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Parachute Underwear posted:It seems like there's a weird power imbalance between the ones who are slinging (D, Bodie, Poot, etc.) vs. the muscle (Bey, Bird, Savino) and the benefits they seem to get. The guy busting heads gets more "privilege" than the guy doing the work establishing drug dealing protocol. Economists who have studied the drug trade have found that it is very unfavorable to people on the street level, most of whom make less than minimum wage. The deal with D is he's been punished with demotion for his error killing a man in front of witnesses. Formerly he was in charge of one of (I think) four housing project towers, which represented a sizable chunk of Barksdale's whole territory. In that capacity most likely he was managing more people, had a higher status in the organization, and was earning much more money. In some ways his demotion is assumed to be temporary, since Stringer and Avon say as much, and soon enough they're telling him his good work in the pit will see him paid a commission on the package instead of a salary. He never gets the opportunity to work off his probation, however, thanks to Omar and the police. From a behind-the-scenes perspective this makes the season easier to produce. Extended filming in and around the project towers would be physically more difficult to film, harder for viewers to follow, and probably impossible to get permission for because of the inconvenience and disruption to the residents. Filming in the exterior courtyard of the low-rise projects is comparatively easy, and the audience can get situated with the small-scale drug trade there. Your observation is correct, though: the muscle makes more money. This is because anything involving serious violence has the potential for aggressive police response and harsh sentences, so they should only be assigned to proven, senior members of the organization. Wee-Bey and Bird, the members of the organization responsible for most of that work, are both caught and given sentences of life without parole, and neither really makes any attempt to cooperate with the authorities in exchange for a better deal. A capacity for measured and effective violence is also a rare and valuable talent in itself, which comes up a bit more in later seasons, particularly with Michael Lee's arc in Season 5.
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Dec 12, 2012 05:19
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DarkCrawler posted:I guess it makes sense that someone who routinely goes into situations where he gets shot gets more money then someone who doesn't. And not only do they face more risks but require more skill as well. Plus, muscle gets you territory. I'm not sure how much money a single corner makes In a later episode this season the squad nails Wee-Bey making a pickup on the morning take from the projects, and from the amount they extrapolate that the Barksdale organization grosses about $60,000 per day. The towers are most profitable, then the pit, then the corners. They actually have five high-rise towers (I looked it up, since the projects were a real place) but I don't know how many corners. Most likely it runs several thousand per corner per day. Freamon guesses the organization's overhead (i.e. salaries, expenses, and spillage), to be about 20%. quote:but you need to have that corner somehow and then hold it. That's Marlo's story, really.
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Dec 12, 2012 06:18
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escape artist posted:As far as the street-level dealers making less than minimum wage, I don't know if that's true. At one point Bodie tells Carver that he [Bodie] makes more than Carver does. It's when they're playing pool. There's a few qualifiers you have to attach to that. I doubt Bodie actually knows how much a Baltimore City cop earns, and he was just talking poo poo anyway. Bodie has no fixed expenses because he's 16 and lives with his grandma. Even if he's only earning as much as a cashier at Wal-Mart, he doesn't have to make rent, car payments, or anything like that, so anything he earns he can waste on clothes, fast food, entertainment, or gambling with Carver. Finally, Bodie is the straw boss in the pit, so he doubtless earns extra money. Most of the employees associated with the pit earn very little. There are probably a dozen or more hoppers, lookouts, and touts who we seldom see and never care much about, because we spend our time on the orange couch with management. They earn almost nothing. Later in the season, when D holds up everybody's pay on Stringer's instruction, you can see that Wallace makes it to about the middle of the next week before he's begging D to give him and Poot an advance, showing that he doesn't make enough to put anything by.
