YouTube and Classical Music - Valentina Lisitsa

   I like a lot that Valentina Lisitsa says - and I get amusement when she reminds the music industry that Lady Gaga seems to have no problem selling CDs despite first making her new music available on You Tube.

October 11, 2013

Concerto for Piano and YouTube

By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

Visitors browsing through the YouTube channel of the pianist Valentina Lisitsa can watch her in hundreds of videos. There are live webcams of her practicing at her home in North Carolina, long blonde hair tossing and brow furrowed in concentration as she reads through new works. There she is in a red gown playing Schumann’s “Traumerei” at a concert in Seoul, and recording Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 at the Abbey Road Studios in London.

Ms. Lisitsa, 43, resurrected a completely stalled career through YouTube. Since posting her first video in 2007, she has attracted more than 62 million views and some 105,000 subscribers to her channel. This Ukrainian-born pianist now has a busy calendar and a contract with Decca, which recently released her new Liszt disc. She will open the 92nd Street Y’s fall season on Saturday with a program of Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Chopin and Liszt; the works were selected by an online vote.

“I was sitting alone in North Carolina eating potato chips, blaming everyone, blaming my parents,” Ms. Lisitsa said in a recent interview in Manhattan. “It’s a sinkhole, and it’s very difficult to get out. It’s only when you stop trying to find faults and start doing something constructive that you will survive.” She added, “It’s just good for you as a human not to dwell on your disasters.”

Casually dressed in jeans, glittery flip-flops and an orange shirt she had bought for her son, Ms. Lisitsa was frazzled but gregarious after a trip to New York from Paris. She spoke about the low points in her career, including a Christmas when her application to perform in a concert at a nursing home was rejected and a stint selling housewares on eBay.

Ms. Lisitsa’s eureka moment came when reading a child’s version of “1,001 Nights” to her son, Benjamin, now 8. “There were all those beautiful women, like another blonde Russian pianist,” she said. “They all got killed after the first night. This one did not. Why not? She came with a story. You have to invent your story. You can call it gimmicky, but whatever works. Something that stops making you a commodity.”

Earlier in her career, Ms. Lisitsa said, she felt like a commodity herself, an “easily interchangeable” female musician who could be called upon at the last minute to wear a fancy gown and trot out Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

She had begun her career as a duo pianist with her husband, Alexei Kuznetsoff. After winning a competition in 1991, they obtained management, but the engagements dried up. “We were naïve and thought that if you play well, people will notice you,” she said. “But music is a luxury product, and if you see a Mont Blanc pen or Rolex watch in Walmart, people will just pass by. It has to come with a certain package, and you have to have your own audience.”

After a midlife crisis when she considered quitting music, Ms. Lisitsa decided to be proactive. Her husband filmed her playing Chopin’s 24 Études, which they released as a DVD on Amazon.com in 2007. The couple were initially irritated when people uploaded sections to YouTube, but they decided to upload the entire DVD themselves as a promotion. The tactic worked, and sales increased. They took another gamble when they spent their life savings to hire the London Symphony Orchestra so Ms. Lisitsa could record the four Rachmaninoff concertos, which Decca has now released.

Niall O’Rourke, the creative director at Decca’s London office, said Ms. Lisitsa’s use of YouTube was new territory for the label’s classical artists. “It’s more of pop approach,” he said, noting the success of Justin Bieber and others discovered on YouTube. “Valentina was on our radar, and when we saw how many YouTube followers she had, we wondered how to tap into that fan base. It was an experiment.” Other classical musicians, like the violinist Hilary Hahn (with whom Ms. Lisitsa recorded sonatas by Ives), are certainly active on YouTube, but Ms. Lisitsa is one of the first to have built a highly successful career via the medium.

On a video called “I Hate Rachmaninoff,” Ms. Lisitsa describes how she rebelled against his music when pressured to perform it in competitions in Ukraine, saying, “I didn’t want to touch his music with dirty, competition hands.” In Rachmaninoff and the other works she has recorded, she is passionate, communicative and deeply expressive. Reviewing her performance of the Liszt Concerto with the Warsaw Philharmonic, Steve Smith wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Lisitsa’s range of colors and expressive shadings was consistently impressive; in the second movement she executed trills with an attention-grabbing precision.”

While speaking to the audience at her Live From the Albert Hall concert (which was recorded for CD and DVD), she self-deprecatingly remarked that her microphone would need a Slavic filter to process her heavy accent, before joking about the soccer match between England and Ukraine taking place at the same time as the concert.

Ms. Lisitsa grew up in Kiev, Ukraine, where she began playing at 3. Her mother, Valentina, a seamstress, encouraged her to become a music teacher. After studies at the Kiev Conservatory and a stint as a serious chess player, the pianist and her husband immigrated to America. After living in Indiana and Miami Beach, they bought a house in a rural, wooded area east of Raleigh. One video on her channel is called “Practicing Piano in North Carolina During Hurricane Irene.”

Below the video are Ms. Lisitsa’s comments about the experience. She actively engages her fans on social media. Unlike the polite feeds of some other classical artists, Ms. Lisitsa, a self-described “contrarian,” is argumentative and outspoken, tweeting about politics and berating concert promoters who have irked her.

Her liberal attitude to listeners photographing or recording her concerts distinguishes her from many of her colleagues. At pop events, audience members ubiquitously record the music, but the practice is invariably prohibited at formal classical spaces. At Carnegie Hall, ushers zealously race down the aisles to berate any device-toting offenders publicly.

In June, during a concert in Essen, Germany, the Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman stopped performing after becoming distracted by an audience member filming him. He left the stage; when he returned, he told the audience, “The destruction of music because of YouTube is enormous,” claiming that he had been refused recording contracts because his music was already online.

The violinist James Ehnes has also expressed concern about YouTube. After noticing someone filming one of his performances and feeling “surprise and mild annoyance,” he wrote an article for The Huffington Post about his conflicted feelings regarding the ethical and economic issues of illicit recordings.

Classical music needs to evolve more quickly, Ms. Lisitsa said. “There is a long train, and we’re the last car in the train. Pop music is the first car. Now, any new song Lady Gaga does, she puts on YouTube first. And I don’t think she has trouble selling her CDs.”

Far from destroying classical music, Ms. Lisitsa said, YouTube will create a new audience. “We are perpetually complaining about our audiences being old,” she said.

“They are always dying but never quite die, because there will always be more old people,” she added, referring to a letter that Chopin wrote about one concert at which there were no young people in the audience because it was the start of hunting season.

“Just as kids who initially like bubbly and graduate to fine wine, some people will graduate to the finer elements of classical music via YouTube,” she said.

The medium also offers listeners a chance to decide for themselves, she said. “The movers and shakers find and proclaim ‘the next Horowitz,’ then it drips down to the people, with the perfect recording and glossy magazines,” she said. “Then if deep inside people don’t enjoy it, they feel guilty and that they’re not educated enough to enjoy it.” As with a restaurant, if the food or service is horrid “you just don’t go back,” she said. “You don’t think ‘I’m not educated enough to comprehend this octopus with chocolate crumble.’ ”

What is needed in the digital era, she said, is a measure of device etiquette. “People know when they go to restaurants, they are not supposed to burp,” she said. “So when they go to concerts, they can take off the flash off the camera.”

YouTube also presents a challenge to maintaining the unhealthy status quo of perfection in the classical industry. Every tiny flaw can forever be immortalized on video, which in turn can stifle artists from taking risks, resulting in note-perfect boring performances.

There have been many brutal comments posted under Ms. Lisitsa’s own videos about her wrong notes and imperfections. “You get a thick skin,” she said. But she rushes online to stand up for other musicians. She once defended the pianist Mitsuko Uchida from nitpicky YouTube commenters highlighting a microscopic error in one of Ms. Uchida’s live performances.

“Classical musicians behave in the same way as young girls looking at fashion magazines and starving themselves,” Ms. Lisitsa said. “Would-be musicians are starving themselves emotionally and intellectually just to be perfect.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/arts/music/valentina-lisitsa-jump-starts-her-career-online.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

When The Law Is Madness Everybody Pays And Pays

More on how we outsource "security issues" to private for profit corporations at outrageous terms that are not favorable to the taxpayer - guaranteed bed counts? Corporate welfare. We are turning incarceration into a guaranteed profit corporate business - as well as contributing to militarization of the United States.

 From The Washington Post -

Controversial quota drives immigration detention boom

By Nick Miroff, Published: October 13

KARNES CITY, Tex. — In the past five years, Homeland Security officials have jailed record numbers of immigrants, driven by a little-known congressional directive known on Capitol Hill as the “bed mandate.”
The policy requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep an average of 34,000 detainees per day in its custody, a quota that has steadily risen since it was established in 2006 by conservative lawmakers who insisted that the agency wasn’t doing enough to deport unlawful immigrants.
But as illegal crossings from Mexico have fallen to near their lowest levels since the early 1970s, ICE has been meeting Congress’s immigration detention goals by reaching deeper into the criminal justice system to vacuum up foreign-born, legal U.S. residents convicted of any crimes that could render them eligible for deportation. The agency also has greatly expanded the number of undocumented immigrants it takes into custody after traffic stops by local police.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials say that they are not needlessly jailing immigrants to meet a quota and that they find plenty of candidates for detention and deportation by targeting criminals who pose a threat to public safety and border security.
But critics of the mandate note that the majority of ICE detainees are not violent offenders. Immigration judges eventually allow many to remain in the United States, but the detainees may spend months in costly federal custody, even when far cheaper alternatives are available, such as ankle bracelets and other forms of electronic monitoring.
With federal spending on immigration detention and deportation reaching $2.8 billion a year, more than doubling since 2006, the mandate has met growing skepticism from budget hawks in both parties, particularly after DHS officials told Congress during the “sequestration” debate in April that the agency could save money by lowering the bed mandate to 31,800 and relying on cheaper alternatives to jails. But House Republicans successfully pushed back, set the mandate at 34,000 detainees and ordered ICE officials to spend nearly $400 million more than they requested.
ICE operations are largely unaffected by the government shutdown, since the agency’s workers are among the federal employees considered essential, DHS officials have said.
Some of the additional money provided by Congress will be spent filling beds at places such as the brightly painted Karnes County Civil Detention Center, which opened here last year amid bobbing oil derricks on the rolling plains south of San Antonio. It holds more than 600 detainees, but ICE prefers not to call them that.
They are “residents,” guarded by unarmed “resident advisers,” and they sleep in air-conditioned, unlocked “suites” with flat-screen TVs overlooking volleyball courts and soccer fields. The low-security facility, built and operated on the government’s behalf by a private contractor, the GEO Group, offers computer labs, libraries and microwaves for making popcorn.
“This place is great,” said one young man from Honduras, strumming a government-issued bass guitar in a recreation room, along with newfound band mates from El Salvador and Guatemala.
Most detainees here are Central American migrants picked up along the border. Having requested asylum, they await an ICE interview to determine if they have a legitimate fear of returning home.
In the meantime, they can earn $3 a day working on cleaning crews or in the laundry room, and there are free English classes, “life skills” instruction and tutorials in Microsoft Word and Excel. They dine in a cafeteria cheerfully appointed with Southwestern art and Georgia O’Keefe prints.
The jail has become a showcase for improved detention conditions, especially as ICE relies less on the low-cost bed space offered by aging, rural county jails and signs contacts with for-profit private detention companies that include incentives such as guaranteed minimum-occupancy payments.
Congress’s expanding detention goals have been a boon to the contractors, especially Florida-based GEO Group and Tennessee-based Corrections Corp. of America.
The two companies have won hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ICE contracts in recent years while lobbying Congress on immigration enforcement issues.
Former ICE director Julie Myers Wood, who led the agency from 2006 to 2008 under President George W. Bush, said a congressional mandate for ICE to maintain a minimum number of detainees was a reasonable guideline at the outset of her tenure, when the Border Patrol was making more than a million arrests per year.
But today, she said, “it doesn’t make sense.”
Defenders of the bed mandate say it remains a useful tool to compel ICE to devote the maximum amount of resources to catching and deporting illegal migrants and foreign-born legal residents who commit crimes, including dangerous gang members, rapists and other violent felons.
With an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, they argue, there’s still a vast pool of potential deportees for the agency to pursue, or as Rep. John Abney Culberson (R-Tex.) put it, “plenty of customers.”
“We know ICE can fill more than 34,000 beds, so why would they use less?” said Culberson, a member of the House Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, which ties ICE funding to its compliance with the mandate.
Four countries — Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — accounted for 88 percent of all immigration detainees in 2011, the most recent year for which statistics were available.
Broad range of offenses
As illegal border crossings have declined, a growing portion of ICE detainees are legal U.S. residents who face deportation after completing a jail term or probation, targeted by ICE’s Secure Communities program.
Of the 33,391 immigrants held in federal custody on Sept. 7 — a single-day snapshot provided by ICE — 19,864 were convicted criminals, according to the agency.
Yet ICE’s definition of criminals includes a broad range of offenders, and a 2009 internal review found that only 11 percent of detainees had been convicted of violent crimes.
Jose Luis Vargas, a legal U.S. resident since 1986, was arrested by San Antonio police three years ago after neighbors reported a marijuana plant growing in his garden, among his tomatoes and prickly pear cactus.
Vargas, 52, said he had planned to make a poultice with the plant to alleviate joint pain from diabetes, which has left him with impaired vision and an amputated finger.
After two years on probation for the marijuana charge, ICE officials took Vargas into custody and tried to deport him to Mexico. He spent nearly three months in ICE’s South Texas Detention Facility until an immigration judge ordered his release.
“They didn’t treat me badly, but when I’d have to ride to the hospital, I’d miss lunch, and being in handcuffs so much was bad for my circulation,” Vargas said.
Immigrant rights advocates say detainees such as Vargas, who was two years shy of paying off the 30-year mortgage on his San Antonio home, should be allowed to remain under cheaper, less severe forms of ICE supervision, such as GPS-enabled electronic monitoring.
Those alternatives can cost less than $10 a day, they say, while the cost of keeping someone in immigration jail exceeds $150.
“The explicit purpose of ICE detaining people is to make sure they show up for their immigration hearings, so it would make sense to consider less costly, more humane alternatives that meet that same goal,” said Ruthie Epstein, legislative policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Immigrant advocates and attorneys say the majority of detainees taken into ICE custody today have convictions for lesser offenses such as drug possession — or no criminal record at all.
Nearly 48 percent of the 350,000 immigrants over the past 16 months who triggered an “ICE detainer” — a request by the agency that local jails or police hold an individual until ICE can pick them up — had no criminal convictions, not even traffic violations, according to the TRAC Immigration Project.
Almost half of all potential deportees who appear in immigration court are allowed to remain in the United States, according to TRAC data.
But many end up spending months, even years, in ICE custody while they await a ruling.
Detention alternatives
ICE officials have testified to Congress that Alternatives to Detention programs — geared toward legal residents with family and community ties — have had compliance rates of 96 percent with court-ordered appearances.
Yet the agency’s budget for alternatives is less than $100 million, dwarfed by its detention budget. The comprehensive immigration bill approved by the Senate in June would expand use of these methods, but the legislation faces increasingly dim prospects in the House.
ICE officials also note that they have limited discretion over which detainees are eligible for alternative forms of supervision. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 greatly expanded the scope of crimes that could trigger deportation.
More than two-thirds of the immigrants in ICE custody on Sept. 7, for instance, were “mandatory cases,” including drug offenders, violent offenders and anyone involved in prostitution-related crimes, among other violations that trigger automatic detention. Pending immigration legislation would give greater discretion to federal judges to assign detention on a case-by-case basis.
“We’re not forcing poor little people to be in there to meet a quota,” said Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee.
“The law is the law, and none of these people are being held contrary to the law,” he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/controversial-quota-drives-immigration-detention-boom/2013/10/13/09bb689e-214c-11e3-ad1a-1a919f2ed890_story.html?hpid=z4 

Harry Rosen - Dinner Therapy at 103

Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Harry Rosen with a photo of himself from his early 20s. Dining out energizes him, he says. 

September 27, 2013

A Nightly Dinner Out That’s Like Therapy

By COREY KILGANNON

It never fails, Harry Rosen said on Wednesday evening as he enjoyed another fine meal by himself in another top-rated Manhattan restaurant.

“Maybe because I’m eating alone at my age, people at other tables start conversations,” he said.

Yes, he tells them, he lives alone, in a modest studio apartment on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and he always eats dinner out, always orders the fish.

