Another Reason to Set Up Online Tracking for Your Name

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In today's connected world one thing all of us should do is track our identities online.  You might think, "Well, I don't blog, or use Facebook or any of those other web things so it's really not worth my while" but I'll have to disagree with you and I have a real life story to help explain why.

This morning I was checking my Google Alert feeds.  I have several set up for various interests, like "winston-salem arts" or "forsyth county business" and I also have alerts set up for tracking blog searches for similar terms.  This morning I came across a listing for a blog that sent chills down my spine.  Essentially it threatened some people at a local institution with severe physical harm and it did so by naming them specifically and providing their home addresses so I thought it needed to be taken seriously.  I'm not going to go into any more detail than that because I don't want to give the threatened folks any more angst than they have already experienced.  I called security at the institution to give them a heads up and they gave me an email address to send them the URL of the page containing the threats.  I heard back from them about an hour later and they said that the page had been found by someone else last night and that the threatened parties had been alerted.  I can't tell you how relieved that made me feel.

But here's the point.  The people who were threatened could have found the same information if they had an alert set up for their name because their names were used specifically on the threatening page.  Even if the threat ends up being a false alarm they will have known about it even if someone else hadn't warned them.  Of course this only happens if you're threatened by name online, but there are other practical reasons to set up an alert system:
  • Someone might be saying nasty things about you on a message board.
  • Someone with your name might be doing nefarious things, and if they are you want to be aware of it so you can let people know it's not you. 
  • Documents that you might have thought were private somehow end up online.  At least you'll know about it and maybe you can take action to have them taken down.  
  • A friend posts pictures that have you in them and tag them with your name when they upload them. You may not have your friend remove the pictures but if you're uncomfortable with your name being attached to them you can ask them to remove the tags.

I think you get the point.  Anyway, if you want to set up an early warning sytem for yourself it's easy and free to do with Google.  Simply visit the Google Alerts page and follow the easy prompts to set up the alert.  You can set up the alerts to be emailed to you as they happen, which means any time your name appears online you'll get an email, or you can have all the alerts compiled and sent to you once a day or once a week.  Here's a helpful tip: use your full name in quotation marks, like "jane smith", because if you don't you'll get an alert for everyone with your first name and everyone with your last name.  By putting both names in quotes you can cut down significantly on the number of "false positive" alerts you'll get.

One last thing: it's kind of fun finding other people who have the same name as you.  I've found that there's a high school baseball player in Oklahoma with my name (seems he's pretty good too), and there's someone else here in North Carolina with my name.  I'm going to have to track him down some day.

Winston-Salem Might Be Barking Up the Right Tree

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For as long as I've lived here I've been reading about plans for revitalizing Winston-Salem.  The strategy seems to be to revitalize downtown, concentrate on developing a business community focused on what can generally be classified as the "creative and design industries", and to try and attract and retain young, well educated professionals.  Two items I've read over the last couple of days cause me to believe that the government, business and civic officials driving this strategy might be going in the right direction.  Here they are in no particular order:

  • An article in Atlantic Monthly by Richard Florida titled How the Crash Will Reshape America that focuses on the fundamental change wrought by the recession and the areas that will be winners and losers in the process.  To put it simply he writes that the areas that will prosper are those that effectively cultivate an economy based on the creative class, and not heavily dependant on manufacturing.  He also references research showing that cities with a greater population density of creative and professional types leads to more innovation which in turn spurs economic growth.  In the article he talks about mega-cities like New York, but there's no reason that similar formulas can't work for mid-tier cities like Winston-Salem, especially when they are within shouting distance of other hubs of creative and professional classes like RTP and Charlotte.
  • An article about the growth of Winston-Salem's downtown and it's potential to grow even more.  See the bullet point above for why this is important. 

While it might seem like things are moving slowly, what Winston-Salem is doing seems to be pretty smart.  If things continue to develop well then eventually the city will have a core comprised of a few square miles filled with what every city center needs: office space of varying quality and expense, restaurants, retail (need lots of work there), arts and other entertainment venues, apartments and condos.

