Healthcare Concerns

By STEVE GARBARINO

Paul Costello for The Wall Street Journal

GLOW WITH THE FLOW | Gas lanterns illuminate the exterior of a 1950s house in New Orleans.

After living for five years in a colorful 100-year-old Creole cottage amid the opulent historic mansions of New Orleans’s Uptown neighborhood, Ashley and Skipper Bond felt that a clean slate was in order. So three years ago they decided to lease-to-buy a midcentury modern residence in the city’s Lake Vista suburb. One embellishment staple of their old neighborhood, however, came with the brick-and-glass structure: a set of copper gas-burning lanterns, affixed to the exterior.

The French Market Yoke lantern, in copper, lights New Orleans’s French Market. bevolo.com

Both were pleased with the effect. According to Ms. Bond, who runs a parenting blog, the flickering natural-gas-fueled beacons “provide an overall sense of warmth. There’s that austerity to moderns, which can feel a tad cold,” she said. “On a less traditional house, they’re a distinct alternative to glaring electric lights. The 24-7 illumination makes it appear we’re always home and the cost is inconsequential.”

Yet despite all their charms, gaslights have been typecast as Deep South and Sherlock Holmes-ian props. With origins dating back to 18th-century London, today in the States they’re also found in historic districts and upscale enclaves in cities such as Charleston, Savannah, San Diego, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Kansas City, Mo., and in New Orleans, where they’re emblematic of the city’s haunted aura.

What isn’t widely known about them is how economical they can be. Or that they can enhance nearly all building styles, adding subtle drama and focus to entrances, gardens, pool areas and ugly service ways. And for most lantern owners, the 2-to-3-inch flames are seldom extinguished, costing on average $7 to $14 a month in gas bills.

The copper Coach House lantern works well on New England-style homes. bevolo.com

Constantine Georges, a former federal prosecutor in New Orleans, who owns a circa-1810 Creole cottage, said he installed five gas lamps in his alleyway and courtyard for their cost-efficiency. “They’re the cheapest form of lighting,” he said, “and the lanterns complement the tout ensemble of it all; they’re mood inducers.” They also, he said, remain burning when bad weather blacks-out the city’s electricity.

With no shortage of natural gas, “It’s the ‘green’-est lighting on the planet,” said Drew Bevolo, owner of the New Orleans-based Bevolo Gas & Electric Lights (since 1945), considered to be the oldest existing copper-lantern hand-crafters in the U.S.

Bevolo’s hand-riveted gas lamps—”basically a pilot light with a fancy cover on it,” said Mr. Bevolo—last for decades. “Electric lamps have to be replaced every three to five years,” he said. Once an electrician has connected the service to a residence’s gas line, homeowners simply have to open the door to their lantern, light a match to the burner tip and, said Mr. Bevolo, it will stay flickering uninterrupted for 50 years. While they’re “ambient, not task lighting,” he added, gas lights can appreciate the value of a home, saving the costs of additional lighting, and yes, interior designers.

The classic French Quarter lantern is a repro of a 1940s original. bevolo.com

The Acadian, from Carolina Lanterns, has a bracket made of black iron. carolinalanterns.com

Paul Costello for The Wall Street Journal

Natural gas-fueled Bevolo lanterns illuminate a side alleyway leading to a courtyard at the circa-1810 Creole cottage of Constantine Georges in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

– All pictured fixtures can run on natural gas or liquid propane, and can be wall-mounted or hung.

By EVAN RAMSTAD

In 2005, Moon Kook-jin was in the U.S. running his small manufacturing firm when his father asked him to return to his native South Korea to solve problems at the small conglomerate his father had started but left others to run.

For Mr. Moon, his return involved more than familial duty. His father, the Rev. Moon Sun-myung, is the founder of the Unification Church and one of the most recognized Koreans in the world.

After decades in which he and his associates ran the businesses more as charities than as for-profit organizations, Rev. Moon realized they were becoming a major drag on both the finances and reputation of the church.

