Housing, housing, everywhere, and not a room to rent. (Courtesy NYCHA)

Housing homies. (Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

Stepping off the elevator on the 12th floor of 250 Broadway, you pass by a dozen  photographs of idyllic, almost bucolic housing projects. The dogwoods are in bloom, matching the pink matting within the frames. That the pictures are a bit faded only adds to the utopianism of the scenes: families frolic in green grass courtyards, the sun is always shining.

These days, the picture is far less rosy: Apartments are overcome with toxic black mold, riven with cavernous leaks, overrun with rats, sometimes all three and then some. Repairs? Fuggetaboutit. Those will be years away. And that’s just inside; outside, it’s a war zone.

Or so the city’s tabloids would have you believe.

But the Housing Authority—or NYCHA, as almost everyone calls it, pronouncing it like some bureaucratic sneeze—represents much more than those run-down apartments we read about, of which there are fewer than the coverage suggests.

With more than 420,000 residents, NYCHA has a population that surpasses Atlanta. Factor in the 232,000 people who receive Section 8 vouchers, which NYCHA oversees, and it is larger than Denver, Seattle or Boston. The difference is that this mythical city would be made up of only the very worst neighborhoods—a world of Brownsvilles and Stapletons and Mott Havens without the Park Slopes and Upper East Sides to support them. This is both NYCHA’s biggest problem and its greatest virtue, a blessing and a curse passed down from Robert Moses, Fiorello LaGuardia and Franklin Roosevelt. Despite the eternal outcry over NYCHA’s shortcomings, most agree that the neighborhoods the projects inhabit would be even worse off without them. Who else is going to provide so many residents with affordable, if not always attractive, housing, in a city that has less and less?

Which is why the agency’s decline is so frustrating to so many. None more so than John Rhea, the man Mayor Bloomberg charged three years ago with fixing the problems—so many problems spread among so much real estate: 178,000 apartments in 334 complexes scattered across all five boroughs.

Of average height and trim build, Mr. Rhea still dresses like he’s headed to work at his last job, as a managing director at Barclays. On the morning of a two-hour interview with The Observer in the chairman’s conference room (as the sign outside the door said), his suit had a fine pinstripe. He wore a white shirt and red tie patterned with tiny Barrel of Monkey monkeys, hand-in-hand.

While he refuses to believe NYCHA’s troubles are intractable, he admits they are grave. “To me, the problem with NYCHA is gridlock. It’s no one actor but things piling up,” Mr. Rhea said. “It starts with an accident, then people are blocking the intersection, one truck is sticking out a little too far so one lane is jammed down. Everyone is trying to merge into fewer lanes. The traffic lights aren't changing.” Mr. Rhea sees himself as public housing’s traffic cop.

As if trapped in Bizarro World, NYCHA's story runs counter to the city's resurgence of the past two decades. When New York was in decline, the housing authority remained, thanks to federal largesse, a shining beacon of hope in the city even as everything around it was consumed. Now the situation has flipped. As the city swells, NYCHA has been suffering, thanks largely to neglect in Washington, where almost all of the authority's funds come from.

In many ways, the debate surrounding NYCHA mirrors those raging throughout the country over the role of government in society.

“It was the place to be, everyone was always hanging out at our place,” said City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, who grew up in the Williamsburg Houses, New York’s second oldest housing development (the complex was even made a city landmark in 2003). "Even when the city started to get really bad in the '70s and '80s, NYCHA still had it all."

Now representing the East Village and the Lower East Side, Ms. Mendez has one of the largest tracts of public housing in her district. Since joining the council in 2006, she has chaired its public housing committee. She is a fierce advocate and frequent critic of NYCHA, but she is also quick to credit Mayor Bloomberg for supporting the authority when few others will.

“When John Rhea came in, I was skeptical,” she said. “I didn’t think we needed a banker, but I have to say, he’s done a good job. We’re seeing progress, but I don’t know if it’s enough. Given the situation we’re in, I don’t know if any one person could fix it.”

First Houses ground breaking. (La Guardia and Wagner Archives)

On December 3, 1935, Roosevelt, LaGuardia, Moses, Congressman Robert F. Wagner and what seemed like half the city crammed onto the corner of First Avenue and East Third Street to open First Houses. Thus began an era of American progress, a social experiment,  affordable housing for all, or at least those fortunate enough to win the housing lottery.

Before long, LaGuardia and his New Deal pals were on 105th Street for the East River Houses, and in Williamsburg, Red Hook, Queensbridge, ceremonial silver shovels in hand, breaking ground on dozens of new housing projects. By 1939, the mayor was regularly traveling around the country, advising cities like Newark, Providence and Philadelphia on how to follow suit. As important as affordable housing was, the construction was as much a jobs program as anything, a salve to the Depression. “In so many instances, it was a pioneering program,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, long-time director of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The Great Migration, the Great Society and white flight, aided by discriminatory practices in the real estate industry, conspired to leave NYCHA’s developments with largely minority and lower-income tenants, rather than the economic mix that had been hoped for. Still, the projects gave birth to everyone from Lloyd Blankfein (Linden Houses, East New York) to Jay-Z (Marcy Houses, Bed-Stuy) and Sonia Sotomayor (Bronxdale Houses, Morisania, since renamed in her honor). Mr. Rhea’s goal, he said, “is to ensure that NYCHA can still foster these kinds of success stories.”

Like so many government programs from the era, the carefully planned social engineering did not always pan out. As Robert Caro and so many others have detailed, the new housing projects erased entire communities along the way. The new homes may have been affordable and modern, but they were not exactly inviting—especially as the technology progressed and the towers grew taller, more ominous and more dense.

Yet still they stand. NYCHA’s current repair bill systemwide tops $6 billion, and is expected to balloon to $14 billion in the next three years, many times the roughly $270 million NYCHA receives a year for capital expenditures.

One housing official marveled that some 10-year-old, privately developed low-income apartmentsare actually in worse shape than many 60-year-old public housing complexes. NYCHA, even with its massive portfolio, is held to a higher, perhaps impossible, standard. “Even in a perfect world, NYCHA would still have its problems,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Regional Plan Association.

Starting in the Reagan era, federal funding, which makes up the vast majority of NYCHA’s non-rental income, began to diminish. Even during the Clinton administration, with welfare reform a national issue (and Andrew Cuomo running HUD), funding waned and talk of privatization was rampant. The situation deteriorated drastically during the Bush years, with federal funds falling to 69 cents on the dollar. NYCHA enjoyed full funding in President Obama’s first year in office, as well as $424 million in stimulus funds—the largest public housing grant awarded in the country. Since then, it has fallen by the wayside due to Congressional intransigence and presidential ambivalence.

“Obama has been hostile to public housing, which surprised a lot of people, since he came up working in it,” said John Arena, a professor at the College of Staten Island and housing expert.

“It is time for New York to realize we have to fight for what is ours, but we also have to be able to stand alone,” Mr. Rhea said. “We have too much at stake to rely on anyone but ourselves to make do.”

Williamsburg Houses, the city's second development (Skyscraper City)

Two thousand, six hundred apartment buildings—2,597 to be exact, built in neat little clusters in almost every corner of the city over the course of six decades. From a plane, or Google Maps, they are plainly visible from above, shocks of green and brown, big gaps in the city’s otherwise uniform street grid. They are pinwheels, crosses, long slabs of concrete and brick lined up like dominoes.

Such projects were once sprouting up across the country, but more and more, New York stands alone. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley demolished one notorious housing project after another, from Cabrini Green to Robert Taylor, names synonymous with urban blight and bureaucratic failure. He replaced them with new developments that lined the pockets of connected developers but housed half as many residents. In Atlanta, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Newark, New Orleans, the story has been the same.

“It’s a battle that’s still being fought here in New York, whereas it’s been given up in most every other big city,” said Victor Bach, a senior housing analyst at Community Services Society of New York.

Mayor Bloomberg is typically viewed as out of touch with the needy. After all, he called the city’s homeless shelters “pleasurable” last month. Nonetheless, he has done more for public housing than almost any other mayor in the country. He has invested more than $100 million into the housing authority and spent political resources on NYCHA when necessary, including drafting John Rhea to run the agency. Granted, his predecessors still received ample federal funding and could basically ignore the housing authority.

Mr. Rhea’s job is not unlike that of other outsiders recruited by the mayor. “NYCHA needed a change agent, and I think I have experience in being an insurgent—you know, going into an organization to make substantial change happen,” he said. “I also didn’t come with a set of preconceived notions about what was right or wrong structurally or strategically at NYCHA.”

Mr. Rhea grew up in inner-city Detroit, in a mixed-income neighborhood where he walked by housing projects and rundown homes on a regular basis. His father ran his own office furniture supply business, his mother was a medical technician He came east for school, attending the honors program at Wesleyan, where he majored in social studies. While attending Harvard Business School, he became friends with Barack Obama, who was then at the law school. He then went to work for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago for three years, where the two remained friendly. He hosted the future president’s first fund-raiser in New York.

Mr. Rhea came to the city to work at JPMorgan Chase, where he arranged more than $50 billion in deals, and then went to Lehman Brothers, where he rose through the ranks to become head of global consumer retail group. He sees himself as a business facilitator, rather than a money-maker (though there was plenty of that too). It was this skill that attracted the Bloomberg administration, along with his management experience at both firms.

When Lehman collapsed, Mr. Rhea found himself with a job at Barclays when it bought up Lehman’s investment banking division. But he had long felt called to public service, and the moment seemed right. He considered heading to Washington, but when word got out he was in the market for a public-sector position, the Bloomberg administration approached him first.

He said that the banking crisis played no role in his decision to leave Wall Street, and someday he could even go back.

“Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t personally feel guilt. I wasn’t a real estate banker, I didn’t put together complicated derivatives, I didn’t sell subprime mortgages, I didn’t have any role at all in housing,” Mr. Rhea explained. “As an American, watching the financial debacle that had many culprits—the financial industry being one, but government policy being another, and just excess, sheer excess in the economy—I didn’t feel guilt but I certainly felt responsibility. I don't know how any American can watch what we went through and not feel some level of concern for the fellow citizens who were truly impacted.”

John Haynes Holmes Houses, Yorkville. (David Saunders/Flickr)

Mr. Rhea's financial experience experience has come in handy at the cash-strapped NYCHA. “Washington has been very clear in saying that there are $30 billion of unmet capital needs for public housing nationally and it doesn’t have the capacity to fund them,” Mr. Rhea said. “Therefore, housing authorities have to think about other ways of availing themselves if they want to maintain their buildings—other ways of attracting capital, and having conversations with residents and advocates about those options, and how we pursue them and what the risks are.”

One of the first projects Mr. Rhea tackled was creating an office of public-private partnerships, a controversial move. Public housing, the bedrock of the so-called safety net in New York, is considered sacrosanct in advocacy circles. Any private involvement, it is feared, will poison the well. How long until everything has been sold off?

Mr. Rhea insists the housing advocates have nothing to fear, and if they are serious about rebuilding NYCHA, they will have to be creative. When an idea was floated internally to possibly put billboards on some of the housing project’s towers, it was exposed in the Daily News and quickly shot down. The outcry was understandable, but what if it meant a new security system or money to reopen a community center or fix up a basketball court?

“What I find incredibly amazing is that the press can say NYCHA isn’t doing anything,” Mr. Rhea said. He said he has proposed “some of the most intransigent, kind of radioactive” ideas, about which NYCHA has been totally upfront. “We’ve put them out there, we’ve said, ‘Here’s what we plan to do about them,’ we’re fully transparent about it, and we’re willing to have a conversation about what are the implications of what’s being proposed.”

Mr. Rhea’s most impressive victory was the federalizationof thousands of units that had been cast off in the previous decade by the city and state. Completed at the end of 2009, it was a reminder that Washington was not the only political culprit. In the late 1990s, Gov. George Pataki offloaded some 21,000 units of public housing the state had built and maintained for decades. The city pulled the same trick in 2002 with a number of developments it controlled, following a devastating blow to the budget as a result of 9/11.

The vast majority of these units had no federal support, thousands of apartments drawing against the rest of NYCHA’s funds. Through a deal with HUD, federal matching funds, however insufficient, are now provided for the entire NYCHA portfolio. The federalization deal also brought in an injection of $400 million in public and private financing, a never-before-attempted partnership meant to modernize many of the most dilapidated developments. “Standing up at the podium with the secretary of HUD and the mayor, the federalization deal being announced and knowing what that meant, that was a huge victory,” Mr. Rhea said. “It shows we can get things done.”

Queens Bridge Houses, Long Island City. (David Saunders/Flickr)

Still, Mr. Rhea’s job has been far from easy. Another of his marquee achievements is Plan NYCHA, essentially a strategy outline subtitled “A Roadmap for Preservation.” At 45 pages, it took more than two years to create, drawing lukewarm reviews when it came out in 2011.

“It’s a scrapbook,” remarked Mr. Bach. “It mentions some important policies, but it doesn’t go into them at all. It devotes most of its space to pictures of resident participation.”

Mr. Rhea defends it as more of a vision statement than a detailed blueprint. “You can’t give people the thousands and thousands of pages of research and documentation that we’ve done and expect them to digest it,” he said. “This allows people to help us guide individual projects moving forward.”

The same goes for the Boston Consulting Group report commissioned by the chairman that has led to some of the harshest media attention on the authority in memory. Begun in March 2011, the report was due to be completed the following September at a cost of $5 million. The study was extended through the following April, and the price tag doubled. In part, this speaks to the complexity of NYCHA—it takes 12,000 employees to manage that city of half a million—but also to a lack of political awareness on the part of Mr. Rhea.BCG is known for its experience in advising government agencies, but it also happens to be where the chairman worked after business school. The Daily News got wind of the report in June and began to demanding its public release. Mr. Rhea demurred.

“If he had public-sector experience, John would have known the report was going to get out, whether or not he wanted it to,” said one City Hall housing expert. “He’s focused on the product, not the politics, and that has its perils.”

Smelling blood, the paper began digging around in the authority and came up with a damaging story. NYCHA had, in the words of the tab, been “sitting on” nearly $1 billion in federal money dating back to 2009.

