Mark Maynard | 2007 | August

wolves in sheeps’ clothing

By Mark | August 22, 2007

Back when I was young and living in DC, I used to protest a lot. Reagan was in the White House, and, at least back then, that’s what college kids did. (Now, I suppose, the TV is better.) Back then, for the most part, it was nuclear disarmament, apartheid and the funding of secret wars…. Anyway, the word would occasionally travel through our ranks that there were plants in our midst who were going to try to turn things ugly in order to create a pretext for a police crack down. Being young and into conspiracy theories, I believed it. If you’d asked me about it yesterday I might have said it was a silly notion, but, today, I’m not so sure. I just watched footage of an exchange during a recent globalization protest in Quebec in which it’s pretty clear that the individuals advocating violence, in an otherwise peaceful group, were cops trying to pass as protestors. Watch the video — it’s interesting/terrifying stuff. (Then, if you want too find out more, you can check out Harpers, Kos, or Metafilter.)

Posted in Civil Liberties | 5 Comments

held captive in michigan

By Mark | August 22, 2007

Hopefully no one our there in the audience who owns a home in Michigan wants to move anytime soon. Houses don’t seem to be selling anywhere. Thanks to the recent closing of the Pfizer global research facility, even Ann Arbor is feeling the pain. (Despite valiant efforts to keep the 2,150 Pfizer scientists gainfully employed here, an overwhelming majority are packing up and leaving.) If you’ve ever dreamed about moving to Michigan, now’s the time. It’s a bad thing, but it occurred to me today that maybe we could use it to our advantage somehow. I can see how it might work against us, but how about an ad campaign aimed at prospective home buyers in Silicon Valley that says, quite bluntly, “The Michigan economy has never been worse. Now’s the time to buy.” I’m picturing an image of a family being evicted from their home with the caption, “Their loss could be your gain.”

Speaking of foreclosures, I just read today that Michigan has moved into the top three. Here’s a clip:

…Michigan ranked third with 13,979 foreclosure filings in July, up 39% from June and a 130% increase from July 2006…. “While 43 states experienced year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity, just five states — California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Georgia — accounted for more than half of the nation’s total foreclosure filings,” said RealtyTrac CEO James Saccacio…

Who knows, maybe it’s ultimately a good thing for communities? I have no evidence to back this up, but might it not be possible that the booming real estate market is at least in part responsible for the corrosion of our local communities? Sure, cheap gas probably deserves more of the blame, but the real estate market has to have contributed. People, even within the same town, are constantly jumping from home to home to home. A few years into one home and they’re selling and moving to another, slightly bigger home in a slightly “better” neighborhood… which isn’t exactly conducive to putting roots down. Maybe now that we’re all stuck in this boat together we’ll become more engaged in civic life and considerably better neighbors… Call me the eternal optimist.

Posted in Observations | 21 Comments

growing hope fundraiser at the corner brewery this sunday

By Mark | August 21, 2007

One of our favorite local non-profits, Growing Hope, is having a fundraiser this Sunday afternoon at Ypsilanti’s Corner Brewery. So, if you’re planning to be drinking ayway, why not do it for a good cause? Seriously, they do great work – helping local people to improve their lives through gardening – and they deserve your beer money.

The event will take place on August 26th from 3:00 to 5:00. Tickets are $20 per person, which includes beer tasting (read “open bar”) for two hours, plus appetizers. Tickets won’t be sold at the door. You can, however, buy tickets online from Growing Hope (at the bottom of the page). Or, you can call them at 734.786.8401.

Posted in Ypsilanti | 4 Comments

ypsi by the numbers

By Mark | August 20, 2007

Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve been exchanging emails with a local urban planning student. Following are a few clips from his emails that I thought that you might find of interest.

So you made a comment about “people moving out of Ypsi”, and it occurred to me this morning that I’d never looked at the deeper data.

Duh: It’s well-known that household size is dropping nationwide, therefore population will drop unless you build housing faster than household size drops. (This is a big part of why Water Street was intended as mainly residential – you need to keep adding housing in order to keep population the same.)

