Rov_Scam
10hr ago
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Wong Kim Ark interprets the 14th Amendment to read that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, subject to the exceptions that were recognized prior to adoption. Indians owing tribal allegiance were among these exceptions. Furthermore, the amendment doesn't state that these are the only circumstances under which one can become a citizen, it just says that these people are citizens. So if congress wants to extend citizenship to other classes of people, they can do so, and have done so. Otherwise, there would be no naturalization and no citizenship for children of US citizens born abroad.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
The articles you linked rest on the presumption that the jurisdiction clause is a stand-in for Common Law exceptions, and that any exception that would apply in the common law would apply for the purposes of the amendment. Hence, people looking for an out tend to get lost in the weeds of the Common Law and get hung up on the justifications for the exceptions and try to apply them to illegal immigrants and other undesirables. That's not what the case says; the long discourse on the Common Law is used for the purpose of explaining why the exemptions exist, and nothing in the opinion suggests that it is to be used for the basis of coming up with additional exceptions. The court is clear:
The foregoing considerations and authorities irresistibly lead us to these conclusions: the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.
The authors tacitly admit this when they say they can't find a common law justification for the exclusion of Indians. That's because the clause doesn't preserve every conceivable common law exception; it preserves the exceptions that were recognized at the time of the amendment's adoption, most of which happen to derive from the common law but one of which doesn't. In any event, no such exception actually exists under the common law. Modern immigration law is a creature of statute with only limited corollary in the common law. What people asking to add an exception are asking is to pretend that a statute from 1965 was part of the common law and continue the analysis of the 14th Amendment using common law principles. This is absurd; the concept of an illegal immigrant in the modern sense simply didn't exist at common law. The court goes on to say:
The acts of Congress known as the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the earliest of which was passed some fourteen years after the adoption of the Constitutional Amendment, cannot control its meaning or impair its effect, but must be construed and executed in subordination to its provisions.
This concept seems obvious, but it's forgotten completely when people are arguing about this. If the exception didn't exist at the time the amendment was adopted, we can't statutorily write it in later. If the amendment, at the time it was adopted, includes aliens, congress can't go back years later and create a new class of "illegal" aliens who aren't covered, any more than they can write in any other exemptions. Allowing them to do so would allow them to gut the amendment entirely. To summarize:
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The clause isn't defined by common law, but by the exceptions that were recognized in the United States at the time of the amendment's adoption, regardless of whether they have any basis in common law.
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Even if the clause were defined by all the common law exceptions, "illegal immigrant" isn't a recognized exception.
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Congress doesn't have the power to create new exemptions by redefining terms.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
You and @Gillitrut and whoever else can go on with comparisons, analogies, and philosophical lucrubations involving the meaning of "under the jurisdiction thereof", but a close reading of Wong Kim Ark makes it crystal clear that there is no universe where this is necessary. When the court mentions the classes that are exempt under the jurisdiction clause, they aren't listing examples of possible exemptions; they're listing the exemptions themselves. That's it. You don't get to add to the list. The opinion makes it clear that the goal of the amendment was to confirm that freed slaves were citizens. Hence, all persons means all persons. The jurisdiction clause was only put in because the government had already recognized certain exemptions prior to the amendment's passing: Diplomats and invading armies were already excepted under common law, and uncivilized Indians were exempted based on their peculiar status in the United States.
This wouldn't be so infuriating if conservatives hadn't spent the past several decades advocating for the kind of minimalist judicial standards that we see in Wong Kim Ark. There's no equivocation, no balancing test, no attempts to shoehorn contemporary ideas into archaic concepts by broadening their scope, just clear, bright-line rules. The fact that we've since restricted immigration to the point that there are 500 different kinds of visas and some aliens who can travel without visas and a whole underclass of illegals below that doesn't change what the 14th Amendment says. It's the same logic as in Bruen, just because the world has changed doesn't mean we change the meaning of the law along with it. And that argument is much stronger here; states had been restricting firearms since the 1800s, but our definition of a natural born citizen has remained consistent until this past month.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
That would be... a solution, but far from a simple one. Even if Trump were DOGE administrator, that wouldn't mean that the DOGE administrator has presidential-like powers. So any action would have to be evaluated as to whether Trump is acting in his capacity as president or in his capacity as DOGE administrator, and stuff he does outside of DOGE could theoretically be challenged on the basis that it's part of DOGE and thus illegal, and the whole thing would turn into an even bigger mess than it already is.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Well that's the question isn't it? What percentage of addicts do you think have to be functional before it's worth spending $25 worth of Narcan on them?
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Given that he's advocating the return of debtor's prisons, I don't think he cares too much about EMTALA.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Part II of this charade will begin when Ms. Gleason, realizing that she is liable in this lawsuit for the actions New Mexico, etc. find objectionable, takes control of DOGE staff and begins issuing orders. Then Trump is forced to fire her, except he can't without conceding to the court that Musk is actually in charge of DOGE. And nobody is going to want a position that has no real authority other than to act as the fall boy for a lawsuit. This is going to be good.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
It's not that every drug addict is a great musician as much as it is that more than you think are perfectly capable of being productive. Naloxone is trivially inexpensive; I don't think that letting someone die over a perceived inability to pay a small sum is any way for a civilized society to operate. This isn't like cancer treatment.
