What the brick--?!?

In honor of “Script Frenzy,” I have written the following short dialogue, which takes place not far from lower slumburbia (southwest Wheaton, in this instance).

Boilerplate Disclaimer:  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and derives from heretofore untapped psychic powers.

INT. CONSTRUCTION SITE TRAILER - EARLY SPRING, DAYTIME

The contractor, JOE, sits on a broken swivel chair, looking over change order forms and other assorted paperwork.  ELMER, a construction worker, enters the room and stands there until JOE notices him.

ELMER

Boss?  My family is growing very fast and I need more space right now.  I want to ask you--

JOE

--what, buddy?  You lookin’ for another bonus?  Or even more overtime?!  You know, work slowed down a bit in the off-season and I think you should really take it easy.  (Pauses.)  Hold on, didn’t you move out of that roach magnet and into a new house in the suburbs not too long ago?  What gives?

ELMER

Yes, but, you see, this house is very small, less than 900 feet.  My wife wants all our boys to have their own rooms and she wants a new kitchen and we have a corner lot, so I--

JOE

--well, why didn’t you say so?!  You want to take that surplus off my hands?  That stuff left over from the jobs last season?  Help yourself, buck.

ELMER

Thank you; I owe you big, Mr. Joe.

JOE

Sure.  Hey, you want those pallets of cinderblocks for cheap?  I really need to free up the space for some new shipments.

ELMER

Yeah, I take those.  Also, I see you have very many leftover yellow bricks--

JOE

--go ahead and help yourself to those, too.  And you’ll need some mortar mix.  Y’know, I’ve even got some manufacturer mortar dye samples you can play with, if you want ’em.

ELMER

Oh, very good!  Thank you, man!

JOE

No problem, charlie.  Show me some photos once you get things going.

ELMER

I will!

The result:

A Lower Slumburbia DIY McMansion —
Fugly Supersized Rear Addition / Re-McModel Variant

That’s right, folks, it’s just your average slumburban

“Surplus Supply Shotgun Special” :



Now let’s examine this aesthetically-challenged architectural hybrid from hell:

1. On the right we have an original Dutch colonial brick-and-frame duplex with a quirky mansard roof, circa 1950.

2. On the left we have a brick-and-block millenial monstrosity, circa 2000-2003.

Exterior Side Wall (Northeast Exposure):

Let’s call this creative color scheme “Adobe Sunset” (or perhaps “El Dorado ” or “La Casa Puesta del Sol ” if we’re marketing to Spanish-speakers).

This wall features:

• 1/5 pink brick with white mortar

• 2/5 pale yellow brick with pink mortar

• 2/5 pale yellow brick with dun mortar

• flimsy builder-grade windows/doors

The spouse calls this ample annex the “Pink Elephant.”  I’ve gotta admit that it does kind of resemble a pink elephant, with its rosy coloration and ear-like frontal overhang.  And if I were one of the itinerant neighborhood drunks, it might make me do a double take, too.



Check out the decorative bricklaying 8-9 feet above grade.  The manic masons decided to lay down a course of “soldiered” bricks just above the first floor windows and side entry door.  The outer ends of the lintel blocks are flush with the corners of the windows, so they provide absolutely no structural advantage over the standard running bond brick pattern, which would have been functionally superior in this case.  (These corners should be fine as long as they used steel lintels, but they really squandered an opportunity to combine form and function in the masonry here.)

The railings look like they’re interior-grade, untreated wood that is supposed to be primed and painted, or at least stained and sealed.  Using this interior millwork for entryways seems to be very popular here in lower slumburbia.  Hence, you tend to see split and rotting wood railings (sometimes with missing balusters) that were installed just within the last 5-10 years.

Exterior Rear Wall (Southeast Exposure):

(If this vivid spectacle is not yet seared into your brain, feel free to scroll back up to reference the top photos again.)

• cinderblock painted a dullish custard yellow

• more cheap builder-grade windows/doors

Other Tidbits:

• assorted junk, typical of casual slumburban living, including the obligatory molded plastic patio chairs

• rebar-embedded cinderblock retaining wall, topped off with a layer of cement (Quikrete or somesuch)

• not pictured: generously proportioned shed/outbuilding, free-roving collie

Foreclosure Fallout in the Mid-County

A foreclosed home on the corner of Turkey Branch Pkwy & Independence St in lower Aspen Hill.
This neighborhood is not included in the county’s new focused revitalization program.
(Saturday, March 28.)

