Sterling Ranch Gets Preliminary Approval

CAVEAT: Trapped in a blog time warp - originally posted in May.

Douglas County commissioners gave preliminary approval Wednesday night to the Sterling Ranch development, despite concerns by some about water, traffic and how the massive project will affect the quality of life in the Chatfield Basin. The vote all but ends several years of meetings, public input and revisions by the developer.



When complete, Sterling Ranch, south of Chatfield State Park and east of Roxborough State Park, would be home to 31,000 people and include 12,050 housing units on 3,400 acres.



The approval is subject to technical corrections in the plan, which will be ratified at a meeting May 31. Sterling Ranch officials hope to start moving dirt by next year and building homes in 2013.

From here.



The amount of regulatory work necessary to win approval for this plan, already within the density guidelines of the existing urban plan, suggests that conservative distaste for government regulation does not extend to urban planning by local governments.

READ MORE - Sterling Ranch Gets Preliminary Approval

Why didn't the predicted surge in teen crime happen?

Conservative criminologist John DiIulio called the fearsome horde "super-predators." He estimated that they'd number nearly 200,000 by now. Even unflappable Attorney General Janet Reno foresaw violent crime doubling among kids. . . . William Bennett, the former drug czar . . . wrote a 1996 book with DiIulio on the topic, titled "Body Count," which attributed the problem to moral decay. . . . It never happened. . . . Instead, Americans are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. . . .

[Why?]

Probably more important than tighter school security . . . were these factors:

In the decade of economic expansion that ended in 2000, the number of older teens who were neither in school nor at full-time jobs dropped by nearly a third. . . . Prosperity . . . gave teens more and better options to crime. . . .

The Latino population in central cities swelled as teen crime declined. . . . Their influx . . . brought more intact families, stronger values, higher religious participation - and lower crime rates. At the same time, many of the black families they replaced moved to suburbs where poverty was less concentrated. "Kids once confined to the inner city started seeing lifestyles other than the street." . . .

Criminologists decided in the `90s to track what worked and what didn't in dealing with teen crime. Boot camps didn't work. . . . Nor did trying juveniles in adult courts. Big Brother and Big Sister mentoring worked. Foster care for delinquents worked better than lock-ups if foster parents were well trained and the goal was to return the delinquents to well-coached biological parents. Suspending delinquent kids from school or leaving them back didn't work. . . . They found that if one parent is strong and consistent, the second isn't missed when it comes to preventing delinquency.

The incarceration rate rose from 1 per 1,000 adults to 4 from the `80s to today, and it has many foes. But . . . jailing more adults sharply reduced the number of teens who commit crimes with adult accomplices.

Economist Levitt attributes teen crime's sharp drop to a reduction in unwanted children, which began with the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Criminologist Zimring, among others, thinks it contributed but isn't as big a factor
as Levitt argues.

From here.

These gems come from a blog associated with The Atlantic magazine, linked to at Enik Rising.

It ties into a Denver Post rehash of a local think tank report on population growth in Denver neighborhoods that I saw today. Three of the top five: Green Valley Ranch, Stapleton, and Lowry, are unsurprising. They are neighborhoods that were previously uninhabited that have seen major residential development in recent years.

The other two, Five Points and Montbello, are cases that fit the dynamic described above in which neighborhoods that used to be predominantly black ghettos with dire poverty that have seen major influxes of Hispanics, as well as others, in a combination of ethnic shifts and gentrification as many black residents of these neighborhoods have moved to suburbs or to central city suburban style neighborhoods like multi-ethnic Green Valley Ranch.

Another place in the metro area that has seen a similar and rapid demographic shift is Old Town Aurora, once a center of blacks and lower income Korean immigrants, that is now increasingly Hispanic.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Denver Post also announced the inauguration of a major overhaul of eleven Northeast Denver schools, a move that has been heralded as positive by some, while arousing extreme controversy, skepticism and complaints about insufficient community consultation from others. FWIW, I haven't followed the overhaul efforts closely and don't have a strong opinion on their merits as a result.

Aurora, also perhaps not coincidentally, has also recently announced a major urban effort directed at the area between Stapleton and Old Town Aurora, although it has been overshadowed by a bid by Aurora to develop a complex that would compete heavily with the convention center complex in downtown Denver.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but, in each case, major governmental initiatives to improve city services in metro Denver neighborhoods have coincided with declining African American populations in those neighborhoods.

Certainly, nothing as crude as Jim Crow racism as it work in Denver, that just elected a second African-American mayor despite having a fairly modest African-American population percentage for a major American central city (Hancock this time around, Webb the last time around), or in Colorado, which recently had an African-American state house speaker (Terrance Carroll). Nor does metro Denver as a whole want for predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods that have been sorely neglected in the government services department. The cause and effect relationships here are more subtle and are not simple examples of racial or ethnic favoritism.

Northeast Denver, for example, has changed due to efforts like the Ballpark Neighborhood gentrification, the transformation of "North Capital Hill" into "Uptown" and the impact of the Stapleton and Lowry developments which sent middle class traffic through these formerly low income predominantly black neighborhoods and called attention to their potential to provide short commutes to downtown.

The housing bubble opened up a lot of affordable, quality suburban homes to people from Denver including families in Northeast Denver that have not been tainted by generations of covert and overt racial discrimination in the housing market that reached a critical mass that became self-sustaining where it has established itself.

Rising real estate values in Denver from a bubble collapsed low point in 1983 until an earlier than the rest of the nation slump, particularly in central Denver, transferred considerable wealth to inner city home owners.

