For example, Newark and East Orange are grouped into a region that includes communities such as Glen Ridge and Montclair where Stephen Colbert and other famous and very wealthy people live as well as many other municipalities across Essex, Morris, Sussex, and Union Counties. The result is an AMI of roughly $115,000 for a single-person household. High salaries from Manhattan and other elite job centers are folded into these calculations, inflating what is considered "affordable."

Developers typically choose which affordability bands they build for, and they advertise it as a WIN with an already bought-and-paid-for “area” “grassroots” housing nonprofit. Nonprofits exist, so development can steal from you with the least amount of screaming possible; people spend an awful lot of time looking at politicians and almost ZERO time looking at nonprofits, which I find interesting.

Developers almost always pick the band they know area residents can’t afford, especially if those residents are Black and its the East Coast, West Coast, Chicago….; they KNOW exactly what they are doing. They want Black people to get the hell out.

As a result, housing labeled "affordable" is often targeted toward upper-middle-class households (and just not Black people, Black and middle class, they do not care, because Black is a class) rather than the working people most affected by rising rents.

Women, Black people, and other racialized residents, as well as many other working-class New Jerseyans, earn less than the regional averages used in AMI calculations. They are therefore less likely to qualify for many of the units that are supposedly being built for affordability. New Jersey should replace Area Median Income with Area Median Wage. Housing affordability should be based on what local workers actually earn, not on a regional income figure inflated by wealthy suburbs, dual-income professional households, and high-paying jobs concentrated in New York City. Area Median Wage would create affordability standards that better reflect the reality of life for working-class residents.

People often say that developers would build less housing under such a system. They are right AND, I don’t see that being a problem. Housing shouldn’t be part of capitalism; I literally DO NOT CARE. Do you care? Nosebleed property taxes, sky-high rents- is this working for anyone? I am so tired of the property taxes conversation.

In formerly redlined and hypersegregated areas, developers almost always get public subsidies, tax abatements, density bonuses, low-interest financing, or zoning approvals in exchange for building.

“We all agree this community is a piece of crap, you wrote a 1000 words on your social media page how you community is simply awful filled with incompetent people, so why would I build here without an incentive? We agree, you’re a POS, I’m here to help!”

Developers win even if not every unit is occupied immediately, a luxury apartment that rents a few units at very high rents can sometimes generate more revenue than a fully occupied building renting to working-class households at lower rates.

Five broke white people in the long term are going to be worth more than ten working-class African Americans and then you have 15 broke people in the longest term; see how that works!! When wealth and power become more concentrated, housing, wages, and public goods deteriorate for everyone else. When racism is used to divide the working class, the beneficiaries are rarely ordinary white people. In the end, we all lose together.

So the market is not going to provide for working people; that is NEVER going to happen. YIMBY fall into two camps, ignorant tools or sadistic liars who are insincere, the latter knows exactly how capitalism works— well there is also the person who just needed a job and YIMBY was hiring, we’ll forgive that person.

New Jersey should expand social housing and cooperative housing, like in the Bronx Co-op City, Penn South in Chelsea, and Gemeindebauten (Municipal Housing) in Vienna. We do not rely on private developers alone to provide schools, libraries, parks, or water systems. Housing is just as essential. If the market cannot provide homes that working people can afford, then the state should build, own, and maintain housing as a public good.

The point of housing is to house people, NOT maximize returns and NOT build generational wealth (more on that later) —public, social, and cooperative housing should play a larger role. Social housing does not need to achieve the highest possible rents. It can be designed around local wages and local needs, ensuring that working people can thrive and live where they work.

502 Bad Gateway at Flux IV

502 Bad Gateway (@502.bg), the art collaboration project of Alexander Baumann and Robert Ruth, make work that operates somewhere between speculative fiction (such as Roadside Picnic) and architectural criticism. In their latest show, Error is Shadow, they take up the idea of “danger architecture”—a kind of brutalism designed not to keep the wealthy safe from the present, but to keep deep-future people, or perhaps aliens, away for their own good. The premise is as much a thought experiment as an aesthetic position: How do you communicate with structure? How do you warn a being that may not share your language, your temporality, your sense of threat?

This is territory we are very engaged in at SUB/URBAN REVIEW. But the question the show keeps circling is whether our future selves listen. If the Pyramids are any indication—or the long cinematic tradition of entering the tomb, the bunker, the exclusion zone, the going towards the SCREAMS—the more elaborate and explicit the warning, the more irresistible the invitation. The show suggests something like a value-discounting hypothesis applied not to economics but to complexity: the more intricate the danger architecture, the more appealing it becomes. The most effective deterrent might be a kind of undesigned architecture, the opposite of complexity and wonder. But that wouldn’t be any fun.

Error is Shadow forces philosophical questions and elicits more discussion than it resolves. What is danger architecture, really? According to 502 Gateway, it may be the opposite of what is happening here, unless the invitation is in itself the invasion.

Bureaucracy is rarely as innocent as it seems, it is often disingenuous in its incompetence and typically accomplishes hegemonic’s goals.

Think Tolkien THE ONE RING!

Do we want to hurt the future us (other)? Is it a final slap (and temptation) from beyond the grave? What if feigned incompetence is all part of the plan!?

Showing at Flux IV until August 30

502 Bad Gateway (@502.bg) is the artist duo of Alexander Baumann and Robert Ruth, whose collaborative artistic disciplines include motion capture performance, oil painting, 3D game development, sculpture, vintage tech restoration, building audio synthesizers, animation, and filmmaking. Their practice focuses on integrating their artistic methods with deprecated technologies from many different eras, drawing on the history of usage to underline the intent of the work.

