The New West Magazine
From The New West magazine
Boise in Its Own Little Bubble
The Treasure Valley Repo Bus Tour embarked on its maiden voyage in March, driving about 25 pre-qualified and hopeful homebuyers on a tour of Boise and nearby Eagle and Meridian, hunting for deals on foreclosed homes.
"In this market it's ‘Think outside the box.' What can we do to generate some business?" says Nate Wilson, who helped organize the monthly bus tour.
In 2005, Wilson's agency, the Boise branch of Keller Williams Realty, had 600 agents. In mid-April, the count was down to about 380.
Boise has been hammered by the national housing slump and the sub-prime loan debacle. In April, there were 200 homes in Ada County scheduled for a trustee sale, the last step in the foreclosure process, compared to 42 last April. March saw 245 defaults filed, up from 99 in March 2007. In the fourth quarter of 2006, single-family home permits plunged 39.6 percent.
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From The New West magazine
Revenge of the Resource Economy
For years now, talk in the Mountain West has been about the "amenity" economy displacing natural resources as the key to prosperity. But as the housing downturn marches across the region and commodity prices soar, the old standbys have returned as key economic pillars.
Clearly, the industry powering much of the growth in the Mountain West over the past decade -- growth itself -- is limping. Residential real estate, while healthier than much of the country, continues to weaken, especially in larger cities like Boise and Salt Lake and in resort markets like Big Sky. The luxury second-home sector is also taking a hit, with high-profile projects like Tamarack Resort in Idaho and Promontory in Utah seeking refuge in bankruptcy.
Yet still-tight labor markets, continued job growth and commercial construction -- all of which are at least partly related to the natural resource boom -- have kept the overall economy in positive territory.
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12 Groups file on first day allowed
Environmental Groups Sue to Reverse Wolf Delisting
As expected, a coalition of 12 environmental and animal-rights groups filed suit today in U.S. District Court in Missoula, Mont. seeking to overturn the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to remove gray wolves in the Northern Rockies from protection under the Endangered Species Act.
The lawsuit seeks a immediate injunction to protect gray wolves from public hunting and aims to return the wolf to federal management under the Endangered Species Act. Gray wolves were officially delisted on March 28th.
“We’re trying to prevent the wolf slaughter from going forward,” said Doug Honnold, managing attorney of the Bozeman office of Earthjustice, the legal organization representing the coalition.
The groups argue state management plans fail to provide adequate protection for the species, especially against indiscriminate public hunting. Instead of protection, state management actually promotes the killing of wolves, Honnold said.
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From The New West magazine
Traffic Perplexes New Western Communities
A century ago, Ustick, west of Boise, was a farming hamlet surrounded by apple orchards and served by a trolley car system. After World War II, Boise's sprawl gradually subsumed the bucolic little burg. Running east-west between Interstate 84 and Chinden Boulevard, Ustick Road – once a graceful tree-lined two-lane thoroughfare – became clogged with cars and lined with strip malls featuring gun shops and nail salons, small office buildings, and, eventually, big-box retail stores (a 97,000 square foot Kohl's department store stands at the corner of Ustick and Eagle Road).
Commute times into Boise lengthened from 15 minutes (the time it once took to ride the streetcar from Ustick to downtown) to 30 minutes and more, as traffic crawled along the narrow arterial.
So it goes across the West on one of the most contentious issues facing the region: traffic. Several decades ago, few even had the word "commute" in their vocabulary; you simply left home shortly before you wanted to arrive at your destination.
But today, an aging and inadequate road system needs immediate repairs while the number of cars and trucks skyrockets, and construction costs soar. Annual vehicle miles traveled in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho doubled between 1995 and 2005. In Utah, the figure nearly tripled, according to the Federal Highway Administration. And local governments simply don't have the money to do much about it -- and when they do, they often can't agree on how to proceed.
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A PREDATOR BECOMES PREY
Can Wolf Hunting Help Conserve the Species?
Hunting outfitter Ray Rugg toes a crusted depression in the snow. "Wolf tracks," he says. The tracks crisscross this small meadow past a piece of front leg and scraps of hide, the last remains of a white-tail deer.
On this damp early Spring afternoon Rugg's only looking for signs of the six wolves he frequently sees on his ranch in the rugged Bitterroot Mountains west of Superior, Montana. But come September, these predators will become prey. Rugg plans to guide hunters into these mountains on both sides of the Montana-Idaho border when the first legal wolf hunting season in the contiguous United States begins.
"I already got a line of clients waiting to put in an application if the hunt goes through," Rugg says.