As bad as that sounded, it was not exactly accurate. In fact, 90 percent of the $950 million had been allocated already, and while $485 million had yet to be spent, that was not unusual. Between appropriations, requests for proposals, and approvals at nearly a dozen different agencies in Washington and New York, it can take up to three years for HUD funds to make their way from Capitol Hill to the streets of Canarsie or Kingsbridge. Furthermore, $540 million the News was complaining about had only been announced in the past six months to a year. Never mind that those numbers had been provided directly to the paper by NYCHA’s public affairs office as a sign of progress.

“That kind of lack of detail leaves a reader with the impression that if you’re Mrs. Smith and your ceiling is falling in, that NYCHA’s not going to do what it’s supposed to do, when it has all of the resources it needs to do that,” Mr. Rhea complained. “When you don’t say you need 6 billion, and you only have a billion, you leave out the fact that even if we snapped our fingers tomorrow and spent it all in the most efficient way, you still have five out of six people still upset about the quality of their conditions.”

To make matters worse, the tab ran accompanying pieces showing apartments full of black mold and rat holes. As bad as that is, the argument was disingenuous. Small repairs come out of the operations budget, while the billion dollars at issue was in capital funds. It is the difference between fixing a leaky ceiling and repointing the bricks in an entire complex to protect against weather damage. Not that NYCHA could rob from capital funds to pay for regular maintenance anyway. It is forbidden to dip into one pot to fund the other, and doing so could actually lead to serious sanction in Washington. A number of council members had to hold a hearing on the steps of City Hall to praise Mr. Rhea, fearing the negative publicity would imperil NYCHA. “That is my gravest concern, the message this will send to Washington,” Ms. Mendez said. “They treat us badly enough as it is.”

At least a few housing advocates believe Daily News owner and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman is working on behalf of the real estate industry to cripple the authority and thereby open up its prime land (along the East River, in Chelsea, on the Upper West Side, in Williamsburg and Red Hook) to development. Nevermind that Mr. Zuckerman exclusively develops commercial real estate.

Another prominent example of the gotcha news involves $42 million the City Council allocated for security cameras in 2009. While desperate for more funding, Mr. Rhea decided to suspend the council contributions to determine exactly the best use for them. In his view, many developments had security systems in place, but they were not having an appreciable impact on crime. He created the Safety and Security Task Force to meet with residents and better understand the issue. “John Rhea decided to freeze our money,” Councilwoman Mendez said. “I didn’t like it, but it was the right thing to do, and now, hopefully, we’ll get the right cameras, the right security, for the right developments.” Instead, the News lamented a rise in crime while NYCHA was developing the new security plan.

While trying to have the BCG report released, the News complained that the 87-page document cost $124,000 a page. “That’s just stupid,” Mr. Rhea said. “How about we talk about how the report could save NYCHA $70 million a year. It pays for itself seven times over in the first year.”

Mr. Rhea’s favorite story was the one about the $325,000 he spent for a two-day conference at the Javits Center that brought every NYCHA employee together to share their thoughts about the agency—an event painted as a management-driven boondoggle. To Mr. Rhea, it was part of a necessary refocusing. “At $30 a person, I would say that wasn’t a waste of money, to be able to hear the ideas and concerns of every one of my employees,” Mr. Rhea said.

“You can worry about the optics or the politics, or if you look like you’re doing a good job,” he continued. “We don’t need that. We don’t need another person just going through the motions. We don’t need more pageantry. We’re looking to make a difference.”

This is what it's all about. (Courtesy Kars 4 Kids)

Is there enough time, resources or authority to make a difference? Despite widespread praise from housing advocates, many question whether or not Mr. Rhea can truly effect the change he speaks constantly of. After decades of disinvestment, no one person could turn around NYCHA in four years.

Still, there are advocates who argue the mayor could be doing more to support his chairman. Mr. Bach, the housing analyst at the Community Services Society, points to the billions of dollars the city funnels every years to private developers through the city’s Economic Development Corporation, the millions more given to parks, museums, even new stadiums. “There’s absolutely no comparison, and there’s no comparable attention and support to the New York City Housing Authority,” he said. How much time has the mayor spent promoting a ban on soft drinks this year? How much time has he spent on promoting NYCHA? It’s a question of political capital, Ms. Vitullo-Martin of the Regional Plan Association said.

Yet political capital does not always get results either. Consider education, an area on which the Bloomberg administration has focused tirelessly. “The solutions are not always easy, clear, or even possible,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said.

Perhaps the experience of another public authority might guide NYCHA back on the right track. “In the 1970s, the MTA was on the verge of collapse, and in the ’80s, it really executed an amazing turnaround,” said Fred Harris, NYCHA’s new director of development, who led the MTA’s real estate portfolio at the time before spending two decades in private development. “I think NYCHA is at a point where it needs to make the same transformation.”

The comparison may be apt for another reason. Despite all the improvements at the MTA, everybody still complains about it.

Last Thursday, without a cloud in the sky, John Rhea stepped out of his city-issued Toyota hybrid SUV and onto the leafy quad of Baisley Park Houses in Jamaica, Queens. He had on a navy suit, no pinstripe, light blue check shirt and matching tie. Local Councilman Reuven Willis, who grew up in the nearby South Jamaica Houses, had recruited Kars 4 Kids, a North Jersey Jewish charity, to hand out backpacks to families from the projects. “It is critically important these kids have the resources they need to succeed on the first day of school,” Mr. Rhea said, touting yet another of his public-private partnerships.

NYCHA had paid to rebuild the project’s community center three years ago, but it so far lacked the funds to open it. Instead, money would soon be spent on those new cameras, after two years of debate, and just in time—a police officer had been shot less than a month earlier. Mr. Willis went up the block to show off a basketball court that had been recently refurbished with a new coat of paint and a good weed whacking. It took 16 months, but it had been decades since anything had been done, and a totally new court was on the horizon, so he remained excited. "He came in, he met with my people, asked what we wanted, and he delivered," Mr. Willis said.

Scaffolding encircles many developments, suggesting repairs when there are none. It frustrates tenants, according to Mr. Willis, but he can live with it as long as more important problems are being tackled. Public housing, a work in progress.

“Growing up, did I know the NYCHA chairman? No. But everybody here does,” Mr. Willis said, gesturing around the quiet street. And it was true, he was getting hugs and fist bumps from many in the crowd, though also some tough questions about the community center. Mr. Rhea promised he was hard at work on the problem.

As Mr. Rhea rushed off to one more backpack giveaway, before a day of meetings in the city, he paused to consider the work he was doing. “I don’t want you to think I’m all pie in the sky,” he said. “I know we’ve got a lot left to do, and the challenges are huge in turning this around. We have another 15 months to run hard to put a bunch of runs on the board, to execute against the plan.”

He looked back at the kids holding their new backpacks aloft and smiled. “I wish this was the only part of my job.”

(Jason Seiler)

From his corner office on the 35th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building downtown, Adolfo Carrion could once survey much of his domain. The regional administrator for HUD Region 2, Mr. Carrion was responsible for the federal government’s housing and urban development projects in New York and New Jersey. Stretching out before the floor-to-ceiling windows is lower Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens are off to the left. Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty peek out from behind the towers of downtown. Out across the harbor to the right is Jersey City and, off in the distance, Newark. Glory and destitution in one vista.

