Yule Heibel's Library tagged housing →  View Popular, Search in Google

An argument for making neighborhoods/ streets "nicer" as a means of returning power to residents so that crime is lessened.
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Did these neighborhoods become safer because better housing telegraphed to the residents that their communities were valuable?

“If there is crime in an upscale neighborhood, everybody would come together, people would be up in arms, they’d demand the police pay attention, they’d say ‘let’s get more patrols in here!’” Cahill says. “Low-income residents in a lot of poor areas, they’ve just given up on the police, they’re not treated well by the police. They feel like the problems are too large for them to address. This is returning that sense of power to the residents, increasing the community’s capacity to do something about their situation.”
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crime urban_design atlantic_cities housing

QUOTE It doesn’t solve the problem to buy a hybrid and retrofit your house if all of that takes place 20 miles from your job. You’d still consume more energy (“suburban single family green”) than an urban household without the latest green tech (“urban single family”). And that has as much to do with associated transportation emissions as the size and efficiency of your home.

The implication is that if more suburbanites opted to move out of their low-density detached homes and into walkable, mixed-use urban communities (or if we retrofitted suburbia to better resemble such places), right there we’d be on our way to taking a real whack at carbon emissions. UNQUOTE

cities suburbia housing atlantic_cities energy ecological_urbanism

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Strengthening property rights, however, would more closely align private costs and private benefits. A group of NIMBY neighbors forced to buy a property in order to limit development on it would only make the purchase if they felt very strongly about doing so and, in particular, if they felt the benefits to them of blocking the development were worth the cost of the land in question.

But wait, you might argue: what if the potential developer stands to make billions by building on a particularly lucrative piece of land? How then could neighbors hope to buy the land to keep it un- or underdeveloped? It would obviously be much more difficult for NIMBY groups to halt development in such cases, but generally speaking, that’s a good thing. When land values are very high because development potential is very high, that suggests that demand is very high. And in such cases, the cost of blocking that high demand is also quite high. It is in precisely these cases that the economy is most harmed by NIMBYs who face low costs in restricting development.
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atlantic_cities cities urban_development ryan_avent nimbyism housing

Fascinating. Valuable land being squatted by plats (as it were) that will never be built, vs. being occupied by humans or wildlife or flora and fauna. Meanwhile, I'd say places like Victoria are on to something when they allow for legal secondary suites in traditionally single-family homes. How else to make sense of 6K-sq.ft. McMansions that will sit idle?
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...recognize the changing market for housing that is steadily turning away from the purchase of single-family homes, said Arthur C. “Chris” Nelson, professor at the University of Utah. In the coming years, households with children will drop, and the market will be dominated by aging baby boomers -- but millions of them will be trying to sell their own homes, creating oversupply, and more interested in multifamily and renting. “We’re overbuilt by about 28 million homes on large lots considering demand by 2020,” Nelson said.
The bottom line, said Holway, who is leading research on what is also known as obsolete or premature subdivisions: “It’s not just a crash. It’s going to be different when (the market) comes back.”
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subdivisions suburbs cities housing zombie_economy zombie_real_estate real_estate boston_globe

Great article in the New York Times Real Estate section on Victoria BC's Dockside Green Development.
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“So it’s all integrated: the economic, the environmental, the social,” he added.

The holistic design is the hallmark of Dockside Green, which will eventually encompass 1.3 million square feet, including 26 buildings and 2,500 residents. The project’s first neighborhood, Dockside Wharf, was completed last year and has 266 market-rate apartments, 253 of which have sold; 26 “affordable” units; 32,600 square feet of office space; and 5,881 square feet of retail. Prices range from 411,900 Canadian dollars (about $390,000) for a one-bedroom to 529,900 for two bedrooms and up to 1,233,900 for penthouses.