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Dec 12, 2012 15:45
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escape artist posted:See, but that's what Simon said is an incorrect analysis. I know it seems so obvious, but apparently Simon says it's much deeper than that. That would have been my own first guess, because it's so obvious. I guess an alternative interpretation would be, uh, I don't know... but if we're just bullshitting... Maybe the tracks are the police department, as in cop society, pursuit of career advancement, looking out for one another instead of doing the job. The train is McNulty's own inability to cope with being there, his insubordination, pride, alcoholism, tendency to gently caress himself up over dumb poo poo. What he really needs to do is get off the tracks--like when he was on the boat after season 1, or when he was walking a beat in the Western after season 3, and he was content and personally stable. But he can't help jumping on the tracks just so he can piss all over them: jumping into the heart of the department to gently caress the bosses and show everybody how smart he is. And when he's doing that, the train (his own hosed-up personality) is always barreling down at him.
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Dec 14, 2012 01:04
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The Rooster posted:It's gotta extend beyond McNulty, since the trains are referenced even in scenes without him. True. The episode summaries probably need a running tally of scenes involving trains, train tracks, and so forth, so we can work this out.
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Dec 14, 2012 07:29
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MrBling posted:They should all be natives, damnit. The distinctive Balmer accent is only spoken in certain parts of the city populated by working-class Whites, who IIRC are descended mostly from Scots-Irish who migrated in from the Alleghenies in the late 19th century to work the factories. The show doesn't really spend any time in those parts of the city. The dockers from S2 are all Polish, Italian, and so forth, more recent immigrants, so they don't have the accent. It should probably be more common among incidental characters, though.
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Dec 14, 2012 18:11
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I think they were emphasizing that when you're being interrogated by the police the only thing you should say or do is ask for your lawyer, then wait quietly for him to arrive. Simon really hammers this message heavily in the chapter of "Homicide" about interrogations. Having Levy go all "you people" and slap D's head is making it clear that D made a really basic and incredibly stupid error. It might also be intended to reinforce the point that D is a bit of a chump, since Levy feels ok putting hands on him and D accepts it (imagine if Levy pulled that on Bird). But yeah, it isn't right for the character and as far as making the point about shutting up during interrogations it is a bit on-the-nose for this show, so I put it down to the writers still trying to find the tone.
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Dec 16, 2012 05:42
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Jerusalem posted:I'm sure there is an element of dramatization to the whole thing, but keep in mind that prison guards have pretty lovely jobs with pretty lovely pay. If some prisoner wants to throw you an extra $50 to let him have some KFC or look the other way about some entertainment contraband I imagine quite a few guards would figure why the hell not? I imagine the thought process is probably along the lines of,"It's not like I'm giving the guy a weapon, and he's still in prison so it's not like it is hurting anyone, plus if I don't do it another guard will anyway." There's this, and also the fact that most of the COs are working class African Americans from the same community as Avon. So, not only do they know his rep and see that they don't want to make him their enemy, but they're also likely to share a somewhat jaundiced view of the criminal justice system. Officer Tilghman takes it the farthest, smuggling drugs in on his own, but buying KFC and letting Avon have extra privileges is pretty harmless. Michael G. Santos was in the federal prison system for decades after running a coke ring for upper-class white kids in the 1980s, and he wrote some books about his experience that are really fascinating. Compared to some of the real-life prisoners Santos discusses, Avon's operation inside the prison is pretty low-key.
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Dec 17, 2012 19:40
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E the Shaggy posted:I never even thought of it from this angle but it makes perfect sense. Goodfellas made this point first, but it's also a useful one for the Wire--even people who are supposedly on the legit have some of the characteristics of a gang, in that they look after their own. You don't need to bribe every CO, you just need to bribe a few. The ones who didn't take your money will never rat on the ones that did, because they have to look out for one another.
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Dec 17, 2012 20:05
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escape artist posted:This is true for almost everyone in every profession, even DOCTORS. If there was a show that did for medical drama like the Wire did for police procedural, I would watch the hell out of it.
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Dec 17, 2012 21:33
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Technical note about Prez's first big fuckup, Like many police departments, the BPD standard service weapon is a Glock pistol, specifically the Glock 22 in .40 S&W. Prez's negligent discharge is actually a nod to the Glock's undeserved reputation for that very issue. One of the major features and selling points of the weapon is that it can be safely carried with a round in the chamber, because it will only fire if the person carrying it deliberately pulls the trigger (as did Prez). As such it needs no external safety--the trigger is the safety--and if an officer needs to use his weapon he can draw and immediately fire without having to disengage a safety or chamber a round. At the same time, however, because the Glock is striker-fired, it has a comparatively easy trigger pull, particularly relative to the double-action revolvers that many older police were used to. To fire in double-action the shooter must pull the trigger a longer distance with greater force, so those weapons were somewhat forgiving when it came to poor trigger discipline, such as drawing or returning the weapon to the holster with a finger on the trigger. Because of the Glock's lighter trigger, making the same error risked discharging the pistol into your own leg, hence the term "Glock leg". Additionally, one of the steps in stripping the Glock for maintenance involves pulling the trigger to trip the striker, before the slide can be removed. A negligent user could easily forget to clear the chamber, in which case during routine maintenance he would discharge a round. If one follows very basic weapons handling and safety procedures these are non-issues, but most police seldom use their weapons and only put forward the bare minimum in training, maintenance, and range time as required to keep their jobs. After some problems with officers negligently discharging, the NYPD requested special trigger springs for their Glock service pistols to make the pull much heavier, similar to a double action revolver. This is called the "New York trigger". Apparently Prez had done the opposite with his weapon, and inserted custom springs for a lighter-than-normal trigger, and was showing Herc and Carver. Basically, Prez is an idiot for failing to clear the chamber before he pulled the trigger, and for all his "aw shucks" reaction he could have easily killed somebody, but it's also a nice little reference to some teething troubles that occurred with the widespread adoption of the Glock by American police.
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Dec 20, 2012 21:00
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cletepurcel posted:One thing I'm always curious about and forgot to ask last night: does the Mayor's Office really have to approve every promotion from Lieutenant and up, as seems to be shown in season 3? Presumably the Commissioner brings him names (that the Deputy Ops brought the Commissioner) and he rubber stamps them, but yeah, I get the impression that they were on a "serve at the mayor's pleasure" scheme. escape artist posted:Wow, I think you're right... I never noticed that. I can think of 3 times at least Prez fires his gun (two in this episode). Not a single time any other cop does, though. Prez's shooting incident in the towers is bananas, by the way. He, Herc, and Carver are being pelted by brickbats and such, and there are even a few shots fired, and then Prez returns fire with his Glock but... he can't see poo poo. He doesn't know where the fire is coming from, because he's buzzed and it's the middle of the night, so basically he's firing random shots at an apartment building. Provided he didn't hit anybody, he can clear it in the report by claiming that he was firing at visible targets, but realistically it was appallingly irresponsible and another indication that he's totally unsuitable for street work. Also the promise of this thread, and the thread itself, caused me to bang on through the episode at a rate of like one or two a day (it's The Wire, what do you want?) so I'm into the start of S3 by now. I just hit S3E3, wherein Omar and co. assault a Barksdale stash and meet much difficulty. If I'm remembering this correctly, that's one of three or four actual shootouts in the entire series, and it finishes up with friendly fire (Dante carelessly shoots Tosha in the face). This is not much of a series for glorifying violence.
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Dec 23, 2012 04:24
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^ I'm watching S3 right now, and that's actually just a trick. The comstat system allows him to sort crimes by type, time, location, and so forth, so Rawls has an inexhaustible source of gotcha questions. He can grab a random figure, like "Car thefts in downtown parking lots on Friday nights," and throw it at a guy, and there's no reason anybody would have that on hand. The guy is stumped and looks like an rear end in a top hat, so Rawls can browbeat him, but he isn't actually doing anything more complex than dicking with a spreadsheet.