“They always ask my age, and I often lie and tell them I’m 90,” he said. “If I tell them my real age, it becomes the whole subject of conversation and makes it look like I’m looking for attention, which I’m not.”

Mr. Rosen is 103 but he doesn’t look a day over 90. His mother died at 53 and his father at 70, but he says he feels fine and has had no major operations or health problems.

“I read in a newspaper column a long time ago that the key to a long life is sleeping on your back, so I always did that,” said Mr. Rosen, who often finds that his bill has been paid by those friendly diners. Not that he needs it. He made a bundle with his office supply company and is spending it — $100 a night, on average — on dinners out.

Much of his work involved wooing clients over lunch and dinner, so after retiring a few years back because of hearing loss, he continued to put on a fine work suit every afternoon, grab his satchel, and head out to hail a yellow cab to one of his favorite restaurants. Café Boulud perhaps, on East 76th Street, or Boulud Sud near Lincoln Center, or Avra Estiatorio on East 48th Street.

“I haven’t eaten dinner home in many years,” said Mr. Rosen, who tried singles groups and other activities after his wife of 70 years, Lillian, died five years ago, when she was 95.

But nothing brought him the comfort of a fine restaurant.

“It’s my therapy, it lifts my spirits,” he said Wednesday evening while examining the menu with a magnifying glass at David Burke Townhouse on East 61st Street.

Twice a week, a server there greets him, walks him to his usual corner table and brings his regular glass of chardonnay, his appetizer of raw salmon and tuna, and then the swordfish, skin removed, with vegetables specially puréed for his dentures to handle.

“The food and the ambience, it’s my therapy — it gives me energy,” he said.

Mr. Rosen has lived long enough to see New York City fill with fine restaurants. In a city of foodies, he may be the oldest.

Call it payback for the meager meals he ate growing up in Russia, where as a boy, he recalled, he marched with protesters during the Russian Revolution. He and his family fled the pogroms, came through Ellis Island and moved into a railroad apartment on Pitt Street on the Lower East Side. By the time he was 11, young Harry’s meals improved to pickled herring sold from barrels on the street, and he worked as a delivery boy for pennies before taking a job at an office supply company.

“I knew it was the business for me, the same way you know you’re in love with a woman,” Mr. Rosen said. He started Radio Center Stationery in Midtown — back then, “you could look down Sixth Avenue and not see a single office building” — whose staff of 50 included his sons, Stan and Jerry. They regularly join him for dinner.

The deals to land clients like Walt Disney, ABC and the Hearst Corporation were made in top restaurants, Mr. Rosen said. You don’t win over the likes of Jack Linsky, the founder of Swingline staplers, by dining at dumps.

But as much as any fine meal, Mr. Rosen savors the memories of his deal making, including landing J. C. Penney with a great price on notepads, and fighting back from bankruptcy as computers encroached upon the industry.

On Wednesday, he backed up these recollections with photos and documents stored meticulously in folder boxes in his apartment.

“They’re called Pendaflex folders,” he said. “I was the first one in the industry to recognize they’d be a big seller.”

Mr. Rosen said he would like to find a regular dining companion. A recent six-month fling with a 90-year-old woman he met at synagogue did not work out.

“I’m still open to meeting someone,” he said, his eyes twinkling as he prepared to order coffee and dessert. “I still have the desire. That’s what counts.”

E-mail: character@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/nyregion/a-nightly-dinner-out-thats-like-therapy.html?_r=0

Lower East Side Movements

   New York City's Lower East Side on the move.....

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Luis Meat Market in the Essex Street Market.

September 27, 2013

A Move for the Essex Street Market

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

There’s a point at which even the most emphatic preservationist must acknowledge the indulgence of nostalgia. Not every building is in every instance worth saving; not every vanished way of life is worth enshrining. If you believe that cities ought to maximize their options for affordable living space rather than accommodate the best-off, then arguments for keeping things as they are often remain incompatible with arguments for how things ought to be. And yet, mourning is so often the reflex that overcomes us, whenever we hear that a certain patch of land in New York will dramatically alter, a certain structure will go to dust.

What we would be lamenting if we were to bemoan the construction of Essex Street Crossing, the 1.65-million-square-foot mixed-use complex, renderings of which the city recently released, is essentially the loss of parking lots that the city has for decades tried to reimagine. The development, which will be erected over various sites near the intersection of Essex and Delancey Streets in Lower Manhattan, will include 1,000 units of housing (both rental apartments and condominiums), half of which will be made permanently affordable to those families with yearly household incomes ranging from $31,000 to $133,000. The project includes a site for Head Start programs, a community center run by the 100-year-old Grand Street Settlement, office space, retail space, a rooftop farm and a museum.

The prospect of glass towers inevitably (and too often rightly) breeds skepticism. In this case, the planned relocation of the 73-year-old, city-run Essex Street Market, from one side of Delancey Street to what will be a glitzier building on the other, has been the focus of a certain degree of emotion and worry. Last year, the community circulated a petition to keep the market in its current location. Ironically, it wasn’t so much the utilitarian-looking 1940 building that seemed to move detractors as what the market had come to symbolize in an era of gentrification.

The Essex Street Market, along with other municipally run food halls, was established by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1940 to get rid of the pushcart culture he found so distasteful. For years preceding the current real estate boom, the market languished. In 2001, vendors occupied only 60 percent of the available space.

In the ’80s and ’90s, “it was very hard to get people inside,” said Ron Budinas, who with his husband and partner, Ira Stolzenberg, has operated Rainbo’s Fish in the market since the ’70s. “Things were dark and dreary; there were prostitutes outside,” he added. “It was horrendous.”

“People were too busy playing numbers,” he told me, and certain stalls simply seemed like fronts for heroin dealing.

In recent years, as the fortunes of the Lower East Side have changed, $22-a-pound cheese and smoked Scandinavian fish have come, and surprisingly, this turn of events has not been odious. The market’s bodegas and their unusual root vegetables have remained. Limes are still sold at six for a dollar.

More than any other shopping venue in the city, the market stands as a place where disparate demographics consume things together — where old Hispanic women from the housing projects, owners of $2 million lofts and artists in rent-controlled Ridge Street apartments coexist in a Jane Jacobs vision.

Is this utopian alchemy now doomed? In its new building, years away from completion, the market will double in size to approximately 30,000 square feet. The city has promised existing vendors, from whom it has sought suggestions, that rents will not exceed what they would be paying in the current location; that they will remain in continuous operation until the new structure is ready; that moving expenses will be taken care of; and that infrastructure will be vastly improved.

At the same time, plans for Essex Crossing include a supermarket, which could steer customers away and, as Mr. Budinas put it, “no one really believes that rents won’t go up.”

But if the city can actually do what it claims it is so passionately committed to doing and build on the social dynamic that has evolved at the Essex Street Market for the whole project rather than displace it, then in this instance development will finally mean what its proponents always say it does: progress, and progress of the kind that uses private financing to serve a greater good.

“You come here and it’s like Coney Island, like you’re going to join the circus,” Rhonda Kave, a chocolatier in the market and a slow convert to the new venture, told me. Quirkiness breeds affection and frustration in equal measure. “I’ll mourn this building,” she said, “even as I curse that the air-conditioning doesn’t work.”

E-MAIL: bigcity@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/nyregion/a-move-for-the-essex-street-market.html?_r=0

Published: September 27, 2013

Microeconomics: A City in Miniature

Randy Hage started photographing New York storefronts in the late 1990s, on visits from Los Angeles, and he fell in love with the stories they told: the hand-painted signs in colors of undisguised optimism, the inevitable rust and decay, the economic pressures exerted by the newer shops creeping in. When he returned on subsequent visits, the stories were often complete, the bodega replaced by an expensive restaurant, the video store by a Duane Reade. “I’d talk to the store owners, and they’d say they were glad there was less crime, but they also missed the old people, and they were vexed by the rent increases that were pushing them out, so they wouldn’t take advantage of the improvements.”
Mr. Hage, who builds models and props for movies and television, decided to arrest this history, at least on a small scale, by making painstakingly exact scale models of the storefronts he photographed. “It became a way of documenting the processes of gentrification and urban renewal,” he said. An exhibition of these dioramas, “Fleeting Moments,” will be at the Flower Pepper Gallery in Pasadena, Calif., from Oct. 5 to Nov. 15.
Mr. Hage was initially drawn to the ironwork of SoHo, but now he has to go to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, or farther to find streetscapes that speak to him. “I’ll go to Flatbush Avenue and walk from Prospect Park out to the end, because that’s what Manhattan used to be,” he said. “This show is about rekindling experiences of what it’s like to be in those neighborhoods, or bringing back a taste or a smell, those visceral recollections that mean so much to us.” He added a lament for the city today. “I think 7-Elevens are the bane of so many people’s neighborhoods,” he said.

— John Leland

 A minature by Randy Hage.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/29/nyregion/album-storefronts.html

More info on Randy Hage and his work -

http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2013/09/new-work-from-randy-hage.html 

http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2010/07/model-new-york.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mindseyeminiatures/9843318925/

Expanding Workers' Representation

From The New York Times - different ways for workers to have a voice -

Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press

At a Workers Defense Project protest in 2011, top, at the Texas Capitol in Austin, mock coffins symbolized workers killed on the job.

August 10, 2013

The Workers Defense Project, a Union in Spirit

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

LIKE most construction workers who come to see Patricia Zavala, the two dozen men who crowded into her office in Austin, Tex., one afternoon in March had a complaint.

The workers, most of them Honduran immigrants, had jobs applying stucco to the exterior of a 17-story luxury student residence. It was difficult, dangerous work, but that was to be expected. What upset them was that for the previous two weeks their crew leader had not paid them; each was owed about $1,000.

Ms. Zavala, the workplace justice coordinator at the Workers Defense Project, listened to their stories and then spent a month failing to persuade the contractors to pay the back wages. So Ms. Zavala, 27, a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the daughter of a Peruvian immigrant, turned to what she calls the nuclear option: the workers filed a lien on the building site. That legal maneuver snarls any effort to make transactions on the property and sometimes causes banks and investors to freeze financing.

The lien, along with a threatened protest march, quickly got the attention of the dormitory’s developer, American Campus Communities, and the general contractor, Harvey-Cleary Builders. Within hours, Harvey-Cleary arranged a meeting between the stucco contractor and the unpaid workers, and, presto, Harvey-Cleary and the contractor, Pillar Construction, agreed to pay the $24,767 owed to the workers.

“Liens are the very best tool workers have,” said Cristina Tzintzún, executive director of the Workers Defense Project. Instead of dealing with subcontractors, she said, “you’re negotiating with the project owner and general contractor. They can no longer shift responsibility and say: ‘I paid the guy downriver. It’s out of my hands.’ ”

The Workers Defense Project, founded in 2002, has emerged as one of the nation’s most creative organizations for immigrant workers. Its focus is the Texas construction industry, which employs more than 600,000 workers, about half of whom, several studies suggest, are unauthorized immigrants.

Immigrant workers, especially those who are undocumented, are especially vulnerable to abuse by contractors. Each year, the Workers Defense Project, which has 2,000 dues-paying members, receives about 500 complaints from workers who say they were cheated out of overtime or denied a water break in Texas’ scorching summer heat or stuck with huge hospital bills for an on-the-job injury.

The Workers Defense Project is one of 225 worker centers nationwide aiding many of the country’s 22 million immigrant workers. The centers have sprouted up largely because labor unions have not organized in many fields where immigrants have gravitated, like restaurants, landscaping and driving taxis. And there is another reason: many immigrants feel that unions are hostile to them. Some union members say that immigrants, who are often willing to work for lower wages, are stealing their jobs.

“The Workers Defense Project is not like a union — it welcomes everyone,” said Luis Rodriguez, a Mexican immigrant who sought the group’s help after he lost a finger in a construction accident. “It is always willing to take in more people and help more people.”

At a recent Workers Defense Project meeting — they are held every Tuesday night — the atmosphere was part pep rally, part educational session, part social hour. After a dinner of tacos, rice and beans, about 60 workers plotted strategy for a demonstration against the developer of a 1,000-room Marriott hotel. A skit mocking the developer drew raucous laughter. The energy and sense of solidarity were reminiscent of what America’s labor unions had many decades ago, before they started to stumble and stagnate.

Worker centers, which are among the most vigorous champions of overhauling immigration laws, coalesce around issues or industries. For example, there is Domestic Workers United, which persuaded New York and Hawaii to enact a bill of rights for housekeepers and nannies, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has gotten most Florida tomato growers to adopt a workers’ code of conduct and to increase pay by at least 20 percent. Young Workers United played an important role in persuading the San Francisco City Council to enact a paid-sick-days law and a minimum wage of $10.55 an hour. With labor unions losing members and influence, these centers are increasingly seen as an important alternative form of workplace advocacy, although no one expects them to be nearly as effective as unions in winning raises, pensions or paid vacations.

“Worker centers are filling a void by reaching out to a work force that is particularly hard to reach out to,” said Victor Narro, a specialist on immigrant workers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jefferson Cowie, a labor historian at Cornell, said: “Worker centers are part of the broad scramble of how to improve things for workers outside the traditional union/collective bargaining context. They’ve become little laboratories of experimentation.”

As worker centers go, the Workers Defense Project in Austin has racked up an unusual number of successes. It has won more than $1 million in back pay over the last decade on behalf of workers alleging violations of minimum wage and overtime laws. A report it wrote on safety problems spurred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to investigate 900 construction sites in Texas — leading to nearly $2 million in fines.

And, despite a liberal image, the group made common cause with law-abiding contractors to persuade the state’s Republican-dominated legislature to approve a law that made wage theft — an employer’s deliberate failure to pay wages due — a criminal offense. The Workers Defense Project has just 18 employees, and its executive director, Ms. Tzintzún, 31, earns just $43,000 a year. But it managed to bring mighty Apple to the negotiating table. The group extracted a promise that construction workers on Apple’s new Austin office complex would receive at least $12 an hour, not the more commonly paid $10 — as well as workers’ compensation coverage.

The workers’ compensation pledge was an important victory. The construction industry in Texas has a higher fatality rate than that in most other states, but Texas is the only one that does not require building contractors to provide workers’ compensation to cover an injured worker’s hospital bills and disability benefits.

“We like organizing here in Texas,” Ms. Tzintzún said. “Things can only go up because working conditions are so awful.”

AS soon as word got out in March 2012 that Apple was planning to build a $300 million operations center in Austin, the Workers Defense Project sprang into action. Gregorio Casar, the group’s business liaison — his title might more fittingly be thorn-in-the-side — learned that Apple hoped to receive tax incentives in exchange for promising to create 3,600 full-time jobs with salaries averaging at least $63,000.

But Mr. Casar, a University of Virginia graduate who is the son of Mexican immigrants, assumed that Apple’s construction contractors would pay much less than that. The typical wage for nonunion construction laborers in Texas is just $10 an hour — about $20,000 a year.

Relying on relationships that the Workers Defense Project had built over the years, Mr. Casar, 24, persuaded the Austin City Council to require Apple to hold talks with the group as a condition for $8.6 million in city tax incentives. (The group had previously persuaded the council to enact Texas’ first ordinance requiring rest and water breaks for construction workers.)

In these discussions, Mr. Casar demanded that Apple’s construction contractors pay at least $12 an hour, provide safety training and workers’ compensation, and allow the group’s representatives to go to the site to inspect working conditions.

“Like many companies, Apple resisted at first because they wanted total flexibility,” Mr. Casar said.

So the group turned up the heat. On March 22, just before the council’s hearing on Apple’s tax incentives, 100 protesters demonstrated outside City Hall. Inside the council chambers, Jose Nieto, a demolition worker affiliated with the Workers Defense Project, testified about how he had once nearly bled to death when a large mirror he was removing from a hotel wall broke and sliced into his arm. His hospital bill, which included multiple operations, was more than $80,000. He had no workers’ compensation to pay for the operations or support his family.

Mr. Nieto implored the council not to grant Apple the tax incentives unless it accepted the Workers Defense Project’s demands. “It is in your power to prevent things like this from happening to other people,” he told the council.

Several weeks of negotiations ensued. Apple — then under criticism for conditions at the Foxconn plants in China that build its products — agreed to almost all of the group’s demands.

“Apple is a strong supporter of workers’ rights around the world,” Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said recently. “We’ve had a productive dialogue with the Workers Defense Project since we first heard from them last year. We shared many of the group’s goals.”

Ms. Tzintzún has an explanation for these victories. “We make it very hard for people to oppose us publicly,” she said. “We know what we’re asking for is the bare minimum, and we remind everybody of that.”

In taking on one of the world’s most successful companies, the Workers Defense Project showed how far it has come. Six years ago, it had just two employees: Ms. Tzintzún, then a senior at the University of Texas, and Emily Timm, now the group’s policy director, who had just graduated from Brown University and was working part time at a homeless shelter where many low-paid immigrant construction workers passed through.

The group limped along with insecure financing until 2009. That year, three immigrant workers plunged 11 floors when their scaffold collapsed in Austin; all three died. A week later, the Workers Defense Project released a 68-page report on worker safety.

The report had been a year in the making. Prepared with the help of University of Texas researchers, it found that two-thirds of 312 construction workers surveyed had not received basic health and safety training and that three-fourths had no health insurance. Most shocking, it calculated that one construction worker died in Texas every two-and-a-half days from work-related injuries.

To draw attention to the report — and to provide a television-friendly shot — Ms. Tzintzún and Ms. Timm held a news conference in front of 142 pairs of empty work boots. That was the number of construction workers who died in Texas in 2007. The report received media attention across Texas and turned the group overnight into an influential voice in a state where labor unions are weak.

The group’s higher profile has also meant more criticism. Stan Marek, chairman of a construction company based in Houston, called the group “a junkyard dog.” “They keep coming at you,” he said.

Scott Haeglin, project manager for Harvey-Cleary, voiced some annoyance with the group for filing the nettlesome lien and holding a protest march despite the settlement. “We take pride in treating our workers well and resolving these matters,” he said.

Phil Thoden, president of the Austin chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America, said: “They have a tendency to paint the entire industry in a negative light. It’s frustrating that when there’s an incident on a job site, they help give it tremendous media coverage and it leaves the public with the impression that contractors are doing nothing to protect their workers.”

Industry lobbyists have blocked many of the group’s initiatives in the State Capitol. A proposal to stop the common practice of classifying workers as independent contractors — allowing construction contractors to avoid providing benefits or paying overtime — died in committee. So did a proposal to require workers’ compensation in construction.

Some business-backed groups have begun a new attack on worker centers in recent weeks, calling them union-front groups set up to circumvent legal requirements that unions face, like strict financial disclosure.

Not all businesses object to the centers. The Workers Defense Project has made allies of many who dislike being undercut by what they call “low-road contractors” — for instance, those that do not provide workers’ compensation.

“It makes no sense — in Texas I’m required to have insurance on the cargo I haul up a construction elevator, but not on the workers in that elevator,” said Andy Anderson, owner of Linden Steel, which provides steel and labor to building projects.

Impressed by the Workers Defense Project’s success in helping immigrant workers and highlighting job safety, the Ford Foundation and others have showered it with grants. As a result, the project’s budget has swelled to $1 million — four times what it was just four years ago. The money has helped finance building site inspectors and safety and computer classes.

Many worker centers rely heavily on grants. “We’re flavor of the month right now,” Ms. Tzintzún said. “I worry what happens to our funding when we’re not.”

Henry Allen, the recently retired executive director of the Discount Foundation, one of the group’s first benefactors, voiced confidence in its future. “They’re a real model,” he said. “If there’s a future for organizing for worker justice, I think it’s the Workers Defense Project.”

LUIS RODRIGUEZ, 42, a short and stocky man with a thick mustache and a deep, bass voice, came to the Workers Defense Project early last year. A heavy industrial drill had torn off his right index finger as he dislodged it from a wall. Doctors could not reattach the finger, and after 20 years of construction work, Mr. Rodriguez was suddenly too disabled to work.

That contractor provided workers’ comp, but the checks did not arrive — and when he went to the state workers’ comp office, he ran into one obstacle after another. “A lady working there whispered to me, ‘You should go to the Workers Defense Project,’ ” he said.

The project helped him get his checks, and it provided him with a cause: worker empowerment. “I was really lost when I went to them,” he said. “I was one of those people who didn’t know anything. But now I know my rights. Now I won’t let some jerk step on me.”

Educating immigrant workers and turning them into activists and leaders is central to the project’s mission. Immigrants make up half of its board, and Mr. Rodriguez is on its Construction Workers Committee. “No union can substitute for what the Workers Defense Project does,” he said. “A union is a more closed group.”

Unions often help workers win better wages and safer workplaces, but unionizing is especially hard in right-to-work states like Texas. The large number of unauthorized immigrants makes it even harder, because many of them fear that outright union support could lead to deportation. (The Workers Defense Project does not ask whether workers who come to it are in the United States legally.)

In the project’s early days, unions often viewed it as an antagonist, a supporter of immigrants who stole jobs from Americans. But unions now often work and march alongside the Workers Defense Project. The change dates from its influential 2009 report about the dangers of construction work in Texas.

“If you had asked me a few years ago, would we be working with a group of nonunion workers to help them better their lives, we’d ask, why would we help people that are taking our jobs?” said Michael Cunningham, executive director of the Texas Building and Construction Trades Council. “Well, the fact is they already have our jobs.

“By working together,” he continued, “we’re trying to drive out low-road contractors that are driving down wages.”

As organized labor strains to reverse its membership decline, unions have established an uneasy alliance with many worker centers, hoping that they might someday help bring immigrant workers into established unions.

“There’s a need to experiment with new ways to reach workers who haven’t been reached by unions,” said Anna Fink, a liaison between the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and foundations that help finance worker centers. “The labor movement doesn’t have the deep trust that worker centers have built with immigrant worker communities.”

Worker centers have done much to discourage wage theft and have marginally increased the pay of some workers. But they do not begin to have the power that unions once had to vault workers into a middle-class life.

Mr. Rodriguez may feel empowered, but he is also poor. After losing his finger, he could not work for seven months. His family of five lost its apartment and moved into a trailer. His son who is now 20 quit high school to help support the family, and to his great shame, Mr. Rodriguez had to cancel his daughter’s quinceañera celebration.

When he returned to work, he found a job framing walls and staircases that paid $11 an hour, $440 a week. That, he said, was not enough, considering that his rent is $850 a month, not to mention costs for electricity, telephone, gasoline, car and food. Some months he makes ends meet only because of that 20-year-old son, who earns money as a disc jockey. A few weeks ago, Mr. Rodriguez found a job paying $14 an hour. He hopes it lasts.

“Eleven dollars an hour isn’t really enough,” he said. “It’s difficult to survive on that.”

But he is grateful to have survived. Many construction workers do not, a truth brought home in 2011, when the Workers Defense Project organized a haunting procession to the State Capitol with 138 mock coffins, commemorating all the Texas construction workers who died in job-related incidents in 2009.

Now, each year, the group commemorates a Day of the Fallen. The workers at the defense project come together around tragedy and hurt, but with a larger purpose, “Now,” Mr. Rodriguez said, “I tell other workers how to stand up for their rights.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/business/the-workers-defense-project-a-union-in-spirit.html?pagewanted%253Dall&_r=0

Fruit Wines & Vinegars - Find A Niche, Learn From Mistakes

     Finding a niche, learning from perceived mistakes.........  From The Eastern Ontario AgriNews -

