Tract Housing Research Articles

Patterns of urban forest composition in Utah’s growing mountain communities

Urban forests provide critical ecosystem services in cities of the Western United States, including regulating thermal extremes, supporting biological diversity, and providing cultural and recreational services. However, these services may come with trade-offs such as heavy water demand in arid environments. Thus, afforestation and its effect on the water budget – as well as other ecosystem services – can be contingent on the species composition of urban forests. Choice of tree species, in turn, is influenced by historical contingencies and development context. The objective of this study was to identify differences in tree species composition between four broad classes of urban development in Heber Valley, Utah, with classes defined by establishment age, lot size, and location within the urban-suburban environment. Publicly available information was used to categorize residential and commercial areas, and standard forestry techniques were used to collect data on trees in a stratified random survey of lots in each category. Older, established housing had the highest tree basal area and species richness per hectare, and exurban (rural, dispersed housing) developments had significantly higher species diversity than new tract housing. Because it appears that exurban communities are being replaced by tract housing, there is evidence that tree diversity may be lost. Another important aspect of community structure in urban forests is the ratio of conifers to broadleaf trees because of fundamental differences in water use patterns. Conifers were twenty-five percent of the average lot basal area in exurban and thirty-five percent in established neighborhoods, as opposed to five percent in tract housing. If functional groups are used as predictors of water use in irrigated urban systems, water demand is likely to increase with the expansion of low-diversity, angiosperm dominated tract forests in the Western US in the coming decades.

Review: The Social Project: Housing Postwar France, by Kenny Cupers

Kenny Cupers The Social Project: Housing Postwar France Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 424 pp., 25 color and 167 b/w illus. $115 (cloth), ISBN 9780816689644; $35 (paper), ISBN 9780816689651 The grands ensembles— the large-scale suburban social housing estates, often featuring repetitive rows of tall concrete slabs—are a significant part of France's postwar built environment. In North America, postwar suburban housing was tied to government financial incentives, private market developments, and individual homeownership, as in the famous case of Levittown tract housing. By contrast, much of France's suburban landscape was defined by housing projects that were colossal in scale and subsidized by the state, much like their Eastern bloc counterparts. If the grands ensembles initially attracted popular interest as a potential solution to ongoing housing shortages, they quickly developed a poor reputation across the political spectrum and attracted criticism for their monotony and obliviousness to human scale. For many, the postwar French suburbs represent a bygone utopian past, an era French economist Jean Fourastie famously called les Trente Glorieuses , which has since devolved into an everyday reality marked by racial segregation, social alienation, and lack of employment opportunities.1 As Kristin Ross has argued in her now classic Fast Cars, Clean Bodies , the suburbs were central to France's economic development and political discourse in the aftermath of World War II and decolonization.2 Yet, despite their crucial place within the postwar built environment and social imaginary, few studies on the grands ensembles have been available in English, a situation that Kenny Cupers helps to remedy with The Social Project . Were the myriad postwar suburban housing schemes in France a long series of “monumental errors,” to use the title of a book by architectural historian Michel Ragon?3 Or do we, in hindsight, continue to underappreciate the humanist ambitions and the varied solutions proposed by French architects and planners for whom modernism was “not a style but a cause”?4 Those reading Cupers's latest book may be disappointed …

Housing demand and neighborhood choice with housing vouchers

This paper presents a new model of household choice of neighborhood and housing consumption, and uses it to predict the effects of alternative housing voucher policies on the choices of voucher recipients and their levels of wellbeing. The model is estimated using household level data from housing voucher recipients in Pittsburgh, aggregate data on unsubsidized households, and a large dataset of neighborhood characteristics including crime rates, school quality, racial composition, and housing prices. Using the estimated model, this study predicts effects of a variety of interesting reforms of the housing voucher program, namely, a more generous voucher subsidy, subsidy amounts that vary with census tract housing prices instead of metropolitan area prices, subsidies that are proportional to the market rent of the specific units, and a requirement that voucher recipients live in a census tract where the poverty rate is less than 30% .

