Rov_Scam
4hr ago
The question was about Cochran, not the jury. And I left out the bloody socks because they come with their own problems, but suffice it to say that one would expect to find more in a house with a white tile floor and white carpeting than a sock with a single drop of blood on it. This only played into the defense theory that evidence had been planted.
Rov_Scam
6hr ago
Johnny Cochran was primarily a civil lawyer who focused on civil rights cases, and his approach to the Simpson case was as a civil rights case rather than as a typical criminal case. In any criminal investigation, particularly one as complicated as a murder investigation, there are going to be mistakes, and it's par for the course for the defense to highlight these mistakes as a means to sow doubt in the minds of the jury. Rather than presenting these as unfortunate errors, however, Cochran was able to craft a narrative that these all flowed from the racism inherent in the Los Angeles Police Department, at a time when such racism was fresh in the minds of the black community.
Consider the behavior of the police from the very beginning of the investigation: Within hours of the crime scene being discovered, the police found it necessary, in the middle of the night, to send four detectives to Simpson's home to personally inform him that his former wife had been murdered. While there, after it is evident that Simpson is not home, the find a reason to enter the property anyway and, surprise surprise, find incriminating evidence. There's an explanation for this that makes sense, and that the prosecution explained, but to someone predisposed to distrust the police it certainly looks like the police zeroed in on Simpson as a suspect well before there was any reason to believe he was involved, and they never seriously pursued any other line of investigation. Then you add all the other mistakes and irregularities and it can certainly look like the police, at best, were so dead set on Simpson's guilt that they didn't bother to conduct a competent investigation, or, at worst, actively manufactured evidence against him. It also didn't help that the detective who discovered key evidence, including the evidence that gave the police justification to enter Simpson's property in the first place, had his own checkered past with regard to racial issues, a past that he actively concealed in court.
The prosecution may have been able to counter this somewhat had they recognized the problem and sought to counteract it, but they were so convinced that the evidence was too overwhelming to ignore that they didn't consider that Cochran could easily give the jury reason to ignore it. They presented the LAPD like choirboys who wouldn't possibly do anything like Cochran was suggesting and couldn't possibly be driven by any motives other than a dispassionate analysis of the facts (though for their own part, the police were less than forthcoming when it came to providing potentially damaging information to the prosecution, as if the problem would go away if they ignored it). When this information came out during the trial, the damage had been done, and the prosecution's half-baked attempts to cover for it were too little, too late. In any event, the suggestion that the LAPD was totally not racist ran contrary to the experience of every black person and Los Angeles, and wasn't going to play well with a mostly minority jury.
In the aftermath of the verdict, a narrative developed among the prosecution team and others that Cochran was trying to convince the jury that acquitting Simpson would somehow be tit for tat payback for the acquittal of the Rodney King defendants. Much criticism of Cochran in the years since stems from this theory. The problem with it is that it presupposes that the jurors aren't just wrong, but are also bad people, that even if they had a videotape of Simpson murdering Brown and Goldman that they would have acquitted anyway. I don't believe this is true, and I don't believe that's what Cochran was going for. If you want to get an idea at what Cochran was going for, read the actual closing argument. He goes through the holes in the prosecution's case and only then discusses how they may have been the result of racism or apathetic bungling. He never suggests what his worst critics do.
Part of the mythology of the OJ Simpson trial is based on the idea that the prosecution had an absolute slam dunk of a case. They didn't. The biggest problem I saw with the case was the timing combined with a lack of blood. The prosecution presented a tight, but plausible, timeline between the murders and OJ getting into the limo. But when you consider the amount of blood that would result from stabbing two people to death, including one who was nearly decapitated, it makes it implausible that the perpetrator would be able to avoid getting blood on themself. In all, police were able to extract less than a drop of blood from the Bronco and no blood from the inside of the house. That someone who wasn't a professional hit man was able to stab two people to death, one of whom was younger and stronger than him, and make it back in a tight window without getting much blood anywhere seems highly unlikely. I'm not an OJ truther or anything suggesting that he's innocent, just that there was good reason for a jury to be skeptical of the story the prosecution was telling them. When you add in the race stuff it cast doubt onto what little blood evidence there was, and a that point it's hard for me to see how he gets convicted.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Forget about the deportation for a minute and assume the mother decided to move to Honduras with the child. Unless the father's parental rights were completely terminated, he would have grounds to contest the decision in Louisiana family court. The fact that ICE is now involved doesn't magically supersede state law and allow the mother to make a unilateral decision, and ICE shouldn't have sent away the child absent a determination by the family court.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
It's not that he posted about HBD insofar as he posted about little but HBD, shoehorning it into every discussion, no matter how irrelevant. 'm not sure what his alleged location has to do with anything.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
It's not so much the idiosyncrasies but the whole picture. I don't know if you were around when he was still posting on the old SSC sub, but he had a single-minded focus on race science and would argue citing knowledge of highly specialized scientific theories and throw out citations as though they were punctuation. He exhibited the kind of knowledge that would suggest that he studies the sort of thing for a living, yet posted with a frequency that would seem to preclude any kind of employment at all. At the very least, I don't recall him ever mentioning any kind of credentials that would qualify him as an expert on genetics, or biology, or anything, really. So when someone starts a substack flogging the same horses in the same little corner of the internet, I'm bound to be suspicious. When that substack's about section is similarly devoid of reference to any qualifications, education, or training, it's raising some definite alarm bells.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I haven't heard of the guy, thus I haven't heard of the rumors, but having skimmed the Substack he almost certainly is the same person.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
The part you're forgetting is that doing the 50 days doesn't mean he gets to stay. It's not a choice between 50 days in jail or get deported, it's do the 50 days in jail and then get deported.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
As much as Steelers fans like to hate on Mike Tomlin, the real object of their ire is late-period Kevin Colbert, who seemingly blew too many drafts for fans to take seriously (never mind that he was the architect of 2 Super Bowl teams). Despite the team's current "woes", one person who fans seem to like is Omar Khan, dubbed the Khan Artist, because he has a similar way of suckering teams into making bad deals. He managed to get the #32 pick in exchange for Chase Claypool, who did shit for the Bears for one season before going to the CFL. He unloaded disgruntled WR Diontae Johnson to the Panthers and got Donte Jackson in return, and while Jackson wasn't particularly loved, he started 15 games and got 5 interceptions. Johnson, meanwhile played for 3 teams in 2024. I was wondering who would come out on top if he and Roseman made a deal, and then I remembered that it already happened.
