Alternative economic strategies

Ran across this blog with some good analysis of Austin's economic situation. In particular is a realistic look at the proposed property tax cut that puts more burden on renters in lower income brackets to give wealthy a 5% tax cut. 

https://keepaustinwonky.wordpress.com/

Leaving the [Salamander's] Cave

In the page tabs above, I posted a piece called Leaving the [Salamander's] Cave about the SOS ordinance through the lens of David Demeritt's What is ‘Social Construction of Nature' and Arne Naess's The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements: A Summary. It is about the change of Austin's ecological movement from shallow to deep, and what this may say about our relationship to the environment.

 

Thin notes

Notes from: Thin, Neil. Social Progress and Sustainable Development. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2002.

1 Three pillars or triple bottom line economic, environmental, social

2 why is it necessary to remind ourselves that people are involved in development and that there are human and social dimensions? What other goals besides human well-being are there?

2 Brundtland Report 1987 published calling for sustainable development

3 'Sustainable' will be dropped when sustainability has truly been integral to our thinking.

3 1940s-1970s world leaders enamored with idea of endless progress through centralized planning, technology transfer, and economic growth and ignored messiness of social relations and cultural diversity. When people were left out, it was a technological necessity or rational decision in national interest or economic growth

4 generally agreed to today that human dimension of development important

7 Social change needs to be pursued or observed and analyzed both for its intrinsic value and for its instrumental importance:

9 BITE 

• Biophysical (natural and cultivated/manufactured goods and processes, human health and disease
• Institutional (formal and informal, social, political, educational, legal and financial
• Technical (broadly conceived to include material and non-material tools, techniques and knowledge)
• Ethical (the philosophical and attitudinal influences on policy and behavior)

BITe mostly about social sustainability mostly ethical and institutional

10 Social transformation makes us continually reach out towards new goals - being adaptive and aspirational.

Four themes in social development in desirable process that is socially meaningful

• social justice (equal opportunity towards achieving all human rights)
• solidarity (empathy, cooperation, understanding, associational life)
• participation (opportunities for everyone to play a menaingful part in development)
• security (livelihood and safety from physical threats)

13 four core elements of sustainable development objectives

• progress: improving the quality of life (multidimensional, and better than a basic minimum)
• Justice (universal human rights and equity)
• Durability (laasting progress)
• Stability/resilience (being adaptive and avoiding excessive fluctuations, quick recovery)

Principle 1 of Rio Declaration: Human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable development - in conflict with deep ecology movement

14 shortlist of important associated principles

• Ecological holism
• Future orientation
• Social responsibility and colective action
• Aspiration
• Adaptibility

17 Concepts of social:

1. fRelational processes like empowerment, participation, communication, organization, possibly education
2. Public as opposed to private provisioning - education and health, basic needs provisioning and unemployment get called social sector
3. social pathology - when things go wrong they must be social when often they are economic

Residual things that governance and economists overlook

Should relink social with society

22 What is society? 

23 poverty still seen as a social issue and not an economic issue

29 confusing individual and social development. UN confused pseudo-science of economics and scientism of biophysical disciplines. These planning paradigms focused on numbers and abstractions and scientific over-emphasized things. 

Policy brief

The low and middle income creative community in Austin is in danger of being pushed out of the creative center of Texas as Austin moves from a sleepy, weird college town to a cool metropolitan international city. Because of increasing property values and tax rates, the core of weird that makes Austin such a desirable place to live can not afford to remain in the traditional inner-city communities in central and near south Austin. Specifically, the 78704 zip code (the popular bumper sticker reads, “78704: It’s Not Just a Zip Code, but a State of Mind”) is under tremendous pressure because of its unique architecture, close proximity to downtown and Zilker Park, and large population of musicians, artists, and writers that formed in the 1950s.

An indication of the situation can be seen in the rise of median incomes in the 78704 zip code located just south of downtown, east of MoPac (Loop 1) and West of IH 35. According to the 2000 US Census, the median income levels for 78704 were between $60,000 and $70,000. In 2010, those same areas had median incomes upwards of $150,000.

What were the conditions that attracted creative individuals and formed communities of cultural producers in the 1950s in austin, and how can this inform the cultivation of further culture production? Is there a process that can support an inclusion of lower income individuals in the traditionally weird neighborhoods of Austin?

The City of Austin is currently recreating its development code to encourage a vital and sustainable urban environment through a process called CodeNEXT. Can a scaffolding of policies be created in a parallel process (WeirdNEXT) to maintain the cultural vibrancy that makes Austin such an attractive city? Are there ways to maintain affordable housing for creative individuals in the urban core, where the critical mass of artistic activity occurs? Do creatives need to find alternative places to go if Austin can no longer support them? Is it time to recreate Austin in another location and leave the city to the consumers of culture who drove out the weird they sought to consume?

