Mike Reynolds - Earthships

An old classmate of my wife's has been in New Mexico for many years building houses out of recycled materials with Mike Reynolds. I have never been very interested with their work, because Mike's philosophy is anti-urban, however this past year they have started work in Haiti, and their proposal is to build denser clusters of these self-sustaining "earthships". Now I am interested. We just rented the movie "Garbage Warrior" from the library. It is a documentary about their struggle to be allowed to legally build houses without water, sewer and electric supplies. It is fascinating, and I hope to be able to go out west next year and visit.

Pruitt Igoe

I would love to see this documentary:


Pruitt-Igoe.com

Other historical footage:

Big House Equals Junk Storage

"Closets? They're nothing but unsanitary boxes! And as for your storage, there's no reason for people to hold on to so much junk!" -Frank Lloyd Wright (quote from the 1940s, when the average house size was under 1,000 square feet and long before we started importing tons of plastic crap from China.)

I admit that storage is a problem in apartment living. At our home, we especially have a hard time finding a place for my tools and my wife's gardening stuff. And I'm never sure where to keep the charcoal. She would love a potter shed and me a wood shop, but instead we have a gardening bucket and tool boxes... stored on shelves. It is a bit inconvenient, but it works.

Sometimes I wish for a basement, but then I visit a relative's house and see the basement full like this:
 

Do we need to save all this stuff? I've seen whole basements full of just holiday decorations! How much holiday decorations do you need? In my opinion is it just best to get rid of all this junk. Give old furniture and clothes to people who need it now. Get rid of the dusty books and magazines. Yes, someone in your family may someday need those toddler clothes. But is it really worth hording this stuff in your closets and basements for sometimes decades, when you may never even use it? We received lots of hand-me-down clothes from relatives for our kids, and the best thing to do after a year of wear is to hand them down again to the someone else.

A 2008 related Citykin post: Smaller Homes = Happier Homes

HUD's New Direction

Found in the American Prospect:

The Reverse Commute

... Shelley Poticha, a small woman with a big assignment. As director of HUD's new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, Poticha is working to encourage a suburban nation to live in ways that make it feasible to walk, take public transit, and bike. Her goal is to make suburban sprawl a thing of the past by equipping local governments with the tools to build neighborhoods centered on public transit and walking.

....housing will no longer be classified as "affordable" based on the rent or mortgage alone; under a new system in development, financing formulas will factor in residents' transportation and utility costs, too.

....New measures to reverse the march of spraw may be too little, too late. It took seven decades and trillions in federal investment to create the sprawl that the Obama administration is now moving to brake. The first interstate highways rolled out in the 1950s with the present-day equivalent of $300 billion in federal funds. The suburban home industry was fueled by subsidies that today amount each year to almost twice HUD's entire budget.

***

"The risk is that the culture war ... will spill over into this field," .... "What should be a bipartisan, economic, and environmental quality-of-life issue becomes, 'Everyone who owns a car is the devil and is going to drive us off a cliff,' versus, 'The other side wants to take our cars away from me, and you're going to rip my hands off my steering wheel when I'm dead and cold.' ...

...A household with access to transit spends 9 percent of its income on transportation, compared with 25 percent for the car-dependent. Making households conscious of the true expense of car dependency is an important part of the Obama administration's sustainability project. ...

...In the stimulus, most transportation spending went to roads and highways because state agencies already had plans ready. But for the first time, a single program, called Transportation Investments for Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER), supported any mode of travel a local government cared to pursue, from rapid bus transit to bike lanes. Its $1.5 billion in grants lured proposals from unlikely places...

But mostly the administration is moving to do things for which it doesn't have to ask Congress to pay, such as influencing consumer choices through devices like the location-efficient mortgage, which gives homebuyers who settle near mass transit more borrowing power. The Obama administration is betting that such gestures can influence individual decision-making on a large scale by tilting economics to favor certain geographic choices over others.

History suggests that the landscape changes when economic habits become cultural ones, so ingrained that most of us don't realize why we act as we do. ...

