Bacon's Rebellion

  • HEALTH CARE — Vocabulary and Metrics

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    James A. Bacon

    The “historic health care reform” is NOT health care ‘reform.’ It is no more ‘health care reform’ than it is a replacement for cheap energy, a reversal of the decline of marine resources or a filter for polluted ground water. It is not a cure for the loss of biodiversity, continuing trade deficits, religious bigotry, state terrorism, climate change, dysfunctional settlement patterns or other serious problems too numerous to mention.

    The health care ‘reform’ does not change health care research, it does not change health care education and is does not change health care economics beyond some patches, fixes – and new problems – related to how and by whom health care insurance is paid and how the benefits are distributed.

    There will be some ripple effect but “health care reform” did not change the delivery of health care at the Regional scale (disaster response / shock and trauma / rare occurrences), it did not change health care delivery at the Community scales (birth to death health care) and it did nothing to improve the health care delivery at the Household scale.

    Health care, like the other pressing problems facing humans, has been allowed to fester. It has been papered over because humans at the top of the Ziggurat had (PAST tense) resources to ignore or take ineffective faints at the problems – often involving throwing money at them.

    As noted in prior posts by EMR, a healthy health care system will require:

    Fundamental Transformation of human settlement pattern,
    Fundamental Transformation of the governance structure, and
    Fundamental Transformation of the economic system.

    Do you want a good summary of how the later two Fundamental Transformations relate? Check out the WaPo Business Section feature for 21 March: “When Profit Outweighs Penalties.”

    The three Fundamental Transformations will lead to profound shift in Consumption Patterns. However, something else is needed:

    A NEW METRIC FOR CITIZEN WELL BEING – PART FIVE of TRILO-G.

    What is a health related “new metric?”

    Personal and Household responsibility for ones own health and the health of those in the Household.

    This new metric must be backed up by a fair allocation of the costs to those who choose to ignore health risks and run up large costs – smokers, stimulant and electronic communication abusers, overeaters and the sleep and exercise deprived, ARE YOU LISTENING?

    Why the focus on individual responsibility? The idea that a ‘doctor’ can ‘manage’ ones health is a tragic Myth akin to those that drive dysfunctional human settlement patterns. One of the responsibilities of being an educated citizen in contemporary society is taking personal responsibility.

    Those who devote the time and effort to becoming a health care professional must be fairly compensated. The idea that everyone can afford a doctor to manage their health is a preposterous as the idea that everyone can afford a Single Household Dwelling on a five acre lot or that any Agency (or all levels of Agencies together) can afford a Mobility and Access system which allows everyone to take a vehicle trip where ever they want, when ever they want. For those who have been paying attention, that is especially true for Large, Private Vehicles.

    What would a new health care delivery system look like?

    In December of 1979 EMR published an essay titled “Ideas for the 80s.” One of the ideas was Telework – which by that time was already an ‘old’ idea but Telework was not yet on the screen of most. There were nine other ideas including a new Regional and Community health care delivery system that would be responsible for providing recreation and exercise facilities and activities as well as delivering health care at the Cluster, Neighborhood, Village, Community and Regional scales. There is need for research, standards, coordination and emergency response at the MegaRegional, Continental and Global scales but health care is PRIMARILY a Regional issue.

    Essays such as “Ideas for the 80s” will be among the resources available on EMRs new website, coming soon.

    EMR

  • TWO NOTES ON SKETCH COMMENTS

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    James A. Bacon

    Excuse the new post but there are two very important points raised by the comments on the Sketch Comments post:

    In the first comment, Not Ed Risse (welcome back!) said:

    “Henry George is irrelevant when exclusionary zoning prevents higher density housing that an otherwise free market would support and build.

    “Most of the dysfunction you decry is the result of government control of land use, not the decisions of ill informed consumers or speculative developers.”

    EMR agrees. If one searches “cambium layer” in The Shape of the Future they will find text that articulates that point and puts in the context of the New Urban Region Conceptual Framework.

    NER used the term “most” to start the second paragraph and this is VERY important. There are also other forces at work – within the context of dysfunctional governance structure.

    For example suing Arlington County and HUD over The First Baptist Church of Clarendon’s multi-use plan on First Amendment grounds is misuse of the US of A Constitution to promote personal privilege over Neighborhood and Village interests. WaPo 21 March.

    In an amazing juxtaposition, on 22 March a similar plan by a Swedish firm is covered in WaPo with the headline “A sign of life in commercial real estate?”

    In fact buildings near METRO stations (the facts in both cases) with a creative mix of use can help meet the need for METRO to become more functional by balancing the travel demand and by decreasing the need for any vehicle trip to support many of the requirements of quality life styles in the station areas.

    And speaking of quality of life…

    In the second comment Larry said:

    “I think if you interviewed the 100-mile a day folks – that most of them would agree that their work/home situation IS..DYSFUNCTIONAL …”

    YES, they do know that but they continue to believe the Myths that prevents rational actions AND as Larry said THEY HAVE NO BETTER OPTION due to the dysfunctional governance structure.

    He goes on to say:

    “…but they’re not going to live in a 1000 square foot hovel with strange characters hanging out on the streets and schools where their kids are not safe and can’t learn.”

    If Larry could just wrap his brain around the fact that 5 persons per acre within the Clear Edge and 10 to 30 person per acre in the built environment INSIDE the Clear Edge has NOTHING to do with “1,000 sq ft hovels and strange characters.” See STARK CONTRAST.

    If one wants to encounter ‘strange characters’ at the Dooryard and Clusters scales look to LOWER density areas. Check the data on SubRegions (Inside the Clear Edge and Outside the Clear Edge.) with 1, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 persons per acre. You will find the higher the density, the LOWER the number that fall outside the bell curve on ALL measures of social compatibility – a more formal way to say ‘strange characters.’ See EMR post on Green Metropolis INCLUDING discussion of the four tragic flaws.

    For example one will find the LOWER the density the higher the per capita ‘deaths at the hands of strangers.’ Spotsy Cnty is far more dangerous than Arlington Cnty according to Prof Lucy’s research for example.

    Myths are powerful forces that befuddle even the most thoughtful.

    EMR

  • COMMENTS ON A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE SKETCH

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    James A. Bacon

    The ‘Sketch’ posted 15 March 2010 generated over 40 comments to date. As a former student Emailed: “I hope they are having fun because they have not added much to the prospect of evolving sustainable human settlement patterns.”

    At the urging of several who responded directly, EMR provides these additional observations on the topic:

    The comments on “A Sustainable Future Sketch Process” were frightening and at the same time reassuring.

    They were frightening because they demonstrate the how far some citizens are from understanding the parameters of functional settlement patterns. Geographic Illiteracy, Spacial Obliviousness, Developmental Topographic Disorientation – what ever one calls it – has a terrible collective impact on the future of civilization.

    They are reassuring because they demonstrate that the organization and content of TRILO-G focuses on the right issues.

    Volume I of TRILO-G (the first five PARTs) addresses the reasons why citizens do not yet understand the importance of human settlement patterns. The comments on the Sketch highlight the need for a new Conceptual Framework to guide the use and management of land. (THE USE AND MANAGEMENT OF LAND – PART FOUR of TRILO-G)

    Three realities spelled out in PART FOUR are not yet well recognized:

    1. There is a profound difference between land and land use patterns suitable for Urban use (serving the daily needs of 95 percent of the population and covering a maximum of 5 percent of the land area) and land and land use patterns suitable for NonUrban use (serving the needs of 100 percent of the population but directly involving the daily activities of 5 percent of the population and occupying 95 percent of the land area).

    2. The Use and Management of land is different from the ownership of land for both Urban and NonUrban activities.

    3. There are many rational choices for land ownership beyond ‘private’ and ‘public.’

    EMR will not try to address all the misunderstandings illustrated by the comments but will focus on four topics:

    Detroit, Land Speculation, Growth Projections, Settlement Pattern Choices and Commuting.

