Bacon's Rebellion

We’ve all enjoyed a good laugh at the bull-testicles bill, but nothing strikes me as more mock-worthy than the debate over the right to carry concealed weapons in restaurants. Surely, people must have something better to worry about!

I don’t own a gun, never have and never will. But I don’t get exercised about other people who do — unless they’re convicted felons, of course, or their last name is Cho. The Swiss are armed to the teeth. Every male of military age is enrolled in the national guard and stores a semi-automatic weapon in his home. But I would feel safe in Switzerland. The Swiss have a culture in which people control their emotions (in stark contrast to a United States steeped in an impulsive, Jerry Springeresque, show-us-how-you-really-feel culture where it’s considered unhealthy to repress one’s rage); as a consequence, there are very few murders in cities like Zurich and Geneva. By contrast, the Hutus didn’t need guns to massacre tens of thousands of Tutsis — they used machetes.

Even though I subscribe to the theory that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, I just can’t get exercised about the prospect of guns in restaurants — or guns banned from restaurants. Either way, I really don’t care.

But The Virginian-Pilot decided to take the concealed-weapons-in-restaurants bill seriously. In a story today, reporter Richard Quinn quoted Mike Standing, owner of the Waterman’s Surfside Grille and a gun owner himself: “Why would somebody want to have a gun in a restaurant? In case the crab legs came alive and got angry?”

Yuk, yuk! Pretty funny. Why would someone want to bring a gun into a restaurant… unless his name was Guido?

But then we hear from Del. Harvey Morgan, R-Gloucester: “I’ve been waiting for this bill for years. I thought it was absolutely insane for someone who was legally carrying a firearm to find a way to dispose of it to get a bite to eat.”

Morgan has been waiting for years? Kinda makes you wonder. Does ol’ Harvey pack heat? He sure sounds like someone who speaks from experience. But, yeah, I can see his point of view. You carry around a hidden gun all day, and then you want a bite to eat. What a pain, you’ve got to take the gun out of the holster and hide it in the back trunk of your car. It might take all of… 20 seconds. What a cruel hardship! I’m weeping with empathy.

Next, we hear from Del. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, who says, “Guns and alcohol don’t mix. They lead to trouble.” Sure, that makes sense. Just one little problem: The bill says you can bring a gun into bars and restaurants — but only if you don’t drink. Kinda takes the fun out of going to a bar, but, hey, the no-drinking restriction would seem to make McClellan’s concern… what’s the phrase I’m looking for? … totally irrelevant.

Finally, we hear from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine: “My strong feeling, has been that bars and Pizza Huts where families go to have pizza with their kids, that more weapons in those places does not lead to public safety.” Ay, yi, yi. Why do we have to drag “the children” into this? Well, there’s no turning back now. Let’s dissect this. Ol’ Harvey walks into a Pizza Hut with his wife and grandchildren. He’s packing heat. Is he going to be any more dangerous in a restaurant than he would be, say, strolling through the mall? Give me a break.

Something about guns renders their friends and foes barking mad. Maybe we should amend the bill to ban legislators, on either side of the issue, from ever talking about the topic.

American citizens have long associated the word “slum” with inner cities — and for good reason. That’s where the slums were. But Christopher B. Leinberger, a Brookings Institution fellow writing for The Atlantic, thinks the United States is on the cusp of a change: Tomorrow’s slums will be in what we commonly refer to as the “suburbs.”

The recent, deceased housing boom may represent the crest of “suburban” development. Leinberger sees changing market preferences pushing growth and re-development back into the urban core of America’s metropolitan areas. And he sees poverty leaking out of the inner city slums into the subdivisions of the aging “suburbs” outside the core. Where traditional cities once experienced fiscal stress and suburban counties prospered, he now sees the opposite:

Many of the fringe counties in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, for instance, are projecting big budget deficits in 2008. Only Washington itself is expecting a large surplus. Fifteen years ago, this budget situation was reversed.

A number of factors are driving this change (reader warning: This is Leinberger’s analysis as viewed through Jim Bacon’s lens.):

Consumer preferences. Surveys have shown that roughly one third of the population would prefer to live in traditional urban environments with mixed uses and grid streets designed around walkability. Another third are torn between traditional urbanism and low-density communities with segregated land uses. But only 5 to 10 percent of the housing stock in most urban areas is in walkable places. Combine that imbalance with the rising cost of gasoline, which discourages long-distance community, and the fact that families are getting smaller — hence their need for large, suburban-style dwellings is decreasing — and market demand will shift capital and developers’ energy into urban re-development at the expense of single-family dwellings on the metro fringe.

Political barriers to suburban redevelopment. In theory, developers could re-develop aging subdivisions and shopping centers into walkable communities. In practice, that’s very difficult. Two problems. First, suburban utility systems and road networks are designed to support lower density populations. Re-development would require tearing much of the infrastructure and rebuilding it from scratch — very, very expensive. Second, NIMBYs and other obstructionists fight re-development that might increase density and, in their perception, congestion. While a market may exist in “suburban” counties for redevelopment, the economic and political obstacles are formidable.