"In my mind there's just a big myth that we can't change," Poticha says. "That isn't true. If we give people better information about making choices and then we deliver some options for them, there are just a lot more ways that we can grow our communities."

Don't Subsidize Home Construction

... The difference between Germany and Spain, when you get down to it, is that Germans work for companies which provide goods and services that the rest of the world wants. In doing so, they make good money, which they save up. That’s how they became rich. The Spanish, by contrast, have massive unemployment, and most of the country’s GDP growth in recent years has come from the construction industry. Their main export is tourism, if that counts as an export, and the main way that Spaniards have become rich in recent years is by sitting back and watching the value of their real estate grow exponentially.

The U.S., going forwards, needs to be less like Spain and more like Germany. So let’s not subsidize housing. That way lies fiscal disaster. - Felix Salmon

Wanted: Suburban House in City

I happened upon an article in a Toronto newspaper in which the author, a mother of two, complained that she couldn't find a suburban type house in her urban neighborhood. I found it interesting, because I have met several downtown couples who feel a similar conundrum. In her words, she wants:

..an affordable, big, four-bedroom suburban house – in the city. That way, we non-car owners could live in spacious comfort and still be within easy walking distance of a decent health-food store, playing fields, the library, the boys’ public school, restaurants, our families and work. ..

...Our boys commute by streetcar to school every day, and they navigate the transit system with ease. They can’t ride their bikes home from school because they’d have to cross three major roads to do so. They play in their neighbourhood park, not their backyard. We make good use of Toronto’s ravines for weekend hikes...

I really don't have any solution for this mother, except to say you cannot have it all. You cannot have your urban lifestyle, and have a large backyard, ...at least on a budget and in a "safe" neighborhood. Yes, those houses do exist in Cincinnati, (for example in the gaslight area of Clifton) but for most middle-class families, you must choose. For my family, we chose to live in a poorer neighborhood, so that we could still afford the space, and yet we still don't have a private yard. We have a community garden, and we have the parks. I haven't run a lawnmower since I was a teenager, but neighbors step on vegetable plants in the community garden. The vegetables are not that important to me.

Understand your priorities, jump in, and don't look back.

Car Costs Make Housing Unaffordable

The Not-So-Affordable Neighborhood
Three out of five U.S. communities are too pricey for the average American when transportation costs are considered, according to a new study.

Even with market corrections bringing the cost of homes down in recessionary times, the United States remains in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. And a new study by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) illustrates just how bad it may be.

Some 48,000 American communities that are currently considered affordable to those making the median family income may actually not be affordable when you factor in the transportation costs necessary for homeowners to get to work, school, and the other locations that shape their daily lives. The study, “Pennywise and Pound Fuelish,” examined housing costs in 337 metro areas nationwide, which collectively are home to 80% of the U.S. population.

...
“The [current definition of affordability] does not take into account the almost equal cost of transportation, which can effectively double the cost of housing,” said Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, during a March 23 media briefing. Transportation costs can range from 12% to 32% of household income, he said, depending on the location.

To this end, CNT has parlayed the study data into a new interactive mapping tool that allows users to get ultra-granular in charting cost-of-living calculations by place. The Housing + Transportation Index contains data on 161,000 neighborhoods, allowing consumers, builders, and developers to pull up average housing and transportation costs for block-by-block comparisons. The architects of this new tool hope it will help home buyers and renters make more informed decisions about where to live, thereby avoiding the risky decisions and overleveraging of assets that lead to foreclosures.
...
“Transportation planning in the United States needs to be recalibrated so that the focus is broader than merely reducing traffic congestion,” Bernstein argued. “We are now realizing that the more we expand road capacity and encourage driving, the more we are contributing to cost of housing.”
...
“We have crashed into our limits of 20th-century thinking, policies, and solutions. This is an issue that’s critical to the future survival of the middle class.”

Resist the Housing Cult

A blog at the WSJ, says that using Federal Stimulus money to reestablish housing construction as the basis of our economy should be resisted:

....The U.S. economy is in transition, reconstituting itself into something that isn’t yet clear. But here’s what is clear: we just don’t need many new homes.

