Neighborhood associations around here are quick to advise the residents about the city’s Code Enforcement Division, a unit of Neighborhood Services which gives you hell for waiting three months to mow your freaking yard fercryingoutloud.

To accompany a story in the Oklahoman about the Division, NewsOK put together a database of this year’s code violations, January through October, searchable by type of grievous offense, by address or ZIP code, or by date. I note for the record that nobody on my block got cited for anything all year.

Many cities are wondering just how they can spur development in their central zones without turning them into Xerox copies of the suburbs. Bill Hudnut, senior resident fellow and Joseph C. Canizaro Chair of Public Policy at the Urban Land Institute, suggests a two-tiered property-tax structure:

More tax on those horizontal pieces of empty land and asphalt, less on the buildings. That is, reduce the tax rate on homes and other improvements, and substantially increase the rate on the site value…

[I]f assessments are fair, the higher land tax would bring vacant or woefully under-used central sites into use, giving new life to inner cities and reducing sprawl. It would also stem land speculation, which is the big engine behind house price escalation, thus stabilizing neighborhoods and keeping sale prices and rents more affordable. The land tax returns to government — the values it creates with bridges, roads, and other infrastructure — helping to pay for maintenance and necessary improvements.

There are those who rank surface parking among the Great Evils of central-city development; were such a system as this in place, the temptation to put down a slab on a vacant lot, then sit back and collect rent, might well be reduced.

I noted earlier this year that our county assessor is now specifying land values on individual tracts as part of the records accessible to the public. Could this be an indication that they’re thinking about eventually moving to a two-tier system? Maybe not: the assessments are set by state law, not at the county level. Still, if this is the future of property valuation, better to be prepared for the transition.

Nope. “Bomber,” or at least “bomber wannabe”: folks near 48th and Brookline were evacuated today while a house was searched for explosives.

Responding to a tip, the police snapped up some guy last night down around Belle Isle packing an unspecified explosive device.

Incidentally, the suspect is not what Tim Blair might call “a man of no appearance”; there’s a photo at that NewsOK link. (To me, he looks like he’s pissed off because he couldn’t find a parking space.)

Regular readers have heard me complain loud and long about the CrappiFlats™ I used to live in, prior to my acquisition of the palatial estate at Surlywood. Still, no matter how horrible the place you live, there’s some place worse.

And this is that place:

Tenants of an apartment complex were given 30 days to move after [Del City] officials this week condemned their home.

Management of Kristie Manor Apartments, 5236 SE 29, has until Jan. 15 to have residents moved out and the units secured.

City Planner Tom Leatherbee said about 20 tenants live at the complex, which once had about 200 rentable units. Inspectors have deemed it unfit for human occupancy because of serious mold, electrical, structural and plumbing problems.

Nor is this the only complex in Del City with problems:

Leatherbee said Logan Point, 481 Scott St., has been condemned and about 60 residents there were told to move by Jan. 15. He said a bank has foreclosed on Logan Point, and a court-appointed property management company is finding tenants units.

About half the units at Eagle Point Apartments, 759 Scott St., are condemned, Leatherbee said.

What do these miserable joints have in common? The same owner: Shashikant Jogani, of Glendale, California, who has eleven other complexes in metropolitan Oklahoma City. He does not own the CrappiFlats™, which are in the process of becoming less crappy.

Oklahoma City Council has decided to fund its subsidy to EMSA by adding $3.65 to city utility bills beginning in October 2009. Those of us who pay those bills will be enrolled in EMSA’s TotalCare program, which means that we pay no out-of-pocket expense for emergency transport via ambulance — or we may choose to opt out during September, in which case we will not be enrolled. Current TotalCare members are paying between $43.68 and $75 a year for the service; $3.65 x 12 comes to $43.80.

Several municipalities in metro Tulsa (including the city of Tulsa itself) are already funding EMSA through utility bills.

The most obvious question is “Why are they waiting until October?” I figure it’s a way to (try to) avoid the wrath of utility customers, inasmuch as water rates went up this past October.

Will I allow myself to be enrolled in this thing? I figure, come the first of the year, coverage by CFI Care (not its real initials) will be further eroded, and I’m not getting a whole lot healthier, so perhaps I’d better. I hope they issue us a membership card or something, though: I’d hate to have to go find a copy of my utility bill before I get loaded onto a gurney.

