High-rise developments like Wolf Point should include transit to avoid traffic congestion

Cities should be full of buildings, not surface parking lots. People in close proximity make cities the economic engines of the world. Surface parking lots are lost opportunities. Particularly in the core of cities, we should get as many buildings up and full of people as possible.

In Chicago, Wolf Point on the Chicago River just north of the Loop is a prime spot for high-rise development. The Kennedy family owns the site and has proposed building three towers according to this Tribune article. Alderman Brendan Reilly has begun the process of community input to determine whether he should support the project.

A group called Friends of Wolf Point has been organized to convey the views of existing residents to Alderman Reilly. The main concern of the organization is traffic congestion, as there isn't much room for hundreds of cars to navigate the very dense River North neighborhood.

Thus, the fundamental nature of cities -- density -- relies on a network of trains, buses and streetcars as thousands of private automobiles are simply too large and bulky in a dense urban environment. The benefit of a train or bus or streetcar is that it passes through and does not need to be parked in the densest, most valuable part of the city. Private automobiles require lots of parking spaces, which are essentially a waste. They also generate a lot of automobile traffic, putting the streets at or beyond their potential capacity, creating gridlock.

Traditionally, public transportation investment has been divorced from the process of real estate development. The government largely invests in buses, trains and streetcars independently of property development; real estate developers take advantage of the investment by building property around those assets.

This proposal presents an opportunity to merge the two processes for site-specific, innovative transit investments. Instead of only imposing parking requirements on proposed real estate developments, I suggest that cities should impose transit requirements as well. The real estate developer should be required to invest in local bus routes to connect to the closest train station or a small streetcar line to connect to other transit routes. As an example, the Wolf Point developers could be required to finance the operations of a new CTA bus line in perpetuity that will serve the expected thousands of new residents and visitors and connect to the Merchandise Mart Brown line station. The CTA already contracts with private institutions to provide specific bus service like the University of Chicago for the #170, #171 and #172 routes. A similar neighborhood shuttle -- based on the particular needs of the River North neighborhood -- can be developed and financed by the real estate developers (the annual contract cost of these buses are, I believe, in the mid-six figures, as fare revenue covers about half the roughly million-dollar cost of running a neighborhood bus route, plus or minus 100%).

Even better, where circumstances permit, would be laying track and running a portion of a streetcar. These streetcars could be extended over time as real estate development continues or circumstances warrant. The ideal city street isn't dominated by automobiles but rather by pedestrians. Imagine, as an example, what Clark Street could look like with a modern streetcar, as promoted by the new organization the Chicago Streetcar Renaissance.

As we live in the end of the oil era (just ask the Mexican government, which passed one of the world's strongest and most progressive climate and energy laws last month), investing in public transportation in the densest part of our cities is fundamental to our economic growth. We should harness the excitement and money of real estate developers to that public policy objective.

What I would do with unlimited resources

If I had unlimited resources, here are some of the things I would like to do:

1. Launch a campaign to educate people about why the government has made their lives better. The allergy to government as a concept in our country is one of the largest impediments to a higher standard of living. The corporate-funded Tea Party wing of the Republican Party aggressively spins a narrative of "government is bad" and, frankly, there isn't much of a counter-balance in the realm of public sentiment. It isn't intuitive that government improves our lives, so we have a story to tell in order to change hearts and minds.

2. Launch a campaign specifically about public works as a particulalry compelling solution to our economic doldrums at this time. Of course, this one is related to the first, but the old-fashioned term of public works is at the heart of what we ought to do to increase employment, increase income and invest in long-term productivity-enhancing infrastructure like high speed trains and education and research and broadband and renewable energy. This campaign would target regular voters so that a regular swing voter can be convinced that we should be investing in public works rather than the GOP mantra of lower taxes and less government. Especially now that interest rates are about the lowest they have ever been, we should borrow money and build 30- and 50-year projects to make life better now. We can make the case and sell people on it so that it becomes a reflexive answer by candidates as to "what are you going to do to improve the economy?" "Public works."

