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ay LaHood has caught Obama fever and it’s wracked him so badly that you’d never know our new Transportation Secretary is (was?) a Republican, or that he once understood, quite literally, what plays in Peoria, the congressional district he represented until the One gave  him the Nod.  Now suddenly a righteous evangelist for bikes over cars, he’s no longer interested in keeping government out of our lives; instead, he’s working to use government to, as he puts it, “change our behavior.”

I prefer a different spin:  He’s using government to force change on us.  As George Will lamented recently,

But LaHood is a Republican, for Pete’s sake, the party (before it lost its bearings) of “No, we can’t” and “Actually, we shouldn’t” and “Not so fast” and “Let’s think this through.” Now he is in full “Yes we can!” mode. Et tu, Ray?

Will sat down for lunch with LaHood a while back to ask him about his newfound love of transformational government, and LaHood was not about to cover up his newfound giddyness over having the power to rip people out of the cars they love and stick them on bicycles:

Indeed, about three bites into lunch, the T word lands with a thump: He says he has joined a “transformational” administration: “I think we can change people’s behavior.” Government “promoted driving” by building the Interstate Highway System—”you talk about changing behavior.” He says, “People are getting out of their cars, they are biking to work.” High-speed intercity rail, such as the proposed bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, is “the wave of the future.”

Yes, my fellow Americans, one day you’ll take a train or your bike to the soccer game, riding the inherently inferior transportion of the future to the inherently boring game of the future. Sigh. I remember when the transportation of the future was the Jetson-mobile, larking its way through the clear, clean skies. Now the car of the future is the bicycle?! A mode of transportation that went out of style in 1910?

The DC press corps apparently read Will’s column, so when LaHood appeared a few days later at the National Press Club, they pounced, according to CNS:

At the National Press Club on Thursday he attempted to respond to George Will’s column and to explain his vision for using the power of government to change people’s transportation behavior and to change the nature of American residential communities.

“We want to really–and notwithstanding the fact that George Will doesn’t like this idea–the idea of creating opportunities for people to get out of their cars–and we’re working with the secretary of HUD, Shaun Donovan, on opportunities for housing, walking paths, biking paths,” said LaHood. “If somebody wants to ride their bike, if–to work or to the place of employment or to other places–mass transit, light rail–creating opportunities for what we call livable communities.”

The moderator of the press club event asked LaHood: “Some in the highway-supporters motorist groups have been concerned by your livability initiative. Is this an effort to make driving more torturous and to coerce people out of their cars?”

LaHood answered: “It is a way to coerce people out of their cars.

“Yeah,” he continued, “I mean, look, people don’t like spending an hour and a half getting to work. And people don’t like spending an hour going to the grocery store. And all of you who live around here know exactly what I’m talking about. You know, the dreaded thing is to have to run an errand on a weekend around here or to try and get home at 3:00 in the afternoon or even 5:00 in the afternoon.

Someone tell LaHood people don’t like having to ride a bike through rain, snow or dark of night to work.  Or having to go to the grocery store every day because the trunk on the ol’ Schwinn just isn’t all that big.  Or having to get shoved into a crowded subway, where the pervert du jour can rub up against you. Or having to pay $75 for a cab because the boss kept you late and you missed the last train. 

Someone tell LaHood that the minute streetcars, then cars, made it possible to get out of the idealized planners’ vision of a compact urban core, we did, fleeing by the millions to suburbs, where we continue to live because we don’t like crack dealers on the street corner, gangstas in our kids’ schools, and car alarms going off at 3 a.m.

One reporter asked LaHood to respond to conservative concerns that he’s just another fascist know-it-all loon he’s supporting government intrusion into our lives.  His response?

“About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people’s lives,” said LaHood. “So have at it.”

Meanwhile, GM bond-holders did not respond warmly to government mandated depreciation of their bonds, forcing the automaker to the brink of bankruptcy.  The GM that emerges could be as much as 70 percent government-owned.  And who, then, would become a pivotal decision-maker for GM’s future?  Roy LaHood, the man who lives to make cars less attractive than bikes and subways.

It’s a brave new world.  Full speed backwards! 

