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.'"

Bad Billboards

Apparently L.A. has a problem with their skyline. And, no, it's not smog.

LA Weekly reported this week on 4,000 illegal billboards in the LA area, including one erected last November "in full view of the windowed offices of Los Angeles city billboard inspectors."

On top of that — or as high as that, at least — the city is letting CBS, Clear Channel, and Regency erect 877 light-emitting-diode advertising signs in a sweetheart deal.

The story goes into a lot of detail and history, probably more than the local reader might be interested in. However, in March, the Memphis City Council lifted an almost-two-year-old moratorium on construction of "regular" billboards.

At the same time, they approved a 6-month moratorium on new electronic and digital billboards and old, regular billboards getting rehabbed to digital. The plan is that the new Memphis and Shelby County sign ordinance will be rewritten by then, and it will establish guidelines for digital billboards.

This is something worth watching. Billboards are big business. The city's billboard ordinance keeps new billboards off city streets, only allowing billboards to be erected along interstates. (Obviously, the ones that already exist are grandfathered in.)

Though part of the ordinance prohibits billboard owners from replacing existing billboards on city streets, there's been a bit of legal wrangling from time to time over what "replacing" means (for instance, can a billboard company upgrade a crappy, existing billboard, thus extending its life another 20 years?) Former city council members Rickey Peete and Edmund Ford were both charged with accepting bribes over a billboard project. The billboard companies have even gone after each other from time to time.

The Weekly story echoes something consultant Eric Kelly told the council a few years ago: "When you look at sex businesses in Memphis, it's worse here than in other places," he said. "But with signage, Memphis is in the same boat as everybody else."