NPR dairy farm series

I have been listening to the recent series on dairy farms on NPR's Morning Edition. Yesterday's was about groundwater pollution in New Mexico. From the article:

More and more milk comes from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where large herds live in feedlots, awaiting their thrice-daily trip to the milking barn. A factory farm with 2,000 cows produces as much sewage as a small city, yet there's no treatment plant.

Here is a link.

Today the piece was about an Ohio farmer, Warren Taylor, who raises his cows outdoors on grass (the CAFO cows are fed a mix of corn and soybeans). He also pasteurizes at a lower temperature and does not homogenize the milk: the cream rises to the top, and you have to shake it before pouring. The milk is sold 48 hours out of the cow and he won't deliver more than an eight hour drive. He claims that all this makes the milk taste better. He can only produce about half the milk per cow that the CAFO operations produce, so his milk costs about twice as much.

Read it here.

Both pieces have good examples of dairy industry propaganda. In the New Mexico piece, the industry sponsors a billboard with an image of a family in front of a green field with cows grazing in an effort to dampen public support for tougher regulations of the CAFO farms. Of course, the image is nothing like the actual farms.

In today's story, the industry spokesman disputes that Warren Taylor's milk tastes any better than industry standard milk. He speculates that it is a "placebo effect." People just think it tastes better because they are paying more for it.

The piece ends with customers at the local Whole Foods tasting Mr. Taylor's milk and just going bananas about how good it is. It would have been better had he asked them to compare it to the standard milk.

I used to buy milk from a local farm when I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was definitely better than the industry standard, and not that much more expensive. I miss it, especially their egg nog, which they sold this time of year.

Microliving

Here is a neat article about a couple who bought a 175 square foot apartment in Manhatten for 150K. They lived in NJ for a while and decided they wanted to live in the city. With such a small space, they just have room for a bed and a cappuccino machine. They don't even have a trash can - but with no possessions, they generate very little trash (and what trash there is they walk across the hall to the chute). They keep their clothes stashed at various dry-cleaners around town, wear jogging suits at home, and change on their way to work. So their lives are totally in the urban fabric of experience. They don't nest. Maybe not for everyone, but it can be done.

The grad studio 3 class finished their models and presented them yesterday. We all worked very hard and we are pleased with the results.

Adding roads and painting terrain



Cutting house shapes out of foam, painting them black and wrapping them in card stock.


Here we have some foam townhomes, painted and waiting to be wrapped.


Adding trees made from wax myrtle twigs.


A view across the wetland at the pavilion, styled after a Greek temple, beyond which is the common green and the cohousing community's common house.


Another view of the pavilion.





Austin's model


Casey's model.


Presentation in the gallery.






From left: Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell.

Bjork finds a model of a city inside her TV

All the work we have been doing on models in Studio 3 (and watching the undergrads put together their models earlier this semester) has reminded me of one of my all-time favorite videos on YouTube, where Bjork explains how TV works. This makes me want to put some circuit boards in my model. You can enjoy it here.

Studio Project 3

The Studio 3 gang is busy creating site plans and three dimensional models of portions of our neighborhood infill sites. Here is my terrain after a couple of days of cutting topo lines from chip board. We are all working at twenty scale: one inche equals twenty feet. I decided to build a wooden frame for my model, to keep it from warping but also to provide a square edge that I could lay my layers of board into and use as a jig to keep everything in line.


Here Austin is finishing up the pen work on some really sharp looking section drawings. He is getting all his 2D stuff done before starting the 3D model.


Meanwhile over on Casey's side of the room an oval-shaped neighborhood park is beginning to emerge out of chipboard and blades. It's truly magical!

Studio 3 Project 2

I have neglected my blog for nearly a month and I feel pretty bad about it. Here is the main reason: our graduate studio class was working on this infill development project. A good bit of time was devoted to the SketchUp model, and I am including the fly-through movie here. I pulled the two-foot contours up pancake style, and drew my roads and sidewalks right onto the pancake terrain. This was a little time consuming. Some of the buildings I drew into the model, others were pulled up out of a flat version of the master plan and moved.

The site is a 31-acre area between town and campus. A historically significant cotton mill is on the site, that's the big red building with the rows of large windows in the model. There are some other buildings, but I chose not to keep them. Part of the site is in the FEMA 100-year flood zone. That's where I put the constructed wetland.

