Category Archives: Mark David Major

Publications by The Outlaw Urbanist blogger, Mark David Major.

Editorial, Mark David Major, News, Press

The Splenda Housing Market | To Be or Not to Be

To Be or Not to Be: The Splenda Housing Market
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

UrbanLand reports we finally have a ‘real’ housing recovery (see below). Trulia Trends and The Atlantic Cities report housing prices are recovering at a more rapid pace in urban neighborhoods than in the suburbs (see below). However, CNN/Money and AOL Real Estate report McMansions of suburbia are making a comeback (see below) based on recent Census data instead of national homebuilder ‘wish fulfillment’ surveys (see The Outlaw Urbanist January 24, 2013 post, “McMansions Return“). Other media outlets are reporting an explosion in rental apartment construction. What gives?

Welcome to a Splenda Housing Market, where the modus operandi is a saccharine high of easy money, taxpayer-funded bailouts, and manipulated markets!

• The Fed continues to pump easy money into the economy at a rapid rate through its bond-purchasing program called Qualitative Easing (what number are we on now?). Despite what Paul Krugman and the American government tell you (“we only measure inflation on things people don’t want to buy”), there are real inflationary pressures out there, which are transmitted into every facet of the American economy including housing. The evidence lies in the year-to-year increase in housing prices from 2011 to 2012. The appreciation of property values in the Trulia Trends report range from 7.3% in New York to an astounding 33.8% in Las Vegas! This is patently unsustainable and highly suspicious.

• Eager to return to the “good, old days” as quickly as possible, realtors and landlords are shamelessly inflating prices for home/property and monthly rents to a level far above their real value, especially in light of the next item.

• The banks have a huge amount of inventory of foreclosed homes on their books, the majority of which lies vacant and withheld from the housing market. What does it mean? Housing prices never reached their true floor.

• For every home foreclosed, the banks not only get the home but also file an insurance claim on the mortgage debt, usually with AIG (i.e. the American {Insurance} Government). What does it mean? The banks get to have their cake courtesy of dispossessed homeowners and they get to eat it too funded by American taxpayers by double dipping on the value of the home and the mortgage.

• As home/property values continue to appreciate at a steady pace, the banks will systematically release their massive inventory onto the market to capitalize on rising housing prices. What does it mean? The value of your home/property is artificially suppressed as increased inventory enters the market;

• The longer home/property values appreciate and the more inventory released on the market by the banks, then the more the initial gain in the recovery rate of housing prices in urban neighborhoods touted by The Atlantic Cities and others will evaporate. These stable, urban neighborhoods tended to be the last to experience the crashing wave of falling housing prices during the Great Recession, so naturally they are the first to recover their real value. However, this is an ephemeral comeback for urban neighborhoods. The longer the Splenda Housing Market is in effect, then the more attractive becomes cheap land at the periphery of our cities and the ‘old way’ of doing things. Welcome back, suburban sprawl! We hardly could stand you the first time around!

What does it mean for you? The long and short is this: unless you possess the equity at hand to pay cash for a property/home now, then you’re totally screwed. Too bad, suckers. Remember friends: the only reason the shit rolls downhill is because of who is squatting at the top and taking a dump.

Excerpt from June 27, 2013 article, “Housing Recovery Strengthens, but Credit Remains an Issue” by Bendix Anderson on UrbanLand:

“The housing sector is finally helping the U.S. economic recovery, rather than holding it back. But more Americans than ever now spend more than half their income on housing, according to The State of the Nation’s Housing 2013, a report released June 26 by the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) at Harvard University. “Clearly, we are in a strong housing recovery now,” said Eric Belsky, managing director of JCHS.

Read the full article here: Housing Recovery Strengthens, but Credit Remains an Issue | UrbanLand.

Excerpt from June 25, 2013 article, “Home Prices Rising Faster in Cities than in the Suburbs – Most of All in Gayborhoods”by Jed Kolko on Trulia Trends:

“Here’s the punch line: urban neighborhoods had faster price growth in the past year, while suburban neighborhoods had higher population growth. The median asking price per square foot was up 11.3% in urban neighborhoods, versus 10.2% in suburban neighborhoods. (The overall national increase, including urban and suburban neighborhoods, was 10.5%.) But despite faster price growth in cities, the suburbs are where people are moving: suburban neighborhoods had faster population growth than urban neighborhoods did, 0.56% versus 0.31%.”

Read the full article here: Home Prices Rising Faster in Cities than in the Suburbs – Most of All in Gayborhoods | Trulia Trends.

