Choices, Lets Talk About Them

Everybody is talking about it. IT is everywhere that you turn. IT is the talk about the rising price of gas, of food, of just about anything that we buy-from household goods to daily utilities. Everything is going up. And there is nothing that we can do about it. We are stuck.

We are just going to have to get used to it. There doesn't seem to be anyone who can do anything about it. So we get mad about having to pay more at the pump and complain that the oil companies did this to us. By golly, we are Americans and gas should only cost around $1.50 a gallon. I hear that Europeans pay roughly twice as much as that, but I don't care about the Europeans and what they do with their time and money.

Somebody should make the oil companies do more for us – not to us. Somebody should make it easier for us to do what we want in order to get through life. We should be able to live anywhere that we want and be able to go anywhere that we want and anytime that we want. Oh, and it should be cheaper.

Folks that somebody is us. We, the people of the United States. And nobody did this to us, we did it to ourselves.

Our choices of where to live are predicated on the availability of cheap gas. Our abundance of electronic gadgets is built on the availability of cheap power. Our shopping centers full of mostly over packaged, soon to be obsolete goods are there due to cheap imports – which is also due to cheap oil. These are our choices. They weren't forced on us by government planners, they were chosen by us by our own free will.

I can remember $0.35 - $0.45 a gallon gas when a neighborhood kid could make a few bucks mowing grass for under a buck's worth of fuel. When you could walk to the gas station and back home in just a few minutes. I can remember when downtown was just a quick bike ride or bus trip away. Those days are about as far off as a quick bike trip in to town from Hamburg or South Point. Nobody make people live out there and nobody make them drive their autos in to town. Those are choices of free will.

I can remember when subdivision development patterns began to use the cul-de-sac as an enticement to quiet suburban living. Cul-de-sac lots were desirable and they carried a 10 – 20% premium on land cost, but the choice was worth it apparently. We do have so many of them. We now know that these cul-de-sac areas, and similarly less connected street patterns, can increase the per capita cost of fire protection services by over 400%. Other government services may be increased likewise. Again, choices of free will.

I can remember when an auto vacation involved many days, not hours and special trips used trains while very special ones took airplanes. When they built the Interstates, folks did not want to be tied to scheduled departures of the trains but still tolerated it for the airlines. Now that the trains are gone and the airlines require such a hassle of screening, we are left with the long road trip and the high cost of gas. This is a result of the choices that we made.

What other poor choices have we, the people of the Unites States, made that we will look back on with regret? What choices will we make in the future? Will we be willing to re-think our cul-de-sac subdivisions in a reasonable manner? Will we be forced to re-think the distances that we will have to move ourselves to work, play and shop? Will our food come from longer or shorter distances? Will our energy sources become more local, sustainable and renewable?

Are we up to the challenge of these types of choices, or are those days gone too.

Growing Old In Lexington? (2)

Since we all realize that we will end up elderly at some point, it is now commonplace to think and plan that, in the future, an assisted care facility and maybe some visits from the kids is a done deal. You would think that we would site our planned facilities a little bit better.

It is only since the end of World War II and rise of the “Baby Boomer” generation that the idea of nursing homes and assisted living facilities has exploded as an industry. The image of the “The Waltons” TV show, where a multi-generational household lives and solves their everyday problems makes for great nostalgia, but it is not a lifestyle for today’s modern family. Living with your parents, or even fairly close to them, is looked upon with disdain and loathing. I think that it is something about having to be self-sufficient and making a life for yourself. Whatever the reason, in today’s world we have an ever increasing number of places to house our elderly.

Mayfair Village is located on Tates Creek Pike across from the Lansdowne Shopping Center. Hardly a great distance when measured form door to door, but there is a busy, four-lane divided highway and a very busy parking lot without a single sidewalk in sight.

Sayre Christian Village is off Camelot Dr and probably 1,000 feet, as he crow flies, from the Tates Creek Center. Winding through the neighborhood, down the hill and along Wilson Downing Rd makes walking to the center about three times as far, especially if you are going to the grocery.

Richmond Place is on Rio Dosa Dr. and not far from the Locust Hill Center but getting there without encountering heavy traffic and no traffic light is not something most seniors want to do.

Public funded facilities are not much better. Connie Griffith and Ballard Place, both located in the very walkable downtown are nowhere near a supermarket, pharmacy or general shopping type stores.

Church supported senior housing in the downtown area like Christ Church apartments or Central Christian’s place on Short St. have full access to the shopping that is downtown but again groceries and drug stores are a long way away.

These are just a few of the many elderly care facilities in Lexington but they all require driving somewhere for the basic necessities of life. Even recreational needs like walking to or in the park with the grandkids, or swimming, or….you name it, you HAVE to drive somewhere to do it.

