News from Everywhere!
Report: GM considering Chapter 11 filing, new company
CHICAGO — — General Motors Corp [GM-N], nearing a Tuesday deadline to present a viability plan to the U.S. government, is considering as one option a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that would create a new company, the Wall Street Journal said in its Saturday edition.
I guess the canary has died in Windsor, we are so not today’s story!
Western Canada hit hardest by decline… Really now!
B.C. and Alberta see swifter, sharper downturn than other provinces as housing slumps and bankruptcies soar
SOMBA K’E/YELLOWKNIFE - For the second consecutive year, Yellowknife was named Canada’s most sustainable small city by a national business magazine. One sustainable city
Who Will Save The Suburbs (Part 1), Saving The Suburbs (part 2) By Allison Arieff of the New York Times.
Blue IsThe New Green; Allison Arieff of the New York Times. Living roofs, living walls (see picture of tunnel entrance), grey water and rain water harvesting.
Project for Public Spaces: Greatest Hits of 2008: 10 Trends Shaping the Future of Our Communities
- Placemaking gains ground around the globe
- Collaboration is the key to making change
- Greenplace: How community revitalization fights climate change
- Placemaking is essential to vibrant travel destinations
- Libraries emerge as new town squares:
- Librarians represent a newly emerging force for placemaking. They already provide a resource center for their communities, but many of them are now pushing to turn their libraries into civic centers that foster a sense of community and offer a unique gathering place. Many librarians now envision their facilities as both virtual and literal town squares for their neighborhoods and downtowns. PPS recently offered workshops and keynote addresses at library conferences in four provinces, and in early 2009 will give a keynote presentation to the National Librarian Conference in Canada. We have learned a lot about the potential of placemaking from these innovative librarians. Are you reading this city council?!! Forget your canals! And build a place for ALL OF US, just not for some jocks and jockettes! And I am proud to say I am a Librarian, one of the leading professions for the 21st century!
- How cities stay lively 12 months a year
- The Power of 10 leverages community assets
- Public markets provide a leg up in a down economy
- The rise of community-based transportation planning
- New developments create innovative models for destinations
Saving Buffalo’s Untold Beauty
ONE of the most cynical clichés in architecture is that poverty is good for preservation. The poor don’t bulldoze historic neighborhoods to make way for fancy new high-rises.
ARCHITECTURE; It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out
As jobs tonic, big digs may be a thing of the past by TAVIA GRANT of The Globe and Mail
The image is persuasive: Thousands of industrious workers wielding shovels to fix Canada’s crumbling roads and bridges, netting a windfall of earnings for their families and motoring the economy out of recession. Trouble is, it may be an image from another era.
While infrastructure spending is a great way to prop up economic activity, many economists don’t see it doing much for job growth, where money may be better spent on daycare and nursing homes.
The knocks against infrastructure are that it is not as labour-intensive as it used to be, tends to employ many more men than women and, these days, requires skills in engineering, technology and architecture that are already in short supply, critics say.
“A lot of this ethos of infrastructure-equals-jobs comes from the 1930s when you put a lot of guys to work digging ditches and shovelling gravel. And we don’t do that any more,” said Dr. Jim McNiven, professor emeritus and former dean of management at Dalhousie University.
How a Metro Nation Would Feel the Loss of the Detroit Three Automakers: The Brookings Institute
Project for Public Spaces (PPS) Placemaking Matters More Than Ever in a Down Economy
By Fred Kent: “In looking back at everything Project for Public Spaces has accomplished since 1975, as I did recently at a sidewalk café near my home in Brooklyn, it has never been more clear that when you focus on the idea of “place,” everything changes. Paying serious attention to places represents a breakthrough for our society, which can spark genuine progress in how we govern ourselves, how we are involved in our communities, how streets and public spaces feel to us, how we shop, work, play and socialize with our friends. If regular folks are encouraged to make the key decisions about their own neighborhoods, towns, cities and regions, a remarkable wave of citizen activity will flourish that can transform our communities in positive ways. (bold is by this author)
see also UrbanRat’s guest blog: Rules for Radicals or how to organize at the local level.
To see more topics by PPS go here
After my last week’s experience with and in Mississauga, seeing will be believing!
The Slumming of Suburbia
The poor are fleeing our cities, but life is not always greener, even when affordable housing comes with a two-car garage.
