Condos & carcinogens

Here are two interesting approaches to very specific problems.

In Los Angeles, the Department of Water recently dropped 40,000 black plastic balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir in an attempt to protect the drinking water.

The Los Angeles Times reported that naturally occurring bromide, with the addition of sun, forms bromate, which can cause cancer. After elevated levels of bromate were found in some of the area's unshaded reservoirs, the water department looked for a solution.

"A tarp would have been too expensive and a metal cover would take too long to install, especially in a year of drought. So one of the DWP's biologists, Brian White, suggested 'bird balls,' commonly used by airports to prevent birds from congregating in wet areas alongside runways."

Photo from the LA Times.


In Vancouver, the city is thinking about banning condos in an expanded downtown business district.

From the Vancouver Sun:

"That change is being welcomed by the business community, which has been raising the alarm for a couple of years about the way office development has been losing the battle to more profitable condo development.

'It's all good to walk and bike to work, but if you don't have offices for people to go to, that makes things rather difficult,' said Bernie Magnan, the chief economist for the Vancouver Board of Trade. 'You won't have the business and the jobs that you're asking people to move down here for.'"

Vancouver began promoting downtown living 20 years ago; since that time, the downtown population has doubled to 90,000 and condos have been converted from a number of former office buildings, leaving available office space at a record low.

Under the proposal, commercial developers would be encouraged to build as high as possible without blocking the city's designated view corridors.

"'When you look at the capacity for job space in the city, there's a problem, particularly in the downtown,' said planner Kevin McNaney, who is in charge of the city's massive metro-core jobs study that has been examining what kinds of occupations and locations the city will need in the future. 'And it really has nowhere to go but up.'"

Miami and Man-Made Meat

This post could probably go a number of ways.

NPR's Morning Edition has a story today about Jorge Perez, the condo king of Miami. The story credits Perez with a condo boom along the city's waterfront and helping to create a livable downtown.

"We try to do the urban buildings — buildings that have restaurants and shops, and they're on the street and make walking a much more pleasurable experience like it is in Paris or New York or London," Perez is quoted as saying.

Interestingly, the billionaire developer started as a bureaucrat with Miami's planning department. But in Miami, as in Memphis, there is now a glut of condos and a troubled real estate market. Perez, like any smart billionaire, is now turning his attention to building condos in Latin America, but says that any money he's lost in Miami is worth it:

"I feel responsible that I contributed to making Miami a true, great urban center.' If the outcome of that is I drop some money in doing it, then so be it. That's not the important part. The important part is that we really are creating a great city."

Must be nice to be a billionaire.

But what does that have to do with man-made meat, you ask?

Not a hell of a whole lot. But, as I was looking at the condo stuff, this story about man-made meat was right next to it. Or, as it was captioned on NPR's website, "semi-living steak." Meat grown in a lab, from a tissue sample, without having to kill an animal to get it. And what kind of futurist would I be if I didn't mention it?

"Technology, I think, is doable," says one of the scientists culturing meat from animal tissue, "and if you have reasonable investment it can be done. But ... you can't create [a] product which nobody wants to buy or is too expensive to buy. So the right timing ... is everything."

NPR asks, "So is this the right time? One unlikely nonprofit thinks so: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA recently announced a $1 million contest to create commercially viable chicken meat, sacrificing neither chicken nor egg. The deadline is 2012, the contest rules Herculean and the prize money paltry. But the thinking is pragmatic: If people must have meat, and factory farming is an animal nightmare, why not find a high-tech alternative?"

I would like to be all for this, but man, does it look repulsive. And, frankly, it kind of reminds me of Soylent Green.