Category: Linked

I missed this last week – Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment, a 30-year-old environmental education organization, has shut down and laid off all of its staff. Beyond the immediate loss for the employees of BCUE, this is a major loss for the Borough. BCUE’s core focus was environmental issues, but they defined their mandate broadly to include all aspects of creating a sustainable city. In addition education programs on the natural environment, including running environmental education programs in public schools, BCUE also ran education programs on the built environment, including sponsoring walking tours throughout the borough, and even being a regular contributer on Gowanus Lounge.

BCUE’s website is closed too.

Via deluxa, a video of Senator Dan Squadron presenting a resolution before the State Senate honoring Bob Guskind. The memorial for Bob is tomorrow afternoon.

Parking trumps filming on the Southside – don’t mess with Leo Moscowitz’s parking!

The AP (via a Vermont TV station) is reporting that two floors collapsed in a building under renovation on Division Avenue. The collapse reportedly happened last night, around 6:45, and no injuries were reported.

UPDATE: The AP (via Crain’s) is now saying that a worker was injured. The collapse involved a when a non-load-bearing wall in a building that did not have permits to do work.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has put numbers to the GOP’s glossy brochure budget. There is a lot of hocus pocus involved in all of the this, but what jumped out at me was the GOP trend line in the attached chart. You’ll notice that actual government spending as a percentage of GDP only dropped below 20% at the very end of the 1990s – the byproduct of fiscal responsibility and a good economy during the Clinton years. The GOP – even when they are pulling numbers out of their ass – needs 80 years to accomplish what Clinton accomplished in 8 years.

Stalled projects lead to developer blight.

In a somewhat contrarian vein, I mentioned it before, but I am actually amazed at the number of Northside projects that are still building. Most of the buildings that I’ve seen that are out of the ground are still going forward. Which is far better for the neighborhood than the alternative. (Though there is a heavy concentration of dead pool projects to the south and northeast of McCarren Park – Roebling/Driggs and Union area.)

Attention Times headline writers – if the index only started tracking housing prices in 2000, a big drop in January 2009 may be a “record”, but that word probably doesn’t belong in the headline.

There are many experts who think that the whole restructuring strategy is misbegotten. These experts think that costs are not the real problem. The real problem is the product. The cars are not good enough. The management is insular. The reputation is fatally damaged.

It is pretty clear that GM’s (and Chrysler’s) product sucks. It has sucked for 25 years or more, and (particularly in the case of Chrysler) shows no signs of not sucking anytime in the near future. They have taken their sucky product model and applied to once-venerable marques such as Saab (Volvo and Jaguar have fared better with Ford, proof, perhaps that there some hope for at least one of the big three). Rather than invest in designing decent-looking, efficient and functional cars (viz., Toyota, Honda) or reinventing themselves by adding excitement to the above (viz. Audi, Nissan), GM and Chrysler have just continued to repackage cheap, ugly and inefficient cars and trucks. Their “design” program seems to be based on an elaborate inside joke. In the case of Chrysler, that joke seems to have begun with a Batman comic book from the 1940s and then allowing someone to free associate from there. In the case of GM, the task of designing cars seems to have been handed over to the same people who have spent the past 15 years foisting McMansions on us (if GM could figure out how to put a cathedral ceiling in an Escalade, they would). As for quality, a race to the middle should not be touted as success.

GM’s and Chrysler’s (and Ford’s) business model also sucks. For the past 15+ years, that business model has relied on cheap gas and lenient regulations on “trucks” to sell bloated SUVs and pickups to people who really only needed station wagons and minivans. The fact that these companies were able to profit for so long on the huge margins they got on “trucks” only proves that Mencken was right.

At least Ford recognized that they had a bad product and an untenable business plan. Five years ago, Bill Ford tried to revamp the company on his own, and three years ago he brought in outside help to do it. At the time, Ford was criticized for trying to move the company away from a over-reliance on trucks and SUVs and towards a greener future. It remains to be seen if he acted in time.

Its not clear to me that the administration is really punting the ball another few months down the field, or that it is taking bankruptcy off the table (I hope its very much on the table), but Brooks is right (hey, it happens) – these companies should be allowed to fail. After all, they’ve earned it.

Concerts are indeed coming to East River State Park – the Times gets more confirmation from Stephanie Thayer of OSA and Assemblyman Lentol’s office.

The latest issue of the Greenpoint Gazette is online, and the biggest scoop they have is Aaron Short, formerly of the Greenpoint Courier. Short devotes his first weekly column to environmental issues in North Brooklyn and the paucity of environmentalists manning the barricades.