Earlier this week Lo Sontag was in conversation with artists, historian, and provactore, Noelle Lorraine Williams. Please watch and more importantly listen to this important interview.

As an artist-in-resident at Newark Project for Empty Space, Williams explores a part of US (& African) History that has not frequently been explored through their exhibit Black Revolutionary Women: 250 Years of a Colony Within a Colony going on now through October 11.

It highlights Black women’s resistance, survival, and freedom-making across the Americas, reframing dominant narratives of the American Revolution as the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

“Black Revolutionary Women: 250 Years of a Colony Within a Colony asks important questions about historical memory, including who is recognized as a revolutionary or freedom fighter in American history and whose stories are remembered and honored. The exhibition recognizes the documented 914 Black women who gained their freedom during the Revolutionary War and were evacuated with British forces to Nova Scotia, situating their experiences within the wider histories of colonialism, war, and emancipation.”

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The third time sitting down with Carlos Acosta for our latest conversation, I was no longer interested in the narrow question of what happened to him.

Yes, of course, facts and timelines matter and he matters.

What draws me to this story is how this relates to power. Space is physical, but it is also social.

When Acosta emerged as a leader in the campaign to end immigrant detention in McHenry County, he was often portrayed as a respectable reformer, a civic participant operating within the accepted boundaries of public debate. He was educated, articulate, and engaged in the democratic process. He spoke the language of public service.

A theme of this series is how quickly boundaries shift.

A formerly model “minority” becomes a threat when it dissents.

Disagreement becomes something entirely different when one is racialized— and hegemony likes to dole out an especially sadistic brand of punishment when you turn out to not be one of the “good ones.”

We discussed organized labor. A former professor of mine, Anwar Shaikh, stated that at times unionism can be reformist. Being in a union allows workers to tolerate capitalism’s oppression.

Acosta and I discussed how institutions often celebrated as vehicles for worker empowerment can also function as stabilizing forces within existing power structures. The issue was not whether unions are good or bad, but whether solidarity is always directed toward fellow workers or whether it sometimes becomes solidarity with the hegemonic institution itself.

This is not a story unique to immigration detention.

Across American history, workers have often found themselves caught between two loyalties: solidarity with people and solidarity with institutions.

Also, the power of media. At first, when Acosta was elected, the media portrayed him as the model minority; as he became more vocal in challenging hegemony, his image changed: his skin was darkened, his face looked meaner, and finally, the mug shot.

You Google him now, and that is what comes up.

Now he was the bad “other.”

Who we are perceived to be is greatly determined by media and institutional framing.

Who gets read as a community leader?

Who gets read as an outsider?

Who is afforded the presumption of legitimacy?

Racialized people are instrumentalized. There are no good stereotypes, only ones that serve power and ones that do not. Legitimacy for people not considered quite human demands constant negotiation.

You will be deemed dangerous when you encroach upon power.

Ultimately, Acosta’s story is compelling not simply because he became involved in a controversial political struggle.

It is that his experience forces us to confront a difficult possibility.

There are grants that encourage and fund participation in democracy and everyone says, “We need more civic engagement.”

Hegemony claims it wants more people to be involved.

But what happens when people participate and actually win?

What happens when they successfully challenge an entrenched system that is an existing revenue stream?

The aren’t official statements.

They are found in the aftermath, I was bankrupted after a media fight with SoFi stadium, I like Carlos could have walked away but I COULD NOT.

So in the aftermath, Carlos Acosta’s story becomes more than a story about immigration detention. It becomes a story about power, punishment, and the uncomfortable relationship between democratic participation and institutional preservation.

This isn’t about what he was convicted of, which was unprecedented.

What I want to know from here —why does it appear that consequences for challenging power so severe when the (wrong) people are victorious?

