New House Rules

My blog droughts have been long, but I have something to show for it. When October 2008 happened, our near future looked extremely bleak. I stood up in an anxious company meeting to tell our associates that we would do everything and anything necessary in order to “opt out” of the impending recession. I meant it. Our team responded with an astounding effort…and for now, we have done it.

About seven months later, I can say with certainty that we have successfully fought off some of the worst effects of the bad economy. Last week, we even had a modest (honorarium level) mid-year profit sharing. Recognizing that in the business of homebuilding, big losses are the norm, Chapter 11’s are common, and thousands of homebuilders have simply gone out of business, we had a happy celebration over the good fortune from our efforts.

How have we accomplished this? “The old fashioned way” is an essential part of the answer. There has been an extraordinary hard work effort throughout the company for months on end, but there are other reasons too. We also responded with one of the most creative and innovative periods in our company history (36+ years). We turned ourselves around quickly; in months, not years, we have simply become much better at what we do.

We have long been adherents of Lean Production principles and strategies. Most of our associates have taken a course on the subject and in the past several years we have also held several Lean educational forums at our facility. Like many things, though, the ultimate success of Lean requires both knowledge and motivation. What we learned recently is that while we’ve had the knowledge, the critical level of motivation had to be thrust upon us by outside forces.

Waste has always been the enemy, but seeing its many facets with clarity sometimes requires a different perspective. A deep homebuilding recession cleared the scales from our collective eyes. There are now many fewer elements of redundancy, inefficiency or waste in our process and products than there were even a few months ago. We have done little things like reduced the steps taken to get a tool and the number of times a piece or element is handled, but we have also done big things, such as eliminating unnecessary construction documents and automating layout.

Sometimes it is necessary to literally invent ways to circumvent waste because it’s so embedded in how things have always been done. In homebuilding, wasteful systems and processes are the norm, not the exception. So we have been creating and inventing in software innovations, new tools, better work stations, and improved building system details. Only the quality goal at the end is unmovable; all else between the starting point and the end point has been fodder for improvement, upgrading and reinvention--whatever it takes.

As a result of intense company-wide efforts, we are already accomplishing highest quality work, with significantly increased cycle times. Better work; less time. It turns out that even in extremely difficult times for the homebuilding industry, a formula that offers the possibility that quality, time and cost can all be optimized simultaneously will draw potential clients like bees to honey. It’s not as if we didn’t know that before last October, but we had to be jerked out of our comfort zone to get there as quickly as we have in the last few months.

What is the definition of quality? This has long remained the same for us: finely crafted, high performance buildings with the features and amenities our clients need and want. We are building homes that range from the low $200K range up to several million. Each client gives us a unique quality goal that becomes its own “no plan B” target. We customize ourselves to fit them. We are also aware that people are looking for a life improvement that goes well beyond the physical aspects of a building. In all that we do, we aspire to improve the quality of lives, which is the ultimate reason new homes are built.

What is the definition of faster time? Through prefabrication and parallel processing, we can cut typical on-site construction times by two-thirds or more. Our off-site fabrication methods are the most creative and innovative in our industry. Our Open-Built systems allow us to take a unique approach in the fabrication of building elements that include everything from rough framing to fine finishes, without submitting to the dull architectural constraints of modular boxes.

What is the definition of cost control? Our immediate intention is to meet or beat the cost of typical on-site construction. While we eventually hope to achieve costs that we expect to be much lower eventually, for now higher quality and much faster delivery are the primary goals.

As a result of these accomplishments, we now have the same backlog we’ve had in banner years in the boom economy. It would be foolish to say that we have become immune to the travails of this hard recession (actually a Depression in homebuilding), but our team is rightly proud of having “opted out” of the recession (at least for now), exactly as planned!

Next time: back to "How to build in a Recession"

Through human history, most people would have been unsurprised by the story of how I built our original cabin as related in my previous posting. Building a place to live without money, using one’s own labor and locally available materials was normal and common for several thousand years. It’s still true in many parts of the world. I’m not suggesting that we’d want to go back to the old, more difficult ways, but submitting to complete dependency on others and to a culture of endless, daunting indebtedness should also be considered situations to avoid, not accept.

