Lower Home Sales, Higher Suburbs

Your home-energy bills might seem like a crime to you, but that's not why police departments from Florida to Washington state and up into Canada are examining suburban utility bills. The cops are looking for a tip-off that a home is being used as an indoor pot farm.

Raids of two houses near Miami late last month turned up marijuana operations worth nearly a million dollars a year in annual sales, according to the Associated Press. A coordinated effort by federal and local agents aimed at stamping out house farms is making hay in some top locales. "You can go into any neighborhood, the nicest neighborhood you want, and the person next door could be a marijuana grower," a Drug Enforcement Administration agent told the AP.

Detecting a pot farm isn't easy. Cops often rely on neighbors to notice when an empty house on the block starts to get regular visits from strangers. They also look for telltales like a spike in water or electricity use as pot growers provide their plants with rain-forest levels of moisture and artificial sunlight. In response, farmers tap illegally into electric lines or water mains to evade the meter. Besides running up energy costs for everyone else, these jury-rigged conduits sometimes electrify the ground outside the home.

So far, law-enforcement agencies are concentrating on drug syndicates, like the Cuban gangs behind many farms in the Miami area. But as the subprime crisis empties out houses across the United States and homeowners look for ways to make their mortgage payments, look for amateurs to get into the racket: One suspected grower arrested in Miami is an older woman known in her neighborhood as the lady who drives the ice-cream truck.

No Rush to Reform in Melbourne

Will the success of the real-estate market endanger smart growth in the suburbs? Outside Australia's city of Melbourne, politicians are siding with developers against the growth management group Melbourne 2030, according to a recent article in The Age, an Australian national newspaper. The capital of Victoria, Melbourne is Australia's second largest city, with a population of 3.2 million that grows by some 1500 people each week. Melbourne also boasts one of the lowest density rates in the world, with less than half the density of London (11 lots per hectare versus 25, but don't ask us what a hectare is.)

The authorities in Victoria have formed a commission to deal with the city's future growth called Melbourne 2030--named for the year by which Melbourne will have added another million people. The commission's goal is to study the best way "to comfortably absorb up to 620,000 extra households ... while protecting and enhancing our existing suburbs." This entails familiar steps like restricting suburban development to 40 percent of new building (from the current 60), and promoting commercial centers in residential areas that will encourage density and discourage the use of cars.

The usual objection to this sort of planning is that Australians--every bit as bent on upward mobility as Americans--won't give up their dream of owning their slice of the homeland and be shoved into apartments. And no less of an Ausssie icon than actor and Melbourne burber Geoffrey Rush (above; photo: Ken Irwin) has joined the opposition group Save Our Suburbs in protesting suburban high-rises. (S.O.S. has proposed that Melbourne 2030 leave posh burbs east of the city alone and direct its do-gooderism to the newer towns to the west.)

But local planning experts say the bigger threat to Melbourne 2030's plans is that politicians have become spoiled by unbridled growth. "The Government’s primary objective is to keep the building industry going because it’s essential to the Victorian economy," observes Bob Birrell, Monash University’s Centre for Population and Urban Research.

Bear this dynamic in mind as the U.S. housing market comes back from the dead in the next few months: its arguable that the building boom here forestalled for nearly two years the downturn we're experiencing now.