interviews
Land, Money, Power
by Jake Virden
August 4, 2020
This interview with Jake Virden, host of the Money. Power. Land. Solidarity. podcast, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Tell me about yourself.
Jake | I'm an artist, and I like to say I strive to be a practitioner of popular education.
I came to my thinking around the issues that I explore in my podcast - economic development, public policy, race, class, wealth, and culture - really through my own experience in seeing the effects of relative poverty. I'm a first-generation college student. I have had family members incarcerated. Both my parents are recovering addicts. They got sober when my brothers and I were younger and were just really hard-working people, they both worked multiple jobs my whole life. I'm still a working-class person. I have a college degree, but I got hella student loan debt. It's weird because, in some ways, I'm class mobile, I have a lot of privileges that my parents and people in my life didn't have, but, with student loan debt, I'm probably poorer than my parents were at my age.
I think a big piece of the story that connects with the podcast is the neighborhood I grew up in. Historically, it was a violently racist neighborhood, predominately made up of European immigrants. I think the word to describe it would almost be apartheid. When we were coming up, certain parts of Northeast were then considered racially concentrated areas of poverty - mostly Black, central American immigrants, or African immigrants. There used to be a joke in my neighborhood growing up - “What's the longest bridge in the world? The Lowery bridge - it connects Poland to Africa.” The Lowry Bridge on the Mississippi River separates Northeast from North Minneapolis. The Mississippi River cuts through the whole city. It comes North into the city, cuts through downtown, and flows out the Southside. The geography of my life is really central to my thinking.
South Minneapolis is a protected area. There's no industry on the south side riverfront. It's a beautiful river gore, just all protected Parkland. On the Northeast and the Northside, it's all a toxic industry. Some of the most toxic industrial sites in the country are on that industrial riverfront there's the Northern Metals Recycling plant. There's the GAF Shingles factory.
The Northeast is now one of the most heavily gentrified areas in the city. It went from this poor and working-class neighborhood to an arts district of sorts. It's one of the hippest parts of town. I can't afford to live in most of Northeast Minneapolis anymore. And the Riverfront development is really what kicked that off.
There's this establishment that used to be called Gabby’s. It was a real working-class bar and one of the few interracial bars Northeast. A lot of people would probably consider it a Black bar since it was known for having one of the few hip hop nights in that side of town, which was always controversial to the racists in the neighborhood. It was bought up and flipped into this touristy hipster bar called Psycho Suzie's, which was themed and had all these weird tropical drinks. That was like really jarring to us, when we first started to see like, damn this really ain't our neighborhood anymore. It's weird to use possessive language, but that is how it felt.
You mentioned the Riverfront development. I want to start with the Upper Harbor Terminal Development and why it's important to your work, and how it serves to illuminate other crises in Minneapolis.
I think it's important for people to understand the base elements of the project. The Upper Harbor Terminal Development is situated on 48 acres of land that's publicly owned by the city. It is in North Minneapolis, a community that's impoverished and oppressed, a community with some of the worst quality of life metrics of any area across the country, a community with high degrees of poverty and environmental racism. In every way, it is what one would imagine of the inner city poverty in America to be like.
The city has say over what happens there, so theoretically the use of the land should be democratically decided, but the city gave the Pohlad family, the wealthiest white people in the state, exclusive rights agreement to develop this land.
Simply off of principle, it is offensive that the city would take 48 acres of riverfront land owned by the city and turn it over to already wealthy white people.
If you were serious about improving the lives of working-class people, building wealth for Black people, or any of the other goals that the so-called “progressive” leaders of Minneapolis pay lip service to, you obviously wouldn't do that. It just shows that that's just how capitalism functions. Private wealth has turned our public wealth over to private hands. And only those who already control wealth and power have privileged access to that land.
I think this development is a really important case study. It is so clearly the way that the economy of Minneapolis has been tilted and organized. It's handing over public land to wealthy people developments that cater to a wealthier class. It's really a good microcosm of the ideology of development that's gentrified Minneapolis. It's egregious and so obvious. Another reason we’re pointing to it is that there's still some chance we could stop it. It's not much of a chance, but we've caused a lot of disruption and have been able to extract some concessions from them.
Is there any compelling argument from the city about the sale of that land? Are they saying the city needs the funds for something specific?