As post from The Atlantic article that led me to the teen crime story that I quoted observed, underclass predominantly black dysfunctional ghettos are nothing to be nostalgic for, even if one is firmly committed to improving the well being of the people who lived in those communities a few decades ago and their children. The transformation of these dysfunctional neighborhoods wasn't a punishment inflicted on its residents; it was a reflection of the fact that the people who lived there have mostly found better alternatives and moved on when barriers to their exit from those neighborhoods became less steep. The neighborhoods weren't bad because they were non-white, they were bad because they had high crime, high truancy, governmental underinvestment, high teen pregnancy, few viable businesses, and high unemployment that had deep and obvious causes in American history.

Improving neighborhood well being makes neighborhoods tolerable to people who have any choice at all about where they live and has led to rapid population growth in these neighborhoods. Creating demand for housing in these neighborhoods boosts property values and makes life more tolerable for those who continue to live there. Even renters who are forced to leave due to rising rents in these neighborhoods spur the construction of newer and better rental housing in the metro area that if often better than what they left behind. The line between someone who is a slum lord who has received a windfall from the changes in these neighborhoods and someone who is a civic minded booster of a neighborhood is often a thin one.

Capitalism may not always seek out hard case situations to invest in for the long run, but it doesn't follow that it profits from large scale systemic socio-economic misery either. It encourages profitable mutual growth, it just sometimes has a hard time getting the ball rolling because not enough people have enough vision to bring the needed investment and suspicion abounds because it is hard to tell who gains and loses from the changes in advance. But, when your current neighborhood is one of the least desirable in the metro area, as was the case for a significant share of Northeast Denver in the 1980s and into the 1990s, it is hard for change, either to the neighborhood or for those who end up leaving the neighborhood as a result, to be a terrible thing or a case of downward mobility.

READ MORE - Why didn't the predicted surge in teen crime happen?

Post-Long Weekend Observations

* Denver's Mayor-Elect Hancock will be sworn in on the 18th of July. Bill Vidal, the outgoing interim Mayor has done a better than expected job in the interim since outgoing Mayor Hickenlooper took the Governor's office, in terms of the budget and police discipline. He's benefited from not owing anything to anyone and not having to run for re-election.
* Byers School, which has sat vacant since the Denver School of the Arts left for the old University of Denver music campus near Stapleton has a new tenant lined up, a new Denver School of Science and Technology charter school set to open, if I understand the matter correctly, in the 2013-2014 school year. This fills a huge hole in the West Washington Park neighborhood with a wonderful bit of infill, adds a good new educational choice to the Denver Public Schools, and makes a large number of people, my family included, who lobbied for it happy.
* My Fourth of July weekend found me at the Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado. A certain number of paid models and Renaissance Festival enthusiasts dress in costume - not strictly of any one historical period and often veering into fantasy. Among the most striking, because they come across as quite natural at first glance, were the little devil horns that some people wore, and the furry tails that a number of people (mostly women) affixed to their outfit as if they were natural. Also eye catching in general are other forms of headgear like garlands and fairy antenna, full back angel wing tattoos, and crows masks which are surprisingly frightening.  Genuine wings of angelic, fairy, and birdlike varieties were also in evidence, but rather less effective.  Opponents of weapons control will note that there are few other events where so many people openly bear arms (some fake, but a significant number of the genuine stainless steel and deadly variety).

* The Greeley Stampede, which I also made my way to this weekend, was more notable for the very strong presence of the National Guard, a lot of cliche Western Art, fried twinkies, alligator wrestling, and mutton busting.

* Aurora, Colorado is proposing major tax breaks and zoning accomodations for a Gaylord entertainment sponsored convention center project that, IMHO, is the last thing that the metro area needs right now.

* I don't recall if I mentioned the major new water compact reached this spring under Governor Hickenloopers guidance.  It diverts water from the Western Slope to the Front Range in exchange for giving the Western Slope more control of future diversion plans and other compensation.  The diversion plans include new hydropower for the state.

* Disney already has a radio station, a television station, multiple international destination amusement parks, a movie studio and a major line of characters.  How long will it be before they have a newspaper and sports leagues as well?

READ MORE - Post-Long Weekend Observations

There's A Prophet In The House, But Maybe Not Me

I like flowers, a lot. I'm not very knowledgeable about them, but ever since I spent about four months living with a florist as an exchange student in high school, I've been hooked. Every time I drive to work, or take the kids to soccer, or drive to the grocery store this time of year, I can't help but to ooh and ahh at the summer flowers that have come into their seasons peak, now that the bulbs and annuals of earlier in the spring have receded into the background a little. In particular, I am awestruck by the amazing rose bushes that dot the landscape of Denver's urban residential neighborhoods.

Indeed, roses are one of the few truly unifying themes of Denver's flora. The presence or absence of trees in a neighborhood turns out to be as accurate a measure of a neighborhood's prosperity in this city as payday loan shop frequency. New developments sport fancy, water efficient grasses and wildflowers as part of xeriscaping efforts. Institutional office building owners tend to have a thing for geraniums and mums. But, roses are ubiquitous, from West to East, North to South, almost all of Denver's neighborhoods have them, dotted irregularly in select houses placed prominent in front of houses, on boundary lines and climbing up back fences. Pink ones, red once, orange ones and yellow ones. Compact bushes and sprawling abundant vines. The rose bushes at the Byers-Evans house next to the Denver Art Museum are more than a century old.

Rose are to flowers what jazz is to music. Growing them isn't necessarily trendy, just as jazz isn't necessarily cutting edge, but it has appeal with every ethnicity and with people from 11 to 101. They are enjoyed by conservatives and liberals, but modernists and traditionalists, and just about anyone else.

The trouble is that in addition to not being very knowledgeable about them, I also don't have much of a green thumb.  More often than not, my gardening efforts are epic fails, despite the encouragement and help I receive from my more talented neighbors.

My dear wife is a better gardener than I am, but has different preferences. Practical woman that she is, she prefers herbs and vegetables to flowers. Flowers just aren't her thing and she isn't inclined to devote much effort to my frivolous decorations.

