Monthly Archives: March 2008

Well, the Bacon family is back from Jackson Hole, one of the most wonderful spots on the face of the planet. My wife and son enjoyed loads of skiing, while I got to work out and read. No skiing for me, though. I remain as determined as ever to stay off the slopes. You can’t go anywhere in Jackson without encountering someone with a leg in a cast or an arm in a sling, all from skiing accidents. I even saw one young woman in a restaurant wearing an elaborate back brace. And the stories… Everyone in Jackson has a story about skiing accidents, one worse than the others. Fools! Crazy fools!

For me, the highlight was a sled ride into the Elk refuge right outside of town, where we could observe a herd of 2,000 elk up very close and personal. We saw our first moose, lounging near a stream — there are moose, too, living near my daughter’s apartment inside the town limits, but we didn’t see them. On the way to the airport, we saw a conga line of mule deer working its way across the side of a butte, just a couple hundred yards from the highway. We also heard reports of recent wolf sightings — apparently, a pack has migrated down to Jackson Hole from Yellowstone National Park. What an amazing place!

Many thanks to Ed, Norm and Peter — not to mention our regulars on the comment boards — for keeping the blog alive in my absence. Judging by the large number of comments, the blog was more controversial than ever. I’ll start posting again shortly.

In the comments on the 9 March AFFORDABLE AND ACCESSIBLE HOUSING – FROM BAD TO WORSE post, you made several comments to which we wanted to add a note:

First, thank you for using ‘New Urban Region’ and ‘NUR’ in your comment.

By using the comprehensive geographic scope implied by use of NUR you made a strong case for your view of the future of the Elephant Clan. (We agree with your view by the way.)

A cause of continuing misunderstanding – which is helped when you use the term NUR – is that many who live and work in a NUR (for example in the Fredericksburg Subregion of the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region such as House Speaker Howell) do not “think” they live in “Northern Virginia.”

Second you said:

“EMR – A suggestion. When you learn a new language the teacher does not just hand you a dictionary and say, “All the words are in this book”. Instead, the teacher starts with basic words and phrases and expands after they are learned. Is there a “Top 10” set of clear words that should be learned first?”

We think you are right and if there were more time EMR and S/P would like to find a more effectively approach to understanding of a new Vocabulary.

That was our intent in publishing APPENDIX TWO, Core Confusing Words. The idea was to suggest words to avoid and let new alternatives filter up in informed dialogue. So far that has been seen as a threat to the independence of 12 1/2 Percenters.

For now we only have time to use the words and phrases we find most useful. Many have obvious meanings from the context except to those who are trying to not understand. For those words and phrases that are not transparent, one can check them in the GLOSSARY.

Keep up the good work.

EMR

At the request of several readers from Greater Charlottesville / Albemarle, we are posting this clarification:

Back on 18 February Jim Bacons posted “Bus Rapid Transit Studied for Charlottesville.”

We agree with Jim’s comments about the need for an authoritative analysis and who should pay for any shared-vehicle system.

Given our experience with shared-vehicle systems and our past work in the Charlottesville / Albemarle Subregion, we do not have high hopes for BRT penciling out.

At 6:30 PM we made the following comment on the original post (edited for clarification):

OK, no one seems interested in this topic so here are some thoughts:

BRT is primarily an “in-the-median” shared vehicle system.

In US of A, applications of BRT would work for a “two or three big stops” subsystem. For example Air and Space Annex / Dulles South Terminal, Dulles North Terminal and an Intermodal terminal in Tysons Corner.

(We should have noted a potential station at Reston Town Center. There would be vastly more demand and an existing limited access roadway with exclusive Airport Access lanes in this application as compared to a C’ville Zentrum to C’ville airport along US Route 29.)

In smaller agglomerations — e.g. Ottawa — BRT does not live up to its potential because there is not the nodal intensity to generate trip demand.

Unless there are Core stations underground as in Seattle, (very expensive) the system works best with when the station is under a big platform over the ‘expressway’ of which the BRT occupies the median.

Platforms such as employed in the U-Bahn service to Nordvest Zentrum in Frankfort AM would work well.

South American applications — e.g. Curitiba — have broad ‘Boulevards’ that separate Village-scale Superblocks.

C’VILLE does not have the Critical Mass to support any of these spacial distribution strategies.

What happened to the Street Car / Trolley idea for C’VILLE?

(Sean Tubbs of Charlottesville Tomorrow provided information on the Trolley proposal and provided other resource links in the original string which are very helpful.)

