advocating urbanism in the opportunity city
When a picture is worth 1000 words…
This (from Slate) is an incredible visual representation of the current downturn, and of how fortunate we are to be in Texas. The blue circles represent job gains in the last year, and the red circles represent job losses. Click on the image to see the original, interactive page. It’s crazy.
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Saying that it’s crazy bad is like the very misleading habit of saying that the mortgage market suddenly “went sour” and avoiding having to keep outright thinking that it was rotten and imaginary during the very good times, and that what we’ve experienced wasn’t at all very good. As for the auto industry, Jane Jacobs told us exactly why it was dead on its feet and had been for fifteen years — and her explanation was in the nineteen sixties.
Some of these positions have wasted incalculable resources schlepping along in the meantime. Best that they be recognized now for the non-viable shell game that they are. In both the large and small cases, these bits of life received justification on the basis of being worth more in the future than the present. That future is here, and for most of those red circles, the premise was never good at all. They’re gone and the granite countertops remain. A lot of our economy was a no more productive investment for the future than that.