Construction professionals are fond of saying that time, quality and money are the three factors in play that affect a building project’s outcome, and you have to choose among them because you can’t optimize all three. The supposition is that if high quality is the priority, it will require more time and money; if time is the priority, then quality and cost control will suffer; if saving money is the priority, then quality and time will be compromised. The reverse is true too. If the project is given a large budget, quality can be enhanced, but the time to achieve that quality may need to be increased too.

But the big consideration I want to point out is this: given enough time, it becomes increasingly possible to accomplish both high quality and decreased cost. As people are forced to complete every detail in their construction in an arbitrarily finite amount of time, they are forced into higher costs or quality compromises. The loss of the freedom to build incrementally, usually forced in the terms of the construction loan (or the personal desire for immediate gratification) is causing new homes to become simultaneously worse and more expensive.

Patience and perseverance are tools that can be employed by anyone to help make big dreams achievable and affordable. When building codes and lending agencies take those tools away from us, we should be fighting back, just as we would about any other personal freedom in jeopardy.

Were it not for my ability to defer gratification and finish my own home slowly, I would have had to choose between continuing with my still-fledgling business and properly housing my family. Here, then, is another way to build when personal or national recessions crimp the normal processes.

Big Need, A little Money
(Where we embrace a work always in progress)

We hadn’t intended to stay in the cabin so long. It was rustic but comfortable; small but debt-free. At 500 square feet, it was fine for two people and tolerable for a family of three (our first daughter, Emily). But when we knew our second child was coming (our second daughter, Corona), we knew we needed a bigger home.

By then (1979) our business kept us plenty busy, even if it was only occasionally profitable. I had an income and some savings, but I wouldn’t have met the requirements to borrow as much money as would be needed to build a new (and complete) home. So I did what had to be done: racing against a growing womb, I decided to ignore the barriers and made plans to build immediately.

Banks were typically friendly institutions back then. Local bankers were often trusted financial advisors as well as lenders. I know; it seems far-fetched, but it’s true. Anyway, the first thing I did was to make an appointment with my banker to find out how much I could borrow and how much information about the new home I would need to bring in to them to get a construction loan. On that visit, I had no plans or drawings with me because the drawings I had were still rough, and I really just wanted to understand my financial realities and the loan process. Despite having nothing on paper to show the bank officer, I left the bank after a short and casual meeting with loan commitment, which came in the form of a handshake. It wasn’t enough to build the house, but it was all I felt comfortable borrowing. I was determined to stretch it as far as possible and get my family into a larger home. With my personal savings and the bank loan, I had about $36K.

Unlike the cabin, I couldn’t do all the work myself. I had a business to run. Much of the work would have to be contracted. I would have real costs that were going to eat through most of the money. Therefore, we had to start subtracting from the big dream and distill it down to the essence. Our plan was a 30 ft. x 36 ft. story and a half cape, with primary living on the first level, three bedrooms and a bath on the second level and small loft spaces on the third level. We also wanted a south-facing solarium, a screened porch and an entry porch.

But we couldn’t do it all at once. With my sweat equity and the borrowed money, my goal was to build a high quality, energy-efficient enclosure and finish the first floor so that we could move in. The bedrooms, second floor bathroom, third floor lofts, and all the appendages would have to wait. We tried to not compromise the things that affected the long-term performance and durability of the home, while sacrificing and cutting back on things we might be able to change or finish at a later date. When we moved to the new house in1980, with our borrowed and saved money gone, here’s what we had:

• 10 inch, heavily reinforced poured concrete foundation
• Drilled well
• Septic system (real plumbing!)
• 3 in. rigid foam insulation under concrete basement slab
• 2 in. rigid foam insulation inside foundation walls
• Timberframe structure: oak and recycled timbers deemed not good enough for clients, but beautiful to us.
• R28 SIP wall and roof panels
• Fixed windows purchased for $10 each from lumber yard going-out-of-business sale. They were paired and mulled with operable windows, purchased for full price.
• Cedar clapboards
• Asphalt shingle roofing
• Brick chimney
• Plank subfloor on primary level was sanded, finished and used as a finish floor until we could afford hardwood flooring
• Kitchen cabinets: built from butternut trees from our land
• Second and third levels: floors planked, but otherwise empty
• Heating system: central wood stove and the sun

The photo below shows the house we moved into, waiting for the solarium and screened porch. The bedrooms and 2nd floor bath weren’t in yet, but we were moving from 500 sq. ft. to the nearly 1000 sq. ft. on the main level. It was huge step up for us. Though the house wasn’t complete, all the visible surfaces were finished, making “finished, but not complete” our motto for the next years. As we tackled projects, we have always tried to consolidate the construction areas to minimize the disruption of our lives. We tried always to have the house look finished, even though it took years to complete.

