Fresh Loaf

If so, you’re screwed.

A frightening story in today’s New York Times explores the toxic toll on families who — unbeknownst to them — moved into former meth houses.

“The meth lab home problem is only going to grow,” said Dawn Turner, who started a Web site, www.methlabhomes.com, after her son lost thousands of dollars when he bought a foreclosed home in Sweetwater, Tenn., that turned out to be contaminated. Because less is known about the history of foreclosed houses, Ms. Turner said, “as foreclosures rise, so will the number of new meth lab home owners.”

It can cost $5,000 to $100,000 to decontaminate a former meth house. One Texas woman lost pretty much everything after buying one such home:

“It makes you crazy,” Ms. [Francisca] Rodriguez said. “Our credit is ruined, we won’t be able to buy another house, somebody exposed my kids to meth, and my dog died.”

Only one state, Colorado, provides federal funds to help innocent property owners clean up meth-infested homes. As for the Peach State …

In other states, like Georgia, landlords and other real estate owners have fought a proposed cleanup law.

Thanks, Georgia.

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The demolition of Atlanta's Bowen Homes earlier this month

Atlanta is often, and rightly, seen as being well behind the curve when it comes to anything resembling progress. Trends — be they related to culture, social issues, business or, god knows, politics — typically take a couple of years to filter through here after they’ve already become old news in New York, L.A., London, Seattle or wherever.

In other words, it’s rare to see Atlanta taking a leading role on the national stage. But that’s exactly what’s been going on the past few years as Dr. Renee Glover, director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, has pursued an ambitious plan to make us the first large American to completely do away with public housing projects in favor of rent subsidies for privately owned, mixed-income properties.

Yesterday, the New York Times had a prominent news story that details how Atlanta has set the pace for the rest of the country when it comes to this important aspect of public policy. Quoth the Gray Lady:

Mixed-income developments oriented toward families, with trendy shops, golf courses and Y.M.C.A.’s, are emerging where bleak, uniform towers once stood. Displaced residents are receiving vouchers to move to private housing. And a landmark experiment in housing the urban poor in large government-run facilities that began under the New Deal is being undone.

And, a little later:

“Atlanta’s plan signifies in a very clear way that the social contract that cities and citizens have with the poor has fundamentally changed,” said Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University who studies urban neighborhoods. “We’ve decided that the market can function to create housing and the role of government should be to move people into the market.”

Now, as with any type of progress, the demolition of public housing has its critics. Certainly, the jury is out on whether the voucher program will eventually be regarded as an overwhelming success, as CL’s Mara Shalhoup has previously reported. In fact, the NYT cites Mara’s reporting in noting that “a large majority of displaced residents settle in 10 of Atlanta’s poorest ZIP codes.”

(more…)

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1) Jon Ginoli reads and signs Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division at Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse.

2) Deluxe Vaudeville Orchestra performs at Academy Theatre.

3) New York Times reporter Warren St. John discusses and signs Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, An American Town at Jimmy Carter Library & Museum.

4) Driving Miss Daisy opens at Theatrical Outfit.

5) Bun B performs at the Loft.

(Photo courtesy Cleis Press)

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Which bearded man do you worship? Choose wisely — your soul and your investment portfolio are at stake.

All you liberals out there better be careful the next time you type in the URL of your favorite news outlet.

Type in www.nytimes.com and you gain access to the latest ravings by Nobel Prize-winning Bolshevik Paul Krugman.

But accidentally type in www.nytiems.com on your iPhone keypad and you’re transported to www.bibledesk.com, a self-proclaimed “mega-site” containing countless pages of highly eccentric religious information. 

Even the most hardened, godless NYT reader would find it difficult to resist this sales pitch on the website’s homepage:

There are app. 10,285 prophecies in the Bible and every one up to this time has come true without one single exception?

Then the site seemingly walks you through each and every one of those 10K Biblical prophecies. My own favorite chapter is “Antichrist moves into the temple in Jerusalem — he proclaims that he is God— he exalts himself.”

Good stuff. I think we’re all guilty of, um, self-exaltation on occasion.

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Here’s a pitfall of privatization: Sometimes the company hired to perform some public task goes kaput. That’s the Atlanta-related footnote to today’s big business news, summed up here by the New York Times:

General Growth Properties, one of the largest mall operators in the nation, filed for bankruptcy early Thursday morning in one of the biggest commercial real estate collapses in U.S. history.

