The Master Plan developed for West Marin in 1964 promised a different future for the region. It included coastal resorts, airstrips, four-lane highways, marinas, and a lot more people. In 1971, conservationists bought tracts of land along Bolinas and Tomales Bay, and organized citizens were able to reject the Plan. It was put to rest once and for all when, in 1973, the West Marin Board of Supervisors limited housing development to one house per 60 acres.

And so, if you visit West Marin today, it’s as tranquil and untouched as it’s ever been. To ensure that it stays this way, the residents of West Marin have taken some very unique and pro-active steps.

EAC

Formed in 1971 by the residents of thirteen unincorporated West Marin communities, the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin is the strongest, and sometimes only, advocate for environmental and wildlife issues. Because there is no local government, the EAC is often the only entity speaking on behalf of West Marin’s environment and natural resources before County, State, and Federal government organizations.

The purpose of the West Marin EAC is to ensure “the protection and appreciation of West Marin’s natural environment and rural character. EAC works for clean air, pure waters, healthy ecosystems, a diverse and thriving native flora and fauna, and the preservation of a rural, community spirit.”

Some of the EAC’s more notable achievements include the banning, in 2001, of all jet-ski activity on Tomales Bay. This makes Tomales Bay, at 948 square nautical miles, the largest jet-ski free area in the country. In 1998, the EAC produced “Madre Terra Solo Hay Una”, the first Hispanic environmental education video ever in the United States.

One of it’s more impressive stand-offs was against the Pritzker family of Chicago, who owns the Hyatt hotel chain. In 2003, the family purchased 850 acres of land, on which they intended to build homes, stables, and guest houses that would have totaled over 52,000 square feet of development. While some counties and cities would welcome this kind of development (and addition to their tax base), the EAC’s primary concern was with the potential agricultural repercussions.

Luxury estates drive up land prices, making them unaffordable for working ranchers to purchase. And of course, where one goes, others will follow, which could have potentially turned the area into a mini-resort, steering it away from it’s current agricultural base.

Determined to ensure that this didn’t happen, the EAC negotiated with the family, convincing them to reduce the size of their planned build. The EAC also required the residential homes to meet strict energy and green building standards.

Countywide Plan

First developed and approved in 1994, this plan has provided years of public policy direction regarding land use, and environmental protection. The Countywide Plan outlines Marin County’s policies on natural resources, agriculture, housing, and transportation. Any commercial or residential development that occurs in Marin County must comply with the policies in the Countywide Plan.

The plan was initially developed by four Working Groups that addressed sustainability, natural systems, built environment and the economy, equity, and culture. These groups created sustainability policies that were used as guidelines for the County Plan.

The plan divides Marin County into three corridors: the Coastal Recreational, the Inland Rural, and the City-Centered Corridors. The corridors were created as a means of controlling where and how land is developed, keeping the majority of the development focused in the City-Centered Corridor.

West Marin Exchange

The residents of West Marin can also utilize something called the “West Marin Exchange”. It’s an internet-based database where residents can buy, sell, and trade unwanted items, rather than throwing them out.

Green Business Program

Formed in 1996, the Green Business Program is a partnership between the environmental and business communities. Through this program, businesses are taught how to comply with “Green Business Standards” for minimizing waste products, conserving resources, and preventing pollution. Local governments in the Bay Area collaborated with the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the California EPA Department of Toxic Substance Control, and the business community to form the rules and regulations that make up the program.

Though the process is voluntary, over 300 businesses to date have been certified.
Becoming certified means that a business complies with environmental regulations, and take a proactive approach to prevent pollution and preserving natural resources.

With these, and other programs, in place, West Marin has maintained it’s pristine, beautiful land, while simultaneously welcoming residential and commercial development. The balance they have achieved sets an exemplary example for communities everywhere.

Source

The City of LA loves bicyclists, officially, and tries to do what it can for them. But the great congested mass of benzene-addled motorheads does not. And the infrastructural legacy that seven decades of pandering to the personal automobile at all costs has left most of the city grimly cold to human life in general, and to bicyclists in particular.


It is stunning, really, that in a city that’s mostly flat, warm, and dry, so few people ride bicycles at all, whether for utility or pleasure. There are fifteen million plus people in LA; there are maybe 1/20th that number in cold, rainy, hilly San Francisco.

Yet there are bicycles around you almost anywhere in SF, whereas it’s unusual to see one anywhere in most parts of LA, except as a prop. Ditto Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York—and let’s not even bring up Amsterdam or Tokyo, all cold, wet burgs half the time that are buzzing with bikes.