Peering down, it is easy to see a century’s worth of transformational urban development. The redbrick monoliths of the New York Housing Authority, the brainchild of Robert Moses and the WPA, abound. Idyllic towers propagated by LaGuardia, Rockefeller, Lindsay and a thousand other urban dreamers, these are the projects that deteriorated into The Projects. Ringing the Battery and over the bridges to Long Island are the FDR, the West Side Highway, the BQE and the rest of Moses’s great interstate network. After four decades, Battery Park City is nearly complete, built on the landfill dredged up by the World Trade Center. More than $20 billion in Liberty bonds is at work rebuilding the Trade Center and other pieces of lower Manhattan, ravaged on 9/11.

Yet for all this work, it is hard to recognize a marquee project, a bright shining beacon of the Obama administration on the scale of those that came before.

Squinting, it is possible to see from Mr. Carrion’s office the aluminum siding wrapping the Brooklyn Bridge. It is being rebuilt for $508 million, $30 million of which came from the president’s stimulus fund. The government is not building a new bridge or new apartment complex, and it is only building a new office tower because the one that came before was destroyed. In so far as something new has been accomplished, it is in the philosophical and cerebral fashion that has been both a blessing and curse to this president.

“This is about thinking about the way we want Americans to live, in this country and as a global player,” Mr. Carrion said. “This is about building a foundation for the future of the country and about rebuilding the economy.”

When Barack Obama took office, he created the first-ever White House Office of Urban Affairs, and he tapped Mr. Carrion to be his city’s czar. This was seen as the first great signal that things would be different, that the promises made by Candidate Obama, of “putting the UD back in HUD,” would be fulfilled.

“It’s symbolic, the White House Office of Urban Affairs,” said Ed Blakely, the former dean of the New School’s urban policy department and New Orleans’s “recovery czar.” He currently directs the United State Studies Center at the University of Sydney in Australia. “It’s very important because it showed the president’s commitment to cities, though a lot of work remains to be done.”

But the office fell by the wayside amid the mounting recession, competition from the cabinet agencies and ambivalence within the administration. When Mr. Carrion left for his provincial position at HUD in May 2010, it all but vanished, with staff falling from six to two. The White House switchboard cannot find it sometimes.

Despite the apparent sputtering of the office, Mr. Carrion holds up programs like Sustainable Communities, which brings together HUD, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department to Transportation to promote regional planning by “breaking down silos” between the agencies and offering millions of dollars in grants. “It’s hard to put your hand on it, because obviously, I would love to say, ‘That’s the bridge that I like that we built,’ but there will be lots of them, as there will be houses, transportation nodes, schools near the housing, mixed-use developments and open space,” Mr. Carrion said. “So I think the proudest, as a policy geek, the proudest thing I can point to is sort of pouring the foundation for the future.”

Mr. Carrion points to a project in Harlem, to build a new school through the PROMISE Communities program, as one of these silo-busting, foundation-building initiatives. The U.S. Department of Education provided $60 million through a charter matching program for a new school, with Goldman Sachs pitching in $20 million, Google $6 million and $5 million in construction costs donated by the general contractor. HUD’s big role was remapping West 129th Street, which was removed when the housing complex the school is in was built in the middle of the last decade. “The approach now is, how do we partner with you to leverage your investments in that city to integrate the public housing into the fabric of the neighborhood?” Mr. Carrion said. “It’s a complete different partnership than before.”

Even the administration’s staunchest supporters struggle to find much to brag about. “He started a new political conversation on the importance of American cities,” Ester Fuchs, a Columbia public policy professor and former aide to Mayor Bloomberg, said. “We’re on the map again, but our territory is still very small.”

The president’s critics are even less charitable.

“There’s nothing there,” Manhattan Institute scholar and Giuliani biographer Fred Siegal said. “This is just more of the same do-nothing identity politics that has been killing cities forever.”

Much of the plight of urban policy started with Ronald Reagan. He was the first Republican president to take the White House without winning a single urban area during his 1980 run, and thus the GOP realized it no longer needed to cater to urban voters. In successive elections, the Democrats came to the similar conclusion that they could take cities for granted. “As a result, politics has largely driven the policy,” Ms. Fuchs said. Republicans could undermine, even attack cities (see: Welfare Queens, Food Stamp President) while Democrats largely ignored them.

President Obama was supposed to change all that. “To seize the possibility of this moment, we need to promote strong cities as the backbone of regional growth,” he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors on the campaign trail of June 2008. This is the first urban president in at least two generations, since JFK or even FDR.

President Obama’s cabinet has been stocked with some of the top talent from Chicago, New York and Boston, among them Valerie Jarrett, Larry Summers and EPA chief Lisa Jackson. HUD secretary Shaun Donovan came of age at the agency before Mayor Bloomberg tapped him in 2004 to champion one of his strongest accomplishments, the New Housing Marketplace plan, a $7.5 billion program aimed at the creation 165,000 affordable housing units. Now Mr. Donovan, with the help of Mr. Carrion and many of his fellow secretaries, is leading an equally ambitious program to remake the way the nation builds not only housing but entire cities.

This creates the potential problem for great expectations, though. Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist well-known for his studies of cities—his last book was called Triumph of the City—said the president may be urban America’s greatest hope in almost a century, but that does not mean he will be able to transform it.

“He is perhaps the most urban president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Mr. Glaeser said. “I think we’d just like more of a recognition that cities are America’s economic heartland, that they’re great things. The problem is, that is politically unwise, as disheartening as that is. So we should get over the fact that it’s not gonna happen.” If the president goes out and stumps for cities, he may wind up as fodder for Newt Gingrich in the next Republican debate.

Mr. Glaeser cautions that the hope for urban change was too great in the first place, and he said as much in an article he wrote for The Times on the day the president was inaugurated. “America today is experiencing a crisis similar to that facing the cities in the 1970s,” he wrote. “Americans cannot afford to treat the president as their personal ideological champion, or to judge him on economic conditions that he cannot control.” In other words, lower your expectations.

“Federal urban policy’s legacy has been terrible whether they are investing in cities or not,” Mr. Glaeser told The Observer. There is only so much that can reasonably be done, and even then, it is not often done well.

The president and his policies are trying to change much of that. “This is about thinking about the way we want Americans to live, in this country and as a global player,” Mr. Carrion said. “This is about building a foundation for the future of the country and about rebuilding the economy.”

But what many Obama boosters seem to misunderstand is that the president is not built in the historical New Deal-Great Society mold of past Democratic presidents. He spent his formative years in Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, witnessing first hand the failures of many of these policies. He was shaped far more by the relatively conservative influence of Mayor Richard Daley and the Chicago School of Economics. “He’s very pragmatic. He always wants the public and private to work together” said MarySue Barrett, president of Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council and a former Daley aide who worked with the president when he was a state senator. “He is a big believer in getting everyone on the same page.”

Part of the reason the president's urban programs do no receive  more recognition is because of their inherent subtlety. Something as simple as tweaking the way the Congressional Budget Office scores projects to account for the savings of sustainability and the cost of sprawl can have a major impact, thought it is not exactly something to go out and campaign on.

Competition has been a prominent feature of many of the programs, from stimulus to education to HUD grants. The administration has moved away from block grants and formulas, requiring states and municipalities to submit their plans, with only the best ones getting the money. The result is often that even the losers will embrace the policy changes the president prefers. “What the presidents wants is, if we are going to be competitive globally, we are going to have to be much more efficient and effective in how we manage our cities,” Mr. Carrion said.

Many urbanists credit this with being one of the administration’s greatest innovations, but it is also a repudiation of the old habit of showering money down on cities. “Your basic New York, political, Upper West Side and caring Democrat wants to go back to 1978,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Regional Plan Association’s Center for Urban Innovation and an Upper West Sider. “They care about issues, but they’re stuck in the past, on programs that never worked. The president, he’s gone in a different direction.”

Yet even as the programs become more market-driven, more results-based, more, in a word, conservative, his political opponents have yet to come around. “Even the programs the other side should support, they reject,” said Eugenie Birch, a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a former New York City planning commissioner. “Congress just refuses to work with this president on anything, and there’s not much he can do about that.”

This helps explain why so many projects have been handled at the agency levels, with dedicated funds and bureaucratic juggling. And why none of the marquee programs have yet been approved.

After three years of squabbling, Congress finally proposed a new five-year surface transportation bill on Jan. 31, 853 days overdue. Initially, the House bill looked like every other surface transportation bill that came before it, with the old 80-20 split between road and mass-transit spending. Obama boosters and transit advocates had hoped for a shift in priorities, maybe even a 75-25 split.

Instead, the bill got worse as the weeks went on. Safe streets programs were stripped, and the Ways and Means Committee even voted on removing mass-transit funding altogether. The Senate passed its version of the bill on Friday, which includes transit funding but strips out bike and pedestrian programs and only lasts two years. The White House supports this bill, but the president has yet to take a stand either against or for more in the way of sustainability or urban programs.

The favorable programs the administration has achieved are no longer safe, either. Among the budget lines excised from the 2012 budget was the hundreds of millions of dollars for Sustainable Communities. Clean energy and carbon taxes have also come up short in Congress.

And then there is, or is not, high-speed rail. The president’s pet project from the stimulus, $8 billion was set aside by the administration to lay the tracks for a network of lines knitting together the metropolitan areas now supposedly at the fore. A line from Madison to Milwaukee was due $810 million, a whopping $2 billion was headed to that important swing state Florida to connect Orlando and Tampa. Both of them were roundly, loudly rejected by their respective governors. Scott Walker even penned an open letter to the president after he won the election warning him not to waste his time or money.

“There was so much hope for cities,” said Terry Mazany, director of the Chicago Community Trust. “Now, four years later, we are back to the sense that if cities are going to thrive, they are going to have to do it on their own. They’re not looking to Washington for the resources anymore.”

Look no further than the State of the Union. One of his pre-eminent initiatives last year was mass transit. “Within 25 years our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail,” the president declared. This year, the only mention of transportation was the success of GM. The message has been the same across the country. A recent report by WNYC analyzed the president’s rhetoric over the past 12 months, and it found he moved from a peak of 18 train references in speeches in April to none in November or December. Meanwhile, discussions of road construction rose to 41 mentions in September and 49 in October.

“I’m hoping what we’re going to find out at the beginning of his next term is he’s already done all these transformative things at the agencies that will let him just take off on all these project,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said, echoing the sentiment of her many city-centric colleagues. “In the meantime, we don’t have too much to look at.”

“He’s done the best that he could,” Robert Cahouette said, standing on the corner of 129th Street and Frederick Douglas Boulevard. “I hope he gets another four years so he can complete some things.”

A Korean veteran with the Marines hat and pins to prove it, Mr. Cahouette had been living at the St. Nicholas Houses for the past five years. He said he thought the president had been good for cities, but he could not point to any specific programs. Nor, like many of his neighbors, did he even realize that the administration had helped facilitate and pay for the school being plopped down in his backyard, half finished after breaking ground in April. There was no mention of the federal government anywhere on the construction fencing surrounding the massive project, twice the size of any of the neighboring redbrick apartment buildings. The president’s image-minders had the good sense to put signs by the side of the road saying the paving was paid for by the federal government, so why not here?

That might have lost them some votes, actually. “The president, Shaun Donovan, John Rhea, Adolfo Carrion, they’re all pimps,” William Danzy declared. “They sold us out.”

Mr. Danzy, with his Yankees cap and brown suede jacket, then proceeded to give a lesson in urban planning to rival Jane Jacobs. He said the idea to reconnect the street grid, to “densify” the complex, to correct the supposed ills wrought by Robert Moses, was all wrong. The 60-year-old life-long resident of the complex said most of the benches the elderly relied on were gone. “It’s not just the kids hanging out,” he said.

“Look at the Lower East Side, the Warsaw ghetto,” he continued. “These projects were meant to correct the social ills inherent in the slums. Anxiety, stress, conflict. The planners tried to eliminate that. All these cats and their new ideas, they’re full of crap.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Tea Party members hold a Tax Day protest. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The most memorable moment from the first major Tea Party rally in front of New York’s City Hall, in April 2009, wasn’t the woman chain-smoking cigarettes by a guard rail, there, she said, to defend “smoker’s rights.” Nor was it the machismo menace that hung in the air, or the “Don’t Tread on Me” signs held by untrod-upon-looking junior insurance executives in for the afternoon from Glen Cove. It wasn’t even the palpable anger at Mayor Bloomberg, who (presumably) sat in his office a few feet away and, his efforts toward gun control and bike paths notwithstanding, was the only chance Republicans had of holding onto City Hall that November.

No, the most memorable moment of that afternoon was the speaker who took to the microphone and urged everyone present to put down their tricorner hats and give a round of applause to the people who had made the rally happen: the New York City Parks Department, the sanitation workers, the police guarding the barricades.

These were “the working people,” the ones lionized by this movement for the screwing they had been taking from the Obama administration and  assorted powers-that-be, but they were also government workers, their salaries and pensions paid for with hard-earned taxpayer dollars, their very existence dependent upon public largess.

In the two and a half years since that gathering, there have been hundreds like it across the country. In 2010, Tea Party protesters and their ilk not only took out the Democrats in Congress, but even managed to squelch the ambitions of a few Republicans who were deemed insufficiently conservative by the latest right-wing litmus test.

But by late 2011, Glenn Beck, once the Cassandra of this crowd, had been shuffled off the stage. The town hall meetings that first alerted the mainstream media to this new substrata of the body politic are now filled not with conservatives yelling at Democratic congressmen to keep their government hands off of Medicare but with liberals yelling at the Republican reps to let the Bush tax cuts expire. The debt ceiling has been raised, budgets have been passed. The likely Republican presidential nominee is as far removed from this tumult in the streets as the average CEO is from the jobs he outsourced.

Into this breach have slipped a couple of books that attempt to explain this new world we now find ourselves in. Each has its appeal and goes some way toward answering what remain the most compelling questions about the Tea Party movement: How, in the wake of perhaps the most conservative presidency since Hoover, did a bunch of white, comfortable citizens in late middle age take up the banner of public protest in the manner of those hated ’60s rabble rousers of their youth? What, in other words, made the silent majority—after the conclusion of a presidency that paid more fealty to the right wing than any in recent history, and just a few months into the next presidency—decide that they were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore?

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.