And if they can’t pay the debt, they go to debtors’ prison, which we also need to reintroduce.
No, we don't. There's a reason we abolished these in the 1800s and established a bankruptcy code. Hell, for how much it costs to imprison someone, we'd better off just having the state pay the debt in all but the most serious cases. The only thing we really have that's comparable to debtor's prison in Pennsylvania is jailing people for failure to pay child support, and this isn't taken lightly. Basically, it's threatened repeatedly, but only against people who obviously have the ability to pay and are just refusing to do so. I used to practice bankruptcy, and believe me, these people are trying to pay. They've usually put themselves in a much worse spot than they could have been in if they had filed earlier. Fraud is rare, and it's rarer still to find a bankruptcy attorney who would file a case in which fraud was evident.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
You're assuming that everyone who ODs is a hopeless junkie, and that all hopeless junkies are incapable of being anything other than bums. Pretty much every jazz musician who came up in the late 40s and early 50s was a heroin addict, and some were truly hopeless. Yet a good deal of them were extraordinarily productive. Same with any number of rock musicians who OD'd. Same with my brother's neighbor, who had a good job and had been to treatment but fell of the wagon and OD'd because she no longer had the tolerance for her old dose. My friend's ex-husband overdosed in a gas station bathroom despite having a good job and leading an otherwise normal life. You can't paint everyone who has a serious drug habit with a broad brush and say that there's no hope for recovery and that their lives have no value.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I'm a member of a VFW and the VA is popular enough that we have people who assist veterans in applying for VA benefits. I don't doubt that media reports of incompetence are accurate, but the impression I get is that this is largely dependent on the hospital and the doctor. I'd certainly prefer the VA over any of the smaller rural hospitals and over most of the suburban regional hospitals.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Even the technical side isn't great. I've been locked out of my account on desktop for a while now since every time I try to log in I get into some kind of loop where it keeps asking for my login information. I never really used it much, so now I just don't use it at all. I imagine for people who are into it they've figured out all its quirks, but for a casual user like me it just isn't worth it.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
It's not a contradiction; there are plenty of things like this. Just last night, a friend of mine's temperature light went on. She was low on coolant. $5 worth of coolant later she was back on the road, no harm done. Had she not spent this five dollars, she could have overheated her engine, rendering a $20,000 car unrepairably useless and leaving her without transportation indefinitely. Deciding against spending the $5 would have been saving a paltry amount and risking severe and devastating consequences.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I'm guessing you never had to deal with business decisions before. Technically, you'd have to ask them, but based on the advice I give, most businessmen have an intuitive understanding that late payment is better than no payment and that bad customers are better than no customers. I don't know that failure to pay a late fee would have been grounds to terminate that particular contract, but even if it did, what of it? Now they have to find someone else to buy 12,000 tons of metallurgical coal per week, with no guarantee that they're going to get a similar price or that the new customer is going to be any better at paying than the old customer. It reminds me of what the owner of a bar I used to frequent once said. He was complaining about how one of his cooks quit without notice a couple weeks after she was hired. Mildly sympathetic, I said "Good help's hard to find." He replied "Bad help's hard to find! I gave up on good help 20 years ago!"
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Big law firms basically froze hiring for a few years, smaller firms weren't doing great, jobs were hard to come by, those you could get didn't pay any better than other jobs, and huge percentage of law school graduates more or less gave up. So right now there's a huge demographic gap where you have partners in their 50s and associates in their 20s and early 30s and few people in between to do all the senior associate stuff. It's not exactly catastrophic, but it's not a position the firms want to be in again if they can help it.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Like I said, this case was significantly more complicated than I made it out to be in the post. What the case actually turned on was a provision in the Uniform Commercial Code meant to address situations such as this. A complicating factor was that Warren wasn't even technically in arrears. The terms IIRC called for something like payment within 30 days plus escalating late fees after that, with breach not occurring until the bill was 6 months overdue. Warren had never once paid "on time" but had waited until the last minute and withheld the late fee. There was some argument about whether the coal company had waived that contract provision by accepting payment without protest, and the coal company was arguing that this was evidence that they were juggling their payments to see what they could get away with, and there were rumors of an impending bankruptcy, and that yes, an order requiring them to comply with the contract terms would essentially mean giving away something like $400,000 worth of coal for free.
The case boiled down to the UCC provision allowing the request for reasonable assurances of performance. The judge was sympathetic to the coal company, but he said that if they had concerns they could have requested reasonable assurances at any time, and that anticipatory repudiation of the contract wasn't proper. Then the argument became how long Warren had to provide the assurances and whether the coal company could suspend performance until it received assurances. This is where the whole irreparable harm thing came in, with Warren saying that if they didn't get the Friday shipment that over a thousand employees would be laid off by the end of the weekend and the mill would be idled indefinitely. The final ruling was that the coal company had to make the shipment but that Warren had to make reasonable assurance before the next shipment, and he would dismiss the breach of contract suit as soon as the shipment had been received.
