What does the Martin Luther King Housing Development Authority (MLKHDA), an affordable housing non-profit organization, have to do with one of the richest companies in the country? They both called the Lorenz Building at 1147 Tacoma Avenue South home.

Built in 1904, the Lorenz Building has played host to a number of companies over the years including a bakery, a floral shop, and a candy company that would eventually become the largest candy company in the world, Mars.

Frank Mars started the Mars Candy Factory, Inc in 1911 out of the family’s Tacoma home kitchen at 3312 North 27th Street. It was while Mars was in Tacoma – and possibly in the Lorenz Building – that the idea was developed for the company’s first blockbuster product, the Milky Way candy bar.

Unfortunately, success was elusive in Tacoma and the Mars family skipped town to return to their native state, Minnesota, to the city of Minneapolis. It was here that they hit their stride and quickly outgrew their facility. Next, the company moved to Chicago to take advantage of its central location and rail access for distribution across the country where, for most of the past century, Mars has had a mostly friendly rivalry with Hershey’s.

Last month, Mars announced it had purchased the William Wrigley Jr. Company, the world’s largest chewing gum producer, for $23 billion cash deal. The two companies together are expected to generate annual sales in excess of $27 billion to unseat Cadbury Schweppes as the world’s largest confectionary manufacturer.

Maintaining a long lasting tradition, Mars remains a private family owned business with family members consistently ranked on the Forbes List of “The World’s Billionaires”

Meanwhile, the future of the Lorenz Building remains uncertain. MLKHDA wants out of the homeless shelter business and the city recently posted a “do not occupy” notice on the front door.

Take the Mars tour of Tacoma! While living in Tacoma, Frank & Ethel Mars called these addresses home: 952 South Sheridan Ave, 504 South Ainsworth Ave, and 3919 North 35th.

The city has a survey of historic buildings and is in the process of updating it. There’s an interesting story about the builder, Edward A. Lorenz:

Edward came from a pioneer Northwest family. He took profits from growing hops in Orting to buy up property in Tacoma. Finding the Tacoma market more lucrative than farming, he sold his 160 acre farm to the town of Orting who wanted to build a Soldiers’ home.

Edward liked to keep busy. In addition to developing commercial real estate in downtown Tacoma, Edward was also owner of a lumber mill, a steam boating company (part of the Mosquito Fleet), and a boat building company.

Related links –
Yahoo News: Mars Announces Merger Agreement with William Wrigley

Wikipedia: Mars, Incorporated

The News Tribune: Tacoma shelter’s future in doubt

Celebrating people, products, and businesses that make Tacoma unique.

Mark Monlux is an award winning freelance illustrator and cartoonist. A northwest native, he has called Tacoma home for the last 16 years. After graduating with a B.A. in Graphic Art from Central Washington University in 1985 Mark entered the freelance market initially as a broad-spectrum designer. But, as more and more clients requested is drawings, he focused solely on being an illustrator. Working mainly in the fields of advertising and published his just a few names from his long history of clientele includes Microsoft, Carnation, Workman Publishing, Eating Well Magazine, Kimberly Clark, Hewlett Packard, Alaska Airlines, Reynolds and Reynolds, Toronto Dominion, Coldwell Banker, March of Dimes, Washington Mutual, and a host of agency design groups.

Recently, the Tacoma Sun sat down at the computer and asked him a few questions.

[Sun] First off, a geek question: your stuff looks too good to be purely digital. How do you do it?

[Monlux] Currently, I start with pencil sketches. Those are faxed for approval. I then do pen and ink. The pen and ink is scanned in at a high resolution, colored in Photoshop and then provided to the client as a for placement file. For a number of years I constructed my illustration in Illustrator as vector drawings. I still do that, but only when the demands of the project call for it.

[Sun] Did you ever imagine that you could make a career out of cartooning?
[Monlux] I knew very early on in life (age 4) that I was going to become what was then termed a “commercial artist”. I could always draw, but it wasn’t until after a few years as a freelance designer that I made the decision to do strictly illustration. And it was a number of years after that before I decided to focus in on the cartoon style which I find I love to do the most.

[Sun] Who were your inspirations?
[Monlux] Graham Wilson was a huge influence on me.

[Sun] How has the web impacted the quality and quantity of your work?
[Monlux] The web had a huge affect on the illustration market. Most of it negative. With royalty free and free clip art available at the click of a button the amount of work has gone down hill drastically from the time when I first entered the market.

