GRAND RAPIDS -- Now that a high-tech life sciences corridor is booming on this city's east side, its leaders are turning their attention back to the arts, which are already transforming a once seedy thoroughfare on the city’s south side into the new Avenue of the Arts. >Link
By Betty Joyce NashAs the boundaries between urban and rural areas blur, the economic benefits of living trees are coming into sharper focus. “Urban dwellers have different values towards nature,” says Ed Macie, a regional urban forester for the USDA Forest Service’s Southern Region. “Timbering might become less acceptable and air and water quality might become more important.” >Link
From Business Week:
Hispanics are an immigrant group like no other. Their huge numbers are challenging old assumptions about assimilation. Is America ready?
Maria Velazquez was born in a dingy hospital on the U.S.-Mexican border and has been straddling the two nations ever since. The 36-year-old daughter of a bracero, a Mexican migrant who tended California strawberry and lettuce fields in the 1960s, she spent her first nine years like a nomad, crossing the border with her family each summer to follow her father to work. Then her parents and their six children settled down in a Chicago barrio, where Maria learned English in the local public school and met Carlos Velazquez, who had immigrated from Mexico as a teenager. The two married in 1984, when Maria was 17, and relocated to nearby Cicero, Ill. Her parents returned to their homeland the next year with five younger kids.
The Velazquezes speak fluent English and cherish their middle-class foothold in America. Maria and Carlos each earn about $20,000 a year as a school administrator and a graveyard foreman, respectively, and they own a simple three-bedroom home. But they remain wedded to their native language and culture. Spanish is the language at home, even for their five boys, ages 6 to 18. The kids speak to each other and their friends in English flecked with "dude" and "man," but in Cicero, where 77% of the 86,000 residents are Hispanic, Spanish dominates.
The older boys snack at local taquerías when they don't eat at home, where Maria's cooking runs to dishes like chicken mole and enchiladas. The family reads and watches TV in Spanish and English. The eldest, Jesse, is a freshman at nearby Morton College and dreams of becoming a state trooper; his girlfriend is also Mexican-American. "It's important that they know where they're from, that they're connected to their roots," says Maria, who bounced between Spanish and English while speaking to BusinessWeek. She tries to take the kids to visit her parents in the tiny Mexican town of Valle de Guadalupe at least once a year. "It gives them a good base to start from."
The Velazquezes, with their mixed cultural loyalties, are at the center of America's new demographic bulge. Baby boomers, move over -- the bebé boomers are coming. They are 39 million strong, including some 8 million illegal immigrants -- bilingual, bicultural, mostly younger Hispanics who will drive growth in the U.S. population and workforce as far out as statisticians can project (charts). Coming from across Latin America, but predominantly Mexico, and with high birth rates, these immigrants are creating what experts are calling a "tamale in the snake," a huge cohort of kindergarten to thirtysomething Hispanics created by the sheer velocity of their population growth -- 3% a year, vs. 0.8% for everyone else.
It's not just that Latinos, as many prefer to be called, officially passed African Americans last year to become the nation's largest minority. Their numbers are so great that, like the postwar baby boomers before them, the Latino Generation is becoming a driving force in the economy, politics, and culture.
Cultural Clout
It amounts to no less than a shift in the nation's center of gravity. Hispanics made up half of all new workers in the past decade, a trend that will lift them from roughly 12% of the workforce today to nearly 25% two generations from now. Despite low family incomes, which at $33,000 a year lag the national average of $42,000, Hispanics' soaring buying power increasingly influences the food Americans eat, the clothes they buy, and the cars they drive. Companies are scrambling to revamp products and marketing to reach the fastest-growing consumer group. Latino flavors are seeping into mainstream culture, too. With Hispanic youth a majority of the under-18 set, or close to it, in cities such as Los Angeles, Miami, and San Antonio, what's hip there is spreading into suburbia, much the way rap exploded out of black neighborhoods in the late 1980s.
Hispanic political clout is growing, too. In a Presidential race that's likely to be as tight as the last one, they could be a must-win swing bloc. Indeed, the increase in voting-age Hispanics since 2000 now outstrips the margin of victory in seven states for either President George W. Bush or former Vice-President Albert Gore, according to a new study by HispanTelligence, a Santa Barbara (Calif.) research group. Bush opened the election year with a guest-worker proposal for immigrants that pundits took as a play for the Latino vote. He will follow up by rekindling his relationship with Mexican President Vicente Fox, who's due to visit Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on Mar. 5. Democrats, traditionally the dominant party among Hispanics, are stepping up their outreach, too. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a Mexican-American and potential Vice-Presidential candidate, delivered a first-ever Spanish-language version of the Democrat's rebuttal to the State of the Union address.
The U.S. has never faced demographic change quite like this before. Certainly, the Latino boom brings a welcome charge to the economy at a time when others' population growth has slowed to a crawl. Without a steady supply of new workers and consumers, a graying U.S. might see a long-term slowdown along the lines of aging Japan, says former Housing and Urban Development chief Henry Cisneros, who now builds homes in Hispanic-rich markets such as San Antonio. "Here we have this younger, hard-working Latino population whose best working years are still ahead," he says.
Already, Latinos are a key catalyst of economic growth. Their disposable income has jumped 29% since 2001, to $652 billion last year, double the pace of the rest of the population, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia. Similarly, the ranks of Latino entrepreneurs has jumped by 30% since 1998, calculates the Internal Revenue Service. "The impact of Hispanics is huge, especially since they're the fastest-growing demographic," says Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER ) Vice-President Carlos Vaquero, himself a Mexican immigrant based in Houston. Vaquero oversees part of the company's 350-person Hispanic unit, which is hiring 100 mostly bilingual financial advisers this year and which generated $1 billion worth of new business nationwide last year, double its goal.
Yet the rise of a minority group this distinct requires major adjustments, as well. Already, Hispanics are spurring U.S. institutions to accommodate a second linguistic group. The Labor Dept. and Social Security Administration are hiring more Spanish-language administrators to cope with the surge in Spanish speakers in the workforce. Politicians, too, increasingly reach out to Hispanics in their own language.