In a general sense, no, it isn't fair, which is why the UCC has provisions for dealing with that kind of situation. If the coal company had concerns it could have asked for assurances a week prior. In any business transaction, there's always some chance that the other party isn't going to hold up his end of the bargain, and that's the risk you take doing any business. The coal company could have protected itself with a condition requiring prepayment back at the formation stage, but they didn't, even though Warren was only a few years removed from coming out of a previous bankruptcy. Up to this point, Warren had held up their end of the deal, just not in a way that inspired much confidence, and there were rumors that they were insolvent. Furthermore, if Warren had already filed for bankruptcy this question wouldn't have even come up, because suppliers have to keep honoring contracts during a bankruptcy.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Firstly, monetary damages cannot be irreperable harm, and this is a settled legal principle for hundreds of years.
This is a general principle, but there are always exceptions. Most of these involve judgment-proof defendants. Say Fred and Sam are having a dispute over a driveway Sam uses to access his business. Fred puts up concrete barricades on the disputed right-of-way, denying access to Sam or any customers, preventing use of the business. Sam cannot operate his business and sues Fred for trespass. Sam may be able to calculate that he's losing $5,000/day in revenue while the barricades are up; under the rule, he wouldn't be entitled to a TRO. Except any court would grant him one, because if the case takes a year to resolve, it's unlikely that fred will be able to come up with $1.8 million in damages.
This example is based on a case I actually dealt with a couple years ago except the defendant wasn't some random guy but a railroad (it was a dispute over a crossing agreement). I was still able to get a TRO, not because there was any question of the railroad's ability to pay damages but because I convinced the judge that my client couldn't afford the mortgage and ongoing maintenance costs to the property without the property generating any revenue. Damages would be cold comfort if the property were foreclosed on and he were forced into bankruptcy.
Another case I was peripherally involved with during my time in oil and gas involved a contractual dispute between Warren Steel and a coal company whose name I can't remember. (This is a grossly oversimplified version) Warren had an ongoing contract with the company that required them to deliver coal to the mill a few times a week. They were way behind on payments and owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. The coal company said they weren't getting any more shipments until they paid what was overdue. Warren sued the coal company for breach of contract arguing that future deliveries weren't conditioned on payment for prior deliveries. From here it gets a bit complicated. The typical remedy here would be for Warren to buy coal on the spot market and collect the price difference from the breaching coal company. Warren argued that their financial position was precarious (there was no denying this based on their payment history) and that they would be unable to secure credit to buy at sharply inflated spot market prices. If the coal company didn't make their next scheduled shipment, they wouldn't be able to make any steel, would have to shut down the mill, and any hope of them remaining operational would be gone. the court issued the TRO and told the coal company to make the delivery. In any event, Warren Steel filed for bankruptcy a few days later.
And who could forget the man himself, Donald Trump. If you remember, last year he was on the wrong end of a nine-figure civil judgment, and was told that if he wanted to stay the judgment pending appeal he would have to post a bond of $450 million within 30 days. This is about as clear-cut as it gets—he had $450 million in assets. If he posted the bond and won the appeal, he'd get the money back. So what's the problem? He successfully argued that since no insurance company would take real estate as collateral, he would have to liquidate it at fire sale prices, causing irreparable harm. The judge agreed and reduced the bond to something an insurance company could manage.
Secondly, a TRO must have an end date. That's part of what makes a TRO temporary.
Most court orders aren't written by the court. If I'm asking for a TRO, I have a copy of the order with me and I hand it to the judge to sign if she decides to grant it. In most cases, you're asking for the TRO in motions court early in the process before the case is listed for trial and assigned a judge.After that it has to go to calendar control for them to schedule a hearing for a preliminary injunction. By law that hearing has to be within 14 days, but the judge who's signing it doesn't know when that's going to be; the upshot is that we put the 14 day max in the order.
In this case, the judge who issued the TRO wrote the order herself after the hearing had already been scheduled. She's hearing arguments tomorrow, after which, she'll either lift the order entirely or grant an injunction. There was no reason to put a specific expiration date because it's implied that she's going to lift it after the hearing.
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Series Index:
Part 5: The Hill District, Continued
The entry on the Lower Hill from a couple weeks ago was really more of an appetizer than a main course, since the area discussed hasn't been a developed neighborhood since the early 1950s. Today, we'll move into the Hill District proper, discussing the neighborhoods officially designated as Crawford-Roberts and Middle Hill, which make up the bulk of the old Hill District. In future installments we'll look at Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village, two project neighborhoods that merit their own discussion, and Uptown, The Upper Hill (Sugar Top), and Polish Hill, three very different neighborhoods that are on the periphery of the Hill District but are nonetheless historically bound to it.
As we discussed last time, much of the Lower Hill was razed in the 1950s for an urban renewal project that never fully came to fruition. Crawford-Roberts is a semi-bogus name city planners gave to the rump section of the Lower Hill that wasn't demolished wholesale. In the section on Downtown I mentioned that Pittsburgh came out of the Second World War with a serious image problem, and was desperate to shed its image as a smog-choked industrial town. Adding to the problem was that one of the poorest, most run-down and overcrowded parts of the city immediately abutted downtown to the east. When Federal money for slum clearance became available in the 1940s, the city moved forward with plans to build a civic auditorium, arts center, symphony hall, lots of tower in the park housing, and other amenities like hotels and restaurants.