Consider the following. The U.S. has about 131 million housing units... Of that only 112 million are occupied. That means 19 million or a staggering 14.5% of all available housing is empty.

...It seems that the only Americans who really need more new houses are the American home builders.

NAHB Changing Course

The National Association of Home Builders is a trade organization that for 68 years has advocated for sprawl. Since the 1940s they have lobbied local and our national government for more roads, less zoning and cheaper vinyl siding.

A few weeks ago they held their convention, and an associate noticed an interesting trend in the program topics:

-Back to Smaller, Better Floorplans
- Transit-Oriented Development: The New Wave of Site Selection..
- Making Workforce Housing Work! Examples from around the country
- ASLA/NAHB Land Planning Workshop
- High Density-50 Units per Acre and More
- Attainable Housing-Designing for the Workforce
- Rethinking Density: Maximizing Infill Development Opportunities
- Boomers in the City: Designing for an Urban Lifestyle

The members in the NAHB are very traditional in their thinking, and seeing some of these topics in their agenda is very surprising.

Some Metropole Residents

The Metropole Is Our Home from Barbara Wolf on Vimeo.

Strange Vacant New City in China

Zombie Subdivisions

Click CNN to see a news video about why these new streets have no houses on them:


View fayetteville in a larger map


Then look at this graph comparing sales of existing and new homes:

I'd like to see the graph above with a line added showing old house demolitions/abandonments, because in the recent past, we were building more than we needed... or at least more than we could afford.

City Home Celebration

 

Join OTR Community Housing in celebrating their newest development called City Home on this Friday, October 16th from 4-7 PM at 1406 Pleasant Street.

City Home is an 11-unit mixed-income homeownership development located on Pleasant Street. OTRCH developed City Home in a partnership with Eber Development (Schickel Design was the architect).

The first phase is complete and we would love for our supporters (and any potential buyers) to come see the finished product.

Please call Sarah Allan at 513-381-1171 with any questions

Metropole Should Stay

An article in the Business Courier and Streetvibes both report that a deal is in the works to close the Metropole Apartment building and convert it to an expensive boutique hotel. I think this is a big mistake, and I will explain why.

In my short memory, downtown once had many of these kind of places. Now there just two, the Metropole and the Dennison. Sometimes called Single Room Occupancy (SROs) or coldwater flats, these are small apartments, often with shared toilet facilities and minimal if any kitchen facilities, often charging rent by the week. They are just about the cheapest housing to be found. Charging by the week allows the landlord to classify the rooms as hotels and thus avoid leases and lenghty eviction procedures. If the tenant doesn't pay that week, the lock can simply be changed.

The people who rent at places like this are often single and just one step above homelessness:

Often, they are people without family help. They may be collecting social security or they may be dishwashers at a downtown restaurant. They may be a panhandler or an alcoholic. But they live among us day to day and 99% of them cause no harm to other residents or visitors to downtown other than to pass us on the sidewalk and look unkempt or ask for a cigarette.

Like I said, at one time there were many SRO apartments downtown. There was the Milner Hotel, which was on Garfield with 115 units. It was demolished and replaced by Towne Properties' Greenwich on the Park in the 1990s.

There was also the Fort Washington, on Main Street. The Lafayette on 8th, and of course there was the YMCA, which closed it's SRO just a few years ago.

I encourage you to read this Enquirer article from 1999 about the possible closing of the Fort Washington. It paints an honest picture of the people involved.

Fort Washington overall:

Thirty years ago there were over 1700 SRO type units in the CBD. That number is now 325. If the Metropole is closed it leaves only the Dennison with it's 105 rooms and 60 baths:

The back of The Dennison:

There is some cheap housing in the CBD like these units on Court Street. Not really an SRO, but if you can manage a lease, monthly payments and utility bills, this is an option:

But the problem is that many of the people who live in SROs cannot make it in standard rental housing. They cannot sign yearly leases. They cannot collect a month's deposit. They cannot get utilities on in their name, and they especially cannot pay higher rents. And you could blame them as another blogger has and say they are lazy or shiftless, (maybe some of them are) but the fact is they are human beings and this kind housing serves their needs. Without this, many of them will be on the street:

In fact I believe that the continual removal of this type of housing is one of the major reasons for an increase in people staying at shelters like the Drop Inn Center.