In October 2007, voters approved a $248-million bond package for the Oklahoma City Public Schools. So far, the district has sold $15.5 million worth of bonds, and Superintendent Karl Springer says they should hold up before issuing more:

Springer announced at Monday’s school board meeting that funding will fall $40 million short if the district continues promised projects.

Voters were told construction would take five years, but that won’t be possible because it will take 10 years to generate the $248.4 million, Springer said. Because of inflation, that would fall about $40 million short of the actual cost of the projects.

In Springer’s view, the district should decline to sell the remainder of the approved bonds and seek voter approval for a new package with more appropriate timing.

Board members have yet to decide on what actions, if any, they will take. Board chairman Kirk Humphreys noted:

“The district took a bond proposal to the voters that greatly exceeded its bonding capacity.”

The new package would be a slightly harder sell, since some folks will remember that we just had an election in 2007 and hardly any of them will know about this little contretemps, which is one reason to mention it here.

Trout season generally runs from the first of January to the end of February, and this year the city is stocking the pond at Dolese Youth Park (NW 50th west of Meridian) with about 8000 rainbow trout. Daily limit is six.

And there will be a free Trout Clinic on the 15th of January at the gym at Putnam City High School, conveniently right across 50th from Dolese, in case your fishing skillz are insufficiently mad.

I expect this eventually will be posted to okc.gov (probably here), but so far it hasn’t.

Jeff Click reports:

The Journal Record covers an unfortunate happenstance regarding the “city detox”, as I’ve always heard it referred to, involving a couple whose business used to be located near the facility. The couple moved their business to Linwood Blvd. nine years ago to get away from the joint. Now, the company who runs the detox has proposed to relocate the facility to … guess where … about a block away from where the couple moved their business.

You can read the story here. You can hardly blame the couple for not wanting to operate in the presence of the besotted.

But there’s this:

Last year, during a presentation on Block 42 … [developer] Grant Humphreys was asked if there had been any resistance from buyers regarding the development’s proximity to the detox.

His response? Something to the effect of, “We actually see it as a plus. It brings more black-n-whites down our street.”

I figure, short of actually shooting the drunks into deep space, there’s no location that’s going to please everyone.

Forbes reports that the Oklahoma City Thunder franchise is worth $300 million, 24th in the NBA, up 12 percent from last year.

It’s obviously too early to tell whether generally higher attendance here in the Big Breezy will be enough to offset the $9.4 million the team lost last season in Seattle; revenues last year were $82 million, lowest in the league. (Still, the decidedly-wealthier teams in Dallas and Denver lost more, due largely to higher payroll costs: both the Mavs and the Nuggets got hit with the luxury tax two years running.)

And the $300-million valuation remains short of what Clay Bennett and friends paid for the franchise, not including various payments to escape the Pacific Northwest. A money machine this isn’t — yet.

Trini reports spotting a new black-on-black-with-black-accents Nissan GT-R around our fair city over the weekend.

Since it’s probably not too likely that this is one of the Lost Ogle guys on a joyride, I’m going to assume that the owner is on the Thunder roster and has the seat cranked way back. (Unless it’s Earl Watson, who is barely taller than I am.)

A new low in customer service, as it were:

An Edmond teenager who was shot last week told police it was because he complained about a faulty CD player installation in his car.

According to the Oklahoma City Police report, James Trinton, 18, went to “two guys” he knew and asked them to install a CD player and speakers in his car. But the day after the job was finished, the wiring caught fire and he had to call the fire department to put out the fire in his car.

Trinton told police he went back to the house … to complain. The two men began to curse at him, and one of them pulled out a handgun and started firing.

Whatever you may think of Circuit City, so far as I know they’ve never actually shot a complaining customer.

You wanna get rich? Buy yourself a building in Bricktown, and your future, so it’s said, is made.

“Good luck with that,” says Steve Lackmeyer:

The Bricktown Canal is littered with empty space. That space hasn’t gone empty due to a lack of interest. Instead, the owners decided a decade ago that they can demand $20 to $25 a square foot in rent with no finish out. And so you have everything frozen in place as if it’s 1999. The owners willing to make deals for canal level space have tenants on the canal. Those who were demanding $20 or more per square foot for empty space still have empty space.