The original core building proved to be remarkably energy efficient. When it was finally completed, we had 2400 square feet of living area, kept warm by passive solar and one central woodstove. It also won’t freeze. Through the coldest winter conditions, we can leave the house for days without worrying about pipes freezing. The secret to this building’s performance is the separation of the supporting structure from the insulating skin. With the frame on the interior and protected from the potential compromises associated with being subjected to air infiltration and moisture, its durability is optimized. Likewise, the insulation system is less compromised by structure, allowing it to be intrinsically tighter and more contiguous. This high performance “chassis” was the primary achievement in the original construction. Exterior finishes and interior “fit outs” were accomplished as time and money allowed and some of it changed several times in the following decades, but the core building remains today, even though you may have trouble identifying it in recent photos.

I don’t know my total costs exactly and I certainly don’t know what it would have cost to borrow the full amount when I started the project, so I’m going to make some assumptions about how the theoretical math works out: I’m going to assume the house would have cost about $250K

Lessons of this project, by the (theoretical) numbers:

As built:

Initial construction: $36K; $30K borrowed (assume 8%, though interest rates were higher then); $6K savings
Loan period: 5 yr.; payments approximately $600 per month
Cost of loan after 5 yr.: $36,500
“Paycheck” cash invested over following years to complete: $215K (this is a worst case scenario)
Total of loan and incremental cash investment: $250K

If I had borrowed the full amount:

Full construction: 250K at 8% (again, 1980 rates were higher)
Loan period: 30 yr; payments approximately $1830 per month
Cost of loan after 30 yr.: $660,000

Now you can see what I’m getting to. Banks don’t give money away. The very best way to save money is to borrow less. By “suffering” with our “finished but not complete” home, we theoretically saved $410,000!

No wonder banks are discouraging people from building incrementally!

***
All these many years later, our house has changed again. We recently invested again and made yet more changes to our home.

•

For added living area, we eventually took off the solarium and added a great room.
• Dormers were added to the bedrooms and the second floor bath for added space, light and ventilation.
• The screened porch was removed and became a larger three-season porch.
• An addition to the north side gave us added room in our study and gave space for an additional second floor bath.
• We added to the entry side for a larger laundry, a new porch and a pantry. It also added space to the master bedroom.

Even today, our home is finished but not complete. I’m planning some much-needed bookshelves; we’re talking about adding doors to the study; what about a little separate writing room? Or perhaps we’ll just relax.

One of our important human rights is the right to roll up our sleeves (bare our arms!) and build or remodel our own homes. Banks, insurance companies and building codes are chipping away at that right, but in most of the country there remains enough latitude for people to find a way to get involved, save a bundle of money, and ensure a better, more personalized place to live.

There are lots of ways for people to participate effectively in the construction of their own homes and I happen to have first-hand, hard-won experience with most of them, starting with:

Big Need, No Money
(Where existence is far more important than perfection)

When my wife and I bought our land, it was a deal we couldn’t refuse. The land was a beautiful piece on a remote dirt road without electricity, and therefore was very inexpensive. In addition, it was financed by the owner, which was critical because no responsible bank (This was back in the old days, when banks were careful and actually held the loans they made.) would have looked favorably on our tenuous, mostly broke, financial situation. Even with the low cost, a good interest rate and a lenient lender, making the payments on the land was all we could afford and precluded paying rent elsewhere.

Without good alternatives, we camped on the land and made plans to build. Youthful idealism, ignorance and physical vigor turned out to be a powerful antidote to our lack of money. I didn’t know very much about what was realistic or practical and therefore just dreamed big.

