If you want a larf, and actually live in Dawson, you can read this.

I hear the Dawson Neighborhood Plan Team is splitting off from the Dawson Neighborhood Association and the DNPT is going to start a whole nother one of them electronical mailing lists!

Their reasoning is quite convoluted: it is too heavily moderated (after years of not being moderated at all) therefore they want one that is completely moderated. WTF? Doesn’t make any sense.

Or does it?

Plenty of sites have both a moderated and an unmoderated forum.   Many also have an ‘announcements’ forum.  The technology in both cases will be Yahoo! so they will have the same administrative and user interface.

Wow!  It might actually work, Batman!  

If you live in Dawson and are not already subscribed to the DNA Yahoo! group, and care to see what all the madness is about follow this link to subscribe:

Click to join DawsonNeighborhood

From in front of the St. Mark’s in the Bowery Church, across the street from where I used to work in NY and down the street from the once-wonderful (and now gone) 2nd Ave Deli (who made the best liverwurst and onions sandwich in. the. world. ever.) Rev. Billy offers a fabulous prayer for the salvation of soles in the face of the shopocalypse …

Pray that it does not happen here…where…

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

A number of empirical studies have been done in Europe and the UK over the last decade to determine, scientifically, whether the claims of “Smart Growth” are true are not. Since urban densification policies have been in place there for a long time, they’re in a positionto actually measure the results — in terms of traffic, wealth, crime, economic activity, foot and bike traffic, per capita spending, car ownership, electricity usage, etc.

Their results are far from encouraging. There is little to support the claim that “everybody will be able to walk everywhere” and that nobody will need a car “like in New York!”*.

For example this article by Elizabeth Burton, The Compact City and Social Justice,reviews and tabulates just about all of the measured data on theactual consequences of “smart growth” up to 2001. The Compact City: European Ideal, Global Fix, or Myth? also questions conventional “wisdom” regarding urban densification. And, more recently, Mark Baard notes that the EPA has found that the narrow, winding streets favored by smart growth mavens
are a hazard to health and human safety because they are difficult for emergency vehicles to move through these areas efficiently.

We are told, here in Austin, that we “must” accommodate a rapidly growing city — for example, by allowing more and more Vertical Mixed Use developments in working-class neighborhoods close to downtown..while 10 acres are set aside in tony Westlake for The Laura Bush Library.

I ask you: WTF?

*NB. I grew up in New York — and there are two reasons people don’t have cars in Manhattan. One, there’s no place to park, because there are already too many cars there; and two, you can’t drive anywhere any faster than you can walk, because there’s too much traffic!.

So what was that about dense urban cores “reducing traffic”? Bollocks!

Texans for Public Justice published an article Austin’s Not-So-Smart Growth Subsidies back in October which reads:

The City of Austin is doling out $117 million in publicly financed incentives to attract a select few businesses to the mushrooming metropolis. An analysis of the city’s seven existing incentive deals reveals that the companies that receive these handouts account for a tiny fraction of the businesses that flock here, expand here or are born here. The costs of these deals typically outweigh the city’s optimistic estimates of their long-term benefits.

…
Yet the city counts torrid growth among its most urgent challenges and it even earmarked $5.4 million of its 2008 budget for managing this growth. For the foreseeable future, businesses will continue to invest in Austin en masse without a publicly subsidized handout. While depressed areas can make an argument for such incentives, does publicly subsidized growth constitute smart growth in the Live Music Capital of the World?

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What are they doing?

First they hand out subsidies to major corporations, then they raise property taxes through the roof, then they wipe out half the equity of existing homeowners with the so-called McMansion ordinance and then…for the poor people driven out of their own homes by this kind of “progress” they try to make street vending and even panhandling illegal!

Talk about Yuppie Values. Sheesh!