[Sun] Any advice for any aspiring Illustrator Extraordinaires out there?
[Monlux] Be aware of the true value your art has in the marketplace. While it’s true that demand for illustration lowered, that does not mean the value of it has lowered. The key these days is to target and connect with clients who are looking for dynamic images that are tailored to them, and not just the random schlock you find on the web that everyone else and their grandmother is using.

Image credit: Art Director: Tony Ulwick, CEO Strategyn; Client: Strategyn

[Sun] As an Illustrator Extraordinaire, I’m sure you could live and work anywhere. What brought you to Tacoma and what keeps you here?
[Monlux] I moved here some 17 years ago when my wife and I decided to buy a house. The prices in Seattle were starting their first surge then. We wanted an older house with a large yard. Our search spiraled out until we found the perfect Victorian here in Tacoma. I’d just shifted my business structure to where I was doing everything by fax, modem and courier. I got myself an 800 number and sent that to clients. I never bothered to tell anyone that I was moving and lost none of my clients when I did. In fact, the process opened my thinking and I started to take on national clients, and then international clients. We are very happy with our move. I live in the Fern Hill District which has a very Mayberry feel to it. An alley runs behind my house and it is the artery of the neighborhood. Everyone visits everyone else in the garages and porches and I know all my neighbors very well.

[Sun] The ability to hold a pen or pencil with a critical eye or witty thought seems to be a fading art form. What is your hope for the future of illustrating?
[Monlux] That people will once again become demanding in what is offered up to them. If you look back at the advertising that occurred in the 60’s and 70’s
folks were very critical of what was set before them. Currently our culture is being very open to anything that appears, whenever it appear. This acceptance of the random was brought about by the internet. Folks learned how to surf, and it’s fun to do, just not very productive. Now folks are learning how to use search features to be a bit more efficient. As response the internet is building features which use your past searches to create ‘intuitive’ recommendations. I belive that as the internet grows in this direction, the average joe will once again become more discriminating about what they want offered up to them. The artist who foresee this trend, and design their presence on the web to be tuned to this trend will have a distinct advantage.

[Sun] Is it just me, or do the comics in today’s daily papers really suck?
[Monlux] With the internet the amount of web comics have shot through the roof. Many web comics do not have to be as tame or conventional as syndicated comics that fill the newspaper. Because they tap into a different revenue stream they’re not required to edit down into something that is widely palatable.

I look forward each day to opening up my email and my blog reader to read all the strips I’ve subscribed. I agree, there is a lot of bad comics out there. But, only because there are more comics. I keep hunting down and adding the ones I think are the cream. I also like to find cartoonists who are trying new and different things. Watching them improve with each strip is just as entertaining for me as the amusement of the strip itself. I’m developing a couple web comics myself, “The Comic Critic” which is a movie review in cartoon form, and “The Return of Stickman”. Both of my cartoons are anti mainstream. In The Comic Critic I use no consistent characters, this breaks the silent rule of having five core identifiable characters in a strip. In The Return of Stickman, all the characters are stick figures and sometimes the only difference between them is their names. Oh, and stickman is usually stuck in a cubical behind a desk. It’s my way of poking fun at strips that constantly use no background and just have a shelf or above the waist shot of their characters. When I see a strip like that I add it to my blog reader list.

Image credit: Art Director: Ron Pullium, Nautilus Design; Client: Flex-a-lite

[Sun] It seems like the best cartoonists are either slightly crazed or get burned out (Robert Crumb, Gary Larson, Berkeley Breathed, Garry Trudeau). How do you keep from going crazy or getting burned out?[Monlux] For a number of years I wouldn’t draw except during business hours. I wanted to be paid for every line I drew. But, the I decided to try something for a year. I bought a bunch of sketchbooks, of all sizes, and I put one in every room of the house, one in the car, and even a small one for my pocket for when I went out. I then drew in them constantly. I wanted to see if the faucet really would run dry, which was a big fear of mine. I did not place any limits on what I drew. I told myself not to care about the quality, or the ideas, just to let it stream out. To my joy and surprise the faucet never ran dry. Instead it flowed even stronger. Ideas, concepts, and gratification came faster and grew better. Sure I still drew a turd every now and then. But, it didn’t strike me negatively like it did before. Now don’t get me wrong, I still like and demand to get paid for the value of my work. If during my doodling I come up with something that I can license, that great. Certainly my client’s have taken note of how much more productive and resourceful I’ve become.