The concept was "home". The design is meant to foster aging in place. A specialty grocery store, recreational opportunities, retail and mixed use buildings should provide residents with all their daily needs right there in the neighborhood. The idea of "neighborhood completeness" which Douglas Farr introduces as a modified version of LEED-ND certification requirements in his book Sustainable Urbanism drives this design.

Right off I will admit that the entrance from Spring Street has a problem in that the two towers frame a view of the corner of the assisted living center. In the model I ran out of time and didn't finish all the roads. Also you can see on the master plan that there are a lot more trees on the plan than are visible in the model. I think there are some good things in this plan, and there are a lot of things that need work. Go ahead and start tearing it up; I can take it.

Don't Top The Crapemyrtles

My blog needs a picture and I would like to get on my soapbox for a moment and state my position on the great crapemurder debate of the last few decades. This is a photo of some crapemyrtles at my Studio 3 design project site, the E.E. Cooley Cotton Mill grounds and environs. This is what happens when you leave crapemyrtles alone. Would you not rather look at this all winter than the stubs that remain where people have topped crapemyrtles all over town, all over the south? I had a neighbor in Chapel Hill who had some nice 30 foot crapemyrtles that she, one afternoon in February, cut back by fifteen feet or so. I asked her (politely) why she did this and she could only come up with the reason that this is what you are supposed to do, you need to cut them back before the ACC tournament.

I have pruned hundreds of these in my career as a landscaper. All this tree needs is about a half hours worth of thinning. Remove branches that are dead, dying or crossing, and remove some of the inward growing branches to improve air circulation (reducing risk of sooty mold). That's it. Topping the trees causes buds to break from below the bark, resulting in vigorous, suckering type growth which is too weak to support the blooms. These weak branches then bend over or snap, which doesn't matter really because they are just going to be cut off at the end of the season anyway. A good example in Starkville are the ones along the entrance to McDonald's behind Strange Brew. It seems to me that those who prune crapemyrtles this way view the tree as strictly a producer of color. The thinning technique that I describe results in a tree that looks good year round. Or, as the photo proves, you can do nothing at all to the tree and it still looks pretty darned good. The visual interest comes from a pattern created by gradients: multiple thick trunks at bottom give way to multiples of multiple thin twigs at the top, a steady visual rhythm of coarse to thin texture. Put a bird feeder in it and you have a middle ground, a stage for dynamic movement through which one can view the background in the distance. If you lop off the crown in the misguided assumption that it will produce more bloom next summer you loose all that dynamic potential.

This is at a smaller scale than is generally discussed in Studio 3, but I saw the tree on my site and wanted to share these thoughts with everybody.

Mo Rocca on The Future of Traffic

This post and the previous are from the journal project for the Community-Based Planning Seminar most of my Studio colleagues are also taking. I am sharing them here because a blog is no good if it is not updated regularly and I thought my classmates might be interested. I just watched a piece by Mo Rocca on CBS News Sunday Morning about the Future of Traffic. The piece isn't online yet, but here is a link to Mo Rocca's "Tomorrow Show" where it will be posted eventually.

Mo Rocca rides around in cars and talks to an old guy (I didn't catch who he was) about paying attention while driving. The old guy says that road signs are actually distracting. Reading a sign that warns of children playing might cause you not to notice the actual children playing. Drivers rely too much on signs, he says, to the degree that they feel they don’t need to be alert to other visual cues and they pay less attention to what is happening in the street. This leads to Mo Rocca’s introduction of the “Naked Streets” campaign that is taking hold in Europe. He travels to Holland and records a piece about a four-way intersection where the stoplight was removed and a roundabout installed with no signs. The mayor of the city explains that the problem with traffic lights is that they make everybody feel safe, but one driver running a red light can cause a deadly accident. The roundabout forces drivers to use visual cues from their surroundings and to communicate with each other. There are even bike lanes (designated by alternate paving surface and color) that wind through the roundabout. Mo Rocca rides his bike through the intersection on the bike lane and a car yields to him and he calls out “thank you!” in Dutch. The mayor says that when the intersection had a stoplight there were four accidents a year (or was it four fatalaties? I don’t recall). Since the removal of lights and the installation of the roundabout there have been none.