Review: SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape and Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923–1968

SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape Museum of Chinese in America, New York 24 September 2015–27 March 2016 Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923–1968 Museum of Chinese in America, New York 24 September 2015–27 March 2016 If the United States, sprawling and diverse, can be difficult to see, the milieu of new immigrants, especially poor ones, is even less visible. A pair of exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America helped bring that world into focus: SubUrbanisms , which explored the lives of Chinese immigrants in twenty-first-century Norwich, Connecticut; and Chinese Style , which documented the mid-twentieth-century career of Chinatown-born architect Poy Gum Lee. SubUrbanisms , curated by Stephen Fan, a young Chinese American architect who grew up, in part, in Norwich, told the fascinating story of Chinese workers lured from New York City beginning around 2001 to work at Mohegan Sun, the massive casino complex developed by the Mohegan Tribe in the late 1990s on the site of a shuttered plant that made components for nuclear reactors. Norwich, like much of southeastern New England, industrialized early. A century ago, its bustling mills attracted thousands of new immigrants from the Lower East Side, mostly Italians and Jews (including several of my great-grandparents). As industry waned, however, downtown faded, and those who remained, like Americans coast to coast, spread out to a new ring of tract houses and commercial strips. It is here, rather than …

The Merchant Crusaders

In the 1950s and 1960s, the National Association of Real Estate Boards and the California Real Estate Association openly opposed fair housing laws, referring to such laws as “forced housing.” Studies have noted that a handful of private developers spoke out against these major industry groups and even developed racially inclusive open-occupancy housing tracts. But the historiography has yet to account for the fact that some developers also helped shape fair housing laws behind the scenes. This study shows that major California developers Joseph “Joe” Eichler and his son Edward “Ned” Eichler exerted a great deal of influence on the regulatory environment by working with state and federal officials. This story is not better known because the Eichlers concealed their activism from the general public in an attempt to protect their business.

Social Space and the Suburb in Mike Cahill’s King of California : Mapping Race, Neoliberalism, and Narratives of the Past in the Southern California Landscape

Social Space and the Suburb in Mike Cahill’s King of CaliforniaMapping Race, Neoliberalism, and Narratives of the Past in the Southern California Landscape Emily Cheng (bio) Introduction Mike Cahill’s 2007 comedy-drama film, King of California, tells the story of a father and daughter’s quest for a previously unknown treasure trove of gold doubloons lost by the fictional Father Juan Florismarte Torres in the seventeenth-century Spanish exploration of California. The main characters, Charlie (Michael Douglas) and sixteen-year-old Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood), undertake this adventure inspired by the Spanish explorers, and in doing so navigate a constantly shifting landscape of suburban sprawl. From their position as modern-day “explorers,” Charlie and Miranda offer a critical perspective on their Southern California suburban space of Santa Clarita, located outside Los Angeles. Their use of historic maps and descriptions of the seventeenth-century physical geography to navigate the present space of strip malls, freeways, and mass housing developments highlights the environmental loss wrought by suburban sprawl. The film associates this physical devastation with the social, political, and economic terrains organized by capitalist development. At stake in this quest is the imagination of a California dream that celebrates the individual against its corruption by consumerism and conformity. The film frames Charlie and Miranda as critics of suburban social and physical conformity. This approach particularly plays out in their position of resistance to the consumerism and privatized space of family valorized by the dominant ideologies of neoliberal [End Page 25] capitalism. Their social distance from the community living in newly built tract housing is signified from the beginning of the film through the visual contrast of their old house falling into disrepair. Diverging from the normative nuclear families around her, Miranda has been living alone since she was fourteen and has dropped out of high school in order to work a low-wage job at McDonald’s to support herself. Charlie, who masterminds the quest, is framed through his difference from the beginning of the film as we are introduced to him upon his discharge from the county mental health institution where he has spent two years in treatment for bipolar disorder. While Miranda initially doubts Charlie’s quest as insanity, she goes along with it and by the end comes to realize the validity of Charlie’s viewpoint that the “sane” world is blind to the constraints and consequences of capitalist conformity. While the overt narrative of the film might be understood as a critique of neoliberal consumer capitalism that celebrates individual thought, this essay suggests that this narrative is complicated by neoliberalism’s central focus on the politics of privatization and responsibility at the level of the individual. By approaching the film through a critical race lens, my reading addresses King of California as a cultural text that embodies the contradictions of the centrality of the individual to neoliberal ideology. The film launches a progressive critique that defamiliarizes the dominant valorization of social conformity and consumerism; however, it does so by focusing narrowly on the economic terrain as a largely separate category. In a sense, the film makes use of the very terms of neoliberalism by leaving normative ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality uninterrogated. As Lisa Duggan writes: Neoliberalism, a late twentieth-century incarnation of Liberalism, organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion. But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classifies human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms. (3) By stopping its critique short of engaging the complex interconnections of the social, political, and economic terrains, the film [End Page 26] performs the racialized privilege of whiteness in regard to the construction of the US liberal individual. This neoliberal separation of social and political categories underwrites the film’s appropriation of racialized histories and memories of California in constructing its filmic world. Through addressing the racial thinking embedded in the romanticized narratives of California history, for instance of Spanish exploration rather than conquest, this essay examines the racialization of the notion of the individual constructed in these mythologies of the West. In...

