Tag Archives: county

North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems

by gerdi Posted on January 16, 2013

North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems

By Philip Bump

Huffington Post

Click to embiggen.

Last year, the North Dakota division of tourism unveiled an ad as part of a series that it hoped would lure people to the state. “Drinks, dinner, decisions,” the ad copy read. “Arrive a guest. Leave a legend.” Reaction to the ad (which you can see at right) was fast and strongly negative. The image of two men leering out a window at a group of women in short skirts struck many as sexist, tone-deaf, and worse.

It turns out that the ad’s subtext may have been more accurate than we knew. From the Times:

At work, at housing camps and in bars and restaurants, men have been left to mingle with their own. High heels and skirts are as rare around here as veggie burgers. Some men liken the environment to the military or prison.

“It’s bad, dude,” said Jon Kenworthy, 22, who moved to Williston from Indiana in early December. “I was talking to my buddy here. I told him I was going to import from Indiana because there’s nothing here.”

This has complicated life for women in the region as well.

Many said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.

Reuters / Jim UrquhartOil industry worker Bobby Freestone enjoys a day off at a so-called man camp outside Watford, N.D.

North Dakota is the fastest-growing state in the country. Fracking the Bakken Shale formation for oil has brought thousands and thousands of young men to the state, given them good salaries, crammed them into whatever housing they can find. It has also created a massive imbalance in the number of men to women in some parts of the state — and the men that have arrived are young and bored.

Prosecutors and the police note an increase in crimes against women, including domestic and sexual assaults. “There are people arriving in North Dakota every day from other places around the country who do not respect the people or laws of North Dakota,” said Ariston E. Johnson, the deputy state’s attorney in neighboring McKenzie County, in an e-mail.

Over the past six years, North Dakota has shot from the middle of the pack to become the state with the third-highest ratio of single young men to single young women in the country. In 2011, nearly 58 percent of North Dakota’s unmarried 18-to-34-year-olds were men, according to census data. That disparity was even starker in the three counties where the oil boom is heaviest — there were more than 1.6 young single men for every young single woman.

The Times article includes a graphic showing those states with the highest imbalance of single men to single women. The top five states — Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, and North Dakota — are all among the states with the highest levels of oil and gas exploration.

New York Times

That imbalance is no excuse for sexism, assaults, or harassment. It is, however, another sign of a region strained by a booming fossil fuel industry — a region that receives very little support from that increasingly rich industry to deal with the problems that are created.

Come to North Dakota, a new, more accurate ad might beckon. Instead of being at a bar, it’s in front of a fracking rig, and instead of two guys, it will show six. And it won’t show three young women, but one — with a nervous expression on her face.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Cities

,

Climate & Energy

,

Living

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

View post: 

North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems

Happy 25th anniversary, San Jose’s useless light rail!

by donnajansen Posted on January 11, 2013

Happy 25th anniversary, San Jose’s useless light rail!

By Philip Bump

For part of the time that I lived in San Jose, Calif., my apartment was downtown, across the street from a light rail station. I used to take the train to work, which was great for the first 80 percent of the ride: The car was almost always near-empty as it chugged along down the middle of streets, passing dozens of automobiles at each stop light. When I reached the stop closest to my office, I’d get off — and start the 20-minute walk in, having to either walk well out of my way or, if I was in a hurry, dash across a busy highway with no crosswalk. It was an hour’s journey, easily, for a trip that took 10 minutes by car without traffic.

My friend Michael and I took to calling the light rail “the Buzz,” both because it sounded confusingly like “the bus,” which amused us, and because it implied a speedy, futuristic system, which the light rail very much is not. A guy I knew who worked with the union that represented bus and light rail operators called it the “ghost train,” since you’d often see it passing by at night, lit up and empty.

pbumpSprawl in Silicon Valley.

The Atlantic Cities’ Eric Jaffe has a good look at the light rail as it celebrates its 25th anniversary. From his article:

Less than 1 percent of Santa Clara County residents ride [Valley Transportation Authority] light rail; the per-passenger round-trip operating cost is $11.74 and taxpayers subsidize 85 percent of costs — third and second worst in the country, respectively. There are problems with measuring costs per passenger mile on light rail, but ouch. …

In November, [the Mercury News‘ Mike] Rosenberg reported that a VTA plan to extend a light rail line 1.6 miles to Los Gatos, home of Netflix, will cost $175 million while drawing only about 200 new riders. Back in May, a local news station found a culture of fare evasion on VTA that gives the system a rate of 7.2 percent — highest in the region.

Jaffe has a series of quotes from people nearly as dismissive of the light rail as I am above. But one word is curiously missing: density. The problem with the light rail is that it serves a county that is home to one of the least-dense cities in America; San Jose, the nation’s 10th largest city, is not in the top 125 in people per square mile. Offices and strip malls and housing complexes are scattered around the valley floor, the result of City Manager Dutch Hamann‘s ’50s-era small-town-incorporation spree. San Jose contains land extending far beyond what even its now 1 million residents have use for, making a skeletal light rail system like platform sidewalks in a massive bog — barely providing access to anything.

I tried to be a good resident. I tried to give the light rail my business in part because I liked the aesthetic of it. Step out of my apartment and hop the train to work. It’s what I’d do now in hyper-dense Manhattan, if I didn’t work from home. But in San Jose, it didn’t work.

So I did what everyone else does. I got a car.

Source

Silicon Valley Can’t Get Transit Right, The Atlantic Cities

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Cities

,

Living

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

View post:

Happy 25th anniversary, San Jose’s useless light rail!

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Happy 25th anniversary, San Jose’s useless light rail!

Big 50-year plan could make Detroit greener and healthier

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on January 10, 2013

Big 50-year plan could make Detroit greener and healthier

By Susie Cagle

Detroit’s city leaders, backed by deep-pocketed foundations, have laid out a new plan for remaking Motor City into a thriving and sustainable metropolis. From Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson:

[P]rops to Mayor Dave Bing and the Detroit Works project he has championed for telling Detroiters the truth about their limited options for redeeming Michigan’s largest city — and reminding them how quickly those options will narrow if Detroit’s elected leaders fail to seize the moment.

The Detroit Future City report unveiled Wednesday is best understood as a municipal triage plan. Squarely confronting the chasm between residents’ expectations and the city’s capacity to meet them, the report’s authors have done their best to apportion the city’s dwindling resources across a sprawling landscape of deprivation. …

Nobody will be forced to move … But if implemented, the Future City plan would codify the tale-of-two-cities scenario that already exists, formalizing the boundary between neighborhoods that retain critical mass and the more sparsely populated hinterlands where the amenities associated with urban living are generally unavailable.

The new Detroit Works Project 50-year plan for the city is sprawling and ambitious, but unlike a lot of huge strategic plans, it actually doesn’t seem completely insane. Put together after hundreds of meetings, thousands of surveys, and tens of thousands of snippets of community input, the 350-page “Detroit Future City” report is full of big, green ideas.

The plan’s recommendations for a future Detroit include building “blue and green infrastructure” to help address water and air-quality issues, creating new open space networks, including local wildlife habitat, and diversifying the city’s public transportation modes. The W.K. Kellogg, Kresge, and Ford Foundations have pledged millions to help the plan become reality.

“This is the most comprehensive framework ever established for an American city,” said Toni Griffin, director of the Technical Planning Team at the Detroit Works Project.

The report calls for adding new, large areas of greenspace, but it’s also emphatic about the need to reuse old buildings (whereas other shrinking cities have taken the approach of knocking them down en masse). From the report:

Vacant land and buildings are among Detroit’s most valuable assets for its future … Turning vacant land from burdens to assets will take more than changes in specific policies and practices. ALL PUBLIC AGENCIES—WHETHER CITY, COUNTY, OR STATE—WILL NEED TO CHANGE HOW THEY THINK ABOUT LAND, AND MAKE EQUALLY FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES TO THE WAY THEY ACQUIRE, MANAGE, AND DISPOSE OF LAND AND BUILDINGS, AND THE WAY OTHER PUBLIC AGENCIES REGULATE THEM. Without such a change in thinking and practice, the inventory of vacant land and buildings in its current condition will not only fail to become an asset, it will continue to act as a roadblock to the implementation of creative strategies for land use, environmental restoration, economic growth and neighborhood revitalization.

Yeah, I’ll get behind any strategic plan for reuse and sustainability that yells at backward-thinking public agencies in bold, all-caps.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Cities

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Read article here:  

Big 50-year plan could make Detroit greener and healthier

Posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Big 50-year plan could make Detroit greener and healthier

Ohio fights a multi-front war against blight

by Myrna Posted on December 13, 2012

Ohio fights a multi-front war against blight

By Susie Cagle

Good samaritans in Ohio may be getting a reprieve from potential misdemeanor charges.

