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Gas prices box in an Alabama community
Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
Cars have connected Wilcox County with the wider world, and with jobs. But now the drive doesn’t pay off.
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… Cheap gas, and cars to put it in, have long given Americans the freedom to roam. For the people of Coy — a largely African American community of about 900, two hours southwest of Montgomery — that freedom has been particularly vital, delivering them out of rural isolation and into decent, if far-flung, employment.
A generation ago, black laborers sharecropped cotton on white-owned land here. Others worked in nearby sawmills. By the 1960s, the mills were thriving, but small-scale farming was fading away, and the civil rights era had opened new job possibilities.
Those jobs, however, tended to be spread around the state. The people of Coy gassed up their cars and drove to them. They drove 13 miles on the two-lane highway to Camden,the county seat, or they ventured farther afield, to the bigger cities of Selma and Montgomery. They took manufacturing jobs and teaching jobs, handyman gigs and government desk work.
Today, gas money and a functioning car are still vital for workers who wish to leave this stretch of pastureland, low-slung houses and tumbledown trailers. The only public transportation is a regional van service that mostly shuttles the elderly to doctor’s appointments. There are only a few local farmhand jobs.
(18 April 2008)
Housing Bubble Popped by Spike in Fuel Costs, New Analysis Shows
Outlying Suburbs Hardest Hit with Devalued Real Estate (PDF)
Joe Courtrigh, CEOs For Cities
While predatory lending and sub-prime mortgages have taken the blame for the dramatic decrease in housing prices and the glut of foreclosures nationwide, a new analysis shows that rising fuel costs played a significant role in the collapse of America’s housing bubble. That’s according to a new report released today by CEOs for Cities titled “Driven to the Brink: How the Gas Price Spike Popped the Housing Bubble and Devalued the Suburbs,” by economist Joseph Cortright.
“The popular narrative on the collapse of housing prices has only blamed exotic lending practices,” said Cortright, “but the much more important story is about how higher gas prices have re-drawn the map of urban real estate values. Vibrant central cities just got a whole lot more valuable.”
The analysis found that while there is overall weakness in housing prices, price declines are generally far more severe in far-flung suburbs and metropolitan areas with weak central cities. The reason for this shift is rooted in the dramatic increase in gas prices over the past five years.
Cities and neighborhoods that require lengthy commutes and provide few transportation alternatives to the private vehicle are falling in value more precipitously than more central, compact and accessible places, the study shows.
…The run-up in gasoline prices has re-written the calculus of suburban housing economics in two key ways. First, there has been an income effect: suburban households spend more of their income on transportation and gas and have therefore taken the biggest hit to their budgets.
As a result, they have less income to spend on housing. Second, there has been a price effect: because living in distant suburbs requires more driving, potential buyers are now willing to bid less for houses at the suburban fringe.
… The report concludes with five policy implications:
- The relative decline in prices in sprawling suburbs is likely to persist because of the continued high price of gas, and governments should plan accordingly.
- The market for higher density and redevelopment in close-in neighborhoods is likely to grow stronger, and local land use plans should accommodate this shift.
- Government can help families save money by making it easy and convenient to live in mixed-use, close-in neighborhoods served by transit.
- Reducing vehicle miles traveled not only saves families money, households that drive less have more to spend on other things, stimulating the local economy. Additionally, reducing oil consumption not only cuts greenhouse gas emissions but lowers the trade deficit.
- Many distant exurban developments may no longer be economical, and propping up building and homeownership in these areas encourages unsustainable settlement that makes families even more vulnerable to future gas price increases.
CEOs for Cities is a cross-sector network of urban leaders from the civic, corporate, academic, and philanthropic sectors in partnerships around urban strategy.
(27 April 2008)
Contributor Ed writes:
Posted above is the media release about the study. Read the full study here (28-page PDF)
Mow Is Less
Hans Noeldner, Entropic Journal
It began sensibly enough. The courthouse square and the schoolyard. The space in front of the house, around the garden, a path to the privy. The younger children would cut some lawn every week or so with the reel mower. Pa and the older boys would scythe the tall grasses in the orchard and surrounding the outbuildings to gather for hay a few times each season. Grazing animals performed much of the “lawn” maintenance too. A century ago, people mowed modestly — enough for picnics and band concerts and the children to play croquet.
How times have changed! Today we-the-people of the United States mow 30 to 40 million acres of grass, an area almost as large as the state of Wisconsin, about half the acreage our nation devotes to corn. Although urban lawns tend to be very small, suburbanites tend to mow a third-of-an-acre or more, and many exurbanites, non-urban businesses, and retired farmers mow five to ten acres of lawn.
Each year we apply millions of tons of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and billions of gallons of fossil-fuel-pumped water to make our lawns grow luxuriantly – and then burn billions of gallons of petroleum to pare back the over-stimulated turf! Tragically, many of us use more water and non-renewable fuels to maintain our lawns than most other humans on Earth use to grow food for themselves.
Do our lawns serve a basic human need? Is our enormous allocation of resources to turf justified because lawns provide essential food, clothing, shelter, or protections from dangers or disease? Are 30 to 40 million acres of mowed grass a practical necessity for civilization?
NO! Rigorously-shorn lawns became fashionable a mere century ago, and their tremendous expansion in the last fifty years was made possible by skyrocketing land, fuel, and water consumption. Modest areas of mowed grass for play areas and around gardens and buildings are indeed practical, but we have far exceeded this. Most of our current lawn acreage experiences human traffic only when we (or our lackeys) are doing maintenance.
So what is the present-day mowed, fertilized, pesticized, and irrigated American Lawn? A host for diverse native grasses and forbs? A sanctuary for birds and other wildlife? An efficient watershed that absorbs, filters, and slowly releases rainwater? A source of livestock feed? An opportunity for healthy exercise? A soil-building carbon dioxide “sink” that helps to fight the greenhouse effect?
NO! Most contemporary lawns comprise a chemically addicted monoculture, so very few plant or animal species live there. Birds cannot nest in frequently cut turf. Short grass and compacted lawn soil absorb significantly less rainfall than woodlands or native meadow vegetation. Lawns furnish almost no livestock feed today. Few kids or adults benefit from aerobic lawn-mower-pushing every week; we perch our ever-fatter bottoms on noisy, gas-guzzling riding mowers instead. Given the amount of fossil fuels we use to mow, fertilize, water, and chemically treat our lawns, we actually exacerbate global warming.
Mow has become less. Less wildlife and plant life. Less clean air and water. Less peace and quiet. Less physical fitness and environmental health. Less financial and energy security. Lawn mowing even plunges our nation deeper into debt, since we now import two-thirds of our petroleum. To keep our mowers fueled and this vast acreage faithfully shorn in the decades to come, will we continue to send forth our soldiers to serve as World Oil Policemen?
When it comes to lawns, we-the-people show no more wisdom or foresight than the sheep and cattle which once cropped the grass. It’s time to wise up, one yard at a time — starting with our own!
Links and references
ohioline.osu.edu/sc177/sc177_14.html
www.nwf.org/backyardwildlifehabitat/problems.cfm
(27 April 2008)
