In the Neighborhood

It’s true that we often chose to live near those who are similar to ourselves- ethnically, financially, and even spiritually. But even this is not enough of a power for a real neighborhood to be created. Many folks often no longer know what they have in common with their neighbor. Can you blame them? We have built homes for quite awhile now as though they are little islands with the garages as their port of entry. Often we may recognize those who live near us just by their cars.

I have been thinking about neighborhoods for the past few weeks for work and am realizing that there is no real fixed understanding of what makes a neighborhood work except the dynamic of how people relate to each other. Can you design a place that improves how people connect to each other and create a real community? Is it more of a roll of the dice? Just because someone shares a similar racial, financial or spiritual background with you may mean very little in regards to how you relate with them. Do some neighborhoods work regardless of how poorly they were designed and other highly-designed ones fail? I have a favorite in the town I live near, Ft. Collins, Colorado. It is in the suburban section, where faded pastel boxes with a garage in front sit along streets that twist and turn inside a mile-square grid. The one exception is a couple blocks that, instead of large yards, the developer put a sizeable rectangular open space in the middle that all the homes face. This also means that all these homes face each other too. This shared space works out great for the dogs and kids, and the adults end up talking to each other. Now everyone knows each other by their voice, not just their car.

I do not know how intentional this development was. It was a simple idea but was not repeated through town. I suspect that real estate agents were afraid of the small yards, but developers realized that if they made the yards smaller they could squeeze more boxes in, and so it goes. What we got was what we all now clearly understand as suburbia. My wife and I have a little game, well, more of a joke. We look at a development’s name and try to guess what was there before the bulldozers came in. Think “Fox Acres” or “Pleasant Meadows” or “Arapahoe Ridge”.

It is for good reason that there is a backlash to the suburban life. The price paid for more and cheaper square footage helped create a real disconnection from those around you, a lack of community. The old town part of Ft. Collins rarely has a “house for sale” sign that stays up for long, but in the mountains where I live, a house at the bottom of the road is celebrating its second year on the market. As an investment it is obvious where to place your chips. But yet the old neighborhoods are hard to recreate from scratch. A mixed use, walkable, park-filled place does not necessarily translate into a great neighborhood.

I have a simple working theory for this. We are better off not living close to people similar to ourselves, but different. One’s ethnic or sexual orientation is a powerful gift to those with a different make up. Same goes with wealth and religion (or lack of either one). This is not kumbayah. I am not suggesting that everyone is going to like each other, only that we have the chance to understand our neighbors better and so we become better for it. I can honestly say that I have little in common with any of my neighbors, but I still seem to communicate with them all the time (the development is called Buckskin Heights, and sure enough one neighbor shot the local buck.) It is not because of my front porch, or that we all face a park or whatever urban planners’ thinking is. We all live on a dirt road, acres from each other. I think it is the difference in our personal lives that keeps us communicating (and my very social dog). Is this Dr. Phil material? Maybe I should get back to talking about buildings.

Can you design for this kind of thriving community? Yes, but only if you ignore the historic pressure of building to a “market”. If you’re serious about this I bet that you need to build to suit a variety of backgrounds and mix of incomes and interests. Throw in some front porches and a way to get around besides the two ton personal transport and we are heading somewhere. My personal lesson learned is to create a common area to gather and run the kids and dogs silly. Even the annoying stuff expressed in Tom Waits’ ballad* that shares the same title as this the sustainable line doesn’t seem so bad, because you are home.

Don’t miss the 2009 EarthWorks Expo in Denver August 22nd and 23rd where I will give a workshop that explores “Green Building with the Naked Eye” in the Panda (!) Room at 4:30 August 22. Here is my attempt at self-promotion:

“Pondering all the aspects of green building can seem like looking through a prism. Learn how to see a green building clearly. This workshop will give an overview of how to look at sustainability in building. See how LEED and Energy Star for Homes work using integrated design and a collaborative approach. Take home seven steps to a sustainable building that you can use to put the different components of green building into perspective. By developing a discriminating eye you'll be better prepared when you want to renovate, buy, or build from the ground up.”