Today the state House is voting on a bill that would allow people to clean up vacant, blighted properties without fear of a trespassing charge. This measure essentially gives residents more power to improve their neighborhoods, harnessing NIMBY instincts for good. From The Columbus Dispatch:

Some residents hesitate to take care of the properties around them because they risk trespassing charges, said Tiffany Sokol, office manager of the nonprofit Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp., which boards up and cleans up vacant properties. The bill would allow individuals to clean up blighted land or buildings that have clearly been abandoned.

“Very ugly, nasty places,” [said Sen. Joe Schiavoni (D), the bill’s sponsor]. “These properties are an eyesore, a danger to their neighbors.”

mbmatt356

Blight in East Cleveland.

The Rust Belt is only getting rustier, and Ohio communities have tried a number of strategies to fight neighborhood blight. Yesterday, The Columbus Dispatch and a city website published the names of negligent owners of more than 100 blighted properties. The city called it a fight for neighborhoods.

City Attorney Richard C. Pfeiffer Jr. said anything is worth a try.

“If it gets their attention, good,” he said.

In Cleveland, officials are rehabbing the shrunken city by aggressively tearing down houses, not fixing them up. From National Journal:

“Trying to convince my colleagues that demolition was the right way to go was against everything we had been taught,” said [city council member Anthony] Brancatelli, who spent his time at [Cleveland’s] Slavic Village Development Corp. focused on building, not destroying. “We built 500 new homes and rehabbed about a thousand and the market was good,” he said of his early years. But then he saw the market change. And he saw the speculators swoop in and devastate the neighborhood he loved. “There was the mentality of this wild, wild west of real estate that defies any logic that I grew up on,” he said.

He also saw the devastating impact on his neighbors. He still gets emotional about his dealings with one elderly woman who had lived in the same small house for 80 years with her family operating a butcher shop in the front of the house. But now she was the last member of the family in the house and needed to move out. “That,” said Brancatelli, “was probably the hardest thing I had to do was tell this poor woman that all we were going to do is tear it down. … She just cried.” …

[Jim Rokakis, former Cuyahoga County treasurer,] became an unlikely champion of demolition over rehabbing the abandoned houses. “By 2007, it became obvious to me that this was a war,” Rokakis told National Journal. “We had lost. And now we had to bury the dead. And ‘bury the dead’ meant taking these houses down, many of them functionally obsolete.” The logic, he said, is inescapable. “If you live next to a foreclosed house, your house is worth 10 percent less. If you live on a street with multiple foreclosed properties, your house isn’t worth 10 percent less. Your house is just worthless.”

While other progressive bastions of urban idealism wring their hands, Ohio is picking itself up and getting shit done. As Richey Piiparinen writes at New Geography:

[T]his groundedness, this Rust Belt-ness, it’s not a settling or a lack of aspiration, but rather — for Clevelanders populating the city that never knew its heights — a chance to look around and see nothing but work to do, and an opportunity to do it. There are a lot of fresh eyes around. The city psychology is changing. And I think this may save Cleveland, because people are no longer waiting for Cleveland to save us.

The Rust Belt may be gritty, beat-down, and other patronizing adjectives we seem to reserve for post-industrial American cities, but there’s a lot of hope in it yet.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Cities

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

See the original post: 

Ohio fights a multi-front war against blight

Posted in Citizen, GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ohio fights a multi-front war against blight

Drought hits Colorado ranchers, and polluting oil drillers deliver another blow

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 11, 2012

Drought hits Colorado ranchers, and polluting oil drillers deliver another blow

By Philip Bump

As of last week, 95 percent of Colorado was under severe drought conditions. A reminder: It is December.

DroughtMonitor

That’s an improvement since early September, when the entire state was in severe drought. At this rate, the problem will be resolved in … oh, five years.

The effects of the drought have been felt broadly — but the damage done to sheep farmers has been particularly acute.

From The New York Times:

“For the sheep industry, it’s the perfect storm,” [rancher John] Bartmann said, glancing out his office window here at a bleating sea of wool. “The money is just not there.”

Many ranchers are laying off employees, cutting their flocks and selling at a loss, and industry groups said a handful had abandoned the business entirely. Mr. Bartmann has trimmed his flock of 2,000 by one-third. With prices down more than half since last year and higher costs for gasoline and corn, Mr. Bartmann said he expected to lose about $100 for every lamb he sold. …

In a slow-motion disaster, a drought covering more than 60 percent of the country scorched corn stalks into parchment, dried up irrigation ponds and turned farm fields into brittle crust. Farmers begged local governments to let them tap aquifers. Scores of ranchers dumped their livestock at drought auctions.

