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The Working Class in Austin by Numbers

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Every once in a while I find myself doing my own little research projects for purely my own self-indulgence. This is one of them and maybe others will find it useful for your own purposes. (Still doing research on the racial, ethnic, gender etc demographics.) 555,010 Austinites earn less than $50,000 a year (65 percent of the workforce Union membership is a pitiful 2.5 percent half that of Texas's 4.5 percent average (which is less than half of the national average). 78,800 Austinites earn less than $21,000 a year. 61,370 Austinites make more than $100,000 a year. Real income has risen by 2.5 percent in the past four years—but housing prices have increased by 40 percent. 54.4 percent of the working class in Austin rent their housing. 16 percent of Ausinites work in traditional “blue collar” occupations (construction, warehousing, transportation, and manufacturing). The fast growing occupation by industry is logistics (warehousing and transportation) the sector creat
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Bernie's Path to Victory in Milwaukee

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Labor Day has come and past, it's time to pull out the backsides of envelopes and look at the Bernie campaign's path to victory. First and foremost it's not really about winning states (especially with Democratic races being proportionally awarded). It's not about the sliver of margin in this or that. If we want Bernie to be president it's about getting one thing after the blood, sweat, and tears: a 50 percent plus one on a roll call vote at the national Democratic Convention. This Convention will be a different beast from those of the past. Sure the spectacle and mind-numbing repetition of speeches and calculated enthusiasm of a major party convention will likely be the same. The core spectacle, electing the presidential nominee, is likely to be something we haven't seen for a very long time in this country. It is extremely likely for the first time since 1952 with Aldai Stevenson that there will be a “contested” (or “brokered”) convention.
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Twenty Minutes in Mueller: New Urbanism, Austin, and Ruminating on the City Liberated

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I've always been drawn to ruminations on the cities that I've lived in, their patterns and cycles. How one feature makes one city so much more livable than another. How another makes it a nightmare. The weird transformed Austin of my childhood, car-culture imprisoned Arlington Texas and Phoenix, the strange two-city feel of San Antonio, the desperate ruins of Detroit have all been so starkly different that I can't help but get caught in the comparisons—and in impossible dreams of what cities might look like if they were transformed and liberated. Knocking doors 6-7 days a week for an extended period of time—as I have in this election cycle--also starts to give you a certain intimacy with the city that you just don't get any other way. You feel the rhythms of people coming and going, get minute-by-minute glimpses in how they lead their lives, and gain an immediate knowledge of just how walkable and livable their neighborhoods are. The majority of the l
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