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Los Angeles tries to overcome Urban Doom Loop with new Hollywood Boulevard streetscape: this approach almost never works

The City of Los Angeles recently announced plans to “renovate” the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the world-famous 1.3-mile section of Hollywood Boulevard centered on the Chinese Theater. Pretty much every tourist who first visits Los Angeles walks along Hollywood Boulevard trying to figure out who Charles Bickford was (hint: great character actor with two stars, one for movies and one for TV, but largely forgotten except for folks like me who love classic films and Turner Classic Movies). And all stop in the Chinese Theater Courtyard to measure their shoes against John Wayne’s boot prints (surprise: he wore a size 6 boot!).

I first explored the Walk of Fame when I moved to LA in the mid-70s. Back then, it was a dirty but exhilarating cacophony of tourists, hookers, druggies, failed actors, Hare Krishna, and insane traffic, with it’s parade of cruisers on weekend nights. My pals and I would go there at night to catch a movie, have chocolate sundaes at the long-gone CC Browns Ice Cream, and enjoy the scene before going west for music at the Roxy and Whiskey on the Sunset Strip. In the mid-80s I owned a house in the Hollywood Hills right above Hollywood Boulevard and would take my kids to see movies like Tremors and Honey I Shrunk the Kids at the Chinese, Pacific, and Egyptian Theaters. After moving to Seattle in the ’90s, I’d often stay at the Rosevelt or W Hotels on Hollywood Boulevard when I came back on business trips. As chaotic as it was, it was fun and I never felt unsafe. But, as Bob Dylan put it, Things Have Changed: 

“The Hollywood Walk of Fame has become overrun with homelessness and violent crime, leaving tourists and locals feeling unsafe. The iconic LA landmark, once the epitome of glitz and glamour, is disappointing visitors with its dirty sidewalks and repulsing locals who have experienced violent attacks.”

The City of LA solution is to “rejuvenate the iconic strip’s sparkle with a much-needed renovation including wider sidewalks and more trees.” This is a classic government response to an Urban Doom Loop that rarely works. Think about it: wider sidewalks provide more room for more homeless and more trees are likely to make folks feel less safe as there will be more places for bad guys, real or imagined, to hide. Still, cities find this kind of hardscape improvement irresistible as it gives the appearance of doing something (“the Do Something Disease”), while providing photo ops for politicians at ground-breaking and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Examples are legion.

  • The basic “improve the hardscape” concept is a classic progressive ideal (as in early-20th-Century progressive, not today’s progressives): people are essentially good so it must be the environment they’re forced to live in that creates problems. This led to a cascade of federal laws and programs, starting with the New Deal era Housing Authority Act of 1937 to build public housing, the Housing Act of 1949 that brought us wholesale slum clearance and urban renewal (more properly termed “urban removal”), the Housing and Community Development Act of 1964 that created HUD, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 that established Section 8 housing, the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program started in 1977, the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act that setup the Continuum of Care (CoC) system, and so on.
  • When I was Economic Development / Grants Coordinator for the City of Lynwood, CA in the late ’70s, the “white flight” following the 1965 Civil Unrest in adjacent Watts left the City with almost no retail and lots of vacant buildings like closed Montgomery Wards and Sears stores. Even with large redevelopment subsidies, I was mostly unsuccessful in attracting new retail, but I wrote many grants for hardscape improvements, including bike lanes; renovating the City’s indoor Olympic-sized pool, a closed relic of the glory days of the 50s and unused because the City lacked the funding to hire lifeguards; and new restrooms to replace the closed ones in the City parks. The last was my favorite; we had a big ribbon-cutting on a Friday, and by Monday, the new restrooms were so badly vandalized that the restrooms had to be closed again. Just before I left for a new job, we got a new City Manager who thought the solution was to adopt retail boulevard design guidelines based on the then-popular Marin County weathered wood storefronts, but he was fired before implementing this bit of hardscape lunacy.
  • From 1981 to 1991, I was Redevelopment Manager for the nearby City of Inglewood, which also had lost most retail due to white flight. Before I arrived, the City had created storefront design easements along downtown streets and paid for the installation of blue awnings for no apparent reason other than that the City Manager liked them. When I assumed the position, I found blocks of vacant storefronts, second-hand stores, storefront churches, etc., with dilapidated and torn blue awnings! Among the many hopeless projects I was given were finding a new retailer to take over a vacant department store that the City had previously bought in hopes of keeping the tenant operating; propping up the City’s last two car dealers, Cadillac and Porsche, before they fled; and trying to convince Circuit City to open up a store on free city land (I was told by their national real estate manager that Inglewood “didn’t have the right demographics”). I ended up working on many useless streetscape projects and loan/grant programs for imaginary retail users. I did manage to negotiate a deal for the second Price Club (forerunner of Costco) in the LA area on land we condemned and sold for almost nothing, but had to relocate hundreds of low-income African American families and demolish their housing in the process (in the spirit of urban renewal, “one must break a few eggs to make an omelet”).

Since 1993, S + A has written many funded economic development, community development, and redevelopment grants, mostly for cities. Taking us back to the top of this post, about 25 years ago we wrote a funded $4M HUD grant for the City of LA to build the parking structure under the then-proposed Hollywood Highland Shopping Center adjacent to the Chinese Theater and Walk of Fame. The Shopping Center was a much-ballyhooed project, as it sits above a B-Line Metro Station, and was one of the first large-scale transit oriented development (TOD) in LA. The planners and politicians, however, failed to take into account who actually takes subways in LA— mostly moderate- and low-income workers, since the city remains almost entirely car-dependent. Few affluent folks are going to take the Metro to a random shopping center, as it’s much easier, faster, and safer to drive. Then along came rampant homelessness, organized shoplifting, and street violence, with COVID being the final straw. The Hollywood and Highland Shopping Center was vacant for three years until a private equity outfit bought it and spent $100M to renovate it (only in LA could a 20-year-old, massively-subsidized shopping center need renovation).

Perhaps the now-reopened and renamed Ovation Hollywood will be bolstered by the Walk of Fame renovation, but I doubt it— homelessness and crime continue to grow and Metro ridership is still only 80% of what it was in 2019. And the Los Angeles Times  recently reported: “With crime up and ridership down, Metro struggles to move homeless people off trains”. Would you spend over an hour taking the Metro from Santa Monica via DTLA to get to Ovation Hollywood for some shopping and a movie? Quite an urban adventure, especially at night, and not for the faint of heart.

