I was interviewed about stadium shakedowns by John Miller of National Review Online (yes, you read that right) a week or so ago, and it’s now available online. I don’t remember what I said, so tune in and then tell me!
I’m going to be on KPFA-FM in the Bay Area tomorrow morning at 7:30 am, discussing the proposed San Francisco 49ers football stadium in Santa Clara. Those out of reach of KPFA’s signal (like me) can listen live via the station’s Internet streams; it looks like the shows are archived as well, so I’ll post a link here once that’s up.
UPDATE: The segment was postponed thanks to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and will now air Friday morning at 7:30 am Pacific instead.
UPDATE #2: The show is now online. (Scroll ahead about half an hour to hear my segment.)
The media frenzy over those Yankees hotel-room aliases continues, as I make two radio appearances tomorrow to discuss the pressing question of why Jorge Posada goes by “Ricky Ricardo”:
For those of you within reach of central Brooklyn, I’m going to be moderating a discussion this Saturday night by Brian Berger and Tom Robbins, two of the many authors (Berger is co-editor as well) of the marvelous new anthology “New York Calling,” a look back at New York City in the ’70s and ’80s that is remarkably free of either rose-colored nostalgia or revisionist Giulianiesque horror at “a city out of control.” (My favorite snippet: The Scene Is Now keyboard player Phil Dray recalling a block committee meeting in the rapidly gentrifying Alphabet City on adding street trees: “All the white people want the trees, but the Hispanics are against it, saying that prettifying the block will just drive the rents up.”)
The reading/discussion will start at 7 pm this Saturday, October 13, at Vox Pop, corner of Cortelyou Road and Stratford Road in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. (By train, take the Q to Cortelyou Road, then walk about six short blocks west, past the newly planted street trees in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.)
I recorded a short interview today for CounterSpin, the radio show of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, on my upcoming report for FAIR, “The Poor Will Always Be With Us… Except on TV News,” which examines poverty coverage (and the lack thereof) on the nightly network newscasts. (The article isn’t online yet, but should be hitting newsstands momentarily.) In New York, this airs 10 am tomorrow on WBAI (99.5 FM); elsewhere, check your local listings. Or just grab the podcast here when it becomes available.
If I’m making a New Year’s resolution, it’s to keep this page updated every month with links to my latest writings and other projects. Not only will that be a better service to you, whoever you might be who’s stumbled upon this Internet backwater, but it will also mean I’ll never again have to do what I’m now about to attempt: a complete recap of everything I’ve done since the end of August. Buckle in, and let’s go:
The final one-third of 2006 saw New York cross the t’s and dot the i’s on three sports construction projects, and I was there to chart the course of the bulldozers. With the Yankees already having broken ground in August on their new $1.3 billion stadium (about $400 million of which came courtesy of taxpayers), construction kicked swiftly into gear, creating a giant dust bowl where a 22-acre Bronx park used to be. Out in Queens, meanwhile, the Mets didn’t break ground on their new stadium until November, by which time they’d announced that Citigroup had agreed to spend $20 million a year to have the new structure dubbed CitiField - money that will go entirely into the team’s pockets, with not a dime to repay the city’s $200 million or so in expenses.
With the baseball stadium out of the way, attention turned to Brooklyn, where the Atlantic Yards megaproject (which is to include a basketball arena for the Nets, which would relocate from New Jersey) entered the home stretch for its own approval process. Following the final uninformative public hearing, the state agency running the project first stonewalled on releasing its economic impact study, then released a memo giving incomplete details of the projected effects of the project. Project opponents hoped this would be enough to convince the state’s top assemblymember to delay approval of the project; it didn’t happen, though.
The New York plans all relied heavily on “hidden” subsidies - everything from tax and rent breaks to low-interest city bonds - something that looks to be an increasing trend across baseball as team owners try to make their projects look more palatable to a skeptical public. That’s certainly what Oakland A’s owner Lew Wolff did in presenting his own stadium plans in November, as he talked lots about all the new gizmos the park would be wired for, and as little as possible about how it would all be paid for.
But enough about giving public money to rich people. I also wrote plenty this fall about giving public money (or not) to poor people, starting with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s poverty commission recommendations and what actual poor people thought of them (choice quote: “The mayor, the president, the governor, they all messed up”), continuing with the latest on how new federal welfare laws could cost New York City big in penalties, moving on to an analysis of news coverage of the welfare law’s 10th anniversary (wherein a study that revealed welfare recipients were no better off financially under the new law was described by the press as showing that “for many the blessings of work have been mixed”), and finally reporting on Bloomberg’s first announcement of how he actually plans to help the poor (or as he calls them, “people who are starting their way up the economic ladder”). With the mayor promising 30 new initiatives but not revealing what any of them exactly are, I’ll be continuing to follow this one closely, believe you me.
