Trees, please

Dear League City Arborist,

We notice that the City has finally begun trimming the oaks near the municipal complex, specifically, those closest to the public library:

Wow!!  For the first time in forever, we can now see that there are buildings behind these trees! 
Walker Street at State Highway 3, looking southwest. 

We commend this effort and have the following associated request:

Please expand this basic maintenance effort to include all of the trees on City land surrounding the muni complex.  Those majestic oaks on the south side of West Walker Street appear to be in particularly bad shape right now:

These, please. 
Looking southwest along West Walker Street, on October 31, 2012. 

These are some of the most remarkable old oaks in the city, but they are currently loaded down with deadwood and what some folks refer to as "trunk suckers".  It is difficult to discern when these beauties might have been last given some proper maintenance. 

The decisions regarding the oaks near the library appear to be well-made, with an esthetically-appropriate degree of trimming having been done.  Sometimes property owners become over-zealous with this kind of maintenance to the point where the results are visually harsh:

The HEB Clear Lake Market in north Clear Lake.  Someone probably told the landscaping contractor to "raise the skirts" of these trees, but they likely didn't mean raise 'em up to their danged ears!

So we certainly are not advocating for ours to look like these ones in the photo immediately above, but please continue with a consistent effort a la the library.

Thanks for your continuing efforts in this regard!

Sincerely,

The Taxpayers.

****
I mentioned previously that I lived in Austin for three years.  Immediately after I moved into a 1-acre property in the beautiful hilly terrain that characterizes west Austin, several neighbors peppered me with questions regarding my tree intentions. 

"We know that you are from Houston, and Houston people generally do not trim their trees," they explained.  "We don't understand why this is the case.  Trees are no different from lawns and shrubbery.  They need proper maintenance.  Thinning them out helps prevent storms from knocking them over and it also discourages oak wilt.  It also allows sunlight to get to the ground, and it looks much prettier.  And yet despite all this, Houston people almost never trim their trees."

Needless to say, I hired a crew to trim eleven oak trees on my new property.  And I was very glad I did so - it did not cost much, and it was a great investment for both their health and for the beauty of my neighborhood.

I don't know why people from Houston are often so reluctant to make this kind of investment.  Perhaps for the same reason that they put up with the world's ugliest fences when just a few bucks for pressure-washing and staining can completely transform the look of a property. 

Anyway, that segment of West Walker will come under increasing public scrutiny now that construction of the new Public Safety Building is under way.  I hope that remarkable row of oak trees adjacent to it can get some well-deserved maintenance.

Interesting election precedents

I confess to being so preoccupied with current financial initiatives as well as other individual ballot initiatives (both local and afar) and the national races that I simply ran out of time and did not parse our League City candidate races as thoroughly as I should have. 

But it appears that the good people of League City did some of that due diligence fairly thoughtfully, electing new Council members with fiscally conservative stances.

That's both supportable and appropriate, I think. There is a powerful argument to be made that League City has been playing too loose and fast with public funds, as these now-successful City Council candidates both alleged.  Galveston County Daily News (GCDN) made that same argument last summer when it basically asked, albeit in an understated tone the paraphrased question, "Whoa - where the hell did this come from?!" in reference to the $75 million loan that LC secured without voter approval. 

And I continued the thread in October, asking why the Public Safety Building ended up looking like the best-kept secret since the beer can house. 

I mean, the whole thing was a bit surreal, wasn't it??  There was all this PR and media hoopla going on about these financially-insignificant upgrades to City Hall, and meanwhile, nobody was talking about the elephant across the street:  the $33 million monument to public debt that got slipped onto our collective yoke without anybody really realizing what was happening (including GCDN, which according to my communications with them, had no idea what was going on even after construction preparations had commenced). 

I felt like I had been duped, that the City Hall renovations were an intentional decoy, a Trojan horse designed to divert attention from the real financial issues that were in play.  Perhaps this is not what League City ever intended, but that's how the whole thing came across to me. 

And that's not right.  And what happens when the voters feel that things are not right?  They turf out the people responsible.  For all of its flaws and limitations, our democratic process does tend to work this way, which is good to see.  In some ways, the American system may indeed be broken - but it obviously ain't completely broken. 

This was a fate-sealing public statement if there ever was one, eh?
Phalen was defeated by Heidi Thiess. 
Screengrab from this previous post.

So with that said, for posterity and future reference, here are a few memorable photos of this memorable election - to be followed by a description of an election precedent that is brand new and positively enchanting!!

