In Common Wealth Magazine, Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone made the case for why the MBTA matters to all of Massachusetts. Nice to see a political leader come out and say it. He put it in fairly stark terms:
Greater Boston represents the lion’s share of economic activity in Massachusetts. The money for schools, healthcare, and roads throughout the state largely comes from the tax base of Greater Boston. If Boston fails to deliver economically, the knock-on effects will be felt in every corner of Massachusetts.
He didn’t play up the standard line about economic justice or how a functional MBTA gets essential health and safety workers to their jobs (all true). Instead he focused on the ability of metro Boston to attract and retain business with a substandard public transit system. He wrote:
This breakdown sounds a clear warning that the reliability of our economic engine has become suspect. Think about what the MBTA and commuter rail do at the most fundamental level: they connect people to their jobs. … This is about as simple an issue as you will ever encounter in the public arena. If we won’t make the necessary investments to keep our economic center viable, then why should the private sector invest its money?
It will be interesting to see if various chambers of commerce and business associations (e.g. the Massachusetts High Technology Council) make this an issue. If Governor Baker and Speaker DeLeo are going to be spurred into action by anyone, it’s going to be business leaders telling them “Your crappy transit system is costing me money.”
I’ve often wondered when the Chamber may weigh in on this. If I was a business owner who’s employees depended on the T, I’d be pissed right now.
I just want to clarify that each city or town has at least one Chamber of Commerce, and each is an independent organization with independent political leanings.
There is no single “Chamber” voice.
This is of a piece with his 2024 outlook.
Note how he cuts to the chase to make the case for the real problem structure without dismissing the rest of the state outside the T footprint.
Cambridge mainly relies on its intrinsic assets and plays hard to get with everyone trying to build stuff.
Curtatone gets out there and works it. I did some video on the greenway that sits on the old Mass Central Railroad right of way in Somerville.
http://youtu.be/XsIvVeaeLx8
It’s an impressive urban linear park with porosity, many little portals off to the sides to enter neighborhoods. Some of these things get walled off over abutter privacy concerns.
And the lamp posts have signage encouraging the users to call a city number and weigh in if needed. It is designed to tie into the Green Line extension.
I live just a few blocks from the path, the playground in your video is where I usually enter.
The newly-constructed extension, on the other side of Cedar St, is very nice. At its current terminus, it offers a very nice vantage point to watch the trains going by on the commuter rail (if you like that sort of thing).
I know the neighborhood well. I used to visit a friend on Cedar street in the 70’s to play a board game called ‘Squad Leader’ about World War Two.
At the time I wondered what that ‘dirt road’ was. I started the series at that vantage point you describe. The Lowell line rail bed there is where the old Mass Central line split away to head for Northampton.
I have video of it from there to Wayland where it gets buried by a bit of Route 20 before crossing the Sudbury River. That’s the next Section I’ll get when snow melts.
I was impressed by the design quality of the linear park. I also know the guys who put those strange junk sculpture things there which they call ‘Skraelings’.
“This is about getting to our jobs. Is there anything more fundamental than that? – promoted by charley-on-the-mta”
Charley – for those of us in areas WITHOUT public transportation, THIS IS HOW WE FEEL ABOUT GAS TAX HIKES.
Do those areas fully fund themselves their non-public transportation needs?
I was surprised to learn on twitter after someone said basically the same thing you said concerning Springfield, that Springfield actually does have public transporation.
http://www.pvta.com/about.php
Although it does have something.
http://www.capecodtransit.org/
It doesn’t seem to have much for the outer cape off season.
Which only goes along Rt 28.
Their destinations are also 2 or 3 miles away from the stops. And the schedule is an estimate rather than a timetable.
The people who voted down the gas tax hikes and our new governor who agreed with them are just short sided people who, like the underfunded MBTA, will just wind up costing us more in the long term. When will Republicans a the anti-tax crowd learn that there is no free lunch?
Our roads and bridges are already in a mess and we now want to cut taxes and spend less on their maintenance?
So yeah, save that five cents a gallon because you are “taxed enough already” and then pull into your local auto repair shop because your tires are worn from an out of alignment frond end due to the constant pounding of Massachusetts roads.
You’ll wish you spent that five cents just like we are wishing now that we planned ahead and maintained the MBTA.
