Across the Great Divide

Love of Place Means Having a Place.

Are you working now? A question we asked folks at the Day Center.

Yesterday, Susan and I heard a talk by the new head of Grand Junction Economic Partners. Robin Brown is smart, dynamic and great for the job. Her informative presentation about the valley's economic development plan was based on the idea of Topophilia, a strong sense and love of place.

The same day in the local paper, I noted the name of a woman arrested for drug possession. She came here in part because of family connections, participated in a women's support group, and was working honestly on achieving sobriety. Let's call her Hope.

Normally, I'd see Hope at the Day Center where I volunteer. She came in daily and we had good conversations, not just about her struggles and her homeless state, but about other things. She lived for seven years in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, but we have more in common right here.

I last saw her when the Day Center closed the first of March for a reconstruction and expansion. Long term, that is good a thing. For the summer, however, it means a hundred or more people like Hope have lost one of its most important services.

Provisions have been made so they can get showers, collect mail and do laundry. But they no longer have a safe, drug-free place off the street that is theirs.

Robin Brown doesn't know Hope. She may not know any people experiencing homelessness. Based on her remarks, Robin, like others in the community, views visible homelessness as a detriment, a reality that economic development efforts must overcome, because "we can't do anything about the homeless."

I get that view. I wrote a novel about the intersection of a community's hopes for itself and the individuals not included in those aspirations.

But there's another way to look at homelessness—as a failure of economic development to produce living wage jobs and affordable housing. Indeed, the plan for the valley focuses on high-wage employers and housing for those families who come here to work for those companies.

Robin mentioned a visit to Boise, Idaho, where she remarked on the lack of visible homelessness on the streets downtown. The answer she got—probably from another economic development person, not a homeless advocate—was that the city had co-located all the relevant services at a location away from the core business district.

That's not a bad approach, but it's not simple or sufficient. Moving homelessness out of sight does not address the core issues where economic development has something important to contribute—jobs, housing and a robust tax base that can help fund social services. And, if it contributes to higher housing costs and loss of low-income housing, development can actually undermine progress to reduce homelessness.

I am rooting for Robin Brown and the community to succeed. And I am rooting for Hope to succeed, too, because that means things are really working in this place they both love.

 

Conserved Beauty's Hidden Price.

Nothing's for sale in Lost Springs. According to Coldwell Banker, "In Lost Springs, 50% of homes are owned, 25% are rented, and 25% are not occupied."

We returned from Colorado this week via blue highways, a convoluted route that detoured us north to the Grand Tetons before passing through forlorn towns strung across the high plains.

It's tempting to project gloom through the windshield when you see tiny crossroads like Lost Springs, where the bars are the last businesses to go. Or ranching towns like Lusk, where a substantial brick hotel, repurposed to affordable housing, hints at a more colorful past of railroads, silver mining and radium baths for tourists.

The gloom deepens when you spend a night in Chadron after convincing your co-pilot it has to be a decent place to stay because it's a college town. Well, yeah, a college town for kids from Lusk and North Platte, who might not notice all the downtown buildings that sport historical designation placards in lieu of For Rent signs.

Because nobody's looking to rent.

We had spent the prior day and overnight in Jackson Hole. It's in a beautiful setting, with ready access to trails, steep ski runs and open space with picture-window views of the Tetons in the distance. The streets are lively and downtown storefronts are full. The town supports a couple nice bookstores and a roller derby team. You can drop $250,000 on a grizzly bear painting or watch elk graze in the valley for free.

This 70-acre estate on the Snake River can be yours for only $19 million.

It's not surprising that, in a town where the median home price is $1.2 million and a 1,200-square-foot condo goes for about twice what you'd pay in downtown Minneapolis, Jackson Hole Sotheby's International Realty office occupies half a city block. 

The prosperity in these uber-resort towns can be deceiving. The very money that has conserved these views, kept the streams pristine and sprinkled the town with music, art and varied cuisine has also priced out regular folk.

Forget Section Eight projects.

Here, "affordable housing" is for nurses, park rangers, teachers, housekeepers, bartenders and accountants. The president of the Aspen Board of Realtors knows 14 brokers who live in employee housing subsidized by the city to allow working stiffs to be year-round residents.