In the end, it stopped with a single apartment tower and the civic auditorium, which lasted for nearly 50 years but was only briefly used for its intended purpose. The rest of the old neighborhood became a sea of parking lots. The Hill District was Pittsburgh's original dumping ground for blacks, Jews, Italians, and other undesirables, who initially settled in the Lower Hill close to Downtown, but gradually moved up the hill as they became more prosperous. By the 1950s, the Lower Hill was the poorest section but also the most racially diverse. The Middle and Upper parts of the Hill were blacker but also more prosperous—the Middle Hill was 80%–90% black by 1940, but was inhabited by industrial workers and others with steady employment. Beyond that was the small community of black professionals on Sugar Top.
During the Lower Hill redevelopment process, the black community in the Middle and Upper Hill was reasonably supportive of the Urban Redevelopment Authority' goals. There as hope that the demolition of a disreputable area would strengthen the link between the Middle Hill and Downtown, and the poorest of the poor would be moved out of overcrowded, unsanitary, dilapidated housing and into gleaming new apartment houses. That they were overoptimistic at best or naïve at worst became apparent shortly after the wrecking balls started swinging in 1956. Changes in Federal housing policy meant that the new projects had not materialized, and displaced residents found themselves with nowhere to go. The Italians went in one direction, the Jews in another, and the blacks went wherever they could. Some went to Homewood or Beltzhoover or other far-flung parts of the city, but the majority just moved deeper into the Hill District.
By the time the Civic Arena was completed in 1961, housing policy was the least of the reasons Middle Hill residents had for concern. While they may have hoped that the redevelopment of the Lower Hill would lead to a revitalization of the Middle Hill, the city fathers didn't see it that way. To them, the Middle Hill was no less a slum than the Lower Hill, and it didn't help that it was increasingly occupied by the same undesirables they had just kicked out. It turned out that selling modern luxury apartments on the edge of a black area was a tough sell to wealthy whites in the 1960s, and the benefactors of the arts didn't want to soil their shoes walking through a neighborhood that, to them, was as much of a slum as it had been years before. The center for the arts, which was to be modeled after Lincoln Center in New York and include a symphony hall, repertory theater, restaurant, exposition hall, apartment building, huge underground parking garage, and maybe even a modern art museum, was the centerpiece of the next phase of development, but the financial backers, particularly the H.J. Heinz Foundation, thought it illogical to pay huge sums for a cultural acropolis without eliminating the neighboring blight. They made it clear to the city that no more money would be forthcoming unless another 50 blocks were cleared east of Crawford St.
The city, apparently realizing that the calls for additional demolition weren't going to stop, did the private backers one better. They responded with a plan to clear an unspecified plot of land for a public park, built a wall along the western side of Crawford St. to protect cultural center patrons from disagreeable views, and build new residential high rises that would obscure the rest of the Hill and cut it off from the redeveloped area. By 1963 the total redevelopment area had expanded to 900 acres, practically the entire Hill District. While publications from the Planning Commission and URA spoke in lofty terms about the need for citizen input and community engagement, the ideas were not presented as proposals but as done deals, even though this was far from the truth. The city seemed bound and determined to clear out an inconvenient neighborhood and have a clear, glistening new corridor between Downtown and Oakland. Whatever revitalization Hill residents had hoped to see ten years earlier was now a distant memory, and they were effectively being told that revitalization was contingent on their leaving. Urban Renewal had become Negro Removal.
The community, previously supportive of redevelopment efforts, turned hard against any further encroachments on the neighborhood, and vowed to hold the line at Crawford St. As the URA sought to make the proposals official, neighborhood residents erected a billboard at the corner of Crawford St. and Center Ave. which read "Attention: City Hall and the URA, No Redevelopment Beyond This Point." From this intersection, renamed Freedom Corner, Hill district residents marched downtown despite death threats from white Pittsburghers and demanded that redevelopment stop — "Not another inch!" This sentiment wasn't limited to the Hill District; by 1965 opposition had galvanized among residents of neighborhoods throughout the city that were the subject of proposed renewal projects. But while the city may have treated these proposals as inevitabilities, the specifics presented were always vague. There were rumors, general recommendations, and the occasional artist's rendering, but these were all theoretical in nature; there was nothing close to any concrete plans or drawings for the Hill District. Despite residents' fears, any redevelopment beyond Crawford Ave. was at the bottom of a long list of projects already in the hopper. As community opposition grew, the city, while stil formally recommending slum clearance, admitted, in an apparent attempt to relieve the pressure, that the plans would take decades to realize.
One can date the end of the Pittsburgh Renaissance not just to the decade, or the year, but to the minute. At 10:30 pm on May 20, 1969, councilman and mayoral candidate Pete Flaherty was having a spaghetti dinner with his wife and two sons when he received a telephone call from his campaign headquarters that his opponent, Judge Harry Kramer, had conceded the nomination. Since the Democratic party had taken over city government in 1934, machine politics, or "The Organization", as it was called, had dominated. Flaherty won a council seat in 1965 and quickly became the heir apparent but increasingly found himself at odds with the administration. In early 1969, before incumbent mayor Joseph Barr decided whether he'd be seeking a third term, Flaherty announced he was entering the race. The Organization was stunned; if Barr retired and Flaherty kept his mouth shut, he could have had the nomination handed to him on a silver platter, but he wanted to earn it instead. More importantly, he felt reform was needed and couldn't make a credible case for it as a machine selection. With Barr deciding he was done and Flaherty turning coat, The Organization tapped Judge Kramer, convincing him to resign a cushy seat on the Probate bench for what should have been a guaranteed position as mayor.