Gut microbiota and neurogastroenterology and motility: the good the bad and the ugly

Although we have known for over 30 years that the gastrointestinal tract houses trillions of microbial organisms, known collectively as the intestinal microbiome, it is only in the past few years that we have begun to appreciate the significant and broad-ranging effects that the intestinal microbiome has on Neurogastroenterology and Motility, including Brain-Gut interactions. The gastrointestinal microbiome is thought to play a role in several inflammatory, sensory and motor gastrointestinal diseases. We are therefore pleased to announce a special collection of papers published in Neurogastroenterology and Motility in 2013 that focus on the intestinal microbiome. In this special collection, Neurogastroenterology & Motility authors have reviewed the interactions between the intestinal microbiome and gastrointestinal health and have stressed the need to move beyond phylotyping towards understanding the impact microbiota metabolites have on the host. Several articles explore the link between the intestinal microbiome and intestinal sensing, including normal function and hypersensitivity. Other articles explore the role of acute changes in the intestinal microbiome in the development of post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome and the roles of the intestinal microbiome in normal and abnormal smooth muscle function, while others explore the fascinating link between the intestinal microbiome and brain function, including depression. This is an exciting and rapidly evolving field, there already appears to be significant potential for utilizing the intestinal microbiome to modulate the function of the brain-gut axis as a therapeutic strategy for several diseases, including functional gastrointestinal disorders. We hope you enjoy this rich compilation of what has been published thus far, and we look forward to highlighting future discoveries in Neurogastroenterology and Motility.

Effect of High Gasoline Prices on Low-Density Housing Development

Real estate development in suburban and exurban fringe areas defined the latest housing boom in the United States. The development of vast subdivisions of greenfield parcels in counties distant from urban cores and employment centers led to an upward trend in driving distances. A gradually developing and then dramatic run-up in the price of oil from 2003 to 2008 precipitated a gasoline price shock. The convergence of rising gasoline prices and a glut of newly constructed, low-density tract housing led to an equally dramatic decline in new housing starts in areas far from center cities and the older suburbs. Whereas the gasoline price shock affected the number of housing starts, the recession is responsible for the decline in housing prices; the two concepts act independently of one another. By correlating gasoline prices, housing starts in rural counties as compared to urban centers, vehicle efficiency, and vehicle miles traveled data, I have determined that the demand for sprawl development declines substantially as the price of gasoline rises over time. Households not seeking to move are not likely to move purely because of changes in gasoline prices; however, people who have plans to change residence take gasoline prices into account when choosing a new neighborhood. The recent global peak oil production milestone acknowledged by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has significant implications for transportation costs and, therefore, the future efficacy of auto-oriented suburban housing development. Whether these emerging trends continue into the future remains to be seen.

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

I Can't See It; I Don't Understand It; And It Doesn't Look Old to Me

I Can't See It; I Don't Understand It; And It Doesn't Look Old to Me Richard Longstreth (bio) When I delivered the content of this article as part of the opening session at the National Park Service's "Preserving the Recent Past" conference in 1995, the subject was still somewhat of a novel one. Some great works of Modern architecture had been preserved as museums, Fallingwater and the National Trust's Pope-Leighey house being among the pioneering ventures during the 1960s. Still the post-World War II legacy was just beginning to be appreciated by many preservationists, and the scope of that legacy remained a matter of debate. In framing my remarks, I sought to cast a wide net, going beyond the icons of Modern architecture, which had long been venerated by architects, to include significant, but for the most part unrecognized components such as major urban renewal projects, early regional shopping malls, and large-scale housing tracts. I also sought to approach the subject by highlighting some of the factors that bred skepticism among many preservationists: that much of the postwar legacy was difficult to comprehend from a single vantage point or even to see at all from public rights-of-way; that often the language of modernism in this era was substantially different from those with which preservationists felt comfortable; and that this legacy was often seen as still "new" and hence not "historic." Although I tried to make clear the fallacies of each of these viewpoints, some members of the audience, including DOCOMOMO representatives, thought I was claiming such work should not indeed be the focus of preservation efforts. I do not think that interpretation was widespread, and am grateful to Forum's editors for picking up the piece so that it could reach a far larger audience. The scene is very different today, less than two decades later. Preserving the recent past, now extending to work of the 1970s, has become a widespread, grassroots-driven activity, as well as one spurred by national organizations, here and abroad. The postwar period has captured the interest of scholars of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism as much as it has drawn thousands of young men and women into the preservation fold. Many significant contributions to the postwar legacy have been preserved, often carefully restored or sensitively rehabilitated. But many more remain ignored and frequently are lost. Examples in the controversial areas I mentioned in 1995 are, with a few exceptions, still on tenuous ground today. Even major monuments such as Richard Neutra's former visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park are threatened. There is much work still to be done. [End Page 35] The champions of modern architecture seldom missed an opportunity to ridicule the past. At best, the past was treated as a closed book whose chapters had mercifully ended with little bearing upon the present. But often the past was portrayed as an evil. Both buildings and cities created since the rise of industrialization in the early 19th century were charged with having nearly ruined the planet. The legacy of one's parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents was not only visually meaningless and degenerate, but socially and spiritually repressive as well. Architects such as Walter Gropius and critics such as Lewis Mumford saw the contemporary city as so much detritus. The more of this alleged blight that was removed from the scene, the better. Such sweeping indictments of the built environment in architectural and planning circles added fuel to the cause of historic preservation in others. It is no coincidence that the National Historic Preservation Act was created at a time when the Modernist cause seemed to be exercising a major hold on federal policy. This relationship, among other things, makes it difficult some 30 years later to consider the legacy of Modernism itself a valued thing of the past. Furthermore, Modernism is still with us. It can be argued that more of its agenda has been realized over the past 25 years than over the previous half century. Nevertheless, the products of a generation ago are assuming a new dimension and indeed can be examined from a fresh perspective. In their...

Role of the microbiota in inflammatory bowel diseases

Studying the role of the human microbiome as it relates to human health status has revolutionized our view of microbial community contributions to a large number of diseases, particularly chronic inflammatory disorders. The lower gastrointestinal (GI) tract houses trillions of microbial cells representing a large diversity of species in relatively well-defined phylogenetic ratios that are associated with maintenance of key aspects of host physiology and immune homeostasis. It is not surprising, therefore, that many GI inflammatory diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), are associated with substantial changes in the composition of these microbial assemblages, either as a cause or consequence of host inflammatory response. Here we review current knowledge in the emerging field of human microbiome research as it relates to IBD, specifically focusing on Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). We discuss bacteriotherapeutic efforts to restore GI microbial assemblage integrity via probiotic supplementation of IBD patients, and speculate on future directions for the field.

Do Mexican Cities Sprawl? Housing-Finance Reform and Changing Patterns of Urban Growth

This study documents a recent, dramatic change in urban growth patterns in Mexico. Using information from housing developers, satellite imagery, census archives, and administrative records on mortgage lending, it contrasts the growth patterns generated by new large-scale developments of tract housing built under an expanding housing-finance system with those of incrementally built, "self-help" housing. In a series of regression models, the growing areas of cities with a larger share of new housing purchased through mortgage financing are shown to have a higher housing density and better access to basic urban infrastructure, yet are not found to be located farther from the city center than traditional neighborhoods. Although the new urban growth patterns in Mexico might visually resemble urban sprawl in the United States, they differ on several important dimensions and therefore will not have the same impacts on environmental and transportation efficiency.