No, not really. The thing is, they don't even really feel that they have to justify it. Before us and a few other people started to raise awareness about it, it was just accepted as business as usual.
I mean, the political life in Minneapolis is so oppressive that the majority of people don't even know this is happening.
It makes a little bit of money short term for the city, but not a lot. I think that the city's argument would be that by developing this land, the property tax revenue increases, which is the city's main economic engine. But that is not the only way to run the city, and that's one of the bigger ideological points that we try to press in our podcast, that this is the neoliberal, capitalist way to run the city.
It means that poor people, working-class people, are rendered a surplus population.
Our city's motto of economic development is based on a logic that says, if you don't raise the property values, if you can't pay the high rent, if you're not propertied in that way, you're taking up space in the city. They want to replace you with people who can pay more. And that's really what happened in Northeast. I watched as so much of the community that I was raised with, got pushed out to the Northern suburbs because they couldn't afford the rent or couldn't afford their mortgages and got foreclosed on. And that's the logic of this development.
And what do we get in return? They want to build an outdoor amphitheater that'll hold seven to 10,000 people. That's a few service industry jobs. A hotel. Again, that's a few service industry jobs. But mostly, they are talking about things that are going to dramatically boost the property values in that area and price people out.
One of the ways new developments always seem to be pitched, to soften the blow, is through the promise of housing – can you talk about what the Upper Harbor Terminals plan is around housing?
It is still unclear exactly what they want to build, but they are proposing building largely market-rate housing and then a few buildings that are "affordable" housing. I don't like to phrase it that way but that is how it is marketed. “Affordable” housing basically means buildings that are mixed-income. For example, 60% of the units will be priced at market rate, and then maybe 40% of units in a building qualify to be financed with low-income housing tax credits or TIF financing.
Low-income housing tax credits are actually a fatal flaw in the “affordable housing” model. The city gives the developer tax credits that allow them not to pay taxes for 15 years on capital gains.
Often the developer sells them to a bank to get funding, meaning the bank profits off of these tax credits. After 15 years, the bank loses the tax credits and loses the incentive to provide affordable housing.
In Minneapolis in the 1990s, they privatized a lot of public housing and built these new mixed-income developments financed with tax credits. But all those developments are hitting their tax credit marker, and these formerly affordable units now are coming onto the market as market-rate units, furthering the gentrification in the city, and furthering displacement. Capital has long term thinking, and the developers definitely planned this - it is the exact same thing with the affordable units that they're proposing at the Upper Harbor Terminal - any “affordable” units are only affordable for a short period of time.
What is the difference between affordable housing and public housing?
Public housing is a socialist vision that says housing is a human right. We shouldn't be turning public land over to a private developer, and then subsidizing that private developers profit when they say that they can't charge lower rent. Public housing means that the city itself owns the land, the city builds the building, hires the contractors, and keeps the homes under public ownership so that they can rent them at a much lower rate. That's public housing.
“Affordable” housing is a scheme that gives public money to private developers so that they can offer the units at a slightly reduced rate. The developer is in it for private profit, so that all of their calculations assume that they're going to be pulling profit from the rent of this land. That's like the basis of capitalism, and we want to use this example to highlight the inefficiency, and really the cruelty of capitalism.
It also highlights the stereotypes around public housing.
Absolutely. It's complicated because the history of public housing is so fraught in America and in Minneapolis in particular. Our public housing system here was always attacked and set up to fail from the start, the real estate industry didn't want it to thrive, but it's possible.
There's a real hunger for a new vision. I tend to say social housing as opposed to public housing, just to try to break people's stereotypes. It's a falsified image that all public housing in the United States has been negative or bad or unsafe. There's been a lot of success with public housing, but still, when you say public housing, you get this image of Cabrini–Green.
I've been studying international examples of social housing. It's mixed-income in the sense that they have tiered rents in public housing buildings - higher rants for higher-income people in the same complex that has really low rents for very poor people. As opposed to America, where a lot of times public housing is concentrated in poverty where you have to be very poor to live in it. That doesn't have to be the case. With season two of the podcast, we are hoping to get more into some of those examples and encourage some more creative thinking around public housing,
It's really easy to overcomplicate urban planning. It's so helpful to hear this from your perspective, in your voice.