The Montgomery County Department of Housing and Community Affairs (DHCA) held a community “charrette” for its new Focused Neighborhood Assistance (FNA) program last night at Wheaton High School.  This was basically a public feedback and discussion session.  Evidently the term “charrette” comes from urban planning circles; it was originally applied mainly to creative sessions run by planners, policy-makers, designers, architects, and other experts.

In the March 31st meeting, any experts in attendance mostly acted as facilitators and observers, except during the introductory and wrap-up speeches, where county leaders treated us with enthusiastic exhortations such as “Be a squeaky wheel!” and “Be an informed wheel!”  (I grew up in this county and I have to say that the shrillest “squeaky wheel” residents can be exhausting and occasionally mildy terrifying to put up with.  Maybe having a comfortable salary and an advanced degree in some optimistic field like urban planning makes dealing with the restless rabble more tolerable.  The planning/housing eggheads at the meeting certainly seemed to be perky, perpetually positive-thinking types.)

For information on the FNA initiative, visit the county housing authority’s informational webpage:
“Foreclosure Prevention”

Most of the maps listed on the DHCA webpage link to large, rasterization-intensive PDFs (>1.5MB each).  These graphics were generated in February based on information released by real estate data clearinghouse RealtyTrac.  If you open up the countywide map (~2.85 MB), you’ll see that the greatest concentration of foreclosures occurs along a southeast-to-northwest axis.  This pattern closely aligns with many declining neighborhoods that tend to attract lower-income residents, as well as those blocks hit particularly hard by recent population destabilization and densification.

If you’re interested in the incidence of foreclosures throughout the entire state, check out Maryland’s Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) website for its Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), which features a map color-coded by foreclosure impact level.  A sum of $26.7 million has been allocated for this program; it’s unclear how much of that will find its way to Montgomery County.

The statewide residential stabilization program falls under Maryland’s Neighborhood Conservation Initiative (NCI), first rolled out in tandem with former governor Glendening’s statewide “Smart Growth” program.  Ultimately, Maryland’s push for “Smart Growth” fell far short of living up to its name, as Environment Maryland outlines in their sobering report, “Not So Smart: Land Consumption in Maryland after a Decade of Smart Growth.”

And yet even today, pro-growth advocates still caricature the opposition as “slow growth” obstructionists who stand in the way of economic “progress” and social “progressivism.”  This smear is pretty astounding, given the overwhelming evidence that the pro-development crowd that has dominated government and local politics over the last two decades has rammed through policies that have degraded quality of life measures throughout the county.  This trends have hit densely populated regions like swaths of the mid-county, as well as rapidly developing exurban regions that used to be more rural and rustic in character.  When pressed, a lot of long-term residents agree that this county has become a considerably less appealing place to live for much of the rising middle class.

And yet when you look at the District 4 Special Election, the few candidates in favor of more active measures to achieve residential population stabilization and safeguard the local environment are constantly sidelined and marginalized by the most well-funded Democratic campaigns, as well as local politics beat journalists.  It appears that the aggressive staffers and volunteers enlisted in these slicker campaigns have transferred much of the rhetoric, tactics, and funding streams used in the national political theater to a humble local council race.  They are counting on members of the usual lock-step, pamphlet-ready Democratic voting blocs to usher in their anointed candidates and shut out all of the other worthy contenders, many of whom are long-term residents and civic activists who have a much more direct ground-level appreciation of the history of this area and the steady decline many of these neighborhoods have experienced for decades.

“Growth is good” is about as sound a statement as “Money quells all ills” or “Poverty is ennobling.”

“Smart” growth in Montgomery County quickly devolved into shortcut growth-at-all-costs expansion and an explosion in construction/renovation projects driven by developers who seduced politicians and residents with their visions of economic invigoration and a transformed metropolitan landscape.  A lot of residents, particularly in the west county, have profited handsomely from these policies.

The decline in rising middle-class neighborhoods like mine has been swift and dramatic during the 2000s.  Top-down policies and planning measures that catalyzed fast growth starting in the late 1990s rapidly created thousands of low-end jobs with depressed/stagnant wages.  Loosening credit standards, misleading leftist political rhetoric, and an ever-expanding stock of cramped and crowded slumburban rental units and sub-units helped paved the way for this steady race to the bottom.