One of the most sympathetic answers to this question comes from Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, the two Harvard political scientists who wrote The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 264 pages, $24.95). The two are receptive to Tea Partiers in a way seldom found outside the right-wing echo chamber. Their book is the result of sitting with Tea Party activists at rallies and in meetings, in an effort to determine what, exactly, motivates them.

On the whole, what they found is that the Tea Party is made up mostly of, in a word, grumps. They are galled at the prospect of a Democrat in the White House—especially a black, Ivy league, former law school professor Democrat. A number of Tea Partiers, they write, date their start in politics to the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign. New recruits tend to be found in areas with large numbers of recently relocated retirees yearning for a sense of community. Although “members of the Tea Party do not bear the heaviest economic burden, they do have some of the most negative views of the economy … [T]hreats to [their] investments convinced many Tea Partiers that hard work is no longer fairly rewarded in America.” They are concerned that their children will not be as successful as they have been. Six in 10 believe that “when it comes to good jobs, America’s best days are behind it.” They love certain aspects of the federal government—Social Security, national parks, Medicare—but wag a disapproving finger at funds going elsewhere. Tea Partiers, the authors write, “condemn the behavior of the young in moral terms.” They fear that “younger people have ‘lost the value of work”’ and lament “that all the kids now ‘expect to be praised’ no matter how they perform.’”

Racial minorities come in for a bad rap with Tea Partiers: “Tea Party supporters are even more likely than other conservatives to believe that racial minorities are held back by their own personal failings.” But they aren’t the only ones:  “It is important to note that compared to other Americans, Tea Partiers rate whites relatively poorly on these characteristics, too. Tea Partiers have negative views about all of their fellow citizens; it is just that they make extra jaundiced assessments of the work ethic of racial and ethnic minorities.”

However unflattering all of that is, the authors have a tendency to downplay some of the more baleful aspects of the movement. They are not violent, they write—“tossing out the occasional emotional epithet or toting the occasional over-the-top sign is as far as they will go. Most Tea Party leaders may use aggressive language, but they do so only to foment activism for protests, electoral activities and other appropriate venues for the expression of political views and differences.” Never mind that Gabby Giffords still has trouble using her facial muscles.

Rule and Ruin.

That most Tea Partiers date their involvement back to Goldwater’s presidential campaign a half-century ago is telling, according to Geoffrey Kabaservice, a Yale historian and the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University Press, 504 pages, $29.95). It was at the 1964 GOP convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco that Mr. Kabaservice pinpoints the origins of the Tea Party-like litmus tests for ideological conservatism. “[T]he venom of the booing and the hatred in people’s eyes was really quite stunning,” he quotes one convention-goer recalling. Another said, “I felt like I was in Nazi Germany. It was really scary.” The object of the conventioneers’ ire wasn’t Lyndon Johnson; it was their fellow Republicans, the ones who favored Nelson Rockefeller over Goldwater.

For Mr. Kabaservice, the Tea Party is just the latest iteration of a wing of the Republican Party that has been trying, since the Eisenhower era, to drum out the ideologically impure. The idea of a nonconservative Republican Party, or even a nonconservative Republican, is something that would be bewildering to readers who don’t remember the John Lindsay administration—pretty much anyone under the age of 50—but as Mr. Kabaservice tells it, the Party of Lincoln once had a sizable and vibrant liberal and progressive wing, and the notion of parties being merely vehicles for ideological expression was considered threatening to the Republic. It would be easy to imagine one of the moderate Republicans Mr. Kabaservice describes with a campaign sign that had the word “PROGRESS” draped across it, much as Barack Obama’s did in 2008, instead of the motto that so many of the people Ms. Skocpol and Ms. Williamson write about would seem to favor: “RESENTMENT.”

All of this makes it more understandable that the Tea Party would act so venomously toward Mayor Bloomberg at the rally in 2009: That lost wing of the GOP that Mr. Kabaservice describes finds something close to its embodiment in the current resident of Gracie Mansion. Mr. Kabaservice describes a part of the Republican Party that was solution-oriented; instead of clinging to a few safe phrases—“more defense,” ”lower taxes”—it valued civil rights, the environment, an internationalist foreign policy.

This wing of Republicanism disappeared largely through a series of maneuvers on the part of conservative stalwarts to retake the reins of the party apparatus. No one has yet given a full account of what drew the GOP—or the electorate—on its rightward lurch over the past few years. That it was the result of a series of small skirmishes among college Republicans or state legislative leadership votes seems unlikely.

So, what did cause it? And why does the Republican Party continue to move further and further rightward while the Democrats seem to stay in place? Can the Tea Partiers have that much sway?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the two major parties are simply much diminished from what they were in the era that Mr. Kabaservice describes. Back then, their attraction was that sense of community that Ms. Skocpol and Ms. Williamson describe as a reason retirees join Tea Party groups. Who registers with a political party these days? Virtually no one, if they can help it, and that leaves the parties to the zealots. Combine this with the fact that so many fewer Americans vote in general elections, districts are gerrymandered to reward incumbency and increasing mobility allows citizens to live among kindred spirits, and the Tea Party takeover of the past few years is not very surprising.

But where do we go from here? Mr. Kabaservice ends his book with the example of the absurd Christine O’Donnell, the Delaware Senate candidate most famous for her hard-line antimasturbation stance and who once took to the airwaves to proclaim that she is not a witch. Buoyed by conservative, Tea Party support, she defeated a well-liked congressman for the Delaware Senate Republican nomination, and went down to defeat in the fall to a Democrat, depriving the party of a likely pick-up in the Senate.

There has been no indication that Tea Partiers are regretful over the way this played out, since, as the saying goes, better a Senate full of Democrats than a Senate full of those indistinguishable from them. Ms. O’Donnell seems unlikely to be the end of the Tea Party, but this very well could be the final wave of books about the movement as the party’s establishment and radical wings collapse into one another. The Republican presidential nominee will almost certainly be Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts moderate, as a series of self-described Tea Party candidates have fallen by the way side. And who does Mr. Romney count among his endorsers? Christine O’Donnell.

dfreedlander@observer.com

The recent Internet-led protest movement against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act clearly has had a profound effect on support for these chilling pieces of legislation. What’s astonishing is that the protests appear to have caught Washington by surprise. According to a report in PC World, neither supporters nor opponents of the bills “anticipated the response by Internet users.” Likewise, the rallying effect of protests led by Wikipedia, Google and other companies stunned the nation’s lawmakers.

Sadly, it is clear that Washington remains firmly entrenched in the 20^th century, with very little sense of how these two pieces of legislation could have a chilling effect on free speech, stifle creativity and innovation and expand government intervention in the free marketplace.

The legislation’s supporters further publicized their absolute cluelessness by assuming that they could railroad SOPA (the House bill) and PIPA (the Senate version) through Capitol Hill using the lobbying equivalent of Rust Belt technology. They rented big-shot lobbyists and depended on the clout of well-connected spokesmen like former Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who has moved from the Hill to be chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America.

That’s how most legislation gets passed. But SOPA and PIPA aren’t run-of-the-mill pieces of legislation. With their broad implications for free speech, they have incited a virtual rebellion among citizens who clearly know more about the Internet than the men and women who grace the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Thirteen million Internet users took part in the recent on-line protest against SOPA and PIPA. Three million emails poured into the inboxes of members of Congress in a single day.

