LAI KeyNotes: September 2007

Land Economics Weekend in Los Angeles, CA
October 18 - 20, 2007
Register Now!

There Are Still Registrations Available for the Fall Land Economics Weekend!

All Aboard for Los Angeles—to the Biennial Land Economics Weekend

Third Street Promenade— Santa Monica Disney Concert Hall— Downtown Los Angeles

Fereydoon Ghaffari, Chairman, and Committee members Marsha Rood, Ronald Buss, Millard Lee, Elizabeth Watson, Gary Nelson, Jim Fawcett and David Lachoff have been putting on the final wraps to the upcoming three-day Biennial Congress event to be held in Los Angeles, Thursday, October 18 thru Saturday October 20, 2007.

Hollywood Highland retail center

Tours will include, the RAND Corporation's new LEED headquarters campus in Santa Monica; Playa Vista and the Marina area; the Westside of Los Angeles (including Westwood, Century City, Beverly Hills); the current revival and renewal areas of the Hollywood District and Downtown Los Angeles, as well as some of the new "signature architectural edifices" (Staples and the Walt Disney Concert Hall) and other significant buildings in the Los Angeles area. The tour is meant to present examples of the major new developments and the ever-changing trends of this Southern California metropolis.

Santa Monica Beach Nokia Theater at LA Live!— Downtown L.A.

The event will feature a welcoming reception, administrative meetings, special awards and speakers, an induction dinner for new members, and addresses by one of our members, Gail Goldberg, the new Director of the Los Angeles Planning Department and Anthony Downs, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institute.

Santa Monica Pier

It promises to have something for everyone, whether you are interested in shopping, dining, touring or visiting the many well known sights in Los Angeles. And of course, the weather promises to be a welcome and sunny break for the easterners.

LAI member Agenda for the L.A. Land Economics Weekend (pdf)
Registration form for the L.A. Land Economics Weekend (pdf)
Registration form for the L.A. Land Economics Weekend (doc)

Letter from the President

Dr. James A. Fawcett

Lambda Alpha has a long tradition of promoting both academic and public education about land and the manner in which it is valued, used and transacted. This is not news to any of you. What occurred to me, however, was that with the recent collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, I'm not sure that we, as LAI chapters, have been doing as much as we could to help the public understand the dimensions of this current market failure. We have in our membership some of the best minds in this field and I wonder if we couldn't, as chapters, use our own expertise to do that.

What I have in mind is, within our chapters, develop a list of potential speakers for topics in which the members have expertise, post that list on our chapter websites as a "Land Economics Speakers Bureau" and then let the press in our cities know that our members are available to discuss land economics matters. While members would not speak for Lambda Alpha as a society, at least the fact that the member is associated with the "honorary land economics society, Lambda Alpha International," would give both the member and LAI a bit of publicity and our collective list would provide the media with a ready-made source of expertise on land matters.

Shifting gears here to the arts, I was happy to attend a joint Orange County and Los Angeles Chapter meeting yesterday in Costa Mesa. The two chapters do a joint meeting once a year and it's a great chance to renew friendships in the region. We had a marvelous tour of the Orange County Performing Arts Center both in front of the house and in the back of the house, and what an impressive theatre it is (and only one part of a performing arts complex including a new symphony hall and other theatre venues). The tour reinforced in my mind how important our cultural venues—museums and performing arts centers—are in providing a gathering place for all residents of our cities as well as providing a prominent landmark artistic statement for the city itself. In our focus on the business of land, I hope we can also take time to consider the contributions to urban vitality made by these marvelous public spaces.

Dr. James A. Fawcett
International President
fawcett@usc.edu

Editor’s Column

Helen Sause

Dear Colleagues: What a Mid-year Melt Down! The prolonged exuberance of the market was a dead give away that this period of high demand had about cycled through, but the "sub prime" kicker was a huge added misery for the foreseeable correction! The innocuous term "sub prime" doesn't do justice to what happened and the deep suffering in human and financial terms appear will be with us for a long while. That's not the topic I wanted to chat about this month but its impact is so pervasive that not to mention it is to not acknowledge a white polar bear in the corner of the room. Real estate professionals out our way are saying, "could we pretend August 2007 never happened?" Ah would that we could! It will work its way through, but fear that much more pain and likely some overcorrection will occur before we are past this one.

There's a strange thing that has occurred writing with President Fawcett, he is always about two jumps ahead of me with the topic he chooses to write on! For the last couple of months this column has focused on five issues that we the members have indicated are priorities. These could be loosely grouped into about three topics. Last month the Organizational issues were considered and the plan to work on them at the Biennial conference in Los Angeles was discussed. This will be an ongoing topic. But the two priorities of Developers Role in Communities and fostering Professional and Ethical Standards form another group. Finally there are the programmatic topics, Preservation of Assets and Retention of the Public Eminent Domain capacity.

So what are some of the ways that LAI can use its knowledge base and powerful membership to address the Developers Role in Communities and enhance/strengthen the Professional and Ethical Standards that are the basis of our professional credibility? Dr. Fawcett really hit the nail on the head!

Being proactive! Using our chapters to conduct sessions on these subjects is a direct way to raise awareness that these complex issues are priorities. Just talking about them is a huge step forward. These are definitely not seminars for finger pointing... but using a "how to" approach to these relationship and behavioral issues in effective ways would increase the professionalism of members and non members.

I mention that these are complex matters. They are indeed. City officials, the neighbors and the developer approach every project with much different expectations, usually these are spoken and unspoken (and sometimes spoken very loudly!) with the development team often caught in-between. Every circumstance is different but there are certain similarities. And those are what the LAI workshops/seminars could focus on from the view point of what issues to look for and ways to consider addressing them. Since LAI includes public officials in its membership we have a wealth of knowledge to draw on and this can be extremely useful in raising the awareness of cities in their roles. Of course we are all neighbors...so we can project how we would feel if this development was going in "next door" to our homes/property!

Putting together such seminars and getting the word out of their consideration would be absolutely beneficial to the profession and almost certainly provide positive publicity for Chapters.

Ideas without implementation are not worth the powder to...... So what Chapters would like to noodle on piloting this idea for LAI? Be interesting to see if it would work in different parts of the country.

The Ely Chapter has begun small discussion groups I believe and maybe they could morph into full scale discussions of roles and responsibilities. No other real estate organization appears to be doing anything similar and since these topics are not often brought up in polite or mixed (public and private) company it would be interesting to see the receptions. Any one up for this?

Till next time!

Helen Sause
International Editor
helensause@alamedanet.net

Guest Editorial -
Response by Roger Cunliffe

Last month's guest editorial by Alan Nevin, Market Point, Realty Advisors provoked (as intended) a number of comments. The following letter is published to give a flavor of comment -

Dear Mr. Nevin:

I read your guest editorial in the August LAI Keynotes with great interest. I have a mid-Atlantic viewpoint: I have lived for two significant parts of my life in the USA (including three years as an architect in Chicago in the early 60s), and I have two American children— a daughter in Portland Oregon and a son in Minneapolis. I also lived in both the UK and the USA during WW2—a time of serious fuel shortages.

I believe that if the USA is going to bring its energy usage more into balance it needs not only to look back to that time, but also at how less energy-fortunate countries are coping right now. It's a place where I think the London Chapter (amongst others) might help. To my mind, the most difficult issue is how to change the general mind-set. When our former Prime Minister Blair said that "everyone enjoys flying away on foreign holidays", I thought back to WW2, when the only folk who flew away to foreign parts were bomber crews. Our politicians have to think smarter.

Professor James Lovelock talks of "sustainable retreat" rather than the conventional "sustainable development"; abundance will have to give way to austerity. "Pioneering backwards" is going to be tough, but I believe will tone the muscles of our somewhat flabby societies. But to be effective we must be pro-active—not victims of circumstances.

So I greatly applaud what you are doing.

Kind regards -

Lord Cunliffe RIBA MCMI
London Chapter Member

ED. Note: This is a topic that LAI could provide significant expertise and influence in carrying out. We will ask the Board to deliberate on the role they would consider taking.