Neil deMause: The Website

Don’t believe anything you read on the front page of the New York Post, no matter how amusing the headline is:

Today’s front-page Post “exclusive” reports that the Yankees and Mets are in “secret talks” to buy the remnants of Yankee and Shea Stadiums so the teams can sell off the scrap to souvenir-hunting fans. In the story inside, memorabilia expert Mike Heffner raves about the value of New York baseball relics, speculating that in the case of Yankee Stadium, “Each brick could sell for $100 to $300. I doubt we’d have any trouble selling every seat in the house for as much as $1,000.”

Even given the low bar for tabloid exclusives, not much of this is news… [read more]

In the course of responding to the New Yorker’s problematic profile of Rudy Giuliani a couple of weeks ago (by Elizabeth Kolbert, who’s usually one of my favorite of their writers, but who usually sticks to environmental issues), I tackle the common belief that the sinking presidential candidate was a mastermind at tackling crime and welfare:

How will history judge Rudy Giuliani? With his presidential campaign (and political career) at a turning point in tomorrow’s Florida primary, it’s a question worth asking.

If there’s anything close to a journalistic consensus about Rudy’s reign as New York mayor, it’s something like what Elizabeth Kolbert expressed in a long New Yorker magazine profile of Giuliani earlier this month… [read more]

Apparently not everybody reads Metro NY. Two weeks after I debunked the claims that the recent theater stagehands’ strike was costing New York City $2 million a day, this week’s New York magazine declaims, in 30-point type no less:

…the stagehands’ strike kept hundreds of people out of work and cost the city an estimated $38 million…

As I wrote in my Metro column: “That’s [only] true in terms of ‘economic activity,’ a nebulous creature that includes all dollars spent on city turf. In terms of fiscal impact - actual city tax dollars lost - the three-week total was likely closer to $1 million, according to the comptroller’s office.”

A letter to the editor will be forthcoming. Then we can see if New York mag is as diligent about corrections as some other news outlets are.

Stagehands at most Broadway theaters are on strike, and here’s how Newsday reported the story today:

The stagehands’ union took its cause to the public yesterday, the second day of a strike that has shut 27 Broadway theaters and cost the city economy an estimated $17 million a day in the busy pre-holiday season.

Wondering where that $17 million figure comes from? According to Newsday’s sister paper, the L.A. Times, it’s an estimate by the League of American Theatres and Producers - in other words, the people the stagehands are striking against. Complaining about the economic impacts of labor uppityness is a time-honored tradition - the city did the same thing during the recent transit strike - but as in that case, it misses two main points.

First off, the $17 million figure is actually the cost to “Broadway” - in other words, the amount of lost ticket sales per day (and, perhaps, the lost spending by theater workers no longer drawing paychecks). The city only collects a small fraction of that in the form of income, payroll, and sales taxes, so the actual effect on city taxpayers is far smaller.

The bigger problem, though, is that it overlooks what economists call the “substitution effect”: People who don’t spend money one place will often spend it somewhere else. And Newsday should have known this, given that on the very same page as the dire warnings about economic ruin, it ran an article by reporter Daniel Massey headlined “Visitors find other things to do” (not online, apparently, or if it is I can’t find it in the mess that is the Newsday website):

A select few got into eight shows that continued to run because they are housed in theaters covered by separate contracts. Most improvised plans - eating, drinking, shopping and visiting the city’s non-theater attractions.

“It’s New York. What’s the problem?” said Lilach Yanai, 37, a computer programmer from Tel Aviv, who had planned to get tickets to a show, but instead said she would tour the New York Public Library and check out Van Gogh’s letters at the Morgan Library & Museum.

The only way the theater strike would have a significant effect on New York’s economy would be if it lasted long enough that tourists started cancelling their vacations here out of fear that they wouldn’t get to see “The Lion King.” Otherwise, what’s bad for Broadway will likely be good for 5th Avenue.

UPDATE (11/15): The city comptroller’s office has downgraded the estimated cost to the city economy to $2 million a day, based solely on the 18% of theatergoers who are making day trips into the city to see shows. (Actual impact on city tax revenues would be an even slimmer fraction of that.) The theater operators now say the $17 million figure is a “worst-case scenario.”