Comment on your neighborhood, or lack of one.

Andrew Michler, LEED AP


The photo was taken at a “new urbanism” project called Prospect New Town in Longmont, Colorado.

*Well the eggs chase the bacon
round the fryin' pan
and the whinin' dog pidgeons
by the steeple bell rope
and the dogs tipped the garbage pails
over last night
and there's always construction work
bothering you
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood

Friday's a funeral
and Saturday's a bride
Sey's got a pistol on the register side
and the goddamn delivery trucks
they make too much noise
and we don't get our butter
delivered no more
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood

Well Big Mambo's kicking
his old grey hound
and the kids can't get ice cream
'cause the market burned down
and the newspaper sleeping bags
blow down the lane
and that goddamn flatbed's
got me pinned in again
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood

There's a couple Filipino girls
gigglin' by the church
and the windoe is busted
and the landlord ain't home
and Butch joined the army
yea that's where he's been
and the jackhammer's diggin'
up the sidewalks again
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood

An education in LEED’s irony

I feel very fortunate that the USGBC is very active where I live. I am also fortunate to have a lot of LEED commercial buildings popping up around too. Our local USGBC group arranged a hard hat tour of a gold rated building under construction in downtown. It is being built by a very wealthy NGO that has deep pockets and a big heart. A week before the tour they made a ‘slight’ change in plans and decided that we would not be allowed inside. A best guess is for safety reasons.

Well a lot of folks showed up none the less with hard hat in hand. We ended up on the other side of the street sweating and watching brick being laid as one of the contractors describe some LEED points that the building achieved. One question asked was how the innovation points were earned. The best answer I heard was that they intended to put an “education” center in the building for everyone to learn how it was put together and how the building works. OK, I sniff an irony.

If you haven’t smelled it yet don’t worry because it took me a few hours to connect the dots. After the ‘tour’ we went back to a contractor's office nearby and have a beer together. Very nicely done. I asked an organizer of the ‘tour’ if it was the lawyers who got sketchy. He said it was the building owner who denied access to our educational event. No further details.

Ok, now the irony has the smell of Limburger. And it was a hot day too. Limburger cheese on a hot day. A nice cooled beer helped, but please…

I would kindly request the USGBC revoke the education point if a building is not accessible to third parties during construction. A few dozen building professionals were denied the essential opportunity to see firsthand LEED construction but the building still gets its innovation point. Education in the building profession is fundamental for expanding green building’s role. If you are going to claim the LEED system on your project then you should allow the local USGBC to use that project as an educational platform.

Please have your dessert before your veggies

Bobby Kennedy Jr. recently made his way to Ft. Collins, Colorado to give a talk about the green energy future. While I did not attend, I got a report of him saying that you need to "eat your veggies before your dessert." He was referring to installing solar electric panels as being your dessert, and creating an energy efficient building as your vegetable. This logic did not quite sit right with me. I know his commitment to a new natural capital economy is pure but his take on the energy efficiency vs. renewable energy debate is a little cloudy.
Here is my way of thinking (and in the spirit of Mr. Kennedy, let me use analogies). Energy is the glue of civilization. Without it we will quickly fall apart. The environment is the bank account of civilization. You cannot over draw without severe penalties, and the interest on debt is compounded. So to resolve the toxic effects of the glue we need to create new formulations that do not withdrawal nearly so much from the environment. We are simply attempting to replace one glue formula with another. Mined carbon with solar and other renewables. This is environmentally important, but certainly not a dessert, we are just replacing one electron with another as the end user.
Energy efficiency is the other hand to renewable energy if you want applause for a natural economy (to throw another analogy into the conversation of course). Without efficiency we are never going to achieve a balance in our closed loop environment. While energy efficiency may be Kennedy’s vegetable, to me it is the dessert. When it comes to building for instance, nothing is sweeter than a well designed and built shelter that is comfortable, naturally lit and ventilated, and affordable to run. While your solar panels are sitting on the roof making some electrons, you efficiency efforts are rewarding you with comfort and financial stability. The solar panels are more like an appliance, or in this conversation, the vegetable.
So with all respect to Mr. Kennedy and the tremendous work and leadership he is displaying with his involvement in the new “green” economy, I would ask him to reconsider his view of energy efficiency.

