Duh! Trib's "Neighborhoods For Sale" Series
How cash, clout transform Chicago neighborhoods
DEVELOPERS: Many give to aldermanic campaigns in quest to build bigger, pricier projects.
ALDERMEN: They decide who can build what. Money, not planning, often drives process.
HOMEOWNERS: They are often left out of the decision-making and boxed in by towering structures.

Community input an illusion
ALDERMEN: They decide who can build what. Money, not planning, often drives the process.
ADVISORY GROUPS: Billed as neighborhood's voice, they are often stacked with developers.


This is the latest investigative series from the Chicago Tribune? Who assigned these stories, some out-of-towner who's never read Mike Royko? I thought everybody already knew how things get built in this city. The Chicago Reader's Ben "TIF" Joravsky has been writing about this sort of thing for years. The Tribune casts a wider net than Joravsky by creating a database to cross-reference zoning changes and campaign contributions, as well as including graphics that aren't in the Reader's budget, but it's really just the same old story that's been told since the golden days of boodle.

Labels: Chicago, duh

- posted by David Johnsen @ 4:30 PM 0 comments

 
Duh! Don't Leave Your GPS on the Dashboard
CBS Channel 2 ran this as their third story on the 10:00 news:

One of the most popular gifts for the holiday season turns out to be a very "hot item" targeted by thieves. Global positioning systems hang from a windshield or sit up on a dashboard. They're easy picking for gadget thieves. Since the first of the year, police in Aurora have had nine reports of stolen GPS units.

Do people really need to be told this? I bought a radar detector 20 years ago, and even as an innocent, far-west-suburban teenager, I knew better than to leave it attached to the windshield when I left the car. I suppose nowadays people are so distracted by their other personal electronics (cell phones, iPods, etc.) that they can't be bothered to consider that somebody might want to steal the compact, expensive hunk of technology sitting on the dashboard. Thank goodness Channel 2 is here to remind them.

But there was more shocking info to come:

Police say mall parking lots are perfect places to get away with the crime.

People break into cars at shopping malls? Hmm, I knew that 20 years ago as well (coincidentally, my local mall back then was the same one mentioned in the story). And yet, this was supposedly the third most important "news" that Channel 2 had to share with viewers tonight. I suppose it's better than telling us about Hillary Clinton's tears, Barack Obama's middle name, or John Edwards' haircut.

Labels: duh

- posted by David Johnsen @ 11:49 PM 0 comments

 
Duh! Big Houses Are Bad For The Environment
Almost every day, there is a news story that is so painfully obvious, it's a miracle someone got paid to write it. Because it's a shame to waste only my own time, I am starting an occasional "Duh!" feature to draw attention to these stories.

The big environmental story on AlterNet today is "Big Houses Are Not Green: America's McMansion Problem." What a shock!

In Los Gatos, Calif., controversy has raged this summer over the city planning commission’s approval of a proposed hillside home that will occupy a whopping 3,600 square feet – and that's just the basement. Atop that walkout basement will be 5,500 more square feet worth of house. The prospective owner says he’ll build to "green" standards, but at the Aug. 8 meeting where the permit was approved, the city's lone dissenting planning commissioner stated the obvious when he told the owner, "You have a 9,000-square-foot house with a three-car garage and a pool. I don't see that as green."

I love that quote. The sad part is that no one else agreed with him.

The article goes on to cite statistics about how 42% of new homes are 2400 square feet or larger, and then it details the cost of raw materials (lots of wood!) and energy. Builders highlight "green" features, but the most obvious seems to elude them: build a smaller freaking house! A study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology in 2005 says, "A 1,500-square-foot house with mediocre energy-performance standards will use far less energy for heating and cooling than a 3,000-square-foot house of comparable geometry with much better energy detailing" (the article notes that the "geometry" of most new homes is woefully inefficient for the sake of looking interesting).

Unfortunately, the American mindset is to get the biggest thing one can afford, be it a house, a car, or a television. Until that changes, we are going to be the energy-hogging bastards of the world.

Labels: duh, energy

- posted by David Johnsen @ 3:13 PM 0 comments