I am not going to delve into whether the spanking has curbed another little teenage problem called pregnancy, Temple being the sweet spot of the Bible Belt. Bell County once boasted one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the state.  (Every ten minutes a teen in Texas gets pregnant.) But it is interesting to think about spanking kids as a driver for real estate values.  I called Temple Realtor Danny Dunn, who will soon be a member of the Temple City Council, and asked how the real estate market is. Fabulous, he told me.

“Our area is the second fastest growing area in the country besides New Orleans,” he said. “We have one of the strongest economies in the state with manufacturing and medicine and remained fairly insulated against the recession.”

As for the Washington Post piece, he says everyone was all excited that Temple was getting national recognition until they realized it was for spanking kids.  A lot was taken out of context, he said. (Oh. My. God.) The intent was for corporal punishment, making kids run or do push-ups instead of sitting in time-out, the district was looking for creative ways to solve behavior problems. Besides, there is some red tape: families have to sign a consent form before their kid can be disciplined. After they read the article, Danny and the president of the school board were chuckling and wondered where the places are in Temple that folks sit on well worn rockers on front porches (the property pictured here is commercial), as depicted by the Washington Post. Temple has it’s agrarian element, but median home prices are $140,000, the same as or more since before the recession, and Temple has a population of  60,000 and growing.

So, would you buy a home in a school district that approved of spanking your children?

Update: A teacher in River Oaks has been suspended for boxing with students in school, which was caught on YouTube, as depicted in this report from KXAS. Now I raised a boy who wrestled and played football and really, I think the teacher was just goofing around. Maybe they should have gone to the gym?

I know it’s sports and memories and tears and all that, but Sunday’s demolition of Texas Stadium is really now a real estate story. Because when that dynamite cleared the Cowboy’s former home in thirty seconds flat on Sunday morning, it left Irving with 350 ish acres of primo raw commercial land that will fetch, according to Irving officials, $25 to $50 million in the not too distant future.

The city has it leased to the Texas Department of Transportation for $1.5 per year on a ten year lease, but should a juicy offer crop up, they wisely retained the right to re-locate the tenants and get on with the development. As I was writing the demo story up for HousingWatch, I was shocked to learn how very visible/accessible that property is: at least 700,000 cars passing by on three major highways PER DAY. In fact, the AOL editors emailed and thought I had made an error — (ha ha, me? You bet!) you mean 70,000, right? I checked with Rick Stopfer and Doug Janeway, Real Estate Services for the City of Irving, to make sure I had not added on a zero. Yeah, they said, it’s 700,000 per day — could be 800,000 but traffic is actually down with the economy. It used to be more like a million cars per day passing by the stadium. Geeze Louise, I said. That means that 3.5 million people are driving past that property per week?

At least, said Janeway.

I would say Irving is sitting on a real estate gold mine. There is no way that land is going to decrease in value, and the planned light rail transit will only make it more valuable.

I also asked the Irving guys if they had had any interesting offers from buyers who wanted to keep the stadium and turn it into, oh, whatever — a giant Medieval Times?

Here’s what Texas Stadium could have been:

A giant indoor ski resort. Don’t laugh, Bearfire Resorts’ said they were building one in Grapevine in 2007 — I so need to check up on that. Where is it?  I could be skiing black diamonds in my backyard by now. And get this: Former House Majority leader Dick Armey was even listed as an adviser to the project. I mean wow, we go from the U.S. Congress to advising on indoor ski resorts  — Mr. Armey must have gotten a lot of experience making snow in D.C.

We also could have had the distinction of being the first site of Marco Polo World, an adventure venue tracing the Venetian explorer’s epic Asian travels and something about spices.

But this last idea would have either generated fewer cars on those highways or a lot of accidents: Arachnid World. A bigger-than-life, world-class spider museum. (No, I’m serious. Not smart enough to make this stuff up.) The creators planned to paint the stadium jet black to create a huge spider body, adding two antennae and multiple legs out of those beams.

Can you just picture 700,000 cars being greeted by a giant black spider filled with spiders every day?

And here’s how we could have welcomed folks to Dallas.

So my question is this: why us? Why would Dallas mortgage delinquency rate be higher than Houston’s or San Antonio or even Austin’s? Is it just because we are larger?

It still blows my mind to think that almost nine percent of homeowners nationwide are delinquent on their mortgages.

“A Dress Code Problem

Suburbs and sweatpants are the culprits. As a person who’s gained 25 pounds since taking a job in the suburbs, believe me when I tell you that it’s not about food; it’s inactivity. I’ve never been one to “exercise,” but when I worked in the city, I walked out of necessity (to the train, from the train to the office, up the stairs when the elevator broke, to Bloomies at lunch time).

In contrast, I now just roll out of bed and drive. When I worked in the city, I wore suits, and a tightening waistband told me to cut back on the cupcakes. In the suburbs, every day is casual Friday, and you’re never conscious of weight gain while wearing sweat pants — they just expand along with you. The obesity epidemic won’t be cured through mindful eating. We all need to move back to the city and enforce dress codes.”

Friend who have moved to New York City tell me they lose five pounds within the first few weeks because they are walking more. It’s true, you tend to drive more in the suburbs because everything is so darn spread out. I agree about the sweatpants: more doctors I know wear scrubs and blame them for weight gain because the waists are string-adjustable.One doc I know keeps a tape measure in his pocket to measure his waist daily.

But with all that open space in the suburbs, you would think suburban folks would get even more exercise than urbanites. And isn’t this kind of backwards? The country used to be where the ruddy folk — OK, peasants — tilled the soil and got way more exercise than the plump, Reubenesque  ladies and gents of London who did not walk because early cities were muddy, filthy wrecks.

Is it really suburban America’s fault that we are fat?

“Polycentric sprawling cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta soon may find themselves forced to reorganize themselves along lines preferred by federal urban “experts.” Hard-pressed industrial cities may find new environmental restrictions on ports and other key infrastructures an impediment to a much-needed renaissance.”