And those were the main themes. The leftover articles in last four months’ portfolio include: a look at how New York City’s housing tax-subsidy reform is likely too little, too late; a tribute to the second New York Yankee to die in the prime of his career in a small plane crash; a look at the new baseball labor pact and how it’s likely to affect team payrolls (a prediction that’s panning out pretty well so far, the Gil Meche contract notwithstanding), and a report on how a New York Sun editor used a description of the Lower East Side in the 19th century to argue for its redevelopment now. But hey, what’s 120 years between friends?
And that’s it for now, at least in terms of the printed word. If you really need to hear more from me, or would just like to rest your eyes, you can hear me talk about poverty coverage on WNUR’s “This Is Hell” show from December 16, or blab about the new baseball labor pact on Baseball Prospectus Radio from November 4.
Until next month - really - I’m still Neil deMause. Farewell, sweet Purvs, wherever you are.
August was a month for two major anniversaries: One year since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, and the 10-year mark since President Clinton signed “welfare reform” into law. Thanks to my Extra! article on poverty coverage in the wake of the storm I’ve been on the radio talking about the former a bunch (see links at the bottom of this item); on the latter, stay tuned for future media analysis.
It was also the 58th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s death - who says anniversaries have to be in multiples of ten? - and the Yankees celebrated by walling off a public park and holding an invitation-only stadium groundbreaking while community members protested outside. I celebrated by poring through more city documents, which revealed that not only had the Yankees billed taxpayers for their stadium lobbying costs (as I reported last month), but also for the salaries of several of George Steinbrenner’s relatives, and for the lawyers who drew up the lease that let them do all this in the first place. Plus, the city could have gotten this money back, but tore up the Yanks’ (and Mets’) IOUs as part of new stadium deals, adding an extra $46 million in subsidies to what’s previously been divulged. Happy deathday, Babe!
Elsewhere for the rapidly shrinking Village Voice, I reported on the raucous public hearing over Bruce Ratner’s proposed Atlantic Yards development project for Brooklyn; with hundreds of people still waiting to testify as the clock neared midnight, the state told everyone left out to come to another hearing next month - on primary day. And then there was the “Roots Reggae Family Festival” in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park that preached of revolution but charged $40 a head for an event in a public park - leading to the odd spectacle of a concert where the vast majority of spectators were outside the gates, with a near-empty circle of lawn inside.
Finally, I’m extremely happy to announce that a newly expanded edition of Field of Schemes will be coming out in early 2008, from University of Nebraska Press. Expect both new chapters on recent events (the Yankee Stadium battle absolutely included), and updates on the stories in the original edition. And thanks to everyone who helped make this project a reality - you know who you are.
Until next week, I’m me. Send healthy thoughts (and cash if you like) to Kirk.
LATE ADDITION: Hear my radio appearances discussing post-Katrina poverty coverage on KCSB, WCCO, and the online Guy James Show.
Also, so long as you’re grabbing MP3 files, check out this one on PBS’ “Waging A Living” documentary - it’s with Barbara Ehrenreich, not me, but it’s one of the best discussions of poverty in America you’re likely to hear all year.
Whoops - it’s another month now, isn’t it? And I picked a bad month to miss the calendar turning over, given that July was jam-packed with action on the byline front.
Let’s start off with my Exclusive with a capital E (as it appeared on the cover of the Village Voice, anyway): The news that the New York Yankees, under a lease clause allowing them to deduct “stadium planning” costs from their city rent, had billed the city treasury for the lobbyists they hired to push for public stadium funding, as well as the salaries of their own top executives. The documents proving this had been sitting around in city Parks Department files for years, but no one bothered to look at them - apparently, checking to make sure that your high-powered tenants aren’t ripping you off isn’t in the job description of anyone in city government these days.
It was also the month that the Yankees reaped the rewards of all that lobbying, as the National Park Service and Internal Revenue Service signed off on the use of federally funded parkland and federally subsidized tax-exempt bonds, respectively, clearing the last two bureaucratic hurdles facing the stadium project. Unless lawyers for Bronx residents manage to get a last-second court injunction, the trees are expected to begin falling in Macombs Dam Park later this month, with the House That Ruth Built to follow in the spring of 2008. The monuments to Lou Gehrig et al. will be relocated to the ersatz Stadium; no word on the fate of the plaque honoring the soon-to-be-landfilled seat of Ali Ramirez.
With the Mets also about to break ground on their new stadium, attention is set to turn to the New Jersey Nets, whose owner developer Bruce Ratner wants to build a new arena for them in Brooklyn, accompanied, incidentally, by a huge passel of butt-ugly condo skyscrapers. Will he succeed? Not if noted Brooklyn poet Steve Buscemi has anything to say about it.
