Note to readers

I hate to admit it, but Rogue Columnist to me is like a drug — it’s hard to go without a new article by Mr. Talton for more than three or four days. I’m already looking forward to April.

You have my sympathies (great Hunter quote, BTW).

I’m out of Mapstone mysteries, so I’ll live with the void. Besides, wouldn’t one long post by Emil take us through April anyway? :0

CDT, that’s a good one!!! Yes, it would. Emil, have at it.
I’m looking forward to the next Mapstone also. “Pain Nurse” didn’t do a thing for me.

Terry: Ouch.

Well, I don’t know about a LONG post, but I did recently see a couple of news articles that I thought I would share.
The first was an article from the “Phoenix Republic” which is what the Arizona Republic calls one of its community insert news-magazines.
Dated February 27th, it notes that Anthem’s city council (voting 6 to 1) has switched from a one person, one vote model — already terribly flawed due to the influence of wealth on campaign financing — to something more explicitly Kookocratic: a system in which wealthy property owners get more than a single vote each, depending on how many acres and/or apartment units they own.
For example, the number of acres owned by a wealthy individual is multiplied by 1.5 to yield the number of votes he is entitled to in the city council election. For rentiers, each apartment owned counts as 0.67 of a vote: so that a 100 apartment complex would be worth 67 votes for the individual who owned it.
Unfortunately, I can’t find an online link to this story (which I clipped from the hardcopy); however, there was a recent follow-up story which does lend credence to what I am saying, even if it doesn’t provide this level of detail, which is available online courtesy of the so-called Info Center (which seems to be very poorly organized, not to mention hit-and-miss):
https://www.azcentral.com/community/northvalley/articles/2010/03/09/20100309anthem-HOA-property-election.html
(For non-Arizona residents, note that Anthem is a community north of metropolitan Phoenix.)

The second was an article in Forbes about the World’s Billionaires for 2010. The article notes:
“In his annual shareholder letter Buffett wrote, “We’ve put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.”
“Many plutocrats did just that. Indeed, last year’s wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/109029/worlds-billionaires-2010
Buy low, sell high. You can’t get lower than the Great Recession without teetering on the brink, kiddies. This is what Marx meant by ownership of the means of production: as long as you own what others need to survive and prosper (always assuming that the system recovers rather than collapses catastrophically) you’re going to do well, because you (and others like you) are the only source for those things.
Another recent (slightly older) Forbes article notes that Bill Gates has a personal balance sheet larger than the gross domestic product of any of 140 countries:
https://www.forbes.com/2009/09/29/forbes-400-gates-dell-walton-charney-rich-list-09-billionaires-vs-world.html
The world’s three richest individuals have more wealth than the COMBINED GDP of the 48 poorest countries:
https://www.endgame.org/primer-wealth.html

Carlos Slim Helu is now reportedly the world’s richest man. Is he a philanthropist? Maybe somebody in this loop knows.
It doesn’t appear that he’s done much in his home country of Mexico.

Slim is a telecom mogul; also owns big chunk of NY Times

Nearly everybody who is rich is a “philanthropist” — even drug cartel leaders. Aside from conventional moral motivations for philanthropy, it’s tax deductable and good public relations.
It’s also a useful way to get control of (or influence over) certain assets that you can’t buy (because they’re not for sale) or don’t want to buy: a sugar-daddy may have considerable influence behind the scenes. Joining or running a university fund-raising apparatus for instance, as well as making your own contributions. This can also get you influential board positions in public institutions. Building up influence in education, the arts, and other areas can feedback into your business or political ventures at a later time, since patrons of the arts and education, as well as their upper administrators, tend to overlap with the circle of those influential in politics and business — at the very least they rub shoulders.

I wonder sometimes if the ideas for a “new development model” for Arizona don’t stray dangerously close to supply-side economics.
Granted, there are certain industries poised for growth as the population ages (e.g., healthcare) and other, emerging industries which make good sense for Arizona to encourage (e.g., solar energy), but there is only so much that groups like GPEC or the state’s Commerce Department or even legislative tax incentives can do.
Furthermore, with everyone competing to lure corporations into their state (whether from other states or foreign lands), there is a tendency to “race to the bottom” in terms of tax rates and incentives, which can only cause further problems down the line with insufficient revenue. At the very least, the tax burden will increasingly fall on individuals as states compete toward a point of diminishing returns.
Finally, with states competing in this fashion, there will inevitably be winners and losers: not every state can be a biotech hub for the nation or region, for example.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB), 72 percent of net new jobs created from 1993 through 2006 involved businesses with less than 20 employees (see Figure 4):
https://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs359tot.pdf
So, most job growth will NOT come from big corporate relocations (including base industries).
Note that nationally, 2/3 of the U.S. economy depends upon consumer spending — demand — and the other 1/3 depends indirectly upon consumer spending, since there is no point in capital investment or wholesale trade by business if nobody is ultimately buying the finished products and services.
The real problem with the U.S. economy is a lack of demand: the solution to the country’s economic doldrums resulting from the Great Recession (and the many structural factors contributing to it and to its aftermath), is to boost demand.
In recent decades that was done by loose consumer credit and with borrowing from ever rising home equity in a seller’s real-estate market. High levels of existing consumer debt, high unemployment, the collapse of the housing market, and the aging of the baby-boom population (retirees generally have less disposable income than their working counterparts) all conspire to keep demand (hence economic growth) low: this in turn will encourage the persistence of high unemployment, feeding back again into low growth.
I’m a radical Keynesian: the best way to encourage growth at this point would be to take (that is, tax, not borrow) income from the wealthy which is currently tied up in speculation (i.e., doing nothing more than increasing the value of paper assets) and directly redistribute it to the bottom third of the population, whose consumer needs are largely unfulfilled and who, provided with disposable income, would spend it on consumer products and services.
Even to the extent that portions of this income were used to pay off debt, this itself would free up disposable income for consumerism, reducing consumer debt as a percentage of GDP by paying down a portion of it.
The increased demand would cause businesses to hire new workers to provide the additional output, make more capital investments, start new businesses to get in on the gold rush, and stabilize the housing market by reducing foreclosures and increasing home purchases. It would also thaw credit to small business since, armed with the documentable prospect of an enlarged income stream, they could approach lenders for loans with greater plausibility.
This would also maintain the classical feedback links between consumers and business since those receiving the redistributed funds, not the government, would decide how, when, and on what to spend it.
Additionally, in addition to stimulating job creation by employers to meet increased consumer demand, it would encourage welfare recipients to obtain gainful full-time employment (since qualification for the redistributed funds would be contingent upon full-time employment or the equivalent in multiple part-time jobs).
The objection that small business generally pays less would be less relevant under this arrangement of subsidized income; however, a national minimum wage would still be necessary to prevent small employers from taking advantage of this and undermining it.
Best of all, it would not be a one-time blip in the economy, but a permanent structural change built into the tax system. The money could be metered out to ensure control over inflationary tendencies: businesses would need to receive the new spending at a rate which allowed them to respond by ramping up production to meet it rather than at a rate which simply encouraged them to increase prices in order to ration (and profiteer from) existing supplies.
Contrary to conservative criticisms, this would not take away investment funds. The taxed income would remain in the banking system the entire time: first in the bank accounts of those wealthy individuals who are taxed; then in the bank accounts of those to whom the funds were redistributed; then in the bank accounts of the businesses which received the funds spent by these beneficiaries of redistribution.
Nobody would be taking money out of the banking system and putting it under a mattress: businesses receiving the funds (a consumer decision) would make use of them, as would banks holding these business and consumer funds in newly enlarged personal and business checking accounts, loaning and investing as they see fit.
In essence, then, we would be moving a portion of the nation’s private wealth from the portion of the economy devoted to speculation, to the portion devoted to productive activity.
Of course, this will never happen because, despite the fact that it would strengthen capitalism by creating a new, expanded class of petit-bourgeois consumers from the existing lower class, the concept of taxation and direct redistribution of income is socialistic; and that’s a political no-no in the United States.