Guest Bio

Carlos Acosta has been active in the social service field since 1990. He is currently the Owner & Lead Organizer/ Counselor of Phoenix Bilingual Services. He previously served as Staff Clinician at Blair Counseling and Mediation (Crystal Lake, IL), Senior Therapist with Irene Corzo and Associates (Lake Geneva, WI), and Onsite Crisis Counselor with the McHenry Co. Crisis Program. Carlos co-founded and served as Executive Director of the McHenry County Latino Coalition, the area’s leading advocacy group for Latino residents, until its dissolution and closure in 2009.

Carlos Acosta has served his community in various capacities. Carlos served as an elected McHenry County Board member (5^th District) from 2018 to 2022. Carlos was previously an appointed member of the Woodstock Plan Commission (2004 - 2010). Carlos also served on the Board of Directors of the United Way of McHenry County (2003 - 2008), Leadership Greater McHenry County (2004 - 2008), and the McHenry County Community Foundation (2003 - 2007).

This is part three in the series The Geography of Retaliation: What Happens When They Win.

The Geography of Retaliation: What Happens When They Win is a four part seriries. Carlos Acosta helped lead a campaign against an ICE detention center in McHenry County, Illinois, whose momentum led Governor J.B. Pritzker to sign the Illinois Way Forward Act in August 2021. Way Forward strengthened immigrant protections by ending local ICE detention contracts and limiting police collaboration with federal immigration enforcement. This act updated the Illinois TRUST Act and the Voices of Immigrant Communities Empowering Survivors (VOICES).

One would think that this victory would be a testament to community power; it was, but it also had other impacts. It was the beginning of a nightmare for Carlos. This series explores the blurred line between political prisoner and criminal prisoner. It is a line that haunts struggles for justice everywhere. It also amplifies the question of who is permitted to shape space and power, and what happens to those who challenge those hegemonic institutions.

Please subscribe and share.

Carlos Acosta has been active in the social service field since 1990. He is currently the Owner & Lead Organizer/ Counselor of Phoenix Bilingual Services. He previously served as Staff Clinician at Blair Counseling and Mediation (Crystal Lake, IL), Senior Therapist with Irene Corzo and Associates (Lake Geneva, WI), and Onsite Crisis Counselor with the McHenry Co. Crisis Program. Carlos co-founded and served as Executive Director of the McHenry County Latino Coalition, the area’s leading advocacy group for Latino residents, until its dissolution and closure in 2009.

Carlos Acosta has served his community in various capacities. Carlos served as an elected McHenry County Board member (5^th District) from 2018 to 2022. Carlos was previously an appointed member of the Woodstock Plan Commission (2004 - 2010). Carlos also served on the Board of Directors of the United Way of McHenry County (2003 - 2008), Leadership Greater McHenry County (2004 - 2008), and the McHenry County Community Foundation (2003 - 2007).

Carlos earned his B.S. in Leisure Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his M.A. in Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

On Friday, September 11, Hudson County’s Secaucus had thousands of gallons of No. 2 diesel spill from its data center into the Anderson Creek owing to what spokespeople are calling ‘a glitch.’

Anderson Creek is a 52-acre wetland that feeds into the Hackensack River.

According to 12 New Jersey, the Secaucus Equinix data center dumped approximately 5,500 gallons of No. 2 diesel.

Essex functions as a city, and so does Hudson; in fact, much of Hudson and Essex share two congresspersons, Mejia and McIver. New Jersey’s home rule and neighborhood-as-city framework make regulating data centers arduous, and that is the point: local politics, especially as constructed in New Jersey, are meant to distract through what Herbert Marcuse calls repressive tolerance. In Essex, local politics matter, but not nearly as much as you think; risks of data centers are hidden when people are under the impression that zip codes work like forcefields (they don’t).

(If you ever said, “ Race is a distraction,” wait until I tell you about zip codes!)

If Secaucus and Newark had data centers, then Essex and Hudson would, too; the issue spreads across county lines, and the local debate matters if you connect it to the larger story: the county is a city. The functional boundaries matter more than the imaginary boundaries in one’s head.

