New Blog Location

To all my valued readers, The Built Environment has a new home. I am switching to a Wordpress based format with its own URL. This will allow me to better market the blog, as well as link to some of my other websites. I have moved all of the posts and comments from this blog, so all the content is still there. However, I am still tweaking the overall format of the blog, and I keep testing different themes to find one that I want to use as a base, and tweak it from there. I had one that I really liked how it looked, but it didn't have any flexibility, so I started over. The one I am currently using is working OK at the moment. However, it doesn't matter how much I tweak the format, the content will remain, and that is the important part, isn't it?

Please check it out and bookmark the new location. You can find me at www.mybuiltenvironment.com. Hope to see you there!

Sad Day in Homebuilding

It was first reported yesterday in the Boulder Daily Camera That Mcstain Enterprises has filed for bankruptcy protection. This is on the heals of Village Homes filing for bankruptcy last fall. These are two highly respected Colorado home builders, which both made the top 350 list of giant home builders that I noted in my previous post.

While it is not a surprise, it is truly sad to see Mcstain go under. They were one of the pioneers of green building, particularly on a production scale. The company was operated with a huge dosing of respect and integrity, something that is sorely lacking in many companies these days. The reasons they stated for filing is the poor housing market, and more importantly the gridlocked lending we find ourselves in. In my opinion, the gridlocked lending is making a bad situation worse. Without lending, nothing new is getting built or developed, which is now causing massive layoffs in the architecture and engineering fields. The entire industry has been brought to its knees.

Lets just hope that we can work our way out of this sooner than later, before we are all living under a bridge.

Shrinking Builders

Professional Builder recently issued there 2009 Housing Giants list. Typically they have listed the top 400 builders in the country based on revenue. This list would typically include the large national builders such as DR Horton, Centex, KBhome, Standard Pacific Homes, as well as larger regional builders. With a few exceptions, small volume local builders would not be on the list.

With the residential crash, this years list is the top 350, not the top 400! The smallest builder on the list, only built 50 homes last year. In the not too distant past, a 50 home builder would have been considered a small volume local builder. My how things have changed.

Interesting Historical Dilemma

Historic Preservation has existed for several decades now nationally, and for a couple of decades locally. The original intent of historic preservation was to help protect and preserve those pristine homes and structures, and in some cases districts of our past architecture that made our communities unique, and/or that had a direction connection to important historical people. Nationally, the guidelines are that any structure (or landscape for that matter) that is at least 50 years old is eligible for designation, assuming it meets other criteria as well, such as being more or less intact, and not substantially altered. This has served us well.

However, now we have an interesting time coming up, and one that will receive much debate. In the past, prior to the 1950's, for the most part, homes and buildings were pretty unique. If builders built more than one of a particular floor plan, there usually wern't more than a dozen or so, and usually far fewer. Now though, the tract homes of the 50's are technically eligble for historical designation. Locally, this hasn't been an issue, because our collection of 50's homes is not huge, and has been consentrated in a few areas, with most of the floor plans fairly unique.

Now though, over the next decade the tract homes of the 1960's will be coming up for eligibility, then the 70's and so on. Now we will have homes eligible that not only do we have hundreds of them locally, but there are thousands nationally as builders built pretty much the exact same floor plan in communities across the country. For example, the brick ranch home pictured here, was built in Fort Collins in a neighborhood called South College Heights where there are dozens of similar homes. The same home was built in Greeley, in Panorama in Grand Junction, and hundreds in the Denver area.

Which brings me to the question of now what? Do we really want to designate and preserve entire tracts of identical homes? Not only locally, but nationally. Do we find a few examples in each community to protect? And if so, how do we figure this out? I don't have the answers as of now, nor have I formed a strong opinion on this yet. However, the Fort Collins Landmark Preservation Commission is starting a project to document the various kinds of home architecture prevalent in Fort Collins, so I volunteered to research and document homes from the 1960's to current. This will be some interesting research, and will share it with my readers.

Web 2.0 arrggghhh!