So, once or twice every year, I am the one who makes an effort to plant some flowers with varying degrees of success. Some years it is pansies and marigolds. On two previous occasions it has been rose bushes which promptly died. Every once and a while I have a little success that keeps me going. Last fall, I planted bulbs and all but one of them actually bloomed this spring.

This year we'd been preoccupied earlier in this spring. Our lawn was eventually fertilized and mowed a few weeks behind schedule. Our vegetables and herbs had finally gone in the week before. And, this year, for father's day, I figured that instead of going on a hike in the mountains, or watching a movie with the kids, we'd plant rose bushes. Planting rose bushes that might still be their when they have kids of their own would certainly be more memorable and would also be a better quality way to spent time with them.

So, we spent the morning traipsing across town to find our treasures. But, my daughter, ever the prophet of doom, having not forgotten the debacle of last year's effort in which our dainty new collection of freshly planted flowers was destroyed by the first bad hail storm of the year informed me:

"Dad, it's going to hail and tear all the petals off your roses. It's karma."

The weather, while clouded, wasn't that foreboding in the morning, I'm not that superstitious, and I was more worried about whether our BBQ plans would be rained out than a hail storm. So, I ignored her dire warning, and by early afternoon our two beautiful rose bushes were nicely settled in the garden plot in front of the front picture window in our living room.

Needless to say, four hours later, the hail came down with a vengeance in raisin to almost acorn sized lumps for a good half an hour or so, followed by about twenty-eight hours of rain (notwithstanding the protestations of our newspaper of record which claims that there was no measurable precipitation on Sunday).

The rose bushes survived, badly battered, and perhaps the rain will allow them to recover and last in the long run. But, given the circumstances, maybe I'm wrong about who in our household is the real "Wash Park Prophet."

READ MORE - There's A Prophet In The House, But Maybe Not Me

First Bank of Cherry Creek Has Friendly Employees

I've done business with a number of banks over the years. One of them is First Bank of Cherry Creek. They don't always have the best interest rates or easiest loan underwriting terms. Alpine Bank, in Western Colorado, is the hands down winner in Colorado for beautiful branch bank office architecture (and when I lived in Grand Junction, Colorado they also had awesome donuts on Saturday morning). But, one place that First Bank really excels is courtesy and customer service. Time and time again, even when I come to them cranky, the people who work there are friendly, stay cool, take the time to listen to my questions and concerns, and address them.

For example, yesterday, the ATM machine ate my First Bank ATM card. I had even taken a detour on the way to where I was going there to go to the ATM machine so that I could do my business before I started work. A day that starts like this is like the beginning of some mediocre independent film comedy. Needless to say, I was pretty cranky, and I was also more than a bit worried that some case of personalized identity theft had struck me - something I've seen more than enough of second hand representing clients trying to sort out resulting bad check prosecutions, inaccurate credit reports, and muddled bank balances.

But, when I got to my office, I had a letter on my desk from the previous day explaining that there had been a security breach at the bank, which I hadn't realized applied to me, and when I called a customer service representative (I spoke to "Rhonda," a real human being from Colorado!) for clarification, she calmly explained to me that indeed, someone had gotten my ATM card number making it necessary to replace it, reviewed my account to make sure that there wasn't anything else amiss, told me when to expect a new card (it arrived later the same day) and explained why I couldn't have received a replacement any sooner given the steps that the bank had to take first and the fact that the breach took place on a weekend. I wasn't exactly happy afterwards, but I was a lot less grumpy than I'd been when the ATM machine ate my ATM card, and I was comfortable that a criminal, rather than bad management at the bank, was responsible for my inconvenience.

In an ideal world, the letter I'd received telling me what was going on could have been more clear, and the ATM machine could have been more specific about the reason it was eating my card, rather than giving me an ominous "please contact your bank" message with no other explanation. But, a chance to speak to a human being who was nice and actually able to answer my questions and was able to explain what was going on made the difference between a mild "shit happens" annoyance and a fury that could easily have led me to change banks. Given how routine it is for customer service line service to be almost as bad as the events that inspired you to call in the first place, this is a real achievement. At least half the time, to get the help you need, even if you can get it, you need to ask for a manager. But, not this time.

I often tag instances of bad business management (the Burger King next door to its Cherry Creek branch office has earned at least couple of those for its parking nazi tactics, nasty bathrooms and notoriously slow front counter service), but excellence deserves recognition now and then as well.

Full disclosure: I am a First Bank of Cherry Creek customer, but receive no special deals and wasn't asked to prepare or compensated in any way for this blog post.

READ MORE - First Bank of Cherry Creek Has Friendly Employees

Denver Businesses and Real Estate Holes Come Back To Life

For any urban area, real estate development and utilization is central to a community's health. Denver's metropolitan area, which took a relatively light blow during the financial crisis and housing bubble collapse, seems to be bouncing back with new businesses and developments filling gaps left by businesses that the downtown purged.

* A major infill development from Alameda to the I-25 and Broadway light rail station which would include 3,000 new homes, a new school, and new office space is in the advanced planning stage. Currently it includes the Denver Design Center which is a suite of interior design oriented retail spaces, a Sam's Club, an Albertsons, two light rail station, a K-Mart, and some strip mall development.

* The Gates Rubber Plant to the south of the planned new development has been the major projects focus for the area at the fringe of Denver's West Washington Park neighborhood, some office space was restored on the east side of Broadway, and a new apartment complex went in at the southern tip of the project, but environmental concerns and a financial crisis spawned collapse of investment in major new real estate projects has put it on hold. But, if both the Gates Rubber Plant and the new transit oriented development planned between it and the Baker Neighborhood eventually take off, it will be a major transit oriented population expansion in Central Denver.

* Another small transit oriented development, with senior housing and retail is going in at the I-25 and Yale light rail stop.

