Neil deMause: The Website

Beneath the longest headline known to man or blog, I examine the possible fallout of the NYC subway’s first-ever naming-rights deal:

That resounding “Ewwwww!” you heard emanating from Brooklyn was the sound of locals discovering that as part of Bruce Ratner’s revamped deal with the MTA for the Atlantic Yards site, he’s set to get naming rights to the Atlantic Avenue subway station. If it’s approved by the MTA board tomorrow as expected, the new station name — which as Ben Kabak notes at Second Avenue Sagas would bear the unwieldy moniker “Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street/Barclays Center — would presumably be put in place once Ratner’s new basketball arena opens, which is set to happen any century now… [read more]

Because you can’t have too much of a good thing, I report for the Village Voice today on New York’s experiment with shutting Manhattan streets to traffic:

After trial runs in the hinterlands of Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue and Montague Street, the NYC Summer Streets program landed in Manhattan for the first of three consecutive Saturdays this weekend. The big question: Would taking a contiguous strip of avenues from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park and shutting it to cars (driven or parked) draw more than the trickle of folks who attended the earlier experiments?

The answer: Hell yeah. Helped along by a crisp, breezy morning that felt more mid-May than mid-August, Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, and Park Avenue were thronged with bicyclists, joggers, more bicyclists, stroller-pushing pedestrians, and still more bicyclists… [read more]

What do ocean trawling and mass transit have in common? unintended consequences.

There’s a word for it in the fishing world: “bycatch.” That’s the unfortunate tendency, when you’re trying to net one type of seafood — say, shrimp — to end up hauling in a lot of stuff you didn’t want or need — crabs, tuna, sea turtles, a Cousteau to be named later. It’s why eating wild-caught shrimp is considered the ecological equivalent of driving your SUV across the Alaskan tundra with the air conditioning on.

It’s also useful for understanding what the MTA faces in figuring how to raise bus and subway fares by 8 percent next year, to make up for the crash in tax revenues resulting from the popping of the real estate bubble… [read more]

New York City is facing the prospect of bus and subway fare hikes again, but could there be another way to do this?

As if New Yorkers hadn’t been beset by enough bad news of late — foreclosures going through the roof, “The Real World” filming its next season in Brooklyn — last week the MTA chimed in with word that its latest round of budget woes would force it to “defer” planned service upgrades, possibly forever. With $500 million in red ink projected for next year, MTA chief Lee Sander declared, the authority needed to put off everything from renovating crumbling subway stations to buying new double-length buses - and still may consider another fare hike next year.

To blame is the MTA’s financing system, which draws roughly equally from fares and from a series of dedicated taxes… [read more]

New York state has a new governor today (the old one was defective), and what better time to rethink the dumb ideas of past administrations?

Among the items topping David Paterson’s to-do list as he takes office today — get a budget done before June, remember not to sleep with hookers — is the looming disaster that is a trio of state development projects on Manhattan’s West Side. Thanks to a mix of soaring construction prices and overly rosy projections, the renovation of the Javits Convention Center, creation of a new Penn Station and extension of the 7 subway line to 11th Avenue all face uncertain futures.

All three, frankly, are good candidates for the scrapheap… [read more]

(A note on the headline: Yes, I know that David Paterson is governor, not mayor. No, I don’t know what the headline writer was smoking.)

The bike bomb someone set off outside a Times Square recruiting station last week had most of the city news media thinking about terrorism; me, it had thinking about the odd things being done in the name of fighting terrorism:

It was interesting, in the wake of Thursday’s Times Square bike bomb, to contrast the excited headlines with the actual stories that followed: New Yorkers were by and large unfazed (“What blew up, did you say? Wake me when it’s a gas main”) while security experts shrugged their shoulders and said there’s only so much that a free society can do to prevent bombs.

If so, maybe it’s time to revisit some of what we are doing under the rubric of “stopping terrorism.” Take the subway bag-check program, which turns 3 years old this summer, having sucked up untold amounts of money and manpower… [read more]

Okay, looks like that New Year’s resolution didn’t go all that well. I may switch to a more continuous-blog format for this page shortly; in the meantime, here’s a two-month recap of my doings and whereabouts:

I usually start things off with the articles I’ve written, but then, it’s not every month that I testify before Congress. On March 29, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Domestic Policy (chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich) had me in to testify on a panel discussing public funding of sports stadiums. The hearing lasted three and a half hours, and also included community activists, sports economists, and an IRS official who looked creepily like Bud Selig - you can see it all via C-SPAN’s website, or read our written testimony on the subcommittee’s site.

Back in the written world, I’ve been focusing on stadiums a fair bit as well, it being both legislative season and the start of baseball season. For Baseball Prospectus I took a look at the status of the four new stadiums (and one renovated one) approved last year, as well as the new deals the Oakland A’s and Florida Marlins hope to cut this year. (Both subscribers-only, sorry.) I also made my long-awaited return to the pages of the Village Voice with a look at the details of the new Yankees and Mets stadiums to see just what New Yorkers are getting for their $720 million in state and city tax money. (Hint: It’s not better views from the cheap seats.)

