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Learning to Love my Comforpedic (with a Little Latex Help)

When our new mattress (the Comforpedic Mystic) was delivered from the factory, I was really excited. We’d been talking about a new bed for the past couple of months, so I was really eager for that first night on the mattress.

The first couple weeks of sleep on the Comforpedic were fine. I wasn’t sleeping any better than on the old Sleep Number bed, but I wasn’t sleeping any worse, either. After the first couple of weeks, though, I noticed a pain like I hadn’t experienced from sleeping on a mattress before.

My legs, feet & even hips hurt so much that I hobbled around like an old man in the weeks after getting the new mattress. The problem for me was that I’d sink into the mattress, but it wasn’t really all that soft. I’d contort throughout the night, trying to get comfortable & wake up feeling like I’d rolled down a hill. At the same time, I had a lot invested in the new mattress and really wanted it to work. I was hoping that I would get used to it & the pain would go away. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of returning the mattress with no guarantee that something else would work better.

I was reading the “Whats the Best Mattress” forums quite a bit at this time, and latex was brought up again and again as the ideal topper for a hard mattress. I started thinking about what bothered me with the Comforpedic – both that I sank too deep into it, and also that it was too firm. Each of those things could possibly be fixed by adding a latex topper, which would hopefully keep me from sinking down too far (dissipating the heat), while adding a little cushion to the bed at the same time.

I looked at a few different places for a latex topper, but the cost was either too much (after spending a lot of money on a new mattress, I didn’t want to pay more than I needed to for a solution that I wasn’t sure would work), or else the foam would take too long to ship. I finally found a 2″ latex topper on Amazon that I decided to buy. It wasn’t what I’d call cheap, but not as pricey as some of the toppers out there. I felt better buying from Amazon, because of their return policy.

When I got the topper, I rolled it out & put it on top of the mattress. The mattress was a ridiculous 13.5″ already, so an extra 2″, plus the “low profile” foundation, made the bed seem like something out of a fairly tale involving a princess and a pea. It also had a faintly weird smell that has dissipated over the course of the last 6 months.

I’m not complaining, though, because the topper worked. What had been a very uncomfortable bed was transformed into the most comfortable one that I’ve ever slept on. I initially felt like a little bit of a failure because I’d picked “the wrong” mattress. But the truth is that it’s really hard to figure out what you are going to like during 15 minutes in a store. With a little bit of help, I was able to get the Comforpedic to work well for both me and my partner. Hopefully, this is an investment that we’ll be able to live with for many years to come. If we get 10+ years out of the combo, it’ll be money well spent.

If I had to do it all again, I probably would make some different decisions based on what I learned through this experience. I’d probably buy a well made, firm, spring mattress without any pillowtop, that could be flipped. Then I’d buy a 3-inch latex topper. Or maybe go 100% latex in the first place. Regardless, I’m still happy with the way things worked out.

Written on 02 January 2012 by Joseph Geierman under Daily Life, mattress buying with No Comments

My Mattress Buying Experience

Prior to this purchase, I did not have much mattress shopping experience. When we purchased our old soft-side waterbed in 2001, it was a pretty cut and dry episode. My partner and I went in to a store & picked it out. It only cost a few hundred dollars, and the sales guy barely talked to us. When buying our next bed, about 5 years later, we already had our minds set on a sleep number bed. We went into the sleep number store at the mall, lay on a few beds, and ended up picking out one of the lower-end models. It was an OK experience. There was not a lot of negotiating involved that time either, from what I can remember.

I really liked the waterbed, but its downsides were that it was too hot for me & very heavy to move. The sleep number bed is easier to move (it’s filled with air), but I never thought it was as comfortable. It also developed sag between the two sleep chambers, which I inevitably seem to roll into. The sleep number bed was made more acceptable when we traded out the egg crate foam inside with some memory foam purchased from the internet. We had slept on a memory foam topper at my dad’s house, which I thought was one of the most comfortable sleep experiences I have had, and that was our starting place in purchasing a new mattress.