I think that's both intentional and a product of the orthodoxy of the field - like you couldn't possibly understand what's going on here without a PhD or a Masters degree. I'm like, well, actually I can. I see the land, and I see who you're selling it to. It's not that hard.
So often we're excluded. A lot of times I had to ask myself after a meeting, like, damn, am I rude because of the way I speak, did I embarrass myself in there because I got passionate and the volume of my voice raised, or I started speaking fast or I got upset and angry?
It's realizing that it's a process of not buying into this idea that you're supposed to be dispassionate or that it's some kind of neutral academic conversation. This is people's lives.
So I appreciate you saying that, honestly, it's been a big politicizing moment for me. Our big motivation behind doing the podcast is to break these conversations out of that stifled space.
I noticed a few days ago the Minneapolis City Council voted on cutting $1.5 million from the police budget...
Which is not even 1%.
So presumably that means not much is changing. I am curious about your thoughts about how policing accompanies new private real estate developments.
Sometimes people just ignore the very obvious, which is that if your strategy for economic development is to court more rich, wealthy people into the city, those rich wealthy people want protection from the poor people who live there, especially if you add the race element to it.
I experienced it first hand. When they gentrified Northeast Minneapolis, the city pushed this big campaign that was calling for 50 more cops. They tore down this old strip mall where we used to do our grocery shopping called East Gate and built a high-end grocery store there, and right there in that building, they put a new precinct substation.
These were my college years, and even with the white privilege I have, I was brutalized by the police several times. I was pulled out of the car and assaulted by a police officer. He squeezed my testicles, put me in jail. It was me and my younger brother. They had probably like six guns trained on us just for driving down the block. I remember another time I was walking on the block, a police officer drove his car onto the sidewalk, hopped out, slammed me against the car, took my wallet, found my ID, and threw all my stuff on the ground. He didn't say anything, got back in his car, and made me pick up all this stuff.
And at the time that was just kind of the way we thought police acted, which is true, it is the way they acted, but now I understand that it was also because that strip of land was being cleared, it was being hyper policed. United Properties, the company that is doing the Upper Harbor Terminal, has been among the loudest on the Downtown Improvement Council that is calling for more cops. They do this because they want to make downtown safe for all the new white people.
There's a corresponding relationship between new market-rate housing developments, the aggressive marketing of the city to these new professionals, and an increase in the police budget. Those two things go hand in hand.
Right.
Jacob Frye, the mayor, is a gentrification mayor. He ran on market-rate housing, density, and he was the one proposing these huge increases to the police budget. You can't have a gentrification ideology and an anti-police ideology, because how else are you going to clear all the poor Black people and all the poor people that you don't want in the city anymore? How are you going to police them other than violent policing?
The corner of 38th and Chicago, where George Floyd was killed, is a really contested corner in the battle against gentrification.
38th and Chicago is historically the heart of Black Minneapolis.
There are battles over increasing gentrification - there is a new coffee shop that just went up across the street, and there's a new co-op that just went in a few blocks down. You think about this police officer pulling up and murdering this man in broad daylight, in that context, and you realize it's absolutely connected to the attempts to seize that corner for the newer, whiter, wealthier Minneapolis. It's intricately linked.
Where there is development, there is increased police presence - that's just the logic of capitalism. We can't let “defund the police” become a flat slogan. It has to be combined with investment in public housing, with public health infrastructure, with investment in our schools and with real cooperative business enterprise. I've been a bit frustrated, in trying to provide some depth to the calls for defunding the police. Yes, defund the police, but also reinvest in changing the conditions you want to change.
The reality is the only economy for a lot of poor people in Minneapolis is drugs and sex work, and the same conditions that pop up in any poor community. It's not just that there's evil, racist, Nazi police. There are evil, racist, Nazi police, but they are enforcing a social order, which deems poor people expendable and puts investment into these businesses that serve a certain fragment of the population.
One point I think you made so well in your episode titled Poor People and Beautiful Things, is your critique of gentrification. That it’s not that you want everything to remain the same, but that you want to see this money go to reinvestment in structures that assist working people.
Thanks for saying that that's really affirming. That's like one of my favorite episodes.
For me, it is about realizing that our lack of political imagination is the result of political repression.
We don't really have any socialist vision - either it is poverty or gentrification, there is no alternative. We fail to imagine actual wealth building and community development and thriving working-class communities. So it's about trying to ask if this dichotomy needs to exist - if nice things come, do we have to be pushed out somewhere else?