What’s the ATL connection? Well, last summer, the City Council finally hit upon a solution for dealing with the motley collection of street vendors that operate around the Five Points MARTA station, Turner Field and other locations. For years, local business owners had complained that raggedy-ass vendors’ booths made a poor impression on visitors and made downtown look shabby (or perhaps shabbier). The city, however, had never managed to muster the political will to force vendors to shape up.

(more…)

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The New York Times Magazine offers a full preview online of its profile about Tony Brancatelli, a Cleveland City Councilmember who’s battling a problem currently plaguing Atlanta — what to do with the rows and rows of abandoned and foreclosed homes.

From the magazine:

Foreclosures are a problem all over the country now, but Cleveland got to this place a while ago. Cities, old and new, are looking at what’s occurring in Cleveland with some trepidation — and also looking for guidance. Already places as diverse as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas and Minneapolis have neighborhoods where at least one of every five homes stands vacant. In states like California, Florida and Nevada, where many of the foreclosures have been newer housing, there is fear that with mounting unemployment and more people walking away from their property, houses will remain empty longer, with a greater likelihood that they will deteriorate or be vandalized. “There are neighborhoods around the country as bad as anything in Cleveland,” says Dan Immergluck, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and an associate professor in the city and regional planning program at Georgia Tech. Local officials from other industrial cities have visited Cleveland to learn how it’s dealing with the devastation. “Cleveland is a bellwether,” Immergluck says. “It’s where other cities are heading because of the economic downturn.”

Immergluck, if you recall, wrote the eye-opening 2007 report (PDF) that concluded property values were rising faster along the southern half of the Beltline — Atlanta’s 22-mile loop of parks, trails and transit — than the project’s other areas. Both that report and the Times article are great and deserve a read.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Newt Gingrich received the glossy treatment from the New York Times Magazine this weekend.

The former Republican House Speaker wants to become a guiding light for the once powerful political party that’s trying to find its way.

On a possible 2012 run for president:

Gingrich said he was focused on building his own movement, his party of the American people. “Now, if in that process I end up helping to shape the ideas and the language and the solutions that for a long period of time define the choices in America, then I’ve succeeded,” he said. “If in that process personal ambition leads to the presidency, that’s fine, but it’s a secondary achievement, I think.”

I said I doubted anyone could be elected president if he actually felt that way.

“I think I’m closer to Benjamin Franklin than to George Washington,” Gingrich told me. “I’m a contributor to my country and to my times. If it turns out that there’s a moment when it makes sense to run, then I’ll run. But if I end up never being able to run, then it won’t devastate me.”

Not a lot of new Newt news there, but it’s worth a read. Even if only for the mental image of Gingrich blurting out “The 1913 Girl Scouts’ Manual!” while discussing steel plants closing.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Acclaimed artist Maira Kalman, whose work is currently on view at Jackson Fine Art, has a new illustrated blog for the New York Times about the inauguration. Stream of consciousness musings tie together simple yet poignant illustrations of Kalman’s visit to Washington for the event.

From the blog:

(Photo by Maira Kalman/Courtesy nytimes.com)

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New York Times media columnist David Carr had an eye-opening article yesterday about TriCityNews, an Asbury Park, N.J. altweekly with a circulation of 10,000, a skeleton-crew staff, and an enviable profit margin at a time when newspapers — and magazines, as well — are seeing layoffs, dwindling revenues and bankruptcies. (Carr mentions Creative Loafing Inc. in the article.)

How’d Dan Jacobson, the paper’s publisher and owner, do it? In what would seem a suicidal move, he invested his energy and focus into the print “product” and saw it become an item readers clamored to pick up.  He set advertising rates 10 years ago and maintained them, and in the process, developed a loyal list of clients. Most importantly, he says, he ignored the publishing pack’s rush to gain an online presence and completely ignored the web. (Look at the paper’s website.) It appears — in this case, at least — there’s something to be said about safeguarding your content.

(more…)

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The New York Times had a piece this weekend examining how Savannah is faring during the economic downturn. Cargo shipping in the city — the fifth-largest along the East Coast — has flattened. Jobs have been cut at the ports while facility expansion has been ordered to go ahead. And then there’s this:

While [Georgia Ports Authority executive director Doug Marchand] and many others await an upturn, Savannah’s economy deteriorates. The unemployment rate in the three-county metropolitan area has jumped to 5.7 percent from 3.9 percent a year earlier. Analysts attribute the jump to hiring freezes and a lot of little job cuts.