If Bricktown were the only game in town, this strategy might make some sort of sense. But it’s not: there’s development all over the city center these days. Admittedly, there’s nothing like the canal in, say, Automobile Alley; but the Alley is filling spaces while Bricktown storefronts go begging. And things are going to be even tougher in Bricktown once I-40 is moved and the Core to Shore revival begins in earnest. If you were planning on getting rich, it’s time you did something about it.

What with Chad the Elder going into great detail about his 16-percent-plus bump in property taxes this year, I figured I’d work up a breakdown of where my property taxes (which have increased 1.48 percent) are going, as per the official rate scale:

• City of Oklahoma City: $125.46
• Oklahoma City Public Schools: $439.83
• Metro Tech Center: $129.49
• Oklahoma County general: $94.29
• Countywide school levy: $34.70
• County Health Department: $21.71
• Metropolitan Library System: $43.58
• Total: $889.06

If it sounds like the city isn’t getting a whole lot out of this, well, this isn’t their major source of funding: revenue from property tax is used strictly for debt service. The city figures to spend $62.7 million to retire bonds this year, out of a budget of $787.5 million. (By law, they can’t run a deficit. For reference, city population was estimated at 547,274 by the Census Bureau last year.)

No, not Sammy. This is a portmanteau concoction meaning “South of St. Anthony,” and while it may sound silly, it’s not really any sillier than “Cottage District,” which is Oklahoma City’s shorthand for this section of MidTown. (Legally, it’s the Northwest Addition to Oklahoma City, a description used by no one but title-insurance folks.)

Right now, SoSA is an area of vacant lots, 1910 architecture, and a smattering of 21st-century contemporaries, all more or less jumbled together. It’s what you might call a hodgepodge, not that there’s anything wrong with that:

The City is currently developing the design guidelines for the Midtown Cottage District (SoSA). Take a look at the area surrounding the intersection of NW 7th & Francis to see what’s already been done. It’s become an architect’s playground … there are currently three architect-occupied dwellings within a 1-block radius, and at least two more are being designed right now. The styles range from historic renovation to contemporary, to an innovative fusion of both. It’s really cool. These types of houses couldn’t be built in Mesta Park or Rose Creek … But what about SoSA? Will the new guidelines turn SoSA into another homogenized neighborhood? Do we want to be assured of lockstep conformity to a Kinkadian vision of “neighborhood,” or would we rather be surprised and impressed by the next new building?

Actually, I wouldn’t object to a bit of Kinkaidery here and there, but I don’t want it to be the defining image of the district. As I posted there as a comment:

I live in one of those districts with fairly strict requirements; I’m thinking that it wouldn’t hurt this town, and might help it, to try a little experiment with Almost Anything Goes. I’ve visited the Okasian House — it was on the 2007 Architecture Tour — and I’d love to see other contemporary homes cheek by jowl with Craftsman houses, just for sheer jaw-dropping variety.

And if someone wants to do a new version of, say, a Wright Prairie House, that’s also fine with me.

Three and a half years ago, I drove the entire length of Oklahoma City’s Grand Boulevard, mostly, well, because I could. I noted at the time:

W. H. Dunn was a landscape architect in Kansas City in the early 1900s, eventually becoming the Superintendent of Parks. His duties in Kansas City, however, apparently didn’t prevent him from helping out other cities in need: in 1909, he developed the first official parks plan for Oklahoma City. One of the features in Dunn’s plan was a boulevard to encircle the city, connecting regional parks in each quadrant. Not much happened on that front until 1930, when the boulevard was incorporated into The City Plan for Oklahoma City, and the process of acquiring rights of way began.

I’d never seen it in print before, but now Blair Humphreys has a copy of the actual plan, in all its yellowing splendor, from the days when we dreamed, and dreamed big. (It took us a while to get back into the habit.)

I described Oklahoma City’s Devon Energy last week as “freaking huge,” and apparently I was being somewhat conservative:

Devon Energy Corporation (NYSE: DVN) [yesterday] reported net earnings for the quarter ended September 30, 2008, of $2.6 billion, or $5.92 per common share ($5.87 per diluted common share). Third-quarter 2008 net earnings were 256 percent greater than Devon’s third-quarter 2007 net earnings of $735 million, or $1.65 per common share ($1.63 per diluted common share). This is the highest quarterly net earnings in the company’s history.

But, you say, fossil-fuel prices were dropping during the third quarter. Didn’t faze them:

Devon accounts for derivative instruments using mark-to-market accounting. As a result, for each reporting period the company recognizes in earnings the unrealized changes in the fair values of its derivative instruments. An unrealized after-tax gain on oil and natural gas derivative instruments of $1.2 billion resulted from decreases in oil and natural gas prices during the third quarter of 2008. This third-quarter unrealized after-tax gain more than offset unrealized after-tax losses on oil and natural gas derivative instruments recorded in the first two quarters of 2008.

Translation: they know how to hedge. And they also know how to drill:

Devon drilled 636 wells in the third quarter of 2008, with an overall success rate of 97 percent.

The only question, really, is this: are they too freaking huge to be bought out and moved away?

Based on what I knew about the parking situation at the church where my precinct votes, I surmised that I would have to arrive no later than 6:20 to guarantee a space, and therefore I contrived to pull in at 6:19. I found a crowd, but not a huge crowd: figure the front door to the church at twelve o’clock, and the end of the line was about quarter past nine. At 6:40 the doors were opened and we got to stand inside for a change; the line was bisected by surname, with the dividing point somewhere between Knipplemier and Koch.

Things moved pretty quickly, though: the lines started moving around 7:01, and I got to shove my ballots into the machine (#70 and #71 — there was a separate ballot for the city-charter changes) at 7:12. Not so bad.

We really appreciate your dropping by with that brace of Benzes; the ML320 BlueTEC should find many friends here in the Big Breezy, and there’s something reassuring about the fact that there’s still a spiffy 190D from the dawn of time still on the road.

That said, though, this snippet from your tour report (December) won’t wash. I quote:

We celebrate another productive day with sirloins at Oklahoma City’s famed Cattlemen’s Steakhouse (operating in the city’s historic Bricktown district since 1945).

We’ll give you “famed.” But Cattlemen’s dates back to 1910 — what happened in 1945 was an unexpected change of ownership — and it’s nowhere near Bricktown, which was so named by the late Neal Horton, first new developer in the old cluster of warehouses, in the early 1980s.

I will not, of course, ask if you tried the lamb fries.

Steve Lackmeyer reports in the Oklahoman:

At a meeting of the committee that oversees downtown’s tax increment finance, or TIF districts, the chief executive officer of Devon Energy pitched his plan for creation of a new district for the $750 million, 54-story tower that could dramatically transform most or all of the downtown area.

A new city staff report indicates the proposed district is expected to generate $135 million. In what may be a first for the city’s tax increment financing program, [Larry] Nichols said he wouldn’t ask for TIF money for the tower, an adjoining new park or for purchase and expansion of the city-owned west City Center garage.

“One hundred percent of this project will be paid for by Devon — it will not be paid by the TIF,” Nichols said. “We’re asking that the TIF be spent to fix up the neighborhood.”

How much fixing up can be done with $135 million? Keep in mind that all the original MAPS projects combined, adjusted for inflation, cost $400 million or so.

If all this seems a hair improbable, it’s partly, I think, because we’re thinking of Devon as just one little ol’ natural-gas producer, hundreds of which have come and gone over the years. It doesn’t occur to us that Devon is freaking huge: the company’s market cap is upwards of $30 billion, even with gas prices on the low side. They could practically build this skyscraper with petty cash. And Lackmeyer reports in a sidebar that the tower alone, by 2022, will have an annual economic impact of $1.9 billion. Now figure in the upgrades to the surrounding area made possible by TIF revenues, and suddenly this looks like the screaming deal of the century.

None of this is graven in stone, of course. But from where I sit, it’s a lot more than a mere sketch on a dinner napkin.

As seen here last fall:

Every year around this time, it happens: traffic snarls at Northwest Distressway and Belle Isle Boulevard, and the backup quickly spreads up the offramp and onto Interstate 44 westbound. The Association of Central Oklahoma Governments conducted a study after the 2005 holiday season to see if there was anything that could be done about it, and ACOG subsequently recommended changing the phasing of traffic signals and additional lane construction.

There’s not a lot of room through there for new lanes, so it’s imperative to get better use out of the old ones. Next spring the city will start reshaping the intersections. For now, signage has been placed to direct drivers to Penn Square Mall or Belle Isle Station — which won’t necessarily be in the same direction — and barriers will be installed to prevent right turns from the westbound Distressway to Belle Isle, a significant cause of backups.

The first barriers were temporary: a series of closely-spaced poles, which did manage to keep the cars in line but which proved somewhat fragile. Today they were removed, and standard-issue concrete Jersey barriers started appearing in their place. It will take several days to complete the installation; in the meantime, the westbound Northwest Distressway exit off I-44 is shut down. Traffic, of course, is horribly snarled, but so what else is new?

As told by a friend not far across town:

I just got home from the convenience store. The man standing behind me in line was dressed like a gorilla. Not only was he all scary and hairy, BUT he had a 4-foot long stuffed, gorilla-sized cock attached to the front of his costume and he had it draped over his arm … so it wouldn’t drag on the floor I suppose. The Eastern Indian folks who own the store weren’t real sure what to think!!! He started shaking it at the girl behind the counter and her very brown face turned very red! What a hoot! Crass, but a hoot!

The guy is obviously not an expert on primate wieners: were it truly gorilla-sized, it would be about four centimeters. Still, I have to assume that he was striving for effect, not for anatomical accuracy.

And: “stuffed”? With what?

Our Neighborhood Association has had a Web site for some time now, and it’s getting more attention than it used to. But it’s not set up for feedback, really, so now we have a Yahoo! Group as well.

It will take a while to get everyone’s attention, of course; I know I have a few readers in the neighborhood, so I’m leveraging whatever clout I have (which isn’t much) on the Association’s behalf.

Melessa takes a jump to the left, or was it a step to the right?

OU won, my family celebrated, and later that night I got to meet Chris, Lanie, and their spouses at the Lyric Theatre to (FINALLY) get our “Time Warp” on for the first time in about 15 years. I had a blast! (Even if my costume looked more like Han Solo in drag than a Transylvanian.)

Speaking of Lyric, The Rocky Horror Show runs through the first of November.

You may now include your best “Han Solo in drag” jokes.

Once in a while I wander up to the Homeland store that displaced my old favorite Albertson’s, despite swearing that I wouldn’t; they still fill one of my prescriptions, and once in a while they have something I need on sale. My rule, generally, is to drop off the old pill bottle, kill 15 minutes hunting for bargains, check out, and then return to the pharmacy to pick up the new bottle. One thing I needed today was shaving cream, and to my amazement, more than a year after the changeover, they still had some of Albertson’s house-brand gel, at half a buck less than Edge. Inasmuch as I’m currently using Target’s house-brand gel, which is probably identical under the label, I figure I’m not giving up much.

Besides which, they had cheap gas: premium today was $2.499, and regular was twenty cents less than that. (I did see $2.279 for regular at a 7-Eleven; a few stations are reported to be even lower.) The twenty-cent price differential is more honored in the breach these days — my Circle K/Shell stations of choice have gone to 24 cents — but stations that sell hardly any premium charge a lot more for it: there’s a little independent market on US 62 that as of yesterday had posted prices of $2.399 for regular and $3.399 for premium. I avoid this station on principle, inasmuch as one of the staff at 42nd and Treadmill once reported being held up there, and she didn’t mean “delayed.”

South of 39th along May, there is an abundance of “buy here/pay here” auto dealers, the bottom of the retail market, generally dispiriting-looking joints with a whole lot of colored fabric flapping in the breeze. I am of two minds about these places: you can argue that yes, they provide a service to people who presumably might otherwise not be able to buy cars, but they charge a scarily high price for that service. (Also in this phylum: “cash advance” places and “rent-to-own” operations. I once rented an apartment full of furniture; I would have been better served had I hung around thrift shops for a month or so.) The one that had crept north of 39th has now relocated a couple of miles west; I have no idea what, if anything, will fill that space.

Among the customers of one of these joints was a fellow I spied in a Wal-Mart parking lot with a ragged ‘79 Dodge D-50 he’d just acquired. (How ragged? Both the backup-light lenses were gone, except for a couple of small plastic shards, the trim strips were down to random coverage, and the top of the once-black dash was now cheese-mold grey.) “Just acquired” was indicated by the standard temporary tag filled out by dealers; I can’t help but wonder if the new owner was sitting there because he couldn’t get it started again. Normally this is where I volunteer my assistance, but the guy looked every bit as scary as his truck, and I backed away slowly, though not very slowly.

We’re not exactly Eerie, Indiana around here — heck, we’re not even Normal, Illinois — but we do have our stories to tell, and one of the weirdest, at least in terms of the quantity of jaw-dropping it induces in the listeners, is the tale of the Great Skyscraper Race of 1930.

Local historian Doug Loudenback wrote up the history of the Great Race a couple of months back. The First National Bank of Oklahoma City announced their new 32-story headquarters in April 1930; the announcement of the 31-story Ramsey Tower came in August. It wasn’t really intended to be a race, but considering the proximity of the two buildings — FNB was at 120 North Robinson, just south of what is now Couch Drive, and Ramsey was at 204, practically across the street — that’s what it became. Further compounding the issue: both buildings eventually topped out at 33 stories. Ramsey was completed first, in early October 1931.

And I’m not sure what’s going on at the First National Center these days, but Ramsey, now City Place, will be the first of the two to offer residential space; new owner Roy Oliver is keeping his major tenants — Globe Life occupies several floors, and UMB Bank is at ground level — but the 16th to 32nd floors will be divided into apartments, and the 33rd will be a single 2500-square-foot unit. As high-rises go, this is as about as high as you can get in Oklahoma City — for now, anyway.

You might be looking at this and thinking “Nineteen thirty-one? Wasn’t there, like, a depression or something going on?” Well, we’ve always been just slightly out of step with the rest of the country’s business cycle, but only slightly: in the summer of ‘35, ownership of the Ramsey Tower passed to Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, mortgage holder, demonstrating that we weren’t immune to downturns. And we still aren’t: Chesapeake Energy chair Aubrey McClendon got caught in margin calls this week and had to sell off the bulk of his CHK shares to raise cash. Then again, McClendon has been there before:

“[T. Boone Pickens] allowed me to invest a million dollars with him one time in the late 1990s, and within six months, he had lost 90 percent of it,” McClendon said during his speech to the Alternative Fuels & Vehicles National Conference.

The other side of that story? Lower natural-gas prices obviously aren’t helping Chesapeake, but they’ll help me keep warm this winter. Somebody wins, somebody loses. It is always thus.

Regular unleaded gasoline, mirabile dictu, has now touched the $3.15 price point, with lots of stations under $3.20. (There’s one report of a single station bravely pumping for $3.079; I monitor such things here.) From my point of view, there’s a slight downside to this: the old twenty-cent gap between regular and premium has widened to twenty-five, even thirty cents. (It was 27 cents at the Circle K/Shell at 63rd and May, where regular was $3.199.)

I am a driver, generally, but there are times when I have to do some walking — Neighborhood Association stuff, generally — so I keep harping on the fact that the city has promised us some sidewalks here in the Near-Core. They couldn’t come too soon for the sk8erboi I saw today east of Meridian on 36th, gliding in and out of driveways while trying to avoid oncoming traffic, which fortunately was fairly light. Yes, sidewalks have these horizontal gaps at regular intervals, presumably inimical to skate wheels; but most of our streets have gaps at irregular intervals, which are not so much of an improvement, I suspect.

It’s been my conviction that 80 percent of white shoe polish never gets applied to an actual shoe: instead, it’s used to scrawl messages on motor-vehicle glass. I saw this today on a Ford Explorer, and you know there’s got to be a story behind it:

Me — 1
Kid who fought — 0

Another unsolved mystery, I suppose. Then again, they don’t always stay unsolved. Remember this?

It’s not every day I get a notice from the Postal Service that I have a certified letter waiting, especially not one from the Oklahoma Tax Commission.

But wait! This isn’t for me at all: according to the notice, the letter is for someone named Sloan. I don’t believe anyone named Sloan has ever lived here; certainly no one named Sloan has lived here in the last four years.

We’ve had no visits from Mr Sloan, but he did get another letter today, which I opened before I noticed his name, and which reveals a little more of the story. The OTC, as part of their Clean Slate ‘08 program, is offering this fellow (I’m not mentioning his first name) a chance to pay up on his back taxes without the usual penalties and interest — before the 14th of November, when the boom will presumably be lowered. I dashed off a note to OTC telling them that I don’t know this guy or where to find him, which is, I think, all I can do at this point.