I started off trying to do a little research on highly rated foam mattresses. There are not really a lot of mattress reviews out there, so I kept coming back to the Apartment Therapy “A Year in Bed” series that reviews a different mattress each month. The reviewer there mentioned a couple of latex beds that were at the top of his list, and we figured that was a good starting point for us to check out. We went on the websites for the companies that make those beds, and identified some stores that sell the brand.

We went to those stores on a Saturday morning. When we walked in, I asked the sales guy who came up to us if he had the Danny Seo latex bed – he didn’t know what I was talking about, but showed us his latex mattress collection. He kept up a constant stream of sales banter while we lay on the 2 latex mattresses there. Both were kind of springy and didn’t have a lot of edge support. I asked him about memory foam, and he showed us the TempurPedic and ComforPedic beds.

Of course we had heard and read about TempurPedic before. To some extent, they are synonymous with memory foam in general. I had heard that they are pretty warm to sleep on, though, and the way we just sank into the bed and stayed there was kind of weird. We tried the ComforPedic next, and there was a lot more “bounce” and responsiveness to them. It was pretty obvious that we were interested in the ComforPedic. The model we liked (the “Navina” – also known as the “Mystic” or “Respiro”) ran about $3500 list price. Immediately, the sales guy told us that Simmons would only let them take 20% off the bed’s list price – which I took as a way to tell us that the starting price was $2800.

I was not ready to really start negotiating for a mattress after having tried just a couple in one store, so we went to a different store a few blocks away, where I thought they would have some different latex mattresses. Once we got there, it appeared to have all the same mattresses at the place we’d just been at. When I told the sales guy, he said, “Oh yeah – we are owned by the same guy as that other place. We are just here to help steer customers away from pre-owned mattresses, which is what most of the other stores around here sell.”

While we were there, we spent some more time lying on the latex ComforPedic and TempurPedic mattresses. We both still liked the feel of the ComforPedics the best. Since both stores were owned by the same company, we got the same “I can only take 20% off” line. I liked the sales guy a little better, but we weren’t ready to commit to purchasing, and called it a day after that.

The following day, we went to Macy’s to check out their selection. Of course they had TempurPedic. The sales man steered us to a set of mattresses called Sealy Memoryworks. We weren’t too impressed, but saw one foam bed sitting by itself. We hopped on top of it & really liked it – we said, “wow – this is as good as the ComforPedic beds from yesterday.” When we looked at the name, it turned out it was a ComforPedic Loft Gel Touch – essentially a special mattress that Macy’s had made for its stores. It had a different mix of latex and memory foam, along with a layer of “cool gel.” I asked the sales guy how much we could get it discounted for, and he said 10% – so they were selling it for about $3200. We got the salesman’s business card and headed out.

After visiting 3 different stores and discovering that we liked the ComforPedic line in each one, we started really focusing in on that brand. It turns out that Simmons has a factory store in Atlanta. They sell discontinued and overstock mattresses that were never slept on. What I read online sounded like you could get half price or more off the mattresses. We went one weekend morning, and while they did have a few ComforPedics, the woman who was there said that they rarely get king size mattresses of any type. Kings are made to order, so it is rare for one to be made but not be delivered to the end-user. We crossed that idea off our list.

When I was younger, I would have probably considered a mattress that had been used slightly and then returned. These days, though, I am not really that adventurous. There are too many stories about people getting bed bugs from used mattresses or hidden dirt and mold. I’m not willing to risk it.

When I was researching ComforPedics, the sites I kept coming to were Craig’s Beds and Grateful Beds – sister sites run by a guy who runs a mattress store in NYC. I sent them an e-mail asking for an “online coupon” and got a call from Craig (the owner) the following day. We talked about the mattresses for about 10 minutes. It was an easy conversation. He told me that he liked selling mattresses over the Internet, because people he dealt with typically knew what they wanted. He had a lot fewer returns that way.