John – Charley was articulating how MBTA communities feel when the T stops midnight runs, raises the fares, and implodes entirely. I was reminding him that the blithe talk of raising the gas tax triggers similar feelings in the rest of the state. Frankly, the roads for most of us consists of municipal appropriation and Ch 90 money, and Patrick repeatedly refused to release money to the towns already appropriated for that purpose which couldn’t be spent elsewhere. Doubtless it was to use the float to disguise the true size of his deficit. So more tax revenue for the MBTA which already has several dedicated revenue streams and an unwillingness to explain where that money has gone is met with indifference by the hinterlands.
Because we have to drive to work – period.
That is at the root of so many of our problems. We have to drive to work and we have to fund the roads, period.
When I see the governor and the speaker tell me “no new taxes” when we are finally out of the recession and our roads are a mess and so much of the state is in disrepair, my brain begins to hurt.
It seems equally knee jerk to insist that all our problems are lack of revenue rather than irresponsible spending.
The actuality is in-between
Especially when it concerns government programs with decades long histories of misappropriation and idiocy in planning.
Just another term used by the right to avoid being responsible and seeking solutions. “Irresponsible” spending? You’re against it? Bravo.
Charlie Baker is against “irresponsible spending”. Gee, he’s really going out on a limb. That’s a bold stand! It’s like being against child abuse.
Do you know of anyone who is for irresponsible spending? It’s the same with “excessive” regulations or “job killing” regulations….always that negative modifier to hide the reality that the right and the wealthy are against taxes, regulations, labor unions, environmental protection, almost anything that contribute to the social good in their support of the minority of wealthy individuals.
Yes, there is an in between but when the governor (and the speaker of the house)and the Tea Party Republicans come out of the gate and say “NO new taxes”, that’s a clear message that they have NO interest in that “in between”.
You finished with “Especially when it concerns government programs with decades long histories of misappropriation and idiocy in planning.”
Where’s your “in between” here?
My local government does a great job. My state government led the nation in health care reform. My state representative and state senator are delivering beyond my expectations. Did I mention Elizabeth Warren?
How about congressman Kennedy and his work bringing manufacturing jobs to the state?
I could go on and on, but that would ask you to look at the “in between”.
I know, Mitt Romney, Scott Brown and their ilk want me to trust the markets, the “job creators”, the private sector. I do, to a point, but there too, I see the “in between”.
Do I really want to privatize Social Security and see it run as the private sector ran Lehman Brothers?
Oh, and of course there is no “irresponsible spending” in the private sector, is there? I’m sure that a $1.2 million dollar redecoration including a $35,000 commode is acting responsibly.
You bray about how the other side is a bunch of coke addled flails who will give away the farm to unworthy poors and cronies.
If they do it loudly enough, often enough and convincingly enough, they’ll get to do all sorts of wildly irresponsible things like start expensive wars, roll back regs that prevent economic catastrophes and sell a bunch of half baked privatization schemes that will let them undermine another sector of middle class entry jobs and replace them with uncertainty and penury.
I get the sense the public is wise to it but if Team Democrat gets too irritating, they can be swatted by voting a few Team GOP Swells in.
that can assert Democratic Party policy priorities, as it has doubtless done for decades.
I live in Somerville. My wife and I (we file jointly) already pay far more for YOUR drive to your job on the Cape than we pay for our own (on a per-capita per mile basis). You’re fine with that.
The only way I have practical access to Cape Cod is by taking the Cape Cod Flyer to Hyannis, and then a bus to my final destination (usually Eastham). I can’t use all those roads I’m paying taxes for.
When was the last time you had to fly someplace? Did your flight depart from Hyannis? I doubt it. I suspect you booked a flight from Logan (maybe Providence). When was the last time you flew to Europe or Asia? Again, Logan was probably your choice. When you go to a well-stocked grocery store near you, where do you think the bulk shipments on those shelves arrive in New England? How do you think the workers who handle those shipments get to the warehouse or distribution point where they load the trucks bound for Cape Cod?
As Mr. Curtatone observed, you benefit from the MBTA and public transportation for each and every trip of each and every worker to and from their Boston-area employer.
Your myopia about Cape Cod is not even penny-wise, and it most certainly is pound-foolish.
It’s like we’re revisiting arguments from the early 1800s or something and the role of robust infrastructure from hill country dairy farm roads to the Acela were pretty much a given.
The Norquist Virus is causing some pretty strange revanchist atrophy.
I wonder how much better the roads and bridges across the state would be if all the money spent on the Big Dig, which I have never driven through, had been spent on infrastructure that we use out here in Western Mass. There might have been enough left over to upgrade the MBTA. But wait let’s be sure the people in the Boston area have a brand new tunnel to drive through, and now let’s give them a new subway system also.
