OPINION
6A
T HE
D AILY A STORIAN
Founded in 1873
STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
Seeing Astoria
through their eyes
I
The bounty of cruise ships begins
t is still a thrill to see a gleaming white tall cruise ship cross
the Columbia River bar, traverse the shipping channel and
dock at the Port of Astoria. After many years of hosting cruise
ships in spring and fall, Astorians greeted the day visitors with
extraordinary hospitality. It was a good day for museums,
shops and restaurants.
If this were a year-round thing,
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tropical places, this might all be-
come predictable. But the cruise
ship shoulder seasons — as ships
move between the southern routes
and the Alaska trade — provide a
bright accent to life at the mouth of
the Columbia River.
The cruise ships are a perfect
jolt to our tourism. Thousands of
visitors arrive, but not in cars. At
day’s end, they leave. The Port of
Astoria gains much-needed reve-
nue from moorage fees.
If you have traveled by cruise
ship, you know that Astoria is
not the usual port. For one thing,
Astorians are not jaded. The town
is eminently walkable. Some cruise
ship passengers have been seen
walking up Coxcomb Hill to the
Astoria Column. Astoria is a real
place, with a storied past. Nearby
is one of the icons of the West, Fort
Clatsop.
JOSHUA BESSEX — The Daily Astorian
The Crown Princess is one of the
many cruise ships that will dock in
Astoria this year. It arrived Thursday.
The Astoria Cruise Ship Hosts
do yeoman’s work in preparing for
these visits — 18 this year — set-
ting up shuttle bus stops and virtu-
ally escorting the day visitors.
Among the many changes that
have made Astoria a more vital
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been an unexpected boost. Best of
all this bounty of visitors in spring
and fall allows us to see our place
through their eyes.
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, MAY 4, 2015
The nature of urban poverty
he would make the neigh-
cushion, not a ladder.
borhood a model of urban
Saying we should just
spend more doesn’t real-
restoration. He gathered
ly cut it. What’s needed
ately it seems as though public and private ac-
is a phase shift in how
tors
like
developer
James
every few months there’s
we think about poverty.
Rouse and Habitat for Hu-
another urban riot and the na- manity. They raised more
Renewal efforts in Sand-
tion turns its attention to urban than $130 million and
town-Winchester priori-
tized bricks and mortar.
poured
it
into
new
homes,
poverty.
But the real barriers to
new
school
curricula,
new
And in the midst of every storm,
mobility are matters of
job training programs and
David
there are people crying out that we new health care centers.
social psychology, the
Brooks
VKRXOG¿QDOO\JHWVHULRXVDERXWWKLV Townhouses were built
quality of relationships in
issue.
for $87,000 and sold to residents for a home and a neighborhood that ei-
This time it was Jon Stewart who $37,000.
ther encourage or discourage respon-
spoke for many when he said: “And
The money was not totally wast- sibility, future-oriented thinking and
you just wonder sometimes if we’re ed. By 2000, the poverty rate in the practical ambition.
Jane Jacobs once wrote that a
spending a trillion dollars to rebuild area had dropped by 4.4 percent.
Afghanistan’s schools, like, we can’t The share of residents who lived in healthy neighborhood is like a bal-
build a little taste down Baltimore owner-occupied homes had risen by let, a series of intricate interactions
way. Like is that what’s really going 8.3 percent, according to a thorough in which people are regulating each
on?”
study by The Abell Foundation. But other and encouraging certain be-
The audience applauded loudly, the area was not transformed. Today haviors.
In a fantastic interview that Da-
and it’s a nice sentiment, but it’s not there are no grocery stores in the
really relevant.
neighborhood and no vid Simon of The Wire gave to Bill
The problem is
restaurants. Crime is Keller for The Marshall Project, he
The real
not lack of attention,
rampant. Unemploy- describes that, even in poorest Bal-
timore, there once were informal
and it’s not mainly
is high.
barriers to ment Despite
lack of money. Since
all these rules of behavior governing how
1980 federal anti-
efforts, there are too cops interacted with citizens —
mobility
poverty spending has
many young men when they’d drag them in and when
exploded. As Robert are matters
leading lives like they wouldn’t, what curse words
Samuelson of The
the one that Gray you could say to a cop and what
of social
Washington Post has
led. He was appar- you couldn’t. But then the code dis-
pointed out, in 2013
a kind-hearted, solved. The informal guardrails of
psychology. ently
the federal govern-
respectful, popular life were gone, and all was arbitrary
ment spent nearly
man, but he was not harshness.