Flux IV is a project space by Flux Factory, presenting an annual season of free, multidisciplinary exhibitions and public programs.

In addition to antagonizing journalism’s essential critical function—Who, What, When, Where, and Why—Solutions Journalism replaces open-ended investigation with a pre-packaged answer and limits public discourse to a tiny corner of the room where you hide things you don’t want others to see, like a pair of dirty panties (or a dirty sock).

Solutions Journalism inverts—or rather perverts—this. It forces writing into a rigid, pseudo-scientific Toulmin model (claim, data, warrant, rebuttal) that seeks a conclusive argument and limits discussion to topics with solutions the wealthy deem best.

“And that’s why WAYMO self-driving cars are awesome and will save many lives—-and probably YOURS!”

The reason behind this, and why they are so insistent on it being for people in what they call “media deserts”—I prefer media apartheid—it is an idea that is similar to the achievement gap. The achievement-gap premise grew from the study Johnny Can’t Read. At the conclusion of the study, researchers felt Black people couldn’t read because they were inferior humans and couldn’t suspend disbelief, so what needed to happen was stories based on REAL life (the real life of the [B]lack/working class according to the ‘unimagination’ of hegemony) because that way Black people could at least learn enough to follow simple instructions at a job.

”Dig the hole here, boy.”

The same theory is behind Solutions Journalism. That is why media foundations find me so abhorrent: it isn’t that I don’t do quality media, it’s that I refuse to submit to the idea that Black people and racialized people aren’t human.

But keep in mind that to the wealthy, anyone who works a job is subhuman; they just start with Black and other racialized people, then slowly roll out their sadism to anyone without a trustfund.

I refuse to practice Solutions Journalism because I refuse to get funding based on the idea that Black people are subhuman, that the working class is subhuman because that, my friends, is the real idea behind ‘local’ ‘solutions journalism.’

I really advise you to watch people who take the money a little more closely.

Your guard against neoliberalism can’t just stop at the ballot box. Cofnas is one of the many symptoms of the disease of neoliberalism.

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There is a lot of talk about Super Political Action Committees (PACs). There should be, as they can raise unlimited amounts of money provided they don’t directly coordinate with campaigns. But regular PACs that can coordinate directly with campaigns are also amazingly effective in shaping policies and platforms, see the ROAD ACT. Since 2018, the number-one PAC engaged in this kind of work has been the National Association of Realtors (NARs). They have given more than the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the American Bankers Association.

In 1968, when the Fair Housing Act was passed, NAR fought to prevent its passage, and when it could not, it realized it needed to be more intimately involved in the political process.

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“You start in 1954 by saying, “N-word, N-word, N-word.” By 1968 you can’t say “n-word”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, (B)lacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N-word, N-word.”— Lee Atwater.

So since 1969, the NAR has been helping you with reformist talking points that allow so many single-family homeowners (SFH) to have their cake and eat it too. (Those cake pops at Costco ARE delicious!)

We have a homeownership welfare state, which is kind of wild.

“I want my own school district for MY kids and low taxes. Heck my kids are grown lower my taxes NOW!! Make it happen, or I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue!”

Well, red actually…possibly purple….

Reformers in suburbia are just neoliberals—who are broke and angry because they finally figured out meritocracy isn’t real.

“I worked hard, why is this happening to me?”

It’s happened to lots of people, sweetie. Possibly connecting property “ownership” and not dying under a freeway eating cat food while kneecapping unions and turning corporations into people and gutting the Voting Rights Act was a bad idea, but whatever…..

Nothing wrong with being a neoliberal, but it is not left. Not everyone is on the left, and that’s not a moral judgment; it simply is what it is.

The American Dream of the SFH with “good” schools is not the only way we can dream, but that is the only dream hegemony and its bought political representatives have pushed, which does two things: turns the social contract into a meritocracy in which you alone are responsible for fulfillig the contract (like if you took the concept of bagging your own groceries and you add in stocking, warehouse duties, and picking prouce on the weekends) and allows for society to feel that those who are renters and/or lose their homes or will never obtain one are morally corrupt.

“I worked hard and that is why I have a house.”

Of course, hon, no one has worked as hard as you.

NAR's “help” has historically been to make the real estate market work more efficiently (again see the ROAD ACT). This means deregulation; why tie the hands of the market with checks on racism, sexism, and ableism? Why have safety codes? Why have finance regulation. That’s paperwork (—and witnesses), and in their weltanshaunnng it will just cost us all money and time. We must think of the BIGGER picture, you know, men with lots and lots of money.

The sprawl, the suburb, the racism, the redlining, the stepford wives, the Auto Asphyxiation, AND the endless wars are all connected to NAR meddling in our elections (well not only them, but you know what I mean). I think we need a list of who is taking money from NAR, and I think I will make it, so we can know exactly who the dogbodies are to the men who keep our rent so very high and our communities so very divided.

Public policy should not subsidize asset accumulation through homeownership; it should instead guarantee housing security directly through social housing, tenant protections, cooperative ownership, and even explore other more imaginative decommodified forms of housing.

Another country is possible.

What can New Jersey learn from (and teach) great transit systems around the world? I spoke with NJ Transit Customer Advocate Franck Beaumin about the unsung importance of buses, the future of the Newark and Hudson-Bergen light rail lines, and the trains that have inspired him most. It's a conversation for anyone who loves transit, cities, and the people who rely on them every day.

