Other shrinking cities
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THE five kinds of heirloom tomatoes on Joanna Lehrman’s and Roxanne Adair’s subcontract look delicious. Their tiny two-acre (0.8 hectare) cultivate also has a buzzing beehive and a hoop house, which protects propagate in the winter. It is just a short walk from downtown Flint, a rough struggling Michigan city. Until about a year ago the land was 16 profligate residential lots along Beach Street, filled with bilge-water, broken pieces of concrete and burnt trees. According to Doug Weiland, who runs the Genesee County Dirt Bank, a third of all Flint’s parcels are abandoned. Even feasibly stable neighbourhoods have boarded up houses.
Flint is one of many cities in America’s rustbelt, like Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Rochester, which have seen melodramatic drops in population over the past half century or so. When manufacturing progressive these cities, so did their residents. In 1968, General Motors, which was founded in Flint, employed 80,000 employees there. Today, there are only 6,000. The borough’s population has halved since 1960, falling from 197,000 to just now over 100,000; proportionately, it has suffered nearly as wretchedly as Michigan’s largest city, Detroit. Many unqualified to sell were forced to abandon their houses. Others confounded their homes to foreclosure. The rustbelt cities of the Midwest and north-east have been in loss for decades, but it has taken decades for many of them to accept that no one was coming to retain them.
Source: The Economist
MADISON.GOV Proposal would allow backyard beehives in Madison
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Jeanne Hanson wants to ease honeybees without scaring anybody.
For years now, bees have been struggling to gullible an onslaught from mites and various diseases. But, because they're fertile pollinators, bees are critical for healthy mount and flowers.
"I wouldn't be surprised if there's a hundred beehives in Madison," says Hanson, who is mixed up with with the Dane County Beekeepers Association and keeps bees herself at her east-side dwelling. "There are not many wild hives. There aren't good places for them. There's a crater tree every once in a while, but as soon as a tree dies, people cut it down. If they haunt in a wall, they're instantly removed."
"Honeybees very much lack beekeepers keeping hives to live," she adds.
Which is why Hanson hopes a new ordinance introduced Tuesday by Ald. Satya Rhodes-Conway passes the Cheap Council. The ordinance would allow residents who get a $10 permit to keep up to six hives, with sure restrictions.
Beekeeping isn't currently illegal, but the burg has no formal rules regulating it. The ordinance creates these rules, stern hives bigger than 10 cubic feet. They also cannot be closer than 15 feet to a means line, 40 feet to a sidewalk or pre-eminent building on an abutting lot. If the hive is within 25 feet of the realty line, there must be a "flyway" barrier at least six feet cheerful and 20 feet long, requiring the bees to fly up in preference to of directly into a neighbor's yard. There also must be a constant provide of water.
Source: Isthmus
