Can Land Banks Help Solve Detroit’s Foreclosure Woes?

Stephan:  More on the Shrinking Cities Trend.

Over at WalletPop, they’ve looked closer into a big recent auction of foreclosed properties in Detroit, and it’s an even bleaker situation than first reported. The Wayne County auction of some 9,000 repossessed properties last week resulted in more than 80 percent of them failing to draw a single bid. And that’s even with the minimum bid starting at just $500. The fact that Rust Belt cities such as Detroit and Cleveland are plagued with foreclosed properties isn’t a new development. But what happened at that Detroit auction gives a glimpse into how acute the problem is. WalletPop explains: The auction didn’t go smoothly, however. Out-of-town speculators cherry-picked prime properties in areas such as the Boston-Edison district, while locals who showed up too late for registration weren’t permitted to take part. That’s the scandal. One of the reasons distressed communities have begun fighting for tools such as land banks - public enterprises that allow a community to quickly acquire abandoned and foreclosed properties, so they can be cleaned up and put to use – is to prevent speculators from playing games with foreclosed properties, while local officials watch helplessly. But as we’ve […]

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Hope, Denial and The Great Schism

Stephan: 

Americans to an increasing degree are becoming more conservative and, as I wrote the other day, based on the Pew Research study, more likely to be climate deniers. I find this hard to accept, but the data demands I do so. You will find some more of it in today’s SR edition. It is like watching a slow motion train wreck. In a thousand passive ways, much of the Middle Class is participating in the processes of its own destruction. Healthcare reform has made this trend starkly obvious. The credit card story today is a variant in miniature. For the second time in my life — the first being the end of the Soviet Union which I was then regularly working in — I am watching a large portion of a society choose dismantlement. It was exciting in a positive way the first time; this time it is tragic and sad. I think these trends in the U.S., and reflected elsewhere as well, arise from fear. Fear of loss. Fear of change. Fear in our unconscious as we precognize the coming events of climate change. It engenders cultural rigidity, theological dogmatism, […]

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How to Teach a Man to Talk Like a Woman

Stephan:  The talk 'Acoustic changes associated with transgender speech therapy: A case study' (1aSC6) by James Dembowski is on Monday, October 26 See: http://asa.aip.org/web2/asa/abstracts/search.oct09/asa39.html

How does the voice of a woman differ from the voice of man? You might think that pitch is the big difference, but according to speech pathologist James Dembowski, you would be wrong. And he should know — for the last year, he has been working with a middle-aged transgendered woman born as a boy, teaching ‘Ms. J’ to use her male vocal anatomy to speak in a womanly way. ‘She did not want a high-pitched voice or some kind of ditzy-sounding voice,’ says Dembowski, who will be presenting his work at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) next week in San Antonio, TX. ‘As a successful academic in a local university, she posed an interesting challenge. She wanted to sound feminine but not stereotypical.’ When boys reach puberty, rising levels of testosterone change the anatomy of their vocal cords, causing the voice to crack and drop. Older female-to-male transgendered individuals taking hormone supplements experience similar changes. But when a man decides to become a woman, his vocal anatomy stays fixed and old speech habits have to be unlearned. It’s true that men and women do tend to speak at different pitches — men […]

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Conservatives Maintain Edge as Top Ideological Group

Stephan:  Survey Methods: The 2009 political ideology results reported here are based on 16 aggregated Gallup surveys conducted from January to September 2009. For results based on the total sample of 16,321 national adults, aged 18 and older, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point. Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).

PRINCETON, NJ — Conservatives continue to outnumber moderates and liberals in the American populace in 2009, confirming a finding that Gallup first noted in June. Forty percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 20% as liberal. This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group. Political Ideology: Annual Trends, 1992-2009 ‘Changes among political independents appear to be the main reason the percentage of conservatives has increased nationally over the past year: the 35% of independents describing their views as conservative in 2009 is up from 29% in 2008.’ The 2009 data are based on 16 separate Gallup surveys conducted from January through September, encompassing more than 5,000 national adults per quarter. Conservatives have been the dominant ideological group each quarter, with between 39% and 41% of Americans identifying themselves as either ‘very conservative’ or ‘conservative.’ Between 35% and 37% of Americans call themselves ‘moderate,’ while the percentage calling themselves ‘very liberal’ or ‘liberal’ has consistently registered between 20% and 21% — making liberals the smallest of the three groups. Independents Inch to the Right Changes […]

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Got Perfect Credit? You Could Be Charged For It!

Stephan:  Yet another way of grinding the middle class.

Loraine Mullen-Kress carries a Bank of America credit card and religiously pays off her balance. ‘Flawless credit,’ she boasted. Yet now, her good credit habits could cost her. Earlier this month Bank of America started notifying customers like Mullen-Kress that they will be charged a new annual fee of $29 to $99. ‘There is a big segment of their population that they will have never made money on, which is people who pay their bills on time every month,’ said Ben Woolsey, Director of Consumer Research at CreditCards.com. Bank of America said in a statement: ‘At this point we’re testing the fee on a very small number of accounts and haven’t made any final decisions.’ Citigroup is also trying out an annual fee with some card holders, and analysts expect more banks to follow their lead. The banks are starting to charge fees to reliable customers in response to a slew of new credit card industry regulations that will limit when banks can hike interest rates. Cardholders who get a new annual fee notice in the mail will be in a no-win situation. ‘They can either pay that fee or they can close the […]

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