“Americans are disillusioned with sprawl, they’re tired of driving, they recognize the soullessness of suburban life, and yet we keep on adding more suburban communities,” saidChristopher B. Leinberger, a land-use expert at the University of Michigan. He said consumer preference is reflected by Hollywood: “People identify with Sex and the City and Seinfeld. So why are we still building like Leave it to Beaver?”
Arts Ban in Stimulus Is Stupid Economics: Commentary by James S. Russell of Bloomberg.com
From an economic standpoint, starving the arts is suicidal. Consider the case of the High Line, the park in the Meatpacking District. The City of New York invested $170 million in the project, which directly inspired as many as 50 major residential projects worth as much as $5 billion. And the park isn’t even open yet.
Follow the Artists! Yes! Artists build communities! A related story and a Canadian perspective
Four celebrity restaurants have located beneath the High Line. High-end boutiques, from Diane von Furstenberg to an Apple store, have rushed into the neighborhood. The Whitney Museum of American Art is raising $435 million to build a branch next to the park.
The High Line would not have been possible if its Meatpacking neighborhood had not become an art-gallery mecca. The galleries moved in because artists and scrappy institutions like the Dia Art Foundation pioneered the area in 1987, paying cheap rents when food processors left.
Artists previously had cleaned up SoHo starting in the 1960s, setting up paint-spattered studios in derelict industrial spaces sandwiched between sweatshops.
SoHo, of course, now commands some of the highest residential prices in New York, and the artists were priced out.
The process by which artists pave the way for high-end development is now well established in the real estate industry. Over the years, developers have chased artists from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Williamsburg in Brooklyn and to Long Island City in Queens. Artists might be annoyed by this stalking, yet the financial value to the city is huge, and the value in terms of neighborhood vitality is incalculable.
OH! OH! Forget about Environmental Assessments!
Ottawa will fast-track environmental assessments to expedite new public works projects, says federal Transport Minister John Baird.
In a move designed to ensure money earmarked for infrastructure flows more quickly, stimulating the recession-plagued economy, Baird said the federal government would slash environmental assessment (EA) red tape.
Now Eddie has the Feds to fight or sue!
NIMBYS are on the endangered species list and we could get a bridge and a road we don’t want or need!
It’s a term both McGuinty, and Ontario Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman used this week to warn that the province won’t be stopped from developing green energy projects that are in everyone’s best economic and environmental interests. OH! OH!
City’s heart is in its budget: Ethicist A very interesting article,
For Michael Gillette, the philosopher politician of Virginia, budget-making is an exercise in practical ethics, exposing a city’s most deeply held values and the kind of place it wants to be.
“A budget document, perhaps more than any other, is a values document, says Gillette, a city councillor in Lynchburg, Va., and a paid ethicist for neighbouring cities. “You can say you believe in all sorts of things. But if I really want to see what you value, I’m going to look at what you spend money on.”
Gillette says each city will have its own priorities, but argues it’s better to keep existing programs operating well than to trim them into irrelevance. It’s a waste of money, for instance, to cut a 12-week program to, say, four weeks in the name of cost-savings – in the process rendering the program ineffective.
I’m hooked on gambling and gambling is hooked on me! So Caesars Windsor and the OLG hopes!
The dilemma of the casino state
Call it the gambling paradox: The economy’s in the tank and we need public money to get it going again. Legal gambling pours a stream of cash into the province’s coffers, especially when times are tough.
So by offering more and increasingly addictive games – taking advantage of the whims and desires of the optimistic, greedy and addicted – the government can help us all. Immoral or not? That policy knot is the subject of a timely new book.
“With gambling, it’s kind of an odd situation, because we expect the state to protect people, to make sure people are not injured. But with gambling, the government is providing an activity that is kind of addictive and tends to take money from the poorest,” said Thomas Klassen, co-editor of and contributor to Casino State: Legalized Gambling in Canada. Klassen, an associate professor in the political science department at York University, compiled the book with James Cosgrave, a professor of sociology at Trent University.
Ya! Ya! Promises!, Promises! I’ll believe it when I see it article!
“In the weeks to come, our government will be announcing more initiatives under our economic action plan, all designed to create jobs, to boost economic activity and to prepare for the future in communities across this country,” Mr. Harper said. Since when did Harper care about cities? Oh! He wants to stay in government!