The big dig was not optional. The central artery was a huge mistake and so poorly planned that it was like a huge stake through the heart of the city. As horrible as the Big Dig turned out to be, without it the city would most likely be dead right now.
But even if not done, most of the federal funds that went into the Big Dig would not have been used in Western Mass under almost any circumstance I can think of…
was going to come down near 2000 due to planned obsolescence and it had to be replaced by something. Alas, the Welducci team screwed the pooch in managing the BigDig with gross incompetence and outright fraud.
Did anyone else notice that Welducci’s former Secretary of Transportation and former director of the Turnpike Authority, Jim Kerasiotes, was last week sentenced to a six months in jail for tax fraud in an unrelated case? Kerasiotes was a liar and a bully, especially towards women, during his decade long reign of error and terror in state government. No surprise that he is a tax cheat also.
From the Boston Globe, February 5, 2015:
Kerasiotes was the chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority who was forced to resign in 2000 because of more than $1.4 billion worth of hidden cost overruns on the Big Dig. He was represented by former Governor William F. Weld, who had been Kerasiotes’s boss….
Kerasiotes oversaw the Big Dig as state commissioner of public works from 1991 to 1992, secretary of transportation from 1992 to 1997, and Turnpike Authority chairman from 1996 until 2000.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/02/05/former-transportation-secretary-james-kerasiotes-sentenced-six-months-prison/DwGdp53UfoiHNRorJX8XQJ/story.html
And isn’t it special that Bill Weld chose to defend the criminal who f-ed the taxpayers of Massachusetts???
The first half of my life was spent watching a mix of GOP members like the truly honorable Elliot Richardson, Ed Brooke, Frank Sargent and Frank Hatch here in Massachusetts, along with the execrable Nixon and Agnew in DC. Now it seems the guys (like Weld) who claim the mantle of Richardson et als are corrupt too, but are smoother and they don’t sweat on television as much as Nixon did.
I bet a lot of the stuff on the shelves arrives through the new double stack intermodal railway which terminates in Worcester. It previously terminated in NY. Then much gets put on trucks and brought into Boston and the Cape.
The Worcester facility was a main goal of a long negotiation between the Patrick era Mass DOT and CSX.
They once did the Boston based intermodal out of here in Allston.
CSX shifted focus to Worcester and a smaller yard in Framingham.
A daily produce run to Chelsea originates there. The whole thing will be a benefit for Worcester while solving the main problem with that commuter rail line. It used to get sidelined and held up waiting for CSX dispatcher permission that originated near Albany at their Selkirk yard.
Now it is controlled by the MBTA.
This is one of several spurious problems the Pioneer Institute is whining about and reading their paper on it and the MBTA was my key to learning what third rate minds they coddle over in that wingnut welfare shop that launched our shiny new Guvinator.
I lost count of the number of businesses with signs in the window stating they’d be closed tomorrow. Talked to a few of them and it was the same answer each time – they’d open if the T was running, but no T means no workers. This includes my local hardware store and supermarket.
Haven’t we been making use of public transit a patriotic virtue for years?
And now there is a very large mass of people who eagerly went along with it only to be left in the lurch.
They basically are pumping and dumping. Pump the chumps and dump it when it slumps from an overload of lumps.
Seems to me we’ve raised driving light trucks everyplace possible in the name of God and Country to an art form.
I know the auto makers are selling rugged individual fantasies but the metro area here has put a lot of effort into convincing people that public transportation is another nail in the Saudi oil dependency coffin.
It’s a real product option. It was worth selling, unlike SUV’s. What I’m saying is the pitch worked pretty well with ridership growth and now these people who want the option and have organized their lives around it are getting it yanked out from under them.
But then I don’t imagine you can run a marketing effort saying that the thing sucks and should be avoided.
from one of the truck manufacturers, where they show pics of a man in front of a truck and then in front of a small sedan, and then question an audience of men in one case and women in a second? Both groups are asked a question that is the functional equivalent of who do you want to boff, a weird moment of homo-erotica with the male audience.
I see trucks parked in store and restaurant lots where it is obvious that the moron who owns it does not know how to drive, trucks with spotless backs that have never seen a day of work.
I admit to having many moments of schadenfreude when these same pseudo-macho men cry like little children about the high price of gas. When gas prices return to their scarcity levels I will likely feel it again. Yes, we need to get these people to recognize their mistaken belief in permanent low cost gas, but as long as I don’t gloat publicly I still get to advocate for carbon pricing on gas and incentives for fuel efficient vehicles.