We talked price – I ended up getting a good one; paying significantly less than “list,” and also less than the discount the guys in the brick & mortar stores offered. I was able to think it over & call back to let him know my answer – which was “I’ll take it!” I paid & then received a notice a few days later about when the mattress would be shipped to me. It was being manufactured to my specifications (King Size, etc), so it wasn’t sitting in a warehouse somewhere. It took a few weeks, but I felt good knowing that the mattress hadn’t been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere or possibly even returned.

Written on 01 January 2012 by Joseph Geierman under Daily Life, mattress buying with No Comments

Mattress Shopping Resources

While shopping for a mattress recently, I found that my usual methods of researching a big purchase were stymied. Objective websites and message boards with informed commenters were few and far between. I eventually did find some resources that helped me investigate mattresses and the whole buying process, but they were hard to come by. Those sites I thought were helpful are listed below – hopefully they will make life a little easier for others who are contemplating a mattress purchase.

Very early in this process, I learned that mattress shopping (like to car shopping) involves lots of marketing tricks, haggling & other high pressure sales techniques. Here are some of the best articles I found that described the mattress-buying process:

What the articles above lack is any kind of objective review of mattresses themselves. When it comes to things like electronics or cars, there are lots of enthusiasts out there who are discussing the pros and cons of various features. Mattresses don’t seem to inspire the same enthusiasm. That said, there are a few online forums and other sites that are worth checking out when trying to figure out how to rate the various makes and models out there:

  • Consumer Reports Mattress Forum – Consumer Reports has a fairly active mattress discussion forum.
  • What is the Best Mattress User Forum – the people who post here probably are the most educated about mattress types and brands. They also seem to tend towards having more specialized problems like fibromyalgia or lower back pain which forced them to become experts. Not always your “typical” consumer.
  • Sleep like the Dead – Features in-depth ratings for a variety of mattresses. Definitely more comprehensive than anything else I’ve found They do not disclose where those ratings come from, however, which makes the site a little suspicious. Even so, I used it as a resource during my search and purchase process.
  • Mattress Reviews Ratings Prices – one of the only review sites with information comparing prices. Unfortunately, they also don’t give their methodology, so I have to take everything on it with a huge grain of salt. Then again, I did look at it for comparison information.
  • Apartment Therapy: A Year in Bed Posts – a series where the author reviews a different mattress each month. I haven’t seen mattress reviews this comprehensive anywhere else.
  • NY Times Graphic from 2009 – Comparison of mattresses based on “organic” content vs claims
  • Fat Wallet Forum Deal Discussion: How to Buy a Mattress – one of the more recent discussions on the topic that I have found.

If I missed any important resources, let me know in the comments. I will write about the experience I had when actually making my mattress purchase in a future post.

Written on 30 May 2011 by Joseph Geierman under Daily Life, mattress buying with 1 Comment
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2009 – An Unexpectedly Good Year!

Too much has happened in 2009 for me not write a short note about it. When the year started, I didn’t think I’d be remembering it fondly at all – I’d just been laid off from a job I was very comfortable in, and was forced to join millions of other unemployed people in the toughest job market of the last 50 years. Few positions that I was qualified for were being posted; and of those, I did not get a lot of interest from their HR departments. Over the course of 6 months, I applied to 106 jobs. Only 5 or 6 of those applications resulted in interviews. Of those, only 3 were in-person. It was a frustrating time, to say the least.

For the most part, I think I kept an upbeat demeanor: I channeled my energies into networking and other job-search activities, and generally managed to keep busy. Ironically, on the day I felt most hopeless about my situation, I received a call from the law firm that I would end up accepting a position with. They wanted me to come downtown for an in-person interview – the rest is history. It’s funny the way things work out.

In fact, when I look back on 2009, it has been a surprisingly good year for me – especially professionally. Here are some of my ’09 accomplishments:

I appreciate all my friends and loved ones who stood by me in the bad times and the good this year, and look forward to more exciting changes in years to come!

Happy New Year, everyone – see you in 2010!