In March of last year, the Steelers traded disgruntled QB bust (Colbert's last draft!) Kenny Pickett and a 2024 fourth round pick for a 2024 third round pick and two 2025 seventh round picks. I'll discount the seventh rounders, since they're essentially lottery tickets, but he was able to turn Pickett in to Payton Wilson, one of the team's most promising young linebackers. The Eagles, meanwhile, got their backup, and traded the 2024 fourth rounder to Miami for a 2025 third rounder. Miami drafted Jaylen Wright, a third string RB who with some luck might become a second string. So who gets the short end of the stick when Khan and Roseman make a deal? The Dolphins.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Maybe the judge thought that was better than ICE personally aiding and abetting the escape of a wife beater.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I'm talking about state judges, because that's what's at issue here. And yep, ask nicely is what they do, by which I mean put in a formal request. And they generally agree for minor crimes as well as major ones, unless there's some compelling reason to get the guy out of the country ASAP. I remember a DUI case in Washington County, PA where the defense attorney was arguing for a dismissal since the guy was going to be deported and the case was moot. The fairly hardass judge wanted the attorney to request a release from ICE detention because he wanted to keep the guy from driving drunk and could require an interlock device and testing if the guy stayed here until the case was resolved. I don't know how the case ended, but I got the impression that the judge was convinced that they guy would end up killing someone in Mexico if he didn't dry out first.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
The issue is that an administrative warrant doesn't really count as a warrant. The whole point of warrant requirements in most situations is that a neutral party (i.e., a judge) has the opportunity to review the evidence and determine that certain actions are, well, warranted. An administrative warrant is issued by the enforcing agency itself, and as such has certain limitations. Most notably for our purposes, ICE agents with an administrative warrant can't enter a private residence to look for a subject the way normal police executing an actual arrest warrant can. So if you're my roommate and you're hiding from ICE and they show up at the door and I answer I can simply tell them to go fuck themselves and there's nothing they can do about it. Since this is the case, they usually have to resort to ruses like pretending they need a guy to sign for a package or acting like they're local police (without actually pretending to be local police) in order to get the guy to come to the door.
Since it's widely recognized that a judge's courtroom is a private area, upon learning that the agents only had an administrative warrant, she told them they couldn't do anything in her courtroom and would have to arrest him in one of the common areas of the courthouse. And she was accordingly under no obligation to make sure that the guy got into the common areas of the courthouse, anymore than a roommate is under an obligation to allow ICE agents inside.
As for §1324, I'm not going to comment on that since the judge wasn't charged under that statute. It's possible it could apply here, but I don't know.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Well, the Supreme Court ruled that there are. If the court had ruled differently, we could have that discussion, but they didn't so here we are.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Suppose you're a judge, and you issue a warrant to arrest a murder suspect. Before the police can execute the warrant, he is detained by ICE and set for deportation. Would you consider this a satisfactory outcome?
Rov_Scam
4d ago
It looks like an open and shut case if the facts alleged in the complaint are true.
Not really. There are two issues here one legal and one practical. As far as legal arguments go, the problems is that it isn't clear if what she did was actually illegal. She was charged with violating §1505 (Obstructing an Official Proceeding) and §1071 (Concealing and individual to prevent discovery or arrest). The Obstructing part is problematic because what the judge did doesn't fit into anything that's actually described under the obstruction statutes. chapter 73 of the US Criminal Code has 21 sections, and while §1505 doesn't specifically define obstruction, the sections that do make references to things like destroying documents, intimidating witnesses, bribery, and suborning perjury. Nowhere does it mention helping someone avoid apprehension by Federal agents. You can make the argument that a plain reading of the statutory language suggests that it would cover this, but the Supreme Court explicitly rejected such and argument in Fischer, saying that the context of §1512 made it clear that the statute only applied to the destruction of documents. In any event, I couldn't find any examples of §1505 being used this way before. I'm not saying this isn't going to work, but it certainly isn't open and shut.
