PostGOP: When (almost) everyone gets it wrong.

This story, is one of those rare occasions where everything that I typically write about can be found in one nice, neat package.....

Republican Tries to Block Muslim From Office. Mike Morris & Rebecca Elliott, HoustonChronicle.com($$$)


Fair warning, I'm going to selectively quote a little more than usual from this story. Please go read the whole thing if you have access behind the Chron's firewall.

1. PostGOP & BadPolitics:

"If you believe that a person can practice Islam and agree to the foundational principles of the Republican Party, it's not right, it's not true, it can't happen," Gordon said.

Yes, Mr. Gordon, it CAN happen.  As it can with Hindus, Atheists, Agnostics, Mormons, 7th Day Adventists.....

But attitudes such as this are one of the reasons why I've abandoned the GOP to itself (again).  The first time I left them was in response to family Bush, of whom I'm not a fan, and what I felt was the abandonment of conservatism by the party proper.  I returned because the Democrats are SO bad that I was frequently voting fairly close to straight-ticket anyway.  Then Trump happened, and all of the bad stuff that makes up the GOP bubbled to the surface.  There are many who feel this way and don't want to be part of a party that is biased, bigoted, anti-Semitic and exclusionary.

What should have followed is a stripping of Mr. Gordon's position of Chaplain, and a motion to censure.  But, it didn't so that's that.

2. More BadPolitics:

Mustafaa Carroll, of the Council on American–Islamic Relations' Houston branch, was less sanguine.

"There is no religious test necessary to be a public official in the United States of America," Carroll said. "This country is founded on religious pluralism and if he (Gordon) knew about the document the Founding Fathers wrote, then he would know that."

The problem with this logic?  Syed Ali was not running to become a 'public official' he was running to become a 'party official' and there's a huge difference between the two. In fact, if Mr. Carroll knew "about the document the Founding Fathers wrote" then he would know that the Constitution is mute on the subject of political parties.

Certainly, they still cannot discriminate based on a protected class, and one could make a reasonable, and accurate, argument that religion is a protected class, but this is not a Constitutional matter as much as it is one of internal party politics.  Which leads me to....


3. BadMedia:

Councilwoman Ellen Cohen, who last year rallied votes for Houston's since-repealed nondiscrimination ordinance, said she found Gordon's comments "abhorrent."

"That attitude is so disruptive and doesn't speak for the kind of country we are and should be," she said.

It's amazing to me that the Chronicle, in an article that is obviously and frankly about party politics, chooses to 1. Quote Ellen Cohen (who has no dog in this fight) in the first place and 2. NOT identify her as a partisan Democrat.

But the Chron, under their new, flown-in-from-Boston leadership, is not about reporting the news these days. They're more about pursuing page hits with slide-show pictorials and allowing cub reporters to opine, seemingly unedited, on hot-button issues. What they cannot shoe-horn into their hard-news coverage, they force into Gray Matters.  

Of course, the Democrats, famously, booed God at their 2012 convention and the Chron was mum while one idiot at a County party meeting does something stupid and it's front page news. If you're running under the assumption that having morons as members is a monopoly held by the Republicans then you're not paying attention.  Both parties have idiots on their voter rolls, far more than each would like to admit.

4. GoodPolitics: (and good people)

The one good person in all of this?  Syed Ali...

Ali, who works in the insurance business, said Gordon's comments did not offend him.

"I don't have anything against him. That's his point of view," Ali said. "Freedom of speech, Constitution of the United States, his belief, his thought, his experience, his individual mind – that was his mind, and that was his speech. That's fine with me."

I like this guy.  And I like Felicia Winfree Cravens as well, but I do think she's putting her head in the sand a little bit regarding the exclusionary proclivities of many within the GOP.  For all of the talk of "big tent Republicans" the truth is there are many who would rather see the party reduced to a single person shanty whose only residents meet some extremely strict purity tests.

I can tell you that I will fail them.  And, eventually, you will as well.

Houston Area Leadership Vacuum: The rise of the Houston LockStep Political Media

When reading the following I want you to keep something in mind: Luxury Apartments and Condominiums.

Houston, it seems, is no longer an affordable place to live. OK sure, housing prices are still relatively low but, in order to raise Houston's cost of living, there is a coordinated effort to fiddle with transportation costs to lower Houston's rating and continue the assault against the single-family vehicle. In fact, it could be argued that you, driving your car to and from work, the grocery store, to your children's recitals, classes, school, etc. have become public enemy number one in Houston's fight against affordability creep.

The car, either within the city or without, has never been sexy when viewed through the spectrum of new urbanist thinking. This is, in large part, because you, in your car, present an obstacle to those who want to be in theirs with less traffic on the roads. It's been known for a long time that the idea of public transportation has strong support but ridership percentages (compared to the whole of the commuting population) are relatively low. The reason for this? People like the idea of buses and trains when other people are riding them and they're driving by (or, in some cases, being driven by) in their cars on wide open roads.