September 2013, Vol. 37, No. 9

AgriNews Interactive    www.agrinewsinteractive.com

Blue Gypsy Wines unlocking unique flavours
OXFORD MILLS It has been well documented just how difficult it can be to grow grapes for wine in Eastern Ontario. Knowing that it requires a full-time approach, Louis Gaal and his wife Claire Faguy decided to take an alternate approach when they got into the wine business in 2008, with fruit wines.
"It all started for us back in college. We would make our own beer and wine for fun out of kits," said Gaal. "We spent some time living in New York State and were right in the heart of a wine country. We would take tours of the wineries on weekends but found ourselves going back to the same ones, ones that had fruit wine."
The couple returned to Canada in 2006 and started looking into a winery of their own. They bought the 62-acre land to build their winery in 2008 and after going through the processes, they found investors and opened in 2011. "We had a solid business plan," said Gaal. "However, it is considered a high-risk business so it took longer to get financing."
Gaal and Faguy built their current facility themselves with the help of their friends. "It was more work than we ever expected," noted Faguy.
They decided on fruit wine because they could not afford to care for grapes full time. In addition, they would be the only fruit winery in the area and knew the potential.
In their first year, the two set up two picnic tables, which are still present at the Oxford Mills location. One had the wines available for tasting, the other was for payment. People seemed to enjoy the initial wines, so much so that Gaal and Faguy sold enough in that first year to qualify as a farm.
The key for Blue Gypsy Wines is that they do not add sulfates to their wine as preservatives. Faguy is very sensitive to them so they are quite careful with their production. In addition, while not certified organic, they do observe organic practices on the fruit they grow for their pure fruit wine. "We can t control what we bring in but we do observe organic practices with everything we grow," said Gaal.
Locally, Blue Gypsy Wines brings in apples from Smyth s Orchard in Dundela and Cranberries from Upper Canada Cranberries in Greely.
"We have between five and seven acres that we grow strawberries, raspberries, black berries, black currant, cider apples and rhubarb on. The rest we bring in but we try to buy locally whenever possible," added Gaal.
"We do no pesticide spraying at all. There is too much going on with the wild life around here. For the most part, spraying is done for appearance, but that doesn t matter to me because I am just going to toss it in a barrel," said Gaal.
Gaal remembers the first year. After making wines in 2010 they released a cranberry, strawberry, raspberry and maple. "We developed recipes based on what we thought would be good and then tried it in small batches."
They also did surveys in both Ontario and Quebec to test the waters for certain flavours.
In 2013, Blue Gypsy offered seven varieties: apple, blueberry, cranberry, maple, ginger, sangria and chocolate mead.
For the most part, the operation is run by Gaal and Faguy, yet they do have one friend who comes in and works "the bar" and is fully knowledgeable about the wines.
The drought last year hit the winery hard as it did to all growers in the region. But when asked about what other challenges of producing in Eastern Ontario are, Gaal gets a bit of a chuckle. "One thing we found out is that things turn to vinegar. In 2012, we lost a batch of blueberry because it turned to vinegar. I thought oh no we are going to lose thousands, but then we realized that it was actually very good vinegar.
So we started producing that too. It has been a hit and we end up making more off of it as vinegar because there are not the same taxes that apply to wines," said Gaal.
The taxes are less favorable on fruit wine producers than on grape and fruit wines cannot qualify to be VQA. That has made it harder for Blue Gypsy Wines to gain exposure. "We would like to get into the LCBO," says Faguy. "But we wouldn t be able to make anything off what we sell. We would have to write it off as an advertising cost and just use it to gain exposure."
This season looks like it will be another strong one for the winery. Their production is up from last year, but construction in the area has hurt their sales a bit. Still, certain flavours like the cranberry, blueberry and chocolate mead are selling like crazy.
In terms of the future of Blue Gypsy Wines, they are planning on using their cider apples to eventually make ice cider. In addition, they are experimenting with rhubarb and black currant flavours. But what Gaal really sees in the future is actually in their mistake, their white vinegars. Currently, they have four varieties: apple, blueberry, cranberry and raspberry. "The vinegar is huge! For what started as a mistake, it has out sold some wine and because it is not taxed the same way we keep more of the profits and can sell it at farmers markets," explained Gaal.
It appears that Blue Gypsy Wines will continue to experiment with interesting wine and vinegar flavours and with the way their customers buy it up, they should continue to be successful. 

http://www.agrinewsinteractive.com/fullstory.htm?ArticleID=13312&ShowSection=AgriBusiness