Prosecuting under §1071 is even more of an uphill battle. Everything I could find suggests that it only applies to criminal warrants, such as the diffeing penalties for whether the concealed person is being charged with a felony or a misdemeanor. Immigration proceedings aren't criminal proceedings, though, but administrative proceedings. Again, I couldn't find any evidence of §1071 being used for an administrative proceeding.
From a practical perspective, ICE fucked up by attempting to detain the guy before his case was resolved. Typically, when a Mexican national commits a violent crime in the United States and then flees to Mexico, we don't leave it at that; we specifically request that the Mexican government extradite him for prosecution here. If he gets deported this is just the administration facilitating his escape. It may not be what he wants, personally, but even for minor crimes, the normal course of business for a criminal defendant in custody awaiting deportation is for the attorneys to request he be released from ICE custody pending the resolution of the case. This is true even for minor offenses like drunk driving, where the defendant is typically out on bail.
So even if this guy is out on bail on domestic battery charges, deporting him to Mexico makes his case impossible to prosecute, and even if ICE is willing to allow him to return for court appearances, it's impossible for the court to monitor his compliance with bail conditions, and he has little incentive to return to the US for criminal prosecution. The ideal situation, from a criminal justice perspective, is to allow him to stay in Wisconsin until his case is either dismissed or his sentence complete, and then begin deportation proceedings. By deporting him now, you only get half a loaf.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Wonderlic is the test that literally lost Griggs.
Well, that and the alternative requirement of a high school diploma. But no one ever mentions that part, for some reason.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
It's only "indoctrination" when you don't agree with the outcome. When I was in elementary school in the '90s. There was plenty of material in reading class that would have been considered indoctrination in a prior era among those of a certain persuasion. A biography of Dr. King comes to mind; why is this being discussed in reading class and not social studies? What about all the other stuff we read that subtly or not so subtly tried to convey the message that it wasn't okay to judge people based on race? What about the story about the girl whose parents met while her father was stationed in Japan? Is this nothing more than indoctrination about interracial relationships and multiculturalism (the story itself was about dating where the dad learned to use chopsticks and the mother learned to eat with a fork, and why they switch between both at home)? For that matter, we also read other stuff about American history in reading class; is the story about a Revolutionary soldier not indoctrination? Shouldn't this be part of social studies class?
The crux of the matter is that the normalization of same-sex relationships is a culture war battle that the right fought and lost, and some of the losers are clinging to the last viable paths of opposition in a desperate attempt to reverse the tide. The problem with these books isn't that they're age-inappropriate due to sexual content, it's that they're presenting same-sex relationships in a manner that isn't sufficiently condemnatory. That the plaintiffs have to resort to bad faith references to leather is proof of this—it's presented in a way to make one think that the book is referring to bondage or gay leather boy culture, when in reality it's a picture of a woman in a leather jacket, which picture would be unobjectionable in a book about anything else.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
You don't get any junk mail or grocery store circulars? I agree that the "lighter fluid bad" crowd tends to be a bit overzealous, but the problem I have with it is more one of consistency—unless you're very careful about how you apply it, there are always a few briquettes that don't seem to light, and you usually have to stir the pot a bit to get everything going. Match-light charcoal avoids this, but it's also the most expensive solution. This is the same reason why I think lump charcoal is an affectation as well. It looks cooler but is more expensive to produce and doesn't give the consistency that good 'ol Kingsford blue bag does.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Because formal recognition would completely obviate the postwar consensus that national boundaries are inviolable. Russia made no claim to Crimea at the time of Ukrainian independence, nor for 20 years thereafter. If countries can dredge up historical arguments for why they need territory that hasn't been a continual subject of dispute and get international recognition of the conquest, it opens up the door for any irridentist claim.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
I've had this one in the hopper for a while, but with all of the drama surrounding Trump and the tariffs I didn't want it to get buried. Since this is shaping up to be a slow week, here it is. Next one to follow relatively quickly, provided Trump doesn't shoot an unarmed deaf man or some other news blowup.
Part 5: The Hill District, Continued
In this installment we will discuss two of Pittsburgh’s six or so “project neighborhoods”. In the introduction to this series, I said that:
Pittsburgh officially recognizes 90 distinct neighborhoods, but the official geography isn’t entirely accurate. First, the official boundaries are based on census tracts that don’t always line up neatly with a neighborhood’s generally accepted boundaries. Second, there are a number of bogus or semi-bogus neighborhood designations. Large neighborhoods are often split up into smaller geographic divisions (e.g. North Haverbrook, South Haverbrook, etc.) that may or may not line up with the way people actually talk. Conversely, some neighborhoods include areas that everyone treats as distinct neighborhoods but are officially unrecognized. Some neighborhoods had their names changed because the residents didn’t want to be associated with a declining part of the neighborhood; in some cases, these new names caught on but other times they didn’t. For this project, I will be discussing the neighborhoods based on what makes sense to me based on having lived here all my life and knowing how people actually treat the matter. When necessary, I will use historic designations that don’t necessarily match up with the official maps, but this is rare. I will always make reference to the official designations to avoid confusion for those following along at home.