But while Kramer's commitment to public service was honorable, his political skills left much to be desired. He had no response to Flaherty when it came to policy and resorted to incoherent personal attacks that accused him of being a far left kook on the one hand and a "Republocrat" on the other. More importantly, the city employees and councilmen who constituted The Organization's rank and file took Flaherty's concerns to heart and broke ranks. Still, Kramer's loss came as a shock. The organization that had seen the city through the Depression and World War II, and that had transformed it smog-choked backwater to one of the most beautiful places in the nation was done. The remaining loyalists were forced to back Flaherty in the general election, as any Republican would allow governor Raymond Shafer to run wild in the city. While Flaherty would see to completion the projects that were already construction, no new proposals would be forthcoming, and any existing ones would die a quiet death. To him, these were nothing more than expensive boondoggles, and he'd focus his administration on unsexy things like paving, street lighting, fiscal responsibility, and labor agreements. The era of machine politics in Pittsburgh was over.
For the Hill, though, it was too little too late. While the Middle Hill's Center Ave. business district was unaffected by urban renewal, it would not survive the riots that erupted in the wake of Dr. King's assassination in 1968. While these affected several city neighborhoods, the Hill District was the hardest hit. What was left of the Lower Hill continued to deteriorate following the initial demolition, as the promised revival never came. Without a functional business district, and with little hope of rebuilding Center Ave., the remaining black middle class decamped for elsewhere, and the neighborhood slowly began to empty. While narcotics had been an increasing problem since the early 1960s, the arrival of the crack epidemic in the 1980s brought gang warfare at a scale never before seen. The population of the Hill District, which sat at over 50,000 in 1950, had been reduced to only 15,000 by 1990. For all of the Hill's problems, overcrowding was no longer one of them.
5B. Crawford-Roberts
Crawford-Roberts is a semi-bogus neighborhood designation that nobody uses in real life, but it warrants separate treatment here as it comprises the rump portion of the old Lower Hill that was spared demolition. Aerial photographs show that it was starting to suffer from demolition by 1967, and by 1993 it was almost completely vacant. Suburban style split-level houses were built in the 1970s in an attempt to retain middle class residents. While this had some degree of success—these are all owned by long-time residents, many original owners—they are incongruous in an urban neighborhood close to a major downtown. While they thankfully aren't building these anymore, what's been going in instead hasn't been much better. In the late 1980s, the URA began an early New Urbanist project called Crawford Square that sought to redevelop what had been lost to blight. It was touted as a "contextualist" development that was meant to blend in with the historic character of the neighborhood. Compromises were made to "reflect the reality of the automobile", and there was no apparent attempt to obtain any variance from contemporary zoning codes. The topography made it difficult to build alleys in some places, so the result was old-style houses with front loading garages and deep setbacks. It isn't horrible, but it stands in stark contrast with the historic structures that remain. The townhomes at the heart of the development have an [antiseptic feel] that evokes a senior living community more than an urban neighborhood; I call it "soft urbanism" because it tries to conform to the large-scale descriptors of urbanism—density, traditional styles, etc.—without actually bothering to see what the existing built form actually looks like. Luckily, the more recent developments do a much better job.
One thing that has been successful is the crime reduction. The first phase of Crawford Square was finished in 1993, and in the decades since the area went from being one of the most dangerous parts of the Hill to one of the safest. This is despite half of the rentals being subsidized "affordable" units, though it should be mentioned that even the for-sale units and new single family homes are also subsidized, but in a different way—the city offers ten year property tax abatements on new construction homes in designated redevelopment areas, giving middle class people financial incentive to buy in the hood and in turn giving developers incentive to build there. For all the outward success, though, this has been an incredibly slow process. While the development was officially completed in 2000, it was only in the past few years that the URA was finally able to unload the last 6 parcels in the development area. So while the Lower Hill has been showing signs of life, the pace of construction isn't exactly frenetic, and what has been built has required significant government nudging.
Neighborhood Grade: Stable. 15 years ago you could have made the argument that this was gentrifying, but that was merely in anticipation of development at the old arena site. Two things hold it back. First, the built form isn't particularly appealing. It wasn't originally designed to be trendy to outsiders but to retain middle class blacks who would otherwise leave the neighborhood; hence the concessions to the suburban lifestyle and aesthetic that is anathema to any self-respecting urban pioneer. More importantly, the old Wylie Ave. business district that was destroyed in the 1950s is still vacant, and the Center Ave. business district in the neighboring Middle Hill isn't doing too hot. Beyond that, there aren't any walkable amenities. If the arena site development ever comes to fruition and is able to attract sufficient ground-level retail, this could change, but I don't see this becoming a trendy area any time soon.
