the blogosphere -- and through a unique lens. She also has a baby name wiki on the site.

The site's latest nifty application is the Namemapper, where you can type in a name and see the states of the Union -- since 1960 -- where the name appeared in the top 1000. Basically, you can track the trek of the name through the country in popularity. The image at the top of this post is, of course, the Namemapper tracking the popularity of my name since 1960. Yeah, it blossomed in the "Midwestern Reserve" and the "Creative Fringe," and wandered from there. It's never quite made it to the "Spanish South" or the "Neotraditionals."

You don't have to have a baby to be interested in this stuff. Wattenberg's latest blog post analyzes red state and blue state names, which are the opposite of what you'd think: red state names are newly coined and daring; blue state names are traditional. Looking at a variety of data she tells us that this is because blue state parents are far more likely to be older, red staters to be younger. And she goes from there to point out that, while political opinions and values between red and blue are closer than ever, the perception of a divide is greater than ever ... but that might just be because the average age difference of mothers in red and blue (20 and 22 in 1970; 22 and 27 in 2000) is widening. It's a "life story gap," not a values gap.

See what you can do with maps?

obama's hud agenda

Oops, I neglected to publish this a couple of weeks ago. Sorry! I'll follow up on this soon.

weird. Obama has dedicated this whole broadcast to building up HUD in the public mind. He even acknowledges -- vaguely -- HUD's bullshit "urban renewal" policies.

But then, right before he announces his selection of Sean Donovan as his new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he says this, which I can't help taking as a blueprint for not just his HUD policy, but his financial development policy: "promoting cities as the backbone of regional growth, by not only solving the problems in our cities, but seizing the opportunities in our growing suburbs, exurbs, and metropolitan areas."

Of course, I think the blueprint is just this part: "promoting cities as the backbone of regional growth," while the rest is a his sop to diversity.

Fascinating that Obama has taken a crisis that's understood as a financial crisis -- the mortgage crisis -- and started pushing instead an agenda that makes it an affordable housing crisis. I'll lay 50 to 1 this was on his agenda four years ago and he would have found a way to make it stick no matter what happened. Smart.

obama city

just for fun, and because I'm not over it yet, here's a map of the area of Japan in which Obama City resides.

Via.

puppet street

the renaming in San Francisco of Bush Street to Obama Street this week has reminded folks of the inaugural prank in 2001, when folks renamed Bush Street "Puppet" Street.

You can see photos here.

And here's a video documenting the action:

Typical SF culture jamming, except with the collusion/blind eye of the police, who didn't care, or enjoyed it. Interesting that culture jamming that attacks government is fine, but culture jamming that attacks business interests is ... not.

not wall street, not main street

renaming Bush St. in San Francisco Tuesday.

Via.

any given latitude

the best thing about this half-hour travel show from Fine Living channel is the title.

I was really hoping it would be something like Michael Palin's BBC series Pole to Pole, the best travel show ever, in which he picked a longitude and traveled from the North Pole to the South Pole entirely on the Earth's surface. (He had to cheat somewhere around the Sudan and jigger over to a slightly different latitude to go around a war, and again at the end by flying, because it was either that or wait six months at Capetown for the next boat to Antarctica.) I was hoping this show would pick a latitude each season and find interesting travel locations around that latitude. Or something.

Alas, the show has nothing to do with latitudes. It's just what the Germans would call a "stinknormale" travel show. If you like travel shows, this won't offend you. If you don't like travel shows, this will put you to sleep. I've tried watching two random episodes and couldn't get through an entire one, even though the total running time is 20 minutes. I don't like travel shows.

By the way: 20 minutes for what is presumably a 30 minute timeslot? That's crass. That's really crass.

Let's hope the next TV show is more interesting. This one gave me nuthin'.

dog finds map/map finds dog

we have both:

A Jack Russell terrier owned by a lucky journalist found--under a bush during a walk--a map of portions of Queen Elizabeth's Scotland residence, the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Even though the map is of parts of the building that are pubic record, it's being treated as a security breach. There was also a letter with the map, but no more mention is made of this in the article.

This website for Tularosa, New Mexico, has a map of the homes of bike-chasing dogs, so bicyclists can avoid them. See the map above. Awesome.

Other awesome dog maps:

• UK dog obesity map. I kid you not.
• A map of wild dog distribution in Africa.
• A completely unsurprising map of the world--with no legend--showing the countries with the most pet dogs
• An unusually attractive map of where you can let your dogs off-leash in Glen Eira.
• And somebody somewhere pointed out that the map of Christmas Island in the previous post looks like a dog ... and indeed, it does.

Happy New Year, all!