What's not yet clear is whether Hispanic social cohesion will be so strong as to actually challenge the idea of the American melting pot. At the extreme, ardent assimilationists worry that the spread of Spanish eventually could prompt Congress to recognize it as an official second language, much as French is in Canada today. Some even predict a Quebec-style Latino dominance in states such as Texas and California that will encourage separatism, a view expressed in a recent book called Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson, a history professor at California State University at Fresno. These views have recently been echoed by Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in a forthcoming book, Who Are We.
These critics argue that legions of poorly educated non-English speakers undermine the U.S. economy. Although the steady influx of low-skilled workers helps keep America's gardens tended and floors cleaned, those workers also exert downward pressure on wages across the lower end of the pay structure. Already, this is causing friction with African Americans, who see their jobs and pay being hit. "How are we going to compete in a global market when 50% of our fastest-growing group doesn't graduate from high school?" demands former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm, who now co-directs a public policy center at the University of Denver.
Still, many experts think it's more likely that the U.S. will find a new model, more salad bowl than melting pot, that accommodates a Latino subgroup without major upheaval. "America has to learn to live with diversity -- the change in population, in [Spanish-language] media, in immigration," says Andrew Erlich, the founder of Erlich Transcultural Consultants Inc. in North Hollywood, Calif. Hispanics aren't so much assimilating as acculturating -- acquiring a new culture while retaining their original one -- says Felipe Korzenny, a professor of Hispanic marketing at Florida State University.
It boils down to this: How much will Hispanics change America, and how much will America change them? Throughout the country's history, successive waves of immigrants eventually surrendered their native languages and cultures and melted into the middle class. It didn't always happen right away. During the great European migrations of the 1800s, Germans settled in an area stretching from Pennsylvania to Minnesota. They had their own schools, newspapers, and businesses, and spoke German, says Demetrios G. Papademetriou, co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. But in a few generations, their kids spoke only English and embraced American aspirations and habits.
Hispanics may be different, and not just because many are nonwhites. True, Maria Velazquez worries that her boys may lose their Spanish and urges them to speak it more. Even so, Hispanics today may have more choice than other immigrant groups to remain within their culture. With national TV networks such as Univision Communications Inc. (UVN ) and hundreds of mostly Spanish-speaking enclaves like Cicero, Hispanics may find it practical to remain bilingual. Today, 78% of U.S. Latinos speak Spanish, even if they also know English, according to the Census Bureau.
Back and Forth
The 21 million Mexicans among them also have something else no other immigrant group has had: They're a car ride away from their home country. Many routinely journey back and forth, allowing them to maintain ties that Europeans never could. The dual identities are reinforced by the constant influx of new Latino immigrants -- roughly 400,000 a year, the highest flow in U.S. history. The steady stream of newcomers will likely keep the foreign-born, who typically speak mostly or only Spanish, at one-third of the U.S. Hispanic population for several decades. Their presence means that "Spanish is constantly refreshed, which is one of the key contrasts with what people think of as the melting pot," says Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a Latino research group in Washington.
A slow pace of assimilation is likely to hurt Hispanics themselves the most, especially poor immigrants who show up with no English and few skills. Latinos have long lagged in U.S. schools, in part because many families remain cloistered in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. Their strong work ethic can compound the problem by propelling many young Latinos into the workforce before they finish high school. So while the Hispanic high-school-graduation rate has climbed 12 percentage points since 1980, to 57%, that's still woefully short of the 88% for non-Hispanic whites and 80% for African Americans.
Meld into the Mainstream
The failure to develop skills leaves many Hispanics trapped in low-wage service jobs that offer few avenues for advancement. Incomes may not catch up anytime soon, either, certainly not for the millions of undocumented Hispanics. Most of these, from Mexican street-corner day laborers in Los Angeles to Guatemalan poultry-plant workers in North Carolina, toil in the underbelly of the U.S. economy. Many low-wage Hispanics would fare better economically if they moved out of the barrios and assimilated into U.S. society. Most probably face less racism than African Americans, since Latinos are a diverse ethnic and linguistic group comprising every nationality from Argentinians, who have a strong European heritage, to Dominicans, with their large black population. Even so, the pull of a common language may keep many in a country apart.
Certainly immigrants often head for a place where they can get support from fellow citizens, or even former neighbors. Some 90% of immigrants from Tonatico, a small town 100 miles south of Mexico City, head for Waukegan, Ill., joining 5,000 Tonaticans already there. In Miami, of course, Cubans dominate. "Miami has Hispanic banks, Hispanic law firms, Hispanic hospitals, so you can more or less conduct your entire life in Spanish here," says Leopoldo E. Guzman, 57. He came to the U.S. from Cuba at 15 and turned a Columbia University degree into a job at Lazard Frères & Co. before founding investment bank Guzman & Co.
Or take the Velazquezes' home of Cicero, a gritty factory town that once claimed fame as Al Capone's headquarters. Originally populated mostly by Czechs, Poles, and Slovaks, the Chicago suburb started decaying in the 1970s as factories closed and residents fled in search of jobs. Then a wave of young Mexican immigrants drove the population to its current Hispanic dominance, up from 1% in 1970. Today, the town president, equivalent to a mayor, is a Mexican immigrant, Ramiro Gonzalez, and Hispanics have replaced whites in the surviving factories and local schools. It's still possible that Cicero's Latino children will follow the path of so many other immigrants and move out into non-Hispanic neighborhoods. If they do, they, or at least their children, will likely all but abandon Spanish, gradually marry non-Hispanics, and meld into the mainstream.
But many researchers and academics say that's not likely for many Hispanics. In fact, a study of assimilation and other factors shows that while the number of Hispanics who prefer to speak mostly Spanish has dipped in recent years as the children of immigrants grow up with English, there has been no increase in those who prefer only English. Instead, the HispanTelligence study found that the group speaking both languages has climbed six percentage points since 1995, to 63%, and is likely to jump to 67% by 2010.
The trend to acculturate rather than assimilate is even more stark among Latino youth. Today, 97% of Mexican kids whose parents are immigrants and 76% of other Hispanic immigrant children know Spanish, even as nearly 90% also speak English very well, according to a decade-long study by University of California at Irvine sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut. More striking, those Latino kids keep their native language at four times the rate of Filipino, Vietnamese, or Chinese children of immigrants. "Before, immigrants tried to become Americans as soon as possible," says Sergio Bendixen, founder of Bendixen & Associates, a polling firm in Coral Gables, Fla., that specializes in Hispanics. "Now, it's the opposite."
