Urban-pundit Witold Rybczynski predicts that when housing construction gets out of its three-year dumps, which it’s just starting to do these days, the homes that will be built will include far fewer “McMansions,” those suburban and exurban monuments to mass-produced exceptionalism and excess.

One reason housing may rebound more slowly than the rest of the economy, Rybczynski notes: A lot of recession-struck households are “doubling up,” with two or even three whole families, or one extended family including adult children, in one house.

Wait a minute: That’s just the sort of household structure that McMansions are actually good for. (Well, that and art communes.)

But there are already more than enough foreclosed or never-occupied McMansions for these uses.

Meanwhile, local urban-development pundit Dan Bertolet (at his own CityTank.org) sings to the apparent end of sprawl and the rise of urban-density development, even in the ‘burbs.

…then howcum it brought the world the abominable mortgage-monster that was the bubble-era WaMu?

The great decimation of one of America’s greatest art forms continues, with the sudden cancellation of both All My Children and One Life to Live.

As noted by Knute Berger, whose aunt was one of the genre’s most venerable actors, these programs seemed to come from another time, another place, another world. They had an eternal, ethereal sense about them, even when they were trying (usually badly) to be young and hip.

It was Agnes Nixon’s (creator of both AMC and OLTL) careful juxtaposition of the universal and the with-it (by suburban standards) that made AMC, in particular, the darling of the young ladies of my teen and college years. It was the reason there are so many women in their 30s these days sporting the names “Erica” and “Tara” (the female corners of the show’s original love-rectangle storyline).

Around this time, there was also a Seattle tie-in to AMC. It seemed to be the place characters kept moving to whenever the producers wanted to drop somebody without killing them off. In the 1990s, two real local businesses were named after fictional businesses on the show—Cortland Computer (in Pine Valley, Palmer Cortland’s high-tech empire; in Seattle, an early ISP) and GlamORama (in PV, Opal’s hair salon; in Seattle, a funky fashion and novelty-gift boutique).

As I’ve written here previously, there’s no more real business model for these shows. Even as more people are working from home (or not working), the archtype of the stay-home mom having “her stories” on during housework has been passé for so long it’s not even retro anymore. In a cable/internet world, scripted drama episodes meant to be seen only once are simply not cost-effective. (ABC previously announced it’s dumping its SoapNet cable channel.)

Domestic drama stories can be told in any medium or format. But the particular qualities of the serials—multiple storylines, no single lead character, no single climactic moment, no ending, no season breaks—those assets belong to the soaps and a very few other genres (mainly certain comic strips and comic books). It’s perfectly possible to have open ended storytelling in Net video “webisodes,” but they’d pretty much need commercial backing of some sort. (Indie productions usually can’t offer long-term contracts to a dozen or more actors.)

Will a savvy marketer try this?

Tune in tomorrow.

“E-book Sales Explode in February.”

Dead-tree book sales? Ehhh….

Just in time for the imminent arrival of baseball season, Grand Slams may again be slammed down within Seattle’s city limits.

The Denny’s restaurant on 4th Avenue South, which became the sort-of indie “4th Avenue Diner” a year or two back, is now a full fledged Denny’s again.

The place had been run all this time by the Denny’s regional franchisee. They had decided the Industrial District branch (the last Denny’s in Seattle proper) could attract just as much business without paying for the Denny’s name, menu, and ad support. Apparently they’ve changed their minds.

While I wasn’t looking, Amazon’s put its Kindle ebook machine in brick n’ mortar stores. Including Fred Meyer, whose own in-store book selection has seldom stretched beyond the mega-bestsellers and Harlequin romances.

Just before the end of the previous year, I wrote here that Seattle has become the home of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre.

Seattle had already been one of the two U.S. hubs of the video game industry, which had been America’s fastest growing media genre the previous decade.

This is a vital, though potentially only temporary, shift.

To explain it, let’s start by going back to the allegedly good old days of the U.S. lit biz.

Books were more of a cottage industry during the first half of the previous century. That’s because they were far less popular than they are now.

Yes, less popular.

The masses read slick magazines and pulp magazines (and, later on, mass market paperbacks). “Real” books, the hardcovers and the coffee table editions, were sold in boutiques or boutique-like settings within department stores, to a target audience of educated but careerless women. They were commissioned and curated by small offices of tweed-suited gentlemen in New York and Boston.

The smallness of the market ensured that the established publishers and distributors could maintain profitable market shares, so long as they kept issuing saleable works.

The few new authors who could break into the rarified world of “trade books” (usually from the fiction sections of the “better” magazines) knew they’d be promoted and nurtured by their publishers, as big fish in a very small pond.