What is it that makes LA a strong contender for the label of the World’s Least Bicycle-Friendly City?

Sprawl is a good place to start, especially in the city that defined the term. Distances in Los Angeles are vast in the conurbation Dorothy Parker once described as “seventy suburbs in search of a city.” Commutes of ten to twenty miles are not uncommon, and some folks drive in to work from distant corners of adjacent counties, sitting in their cars for one to two hours each way each day.

That this is a collective madness that generates individual psychopathy is undeniable; that the galactic scatter of workplace and domicile mitigates against bicycle commuting for many people is self-evident.

The concentration of retail and services into gigantic malls, and concomitant decimation of neighborhood commerce (literally illegal in most parts of the city) makes it difficult to bike or stroll to a nearby bakery, greengrocer, shoemaker, hardware store, or what have you for a simple purchase, because such places simply do not exist except in the luckier, historic districts.

Since each trip involves an expedition, the tendency is to bunch them together so that one braves the intimidating expanses of mall parking as infrequently as possible, loading up the car to the brim with whatever goods one feels compelled to buy that week. Mall culture and bulk buying are antithetical to bicycling, not to mention to civility itself.

This exaggerated dependence on the motorcar coerces the denizens of this automotive dystopia into spending endless hours staring at the bumper ahead of them on freeways, streets, and parking lots, leading the citizenry to clamor for -— you guessed it! -— more freeways, streets, and parking lots.

For which you tear down yet more local stores and cozy neighborhoods, only to replace them with more malls and bedroom communities even farther apart from each other and the central city, thereby perpetuating the very syndrome one thought to escape thereby, in a slow but inexorable feedback loop.

The result is wide, eternally crowded asphalt planes that don’t even deserve the name of “streets,” fourteen lanes filled with cars from curb to curb and horizon to horizon, with nothing to look at but the cinderblock soundwalls demarcating malls, industrial parks, and the occasional cloistered pink stucco ghetto.

It creates a place that no one wants to be in, especially not on a bicycle.

The motorist’s salvation was to be the freeway, which simply replicated the conditions of the streets with added horrors, such as the practice of lowering the road into a trench from which escape is possible only at long intervals of sometimes several miles between off-ramps.

The solution, for many drivers, is to cut through residential streets. So many drivers have chanced upon this obscure but clever idea that now little narrow lanes have one or two dozen cars per block, squeezing past each other with engines roaring in opposite directions, chirping their tires as they blast away from the stop signs, and yelling the LA motor-moron’s slogan, “get off the road!,” to any bicyclists they may have to pass.

And pass and pass and pass. It so happens that one of those hapless roads is Hauser Boulevard, which comprises the first half of my bike ride to the office every morning. Let me recount an all-too-typical incident of recent date:

I was pedaling on to work one morning, going up Hauser as usual. About the middle of one block a gigantic SUV — an Escalade — swung past with the usual flurry of rasping motor sounds and tire hisses. The tires alone seemed nearly as big as my wife’s Mini Cooper. He bounded around a slower car ahead of him too, and crowded up on the next one , since there was opposing traffic and the road is narrow, as are most residential streets.

A block or so later I caught up with him at the light, waiting behind a short row of his fellows. I went past, the light turned green, we all started up again. A half a block later, he passed me again. A block and a half later, I caught up to him again, and passed him again.

This went on for nearly three miles. Finally we came to Santa Monica Boulevard. I pulled up on his left this time and motioned for him to lower the window.

Of course he was probably expecting a lecture from a self-righteous bicycle radical (which I am). Instead I just told him his right brake light was out, and that he might get a ticket for that. He thanked me and turned; I went on.

Maybe, just maybe, he’ll reflect on how much he was spending in gas and nerves to go uphill at exactly the average speed of a greybeard on a bicycle. We can only hope.

At least he didn’t yell at me. Some do. Besides the usual “Get off the road!” mantra, I’ve had drivers inform me that I wasn’t a car, something I thought was pretty obvious. The implication is that I shouldn’t be on the road. So one fellow bitterly informed me one rainy night on Van Ness Avenue. I didn’t bother to argue with him. I just pulled on ahead in the space between the cars and the curb. The cars that were actually blocking his way. I was a mile closer to home before he got to the end of the block. So maybe he was jealous of my freedom.

