For hundreds of homeowners in this mostly middle-class corner of Denver — and an estimated 1.2 million more nationwide — the wave of foreclosures battering U.S. financial markets is quickly unraveling the American dream. Those who have lost homes here describe seeing their lives crumble into anxiety and embarrassment. Many leave for cheap apartments or rooms with relatives, a trend that is tightening the market for affordable housing.
This small corner of the Mile High City represents an extreme example of how foreclosures are transforming lives and neighborhoods. On some blocks, as many as one-third of the residents have lost their homes, making this one of the worst hotspots in a city that was among the first to feel the pinch of the foreclosure crisis. Many houses here remain empty, bank lockboxes on the front doors.
The foreclosure epidemic has swept so quickly through this part of Denver that in less than two years, lenders took action on 919 of the roughly 8,000 properties here, according to city records. Their owners defaulted on more than $171 million in mortgages they had used to buy their way out of apartments and into cul-de-sacs. Many were buying homes for the first time, in what seemed the most affordable of the city's new subdivisions. They paid their way with easy credit — sometimes secured from aggressive lenders who appeared to look past the checkered credit histories and unstable jobs of some of their customers. Ultimately, many of the buyers couldn't afford their mortgages.
Unless municipalities are prepared to take elaborate and sustained measures, some of these neighborhoods are going to be destroyed. Abandoned homes and lots, though a common feature of my neighborhood, really create neighborhood problems. And much contemporary suburban construction isn't exactly especially high quality. Looters, squatters, weekend partyers,...
Finally a bit of almost warm weather here in Philadelphia. Sadly the coffee shop I headed to this morning had just closed up, perhaps a sign of the looming recession (joke).
I recommend reading this primer by DHinMI. It isn't the biggest deal in the world, but it's one of those subjects that reporters frequently report in a completely misleading way. And unlike some issues, this one is rather simple and something they should (and probably do) understand. Corporations cannot give money to candidates. When people donate money to a candidate, they list their employer. But most people who give money aren't doing so because they think they're pushing the interests of their employer, they're just normal citizens donating to their favorite candidate. Corporate PACs, while still coming from individual employees in theory, are a bit different. The money still doesn't come from the firm itself, but obviously they exist to advance the interest of the firm/industry and there might be some informal coercion which gets employees to contribute to them.
Last November, I noted that ABC's Nightline, its long-running signature news program, had essentially boycotted Iraq as a news story. I found that over an 18-week span, from mid-July through late November, Nightline aired approximately 230 separate news segments, only one of which was about events on the ground in Iraq. In the 17 weeks since then, Nightline has continued to look the other way, which means that over a nearly nine-month span, during which time more than 300 reports aired, Nightline has effectively ignored the war in Iraq as a news event.
Big Media Matt says what I've tried to say many times, that no one is trying to turn the entire country in Manhattan. It's about creating economically viable spaces, often with rather modest changes in policy and focus, in which automobile reliance is reduced. These spaces require walkability and a sufficient population density to support certain kinds of neighborhood retail and services. Decades of bad policy and planning have worked in the other direction in many places which were pretty well-suited for this kind of thing, as a standard urban response to white flight was something like, "People are moving to the suburbs? Let's make the city more like the suburbs!"
And no one is trying to make every place like this. Some people like the country! Some people like exurbs! Some people like typical suburbia! But I do believe that many people would like the option to live in such placed, and those options are fairly limited or nonexistent in much of the country.
I have to read a lot of the internets every day. This primary really has made them come with extra stupid lately. Lots of people making transparently stupid arguments and pointlessly snide remarks. I appreciate that there are committed, strong, and opinionated supporters of both candidates and have nothing against a little bit of heat in political rhetoric....but please, please, cut out the stupid...
US employers cut payrolls by a bigger-than-expected 80,000 in March, adding more evidence that a housing downturn and credit crisis has pushed the economy into a recession.
It was the third monthly decline in a row and the biggest in five years, according to the Labor Department.
Adding to the bleak picture, the department revised the first two months of the year's job losses to a total of 152,000 from a previous estimate of 85,000.
...
Economists polled ahead of the report forecast a decline of 60,000 in non-farm payrolls and a rise in the unemployment rate to 5 percent.
...bad reading comprehension in the morning. I thought that paragraph was saying the unemployment rate was 5%. It isn't, it's 5.1%.
Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.
