Robert David Sullivan

Is it anti-democratic to eat at Chipotle instead of McDonald’s?

The Washington Post ’s Roberto A. Ferdman writes about the success of “fast casual food,” a type of counter-service restaurant that “has grown by 550 percent since 1999, more than ten times the growth seen in the fast food industry over the same period.” The best-known example of the genre is the burrito chain Chipotle, with Panera and Shake Shack also thriving.

What does “fast casual” mean? “It’s surprisingly hard to define what it is exactly,” Ferdman writes. One industry analyst reels off 10 criteria, most of them vague (“food that is wholesome”) or not exclusive to Chipotle and company (you can get “flexible offerings” at Burger King if you insist on it). He does not mention the key characteristic of fast casual restaurants: They don’t have poor people in them.

Ferdman does write that fast casual places are more expensive (“$9 to $13 dollars per receipt, compared to an average ticket closer to $5 for fast food restaurants”), but Chipotle fans gingerly avoid the effects on the chain’s clientele. It’s supposed to be the fresh ingredients that keep people coming back, not the tasteful clothes of the customers.

I go to Chipotle a lot, as well as to Boston-area fast casual chains like Boloco and B. good. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King are off-limits to me, as is New England’s beloved Dunkin’ Donuts. One reason is that the fast casual chains do tend to have healthier options (such as vegetable alternatives to French fries), but equally important is that they so much more pleasant to spend time in.

Are Democats waging a "war on suburbia"?

No, but resentment toward prosperous big cities may be a problem for the Democrats in 2016, as I argue in my new post at America magazine. First, I tackle the silly theories of sprawl proponent Joel Kotkin:

Kotkin, a longtime opponent of smart-growth policies and champion of scare quotes, writes of the Democrats, “The progressive ‘clerisy’ and their developer allies may wish to destroy the suburban dream, but they will not be able to stay in office for long with such attitudes.” He argues that the Obama administration is alienating most voters by giving grants to urban developers and funding public transit as part of a “vision of getting Americans out of their suburban homes and cars and into apartments and trains.”

There may indeed be a backlash against Democrats outside of major cities, for reasons I’ll get to, but Kotkin’s theory doesn’t really make sense. Except for those in the construction and real estate industries, voters who already live in suburbia tend to oppose new housing (and traffic) near them, and I don’t know why they would object to squeezing more people into cities. If Kotkin is correct, urban dwellers should be angry at Democrats for not helping them to move out.

Keeping up with the minimum wage

My Monday post in America magazine looks at the overwhelming support for a hike in the federal minimum wage, something that is not likely to happen in today's political climate:

Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Rep. George Miller of California, both Democrats, have introduced a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10—higher than any current state minimum wage—and then index it to inflation. (It would be $25 if it had kept pace with inflation since 1968.) Poll numbers notwithstanding, this has little chance of passing the GOP-controlled House of Representatives or overcoming a Republican filibuster in the Senate. It is an article of faith for conservative pundits that an increase in the minimum wage will cause employers to simply eliminate jobs. George Will differs a bit in arguing that it’s silly to raise the federal minimum wage when only 3 percent of American workers earn it, but it’s still serves as a benchmark for the 19 states that distinguish themselves by mandating a slightly higher wage, as well as for many employers that attract workers by promising a bit more than the stigmatizing $7.25 an hour.

Read the entire post here.

The long-term unemployed aren't going away

My Thursday post for America magazine is about the long-term unemployed, which is a growing segment of our society. Too bad it's not a growing political force. An excerpt:

Solutions to long-term unemployment do not seem to be on the agenda for 2014. [Matthew] Ygelsias admits that it’s politically unthinkable for the government to directly hire more people to fix our crumbling infrastructure, or do anything else. (Going to war is a traditional way to put people to work, but I think the Tea Party Republicans would rather cede a few blue states to China than put more soldiers on the public payroll.) One small-bore idea is to help people move to places with better employment prospects.

Read the entire post here.

Too creative to succeed

As I approach a landmark birthday with little money and a lack of entrée to the highest social circles of my profession, I can tell myself that I'm just too darn creative to make it big. That's what Jessica Olien's essay in Slate implies:

This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.  

That sounds right to me, but you'll have to get me pretty drunk before I'll give any examples.