So I’m missing all these deranged phantasms concocted by venal swill puppies to peddle amalgams of fools gold to simple minded chumps.
I see them as tiny video box ads on a web screen where they are very easy to ignore. And the algorithms have figured out that I don’t drive by now.
High School White Guy isn’t letting go of all the shallow status symbol toys he’s been conned into chasing without a lot of weeping, teeth gnashing and the occasional shooting of disposable colored people who take his parking spot or play music he hates too loudly.
He has become this strange indigestible lump in the body politic and doesn’t seem to be alert to how he gets manipulated.
An enlightened politic would seek to help get him out of that fix so he can rejoin the rest of us and stop agonizing over how rugged an individualist he is.
Us male monkeys get weird when in the grip of corrosive insecurity.
Keep on keeping on…..one funny, perceptive comment after another.
Given your avid recommendation from one of my favorite regulars here, it’s pretty cool that I can come up with something that answers you or speaks to you.
Thanks for a long haul at trying to work with this state, in case it isn’t mentioned often enough.
I am back to what I ORIGINALLY said to Charley – that is how we all get to work. Pretty fundamental as he said
The business has a truck for deliveries but I drive 37 mpg Honda Fit LEV with Enviro button. Hybrids are pretty useless in highway driving as the only use electric in stop-and-go traffic. Not much use in more rural areas.
It depends on the hybrid, but hybrids like the Prius are using the electric motor (two actually) at ALL times. Our 2002 Prius usually gets around 45 mpg highway, but have gotten as high as 60 mpg driving rural roads going no faster than 50 (I believe 50 mph is supposedly the “sweet” spot for that model Prius, I believe newer model Prii supposedly do better at higher average speeds).
Of course a big reason to buy these cars is not so much that you will save money on gas, because the added cost of the car is probably going to be more than you are going to save in fuel unless you drive it quite a lot. It is more that that they, or at least the Prius, pollutes less than a comparably sized car.
The payback on the Prius (standard model) is just a factor of mileage. We have a 2005 that I drove 40K a year so it did not take too long to get the cost per mile lower than a typical Camry. Even so, if you drive 12K a year, you’ll get into the black maybe after seven years? It all depends, of course, on the price of gas. In 2008, I switched jobs and now I drive very little, so we transferred the Prius to my wife. It now has 150K miles on it and short of oil changes and three sets of tires, has not cost us a dime in maintenance. I got 50-52 MPG and my wife gets 44-48 MPG.
And since we have a 42% increase in electric rates down here, I would say that the comparable mileage more than makes up for the increased cost of electricity.
Unless you have a plug-in variety (which costs a lot more) you are still using gas.
The Cape could have had public transportation, and chose to say “NO”.
The Cape Cod rail trail (CCRT) was a rail connection that went all the way to Provicetown. The trip from Provincetown to Boston took five hours — in 1880. That could have been commuter rail. Even today, the Cape could rebuild a light-rail DMU system on the CCRT, there appears to be ample room for both in most places.
When you have to drive from Provincetown to Boston on a summer Sunday evening, how much time do you budget?
The fact that you and so many other Cape residents chose to build your lives around an unsustainable transportation technology — destroying a perfectly serviceable existing right-of-way — heavily funded and subsidized by the rest of us is NOT an effective argument in support of your claim that the region’s addiction to automobiles should be enabled,
An alcoholic is not excused from mortgage or other financial obligations because he or she spent all his money on booze.
But progressives wanted an eco-friendly bike trail and explained that rail would never be viable in America again as it was an 19th century technology.
Even now, we are EXPANDING the bike trail using state monies as the Commonweath regards this as the right thing to do.
I don’t remember the residents of the Cape — and I especially don’t remember anybody from the MA GOP — loudly arguing that we should be using that money to restore rail service along the CCRT right of way. Making it possible to use bikes instead of cars IS the right thing to do (as opposed to even more spending on highways) if rail is off the table.
Perhaps you’ll join us in arguing to put rail ON the table. I will enthusiastically support a proposal to redirect bike path funding towards that effort.
You got time to break the state’s conservation restrictions, too? It runs through Nickerson State Park and the National Seashore as well.
But hey, a guy who can redirect state funding from a keyboard in Porter Square…
But progressives wanted an eco-friendly bike trail and explained that rail would never be viable in America again as it was an 19th century technology.
Even now, we are EXPANDING the bike trail using state monies as the Commonweath regards this as the right thing to do.