* National Jewish Hospital has finally decided to buy the long vacant Gove Middle School at Colorado Boulevard and 14th Street, that is adjacent to its campus, allowing it to consolidate its expanding operations, and providing capital projects cash for a cash strapped Denver Public Schools.

* The former University Hospital on University Boulevard was to have been redeveloped by a developer who managed to rezone the property but gave up on the project. The new infill developer on the project has more modest ambitions, but looks likely to be able to put this major hole in the neighborhood back into productive use. A new apartment complex and new restaurants have kept that neighborhood surprisingly healthy considering the massive loss of employment that it has experienced.

* A shakeup is looming in the area of Saint Joseph's and Presbyterian/Saint Luke's Hospital in North Denver. P/SL has recently upgraded its ER and added a children's focused facility to fill the gap created by the departure of Children's Hospital to Fitzsimmons. Saint Joseph's signature tower has serious building code issues, so a somewhat complicated plan involving major new construction is underway to deal with it.

* A string of vacant store fronts along Alameda Avenue in West Washington Park created by the pull out of Twist and Shout Records, a closing Blockbuster store, a failed used book store, a closed laundromat, a long dead gas station, a floundering dinner assembly business, and several other faltering small businesses is almost entirely back to life. Two bars at Alameda and Downing have come under new management replacing the old ones. A hair salon has expanded to fill the space left vacant by the loss of a small neighborhood gym. A tailor and a new dry cleaner moved in, while a space once held by a travel agent struggling with declining commissions has been filled by a home nursing service. Pho Pasta took over the used book store space, Bittersweet have turned the old gas station into a beautiful new fine restaurant, Italian restaurant La Scalia filled the space previously occupied by a Dinner assembly business and the adjacent Chinese restaurant has taken the opportunity to give itself an upscale face life. A high end appliance store filled one gap. A Jimmy Johns, a hair salon, a new small gym, and a Larkburger have filled the gap created by the move of Twist and Shout records to Colfax near East High School. A new bar will fill the gap created by a closing Blockbuster. Further down the road, medical marijuana dispensaries have filled several street front locations zoned for retail.

* Also nearby the Wask Perk coffee shop at Emerson and Ohio in West Washington Park has expanded, both taking over the space of its retail neighbor which was most recent a struggling gift shop and starting to offer a mobile bicycle like station in Washington Park itself. The establishment seems to be thriving, after struggling through at least three successive rounds of owners, clashing with the local neighborhood association, and facing traffic declines due to road work. Nearby a new bare bones retro style barber shop has moved in, next to a pet grooming business.

* The new Central Denver Recreation Center that had been planned for a parcel near East High School that had once been a grocery store and then was a church, on land purchased for a pretty penny (arguably suspiciously high), has been put on hold in favor of what I call the million dollar dog park. The dog park meets the urban planning goal of turning what had once been a popular gathering place for vagrants and youths with nothing to do into a space securely held by middle class dog owners, but has not filled the hole in community services that exists in the neighborhood.

* One major question mark that may be resolved in the next few days or weeks is the fate of the old Byers School. It was the home of the Denver School of the Arts until that relocated to the former DU Music School near Stapleton, and has sat vacant since then. Its school yard was redeveloped into a complex of what I call cereal box houses. They are small, narrow houses that look like half duplexes but have space between them because the neighborhood association (WWPNA) insisted that they be single family dwellings rather than town houses or duplexes (a preference that still baffles me). Neighbors, myself included, are pushing to have the location serve as the home for a new campus of the Denver School of Science and Technology, the most successful of Denver's charter schools. Success would mean another major hole in the neighborhood filled, an attractive new educational option nearby, and relief for the Denver Public Schools from the fiscal strain of carrying valuable empty real estate without getting any benefit from it. Failure would probably lead to increased efforts to dispose of the property, but this wouldn't be easy as it has few alternative uses that wouldn't take lots of ambition and capital investments.

* Downtown, a space filled by the failed Niketown store on the 16th Street Mall is slated to become the new home of discount fashion department store H&M. Considerable rumor had gathered suggesting that it would replace the departing Saks Department store in the Cherry Creek mall, but that apparently, will not be happening. A new tenant there has not been announced.

* The Commons Park, South Platte, Highland area to the west of LoDo is thriving.

* West Colfax will soon lose Saint Anthony's Hospital to the suburbs, a major hole in a neighborhood that has not seen the redevelopment and infill activity of many other Denver neighborhoods.

* Construction seems to be picking up again in Stapleton. It also has a new beautiful church opening in a signature concrete arch building, a new modern architecture inspired new recreation center, and new schools. Much of this is development funded.

* The new, reasonably affordable, suburban style Gateway neighborhood on the road to DIA in Denver proper, just opened a new library and is also getting new schools.

* Aurora, in a urban planning department lead initiative, is looking for a way to open the doors to a major infill redevelopment of the area between Fitzsimmons and Stapleton, which is currently a working class residential neighborhood that has seen major upheaval as many black and moderate income Asian residents have moved to more suburban neighborhood's like Denver's Green Valley Ranch and the E-470 corridor, and many new Hispanic residents have moved in, given the "Old Town Aurora" neighborhood a new ethnic character. They would like to expand the middle to high income neighborhoods created by the redevelopments of Lowry and Stapleton and Fitzsimmons to link them all into a coherent larger scale zone of prosperity. But, it is unclear is the private sector interest to make it happen in present.

* A major new development that will bring thousands of new residents is planned for Douglas County near Chatfield Reservoir at densities within the levels allowed by current zoning, but the supposedly pro-growth, anti-government regulation Republicans of the area are balking at the new project.

* Meanwhile, facing renewed budget cuts, the Denver Public Library system is pushing to form its own property tax funded district, apart from the municipal government's general fund from which it is funded now, to stave off those cuts and provide it with greater budget security. Hickenlooper's administration managed to stave off deep cuts to the system, compared to many library systems such as the decimated Aurora Public Library system, but the fear that another recession could inflict deep permanent damage to the system lingers.

