Las Urbanistas

Christopher Williams, 10, of Long Island, holds environmentally friendly products on sale at a Home Depot in Manhattan.

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS Published: June 25, 2007

ATLANTA — Home Depot sent a note a few months ago to the companies that supply the 176,000 products it sells, inviting them to make a pitch to have their products included in its new Eco Options marketing campaign.

More than 60,000 products — far more than obvious candidates like organic gardening products and high-efficiency lightbulbs — suddenly developed environmental star power.

Plastic-handled paint brushes were touted as nature-friendly because they were not made of wood. Wood-handled paint brushes were promoted as better for the planet because they were not made of plastic.

An electric chainsaw? Green, because it was not gas-powered. A bug zapper? Ditto, because it was not a poisonous spray. Manufacturers of paint thinners, electrical screwdrivers and interior overhead lights claimed similar bragging rights simply because their plastic or cardboard packaging was recyclable.

 

“In somebody’s mind, the products they were selling us were environmentally friendly,” said Ron Jarvis, a Home Depot senior vice president who oversees the Eco Options program.

But not in his mind.

“Most of what you see today in the green movement is voodoo marketing,” he added. “If they say their product makes the sky bluer and the grass greener, that’s just not good enough.”

By the standards of Mr. Jarvis — who fertilizes his own home garden with a liquefied worm waste product packaged in recycled soda bottles and fills his swimming pool with salt water to avoid putting chlorine into the environment — only 2,500 of the products made the cut.

Even at that number, some environmentalists say that Home Depot is being too inclusive. In the process, they say, it is engaging in its own kind of overstated marketing, posing as green even as it continues to sell powerful pesticides and polluting lawnmowers.

Green, after all, has become the new “new and improved,” a label so widely used that many environmental groups, while lauding the heightened interest of consumers, now dismiss many of the efforts as greenwash.

“Everybody is in a mad scramble to say how green they are,” said Jim O’Donnell, manager of the Sierra Club Stock Fund, which handles $50 million in a portfolio of companies it considers environmentally friendly. He added that he was hopeful the product greening would become more meaningful over time.

One reason for the scramble is that there are few verifiable or certified standards to substantiate claims. Crest has introduced a toothpaste containing green tea extract and natural mint, sold under the “Nature’s Expressions” label, even though it contains artificial ingredients like most toothpastes. Raid sells a wasp and hornet killer in a green can marked “Green Options” with “Natural Clove Scent.”

“You almost have to be a scientist with a lab to decipher the dizzying array of claims,” said Robyn Griggs Lawrence, editor in chief for Natural Home magazine. “It’s hard to get information on what makes a product green.”

Few people know that better than Mr. Jarvis of Home Depot, the nation’s second-largest retailer behind Wal-Mart.

The products he has accepted for the Eco Options promotion include solar-powered landscape lighting, biodegradable peat pots and paints that discharge fewer pollutants.

But he has often gone back to suppliers and independent testers for clarification and new testing on products. Sometimes he requests product improvements, since Home Depot ultimately wants to sell about 6,000 products under the Eco Options program. (The suppliers have an incentive to meet his requests: sales of products in the Eco Options program have gone up an average of about 10 percent since the program began in April.)

Home Depot executives acknowledge that they are navigating largely uncharted waters because the government and private-company certifications that do exist on environmental impact tend to be narrowly focused.

It took weeks, for instance, to choose among a multitude of paint toxicity standards that local governments have set around the country. (Home Depot said it chose the strictest standard, set in Southern California.)

For now, most Eco Options products rely on independent certifications like Energy Star, which measure energy efficiency and is run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.

Even though Energy Star is a widely accepted barometer for how much electricity a refrigerator or washing machine uses, it does not measure other factors, like how much energy was used to make the appliance in the first place or whether the manufacturer used recycled materials and encouraged its product to be recycled at the end of its life.

Home Depot is working with Scientific Certification Systems, a private company based in Emeryville, Calif., that audits and certifies company claims, to develop new broad-based standards. They will grade a product based on its environmental record over its entire life cycle — including the sustainability of its production process, its efficiency and longevity and how it can be recycled when it is no longer useful.

But until some kind of standard can be worked out, Mr. Jarvis and his team are forced to work their way through the thicket of claims.

They are currently considering a rug that is made out of corn fiber instead of nylon, one that the manufacturer is heralding as a natural, earth-friendly product. Corn is natural, Mr. Jarvis acknowledged, but he said he was concerned about the buildup of phosphates in the Gulf of Mexico coming off the Mississippi River from corn farming, as well as the fuel it takes to run the tractors in corn fields and to transport the corn.

“When you look at the entire life cycle, nylon could have less of an environmental impact,” he said.

Teimeiko Fletcher, an environmental marketing manager at Home Depot, walked into Mr. Jarvis’s office on a recent day with a thick folder of products that manufacturers wanted to be included in the Eco Options program.