If you didn’t count on this kind of response—and Congress clearly didn’t—it follows that you simply don’t understand the brave new world of the web. And if that’s the case, you should not be regulating it.

But even if Washington were better-informed, the legislation is what it is—an assault on free speech and unfettered access to information. These bills deserve a quick burial.

Those heartfelt positions, however, come with an asterisk. Republican leaders in the House may like the idea of state’s rights—but they’re not so keen about local control when states like New York decide that it’s a bad idea for people to carry concealed weapons, because, well, you just never know when a whack job might open fire on a crowded street.

In an astonishing and dangerous bit of pandering to the nation’s gun nuts, House leaders (with the cooperation of 43 misguided Democrats) recently rammed through a bill that would force states with tough gun-control laws to honor concealed weapons permits issued in other states. Give the Republicans credit for candor—they didn’t try to conceal their intentions. They labeled the bill the “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011.” Not the “Protect Your Spouse and Children Act” or the “Go Ahead, Make My Day Self-Protection Act.”

The candor may be refreshing, but the thinking behind this bit of insanity is not. It’s the same old argument: The Second Amendment guarantees Americans in any mental state to stockpile and carry their favorite weapons of choice. Mayor Bloomberg, one of the nation’s most vocal proponents of gun restrictions, rightly noted that the House approved this bill less than a year after one of its members, Gabrielle Giffords, was gravely wounded in a murderous rampage in Arizona.

While the bill is mind-numbingly stupid, there is a bit of heartening news to report: Several New York Republicans refused to toe the party line. They voted against their leadership and in favor of sanity­—an all-too-rare act of political courage. Michael Grimm of Staten Island; Robert Turner, who won Anthony Weiner’s old seat in Brooklyn and Queens; and Long Island’s iconoclastic Peter King sided with most Democrats on this issue.

What a shame that two of their Republican colleagues from New Jersey, Leonard Lance and Rodney Frelinghuysen, couldn’t summon the nerve to defy the GOP’s gun-lovers. Other Republicans from the metropolitan area also voted with their caucus, but Mr. Lance and Mr. Frelinghuysen have sought to distance themselves from their party’s extremists. Both see themselves as prototypical moderate Republicans in the model of former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean. This vote makes them no different from the yahoos who think they have a right to carry and conceal their handguns in places like Midtown Manhattan.

All the more reason to give a pat on the back to Congressmen Grimm, Turner and King. It would have been far easier for them to go along with their party’s agenda. Instead, they put their constituents’ safety—and, let’s remember, the safety of police officers—ahead of partisan politics.

Good for them. Great for us.

It was early on Saturday afternoon, the third day of the (e)merge Art Fair, and Ms. Leene was brimming with energy. "I sleep with my art," she said. "It's a new experience, but it's kind of nice." Many of the other exhibitors—80 in total, split roughly evenly between galleries and artists—had opted to stay in other rooms in the hotel, which is owned by the art-collecting Rubell family, who plan to open a contemporary art museum nearby.

Ms. Leene had arrived into town from the Houston Fine Art Fair, which, like (e)merge, had presented its inaugural edition this month. She had removed most of the furniture from the room, including one of its beds, and hung messy text paintings by Ruud de Wild and lush photographs of insects by Agniet Snoep against the room’s pale yellow stripped wallpaper.

It was about 1 p.m., and the fair was quiet, though the number of visitors slowly picked up throughout the day. We were told that the opening evening and even the day before had been raucous, filled with artists and local arts supporters. Most of the galleries involved were young or small or both, and their works carried low prices. There were few works beyond the low-four-figure range, and quite a number of pieces—drawings and prints, mostly—available for a few hundred dollars.

"We have had a couple of good sales, and a lot of very good contacts,” said Walter de Weerdt, of Brussels-based Nomad Gallery, who had removed all of his room’s furniture, except for chairs and a desk, and filled it with small carved portraits by Aimé Mpane, who showed at the Smithsonian’s African Art Museum back in 2009. The portraits were priced at $2,500, and red dots hovered next to a few of them. With rooms going for $4,700 apiece, Mr. de Weerdt had likely covered his costs easily.

Mr. de Weerdt met Leigh Conner and Jamie Smith, co-directors of Conner Contemporary, who organized (e)merge along with Helen Allen, at the Art Brussels fair, and they sold him on the idea of coming to D.C. “The name of my gallery is Nomad Gallery, so I have to prove it,” he laughed.

However, even with those low prices, not everyone had made sales. “We’ve had a lot of note takers,” one gallerist told me, a comment that a handful of other exhibitors echoed.

“D.C. would seem to have everything necessary for a successful fair,” David Markus, of New York’s Josée Bienvenu Gallery, told The Observer. Indeed, the surrounding area is filled with highly educated, upper-income people with plenty of exposure to art. But D.C. has never had a commercial art scene on the scale of New York  or Los Angeles or Chicago. The area’s collectors buy elsewhere. A previous attempt at a fair, Art DC, held at the city's convention center in 2007, lasted only one year.

Bienvenu had secured two adjoining rooms and devoted one to a large-scale installation by Lebanese-American artist Annabel Daou, which was one of the few works priced in the five-figure range at the fair. “The State Department sent her work to the Cairo Biennale,” Mr. Markus said, “so this was a perfect opportunity to show it here.”

With a few exceptions, the caliber of the work on view at (e)merge seemed unlikely to draw major collectors and museum curators. But it could happen if D.C. develops a viable gallery scene (it will no doubt take time). Neighboring Baltimore, which has a fair amount of buzz and where a handful of artist-run spaces have caught national attention, doesn't hurt either.

Many dealers cited reasons for doing the fair beyond sales. “We thought that the galleries in D.C. needed a platform like this,” said Amy Cavanaugh Royce, the director of Honfleur Gallery, which is based in the Anacostia neighborhood in D.C. “We wanted to support the fair. It is really well intentioned. There has been lots of interest and lots of enthusiasm. There’s a really good vibe.”

Karyn Miller, the director of visual arts at D.C.’s Flashpoint gallery concurred. “There's such a palpable energy here, which I don't feel very often in D.C.,” Ms. Miller said. “It feels like we're part of something that's bubbling up.” Flashpoint had also secured two rooms, and devoted one to a pinball machine and slot machines lovingly redesigned and repainted by Kenny George. With the curtains drawn and the lights turned off, the room glowed with light from the machines. It was gorgeous.

In the ground floor ballroom and in the basement park garage, artists, who had beaten out hundreds of other applicants, showed their art at no charge. Unfortunately, the work tended toward the sort of half-baked conceptual, performance and installation works that has become de rigueur in the artist sections of the more loosely curated art fairs.

However, the hotel, designed by architect Morris Lapidus, famed for his ritzy Miami Beach hotel, the Fontainbleau, had its charms. The stairwell to the basement featured shimmering blue tiling, and the pool looked refreshing, though it had no takers on our visit.

On Sunday, The Observer visited the Phillips Collection, the modern art museum founded by Duncan Phillips and his mother Eliza Laughlin Phillips in 1918. There were on view a trove of modern European works, half of Jacob Lawrence's "Migration Series" (the other half resides at MoMA) and a small number of works by the Color Field painter Morris Louis, a onetime D.C. resident.

We had our (e)merge tote bag hanging over our shoulder and, two separate times, young museum attendants stopped us to ask if we had been to the fair. They had friends in the shows, and were enthusiastic to hear how it had been. (e)merge, it seemed, had tapped into latent enthusiasms, allowing people to show work and network, all commendable side effects.

"It's good for the art community here, because everyone eventually leaves," one of the women told us. We asked her about what she did for a living. "I'm an artist," she replied. "I'm going to leave."

arusseth@observer.com

Mr. Schneiderman’s position is admirable. If he believes the settlement is not in the best interests of New York consumers, he should continue to resist. That won’t be easy, because the attorney general’s fellow Democrats in Washington are putting pressure on his allies—just as bank officials are putting pressure on federal officials to finalize the settlement.

When politicians and special interests are eager to get a deal done quickly, consumers and taxpayers generally should be skeptical—especially on the eve of an election campaign.

Under the proposed settlement, which grew out of revelations that some banks submitted improper paperwork in foreclosure proceedings, some of the nation’s largest lenders would be asked to fund a $20 billion pool of money that would be made available to consumers who wish to modify their loans. In return, state attorneys general who are investigating these practices in their individual jurisdictions would agree not to pursue litigation.

Mr. Schneiderman and several other attorneys general are reluctant to surrender their ability to litigate—after all, litigation is what they do. As long as they are not looking to scapegoat the banks, they should continue to resist the Obama administration’s pressure to get a deal done in time for the 2012 presidential campaign.

Mr. Schneiderman is taking a principled stand. That’s rare enough these days, and something worthy of admiration.

Boehner and Obama.

It would almost seem that the stars had finally aligned. After weeks of stalled talks and contentious meetings between House Republicans and Democrats that escalated into a public spat between Speaker John Boehner and President Obama, a bill finally made it through the House and into the Senate, where it was speedily approved Tuesday morning thanks to backing from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Majority Leader Harry Reid, just in time for the Cinderella-esque stroke-of-midnight deadline. The anthropomorphic bill from Schoolhouse Rock! had nothing on this drama.

So, the good news is that the country isn’t going to default on its debt obligations, which puts us at least one step ahead of Teresa Giudice from the Real Housewives of New Jersey. The bad news is that just as everyone was making nice and learning to compromise, Vice President Joe Biden made an offhand comment that Congress’s Tea Party Republicans “acted like terrorists” during negotiations, an ill-timed gaffe that not even the heartwarming sight of Gabrielle Giffords casting her first vote on the House floor after nearly getting assassinated in January could correct. Oh, Joe. To paraphrase The Princess Bride, you fell victim to one of the classic blunders—of which the most famous one is “Never get involved in a land war in Asia,” and an only slightly less well-known one is: Never go in against the Tea Party when debt is on the line.

But at least the Dems aren’t buying Twitter followers, which is more than we can say for beleaguered 2012 hopeful Newt Gingrich. After bragging to the Marietta Daily Journal that, despite abysmal poll numbers, he has “six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined,” a former staffer submitted an anonymous tip to Gawker claiming that 80% of Mr. Gingrich’s 1.3 million followers are either inactive or dummy accounts (this figure was later amended by networking firm PeekYou to a whopping 92%). File this under #YouKnowYouWon’tWinTheNominationWhen …

Also stepping in it this week: Bronx principal Frank Borzellieri, a white supremacist who, despite having published racist essays, somehow worked at a largely black and Latino Catholic school for two years before anyone noticed; Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who did not do a very good job of apologizing to the vacation rental company’s disgruntled clients whose apartments were trashed (it’s O.K., now you can rent swaths of Lower East Side grass for $50/hour, courtesy of N.Y.C.’s own Timeshare Backyard!); British comedian Johnnie Marbles, who got sentenced to six weeks in jail for memorably pie-ing Rupert Murdoch during July’s News Corp. hearing in Parliament; and the M.T.A., which is responsible for screwing up repairs and slowing service, according to a joint report released last weekend by state and city comptrollers Thomas DiNapoli and John Liu. (And here we thought we were just getting a complimentary sauna with our subway fare.)

So perhaps we were too hasty about the whole “stellar alignment” thing. Turns out mercury is in retrograde, and not to get all Dionne Warwick on you, but something has seemed … off the past few days. First, in the midst of an oppressive heat wave, baseball-size hail rained down on Queens (adding insult to injury for the hapless Mets). Then, a peacock escaped from the Central Park zoo and began terrorizing (read: sitting calmly on) a Fifth Avenue window ledge. Not one but two adult men made the news for wearing inappropriate full-body animal costumes (but on the upside, only one, David Wu, was a member of Congress). Mark Zuckerberg added a creepy pregnancy feature to Facebook. And just as the debt ceiling legislation went through, assuaging Wall Street’s fears about market stability, the Dow dropped 265 points. Maybe it’s just our bad fortune.

It’s time for them to stop talking to us and to engage each other in the spirit of cooperation that the President cited in his presentation. The ideologues in both parties are not going to be happy with the final result, since they are invested in dogma, not compromise. The Tea Party types on the Republican side would rather see the nation slip into default to prove a point. The entitlement-loving lefties on the Democratic side would rather look the other way as the nation continues to spend far beyond its means.

Either way, people are going to be unhappy. That is the nature of compromise.

So it is incumbent on leaders to lead, not to calculate, not to maneuver, not to grandstand. If the nation does default on Aug. 2, chances are good that the American public will pin the blame on both parties, rather than identify a single villain. Voters simply are not engaged enough in Beltway politics to sort out the details of the debt ceiling. All they know—and, frankly, this is the root of the matter—is that their elected representatives seem incapable of governing. That’s bad for all concerned.

It is instructive to compare the paralysis in Washington with the energy exhibited in Albany over the past seven months. In New York, a governor and leaders of the state legislature understood that the vitality of state government depended on tackling, rather than evading, hard issues. They did so through negotiation and compromise.

It is a measure of changing times that Albany can now teach Washington a thing or two about governance.

It’s time for the Beltway crowd to stop giving speeches. We already know what’s at stake. If the worst happens, there will be plenty of blame to spread around.

Emanuel left his D.C. job in September. He officially announced his candidacy in the race for Chicago City Hall on Saturday. 

The ad begins by emphasizing Emanuel's roots Windy City roots. 

"Chicago is a great city with great people and I want my children to feel as passionate about this city as I did growing up," Emanuel says amid footage of him shaking hands in the streets. 

The title of Emanuel's ad is "Tough," which is appropriate given Emanuel's reputation as an enforcer and the blunt assessment of Chicago's future that he offers in the commercial.

"We face big challenges from our schools our streets to our businesses," Emanuel says. 

Emanuel ends the ad with a comment that, in the words of Mediaite's Rachel Sklar, "smartly appeals to city status anxiety" in Chicago.  

"I think we're at  a crossroads, we've got to decide whether we're gonna continue to be a great city or become a second tier city," he says.

Emanuel's campaign commercial makes its television debut tomorrow. It will be interesting to see whether playing into the local inferiority complex backfires or brings him votes. 

Watch video of Emanuel's campaign ad below.