Rich Mintz

I follow the news from the city I lived in from 1999 to 2007, and a couple of things I’ve read recently, such as this short piece from the Economist’s American politics blog, have got me wondering whether Atlanta — like Phoenix and Las Vegas — may have hit its growth ceiling in the current recession, and whether the Atlanta of, say, 2030 might not be somewhat smaller than today’s.

I’m not talking about the city of Atlanta (2008 pop: 537,000), the municipality at the heart of the metro area, which has absorbed rapid growth over the past decade (due to both densification and immigration) and can presumably absorb plenty more on its ample vacant land. I’m talking about the Atlanta metropolitan area (oops, the “Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta MSA”) — the agglomeration of 20 counties, covering an area the size of Massachusetts, that is home to 5.4 million people.

Much of that land — and virtually all the land outside the Perimeter, except along traditional rail and road corridors like US 41 — was rational to develop only in an economy that counted on three things: unlimited cheap gasoline married to an unlimited willingness to build new highway mileage; endless real estate appreciation, leading to endless speculative residential construction; and a core city of Atlanta that was perceived as unsafe, tax-hungry, and crumbling. The recession’s taken care of the first two; and the third has been taking care of itself, as the city has spiffed itself up, embraced its advantages, and started living within its means. (When I left for good, the city of Atlanta was a much nicer and better-kept place to live than when I arrived eight years earlier, and the progress has continued.)

Geographically speaking, Atlanta is in an arbitrary spot. It is located where it is because of the decisions of railroad-builders and local boosters more than a century ago. Unlike most American cities, it is not on a river, not on the fall line, not on a traditional trade route. And it’s so far up in its watershed — in the Piedmont of the Appalachians — that even something as basic as water can by no means be taken for granted.

When I was in high school, the late Father John Gill, who taught me 9th-grade European history — and was also a California history fetishist, and our chaplain, and probably one of the most interesting adults who took me seriously before I moved away for college — said that if we wanted to make a mint, we should all study riparian law. He was thinking of California (where it’s also true), but his advice would have been useful in Georgia, too. The endless squabbling with Florida and Alabama over water rights — in which, the Economist writer points out, all of Georgia downstream of the Atlanta metropolitan colossus inherently sides with Florida and Alabama — may well be resolved in the favor of those downstream, which would make it difficult to sustain a population the size of Atlanta’s indefinitely without major civil engineering projects.

The City of Atlanta — the hole in the doughnut — will likely be fine. Dense enough to justify infrastructure investment, it’s also proportionally wealthier now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, so a solution will be found to serve the water needs of 600,000, or 800,000, or a million. But at least two or three of the remaining four million in the metro area are living unsustainably, and as foreclosures hollow out their neighborhoods and job losses devastate the county tax bases, there’s going to be a lot of shrinkage in the doughnut itself. And it looks like the go-go days of a decade ago are probably gone for good.

In the long term and even the medium term, that probably means densification, infrastructure, and quality-of-life improvements that my old friends in Grant Park and Candler Park and East Atlanta and Decatur, and the other inner neighborhoods I used to frequent, will get to enjoy. But it will also mean a lot of pain, spread out over a decade or two, for people who bought into an unsustainable lifestyle in places like Suwanee and Buford.

I sure love me some Orly Taitz… and she’s back!

In case you’re not an obsessive follower of this story, Orly is the über-Birther who’s bombarding the federal courts with frivolous lawsuits about Obama’s origins. Here’s a detailed history of the saga (juiciest part here — court’s judgment worth reading in its entirety).

Well, Orly’s back! She’s pissed off a Federal judge, the Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court, but she’s not letting it go. In our latest installment, Orly claims that Obama’s passport is doctored and she can prove it. If I’ve learned anything from TV about judges, it’s that they don’t like having their time wasted, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that fine go up, and up, and up…

Some right-winger I never heard of has announced he wants to open a gay bar in Lower Manhattan, next door to the Cordoba Initiative’s Islamic center. Apparently he means to be inflammatory. This has gay people up in arms, but I don’t really understand why; as right-wing pundit theater, it’s low-grade, adolescent “nyah-nyah” stuff (“ha ha, I’m gonna make you touch a gay and get cooties!”); and as an actual proposal, well, it would be unremarkable. It would probably even pass CB1. The Cordoba Initiative people would, you know, go on with their lives, like we tend to do here in New York.

What’s really execrable, however, is this ad, which the MTA was bullied into accepting for placement in the transit system:

My issue isn’t just with the subject matter (although that, I agree, is insulting to anyone with a healthy respect for the Bill of Rights). It’s not just with the decision to make the “mega mosque,” which last I heard was going into a 13-story building, look as tall as a 110-story building. It’s also with the ad’s overall design choices. What a disorganized pile of mess, which will (I am amazed to be writing these words) make the interior of any bus it appears in much uglier than it was before. Whoever designed that thing, they should never work in this town again.

The Awl sends crack reporter Jordan Carr to Park Place in Lower Manhattan, to investigate the neighborhood where the new Islamic center is going in. He finds a defunct Burlington Coat Factory, an OTB full of sad old guys, and a bunch of people who don’t give a shit about Cordoba House, as, you know, pretty much any of us who live anywhere near there could have told you.

In response to the Anti-Defamation League’s appalling squandering of its moral authority last week, in coming out in opposition to the Cordoba Initiative’s Islamic center in lower Manhattan, esteemed journalist and editor Fareed Zakaria has returned the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize that he was awarded by the ADL, along with the $10,000 honorarium.

Here’s Zakaria’s column on his decision from next week’s Newsweek, and here’s his open letter to the ADL, which lays out the facts, I think, quite clearly, so I quote it in full:

Five years ago, the ADL honored me with its Hubert Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. I was delighted and moved to have been chosen for it in good measure because of the high esteem in which I hold the ADL. I have always been impressed by the fact that your mission is broad – “to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens” – and you have interpreted it broadly over the decades. You have fought discrimination against all religions, races, and creeds and have built a well-deserved reputation.

That is why I was stunned at your decision to publicly side with those urging the relocation of the planned Islamic center in lower Manhattan. You are choosing to use your immense prestige to take a side that is utterly opposed to the animating purpose of your organization. Your own statements subsequently, asserting that we must honor the feelings of victims even if irrational or bigoted, made matters worse.

This is not the place to debate the press release or your statements. Many have done this and I have written about it in Newsweek and on my television show – both of which will be out over the weekend. The purpose of this letter is more straightforward. I cannot in good conscience hold onto the award or the honorarium that came with it and am returning both. I hope that it might add to the many voices that have urged you to reconsider and reverse your position on this issue. This decision will haunt the ADL for years if not decades to come. Whether or not the center is built, what is at stake here is the integrity of the ADL and its fidelity to its mission. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain your reputation.

Here, in response, is the ADL’s press release and Abe Foxman’s letter to Zakaria, wordsmithed to death by the communications department. It says, more or less, the same thing that their original statement did, which is that the “feelings” of 9/11 widows and Staten Islanders are to be given more weight than the First Amendment.

I challenge Foxman’s claim that those New Yorkers who oppose the mosque are not bigots. Until someone can convince me with evidence that the members of the Cordoba Initiative community are connected to 9/11 by anything other than sharing their religion with 1.6 billion other people, I say that anyone who opposes the mosque but would not oppose a Congregational church on the site is a bigot by definition.

(In any case, this is a local land-use decision, in support of which the actual residents of the neighborhood are nearly unanimous. As I believe I’ve said before, anyone with an opinion on this subject who doesn’t live somewhere on the map at left is simply not interesting.)

Congratulations to Zakaria for joining Mike Bloomberg and almost no one else (!) in taking a frank and principled stand on a matter of fundamental cultural importance.

Incidentally, read Mike Bloomberg’s remarks on the Lower Manhattan Islamic center. I know you saw the news, but read the whole thing.