* Despite funding shortfalls that leave the prospects of a timely completion of Northern expansions of Denver's light rail and transit system in doubt, as it isn't clear what sort of sales tax increase voters would support to fund it, the FasTracks line from central Denver to the Jefferson County court house is coming ever closer to entering service and the Union Station redevelopment is moving along. Most of the new light rail bridges for the line are in place.

* Next in line for rail transit expansion will be the efforts already underway to connect downtown Denver and the Denver International Airport, a line that might also connect Stapleton to DIA via rail.

* The Greyhound bus station downtown is closing, and the very obvious optimal place for it to relocate would be Union Station, which is supposed to be a multi-modal transit hub for downtown. But, it isn't clear that this will happen.

READ MORE - Denver Businesses and Real Estate Holes Come Back To Life

Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

The victim in a Washington state sex assault that is now linked to a 32-year-old Lakewood man was charged with false reporting and paid a $500 fine in 2008 because police didn't believe her story.

Authorities in Lynnwood, Wash., reopened their case and reimbursed the woman after Colorado detectives found pictures of the victim on a camera belonging to Marc O'Leary, an Army veteran charged in two similar cases in Golden and Westminster, Lynnwood police Cmdr. Steve Rider said.

From here.

Women are still raped in public view in places like Denver International Airport.

Drunk young women still disappear into the night after clubbing in LoDo, and go missing for weeks without explanation.

Coaches, and pastors still abuse positions of trust.

Little girls are still shot dead.

And, that is just in Colorado so far this month.

READ MORE - Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

Class, Culture, Toilets and Time

I heard two recent stories about toilets in Asia in the last twenty-four hours.

HADENYA, Japan — The colossal wave that swept away this tiny fishing hamlet also washed out nearby bridges, phone lines and cellphone service, leaving survivors shivering and dazed and completely cut off at a hilltop community center. . . . With no time to mourn for their missing loved ones, they were immediately thrust into the struggle to stay alive in the frigid winter cold, amid a hushed, apocalyptic landscape of wrecked homes, crushed vehicles and stranded boats. They had scant food and fuel and no news from the outside world — not even the scope of the devastation.

On Wednesday, after the Japanese military finally reached them for the first time since the tsunami struck 12 days ago, by erecting makeshift bridges and cutting roads through the debris, they told a remarkable tale of survival that drew uniquely on the tight bonds of their once-tidy village, having quickly reorganized themselves roughly along the lines of their original community: choosing leaders, assigning tasks and helping the young and the weak. . . .

Almost as soon as the waters receded, those rescued here said, they began dividing tasks along gender lines, with women boiling water and preparing food, while men went scavenging for firewood and gasoline. Within days, they said, they had re-established a complex community, with a hierarchy and division of labor, in which members were assigned daily tasks. . . .

Refugee centers like this one in Hadenya exhibit a proud cooperative spirit, and also a keen desire to maintain Japan’s tidy perfectionism. Along the hallways, boxes of supplies lie stacked in orderly rows. The toilets are immaculate, with cups and soap neatly lined up. At the entrance, sheets of paper list names and assigned tasks for the day, like chopping firewood, carrying supplies and cooking.

From here.

How can you not admire a society that is organized enough to keep its toilets immaculate and its people well organized, even in the most dire circumstances?

Yesterday, I heard a story on the radio about the state of rail infrastructure in India (probably NPR or the BBC although I can't find a link to the story), where construction surges ahead in places like Mumbai, while the existing infrastructure is aging and underfunded. Particularly striking was an account of a train called the "Super" which was anything but. It's toilets, typical of passenger rail in India, were noxious. As another recent story on the subject sums it up:

For most visitors, rail travel in India is an indispensable part of any holiday, although an ability to overlook the often filthy toilets and deal with basic comfort and crowded carriages is required.

India has no shortage of cheap labor. Indeed, it has a government program that guarantees every person in India who shows up wanting to work a minimum wage job a certain number of days per year, usually on infrastructure projects. It also has trains full of people who could volunteer to do the work if organized properly. But, it doesn't. It has nausea inducing cesspools used only by the most desperate instead that make life miserable for train passengers and present a poor image of the country to every traveler domestic and foreign.

Meanwhile, Japan manages to keep its toilets pristine, even an isolated village devastated by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami that hasn't had contact with the outside world for a week and a half.

It is hard to chalk this difference to religion. Both Hindu and Islamic religious precepts give considerable attention to ritual purity and cleanliness; at least as much as the Shinto, Buddhist and Confucian syncretism found in Japan. Nor can one look to differences in climate - if anything, toilet cleanliness is more important from a public health perspective in sultry India than it is in frigid Northern Japan. Nor, must toilets on conveyances necessarily be putrid. Amtrak and most commercial airlines manage to have at least marginally clean toilets most of the time. Back in the era when trains were a leading means of intercity transportation in the United States, toilets on trains were cleaner than they are on Amtrak today.

Instead, it is a product of culture, and perhaps, in a not unrelated way, of economic development. Japanese communities place a premium on having decently clean toilets and are willing and able to organize themselves to secure them. India's rail culture continually drifts on the edge of mayhem and chaos, and the communities that use and manage it lack the will to decide that nasty toilets on trains don't have to be tolerated.

It isn't that South Asians don't prefer clean toilets to dirty ones. An ability to provide indoor plumbing and running water are now central to a young man's hopes of securing a good marriage match in India these days, very much as they were in the Reconstruction Era American South. But, for whatever reason, today's India is having trouble organizing itself as a society to secure this desirable thing.