I decided that we not only needed a place to live, but I also needed a woodworking shop and garage to broaden my work possibilities and give me a way to continue working through the long New Hampshire winters. The phased plan thus unfolded this way:

1. Next 2 months: 14’ x 28 ft. barn/cabin for temporary living quarters
2. Next 12 months: 30’ x 70 ft. woodworking shop and garage
3. Next 24 months: Big, fancy house in which to live happily ever after

With little income and no possibility for a bank loan, I got started by doing the tasks I could that had little or no cost associated with them. Of course, I couldn’t do anything without building materials and I also I couldn’t buy them, so the alternative was to salvage materials from derelict buildings and scrounge whatever I could find from other sources.

As I traveled the area, I first mentally inventoried the unused barns, silos and outbuildings and eventually approached the owners of the best ones to see if they might be interested in demolition and removal in exchange for usable materials. I could have done demolition and deconstruction full time. Within a few days and about a dozen inquiries, I had more buildings to take apart than I could accomplish in the time I had. It turns out that New Englanders don’t like wasting things and they don’t like paying taxes, especially on assets they don’t use. Many owners readily accepted my no-cost solution to both problems. I found my construction manna in buildings that leaned, sagged or had holes in the roof. If the situation looked bad, my possibilities were good.

With the help of my brother and a friend, we did the deconstruction work between paying jobs, in the evenings, and on weekends. Before long, we had taken apart several small buildings and were putting up impressive piles of cleaned and sorted timbers and boards. Barn deconstruction is a lot of work, but the materials are often very good and usually have good character. My new buildings would instantly have a historical patina, with the various blemishes and weathering telling part of their story. Each piece was earned with sweat and perseverance and was precious beyond anything I might have purchased with money.

The most labor-efficient salvage came from wooden silos. They are made of vertical 2” x 6” tongue-and-groove staves held together like barrels, with external iron hoops providing compressive pressure to clasp them together to form big cylinders. I discovered I could just topple them by hooking a cable to one of the top hoops and then pulling the cable with my pickup truck. When collapsed, the staves would crumple into a loose heap, mostly free of attachments to each other and the hoops. Within ½ hour, we were piling up good, clean lumber that could be used either for decking or framing. Pulled-out straight, the hoops made good concrete reinforcing bar and cut into short lengths, they could be used like huge nails to hold timbers together.

It wasn’t long before I had enough framing and sheathing lumber to build the cabin and was already well into assembling a kit of materials for the woodworking shop. Since we desperately needed shelter before winter, I needed to focus my attention on the cabin. I paused on the demolition projects in order to find the rest of the materials and deal with a few infrastructure issues, which resulted in more sweat equity and some good scrounges.

• Foundation: piers of dry-laid stone.
• Windows: fixed sash found at dump
• Door: made from barn board and silo staves
• Roof shingles: free pine sawmill slabs cut into 24 in. lengths
• Insulation: factory seconds from Styrofoam manufacturer
• Well: clean and revive old hand dug well on property
• Bathroom: two-holer
• Heat: used woodstove

Without regard for precision, the cabin went up quickly. It was designed around the materials I had and most of the cutting was done with a chain saw since there wasn’t any electrical power on the property at the time. It didn’t make sense to be overly fussy anyway because it was intended to be used for living quarters only temporarily and then converted into a barn.

We moved in with full ownership after spending under $500. I had a full investment of personal labor hours and some debts to the family members and friends who helped, but otherwise we were well-positioned to ride out our personal recession in relative comfort.

As it turned out, we stayed there for 8 years, holding out until the birth of our second daughter forced us to build a larger home. During the time we were there, we upgraded nearly everything and added a bathroom wing. When we left, another couple moved in and stayed even longer and made even more improvements. They also had two daughters during their years there and finally built a beautiful new home down the road.

A few other people lived in the cabin for short periods and then my daughter and her husband lived there up until recently. They improved the heating system, fixed the roof, and built an even better bathroom. My grandson lived there for the first two years of his life.


After 37 years, the “temporary” cabin has become revered and nearly sacred in our family. It is now empty for the first time, but waiting for the next adventure.

Lessons from the cabin about life:

• No home mortgage payments meant I could do what I wanted to do, not what I had to do. The path we chose would not have been possible if we were in debt. My company wouldn’t exist today if I had needed to be profitable in the first 5 years.
• Idealism and apparent ignorance sometimes can be forces for good. Resignation and cynicism are useless.
• In modern lifestyle assumptions, comfort can cost you your life and therefore is way overrated. The comforts of home aren’t comforts if you can’t afford them.
• If you have no work, you can still earn the things you need.
• Friends and family are your strength and hope.

