SPIRITWOOD, N.D.—A hulking yellow machine inched along Old Highway 10 here recently in a summer scene that seemed as normal as the nearby corn swaying in the breeze. But instead of laying a blanket of steaming blacktop, the machine was grinding the asphalt road into bits.

“When [counties] had lots of money, they paved a lot of the roads and tried to make life easier for the people who lived out here,” said Stutsman County Highway Superintendant Mike Zimmerman, sifting the dusty black rubble through his fingers. “Now, it’s catching up to them.”

Outside this speck of a town, pop. 78, a 10-mile stretch of road had deteriorated to the point that residents reported seeing ducks floating in potholes, Mr. Zimmerman said. As the road wore out, the cost of repaving became too great. Last year, the county spent $400,000 on an RM300 Caterpillar rotary mixer to grind the road up, making it look more like the old homesteader trail it once was.

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

The moves have angered some residents because of the choking dust and windshield-cracking stones that gravel roads can kick up, not to mention the jarring “washboard” effect of driving on rutted gravel.

But higher taxes for road maintenance are equally unpopular. In June, Stutsman County residents rejected a measure that would have generated more money for roads by increasing property and sales taxes.

“I’d rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill,” said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman’s Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood.

Rebuilding an asphalt road today is particularly expensive because the price of asphalt cement, a petroleum-based material mixed with rocks to make asphalt, has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Gravel becomes a cheaper option once an asphalt road has been neglected for so long that major rehabilitation is necessary.

“A lot of these roads have just deteriorated to the point that they have no other choice than to turn them back to gravel,” says Larry Galehouse, director of the National Center for Pavement Preservation at Michigan State University. Still, “we’re leaving an awful legacy for future generations.”

Some experts caution that gravel roads can be costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed. A gravel road “is not a free road,” says Purdue University’s John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled “Back to the Stone Age.”

Paving grew in popularity in the early 20th century as more cars hit streets and spread when the federal government built the Interstate Highway System.

Over the years, many of the two-lane arteries that connect country roads with metro areas have deteriorated under rising traffic and the growing weight of farm combines, logging trucks and other heavy equipment.

Frederick Wachtel, county engineer in Coshocton County, Ohio, says his budget, largely driven by fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, was off 5% last year, the first decline in nearly 20 years. He is now letting some of his roads return to nature.

In Spiritwood one day recently, a soft breeze carried the scents of cow manure and hot asphalt over the tall broom grass. The giant Caterpillar chugged along at a speed of 2.4 feet per minute and pulverized Old Highway 10 into a black dust with chunks of rock and pavement. A piece of equipment following behind rolled the surface flat.

The machines rumbled along a path carved by homesteaders’ covered wagons in the 1800s. Over time, grain elevators and railroad depots sprung up along the route, which became known as the Old Red Trail. Later, the road was paved and renamed Highway 10.

After Interstate 94 was built alongside the road in the 1950s, it became Old Highway 10. Traffic volumes gradually dropped until Old 10 became a lazy backcountry road dotted with abandoned farmsteads. In the 1960s the state gave Old 10 to the counties it ran through, leaving them to pay for upkeep. North Dakota’s Stutsman County got a 30-mile stretch.

The gift became a burden. The Stutsman highway department, which gets the bulk of its funds from local property taxes, state fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, let the road fall into disrepair as it juggled other projects. Every year without major maintenance, the road became more expensive to fix.

Judy Graves of Ypsilanti, N.D., voted against the measure to raise taxes for roads. But she says she and others nonetheless wrote to Gov. John Hoeven and asked him to stop Old 10 from being ground up because it still carries traffic to a Cargill Inc. malting plant. She says the county has mismanaged its finances and badly neglected roads.

“Our expenses outweigh the income,” says Mr. Zimmerman, who has been with the county highway department for nearly 30 years. He says the county will pay about $2,600 per mile annually for the newly ground-up road, as against about $75,000 per mile to reconstruct it.

Gayne Gasal, who lives along the redone stretch of road, says it has turned out “better than we all thought.” But Sportsman’s Bar owner Hilda Kuntz worries that the classic cars and bikers that roll through town in the summer will stay away.

“It’s going to kill my business,” she said.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Drought and raging wildfires have destroyed one-fifth of the wheat crop in Russia and sent wheat prices soaring around the world.

The fear that Russia, a major wheat producer, will have to cut exports by at least 30 percent is good news for U.S. farmers, who now are getting more money to go along with a bumper crop this year.

That big harvest, analysts point out, should spare U.S. consumers much increase in the prices of bread and other wheat-based foods despite the problems in Russia.

Any price increases will hit consumers hardest in wheat-deficient areas such as the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia.

The severe drought in Russia is thought to be the country’s worst in 130 years. Most of the damage to the wheat crop has been caused by the drought, but now wildfires are sweeping farmlands in western Russia.

The Associated Press reported that the director of a small state farm outside Moscow said fire destroyed its entire wheat crop one night before the harvest.

“The fruits of the year’s labor of the farm went up in smoke. This is very painful,” Pavel Grudinin, director of Lenin State Farm, said on Russian television.

The drought is also affecting harvests in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Russia’s neighboring wheat-producing countries.

Troubles with wheat crops aren’t confined to that part of the world. Heavy rains during the planting season destroyed much of Canada’s crop. The Canadian Wheat Board, the marketing agency for the country’s farmers, is forecasting a 35 percent drop in the harvest.

The crop disasters have fed an unyielding price rally. In July alone, prices at the Chicago Board of Trade surged 42 percent, the biggest monthly gain in half a century.

In Chicago, wheat prices breached $7 a bushel Tuesday for the first time since September 2008.

At the Kansas City Board of Trade, the leading exchange for hard red winter wheat, prices are at a 13-month high, closing Tuesday at $6.85 a bushel.

“The Russians have been very active in selling to the world. The drought and fires now mean less will be available this year,” said Joseph Baker, the branch manager for country hedging at the Kansas City Board of Trade.

“The big losers will be consumers where the diets are more pure,” said George Lee, the agriculture fund manager at London-based Eclectica Asset Management. “I don’t think U.S. consumers will notice the price difference very much.”

But U.S. farmers are enjoying an unexpected bump in their incomes.

“The price at harvest time was not that favorable, but we have seen an increase of about $2 per bushel in the past two months caused by the limited supply out there,” said Bill Spiegel, the director of communications at the Kansas Wheat Commission, which represents 25,000 farmers.

Spiegel said the fears of an international shortage were a boon for U.S. farmers who expected a depressed price after recording a huge harvest.

“It is an unusual scenario that we have so much surplus wheat but prices are still rising,” Spiegel said.

The U.S. Agriculture Department has forecast a production surplus of about 1 billion bushels. That diminishes the likelihood of a repeat of the global rally in the cost of grains experienced in 2008, when wheat prices touched a high of $13.84 a bushel at the Kansas City Board of Trade.

Cities View Homesteads as a Source of Income

Give away land to make money?

It hardly sounds like a prudent scheme. But in a bit of déjà vu, that is exactly what this small Nebraska city aims to do.

Beatrice was a starting point for the Homestead Act of 1862, the federal law that handed land to pioneering farmers. Back then, the goal was to settle the West. The goal of Beatrice’s “Homestead Act of 2010,” is, in part, to replenish city coffers.

The calculus is simple, if counterintuitive: hand out city land now to ensure property tax revenues in the future.

“There are only so many ball fields a place can build,” Tobias J. Tempelmeyer, the city attorney, said the other day as he stared out at grassy lots, planted with lonely mailboxes, that the city is working to get rid of. “It really hurts having all this stuff off the tax rolls.”

Around the nation, cities and towns facing grim budget circumstances are grasping at unlikely — some would say desperate — means to bolster their shrunken tax bases. Like Beatrice, places like Dayton, Ohio, and Grafton, Ill., are giving away land for nominal fees or for nothing in the hope that it will boost the tax rolls and cut the lawn-mowing bills.

In Boca Raton, Fla., which faces a budget gap of more than $7 million, leaders are thinking about expanding the city’s size and annexing neighborhoods as an antidote. Sure, more residents would cost more in services, but officials hope the added tax revenues will more than make up for it.

And leaders in Manchester, N.H., and Concord, Mass., are taking an approach that might have once seemed politically unthinkable. They are re-examining whether their communities’ nonprofit organizations really deserve to be tax-free.

“The stress of the past couple years is causing us to look absolutely everywhere,” said Anthony Logalbo, the finance director in Concord, where officials realized that 15 percent of the town’s property value had become tax exempt and sent letters to nonprofit groups asking whether they would consider paying something to the town.

“Private schools and nonprofit museums and community organizations benefit the town in lots of ways,” Mr. Logalbo said, “except that they don’t contribute to the cost of running the town.”

Analysts say that this year and next, city budgets will reach their most dismal points of the recession, largely because of lag time inherent in the way taxes are collected and distributed.

Despite signs of a recovery, if a slow one, in other elements of the economy, it may be years away for many municipalities. Between now and 2012, America’s cities are likely to experience shortfalls totaling $55 billion to $85 billion, according to a survey by the National League of Cities, because of slumping revenues from property taxes and sales taxes and reduced support from state governments.

