Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the Piper connected home security system that was recently bought by iControl? Following the update it received back in early April, the system has been revamped yet again, and with the newest batch of changes comes a particularly notable drop in price. As of now, Piper is now priced at $199, down from the previous $239 USD, something said … Continue reading

WASECA, Minn. (AP) — A Minnesota teenager accused of planning to massacre his family and high school classmates mocked the attacks on the Boston Marathon and Sandy Hook Elementary School as “pretty lame” and “pathetic” and said he idolized one of the Columbine gunmen, according to recordings of his police interrogation.

The 17-year-old was arrested in April after authorities said they found him with bomb-making materials in a storage locker at his school in Waseca, 70 miles south of Minneapolis. In the two recordings released Tuesday, the teen calmly described his plan to “dispose of” his family, set a fire as a diversion and use explosives and guns to attack his school. He said he thought it would be “fun” and that he was following his idol, Eric Harris, who alongside Dylan Klebold slaughtered 13 people and injured 26 more before committing suicide at Columbine High School in 1999.

The teen told police he was not targeting anyone specific at the school.

“I would have taken anyone out, I didn’t care,” he told detectives. He insisted, though, that he had only wanted to kill older students because he did not want to be remembered in the same way as Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, who killed 20 elementary school children in his December 2012 attack.

“That’s just pathetic,” he said. “Have some dignity.”

He told officers he planned to use two pressure cooker bombs with explosives three times more powerful than the ones used in the 2013 Boston Marathon attack, according to the recordings.

“I thought three casualties was pretty lame,” he said.

He planned to put one pressure cooker inside a recycling bin and detonate it during lunch when lots of students would be around. He would detonate a second bomb when students were running away, he told investigators. Then he would throw Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs, and “when the SWAT comes I would destroy myself,” he said.

The teen said he had been planning the attack for more than a year and jotted it down in a notebook that he kept locked in his room.

However, his father told reporters last week that he does not believe his son would have carried out the plan and that there were no signs the teen was troubled.

The teen was charged with four counts of attempted murder, two counts of first-degree damage to property and six counts of possession of a bomb by someone under 18. The Associated Press generally does not identify juveniles accused of crimes. Prosecutors are trying to have the case moved to adult court.

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Information from: Star Tribune, http://www.startribune.com

Back in February, I wrote about the complexity of immigration law, and described how a federal court conflated immigration provisions in an important case. Now it turns out that immigration law stumps even the Supreme Court. The Court’s recent decision in Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio is marred by errors that may well have affected its outcome.

Cuellar dealt with the typical stuff of family-based immigrant visa petitions. A family member files a visa petition to request that the government recognize a relationship that allows a relative to apply for a green card. Depending on factors like the type of family relationship and the relative’s age, the waiting time between filing a visa petition and a green card application can range from months to decades. Why the potentially long wait? Because the government caps the number of people who may immigrate each year in certain family petition categories.

A U.S. citizen’s child, for example, immediately qualifies to file for a green card when her parent submits a visa petition. There is no cap, and thus no wait. In contrast, because the demand for sibling visas far exceeds supply, a U.S. citizen’s sister might wait two decades after a petition is filed before she becomes eligible to apply for a green card.

The question in Cuellar was whether a child may hold the spot in line established by a previous visa petition even after turning 21, the age of majority in immigration law. This is called “aging out,” and it invalidates categories of petitions available only to children. What if a different or newly qualified family member is able to file a petition for the aged-out adult? Should the government treat the petition as filed on the same date as the earlier one? For most categories of visa petitions, the Court’s answer is no. In other words, the family must start the process all over again.

Unfortunately, the Court stumbled to this answer under the weight of legal misunderstandings. In what initially appears to be a cosmetic mistake, Justice Elena Kagan insists on using the terms “petitioner” and “sponsor” interchangeably. Unfortunately, however, these words have distinct meanings in the context of immigrant visa applications. No family visa “petitioner” becomes a “sponsor” until her relative (the “beneficiary”) has finished her wait in line. Only once the wait is over, and the relative applies for a green card, is the petitioner called on to pledge financial support–thus “sponsoring” her relative.

