Providence Academy is holding two open houses for prospective students and their parents to come see what the school is all about. My family has moved around the country quite a bit in the past 15 years so I’ve had an opportunity to experience many different schools. I currently have two high school kids at Providence Academy. It’s my opinion this is the best school in the Twin Cities and is well on its way to being one of the top schools in the nation. In fact, the school was named once again to the Top 50 list of Catholic schools in the U.S. for the fourth year running.

Providence Academy is a Catholic college prep school for grades pre-K through 12th grade. They aren’t afraid to teach the Catholic Faith but you should know that the school is not limited to Catholics. There are a number of Protestant Christian students there as well. The faculty is top notch. The students who graduate are very well prepared even for the most elite colleges in the country. (I must admit that I am a little jealous of the education my children are receiving there because I would have liked to have experienced that same caliber of training, education and formation).

The open houses are November 8th and the 15th from 6:30 – 9:00 PM. Please call the admissions department if you’d like to register for one of the open houses. They can be reached at 763-258-2502.

Providence Academy is located at:

15100 Schmidt Lake Road, Plymouth, MN 55446

If you’re looking for the best education for your child, then you really should consider Providence Academy.

Some might ask, what’s with the posting about ethanol on a real estate blog?

In case you missed the opinion piece in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, this is must reading for everyone as the energy debate and the challenge to find and develop alternative fuels impacts us all.

How this relates to housing is the fact that ethanol plants need to be located close to major metropolitan areas because of transportation issues. Because they use a truly stunning amount of water, they will draw down the acquifers in the area. Battles are already being fought across the country as more ethanol plants are approved for construction.

If you think it has been difficult and expensive to water your lawn the past couple of years, just wait if Congress passes the latest “renewable fuels” bill. According the the WSJ, we currently consume about 7 billion gallons of ethanol per year right now. The bill will require that to jump to 36 billion gallons per year by 2022. They also say that a Cornell University professor by thte name of David Pimentel says that, “when you count the water needed to grow corn, one gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of water.” If true, that’s incredible!

If we start to go down this road, the Chanhassen Total Watering Ban that occured this summer will be commonplace and it won’t hit in late July or August like it did this year. I believe there will be either highly restricted water use or year round total watering bans.

A big yard might become increasingly a luxury of the past and a liability for the future.

The National Center for Policy Analysis published this excellent summary below of the Wall Street Journal’s piece:

Heavily subsidized and absurdly inefficient, corn-based ethanol has already driven up food prices. But the Senate’s plan to increase production to 36 billion gallons by 2022, will place even greater pressure on farm-belt aquifers, says the Wall Street Journal.

Consider:

• Ethanol plants consume roughly four gallons of water to produce each gallon of fuel, but that’s only a fraction of ethanol’s total water habit.
• Cornell University ecology professor David Pimentel says that when you count the water needed to grow the corn, one gallon of ethanol requires a staggering 1,700 gallons of H2O.

Some corn-producing regions are already scrapping over dwindling supply:

• Kansas is threatening to sue neighboring Nebraska for consuming more than its share of the Republican River.
• There is local opposition to a proposed ethanol plant in Erskine, Minnesota, with anti-refinery yard signs sprouting up and residents concerned about well water.
• Backers of a proposed plant in Jamestown, North Dakota, recently withdrew their application when it became clear that the plant’s million-gallon-a-day appetite would drain too much from a local aquifer.

Further, ethanol’s big environmental footprint is not limited to water, because biofuels like ethanol are highly inefficient, says the Journal:

• Growing corn to produce ethanol means converting land from food production to fuel production.
• Writing in Science magazine, Renton Righelato and Dominick Spracklen estimate that in order to replace just 10 percent of gasoline and diesel consumption, the United States would need to convert a full 43 percent of its cropland to ethanol production.

The alternative approach — clearing wilderness — would mean more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than simply sticking with gasoline, because the CO2-munching trees cut down to make way for ethanol absorb more emissions than ethanol saves.

Source: Editorial, Ethanol’s Water Shortage,” Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2007.

ForeclosureS.com countered the data released this week from competitor RealtyTrac that overhyped the recent foreclosure numbers. Remember, like the mainstream media, these websites that cater to the housing crisis can also fall prey to sensationalizing the news or data reports in order to captures more web visitors and subscribers. People love real estate and when the TV news runs a report on the state of the housing market, they get viewers. When the newspapers and magazines run big cover stories on housing, they sell copies. It’s business folks. (I subscribe to both – they are each $50 per month to have access to the data).

But given that this is a business, let’s look at the business of real estate. The table below is from the ForeclosureS.com press release and it shows that in Minnesota, the number of REO (real estate owned (by banks)) filings dropped by 8% in Q307 vs. Q207. While there is no way we’re out of the woods yet with regard to the foreclosure problem, this is a bit of good news in an otherwise dreary market. (For those not in Minnesota, it has rained 16 out of the last 17 days and we’ve gone from a drought to an extra 10-12″ of rain fall).

From the ForeclosureS.com press release on Sunday:

Sunday, October 14, 2007 @ 10:35:00 PM

The Truth: Foreclosed Homes TUMBLE 21.5% in September

Nonetheless year-to-date seven states reported solid decreases in the number of REO filings over the same time period last year, McGee adds. Those states, according to ForeclosureS.com, include Massachusetts, Utah, Colorado, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania.

On a quarterly basis, 15 states had a drop in the number of REO filings in the third quarter compared with the second quarter, as follows: