Joshua Mamis

Monthly Archives: April 2015

Mayor Sanders for President

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I’m waiting for my “Bernie 2016” sweatshirt!

It has already started. The New York Times Upshot column confidently declared that Bernie can’t win the Democratic nomination because he is too liberal. Seems like his exhaled breath was barely cold before the pundits decided that his candidacy didn’t have a pulse, but so be it. It’s the nature of the horse race, and who am I to quibble?

But Bernie Sanders is one small “s” socialist who should not be underestimated. You don’t get to be a U.S. Senator, even from the bastion of NPR-listening, Saab-driving, Ben-and-Jerry’s-eating, Magic-Hat-drinking, snow-shoeing liberal Vermont, if you’re not doing something right. And the first indication that Bernie was more than a rabble-rouser who lucked into getting elected is rarely talked about: The fact that he was a damn good mayor.

I arrived in Burlington a few weeks after his legendary 10 vote victory over entrenched old-school Democrat Gordon Paquette. Legend has it that Paquette ran a good ol’ boy administration, full of patronage and inattention to detail. Things were bumbling along until he was blindsided when neighborhoods challenged his plans to build a highway link to downtown; when tenants in the city’s low-rent Old North End got organized, and when people rose up in opposition to building high-end high-rise condominiums on the Lake Champlain waterfront. Bernie was the orator who filled the power vacuum and stepped into the mayor’s office.

So Bernie was the original (OK, maybe not the original, but you get the idea) candidate of hope and change. He stopped the highway. The city amped up its housing inspection program and gave tenants more rights. As for the condos, they eventually got built (after Bernie was elected to Congress), though in a more tasteful, scaled-down design.

Perhaps more impressive, though, is that he hired an amazingly committed, super-competent staff of talented, creative problem solvers. Bernie ran a tight ship. He delivered services efficiently, attracted human-scale economic development, managed to find enough solutions to the sometimes conflicting demands of the long-time Vermonters and the post-hippie newcomers to win easy re-elections.

Socialists get tagged in this country as believing in a centralized, tightly controlled, inefficient bureaucracy. Burlington under Bernie was anything but. At one point, if memory serves, his treasurer, a recruit from corporate America (who liked to wear bow ties!),  found an overlooked $1 million on the books.

So I’m with Bernie on all the issues. Every one of ’em. Income inequality. Money in politics. The Pacific trade deal. You name it.

But I’m also with Bernie because he proved he can actually run something and run it better than those who genuflect to the alleged efficiency of the free market.  I’ve seen corporate America from the inside and “efficient” is the last word I would use to describe it

I fear that the New York Times is right: Bernie is pretty far out of the mainstream. But if “Main Street” knew just how good Bernie is at running things, maybe they could get past the whole “socialist” thing and see why he should be electable after all.

 

 

Rosa Colored Glasses

During my years editing the New Haven Advocate I was not a fan of our elected (and elected and elected, etc., etc.) member of congress, Rosa DeLauro.

I arrived in New Haven in 1993, when the promise of the end of Cold War was still fresh. There was actually buzz about how we would be able to redirect military spending and invest in our infrastructure, build homes for the homeless, feed the hungry, reduce teen pregnancy.

Yet somehow the military spenders soldiered on, hoisting the banner of “preparedness.” We had to maintain our capacity to build nuclear subs, was one of their arguments — thus saving jobs at Groton’s Electric Boat. And there was our Rosa DeLauro among them, saving jobs by maintaining our ability to build bigger and faster and better weaponry.

A few decades (and elections and elections and elections) later, I have done a 180.

My experience at United Way of Greater New Haven has shown me that DeLauro is an effective advocate in Washington for issues that matter: ending homelessness, feeding hungry kids, protecting workers (especially women), keeping our food safe.

I had the opportunity to cover a panel discussion Monday night featuring DeLauro and Maryland Congressman John Sarbanes (at left in photo) about publicly financed elections, for the New Haven Independent. Sarbanes’ “Government By the People Act” is certainly a step in the right direction.

DeLauro was riled up at the panel, raising her fist against the march toward fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, another dastardly trade deal engineered by “new” Democrats, including the Obama administration, in concert with their corporate and industrial masters and their paid lobbyists, with plenty of Republican support. The negotiations are proceeding largely in secret, and the leaked details have shown the potential for the deal to weaken our environmental and food safety regs, and displace still more workers.

I checked the Independent story a few minutes ago, and I hear my old inner voice in some of the comments that have been posted in response: a deep cynicism that says that publicly financed elections can’t work, a similar distrust of DeLauro herself, especially since she has proven pretty adept at building an enormous war chest.

There’s some truth to these critiques. But there’s truth, as well, to the Rosa DeLauro who is unafraid to challenge President Obama on free trade. Who has delivered on food safety, family leave, and homelessness, and more.

Last November was the first time I was proud to pull the lever for Rosa DeLauro.  Last Monday night reminded me of why.

Welcome Costco Shoppers?

What kind of town do we want Branford to be? That’s the question at the heart of the debate over the proposed Costco development, planned for a strip of land off of Exit 56, the gateway to the Stony Creek community, where I have lived since 1993. (A public hearing on the proposal takes place on April 16 at 7 p.m. at Branford High School.)

There’s an illuminating story posted on the Branford Eagle on April 14, about a previous plan to develop the parcel (and adjoining lots) back in 1979. The plan then: To create a “supermall” that would have been, reports said, the second largest in the nation, featuring anchor stores such as Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Sears.

The piece artfully implies how lucky Branford was to escape the building of the supermall. Many of these faceless hulking buildings with endless parking lots have been abandoned across the country as the culture of retailing has gone online. Macy’s in New Haven closed long ago. Sears announced it would be closing 200 stores last December. Radio Shack, a mini-mall mainstay, recently closed its stores in New Haven and Branford.

Press reports say that the town is divided over the plan, with those in favor citing the jobs and increased tax base.

Opponents talk about the increased traffic, and point out that the cost of providing services to the development would offset most gains in tax revenue.

But I think this debate misses the bigger point. I moved to Branford in 1993 because I appreciated that it was not overrun with big-box national chains. It felt like it had a strong local identity. That didn’t change much when Wal-Mart arrived, largely because it was tucked away, out of sight of Main Street.

Essentially, Branford is a quiet suburb. But in many metropolises, it would be a neighborhood inside the city limits. Think about it: I live at the eastern edge of Branford, and I am less than 12 miles from Church Street in New Haven (and I have to leap-frog a whole other town – East Haven – to get there). That’s about the same distance as mid-town Manhattan is from Inwood Hill Park at the far tip of the island – before you even get to the Bronx or Riverdale.

So for many of us who live in Branford, it’s a quick hop to Home Depot or TJ Maxx on Frontage Road in East Haven. Making the decision to re-zone the proposed Costco parcel in Branford in order to green-light similar development off of Route 56 is nothing less than endorsing sprawl – the kind of sprawl that hurts urban economies, and damages the very thing that makes shoreline living attractive: a low-density, low-traffic quality of life.

One way to contain sprawl, and provide the access to the kinds of shopping people seem to want, is to restrict such retail to places where it already exists. Voila: Frontage Road in East Haven. (Where, by the way, sits the now vacant XPect Discounts store.)

On the Shoreline, Guilford is moving forward with a plan for a Bed, Bath & Beyond and gourmet food market off of Exit 57. If Costco rises up one exit west, surely the strip malls will follow in between.

Before making a decision, the town should be open-eyed: What will we be trading off for our easy access to inexpensive cases of toilet paper and fine bath towels? What will be the experience of living here? Will the comparatively reasonable but still barely living wage jobs and a small bump in our tax base be worth what we will be giving up? These are the questions we need to answer, because once we break ground, we won’t be able to turn back.

Mamis.com: A Family History

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Until he retired last year, my father, Justin Mamis, used this mamis.com url to promote The Mamis Letter, his weekly musings and analysis of the goings on of the stock market. My father was a technical analyst, and for most of my life he was inseparable from the charts he kept that graphically displayed the ups-and-downs of the stock prices of an untold number of publicly traded companies. He didn’t need the jibber-jabber on the business pages to indicate whether a stock price would rise or fall. As he used to say, “the tape tells all.”

What was unique about The Mamis Letter was that he managed to weave in cultural and political observations, the kind more comfortably at home in a magazine or on a well-edited op-ed page.

I grew up in a household where the soundtrack was the clickety-clack of typewriter keys. The New York Times and The New Yorker were well-read by all of us. My brother’s high school underground newspaper, first called the Flea, and then commandeering the New York Herald Tribune moniker when that legendary publication folded, was birthed in our apartment, and putting it together seemed like so much fun I was determined to follow in his footsteps.

Newsrooms are now silent: some, of course, because they couldn’t navigate the transition from print to the instantaneous 24-hour news cycle of online publishing. Some, like the Advocate newspapers of old, have been dimmed because national mega-corps were so distant from the communities they were supposed to be serving they had no idea how to keep a product vital and meaningful while the business model was changing so quickly. And that’s being charitable.

Those newsrooms that are left seem adrift without the din of excitement that comes from pounding out a hot story on deadline. No matter how fast and hard you type on a computer keyboard it’s still basically quiet, and you don’t make any noise doing interviews via text and email, as this generation seems to prefer.

When my father retired, The Mamis Letter had been running out of steam. Like print media, the business model of what we used to call Wall Street had changed as well. I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that old-school technical analysis may have lost its charm in an age when billions are made overnight with the help of high-tech computer modeling.

This is all a long way of saying: If you’re looking for The Mamis Letter, it has, unfortunately, ceased publication. The good news is that Justin is no longer tethered to his charts, and seems to find tending to his orchids equally gratifying.

Why Five Guys is Good for New Haven

 

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So the strip-mall burger joint Five Guys is coming to prime real estate in downtown New Haven. I posted an enthusiastic welcome on Facebook when the news broke, only to be taken aback when a friend whose opinion I value commented with a one word takedown: “meh.”

I’m usually the guy who bangs the drum on the urgent need for homegrown, unique food and retail destinations — the kind of spots that can make a place like New Haven show off some creative-class vigor. So why was my initial reaction to a near ubiquitous chain like Five Guys positive (other than the fact that they do have great fries)?

Because for all of the brouhaha over the New Haven foodie scene (I revisited Miya’s recently, for example, and can’t wait to go back) there are precious few inexpensive, family-friendly places to eat. Much of downtown too often feels like a playground for wealthy suburbanites, and I believe that has largely been by design.

For New Haven’s downtown to truly thrive, it needs to find ways to be more actively inclusive. Yes, racially and ethnically, but also — importantly — economically.

Without the buzz of people from all walks of life, downtown New Haven treads perilously close to feeling much like (shudder) Hartford — albeit a city with a grand University in its midst, with the smarts and gothic-tinged architecture to help us masquerade as more fully realized than I fear we are.