5C. Middle Hill
This was the heart of the old Hill District and remains the heart of the current Hill District. The boundary between the Lower and Middle Hill was always indistinct, but the Middle Hill starts around the beginning of the Center Ave. business district and includes everything up to Herron Ave. that isn't part of a housing project. See map. If the Crawford-Roberts area is the part of the hill that the city wants you to see, then the Middle Hill is the part it doesn’t want you to see. There is a significant amount of neglect, abandonment, and, ultimately, demolition. There are plenty of historic structures scattered throughout the neighborhood, and occasionally enough remains intact to give you an idea of what the neighborhood looked like in its heyday. There are also a couple of weird suburban enclaves like Midtown Square and Francis Court that have held up well. But this part of the Hill is mostly vacant lots, with some streets only having a single, vacant structure remaining. Keeping in mind that the Hill once had a population density of over 80,000 people per square mile, comparable to the denser parts of Brooklyn, this is an odd, sad fate. While most of Wylie and Center avenues are technically zoned commercial, there is often not enough left to tell where the business district even was, though there are plenty of businesses scattered throughout the neighborhood. While the Lower Hill is more celebrated, the Middle Hill was always more the center of black life in Pittsburgh. The fame of the Lower Hill comes primarily from its notoriety as a rowdy nightlife district, where too many jazz greats to list cut their teeth and many more played when visiting. But it was the Middle Hill where residents went to take care of the boring, functional, everyday things. While displacement of low-income residents is the big issue that’s always brought up when discussing gentrification, I suspect that a large part of the issue is also that gentrified business districts tend to cater to the kind of chi-chi things that primarily appeal to rich white people. There's some cultural signaling involved here; when the first businesses that move into a moribund area are microbreweries and art galleries, but nothing that appeals to the immediate needs of existing residents, it doesn't help them in the short term and signals to landlords that it's time to start renovating their properties and raising rents. There's some level of understanding that these kinds of things are necessary to attract business from outside the neighborhood, but they'd prefer that to happen after the business district can satisfy their basic needs.
Nothing illustrates this dynamic better than the Hill's decades-long grocery store issue. In the 1970s, part of the attempt to stabilize the Hill by suburbanizing it was the construction of an auto-oriented shopping plaza, anchored by a grocery store. That store was gone by the mid-80s, as the Hill continued its decline. The lack of a grocery store rose to political prominence as the plans for a new arena were coming to fruition. For all the grand redevelopment plans being discussed, Hill groups just wanted a grocery store on the site, or, barring that, anywhere else in the Hill. Most white Pittsburghers saw this as nothing more than whining, to the extent they paid attention to it at all. There was no grocery store because the Hill can't support one, and we aren't spending tax dollars to prop up an unprofitable business just so you have a shorter bus ride.
Hill House was a community organization that had existed since the 1960s to provide after school programs, music lessons, and the like to Hill residents, as well as general community activism. Changes to the nonprofit landscape had them scrambling for program funding by the 2000s. In 2008, with the Civic Arena on the demolition block and redevelopment talks in the works, the Penguins and the URA signed a community benefit agreement that included several groups, with Hill House named as fiduciary representative for the community. The deal included 1 million dollars to put toward a grocery store. They found a tenant, secured the property, and began construction in 2011.
Things went sideways almost immediately. The contractor didn't post a bond. Architectural plans proved unworkable, necessitating a last-minute redesign. Overages abounded. Hill House took out massive loans to cover fundraising shortages. Nonetheless, a Shop-n-Save opened in 2013 to much fanfare. It wouldn't last the decade. For background, Shop-n-Save is a regional chain that is more or less the marketing arm of wholesale distributor SuperValu, the stores themselves being independently owned. This is in contrast to Giant Eagle, the regional flagship, that owns the vast majority of its stores outright. Giant Eagle is perceived as overpriced by most people in Pittsburgh. Anyway, the local NPR affiliate ran a story about a year after opening that said the store was doing about $25,000/week in total sales. By contrast, a typical suburban Aldi does about $350,000/week despite a smaller footprint and lower prices. Initial projections were dependent on the redevelopment of the old arena site, and, as we saw last time, we're still waiting for this to happen.
The bigger problem was theft. It's expected that a store in a low-income location is going to have an above-average amount of shrinkage. It's not expected that the manager of the store will be responsible for most of that shrinkage. The guy was taking cases of product before it could even go on the shelves and selling it himself. Able to read the room, store employees followed suit, loading up after a shift and heading to the bars and street corners where they'd unload it at a discount to passersby. Given the general vibe of the place, there was no motivation among employees or management to prevent customers from doing the same thing; the store was a block away from a police station, the police assured the owners that they were committed to preventing theft, but no one ever bothered to report anything. Combine the theft with a small, low-income customer base and it was bound to fail.
When the Shop-n-save closed in 2019, it took Hill House down with it. The store debacle was far from their only problem, but the rent couldn't cover ongoing building maintenance. In a supreme twist of irony, the final straw came when the URA cut off their line of credit. Hill House had been borrowing money to cover maintenance costs, but the URA said that enough was enough. Hill House was able to avoid bankruptcy, but only by selling off real estate as a prelude to dissolution. Without an anchor tenant, however, they couldn't find a buyer for the shopping complex, and the URA was forced to assume ownership.