I want to expand on this a bit; I didn’t start with a list of neighborhood designations that I wanted to use, so I’m playing this by ear. In the last installment I mentioned that Crawford-Roberts was a semi-bogus neighborhood that nobody refers to as such but that warranted separate discussion anyway, and the two project neighborhoods I’m about to discuss are in more or less the same boat. To everyone in Pittsburgh, this is just the Hill District. This has political implications as well, since Hill District leaders have accused the city government of engaging in a sort of divide-and-rule mentality to prevent opposition from coalescing.
The first reason I bring this up is because, while it would be easy for me to have just lumped these two project areas in with the rest of the Hill, I don’t have the luxury of doing that with the other four. As I have alluded to in past installments, Pittsburgh’s topography prevented the city from expanding in the traditional manner, with more or less uniform development radiating outwards from the urban core. Pittsburgh’s development followed rivers, then hillsides within walking distance to rivers, then areas with streetcar access, and finally areas with automobile access. The result of this is that well into the 20th century there was a significant amount of undeveloped land closer to downtown as the crow flies than areas that were developed earlier. This land that evaded traditional development then became a prime location to build housing projects within city limits. The upshot is that most of Pittsburgh’s project neighborhoods are relatively remote areas that otherwise only have a limited amount of development, and they shouldn’t be ignored. But I feel like if I’m going to treat some of these as neighborhoods, I should treat all of them as such.
The second reason is that I’m about to get to Oakland soon, and that neighborhood is a mess when it comes to dividing it up. The area commonly called Oakland is huge, comprises four official neighborhoods, and includes several well-recognized sub-neighborhoods, some of which reasonably conform to the city’s definitions, some of which don’t but have the same name, some of which only refer to a part of the official neighborhood, and some of which are wholly distinct. And a lot of it is just called Oakland without any greater specificity. This made me take a harder look at what a neighborhood actually is than I had initially anticipated. It would be impossible for me to assign every square inch of the city to a well-recognized neighborhood, so I guess the best I can say is to bear with me. With that bit of throat clearing out of the way, let’s dive into it.
5D. Bedford Dwellings: Public Housing in America
Public housing does not have a good reputation. It is synonymous with crime, drugs, poverty, delinquency, and the failure of postwar urban renewal. But this wasn’t always the case, and while contemporary observers of the social problems embodied by such notorious disasters as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago, and a close examination of the history behind public housing suggests that this didn’t necessarily have to be the case. Jane Jacobs suggested in the early 1960s that the problem was due to a lack of “eyes on the street”, and architect Oscar Newman developed a theory of “defensible space” a decade later, but these come across to me as too-pat solutions to a complicated problem. The best explanation for public housing’s failure at a nationwide level is D. Bradford Hunt’s Blueprint for Disaster, in which he examines the history of public housing using Chicago as an example. While a lot of what’s in that book doesn’t apply to Pittsburgh, it’s shaped the opinions I will express below insofar as politics shaped what public housing became, so I’m just putting that out there.
Overcrowding and substandard living conditions had been a problem in cities since the industrial revolution found them, but the problem became particularly acute during the Great Depression, when new construction fell off despite high demand. The National Housing Act of 1937 sought to alleviate this problem. Sort of. There was opposition from developers, who felt they couldn’t compete with government subsidies, particularly in Pittsburgh. Rather than a comprehensive housing program, it was essentially a one-off; projects were planned, but there was no sustained funding for future developments. Furthermore, the whole thing was pitched more as a jobs program for laid-off tradesmen than a solution to the housing problem. Nonetheless, the newly-created Pittsburgh Housing Authority broke ground on Bedford Dwellings in 1938 and completed it in 1940.
Bedford Dwellings is on the outskirts of the Hill District, built on the northern side of Bedford Ave. at the edge of a steep hillside. The site previously contained Greenlee Field, home of the defunct Pittsburgh Crawfords Negro League team, and a brickyard. In contrast to the slum clearance ethos that became synonymous with housing projects, very few people were displaced. At the time, there was no stigma to living in public housing; it was just an option for people who were down on their luck, and in the 1930s most people could sympathize. Public housing was originally intended for the working class. And to be temporary; the idea was that residents would be able to find permanent housing once the market recovered and the shortage was over. In the meantime, it was better that they lived in new, comfortable surroundings, rather than slums where they could fall victim to disease, vice, and crime.
With the start of World War II, the Depression had ended and industrial workers were in higher demand than ever. With Pittsburgh’s mills at capacity, temporary housing for industrial workers became a priority, and the Federal spigot was turned back on. In 1949, Congress authorized the program on a permanent basis, but with the Korean War and other things taking priority, funding became a problem. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, housing authorities became increasingly cost-conscious and were building new projects to lower and lower standards, both in terms of amenities and overall build quality. While the bare-bones nature of these units was often justified on a “beggars can’t be choosers” basis, the postwar construction boom gave potential tenants better options. In the 1930s, the Pittsburgh Housing Authority limited relief families to a quota of 20% of the available units in a development. As the decades rolled on, the lower standards meant that the units they owned couldn’t attract many people willing to pay full freight. This caused a snowball effect—the program was designed so that the Federal government would fund construction, and maintenance would be paid for out of rents. But as more and more residents required subsidies, there was less and less money available.