I think the question of how to grow economies locally is a really difficult one, and I think you are right that it will require a new political imagination.
I think it goes back to top-down planning versus the bottom-up planning. Obviously what I'd like to see is like bottom-up change and a real grassroots movement, but I think what we need is a coherent political organization that can operate on both ends. We need professionals, planners, politicians - people who can operate seats of power, but in favor or in the service of a socialist vision, and in communication with every day, working-class people.
That is one thing that was really instructive about this Upper Harbor project - after there was a huge round of protest before the first city council vote, we almost got the project stopped. But, one of the city council members said, we're still gonna pass it, but we will add this community advisory committee - a group of representatives who can meet with the planners. And it's a complete facade. There's an episode coming out in season two, where we interviewed the author of Capitol City, Samuel Stein, and he describes this phenomenon of fake community planning where people get to choose between ascribed choices. And that is exactly what we are seeing.
The current liberal bottom-up efforts are really limited because they have no alternative vision. They just think that if they bring people to the table it solves the problem, but it really ends up disempowering people when they see that they can’t exercise real power. What we are missing right now is an alternative political organization that can compete in these spaces – right now it doesn't exist. You have planners that are indoctrinated liberals, and even if they have good intentions, their bottom-up efforts are not really challenging the power dynamics.
Yeah. I think there's a maintenance of the status quo that is really harmful. Changing the hands of the oppressor happens constantly.
I have to speak on this sensitively because I understand that as a straight white male, I can't speak for everyone. And I want to speak with humility. But, I think that we have to name and criticize the empty bourgeois, fake racial justice rhetoric.
For example, the representative of the ward where the Upper Harbor Terminal is was for a long time represented by the most conservative member of the city council, a white woman named Barb Johnson, a big friend of the police. She was replaced by one of the first Black trans elected officials in the country, Phillipe Cunningham, who made national headlines. What's important to understand is that Phillipe Cunningham has pretty much the exact same politics that Barb Johnson had. He does good work in terms of trans representation, which I value and is important, but he's in the pocket of all the big developers. He is a capitalist and he hasn't done anything to stop this project. So it's like, there's a new face, but he is completely pursuing the same agenda as his predecessor.
That's a piece that I think should be dissected - we have to go beyond representation to ideology and political power.
That takes vigilance, which is exhausting. I also think the celebrity making of politicians makes us afraid to criticize, but it allows people to forget that these politicians work for you, not the other way around.
Exactly. It's so clear in terms of the way that the Minneapolis City Council has been praised around the country like they are abolitionists or something. They gave the Minneapolis police a million-dollar raises this year. They took that bullshit pledge in the park to "work on ending the police department," and then they just passed up the most unprecedented opportunity we've had to defund our police department in Minneapolis history.
We had to redo the budget because of COVID, we had a national uprising sparked by how violent the police are, and they can't propose even a 1% cut to the police budget?
And a lot of that is because that dynamic that you just described in terms of symbolic representation. They'll put out a certain image, but it's really hard for people to pay attention to the substance or follow the policies. So I definitely feel that, and I definitely feel like that's a real issue in Minneapolis right now.
interviews
Consequences of Incompetence
by Vishaan Chakrabarti
April 6, 2020
This interview with Vishaan Chakrabarti, the founder of PAU, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
I want to talk about New York specifically, as it’s an epicenter of this crisis. How do you see the city through a planning perspective?
Right now, planning wise, obviously everything is about public health. That obviously necessitates public health expertise, which is not what I really do, so I like to defer to the experts on that.
In terms of how we move forward, I think about how my entire experience was forged through essentially a series of crises. I moved to New York right after the 87 stock market crash and saw the architecture firm where I worked go from 485 employees to 90, and I got to be one of the unlucky 90. And then after 9-11, I watched major leaders say, we're going to have to diffuse all the office space in the city. We don't know how many attacks are coming.
What's really interesting is that after each of these things, there is a move to de-densify. There is a tendency to say, oh, the city's not working, but after a few months we get over that. Just think about the 1918 influenza. What comes right after 1918? The Roaring 20s.* It's New York City's heyday for a decade, before the depression hits.