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Dec 25, 2012 04:47
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watt par posted:(and as a side note apart from being right on 95 and the B&O line it's not a very well-located port) They actually try to explain it a couple times in passing, but I don't think they do that great a job of it. The port of Baltimore actually does an appreciable amount of tonnage, but much of it is roll-on/roll-off stuff (vehicles) and bulk cargo (e.g. steel) that does nothing for stevedores like Frank and his guys. Different ports have specialized. On the East Coast, most of the container traffic goes through the Port of New York and New Jersey. Some of it also goes through Hampton Roads, which is an enormous natural harbor at the mouth of the Chesapeake that accommodates several large port facilities and can handle all kinds of cargo. As Frank says, with Norfolk available there's no reason for ships to take an extra day going all the way up Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore. So, Baltimore shifted to fill other niches. Wilmington, Delaware is another example of specialization, in that they have the best facilities for handling frozen goods that require cold storage. In the Moyers interview and in his writing in The Corner, Simon talks about the notion of surplus people, people who aren't necessary to the smooth functioning of capitalism. I think season 2 shook a lot of viewers because of the seeming sudden change of subject, but to me it kind of seemed like they were trying to address one of the possible criticisms of the show. A thoughtless or antagonistic viewer can kind of dismiss stories about African American criminals, addicts, and the cops who are paid to keep them down. S2 shows the system failing hardworking white people. "They used to make steel there, no?"
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Jan 9, 2013 03:55
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Omar also pays more attention to street people because he has his own stable of snitches. I can't remember which episode in S1, but at one point Avon and Stringer are discussing how to track Omar down and get at him, and Stringer explains how every time Omar takes down a stash he goes around handing out free vials like Robin Hood. Consequently, just as soon as Barksdale soldiers go on the hunt, Omar will know about it. In the scene where the soldiers find and burn his van, Omar is watching them from a shooting gallery across the street the whole time.
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Jan 13, 2013 22:04
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Jerusalem posted:I'm really interested in what people think of Agent Koutris, whether they feel he is corrupt or not. When I first saw this season, the cooperation between the Greek and Koutris immediately jumped out to me as a reference to Whitey Bulger. For those who don't know about Bulger, the character of Frank Costello in the Departed was heavily based on him. One of the most important things drilled into law enforcement officers who use confidential informants is that you must be certain that you are in control of the relationship and the informant is not using you for his or her own purposes. Bulger was an FBI informant who shrewdly manipulated his handlers, to the point that he was able to leverage it and effectively became boss of organized crime in Boston. He tipped the FBI to weaken rivals, and they protected him from investigation and prosecution much as Koutris does for the Greek. In the beginning the FBI's objective was to use Bulger as a way to get at the Italian Mafia in Boston, but eventually Bulger displaced the Mafia as well as the other Irish gangs, and at that point he should have been their primary target. Bulger's organization was eventually brought down after other law enforcement agencies realized that the FBI was scotching all their investigations, and a joint DEA/MSP/Boston PD task force came after him by carefully keeping operations secret from the FBI. In the end, though, the indictments resulting from the investigation had to come from the Justice Department and the FBI got word that Bulger was about be arrested and warned him, and he was on the lam from 1995-2011. The story is fascinating and worth looking up in more detail, and I'm sure Simon and the other writers were thinking about it when they wrote Koutris. In the end the agent who had mainly worked with Bulger, John Connolly, went to prison for murder because of a killing he had enabled in 1984 (he told Bulger that one of his people was informing on him). The use of protected informants is a pretty thorny ethical question, because you have the authorities directly enabling criminality. At times it becomes a necessary evil, though, because you use that relationship to make larger cases against more dangerous criminals, at least in theory. I think the tipping point is when the criminal you're protecting is worse than the ones you're busting, as is probably the case with Koutris and the Greek. It's definitely worth noting that Koutris's drug bust has a big dollar value, but there's no arrest--the Greek basically fined them for loving with his money. When you compare this to what the Greek is able to do thanks to Koutris's help, with the drugs, theft, human trafficking, and so on, it doesn't come close to evening out. The most damning thing, though, is the murders--specifically the murder of Frank Sobotka. If Koutris's role in Frank's death were known, he would be indictable for murder just as John Connolly was. Ainsley McTree posted:To me, corruption implies some level of self-serving. If Koutris was using the Greeks to make money or fame for himself to the detriment of the job, he'd be corrupt, but I don't think we ever see him do that. As far as we know with the information we're given, he's just a morally gray agent, willing to sacrifice people and do dirty things for the greater good (as determined by FBI protocols, I guess). The show doesn't come out and say this directly, but you if you pay close attention it's clear he's bent. We know that Koutris was an agent in San Diego (I think) when he started using Glekas as an informant and by implication hooked up with the Greek. It is very important to note that it is Glekas who is on record with the FBI, while Spiros and the Greek are unknown. Koutris deals with those two directly and on a face-to-face basis, so he must have deliberately omitted to put them on paper with the FBI. He also directly lied to Fitzhugh when asked about Glekas. This is all very suspicious and all but confirms that he is not acting on the legit. Anyway, he's an agent in San Diego when he starts working with them, but we see him several years later, and now he has a key supervisory posting in Washington D.C. The obvious implication of this is that he has parleyed his relationship with the Greek into professional advancement, likely with prior superstar smuggling busts, so there is definitely a self-serving aspect of what he's doing.
