80,000 chemicals

December 29, 2009 · Posted in Materials · 3 Comments 

They make headlines every so often. They aren’t politicians, entertainers or sports figures. Many of them are in your body right now. Some of them change your body. A few kill you a little bit at a time. Children are most vulnerable.

I’m referring to the 80,000 synthetic chemicals registered with the USEPA. Only about 20 percent – mostly pharmaceuticals, pesticides and foods – have been examined for affects on humans, animals and ecosystems. Only six chemicals have ever been banned in the U.S. When Rachel Carson wrote her seminal work Silent Spring in the early 1960s, one-half pound of pesticides were used per person. Today, 20 pounds are used per person.

For chemicals, it’s innocent until proven guilty. I don’t recall chemicals in the Bill of Rights, but the power of money over politics gives chemicals special rights that animals, ecosystems and even some humans don’t enjoy.

A simple web search leads to countless examples of man-made toxins in human tissue, including breast milk and fetuses. A friend of mine died of breast cancer about 15 years ago. She was in her early 40s and had lived for several years in an old farm house surrounded by large agricultural fields. These fields were sprayed with pesticides from the air several times a year. Another friend, a breast cancer survivor, found herself chatting with other women in the oncologists office. More than half the group remembered the common childhood experience of picking field crops (strawberries, beans, etc.) in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1979, the chance of a 50-year-old woman having breast cancer was one percent. Today, it’s 12 percent.

Rapid increases in the rates of respiratory diseases, autism and even obesity have been blamed on the rampant spread of untested synthetic chemicals. In 1989, autism was diagnosed in one of every 2,500 children. Today, the rate is one in every 150 and one in every 80 boys. Childhood leukemia has increased 30 percent since the 1970s.

The most disturbing class of synthetic chemicals are endocrine disruptors, which act like hormones with devastating effect. A good example is bisphenol-A, which made headlines earlier this year as an additive to plastic water bottles. It’s been removed from many water bottles, but it’s still ubiquitous. Every year 2.3 billion pounds of BPA, as it is commonly called, are produced.

Hormones are vital chemical communicators. In minute quantities, they tell our bodies what to do and how to feel. Other common endocrine disruptors are phthalates, polychlorinated biphynels (PCBs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). PCBs were banned in the 1970s (one of only six mentioned above), yet the chemical is commonly found in people and animals – even those that were born many years later. PBDE is a commonly used fire retardant found in many building materials. Although difficult to remember, and almost impossible to pronounce, these chemicals have been in the news regularly over the years. Yet I’m not aware of any action taken to control them.

Synthetic hormones have now permeated the natural world, causing amphibians to switch sexes and human girls to start breast development as young as 8 years old. Men suffer higher rates of testicular cancer, falling sperm counts and more cases of hypospadias.

A column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times tied this all together nicely. He reported on a recent seminar at Mount Sinai’s Children’s Environmental Health Center. There is a short video of the seminar that’s worth watching. In it, Robert Kennedy, Jr. poses an entirely believable explanation for why chemicals seem to have more rights than people. If you dare learn more about this insidious trend, visit the National Institutes of Health, Natural Resources Defense Council or the US Environmental Protection Agency web site.

Bruce Sullivan

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Lenders block housing recovery

December 26, 2009 · Posted in Real Estate · Comment 

There is plenty of blame to go around for the housing bubble and its collapse. Few of us complained as we watched skyrocketing values, even as we acknowledged that it couldn’t last. Certain lenders deserve special attention for lax standards that poured gasoline on the fires of speculation. Sure, they were just playing the same game as thousands of others who packaged mortgages and sold them off to secondary markets. By reducing their own risk to near zero and raking in big fees for these loans, certain originators earned a special place in hell. Unfortunately, they have pulled the entire housing industry into the fire with them.

Lenders who keep mortgages, mostly community banks and credit unions, should be applauded for resisting the siren song of short-term gain. There are many stories of these smaller, local lenders that need to be told.

The big question now is: what’s next? The same short-sighted, profit-hungry companies that pulled the industry down seem content to hold it down. Builders I know tell a similar tale. Lenders consistently decline mortgages even for homebuyers with good credit, stable jobs and cash for down payments. This behavior strangles the emerging economic recovery. It may protect lenders’ balance sheets, but it’s no path to profits.

My inner pessimist explains this 180-degree change in lending behavior as callous self preservation. One builder pointed out that many lenders have now become owners of distressed property. Self-interest prevents them from funding competition that may slow down sale of their own inventory. While listings of bank-owned property may be slowly dropping, there is clearly much more where that came from. Lenders appear to be slipping their own properties into the market slowly. In some places, it may take another year or more for banks to unload. In the meantime, they can choke off competition by refusing even high-quality loans.

My inner optimist sees hope. To the extent that the housing bubble was built on speculative greed and, in some cases, outright fraud, we can now regain stability by rewarding strong loans. Strong fundamentals don’t seem to be good enough. We need a new factor that is quantifiable, stable and new. I’ll call it the Green Factor.

Certified green construction increases property value at the same time it strengthens and stabilizes home buyers’ fundamentals. The Green Building Value Initiative used data from multiple listings services in Seattle, Wash. and Portland, Ore. to show that certified green homes sold for three to eight percent more than the typical home. That same study calculated the time-on-market at 18 days less. More value and faster sales would be a good prescription for a housing recovery.

Energy efficiency is built into third party certification programs, such as ENERGY STAR, Earth Advantage and LEED for Homes. To the extent that home buyers invest more in the homes, they pay higher mortgages. Higher monthly payments are more than offset by monthly energy savings. Buyers make money the old fashioned way. The cost of their investment is lower than the return. The benefits begin the moment buyers walk in the door and get better every year as energy prices inevitably rise. Instead of finding themselves underwater with more house that they can afford, green buyers make a sensible investment that gets more sensible over time. You would think that this winning combination would be just what the doctor ordered for the lending hangover.

The main obstacle on this path is stingy lenders who now compound their earlier sins of excess with the new sin of self-interested frugality. Lenders rode the housing bubble to great riches. They should do the right thing and help the housing industry climb out of this hole.

– Bruce Sullivan

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