Mr. Jarvis liked a dimmer made by Lutron that promised 5 percent energy savings, but asked that the Environmental Protection Agency be consulted for verification. He was impressed by a claim by E-3 that a spark plug for lawn and garden products would lower carbon dioxide emissions by 7 percent, but he asked Ms. Fletcher to find out if other spark plugs on the market could do better.

One manufacturer said its asphalt roofing was environmentally friendly because it could be placed over existing roofing, thereby limiting overloading of landfills.

Mr. Jarvis said he was not impressed, even though Home Depot already sells the product. “Wood shingles would be better, as long as it comes from sustainable forestry,” he noted.

Skeptics say Home Depot is also attempting to give itself a green patina, endorsing products that may not be all they are cracked up to be while continuing to sell lawnmowers, toxic pesticides and inefficient light bulbs.

Urvashi Rangan, a senior environmental health scientist at Consumer Reports, complained of one store where Eco Options signs were placed haphazardly around toxic bee and hornet insecticides.

“If they really wanted to promote sustainability, they would discontinue their products with the least green attributes,” said Garvin Jabusch, a partner at Green Alfa Advisors, which directs investors on how to invest in a sustainable economy. “Manufacturers would stop making them on the spot.”

Mr. Jarvis says many manufacturers have expressed a willingness to work with Home Depot to improve their products to earn the Eco Options label. “The manufacturers are seeing the green ship leave the port,” he said “and they don’t want to be left on the dock.”

Civic improvements begun 25 years ago are turning Paramount, a former eyesore, into a success story.

By Louis Sahagun, Times Staff Writer
June 25, 2007

Not even civic boosters were prepared for the stunning news last week: Paramount, once labeled among the worst places to live in the nation, scored the second-largest gain in property values of any city in Los Angeles County.

Property values in the working-class, mostly Latino community grew 17.2% in 2006, placing it ahead of Palmdale and behind Lancaster — both perennial growth magnets. “We were very surprised by this finding,” said Robert Knowles, a spokesman for the county assessor’s office. “A year ago, Paramount had 12.3% growth, which was not even close to the top 10.”

Authorities in Paramount, 15 miles southeast of Los Angeles, attributed the city’s achievement to a long and hard parcel-by-parcel slog out of a municipal funk and relatively simple improvements that redefined its image.

Can other troubled suburbs hope to match Paramount’s success?

To answer that question, Paramount City Manager Linda Benedetti-Leal likes to lead visitors into a new civic center oasis near the City Hall serving the city’s 58,000 residents. She sweeps her hand past the native California plants, Mexican fan palms and a fountain-fed koi pond and says, “Our perception of ourselves starts here. This beautiful place sets a tone and raises expectations.”

Richard Hollingsworth, president of Gateway Cities Partnership, a nonprofit community development corporation representing 27 cities of the southeast county, put it another way.

“There’s a lesson here,” he said. “Smart growth is not done in weeks or months or even years — it takes decades of plodding along. You start with a good plan and stick with it.”

Many cities have defining characteristics. Lakewood has 40,000 trees. In Monrovia, it’s classic California bungalows. Cerritos touts a titanium-clad library.

Paramount’s sense of place is reflected in its little parks and white picket fences. The city’s White Picket Fence Program pays 75% of the purchase and installation cost to replace chain-link fences with rust and graffiti-resistant polyurethane picket fences.

Satisfied customers include Jose Luis Romero, who a year ago adorned his two-bedroom home with a fence he described as “a heck of a deal, almost free. The city lets you pay your 25% portion on a payment plan.

“I’ve noticed a few more fences have gone up on the street since I got mine. I bought my home in 1994 for about $120,000. Now, I could get $400,000 for it, no problem,” the 44-year-old warehouseman said.

The fences tend to serve as catalysts, motivating nearby property owners to paint a house, add an awning or plant a garden. They also embody one of the city’s strategies: modest expenses for improvements with ripple effects.

Paramount has spent $708,380 on the fences in the last decade, about $70,000 a year, city officials say. About 325 homes have been spruced up. The average cost for each household — about $770.

A few blocks away from Romero’s house, Alicia Alongi and her husband, Gus, prepared for the lunch crowd at their Cafe Corleone, an Italian restaurant that opened June 14.

“This city is amazing,” said Alicia Alongi. “City officials said they will pay 75% of the cost of improving our facade, up to $26,000.”

The couple had explored the possibility of opening their restaurant elsewhere, perhaps in Westwood or Culver City, but “fell in love with Paramount because of the way they have welcomed us,” she said.

It helps that Paramount has a cohesive City Council. When it comes to renewal projects — from the first major redevelopment plans in the 1980s to recent agreements to make room for Wal-Mart and Home Depot stores — the five-member council routinely votes unanimously.

This year, the Paramount Unified School District is rolling out a new arts program and is building a new science building and football stadium at Paramount High School. This month, three Paramount High seniors were recipients of Gates Millennium Scholarships, which funds minority students’ college education from the undergraduate through doctoral level in science, engineering, mathematics, education and library sciences.

Now, as Paramount celebrates its 50th anniversary as a city, officials are exploring proposals to upgrade their 20-year-old downtown core with new restaurants and condominiums.

Recreation Director Vince Torres said he was particularly proud of what he called the “Paramount welcome wall,” a new public sculpture at Flower and Downey avenues. The wall, which masks a bus maintenance yard, incorporates a waterfall worthy of an upscale Orange County suburb, Torres said. Foot-high silver letters that spell Paramount are on the wall.

Torres also likes to show off Paramount’s “pocket parks,” which have become the city’s antidote for trash-strewn vacant lots. The city entered into no-cost leasing agreements with the property owners to landscape their lots and accept liability while the land is in public domain, but the owners retain the right to sell at any time.

The effect of such enhancements is palpable just driving into town. It’s generally tidy, devoid of graffiti and green. But getting to this point wasn’t easy. The area once thrived as a center for dairies and hay markets. One of the few reminders of that time is a 50-foot-high, 120-year-old camphor tree — now a state landmark — that stands where hay dealers gathered to set the commodity’s price.

Paramount was incorporated in 1957, combining the communities known as Clearwater and Hynes into a city of 5 square miles that now is bracketed by three freeways.

Paramount’s fields, feedlots and more than 25,000 cows gave way to auto salvage companies, pipe yards and chrome platers. Many residents moved out.

In the 1970s, the demand for industrial use of former dairy lands, which initially had created a strong tax base, began to wane. Paramount then became a miniature rust belt. Some doubted whether the city, which had no discernible downtown, would ever attract commercial-retail development, given its severe shortage of space for basic goods and services, let alone office workers.

Then came a 1982 Rand Corp. report, which labeled Paramount a disaster area of gangs, polluting industries and cruddy neighborhoods. Things got so gloomy that when someone would ask, ‘Where do you live?” Paramount residents would often reply, “Near Long Beach.”

The year of that report, officials hatched the revitalization plan that continues to this day.

The plan couples aggressive municipal tools, such as code enforcement, with improvement programs designed to soften the “concrete jungle look” of a built-out city. Along with the White Picket Fence Program, the city offers roof rebates, in which public funds help underwrite the cost of a new roof. In the process, the program is eliminating the flat asphalt shingles which once dominated the city’s skyline.

In 20 years, the city has planted 10,000 trees, built 11 fountains and created 10 miles of landscaped traffic medians. It added 10 pocket parks with no land acquisition costs. During the last decade, the crime rate plunged 40% and the number of gangs plummeted to 12 from 212.

But the city remains the proud home of Paramount Petroleum Corp., the largest producer of asphalt west of the Rocky Mountains, and the birthplace of the Zamboni, the ice-resurfacing machine invented by Frank J. Zamboni in 1949.

Standing in the machine shop of Frank J. Zamboni & Co. Inc., where ice groomers are still manufactured by hand for use in rinks worldwide, President Richard Zamboni said, “The 5-to-zip votes on the council speak to the town’s single-most important purpose: fixing up.”

That goal may be among Paramount’s most valuable assets, said D.J. Waldie, a spokesman for neighboring Lakewood.

“A sense of place is not something you get by a lucky turn of the card,” Waldie said. “It takes decades of focused effort at many levels, from neighborhoods to the retail core.”

Nonetheless, the city continues to battle lingering negative impressions forged a quarter-century ago.

“We had to fight tooth and nail in 1999 just to get a Starbucks in Paramount,” recalled former City Manager Pat West, now director of community development in Long Beach. “They were nervous about public safety. But we reminded them that two years earlier there had been a murder in Huntington Beach and yet they built a store there.”

In an interview at a scholarship fundraiser, which featured wine-tasting and live jazz beneath the stately sycamores and elms of Progress Park, Paramount Mayor Peggy Lemons said, “We’ve come a long way, baby, but we’ve still got a long way to go.”

“Some people just won’t let go of that old negative image of Paramount,” she added. “That is, until they come into town. Then they take a look around, smile and say, ‘I had no idea.’ “

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louis.sahagun@latimes.com

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(INFOBOX BELOW)

City of Paramount

Stepped-up law enforcement efforts and civic improvements have boosted the city’s property values in recent years.

Paramount then and now

Population
1990	47,669
2007	58,000

Gangs
1990	212
2007	12

City-subsidized white
picket fences
1990	0
2007	325

Pocket parks
1990	0
2007	10

Median household income
1990	$29,015
2000*	36,749

Median resale value of single family homes:

Paramount
1990	$143,000
2007	470,000
Southern California
1990	$179,000
2007	538,000

* Most recent data available

Sources: City of Paramount, Census Bureau, DataQuick. Graphics reporting by Louis Sahagun

It is among the world’s fastest-growing cities, at once a chaotic megalopolis and a thriving center of entrepreneurship.

By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer
June 25, 2007

LAGOS, NIGERIA — Away from the noise and hustle and stink, the shriek of energy, the never-ending buzz that is Lagos, a man reclines on a gravestone, serenely reading a book.

His name is Immortal, and he sells life insurance. He says he is waiting for an angel.