The good news for you grant-seekers and us grant-writers is that there will soon be a flood of new federal, state, local, and foundation grant programs to tackle Urban Doom Loops in LA and other cities, large and small. Put on sunscreen and wax your board, as it will be a grant Surfin’ Safari right after the 2024 election, no matter who wins.

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Don’t Believe Everything You See On TV or Government Websites: The FY ’24 HRSA NAP NOFO Shows Why Forecasted RFPs Aren’t A Sure Thing

Note: this is the first post written by our new Associate, Liz Rego (erego@seliger.com).

Some federal agencies, like the Department of Education and the Health Services and Resources Administration (HRSA), but not all, publish forecasts of when certain funding opportunities will be issued, usually before the start of the federal fiscal year on October 1.

Case in point: Last July 3, HRSA published a forecast on grants.gov that the FY 2024 New Access Points (NAP) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO, which is HRSA-speak for RFP), would be published on December 12 with a February 2024 deadline. A new NAP NOFO is a big deal, as they are only published every three years or so and NAP is the best way for an FQHC to expand or for a nonprofit healthcare provider to become an FQHC. Unsurprisingly, when the NOFO did not appear on December 12, our FQHC clients started sending “what gives” e-mails. We guessed it had something to do with the screwed up FY ’24 federal budget process, and this was confirmed when one FQHC client reached out to her HRSA Program Officer and received the following response: “Although FY24 NAP funding has been forecasted, HRSA does not currently have a NAP funding opportunity open and does not plan to post it until we have a better sense of the FY 2024 budget.” So, when congress finally reconciles the different versions of the FY 2024 budget passed in December by the Senate and House, there will be a deluge of RFPs published quickly, with grant-writing chaos ensuing. HRSA recently undated their grants.gov NAP forecast, with the NOFO now expected to published on February 12 and has an April 12 deadline. Potential applicants can curse the federal government and those lying forecasters, but the sad reality is that the “Golden Rule” of grant seeking is that those with the gold make the rules.

To be fair, many forecasts are not any more accurate than projected RFP issuance dates. Meteorologists, for example, get a bad rap. For as long as the “TV weatherman” has existed, meteorologists have been the subject of ridicule in rain or shine, quite literally. Growing up in the Northeast, there was nothing more exciting for a kid than a snow day, and nothing more disappointing than a “false alarm.” All too many times, however, Mike Seidel* told us we were expecting a massive blizzard, schools announced closures, we pulled out our snowsuits** and sleds for the next day, and by 10 o’clock the next morning it was clear that we wouldn’t see even an inch of snow that day. As upsetting as this was for those of us hoping to make a snowman, at least we kids still got the day off from school; it was infinitely more upsetting for our parents, who were now stuck home with their children on a Tuesday for no reason, and those children now had absolutely no desire to go outside in the snow-less 25-degree weather. My father reserved some choice words for Mike and his fellow meteorologists on days like these, but to paraphrase sans expletives, he always said something to the effect of, “Those idiots are the only people who get paid to guess, and they get paid whether they are right or wrong so why would they care?!”

Okay, so the G-rated paraphrasing of my blue-collar “Masshole” father sounds absolutely nothing like him, but I’m sure you and your parents have said some variant of the same thing. I learned at a young age not to get my hopes up for snow, no matter what the weatherman says. Now having lived in Southern California for 14 years, ten of which were “dry years,” I’ve learned to apply that same “snow day” logic to rain forecasts. Whenever a friend says, “It’s supposed to rain this weekend!” my response is invariably, “Yeah, we’ll see.” Sometimes it does, but it seems that most of the time, it doesn’t. Since entering the world of grant writing, however, I have found that I can no longer agree 100% with my father’s sentiment; I need to give meteorologists a break- they are definitely not the only people getting paid to make predictions that seem to be inaccurate more often than not. It’s now part of my job to learn when “snow day” reasoning is required. There are some things that are just impossible to predict: Kanye West, the weather, and the government.

A forecasted RFP is not only similar to a questionable weather forecast, but also a bit like a film preview. How many of us got excited in 2019 for the last Bond film, No Time To Die, only to see its release delayed six times until October 2021? Maybe you’re not a Bond fan, but I think no matter what, we all became frustrated after being fed two full years of marketing for the film before it actually came to theaters. Life doesn’t always go as planned. In the case of, well, every film produced in the last four years, the Covid-19 pandemic was to blame for throwing a wrench into the works. In the case of recently forecasted RFPs, the federal government is to blame for the holdup. Yes, I know, you’re shocked!

When we research available grants, there is a reason that Seliger + Associates usually does not pay heed to “forecasted” RFPs- they aren’t real yet, and we know better than to create hype over the hypothetical, with the exception of opportunities like NAP, which are so highly anticipated by FQHCs (and we work for many FQHCs). A forecasted RFP is well-intentioned, and everyone appreciates a heads-up, but in the nonprofit world and the world of grant writing, it doesn’t do much good to plan for a grant opportunity that doesn’t yet exist. It’s a bit like being “engaged to be engaged,” if you know any of those couples (apologies if you are one of those couples). You either have a ring, or you don’t- no one cares if you “want to, you know, get a ring in six months maybe,” after you “figure some things out.” Funders are like significant others. They are the best. But letting us know in July that they plan on having funds for us in December, after they figure some things out, doesn’t help much. Then, December comes around after we waited patiently, but they still don’t have the ring- I mean funds- there’s no marriage proposal- I mean RFP- and we’re extremely disappointed, but we have no right to be because we’re the dummies that got our hopes up for nothing instead of going out and finding another S.O.! I mean, another grant.

RFP forecasts usually come out close to the start of the federal fiscal year on October 1 because, of course, that is when the federal budget used to be adopted. As you may know, that’s not how it really works anymore.*** For the last quarter of a century, Congress has funded the federal government through a series of Continuing Resolutions (CRs), rather than passing actual budgets, so the federal budget is never set in stone. Congress passed a CR last week, the third short-term spending bill approved in FY 2024, essentially buying them time until March to actually pass appropriations bills, since this of course has taken a backseat to holiday vacations and disagreements resulting in the now-constant threat of a “government shutdown.” So if you’re wondering what is going on with the federal budget, you’re not alone- no one knows! And if you’re wondering what happened to the RFPs forecasted for FY 2024, the answer is, the federal budget. At this rate, we will be close to halfway through the fiscal year before our government agrees on a budget for the fiscal year. No publicly traded corporation would be permitted to operate without a budget, but refer back to the Golden Rule of grant seeking.