Commentors on the Enquirer website don't know it yet, but downtown Cincinnati is changing and growing a lot. Between the Banks, Queen City Square, the new offices, dozens of new restaurants, a constantly packed Fountain Square and the hundreds of new condos, things are moving fast. It is a great place to live and getting better.

Look at this graph of Downtown Residential Growth made by DCI:

In two years they project that the CBD will have over 7,000 residents, and the trend is upward from there. My question is can't we commit to at least 5% (350) of them being very low income people? I don't think that is unreasonable.

After all SROs make the most sense downtown. It is downtown where single men can walk to their jobs at the stadium or as janitor in an office building. It is downtown where a guy can walk to half a dozen places and get a free dinner. Even if someone were to build a new SRO, which I don't think anyone is, why would you build it in Price Hill or Avondale? Yes the land is cheaper, but does it make sense?

In progressive cities, SROs are being newly built as part of an overall housing strategy. See L.A., Chicago, and Portland among many others.

One of the things that attracts people to an urban environment is the diversity and jumble of people. I personally love rubbing shoulders with everyone from the beggar to the councilmember. The older man in the photo way uptop, we met at Skyline, and as we were leaving, we literally bumped into ex-mayor Charlie Luken. I love that. Happenstantial meetings are what a vibrant city is all about.

And many people say they want this diversity, but when the places that house the poor are being removed (and not being replaced) people say "well that is the market". I'm not so sure that this hotel will not receive city funding, but either way, do we want the market to continually drive up prices and drive out people until we have the same segregated type neighborhoods that typify the suburbs? I say no.

Here, we have a place where over 200 poor people live mostly peacefully, next to some of the most upscale places in our downtown.

Kids playing next to the Metropole:

The Metropole should be rehabbed, but not as a hotel, rather it should be rehabbed as a better SRO for the poor.

I think a Boutique Hotel is also a fine idea. There are several vacant buildings nearby that would work well:

Or this block:

Living with all kinds of people is part of the reality of living in the city and I really want people to think about this issue. It goes to the heart of what kind of city we want Cincinnati to be.

Your opinion?

New American Dream: Renting

Article from Wall Street Journal requires a subscription to view in its entirety.

It's time to accept that home ownership is not a realistic goal for many people and to curtail the enormous government programs fueling this ambition. By Thomas J. Sugrue

...Surveys show that Americans buy into our gauzy platitudes about the character-building qualities of home ownership—at least those who still own them. A February Pew survey reported that nine out of 10 homeowners viewed their homes as a "comfort" in their lives. But for millions of Americans at risk of foreclosure, the home has become something else altogether: the source of panic and despair....

... One third of respondents don't believe that they will ever be able to own a home. And 42% of those who once purchased a home, but don't own one now, believe that they'll never own one again.

...In France, Germany, and Switzerland, renting is more common than purchasing. There, most people invest their earnings in the stock market or squirrel it away in savings accounts. In those countries, whether you are a renter or an owner, houses have use value, not exchange value.

... the story of how the dream became a reality is not one of independence, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurial pluck. It's not the story of the inexorable march of the free market. It's a different kind of American story, of government, financial regulation, and taxation.

We are a nation of homeowners and home-speculators because of Uncle Sam.

It wasn't until government stepped into the housing market, during that extraordinary moment of the Great Depression, that tenancy began its long downward spiral. Before the Crash, government played a minuscule role in housing Americans, other than building barracks and constructing temporary housing during wartime and, in a little noticed provision in the 1913 federal tax code, allowing for the deduction of home mortgage interest payments.

Until the early 20th century, holding a mortgage came with a stigma. You were a debtor, and chronic indebtedness was a problem to be avoided like too much drinking or gambling. The four words "keep out of debt" or "pay as you go" appeared in countless advice books. As the YMCA told its young charges, "If you can't pay, don't buy. Go without. Keep on going without." Because of that, many middle-class Americans—even those with a taste for single-family houses—rented. Home Sweet Home didn't lose its sweetness because someone else held the title.