3. Since Catholic suburban married mothers who don't attend church regularly are one of the core groups of swing voters, I'd like to run a campaign targeted just at those women, by other Catholic suburban married mothers, about why government is a sensible, helpful tool to make raising a family easier. I'd find the voice and the messenger that resonates most with married Catholic suburban moms, and then get that voice and community all over social media, publish a magazine and even launch a weekly talk show on cable to build a community to spread that message.

4. Run issue-based infomercials in secondary cable markets where the cost of a 30 minute ad is under $100. Each infomercial would include a pitch to donate to the organization at the end (like those incredibly effective animal ads where Sarah McLaughlin sings about the arms of an angel) so the infomercials are self-sufficient (minus the cost of production, perhaps). That way the informercial educates all the viewers about the issue and it raises enough money to pay for the cost of running the 30 minute ad in the first place. It could be like a perpetual motion machine where the motion is teaching voters about an issue.

5. Target Republicans and Tea Party people with a Small Government Requires A Small Military message. The military takes up the bulk of all general revenues for the federal government and is way too expensive. It sucks up all our money and doesn't make our life better anywhere close to justifying its cost. The Republican House increased the military budget, despite all the talk of runaway spending and debt crises and blah blah blah. I had a chance to ask on a radio show Congressman Joe Walsh (a leading Tea Party GOP from suburban Chicago) about how he justified voting for a higher military budget despite his calls for a smaller government, and he essentially conceded that he wasn't consistent. The anti-government crowd knows that military spending is way too high, and they know that Republicans have not been consistent on this point. They are vulnerable. More importantly, military spending is way too high, and I'd like to convince regular voters who believe the government is too large to extend that belief into the size of the military budget, as right-wing people are the people we need to actually cut the military budget in half.

6. Run a global campaign for global democracy -- meaning, work to convince regular people around the world that we really ought to have some sort of global elections where we all vote to elect people to serve in the same body. That's such an exciting and revolutionary idea. And it's only inertia and lazy imaginations that prohibit us from realizing global democracy of some kind.

7. Write a book about the revolutionary property of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This Act of Congress was the first time in history a ruling power decided that new territories would not be colonies but would be equal powers to the existing states. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota came to be states with equal powers to the original 13 states, but it didn't have to be that way. We could have been colonies with fewer rights than the original Americans. The Northwest Ordinance is overlooked but almost as important as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in creating the character of our Republic. I first stumbled across this when reading a plaque in the Minnesota state capitol, and I wish I had the time and a research assistant to learn more about the revolutionary idea and implementation of the Northwest Ordinance.

8. Promote the European model of concessions for public transit and passenger train service. There are lots of private companies that compete for the right to operate buses and trains all over Europe and the government authorities for cities, suburbs and regions bid out on a regular basis the right to operate transit service along with the mobility subsidy from taxpayers. They get better, more innovative service than we do, and they are finding a more suitable role for private capital to play in public transit. Who would have thought that so-called socialist Europe is so far ahead of anti-government America, but we're still stuck in a monopoly model for transit (the government not only pays for transit but owns, operates, maintains and finances it as well here) while they are getting better, faster and cheaper service from the private sector.

9. Figure out how to restructure our financial industry to get away from a few banks that are too big to fail. Aside from just breaking up the big banks, there must be a way to help small banks become mid-sized banks that can serve our biggest companies. We can repeal the 90s-era laws that allowed banks and investment companies and insurance companies to all merge together, but I'd like to figure out how to help smaller and mid-sized banks and other financial institutions like credit unions to grow larger to provide alternatives to the biggest banks. And I'd like to know what cities and counties and states can do to help grow those smaller banks.

10. The adversarial structure of the American judicial system (a judge is a referee and each side has a lawyer who gets all the evidence in the record) does not work for people who can not afford an attorney. And that's most people. Any eviction proceeding, any small claims issue, most criminal proceedings -- the poor person is out of luck. We should develop a different structure where the judge is less of a referee and more of an active player in getting evidence, questioning the witnesses and bringing justice to the case. We taxpayers are already paying for the judge. Why should we pay for a public defender as well? And in non-criminal cases, there is no public defender, so we rely on the good will of lawyers who volunteer. It's structurally kind of dumb, especially when we start paying for non-profit organizations to try to fill the gap as psuedo public defenders. Let's just have a system where the judge handles more of the case so you don't need a lawyer anytime you go to court. There's a place for the adversarial system - when both parties have resources to duke it out. That's not how it is in most courtrooms today, so let's modernize our structure to reflect how things are (and save lots of taxpayer money in the process).