Here’s a very nice post by ED Kain about the problem with sprawl and the nature of conservatism. The entire post is worth reading. This is the last paragraph:
Sprawl is a result of massive statist interventions into our culture and society, and its symptoms are equally enormous. Everything that conservatism has historically stood for is undermined by sprawl. It is not only the physical manifestation of our decline, it is a poison which continues to contribute to that decline. Its repercussions can be felt in our discourse, in our speech, in our way of thinking. This is not merely a matter of aesthetically pleasing communities, but of communities which allow individuals to be a part of the whole. I doubt this is sustainable, this suburban maze – in any way: fiscally, socially, spiritually. It is, as James Howard Kunstler called it, “a peculiar blip in human experience.” https://trueslant.com/erikkain/2010/03/12/out-of-the-endless-sprawl/

I have serious reservations about the social theory of sprawl. For example, I don’t think there is any constant, unidirectional correlation between sociability and housing density.
I go to Prescott once a week, and on the way north through Phoenix and the outlying areas, I’m always shocked when I see how much MORE densely built the newer suburbs and exurbs are, compared to the old family home in the Bridal Path area (my former home was built, I think, in the 1960s). I could stand between some of the houses in these new developments, stretch out both arms, and almost touch the houses on both sides.
Apparently this is because developers are a lot more greedy than they were 50 years ago: they seem determined to squeeze every last bit of profit possible from the land, which means as many housing units as possible on a given development lot. Of course, there are still exceptions in the tony neighborhoods, but this is the rule.
Even in exurbs where housing density is light, this is really comparable to a small town. In a small town, however, the sense of community may become oppressive, with nosiness, rumor, and gossip dominating over genuine neighborliness. Ironically, the demand for conformity may be greater where the community is more tightly knit: this is why some individuals long for the relative anonymity and privacy of city life.
The issue of long commutes, where this is the case, seems secondary. One doesn’t develop a sense of community from random fellow travellers even in mass transit: one developes a sense of community from one’s immediate neighbors, and from the character of one’s general area within a city or town.
Or, one doesn’t: but this can scarcely be laid at the foot of private transportation or the existence of exurbs separated from the city of which they are satellites, since the opportunity for community relations starts there, where they live; just as the opportunity for dwellers in the center of Phoenix starts where they live, and not in another area across town. The only difference is what separates the two: in one case, undeveloped space; in another, connecting neighborhoods that have no relevance to those who live elsewhere in the city.
Another point is that even in areas with a thriving multi-use district and high population density, e.g. Manhattan, the degree of alienation and isolation can be extreme. New Yorkers are known for being aloof, paranoid, and even hostile — or were in recent decades past. One is almost tempted to explain this away with handwaving arguments claiming that the lack of personal space and privacy causes individuals to grow a thick skin to compensate — but there are equally dense areas where this does not hold true, as well as sparsely populated areas where residents keep to themselves almost obsessively.
The bottom line seems to be that there is no substitute for neighborliness itself. You might find it in rural areas where each house occupies many surrounding acres, yet not find it in a light density urban area — or vice-versa. You might find it in a community where individuals are packed like sardines and forced to constantly interact, or at least be physically and personally exposed to one another; or you might find much greater insularity in such a setting.
You might find suburban neighborhoods with cookie-cutter houses and those beautifully tended lawns some seem to love to hate (why?), where block-parties, housewarming visits, and other examples of social interaction are common; and you might find high-rise apartment blocks where not only the occupants of different buildings are unknown to one another, but where even the tenants of a single building retreat behind the quadruple-locked steel doors of their cubicle apartments, refusing to make eye contact in the halls, stairs, or elevators (much less exchange conventional pleasantries, still less have extended conversations): places where six feet of separation might as well be six miles, and six inches of common dividing wall six-hundred yards.
Something similar can be said about poverty and wealth as factors. You can find dirt-poor neighborhoods consisting of shacks, where personal pride and dignity flourish, albeit with a whisk-broom, a bit of brightly colored paper, and perhaps some cheap lace curtains — where everyone knows and looks out for each other. You can find dirty, gray, old residential areas serving industrial laborers, full of endless rows of identical attached houses where housewives get together to play cards and drink gin and talk, and husbands spend their after hours at the pub or poolhall bragging, telling stories, and competing in friendly ways.
Or you can find versions of these places where suspicion, isolation, and general contempt for all living things poisons the atmosphere like toxic gas; where garbage and malignant neglect and vandalism form a physical counterpart to the moral decay.
In other words, it isn’t density, or space, or private or public transport, or distance from the city center or closeness, or even (strictly) poverty or wealth, that determines neighborliness; it’s neighbors.
Mr Kain also wrote:
“Something is lost when we tear apart the natural, organic community and replace it with long lines of indistinct houses, well-groomed lawns, and endless stretches of highway.”
I don’t know what he means by “the natural, organic community”. Communities are either planned, or added to ad hoc, or (usually) both. As manmade, developed areas go, there is nothing especially unnatural about suburbs. They can be as lovely or as ugly as central city neighborhoods, depending on the sense of space, or architecture, and of landscaping. They tend to have green lawns, shrubs, and trees, whereas inner city neighborhoods tend toward concrete and brick. There is nothing objectionable about lawns, and if you have lawns they generally are more attractive if they are well-groomed: weedy, overgrown lawns suggest neglect and decay.
Long roads, like long rail lines, connect expanding populations. As long as the population keeps breeding, it needs to expand; even inner cities have a limit, as the residents of Tokyo can attest. They connect their suburbs with modern rail rather than highways, which makes planning sense, but there is nothing social about a ride on a Japanese commuter train. Everyone is packed in like sardines and it’s considered rude to start conversations with the stranger you happen to be squished up against.
Lines of similar houses were a way to open homeownership to the burgeoning middle class of America’s post-war years: having an individual architect and new plan for each home produces greater variation but is a lot more expensive, and those moving from working class to middle class life could ill afford it. It worked in the same way that Ford’s assembly line did: it brought thousands of identical, black model-T cars to the hitherto inaccessible masses, by using fixed plans, factory techniques and mass production to keep design and construction costs down. These days, there are multiple versions of fixed plan housing, and smart developers can easily mix them together in single neighborhoods to create a more passable illusion of individual variation.
If we were all country squires, we could have our houses designed and built from scratch according to our individual whims and those of our individual architects. We can’t. Mass produced housing, whether single-occupancy homes or apartments in a common building, implies a great deal of design similarity to be affordable to the masses. “Here’s our set of basic plans: pick one” — that’s generally the most you’ll get.

