Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
BetterVegas: Nowhere Train ridership: The dirty little secret leaks out...

The big Vegas news today is that Donald Trump, a recidivist failure in the casino business, has plans to build a time-share tower off--not on--the North Strip. But Las Vegas is a company town, so you always have to dig a little deeper to find the news behind the blustering boosterism.

For example, the Las Vegas Monorail, the Nowhere Train, has been in operation for more than two weeks, yet nary a discouraging word has been heard. Long lines, equipment failures, malfunctioning automated systems, but it's all fun, fun, fun, and everyone, locals and tourists alike, are effusive in their praise of the bone-headed, dys-located, very, very, very slow train system. The news, in short, could not be better.

Until today, that is. Consider this:

A lack of slack in Citizens Area Transit's bus fleet led to a sudden end to connector bus service between the Las Vegas Monorail and downtown Las Vegas on Thursday.

Route 551's light ridership appeared to play a role in its demise after just two weeks of service. But the main culprit was a need for spare buses elsewhere, officials said.

It wasn't the lack of passengers, the blustering boosters insist, that led them to cancel the route without notice. Those buses just happened to be more available than buses on other routes because of... What?

Maybe John L. Smith, the closest thing in Sin City to an honest news broker, has the answer:

Speaking of the monorail, Snow also reported a solid start for the system. He wrote, "Ridership has started strong on the monorail, stronger than we expected but not strong enough yet. Ridership is consistently hovering around the 30,000-a-day mark. They are taking in about $100,000 a day. To cover their costs they need to take in $160,000 per day."

"We're very pleased with what we've seen," Snow said Thursday, adding that riders can expect expanded hours of operation soon.

Well, that's not quite honest, but it's Vegas-honest: The Monorail is only 37.5% short of its break-even point in the middle of the summer tourist season--after weeks and months and years of blustering boosterized ballyhoo.

So: 30,000 people a day are taking the Nowhere Train. If they ever actually break even, they will be moving around 48,000 people a day. About two times that many people, around 100,000 souls, walk past Caesar's Palace every day. They walk. They don't drive. They don't taxi. They don't scoot along on rented Vespa MoPeds. They walk on The Strip, on the west side of The Strip only, past the extruded marble majesty of Caesar's Place. Just that one casino/resort/hotel on the four-mile length of The Strip. Thirty-five million people a year.

In any other city this would be news: "Feet stomp $3 Monorail--for free!" In any other city, the insanely useless location of the Monorail would have been news. In any other city, the incestuous relationship between the Monorail's allegedly private ownership and the state government would have been news. In any other city, the obvious and inevitable failure of the Monorail, which will then be purchased at a premium price by federal, state, county or city tax-payers--or all of them, all at once--would be news. But, to give Las Vegas its due, in any other city, the Nowhere Train probably would have been a massively tax-subsidized state-of-the-nineteenth-century-art Nowhere Trolley instead...
posted by Greg Swann at 9:26 AM

 
Islam watch: The Case for George W. Bush...

Tom Junod, a smarmy liberal writing in Esquire, looks down at a mud puddle and accidentally catches a brief reflection of reality:

What if he's right?

As easy as it is to say that we can't abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does, what haunts me is the possibility that we can't abide him because of us--because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.

The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November--no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer--is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction--because it's easier than conviction.

And more:

I am, however, asking if the crisis currently facing the country--the crisis, that is, that announced itself on the morning of September 11, 2001, in New York and Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia--is as compelling a justification for the havoc and sacrifice of war as the crisis that became irrevocable on April 12, 1861, in South Carolina, or, for that matter, the crisis that emerged from the blue Hawaiian sky on December 7, 1941. I, for one, believe it is and feel somewhat ashamed having to say so: having to aver that 9/11/01 was a horror sufficient to supply Bush with a genuine moral cause rather than, as some would have it, a mere excuse for his adventurism.

We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death--that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global--and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling "blood and treasure," then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil--and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it--then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.