The death blow for public housing was the Brooke Amendments, passed in 1967. Slum clearance had displaced an uncountable number of low-income families who simply couldn’t afford to pack up for the suburbs. Racism didn’t help. Urban decay didn’t help. And public housing authorities were still charging rents that assumed a working class income. The Brooke Amendments stipulated that a tenant would have to pay no more than 25% of his income in rent, and prioritized housing for the poorest applicants, eliminating any possibility for a mixed-income community. Working families, now required to pay 25% of their income to live in projects, found better housing for the same price, leaving only the poorest of the poor.
This was as true in Pittsburgh as anywhere else. In 1942, 20% of public housing residents were receiving assistance, in line with Housing Authority guidelines. By 1952 these limits had been relaxed, but the number had only risen to 23%. By 1972, nearly half of residents were receiving welfare, and by 1996, a staggering 95% were. The effect on the budget tells a similar story. In 1940, every public housing authority in the nation was self-sufficient. In 1969, the year the Brook Amendments took effect, the amount spent by HUD on operating expenses was minimal. By 1999, HUD subsidies nationwide had increased to 2.8 billion. The 1970s was when, in the words of David Rusk “public housing began to look like public housing”. Once again, Pittsburgh didn’t escape any of these problems. The units were old and, without a maintenance program, leaking plumbing and cracking plaster were ubiquitous. 600 units were vacant in 1976, not due to lack of demand, but because they were uninhabitable. The Housing Authority was mismanaged and facing bankruptcy due to a high rate of delinquency.
In 1974, national legislation aimed to shift some of the burden off of overextended and mismanaged local housing authorities and onto private landlords. Section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act established a program whereby eligible families would receive vouchers to rent private housing. The act called for two types of subsidies: “Tenant-based” vouchers simply let a family rent an apartment from a private landlord who was willing to accept the voucher. “Unit-based” vouchers allowed a local housing authority to select units in privately-owned buildings and commit vouchers to them. For whatever reason, whites generally received assistance through the first program, and blacks through the second. The upshot was that the privately-owned “Section 8 ghettos” became indistinguishable from their public counterparts.
By 1980, the transformation was complete. The poorest of the poor were usually single mothers, often on drugs, with children growing up unsupervised and without direction. Residents who had remained from the early days were gradually either moving to greener pastures or dying out. In 1940, the face of public housing was clean, mixed-income apartments for working class people down on their luck. By 1990 it was crime ridden shitholes for people with literally nowhere else to go.
5E. Bedford Dwellings: Its Present and Future
Bedford Dwellings might not be the worst project in Pittsburgh, but there's strong emphasis on the word “might”. I mentioned in my last installment that the Hill District’s reputation for crime is a bit overblown, but 75% of what does happen emanates from Bedford Dwellings at Chauncey Drive. Since the city divided the Hill into several semi-bogus units within close proximity, the knuckleheads drag down not only the project neighborhood but parts of the Middle Hill and Crawford-Roberts as well. It seems like every shooting that isn’t in the project itself is either a street or two off of it or at least involved people who lived there.
The response of the city, of course, is to tear it down. An extension built in the early 1950s was demolished during the late-90s/early-2000s mania to get rid of these hellholes, but this proved ill-advised; it turns out that the people causing the crime don’t just disappear when you tear down their homes but move to other areas. Some of these areas have their own gangs that don’t particularly like people from your old project. Others are already on the ropes and could go either up or down depending on how many shootings are in the news. Wherever they go, the result isn’t good.
So the city has recently viewed public housing demolitions as a long-term process. Part of the original project that was demolished was turned into a mixed-income development in the early 2000s and while I wouldn’t want to live there personally, it’s noticeably better than Bedford Dwellings. There are 25 or so original building remaining, and the city plans on demolishing them all over the next several years, but they aren’t going to do so until they have units available where they can relocate the residents. Some of them will be going to a new mixed-use mixed-income development in nearby Uptown, which is currently under construction. It also looks like they’re doing something with the site of the 1950s expansion, though I can’t seem to find any details on this. Something similar is supposed to go on the current site.
Will this work? We’ll discuss that in the next section on Terrace Village. But before we do that, I want to mention two things. First, in addition to the project, I’m also including Milliones Manor, the former Western Pennsylvania Tuberculosis Hospital that has since been converted into housing for low-income seniors. It has its own problems, but I don’t want to go down another rabbit hole. There is also a street of private homes. The other thing I wanted to mention is that “prewar” is not a good guide to whether architecture is good or not. Bedford Dwellings was built in 1938 in a barracks style that was popular for public housing developments in the early years. When Crawford Square was being planned in the early-1990s, this was specifically cited as an example of what not to do, i.e. build structures without any regard for the context of the neighborhood they inhabit. One of the themes I’m noticing here is that all of the bad ideas attributed to postwar urban planning were actually pretty popular for a long time before, there just wasn’t either enough money or enough motivation to put them into effect.
5F. Terrace Village: Is This the Future?
