He’s now having to walk back his proposed staff cuts in the face of opposition from the entrenched bureaucracy:

During his campaign, McGinn promised repeatedly that if elected, he would cut hundreds of “political appointees” added by his predecessor Greg Nickels—strategic advisors and “senior management” who owe their jobs to political patronage. The claim, a staple of McGinn’s stump speech, was a red-meat line for the fiscal-conservative wing of his supporters.

The problem, as the testimony at this morning’s meeting laid plain, is that most of the folks McGinn is targeting aren’t political appointees at all. In fact, the majority of those who spoke this morning have been at the city for many years or decades. And many were elevated to their current positions after taking on new responsibilities, or, ironically, as a way of saving money—because strategic advisors are management, they aren’t paid overtime for working extra hours.

Come on dude, get it together.

Overall, eleven participants are still in the program and have avoided further issues with law enforcement. Here’s how they break out:

• Two are currently in drug treatment to work on addiction issues that they previously supported through drug dealing
• One has agreed to enter the GOTS program, which will give them housing stability, group support, and further drug treatment if they need it
• One man is now enrolled in Bellevue Community College
• One man wanted to go into fashion design, so a case worker found him a sewing machine to help him get started

There’s more at the link. We’ll return to this on a later podcast, but what really strikes me is this: how do you deal with the poverty of imagination? What happens when someone has spent a life in poverty simply can’t visualize what a new life might look like?

Like Barack Obama, Booker embodies a promise kept, a deferred dream finally come true, living proof that the stain of slavery, our original national sin, might yet be lifted from our collective soul. Booker knows this, too — he has shown up in Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, and elsewhere as Obama’s surrogate during primary season — and he is fully capable of embroidering the cloth of Dr. King’s soaring rhetoric with his own echoic stitch.

In truth, Cory Booker is eager to do so. And when he proclaims, “We need a prophetic leader — somebody who can raise us above our baser angels and show that truly we are all tied in a common garment of destiny,” he’s speaking not only of Obama but also of himself, of King, of Gandhi — Booker’s a huge Gandhi fan.

But unlike Obama, whose knitted brow, faraway eyes, and dry, bony passivity rub thinner day by day, Booker fairly bursts with adolescent energy, fueled by his athlete’s physique and streams of caffeine and testosterone. To a Goldman Sachs guy, and to Marc Ecko, he’s not merely the longed-for fruit of the seeds of racial equality, he also is the captain of the varsity team, Henry V leading the charge, and Will fucking Smith, all formed into one hearty, brainy, humble stud. To many Newarkers, however, Booker is none of the above — he’s a creature they’ve never seen before, and they can’t quite believe he’s real.

. . .

“Oh, I’ve been working on Cory, the phenomenon,” [Rutgers-Newark history professor Clement Price] chuckles. “What is a black guy at the end of the day? We haven’t seen a lot of people like Booker in the post-civil-rights era; we actually saw more of them in the segregated era, when black people created an extraordinary hierarchy of well-educated, well-spoken, and noble men and women.

“In the post-civil-rights-movement era, we see them and they suddenly don’t strike us as being authentically black — because they can move very, very easily within the white world. One of the things that I think gets Cory into trouble is the extent to which he’s beloved in the white community. I saw him speak at Newark’s last synagogue. When he spoke Hebrew, the Jewish women on the first two pews, I thought they were having an orgasm. He’s good. He’s good.["]

*Speaking of which, Cory, it’s cool — you don’t have to feign all the outrage!

One thing that struck me, watching the film, is the kind of person it takes to succeed in politics… and governance. We’re about to elect a sitting U.S. Senator to the White House for the first time in almost 50 years. I’ve always been sympathetic to the argument that you need a good manager, a good executive, in the office. But I’m not sure that’s right. You also need an evangelist.

Booker, like most insurgent reformers, is a little insane. Irrationally optimistic. You have to be to do what these guys do, get up every day and push, push, push. Could you have woken up every day for 3 months in Hillary Clinton’s position, going through the rituals of 3 or 4 campaign stops a day, hours and hours in makeup, for what you had to know was a totally doomed effort? I couldn’t.

Good executives know when to quit. I’m not sure the same is true of good politicians.

Listen.

No, wait — he doesn’t actually argue that, but you have to read the piece twice to realize it. Instead, he uses several rhetorical sleights-of-hand, leading you from “warming” the temperature sense, to “warming” in the Al-Gore-global-climate-change sense, with no logical basis of support. Observe:

Recent studies out of Australia and Greece, as well as studies on U.S. cities, have also documented this difference in warming between highly concentrated central cities and their surrounding areas.

This is critical as we deal with what may well be a period of prolonged warming. Urban heat islands may not explain global warming, but they do bear profound environmental, social, economic and health consequences that reach beyond city boundaries. A study of Athens that appeared this year in the journal Climatic Change suggested that the ecological footprint of the urban heat island is one and a half to two times larger than the city’s political borders.

In other words, heat islands are “critical” to global warming, and yet have absolutely nothing to do with it. Amazing!