Selling in Spanish
In its eagerness to tap the exploding Hispanic market, Corporate America itself is helping to reinforce Hispanics' bicultural preferences. Last year, Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) spent $90 million on advertising directed at Latinos for 12 products such as Crest and Tide -- 10% of its ad budget for those brands and a 28% hike in just a year. Sure, P&G has been marketing to Hispanics for decades, but spending took off after 2000, when the company set up a 65-person bilingual team to target Hispanics. Now, P&G tailors everything from detergent to toothpaste to Latino tastes. Last year, it added a third scent to Gain detergent called "white-water fresh" after finding that 57% of Hispanics like to smell their purchases. Now, Gain's sales growth is double-digit in the Hispanic market, outpacing general U.S. sales. "Hispanics are a cornerstone of our growth in North America," says Graciela Eleta, vice-president of P&G's multicultural team in Puerto Rico.
Other companies are making similar assumptions. In 2002, Cypress (Calif.)-based PacifiCare Health Systems Inc. (PHS ) hired Russell A. Bennett, a longtime Mexico City resident, to help target Hispanics. He soon found that they were already 20% of PacifiCare's 3 million policyholders. So Bennett's new unit, Latino Health Solutions, began marketing health insurance in Spanish, directing Hispanics to Spanish-speaking doctors, and translating documents into Spanish for Hispanic workers. "We knew we had to remake the entire company, linguistically and culturally, to deal with this market," says Bennett.
A few companies are even going all-Spanish. After local Hispanic merchants stole much of its business in a Houston neighborhood that became 85% Latino, Kroger Co. (KR ), the nation's No.1 grocery chain, spent $1.8 million last year to convert the 59,000-sq.-ft. store into an all-Hispanic supermercado. Now, Spanish-language signs welcome customers, and catfish and banana leaves line the aisles. Across the country, Kroger has expanded its private-label Buena Comida line from the standard rice and beans to 105 different items.
As the ranks of Spanish speakers swell, Spanish-language media are transforming from a niche market into a stand-alone industry. Ad revenues on Spanish-language TV should climb by 16% this year, more than other media segments, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. The audience of Univision, the No.1 Spanish-language media conglomerate in the U.S., has soared by 44% since 2001, and by 146% in the 18- to 34-year-old group. Many viewers have come from English-language networks, whose audiences have declined in that period.
In fact, Univision tried to reach out to assimilated Hispanics a few years ago by putting English-language programs on its cable channel Galavision. They bombed, says Univision President Ray Rodriguez, so he switched back to Spanish-only in 2002 -- and 18- to 34-year-old viewership shot up by 95% that year. "We do what the networks don't, and that's devote a lot of our show to what interests the Latino community," says Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos.
The Hispanicizing of America raises a number of political flash points. Over the years, periodic backlashes have erupted in areas with fast-growing Latino populations, notably former California Governor Pete Wilson's 1994 effort, known as Proposition 187, to ban social services to undocumented immigrants. English-only laws, which limit or prohibit schools and government agencies from using Spanish, have passed in some 18 states. Most of these efforts have been ineffective, but they're likely to continue as the Latino presence increases.
For more than 200 years, the nation has succeeded in weaving the foreign-born into the fabric of U.S. society, incorporating strands of new cultures along the way. With their huge numbers, Hispanics are adding all kinds of new influences. Cinco de Mayo has joined St. Patrick's Day as a public celebration in some neighborhoods, and burritos are everyday fare. More and more, Americans hablan Español. Will Hispanics be absorbed just as other waves of immigrants were? It's possible, but more likely they will continue to straddle two worlds, figuring out ways to remain Hispanic even as they become Americans.
By Brian Grow, with Ronald Grover, Arlene Weintraub, and Christopher Palmeri in Los Angeles, Mara Der Hovanesian in New York, Michael Eidam in Atlanta, and bureau reports
From Wall Street Journal:
by David Wessel
Some cities have grown in the past several decades. Some have shrunk. The spread of air conditioning helped sunnier spots such as Las Vegas. Waves of immigrants kept the population rising in cities such as Miami.
But why is Boston doing so much better than Philadelphia? Minneapolis better than Milwaukee? Columbus, Ohio, better than Cleveland? In Scotland, why is Edinburgh doing better than Glasgow, which has lost nearly half its population since 1960?
Blending a rich sense of history with clever number-crunching, economist Edward Glaeser finds that what's often true for people is true for cities: If you aren't born lucky or popular, be smart.
American cities outside the Sunbelt that have particularly skilled and well-educated populations prosper. "High-skill areas have been getting more populous, better-paid and more expensive," as in higher housing prices, he finds. Mr. Glaeser, 36 years old, who grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, suggests these cities do better at adapting when the economic winds shift.
Boston, across the Charles River from Mr. Glaeser's Harvard University office, well illustrates his point. "Boston's history is not a story of steady success," Mr. Glaeser wrote in a recent academic paper, "but rather a series of crises and restructurings."
Initially the largest city in the American colonies and a hub for trans-Atlantic trade, Boston stagnated in the late 1700s as New York and Philadelphia, with better ports and locations closer to the South, rose. But Boston prospered, again, in the early 1800s because it had the people who crewed, captained and owned sailing ships important to that era's maritime economy. With the advent of the steamship, which required fewer skilled workers, Boston suffered.
The city was left with one byproduct of its sailing supremacy: Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine of 1845 to 1850. (A decade later, Mr. Glaeser says, and it would have been cheaper for the Irish to take steamships to New York.) The combination of Yankee money and ingenuity and cheap Irish labor turned Boston into a successful factory town.
Yet Boston peaked about 1920, and it began losing people around 1950. Boston was cold, and warmer cities thrived. Boston was a factory town, and all factory towns suffered. The age of the automobile arrived, and downtown Boston's narrow streets were bad for driving. Boston taxes were high and regulation heavy, and business looked elsewhere. By 1980, three-quarters of Boston's houses were valued at less than the cost of building them. "There was little reason ... to suspect that Boston would be any more successful than Rochester or Pittsburgh or St. Louis over the next few years," Mr. Glaeser has written.
