Monthly Archives: March 2009

29. Reinventing America’s Cities The Time Is Now –

Reinventing America’s Cities – The Time Is Now – NYTimes.com. but this is not what a city should look like. GarenWorld would approach this differently, keeping function but adding aesthetic. Think of Austin, Texas. This is the LA river.

28. Reinventing America’s Cities – The Time Is Now

Reinventing America’s Cities: The Time Is Now By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF via Reinventing America’s Cities – The Time Is Now – NYTimes.com. Published: March 25, 2009 THE country has fallen on hard times, but those of us who love cities know we have been living in the dark ages for a while now. We know that turning

27. Watsonville plan

Over the weekend Bill Leland and I met and came up with a proposal we think makes sense and can be done. The idea is to bring together foreclosed houses, people who need housing, and a support network based on Americore workers. Banks are concerned that foreclosed houses are a likely candidate for deterioration through

26. Mortgage Defaults, Delinquencies Rise

y JAMES R. HAGERTY Defaults on home mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration in February increased from a year earlier. A spokesman for the FHA said 7.5% of FHA loans were “seriously delinquent” at the end of February, up from 6.2% a year earlier. Seriously delinquent includes loans that are 90 days or more overdue,

25. In Homeowners’ Latest Woe

On our housing proposal City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal —

24. Greider on Bill Moyers

On the economy we had the rules and regulations, the agencies created some 80 years ago and afterwards to prevent this sort of catastrophe. And these same political players, Republicans and Democrats holding hands, stripped them away, eviscerated them. The same agencies these reformers want to put in power to prevent this from happening again.

23. The Quiet Coup – The Atlantic May 2009

The Quiet Coup – The Atlantic May 2009 . must read.

22. No more derivatives, back to simplebanking.

If we take Krugman, As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization

21. Politics

so we have the usual democrats looking for social good republicans looking for private good but Obama is wanting social good – the budget – and private good, protecting the banks. To paraphrase we can’t have both  butter and beef. The democratic agenda comes undone if the republicans let the banks become the dominant force

20. Notes march 25

This must be one of the most complex periods in lived american history. Everything seems at play. Obama Told Us To Speak Out, But Is He Listening? The president is getting what he asked for, but perhaps not what he had in mind. During the campaign, Barack Obama beckoned Americans to put aside their cynicism