That's my top ten list of some of the things I wish I could be doing and would be doing if I had unlimited resources.

We are the 1%

We are the 1%.

That's the sobering reality check from the excellent book The Haves and the Have-Nots by Branko Milanovic.

As it turns out, there are a whole lot of poor people in the world. And the United States is so very rich. Even the very poorest Americans living in what we consider to be abject poverty (and they are significantly poorer than the average American) is richer than more than two-thirds of the rest of the world.

For upper middle class Americans (defined as those who earn $34,000 a year per person, not per family), we are the 1%. Turns out, that level of income (after-taxes, per person, in dollars, living in the US) happens to be the line above which sits the top 1% richest people in the world.

Yikes.

I had thought I was part of the 99% (and in the US, I am). But in the world, I am part of the 1%.

Bit of a paradigm shift, right?

So just as I believe it is not only a moral imperative but a practical economic strategy to spend more of the income of the top 1% on public assets that benefit all Americans (like education and sewers and high speed trains and police officers and social workers and parks), I have to extend that logic to spend more of my income on public assets that benefit everyone in the world (like education in India and sewers in Cameroon and high speed trains in Brazil and police officers in Juarez, Mexico and social workers in Malasia and parks in Libya) as a moral imperative and as a solid economic development strategy.

Just as charity balls and voluntary private donations from rich Americans doesn't come close to substituting for the moral imperative and economic development strategy of taxing the 1% more to spend it on public assets that benefit all 100% of us, so too voluntary contributions from we wealthy Americans to relatively impoverished others does not cut it. We ought to be taxed. And that money ought to be spent making people wealthier in poor countries.

It's the same logic. They are the 99%. And spending some of our income to make them wealthier – whether all of us like it or not – is the right thing to do.

Republicans are intentionally blocking Americans from their ballots

It is appalling and craven.

Republican state legislators are intentionally trying to keep millions of Americans from voting.

This article from the Tribune lays out how Republicans are putting up barriers to the ballot -- fewer early voting days, requirements to show photo IDs and government registration and fines for those citizens who help others get registered to vote.

During the days when respectable Americans could justify imposing a literacy test or a tax on people who wanted to vote (as many states did as recently as the 1960s), what side would you have been on? Or if you were alive, what side were you on?

Here is how President Clinton described this wave of anti-American vote-blocking:

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," former President Bill Clinton told a group of college students in July.

It's time to attack back.

The government should handle all voter registration automatically -- we shouldn't make people jump through administrative hoops to register to vote -- and then fine those fantastic citizens who help others jump through the hoops.

Cities and counties should issue photo IDs to all residents and visitors to overcome the new photo ID poll tax requirements. They should require all landlords to give new tenants a voter registration form. City stickers should have a voter registration form included. Anytime a citizen moves and tells any level of government, that agency should automatically prepare a change of address form and send it to the election agency.

And most importantly, we should introduce an element of shame to the politicians who try to block citizens from making a free choice as to which politicians should run the government. Spread the word about what Republicans are doing. Attack back.

There is a war against voting. Attack back.

The Republican Party is waging a war on voting. This Rolling Stone article by Ari Berman explains it.

Republicans have taken control of several state governments and have implemented new laws designed to deny Americans the ability to vote in the presidential election. By making American citizens carry a photo ID with their current address before voting, by reducing the days and hours when polling places are open and by making citizens jump through administrative hoops just to register at their current address, these Republicans intend to win elections by keeping people who intend to vote Democratic from ever casting a ballot.

It’s appalling. And it is time to attack back.

Republicans may control state governments. But Democrats control local governments. And the best way to attack the Republican push to keep Americans from voting is to pass local laws and programs that will result in more people voting.

What can Democratic cities and counties do? Plenty. One main target of the Republican assault: people who move. Republican base voters are older, conservative people who have lived in the same house for years. Younger people who rent (and move every year) are more liberal and vote for Democrats. That’s why Republicans pass laws to make people submit paperwork to some obscure government agency every time they move to update their new address, because lots of people won’t know to do it, and then they won’t be able to vote.