But Boston boomed as a center of finance and technology. Its population has been rising since about 1980. Its skilled people, both home-grown and recruited, are key. "Boston has been specializing in skills for almost 400 years," Mr. Glaeser says. Among the 200 or so U.S. cities with more than 160,000 people, only four (Boulder, Colo.; Stamford, Conn.; Madison, Wis.; and San Jose, Calif.) have a higher fraction of residents over age 25 with college degrees.
Cities with bigger educated populations have more success than others at arresting urban decay, Mr. Glaeser's number-crunching finds. Skilled, educated workers may react more quickly when the economy changes, reinventing the cities in which they live, he speculates.
One lesson is that luring and keeping smart, educated people is crucial. Access to raw materials or major transportation arteries is no longer sufficient for urban success, and tax breaks to attract companies aren't always the right recipe.
"Boston's ability to regenerate itself hinged upon its ability to attract residents, not just firms," Mr. Glaeser says.
That means maintaining city services, amenities and public schools that appeal to educated workers without raising taxes so high that the mobile go elsewhere. Federal or state governments should shoulder the burden of aiding the urban poor. Mr. Glaeser, who studied at the University of Chicago, a bastion of free markets, advocates vouchers for private school, but he'd settle for any alternative "that makes people come to your city and not have to pay $22,000 private-school tuitions."
Another lesson is to avoid excessive planning. "Get the smart folks," he says, "and let them figure out what the industries of the future are. Don't micromanage."
When the Berlin Wall fell, and Germany cut subsidies that had kept the city's factories alive, urban planners hoped to lure big-company headquarters. They failed. But because Berlin became a cool place to live, it drew hip Web-site designers, software writers, fashion designers and musicians, and they are reinventing its economy.
The dot-com bust hurt, of course. But because Berlin is increasingly where the trendy people are, Viacom's MTV and Vivendi's Universal Music Group recently moved their German headquarters to Berlin, from Munich and Hamburg, respectively, and the city recently had its first Fashion Week.
From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
By Whitney Gould
Traverse the neighborhood around the intersection of W. Fond du Lac and W. North avenues and one of the first things that strikes you in this landscape of time-worn houses, struggling businesses and beautiful old churches is the number of vacant lots. In block after block, they're like missing teeth.
What if, as part of the strategy for rejuvenating the area, some of these accidental open spaces were turned into mini-parks or community gardens?
In an area with more pressing social concerns, parkland might seem like a frill. But Henry Hamilton begs to differ. "For long-term economic development, you must have a beautiful neighborhood," says Hamilton, a community activist who co-chairs the NAACP's environmental justice committee. "Open space can enhance property values. And here, you wouldn't even have to tear down a house to get it."
The Urban Open Space Foundation agrees. The non-profit, which promotes the creation of vest-pocket parks, plazas, gardens and other forms of "green infrastructure," has joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in nudging the city to give a higher priority to open space in the comprehensive neighborhood plan under development for the Fondy/North corridor.
The partnership has numbers on its side: Statistics show that, not counting nearby Tiefenthaler and Carver parks, only 1.75% of this high-density neighborhood is in open space, compared with 10% of the land area countywide.
Mike Maierle, the city's long-range planner, notes that the neighborhood plan already includes extensive language calling for usable, accessible green space. "The last thing we want," he says, "is to be perceived as anti-open space."
But the NAACP and the foundation want more specifics spelled out in the plan, according to the foundation's executive director, Heather Mann. And Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, who handily survived Tuesday's primary election, has supported the two citizen groups.
The cause got another boost recently when the foundation won a grant of $90,000 from the U.S. Forest Service to assist the city in open-space planning for the corridor. The group still has to raise an equal amount from other sources, and it faces an even bigger challenge in getting new green spaces funded, because the city is not in the park business and the county can barely maintain the parks it has. That's one reason that former Mayor John O. Norquist was generally cool to expanding open space.
But with creative partnerships, it can be done. Possible options include tax-incremental financing, in which the increased property value from redevelopment is used to underwrite public improvements (a tool used in adding parkland to the booming Beerline redevelopment area along Commerce St.); business improvement districts, in which commercial property owners tax themselves for such amenities; private donations; and grants from foundations and corporations and government sources.
There's also talk about starting an urban version of the state's Stewardship Program, which has tended to concentrate on acquiring natural areas in the countryside.
The Fondy/North neighborhood isn't the only place where green infrastructure is taking root. There's a push to beef up open space in redevelopment of the Park East corridor. The plan for renewing the Menomonee Valley envisions extensive open space, especially along the Menomonee River. And the Historic Third Ward Association, in revising its neighborhood plan, is looking at ways to green up the area, including land swaps with developers for creating plazas near the river.
It's no easy task. "Everyone insists, 'I shouldn't have to pay for it,' " says Einar Tangen, president of the Third Ward's business improvement district.
Still, there are good arguments for finding a way to make it happen. As Tangen notes, "It's claustrophobic to be in a city surrounded by skyscrapers. Any urban neighborhood that has maintained its value will have significant green space. To not do it is to create the conditions that drove people out of the cities in the first place."
Besides adding value to neighborhoods and making cities more competitive with suburbs, open space consumes less in public services than development does. It absorbs runoff that would otherwise pollute waterways. It reduces the "urban heat island" effect by which the collective warmth of paved surfaces boosts global temperatures.
Steve McCarthy, a landscape architect active with the Urban Open Space Foundation, thinks the emerging revival of places like the Menomonee Valley, Park East corridor and the Fondy/North area makes this the perfect moment for green infrastructure to take hold here.
If we do this right, he says, "we have the potential to change the national image of Milwaukee."
I agree. And the idea is hardly revolutionary. More than a century ago, the pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted imagined ribbons of green threading their way through cities like Milwaukee, providing respite to rich and poor alike. Olmsted's emerald vision deserves renewal.