Even off-season rents have always been tight in these resort towns, but the trend is to knock down anything that comes on the market. Last July owners of Jackson Hole’s largest apartment complex notified tenants of a 40 percent rent hike.

It's not just rent that's overpriced. We saw Sierra Nevada and New Belgium beer 12-packs on sale for what was full price in Minnesota. But there's lots of work in these towns, and if you live where the economy's hurting, you might find a way.

Construction workers drive in from Idaho to Jackson. Steamboat Springs has converted two motels into man camps for the hospitality industry. Aspen collects a real estate tax to subsidize local worker housing. Vail provides some employee housing, but recently suggested workers might ease the crunch by sharing bedrooms.

During ski season, a nephew-in-law commuted from Grand Junction to Breckenridge for a part-time  job delivering goods to vacationers. (If he'd stayed there for his days off, he might have found a couch to rent for $200 a week.) Other service workers may live in their cars, sleep in shifts in moldy rentals, shiver in unheated basements or camp during the summer. In Crested Butte, 12 percent of the seasonal workforce summered in tents last year prompting a local biological research station to complain its research sites were being compromised.

Meanwhile, million-dollar homes sit vacant for long stretches of the year.

Most of the time, I blog about homelessness. This is pretty damn close.

 

Shelter Report: "A Safe Place to Land."

Scott and Robin came in looking for a shower. They were too late, the mark of first-timers.

This was their first full day in town after arriving last night from Parachute, a small town of 1,100 people on I-70 about 45 miles from here. Parachute's slogan is "A Safe Place to Land."

Until this month, they had been employed at restaurants in Glenwood Springs, a resort town another 45 miles upriver. Glenwood is the town where I grew up. It's beautiful, set in a narrow valley with a renowned hot springs. However, there's a shortage of housing at any price.

Affordable housing is an issue all around the Vail-Aspen corridors. Service workers like Scott and Robin can't afford to live where they're employed. That means commuting from places like Parachute, a town that once was going to be the epicenter of the oil shale boom.

Correct that. It was going to be the epicenter of a bunch of oil shale booms.*

Once Robin and Scott lost their jobs in Glenwood, their low rent wasn't such a good deal.

It happened this way, as it often does, a downward spiral that starts with a vehicle that breaks down and can't easily be repaired. They can't get to work without their car and they can't fix their car without work. 

Parachute has opened a few legalized marijuana shops but it doesn't have a grocery store. The main industry seems to be serving as a highway rest stop, selling gas and feeding travelers. But those restaurants are mom and pop operations or gas station one-holers. There were no jobs to be had locally.

Actually, Parachute has a sort of grocery.

They were scraping by looking for work in the next town, Rifle, 16 miles away. One day Robin caught a ride there but ended up walking back; no one would stop and pick her up.

A few days ago their power went out. Scott called the power company to find out if it was a general outage. The company said, your power's been cut off. You're behind on your bill. He said, we just paid it 12 days ago. You owe $600, the company said.

How can that be?

They'd made the mistake of paying half the electric bill to a landlord who lived in the other half of the property. He hadn't been paying the bill.

That's when they decided they had to get to a bigger town.

They'd spent the night in their minivan after putting the last of their cash down on a storage unit for their belongings. (The owners let them park inside the gates overnight.)

Their first stop in the morning was the Workforce Center to get a line on potential food service jobs. (Scott is a cook.) Robin applied for food stamps, "though I hope we won't need them. We never have before."

By 11:00 it was too late for a shower before hitting the street to put in applications, so tomorrow they'll be back at the Day Center early. They seemed optimistic.

See you tomorrow, they said.

I'm only here on Wednesdays, I said.

Okay, we'll see you next week.

Or maybe they won't. Maybe this town will be better than the last one and they'll find work quick.

A guy can hope.

__________

 

*When I was kid in the '50s, there were street signs in the desert, put there by speculators who envisioned a monorail running from Grand Valley (as the town was called then) to the top of the Grand Mesa.

In the late '60s oil and gas producers experimented with an underground nuclear explosion to release oil from the formations in nearby Rulison. That didn't catch on, either. 

In the early '80s the big oil producers built worker housing on nearby Battlement Mesa for the next boom that was supposed to happen. The Colony Oil Shale Project shut down suddenly in May, 1982, laying off more than 2,000 workers on Black Sunday, and sending all of western Colorado into a depression that last for years.