Justice Kagan’s logic in the Court’s opinion, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts’ reasoning in his concurrence, reveals that the use of incorrect terminology is a symptom of serious substantive confusion. Both Justices assume (in Roberts’ words) that preserving one’s place in line “requires, at a minimum, that the beneficiary have his own sponsor, who demonstrates that he is eligible to act as a sponsor, and who commits to providing financial support for the beneficiary.” But this is incorrect. The beneficiary initially requires only a “petitioner,” whether wealthy or destitute, to file a visa petition on her behalf. Sponsorship comes later.

Justice Kagan commits several other legal errors. In holding that beneficiaries may not switch petitioners after aging out, she harshly critiques the dissenting Justices’ opinions to the contrary. “Were their theory correct,” she chides, those “aliens” could hold their place in line “for years or even decades while waiting for a relative to file a new petition.” And then comes her unfortunate misstatement: “As far as we know, immigration law nowhere else allows an alien to keep” her spot in line “untethered to any existing valid petition.”

This is plainly wrong. A federal court noted in 2012 that beneficiaries from certain countries may hold spots established by petitions filed prior to 1977. Had Justice Kagan realized that the dissenters’ position is not exceptional, she might not have been so dismissive. The 2012 opinion complains that the “case exemplifies why the immigration law of the United States is inexcusably complicated and in need of immediate revision.” No matter. It’s our law, and we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future.

Cuellar begs the following question: If Justices Kagan and Roberts got so much wrong in their written opinions, what other, unstated misunderstandings affected their analyses? Justice Kagan characterizes those who voluntarily read the immigration law in Cuellar as “masochists.” Her distaste may explain her mistakes. But we desperately need federal judges to read and interpret immigration law correctly, even if they find the exercise masochistic. While hacking through the underbrush, every judge must bear in mind that the misery of immigration law is intertwined with much deeper human suffering.

Did you see any homeless youth on the way to work this morning? If you’re like a lot of people here in New York or other cities, you probably did, even if you didn’t realize it. That’s probably because homeless youth have become adept at not standing out for fear of being arrested, harassed or exploited, especially if they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer/questioning (LGBTQ).

On June 29, Safe Horizon will march in New York City’s Pride parade, one of the largest in the world. We are marching with colleagues and youth we’ve helped through our Streetwork Project because homeless LGBTQ youth deserve to be seen. With the recent addition by Mayor Bill de Blasio of 100 beds to New York City’s youth shelter system — including 24 beds designated for LGBTQ youth — the problem of youth homelessness is picking up traction. But increased understanding of the problem is critical to building support.

At Safe Horizon we are incredibly proud of our programs to provide thousands of young people every year a respite from hunger, loneliness, and fear, and the opportunity to reclaim for themselves a sense of dignity and self-worth. However, we cannot take pride in the fact that youth homelessness is robbing our country of its most valuable assets.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Homeless Youth

I want to share with you five things that you might not know about homeless youth and ask you to share with your networks. The more that people understand this problem, the more that we can rally behind efforts to create solutions.

1. LGBTQ youth are over-represented among homeless youth.
   1 in 20 young people in NYC identify as LGBTQ; among homeless youth the number is 1 in 4. LGBTQ youth are over-represented because, in addition to all of the reasons why any young person may become homeless (poverty, family violence, untreated mental illness, or substance addiction, systemic racism, etc.), LGBTQ youth face the added risks of being rejected by their families or pushed out of their foster care placements because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.
2. Homeless youth are at enormous risk of being involved in illegal activities – often just to survive.
   According to a recent study by Columbia University Law School, “Family rejection and homelessness are top predictors that a young person will come in contact with the criminal justice system because of police targeting of homeless and low-income communities and people engaged in survival economies — such as drug sales, sex work, and other criminalized activity — to quite literally survive.”
3. We are very bad at counting homeless youth.
   The last time a youth homeless count took place in NYC, counters hit the streets on one of the coldest nights of the year, a night when many homeless young people sought refuge somewhere warm, like a subway car. They counted only 71 unsheltered young people in all of NYC while experts estimate that there are 5,000 homeless or unaccompanied young people on any given night. Tragically, incomplete data is then used to determine how many beds are funded, leaving thousands of young people under the radar and literally out in the cold.
4. We don’t have nearly enough safe places for homeless youth to sleep.
   Even with Mayor de Blasio’s addition of 100 beds, there are less than 500 emergency shelter spaces for more than 5,000 young people who need them in NYC. At Safe Horizon’s Streetwork Project, our shelter has 24 beds but the waiting list is often 100 names long . Nationwide the situation is even worse: there are just 4,000 beds for the more than 500,000 homeless young people.
5. Violence at home is the leading cause of youth homelessness.
   70 percent of homeless youth say they left their homes to escape violence like physical and sexual abuse, neglect and domestic violence. Additionally, many child victims of violence become involved with the foster care system where they can “age out” of care as young adults, with no housing and no means of supporting themselves.