So we can attack back by making sure people who move know they have to follow the ridiculous rule to register at their current address. We can pass local laws that require every landlord to give a voter registration form to every new tenant when they sign a lease. We can pass local laws that require every utility company to include a voter registration form in the first month’s bill for every new customer. And every city and county we control can automatically submit a completed voter registration form for their citizens whenever they update their address with the city or county through a car registration or school address or park program.

And we should really take the responsibility as a government to create an up-to-date voter registration list and proactively register our citizens to vote, rather than putting that burden on the citizen. The unique ID number that each state already issues to each citizen for their drivers license or state ID should be the same unique voter ID in a statewide database for voter registration, so that millions of Americans won't fall through the cracks and not get registered to vote.

Not every Republican elected official is part of the war against voting. And truth be told, some Democratic electeds have joined that war. When I have drafted, lobbied and passed pro-voter laws in Illinois, there were usually one or two Republicans who would vote for the bill, and one or two Democrats who would vote against it. So there are exceptions. But by and large, 95% of the Republicans were against my bills that got more people voting (and were quite clear they didn't want people to vote!) and 95% of the Democrats were for the bills.

There is a war going on. And we’ve been losing it. It’s time for local Democratic leaders to join the rebel forces that are fighting back. For every law they pass that will block one person from voting, we will pass a law that will bring a ballot to one more person. We will not let them win elections by disenfranchising Americans. We will attack back over the next 12 months with new local laws, programs and initiatives to get citizens in Democratic cities and counties registered to vote and prepared to do so under the new rules, so that in November of 2012, the greatest possible number of Americans will choose our leaders.

No government policy should stand between an American and her ballot. Let's attack back.

The rules of democracy matter. Raw disenfrachisement of voters is appalling

I find it appalling when government officials (almost exclusively Republicans, sadly) keep citizens from voting. They do so by putting up deadlines for citizens to register with some obscure government agency days or weeks before the election. They do so by making citizens stand in line in some random neighborhood location for one time period on a weekday. And recently, about a dozen states are requiring citizens to carry around and show photo identification in order to vote.

As if someone is any less of a citizen if they don't have an up-to-date drivers license.

(And in Texas, student IDs explicitly do not count.)

I have a bit of a hobby pushing for more inclusive voter registration laws in Illinois, and I am usually appalled when good-natured and intelligent legislators (again, almost always Republican) turn somewhat savagely against every effort to repeal government roadblocks to citizens exercising their right to vote.

That's why I really like this Colbert Report segment on voter ID laws passed in the last two years. He is clearly angry about them. And so am I. This is inspiring me to work to improve Illinois' laws even more in 2012 and expand the grace period even closer to election day.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Voter ID Laws
www.colbertnation.com
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Great video on a new millionaire's income tax rate

This is a really neat video. The ending actually gave me chills.

I love this line: "Rich people are not the cause of a robust economy; rich people are the result of a robust economy."

Nice job.

Wouldn't it be great to meet a business partner online?

I have started a lot of different businesses. Most of them have failed, in the sense that they are no longer operating. The main lesson I have learned is that it is much better to start a business with a partner than to go it alone. Risk is shared, skills are shared, sweat equity is pooled and the end product is usually superior.

The trouble is finding a partner.

I don't know a good way to do it. It seems to be a friend-of-a-friend process, or who you went to school with thing, which is remarkably inefficient. It's a big world and everyone's circle of friends is relatively tiny.

It hit me one day when I was at lunch in Springfield with one of my clients, the Federation of Women Contractors. One of the women was talking about her son who had married a woman from Scotland. They were from the Chicago suburbs. I asked how they met, and she answered (you can predict): online. She said that on his profile he was very clear -- he was looking for a wife. Nothing else. And the woman who found who was looking for a husband with similar qualities that he had happened to be Scottish. And now he lives over there, happy as a clam.

Without an internet dating site, it would be essentially impossible to find a person with remarkably similar interests and goals over great distances without any shared friends. These dating sites are remarkably efficient market-making platforms for pairing up life partners. They make every other method of finding a spouse or a girlfriend seem ridiculously limiting and self-defeating. How do you meet a compatible stranger without a platform? Chance? Serendipity? Referrals?