    DETROIT

    Had commentors bothered to read what Dave Bing and others are actually doing in Detroit – including support for Urban Agriculture – they would know that what is being proposed and attempted in Detroit is similar to what EMR has advocated for over two decades. Note that in the original Sketch post there is reference to ‘Subdivision Recycling’ and to ‘Parcel Consolidation’ (which includes Parcel Reconsolidation). In the mid 80’s SYNERGY clients were implementing these tactics to increase the flux of Urban activity where that was logical and remove Urban land uses where that made sense.

    Beyond the MainStream Media babble concerning Detroit, there is an important issue that may or may not be adequately addressed in the strategies for a new Greater Detroit Core for the Detroit / Windsor NUR:

    Are the changes in human settlement pattern resulting in Balance and Critical Mass necessary to support both Urban and NonUrban economic, social and physical interrelationship upon which a sustainable society must be based?

    Is Balance and Critical Mass being addressed for each of the organic components of human settlement pattern?

    In other words, will the result of Subdivision Recycling and Parcel Reconsolidation be functional human settlement patterns or just a hodgepodge checkerboard of land uses created by removal of derelict buildings? The 50,000 foot perspective noted in THE USE AND MANAGEMENT OF LAND is a place to start to get an answer to this question.

    By the way, ‘farmland lost’ is NOT farmland lost FOREVER. Some of the best land for agriculture has been covered with dysfunctionally low density Urban land uses and can and should be recycled. Urban agriculture programs are demonstrating this in North America, the Carribean, Europe and Asia.

    LAND SPECULATION

    AZA who commented on the WSH, WL post was taking good notes at one of EMR’s lectures:

    If a speculator pays market value for vacant and or underutilized land and pays the carrying costs (e.g. receives no cash flow from the land) for 17 years in the average case the Net Present Value (NVP) of the investment is ZERO when inflation is factored in. That is ZERO $. LAND SPECULATION DOES NOT PAY.

    The 17 year parameter is based on actual experience in the Northern Part of Virginia over the period 1960 to 2000. The result is the same if one buys the land with borrowed funds and pays interest or if they buy the land for cash and Alternative Investment Opportunity is applied to determine NPV. If the land generates income during the holding period, that cash flow extends the time until NPV goes to Zero. A good rule of thumb is when buying vacant land to have a three year backdoor al all times.

    Over time, interest eats speculators lunch. Amateurs do not know this and agents who profit from real estate churn will never disclose it.

    If all speculatively held vacant and underutilized land (for which there will NEVER be a market due to the vast overbuild for Urban uses at functional patterns and densities) was put on the market at the same time, the price of vacant and underutilized land would fall.

    It would likely fall to the point that it would be feasible to but it for extensive (aka, NonUrban) land uses. That is essentially what is happening in Detroit for high value crops and, as EMR noted four years ago, in selected areas in the Heartland.

    The fact that paying the full cost of Urban services would help end land speculation is reason why speculators attacked Henry George with such vehemence and still do to this day.

    A major housing downturn (See WSH, WL) is just what is needed to bring land speculation into perspective. The problem is that loss of dwelling values is now on course to Collapse the economy and destroy the economic foundations for millions of Households who had no idea they were contributing to Collapse.

    GROWTH (DECLINE) PROJECTIONS

    In the comments following the Sketch post, Larry G said:

    “There are two big issues with growth.

    “1. – The first is how do you predict growth?

    “about the only thing I have seen is you look at the past 10 years and then assume the next 10 will be similar. That seems pretty dumb to me …”

    There are a number of BIG potential errors generated by ten year projections keyed to the census. For example.

    In the early 70s EMR managed a study of the Balto / Wash Corridor as a consultant to Wash COG and Balto COG (a joint Agency study). (Each COG represented two of the 4 key municipal jurisdictions in the Corridor.) The team was amazed to fine that based on the 1950 to 1960 growth rate, the 1960 to 1970 growth projection had been pegged by the two Agencies at ‘X.’ However, the actual growth from 1960 t0 1970 was 1 / 7th of X. Being off by a factor of 7 can have BIG consequences.

    An interesting footnote: The Planned New Community of Columbia, MD is in the Balto – Wash Corridor and the economic model was based on the Balto COG projection. Instead of getting ‘Y’ percent of the ‘X’ growth, it got 8 Y percent of 1 / 7 X and came out ahead of projection. Most of the Corridor growth happened in Columbia – a 13,000 acre patch of the 200,000 + / – acre Corridor. This was an early illustration for EMR of the vast amount of the vacant and underutilized land within 25 miles of the Centroid of major Urban agglomerations.

    To avoid going off track, the Sketch EMR posted suggests an ANNUAL review of the MegaRegional numbers based on what is actually happening. There are a number of indicators that can be monitored to be sure Agencies are preparing for the right parameters.

    “2. – the second is even harder. Let’s assume that you correctly predict a certain amount of growth.

    “Now tell me where that growth will allocate itself geographically – honest injun – no handwaving or rope-a-dope theories.. just lay it out in plain English.”

    If the projection is made by professionals who know the entire Region and have no bias (such as having consulting contracts with jurisdictions that are governed by ‘pro-growth’ Agencies), past experience and alternative scenarios – for example in the above example, Jim Rouse was offering a far better product that any other developer in the Balto – Wash Corridor – plus annual monitoring, the projections as to location can be very close to what actually happens.

    In the years ahead there is the probability of loss of population and Jobs for those Communities that do not take actions to evolve Balance and Critical Mass – as in Detroit and many other places that get less publicity.

    “The Fredericksburg area is project to DOUBLE in population in the next 30 years. Where will it allocate itself geographically?”

    First the big picture:

    If one adds up all the municipal / SubRegion projections (in the case of VA, the PDC numbers) across the MegaRegion they will find FAR more growth projected than is projected at the Regional scale. If Greater Fredericksburg doubles, other SubRegions will grow less than projected and / or others will shrink.

    The Wash COG SubRegional projections have been quite accurate over the past three decades. The staff has wisely expanded the analysis area beyond the COG jurisdictions borders. If they had included the entire National Capital SubRegion of the Washington-Baltimore NUR in each analysis, the projections would have been right on. The distribution of jobs and households by municipal jurisdiction, however, has varied widely.

    On the SubRegional scale:

    If Greater Fredericksburg grows by 50%, 100% or 200% over the next 30 years there is plenty vacant and underutilized land to accommodate that growth ON LESS LAND THAN IS NOW URBANIZED. The bigger issue is to maintain Balance and Critical Mass.

    SETTLEMENT PATTERN CHOICES AND COMMUTING

    As EMR noted In the WSH, WL comments, EMR will not add additional comments on the WSH, WL string. Larry posted the following to which EMR will respond here:

    “I think part of the job here is to understand why 300,000 people live in the Fredericksburg Area and at least 50% of those who work – commute 100 miles a day round trip if [because] the option of having a nice place to live for the same amount of money existed [does not exist] in NoVa.”

    The first ‘job’ is for Larry to understand that these ‘100 mile commuters’ work AND LIVE in the Northern Part of Virginia, not somewhere else. SubRegions and Regions are determined by the pattern of economic, social and physical activity.

    “Folks do not commute 100 miles a day – every day because they misunderstand their options – right?”

    In fact they do. They do that because they misunderstand their options and because of what they believe to be the facts are in reality Myths that are spelled out in The Shape of the Future (SotF). The HANDBOOK process has an exercise on over coming Myths.

    Why they are wrong is a complex issue and one of the reasons SotF was written. As noted below, there is an entire industry that profits from perpetuating Myths so they can avoid paying (or passing) on the total cost of their actions – they are called ‘externalities.’ These externalities turn up miles away – in the Chesapeake Bay and in the federal budget for “commuter assistance.”

    “One must assume that most of them have made the tradeoff calculations correctly.”

    Sorry, they do not. And the problem did not start in 1980 or in 2003. For 90 years land owners, developers and builders have relied on subsidies and not having to pay the full cost of their actions. These Enterprises make more money in the short term if they perpetuate the Myths. AND after they move in, the homeowners EVERY DAY THEY LIVE IN A WSH, WL also enjoy subsides paid for by those who have chosen more sustainable settlement patterns.