That’s happened across many so-
$14,000 per poor person. If you sim- on the path to upward mobility. He
ply took that money and handed it to won a settlement for lead paint poi- cial spheres — in schools, families
the poor, a family of four would have soning. According to The Post, his and among neighbors. Individuals
a household income roughly twice mother was a heroin addict who, in a are left without the norms that mid-
the poverty rate.
deposition, said she couldn’t read. In dle-class people take for granted. It
Yet over the past 30 years the RQHFRXUW¿OLQJLWZDVUHSRUWHGWKDW is phenomenally hard for young peo-
poverty rate has scarcely changed.
Gray was four grade levels behind in ple in such circumstances to guide
In addition, U.S. public spending reading. He was arrested more than a themselves.
Yes, jobs are necessary, but if you
on schools is high by global stan- dozen times.
dards. As Peter Wehner pointed out
It is wrong to say federal efforts live in a neighborhood, as Gray did,
in Commentary, in 2011 Baltimore to tackle poverty have been a failure. where half the high school students
ranked second among the nation’s The $15 trillion spent by the govern- don’t bother to show up for school
largest 100 school districts in how ment over the past half-century has on a given day, then the problems go
much it spent per pupil, $15,483 per improved living standards and eased deeper.
The world is waiting for a think-
year.
burdens for millions of poor people.
The Sandtown-Winchester area But all that money and all those ex- er who can describe poverty through
of Baltimore, where Freddie Gray periments have not integrated people the lens of social psychology. Until
lived, has not lacked for attention who live in areas of concentrated the invisible bonds of relationships
either. In the late 1980s, Baltimore’s poverty into the mainstream econo- are repaired, life for too many will
then-mayor, Kurt Schmoke, decided my. Often, the money has served as a be nasty, brutish, solitary and short.
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
L
Men wielding power in hellish times
By CHARLES
KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post Writers Group
North Coast has major W
homeless population
L
ASHINGTON — Wolf
Hall, the Man Booker
Prize-winning historical novel
about the court of Henry VIII —
and most dramatically, the con-
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ook at a map of homeless- Oregon, at least in our most pop- and Sir Thomas More — is now
ness in the U.S. (tinyurl.com/ ulous northwest corner, tends to a TV series (presented on PBS).
p23ox4k) and a geographical
pattern is instantly apparent. The
problem is most acute on the West
Coast including Hawaii, plus New
York state and Massachusetts.
Alaska and Vermont also have
comparatively high percentages
of homeless people, somewhat
belying their reputations for rug-
ged self-reliance.
Some usual poverty hot spots
get off easy in this analysis, with
perennial underdog Mississippi
having the least homelessness in
the nation, at just 74 per 100,000
residents.
Oregon is near the top of the
homelessness Top 10, with the
fifth-highest proportion — 306
per 100,000 resident lack a home.
Hawaii is first with 487, New York
second with 408, followed by
Nevada, 372, and Massachusetts,
315. In sixth place behind Oregon
in California, 294, Washington,
261, Vermont, 249, Alaska, 242,
and Maine, 205. All these 2014
estimates are based on federal
data.
There actually is some good
news behind these statistics. In
Oregon’s case, we can take some
comfort in a 31 percent decline
in homelessness between 2007
and 2014. The rate fell by 21 per-
cent in Washington, 18 percent
in California and 16 percent in
Nevada. It rose in all the other
Top-10 states — by 51 percent
in Vermont and 40 percent in
Massachusetts, for example.
There are several explanations
for these distinct regional differ-
ences. Housing in Mississippi is
inexpensive — though also often
substandard — and the expendi-
tures on utilities and other com-
ponents related to housing are
also relatively low. Housing in
be quite expensive. The Portland
Tribune and other Portland news
media have recently been report-
ing on declining housing avail-
ability and rising costs that are
driving new construction into in-
creasingly remote suburbs.
Astoria and the North Coast
also are seeing increases in home
prices, along with significant
homelessness in relation to our
population. In 2014,
What can be done to help alle-
viate this problem, which is dam-
aging to those directly impacted
and to society? Portland is ad-
vocating for a bill in the current
Legislature that would give cities
the ability to work with develop-
ers to encourage more affordable
housing units in new construc-
tion.
The online news source Vox
meanwhile reports that in some
setting the most effective answer
is to simply give homeless peo-
ple a permanent place to live. In
Utah, which has a homeless rate
of 105 per 100,000, a state pro-
gram costing between $10,000
and $12,000 per person puts roofs
over the heads of chronically
homeless people. This compares
to $20,000 in public costs to care
for and treat homeless people on
the street. In Florida, the annual
cost of homelessness was pegged
at $31,000 per person for law en-
forcement, jails, hospital care and
other services.
Bearing in mind long-term
community concerns about not
rolling out a welcome wagon
for new homeless people, we
must pay more attention to get-
ting our problem under control.