Finally, I’m keeping my trash day. The city is changing the collection pattern to save time and fuel, but my neighborhood will still be picked up on Tuesdays. (The city picks up only about half the homes in city limits; trash service in other parts of town is outsourced and presumably won’t be affected. Map here.) One more habit I don’t have to break, thank heaven.

Everybody knows that real-estate prices are in the toilet. And, as usual, everybody is wrong:

Realtors say buyers are unwilling to jump off and buy. Low interest rates aren’t enough to overpower their national news-fed fear of price depreciation, even though home values here have remained stubbornly firm and even increasing.

The median price of homes sold in the metro area in August remained firm at $135,000, virtually flat compared with July — but up 4 percent compared with August 2007, according to the Oklahoma City Metro Association of Realtors.

The average price of $163,963 in August was up 2.1 percent from the month before and up 6.2 percent from August of last year, according to the Realtors.

Logically, you’d expect prices to fall if there are no buyers, but apparently that’s not the case here. There are buyers, just not enough to suit the realty-based community, which would like to reduce inventory, especially in the faux-château class:

Sellers still find themselves having to yield. Those with homes priced from $275,000 to $325,000 continue to deal with serious doldrums.

Those of you who live in areas where $275,000 will buy you a doghouse, if your dog isn’t all that large, are encouraged to stare in disbelief.

From December 2004:

I haven’t heard that [Bradford] Commons are going to be Cabrini-Greened out of existence, but at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see bulldozers heading down 8th Street.

A year and a half later, the bulldozers had been there, and yes, they’d done that. Now there’s a new use for the land:

The Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority today approved conceptual plans for an eight-story, 196-room Embassy Suites to be built in the Oklahoma Health Center.

The proposed site at NE 8 and Phillips Avenue was home to a Section 8 complex until a few years ago.

A little more detail:

It will boast multiple water features throughout its four-story indoor atrium. The facility will also include a 16,000-square-foot multi-function banquet area, an on-site restaurant to seat 133 patrons, a market deli restaurant, a business center, a 627-square-foot exercise facility and a concierge lounge on its 8th floor. Temporary parking will be available to the south of the project until future development of a 316-space parking garage is developed.

And suites make sense for a hotel near a hospital complex, right?

No start date has been announced.

The ride home certainly started out amusing enough: I watched two guys on horseback pull up at a tag agency, which is not exactly an everyday occurrence. (Do horses require licenses?)

The fun, though, began at the westbound Classen exit from I-44, which in its present form is not long for this world. (I knew a redesign was coming, but I didn’t expect it quite so quickly.) This is a particularly heinous example of the breed: you’re barely around the curve (it’s posted 40 mph) and you hit an actual intersection at 51st. And there almost certainly will be oncoming traffic; in fact, there’s a hotel just on the corner. (The old Guest House Inn was razed; this is a modern Sleep Inn.) They’ve got the stop sign, and sometimes they even obey it.

For now, you can’t proceed down the curve: you’re detoured to eastbound 51st, which will put you right on Classen — if you’re heading north. If not, you’re screwed. Eventually, I understand, 51st will be rerouted along the side roads to what used to be the Classen Circle. Getting into Edna’s, always a thrill, is about to become more so.

The drive home from 42nd and Treadmill is usually dull, but it’s also usually over with quickly enough; it’s actually possible, even between 5 and 6, to do the nine-mile freeway loop in less than fifteen minutes. If everything’s going swimmingly, it can be done in nine minutes at the posted 60 mph.

Today, though, was a drowner. Around 50th and I-35 there was a RIGHT LANE CLOSED 1 MILE sign, and it was stop and go all the way to the I-44 offramp. Apparently the quickie fix scheduled for that overpass today proved to be neither quick nor much of a fix.

Once past that, clear sailing, right? Wrong. Traffic was backed up to Martin Luther King, and after the tedious crawl to Kelley we saw what had happened: some wannabe Darwin Award contender had plunged from the opposite lanes through the cable barriers. He wasn’t blocking any traffic, being at about a 45-degree angle to vertical, but there being no shoulder to speak of through there, there was no place for the OHP, which was wrapping up Investigation Mode.

I shouldn’t complain, of course; were I living in [fill in name of damn near any other metro area this size] I’d have to face delays every day. But these things do bring out the worst in me: not enough to result in the dreaded “road rage,” but enough to get me to start grumbling under — sometimes over — my breath.