“I just come here to relax,” says Immortal Emenike, 40, from his unexpected haven in Trinity Cemetery in Olodi Apapa neighborhood. “I like the serenity, the fresh air. It’s very hard to find in Lagos.” Nearby, a goat named Sikira nibbles on the vegetation. Outside is a wall of sound: buzzing motorcycles, car horns and traffic.

Like many Lagosians, Immortal appears nonplused if you ask him what he loves about the raucous mega-city he calls home. He has a passion for Lagos, yet seems wary of questions, in case they’re not kindly meant.

“Lagos is like the New York of Nigeria,” he says. “It’s a jungle where a lot of things can happen. Things that don’t happen anywhere will happen in Lagos: the unexpected.”

Lagos is one of the planet’s fastest-growing mega-cities, with people drawn not only from rural Nigeria but also from all over West Africa to hack out a living. Depending on your point of view, it’s either a center of irrepressible entrepreneurialism or a nightmarish city of unplanned chaos, a cautionary tale on what not to do.

No one is sure whether the population is 9 million, as last year’s house-to-house census claimed; 16 million, as estimated by the U.N. Population Fund; or 17 million, as the Lagos state government insists. The United Nations agency has predicted that Lagos will be the world’s third most-populous city by 2015, with 23 million people.

It’s not a place for the fainthearted. From the first wallop of steamy air on alighting from a plane, Lagos is a plunge pool of intense exhilaration, jumbled with measures of shock, frustration, rage and boredom.

Despite poverty, intractable social problems, mind-boggling corruption and dire failures of planning and infrastructure, “I think this total doomsday scenario that Lagos is going to be this total Dickensian horror place is not right either,” says Daniel J. Smith, a demographic anthropologist at Brown University. “Nigerians have lived with the failure of their government to provide leadership and infrastructure for a long time, and so they have adapted all these ways to make things work.

“There’s this incredible ethic and tradition of entrepreneurship, and maybe that’s related to living in a place where you can’t count on the government to provide services and amenities.”

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has argued that the mega-cities of the future will look like Lagos: chaotic and spontaneous with planning solutions improvised on the run rather than following some master plan.

Even arriving can be a shock. “Lagos airport? In a word, don’t,” cautions the Lonely Planet Bluelist of destinations to avoid at all costs.

Borne downward on the airport arrival hall escalator, international visitors arriving for the presidential inauguration at the end of May found themselves trapped, with a solid crowd bottlenecked at the bottom. They crashed into a wall of backs, tripped, stumbled, even leaped over the sides, literally falling into Lagos with a thunk.

Then there’s the metal jigsaw of rickety trolleys pressed around the baggage carousels and sometimes a wait of hours to collect as huge bags of traders’ goods are unloaded.

Outside, license plates proclaim that you’ve arrived in “Lagos: Center of Excellence.”

The jostling thoroughfares are much more than mere arteries for the choking traffic. The roadside is an open-air market, a car sales yard, a photo studio; a truck depot, pool hall, butcher’s; a lumber yard, an office, a sheep yard; a place to hang laundry on the highway sidings, or to nap on any available surface.

There are some sights that strain credulity: A city skyscraper just folded like a house of cards one weekend.

Papered all over walls and suspended from any pole are advertising billboards and banners, as though the city were screaming out its own exuberant and often perplexing monologue: “Food is ready.” “Slow down, bridge under investigation.” “Plumber is here.” “We paste posters.” “Keep off the wall.” “No parking no waiting no hawking.” “Please pay your tax regularly.” “Do not urinate here. It is prohibit.” “Don’t offend our ancestors with fakes. Insist on the original prayer drink.” “Overhead banners are prohibited.” “It is illegal to have anything to do with touts. You may end up facing various miscellaneous offenses.”

Taxis are plastered with biblical verses and homespun advice: “Love everyone Trust no-one.” “Watch and See.” “No controversy.”

Businesses grab attention by turning to religion: “God is Able Store.” “Heaven Economics.” “Miracle Outfits.” “Divine Ultrasound.” Then there are more the bizarre appeals, such as the “Peculiar Beauty Salon,” or the “Cholesterol Hair Conditioner” found in some outlets.

The exuberance is reflected in Lagosians’ flamboyant clothing and the startling towers of bright material that women wear on their heads like flames of color. There are nightclubs where patrons fling all the plastic tables and chairs into the air when things are really humming.

Taiwo Adeyeye, 19, arrived alone from the town of Ogbomosho in Oyo state in April.

“I love it because it’s a commercial city. It’s a place where you get a lot of buyers for your wares,” says Adeyeye, who lives in a room behind a baker’s shop and walks all day in the sauna-like heat selling bread from a tray on her head.

“It’s not really everything that I’d want,” she says of her room and job. In the little leisure she has, “I just walk around the area. I feel good walking around. The things I see all around excite me.”

Smith, the demographic anthropologist, says that despite government failures and corruption, Lagosians have developed small trusting business networks, allowing them to survive and profit.

“People look at a place like Lagos and some of them think, ‘Why would anyone ever want to go there, because it’s so big and populated and there’s so much poverty?’ ” he says. “But people are carving out a living better than they would have been able to had they stayed at home.