Approaching the scene of the non-crime yesterday on foot of course! across the Bridge to Nowhere, I noticed a KTRK news chopper hovering above the League City muni complex.  "Holy cow - I hope nobody got shot," I thought to myself. 
:-)

Say what??  I don't remember commercial news boom trucks at any previous election.  But I've only lived in League City for about four years now. 

No obvious police presence or tell-tale bullet holes, but hmmm.....

How very craptastic... glad to see so many people exercising their rights, but it was a bit inconvenient to have to stand in that line!

All that being said and shown, here is the Election 2012 moment that utterly won my heart:

THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is John Kelso. 
If you've ever lived in Austin, I don't need to tell you who he is.  For those of you who are thus far uninitiated, he's a well-known humor columnist and commentator.  A veritable institution unto himself, much like Keep Austin Weird. 
Photo screengrabbed from the Austin American Statesman. 

In a stroke of utter brilliance the likes of which I haven't seen manifest in the political arena in decades, Kelso determined that it's not illegal to vote dressed as Big Bird.  In many states, it's apparently illegal to present yourself at a polling station in open advocation of any party or candidate.  It's considered to be a form of electioneering which is not fair (in Texas we have a 100-foot distance marker which restricts that kind of thing). 

But apparently wearing a Big Bird costume is subtle enough so that it's not considered to be electioneering.  He dressed as Big Bird so that he could protest Romney's stated intention to cut funding for PBS (and he got national news coverage for doing it).  But a voter would have to know the issues intimately in order to understand what was being said (wordlessly) here, so no fowl... er, foul.

You know what this means, don't you?  It means that I would have been within my legal rights if I had voted yesterday dressed as a human sidewalk segment!!  

Especially because that would have represented an even more subtle political statement, given that no candidate for public office had expressed any concrete position on sidewalks.

So Kelso has hereby done me a greater favor than he ever did during the three years I lived in Austin: he set a ground-breaking precedent of which I may indeed avail myself in the future. 

Of course, this plan has the obvious aesthetic drawback.  I could easily craft visually-convincing sidewalk segments out of high-density painted styrofoam and strap them onto my front and back, but the answer to that age-old question, "Do I look fat in this?!" would be a resounding "HELL, YES!!!"  My size 8 Levis may be hanging loosely off of my middle-aged rear end, but it's simply not possible to trot about dressed as a human sidewalk and NOT look fat in that. 

Oh well.  That's just the type of sacrifice that a person has to make sometimes for the public good, ain't it?

Happy election hangover day!!

Your friend,
The Trash Whisperer.
;-)

Something Stinky, Part 2: Recycling Rates

This is a companion post to the questions I raised a few days ago about the trash portion of League City's waste contract. 

At the bottom of that post, I noted that, on October 31, 2012, I'd measured a recycling participation rate of just 43% of single-family households in my informal "study area".  This rate is potentially concerning from a financial perspective because it's so low. 

Here's where the analysis gets particularly frustrating because the information needed to properly assess this type of program is often either intensely politicized and/or is not publicly available in an accessible format.  The net result in this case is that I have far more questions than answers, but the questions are worth asking because, again, millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake. 

First of all, I note for the record that I am a huge, huge proponent of recycling - providing that the program is financially optimized to the point where it's in the best interest of the taxpayers who are footing the bill for it.  I'm one of those extremely rare homeowners who took the initiative to create my own superior recycling rolly cart...

Ain't she just a beauty??  Cost me six whole dollars for the spray paint to convert this regular trash rolly into an Ameriwaste-colored recyler.  This kind of container holds a lot more volume than the bins that Ameriwaste distributed, and it's also much easier to move around because it has wheels.  Photo from this post.

...and I would never dream of throwing perfectly good compostable yard trimmings or food waste in the regular trash - that's just an insensible waste of a valuable resource.

Photo from this post of just a few months ago, where I showed how simple the home composting process really is.  Not only can home composting keep a surprisingly large amount of organic matter out of landfills, the equivalent high-quality landscaping soil amendments that it replaces would otherwise cost about twelve bucks a bag by today's prices.  Talk about win-win-win: drag less waste to the curb, less waste ends up in landfill, more money in your pocket by virtue of costs avoided. 

Here's where the "not publicly available" and "intensely politicized" informational factors enter into the equation, though. 