And even in places like Concord and Beatrice, where officials say budget strains are not severe enough to lead to layoffs or major cuts, a slow chafing has still taken a toll.

Beatrice (pronounced bee-AT-russ), which sits about 40 miles south of Lincoln down a highway called the Homestead Expressway, is recognized as home to the first Homestead Act application nearly 150 years ago. That law ultimately granted 270 million acres of land in 30 states to nearly anyone who could survive on it and pay a minimal fee.

Daniel Freeman, who came from Ohio, is said to have filed his claim for 160 acres near Beatrice just after midnight on Jan. 1, 1863, the day the law took effect. There were others who filed claims in other places on the same day (some say they were actually first), but Mr. Freeman captured a place in history. The government paid to take back his Nebraska homestead decades later to turn it into a national monument that honors the Homestead Act and how it transformed the nation’s population.

Beatrice’s new Homestead Act is not the first to revive the land giveaway. Some tiny towns, particularly in the Great Plains, have made such offers before, mainly as a way to increase dwindling populations. But disappearing is not the fear in Beatrice, which is home to several lawn-mowing equipment manufacturers and where the population has held steady at around 12,000 for decades.

Instead, city officials are hoping to return some of the many lots the city has accumulated, because of unpaid taxes or flooding risks from the Big Blue River, and return them to the tax rolls. The city has not suffered gaping budget shortfalls or the property tax declines seen in some larger cities, but some large purchases and road reconstruction have been delayed, waiting for a return to flusher times.

If the city were to give away just a few lots — and if people were to, as required by the law, build homes on them and stay for at least three years — Beatrice would secure annual real estate taxes on them, collect money for water, electric and sewer use, and no longer pay to mow the lawns.

The arrival of new, improved homes might also have an infectious effect on existing neighborhoods, said Neal Neidfeldt, the city administrator. The plan has its critics; at least one candidate for mayor here wonders what right the city has to give out public land to any non-taxpaying outsider who asks.

Officials acknowledge that the benefits sound modest, in the thousands of dollars annually, but say the revenue is needed.

“What is the value of a lot to us if it’s empty?” said Tom Thompson, the mayor of Grafton, where an offer of 32 city-owned lots, promoted with a television advertising campaign, has quickly led to eight takers so far. “This is strictly financial — a way to go upstream from the trend.”

In Dayton, officials are offering thousands of vacant, foreclosed or abandoned properties under certain conditions for nominal fees — $500, in many cases, to cover the cost of recording fees or $1,200 if the city must initiate tax foreclosure proceedings. The prospect of city savings on mowing fees alone is enormous: each year, Dayton spends $2 million to cut grass on the properties.

Back in Beatrice, though, the effort is only creeping along. Since the Homestead Act took effect in May, many people have called with inquiries, but no one has moved onto the lots along a gravel-covered road called Grace. Two families filled out an application — which seeks only a name, address and telephone number — but both have since put off plans.

One applicant, William Hendrix, 47, said the city’s law requiring him to secure permits for a new home on the property within six months, then build within a year after that, was too daunting. What if he could not get loans? What if he could not pay for the construction? What if he built a home but could never sell it?

“Right now, giving away the land isn’t going to be doing anybody favors,” Mr. Hendrix said. “I realized that Beatrice will get the taxes they want, but it won’t do me any good in this market.”

For their part, people in Beatrice sound patient. The peak of homesteading acres claimed under the federal act, they point out, came in 1913, some 50 years after the act’s passage.

Source: NY Times

Banks repossessed a record number of U.S. homes in the second quarter, but slowed new foreclosure notices to manage distressed properties on the market, real estate data company RealtyTrac said on Thursday.

The root problems of job losses and wage cuts persist, making a sustained U.S. housing recovery elusive.

Banks took control of 269,962 properties in the second quarter, up 5 percent from the prior quarter and a 38 percent spike from the second quarter of last year, RealtyTrac said in its midyear 2010 foreclosure report.

Repossessions will likely top 1 million this year.

“The underlying conditions haven’t improved,” RealtyTrac senior vice president Rick Sharga said in an interview.

The housing market still grapples with “unemployment, economic displacement in general, and still sits on over 5 million seriously delinquent loans that in all likelihood will at some point go into foreclosure,” he said.

In 2005, the last “normal” year in housing, Sharga said, about 530,000 households got a foreclosure notice and banks took over a comparatively minuscule 100,000 houses.

This year more than 3 million households are likely to get at least one foreclosure filing, which includes notice of default, scheduled auction and repossession, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac forecasts.

In the first half of the year, foreclosure filings were made on 1.65 million properties. That was down 5 percent from the last half of 2009 but up 8 percent from the first half of last year.

One in every 78 households got at least one foreclosure filing in the first six months of this year.

