[PHOTO] Disembarking at Eglinton

Caught in a blur is someone disembarking from one of the new Bombardier-designed subway cars at Eglinton station.

[CAT] Caught in the moment

I didn't have any pictures of Shakespeare licking his paws. Until last night, that is.

[URBAN NOTE] Two links on the upcoming purge of TTC chair Gary Webster

Gary Webster, general manager of the Toronto Transit Commissioner, is set to be purged from his position--at an estimated cost to the city of a half-million dollars--for having testified before City Council that light rail, not subways, would make the best investment in the city's transit future.

Two Toronto Star articles provide useful commentary. The first reports on TTC chair Karen Stintz' reaction.

Although she doesn’t believe he deserves to be fired, TTC chair Karen Stintz says she’ll abide by the transit board’s decision if it axes TTC chief general manager Gary Webster at a special meeting Tuesday.

Stintz told reporters she won’t push for another special city council meeting to reinstate Webster or have her Toronto Transit Commission rivals removed from the TTC board.

But, speaking to reporters at City Hall, she warned that the stability of the TTC is at risk if Webster is removed.

“Over the last 16 months, we’ve done a lot of really good work at the TTC to improve our customer service, to improve our operational efficiency, to get our budget under control. At this time, it’s not clear to me why we would have a leadership change when all of those initiatives are just starting to get implemented.

Stintz said council is responsible for the decisions the city made to overturn Mayor Rob Ford’s plan to build underground transit and that Webster rendered his best professional opinion.

“Council could have chosen to accept or not accept his professional opinion. Council chose; to accept his professional opinion. I don’t’ know why my colleagues have called this meeting for today. I have to wait and see what it is that they’re hoping to achieve and why now,” she said of the meeting that was called by Ford loyalists Cesar Palacio, Frank Di Giorgio, Norm Kelly, Denzil Minnan-Wong and Vince Crisanti.

The second, a more extended consideration, is by Christopher Hume, who observes that if you want an efficient transit system, getting rid of its managers whenever the facts they communicate offend you is a pretty vulgar way to go about it.

In this mayor, Toronto has a man who knows little about basic principles and respects them less. His treatment of Webster, and the threats against other senior TTC managers, shows a contempt that goes well beyond anything seen before at City Hall.

Recent comments by the mayor’s brother, Doug, about the TTC being in need of an “enema” were revealing of a mindset that stands out in its utter coarseness.

By now, pretty well anyone who knows anything about transit has made it clear that burying the LRT on Eglinton Ave. east of Laird Dr. is bad policy. Unnecessary, inappropriate and wasteful to the tune of $2 billion, an underground LRT only makes sense from the point of view of a driver consumed by road rage. Even then, Eglinton East isn’t where drivers are most likely to find themselves overtaken by anger.

But even if putting light rail below grade were justifiable, Ford’s actions demonstrate a degree of disrespect that raises the question of his ability to lead. Governance itself doesn’t care about outcomes; only how they are reached. That’s why process matters, especially in a democracy, which by its nature, is divided and fractious.

Claiming to speak for some mythical man in the street, those he meets at Tim Hortons and McDonald’s, Ford first declared city council “irrelevant,” and now wants to emasculate the bureaucracy.

How ironic that Ford’s petulance should be directed at a person, Gary Webster, whose integrity and intelligence are above reproach. The contrast between the two men couldn’t be starker.

That Ford can still find five members of council willing to do his bidding, no matter how transparently shabby it may be, also speaks volumes about the sorry state of Toronto politics. The members of this odious quintet — TTC commissioners Norm Kelly, Denzil Minnan-Wong, Frank Di Giorgio, Cesar Palacio and Vincent Crisanti — shame all Torontonians, including the mayor.

The message to City Hall management, and indirectly to the rest of us, is that it’s Ford’s way or the highway. There’s no room for discussion, compromise or consensus. Indeed, Ford and his TTC heavies have even gone so far as to suppress reports that don’t back up their demands.

Nobody voted for Rob Ford because he’s the smartest man in town, but his failure to understand that truth — facts and figures — plays a role in decision-making is deeply concerning.