We have some actual poetry: America is "a nation incapable of feeling any but the freshest wounds." And we end on a plaintive note of moral ambiguity, the awful indecision of a smarmy liberal who has unwittingly contaminated his mind with an education:

I will never forget the sickly smile that crossed the president's face when he asked us all to go shopping in the wake of 9/11. It was desperate and a little craven, and I never forgave him for it. As it turned out, though, his appeal succeeded all too well. We've found the courage to go shopping. We've welcomed the restoration of the rule of celebrity. For all our avowals that nothing would ever be the same, the only thing that really changed is our taste in entertainment, which has forsaken the frivolity of the sitcom for the grit on display in The Apprentice . The immediacy of the threat was replaced by the inexplicability of the threat level. A universal war--the war on terror--was succeeded by a narrow one, an elective one, a personal one, in Iraq. Eventually, the president made it easy to believe that the threat from within was as great as the threat from without. That those at home who declared American moral primacy were as dangerous as those abroad who declared our moral degeneracy. That our national security was not worth the risk to our soul. That Abu Ghraib disproved the rightness of our cause and so represented the symbolic end of the war that began on 9/11. And that the very worst thing that could happen to this country would be four more years of George W. Bush. In a nation that loves fairy tales, the president seemed so damned eager to cry wolf that we decided he was just trying to keep us scared and that maybe he was just as big a villain as the wolf he insisted on telling us about. That's the whole point of the story, isn't it? The boy cries wolf for his own ends, and after a while people stop believing in the reality of the threat.

I know how this story ends, because I've told it many times myself. I've told it so many times, in fact, that I'm always surprised when the wolf turns out to be real, and shows up hungry at the door, long after the boy is gone.

posted by Greg Swann at 11:13 AM

 
Phoenix Rising: Downtown...

The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown. Things'll be great when you're
Downtown--No finer place, for sure
Downtown--Everything's waiting for you...

My friend Richard Riccelli writes with respect to my investment ideas:

I am interested in following your model in emerging SoHo (SoWa in Boston) style neighborhoods / condo properties. Are there any such emerging Greenwich Villages / properties in Phoenix or are non-car-culture neighborhoods just a non-concept there?

This actually comes up a lot when people are relocating from Back East. They say things like, "We'd like to be able to walk to work." Or: "We need to have shopping nearby." Or: "At least put us near workable public transportation."

Alas, in Phoenix, as in many cities of the West, none of these things is possible, or at least practical, and nothing seems likely to change soon.

There are reasons for this, and we'll get to them. But first consider Verrado, a master-planned community--a subdivision of subdivisions--being built in the Far West Valley. Cathy and I went there last weekend, because it's my job to stay up on stuff like this. The Verrado idea is "home-town Arizona", and in its core it is conspicuously modeled on old-Arizona towns like Prescott and Flagstaff, with a close-in, semi-vertical "downtown" area that is supposed to sprout towny retail stores. Actually, it had the look and feel of real Newburyport, Massachusetts, a town Richard and I both know. Minus the history, of course. And the Merrimac River and the Atlantic Ocean. And the population.

For the core of Verrado is intended to be a fake downtown, a reintroduction of an idea long since vanished from the vast Phoenician sprawl. But it is truly wrong to call it fake if it works. When you see the faux-Princetonian scullers on the Tempe Town Lake, you are no longer seeing a fake-lake. The lake is as real as the rowers, as real as any lake anywhere. And what makes a downtown work is not architecture of differing ages and styles, not grit, not dirt, not winos being harried by Salvation Army bands, but simply this: A critical mass of around-the-clock urbanites.

Phoenix is not a city, not a city with a downtown, because in the spot with all the vertical architecture, the downtown-of-the-business-world, there are no around-the-clock urbanites. They go home at the end of the business day, just as they do in Wall Street in New York, and just as they don't do in Greenwich Village or Midtown Manhattan, the downtowns of Petula Clark's desiring.

Verrado, as it happens, is 210 avenues west of that downtown-of-the-business-world, that place where the high-paying jobs are, and for this reason it is probably doomed as anything but a fake downtown. Those 210 avenues come to 26.25 miles, which is a long way in Phoenix, but it's really nothing in suburban Boston. I used to live in North Andover, Mass., which is 35 miles from downtown Boston, and a much, much longer commute. Yet Boston has a downtown. And so does North Andover. But Boston and downtown North Andover were settled before the automobile, which makes for a huge difference. Boston is walkable, where virtually nothing in Phoenix is--including the fake downtown at Verrado. The cities that developed primarily after the introduction of the automobile, starting with Detroit and motoring west, will probably never, ever be walkable, downtownable cities. Not without a lot of blasting, in any case. The cities of the West that Easterners love are Seattle and San Francisco, precisely those cities that did their important development before the advent of the automobile. The reason is that with the automobile came "free" tax-supported roads, and there can be no walkable city where the tax-payers are gleefully subsidizing the development of the endless horizons. Verrado is being built on the old Caterpillar Proving Grounds, which was there because the land was useless and therefore very cheap. The I-10 Freeway gets you out there now, but Indian School Road and the SR-303 Freeway are being built to deliver traffic to and from this once nearly-useless land.