In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed that “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2003.
Sure it's a nice feel good thing with some benefits if a bunch of people volunteer to clean the streets of Philadelphia. But then they'll go home, and more trash will be generated and scattered around. The city needs to have more comprehensive street cleaning, more public and regularly replaced garbage receptacles, and to a least consider having more frequent trash collection in some areas.
But what is it that made supporting a senator who has earned an 83 lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union and votes with his party 88.3 percent of the time feel like mourning in the first place? They weren't this hard, after all, on fair-weather conservatives Bob Dole in 1996 or George H.W. Bush in 1988 and 1992, were they? Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance--the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer. And to conservatives, McCain has been too often one of the sneerers. It is, as much as anything else, a question of affect. As Michael Reagan wrote, "I don't like the way he treats people. You get the impression that he thinks everybody is beneath him."
They are not entirely imagining things. Birds fly, fish swim, McCain preens: it has ever been thus. His preening has turned the thin-skinned crypt-keepers of conservatism hysterical. "McCain's apostasies," Charles Krauthammer recently wrote in the Washington Post, "are too numerous to count." They aren't, really. Some conservatives still call the Republican nominee "Juan" McCain, for what Reagan calls "such blatantly anti-conservative actions as his support for amnesty for illegal immigrants." But of course Reagan's sainted father, in signing the 1986 immigration bill, was a more unapologetic and effective advocate of "amnesty" than McCain ever was--and you don't hear him getting labeled "Ronaldo" Reagan. Note, also, that other supposed bugaboo of conservative ideology: pork-barrel government spending. McCain is the Senate's leading fighter against spending earmarks. If pork was what they truly cared about, he'd be a hero. But that stance has earned him no points on the "conservative" side of the ledger.
The issues aren't the issue. George Stephanopoulos once asked Tom DeLay what it was conservatives demanded of McCain, and DeLay admitted as much: "I don't think they're demanding that he change in his position," he said. "It is attitude."
In other words: it's the ring-kissing, stupid. Consider George H.W. Bush's attitude: he all but groveled before conservatives--first calling supply-side doctrine "voodoo economics," then swallowing hard and accepting a spot as voodoo priest Reagan's running mate. Bob Dole, formerly a proud budget balancer, lay prostrate before them in accepting a 15 percent across-the-board tax cut as the cornerstone of his 1996 presidential platform, then took on movement hero Jack Kemp as his running mate.
I grew up during the "latchkey kid" era, when it was pretty normal for fairly young kids to have to do superhuman tasks like navigate their way from the bus stop to home and then spend a couple of hours alone before a parent would show up. At the time this wasn't necessarily seen as a good thing, but concerns were much more about kids being lonely and lacking human interaction than they were about lack of adult supervision and safety issues.
Obviously things have changed quite a bit, and I'm often shocked at how old kids have to be before parents are comfortable leaving them alone. It's their call, but definitely times have changed quite a bit.
And, yes, it's perfectly safe to put your 9-year-old on the subway. It isn't a choice every parent would make, and that's fine, but it's a perfectly sound choice.
And the woman who did it gets it right, that accidents and bad things can always happen and since parents get blamed for them they feel the need to go through elaborate steps to shield children from very low probability events. I'm reminded of my college days, when rape awareness education for women was all the rage. It started off in a sensible place, but it also gave women a list of "risky behaviors" which made them feel responsible for their own rape if they actually did crazy things like walk out alone at night.
The issue in the funny comment below isn't that someone should be spending their money at nice restaurants instead of fast food. I don't care how this person spends their money. And obviously for poor people fast food can provide a very cheap if not exactly healthy price/calorie meal.
It's the sneering at the idea that some people might actually enjoy something this person doesn't. They're idiots! Fools! Suckers! They've been tricked into spending money! Ha ha! They aren't as smart as I AM!!!
The general genre of telling other people how they should enjoy life and spend money and time is one of their more irksome things which has a lot of representation on the internet. I'm not talking about good financial advice, I'm talking about pointlessly criticizing other people for how they choose to spend their time and money.
The bits about tippping and bachelorhood were gravy.
By combining the fact-free observations of a futurist pundit and the hypocritical tirades of a sinful preacher, Siegel's book is as unreliable as it is insufferable. Ironically, he sounds like the caricature of bloggers he denounces: uninformed, shrill, defensive, and self-obsessed.
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