His son was in his mid-30s, a point, the younger Mr. Moon says, “when I was willing to do something to help my community out.”

As chairman of the Tong-il Foundation, which operates the Unification Church’s businesses, Mr. Moon has pared the number of businesses to 12 from just over 30 via a series of asset sales and mergers. All now produce an operating profit and contribute to the charitable work of the church, instead of drawing money from it.

It has been a wrenching process, Mr. Moon said in a recent interview with Evan Ramstad at his office in Seoul. Mixing business and religion is always difficult, but especially so when one’s father is a world-wide celebrity. Excerpts from the discussion:

WSJ: What is the basic structure of the Tong-il Foundation or, in English, Unification Foundation?

Mr. Moon: I’m the chairman of the Unification Foundation here in Korea. That’s a nonprofit. It’s actually a religious institution by its corporate form. It’s a supporting institution to the Unification Church. And our foundation owns a business group. We are different than other business groups in that other business groups operate to make profit for their shareholders. We operate to make profit in our business group for our church.

We have a church hierarchy. I’m not at the top of the hierarchy. My father is the leader of the church. My function is more like a chief operating officer. He actually decides where the major direction for our group investment is, which industries we’re going to be operating in, and then I’m executing the strategy and trying to make it work.

WSJ: What was the basic problem you encountered when you arrived in 2005?

Mr. Moon: We had a very challenging situation because we had over 30 businesses and we had quite a lot of losses in the group. And the accounting and management was less than adequate for the size of the companies we were running. We started investing in businesses [in the 1960s] because a lot of our members needed jobs. It was kind of like a jobs program initially. We were a new church and a new religion and we weren’t really very well accepted in society. Our members weren’t really given job opportunities. As a result, the management of the companies was not fully professional and they didn’t operate efficiently.

WSJ: What was the first thing you did?

Mr. Moon: Within the first week I interviewed everyone at the foundation headquarters and the conclusion I came to was, if I’m going to fix this problem, it’s not going to be with this staff. So this is where I first focused on changing personnel. I re-staffed the entire headquarters. I focused on bringing in a lot of professionals, CPAs, attorneys, seasoned managers and then we contracted with several consulting firms to help us start the process of reform. We spent a lot of time sorting out the group portfolio. We tried to scale down the size of the problem to make it more manageable. We got rid of the ones we didn’t want to spend time on and made time for the business we wanted to fix.

WSJ: Would you describe some of the moves you made?

Mr. Moon: We had this business called INP, a shipbuilding business that was acquired by our group after our group restructured in the 1997 IMF crisis period. When we looked at the business, at the capability of that business, and the prospects going forward, we thought it was not possible to operate profitably for the foreseeable future. We got rid of that shipbuilding business and then another smaller shipbuilding business. Then we had a number of small manufacturing businesses, about eight of them. I worked very hard to change them and we turned them into one company called TIC. And it has viability now. They’re in three major lines of businesses: automotive parts, grinding machines and ball screws. Now the business is viable. That process of integration was largely successful and that’s a businesses we could expand through M&A.

WSJ: Was it essentially your goal to get the businesses to make money for the church?

Mr. Moon: What was happening in the past was that the foundation received church donations from around the world and a lot of those monies were being used to subsidize the businesses we owned. That’s the reverse of the [current] model, though you can’t say it’s the complete reverse because the businesses were actually like welfare programs for church members. The difference now is, since all the businesses are profitable, the flow of money from church members to businesses has stopped. And now, the foundation receives money from the businesses and provides it to the church and its mission activities.

WSJ: What is your father’s role on the business side?

Mr. Moon: I basically present recommendations from a professional point of view. The nonprofit aspect is up to my father to decide. Based on his direction and perspective, we proceed. My father has never really been interested in the details of the business. He’s more interested in the overall direction. The actual detailed operations he doesn’t really get so involved.

WSJ: Was it harder to let people go than in a normal business setting because many of the people were connected to the church?