“People have managed to cobble together an informal economic infrastructure that enables them to carry out all these commercial activities somehow. Everyone’s getting water for their homes somehow, and every business manages to hire a generator to keep their business going.”

Ezekial Charles, 38, a pastor and businessman who arrived seeking his fortune in 2001, sits in the shade of a tree surrounded by litter a few yards from a busy highway.

“I think you get used to it. When there’s no light it sometimes is painful, but still I feel happy,” he says, referring to the long and frequent power outages. “I love the population, the way business is flowing. A few people are honest, let’s say a quarter of them. People here can help you and make life easier for you.”

Even the rich cannot escape the city’s notorious traffic jams. But for the poor, opportunity knocks with every “go-slow.” Buyers collect their purchase before paying, in case the traffic moves along. Then, according to local etiquette, it’s up to the seller to run thundering along to collect the cash and give change. The traffic lanes are always busy with the sound of flip-flopping feet in cheap Chinese footwear and the shout of traders plying their goods.

Everywhere there are entrepreneurial openings: Two boys put up a traffic cone blocking access from a clogged artery to a highway, demanding money to pass. When one driver refuses to pay, he and one of the boys scream at each other, waving arms and blazing with fury. Just as it seems someone will pull out a gun, the row abruptly evaporates. The cone is removed. The driver passes.

“Roads are the worst planning problem,” Lagos state government planner Benedict Kehinde says. “I can say that there wasn’t any planning. The government would acquire land, and people just moved on and constructed buildings, so it becomes difficult to build roads on that land. So you have to wind your way around the existing structures.”

At times the city is visual anarchy, with piles of uncollected trash, mountains of jumbled timber, abandoned car skeletons, tires. Lagos produces half a million tons of trash a day, according to a recent environmental report to the state government, and much of it is collected and dumped anywhere by freelancers.

A train drifts by with people crowded on the roof. Traffic buzzes the wrong way up a one-way street, spreading across the lanes like waters in front of the opposing traffic flow.

Lounging near two dusty outdoor pool tables on a recent election day, civil servant Kola McCauley, 30, waxes lyrical about his hometown.

“I love my city. I love Lagos. It’s very lovely. The people, they’re very intelligent. They’re very versatile. They’re very hospitable and accommodating,” he says as a screaming match erupts between voters and polling officials a few yards from where he sits and police have to be called in.

Mostly, Lagosians know when to stop. But not always, says Immortal in the cemetery, taking a break from his book.

“You have to be cautious all the time. Maybe I’m walking and I step on your shoes, even if it’s by mistake. It can cause a big fight, and in the end the police arrive. It’s because of the pressure of society.

“You see it every day. Things that should be cooled down are blown up like a volcano. The serenity here helps me to mellow and think of good things.”

By BILL PENNINGTON ; Published: June 24, 2007

When she moved into her retirement condominium on a golf course, Eleanor Weiner admired the lush, pristine views of the fairways and greens, a landscape she never had to mow or maintain. Not long after, as she prepared dinner, a golf ball shattered the kitchen window, whistled past her head and crashed through the glass on her oven door.

Ms. Weiner retrieved the ball from her oven and stalked outside to confront the golfer who had launched the missile.

“He told me that’s what I get for living on a golf course,” said Ms. Weiner, who is in her 80s and has lived for a dozen years alongside Rancho Las Palmas Country Club near Palm Springs, Calif. “That was the first time I heard that, but it surely hasn’t been the last.”

The intersection of errant golf shots and private property is not a new phenomenon. But with new gear that enables average golfers to hit a ball 250 yards, and with golf communities sprouting nationwide — 70 percent of new courses include housing — it is becoming an increasingly prominent problem. Most homes built near this country’s 16,000 golf courses may not be in the cross hairs of slicing duffers, but thousands are.

“It’s not only an ongoing problem, it’s been made worse by technologically advanced golf equipment that makes golf balls go farther — and farther sideways,” said David Mulvihill, a managing director at the Urban Land Institute, who has studied golf course development.

“So homes that have been on a golf course for decades without incident are suddenly in the path of guys whacking giant-headed drivers. The golf course designers are trying to adjust with wider fairway corridors, but because of liability issues, no one is willing to put on paper what the acceptable setbacks are.”

Before buying a five-bedroom house in Maricopa, Ariz., Jenny Robertson scrutinized it, with her mother’s help, according to feng shui principles to assess its harmony with its surroundings. Mrs. Robertson, who is not a golfer, barely looked at the tee box 150 yards from her backyard.

“We did not consider the feng shui of bad golfers,” she said. “When I go outside, it’s like dodgeball out there. I wish I knew that you have to be careful where you live on a golf course.”

Some people have become virtual prisoners in their homes. Earla Smith lives at Lookout Mountain Golf Club in Phoenix. Look out, indeed.

“The second day I was in the house, I kept hearing a banging outside,” Ms. Smith, 85, said. “It was golf balls hitting the outside walls. Three or four windows were broken. I sat out on the patio and I was lucky I wasn’t killed. I had a 70-inch picture window broken on the front of the house, and that doesn’t even face the golf course.”