In reading the articles about the T, the Pioneer Institute and other conservatives have this talking point about how the MBTA should not have expanded.
Moving lots of people around on the T gets employees to work & customers to shops. If we expand the reach of rail, we create more opportunities for all kinds of businesses to form.
It was a turning point because we discovered a way around the manipulations of venal GOP stooges that started taking up space in the executive over a long dark run of years.
That they are still bitching about it really just tells us where their jugular is when they do something predictably obnoxious in days ahead.
Building out a good commuter rail system is a long game but these Pioneers are just trying to set a table for short term gain, preferably for their class and no one else.
The Judiciary is our ace in the hole.
Weld/Cellucci really thought they could get away with doing the Big Dig minus the public transit improvements that helped sell the project. To a degree they did. I mean, they did very little during their terms. They were aided and abetted by Tom Menino. Seemed like all he cared about were the Courthouse and Convention Center stations, outside of that he let the Silver Line be a half-assed endeavor. The Red-Blue Connector (which also was part of the CLF lawsuit) and the E Branch extension out to the Arborway are conjectural and dead, respectively. Menino did not give a damn about public transit.
I don’t recall former Somerville Mayor Mike Capuano causing a stink when the GLX got mothballed. Despite Massachusetts having made a legally binding commitment to do the project, Capuano didn’t seem inclined to hold anyone’s feet to the fire. A couple of years ago Capuano was still talking about whittling down the project to be another Greenbush Line. Amazing the difference a mayor makes. Curtatone’s been on full-court press for the GLX since he took office. Got a feeling the CLF lawsuit would have been a Pyrrhic victory without that.
Perhaps Marty Walsh will do like Curtatone and demand the Red-Blue Connector get done. Doesn’t really matter whether it says D or R on the corner office door at the Statehouse. A mayor backed by lawyers and grassroots support seems to be the formula for getting the state to honor its obligations.
Somerville has changed profoundly since it was run by Howie Winter in the 70s and 80s. It was a backwater shithole with cheap rents in cool old houses.
I lived at 19 Cottage Ave which was dirt cheap. It was a duplex with three floors of bedrooms and Tracy Chapman living on the other side. I’d sit on the stoop drinking cheap wine and roasting chicken legs on a small grill.
Davis Square was pretty wonderful then. You could walk to Mass ave and find Tip O’Neill sitting on his porch.
Over time it seems to have gotten intensively gentrified and is nearly as valuable as Cambridge. It’s a trend they want to build on and the Mayor out in front. I live on the border with Cambridge and Somerville will blast through 10 building projects in the time Cambridge takes to permit and approve 1.
It was strange to see that Union Square junkyard area finally go. I’m glad I got plenty of photos before it wen. The weird steam radiator collection was stunning.
The metamorphosis of Somerville didn’t just happen. I lived in Boston during that time as well. Porter Square was a slum where leaving a car parked there for more than half an hour was asking for trouble. The Dunkin Donuts at Mass Ave was the ONLY place my daily carpool (from Boston to Maynard) stopped on its trip through Somerville in 1974.
The metamorphosis of Somerville is a DIRECT result of the Red Line extension from Harvard Square to Alewife.
The extension added immense value and would have gone to Arlington but for home rule objections. The 70s were probably the trough point for decline.
Porter was charming and harmless in the 60s. My old man had an office above the gun and fishing stuff shop. It took a while for the value enhancement to take effect but it did.
…partially as a result of economic inequality, Massachusetts is Rhode Island and/or New Hampshire without Boston. 1/5 of revenue is generated in Boston, with just a fraction going back into the City.
Only gripe I have with this post is Somerville being the table thumper. Pointing out the T’s failures during this winter of hell when you couldn’t get schools open all of last week when your neighbors could seems a bit untoward.
Somerville’s schools (and many town buildings) are closed for the same reason that the MBTA has been paralyzed — decades of deferred maintenance.
The school buildings in Somerville have old, flat, and dangerously obsolete roofs. The snow load on them creates a very real hazard.
The town correctly closed its schools this week. The MBTA should have closed the Red Line last week. One of my children graduated from the sometimes-maligned Somerville High School in 2012. He (and we) had an excellent experience, in spite of the shortcomings of the physical plant.
Like Beverly Scott, Mr. Curtatone has had to manage our recovery from a very long period of decay. We are raising taxes (to the chagrin of some Somervillians) in order to invest in solving these problems.
If our state government was as aggressive in restoring a reliable, safe, and affordable MBTA as Mr. Curtatone and Somerville is in rebuilding Somerville schools, we would not need to have these exchanges.
Unlike Gov. Baker who is a terrible manager, or Marty Walsh who seems to have an uninspiring vision for Boston. I would look to him as a future statewide leader, or at the very least, take his policy proposals quite seriously. He has more than walked the walk for almost a decade.
I frequently compare his accomplishments as a duly elected Mayor with actual power under a Plan B charter with his neighbor to the south. Somerville has clearly leapfrogged Cambridge in terms of progress, innovation, and inclusive development. Unfortunately, it may be catching up to Cambridge in terms of rising housing costs and lack of affordable housing. I know all nine councilors in Cambridge, two of them quite well, and feel like they are doing the best with the limited authority they have. But Plan E is definitely holding Cambridge back, Somerville has a much more vibrant civic culture and model of urban leadership under Curtatone. I’ve long felt he was a great gubernatorial candidate.
It’s an easy position. It is as obvious as the rise of sun. It is as difficult as rooting for mom and apple pie and about as insightful.
But the problem of taking care of the whole state in some equitable manner gets short shrift time and time again.
Boston got hosed by old Brahmins who didn’t trust the Irish immigrants. It has a strange lack of home rule in a home rule state.
Greater Boston… (why is there no “Lesser Boston?’) is up to its eyeballs in avid boosters who never tire of belaboring its importance.
But little Hawley or old Clinton… who’s going to speak for them?
Many cities not in greater Boston have many of Boston’s problems, with few of the largesse of its economy. Labeling cities that are fighting to do right as “Gateway Cities” and throwing the occasional tiny grant at it is not a solution.
And I cringe when people do those extremely chauvinistic claims for Boston that only indicate how provincial it is.
Lording over others when you’re the top dog is like bullying lite.The calculus is juvenile.
Who cares if Boston or Rhode Island wins the significance lottery?
Both are great places to be when they are well run and made to work for all the citizens.
And those cities can’t revive without finding their way to a robust intrinsic economy.
The crap triple decker in Fields Corner gets dolled up and pieced out as condos for 300k plus per floor while it’s counterpart in Brockton is lucky to make mortgage payments with steady tenant rent flow and much lower value appreciation.
Exclusive of the Ray Flynn years (1984 – 1993), Boston policies have been premised for decades upon viewing the City’s working-class populations as so much used Kleenex.
The operating premise is that educating and retaining outsiders takes priority over protecting, advancing, and retaining local talent if the latter don’t meet criteria established by inverse means-testing. Hence the City’s current gentrification on steroids.
It must be noted, that such priorities are integral to the political cultures of progressive municipalities and neighborhoods – Jamaica Plain, Cambridge, and Somerville come to mind – and are part of a national dynamic.
At the State level, class-bigotry has been the operating principle of Massachusetts public policy since 1974 when Michael Dukakis won election by running to the Right of his Republican opponent.
We can’t address where we are without facing up to why we are.
There is no higher good than creating alluring sucker traps for yuppies and the rest of the public can pound sand.
I see no evidence of “class bigotry” in that piece, nor in the first Dukakis administration.
What part of “Republicans, Watergate, Richard Nixon, and an anemic economy” is “class-bigotry”? My recollection is that Mr. Dukakis was turned out of office after one year because he had the audacity (and courage) to face up to the budget disaster that he had been left.
Was Ed King also a “class bigot”? He ran to the right of Mike Dukakis!
The most obvious common element that I see running through all this is a refusal to face the reality that modern society requires paying taxes. Are you seriously arguing that Kevin White was a class bigot? Are you really arguing that Ray Flynn did more for Boston’s working-class population than Kevin White?
The communities you cite — JP, Cambridge and Somerville — are still more affordable than Boston itself. What is your opinion of the “Micro Apartment” concept so famously championed by Mr. Menino?
I ask because it strikes me as intentionally building tenement slums — hardly a “friendly” to working class people.
I’m sure you know that Dukakis served one four-year term before being defeated by King, but you wrote, “…Mr. Dukakis was turned out of office after one year…”
I appreciate the correction.
Let’s start with a quote from Rick Perlstein (from which the original link was taken):
Does the text in bold remind you of anyone?
Insofar as equal-opportunity bigotry is concerned, I would suggest that you take the time to read “What It Takes” by Richard Ben Cramer. Arguably the best analysis of the 1988 Presidential race, the book covers Dukakis sanctimony and personal contempt for both working class people and the civil rights movement at length.