Reed Kroloff headed the Arizona State University school of architecture before leaving in disgust. He contended that production housing need not be a series of mindless boxes . . that the options could be somewhat creative and maybe even energy efficient. Might Emil see this as elitist? There’s another element here (ref: HGTV) and that’s the Wal*Mart-i-zation of our collective taste.

Reed Kroloff will be giving a lecture on Apri 10 at the Scottsdale Center about “Arizona School” architecture. More info:
https://www.modernphoenix.net/hometour/
Kroloff and I were neighbors in the Willo neighborhood back in the 90s. He was associate dean of the ASU architecture school and also doing architectural criticism in the Republic. It’s interesting to recall thatthe Republic was once engaged in creative ideas. An architecture critic! Unfortunately, the business community didn’t appreciate having him critique their edifices to corporate glory. He called the (then) Dial Building ” a deodorant bar to the gods”, which probably got the irascible John Teets even more apoplectic.
Arizona has a few great buildings but very little urban design. The net result is a state that is mired in an unsustainable and unnourishing relationship to community itself. The various neuroses and evasions that characterize suburban anomie are not going to be decorated out of existence.
It’s true that good architecture is something that money buys while the rest of go discount shopping. Still, when I think back on Arizona’s primal boom in the 50s, it was how much good architecture was available. Even John F Long had a modernist line of production houses. Ralph Haver, Blaine Drake, Jimmie Nunn, et al, were offering average Arizonans entry-level access to good design.
Is Modernism part of the “blip” Kunstler writes about? There’s no reason to think we’re doomed to the perpetual dreariness of bad architecture. It would help, however, if we cared enough about our history to honor a significant legacy.

Jim, I wrote:
“These days, there are multiple versions of fixed plan housing, and smart developers can easily mix them together in single neighborhoods to create a more passable illusion of individual variation.”
Which seems to be what Reed Kroloff said in the paraphrase you attributed to him. So why would I consider that elitist?
Besides, I wasn’t advocating conformism in mass-produced housing: I was explaining it, or if you prefer, apologizing for it. Yes, with a set of fixed plans and pre-manufactured modules (some of which are purely cosmetic but alter the lines of the house) one can mix and match; there may be a moderate increase in expense.

