friend of the built environment

I sometimes chuckle at the people who are out there stocking up on guns and ammo in case Obama gets tough on the Second Amendment (which I’m sure is a huge priority for him…), or in case an economic collapse leads to civil unrest and general social unpleasantness.
I also chuckle at those who are stockpiling tons of [...]

We are being harvested. One reason to reconsider the benefits of a wholesale conversion to a ’service economy’ (aka, one that produces no tangible goods) is that we end up here: spending trillions of Federal Reserve Notes to support our only remaining large domestic businesses - banks. Meanwhilst, the only large manufacturing industry we have [...]

This piece really sums up my feelings of late toward the generation that ruined our lives:
Boomers might be on the dark side of the cemetery lawn. The rest of us will be taking their name in vain for the mess they bequeathed. “The psychology of Boomers is, ‘There is no future, we are it,’” Males [...]

It’s interesting that, despite having much better scientific screening resources in place, America still bans healthy homosexual men from donating desperately needed blood, whilst most of the rest of the developed world, including Russia, whose social attitudes toward sexuality are somewhat more conservative, allow it.

Another one down. I really have to stop this plane travel.
President Obama, by straight-talking (as close as a President possibly can, at least) on the vices of his people, steps dangerously close to the the self-realization that ruined Jimmy Carter. Watch out, Prez! Children don’t like it when you tell them no! It’s much easier [...]

Old, stable populations are a good thing. Richard Florida doesn’t agree. But then, he’s an ass.
Lots of people question my vehement, personal enmity toward the man. Why do I take him so personally and waste so much energy hating him? Several ideas come readily to mind:

His dog and pony show reels in public officials who [...]

One thing that’s bugging me as I read thru the copious commentary on how America should solve it’s housing problems is the increasingly constant refrain that we should stop striving for high levels of homeownership - as if homeownership as an institution got us into this mess.
Homeownership is the idea that you will eventually no [...]

It’s interesting that I have heard about 10 different news sources today talking about how much pork is in the new Federal spending bill that the President is signing today, almost all of whom are mentioning Amtrak as one of those pork projects which is ‘popular with Democrats’.
Let’s look at what sort of pork was actually there:
Above [...]

When you read stuff like this.
But then I think about stuff like this and this, and I at least feel a little better about my chances to live some future life despite the coming banker-junta.

As David recently mentioned, Pittsburgh’s managed decline seems to be ubiquitous in the news lately, or it could just be the fact that we are paying more attention to it. Either way, I think one extension of this theme could potentially be the lessons a place that successfully and gracefully manages a decline could teach [...]

From the (now online-only) PI:
The Miami, Riverside, Calif., Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and Los Angeles areas all had a 99.9-percent probability of declines. Las Vegas, Tampa and Orlando were just behind, at 99.8 percent, 99.7 percent and 99.6 percent, respectively.
At the other end, Pittsburgh had the lowest risk, 1.7 percent, followed by Cleveland, 2.3 percent, and [...]

This is not a new story, but I was just on an oversold Amtrak train twice this weekend, which made me very conscious of the fact that our country subsidizes auto owners so perversely much more than transit riders, and as this chart illustrates (but which the accompanying story seems unable to specify), denser, urban [...]

In one of the first sources I’ve seen to admit that the overbuilding of the boom years included retail and commercial building; The glut of space to be vacated by fallen Fresno icon Gottschalks is a case in point for California. The mall in my childhood town of Clovis is a good example of what may [...]

The inn-keepers, porters, servants multiplied and soon the butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, the smiths, carpenters and masons added their services and created new consumer demands. Before long the town… became itself a burg or fortified place, and its inhabitants were described as burgenses, the dwellers of the burg, the bourgeoisie…
The towns, fortified, administering their own law, [...]

I always get a chuckle when I see charitable causes blow immense amounts of cash of advertising. The Breast Cancer 3-Day is a case in point. I see the TV commercials for this between 10-20 times each day, and I only watch a couple hours of TV at the most. It’s saturating more than election campaign [...]

Pretend for a moment that a far-right political party emerged in France or England. It claimed that the interest of the state and the interest of the party were identical; it insisted that any opposition to that party was a form of treason; it drew thinly-veiled racial distinctions between the “real” French and those others; it [...]