Canada has no choice but to go global; the end of the American century!
The trade news was frightening yesterday. For the first time in 33 years, we’re (Canada) in the red. A $458-million deficit in December, fuelled by a 10 per cent plunge in exports, mainly to the United States.
While the American economy will rebound (it always rebounds) from this stretch of penury, it won’t be like the old days. With the encroachment of Asian powers, such as China and India, the global courtyard will no longer be a Yankee esplanade. The American century is over, and for this country the ramifications will accrue. We will be forced, whether we like it nor not, to find other pastures.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty on electricity conservation and generation ….. HUH! What?
…one of the failures of the government of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has been its inability to mobilize people to the environmental cause. And that’s unfortunate because the least expensive way of retaining electrical capacity in Ontario’s grid is through conservation. Mr. McGuinty should have Ontarians thinking constantly about turning off that light bulb, shutting down the computer, not leaving the television running unwatched and buying low-energy appliances.
Yet there is a more immediate goal. According to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, the province could be completely coal-free by next year if Queen’s Park enacted a tough Green Energy Act and promoted conservation.
This is more than just a nice-to-have. Taking coal out of the Ontario energy mix would save the equivalent of the annual emissions of 2.3 million cars. This would be a massive boon to the environment, remarkably inexpensive and surprisingly effective.
The possible dark side of Biofuels!
Policies favoring biofuel crop production may inadvertently contribute to, not slow, the process of climate change, Gibbs said. Such an environmental disaster could be “just around the corner without more thoughtful energy policies that consider potential ripple effects on tropical forests,” she added.
Gibbs’ predictions are based on her new study, in which she analyzed detailed satellite images collected between 1980 and 2000. The study is the first to do such a detailed characterization of the pathways of agricultural expansion throughout the entire tropical region. Gibbs hopes that this new knowledge will contribute to making prudent decisions about future biofuel policies and subsidies.
For Valentine’s Day: Love, Divorce and The Economic Crisis
If only our city councilors listen to their public! From The Hamilton Spectator’s: City Hall Blog by Nicole MacIntyre: One is the Loniest Number
Wow, quite the moment at council tonight. The vote on the $2 million glass enclosure was 13-1 against. That’s right, only one person supported it - the mayor.
Right before the vote, Councillor Chad Collins called for a standing recorded vote, despite knowing it was clearly going his way. (Standing recorded votes are optional and typically done when politcians want a formal record of council’s position, i.e. the winners and losers). The mayor, who didn’t speak to the issue during the televised meeting, was forced to stand alone as the only supporter of the proposal.
Councillors Lloyd Ferguson and Russ Powers, who previously supported the addition, were absent. Councillors Tom Jackson, Terry Whitehead, Margaret McCarthy, who supported the enclosure at previous meetings, changed their votes at council. Clearly the public backlash had an impact.
London and area get 88 million
Rider Paradox: Surge in Mass, Drop in Transit … ! I hope city council reads this before they cut public transit! From, you can’t win for trying department!
GIS, GPS meet PsychoGeography neat experiment!
Especially for Chris! How the Crash will Reshape America, Richard Florida, The Atlantic magazine, a very long but worth your time to read article!!! Rated ***** five stars!
What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?
The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.
Perhaps no major city in the U.S. today looks more beleaguered than Detroit, where in October the average home price was $18,513, and some 45,000 properties were in some form of foreclosure. A recent listing of tax foreclosures in Wayne County, which encompasses Detroit, ran to 137 pages in the Detroit Free Press. The city’s public school system, facing a budget deficit of $408 million, was taken over by the state in December; dozens of schools have been closed since 2005 because of declining enrollment. Just 10 percent of Detroit’s adult residents are college graduates, and in December the city’s jobless rate was 21 percent.
To say the least, Detroit is not well positioned to absorb fresh blows. The city has of course been declining for a long time. But if the area’s auto headquarters, parts manufacturers, and remaining auto-manufacturing jobs should vanish, it’s hard to imagine anything replacing them.
When work disappears, city populations don’t always decline as fast as you might expect. Detroit, astonishingly, is still the 11th-largest city in the U.S. “If you no longer can sell your property, how can you move elsewhere?” said Robin Boyle, an urban-planning professor at Wayne State University, in a December Associated Press article. But then he answered his own question: “Some people just switch out the lights and leave—property values have gone so low, walking away is no longer such a difficult option.”