That both the Universal Vehicle Code and the California Vehicle Code classify bicycles as vehicles and require that one operate them only on the roads is something that these boneheads shouldn’t be ignorant of, considering that they have to pass a test of their knowledge of those very codes to get their licenses. But immuring oneself in a car nurtures ignorance, and here, at Ground Zero of Autogeddon, ignorance is seen as, if not bliss, at least the comfort of the falsely self-righteous.

Plus, if tedious distances and Neanderthal drivers weren’t enough, there’s Proposition 13. Sold to the public as a way to save grandma from being taxed out of her cottage, what it really did was insulate anyone who held onto property past a certain date from paying any reasonable share of property tax. Well, grandma died, and anyway the average homeowner in LA moves every seven years, so all the small property owners were paying high taxes again fairly soon. But the Big Corporations, who hold vast tracts of land for decades, sometimes centuries, well, they’re holding onto their cash. This first great success of the starve-the-beast movement gutted California’s budget, and one consequence of that was that streets and highways that used to rival Switzerland’s now more closely resemble the shattered lanes of particularly destitute Third World countries.

Ripples, cracks, and bumps—why, you hardly even notice them! But potholes the size of real cooking pots do get your attention. Solidified asphalt washboard with repeated three to six-inch heaves that convert your bike from a thoroughbred stallion to a spastic camel as you bounce down the space between the speeding cement truck and the trash-filled gutter are hard not to notice.

Irregular longitudinal trenches up to four inches deep and wide enough to swallow a motorcycle tire, let alone a bicycle’s, occasionally inspire concern. Not to mention the surprisingly unrare blocks of concrete left in the street for weeks at a time—chunks of curb broken off in violent accidents are common, as well as fistfuls of macadam torn up by the relentless pounding of heavy trucks. Never mind the sheets of plywood, constellations of broken glass, and half-mashed shopping carts…

And dead rats. Lots of those in Hollywood, for some reason.

Fourth Street, near where I live, is a designated bicycle route. Halfway down one mansion-bordered declivity is a bad patch job where a one-by-four foot rectangle of road drops four inches down, leaving edges of jagged concrete.

The bike lanes on the eastern stretch of Sunset Boulevard place you about eighteen inches from car doors—if they’re small cars. Of course the SUV-stretch pickup with the dual rears sprawls well beyond the painted line designating your space, forcing you out into the path of stoned gangbangers, imbecilic teenagers, hemmorhoidal lawyers snarling into cell phones as they swerve their Beemers through traffic, and befuddled immigrants who took their first driving lessons at age seventy-five.

You’ve really got to love bicycling to ride in LA.

It’s a tribute to the World’s Most Efficient Machine that some of us do.

More and more each day; I see them every morning, every night, and unlike the Spandex Superheroes who attack the canyons Sunday mornings, they wave back when you say hello. We’ve even got Critical Mass, and when a phalanx of bicyclists occupies a whole block of La Brea Avenue, the diners at the sidewalk tables look up, shocked by the sudden tranquility—and everyone smiles.

So there’s hope, even here. But we’re still pioneers against our will. All we want to do is ride our bikes and create a little peace in a weary world. LA makes it difficult. But still we ride.

See more writing from Richard at EBykr

The city of Portland, Oregon has had a long history of pouring raw sewage into the Williamette River that continues to this day. Once considered dead in the 1960s, the river is now slowly recovering with the assistance of local citizens.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has fined the city of Portland $449,800 for numerous raw sewage overflows into the Willamette River and several streams that flow into the Willamette.
A total of 67 discharges over a period of about four and a half years occurred from the city’s sewage collection system at multiple locations throughout Portland. Discharges also were reported to the Columbia River and Columbia Slough. The 67 discharges totaled about 1,875,000 gallons of sewage.
Portland Business Journal Nov 21 2005

Although the Clean Water Act was passed over 30 years ago to protect and restore water quality, approximately 40 percent of the nation’s assessed waters are unsafe for fish, wildlife, and people. In some areas the problems are more widespread: nearly 80 percent of Oregon’s waters are too warm for salmon; 97 percent of the Great Lakes shorelines are impaired by chemicals. These unsafe pollution levels reflect harmful land practices, excessive water withdrawals, pollution from industries and cities, air deposition of chemicals, and waste disposal.Northwest Environmental Advocates

There is a plaque installed by the Portland Development Commission overlooking the Willamette River near Portland’s RiverPlace Marina that states that the Willamette was made clean for swimming in 1972. It is more than ironic that just below this plaque is a “Combined Sewer Overflow” or CSO. The lingo masks the fact: this is a pipe from which raw sewage, sometimes mixed with storm water, flows into the Willamette River.