Jim Hamblin wrote:
“There’s another element here (ref: HGTV) and that’s the Wal*Mart-i-zation of our collective taste.”
Well, you’re right about that. The best remedy for that is to make sure that folks have the kind of income which allows them to patronize those who produce better quality goods but at a higher price. In order to do that we need less concentration of income, and in order to remedy the latter on a permanent basis we need direct redistribution of income.
Note that over the long term, at least with respect to durable goods, big discount items may not always be such a bargain; a good pair of shoes for example may last so long that all the cheap replacements needed to equal its life-span may actually end up costing more in total.
But when you’re living from check to check on low wages and your shoes wear out, you’re not thinking “I’ve got to save for months so I can get the kids some quality shoes and maybe save money in the long term and enjoy better quality and style in the meantime” — you want something that looks good (at first) and fits and is cheap.
Another problem, and this has been going on longer than Wal-Mart, is that nobody who shops at ordinary consumer supermarkets (and some of the more specialized but bulk markets) even knows what good food tastes like.
There are whole generations who have no idea what good butter tastes like, or that tomatoes are supposed to be an intense mixture of tang and sweetness and not something tasteless that Subway uses to bulk up their hero sandwich. Ditto oranges, tangerines, and other fruit and vegetables.
All of this stuff has had the taste bred out of it in order to get genes that produce large volumes of cosmetically attractive produce year round. And you might as well be eating cardboard.

Soleri wrote:
“It’s true that good architecture is something that money buys while the rest of us go discount shopping. Still, when I think back on Arizona’s primal boom in the 50s, it was how much good architecture was available. Even John F Long had a modernist line of production houses.”
Yes, but Maryvale was the norm. And anything marketed to a small consumer segment having “sophisticated” tastes (e.g., modernism) is going to be more expensive.
“Ralph Haver, Blaine Drake, Jimmie Nunn, et al, were offering average Arizonans entry-level access to good design.”
Haver and Nunn are known today mostly for their non-residential projects, and the custom-designed residential projects I’m familiar with weren’t “entry-level” priced comparared to the cookie-cutter development projects of the day:
https://modernphoenix.net/haver/haverportfolio.htm
If you can document something else I’d be happy to be educated on the subject.

Emil, I hesitate to engage you on this subject since I suspect you have no idea what you’re talking about. That John F Long series of modern designs was in Maryvale. If there was a cost premium to them, I’m not aware of it. Haver & Nunn designed quite a few residential subdivisions, which are highly valued today. But these were low-cost, low-square-footage houses in their day, much akin to the Eichler houses in northern California. You can still see a few in their original condition and apart from their aesthetic appeal, they were quite basic. Blaine Drake was a custom home designer but he built more than few modest houses (I grew up next-door to one).
I make these points not to argue about anything really germane to this blog and its POV. Sometimes we fall off the track here in discussing one thing or another (just like conversations). If I’ve given you cause to resent my posts, please accept my apologies.

Incidentally, there is more than one reason why Wal-Mart is so inexpensive. Obviously, cheap foreign labor (kept in line by a totalitarian government which outlaws independent unions), manufacturing that operates without all of the environmental, safety, and other regulatory overhead that American citizens (rightfully) prefer in their own workplaces, and wholesale currency manipulation (of a currency pegged to the dollar rather than traded on interconvertible markets like “real” currencies) are all obvious and fundamental reasons for Chinese “competitiveness”.
However, those who saw the eight-minute intro of the documentary film Manufactured Landscapes have some idea what “economy of scale” means with respect to manufacturing. In distribution and marketing as well, those kinds of sales volumes also permit you to negotiate heavy discounts with other parts of the wholesale and retail chain from factory to consumer; it also allows you to dominate your competitors in ways that have nothing to do with free-markets.
Here’s an abbreviated version of the documentary intro from You Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eLsRUbtBk

Having grown up in the Target Corp., I was imprinted with the “mass with class” differentiation vs. Wal*Mart. My alma mater has lost momentum from time to time, but generally does a pretty good job of combining taste and value.
Semi-related comment: the Republic is showing interest in the 50’s modern homes . . doing a feature on an Al Beadle house in our former neighborhood. These were neither large nor particularly costly. So maybe Blaine Drake, Beadle, Haver and their colleagues will get the attention they deserve.

