Over on MarkMaynard.com, there's an interview with Ypsilanti City Planner Teresa on all things street tree: the trees added to West Cross as part of the recent streetscaping project, the city's tree inventory and urban forestry plan, and the public tree nursery project underway.

Mark asked whether street trees have economic development benefits, on top of the obvious quality of life benefits, and Teresa pointed to a round-up by the Arbor Day Foundation; I decided to go a little further and dig up some primary sources. Copied over here for my own future reference, plus just a little bit of math based on the first source:

$50k median taxable value in Ypsilanti * 3% increase from street trees * 33.67 mills for all local property taxes = $50.51 / year tax revenue increase due to each street tree added to an Ypsilanti home that doesn't have one.

Records from the 1940 Census were released earlier this month, 72 years after the Census was taken, and you can find full, house-by-house data online via the National Archives, in the form of scanned record sheets filled out by the census takers. Simply fill in your state/county/city/street, et voila! ...you have 50 pages of scanned, 70-year-old, handwritten pages to read through to find your house. (That last step is the time-consuming part.)

Our house was inhabited by one Theodor Schellinger and his family, who apparently relocated from Flint to Ypsilanti sometime between 1935 and 1940, and paid $35/month in rent for our house.

I'm going to make a suggestion that sounds absurd on its face, in Ypsilanti's current heated battle over cutting costs vs. raising taxes: the city should hand out $10,000 cash grants to people who purchase, fix up, and occupy vacant and foreclosed homes. Why? Because it's a net fiscal gain for the city. (Obviously, this should be treated as a starting point for discussion, rather than a fine-tuned proposal.)

As a timely case study, let's look at the properties owned by local landlord David Kircher, whose entire portfolio was recently put on the market by the trustee appointed in his bankruptcy proceedings. I understand most (perhaps all?) of these properties to also be subject to tax foreclosure by the county for unpaid property taxes.

A few posts ago, I suggested that sale prices of houses in Ypsilanti are starting to swing up over the last few months. How about the other popular metric of the housing market--the foreclosures?

Foreclosure activity, as we expect, is a downward force on home values, because the bank-owned homes dumped on the market soak up buyers. Over the last few years, from city assessing records, we can see that bank sales in the city go for half or a third the price of private sales:

With average MLS sale prices bumping along at $80,000 during that entire two year period, we can see that it was the bank sales dragging down the price. Fewer foreclosures means fewer bank-owned homes glutting the market, meaning prices can start recovering. Fortunately, Ypsi (the city, at least) is on the right side of that curve.

Several communities around the state are having conversations about mergers between municipalities, ranging from Onekama Village and Township (total population < 1,000) to Grand Rapids & Kent County, which, as a single municipality of 606,000 people, would be the 24th largest city in the United States, right between Seattle and Washington, DC. No time to process right now, but some assorted links...

One Kent:

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/03/one_kents_new_city-county_gove.html

[Note: post originally occurred on Google+, where I could limit permissions to other gamers. Photo and named redacted here to protect the "innocent".]

At least one subject of this photo will claim gamer-shame, but too good not to share.

This weekend was a bye week for my primary game, but some of my players vocally and repeatedly expressed their desire to "hit stuff". Just the excuse I needed to run Paizo's Free RPG Day module We Be Goblins!

Never in my middle school self's wildest dreams did I imagine that I'd spend my adulthood with packs of women demanding that I run D&D (er, Pathfinder) games for them. (The homebrew, in the foreground, is another nice perk of age.)

Last week, as part of the 3rd now-annual Ypsilanti City-wide Open House, I toured about 15 houses for sale around town. The only ones that might make me wish to "upgrade" all cost now at least what we paid for our house in mid-2006, which I colloquially refer to as "the peak of the market" in our neighborhood. This made me feel pretty good about my house, but, in combination with the latest discussions of the city budget, made me wonder where the market is at.

The Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors handily provides monthly market reports of MLS listings and sales, broken out by school district. A little quick and dirty scraping and spreadsheeting later, and I can make a couple observations:

...is the time elapsed since the previous post. Am I allowed to claim I've kept up this blog in various forms for over a decade, or do I have to subtract that time? This post serves as recognition that there's been a gap.

Credit for my return goes to Google+, for first renewing my interest in longer-than-facebook style posts and then suspending my account because my calling myself "Murph." there somehow violated their policy that you must, "use the name that commonly known by to my friends, family, and co-workers."

Anyways, back here and blowing off some of the dust.

Along with getting back into playing D&D over the past year, I've started catching up on the world of 3rd party publishers. One really interesting publisher is Kobold Quarterly, which seems to have developed over the course of a year from a one-man gaming zine to a respected publication with big-name contributors like Ed Greenwood, Jeff Grubb, and Skip Williams.

The biggest thing KQ is doing, though, is their patronage-based Open Design adventures. KQ puts out the bare sketch of an idea, with a couple of big options left open. (The current project, Halls of the Mountain King, has 3E and 4E versions competing.) Patrons sign up via paypal; when one of the competing options hits a dollar target, it goes into development, and other options' patrons get the option to join the winner or else get a refund. The project then commissions writers, a cartographer, and artists, and the patrons are given access to private forums to discuss the project, guide its development via polls, or propose ideas to the writers and other patrons for inclusion into the project. At the end, the patrons each get copies of the project - and nobody else does. It's a limited run, private work, and it appears that the total commission is in the few thousand dollar range, though I haven't been able to find totals anywhere.

As any self-respecting nerd knows, the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released this summer. It's probably the most significant overhaul the game has had, at least in my almost 20 years of playing, and reactions predictably range from fawning adulation to burning in effigy. I've only played two sessions of the new edition - once this running the beginning parts of Keep on the Shadowfell, and once, just over Christmas, as a player in a play-testy mid-level dungeon crawl.

So far, I'd say there's a lot to like with the new edition, but enough bad that I don't think I'll exert any effort to migrate from 3.5. I find myself wishing there were a v3.75 as an intermediate step - though I expect such a thing will evolve eventually, thanks to teh interwebs. Some thoughts: