A commenter in the thread below suggested that any new Philadelphia development requires parking, so developers can't be blamed for putting in stupid ass garages. It's true that this is a widespread belief, a belief so widespread that I even believed it until someone set me straight, and so widespread that many developers even believed it to be true for a time. But someone in the know set me straight and it isn't actually true. Any new development with 5 or more units needs to address parking, but single lot development doesn't.
It's true that you can get community opposition to development which doesn't have parking, though why "subtract one public parking space and replace it with one private one" is something which addresses such concerns escapes me.
More than that, often (though not always) the option exists to put the parking in either a back spot or garage. Just keep them off the front of the buildings.
Personally I've never really understood why "donating to candidates" was a high sin for mainstream media personalities, but certainly Bennett should've disclosed his support for McCain given the typical rules of their breed.
One of the rather depressing development trends here in Philly, where there has been a lot of rehabs and teardowns/new construction, is the proliferation of street level garages on major streets. I have nothing against people owning cars and understand that people want parking spots, but they really lead to the deterioration of the quality of a block. It takes away what was a public on-street parking lot and takes it private into the garage (some enterprising owners understand that they now have two spaces - the garage and their private space in front of it). They're a pedestrian hazard. String a few of them together and they make an eyesore. Blocks with lots of them tend to be dead zones, and in urban areas dead zones tend to attract crime (less foot traffic, fewer witnesses around).
While I actually think developers overestimate the demand for garage parking in the city - they do take away a significant amount of square footage of a house and on your typical Philly lot make for a rather strange and unappealing ground floor - I'm not against them altogether. Just put them in the back, off an alley.
So you know, Philly residents get cheap permit parking for on street spots, so lacking a garage or other private spot doesn't mean you can't park or require an expensive lot space.
....Visual aids. Here's a particularly ugly example. Remember that these lots are right up against the sidewalk, they usually aren't set back at all.
And here's what happens when you string a few together and completely kill the block.
I really wish members of Congress would understand that when they get involved in sports-related controversies to demonstrate their relevance and regular guyness they just make themselves look like idiots.
There are more important things to be spending their time on.
The book excoriates Mr. Bush and his GOP allies who repeatedly fanned such wedge issues as changing the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage, abortion and flag-burning. But he saves some of his harshest words for Democrats who paved the way for Mr. Bush to use the U.S. military to invade Iraq. . . .
"The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were," writes Chafee. "They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom.
"Instead of talking tough or meekly raising one's hand to support the tough talk, it is far more muscular, I think, to find out what is really happening in the world and have a debate about what we really need to accomplish," writes Chafee. "That is the hard work of governing, but it was swept aside once the fear, the war rhetoric and the political conniving took over."
Chafee writes of his surprise at "how quickly key Democrats crumbled." Democratic senators, Chafee writes, "went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration's nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?"
CNBC's Gasparino is reporting that a few years ago the ratings agencies told bond insurers, who had specialized in municipal bonds, that to maintain their AAA ratings they need to diversify into CDOs, otherwise known as Big Shitpile.
You know, if Bush actually wanted to get a poll bounce he could get on the teevee, say he's consulted with all the experts, concluded that the TSA liquid ban is the stupidest fucking thing since the last thing Jonah Goldberg wrote, and proclaim that he was ending it.
Source: 8 banks form consortium to seek rescue plan for bond insurers.
Banks working with bond insurers and NYS insurance dept.
Variety of solutions are being considered for rescuing bond insurers.
Kudlow loves it, AND IT IS NOT A GOVERNMENT BAILOUT SO STOP SAYING THAT, so you know it's bullshit.
This is just another ploy to delay the day of reckoning, and it will work as well as the last time the banks got together to try to start a fund to bail themselves out.
With today's report, the Labor Department revised the payroll numbers after reviewing more complete tax data not available earlier from state unemployment insurance programs and making adjustments to its estimates of seasonal hiring patterns.
The revision subtracted 376,000 jobs from the previous estimate for the year ended December 2007, bringing total job growth for the period to 1.137 million.
That's a monthly average of 94,750 for the period, below the 140,000 or so necessary to keep up with the growth in the working age population.
U.S. employers unexpectedly cut 17,000 non-farm jobs in January, the first time in nearly 4-1/2 years that U.S. payrolls shrank as fading construction and manufacturing sectors reflected the economy's waning momentum.
The Labor Department report on Friday came in much weaker than anticipated by analysts surveyed by Reuters, who had forecast 80,000 jobs would be added last month. The department revised December's new-job total up to 82,000 from 18,000 but the hiring trend clearly was fading as 2007 ended.
While I do think no-or-little-money-down combined with the general corrupt carnival atmosphere of the whole lending/housing markets in recent years are the major explanations, one certainly can't dismiss the likely role of the Bankruptcy Bill in all of this.
The issue at stake revolves around so-called delinquency rates, the proportion of people who fall behind on their debt repayments. When American households have faced hard times in previous decades, they tended to default on unsecured loans such as credit cards and car loans first – and stopped paying their mortgage only as a last resort. However, in the last couple of years households have become delinquent on their mortgages much faster than trends in the wider economy might suggest. That is particularly true of the less creditworthy subprime borrowers. Moreover, consumers have stopped paying mortgages before they halt payments on their credit cards or automotive loans – turning the traditional delinquency pattern on its head. As a result, mortgage lenders have started to face losses at a much earlier stage than in the past.
“In the past, if a household in America experienced financial problems it tended to go delinquent on its credit cards, but kept on paying its mortgage,” says Malcolm Knight, head of the Bank for International Settlements, the central banks’ bank. “Now what seems to be happening is that people who have outstanding mortgages that are greater than the value of their home, or have negative amortisation mortgages, keep paying off their credit card balances but hand in the keys to their house . . . these reactions to financial stress are not taken into account in the credit scoring models that are used to value residential mortgage-backed securities.”
One possible explanation is that it has become culturally more acceptable this decade for people to abandon houses or stop paying in the hope of renegotiating their home loans. The shame that used to be associated with losing a house may, in other words, be ebbing away – particularly among homeowners who took out subprime loans in recent years, as underwriting standards were loosened. Consumers may also be rationally re-evaluating the costs that come with defaulting on different forms of debt, in the light of recent bankruptcy law reforms in America.
All of this cultural "shame" stuff is nonsense. But bankruptcy laws exist largely for the benefit of creditors, not debtors, and if you don't make it a reasonable path for people who are underwater to take then they'll choose another course. And so they send in the keys and walk away from the house.
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