Missed Opportunities – A look at the Brookings Institute’s Study

What does the Brookings Institute’s Study on Transit & Jobs Really Tell Us?

On May 12, 2011, the Brookings Institute released a first-of-its-kind study that looked at job accessibility in metropolitan areas via transit.  This exhaustive study took on the issue of job sprawl – the decentralization of jobs from the traditional downtown or urban core and out into the suburbs – and found that Western US cities’ transit systems, such as Los Angeles and Honolulu, have better job accessibility than their compact East Coast counterparts.  The reason is because Western cities’ transit systems were designed post-automobile.  That is to say, Western transit systems were designed to connect suburbs to central cities.

In summary, the Brookings study made the following conclusions:

• Nearly 70% of large metropolitan residents live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind.  This includes bus and light rail.

• In neighborhoods covered by transit, morning rush hour service occurs about once every 10 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter.

• The typical metropolitan resident can reach about 30% of jobs in their metropolitan area via transit in 90 minutes.

• About one-quarter of jobs in low- and middle-skill industries are accessible via transit within 90 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter, compared to one-third of jobs in high-skill industries.

• Fifteen of the 20 metro areas that rank highest on a combined score of transit coverage and job access are in the Western US and 15 of the 20 metro areas that rank lowest are in the Southern US.

Download the Study Here!

The Brookings study did not do one thing that has some critics crying foul.  The study did not look at performance as a function of ridership.  Because the study ignored ridership, instead to focus on job accessibility, does that make the study flawed?  Are its conclusions and ranking of transit systems somehow incorrect because of it? Some say yes. I say no.

Should NGOs Merge or Face Closure?

In a true sign of the times, i was on Twitter when one of the users i follow posted a link to this San Francisco Chronicle Article.  The article describes how SF is flushed with non-profit organizations (NGOs) who have contracts with the city to provide social services and how SF is considering cutting funding entirely to some of those organizations as a way to deal with their budget deficit.

The hard truth is there are far too many service providers for this relatively small city. They duplicate efforts, they don’t have enough oversight, and they spend hundreds of millions of city dollars.

Now – and here’s the tough part – with the city facing a historic $483 million deficit, some of them are going to have to go. Or, as the San Francisco Community-Based Organizations Task Force put it in April 2009, they need to be “encouraged to identify their placement within the nonprofit life cycle, and contemplate the possibility of closure.”

Close service organizations? Let the howls of protest begin.

Confessions of a Third Generation Latino: Common Space

This is the fifth and second-to-last post in my series.  The last post focused on my time in college.  This post transitions my views into the real world.

Common Space

While still at Cal, I tried to spend my last years studying and preparing for my graduation but i still found myself involved in the struggle between my identity as a Latino but struggle to find a place where other Latinos would also accept me as part of their community.  But I didn’t feel as alone as i once had.

After reading so far into this blog, you may feel as if i beleive their are only two faces of the Latino community.  Those in my position and those not.  However, this would ignore the many shades in between.

Both while at Cal and after graduating, i was working for a law firm in a nearby city.  The supervisor there was a very attractive older Mexican woman who, like me, was third generation.  However, unlike me (and for whatever reason) she had gone a route that i very well could have myself.  Her attitude towards the Latino community was actually one of annoyance and disdain.  She felt that with her education and skill-set that she had actually surpassed what being Mexican was all about.

It’s interesting to think about because in order for her to feel as she did, she accepted the basic premise of “being Mexican” that i heartedly deny.  This is that there is a specific way to “be Mexican”: That Mexicans are low skill, low salary earning people with little hope of potential. Any advancement by a Mexican was not actually an improvement of he or she as a Mexican but, instead, a disregard of their Mexican self in place of a White-American self.

Confessions of a Third Generation Latino: Walking Through Ivory

This is the 4th post in a series.  For my previous post, click here.  This post focuses on my time away from the Central Valley while i attended college and my evolving outlook towards my place in the Latino community.

Walking Through Ivory

Before i left for college, my father passed away.  It was in the summer before the start of my senior year at Redwood High when he finally succumbed to liver cancer.  My father left a large imprint on my life, especially on my views of who I am in relation to being Latino and I still wish today that he had lived long enough to hear me come out as a gay young man .  My father grew up on a farm outside of Visalia and hated it.  He left home to pursue a career that made him equally a target to the more fundamental characteristics of local Mexicans.  But he beleived that he didn’t have to be anything for anyone except himself and his family.  Perhaps it was something that he developed later on in life; further along than the stage of life i am in now.  But perhaps it too began in college and at one of the same universities I would soon enter.

Redwood High, has about 2,000 students every year and more than half of that population is Latino.  Unfortunately, district wide, Visalia has a 1/3 drop-out rate in grades 9-12.  In my high school class a lot of those who made it to graduation did initially take off to college.  A good number of them attend the local community college: College of the Sequoias.  I haven’t found any data on this specifically but anecdotally, a good number of those students who leave for college usually return to Visalia before completing a 4-year degree.  Many of those who do leave home attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (SLO).  The joke around most high school campuses in Visalia is that SLO is a lot like Visalia except near water.  I did not attend SLO.