And what happens when there is an environmental fix for this issue? Will we still recognize the threat of handing our art, security, and social life to a machine? Machines owned by maybe (if we’re lucky) two or three private corporations; this is the broader threat behind the data center debate.

We’re just now recognizing the dangers of manufactured consent; what happens when we no longer need the middle management and handmaids of capitalism and have —Artificial Consent? This is the larger question driving the episode.

In this episode, we also discuss the proposed Data Center in Nutley on its ON3 campus.

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Nothing makes me sadder than seeing people who are in their hearts progressive but lack the tools or knowledge to do more than repeat neoliberal talking points and Chicago School ideals.

This isn’t an accident; it is a crash.

In this VERY special fundraiser episode, SUB/URBAN REVIEW draws on Henri Lefebvre, Amartya Sen, feminist economics, critical geography, and Law and Political Economy to challenge the market-centered assumptions that dominate and consume contemporary urbanism—and to ask you to become a supporter of SUB/URBAN REVIEW. If you value this work, please become a supporter of SUB/URBAN REVIEW.

Independent left urbanist media matters in a landscape shaped by developers, business interests, and market-oriented institutions. Cities are not engines of growth. Cities are places where people struggle over freedom, belonging, democracy, and the right to shape urban life itself.

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Bloomfield Avenue is more than a road. It is the shared spine of SUB/URBAN Essex, connecting Newark to West Caldwell and linking neighborhoods, businesses, institutions, and public life across the county.

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This discourse around immigration leans on the narrative of “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants. We all agree political persecution is wrong, but criminals- well, they had it coming- but who gets to shape what is criminal? These categories are unstable and are shaped by what hegemony finds more useful. From the criminalization of migration to the racialized realities of policing, the line between political prisoner and criminal prisoner is frequently blurred by systems of power rather than defined by clear moral boundaries.

To explore these questions, I speak with Amanda Garcia, Senior Program Associate at the Acacia Center for Justice. Garcia previously helped manage the Legal Orientation Program, which provides free legal education to people detained by ICE, and has represented noncitizens in family-based petitions, U visas, asylum claims, and removal defense proceedings before the Chicago Immigration Court. Drawing on her experience working directly with detained immigrants, Garcia helps unpack how immigration detention intersects with the criminal legal system and what the Way Forward Act was seeking to change.

Amanda and I discuss the politics of criminalization and the consequences of detention and deportation and the consequences for those who stand up against this.

As the series moves from hero to villain, SUB/URBAN Review hopes that listeners and readers reconsider the stories we tell about “the other,” to justify their treatment or to be appalled by it. The Green Monster is directly across the street from Delaney Hall.

Guest Bio

Amanda Garcia is a Senior Program Associate at the Acacia Center for Justice. She previously delivered and helped manage the Legal Orientation Program, a free legal education program for unrepresented people in ICE detention. She has represented noncitizens with family-based petitions, U visas, asylum claims, and in removal defense proceedings before the Chicago Immigration Court. Garcia holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Michigan and a Juris Doctor from Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

This is part two in the series The Geography of Retaliation: What Happens When They Win.

The Geography of Retaliation: What Happens When They Win is a four part seriries. Carlos Acosta helped lead a campaign against an ICE detention center in McHenry County, Illinois, whose momentum led Governor J.B. Pritzker to sign the Illinois Way Forward Act in August 2021. Way Forward strengthened immigrant protections by ending local ICE detention contracts and limiting police collaboration with federal immigration enforcement. This act updated the Illinois TRUST Act and the Voices of Immigrant Communities Empowering Survivors (VOICES).

One would think that this victory would be a testament to community power; it was, but it also had other impacts. It was the beginning of a nightmare for Carlos. This series explores the blurred line between political prisoner and criminal prisoner. It is a line that haunts struggles for justice everywhere. It also amplifies the question of who is permitted to shape space and power, and what happens to those who challenge those hegemonic institutions.

