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McMansions no more
Matt Assad, The Morning Call (Pennsylvania)
Fewer behemoth homes may be built in the Lehigh Valley as turmoil in the housing market opens the door for smaller, more affordable living.
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For nearly a decade, tax-weary people from New Jersey and New York poured into the Lehigh Valley in search of a bigger home on a bigger lot, and developers couldn’t build so-called McMansions fast enough to meet demand. But as a credit crisis sweeps the nation, forcing a record number of homeowners into foreclosure, home building — especially construction of large homes — in the Lehigh Valley has slowed to a crawl.
A housing downturn that has made credit more difficult to get, combined with rising energy costs, is pushing the market away from the McMansions built in the Valley the past decade, and toward a more affordable version of the American Dream.
That may give Lehigh Valley Planning Commission members the opening they have been looking for to shift future development toward smaller, more affordable homes that chew up less open space.
The Planning Commission is reviewing more than 100 of the best development concepts used across the nation to build a new neighborhood model members hope they can sell to municipal leaders and developers across the region.
Though it will take at least a year to craft, the model probably will include cottage housing, clustered housing that preserves green space, zoning that encourages businesses and homes to occupy the same neighborhoods and incentives to developers to preserve open space.
(26 May 2008)
Ceilings Come Down to Earth
Nancy Keates, Wall Street Journal
Drafty, Noisy, Hard to Clean,
Two-Story Rooms Are Waning;
How to Fill In the Air Space
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It’s said that hemlines fall with the economy. Ceilings may be following suit.
The cathedral-ceilinged “great room” — a defining feature of big suburban houses for the past 15 years — is losing favor. Owners say these double-height rooms are expensive to heat and cool. They can be drafty and reverberate noise. Cobwebs are hard to reach, painting requires long ladders and washing the second-story windows can be a nightmare. Moreover, growing numbers of home buyers think these soaring rooms waste space.
… For decades, cathedral ceilings have been an attempt at grandeur. They started gaining momentum among suburban homes in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a way to show off wealth in a growing economy, builders say.
(23 May 2008)
Living within our means
Rob Adams, The Age (Australia)
Barcelona provides a sustainable city model that we can follow.
SINCE 2006 – the year the world woke up to climate change – our search has been for big, new solutions for a big problem, billion dollar solutions, often untested. It may seem naive to suggest, but perhaps the solutions already exist and they are not necessarily expensive.
Cities are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s emissions – and 80% of Australians live in cities (compared with 50% worldwide). So if we are to tame global warming, we need to make our cities liveable, sustainable and economically viable. As 80% of the infrastructure that will exist in cities by 2030 already exists today, the larger challenge is how to reconfigure our existing infrastructure to achieve a sustainable future.
If I were offered any city in the world to take to zero emissions by 2030 I would choose Barcelona (pictured). At 200 people per hectare Barcelona is one of the world’s most dense, mixed-use cities, a place where you can walk locally to service all your needs.
… We no longer have the luxury of waiting for a “silver bullet” to halt global warming, particularly as the solutions already exist. For example, in the design and construction of the six-star Council House 2 building in Little Collins Street, all the technologies used to reduce its greenhouse gases to a mere 13% already existed. Ironically the most efficient technology was the ability to open the windows for four hours at night in summer to allow the building to cool down naturally, saving 20% of its energy.
Nearly 40 years of urban design has taught me that if you design a good street you design a good city. Surely the time has come to apply a modicum of common sense, learning from past models rather than sitting like frogs in an increasingly warming pot hoping someone will find a clever new way to turn off the gas.
Professor Rob Adams, AM, is director of design and urban environment for the City of Melbourne.
(26 May 2008)