Chronologically, I’ve lived in or had a home in:
Nielsen DMAs 55, 6, 24, 46 and 23.
Census MSAs 55, 12, 35, 105 and 22.
Census CSAs 42, 6, 20, 30 and 18.

Today America West US Airways announced that it would be consciously avoiding flying anywhere near Pittsburgh or Winston-Salem. Routes that approach airspace within 200 miles above these cities will be diverted to ensure the airline is no longer tainted by its Appalachian roots. “It was a tough business decision,” noted spokesbabe Valerie Wunder at a press [...]

Victorville Homes Demolished.
We really need to be doing more of this. To those not in the know, Victorville is an isolated desert outpost in Southern California. If you enjoy 90-240-minute commutes, you might be able to find a job in the LA area to support a home in Victorville - assuming you produce your own [...]

I do not own any stocks. I have cash. Not much; and because so many things are cheap right now, I’ve been spending lots of my cash lately on things that I can use long-term, like houses and appliances and clothes.
But not stocks. I don’t care if people think stocks are cheap and that ‘the [...]

Transit Funds Skip Pittsburgh In Favor of Phoenix.
The U.S. Department of Transportation yesterday announced $742.5 million in new stimulus grants to mass transit projects, but the Port Authority, seeking additional funding to complete the North Shore Connector subway extension, got nothing.
The funded projects were in Arizona, California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia and [...]

90 people get the swine flu & everybody wants to wear a mask. A million people have AIDS but no one wants to wear a condom.

In case any Pittsburghers ever read this, can you please tell me why PAAC busses have that stupid “pay when you exit” rule?
Since my most widely used transit in the past has been SFMuni, I’m used to paying as I board thru the front door, riding where I need, and exiting the back door at [...]

One particular frustration of mine in Pittsburgh was the difficulty I had in finding restaurant to eat at. A huge number of places I went that resembled restaurants ended up being bars. The boundary was quite blurry and often a neighborhood would score very well from the street when you count the number of ‘restaurants’ [...]

Just days after New York did it, San Francisco introduced a new park in the middle of what was once a street.
I actually like it. I’m still sometimes floored at how auto-centric even the densest neighborhoods in San Francisco are, and especially a touristy area like this, at Castro & Market has way too much [...]

One lesson we should all learn from the current economic crisis is to live within our means and know when to quit. The past decade was a story of lost opportunities, wasted energy, over-investment and wasted money. Let’s stop wasting local government cash and abandon this Ballpark. Even if this Ballpark is finished (which still [...]

I haven’t chimed in on world affairs much lately - thankfully the economic crisis has seemed to make foreign adventures seem less appealing to most Americans.
But I do have a few opinions on the events taking place in Iran. Take them for the views of a person with limited education on the situation that they [...]

Goths Nationwide Raid Head Shops for Last Clove Cigarettes.
Whilst I no longer hold the hardcore anti-regulation view I once held on cigarettes, I really can’t understand regulating cigarette flavors. The idea just seem silly.
Yes, we should protect workers who are clinging to their jobs from having to sacrifice their health for their job. I agree [...]

Chase. For those times when you need a cheap, half-assed, hack-job bank. When only crap will do.

Latin hiphop gayboys

Yes, it was very normal.
Some people, including me at times, have argued that homo culture is a sort of dissent, and succumbing to normalcy is a bad thing. But normal in this context was so much different than normal as seen in its dark light by certain authors.
This sort of normal was amazingly diverse, celebratory [...]

I’ve spent so many years being a fabulous homosexual living in Ueber-Creative San Francisco, and seen the casualties of creative cities - namely drug addiction, AIDS, and dead-end careers that will do nothing for people when total social collapse comes in the next decade or so.
Florida seems to have no original ideas: his philosophy is [...]

Conservatives are often boisterous in their opposition to healthcare reform. Specifically, most conservatives are opposed to a single-payer national government insurer or provider.
Personally, I don’t think the legislation currently on the block goes far enough. From what I’ve been able to glean so far it seems mainly to compete with current state-regulated insurance plans to [...]

