Just flying out of one of the nation’s richest cities with the worst airport, LaGaurdia. The amenities are a joke, the airport design is uglier than a bus terminal. And when I asked the TSA agent his favorite restaurant he smirked and replied, “Not in this dump.” While JFK recently went under a major makeover with celebrity chefs, gourmet markets, and martini bars, its twin sister is in dire need of a face lift!
In South Beach recently and had the pleasure of dining at Casa Tua. Now here’s a restaurant that understands the intersection of work-life-play. In fact, their website is http://www.casatualifestyle.com/. It has all the amenities of a five-star restaurant: beautiful setting, soft music, gorgeous garden with twinkling lanterns, amazing food, great wine selection but without the pretension and attitude that accompanies most restaurants these days. It’s child friendly, with families dining at 11 p.m. The book-lined dining room inside was cozy, the bar is the perfect place to meet friends, and the wait staff was numerous and delightful. Casa Tua is for Creative Class members wanting fine dining without all the fuss – and not feeling out of place bringing your kids, all the better.
Forbes has released a list of the best cities for business and careers. Factors that influence this list are business and living costs, education, crime, along with job and income growth. Interestingly, there is some overlap with the list of best cities in Who’s Your City which examines the best places based on a wider degree of factors.
What do you think? Is your location of choice grounded on your business/career prospects exclusively? Or do you consider other factors such as accessibility to cultural amenities, architecture, community openness?
Aside, in a sign that the mortgage mess is truly underway, Forbes also has a list of the best places to pick up a foreclosed home.
Aleem Kanji
The Economist reports on the Democratic divide:
A famous political distinction exists between “wine-track” and
“beer-track” Democrats … Obamaworld is a universe of liberal professionals and young
people—plus blacks from all economic segments. Hillaryland, by
contrast, is a place of working-class voters, particularly
working-class women, and the old. These are people who occupy not just
different economies but also different cultures …
These groups could hardly have a more different view of politics. Mr
Obama’s supporters are, mostly, the liberal version of “values voters”.
They are intensely worried about America’s past sins and its current
woeful image in the world. They regard Mr Obama as a “transformational”
leader—a man who can, with one sweep of his hand, wipe away the sins of
the Bush years and summon up the best in their country.Mrs Clinton’s supporters, by contrast, are kitchen-table voters.
They wear jackets emblazoned with the logos of their unions. They work
with their hands or stand on their feet all day. They have seen their
living standards stagnate for years, and they are worried about paying
their bills rather than saving their political souls.The battle for the Democratic Party is so bitter because it is a
battle over culture. Mrs Clinton’s supporters look at Mr Obama’s and
see latte-drinking elitists. Mr Obama’s supporters look at Mrs
Clinton’s and smell all sorts of ancestral sins, not least racism. The
two groups neither like nor respect each other.
I’ve been working the data and will have more to say soon.
New Yorker economics writer James Surowiecki:
Americans may disagree about nearly everything, but
few contest the idea that owning your home is a good thing. …To recover from recession, economies need prices to fall until they
reflect genuine supply and demand. With certain kinds of assets, like
stocks, these adjustments take place quickly, sometimes viciously so.
Buying and selling houses, though, is a far slower process. The good
thing about this is that housing prices never suffer crashes on the
scale that you sometimes see in the stock market. The bad thing is that
it can take a long time for housing prices to reflect reality.
Homeowners, as economists have shown, tend to remain unreasonably
optimistic about the value of their homes, and they hate to drop their
asking price. As a result, existing-home sales in the U.S. are now at a
nine-year low.Homeownership also impedes the economy’s readjustment by tying
people down. From a social point of view, it’s beneficial that
homeownership encourages commitment to a given town or city. But, from
an economic point of view, it’s good for people to be able to leave
places where there’s less work and move to places where there’s more.
Homeowners are much less likely to move than renters, especially during
a downturn, when they aren’t willing (or can’t afford) to sell at
market prices. As a result, they often stay in towns even after the
jobs leave. And reluctance to
move not only keeps unemployment high in struggling areas but makes it
hard for businesses elsewhere to attract the workers they need to grow.This doesn’t mean that the U.S. should become a nation of
renters—even if both New York City and Switzerland show that high rates
of renting are compatible with great prosperity. With the bursting of
the housing bubble, though, it’s time not just to scrutinize the
excesses of our home-buying process but to recognize the risks and
costs inherent in owning a home. Sometimes the price—for the home buyer
and for the economy as a whole—is too high to pay.
Housing tenure is not a given. It is associated with particular modes of production. Homeownership was a critical cog in the fordist economy – stimulating purchases of everything from cars and washing machines, spurring the large-scale development of infrastructure. But it is a significant institutional impediment to the flexibility, adjustment and mobility the creative economy requires. NYC and London will derive even greater benefits over time from high rates of renters. My hunch, which I outline in Who’s Your City and Atlantic writer Matt YgIesias picks up on, is that sooner or later housing tenure types will adjust.
After traveling all day, I watched the core of Barack Obama’s speech. It is plain and simple the most moving message I have ever heard from an American politician. Interesting thing is I was reading Shelby Steele’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the plane.
Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s
political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white
woman, sat Sunday after Sunday – for 20 years – in an
Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to
mention other whites, could never feel comfortable…What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t
thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to “be black” despite
his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race
hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity.
And anyway, wasn’t this hatred more rhetorical than real?But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has
trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a
mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of
bonding and of asserting one’s blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed
across America’s television screens, has shown us that there is no real
difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.No matter his ultimate political fate, there is
already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale.
His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining),
and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and
duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to
become himself.
He more than “became himself” today. He took on race, he took on identity, and he did in a way that is both personal and unifying. He seemed very much like a “whole” person to me – fully in touch with his own identity, his “bi-racial” background, the “black” and “white” sides of his identity. He addressed it, and walked away from nothing. He gave us a vision of a future where we can come to grips with race, understand differences, and respect them. At times, I felt Obama was talking directly to Steele. And what was particularly poignant was how he transcended and reframed every one of the issues Steele says mires him – and us – down.
Here’s what Alan Wolfe has to say:
What I heard today, though, was not a political speech in the sense we have
gotten used to in this country. I heard instead a speech that, as much
as it was about Obama and Wright, was also about us. Our politics does
not quite know how to handle such a thing; campaigns are meant to tell
people what they can expect to receive, not to ask them to understand,
forgive, and reach out.We have been asked to reflect in the most serious of ways
about the role that race plays in the life of our country. I cannot
recall any leader or potential leader in the last two or three decades
asking us to do that. I hope we are up to the challenge. I do not
believe–nor, from his speech, do I think that Obama believes–that to
think seriously about race we have to vote for him … Agree or disagree with Obama, I ask
people who are less inspired by him that I am, but at least acknowledge
that in this presidential candidate, we have a man of honor–and an
honest man.
Amen.
Guest Blogger -Rana
If you’re flying out of Miami International Airport, pack your brown bag and a sandwich. This airport leaves much to be desired on the culinary front. Concourse C & D have a greasy cafeteria-style Cuban restaurant and Concourse E has a CPK asap, Chili’s Too, Au Bon Pain, and Burger King. Thank GAWD for Starbucks in those concourses. For the full gastronomically delightful list click here. 
With "Who’s Your City?" due any day now, this seems most appropriate.
So, a colleague asks:
I’m working on my dissertation proposal and I’m thinking about what brings people to places versus what happens once they are there.
My work will focus on this latter part, not on the "moving" part. It’s always hard to have large scale data on "moving decisions", you know.
But I was thiking: how many people actually move in or out a city every year? Do you have at hand average numbers about this mobility?
Even rough estimates? I’d be very very curious to see them.
My point is: we are always so obsessed by what "moves" people to one place to another, but after all most people (don’t look at us!) never even leave or if they do, they do very few times in a lifetime. Isn’t that the case?
Response after break.
Taste is always subjective and fame-fleeting, but I could not agree more with NPR’s Carrie Brownstein on this:
This afternoon I went to the Spin party to see X. The band played
all of the hits, from ‘Los Angeles’ to ‘We’re Desperate’. John Doe,
always the storyteller, told the audience that ‘Nausea’ was how we’d
feel after the amount of beer we’d all been drinking and that ‘Motel
Room In My Bed’ is where we’d be when we woke up feeling sick … Before X were Vampire Weekend, who I saw yesterday at The Parish. It’s a shame so many people left after Vampire Weekend and missed X’s show.
To my ears, X were one of the very best bands of their era. Doe is a terrific lyricist and the male-female vocals as good as any this side of Jefferson Airplane.