Bloomfield Avenue is more than a roadway it is a COMMONS. It’s a place where people work, shop, meet friends, raise families, commute, celebrate, and sometimes experience tragedy.

On October 15, we’re going to have a very special event at Montclair State University and you are ALL invited.

We’re gathering firsthand stories from people who know the avenue best.

We’re especially interested in:

• Favorite places and memories

• Biking, walking, transit, and driving experiences

• Businesses and landmarks that shaped the community

• Moments of connection and belonging

• Near misses, crashes, injuries, and traffic fatalities that left a lasting impact

Share your story by leaving a voicemail at 201-387-0178 or emailing your story here with Bloomfield Stories in the HEADER: D1011@SuburbanReview.com.

Selected participants may be part of the larger October 15 project that will be recorded, archived, so that we can remember what Bloomfield Avenue is and what it CAN continue to be.

Dorothy Parker allegedly said that Los Angeles is “72 suburbs in search of a city.” As a fifth generation Angeleno, I am going to have to reject this assertion. Los Angeles is a city, just one with contradictions inside and out. I spend much of my work life in New York, a place that US urbanists uphold as the gold standard for functional density.

As a bicoastal sub/urban critic married to a Midwesterner, a one-seat train ride into Manhattan in a North Jersey suburb, a place with a small yard, and a cat who takes walks on a leash, I am always searching for the answer to the question:

How should we arrange human space?

That question was a third wheel on my trip Chautauqua.

What I noticed when I first arrived was that I could hear. I could hear cicadas and the birds chirping. I also could hear conversations.

My headphones exist to drown out the city and to keep strangers away. I didn’t feel the urge to put on my headphones to drown out noise or to keep away strangers

On the grounds people shared. Tricycles and mobility scooters shared paths with electric bikes and walking sticks. Children practically danced with their bicycles while their grandparents wandered between the trees. The Chautauqua Symphony performed, and its Opera, the oldest continuously producing summer opera company in the United States, staged works by Debussy & Mozart. People talked to one another on porches and outside the library.

And there was quiet stillness that I didn’t know existed outside of turn of the century Victorian novels.

And it wasn’t creepy stillness like when you wake up in the middle of the night like you forgot something, but the kind of stillness when you’re out in the middle of nowhere, but this is definitely somewhere, and now I remember! There was music, laughter, and squirrels walking right up to you as if to say, “Can you spare some ice cream?”

But this place was carlight, practically carFREE.

Cars are funny that way. You don’t notice how busy and annoying they are until they are gone.

I rented a house about five miles down in Mayville and bicycled to the Institution each day. The bike lane connecting it to Chautauqua, I am going to politely call it, aspirational. It was mostly a highway shoulder separated from traffic by a line of paint and a prayer. As truck (drivers) threatened my life, I couldn’t even hear my audiobook, David Sloan Wilson’s The Neighborhood Project, a book about how communities shape human behavior.

That is not written for effect.

You know what, though, the moment I entered the grounds of Chautauqua, the difference was a good reminder. Stripping away the automobile changes what people pay attention to and how they feel. People stop and look at one another. People actually talk to you, like so many people said hello to me, and I’m new at Chautauqua, and with my gigantic curly hair, I stand out.

But when people talk, even a little, they begin to know one another.

When they know one another, they begin to care about one another.

In the United States, we spend large clumps of time discussing what is broken and wrong. We debate polarization, loneliness, and the erosion of trust. We publish reports and commission studies. We all like to diagnose on our social media accounts:

“It is the parents, mom probably.”

We rarely talk about places that work, like Chautauqua.

And this place works! Not because it’s completely shielded from reality as it has not escaped the challenges of modern America, but it does work because it creates the conditions that turns strangers into neighbors.

One afternoon, I was working outside the bookstore, and was getting a good rhythm on my laptop. Then I stopped. I heard some music. This couple was playing folk music, one on an accordion and the other on a fiddle. The man reminded me of my preschool teacher, Mr. Garless. Mr. Garless who would randomly break out his accordion to sing the clean-up song or make up a song with your first name. I placed my glasses on the bench and headed off to the amphitheater for an opera performance.

Halfway through the evening, I realized why the subtitles were so blurry and then in my head, “Oh no, MY GLASSES.” Oh well, my glasses were gone, yet again, or so I thought.

Gone not owing to some nefarious purpose, but because people, when they are in a hurry and the night is ending they have to get home and that’s two buses away. People clean, and things get thrown in the trash or put in a bin of lost items that has ten years of stuff, because that is too far of a drive to go back ... .who wants to go figure that out? I don’t.

The next day I returned because it was a good spot to people-watch, and there they were. Folded neatly on the bench exactly where I had left them.

Lots of people had to have passed by the bench. Some had to have noticed them and sat next to them, but you know what, person after person made the same tiny decision. These aren't mine, but they belong to someone. They will probably be back, so I’m going to leave them here.

It seems silly, but it wasn’t silly. It said something about the social infrastructure.

As a sub/urban critic and a political economist, me and my friends talk a lot about social capital and trust. We debate theories and build models to explain why so many places do not work.

My glasses being on that bench is a reminder that the the best places are filled with countless tiny acts of care by regular people.

Chautauqua is not populated by saints. It is not about the perfect, yet it is perfectly ordinary. It is about the ordinary.

My glasses were on the bench because Chautauqua is set up in a way that gets people comfortable with sharing their physical and social space.

Being in a place on the timeline where everything appears a mess, trust and neighborliness are among the most important forms of infrastructure that we can build, and we CAN build it.

