Free Republic

The conversion of cornfields to subdivisions is a familiar phenomenon by now, as growth booms in ever-larger rings around Chicago. It means new housing for growing families, increased tax revenues for local government. But what does it mean for farmers? Will County is a good place to look for an answer. It is the second-fastest growing Illinois county, experiencing a 33 percent population increase from 2000 to 2006, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. So one might expect an outcry from the farming community over the loss of land. "When I started at Will County I thought I was going...

RATHDRUM, Idaho (AP) -- A developer has threatened to make a big stink after the Kootenai County Commission denied his request to rezone property he owns at the edge of town for a professional building. Specifically, Steve Nagel plans to park a pig farm on the site, with hundreds of squealing porkers greeting visitors to the northern Idaho town. (snip) Nagel doesn't want to be in the city because he would have to pay an estimated $300,000 to extend a sewer line a half-mile and a water line a mile under railroad tracks to the property. (snip)Nagel, a Rathdrum native,...

Today marks the 105th anniversary of the unnamed hurricane that destroyed this island city, killed somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people and inspired one of history’s most amazing feats of civil engineering. [. . .] . . . The highest house in the city was at an elevation between eight and nine feet. . . . By the peak of the storm, no part of the island remained dry. “In reality, there was no island, just the ocean with houses standing out of the waves which rolled between them,” [. . .] Pictures taken after the storm show empty streets....

The Mets, the Jets, the Nets, the Yanks — new stadia all around! But where to put them? Architect and urbanist Michael Sorkin surveyed the five boroughs for sites to consider. The fight over the city’s attempt to build a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan was never about football (other than the political kind) or, for that matter, the Olympics: It was over where to put the stadium and who should pay for it. The West Side project has now gone down in flames because the administration chose one of the worst places available and then asked us...

Voting with their feet, boomers head back to the city. Jim and Marty Shannonhouse love the Carolina Panthers, but they don't bother with season tickets. On game days, they stroll from their Charlotte, North Carolina, home to the stadium in search of cheap seats. "If we can't find any, we go home, watch the game on TV, and leave the door open so we can hear the crowd roar," Jim says. Most days are equally relaxed: in the morning, he walks a few blocks to his office. In the evening, he and his wife saunter to bistros, ballet, and the...

It never ceases to amaze that people are willing to have others do what they want, but seem less inclined to actually change their own behavior. The Onion satirized this impulse two years ago when they joked that: "A study released Monday by the American Public Transportation Association reveals that 98% of Americans support the use of mass transit by others." A good example of local life imitating satire is the results of the latest "survey" done by Envision Central Texas, where self-selected citizens responding to a questionnaire declared their preferences for how and where all of us in central...