2 Things You Can do Right Now to Help Homeless Youth

1. Share the infographic below on social media.
2. Support Safe Horizon and other organizations fighting for funding and policy changes that will turn the tide for all homeless youth.

With 40 percent of homeless young people identifying as LGBTQ in our country, the homeless youth crisis in America should be front and center this month during Pride celebrations, and throughout the year as well. The battle for safe shelter and homes for all America’s young people is being strengthened by LGBTQ youth and advocates. On behalf of thousands of homeless youth we help through Safe Horizon’s Streetwork Project, I thank you for raising concern for their lives and for sharing our belief in their limitless potential.

New Urbanism, with its focus on building walkable neighborhoods and reestablishing population density in the urban core and its ability to inspire generations of citizen planners, is among the most successful thought movements of our time. For decades, New Urbanist prophets like Andres Duany and James Howard Kunstler, building on the teachings of Jane Jacobs — who first reminded us that cities should be planned for people, not ideologues or machines — have articulated a compelling critique of auto-centric lifestyles, the plasticity of suburban existence and the unsustainable cost-burden of post-war American infrastructure.

The New Urbanist creed has been embraced by milliions of millenials, whose tastes trend away from cul-de-sacs and toward pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented neighborhoods in proximity to lively commercial districts. But with a wave of hipsters and empty nesters now flocking to cities across the country, New Urbanism faces a new challenge: how to advocate for principles of good design and the re-densification of depopulated districts while respecting the people for whom urbanism is not new at all — the folks who remained in struggling neighborhoods now seen as hot and bore the brunt of the ills in the era industrial collapse and suburbanization.

The central organs of the New Urbanist and allied movements — groups like the Congress on New Urbanism and Smart Growth America–have fostered a consciousness so pervasive that it underlies most of the seminal projects remaking the American city, from the parks proliferating on the Brooklyn piers to Boston’s Big Dig, a $14 billion effort to bury a renewal-era highway that cut through downtown. These are no small achievements in a country whose politics are so thoroughly dominated by the overlords of the auto-oil Leviathan, a complex heavily invested in the old regime.

Part of New Urbanism’s appeal is that it offers the prospect of spiritual redemption, a hope of putting the existential gloom and isolation of suburban existence behind us as we move toward more connected lives on walkable streets that foster cultural and commercial exchange. With a revival of the street, we can soothe the strife of what Kunstler calls, “a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization.”

The apotheosis of the New Urbanist gospel — which draws heavily on the geometries and densities of town planners from antiquity to early modern era — is upon us in the form of the Great Inversion, a futurist phenomenon first noted by author Alan Ehrenhalt in which core urban neighborhoods with vital streets and mixed-use development are in such great demand by back-to-the city millenials that working class and poor folks who held down the fort in these places for a half-century are displaced to decaying suburbs.

The ugliness of this process, and its threat to the culture that is the cornerstone of true urbanism, is entirely evident in the East Coast capitals, where epidemics of gentrification are moving forward with haste in vast swaths of Brooklyn, Boston and Washington, D… New York and Washington saw substantial African-American population losses in the last Census, a trend that will only intensify as rents spiral out of control. While some of these residents cashed out their appreciated equity on the way out the door, most were renters who gained nothing from the process.