That's when it hit me. There isn't an analogous platform for potential business partners to meet. There isn't a dating site for business partners. And there should be.

I would use it. In a heartbeat.

So, I'll create one. The trouble is, I need to use the product I'm trying to create in order to find the business partners (like a programmer and a marketer) I need to create the product. A bit of a Catch-22.

In the meantime, I'm working on the part that I can do: coming up with the filtering questions to get down to the most important qualities for potential business partners to know about each other. I've set up a surveymonkey site where my evolving questions are -- and I invite you to fill out the survey and 'join' EquityPartnerMatch.com

I've asked for advice from other entrepreneurs, and some people suggest I keep the idea to myself until I can line up funding, rercuit the people to run the company and then emerge as the first-mover to market. I've decided not to follow that path. Ideas are nice, but execution makes an organization work. So if someone else 'steals' this idea and actually executes it into a product and a viable business, good for them. An idea that never gets implemented ultimately isn't that valuable.

This product may fit best with LinkedIn (as there really isn't a great way to communicate with other people on LinkedIn) or, perhaps, the freelance sites like guru.com that list hundreds of thousands of freelancers available for hire. Networks become more valuable with more members, so adding onto an existing large network of potential business partners like programmers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, marketers and the like is probably easier than trying to create an entirely new network from scratch. The trick is finding the most useful way for strangers to match up as business partners by filtering down to the essential attributes about themselves that they are willing to share. Maybe there's an expert out there that already knows how to do this, but I suspect it's a trial-and-error proposition to come up with the right questions. I'd be interested in your feedback.

Closing the ignorance gap is good for progressives and Democrats

Millions of Americans believe that Medicare is not a government program. Millions. Medicare is probably the most effective socialist program in the country (the government taxes people and directly pays for the service without any for-profit middleman insurance company -- seems like socialism to me!), and instead of warming people up to the idea of government making their lives better, millions of people think that the government ought to stay out of Medicare.

This is ignorance.

And this civic or government ignorance that millions of American suffer from is a heavy anchor holding back progressive governance.

The more people hold reflexive anti-government suspicions, even as they like some of the biggest government programs like Medicare, the harder it is to build consensus for reasonable, pragmatic investments in our economy like Medicare for everyone or expanded public transportation. This is because the ignorant won't agree.

We must educate the ignorant. If after they come to understand that Medicare is, in fact, a government program, and they are still against the government out of some precious feeling that the government is bad, then fine. But some of the people who are anti-government but pro-Medicare will change their mind and drop their animus against the government when they are shown what the government actually is.

Who will close the ignorance gap? It isn't fair to ask a political candidate or a political party to do so. Their job is to earn majority support from the people where they are -- not necessarily to change the electorate's views on issues. They are working to change the electorate's views on the candidates and the parties, but not on issues. If a candidate finds that a good chunk of the people are simply misinformed about an issue, it isn't the candidate's job to teach them. So who will?

Who will pay for a mailing to every Republican-leaning senior in America that says Medicare is the Government!

I think we tend to overlook the very large benefits of relatively small civic education targeted to the ignorant whose ignorant views result in voting for the anti-government party. (Not all Republican voters are ignorant, of course, but for those that are in the 'keep government out of Medicare vein', some civic education could change their minds and their votes.) As a related example, I'm convinced that millions of Americans have no idea how marginal federal income tax rates work (if we raise taxes on income above $250,000, no one who makes less than that in a year will pay higher taxes). If all American did understand it, then no one would fall prey to the ignorant response to raising the highest marginal income tax rate with 'you're going to end up paying higher taxes....somehow'. And people do!

I'm increasingly intrigued with the idea of waging a campaign to narrow the ignorance gap among swing voters. People need to be educated in order to make up their own mind about the state of our nation. We can't expect a modern, intelligent, pragmatic government if we don't invest in educating the people who ultimately run it, and that's the electorate.