Could Americans, who are notorious for texting, shaving, eating breakfast and surfing the web while driving, ever be able to design and use such a system? Mo Rocca then goes back to the states to report on the development of cars that drive themselves using remote sensing technology. One of the designers of one of the cars says that this kind of automation is working well for the airline industry and is the future of driving in America. It was pretty scary. Exactly the wrong solution to the problem, instead of trying to get people more engaged with the street, with what is going on around them, these designers want to turn to technology to allow people to become even further removed from their physical surroundings. So that they can concentrate on what? I wonder.

Local Farmland Viewed as Possible Industrial Site

The current issue of the Columbus Dispatch online has an article about the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors giving their official support to a proposed industrial aerospace park on 2,500 acres west of the Golden Triangle Regional airport. It sounds like a good industry to develop, MSU has an aerospace engineering program, Columbus has an air force base and Eurocopter has a manufacturing presence near the airport. The plans will be presented at East Mississippi Community College on October 18th. My biggest concern is that it replaces farmland. All three cities in the Golden Triangle have industrial areas that could benefit from this development. It seems that instead of getting into a drawn-out battle over which city gets it, the organizers used a 1980s-era solution and decided to stick it into a rural area that is a ten-minute drive from everybody. What if we took a big picture approach? Give it to the town that needs it most. That would be West Point. I come from a "Triangle" myself: THE triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. We put a research park in the midpoint of our three cities in the 1950s and enjoyed a half-century of prosperity in the age of the automobile. With no mass transit system in place, however, some hard choices are going to be confronted by the denizens in the next half century. I say build the Global Industrial Aerospace Park in West Point, give that town a boost, and save the farmland.

Follow up on Columbus Charette

I recently read an article in the Columbus Dispatch called "Burns Bottom dispute continues to sizzle." Our Seminar in Community Based Planning attended a community design charette in Columbus, Mississippi in early September. The charette was designed to help the town citizens and leaders incorporate a number of elements, most notably a soccer complex, into a comprehensive plan for the city. Now a county supervisor is advocating for upgrades to the existing city parks to be included in the plan. Political grandstanding or responsible activism?

The article is about a meeting organized by last Thursday by Lowndes County’s District 5 Supervisor Leroy Brooks of African-American elected officials, ministers and community leaders. From the comments section below the article I gather that Leroy Brooks is an outspoken and perhaps polarizing figure in the community. He claims that the city parks have long been neglected and there is nothing in the article to dispute that. He sees some movement happening on the soccer complex and perceives an opportunity to generate support for improving the parks. At a recent joint meeting of the town council, county supervisors and Columbus-Lowndes Recreation Authority officials,he asked that the city parks be a part of the plan and got voted down. At that meeting, the supervisors voted unanimously to commit $3.25 to the Burns Bottom soccer complex and alleviate the city of any financial responsibility, if the city later pays to renovate the Trotter Convention Center. Brooks calls that vote illegal, because the meeting was considered a workshop. Included in Brook’s suggested improvements are a new building, a rubberized outdoor basketball court and a pavilion.

Brooks wants this all included in a comprehensive recreation plan. He says he supports the soccer complex, but that efforts to improve all the parks should be included with the effort to build this new park. He downplayed the racial aspect in his comments, but Rev. Larry Story of Turner Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church was a little more forthright. From the article:

“I think that’s just a way of saying no,” Story said of the decision to put off further consideration of the issue until a later date. “It seems like the board (of supervisors) has historically been locked around racial lines. I think unless the three-vote majority have hearts of compassion, nothing is going to change, except you’ll see an uprising of the African-American community. People seem quick to jump on the African-American community, as far as drugs and crime, but they don’t want to make an investment in the community. It seems like there’s constant division down racial lines.”

I don't know whether Mr. Brooks or any of the other people from the meeting attended the charette. The design team was very professional and seemed to have done their reconnaissance work well; it seems inconceivable that they would not have approached Brooks or the ministers ahead of time and tried to get them involved. Reaching out to minority communities is definitely in the charette handbook. As I recall, there was some discussion of the parks and it was an item on the flip charts.

The town needs a comprehensive plan about how to improve the parks. I don't think it has to be attached to the Burns Bottom project, but it should be addressed somehow.

It is disturbing to see how negative and even rude the comments after the article are. I guess it is a sign of the times, small-minded, short-sighted people emboldened by the rancor of the August town-hall meetings. One responder said “you stupid ass people…don’t blame anybody but yourselves for putting into office those selfish pricks who waste our taxpayers money on their silly projects.” I hope nobody uses language like that in my comments section!

Esther Short Park

When I was in Vancouver, Washington, I was happy to get the chance to spend some time in this little park across the street from the Vancouver Hilton. A lot of things are going on in this small city block area. A restored Victorian house occupies the southwest corner. The bell tower and splash pool bring the sound and movement of water. The park also includes a pavilion, large grassy areas,and a playground. Condos are on three sides, along with the hotel and the offices of the local newspaper. Walking around I found a lot of shops, offices and restaurants, but no groceries.


Panorama made by stitching together eight photos taken from the second floor balcony of the Vancouver Hilton just after dawn on September 15th.

Stream bed above the splash pool. The park has a nice rhythm of spaces intimate and open, making possible a variety of experiences in a limited area.

Kid playing in the splash pool.

Climbing rocks at the splash pool. Smelled like chlorine.

That's me at the base of the bell tower. Somebody invite me to lunch!

Bell tower with condos on the east side.

Long view of the playground across the greensward.

Signage at the playground.


Diagonal parking on west side, no curb. Cars are held back from the sidewalk by monoliths.


Condos overlooking the park. There is a fitness center at street level. The chrome letters spell out "Farmer's Market," which I think is in the courtyard of the building every Saturday.

The Natural Areas Conference

Natural Areas Association
Conference, September 15-18th 2009
Vancouver, Washington

I have spent the last few days at the Natural Areas Association’s 36th Annual conference in Vancouver, Washington. A great group of people here, smart and down-to-earth (in the best sense). It seems to me that the group is about evenly split between university people and government people. The keynote speakers on the opening day included Pat Pringle, a geology professor from Centralia College, who walked us through the complicated geological history of the state of Washington, Sam Green, the poet laureate of Washington, who shared some very fine verses inspired in part by his experiences living in a cabin on a remote Island off the Washington coast for 26 years, and Robert Pyle, a writer of fifteen books and an enthusiastic advocate of the experiential aspect of nature.

On Wednesday morning I attended three presentations on urban wilderness restoration and management issues in parks in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Northern Oregon. I learned that the contractor in the Philadelphia project had to contend with packs of wild dogs, that Cleveland actually has a lot of green space and that the managers there are having difficulty with an introduced and destructive earthworm (of all things), and that aspects of the Cooper Mountain state park woodland habitat restoration plan could be applied to our own Osborn Prairie management plan. Then I presented my Jackson Prairie, General Land Office Records paper in a session that was well attended. To my relief, there was nobody scheduled to speak after me, so I was able to relax and take my time. I got a good response, especially from two people in particular, one a retired forester with the Washington Department of Natural Resources who had worked with GLO records in the past and the other a researcher at Montana State who is using GLO records to map historic grassland (they didn’t use the word “prairie” in Montana at the time of European settlement).
The site of the conference, the Vancouver Hilton, is a LEED certified facility that borders the southern end of Esther Short Park. The park has a little splash pool with misters, a clock tower with a waterfall, and a playground area in addition to grassy expanses and scattered large redwoods, firs and sweetgums. It is not very big, a small city block in size, and is divided into informal “rooms” or distinct areas, all of which combine nicely into an integrated whole.

The Keynote speaker for the Wednesday luncheon was George Divoky, a biologist who studied seabirds on a remote island off the north shore of Alaska for over thirty years. In that time span he was able to document how global climate change made it possible for a certain bird to nest on the island by making the summers just a little bit longer. This bird fed on arctic cod, which are dependant on krill that live in the ice packs just offshore. Over time, again due to climate change, the ice packs moved north, or dissappeared altogether, and the lack of a critical protein source caused the birds to have much more difficulty raising chicks. Then, with increased warming, polar bears showed up. With no ice, the polar bears couldn’t hunt seals anymore, so they came to Cooper Island and ate all the birds Divoky was studying. So in thirty years the arctic ecosystem as changed enough to see this one species appear and then disappear on Cooper Island. The entire arctic ice pack will disappear at some point in our life time. Since the icepack is home to invertebrates that are the basis of the arctic marine food chain, this can be said to be the largest habitat loss in the world at this time. Scary stuff, and Divoky presented it in a way that avoided doomsday and desperate tones. He pointed out the good news: soon we will be able to grow wheat across Canada. The bad news: we will no longer be able to grow wheat in most of the USA. We need to plan for this.

Thursday was for field trips. I went to the prairies of the South Puget Sound. The cool thing was the Mima Mounds: a very regular pattern of mounds, each one about five feet tall and twenty feet wide, continuing uninterrupted by stream, hill or dale, over an expanse of hundreds of square miles. These mounds support a grassland habitat, which supports a pocket gopher species, numerous flowers (not many of which are blooming now) and lots of different butterflies (we didn’t see any). Thus far nobody has come up with the final word on what caused this formation. Too vast for humans, probably had something to do with patterns in the way the ice melted (suncups) at the end of glaciation and sediment from glacial wash collecting in the cups. We also visited a nursery managed by the Nature Conservancy for the production of seeds for prairie restoration.

On Friday my thesis professor returned to Mississippi, leaving me by my lonesome. I spent the morning in a workshop focused on the Nature Conservancy’s Conservation Action Plan. The CAP is a strategy for implementing restoration. It is much like the “goals and objectives” phase of the design process that we teach in the Landscape Architecture Department here at Mississippi State. One difference with the CAP is that there is a component by which the monitoring of the results, that is, collecting data to determine whether or not the objectives of the plan are actually being achieved, leads to possible revisions of initial stated objectives, so the process is cyclical and self-revising. I spent the afternoon exploring the Esther Short Park more closely and walking around the downtown area of Vancouver. For dinner, I tagged along with the conference organizers on a tour of some of Portland’s breweries. I met some very nice people who are involved in ecological restoration in its many aspects all across the country and who patiently indulged my curiosity about the details of their professional lives. And the food was very good. The next NAA conference is going to be in St. Louis and I am looking forward to it.

Branding

Interesting front page of the Starkville Daily News today. The Greater Starkville Development Partnership unveiled the winner of the town logo design contest. The winning design is by Greg Jeffries, a Starkville native. From what I can tell in the photograph the design consists of four panels, three depicting campus buildings (Chapel of Memories, Humphry Colusiem, That building with the two towers behind the Student Health Center) and a Church, possibly the Presbyterian one close to downtown. Anyway, the interesting thing is, just below that article is one about the new banners. Another group, of which GSDP is a part, is raising money to purchase banners to hang along highway 12. The banners read "Welcome to Starkville Home of Mississippi State University Go Dogs" The banners look nothing like the winning logo design. Granted, the logo design is not finished, there is some tweaking to do. But maybe they should have held off on the fund raising for the banners until they had a final idea for the design. They are rushing the effort because of football. The banner they are proposing has no graphics on it at all, only text. They look a little, well, stark, if you ask me.

Interactive map of California Wildfire

The Chicago Tribune has a cool interactive map of the California Wildfires up here. Clicking on the stars in the map takes you to newspaper articles relevant to those locations. Media coverage of the fire has an impact on public perception of fire in the landscape. It sounds like now they are going to try to blame it all on some "arsonist." I know it is stupid to start a fire in a forest during an extreme drought, and if anyone did so and can be caught he or she should be punished. But the reason for the fire really has a lot to do with the physical conditions of the land cover.

Something's fishy in Wellington |West Palm Beach News, South Florida Breaking News, Forecast, Video from WPTV

Something's fishy in Wellington |West Palm Beach News, South Florida Breaking News, Forecast, Video from WPTV

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I am posting this in response to the video on Taze's blog. Code enforcement officials are using "catfish" (actually pelcostomus) to clean abandoned swimming pools on foreclosed properties. I have a couple of questions. Why is code enforcement burdened with the expense of maintaining swimming pools on abandoned properties? If the property owners can't maintain the pool, condemn the property and give it to the poor! Also, these are not native catfish, they come from Central and South America. Nobody seems to be addressing the environmental impact of putting them "back" in local lakes. The code enforcement official says you can just "put them back in the lake that they came from." This is disingenuous. I'm no ichthyologist, but I believe there is a difference between a native catfish and a plecostomus.

"You can't defy the laws of physics or building codes," Mr. Phillips said, "but beyond that, the possibilities are endless."

Interesting slide show about a fellow in Texas named Dan Phillips who builds low-income housing out of salvaged materials. His company, Phoenix Commotion, emphasizes innovative craftsmanship and aesthetically pleasing results. He involves the tenants or clients in the process of building the houses, and some of the projects, such as the Osage-Orange countertops and railings and the broken-tile grouted bathroom floor, require perhaps more time than many people are willing to commit to the process but the results are visually stunning works of art. Reminds me somewhat of the late Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio in Auburn, Alabama.

Cool Student Blog

I was searching for some graphics to go with a poster I have to do for this studio class and I stumbled upon a really neat blog created by architecture students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. This is worth checking out: these guys are really sharp, they pack a lot of information into the posts and also lots of great images.

More on closing main street

Starkville Dispatch does a better job with the closing Main Street story.

Here Chief Lindley seems to be working with the downtown business people, saying something along the lines of "tell me what you want me to do." Also, the article mentions what part of main street is being discussed (Washington to Lafayette, or Washington to Jackson). It also mentions the possibility of street vendors. Guys with hot dog or burrito carts could rake in the cash with both hands. Every game night could be a night to remember!

Scary downtown crowds rattle local merchants

Last Saturday the Starkville Daily news reported on a meeting between members of the Starkville Downtown Business Association and “business and city leaders, law enforcement officials and at least one representative from Mississippi State University,” to address the issue of large crowds gathering downtown late at night and a possible threat to safety. Melissa Dixon, president of the SDBA, wants to bring the possibility of closing downtown streets on game days to the SDBA “to see if they are on board.” The article doesn’t explain what is meant by “closing downtown streets.” It doesn’t address the question of what is currently unsafe about the situation downtown except in this garbled, run-on mess of a sentence: “[merchant concerns] include a few ladies saying they had to go in to an office or shop to work late and were afraid to leave because of the crowd which filled the street and restaurants complain when the street is blocked off and they feel it’s not safe.” Dixon also refers to a recent mugging, for which three people have been arrested. Dixon wants to start a safety committee. Starkville Police Chief David Lindley called street shutdown “an option of last resort.” Lindley explained the current strategy for managing large crowds on Main Street, which includes a combination of foot patrols and video cameras. According to the article, the cameras “record every night from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.” I read the Starkville News every day and find three of four errors like that in every issue.

Police captain Frank Thomas noted that the crowds tend to separate by race and that one night there was a perception that “we were picking on black people.” Officer Thomas is black. I wish that when we see a hundred white college students in the street we could judge them as being every bit as “safe” or “dangerous” as a hundred black college students. For most white people, the hundred black people are always going to look scarier. It shouldn’t be that way. I attended a good number of post-game celebrations (and other large crowd/late night events) in my home town of Chapel Hill, NC, and never felt threatened. In most of these situations the only real danger is somebody is going to trip over something and get hurt.

The strangest comment in the article comes at the end: Bill Kibler, vice president of student affairs at MSU, mentioned another small town that “worked toward a longer-term solution to ‘shift everything back a block.’” What on earth does that mean? Is he talking about moving Mug Shots and Barristers to a point east of the Historic State Theater?

I wonder if letting the bars stay open to 2:00 a.m. would help, people would get tired and the departure times from the bars would be spread out over a longer period, rather than having everyone out at midnight as it is now.

I am going to have to research this further. Our community design professor should give each student $20 drinking money to go out this weekend and find out what is really going on with these crowds.

Read the original article here.

Sugar Shacks

Christian’s post (in his blog land+form+design, there is a link on the sidebar) about the Katrina cottages reminded me of Starkville’s own Sugar Shacks. The Sugar Shacks were one of the first things I noticed about what is sometimes called "vernacular" architecture when I moved to Starkville. The first thing you notice about the Sugar Shacks is that they are small...really really small. Possibly smaller than the Katrina cottages. They are tool-shed sized. The other thing is that the little decks and corrugated tin roof awnings on the front doors actually give them some flair. This feature is important because it is what makes the Sugar Shacks actually tolerable to look at. Each shack has its own two-car concrete parking slab (a slab about equal in area to the footprint of the building it serves) and a dedicated entrance off of North Montgomery Street. Ten units occupy about an acre with about 400 feet of street frontage.