Written on 31 December 2009 by Joseph Geierman under Daily Life with 3 Comments

Views of Atlanta

King Plow Arts Center
Twitter and my camera phones have given me the excuse to take many pictures of Atlanta and its skyline.  I was looking through some of them recently, and decided to put them online here.  It really is a beautiful city.

Written on 30 August 2009 by Joseph Geierman under Uncategorized with 1 Comment

Help Find Pixie a Home

Almost exactly a year ago, I was walking through my neighborhood when I discovered a 5-week old puppy cowering and alone in front of an empty house. She had no tags or other identification, and I felt like I couldn’t leave her there. I brought her home with me and got her enrolled in Atlanta Lab Rescue‘s adoption program. She was very cute as you can see for yourself in the following picture and video from that time:


picture of Pixie

The rescue group named her “Pixie” to capitalize on that cuteness. It worked – she was adopted within a couple of weeks to a family we hoped would give her a good home for the rest of her life.

Fast forward to one-year later. It turns out that the people who adopted Pixie (they renamed her “Cocoa”) were not as good of a match as everyone had hoped they would be. They haven’t given her the attention she needs and lock the poor dog up in a crate almost all day, every day. She is a 1-year old puppy, so she has a lot of energy — she has no way to burn this energy off, because these people are more infirm than they originally let on and do not have a fenced-in yard where the dog can run around. It doesn’t sound like she’s getting walked very much, either. They have told Atlanta Lab Rescue that dog ownership is not for them and they are giving Pixie/Cocoa back immediately. This is a little frustrating, because it is much harder to get a 1-year old dog adopted than it is to get a 6-week old one adopted.

I want to help get the message out about Pixie/Cocoa and help her find a home with people who will love her, give her the exercise she needs, and give her a home she can count on for the rest of her life. She is back in the Atlanta Lab Rescue program, and they are going to waive or reduce most of their usual fees to make this transition go as smoothly as possible.

Please help Pixie. Use the “Share This” button below to spread this message as widely as possible and share this page on twitter and facebook. If you are interested in either fostering Pixie/Cocoa or adopting her, we want to talk to you. Leave a comment here or e-mail me at “Joseph [at] geierman.net.” Some recent pictures of her are below.

Written on 27 May 2009 by Joseph Geierman under Uncategorized with No Comments

Life Support for Dying Business Models

When I moved to Atlanta, there was a great bookstore here specialized in mystery and science fiction literature – it was called, appropriately enough, “The Mystery and Science Fiction Bookshop.” It had been around for over twenty years and was a fixture in the science fiction fan community.

By the middle of the decade, though, it was clear that the business was not doing well. Competition from big box bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders was compounded by the new threat from online retailers – sales at the store were tanking, and it needed to do something drastic in order to save itself.

The owner felt that the store’s location, on Cheshire Bridge Road – a somewhat seedy area – was the problem. He thought he might be able to make a go of it in a new location with higher foot traffic. To get the cash to move the store, he asked his customers for donations that would cover the cost of the move. He got those donations and was able to move the store. It closed not even 2 years after moving into the new space.

At the time, I wanted to help keep this business open – I felt that it added something to the community, and donated money to them a couple of times. Looking at it in retrospect, though, the donations were only prolonging the inevitable. For a specialty book store, location doesn’t really matter. Someone isn’t going to finish their shopping at Publix and decide to run into the bookstore to buy a science fiction novel. The real problems were:

  • Fewer people are reading, because of many other entertainment options (movies, TV, videogames, etc)
  • It was cheaper to buy a book on Amazon than at the SF & M Bookshop

These were structural changes that a traditional specialty bookstore could not compete with. Without a change in his business model, no amount of donations could have postponed the inevitable.

