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July 21, 2006

Benedict Commons, Aspen, Colorado

Why can't more affordable housing look this good?

Yes, this is affordable housing! It's one development that visually stood out from the Smart Growth Illustrated set of case studies highlighted yesterday.

In Aspen, Colorado, the wealthy bid up the prices of homes in the city (average home price of $1.7 million - that's not a typo!), resulting in traffic jams and air pollution from the commuting employees who couldn't afford to live there. It's so bad that it's nationally known as the Aspen effect.

The developer, Curtis/Affordable Housing Development Corporation (an affiliate of the Jonathan Rose Companies) and the City of Aspen partnered to develop Benedict Commons, 27 units of housing for the employees. Hey, it's a start. The community is designed for residents earning $17K-$38K, the studio and 1BRs originally sold for $57K to $130K, and the resale price of the units can only rise at the rate of the Consumer Price Index.

The design genius of the project is that it's designed to look like half the density it really is. What would you guess it is? The variations in facade, roofs, windows and soft building materials give it the appearance of single-family homes. The density is 78.4 units/acre.

And of course, it follows green building principles: super insulation, Low-E glass, cross-ventilation, recycled building materials, and south-facing interior courtyard providing passive solar heat.

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July 20, 2006

Smart Growth Illustrated

'Smart Growth Illustrated'

If you want to better understand what makes a place successful and you can't visit it, the very least you can do is find some imagery on it (this website being no exception!) That's the purpose of the EPA's Smart Growth Illustrated research. They provide visuals for 20 case studies by category, but here are the 14 that apply to this website's target market:

Mix Land Uses
Eighth and Pearl, Boulder, CO - A benchmark for attainable, mixed-use, urban infill. (Lower image)

Take Advantage of Compact Building Design
Belmont Dairy, Portland, OR - Quite the cooltown type of development. (Middle image)

Create a Range of Housing Opportunities and Choices
Hismen Hin-Nu Terrace, Oakland, CA - A how-to in redeveloping an abandoned 'big box' into a housing community that celebrates the local culture.
Benedict Commons, Aspen, CO - Now this is some gorgeous, relatively affordably-priced multi-family housing...

Create Walkable Neighborhoods
Bethesda Row, Bethesda, MD - Upscale and chain-ridden, but beautiful architecturally with lots of outdoor dining.

Foster Distinctive, Attractive Communities with a Strong Sense of Place
The Can Company, Baltimore, MD - A model redevelopment, from a factory into a hip workplace and dining destination. Profiled earlier.
Downtown Brea, Brea, CA - A great example of the revitalization of neglected downtowns happening across the country.

Strengthen and Direct Development Towards Existing Communities
Mizner Park, Boca Raton, FL - A visually striking contemporary urban/suburban town center
Uptown District, San Diego, CA - One of the best examples of a small neighborhood retail center. (Top image)

Provide a Variety of Transportation Choices
The Crossings, Mountain View, CA - A little too much 'mass homebuilder' in appearance with only a smidgen of retail, but it is built directly on a transit station.

Make Development Decisions Predictable, Fair, and Cost Effective
Green Tape Program, Silver Spring, MD - Why can't all cities work with developers like this?
Compact Development Endorsement Program, San Francisco, CA - Environmental endorsement by a respected environmental organization.

Encourage Community and Stakeholder Collaboration in Development Decisions
Barrio Logan, San Diego, CA - Good example of how the CoolTown beta community program would work
East Russell, Louisville, KY - Inspiring story of how low-income residents went to work to improve their community instead of complaining about how bad it looks.

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July 19, 2006

Car sharing in Germany

Car sharing's popularity continues to rise

Ok, so maybe this image of a pedestrian-only street, sleek streetcar and Smart car sharing is the future rather than the present in the U.S. (it happens to be a current image in Germany), but maybe not so far down the road. Progressive efforts like in Arlington County, Northern Virginia, helps.

Two years ago, I highlighted the car sharing program that Arlington County was piloting. So, how's it doing? Some of the results:

- Car sharing membership, featuring Zipcar and Flexcar, tripled from 2004 to 2006, with 3.6 times the number of car sharing vehicles.
- 83% of car share members live in Arlington’s Metrorail corridors, 50% of whom both work and live in Arlington.
- 5% of Arlington residents living in the transit corridors are car share members.
- In the last year, car share trips increased 27%.
- 47% vs 30% use transit more often
- 65% vs 19% save money on transportation
- 47% vs 30% walk more often
- 71% vs 15% were able to postpone buying another vehicle
- 85% were more confident about the private-sector car sharing services being partnered with the county than not.