Sheese, with the explosion of social media, I feel like we all have to be specialists in full time marketing! And marketing never has been one of my strong points. Now we have LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter (and those are just the ones I am on), plus Youtube, blogs, websites, you name it. To heck with big brother, we are doing it to ourselves!

Midori Approval

Tonight we obtained Planning Commission approval for the Midori project I have been working on for awhile. The next step is County Commissioners. This project still continues to generate solid interest in the lots and homes, and stands a good chance of being sold out by ground breaking! Here is the current site plan. For more information on this sustainable project, visit www.midoriliving.com

The Built Environment is moving.

I have started working on moving this blog over to a Wordpress format with its own domain. However, there is the rub. Both the domains for The Built Environment, and just Built Environment are taken. So I am trying to figure out a good domain name. Any ideas?

Car Free Society?

Recently, there was an article in the New York Times about a suburb in Vauban, Germany where cars are basically outlawed. Street parking, driveways, and home garages are forbidden within the community. If you do have a car, you have the option of purchasing a garage space on the outskirts of the community to park it in...at a mighty premium. From what I gather, this community is wildly popular among the eco-friendly and executives alike. This community works where it is, because it happens to be located along a tram line with a direct link to downtown Frieberg, and connections to the commuter rail. Compared to the United States, it is widely known that Germany and the rest of Europe have a very comprehensive and successful public transportation system, that makes living car free for entire communities possible.

Can it work here? In my opinion, it can in limited locations across the country. Indeed, you can find people almost anywhere that don't have cars, either because they can't afford one, or choose not to have one, and they get along fairly well. But for an entire community? I say, this won't happen on a large scale in this country until we start thinking about the common good, with a look at the long term, and start putting some real emphasis on creating a viable public transportation system, that actually goes somewhere. I am not talking about just Fort Collins, but the country as a whole. People have to be mobile, and to go without cars, there needs to be a way to get from point A to point B in a relatively short period of time. We are starting to see signs of life on this front, but we have a long way to go. Of course, this will also require more compact development patterns. Indeed, in Vauban, single family homes are not generally permitted. Basically the community is a TOD project, but taken one step further.

To further this goal and concept, I think we also need to get away from the idea that homes must face paved public streets. Why does a street have to have 30-50 feet of asphalt to function as a public street? Why can't homes face "green streets"? Instead of asphalt, why not landscaped courtyards? This would also serve as a place to play for kids that is close to home...and allow for smaller lots and denser developments. I have been pushing this concept for years with some success. A current project that I am working on is attempting to do this. I have blogged about Midori before, with more coming soon. The battles I face in trying to do "green streets" is how do we address the homes without a paved street, how to get utilities to them without a front door, and the real issue of fire access. Of course, people also have to get away from the idea that they have to have a garage attached to the home. There are some communities that have been successful at this, including co-housing communities, and many of the communities built by The Cottage Company Interestingly though, many other builders who try to build off the concept of The Cottage Company include attached garages now.

I would love to find an infill piece of ground to create a car free community in Fort Collins. Anybody want to join me on this?

Computer Frustrations Part 2

Those of you that know me, know that I am a huge mac fan. I love my MacBook, and will tell anyone that listens that even though Mac's are more expensive upfront, you spend far less time keeping them running, as you do with Windows on PC's. Mac's just work. However, some of the software I use for work, specifically AutoCAD only works on windows. So I am also forced to run windows on my mac as a virtual machine. I won't go into all the details, but for the most part it has worked well. I do use XP, and have stayed away from Vista.

A couple of weeks ago I started having all kinds of issues with XP running extremely slow. I even did the standard Windows thing, and did the equivalent of reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling everything. That has helped somewhat, but there is still a bug in it somewhere.

However, at the same time I learned about Windows newest operating system, Windows 7. Usually I am very suspicious of anything new from Microsoft, but I took the leap and downloaded the free evaluation version of the operating system. One advantage of running thinks virtually, is that I can easily set up more than one operating system. Anyway, long story short, I am very impressed with Windows 7.0. Even though it is still in pre release form, it has worked for me without any issues, and is far faster than XP. So far, it far outshines Vista, and seems to be better than XP. One downfall for windows though, is I hear they will have several versions of the it coming out, as they have done in the past, only to add to the confusion.

