New Gang in Town

I began my career in rural Appalachia struggling to help the working poor earn a living wage. Employers exploited workers, keeping them in line by using fear and intimidation. Community organizing was an obvious response. By coming together in an organization that approximated a gang, workers had a better chance to appeal for fairness.

The widely circulated AP story "Jobless professionals vie for holiday sales work" By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD and MAE ANDERSON, AP Business Writers put a face on the current unemployment crisis.
AP – In this photo taken Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009, Mara Proctor arranges merchandise at Sticks boutique in Kansas …

Mara, and the 6 million former professionals like her, are terribly alone. Having done everything the society asked of her, she finds herself discarded. Despite having ample cause for fury, her survival strategy is to get to work, any work will do.

I have a suggestion for Mara, form a gang. Not one of those groups who grope around trying to create a better resume or network, hoping against hope to find a way back into the system that just failed them. No, a real gang that pools their resources and begins with the premise that they do not want to get back to business as usual.

The first principle of the gang they should form is that society has failed them. They signed the social contract, but they got no security. They will take it as a truth that if you locate a problem that one person has, ten thousand others have the same problem. In some basic way, society has failed the majority of its citizens. The gang's job will be to identify and rectify those failures. This is Mara's opportunity. Mara should assess a set of needs that are common in her locale, and begin to solve those needs.

Let's get the ball rolling with a short list based on areas of opportunity that are fairly common, one of which Mara might want to exploit.
Programs are beginning to assist seniors in their transport needs.
Mara starts a car service, contracting with seniors, parents, and commuters.

Persons are struggling to eat right. Home chefs are but one new start-up.
Mara could do that or assist persons in their homes to rid their lives of junk food and teach the basics of healthy food prep to the entire family.

Schools are failing to provide the skill sets that Mara and her peers need to survive. Mara could tailor teaching sessions to the job skills required by specific corporations. Different then job training that is rarely specific, this concept begins with the employer and moves the training off site. States are starting to experiment with funded models that she might want to explore.

Mara might find a commercial building suffering a lack of tenants. This problem is only going to get worse. At the same time her state, and others, are going to suffer drastic budget cuts and education will not be immune. Mara proposes to the building owners and the existing tenants that what she wants to develop is a charter school, the organizing basis of which is that it is geared to provide real world office experience to its students.

This list is just suggestive. To develop any project Mara is going to need help. Enter the gang. For any of these suggestions to become a reality will require enormous amounts of energy. But it has to start with Mara and her gang, getting off their knees.

Who knows what she and her pals will come up with. The important thing is for her to form an alliance with a small group who share her motivation.
Maybe after a successful launch, her most ambitious project will be to replicate this process. "New Starts" might be their logo.

Salad Spinner

Grand baby West is 4 today!

Last Friday, in the middle of his play day, he marched into the kitchen and asked if he could have the salad spinner. His dad passed it to him, West retired to the living room, and we could hear the whir of the spinner as it wound up and down. A peek around the corner revealed the little guy poised over the tool, head bent to see the interior. A minute later he returns to the kitchen, and places the spinner on the table around which we are seated. He can now see the spinner at eye level. So can we. What West has done is place his three favorite "Match-Box" cars in the spinner, locked down the lid, and pumped them up into a fair simulation of the Metrodrome, Wall of Death. We are mightily impressed.









Another little guy getting ready:




I ask West if he has a paddle ball. He rummages around the toy chest and produces one. I hold the rubber band 4 inches or so above the ball and ask him to watch closely. I slowly start to spin the ball and sure enough the ball rises to orbit around my finger. "Now look at my mouth West. Say centrifugal force." He does and runs to repeat to his father, "centrifugal force".


West will start kindergarten next September. When he does he will be locked into a space with a bunch of other 4 year olds, and one adult. Where did that madness come from? Bonnie Moen in her excellent paper; "Multi-age Education -- Time for a Change" sets out the history. Horace Mann imported the concept from Prussia in the 1840's and it has been the norm ever since. This practice interrupted thousands of years of successful multi-age education.

Later that day West was drawing on the side walk. We asked him what he was drawing. "The Planets" he said.

Cut the Crap

It is the holiday season and the whole world watches to see if the American consumer will rise to her obligation to shop till she drops. Tapped out, frightened that she will lose her job, busted from the market crash and the loss of value of her home, she probably is going to spend less. This probability provoked a spate of articles on the subject. The NYT ran a blog debate in September; "Saving the World Without US Consumers"
Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Within the above is yet another article that suggests that the measures that we use to determine human and planetary well being are misguided. In other words there is more to the well being of the people of the world than just what they consume. The GNP or rate of growth as just a number belies the costs of the consequences of that activity.

James Surowiecki brings economic issues to the masses with his weekly column in NewYorker. This week his interest is the disparity between Chinese manufacturing and the relatively light consumption of the Chinese people. He makes an argument that they, and the rest of the world, would be a better place if they would just start buying more of what they produce.

He is not alone.The McKinsey Quarterly has published a series of articles on the subject that you can access here.

Neither of these articles address the impacts of increased consumption on the part of the Chinese. They are simply looked upon as a market.

Questions regarding the ethics of counting the economic activity of consumption without consideration of the consequences are not discussed.

Hazel Henderson has been writing about the horror of a system that would calculate the "value added" of say an earthquake from the perspective of the building activity that will follow as opposed to the negative impacts on the people who suffered from the disaster. What she and others want is a true cost accounting of economic activity. If you produce a hybrid car battery for a new Prius then someone is going to pay the cost of cleaning up the pollution created in the manufacturing process. That cost ought to be considered when we "value" the car.

The cost of environmental consequences is never on the books. Nor is the reality of the Limits to Growth.

You have probably read some form of 'how many planets it would take if everyone lived like we do". For balance read the following counter argument.

Behold there is another concept starting to gain some traction. Some economists are indeed considering the limits to unbridled economic activity and call for a Steady State.

It should be obvious that we can't achieve a steady state if we raise the standard of living of some people of the world without a balanced reduction by others. This is where the right has a hissy-fit. "That means we have less", they argue. And right they are.

Here's where Will begins. I want to name the crap we can do without. Stuff on which there is something like a consensus of its valuelessness. I am willing to trade my low value stuff for others ability to have more. I'll start my list with corn sugar. Less for me, more corn for tortillas where they are a staple. I will add fewer clothing garments, wearing what I own longer. I will eat less meat, eschew bottled water, and drop chips. I will not buy my grandson anything in a primary color this season, nor will I replace the aging Big Wheel. That's a start. It has implications for jobs. This is but a topics list of what should be a very long national discussion.

An idea whose time keeps coming, and coming

This spring the Volvo Round the World maxi boat race sailed into Boston harbor. Their arrival was preceded by the Puma pop up store that was erected on the pier in a day.

Thousands of us clambered aboard, bought gear, partied, and became impressed with the possibilities of container architecture.

I had seen "Positions"the art installation village consisting of "galleries" assembled from around the world and then transported in containers, lined up along the beach, and forming an instant art's district on Miami Beach, but this project moved the possibility from art to reality.

LOT-EK has been experimenting with containers for some time. An earlier example of a project was their









container home.










Bob Vila's web site featured a story on home creation utilizing containers and concluded: "Perhaps the biggest barrier to increased production of container homes is the stigma that is attached to the ugly metal boxes left abandoned in urban shipping yards. Transformative thinking and a willingness to move outside of the box can bring this technology to the forefront of urban planning agendas everywhere."
Text by Mark Fuller














A Seattle based architecture firm Hybrid Seattle coined the term "cargotecture" to describe their development and their first structure has landed.
I also know that when talking to the principals of the firm they are at work on an infill concept that is so smart it is a wonder that it hasn't been implemented yet. They view dorment development plots, builders waiting for financing might be a reason for a plot to lay fallow, as sites for temporary villages of container homes. The portability of the containers would allow them to have a temporary location until such time as the underlying project was green lighted, and then would move to the next site. A much better use than surface parking or weed patches.

The AIA, and the City of Newark sponsored a world wide competition for a container based development for their city. The results are amazing.

The beat goes on. LOT-EK won a competition to build a new shopping mall on a NYC pier, an Italian firm built a jewel box and slowly the concept is winning acceptance. It is important to take away the reality that zoning and planning board rules that might inhibit creative housing solutions are responsive to political will. If you have the will, there is a way.