Mr. Moon: It’s been much more difficult to restructure this business than if it was just a normal business group that didn’t have the religious component. You had a lot of cross-pollination from people who work in the ministry working in the businesses. But they weren’t businesspeople by background. As a result, they really didn’t know what to do or how to do things properly and there were a lot of mistakes made.

Well, it worked, but it was a very painful process. Whenever you do restructuring, you always have your standard demonstrations and hate mail. I had those. But because it involved the church, it was also a lot more personal. That was the most difficult aspect of it. I had lots of back-seat drivers.

Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com

By JULIE V. IOVINE

New York

This city’s zoning codes regulating the size, use and location of buildings could sap the life force out of all but the most zealous urban enthusiasts. Their technical language is intelligible only to initiated bureaucrats—probably with pocket protectors—and a handful of canny developers, certainly with a gleam in their eye.

Or so it is believed. But times have changed and so has the New York City Zoning Resolution, which just passed its 50th anniversary last month. Once regarded with frustration and loathing, zoning in middle age is hot, the cougar of urban regulatory devices: more flexible and dynamic than ever. Actually, urban planners are more likely to invoke a thermostat metaphor—noting that zoning can raise or lower the habitability of the city by degrees. The layperson might also think of it as planning’s magic wand—an implementation technique, not an avoid-at-all-costs, manipulate-as-possible rule or regulation.

Chad Crowe

And in the Bloomberg administration, as wielded by the New York City Planning Commission and its director, Amanda Burden, zoning has assumed a more activist role than ever before. It not only shapes the blocks and writes the skyline, but also aims to curb obesity by offering incentives for fresh-food markets in low-income neighborhoods; buck up the mom-and-pop store; and promote an astonishing range of other quality-of-life benefits.

“Zoning has always concerned itself, for better or worse, with social matters, such as banishing noxious uses,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association. “What’s different now is that the planning commission is moving from zoning that’s negative on social issues to being positive, like mandating green markets and bike rooms. It’s reasonable for city government to encourage people to move in a beneficial direction. Whether zoning is the correct device is another matter. A market person might say it’s better to go with incentives than mandates.” As such, zoning is something of which every New Yorker and visitor ought to be aware.

It has all become very cosmopolitan. The city’s selective bus lanes were inspired by the rapid-transit bus system in Bogotá, Colombia; the newly accessible waterfront borrows its sociable seating arrangements from Sydney, Australia; even New York’s controversial bike lanes come by way of close attention to those in Copenhagen. By tweaking the number, type and location of everything from bus lanes to street benches, zoning makes places more welcoming to visit and inviting to use.

Last month, the planning commission submitted a new initiative to public review. Called Zone Green, it will promote energy efficiency by making it easier to add photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, greenhouses and shading devices to the roofs and sides of older buildings. On Jan. 3, Commissioner Burden introduced a zoning amendment that will preserve small shops on avenues with a residential character and force new banks on the Upper West Side to shift most of their services from extended street fronts to second-floor locations. “We want New York to be a walkable city,” Ms. Burden said, “with active, tree-lined streets and active retail frontages. This modest proposal will preserve that small-store character by allowing stores a maximum of 40 feet on the street.” Banks would have a tighter, 25-foot restriction.

Tom Angotti, an urban planner and director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development, questions the significance of the planning-commission director’s emphasis on fine-grain maneuvers. “Amanda Burden brings a very personal touch because of her interest in design,” Mr. Angotti said. “But I would give greater weight to the directives coming from City Hall. Of the more than 100 rezonings in the past 10 years, most have been about creating opportunities for new real-estate development.”

As now practiced in New York, zoning and its achievements have become the envy of other cities, even Paris. For the first time in an almost 10-year run of urban design conferences held around the world, the French Minister of Sustainable Development selected New York and its zoning innovations for study. The event last July was subtitled “New York Reinvented,” and some 150 French and European mayors, urban planners, developers and architects toured such recent local triumphs as the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park and community regeneration projects in the Bronx.