Otherwise, as more people move
to Oregon, the progress we have
made will surely disappear.
It is maddeningly good.
Madden-
ing
because
its history is
tendentiously
distorted, yet
the drama is so
brilliantly con-
ceived and ex-
ecuted that you
almost don’t
care.
Faced
Charles
with an imagi-
Krauthammer
native creation
of such brooding, gripping, mordant
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pay for it in historical inaccuracy.
And Wolf Hall’s revisionism is
breathtaking. It inverts the conven-
tional view of the saintly More being
undone by the corrupt, amoral, ser-
pentine Cromwell, the king’s chief
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Author Hilary Mantel, an ex- and
anti-Catholic (“the Catholic Church
is not an institution for respectable
people”), has set out to rehabilitate
Cromwell and defenestrate More,
most especially the More of Robert
Bolt’s beautiful and hagiographic A
Man for All Seasons.
Who’s right? Neither fully,
though Wolf Hall’s depiction of
More as little more than a cruel her-
etic-burning hypocrite is particular-
ly provocative, if not perverse. To
be sure, More-worship is somewhat
overdrawn, as even the late Cardinal
Francis George warned at a 2012
convocation of bishops. More had
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for all seasons, but he was also a man
of his times. And in those times of
merciless contention between Rome
and the Reformation, the pursuit and
savage persecution of heresy were
the norm.
Indeed, when Cromwell achieved
power, he persecuted Catholics with
a zeal and thoroughness that sur-
passed even More’s persecution of
Protestants. Wolf Hall’s depiction of
Cromwell as a man of great sensi-
tivity and deep feeling is, therefore,
even harder to credit. He was cruel
and cunning, quite monstrous both
in pursuit of personal power and
Photo courtesy of PBS
Damian Lewis plays Henry VIII in the PBS series “Wolf Hall.”
wealth, and in serving the whims and FHVVIXOSLHFHRI¿FWLRQZHDUHIRUFHG
to ask: What license are we to grant
wishes of his royal master.
Nonetheless, Cromwell’s modern to the historical novel?
For all the learned answers, in
reputation will be enhanced by Mark
Rylance’s brilliant and sympathetic reality it comes down to tempo-
cinematic portrayal, featuring a still- ral proximity. If the event is in the
ness and economy of expression that recent past, you’d better be accu-
is at once mesmerizing and human- rate. Oliver Stone’s paranoid and
izing. The nature of the modern audi- libelous JFK will be harmless in
50 years, but it will
ence helps too. In this
take that long for the
secular age beset by
When
stench to dissipate.
throat-slashing reli-
On the other hand,
gious fanatics, we are
Cromwell
does anyone care that
far more disposed to
Shakespeare diverges
despise excessive pi-
achieved
from the record (such
ety and celebrate the
pragmatic, if ruthless,
power, he as it is) in his Caesar
or Macbeth or his
modernizer.
Henrys?
Which Cromwell persecuted
Time turns them
was, as the chief engi-
Catholics
to legend. We don’t
neer of Henry’s Ref-
feel it much matters
ormation. He crushed with a zeal.
anymore. There is the
the Roman church,
historical Caesar and
looted the monaster-
ies and nationalized faith by subordi- there is Shakespeare’s Caesar. They
QDWLQJFOHUJ\WRNLQJ7KDWPD\ÀDW- live side by side.
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But we do well to remember that the mann said much the same about
centralized state Cromwell helped David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia
midwife did prepare the ground, over vs. the real T.E. Lawrence. They
the coming centuries, for the rise of diverge. Accept them each on their
the rational, willful, thought-con- own terms, as separate and indepen-
trolling, indeed all-controlling, state. dent realities. (After all, Lawrence’s
It is perhaps unfair to call Crom- own account, Seven Pillars of Wis-
well (and Henry) proto-totalitari- dom, RIIHUV PDJQL¿FHQW SURVH EXW
an, as some critics have suggested, quite unreliable history as well.)
So with the different versions
essentially blaming them for what
came after. But they did sow the of More and Cromwell. Let them
seed. And while suppressing one live side by side. Wolf Hall is ut-
kind of intolerance, they did little terly compelling, but I nonetheless
PRUHWKDQUHGH¿QHKHUHV\DVDQRI- refuse to renounce A Man For All
fense against the sovereignty not of Seasons. I’ll live with both Mores,
both Cromwells. After all, for centu-
God but of the state.
However, Wolf Hall poses ques- ries we’ve accepted that light is both
tions not just political but literary. wave and particle. If physics can live
When such a distortion of history with maddening truths, why can’t lit-
produces such a wonderfully suc- erature and history?