Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

The Project Begins

Welcome to SPRAWLED OUT, a blog which will accompany my work on a book designed to use my city of Franklin, Wisconsin as an example of the community planning process in modern American cities and towns around the country. As the title implies, there will be a certain bias against the sort of unchecked, freeway-fed expansion that the United States has seen since the end of World War II.

Man on the street Boomgaard video: SURPRISE! Nobody like the name ...

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Jim Stingl asked some folks around town what the think of "Boomgaard District" as a name for the 27th Street area (click HERE for video feed).

The Zizzo Group and 27th Street honcho Ted Grintjes must be bursting with pride.

Wait until we talk about the money we spent for that silly name ....

Sad news at the Franklin Post Office

Do you see that space above? It's inside the "conveniently located" Franklin Post Office. That defiled space is where the single greatest innovation in Franklin Post Office history used to reside - - until recently.

It was the home of the self-service package and parcel machine. Instead of racing to get to the P.O. during business hours and then waiting in line  you could walk in 24-7 and push a few buttons, slide that credit card, and out came a postage decal ready to affix to your box or oversized envelope. It made you feel like George Jetson. No lines, no hassle.

So we don't have jet-packs, vacations on the Moon, or mechanical smart-aleck maids; who cared as long as we had the wonderful self-serve package machine?

But now it's gone - - some P.O. honcho decided it wasn't getting used enough here. The lady at the counter said she gets about 20 complaints a day about its disappearance.

Boomgaard, and now this. The downward spiral ...

"The aspirational spending race brought to the lawn"

[Illustration: Slate.com]

When I was a youngster, the ball park and playground were close enough that we in the neighborhood felt those amenities were extensions of our back yards. Sure, there were the every-two-summers-or-so trips to the riverbank to get fresh sand (fresh sand!) for the sandbox, and most people had a little swingset with which to create minor injuries, but the real action - - and INTERACTION - - was at the playground and ball parks we all shared.

Of course, those days are over, and every suburban house is a world unto itself. I often look at the huge, elaborate Rainbow play structures in certain backyards - - out where they are accessible by all the surrounding houses, yet not usable by the neighbor kids because it's private property - - and wonder no more about where our civility has gone.

We began losing it when we lost neighborhood playgrounds. To save $18 a year on our property taxes.

From Slate.com:

Lawn Pox

Children's play equipment and the decline of the American yard.

By Tom Vanderbilt
Posted  Friday, May 2, 2008, at 7:13 AM ET

---

The next time you drive down a street in suburban or exurban America, pay careful attention to the yards. Lurking somewhere, either peeping out from the back or nakedly displayed right in front, some form of children's play equipment, typically in plastic and typically in some bright primary color, will probably be splayed on the grass.

I'd like to raise just one question about this picture of domestic bliss: How often do you actually see a child playing on, or near, one of these devices?

On a recent weekend trip through a posh Connecticut suburb, the kind with moss-covered stone walls and dense canopies of mature trees, I was dismayed to find the sylvan harmony of the scene constantly disrupted by garish blights, from wavy slides to inflatable contraptions of the kind once relegated to seasonal carnivals. It was as if a McDonald's PlayPlace—some alien, mother-ship PlayPlace—was spawning its miniaturized brood across the landscape (and simultaneously vaporizing the kids).

The Web site of Little Tikes—which boasts an American flag banner noting that some of its polycarbonate products are "Made in the USA" and then, just below, slightly less triumphantly, "or Made in the USA with US and Imported Parts"—offers a representative field guide to this kiddie sprawl, listing such injection-molded contraptions as the "Endless Adventures Slide & Hide Tower" and the "6-in-1 Town Center."

The phrase "fun that lasts" pops up often on the Little Tikes Web site, as if the manufacturer were trying to allay the suspicion of the purchasing parent that the giant red, yellow, and blue elephant he or she is buying will soon be nothing more than a mowing obstacle. For parents were once children, and they know the iron law: The more time spent in assembling a toy, the less it will actually be used. (A corollary: The packaging is inevitably more interesting than what's inside.) My sister-in-law reports that each year, her upstate New York town's annual "cleanup" day produces a massive haul of slides, swings, tubes, and tunnels, all of which seemingly have half-lives of one weekend and swiftly find themselves headed for the landfill.

The environmental implications alone—each piece of equipment must represent a lifetime's worth of plastic shopping bags—are reason enough to eschew this stuff. Then there are the aesthetics. On this, I'm hardly alone in my displeasure. In her account of the perils of suburban gardening, Paths of Desire, Dominique Browning recounts how a new neighbor installed an enormous swing-set with a plastic slide facing her house: "Obviously, I had developed an exaggerated aversion to the plastic; I'm the first to admit it. But brightly colored plastic (and who decided kids enjoy these colors anyway?) in the garden is one of my peeves." Or, as one blogger more bluntly put it, "The only thing worse than a neighbor with fifteen different pieces of play junk in his front yard is a neighbor with fifteen different pieces of insanely brightly colored play junk in his front yard."

