More good ideas from English footie

I was reading Mark Bradley's round up of national coverage on the Braves' Vazquez/Cabrera trade, and got to thinking how silly this whole trading players thing is.  I previously lauded the Premier League's dual championship format, and I think the Europeans have the right idea about personnel management, too.

All of the commentary in Bradley's round-up is basically about assessing whether the Braves got a fair-market for Javier Vazquez.   This means trying to assess the specific needs of both clubs with the specific talents of many different players.  It also means assessing the potential free agent signing the Braves can do with the extra salary freed up by dumping Vazquez.  Teams have to try and find clubs that have both the player they want, plus that want a player they have.  The whole trading idea just seems way to complicated to me.

In European football, you simply buy or sell a player's contract.  You determine a market value for the rights to the player's contract by negotiating with teams that want him, and you pocket the transfer fee.  This money can then be used for paying salaries or for buying contracts for other players.  If the Braves want to unload Vazquez, they simply sell him to the highest bidder, instead of having to take Melky Cabrera and some (very good) prospects. 

In economic terms, the present value of the contracts for Cabrera and the prospects should be equal to the present value of Vazquez.  All the talk about "was this a good deal" is really about trying to determine whether one team ended up with a higher PV for the contracts under their possession.  The mix-and-match nature of trading makes me think that it is very, very hard to make this collection of contract values match perfectly.  Someone is always going to get a better deal at the time of the trade, regardless of how each player performs down the line.

Isn't this analysis just a lot easier to do through just paying for the contracts outright?  If you still insisted on a trade, you'd at least be able to make up any discrepancy in present value in cash.  I would also think that the flexibility inherent in the European system would bring added value to these contracts, which would be a positive for team owners.

City politics update

Lots of articles recently on Kasim Reed and the new council members.  Plus more MARTA drama.

• Reed has chosen Lisa Borders as co-chair of his transition team.  He also went to Washington last week to lobby the feds for money for the streetcar.  
• Reed has also announced a panel to help come up with ways to fix the city's pension problem.  No idea who is (or will be) on it, just that it is chaired by former AJC editor John Mellott.
  
• I was unaware that three of the new council members are CPAs or financial analysts by training.  I'm not sure if it is just the slightly optimistic tone of the article, but I am cautiously optimistic about the new crop of council members. 
• MARTA and Jill Chambers still can't see eye-to-eye.
  

  "Every year they say they’re going over a cliff and there’s going to be a crisis, and yet MARTA’s running just fine," Chambers said.  "You can almost cut and paste the press release from the year before."
  MARTA CEO Beverly Scott says Chambers' statements are "inaccurate and fail to grasp the magnitude of the crisis."
  

  So things should go well next year at the legislature...
  
  

TADs and encouraging revitalization

Stephanie Ramage's recent post about TADs is interesting.  I disagree with Ramage about the magnitude of her criticisms, but I think they are very valid.  To summarize, she views them as too politically motivated and too big a burden on services and future tax revenue.

She uses Historic Westside Village as a sort of case study, which I think isn't very illustrative - Westside Village started as a Bill Campbell boondoggle, and the TAD component comes in later in the story.

There are plenty of other successful TAD projects in the city, but I largely I think Ramage's criticisms shouldn't be completely dismissed.  As a supporter of TADs, I wouldn't be doing myself any favors by ignoring the very real risks inherent with TADs. 

What I want to focus on though is what I think the fundamental difficulty with TADs is:

Reed to be "muscular" with panhandling problem

Mayor-elect Kasim Reed is pledging to enforce existing ordinances and get "muscular" with the panhandling problem downtown.

"We're going to enforce the ordinances and we are going to fix the panhandling challenge in the city of Atlanta, period," Reed said to rousing applause from members of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau.

"We are going to deal with this issue in a very muscular way," he said.

I am not sure if new ordinances are needed, not that Reed has proposed any.  Stronger enforcement is a good first step here.

FWIW, I'm downtown quite often and I have certainly felt like the panhandler situation has been much better the last six to nine months.  I can't remember the last time I got asked for change Downtown (although it happened to me at in Midtown Tuesday).  I'm not really sure why - maybe I'm just getting better at ignoring it all?

Can we be smarter about transit advocacy?

Richard Green, a professor at the University of Southern California who blogs about real estate, has a great little post about how transit advocates sometimes don't do themselves any favors.  The issue in the post is local opposition to a major highway tunnel proposed for downtown Seattle:

Let me stipulate that the project may very well not pass a cost-benefit test. But the line "will only advance the interests of car commuters" reflects both snobbishness and detachment from reality. According to this blog, more than four-fifths of commuter trips and 85 percent of all trips in Seattle are made in private automobiles. Complaining that something advances the interest of auto commuters is like complaining about advancing the interest of, say, children--pretty much every one of us is one, or loves someone who is.

As the Onion so wisely headlined, "98 percent of US commuters favor public transportation for others." 

This sounds uncomfortably familiar to my rantings about a tunnel under my neighborhood:

Clermont condemned; no one surprised

Via Creative Loafing, I see that the Clermont Hotel has been condemned and must close by Dec. 31.  The inspection which preceded the condemnation was triggered by the property's foreclosure, as Inman Park Properties was unable to sell the property in time. The building is practically rotting on the inside:

"There are several issues that would have to be addressed," said Kevin Jones, a manager with the Fulton County Department of Health and Wellness. Dirty linen, old bedding and bed bug stains were among them, he said. Inspectors also found mold growing on the walls, black water spilling from faucets and broken toilet fixtures.

None of this should surprise anyone who has followed Inman Park Properties over the years.  The company is infamously neglectful of property.  In June IPP got a lot of coverage from CL and the AJC, and the owner came off sounding more like a collector than a legitimate real estate investor.  I can't really fathom what business strategy he had in mind when he bought all this property and the did absolutely nothing with it. 

Anyway, anyone interested in great deal on a real fixer-upper knows where to look!

UPDATE: I can't have this post up without linking to Too Busy to Hate's requiem for  the clermont.

*image courtesy of Tadson via flickr

Reed reiterates shorter timeframe for BeltLine

Thomas Wheatley has a good article about Kasim Reed and the BeltLine.  The next mayor wants to make the BeltLine a reality sooner rather than later:

At a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday for the Beltline’s multi-use trail in southwest Atlanta, the city’s next mayor made a symbolic appearance, voiced his commitment to the project and reiterated something he said on the campaign trail: He’d like to see the Beltline become a reality in the next decade. And Reed says he’s gonna push for that to happen.

This is something I've been talking about for quite some time, and frankly I dismissed it when Reed mentioned it on the campaign trail.  I took note of it, but he phrased it rather non-committal way so it didn't really register.

As Wheatley notes in the article above, there is a matter of just how exactly to move things along quicker - all it takes is money...


h/t: Rusty Tanton