Excerpt from June 5, 2013 article “McMansions Are Making a Comeback” by CNN/Money on AOL Real Estate:

“As the economy recovers, America’s love affair with the oversized McMansion has been reignited. During the past three years, the average size of new homes has grown significantly, according to a Census Bureau report released Monday. In 2012, the median home in the U.S. hit an all-time record of 2,306 square feet, up 8 percent from 2009.”

Read the full CNN/Money article here: McMansions Are Making a Comeback | AOL Real Estate.

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Editorial, Mark David Major, Press

Lying Statistics | Suicide in America | Atlantic Cities | New York Times

Lying Statistics | Suicide in America | Atlantic Cities | New York Times
Editorial by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

“Beware of false prophets who come to you disguised as sheep but underneath are ravenous wolves.” – Matthew 7:15

The difference between statistics and damn, lying statistics is the same as between the truth and demagoguery. In his May 8, 2013 article, Richard Florida exerts gun ownership is the ‘smoking gun’ behind surging suicide rates among Baby Boomers in the United States. He cities statistical data about gun ownership and suicide rates to make this argument. However, an objective assessment of the data reveals a more mundane truth: people who want to kill themselves are more likely to succeed if they own a gun. The key phrase here is not “a gun” but “people who want to kill themselves.” This revelation should rightly be filed under “Well, duh.”

Excerpt from “The Hidden Geography of America’s Surging Suicide Rate” by Richard Florida in The Atlantic Cities:

“While the economic crisis has clearly been a contributing factor to America’s rising suicide rate, perhaps it is not the only, or even the most important factor, behind the surge. In fact, another key factor appears to be at play: guns. Guns are the leading cause of suicide by far, according to the CDC report, accounting for nearly half (48 percent) all suicides among adults ages 35 to 64 in 2010. Slightly less than a quarter of suicides of people in this age group are caused by suffocation, and another 22 percent are poisonings, mainly drug overdoses.”

Read the full article here: The Hidden Geography of America’s Surging Suicide Rate – Richard Florida – The Atlantic Cities.

Unsurprisingly, Florida’s article appeared after 24/7 national media coverage of a series of high-profile mass shootings and, subsequently, legislative attempts by some in Congress and the present Administration to curtail constitutional protections under the 2nd Amendment. (Look at that superhero pose in the featured image via The Guardian! I wonder though if he can make the superhero landing… hard on the knees). However, in making this argument, Florida shamelessly misinterprets  statistical data to fuel a political agenda and, in doing so, does a great disservice to the real mental health issues contributing to the increased suicide rate. To paraphrase the old NRA mantra, “guns don’t kill people, people kill themselves.”

Fortunately, the New York Times did not succumb to this urge to demagogue the issue. What followed was a series of (should be award-winning) articles offering more thoughtful insights into surging suicide rates in the United States. This includes the May 2, 2013 New York Times article, “Suicide Rates Rise Sharply in U.S.” by Tara Parker-Pope (excerpt below):

“Suicide rates among middle-aged Americans have risen sharply in the past decade, prompting concern that a generation of baby boomers who have faced years of economic worry and easy access to prescription painkillers may be particularly vulnerable to self-inflicted harm.”

Read the full article here: Suicide Rate Rises Sharply in U.S. – NYTimes.com.

And a more thorough 6/26/13 investigative report in the New York Times, “The Suicide Detective” by Kim Tingly (excerpt below):

“For reasons that have eluded people forever, many of us seem bent on our own destruction. Recently more human beings have been dying by suicide annually than by murder and warfare combined. Despite the progress made by science, medicine and mental-health care in the 20th century — the sequencing of our genome, the advent of antidepressants, the reconsidering of asylums and lobotomies — nothing has been able to drive down the suicide rate in the general population. In the United States, it has held relatively steady since 1942. Worldwide, roughly one million people kill themselves every year. Last year, more active-duty U.S. soldiers killed themselves than died in combat; their suicide rate has been rising since 2004. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the suicide rate among middle-aged Americans has climbed nearly 30 percent since 1999. In response to that widely reported increase, Thomas Frieden, the director of the C.D.C., appeared on PBS NewsHour and advised viewers to cultivate a social life, get treatment for mental-health problems, exercise and consume alcohol in moderation. In essence, he was saying, keep out of those demographic groups with high suicide rates, which include people with a mental illness like a mood disorder, social isolates and substance abusers, as well as elderly white males, young American Indians, residents of the Southwest, adults who suffered abuse as children and people who have guns handy.”

Read the full article here: The Suicide Detective – NYTimes.com.

If you want to solve a problem, it’s always best to start addressing the problem on the basis of scientific objectivity, not political subjectivity.

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Mark David Major, On Space, Phenomenology, Philosophy

On Space | The Geometrical City

On Space | The Geometrical City
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

The geometrical city exists in and across time and space, a quantitative and describable pattern finitely persistent in its stability and infinitely malleable in its qualitative flexibility. The spatial geometry of the city flows, never halting and without beginning, it merges together into an intricate network of limitless possibilities and strategic offerings that guide the weary traveler to his destination. It is a tradition rooted in the instinctive nature of our being, stretching back into shadowy mists of the past and striding forward into the enchanted light of a promised future, bounded by the essential truth of living on a tiny sphere floating, awashed at the edges of a universal shore. The geometric city is the hearth of the community, the fertile land gathers around it, providing both sustenance to and sustaining from the urban ideal. At its center lies a sacred space, a place to gather for all, where insider and outsider mingle and exchange freely of their valued time and goods. This is the true Pilgrims’ pride of America, that which can be independently traced to worlds and cultures of Antiquity from east to west, south to north, following the path we emerged from African jungles to cross plains and rivers, the mountains and oceans. The geometrical city is the economy of the community, goods and services are exchanged in space and carried forth into the larger, unfamiliar world. It welcomes and reassures, it is questions with answers, offering solvable riddles to the observant and the observed.

19th century America represents the urban fruition of a geometrical order, a full expression of the possibilities for street, block, square, and plan in the geometrical city. In the virgin land of this milieu, the geometrical city attains its Renaissance ideal, ultimately a Spanish model of the rational city, relentless in its magnificence as a tapestry, woven by individual hands into a common entity, holistic and worthy of an ancestral past from which it sprouted. Until, at last, radial parts emerge from within or reach forth from center-to-edge to bring a structural wonder to the urban spectacle. The formal and informal, planned and unplanned, coincide in the spatial beauty of the rationally urbane, all shaped within a Jeffersonian framework leaving marks on the landscape to this day. 20th century America demands the ruination of the geometric city in its heedless pursuit of state control and private profit; the faceless bureaucrat and masked capitalist hidden beneath self-serving rubrics, all in the name of an artificial (public and personal) welfare, which taunts the instinctive nature of urban dwelling. Stability is exchanged for unpredictability, the malleable for the rigid, the persistent for the ephemeral, and a natural pattern for the awkwardly contrived forever haunted by an unnatural entropy. It is a doctrine that demands more and more at the expense of less and less (quantity and cost) whilst ignoring the concept of the better and the best (quality). It becomes an irrational anti-city.

On Space is a regular series of philosophical posts from The Outlaw Urbanist. These short articles (usually about 500 words) are in draft form so ideas, suggestions, thoughts and constructive criticism are welcome.

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Architecture, Editorial, Mark David Major, Poor Richard, Urban Planning

More Poor Richard | Part 2

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More Poor Richard, Part 2
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNUA-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Courteous Reader,

I attempted to win your favor when I wrote my first Almanac for Architects and Planners, in the name of the public good and professional betterment, by way of earning some profit and a wife. I am gratified by your expression of encouragement for my tireless efforts dedicated to these aims. Alas, my circumstances still find me exceedingly poor and, unluckily, exceedingly wifeless. I am required to earn some profit to address both problems whilst now addressing a third, namely testing the proposition that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” To satisfy my own particular brand of insanity, I have written more proverbs and whimsical sayings for your benefit and, hopefully, my own.

As before on The Outlaw Urbanist, I write this new Almanac in increments of ten, according to the dictates of Moses and the Almighty. However, once published as an Almanac for Architects and Planners, the proverbs and witticisms were gathered into a number equal to the days of the week, after being reliably informed that both seven and ten are sacred numbers. My desired requirement for a wife is sufficient motive to write this new Almanac in the hope it will find your favor and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my continued efforts but also your charity to this sane Friend and poor Servant,

Richard

On Architecture

11.      Quality is presence of value and not absence of mistake.

12.       Profit is not an aesthetic choice. It’s a surrender.

13.       The act of design condemns all architects and planners to play God poorly, some more so than others.

14.       Good design enhances everything as surely as bad design defiles all.

15.       Architecture cannot save the world, only people can. This is why God sent a carpenter to be the ‘temple’.

16.       If architecture is a language, then a lot of architects are speaking in gibberish.

17.       Don’t judge a building by its façade. Every building is a story waiting to unfold for those willing to read it.

18.       Architecture always lies. Technological innovations only make the lies more transparent.

19.       Standardization is a blessing for quantity and a curse for quality in architecture.

20.      Architecture represents the outward appearance of things best when the architect understands the inward significance of those things.

Issue 3 of More Poor Richard for Architects and Planners cometh soon!