Source: Reuters

In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama defended last year’s huge economic stimulus package, saying it helped break the economy’s free fall, but argued that more spending is urgent and unavoidable. “We must take these emergency measures,” he wrote in an appeal aimed primarily at members of his own party.

The letter comes as rising concern about the national debt is undermining congressional support for additional spending to bolster the economy. Many economists say more spending could help bring down persistently high unemployment, but with Republicans making an issue of the record deficits run up during the recession, many Democratic lawmakers are eager to turn off the stimulus tap.

“I think there is spending fatigue,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said recently. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.”

Democrats, particularly in the House, have voted for politically costly initiatives at Obama’s insistence, most notably health-care and climate change legislation. But faced with an electorate widely viewed as angry and hostile to incumbents, many are increasingly reluctant to take politically unpopular positions.

The House last month stripped Obama’s request for $24 billion in state aid from a bill that would extend emergency benefits for jobless workers. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to restore that funding but with debate in that chamber set to resume this week, he acknowledges that he has yet to assemble the votes for final passage. Obama’s request for $23 billion to avert the layoffs of as many as 300,000 public school teachers has not won support in either chamber.

Mixed signals

Senior Democratic congressional aides said those initiatives have not gained traction in part because the White House has not made additional spending on the economy a clear priority.

In recent weeks, for instance, the White House has appeared more intent on cutting spending — threatening to veto a defense bill over a jet engine project that the Pentagon views as unnecessary and urging every agency to come up with a list of low-priority programs for elimination. Obama has also proposed a three-year freeze in discretionary spending unrelated to national security, an idea endorsed by leaders of both parties at a meeting at the White House last week, according to Obama’s letter.

With the letter, however, Obama makes a direct and unequivocal case for additional “targeted investments,” including state aid and several less-expensive initiatives aimed at assisting small businesses. He specifically calls for passage of the measure that is before the Senate, which would extend unemployment benefits and offer states additional aid, increasing deficits by nearly $80 billion over the next decade.

Obama asks lawmakers to be patient on the deficit, noting that a special commission is at work on a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan.

“It is essential that we continue to explore additional measures to spur job creation and build momentum toward recovery, even as we establish a path to long-term fiscal discipline,” Obama wrote. “At this critical moment, we cannot afford to slide backwards just as our recovery is taking hold.”

Read the rest of the story at: Washington Post

Even as the idea of buying local finds eager audiences at the area’s many farmers markets, few might imagine that “local” means anything closer than a swath of farmland somewhere in Carnation, Mount Vernon or Monroe. That’s where produce comes from, right?

But in Seattle’s North Beach neighborhood, the radishes already are appearing for Noelani Alexander, who spent a recent morning planning an irrigation system for her 1,200-square-foot plot behind a home on Northwest 91st Street.

By summer’s end, on the five Seattle plots that comprise the urban farm operation she calls City Grown, she expects to see carrots, leeks, lettuce, spinach, squash and cucumbers and more — all destined for local sale, mostly online.

While many more people are growing their food, either to go green or save money, the notion of growing for profit — a Depression-era activity briefly revived in the 1960s — is another, more challenging matter.

“It’s kind of new for America to be going back to urban farming on a commercial scale,” said Josh Parkinson, of similarly minded Magic Bean Farm in West Seattle. “This is about as local as you can get.”

The practice has been rapidly resurrected over the past few years in cities such as San Francisco, Austin, Texas, and Boulder, Colo., seeded by economic need, the sustainability movement and national groups such as SPIN-Farming (Small Plot Intensive Farming), which works with farms in the United States and Canada.

In recession-ravaged Detroit, for example, efforts are under way to convert 40 acres of the Michigan State Fairgrounds into what organizers say would be the world’s largest commercial urban farm.

“Productive space”

Alexander, a 32-year-old former farm employee who had gone into landscaping, figured she eventually would leave her Wallingford home for a rural spread where she could return to food production, “but things weren’t going that way,” she said. Now, “getting food into the city is more important to me.”

While some of City Grown’s produce is grown at her Wallingford home, the bulk of the operation’s nearly 4,000 square feet of growing space — about one-tenth of an acre — is divided among four other residential properties in North Beach, Ballard, Wallingford and the Central District.

Those homeowners will receive weekly produce, and besides, “they get their yard developed. Most are lawns they weren’t using — and now it’s productive space.”

Commercial urban farming “makes the most of underused urban natural resources, and provides fresh food to people right where they can see it growing from seed to harvest,” Nicole Jain Capizzi, former director of a for-profit urban farm in Milwaukee, wrote on the Seattle-based website UrbanFarmHub.org.