    “Thousands of them drive 5 miles or less to a bus or van – and they do this every day 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year – for something they want and consider worth the sacrifice.”

    Well that “sacrifice” by a small minority of the workers in the NUR is costing the majority in the NUR (8 plus million of them) AND all tax payers in the US of A a lot of money. If the minority had to pay the full cost of the services they would make different choices.

    “If the only answer to this is to make this option more expensive…”

    As in ‘pay the full cost’…

    “… it still won’t change how people feel about the appeal of living 50 miles from where they work.”

    That is doubtful. EMR’s position is that on a level playing field a well informed buyer will question and abandon the Myths that drive dysfunctional human settlement patterns.

    Recall that the only way one can help commuters is to help them become non-commuters. See BRZ Column # 92 “Solving the Commuter Problem” 5 Feb 2007 concerning the expansion of VRE.

    Recall also that in any Alpha Community (inside the Clear Edge around the Core of the Region or outside the Clear Edge there will always be SOME who ‘commute.’ Commuting, however is not a sustainable home – work relationship for a significant percentage of the population in any Alpha Community.

    “I think you have to come at this problem accepting that reality.”

    NOW YOU ARE TALKING!

    “Here’s an essential truth – People can live like Groveton lives – on a large lot with well/septic without traffic noise or sketchy characters in the neighborhood and schools that give their kids a genuine opportunity to grow up with a good education for 2/3 to 3/4 less than it costs Groveton if they are willing to commute 8 times further a day than Groveton.”

    Let us leave Groveton out of this. Both Jim Bacon and EMR agree that Groveton and others who have worked hard and done well should be able to live where and how they choose, as long as they pay the full cost of their decisions – including ALL externalities.

    As EMR has noted repeatedly, most of those who live in Groveton’s zip code could not (or would not choose to live there) if they had to pay the full cost of their location choice. See The 10X Rule.

    “Why would folks do that?

    Because of Geographic Illiteracy? Because of Spacial Obliviousness engendered by Autonomobile Myths? Because of Developmental Topographic Disorientation?

    “until we understand why and deal with it on some level other than financial punishment …”

    Not ‘punishment’, just paying their fair share.

    “… of those who engage in it.. I don’t think we are anywhere close to [support for F] fundamental [T] transformation because people – have to want the solution rather than have it imposed on them.”

    And the longer pandering politicians and Business-As-Usual advocates can keep citizens from understanding reality, the longer they will think something is being ‘imposed.’

    “Either you think most of these folks are just plain stupid and don’t realize how dumb they are in choosing their commute – or… they do know and there are no better options for them (in their minds).”

    Ah “BETTER OPTIONS”!

    THAT is a BIG part of the answer. Where folks do have BETTER OPTIONS they take them. That is way those better located Units sell for so much more.

    But again, there is a whole industry that makes more profit in a shorter time by perpetuating Myths and dysfunctional human settlement patterns that consume vastly more land than is necessary for quality human habitations because the Enterprises do not pay full cost of their actions. These Enterprises, of course, share the profits with governance practitioners through political contributions and support Institutions to perpetuate the dysfunctional processes. What Prof. Lucy call the Tyranny of Easy Development Decisions.

    That is why the creative use of Private Transfer Fees might be a good idea to encourage more functional settlement patterns and reward developers and builders for making the right decision without having to resort to bribes and subsides.

    EMR

  • ACHIEVING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE — A SKETCH

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    James A. Bacon

    As documented in The Shape of the Future Vol I – and reinforced by TRILO-G – achieving economic prosperity, social stability and environmental sustainability depends on evolving functional human settlement patterns.

    Citizens of Virginia the question is:

    How do citizens of the Commonwealth implement something like the six overarching strategies to achieve functional human settlement patterns outlined in Vol II of The Shape of the Future?

    For those who have not been paying attention, here is a sketch:

    1. Start with a Wright Plan* for ALL the territory that directly impacts the use and management of land in the Commonwealth. That means doing a Wright Plan for the Washington-Baltimore NUR, the Richmond NUR and the Hampton Roads NUR as well as the DelMarVa, Appalachian and East Carolina USRs. (It would be helpful if the Philadelphia NUR and the Central Carolina NUR would also undertake a Wright Plan but that is not essential.)

    2. Based on best available data, project future growth / change in Jobs and Housing for 10, 20 and 30 years by NUR and USR. Then allocate thse projections to coterminous SubRegions within the NURs and USRs.

    3. Quantify the demand for land for Jobs, Houses, Services and Recreation by SubRegion starting at the Centroids and working out. This means the Centroids of the NURs and the Centroids of the Urban agglomerations of Beta Community scale or larger within USRs. Use as the basis of per capita consumption, the patterns and densities needed for developers to make a 8 percent profit if ALL the location-variable costs are fairly allocated.

    NB. This calculation will document the vast OVERSUPPLY of already Urbanized land. (See “Stark Contrast” in Chapter 49 of TRILO-G. For this reason, the Initial Quantification would allocate twice as much land as will be needed to meet projected 10, 20 and 30 year demand so that the process of DeUrbanization (including Subdivision Recycling and Parcel Consolidation) can proceed from the least well located land for Urban uses to the better located land. (The value of land for agriculture, forestry, OpenSpace, extraction, and environmental functions would be factored into the process in step 5.)

    4. By SubRegion allocate the amount of land Quantified:

    A. INSIDE Clear Edges around the Cores of NURs (Urbanside that includes OpenSpace), and

    B. OUTSIDE Clear Edges around the Cores of NURs (Countryside that includes Open Land and Urban enclaves that are within the Countryside (components of Beta Balanced But Disaggregated Communities) including larger Urban agglomerations in USRs.)

    For illustrations of the boundaries of allocation see PowerPoint “New Urban Region Conceptual Framework.” in Chapter 49 of TRILO-G.

    5. Start the Three Step HANDBOOK process for every Beta Community in each of the SubRegions within the entire Wright Planned territory. For an overview of how the early phases of such a process might work see EMRs 16 Feb 2004 BRZ column (#25) “The Shape of Richmond’s Future.”

    Steps 1. through 4. would take no more than 5 days and would be repeated every year for 20 years to reflect changes in economic, social and physical reality, including feedback from the Step 5. processes. After the first two years, the calculations and allocations would be carried out in a transparent on-line process by a constituent assembly elected to represent to entire territory.

    Step 5. would be carried out as an ongoing democratic process as outlined in HANDBOOK – TRILO-G – PART TWELVE.

    The questions remains:

    By the time a majority of citizens come to understand the need for such a process to achieve Fundamental Transformation of human settlement patters, will there be resources left to implement a sustainable trajectory?

    * The term Wright Plan is named after and based on the 1928 plan for New York State prepared by Henry Wright. Google turns up information on Henry Wright and there is an illustration of his New York plan in Lewis Mumford’s book The City in History. The Wright Plan comes very close to allocating land in the categories suggested in THE USE AND MANAGEMENT OF LAND – PART FOUR of TRILO-G.

    EMR

  • The Ugly Ain’t Over Yet, Not by a Longshot

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    James A. Bacon

    Building on EMR’s previous post, I bring to the attention of Bacon’s Rebellion readers a Congressional Oversight Report, published February, “Commercial Real Estate Losses and the Risk to Financial Stability.” The executive summary states the problem so pithily that I quote from it directly:

    Between 2010 and 2014, about $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans will reach the end of their terms. Nearly half are at present “underwater” – that is, the borrower owes more than the underlying property is currently worth. Commercial property values have fallen more than 40 percent since the beginning of 2007. Increased vacancy rates, which now range from eight percent for multifamily housing to 18 percent for office buildings, and falling rents, which have declined 40 percent for office space and 33 percent for retail space, have exerted a powerful downward pressure on the value of commercial properties.