Don't get confused, Mac is till the superior operating system, and the fact there is only one version of it is a big plus to boost. But if I have to run Windows too, then, at least for now, Windows 7.0 looks very promising.

Sign of the Times

As recently reported in the Los Angeles Times, a bank that took over a failed housing development in Victorville, CA has decided it will be cheaper to demolish the unfinished project, rather than finish it and sell the units. Granted, things are no where near this bad here in Colorado, but I still find this story rather wild. Of the 16 homes in the development, 8 were under construction in some fashion, while 4 were finished model homes. All have been torn down. In Victorville, home values are about 50% off from where they were when this project was started.

Fortunately, the on site crews have been selling off a lot of the materials, and are recycling a lot of the rest, so at least it isn't going into the landfill. But this entire exercise is still a waste of resources from building the homes in the first place, to tearing them down. Not to mention all the money spent on this project for building and ultimately demolition, taking the project back to dirt.

Computer Frustrations

It just frustrates me to no end when I need to tackle a 5 minute task, but it takes an hour and a half or so to solve a computer issue, so I can get to that 5 minute task.

April Fuglie

Okay, I will admit, this is not fugly, just plain dumb. It also isn't often I give a fugly award to a project that I just gave high accolades too (see previous post). But as part of the Seventh Street reconstruction project, the planners decided to add diaganol parking, that you have to BACK INTO! I can only imagine the fender benders that are going to occur with someone stopping in traffic, starting to back up into the parking spot, only to have the person behind them not notice and running into them. This parking situation has had such an outcry against it, that the planners have decided to never do it again. Don't get me wrong, I think diagonal parking is a great idea, and should be encouraged on more streets, but done the traditional way with pulling in forwards, and then backing out. A lot less dangerous in my opinion.

Grand Junction Downtown

Recently, Grand Junction, Colorado has been spending a lot of time and money rebuilding its external downtown streets, and generally doing an excellent job. Basically, they are continuing the successful reworking of Main Street that was completed in the early 1960's and was nationally acclaimed. This is also one of the first downtown streetscapes that I have seen that constructed a round-a-bout in an existing downtown intersection, and done very successfully.

Also included with this reconstruction was a lot of attention paid to the pedestrian environment. Sidewalks were widened, outdoor dining areas created, pedestrian scale lighting, and enhanced crosswalks. Low brick walls have also been incorporated to provide additional seating, and to separate pedestrians from street traffic.


The particular project these photos are from is 7th Street. This involved a reconstruction of approximately six blocks of a four lane street. Since then, they have also reconstructed five blocks of Colorado Avenue in a similar fashion.

On both of these, the City of Grand Junction has done a fabulous job, and this will serve as a model for other cities to look to as they rebuild their downtown streets. Downtown Grand Junction also has a lot of land that is begging to be redeveloped. If you know of anyone who would be interested in a long term investment, let me know!

Detroit Followup

I have done some research into the redevelopment efforts of Detroit. There is a lot going on in the works to redevelop downtown, which is starting to filter into outlying neighborhoods. There have been millions of dollars spent over the last decade redeveloping downtown, and the riverfront district. This includes new corporate headquarters for Quicken Loans, loft projects, and new retail and businesses. This has begun to spill over into other adjacent neighborhoods. Midtown in particular is seeing a renessaince with several new single family and townhome communities being built. What is more, most of it is being done using the existing infrastructure and street networks, which is important. The new buildings and neighborhoods are being incorporated into the existing neighborhoods. ModelD has a wealth of information on what is going on in Detroit. There are also organizations that are working with residents to create urban gardens, becoming somewhat sustainable.

Of course, a lot of this was going on prior to the economic collapse of late 2008, and in particular the auto industry which Detroit is heavily reliant on. And all is not rosy either. There are debates going on about whether abandoned buildings should be razed as noted in the article, Cleaning Detroit up, don't demolish its gems. There are also claims of corruption within city politics, and a government culture of getting in the way and heavy bureaucracy, and the high crime rate.