In any case, mortgages were hard to come by. Lenders typically required 50% or more of the purchase price as a down payment. Interest rates were high and terms were short, usually just three to five years....

...Herbert Hoover signed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act in 1932, laying the groundwork for massive federal intervention in the housing market. ...Frankin Roosevelt created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation... created the Federal Housing Administration, ...instituted 25- and 30-year mortgages, and cut interest rates...and created the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) which created the secondary market in mortgages...

Easy credit, underwritten by federal housing programs, boosted the rates of home ownership quickly. By 1950, 55% of Americans had a place they could call their own. By 1970, the figure had risen to 63%. It was now cheaper to buy than to rent. Federal intervention also unleashed vast amounts of capital that turned home construction and real estate into critical economic sectors. By the late 1950s, for the first time, the census bureau began collecting data on new housing starts—which became a leading indicator of the nation's economic vitality.

... Tens of millions of Americans owned their own homes because of government programs, but they had no reason to doubt that their home ownership was a result of their own virtue and hard work, their own grit and determination—not because they were the beneficiaries of one of the grandest government programs ever. The only housing programs prominently associated with Washington's policy makers were underfunded, unpopular public housing projects...

Federal housing policies changed the whole landscape of America, creating the sprawlscapes that we now call home, and in the process, gutting inner cities, whose residents, until the civil rights legislation of 1968, were largely excluded from federally backed mortgage programs. Of new housing today, 80% is built in suburbs—the direct legacy of federal policies that favored outlying areas rather than the rehabilitation of city centers. It seemed that segregation was just the natural working of the free market, the result of the sum of countless individual choices about where to live. But the houses were single—and their residents white—because of the invisible hand of government.

But by the 1960s and 1970s, those who had been excluded from the postwar housing boom demanded their own piece of the action—and slowly got it. The newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development expanded home ownership programs for excluded minorities...

During the wild late 1990s ...New tools, including the securitization of mortgages and subprime lending, made it possible for more Americans than ever to live the dream or to gamble that someone else would pay them more to make their own dream come true..

... If there's one lesson from the real-estate bust of the last few years, it might be time to downsize the dream, to make it a little more realistic. James Truslow Adams, the historian who coined the phrase "the American dream," one that he defined as "a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank" also offered a prescient commentary in the midst of the Great Depression. "That dream," he wrote in 1933, "has always meant more than the accumulation of material goods." Home should be a place to build a household and a life, a respite from the heartless world, not a pot of gold.

UPDATE: here are a few studies about the effect of apartments on nearby
housing values:

Apartments Have Positive Impact on Property Appreciation Rates

Effects of Mixed-Income, Multi-Family Rental Housing Developments on
Single-Family Housing Values

America's Working Communities and the Impact of Multifamily Housing

National Multi Housing Council has resources about "Apartment Myths":

Real Full-Size Livable LEGO House

According to this BBC Article, TV host James May is looking for volunteers to help him build a new house in Surrey - made entirely out of Lego bricks.

As part of his BBC series James May's Toy Stories, he plans to build a two-storey house in the middle of the Denbies Wine Estate, in Dorking. More than three million Lego bricks have been delivered to the site.

May will host a building day next Saturday, when members of the public can help him with the project. The house will be life-size with a staircase, toilet and shower, and May said once it was completed he intended to live in it for a few days. He said although the house would be temporary, there had still been various "planning hoops" to leap through.

"I've got a man working on a flushing Lego lavatory. We think it's possible. Things like power supply, sanitation and plumbing coming into the house are as they could be for a real building... everything within my Lego house must as far as possible be Lego," he said.

May said although he already had thousands of Lego bricks, he could not be sure there would be enough. "So if people do have bricks that aren't being used that they would be happy to donate to a very worthy pioneering Lego cause, then we'll be happy to take them off your hands."