With home sales down 24 percent, the local Coldwell Banker has watched its army of real estate brokers, the largest in the city, dwindle to 180 from 240 last year. “They just went into other businesses or stopped working altogether,” said Connie F. Ray, chief executive of the Coldwell operation here, adding that through last year brokers had been averaging $40,000 to $50,000 annually in commissions.

Manufacturers still have a big presence here, employing 15 percent of greater Savannah’s 171,000 workers, but factory employment is shrinking. Georgia-Pacific, for example, which makes paper towels, napkins and toilet paper at a mill here, no longer hires dozens of contract workers. They had been used as a flexible work force, a supplement to the 1,200 regular employees, to step up production during demand surges, now nonexistent.

Not all of Savannah is hurting, the article says — five hotels are under construction and Fort Stewart’s expanding. Luxury jetmaker Gulfstream is headquartered in the city; a company spokesperson says a long list of backorders will keep its workers busy for at least the next three years.

And there’s another sign of hope:

“When I go by a Red Lobster inn on the south side on a Friday night,” [John C. Helmken II of Savannah Bancorp] says, “there are people lined up waiting to be seated.”

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The New York Times, with much gravitas, and Gawker, with much faux-condescension, are reporting that, in politics, the South no longer matters.

Says Gawker:

Good news, Fake America—we’ve marginalized The South! The New York Times reports today that based on the totally conclusive 2008 election results, no longer will The South have any impact whatsoever on National Politics, and we can safely ignore them.

Best Gawker comment:

Well, if Florida is America’s penis, it’s the “balls” of the Redneck Riviera that has the rash.

Most reasoned Gawker comment:

This is not the south that went Red. This is the really, really, really racist part of the south. Missississippi, Ga and SC went more blue.

Most obvious display of Deep South stereotyping by a Times photographer:

This guy.

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When it comes to characterizing the way Georgia might swing in tomorrow’s presidential election, the state alternately has been depicted as sure-fire red, demure pink, ever-ambiguous gray, wishy-washy yellow and half-assed red-striped.

How close do you think it’s gonna be?

a) Toss Up

b) Leaning McCain

c) Strong McCain

d) Leaning Obama*

*Not pictured, ’cause I couldn’t find a map with Georgia painted baby blue

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Andisheh just pointed out to me that Sarah Palin told Katie Couric the other day that she reads Creative Loafing. I’m excited that a potential vice president “established her worldview” by reading our paper, as well as by reading dailies like the New York Times and Pravda.

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The New York Times reported yesterday that Obama pulled his TV ads from Georgia. Scaling back TV ad purchases in a state where you’re behind in the polls typically means the campaign has given up hope of winning the state.

In today’s AJC, Obamaniacal State Sen. David Adelman, D-Atlanta, insisted Obama is still competing in the Peach State.

“We have a strategy to win Georgia,” Adelman said. “It might not be the same plan to win Ohio, but we have a plan to win Georgia.”

No word yet on whether that strategy includes more TV advertising.

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In a sign that the presidential race has tightened and the contest is narrowing to just a few battleground states, the New York Times reports today that the Obama campaign has pulled ads in Georgia.

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Joe Nocera’s column today in the New York Times offers an interesting take on Arthur Blank’s frustrating quest to turn the Falcons into a winning franchise.

Revealing quotes about his relationship with fallen star Michael Vick include:

“In some ways, I would argue that we weren’t close enough to [Vick]. The fact that he had this whole other life in Virginia that we were unaware of. …” His voice trailed off and he shook his head sadly. “We need to understand who the players are running with, and what is going on in their personal lives. A football player or a store manager — it is always better to know what is going on in their lives.”

Full story here.

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A BRIDGE TOO FAR: Study shows that many Georgia bridges deemed “structurally deficient” by inspectors still go years before being repaired, often driving up the costs.

DYLAN: Popular sea turtle is released into the wild after nine years in captivity.