On Lost Rivers and Other Man-Altered Landscapes

The problem of imaging ecological harm is not getting any easier. Artists who have taken a documentary approach now seem almost quaint in their investments. Painters from the nineteenth-century Hudson River School, for example, gave audiences composite scenes of a romantic, indigenous wilderness on the cusp of industrial expansion. A hundred years later, in distilled photographs of western mountain ranges, lakes, and dunes, Ansel Adams expunged the human presence altogether, instead sacralizing nature. These ways of seeing are tricky in the face of contemporary environmental problems, largely because they register and reinforce certain binaries--nature/culture, city/country, human/nonhuman that routinely collapse under the operations of advanced capitalism. How then to picture the damage wreaked by these operations? And how to picture it in ways that are sensitive to the enduring appeal of that which we call natural? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The landscape aesthetics of Alejandro Cartagena offer one possibility. Dominican-born Cartagena spent two years photographing the desiccation of streams and rivers in and around the metropolitan area of Monterrey, Mexico. Entitled Lost Rivers (2007 08), the resulting series makes up part of Cartagena's larger project on Mexican real estate development, which tackles the complexities of tract housing, home ownership, and inner-city decay. Lost Rivers is an integrated feature of Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect (2006 09), a lush and moving testimony of the toll taken on ecosystems enmeshed in the region's rapid growth. Crucially, Cartagena's art also represents a rediscovery of imagemakers featured in the watershed exhibit Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Curated in 1975 by William Jenkins at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and re-launched in 2009 for an international tour, the exhibit featured work by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, and six others, and marked a radical turning point in picturing the American landscape. The New Topographers eschewed idealized treatments of nature by showing, with an understated irony, its presence as a constitutive part of the built environment. These sharply focused photographs look familiar elements of the landscape tradition trees, mountains, deserts, waterways--and placed them in matter-of-fact conversation with the subdivisions, roadsides, industrial parks, and parking lots that stood by and around them. (1) More central to Cartagena's practice, however, is the extent to which their man-altered landscapes resonate with the current experience and effects of Monterrey's sprawl and Latin American suburbanization more broadly. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This past summer, I had the opportunity to interview the photographer about these and related concerns. Our lengthy email exchange revealed Lost Rivers as an exploration of the shifting and layered dimensions of all environments under strain. Cartagena gives us a potent example of what cultural theorist Ursula Heise provocatively calls eco-cosmopolitanism, an environmental imagination that, while responsible to the local, refuses to stay in and speak from one particular place. (2) LISA UDDIN: I want to begin from a place of urgency. I've been digesting the daily stream of images coming in from the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, mostly from a popular photo blog called The Big Picture. (3) Today's scenes, for example, include an aerial shot of an oil slick moving toward an umbrella-lined beach, a wide-angled image of pooling oil along coastal marshlands, and several close-ups of coated pelicans, turtles, and crabs struggling at the shoreline. I find it difficult to breathe when I look at these pictures, and they resonate with me long after I stop looking. I am wondering if and how they are affecting you. ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA: So many things come to mind when looking at those images: greed, helplessness, anger, tragedy, disgrace. …

Abstract PR-8: Gene-environment interactions between JAZF1 and occupational and neighborhood lead exposure in African American prostate cancer cases