For better politics, talk about money

"We're not allowed to talk about money in our society. You can't ask someone how much they make. That's considered impolite. It's taboo. But who does that benefit? The rich people. They don't want us talking to each other about money. Because if we do, we're going to want to do something about how much we're all struggling and how much money they make."

That blew me away about a decade ago at a fundraising workship put on by Kim Klein. The topic was how to fundraise for a non-profit organization (key point: ask someone for money), but I learned then that talking about money is the key to progressive politics.

Politics is basically about money. The rich want to keep it. The rest of us want to take that money and spend it to make our lives better off. That's the bottom line.

Turns out, the rich are actually better off when we take that money and spend it on everyone else, because that makes the economy work better. Wouldn't you know it, when the masses of people have more money to spend, we spend it! And that makes the economy work. When the masses do not have a lot of money to spend, we don't spend it, and that slows the economy down, hurting the rich as well.

Unfortunately, most of the rich (and the Republican Party that supports them) do not see it that way. They just want to keep the money, even if makes the rest of the country essentially bankrupt. So the big ongoing fight at the center of American politics is whether we are going to take the money that the rich get now and spend it on the rest of us or not. That's going to be at the center of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign in a year and half, when he campaigns to raise the federal income tax rate on income above $250,000 and all Republicans will oppose it.

The fascinating part of American politics is trying to figure out how to convince the people who make less than $250,000 a year and who vote Republican to understand that they are hurting themselves financially. They may have other reasons to vote Republican that are correct on the merits (maybe they are anti-choice or they are for unilateral military action) but on whether or not they are making their family better off financially, people who are not rich and and vote Republican are objectively voting to make their families worse off.

This paradox of non-rich Republican voters choosing to make their families worse off on behalf of some other cause (the concept of a small government, perhaps) needs a lot more attention. We need polling data and focus groups with all sorts of representative demographic groups (women, men, younger, older, southern, northern) to really understand how best to point out to non-rich Republicans the financial consequences of Republican policies. We non-rich people vastly outnumber the rich people in any given year (the top 2 percent of wage earners by definition only make up 2% of the population). But somehow, 98% of Republican voters are supporting tax policies that only benefit the top 2%, and they either don't know that they are hurting their families by doing so or they don't care. We need to understand which it is, and we need to find out which of those non-rich Republicans are open to accepting that financial truth if explained to them from a trusted source in a non-confrontational way.

I think the main reason why so many non-rich people vote for tax policies that hurt them is how little we talk about money in our culture.

It is to our advantage to get people talking about money. When people talk about how much they make, and whether they are getting by, and then talk about whether the people who are making a million or twenty million or two hundred million dollars this year can afford to pay more in taxes to make them better off, they are much more open to voting Democratic to raise taxes on high incomes. And when people do not talk about money at all, because it is taboo, they are not very open to raising taxes on the top 2%, because they assume that might somehow in some way be worse for them.

Most of politics is defining the question. A great and powerful independent educational campaign would be to ask the question directly to millions of middle-income Americans "Do you think millionaires can afford to pay 5% more of their income above $250,000 in taxes in order to make your family better off?"

Perhaps it's another version of class consciousness. An educational campaign to remind people how much they make and that in order to look out for their family, they should vote for the party that will look out for families who make about what they make, not the people who make a million dollars a year.

It's a campaign that will never be waged through earned media. But by getting people to think -- perhaps through paid media or through social media or direct mail -- "I have to look out for my family, and since I make under $100,000 a year, I have to vote for whoever will look out for people who make that amount of money" we are on the path to a consensus to raise taxes on the wealthy who can afford to pay it.

I can imagine a radio ad that appeals to men broadcast on the news stations. Instead of hawking gold investments, insurance or hair growth products, sell the listener on how he and his family are better off if we raise taxes on income above $250,000 a year, since somebody's got to pay for the government, and it's either going to be you or them. Or a financial advice columnist type of voice, like Terry Savage, but instead of calling on people to wake up and get their personal spending under control by acknowledging how much they make and bringing their expenditures in line with their income, send out the same frank, insistent call for families to take control of their finances by voting for the candidates who are going to help people who support their income bracket, not the wealthy.

I want to help run an independent, educational campaign that gets more American voters to think about politics through the lens of how much money they actually make in order to make their family better off.