Today’s Metro New York reports on a scary crime wave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

Of Brooklyn’s police precincts, Williamsburg’s 90th, which encompasses the gentrifying South Side plus its central and east sections, has seen the greatest rise in crime over the past year — 13.49 percent — according to Compstat data. The neighboring 94th precinct, which includes Williamsburg’s tonier North Side and Greenpoint, has seen a 6.38 percent crime hike — the borough’s second-highest increase.

“Gang violence in the community [has] re-emerged into something we haven’t seen since the 1980s,” said William Orellana of community group El Puente.

Williamsburg (and neighboring Greenpoint and Bushwick) may have the highest density of artists of any neighborhood in the country.  And although there was a vibrant Latino arts community there for decades, the Williamsburg of today is best known as a hipster haven, thanks in large part to the huge influx of (mostly White) artists who’ve come in droves since the mid-90s.

Reading about the sudden surge in gang violence made me think of a post I read on the Freakonomics blog yesterday:

The paradox of economic growth is that the same mechanisms that create great wealth –secure property rights and rule of law guaranteed by an independent judiciary — also give rise to great inequalities in its distribution. Private property provides a powerful incentive to produce wealth for oneself while simultaneously denying that same wealth to others. Wealth does trickle down to the rest of the population, but often not fast enough to avoid political strife and worse….

Economic libertarians argue that this growing inequality is unimportant: aren’t the poor of 2008 still far better off in terms of real income, health, life expectancy, and material comfort than even the richest citizen in 1900?

The fallacy of this argument is that human beings do not measure their well-being by absolute real income or longevity — but rather in relative terms. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, a wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s brother-in-law.

Further, a growing body of research reveals that the social and medical costs of inequality are high…. Among both American states and Canadian provinces, homicide rates closely track income inequality, even after the absolute level of income itself is carefully controlled for. That homicide is not driven by poverty alone is demonstrated by Canada, where, because of aggressive redistributive policies, the poorest provinces have the lowest inequalities and also the lowest number of violent deaths.

It’s impossible to say right now what exactly is or isn’t going on in Williamsburg.  But I know for a fact that the extremely rapid gentrification of the past 10 years has created a lot of resentment and pent-up hostility towards the newcomers who are changing the face of the neighborhood. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that this is a contributing factor in the current crime wave.  The irony is that artists tend to see themselves as victims of the gentrification process (since they can rarely afford to stick around in a neighborhood after it’s become hip), while to other neighborhood residents they look an awful lot like the perpetrators of that gentrification.

This all points to the importance of sustainable economic development built on a foundation of neighborhood self-determination.  Rising real estate prices cannot be the only measure of urban economic progress.  As with any ecological system, diversity creates strength.  As a society, we desperately need to develop better strategies for urban economic sustainability.  And as artists, we can’t continue to feign ignorance of our role in these processes.

Watching the Democratic National Convention last night, I was struck by one of the most significant but rarely discussed aspects of a potential Obama presidency.  Barack Obama would be the first president in memory - to my knowledge the first since Teddy Roosevelt - to come from an urban background.  He grew up in Honolulu and has spent time in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Boston.  This isn’t merely a biographical curiosity.  It contributes to an unprecedented focus on urban policy for a major national politician.

America’s cities are stereotyped either as enclaves of effete, intellectual socialists or as concrete wastelands packed tight with welfare-dependent leeches.  Authentic American individualism and entrepreneurship comes from the midwest, right?  Not so much.  The reality is that our cities provide massive subsidies to rural America.  This is perhaps best illustrated by a report from the Tax Foundation showing a breakdown of which states receive the most federal aid compared to their tax contribution and which receive the least.  (If you’re feeling feisty, check out this hilarious but informative rant from the day after the 2004 election.)

Over the coming years, America’s dependence on its cities is only going to grow, and our cities are going to play a bigger and more important role in the 21st century economy than they have in decades.  Mainstream policymakers are finally starting to understand the creative economy - which is inextricably linked to urban environments - and its potency as an engine for economic development.  Cities are hotbeds of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.  At the same time, rising fuel costs and environmental consciousness highlight the benefits of mass transit and population density.

Yet the myth of rural/suburban authenticity and urban sloth is so entrenched that politicians with ambitions to national office wind up tripping over each other in an effort to see who can most shamelessly pander to the farm lobby.

All of this goes to show why it’s significant that Barack Obama has quietly made urban policy a centerpiece of his campaign platform.  His urban policy plan contains some of his most detailed prescriptions, including symbolic steps such as the creation of a White House Office on Urban Policy and major investments in things like public-private business incubators.

The Obama campaign has published an arts platform as well, but I believe its ultimate potential impact on the arts community would not be as great as that of a more broad-based investment in America’s cities.

Cities provide the social context for so much of our collective artistic output.  Yet rising real estate prices, deteriorating infrastructure, and a host of other problems are driving artists from cities like New York in droves.  Some are landing in places like Philadelphia that are savvier and more progressive regarding urban cultural policy.  But many others are bidding farewell to the US altogether and heading for foreign cultural hotspots like Berlin.