“By the mid 1950s, one of the biggest builders in the country was Phoenix-based John F. Long, who single-handedly managed the development of more than a thousand homes a year. Merchant building was essentially a retail operation but one based upon a highly complex and often unwieldy industrial scale process. Success or failure depended upon the relentless oversight of thousands of steps in the process, from design to customer relations. Small deviations from a prescribed routine might jeopardize a company’s profits, profits that might be as low as 3 percent.”
from “Eichler: modernism rebuilds the American dream”
https://books.google.com/books?id=3MWIcHy00NgC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=%22#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Soleri wrote:
” That John F Long series of modern designs was in Maryvale. If there was a cost premium to them, I’m not aware of it.”
So, you’re not aware of it: or else the builder absorbed the cost differential for promotional reasons. Either way, it doesn’t change the economics, does it? Maryvale was not a modernist development, and a concession to modernism incorporated into a small fraction of its houses was a “deviation” in the sense quoted above.
Soleri wrote:
“Haver & Nunn designed quite a few residential subdivisions, which are highly valued today. But these were low-cost, low-square-footage houses in their day, much akin to the Eichler houses in northern California. You can still see a few in their original condition and apart from their aesthetic appeal, they were quite basic.”
Regardless of their “aesthetic appeal” did they all look alike, or pretty much so? Because I think I’ve established the fact that the most inexpensive, truly entry-level priced homes built for the newly upwardly mobile masses required certain economies, and that deviations from a basic design (whatever that design was) required additional costs, and those were generally passed on to the consumer.
There are other ways to cut costs, also: you’ve said that the houses were “pretty basic”. Without pricing and other details it’s difficult to discuss this aspect of it.
Soleri wrote:
“If I’ve given you cause to resent my posts, please accept my apologies.”
Why would you ask? All I did was calmly argue a point and ask you to educate me if I were misinformed. Did you take that as sarcasm? It wasn’t.

Jim, I wanted to mention Beadle but I’m not aware of a subdivision of his designs aside from Paradise Gardens (subject of the April 10 home tour). Beadle was our most famous post-Wright architect. His designs showed the greatest arc in terms of creative development. One thing we saw in Beadle were apartment/townhouse designs that were remarkably stylish. The Boardwalk on 36th St date from the mid-60s and consist of small two bedroom units. Today, they are highly valued by modernist fans. At the peak of the boom, they exceeded $200K in value. Here’s an example of relative rarity driving prices beyond the means of entry-level buyers.
There are some current townhouse developers (i.e., JAG) that cater to the modernist community. I think one bellwether of community vitality is the degree that citizens are involved in expanding the design palette of the built environment.

I came across an interesting statistic in a WSJ story about Wal-Mart’s plans to open an additional 500 “money centers” in its stores:
“The expansion would push the number of Wal-Marts with “Money Centers” to 1,500, or a little less than one for every two Wal-Marts in the U.S., giving the nation’s biggest retailer a financial presence that only a handful of banks have. Wal-Mart plans to open its 1,000th money center Tuesday.
“The money centers cater to millions of the retailer’s lower-income customers who don’t have a bank account or significant relationships with a bank. The federal government estimates that one in four U.S. households.”
https://www.myfoxny.com/dpps/your_money/dpgonc-wal-mart-to-add-more-money-centers-to-stores-fc-20100316_6596266
It’s that last part I wanted to highlight: fully 25 percent of American households don’t have a bank account.
I wonder, now that easy credit, home equity loans, and house-flipping, supported by an ever-rising real-estate market, are things of the past, and real household incomes have been stagnant or in decline for that segment of the population for some time, and high unemployment produces a hirer’s market which will keep a lid on wage growth still further, whether the now ubiquitous “payday loan” centers will see increasing business in the years to come.
I realize that Wal-Mart doesn’t qualify for this, at the moment, without a banking charter, but this sort of legalized usury already rivals corner liquor stores and convenience marts in many areas of many cities.
At the moment, both of the bills to revive the industry in Arizona (against the voters’ will) have been killed. Does anyone have information on how many states ban this industry?