In the cultural sphere, the legacy of jazz, soul, Nuyurican culture and hiphop, America’s greatest contributions to the global scene, are in peril in New York, a tale well told in the documentary Brooklyn Boheme, which details the transformation of the Fort Greene neighborhood from a hot-bed of the black arts movement to an epicenter of gentrification.

The challenge for New Urbanism is that, as a movement whose base is comprised largely of middle-class planning professionals, it has always been better at prescribing bump-outs, round-a-bouts and bike lanes than it is at confronting the gaping race and class divides that have long shaped the spatial and sociological realities of the American city. New Urbanism has fully absorbed the teachings of Jane Jacobs and others who had the courage and foresight to question the groupthink of Corbusier-inspired renewal planners. But the movement is less fluent in critical urban thinkers like Henri Levebre and David Harvey, who recognize that infrastructure improvements and design interventions of the kind favored by New Urbanists have huge impacts on real estate appreciation, rental markets and the demography and culture of place.

The tendency to fetishize design over social analysis surfaced last month at the bi-annual Congress on New Urbansim conference held in Buffalo. In covering the conference, Buffalo News reporter Colin Dabkowski issued a much-discussed public letter calling on the 1,400 congregated New Urbanists to deepen their analysis of how to improve the lives of residents living in neighborhoods far off the hipster map.

Dabkowski’s critique came at a pivotal moment. With market pressures rising, Rust Belt capitals like Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit are running out of time to redefine race-class relations in ways that diverge from the banalities and inequities of the Brooklyn model.

There are proven community development approaches for guarding against the threats of cultural and economic colonization inherent in the Great Inversion, and now is the time to adopt them in older cities throughout the northeast and midwest experiencing new growth after decades of decline. These strategies include Community Land Trusts, municipal Land Banks, and ambitious affordable housing programs like the one sought by Mayor Deblasio in a last ditch effort to preserve space for working people in New York.

These approaches emphasize the stewardship of land and property in ways that preserve space and generate wealth for low-income people as market pressures heat up. Community Land Trusts, which typically impose conditions of affordability on parcels held in trust, are often administered by high capacity community organizations. The best ones utilize community-engaged design processes that achieve the ideals of participatory democracy. Variations of the trust model have been employed to preserve affordability in gentrifying markets in the Dudley Street neighborhood in Boston, D.C., Albany, and more than thirty other cities.

PUSH Buffalo, the organization I direct, has assembled a trust of 100 parcels on the edge of a gentrifying district to preserve affordability over time, while demonstrating that low-income neighborhoods can lead the fight against climate change and create green jobs through intensive investments in weatherization and green affordable housing construction.

Municipal land banks, which got to scale first in Michigan, are also poised to define the shape of cities that have struggled with tax foreclosure and abandonment. Detroit’s land bank, for example, will soon take title to 50,000 vacant parcels. Of these properties, the most critical to safeguard for affordable housing and community-engaged planning are those located in proximity to the city’s Woodward Avenue growth corridor, which is attracting middle and upper-middle class residents. Most post-industrial cities have similar such growth districts — Elmwood Village and the Medical Campus in Buffalo, the Euclid Avenue corridor connecting downtown to the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland — typically designed along New Urbanist principles and located in proximity to job centers and public transportation networks.

Establishing community land trusts and working with municipal land banks to meet ambitious affordable housing goals on the edges of these growth districts is the only surefire way to stave off displacement, hipster monoculture and extreme wealth disparity. Community development entities will only have the leverage they need to shape urban growth in an equitable way if they gain a foothold in emerging growth corridors before market appreciation kicks in.

With hype about the Rust Belt renaissance growing by the day, the window for investing in strategic land acquisition in neighborhoods that will see a flood of millenials in coming decades, putting existing residents at risk, is closing. Our cities, many of which have lost more than half of their populations since WW II, should welcome the newcomers, but only when a plan is in place to manage growth in ways that reduce the threat of displacement and accrue wealth for long-term residents. With relatively modest investment from governments and foundations in community-controlled land banks and housing development initiatives, the new American city could aspire to principles of equity and heterogeneity so central to the democratic ideal.