SECOND SUNDAY AT SIX
VALUES IN SOCIETY
March 14, 2004
6 PM
Unitarian Universalist Meetinghouse
5310 Old Mill Road
Speaker: John Stafford, Director of IPFW's Community Research Institute
Topic: Appointed Not Elected: The Question of Personal Bias When Influencing Public Policy
John Stafford, who has served Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana for many years in many capacities as an appointed public official and consultant working with elected public officials on long-range planning, economic development and community development, will reflect on his experience in local government and lobbying at the Statehouse. He will explore the role of an appointed public official in the formulation of public policy in local government and pose the questions, How can you provide useful information to elected officials without bringing in personal bias when it is fundamentally impossible to do so? How do you attempt to provide balanced information and yet offer something of value to keep the process moving?
Future Programs:
May 9 at 6 PM
Rusty York, Fort Wayne Chief of Police
June 13 at 6 PM
Wendy Robinson, Superintendent, Fort Wayne Community Schools
Question and answer and conversation time with the speaker will be provided.
According to the 2000 Census, there are more than 65,000 people between the ages of 20 and 34 living in the Tampa area, and a host of young professionals groups are cropping up to cater to them.Teresa Gelston wants to make something clear: Verve is not your parents' networking crowd.
Rather, it's a self-directed collective of dynamic 20- and 30-somethings committed to making the Tampa Bay area a better place to live, work and play. >Link
Tuesday, 3/9: The Triplets of Belleville 6:30; 21 Grams 8:15
Wednesday, 3/10: 21 Grams 6:15; The Triplets of Belleville 8:30
Thursday, 3/11: 21 Grams 6:15; The Triplets of Belleville 8:30
Last Shows for 21 Grams!
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The Triplets of Belleville, Red Betsy, & Duck Soup
--Coming Soon
Calendar Girls – Opens Friday, March 19th – One Week Only!
Girl with a Pearl Earring – Opens Friday, March 26th
The Fog of War – Opens Friday, April 2nd
The Company – Opens Friday, April 23rd
Monster – Late April/ Early May
Red Betsy One Week Only!
“3 Stars. This is not the country postcard of Hollywood fantasies, but just a working farm in a district where there are few enough people that every personality seems back lighted."—Roger Ebert. “Reminds us to treasure the not-so-distant past like it was a family heirloom."–Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 98 min., Rated PG.
Friday at 8:15PM, Saturday at 2PM & 6:30PM, Sunday at 2PM, Monday at 8:30, Tuesday at 8:15PM, Wednesday at 6:30PM, Thursday at 6:30PM
The Triplets of Belleville
-2 Academy Award Nominations– Best Animated Feature & Best Song
"A truly out-there piece of comic animation, the most outlandishly visual film of the year, this 80-minute French treat takes us into a world that can barely be described, a world unlike any we've seen before." – Los Angeles Times. "Comic, touching and a visual knockout." – Rolling Stone. "Impossible to describe, impossible to forget."—San Francisco Chronicle. "Most of the magic of this unusual movie comes from the freshness, imagination and sweet spirit of its animation, which is blissfully its own thing and does not show the influence of any of the reigning forces in the art form." – Seattle Post Intelligencer. 80 min., Rated PG-13.
Friday at 6:30PM, Saturday at 4:00 & 8:30PM, Sunday at 4PM, Monday at 5:15PM, Tuesday at 6:30PM, Wednesday at 8:30PM, Thursday at 8:30PM
Fort Wayne Cinema Center & the Fort Wayne Jewish Federation present:
Shtik: Jewish Humor in American Film
--Admission to this film is $4 General Admission, $2 Students, Seniors & Members
Duck Soup 7:00PM March 15, 2004
The Marx Brothers’ greatest and funniest masterpiece, “Duck Soup” skewers authoritarianism, dictators and Fascism – just as the Great Depression was strangling America and Adolph Hitler was rising to the world’s attention. A critical and commercial failure when it was released, it has since been embraced as the quintessential satire of autocracy. The mythical Balkan state of Freedonia has gone bankrupt and Mrs. Teasdale (the long-suffering Margaret Dumont) will bail it out, but only if Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) will assume the presidency. Rivals, spies and insults fly in pure Marx Brothers’ style. “Duck Soup” was the brothers’ last film for Paramount and the last film that included Zeppo Marx.
USA; 1933; 70 min.; Unrated
Red Betsy
Not since "The Straight Story" has a film done as fine a job of capturing a Midwestern sensibility as "Red Betsy." Lots of movies are set in the "Midwest," which, as far as Hollywood is concerned, means they are shot somewhere outside of Toronto where there's grass and a hill or two and it's 40 percent cheaper to shoot than the actual Midwest, even though it looks completely different. But "Red Betsy," filmed north of Milwaukee, not only captures the look of the place but it also nails the outlook: that combination of pride, reserve, hopefulness and suspicion that is common to many of us small-town Midwesterners. What they're suspicious of in the modest, winter-pretty "Red Betsy" is, oddly, electricity. But what they're really afraid of is change. It's 1941, and a number of tragedies have brought together two people who aren't fond of each other: pregnant Winifred (Alison Elliott, "Wings of the Dove") and her father-in-law, Emmet (Leo Burmester). The movie is set over a span of 10 years, during which tragedies and misunderstanding push Emmet closer to his granddaughter and away from her mother, who embraces change in a way that alarms Emmet. There's a lesson to be learned, of course, and it takes 10 years to learn it and it gets learned on Christmas Eve, which sounds corny, but "Red Betsy" isn't. There's a spareness to the storytelling and a genuineness in the acting that give the story real emotion without sentimentality. Nothing is overdone in this modest film, but the details are perfect: the forced sense of community a party line gave telephones, the affection with which a farm wife steers her husband's crabbiness toward humor, the way objects help us recall the departed. What it all adds up to is a story about how time could drive a wedge between people and about what small steps might be required to bring them back together. Rated PG. 98 min., Rated PG.