And unlike in places like northern Virginia, broad economic development and job growth hasn’t kept pace with the residential overpopulation and densification bubble in Maryland.  Now that county employees are increasingly missing out on perks like cost-of-living adjustments, they may finally develop a deeper appreciation of what so many other residents are struggling with right now.

And yes, “densification” appears to be a legitimate word.  Using it here only invites obvious slurs about the stupefication of local leaders and residents during the Dumb Money decade.  (Hey, I sipped half-heartedly at the Kool-Aid, too, until about 2004 or so.)

Well, well.  Google tells me that British tunesmith Graham Parker once wrote a song titled “Stupefication.”  This minor associative tidbit gives me the perfect pretext for including my gratuitous music vid embed of the day, an early new wave gem from three decades back:



This song — from Parker’s 1979 acclaimed LP Squeezing Out Sparks — arguably has a quasi-suburban feel to it, especially since the accompanying vid features plenty of goofy girl-next-door Londonettes along with the come-hither caddishness of Mr. Parker.

Ahem, now let me return to the weighty subject of mid-county suburban decay.

* * *

The county’s revitalization program targets a few key areas hit hard by foreclosures, including one upcounty region (Germantown).  Their mid-county target area is Glenmont.

I wish I could say that this is merely a pilot program, but it looks like county officials are being very cautious about the initiative because of their depleted budget and re-shuffled policy priorities.  Ms. Cantor of the Mid-County Regional Services Center used the word “scant” at least twice while describing the level of funding available for the effort.  Speaking for County Exec Leggett, one official emphasized that local priorities are currently ordered as follows: “public safety, education, and safety net services.”

It looks like Montgomery County has been monitoring preliminary and active residential foreclosure trends for several years, along with the socioeconomic and other demographic data they normally compile and analyze for policy guidance.

I excerpt one of these maps below; again, the data was current as of February.

This is a snapshot approximating foreclosure activity in west Wheaton and Glenmont during the 4th quarter of FY 2008.

FNA = Focused Neighborhood Assistance
CAE = Connecticut Avenue Estates

For the original maps this graphic is extracted from, again, see the DHCA’s foreclosure resource webpage.

The area surrounded in blue is the mid-county zone being targeted by this program.  The vast majority of people within this area identify as Glenmont residents.  (Glenmont and Wheaton share the same census-designated place, or CDP.)

My household falls within the triangular area outlined in red, which roughly comprises much of the the “Connecticut Avenue Estates” (CAE) legal subdivision.  (Portions of “Connecticut Avenue Park” and “Montgomery Highland Estates” are cordoned within this red boundary as well, albeit unintentionally.)  There are at least a thousand households with the CAE subdivision designation; at least a couple of hundred of them are located in the southern region of the county’s targeted area, north of Randolph Road.  CAE is an aging high-density subdivision that the county has targeted before in combatting mid-county suburban blight.

Too Little, Too Late?

We’ve got a mid-county landscape studded with foreclosures and overshadowed with many other manifestations of creeping suburban blight.  These trends have been worsening for the past fifteen years or so, accelerating during the last 5 - 7 years.

While we are grateful that the county is finally addressing these long-developing patterns after all these years of decay and neglect, it’s frustrating that officials can only muster up the resources to focus on this very circumscribed area for this latest round of revitalization efforts.  Even with these well-defined constraints, DHCA officials made sure to repeatedly temper residents’ expectations about the project at Tuesday night’s meeting, which is certainly a good idea during this lean fiscal era.

If anybody has any other ideas about how or why county leaders arrived at this particular targeting decision, I’d really like to hear it.  I think they may have been chosen in part because of an emerging groundswell of civic involvement within that neighborhood.  Congratulations to the men and women behind the new Greater Glenmont Civic Association (GGCA).  The county is obviously looking to capitalize on the energy and “human resources” within these neighborhoods in its FNA initiative.  Incidentally, GGCA seems to tilt toward the southeastern portion of the region highlighted in the map above, which is centered on the subdivision known as “Glenmont Village” near the Glenmont Metro station.  The western regions of the neighborhood seemed somewhat isolated from this civic movement (e.g. portions of “Glenmont Hills,” “Connecticut Avenue Park,” and “Stoneybrook Estates”).

Those of us in neighboring communities (e.g. west Wheaton, Aspen Hill & north Kensington) really ought to redouble our own efforts to resurrect and support our own flagging and oft-neglected neighborhood groups.