We also know that everyone wants there to be affordable housing, provided it's located far away from their own neighborhood. The convenient answer to this, provided to us by think-tanks and the unproductive class, is "affordable housing located next to transit centers".  This is, presumably, the best of both worlds. You give the poor and gormless ready access to trains and buses which prevents them from mingling with their more enlightened brethren who like to ride their bikes at parks, visit sidewalk cafes and generally live life as they imagine the Europeans do. (except that, the Europeans really don't). This ensures that the older, more expensive, inner-city neighborhoods with their McMansions and refurbished bungalows maintain their 'character and charm' without being subjected to the blight that is brought on by an influx of those less sophisticated and fortunate. It also ensures that the roadways are only populated by two types of people. Either those with luxury sedans who have 500 plus horsepower to travel at 30 MPH or those who drive more modest vehicles from the sticks to work the service jobs that the luxury set requires.

Of course, there's a flaw in all of this thinking and it lies in the italicized words at the top of this post.

Because, you see, what's being built around the transit centers is not affordable housing. Increasingly, in Houston, it's luxury apartments that are being built. The reason for this is due to the relatively high valuation of land requiring high-rents to be sustainable. You're not going to receive a ROI high enough to please your investors if you're building affordable housing inside Loop 610.

It's no accident then that Houston's public transportation network was not designed to bring people from the outlying areas to job centers, as most good public transportation systems do. Instead, the entire purpose of the system is to move relatively affluent residents from their residences and businesses to their places of recreation. During the rare times that the Metrorail builds out to low-income areas (the Near East side for example) the long-term hope is gentrification and an increase in collectible rents will "bring up" blighted, aging neighborhoods. Historic preservation is the sole provenance of the well-to-do. The poor don't have that luxury and, in many cases, would prefer a nice grocery store over a 40-year-old school house that's falling in on itself.

Put it this way: Parks, curbside coffee-ships, wine & tapas bars and five-star restaurants catering to the foodborg and their fellow travelers are not designed for the poor. They're catering specifically to a more elevated class (in their minds) and would recoil in horror if a family of five came in to celebrate a 20 year anniversary. You don't see parents feeding a baby Cheerios from a Ziploc baggie at Pass & Provisions.

Houston's elite and ruling class have long looked to cities such as New York, Chicago, Portland and San Francisco with envious eyes. Cities that are given more run in the national and global media as centers of culture and urbanism. At heart, what we're currently witnessing are successes at attempting to copy those cities. In many cases, the very people who are grousing that Houston needs to copy those cities are the same who came to Houston because it had jobs where the others did not. Trying to explain that to a New Urbanist can cause a paradigm to shift without a clutch, so tread carefully.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong, or faulty, in what the New Urbanists would like to see. It is a different vision of Houston than many people had when they arrived, and a different Houston than what attracted them in the first place, but it's a valid point of view on what the city should be. While I, and others, disagree with the goal that doesn't mean that it's adherents are fundamentally wrong. It would be nice if they argued about it honestly however. Missing from any of these arguments is the fact that Houston's relatively cheap housing has allowed people to spend more on other priorities (including nicer cars) or to move outside of the city center to outlying areas where drives are longer, but lot sizes and square footage bigger, schools better and the infrastructure actually works. These are choices that people make, not something that they are, in many cases "forced" to do. In fact, for all of the talk about 'Houston' growing, it's really the Houston extended metro area that's growing, while the city itself sees population numbers that are flat, or slightly declining.

The problem then is both that people have a choice and they're increasingly not making the ones that the unproductive class would prefer. There are trade-offs inherent in any choice, something that the utterly worthless Houston Area Study constantly fails to include in it's questions. The New Urbanists among us don't want to mention those, because they water down their arguments. Houston being a lot more nuanced than Houtopia.

I've stated before that the "battle" for the future of Houston is over and those who believe as I do, that the public transportation system should be focused on moving people into the city and then to various job centers, have lost badly. From Metrorail to bus reimagining, Houston's public transit system is now fully positioned to actuate the New Urbanist vision. Whether or not the argument has been an honest debate is irrelevant to our current position. We're running full-on, full speed to Houtopia and every out-of-context data point only serves to feed the popular narrative.

What we're seeing now is the second stage, a chance for further diminishing the role of the single-family automobile, and further separating 21st century Houston from the past that led to it's rise as the global city for energy. So-called "complete streets" seek to choke traffic flow to the point of impassability while benign sounding "traffic calming" measures are anything but. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing we might not ever know because the rise of the Houston Lock Step Political Media is going to ensure that only one view is given a voice. That the 'one chosen view' is biased, occasionally dishonest and, in most cases, dictatorial are just the eggs that inevitably get broken in the New Urbanist omelet.