Phoenix goes this once worse by being a very Mormon city. The pioneering Latter Day Saints had grown weary, by the time they came to the Salt River Valley, of having to drive their wagons out of town to turn their teams around. They decreed when they came here that a street would be wide enough to turn a wagon pulled by two oxen around without backing up. In consequence, the side streets of Phoenix are about twice as wide as in other cities, and perhaps four times as wide as the cobbled streets of Olde Boston Towne. And the consequence of that one little bit of unintended urban planning is that Phoenicians play in their back yards, having little or no interaction with their neighbors. We are not the downtown sort.

But wait. There's more. The fact is, it's hot here. Really, really hot in the Summer, and what people from Back East consider pretty darned hot through most of the Winter. A Verrado-style downtown is a hard sell even with jobs and people, simply because much of downtown life is lived outdoors, while in Phoenix, much of outdoor life is unlivable. The one place in this Valley where there is a substantial and self-sustaining downtownish kind of life is in Downtown Tempe, just off campus from Arizona State University. It's just as hot there, but young people are willing to suffer through a lot for music, beer and careless rapture. And even then, excluding the dorms, there is no downtown vertical residential living. Downtown Tempe is a downtown full of commuters--with lots of free or vouchered parking.

There is one other factor, and this is not peculiar to Phoenix: Zoning. It's actually bigger than that, the epidemic infestation of government into all aspects of real estate. But every city young enough to have its own suburbia has been ruined by zoning. Houses here, churches there, factories here, stores there, and everywhere smiling happy people in neat and orderly lines, boy-girl, boy-girl, single-file.

A city is spontaneous, an anchor in the harbor, a shovel in the ground, a hope, a promise, then a bankruptcy and a new hope and a new promise erupting from that same spot of ground. By decreeing their orderly sameness, the zoners made it impossible for young cities like Phoenix to develop as anything except vast, bland suburbs. There is no there there? How could there be? Spontaneous human action, infinite and illimitable, has been smothered under the dead hand of the state. In Phoenix, decade after decade, the town fathers promise to make a new downtown, but this never happens because it never can. Downtown, Back East or in the Pacific West, is that part of town that developed before government presumed to muck everything up in the name of "improvement" or "order" or "planning" or "growth". In a real downtown, a school can be next door to a tavern, and the principal and the custodian can meet for a snort over lunch. Nothing like this, neither the structural nor the social juxtaposition, can happen in a city afflicted with zoning.

So, what do we have? Phoenix doesn't have a downtown because it is car-addicted. Because its streets are too wide. Because it's almost always blisteringly hot outdoors. And because like most young cities, it is afflicted with zoning. The heat alone is probably decisive: Without "free" roads and "free" Federal dams, Phoenix would probably never have developed beyond the size of Cheyenne (which, incidentally, does have something resembling a downtown, although it is still a car-addicted downtown). No free roads, no wide streets, no zoning--but still no downtown Phoenix, just because it is too uncomfortable to be outdoors for long.

What are the implications from a real estate investor's point of view?

We have to take downtown indoors, of course. I first had this idea more than 25 years ago, long before I'd ever thought about Phoenix. I was living in New York City at the time, and I thought it would be a wonderful thing to develop the entire length of the Long Island Expressway as a ribbon city, a skyscraper park nearly 200 miles long. The idea of mixed-use skyscraper development originated at Rockefeller Center in New York--office, retail and recreation. A very nice expression of the concept can be found at Copley Plaza in Boston, a shopping mall anchored by two hotels with office space between them, all built over the Massachusetts Turnpike. My way of doing this is much bigger and much more ambitious, as I've discussed with respect to Phoenix and Las Vegas, but we don't need to worry about doing that much to give Phoenix a real fake downtown.

What do we need, the sine qua non? A critical mass of around-the-clock urbanites. How can we have them? They have to start and stay indoors. That means that the downtown space has to be connected to where they live. The there where they are has to be right there.