Eminent Domain To Protect Homeowners

An interesting and unique use of eminent domain -

Richmond’s rules: Why one California town is keeping Wall Street up at night

By Lydia DePillis, Updated: October 5, 2013

Very early on a Wednesday morning in September, the city council of Richmond, Calif., did something that no American city had yet managed: It voted for a plan to wrest underwater mortgages from the hands of Wall Street, depriving investors of tens
of millions of dollars in order to save borrowers from foreclosure.
For communities across the land -- North Las Vegas, San Bernardino County, Calif., Chicago -- where too many are stuck with house payments beyond what they can afford, this was the nuclear option. While those cities backed away, Richmond hit the
button.
The mechanism? Eminent domain, the power of the government to seize private property for public use, which has not typically been used to help poor neighborhoods. After five years of the federal government gently nudging banks to forgive homeowners debt they took on in better days, cities have found a legal weapon the financial industry truly fears.
The stability of those housing markets, and the banks that profit from it, could depend on the fallout.
The strategy's complexity has left stakeholders to lean on dogfight rhetoric: From the community activists, "Save homes, stop foreclosures." And the Realtors, "Stop investor greed." And the lawyers for the investors, "Prevent this unconstitutional
investment scheme."
In short, here's how it would work: Richmond condemns mortgages on homes that are now worth far less than what the borrower owes. The note holders -- investors such as pension funds and mutual funds -- are forced to settle for the current fair market value. The city pays for this with cash from a new set of investors, who now own the mortgage. The new price is set by the current market, and the homeowner settles into a more manageable loan.
It's that smashing of the bond between lender and debtor that animates investors. They've acted aggressively to stop it, lobbying the mayor and council members directly. Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank, on behalf of scores of investment funds, sued to stop the plan. The securities industry points out that the plan would also hurt pensioners who own pieces of Richmond's mortgages. Indeed, last week, California Public Employees' Retirement System -- the safety net for some Richmond workers -- expressed concerns.
Richmond couldn't get insurance to shield it from a crushing judgment -- if it lost its bid to spare struggling homeowners, the city could find itself underwater. In the backlash to the plan, the market boycotted the city's most recent bond issuance, forcing it to withdraw the $34 million offer, which was supposed to refinance earlier debt.
Richmond's leaders stared hard at the threats. In the end, it seemed to only harden their resolve.
"They sold everybody a dream, and said 'you have to own a home, or you're not American,'" said Council member Joel Myrick, explaining to an auditorium packed with yellow T-shirts (those for seizing the mortgages) and red (those against it) why he
voted in favor of using eminent domain. "I am not willing to allow people to be dependent on the generosity of these same banks that are suing us in order to be able to pay off their loan before they die."
After the council vote, a district court judge threw out the investors' complaint as premature -- not on its merits, but because the city hadn't actually seized any mortgages yet.
"This is not a victory for the program and only postpones the day that Richmond and Mortgage Resolution Partners will have to defend this program in court," the banks' lawyers said in a statement.
A courtroom victory for Richmond, a town of about 100,000, could give cities around the country the courage to act -- and potentially help keep millions of people in their homes. But even a win could spell defeat for Richmond if the financial industry cuts
off lending to make an example of the city.
So why hit that button? And what would it mean if other cities did the same?
Three minds, one conclusion
The plan for using eminent domain to seize mortgages has at least three parents: Cornell Law professor Robert Hockett, Loyola University's Lauren Willis and Harvard's Howell Jackson, who independently came out with similar proposals as the housing
market was starting to collapse.
"We all three came to the idea more or less at the same day back in September of 2008," said Hockett, who went on to become the strategy's chief academic exponent. "It became clear that housing prices were going to drop in a profound way, and that
there were going to be a lot of foreclosures."
They noticed two things.
First, although it was in the banks' interest to write down the principal on loans to avoid an outright default -- after all, it's better to get something than nothing -- the mortgages that had been reshuffled into pools of securities owned by many different investors were much more difficult to modify, because so many different investors would have to sign off on the change. Because of that, these "private label securitized" loans are much more likely to default than the banks' portfolio loans.
And second, governments could help unwind that tangle by using eminent domain to facilitate an exchange between a bunch of investors who were likely to lose most of their money to a few other investors who'd give them cash up front equal to the fair market value of the loan. In effect, it's breaking what Yale housing economist Robert Shiller calls real estate's collective action problem, wherein a large group of investors can't coordinate to act in their shared best interests.
At first, Hockett thought he might be able to get it done on the federal level, through the Troubled Assets Relief Program. He says he had strong interest from someone high up on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign team, but it quickly waned.
"It became clear they were going to bail out the banks directly, rather than help them indirectly, by helping the homeowners," Hockett said.
Then-Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) proposed his own version of the idea, a throwback to a New Deal-era government agency that bought distressed mortgages from banks and relaxed requirements on their borrowers, taking the edge off a ballooning real estate crisis. It attracted some interest on the Hill, but didn't make it into the final mortgage relief programs, which ultimately helped far fewer people than envisioned.
Frustrated with the feds, Hockett started throwing around the idea with a friend of his, a former Rhodes Scholar and banker named John Vlahoplus. They decided their plan could better be accomplished by states and municipalities. To do that, they'd need money.
Passionate support
The day before Richmond's city council meeting, on the steps of San Francisco's City Hall, City Supervisor David Campos (D) held a news conference to announce his support for Richmond's plan. Backed by homeowners bearing the wonky slogan, "We need principal reduction," speakers railed against banks like Wells Fargo.
"For the rich, eminent domain works," preached the local Archbishop Franzo King. "But when the poor or black or brown people see it as a solution to a problem the banks don't feel like dealing with, we're on the wrong foot. We're going to put these
banksters on the run!"
At the edge of the sidewalk, a man with a white beard, baseball cap and sunglasses leaned against a lamppost, watching quietly. He's actually the guy responsible for it all: Steven Gluckstern, a former insurance executive who had teamed up with Vlahoplus to co-found Mortgage Resolution Partners, the firm that's lining up the capital -- from hedge funds, for instance -- to buy any mortgages that Richmond might seize. After that happens, Mortgage Resolution Partners would help the homeowner refinance through a Federal Housing Administration loan, and earns a $4,500 fee per successful transaction.
Gluckstern knows the process is more complicated than the ralliers are making it out to be -- for one, the banks pushing back don't own these mortgages, but they are obligated to act on behalf of the investors who do.
Even so, "it's helpful to have a bad guy," Gluckstern says. Wells Fargo, headquartered across the plaza, makes a good one. This is the kind of activism that was missing in San Bernardino County, one jurisdiction to have seriously considered using eminent domain and opted against it after a sustained opposition campaign and little community support. Besides, he says, the financial services and real estate industries are going all out.
"The opposition is so vehement because it's the 'shoot-the-puppy' strategy," Gluckstern said, in his shiny Volkswagen SUV on the way to his storefront personal office in a cute neighborhood in the southern part of the city (Mortgage Resolution Partners used to maintain an office downtown but closed it to save money). "If this can take hold in one community, and other communities see that it can happen, and the sky doesn't fall, and people see that homeowners can be kept in their homes, you're going to see the tidal wave, which the other side's figured out."
That's an accurate read of the situation. In court filings, the banks suing Richmond estimated that investors stood to lose $200 million if all eligible city homes received write-downs. Fannie Mae alone says that if the program were extended nationwide,
the government-owned mortgage giant could theoretically lose $24 billion. Even if this crisis is unique and there's no reason Richmond would need to use eminent domain in the future, as Gluckstern argues, the industry would much rather not see anybody
else use it even once. Besides, they worry, what's next: Underwater car loans? Student loans? Credit card debt?
"There is no doubt, investors will not put capital to work in a jurisdiction where there is a threat of a taking," said Tim Cameron, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association's point person on the issue. "We're going to go to those with the best credit, and where the belief in property rights are sound."
For Gluckstern, the bigger problem is getting any support from entities in the Washington establishment whose opinions carry weight. The Federal Housing Finance Administration has warned it will stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from lending in jurisdictions that use eminent domain to seize mortgages. Since private lending is at a standstill, that would effectively put Richmond's real estate market into a deep freeze.
While national fair housing organizations condemned FHFA's threat as "redlining," since it would cut off credit to a disproportionate number of Hispanics and African Americans, other big groups - such as the National Housing Institute, National League of Cities and National Housing Conference -- have been skeptical of the city's approach as well.
"I just don't think cities are going to want to take up the work," said Linda Couch, policy director at the National Low Income Housing Commission. "Implementing eminent domain and buying up the properties is the easy part. How do you know that a city manager is going to know how to right size a mortgage? Does the city then become responsible for evicting people if things don't work?"
Even credit unions, which made lower-risk loans and are rooted in their communities, decry the plan. David Green is president and chief executive of the Contra Costa County Federal Credit Union, which serves city, county and state employees. He says
he's maintained strict underwriting standards and has foreclosed on only three homes in the past few years. Green says he doesn't think investors should be bilked through eminent domain.
"I don't agree with what they're doing, especially since it hits so close to home," Green said. "I think their heart's in the right place, I just think it's the wrong vehicle for doing it."
Gluckstern has made the rounds in Washington, too, with little success: Richmond's own congressman, George Miller (D), only reluctantly sent a letter encouraging Bank of America to do more principal write-downs.
Gluckstern, frustrated by the timidity, is starting to sound like an Occupy Wall Street person himself.
"I think most politicians don't give a [expletive] about the middle class," he said. "I think they wish they'd go away. It's hard to know what to say to people about the fact that the rich keep getting richer -- how long do you think we can sustain that? It's way too unequal, and the consequences for my grandchildren are going to be severe." It seems he's given this spiel before, including the doomsaying conclusion.
"And then what happens? The French Revolution."
Entrenched positions
Neutral parties are hard to find in Richmond.
Mortgage Resolution Partners has lots of investors to pay back (it's spent more than $7 million promoting the plan and paying Richmond's legal fees). Underwater homeowners are eager to see their debt reduced and loans locked in at a lower interest rate. The pension and mutual funds that own the securitized mortgages don't like the precedent of government seizing their assets.
Real estate agents don't own the homes or the mortgages. They mostly care about a healthy market. But having decided eminent domain would be a disaster, they signed on as ground troops for the opposition. In Richmond, the local Realtors' association
detailed 30-year veteran Jeff Wright to lead the charge.
As part of that mission, Wright offered a tour of the city to prove that Richmond isn't the hardscrabble suburb it's been made out to be -- and that it doesn't need to take the kind of drastic measures the city council is contemplating.
Wright pulled up to the El Cerrito Bay Area Rapid Transit railway station in a silver Mercedes and shades, wearing a starched shirt with gold cuff links and a carefully tended goatee, easily recognizable from the glossy attack mailers warning that
Wall Street was coming to "take a bite out of" Richmond's homes. First stop: The house in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of South Richmond where he grew up. Wright scans for boarded-up houses and finally finds one.
"If you see a news account of Richmond, they take the picture here, because that gives the slant of poverty and not looking so great," he said, punctuating his sentences with pauses and hand gestures. Then we drove west toward Point Richmond, which has breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay and large houses with expensive cars in their driveways.
"Did you know that some of the houses on the list are in here?" Wright asks, affecting astonishment. "Guess they need some help, too."
That's one of the pro-eminent domain contingent's public relations failures. They included all owner occupied underwater mortgages locked up in private label securities on their initial list of 624, even those that were current on their payments. While
activists and city officials have said they'd probably reevaluate whether the borrower really needed help before seizing the mortgage, opponents have successfully used the cluster of listed homes in wealthy neighborhoods to characterize the whole
program as an indiscriminate bailout for the wealthy.
Our tour of not-struggling Richmond continued.
"Okay, this is a country club," Wright said, pausing for effect as we passed a gated golf course. "The Richmond Country Club." And then, climbing the heights behind it: "This is called Country Club Vista. Country Club Vista: Why? Because it overlooks
a country club. This is poor, impoverished Richmond," he finished, chuckling to himself.
The Realtors' opposing argument breaks down into three basic parts.
The first is self-interested. They're terrified of giving lenders and bond buyers any reason to look twice at Richmond, which is what appeared to happen when nobody bit at the $34 million bond issue it floated in July. Wright uses a grocery store analogy
to explain his fear.
"All prices being the same. If I reach for a can of beans and there's a dent in the can, you know what I do? I put it back on the shelf and get the can that has no dent in it," he said. "The contents might be okay, but I don't want the dented can. In a sense, Richmond's bonds are like a dented can."
Is that actually how bond buyers operate? Yes and no. Deborah Lucas, a municipal finance expert at MIT's Sloan School of Business, points out they could see the threat of eminent domain as a signal that the bonds are risky, even if they buy Gluckstern's
argument that a seizure would never happen again. At the same time, though, bond markets are broad and deep. "The effect of a boycott by some investors would only be to drive up yields, which would attract others to take their place," Lucas said.
The second sort of argument the Realtors make is ideological. Richmond conservatives also fought Green Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin on a proposal to tax soda, which Wright sees as evidence of a "nanny state," just like intervening to break a contract with a lender to help out someone who shouldn't have taken out that loan in the first place, he says.
"Did you have to buy that property? No, you didn't," he said. "If people can show me where their signature was forged on the document, or you can show me you had to sign under duress, lender put you in a chair, tied you up, put a gun to your head
and said 'you're going to do this loan,' I will shut the hell up and go to the other team."
Advocates respond that personal responsibility is irrelevant: In a world where more people held good jobs and banks had lower standards, paying a high price seemed perfectly reasonable. After all, many people had fared well in a booming housing market.
Besides, the thinking goes, in the aggregate investors would be better off getting fair market value now than losing the entire value of those securitized loans that tend to fail at about a 30 percent higher rate than regular bank-owned ones.
The last argument has to do with what's good for the neighborhoods. Wright figures that there's no inherent harm in a foreclosure -- if someone defaults and leaves, the market is hot enough that someone else will take their place.
"So now the family that got foreclosed on. They're gone, that's unfortunate, but now another family's in there," he said. "So it's transitioned in the same way as my neighbor's, who's put his house up for sale. Transition is transition. One's voluntary, one's involuntary. What harm is caused to the community by one family moving out and another family moving in?"
But this is the biggest point eminent domain advocates have to drive home: That foreclosures are so devastating to a community, and more of them are so inevitable, that it's worth risking the wrath of markets to make them go away. So they'll talk about
how foreclosures lower property values and therefore tax revenue, replace stable homeowners with investor-owned homes full of shiftless renters and demoralize a community. In Richmond, it's been enough to convince city leaders they have little left
to lose.
Too late for many
The tragic thing, for Richmond and other cities, is that even if they decide to use eminent domain, it will be too late for many of the worst affected. Two thousand Richmond homes have gone into foreclosure in three years, and about 1,600 more homes with underwater mortgages are wrapped up in private-label securities. Meanwhile, housing values are on the rise, which means that they're less valuable for investors that might supply the funds to buy them from those securitized pools.
Nationally the situation is similar; the plan wouldn't help 4.4 million households that Corelogic estimates have foreclosed since the beginning of the financial crisis in September 2008. Another 4.5 million investor-owned loans are still underwater,
by Hockett's estimates.
Some Richmond residents have adapted to the new normal.
Take Ricardo Cabral. He lost his house in Oakland to foreclosure eight years ago after losing his job in construction, his back wracked with the pain of decades as an ironworker. He moved with his wife and daughter to Richmond, where they rented
a house from a friend until that house was foreclosed on as well.
They found another place in the city's notoriously run-down and dangerous Iron Triangle, renting it for $1,200 per month. Cabral, who stays home with four chihuahuas while his wife goes to work in Marin County, keeps the lawn neat and tidy. They try to ignore the gunshots that ring out at night and figure they'll stay as long as they can, having given up on the idea of actually buying a house ever again.
"I don't own the home, but I'm very happy," Cabral said. "I'm here to stay in Richmond, not Oakland."
Cabral is hopeful that the city will be able to pull off its plan, but he's skeptical.
"If it comes true for the people, hooray for them, hooray for Richmond," he said. "If you can back your story up and say, 'Hey, you're for the underdog, you're going to help people keep their homes,' I'm all for Richmond. Right now, you're just a piece of paper saying this is what you're going to do, and you ain't done nothing, yet."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/05/richmonds-rules-why-one-california-town-is-keeping-wall-street-up-at-night/