I also tried my hand of late at the ever-popular pastime of concocting new baseball statistics, introducing MP/MWW to evaluate which teams got the most bang for their payroll spending buck, ROPE to gauge their return on player investment (not very good, as it turns out), and BAD and BADr to find the most wasteful player contracts of all time. Murray Chass, forgive me.

Other of my writings in the last two months include: a look at the cost overruns that are threatening New York City’s #7 subway line extension (for the newspaper City Hall); a report on the city’s individualized medical/psychological care system for welfare recipients that costs $200 million and doesn’t provide individualized care; coverage of the anticlimactic groundbreaking for Brooklyn’s controversial new Atlantic Yards project; and a report on how the city proposed to switch a pair of two-way streets to one-way in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and ended up faced with an angry mob that charged it was all part of a plan to making it easier for fans to speed to the controversial new Atlantic Yards project (last three all for the Voice’s Runnin’ Scared news blog). Also, for the transit news site Streetsblog, reports on Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to create a “sustainable” New York for 2030, and a UCLA professor who thinks “market-rate” parking meters are the solution to midtown traffic and parking woes.

Finally, to top off a busy bimonth (quadrifortnight?), I dropped in on a fascinating lunch talk by several ’60s activists featured in the great oral historian Jeff Kisseloff’s equally great new book, Generation on Fire, and wrote about it for In These Times magazine. If you like the article, read the website; if you like the website, buy the book. Actually, just buy the book anyway - it’s worth it alone for Gloria Richardson and Bob Kellner’s recounting of their time at the front lines of the civil rights movement, which is a sorely needed antidote to revisionist crap like “Mississippi Burning.”

Coming up next: I’ll have a long piece in the April 11 issue of the Village Voice, so check their website starting on the afternoon of the 10th. After that, I have a bunch of irons in the fire, so stay tuned to this site for more news of the world around you and its trip to hell in a handbasket.

Oh, and donate to WFMU! It’s not too late, and it’ll get you into heaven. I promise. I know a guy.

Whoops, looks like I skipped January entirely, and the first day of February as well. Actually, given what January was like, that might not have been a bad idea … but I digress.

The big news around these parts is that New York City’s plans for $1.8 billion worth of baseball stadiums (public cost: about $800 million) is lurching forward toward a city council vote in the spring, and I’ve been scribbling madly on the topic. First up was a report for the Village Voice on how the city’s own economic impact study shows that the HREF="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0603,demause,71747,5.html">Yankees stadium would be a money loser; immediately following on the heels of that were reports for both the Voice (freebie) and HREF="http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=4719">Baseball Prospectus (subscribers only) on how various tax breaks and bookkeeping shenanigans would leave the Mets paying almost nothing for
their new building; which in turn begat a BP mailbag (again subscribers-only) answering reader questions about the
previous article. Meanwhile, an offhand remark about a cracktastic New York Times op-ed by economist Andy Zimbalist prompted a rebuttal by Zimbalist, which is going to require a further rebuttal from me … Jane, stop this crazy thing!

The previous big news around these parts was the transit strike, which led to three days of massive traffic snarls and throngs of New Yorkers trudging to and from work across the Brooklyn Bridge. (Good thing the bridge was there, or they would have had to wait for a passing ice floe.) It also, according to city officials, cost the city more than a billion dollars in lost economic impact - though as I reported on the Voice website, the city comptroller’s office admitted these were “numbers we sort of made up.” Not that that stopped people from griping about those damn greedy unionized workers.

Rounding out the last two months were another pair of BP articles - I seem to be writing for them a lot these days, despite a pay rate in the high two figures - one on baseball’s likely revival of the “contraction” threat in 2006, the other about the ongoing stadium mess in Washington, D.C., which is just as entertaining as the
New York one, only with fewer angry economists. And more angry mayors.

Finally - and I hate to stick this last, since it’s by far the most exciting news of the bimonthly period - I’m very pleased to announce that the Baseball Prospectus book “Baseball Between the Numbers” will be out the first week in March, with my chapters “Do High Salaries Lead to High Ticket Prices?” “Are New Stadiums a Good Deal?” and “Does Baseball Need a Salary Cap?” (Others of my favorite chapters include essays on when
managers should bunt, whether clutch hitting really exists, and “Is Alex Rodriguez Overpaid?”, a stunning piece by Nate Silver that actually concocts a formula for determining a player’s monetary value to his team, to the dollar.) Think “Freakonomics” for baseball, only with more statistical rigor.

You can pre-order it now from Amazon.com or Powells.com or via your local bookstore; members of the press or potential reviewers can HREF="mailto:neild@fieldofschemes.com">e-mail me and I’ll get you on the freebie list.

This month’s bonus material (courtesy of the WFMU blog): HREF="http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LG/Boney_M_-_Rasputin.mpg">Rasputin!