 

The worker housing was later marketed to retirees from out of state. Some of those buyers are disturbed to learn they only control the surface rights to the land. Gas wells have been showing up in the neighborhood again.

 

Homelessness Ate My Homework.

"You can hire 10,000 people for 10 to 15 minutes," says Gigwalk CEO Bob Bahramipour. "When they're done, those 10,000 people just melt away."

– Temporary jobs becoming a permanent fixture

Just before I left town this spring, a woman I knew who frequented the Day Center serving the homeless in Grand Junction had been hired to do overnight stocking at a local Wal-Mart. She was very excited—not because it was a great job or that she was the excitable type, but because it gave her "a chance to get out of this situation I'm in."

I'll be very interested to find out if it did.

A few weeks ago, I heard a story from a teacher friend who had spent all year putting extra effort into keeping a child in her fifth-grade class. The girl had six different residences during the year, including a motel and the apartment of his father's ex-girlfriend, who the dad was trying to get removed as a custodial adult because it turned out the gf was bad news.

Through all the drama and turmoil, the girl kept making it to class—largely because of three factors: a federal law that guarantees homeless children transportation to the school where they are enrolled, regardless of their address; a teacher and support staff who went the extra mile; and a father who stayed employed and cared deeply about what happened to his daughter.

His job was in night warehousing at Wal-Mart.

His supervisor liked him and kept his job open for him when he spent 10 days in jail while a domestic complaint was being sorted through with the ex-girl-friend. By the teacher's account, the father. who came here from rural West Virginia, is stable and  hard-working but uneducated and unsophisticated.

And he doesn't make enough money at his job to hang onto housing.

A recent report by Minnesota Housing Partnership underscores the connection between low-wage employment, affordable housing supply, homelessness and children. Minnesota 2020 summarizes:

[I]n Hennepin County, an average of 330 families sought shelter each month, an increase of 115 (69%) from two years ago. Of particular concern is the fact that the data show both the length of stay in a shelter, and the number of families returning to shelters after periods of being housed, is increasing. Similarly, Minneapolis and Saint Paul public schools reported roughly 1000 more children as being homeless than they did at the recession's height.

My teacher friend described how just finding where the student was staying and getting her to class was only the start of the daily battle. She sometimes got separated from her homework or was unable to complete it. At least in one case, the girl couldn't produce a major, ongoing assignment. With the teacher's help, she located the work—and they found a second version in her things as well.

Despite her stressful home situation, she'd completed the homework twice—but distracted by the chaos around her, she couldn't remember having done it even once.

How long is a motivated, intelligent girl going to be able to keep progressing under this stress? What if she'd been in the classroom of a neophyte Teach for America teacher, instead of having one with nearly 40 years of experience who could navigate all kinds of obstacles in and out of the school? What if the school's systems weren't geared to supporting her special needs and instead treated her as truant or an unmotivated student?

There's clearly dysfunction in the way Minnesota schools are addressing the educational achievement gap. We tend to cast it in terms of a racial divide, but it is also a poverty divide. Temporary and low-wage jobs that seem to offer a way up for people at the bottom don't necessarily offer a path to permanency or stability. (Only 27% of temp jobs lead to "permanent positions" with an employer.)

It's not just Wal-Mart hiring people who desperately need jobs and then paying too little for them to achieve security they desperately need. You could see the same issues unfold at other employers in all kinds of sectors who are hiring better educated workers. Even a marginally higher wage to a temp or contract worker isn't that great if the hours and duration are too low to pay for housing and other basic needs.

Nothing in life is permanent, of course. But for an increasing number of Americans, even the illusion of permanency ain't what it used to be.

Shelter Report: These Kids are Learning to Be Still.

Following the move from Colorado to Minnesota each year, I make the transition from a homeless service center for adults to a preschool for children staying the a shelter.

This week I made yet another switch, from a morning shift to the afternoon. A friend I'd recruited to replace me Thursday mornings is staying on.

The kids, aged roughly 3 to nearly 5, have been difficult, I'm told. A number of behavior issues. There's a high proportion of boys, including one still there from the group I worked with before I left.

I've always assumed it helps to have men in the classroom as role models, since not all the fathers are with the families in the shelter and the staff is all women, although that's based on a somewhat flawed gender premise. The female teachers are tougher and professionally better equipped than the male volunteers.