If there was a mission statement it would read as follows:  "In Houston, you are free to choose any mode of transportation you want, as long as it is not a car."

Houston Mayoral Election: Bill King on TIRZ

BlogHouston has posted an editorial from the Bill King Campaign on a subject that I have brought up from time to time: Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones (TIRZ)

While it is not the policy of this blog to make endorsements in elections, I do believe this issue will be big in the coming years and Mr. King's thoughts are worth a read.

King: Growing Concerns Over TIRZ, BlogHouston


Since BlogHouston sought, and obtained, permission from the King campaign to reproduce the editorial in full, I will not block-quote here but will encourage you to head over to that site and read the entire thing.

What I will do is re-post some of my thoughts from a previous post on how TIRZ can be reformed:

 - Shorter, more flexible sunset dates. - This would allow the TIRZ to be brought to an end once their mission ended.
 - More narrowly defined objectives - Preventing the 'mission creep' that we're now seeing in highly developed areas where TIRZ officers are trying to keep their phony baloney jobs.
 - Harder boundaries - Preventing the types of land-grabs that are outlined in the Press piece.
 - More accountability - Including increased audit requirements and new, more robust, public disclosure rules.
 - Term limits for appointments -  because.

Houston Area Leadership Vacuum: Ken Hoffman makes a good point, buries it, and readers miss it entirely.

Reading through Ken Hoffman's recent piece on HISD Graduation parking fees made me realize something......

NRG Parking Fee and Insult at HISD Graduations. Ken Hoffman, HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)

(The linked article is behind the Chron's increasingly expensive paywall. My quote here is very selective but please, if you can, go read the entire column)

This was a public-school graduation at a public facility. It wasn't professional entertainment, like a football game or a concert, where you expect to pay for parking.

The quoted piece, above, is the argument against the NRG complex charging the parking fee. Sure, Hoffman goes on to do what we all do, argue that many of the student's families attending the graduation might not be financially well off, but he needn't do that.  The argument against was in the quoted sentence above.

What Hoffman did, by making economic demographics the central figure of his piece is to politicize it needlessly.  Take the following response from the comments:

Well, I think life is too short to complain about a $12 parking and if you can't afford it, then you shouldn't be driving an uninsured car.

This is why, in the incredibly insipid world of anonymous online commentary, bringing a red herring into the argument such as demographics only serves to distort the argument for into something it is not.  By bringing in issues such as income inequality and demographics Hoffman all but ensured that his central point (this was a public event at a public-owned [albeit privately operated] facility) has been lost in a wave of anti-corporate, and anti-immigrant snark.

There are also a lot of commenters blaming NRG for this mess.  In fact, NRG only has the naming rights for the complex and had nothing to do with the decision to charge for parking.

If you want someone to blame, then look at the Harris County Sports Authority who neglected to carve out a 'public use' exception to the parking fee in the contract with the Texans and the Rodeo. Had Harris County the leadership to negotiate in this manner, issues of this type would not exist. Instead, it often feels like the lease to run the complex was nothing more than a giveaway on behalf of the County to Bob McNair*.

Should the Texans have offered parking for free?  Certainly. But, absent a contractual obligation to do so they were well within their rights to charge full-rate, regardless of the nature of the event. If you want to blame anyone, point your ire directly at the Harris County Sports Authority.











































*On another, tangential, note: Has there been another public figure who has fallen so far, so fast in public perception than Bob McNair?  From savior of football in Houston to nothing more than a greedy, conniving, miser who's doddering management style is not only ruining the Texans, but embarrassing and financially damaging the City of Houston as well.

 

Houston's Summer Tradition: Lessons (not) learned from a poorly designed survey.

As Spring winds down and Houston begins it's long slog toward Summer's heat and humidity it's time to revisit the worst of political traditions, The Kinder Houston Area Survey.

It's a bright, sunny time when the unproductive class (and the Houston Chronicle) rely heavily on questions asked minus the vital context of trade-off. Where pluralities support light rail and dense, urban living without being asked what they're willing to give up in order to achieve Houtopia.

To whit:

Montgomery and Fort Bend Counties more similar than different study shows. Matthew Tresaugue, HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)

(You know the drill, fair use quote, go read the entire article if you can)

Separated by 50 miles of Houston sprawl, the two counties see bumper-to-bumper traffic as the region's biggest problem, ahead of crime and the local economy, the poll found. And despite the car-oriented cultures of both places, four in 10 people surveyed say they would prefer to live within walking distance of work, restaurants and shops.

(Emphasis mine)

Anyone surprised they said that?  Because who wouldn't want to live within walking distance of these things?  In a perfect world I'd like to live in the South of France and sip Chablis all day while watching beautiful sunsets with two ladies in bikinis by my side.