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May 18, 2013 21:30
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cletepurcel posted:To see Koutris as an independently corrupt agent who ruins stuff by himself directly contradicts everything else the show says about institutions and individuals. Sepinwall has a good bit in his book, which has a chapter on The Wire, on this idea of the one bad apple, which Simon very specifically fought against (I think he says that people seeing Koutris as independently corrupt is one of the biggest misinterpretations people make when watching the show.) Who's saying that Koutris is the one bad apple and independently corrupt, and the FBI is blameless? Koutris being crooked is not exclusive from the FBI being crooked, they're both terrible. In fact it's the dirty institutional environment of the FBI that encourages and validates his corruption. We never see him taking cash bribes, instead the Greek pays him off by helping his career. Their connection is presumably how he rises from chasing a petty theft ring for the regional office in San Diego to a desk supervising counter-terrorism in D.C. At the same time, it's clear from subtext and the way he behaves in his brief on-screen appearances that Koutris's activities go beyond what the FBI would permit. He insulates the top tier of the Greek's organization by registering only Serge and Glekas as informants, while omitting Spiros and the Greek. In response to a direct question about Glekas from another FBI agent, he he lies, hedges, and warns the Greek that he's being investigated. Note that, if this was all the FBI and not Koutris acting on his own initiative, he could have just hung up and called the Fitzhugh's boss, the Baltimore SAC, and told him to ease up because the Greek is a protected informant and source of vital counter-terrorism information. He doesn't do that. Finally, and something rather significant that people on the other side of this question haven't mentioned, he directly initiated a murder by warning the Greek about Frank proffer. There's no way he did that without knowing Sobotka would be killed. At any rate, Koutris is very clearly hiding his relationship with the Greek from the FBI, which illustrates rather concretely that he's up to some dirt that is beyond what even they would permit. But from what we see of the Bureau in other contexts, he's an exceptional case but not that far out of the ordinary. The FBI on the show is always more interested in scoring points union-busting and chasing politicians than stopping serious crimes. I would say Koutris is to the FBI as Valchek is to the BPD, in that their environments are toxic but even so they're particularly venal and self-serving individuals.
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May 19, 2013 17:14
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cheese and crackers posted:A good real-life example of this is whitey bulgers involvement with the fbi in boston back in the day. That was a complete fiasco for the FBI, as I outlined above. quote:A criminal of that stature can get information on international crime rings that the fbi never could otherwise. The Greek is the international crime ring. The only reason he gave up that crack shipment to Koutris was the Colombians tried to stiff him on chemicals they needed to process cocaine into crack. Based on what Spiros said in his conversations with Nick, that deal involved delivery of whole shipping containers full of such chemicals, i.e. tons. The Colombians reneged on their end so it ended up a one-off, but initially Spiros talked to Nick about getting further containers in the future. That is, the Greek gave up about a metric ton of their crack to the FBI, but only because they tried to screw him on a deal that would have helped them produce many tons of crack on a continuing basis. And this is just one facet of his operations.
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May 20, 2013 08:48
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Buller posted:No the Columbians underpay the Greek on the chemicals used to make Cocaine out of Coca leaves. Hahah, this is what I meant to say. Mescal posted:Oh, okay. That makes a little more sense. But still, I can't imagine that process requires more than some simple solvents, maybe some strong acid/base, and at worst some distillation. Doubt it requires going international. Beside which cocaine almost never comes into the country unprocessed. It's grown in Colombia or Bolivia or someplace, processed in the country next door, and usually cut a couple times by the time it's shipped to the consuming country. Importing coca leaves themselves is impractical for reasons including the sheer bulk of it. They actually name the specific chemicals that Nick is stealing for them. I don't have the episode in front of me, so the only one I can remember was acetone, but you're right that the list wasn't particularly exotic. So why steal it in the first place? Price is one reason, in that stolen goods usually go for quite a bit less than legitimate purchases. Paperwork is another. You can go to a hardware store and get a can of acetone with no issue, but say you want industrial quantities of it, like the Colombians do? You'll have to get it wholesale, and there are rules for buying and selling large quantities of industrial chemicals. They'll want to know what you're using it for, especially if they're the exact chemicals used to produce cocaine and you want them shipped to Colombia. I've read more about this with regards to methamphetamine, but I know that in that case the precursors are tightly controlled and major manufacturers have to jump through some significant hoops to get the quantities they want without drawing attention. Orange Devil posted:I don't know that it is accurate to say that the Greek is the international crime ring. He seems to me to just be a shipping company. He's got ways to move goods in bulk by boat, doesn't really care what those goods are and can evade legal issues such as customs. International crime rings are exactly this, for the most part. The Greek runs a particularly streamlined version of it because he has no involvement in either production or distribution of what he's working with, but the basic business model is not dissimilar from other, real-life groups. quote:I think it's actually rather odd that he seems possibly more directly involved with the brothel. It's probably because the brothel has a high profit margin, low manpower requirements, low risk, and the barriers to entry are low. The distribution end of drug dealing is a much more complicated and risky business, which he leaves to guys like Marlo--characters who are the top of the Baltimore crime ladder but who are functionally little more than independent contractors to the Greek. Edit: Also, to go back to the crack seizure, it isn't a coincidence that the Colombians happened to be shipping a metric ton of drugs through the port of Baltimore, and that the Greek happened to know exactly which container it was. Reasonable supposition is that the Greek organized the shipment for them in exchange for a flat fee, and that the container was bound for their people elsewhere, perhaps New York. He caused that shipment to be busted, but how many earlier were passed through without incident? Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 20:04 on May 20, 2013 |
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May 20, 2013 19:50
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cletepurcel posted:I thought the Greek also produced the drugs - isn't that the whole point of his arrangement with Joe and later Marlo? They even show the actual transaction twice, first with Cheese getting robbed by Omar then with Chris and Monk getting jacked up by the MCU. Obviously he's far enough removed that the cops don't figure out who the supplier is when they bust Marlo but still. Actual production of the heroin that can be found in the USA is mostly in the hands of criminal organizations like Colombian paramilitaries or the Mexican cartels, who pay the farmers to grow poppies and then they refine the opium into heroin in factory-style operations. Most likely the Greek has a relationship with somebody down there, and he buys at the source and brings it to Baltimore to hand off to distributors at a gigantic markup. The vast majority of the profit accrued in this chain (farmer->refiner->smuggler->distributor->dealer) stays with the guy who gets it into the USA, i.e. the Greek.