[Sun] Do you ever get “illustrators block”? What do you do to break through?
[Monlux] Drawing more and keeping the flow open is a long term solution. But, there are days when I get totally blocked. When that happens I try to get out of my head. Usually a walk will do it. If not I will read a short story or book and temporarily spend my time crawling into someone else’s head. By the time I get back to my own, the furniture looks like it’s been moved around.

[Sun] Can we expect to see you at a Frost Park Chalk Off sometime?
[Monlux] Yes. I keep planning on going but life interferes. Either I’m flying in or out of town, having the car die on me, have a crushing deadline, or like this Friday, I’m picking up my nephew to attend the Emerald City Comiccon. But, I do plan on making it one of these days. And I will dominate and lay low my competition.

[Sun] What is a question you’ve always wanted to be asked?
[Monlux] Would you like to draw an illustrated history of zombies in the cinema? Yeah, I’d really like to do that. In fact, I think I will start working on my first draft.

[Sun] GREAT! We look forward to seeing it. Thanks for taking time out to chat with us!

If you would like to see more of Mark’s work, check out his website and blog at: www.markmonlux.com

I’ve been thinking about Kunstler’s recent visit. For all his bombast and bleakness, he does offer some food for thought.

The first part of Kunstler’s talk was about our reliance on fossil fuel and how we’ve come to rely on it for commuting long distances to jobs (unsustainable), to move food from other countries to our tables (unsustainable) while converting our farmland to giant warehouses (unsustainable) that are served by giant fleets of diesel trucks (unsustainable). Meanwhile, we don’t support our national passenger rail service, Amtrak, and can no longer afford to maintain our highway infrastructure.

While I agree there is a finite source of fossil fuel – they don’t make dinosaurs anymore – I don’t agree with Kunstler that passenger air flight or single occupancy vehicles will be only for the ultra-rich anytime soon. Although the recent collapse and mergers within the airline industry may prove him right. It is clear to me though is that we are not moving fast enough towards effective sustainable solutions.

Cities vs. Burbs

Sidebar:
Top 5 Cities with the Greatest Percentage Population Growth, 2000-2007
1. Snoqualmie (King Co.) 427.3%
2. Roy (Pierce Co.) 234.6%
3. DuPont (Pierce Co.) 187.3%
4. Issaquah (King Co.) 120.4%
5. Lake Stevens (Snohomish) 109.9%
source: PSRC

About 12 miles southeast of Tacoma near Bonney Lake is a master planned community called Cascadia. Over a decade in the making, the Cascadia project is an ambitious project that sits on nearly 5,000 acres and is anticipated to eventually be home to more than 16,000 people. Needless to say, much planning has gone into the Cascadia vision: open space, parks, ponds, and miles of trails. According to their website other features include, “a major conference center, the business park, a town square built with pedestrians in mind, a performance hall, a think tank focused on international understanding — the Cascadia Institute — a culinary school, a hotel and an outdoor sculpture park. It will draw on green-development principles that include the use of sustainable power and water recycling.” It’s hard to find fault with such an admirable vision. Indeed, judging by the fact that they’ve already sold over 400 lots to homebuilders without even having infrastructure in place indicates there is something compelling about this project. The project is as close to being perfect as you’re likely to see, except for one thing: it’s not supposed to be there.

According to the latest numbers released by the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC), suburban development accounted for over 75% of new housing development for the years 2000-2007. Put another way, less than a quarter of all new development was inside the Puget Sound Metro area which includes Tacoma, Seattle, Bellevue, Everett, and Bremerton. To implement Washington State’s Growth Management Act, the PSRC has just released the latest version of its guiding document called Vision 2040. The document was approved about a week ago by PSRC representatives from Snohomish, King, Pierce, and Thurston counties and various ports, tribes, state offices, and transit organizations.