Don't hang around and let your problems surround you
There are movie shows--Downtown
Maybe you know some little places to go to
Where they never close--Downtown

It's a mall, of course. The mall was the answer to the unsavory facts of downtown life: The grit, the dirt, the winos being harried by Salvation Army bands. It is important for urban pioneers and rapacious city planners to remember that America's downtowns died because car-addicted suburbanites much preferred the mall to downtown. But if we were to build a mall in an area like the downtown-of-the-business-world in Phoenix, then use the superstructure of that mall as a platform for residential skyscrapers, then--with some selling--we could build a workable fake downtown. Walkable. High-paying jobs nearby. Continuously air-conditioned. And lots of free and vouchered parking underneath everything--because this is still Phoenix after all.

This is doable, 20 acres, 40 acres, every cubic inch a profit center, with many, many spin-off businesses to keep the capital flowing in development. Below ground is the parking lot. The mall begins at street level, anchor stores and high-volume stores and theaters. Above that is more boutique-retail, plus restaurants and food courts. And above that are those downtown services Phoenix suburbanizes--supermarkets and drug stores and dry cleaners and doctor's offices and health clubs and Montessori schools. And above that is the outdoors, a huge park by now 60 or more feet above street level, with pools, jogging trails, tennis courts. And sprouting among them are the residential towers, ownable condominiums or rentable apartments, each one its own business. Apartment-like housing can be a hard sell in Phoenix, because people very much want that American Dream home with the yard and the garage. But, built right, a structure like this can take a lot of those objections away. The needle skyscraper, for example--outlawed in New York for reasons of envy--provides a home that feels like an in-city estate. More traditional residential architecture will work, too, at an amazingly low cost per home. And all of these buildings are connected by elevator to the superstructure below--recreation, retail, dining, entertainment, parking and the blistering heat of the bristling street.

This is a downtown that works in a car-addicted America, a twenty-first century downtown, not a sad replica of fading photographs from the nineteenth century. The bad news is, no one is doing anything at all like this right now. Just lately we have high-rise residential happening in Phoenix for the first time in 30 years, but it's not even timidly mixed-use. This is a stop we would like to hit in our real estate journey, but we're a long way from that kind of capitalization now.

I have a lot of fun ideas for real estate development in the New Millennium. As an example, while Swinging Singles apartments were outlawed by the Fair Housing Police, I think there is going to be a significant market for in-city, high-rise 55+ condominiums. True Baby Boomers will not ever move to Sun City, but that doesn't mean they won't pay a premium for a residence with no kiddies shrieking at the pool. There are a lot of other things that ambitious investors can do to capitalize on the very slow but ultimately inevitable reurbanization of cities like Phoenix.

And in the long run, we will have the kind of master-planned downtowns that I describe here. But that will be a very long long run...
posted by Greg Swann at 10:39 PM

 
Can you spot the "somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagon"...?

I am dying to see a picture of the USA Today editor who blue penciled this remark:

NOT FUNNY, I DON'T GET IT

in response to this Ann Coulter joke from her spiked Democratic National Convention column:

My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call 'women' at the Democratic National Convention.

The editor might not actually be a pie wagon herself, but I'll bet she'd be plenty ugly in a naked war protest photo.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:12 PM

 
BetterVegas: Elton John catches a clue

From the Las Vegas Review Journal:

Elton John stayed away from the Linda Ronstadt controversy during his return to Las Vegas on Friday. John's only comment came at the end of his show at the Colosseum (Caesars Palace) when he thanked America for supporting his career and added that it was fashionable to knock this country. Ronstadt, whose eviction from the Aladdin last week stirred a political firestorm, told the Tucson Citizen newspaper that John had sent flowers in support.

posted by Greg Swann at 8:41 AM

 
Connecting the dots for Blundering Andrew

Just after campaigning for John Kerry, the Boy Blunder wonders:

Remind me why libertarians should support Bush again, will you?

Here's why: Because, whatever his faults, Bush is fighitng the War on Terror, when, as the Berger incident makes eminently plain, the Democrats were avidly avoiding doing the same. Between those two Blunders, there is this, quoted approvingly from the 9/11 Commission's report:

[Radical Islamism] is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it there is no common ground -- not even respect for life -- on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated.

Libertarians should support Bush because, of our two bad choices, he will do this and Kerry will not. Very simple.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:20 AM

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