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May 20, 2013 20:16
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One facet of this episode that always interested me from a history/urban planning perspective was the demolition of the towers (Lafayette Courts), which actually occurred in real life in 1995, years prior to the production of The Wire. Simon and his main collaborator, ex-cop Ed Burns, most likely wrote the first couple seasons as if the towers still existed because they had been a key fixture of the city when they were active on the street in the 1980s to early 1990s. In addition to its metaphorical uses and setting the season's plot in motion, the demolition brought the show's geography and depiction of the drug trade up to date. The mid-to-late 1990s were actually a key period for urban renewal projects not only in Baltimore but throughout the United States. Being from the midwest, I'm most familiar with the Chicago Housing Authorities actions over the recent period of history. (In)famous housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green project were slated for demolition in this period, although the process was only completed recently (the last tower at Cabrini-Green came down in 2011). These housing projects were built to provide quality affordable housing for city residents in the optimistic period from the end of WWII through the middle 1960s, but by the 1980s they had become symbols of urban decay, with sky-high unemployment and crime rates. The explosion of the narcotics trade with the advent of crack and the concomitant surge in violent crime was the final straw which justified demolition. The aim of these redevelopment projects, which were heavily subsidized by the federal government under the HOPE VI program, was to replace high-density and purely residential project towers with lower-density mixed-use neighborhoods. In theory it was the concentration of huge numbers of people and the lack of services and economic outlets for them in their own neighborhoods that had led to social decay. By instead constructing low-rise apartment buildings with commercial spaces at the ground floor, these problems would be ameliorated. Of course the obvious problem with a lower-density approach is that the number of housing units per unit of area would be much lower, making it impossible to accommodate all the residents displaced by demolition. This issue was exacerbated by delays in the construction of the new units. Many former residents of housing projects had to move out to distant suburbs and often even farther than that, typically by renting apartments with the help of vouchers under HUD's Section 8 housing program. When the CHS demolition project was reaching completion in the late '00s, I was in a smallish university city about four hours' drive from Chicago, and there was a lot of hand-wringing in the local (white) community about the social problems that might result from the (black) Section 8 residents then arriving from Chicago. These people wound up in a great number of cities all over the Midwest. On the one hand these population movements removed people from blighted neighborhoods, but on the other hand it also left the communities atomized and in unfamiliar situations. A person who had never owned a car and had no resources to purchase one could rely on the dense public transportation networks present at the core of many large American cities, but might be feeling stranded after relocating to a suburban apartment complex or a distant, smaller city with a less effective transit system. They also might find themselves out of touch with their friends or living as isolated "penny packets" of minorities in mostly white areas, where the majority could often be suspicious and unfriendly (as above). The distribution of these people also resulted in Chicago's powerful street gangs, like the Gangster Disciples or Vice Lords, establishing branch operations in the other cities where members landed. Finally, in a theme that was hit fairly heavily by the third season of the Wire, there is the question of whether these renewal projects were actually intended to benefit residents (many of whom wound up not being residents any longer anyway!) or some other party. Renewal creates opportunities for businessmen in the form of demolition contracts, construction contracts for the replacement structures, increased property values in nearby privately-held real estate. Residents relocate from demolished government-owned housing to units rented by private landlords, so that the Section 8 program functions as a subsidy to the rental industry. And of course, on the Wire, the people we see concretely benefiting from the demolishing of the towers and the resulting flow of HUD money are crooked politicians and real estate developers like Andy Krawczyk. Sociological studies of the results of urban renewal often show qualified success for the cities involved. For example, overall crime rates have tended to decline noticeably rather than simply being shuffled around geographically. However, the programs are still controversial with advocates for the disadvantages social groups who are primarily affected. As a further anecdote from own experience, up until about a month ago I was living in Toronto (for around 18 months) quite near Regent Park, a low-income neighborhood of mainly public housing. Regent Park is currently benefiting from a major revitalization project; unlike in the US programs I discussed above a lot of new units are being constructed. However, some people working in neighborhood non-profits I spoke with indicated that the new units being constructed were predominantly small single-bedroom units, even though the present character of Regent Park is mostly immigrant families. Their supposition was that Toronto is attempting to alter the composition of the neighborhood towards younger residents, unmarried individuals or couples without children. Here's an article from the Toronto Star from a couple years ago about residents' concerns. Even a program like that, which is very fair by comparison to the US equivalents outlined above (and had some very positive effects that I observed directly), gets mixed reviews from them. At any rate I should stop running my mouth since urban planning is well outside my expertise, I just find the whole deal interesting and it's not something that this season of the Wire really gets into.
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Jun 2, 2013 21:34
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Hedera Helix posted:Ah, ok. I didn't actually make it that far- I dropped it midway through the fifth episode- but the way you describe it makes it sound like there's a lot more going on than appeared on the surface. It's actually really interesting that you mention dropping it midway through the fifth episode. The end of that episode (Wild Bill's funeral) is one of the best scenes in the series, and it's when the show best gets across what it is really talking about.
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Aug 22, 2014 21:52
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