Score it as a win: This neighborhood gets to keep its supermarket (for now, at least)

I can't tell you who did what, but whoever did what, hats off to Senator Espaillat, Councilmembers Levine and Rodriguez, the Hudson Heights Owners Coalition, Community Board 13, and whoever else did whatever it took to achieve this happy result.

by Ken

It may not sound like that big a story -- a neighborhood gets to keep its supermarket -- especially when you consider that what we here in Manhattan call a "supermarket" is so un-super, Manhattan real-estate prices being what they are, that folks accustomed to supermarkets that spread out over an acre or two would take one look at it and ask what the fuss is. But the fuss is, those Folks Up There on the Hill came this close to losing their only place to shop for the daily necessities that most of us take for granted. And by "this close," I mean it was essentially a done deal: Bye-bye, supermarket; hello, whatever. I forget what exactly it was, teh intended "upgrade" planned for the premises. For our purposes, just imagine one of the many sorts of business that was going to yield the landlord a heap more rent.

Only now it's not going to happen, at least for now. I'm not attending the gathering to which this e-mail yesterday from Councilman Levine invited me, because it's not actually my neighborhood. If you look at the map, you'll say, "But hey, it's right over there, you can practically touch it." What the map doesn't show you is that it's way up on top of a mountain of a hill, and if you don't think it's "way up," I invite you to walk up the giant stairway at 187th Street that links the People Up There to us folks down here in the valley. I've actually done it a couple of times, walked up those stairs, before coming to the decision that "down" is OK on occasion, but "up" is henceforth out of consideration, especially since there is an alternative: the escalator in the 190 Street subway station that links the People Up There to the subway down here. (While we're on geography, I might point out that that subway station at its closest reach doesn't reach anywhere close to 190th Street, because it didn't get built where it was originally intended, but that's another story.)


It may not look like much, but for the people in the hood, this place is their lifeblood.

It's a nice neighborhood up there on top of the hill, where historic Fort Washington once stood, and in recent years the neighborhood has been trending upward scale-wise. It's even taken on a name of sorts, or leastwise the real-estate folks have tried to give it one: "Hudson Heights." But people still have to shop, and while they've got some nice shopping places on the small commercial strip of 187th Street, they've got only one place to shop for the things you would normally turn to a supermarket for, and one day the People Up There woke up to find that their supermarket was counting down to doom. The way I remember it, the landlord wasn't even talking to the supermarket leaseholder about a new lease -- though probably, given the numbers such a lease would have entailed, there wouldn't have been much to talk about.

For some modern folks a neighborhood supermarket may not be such a big deal anymore, when eating is mostly done via eating out or local takeout, and "shopping" for everythng from foie gras to toilet paper can be done online thanks to the warehouses and truck fleets of entities like We Got Your Stuff, maybe combined with the occasional "shopping" expedition to the nearest Hole Foods or Traitor Joe's. Still, for the rest of us, however, there's no substitute for a place, a brick-and-mortar place, to stock in the daily necessities of life. From as recently as five months ago I found this petition online:

We the residents, neighbors, businesses and stakeholders of the Hudson Heights / Washington Heights community petition the Landlord of 592 Fort Washington Ave, the property Management Company Benson Capital Partners LLC, and Walgreen's to extend the lease for the Associated supermarket located at 592 Fort Washington, and preserve this vital food venue for the community.

We are an economically and socially diverse community, and many of us rely on the products and services provided by Associated for our basic, everyday grocery and dry-good necessities. Without this commercial resource, our neighborhood would become a food desert as many people would find other options for food and basic necessities to be inaccessible and unaffordable. Help save this valuable community business!

In fact, for decades now accoess to supermarkets has been a hot-button issue in neighborhoods all over NYC. In poorer neighborhoods, where supermarket chains found it increasingly difficult to justify the investment, it has often been common for residents to have no ready access to, say, fresh produce. Of course it's a tricky business, being so bold as to dictate to land owners what they can and can't do with their property, or even what they should and shouldn't do. But land is a finite resource, and we already have zoning laws precisely because land use affects communities as a whole, not just the owners of individual pieces of property.

More and more of these battles, as I've occasionally chronicled here, have been going the other way, as the forces of Big Money have learned to use their economic muscle to get their way. I thought it might be nice for us to share this moment with the People Up There who attended today's rally.

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Globalization Craze Petering Out

Tomorrow's NY Times features a piece by Larry Rohter about the collapse of Globalization. International capital, cheer-led by Thomas Friedman, in a quest for cheap labor, avoidance of social norms (like environmental standards), and higher margins, seems to have goofed up big time and, as the Times puts it, "globalization may be losing some of the inexorable economic power it had for much of the past quarter-century, even as it faces fresh challenges as a political ideology."

Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.

“If we think about the Wal-Mart model, it is incredibly fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars,” said Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

“That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that’s great.”

...To avoid having to ship all its products from abroad, the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea opened its first factory in the United States in May. Some electronics companies that left Mexico in recent years for the lower wages in China are now returning to Mexico, because they can lower costs by trucking their output overland to American consumers.