GINGREY DISCOVERS WATER: State Rep. Phil Gingrey took part in the Lake Allatoona Preservation Authority’s congressional cruise Monday, noting that the lake is “a real treasure” and has made him appreciate the importance of water: “After being in a level-four drought, you look at water the same way you look at gasoline.” True. The only difference is we couldn’t live without gasoline, silly.

TAKE YOUR GUNS TO TOWN: And on MARTA, to your business lunch and at the wildlife refuge, starting today. That’s still not enough for state Rep. Tim Bearden, though, who’s filing a federal lawsuit to prevent the city of Atlanta from banning guns at Hartsfield-Jackson, where he says he’ll be packing heat today when he goes to pick up his family.

NOT READY FOR MARTA: Clayton County Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell injures his hand firing a gun at a strip club owner’s family outing.

JOSHES: Hawks want and need to keep them, but they won’t come cheap.

OBAMA AND THE SOUTH: In a NYT op-ed today, Thomas Schaller writes that Obama can’t win Mississippi, Georgia or North Carolina, but maybe can win Virginia and Florida.

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That’s how one commenter on Manhattan gossip blog Gawker.com responded to a New York Times‘ want ad seeking a researcher for its Atlanta bureau.

The fuss arose after the Times elicited five pitches from would-be applicants on JournalismJobs.com — and gave rather explicit instructions on what not to pitch: “Please do not submit ideas concerning dog fights, cock fights, or the Confederate flag.”

I think that’s kind of funny. To me, it speaks to an exasperation with journalism applicants perpetuating Southern clichés. Or something like that.

Gawker saw it differently — as an affront to the South:

To help ensure you are not a hick, the Times has asked you to pre-pitch five stories NOT involving anything the Times has ever covered before (you do take the Times right? It’s only $665 per year in trashy zip codes!), and also NOT about cliché things only of interest to the poors.

The Gawker comments that ensued are priceless. They’re also as disparaging as Gawker claimed the Gray Lady to be (e.g. “nobody in Atlanta can read”). Gawker accuses the Times of condescension and elitism, and Gawker’s readers respond by being condescending and elitist. Oh, the irony.

Best of all — or, depending on your POV, most depressing — are the comments that liken the average Southerner to one John Fitzgerald Page, the Buckhead “douchebag” immortalized by Gawker and honored with a No. 5 spot on CL’s most recent Least Influential list.

Basically, we Atlantans are either illiterate or wear really bad shoes. To New Yorkers, I don’t know which is worse.

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Bob Barr’s Libertarian bid for the presidency could put Georgia in play for Barack Obama, the New York Times quoted U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson as saying over the weekend.

“If Barr got 8 percent, and you’ve got the higher African-American turnout from Barack Obama, then you’d have a significantly close race in the state,” the Georgia Republican told the Times in an article published Saturday.

That differs from the line of most local Republicans, who’ve generally pooh-poohed the potential Barr effect. But several polls have shown Obama surprsingly within 10 percent of John McCain in Georgia, and Barr with support as high as 8 percent — presumably drawn from libertarian-leaning conservatives who’d otherwise back McCain.

Barr, a former uber-conservative congressman from the north Atlanta ‘burbs (who gained true fame as a Creative Loafing columnist), was dissed by Bush, Rove and the Republican establishment during redistricting earlier this decade when he was lumped into an unfriendly district dominated by a more lockstep party mate. He doesn’t seem to bothered by the prospect of harming McCain’s chances:

“ ‘Well, gee, you might take votes from Senator McCain,’ ” Mr. Barr said this week, mimicking one of the complainers, as he sat sipping Coca-Cola in his plush corner office, 12 stories above Atlanta. “They all said, ‘Look, we understand why you’re doing this. We agree with why you’re doing it. But please don’t do it.’ ”

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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The New York Times has found Kristen, the alleged prostitute with whom New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer allegedly had alleged sex with (allegedly) on Feb. 13 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C., the alleged nation’s capital. Naturally, Kristen is not her real name:

Born Ashley Youmans but now known as Ashley Alexandra Dupre, she spoke softly and with good humor as she added with significant understatement: “This has been a very difficult time. It is complicated.”

The Times even found her MySpace profile, which includes at least one soon-to-be-widely-reproduced bikini photo:

And one soon-to-be-widely-psychoanalyzed blog post dated August 30, 2007:

The past few months have been a roller coaster with so called friends, lovers, and family…but its something you have to deal with and confront in order to move on…

I stepped away from each situation that happened and asked myself…

1) What is this person doing to make my life better? (financial, intel, drive, networking etc.)