There’s a lot of raw sewage, human excrement, industrial wastes, condoms, syringes, tampons, toilet paper and the toxic pollution from city streets- in our local rivers. The City of Portland discharges completely untreated sewage from over 56 pipes and concrete bunkers into the Willamette River and the Columbia Slough.

The end result is that, contrary to the statement on the plaque, the Willamette never was made fit for swimming. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) data shows that the lower Willamette sometimes is, and sometimes isn’t, safe. DEQ calls this “partially supported” for water contact. What all of this really means is that you’ll never knows which days are safe and which aren’t. (Some days, it is a lot less safe than others!)

The fact is that river users are not told that these pipes are dumping raw sewage into the rivers and that they should be careful. Careful not to step on the syringes, careful not to touch the water, careful not to put hands to mouth after touching the water. And there’s an awful lot of water contact that goes on even if you aren’t swimming, wading or water skiing.
Freshwater News, May 1991 By Nina Bell

When it passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, Congress created a regulatory program to clean up and protect water quality. The law requires that where too much pollution is entering a stream, all sources must restrict their contribution of pollution and habitat damage to the extent necessary to meet water quality standards.
Northwest Environmental Advocates

In 1985, the Willamette/Slough system contained 56 pipes and concrete bunkers discharging raw sewage, industrial wastes, and toxic pollutants from city streets, into the urban waterways. Despite complaints from citizens, in 1990 the Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) still poured billions of gallons of rainwater runoff and sewage annually into the Willamette River and the Columbia Slough.
source

Since last June there have been three times when filthy and stinking SEWER WATER has backed up into basements of residents. . . In September we suffered 6 inches of foul stinking filthy sewer water covering our entire basement floor. Petitions were signed by more than 600 people urging the City to DO something — they did nothing!! Then Jan 22nd, just last month, we this time had 12 inches of the same filth in our basement. . . . NOW, WE DEMAND THAT SOMETHING BE DONE ABOUT IT!!
Loren C. Mabee, north Portland resident, 1970 source

IT’S THE OLD chicken-and-egg question: Are people fat because they come to Las Vegas, or do they come to Vegas because they’re fat? The other conundrum that plagues me in Sin City: Why am I here? More precisely, why am I — who does not like to drink Bud or eat steak; watch TV or vaudeville; marry, divorce or pick up hookers; work on the perfect sunburn; or throw money into a hole, never to be retrieved — here?

watch a slideshow of images (in a new window)

To answer the first engima, I approached the Vegas altar: the Buffet. Eschewing the 99-cent shrimp cocktail, I “splurged” an unlucky $13 on the stylish luncheon at the new Bellagio hotel. Its supermarket of dishes could easily give an eater an anxiety attack and put her in a diabetic coma. Bowls of mixed chocolates and baskets of focaccia, cow and pig killed and cured two dozen ways, seven varieties of seafood salad, five kinds of pickle and everything else edible, short of a partridge in a pear tree.

It was clear that people were fat here because they ate too much chicken *and* eggs. The second engima didn’t surrender an answer so easily, so I set out on the town to discover why Vegas had lured me here.

The tourist’s Vegas boils down to the Strip, four miles of casinos and their bewildering mazes of hotel towers, restaurants, theaters, shops, rides and chapels. At north end is the “Fremont Street Experience”. This is casino skid row, the white-trash roots of modern Vegas. These joints use gimmicks like free popcorn and champagne cocktails (i.e., wine coolers) to get cheapskates to part with a few nickels.

From Rome to Rio, ancient Egypt to medieval England, every Strip hotel has a theme that recurs like a nightmare. The rooms at the Luxor (itself a glass pyramid) feature obelisk-shaped shampoo bottles and papyrus-column wardrobes. Treasure Island stages a live pirate battle in its Buccaneer Bay. Excalibur’s moving walkway says, “Keep to the right in case a knight comes by to rescue a damsel in distress!” Paris!, the newest city on the block, has a rather large Eiffel Tower out front. You get it.

The constant in the Vegas equation? The soothing hum of slot machines being played en masse. From the second you step off the plane, it summons you leave time and join the trance. The lights are dim; there are no windows. Slot players are tao masters of ash. They smoke without the cigarette ever leaving their mouth. (What’s not often heard is the payoff, a lovely tambourine of quarters tapping tray. )

Back in daylight, the Strip offers the best free show in town. Its soundtrack is eighties music cranked from casinos. Its sidewalks are a grotesque spectacle of rouge and hair dye, varicose and celluose. Tons of pasty flesh, splotched desert red and clad in neon, clump up at the Strip’s eternal stoplights. Gals and guys, often Latino immigrants desperate for work, accost them with flyers for stripper studs and girls girls girls.

Wide roads, long lights, big people — everything on the Strip is exponentially larger than in the normal world. At last count, the town boasted nine out of the world’s ten largest hotels; its total number of rooms recently topped 100,000.

Some 50,000 people move to Vegas a year. Still, ask locals what’s so great about the place and they’ll answer the weather. That’s like saying a blind date has a nice personality. An ex-co-worker living here gave me a tour of strip malls and subdivisions. “There is no street for window shopping,” she said darkly. She left me her bicycle to explore Vegas further, if I didn’t believe her.

We visited another friend’s ‘hood, a quiet version of Hell involving communism and Martha Stuart. She showed off her lawn, explaining the laborious process of creating green squares in a wasteland. The driest spot on the continent, Las Vegas uses more water than any other place in America — some 300 gallons per person per day!

During my visit, Park Place announced plans to acquire Caesar’s World for $3 billion in cash. AA and the FBI recently held conferences here. The area’s first white settlers were Mormons.

But no one else laughed. This is the Vegas terror: no sense of the irony in this Grimm fairy tale, set in the desert; no sense of anything but what’s designed to charm the eye. People buy “Rehab is for Quitters” t-shirts and ashtrays for Pat’s Butts — and mean it.

Vegas is such an easy target that I got tired of picking on it. Why was I here? Maybe to see that Sin City could bring out my worst vices, too — judgmentalism and hypocracy. Maybe to strip away my cynicism long enough to see the beauty in the beast.

At sunset, just before the night neon takes over the sky, Vegas is gentle. Mirrored casinos catch gold clouds in their facades. Everyone holds hands and gazes at the moon, rising above the Eiffel Tower.

I peddle into the night, crickets chirping and warm wind on my face. Neon jewels — the Flamingo’s pink, feathered lotus, the Stardust’s retro diamonds — sparkle against black velvet sky. It’s a new night, a fresh chance to win big. For a moment, I’m not smiling at them, I’m smiling with them.

By April Thompson.

View images for this story as a slideshow.

Now this same land is being taken away by developers with the cooperation of local and state governments.

What’s being lost is not just land or money: It’s community. Five, six, even eight generations of the same families have lived continuously in these coastal communities. The neighborhoods they form are tight-knit, safe, and supportive – a rarity in modern American life.

Generations without wills or the need for them

Every state in the US requires that land deeds be transferred in writing. However this was not an option for the African American property owners during Reconstruction.

It was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, so that first generation couldn’t possibly have written wills. The Jim Crow laws that followed Emancipation then impeded black people’s access to the legal system, according to Willie Heyward of the Center for Heirs Property Preservation. So, the first generations of these land owners were unable to create written wills, and property was handed down verbally.

The tradition of verbal bequeaths continued in the African-American community. Rather than honoring a verbal will, the State considers land left by those without a written will (those who are “intestate”) to be equally owned, by all heirs.

Thus, there are many tracts of “Heirs’ Properties” in the South in which the last recorded deed is from the Reconstruction period. Some of these properties can have over a hundred heirs associated with them.

Turning Bottom-land to Gold

The introduction of air conditioning and mosquito control has turned these properties into the type of gold that makes developers drool. Since the mid-50’s, coastal islands and marsh-front properties have been converted to high-end housing, resort and commercial properties, displacing the long-standing African American communities.

The SC Government has so favored developers that they have changed the laws defining land ownership. For instance, persons who possess a piece of land, pay taxes on it, and were verbally deeded it by an ancestor do not have “clear title” to that land in South Carolina. This lack of clear title leaves the land vulnerable to court-forced sale, if even a single heir chooses to raise the question of ownership.

Once a court orders the sale, the developers are standing in line at the auction with more cash in their hands than the heirs could ever hope to raise.

Techniques of Taking The Property

Unclear Title

So long as there is no clear title to a property, a single heir can force its sale. In all heirs’ property cases a ruling from a court is required to “clear” the deed. Quite often, there are too many heirs, or the plat is too small, for equal and reasonable division. So, the court orders the property to be sold at auction, and profit is split between the heirs.

Build Something Really Nice Next Door

Property taxes in places other than California are assessed based on the value of the house and land. This value is based on subjective factors – how much would people be willing to pay for it? A $10,000 house surrounded by other ten thousand dollar houses will be assessed at ten thousand dollars. However, if someone builds a single $1 million dollar house next door, the property value of the $10,000 will go up – a hundred fold.

So while the property tax on the ten thousand dollar house was just a couple hundred dollars and easily paid, the property tax on the same house next to a mansion is in the tens of thousands and beyond the reach of the average South Carolinian.

Tax ‘em Out

While many States consider land ownership to be a basic and inviolable right, South Carolina acts aggressively to remove land from people who cannot pay property taxes.

South Carolina will sell off a person’s land if they are ten months late in the payment of taxes. Other states give people several years to pay back taxes and some even have laws preventing tax sales. For instance, in Ohio, a lien may be placed on a property for delinquent taxes, but the land cannot be forced into sale.

The taxes on heirs’ properties were quite reasonable for a very long time. However, as the value of the land has gone up, thanks to air conditioning, mosquito control, and mansions placed on neighboring properties, the tax bills have also increased.

It can be difficult to keep track of a single tax bill, which is applied to large tracts where dozens of families live. If the person who has taken responsibility for paying the taxes dies or moves away, the bill is often forgotten.

It is also possible for any person to go to the County offices and change the address on any tax bill.

Would the developers do this and then enjoy the confusion as the land goes into tax sale?

It would explain a few incidents.

South Carolinians are only given nine months to pay their property tax bill. After that, they must pay what is owed, plus the taxes that will be due next year to prevent the sale of their land in the tenth month.

For example, in 2005 taxes are due on January 15 and delinquent properties are sold on October 3. Developers, with loads of cash in hand, will be ready to snatch up the valuable properties at auction, pricing heirs out of the picture but still often buying at well below market value.

Even though the governing agency is only allowed to sell as much land as is necessary to cover the delinquent taxes, they have traditionally sold the entire plat.

Regulate ‘em Out

In other places, the local government has lent the developers a hand by creating regulations that surpass the means of the Heirs’ Property owners. For instance, in Mount Pleasant, sewer hookup is now required for all new houses and renovations. But the City did not run the sewer line close enough to the Heirs’ Property sites to allow for hookup at a reasonable cost; They actually went around one Heirs’ Property site to put sewer lines to a new sub-division.

So now the property owners must pay tens of thousands of dollars to “tap in” to the system. If unable to pay, they can not modify their homes, build new homes, or even repair the existing septic systems when they break. In effect, they are forced to sell the land, to someone who has enough money to pay for the sewer connection.

What Is Being Done

The Center for Heirs Property Preservation is fighting hard to preserving these unique communities in Charleston and surrounding areas. They are providing community education by doing things like leaving pamphlets at government offices and community centers and teaching Heirs Property seminars. There has been a Public Television special about Heirs Property.

They are additionally providing legal and mediation services to embattled Heirs Property owners, and helping to clear the titles. Also they work to change State laws that disadvantage Heirs Property owners.

In one ingenious approach, according to Willy Heyward, they are helping families create autonomous entities to manage and own land in potentially disputed heirs’ properties. Once this entity is formed — a Partnership, Limited Liability Corporation, or other form of Corporation — each heir is given shares in it equal to their stake in the land. Developers cannot then get a single heir to force a sale; the majority of the share holders must agree to what will be done with the property.

A State-appointed task force that includes members of the Center for Heirs Property Preservation and Charleston School of Law is looking at ways to protect property owners’ rights. One law they are working on would require mediation amongst heirs prior to, or instead of, going to court, in order to avoid a forced sale.

Even the world-famous Spoleto Festival USA is getting involved. Their Evoking History project for the 2006 Festival involves the members of the Phillips Community – one of the Heirs’ Properties that is being threatened by developers.

In the end, it all comes down to how well groups of heirs, some numbering over 100, can cooperate to save their communities. The sad thing is that they have to fight against both developers, and their own government.

Sources

http://ccfgives.org/heirsproperty.htm

http://www.lri.lsc.gov/abstracts/abstract.asp?level1=SPA&level2=Housing&abstractid=030017&ImageId=1

http://www.pfdf.org/innovation/innovation/innovation.asp?innov_id=567

High Resolution Images

Much of the news coverage of the horrible devastation of Hurricane Katrina has focused on what many consider the almost irreparable demolition of New Orleans. This city, once a vibrant part of Louisiana’s rich history, now lays in ruins; however, Louisiana’s capital Baton Rouge, which experienced very little damage during the storm, is facing its own set of issues as it attempts to aid fellow Louisianans.

As New Orleans residents leave their homes, many have found their way to Baton Rouge, which has seen a population boom upwards of a quarter million people. This means traffic jams, overcrowding, and an overall increase in tension for native Baton Rouge residents. Grocery stores are running out of food, gas stations are fighting to keep up with long lines of customers, and, most alarmingly to residents, gun sales have increased dramatically.

“Baton Rouge is now the largest city in Louisiana, and I don’t think it will change for another five to 10 years,” said David Guillory, special assistant to the director of the Baton Rouge Department of Public Works.

On Friday, reports out of Baton Rouge rank the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport (9430 Jackie Cochran Dr. Suite 300, Baton Rouge, LA 70807-8020) as the second busiest in the nation. Traffic that is already overflowing throughout the city has reached epic proportions in the areas surrounding the airport, leaving drivers and commuters at a loss as to how to get to work, school and home.

“It used to take me 30 minutes to get to work, and it now takes me two hours,” said Courtney Finnan, a resident of a nearby suburb who has always commuted to the city for work.

“My wife relocated her office here, and the other day it took her an hour-and-a-half to go 2 miles,” said New Orleans resident Charles Macalso; he frequently travels back to check on his home.

Shelters in the area have been filling up as soon as they open, with most of Baton Rouge’s Community Centers and High Schools pitching in to take on as many people as they can. With school starting last week for most of the country, Baton Rouge has had to find ways to accommodate the influx of school-aged children from New Orleans, as well as their native children, while still using schools as makeshift shelters.

One of the shelters that was first to take in evacuees was the Volunteers of America Shelter (827 America St, Baton Rouge, LA 70802). Normally a transitional shelter for adults in housing transition, the shelter has transformed into a makeshift triage and home for hundreds. The area around the shelter, as with shelters all around the city, is growing more congested by the day.

This intermingling of displaced New Orleans residents has led to a rise in already-existing tensions among the two areas; while New Orleans has always been a notoriously “fast” city, Baton Rouge dwellers have always considered themselves to lead a much “slower” existence. Never has that been more true.

Dealing with hundreds of thousands of Katrina evacuees has indeed slowed things down – traffic, especially near shelter areas and schools is gridlocked most of the time – however, the immediate need for housing has led not only to a housing boom, but to a building boom as well, with houses being rushed into production wherever possible.

“I’ve been in the business for 30 years, and we’ve never seen anything like this. The only other time I’ve seen something like this was when my daughter moved to Washington D.C.” said Lara Dupree, the owner of Dupree, Terrell, and Company, a family-run real estate firm. “Any space where builders can build is being taken up.”

Judy Burkett, president of the Greater Baton Rouge Assn. of Realtors, said that prior to the storm, Baton Rouge had 3,626 homes listed for sale – over 75% of those have sold already. Prices, however, have risen significantly, with some estimates at 20% or more. Adding to the confusion are downed communications, which have prevented some recording of sales.

“The families go out to them and they’ll just snap them up — they’ll just snap up anything they can,” Burkett said.

As with the Southern California’s current housing market, buyers in bidding wars account for the major price increases. With so many people, both native and evacuee, vying for places to live, houses are springing up everywhere.

“If there’s lots, we’re putting slabs on them as soon as possible,” Burkett said.

High Res Images

In 1876, Kudzu was introduced to the United States at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Japanese government had constructed a beautiful garden filled with plants from their country. Because of its dense, rapid growth and wisteria-like purple flowers, it soon gained popularity with American gardeners. Then it took over the American Southeast.

Got Kuzu 2 [in North Carolina] photo credit: jimfrazier

“In Georgia, the legend says, / that you must close your windows / at night to keep it out of the house. / The glass is tinged with green even so”
James Dickey

Between 1935 and 1942, Soil Conservation Service nurseries grew a hundred million kudzu seedlings. They were shipped and distributed to farmers throughout the Southeast. The vines were used on gullied croplands and fed to livestock as well. Highway departments planted the rapidly growing seedlings along exposed right-of-ways.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Soil Conservation Service promoted kudzu for the control of soil erosion. Farmers were paid as much as eight dollars an acre as incentive to plant fields of the vines in the 1940s. A columnist from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution organized the Kudzu Club of America by the mid-1940s. Between the kudzu club and the Soil Conservation Service, about half a million acres were planted in the South by 1945.

Is this sounding reminiscent of the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Read on, and you’ll discover even more correlations of overnight possession!