Fast forward 4 years, and those of us in Metro Atlanta saw a very similar situation happen with a Decatur bookstore called “Wordsmiths.” While I never went there, by all accounts the bookstore was a community gathering place. They featured author signings and other events, and were a very strong independent bookstore. The same forces at work against the Mystery & Science Fiction bookstore, however, were at work against Wordsmiths. There was no way they could sell books as cheaply as Amazon did, and there are just so many more distractions competing against books. Wordsmiths held a big fundraiser in 2008, but went out of business in March of this year.

So here we are in 2009, and another Atlanta-based business is holding a fundraiser. This time, its Paste magazine – the third largest music magazine in the country. They have been negatively impacted by the advertising downturn, and are in the process of restructuring. They need some money to help them with the transition. I wish them all the best, but remain skeptical about their chances. While Paste isn’t a bookstore, it faces a structural challenge similar to the two Atlanta bookstores I mentioned above. The print advertising market is imploding and there isn’t a good revenue model for online media yet. How is a fundraiser going to change that situation?

Donations are an acceptable business model, but the magazine and bookstore weren’t/aren’t changing their underlying mode of operation. These fundraisers are actually meant to prop up dying industries in the hope that a miracle will happen and the tectonic changes happening in our society and economy will reverse themselves. It’s the kind of thing that is easy to support with one’s heart, but not with one’s head. And it probably isn’t going to work.

Written on 15 May 2009 by Joseph Geierman under Uncategorized with 2 Comments

Desert Garden in Atlanta’s Sky

Over the past 10 years, one of the most important trends in Facility Management has been the increased focus on “green” – both in constructing new buildings and in maintaining those facilities once they have been built. As the public becomes more aware of the way humans affect the environment and are affected by it, it has become imperative that a facility manager respond to these concerns in innovative and pro-active ways.

New, eco-friendly ideas range from making changes as small as eliminating bottled water from vending machines (asking employees to drink filtered water instead) to retro-commissioning aging buildings for improved energy efficiency and significantly lower utility bills. One of the most interesting and innovative has been the creation of green roofs – gardens at the top of our cities’ buildings. These sky gardens help prevent water run-off, reduce heat-island effect and provide a relaxing place for a building’s inhabitants to break-up their workday.

The concept of a green roof is still fairly new. They offer challenges for facility managers both in their construction (how do you make sure your building can stand the weight of all that extra dirt, water and plant-life?) and in all the brand new maintenance issues they bring up – this is definitely not the kind of roof you want to have spring a leak! One of the first facilities in the South East brave enough to jump into the unknown and put a green roof on their building was the Atlanta City Hall, which did so in 2003. I was lucky enough to get a tour of this green roof recently — learning much from both its successes and failures.

We were very lucky in the weather we had while on the tour — while we were on the roof the temperature was in the 60s and there was a slight breeze. The first thing I noticed when we walked out was how similar much of the vegetation was to what I had grown up with in the semi-arid region of Southern California. There were cacti, junipers and sedum. The reasoning behind the use of non-native (to Georgia) species of plants is that the windswept conditions at the top of city hall are not “natural” and native plants may not survive them. The 3000 square foot roof area is exposed to constant wind, is mostly unshaded, and there is no irrigation system installed. In a lot of ways, city hall’s roof actually is a very similar to the type of environment that you might find in Southern California, hence the choice in plants.

Even on the roof, though, there are actually several micro-climates. There are a few areas that get a lot of shade, and in those many of the plants that are dried-out or dying in the main sections seem to be thriving. Other areas are occasionally shaded by tall skyscrapers, and in these areas certain species like Rosemary thrive (it does not do so well in the completely unshaded areas). North Georgia’s drought has taken its toll on the green roof in general, killing off many of the plants that had once taken over most of the available soil.

It would be interesting to hear how much more or less maintenance is involved in maintaining the green roof when compared to city hall’s more conventional roof tops. According to Bill Brigham, the project’s landscape architect, maintenance of the plant-life on the roof only requires an average of about one hour per month. Since the roof is Xeriscaped – meaning it uses drought-resistant plants – no watering is required outside extreme circumstances (I believe they have watered the area a few times over the course of the drought in order to keep all of the vegetation from dying). Other janitorial tasks are also required – including a constant vigilance against cigarette butts. Even though smoking is not allowed on the roof, the close proximity of city council and the courts don’t seem to stop people from lighting up. The city has installed cigarette disposal bins on the roof, but there are still butts lying all over the ground which need to be picked up regularly.

There are other challenges to maintaining the green roof which were probably not considered when it was first installed. One of these is the way it was affected by the pressure washing the building recently underwent. The individuals doing the pressure washing needed to use scaffolding which required counterweights be placed on the roof. These were thrown in the middle of the roof garden, and ended up killing many plants over the course of the month this work went on – the plants just could not withstand being crushed by the 500+ pound counterweight. Another challenge has been finding the right mix of plants in a constantly changing climate. What works well in a drought might not be the right set of plants in a more normal circumstance and vice versa.

Being able to see a green roof up close and personal was a fantastic experience. One of the best things about this one is that anyone can go see it – it is open to the public and accessible from city hall’s 5th floor cafeteria. This is one case where Atlanta was truly visionary – doing something here first that the rest of the world has been able to learn and improve from. As more facility and property managers start to see the benefits of going green, I believe we will eventually see sky gardens like this one pop up all over Atlanta and the rest of the country. I can hardly wait!

Written on 10 February 2009 by Joseph Geierman under Uncategorized with No Comments

Future Shock: Newspapers

For a while now, I’ve felt like I’m on the verge of experiencing “future shock,” described by Orson Wells as “the reaction to changes that happen so fast that we can’t absorb them.” Our society is undergoing some massive upheavals – they are happening just slow enough that we don’t yet notice how jarring they are – but they have started picking up speed. In just a few years, the world we wake up in bears no resemblance to the one we started out in – a process that used to take decades. Several things make me feel this way, one of which is the extreme turmoil we’ve seen in the newspaper industry.

Take, for example, this video from 1981:



At that time, “sitting down to your morning coffee and turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper” was a “far-fetched” idea. Indeed, the online newspaper that the story describes took over 2 hours to download and cost $5 an hour to use! How funny, then, that just 27 years later, the Pew Research Center reports that the Internet has overtaken newspapers as people’s primary news source (TV is still in the lead). Among people under 30, the Internet even rivals television as that age-group’s primary source of news!

Honestly, the fact that people are consuming media in a more convenient and more social form is not all that shocking. What is a little gut-wrenching, though, is seeing how established media companies are dealing with the changes. For example, over the last 6 months, there has been an ever-increasing turmoil in the nation’s newspapers (who do not have a revenue model yet that can make utilizing an online platform work). The most prominent paper in the spotlight is the NY Times, about which there has been much speculation about whether or not it can continue publishing while staggering under hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. Closer to home, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is losing $1 million a week and may be considering eliminating its print edition. Even the local alternative paper has been forced into bankruptcy and major cuts to its staff.

We’re almost at the tipping point. To quote Atlanta/Georgia blogger, Griftdrift, “I don’t know if papers will survive. I know the news will survive and I know writing will survive. And although it’s going to be tough and it’s going to hurt at times, someone’s going to find a way to make this work.”

Of course, not everyone thinks newspapers are going to completely die out. A friend of mine, Amber Rhea, believes that a subset of newspapers will survive by concentrating on hyper-local events – city council meetings, obituaries, wedding announcements… and of course local advertising:

I think it’s not so much print media that’s declining, but corporate conglomerate print media. Are small papers getting bought out by those conglomerates? Yes, but they’re ultimately not surviving. I think in the coming years we will see more community-driven papers – you might even call them “hyperlocal!” – developing because it makes sense for their community. We all know newspapers survive largely on advertising – well, businesses within the community will advertise in the community paper because that’s how they’re going to reach their customers. They know their audience – we always talk about the importance of that, right? Well it applies just as much when we’re talking about non-internet-based stuff. I just get annoyed because sometimes it seems like people in my generation, of a certain class and inclination, get very zealous about this new media stuff

She may have a point. In December, the NY Times ran a story about a small, hyper-local paper that shuns the Internet and is “double-digit profitable.” Its owner believes that putting information on the web is stupid, because that detracts from its ad revenue.