Now, Kotkin is right to say later in the piece that this excess heat leads to increased air-conditioning usage, which does contribute to actual global warming. But he fails to put it into the proper context, which is that cities still use far, far less energy per capita as suburbs, despite all the air-conditioning. And initiatives like Chicago’s green roof program can improve that even more, by lowering building temperatures and reducing the need for costly A/C.

Kotkin actually has some a decent point to make later in the piece, which is that not everyone lives in New York or wants to, so we have to think about ways to make suburbs more energy-efficient. But the degree of sophistry he uses to make his argument makes me loathe to recommend the piece as a whole.

Tacoma’s approach does seem like a hard sell in bleeding-heart Seattle. Does the city have the jail space, the mental-health resources, and the addiction services that would be needed if panhandling was criminalized? Surely those questions would be asked.

And what about the unintended consequences? Just the other day I asked a homeless man waving a sign near an Interstate 5 on-ramp what he thought of Tacoma’s law, which bans his behavior there. “People will be doing other things, I guarantee you that. Breaking into cars and garages and whatever they can do,” he warned. “This gives people an option.”

So, next time you roll up to an intersection or off-ramp, make sure you thank the person begging for change for not breaking into your house. It’s very kind of them.

Real estate specialists predict that these projects will serve as catalysts for the neighborhood’s revival. “The Tulane corridor will transform into something it hasn’t been for 50 or 60 years,” said J. Mark Madderra, a principal in Madderra & Cazalot, a mortgage banking firm, who is a co-author of the multifamily report. Domain is also planning a third apartment house, with 72 units, in the neighborhood, on Jefferson Davis Parkway.

After Katrina, there were lots of discussions of grand plans to remake the city (as there were in New York after 9/11), most of which came to nothing. But a few, more subtle changes, based on new market conditions and opportunities, could make a significant change.

For more on this, check out this 2006 NYT Magazine article on the New Urbanists efforts to remake Biloxi, MS after Katrina. Fascinating account of what happens when well-intentioned outsiders try to remake a city.

“The mayor is ignoring (a) cherished principle of our democracy: the separation of powers. No executive, whether they are President George W. Bush or Mayor Nickels, can ignore legislative authority, particularly when it comes to the administration of something as fundamental as equal justice under the law,” [Council President Nick] Licata wrote in a recent editorial in the West Seattle Herald.

Nothing gets ‘em riled up here in the NW like a Bush comparison. It’s like our own version of Godwin’s Law. Anyway, later in the article we find out that the comparison is actually pretty apt. Because if Nickels is Bush, then the Council is surely Nancy Pelosi’s feckless Democrats:

To be sure, the council is partly responsible for Nickels’ lopsided influence on legislative matters. It’s relatively rare that council members produce major policy initiatives on their own. Rather, they’ve ceded much of their policy-setting authority to the mayor.

“For the most part, we’ve either passed it or amended it,” Licata said. “In that sense, we’ve been very deferential.”Some council members have said they consider it primarily the mayor’s job to develop legislation. The council has a “secondary role” in legislation — the job of refining it as appropriate, Councilwoman Jean Godden said in an interview last fall.

It’s an unusual political perspective, as basic democratic principles usually assign the legislative branch the duty to write laws and the executive branch the responsibility to administer them.

That’s some quality snark in that last line from P-I reporter Angela Galloway: “unusual” indeed…

As I mentioned in my initial collection of photos from the complex, this building was used as a freezer facility from 1937 to 2002 and had frozen the water table 24 feet down. Over the years, the building has launched up 12 inches into the air and now as the water thaws over the years the building is settling and cracking. I have to say that when I was on the tour of the building in this area I did not feel safe and was extremely skeptical, given the structural condition of the building, if they’d be able to salvage any of it.

Who knew?

Mayor Bloomberg is taking on presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and others who’ve said the federal government should slash funding for cities that don’t strictly enforce immigration laws.

“Boy, let them come,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday when asked about Mr. Romney’s recent remarks denouncing New York as a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants.

While Mr. Bloomberg declined to criticize Mr. Romney or anyone else by name, he said: “I can’t think of any laboratory that shows better why you need a stream of immigrants than New York City.”

The mayor pointed to New York’s low crime rate and its thriving economy as evidence the city is doing something right.

“If that isn’t example enough as to why you need immigrants coming in, I don’t know what to tell anybody,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “If they don’t believe that immigrants add a heck of a lot more than they cost they just aren’t looking at the numbers.”

*And I’m surprised that no immigration advocates explore this aspect — it’s a concrete example of the positive — actually, indispensible — benefits of immigration.

Arup believes good design can do something about this mess. Dongtan’s master plan — hundreds of pages of maps, schematics, and data — has almost nothing to say about architectural style. Instead, it outlines the world’s first green city, every block engineered in response to China’s environmental crisis. It’s like the source code for an urban operating system. “We’re not focused on the form,” Gutierrez explains. “We’re focused on the performance of the form.” He and his team imagine a city powered by local, renewable energy, with superefficient buildings clustered in dense, walkable neighborhoods; a recycling scheme that repurposes 90 percent of all waste; a network of high tech organic farms; and a ban on any vehicle that emits CO2.

It’s amazing how efficient we can be when we start from scratch. All these great technologies are out there, there just hasn’t been the will to capitalize on them. Read the whole thing… lots more fascinating nuggets inside.