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  2006 Wish List/ By Carla Blackmar

I’ve been thinking about what I’d really to see happen in 2006, and I’ve decided that this year I want:

1) “Mug-o-Matic” low-water power washers installed in every Starbucks across the country.

These handy little devices would look a lot like the blenders that Starbucks makes their Frappucinos in... they’d have plexiglas lids that closed over a solid base that had a little clamp that would hold your mug down. When you closed the lid, a sudden whooshing and whirring would begin, and within seconds, your mug would be cleaned and sterilized, and ready to be put back into your purse or bag for use the next time you wanted a coffee (or alternately, if you’re about to get your Frappucino, it would clean out the mug you forgot to wash yesterday.) Using this nifty device would be so much fun, it would create an incentive for people to bring their own mugs. Of course, the incentive would be increased by Starbucks’ new vow to start offering a 50 cent discount to re-usable mug users, rather than the measly 10 or 15 cent discount they currently offer.


The new re-usable mug fad would be so effective that other restaurants and supermarkets would start offering the Mug-O-Matics (and discounts) as well. Jamba Juice, Whole Foods, Peets, everyone would get in on the act. And before we knew it, we’d have a culture of container re-users. Wouldn’t that be great? All because of Starbucks and the Mug-o-Matic.
 
 
 

2. A new store on my block called “Half-Used-Hardware.” Right now, the closest hardware store to my house is a fairly long ways away, and every time I go there I’m frustrated by the way they think us urbanites only want jelly bean shaped trash cans (and have no use for the right sort of wood screws.) My Christmas-wish store “Half-Used Hardware” would be a different sort of joint. This store would be developed and managed by a tool fanatic; one of those guys who has a garage done wall-to-wall in pegboard, with hooks for every tool he’s ever owned. This guy would be a real pack-rat, and he would have started the store not with new inventory, but simply with the inventory he’d gathered up in his lifetime as a handyman. All these old tools and unused nails would be logically and meticulously organized, and the manager himself would be on hand to help people find just what they needed.


This store would be a refuge for people who purchased stuff from Home Depot, tried it out, realized it wasn’t the right thing, and then discovered it couldn’t be returned because it had been opened. Rather than going to pieces in frustration, they’d be able to bring their stuff to Half-Used Hardware instead. In exchange for the wrong thing, they’d be able to get a half-used container of the right thing. (Read More on this>>)

  
   
3. 2006 Wish Three sort-of relates to wish two. For This year, I would like it if the standard American 5-day 40-hour work week was cut down to a 4-day 32 hour work week.
 
Rather than earning money on that extra day (money which is in turn be spent on the services required by an extra day of work: child care, take-out dinner, house cleaning, etc.) that fifth day would instead be the new “working weekend” day, when people would be able to stay home and do all those things for themselves. An extra day to grow and prepare food, an extra day to look after one’s children, an extra day to go to the beach. This would be the first step in decreasing the power of the money economy in favor of enhancing the value of the labor and do-it-yourself economy. The fifth day could also be spent volunteering at places like Half-Used-Hardware or the homeless shelter, so that the burden of supporting those places doesn’t fall entirely on the state or the churches.
 
 
 
     
  4. 2006 Wish Four: Triple Deckers in the Exurbs! A miraculous change in suburban zoning codes that would create incentives for developers (and re-developers) to start converting single-family suburban homes into traditional three-decker, 3-family homes  
     
   
 

(of the type they have in Dorchester, MA, and other older Northeastern cities.) The inclusion of three family-homes in neighborhoods usually occupied by row after row of single family homes would be fantastic. Not only would it break up the visual monotony of such places, it would also help diversify the communities of people that live there. It would increase the ease of creating a multi-generational family households, where the grandparents could live on the bottom floor, and the family could live on the top two floors. Or it would make a place in the burbs for couples who didn’t want to have children, but who wanted to be part of a community that had children in it. It would also create a place for lower-income families in areas where (traditionally) only wealthier people could live.

One of the best side-effects of the new 3 deckers in the ‘burbs would be that the increased population density of the suburban neighborhoods would increase the likelihood that public transit could work in such places. With higher density neighborhoods, there would be more people to take the bus, and more places to take the bus to (more people would be able to support more local businesses and services. Because the three family homes wouldn’t all be developed by the same time or by the same construction companies, they would all look different, which would start to lend formerly monotonous neighborhoods some degree of individual character. This would in turn develop greater regional loyalties on the part of the neighborhood’s citizens, which ideally would create a greater individual investment in the public life and public space of those neighborhoods, re-invigorating local culture.

   
 
 
5. 2006 Wish Five: Dedicated Bus Lanes As part of the new zoning codes, the extra-wide streets that have been built in most of America’s new communities would be re-appropriated for the noble cause of making public transit speedier and more efficient. On six-lane urban streets (the kind we have a lot of in California), one lane going each way would become a dedicated “public transit” lane.
 
This lane would be exclusively for use by busses and street cars. The street cars which we got rid of in the forties and fifties would be brought back into action, allowing those who don’t drive to get around our cities more easily. Instead of being slowed down by gridlock created by Single-occupancy-vehicles, the public transit would become a faster means of transport than cars themselves, as they would travel quickly in public-transit dedicated lanes. This in turn would enhance public transit ridership, which would increase the functionality of transit as a whole, and decrease our dependence on fossil fuels, and production of greenhouse gasses.
What's on YOUR holiday wish list? Post on the Forum!>>