Rather than introduce her myself, I’d like to let Nikki tell her own story:

“In my life, I’ve been an abused child, a rebellious teenager, a 21-year-old drug dealer, a homeless junkie hooker, and an openly gay suburban soccer mom struggling to hide my past behind a façade of bake sales and carpools. Healing from my childhood trauma has not been pretty, but facing those demons with honesty, humility, and a little humor saved me in a way that running from them never could.

Now in my 50s, I live what appears to be a typical suburban life that belies a lifetime of wild and dangerous experiences. After all, how many PTA moms have been on the run from the feds?”

Nikki’s memoir, Breaking Good, is a story of survival, transformation, and radical honesty. Join us for what I know will be fascinating and unforgettable afternoon as she shares her work (and maybe if time permits) lessons she’s learned along the way, but you can just watch the interview for a bit more of that.

Learn more about Nikki on August 9—and in the meantime, visit her author page for more information.

https://www.nikkimammano.com/

Far more than the political establishment wants to admit.

In this episode, we unpack the New Jersey voter registration error that resulted in roughly 6,600 non-citizens being mistakenly added to the voter rolls and fewer than 400 casting ballots, as well as the growing backlash against bike lanes, transit investments, and other forms of public infrastructure. On the surface, these seem like separate controversies. Underneath, they’re part of the same struggle over who public institutions serve and who gets to shape the future of our communities.

There are no nonpartisan politics. The same crew that said Democrats and Republicans were basically the same—that both parties embraced a neoliberal consensus built around privatization, deregulation, real estate speculation, and releasing democracy to the anti-human and the anti-nature weaponry of finance and technology. Are now confused that bike lanes are included in this? White men are not exempt from the working class. WE THOUGHT you got that, but you seem surprised. Surprised that bicycles are called partisan when they clearly redistribute space, mobility, or political voice toward ordinary people- yes, that is partisan, because what do you think partisan means? There are two sides: the workers and the wealthy, and we thought that was the class reductionist’s thesis…what is your thesis exactly, because if its not about power, then maybe YOU ARE the one distracted…we’ll explore that later….

So why is a bike lane considered ideological, but a highway isn’t? See above. Why is expanding democratic participation considered political, while Citizens United and just generally corporate influence in government is treated as normal? Who benefits when every public investment is framed as a culture-war issue?

At Auto Asphixation, we explore how the real political divide, hegemony against the rest of us: workers, renters, transit riders, immigrants, and everyday residents on one side; and entrenched interests in tech, finance, real estate development, and concentrated wealth on the other.

Who gets to define safe? What does a safe street look like? Who gets representation? Who gets public investment? Who is told to shut their damn mouth? And who is really distracted by cultural battles? I think most of us get it; there is a select group who seemed to have forgotten about class analysis.

Whether the argument is about bike lanes, ballots, housing, or immigration, the real question isn’t red versus blue. It’s whether democracy serves ordinary people or entrenched power.

Auto Asphyxiation actively distorted the lead-crime crisis theory demonstrated by Nevin in 2000 and further supported by Masters in 2003. The automobile industry leveraged racist narratives of intellectually deficient parenting to deflect blame for the significant harm lead exposure caused to young children.

“The Lead Industries Association was able to manipulate the perception of lead poisoning was that they defined it as a problem of what they called slums. That is, inner cities where the housing was deteriorating and primarily children of color were being exposed to flaking lead off of the walls and ceilings.” —Gerald Markowitz, history professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY in a 2022 interview in Noise Omaha.

A peer-reviewed study in Environmental Research (Nevins, 2000) revealed a strong link between childhood lead exposure and violent crime rates. Researchers found that variations in gasoline lead exposure from 1941 to 1986 accounted for 90 percent of the fluctuation in violent crime rates from 1960 to 1998. Similarly, differences in childhood paint lead exposure from 1879 to 1940 explained 70 percent of the variation in murder rates from 1900 to 1960. These findings highlight the long-term societal impacts of environmental lead exposure and moved the lead-crime hypothesis to theory.

In the lead-crime theory, the culprit that is often pointed to is lead paint in homes, even more so than lead pipes. There was a great deal of lead in homes, according to the EPA 87 percent of homes built before 1940 have some lead-based paint, 24 percent of homes built between 1960 and 1978 have some lead-based paint. However, the greater villain was masked by the focus on household lead. Many U.S. children were exposed to high quantities of leaded gasoline, especially in urbanized cities (by 1980, cities like Montclair and Bloomfield New Jersey were urbanized cities).

Eating a paint chips was NOT the main vector of transmission

In a 2022 peer reviewed study conducted by researchers from Florida State University and Duke University and edited by Pricenton’s Douglas Massey found that childhood lead exposure cost America an estimated 824 million IQ points, or 2.6 points per person on average.

For people born in the 1960s and the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption skyrocketed, loss was estimated to be up to 6 points.

Exposure to it came primarily from inhaling auto exhaust.

As a child in Los Angeles I remember briefly that there was a choice between leaded and unleaded gasoline. Growing up in the U.S. you didn’t have to eat paint chips to be exposed to lead, you simply had to go outside. Despite many stories to the contrary I do not remember a proliferation of paint chip eating by myself nor my friends as a child, and prior to moving to Los Feliz, we were in a hypersegregated Los Angeles neighborhood neighborhood. But I do remember in both neighborhoods was the smell of exhaust fumes. The lead-crime theory often omits gasoline, which remains a scary villain in groups with peers born at the end of the 20th century.

It does not just end with the air in regards to auto emissions.

Leaded gasoline leaks from out of commission gas stations can directly contaminate groundwater and Superfund sites include many such stations.

It also impacts the soil. From the study Getting the Lead Out:

Read more

What if your city were defined not by municipal borders but by how people actually move through it?

In this episode, Lo Sontag sits down with Nick Giglia, founder of ROUTE (Restore Our Transit in Essex), a grassroots organization reimagining what transit advocacy can look like in one of the most densely populated and most politically fragmented (but functionally pretty whole) states in the nation. As Nick puts it, “Frequency is freedom.” The ability to move without planning your life around a bus schedule is not merely a transportation issue; it is a question of access, opportunity, and belonging.

I will give you a little hint of ROUTE’s origin story: it involves hockey, an exhausted kindergartner, and the uh-huh moment familiar to so many New Jersey families. What we all know and no one needs a degree in urban planning to see this- the NYC region functions as a single interconnected place, but our transportation systems are trapped by municipal boundaries and political arrangements that too frequently fail to reflect how people actually live. New Jersey’s home rule tradition has long shaped local governance and yet ROUTE asks:

What happens when we instead organize around the geography of daily life?

For Giglia, that geography is Essex. We are a network of communities linked by shared destinations and transit corridors. Whether traveling from Bloomfield to Newark, Montclair to East Orange, or West Caldwell to the Ironbound, we routinely cross municipal lines that appear way harsher in politics than they do in real life.

Together, we discuss the founding of ROUTE, its organizing philosophy, and the victories the group has already achieved in the fight for better public transportation. We explore the challenges of advocating for transit in a state where thousands of people rely on buses and trains every day, yet decision-making remains scattered across dozens of local governments and agencies. And we consider a larger question: what does democratic organizing look like when the public space we depend on most is a transportation network?

The (transit) line of this episode is about more than trains and the departure of this much-loved DeCamp’s bus line. The route we take in this conversation is one that explores regional identity, civic imagination, and the infrastructure that makes collective life possible. Transit is NOT a service for someone else, but a public good that shapes community and the possibilities of an entire region.

From organizing lessons and policy wins to dreams of a more connected future, this conversation offers a compelling vision for how residents can build power across borders—and why the future of New Jersey may depend on learning to think beyond them.

Because if frequency is freedom, then organizing for transit is organizing for the freedom to thrive in this place in New Jersey that so many of us call home.

New Jersey e-bike laws are the result of disaster patriarchy. The surge in bicycle takeovers, often involving e-bike speeding and lawlessness—these are not pathologies of cycling culture. These are symptoms of a political economy that remains invested in keeping people in cars. It is the natural progression of the roadie.

From Bloomfield Pulse

How “Greed is Good” Gordon Gecko Capitalism brought about gangster rap and justified “The War on Drugs.” Hegemony works in not-so-mysterious ways. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, hip-hop was explicitly political with cooperative tones, but this was not useful to hegemony, so instead they amplified violent and hyper-individualist sounds —its architects preached self-sufficiency and a brutal, patriarchal -capitalist ethos—so too does our transportation system reward aggression and spectacle. When you refuse to build safe, dignified alternatives, the streets become arenas. And arenas produce warriors, not neighbors.

Streets are not neutral paths. A community grounded in mutual respect, care, and cooperation builds infrastructure that reflects those ideals. Currently, our streets are designed so that public space is a pedagogy of power. Our streets say this person in a two-ton car belongs and anyone else is a hindrance to capitalism. It uses negation communications to say “you’re vulnerable,” so we should NOT make a space for you; your existence makes exploitation vulnerable and liable.

For over half a century, U.S. transportation policy and much of bicycle advocacy being captured by lawyers, roadies, and men who love market individualism have defaulted to the logic of “vehicular cycling.” Vehicular cycling is a framework pushed by John Forester. Its deceptively simple premise is that bicycles are vehicles. Seems liberating, but like faux meritocracy, it is only liberating for the privileged few who don’t need rules, because they are armed with 21 mph pace, a high STRAVA score, platinum health insurance, and a lawyer on speed dial— hell you are a lawyer.

Owing to this, cyclists must survive through skill, which can be obtained via a LCI, certified by the League of “We no longer subscribe to Forester —- we love you, try Waymo” American Bicyclists, assertiveness through the Chicago School, and individual vigilance ala boot straps. And under this sadistic regime (and plenty of protein powder), the preferred remedies are legalistic, meaning scientifically unproven three-and four-foot passing laws, helmet mandates, enforcement cameras (that has helped in throwing people in concentration camps); they are punitive rather than structural. The state allocates liability, not safety, to the working class. Protection remains privatized, not socialized.

While this appears to be a natural or a neutral technical choice, it is neither. It is an ideological project under the guise of common sense. It plants market logic into the soil of mobility. The burden of safety falls on the cyclist’s body and the car driver’s insurance premium and court-appointed lawyer, not on the collective’s investment. The question shifts from “How shall we protect one another?”to “Can you hold your own?” Failure is framed as personal inadequacy (sometimes driver and sometimes cyclist), not infrastructural failure.

And there are consequences. In the US, we have a cycling culture that rewards risk tolerance and aggression. If you ride with more than one man, at least one will confront at least one person, typically working class, to assert dominance: “Move your damn truck.” And sneer as they whiz past a double parked Amazon driver. Riders are trained to treat the street as a contest—a kind of transportation Dune where the spice flows only for the fierce. The implicit command is unmistakable: be tough, take the lane, or stay home.