Before you dismiss such complaints as mere aesthetic snobbery, consider another of Browning's pet peeves: "Why [does] every yard have to replicate the same debris, swing after swing, marching down the backs of the houses?" Her question highlights a few larger problems with this seemingly benign landscape element. The first is the decline of the playground. In her book American Playgrounds, Susan Solomon notes how the fear of injuries and their litigious consequences forced the closing, or banal "post-and-platform" retrofitting, of many playgrounds. Gone are the kinds of things that defined my own childhood: terrifying metal "monkey bars" pitched over a pit of hard gravel or the towering, twisting, all-metal "tornado slide," as we called it, which was at once the most exhilarating and the most dangerous thing in my young life.

But, injuries aside, a larger specter began to haunt playgrounds, Solomon notes: "Told incessantly to be mindful of lurking dangers and the people who might inhabit the outdoors, [paranoid] parents often defer trips to public spaces. Going to a playground becomes too exhausting for a parent to contemplate." And so instead of a communal play space, each yard becomes a (rarely used) playground unto itself.

It's not just fear that underlies the American tendency toward elaborate play furniture. One parent-blogger recounted how his wife had purchased a massive water slide from Sam's Club. This led him to reflect that, once upon a time, only one house on each block had "the cool thing." "Today," he writes, "I live in a neighborhood where, if one kid gets a toy, everybody else eventually ends up with the same thing, albeit bigger and more ghastly looking."

Yes, it's the aspirational spending race brought to the lawn. Of course, it was already there, in the execrable outrages committed in the name of "outdoor living," the kind routinely chronicled in the pre-recessionary Weekend section of the Wall Street Journal (the Masters and Johnson of bourgeois anxiety): the grotesque waterfalls coursing over volcanic rock from Hawaii, the waterproof plasma televisions hovering over the pool, the backyard pizza ovens. But this impulse has spread to the short-pants set. How else to explain the ridiculous ensembles found at the higher end of the children's play equipment market? At Posh Tots, for example, one can purchase, for $122,000, a "Tumble Outpost" filled with ropes and swings and ladders, the kind that would sustain an entire playground but is meant for private consumption. Or feast your eyes on the capacious "luxury playhouses," like the "pint-sized plantation" known as "Oakmont Manor."

I have come to think of all these things, in both their lack of use and aesthetic alien-ness, as being symptomatic of the decline of the American lawn. I don't mean grass per se but, rather, the whole relationship of the house to its exterior; the meaning of the outdoor space as a pastoral enclave in a larger natural setting; the civility and beauty brought by the carefully considered arrangement of plants, trees, and shrubs—the sort of things one used to see in the so-called "garden suburbs."

U.S. Census Bureau data tell us that as American house sizes have grown (despite shrinking family sizes), the size of lots has actually shrunk. It is now not uncommon to see massive houses crowding to the very edge of their property line. Whatever lot is left is typically barren grass with a few random shrubs installed by landscapers (the lawn version of a bad hair-plug job). The scalped appearance of these lots is usually not accidental—developers often find it easier to cut down mature trees than to work around them.

And so then one sees it: the asymmetrical, triple-garage-fronted, architecturally confused house, towering over a lawn that's utterly stark—as if surrounding a prison so escapees can be seen—except for the assemblage of plastic junk and recreation equipment scattered here and there. Which is not being used, of course, because the entire family is inside the giant house, where the sounds of Nintendo echo off the high walls of the great room. The bright plastic begins to look like a memorial to the noble, dated idea of children playing outdoors. As historian Kenneth Jackson notes in his book Crabgrass Frontier, the shift to largely indoor living, accompanied by the much-reported decline of gardening and encouraged by everything from air conditioning (often now needed because houses seem to lack shade cover from trees) to front porches being replaced by garages, has left yards—when they even exist—curiously empty. "There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon," he writes.

The unused plastic playthings and private playgrounds scattered in the barren yard speak not only to vanishing outdoor play but to a larger cultural disconnect from nature, from one's own environment. But there is a simple solution for this. Instead of buying cheap, potentially toxic plastic water slides and the like, plant a garden. Plant a tree. Plant something. It may not impress your neighbor, but it will last longer, it will look better, and it will have a better effect on the environment than plastic slides. And there is another benefit. In his book Second Nature, Michael Pollan writes touchingly about a hedge of lilac and forsythia at his childhood home on Long Island, N.Y. To the adult eye, the hedges were simply flush against the fence. But he had his own secret garden, a space between the hedge and the fence. "To a four-year-old, though, the space made by the vaulting branches of a forsythia is as grand as the inside of a cathedral, and there is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall." He didn't need a plastic playhouse or an obscene mini-McMansion to find space to play. The natural world, when it is embraced, not only provides the opportunity for play—I imagine many of you, like me, have fond childhood memories of a swing hanging from a tree, or a tree house, or jumping in leaves, or running through the sprinkler as it watered the tomatoes—but connects us all to something larger and more lasting.

Tom Vanderbilt is the Brooklyn-based author of Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America and writes for many publications including the New York Times, Nest, the London Review of Books, and I.D.

Is Menards having its cake and eating it too with subdivision development?