“The resurrection of New York, hit in its very flesh and its pride by the September 11, 2001 attacks, is nothing short of astonishing,” wrote Jean-Louis Cohen in the program’s introduction. Mr. Cohen, a historian and one of the organizers of the event, added in an email that although zoning “was originally a German invention, it has been greatly perfected in New York City since 1916.” The elite European group, he noted, was especially keen on understanding New York’s sharp-cookie culture of negotiation and flexible regulation.

It wasn’t always such a success story. In 1916, New York City wrote into law the country’s first comprehensive Zoning Resolution. Designed to bring light and air down the street even as skyscrapers soared higher, the earliest zoning codes called for setbacks, and left it largely at that. More than 2,000 amendments followed, introducing such notions as superblocks in the 1940s—to limit density by spacing skyscrapers widely apart. In 1961, the Zoning Resolution was overhauled. Architect and historian Robert A.M. Stern recently called it “the pivotal postwar architectural event.”

Eighteen years in the making, the 1961 resolution almost immediately backfired with, among other missteps, its endorsement of the deadening tower-in-a-plaza motif that resulted in wide and windswept public spaces avoided by pedestrians, still in dreadful evidence along the Avenue of the Americas. Zoning in those days focused primarily on the bulk of individual buildings. It was not until the ’70s that it considered the larger context of whole neighborhoods by designating special districts—for theaters around Times Square; for retail on Fifth Avenue—and addressing more subtle issues such as economically diverse housing. At the same time, developers shrewdly learned how to swap public amenities for bigger buildings. Zucotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protestors gathered, was created in one such swap in 1968 but, unlike most other so-called privately owned public spaces, it was required to remain open 24 hours a day because its creation included absorbing an alley. Zoning became a game for poker sharks.

The current trend in moving zoning away from shaping big buildings toward how buildings and places are used and perform can already be seen at the recently opened East River Esplanade, where a balustrade as wide as a lunch counter and bar stools are mandated. While Mayor Michael Bloomberg is often portrayed as the developers’ friend, Ms. Burden has kept a steady eye on improving the public realm through the tools close to hand. “Zoning is not going to solve world peace,” she said in a recent interview. “But if we can figure out the issues now and address them, we can lay the foundations for the next administration so that what we start now will carry New York City into a better future.”

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

Corrections & Amplifications: An earlier version of this story indicated that both banks and retail stores on New York’s Upper West Side would have a store-front restriction of 25 feet.

By ELIZABETH GARONE

While the financial sector is slowly starting to recover, there are still thousands of professionals scrambling for a small number of available positions. More than ever, candidates need to stand out from the competition.

In this installment of The Résumé Doctor, three experts critique the résumé of a candidate early in his finance career. What he lacks in finance experience, he makes up for with an interesting background: two seasons as a tight end in the National Football League. Our experts say he needs to capitalize on his unusual background in a competitive market where skills—and standing out—are critical.

The Job Seeker:
Sean Mulcahy, 28, was laid off in December from a financial adviser position in Merrill Lynch’s New Haven, Conn., office. He says the “writing was on the wall” when an earlier round of layoffs hit in October. Mr. Mulcahy interviewed for a number of positions between October and his Dec. 13 layoff. Since December, he estimates he has sent out 150 résumés and has had several interviews. Previous to Merrill Lynch, he played in the NFL for the Cincinnati Bengals and the Carolina Panthers and he was a financial analyst at Castlekeep Investment Advisors in Westport, Conn.

The Objective: Mr. Mulcahy would like to make the jump from retail to institutional sales and remain in the New York metro area. At Merrill Lynch, he made $55,000 his first year, including commissions. He hopes to earn at least that in his next position.

The Experts: Offering feedback on Mr. Mulcahy’s résumé are Scott Fletcher, a partner at Goldsmith & Co., a New York executive-search firm focused on the financial-services and asset-management industries; Diane Morgan, director of career services at London Business School; and Sue Richey, the recruitment manager for the Associate Financial Consultant Program at RBC Wealth Management in Minneapolis.

The Résumé: Mr. Mulcahy’s fairly traditional résumé is a page, single-spaced. It leads with his contact information followed by his professional experience. He then lists his education followed by a “Systems and Applications” section. He finishes the résumé with a list of personal interests.

The Positives: Our experts like that Mr. Mulcahy has held two wealth-management positions. “It’s attractive to see that someone is focused and not moving around,” says Mr. Fletcher. All three were also impressed by his NFL experience. “That competitive nature is something sales and trading desks would value,” says Mr. Fletcher. Ms. Richey says it is quite common for the finance industry—and her firm in particular— to hire former athletes because they “understand the competitive nature of our business and this lends to their proven success.”

The Advice: While Mr. Mulcahy has covered most of his career bases in his résumé, he has done so at the expense of a visually appealing and easy-to-read document, according to two of our experts. Under his professional experience, he lists six different positions—including his time on the University of Connecticut football team and part-time stints as a sports reporter after college—in single-spaced lines, making it difficult to differentiate between them. Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Richey found Mr. Mulcahy’s résumé a chore to read and recommended he make it simpler.”His résumé forces the reader to figure out what he did when, and it appears cumbersome to read and interpret,” says Ms. Richey.

Mr. Mulcahy doesn’t include a summary statement. For Ms. Richey and Ms. Morgan, Mr. Mulcahy’s plan to move from retail to institutional sales warrants a one- to two-sentence summary statement at the top of the résumé explaining the shift. “It will be critical to connect any institutional experience he has—any client interaction, research, sales— with his objective,” says Ms. Richey.

For his professional experience, Mr. Mulcahy uses a stylistic diamond bullet pattern in lieu of traditional round bullet points to list his responsibilities, and none of the experts liked it. Nor did Ms. Richey like the style inconsistencies and grammar errors she says she found throughout the résumé: capital letters where they shouldn’t be, missing punctuation, uneven word spacing. From a visual standpoint and to get a “second look” from hiring managers, a résumé should be “perfect,” she says.

While all three experts were impressed with Mr. Mulcahy’s finance experience, they felt he needed to do a better job of illuminating it and showing how he could contribute to an institutional sales position. “He needs to demonstrate that he is a quick learner, that he can be a team player, that he is mentally tough enough to get through the break-in period to learn the ropes,” Mr. Fletcher says.

One way to do this would be to “show more context around his achievements,” suggests Ms. Richey. Rather than simply list “$400 million under management” for a bullet point under Merrill Lynch, he needs to describe how he contributed to that figure, she says. “The important thing to take away is that he produced at the level he should have been.”

All three experts say Mr. Mulcahy’s NFL experience could be his ticket to an interview as it sets him apart from other candidates. “I would go into more detail and really highlight excellence, stamina, perseverance as well as communication skills, leadership and adaptability,” says Ms. Morgan. “This needs to be much more thought out, and he needs to make the bridge for the reader on how his very able sports skills have well prepared him.”

The Systems and Applications section was confusing to the experts since Mr. Mulcahy includes his Series 7 and 66 licenses needed for selling securities and an insurance license alongside computer applications he knows. Our experts felt these warranted their own “Professional Licensing” section. Two suggested Mr. Mulcahy include mention of his efforts to become a certified financial planner in the licensing section. Currently, he includes it under his most recent position at Merrill Lynch.

As for the last section listing his personal interests, Mr. Fletcher felt it didn’t have a place on a finance résumé while Ms. Morgan and Ms. Richey felt it needed to be pared down. Mr. Mulcahy’s myriad experiences and interests (finance, sports, sports reporting, multiple hobbies) make for a well-rounded candidate—but also left Ms. Richey with a couple of concerns. “What is he really focused on?” she asks. “Is work going to get in the way of some of his interests?”

Write to Elizabeth Garone at cjeditor@dowjones.com