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his morning, Capt. Ed took a macro view of California and pronounced, “Maybe Escape from LA wasn’t so far-fetched after all.” Well, taking a much more micro view, I suggest we add Escape from Ventura as well, because what just happened there is emblematic of how tarnished the Golden State is.

By way of background, I draw your attention to the most recent news release by Santa Barabara Channel Keeper about water quality in the Santa Barbara channel.  Channel Keeper, a spawn of Robert Kennedy’s River Keeper franchise, is an environmental group that crusades for better water quality because, you know, our water quality just sucks so bad.  So here’s what the release said of the waters off Ventura County:

Ventura County beaches also fared better this year than last, showing a 37 percent decrease in the number of beach closing and advisory days – 452 in 2004, down from 720 in 2003. In California overall, the number of beach closing/advisory days decreased by 26 percent in 2004 to 3,985, from 5,384 in 2003.

Wow!  That’s great!  Maybe we could slack off a bit on the over-regulation and enjoy our considerable success at protecting our water quality.

Not on your life.

After a hearing that involved 11 hours of public comment, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) adopted a raft of tough new stormwater pollution rules for Ventura County aimed at keeping local waterways and beaches clean.  The considerable financial burden the unelected RWQCB imposed will fall on taxpayers and land developers, two segments of the population that are just rolling in dough.

Taxpayers are getting creamed because the RWQCB is requiring the city and county of Ventura to step up water quality testing along the ocean beaches because, you know, the ocean’s getting cleaner.  Here’s the Ventura County Star on the action:

The board added language just before the vote that calls for weekly, year-round beach water quality testing along county shores. The county and cities now have to figure out how to pay the tab.

Local officials estimated the cost of compliance at $20 million to $33 million annually, or $60 to $100 per household per year.

Current fees generate about $3 million a year, far short of what’s now needed – and any increase in the fees will require a vote of the electorate, thanks to California’s initiave system (Prop. 218).   Like that vote’s going to pass.  So local government will be stuck – forced by non-elected enviro-bureaucrats to spend money, and probably having to cut cops and firefighters to come up with the scratch.

Developers are getting creamed because the new permit requires all new development be low-impact development, as in:

Under the language, new development and redevelopment projects would have to be designed to capture virtually all runoff and treat the water on-site during most rain events. On projects, particularly infill, where that wasn’t feasible, the runoff would have to be mitigated downstream in the stormwater system to prevent pollution from reaching the oceans.

Got that?  Imagine a downpour cascading down on a large subdivision.  Virtually every drop will have to be contained and treated before it can leave.  Or a shopping center. Or a hospital.  How is this done?  Well, you could build a huge reservoir under the parking lot at considerable expense, or you could slice off a few acres of perfectly developable land and put in a retention basin.

Then you’ll buy some expensive to purchase and expensive to maintain equipment to filter the storm water, or carve off even more acreage for a natural treatment system – a manmade wetland.  And you’ll price your homes, set your rents, charge for your surgeries, sufficiently to recover the extra costs.  Meanwhile, all the developed lands all around you – which produce vastly more runoff than your subdivision, shopping center or hospital – get off without a nickel’s impact since even unelected enviro-bureaucrats are afraid to impose any costs on established residents.

Oh, and this being California, the Building Industry Association of Southern California was not invited to the hush-hush negotiations that resulted in the low-impact development rules.

Of course, it would have been wiser by far to build a regional stormwater treatment plant, paid for by all the taxpayers to clean all the taxpayers’ runoff, but such ideas are not even considered by RWCQBs throughout the state – because they want gutters, storm drains and flood channels to have good water quality.  As if anyone cares.

Bottom line:  For all that money, the quality of water that reaches the ocean to be tested in those weekly tests won’t change all that much, and California, already home to the greenest metropolitan areas in the country, just got less competitive and more expensive because  no one here can control our environmental extremists.

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s a public affairs guy with clients in the land development business, one of the issues that is always on the agenda is affordable housing; specifically, how to avoid being taken to the cleaners because some politician wants to get some votes at the developer’s expense by forcing false affordability into the free market. 

My, my, my.  How things have changed.