In Rehoboth, Mass., Joyce Amaral collected 1,800 golf balls from her property abutting Middlebrook Country Club, then lugged them into court when she sued the club. Ms. Amaral’s house was hit so regularly, her landscapers wore hard hats. Balls set off the burglar alarm and dented her car.

Although the club existed decades before the house was built, a court ruled that the balls — and the golfers looking for them — were a trespass. The parties settled this month, with the club agreeing to shorten the No. 9 hole, which should keep the Amaral property out of the line of fire.

But Pete Cuppels, the club’s owner, said the settlement would probably put his low-cost nine-hole course out of business.

“I’ve already had to take $50,000 from my retirement account to pay for legal fees, both the plaintiff’s and mine,” Mr. Cuppels, 68, said. “We modified the hole before the settlement, and we’ve already seen a big drop in return business. I feel worse that my name is on a ruling that could be like the Roe v. Wade of golf law. If the precedent is that golf course owners are responsible for every crooked shot hit by a novice or a good golfer, we’re all in trouble.”

Most courts, however, instead rule that homeowners assume risk when they move adjacent to a golf course, said Dalton B. Floyd Jr., a South Carolina lawyer whose practice regularly involves golf-related litigation and who has been a consultant to the Professional Golfers’ Association of America.

“The golf course owners have a duty to exercise ordinary concern,” Mr. Floyd said. “And in some instances, there may be a design problem that can be corrected by moving tees, greens, trees or using nets. There are always exceptions, and sometimes it can get very serious. But it is also part of golf that the golfer doesn’t always know where that ball will end up.”

Some follow golfing etiquette: You break a window, you pay for it. But several homeowners said golfers rarely offer restitution.

“Nobody leaves their business card in the broken glass,” said Joe Jonas, who lives near a course in St. George, Utah. “The one time I did catch the guy, he gave me an address and phone number that turned out to be phony. He was playing in a church outing.”

Course designers and golf professionals agree that the worst place to build a house is the right side of a hole about 150 to 200 yards from the tee. Directly behind or to the side of a green is risky, too, even if the home is high above it.

The deck behind Dave Feigin’s town house on the popular Crystal Springs Golf Course in Hardyston, N.J., is 50 feet above a green. Yet a steady stream of sliced shots make their way onto his deck and yard. Mr. Feigin keeps two five-gallon buckets overflowing with balls he has found.

“I give most of them away, but I keep and play those beautiful $4 golf balls,” he said.

Other homeowners have found ways to peacefully accommodate their proximity to courses.

Ms. Weiner and Ms. Smith turned to Screenmobile, a company that specializes in heavy-duty screens for doors and windows. Screenmobile said it received more than 400 calls from golf course homeowners last year.

Ms. Smith said the screens helped considerably. But asked what advice she would give a friend considering such a location, she bellowed, “Don’t do it.”

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN; Published: June 17, 2007

The Canadian city sees food-producing gardens in urban residential developments as the wave of the future.

By Linda Baker, Special to The Times
June 17, 2007

The residential skyscrapers in downtown Vancouver, Canada, are already covered with green. Rooftops and balconies overflow with ornamental vines, shrubs, even midsize magnolia and maple trees. And now, there’s more.

Vancouver is launching a novel green initiative aimed at bringing food-producing gardens to the city’s high-density developments. In what may be a first for a North American city, municipal planners have crafted a set of “urban agriculture” conditions for a new downtown neighborhood: Southeast False Creek, an 80-acre mixed-use community springing up on the former site of a shipyard.

Developers will be required to include “edible landscaping” and productive food garden spaces for rooftops and balconies. In the fall, planners will expand the False Creek policy to include such guidelines for all new multifamily projects in Vancouver.

One developer is ahead of the game. Last July, residents moved into the Freesia, a 19-story high-rise in downtown Vancouver and the first condominium project in the city to incorporate garden plots for residents. Situated on the seventh-floor mezzanine rooftop, the area features 60 wood-frame raised beds, a tool shed and garden lockers.

The Freesia and Southeast False Creek represent a “brave new world,” said Michael Levenston, director of City Farmer, a Vancouver nonprofit organization. Most North Americans garden for recreation, not for food, he said, but urbanization, as well as concerns about climate change and food safety, are driving the trend toward locally grown foods in cities.

“You can’t get more local than your own home,” Levenston said. “We’re going to see more of this in the future, no question.”

Over the last few years, farmers markets and organic grocery stores have proliferated in cities around North America. But if stalking the locally grown tomato has become all the rage among some urban dwellers, getting condominium residents to raise their own strawberries and radicchio is another story.

“Urban agriculture demands a complete rethink of how the public and private realm is designed,” said Janine de la Salle, the author of a report on how food will be grown at Southeast False Creek. Residents will not be required to garden, but the city is hoping the project will serve as a model for innovative sustainability practices.