American culture is somewhere in between. There are places - upper floors of office buildings, university classroom buildings, McDonald's restaurants, airports, the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, and country clubs, where toilets are routinely tidy. There are other places - small rural gas stations, the Burger King restaurant at Cherry Creek North in Denver, public parks, the first floor of inner city libraries, outhouses at construction sites, and bus stations, where nasty bathrooms are the norm.

In America, toilet cleanliness is a pretty reliable social class marker. The higher the social class of the people who usually use it, the cleaner they tend to be, although this is also strongly a function in the institutional culture of the toilet operator. Toilet cleanliness is also something that is typically greater in private settings than in public ones in the United States, although there isn't a firm general rule.

There are other fascinating things one can learn from toilet culture as well. Americans, despite their strong ideological commitment to market approaches to economics, very rarely charge directly for using a toilet, although many establishments try to limit them to customers only, especially in areas with large numbers of transients. The decidedly socialist leaning French, by comparison, routinely charge a small fee to use a toilet, or at least expect users to tip an attendant. French fee for service toilets tend to be quite clean.

Toilets are interesting as a cultural indicator because they are impossible not to observe if you spend any amount of time someplace, because it is a universal indicator since every society has to have some way of handling the issue, and because it is pretty much impossible to hide their condition.

To the extent that toilet conditions reflect some version of economic development and social class, how "civilized" a culture is to use an out of fashion term and way of thinking, and there seems to be reason to think that this is something of a general trend, one also has to ask how much this is an effect of affluence, and how much it is a result of some attitude about how communal affairs are managed that gives rise to affluence. Are clean toilets a result of a shared high value afforded to a tidy and well ordered public sphere? Of shared social norms? Of minimal civic obligation? And, these these same values translate into affluence in the economy?

People like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish State, were convinced that this kind of thing was crucial to economic development. His agenda for reform included not just changes to the legal system and political system, but such cultural level reforms as the adoption of a national, Western style dress code designed to root out social and religious markers of the Ottoman era, despite the lack of an obvious connection between wearing suits and ties and conducting the affairs of a modern society. After all, as a former employer of mine enjoyed observing, the British conquered the world in shorts. But, it also seems that there really is something cultural that has to transform in the course of economic development.

One of the fascinating examples comes from British history in the early Industrial Era, one of the first places in the world anywhere that was organized socially and technologically on an industrial basis (continental Europe followed later, often heavily driven by government action as opposed to private investment). At that time and place was a cultural upheaval that included a greatly increased attention to punctuality and uniform time measurements. Clock towers went up all over England to keep communities synchronized. Many farm workers in the first waves converting to the industrial regime had great difficulty getting used to ideas like showing up on time and getting paid by the hour. While not many economists study international toilet cleanliness levels, there is an entire subfield of studies on the link between punctuality and time consciousness and economic development (see e.g. here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Economists study how fast people walk, how fast people talk, how timely trains are, and more. The aphorism about the Italian fascists is that at least they managed to get the trains to run on time. Standardized time zones have their origins in the efforts of train operators to coordinate their time tables.

Certainly, suits and ties are any more necessary to economic development than kimonos. Likewise, toilet cleanliness is not a cause of the rise and fall of great empires. But, one doesn't have to believe such absurdities to conclude that economic development and cultural transformation are inextricably intertwined, and that the development of some set of social virtues is as a critical a technology as the railroad or the internal combustion engine to attaining the economic scale and social coordination that is necessary for an affluent society.

READ MORE - Class, Culture, Toilets and Time

Boulder, Colorado Is America's Happiest City

and Fort Collins is number three, per Richard Florida's blog. Provo, Utah also comes out at the top of the pack.

Boulder also came out on top in the subcategory of physical health, which is unsurprising as Colorado as the least obese state in the nation.

Ohio is home to two of the least happy cities in the nation, Ashland and Youngstown. Shreveport, Louisiana; Myrtle Beach, North Carolina; and McAllen, Texas were also dismal in the happiness index.

College towns dominate the top of the list; the Rust Belt fills the bottom.

READ MORE - Boulder, Colorado Is America's Happiest City

The Downside To Wash Park

For all my beloved Washington Park's virtues, we have at least one notable drawback. It seems that it, as well as nearby University Park, has a reputation for having for the worst At&T network cell phone coverage in the entire city of Denver, Colorado (truth be told, the digital television signal reception is pretty mediocre as well).

It so happens that there have been a somewhat fierce but obscure series of land use squabbles over the matter of building a new tower to address this shortfall (and related but more serious dead zones for EMS radios in the area), but apparently tech reporters at the Denver Post like Andy Vuong, don't talk much to the city beat reporters who cover such matters, or the paper may lack institutional memory - if it isn't readily discoverable via Google, it doesn't exist.

READ MORE - The Downside To Wash Park

Graffiti Wash Park Style

Every neighborhood has some graffiti. My own Washington Park is no exception. My city councilman, many of his colleagues, and many neighborhood associations in Denver have made it a priority to control it.

But, while in many neighborhoods, graffiti involves simple tagging, or perhaps marking of gang territory the concerns of our graffiti artists are decidedly more middle class. Hence, on my way to work this morning along Alameda Boulevard, our local midnight spray paint artist has proclaimed:

AUDIT THE FED.

He didn't even deign to give his demand an explanation point! We're mild mannered as well.

READ MORE - Graffiti Wash Park Style

How Will We Use Vacant Public Space?

Empty Public Space Abounds

Denver is littered with grand old churches that are empty or have Congregations of a few dozen in edifices built for many hundreds.

The Denver Public Schools has far more space in schools than it has students, a few neighborhoods have overcrowding (like Green Valley Ranch and Stapleton) while other neighborhoods have a particularly great excess of empty school space. My neighborhood has the old Beyer's School (once home to Denver School of the Arts which relocated to fill part of an abandoned North Campus of the Universty of Denver, the rest of which was filled with Johnson and Wales University) looming over it and fervantly seeks to make it the home of a new Denver School of Science and Technology Charter School.