As the first wolf hunts begin in the Northern Rockies, state and federal wildlife officials hail the transition to state management with public hunting as a major step forward in wolf conservation. They say it will develop greater acceptance and a conservation constituency for the contentious carnivore among hunters like Rugg and the public at large, because citizens will have a hand in management. But critics contend that a more enlightened ethic is unlikely, and the wolf's long-entrenched malevolent symbolism, and the backlash it incites, will persist.
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In The New West magazine
From Rubble to Riches: Western Communities Capitalize on Cleanups
Missoula's affable Mayor John Engen calls it an unsavory part of town, a place that "deadens community energy" and enables vandalism and crime. Bad stuff happens to people there -- "That's where I first learned to drink Sterno," he quips.
The former Champion Sawmill site is maybe a minute's float down the Clark Fork River from vibrant downtown Missoula, a fenced in and desolate 46 acres. On a still December day the dregs of demolition remain, blanketed by snow.
Today, nearly 100 years after the mill first opened, a propitious recipe of rising land values, forward-thinking local government, community-minded developers, and some financial gymnastics mixed with grants from the Environmental Protection Agency is working to turn this symbol of the Old West into the New: the blight will give rise to a mixed-use development in the heart of town, called The Old Sawmill District.
Such redevelopment is happening in cities around the Rocky Mountain West, from Missoula to Boise to Denver -- cities still carrying the legacy of industrial booms of the past and now confronted with this question, as posed by Chris Behan of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency: "If we're not going to sprawl, where are we going to grow?" Former industrial sites, or brownfields, are increasingly a viable answer.
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In The New West magazine
The LEED Shade of Green
When the U.S. Green Building Council announced in November a program to rate the environmental qualities of new home construction -- one based on the highly successful Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design requirements for commercial buildings -- it marked a watershed of sorts for the two-decade old sustainable building movement.
In the last year, public clamor for more responsible and energy-efficient ways of living, combined with the politics of climate change and the economic reality of soaring energy costs, has ushered the once-staid subject of how we build from the business section to the front page.
This story first appeared in the preview issue of The New West magazine. For more information on the magazine, or to subscribe, go to www.newwest.net/magazine.
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In The New West magazine
Bill Vaughn: The Art of the Feud
If Thomas Jefferson had time-traveled to our rural neighborhood he never would have predicted that small landowners will forge the spine of democracy. Because here in the Squalor Zone -- that redneck netherworld of "manufactured homes" and distressed pickups that encircles Western towns like the puffy flesh around an infection -- it's one against all and all against one.
Soon after we moved into our ten-acre plot of Montana floodplain the opening salvos were fired in what would become a civil war raging across two decades and multiple fronts.
First, we discovered that the Smiths (not their real name) had installed a gate in the barbed wire separating our place from theirs so they could traipse around our forest on their nags. Then we found the bloated carcass of a doe gut-shot with an arrow in a copse of hawthorns not far from a steel archery stand these yahoos had installed in one of our Ponderosas. I nailed the gate shut, pulled down the tree stand, and tacked No Trespassing signs on the border. One winter morning Mr. Smith blew these signs to smithereens with a shotgun fired from his snowmobile. So when the Smiths decided to sell half their place, presumably to pay down their liquor bills, I sent an aerial photo to the real estate agent that showed the five acres in question under water during the most recent flood.
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In The New West magazine
Hot or Not: Roundabouts
Orderly roundabouts -- as opposed to the disorganized rotaries of East Coast cities such as Boston -- are a safe, quiet, clean and community-friendly alternative to traffic lights and stop signs.
Here's the pitch: A roundabout eliminates almost all of the risky split-second decision-making that occurs at most congested intersections. Do I try to make that left before the red light? Does that guy see the stop sign?
You wait until the circle is clear and move forward. The new roundabouts include signs in advance explaining what lane you should take in the circle, depending on where you plan to exit. If it doesn't make sense the first time, proponents say it will on every subsequent trip.
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In The New West magazine
Ancient Building Blocks of Dirt
How a few homes in the West are reviving the oldest construction material.
Consider dirt. It's old, and it's making a comeback as a construction material under a new name: rammed earth.
Rammed earth is exactly what it sounds like.
Hard-packed dirt, as a building material, predates all others. Under the right conditions, it endures. About 22 centuries ago, the Qin Dynasty built parts of the Great Wall of China using rammed earth. Some portions still stand. There's an earthen building near Luxor, Egypt, which was built some 3,300 years ago.
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