Following a post concerning the need for a “compelling vision”

EMR noted (again with editing for clarification):

The “compelling vision” must be a vision of future, functional settlement pattern, not of this or that Mobility and Access system. The Mobility and Access System comes after there is a decision on the desired settlement pattern.

This comment was misinterpreted by a commentor as being a suggestion that: “unless the plan is to Nuke C’VILLE and start all over”

There is a pervasive misunderstanding that it is hard to evolve functional settlement patterns from those that exist now.

Human settlement patterns are organic systems and they are continually evolving. The problem is that current Agency and Enterprise projects, programs, incentives and controls are not geared to evolving functional settlement patterns because alternatives make more money and / or gain more benefit for some in the short term.

“how does C’VILLE or any area that already exists and cannot be torn down and recreated – evolve to more optimal settlement pattern?”

(See above)

“If I understand EMR correctly, it is futile to be thinking in terms of different ways of accomplishing access and mobility if the settlement pattern itself is dysfunctional.”

(No, it means that the first step is to create a plan for functional settlement patterns.)

(It also means that it is futile to try to spend money on a shared-vehicle system in hopes that a functional settlement pattern will just evolve due to the new system. The settlement pattern and the Mobility and Access system must be planned and evolve together.)

There are many individuals and several groups that would like to see a clear rendition of what the shape of the future should be in Greater Charlottesville / Albemarle

Once those images are clearly articulated, a number of shared vehicle systems should be examined to see which (one or more) systems best serve these settlement patterns.

One of the many weaknesses of the Blog format is that posters, commentors and readers must be ever vigilant lest intentional or unintentional attempts to misinterpret comments mislead those who are seeking an understanding of complex issues related to human settlement patterns.

Comments on the original C’ville post by Jim Bacon and especially on the proceeding post by Jim titled “Heavy Rail and Flying Pigs” are prime examples of comments by those who have an agenda to (and/or are paid to) confuse and confound useful dialogue.

Our thanks to those who were confused by the comments and contacted us directly for clarification.

We hope this clarification is of use to those who are trying to bring functional settlement patterns in the Charlottesville – Albemarle Subregion.

EMR

In our latest Agree to Disagree column, Thad Williamson and I don’t disagree about much when it comes to the Richmond mayor’s race.

Barring a huge change in existing conditions, this is Doug Wilder’s race to lose. Should he decide to run again, that is.

And that is really the question: will Doug run again? I’d place a small wager that he does. If so, he sweeps the field, but has a much harder time doing so than in his first outing back in 2004, when he rolled up 80% of the vote and carried each of the city’s nine wards.

However, if he decides there is no more good china left to smash on Broad Street and decides life was better in Charles City after all, then I expect the field to grow by leaps and bounds…and provide local political junkies with the show of their lives.

Talk about history and Karma. Buried in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch is a column by librarian Larry Hall who recollects a horrible tale of power elite racism at William & Mary, the nation’s second oldest university that proponents love to dress up in fluffy history and the usual Rights of Man blather.

Hall’s engrossing tale involves a senior at W&M in early 1945 who also edited the student newspaper, The Flat Hat. Marilyn Kaemmerle took some bold risks for the time. In honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, she wrote an editorial that asked why there were no blacks at segregated William & Mary, questionned Southern white perceptions that blacks were physically and mentally inferior and even had the guts to ask why blacks and whites could not intermarry, which was illegal in Virginia at the time. After all, she noted, America was fighting the Nazis at the time over just such issues.

As Hall notes, Kaemmerle was anxious to spark discussion but a silence became defeaning. As a student from Michigan, Kaemmerle may have misjudged just how deep institutional racism was in the South at the time. Free speech, the lifeblood of any university, did not exist for some topics in the Old Dominion, mother of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all those other brave patriots and fighters for human rights that the old, white “Virginians” love to bring up all the time.

Then, in an eerie way reminiscent of the recent controversy over former W&M President Gene R. Nichol, the Board of Visitors struck. Egged on by rector J. Gordon Bohannon of Petersburg, who opined that “a girl who reflects such heresies is not a proper person to be editor,” the board pushed the school to suspend the newspaper and fire Kaemmerle as editor.

Just as in the Nichol case 63 years later, students angrily protested, but the crackdown was complete. Kaemmerle’s brave ideas almost caused her expulsion, but the effort failed when board member threatened to resign if it happened. She was allowed to graduate. Once again, eerie flashbacks. Nichol would have been fired outright, too, had it not been for the threat of resignation by a visitor behind the scenes. Still, the powers of Virginia’s ruling elite prevailed – both Kaemmerle and Nichol were out.

There’s one more strange irony here. The Times-Dispatch published the “Time Capsule” with the fascinating Kaemmerle tale. Yet the same newspaper once censored its best editor for questioning the status quo and white supremacy.

Virginius Dabney was one of the best editors the state ever produced. His progressive views and intelligence won national respect for the Times-Dispatch in the middle part of the 20th Century. But the white power elite, of which newspaper owner Tennant Bryan was a part, silenced Dabney when he tried to speak out against the racist and horribly-backward policy of Massive Resistance to desegregation in the 1950s.

As journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff note in their excellent 2006 book, “The Race Beat”:

” . . .Virginius Dabney was blocked from opposing massive resistance by Tennant Bryan, the principal owner of Dabney’s Times-Dispatch as as well as (James) Kilpatrick’s News Leader. Bryan and Dabney struck a deal: when the owner wanted militantly segregationist editorials, a business executive with a flair for writing, not Dabney or his editorial staff, would supply them. At one point, Dabney considered leaving his post but got only one nibble, from the Cox papers in Dayton.”

As for Kaemmerle, W&M wrote a letter of reconciliation in 1986, long after the ideas she espoused becme accepted. Jim Crow came to an end by law in the 1960s as did Virginia’s hate-based ban on inter-race marriages. When she died in 2001, an obituary in a newspaper in Arizona where she lived praised her heroism and for being ahead of her time.

As for Nichol, after a few days of thunderous silence, the board announced that he wasn’t that great an administrator and was a lousy fund raiser. The fact that he was an outspoken liberal who challenged long-held views wasn’t a factor in his contract not being renewed, the board claimed.

The cases of Nichol, Dabney, Kaemmerle demonstrate the hideous tendency in Virginia for the power structure to move from the safety of barricaded rooms to punish those who ask too many questions or somehow threaten the status quo, especially when that status quo is so badly flawed. Yet the same power elite will wrap themselves up in history and pompously proclaim just how wonderful their ancestors were and how important forward thinking and equal rights are.

–Peter Galuszka

OK, I will admit it.

I posted on this topic (See “Sub-Prime Lending and the Slums of Tomorrow” 21 Feb 2008) and committed a sin of which I have accused others. I posted without reading the Leinberger article in Atlantic “The Next Slum?”

Since Jim Bacon’s original post went into the archives, I downloaded the article and read it with some care. Jim is to be commended for taking Deena Fulchum’s tip and putting up a good post on what Leinberger had to say. There is more to be said, however.

Back to the core problem of Vocabulary.

The very first sentence indicates this is something new and beyond what our friends Bill Lucy and Dave Phillips have been documenting.

Further it is now showing up in the weekly listings of foreclosures here in the R=30 Miles to R=60 Miles Radius Band around the Centroid of the National Capital Subregion.

What Lienberger finds goes to the question that Groveton raised in the recent post on the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis about “wrong sized house in the wrong location.”

Leinberger makes a number of points that will skewer those 12 ½ Percenters who chafe at the idea that there is a difference between functional and dysfunctional settlement patterns and that the dysfunctional ones would be eliminated by a fair allocation of location-variable costs.

Leinberger leaves out a lot, after all it is a short article. For example who was the sponsor of Futurama at the 1939 Worlds Fair? (Hint: it was the Enterprise for whom it was said in the 50s that what was good for the Enterprise was good for the US of A.)

What about the impact of Frank Lloyd Wright in the illusion of the benefits of scatteration that still resonates with 12 ½ Percenters?

The list of other things to say is long but the points Leinberger makes are well worth reading and digesting.

Sorry I did not do it before the posting.

EMR

The comments on settlement patterns and housing are going on and on with good comments but several sub-threads make it hard to follow. We need Jim Bacon back to keep enough topics on the table so that the comments stay at a manageable number. We will jump in later to try to answer some of the questions, we may miss some, sorry.

Here is a new topic: Bailouts For All.

“Free market” folks must be in apoplexy over the news: a $200 Billion bail out here, a $200 Billion bail out there… The only times that the gambling venue called the NY Stock Exchange has gone up is on news of anther “big government” bailout or a collapse creating opportunity for bottom fishers.

You can see why we wanted to get “Good News: Bad Reporting (Jim Bacon’s 5 March post) before he left for Wyoming. Today, WaPo’s economic columnist Steven Pearlstein calls the current unpleasantness “the most serious financial market crisis since the Great Depression.” He makes some other points that are worth reading too.



Those of us who are concerned about the trajectory of society and the future of democracies with market economies can only shake our heads and ask: Why did not more people listen in 1973?