In defense of you forecasters out there- meteorologists, government agencies, economists, psychics, etc.- I’ll point out that the definition of a forecast is a “prediction or estimate of future events” (i.e., an educated guess). Though “forecast” sounds more definitive than “prediction” or “estimate,” it is just that, not “a promise” or “an unconditional statement of fact regarding future events.” When a forecasted RFP doesn’t end up coming to fruition, our first instinct may be to blame those idiots that forecasted it for getting our hopes up, but as we all should have learned from Mike Seidel and The Weather Channel, some things are predictably unpredictable, and if we confuse forecast with fact, we might be the real idiots.

* A long-time TV weatherman is the Weather Channel’s Mike Seidel.
** If you didn’t look like Randy from  A Christmas Story, you were doing it wrong.
*** Since 1998, Congress has funded the federal government via a series of CRs, rather than passing actual budgets. The CRs use a “baseline budgeting” concept and mostly continue funding levels for discretionary grant programs from the previous CR, adjusted for inflation. Since a CR is a resolution, however, and not a budget, Congress can and sometimes does change funding levels during a FY by passing a new CR. Again, see the Golden Rule of grant seeking.

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2023 Grant Writing Post-Mortem: The Rise of DEIA and Department of Energy Community Benefit Plans

As 2023 has stumbled to a close, a grant writing post-mortem is in order.

Having written grant proposals since dinosaurs walked the earth (mid-70s, but close enough), the process remains relatively the same, except now we use computers instead of a legal pad* and the Internet instead of endless trips to the library. So, like the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime, it’s the “same as it ever was.” This is because very little has changed in how human services are delivered, how capital projects get built, etc.—outreach and case planning are still conducted in the same ways and site control and a building permit are still needed for construction. So, we develop project concepts in much the same way as I learned decades ago and the proposals look about the same when printed. But, 2023 introduced a new obsession with all things Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA): virtually every federal RFP we see these days requires some form of DEIA discussion, often quite extensive, in the project narrative, no matter the program purpose or target population. This may include President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, which is nominally about environmental justice but is used as DEIA shorthand in some RFPs.

Writing about DEIA concepts in proposals, however, is not new, as these are just different words for old themes. In the late ’70s, I was the Grants Coordinator for the City of Lynwood in LA County, which had transitioned from almost 100% white pre-Watts Rebellion in 1965 to almost 100% African American by the time I got there. I quickly learned that threading in variations on what was then usually called institutional racism (e.g, the “400 years of oppression causes all problems” argument) was a winner and I larded it into every proposal I wrote for Lynwood, and later for the City of Inglewood, another mostly African American community, where I was Redevelopment Manager in the ’80s.

Since S + A started business over 30 years ago, we’ve continued to use similar arguments in needs assessments, modified for such other target populations as Hispanics, LGBTQ, etc. It doesn’t matter much who the population is because, like college professors and reporters, most grant reviewers are Democrats/progressives. They are steeped in the oppressor/victim construct and we write to their expectations, since our job is to get our clients funded. It’s fairly easy to manipulate data to support this gestalt. Case in point: some years ago we wrote a funded $2M California state grant proposal for an affluent city in Orange County to build a new youth center. The RFP was aimed at funding facilities for low-income, at-risk youth of color, but this was an upper-middle-class, mostly white city. What to do? Since Mission Viejo had a small but rapidly growing Asian population, we were able to carefully manipulate/obfuscate** census data, other data, and anecdotes to create the illusion of need, which is all that a needs assessment actually is.

Since DEIA is now ubiquitous, we must often go through some narrative contortions to apply the concept, particularly if the project concept or target area have little, if anything, to do with this issue. For example, we write many proposals for clients in rural Appalachia, which is very low-income but almost 100% white. So, the needs assessments discuss applying DEIA to imaginary residents, since everyone knows that DEIA is usually not applied to poor white folks, just like the violent protests across America following the recent horrific attack on Israel show that intersectionality is rarely applied to Jewish folks, no matter what other characteristics beyond religious affinity they may have. Still, this slight-of-hand writing should not be hard for an experienced grant writer.

Due to the avalanche of funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and similar appropriation bills, we wrote many Department of Energy (DOE) proposals in 2023. The DEIA obsession is evident in DOE FOAs (DOE-speak for RFP), which not only require that DEIA be addressed in project narratives, but also require that long-winded Community Benefits Plans (CBPs) be attached. We recently completed a DOE proposal—the FOA was 90 single-spaced pages, including about 15 pages devoted to the complex CBP instructions, but the project narrative response was limited to nine single-spaced pages, while the CBP had no page limit. This creates a classic “tail wagging the dog”*** writing challenge.

Newsflash to DOE: no matter what the proposal topic, all CBPs will be relatively the same because the “solutions” are all about the same. This is very similar to many HUD proposals we used to write. Up until a few years ago, these required an attachment similar to CBPs: a discussion of how the project related to Section 3 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1968: “The Section 3 program requires that recipients of certain HUD financial assistance, to the greatest extent possible, provide training, employment, contracting and other economic opportunities to low- and very low-income persons, especially recipients of government assistance for housing, and to businesses that provide economic opportunities to low- and very low-income persons.” CBPs are just Section 3 Plans by another name with a soupçon of DEIA. All Section 3 Plans read more or less the same, as do CBPs, and I could convert a HUD Section 3 Plan we wrote 20 years ago into a DOE CBP fairly quickly. I don’t think anyone actually read a Section 3 Plan and doubt if anyone will read a CBP. Also, these would be very hard to enforce, as the goals, objectives, and activities are very nebulous and few federal agencies still conduct program audits.

Since most of our DOE clients are for-profits, including some Fortune 500 companies, they are unfamiliar with the grant-seeking process and terrified of the CBP requirement. When we scope the proposal project concept, we talk them off the ledge and draft their CBP as part of the assignment. The fun part is that not a single DOE client seems to care about the CBP, except that they know they must submit one to get funded. When drafting a CBP, we usually get the company’s DEIA statement/policies to incorporate. Second fun fact: these also read about the same, which means they’re likely boilerplate, written by the army of DEIA consultants that have emerged. From a grant-writing perspective, DEIA discussions and CBPs are just friction in the system. This should be obvious, since discrimination has been banned by federal, state, and local laws since 1965, and Affirmative Action has existed since the Nixon administration. But, the Golden Rule in grant writing is that the people with the gold make the rules, so the need to incorporate DEIA will continue until Congress replaces it with a similar requirement.

