This morning you could have seen me on the 903am San Bernardino Line train from Los Angeles Union Station to Claremont. If I missed that train, the next train was at 1103am and my seminar at CMC started at 1030am. Knowing that the supply of such reverse commute trains going from the city to the eastern suburbs was small, I arrived at Union Station at 730am. I also arrived this early because if I had taken a later taxi from Westwood, I would have gotten stuck in congestion.

So, it took me 2.5 hours to go from Westwood Los, Angeles to Claremont, Los Angeles by taxi and public transit. Can you travel 2.5 hours in St. Louis and still be in St. Louis? I would guess that you would be in Chicago. I did enjoy my trip to Claremont McKenna College. http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/econ/seminars/

The train does attract a group of people I do not run into in my typical "university" life. I over-heard a number of exotic discussion ranging from drugs, to dating advice, to the challenges of having a boyfriend in prsion. I was having trouble doing my referee reports with all of these juicy tidbits of gossip flying around the train car.

In other news, I'm impressed by how intellectual property flows. I found a cool figure from my Green Cities book reproduced in this
Report Presented at the World Economic Forum . I'm waiting for my royalty check and my chance to meet either President Clinton at the WEF or is it WWF session.

UCLA teaching starts on thursday. There are plenty of students now here on campus.
I'm trying to start some research on the demand for solar paneled homes.

If you are a long time reader of this exciting blog, you may remember this classic;
greeneconomics.blogspot.com/2005/08/giving-hybrids-traction-veblen-status.html
where I discuss how the Prius signals your "greeness" to others and this increases demand for this vehicle among the greens.

I am now interested in whether observable solar panels have a similar effect.
One interesting point is that I've been told that there is population heterogeneity.
Some home builders are designing roofs that have solar panels built into them but do not look "weird" --- they look like any other roof. It will interest me whether social scientists can explain the patterns of who buys a solar panel roof versus who buys a solar panel roof "disguised" as a typical roof.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-solar25sep25,1,2162627.story?coll=la-headlines-business&ctrack=1&cset=true

Sun-powered homes defy a cool housing market

Builders say buyers are seeking them out, and solar industry officials say growth is going through the roof.

By Elizabeth Douglass
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 25, 2007

With foreclosures rising and home prices diving, there is a bright spot in California's residential real estate market: Solar-powered homes are starting to outsell traditionally electrified new homes in several markets, and developers are stepping up their use of the technology.

Perhaps it's only fitting for a state that so openly celebrates its sunshine. Still, the growing popularity of household solar power is an encouraging sign for the thousands of solar enthusiasts and vendors gathering in Long Beach this week.

"Those builders are seeing that they'll get more buyers coming to their developments when they have solar. They sell like hot cakes," said Bernadette del Chiaro, energy specialist at the advocacy group Environment California.

Julie Blumden, a vice president at SunPower Corp., a San Jose-based manufacturer of solar roof tiles, said builders using solar were selling homes faster than nonsolar competitors -- an important factor in a slow market. "The increase in sales velocity is actually paying for the solar systems," she said.

SunPower, which sells its solar tiles to builders including Lennar Homes and Grupe Co., said it had orders to provide solar systems for 3,000 new homes in California in the coming years.

"The last time we saw interest in solar that was anything close to this was back in the 1980s, the first time there were federal tax credits for solar energy," said Julia Judd Hamm, executive director of the Solar Electric Power Assn. and co-chair of the Solar Power 2007 conference underway at the Long Beach Convention Center. "But the numbers then aren't even comparable to what we're seeing now."

Solar power is hotter than ever, helped by California's ambitious Million Solar Roofs rebate program, federal tax credits and growing public and political support for renewable power of all kinds. The U.S. solar industry saw record growth last year, with California the largest market by far, according to a study by the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development. And 2007 is shaping up to be another big year, industry officials say.

The boom also has swelled the community of solar products and pitchmen.

Both will be on display at the solar conference and expo, which is expected to draw more than 11,000 attendees in Long Beach, up from 8,500 at last year's event in San Jose, organizers say. Tonight, the show is free to the public from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Exhibitors will be hawking photovoltaic solar panels in all forms, with some companies showing off systems that embed the technology in carports, roofing tiles and other structures. Some will be targeting individual homeowners, while others will be angling for business with utilities that want to boost their use of renewable power.

California's largest electric utilities, including Edison International's Southern California Edison Co., PG&E Corp.'s Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Sempra Energy's San Diego Gas & Electric Co., have signed deals to build power-plant-sized solar facilities in and around the Mojave Desert or negotiated contracts with companies putting up such plants.

"Obviously, there are a nearly unlimited number of rooftops available in California and across the country" for individual solar power production, Hamm said. "At the same time, the whole concept of utility-scale plants is really just starting to gain momentum. So it's going to be a combination of the two."

California's $3.3-billion Million Solar Roofs program is based on the notion that businesses and homeowners would install solar systems faster if the cost was partially offset by rebates and incentives. The goal is to create 3,000 megawatts of new solar power in California by 2017 and to build solar power systems into half of all new homes by 2015.

"We were at 1% in 2004, and we're probably only at about 5% of all new homes right now," said Del Chiaro of Environment California. "It's good growth, but we're going to have to ramp up quite significantly to get to that 50% mark."

The solar power industry is drawing its share of star power.

Cable television mogul Ted Turner, who will deliver one of the keynote speeches launching the show today, teamed up this year with New Jersey solar developer Dome-Tech Solar to form a venture called DT Solar. Turner, chairman of Turner Enterprises Inc., said the renamed solar company would continue its focus on designing and installing large-scale projects and was expanding into California and other U.S. markets.

"Clean alternative energy is going to be a huge market because it's going to be done all over the world and it's got to be done right away. We're out of time," Turner said.

"Solar has probably the most potential because the sun is everywhere."

Hamm and others are encouraged by the explosion of start-up companies and new products in the solar industry, as well as by the technology's growing popularity with the public. But she knows solar is still a small fry in the electricity world.