As you might guess, we believe Robert Reich has a number of answers in Supercapitalism.

EMR

We have not addressed the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis in some time, however, the last few days headlines suggest it is going from bad to worse.

The front page feature in Sunday’s WaPo spotlighted the convergence of bad Agency policies, programs and controls that have created a crisis in the Federal District. (“Forced Out: The Cost of D. C.’s Condo Boom.”)

The news is no better is Fairfax: “Some Homes Once Crowed Now Vacant: Fairfax Crackdown (on “over-crowed” dwellings) Has Unintended Consequences. An Hispanic immigrant was carrying a $550,000 mortgage on a house that sold at foreclosure auction for $120,600?

And the chickens are coming home to roost for Agencies as well. “Damage From Downturn May Be Worse Than Expected: Officials Say Rising Foreclosures and Drop in Spending May Force Revision of Feb. 25 (Fairfax County) Budget Proposal.”

On Friday the business news was headlined by “Investors Dump Securities From Fannie, Freddie: Mortgage Sector Strongholds Falter.” We have said for years the crime at Fannie and Freddie was not the huge salaries and coverups but rather the loan bundling was location-blind thus leveraging support for building the wrong size houses in the wrong locations.

Speaking of crimes, CNN reports that the FBI is looking into fraud at Countrywide Mortgage. Citibank is reported to be in trouble with subprimes…

And the ads keep rolling in; on paper; on Television; and on banners running over Google searches and under AOL e-mails for refinancing…

Financial Enterprise deregulation has really worked well. For lawyers and criminal investigators.

It is not just homeowners that are hurting from a drop in dwelling values and wild lending practices. The whole economy is on weak grounds.
You may have missed it but the Federal Reserve on Thursday announced that for the first time since 1945, owners equity in homes in the US of A dropped under 50 percent. Since 1945! Recall how many new houses were built and sold with very low down payments after World War II. But then this: The only reason that the 1945 date was in the press release is that 1945 was the first year they kept this record.

See “Good News, Bad Reporting” at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

Note for Larry Gross:

I just saw your note to us under the Atlantic Reality Falls Church post by Jim Bacon.

You are right “RuralZED” housing is not a useful term. I will check out the links you provided when I get back to the Housing Chapter of TRILO-G.

In the meantime, just because a dwelling has no connection to the grid for energy, water or sewer does not mean it does not have location-variable costs. There are 35 + / – other goods and services to be concerned about.

And speaking of eco-footprints, Larry, check out “Eat Locally, Ease Climate Change Globally” an op ed in WaPo Sunday. A farmer from Abingdon provides some numbers on the cost of food transport.

I know, I know you worry about mangos and papayas when you cannot eat them right off the tree. Do not get me wrong. We love mangos and papayas. Mangos are called “winter peaches” in our Household.

The answer is the same, price them for what they really cost to grow and ship and then let the market decide if they are a four times a week item or a once a month item.

Of course if you do not have a house and no refrigerator you may have to wait until Global Climate Change allows them to be grown in Appalachia. But maybe they can be now in that big green house… Does not look very wind proof…

EMR

Groveton travels a lot, observes a lot and offers a number of good perspectives.

On 6:09 PM 6 March in a comment on Jim Bacon’s post “Virginia’s Nuclear Power Cluster Just got Bigger, Groveton noted:

“4. In the early part of America’s history Virginia was the most populous colony / state. It was an economic, political and intellectual center in the US. However, after peaking in about 1790, Virginia started a steady decline in power and importance. None of that decline had anything to do with the location of Washington, DC. It was simple sloth and neglect combined with Jefferson’s misbelief that cities were evil places that should be avoided and discouraged. He didn’t get many wrong – but he sure got that one wrong.”

Some may not understand how important this reality is to Virginia’s chance of achieving a sustainable economic, social and physical trajectory.

One manifestation of the historical context Groveton articulates is that Virginia has always ended up favoring individual freedom over community responsibilities. Sustainability requires a Balance between the two in an urban, much less Global, society. The last nonurban society disappeared in New Guinea years ago – or was the last one in Brazil?

The second manifestation of Groveton’s observation is that there has been and continues to be an anti-urban bias build into the Commonwealth’s Constitution, governance structure, legislation and especially the infrastructure.

I recall a dinner in Richmond where members of several of Main Street’s leading families – and thus Richmond’s leading families as this was 25 years ago – each identified themselves by the plantation / hamlet in the Countryside with which their family (or their spouse) was associated before the Civil War.

In an urban society a nonurban orientation is not springboard for success.

Something to think about on a rainy weekend.

EMR