The kids just know we're the guys who come in one day. Not that one of us was a bond trader/analyst for an investment bank and the other used to own a marketing agency. We met at a golf club. If we are any kind of role models, our former professional lives won't have much to do with it.

One more difference. The morning shift is much more hyper. The kids have a three-hour series of activities and generally start out with more energy. After lunch, though, there's a two-hour quiet time, where my job is to help children wind down into nap land and calm any kids who are disturbing the others.

Now I'll have to be still for two hours. We're all learning.

Biking in for the first time on my regular commuter route, I was struck by the amount of building that's begun in Minneapolis since I left last November.

Two buildings destroyed by the tornado that hit the neighborhood exactly two years had finally been cleared—a former day care center and a corner commercial building that had housed a barber shop and apartments above. Three of the four corners of that intersection at Golden Valley Road and Penn Avenue are now empty.

A large apartment building damaged by the storm is still shuttered and the apartments are off the market. A recent national study ranked Minnesota's housing least affordable in the Midwest.

Last month, a barber shop that had been nicely outfitted after the storm was burned less than three weeks after the owner joined Facebook and posted photos of the interior. Hmmm.

Things are still not looking great for this neighborhood that supplies our shelter with families who can't find jobs or places they can afford—or places they can afford that are anywhere near their jobs.

Meanwhile, work is proceeding on the Exchange, a big transit hub next to Target Center. Apartments and condos are sprouting throughout downtown, rushing to meet the rental demands of the well-off and upwardly mobile.

Even more exciting development's on the way. The urban park proposed as part of the new Vikings complex will be right across the street from People Serving People, the shelter where I volunteer.

Well, not quite. The shelter residents' view will be blocked by the new office tower and residential complex planned for the north edge of the park.

Be still, children. Be still.

The Five-Minute Argument or the Full Half Hour?

So, far Craig Westover and I seem to be doing better than the fellows in the Argument Clinic.

We started our conversation with this story about social services providers continuing to work through the government shutdown, and then we discussed his "first lesson" here and the second regarding the private sector/government relationships here.

Though we may continue hammering away in the comment sections of those posts, it's time to move onto the third lesson, which Craig formulated this way:

A third lesson is one shouldn’t put all one’s economic eggs in the state basket. It’s also another reason “tax the rich” doesn’t work.

Williams was in a financial bind because all (most) of her revenue came from the state. In her case, the problem was a state shutdown; in the future, it might be a recession that reduces the income of the “rich,” which significantly reduces state revenue from taxes. The problem with highly progressive taxation is in dollar terms a relatively few people are supporting everyone else. They take a hit, and the ripple effect is disastrous.

The solution for Williams is multiple revenue sources, which implies a market solution.

Craig, you'll get no argument from me about the "all-in-one basket" caution, but your explanation of it betrays you once again peering from the fat end of the telescope.

The clients at All About Kids daycare are indeed subsidized, but we don't know how much of Williams' revenue came from the state. The story says, "All of her clients are low-income and struggle just to pay their $2 to $24 sliding fee." Sounds like multiple revenue sources to me.

This is one reason I picked the story to discuss. The subsidy is supplemented with client funds based on their ability to pay — sort of a progressive scheme, just like the income tax. As their circumstances improve, they pay more.

Perhaps this model could be employed more widely. Not simply, as in the case of health care vouchers, as a way to throw people out of public plans, but as a client-centered, outcome-based approach to helping people at the margins Republicans seem none too interested in.

You argue Williams' problem came from being too dependent on the government payments. I'd argue her revenue shortfall came her choosing to serve a segment of the population that is disproportionately affected by policies that favor your favorite constituency.

The shutdown occurred because the representatives of wealthy Minnesotans didn't want them to pay higher taxes, and guess who paid the price? A recession definitely affects the income of the wealthy and lowers government revenues, but it affects the low-income clients Williams serves even more.

Well-to-do taxpayers have lots of options that don't affect their lifestyles one whit. They can lay off workers, book losses against future tax bills, draw from savings or take capital gains. And the progressive income tax rates on high earners, remember, are historically quite low.

Last year, with the "help" of some tax losses, our combined effective state and federal income tax rate was 13.1%, although our household income put us right on the cusp of the top ten percent of earners in the state. We aren't hurting, and I'd be surprised those making substantially more are, either.