Lessons from the cabin about building:

• Lots of free materials are available, but you have to go get them. There are just as many abandoned buildings now as there were 35 years ago.
• First assemble the kit of parts, and then design the building around what you have.
• On little money, the point is not to finish, but to make continual progress. All improvements are paid for in cash or sweat equity. It’s the rule of low-budget building.
• A decent place to live doesn’t mean a fancy place to live. Good workmanship in this type of dwelling means sturdy first, getting the job done second, and being fussy about the details third. Two out of three is sufficient.

When the cabin was done, I went about building the woodworking shop in exactly the same way. It was a much bigger building, but the challenge of that was somehow exciting more than daunting. We took down a very large barn and also recovered some salvage from a railroad trestle. I was able to trade some of the beautifully weathered barn boards for new boards and went about my scrounging until I had gathered all the materials needed for the building.

• Used windows given by a neighbor when their home was renovated
• Metal roofing salvaged from a covered bridge when it got a new roof
• Pilings salvaged from old telephone poles
• Concrete slab filled with a large quantity of stone to displace concrete volume and reinforced with silo hoops and assorted junk metal.
• Wooden deck: timbers and silo staves
• Structure: barn and bridge timbers
• Insulation: Styrofoam slab seconds
• Labor help: friends and family
• Heat: wood furnace salvaged from an old house; owner had upgraded to an oil furnace

When the building was enclosed, my business moved in. We owned it, having no debt to anyone other than the amount remaining for the land. It was in that building that we developed the ideas and methods to make timberframing a practical way to build again. Without any financial pressures, we could focus on doing things right and getting good results. Making money came later.

Thirty-five years later, the shop is a thriving facility. It grew and expanded several times over the years until we had over 45 people employed in our timberframe operation and overwhelmed that dirt road location. Today, it is once again our woodworking shop and is humming with activity and continues to be the scene of great craftsmanship, remarkable creativity and inspiring energy.

The current recession is nothing compared to my personal recession in those early years.
Now, as then, nearly anything can be accomplished with work and perseverance.

Now, as then, lack of money isn’t necessarily a reason to not to pursue one’s dreams. It may, in fact, become the very reason you can make them real.

Unwarranted and irrational optimism is one our most powerful tools. Hope and striving, despite the steadfast gravitational force calling for resignation and stasis, is the fuel of human progress. The New York Times ran a story the other day, entitled “What Happens to the American Dream in a Recession?” Sure enough; buoyed on warm wafts of denial, hard times only seem to bring our dreams into sharper focus. No matter the depth of economic difficulties, it’s apparent that we cling to the idea that anything is possible for those who are willing to work for it.

Despite half a million job losses a month, despite dismal forecasts for the future, despite so many people having lost most of their savings or worse, the dreams remain. No doubt, every dream is different and all dreams are adjustable, but it is still remarkable under the circumstances. Perhaps it’s how we survive life’s challenges: just rescale the dream in light of the setbacks and move on. How can a paraplegic get motivated to compete in athletics? How can a person in prison for the remainder of his days “love the breath of life?” How does a single mother with four children, who can’t make ends meet with only one job, find it important to “count my blessings?” Whatever the reason, it’s the best of humanity revealed, again and again.

In these hard times, the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans are becoming sparer, more essential, and therefore less trivial. Basic ideals like freedom, equality and peace are championed again, as are basic needs like good food and reliable shelter. It may take this kind of shaking up to remind us of what’s really important and what’s really needed. No doubt, one of those essential things is the critical role that housing plays in the lives of all people. It came up when the NYT/CBS survey asked people what the American Dream means to them.

“Basically, have a roof over your head and put food on the table.”
“Working at a secure job, being able to have a home and live as happily as you can not spending too much money.”
“Owning own home, having civil liberties.”

As some of the gaudy bubble-induced ambitions get pared back, a decent and comfortable place to live always remains an elemental basis for achieving an improvement in the quality of life. Sturdy homes are at the root of civilization. Freedom and democracy mean nothing to people who lack the security of dependable, dignified shelter.