It was just a year or so ago that cities were passing ordinance mandating that new development provide ten or 15 percent of units at market rate or lower.  For a developer of market rate or higher developments, this was akin to ordering Saks that 15 percent of its clothes would henceforth have to be Walmart priced.  Not only would Saks give up floorspace that could have gone to clothing with higher profit margins, but Saks’ snotty upscale customers wouldn’t really like sharing the store with those Walmart shoppers. 

But after years of political grandstanding on the affordable housing issue, politicians have forgotten every promise they made, every threat they uttered about the horrible societal cost of rising home prices and are pouring their passion (and our money) into the need to keep home prices up.  The absurdity would be delightful if it weren’t so dangerous, as Thomas Sowell points out today:

The same politicians who have been talking about a need for “affordable housing” for years are now suddenly alarmed that home prices are falling. How can housing become more affordable unless prices fall?

The political meaning of “affordable housing” is housing that is made more affordable by politicians intervening to create government subsidies, rent control or other gimmicks for which politicians can take credit.

Affordable housing produced by market forces provides no benefit to politicians and has no attraction for them.

Here’s what will happen if Congress doesn’t intervene, in Sowell’s eyes and mine:  People who didn’t save for a rainy day or who bought beyond their means will lose their homes and move into apartments.  People who were saving for a rainy day and living within their means will move out of apartments and into now-affordable homes.

What a nightmare!

Strong, nasty-tasting medicine is all the economy needs right now, but Franklin Delano Obama is intent on re-establishing the warm, comforting governmental teat that Ronald Reagan worked so hard to stuff back into the bra. It’s a shame and a disaster, but the majority of Americans are ready to sacrifice the beautiful efficiency and freedom of the free market in the name of a thin security blanket imported from China.

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here are so many reasons why California is slipping into fiscal and infrastructure chaos – most of them with (D) after their names – that we have become a textbook for other states to study.  It used to be “As California goes, so goes the nation.”  Now you’d better hope your state looks at California and runs full-bore in the other direction.

At the core of the state’s problems is self-centeredness.  The Legislature wants what it wants, without a care to the consequences.  And locally, anti-everything NIMBYs hold progress in check because they see all change as negative; there can be no change for the good.  Oh, c’mon, you say?  No, really:

Levee repairs in Sacramento’s Natomas Basin face new legal and financial threats that could delay construction of the massive project.

The Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency is just weeks from awarding a $90 million construction contract for a key phase of the project. But that work depends on state matching funds, which have been bottled up by the state budget crisis.

And last week, the Garden Highway Community Association filed two new legal actions against the project. (Sac Bee)

Natomas is an extremely flood-prone area that is protected (if we can use that word) by aging, deteriorated, undersized levees. So why would a community association sue to stop levees that would protect the homes in that association? Can you say “self-absorbed?”

Doug Cummings, president of the Garden Highway Community Association, said his group is particularly concerned that 1,000 trees are already being removed to accommodate the wider levee.

“Am I just protecting my own house? That’s part of it, because I don’t like to drive down Garden Highway just looking at a giant berm of dirt,” Cummings said.

Never mind that the giant berm of dirt is what they call a levee, you know, something that keeps the flood waters out of your living room.

Maybe the state should just take its scarce levee-building money elsewhere, let the homes in the Garden Highway Community Association wash away, and protect folks who are decent enough to remain a part of the gene pool.

hat-tip: Neil

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here’s a book excerpt in Salon today, a story by a Brooklyn woman of her quest to buy a home back before the bubble burst, driven by the common fear that if she didn’t get in, she would continue to pay landlords for the rest of her live, that her children would never play in their own backyard.

The excerpt ends abruptly after two pages, just as she’s talking with her Realtor about buying a place using a no-documentation loan.  I know the rest.  They get a crappy, expensive loan and buy a vastly overpriced home.  They’re now upside down, and since they never really had the wherewithall to afford the place, they’re at risk of losing it and want The Gift-Giver in DC to bail them out using other people’s money.

Yawn.  Not interested.  But I am interested in the class hatred this woman exhibits as she watches more successful families move into the new condos that are being built in her new neighborhood:

Later, I’m in the park with my friend Geri and our spawn. I’m talking about the weekend and the million-dollar condos and the fancy new crop of families at the school when I find myself off on a rant against rich people and their designer diaper bags that starts from my toes and gushes forth like a Vesuvius of resentment. “These douchebags come in and ruin everything. What is it?” I ask. “Why do they make me so crazy?”