When Bush first stole the election in 2000, the cost of shipping a standard 40-foot container from Shanghai to Long Beach was $3,000. Now that the Bush Economic Miracle has begun to kick in, the cost is around $8,000... and rising-- and slower, as the ships cut their speed to save money on fuel. And ocean freighters aren't the only problem. Friday, the price of a barrel of oil closed at $125.10. Let's say it falls all the way back down to $107 a barrel for the rest of 2008. In that case, the aviation industry would merely lose $2.3 billion for the year. A more likely scenario is that oil averages $135/barrel for the rest of the year... in which case the industry loses $6.1 billion. That's the end of that industry.

Shotgun marriage: Robin Hayes and Tom DeLay

Four more years of Bush economics-- aka- a McCain administration-- and we'll probably be bringing back three-masted China Trade clippers that are even older than John McCain is. "The industries most likely to be affected by the sharp rise in transportation costs are those producing heavy or bulky goods that are particularly expensive to ship relative to their sale price. Steel is an example. China’s steel exports to the United States are now tumbling by more than 20 percent on a year-over-year basis, their worst performance in a decade, while American steel production has been rising after years of decline. Motors and machinery of all types, car parts, industrial presses, refrigerators, television sets and other home appliances could also be affected." The U.S. may have to actually rebuild a manufacturing sector. Post-Bush, North Carolina, for example, may be actually gaining good jobs instead of losing them. This is what Larry Kissell has been bashing Bush rubber stamp incumbent Robin Hayes over the head with for almost 4 years!

Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship American timber from ports like Norfolk, Baltimore and Charleston to China, where oak and cherry would be milled into sofas, beds, tables, cabinets and chairs, which were then shipped back to the United States.

But with transport costs rising, more wood is now going to traditional domestic furniture-making centers in North Carolina and Virginia, where the industry had all but been wiped out. While the opening of the American Ikea plant, in Danville, Va., a traditional furniture-producing center hit hard by the outsourcing of production to Asia, is perhaps most emblematic of such changes, other manufacturers are also shifting some production back to the United States.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm reading Robert Wexler's book, Fire Breathing Liberal and I just recalled a part I read a few days ago that has former Mississippi Congressman Ronnie Shows remembering how viciously the "free trader" traitors insisted on shoving their failed orthodoxy down everyone's throat. Although no one is worse on this than Democratic leader Rahm Emanuel, Shows' remembrance involves Tom DeLay (the GOP version of Emanuel) and the aforementioned North Carolina Republican rubber stamp Robin Hayes. Shows is recalling a vote on renewing some horrible trade arrangement with China "that had devastated the textile and furniture industries in North Carolina."

The Republicans wanted this legislation to pass-- but a Republican congressman from North Carolina [Hayes] intended to vote against it. It was a terrible bill for his district. As Shows recalls, "After this member voted against the bill, I watched DeLay walk up to him on the floor and force him to change his vote. The man literally was crying as he cast his vote. DeLay stood right behind him until he changed his vote."

Robin Hayes is a weak, spineless rubber stamp who won't even stand up for his own manhood, let alone for his constituents livelihoods. It's why he nearly lost in 2006-- 60,926 to Larry Kissell's 60,597-- and why Larry is expected to beat him handily in November.

DO REPUBLICANS APPROVE OF PIG LATIN AS A SECOND LANGUAGE?

A friend alerted me to the new site GOPplatform2008.com. "Between the people unhappy with the party for the war in Iraq (a bunch of these comments), the racists, the death-penalty-for-immigrants folks, the global-warming-is-a-conspiracy-theory people, and so on, it’s a wonderfully accurate portrait of where the party stands right now," he wrote. "Favorite idea under the Energy/Gas Prices plank: 'TAKE IRAQ’S OIL.'” As I was reading these comments today I was thinking about Senator Obama's sensible observation yesterday about American students learning a foreign language and how reflexively he was attacked by a Know Nothing Republican base cultivated and even brainwashed by the Limbaughs O'Reillys, Hannitys, Coulters and Dobbses.

Speaking in Powder Springs, GA on Tuesday Obama told the crowd that its embarrassing when Europeans come to the US and they all speak English. By comparison, Obama said, America's young people do not have matching language skills.

"All we can say is merci boucoup," Obama said. "We should be emphasizing foreign languages in our school from an early age."

The statements prompted outrage from some conservative groups who argued his remarks were an endorsement of the idea that Americans should be forced to learn Spanish."

I wonder if they were embarrassed when someone told them that merci boucoup actually isn't Spanish. Maybe someone should tell them that it's actually Aramaic.

Obama, of course, was talking about the shambles Bush's disastrous No Child Left Behind agenda has left behind a generation of American school children who won't be ready to compete in the global marketplace the Republicans are always pushing. I lived in Holland for 4 years when I was younger. Everyone spoke Dutch, English, French and German and then people interested in languages also spoke one or more languages like Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Swedish on top of that. Small country but a trading giant. Bush-- and the rubber stamp Republicans who followed him, like John McCain-- couldn't have done more harm to the long term prospects of American families if he and they had deliberately set out to do so.