But there is another philosophy of the street; we only have to look across the street or rather, the pond.

In Europe, transportation infrastructure has a different weltanschauung. To use one’s bike is ordinary, not extreme. Protected lanes, traffic-calmed streets, and continuous networks loudly say that children belong here. Elders belong here. New riders, parents with cargo, disabled people, people running errands—we all belong on the street. The system is not designed to sort the brave from the timid. It is designed to maximize participation. Its success is measured not by speed records but by demographic breadth.

Bike lanes are social institutions. They are part of the social contract that in the United States is frayed. Their purpose is not for safety, an idea that I have grown to loathe. Protected infrastructure does more than prevent crashes; it cultivates a different political imaginary—one rooted in cooperation rather than competition, care rather than conquest. It makes mutualism legible and routinized.

This is not about cyclists being “nicer.” It is a structural claim: environments produce subjects. When you design roads that force cyclists into continuous high-stakes conflict with two-ton automobiles, you should expect the resulting culture to be defensive, aggressive, and exclusionary. When you empower disaster patriarchy you create a system where we must be saved by dominant men.

It DOES not have to be this way. There is another path.

If we want a bicycle culture that is welcoming, prosocial, and genuinely democratic, we must build for it.

That means aesthetically beautiful and pragmatic protected pedestrian and bicycling networks, low-stress street designs, and public policies that lower barriers to entry—not just for the lycra-clad or the worked tied to the algorithm, but for the elderly, the disabled, the young, the anxious, and the ordinary women.

I am not asking what kind of cyclists we want, but what kind of community do we want to develop and live in. Bike lanes are one way we answer that question, because if they are built well, they become institutions of solidarity. Built poorly, they remain monuments to a politics we claim to have outgrown, like Forester. The choice is ours, and it is material. We can continue to empower extractive market-based ideas or we can break from the pack and empower community and the choice is really ours.

In this episode, we use Taco Bell, Temu fas/cists Argentina, and the recent Taylor Farms (guess we put alleged here now) lettuce recall and Cyclospora outbreak as a jumping-off point to explore a deeper question: How does power become invisible?

From the vaults of Law & Political Economy (LPE), Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, feminist urbanism, and political economy. In this episode we stroll through how global food systems depend on complex networks of labor, logistics, expertise, and trust that most of us rarely see and that is on purpose. Who bears risk and captures profit, and who gets to call the FDA a dirty liar, when looking at geography critically.

We discuss:

• Gramsci and the manufacture of common sense

• How hegemony shapes what we see—and what we don’t

• The hidden labor behind modern food systems

• Feminist critiques of invisibility, care work, and social reproduction

• Feminist urbanism ideas of Doreen Massey and the fetish of the local

• Supply chains, corporate power, and vulnerability

• Truth, misinformation, and strategic omission

• Why crises reveal the structures we normally ignore

A microscopic parasite is invisible just like the forces that organize our lives. This discourse explores how we are willfully blindfolded then pushed down a shaft and then blamed for it.

“What did I do?’”

Featuring discussions of: Antonio Gramsci, Dolores Hayden, Doreen Massey, Law & Political Economy, feminist urbanism, food systems, logistics, care work, and democratic accountability.

#LawAndPoliticalEconomy #FeministUrbanism #Gramsci #PoliticalEconomy #FoodSystems #TaylorFarms #Cyclospora #Urbanism #Hegemony #Power #SupplyChains #TruthAndPower #SubUrbanCriticism #D1011Media #LPE

A week ago, a member of VELO Bloomfield was riding on Bloomfield Avenue near Grove when a driver struck her.

We will identify her anonymously as Citizen Jane due to the ongoing investigation into the crash.

What she remembers most is not just the impact, but the realization that her life could have changed in an instant, just because she wanted to be carFREE.

“I have been carFREE for about 6 months now. I wanted to have a more environmentally friendly way to get around and also be able to get around on my own time, because the bus is hit or miss.”

Like many people who ride bicycles in Bloomfield, she was not training for a race or in a park, as it is illegal to ride your bike in Essex parks. She was simply trying to get around her community. The same street that thousands of residents drive every day became, in a matter of seconds, a place of danger.

For many cyclists, stories like this are all too familiar. Yet the crash raises a larger question that extends beyond any one rider: What kind of street do we want Bloomfield Avenue to be?

For years, local officials, planners, business owners, and residents have talked about making Essex more walkable, more vibrant, and more welcoming. Bloomfield Avenue is the spine of that vision. It connects West Caldwell, Caldwell, Verona, Montclair, Glen Ridge, Bloomfield, a tiny bit of Belleview, and our heartbeat, Newark.

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It connects neighborhoods, schools, parks, transit, and businesses. It is where many of the townships’ daily interactions take place.

But it is also a road that many residents say feels unsafe to bicycle on.

“I don’t think paint or the 4-foot laws are sufficient. We need physical barriers between bikes and cars. I get the impression that car drivers are frustrated when they share the road with a bike because a human-powered bike does not go nearly as fast as a car, and no one is going 25-mph-on Bloomfield Avenue. We need scientifically proven traffic calming.”

Citizen described the emotional post-crash as being just as important as the physical one. The road is a commons. Riding a bicycle requires a sense of trust, trust that drivers will see you, that roadway designs account for your presence, and that the local government has considered your safety. Once that trust is broken, getting back on a bike can feel daunting.

Her experience is not simply an individual story. It points to a broader challenge facing Essex County and communities across North New Jersey.