Abstract African American men have the highest incidence of prostate cancer in the world and have substantially higher rates of prostate cancer when compared to white men in the U.S. The cause(s) for this race disparity remains elusive. A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs10486567, in intron 2 of juxtaposed with another zinc finger protein 1 (JAZF1) has been associated with increased risk of prostate cancer in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and may be key to uncovering reasons for disparities in the disease. JAZF1 is a cysteine-hystidine structured zinc finger protein, a type of protein that has been shown to interact with lead in vitro. Lead is recognized as a probable carcinogen in humans and African American men who are residentially segregated to industrialized urban environments in the U.S. have higher blood lead levels on average compared to white men. In a case-only study of 228 African American men with prostate cancer diagnosed at a large health system in the Detroit Metropolitan area, we assessed gene-environment interactions (GxE) between rs10486567 (CC vs. CT/TT genotype) and two sources of lead exposure. Lifetime occupational lead exposure was determined through industrial hygiene review of extensive face-to-face interviews. Neighborhood lead exposure, defined as the median proportion of census tract housing built before 1950 (≥ 47% vs. <47%), was derived from subjects address at time of diagnosis. Generalized estimating equation (GEE) modeling was used for analyses that included nested census data. In younger African American cases (<62 years of age), we found a significant gene-environment interaction between rs10486567 CC carriers and high occupational-respiratory lead exposure when compared to those with no respiratory lead exposure (OR 2.68, CI 1.05-6.88, p=.04). A significant GxE interaction was also observed between CC carriers and residence in a neighborhood with a large proportion of older housing in all cases and younger cases (all OR 1.92, CI 1.12-3.29, p=.017, younger OR 2.64, CI 1.21-5.73, p=.014, older OR 1.64, CI 0.73-3.70, p=.23). The interaction between rs10486567 and housing remained significant even after adjustment for occupational lead exposure. Combining lead exposure from occupation and neighborhood housing into a four category index showed even stronger interactions between the polymorphism and the highest lead exposed group compared to the lowest exposure group (all OR 3.13, CI 1.22-7.99, p=.017). These findings indicate that lead may be an important risk factor for prostate cancer in carriers of the rs10486567 CC genotype. Future studies of race disparities in prostate cancer should further assess interactions between lead and JAZF1 and lead and other zinc containing proteins. Focusing on genes and polymorphisms identified in GWAS studies might help to identify environmental risk factors for prostate cancer. Citation Information: Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2010;19(10 Suppl):PR-8.

HIV Infection and Gut Mucosal Immune Function: Updates on Pathogenesis with Implications for Management and Intervention

HIV is primarily a sexually transmitted infection. However, given that the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) houses most of the body’s lymphocytes, including activated memory CD4+ T cells that are preferential targets for HIV, recent research has focused on the role of the GIT in transmission and pathogenesis. In health, the GIT maintains a balance between immune tolerance and rapid responsiveness. A complex network of innate and adaptive responses maintains this balance, which is severely perturbed in HIV infection. Recent studies have focused on mechanisms of GIT CD4+ T-cell depletion and epithelial disruption in HIV infection, the role of inflammation in accelerating viral dissemination, the kinetics of the adaptive response following transmission, and the extent of T-cell reconstitution following antiretroviral therapy. This review summarizes the results of recent investigations that may have important implications for the development of vaccines, microbicides, and therapeutic interventions for HIV and other mucosal pathogens.

Reshaping Economic Geography: The World Development Report 2009

Something ominous began to happen in 2006. The rate of foreclosures in low-income areas of older US cities began to increase. Officialdom and the media took very little notice because, as had happened many years before in the early stages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the communities affected were low-income, mainly African-American or immigrant (Hispanics), in cities like Cleveland and Detroit that were in any case already blighted and deteriorated. It was only in mid-2007, when the foreclosure wave had spread to white middle class areas as well as to the US South (Florida in particular) and Southwest (California), where new housing tract developments, often in peripheral areas, were becoming vulnerable, that officialdom started to take notice and the mainstream press began to comment. By the end of that year, nearly 2 million people had lost their homes and estimates began to emerge that another 4 or perhaps 6 million more might be lost before it was all over. By the autumn of 2008, the phenomenon of the ‘sub-prime mortgage crisis’ had led to the demise of all the major Wall Street Investment Banks, either through change of status or through forced mergers, and the outright bankruptcy of Lehman that triggered a worldwide collapse of confidence in financial institutions. The contagion then spread outwards from banking to the major holders of mortgage debt (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) along with insurance giants like AIG, before hitting the rest of the economy bigtime towards the end of 2008. By early 2009 the export-led industrialization model that had generated such spectacular growth in East and Southeast Asia was contracting at an alarming rate; at the same time, many icons of American capitalism, such as General Motors, were moving closer to bankruptcy.

Should We Ban or Welcome 'Spec' Home Buyers?

This paper begins by recounting the extent to which speculating buyers contributed more than proportionately to housing price volatility and the rate of mortgage foreclosure. The second section turns to the way spec buyers deceived mortgage lenders by committing occupancy fraud, claiming falsely that they were buying as owner occupants so they could benefit from more favorable mortgage rates and terms. The third section starts by describing the mischief spec buyers caused home builders and condo developers by signaling phantom housing demand, and degrading ‘for sale’ housing tracts and condo developments by leaving newly bought homes vacant or filling them with short term rentals. The fourth section explores the rationale for a government imposed ban on home flipping. This would be a publicly imposed constraint on alienability.