The failure of the Shop-n-Save didn't end the Hill District's bid to get a grocery store. The URA was desperate to unsaddle itself from the building maintenance, and offered 1.5 million in incentives for anyone who wanted the property, provided they had a plan for a grocery store. Four prospective bidders came forward, and the winner was Salem Abdullah, the owner of a successful Halal grocer in the Strip District. Salem's was popular but had outgrown its location. The crux of the plan seems to have been twofold. First, a destination store with an established customer base would make it so he wasn't relying on Hill residents alone to make ends meet. Second, the larger location would allow him to expand his core operations while also expanding into a full-service store. No one doubted his dedication to the project, as he sunk 5 million of his own money into it on top of what the URA gave him.
Last week, he announced that the store would suspend operations indefinitely. But this time, attitudes range from indifference to good riddance. The entire reason Hill District residence wanted a grocery store so badly was because they didn't want to deal with the inconvenience of going elsewhere to shop, and since they're a low-income community, the store would have to have competitive prices that allowed them to stretch their dollar. Salem's did neither. To the first point, although it was ostensibly a full-service grocery store, an observant Muslim isn't allowed to sell anything that isn't Halal. The lack of pork products should have been a showstopper in and of itself, but few realized how far this went. Canned soups, boxed stuffing mixes, ramen noodles, pop tarts, broth, gravy mix, wine vinegar of any kind, corn bread—and the list goes on. Other items beyond his normal scope of operations were limited and inconsistent. The produce selection was about half of a normal grocery and frequently was out of key items like apples and cantaloupe, white bread sold out quickly and was slow to be replaced, and deli selection was limited. There was no tobacco, lottery, or money orders.
In short, it was a larger version of his specialty store in the Strip with a limited selection of grocery items and a limited deli. And since he didn't have the buying power of a chain, he was effectively paying retail for everything. If people have to go to another store to get produce, or pork, or whatever, they're going to do all of their shopping at the other store. If the other store also has significantly better prices, you can't compete, period. If it's both more economical and more convenient to pay a jitney ten bucks to take you to the South Side Giant Eagle, that's what people are going to do, especially if that's what they've been doing for the past 30 years.
I don't think that Salem Abdullah is a bad dude or that this was some kind of URA cash grab boondoggle. The 1.5 million he got was mostly loans, and he put another 5.5 million of his own money into the project. His idea was bad, but it was the only one on the table that was remotely feasible. There were three other bids. Two were from idealistic groups with visions of saving the community from food desertdom by offering high-quality, healthy options. These were discarded pretty easily, since neither group had any experience running a grocery store and came across as disorganized. The other bid was from a national chain of Asian markets, who put the bid in at the last minute and didn't bother to clarify that they sold non-Asian items. Salem's was local and had the money. He just completely misread the needs of the community.
Neighborhood Grade: Ghetto. Between the urban prairie and fragmented remnants of what was once a huge business district, the area is bleak. Crime is still high, though the gang warfare is over and most of this is spillover from nearby housing projects. But the stigma is still there, and any new business has a hard time attracting customers from outside the neighborhood. Pittsburgh's ghettos are more "have street smarts and avoid known drug areas" than "make a beeline for the highway and don't stop at any red lights". It also has a prime position between downtown and the University of Pittsburgh that's had city planners salivating for decades.
That being said, there are a few factors weighing against a turnaround happening any time soon. First, the city and the URA have officially committed to developing the Hill District from "the bottom up". So far, that's meant that development has been focused on the Crawford-Roberts area and whatever the hell they're doing at the old arena site. There's been some limited development in the Middle Hill—a YMCA on Center Ave., townhomes and a senior living complex on Wylie, a few single family homes, and a new library. All this development, though, has been limited to the western third of the neighborhood. It seems highly unlikely that it will extend beyond Kirkpatrick St. in the foreseeable future, let alone fill out the neighborhood.
Adding to the problem is that the centrality of its location is deceiving. On a street map, it appears to be in the middle of everything. But it's hard to actually get to unless you're really trying. Access from Downtown is hindered by I-579 and the gaping maw that is the old arena site. The northern edge of the neighborhood is a steep hillside with no road access even possible. The only direct access to Oakland is via Center Ave., which dives into a valley somewhat apart from the main neighborhood before going up over another hill, and even then it only spits you out into an odd corner of Oakland far from the Pitt campus and main business district. Access is somewhat better from the south, but that's only by turning off of 5th or Forbes Ave. in Uptown, which is a peripheral part of the Hill with its own business district that already acts as the main thoroughfare between the two neighborhoods. And, as we shall see in a few weeks, even it has a ways to go.
And then there's the red tape. A disproportionate share of the available land is owned by the URA or the city, which means that any developer has to go through them and by extension Marimba Milliones her ilk who will insist that you provide affordable housing guarantees on the one hand but tell you they don't want a housing project on the other. What's their actual vision for the future? Based on the reports they've commissioned in the past 15 years, it's mostly a pie in the sky vision of a diverse yet African-American-centered community full of improbable businesses like an African Diaspora Food Hall, an automotive shop that gets cheap rent in exchange for motorcycle repair classes, a pop-up mini golf course, a late night music venue that looks like an unsanctioned rave even though it isn't—you know, the kind of stuff that attracts rich white people but isn't too obvious about it.