    The largest commercial real estate loan losses are projected for 2011 and beyond; losses at banks alone could range as high as $200-$300 billion. The stress tests conducted last year for 19 major financial institutions examined their capital reserves only through the end of 2010. Even more significantly, small and mid-sized banks were never subjected to any exercise comparable to the stress tests, despite the fact that small and mid-sized banks are proportionately even more exposed than their larger counterparts to commercial real estate loan losses.

    A significant wave of commercial mortgage defaults would trigger economic damage that could touch the lives of nearly every American. Empty office complexes, hotels, and retail stores could lead directly to lost jobs. Foreclosures on apartment complexes could push families out of their residences, even if they had never missed a rent payment. Banks that suffer, or are afraid of suffering, commercial mortgage losses could grow even more reluctant to lend, which could in turn further reduce access to credit for more businesses and families and accelerate a negative economic cycle.

    That’s just commercial real estate. We haven’t even begun to talk about the coming wave of defaults in Alt-A or Option ARMs in the residential market that could be as disastrous as the collapse of the sub-prime market. It looks like we’re in for another round of deflation in real estate prices. Then, there’s the continuing de-leveraging of the American consumer generally.

    Property tax revenues… down. Sales tax revenues… down. Municipal governments will be in a world of hurt for some time to come. My sympathy goes to anyone living in one of Virginia’s “fast-growth” counties because that’s where most of the damage will be located.

  • WSH, WL — THE SHAPE OF THE HOUSING CRISIS

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    James A. Bacon

    The 12 March front page headline in WaPo says it all:

    “Foreclosure wave threatens stability of housing market.”

    Do not wait for a journalist to package the contemporary condition of the housing market for you. Go to Realtor.com and check out what has happened this week in your Village, your Neighborhood, your Cluster or even your Dooryard. In just the last few days the picture has changed dramatically.

    The snow has melted? Daylight Savings Time starts tomorrow? A week until Spring arrives? Who knows the catalyst?

    Whatever it is, houses that have been off the market – or have not been listed in years – are flooding back and many are $100K below what they and similar dwellings were listed for just a few months ago.

    There appears to be a rush to move foreclosures, do short sales and get out of underwater dwellings, especially the WSH, WL dwellings.

    If one looks at the national scene, Virginia and especially the National Capital SubRegion (Washington MSA is a passable surrogate) SHOULD be better positioned than most vis a vis employment / unemployment, foreclosures and dwelling prices.

    Those who applied an analysis of Radial Bands (a tool of Regional Metrics) to get a handle on the housing market / foreclosure patterns will not be surprise at the spacial distribution but most will be shocked at the scope of the value loss.

    On 11 March CNN had a story that was similar the WaPo story a day later. CNN painted a more rosie picture in the headline and the first few paragraphs but came clean later in the story. The reader comments were very pointed. For example: “How can you distort the truth just to save your real estate ad revenue…” Sounds like they had read THE ESTATES MATRIX… (Today’s WaPo Real Estate section was four pages and the feature story was how to do a short sale.)

    The other shoe – commercial real estate – is about to drop. Insiders have been saying for a year that April of 2010 will be the month.

    And now the REALLY scarey news:

    On Friday WaPo headlined: “No rush to restructure Fannie, Freddie; Who wants to topple the housing giants? Politics, shaky economy make it an unsavory task for Obama, analysts say.”

    Well yes, but until there is a Fundamental Transformation – including rational location criteria for residential lending – the problem will only grow worse.

    As much as Groveton, rightly, beats on the Clown Show in Richmond, let us not forget the Super Clown Show in the Federal District.

    As EMR has argued in these posts for six years:

    WSH, WL.

    (For those just coming in, WSH, WL means Wrong Size House, Wrong Location. See TRILO-G – PART SIX – Chapter 22 – Without Shelter: The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis. Also keyword search ‘affordable and accessible’ in Chapters 46, 47 & 48. )

    EMR

  • Is It Amateur Hour? Or Worse?

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    James A. Bacon


    It was such a strange scene, I had to pinch myself. Here at Virginia Commonwealth University, in the middle of Richmond, that “hotbed of civil rest” about a thousand students held signs touting “Keep Your Gospel Off My Gonads” and other slogans as they listened to a professor note how the father of computer science was openly gay.

    How did sleepy VCU in staid old Richmond become a 60s flashback so quickly?
    The immediate reason, of course, was Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s new and highly volatile attorney general, who seized upon the failure of a state Senate bill to expand protection to state gay workers and issued a sweeping legal opinion to public colleges that their anti-discrimination policies regarding sexual orientation were no longer valid.
    Very quickly, Virginia became the object of derision nationally, not to mention a farce on “the Daily Show” national TV comedy, Gov. Bob McDonnell, the state’s new governor who put gays on the same level as “fornicators” in a master’s thesis he wrote in the 1980s, quickly backpedaled. He overrode Cuccinelli at a dramatic press conference and issued a toothless “declaration” that the state would not tolerate discrimination against gay state workers.
    Of course, McDonnell could have put such a declaration in an executive order as former Govs. Mark Warner and Time Kaine, both moderate Democrats, did. Then it would have actually had some bite. But McDonnell touched off the controversy by kicking the anti-gay matter to the General Assembly, knowing it would die quickly.
    Such antics smack of “Amateur Hour.” Even the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which predictably ran a front page photo of McDonnell at his press conference in a phony, dramatic pose reminiscent of George Washington or other brave American patriot, editorialized that this whole mess is a shame.
    To me, it raises two big questions:
    (1) Don’t Cuccinelli and McDonnell understand what damage they have done to Virginia with this half-assed grandstanding? Most state colleges have anti-discrimination policies protecting gays. There are good reasons to do so. To accomplish their missions, colleges must be open and diverse. Plus, if they don’t have such anti-discrimination policies, they won’t qualify for untold thousands of dollars in private foundation and grant money which state clearly that the money won’t go to homophobic college systems. The American Association of University Professors says that Cuccinelli’s opinion is “outrageous” and “chilling” since it would make the state college system a pariah when it tries to recruit top academic talent. And after Virginia has added some luster to its reputation as a good place to live and do business, the Old Dominion suddenly is the butt of jokes on the Comedy Channel, which carries a hell of a lot of weight in terms of national image.
    (2) Who’s running the store? Both McDonnell and Cuccinelli are cut from the same cloth. They are die-hard, right wing social conservatives who want to cash in on the backlash against Barack Obama as he struggles to chart a course after the disastrous George W. Bush years. McDonnell ran a smart campaign by downplaying the extreme views of his political past. The rumor was that he was trying to keep Cuccinelli on a tight leash. But what’s the real deal here? Are we looking at Good Cop, Bad Cop? Do we really buy McDonnell’s excuse that he has had to rein in
    “Cooch” when he was the one that set the whole thing up in the first place?
    Meanwhile, McDonnell has extended lots of corporate welfare offers to get Northrop Grumman to locate in Virginia, even though he has trashed the firm for its trouble technology contract with the state and has threatened to drive the defense contractor away with these homophobic policies.
    With the General Assembly nearly over, what do we have to show for it? Millions of dollars for education and many jobs have been cut. But we spent a lot of time arguing over whether some pistol-toting cowboy can bring his loaded .44 into a bar. State parks closed. Highway bathrooms opened. Offshore oil OK, if any when it is explored and even if no major oil firm has expressed any interest in it. I don’t know where putting toll booths on the southern entrances to Interstates 85 and 95 went, but it reminds me of Mel Brooks erecting a toll booth in the middle of the desert in the comedy “Blazing Saddles.” As Slim Pickens says, “Any of you guys got any quarters?”
    So, we are left with two rather frightening questions. Is the McDonnell gang simply incompetent? Or is there a much broader agenda?
    Take heart, though. I was truly impressed with the kids at VCU. With people like them, we’ll survive this.
    Peter Galuszka