The Triplets of Belleville
"The Triplets of Belleville" is a bizarre yet beautifully composed piece of nutty whimsy. Madame Souza lives with her dour grandson, Champion, on a hill in Paris where a train always goes rattling by. Since the one thing he enjoys is bicycles, she buys him one. By the time he's an adult, Champion becomes a cycling prodigy. While competing in the Tour de France, he's kidnapped by the local mafia, which leads Grandma and their melancholic hound, Bruno, on Champion's trail. The journey takes them across the sea towards the magical city of Belleville, where Madame Souza encounters a curious trio of '30s-era musical hall sisters that lend a hand in finding Champion. Director Sylvain Chomet is a wizard at letting his jokes quietly brew to the surface. His macabre wit combines the cartoons of Gahan Wilson with some of the playful jest of Jacques Tati and the enchanted drawings of Otto Messmer and Max Fleischer. In its pure originality and off-key sense of humor, "The Triplets of Belleville" is a captivating experience. "A truly out-there piece of comic animation, the most outlandishly visual film of the year, this 80-minute French treat takes us into a world that can barely be described, a world unlike any we've seen before." – Los Angeles Times. "Comic, touching and a visual knockout." – Rolling Stone. "Impossible to describe, impossible to forget."—San Francisco Chronicle. "Most of the magic of this unusual movie comes from the freshness, imagination and sweet spirit of its animation, which is blissfully its own thing and does not show the influence of any of the reigning forces in the art form." – Seattle Post Intelligencer. 80 min., Rated PG-13.
Wednesday, 3/3: The Triplets of Belleville 6:30; 21 Grams 8:15
Thursday, 3/4: The Triplets of Belleville 7:00; 21 Grams 8:45
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Fort Wayne Cinema Center Movies for 3/5-3/11
The Triplets of Belleville, 21 Grams, To Be or Not to Be
& Sneak Preview of Red Betsy
--Coming Soon
Girl with a Pearl Earring – Opens Friday, March 26th
21 Grams
--2 Academy Award Nominations
Benicio Del Toro - Best Supporting Actor, Naomi Watts - Best Supporting Actress
--Number 4 on the National Board of Review's Top Ten Films of the Year
Friday at 6:15PM, Saturday at 4PM & 8:30PM, Sunday at 1:30PM, Tuesday at 8:15PM, Wednesday at 6:15PM, Thursday at 6:15PM
The Triplets of Belleville
-2 Academy Award Nominations– Best Animated Feature & Best Song
"A truly out-there piece of comic animation, the most outlandishly visual film of the year, this 80-minute French treat takes us into a world that can barely be described, a world unlike any we've seen before." – Los Angeles Times. "Comic, touching and a visual knockout." – Rolling Stone. "Impossible to describe, impossible to forget."—San Francisco Chronicle. "Most of the magic of this unusual movie comes from the freshness, imagination and sweet spirit of its animation, which is blissfully its own thing and does not show the influence of any of the reigning forces in the art form." – Seattle Post Intelligencer. 80 min., Rated PG-13.
Friday at 8:45PM, Saturday at 2:00 & 6:30PM, Sunday at 4PM, Monday at 5:15PM, Tuesday at 6:30PM, Wednesday at 8:30PM, Thursday at 8:30PM
Fort Wayne Cinema Center & the Fort Wayne Jewish Federation present:
Shtik: Jewish Humor in American Film
--Admission to this film is $4.00 General Admission, $2.00 Students, Seniors & Members
To Be Or Not To Be Monday, March 8 7:00PM
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, 1942’s “To Be Or Not To Be” is a masterpiece of satire and one of the most controversial films of its time. Jack Benny and Carole Lombard play vain Polish stage actors caught up in anti-Nazi spy games. The film lampoons the Nazis and the vanities of actors while raising serious issues of patriotism, loyalty and censorship. The film was also Fort Wayne native Lombard’s last -- and arguably her best – film. USA; 1942; 99 min.; Unrated
21 Grams
Like "Mystic River," "21 Grams" is a grim, compelling and exceedingly well-acted meditation on life, death, guilt and redemption, starring a superlative Sean Penn. Clint Eastwood's traditionalist masterwork dealt with three childhood friends haunted by a long-ago event; "21 Grams," directed by Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, making his English-language debut, uses a radically different style to focus on three strangers brought together by a new and terrible act of fate. Penn plays Paul, a math professor dying of coronary disease who gets a new lease on life, thanks to a heart transplant from a man (Danny Huston) who was cut down with his two young daughters in an automobile accident. Paul's nagging sense of guilt compels him to track down and - without revealing their link - try to help the man's widow, Christina (Naomi Watts), a former party girl who has resumed her cocaine habit following the tragedy. They become lovers and together decide to seek vengeance against Jordan (Benicio del Toro), a born-again ex-convict whose determination to stay straight with God's help was challenged when his truck accidentally plowed into Christina's family. In less talented hands, the screenplay by "Amores Perros" writer Guillermo Arriaga might seem like a glorified soap opera - the borrowed-heart trope is especially well-worn - but with this cast and director, you won’t want to miss a moment. That's not only because it's solid adult drama, but because Inarritu has eschewed a straight-line narrative in favor of a challenging, non-linear structure that sketches the basic story in the first few minutes, then keeps going back and forth to fill in more and more key details. Penn, del Toro and Watts create some of the year's richest, most wrenching characters, ably supported by Charlotte Gainsborough as Penn's estranged wife and Melissa Leo as del Toro’s stricken spouse. Stunningly photographed, largely with a hand-held camera, by Rodrigo Prieto (another member of the "Amores Perros" team) on gritty locations in Memphis and Albuquerque, "21 Grams” is also a visual tour de force - and a rare Hollywood product depicting class differences with any kind of honesty. The title refers to the weight - perhaps the soul - the body is said to lose at the precise moment of death. But "21 Grams" has no shortage of soul, wit or intelligence. 125 min., Rated R (violence, profanity, sex).
