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March 11, 2006
levee investigation
nope the experts
still aren't on to em
==================================================
Weak clay soils
combined with tilting concrete storm walls
caused the failure of the 17th Street levee
during Hurricane Katrina,
according to an Army Corps of Engineers
investigation released Friday.
The corps' first official findings
do not indicate whether
they resulted from defects
in design or construction,
the wall withstood less force
than it should have.
A 465-foot section of the 17th Street levee
was breached Aug. 29, flooding the Lake View section
of New Orleans.
Breaches occurred on two other major canals
in New Orleans;
the analysis of those failures is incomplete.
As the 17th Street Canal
filled up with water
from the surges that inundated Lake Pontchartrain,
the top of the wall on the canal
began to deflect or tilt
toward the neighborhood
and away from the canal,
The tilting of the concrete wall
opened a gap between the soil
and steel-sheet pilings
that had been sunk 17 feet
into the ground.
The water raced into the gap
and to the bottom of the sheet piling,
exerting heavy pressure
along the entire height
Despite those intense pressures,
the levee should have remained standing,
other storm walls in New Orleans
suffered similar deflection
during Katrina and did not fail.
But the soil was weak
in ways the corps did not anticipate.
The soil directly under the levee
was compacted and strong,
the result of the massive weight
of the levee and storm wall
sitting over the foundation for decades.
However, at the toe of the levee
in the backyards of residents
living near the storm wall,
it was comparatively weak.
As the water pushed
against the steel sheet piling,
it caused the entire foundation
of the levee to slide backward
toward the homes,
the gap also compromised
half the strength of the levee.
The gap negated any strength
that would have come from
the canal side of the levee.
At the 17th Street levee,
the failure did not occur
in a layer of organic peat,
as earlier surmised.
Posted by the baron at 05:22 PM
March 06, 2006
WHY THE BARON BLOGS
this by some side winder
"blogging
gives people the opportunity
to live out the fantasy
that they are special
without actually having to put
in too much effort "
================================
Posted by the baron at 01:13 AM
a tale of two cities
detroit ain't no boston town
one spirals up
while the other spirals down
but ivy league fatalism hasn't yet met
my eye openner
the big easy solution
a super fast down size
is the proper detroit Rx
========================
skills are destiny
influx builds influx
skill out flux breeds
a drop in lot values
and the bustication of neoghborhoods
this 'll suck in
idlers
end zone
a sump of idlers
here's
that vunce cantab prof glaeser :
"Boston would be just another declining,
cold, manufacturing city
if it weren't for its preponderance
of human capital,"
"my studies suggest
the more skilled a city's population,
the more skilled it is becoming,
as entrepreneurs attract skilled workers
who in turn attract entrepreneurs"
"Americans are sorting themselves
through education and geography
more and more with each passing year. ..."
detroit is a cheap place to idle away in
with its birds of a feather
and a nice big cheap crumbling housing stock
my nero answer
burn it down
a controled burn of course
like burning under brush
and
a one timer
set your starters to hit all one very sad nite
not a series of minis
that gets too obvious
an artificial big burn
like the big ones
of the post civil war era
in the here after ...
a much down sized detroit
could
take on the bean town up spiral
begin a second career
as maybe an r&d
for post smoke stackery
from automotive
to
automative ????
sound like a boomer to ya ????
robo detroit
at any rate
a non academic technical
hubsteration
but ahh
i get ahead of myself here
Posted by the baron at 12:36 AM
March 05, 2006
this is cutting edge science ????
the so called
rogue economist has a look at our "profession"...
=======================================
" March 5, 2006
It is hard to think of many occupations
that garner less good will these days
than the real estate agent.
A great many of these agents and brokers,
more than 1.2 million
, belong to the National Association of Realtors,
which the Department of Justice
accused in a recent lawsuit
of behaving like a cross between
a cartel and a mafia,
hoarding access to home-sale databases
and harassing competitors
who dared to offer discounted commissions.
Even if you believe
all these terrible things
about real estate agents,
however, you should try to find in your heart
a bit of sympathy for them.
There are two reasons for this.
To examine the first reason,
ask this question:
Who has prospered during the recent real-estate boom?
Home sellers, to be sure,
along with developers,
mortgage brokers --
and also, you would assume,
your average real estate agent.
These agents have rung up millions of sales
while home prices have been doubling
and even tripling.
Since an agent's commission
is usually based on a fixed percentage
of the sale price -- typically 5 percent
or 6 percent,
of which about half goes
to the listing agent and half to the buyer's agent
-- agents' fees have climbed along with home prices,
even though they probably
don't have to work any harder
to sell an $800,000 house
than they do a $200,000 house.
A listing agent really only performs
four main functions:
setting the price of your home,
finding potential buyers,
prepping and showing the house,
and
handling the negotiations and contracts.