From a sustainable urbanism perspective, the Sugar Shacks could be said to fulfill a few basic principles such as energy efficiency and density, but barely. They would be more efficient if four or five of them had been combined into one building with shared walls. How much privacy would the tenants loose? How much privacy do they have now?

I always get a kind of weird feeling when I look at the Sugar Shacks. The Sugar Shacks were mentioned often in the recent debate about the zoning change for the five acre “pasture” on Yellow Jacket lane. The neighbors who opposed the zoning change invoked them as an example of what would result. The zoning change passed and we will be watching closely to see how right (or wrong) these opponents were.

I thought my blog needed a picture. This is at a gas station at the first exit you come to on I-85 after cross from North Carolina into South Carolina. Now, before you start tearing it apart, let me say right away that the design has issues. There are some problems with proportion, particularly with the footers and steel girders that frame the water feature. But I must say that the reason I took the photo was because overall I was impressed with the effort. Here is a business that took the time to try to do something nice under the sign and actually went so far as to include a little fountain. It is clean and neat and gives the impression that somebody cares.

“I wish we could pass a law that would require people to go to church on Sundays,”

That's what Alderman Roy Perkins said in opposition to the proposed amendment to the alcohol sales ordinance which would allow the sale of alcohol in restaurants and taverns (but not stores) at the Board of Aldermen meeting last night. The amendment passed 4-3, making Sunday sales all but inevitable. You can read the Starkville Dispatch article at the Starkville Now blog here.

The day before the vote, the Starkville Daily News published a letter by William L. Smith which began: "Satan is alive and well as far as the liquor industry and crowd is concerned, but he is a defeated foe, and, sad to say, a lot of good people are going down with him because they know not the truth." The opponents of Sunday sales used rhetoric such as this often and in a way that made it clear that they were actually opposed to the drinking of alcohol anywhere, any time. They tried to back up their opinions with bogus statistics about driving fatalities and even violence against women. Not statistics really, but just assertions.

As a happily married, middle-aged father of two who does most of his drinking at home, I can tell you that I didn't care all that much about Sunday sales. But this is a college town, and the weekend is the weekend. I can tell you that a couple of times we have had out of town guests and have gone out on a Sunday thinking we could eat at a restaurant, forgetting that most of them are closed. Now when Mom and Dad come to town for a game they can stay the whole weekend, because there will be a lot more going on in town. The prohibition on Sunday sales helped Starkville have that "sense of place," (a sense that is diminished now that Outback and Olive Garden are probably now on their way), I think on balance it was a sense that we can afford to lose. The pronouncements of Roy Perkins and those who think like him can be seen as an embarrassment to the town: does he not know that Jews worship on Saturday, and Muslims on Friday? Does he think God will be happy if I sit in a pew on Sunday to fulfill a legal obligation? However he represents a significant and vocal part of the community, as the evidenced by the debate. I think it is a reasonable amendment.

Legalize It

Two former Baltimore City police officers write a column in the Washington Post calling for the legalization of drugs.

(Hey I successfully put in a hyperlink!)

Large areas of our cities have been largely abandoned as a result of the disastrous and unwinnable war on drugs. It's not the drugs themselves, it is the black market, the piles of cash, and the violence that comes with it, that has caused a lot of the problem. The writers of the editorials don't call for legalization across the board, but rather propose to let communities decide for themselves how to regulate drugs. We regulate the sale of alcohol and tobacco as it is. If the states could also manage the sale of narcotics and psychedelics, the results would not be perfect, but would be much better than what we have now. Entire criminal cartels would be out of business over night. There would be far less gun violence, because the criminals would no longer have anything to protect.

Hello? Is this thing on?

Taze, can you hear me? Hello? Austin? Can you turn up my microphone? I'm gonna need a lot more vocal in the monitor. Check. Check. Testing one two. Casey, do you copy? Whisky tango foxtrot. OK this isn't working. Turn me all the way up in the stage monitor please. I'm gonna have to ask you to turn everyone else down.