This is encouraging for Detroit, but the downsizing of the automobile companies is sure to have a profound impact on Detroit, and will likely derail any initiative to redevelop that was going on, particularly with the collapse of real estate prices. On the other hand, cheap real estate might encourage people to move to Detroit. These are people who arn't reliant on a local company for employment. Of course, the same can be said for many communities.

While I haven't had an interest in visiting Detroit in the past, I do now, to satisfy my own curiosity.

Foothills Fashion Mall- On Deaths Doorstep

Yesterday, the family made a visit to the local shopping mall, Foothills Fashion Mall, so our daughter could do some birthday shopping. I admit, I do not go to the mall very often, and I knew that some of the big tenants had left such as Mervyns and JC Penney, but I was still surprised to see the shear number of vacancies inside the mall. This mall is a dying mall. I remember seeing the same thing in other malls that used to be around Denver, such as Southglenn, Northglenn, and Cinderella City. All of which have been torn down and redeveloped.

Foothills Mall though continues to hang on. For most of it's life, this mall was owned locally, and they would occasionally put money into fixing the place up. Ironically, they sold it a few years ago to General Growth Properties, because GGP had a reputation of breathing life into malls, and upgrading them. Everyone thought this sounded like a good idea. They even bought up many of the surrounding properties with the intent of including them into a redevelopment plan. Knowing the buildings were going to be torn down, many of the tenants moved out.

Now that GGP is having its own financial issues, redeveloping this mall is nowhere close to being on their radar screen. So now we are left with several vacant buildings around the mall, the mall half empty itself, and what was once the retail economic engine for Northern Colorado, is now adrift in a sea of retail wasteland.

Of course, this is hardly unique to Fort Collins. Malls all over the country have run out of favor with shoppers. What was once a highly popular way to shop, which killed thousands of downtown's, is now falling victim to the latest retail trend - Lifestyle Town Centers. Of course, the big irony here is that these Town Centers are trying to emulate downtown's. Anyway, I recently read an article in New Urban News, where in Denver alone, 7 malls have been torn down in the last decade to be redeveloped (I can only think of 5), and only one new mall has been built, and it has struggled. I think that Town Centers are about to run there course too, and we will be looking at the next trend in retail centers, whatever that may be. In the last 20 years we have had malls, factory outlet stores, power centers, and now Lifestyle Town Centers. Shoppers are a fickle bunch, flocking to the latest in shopping trends, leaving a wasteland of shopping centers behind, always going to the newest and latest place. This is hardly sustainable in my opinion.

Anyway, back to Foothills Mall, we shall see what happens with it. It needs to be redeveloped into a mixed use center. General Growth can't do it. The best thing that could happen is it is sold to another company that can do it. Of course, in the current economic and financing climate, that won't be happening anytime soon.

Detroit Followup

One of my readers, lostfortcollins.com, directed me to this fabulous video on nature returning to the abandoned neighborhoods of Detroit. Now my curiosity is really piqued, and I will add to my plate doing some further research and reporting on Detroit.

The original video is on Current.com

Google Earth Visits - Detroit

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I will admit that I have never been to Detroit, nor have I ever had any inkling too, but with all the recent press that Detroit has been getting with regards to the automobile industry, and the state of the housing economy there, I thought I would make a Google visit. As with most of my tours, I start with the downtown area. I immediately became intrigued with Detroit with the overall layout of downtown. All the major streets are broad parkways that are heavily landscaped, and all of these parkways pinwheel out from a central park. Very nice indeed, and a classic layout seen in many great cities. I also like the fact that the ballparks are oriented to the adjacent streets. The whole downtown area is very pedestrian friendly (at least from bird's eye), and extraordinarily well laid out.

Of course, from the air, you also see the downside. There is a tremendous amount of surface parking lots, and a fair amount of empty space between buildings. This provides opportunity for infill, with a good structure already in place. This of course, ignores the current economic climate of Detroit.


View Larger Map

Now one of the things that amazed me even more, was traveling less than a mile and a half outside of downtown, and there are blocks and blocks and blocks of vacant land...street are there, but few structures. I have to ask myself, what happened here? In most cities, you see very dense neighborhoods fairly close to the city core. And this isn't unique to this one area of Detroit, cruising around, this goes on for miles.