  • Back to the Dark Ages

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    James A. Bacon

    Just when you think Virginia’s finally entering the 21st century, it takes a major step backwards.
    Take gay rights. Much of the rest of the country has come to terms with gays and lesbians and is accommodating them not as sinful folk but worthy individuals who can make big contributions to society and its economy. This is especially important to create jobs after the disastrous 2007-2010 recession. Indeed, many modern corporations understand this and have internal policies to protect gays and offer them benefits similar to what they offer to married heterosexuals.
    So why, one wonders, is our so-called “jobs” governor, Bob McDonnell, getting away with throttling rights for state workers who happen to be gay? Unlike Govs. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, the staunch social conservative and former graduate student at Pat Robertson’s university, which is hardly a bastion of tolerance, declined to include gays in an executive order forbidding discrimination against state workers.
    Instead, McDonnell punted the issue of gay rights to the General Assembly, where a bill to protect gay state workers introduced by Democrat Sen. Donald McEachin, was killed in a House committee after being approved by the Senate. (The GOP controls the House and the Democrats control the Senate).
    McDonnell is entitled to his personal views on gays which he spelled out in his infamous graduate student thesis at Regent University where he equated gays with sinful fornicators, as noted in a column by Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond Times Dispatch.
    Unfortunately for the “jobs” governor, others are watching. As I noted in a story I wrote for Style Weekly, Richard S. Madaleno, a Democratic state senator in Maryland who happens to be gay, wrote to the CEO of Northrop Grumman noting McDonnell’s views on homosexuals and urging him to select Maryland over Virginia since it is friendly to gays.
    Landing Northrop Grumman, already Virginia’s fifth largest employer, would be a feather in the cap for McDonnell since it would bring 300 high-paying jobs to Northern Virginia and further cement Virginia as a venue for defense contracting, which is a highly sustainable industrial sector during these days of layoffs and budget cuts.
    Northrop Grumman, like a number of large corporations, is much farther ahead of states such as Virginia when it comes to diversity. NG has strict anti-discrimination policies for gays and offers generous benefits to them. In fact, a number of big firms doing business in Virginia — about 18 — offer same sex benefits. About 32 out of 50 top firms have exactly the same anti-discrimination policies that McDonnell refused to put in his executive order.
    One reads a lot of pop sociology and urbanism in this post and, frankly, I often get sick of it. If I hear another tome about “clustering” by Michael Porter or another laud of the “Creative Class” by Richard Florida, I think I will be sick.
    But consider what Florida wrote about gays:

    “. . . the big new-ideas and cutting-edge industries that lead to sustained prosperity are more likely to exist where gay people feel welcome. Most centers of tech-based business growth also have the highest concentrations of gay couples. Conversely, major areas with relatively few gay couples tend to be slow- or no-growth places. Pittsburgh and Buffalo, which have low percentages of gay couples, were two of only three major regions to lose population from 1990 to 2000.”
    So, there you have it. Too bad we are being taken back to the Dark Ages when we need forward thinking.
    Peter Galuszka

  • CLIMATE CHANGE HEAT AND LIGHT

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    James A. Bacon

    EMR has NEVER been able to figure out why Jim Bacon gets SO upset about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). He has his hands full getting out Bloomergeddon, why take on this windmill?

    Of course, in the end Jim is correct:

    The University of East Anglia scientist’s arrogance has not DISPROVED anything,

    This dispute will leave far more casualties than winners, and

    There are far more current, important challenges about which there is little controversy than there are resources to address them.

    In comments submitted on Jim’s post on the topic (“Cuccinelli is Right” – did not everyone know he was far right?) Larry and Waldo put the East Anglia controversy in perceptive – the helium balloon analogy is priceless.

    TMT and Larry do a nice job of sorting out the ‘right to sue’ issue.

    But Peter has the best (if not last) word:

    Why with all the other things going on is THIS a priority for any elected official in the Commonwealth?

    See for example this weekends’s WaPos on the economy, China, giving up on trying to stop radioactive shipments into the US of A… Those containers from Iran via Hong Kong will arrive in Hampton Roads, sue about that…

    Here is why all the heat over AGW:

    A lot of big money will be lost if something serious is done about reducing Green House Gases (GHG) – which most agree needs to be done to solve a lot of other problems including air and water pollution, the cost and security of energy supplies.

    So with Business-As-Usual money at stake, fire up the opinion tanks with some extra donations to take attention off the real issues.

    Here is something else to chew on. On 23 Feb WaPo published a nice colored Quake potential map and a story about the need to consider the 430 million humans now living in high risk areas – tens of millions of them poor.

    Sure enough, a quake hit Chile last night. There will be less loss of life than in Haiti but the cost will be in the Trillions.

    So what if the loss of ice caps (no one disagrees that glaciers and ice caps are shrinking – just how fast they are going) has a direct impact on the tectonic plates and THAT is triggering a rash of earth quakes. Just saying…

    The overarching goal must be to shift human Urban agglomerations away from locations, settlement patterns and cheap construction that makes humans and their economic, social and physical well being susceptible to fire, flood, hurricanes, quakes, etc.

    As the WaPo map shows, and as events of the past 50 years document, Urban settlement patterns are now vulnerable AND they are energy hogs and untransportable to boot.

    Here is a thought:

    Now that there is a major shift from Cap and Trade to Criteria for Energy Consumption Sectors to address GHG this is an opportunity to make clear the impact of human settlement patterns on energy, safety and happiness.

    Let us turn heat to light.

    EMR

  • Cuccinelli Is Right

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    James A. Bacon

    Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli is absolutely right to file a petition against the Environmental Protection Agency for attempting to regulate greenhouse gases, including carbon dixoide, by means of executive fiat. And he is absolutely right to cite the East Anglia email scandals as justification for questioning the so-called “science” underlying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming.

    Most Americans wouldn’t know it from relying upon such U.S. media luminaries as the New York Times, Washington Post and network television, but U.K. media news organizations, even the leftist Guardian, have been all over the East Anglia email story. The Labor government has initiated reviews and investigations to examine the integrity of the scientific process. Far from being a “mini-scandal,” as my friend Peter portrays it in the previous post, East Anglia is the tip of the iceberg of what could prove to be the greatest scientific scandal in modern history: the hijacking of science by politicians and ideologues for the purpose of reorganizing society according to their ideological tenets.

    As Cuccinelli pithily puts it, “It is political science, not real science.”

    Of course, Cuccinelli is himself a politician, and as Peter describes him, “a staunch social conservative” — and as we all know, social conservatives, most of whom who are Bible thumpers who don’t believe in Darwinian evolution, are anti-science. So, let’s not accept Cuccinelli’s appraisal of the significance of the East Anglia scandal. Let’s see what the U.K.-based Institute of Physics, which claims a worldwide membership of 36,000, has to say in a memorandum submitted to Parliament:

    The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital.

    This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

    The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the [temperature] reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented.

    The “mini-scandal” is growing. Numerous reports have surfaced, calling into question the accuracy of the IPCC report — most notoriously the claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, which even the IPCC concedes represented a failure to live up to its own standards. If you rely upon the Washington Post for updates on the IPCC, you would read that “critics have found a few unsettling errors” due to typos and sloppy sourcing, with virtually no explanation of why the international body might feel compelled to restore public trust in its findings. You’d have to read the British press, such as this somewhat polemical column in the Telegraph, for an understanding of what is going on. By the way, has the Post or NY Times yet to seriously report on IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri’s conflicts of interest?

    Have the Post or the NY Times yet to report on the extraordinary concessions made by Climate Research Unit chief Phil Jones, who was at the heart of the East Anglia scandal, among others that: (1) there is still legitimate debate over whether the current warming period is unprecedented, as it is proclaimed to be, or whether the Medieval Warming Period was even warmer — gee, we thought those matters were “settled” — and (2) that the sources of the data (not the data itself) in the East Anglia database are “probably not as good as they should be.”