Geothermal and Hydro Power The Economy In Iceland

Translated from German at Die Welt -

How Renewable Energy Has Fueled Iceland's Miraculous Comeback

Henryk M. Broder (2013-10-03)

KEFLAVIK — The first thing that strikes you on landing at Keflavik International Airport is the weather. It’s raining. The clouds hang so low that it looks like you could reach out and touch them. Welcome to Iceland.
A land mass covering 103,000 square kilometers, Iceland is a little larger than Hungary, but at 330,000 its population is less than a fifth that of the Hungarian capital. Still, this sparsely populated island, just beneath the Arctic Circle between Europe and North America, boasts an infrastructure that would make many larger countries proud. The Hringvegur, a well-built ring road that goes all the way around the island, is 1,340 kilometers long — about the distance of a flight from Hamburg to Rome.
Iceland has two international and six regional airports, three universities, three daily papers, an opera, over 12 theatres and more than a dozen state museums and art galleries.
This thriving cultural center is a very different picture from five years ago when the financial crisis hit. Banks that had overextended themselves in international dealings fell like dominoes and had to be taken over by the state. The construction industry ground to a halt, and the Icelandic currency, króna, became massively devalued. Iceland, once the poorest country in Europe along with Ireland, was regressing back to the 19^th century.
But not now. While mainland Europe continues to battle the financial crisis, the descendants of the Vikings are breaking new ground. They are rebuilding, the economy is growing, tourism is booming, and unemployment is falling faster than expected.
Ask what problems Icelanders face today and the replies are unbelievable. “It’s hard to find a parking space in Reykjavik.” “For good restaurants, you have to make a reservation two or three days in advance.” Is that all? No, there are the debts owed to foreign banks and investors, but the government will worry about that.
Negotiations to join the EU have been put on ice, so to speak. The króna may be a weak and unpredictable currency, but the euro doesn’t seem to be a particularly stable alternative. Icelanders have learned to rely on themselves.
“Who needs coal when you already have fire?”
The question is written on posters at the state electricity company Landsvirkjun, which produces roughly three-quarters of Iceland’s energy. Founded in 1965, Landsvirkjun has 13 hydroelectric power plants and two geothermal plants and has recently added two wind turbines. Geothermal and hydroelectric power supply about 80% of the country’s energy, while the remaining 20% is imported gas for cars, buses and fishing trawlers. There are no more coal plants in Iceland and only one oil power station.

Krafla geothermal power plant in Iceland — Photo: Asgeir Eggertsson

“Now we only need coal for barbecues,” says Rikardur Rikardsson, an engineer by training who is responsible for recruiting new Landsvirkjun clients. Many companies with high energy demands have chosen to base their production in Iceland because the energy costs are so much lower than on the European mainland or in the United States. “It’s worth it for these companies, even though they first have to transport the raw materials to Iceland and the end product somewhere else.”
Rikardsson is 35 years old. His parents can still remember a time when they were dependent on coal ovens and plagued by smog and air pollution. Hot springs were used for washing and cooking, but imported coal was still used for heating. In Reykjavik alone, over 270,000 tons of carbon dioxide was emitted into the atmosphere. Now Reykjavik is one of the cleanest cities in the world. The volcanoes and hot springs emit more natural CO₂ than all Icelandic power stations put together.
Rikardsson is keen to excuse the wind turbines that his company has installed in a deserted area of the island. They are “an experiment,” he stresses. It seems that no one wants a wind turbine “on their front doorstep,” he says, characterizing them as just “one option among many.”
Literary inspiration
Energy companies have found inspiration in unlikely sources. At Verne Global, an Icelandic company with headquarters in London, the name says it all. Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth begins on the Snæfellsjökull volcano in west Iceland, which is now home to the company’s massive electronic storage facility. “Databases require huge amounts of energy,” says Andreas Sturm, an IT technician at Verne Global. “They’re responsible for the same amount of CO₂ emissions as the entire civil aviation industry.”

The Nesjavellir geothermal power plant — Photo: Gretar Ivarsson

The Smart Data Center stores data for companies from around the world, powered entirely by renewable energy. Over 150 years ago, Jules Verne realized that Iceland was the perfect setting for a utopian vision. Now companies looking to reduce costs and improve their green credentials come to Verne Global.
The trend that started with outsourcing call centers to India has now gone high-tech, with computers transferring data in milliseconds. Here a third company comes into play: Farice, which lays high-capacity underwater cables between Iceland and mainland Europe. There are already two in use: one running between Iceland and Scotland (1,200 kilometers) and one to Denmark (2,300 kilometers). Clients can rent cables as a kind of private data motorway. For managing director Omar Benediktsson, this is only the beginning. His engineers are working on a super cable that will be able to export energy.
If they are successful, Europe could be joined to the Icelandic energy network. Iceland’s electricity could heat swimming pools in Britain and allow factories in Germany to keep production running day and night without worrying about their energy supply, all for a fraction of the current cost. A utopian vision? Perhaps, but as Jules Verne knew, Iceland is the world leader in utopias. The Icelanders have transformed almost every disadvantage — their geographical situation, the climate, the lack of natural resources — into an advantage. The journey to the center of the earth continues.

http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/how-renewable-energy-has-fueled-iceland-039-s-miraculous-comeback/island-energy-revolution-keflavik/c3s13581/#.UlNZfhAQMVg


Original in German -
http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article120539785/Die-Energiewende-in-Island-braucht-keine-Windraeder.html