But Capizzi, who since has moved to the Seattle area, noted challenges — untested business models, unpredictable weather and the difficulty of cultivating non-arable land. Throw in pests and the cost of real estate, and one wonders: Are urban farms really possible?

Seattle already has Seattle Market Gardens, a year-old program in which consumers can purchase carrots, peas and other produce grown by immigrant farmers throughout the city’s South End. Proceeds from the program, sponsored by nonprofit P-Patch Trust and Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, go mostly to the farmers.

While it’s still tough going, people like Alexander and Parkinson hope to show that, despite the challenges, they can handle everything from the ground up — including production, marketing and managing. Both hope their efforts ultimately will reap long-term benefits, an experiment driven more by principles than profits.

“This is a question I ask myself quite frequently: Is this something I expect to make a livable wage from?” Alexander said. “At this point, it seems difficult.”

“It’s not something you’re going to get rich on,” Parkinson said. “… You have to be able to suffer through the mundanity of a lot of repetitive tasks. You have to look at the big picture.

“… It’s not like I’m just tired of a desk job and want to be in the garden all day.”

Early last year, urban-farming enthusiast Ryan Hawkes pitched the idea of a worker-owned farm cooperative to others in the local agriculture community. By last summer, nearly a dozen people — including Alexander — had coordinated efforts, lending each other equipment, helping develop each other’s land and sharing the fruits of their labor.

“We ate really well last summer,” Alexander said.

This year, the seven who remain are re-creating themselves as a producers’ cooperative called Harvest Collective, aiming to sell their produce online and through their individual farm operations, which comprise about 7,000 square feet in all.

“Together, we can make more of a complete-sized farm,” Alexander said.

The collective’s vision, pushed by Hawkes, is to see a farm in every neighborhood — not only for the sake of production but as a source of empowerment as residents learn new skills and self-reliance.

The group takes its inspiration from others like it, such as Milwaukee-based Growing Power, which promotes the notion of community food systems.

Social benefits

Urban farming, Alexander said, also promotes green space, which benefits communities socially and psychologically. Both the collective and Magic Bean are hoping to recruit additional homeowners and urban farmers to the cause.

Parkinson’s Magic Bean Farm is about half an acre in all, or some 20,000 square feet, spread out among seven homes mostly clustered near his home near South Seattle Community College. As with City Grown, the homeowners will receive a portion of the harvest in exchange.

Parkinson, 29, who had tinkered with ecological gardening methods for some time, finally decided to put research into practice. He aims to create a robust, interconnected ecosystem of plants, rich soil and nutrient-rich food. “There’s a lot of biology going on,” he said.

He’s purchased so many seed types that they fill four pages of an Excel spreadsheet, and he is hoping to pair with local chefs to create recipes built around his often-unusual varieties, things such as dragon’s tongue beans and purple asparagus. He plans to sell mostly at farmers markets.

In Seattle, anyone can grow and sell food on site or at a farmers market as long as no plot exceeds 4,000 square feet, said Bryan Stevens of the city’s Department of Planning and Development. The seller requires a business license if the food is turned into a product — for example, syrups or prepared salads.

Proposed legislation would create more opportunities for farmers markets, urban gardens and farms; it also would raise the per-lot limit on urban chickens to eight rather than three.

Urban-farming advocates say they’re glad to see the city encourage such efforts.

“We would love to see sustainable agriculture in the city be something people could make a living off,” Alexander said.

Source: Seattle Times

Most Americans know that the U.S. economy is in bad shape, but what most Americans don’t know is how truly desperate the financial situation of the United States really is.  The truth is that what we are experiencing is not simply a “downturn” or a “recession”.  What we are witnessing is the beginning of the end for the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen.  Our greed and our debt are literally eating our economy alive.  Total government, corporate and personal debt has now reached 360 percent of GDP, which is far higher than it ever reached during the Great Depression era.  We have nearly totally dismantled our once colossal manufacturing base, we have shipped millions upon millions of middle class jobs overseas, we have lived far beyond our means for decades and we have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world.  A great day of financial reckoning is fast approaching, and the vast majority of Americans are totally oblivious.

But the truth is that you cannot defy the financial laws of the universe forever.  What goes up must come down.  The borrower is the servant of the lender.  Cutting corners always catches up with you in the end.

Sometimes it takes cold, hard numbers for many of us to fully realize the situation that we are facing.

So, the following are 50 very revealing statistics about the U.S. economy that are almost too crazy to believe….

#50) In 2010 the U.S. government is projected to issue almost as much new debt as the rest of the governments of the world combined.

#49) It is being projected that the U.S. government will have a budget deficit of approximately 1.6 trillion dollars in 2010.

#48) If you went out and spent one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.

#47) In fact, if you spent one million dollars every single day since the birth of Christ, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

#46) Total U.S. government debt is now up to 90 percent of gross domestic product.