Just for fun,
let's put a value on each of these functions
. Setting a home's asking price
requires a few hours of work at most,
studying the house and comparable sales.
Showing the typical home might take
20 or 30 hours,
with negotiations and contract
s taking maybe four hours.
Attracting potential buyers
is of course the trickiest task --
which is why, as the Justice Department alleges,
realtors have tried to block access
to the databases.
But it's now easy
to find independent or discount agents
who will list your house
on the Multiple Listing Service
for about $750.
So in sum,
we are talking about perhaps
40 hours of work.
Let's be generous
and say that's worth $100 an hour.
Add another $750 to list the home.
That's a total of $4,750,
which makes the 6 percent commission
that you would pay on the sale of a $500,000 house
-- $15,000 each to your agent and the buyer's agent
-- look pretty steep.
It would seem obvious
that being an agent
during a real estate boom
is a great way to earn a good living.
As it turns out, however
, most agents don't make very much money
during a boom,
because of one simple fact:
the boom attracts way too many of them.
Over the past 10 years,
membership in the association
has risen more than 75 percent.
And why not?
Compared with most professions,
becoming a real estate agent
is quick, cheap,
and relatively painless.
In economics,
this phenomenon is known as free entry.
In a 2003 paper titled
''Can Free Entry Be Inefficient?"
Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti,
economists at the University of California
at Berkeley,
examined the income of real estate agents
in various markets under various conditions.
Relying on data
from the Census of Population and Housing
in 1980 and 1990,
Hsieh and Moretti compared home sales
in 282 metropolitan areas.
But their story can be told
using just a pair of cities:
Boston and Minneapolis,
which are similar in size and demographics -
- but quite different
in the price of their real estate.
In 1990, a typical house in Boston
cost roughly twice as much
as a typical house in Minneapolis
Since commission rates were fixed,
an agent would earn twice
as much selling a house in Boston.
But the Boston market
, with so much more commission money up for grabs,
attracted many more agents
than Minneapolis did --
even though it turned out
that more homes were being sold
in Minneapolis.
The result?
The typical Minneapolis agent
sold twice as many homes
(6.6 per year)
as the typical Boston agent (3.3 per year)
-- which left the Boston agent
, despite the higher prices
in her market,
no better off than her Minneapolis counterpart.
What should be a competitive marketplace
-- which would inevitably lead to lower prices --
is not,
since the price of the agents' service
is essentially fixed.
The association's own figures
show the same dynamic at work today,
nationwide.
From 2002 to 2004, during one
of the hottest real estate markets
in American history,
the median income for realtors actually fell --
to $49,300 from $52,200.
This is not to say
that some agents haven't become rich.
As in most sales professions,
whether the product is diamond rings
or crack cocaine,
the people at the top of the pyramid
make an awful lot more money
than those down below.
It's just that the base
of the real estate agent pyramid
grows significantly during a boom.
And because hungry new realtors
are discouraged from undercutting
their competitors by lowering their commission,
they compete instead by frantically trying
to obtain new listings.
This would explain why your mailbox
is jammed with postcards
from realtors exhorting you to sell.
------------------------------------------
The second reason to feel bad
for real estate agents is even more dire:
their very profession is about to join
the endangered-species list.
Think back for a moment to 1999.
Travel agents still roamed the earth
in vast numbers.
So did stockbrokers.
But their business models
were being blown apart,
largely by the Internet.
The new market for do-it-yourself
online securities trading
lowered fees so drastically
that a full-price stockbroker
could simply no longer earn a living.
Travel agents were shoved aside
once the Internet gave customers
the ability to book their own trips
-- and when, perhaps more damagingly,
the airlines decided to stop
paying the travel agents' commissions.
The Internet is a natural repository
for the sort of data
that drive the real estate market
. New sites like zillow.com
let anyone try to figure out
(if imperfectly)
what his home is worth;
sites like craigslist.org
allow buyers and sellers
to find each other easily.
As those services
and ones like them become more popular,
it is hard to imagine that the market
will allow realtors to maintain
their hefty commissions.
In addition to discount
and flat-fee brokers,
one likely successor
is the fee-for-service broker.
They charge
$750 to list a home
on the Multiple Listing Service,
$50 an hour for showing the home
and $250 for negotiations and closing.
"Do you want to go to the Caribbean?
Or would you rather give the money
to your real estate agent?"
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
are the authors of ''Freakonomics:
A Rogue Economist Explores
the Hidden Side of Everything."
----------------------------
the science
"when the average price
of land in a city increases,
(1) the fraction
of real-estate brokers
in a city increases;
(2) the productivity
of an average real-estate agent
(houses sold per hour worked)
falls;
(3) the real wage
of a typical real-estate agent
remains unchanged.
qed
----------------------------------------------------
Posted by the baron at 07:03 PM