I didn’t vote for him, and I understand why people say his business-friendly approach has changed the city. But on this issue, he’s absolutely, positively right on, and could not have been more eloquent. Thank God there’s someone left in a position of prominence who’s willing to get up in front of TV cameras and say that the principles of tolerance for diversity on which this country was founded are not contingent or temporary or mutable.

Plus, how awesome is it that someone said “Flushing Remonstrance” on TV?

With all the coverage of Sarah Palin’s Facebook and Twitter strategy, it’s easy to forget that a presidential election is not conducted by putting the members of each candidate’s social network on one side of a scale and seeing which side is heavier. (Obligatory joke about obese red-staters goes here.)

But would that it were! If it were, someone like Stephen Fry — actor, auteur, thoughtful social commentator — would boot that Sarah Palin right back to the hostess counter at the Wasilla Applebee’s where she belongs.

Consider:

(True, Fry wasn’t born in the United States. But then I think I read somewhere that Obama wasn’t either, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his success any.)

I’m ashamed of my fellow Americans this month, as allegedly intelligent and thoughtful people toss the Constitution (not to mention American values and common sense) in the garbage, and come out against the Islamic cultural center (abbreviated by everyone as “mosque”) on Park Place in Lower Manhattan.

This location is six blocks from my apartment, and I walk past it almost daily, so I think I have standing to have an opinion on the matter. The elected and appointed officials who have jurisdiction are, in large part, people whom I and my neighbors selected, who serve at our whim and whose salaries we pay. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, live 4,300 miles away and 236 miles away, respectively. Would they kindly shut the hell up and go away?

There have been Muslim-Americans living in Lower Manhattan effectively forever, in planning terms; there were mosques in our neighborhood before the World Trade Center was here, and long before I lived here, and certainly before Sarah Palin ever came shopping here. Every day, hundreds of Muslim-American taxi drivers stop for lunch or dinner at one of the halal restaurants on Church Street around the corner from the proposed site. And last time I checked, neither the First Amendment nor RLUIPA had an asterisk leading to the disclaimer “except Muslims.” End of story.

Matt Yglesias’s Mosque Exclusion Zone posts are funny, and right on point, but this is a serious matter, which is why I was so disappointed to learn today that the Anti-Defamation League, one of America’s most important historical forces against intolerance and bigotry, has come down on the wrong side of this issue.

There are, to be sure, political issues in American social discourse that have two sides. But if you have any respect at all for equality, for freedom of religion, or for the founding principles of America, this isn’t one of them. And we do have plots of secular hallowed ground in America — but they’re not at “Ground Zero” (an embarrassing term that highlights all the wrong aspects of the events of the past decade). They’re in Montgomery, where Rosa Parks rode home from work on the bus. They’re in Little Rock, at Central High School. They’re at Tule Lake, in California, where my great-grandparents (I’ve been told) taught school during one of the most shameful failures of our constitutional system in our nation’s history. They’re at Gettysburg. They’re in Jackson Heights, Queens, home of some of the most diverse census tracts in the country.

I’m angry at Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, but at the end of the day, what can you expect from anti-intellectuals and opportunists? But the ADL? I’m ashamed of them, for losing sight of their mission, and for the implication that they are speaking in my name as a Jewish American. They emphatically are not, and I’m afraid they have done permanent damage to their credibility today.

Signs by the side of the road, NY 22 at NY 311, Patterson, New York.

In “Do You Take This Immigrant”, the NYT’s Nina Bernstein interviews people on both sides of the desk at one particular immigration office: the one where green-card applicants and their US-citizen spouses are questioned separately and together to root out cases of fraud.

The incidence of fraud is very, very low, but that doesn’t keep this process from being emotionally draining and controversial. The examiners interviewed come off as, on the whole, respectful and thoughtful people. One of them is even herself a US permanent resident. It’s worth noting that a Federal district court settlement almost four decades ago put extra safeguards in place with regard to this process in New York that don’t apply elsewhere.