#45) Total credit market debt in the United States, including government, corporate and personal debt, has reached 360 percent of GDP.

#44) U.S. corporate income tax receipts were down 55% (to $138 billion) for the year ending September 30th, 2009.

#43) There are now 8 counties in the state of California that have unemployment rates of over 20 percent.

#42) In the area around Sacramento, California there is one closed business for every six that are still open.

#41) In February, there were 5.5 unemployed Americans for every job opening.

#40) According to a Pew Research Center study, approximately 37% of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have either been unemployed or underemployed at some point during the recession.

#39) More than 40% of those employed in the United States are now working in low-wage service jobs.

#38) According to one new survey, 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

#37) Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.  Not only that, more Americans filed for bankruptcy in March 2010 than during any month since U.S. bankruptcy law was tightened in October 2005.

#36) Mortgage purchase applications in the United States are down nearly 40 percent from a month ago to their lowest level since April of 1997.

#35) RealtyTrac has announced that foreclosure filings in the U.S. established an all time record for the second consecutive year in 2009.

#34) According to RealtyTrac, foreclosure filings were reported on 367,056 properties in March 2010, an increase of nearly 19 percent from February, an increase of nearly 8 percent from March 2009 and the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing its report in January 2005.

#33) In Pinellas and Pasco counties, which include St. Petersburg, Florida and the suburbs to the north, there are 34,000 open foreclosure cases.  Ten years ago, there were only about 4,000.

#32) In California’s Central Valley, 1 out of every 16 homes is in some phase of foreclosure.

#31) The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that more than 10 percent of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one payment during the January to March time period.  That was a record high and up from 9.1 percent a year ago.

#30) U.S. banks repossessed nearly 258,000 homes nationwide in the first quarter of 2010, a 35 percent jump from the first quarter of 2009.

#29) For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

#28) More than 24% of all homes with mortgages in the United States were underwater as of the end of 2009.

#27) U.S. commercial property values are down approximately 40 percent since 2007 and currently 18 percent of all office space in the United States is sitting vacant.

#26) Defaults on apartment building mortgages held by U.S. banks climbed to a record 4.6 percent in the first quarter of 2010.  That was almost twice the level of a year earlier.

#25) In 2009, U.S. banks posted their sharpest decline in private lending since 1942.

#24) New York state has delayed paying bills totalling $2.5 billion as a short-term way of staying solvent but officials are warning that its cash crunch could soon get even worse.

#23) To make up for a projected 2010 budget shortfall of $280 million, Detroit issued $250 million of 20-year municipal notes in March. The bond issuance followed on the heels of a warning from Detroit officials that if its financial state didn’t improve, it could be forced to declare bankruptcy.

#22) The National League of Cities says that municipal governments will probably come up between $56 billion and $83 billion short between now and 2012.

#21) Half a dozen cash-poor U.S. states have announced that they are delaying their tax refund checks.

#20) Two university professors recently calculated that the combined unfunded pension liability for all 50 U.S. states is 3.2 trillion dollars.

#19) According to EconomicPolicyJournal.com, 32 U.S. states have already run out of funds to make unemployment benefit payments and so the federal government has been supplying these states with funds so that they can make their  payments to the unemployed.

#18) This most recession has erased 8 million private sector jobs in the United States.

#17) Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of 2010.

#16) U.S. government-provided benefits (including Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs) rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

#15) 39.68 million Americans are now on food stamps, which represents a new all-time record.  But things look like they are going to get even worse.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture is forecasting that enrollment in the food stamp program will exceed 43 million Americans in 2011.

#14) Phoenix, Arizona features an astounding annual car theft rate of 57,000 vehicles and has become the new “Car Theft Capital of the World”.

#13) U.S. law enforcement authorities claim that there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs inside the country. These 1 million gang members are responsible for up to 80% of the crimes committed in the United States each year.

#12) The U.S. health care system was already facing a shortage of approximately 150,000 doctors in the next decade or so, but thanks to the health care “reform” bill passed by Congress, that number could swell by several hundred thousand more.

#11) According to an analysis by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation the health care “reform” bill will generate $409.2 billion in additional taxes on the American people by 2019.

#10) The Dow Jones Industrial Average just experienced the worst May it has seen since 1940.

#9) In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1.  Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

#8) Approximately 40% of all retail spending currently comes from the 20% of American households that have the highest incomes.

#7) According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two-thirds of income increases in the U.S. between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1% of all Americans.

#6) The bottom 40 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

#5) If you only make the minimum payment each and every time, a $6,000 credit card bill can end up costing you over $30,000 (depending on the interest rate).