Farmers say they are still paying near-record prices for corn and hay to feed their livestock through the winter. And if abundant snows do not come to replenish streams and coax new grass from the ground, they worry that next summer could be even worse than last.

J B Foster

The still-green White River Valley, Colo.

The drought struck at a particularly bad time — and as is often the case in food production, Big Ag played a role in how severely it affected ranchers.

The drought withered grazing grounds, killed off young lambs and dried up irrigation ditches, and a glut of meat and imported lambs from New Zealand helped send prices plummeting.

But some ranchers and officials in Washington believe that the deck was stacked against the sheep ranchers by the small number of powerful feedlots that buy lambs, slaughter them and sell them to grocery stores and restaurants. Even as prices farmers received fell to 85 cents a pound, consumers at supermarkets were paying $7 or more a pound for the same meat.

Meanwhile, some of the groundwater that’s left is being polluted by oil and gas extraction. From The Denver Post:

Oil and gas have contaminated groundwater in 17 percent of the 2,078 spills and slow releases that companies reported to state regulators over the past five years, state data show. …

Most of the spills are happening less than 30 feet underground — not in the deep well bores that carry drilling fluids into rock.

State regulators say oil and gas crews typically are working on storage tanks or pipelines when they discover that petroleum material, which can contain cancer-causing benzene, has seeped into soil and reached groundwater. Companies respond with vacuum trucks or by excavating tainted soil.

Contamination of groundwater — along with air emissions, truck traffic and changed landscapes — has spurred public concerns about drilling along Colorado’s Front Range. There are 49,236 active wells statewide, up 31 percent since 2008, with 17,844 in Weld County. …

“There is an impact,” [Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission] environmental manager Jim Milne said, reviewing the groundwater data. “We don’t know if it is unreasonable or not.”

If it helps to clarify, here’s our assessment of unreasonable: a single drop of water polluted with benzene in the midst of an historic drought.

Colorado is increasingly on the front lines of the water wars. As the climate continues to warm and drought conditions become the norm, how states use and conserve water will become issues of life and death.

And not just for sheep.

Source

Drought and Economy Plague Sheep Farmers, New York Times
Drilling spills reaching Colorado groundwater; state mulls test rules, Denver Post

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Climate & Energy

,

Food

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Taken from: 

Drought hits Colorado ranchers, and polluting oil drillers deliver another blow

Posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Drought hits Colorado ranchers, and polluting oil drillers deliver another blow

Nearly half of Los Angeles car accidents are hit-and-runs

by Myrna Posted on December 7, 2012

Nearly half of Los Angeles car accidents are hit-and-runs

By Philip Bump

In one sense, this is a bit of good news about Los Angeles and its car-heavy transportation culture: More than half of the time people are involved in car accidents, they actually stick around and take responsibility for it. Slightly more than half.

From LA Weekly:

About 20,000 hit-and-run crashes, from fender benders to multiple fatalities, are recorded by the Los Angeles Police Department each year.

That’s huge, even in a city of 3.8 million people. In the United States, 11 percent of vehicle collisions are hit-and-runs. But in Los Angeles, L.A. Weekly has learned, an incredible 48 percent of crashes were hit-and-runs in 2009, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available. According to data collected by the state, some 4,000 hit-and-run crashes a year inside L.A. city limits, including cases handled by LAPD, California Highway Patrol and the L.A. County Sheriff, resulted in injury and/or death. Of those, according to a federal study, about 100 pedestrians died; the number of motorists and bicyclists who die would push that toll even higher.

In other words, Los Angeles drivers are four-and-a-half times more likely to bail after an accident than the country on the whole.

An accident scene near Long Beach.

LA Weekly credits a perhaps-predictable source for the data.

In fact, it appears that the best data on the massive scope of L.A. felony hit-and-runs — “felony” generally meaning somebody was seriously injured or killed — were dug up not by city leaders or law enforcement but by well-known bicycling advocate Alex Thompson, founder of the now-defunct website Bikeside L.A.

According to the blog Biking in LA, 24 riders were killed in traffic-related accidents in Los Angeles County in 2011 — 71 in Southern California. While the figure for LA is relatively consistent, it’s growing in the surrounding area.

Ito World took data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to create this map of fatalities in the greater Los Angeles area from 2001-2009.

It’s a staggering picture of a decade of injury. And according to LA Weekly, a massive percentage of the people responsible for those accidents may have suffered no consequence at all for doing so.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Cities

,

Living

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

See original:  

Nearly half of Los Angeles car accidents are hit-and-runs

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Nearly half of Los Angeles car accidents are hit-and-runs

Supreme Court takes on dirty water

by Myrna Posted on December 3, 2012

Supreme Court takes on dirty water

By Susie Cagle

Nobody wants to take responsibility for nasty, polluted storm-water runoff. But the Supreme Court might soon force a few somebodies to do just that.

cbcastro

Today the court is hearing two cases on runoff from logging roads in the Pacific Northwest, which environmentalists say can threaten fish.

