Downtown Stadium is a Strikeout

It has been interesting to watch news people, politicians, and the business community salivate over the proposed $50 million dollar baseball park adjacent to Railroad Park.  Without fail, proponents cite the positive economic impact and the redevelopment of properties between UAB and 1st Ave North, and without fail there are no dissenters among the voices.

Well, count me among the dissenters.  The academic research on sports stadiums shows that these stadiums benefit investors, owners, and players and no one else.  Some highlights of the research follow:

• According to Calvin Jones in the Journal of Environmenal Planning A, sports stadiums contribute to uneven development between and within cities (think spatial injustice from previous post).
• According to Robert Baade and Richard Dye in Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy, "the presence of a new or renovated stadium has an uncertain impact on the levels of personal income and possibly a negative impact on local development relative to the region. These results should serve as a caution to those who assume or assert a large positive stadium impact."
• Baade again argues in the Journal of Urban Affairs that "(t)o attract or retain a team, cities are offering staggering financial support and rationalize their largesse on economic grounds. Do professional sports increase income and create jobs in amounts that justify the behavior of cities? The evidence detailed in this paper fails to support such a rationale. The primary beneficiaries of subsidies are the owners and players, not the taxpaying public."
• Adam Zaretsky argues in the April 2001 issue of the Regional Economist, a publication of the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, that "the use of public funds to lure or keep teams begs several questions, the foremost of which is, 'Are these good investments for cities?' The short answer to this question is 'No.' When studying this issue, almost all economists and development specialists (at least those who work independently and not for a chamber of commerce or similar organization) conclude that the rate of return a city or metropolitan area receives for its investment is generally below that of alternative projects. In addition, evidence suggests that cities and metro areas that have invested heavily in sports stadiums and arenas have, on average, experienced slower income growth than those that have not."

Clearly, stadiums do not benefit the majority of the taxpayers and under some circumstances may actually harm them.  Those that benefit from the subsidy are those that seek to gain the most from the development: real estate magnates benefiting from rising land values, investors in businesses in the surrounding entertainment district, and politicians with more money for their projects.  No cities build baseball stadiums with public money anymore, specifically because there are few public benefits and legions of private sector benefits.

If Birmingham Barons owner Don Logan wants to move the Barons back to Birmingham, he should assemble his own investors. God forbid that he put his own cash up for the stadium [/sarcasm].  It is understandable that Birmingham wants to follow the lead of many cities in turning downtown into a playground for the rich, but careful attention to the research reveals that the benefits from such redevelopment never actually trickle down.

Birmingham needs a municipal economics built on service to the least fortunate, not the most fortunate.  Parkside stadium strikes out in this regard.

Race in Birmingham

Reinventing Our Community: Can Metro Birmingham Move Beyond Race?

This is a pretty good analysis by the Birmingham News.  My only complaint is that the attention to black flight is misleading.  While suburbs in metro Birmingham may be more diverse than in recent years, Birmingham is still the most segregated metro area in the South and 15th most segregated in the nation.  Stay tuned, we have research on race and the local food movement in Birmingham coming out in the next year.

Food access is not the answer

Today's LA Times article on food access and obesity confirms what I have been suggesting throughout this entire blog.

Eating healthy is a question of having money, not of having access to food outlets. Poor folks are going to buy the cheapest food even if a conventional grocery store with healthier options exists. The quickest way to improve people's diet is to increase their income. 

The food movement up to this point has centered on technical fixes to obesity - namely, increasing access to healthy food - but what is needed are interventions that combine community economic development with increased food access. Main Street Birmingham and Project Hopewell are developing public markets in Southwest Birmingham for precisely this reason, but this project is only one piece of the solution.

Birmingham needs comprehensive community economic development beginning with food production through urban farms and possibly aquaponics cooperatives, proceeding to value-added products such as cakes, breads, and jams, and ending with the public markets that are being created.  Comprehensive projects like these will increase access to healthy food, raise incomes, provide employment, and integrate food within every aspect of community life.

These projects are inherently political in the sense that they challenge dominant economic development paradigms that center on financial power, instead devolving control to individual entrepreneurs and in ideal cases, worker-owners of a cooperative.  This stands in stark contrast to the ill-conceived and ineffective focus on access.