Of course, that would anger my wife, which would put a strain on my marriage and probably end up with me being divorced. So that would suck. I also would probably lose my job which would mean that I'd have to sneak into France, avoid their tough immigration and have to live in the shadows. Because of this I'd probably be broke so the Chablis that I would drink would be limited to mostly empty bottles that I lifted from café tables, and the two bikini-clad French ladies on my arm would probably only be figments of my imagination since I wouldn't have the Millions of Euros needed to support that lifestyle.

So, that's out then.

What Kinder doesn't (adequately) ask people in it's survey is similar, although not nearly as extreme. What would survey respondents be willing to give up to live the mythical lifestyle that Houston Tomorrow and other groups advocate?

For one, they'd have to give up their current employment which, as is the case with most large companies, is located in on of Houston's business centers. This would probably mean that they'd have to take a significant pay cut. Are they willing to do that?

They'd also probably have to pay 5-10 times more for a similar home if they lived in a walkable area. Dense, urban city living often carrying a high cost. In reality, they'd probably be looking at multi-family housing. I know right now you're thinking one of Houston's many luxury apartments would be pretty good right?  Well, they're not cheap, "luxury" not meaning actually luxurious but expensive. In most cases, including rent and maintenance fees, these will run 2-3 times current house payments in the suburbs.  This means that they're probably looking at a mid-to-lower level apartment complex, which carry negative connotations of high-crime and dodgy maintenance.  Would they be willing to give up their yards and pets to partake in this idyllic life-style?

Then we have the thorny issue of schools. A LOT of suburbanites move to said suburbs to ensure that little Tommy and Tammy attend better school districts. They do this because they all think that their offspring are going to become star athletes or lawyers, doctors etc. The ignores the reality that, in todays marketplace, they're probably going to end up as middle managers with ulcers and 2.4 children, a mortgage (in the suburbs) and a car payment that's slightly too high because that Acura CXV really looked nice in the showroom and 84 months is totally a reasonable amount to spend on a car.

But would they want to give all of this up if it meant they could pop down to the local Whole Foods, get an EZ credit decision to finance their weekly grocery bill and get back home before the Voice starts?

Again, this year, we will never know because the study never asked.

Houston Area Leadership Vacuum: The New Mrs. White rebuts her own argument without realizing it.

It's very rare these days to click on Chron.com and find actual 'news'.  Typically the former newspaper of record for Houston focuses on click-bait slide shows usually involving women in various stages of undress or Houston "lifestyle" stories that typically focus on things wealthy white folks like to do. It's not surprising then that, when they do attempt to venture into the serious, they quite often get it wrong. Increasingly, they don't even understand why they get it wrong.

Take today's editorial on the creatively named ad-hoc committee on city charter changes.

Charter Changes, The New Mrs. White, Chron.com

The committee voted unanimously on Thursday to leave in place the unnecessary and fiscally irresponsible revenue cap. Passed by voters in 2004, with some tweaks in 2006, the cap requires the city to limit growth in property tax revenue. There is no similar mechanism to limit declines in tax revenue. So while city services can take a sharp nosedive during an economic downturn, any recovery will remain stuck in the slow lane.

Council members have said that they're hesitant to remove the cap when cutting spending is still an option. But savings that seem plainly obvious are often politically difficult to achieve.

That cost savings are so difficult to implement is proof of case that the revenue caps are a needed and necessary check on government growth.  If even obvious savings can't be implemented then there has to be a mechanism in place to ensure that City Government is living (sort of) within its means.

Maybe it's because they're too busy looking at slide-shows of bikini's through the ages, or buildings that used to be in Houston but the New Mrs. White, and the rest of news room, seem to have little idea of the problems actually facing the city, or any idea how to deal with them.

The rest of the article is a rather tepid defense of Houston's 'strong mayor' system of governance, her only argument for keeping it is that "it's not broke".  What Mrs. White ignores is that the system IS breaking as Houston's financial outlook grows worse and worse as the Parker administration winds down.

In times like these, where the Mayor obviously is not up to the task of governing, having a system in place that would allow Council Members to have more input on the agenda would help. That the New Mrs. White cannot see this would be puzzling except that the Chronicle has abdicated the throne of media watchdog in Houston.

In short, there's very little reason to pay attention to the Chronicle on matters of Houston, State or Federal governance any longer. As such, there's very little reason to pay attention to them at all.

The quick fix here is to shutter the entire editorial department and redeploy the resources to actual hard news reporting. Unfortunately that won't be happening any time soon because the leadership seems hell-bent on turning Houston's last newspaper into some kind of watered down hybrid of Deadspin and TMZ. All of this while still claiming they have the insight to make reasoned political arguments regarding government.

They could not be more wrong.