In 1937, Ruch's Hill was a steep, lightly populated eminence on the outskirts of the Hill District. What this meant for the housing authority was that land was cheap, few people would have to be displaced, and the existing structures were in dreadful condition. In 1939, crews began cutting off the top 100 feet of the hill, eventually moving some 2.4 million cubic yards of material to create a level site for the Allequippa Terrace housing project. Shortly thereafter, nearby Goat Hill met a similar fate, and was turned into a project called Addison Terrace, with the two projects being collectively known as Terrace Village (at least they are true terraces) and now designated as the semi-bogus neigborhood of the same name.
For most of its history, Terrace Village suffered the same fate as Bedford Dwellings and the other housing projects around the country. But with these problems becoming abundantly clear by the 1990s, Federal housing policy began to move in a different direction. A lot of the bureaucratic hurdles were removed, the tying of rent to income was relaxed (though the Brooke Amendment remains in place), and rather than requiring often impractical renovations of distressed projects, money was made available for wholesale demolition. As most of Terrace Village was, by this time, past the point where it was worth saving, Allequippa Terrace was mostly demolished in the early 2000s and replaced with a privately owned, mixed-income development.
The new Oak Hill Apartments have largely been a success, albeit a low-key one. About a half-dozen of the original buildings were renovated and retained, but it's mostly a mix of low-rise apartment buildings and town homes. From what I can find, about 60% of the units are subsidized. When Allequippa Terrace was demolished and moved to private control, background checks and other strict requirements for residents were implemented, but former residents who wanted to stay were permitted to. The area was thus initially slow to improve. But a high-profile murder around 2009 got a lot of bad press for the landlord, and they started strictly enforcing lease terms in an attempt to force as many of the troublemakers as possible out. To be fair, some of the problems endemic to low-income neighborhoods still exist here—loud music, public arguments, smoking in corridors, people blocking traffic while they sit there with their windows down talking to a guy on the sidewalk, youth verbally harassing unaccompanied women—but it's nothing like the old days, with gang activity, drug dealing, and almost daily shootings.
Architecturally, it's a mixed bag. Nominally, it was built in a New Urbanist style, but, like Crawford Square, certain allowances were made that prevent it from being a prime example of the genre. For instance, the original project was built at a time when winding, suburban streets were seen as the intelligent way to allow for automobiles but limit their impact. Oak Hill has retained this street layout; there was no previous street grid to revert to, and tearing up the streets and rerouting all the utilities would be ridiculous. But what exists now makes it impossible to give the neighborhood a true urban feel. The townhomes aren't modernist nightmares like the original barracks-style buildings were, but they don't much resemble anything that previously existed anywhere in Pittsburgh. Frame rowhouses do exist in Pittsburgh, but not really in the Hill, and not in the style in which these were built. The apartments are even worse, in that they ditch contextualism entirely and instead look like something from an exurban college campus. No provision was made for any kind of business district, with the sole exception of a neighborhood store that supposedly has good sandwiches but not good enough to make a special visit for.
Nonetheless, the development was successful enough that, a decade later, a similar project was built on the former site of Addison Terrace. While smaller, this development hewed closer to traditionalist styles, though it is all row houses and no apartments. I think a friend of mine actually owns a house built by the same developer in a different part of the city, because they have the same "trying, but not too hard" look to them as does his house. I've seen Pittsburgh's housing stock described as "disturbingly heterogenous", unlike Baltimore or Philly, which have rows of identical houses. This isn't a difficult feat to achieve organically, but it presents a nightmare for a developer who isn't going to do a custom design for each unit. So it looks like what they did put together a list of architectural features that they could mix and match and hit the randomize button. So half the houses are brick and half are siding, some have dormers and some don't, colors are variable, etc. The effect isn't entirely convincing, but they did what they could, and it's certainly the best iteration of affordable housing we can hope to expect, unless we just want to go full-on modern again.
The one thing that still gets me, though, is the setbacks. Ostensibly, the purpose of these is for privacy, since it's a bit disconcerting to have a sidewalk passerby walking directly in front of your window. Keep him 15 feet away and it solves this problem. But that's all it does, and all you get out of it is an unusably small lawn you now have to maintain. The traditional way of solving this was raising the first floor about four feet above street level and entering via a stoop. That way, people could walk right in front and not see in the windows. The reason they didn't do that here, aside from zoning issues they probably didn't want to fight, is that these houses are all built on slabs (assumption based on my friend's house), and without a basement you can't really raise it up that far. And building basements might not have been an option here, since removing 100 feet of dirt means these could be sitting too close to bedrock, and other parts of the Hill have had mine subsidence issues, so maybe it just wasn't practical here. But combine that with the weird alleys every few houses, the grade issues, and the winding roads, and nobody's mistaking this for part of the old Hill, even as the development creeps into the old Hill.
Given the recent discussions about architecture we've been having here, there's a question I'd like to pose to those in the group who have participated in those discussions: Assuming that modern construction techniques and budgetary constraints make it impossible to credibly recreate traditional urban forms, is it preferable to remain faithful to the existing urban fabric via an ersatz traditionalism as seen above, or should we burn it all down and create a new urban space in the modern mold, similar to what's going on in the Strip District?