While it's wholly appropriate to debate the use of public dollars to entice businesses to move here or help finance ballparks, it's also important to keep in mind that we're lucky that city leaders seem to have a fairly coherent strategy for downtown development.  The city leaders aren't perfect, and not everything is working as expected, but I think we're in much better shape than many cities in similar situations because we are primed to take advantage of the direction the economy is heading in America.

Don’t Sell Me a Recession

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So, raise your hand if you aren't aware that we're in the midst of a recession of epic scale.  If you raised your hand then please let me know what cave you've been living in so I can move there with my family.  My point is that we all know there's a recession on and we're not likely to forget any time soon.

I confess to a morbid fascination myself, as is abundantly evidenced by my posts about the economy, real estate, etc.  I've watched with fascination as people started pointing fingers at each other in blame.  "It's the bankers' fault" some say.  Others blame homeowners, the media, the government, the…well, almost everyone.  Basically the recession is the most significant event since at least since 9/11 and it has had arguably a greater impact on our daily lives than any event for a couple of generations.  As much as we'd like to we can't escape it.

All this has me wondering: why is every company out there playing off the recession to sell their services.  Many seem to be using gimicky plays on the 'stimulus plan', as in "Come shop at ACME shoe store and take advantage of our toe stimulus plan!"  Or they come across with messages like "We know times are tough, that your budget's tight, so we're offering deep, deep discounts on…"  My problem with this approach is:
  • I hear enough about the recession on the news, at the water cooler, etc.  I don't need to be reminded of it by every merchant out there.
  • How is it effective marketing to remind me that I'm broke as you try to sell me your discounted wares?  The reality is that if I'm broke and if your product isn't a staple (milk, bread, eggs, Nintendo Wii) then I'm not going to be swayed by your discount.  In effect your discount is going to woo people who have money and still have their jobs so why create a negative association with the recession? 
  • If everyone else is doing it how are you separating yourself from the herd? 

My advice?  Go back to the basics and play up your strengths.  Better quality, better service, customers are treated like family, etc.  Unless you're Wal-Mart the likelihood that you'll win on price is pretty low, and who really wants to be known as the cheapest shop in town?

So merchants of the Piedmont Triad please, please, please do me a favor.  Don't sell me a recession, sell me what you've got.

2 for 1 at Carolina Kia

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If you live in the Triad you've probably seen the Caaaaar-o-lina Kia commercials.  Well, according to Ben they're running a commercial offering a 2-for-1 deal; if you buy a Sorrento or Sedona you'll get a Rio for free except for taxes and tags.  As Ben mentions there's nothing about it on their website, so I can't point to details, but if you're in the market for a car you might want to make your way to High Point to give them a look-see.  

One in Nine Homes Empty. Eternal Optimists. The Bottom Near?

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According to this story in USA Today one in nine American homes is vacant.  10.1% of rental units are vacant and 2.9% of homeowner units are sitting empty, and the total number is over 14 million units nation wide.  Housing units worth over $500,000 are just as likely to be empty as those under $100,000.  9% of units built after 2000 are empty compared to 2% of older homes.  In other words the units sitting empty aren't just squats in crumbling industrial cities, and in fact they are more likely to be developments that promised a piece of the American dream in the newly landscaped suburbs and exurbs.

But there are always the optimists.  Real estate licensing exams in New York still have plenty of takers. I like optimists because they're the engines that keep the country going.  I figure if these folks can make a go of it now then they deserve every success that comes their way.

Optimists also look at the glass as half full.  Just look at the recent foreclosure news here in the Triad.  One article in the Greensboro News & Record focuses on the fact that foreclosures in the Greensboro/High Point markets rose 28% from 2007 to 2008.  Yet in the Business Journal we find this article that tells us that foreclosures in the Triad are down 62% from January 2008 to January 2009, and that follows on the heels of a 23% drop from December 2007 to December 2008.  In other words we could finally be finding the bottom of the housing decline.  Guess which article the optimists will focus on?