If, by any chance, Ms. Youmans deletes or blocks access to her profile, feel free to console yourself with my MySpace profile.

I can’t offer you bikini photos*, but I have been to the Mayflower Hotel. I went to a bat mitzvah there when I was 13.

And if that doesn’t make you want to Add Me, my senior prom was in the hotel where former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was videotaped smoking crack.

(*I prefer the comfort and coverage of a unitard)

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(Photo courtesy bldgs)

What a great surprise to open the New York Times magazine Sunday and find Pilar Viladas’ profile of David Yocum’s and Brian Bell’s West End architectural firm, bldgs.

Read the rest of this post on PopSmart — CL’s arts and entertainment blog.

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A front-page story in today’s New York Times tells the amazing story of the International Community School, a charter elementary school in Dekalb County that specializes in educating refugee children.

More than half the 380 students at this unusual school outside Atlanta are refugees from some 40 countries, many torn by war. The other students come from low-income families in Decatur, and from middle- and upper-middle-class families in the area who want to expose their children to other cultures. Together they form an eclectic community of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Muslims, well-off and poor, of established local families and new arrivals who collectively speak about 50 languages.

Don’t miss the slideshow and video accompanying the story.

(Disclosure: I’m a volunteer tutor at Saturday School, a family literacy program for refugees started by ICS’s founders.)

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*… and nobody gives a damn.

The United Nations released a devastating report yesterday that says mankind has basically laid waste to the planet and that it may be too late to turn the tide. It is so dire that “humanity’s very survival” is at risk, according to the report.

And this isn’t from some left-wing wacko group. The report was put together by 400 scientists from all over the world, then peer-reviewed by 1,000 others.

And yet, the report has gotten virtually no play in the United States.

Lead story in the New York Times? Nope. That would be the California wildfires and a story on how the disaster has brought our president closer to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Perhaps he got an autograph from the Terminator?

Lead story in the Washington Post? Nope. It talks about how a U.S. strike on Iran would screw up the oil supply. And there’s a piece on Rudy Giuliani’s political guru.

Lead story in the AJC? Nope. That would be Georgia’s battle for water.

WTF?
(more…)

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The regional water crisis story is stepping more into the national spotlight, with links to articles on Drudge Report and now some attention from the New York Times. Click here for the Times‘ overview of the drought, what has — or hasn’t — been done and what still needs to be.

For an in-depth look at the water-supply crunch in the West, read Jon Gertner’s piece from this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It’s a lengthy, solid read and worth printing out and poring over later.

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Kevin Sack, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times Atlanta bureau chief turned Pulitzer-winning Los Angeles Times Atlanta national correspondent, has returned to the Times — er, the NY one.

He tells CL that as an Atlanta national correspondent for the N.Y. Times, he’ll be covering “health care reform and the health care crisis.”

Sack left the N.Y. Times in 2002, unhappy with then-editor Howell Raines’ decision to reassign him to the Washington, D.C. bureau. (He has a young daughter in Atlanta to whom he wished to remain close.) Rather than leave the ATL, Sack signed on as the L.A. paper’s man in Atlanta — and promptly won his second Pulitzer for his and Alan Miller’s 2002 series on a military aircraft dubbed “The Widow Maker,” a vertical take-off Harrier jet that was linked to the deaths of nearly four dozen pilots.

“Oddly enough,” Sack says, “the Harrier story was my first story for them.”

(While at the N.Y. Times, Sack had earned the Pulitzer for his contribution to the 15-author 2000 series, “How Race Is Lived in America.”)

With the recent resignations of two L.A. Times editors, John Carroll and Dean Baquet — who quit in protest of a corporate push to further downsize the paper’s staff — the L.A. paper had, according to various accounts, become a dismal place to hang one’s hat.

Sack says his departure from the paper was “precipitated more by the general instability at the L.A. Times. Certainly, Dean’s departure and the departure of John Carroll before him and the departure of two publishers are part of that, and the recent sale of the company.”

Asked whether he’ll remain in Atlanta, Sack says, “There’s a general understanding that I’ll be here for a while.”

As long as he keeps filing his top-notch investigative stories from Atlanta, it’s no loss for us.

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