My knowledge of municipal recycling challenges is partly predicated on what I learned as a previous homeowner in the Pineloch community of Clear Lake.  Pineloch was one of Houston's pilot program subdivisions for recycling several years ago.  At that time, we received information directly from Pineloch CAI (the homeowners association), but it was mostly in the form of paper circulars, which are no longer in my possession, unfortunately.  If I still had them, I could use them as concrete references for this post, but instead I must rely on memory.   

But here is what I do remember from those circulars and associated public discussions: 

Unless a municipality can raise recycling participation rates above a certain threshold, the program is simply not worth doing.  It costs so much in fuel, manpower, and equipment to deploy a recycling program that, without a good return on investment via participation, the municipality would be better off taking that same money and investing it on a different environmental initiative instead - the taxpayers would end up being better served that way.

City of Houston did a pretty good public outreach campaign in order to raise participation rates.  But they didn't really do it for the sake of friendly competition - I'm remembering that they did it because it was simply necessary to make the program viable. 

Compare these Round 2 participation rates (percentage of carts out) to the 43% that I measured about a week ago here in my League City example neighborhood. 

 Much has been said in the popular press lately about greenwashing - the process of spin-doctoring the facts to make a given situation or product appear more "environmentally friendly" than it really is.  Most of that coverage focuses on allegations of corporate greenwashing (such as this example), but municipalities often intentionally engage in this deceptive practice as well.  I'm not specifically accusing League City of doing this here - I'm simply noting that the practice manifests frequently across many levels of our government.  The example with which I am most familiar is the use of rain barrels.  In this post from a year and a half ago, I explained why they are not the magic bullet that many government outreach programs declare them to be.  And many munis know that these kinds of sales jobs don't represent reality - but their private conclusions about the issue often fall into the category of "the end justifies the means".  Specifically with rain barrels, raising environmental awareness within the public is frequently justified even if the method used to do it is actually cost-degenerative for everyone involved.

I don't agree with that analysis, first because it is cost-degenerative.  It lacks imagination and you have to remember that any cost-degenerative program also comes with a significant opportunity cost because it's displacing the non-cost-degenerative program that would otherwise be running in its place. 

And I also disagree with it because it's the kind of bureaucratic snow-job that gives conservation a bad name in general.  People are not stupid - they can detect when smoke is being blown up their rear ends.  League City's median family income currently stands at around $88,000 - this is an educated population that is fully capable of comprehending cost trade-offs on any issue.  Fully capable of comprehending what activities really are conservation-minded, and which ones are closer to the greenwashing end of the spectrum.  They can handle hard answers to real questions. 

So with those somewhat-rambling observations in mind, here are my questions for which I genuinely don't know the answers:

1. In dollar terms, how much of League City's trash contract is being allocated to support the household recycling initiative?
2. What are the recycling participation rates across League City as a whole?
3. Do those participation rates justify the costs of the program?  Has LC evaluated this? 
4. If they have evaluated that, can we see the resulting financial analysis?
5. If not, does LC have any plans to engage in outreach or other measures intended to increase the participation rate to a level that would make the program financially more viable?

If I didn't have a job and a family, I might have the time to run down some of those answers myself.  But we have City employees who should be providing that kind of a public service, don't we??

Would City of Houston (which, due to its much larger size, has studied recycling cost-benefit issues extensively) continue to pick these things up if only 43% of households were putting them out?

Does this make financial sense for the taxpayers?  Or would we be better off taking the same amount of dollars and instead dedicating them to parks or public green space set-asides or some other environmental initiatives that actually build value for our collective futures?

I'd love to know the answers.

There's something stinky with the trash contract...

...and it might not be what our local journalists and business people are thinking it is.  From rotten in the state of Denmark, we proceed to a discussion of putrescible in the City of League City. 

If you've been following this story at all, there arose a few interesting discussion threads on an article written by Chris Gonzalez and an editorial by Heber Taylor of Galveston County Daily News.  Writing for Bay Area Citizen, Y.C. Orozco (a journalist thus far unknown to me) penned perhaps the most comprehensive summary of the contract status and also the historical legacy (including a recap of the irregularities that characterized the letting of the present trash contract to Ameriwaste). 

On October 28, I began asking the obvious questions that don't seem to be arising in any other arena.  Now, I am the first to admit that I don't have any grasp of the legalities behind municipal trash contracting.  I note this because Bay Area Citizen quoted Mayor Paulissen as describing it as "a state process".  What the heck does that mean exactly, and what impacts might it have on common sense?  I don't know. 