Coincidentally, my last post for America magazine is about satisficing in politics, which is one letter off but pretty close to what Olien is writing about: the tendency of people to pick the first "good enough" option that's presented to them. The subtle difference is that it means that people who are already in a position of power can sometimes implement creative ideas. But it's not necessarily the best way to reach the top.

Photo: underappreciated television genius Ernie Kovacs

 

Blocking Walmart doesn't make up for shopping at Crate & Barrel

The near-unanimous opposition among Boston mayoral candidates to letting a Walmart open in the city frustrates the Globe's Shirley Leung:

Walmart looked at opening a grocery store near Dudley Square a couple of years ago, but Menino feared its rock-bottom prices would drive the little guys out of business. Walmart had also scouted out sites in Downtown Crossing and Dorchester.

The argument against Walmart assumes that City Hall should dictate where residents shop. This isn’t Soviet Russia.

Leung addresses two of the biggest complaints against the megastore chain. One is that Walmart drives down wages, something that could be specifically addressed through local or state law (“You can require a higher wage for big box retail,” as Leung quotes one economist.) Another is that Walmart kills smaller, locally owned businesses. Leung writes that this fear is both oversold ("while some independents close, others come along to fill the void") and misplaced ("let the market play itself out").

Classism also plays a role in the Walmart debate. Poorer neighborhoods in Boston are already retail wastelands, and I don't feel comfortable telling residents they must pay ridiculous prices or take a bus to the suburbs to get necessities like brooms, light bulbs, irons, and laundry baskets. You don't have a functioning neighborhood without well-stocked hardware and home furnishing stores. (The omnivorous Woolworth chain used to provide the service of driving inadequately stocked stores out of business.) If Walmart is the only solution on the table, it's paternalistic for residents of wealthier neighborhoods to organize against it.

Blogging elsewhere

Reminder: I'm also blogging on urban issues, education, and criminal justice at MassINC's INCSpot. A taste of my latest post:

Champions of older cities long ago criticized suburbs (or, worse, exurbs) on aesthetic grounds. Then they pointed out the environmental damage of sprawl. Now comes data suggesting that the dispersal of homes and jobs from urban areas is bad economics.

This week New York Times columnist Paul Krugman used the occasion of Detroit pleading bankruptcy to shine a light on what superficially seems to be the opposite of the Michigan city: Atlanta, whose metro area has been experiencing a population boom over the past few decades. In his “Stranded by Sprawl,” Krugman argues that “Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the economic ladder.”

I hope to catch up on television and other pop-culture matters here when I catch my breath.

Update: Is Boston growing because people are stuck here?

A follow-up to yesterday's post, "Boston's reasserted dominance of New England, in three charts":

The Wall Street Journal's Neil Shah reports on the national trend of cities growing faster than suburbs in the past few years. Among the 51 biggest metro areas in the US, central cities grew by 1.12 percent between 2010 and 2012, outpacing the average 0.80 percent in suburban areas. But that's not cause to celebrate, says demographer Kenneth Johnson of the University of New Hampshire, who tells Shah that fewer people “are moving out of the big urban cores because the recession [and sluggish recovery have] tended to freeze people in place.”

Johnson's explanation is consistent with the recent drop in the US homeownership rate. It's still debatable how many people are remaining big-city renters out of choice and how many are "frozen" in cities like Boston because they can't afford to buy a house in the suburbs.

Yay! Now we can browse pregnancy tests on our lunch hour

Last week an absurdly large Walgreens drugstore opened on the site of the former Borders bookshop in Boston’s Downtown Crossing. It has everything you can find at the CVS a couple of doors away (but it’s unlikely to put that hall of horrors out of business), plus stuff like wine and un-American cheese for sad office parties. Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow is unimpressed: “The storefront at the corner of Washington and School Streets looks great, but the place stinks of low ambition. If a pharmacy that slings mediocre sushi is a sign of what’s to come from Downtown Crossing’s rebirth, the long-struggling neighborhood is headed down a very bad path.”