    Nor have the Post or NY Times yet to acknowledge concerns that the data in the U.S. databases at NASA and NOAA might not be as good as they should be. A recent report, “Surface Temperature Records: A Policy Driven Deception?” has documented how NOAA has systematically reduced the number of weather stations around the world from which to calculate average global temperatures, showing a bias toward eliminating stations in colder regions and substituting statistical interpolations. The authors do come across as polemical in their conclusions about the motives of the NOAA temperature record keepers, but their underlying case about the bias in the measurements has at least superficial merit worth a closer look. (David W. Schnare with the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy has taken a closer look at one weather station near Harrisonburg and concludes that NOAA’s statistical adjustments have doubled the actual observed warming.)

    Finally, there is the stubborn refusal of global temperatures to actually rise over the past 12 years. While the data can be explained away as the result of natural climatic fluctuations temporarily masking the inevitable rise, stable temperatures suggest that the broader trend is consistent only with the “low” range of temperature increases predicted by the climate models, and totally inconsistent with the alarmist scenarios.

    None of this is to say that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has been “disproven,” or is a “hoax,” as the Rush Limbaugh crowd would maintain. What we should conclude from recent developments is that the case for AGW remains unproven. Any “consensus,” if it ever existed, rested upon faith in the integrity of contemporary temperature measurements, reconstructions of past temperatures through proxies like tree rings, and the integrity of the IPCC synthesis of the science. We can no longer have faith in those assumptions.

    Therefore, it is entirely reasonable for Ken Cuccinelli to suggest that the EPA is making an extra-constitutional power grab on the basis of unproven science.

    Warning to environmentalists: I expect that the overwhelming majority of environmentalists have become so attached to the AGW hypothesis that they will reject the recent round of criticisms out of hand. They have too much invested not to defend it to the death. But if the AGW hypothesis ever is discredited, they will go down with the sinking ship, and the entire environmental movement will be tarred. And that would be a tragedy. The world is full of proven environmental problems, too numerous to list here. While we certainly need to continue researching the dynamics of climate change, we should focus on fixing what we know is broken.

  • The Attorney General From East Anglia

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    James A. Bacon

    Lots of observers were skittish with the election victory in November of Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a staunch social conservative unafraid to rattle cages. The Washington Post editorialized that he might prove an “embarrassment” for Virginia as did The Virginian-Pilot. More conservative editorial writers were delighted with him.
    Well, it hasn’t taken long. Straying a long ways from the typical confines of the Old Dominion, Cuccinelli has filed a petition against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which after a decades-worth of study, has declared that six greenhouse gases coming from factories, cars and big electric plants pose a threat to the ecosystem and the public health.
    Of course, most of the world has little trouble with this and many governments have made such declarations. There are plenty of supporting scientific studies which would be the basis of some kind of international effort to curb greenhouse gases which have been found to promote global warming.
    Even big U.S. corporations such as power-generators Dominion, Duke Energy, and Excelon support some type of “cap and trade” restrictions because they (1) realize the scientific problems and reasons behind warming; (2) they want to avoid future lawsuits by shareholders and environmentalists armed with a preponderance of data about the human factor in global warming and (3) they might be able to do just as well, if not better, profit-wise by turning to newer types of technology that are more eco-friendly and less reliant upon dwindling global supplies of polluting hydrocarbons.
    So much for being long-sighted. A core element in the right wing wonk movement (CATO, A.E.I. The Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, which publishes a another version of Bacon’s Rebellion that is tightly censored for ideological purity), wants to diss global warming as much as it can. To discredit attempts to regulate greenhouse gases, it wants to pretend that human activity has nothing to do with such gases.
    This is where Cuccinelli comes in. Not only has he filed a petition against the EPA, he cites among his reasons for doing so, a mini-scandal at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia which last year suffered a kind of mini-Watergate that involved computer hacking and e-mails supposedly casting doubt about the scientific veracity of global warming. This is because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation’s body supplying supporting data on global warming, makes big use of the East Anglia school, even though there are many other sources as well.
    Anti-warming ideologues such as Cuccinelli have leaped on the scandal as some kind of conclusive evidence that global warming is false. Whatever.
    Maybe someone should give Cuccinelli a world map and a copy of the U.S. Constitution. The last time I checked, The University of East Anglia is in the County of Norfolk, England, not the City of Norfolk, Va., in the U.S. Unfortunately, Cuccinelli’s legal venue does not extend to the County of Norfolk (although it does the City of Norfolk, Va.). Also, Cuccinelli’s legal authority does not extend to the EPA , which is a federal, not state, agency.
    Trying to make his case, Cuccinelli says that he is, by training, an engineer along with a lawyer, and that he knows that any reputable scientific findings must be verifiable by independent testing. True enough, but keep in mind that Cuccinelli is a mechanical, and not an environmental, engineer. In other words, he would have more credibility if he were talking about industrial processes or copying machines than the global environment.
    Of course, Cuccinelli’s play is purely political, not to mention ideological . It is part of grand strategy of the right wing arm of the GOP to promote a bunch of mini revolts at the state and local levels to raise awareness of pet projects such as dissing global warming, arming citizens to the eye-teeth and banning abortions. The targets are elections later this year and of course, beating Barack Obama in 2012.
    Cuccinelli’s ploy already has won praise from The Washington Times, the faltering Moonie newspaper that says Cuccinelli is “spot on.” But you have to worry that the other Washington newspaper might have it right — that Cuccinelli’s anti-global warming, anti-federal tantrum is an embarrassing sideshow for the citizens of the Old Dominion.
    It isn’t as if Virginia doesn’t have other more serious problems, such as jobs. So far the state’s GOP leadership has presented us with a weak mish-mash of jobs bills while screwing around with Cuccinelli’s petition and laws that that make it OK to bring a loaded handgun into a bar.
    Rumor is that even Gov. Bob McDonnell is trying to keep Cuccinelli on a shorter leash. But all of this makes Virginia look like some Southern backwater rather than a worthy player on the global scene.
    Peter Galuszka

  • Want to Create Jobs? Think Big.

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    James A. Bacon

    The Republicans in Virginia’s House of Delegates have passed a lot of bills to promote “jobs and opportunity” this year — at least 34 by my count, based on a compendium of bills approved by the House on the House Speaker’s website. The best that can be said is that, if enacted into law, most of them wouldn’t do too much damage. A number use the old ploy of exempting favored groups from assorted taxes, which is a bad thing because the state tax code has too many exemptions already, but for the most part they are inoffensive.

    But it is difficult to imagine these narrow-bore bills having much impact on Virginia employment. In the long run, the best way to increase employment and economic opportunity are by making sure the commonwealth does a good job of performing core functions and services, keeping taxes low and getting the hell out of the way. If legislators really want to promote jobs and opportunities, here are some general strategies they should pursue that require no expansion in the scope of government.

    Build knowledge clusters. Companies are more competitive, more likely to grow faster and more likely to spin off new enterprises when they belong to a strong knowledge cluster, usually focused on a specific industry. Most of the knowledge resides in the companies themselves, but some of it resides in academic institutions, research centers, not-for-profit organizations and the legal and financial professions. Knowledge concentrations lead to greater innovation and higher levels of productivity, and they attract outside capital investment. Government is not particularly adept at creating knowledge clusters, but it when such clusters already exist, government can act as a catalyst to get key players organized and acting in the common interest, and it can play an important role by supporting community college and higher ed programs to create a stream of graduates possessing skills relevant to the clusters.

    In my day job, I have worked with the state of North Carolina, which has played a role in creating the North Carolina Aerospace Alliance, and with metro Atlanta, which, with the state of Georgia, is actively promoting a digital entertainment industry. Virginia has numerous knowledge clusters, too, but I don’t see the state doing anything substantive to promote any of them.

    Reform human settlement patterns. You don’t have to buy into the “smart growth” vision to acknowledge the need to reform Virginia’s scattered, disconnected, low-density human settlement patterns. Just think resource scarcity. Our human settlement patterns have evolved during an age charactrerized by energy abundance and a profligate use of natural resources. While the Global Financial Crisis has temporarily obscured the fact by depressing energy and commodity prices, we are moving to a new plateau of higher energy and resource prices. (Don’t believe me? The 2.4 billion inhabitants of China and India do.) We need to evolve more compact, better connected communities that consume less energy and fewer raw materials. We don’t need to employ social engineering to reform human settlement patterns. We simply need to (a) devise funding mechanisms for transportation and public services that require households and enterprises to pay their location-variable costs, and (b) scrap the antiquated zoning codes that lock existing development patterns into place.

