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Much good stuff to write this week, but I was buried with Charlotte City Council endorsement research and writing. I’ll dive back into blogging after Labor Day. ‘Til then have a good holiday, everyone.

I’m just back from the noon rally at Trade and Tryon for the Charlotte Symphony, which was fun in a too-much-sun, humid sweat kind of way. Especially since I not only got to hear some professional musicians play, but I got to hear former Gov. Jim Martin play the tuba. Who can’t love that?

For the record, he played “Asleep in the Deep” on an instrument he said he borrowed from the Salvation Army. It did indeed have a beat up, well-used look to it. I missed his performance before the official rally started, but he was nice enough to play when I asked him, afterward.

The snoopy journalist in me, of course, required that I ask around about to try to get some clues to the identity of the anonymous donor who just gave the symphony a $500,000 challenge grant. The symphony has until Dec. 31 to raise its matching money, although I was told the challenge grant will be given out in increments, as the matching money is raised.

Meg Whalen, the symphony’s public relations director, told me no one at the symphony knows the donor’s identity except the CSO executive director, Jonathan Martin, and board chair Pat Rodgers. But, Whalen said, the donor intends to remain anonymous forever. So we’re left to speculate about local philanthropists. Leon and Sandra Levine might be atop the list, except they apparently have been busy wiring up a $1 million challenge grant to the United Way of Central Carolinas, announced this morning. And they’ve already been generous to the symphony, with a $25,000 grant in May.

The symphony has to give its financial turnaround plan to the Arts & Science Council on Sept. 2. If the ASC doesn’t like the plan, the symphony gets only a $150,000 in ASC funding, down from $1.9 million last year. If the ASC approves, the symphony gets $900,000.

I’m obviously cheering the symphony on. I’d hate to see Charlotte become one of the largest cities in America without a symphony. Here’s a column I wrote on that topic a couple of weeks ago.

Update on Thursday, Aug. 27: I have a request from reporter Ann Doss Helms: She’s trying to find parents of kids who’d be switched from the Myers Park High School attendance zone to East Mecklenburg. Would the person who left the comment on that effect – or anyone else in that category – please contact her at ahelms@charlotteobserver.com or at 704-358-5033? She wants to hear from people on all sides of the issue.

The comment thread about Best Cities for Kids took an interesting turn last night and this morning. Take a look (link).

Several commenters made the valid point that the U.S. News & World Report rankings appeared to favor relatively affluent, mostly white suburban-ish areas with well-funded schools and low crime. “White flight” someone said, shouldn’t be rewarded.

Indeed, I believe a community with many different ethnicities is a lot more interesting, and I agree that the rankings look as if they hadn’t taken into account the reality that an affluent suburb is probably going to compare well for schools and crime stats. One commenter said, “Diversity is a city like Charlotte that has a 33% black population, a large Hispanic population, and a large white population. That in itself presents quite a challenge.”

Then faithful reader/commenter “Cato” brought up Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor. His recent studies have shown that as ethnic diversity in an area rises, social trust goes down. This is true, he says, for all races and ethnicities. I’ve heard him lecture on this phenomenon several times, and each time he said he didn’t like getting those results and kept double-checking his data and coming up with the same result.

So whoever thinks Cato is misquoting Putnam is off-base.

But I think Cato, too, is off-base in saying, “Why is this [less social trust] a desirable trait in a city? Especially if you get more crime and worse schools in the bargain? Or is it that the intangible benefits of white liberal self-congratulation are enough to coutnerbalance it?”

Putnam thinks it’s a good idea to be aware of the tendency toward lower social trust and figure out how to counteract it. To say, “Especially if you get more crime and worse schools in the bargain,” seems to me to ignore some realities:

One: Bernie and his hedge fund ilk as well as all the toxic loan purveyors and mortgage fraud perps have proved there’s plenty of crime in rich areas too, and it’s certainly not “victimless.” It’s not someone taking your CD player. They’re taking your investments, or driving up your taxes by not paying theirs, or destroying the companies in which you own stock. I’d rather have my car stolen than the worth of my 401(k).