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Art, Books, Editorial, Mark David Major, Press, Review

BOOK REVIEW | Think Different, Be “Insanely Great” | Steve Jobs | Walter Isaacson

Think Different, Be “Insanely Great”
BOOK REVIEW of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
by Mark David Major, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am writing this review on my MacBook Pro with Retina Display with my iPhone and iPad Mini sitting near at hand while I listen to a shuffle of classical music in my iTunes Library. When I started writing this disclosure paragraph, I noticed my apps were syncing to all of my devices via iCloud, which finished well before I had completed this paragraph. I have been an unapologetic member of the Apple Cult since 1993.

A few times in Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the biographer and his subject admit there will be a lot that Jobs won’t like in this authorized biography. Once again, Steve Jobs was right. Isaacson’s biography is not a great product. The writing is often repetitive, even diverging into triviality on occasion, with the biographer/interviewees (except Jobs himself) all too eager to engage in ‘Dime Store’ Freudian psychoanalysis about the book’s subject. At 656 pages, Isaacson’s biography would have benefited from the same zeal for simplicity and minimalism (in terms of editing) that characterized so many of Apple’s products during Jobs’ two tenures at the company. In fact, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson reads like Simon & Schuster rushed the book to market months ahead of schedule so it could financially capitalize on Jobs’ death in late 2011. The release date is a mere two weeks after Jobs death on October 5, 2011. This is something Jobs would have never tolerated while he was alive. Isaacson’s biography is not a bad book but it could have been “insanely great” like its subject. There are many useful, some wonderful insights (usually originating from Jobs himself) contained within, so it is well worth your time to read. In the end, what shines through in the book, despite its problems, is the genius and greatness of Steve Jobs.

Isaacson’s fairly ridiculous thesis is Jobs was driven to greatness by a desire to prove his natural parents were wrong to put him up for adoption, which begs the question why there aren’t more industry leaders with adoptive parents. Jobs is fairly dismissive of this line of thought. Isaacson’s equally ridiculous aim is to get his subject to admit, “He is an asshole.” We are all angels and assholes (some, more one than other). It is called being human so it’s unclear why this is important. Jobs was a perfectionist but he never (thankfully) claimed he was perfect. Many of Jobs management techniques are tried, tested and effective even if Jobs’ form of brutal honesty lacked a ‘politeness’ filter. Anyone successful, who has been in a leadership position, will recognize these techniques.

Isaacson devotes a considerable amount of words to Jobs’ tendency to construct a “reality distortion field”, an ability to weld or ignore reality to his wishes but also compel designers and engineers to do the seemingly impossible. We all construct “reality distortion fields” in an attempt to warp reality to our wishes. Some are more successful and ambitious at it than others. It is unclear why Isaacson finds this distinctive human trait so compelling other than the fact Jobs changed the reality of the way things work in this world. The fact is there are many people in the world, who simply cannot abide greatness in their presence. They seek to bring genius down to their level, a sort of “stupidity distortion field.” Jobs would describe this as Grade C people bringing down the Grade A people around them to the average, “the ugly”, or the “totally shit”. Isaacson could easily devote an entire book to how otherwise seemingly intelligent people (like Bill Gates, who comes across as a decent and pleasant schmuck but a schmuck nonetheless) adopt stupid arguments, decisions, and positions to distort the greatness or genius of individuals around them. The fact is there are more like Steve Jobs out there but the herd is too busy trampling them under foot to recognize them. In the end, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is best when all aspects of Jobs (the good and the bad) filter through the biographer’s gaze. Was Steve Jobs perfect? No, he was human. Personally, I never asked for Apple products to be perfect. I only asked that Apple products be the best in the world and, usually, they were. I never asked Steve Jobs to be anything than what he was: a brilliant businessman, an insight artist, and a (sometimes) source and (often) shepherd of technological innovation. In the end, what was remarkable about Steve Jobs was not that he changed the world but he changed the world in the face of the ‘conventional wisdom’, which is often polite code for the stupidity of the consensus. Frankly, I prefer to live in Jobs’ reality. Along the way, he lived a remarkable life. Surely, that is enough. The world seems smaller without Steve Jobs in it. We have Jobs’ Apple to thank for it but it is also a testament to the legacy of Steve Jobs. He will be missed.

I’m attaching video links to a couple of seminal moments in the life of Steve Jobs. First, the famous 1984 MacIntosh commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, which aired during the Super Bowl (above in the body of the review). Many in the trade (including TV Guide) say it is the greatest commercial ever. Second, is the famous commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005 (see below). Remember: think different.

 

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover, 656 pages
Available from Amazon here.

 

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