The Southeast False Creek conditions require shared garden plots for 30% of the neighborhood’s residential units that lack access to balconies or patios of at least 100 square feet. False Creek buildings also will have a maximum of 12 stories to increase green space and sun exposure. Plans call for fruit trees and raised beds on rooftops, courtyards lined with blueberry bushes, and balcony trellises to support fruit-bearing vines.

“It’s a massive experiment,” acknowledged Elaine Stevens, a professional gardener and a member of the community group advising the Southeast False Creek developers.

A public-private partnership, Southeast False Creek will house about 16,000 people when completed in 2020, and will include a school, child-care centers and green building features.

Millennium Group developers — who received no tax incentives for the project — and the city are now working on the first phase of False Creek: Millennium Water, a 14-acre, $1-billion community that will also house the Olympic Village during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. Millennium Water will open in fall 2010 and will include 350 units of affordable housing and 750 condominiums and town homes priced, in U.S. dollars, from $421,250 to $5.6 million.

But all is not rosy.

Almost a year after the first residents moved into the Freesia project, the rooftop garden beds remain unplanted, except for a few azaleas and lavender, courtesy of the developers. Residents said having to pay for the plots — $2,621 ( U.S.) for a 24-square-foot raised bed — was a deterrent.

“The price is just too high,” said Farzad Forooghian, a 29-year-old lawyer who is spearheading an effort to activate the garden area.

So far, only two of the plots have sold.

Another problem is that about half of the Freesia’s 181 units are investor-owned, and many renters lack the opportunity and the inclination to purchase a plot.

Freesia developer Henry Man said he may hand over the Freesia beds to the homeowners association for management of the food gardens communally but also said he is unperturbed by the still-dormant plots.

“Condos take a while to settle in,” he said. “It’s a normal evolution.”

He is now developing a second high-rise with garden plots: the 29-story Atelier, which will open in 2009. Prices for the 200 units start at $655 a square foot. The raised beds will be free.

As public and private food garden initiatives move forward, it is important for people to remember the underlying purpose, said Vickie Morris, a city planner. “It’s about the taste and joy of eating the food you grow,” she said.

By JIM RASENBERGER Published: June 17, 2007

Jim Rasenberger’s book “America, 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation” will be published this fall by Scribner.

The new proposal for Grand Avenue’s first phase has the architect’s trademark loose forms. But will infighting drive him off the project?

 

By Christopher Hawthorne, Times Staff Writer; June 12, 2007

 

SINCE Frank Gehry was hired nearly two years ago to design a massive mixed-use project along Grand Avenue, he has clashed repeatedly and sometimes bitterly with the developer, New York’s Related Cos. Barring some sudden rapprochement, it now seems unlikely that Gehry will return for the planned second and third phases of the project.

But the plan, which the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will consider this morning, has turned a significant corner in recent weeks. The latest version suggests it will rise not only as an effective complement to Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall across the street but also as a dramatic architectural presence in its own right.

After bottoming out late last year, when models showed a pair of plain, rectangular office towers largely sealed off from the streets around them, the design has grown richer, more colorful and more reflective of Los Angeles and contemporary culture. The new design includes a pair of L-shaped towers playing energetically against each other — and against the rest of the downtown skyline — and framing a dense, multi-level retail plaza dotted with oak trees and other lush landscaping.

Some of the improvement is the natural result of the design gaining detail as it moves from concept toward groundbreaking this fall. But far more than previous versions, this one displays the loose, exuberant forms for which Gehry is known — and which, presumably, he was brought on to provide.

Still, Gehry appears to be loosening his ties to the development. Reversing an earlier demand that his firm fully control the design of the first phase, he has agreed to let Dallas-based HKS Architects produce the final working drawings that will guide construction. His handpicked landscape architect, Laurie Olin, has left the project.

The architectural progress of the first phase, now budgeted at roughly $900 million, is a reminder that some of Gehry’s best buildings, including the long-delayed Disney Hall, have been the result not just of sustained give-and-take between architect and client but also of substantial uncertainty. Far from a creative genius producing idiosyncratic forms in isolation, as he is sometimes portrayed, Gehry is an architect who thrives on drama and even brinksmanship. This project, from the beginning, has had no shortage of those elements; where they have been lacking, Gehry has sometimes worked to create them.

Although the budget for the first phase remains tight, it has loosened enough in recent months to allow the architect and his chief collaborator on the project, Craig Webb, a bit of creative wiggle room. The architects have given the taller, 48-story tower, which will contain a Mandarin Oriental Hotel along with a health club and high-end condominiums, more personality than it has shown since the earliest renderings. It is now cloaked in an undulating façade of mirrored glass that at several points pulls away dramatically from a boxy structural shell underneath.

In shaping the tower, Gehry and Webb say they are reaching back in part to the skyscraper designs of Kevin Roche, particularly Roche’s U.N. Plaza, finished in 1975 on the east side of Manhattan. But the inspiration is also local. The tower design represents an architectural bridge between Disney Hall and the two mirrored-glass skyscrapers that make up Arthur Erickson’s nearby California Plaza.