"All the Devils are Here" Pricing Provokes eBook Tempest.

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

– The Tempest

I haven't yet read All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, which gives a detailed review of the fingerprints all over the subprime-driven meltdown, but I have noticed a tempest going on over at Amazon related to the book.

When the authors appeared on The Daily Show and in other media to promote the book's launch, readers went to Amazon.com to buy it.

Kindle readers were shocked to find the eBook edition priced almost the same as the hardcover.

That stimulated a discussion "How is it that kindle version is just 85 cents less than hardcover?" as well as a 1-Star review protest directed against the pricing, not the book's content.

Readers argue that a digital-rights-managed edition should be priced substantially lower than the discounted hardcover price of $17.50. The e-readers seem to expect a price point of $9.99.

When I checked the site to grab these links, I noticed the Kindle price had dropped to $14.99, still closer to the hardcover price than to the $9.99 magic number.

Is this Amazon and the publisher simply trying demand pricing during the media blitz, intending all along to drop it? Or did they price it higher thinking the audience (techno-driven financial types?) would not resist the higher price point?

More than one commenter noted the irony of a book about financial misdeeds carrying a higher price.

Whatever was behind the pricing decision, the authors have to be peeved that their Amazon rating has been downgraded by something outside their control. And future authors could also see the same thing befall them until the market settles the question for everyone.

Doing the Tip Credit Shuffle.

Michael Saltsman's op/ed today on Minnesota's tip credit purports to explain the issue from an employer's and a economist's point of view. (Commenters at the Strib have already outed the PR-firm-created Employment Policies Institute with which Saltsman is affiliated.)

He paints a picture of the financial impact of a tip credit on a

hypothetical restaurant with part-time employees [that] averages 300 employee hours per day, 365 days a year. An extra dollar per hour translates into an additional $109,500 a year in labor costs (before you add additional payroll taxes), meaning the restaurant will have to generate an additional $2.2 million in revenue just to break even.

and says " it's hard to figure out where that much extra money — $6,000 a day, to be exact — would come from."

Exactly. Especially if you're looking at the colorful scarf while he pulls the rabbit out of the hat.

His restaurant would require 37.5 tipped employees working eight-hour shifts every day to hit 300 hours. Not exactly your struggling neighborhood bistro.

Second, there's no "additional" labor cost required to break even, because Minnesota is not taking away a tip credit. Menu prices, staffing levels and profits are set by the owner taking into account the local market and a law that's been in place for decades.

So, yes, the hypothetical owners with the hypothetical staff under a hypothetical change in the law will  compensate in this way:

Avoid the expense altogether by cutting labor costs in other ways. Restaurants that used to employ servers who took care of three tables each now have a single server waiting on four or five. As a customer, you get your food but with less attention paid when you need something extra.

And hypothetical customers, through their tips, can decide to pay servers directly for better service, just like they do today — while the middleman looks on and pays a little as possible to his employees.

Are Tips Really a Jobs Issue?

A lot has already been written about GOP candidate for governor Tom Emmer's claim that forcing restaurant owners to pay minimum wages for workers who also receive tip income burdens the businesses.

Minnesota prohibits a "tip credit" that would allow these employers to avoid paying the full minimum wage. Both Emmer and Independence candidate Tom Horner contend that this potentially hurts businesses in the food service industry.

Too many pixels have died from bloggers and commenters focused on the wrong part of the question, doing speculative math because the Strib's story didn't ask the basic question: Is what Emmer said about $100,000 waiters true?

Strib columnist Jon Tevlin did talk to the owners who supposedly told Emmer about the highly compensated waiters they employed. Not surprisingly, the owner claims a misquote: "No way, shape or form did I [tell Emmer] anyone made $100,000."

The truth is, tips already enable the industry to get away with paying its hourly workers less. Minnesota eating and drinking establishments account for 7.6% of the state's hourly workers — but for almost 54% of all hourly workers at or below the federal effective minimum wage of $6.55 [Download]. And 69% of these workers receive overtime pay, tips or commissions. (The reports don't break out tips individually.)

The conservative spin on Emmer's position comes from Mitch Berg, who says:

This is entirely about bringing jobs back to the hospitality business in Minnesota.