And tomorrow the court will hear a case on Los Angeles’ filthy storm water, which contains “high levels of aluminum, copper, cyanide, fecal coliform bacteria and zinc,” the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said last year. That water flows into the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers and ultimately pollutes the area’s beaches.

The fight over L.A.’s dirty water began back in 2008, when the Natural Resources Defense Council brought suit against the county flood control district, hoping to force stricter measures to prevent water pollution. But the county doesn’t acknowledge that the water is its responsibility. From the Los Angeles Times:

County officials agree storm water is polluting the rivers but disagree on who is responsible. Its one monitoring station along the Los Angeles River is in Long Beach, near where it empties into the ocean.

“Yes, there are pollutants in the water, but dozens of municipalities are upstream from there. It’s a collective runoff. It doesn’t point to a particular source,” Gary Hildebrand, assistant deputy director of the L.A. County Flood Control District, said in an interview.

In court, the flood control district’s lawyers have argued that because the Clean Water Act regulates only “discharges” of pollutants, the county is not responsible for discharges that come from the thousands of drains in the county’s 84 cities.

The dispute, if nothing else, illustrates the difficulty of regulating storm water. The Clean Water Act of 1972 first targeted “point sources” of pollution, such as an industrial plant putting toxic chemicals into a creek, or a sewage plant that was leaking sewage into a river. Violators could be identified and forced to stop the pollution.

By contrast, a heavy storm sends water flowing from across a vast area, picking up pollutants along the way. There is no obvious point source.

Who will win: Clean water or municipal fiefdoms that buck collective responsibility?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Cities

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Visit source: 

Supreme Court takes on dirty water

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Supreme Court takes on dirty water

California’s Central Valley is tired of taking Los Angeles’ shit

by Myrna Posted on November 26, 2012

California’s Central Valley is tired of taking Los Angeles’ shit

By Philip Bump

From the Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles’ land in Kern County features a red barn and a sign: “Green Acres Farm.” The city’s website proudly describes the corn, alfalfa and oats that are grown there.

Hey, sounds nice! Except:

[T]he city of Los Angeles … has been sending up more than 20 truckloads a day of “wet cake” from the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant near LAX. …

Most experts say recycled products such as sludge and compost are safe if handled properly. But Kern County officials filed court declarations from scientists who are skeptical. Portland State University engineer Gwynn Johnson, for instance, said research shows that biosolids contain metals, antibiotics and flame retardants, and that more study is needed to determine the implications for “human health and the environment.”

Residents tend to focus on the “ick” factor.

Ronald Hurlbert, who owned property near one sludge operation that at one point received waste from Orange County, said the odor was “virtually unbearable (like a well-used bathroom at LAX),” according to a sworn declaration filed in court by Kern County officials.

vmiramontes

As it drives through Kern County, this RV will also be leaving behind its sludge.

At issue: Los Angeles’ endless supply of solid waste. Not, you know, garbage. Waste. Much of which is shipped north from the city every day into California’s agricultural heartland, the Central Valley — where it is increasingly unwelcome. This is the downside to recycling: Sometimes, no one wants to do (or live near) the dirty work.

One of the most bitter battles in California is over sludge, the batter-like material left over after treatment plants finish cleaning and draining what is flushed down the toilet or washed down the sink.

“Batter-like.” Let that one marinate in your brain for a while. Until the ’80s, the poo-batter was dumped in the ocean — until someone figured out that dumping lightly processed feces into the sea was a form of pollution.

Kern County voters passed a ballot measure in 2006 banning sludge from entering the county. Los Angeles sued. While the dispute remains unresolved in the courts, Los Angeles is allowed to keep using Kern County as its toilets’ toilet.

And there’s more to come for the Central Valley.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County announced that it had purchased 14,500 acres in Kings County — also in the Central Valley — where it would be allowed to send hundreds of thousands of tons of sludge and yard waste.

Some material could start arriving at the end of next year.

Source

Central Valley residents tire of receiving L.A.’s urban waste, Los Angeles Times

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Cities

,

Climate & Energy

,

Living

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

More here:  

California’s Central Valley is tired of taking Los Angeles’ shit

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California’s Central Valley is tired of taking Los Angeles’ shit