A new bakery/coffeehouse opened in my San Francisco neighborhood. When I visited, they were out of most of their baked goods but the kitchen staff were rushing frantically to prepare more bagels and pastries.
They apologized and said they’d have lots more in another hour. I chuckled and commented that hopefully this means they’re doing better [...]

Jackson death probe.

This is quite possibly the best essay I’ve read on the problem with mid-sized cities (those outside of the top-10 super-urban set) and how they market themselves.
Richard Florida managed to sell them all the “Young Hip Alcoholic” vision and they went out of their minds because so many of them still had to convince responsible [...]

I agree with this, for the most part: timing is half the success in the modern world of investment-speculation (I consider them interchangeable these days).
I do have a bit of an ethical problem with a similar animal, though: I’ve often recently heard financial ‘guru’ types talk about how they ‘called the housing crash’ - [...]

Just a reminder to those who think that just a few more recessionary quarters and it’ll be back into full-swing 2005 all over again:
Debt is included in the GDP calculation. This means that economic indicators will show the “economy” growing at a very healthy clip if all we do is borrow enough to make our [...]

Dear ‘Progressive’ Americans,
Please support and actually start using regular public transit and existing stuff like Greyhound and Amtrak and support the expansion and improvement of these services before you start calling on the government to blow its wad on “High Speed Rail corridors” all around the country. Do you have any idea how grotesquely expensive [...]

…Is what you get for thinking this guy’s hawt.
We have a ways to go when it comes to equality before law, it seems; though I guess I could understand if the jury may have acquitted the guy because they thought anyone who thought he was hawt must have deserved to die.

…That uses the word “boutique” this many times has got to go.

What a great discussion going on at NullSpace:
As flights from Pittsburgh have collapsed, the Pittsburgh story has gotten a whole lot brighter. I DO NOT imply any causality like that for the record. But what was equally baseless was the causality many just assumed went the other way.
Followed up by MH:
Your last two sentences sort [...]

A nice side-effect of building Creative cities during the housing boom: gentrification made rich white people flood into urban cores, and the gradual regearing of federal housing subsidies encouraged the poor to migrate to the vast swathes of cheaply-built, overpriced, but marginally-cheaper suburbs, as they were priced out of their own neighborhoods, wherein they now [...]

An interesting proposal by Rustbelt Intellectual: lowering speed limits (and enforcing them, of course) could be a way of not only saving lives and gas, but encouraging density and making sprawl more painful to the sprawlers…
…lowering the speed limit back to 55 would increase the time exurbanites spend in their cars by over 15% (roughly), [...]

Many economists often like to point out that the cost of basics has trended down over the past few decades: things like food, shelter, clothing. This is a big lie: the cost to replicate the quality of food the average family enjoyed fifty or seventy years ago is vastly higher today as a percentage of [...]

I thought this screen capture from my WSJ widget was a perfect example of the interesting times we live in…

The “Dow” is “up”, even though everyone is losing their job. Oh, and Wal-Mart thinks fast health care reform is good. Sheesh - where’s my umbrella?

In recent months I’ve been getting friendly notes in my inbox from Zillow every few weeks telling me how wonderfully well my new house in Pittsburgh has been performing in the market - Up 5%! Up 10%! Up 9381346fqrqbsdhh3947WTF%!
I finally managed to dump the top 50 sold homes from my neighborhood from Zillow’s recent sales [...]

Said better than I could ever try to paraphrase:
Do you know anyone who actually buys insurance – either someone in the individual market or someone who buys insurance for an employer – who is happy about what he or she is getting these days?
And:
All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, [...]

No, this is not going to be a tirade about skewed statistics, unfunded liabilities, or funny munny. Though it’s true that our GDP is much lower than general statistics admit due to weighting and hedonics and our perpetual habit of underreporting inflation; and though we’ve been spending social security receipts as they come in and [...]

One caution to those piling back into the stock market after locking in their losses last year (or, worse, earlier this year): Up 48% from trough does not mean “these 500 stocks are up 50%.” It just means “paper asset market value of a select club of arbitrary firms are trading 50% higher.”
Huh? Well, first, [...]