Real Green Builders Collaborate

The green building movement has its spurts and starts, but on the whole sustainability is still a theoretical notion, an interesting side note in the building world. While a lot of people are taking notice, very few of them are taking real steps in adopting the deep knowledge base within their own buildings. Someone told me to think about it like this-- in the tech sector, new processes change the industry every two years or so, in the automobile industry it takes maybe ten years, but in the building trade it takes fifty years to adopt new thinking. If this is true, then by the time most of today’s builders retire or go to the big building in the sky we will be ready for sustainable building. Stuff like advanced framing is still a curiosity in the profession, even though it takes fewer materials, less time to construct, and results in a much improved energy-efficient wall system. A local homes developer with million-dollar houses on the market, and a LEED platinum one to boot, will still try to save a buck on engineering by framing their projects conventionally. Whoever buys these homes is getting an inferior product, and any money saved on the engineering just gets lost on materials and labor. This is just one of many issues often neglected in the making of a building. In the end you get a failed project from the standpoint of sustainability because of a lack of commitment and foresight. Builders and developers are often willing to take great financial chances in the marketplace, but where it really counts, the building they make, they often leave us with poorly conceived projects.

This is unacceptable. These builders may have been putting together buildings for years, using the same methods that lead to the same mistakes. Building but rote, by first dollar, by fickle market demands is leaving us with million-dollar energy vampires dotting the landscape. Their little brothers and sisters are hungry too. All are sitting around waiting for their next meal.

How do we stop breeding these vampires? First take a breath. The high-flying building boom is over. Speculative development has crashed, along with its commuter-based, isolated, and resource-intensive program. This is a wonderful time to step back and examine what we are doing. This is our opportunity to redesign our mode of operation and reestablish our relationship with our buildings, our buildings with our community, and our community with the environment.

The failed approach to building up to this point, I suspect, is that we building professionals are too proud to admit when we make mistakes. As one who has constantly found a better way to do things by messing them up, I have some firsthand knowledge that too much pride can develop a bad building. I am a better consultant when my oversights are pointed out, the earlier the better. I am a better builder when those who I work with are better at it than I am. The best green building is one where those who know how to do it are the ones who are allowed to. At this point the market for green building is not met, it is made. I understand that it will take time for green building to prosper, but we must start taking it seriously now. Now is not a point in time, now is an attitude and a commitment.
I am not your competition, nor are your mine. We are conspirers in a project that is focused on birthing new approaches that solve the mess we created. That mess comes to you in the mail once a month from your local utility. That mess is a child with asthma. That mess is a billion dollar water reservoir because we are too cheap or too distracted to change out our old toilet, fix our faucet, and change our showerhead. A lot of folks don’t really give a damn, no pun intended. If you are reading this then you probably do.

Here is how we are going to collaborate in making a substantial improvement in our built environment. We share our knowledge, our passion, and our resources. We give ground, applaud great ideas, and put our money and backs into it. We demand, coax, and, if we have to, we beg. We allow each other to take chances. We enjoy each other’s company but stand our ground. We respect the deep level of knowledge each one of us brings to the table. We suspend our disbelief. We rise to the occasion and do not slip into mediocrities. We engage. We return phone calls and emails. Ask someone you respect what they think.

Van Jones, from my home town of Oakland, sums it up in his new book The Green Collar Economy. “The time has come for us to stop letting a small number of groups and leaders carry the load on environmental and energy policy. Rather than complaining about the way they do it, all of us must step forward, take responsibility, and say in our own voices: ‘This is our Earth, too. We are going to be a part of saving it.’”

This edition of the sustainable line is written in the spirit of a manifesto to all interested parties regarding the official formation of the Be Local Northern Colorado Green Builder Group. Please contact me if you would like more information.