Wedding Crashers Don’t Have to #%$@ing RSVP

Check out this D.C. Craigslist RNR flamebait:

washington, DC craigslist > northern virginia > rants & raves

Couple in need
----------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: [please-dont-flame-the-happy-hubby-2-b]@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-03-21, 8:08AM EDT

This is a long shot, but here goes. I am 38 year old dealing with overwhelming task of getting married for the first time. My future wife and I are both employed, hard working tax paying citizens. She owns a condo in Las Vegas which unfortunatley has be to be short sold to get out from under that burden. At our age we basically are paying for our wedding by ourselves, which is putting further and further in debt. I can easily say it is the best investment we both have ever made! Unfortunatley we are still in need of help. With only 1 month till the big date. That is why I am posting this. If find you can donate, even a little bit I could not thank you enough.

God Bless
Jason
----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Couple in “need”                      (the courthouse steps)

“Love:  A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”
—Ambrose Bierce

Regarding this beggar bridegroom and his “long shot” at satisfying his nuptial “need”:

Maybe “Jason” still believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, too.

Otherwise, why is he begging a bunch of strangers on Craigslist to help pay for his catering bills?  Is he even trying to hit up his parents or his fiancée’s parents?  Is he shaking down his buddies and his girlfriend’s girlfriends?  After all, at least those folks can look forward to attending this blessed celebration that he’s not even inviting us to crash in his charmless appeal.

When “Jason” and his lovely bride-to-be made these wedding arrangements many months ago, there were obvious signs that we were already heading into a recession, if we weren’t there already.

Besides that, if he’s 38, that means he was in his early twenties when the last recession hit.  Of course, it could very well be that it didn’t hit him too hard back then, either.

Perhaps like a lot of D.C.-area workaholics, he is already married—to his career—and doesn’t have a concrete idea of how dire things are out here for many people.

Maybe he somehow thinks that asking anonymous strangers to help finance a wedding is not an asinine thing to do in an economy where anonymous strangers are losing their jobs, having to drop out of school to pay their bills, postponing retirement because their life savings are depleted, witnessing their businesses fold, and sacrificing their health while trying to stay afloat.

He may believe that asking for donations to carry on a lavish rite-of-passage party is not a tacky thing to do at a time when people are getting kicked out of their housing, watching their marriages & relationships fail, trying to explain unsettling new realities to their kids without upsetting them, having their “friends” turn their backs on them, losing their minds and their identities, becoming victims of crime as those with less scruples grow even more selfish and desperate, and more.

To be fair to “Jason,” so many people in our generation get suckered in by our parents, our friends, our sad-sack middle-class assumptions about the “American Dream,” and the extortionists of the wedding & hospitality industries who prey upon the princess-for-a-day fantasies of brides-to-be.

I’ve been to a few weddings in the last ten years where the families blew tens of thousands of dollars on a weekend—only to find out that the blessed couple filed for divorced within 3-5 years anyways...  Many of these were extravagant affairs that were almost embarrassing to participate in because of all of the tasteless excess.  Half the time we didn’t even know why these conspicuous consumers and careless carousers invited us to these over-the-top shindigs, as we barely knew the couple or the family.

“In economics, a study (done by Pew Charitable Trusts, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Urban Institute) challenged the notion that each generation will be better off than the one that preceded it.[16] The study, 'Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?' focuses on the income of males 30-39 in 2004 (those born April, 1964 – March, 1974) and is based on Census/BLS CPS March supplement data.[17]

The study, released May 25, 2007, emphasized that in real dollars, this generation made less (by 12%) than had their fathers at the same age in 1974, thus reversing a historical trend. The study also suggests that per year increases in the portion of father/son family household income generated by fathers/sons have slowed (from an average of 0.9% to 0.3%), barely keeping pace with inflation, though increases in overall father/son family household income are progressively higher each year because more women are entering the workplace, contributing to family household income.[18]”
—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

I don’t know what the facts on Gen Y are but they can’t be very good either.

Our baby boomer parents have done a lot of us a huge disservice.  Their rules no longer apply to many of us but they still keep at it, urging us to follow in their footsteps and hit all the adult milestones in the correct order, at the right time, just like they did.

I just want all you older (boomer and Gen Jones) folks to know that we are not all as blissfully oblivious and shameless as “Jason” appears to be.

