Otis White

Recent Articles

• Thar She Blows!
• Nov 1, 2003
• Some homeowners in Miami are getting the shocks of their lives: toilets that erupt with sewage shooting two feet in the air--with all the unpleasantness you might imagine.

• Secrets of A Turnaround
• Oct 1, 2003
• Can you turn around a place whose name is synonymous with urban blight? Surprisingly, yes. Example: Camden, New Jersey, the played-out factory town across the river from Philadelphia.

• To Smell A Thief
• Sep 1, 2003
• Somebody keeps stealing garbage cans in Dallas, and it's causing a stink. Reason: These aren't your usual Rubbermaid trash cans; they're official City of Dallas receptacles, 90-gallon cans with wheels known as roll carts that are designed to work with automated garbage trucks.

• Yes, We're Rich, But Please Don't Remind Us
• Aug 1, 2003
• Which city of 100,000 or more population has the greatest concentration of million-dollar homes? Star-studded Los Angeles? Nope. Chicago and its famous Gold Coast? Nah. Swanky New York? Not even close.

• Dream Town Houses
• Jul 1, 2003
• The New Urbanist dream goes something like this: People will give up their sprawling, inefficient suburban homes on half-acres of land and embrace the joys of compact living in places served by public transit and convenient walkways to schools, parks and stores.

• Five Feet Under
• Jun 1, 2003
• Life is tough in city halls across the country, with tax revenues declining and expenses rising. And, as it turns out, death isn't much better. In Danville, Virginia, the city council recently was struggling with how to hold down costs at the city's cemeteries when one council member made an interesting suggestion: Why not bury people five feet deep rather than six feet?

• Change The Locks!
• May 1, 2003
• Guess who once was given a key to the city of Detroit: Saddam Hussein. The Detroit News discovered recently that in 1980 the Iraqi president was awarded a ceremonial key by a pastor of Detroit's Chaldean Christian community.

• The Celebrity Shortage
• Apr 1, 2003
• If your community doesn't already have enough worries, here's one: You may be up against a celebrity gap. This is a particular problem for charities, which use movie stars, pop singers, athletic heroes, former presidents and big-time authors to draw donors to their fund-raising events. Clearly this isn't a problem in places such as Los Angeles or New York.

• Birds of A Feather
• Mar 1, 2003
• One of the handiest concepts for understanding how cities develop is the notion of "clustering," developed by Harvard business professor Michael Porter. Simple concept: It holds that, in some highly developed industries, leading practitioners need to be near one another, even when logic and high land costs might suggest that it's better to disperse.

• Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest
• Feb 1, 2003
• What is the dumbest local government in America? Hard to say, but at least until recently New York's affluent suburb of Nassau County would have to be a contender. How dumb was Nassau's government? So dumb that it bought 1,200 computers a few years ago as backups for the Y2K problem, then left them in boxes for three years as employees begged for upgrades.

• Is Bigger Better?
• Jan 1, 2003
• Some cities have long had an appealingly simple answer to urban problems: annex their way out of them. The problem of cities, they say, is that affluent suburbs have surrounded them, so the secret is to annex those areas before they can incorporate.

• Featured Foul-Ups
• Dec 1, 2002
• This is every public official's nightmare: The San Francisco Chronicle has started running daily photos and brief articles about government foul-ups. The first was a picture of graffiti defacing a city park's murals.

• Mother Nature's Drainage Ditch
• Nov 1, 2002
• OK, so Houston's Buffalo Bayou isn't exactly the Seine. In fact, among urban rivers, it's one of the ugliest, a big, muddy stream that floods regularly.

• Stay in School Forever
• Oct 1, 2002
• Something funny is happening to Atlanta's old school buildings. People are living in them. Already three public schools have been recycled into loft apartments, another is being developed and a fifth is up for sale and may join the trend.

• No Mint on the Pillow?
• Sep 1, 2002
• Hotel owners and managers are usually the biggest boosters of their cities. Stands to reason: If outsiders want to visit a place, the hoteliers are the beneficiaries.