So I checked out Census 1990, Census 2000, and the SEMCOG 2006 Estimates.

* Ypsilanti population: 24846 / 22362 / 21027… obviously, dropping. This is the number that gets all the attention.

* Average household size: 2.38 / 2.15 / 2.02… dropping, even faster than I had realized.

* Occupied households: 8551 / 8551 / 8702… ayep – we actually have MORE occupied homes in 2006 (estimate) than in 2000 or 1990. So it’s not as if people are moving out and leaving vacant homes; we actually have an increasing number of households — it’s just that the average household size is dropping. This was news to me.

* Vacant households: 770 / 664 / 849… vacant housing units actually went down from 1990 – 2000 (we must have torn down or converted away housing units); estimated to have gone up from 2000 – 2006. So we actually (estimated) gained a lot of households, including some vacant, but somewhat more occupied, from 2000-2006. Part of this is no doubt Peninsular Place, which added 160-some housing units, and probably contributed to some vacancy downtown.

SEMCOG’s numbers typically need to be taken with a grain of salt, but we won’t have any actual numbers until about 2011-2012, when the next census report is released, so SEMCOG’s the best we’ve got. Population is, sure, decreasing, but that’s the case for any city in the country that’s not building fast. (A2’s population only grew by 0.2% from 2000-2006.)

Here are the Ann Arbor numbers for comparison.

1990 census / 2000 census / 2007 semcog estimates
* Population: 109,592 / 114,024 (+4.0%) / 114,265 (+0.2%)
* Occupied households: 41,657 / 45,693 (+9.7%) / 47,248 (+3.4%)
* Average household size: 2.32 / 2.22 / 2.15

So A2’s household size is dropping, but not as fast as ours, while the 2000-2007 # of households to # of population change is pretty dramatic. 1600 new housing units for only 200 new residents.

Occupied households includes stand-alone houses, condos, apartments, the works. Essentially, if it’s got four walls, a bathroom, a kitchenette, and its own mailbox, then it’s a household.

Non-household population, or “group quarters population”, includes people living in hospitals, dormitories, jails, or other “institutional” uses.

Within A2’s census 2000 occupied households, 54.7% are renter-occupied.

(Our 2000 renter occupancy share was 67.1%, which is high, but not that much higher than A2’s. Especially since the majority of our rental units are ghettoized up on Huron River Drive and LeForge, and don’t really function as part of the city.)

Let me find housing style…Here we go. Census 2000, 41.8% of A2’s households are 1-unit detached (“houses”), while 35.8% of Ypsi’s are.

So, assuming that the census data is good and that these 2006 projections are accurate, what does this tell us about Ypsilanti?

Posted in Ypsilanti | 6 Comments

baby einstein, more harm that good, and how we’re failing our most brilliant kids

By Mark | August 20, 2007

I was reading “Time” on the flight back from Atlanta. They had an interesting article on young geniuses and how we as a nation aren’t doing enough to encourage them and keep them intellectually stimulated. It appears that programs established to help keep them engaged, etc, have suffered massive cuts since the roll out of Bush’s No Child Left Behind program. Here’s a clip from the article:

…American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn’t even tabulated in some states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800 million on gifted programs. But it can’t make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential…

According to the article, funding for the education of gifted children in Michigan went from $5 million to $500,000 in the wake of No Child Left Behind, when the emphasis was shifted to the lowest common denominator.

The article also contained an interesting sidebar on the “Baby Einstein” phenomenon. Here’s what it says:

There are no shortcuts when it comes to learning, and that applies to becoming a prodigy as well. Popular videos such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series have attracted millions of parents eager to give their babies an intellectual leg up. But a recent study shows that these products may be doing more harm than good. Experts at the University of Washington reported early in August that for every hour each day that infants watched the kaleidoscope of changing images and music on these DVDs, they understood an average of seven fewer words than babies who did not use such products…

One wonders how that one short blurb might effect the sales of Baby Einstein DVDs, which, last year, brought in over $200 million… I suspect we’ll see a hell of a lot of advertising over the next few months as the company tries to keep pushing their crap on new, insecure parents.

Posted in Other | 7 Comments