McMorrow wishes the space had become anything else (even a “multi-level roller disco”), but the Walgreens fortress is a logical outcome of the shopping district’s shift from what could be called hard retail (books, clothes, appliances) to the soft goods of junk food and skin creams. I wrote about this trend for the Globe in 2011 (“Next Stop, Downtown Noshing”) and tried to take an optimistic view: “The city has always been about the spaces where people can run into each other. So cocktail bars and food trucks will fill the gap left by Filene’s Basement and Tower Records.” Walgreens tests that optimism; miles of too-sugary energy drinks and potato chips do not serve the same function as a corner bar.

If we can’t get that roller-disco, we can hope that a medical-marijuana dispensary will open in the multi-story space that’s been vacant since Barnes and Noble abandoned it in 2006. At least its customers can take advantage of the abundance of junk food in the area.

•A dissenting view from the Boston Business Journal's George Donnelly: "It puts more people to work in the neighborhood. It’s open 24 hours. It’s a positive step forward, although not a huge one."

Dear new city dwellers: What do you want and how can we make money giving it to you?

Jack Shafer writes for Reuters about the decline of alternative newspapers (like the Boston Phoenix, where I once worked) and makes a connection to the death of retail in big cities:

Mostly gone, too, is record-company advertising. Before that business was disrupted, the labels would give record stores — remember them? — big bags of “co-op” money to advertise the new releases, and even reissues! Video stores — remember them? — were big advertisers, too. Amazon has helped to clean out whole categories of retailing that once advertised in alt-weeklies, such as electronics, books, music and cameras. Big-box stores have displaced many of the indie retailers that long provided advertising backbone. And while Hollywood still places ads, it’s nothing compared to the heyday. [...]

These retail shifts have made it harder for publishers to distribute their weeklies. Before Tower Records went under, a paper could drop thousands of copies a week at the store’s many locations, and the stacks would disappear in a day or two. The video stores that once distributed them? Gone. Borders Books? Gone.

This is part of a so-far-unsolvable problem. We know that urban life is becoming fashionable again, and cities like Boston can't build apartments fast enough to meet demand. But so many appealing aspects of living in a big city are becoming extinct, such as retail stores where people can browse, hang out while waiting to meet friends, and just kill time. Movie theaters are becoming sparse and expensive, diners are being replaced by more upscale eateries that can cover downtown rents, and both the police and neighborhood groups are ready to shut down any bar that gets too popular. Alternative journalism, which boosted urban arts and commerce as much as it made money off them, is another victim of a glossed-out city.

Election 2012 preview: Six politically unpredictable Massachusetts towns

I will be spending Election Night at WGBH radio, looking for signals and surprises as the town-by-town vote comes in. Here's what to expect in the US Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren.

There are a handful of places where Martha Coakley won by more than 2-1 even as she lost to Brown in the 2010 special election. They include Boston, Newton, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, and, way out in the west, Pittsfield. If Warren doesn't double Brown's votes in these towns, and doesn't repeat Coakley's sweep of small towns in the liberal western end of the state, she could be in trouble.

The big question in Boston is turnout. In 2010, there were 153,270 votes cast in the special election, which equaled 66% of the turnout in the 2008 presidential race (232,642). Statewide, turnout in the special election was 74% that of the last presidential election, so Boston needs a rebound in participation to achieve its potential influence on the race. And that may depend on whether enthusiasm for Barack Obama brings out potential Warren voters.

Stop blaming the victims for loneliness "epidemic"

The theme has become something of a joke after the publicity given to the Atlantic's "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" article, but yesterday NPR offered another suspect for the death of civility. It asked, with a possibly winking headline, "As Headphones Invade The Office, Are We Lonelier?"

Headphones or earbuds are becoming common in the workplace. Not just for listening to music on a break, they allow people to tune out their co-workers all day long. But in many cases, those same co-workers are still communicating — online. ...

"We're getting used to a new way of being alone together," says Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She's concerned that all these snippets of information, texts and posts are connections, not conversations. She says technology is letting us hide from one another.

The horrified fascination with loneliness — when will Washington declare war on it? — goes back to the 2000 book Bowling Alone and has intensified with the greater use of smartphones, hook-up sites, iPads, Twitter, etc.

I'm not convinced that loneliness is on the rise. I suspect that it's always been pervasive in free societies (as opposed to places with arranged marriages and the like) and that we're just disappointed that we haven't figured out a way to eliminate it.