No one else has asked, so I will: In cases where Menards is developing locations adjacent to or in proximity of land that they have acquired through subsidy deals with local governments, or near roads improved or built as part of that subsidy, is someone holding Menards accountable in some way as they exploit that subsidy in this new venture?

For example, are local municipalities seeing to it that taxpayer-funded subsidies to Menards are at least partially repaid by ensuring that these new subdivisions serve their constituents that are in need of affordable housing?

A sidenote to the story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel answers that question:

THESE AREN'T STARTER HOMES
Of the three residential subdivisions being developed by Menard Inc., just one - Prairie Meadows, in Yorkville, Ill. - has homes that have been built. Houses currently available there have listed sale prices ranging from $349,900 to $396,900. They include such features as three-car garages, walk-in pantries, stainless steel appliances and master bathrooms with whirlpool tubs.

Perhaps there is someone out there who can show me that the locations mentioned in the story were developed without subsidy support, and therefor Menards faces no obligation to local taxpayers. Good luck.

Wal-Mart plays a similar game. Local municipalities basically give Wal-Mart the huge chunk of land they demand for their superstores; then Wal-Mart collects rent from "out-buildings" on the huge unused frontage that are leased by Wendy's and other tenants (Wal-Mart counts itself as a tenant as well, paying rent to itself in the ever-popular REIT tax avoidance scheme).

What a deal.

Menards breaks new ground

Retailer hopes developing subdivisions will pay off

By TOM DAYKIN
tdaykin@journalsentinel.com

Posted: May 5, 2008

People typically run to Menards to buy stuff for their weekend projects: a new drill, maybe a toilet seat.

But lately, the company is stocking something a bit more unusual: home sites.

Eau Claire-based Menard Inc. is becoming more active as a developer of residential subdivisions - an extension of the company's role as the nation's third-largest home improvement retailer.

Menard is proceeding with plans to develop two large subdivisions, in Warsaw, Ind., and Urbana, Ill., and is currently developing another subdivision in Yorkville, Ill. The company also owns land set aside for a small condominium development that might someday be built near its Oak Creek store.

Those projects are happening through opportune purchases of excess land as Menard buys parcels to build home improvement stores, said Jamie Radabaugh, director of sales and leasing for the company's property division.

"We are actively looking for new residential projects around our new and existing stores," Radabaugh said.

The company appears to be the nation's only home improvement retailer that's also a subdivision developer, said Scott Wright, spokesman for the North American Retail Hardware Association, an Indianapolis-based trade group with around 13,000 members - most of them independently owned stores.

"I certainly haven't heard of anyone doing anything like that," Wright said about Menard's side business. "Especially in this economic climate."

Menard did its first residential subdivisions, in Franklin and Eau Claire, many years ago. The company's land acquisitions have increased as Menard, which operates around 240 stores in 11 states, continues to grow.

Because it's privately held, Menard doesn't have to meet the quarterly earnings expectations that Wall Street demands from the chain's chief rivals, Lowe's Cos. and Home Depot Inc.; the latter announced last week the closing of 15 stores, including three in Wisconsin. The fact that Menard is not publicly traded gives it more leeway to invest in real estate developments, according to a company presentation made in January to the Urbana Plan Commission.

By developing residential subdivisions close to new stores, Menard creates a larger customer base among those new homeowners, and among local homebuilders.

Houses go up in Illinois

Menard's development in Yorkville, on the outer fringe of the Chicago metropolitan area, illustrates that strategy.

Yorkville is in Kendall County, which the Census Bureau recently named the nation's fastest-growing county.

In 2001, Yorkville annexed around 250 acres of farmland owned by Menard. Some of the land was set aside for a new store, which opened in 2003, said Lynn Dubajic, executive director of the Yorkville Economic Development Corp.

Additional parcels were set aside for 164 single-family homes and 68 townhouse-style condos, Dubajic said.

Menard put in utilities and other infrastructure for the single-family homes, and so far, it has sold 129 lots to AMG Homes, a local homebuilder. Since 2005, AMG has built 110 homes, said Chad Gunderson, AMG co-owner and chief executive officer.

The townhouse sites probably will be sold once the housing market improves, Dubajic said.

Materials from Menard

In purchasing the lots, AMG agreed to buy virtually all of its building materials for the project from Menard, Gunderson said.

The shopping list includes lumber, windows, doors, flooring materials and roof shingles, Gunderson said. AMG was allowed to buy a few products, such as concrete, from other vendors, because Menard doesn't sell them in large enough quantities.

The arrangement has worked out well for AMG, Gunderson said.

"We look at the contract as mutually beneficial," he said.

The company will have similar requirements with homebuilders buying lots from other Menard-developed subdivisions, Radabaugh said.

"It only makes sense to tie our company's main business with the residential development projects," he said.

Two more sites in works

In Warsaw, in north central Indiana, Menard is building a store that will open early next year, said Jeremy Skinner, city planner. He said Menard owns 70 acres, with 30 acres set aside for the store and other commercial use. The remaining land is for single-family homes.

Menard originally proposed 66 single-family lots for the Warsaw site but now is seeking to develop 89 lots, Skinner said. He said Menard is in discussions with a local homebuilder interested in buying the lots.

In Urbana, in east central Illinois, Menard bought just more than 350 acres at an auction in 2005. Menard is still working on its plans for a store, additional retail space, single-family homes and townhouses. The company expects to have a total of 425 residential units in Urbana.

As in Yorkville and Warsaw, Menard plans to sell the residential lots to homebuilders, said Lisa Karcher, a city planner. She said the entire project, including construction of all the planned houses and condos, will likely take five to 10 years to complete.

In the Milwaukee area, Menard owns just over 5 acres of vacant land northeast of its Oak Creek store, at 6800 S. 27th St. That store opened in 1998, just across S. 27th St. from a smaller Menards store in Franklin, which closed.

In 2001, Menard was granted permission to develop 22 townhouses on the Oak Creek parcel, but that approval has since lapsed, said Doug Seymour, Oak Creek director of community development.

Menard is looking for homebuilders interested in developing the Oak Creek parcel, Radabaugh said.

Menard's foray into development is "very interesting," said Wright, of the hardware retailers association.

The chain, which has grown despite increased competition from national players Home Depot and Lowe's, "has staying power unlike any other," Wright said.

Gas tax “scam” petition

(Via Smart Growth Around America.)

Gas tax “scam” petition:

If you, like a majority of Americans, think that any proposal to suspend the gas tax is a bad idea — bad for the environment, bad for our infrastructure, bad for our dependence on foreign oil, and bad for our wallets— you’ll be interested to see an online petition that was sent to us today:

  Eliminating the federal gas tax all summer would only save American consumers about 30 dollars, send more money overseas, reduce our ability to invest in infrastructure, and encourage even more driving and pollution  contributing to global climate change. At the end of the summer, gas prices would be as high or higher than before and no problems will be solved.

The only way to save Americans from spending huge sums on gas is to reduce the gas Americans use. We need to invest in alternative sources of energy. We need to build more fuel-efficient cars. And we need to make it easier for more Americans to accomplish everyday tasks without having to drive.

Real estate values are strong in walkable communities while they plummet in exurbs which require long, expensive commutes each day. Our federal policy can encourage more housing near offices and schools, and support more transit lines that get people to work without having to pay for gas. We also need to transport more of our freight by rail, a method that consumes far less energy and makes everyday goods cheaper for consumers.

Check out the petition online at http://www.gastaxscam.com/

-> Share or email this story "

John Norquist: I-94 Expansion From Milwaukee-To-Illinois, at $1.9 Billion, Is Misconceived And Wasteful

Political Environment reports:

Former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, now President of a Chicago-based planning organization, sent a comment to the Wisconsin Department of Transportation about its $1.9 billion plan to rebuild and expand I-94 from Milwaukee to the Illinois border.

The comment period closed Monday. Here is Mayor Norquist's comment:
*****

WisDOT's proposal to widen I-94 from six lanes to eight lanes from Mitchell Interchange to the Illinois border should be rejected.

Instead, the State of Wisconsin should resurface the existing facility, thus extending its use for many additional years and saving a billion or more of taxpayers dollars.

The stated reason for the widening is to accommodate projected traffic growth and to "modernize" the ramps and interchanges to correct what WisDOT calls "functional deficiencies."

As for the widening, the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) states "existing travel times within the corridor are not currently encumbered by congestion - reductions in travel time will be minimal.''

The functional deficiency of the ramps is expensive and is unlikely to increase safety. Traffic deaths, for example, result largely from two factors, speed and alcohol consumption.

Spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars to widen turning radii and lengthening ramps will encourage faster drive speeds and increasing the chance of fatal accidents.

The waste of resources of scarce tax money on functional conditions can actually be tragic if those resources could be spent to alleviate dangerous structural deficiencies. This may have been the case in Minnesota where resources were invested in "modernizing" ramps on an interchange on I- 35 not far from the deadly collapse of the structurally deficient bridge in downtown Minneapolis.

Lane widening and ramp lengthening are less complicated projects and likely more profitable than fixing structural deficiencies which contain the risk of cost overruns.

If the state commits the exorbitant amount of tax money proposed for I-94, less money will be available to repair the many structurally-deficient bridges in Wisconsin.

If a tragedy resulted it would, in my opinion, not be unreasonable to hold WISDOT, and ultimately the Governor, responsible.

As a former member of the Wisconsin Legislature and the Mayor of Milwaukee from 1988 to 2004, I appreciate the opportunity to comment.

John Norquist
President of the Congress for the New Urbanism
140 S Dearborn
Chicago, Il 60603"

(Via The Political Environment.)

McMansion blight

Clip from the film Subdivided

"You're probably one of these people who thinks that the world has a creamy nougat center of oil. But it doesn't."

James Howard Kunstler on The Daily Show.

Civic pride: Franklin provides example of terrible street design for national organization

The folks at Smart Growth America didn't have to look far when searching for an example of terrible, hostile-to-pedestrian street design to illustrate their article on Complete Streets bills now before the House and Senate - - they grabbed my photo of the gauntlet-like entrance to Franklin's Pleasant View Elementary School (see screen shot above).

Congratulations, Franklin - - national recognition!