Retaining a vibrant arts and cultural sector in American cities won’t require massive public subsidies or a huge increase in the NEA’s budget.  Artists are experts at making do with very little and generally rise to the challenge when given a chance to prove their worth through merit-based processes.  What we need is a proverbial level playing field.  In part, that means paying our cities even a fraction of the attention we’ve historically paid to rural America.

P.S. - Mainly out of genuine curiosity but also in the interest of fairness I did some research on John McCain’s urban policy and arts policy positions.  Alas, it turns out that he doesn’t have either (at least not published by the campaign).  The only comments I could find from McCain on urban issues were, uh, a bit scary.

If you’re feeling wonky or if you’re just looking for respected sources to cite in your next grant application, you should check out PolicyArchive.org, a new website from the Center for Governmental Studies.

PolicyArchive is an innovative, new digital archive of global, non-partisan public policy research. It makes use of the power, efficiency, and economy of modern Internet technology to collect and disseminate summaries and full texts, videos, reports, briefs, and multimedia material of think tank, university, government, and foundation-funded policy research. It offers a subject index, an internal search engine, useful abstracts, email notifications of newly added research, and will soon expand to offer information on researchers and funders, and even user-generated publication reviews. Over time, it will grow to include policy content from international and corporate organizations.

A quick perusal found a fairly small number of listings on cultural policy.  The site’s brand new, however, so hopefully it will grow over time.

Ray D. Madoff, writing in this morning’s NY Times, laments the news that Leona Helmsley bequeathed most of her $8 billion fortune to a foundation dedicated to the care and welfare of dogs:

The charitable deduction constitutes a subsidy from the federal government. The government, in effect, makes itself a partner in every charitable bequest. In Mrs. Helmsley’s case, given that her fortune warranted an estate tax rate of 45 percent, her $8 billion donation for dogs is really a gift of $4.4 billion from her and $3.6 billion from you and me.

To put it in perspective, our contribution to Mrs. Helmsley’s cause equals approximately half of what we spend on Head Start, a program that benefits 900,000 children.

What will we get for our $3.6 billion? An eternal monument to Leona Helmsley’s generosity toward dogs.

First off, why all the canine hate?  Okay, so it’s true that few of us share Leona’s priorities, or at least her apparent enthusiasm.  But I don’t share all of the federal Government’s priorities either.  At the risk of getting political - would you rather than $3.6 billion be spent for the care and welfare of dogs or to buy bombs that will be blown up somewhere in the middle east?

This is the beauty of the charitable deduction.  It decentralizes decisions about which public services are most deserving of support.  Sometimes people make bad decisions.  Sometimes they accomplish brilliant, ambitious things that would never come out of government (witness the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).  If you believe in the power of markets and the wisdom of crowds, then you believe that, in the aggregate, this is an efficient way of ensuring that society’s concerns are addressed.

Of course, there are limitations.  These are defined by Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.  As explained on the IRS website:

The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.  The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.

(Notice that preventing cruelty to animals is expressly mentioned, so Leona’s gift seems unambiguously within established guidelines for charitability.  Also notice that there’s nary a mention of the arts…  That’s right, we fall under “education”, a seemingly precarious position that makes me nervous whenever I contemplate it!)

So Madoff’s pretty misguided on this point. However he raises another issue that deserves to be taken very seriously:

Most such foundations perform no charitable work but only give money to organizations that do. The law requires foundations to spend a minimum of just 5 percent of their assets a year, thus helping ensure their perpetual existence, and their donors’ immortality. In meeting this requirement, foundations are allowed to count fees paid to their trustees and other administrative expenses.

In 2003, legislation was introduced in Congress that would have required private foundations to devote the full 5 percent to charitable expenditures. But the foundations complained that this would threaten their perpetual existence, and the bill did not pass.

Some people who establish perpetual charitable trusts may assume that their philanthropic dollars will go further if the trust distributes only its investment income and preserves its principal. Anyone familiar with the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs knows the importance of not spending principal. However, because a dollar spent today is worth more than a dollar spent several years from now, in many cases, the sum of payments made over time — even in perpetuity — never equals the value of the original principal.

Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of finance knows that he’s right.  The financial math leads inescapably to the conclusion that private foundations would be maximally effective if they gave away all of their assets within their first year of giving.  Of course, this reasoning fails to consider that wiser giving decisions will presumably be made if there’s a little more time to make them.

So where is the middle ground?  Reintroducing (and passing) that 2003 legislation would be a good start.  By requiring that operating expenses be above and beyond the 5% minimum annual payouts, you ensure that the more efficient (or less profligate) a foundation is, the better shot it has at immortality.  Another approach would be to benchmark the minimum payout threshold to investment returns, thereby ensuring that the foundation’s endowment doesn’t outpace its giving.