Myself, I hope only that Webster will not be purged. If he is, I expect protracted instability. Will Ford's opponents proceed by getting involved in staffing and management themselves?

[URBAN NOTE] Gary Webster has been fired

Well, they did it.

Over on Facebook. blogTO reported this news on Facebook by pointing out that the Toronto Transit Commission board is responsible to City Council, the members indeed serving at the discretion of the city council that just voted by a majority in favour of the light rail plan that got Webster fired.

TTC chief general manager Gary Webster has been relieved of his duties, following a vote during a special meeting of transit commissioners Tuesday.

In a motion describing termination "without just cause," the transit commission voted 5-4 to fire Webster, who has worked at the service for 35 years, just two weeks after he expressed open defiance to a subway plan championed by Mayor Rob Ford. His ouster comes a year before he was set to retire.

"This was not how I expected this to end — certainly not how I wanted it to end," Webster told reporters shortly after his termination. "But clearly the choice has been made to replace me as chief general manager and I accept that."

TTC chair Karen Stintz, a vocal supporter of Webster's, thanked the outgoing senior manager for his years with the commission.

"Coming into the meeting, I had questions of 'why now' and 'what next,'" she said. "And the 'what next' is we now need to do a search; the 'why now' is not answered."

The TTC's current chief operating officer, Andy Byford, will take over Webster's day-to-day duties until a permanent replacement is found.

Tuesday's vote came after an hours-long in-camera meeting at Toronto City Hall and was followed by impassioned pleas from several councillors to save Webster's job.

Calling Webster a "consummate professional," Coun. Maria Augimeri's voice broke with emotion as she faced the commission members who wanted to dump the TTC veteran.

"You're kicking success out the door. You're throwing away success with both hands. What are you thinking?" she said, moments before the vote came down.

At one point, Augimeri raised her voice to a yell, accusing those loyal to Ford of "abuse of power" for getting rid of a dissenting voice.

[. . .]

Stintz had said earlier Tuesday her fellow transit commissioners should think twice about dumping Webster, who she said guided the TTC through a difficult period and is set to retire next year.

She estimated getting rid of Webster will cost taxpayers at least $500,000 in severance “because there is no cause” to do so.

[LINK] "Branding Cleveland"

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes at length about the effort of fellow Great Lakes city Cleveland, trapped in an identity crisis since the end of its industrial era, has been trying to rebrand itself by--paradoxically--embracing an idealized past even as interesting things happen at the grass roots. Nostalgia, unsurprisingly, is unhelpful.

Cleveland faces a crisis of leadership and identity that you can see in these rebranding efforts. It wants to recapture its past glory. Cleveland identifies as a working-class white town and wishes it could be that again. It’s hardly alone here. Cities from Detroit to Butte have had a really hard time letting go of their vision of what their city to rethink what their city could be.

Last spring, I read an article about Detroit that I wish I could find. It was a letter to the editor of a Detroit business journal by an out-of-town executive who had recently visited the city. He said in no uncertain terms why his company would never move to Detroit. He wrote that white flight continued to destroy Detroit because that city was so dependent on cars and suburban living that it had not developed any of the 21st century infrastructure that is bringing young people back into cities. You can’t walk anywhere. Public transportation is a disaster. His company’s young workers wouldn’t move to Detroit, not because of its history but because of its present. This executive blamed a lack of leadership in Detroit, telling its politicians it needed to think about the future instead of the past.

I read this article in a link off of a Cleveland blog and the commenters there really agreed with sentiment in regards to Cleveland. Local politicians there want the old industrial jobs back and have a heck of a time thinking beyond that. These commenters really wanted Cleveland to succeed and felt that investments in public transportation especially would make a huge difference.

The thing is though is that Cleveland has some amazing neighborhoods developing without a lot of outside assistance. The Great Lakes Brewery and West Side Market anchor a very small but pretty cool walking neighborhood west of downtown that includes several excellent bars and restaurants, including the superb Bier Markt and the new Market Garden Brewery, owned by the former brewmaster at Dogfish Head. Tremont is another awesome neighborhood, combining cool old homes with excellent bars and restaurants and the Christmas Story house (where you can buy a leg lamp).