Will this change a few things? I think a lot of the battles that we've been fighting in urban planning for the last 10 years have become all but irrelevant. New York City is probably not going to see a lot of gentrification concerns over the next couple of years. Real estate demand is going to go way down, and there just won’t be that kind of building. The homeless crisis will likely get worse, and I imagine a need for much more housing. Culturally, maybe we'll stagger some more work hours or people will work remotely more. But, I just don't think that this is the death of office space or the death of cities. I think that everyone's yearning to get back to normal – and that is an immediate sign you're going to see people move back to the way cities were.
Do you think there will be a rejection of density again? As we’ve seen historically, or are we seeing through that rhetoric already?
I’ve seen some writing arguing that this is why sprawl is better, but the total bullshit about that is places like South Korea, Japan and Singapore, and Hong Kong, some of the densest environments in the world, are dealing with this crisis way better than we are.
To me, the thing that's really remarkable is that I have now witnessed, in my own lifetime, twice, New York City having to bear the consequences of a president ignoring their intelligence briefings. There were intelligence briefings that told us 9-11 was going to happen. And we had intelligence on Coronavirus.
Plenty of dense cities are out there proving you can manage this virus and actually defeat it. I am sure there will be a bunch of rhetoric about how we need to de-densify and then we're going to come out of that, and people realize why we've always lived in dense circumstances and that we’ve continued to despite technological advances.
Technology has actually promoted more density, not less. I remember reading an article about how the fax machine was definitely the death of the city. But cities didn't die. Fax machines died. We've had a huge exponential growth and change in technology since 2007. Within the same period, we see more people living in cities than in any other form of human inhabitation. This idea that telecommunications is de-densifying us or providing some incentive to de-densify, doesn’t hold. Even at the level of Tinder and Grindr, what is that about? It's using technology to actually get together.
There's both an economist and technologist mindset that says cities are necessary evils, and if you take the necessity away, people will not live in cities anymore. Which belies the fact that human beings actually like human connectedness and they like to get together. Cities are just constant proof of that. I am very bullish about the future of the city. Nothing about this has shaken my aspirations and hopes for cities.
I do think that perhaps the bigger victim of this crisis is neoliberalism. It's really hard to put up a Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan defense of the current system. The private market and tax cuts are not helping us right now. We don't have a national pandemic office. Our infrastructure is failing us. And I think that's just four decades of neoliberalism coming home to roost.
The jig is up.
Right. The stimulus package is not a neoliberal package, let's put it that way. Where I think it gets interesting is looking at what this means for city planning in the coming years. What I would imagine it means is the need to make huge public investments in, what I call in my book, an infrastructure of opportunity. Meaning not just traditional infrastructure – water, power, waste management, transportation. But expanding it to include things that create social mobility – like housing and culture. Assuming the administration changes in November, I think there's going to be a huge move towards multiple packages that can wake us up out of the neoliberal fever dream. Maybe the way out of this crisis is we have a national high speed rail program. Maybe we have a new national housing policy. Like you just said, things that sounded absolutely nuts during the primaries are going to come to fruition now.
There's something about the ugly underbelly of this country that this exposed. The fact that in New York City, they hesitated so long to close the city school system because basically it acts as a homeless shelter for a lot of kids, is really, really ugly. Things like this were made really, really apparent to the world. We’ve become a Banana Republic.
We spoke to the Dean of Boston University's School of Public Health, he talked about how public health isn’t about just healthcare, but rather, affordable housing, good schools, fair wages, clean water, etc. I wonder if you feel like within this broader definition of public health, there is space for planning to improve?
I think that that larger point is correct. You can't have a healthy society if you don't have housing. That is a really basic thing. I think what's going to be really interesting about what follows out of this moment is the question of whether the power structure of this country is going to recognize this? Lots of people have been talking about different aspects and angles of this issue for years now, but is the power structure going to really realize that like the jig is up?
I wonder if even something of this scope can reach enough people to alter the power structure? Can people see their votes in action and see the difference between what is said and what is done?
I don't know how you feel about it as someone who actually works in the news, but like I feel like this is going to really put ideology to the test. Look at this sudden enormous popularity Andrew Cuomo is enjoying. That is extraordinary, right? This guy was not a popular guy, especially among progressives, and yet so many people are so hungry for core competence. Ideology is proving to be way less important than core competence.