This is the milieu that “people of the book” nostalgize about. I dunno ’bout you, but I’d have hated it. Too stifling, too restrictive, too frou-frou.

Then the industry got big.

The GI Bill fueled three decades of growth in college lit programs.

Trade paperbacks, and original (non-reprint) mass paperbacks, helped bring the book racket into supermarkets and discount stores.

Chains opened full-line bookstores in shopping malls, succeeded by bigger chains opening big-box bookstores in every town and suburb.

Global conglomerates bought, sold, and combined publishers, bringing in cadres of corporate bean-counters in the process.

Authors became in-demand guests on TV and radio talk shows; their facility with these appearances (or lack thereof) often greatly affected their career prospects. Even in

Then came Amazon.

Instead of the extremely inefficient bookstore world, whose crippling (for publishers) return policies became ever-more abused by ever-bigger big box chains, there was one massive retailer who bought to order, and who tracked every sale with a staggering array of useful statistics.

Within a decade (a mere trice in this traditionally snail-paced industry), Amazon became the big publishers’ best frenemy.

As the big chains had eased out many smaller booksellers, Amazon took market share from the chains. When the great recession struck all retail sectors, the book chains suffered more than most.

Then came Kindle.

After more than a decade of attempts, electronic books finally took off thanks to Amazon’s marketing clout.

With no physical product for publishers to have manufactured, Amazon has wound up with even more leverage in the delicate dance of supplier and seller.

Amazon doesn’t even have to sell all its own hardware, with Kindle-format ebooks playing on PCs, tablets, and smartphones as well as Amazon’s own branded devices.

I’m not the only observer to see Amazon having a clear upper hand in the industry, if not its fulcrum of clout.

It had subsumed some of the biggest media companies on earth (while imposing its will on more than a few smaller publishers along the way).

And now, Amazon’s put its valuable sales-metrics data on a handy online dashboard widget thang. It includes data about industry-wide sales of a publisher’s titles, not just those made through Amazon.

With this information at hand, and without the need to invest in print runs or suffer the bookstore chains’ consignment policies, the financial barrier to book publishing (on a serious commercial level) continues to plummet.

It’s easy to imagine more authors becoming self-publishers, hiring their own copy editors, publicists, etc. instead of working for corporate publishers who have those operations in-house. (Already, in the comics world, ebook sales favor indie titles more than comic-book-store sales do.)

Who needs a royalty-sucking edifice in Manhattan, when an author can deal with Amazon direct?

The Jet City, once thought of in lit circles as little more than a strong book buying market and a gateway to Montana, has become Book City U.S.A.

For now, at least.

Thing is, the brave new book world is a faster place. A much faster place.

Enter Google Ebooks.

And Google Ebooks’ strategic ties with local indie booksellers.

That’s something Amazon just isn’t set up to offer (though the fiscally troubled Barnes & Noble is)—a physical, real-world presence, with friendly neighborhood book-lovin’ experts guiding buyers’ individual reading pleasures.

Then there are the authors and publishers who claim not to need Amazon or Google. They just sell direct, from their own websites. These include the new OR Books and my own sometime ebook publisher Take Control Books.

It’s going to get messy and complicated. When and if the dust clears, I expect Amazon will remain a strong player in both “e” and non-“e” books.

But it won’t be the only one.

Seattleites, enjoy your collective symbolic stance as capital of the world of words while it lasts.

A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.

There’s talk about seeking historic preservation status for the doomed Bank of America drive-thru branch at Broadway and East Thomas.

SRM Development wants to establish the right to tear the bank branch and three adjacent buildings down. That’s so the four buildings (and a back parking lot, where the Capitol Hill Farmers Market has been held in recent years) could eventually make way for another of those retail-residential mixed use projects that were so popular a few years ago.

Right now there’s still a surplus of storefront and condo spaces, on the Hill and in the greater Seattle area. But SRM is betting that, as the economy eventually improves, this backlog will eventually fill up, leaving a market for new projects again.

In December, SRM learned that the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods has formally begun to investigate whether the B of A building was worth landmark status. This status, if granted, would not automatically prevent the building’s demolition, but it would make the developer jump some more bureaucratic hurdles.

The building in question was built by Seattle-First National Bank, for more than 50 years the state’s dominant bank.

“Seafirst” (as it was later known) and its predecessors gave Seattle many true landmark buildings. In downtown alone, the Seafirst heritage includes three of its headquarters buildings—the Dexter Horton Building, the 1969 Seafirst Tower on Fourth Avenue (now known as “Safeco Plaza”), and its last headquarters, the Columbia Center (the tallest building west of the Mississippi).

Several original Seafirst branch offices are also landmarks, or could be. In that roster, I’d include the relatively huge (for neighborhood branch banks) brick edifices in SoDo (still used by B of A) and on Denny Way (now a Walgreens).

But the Broadway branch building’s a more quesitonable candidate for landmark status. It was built in 1967, to a standard suburban-style prototype Seafirst was using at the time.

It presents a slate facade and a small rock garden to the street, and a blank wall to its barren side plaza. It’s never been a particularly pretty or pedestrian-friendly spot. Its drive-thru window is a quintessential example of the ’60s “car culture” City officials now want to discourage.

Two of the other three buildings SRM wants to replace as part of the development scheme have far more character. They’re the old First Security Bank building (later a Crown Books, most recently housing a salon and a pho restaurant) and the old Cafe Septieme/Andy’s Cafe building. The former sports an institutional white facade, symbolizing an image of comfortable solidity banks used to care about promoting. The latter is a quaintly aged neighborhood diner structure.

If the City’s willing to let those buildings fall, for the sake of higher residential density near the future light rail station, there’s no real reason to keep the B of A building standing.

(The bank itself plans to move back onto the block when the retail/residential complex is built, and to temporarily occupy other space on the Hill during the construction.)

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

You’ve heard of paid signature gatherers. Now, George Monbiot ponders whether corporate and right-wing forces are hiring paid Internet comment trolls.

I do know this site’s comment threads have been attacked in recent weeks by spam bots. In my efforts to “moderate” those pitch people off of the site, I might have inadvertently excised an actual comment by one of you dear readers. My apologies.

Our ol’ pal David Meinert suggests at Publicola that Seattle could get at least a little out of its deep fiscal hole by opening itself up to casinos, slot machines, and booze in strip clubs.

(UPDATE: And our other ol’ pal Goldy thinks it’s a lousy idea.)

In typical DC Beltway pundit pomposity, the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber claims “Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business and Big Government.”

Scheiber’s claim: In an age when organizational secrets are porous commodities, big orgs shouldn’t have a lot of people around who know them. That, in turn, will require smaller, more cohesive orgs. Perhaps no bigger than 500 workers (the size of Obama’s campaign organization, which held great internal discipline).

“The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information.” Scheiber asserts. “It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.”

We’ve discussed this dream of de-consolidation in the past, with local author David C. Korten’s 1999 book The Post Corporate World. Where Korten saw utopian promise in small businesses and housing co-ops, Scheiber sees business (and government) as usual (or close to it) surviving by becoming smaller, nimbler and tighter.

At once, Scheiber’s and Korten’s visions contradict and support one another.

Scheiber sees big institutions going small to retain strict top-down control.

Korten sees grassroots people-power ventures offering an alternative to strict top-down control.

In reality, both could happen. And in some ways, they already are.

The Republican wins this past midterm election largely occurred in spite of the national Republican Party. They were the works of more decentralized big-money whores of all genders and many ethnicities, who’d directly solicited big campaign cash from corporations and billionaires.

And with so much of America’s personal wealth concentrated on the top one or two percent of the population, a lobbyist-lovin’ politician only has to successfully nab a few mega-donors to run a “friend of the little guy” campaign.

And as we’ve learned in the ecological and economic and workplace-abuse fields in recent years, an institution doesn’t have to be big to do bad things.

Still, decentralization is an interesting starting point for a conversation about the world and its future. Lots of folks these days despise the world of global business and its capacity for harm, but I’ve not met many people with well-thought-out alternatives to today’s capitalist system.

Could Microsoft really be the tech sector’s new ‘Underdog’?

The local rumor mills, online and on AM radio and in person, have been all a-flutter this past week over the mere hint of possibility, that men’s pro basketball could again be played in Seattle.

The facts: The league took over running the New Orleans Hornets from the team’s fiscally embattled owner. The team’s arena lease could legally be broken after this season.

All else is speculation.

Could MS mogul Steve Ballmer buy the team, move it here, and along the way pickup rights to the SuperSonics logos and trademarks (now held by NBA Properties)?

Maybe.

Also maybe, the league could fold the Hornets. Or sell them to a New Orleans group. Or move ’em to some other town.

Or the whole league could be shut down in a labor dispute next season, for who knows how long.

So David Stern apparently doesn’t know how to run a sports league during a recession. He’s talking openly about letting the NBA’s weaker franchises die. Anything, I suppose, to keep Seattle from getting its rightful due.