Comments on: The Suburban Bulldozer

By: Buzzcut

Buzzcut — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:46:24 +0000

I’d rather live in a “slum” that is an exurban development with houses that are a few years old than live in Detroit or Buffalo. At least the weather is niceish in the Central Valley. You don’t spend much on heating, that’s a huge savings. Especially this winter, poor people in the North had outrageous gas bills because their old houses are so poorly built.

By: Buzzcut

Buzzcut — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:37:38 +0000

Jim, that is an awful, awful idea. Any licensing scheme (which is basically what you are proposing) inevitably gets captured by those being licensed, and used for their own purposes. Generally, it is used to make it unneccesarily harder to get into the profession being licensed, or to keep other, similar professions from doing certain work.

So… your “certificate of need” would just be used by certain, powerful builders to keep other builders at bay.

By: Jim Meredith

Jim Meredith — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:42:47 +0000

Something coincidental with this inflected my thinking toward the concept of “certificates of need” through which states correlate the amount of health care construction to some proofs of actual need. Could this be a device to control the specualtive overbuilding that leads to disasters like this? http://archizoo.com/2009/05/06/could-certificates-of-need-solve-the-mortgage-mess/

By: Steve M.

Steve M. — Tue, 12 May 2009 23:45:55 +0000

How come the highest neighborhood vacancy rates are in older industrial cities?

By: Georgette

Georgette — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:25:35 +0000

Sci fi anticipated this: give Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower a read!

By: hayden fisher

hayden fisher — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:30:38 +0000

Inevitable and only the beginning. It’s good to see that at least some of the market players have checked into reality, as painful as the reflection in the mirror might be.

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:39:38 +0000

Victorville is about 80 miles inland from LA, on the edge of the Mojave desert. It’s about 50% Latino, about 20% of population below the poverty line.

While I agree that this is a crazy place to be building new suburbs, it’s also crazy to demolish half-built houses that people could live in. Could they have been donated to Habitat for Humanity? A lot of Latinos work in construction, and could have finished the houses for low-income families.

The news story says the city was fining the developer for unfinished construction. I suspect zoning and nearby neighbors were an impediment to more creative solutions.

The bad news just keeps coming for the Central Valley. Stockton, Modesto & Merced are on one 70 mile stretch of Hwy 99.