I do think that that's going to take hold for a while because, let's face it, some of the ideological battles that we've been in over the course of the last decade are a consequences of the country that feels like it's at peace, even though it's at war, and is extraordinarily prosperous, even though that prosperity is incredibly uneven. So there's just been this ability to have a lot of noisy dialogue. Let’s face it, the fake news phenomena is not reserved to the right side of the spectrum. I wrote an op-ed about Amazon today, and even if you hate Amazon, what is really clear is that people who considered themselves progressives who are fighting that deal, were churning out a lot of false facts. When it comes to something like this, it cuts all that clutter away and begs the question, ok who can do the job?
It will be interesting to see how long that lasts. The issues that we have with things that feed into the public health infrastructure - mass transit, housing - these things take patience and time. Catherine Bauer wrote the National Housing Act in 1937 and the first public housing project was built two years later. But it doesn’t really take off until after World War II. It takes 20 years for that to actually manifest.
Yeah. I wonder. The other thing that I think about is how information is acquired and dispersed. Will information start flowing upward?
You've got people drinking fish tank cleaner because the president told them to. I do think it'll be really interesting if the epicenter shifts from New York to some of the red states, like, Dallas or Houston where a lot of the people will suddenly see their friends and neighbors on the ground experience something that's diametrically opposite from what the president is saying.
Exactly.
Right. Like will that change the way they think about this? I don't know.
I mean the president's clearly trying to turn this into a blue state and red state thing. He is trying to pin it on the governors and that will influence infrastructure funding and public health funding. But clearly, while this virus might start in big population centers, if it goes unchecked the way it is without a testing regime, it's not going to stay in those population centers. And when the red states start feeling it, what is going to happen?
Right, it still feels really far away to some areas. Is the news manipulating the seriousness or the horror? People can still imagine that might be true.
All the other tropes come out too. If you look at the comments on any of the news articles, you'll see well of course this is happening in New York, there's all these public housing projects and they're dirty. All of these dynamics about race and class that are embedded in people's narratives about a city like New York or a city like San Francisco all come out. What is going to happen when it's Dallas or Houston, and they can't hang on those same tropes?
There has to be this culture of government matters, right? We started this interview discussing urban planning. One of the big challenges of urban planning in this country is that people are very anti-government. And not just on the right.
I am not a public health expert, but there are those who have been warning about a pandemic for 20 years. And they just have to sit there and watch our government fail to act accordingly because no one trusts authority.
I don't know if we have the capacity to think one hundred people removed from us. We need leadership and clarity.
Well that and expertise. I think that's the other really interesting thing here – the postmodern period is defined by this gutting of expertise, and that could also fall victim to this virus.
To me, this seems to relate directly to thinking on climate change. If scientists were right about this, maybe they're right about climate change. I think that's going to be one of the most interesting things I'm going to be watching in the coming years. Whether this influences how people think about science, and think about expertise. And about why people who are trained to think about things have a more earned voice then just anyone who can pop off on social media, and say well this is my take on it, and it's equally valid.
I don't think by having this critique that says that we need to have experts and we need to have government means that we're somehow going back like to some 1950s socialists model. I think there's a big difference between staying within the framework of the culture and the society we have. There should be an ability to listen to experts, to plan for the future. That is not contradictory to the American model.
When the left talks about their Scandinavian fever dream, I’m like, I’m a brown guy, I don’t want to live in Scandinavia. There are things about the American ethos I hold really dear, so there has to be some nuance to the conversation. You can have expertise and an assertive government without us talking about going back to Yugoslavia. There is a middle ground, these things are not so cut and dry.
There’s a world where what is provided by government is not antithetical to personal freedom, but actually enables freedom for the individual. The idea of freedom and the reality of freedom in America is vast.
No, I know. I think this is going to be a very interesting time to talk about the future of human habitation and environmental design. For decades we’ve been responding to neoliberalism, which is really hard to do because the things that we care about in this discipline require a mental framework that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal thinking. One that says you plan for the future. You don't let private markets do everything. You know, you do have an assertive government. You do have to have expertise.
I think it's going to be a really interesting moment to ask if we regain that sort of thinking and actually use it to address public health, climate change, these large systemic things that we haven't been addressing.
I hope so.
Yeah, me too.
*Author has amended original quote “The Gilded Age” to the “Roaring 20s” for clarification