Public school enrollments are plummeting along the West Coast. Statewide, California schools lost 10,000 students this year, the first such decline in a quarter-century, the Los Angeles Times reported. In Seattle, city schools lost another 400 students. Seattle has one of the highest rates of private-school attendance in the country, so it isn't just a declining market that's shrinking the public schools, it's a loss of market share. You can see similar dynamics at work in Santa Barbara, California. Over the past seven years, 400 students have left the city's public schools. Santa Barbara's population is actually up from 2000. But housing prices also have skyrocketed, changing the demographics of the county. As one observer told the Times, "You have rich people who don't have kids and poor people living two or three families in a house." The poor are minorities, in this case Latinos, and as their children enter the public schools, it is touching off white flight, the newspaper said. In the elementary schools, for instance, 70 percent of students today are Latino and only 25 percent are white non-Hispanics. Citywide, 35 percent of residents are Latino.
UP IN THE AIR
Like water rights in the West, air rights are commonly understood only in New York. But talk of air rights is popping up in Philadelphia, where a developer announced plans recently to knock down a three-story building and construct a 40-story condo tower. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, the owner of a 17-story building on the same block informed him that he owned the rights to develop above the building. Why would you want to own development rights atop someone else's building? In New York, air rights are commonly sold above squat, unglamorous things that could be happily hidden beneath a larger development. That obviously doesn't apply to the building in Philadelphia. Most likely, they were bought to prevent anything from blocking the views from the 17-story building or, if anything were to be built there, compensate the owner. The most surprising land-use trend of recent years is the popularity of very tall condo towers and the resulting migration of skyscrapers away from downtown and into nearby neighborhoods. The views from these towers are their greatest assets, so air-rights sales may be coming to cities across the country.
COOLING OFF HOT TOWNS
Here's another problem to add to your list of worries: the urban heat island. Cars, subways, factories, power plants and other human activities create a lot of heat, but cities also have a lot of hard surfaces--streets, buildings, parking lots, roofs--that absorb and trap heat from the sun. The heat is obvious in the daytime, but it's more troubling at night. In many places, nights are hotter than they used to be. This is the case in Phoenix, where nighttime temperatures in July linger at 90 degrees, which is unlike what longtime residents remember, the Arizona Republic reported recently. In places such as Atlanta, where the downtown is 10 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, the heat island aggravates air pollution, strains electrical grids, places the elderly at risk and is changing the weather. Researchers at Arizona State University are studying new building materials that trap less heat than the ones we use now. Light-colored roofs reflect light better than dark ones, and "green" roofs, planted with trees and shrubs, cool buildings below and around them. There are some solutions yet to be developed, the Republic reported, including photochromic materials that change color depending on the sunlight and, of course, solar power devices that can put blinding summer light to good use.