UPDATE: The Smart Growth America people were nice enough to update the photo caption on their site; now the whole world is aware that it's indeed Franklin, Wisconsin that makes its most vulnerable citizens walk a ditch and brush against traffic on the way to their daily destination.

See also:
Complete the Streets: The upcoming Drexel-Shoppes test, and
Complete the Streets pt 2: Saner streets for Franklin?

Pabst Farms looks pretty sad

As a commenter on this post from Water Blogged in Waukesha says, it's one thing to read about this debacle, but quite another to actually see the growing blight-by-design - - be sure to see the video posted by blogger Jim Bouman:

Water Blogged in Waukesha: Pabst Farms is looking like a bust...:

(Via .)

Urban Archaeology

You'll want to check out this fascinating article and accompanying photos at Racine Post

But first, Sixth Street was our historic Plank Road:

There's a phone line down at the bottom...

Like an archaeological dig, Racine's Sixth Street utility work and repaving project is  exposing the city's history. Unlike archaeologists, however, the construction crews are destroying what they find.

Not that there is much to save, beyond some rotting planks and brick pavers upon which the city's commercial reputation was built; even a hollowed piece of wooden water pipe here and there. All have been uncovered by the Sixth Street road construction crews -- and for the most part unceremoniously hauled away to the landfill to be crushed and buried.

Sixth Street, layer by layer...

Some of the bricks have been recovered by adjoining storefront owners. Alongside the construction path today, a few small piles of rotting planks -- four or five feet long, maybe 6" by 8" in dimension -- lay by the sidewalk.

Kate Remington, whose concrete art studio overlooks -- and shortly will become part of the reconstruction project -- brought it to our attention Thursday morning. She took a portion of a plank to the mayor, suggesting that a cross-section of the road would make an interesting historical marker along the street.

"The highway came to be known as the Janesville Plank Road, and it is said to have been the first roadway constructed of planks to be laid westward from the shores of Lake Michigan. It began at Main Street and ran from the square along Sixth and out the government road. The plank pavement was considered a great improvement, a boon to travel and shipping. Stagecoaches used it daily, carrying passengers and mail on a regular schedule, and farmers drove their wagons in to the city filled with sacks of grain or piled high with hay, to be dumped for sale in the public square.

"The plank road was responsible in no small part for the growth of the City of Racine and, most particularly, of the Sixth Street business district...

"The Historic Sixth Street Business District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on March 24, 1988."

(More at Racine Post.)

The Political Environment: Raid On Federal Transit Funds For More Roads Sought By Bush Administration

We get the government we deserve. $10 a gallon gas on the horizon, and NOTHING being done to prepare.

Raid On Federal Transit Funds For More Roads Sought By Bush Administration

An excerpt from Michael Horne's report at MilwaukeeWorld (read it and weep):

In testimony April 3rd, 2008 before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, it was reported that the Bush administration has proposed two measures for remedying an expected $3.7 billion cumulative FY2009 deficit in the Highway Account of the Highway Trust Fund.

The first would cut federal highway investment to $39.4 billion in 2009 from the announced $41.2 billion. (The $1.8 billion difference is roughly the proposed cost of the I-94 North – South corridor project championed by the Doyle administration.)

The second plan of the administration to maintain solvency in the Highway Trust Fund would be to borrow $2.7 billion for highway construction from the separate Mass Transit Account which is not in a deficit condition at this time. (It won't go broke until 2012). According to testimony of James S. Simpson, Administrator, Federal Transit Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, the numbers work out like this: "The administration is projecting a $3.2 billion shortfall in the Highway Account. The Mass Transit Account is expected to remain solvent through FY 2009, with an estimated balance of $4.4 billion, leaving a net total of $1.2 billion in the combined Highway Trust Fund at the end of FY 2009." Simpson asks for "a new flexibility to manage funds," and requested "temporary authority to allow 'repayable advances' between the Highway and Mass Transit accounts."

 

(Via The Political Environment, via Michael Horne on MilwaukeeWorld)

On the road in Menomonie, Wisconsin

P1020441.JPG, originally uploaded by johnruexp.

Main Street - - and not a chain store in sight.

On the road in Hudson, Wisconsin

Here it comes: $10-per-gallon gas

... And, thanks to obstinate leaders at the state (Scott Walker) and national level (the Bush petro-gang), we will be far from ready to deal with the consequences.

Who needs sane mass transit when we can all drive?

From The New York Sun:

Gasoline May Soon Cost a Sawbuck -
Big New Shock at the Pump Forecast by Two Analysts

BY DAN DORFMAN - Special to the Sun
April 28, 2008

Get ready for another economic shock of major proportions — a virtual doubling of prices at the gas pump to as much as $10 a gallon.

That's the message from a couple of analytical energy industry trackers, both of whom, based on the surging oil prices, see considerably more pain at the pump than most drivers realize.

Gasoline nationally is in an accelerated upswing, having jumped to $3.58 a gallon from $3.50 in just the past week. In some parts of the country, including New York City and the West Coast, gas is already sporting a price tag above $4 a gallon. There was a pray-in at a Chevron station in San Francisco on Friday led by a minister asking God for cheaper gas, and an Arco gas station in San Mateo, Calif., has already raised its price to a sky-high $4.62.