Eddie King was your basic “when-in-doubt-take-the-sleezy-way-out” pseudo-populist 1970’s Massachusetts pol, who was able to exploit the backlash against Dukakis in 1978, but who was done in by the aforementioned sleeze four years later. The issue wasn’t ideology in either the 1978 or 1982 elections: it was style.
I don’t doubt Kevin White’s intentions, but his elitism was a prime reason why he was unable to get much traction in working-class white neighborhoods during his tenure. Ray Flynn’s inclusive populism, on the other hand, did much to heal the city’s racial divisions.
I would hardly call JP, Cambridge or Somerville affordable (and last I heard, JP was a Boston neighborhood). In a similar sense, I have yet to see a Micro Apartment demonstration project, Menino’s rhetoric notwithstanding.
To your last point: one person’s “tenement slums” are other people’s neighborhoods.
They were designed for singles or couples who worked in the Market. They had tiny kitchen sinks but were pretty live-able.
One of the big disasters of modern rental housing has been the elimination of affordable small spaces for blue collar singles. Rooming houses have been regulated out of existence in snob towns but can still be found in working class towns like Walpole.
It’s probably due to the high stakes of project costs and financing. Banks want to finance luxury projects with granite and stainless steel or whatever the status decoration du jour is.
But eventually, the yuppie well runs dry and an inventory hangover of luxury dumps leads to a price collapse.
Affordable housing is only sexy if significant dollops of corporate welfare via HUD or whoever can be extracted. That is happening in the marginal fringe parts of New Hampshire like Dover that are just at the edge of a doable commute.
Dad worked as a mental health counselor for disabled children for almost 30 years, and laments that the Duke and his cuts put more ‘mentally ill people out on the streets’ than any Governor before or since. How accurate his anecdotes are, I can’t say, and he definitely backed him in the 1988 presidential race in the primary and the general, but I can’t say he was a fan.
Frank in his autobiography writes with disapproval of how the bean cutting Dukakis really stymied a progressive agenda that could have come from the young turks in the House. It hurt that Frank felt Duke was ‘one of them’.
And Pearlstein has done a great job showing how both Mondale and Dukakis ran DLC style campaigns focused on center-left social policies coupled with center-right economics. Tsongas and Hart were in the same mold, arguably Gephardt in 88 and Harkin in 92 were the closest to carrying on the populist/New Deal tradition.
Dukakis out here. I can’t speak for Boston. The Duke was a technocrat. As far as his “conservatism” out there goes, remember what was happening in Boston at the time: busing. What happened to the mentally ill was an tragic confluence of de-institutionalization (a goal of the Left that envisioned a less restrictive environment for the mentally ill) and conservatism that wanted to rend the social safety net.
It’s hard to explain how dominant neo-liberal Democrats were. The Left, which in part was burned out by the 70s, and conservatives were in ascendance. The DLC and friends were all the rage in the late 1980s and 1990s. I was in my 20s at the time and was a fairly conservative Democrat, liking Bill Clinton and Sam Nunn. For Dukakis to think like this would not be surprising. Conservatism was the zeitgeist on both sides of the aisle. We also have to remember how important social issues were in those days. We take marriage equality for granted now, but we were on the ropes in the 80s and 90s. We’re still on the ropes in many ways, but at least we know it and can fight against it.
Of course, absent any community-based residential treatment centers for the mentally ill (the Dukakis Administration made no serious attempt to establish them), most of them ended up on the streets, abandoned and forgotten. Of course, by that time, both the Left and progressivism were firmly wedded to class bigotry, and working class Americans were equally ignored. Per Perlstein:
Of course, as John Hope Franklin noted, the New Left was “neither new, nor much of a Left”.
Much of what passes for “progressivism”, both here and nationally, is actually a narcissistic tory Right that operates primarily as a Republican outreach mechanism.
The narcissism is like some thick pea soup brain fog that makes them oblivious to those outside of their bubble.
Look at how testy people get here when their brilliant ideas don’t just take wing. Look at how much they they cling to like mindedness as a kind of default cult. Look at how hilariously oblivious they are to the concerns and problems of those who aren’t on their radar screen.
I’m from an old school New Deal family. I never noticed that all these blow dry democrats were throttling the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.
They basically blew off a vast part of their constituency and left it to twist in the wind and curdle into reflexive tea-hadists.
