News That Makes You Go “Huh!?”

Guess which one of these headlines is real:

1. Affordable Housing Neighborhood for Artists is Being Developed
2. Tiny Houses Popping Up to Shelter Homeless
3. Too Many Male Trees are Upping Your Allergy Misery
4. A River is Given Human Status

Funny thing, all four stories were published within the last couple of days.

Affordable Artists Housing

In Indianapolis, an Arts organization and a “non-profit” community developer are teaming up to turn vacant houses into long-term affordable homes for artists in the Garfield Park area of the city. They hope to overcome urban blight in the area and to provide housing and a venue for artists in the area of the park.

“The idea is to keep the houses outside of market forces and maintain an affordable place for artists to be able to be homeowners in the community,” said Eric Strickland, executive director of Riley Area Development. When selling, neither owner — the artist or the partnership — will profit from an increase in property value. And the artist homeowner isn’t under risk for a decrease in property value.

The art studio that was recently transformed from a Vending company building is shown here. This art studio is close to the new housing and the Park.

Tiny Homeless Housing

Groups on both the City of Denver and Portland are planning or currently developing a tiny house community to support the transition of homeless people from the streets to more permanent housing. The Portland community is focused on homeless women.

In Denver a small 0.6 acre lot will have housing for 14 people, to include common showers, restrooms and laundry services provided by a local non-profit. The development of this lot required the developers to gain zoning approval for this whole new land use.

The idea sounds nice, and I applaud their desire to help other people. I do think it would be better to place this a little farther from the Liquor Store (see article photo above.) They do say that this is a temporary site for the units and that they will be moved to another location in the future.

Too Many Male Trees

This story comes from Washington, D.C. (Insert Donald Trump Joke Here.) Apparently since the 50’s urban landscapers have chosen to plant male trees instead of female trees because females drop fruit or seeds that have to be cleaned up. (Insert strange similarities to humans joke here.) While the male trees don’t have this problem, what they do is release pollen, which would normally be captured by the female trees. Without the female trees, the pollen goes into the air, where it is breathed in by all of us allergy plagued folks.

When it comes to dioecious plants, cities tend to prefer planting males to females because females drop fruit or seeds that the city then needs to clean up. The most notorious female offenders are gingko trees, whose undesirable smelly fruit plague residents with "strong notes of unwashed feet and Diaper Genie, with noticeable hints of spoiled butter."

A River “Runs” Through It, Literally!

Pardon my pun but this one is strangest to me. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River, revered by the Maori people, was recently granted the status of a living being by the country’s parliament. This allows it to be represented in court proceedings, at the public’s expense no doubt.

And, the river immediately became a Millionaire (though in New Zealand dollars.) He/She (I didn’t mean to imply that the river has a gender but, WTH) was given $80 Million in financial redress, $30 Million towards a fund to improve the health of the river, and $1 Million to establish the legal framework for the river. By the way, this court battle has been going on since the 1870’s.

I really don’t have further comment. I have lots of jokes I thought of but I’ll refrain. I just found it interesting that all of these stories showed up in my Reader RSS Feed in the same day. So I thought I’d share them with you.

J. Keith Maxwell is a Professional Land Surveyor and Civil Engineer in Alabama. He finds humor in some crazy places, but overall he's a pretty normal, for a Nerd.