Banking on a song and a prayer...

This past Sunday, CBS’s “60 Minutes” ran a segment about FDIC / Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) bank takeovers.  I think I heard or read somewhere that they’re calling in retired bank takeover specialists who are veterans of the S&L collapses of the ’80s.

Not surprisingly, the “60 Minutes” correspondent emphasized the overall stability of the retail banking sector, the continuity of customer service and asset guarantees once distressed banks are taken over by the feds, and the security of deposit accounts, now insured up to $250k as of 2006.

The piece didn’t really focus on which banks are vulnerable and why they have become insolvent.  However, Maryland was mentioned as the site of a recent bank failure, which prompted me to look up the story of Crofton-based Suburban Federal Savings Bank, whose employees now pledge fealty to a bank based in Virginia’s Tidewater region.

A revealing follow-up story on the bank that ran in the Baltimore Sun shows us how this formerly modest and conservatively operated “community” bank mutated into a mortgage wholesaling monstrosity.

We learn about Maryland minister Samuel Burrow, Jr., who claimed in his loan documentation that he made something like $350k in annual earnings when he actually brought in an amount below the state median income of ~$65k.  Nevertheless, this self-styled man of the cloth goes on to sue the bank for seducing and trapping him in a loan he couldn’t afford.  Perhaps the good reverend was a proponent of prosperity gospel; he certainly ordered up a very worldly custom mega-McMansion.  Unless this man was speaking in tongues or drooling on the loan documents in the Title office, his lawsuit looks pretty baseless.

However, this “community” bank was wildly irresponsible as well.  After 2004, Suburban Federal grew very profligate very quickly while it aggressively fought for a piece of the action during the mid-decade asset commodification frenzy.  Perhaps the old hands from the elder generation of this family of bankers should not have handed the reins over to junior so eagerly.

“Court papers say that in April 2005, Burrow was constructing ‘a palatial, seven bedroom residential home on over five acres of property with amenities including a movie theater, recording studio, gym, and media room.’  Suburban agreed to refinance his existing $872,000 mortgage and give him $389,000 more to finish building.  Two months later, Burrow settled a loan for $1.3 million, bringing in $41,000 in points and fees to the bank and the mortgage broker.

[....]

“What burned Suburban more than anything - not just on that deal, but on scores of loans - was that the value of houses and construction projects dropped when the real estate market cooled, often to less than the amount of the loan, [Baltimore-based loan broker Sidney P.] Levin said.  Burrow's house was once appraised for $3 million.

“‘As long the value is going up, it doesn't matter,’ Levin said.

“Indeed, [deputy director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision Timothy T.] Ward and other regulators say Suburban might have endured its foray into no-documentation lending if the real estate market hadn't crashed.  But as values dropped, the amount of bad debt on Suburban's books soared.  With capital of around $30 million, Suburban could not afford to have many large loans go into default.”

—“Suburban Federal’s short, sharp fall,”  Baltimore Sun,  February 22, 2009

The bank “might have endured if the real estate market hadn’t crashed”:  Wow, this statement makes me wonder how many people are still laboring under the delusion that this comprehensive “market correction” wasn’t inevitable, given the massive quantity of counterfeit wealth that was manufactured at so many levels of the American economy before the financial market collapse of ’08/’09.

Housing False Starts

Below is a digitally vandalized version of a Flash ad I saw yesterday on a major DC metro website.


This was a rather large skyscraper-format ad run by a company that has consistently ranked among the top ten large-volume homebuilders during the crest of the 2000s U.S. housing bubble.

For some reason the ad has huge expanses of white space, some of which I filled with my own vulgar “copy.”

I omitted the bottom section, which looks almost blank.  If you mouseover this area on the real ad, you will see links to “quick move-in homes” in:

“Suburban Maryland ~ From the $500s”
“Baltimore Metro ~ From the $300s”
“Eastern Shore ~ From the mid $200s”

(These items may be geographically filtered based on my user profile, which indicates that I am a Maryland resident.)

If you click on any of these, you will be taken to the builder’s website featuring listings of luxurious exurban McMansions.

Perhaps the builder is counting on the fact that oil prices have partially collapsed due to the global economic contraction, so high-consumption-oriented prospective homebuyers are more likely to tolerate long commutes to job centers like D.C. and Baltimore.

In any case, the original unvandalized ad struck me as perverse and even anachronistic in March 2009.