Job Insurance – Part 11 (For the Young)

Introduction:

Peter Coy’s article, “The Lost Generation – Bright, Eager, and Unwanted” drew much-needed attention to the disastrous impact of the current recession on the young. Unemployment rates for those under 24 are nearly twice the national average, and the trajectory for youth employment is not heartening. As young people, many of whom have sunk themselves deep into debt for college educations that were sold to them as tickets into the middle class, face years of empty spaces on their resumes and lost wage income and promotions they will begin to fall further and further back from their potential and become a truly lost generation.

Something needs to be done to save a generation from a blighted economic life, and to recover untold amounts of potential labor power that will go unused in the interim. Luckily, history gives us a perfect example of how to save this generation in the youth policies of the New Deal.

Gimme Shelter – The Problem of Housing in New Urbanism

Introduction:

In my previous segment on working-class new urbanism, I focused on the non-housing aspects of the urban squeeze-out effect that the working and middle classes face in gentrifying cities. However, it is true that housing is the leading factor that causes cities to shift from a “bell curve” socioeconomic distribution, where the city is anchored by a broad middle class and a prosperous and mobile working class, to a “barbell” distribution, where a megawealthy elite perch on top of a vast number of poverty-wage workers.

However, the new urbanist emphasis on expanding supply through higher density, while necessary, is not sufficient to make the city safe for the working and middle classes.

Working-Class Urbanism

Introduction:

Recently, there was a bit of a stir when geographer Aaron Renn posted an article on New Geography alleging that “progressive urbanism” was advocating for a model of urbanism that was melanin-deficient. Now, this study was flawed in many ways – the sampling excluded New York, Chicago and L.A as progressive urban models, it equated non-black population with white, which is a major mistake especially in the Southwest, it left out San Francisco, and so on.

However, while progressive urbanism can for the moment be cleared of the charge of being blind to issues of race, it is true that new urbanism as a movement has tended to emphasize the physical side of denser development, as opposed to some of the more human-scale issues – and class is one issue that comes to mind as an area that needs to be dealt with.