An asylum for the preservation of illusion.

Prospect'n

You can pretty much assume that if someone is a developer, he's a dirtbag. That's not to say that there aren't some good ones out there, but the vast majority are looking to get rich by dumping crap on our neighborhoods. As wretched as the developer's inferno is, however, the deepest ring is reserved for the speculator. The speculator is a creature that drains money out of a neighborhood with no intention of ever putting anything back in. It sits on key property for years--sometimes decades--hoping for a higher price, while the neighborhood is left to suffer vacant lots or boarded buildings long after redevelopment would have become viable.

I mention this because of an article I came across from the Buisness Journal of Milwaukee which reports that the Chicago-based CMC Heartland Partners has been making promises to the City of Milwaukee for years so it could continue to buy low and sell high on properties around the city, driving up their eventual development costs. The excuse CMC gave for the failed projects is that the City of Milwaukee is too difficult to work with (their submitted projects failed to get approval because they violated city zoning), yet the eventual buyer of most of their properties ended up being state and local government agencies. Some were bought by the city itself.

Diversity Is Chic (Sorta)

Planning Magazine discusses the way suburban municipalities are slipping multi-family housing into formerly homogeneous single-family areas through the use of small projects--often consisting of a single building of 5-6 flats or rowhouses--that fit into the prevailing lot pattern. There's a good analysis of why mixture is good for the neighborhood, financing issues faced by small but non-standardized projects, and perhaps most amusingly, the still virulent and sometimes personal attacks against the developers by NIMBYs.

Most interesting is that the typical New Urbanist canard about providing for an economically diverse neighborhood is only hinted at, but never directly asserted. New Urbanism provides many good things but economic diversity is not one of them. Given that the single biggest unspoken (and oftentimes spoken) fear of these NIMBYs is of having to live next to the racial or economic other, perhaps the the key to "infiltration" is dropping the pretense that you're solving social problems.

Securing the Pundit's Pulpit

Move over David Brooks, there’s a new kid in town, and he appears to be so good at conveniently missing the point as to make the bobo author look like an amateur. I am, of course, talking about Joel Kotkin, who manages to do something our favorite conservative could never quite pull off: repeat himself in a novel way every article. He does this, simply enough, by glancing at the front page—thereby discovering the newest piece of evidence that New York is dead and the future lies in Phoenix (after his artful interpretation, of course). It should therefore come as no surprise that the London attacks spell, according to Mr Kotkin’s percipient pen, the end to everything that doesn’t involve an attached garage.