This sense of local connection — an idiosyncratic spin on the idea of architectural context — is precisely what’s missing in other Related projects, such as the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. For Gehry, the most effective kind of contextualism is surprising and energetic rather than dutiful — riffing on nearby buildings instead of copying them. That’s the approach he’s taken here, and it will make the tower — if built in its present form — the most compelling vertical form on the downtown skyline.

The guidelines of the Community Redevelopment Agency, however, include a recommendation against using any kind of reflective glass, which can cause glare. (Gehry ran into problems with glare at Disney Hall.) Yet strange as it might sound, given the banal reputation of the material, losing the mirrored glass would be a significant setback at this stage architecturally.

At the same time, the architects have made the smaller, 24-story tower, which will hold a mixture of market-rate and subsidized apartments, more distinct in its own right, adding fixed window boxes to its facades along 1st and Olive streets. The boxes, which Gehry has used in European projects, would help give some character and life to the outside of the tower.

Perhaps the most surprising new element in new models is the decorative pattern that Gehry has added to the tower facades overlooking the plaza — the inside faces of each L. The pattern would take the lush landscaping growing out of the retail pavilions and, as a visual motif, extend it vertically into the sky. It could connect the project not only to the history of murals downtown but also to the nascent revival of ornament in the architecture and design worlds. The pattern, a floral design blown up to skyscraper scale, is something of a placeholder and needs refinement.

The idea of pulling the landscaping up into the air is topped off, literally, in the current design by live oak trees on the roofs of both towers. Though Gehry says he isn’t aware of the reference, the gesture recalls the medieval Guinigi Tower, in the Italian town of Lucca, which is also crowned by spreading oak trees.

With Olin having left the project, the job of refining those and other landscape elements has fallen to Nancy Goslee Power, who runs a landscape firm in Santa Monica and collaborated a decade ago with Gehry on the renovation of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Related officials insist Power’s job will be to flesh out, not recast, Olin’s scheme.

At the plaza level, meanwhile, the design has made significant progress. Behind the free-standing retail pavilions along Grand rises a dense multi-level collection of shops and terraces. This effectively creates a kind of urban hillside: a third architectural presence with enough height and size to compete with the towers on either side.

At sidewalk level along 1st, 2nd and Olive streets, the models now show a loosely stacked collection of geometric forms. Large, brightly colored concrete panels (where other Related projects might use impressive-looking stone) alternate with expanses of glass and punched-through openings for pedestrians or cars. The retail pavilions themselves, topped with colored-glass sunshades, suggest a dense interplay between closed-off and open-air spaces, between informality and refinement.

It’s still not clear which retailers will fill those pavilions. Related has been hoping that an Apple computer store will occupy the most important retail corner, at Grand Avenue and 1st Street. But Related and Gehry say Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, is interested in putting the same kind of sleek cube on that corner that he has used for other high-profile Apple stores. Since Gehry hates that idea, Apple may wind up in another downtown development.

The overall design has yet to solve some of its most stubborn problems. It is not as open in the direction of Broadway — and, in general, to the south and east — as it should be. The façade along Olive Street is still getting the back-of-house treatment.

On top of that, the diverse mixture of forms, materials and colors that Gehry is using here as a means of disguising the project’s bulk remains something of a gamble. In general, Gehry’s most successful recent designs have used a limited, monochromatic material palette — steel panels for Disney Hall, titanium for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain — to temper their energetic forms.

And with the details of the commercial block still consuming so much of Related’s energy, planning for the project’s 16-acre park, which will run downhill from the Music Center to City Hall, continues to lag. A team headed by Mark Rios, who has quietly taken the lead on the park, is expected to unveil a preliminary design this fall.

There are those in this city who lament that we’ve pinned too many of our collective hopes on the Grand Avenue development. Certainly it would be a mistake to expect that when it’s built it will feel anything like the beating heart of Los Angeles, or, to borrow Eli Broad’s phrase, like our Champs-Élysées. But the project has proven to be a fascinating measuring stick for the emerging public-private partnership model of urban development. It has provided a remarkable late-career test for the 78-year-old Gehry, who understands that it will help shape his legacy — particularly as an architect so closely associated with Los Angeles — but who has grown accustomed to generous budgets and deferential clients.

And it would be a mistake to reject outright the idea that a commercial plaza thick with pricey shops can tell us something meaningful about the future of shared space in this city. Los Angeles is familiar with the notion of playing out public life in the private realm: Look at Universal CityWalk, or the Grove.

In that sense, compared with those retail projects or the aloof California Plaza, the Grand Avenue project represents at least a tentative step by commercial forces back in the direction of substantial engagement with cities and city-making. Gehry and Related deserve credit for gamely challenging the notion that high-end retail spaces have to embrace either an old-fashioned or a numbingly sleek form of urbanism.

The most important question going forward is how Related officials will judge the architecture of the first phase. They may view it as an encouraging sign of what real architecture can bring to a development, in buzz and urban character as well as in sales. But it’s also possible that they’ll see their tumultuous experience with Gehry primarily as a cautionary tale — a bullet dodged — and move forward convinced that the risks they have taken so far aren’t worth repeating.