Durability and livability. The quality of stick-built housing in jursdictions outside the urban core is lower than the quality of housing built four or five decades ago. (There are exceptions, of course, but as a rule this is true.) Houses will depreciate faster. Furthermore, I would add, communities of cul de sac subdivisions and shopping centers do not generate the pride of place that older communities do. People are less inspired to reinvest in maintaining and upgrading their properties. These areas will rapidly lose value compared to areas elsewhere.

The sub-prime mortgage mess. Suburban housing is way overbuilt. With foreclosures mounting, vacancies are mounting. And that creates social problems. Leinberger cites the case of Windy Ridge outside Charlotte, N.C., where 81 of the subdivision’s 132 small, vinyl-clad houses were in foreclosure late last year.

Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

Outmigration of the poor. When affluent households move back into the city and gentrify the neighborhoods, where do the displaced poor people go? Many move into decaying, inexpensive property outside the urban core — into the “suburbs.” We can see this happening in the Richmond region, as urban slum dwellers from the City of Richmond move into neighboring Henrico and Chesterfield counties, accelerating the decline of ’50s and ’60s-era neighborhoods through crime, vandalism and insufficient financial means to maintain properties.

This thesis is not entirely new. University of Virginia professor William Lucy has tracked the demographic changes I write of from census to census, and I have been making this argument myself for more than a decade now. What’s new in 2008? We’re hitting the trough of another housing cycle and the glaring deficiencies of the past are becoming more visible to all. If we look hard enough, I’m confident that we could find more than a few Windy Ridge-like subdivisions here in Virginia.

The slummification of Virginia suburbs will not be uniform. Some neighborhoods, where houses are newer and better constructed, and where neighborhood amenities are superior, will hold back the tide. In some instances, county governments will encourage re-development of mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods. But overall, the migration of the “urban” poor into suburbia is not a process easily reversed.

(Hat tip to Deena Fulchum for pointing me to The Atlantic article.)

Protesting criticism of former President Gene Nichol by fellow board members, Paul Blair has announced his resignation from the William & Mary Board of Visitors. In a letter to the William & Mary community posted on a Student Assembly web page, he praised Nichol’s track record of promoting diversity at the university. Nichol resigned last week after the Board refused to new his employment contract.

Blair’s letter lends some insight into the reaction of Board members to the firestorm set off by Nichol’s abrupt resignation.

In praising Mr. Nichol I in no way seek to diminish the critical work and achievements of our former President Tim Sullivan. They are many. Some would try
to drive a wedge between Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Nichol, because Mr. Nichol takes credit (and is blamed) for progressive policies now in place, some of which I think built upon Mr. Sullivan’s work. …

There has been an incipient effort by some members of the Board of Visitors to pick apart President Nichol’s accomplishments. To what end? They gained their stated objective. I have also seen mean-spirited communications that are not worthy of the professional deliberations of any managing board, but most especially not the Board of Visitors of William and Mary. Such communications call into question the real motivation for the initial decision not to renew the President’s contract.

I know the reasoned reactions, as well as the emotional ones, of Board members are in response to the President’s message of February 12th to the William and Mary Community. Would I have refrained from some of what Mr. Nichol said? Certainly, but then I knew more than he.

Based on this letter, I have to modify a key statement that I included in a previous post (“The Nichol Resignation Narrative Looks Weaker and Weaker“): that the Board of Visitors decision not to renew Nichol’s contract was unanimous. As Blair makes clear, Blair was one among “several” board members who fought for the renewal of the contract. (However, Board member John W. Gerdelman confirmed to the Daily Press that board members were unanimous in their final decision, although no formal vote was taken.)

The letter also highlights what some board members are not saying publicly: They were angered by the way in which Nichol, in his resignation letter, had hogged the credit for achieving greater diversity at William & Mary — presumably at the expense of his much-beloved predecessor Timothy Sullivan. Not all BoV members, it appears, were as willing as Blair to overlook Nichol’s one-fingered salute to them on his way out.

Payday lenders got a black eye yesterday when Cameron Blakely denounced in a press conference yesterday the predatory lending practices he engaged in last year as manager of a Washington, D.C., Check ‘n Go. As the Associated Press reports, Blakely said he was trained to encourage people to take out the maximum $500 payday loan as a way to keep them coming back for more money.

“I realized I was working for financial terrorists, bent on financially enslaving as many hardworking Americans as they possibly could,” Blakely said at a news conference. He appeared with John LaCombe, founder of CapAmerica, a group of former payday loan borrowers and whistleblowers.

Check ‘n Go attorney Yancy Deering countered that the company does not lend the maximum amount to people it doesn’t think will be able to repay the loan. “We want the product to work, and for it to work people must be able to pay it back on the date that the loan becomes mature.”

Blakely’s charges, if true, would prove very damaging to the Payday lending industry. It’s one thing to offer emergency loans with high interest rates and high fees — the loans are small, short-term, expensive to adminster and inherently risky. It’s quite another to deliberately entrap customers in a cycle of indebtedness. The Payday people had better present some convincing evidence that Blakely’s charges are either untrue or an aberration, or they’ll lose me, an otherwise consistent defender of the industry, just as they’ve lost many others in this debate.

I would say this, though. Rather than imposing all sorts of restrictions on interest rates and other lending terms and conditions, shouldn’t the General Assembly simply ban the practice of deliberately cultivating indebtedness? I can’t think of how that would be done, but there must be a way that more precisely targets the abuses that Blakely described than the restrictions the Payday foes are clamoring for.