Our seniors just don’t fit in out in the suburbs, stuck at home, unable to drive (or walk) to see friends, sometimes unable to do for themselves. They are then relegated to the facility of their children’s choosing (kind of like warehousing them for the time being) and visited by them if they have time. There they are safe, secure and we know where they are when we want to go see them.

Both of my sets of grandparents lived within a fifteen minute walk of where I grew up and I visited often. My aunts(one on each side) lived with them and we all got together on a regular basis. None of them went to a long term care facility. My maternal aunt did decide to retire to Florida when her circle of friends here began to dwindle and she could no longer drive. She had cousins and friends in Florida, but they were in the same shape as she and she soon returned to Kentucky, settling a block or two from where she had been.

Where we place our elderly care facilities is not so much an issue of land use or being allowed by the comprehensive plan or zoning because they are allowed in just so many zones. But where in those zones is the more important question. The higher density residential for the able bodied is usually placed adjacent to the shopping center and the elderly buffered just a little by less intensive uses some distance into the neighborhood. They don’t create as many peak hour trips as the apartments and shopping so their traffic impact will be minimal and won’t disrupt the neighborhood. We place them in the neighborhood but we don’t incorporate them into the neighborhood. And we wonder why they tend to just wither away.

We all will have to make a choice someday, either about your parents or yourselves, or it will be made for us. It seems to me that we should be working to make those decisions easier on ones who have to live with the outcome of those decisions.

Those are some of the things that we should be working on right now.

Thoughts For A Friday Afternoon

“A commonly quoted statistic from the Small Business Administration (SBA) is that 65% of all new jobs are created by small businesses” so says an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. It also gives the general definition of a small business as “any business employing 500 people or fewer.” Although I wonder if that includes subsidiaries of large multi-nationals whose start-up costs are covered while an entrepreneur’s are not.

The author goes on to reveal that “99.7% of all companies in America meet the SBA's definition of small business”, again, what portion of that are the multi-national subsidiaries mentioned earlier.

His logical conclusion was that “the remaining 0.3% of American companies—big business—create 35% of all new jobs in this country”. We have now run the gamut from any business (regardless of any financial connections) through all companies in the nation to only American companies. Not just apples and oranges, but sliced and diced fruit.

It appears from this that any job creation bill from Congress should focus on our big businesses, those with the ability to properly accomplish this task. After all the SBA says that 56% of all start-ups fail in the first few years.

The current Senate jobs bill, which Sen. Reid says he wants to simplify over this next weekend, is estimated to cost $52 billion and the House version from December was $155 billion. The Senate bill relies on tax breaks and construction projects while the House’s one was construction and state aid packages. That is a lot of our money but it pales in comparison to the funds already held by big business.

Bloomberg is reporting that “A majority of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index increased cash to a combined $1.18 trillion while simultaneously reducing spending, keeping a jobs recovery on hold.” These are S&P’s, not the Blue Chip, big boys. 256 of these companies added about 4 times the House bill’s cost to their cash reserves in the past year. Does the Senate need to give more incentives when they have socked away nearly the National Debt?

Where did these companies get this money? Why we gave it to them. We the consumer and we the government. We gave it to them for products sold and for services rendered, since every business need to make some profit. That works out to about $1,600 per person that we gave them last year alone and just over $3,800 in all. $1,600 is just under double my Federal Income withholding for last year. And this is not the big guys. This is also money that is NOT going for job creation.

This is money that is not going for investment in alternative energy exploration (a job creator), or high speed rail, or re-localization of agriculture, or recreating our ability make things for ourselves, all good job creators. This money is also not just setting around doing nothing, it has become the plaything of our financial institutions and we saw what they did with such playthings in the past years.

Job creation is not something that the Federal government should pay for.

Our Growing Footprint

I have been a little pre-occupied this past week thinking about things other than this blog. Maybe, tonight I can get back to what is going on here.

I saw over on Steve Austin's Bluegrass reVISIONS that we have five years before our carbon emissions should peak or we have reached the tipping point of our slide into doom. Well maybe not that bad, but we need to adjust our lifestyles to make less of a carbon footprint than we do.

He states that Put simply, this means either that we must rapidly scale up renewables or we must reduce economic activity. I wonder if that could not say that we rapidly scale up AND modify our economic activity so as to achieve the same gain from alternative sources. I am not sure that it has to be an either/or situation.

Steve does ask what this means for Lexington, but he seems to be the only one asking out loud. Since the end of May 2008 the people of Lexington have thought about a lot of thing that they could be doing, but none of them concerned our carbon footprint. Football, basketball, horse racing, whether or not a new energy efficient building should be built downtown, downtown traffic patterns of one-way vs two-way, these all made the list, but not "can I live closer to my job?" or can I find an alternate mode to get to work?". These thoughts maybe made the fleeting moment list and were quickly dismissed as Lexington does not do this kind of thing.

Some thoughts that should have been making the rounds are:

• Do I need the fenced in yard that I hate to take care of every weekend of the summer and fall?
• Do I need to run the HVAC all year round just because the house/apartment is designed to prevent flow through air ventilation?
• If the bus(or other transit mode) came by my house would I take it on a regular basis?
• If the grocery was closer to my house would I need such a big refrigerator to store things , or such a big car to haul them or would I need to buy so much in one trip?
• Would my carbon footprint be smaller if I put more of my own on the ground?

On a city-wide level, has there been any discussion of what we can or should do to encourage people to modify their lifestyles to reduce their carbon footprint? In terms of meaningful discussions, I would have to say NO and in many instances the city leaders actions have done exactly the opposite. The government, on a regular basis, encourages those living in the outer reaches of the urban sprawl to boost the idea of downtown living by adding to the carbon footprint and coming downtown on the off traffic days. The Farmers Market, the weekend festivals throughout the year, the Second Sunday events to promote a cleaner healthier lifestyle, these all add to the overall carbon footprint, not take away from it.

Don't get me wrong, I think that all of these activities are worthwhile, but in places that make ecological sense more than economic sense. I can remember when some of the city's biggest events started out as neighborhood style happenings. The Shakespeare plays were held originally in the grassy field of Bell Court, until it grew too big and moved to Woodland Park. Now it NEEDS the setting of the Arboretum and the associated parking spaces to make a profit. What future does this bode for the new amphitheater in Beaumont Centre? Does this mean that there should be more of these play productions in more neighborhood settings?

I have already posted about the Second Sunday events and the city has responded with monthly escorted bike rides in various sectors of the city, but these all will originate downtown where the participants will have to drive with their bikes, to ride out to the suburbs and return to their cars to take their bikes home. Would it not make more sense to start where the people ARE and go to where some other people ARE and return, then next time start at the previous destination and go the where other people ARE, working your way around the suburban rings of Lexington? There is NO NEED to increase the pollution on an off traffic day all for the name of clean living and exercise.

Has the city encouraged the owners of our downtown buildings to install some type of passive solar collectors on their roofs, or cylindrical wind generators on the upper floors of our high rise structures in an effort to lessen their use of carbon generated electricity. I know that the upper floors of modern building are designed to handle the unseen air movements of the urban climate and that there are several natural wind tunnel like area in the downtown area. Has the city, with its power of granting zoning and development opportunities, sent a clear suggestion of its intent to combat our negative carbon footprint image with some of the proven methods of urban design? Quite the opposite, up until the bursting of the housing bubble, our Urban County Council has continued to send the signal that the current "status quo" will still work in Lexington.

That is about enough for tonight. Maybe we will have more to think about tomorrow.

Power Lines, What Can We Really Do About Them

I have disliked high voltage powerlines and the gashes they make through the countryside for a long time. They don't follow any natural features nor do they define any logical areas and only in urban areas do they follow streets or property lines and that because they were there first. They do have their good points, or so my father said, when they paid him a fair price and a decent yearly fee for an easement across the family farm back in the early '60s.

The smaller urban trunk lines can also be fairly ugly when they spring into view along some our major roadways like those being built on Euclid Ave to service the new UK hospital. I would think that they could place them underground on some stretches, but they say that it is cost prohibitive. A truly "green" building could help generate some of its own power so as not to require such a massive trunk line as they are building. As a follow up to one of my earlier posts, why does the University not lead in the development of alternative energy sources on all of its new building and the retrofitting of its existing ones?

This was all brought to mind because of the new plan for the property along Angliana Ave with the 12 cinemas, the bowling lanes and the 80,000 sq. ft. commercial structure(possibly a big box grocery, though they really haven't done well in the area). There is a major trunk power line right at the street edge and these building do sit a lot closer to the road than a suburban model would place them, the development would look a lot cleaner if the lines were buried. Then there is the situation with the "iconic" tower and restaurant near those same power lines. If natural alternative energy sources were used for this project would such a major trunk still be needed? Alas, if the old streetcar/interurban line still ran down Angliana would all that parking be needed?

I am not so naive as to believe that individual buildings can supply all of their energy needs from alternative sources, or even a major portion. I am just saying that any reduction in the need to move massive voltages through urban areas, and especially above ground, will make our city a much cleaner city.