But why? Is there environmental pollution? Were these neighborhoods intentionally torn down, was there some kind of great fire? If you go miles out from the city core, you can find all kinds of new home development going on (or at least there was). So why has the city core all but been abandoned?

With all the talk these days about sustainability and redevelopment, this is an area where redevelopment should be strongly encouraged, in and orderly fashion. Why is the development in the suburbs, eating up raw land and having to extend utilities, when there is all this land close in, with all the infrastructure in place to support new development? I realize I am taking a rather simplistic view of this, as there are all kinds of other factors such as crime rates, environmental concerns, economic concerns etc. But these kinds of issues have been overcome in other areas, so why not here? I think as a society, we need to take a hard look at our priorities, and take a harder look at sprawl and urban development.

If anybody has any insight as to what happened in these neighborhoods of Detroit, I would love to here them!

Google Earth Visits

One of the things I like to do is to visit different locations using Google Earth. I find this to be a fantastic tool to virtually visit areas around the globe that I have never been too. It is rather fascinating to see some of the various development patterns is different cities, towns and countries. With street view, it becomes even more fascinating to actually get on the street and see stuff, do 360 degree views and so on. Doing this for awhile, it finally hit on me, that I should actually blog about my visits, talk about what I see, and share my thoughts. Of course this will be done with very little or no knowledge of local politics, history and what not. I look forward to seeing the comments from my readers as well.

Spring is here..Way to early!

In our our area, and most of the front range of Colorado, this has been an incredibly warm, dry, and windy winter. It is so warm, we already have Tulips up several inches and crocus blooming. Today I noticed that the Nannyberry's are leafing out, and the blossoms on the Lilacs are turning purple...all a good month early! I am not ready to start watering yet, nor am I ready to clean up the yard yet. Knowing our luck, everything will leaf out, then we will get a massive freeze and snowstorm and wipe it all out.

Guess it is time to get the lawn mower fixed.

Recently a friend of mine asked me the following question (excerpt):

"I’ve been wondering about somethings, and thought you might have an opinion…..when the economy starts to turn around and we start pulling out of this mess, do you think how we do business as landscape architects and the development business as a whole will be different than it was before? Do you think we as landscape architects will continue to become more of an integral part of projects, team leaders as we were in Colorado? Or is our status shrinking again? Do you see developers developing entire projects for just building the infrastructure and selling paper lots? Or do you see things changing to a completely new way of doing things? Are things still headed toward the muli-discplinary firms?"

The following was my reply:

"Good questions. I do think we are going to be seeing a huge consolidation of firms, and more multi-disciplinary firms. I also see things going far more in the direction of design-build... particularly public projects. We are seeing Fort Collins going that way for all public buildings, and I bet it will head more in that direction for other public facilities as well. I don't think that is a bad thing, and I have enjoyed the ones I have worked on. I see a big disconnect between us design types, and the way things get built in the field. I have never been convinced that architect/designers/engineers know all about construction when it comes to designing things. On the other hand, as we both know, contractors don't always have an eye towards design. Of course I am generalizing. There are certainly some craftsman contractors out there with a strong eye for design, and vice verse. I like the idea of being able to get solid budget numbers as we design projects. I think LA's in particular, do tend to over design projects and add unnecessary costs. But then most civil engineers who think they are designers tend to under design... costs drives design.

I think the best projects is where all team members respect each others discipline and work towards the same goal. I have always tried to do that, and found the projects that are most enjoyable are where that has occurred.

As for the state of development, unfortunately what you are witnessing where engineers and architects rule the world is more the norm than not. What you saw in CA and Denver with the big builders dominating the market is not the rule. In fact, I think that the days of big builders are numbered, at least as large as they have been. I forsee a rise of the smaller builders again, at least for several years. Eventually the big builders will take over again. I do see that builders, esp. big ones, will quit developing their own land and buy finished lots from developers. That has been shifting for several years.