I haven’t been to Detroit, but I understand there are also little islands of interesting things happening there. In both places, with little to no municipal leadership, young people are beginning to move in and open businesses. Is this going to replace industrial labor and save the city? No, but these businesses do build off each other. Can the city help? Absolutely, but it takes shifting the political emphasis away from the 20th century and into the 21st.

Go for the post and for the insightful comments.

[LINK] On the decline of Detroit

Landscape+Urbanism some days ago made the first post in a series about declining cities. Fittingly enough, that post was about the city of Detroit. At one point Detroit was one of the global centres of high modernity, the very metropolis where Fordist methods of production were pioneered.

It's race, Landscape+Urbanism argues (after its sources), that was the undoing of Detroit. Far from there being a civic identity common to all Detroiters, it seems like racial identity--white, black--was the more noteworthy factor. Inasmuch as this led to the reproduction and intensification of inequalities, of which shortages of decent and affordable housing were key, this triggered a downwards spiral.

The focus on single-family houses led to perpetual housing shortages - particularly when combined with a history of official and unofficial policies that prevented blacks from obtaining housing. Unlike many of the eastern cities where the geography was a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, Detroit was much more literally black and white, as Segrue mentions, "class and race became more important that ethnicity as a guide to the city's residential geography." (p.22) While it was understood as a "City of Homes" for most, the influx of black workers from the South, who came in the 'Great Migration', were met with a consistent range of discrimination and violence, as existing residents perceived in-migration as a threat to their community, starting in the 1920s and continuing all the way through the 1970s.

[. . .]

There were some inroads to employment in good jobs around WWII, driven by a tightening labor market, the coalitions of unions and civil rights groups, and some federal policies, which made sure that "blacks made significant gains in Detroit's industrial economy during the war." (p.27) There was still an undercurrent of racial tension, which played out in housing and employment, a continual topic that Segrue alludes to being a 'structural' racism that played out in Detroit, and were displayed in significant riots and other violence throughout the years, but that this didn't stop the influx of blacks coming into the city, leaving the Jim Crow south for something better. It's debatable if Detroit was much better.

The availability and quality of housing was poor for blacks - driven by a number of social and policy factors. While the New Deal had instilled a new ideology of opportunity for blacks - it had also instilled an ideology for current residents that the government would protect their property and the status quo. Thus the competing ideals of opportunity and protection played out in Detroit, and although, as seen previously, some gains were made - the majority of the wins came in maintenance of the status quo and protection from the new waves of poor, black residents.

[. . .]

The geography of race was perpetuated by the real estate community as well, who were actively involved in the exclusion of blacks from housing. Another aspect was construction, with new houses rarely being built for blacks or in a price range that was suitable. As Segrue mentions, in "1951, on 1.15 percent of the new homes constructed in the metropolitan Detroit area were available to blacks." (p.43). Another major issue that shaped this geography in Detroit, and many other cities around the United States, was the concept of redlining. Maps were produced by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, informed by local real estate brokers and lenders, to rate the neighborhoods in cities according to a scale from A (green) to D (red). While ostensibly a methodology for determining investment risk, the process became a de facto method for exclusion, disenfranchisement, and continued disinvestment in the minority areas.

[. . .]

The promise of the New Deal, in post-WWII era, was predicated on government intervention to solve the problems of the city. One of those things was to provide adequate housing for the poor, whether this be true building of community and opportunity, or the more commonly wielded tool of 'social engineering' to make better citizens. Through a number of acts, the US developed policy and funding for many types of affordable housing, complementing the already robust subsidies of single family home construction and highway building.

[. . .]

The problem in Detroit, was that nobody seemed to want public housing, as it was fought almost everywhere by both whites, unions, real estate agents, developers and even some established black residents. The adjacency of even some black areas was problematic, and developers had to make deals with the FHA, such as the 1 foot thick, 6 foot high wall that separated the new development from the old - remnants of which still exist. This sort of approach reinforced the FHA's official policy, not of true equality, but as mentioned by Segrue, even with some of the more enlightened bureaucrats, "a separate but equal philosophy." (p.67)

I'll be watching for the series as it's completed. If it turns out Detroit's only role now is as a negative role model, that may be enough.