"I don't think anybody in the solar industry thinks that solar is the answer and is eventually going to take over," she said. "Right now, solar electricity is about one-tenth to two-tenths of a percent of the entire U.S. energy mix. It's barely even a dot on the radar screen."

elizabeth.douglass@latimes.com

Suppose you want to plant 1 million trees in your city and your name isn't Johnny Appleseed, how are you going to get this job done? The Los Angeles "solution" is to give them away for free and hope that the gift receivers actually plant the tree somewhere. This Los Angeles Times article questions whether this cheap strategy is working. Behavioral economists would say that receiving the gift would make the recipient feel that he "owes you" and to follow through with what he promised to do (to plant it).

Now rather than appealing to folk's guilt about not doing the right thing --- the Mayor of L.A could appeal to their pocketbook! This Wharton Study by Grace Wong and Susan Wachter studies the real estate returns to greening your local area.

http://real.wharton.upenn.edu/%7Ewongg/research/index2.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/los_angeles_metro/la-me-million24sep24,1,3834860,full.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

From the Los Angeles Times

A million L.A. trees: Will they take root?
The city is giving them away, but no one knows if they are being planted.

By David Zahniser
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 24, 2007

Monica Barra went to South Los Angeles last month to attend a jazz festival. She went home with a free tree, a one-gallon African sumac that she lugged around on a Sunday afternoon past the shops and restaurants of Leimert Park.

The college senior took the tree on an impulse, though each tree recipient was required to fill out a "pledge to plant," a form smaller than an index card and a signature feature of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan to plant 1 million trees across Los Angeles.

Six weeks later, Barra's leafy friend has yet to make contact with the soil. Because Barra has no land of her own, the tree sits in her apartment in Redlands, roughly 60 miles from Los Angeles.

"I just really like having trees and plants where I'm living," said Barra, who majors in literature, historiography and urban studies. "And it was free."

Villaraigosa has trumpeted his Million Trees LA initiative as a cornerstone of his environmental agenda, bringing it up before audiences as far away as London and Hong Kong. Each time, the mayor's refrain has been the same: "We're planting 1 million trees," a phrase that brings to mind a populace working harmoniously to transform Los Angeles into a verdant forest.

The reality, however, is that, in many cases, organizers are not so much planting trees as giving them away, offering them up by the hundreds at fairs, festivals and farmers markets, many of them in the summer in a year of intense drought.

So far, no one has checked to see whether those trees have been planted, are still alive or even are in Los Angeles, one of several cities pursuing massive tree initiatives.

More than two years into his term, Villaraigosa is roughly one-tenth of the way toward his tree-planting goal. Of the roughly 110,000 he lists as planted, more than half -- 51% -- were given away to the public. Of those given away, more than a third were seedlings: slender wisps that die unless they are planted immediately, tree advocates say.

The giveaway strategy has proved controversial among the city's environmentalists, who praise the mayor for focusing on trees yet worry that the program has been too fixated on a numerical goal.

"It's giving away trees to get your numbers up," said Peter Lassen, a member of the city's Community Forest Advisory Committee.

The issue is especially relevant now that Villaraigosa aides say they expect as many as 70% of the trees to be distributed to private property owners: 700,000 trees over the life of the program.

With each weekend giveaway, more people have filled out the pledge cards. And Barra's experience is hardly unique.

Teacher Yvette Davis took an olive tree and an African sumac from a Million Trees booth the same day as Barra. Both went onto a patio.

Then there's Koreatown resident Keita Mellion, a 26-year-old musician who also picked up a free tree at the jazz festival. Mellion has struggled to keep his seedling alive since August, when he went out of town for a week and a half and made no plans for watering it.

"I don't think the environment is very conducive to it," said Mellion, describing the tree that sits on his apartment patio, still encased in its one-inch plastic container. "It looks dried up."

Although Million Tree coordinator Lisa Sarno said Villaraigosa's team expects one out of every four trees to die, Lassen said the usual mortality rate for a tree given away at a fair is at least 50%.

The spur-of-the-moment tree adoptions are drawing sharp questions from Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, whose district has the fewest shade trees in the city, according to a city survey. Hahn said visitors to a festival are not necessarily dependable candidates for expanding the city's urban forest.

"It's sort of like adopting a bunny at Easter," she said. "People say, 'This will be fun.' And then it falls by the wayside. They don't have time, they go on vacation, and they're not really committed to it. Only the problem with [the trees] is you can't give them back. They just die."

Villaraigosa's tree team defended the 187 tree adoption events held so far, saying they are part of a civic engagement process that is essential to the program's long-term success. They also said they will develop a follow-up system by the end of the year.

"People love things that are free," said public works commissioner Cynthia Ruiz, the mayor's spokeswoman on the program. "And when they learn about the benefits of the trees, it's a win-win for everyone."

Villaraigosa's office says the city will be noticeably greener once the project is finished. And although the mayor's team said in July that it expected to reach 1 million by 2012, Ruiz said that deadline is increasingly less important.

"I'm not so much focused on the time frame," she said. "I'm just focused on having a successful million tree program."

In some ways, the Million Trees initiative resembles a larger agenda promoted by Villaraigosa immediately before and after he took office.

Since his election in 2005, the mayor has retreated from his plan for seizing control of the Los Angeles Unified School District, settling for a few dozen "partnership" schools. Despite his promise to get more money out of Sacramento, Villaraigosa watched helplessly this year as state lawmakers raided local transit funding to balance their budget.

Still, few programs had as much difficulty gaining traction as the tree initiative, which has been repeatedly reworked. When the program was launched, Villaraigosa originally promised to add 300,000 new trees in the city's parks. As of July, the Department of Recreation and Parks had planted 4,200, according to the mayor's office.

Although Million Trees was billed as a $70-million program when it was rolled out last year, the mayor has raised just $3.2 million in private donations so far; $11.2 million has come from public agencies, four-fifths of it from the Department of Water and Power and the Port of Los Angeles.

Backers of the program point to its tangible successes: rows of sycamores, oaks and citrus trees added to neighborhoods that include Cypress Park, El Sereno and Boyle Heights.

Furthermore, nonprofit groups involved in the program say it should be judged not only on the numbers but also on its other benefits, from tree-care workshops to classes that will teach 8,000 students the value of having shade to cool the city.

"If you have a kid that walks home from school with a seedling and learns about what the tree can contribute to the environment, there's a value there that transcends the tree's actual survival," said Larry Smith, who heads the nonprofit North East Trees.

Behind the scenes, environmental groups long resisted the 1 million goal, saying such a number is arbitrary and could lead to hastily offered plants and fewer long-term benefits.

Tree advocates recommended that Villaraigosa take 10 years, not four, to reach his target, Smith said.

Meanwhile, one group decided it would rather hold just one tree giveaway each year: a massive citywide adoption of fruit trees in January, the height of the rainy season.

Andy Lipkis, president and founder of Tree People, said his group is pursuing the slower, more painstaking work of showing residents how to plant and care for a tree over the long term, even if that results in fewer new trees.

"We didn't want to buy into a numerical goal, not because numbers aren't important but because we've seen that whenever they're locked into a numerical goal, no matter what their higher goals were, at some point, they focus just on getting the numbers," he said.

Tree People embarked on a campaign similar to Villaraigosa's nearly three decades ago, asking Angelenos to plant 1 million trees in preparation for the 1984 Olympics.

But unlike the mayor, Tree People did not consider a giveaway tree as planted unless the owners went to the trouble of mailing back a postcard stating it had gone into the ground.

Villaraigosa's Million Trees program was formally launched one year ago, after 12 months of planning with half a dozen tree organizations. The mayor said it would beautify the city while creating shade to cool its low-income neighborhoods.

The concept was based largely on a "canopy analysis," a study that examined the places that had the fewest shade trees. Not surprisingly, the survey found that neighborhoods with large, mature trees -- the kind that form a soaring arc over a street -- were usually the ones with the greatest wealth. Consider the giant jacarandas that tower over sections of Sherman Oaks or the camphor trees that line the streets of Hancock Park.

With tree cover the thinnest south of the 10 Freeway, the Million Trees initiative has gone to such places as the jazz festival in Leimert Park, Ralphs supermarket on Crenshaw Boulevard and the farmers market in Watts.

On a hot day in July, the Koreatown Youth and Community Center -- one of the groups carrying out the Million Tree program -- provided 174 trees to patrons at the Watts market, held each Saturday in the parking lot of Ted Watkins Park.

Two-thirds of them were seedlings.

Yet seedlings are the most hotly contested component of Villaraigosa's arboreal initiative.

Smith predicted that no more than one in four will survive.

The tree could dry up "just between the time you put it in your car and you take it home," Smith said.

Sarno, Villaraigosa's top advisor on the trees program, said the mayor plans to reduce the program's reliance on seedlings. But that decision was made after more than 20,000 seedlings had been given out.

In May, tree groups distributed 2,300 seedlings at the two-day UCLA Jazz & Reggae Festival. And in June, organizers gave away 338 outside La Curacao, a department store in Pico-Union popular among Central-American immigrants.

The seedlings demonstrate how difficult it is to add trees in a city with a high concentration of renters and low-income residents.

Million Tree participants would much rather give away trees in one- and five-gallon pots, said Dore Burry, environmental manager for the Koreatown Youth and Community Center. The problem, he said, is that the people who approach his booth at festivals and fairs frequently want something they can pop into a shopping bag.

"In South-Central, you don't have sprawling estates where they have open space," he said. "But they're willing to plant a seedling, because they have 10 to 15 years before they have to worry about it."

Hahn said she picked up three seedlings at various events over the years, none of them affiliated with the mayor's initiative. Two died and one never made it into the ground, she said.

Even the mayor's employees have been slow to get seedlings into the soil. One fragile seedling, which has a Million Trees sticker on its plastic pot, sits on the carpet on the mezzanine of City Hall.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

UC Berkeley is an ambitious university. I encourage you to take a look at this link http://alumni.berkeley.edu/California/main.asp

In the current issue, this Alumni Magazine makes the case that Berkeley is the epi-center of cleaner energy research (see
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california/200709/margonelli.asp)
such that we can maintain our standard of living with suffering from climate change's consequences.

In addition, this issue provides an interesting profile of a retired Berkeley Professor named Edward Blakely. Edward faces the challenge of helping to rebuild New Orleans. This subtle article provides an insider's look into the challenges he faces.


