Tribute in Light 2009, originally uploaded by mr.seymour

Today…, originally uploaded by plemeljr

Skylight, originally uploaded by plemeljr

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5137183&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
Keith Loutit uses a tilt-shift lens and a Nikon D3 body to create his Little Sydney project.
Amazing.

The CBO scored the 3-committee House health care plan: $1 trillion over the next decade for 97 percent coverage of legal residents.
This is a bargain.
Only costing $100 billion every year to cover every legal American citizen is truly a bargain. No more wondering if this hospital covers my insurance – under this plan, every hospital will accept USA Insurance. No more wondering if my new insurance plan allows me to use my current doctor – under this plan, you get to keep your doctor.
Where do we get the money to pay for this? Through our premiums and restoring the upper tax brackets for those making over $300,000 so they can pay their fair share.

• Taxing the Rich: The (Politically) Smart Way to Pay for Health Care
• Designing spaces to manipulate people’s moods
• Freeway Air Pollution Is So Much Worse Than You Thought
• Stalled Condos Will Become Affordable Housing in City Plan
• Roundabouts vs Traffic Circles
• A Push to Make a Con Ed Steam Plant a Landmark
• We’ve fucked the only planet we can live on: Positive Feedback in the Amazon & Sea-Level Rises: Worse Than We Thought
• Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris, 2009
• California HSR project could still be derailed by NIBMY resistance (F-U)
• David Sucher sure doesn’t like Frank Gehry, which I can agree with, but David’s reductionist stances often fail to impress me
• Augmented reality iPhone London tube station finder – the future is now
• Newspaper Club

I approve of this: City Launching Plan to Turn Unfinished Condos Into Subsidized Housing:

The city is launching a $20 million initiative to restart stalled condo projects, turning some of the unfinished developments into below-market-rate housing. Details are still hazy, but Council Speaker Christine Quinn and the commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Rafael Cestero, said Wednesday that the city would solicit proposals from developers and lenders by the end of July.
The target is 400 units, meaning that the average subsidy of the apartments—which are designed to be for moderate- and middle-income families—would be about $50,000, well below the typical level usually doled out for new subsidized housing construction in the city.
Scores of condo sites in the city have stalled amid the economic crisis, and the concept in the plan is to find a way to offer enough incentive to restart them. The developer would commit to leaving a number of its units as affordable for moderate- and middle-income families; in return, the developer gets the subsidy and is also promised a buyer or a rent stream (unlike luxury condos, there is still demand for subsidized housing).

This is excellent, with the caveat that developers (who we all love to hate) will be getting more or less a bailout.
However, this is minor (and we need to grit our teeth) to the status quo: empty holes or half-finished buildings dotting the landscape and the construction industry left idle costing jobs. Creating moderate- and middle income housing, a socially just way to keep the middle class in New York City, is also a handy way to stimulate the local economy. I would also suggest that the city should underwrite the loans to the moderate- and middle-income families as well who will populate these condos.
Attacking the supply issue (not enough homes for the middle class), creating a stimulative system is perfect for satisfying the demand of housing in New York City.

Manhattan Bridge, originally uploaded by plemeljr

John Adams was right, “Thomas Jefferson survives, and is winning: Cities Lose Out on Road Funds From Federal Stimulus:

Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, home to the nation’s worst traffic jams and some of its oldest roads and bridges. But cities and their surrounding regions are getting far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money.
According to an analysis by The New York Times of 5,274 transportation projects approved so far — the most complete look yet at how states plan to spend their stimulus money — the 100 largest metropolitan areas are getting less than half the money from the biggest pot of transportation stimulus money. In many cases, they have lost a tug of war with state lawmakers that urban advocates say could hurt the nation’s economic engines.
…
The 100 largest metropolitan areas also contribute three-quarters of the nation’s economic activity, and one consequence of that is monumental traffic jams. A study of congestion in urban areas released Wednesday by the Texas Transportation Institute found that traffic jams in 2007 cost urban Americans 2.8 billion gallons of wasted gas and 4.2 billion hours of lost time.

This shouldn’t be news. Our government at both the Federal and State level is structurally aligned to diffuse power, and thus money, to rural America. The Senate is but one example where the great people of Montana have more representation than the Borough of Brooklyn.
Here in New York State, when we actually have a functioning government, often Upstate is denying New York City homerule – cf bus lane cameras, letting the MTA’s finances crumble (Pataki), denying congestion charge, to name but a few.
If you want to change this, get rid of the US Senate and move toward unicameral state legislatures.

Ryan throws down the chart gauntlet in his post, Where the Congestion Grows Like Kudzu:

Real Time Economics helpfully reprints a chart from TTI’s urban mobility report which looks at hours wasted per traveler by metropolitan area. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. For a Washingtonian, the thing that’s likely to stick out is the fact that Washington is second in the country in hours wasted per traveler, and sustained the largest increase in wasted hours between 1982 and 2007.
One representation I’d love to see, should someone have the time to put a chart together, is hours wasted per traveler versus metropolitan population. The average traveler in the New York metro area faces 44 hours wasted per year, for instance, while the average traveler in Los Angeles loses 70 hours per year to congestion, even though New York’s metropolitan population is much, much larger than LA’s.

Please look no further: Driving Congestion v Population:

I took data from the Texas Transportation Institute report and matched it with some Metropolitan Statistical Area population data I had laying around when I Compared NYC & Washington DC – Area, Population, Density & Average Income. I was lazy and didn’t find the Texas Transportation Institute report to verify that they were using MSA’s as their population boundaries, but I assume that’s what they did.
Maybe my next chart will be a moving average of a city’s population-to-congestion analysis to see if there is anyway to find a consistent drift. My guess there will be a correlation between population and hours wasted (but that is a pretty safe assumption).
And don’t miss, Washington DC Congestion v Population Over Time:

Ball is in your court, Mr. Avent.