Geri, with all the wisdom of the Dalai Lama if he’d grown up over a bar in New Jersey, fixes her gaze on me. “Do you know any rich people?” she asks.

I ponder this. I have a suspicion a few of our friends are wealthier than they let on, but actual, three-kids-in-private-school, wheeeee-I-have-so-much-money rich? “A few,” I tell her.

“They’re all a**holes, right?” she replies. I have to admit she has a point there. “You don’t get rich enough to buy a house in this neighborhood today unless you’re f***ing people. So when you see somebody pushing one of those $800 strollers, you know it was paid for by f***ing people. That,” she says with a flourish, “is what you hate.”

That’s it? If you’re rich, you might as well have a tattoo on your forhead that says “I f*** people?”

Look, I live in Coto, where the nefarious “Real” Housewifes of Orange County folks live, so I know ruinous rich folks when I see them, but I also know plenty of amazingly decent people who happen to be rich – and they didn’t get there by hurting others.  I know an amazingly giving and charitable family that owns a chain of restaurants that serve hearty meals and a fair price, and another that owns a chain of hotels and loses bookings every day because they refuse to put pay-for-view movies in the rooms since doing so would require carrying porn. 

Rich folks like this are all over the place; it’s called success, achieving your dreams, filling a need.  And if the author of the book gets bailed out, it will be these rich people who pay for her mistake.  Obama will dig deep into their pockets so the Brooklynite doesn’t have to deal with her prejudices and her errors, so that she can go on with a grudge on her shoulder, hating anyone who does better than her, demanding a neutered and dying America so she can feel better.

She’s an Obama gal. No doubt. 

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merica is the land of dreams and opportunity and all, but really, what’s a bus driver doing with an $800,000 home? (That’s it on the right.)  And why should we bail out her hyper over-extension? Michelle Malkin provides the commentary from an SF Wrongicle sob story:

ACOSTA: Like countless other Americans, Garcia admits she and her husband bought more house than they could afford, but she says the lender made the purchase all too easy. Now her mortgage is worth more than her house.

(on camera): How much was the house when you bought it?

GARCIA: Eight hundred.

ACOSTA: Eight hundred thousand dollars?. And how much is the house worth?

GARCIA: Right now, it’s like $675,000 on the market.

Before you run out of hankies crying for Garcia, consider this comment from a discussion item I posted on a building industry LinkedIn page asking for commentary on the Obama housing bailout:

It will be a good stop-gap and stabilize market prices in many areas of the country. However, long term it will not solve the problem because many of these homeowners will end up back in the same situation. Even if the package paid off their mortgages completely, it wouldn’t be long before they leveraged all of that equity. So it will likely pass, it will likely work short term, and in the end it will fail to make a lasting difference.

Got that? Do you think Rahmbama has thought this through? Do they really think that these overly entitled, bailed out “victims” won’t immediately turn around and draw out the equity boosts they got thanks to non-victims like us?

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Mysteries Of Evolution

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ere’s a story that might give Darwin pause:

Amoebas glide toward their prey with the help of a protein switch that controls a molecular compass, biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered.

Their finding, recently detailed in the journal Current Biology, is important because the same molecular switch is shared by humans and other vertebrates to help immune cells locate the sites of infections.

The amoeba Dictyostelium finds bacteria by scent and moves toward its meal by assembling a molecular motor on its leading edge. The active form of a protein called Ras sets off a cascade of signals to start up that motor, but what controlled Ras was unknown.

Amoeba have a sense of smell? They know how to build a molecular motor? Darwin certainly never suspected a single-cell critter could have all that!

It requires more faith to believe such a complex system can evolve out of the primordial mud than it takes to believe the amoeba is part of God’s design. Continue Reading »

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fter last night, I’m thinking about changing my license plates because I’ve discovered (again!) just how much I hate presidential debates.