Personally, I’m skeptical that even these small local rags will outlive the big-city papers by very long. Even the publisher of the NJ paper mentioned above says he doesn’t buy newspapers anymore. The NY Times quotes him: “I just get on the Web site, I look at what I need to and I never look at the ads.” I believe that social networks (Facebook, blogs, whatever comes next) are probably a more efficient way of getting out the message about births, deaths, marriages, etc. Sure, a lot of people will always feel more comfortable with print publications — but I don’t think that’s going to make for a lasting business case. I read an article the other day on the shift from print to ebooks the other day which sums my thoughts up perfectly:

The next generation, though influenced by the prejudices of their parents, are nevertheless more likely to judge new technologies on their merits, and so on for each new generation.

I know that I’m unlikely to ever look at an obituary (or anything else) in a physical paper unless someone points me to it (probably on FaceBook).

I think the changes in this industry are only going to come faster – we all better hold on, because the world we wake up in next year may not resemble the one we’re living in today at all.

Written on 06 February 2009 by Joseph Geierman under Current Events, Pop Culture, Social Networking, Technology with 1 Comment

The Housing Crisis and the Outer Suburbs

The other day, I came across two articles about how bad the housing glut is in the outer suburbs. I don’t exactly live “in-town”, but I do live very close to Atlanta. Unfortunately, I pass many half-finished developments and other fields of dreams around here every day. Even just a little further outside the city, however, things get much worse.

On January 11, the AJC reported on real estate research group, “Metrostudy’s,” recent findings that there are “148,000 vacant home sites” in 22 metro-Atlanta counties – an increase of 42% since 2006 (at the peak of the market). The article focuses on Carroll county, about 50 miles East of downtown Atlanta, where so many empty lots were cleared before the developers’ credit fell through, that it would take 26 years to develop all of them at the current rate of population growth.

On the same day this local story came out, the New York Times published a complementary essay by Allison Arieff. In it, she focuses on all the houses that were actually built in the suburbs during the housing boom that are now going unoccupied — whether because they were never sold or because they have been forclosed on. The following excerpt cuts to the heart of her essay:

In urban areas, there’s rich precedent for the transformation or reuse of abandoned lots or buildings. Vacant lots have been converted into pocket parks, community gardens and pop-up stores (or they remain vacant, anxiously awaiting recovery and subsequent conversion into high-end office space condos). Old homes get divided into apartments, old factories into lofts, old warehouses into retail.

…

But similar transformation within the carefully delineated form of a subdivision is not so simple. These insta-neighborhoods were not designed or built for flexibility or change.

How do you re-use whole groups of buildings that were built for a very specific purpose when their reason for being has evaporated? She points to a few efforts — subdividing McMansions; tearing them down and using the salvaged pieces in other construction; even retrofitting them with “green” fixtures as part of Obama’s upcoming stimulus plan. In the end, Arieff admits that she doesn’t know what the final answer should be, and that all of her thoughts on this so far are inadequate to the task.

I don’t know what the solution is for all these empty houses and lots either. Maybe doing something “green” is the right idea. We could turn them into wind and solar farms, use the land to grow vegetables, or just rip down everything that’s there and plant a bunch of trees. Giving people jobs demoing the shoddy construction could be part of the stimulus plan!

The past decade has exposed me to a lot of things I never thought I’d see — gas shortages, mass foreclosures, the worst economy in 60 years. I’m definitely not insulated from any of those things, but they would affect me even more if I lived in a subdivision surrounded by nothing but fields. The final answer to all of this will be messy and likely won’t be that satisfying to anyone involved. I think this is a good opportunity, though, for us to question the way we build and start brainstorming about new ways to do things.

Written on 14 January 2009 by Joseph Geierman under Current Events with 4 Comments