And enough about all that. On a different topic, the new July/August issue of Extra! is out, with my analysis, as the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, of how the news media lived up to promises that it would pay more attention to pervasive poverty now that the hurricane and its aftermath had brought it to light. In a nutshell:
On CNN’s Reliable Sources (9/18/05), Newsweek contributing editor Ellis Cose was asked how much longer “the underclass” would remain in the news after Katrina. He replied: “I think it’s going to be a story for a long time, and a long time meaning at least six months or more. And I think these issues are going to be finally examined.”
Contrary to Cose’s predictions, “a long time” turned out to be a matter of weeks. An Extra! analysis of media coverage since Katrina - of the hurricane’s aftermath along the Gulf Coast and of poverty issues in general - found that with few exceptions, the media’s rediscovery of impoverished Americans lasted barely a month. While occasional individual journalists did follow up on how New Orleans’ poorest residents were faring in the months after the hurricane, these seldom went beyond tales of individual tragedy, examining neither the systemic causes of their destitution, nor what could be done to alleviate their woes.
The article isn’t up on FAIR’s website yet [okay, now it is] - in fact, I haven’t even gotten my copy of the magazine yet, though others have. In the meantime, you can hear me discuss post-Katrina coverage, as well as how the media mishandled the recent welfare law changes, on the July 7 edition of FAIR’s radio show, CounterSpin.
Thanks to everyone who showed up at my Philadelphia talk with Dave Zirin, and for my Baseball Prospectus chat (transcript here). If you’re looking to meet me live and in person, your best bet is either to pester BP to hold a New York pizza feed, or attend the sure-to-be-a-blast Yo La Tengo show at the Landmark Loews Jersey Theatre on September 29, part of the tour for their rumored-to-be-their-best-in-a-decade long-player (and even longer-namer) “I Am Not Afraid Of
You And I Will Beat Your Ass.” Look for me in Row P.
We were all set to head west for the four-day celebration of freedom for slaveholders, but nature has decided to remind us why they’re called floodplains, so we may go north instead. In the meantime, a recap of my writings and other noteworthy events from the month of June:
The Village Voice may be down
one editor-in-chief, but the printing presses - and the, er, website presses - continue to churn, with a good chunk of this month’s output bearing the byline of yours truly. The big item: My investigation of Housing Stability Plus, the New York City homelessness-prevention program that is increasingly leaving families stuck in substandard housing with no way to pay their rent. And if you thought that was the whole reason behind the homelessness crisis in the first place, well, read the article. (It has a picture of a cute kid, even!)
On the web front, I covered two of New York’s ongoing sports-subsidy controversies: first, the Bronx borough president’s move to punish
those who voted against his Yankees stadium plan by booting them from the community board (followup story here); and second, the growing opposition to New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner’s plan for a basketball-arena-and-skyscraper development in Brooklyn for being too damn freaking ginormous. And I haven’t even gotten a chance to weigh in on the Mets’ demands for a new commuter rail station or the plans to shoehorn a new Madison Square Garden into a landmarked Manhattan post office building - watch for them in July, perhaps.
Finally, just this week I covered the release of the new federal welfare rules by the Department of Health and Human Services, a hugely important development for anyone who relies on public assistance - or any state taxpayers who pay the bills for the programs - but which, aside from the AP and the Washington Post, the daily media mostly greeted with complete disinterest. In a nutshell: The Bush Administration has drastically reduced the number of allowable “work activities” under the welfare law, which could lead to a renewed wave of families being kicked off the rolls. Outside of a nutshell, read the full article.
Finally, my analysis of media coverage of poverty since Hurricane Katrina will appear in the July/August issue of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, which should be hitting shelves and mailboxes in
mid-July. Not sure yet if it’ll be on the web as well, but if it is, I’ll add a link to it here.
Also upcoming in July: For those in the Philadelphia area, I’ll be speaking (along with my comrade Dave Zirin) at the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street, on Thursday, July 6, at 7 pm, on “The Dirty Business of Sports and the Rebellious Athletes Who Play Them” (so I’m told). For those
not in the the Philadelphia area, or just too lazy to get off their butts and walk away from the computer, I’ll be doing a live chat about stadium
shenanigans, baseball’s upcoming labor talks, and other stuff like that, at baseballprospectus.com, Friday, July 14, 1 pm Eastern time. As always, questions can be submitted ahead of time; for that matter, questions can be submitted after the
fact, but not if you want them answered.
Let’s see, war on the poor, stadium ripoffs, natural disasters … yep, that about covers it for this month. I think I need to cheer myself up by listening to the Art Brut record a couple of times in a row. I recommend that you do the same.
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