5G. A Note on Crime
For all the social pathologies low-income housing projects have been known to cause, crime is the most salient. The trouble with evaluating crime is that it's often context dependent and is subject to our own biases. When we talk about a "bad neighborhood", there is something ineffable that we are trying to express; this superficially means crime, but not strictly. For instance, if you look at the top neighborhoods in Pittsburgh by overall crime rate, Downtown and the South Side Flats are easily the top two, year in and year out. Yet nobody considers these to be bad areas; indeed, they're among the most popular destinations in the city. This second fact underscores the reason the crime rate is so high—crimes require people, and we think of crime rate as the likelihood of being a crime victim based on the number of people in an area. But crime rate only considers the resident population, and one need not be a resident to be either a victim or criminal. So while some areas may have a nominally high crime rate, it's actually pretty low on a per-pedestrian basis.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have the hair-trigger suburbanites who think that anywhere with more than a few black faces on the streets, derelict houses, and Boost Mobile stores is a dangerous ghetto, regardless of what the crime statistics say. These people have invariably never spent any real time in the neighborhoods they criticize and are thus unqualified to cast judgment. In contrast to these are the people who insist that any ghetto isn't really dangerous because all the violence is targeted, or because more money is stolen daily on Wall Street, or there are just as many drug deals in Beverly Hills. And then there are the people who doubt the crime statistics themselves and go with their gut, claiming that they're unreliable due to reporting variations, or that we only need to worry about violent crime, or whatever. The upshot to all of this is that it makes it very difficult to say whether a neighborhood has really improved because a certain cohort will insist that it has, even if it hasn't, and another cohort will insist that it's still bad because they got sketched out once when driving through.
The City of Pittsburgh hasn't provided as much in the way of crime statistics since the big reporting switch a couple of years ago, but the data they do provide is of much higher quality than before. First, they include both total reported crimes and total reported incidents; the old data was skewed by, say, a guy breaks into a house and steals something and is charged with burglary and theft, which get counted as two crimes. The other thing is they started publishing non-fatal shooting data in addition to homicides, since these are obviously relevant but are hard to discern from the crimes charged. In attempting to determine how much of a crime reduction has taken place, I've avoided historical comparisons, since they can be influenced more by global trends than specific interventions. I've looked at sample rates from a variety of Pittsburgh neighborhoods to get a feel for the numbers, and specifically looked at comparable neighborhoods. I'm assuming that reporting rates are reasonably consistent between neighborhoods.
Anyway, Terrace Village had about 58 crimes per thousand people in 2024. That's about half of Bedford Dwellings. It's on par with the South Side Slopes, which we already discussed, and Polish Hill, which we'll discuss next time. These are valid comparisons, in my opinion, as they are primarily residential areas with no significant business district, although Polish Hill has some scattered businesses. On the violent crime front, Terrace Village has about 2 or 3 shootings a year since 2018, which is also comparable to the slopes, and also about half of what Bedford Dwellings has. Polish Hill has only had 2 shootings since 2018. The upshot of this is just to say that the model appears to have worked, providing a significant crime decrease compared with a traditional project and providing numbers in line withworking class white areas a comparable distance to the city center.
Neighborhood Grade: Project for both. As far as gentrification potential is concerned, for Bedford Dwellings it would require a significant number of market-rate apartments or for-sale units in whatever replaces the old project, and even then it would be dependent on a revitalization of the Hill District proper (as it's not a distinct neighborhood), so I wouldn't bet on it. I would assume that once all the troublemakers are gone the lack of spillover crime will lead to some kind of destigmatization that would make that possible, but given the decades-long stigma and lack of any real foundation I wouldn't hold my breath. As for Terrace Village, it may be safer and more racially and economically integrated than it's been in any time since the 1940s, but I don't see it ever becoming trendy. The neighborhood's relative lack of amenities, walkability, or housing to flip mean it won't jump onto the gentrification train even if nearby areas like the Lower Hill and Uptown eventually do. This is a good thing—Pittsburgh could use more affordable, safe, majority-black neighborhoods within the urban core.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
The problem with theories like this is that motivated reasoning leads one to the desired conclusion without considering that similar motivation can just as easily lead to other, equally plausible conclusions. So the marijuana leaf supposedly is a stand-in for the M in MS 13. Okay, but the plant has so many colloquial names that it would work with other letters as well. So it could also be a C (cannibas), or P (pot), or W (weed), or even L (leaf), or any number of other things. Then go to the smiley face for S, except that it could also just be F for face. And then it gets ridiculous. The cross is supposed to be a coverup for a 1. Or it's commonly used as a stand-in for a 1 (I've never heard this before, and I can't find any support for it online). And the skull is a coverup for a 3, which seems highly unlikely since there's nothing even remotely resembling a 3 in the skull. Or maybe the the two eyes and nose mean 3 (but the two eyes in the smiley face don't mean 2?). OR maybe skull in Spanish is clavera and 3 is the third letter of the alphabet, though cross in Spanish is cruz, so MS 33? Or maybe he just decided to mix a bunch of pictograms together like a bad metaphor. Or maybe the cross really means X and it's actually WF33. Or WD40.