Gentrification in Portland, OR

Map of vulnerability from Gentrification and Displacement Study: implementing an equitable inclusive development strategy in the context of gentrification

Dr Lisa Bates performed a study on how to assess vulnerability of different neighborhoods to increased gentrification pressure in Portland, OR for the Planning and Sustainability Bureau. It includes risk assessment of particular neighborhoods and a policy strategy with recommendations for market-based approach that includes:

• An inclusive development paradigm with a racial/ethnic equity lens.
• A recognition of how public investments affect the private market.
• Ways to anticipate housing demand and market changes.
• Options for utilizing the public sector to regulate and engage a range of private development and community actors to minimize the effects.

She also states a series of strategic questions for Portland:

1. Which changing neighborhoods should be addressed first and/or with the most resources?
2. Could an anti-displacement goal mean an entirely different set of priorities for the City?
3. Which policy tools or activities should be implemented, and how should they be prioritized?
4. How does gentrification policy fit into the broader set of goals, policies and identified needs for Portland’s neighborhoods?

So what: 

This provides a useful format for looking at the issues of gentrification in a city of similar mindset to Austin. Bates' study includes the following sections:

1. Scope : gentrification and housing
2. Defining gentrification
3. A new approach to the housing market
4. Neighborhood typology of gentrification and displacement
5. Policy program for inclusive, equitable development
6. Strategic policy questions

Appendices:
A. Housing Market Typology: Detailed methods and maps
B. Neighborhood Drilldown Analysis: data and variables
C. Cully drilldown analysis example
D. Annotated toolkit of best practices 

My interest is more specific to the bohemian cultural demographic subset in low to medium income brackets as there may be solutions based on that particular sub group of displaced individuals. I may have to carve out a definition of my own for cultural gentrification. Bates' study focuses on housing, which I believe to be of utmost relevance, too. While her only mention of tax has to do with low-income housing tax credits, I am interested in a more progressive solution to property tax pressures on residents in existing neighborhoods that are forcing long-term citizens out of the urban core.

Becoming Places

From the back cover:

Becoming Places is about the practices and politics of place and identity formation – the slippery ways in which who we are becomes wrapped up with where we are – this book exposes the relations of place to power. It links everyday aspects of place experience to the social theories of Deleuze and Bourdieu in a very readable manner. This is a book that takes the social critique of built form another step through detailed fieldwork and analysis in particular case studies.

Dovey uses an old friend of mine, Deleuze to construct the idea of the assemblage of place. Assemblage operates at both a micro and macro level independent of scale as does place. Assemblage corresponds to Bordieu's notion of the field and Latour's actor-network-theory where all describe a gathering of many different influences to create a sense of a space. In all of these, too, is the notion that these senses of space are continually in a state of change or a becoming of place that is counter to the Heideggerian notions of being. Rajchman in his book Constructions believes that the Heideggarian notion of a spatial rooted ontology is a source of false naturalism and constraint on the freedom of being human.

Once we give up the belief that our life-world is rooted in the ground, we may thus come to a point where ungroundedness is no longer experienced as existential anxiety and despair but as freedom and lightness that finally allows us to move.

Dovey also explores sense. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze constructs an idea of sense through analysis of Lewis Carroll's work that explores not the every day 'common sense' and 'good sense', but rather the logic of sense that is infused with paradox. Sense is not something that resides in things or spaces, but rather it is "an event that connects the material and expressive poles of the assemblage" (Dovey 2010: 25). Any quest to 'make sense' of the world results in paradox as does Alice's trip through Wonderland. If we try to extract the sense form the assemblage, we neutralize it and are left with the smile without the cat. (Deleuze 1990: 32).

From all of this arises the idea of intensity that is most strongly linked to the sense and affect of place (Dovey 2010: 26).

Intensities are directly desired effects or qualities rather than meanings, however, desires become overcoded as everyday experiences are reduced to signified identities as in a tourist brochure. This is what we mean when we say a place has become 'trendy' or commodofied - the sense of place is seen to become clichéd, a prepackaged meaning for consumption (Dovey 2010: 26).

Dovey also examines place-as-assemblage as a coherent multiplicity of parts, a hotch-potch with no pre-existing whole through Deleuze|Guatarri and Henri Bergson's notions of multiplicity as either extensive or intensive. Extensive multipilicities' constituent parts are defined by their spatial extension and are unaffected by new additions as jelly beans retain individual flavors as more are added to the jar. Intensive multiplicity is like soup that is changed by each new ingredient. A city is an intensive multiplicty. When each new person, building or neighborhood is added, the sense of the larger place changes (Dovey 2010: 27).

So what:
This is what is happening in Austin: the feeling that the sense of place is turning into a commodity. The influx of cool seekers are the buyers, and the extant citizens of Austin are the unwilling sellers of weird. Each additional person who moves to Austin to consume the commodified weird changes the place from a space of weird creation to one of cool consumption. What happens when all of the weird is gone? Is it merely replaced by production of cool and the next migrants come for cool? I believe this is already happening. What should the strategy be to productively deal with this?

The intensity of the creation of weird is falling even as it is diluted and displaced by consumers of it. Is there a way to maintain the sense of place that is so attractive? Can this influx of consumers be used as a positive factor to create a WeirdNext that actually makes Austin more of what it is versus less?

Just started reading

A book by Joshua Long derived from his work as a student at UT. Good background and groundwork for the definition of Austin weird and clues to the conditions that foster it.