* I got so good at writing proposals by 1979 that I was able to dictate them to my secretary who knew shorthand (Millennials and Gen Z can google “shorthand”).
** While S + A is a master of data manipulation and obfuscation, we never intentionally include any untruths or fabrications in our proposals and neither should you.
*** The 1997 movie, “Wag the Dog” is worth watching.

 

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Good news for FQHCs and Look-Alikes: HRSA will issue the first New Access Points (NAP) NOFO in years on Dec. 12!

It’s been about seven years since the Health Resources and Services Administration issued a New Access Points (NAP) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). That’s a long dry spell for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and their Look-Alike brethren, but fear not, the FY ’24 New Access Points will be published on December 12.*

There will be $150M up for grabs, with 230 $650K/year grants for five years to be made, and the deadline will be February 12. I have no idea why HRSA has not issued any NAP NOFOs for years, but, if your organization is an FQHC, LookAlike, or wants to become an FQHC, I’d get on this NAP NOFO bus—who knows when the next NAP NOFO bus will come along.

By way of background, to be eligible for a NAP grant, the applicant has to be, or agree to set-up, a nonprofit “Health Center” under Section 330 of the Public Health Service Act (42 USCS § 254b), or, as they are termed in the trade, a Section 330 provider/FQHC. Without getting too far into the weeds, the mission of FQHCs is to provide access to patients who are eligible for public insurance programs (e.g., Medicaid, etc.), are very low-income, or lack health insurance. Although services are nominally provided on a sliding scale and no one is supposed to be turned away, Section 330 providers have to keep the lights on and, like all health care providers, they prefer patients with third party payers. Still, in much of low-income urban and rural America, FQHCs have become the healthcare providers of last resort.

We’ve written many funded NAP grants and this is the best way for an FQHC to open a new service delivery site, or if you’re a Look-Alike or other nonprofit healthcare provider, become an FQHC. While the Section 330 grant only covers about 15% of operating costs for most of our FQHC clients, this is a key component of funding healthcare services for underserved folks over the long-term. Also, FQHCs are covered by FTCA federal malpractice insurance and participate in the 340B Program  for reduced prescription drug costs, both huge competitive advantages over non-FQHC providers.

NAP proposals are very similar to Service Area Competition (SAC) proposals, which FQHCs must submit every three years to keep their Section 330 grants. This means a NAP proposal is very complex to draft and must be nearly perfect to be funded, as there will many more applicants than the 230 grants to be made. So, it’s best to start planning your NAP application as soon as possible. Also, if your internal grant writing team is either not quite ready for prime time or stretched too thin, hire Seliger + Associates to do the heavy lifting. We’re tanned, fit and ready to rock ‘n roll.

*This link is from a non-government site but includes info you find at grants.gov if you do a search. Since this is a “forecasted” grant opportunity, the actual NOFO won’t be available on grants.gov until December 12, so set a “tickler.”

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Urban doom loops mean that a new “Grant Wave” is forming

Many nonprofit and local government executives think that federal and foundation grant funding priorities are relatively static, but they’re not—we’ve written about grant waves before, and a massive new grant wave is forming just over the horizon. Unlike sudden funding shifts due to unanticipated disasters such as COVID, or a major hurricane like Katrina, grant waves develop over time as the legislative and executive branches react to emerging challenges. The new and building grant wave is one I’ll call the “Urban Doom Loom Grant Wave.”

The media is filled with Urban Doom Loop stories like “The risk of an urban doom loop for America’s old-line cities: Ailing metropolitan centres need creative solutions from the public and private sectors.” This article gets two major points wrong and one correct:

  • First Wrong Point: It’s not just “old-line” cities that are at risk of economic implosion, as this can happen to any city, old-line or new. By old-line, the author refers to “San Francisco, Chicago, New York.” Urban economic woes, either historic or current, can be demonstrated using various metrics, one of which is simple population increase vs. decrease. Chicago’s population, for example, peaked at 3.6M in the 1950 census, declined to 2.7M in 2020 and is down to 2.6M in 2023. A case can be made that San Francisco, which the tech revolution has transformed in recent decades, is more of a “new-line” city than an old-line city. Still, its population peaked at 874K in 2020 and has dropped 17.7% to 715K in 2023. While this simple change metric ignores underlying factors like the incomes and other socioeconomic indicators of who’s moving in and out, it’s one approximation of local economic health—people tend to move toward job opportunities, affordable housing etc. But the median sale price for a San Francisco housing unit is $1.4 million—hardly a sign of doom, although prices are down about 8.5% in 2023 from 2022.Population obviously isn’t a perfect metric. Seattle and Portland, which appear in daily apocalyptic news stories about crime, are both new-line cities. Leaving aside the “if it bleeds it leads” aspect of news coverage, both seem to be facing significant economic and quality of life challenges, which are reflected in modest population change: Seattle’s population has dropped by 1.7% and Portland’s by 2.8% since the 2020 Census. One reason population growth or decline is a fair measure of urban vitality is that a city’s public and private infrastructure (e.g., roads, transit, office/retail buildings, housing stock, etc.) grows as the population grows. Expanded infrastructure is a “spent cost” and public and private infrastructure must be maintained even if the tax base and lease/rent revenues fall. In the short- to medium run, this inevitably means higher taxes and/or lower services, which are strong feedback loops for the Urban Doom Loop phenomenon. Detroit, for example, has lost 50% of its population since 1960, despite endless attempts by the city, state, feds, Big Three car makers, and more recently Rocket Mortgage to reverse this trend.
  • Second Wrong Point: The article attributes the current Urban Doom Loop to “the lingering effects of the pandemic.” While lockdowns in cities like LA and NYC disrupted city economic life with work-from-home leaving office buildings empty and few retail shoppers, this is not the only cause of the current Urban Dom Loop cycle. For many Midwestern and Eastern industrial cities, there are been several Urban Doom Loop cycles starting around 1950. This began with the shift of manufacturing first to suburbs, later to the South, and eventually developing countries.Returning WWII GIs took advantage of the GI Bill to buy starter homes in burgeoning suburbs aided by the Interstate system that facilitated commuting. Then, the wave of civil disturbances in 1967 and 1968 accelerated the urban-to-suburban migration, along with well-intentioned but misguided federal urban renewal policies. This might have been better termed “urban removal,” with thousands of commercial buildings and housing units bulldozed in the name of “slum and blight clearance.” The replacements were usually high-rise public housing like the infamous Cabrini Green Housing Project in Chicago and soulless windswept office plazas like the Empire State Plaza in Albany (Jane Jacobs prescient 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is still relevant in understanding the implications of poor urban land planning). The planners either didn’t understand or didn’t care that the original residents would never return to the “decent safe and sanitary housing” (HUD lingo) or want to work in isolated office building “islands.”I grew up in the then Jewish immigrant trending African American Near Northside of Minneapolis, which was “blighted” but was actually a well-functioning urban neighborhood with plenty of inexpensive housing, shops, and a street-car line to downtown 10 minutes away. By 1960, the city had begun buying the properties for wholesale clearance, including our house. While my parents could have bought a house in a better part of the Northside, they bought a modest house further west to a working-class first-tier suburb. In his new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, Jack Cashill analyses this urban-to-suburban migration.
  • Correct Point: The article argues that “failing metropolitan centres need creative solutions from the public and private sectors.” The resurrection of most downtowns and commercial nodes like Times Square in NYC in the 1980s from decades of decline took a combination of public funds in the form of grants and other subsidies and pioneering developers willing to risk capital. Around 1980, a pioneer developer tackled Times Square. The developer used city tax abatements and a HUD Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) to renovate the dilapidated Commodore Hotel into the Grant Hyatt Hotel, just ahead of the 1980s economic boom. Cities can’t facilitate this kind of urban metamorphosis without private developers and developers won’t make risky investments without grants and subsidies. Like or it or not, this is how American cities come back from the dead, although it can take years or decades for this process to unfold.

Many American cities, large and small, are in some stage of the current Urban Doom Loop. This is due to a perfect storm including the COVID pandemic and work-from-home policies/lockdowns and an array of sudden and perhaps not well thought out public policy shifts like ending cash bail, reducing police budgets, allowing homeless encampments on streets and in parks, adopting the new Housing First approach to addressing homelessness instead of the traditional treatment first strategy, the flood of fentanyl and other drugs across the porous southern border, the tolerance of shoplifting and other crimes, and so on. Whatever the reasons one ascribes the current Urban Doom Loop to, it’s real. People, no matter how committed they are to urban living (I love big cities and am a fan of New Urbanism planning concepts), will flee unsafe and dirty streets, while businesses that become unprofitable will close or move, leaving vacancies.

In the face of the above, how will government policymakers and foundations respond? A typical response would be an avalanche of new federal, state, local, and foundation grants, not only for redevelopment and adaptive reuse of vacant office and retail buildings into affordable housing, but also for human services. As downtown economies falter, low-income and working-class residents will need more services at the same time as local tax revenues fall. We are currently in the Post-Covid Grant Wave with lots of funding for EVs, carbon reduction, advanced manufacturing, etc., but this won’t last because grant waves never do. We’ve seen this before and the Urban Doom Loop Grant Wave is approaching. Nimble nonprofits and local governments should be poised to take advantage of the new funding likely to emerge as the 2024 election approaches.

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Are you ready to age while working in academia?

This is a guest post by Genie Giaimo, Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric, Middlebury College (Ggiaimo@Middlebury.edu). While the post focuses on aging and academia, it has implications for grant seekers and grant writers: most federal grants for the delivery of services to the elderly come are derived from the 1965 Older Americans Act administrated by the DHHS Administration for Community Living (“ACL”). The ACL funds over 600 Area Agencies on Agencies (AAA) across America, which is turn fund local nonprofit and public service providers. So, your agency can get OAA grants directly from the feds and/or your local AAA. The National Institute on Aging (“NIA”) is the primary federal source for research grants relating to aging.

Higher education deserves more attention as a workplace site, and, as part of this effort, I plan to survey and interview academic workers across rank, years of experience, and disability and health statuses. Consider higher ed in the context of America’s workforce, which is undergoing unprecedented seismic shifts—with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns, workers started to rethink their relationship to their jobs (McKinsey & Company, 2022). Many workers now report their new top concerns as being able to work remotely, organize safer workplaces and better wages, and shifting priorities from “workism” to non-work pursuits. Corporations are flirting with the four-day work week* and alternative productivity models. Remote work is undergoing a natural test case and has largely been found to increase worker productivity (George et al., 2021) though managers and workers differ in their perceptions of remote work outcomes (Tsipursky, 2022). Labor is in our zeitgeist because work leads to self-efficacy and for most, give meaning to their lives. And with the increase in union organizing—across many different sectors including ones not historically pro-union, like the tech sector—workers have begun to recognize their value.

The last fifty years, however, have seen limited gains for American workers, including stagnant wages, increased cost of living, and an increase in overall working hours (Lee, 2022). Americans work more than their French, German, and Japanese counterparts (International Labor Organization). And the 2008 financial collapse saw the devastation of stable middle class jobs in favor of part-time, low wage work (McCallum, 2020). For these reasons, and more, over 40 million Americans changed their jobs the past several years. While many bemoaned “the great resignation,” it is more accurate to say that the workforce has undergone a “great reshuffle” (Meister, 2022). Time is now seen as an invaluable commodity (Stolzoff, 2023).

As a scholar, I’m attuned to the underlying sentiment around workers and labor in the media landscape. My research reveals that the attitudes about labor and productivity differ greatly between workers and management. The most fascinating connections, however, between rhetoric and work are the ones that center on the conflation of individual health and well-being with the well-being of the nation. In the early days of the pandemic, we often heard such rhetoric from politicians and from our government—for example, that keeping the economy open was more important than individual lives. As Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested elderly grandparents are willing to die for the benefit of the economy and the nation (Levin, 2020). The trade-off between individual and economic benefits also came to light in government policies around who was labeled an essential worker (and, later, who received work from home privileges and who did not). This rhetorical flip flopping became a catalyst for labor organizing which, in turn, shifted the identities of many care workers. And, as the essential worker as “hero” narrative was replaced with less favorable interpretations of care workers labor, healthcare workers and teachers, for example, left their jobs in droves (McCallum, 2022). The rhetorical figurations of workers, deeply impacts not only the workplace but worker identity; this is not just an economic or governmental issue.

Higher education has followed a similar trajectory over the last half century with the hollowing-out of tenure, “adjunctification” of the professorate, and the de-skilling of many university-based jobs moved to part-time student and staff lines. The supply of people who want to work in universities is far higher than the demand for workers, so wages (considered broadly) have stagnated or fallen. At the same time, the cost of a college education has ballooned, as has the number of administrators staffing colleges and universities. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated labor organizing as the recent strikes at Rutgers University of California—among many others—demonstrate (Iafolla, 2023). We are also in an unprecedented moment for academic workers organizing and unionizing (Barnes & Thornburg LLP, 2023). Yet the patchwork system of laws and regulations that public and private higher education institutions follow deeply impacts who can organize and form a union.

My research is centered on the impact of aging on the academic worker and workplace. If the local, state, and federal laws that dictate who can unionize and who is prohibited, the complex set of roles that academic workers occupy further complicates the landscape. For example, tenure track faculty at private institutions are not allowed to unionize because they were determined to be managers by the 1980 Yeshiva ruling (AAUP), yet non-tenure track faculty and staff are excluded from this SCOTUS ruling. At public universities and colleges, all workers can unionize. Still, the stakes of unionization are high. Intimation, misinformation, and downright retaliation are some of the barriers to organize. The stakes are highest for the most precarious university workers, like adjuncts and other part-time, non-benefitted, workers. Many institutions engage in union busting tactics including intimidation, misinformation and retaliation (AAUP; Fang, 2022).

The patchwork system of rules around union organizing as well as retaliation—combined with the Covid-19 pandemic and a better than average job market—have been catalysts for many university workers. Another, darker side to this tale is the ongoing exploitation of workers in higher education. Non-tenure track workers now many up over 70% of the professoriate with national numbers hovering in the mid-20% range for TT lines. At the same time, academic freedom is being challenged in states across the country; last year 53 bills have been introduced to state legislature to restrict teaching and research in higher education (Levenstein and Mittelstadt, 2022). States such as Florida, Texas, and Ohio passed bills that restrict DEI and other cultural touchpoints in higher education curricula even as political factotums are being named to the highest administrative positions at public universities, hundreds of colleges and universities are struggling with solvency issues (The Hechinger Report, 2020). Amid these large-scale concerns, the health and well-being of academic workers might not seem like a top issue. Still, given the widespread precarity of most academic workers, and the bleak financial climate at many higher education institutions, now is an important moment to evaluate how academic workers are treated and what lies ahead as they continue to age into their work—and to look at why they don’t switch careers, into healthier, in-demand industries.

Already, academic workers are more likely to delay retirement out of financial concerns. And, given the large number of non-benefitted at-will academic workers, there is a crisis on our hands for aging as an academic worker. While this issue is framed as a cost-basis problem for schools (or the government), I’m interested in understanding how academic workers navigate their institution’s wellness-related policies, such as different types of medical leave, short-term and long-term disability, FMLA, and other unpaid and paid policies. I want to survey academic workers to understand how these things work.

Navigating policies in any workplace can be challenging. My hope is that more research on academic workers leads to measurable and consistent reform in U.S. higher education that is better prepared for the kinds of precarious workers it currently hires, rather than tenure track ones it previously hired. Yet the individualistic nature of higher education makes it difficult, even among tenured faculty, to navigate job expectations and leave policies, especially during unanticipated health crises. Add to this erosion of worker benefits (e.g., retirement contributions, leave policies, and insurance plans) for staff and faculty, alike, and we are headed for a perfect storm of aging, ill, and disabled academic workers. We need better structures in place to prepare and to advocate for meaningful workplace policies and support.

 

 

 

 

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Links: Peculiar HUD programs, hydrogen energy, breakthrough therapies, and more!

* I spotted an interesting HUD program that covers a topic I’ve never or rarely seen the feds touch: “Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing through Off-Site Construction and Pro-Housing Reforms Research Grant Program Pre and Full Application.” Four million dollars are available, with grants of $500,000 and five estimated awards. (Five times $500,000 is $2.5 million, not $4 million: feel free to ask HUD about the discrepancy). Still, the “Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing” offers funding for research to “build the evidence base to accelerate the adoption of effective practices and policies to increase the production and supply of quality, affordable housing.” News that the housing crisis is primarily one of demand may finally be percolating through the federal bureaucracy.

What’s your favorite unusual grant program? Leave a comment with the answer.

* “US could soon approve MDMA therapy — opening an era of psychedelic medicine.” Better late than never. Banning MDMA by making it a Schedule I drug was a mistake when it happened and continues to be a mistake, and one that makes millions of people pay the price of our collective folly. “What MDMA Therapy Did For Me” is a passionate first-person account of using MDMA therapeutically, and it begins: “I did MDMA therapy. It was a deeply profound and life-changing experience.” And then: “I would rank it as one of the top 3 most important things I’ve done in my life, at least in terms of my personal development.” I of course, like you, have never done anything illegal, but “What MDMA Therapy Did For Me” is consistent with my own experiences.

* “I personally named my house and business after Silmarillion references – I would have named my car after one, but I learned my friend had named her car after it first, and that Steven Colbert had also named his car after it, and it would be weird to have all these cars named ‘Vingilótë’ driving around. At this point I backed off.” Would it be weird, or too weird? From “Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters.”

* Rice cookers are great, underrated kitchen gadgets. I use mine (also a Zojirushi, if you’re wondering) all the time. It, combined with an Instant Pot, helps me make a lot of good, interesting food in a relatively short period of time, and without having to constantly check for doneness.

* A supposed breakthrough in stationary storage for hydrogen-nickel batteries. Emphasis on “supposed.” I’m not sure what the “catalyst” is, exactly, as described in the article. We’ve worked on some hydrogen grant projects and are cognizant of the potential benefits (here is us describing the DOE’s Hydrogen Shot grant program), but we’ll see how many breakthroughs materialize that can also be commercialized. Press releases are cheap.

* The great electrician shortage. It’s interesting to see this:

People who graduate from college do earn more, on average, than people who don’t, but the statistics can be misleading. Many young people who start don’t finish, yet still take on tens of thousands in education loans—and those who do graduate often discover that the economic advantage of holding a degree can be negated, for years, by the cost of having acquired it.

Those who skip college frequently do better, and not just at first.

While I’m not sure we’d have seen emphasized in this venue a decade ago, word about the problems of the “college for all” model is spreading. Better late than never. My main essay on this topic is here, from 2017, but it’s still relevant.

* Make parking impossible. We can choose to make the cities we want to live in through effective public policies.

* “How to Stop Environmental Review from Harming the Environment.” The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) is having the opposite effect of what its creators intended. It often harms, instead of helping, the environment. Maybe we should fix that.

* 2023 geothermal update.

* California strip malls were upzoned last Saturday. The housing crisis is encouraging California politicians to take some relatively modest steps towards improvement, which are welcome, but more can and should be done. Property owners should be able to build whatever they (safely) want to. Don’t believe me? Visit Tokyo and observe the incredibly dense and creative land use planning that allows 36M folks to live in relatively affordable and good housing.

* Related to the link above: Developer could build hundreds, and maybe a thousand, apartments in Beverly Hills. Good. California needs more housing—a topic we’ve covered extensively, particularly because we’ve worked on so many California homelessness services and affordable housing grants—and the sooner California builds more, the sooner it can help get the homeless housed and make life at least somewhat affordable for the middle class. The California dream of inexpensive, sunshine-filled life was alive until NIMBYs brutally murdered it via zoning. Let’s bring it back.

* “Towards an enlightened centrism.” This is often what we aspire to: knowledge, information, understanding, and an avoidance of petty clannishness.

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Bad nonprofits: An unfortunate reality of charitable giving in America

I recently saw an article about “The WORST charities in America? These are the organizations giving over 90 PERCENT of donations to their fatcat executives – while ignoring their causes.” Anyone who’s worked with nonprofit organizations over time knows that, while most are reasonably honest and at least try to perform needed services, some aren’t.

Since 1993, we’re written grants for somewhere between 600 and 1,000 nonprofits across America. When a prospective nonprofit client calls for a fee quote, I can usually tell within a couple of minutes if the caller is a true believer (about 10%) or a more typical nonprofit. It’s much harder, however, to tell if the nonprofit is honorable, because nonprofit executives are skilled in the art of happy talk—a bit like Gríma Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings.

During initial calls, the prospective client is interviewing us, but to a degree we’re also interviewing them, since we try not to accept assignments from clients who are illegible applicants. Eligibility is almost always straightforward, but we also try to avoid scammers and scoundrels, which is much harder. A few times, callers have told us outright that they plan in effect to misuse the grant money.

Some of the red flags we look for:

  • The caller refers to their nonprofit as a “business” or “company,” or otherwise talk about their organizations as if they’re running a business that’s going to pay money out to its owners. Real nonprofit executives rarely use this sort of terminology, since nonprofits are not supposed to generate profit and there are no “shareholders” (excess revenue over expenses is usually termed “operating reserves” or “endowment”).
  • The Board of Directors has five or fewer members. While it’s possible to organize a 501(c)3 nonprofit will just a few Board members, they’re usually supposed to be “community-based,” so one expects to see a board of 7 – 11 members (odd numbers break tie votes). Tiny boards often enable the Executive Director to control the board by cherry picking compliant members. As we describe in the linked post, the Executive Director can run a nonprofit with this board structure like a small business without worrying about interference or a board coup.
  • The Executive Director admits that they own the nonprofit’s facility and lease it to the nonprofit. While not always technically illegal, this obviously raises self-dealing concerns.
  • The Executive Director brags about double or triple funders for the same client or service. For example, a substance abuse disorder (SUD) treatment provider might bill Medicaid and a specific grant or contract for the same service. This is a fairly common practice, but generally illegal and not discussed in polite company. Sometimes double-billing is the only way to provide effective services, but you’re not supposed to admit this to relative strangers.
  • The nonprofit is just straight up charging fees to its client for services rendered. I’m not talking about a Boys and Girls Club charging a modest, but waivable, fee to join a club basketball team, but rather something like a Board & Care home in effect stealing the client’s SSI payment and putting it towards “rent,” while providing little more that “three hots and a cot.” Some years ago, we had to terminate a retainer agreement with a nonprofit that was supposedly providing adoption counseling, but in reality was selling babies.

At least six Executive Directors of former S + A clients have gone to prison, usually federal, for various frauds and scams, though we only find this out when we happen to spot a news article or someone sends us the story, so the real number is likely higher. Let’s assume that under 1% of nonprofits are bad applies, but there are over 1.5 million American nonprofits, so even a 1% estimate results in tens of thousands of questionable nonprofits. Size isn’t necessarily an indication of honor, since our nonprofit clients range from mom & pop community groups to hospital chains with billions in annual revenue. The larger the organization, the greater the number of funders and potential for corruption. Why steal a small amount when you can steal a large amount?

While we attempt to identify potential scammers, it’s much harder to decide which nonprofits to donate one’s own money to. Some of my rules of thumb for personal philanthropy:

  • Don’t donate money to any organization that buys TV advertising.
  • Pick a type of charity that you’re familiar with. If you’ve had a relative struggling with addiction or homelessness, you’re likely already familiar with good local nonprofit providers.
  • Choose a charity with a local facility you can visit to meet the staff and possibly some of the clients. Mismatched office equipment or perfectly matched equipment doesn’t mean much, although if the equipment is super nice, ask how they got it. A scammer can fill their office with Goodwill rejects for show purposes, while a good nonprofit might have just received an in-kind donation from Steelcase of 20 new desks and chairs. If something doesn’t pass the smell test, ask.
  • Be wary of any organization that can “sell stuff out the back door.” This can range from re-selling donated computer gear that was supposed to go a after school program on eBay, or an animal rescue farm selling the occasional steer to McDonald’s.
  • If the donation is relatively large or your antenna has gone up, ask to see the nonprofit’s 990 Federal Tax Returns for the last few years, which among other things, should list salaries.
  • Consult Givewell.org
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How grant writers can use HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) Mapper system: a post in honor of Service Area Competition (SAC) season

HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) Mapper is powerful but also incredibly hard to use, and I suspect most people get stymied by its clunky user interface—and give up. The difficulty of using the UDS Mapper inspires me to write a guide describing how we tend to use it. “Giving up” is a legitimate reaction to software with a poor user experience and user interface, but giving up won’t help a HRSA needs assessment get done, and it won’t move your organization closer to being funded. Healthcare organizations like Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in particular need to use the UDS Mapper. However frustrating the UDS Mapper may be, the UDS Mapper also collects healthcare indicator data not available anywhere else, and for that reason it’s useful not just in HRSA or healthcare proposals, but a wide range of other proposals.