    Want to promote job creation? More efficient human settlement patterns will provide cost savings for households, enterprises and municipal government.

    Overhaul the health care system. Virginia Republicans rightfully regarded Obamacare as a monstrosity that would have increased the role of government and transferred wealth without addressing the underlying causes of escalating healthcare costs. Unfortunately, the Republican proposals, though relatively harmless, would have little effect. If they could just grit their teeth and admit it, Obamacare did contain a few good ideas, most particularly: measuring medical outcomes, disseminating best practices, and increasing transparency. There is nothing inherently “socialistic” or “big-governmentish” about these ideas.

    There is no reason that Virginia needs to wait for the federal government to reform the state health care system. A good place to start would be to convene all major stakeholders — hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, consumers — and expand upon the state’s existing but tepid data collection measures. Key goals would be to measure medical outcomes, allow health plans and providers to access the data to improve quality and reduce costs, and share the data with consumers so they could select providers on the basis of value (i.e. the best trade-off of price and quality). As measured by the Dartmouth Atlas, Virginia’s health care sector already delivers the best value anywhere on the East Coast. But there is huge room for improvement. We should aspire to be lead the country.

    Want to create jobs? How about having a healthcare system that provides top quality care at half the cost of anywhere else in the country?

  • A NOTE ON GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE

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    James A. Bacon

    In the 16 February post on the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis Groveton said:

    “I want a smaller national government, a much smaller state government and a much larger local government.”

    As EMR noted in a comment on that post:

    “Groveton is RIGHT but there are two Vocabulary problems with his statement. We will get to that in a new post coming up…”

    The first Vocabulary problem is the use of the term ‘local.’

    See discussion of the Core Confusing Words in The Shape of the Future. ‘Local” is perhaps the most confusing of those words.

    Groveton’s ‘local’ government has twice as many citizens as EMR’s home ‘state’ – Montana has two Senators and a Representative – and is 183 times as large as EMR’s current municipal government – which has done a great job of keeping our street plowed since the 18th of December.

    Another problem is the use of the term ‘larger.’

    NO ONE wants what jumps to mind (the neural linguistic image / framework) when they hear the words “large government’ aka ‘Big Government’ – not even the most well meaning Progressive.

    What is needed is:

    Far more levels of governance Agencies – at and below the Regional scale – one level of Agency for each of the organic components of human settlement, AND

    Far more citizens ACTIVELY involved in Agencies and in Agency activities – but as citizens and volunteers, NOT as employees. It starts with the direct democracy at the Cluster scale as EMR has articulated for 20 years.

    The fundamental principle of human interaction is the Golden Rule.

    The fundamental principle of governance is allocation of responsibility to the correct level (and levels) of Agency:

    Level of impact equals level of control.

    (Shared impact requires SHARED control – NOT higher level UBER ALLES.)

    One other observation:

    Groveton makes a good point about the idiocy of continuing to place importance on the boundaries drawn up even before the current governance structure was created.

    For this reason the whole idea of ‘state’ is outdated and needs, and EMR repeats time and again, to evolve to a structure of New Urban Regions – the fundamental building block of contemporary Urban civilization – and MegaRegions. Much more in TRILO-G.

    From recent communication with colleague on the need for Fundamental Transformation of governance:

    One of the basic requirements of achieving a sustainable trajectory for civilization is Fundamental Transformation of governance structure. That means evolving a governance structure that reflects the organic structure of human settlement. The 3.5 level governance structure was outdated in 1770 and has just gotten worse decade by decade.

    It is not possible to pretend that the 18th century economic, social and physical reality which the current governance structure was intended to serve still exists. The evolution from clans to tribes to city-states to empires to nation-states did not freeze in 1770. Economic, social and physical relationships and reality have continued to evolve even if governance structure and the Vocabulary used to describe governance and human settlement patterns did not.

    The transformation from agrarian society to an Urban society has made the current 3.5 level system and the Vocabulary used to describe it obsolete.

    In 1800 about 95 percent of the population derived economic support from agrarian activities.

    In 2000 about 95 percent of the population derives economic support from Urban / Non-Agrarian activities.

    In 1800 ‘society’ was controlled by a few literate citizens and it took those citizens or their ideas three days to get from Charlottesville to Georgetown.

    In 2000 it takes two hours for almost any citizen to get from one of those places to the other.

    Most of the travelers are literate.

    In addition, their ideas, images and money can move 120 miles or 12,000 miles in nano seconds.

    In 1800 most of the occupants of the several states could only dream of acquiring what the few at the top of the Ziggurat had AND most at the bottom did not know what those at the top actually had.

    In 2000 with instant communications, advertising and entertainment there are immediate “I want (deserve) that too” demands / expectations.

    Just 40 years ago those at the bottom of the Ziggurat could expect to earn a living wage that was perhaps 1 / 100th of those at the top of the Ziggurat.

    Now the chance of getting a job is less certain and the Wealth Gap is much wider and growing. See Supercapitalism concerning the magnitude of the Wealth Gap problem and trajectory of the widening gulf.

    With dwindling Natural Capital and a widening Wealth Gap there is the potential of widespread unrest. The threat of weapons of mass destruction is real and current.

    Clearly it is time to embrace the need for Fundamental Transformation

    Also see analysis of Green Metropolis (post of 20 November 2009) which provides an overview of the importance of Vocabulary – especially the use of ‘city” – and the need for a comprehensive Conceptual Framework.

    EMR

  • AFFORDABLE AND ACCESSIBLE HOUSING, AGAIN — DIGGING THE HOLE DEEPER

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    James A. Bacon

    The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis that directly and indirectly impacts all citizens continues to get worse. Ignorance about the root causes is making the potential for recovery less likely with each passing day.

    The lack of Affordable and Accessible Housing to meet the needs of most of the Households in the economic and social Ziggurat – the three dimensional manifestation of contemporary, Urban society – is a critical and growing problem.

    The latest indicator of shelter dysfunction? The 14 February WaPo front page headline: “Refinancing Unavailable for Many Borrowers. Millions Shut Out of Best Rates, Depressed Home Values, Poor Credit, High Debt Hurt Chances.”

    The authors get the problem right but not the cause or the cure.

    As readers of The Shape of the Future, EMR’s columns and posts and now TRILO-G know, there are three interconnected, overarching Crises preventing humans from achieving a sustainable trajectory for Urban civilization:

    • The Mobility and Access Crisis,
    • The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis, and
    • The Helter Skelter Crisis.

    None of these overlapping Crises can be solve without solving all three. More important, none can be solved without:

    • Fundamental Transformation of human settlement patterns,
    • Fundamental Transformation of governance structure, and
    • Fundamental Transformation of the economic system.

    Articulation of the third Transformation evolved between the time The Shape of the Future was completed in 2000 and completion of TRILO-G in 2010. The Dot Com Bust, the mid-2000’s consumption / housing Boom and The Great Recession document the need for this Fundamental Transformation. The other two Crises are explored in The Shape of the Future.

    Readers of EMR’s work also know that the effort to expand home ownership since 1920 without regard to location of dwellings is to blame for creating and recently exacerbating the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis. Over the last decade the Crisis has been characterized as: Wrong Size House in the Wrong Location.

    Over-washing the many prior contributing causes of The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis is the fact that Fannie and Freddie completely divorced the ability to get a loan from the intrinsic Value of the dwelling.

    Early FHA and VA programs – and many state and municipal shelter programs – had spacial / locational and quality standards at the Unit, Dooryard and Cluster scales. There also evolved between 1925 and 1975 a professional consensus on how Clusters could best be agglomerated into functional Neighborhoods, Villages and Communities.