Perhaps Detroit has reached a tipping point, and will become a ghost town. I’d certainly expect it to shrink faster in the next few years than it has in the past few. But more than likely, many people will stay—those with no means and few obvious prospects elsewhere, those with close family ties nearby, some number of young professionals and creative types looking to take advantage of the city’s low housing prices. Still, as its population density dips further, the city’s struggle to provide services and prevent blight across an ever-emptier landscape will only intensify.
But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.
The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy. Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they otherwise would. That means less spending on medical technology, or software, or alternative energy—the sectors and products that could drive U.S. growth and exports in the coming years. Artificial demand for bigger houses also skews residential patterns, leading to excessive low-density suburban growth. The measures that prop up this demand should be eliminated.
If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there. A recent study by Grace Wong, an economist at the Wharton School of Business, shows that, controlling for income and demographics, homeowners are no happier than renters, nor do they report lower levels of stress or higher levels of self-esteem.
If there is one constant in the history of capitalist development, it is the ever-more-intensive use of space. Today, we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life. That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.
Finally, we need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try. Places like Pittsburgh have shown that a city can stay vibrant as it shrinks, by redeveloping its core to attract young professionals and creative types, and by cultivating high-growth services and industries. And in limited ways, we can help faltering cities to manage their decline better, and to sustain better lives for the people who stay in them.
The Stanford economist Paul Romer famously said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
I have finally caught up on my reading for the past week! And it is only Saturday …two blogs in twelve hours! Maybe another tomorrow to catch up!
“Reading, everything and anything, it doesn’t matter..read as if you life depends on it, has always been my weapon against the darkness!” Mark Bradley, PS: I have read and do read everything that I post here!
Tags: Alternative Energy, Architecture, arts, Auto industry, Budgets, Buffalo, Conservation, culture, detroit, Economic crisis, Environmental assessment, Gambling, GIS, Global economy, Governance, GPS, Heritage planning, Infrastructure, Libraries, NIMBY, Parking, place making, Psychogeography, Public spaces, Reuse, Richard Florida, Suburbs, Windsor
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There could be no better investment in America than to invest in America becoming energy independent! We need to utilize everything in out power to reduce our dependence on foreign oil including using our own natural resources. Create cheap clean energy, new badly needed green jobs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The high cost of fuel this past year seriously damaged our economy and society. The cost of fuel effects every facet of consumer goods from production to shipping costs. After a brief reprieve gas is inching back up. OPEC will continue to cut production until they achieve their desired 80-100. per barrel. If all gasoline cars, trucks, and SUV’s instead had plug-in electric drive trains, the amount of electricity needed to replace gasoline is about equal to the estimated wind energy potential of the state of North Dakota. There is a really good new book out by Jeff Wilson called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence Now. http://www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com
Local blogger Andrew Foot now a brand
http://www.windsorstar.com/Technology/Andrew+Foot+brands+himself+through+blog/1294655/story.html
Way to go Andrew! When is the perfume coming out and the clothing line?
What would THAT perfume smell like? Old Buildings don’t really smell that attractive!
Great job Andrew. Now who’s blog is in line next for The Star’s interviews?
The brand is here and now! Stay tuned for the new Andrew Foot Edition Ford Explorer!!!
It has been a bad week for Windsor’s leveraged three (Chrysler, Harrah’s, and CanWest).
Chrysler is pleading for additional government bailout money to stay out of bankruptcy; Harrah’s has maxed-out on it’s $2 billion credit line; and CanWest desperate for cash miscalculates the market and is forced into an embarrassing reversal.
GM, Chrysler seek billions more in aid
http://www.windsorstar.com/Cars/Chrysler+seek+billions+more/1299604/story.html
Harrah’s Bonds Drop After Request to Drain Revolver
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ai1kS5Gf3OjI
Ten Holdings Elects Not to Proceed with Proposed Equity Offering
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Ten-Holdings-Elects-Not-to-bw-14394793.html
The parent company of the Windsor Star (CanWest) is scrambling to secure a financial lifeline before the end of the month to avoid sliding into bankruptcy protection.
CanWest seeks financial saviour
http://www.bnn.ca/news/7251.html