The development also includes an 8 million Canadian dollar heating plant that converts locally sourced wood waste into a clean-burning gas that produces all the community’s heat and hot water. The system, which eliminates the need to use fossil fuels as a heat source, illustrates Dockside’s neighborhood-based approach to environmentally friendly design, said Robert Drew, a project architect and an associate principal with Busby Perkins & Will.
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housing victoria dockside_green nyt

"Money hasn't saved Canada's most blighted neighbourhood, the drug-infested Downtown Eastside. Resources aren't wanting; it's estimated that $1-million is shovelled into the area every day to pay for myriad services and examples of social housing not seen in other communities. "

Interesting indictment of the poverty industry, too.

vancouver housing affordable_housing homelessness social_disorder

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The only way toward long-run and sustainable recovery is a dramatic change in where and how we live. What ultimately got us out of the Long Depression of the late 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t just new technology, or creative destruction, or government spending, it was a phase-shift in the way we live - in our economic geography. The recovery after the Long Depression took shape around the rise of the industrial city and its streetcar suburbs. The recovery after the Great Depression was powered by suburbanization. We need a massive shift not just in our infrastructure but in our housing system.
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housing mortgage_crisis richard_florida economy spatial_fix

I'm bookmarking this Richard Florida/ Creative Class blog post since it's one I left a long(ish) comment on, this time around the need for buildings to be adaptable.

retrofit adaptability housing built_environment comments

This page has a great series of videos explaining some of the projects showcased in the exhibition, "Home Delivery."

moma prefab housing manufactured_housing modular exhibitions

Portal page for a number of outstanding in-progress prefab/ modular housing projects.

architecture prefab modular housing manufactured_housing

Article published in Seattle-based Crosscut about an initiative out of Vancouver to build "Stop Gap Housing" (as per architect Gregory Henriquez), essentially fixed mobile/modular homes, for people who are homeless. Article continues over 2 pages.

homelessness vancouver housing affordable_housing modular british_columbia crosscut

Quite a horrifying article about the depth (and breadth) housing's role in the financial crisis, and why the market is in the doldrums in a bad bad way.
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Home values have fallen before — during the Great Depression and in Texas after a 1980s oil boom, for example — but those drops were a response to other economic forces. This time, the housing price collapse is the cause of the nation's broad economic troubles, not just an effect.
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usatoday housing subprime_mortgage_crisis bailout financial_crisis economy

Excellent blog post by Donald Elliott on why and how (un)affordability is systemic, and what (little) steps municipalities can take to mitigate the problem.
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What can local government do? It cannot solve the macro-economic problem, but it can remove barriers that drive housing prices even higher than they need to be. Minimum lot size and minimum house size requirements are two of the main culprits. Artificially low multi-family densities are another, and narrow definitions of allowable housing types are a third.
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affordability housing planning urbanplanning density donald_elliott

Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on "wired" homes, including http://twitter.com/andy_house, by IBM "master inventor" Andry Stanford-Clark who "rigged up his home to twitter its energy use." See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/30/the-house-that-twitters-its-energy-use/).

Compare to Wired Mag's recent "Peak Water" article, which pointed out that many London households aren't even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible.

In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, "City road networks grow like biological systems" (4/23/08).

All this relates to infrastructure -- and to how we're just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls' continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

twitter infrastructure data architecture housing consumption energy wired_magazine

"Canada is the only major country that doesn't have a national housing strategy, the report notes." The article deals specifically with Toronto and Ontario, but most of what it argues holds for every desirable (and expensive) city (including Victoria) in Canada. This article, by Laurie Monsebraaten, is followed up by a second one from the same day; see http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/299928 "The long wait for affordable places to live" by Tanya Talaga.

affordability affordable_housing funding housing municipal_funding toronto

- brief article on St. James's Village in Gateshead, UK, which is Britain's first "village of flat-packed homes" "assembled from kits made using the BoKlok concept" and Ikea.

affordable_housing boklok housing ikea prefab

affordability cities crosscut housing policy seattle