I don't think this is going to happen. What I think will happen is one of two things. The most likely scenario is that the URA's slow but steady march continues and the neighborhood continues to be a lower-income black area with newer housing and new storefronts that can't find commercial tenants. There's also the possibility that the gentrification wave slowly percolating in Uptown shoots up the hillside faster than anyone's ability to control it. I guess a third possibility is that the neighborhood eventually empties out so completely that there's no base of political power left and the URA gives developers a blank check, but I wouldn't count on that happening. The best case scenario is that Center Ave. turns into something akin to the U Street Corridor in Washington DC. I think things will eventually turn around, but I wouldn't venture a guess as to when that will happen. The only question is whether, when that day arrives, anything of the old neighborhood will be left standing.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
They don't do this because the information isn't readily available and there's no call for it. It may be easy to find run times for movies and music, but few people pay much attention to these, the only real exception being if a movie is unusually long. Consumers generally don't need down-to-the-minute information about how long things take; if I'm book shopping, forget even page counts, how thick the book is is usually a close enough approximation. Publishers know this, too, so they will often make the kind of formatting decisions you mentioned above with that in mind, whether to add extra bulk to a slim volume or condense a longer work down so it doesn't look too intimidating.
But suppose they did start publishing word counts. What of it? If a book says that it contains 100,000 words it means absolutely nothing to me the way it does if an albums says it's 38 minutes long. I vaguely remember learning in 9th grade that a novel was anything longer than 60,000 words, but I couldn't tell you how long most novels actually are. And I couldn't translate this into how long it will take to read because I have no idea how fast I read, other than that I read faster than most people, though even then I'm sure there's variation based on how tired I am, how engaged I am with the material, etc.
Complicating this even further is the fact that people rarely read an entire book in one sitting. In judging how "long" a book will take to read I'm usually thinking more in terms of days or weeks than in hours or minutes. If a movie is listed at two hours I can say easily that if I start watching it at 8 pm I'll finish watching it at 10 and plan my evening accordingly. If a book says it's 90,000 words then I have to divide that by my average reading speed to get the total time in minutes, then divide that by 60 to get hours and an approximation of minutes, then figure out how much time per day I anticipate having to dedicate to reading, and only then can I figure out how long it will take to finish it. Most people aren't doing this calculation.
And word count isn't as cut and dried as running time. For most fiction, there isn't much superfluous text, but in nonfiction this gets sticky, since a lot of the material included isn't really intended to be "read", per se. Do you include the preface and foreward? Probably. The acknowledgements? Most people skip these but the author wants you to read them. Appendixes? Depends on what's in them; is it supplementary text or a collection of facts and figures? Call that a maybe. Footnotes? Depends on whether they're explanatory or bibliographic, though many are a combination of both. The index? Almost certainly not. We can quibble over where to draw the line, but the word count the publisher is using includes all of the above, because they have to print all of it regardless. And then there's the variation on how different software programs count words. So the same book could have a huge variation depending on whether they're using the count from the manuscript as submitted in Word (the stingiest program) or the InDesign count for the entire published text, that counts every numeral in the index as a separate word. This could be solved by industry standardization, by why develop such a standard when there's simply no call for it?
Rov_Scam
10d ago
Alright, the weekend is over, so for the vanishingly small number of people — @curious_straight_ca, @DoctorMonarch, @sarker — who expressed interest, here are the answers:
AAB-FAB: Aggravated Assault & Battery / Felony Assault & Battery
RS Goods: Receiving Stolen Goods
VUFA: Violation of the Uniform Firearms Act (this is still police lingo for an illegal weapons violation)
KA House: Keeping an Assignation House (Brothel or no-tell motel)
CP: Common Prostitute
Pandering: Would probably be categorized as "promoting prostitution" under current law.
VA House: Visiting an assignation house
KD House: Keeping a disorderly house. This is still on the books, though this is usually a municipal ordinance rather than a state-level criminal offense. College towns will use these to put pressure on students who frequently throw loud parties, and urban areas will use them to cite owners of crack houses and the like. Nuisance bar laws are closely related. Basically, being in control of any building with excessive police calls for things like noise, fighting, drug use, or other things that make it a public nuisance will make you liable for this.
VD House: Visiting a disorderly house. These days, when the cops break up a party for noise and arrest everyone inside, this is what they get charged with if they don't have grounds for an underage drinking charge. Not commonly charged.
KG House: Keeping a gaming house.
VG House: Visiting a gaming house.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
There's no returning what was never owned by the states to begin with. Either way, it's not practical. The average rancher is going to have a coronary when he finds out that he has to buy a grazing permit for every cow that might wander into another state or risk fines.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I stumbled across some old annual reports from the Pittsburgh Police and when they listed the arrests by crime there were a few old-timey ones that aren't immediately apparent,. particularly ones involving various types of house of ill fame or loose ethics. See how many of these you can get:
AAB-FAB
RS Goods
VUFA
KA House
CP
Pandering
VA House
KD House
VD House
KG House
VG House
To wit:
In other words, the exceptions are justified because the framers of the amendment sought to preserve those that were recognized at the time of ratification. There's nothing in the opinion that suggests the amendment allows for every conceivable exception under common law. I think people lose the plot after the part that says:
The opinion then goes on to discuss those principles, but at no point does it suggest that those principles can be used to craft exceptions other than those that the court recognizes in opinion. Further on, it closes the door:
That's it; here's the rule, here are the exceptions. It couldn't be any clearer.
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