Beyond Red & Blue

New issue of CommonWealth released today

CommonWealth’s summer issue is posted online in its entirety. Click here to see the full contents, or click on a link below to go directly to the story of your choice (one-time free registration required).

The cover story, by editor Bruce Mohl, focuses on Secretary of State William Galvin’s administration of a $50 million-a-year state tax credit program designed to promote the rehabilitation of historic buildings. The tax credit program is structured in a way that gives Galvin tremendous political leverage. The secretary has also gone to great lengths to keep the names of tax credit recipients under wraps. CommonWealth had to file a public records request to obtain the names. Among the big winners: the Boston Red Sox and politically well-connected developers Richard Friedman and Arthur Winn.

Staff writer Gabrielle Gurley, in “Pump It Up,” documents the precarious finances of the state’s debt-ridden transportation agencies and says an increase in the state’s gasoline tax may be the only way out.

Our final feature deals with the state’s Community Preservation Act. Originally created as a way for the state to provide financial help for municipalities creating open space and affordable housing or pursuing historic preservation initiatives, the act increasingly is being used for questionable recreational projects like synthetic-turf playing fields and even residential sidewalks.

Executive editor Michael Jonas sits down with Harvard political scientist Archon Fung to talk about his new book, Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency. Fung and his co-authors say transparency policies can be powerful tools for democracy, but only if citizens receive the right kind of information and know what to do with it.

A new column called Real Talk, by Alison Lobron, makes its debut in this issue. A young person’s take on public policy issues, the column suggests that today’s economic realities mean young people need to define success differently than their parents did.

In our Perspectives section, Charlie Lord, executive director of the Urban Ecology Institute at Boston College, makes the case for the urban forest, while transportation expert Terry Regan argues that those who seek to expand the reach of the MBTA may actually be undermining the transit agency.

Ben Forman and John Schneider of MassINC say the state’s economic development policies should be promoting growth in the 11 Gateway Cities, but unfortunately just the opposite is happening. The authors say the state invests half a billion dollars annually in business incentives, but less than 5 percent goes to programs that draw companies to economically distressed areas.

Finally, be sure to check out our regular features. Washington correspondent Shawn Zeller scrutinizes US Rep. John Olver, the Bay State’s money man in Washington. B.J. Roche, in What Works, says regionalization is paying dividends in Franklin Country. Dan Kennedy, in Mass.Media, reports on New England Ethnic News. And managing editor Robert David Sullivan tracks state spending on prisons, maps municipal spending on culture, and reveals that foreclosures are hitting multifamily homes especially hard.

It’s an exciting time at CommonWealth. Our recent Education issue is garnering rave reviews, and The Boston Foundation recently gave us a grant to pursue investigative reporting. Our success depends on your ideas and support. Let me know what you think of this issue and, as always, send me your thoughts and ideas at bmohl@massinc.org.

Thanks,

Bruce Mohl
Editor

Is Boston mostly white again?

Ever since the 2000 Census showed that Boston's non-Hispanic whites had dipped ever-so-slightly below 50 percent of the total population, there was been a lot of talk about the symbolism of being a "majority minority city" and what that means for politics and the business community. But the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that demographic trends are reversing:

In [many large] cities, whites are still leaving, but more blacks are moving out. Boston lost about 6,000 black residents between 2000 and 2006, but only about 3,000 whites. In 2006, whites accounted for 50.2% of the city's population, up from 49.5% in 2000. That's the first increase in roughly a century.

Conor Dougherty writes that "white flight" in such cities as Atlanta and Washington, DC, may have come to an end, and there may now be a "black flight" to the suburbs.

The details on police details on the Cape

The Cape Cod Times pulls public records to determine exactly how much Barnstable County towns are paying for police details at road construction sites. According to reporter George Brennan:

While more than 75 percent of those bills were paid by private companies and utilities, Cape towns shelled out at least $400,000 to their local officers for town projects like roadwork, records indicate.

The police chief for the town of Barnstable, Paul McDonald, defends the practice of paying off-duty officers to direct cars around traffic cones:

"We can double the size of the force on the streets with police details," he said. Those officers are trained as first responders and can react quickly in an emergency, he said.

"Several years ago," a police officer on a detail rescued a child being bitten by a dog, Brennan notes as an example. But the state's best-known tax watchdog still isn't convinced:

"Police details are the poster child for public outrage and correctly so," said Barbara Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation and a longtime critic of details. "People are losing respect every time they pass a police officer doing a detail."

Starbucks still high on Boston

Governing.com's Josh Goodman looks at the geographical distribution of doomed Starbucks stores. Turns out the Nevada, North Dakota, and Minnesota will suffer the greatest, proportionally, from the impending 600-store shutdown.

Surprisingly, Massachusetts will lose only six outlets (so far), and none are in Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, or Somerville, even though there are 19 of them within walking distance of my office near Government Center. (See store locator.) The Bay State closings are in Burlington, Dartmouth, North Attleborough, Sharon, Stoughton, and Worcester.

Most other larger cities, including Manhattan, Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco are losing at least one of the cafes. Are we standing grande in Starbucks' eyes because Boston's economy is relatively strong, or because we're especially caffeine-addicted? Or is the Seattle-based company simply determined not to give Canton, Mass.-based Dunkin' Donuts the satisfaction of closing stores in New England?

Is school desegregration still a priority -- or even a possibility?

In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon looks at a possible shift away from racial integration in public schools and toward attempts at race-neutral, socioeconomic diversity. But there's a problem with either approach:

Simple demographics dictate that [most large cities] hey can’t really integrate their schools at all, by either race or class. Consider the numbers for Detroit (74 percent low-income students; 91 percent black), Los Angeles (77 percent low-income; 85 percent black and Hispanic), New York City (74 percent; 63 percent), Washington (64 percent; 93 percent), Philadelphia (71 percent; 79 percent), Chicago (74 percent; 88 percent) and Boston (71 percent; 76 percent). In theory, big cities can diversify their schools by class and race by persuading many more middle-class and white parents to choose public school over private school or by combining forces with the well-heeled suburbs that surround them. But short of those developments, big cities are stuck. “The options have shrunk,” says Tom Payzant, a former superintendent of schools in Boston.

CommonWealth staff writer Gabrielle Gurley looked at the same issues from a Massachusetts perspective in "A Question of Equity," in our Winter 2008 edition.

You kids get off my lawn and stay out of my wallet!

The Arizona Republic has a column on retirement communities in Arizona and Florida that have adopted an "not my responsibility" attitude toward future generations. Andrew Blechman, author of Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias, writes:

After defeating 17 school-bond measures in 12 years, de-annexing from the local school system, and all the energy spent evicting "contraband children," Sun Citians can likely forget relying on the goodwill of their neighbors who often share a reciprocal bounty of distrust, anger and apathy. Shown in this light, Sun City's claim to fame - community service - rings rather hollow.

Life in the Villages is similarly premised: Seniors have taken control of their county's political machinery and have already begun closing parks for young families who live outside the gated community. As one Villager proudly told me without a trace of irony, "In the Villages we spend our tax dollars on ourselves."

Massachusetts has seen a bunch of age-restricted housing complex come online in recent years, but at least it's not so easy to secede politically from governments that feel obligated to provide parks and education.

Young Bay Staters like their employers but aren't so keen on government

MassINC's groundbreaking report Great Expectations: A Survey of Young Adults in Massachusetts reveals that the under-40 set in the Bay State are optimistic about their economic futures (80 percent think their incomes will rise during the next five years) and happy with their jobs (87 percent are satisfied with their employers) but aren't so sanguine about state and local government (62 percent are "not too confident" or "not at all confident" about its effectiveness). The survey also reveals that 22 percent of adults between 25 and 40 expect to move out of Massachusetts during the next five years -- not good news for the state's economy.

Get the full report here, or check out the coverage in the Boston Globe ("Most young Bay Staters say future's bright") and the MetroWest Daily News ("Study: 25- to 39-year-olds optimistic, but not about government"). You can also hear an interview with MassINC Research Director Dana Ansel on WBUR.

Third-party strongholds

Here's a quickie map for third-party enthusiasts, especially those who hope that Libertarian Party nominee and former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr will cause a lot of mischief in the South. The South, in fact, has shown the least enthusiasm for third-party candidacies over the past three decades, perhaps in part because so many major-party nominees have come from the region.

From 1936 through 1972, most "spoilers" were cultural conservatives such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, but since then liberals and libertarians have dominated the third-party vote -- most notably John Anderson, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, and the various Libertarian nominees who have approached 1 percent of the vote. (Perot wasn't a total liberal or libertarian, but he indicated little interest in "family values" issues.) That there isn't a significant social or religious conservative running outside the two major parties this year -- even with John McCain as the GOP nominee -- suggests that the South will continue to be at the low end of the "other" vote.

Note: Broomfield County, Colorado, and La Paz County, Arizona, are not colored on the map because they did not yet exist in 1976.

Lots of ink on New Bedford newcomers

With U.S. newspapers on the ropes and even big-city dailies trimming back coverage in all sorts of areas, The Standard-Times of New Bedford deserves a shout-out for its exhaustive recent series on new immigrants to the South Coast city.  The paper ran multiple stories each day over the course of its four-day series, The New Immigrants.  And the website version went fully multimedia with narrated slide shows and video clips from Guatemala, where the paper sent a reporter and photographer.  That kind of investment in telling a major story with depth and nuance is becoming all too rare at big metropolitan dailies, never mind smaller-market papers like the Standard-Times.  Kudos to the paper's higher-ups for being willing to spend the dough and to the staff for their work on the series.

Jackson vs. Obama

Yesterday's Boston Globe has a piece by Joseph Williams on the ambivalence of older African-American political leaders (i.e., Jesse Jackson) toward Barack Obama's presidential campaign. I was struck by this passage:

"We don't need Jesse Jackson to be divisive," said Jerome Jenkins, 44, sipping a glass of wine at a downtown Washington cigar bar. "It's Barack's time. If the man's going to be president, let him be president."

By making the debate public, Jenkins said, Jackson feeds white-held stereotypes: "They'll say, 'Look at the blacks -- they still can't get together,' " he said.

Actually, I think that the white-held stereotype is that blacks stick together, and the dispute between Obama and Jackson helps to break that stereotype.