feature 2007 September / October
Patching a broken city
by Sara Catania

Former Berkeley Professor Edward J. Blakely brings order to New Orleans’s hodgepodge bureaucracy, and urgency to its laissez-faire citizenry.
It was just past seven on a balmy Tuesday morning last February, and the streets of New Orleans's moribund Central City were temporarily bustling. Barbecues hissed as hip-hop throbbed from car stereos and the open windows of seemingly abandoned homes. Residents displaced to Houston, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge had returned, filling vacant lots with folding chairs, card tables covered with floral cloths, and coolers. They'd come to witness the Mardi Gras return—after a one-year, post-Katrina hiatus—of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Founded in 1909 to provide African-American residents with insurance, the benevolent society is now known primarily for sponsoring Fat Tuesday's largest and most famous African-American parade.
At La Maison, a wood-frame house built in the mid-1800s and more recently converted into apartments, the celebration was in full swing. Partygoers ducked through a second-story window to a balcony overlooking the parade route through the old working-class neighborhood. Their host was tenant Edward J. Blakely, a soft-spoken urban planner and former Berkeley professor who had arrived in January to take on the professional challenge of a lifetime: orchestrating the city's belated post-hurricane rebirth. Before long the parade began, with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in the lead astride a chestnut mare. Nagin spotted Blakely and beamed. When announcing Blakely's hire in December 2006, Nagin could not have been more bullish, declaring, "We think he's the best in the world to help us get through this recovery."
Blakely's bona fides testify for his selection. He rose from an impoverished childhood in San Bernardino to earn a master's degree at Berkeley and a doctorate at UCLA . His 40-plus years of experience include advising governments in Korea, Japan, South Africa, and Europe, as well as two Oakland mayors; authoring or coauthoring four books; and chairing Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning. He has served as a dean at urban planning departments at The New School University in New York City and the University of Southern California. He currently chairs the Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Sydney while heading a team studying urban climate change and global warming for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And yet one of Blakely's strongest assets may have been pronounced in his early assessment of the challenge of putting the Big Easy back together: "There are forces here that would rather have failure than success." His trademark piercing candor, interpreted by some as the hubris of an outsider, is something that narcissistic New Orleans has rarely tolerated in the past.
Nagin's parade horse trotted off, and the "Province Prince" appeared. A two-tiered float fronted by a massive statue of a feather-clad warrior, it embodied a Zulu tradition that began as a counter to the exclusively white parades and evolved (some say devolved) into a spectacle of campy ethnic stereotypes. As the float trundled past, Zulus on board decked out in blackface and afro wigs hurled doubloons, beads, spears, footballs, and rubber snakes at the outstretched hands of the surging crowd.
One by one, Blakely's guests slipped down to the street, but Blakely had no interest in flying prizes or any other aspect of the parade. "Not my kind of thing," he said.
The Mardi-Gras-at-any-price mentality is just one of many hurdles confronting Blakely as he tries to refashion the city known more for great beignets than for good business sense. Other challenges include the precarious state of the levees, floundering schools, a resurgence of gun violence in the streets, and the drifting homeward of unemployed, homeless residents. There is an intractable, impossibly diffuse, and dysfunctional local government bureaucracy; a culture of pervasive corruption that has left the city with zero Wall Street credibility; and the issue of race—or, more precisely, racial politics—which may be the biggest barrier to the city's recovery.
We get people saying 'we want you to deal with the race issue, the schools.' Every problem the city has, they suddenly want me to fix.
African Americans make up the largest percentage of residents who have not moved back to the city. The more affluent white neighborhoods along the Mississippi River that suffered mild hurricane and flood damage (the so-called Sliver by the River) are largely revived, while some predominantly African-American neighborhoods that were all but destroyed remain mostly empty. This disparity has intensified an already sharp racial divide. Blakely, who like the mayor is African American, is frequently sought out by residents looking for a champion. "We get people saying 'we want you to deal with the race issue, the schools,'" Blakely said. "Every problem the city has, they suddenly want me to fix."
But Blakely frequently reminds residents and city leaders that his job, simply put, is to generate revenue and build momentum for new housing and businesses, to get the work going, and to show the city how to keep it going when he leaves.
When it comes to specific goals, Blakely is evasive. He won't say what, precisely, he intends to accomplish before he departs, or when, for that matter, he plans to take his leave. He has suggested variously that he will leave within a year, that he will be done when the mayor says he is, or when the people say he is, or when he can't get access to the funding needed to keep his projects moving. Such responses acknowledge the perils of speaking with certainty about a future that is anything but clear. Since August 2005, when 480 billion gallons of water poured into New Orleans, covering 80 percent of the city and festering for weeks, more than 1,400 Louisiana residents have died as a result of Katrina. As of Mardi Gras 2007, much of the city that was damaged or destroyed was still in ruins. More than 200,000 New Orleansians remained displaced, and the city was operating with half its pre-Katrina budget and staff. The total cost of the disaster approached $250 billion. None of this was news to Blakely when he arrived. But after six weeks on the job, he was beginning to grasp the profound depth of the city's need. As he stepped away from the parade and brewed a fresh pot of coffee, he reflected, "It's like nothing I've ever done before."
Yet the magnitude of the mess is what appeals to him. As executive director of the New Orleans Office of Recovery Management, Blakely's goal is to amass enough funding to build large-scale housing and commercial developments that target specific high-visibility, high-impact areas. He has identified 17 zones for various degrees of redevelopment. The work ahead includes an overhaul of the devastated African-American community known as the Lower Ninth Ward, to include housing, commercial centers, schools, and community centers. Other projects range from an 80-acre regional, mixed-use residential, shopping, and hotel complex in New Orleans East, to a facelift for a modestly damaged commercial strip in Village de l'Est, the Vietnamese community on the eastern edge of the city. Smaller projects are scattered across the remainder of the incorporated area.
Initially Blakely had expected work to begin in September 2007, but by early summer he acknowledged that it was taking longer than he expected to raise the estimated $1.1 billion required to move forward. That funding includes hundreds of millions of dollars in federal disaster relief that must be wrested from competing recovery programs, as well as a sizable chunk that must be appropriated from recent city bond issues. Blakely remains confident that he can pull the money together and that the work will be underway by yearend. Once these "seed" projects are off the ground, Blakely's theory goes, they will boost public confidence and lead to private investment, which will lead to even more private investment and more development. Combine this "spread effect," as Blakely calls it, with the ongoing work of his agency, and the city will be on its way back.


A realist with an outsider's advantage, Blakely has heard the arguments that location-wise, at the bottom of the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans is a geographic mistake that should not be repeated and hence not rebuilt. His response is that the city should be rebuilt, but rebuilt better. So he walks the line between the ennui that holds sway over so much of city life, and the seriousness of his mission. "The level of stress here is so low it destroys the possibility of doing good things," he said, his bespectacled demeanor softened somewhat by drooping eyelids and a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper moustache complementing his equally neatly trimmed hair. "I just have to keep it in mind."
One has to wonder, though, in a city where power is cultivated through long-term personal relationships, whether Blakely has any real clout. Does anyone have to listen to what he says?


Planner-speak can be as mind dulling as any specialized language, but Blakely has a knack for conveying his ideas in quick, often witty bites. During his early months in New Orleans, he has shopped aspects of his still-evolving plan to city council members and agency heads, to foundation boards and businesspeople, to college committees and community groups, as well as to the media. When explaining the importance of reducing the city's reliance on tourism, because the jobs it generates are mainly low-wage, he said, "We've got to stop selling T-shirts." When outlining his plan to woo lucrative new industries such as a biomedical center that would develop products and services for export to Latin America, he said, "It's not the beds that count, it's the biomedicine."

Blakely, 69, takes a scavenger's delight in finding new value in the city's neglected resources. He's working to boost shipping through the city's underutilized port ("We were the biggest port in the Gulf and we went to sleep on our assets."), and he's pushing for expanded cargo service at the eerily empty airport ("We're not carrying enough freight—that's where the real money is these days."). When Blakely learned that the city loses half the water it pumps each day because of massive leaks in the municipal sewer system, he saw opportunity. Why couldn't the city fix the leaks, capture that surplus and turn it into a commodity instead? And he wants shuttered housing projects repaired and reopened for 1,000 workers immediately, with a companion training program.

While singularly focused on putting the pieces in place to begin redevelopment, Blakely is not forging ahead in a vacuum. He's incorporating locally developed plans into his strategy, most notably the Unified New Orleans Plan, a $5.5 million proposal more than a year in the making that combines the work of dozens of government agencies and community groups. In the end, though, the plan he comes up with must satisfy his own vision for the city. "If you haven't built a city, you might want to listen," he challenges. "I'm not bashful about that."

"This is the biggest and most challenging reconstruction since the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake," said Gary Hack, dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and member of the winning redevelopment design team for the World Trade Center in New York. A big part of that challenge for Blakely is being an outsider in the consummate insider's town. He refuses to partake in the good-old-boy approach, preferring to build his own networks in his own way. He golfs, plays tennis, bikes, and is a vegetarian, retaining the athletic physique of the erstwhile college quarterback who captained his UC Riverside team to an undefeated season (he was named Athlete of the Year in 1959 and later inducted into the university's Hall of Fame).


A wealthy man by virtue of a sustainable living community he helped develop in Southern California, Blakely said he initially refused the $150,000 annual salary for the New Orleans job, but Nagin insisted. "He wanted to hold me accountable," Blakely said. "He felt that by paying me I would feel more bound to the city."

Rule number one in the Blakely book of leadership—if such a thing existed—might be Act like you're the boss. Blakely refers to himself as New Orleans's renewal "coach" and asked a city council member who was formerly with the New Orleans Saints NFL team to arrange a photo op with the team during summer training. The message: "I'm here rebuilding the city and here rebuilding the team." During a January press conference, he and his 17-member staff appeared in matching purple polo shirts embellished with gold fleurs de lis (the logo of the New Orleans Saints football team).

For New Orleans, Blakely's methods are unprecedented. For Blakely, it's a familiar role, one that enables him to meld erudition and the real-world chops he's honed for years. While at Berkeley, he worked long and steadily in the redevelopment of Oakland and aided in the city's recovery from the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and the Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991.

One has to wonder, though, in a city where power is cultivated through long-term personal relationships, whether Blakely has any real clout. Does anyone have to listen to what he says? The short answer is no, and Blakely is the first to acknowledge it. "It's like a doctor," he reasons. "You've got your patients. You hope they'll do the right thing. If they don't, there's nothing you can do about it."

The experience that probably best prepared Blakely for the sort of power-leveraging he needs in New Orleans was his tenure, post 9/11, on a citizen's advocacy panel called the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York. As a co-chair, Blakely had a hand in nearly all the alliance's accomplishments, said Robert D. Yaro, chair of the alliance and president of the area's Regional Plan Association. A week after the terrorist attacks, when government agencies were swamped with disaster recovery, Yaro, Blakely and several others devised a $5 billion downtown transportation proposal that is now under construction. Later, Blakely took a lead role in quashing a developer's plan to site a suburban-style shopping mall at Ground Zero, helping to persuade the Port Authority to buy out the lease for $400 million. And Blakely helped secure and dole out millions of dollars in community redevelopment funds in the area. "Ed is the consummate professional," Yaro said. "He brings an authority and integrity to the process that is above the fray. We needed that in New York after 9/11, and New Orleans needs rogram."

When Blakely arrived in New Orleans in January, his City Hall office consisted of an empty, fluorescent-lit room furnished solely with 17 straight-backed chairs, one for each member of his staff. No matter. He didn't spend much time there anyway. He led neighborhood bicycle rides to meet with residents and community groups and seek input for his plan. He weighed in on renewal at every opportunity, openly criticizing programs that didn't work.

Regarding state and federal aid, he told business leaders, "We are … not going to kiss anybody's ring—or any other part of the anatomy," and said he would help the city generate investments from private sources. When a television reporter asked Blakely if he would incorporate green space into redevelopment projects to guard against future flooding, he replied: "What I'd like to see … is spaces that produce green dollars. … It's a lot better to have a small factory knocking down a surge than a blade of grass." In Blakely's first meeting with the state-run Louisiana Recovery Authority, when the body wavered over granting his request for control of a $117 million infrastructure fund, his response was unequivocal. "If I don't have it, I go home," he said. The agency acquiesced.

At times Blakely's impatience crosses the line into snobbery, particularly when his verbal barbs veer away from the politics of the city to its people. He noted that the city pumped $100 million into this year's Mardi Gras while blighted homes and piles of debris still dominated neighborhoods. He concedes that trying to stop Mardi Gras "would be foolish," because "there's something too deeply ingrained in the culture not to spend the money. But would I invest a lot of time and money in it? No."

But by assuming responsibility rather than dodging blame or public outcry over his perceived insults, Blakely has won the support of city leaders as he sells them on the transformative effect a good urban plan can have on wideranging city woes. For New Orleans he devised a five-point recovery strategy that reads more like a wishful cure-all: Continue the healing and consultation; improve safety and security in all communities; develop a more diverse and robust economy; build an infrastructure for the 21st and 22nd centuries; and establish a smart and sustainable settlement pattern. Blakely sees these points more as guiding principles than concrete goals—a way of trying to shape and manage the fast-moving, scattershot approach that had been driving city development. "This is a train," he said. "We're going to be riding on the side of it, but there are things we can do from here to improve it."

Of course, none of the rebuilding will make any difference if the levees fail. Blakely is as aware of this reality as anyone. "If we have even a small breach on those dikes," Blakely said, "it's over." He is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on elevation plans and other ways urban design can increase the safety of New Orleans residents. In the short term, he wants to eliminate the "low house/ high house" phenomenon popping up around town. "You've got one house up here, another down low," he said, gesturing. "As soon as the surge comes, the low house just knocks over the high one. It's like a bowling alley." But, he said, overall redevelopment in New Orleans can't wait for an unassailable levee safety guarantee. "If I take all that stuff into consideration I wind up doing nothing," he said. "I don't have time for that."
Sara Catania is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who specializes in reporting on criminal and social justice.

Today, I won a "silver medal" in the contest for whose writing does yahoo news view as popular. The "Gold Medal" (see below) does look kind of interesting but in my biased opinion, the world quality of life rankings is the most interesting story.

To be serious for just one second, what I think we did right in this October 2007 Reader's Digest piece is to incorporate data on economic opportunities, local pollution levels, and global "good environmental" citizen indicators and create a ranking index based on all of these criteria. While people may quibble about our index weights, this approach builds on Sen's work on the Human Development Indicators report. A city or nation that scores high on our index offers economic opportunities, high environmental quality of life and one doesn't have to feel guilty that your lifestyle is exacerbating global public challenges such as climate change via producing more greenhouse gases.


Most Emailed News

1. Glamorous politician wants law to allow 7-year itch

Reuters - Fri Sep 21, 4:00 AM ET
Sent 7,334 times
BERLIN (Reuters) - Bavaria's most glamorous politician -- a flame-haired motorcyclist who helped bring down state premier Edmund Stoiber -- has shocked the Catholic state in Germany by suggesting marriage should last just 7 years.

2. Can't beat quality of life in Scandinavia, says world ranking

AFP - Thu Sep 20, 11:18 AM ET
Sent 6,519 times
PARIS (AFP) - Nordic countries take the greatest care of their environment and their people, according to a ranking published on Thursday by the publication Reader's Digest.

Reader's Digest Piece that Makes Yahoo's Most Popular News

This is an interesting case study related to the recent literature in urban economics on how zoning laws shape land use patterns. In Mexico City, a developer wants to build a huge skycraper near a major park. He has bought the land up cheaply and now wants to build a "Green" building. The land he bought up was zoned for commercial buildings under 5 stories tall. Since it was zoned for this activity, he was able to buy this land cheap. His profits equal = price per apartment unit * Units - cost of land - cost of construction - cost of lobbying for the zoning change.

This developer must have reasoned that he is "too big to fail" and that knowing that he has powerful friends in government that he would be able to change the zoning of this land parcel.

If this case study generalizes, then do zoning rules bind? Or do they just affect the distribution of income? By binding, I mean does land get allocated to its highest value use? For example, suppose that in New York City a large parcel of land near Central Park is zoned solely for auto repair shops. This would be a crazy allocation of land. The Coase Theorem would say that a Don Trump should buy the land from the auto shop and build a skyscraper once he has received zoning approval. It is true that Trump's new building might impede the view of the park for other pre-existing skyscrappers. The Coase theorem would say that owners in those apartments may need to be compensated but ignoring these external costs, my point is that it can be inefficient for zoning boards to stick to their past rulings ignoring market signals about alternative uses of land that past laws have consigned to categories such as "commericial" that may not be the best use of the land.



September 20, 2007
Mexico City Journal
A Tower Fight, but Just What Borough Is This?
By ELISABETH MALKIN

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 19 — An influential developer plans an enormous skyscraper at the edge of the city’s giant central park. A celebrity architect is commissioned, and the ambitious mayor unveils the proposal at city hall.

Instantly, the prospective tower’s largely genteel neighbors rise up in arms. They vow to tie the plan up in lawsuits and procedural reviews. There is also a reclusive investor, a much-questioned relationship between the mayor and the developer and a building on the site that, though it has long been ignored, preservationists now want saved.

It could be New York.

But this is Mexico City, and the fight over what would be Latin America’s tallest skyscraper — at 300 meters, or 984 feet — takes on a tinge of high drama.

The developers and their allies in city hall say the tower will catapult Mexico City into the ranks of the world’s great cities, alongside emergent Asian capitals where skyscrapers grow ever taller. For Mexico City to compete globally, “we will need dozens of projects like this,” said Jorge Gamboa de Buen, the chief executive of the project’s developer, Grupo Danhos. “The city will have to learn to deal with the issue of these projects.”

Opponents say the tower is simply illegal. “They are twisting the law around like a pretzel to get their objectives through,” said Denise Dresser, an academic and commentator who is helping organize opponents. She said the city’s support for the tower recalled the days when authoritarian governments built big public works projects whether anybody wanted them or not.

The leftist mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, a likely presidential candidate in 2012, is determined to make his mark on the city.

“No other city in Latin America will have a tower of this size now,” Mr. Ebrard said when he presented the project with Mr. Gamboa de Buen in late July. “We’re ahead of everybody else.”

Mr. Ebrard’s chief political opponent on the project is a 28-year-old conservative, Gabriela Cuevas, the elected official in charge of the delegation (similar to a borough) where the site lies. The project’s supporters argue that she has jumped on the issue to further her career.

“It’s not politics to want to apply the law,” Ms. Cuevas said. “It’s a matter of what Mexico you believe in.”

The legal core of the debate is the site’s zoning, which is now limited to commercial buildings of just five stories. The site cost Danhos just $18 million, far less than if zoned for a high-rise.

The developers need a change in zoning, which is up to the city legislature, dominated by Mr. Ebrard’s party. “They bought the land cheap, and now they want the legislature to modify it just for them,” Ms. Cuevas said.

The 70-story tower would loom over the edge of Chapultepec Forest, the vast park that dates to before the Spanish Conquest. It will be called the Bicentennial Tower — ready, Danhos executives hope, by 2010, when Mexico celebrates 200 years of independence from Spain.

Bypassing Mexico’s own well-known architects, Danhos sought out a global star, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Alluding to Mexico’s pre-Columbian past, Mr. Koolhaas’s design joins two pyramidal forms. One editorial cartoonist redrew the design as a coffin holding the remains of the city’s urban plan.

Danhos will split the $600 million investment with an investment company owned by the Spanish billionaire Amancio Ortega, the press-shy founder of the Zara clothing chain and the eighth-richest man in the world, according to Forbes.

Although there are skyscrapers nearby, the site is surrounded by a middle-class neighborhood of low-rise houses, offices and stores. Several blocks away, though, lies one of the wealthiest neighborhoods, where high walls shield expansive houses.

The tower would also abut the intersection of two main traffic arteries, one of the city’s worst bottlenecks. With the cars it would bring, opponents argue, the city should find it impossible to approve the environmental and urban impact studies.

If all this sounds like a city with no real plan, it is. Mexico City is pocked with high-rises hulking over residential streets. And 15 years of unchecked development in the western suburbs has created a mini-city of towers, Santa Fe, without proper roads or public transportation leading to it.

Opponents have seized on the mess in Santa Fe to bolster their case against the mayor and Mr. Gamboa de Buen, who worked together as city officials to launch Santa Fe. Mr. Gamboa de Buen blames succeeding mayors for ignoring the area.

The tower would be built according to strict international environmental and earthquake standards, using little water and energy. And Danhos promises underpasses and other improvements to deal with the traffic.

For now the project has been slowed by legal wrangling over the building currently on the site, an example of mid-20th-century functionalist architecture designed by a Russian émigré, Vladimir Kaspé. The National Fine Arts Institute rushed through an upgrade of the building’s protected status last month.

The opposition says it is growing, hiring a well-known environmental lawyer, adding celebrities and enlisting support from people in less privileged areas.

“It’s not like other countries here,” said Mike Rios, a retired teacher who has fought new construction in his working-class neighborhood. “In Japan, when it’s ecological, they can’t touch it. Here, it’s just the opposite.”

The Internet is filled with great stuff. It amazes me that anyone gets any work done with all of this posted excitement. While Google Scholar is a productive tool for finding papers I should read before I write a paper, most of the Internet is just plain old fun. The digital divide may have a positive effect on productivity by allowing people to focus on what they are supposed to be doing!

Here is a quote from some dude that I found really funny;

Randy R:
"We have a god-given right to be fat, and no liberal is going to force me to be healthy!" 6.19.2007 1:10am

Quoted Here

I guess this guy would not be a big fan of benevolent paternalism and potato chip taxes or at least the "self" who wrote this quote. How do we respect each others differences when one's choices have social negative consequences? If this guy gets too fat and goes on DI, my taxes go up to pay for him. His choices become my problem. Do we vote this guy off of our "island" like on Survivor? Or do you try to incentivize him to act "better"?

I wonder what John, Paul, George and Ringo would think of this NYT editorial today? It is a little bit too deep for me. My son has a book about the field of astronomy. There is a section on a potential manned flight to another solar system. The author says that people would have to board the space craft knowing that they would never arrive at the final destination. Instead, the space travelers would pair off and have children and their children's children's children's .... would eventually land at the destination. This book made me wonder how the laws in this new society would be enforced but this New York Times editiorial suggests that it is almost time to book a flight to this distance solar system.


September 17, 2007
Editorial
There Goes the Sun

We know, when we stop to think about it, that the Earth is in fact a planet of rock and water, with an existence quite separate from our own. But we don’t believe it in our bones. Perhaps the best proof is the discovery of a planet orbiting a star called V 391 Pegasi, some 4,500 light years from us.

That planet appears to have survived the transformation of its sun into a red giant. That is the very fate predicted for our own Sun some five billion years from now, when it will swell to a size that engulfs the orbits of Mercury and Venus. But to suggest that Earth might survive the Sun’s senescence is to say something about this lump of rock we live on, not our species. And yet we have trouble reading it that way.

Most of us have come to terms with the notion that the Sun will swell catastrophically — some day. Five billion years is roughly 25,000 times longer than Homo sapiens have lived.

Still, once upon a time, even to talk about that distant catastrophe was to assume that it would somehow be a human event. You may remember learning about Earth’s eventual fate with a sinking feeling.

The grimmer realization of recent decades — a time of looming man-made cataclysms — is that we do not live in geological or astronomical time. We live in ethical and cultural time, that is, human time. The sensible questions are how to live that time to the fullest and how to stave off a premature ending.

A sociologist at NYU wrote a whole book on the Chicago Heat Wave in the 1990s that killed dozens. As I recall, most of the victims were poor and black. Does the popular media devote more attention to shocks that affect middle class whites? Climate change will increase the number of heat waves --- so it is very interesting to explore how society copes and adapts to this expected trend. My colleague Ann Carlson has written a paper that I plan to read.

I can't read it yet because I'm devoting my recent life to downloading the PSID into a stata panel format that I can actually work with. The good news is that it is easy to download each wave of the data. A wave might be the 1997 or 2005 cross-section. The problem is that different variables mean different things in different waves! I ask for consistency in this life. If E2027 is "marital status" in the 2005 wave, then E2027 could be "have you had a sex change" in the 1997 wave. This is making me nuts!



Heat Waves, Global Warming & Mitigation

ANN E. CARLSON
University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law

UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 07-20
Issues in Legal Scholarship, No. 7, 2007

Abstract:
Why do heat waves, which annually cause far more death, on average,
than any other natural disaster, provoke little public reaction? Heat
waves will become more common place and heat wave deaths more
frequent as temperatures increase from climate change. Models predict
that annual heat wave deaths in the U.S. by 2050 will easily surpass
the death toll from Hurricane Katrina. This Article analyzes
extensive data about heat waves, evaluates why heat waves seem not to
raise widespread public concern and suggests that mechanisms already
exist - though widely ignored - to mitigate the worst effects of
excess heat. These mechanisms include careful emergency planning, the
provision of air conditioning availability and funding, and larger
structural changes in the delivery of electricity, energy efficiency
and land use planning. Yet the nature of the victims of heat waves
combined with cognitive mechanisms that cause individuals to
systematically underestimate risk from heat waves and the fact that
heat waves cause little property damage all contribute to a failure
by many jurisdictions to adopt policies and programs that can
mitigate heat wave deaths.


Ann Carlson's Paper

Today's Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece focused on the surprise that Southern California has "surplus" water despite the fact that the region keeps growing. While more people and jobs are now located in this paradise, water consumption per-capita has been falling faster than the scale of growth has increased. The net effect is that aggregate demand has declined.

The general point here is that aggregate scale effects (i.e growth) does not have to degrade the environment if the per-capita footprint declines.

Joel Schwartz and I make a similar point in the case of vehicle emissions. Here is a preliminary draft of a paper that will soon appear in the Journal of Urban Economics.
www.owlnet.rice.edu/~econ461/papers/UrbanAirPollution.pdf

We document that despite growth in miles driven, aggregate emissions have sharply declined because emissions per mile have sharply declined.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water15sep15,1,420790.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=2&cset=true
From the Los Angeles Times

Soaking up lessons of last drought

It's been dry, and one city is mandating conservation, but water officials have spent years building reserves.

By Hector Becerra
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 15, 2007

Watering the lawn under the moonlight. The specter of "water police."

If the current water shortage is beginning to sound a lot like the great drought of 1990-91, grab a glass of water and chill.

Although Long Beach is beginning mandatory water restrictions and other communities are expected to join suit, the Southland's water supply is in significantly better shape than it was 17 years ago.

Officials say they learned from that drought and spent the ensuing years building up water reserve capacity. Despite the record dry conditions, the Metropolitan Water District has 14 times more reservoir and groundwater storage than it did in 1991, with many local reservoirs flush with water. This is giving the region a buffer against a reduction in supplies from Northern California and the Colorado River.

Moreover, the region has learned to conserve in dramatic fashion.

In 1991, the average household used 210 gallons of water a day. Today, thanks to low-flow toilets, new shower heads and changes in behavior, that number has declined to about 180 gallons, according to water officials.

In a sign that the conservation message is sinking in, the Metropolitan Water District said it delivers the same amount of water -- 2.1 million acre feet a year -- to Southern California now as it did in 1990. That's despite having 3 million more customers.

Water officials warn that more restrictions -- and possibly higher rates -- are on the way in the coming months. But they said this was not yet a crisis.

In fact, water officials and weather experts believe that further restrictions might result in enough savings to deal with the continued dryness and a recent court ruling that could yield a 30% reduction in water deliveries from Northern California.

Moreover, they argue that mandatory water reduction is important because Southern Californians need to learn how to do more with less as the region's population grows and water supplies remain finite.

"Never have so many people had water so cheap, so clean and so uninterrupted as Southern California has for the last 50 years," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. "We just need to use water more rationally."

The drought of 1990-91 bore some similarities to today. There were record dry conditions that affected not just Southern California but the two areas where the region gets much of its imported water: the Colorado River and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In response, the state cut water deliveries to the region -- only the second time in history that had happened.

Southern California was jolted. Restrictions on water use were imposed, prompting complaints from both residents and farmers. At the height of the drought, water deliveries to Southern California were reduced by half. Lawns shriveled and turned brown.

But there are also major differences between 1990-91 and today. Back then, water levels at state reservoirs were so low they were considered to be "essentially empty" -- creating a severe shortage of water for customers.

Today, the water supply is much more plentiful thanks to lessons learned from the drought.

"It taught us a lot," said Debra Man, chief operating officer and assistant general manager for the Metropolitan Water District, which delivers water to most of Southern California. "We learned that we had to really diversify our water resources. We had to be prepared for some of the worst-case drought events."

More than $3 billion has been spent on increased water storage above and below ground. In 1999, water importers built the 260-million-gallon Diamond Valley Lake in Riverside County. Also, before 1990, the MWD did not focus on groundwater storage. That changed because of the drought, and now aquifers are carefully managed.

The MWD had only 225,000 acre-feet stored in 1990. Today, the district has 2.7 million acre-feet in storage. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, enough to cover an acre 1 foot deep or supply two households for a year.

Also over the last decade, officials moved to diversify the water supply. The district signed an agreement with an agency in the San Joaquin Valley to hold 350,000 acre-feet of MWD water from the State Water Project, which delivers water from Northern California to much of the Southland. The district has since signed agreements with other farming areas and desert water districts outside of Southern California to store an additional 700,000 acre-feet.

Man said a goal of the MWD is to reduce its reliance on water from the Colorado River and the State Water Project from 50% of the district's supplies to 26% by 2025.

Despite these improvements, regional water officials said they expect more mandatory water rationing because of the current drought and water problems. Long Beach took the first step Thursday, imposing rules on when residents can water lawns and how restaurants serve water to customers.

Southern California is seeing its driest year on record. In addition, the region could see as much as 30% of its water supply cut because of a federal judge's ruling last month.

U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger ordered protective measures for a tiny endangered fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Delta smelt grow to about 3 inches and live about a year. A so-called indicator species that is a harbinger of ecological conditions in the delta, the smelt were declared threatened in 1993.

Long Beach officials said Friday that the city expects a water shortage and that it needs its residents to conserve more. Also, they said they hoped to permanently change how residents use water.

"This is a proactive step, and we're hoping other cities follow," said Kevin Wattier, general manager of the Long Beach Water Department. "Let's be prudent and tighten our belt as much as we can."

Over the years, more people have relied on devices such as low-flow toilets and shower heads, and municipal codes have been enacted to require new buildings to carry these devices. More water is recycled, and there has been a push for people to landscape with plants that do not require as much water.

But a lot more has to be done, experts say. Over the next half-century, according to a recent state projection, California's population will grow by nearly 75% to about 60 million people. And the water supply is not going to keep up, officials said.

The MWD is having to dip into its reserves because of the drought conditions, a concern because those are designed to be saved for an emergency, such as a major earthquake.

And though the region has depended on water from the north, there have been signs over the years that that reliance needs to be eased.

In 2003, the MWD lost its exclusive rights to surplus water from the Colorado River because Arizona and Nevada began to get their full share. MWD lost half of its water from the river when that happened.

"We're living in a desert," said Patzert. "We should be using less water."

hector.becerra@latimes.com