As the volume of mail sent via the postal service declines in favor of e-mail, one by one, post offices are going to sit vacant. Budget cuts have left communities like Aurora and Colorado Springs, and even Denver, unwilling or unable to keep recreation centers open, leaving more public spaces vacant. As multiplexes replace humbler theaters, the old theaters have had to find new uses. Dead malls lurch quietly. And, the declining rolls of service clubs from the Masons to the Eagles chronicled most famously by Robert Putnam continue to dwindle, their lodges and halls sit underused or empty. Converting old public spaces into private ones is a growth industry.

Taken together there is a lot of empty public space.

New Uses

Sometimes, old churches and public spaces become lofts. S. Broadway has a church converted to lofts at about 1st Street, University Boulevard has another church converted to a residence at about 5th Street, 10th Street in Congress Park features an old fire station converted to residences. There is an old school converted to residences near Old South Gaylord in Washington Park. The home can be delightful, but it is also a shame to see public space become private.

The old late night post office and mail sorting facility in LoDo was replaced by a shiny new, eco-friendly EPA building. In my home town, Oxford, Ohio, an old post office became a municipal court.

Train stations are seeing a renaissance, ironically, as train stations, mostly supporting metro area transit rather than intercity rail, although rejections of federal high speed rail funds in Ohio and Wisconsin, and indifference towards them in New Jersey and Florida, makes Colorado's hopes of securing some of these funds look like less of a pipe dream. Denver's Union Station is already well in the process to be restored to glory as a transportation hub (even as the Greyhound Station looks for a new home).

The dead malls at Cinderella City (in Englewood, Colorado) and Villa Italia (in Lakewood, Colorado) were razed and replaced with mixed use neighborhoods, in the case of Cinderella City, complete with a new city hall and library.

Movie theaters have found mixed dispositions. Some, like the Esquire and Mayan have been subdivided into multiscreen art house theaters. One at S. Colorado Boulevard and Alameda in Glendale became a gym. One on S. Broadway was converted into a climbing gym. Several have been converted into venues for live rock band performances. One on Federal Boulevard was converted into a missionary megachurch.

Libraries are beautiful public spaces, but I can't think off hand of what has become of any of them, despite the fact that I know some that have closed fairly recently, and others that are at grave risk of closing.

An old grocery store, converted to a church, near East High School, originally slated to become a new Central Denver Recreation Center, has wound up for the time being, as a community garden and dog park instead. Across the street, an old live theater has been converted into a book store, record store and restaurants, as well as a movie theater that died and since has been reborn with the Denver Film Society relocating there from Tivoloi on the Denver's Auraria campus.

Challenges To Come

This, of course, only scratches the surface of the general issue of finding new uses for no longer needed properties. Greater Denver has a variety of spaces that need repurposing.

Old Saint Luke's Hospital has now become Post Properties in the rechristened Uptown, and Old Elitch Gardens has become a residential development (which defeated efforts to have a Wal-Mart put in their neighborhood, only to have one spring up ten blocks down the road in Lakeside). The old Children's Hospital Campus is reportedly going to be the home for a new Saint Joseph's hospital, because its existing tower has fire code issues.

But, the disposition of the old University Hospital, abandoned in part of the effort to remake the old Fitzsimmon's military base and turned over to a redevelopment company, is not yet clear. In a year or two when Saint Anthony's Hospital off Colfax in Northwest Denver relocates into its under construction new facility, there will be yet another big hole for Denver to fill in a space where the impetus for new development has not been as vigorous.

A defunct public school which has passed from one speculative investor group to another in the Golden Triangle remains vacant. Ironically, the neighorhood has transformed enough that it could really use a school again, although that use for the space seems unlikely.

Denver also has its brownfields. The financial crisis stalled the redevelopment of the Old Gates Rubber Plant, but sooner or later, it will have to find a new use. I know of a couple of families who have turned old industrial buildings in North Denver into residences and art studios. Between Sante Fe and Kalamath a few blocks North of Alameda, old industrial properties have been repurposed to be a micro-distillery and a Hispanic cultural center. Another old public building near the Auraria campus off Colfax was also repurposed to be a cultural center. Perhaps this trend will continue.

The Coming Inversion Of Center And Fringe

Maybe Denver proper will be O.K.

Infill construction has continued steadily while suburban Denver construction came to a screeching halt. The rising price of gas, increased dissatisfaction with long commutes, and increasing public faith in the Denver Public Schools, represented most recently by a remarkable surge in middle school enrollments may fuel an influx of new people to the central city. For most of history from the Middle Ages until the construction of street cars, central cities were considered more desireable than the urban fringe. Street cars created street car suburbs, like Washington Park. Interstate highways pushed attractive housing even further away from the core for a generation or two. But, the trend seems to be reversing itself. It may be only a matter of time before the metro area's ghettos are in Highland's Ranch instead of already gentrifying Five Points.

READ MORE - How Will We Use Vacant Public Space?

The Economics of Place

Suppose that the 300 million people who live in the United States were all bunched together at the population density of Brooklyn. And for those not familiar with it, Brooklyn is certainly not the most densely populated part of New York City (that would be Manhattan). Denver's Capital Hill neighborhood, for example, is more densely populated than Brooklyn. So, how much space would it take to fit the population of the United States in one place at Brooklyn's population density?

Answer: About the land area of New Hampshire "with extra room for parks (because Brooklyn could use more)."

Of course, not all activities necessary for the survival of the United States economy and civilization can function at that population density. A big chunk of the United States is farmland and the 2%-3% of the population in the farm economy would have to be spread out to tend those farms. Likewise, another 1%-2% or so of the population is engaged in harvesting lumber, fishing, and mining, which likewise have to be undertaken where the resources are located.