They're enthusiastically continuing the program. By the way, the car featured in the image is the Smart car, and it was just announced that it's hitting the U.S. within a couple of years. It's all happening sooner than you think!

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July 18, 2006

Christopher Columbus in front of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella

What do Christopher Columbus, Steve Jobs and real estate have in common?

Continuing yesterday's entry using Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel as a historical model in determining where to invest in real estate...

First, how did large populations become technologically-rich societies? If Europe and China were the world superpowers in the 1400s, why didn't China 'conquer' the Americas 'first'?

Large-scale food production resulted in ever greater populations of people, which in turn required political and writing systems to manage it. This in turn facilitated a formal program for technological development, especially as larger populations required an advanced defense to protect it from invasion. However, this is where Europe and China diverge.

Enter Christopher Columbus, a 15th century Steve Jobs if you will. He was seeking an adventure capitalist for his 'business idea'. Good thing he wasn't in China, since the government at the time banned shipping outright for the simple reason that they didn't think it was important. Sound like some current city administrations? Europe however, was widely diverse, featuring multiple countries with multiple viewpoints. Columbus was refused funding from four government entities in three countries before the king and queen of Spain got with the program. (pictured)

So what does this have to do with real estate? Reiterating yesterday's and today's points:

- Societies required the right seeds and animals to produce enough food, and proximity to animals provided immunity from disease. Knowledge is our present-day economic 'food', thus universities are the modern-day equivalent to seeds and animals, with the equivalent of disease being lack of education.
- Cities host the densest, largest concentrations of people. That's where you'll find innovation and forward-thinking investors. There is no danger of a crippling invasion from neighboring cities, but there is now a threat of an equally devastating exodus of talent, aka brain drain.
- Just as Europe was diverse, decentralized and thus creative - allowing Columbus to find capital for his trip, the cities that rank high on the creative index today will provide the same for entrepreneurs.
- Apply the same rationale to identify the most creative neighborhoods in those cities, down to the most creative buildings or sites (in cities near universities), and you'll have a sound plan for where to invest in real estate, and that's where CoolTown Studios specializes in linking up developers and investors to do just that.

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July 17, 2006

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Where to invest? 13,000 years of history will tell you

There's no better body of knowledge than history when identifying the right buildings, neighborhoods, cities and even countries to invest in, especially when your scope is 13,000 years. That's what biologist, physiologist, and biogeographer Jared Diamond provided in his mind-boggling Pulitzer Prize winner, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Not that anyone can condense 13,000 years into a 400-page into fleeting blog entries, but here are the basics as best as I can summarize, and definitely in my view as it relates to investing in the right place at the right time to rejuvenate a neighborhood's economy and quality of life.

- While the earliest human remains were found in Africa millions of years ago, populations didn't grow substantially until humans reached Europe and China, where the seeds of basic crops and domesticated animals far outnumbered any other region in the world. Both are necessary to support significant populations.
- The east-west axis of Eurasia allowed seeds and animals to multiply across the same latitude (from Europe to China), which is extremely prohibitive across the severe weather/season/terrain changes when moving along the north-south axis continents of Africa and the Americas.
- We don't prepare raw chicken with our salad for a reason - major human diseases originate from animals. This allowed ancestors of Europe to build up an immunity to diseases over thousands of years, allowing them to 'conquer' the Americas by passively wiping out 90% of their populations by disease alone.
- Europeans and the Chinese also were technologically advanced, especially in weaponry (swords, guns) and transportation (ships). Tens of thousands of Incas didn't stand a chance against a hundred Spaniards when they first encountered one another.

Thankfully in a global economy perhaps things are a bit more civilized. The question is, how can we learn from history? How did seeds and crops transform populations into technologically-rich societies? Studies prove the Spaniards weren't any more inherently intelligent than the Incas, just historically geographically fortunate. But China's ancestors had the same head start. Why didn't they 'conquer' the Americas 'first'?

The answer is strikingly similar to why places like Silicon Valley and Austin are magnets for innovation and economic performance over other cities. More tomorrow...

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