The pieces are in place to do real community economic development around food, and the time is now to shift the movement from technical fixes to revolutionary projects.

Why Health is Really a Stand-in for Class

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reveals in his seminal text Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste that lifestyle is a function of an individual's position in society.  In "America's Fittest Cities," Atlantic blogger Richard Florida shows how those lifestyles are a function of uneven economic development in the US. In the rankings of the fittest Americans, "fitness" tracts roughly onto the division of labor between American cities.

Working class, poorer cities are "unfit," while wealthy cities with heavy knowledge industries are "fit."  The lifestyle dubbed healthy by the CDC and others is the lifestyle most appropriate to the labor market best characterized as post-industrial, information-oriented, and "creative," while the least "fit" lifestyles are associated with heavy industry and manufacturing, remnants of an older economic paradigm.

Think of it this way: the assembly line nature of fast food is more congruent with vertically integrated heavy industry or Fordism, while farmer's markets are more in line with creative, flexible, knowledge-based industries.  Foodies are more or less producing the food system of neoliberalism and flexible accumulation.  In other words, the people who have the "healthiest" lifestyle are the most affluent and they use the notion of health to legitimate and generalize the culture and lifestyle associated with affluence.

Simply put, the idea of an objectively healthy lifestyle serves more to legitimate the wealthy than it does to actually address the health needs of the exploited.

As I have said in previous posts, good food is a human right, and what counts as good food or a healthy lifestyle should be determined by those living that lifestyle - not by technocrats at the Health and Human Services and the Center for Disease Control.  These organizations base the assumptions of fitness for their research on the lifestyles of the elite.

For instance, the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (creepy name), on which the AFI is based, opens the exercise section with the question "During the past month, other than your regular job, did you participate in any physical activities or exercises such as running, calisthenics, golf, gardening, or walking for exercise?"  So the activity of an auto mechanic or construction worker during their regular job doesn't count as exercise?  Obviously, the question is remarkably biased in favor of those who do sedentary work and exercise for leisure - biased in favor of the lifestyle of the wealthy.  By the very structure of the survey, a working class person cannot be as fit as an elite.

Of course, there are negative health effects to not being wealthy, such as lack of adequate food and stress, but food activists should connect these to the unevenness associated with economic development and not try to generalize one, elitist culture of health and fitness for everyone.  At its root, food injustice is economic injustice.  This should be the starting point.

Hometown Boy?

I've done alright for myself.  I was on the college track as a high school student, but during my senior year I abandoned that path and became an auto mechanic.  My parents were horrified.

Mostly, what I can say about being an auto mechanic was that it gave me a unique insight into race and class, my current intellectual preoccupations, but this insight only developed after I got to college and began reading critical literature on race and economics.  My personal experience as a working class person appeared as exploitation with the right framework, and the clear exclusion of blacks from higher-paying, white collar jobs was only recognizable through the lens of race theory.

Now, I see the world through these lenses and I observe how both race and class shape the local food movement, economic development, and alternatives in the Birmingham region, my home.  What I bring to the table is clarity about the political-economic framework under which most of this activity happens. 

Not everything that is billed as universally good is, and not everything billed as parochial is bad.  Different groups with vastly different experiences need different sorts of responses from business and government, and the notion that "we can all just get along" may be true, but it has to be a getting along that recognizes difference and doesn't universalize one way of being (which, in the end, tends to universalize the being of the rich and powerful, as evidenced by my discussion of obesity in the last post).

Finally, I consider myself to be in the tradition of the great Southern eccentrics -  William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, and Hunter S. Thompson.  And, like them, I wrestle with the beauty and brutality of the South, with its persistent racism and sexism, and the Southern belief that being poor is somehow noble (and therefore not challenged).

I'm also increasingly concerned with the ubiquity of the Christian religion in the South and its use as the connective tissue of community, following Martin King's formula.  This seems like a highly exclusionary way to construct community and reveals the problem of creating community through difference.

Ultimately, I would like Birmingham, and by extension Alabama and the South, to transform into a progressive, open society that celebrates, instead of mourns, its past.

Let's stop talking about obesity.

