The Guru Is In Archives

Although virtue may be its own reward, try telling that to a nonprofit’s chief financial officer.

Because life makes sense only in retrospect, we’re seldom aware in the moment that someone else’s action can change our lives forever. Nor will your benefactor know, then or after, just how seminal his or her small action was, and somehow, you’ve never thanked those who helped you.  

Forcibly caged in 1982, and virtually somnolent for the last two decades, inflation is back with such a vengeance that the Administration is using ever more grandiloquent circumlocutions to deny its existence.   

When predicting the future, science fiction authors have a better group track record than engineers, because their imaginations aren’t hamstrung by too much learning.

During 1858’s Great Stink, London’s Thames River was so foul that members of Parliament fled, and Parliament shut down.

At MIT, one can traverse half a mile of jumbled urban campus entirely indoors.

Pop quiz, hotshot: You’re mountain-biking down a virgin trail making great time, when it abruptly turns much steeper and much rockier. Trying to stop now will just launch you headfirst over the handlebars. What do you do?

In 1898, New York City hosted the first international conference of urban planners to tackle an urgent global crisis of health, congestion and overcrowding – what to do about the horses?

Never in my professional experience has a government defendant so cavalierly offered up a gratuitous admission against interest as did President Biden the day the Centers for Disease Control “independently” announced that it had miraculously discovered authority to reimpose a nationwide eviction moratorium.

As I showed in last month’s Guru, under-reinvested urban neighborhoods are left behind or shortchanged on economic capital, political capital, municipal infrastructure, coordinated government policy and local income and earning power.

As the pandemic has demonstrated, for people to be healthy, their homes must be healthy, and for homes to be healthy, their communities must be healthy. Work we’ve been doing for the last half a year in Black neighborhoods of Milwaukee has uncovered six deeply rooted and mutually reinforcing causes of unhealthy neighborhoods due to contagious underinvestment:

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last August that it was declaring a nationwide moratorium on all rental evictions, not just those in federally subsidized properties, I instantly thought, That’s unconstitutional. Somebody will sue the government and it’ll get overturned. Sure enough, on May 5, 2021 the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (DC for DC) did just that, and a good thing too, because well-met laws intended to offer short-term relief frequently do long-term damage – as I know from personal experience.