But common sense is my default perspective, and common sense is increasingly leading me to conclude the following: 

The problem with the trash contract is not that it unfairly burdens businesses and other non-residential entities with a disproportionate share of the costs.  The problem with the contract is more fundamental than that - it's a bad fit to the needs of the city simply because it appears to be based on a surprisingly wasteful (no pun intended) set of logistical assumptions.

On October 28, I questioned why we had twice-weekly trash collection in the first place when residents of other local munis (most notably, City of Houston) pay for only one. 

Bear with me here because this question is not the non-starter that some people assume it to be.  Here is my more precise derivative question today:  has anyone actually studied this issue and gathered data to support a twice-weekly scenario with all of the extra millions of dollars that it obligates us to fork out (allegedly by shifting much of that resulting cost burden to non-residential customers) over the life of this new contract? 

I am not aware of any quantitative investigations, so (as unromantic as this sounds) I started gathering my own data (my dog does not care whether I carry a clipboard on our walks). 

I chose Section 9 of Centerpointe subdivision as my study area because it's convenient and because I know it well (n = 75 homes, of which only one was known to be vacant at data collection time).  According to HAR, Centerpointe's median appraised home value is $221,600.  That's within 10% of the medians for subdivisions such as South Shore, Tuscan Lakes, and Westover Park, and thus our little slice of suburbia probably represents a reasonable "League City bedroom community" approximation (and League City is dominated by such subdivisions).   I didn't tell anyone in advance that I would collect data, because I did not want to skew behavior (and because most people wouldn't care anyway). 

What I found was striking.  On Wednesday October 31, we had a 91% trash participation rate, meaning, 91% of households put out their trash for collection.  Wednesday is also our recycling day, so this was not a surprising result: peoples' brains generally register Wednesday as "trash day" here and many tend to put everything out at once. 

The following Saturday (November 3), which is our second weekly collection day, participation fell to just 56%. 

But what was most striking on Saturday was not that percentage by itself - it was the way in which those people were participating: most of them put out almost no trash. 

Many folks had so little trash to be collected that they didn't even bother to put it in trash cans or rolly carts, like they normally do on Wednesdays.  Of the folks who did bother to haul out their cans, this was a common sight - one tiny sack at the bottom. 

This was the common non-can alternative - bags simply placed on the ground.  That larger bag contains mostly uncompressed cardboard.

And this example.  Looks lonesome, doesn't he??  He has no friends to keep him company.  I could go on and on with pictures of this type. 

And this example.  This isn't even a kitchen-style trash bag - it's just a tiny handled shopping bag containing mostly junk mail.  Should management of this material be a huge financial priority for taxpayers??  Is our collective public health status somehow going to be jeopardized if little bags of general household rubbish are allowed to remain sitting in rolly carts for slightly longer periods of time?

Basically what we seem to have here is a situation in which League City taxpayers are forking out millions and millions of extra dollars so that these teensy weensy bags of trash can be picked up three to four days earlier than they would be otherwise. 

If, for the moment, we accept these data at face value, we can conclude that only about half of League City is availing themselves of this extravagant twice-weekly scheme - and worse - that half is just barely using it to boot. 

Obviously this is not a full quantitative scientific study here, because it involved only one subdivision and one pair of participation measurements (this being due to the newness of this trash debate).  But these results are qualitatively consistent with what my common-sense eyeballs have been telling me for years both in Centerpointe and at my former residence in Old Town:  League City residents don't really use this service the way it was apparently intended to be used.  They don't use it because they simply don't need it.  Like the 2.1 million residents of Houston, we could get along just marvelously with once-weekly service, at substantial tax dollar savings.  About half our populace has already volunteered to do just that, without even having been asked!

And the flip side of that resource allocation coin is the allegation that League City is shifting the cost burdens for this wasteful waste scheme onto our commercial businesses and local nonprofits.  It is alleged that the new scheme will cost Clear Creek ISD an incremental trash collection fee that is roughly equivalent to one teacher's salary!  Does any of this make a lick of sense?? 

I sure as hell would not vote for things to be this way, nor would I vote for anyone who votes for the likes of it.  I do not vote for initiatives in which I feel taxpayer dollars are being squandered. 

Reverting now to what Bay Area Citizen quoted Paulissen as saying, is there something about "state law" that compels small municipalities to scope trash contracts to be as wasteful as this?  If so, why isn't anybody doing anything about that?

And believe it or not, the situation might actually be even worse than all that, when evaluated from a financial viability standpoint.  On October 31, I measured only a 43% recycling participation rate.   That fact just in isolation has significant cost-benefit ramifications, but this blog post is getting long, so I will save that for a separate future entry.