First of all how do you get used to living in a place called "Dorking"? Then how do you get code authorities to signoff on a structure constructed entirely from combustible petrochemicals? I'm pretty sure Lego bricks don't have the kind of UV stabilizers that would allow them to remain outdoors for any length of time. But this would definitely be fun to build!

The Nano Home

Matheran Realty is one of several firms that think they have a solution: ultra-low-cost housing. In Karjat, 90km east of Mumbai, Matheran Realty is in the process of building 15,000 flats with prices starting at just 210,000 rupees ($4,500) for (200 square feet). Tata, the firm that makes the $2,500 “Nano” car, is building 1,300 basic units at Boisar, about 100km north of the city, and may add more. Priced at 390,000-670,000 rupees each, they are already oversubscribed. Other firms are planning similar developments elsewhere in India.

The cost is being kept low chiefly because the flats are being built outside big cities, where land is much cheaper. Owners are expected to commute.

The units are also very small and spartan. The simplest consist of a single room with a sink in the corner and a toilet behind a partition. They are in buildings of no more than three storeys, so there is no need for expensive structural works. Instead of bricks, lightweight moulded concrete blocks are used for the walls. The concrete is often made with foam, fly-ash or other waste materials to make it lighter as well as cheaper. There are no lifts and just one staircase per block. All this means that the homes can be built very quickly and with unskilled labour
-The Economist

Super cheap cars plus super cheap housing will likely equal a pretty miserable life commuting to keep you head above water. Heck, you can buy a vacant house in Cincinnati sometimes for $4,500. In Detroit, friends have found the fabled $100 house. Hmmm, maybe some of those Indians looking for cheap housing chould immigrate to the rust belt.

Colerain Selected Homes

I have a million things on my mind that I want to blog about, but it is hard to find the time with so much going on downtown everyday. Some of the public pools opened yesterday, so the family is off to Lincoln pool, and tonight we go to a fundraiser for Tony Fischer.

Anyway, last weekend, we went to The Skatin' Place for a roller skating birthday party. This is a place I went to many times as a kid, and it has barely changed. I am very familiar with this part of town. On the drive there and back I took notice of some run-down houses that were worthy of a photo.

3204 Lina Place.. I like this little house a lot, and that is what started me on this thread. It was built around 1927, when the corner of Colerain and Galbraith (which is just behind the building), was a dirt road serving the neighboring farms. Today it is a auto-focused mess:


This is the empty business next to the old house:

[where: 3204-3211 Lina Place Cincinnati Ohio 45253]

Two others, from 1948 and 1950:
3173 Lina Pl.:
There are hundreds of houses in this area built like these two. Houses like these that are well-cared for and still used as houses, routinely sell for well under $100k in this area.
3167 Lina Pl.:


Then, back within the limits of Cincinnati, at the bottom of Colerain hill are the following houses, which according to Building Cincinnati are slated for demolition. 13 or 14 will probably be demolished for road widening:


4410 Colerain, 1923:

4412, 4414 Colerain, circa 1901:

4422 Colerain, circa 1900, $39k:

4426 etc circa 1875-1880:

4436 Colerain Ave., circa 1885:

The nicest house in the group: 4442 Colerain Ave., circa 1926:

Little red house owned by Working in Neighborhoods, circa 1913:

Robbins Street Open House

 

Join the Center for Great Neighborhoods as they celebrate the completion of another rehabbed home in Covington's Arts District. Tomorrow, Thursday April 16th 4-7pm.
[Where: 308. W. Robbins Street, Covington, KY 41011]

Inward Trend in Building Permits?

The EPA just released results of a study of residential construction trends to see if there is a real shift inward, or if most construction is still on the suburban fringe:

...In more than half of the largest metropolitan areas, urban core communities have dramatically increased their share of new residential building permits.
* The central city has more than doubled its share in 15 regions (of 50 studied).
* The increase has been particularly dramatic over the past 5 years.
* Data from 2007 show the trend continuing in the wake of the real estate market downturn.

However, in many regions, a large share of new residential construction still takes place on previously undeveloped land on the urban fringe...