Please subscribe and share.

It replaces human dignity with market access and supply-side deregulation speed.

The ROAD is entrenching the very exclusions it purports to be fixing.

Most Americans don’t have inherited wealth or someone who can help with a down payment on the American Dream: the Single-Family Home. So the dream has become a means-tested obstacle course of credit scores and down-payment lotteries. This ACT changes NONE Of this, in fact it supports it with classes AND after these classes the endpoint for many won’t even be a secure home, but a manufactured house on leased land.

A manufactured ADU on someone else’s land now counts as a Single-Family Home in this ACT, which can now be subsidized, but NOT FOR YOU, not for the Working Class.

And nothing in here about the practice of the reverse mortgages that snatch so many homes from people after they are past working age. There is no rest for the working class under capitalism.

That is utter madness.

The dream is a nightmare of predatory contracts and regulations that offer “ownership” without control, like sharecropping or Uber driving. Is an Uber Driver a small business person? Is a person who bought a manufactured home on someone’s else’s land a homeowner? Who knows, if we just do enough thought exercises, we can make it so!

We are now asking people to accept an even lower rung on a ladder that is missing many of the middle rungs.

The ROAD is a descent to hell, but this time with more tech. It resuscitates the supply-side fantasy, that more roads and more greenfield development will somehow (god willing) produce affordability. It’s Lucy and the football for the working class and mother earth.

It is neoliberalism’s last séance. It thinks a dead orthodoxy can be summoned just one more time with streamlined building regulations and 3D printing.

It won’t.

This Act mistakes (if I were to be generous, I think they totally know) the reasons for this crisis. No financial literacy class will solve the problem of not making enough money, because the US gutted the unions and their ability to organize.

This crisis is NOT about financial illiteracy nor is it about the free market being henpecked. Public policy, land-use rules, a coddling of the finance system, and decades of state via private interests (see Citizens United) action built this housing crisis by concentrating wealth (for the working class I use term wealth very loosely) through property ownership.

Another glaring issue with this legislation is that it acts like the climate crisis is a manageable slight inconvenience, this is wrong, very wrong.

The climate crisis is a hard constraint and the fires, floods, and the insurance agents are daily reminding us about these hard constraints.

A just ACT for the housing and related climate crises starts with walking away from the lies told by the manifest destiny of sprawl and grasping this truth: human thriving and our planet’s healing begin on shared prosperity and shared space. We don’t need bigger lots and longer commutes (or faster commuter trains, to and from exurbs). There are many attractive and affordable models exist for climate conscious dense, walkable cities. NYC’s Co-Op City has 1-bedroom units for $16,500 equity and $750 monthly maintenance. The Mitchell Lama model needs to be revived in NY.

In medium-sized cities, the Co-Ops in Madison, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, have rooms that average $535 a month. These models are in place, have functioned successfully for decades. Therse are models that are free of predatory landlord relationships.

We can create a road to wealth that is rooted in community and cooperation rather than each person having a little castle made of debt.

A better American dream is possible, but we need to end this necromancy with Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

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A new piece in The New York Times discussed the framing of bike lanes as DEI, but the League of American Bicyclists responded with a reassuring message in the piece and on LinkedIn. While not any where near a direct quote I will paraphrase, “Good news TAP still funds the kind of cycling that matters, and most Republican like cycling, the real kind.”

(See, I get subtext too guys!)

From the article:

66% of Republicans support bike lanes where they live.

That is just swell Will!

TAP pays for rail trails, scenic routes, and bicycling for the children of roadies, because apparently that doesn’t count as “DEI.” No darkies are roadies!

In the U.S., urban cycling is pathologized as cycling for people who aren’t really cyclists (or people.)

On my Instagram post regarding how Bloomfield Avenue is killing people, a guy in the UK thought I was from his country’s Essex and told me to just get on the sidewalk. He wasn’t trolling; he was seriously asking why I would put myself in danger. He then apologized when he realized I was in New York and asked what he could do to help.

I responded, “Stop platforming American cycling ‘advocates’ abroad who are handmaids to development & tech oligarchs.”

He thought that was funny, but it’s not actually a joke.

I thought about our online discourse and realized no man cyclist in the US had ever suggested I ride on the sidewalk or even said they were scared of the road, because admitting fear is just not an American thing. The (unasked for) advice I typically get is “wear a helmet” or “take the lane.” Anyways, I couldn’t go to sleep or make another video, as Chas was sleeping, so I began to reread Babel by R.F. Kuang, a fictional fantasy tale about Oxford and how language is used to manipulate and retain power. Then I had this weird Keyser Söze moment or an anagnorisis or epiphany, since I’m a real person, and not a plot point in the fictional retelling of capitalism (I think. I hope. I am real right?!) Urban cycling in the US is pathologized, not simply by car drivers, but by US cycling itself.

(My friends not in the US please understand US cycling is run my tech oligarchs, developers, and lawyers not cyclists or environmentalists—you think you know what is going on here, you do not.)

When they say ‘not just bikes,’ it means something a little deeper than one might think. I’ll be explicit: not just humans.

That is why all these weird terms (within US cycling, like these are their DEI part)

like micromobility, pedestrian, and road users exists, to separate urban cyclists from REAL cyclists, roadies.

It is how the nonprofit industrial complex always tries to separate out women, racialized people, from their fields:

They do journalism, and YOU do civic information.

They are writers, and YOU are a content producer.

They are critics and theorists, and YOU are an organizer or activist.

Hegemony can racialize (and genderize) just about anything.

Cycling is for humans, and like the term America, it is for them—you are a hyphen, if you even exist.

We need to all accept our racialization and our role as not real cyclists, not like them, according to them. My assertion to the contrary (and my hundred of miles ridden) has continued to be an irritant to US maket neoliberal living urbanism writ large.

“We’re not DEI!!”

See what they mean they are human, and you are not. Like how dare you put us all into the same category.

Class solidarity disappears when an American gets his LCI card.

In Western Europe, Asia, & Scandinavia, there is no need to make up additional terms for commuting that includes bicycling, because of course, commuting to work might include public transit and it might include a bike, why does it need a label…a grant oh yes, we need names for grant purposes….sigh

If you understand the history of US cycling, you’ll understand what exactly is going on here, and even when they were doing DEI, they were doing it in a very specific way, which is why I was so very irritated.

“OK colored people talk about walkng and diabetes! See not just bikes!”

The League of American Bicyclists started as the League of American Wheelmen. It is an organization that is rooted in patriarchy and eugenics- now not explicitly eugenics, but in the US racism means dehumanization, i.e., the human race is white, and the rest is the animal race-like; this is why racists will often say “there is no race but the human race.”

So anyone extremely racist is typically of the belief that white men are human and everyone else is a lower kind of animal, which is why I don’t use the phrase “racial justice,” because it’s like “misogyny justice.” It makes no sense to me.

Hence, urban cycling is treated as weak, scary, and less human, while road cycling is treated as premium and human- I would say superhuman, but remember, in this scenario the rest of us are not humans.

(They do not think delivery riders are human, they don’t now and they didn’t when it was a bunch of ethnic white guys from outer boroughs and Jersey.)

Their narrative is that cycling is for humans, and micromobility is for those not as skilled. You need tonbe taught how to ride a bicycle in traffic, because you’re a subhuman that can’t figure it out.

“But you don’t ride your bike in traffic, you only ride your bike once a month, up the coast.”

“You sure ask a lot of questions for a replicant lady with a blog.”

This is the real issue to them: CYCLING is NOT DEI, because what I am doing by using a foldable bike and train combination to get to work is not the same as what they do, which is real cycling. Getting on your bike, putting on some spandex, drinking a protein drink, and riding 200 miles, that’s cycling.