Not much work to do this morning, boys:
An Ameriwaste truck cruising through a sparsely-trashed area on the morning of November 3.  The five closest subdivision lots in the foreground had collectively put out only two trash cans.  One of those was the same can pictured in the close-up above, the can with only one small bag at the bottom of it. 

Ticketed for illegal sidewalk parking

Oh, you simply cannot imagine the degree to which this fantastic article was sweet music to my blogging ears...

I'm thinking of framing this and putting it up on my wall.
Screengrab from Houston Chronicle.   

The only thing that surprised me in this news piece was the degree to which some of these respondents were indignant because they got ticketed for parking on public property that does not belong to them. 

Ignorant, selfish bastards! (in my personal opinion).  They would rather see a child on a tricycle divert into the street or a mother pushing a carriage struggling to drag her baby through the hell strip simply because they, with their ridiculously-oversized air haulers, happen to be the Absolute Center of the Universe and are therefore entitled to park wherever they damned-well please.

I've said it before, and I've said it again, and I've even said it within the context of current events:  the sidewalk is a publicly-owned pedestrian resource, not a bloody personal staging area for trophy trucks. 

I've even said it with pictures.
From this previous post.

Aaaand I've said it with more pictures.  Google screengrab of an offending residence on Walnut Pointe.  Even if these folks lacked the awareness to buy a house large enough to accomodate their needs, they could have squeezed those four cars foward and largely avoided this. 

If I had all the free time in the world at my disposal, I would have attended the League City police chief candidate meet-and-greet that was held recently, in order to ask the candidates where they stood enforcement-wise on issues like this - to raise awareness if nothing else.  We've heard reports of sidewalk ticketing farther north in Clear Lake (as reported in one of the previous neighborhood newsletters) and now this latest round as reported by Chron in Fort Bend County.  I'd like to see it start happening here in Centerpointe as well, but it would be appropriate to first devote more resources to raising awareness, just in case there are residents who (for whatever reason) genuinely haven't snapped to the inconvenience that they are imposing on their neighbors by doing this. 

To that end, I encourage you to have a chat with your neighbors if you see sidewalk parking happening near you.  On our short stretch of subdivision street extending from the nearest intersection to our cul-de-sac, we have nineteen children.  Nineteen children just in this one little area, who are out running around and playing with each other on a daily basis.  If I see anyone impeding the activities of those children, including via blocking sidewalks, we are going to be having us a neighborly chat.   

Autobody language

Decades ago when I was just a small child, my father taught me to interpret the subtlest of signals that are emanated from the many different drivers on our public road systems.  I would marvel at how perceptive he was, and how he could almost magically anticipate what was going to happen next. 

My Dad would have seen the likes of this coming a mile away.
Photo attribution: Damnsoft 09 at en.wikipedia

I started the same training procedure with my own child when she was very young, referring to the interpretable phenomenon as "autobody language".  "You have to learn to read their autobody language," I would tell her, but she was decidedly more skeptical than I had been at her age.  "There is no such thing as 'autobody language'," she would retort, and from there, we would proceed into the inevitable "my mother is a nerd" conversation.

I would tell her that a car is just a mechanical extension of a person's body and that, just as their body reflects their underlying mood and intentions, so, too, does their car.  The effect is a bit muted by those thousands of pounds of painted steel surrounding them, but it can still be detected. 

And to drive home my point (pun intended), I would give her live examples.  "Watch what happens here next," I would say from my driver's seat.  "That guy in the red car is going to cut off the other guy in the truck."  Sure enough, it would happen.  But all she would reply was, "There is no such thing as autobody language."

Until that one precious day when I heard her muttering to herself under her breath, "Oh my God, I don't believe this... I knew exactly what that guy in the blue car was going to do, because I read his autobody language..."

Occasionally I will read someone's autobody language, but I'm not sure if the driver's implicit assessment of his own skills is commensurate with actual reality. 

Such was the case about a month ago at one of my favorite local intersections - the corner of West Walker and League City Parkway.

Do you notice how I'm hanging waaay back from that fuel truck?  In contrast to the car on the left, which is creeping up on his tail?  I was hanging back because he was driving pretty assertively - while probably carrying enough fuel to blow up a small skyscraper. 

What else do you notice about this scene?  He has straddled both lanes.  Why?  Because he needed to turn right.  But why in particular did he swing so wide in this case?

Once he executed his turn, I realized that he did, in fact, know what he was doing - his autobody confidence fit his actual skill level. 

Did you spot the special hazard here?  It's not the fuel truck - it's the utility pole that is inexplicably planted within about fourteen inches of the southbound right lane.  This trucker wanted to make especially sure that he did not clip it, because a load of combustible fuel plus electrical utility pole equals potential worst-case scenario.  Which is why I was hanging waaaay back until he finished executing his turn. 

I think the driver to the left also figured this whole thing out, albeit a few seconds after I did, because look - he didn't proceed down his lane, even though space opened up.  Best to leave the friggin' fuel truck alone!!

That particular truck driver proved to be smart and situationally-aware.  However, here is my prediction regarding this intersection:  that utility pole is eventually going to come down.  If it's left in its current position, which is impossibly close to the lane of travel, it's only a matter of time before somebody's wheels jump the curb and take it out.  There's a small electrical transformer at the top of it, but it appears to serve only the Gas Dude.  Nevertheless, when it comes down, it's going to make an unholy mess for a while, at this very busy intersection. 

If we get lucky, someone will merely damage it, without bringing it down catastrophically.  Then its owner will realize, "Oh, heck, that's in a bad place" and they will move it back from the lane. 

One of the reasons why I noticed this situation is that I used to live in north Clear Lake, where the light poles are set in crazy proximity to the travel lanes.

Clear Lake City Blvd. eastbound past Highway 3, screengrabbed from Googlemaps ground view.

WHY would any right-of-way designer put the light poles in these positions??  In this scenario, all you need is one car tire jumping the curb even slightly, and it's Game Over.  I spent seven years watching drivers knock these things over like bowling pins. 

Anyway, there's today's anecdote FWIW.  If one day you're approaching this intersection and you see a lot of flashing lights and commotion, remember - you heard it here first.
:-)

Hallowed suburban ground

We in Centerpointe Section 9 passed our final litmus test of "subdivision viability" last night: for the first time ever, we had streets teeming with kids trick-or-treating for Halloween.

The scene near dusk with the first wave of the smallest kids.

It was only around May of 2012 that this section's last spec house sold, which means that for the 2010 and 2011 Halloween nights, there were fewer participants.  Nobody wants to have to navigate their kids around muddy streets, waste piles, mountains of mortar sand, and orange construction fences, so many people simply went elsewhere for our first two formative years.

I had well over one hundred kids and had to turn off our lights before the evening was over because I completely ran out of treats. 

I'm a bit of a radical in handing out fresh popcorn as well as candy.  I always put my address on each bag (house number concealed on this photo but not on the actual bags) so that parents will know where the stuff came from and hopefully will realize that no aspiring Halloween ax murderer would bother to identify themselves this way.  I don't know what parents ultimately think of this idea, but the kids absolutely LOVE it because it's something different. 

I popped eighteen bags of Boy Scout popcorn, with each bag being enough to stuff about three of these zipper baggies.  My house will probably reek of popcorn for the next month! 

As with previous Halloweens in other subdivisions where I've lived over the years, I did notice many, many unfamiliar faces last night.  This is a well-known trend (here also) and it's not always graciously received by folks.  The speculation as to why lower-income people trick-or-treat in neighborhoods like Centerpointe often comes round to the notion that lower-income people can't afford to pass out candy and therefore, if those kids go around in their own neighborhoods, they won't receive much. 

I tend to doubt that.  Have you looked at the price of candy recently?  It's dirt cheap.  To hand out two pieces of candy costs about thirteen cents per child, and that's assuming you buy it in a name-brand store at full price, like I did at the last minute yesterday.  I suspect that most people could swing this magnitude of an outlay regardless of their prevailing socioeconomic status.

I suspect that the real reason is much simpler in many cases: people can walk in places like Centerpointe.  Remember, Halloween is hands-down the single most intensive pedestrian social activity in which we engage as a culture.  Many people get out and walk on Halloween who never set foot outside their houses any other day of the year.  Most kids walk with a few parents or older siblings in "pods" - little groups of people who know each other and travel around together.  It's almost impossible to safely herd a group of over-excited cats, er, kids, in places where no sidewalks are present.  We have sidewalks here and sidewalks don't exist in many lower-income areas.  The impact of that cannot be overstated. 

Regardless of the reason, I certainly wouldn't begrudge those unfamiliar, wide-eyed little faces a helping of goodies.  Including popcorn that I hope their parents realize is safe, like basically all of the goodies out there regardless of whether or not it's prepackaged junk or home-made stuff that's actually much healthier (here is the Snopes article describing how there's never been a genuine random case of kid poisoning via Halloween goodies).