#4) According to a new report based on U.S. Census Bureau data, only 26 percent of American teens between the ages of 16 and 19 had jobs in late 2009 which represents a record low since statistics began to be kept back in 1948.

#3) According to a National Foundation for Credit Counseling survey, only 58% of those in “Generation Y” pay their monthly bills on time.

#2) During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.

#1) According to the Tax Foundation’s Microsimulation Model, to erase the 2010 U.S. budget deficit, the U.S. Congress would have to multiply each tax rate by 2.4.  Thus, the 10 percent rate would be 24 percent, the 15 percent rate would be 36 percent, and the 35 percent rate would have to be 85 percent.

Source: endoftheamericandream.com

Locking up his station wagon, the one with the scratched paint and unpaid bills covering the floor mats, Cam Slocum crossed the parking lot and stepped into the kitchen of the swanky French restaurant Mélissein Santa Monica.

A cook set down his knife and walked over to greet the stranger. Slocum held out a Ziploc bag filled with lettuce.

“Hi,” said Slocum, 50, his deep voice straining to be heard. “I grow Italian mache in my backyard. It’s really good, only $8 a pound. Would you like to buy some?”

A few feet away, chef de cuisine Ken Takayama glanced curiously at the lanky stranger in jeans and a worn plaid shirt. He’s heard this sort of pitch before.

“Every day, every week, it’s something new,” Takayama said. “You name it, they have it.”

Since the economy took a dive three years ago, Takayama and others say they’ve seen more and more people showing up unannounced at restaurants, local markets and small retailers, looking to sell what they’ve foraged or grown in their backyards.

No one keeps track of the number of people selling their homegrown bounty, but scores of ads have cropped up on Craigslist across the country, hawking local produce, home-filtered honey and backyard eggs.

One Los Angeles resident with a lemon tree posted an offering on Craigslist to let customers “save over 50% over Vons, Ralphs, etc. $1.00/pound.” At the Orange County Swap Meet, officials said the number of people selling home-canned beans and other homemade edibles grew to 30 vendors this month, up from eight vendors in early 2007.

In the South, hunters are selling venison and wild boar meat. In the Midwest, people are combing the forests for morel mushrooms, which can fetch $10 to $40 a pound.

Tacey Perkins decided her best customers may be the neighbors around her Riverside County home. Last fall, the mother of two and former real estate agent posted a sign on her front lawn in Mira Loma advertising home-grown pumpkins. She sold $100 worth.

This summer she plans to have a farm stand on the family’s picnic table with baskets of zucchini, peppers and eggs.

“My husband works in the construction industry, and while he still has a job, things are slower,” said Perkins, 35. “Every little bit helps.”

The trend harkens back to the U.S. depression of 1893, when cities encouraged owners of empty lots to let unemployed people farm them and sell the excess produce, said Laura Lawson, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“It was seen as engendering the capitalist ideal of this country, that people were bettering themselves by being outside and working,” Lawson said.

She said that changed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when civic leaders, reluctant to create competition for struggling farmers, advocated gardening for food — not profit.

In Los Angeles, it’s unclear whether such entrepreneurship is legal: A 1946 zoning ordinance allowed “truck gardening” but didn’t define what that meant or identify what could be grown for sale in residential areas. Because of the ambiguity, the city has shut down some backyard enterprises, but not others.

An outcry by urban farming advocates last summer prompted Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti to introduce a motion dubbed the Food and Flowers Freedom Act, which would allow people to grow “berries, flowers, fruits, greens, herbs, ornamental plants, mushrooms, nuts, seedlings or vegetables for use on-site or sale or distribution off-site.”

The city’s building and safety department has stopped enforcing the old ordinance for now. The City Council is expected to vote on the proposed ordinance Friday.

Many people, though, can’t afford to wait.

Slocum, a furniture dealer, saw his paycheck dwindle to zero after the real estate market crashed. The only thing he owned was the clay soil beneath his home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Lincoln Heights.

So he ripped out his backyard weeds and planted beefsteak tomatoes and baby mache, a salad green often prepared like spinach. The dime-sized leaves carpet his half-acre lot in lush emerald rows.

Slocum started selling at farmers markets and on online blogs, and cold-calling local restaurants. Today he has 10 restaurants that are regular clients. He needs another 20 to pay his bills.

Stepping into the Mélisse kitchen, Slocum opened the bag of mache and handed the chef a curling leaf to taste.

“It tastes sweet. Like rose,” said Takayama as he chewed.

“It’s good, right?” Slocum said. Takayama nodded. Still, he wasn’t buying.

“I have enough right now,” Takayama said.

Slocum grimaced in frustration as he walked back to his car. As he drove away, his eyes scanned the street, looking for possibilities.