Even these intensely location dependent industries continue to grow less labor intensive. Less than half of all farms produce a very large share of all agricultural output in the United States. Shrinking wild fish resources mean that in the future there will be fewer fishermen. Recycling has muted the demand for newly mined metals. An increasingly paperless world needs less pulpwood than it used to require. Energy efficient technologies have reduced the amount of energy consumed in the course of making each $1,000 of GDP.

But, for the most part, location is a matter of choice. Historically, for example, car factories and other heavy industry in the United States was located in Rust Belt in cities like Detroit, Flint, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo and Pittsburg. But, there's nothing sacred about that today given the much reduced cost of transportation. A new automobile assembly plant was recently built in Mississippi, and the old guard of internal combustion engine automobile makers recently handed over an automobile assembly plant in California to a new guard company set on making electric cars. Some of the cars you see on the street were made in Japan (which is famous for its utter dearth of natural resources) and Germany, both of which are half a world away, even though a car is one of the heaviest goods (and hence most expensive to transport) that the average person owns other than a home. Vehicles are made in North American both in Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, and in Ontario, just across the border from Buffalo and Detroit. Manufacturing enterprises have immense freedom to locate pretty much anywhere they want, subject to very modest constraints.

Most of the economy, retail trade, hotels, branch commercial banking, gas stations, post offices, schools, hospitals, construction, government, and so on, needs to be located conveniently to the people who buy the goods and services they offer but aren't intrinsically connected to any particular place. There is very little that is done in Denver that couldn't be done just as functionally in Fort Collins or Colorado Springs had the path of history taken a slightly different step.

We also have quite a few industries where geography is absolutely critical, but it is critical because the industries operate in national or international marketplaces where proximity to industry colleagues is critical. New York is the center of the American investment banking industry because it started there and never left, and because there is considerably value in that industry in being able to have face to face meetings with other members of the investment banking community on short notice, not because the intrinsic geographic benefits of New York, like its status as a port city, have any continuing relevance to what the financial industry does there these days. The same is true for some of New York City's other major industries like television, publishing, and live theater. These industries are prominent simply because they thrive on large local markets and intra-industry interactions, and the New York City metropolitan area is one of the largest local markets in the country with the most established publishing houses and theater scenes. It is helpful to have key parts suppliers for a company near the company that makes the final product, particularly if the parts are physically large, the demand for them fluctuates unpredictably, and it may be necessary to make adjustments to return or modify parts that don't quite fit.

Indeed, industry inertia frequently trumps considerations of geography that would seem to be important. Lots of movies set in the United States are filmed in Prague or Toronto, for example. A majority of publicly held companies in the United States are incorporated in a suburb of Philadelphia called the state of Delaware that doesn't have any notable skyscrapers of its own (the pyramid of Giza built by the ancient Egyptians was 451 feet tall, while the tallest building in the state, the Chase Wilmington Building, is 330 feet tall), lacks an Ivy League college or a prestigious law school, is the only state in the United States without commercial air service, and closes its bars at 1 a.m. The state doesn't even have a single major league professional sports team of its own.

Even industries you might think of as highly location dependent, like tourism, aren't quite as bound to a particular place as you might think. Las Vegas could have been built anywhere within a moderate drive from a major population center. Disneyland and Disney World are likewise not to tightly tied to the world beyond their walls, a fact evidenced by the fact that new ones have sprung up across the world.

If a Nor'easter did to New York City what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans, with a similar amount of lead time to allow most people to evacuate, and the Mayor of New York City convinced everyone to move to Fargo at some critical moment, the city that never sleeps could be rebuilt in the Great Plains and continue on a more or less business as usual basis. Something is lost in translation at first, as we observe in cases where national capitals are relocated to completely planned cities like Canberra, Australia and Brasilia, Brazil. Washington D.C. was established on that kind of basis as well, but has aged enough into a character of its own that we tend to forget that fact.

The disconnect between economic activity and location is relatively new. In the 1920s, for example, close proximity to natural resources, consumers, water routes and rail lines was much more important for manufacturing firms. Until World War II, a much larger share of the population lived on farms.

Telecommunications have gotten cheap even more recently. I used to spend a large share of my monthly budget on long distance phone charges so that I could talk with the woman I would later marry when I was in law school, while she was half way across the country going to school somewhere else. These days, there is usually no extra charge for long distance calls relative to local ones. The postal service is coughing up red ink because information can be sent for a near zero marginal cost over the Internet and so people don't send letters nearly as often.

It isn't that location is irrelevant. But, today, what matters is "who lives there?" and "how nice of a place is it to live?" Not, "what is there?"

READ MORE - The Economics of Place

Denver Bike Program Ends First Season

Denver launched its B-Cycle program, a system of bike rentals kiosks, this year, in cooperation with the non-profit Denver Bike Sharing, and its first season is now over as it shuts down until March.

This season it had 500 bikes and about 50 kiosks, mostly in the vicinity of downtown Denver, Cherry Creek and the University of Denver, with some points in between. "In the seven months since it launched April 22, Denver B-cycle hit nearly 103,000 rides, selling 1,784 annual memberships and more than 32,900 short-term memberships." Short term memberships were $5 to $30 depending on length, annual memberships were $65. Rental rates, in addition to the membership costs, ranged from free to $8.80 per hour, depending on the length of use (longer rentals cost more). Next season's plans include a simpler fee structure, adjustment of kiosk locations to reflect the demand levels in different locations, and improvements to the touch screen interface of the kiosks.

Notably, no Denver taxes go towards the programs, although Denver does maintain at taxpayer expense, a bike path system in the city and has made city property available for kiosks to be set up upon. The program is funded with user fees (my back of napkin math suggests that those fees are more than $300,000, perhaps quite a bit more), donations and a $210,000 grant.

READ MORE - Denver Bike Program Ends First Season