Articles by Katharine Wroth

Are people smart enough to abandon the ‘burbs?

A fairly speculative piece on MSN yesterday asks the question, "Could rising gas prices kill the suburbs?" Its talk of infill and vertical cities may be the stuff of urban planners' dreams, but how will it resonate with real people?

Someone I know read the piece and took away this message: Housing prices in the suburbs are about to drop because everyone's going to leave! Sweet!

And if last night's House Hunters -- in which a couple with a baby upgraded from a 2,800-foot house in the 'burbs to an even bigger one because there "wasn't enough room" -- is any indication, it's gonna take a lot more than $3 gas to move us forward.

Lawsuit over New Orleans landfill dropped

Last week, Wayne Curtis reported on the battle over a landfill in New Orleans. The landfill was set to close today, but a lawsuit being heard last Friday could have kept it open. Seems that the lawsuit was dropped, though, and the closure will go forward as originally planned.

Tip o' the cap to our very own Sarah Kraybill for asking the logical question, "Hey, what happened with that lawsuit?"

Seattle’s papers catch up with electric cars

Here in Seattle, we have two daily papers. They're embroiled in a seemingly endless joint-operating dispute. I don't know the ins and outs of the deal, being a relative newcomer to the city, but I do know this: every morning at the bus stop, as I review the front pages displayed in the papers' side-by-side machines, I marvel at their attempts to tell the same stories in different ways.

Today, for instance, both front pages featured huge, splashy photos of our visit from the Blue Angels -- but with different headlines, people! Different headlines! And there, at upper left, each had a plug for an article on an electric car. The Times went with the Tesla, while the P-I featured the Zap! Xebra. (Both PDFs, sorry.)

Semi-funny, yes. But it's also an indication of how far we've come. This is the dawning of the age of the curious. Better to have two papers reporting on this kind of thing than none.

From Guzzlers to Greenlanders

Size does matter Fingering the Hummer H2 is so last year. The latest trend in Hummer humiliation? Video of die-hard haters humping the gas guzzlers. If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, this specimen is infinity squared. (Safe for work, but only if your boss has a sense of Hummer humor.) Photo: ihumpedyourhummer.com Damn those special […]