The Triplets of Belleville
"The Triplets of Belleville" is a bizarre yet beautifully composed piece of nutty whimsy. Madame Souza lives with her dour grandson, Champion, on a hill in Paris where a train always goes rattling by. Since the one thing he enjoys is bicycles, she buys him one. By the time he's an adult, Champion becomes a cycling prodigy. While competing in the Tour de France, he's kidnapped by the local mafia, which leads Grandma and their melancholic hound, Bruno, on Champion's trail. The journey takes them across the sea towards the magical city of Belleville, where Madame Souza encounters a curious trio of '30s-era musical hall sisters that lend a hand in finding Champion. Director Sylvain Chomet is a wizard at letting his jokes quietly brew to the surface. His macabre wit combines the cartoons of Gahan Wilson with some of the playful jest of Jacques Tati and the enchanted drawings of Otto Messmer and Max Fleischer. In its pure originality and off-key sense of humor, "The Triplets of Belleville" is a captivating experience. "A truly out-there piece of comic animation, the most outlandishly visual film of the year, this 80-minute French treat takes us into a world that can barely be described, a world unlike any we've seen before." – Los Angeles Times. "Comic, touching and a visual knockout." – Rolling Stone. "Impossible to describe, impossible to forget."—San Francisco Chronicle. "Most of the magic of this unusual movie comes from the freshness, imagination and sweet spirit of its animation, which is blissfully its own thing and does not show the influence of any of the reigning forces in the art form." – Seattle Post Intelligencer. 80 min., Rated PG-13.
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Special preview of “Red Betsy.”
Director Chris Boebel and Charles Boebel will join us for this special preview.
Sunday, March 7th reception at 6PM. Film at 7PM. Q&A with the filmmakers after the screening.
Tickets are $10.00 general admission and $8.00 for Cinema Center members.
Cinema Center members can pre-buy tickets. Tickets will be available for sale in the Cinema Center office 10:30am-12:30pm Monday through Friday or during box office hours. The box office is open a half hour before show times.
Red Betsy will open at Cinema Center on Friday, March 12th.
Set in the rolling hills and farmlands of rural Wisconsin during the 1940’s, Red Betsy stars Alison Elliott (The Spitfire Grill, The Wings of the Dove), Leo Burmester (Lone Star, The Abyss), Lois Smith (Minority Report, Fried Green Tomatoes), Chad Lowe (Unfaithful), and William Wise (In the Bedroom, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing.)
“This is not the country postcard of Hollywood fantasies, but just a working farm in a district where there are few enough people that every personality seems back lighted."—Roger Ebert.
"Reminds us to treasure the not-so-distant past like it was a family heirloom." –Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The making of “Red Betsy” was a family project for Charles and Chris Boebel. Charles Boebel was born in Wisconsin, where “Red Betsy” was filmed. He recently retired from Manchester College where he was a professor of English. His son Chris adapted his father’s story for the screen and directed the film. Chris has directed short films, the Ted the Head series of shorts for Nickelodeon, and is also the director of a documentary feature Containment: Life After Three Mile Island. Red Betsy is his feature film debut.
Red Betsy
Not since "The Straight Story" has a film done as fine a job of capturing a Midwestern sensibility as "Red Betsy." Lots of movies are set in the "Midwest," which, as far as Hollywood is concerned, means they are shot somewhere outside of Toronto where there's grass and a hill or two and it's 40 percent cheaper to shoot than the actual Midwest, even though it looks completely different. But "Red Betsy," filmed north of Milwaukee, not only captures the look of the place but it also nails the outlook: that combination of pride, reserve, hopefulness and suspicion that is common to many of us small-town Midwesterners. What they're suspicious of in the modest, winter-pretty "Red Betsy" is, oddly, electricity. But what they're really afraid of is change. It's 1941, and a number of tragedies have brought together two people who aren't fond of each other: pregnant Winifred (Alison Elliott, "Wings of the Dove") and her father-in-law, Emmet (Leo Burmester). The movie is set over a span of 10 years, during which tragedies and misunderstanding push Emmet closer to his granddaughter and away from her mother, who embraces change in a way that alarms Emmet. There's a lesson to be learned, of course, and it takes 10 years to learn it and it gets learned on Christmas Eve, which sounds corny, but "Red Betsy" isn't. There's a spareness to the storytelling and a genuineness in the acting that give the story real emotion without sentimentality. Nothing is overdone in this modest film, but the details are perfect: the forced sense of community a party line gave telephones, the affection with which a farm wife steers her husband's crabbiness toward humor, the way objects help us recall the departed. What it all adds up to is a story about how time could drive a wedge between people and about what small steps might be required to bring them back together. 98 min., Rated PG.
Richard Florida has built a thriving career on the theory that the "creative class" drives urban economic growth. But critics increasingly say his ideas just don't add up. Link
By Christopher Shea, 2/29/2004
THE ECONOMY MAY have been flat for the last two years, but Richard Florida is soaring. The Carnegie Mellon business professor's 2002 book "The Rise of the Creative Class" connected with something in the public psyche. It heralded the arrival of a new breed of American worker: educated, ambitious, hip, probably a mountain biker, ready to dump a job whenever hit with the slightest urge for a "life shift." These workers differ from the old Organization Man in many ways, but this difference is crucial: Creative-class members want not just decent jobs and good schools but "authentic" neighborhoods, Thai food, a happening arts scene, and -- most importantly -- proximity to other "creatives."
Florida's jaunty New Economy tome, a bestseller, set in motion his thriving career as an urban-development guru. Even in the post-boom era, civic leaders are seizing on the argument that they need to compete not with plain old tax breaks and redevelopment schemes, but on the playing fields of what Florida calls "the three T's: Technology, Talent, Tolerance."
The mayor of Denver announced last fall that he'd bought copies of "The Rise of the Creative Class" for his staff and, inspired by his reading, engaged an $80,000-a-year public-relations expert to "rebrand" the city as a more creative metropolis. After perusing the book, Michigan governor Jennifer M. Granholm put on a pair of sunglasses and boasted that, thanks to Florida's ideas, Detroit,Dearborn, and Grand Rapids would soon be "so cool you'll have to wear shades." She has asked the mayors of 250 Michigan cities and towns to form "Cool Cities" advisory boards to brainstorm about hipsterization strategies. Additionally, Michigan is spreading seed money to startups in the life sciences, high-tech automotives, and homeland security.
Florida consults with Granholm free of charge, but he gives about 50 paid speeches a year and also owns a consulting company, Catalytix, that has helped Providence, R.I., measure its "brain drain" and is now assisting upstate New York with a revitalization plan. (Some suggestions: Promote outdoor sports, create "support mechanisms" for artists, and have local families "adopt college students" so they'll stay in the area after graduation.) Last spring, he appeared with leaders of Massachusetts arts groups at a two-day conference in Framingham aimed at making the case for increased state arts funding as an engine of economic growth. Last month, he met with Hillary Clinton's staff to discuss the upstate New York plan.
Now, just as the paperback of "The Rise of the Creative Class" is appearing in bookstores, Florida is internationalizing his argument. In the current Washington Monthly, he argues that places like Brussels, Sydney, Wellington (think "Lord of the Rings"), and Dublin are giving American creative-tech centers a run for their money by hustling for mobile intellectual talent. Meanwhile, he writes, the Bush administration threatens to touch off a "creative class war" with innovation-busting policies like the ban on stem-cell research and increased scrutiny of foreign graduate students.
At the same time, an anti-Florida tsunami is gaining momentum. A growing number of urban-policy commentators question his advice that mayors concentrate on luring "singles, young people, homosexuals, sophistos, and trendoids," as Joel Kotkin, a journalist and professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, put it in the magazine American Enterprise last summer.
Florida is taking political hits from the right and the left -- and battling back on his lavish website, CreativeClass.org. "There is just one problem: The basic economics behind [Florida's] ideas don't work," writes Steven Malanga in the Winter 2004 issue of the conservative City Journal. And in the latest issue of the waggish leftist journal the Baffler, based in Chicago, writer Paul Maliszewski calls Florida's city-revitalization theory "so wrong and backward that it reads like satire." Florida has "mistaken the side effects of a booming economy," he writes, "for the causes of growth." After all, "Potemkin bohemias" are not going to get old steel cities humming again.
. . .
Pepperdine's Joel Kotkin, who runs his own consulting business, says he first had his doubts about Florida's work when he read a Florida paper yoking together the Bay Area's gay-friendliness with its success as a tech incubator. "I started to think, `San Jose is 40 miles from San Francisco and those are really different worlds,"' he says.
Then Kotkin was startled when the leaders of gray Midwestern cities began to ask him for advice on how to lure 25-year-old gay college graduates to their regions. "I'd say, `What do you mean? You don't have a snowball's chance in hell.' " Furthermore, Kotkin dismisses Florida's idea of a 38-million-strong "creative class" -- some 30 percent of the US working population -- that lumps together everyone from ballerinas to software coders to accountants. "I don't see how they are more creative than bricklayers," he says.
In publications ranging from Metropolis to Blueprint, the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council, Kotkin has been arguing that right now workers and businesses -- including tech firms -- are more interested in affordable housing and labor costs than they are in the availability of lattes. Besides, he argues, tech people actually *like the suburbs.
Kotkin also takes issue with Florida's metrics. According to Florida, for example, San Francisco (#2), Boston (#4), and Portland (#6) are all among America's most creative cities -- past and future powerhouses. But in the current issue of Inc. Magazine, Kotkin presents a list of the "10 Worst Metro Areas" in which to do business, which uses a more blunt measure: job creation in 2003. Boston, New York, and San Francisco, in this view, are the "lost bubble children of the 1990s": pricey and overreliant on tech.
The top big-city job creators last year, meanwhile, were Atlanta, Riverside-San Bernardino, Las Vegas, San Antonio, and West Palm Beach -- none of which are superstars according to Florida. Kotkin is especially hot on Riverside-San Bernardino, California's "Inland Empire" -- a hipster urbanite's idea of sprawling hell on earth, but one which has attracted some 660,000 new residents since 1990.
In his City Journal article, Stephen Malanga adds some fresh attacks on Florida's statistics. Florida's list is self-contradictory, he argues: The Top 10 creative large cities increased their jobs base by 17 percent over the past decade, while his 10 worst (a roster of shame that includes Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Memphis) grew by 19 percent. The best remedies for downcast cities, Malanga argues, are the good old conservative ones: Cut taxes and slash onerous regulations.
. . .
But Florida sticks to his guns in the face of these critiques, arguing that his ideas sit squarely in the economic mainstream. He points to a long line of respectable research -- by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas and the Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, among others--citing the rising importance of "human capital" as America de-industrializes. Some cities may bind businesses in excessive red tape, but in the end American cities can't compete -- among themselves, or worldwide -- on cost alone. "Why does New York have to play the same role in the world economy as Bangalore, or Oklahoma City?" he asks.
As for Kotkin's alternate list of hot spots, Florida says: "I will take any day Boston and San Francisco and New York over Las Vegas and Des Moines and the rest of Joel's cities." The latter group, he points out, just end up manufacturing and distributing what the more "creative" cities have invented.
Can hard numbers resolve this debate? According to Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, there are grains of truth -- and great dollops of hype -- in both Florida's and Kotkin's views. Florida is onto something -- but only in the industrial Midwest and East, where "skills are close to destiny," he thinks. (He defines skills largely as a college degree, without all the extras Florida adds.) College-educated workers, he points out, helped Boston reinvent itself after factories were shuttered.
But nationally, Glaeser believes other factors are driving growth: People want to live in sunny, dry climates and -- to the horror of smart-growth advocates everywhere -- they actually like car-centered cities. In place of Florida's "Technology, Talent, Tolerance," Glaeser proposes a different recipe: "Skills, Sun, Sprawl."
. . .
The most biting attack on Florida comes, ironically, on class grounds. When Pittsburgh razes an old factory, the Baffler's Paul Maliszewski charges, Richard Florida gets teary over the loss of future loft apartments, while the steelworkers who've lost their jobs over the last quarter-century are acknowledged "only in passing and as statistics." In Florida's new utopia, the working class exists only to "serve the creatives, cleaning up their mess." In a C-SPAN exchange acidly described by Maliszewski, entrepreneurs with "idle minds and comfortable bodies" whine to Florida that unions and taxes are hampering their deep creative visions.
Florida, who has posted a lengthy rebuttal to the Baffler on his website, calls this attack "really weird." He says he is constantly telling city fathers that they need to harness the creative power of all their citizens, rich and poor. "What we have to do is open up membership in the creative class to a much greater group of people," he says, until it eventually includes "everyone."
So schools need to get better, for starters. Admittedly, that's not quite as catchy as the soundbites Florida was generating two years ago, but at least it's one even squares can get behind.