As for what developments will look like I am not really certain. For the short term, I see smaller 10-20 lot developments getting done, as they will be easier to get financed and absorbed by the market, and ones that fill particular niches. On the other hand, economies of scale are hard on these small projects, something I know first hand. Over time larger projects will again come to roost. I do kind of like the model that Lowry and Stapleton have formed, where builders only buy a block of lots here, and a block of lots there, so it is truly mixed."

While this is kind of long and rambling, I would be interested in knowing what you all think.

Curiosities of Life

Recently I was staying at a nice hotel during a conference in Denver. A curious thing happened at this hotel, and it follows the pattern of various hotels I have stayed at over the years. Why is it, at so-called low cost hotels, such as Holiday Inn Express, with the price of the room, you get free wireless internet, usually a free breakfast, and occasionally a free drink thrown in at the bar. When you stay at the so-called luxury hotels, not only do you pay more for the room, but you have to pay for wireless, breakfast, etc! So then, why do we stay at luxury hotels? To be honest, the only luxury ones I have stayed at are either ones where we got fabulous weekend deals, or someone else has payed for it. This has always been a curiosity to me.

HIstoric Remodel Part 2

This time I have attached a picture of the exterior of the home. It is pretty intact from the original construction 105 years ago, other than I can see where a porch roof used to attach to the home. Hopefully, this week or next I will get time to go down to the assessors office to explore the history of this home, and maybe even find some photographs of when it was built.

There are some things on the interior that are greatly amusing me. I have heard about some of things before, but have not witnessed them myself, not having been involved with a home this old before. First of all, there are many different styles of doors, and many different door heights! There is one door that goes between the bedrooms that I don't think is even 6 foot tall. I do have to duck through many of the doors. I wonder if we built a new today with mismatched doors, and varying sizes if it would even get through building inspections, much less be able to sell it. Oh well, the charm of older homes.

Historic Remodel

One of my business associates has a rental home he bought a year ago. Last month the tenants unexpectedly moved out, leaving quite a mess. After we got the got the junk cleared out of the house, we decided to fix it up, and rent it out again. This home is part of a larger piece of ground he is looking to develop, and the plan was to demolish this home. Now we are looking to keep it, and rent it out again for awhile, and possibly convert it to a commercial use.

In the interim, my wife has put a tremendous amount of time into cleaning it. We don't think it was cleaned once in the 10 years or so the tenant was there. Structurally the house is in good condition, but it needs some TLC. The owner tore out the old kitchen floor, and I took on the painting.

In the spirit of sustainability and being green, we are going to attempt a green remodel, on a tight budget. Part of the picture is of course, saving the structure in the first place. For the paint, I selected Olympic paint since it is a low VOC environmentally friendly paint. The floor was purchased off of Craig's list as a left over piece of sheet flooring.

Over time we will have to replace the wiring, rebuild the back lean too addition that house the kitchen and bath, replace the roofing (structure is fine), replace the heating system, etc. I will keep you posted on the progress. For now, enjoy the picures of us actually working on the place!

Change is in the Air

As seems to be the theme this year all over the place, 2009 has brought a lot of changes to mine and my families life. With the tanking of the construction and development community (largely due to the collapse of the financial industry), I have been forced to make major changes in my business and restructure it. The sad side of all this, is having to significantly downsize our staff. I know I am not alone in this, as a lot of my clients have had to do the same thing. This economic downturn has been devastating to my professional community, and it is hard to affect the livelihood of people. However, it was either them or me, and since it is all in my name, I had to make the hard choices.

Of course, in the long term, this will allow me greater flexibility and the opportunity to explore new career directions. I am not sure if I will, but at least the flexibility is there now. Of course, I do love what I do, but I don't always enjoy the small business owner side.

The other significant change we are looking at this year is selling our home. Like a lot of other people, we wish to downsize and simplify. That we have yet to do. Change is never easy, but it can be exciting at the same time. Not to mention emotionally exhausting.

Oh well, Life goes on.

Note to Self

Ok, this past summer I built my daughter a beautiful Futon out of Knotty Alder. After the second major frame piece has cracked, I need to remind myself NOT to use Knotty Alder if something needs structural strength! OOPS!