Maximizing the built environment

A scenario:
Barbara is a single mom who got herself behind the eight ball. Her husband died from a sudden heart attack while jogging. They had no life insurance. To help her with cash flow she refinanced her modest three bedroom, two car garage home in middle America using an adjustable rate mortgage. The way it was explained to her, "when the affordable rate is about to adjust, we will refinance again, and the monthly payments will remain the same". The problem is that when the adjustable rate reset, there was no bank ready to refi her loan and now she was saddled with a mortgage that was breaking her.

Barbara works in human resources at a mid-sized utility company. After her debt service she barely has money left to feed her two kids, 3 and 5 years old.. She was very close to foreclosure when a group of three approached her office with a concept for a new small business (house retrofitting for conservation) that they imagined was allied with the utility, and that the utility might want to fund. This was beyond her pay grade and she pushed the proposal up the chain but kept the cover sheet of the proposal in her desk. Weeks later she called one of the principals out of curiosity. No the utility hadn't funded the venture but the group had secured some start up money and was plunging ahead. They were looking for space.

No one can ever trace the sparks that trigger creative energy. What Barbara blurted out was, "would you consider renting my house from me during the working day?" Meetings were had, problems discussed, and the resolution worked as follows: They split the debt service and utilities. For the start-up this was far cheaper than the office options they had explored and far more comfortable. The living room, dining room, kitchen, and one bedroom would be shared by the business while Barbara was at work. Barbara and the kids each maintained a private bedroom. The key to the success of the concept was the separation of stuff in the shared space. Barbara contacted the head of the architecture dept. of a nearby university and posted a want-ad for a design project. A short description was included and of course a student responded within days. In addition to a little money beyond materials what the student needed was a practicum for credit. For that the student required they document the process. No problem.

Barbara suggested the student set up shop in the garage. He did. And what he fabricated was a set of three modular storage cubes on wheels. During the work day they opened to include the work surfaces, and communication storage areas that were needed, and at the end of the day, were secured and rolled against a wall, out of Barbara and the kids' way.

The kicker was that when the project was finished, the student suggested that he could retrofit the garage and create an apartment for himself in the space. He did. You will be pleased to know that Barbara is secure in the house, the start-up has positive cash flow, and the city certified the garage as a legal ancillary space.

They're Back

They're back:
From the gang that brought you the economic collapse of 2008.

The building and allied trades, has been the most successful economic enterprise in human history. They formed a perfect alliance with government at all levels, becoming the largest donor in most campaigns. The result has been the pairing of interests so that government revenue is tied to developer success in bringing tax generating projects to ground.

The fact is that to develop, the building industry needs land. In the past they supported planning and development boards that ripped out entire neighborhoods in all of our major metropolises, giving them the space they needed to construct new projects. They created language,"highest and best use", that sanctified the process. They determined what the half life of a building was and if creative destruction wasn't rapid enough, they destabilized entire neighborhoods by red-lining, lax policing, or finding some other incentive (removal of politically weak minorities). In one of the more amazing acts of political manipulation the building industry got tax payers to foot the bill for the Impacts, (costs of schools, water treatment, public safety) of their developments.

They supported "white flight" and built the suburbs that sprawled across the countryside. When the price of gas rose, and it appeared there might be advantages to inner city living, they stimulated gentrification and created new "workforce" housing near the plants that hired the former inner city resident they displaced. They got highways and ramps built to facilitate access to their projects again at tax payer expense.

This kind of manipulation is not easy and they need the appearance of independent thinkers to rationalize their behavior. For example, when an argument is needed to support the myth that more building will create a bigger tax base, it helps to have a think tank to create the story.

To that end the industry created the Urban Land Institute (ULI). This group includes every major mortgage bank, builder, developer, real estate sales firm, and even many government agencies send representatives as members. They publish, hold conferences, train youth, and steer development by creating trend analysis.

Some of their hits include urging the FED to support the idea that everyone deserves to own a home, and deregulating the banking practices that stood in the way of loans for people who couldn't afford them. They got the right of eminent domain to include taking private land for the benefit of private developers. They made it illegal to have more than one head of household in a residence, and saw to it that there was a strict separation of work and living spaces. They define what space is, what building material can be used to create it, and who can build the space, all in an attempt to suggest a shortage of available space, creating the opportunity for yet more building.