These are not debates; they are hope-athons. I hope McCain will break through. I hope Obama will say something so wretchedly awful it will cost him the election. It’s like watching NASCAR just for the crashes. And because that’s what they’ve become – thanks to 30+-page memorandums of understanding between the candidates, thrashed out by lawyers – the candidates are so careful about not saying something wretchedly awful that they simply cannot break through.

If a high school debate team performed like these two men who want to be the leader of our country, they would fail to score a point. In a debate, you are expected to answer the question and counter your opponents answer with a logical rebuttal. All we see is block and bridge, block and bridge, block and bridge: They quickly dismiss the question at hand and bridge to a talking point from their prep sessions, too often a point they’ve made thrice already.

If I hear John McCain say one more time, “I know how to do this,” I’m going to puke. Don’t tell me you know how, show me what you know and let me decide whether you know how or not.

I would like just once to hear a candidate say something like this:

Well, you know I have a health care plan that will [do whatever it does], and I think it’s a very good plan.

But you also know who American government works. I will submit my plan to Congress where there will be committee hearings, and amendments proposed, and language struck. There will be votes in two houses and conference committees and new votes. There will be lobbyists for insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, sick people, trial lawyers and who knows who else. There will be campaign contributions and junkets.

In the end, we may or may not get a new health care bill. You are not voting in November, ladies and gentlemen [or "my friends," if you're McCain], for who’s got the best health care bill, you’re voting for the one who you think has the best chance of getting a bill that is somewhat like what you’ve hoped for through that maze. Let me tell you why I’m that man.

But of course we never do. They argue pretend points about fantasy legislation and we’re supposed to judge them on which one misrepresents reality in the way most pleasing to us.

There’s been a lot of hoopla this morning about McCain’s housing bill, including a typically excellent wrap-up by Michelle Malkin with a zillion links. She says of it:

I can’t underscore enough what a rotten idea John McCain’s ACORN-like government mortgage buy-up is. I said it during my liveblog. And I’ll say it again: “HE WANTS TO EXPAND THE BAILOUT. He wants to do what ACORN wants to do. We’re Screwed ‘08.”

This was his supposed “game-changer.” This was the very first thing out of his mouth during the debate tonight — his big pitch right off the bat. The McCain campaign immediately sent out this fact sheet on the proposal, which will cost at least $300 billion. The proposal involves directing the Treasury Secretary to “purchase mortgages directly from homeowners and mortgage servicers.” That’s on top of the trillion-dollar crap sandwich (update - McCain says it would be included in the crap sandwich), the $85 billion to AIG, the $25 billion to automakers, the $200 billion in capital and credit lines to Fannie and Freddie, and who knows what else we’ll be forking over to California, Massachusetts, etc., etc., etc.

Because we no longer have real debates, McCain felt the need to have an anti-crash, a game-changer, hoping that people would really like this, and at the same time Obama would pull out a can of spray paint and spray “potatoe’ on the wall of hall.

Judging from the reaction and the instant replay, he failed on both counts.

I’m not as apoplectic as Malkin and her friends. (Full disclosure: My income from the land development and home building businesses has dropped precipitously this year and I’d like to get it back.) As you may recall, I proposed a similar plan on the eve of the bailout:

I do not want one penny of my currently very dear money to go toward saving people who lied about their income on “‘no stated income” loans. And not a penny to people who made bad bets on the market with nothing down mortgages. And the people who sold and repackaged these mortgages? Let them stew in their own desperate financial juices.

Not one penny to any of them, and I don’t care what the consequences are!

Here’s what we should do instead: Be a government of the people, not a government of the businesses and the lobbyists. We should set up a short-term (three years ’til it sunsets) federal mortgage repackaging house. It would have only one purpose: To rewrite an individual taxpayer’s loan as a 50-year fixed (or even a 100-year fixed; such mortgages are common in Japan).

People who are in bad mortgages or are otherwise about to lose their houses would have show an ability to pay, with the term of the mortgage being flexible enough to allow some pretty underqualified people to slide through. Interest rates, though, would be competitive, not written down at our expense, so the government would be able to sell the mortgages to the private sector at auctions.

McCain’s plan will supposedly keep out those who lied about their finances, those who multi-mortgaged to flip houses, and those who put no money down. Good. Now get out of the underwriting business and the interest-rate jiggering business and do as I say: Re-write the term of the mortgage and only the term. Then I’m fine with McCain’s plan; as it is, I’m not at all fine with it.