In this week’s New Yorker, economics columnist James Surowiecki takes on Elizabeth Currid’s book “The Warhol Economy,” which argues that the art/music/fashion industry is more vital to New York City’s economy than even Wall Street. While agreeing that art and culture have economic value, Surowiecki takes issue with Currid’s conclusion that the soaring cost of living in the city is threatening to kill its golden goose:

Currid’s concerns are familiar ones by now: as the city gets wealthier, it becomes harder for young creative people to live here, and, if they stop coming, the well of creativity will dry up. Her answer is a series of industrial-policy prescriptions, including subsidized rents for artists, more support for things like Fashion Week and the Whitney Biennial, and a more welcoming approach toward night clubs (where, by her account, much of the culture industry’s business actually gets done).

Currid’s desire to subsidize creativity is understandable, but her insistence that the culture industry is on the verge of crisis is refuted by her own work. Unless you think that network effects in the art-and-culture business are suddenly going to stop mattering, creative people are still going to find ways to make a living here, because they must, in order to succeed. And, empirically, if you look at the history of New York in the twentieth century there is little evidence that a more expensive New York is a less creative New York. To be sure, there was a tremendous artistic efflorescence in the nineteen-seventies, the worst decade of the century for the New York economy. But, in the twenties and the sixties, cultural booms coincided with economic ones, while the explosion in the number of art galleries, bands, and boutiques in the past decade makes it hard to believe that New York is suffering from too little art and culture.

Surowiecki’s conflation of “art galleries” and “creativity” aside, his argument misses Currid’s point (as she described it in this Village Voice profile): That as New York City increasingly becomes prohibitively expensive to live in, artists are forced not just out of the city but to the fringes, making it harder to have a creative hub like the Lower East Side circa the late ’70s.

And as for the ’20s and the ’60s, there’s plenty of reason to believe that housing availability aided in those creative boom years as well. While those decades may have been economic good times, they also coincided with big increases in the city’s affordable housing stock. In the years leading up to the ’20s, the expansion of the city subway system was opening up fresh territory for residential neighborhoods, with 420,000 new apartments built during the decade (according to the Encyclopedia of New York City); the Harlem Renaissance was largely made possible by the fact that Harlem’s previous Jewish residents cleared out to places like East Tremont and Brownsville.

In the ’60s, meanwhile, not only was white flight making room for bohemians - I grew up in a middle-class rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side that was originally built for rich people several decades earlier - but subsidized housing programs like Mitchell-Lama were greatly expanding affordable housing. Bob Dylan may not have lived in Co-op City, but he wouldn’t have been able to rent a cheap Greenwich Village apartment without it.

The way to do a real analysis of Currid’s claims would be to look at historical rent data - I couldn’t find any in a quick search of the web and reference books, but presumably Surowiecki could send an intern to dig some up - and see if creative boom years really have coincided with tough housing times in the past. But why bother with research, when glib contrarianism will do?

The study that Steve Rendall and I conducted of nightly news coverage of the poor - which I mentioned last week would soon be out - is now online. (You can also grab a snazzy PDF version of it here.) Our key findings:

Despite being an issue that directly or indirectly affects a huge chunk of the U.S. population, poverty and inequality receive astonishingly little coverage on nightly network newscasts. An exhaustive search of weeknight news broadcasts on CBS, NBC and ABC found that with rare exceptions, such as the aftermath of Katrina, poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news—and when they do, they are relegated mostly to merely speaking in platitudes about their hardships… [read more]

And the CounterSpin interview is up: Click here to listen.

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.

Reports on climate change look very different depending on whether you’re getting your news from British media or U.S. ones. (In the subscribers-only print edition, so you’ll need to order Extra! to read it - or look for it on Nexis if you have an account there.

If 2006 was the year that the issue of global climate change broke through into greater public consciousness–thanks in large part to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, plus books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe–2007 could be the year that it becomes old news.

Between February and May of this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a joint project of the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization, issued a series of three comprehensive reports designed to present the scientific evidence for climate change, as well as the likely consequences and how the most catastrophic effects can be avoided. By the end of it, “Live Aid” organizer Bob Geldof could be moved to harrumph on hearing of Al Gore’s planned “Live Earth” concerts to raise consciousness of the issue: “We are all fucking conscious of global warming.”

How conscious you are, though, likely depends largely on where you live–and how you get your news…

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.