As for commercial real estate. Ugh, let's just stop here and have a nice Valentines Day.

You Know Times Are Tough When…

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You know things are tough when even government jobs aren't safe.  Growing up in DC the conventional wisdom was that if you wanted to make real money you worked in the private sector, but if you wanted stability you went to work for the government.  The joke was you'd have to die to lose your job.

Reading about the county commissioners' meeting in this morning's paper was just a tad depressing.  The commissioners were told that they were facing a shortfall in next year's budget unless taxes were raised or expenses were cut.  They said that if the cuts came from job cuts alone it would mean cutting 226 jobs, and commissioner Walter Marshall actually asked how those job cuts would affect citizens.  Well, I know what the effect would be on at least a couple of hundred taxpayers.

Commissioner Dave Plyler also asked how much money the county would save if they forced county employees to take 14 days of unpaid leave during the year.  I'm sure the county and school employees were just overjoyed to hear that question, but I'd think that they'd prefer that to the possibility of losing their jobs or of seeing their coworkers lose their jobs.

There's another old joke from my days in DC.  During snowstorms the federal government would make announcements that they were closed except for "essential personnel" and we'd always ask "If someone isn't essential then why do they have the job in the first place?"  Well, I guess we're about to find out exactly which jobs are essential.

Forsyth County Property Revaluation: Whether Now or Later We’re Going to Get Hosed

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I have a prediction: there's going to be an absolute crap-storm when Forsyth County does its property tax revaluations, whether it's this week or in two months.  The county commissioners heard last night from the fellow in charge of doing the revaluations and he told them that he'd heard from an expert that because they'd already announced the revaluation schedule there was nothing in the state's statutes that allows them to delay the revaluation.  After reading that my first question was, "Is there something in the statutes that disallows them from delaying the revaluation?"  But after mulling about it a moment more my second thought was, "Even if they delay it six more months will it make that big of a difference?"

Here's my rationale.  They did a good thing by waiting for all the 2008 data to be in before doing the revaluation because the real estate market tanked in the last part of the year.  That said, from what I've read they only use sales data to determine the property value which means that there's no way to capture the actual loss in the value of our property.  In other words if the houses in my neighborhoods can't sell, and I mean literally can't because there are no buyers out there, and the most recent sales occured earlier in the year how is the assessor going to see that houses that sold for $250,000 last March would only fetch $215,000 this March?  Also, as I argued in an earlier post, if they take the average of the sales over the last four years, and there were hundreds of sales at the higher prices from 2005 through 2007, but only a handful at the lower 2008 price then the prices will be skewed higher.

All this leads me to the following: the revaluations do a better job of capturing an increase in property value because increased prices generally occur in a hot market with lots of sales.  As more sales occur the prices rise and they push the valuations up.  But when a market cools prices might fall but they aren't reflected in the valuations because no one can sell their houses thus the losses in value are hidden.  I might be able to claim that the realistic market price for my house is only a certain amount, but since there's no empirical sales data showing that houses in my neighborhood would sell for that, because there are very few or no sales, then as far as the assessor is concerned my property value is frozen at the higher rate.  My valuation may not have gone up any more from its high, but it almost certainly hasn't gone down to the true market price.

That's why it doesn't really matter if the revaluation comes this month or in July. For all intents and purposes our property values are frozen at an artificially high amount.  If the commissioners really wanted to be fair they'd talk about lowering the tax rate, but since they're staring budget deficits in the face there's a better chance of me becoming Pope than that happening.  Another thought: why not do the revaluations every year?  That way you can adjust to any rapid rise or fall in property rates and set taxes on current market values.  I think residents would prefer either of those proposals to the current system.  I'm not saying they'd like it, they'd just hate it less.