So Obama forgot his WWII history and mistakenly had the government inventing computers. And McCain laid out a mortgage plan that reminds us that he’s not a conservative, like we didn’t know that already. Did anything change last night?

Of course not. I H8 DB8S.

Photo: Steven Crowley, NY Times

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Updated

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t appears that under the plan Pres. Bush announced this a.m., the federal government (i.e., you and me) will spend up to $700 billion to buy back troubled mortgages from banks. AP characterizes these mortgages as “toxic,” and that’s a good definition.

I do not want one penny of my currently very dear money to go toward saving people who lied about their income on “‘no stated income” loans. And not a penny to people who made bad bets on the market with nothing down mortgages. And the people who sold and repackaged these mortgages? Let them stew in their own desperate financial juices.

Not one penny to any of them, and I don’t care what the consequences are!

Here’s what we should do instead: Be a government of the people, not a government of the businesses and the lobbyists. We should set up a short-term (three years ’til it sunsets) federal mortgage repackaging house. It would have only one purpose: To rewrite an individual taxpayer’s loan as a 50-year fixed (or even a 100-year fixed; such mortgages are common in Japan).

People who are in bad mortgages or are otherwise about to lose their houses would have show an ability to pay, with the term of the mortgage being flexible enough to allow some pretty underqualified people to slide through. Interest rates, though, would be competitive, not written down at our expense, so the government would be able to sell the mortgages to the private sector at auctions.

Those who are not able to meet the income requirements for a 50- or 100-year fixed would lose their houses. They don’t deserve to keep them; welcome to the wonderful world of personal responsibility. Even so, this would reduce dramatically the number of foreclosures on the market, which would help the homebuilding industry come back.

Also helping the homebuilders is the probability that new longer-term mortgages would become widely available through the private sector, to be used for new home purchases in addition to bail-outs. This is pivotal to a recovery because you just cannot underscore the importance of home-buying to the economy. In the early 2000s, the homebuilding industry had the highest sales of all industries in California – outpacing even retail for a year or two. That translates as jobs, purchases, taxes – what makes the world go round. If the “‘fix” doesn’t fix the homebuilding, it’s not a fix.

And what of the institutions, with their MBAs and PhDs that dreamed up mortgage based derivatives and other instruments of economic death? Let them all crash where they may, and watch very carefully the new institutions that will quickly rise to fill the void. Congressional hearings will be needed from day one to track what they’re doing and hold them responsible, and the members of Congress who serve on the oversight committees will just have to deal with the fact that America will no longer tolerate the acceptance of campaign funding from the industry they oversee, you SOB Chris Dodd.

Finally, we need to treat new financial products like we treat new pharmaceuticals. They need to be overseen, tested and certified by a Federal Financial Instruments Agency before they are foisted on the market, because like Thalidomide, they can create great human suffering if there’s something wrong with them.

This could work, and work without selling a lousy mortgage on America to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, unlike the plan Bush outlined today. That plan just might prove the crazy liberals right: It just might make him the worst president in American history.

Update: Paul Krugman agrees:

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

As I posted earlier today, it seems all too likely that a “fair price” for mortgage-related assets will still leave much of the financial sector in trouble. And there’s nothing at all in the draft that says what happens next; although I do notice that there’s nothing in the plan requiring Treasury to pay a fair market price. So is the plan to pay premium prices to the most troubled institutions? Or is the hope that restoring liquidity will magically make the problem go away?

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reenies and urban planners hate suburbia, and now that global warming and gas prices are fighting for our attention, they’ve ratcheted up the rhetoric. Christopher Leinberger captures the mood in an Atlantic article called The Next Slum? -

A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

And he chooses a suburb, Windy Ridge, to showcase his hypothesis:

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

His conclusion, that the suburbs will become a thing of the past and people will remove themselves to the inner city, the holy land of urban planners,  is incorrect because he ignores the simple fact that foreclosures are higher in the suburbs only because more people choose to live there.

Writes Joel Kotkin in an LA Times op/ed: Continue Reading »

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