The politics of the possible: Making urban life in Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh, ‘re‐entering’ urban history as it did just some three decades ago becomes an important arena in which to focus on the intensifying contestation of rights, practices and development trajectories related to city making. Far from being comprehensively marginalized by emerging urban economies, residents with limited economic means, through their configurations of space, social relations and infrastructure continuously attempt to construct the conditions that enable the city to act as a flexible resource for the viable organization of their everyday lives. These issues are taken up in an analysis of some of the ways in which residents of a large low income housing tract, popularly dubbed ‘Building’, in the Bassac River neighbourhood collaborate to maximize their access to resources and opportunity.

A Watershed‐Based Approach to Environmental Education Integrating Ecology, Hydrology, and Geochemistry

Watersheds provide an excellent focus for environmental education because they are the basic unit where hydrological and biogeochemical cycles can best be studied (Likens and Borman 1995). Examples of environmental education at the watershed level at other institutions include work within the Burd Run (Woltemade and Blewett 2002), Bushkill (Brandes and Germanoski 2001), and French Creek Watersheds (O’Brien et al. 2002) where case studies, field exercises, and laboratory analyses have been utilized. Several recent studies have also provided examples of interdisciplinary classes and field exercises for adaptation by campuses containing waterways and wetlands (Heins and Walker 1998, Panno et al. 1998, Woltemade and Blewett 2002). All of these projects have guided the development of the goals and objectives for our efforts. The Binghamton University (BU) campus is located within a small watershed that contains forest covered areas with ponds and wetlands embedded within an urban landscape, suburban housing tracts along a straightened river corridor, and a university campus with high human density and a large percentage of paved surfaces. These differences in land uses influence water flow, ecosystem dynamics, and water quality, all ideal topics for study from a multidisciplinary perspective. While we had begun hydrological monitoring within this watershed to fulfill needs within our Environmental Geology curriculum previously (Salvage et al. 2003), there were opportunities for study in the Fuller Hollow Creek Watershed (FHCW) from a broader perspective. This paper outlines the development of a broad watershed-based education approach at BU recently funded by the National Science Foundation Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (NSF CCLI) Program. One objective for the project was to integrate ecology with hydrology and geochemistry in order to initiate study of the FHCW from a process-oriented multidisciplinary approach. Our second objective involved use of pollution as a unifying theme for understanding biogeochemical cycles within a mixed land use watershed on a university campus. Our third objective involved promoting synergy of research and education opportunities for all students irrespective of background or discipline. Keys to meeting the project objectives were 1) integration of physical, chemical and biological perspectives from an ecologist (Zhu), hydrologist (Salvage) and geochemist (Graney), 2) installation and use of equipment to monitor biogeochemical processes at three sites with differing land use within the watershed, 3) development of crossdisciplinary exercises to link concepts within three courses in three different disciplines: Hydrology (Environmental Studies, ENVI 342), Environmental Measurements (Geology, GEOL 465), and Ecosystem Ecology (Biology, BIOL 455), 4) developing a plan for evaluation and revision of the field exercises, 5) involving students, including future K-12 science teachers, in all stages of the project, 6) encouraging undergraduate participation in research, and 7) ensuring long-term data collection and archiving for future use and dissemination. We believe that cross-linking between hydrology, 22

Performance of a Zero-Energy House

A comparative study is reported to measure the actual performance of a zero-energy house (ZEH) of typical tract design. Ideally, a ZEH produces as much energy as it consumes in a year’s time. Two identically sized tract houses (149.6m2(1610ft2)) were constructed side by side in southwest Las Vegas, NV. One house is used as a base line (standard comparison) house and was built using conventional construction techniques. The other house, the ZEH, employs many energy saving features, solar power generation, and supplemental solar water heating. Both houses have been equipped with a network of sensors that measure virtually every aspect of energy usage in each home. Initially, both houses have been utilized as model homes in a tract housing development, so it was reasonable to believe that both experienced similar and consistent usage. Performance data are logged and are posted on the web. This paper describes the differences in construction details between the two houses. Results of monitoring are presented that contrast the performance of the two houses.