In all seriousness, if you want to use any of this as evidence, you need to find a qualified expert to testify that these are actually MS-33 gang tattoos, not rely on crowdsourced Twitter speculation.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
This is a complicated procedural situation and while you're analysis is on the right track, it isn't quite correct and leads you to the wrong conclusion. New York didn't request an injunction in its lawsuit. For the court to issue an injunction, there has to be some kind of action involved (either for the opposing party to take or forbear from), and since the DOT has not engaged in any enforcement or threat of enforcement, such and action does not exist here. In other words, New York can't ask for an injunction, preliminary or permanent, because there isn't anything for the court to tell the Federal government to stop doing. New York is instead requesting declaratory judgment. In this case, New York has taken the position that the Secretary of Transportation does not have the authority to unilaterally rescind the approval, and is asking the court to confirm that position. If New York's position is correct, then they were never under any obligation to comply with the Secretary's request to begin with.
The strategic implications here are that, by filing suit in advance rather than waiting for the DOT to engage in some kind of enforcement action, New York gets is position on the record and throws the ball into the Federal government's court; the reason they went this route to begin with was specifically because it allows them to avoid compliance until a court has ruled on the matter. Strategically, New York's move here is so slick it makes me want to cry. Courts in general don't like to grand preliminary injunctions or TROs, and the standards for getting them are high: You have to demonstrate irreparable harm and a strong chance of prevailing on the merits. Suppose that New York waits until DOT begins enforcement, and also suppose that the case is a tossup on the merits. Now New York has to ask for a preliminary injunction while the case is pending, and they probably aren't going to get one. So now even if they prevail on the merits, they have to pause the program for the entire time the case is pending.
By asking for declaratory judgment in advance, the onus of getting preliminary injunctive relief is now on the Feds. Now that there's a live dispute over their authority, they can't just unilaterally assert it; they have to ask the court. And since the bar for getting this kind of relief is high, they aren't likely to get it. And if they simply don't seek the relief at all but instead try to penalize the state retroactively if they end up prevailing, it's going to be hard for them to do, since if the matter was so important why didn't they file for a preliminary injunction?
Rov_Scam
11d ago
One thing I've noticed in my years of practicing law is that probate courts are, in general, more favorable to questionable claims that involve people who are actively involved in the family and not distant relatives. While the legal reasoning may be impeccable, the justices probably secretly considered the fact that Yale and Dorothy weren't exactly close if he didn't even know that his sister died, and that his brother didn't even know if he was still alive. Then take it back one more level and have a trust for the benefit of the brother-in-law's heirs trying to put a claim on a piece of property 25 years after the estate settled. And on the other hand you have a nephew who was close enough to act as the executor of his aunt's estate. No judge is going to undo a done deal for the benefit of some strangers unless there's compelling evidence that the law requires it, like some sort of evidence that the nephew was intentionally keeping his uncle in the dark about Dorothy's death so he could inherit the property. BTW, the actual terminology is Supreme Court, Supreme Court—Appellate Division, and Court of Appeals. New York is just more egalitarian in that they believe all their courts are important enough to have the Supreme Court label.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
I have neither the time nor the inclination to write a legal opinion outlining any proposed limits of judicial interference with executive action. What I will say is that from a practical perspective, it doesn't matter. You can propose all sorts of scary scenarios you want where the president is required to wage nuclear war based on a court order for something seemingly trivial, but I'm not moved by them for the simple reason that such a system is vastly less scary than the one we're currently presumably operating under. Per the government's arguments, the president—one man—could achieve any of these insane and evil ends on a whim, with no check whatsoever other than the courage of subordinates to defy orders. The argument in favor of this position is that the president is at least elected, and thus reflects the will of the people. But leaving it to the courts is the safer option. If the courts did order the president to overthrow a foreign government it would only be after several levels of review that requires at least some consensus among multiple people. I'm not arguing that the court should necessarily have this much power, or that the president shouldn't have a large amount of discretion, but even if we take the slippery slope all the way to the bottom, I still don't see what the huge concern is relative to the existing structure.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
The district court order the government is appealing requires them to provide updates and outline steps being taken to effectuate his release. The government is arguing that they aren't required to do that. I don't think anyone is under the impression that El Salvador wouldn't return him if the Trump administration were serious about getting him back.
I heard a young person describe the Depp–Heard trial as the Simpson Trial of their generation and, no. Not even close. Those who weren't around for it don't understand how big OJ was, because it's unlikely anything will again be as big for at least another few decades. I got about 50 channels at the time and the trial was always on 3 or 4 of the channels, and sometimes it was on most of the channels. Minor figures like Kato and Rosa Lopez were household names. I found a book about the murders in a garbage can within a month of them, seemingly not enough time for a book to be written let alone published, read, and discarded.
The only other crime in American history that generated a comparable level of interest was the Lindbergh kidnapping, and that was in the 30s. I think that after a media circus to that degree the media and public as a whole take a step back,.and it can only happen again once anyone old enough to have any real memory of such an event is too old to have had any involvement with the coverage. Maybe once everyone who covered the OJ trial is retired and the zoomers are running the media machine, we'll get a case of similar interest, but I think this is the kind of thing that can only happen once every 50 years or so.
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