If you've been paying attention at all to claims from Camp Emmer, you know you have to check these things.

According to the state's Department of Employment and Economic Development, jobs in the hospitality industry did fall off starting in late 2007, about the time the recession began to gain steam. Before that, jobs, number of establishments, total wages and average wages grew steadily.

Industry codes changed in 2000, so it's difficult to compare earlier data, but I found a study that showed steady growth in personal income from Minnesota eating & drinking establishments from 1969-1999 [Download].

If the lack of a tip credit has been killing jobs, it apparently didn't make a difference until the whole economy took a dive.

Economist and GOP legislative candidate King Banaian finds there's scant evidence to support the idea that higher tipped minimum wages do much to boost server pay. So who benefits?

To put this all another way, as a group, proportionately more workers who receive tips are already paid relatively lower wages than hourly workers in other industries and occupations. The claim that restaurant owners are hurt because they can't lower their wages even more doesn't seem supported by the data.

And they aren't going to bring in more business by hiring more servers at even lower wages. At least, the past growth didn't occur that way.

This brings us back to Mitch:

So here’s the question:  are the “workers at the bottom of the pay ladder” better off hustling for tips (which can be volatile and low, and can also be really really good money), or out of work entirely?

Because in this economy, that’s pretty much the choice.

Unless you look at the facts.

Shelter Report: How High Unemployment and Worker Shortage Coexist.

Between my shift at the Day Center and attending a trial (for background research on the prosecution of child abuse cases), I stopped for lunch at a Main Street Pizzeria. Grand Junction's Main Street is being reconstructed, a few blocks at a time, so the businesses in those closed off blocks must rely more than normal on pedestrian traffic for a few months.

[The redo is an update of a pedestrian-oriented, serpentine mall lined with trees, planters and sculptures that was originally built in 1962 — six years before work began on Minneapolis's supposedly groundbreaking Nicollet Mall.]

As I walked down the street, I noticed virtually the entire workforce doing concrete finishing work and other construction was Hispanic. Inside the pizza joint, which was doing a good business, I came across a newspaper with this story describing the challenges of local orchards finding good local labor. This, in a town with unemployment hovering around 10 percent.

More than 300 local job-seekers have trooped into Talbott Farms' office this year to inquire about jobs in the orchards and vineyards.

Still, out in the fields, most of the workers doing the early thinning and spraying have come here on temporary guest-worker visas from Mexico.

It is not that Talbott and other growers don't want to hire fellow Americans hurting from extended unemployment. But many of those job-seekers aren't willing to tackle the tough, low-wage, long-hour farm labor.

Coincidentally, I had spoken with a number of men at the Day Center about their efforts to find work.

One man has been doggedly pursuing a dish washing job at local pub. Nearly a month after his first contact with them, he headed out today for an interview and was optimistic about landing something.

"I always want to work," he told me, "but I haven't had a job since November. It's been really tough."

Another man, who showed up here last week from Moab, now has his feet under him and has lost that dazed look he had when he arrived at the Day Center. One of the regulars escorted him around town and showed him where he could get assistance, a daily meal, a bus pass and a bed at a shelter.

He, too, wants work. He has been to the Workforce Center, which told him about a meat cutting job. "I have experience — you need it to cut meat — but it only pays $7.50 an hour," he said. "A skilled job like that should pay at least $12."

This man likes it here, better than Moab, where there's no shelter that accepts homeless men and the only soup kitchen serves leftovers from the school lunch program. He has some serious psychological effects from his alcoholism, bad enough that he has stopped drinking for eight months and takes antabuse and other medications. He seems determined to be productive, but he will struggle for the rest of his life.

"Are you taking your medications?" is a serious question I hear all the time here.

The third man talked to me about his plans to leave town. 

His theory, the opposite of the other man's, is that smaller communities are more receptive to homeless people who want to work. Because there's no safety net in those towns, there's no identifiable homeless population, so he can look for employment without being branded as "one of those."

He is intelligent and very presentable. He keeps himself busy here playing guitar or reading, and at the end of the day he helped with the clean up. But like the other two men, he exhibits the stream-of-consciousness talk that signals other issues at work.

I like all three of these guys and wish them luck. But I also see how Hispanic laborers can come to town and "take jobs away from the locals."

Language and cultural barriers are a piece of cake compared to what some of these guys carry.