Soon the vigorous growth of kudzu proved to be a virtue in excess. By the 1950s, foresters and highway engineers were complaining that wherever the vine was planted, it grew — upward and outward — at the rate of 60 to 100 feet per season. It smothered forestry and created thick mats (several feet deep) along roadsides. In 1972, the Agricultural Conservation Program demoted the once praised plant to an invasive weed status. Just like that, a plant that the government used to pay you to grow was declared a public enemy.

This vine can grow a whole foot, overnight. You can almost hear it growing. You can see it growing, if you’re in the right frame of mind.

Do you think it dies during the winter? Don’t let it deceive you. With the first frost, the kudzu leaves will die and the vines will turn gray. Don’t be fooled. As soon as spring arrives, the vine will continue growing almost exactly from where it left off the previous fall. These vines will cover buildings and parked vehicles if no attempt is made to control the rapid growth. They will shrubberize small wildlife, and pets. Keep them away from your three-toed sloth.

Kuzu Tendrils, photo credit: nailbender

Hungry for more facts?

• Kudzu is a climbing deciduous vine, capable of reaching lengths of over 100 feet in a season.
• The stems can grow to four inches in diameter.
• The large semi-woody roots can reach a depth of three to 16 feet.
• Kudzu is easily identifiable by its three-leaflet foliage, up to four inches across, which spreads into a dense mat of vines.
• These plants usually flower in their third year. The flowers are purple and fragrant and bloom during July–October.

Now for the really bad news

Kudzu is all-too-happy to grow under a wide range of environmental conditions. Its greatest growth is achieved where the winters are mild, summer temperatures are moderately hot, and rainfall is plentiful. Kudzu can grow in almost any type of soil, and its large roots allow the plant to survive in fairly dry climates and drought conditions as well as the most desirable conditions. The vines grow rapidly and then penetrate the soil again, only to create a new rooted area. Kudzu thrives not only in forests and abandoned areas but also in urban landscapes as well. The city of Atlanta has already been invaded!

Store Display, photo credit: Automatt

How to fight this supervine?

Hopefully you’ve got a lot of stamina, because that’s what it’s going to take. Use a digging tool and remove the entire plant, including the taproot. Destroy the vegetation you remove by burning or bagging it. You can also chop the vines and runners just above ground level and destroy the pieces. Repeat this cutting at two-week intervals to weaken the crown and slow the resumption of photosynthesis.

This method is only used to control the spread of the wildly invasive vines. If you want to actually remove via an herbicidal approach, check with your local Soil Conservation Agency for the necessary chemicals and methods, and keep your fingers crossed. It will not be an easy task. An environmentally safe herbicide made from legumes is sprayed on the kudu leaves. Three weeks later, the invasive plants should be dry and ready to clear.

Chair Growth Club, photo credit: Automatt

In Japan and China, kudzu has a fine reputation where it has been used for centuries in medicines and in food. Starch is extracted commercially from kudzu and made into tofu, tempura batter, noodles, and gelatenous treats. The vine is actually respected and enjoyed in these countries as well as by herbal and natural food enthusiasts.

But kudzu grows better in the South than it does in its native lands, and its natural enemies were not brought to the United States in 1876, when the plant arrived. Also, for an unknown reason, no insects have adapted to eat the delicious plant in the hundred and fifty years it has been growing here. Only between three and seven percent of kudzu is consumed by insects, compared with between five and fifteen percent of other edible plants.

Kudzu folklore and humor

Here in Atlanta, we have come up with some expressions of our own to combat the fatigue of fighting this persistent devil of a plant. Two pieces of advice are:

“If you’re going to plant kudzu, drop it and run,” and

“Plant it at night so that your neighbors don’t see you.”

Visitors are told about hitchhikers who have disappeared without a trace on kudzu-rampant county roads. Be advised to keep your car windows rolled up when driving along these roadways—to keep the growing vine from reaching in and grabbing your steering wheel.

There are people in the Southeast who have adapted to the kudzu proliferation. They’re consuming the problem. How about some kudzu blossom jelly to spread on your morning toast or perhaps some kudzu syrup to pour over your Sunday morning pancakes? Maybe put some grease in the skillet and fry up some kudzu leaves to accent your meal, or a kudzu quiche might be your choice for a Saturday luncheon.

Maybe they have the right idea. Municipalities have been known to buy goats to fight the tree-eating creeper. It worked out for them that the goats were more cost-effective than spraying the kudzu with herbicide.

Like it or not, “the vine that ate the South” has become a part of the Atlanta habitat.

sources

• Kudzu—The Vine
• The New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council
• The Amazing Story of Kudzu