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Compost Nation
James Howard Kunstler, Clusterf*ck Nation
… Spring comes late up here. I was down in Georgia back in February and the daffodils there were already gone by, for goodness sake. But up here, they had barely sprouted as of the last week in April. The landscape (and townscape) had a horrible sort of laid bare look — like an old person in the intensive care unit getting a sponge bath in bed. The ground itself looked scrofulous, with vast quantities of plastic flotsam littering the roadside swales, and tatters of windblown plastic supermarket bags hanging off the sumac bushes, and no foliage yet to hide any of it.
But it was the buildings that really got me. You have to wonder: have Americans forgotten how to build dignified houses, or are we simply not dignified people anymore? Virtually every building put up after 1950 looked terrible and many of them were rotting into the ground. Most of them are little more than elaborate packing crates with a few doo-dads screwed on — exactly the kind of buildings, by the way, that Venturi and Scott Brown celebrated in their writings. They called them “decorated sheds,” the vernacular expression of the mainstream American soul.
The design failures of these things might be attributed to a loss of knowledge and a lack of attention to details, but I think a deeper explanation has to do with the diminishing returns of technology. We’ve never had more awesome power tools for workers in the building trades. We have compound miter saws, electric spline joiners, laser-guided tape measures, and many other nifty innovations, and we’ve never seen, in the aggregate, worse work done by so many carpenters. For most of them, apparently, getting a plain one-by-four door-surround to meet at a 45-degree miter without a quarter-inch gap is asking too much. In other words, we now have amazing tools and no skill.
(30 April 2007)
Carbon trading and why it will hit home
Alex May, Sydney Morning Herald
All the talk about targets for greenhouse gas emissions and carbon trading may seem entirely unrelated to homes and how we live — but it ain’t.
…British environmental expert Peter Head — who created China’s sustainable city of Dongtan — says individual carbon allocation could prompt us to move in with elderly parents and return to multi-generation households.
“Something we could all do tomorrow to make a big difference to our carbon footprint is have our elderly parents move in. You divide your carbon emissions by the number of people living in the house,” explains Head, a director of Arup, the company that engineered the Sydney Opera House and creates sustainable projects all over the world.
“If you team up as a family, you will find a better way of living. You wouldn’t have to travel to see your parents anymore, which is fantastically good for reducing emissions,” says the global guru of Green engineering. “Child care, having people around to help, eating communally and heating or cooling only one house instead of two or three is much more efficient than single households.”
Head says multi-generation households could save and trade individual carbon allocations more easily than single-person households. “There is no question that people will move to find these sorts of solutions to climate change,” Head says. “Whether it would work socially is another matter — I mean, what if you hate your daughter-in-law or can’t stand your father?”
(25 April 2007)
Better-heeled failing home economics too
David Streitfeld, LA Times
As more owners are unable to make higher payments, Deputy Strickland finds himself evicting people in nicer neighborhoods
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Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Strickland is a postman of bad news, delivering eviction notices in the western stretch of San Bernardino County.
He is armed with a Glock .45, which he seldom draws, and Scotch tape, which he goes through in prodigious amounts while posting court orders on doors and windows.
The deputy spends most of his days at down-market apartment complexes, where the destitute, the addicted and the forlorn fitfully live. But in recent months he has begun venturing into neighborhoods with spacious homes and groomed yards, bringing his legal warnings to those who have fallen hopelessly behind on their mortgages.
These people typically bought a home they couldn’t afford or drained their equity through incessant refinancing. If they had a chance to sell, they passed it up.
Eventually, the lender foreclosed on the property. When it was over, the home was auctioned off.
Now there’s a new owner. But they still won’t leave.
In some cases it’s denial; in others, unwarranted hope. They hang on as long as they can – often to the last week, sometimes to the last day.
Most of the time, they abandon the premises before they have to be forcibly removed, but not always.
That’s when Strickland shows up.
“You see me coming. You know I’m not exactly bringing tidings of joy,” the deputy says. “I’m the grim reaper.”
(6 May 2007)
Related from the UK Telegraph: American dream sours as housing market collapses (also at Common Dreams).