Source: LA Times

Nearly 40 million Americans received food stamps — the latest in an ever-higher string of record enrollment that dates from December 2008 and the U.S. recession, according to a government update.

Food stamps are the primary federal anti-hunger program, helping poor people buy food. Enrollment is highest during times of economic distress. The jobless rate was 9.9 percent, the government said on Friday.

The Agriculture Department said 39.68 million people, or 1 in 8 Americans, were enrolled for food stamps during February, an increase of 260,000 from January. USDA updated its figures on Wednesday.

“This is the highest share of the U.S. population on SNAP/food stamps,” said the anti-hunger group Food Research and Action Center, using the new name for food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “Research suggests that one in three eligible people are not receiving … benefits.”

Enrollment has set a record each month since reaching 31.78 million in December 2008. USDA estimates enrollment will average 40.5 million people this fiscal year, which ends Sept 30, at a cost of up to $59 billion. For fiscal 2011, average enrollment is forecast for 43.3 million people.

Source: Reuters

Wrecking crews are preparing to tear down a landmark 5,000-square-foot house in the posh neighborhood of Palmer Woods in the coming weeks, a sign that Detroit is finally getting serious about razing thousands of vacant and abandoned structures across the city.

In leveling 1860 Balmoral Drive, the boyhood home of one-time presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Detroit is losing a small piece of its history. But the project is part of a demolition effort that is just now gaining momentum and could help define the city’s future.

Detroit is finally chipping away at a glut of abandoned homes that has been piling up for decades, and intends to take advantage of warm weather and new federal funding to demolish some 3,000 buildings by the end of September.

Mayor Dave Bing has pledged to knock down 10,000 structures in his first term as part of a nascent plan to “right-size” Detroit, or reconfigure the city to reflect its shrinking population.

When it’s all over, said Karla Henderson, director of the Detroit Building Department, “There’s going to be a lot of empty space.”

Mr. Bing hasn’t yet fully articulated his ultimate vision for what comes after demolition, but he has said entire areas will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. For now, his plan calls for the tracts to be converted to other uses, such as parks or farms.

Even when the demolitions are complete, Detroit will still have a huge problem on its hands. The city has roughly 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes and residential lots, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that tracks demographic data for the city.

After a stuttering start, caused by a dispute over the disposal of asbestos from demolished homes, the program is just now gaining pace.

City officials say they aren’t sure how many structures ultimately need to be torn down. The mortgage crisis compounded Detroit’s economic decline, leaving nearly 30% of the city’s housing stock vacant, according to Data Driven Detroit.

“Neighborhoods that are considered stable are now at 20% vacancy,” said Deborah Younger, a development consultant involved in the demolition effort.

Until recently, the city didn’t have the funds to tackle its growing list of houses slated for demolition. But $20 million in federal funds, primarily stimulus dollars has helped to kick-start the effort.

Demolition, particularly of historic buildings, is a sensitive issue in Detroit, often leading to wrenching battles between developers, residents, city officials and preservationists. But many residents are now pleading with the city to tear down decaying structures that are attracting crime and repelling home buyers. However, some still worry that the sort of large-scale bulldozing that the city is now talking about will forcibly dislocate longtime homeowners and preclude any chance of a comeback for Detroit.

“The city has never done this before,” says Ms. Henderson, the Building Department chief. “We had to make a culture change.”

The demolition of the Romney family home is the first of its kind in Palmer Woods, a high-end enclave in northwest Detroit that was developed at the dawn of the U.S. auto industry and housed many of its pioneers. Palmer Woods has just a handful of vacant properties among its 292 homes, according to residents. It’s one of the anchor neighborhoods that is critical to the success of Mayor Bing’s right-sizing effort.

The house was owned by Mr. Romney’s parents, George and Lenore Romney, from 1941 until 1953, when the family moved to the northern suburbs. The elder Mr. Romney would go on to become head of American Motors Corp., then governor of Michigan and U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

As recently as 2002, the house sold for $645,000. But it has had a troubled history since then, lapsing into foreclosure more than once, bouncing between lenders and falling into disrepair. Last year, following years of complaints from neighbors, Wayne County declared it “a public nuisance and blight” and ordered it demolished.

The younger Mr. Romney, who is considered a leading GOP presidential candidate for 2012, said “it’s sad” that his childhood home is being razed, “but sadder still to consider what has happened to the city of Detroit, which has been left hollow by fleeing jobs and liberal social policies.”

Residents of Palmer Woods take pride in their tradition of historic preservation. But they’re happy to see this house go. “This is an eyesore, and it makes no economic sense to fix it,” said Joel Pitcoff, a retiree who lives around the block. “Who wants to spend $1 million on a house so it will be worth $400,000?”

Source: Wall St. Journal