    Driven by the greed-inspired securitization that leveraged money ‘invested’ in housing, Fannie and Freddie abandoned any shred of a nexus between size, location and Value.

    In this context the cost (with a small ‘c’) is what a buyer pays as distinct from the full, true Cost (with a Capital ‘C’) that reflects a full allocation of the location-variable expenses at all six scales of human economic, social and physical activity below the New Urban Region (or Urban Support Region) scale.

    ‘Value’ in this context is based on the location of the dwelling and the relationship of that location to the other activities that are necessary to support a quality life in contemporary Urban society. When cost is lowered by intentional and unintentional subsidy, the Value is masked by the housing consumption bubbles.

    Because residential land uses (and directly supporting Services – activities of Agencies, Enterprises and Institutions) make up 70 to 80 percent of the built environment, the flood of location-blind money transformed not just housing location but human settlement patterns at the Regional and MegaRegional scales over the past four decades.

    The build environment takes up about 1.5 percent of the land area in the US of A. This hard core of buildings and pavement has been scattered across 30 percent of the total landscape and most of the accessible landscape. See PART FOUR – THE USE AND MANAGEMENT OF LAND in TRILO-G.

    This scatteration has blurred the identity and crippled the functions of both Urbansides and Countrysides. Thirty percent of the land area WAS six times the area that would be required for Urban land uses at MINIMUM functional settlement patterns – even with cheap energy.

    Now that the sources of cheap energy have been exhausted, Urban settlement may be scattered across ten times the area required for sustainable habitation. See David Owen’s Green Metropolis and EMR’s review of that book “Read It Now” in Chapter 50 of TRILO-G. (An earlier version of this review can be found at www.baconsrebellion.blogspot.com of 20 November 2009.)

    To keep the BIG picture in mind, this irrational, subsidized and unsustainable scatteration of the daily human activities carried out by 95 percent of the population:

    1) Cannot be served by Large, Private vehicles (the Mobility and Access Crisis)

    2) Is the root cause of the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis

    3) Results in vast Mass OverConsumption of resources – especially energy – that cannot be supported by any known economic system, and

    4) Is the primary catalyst for in the disintegration of the social fabric in contemporary Urban society.

    The total of these four realities IS The Helter Skelter Crisis.

    Few disagree that the housing bubble – created by decades of misguided attempts to expand home ownership without regard to the commutative impact or the total cost – triggered a credit / financial Collapse termed The Great Recession. To grasp the profound level of ‘leadership’ ignorance , recall that in 2006 the recently reappointed chair of the Fed asked “What bubble?”

    The rolling impact of The Great Recession and the reality that a growing population of humans – with rising expectations and a widening wealth gap – inhabit a finite planet with finite resources is not a pleasant prospect. In an era of instantaneous communications and weapons of mass destruction these factors cloud the future of civilization as it has been experienced in recent decades by those at the top of the Ziggurat.

    Society is running of fumes. Political clans are doing their best to deny the role they played and are stonewalling any meaningful change, much less Fundamental Transformations.

    The 14 February WaPo story makes it very clear that there is a huge problem in the area of shelter but fails to make it clear that the root cause of the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis was divorcing the cost of housing from the Value of housing.

    As pointed out in THE ESTATES MATRIX – PART TWO of TRILO-G, MainStream Media consistently fails to explore the impact of settlement patterns because to do so would undermine the short-term profitability of the Enterprise that owns the media outlet.

    Even those who should know – appraisers, lenders, buyers and the entire ‘real estate’ industry – are adrift. They do not have an overarching Conceptual Framework with which to comprehend human settlement patterns AND they refuse to even consider adopting a more robust Vocabulary with which to articulate a comprehensive Conceptual Framework

    The general perceptions about the location of foreclosures is a perfect example. For most, the geography of foreclosures is similar to the ethereal, Myth besotted fog that clouded medieval minds concerning the cause of human diseases such at the Black Death. This same fog clouds minds concerning the importance of spacial distribution of human activities and human interactions.

    Buying a smart phone or an iPad will not solve the problem. Neither will making dwellings easier to buy without regard to their size, location and relationship of the dwelling to all the activities necessary to create a quality life for the Urban humans who occupy the dwelling.

    AND NOW THIS:

    Again on WaPo page one for 16 February:

    “U.S. Hopes Foreign Money Can Boost Housing Market [Wrong Size House in Wrong Location], [Foreign] Governments Took A Hit When the Boom Went Bust. Will They Return?; U.S. Looks Abroad to Fill a Housing-Finance Void”.)

    Hoping other nation-states will make a bad situation worse must be one of the last sign posts on the way to the cliff.

    EMR

  • The Rain in Spain

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    A steady refrain on this blog is a kind of Protestant guilt trip about deficit spending (see Boomergeddon). We are supposedly responsible for our own lives and destinies and we have failed miserably because we listened to irresponsible liberal dogma from the likes of Barack Obama and we are so covered with government debt that our lives and futures are ruined. Can we be redeemed? Can we be washed in the blood of the lamb?
    At least that’s the dogma du jour and it is all over the place from the Teabaggers to the “fair and balanced” coverage of Fox News to, of course, “Boomergeddon” on Bacon’s Rebellion.
    Problem is, dogma du jour is often not only wrong, it is short-lived. Consider my experience in 1989. I had been elevated to a middle-level editor at BusinessWeek (back when it was a real magazine) after a tour in the Soviet Union. One of my more droll colleagues took me aside and explained to me: “Look, we cover basically three types of stories here — the Yellow Peril,. Europe 92 and the Death of Communism.”
    That summed things up rather neatly. The ruling brass on the 39th floor of the midtown Manhattan skyscraper liked stories shilling that the Japanese were overtaking us, Europeans were right to unify in 1992 and how the USSR and China were doddering. Another dogma we were supposed to follow was cheerleading for the Thatcher-Reagan concepts of globalization which, in their view, was a triumph of muscular Anglo-American decency, capitalism and democracy.
    Of course, a lot of this was bunk. The Yellow Peril quickly slunk away after Japan entered a decade of disastrous economic deflation. The Soviet Union did implode but Chinese Communism appears to be stronger than ever. By backing the New York City and academic elites in their globalization theories, we sold out millions of American workers from Danville, Va. to Kannapolis, N.C. to Detroit.
    And now, there’s lots of criticism that our feeble economic recovery is endangered by those free-spending Euroweenies who, of course, deserve what they get because they are arrogant socialists!
    Maybe but maybe not. Paul Krugman has an interesting column in this morning’s New York Times suggesting that things are a bit more complicated. The problem now is that some of the weaker European economies, notably Spain’s and Greece’s, are tottering and they could drag down the struggling European Union which would put the qui-bosh on our own recovery. That’s one reason the stock market has been jittery recently after a health, nearly-year-long run up.
    The Boomergeddon types will, of course, trot out their Sunday church sermons about deficit spending. But Krugman says it’s a bit more complicated than that. His argument? The pressures result from pushing Europe into the 1992 unification and single, Euro currency before it was really ready.
    Take Spain. The nation was actually a healthy spender (debt was about 43 percent of GDP) and was chugging along nicely. Then the single currency made it easier for bigger economies such as Germany’s, to take advantage of the sunny, Spanish beaches and invest lots of bubble money into resorts and tapas bars. So, when Germany’s economy hit the wall, it took down Spain’s.
    In earlier years, had it been a truly independent country, Spain could have wiggled out of the mess by devaluing its currency. But it can’t set things right because it is tied to the Euro. It can’t affect a change in the Euro’s value as a sovereign nation. Deficits, Krugman argues, have little to do with it.
    Bacon and his Baconauts, of course, will retort that Greece, the other villain in this picture, does have a big deficit problem and they are right. But my point is that things are more complicated and simply trotting out that Old Time Deficit Religion has limits. Besides, when you are in the economic dumps, you spend, which is another thing the Baconauts do not understand, but that’s fodder for another post.
    Peter Galuszka

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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