Recently, VELO Bloomfield conducted a community survey , that included participaction of 16 cities across the Metro in North Jersey (13) and NYC (3), regarding a protected bike lane on Bloomfield Avenue. The results were striking: approximately 90 percent of respondents supported the idea and this survey included a substantial N.

That level of support suggests that residents are not asking whether improvements should happen, but how they should happen.

The organization has since launched a petition outlining a community vision for what a Bloomfield Avenue bike lane could look like. Rather than treating bicycle infrastructure as an afterthought, the proposal imagines a safer street where people walking, bicycling, taking transit, and driving can coexist more comfortably.

Auto Asphyxiation often describes bike lanes as taking away needed parking and harming business, or a cheap way for unsavory outsiders to come in; both are false. Transportation researchers and planners have long shown that good bicycle networks that strengthen the community are networks that ordinary people in your neighborhood feel comfortable using. Meaning you create the cyclists that you want, you want risk takers, build risky bike lanes, you want soccer moms to use it, then create a bike lane that is accessible to her.

“If we’re going to have a bike lane, we need to actually have a bike lane that goes for more than a block and that’s the bare minimum. I understand that these things cost money, but I feel like if there is a will there is a way. I’m happy to pick up some tools.”

One of the most overlooked aspects of the transportation conversation is gender.

Across North America and Europe, studies have consistently found that women are underrepresented among people who bicycle on high-stress roads. The reason is not a lack of interest. In many cases, women report concerns about safety and traffic conditions. When protected bicycle facilities are installed, the number and diversity of cyclists typically increase.

“I’m a licensed psychologist, and I chose to switch from a car to a bike, because driving a car is stressful and expensive, and keeping me poor. “

That observation should matter in Bloomfield.

Many of the newest riders seen on local streets are women, like Citizen. Some are returning to cycling after years away from a bicycle.

Others are using bikes for everyday transportation. Some are parents. Some are students. Some are trying to incorporate physical activity into their daily routine.

All of them deserve infrastructure designed with their safety in mind.

If a street feels safe only to the most confident riders, it is not truly safe.

“This is what we need on Bloomfield,” Dr. Susana Sotillo, Emeritus Montclair State University on the community group page Space is a Means of Production, a group dedicated to prosocial methods and the climate crisis.

The question Bloomfield faces is therefore larger than whether a bike lane should exist. The question is who the street is designed for.

Is Bloomfield Avenue intended primarily for moving automobiles as quickly as possible? Or is it intended to function as a community corridor that supports local businesses, neighborhood connections, and multiple ways of getting around?

The proposed bike lane offers one answer. Creating a dedicated space for cyclists would reduce conflicts between bicycles and motor vehicles, improve comfort for new riders, expand transportation options for residents who cannot or prefer not to drive, and create a prosocial commons environment on Bloomfield Avenue.

The proposal also aligns with broader goals that Essex has embraced for Bloomfield Avenue in recent years: safer streets, stronger downtown businesses, environmental sustainability, and more transportation choices.

No infrastructure project can undo what happened to the cyclist who was struck. A bike lane cannot erase the fear that follows a crash.

But communities show their values through the choices they make after tragedies occur. This is a near tragedy. Disaster patriarchy pushes the idea that death is the only thing that can motivates change; feminist urbanism pushes against that idea. We don’t need a death to fix this.

The story of one rider being run over on Bloomfield Avenue is ultimately about more than a crash. It is about whether residents should have to accept that level of risk as the cost of riding a bicycle.

Survey respondents have expressed overwhelming support for change. Residents have signed petitions. Cyclists have shared their stories. Community members have offered a vision of a safer Bloomfield Avenue.

The question now is whether state, county, and congressional leaders will listen.

Because the real issue is not whether Essex can build a bike lane on Bloomfield.

It is whether Essex County and the towns connected by Bloomfield Avenue are willing to create a street where cycling is a practical and welcoming option for everyone, from children and families to older adults and first-time riders.

Editorial Note from VELO Bloomfield

At VELO Bloomfield, we believe every resident deserves the freedom to move through our community carFREE.

The story you have just read is painful because it is personal. One of our members was struck by a driver while riding on Bloomfield Avenue. We are grateful she survived. No one should have to experience that kind of trauma simply for choosing to travel by bicycle.

But this is not only her story.

It is the story of many residents who say they would like to bike more often but do not feel it is safe or accessible. It is the story of parents who want to ride with their children, older adults who want alternatives to driving, students trying to reach school, and neighbors who would choose a bicycle for short trips if our streets felt welcoming. Increasingly, it is also the story of women and beginning cyclists who are discovering the joy, independence, and practicality of riding a bicycle but are confronted with roadway conditions designed primarily around automobiles.

The purpose of sharing this story is not to assign blame or inflame division. Our goal is to ask a simple question: What would it take to make Bloomfield Avenue safe and accessible for everyone?

We believe the answer begins with protected bicycle infrastructure.

Through our recent community survey, approximately 90 percent of respondents supported a bike lane on Bloomfield Avenue. Residents have continued that conversation through a petition that outlines a vision for what a safer, more comfortable street could look like. These responses tell us that support for safer cycling is not a niche concern—it is a broadly shared community priority.

A protected bike lane is not merely an accommodation for people on bicycles. It is an investment in a healthier, more connected, more prosocial, and more accessible Bloomfield Avenue, which is common to the “City of Essex.” It is a statement that our main street should work for everyone who uses it.

We invite students, residents, business owners, community organizations, foundation-funded and grassroots advocacy groups, as well as elected officials at the congressional, county, and local levels to engage with the proposal. Please reach out to us so we can review the survey findings and join the conversation. Great streets are not built through conflict alone; they are built through prosocial methods, public participation, listening, and collective vision.

We owe it to our injured member—and to everyone who wishes to travel safely on Bloomfield Avenue and in Essex County—to act before another crash becomes a more tragic story.

VELO (BIKE) Bloomfield
VELOBloomfield@gmail.com

Building towards the idea of Bloomfield Avenue as a commons where everyone in Essex County can access carFREEdom.

Disclosure: Lo Sontag, the writer of this piece is the founder of VELO Bloomfield.

The horrific crash on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on July 7 between an e-bike delivery worker and a jogger, which left the jogger in a medically induced coma, has produced two victims. Public discussion, however, is already moving toward a familiar script: the search for individual blame. There is blame here, but not on the individual who was eking out an existence, and reportedly tried to leave the scene.

In this script, what is hidden in the workings of the political economy’s hegemony which made this tragedy possible. Unlike trickle-down economics, deregulation actually transfers risk downward. Harms that should be absorbed by manufacturers, regulators, or public infrastructure are instead absorbed by ordinary people navigating increasingly chaotic streets in an even more chaotic economy. It is socialism for corporations and brutal, skull-crushing capitalism for everyone else, pushed by a regime under the cloak of advocacy that often advances the language of safety.

But whose safety? It appears to be the safety of the balance sheet.

For decades, advocates and policymakers alike have embraced a culture of vehicular cycling and market fundamentalism: the idea that the bicycle is simply another vehicle and that innovation should move faster than regulation.

And here we are, not at the site of an accident but at the site of a crash that could have been prevented. Through the weltanschauung of what feminist scholars describe as disaster patriarchy, the rapid expansion of high-speed e-bikes creates harm and damage, of all kinds, to economic, health, and social relations. The elite captures the gains while the public absorbs the risk. This is not an argument against e-bikes. I do not own an e-bike, but I ride with people who do. For disabled riders, adults who tire easily, and anyone who benefits from mobility assistance, a modestly powered e-bike can be transformative. Around the world, pedal-assisted e-bikes that go under 20 mph have helped thousands, if not millions, escape auto asphyxiation.

The problem is the absence of democratic limits and regulations. Hegemony has demanded a race toward speed and market expansion while neglecting and defanging the public institutions capable of governing the technology. As a daily cyclist, I want stronger regulation of manufacturers, clearer standards, and infrastructure that prioritizes people over maximum speed and maximum market efficiency. The problem is this, much of contemporary bike advocacy has become entangled with industry interests. In the US, many organizations often present themselves as public-interest actors while advancing agendas closely aligned with car, tech, bike & real estate businesses.

Policymakers, searching for credible partners, frequently treat these groups as neutral experts. They are often FAR from neutral.

The result is that lobbying arrives dressed as civic engagement to make people healthier. Well, I’m going to say what so many refuse to, you are naked, and you need to go in the house and put some pants on.

Especially in communities that have experienced decades of disinvestment, policymakers are more likely to come from K-12, where historically excluded people who score well on college entry exams are pushed, rather than from economics and urban planning. When these elected officials in particular, mistake industry lobbying for public representation, policies intended to improve safety can instead result in physical harm, labor exploitation, displacement, and distrust of anyone with a bicycle.

The tragedy is that we are now headed toward an individualist response. More policing. More punishment. More conflict between cyclists and pedestrians. More division within a working class that is already fragmented and polarized. The question will tragically become, like currently in New Jersey, how to regulate individuals rather than how to govern powerful institutions.

I am not writing about an accident between a jogger and a delivery worker. I am writing about the crash that results when a system privatizes rewards and socializes risk. The anger here should be aimed upward—at the economic and political arrangements that make ordinary people bear the costs of decisions made in corporate boardrooms.

In this episode of Auto Asphyxiation, we explore the relationship between patriarchy, political respectability, and urban space through the work of Henri Lefebvre, Dolores Hayden, and Leslie Kern. Using recent political controversies and public figures, including Graham Platner, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and examples from New Jersey politics, such as Tom Kean Jr., we examine how institutions produce credibility, authority, and forgiveness differently for different people.

Drawing on Lefebvre's concept of The Production of Space, we argue that patriarchy is not simply an attitude or ideology. It is embedded in institutions, planning processes, political cultures, and even the built environment itself. From city halls to transportation systems, from campaign politics to public meetings, power shapes who is heard, who is believed, who is granted a second chance, and who is allowed to work in Manhattan with zero static after a 250 million dollar deficit.

Patriarchy isn't holding up men; it is holding up the infrastructure of power.

Topics include:

Henri Lefebvre and the production of social space
Patriarchy as infrastructure rather than individual prejudice
The politics of respectability and public forgiveness
Dolores Hayden's critique of gendered urban space
Leslie Kern's vision of the feminist city
Political legitimacy and elite power in New Jersey
The relationship between urbanism, credibility, and belonging
Why feminist urbanism is essential to democratic cities

A reading list!
Henri Lefebvre — The Production of Space
Henri Lefebvre — The Right to the City
Dolores Hayden — The Grand Domestic Revolution
Dolores Hayden — What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?
Leslie Kern — Feminist City
Doreen Massey — Space, Place and Gender
Iris Marion Young — Throwing Like a Girl

Produced SUB/URBAN Review, a project exploring sub/urbanism, feminist urbanism, law and political economy, transportation, planning, culture, and the hidden power structures that shape everyday life.

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