In Manhattan, at a Mobil gas station at York Avenue and East 61st Street, premium gas is now $4.03 a gallon. Two days ago, it was $3.96. Why such a high price? "Blame the people at STOPEC (he meant OPEC) and the oil companies," an attendant there told me.

These increases are taking place before the all-important summer driving season, signaling even higher prices ahead.

That's also the outlook of the Automobile Association of America. "As long as the price of crude oil stays above $100 a barrel, drivers will be forced to pay more and more at the gas pump," a AAA spokesman, Troy Green, said.

Oil recently hit an all-time high of nearly $120 a barrel, more than double its early 2007 price of about $50 a barrel. It closed Friday at $118.52.

The forecasts calling for a jump to between $7 and $10 a gallon are based on the view that the price of crude is on its way to $200 in two to three years.

Translating this price into dollars and cents at the gas pump, one of our forecasters, the chairman of Houston-based Dune Energy, Alan Gaines, sees gas rising to $7-$8 a gallon. The other, a commodities tracker at Weiss Research in Jupiter, Fla., Sean Brodrick, projects a range of $8 to $10 a gallon.

While $7-$10 a gallon would be ground-breaking in America, these prices would not be trendsetting internationally. For example, European drivers are already shelling out $9 a gallon (which includes a $2-a-gallon tax).

Canadians are also being hit with rising gas prices. They are paying the American-dollar equivalent of $4.92 a gallon, and they're being told to brace themselves for prices above $5.65 a gallon this summer.

Early last year, with a barrel of oil trading in the low $50s and gasoline nationally selling in a range of $2.30 to $2.50 a gallon, Mr. Gaines — in an impressive display of crystal ball gazing — accurately predicted oil was $100-bound and that gasoline would follow suit by reaching $4 a gallon.

His latest prediction of $200 oil is open to question, since it would undoubtedly create considerable global economic distress. Further, just about every energy expert I talk to cautions me to expect a sizable pullback in oil prices, maybe to between $50 and $70 a barrel, especially if there's a global economic slowdown.

While Mr. Gaines thinks there could be a temporary decline in the oil price, he's convinced an overall uptrend is unstoppable. In fact, he thinks his $200 forecast could be conservative, and that perhaps $250 could be reached. His reasoning: a combination of shrinking supply and increasing demand, especially from China, India, and America.

Mr. Brodrick's $200 oil forecast is largely predicated on a combination of pretty flat supply and rip-roaring demand. Other key catalysts include surging demand in China and India, where auto sales are booming, and major supply disruptions in Nigeria and also in Mexico, our second-largest source of oil imports, where oil production has fallen off a cliff.

More factors include the ever-present danger of additional supply disruptions from volatile countries in the Middle East that are not our allies, and the unwillingness of SUV-loving Americans to trim their unquenchable thirst for foreign oil. Likewise, for the first time, emerging markets this year will use more oil than America.

To Mr. Brodrick, it all adds up to an ongoing energy bull market. His favorite plays are the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund ; United States Natural Gas Fund LP; Apache Corp.; Occidental Petroleum; Anadarko Petroleum, and Schlumberger.

Dandordan@aol.com

Kunstler: Good-Bye, Cheap Oil. So Long, Suburbia?

In BusinessWeek, our hero warns of rough sailing ahead for a car-dependent society. Artificially low (yes, I said low) gas prices will not last forever and we're doing nothing to prepare (and, of course, some people just don't get it).

Good-Bye, Cheap Oil. So Long, Suburbia?:

The suburban landscape has been marred by foreclosures and half-built communities abandoned in the subprime aftermath. But James Howard Kunstler, author of a dozen books, including The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, thinks there's a bigger threat to those far-flung neighborhoods: the scarcity of oil. As Kunstler sees it, oil wells are running dry and the era of cheap fuel is over. Given the supply constraints, he says the U.S. will have to rethink suburban sprawl, bringing an end to strip malls, big-box stores, and other trappings of the automotive era. Kunstler, 59, predicts a return to towns and cities centered around a retail hub—not unlike his hometown of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. But the shift to this new paradigm, he says, will be painful. (Kunstler could be off the mark; he predicted technological Armageddon after Y2K.) BusinessWeek writer Mara Der Hovanesian spoke with Kunstler about suburbia, which he calls "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known."

Why has suburban life flourished?
The suburbs were largely products of industrialism. We had a huge supply of oil and cheap undeveloped land, and we decided to become a happy, motoring utopia. It had many practical benefits. The trouble is after a while it became a cartoon of country living.

Why is suburbia now threatened?
Cheap oil is what made suburbia possible. But we'll run into problems with spot shortages. As we get into trouble with these supplies, our economy will suffer. Major instabilities in the system will present themselves much sooner than we are led to believe. And by that I mean the way we produce food, the way we conduct commerce, and the way we move around.

When will all that happen?
The rise and fall of oil production is asymmetrical. In other words, it'll be a steeper, rockier tumble down than the steady increase going up. My own sense of things is that we will be in very serious trouble inside of five years.

Won't it help to cut back on gas?
I get people who come up to the podium after a speaking engagement to tell me they've just gotten a Prius, expecting brownie points. It's not that we're driving the wrong cars. It's that we're driving cars of any size, incessantly.

What about biofuels?
We will use all of them, probably. But we will be greatly disappointed by what they can do for us. We certainly aren't going to run Wal-Mart (WMT), Disney World (DIS), and the highway system on any combination of solar, wind, nuclear, ethanol, biodiesel, or used french-fry oil.

Isn't it a bit radical to declare game over for Wal-Mart?
It is part and parcel of the suburban predicament. How long can they maintain their warehouse-on-wheels as the price of motor fuels goes up?

How will the U.S. have to adapt?
Virtually anything organized on a grand scale is liable to fall into trouble—government, finance, corporate enterprise, agribusiness, schools. Our gigantic metroplex cities will prove to be inconsistent with the energy diet of our future. I think our smaller cities and towns will be reactivated. We are going to be a far less affluent society.

Does your lifestyle reflect all this?
I live in a classic Main Street town. I've always had a garden. It certainly doesn't provide for all my needs, but for all of my salad and salsa fresca needs, in season. I'm not a survival nut. I'm not squirreling away wheat berries in plastic tubs in the basement. I don't have an arsenal of firearms. I lead a pretty normal American small-town life. Of course, I'm a self-employed author and don't have to commute to work.

 

Der  Hovanesian is Banking editor for BusinessWeek in New York .

Pain of Foreclosures Spreads to the Affluent - New York Times

This home on Hettiefred Road in Greenwich, Conn., came close to being auctioned off three times as a result of foreclosure actions. But each time, its owner managed to rescue his position.
( Douglas Healey for The New York Times)

From the New York Times:

April 25, 2008

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
GREENWICH, Conn. — This wooded town of roughly 60,000 on Long Island Sound — home to dozens of hedge funds, many millionaires and more than a few billionaires — is one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country. But even Greenwich is not immune to the wave of home foreclosures sweeping the nation.

On Stanwich Road, for example, a house worth $2.6 million is close to going on the block. On Hettiefred Road, the owner of a 2,720-square-foot, four-bedroom colonial featuring a luxury kitchen, swimming pool and tennis court, has been threatened with foreclosure for months. Several dozen other owners in Greenwich have received foreclosure notices this year.

But there is a difference from most other communities. Auctioning off such homes is a far greater challenge here than elsewhere, as affluent but cash-squeezed owners often find ways to delay losing their homes, sometimes by coming up with just enough to make last-minute payments avoiding a final sale — for a while, anyway.

Just ask John Thygerson, who parked his Jeep sport utility vehicle in front of the empty house on Hettiefred Road on the flawless spring day last Saturday.

As a foreclosure auctioneer, he was scheduled — for the third time since January — to sell the house. But the owner, a construction business owner who has fallen on hard times, made a last-minute mortgage payment and the foreclosure was postponed yet again.

So Mr. Thygerson was there to shoo prospective buyers off the property, nod at inquisitive neighbors and stake out a new spot for a fourth set of foreclosure signs after the first three had been mysteriously torn down.

“We never had a case that had gone through three separate sales attempts,” he said, still dazed that the auction failed to take place. “Greenwich being Greenwich, foreclosures are a rare occurrence.”

27th Street Corridor gains a name that no one will use

So, it's time for Oak Creek and Franklin to name the 27th Street corridor something more interesting than "the 27th Street corridor."

Given the colorful and varied history of the 27th Street corridor (touched upon in a FranklinNow story), I have to say I expected something much, much more evocative than.... THE BOOMGAARD DISTRICT.

That's "creativity by committee" for you. Blech. I can see the twee little logo already. When will we stop naming developments and subdivisions after the natural features that have been plowed under to construct them?

So much for effective branding.

UPDATE: If IKEA made those concrete blockades around the Green Zone in Baghdad, they would be called Boomgaards.

From FranklinNOW.com:

27th Street Corridor gains a name
By Julie Becker

As 27th Street continues to evolve in Oak Creek and Franklin, the two communities hope the joint development will become known as the "Boomgaard District."

Both the Oak Creek and Franklin common councils have endorsed the name, as its origin - boomgaard is Dutch for "orchard" - represents the area's agricultural economic history, according to a news release issued today by Zizzo Group Advertising and Public Relations.

Officials also selected the name based on its uniqueness, stating it brings to mind thoughts of progress, momentum and positive energy, and embodies an environmentally friendly vision for the six-mile corridor.

"The Boomgaard District name is as unique as the collaborative efforts between Franklin and Oak Creek," Oak Creek Mayor Richard Bolender said in the release. "The uniqueness of the name will set this development apart from others not only regionally, but nationally."

The name was selected after extensive research and discussion by the Zizzo Group and Joint South 27th Street Steering Committee, which unanimously recommended the councils adopt it.

Home Prices Drop Most in Areas with Long Commute : NPR

Those looking for a more blatant economic basis for the elimination of sprawl-type planning and development may not have to wait much longer. (Thanks to Michael Mathias for the tip).

Kristine Bruce walks her son David Bruce, 2, through the Arlington, Va., neighborhood of Clarendon. The area is on Washington's Metro subway system. AP

Morning Edition, April 21, 2008 · Economists say home prices are nowhere near hitting bottom. But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.

The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl.

The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has been hit hard. Prices tumbled an average of 11 percent in the past year. That's the big picture. But a look at Ashburn, Va., about 40 miles from the center of town, finds a steeper fall.

In parts of the county, housing prices have dropped 18 percent over that same period. New construction has ground to a halt.

Realtor Danilo Bogdanovic surveyed two rows of neat, new, brick townhouses on Falkner's Lane. "These were selling for about $550,000 at the peak, which was about August '05, and they're selling right now for about $350,000," Bogdanovic said. "Fifty percent of this community has been ether foreclosed on or is facing foreclosure."

For residents who work in the city, their commute is around an hour on trouble-free days. But that can extend upward toward two hours.

At a recent auction of foreclosed homes north of Washington, in the Maryland suburbs, there weren't many takers. All of the addresses are far from downtown, and average commute times are among the highest in the nation.

It's a different story for properties that are closer to the city's center — in areas of Montgomery County that are on the edge of Washington.

"When I have a listing in this neighborhood, there are often 40 to 60 people coming through the open houses," said Pam Ryan-Brye, an agent with Long and Foster Real Estate.

Inside the city, median home prices are actually up 3.5 percent from a year ago.

Jonathan Hill, vice president of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which tracks home sales, sat in his office recently, clicking through page after page of price data sorted by ZIP code. There were a lot of negative numbers, but not in places that are close in or near public transit.

The 20912 ZIP code, for example, showed almost a 10 percent increase in average sales price, Hill said.

David Stiff, chief economist for the company that produces the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, saw the trend in other cities, as well — including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, San Diego, Miami and Boston.

Stiff recently matched home resale values against commute times and found that in most of these major metropolitan areas, the trend is the same. The longer the commute, the steeper the drop in prices.

Stiff says home buyers' attitudes have changed. The old rule was, "Drive 'til you qualify" — meaning they should go out from the city until they could get what they wanted at a price they could afford.

Stiff says buyers are now asking different questions: "What is the cost of gasoline? What is the cost of my time?"

Recent studies suggest that buyers underestimated the costs of their long commutes. Those expenses can add up to more than the buyers saved on the home. Developers also miscalculated, lured by cheap land and rising home prices. They overreached, "partly because the bubble collapsed, but partly because these developments were just bad ideas to begin with," Stiff said.

Many of the projects were simply too far away from places that people need to go.

Builders have already shifted gears. David Goldberg of Smart Growth America, a national coalition of planners and environmentalists, points to what his hometown, Atlanta, was like in the 1990s.

"Atlanta was recognized as the fastest-spreading human settlement, probably in the history of the world," Goldberg said.

But while the suburbs spread, the city was losing population. Now the tables have turned. In the past two years, new construction in what had been forests and farmland has slowed by more than 70 percent, but construction in town has held steady.

Goldberg sees other cities rebounding, too, including Baltimore and Philadelphia.

"Philadelphia was losing downtown housing and in-town housing until very recently," Goldberg said. "And now that's the hottest part of their market."

Goldberg expects the trend to continue, even after the current housing crisis ends. Throughout the country, the percentage of families with children is shrinking. The share of empty-nesters, seniors and young people living alone keeps heading up. Those groups don't typically seek big green lawns.

"We don't live in the Ozzie and Harriet era anymore," Goldberg said. "We live more in the Seinfeld, Sex in the City era, in which young people find cities to be compelling."

So for now, at least, it seems that sprawl may have stalled — but not everywhere, and probably not forever. Experts are waiting to see what the next housing broom brings.

 

(Via NPR: .)

Attract more creatives with 'anchored coworking'

More on coworking sites? Absolutely - - Offering this amenity in a suburban community like Franklin could very well spell the difference when people are shopping for a city in which to settle.

Maybe some of the unused space in the epic Franklin Law Enforcement Center could be repurposed into a productive space like the one above.

From CoolTown Studios.

Creatives, free agents, entrepreneurs and mobile knowledge workers may be driving the economy, but they aren't going to be driving to work. They prefer avoiding isolation at home, but there are only so many coffeehouses, and even fewer coworking sites.

One growing source of spontaneous workplaces are anchored coworking sites - coworking sites provided by established companies who not only have extra space, but enjoy reserving it for untethered creatives. PSFK: Trends and Inspiration profiles several such examples in their recent article, A Deeper Look at Coworking.
What're the benefits of anchored coworking sites?

- For once, it doesn't take much additional investment or planning because the anchoring firm has already done so for itself (ie general lease, network printer, internet, phones, etc.)

- Second, the anchor company is often open to collaborating with its itinerant tenants, and thus will choose those with like-minded interests - a win-win proposition.

- Third, it's a heckuva lot faster, easier and much less risky with a more ubiquitous supply when you're talking about companies with extra desks vs starting completely from scratch.

By Neil Takemoto