Every effective monopoly overreaches and in this case they created a doozy. In the wake of the disaster of their overbuilding, over leveraging, and over lending, they have created the greatest economic debacle in the history of mankind.

They have an enormous problem. After transferring the blame for the collapse on the hapless home owner, they have to concoct another scheme to keep their engine going. They count for over half of the national economy. Talk about "too big to fail". They use other people's money and even the average citizen is starting to get the fact that if they fail, we pick up the tab.

Opportunities are being created as I write this. They are creating new wastelands,
taking down structures they couldn't sell and turning their backs on the suburbs they created.
The effect of this on the individual is to wipe out a lifetime of saving, belie the myth the real estate is a good investment, and that home ownership, as defined by the industry, is a noble objective. The industry needs a new set of suckers, and it is setting about creating them.

The ULI concluded their annual conference in San Francisco last week and their proceedings are fascinating. Here are some highlights:
ULI "Icons" have advice they share with attendees.

Emerging Trends in Real Estate®, released this week at ULI’s Annual Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Emerging Trends predicts that investment and development will start to pick up steam in a couple of years. In the meantime, those who are in a position to do so should buy or hold multifamily; buy hotels; buy distressed condos and second homes; buy land; buy or hold industrial; hold office; and apply a "triage" approach to retail.
Looking past the recession, "The future is about green development, infill, and transit-oriented development."

The panel discussed two main demographic groups that will drive the next decade’s housing market: Generation Y and their parents (the aging baby boomers). Looking past the recession, "The future is about green development, infill, and transit-oriented development."

In other words: If they play their cards right, they can get a whole new generation of people with no experience to buy the idea that they are going to build them the green future we demand. As for their parents, who they just wiped out, and the brown and black immigrants who barely speak the language, they will validate new multiple family dwellings.

And they concluded: "The bad news is that it is unlikely that enough new housing can be built in urban areas to meet this growing demand. The result is likely to be rising urban housing costs--good for developers and owners and bad for homebuyers and renters with limited funds."

Let me tell you what that means in plain english. When a developer applies to the commission of a "built out" city for permission to build yet more, higher, denser property for which he is not willing to contribute additional costs of operating the services that are necessary to sustain it, and is requesting public money and tax forgiveness, he will use the argument that the new young workers need these places if they are to move here, and it will increase the tax base.

The city will fall deeper in debt, the tax burden will increase, and a new class of home buyers will suffer the ravages of the second wave of housing destruction.

The reality as reported by Fortune Magazine is more realistic.

Bikes-A-Million

We read the NYT story on the destruction of bikes in the Paris share program with sadness. The French sociological perspective is that the program is troubled by the inequality of persons who are acting out a salvo of class warfare. Could be.

I lived through the Provo white bike program in Amsterdam and witnessed the same destruction 35 years ago. That failure and evidence that humans seemingly won't maintain that in which they have no personal stake, motivated the antipathy of The Tragedy of the Commons thesis of Garrett Hardin. He was wrong then and those who snicker are wrong now. But not nearly as wrong as the silly but well intentioned civil servants in Paris, and their followers, constructing complex multi million dollar bike rental programs complete with corporate sponsors. (In the day, you went to a bike rental store and borrowed a bike).

I think the most important contributing factor in the Paris Debikel is the fact that the bow ties who designed this program had NO street smarts! I am afraid that they represent the legions of sustainable opportunists who believe that the answer to our environmental problems will be to build our way out, create green jobs, and be the next cool thing in the process.

Smart city dwellers know that their commuter, around town bike, is likely to be stolen. They buy them by the thousands for tens of dollars. They scrounge the millions of summer rentals that are blown out at the end of a season. They reclaim the bikes of the graduating college kids who leave them as they move on. They buy them at yard sales from people who are moving up or out of the sport. They know that police auctions are a great place to buy a bike on the cheap. Millions of bikes are retrofitted every year by smart riders looking for a set of wheels. Some of these recycled bikes are the stuff of legend.


Smart cities are adapting programs that begin with biker's needs. Bike stations are becoming more widespread The problems of commuting to work are being addressed and are discussed at length here.


That is not to say that bike sharing is doomed. Three days before the Paris story ran the Times featured a group ride to a Princeton based program.

There's hope. It just might be class warfare.