If you look closely at the UDS Mapper’s output, you’ll see what I mean in terms of HRSA collecting data others don’t. The curiously named set of columns for the “health center penetration rate” in particular can yield insights into local areas; are people who are low income or living in poverty managing to access healthcare? I’m not aware of other places that collate such data. The Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) tab similarly gathers data not readily available elsewhere.

Right now, it’s also Service Area Competition (SAC) season, which means mabt FQHCs need to use the UDS tool, along with others like it, to prepare their SAC applications. We’ve written about the SAC experience in a bunch of places, including here, and we encourage organizations that are applying for SAC or other HRSA funding to contact us.

I developed the UDS Mapper guide to be used internally, but it occurs to me that others may find it useful, so I’m uploading it here. Questions or comments? Leave them below. This draft of our guide isn’t the last word.

Click here to download the guide.

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Links: Battery recycling, how to lower housing prices, the shift from colleges to apprenticeships, and more!

* The Dept. of Energy announces a $375 million loan for an automotive-grade battery recycling plant, which is sited for Rochester, New York. We didn’t work on this project, but we’ve written proposals for many adjacent DOE applications in batteries and other materials, so we know how arduous the underlying process for this one likely was.

* “More Students Are Turning Away From College and Toward Apprenticeships: Some white-collar training programs have become as selective as Ivy League universities.” This makes sense, for all the reasons I articulated back in 2017. There are also now programs like Western Governors University (WGU) that are designed to reward skills not time in seat. A lot of students presently in college probably shouldn’t be, and probably aren’t getting much if anything out of college—apart from debt. College isn’t the magic panacea it was made out to be for many decades; instead, college degrees were then relatively rare. Now they aren’t and, simultaneously, schools have reacted to the current student-loan environment by creating degrees that require almost no work and impart essentially no skills.

* “More Flexible Zoning Helps Contain Rising Rents: New data from 4 jurisdictions that are allowing more housing shows sharply slowed rent growth.” While this is obvious, there’s a weirdly large amount of denialism out there about the way increasing supply will over time lower prices.

* Looks like RSV vaccines will be available by next winter, which is great! Less illness is better than more.

* Closing Industry Frontiers, which compares the closing of the American frontier to the filling out of the Internet software industry over the last ten years. The next political frontier might be O’Neill habitats.

* Why the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) Deserves More Funding. Modern vaccine approaches may take out a large number of diseases in the 2020s and that’s great. The RSV note above concerns only one disease, but there are many others.

* One “secret” of writing is to write every day. (This is not really a secret: pros know it, but amateurs often don’t want to believe it.)

* “Lennar defies La Habra’s Measure X, files what could be ‘builder’s remedy’ application.” Building more housing is vital to improving human well-being, which is ultimately what the grant process is about, or what it’s supposed to be about.

* Is the college essay already dead? Maybe future essays are going to be written on computers without Internet access. Or, colleges could bring back the old school Blue Books!

* “US Cities Are Falling Out of Love With the Parking Lot: California and many local governments are scrapping requirements that once made cars the center of the urban landscape.”

* Bowdlerizing Roald Dahl and the Ethics of Art.

* “How to go car-free — or car-light — in Middle America.”

* “The educational skeptic’s guide.” There’s some quotable material in here for your next Dept. of Education proposal, although you’ll need to be judicious in your choice of quotes—which is almost always true when you’re questioning orthodoxy, however mild the questioning may seem. “Social desirability bias” (SDB) is a real thing, and a lot of educational improvement initiatives are bound up with SDB.

* “The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again,” which is bad for FQHCs and bad for anyone who needs healthcare (which is, over the course of a life, almost everyone).

* “Apartment Rents Fall as Crush of New Supply Hits Market.” Supply and demand matter, and homelessness is first and foremost a housing shortage problem.

* “Smaller, safer, cheaper? Modular nuclear plants could reshape coal country.” This would be a major step in the right direction, especially because coal plants tend to already have transmission lines and interconnect rights.

* “New Thinking on Peer Review at NIH.” Better peer review is welcomed. Like so many forms of institutional infrastructure that really got launched in the postwar period, “peer review” isn’t working well any more.

* Are parts of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department run by gang members? If you don’t want the reporting filter, the original report is here and says things like:

The Department currently contains several active groups that have been, and still are, engaged in harmful, dangerous, and often illegal, behavior. Some of these groups have engaged in acts of violence, threatened acts of violence, placed fellow Deputies at risk of physical harm, engaged in acts celebrating officer involved shootings, and created a climate of physical fear and professional retribution to those who would speak publicly about the misconduct of such groups.

Ever seen the TV show The Shield? I think that was about LAPD, not LA County Sheriff.

* Do nonprofits drive social change? Not according to this analysis, but nonprofits of a certain kind maintain a certain high status among certain persons.

* The efforts of geothermal power startup Fervo. We’ve worked on lots of geothermal energy projects.

* “Global Supply of Cocaine Hits Record Level, U.N. Says: Coca cultivation rose 35% from 2020 to 2021, new report says.” At what point does one decide that prohibition has failed, and it’s time to try a new strategy? Imagine that coffee were under the same sanctions as coca leaves.

* Oregon botches the decriminalization of drugs.

* “Review: The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen.” Another take on the book we previously wrote about, and which is germane to behavioral and mental health. Those of you who work in mental health will likely recognize some of the issues they face (excuse the length of this quote, but you’ll understand why by the end):

“The best minds” of the title refers to Laudor, who’s brilliant by wide affirmation and whose intelligence and intensity are now inextricable from his illness, at least in the popular understanding. But it also refers to the people who created the medical and social context in which the murder occurred – the mental health advocates who fought (and fight) against the effort to hospitalize patients who are psychotic or otherwise dangerous, the anti-psychiatry movement that has demonized treatment of debilitating medical conditions, the media that wanted to see Laudor in nothing but facile storybook terms and so of course could see nothing else, the various authority figures and community members who had enabled Laudor’s uninterrupted descent into madness because they thought it was the right thing to do, and the family members and friends who were unable to see how obviously, cripplingly sick he had become near the end.

Consider also this controversial take:

The biggest problem in American mental healthcare is not people getting stuck in the system but those who need to get in and can’t.