Two: Poverty correlates with higher crime, no question. Yet to say that you get “more crime” when a city area is more ethnically and economically integrated might really mean “more crime where I live in what used to be an all white, all middle-class area.” The crime is already there, and many low-income people suffer horribly from it.

Three: “Worse schools.” Again, the kids with the bad teachers, crappy home lives and falling down schools are already out there, so racial and ethnic and economic mixing doesn’t cause those problems, but rather brings them to the attention of people heretofore not having to deal with them.

White flight – or to be more accurate, wealthy and “bright” flight – makes public schools worse, as parents with time, means and enthusiasm to help the schools disappear from the support base. That leaves schools with disproportionately more kids from bad situations, and fewer parents able and willing to fight for better resources. So more of the parents who care about their kids’ school then leave, which causes a downward spiral. But it isn’t as if racial/ethnic diversity by itself “causes” bad schools, rather the effects of people fleeing the effects of poverty can cause schools to start spiralling downward.

But Cato’s right in saying that an economically and ethnically integrated city will indeed have to deal with those problems more than a bedroom community of affluent educated residents.

And for the record, I’m a proud parent of a high school senior who’s been at CMS since kindergarten and has top-notch schooling at Charlotte’s racially and ethnically diverse public schools. Many CMS schools are excellent, safe and well-run. And yes, some aren’t. But just because you see some brown faces doesn’t automatically mean the school’s a bad place for your child.

This month’s Civic By Design discussion will be an exercise in imagining how to enliven a dead zone. Last summer, the zone was the intersection of Kings Drive and Morehead Street. This month is the “seas of asphalt of our Center City around West Trade Street, Fourth Street, and Graham Street.” Click here for a Google maps/street view – and you’ll see why it’s an appropriate spot to re-imagine.

Just an alert for whatever faithful readers are out there: I’m working on several other in-house duties this week and next and won’t be posting to Naked City as often as usual. You may now begin your lamentations or celebrations accordingly.

Look for more regular Naked City blogging starting the first week in July.

This will be news to retired BofA CEO Hugh McColl, and his multiple lieutenants:

Mayor McCrory, council members Andy Dulin and John Lassiter, can I make a request? If you don’t like the city’s 1 percent-for-art program, then end it. But as is, it’s tediously predictable that whenever you get a presentation about what the money is being spent for, you go off on the program’s administrators and trash the art.

Guess what. Their job is to administer the city program. The city program allocates 1 percent of the cost of most (not all) city projects and dedicates that money for public art.

Now, plenty of people can make good philosophical arguments for why government shouldn’t be paying for art. It’s a reasonable position: Art should be independent of government, because public money comes with strings attached. Public art typically isn’t very cutting-edge, for instance, because that would offend the pols and they’d ax the money. Some people genuinely think art isn’t what government should be doing, and I respect that view, even though I disagree.

But there are other good arguments about the value of art to the public and about the value of having artists in your city. And for now, city government (and the county, and the transit system) have concluded it’s worth the fractional amount of money it takes to have public art.

The item getting people’s attention is a project to put mosaic tile covers on trash cans along Central Avenue, as part of a Central Avenue streetscaping project. Here’s a link to the slide presentation; mosaics are on page 6. The City Council heard a presentation on Monday, showing numerous public art projects. Dulin tallied up the cost of the mosaics – $42,000 for mosaics on the outsides of 12 trashcans, 4 mosaics each – and said, “That’s $3,500 a trashcan.” Then he asked if he could get one of those trashcans at the bus stop near Myers Park High School. “$3,500 per trashcan is a little bit out of line, I’m sorry,” he said.

Lassiter wondered whether the primary colors of the mosaics would look good next to some murals also planned along Central Avenue, whose colors looked (in the slide show) more pastel. (Should we cut him some slack? He was suffering jet lag from a trip to Ireland.)
McCrory complained – as he does whenever public art comes up – that he prefers more representational statuary that depicts people and history. “I like the statues at The Square. I just don’t think we have enough of them,” he said. “The most comment I get from people is the statue at Myers Park Hardware [a privately funded statue of the late, eccentric Hugh McManaway].”

There were snickers and snide remarks about several of the art works. Robert Bush of the Arts & Science Council, which administers the public arts program, was stoic. Public art administrator Jean Greer kept a pleasant smile on her face. Surely they get sick of this, every time they appear.
OK, let’s try it one more time: Not all art will please everyone. If it did, it would be awfully tame. Some people like abstract art, and I don’t want the mayor, or any mayor, choosing what art I see. Some people prefer ancient Roman busts, or statues of nekkid goddesses or “The Thinker.” But art changes with its era, and this art should reflect this era.

Putting art on a trashcan might just be a way to brighten up a part of town that, heaven knows, has felt decades of city neglect. Should all art be restricted to uptown or Myers Park, where more affluent people live? Should art not be allowed on trashcans, only walls?

This is silly, fellas. Can’t we just move on?

It’s always been a mystery to me why downtown Gastonia hasn’t economically revived like Salisbury, Mooresville, Concord and other downtowns around here. Last night I ran into a former Gastonia City Hall-type who gave me an interesting insight, as we were chatted over wine and hors d’oeuvres. Here’s a paraphrase what the person said:

(More from “The Next City” conference last weekend in Cambridge, sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. I encountered blogus interruptus when my Mac laptop went on strike. I’m doing a series of notebook-dumping posts.)

Continuing the theme of quotable economists: Jeff Chapman, professor of applied public finance of Arizona State, who researches state and local government finance, gave a rundown of what he called “tax myths.” Herewith:

1. All states are the same.
2. Tax breaks for economic development are worthwhile. His position is that almost always the companies would locate there anyway and that taxes are a lesser consideration for those corporate decisions.
3. Property taxes are regressive. (A regressive tax disproportionatelys hurt lower-income people. Sales taxes are regressive. The income tax is progressive, as in wealthier people pay proportionately higher rates.) Chapman is a fan of the property tax because it’s stable, hard for people to evade, and promotes local government. ” …and it is really unpopular,” he concedes.
4. Not taxing e-commerce is good.
5. Housing impact fees are always shifted to the buyer. Most empirical evidence, he said, shows that isn’t true. And, he asks, if housing impact fees could be shifted so easily to the buyers, why are the plaintiffs in cases challenging them always the developers?

(More from “The Next City” conference last weekend in Cambridge. I encountered blogus interruptus when my Mac laptop went on strike. I’m doing a series of notebook-dumping posts.)

One more from Wellesley College economist Chip Case. Then, later today when my other opinion-writing duties are finished, I’ll dive into such topics as the myth that housing impact fees are always shifted to homebuyers.

Do you get the sense Case likes to skewer conventional wisdom? He opined on the belief, particularly dear to some political conservatives, that the Community Reinvestment Act is what caused all those mortgage companies to give mortgages to unqualified people.

Now before you go off on me, I’m not saying the Democrats were blameless. The ideal of homeownership has been up there with apple pie, motherhood and the American flag for many Americans for many years, nudged along by Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, social policymaker wonks and numerous homebuilder and Realtor associations. Everyone seemed to accept as given truth that homeownership is the ticket to wealth, stable neighborhoods and family values. Which is one reason — among many — that the out-of-control mortgages didn’t get nearly enough scrutiny from people who might have stopped it.

This is about the Community Reinvestment Act, a Carter-era federal banking law that applied to banks (not to hedge funds or mortgage brokers or insurance companies) and required them to make loans to qualified customers in poor and minority neighborhoods and to ensure banks were serving those neighborhoods. It clearly was not perfectly enforced, or you’d see a heckuva lot more Wachovias or BofA branches in Charlotte’s poorer neighborhoods. But I digress. If you were a bank looking at buying another bank, the feds would look to see if you were following the CRA, and if not, perhaps might not let you make that acquisition.