I'm glad Eric Schlosser has publicly adopted the food justice paradigm in his recent Washington Post op-ed, Why being a foodie isn't 'elitist.'

I'm saddened that it took criticism from industrial food advocates to finally gain acknowledgment that food justice is the only acceptable paradigm for the food movement, and that years of criticism from food justice advocates went ignored.  Unfortunately, because of this, Schlosser appears to wield the poor as a political tool instead of having a true dedication to the plight of the oppressed. Anyone with any significant involvement with the food movement (I have been involved in both Alabama and North Carolina) should recognize that the movement has absolutely no answers for the poor and that most movement interventions are targeted at the privileged-lifestyle left.

Leaders like Schlosser may finally be understanding the necessity of addressing injustice for a movement to be successful, but the practices of the rank-and-file in the movement only reinforce its elitist status. Farmer's markets in trendy neighborhoods, $800-a-year CSAs and cooking demonstrations are no substitute for a robust policy agenda that genuinely remakes the food system.

While I'm glad Schlosser is on the right side, I'm cynical about his motivations. I wonder how much work he has actually done in poor neighborhoods and his argument seems like one of political convenience. Furthermore, to suggest that the food movement has any workable answers (i.e. empowerment not charity) to issues of hunger and food insecurity is to either be completely naive or outright lying.

The fact of the matter is that the industrial food system produces affordable food, and the food movement does not. Industrial food advocates are right - the food movement is elitist, but Schlosser's arguments are a step in the right direction. I have another step to suggest.

Let's stop talking about obesity.  Medical professionals have long branded the poor and oppressed as deviant, alternately disciplining that deviance with punishment and working to change that deviance through medical intervention. All the talk about obesity serves the purpose of branding the poor as deviant because they are poor - it further "others" them. Moreover, the BMI was developed using white bodies as the norm, meaning as usual, whiteness becomes the standard by which all others are judged.

The poor deserve good food because they are human beings, not because it is our ("the privileged's") job to ensure that they meet some standard of bodily normality. They also deserve the option to be allowed to choose bad food.  In fact, this line of reasoning calls into question whether largely white leaders like Michael Pollan and Schlosser (and myself for that matter) should have any say at all about how food is produced, distributed and consumed among the poor. Food sovereignty should be the goal, not technocratic fixes to bodies constructed as deviant by medical science.

Schlosser's op-ed is a step in the right direction. Now the question is, are the poor going to serve as a political volleyball, or is the movement going to bend towards a real justice paradigm?

Constitution Reform Coopted?

In an admirable display of political dexterity, Alabama Republicans may have demobilized an entire movement and successfully co-opted their agenda, all while delivering for their powerful friends.

What am I talking about? Alabama State Senator Del Marsh's (R-Anniston) plan to remake the Alabama constitution in favor of his buddies. Naturally, the tax code is way off limits, meaning that our current tax code which punishes the poor will remain firmly in place.

Home rule makes the cut, but with a commission made entirely of Republicans, it is fair to say county commissions won't be given too much more power, especially in the realm of taxation.

I can just see Marsh now, running for governor, claiming the mantel of bipartisan reformer and raking in donations from the new plantation owners (timber) - who seem to be cut from the same mold as the old plantation owners (cotton).

Sadly, the response from the Alabama left has ranged from adulation to giddiness.

Nevertheless, this represents an opportunity and possibly even a significant misstep by Republicans, if played right by reformers. No longer is constitution reform a fringe issue of the left, but a mainstream reform on which everyone agrees. All that remains is to determine the rules engagement.

Republicans have fired the first salvo. Liberals and leftists should waste no time firing back. They should make it known that constitution reform is only legitimate if it includes:

1. Tax code reform
2. Limited but significant home rule
3. The commission should be composed of leaders from civil society, business, and government, not just government.
4. The commission should consist of a group representative of Alabama's diversity of opinions and backgrounds, not just Republicans

There is plenty more, but what I'm trying to say is that the left needs to quickly produce a counter plan that questions the very framework set up by the Republicans and attempt to push constitution reform onto more friendly turf.

Reformers have worked for years to get to this point and, as Yoda said on the eve of the Clone Wars, "now the time is."

[Ed. note: Zac is a nerd.]