If anyone knows what’s going on with growth in the Puget Sound, it’s the PSRC. Yet, even in their latest document their projections show housing growth for unincorporated and rural areas only 28%. Why the discrepancy? Why, despite all the cranes over Seattle’s skyline building condo tower after condo tower was Seattle’s growth less than the state average? City of Tacoma officials have known for years that something was amiss due to the fact that nearly no new housing has been built where it wants it most: in its mixed-use centers. Sure, downtown has seen much new development especially in the form of high-end condos and the Tacoma Mall area (Zen question: How is the mall a village?) has seen many new town-homes of questionable design go up. Meanwhile, there has been very little new housing built in Proctor, Sixth Ave, or Stadium – all desirable or upscale neighborhoods. Despite Seattle and Tacoma each garnering sub 5% gains for the 2000-2007 period, the PSRC did get right its forecasted total growth. Translation: the Puget Sound Metro area IS getting the increase in population it was expecting… it’s just not WHERE it was expected – or desired.

In his insightful story on Vision 2040, Crosscut writer Douglas MacDonald concludes, “This decade’s actual results to date, in other words, are farther from the expected share of regional population growth set in the Vision 2040 plan than the results across the previous decade. In the 1990s, those cities’ total growth was 96,000; for the first seven years of this decade, it is only 41,000. Seattle, for example, in that earlier decade added more than 47,000 people. Seven years into this decade, it has added 23,000. Bellevue added 11,500 (net of annexations) in the 1990s. Seven years into this decade, it has added 5,500 (net of annexations). Tacoma in the 1990s added almost 17,000. Seven years into this decade, it has added about 8,100.

Judged across two decades, we have been heading backwards from our goal of attracting much higher rates of population growth to the metropolitan cities, as Vision 2040 supposes we must in this and the three coming decades.”

Backwards?! I don’t think that was the plan! What does all this mean? Most immediately, it means that more earned dollars that should be going to places where they’re needed, like people’s bank and retirement accounts, will be needed for more infrastructure, public facilities and services, and of course, more roads.

That’s where it comes back to Kunstler: if you’re going to live outside a metro area, you will need your car. But it’s hard to drive when there’s no gas or when the price of gas continues to sky rocket as it has these past few years. Will Kunstler be right? Will the current gas trend make us rethink the future of driving? Will it make the Cross-Base Highway Project obsolete even before it’s finished? Only time will tell.

All this raises the question of what will happen to all those affordable cul-de-sac suburban homes when they become more expensive to get to and away from? As much as some new suburban developments try to mimic traditional neighborhoods, they continue to segregate uses which means residents must rely on their car to go shopping, go out to eat, go to work, go to the park, etc. Aside from being suburban developments being unsustainable due to their heavy reliance on cars, some recent articles suggest another emergency facing suburban developments: the sub-prime meltdown.

The Trend: More Going Local

In the March ’08 edition of the Atlantic magazine, Brookings fellow, Christopher Leinberger, wrote “Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements. Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, ‘I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.’”

More interestingly, Leinberger goes on to connect the decline of suburban developments with a renewed interest in urban living. He writes, “The decline of places like Windy Ridge and Franklin Reserve is usually attributed to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, with its wave of foreclosures. And the crisis has indeed catalyzed or intensified social problems in many communities. But the story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the crisis, and will not end with it. A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.”

Tacoma’s Destiny

This bodes well for older cities like Tacoma that already have services and infrastructure in place – even if some of our infrastructure could use some TLC (hello Murray Morgan Bridge). I noticed a regional trend starting about ten years ago of towns and cities wanting to create a downtown they never had. Most of them were too small or to young to have a real downtown. Witness the plight of University Place as a current example. Its leaders desperately want to create a new center for the town and are learning how hard it is to create a new heart from scratch. Besides downtown, Tacoma has the advantage of already having many built-out neighborhood commercial districts – thanks to an extensive streetcar system that once connected neighborhoods together. However, there are many obstacles to overcome: decades of disinvestment by property owners; a low level of entrepreneurial sophistication and activity (which could be connected to the high number of government and non-profit employees); a lack of commercial development capacity, expertise and opportunities; dirty image based on tide flats smokestacks, to name a few.

I do believe that Tacoma turned a corner sometime recently. It has been a long time since there was a critical mass of residents who actually cared about the place and its future. This has caused some tension between the old guard and the new, but this is a natural part of the process and is to be expected. The question remains though, if Tacomans can come together, take back ownership of their neighborhoods, create community, and demand a better more livable city. Once this question is resolved we will be able to take advantage of Kunstler’s “oil free” world and give suburban developers and residents a reason to move back to the city – our city.