At the end of the day, it’s a bizarro, US-warped, sadist version of eugenics. The US can turn anything into a eugenics contest and also grant exceptions. Major Taylor, well, cycling is a skill; he just had power, so…

This is why they can write books for the public on urbanism and theory, and you can talk to the less human people, not about cycling, but about micromobility, until you get old, because field workers aren’t much good after they turn 40; that’s the peak for non-humans.

When they say they are not DEI, I get it now. They MEAN that. They mean the part that was the cycling part that was never DEI to them. DEI was micromobility, walking, those weird branches, like how they separate r&b from rock and how they tried to separate pop music by Koreans into a separate category that was all done, so you couldn’t sully US cycling, so you could keep it white and male.

I always knew that, but their entire strategy was to pathologize urban “micromobility” so as not to sully the reputation of American cycling; I just caught that right now. White-abled-body men are cyclists, and the rest of us are plebeian tools, and that’s why the roadies-lawyers of cycling, the tech oligarchs, and the League of American Bicyclists are negotiating right now to put robots in urban bike lanes; to them, an urban cyclist is no different than a mule or a robot.

In this multimedia SUB/URBAN REVIEW series The Geography of Retaliation: What Happens When They Win, we look at ICE, Acosta’s role, and how effective solidarity challenges hegemony.

Illinois was the first state to ban private prison contracts for immigration detainees.

Some history— The September 11 terrorist attacks allowed an overreach and a violation of civil rights under the guise of reorganization for safety. President Bush created Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, and it was housed within the Department of Homeland Security. It was created by combining parts of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the U.S. Customs Service.

Its alleged focus was interior immigration enforcement, investigating illegal movement of people and goods, and protecting national security.

So in 2003, ICE began slowly gearing up its reign of terror on racialized immigrants. For people who had not gone through the immigration process in the latter half of the 20th century, it was still out of view.

In McHenry County, this was no different. The county began a contract in April 2003, and the Great Recession of 2007-2008 later made this private prison contract very attractive, in material ways and as a tool to oppress members of the working class.

But from the beginning, community members from all walks of life, including former detainees, faith community leaders, and social justice activists, stated it was wrong to profit from detaining people for reasons as random as a paperwork error owing to a government error or a traffic ticket.

In 2019, after a decade of attempting to amplify this situation, the abolition of prison movement and the COVID-19 pandemic brought the larger public’s attention to what was going on in McHenry County.

Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County was a substantial and critical part of this amplification, but like always, activists need politicians with the courage to support actions. Liberation of the working class has never been obtained using only one path.

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McHenry County Board member Carlos Acosta, elected in 2018, questioned the partnership’s financial and moral motives, introducing resolutions and working alongside the grassroots group Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract. That effort ended with the signing of the Illinois Way Forward Act, which prohibits local law enforcement and county jails from entering into contracts with private agencies to house people under immigration detention.

And as quickly as Acosta moved to stand up, hegemony also moved to shut him down.

Please subscribe to continue this story of triumph and what happens when you point out the boot on the neck of the people.

This is part one in the series The Geography of Retaliation: What Happens When They Win.

The Geography of Retaliation: What Happens When They Win is a four part seriries. Carlos Acosta helped lead a campaign against an ICE detention center in McHenry County, Illinois, whose momentum led Governor J.B. Pritzker to sign the Illinois Way Forward Act in August 2021. Way Forward strengthened immigrant protections by ending local ICE detention contracts and limiting police collaboration with federal immigration enforcement. This act updated the Illinois TRUST Act and the Voices of Immigrant Communities Empowering Survivors (VOICES).

One would think that this victory would be a testament to community power; it was, but it also had other impacts. It was the beginning of a nightmare for Carlos. This series explores the blurred line between political prisoner and criminal prisoner. It is a line that haunts struggles for justice everywhere. It also amplifies the question of who is permitted to shape space and power, and what happens to those who challenge those hegemonic institutions.

Please subscribe and share.

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.