John McKnight calls it the Cult of the Professional. As manufacturing declined and a new kind of unstable mercenary service economy ascended the so called innovators in the party hastened to pander to that cult while dropping their old constituents like hot potatoes.
on deinstitutionalization, but we’re on the same page if we agree that it was bigger than his governorship. It evidently started with JFK:
…the guy who campaigned on “good jobs at good wages” and who takes public transit whenever he can of being an enemy of the working class? I’ve heard him speak plenty over the years and nothing can be further from the truth.
n/t
I don’t know enough about Dukakis, I know his antecedent Gary Hart and his successor Bill Clinton were both close to Wall Street and skeptical of organized labor-Hart especially so. Tsongas was almost libertarian in his fiscal conservatism, he infamously said he wasn’t Santa Claus when asked about his health care program. Even Jerry Brown, the left wing candidate in 1992 had more in common with Perot than Howard Dean and endorsed libertarian ideas like the flat tax and term limits. In short, we have come a long way, we have a long way to go.
about 35 years of conservatism, we aren’t just talking about Republicans.
Coming of age in the 1980s was a bit of a let down. I remember loving the movie The Big Chill about these former college radicals reuniting in their 40s. There was a lot of talk about how great that time was and how their lives had meaning.
Born in the mid-1960s, my generation heard about such things, but didn’t experience them. The radicalism I remember at UMass was Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter taking over a random building on campus to protest CIA recruitment that no one cared about. Much of the New Left was like that, but the degree of activism was so great it was hard to ignore.
The New Left gave birth to valuing cultural authenticity and tolerance over class consciousness and working class politics. In their eyes, Tom Joad morphed into Archie Bunker and the intelligentsia wanted nothing to do with him. The irony is many New Left radicals moved to the right-folks like Dana Rohrbacher, David Horowitz, even Neil Young and John Lennon backed Reagan in 1980. The other irony is the New Left drove Old left/ liberal academics into the neoconservative movement.
It ceases to be populist and for the common man, lately for cultural reasons. Hopefully we can start to get it back-real left wing populism.
to say the New Left drove the Old Left to be neo-cons. I think the neo-cons did that on their own. The sainted Michael Harrington was the transitional figure from Old- to New-Left but neither he nor Barbara Ehrenreich had as much influence on a Norman Podheretz than I have over my grand-daughter today.
Not all of us who were in that transitional period of Old- to New-Left were in love with the Yippies or the hippy doper musicians. Check out David Crosby for an example of why hard dope is bad for your brain. Or check out almost any popular musician today for evidence that pop culture stars are NOT a person to learn politics from.
There are always people in political movements and ideologies who, depending upon your view, are either flaky enough to flip or smart enough to learn.
Is a great PBS doc from a few years ago that shows Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol and traces their move to the right and their shared agitation at the New Left . Howe remained a socialist, as did Bell to a lesser extent-but both were dismayed at the radicalism and anarchical focus of the New Left and saw it alienate the very working class they has hoped would make their revolutionary reforms.
I would agree that Podhoretz and Kristol likely would’ve gone right anyway-their writing prior to the 60s indicates a skepticism towards governments and overwhelming fear of communism.
Good discussion, though once again I am utterly guilty of diverting a thread far from its original topic.
He remained a political liberal, but a strange cultural conservative. In the last couple of years, I read some of his stuff and was appalled by his criticism of 1960s avant garde. He makes Harold Bloom look like a literary liberal. Old fartism inflated by intellectualism.
My social political trajectory began with an interest in helping with Civil Rights. I favored Frantz Fanon, Regis Debray, Marcuse. Vo Nguyen Giap and later, the various situationists. And the foundation would be FDR.
American Neoliberals from Dukakis and Gary Hart on to the present versions always seem like bloodless sterile academic yuppie apologists and enablers. They are dumb about non white people and patronizing, they tend to have bland art and culture preferences, especially here, and they can be insufferable scolds and bores.
And that’s on a good day. I only go along with them because the GOP is orders of magnitude worse and flatly repulsive.
Good public transportation raises property values, especially in Boston and surrounding communities when public transportation is also linked to other amenities (shopping, restaurants, cultural attractions, etc.). And diminished public transportation would depress property values. So some (not all) of the extra revenue needed for the MBTA should come from property taxes.
The obvious drawback of property taxes is that these can be regressive, with an adverse effect on older longtime owners and on renters. But Boston needs to address the regressiveness of property taxes anyway, and is talking about some property tax relief for longtime owners, and already has a resident rate that is lower than the rate for non-resident owners.
And there are a lot of well-off people and businesses that own buildings, condos and commercial properties that are worth a lot of money because of the availability of public transportation.