In light of how important home is in the lives of everyone, it’s unfortunate that homeowners have become removed from the homebuilding process. For most of history, people had to know how to make and maintain their homes. Along with hunting, farming and cooking, the essential skills of homebuilding were critical to the process of creating a sustainable lifestyle. In the 20th century, though, Americans unlearned building knowledge and skills and instead, ceded the idea of outsourcing the entire making of their most important physical asset to “professionals.”

Meanwhile, and ironically, the homebuilding industry used the same century to unlearn their integrated skills and also developed a process dependent on outsourcing an ever-growing number of discreet tasks to teams of specialists. The result is that would-be homeowners have put themselves at the mercy of an industry that is itself at the mercy of a fragmentation and disintegration that has made the homebuilding process too hard, too expensive and wholly bad. Homebuilding is a team sport with no coach, no training, no practice; no team. The average jobsite morale, organization, focus and sport proficiency would appall the average Pop Warner Peewee league coach.

This deep recession also reveals numerous opportunities and one of the big ones is for homeowners to take back homebuilding. In reaction to the economy, there has been a tremendous resurgence in backyard gardening and home-cooked meals. Many are doing this because they are forced to, but they also recognize the rare opportunity to save money and improve quality at the same time. The same is possible in homebuilding. Owner-builders can save a lot of money, and also ensure a better product, with much more customization to personal taste and needs.

The need for good quality homes, critical maintenance and important renovations is almost certainly greater than ever, as we’ve seen record low levels of building activity for nearly a year. Of course, there’s a big inventory of relatively inexpensive housing stock on the market, but most of it is junk. So what if the price of a McDonald’s hamburger is on sale for a dollar? It’s still only a McDonald’s hamburger. If you want a really good quality, affordable meal, you’ll have to cook it.

And if you want a high quality home you can afford, you may just have to roll up your sleeves and build it.

I am among those who believe that the current recession, while painful, is a necessary correction, one that will help lead toward a more sustainable culture, a stronger economy, and importantly, more contentment and happiness.

The foundation of the American experiment is dug deep in the hearts of its people. It is built on an indomitable work ethic, uncommon generosity and the collective pursuit of the common good. Its antithesis is indolence, personal indulgence and selfishness. The virtuous cycle of the former is the well-spring of our greatness, while the vicious cycle of the latter is a recipe for any civilization’s imminent ruin.

Our apparent willingness to trade our hard-won values for a quick road to the “high life” can now be recognized as the worst kind of “deal with the devil.” In the classic Faust legend, he was at least attempting to trade for knowledge; our bargain was only for money and stuff but just like Faust, we ended up losing things far more precious than what can be easily summed.

Of course, the temptation of an easier way has probably always lured people away from their core principles. The American character was hewn to shape in the making of a country. Somewhere, deep in our memory, is the passion and tenacity of the people, who created entire civilized communities out of raw wilderness; who cleared fields of stumps and stone; who built houses, barns, churches, meeting halls and whole towns with bare hands and mutual effort. In the process, they did more work in less time than it took slaves to build the Roman Empire. The intrigue of the American story is the nuanced mystery of what it is that brings about the best of humanity.

Still, the devolution of values has always been a constant possibility and real worry of leaders and wise men through the ages. What John Adams wrote to his brother-in-law at the turn of the 19th century would have been a timely warning for the beginning of the 21st century:

"I am no enemy to elegance, but I say no man has a right to think of elegance till he has secured substance; nor then, to seek more of it than he can afford."

Later, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1819, Adams sounded despairing, as if trends had not gone his way.

“Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from becoming effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance and folly?”

In a few short months, we’ve learned a lot about the link between “extravagance and folly.” The happy illusion that the lifestyle and amentities of your choice could be had without effort did, in fact, intoxicate enough people to cripple the economy when the bitter scheme of it unraveled. We therefore have sobering evidence that Adams’ admonition about living within one’s means and “substance before elegance” is the correct mantra for a better way of thinking, acting and living. It’s a more sustainable approach that is available and applicable at all levels, individually and collectively. Taken together, it’s a prescription for a simpler life; for less grasping for more, and more accepting of less.

Wealth, after all, is not a measurement of asset accumulation, but is instead only an irritating, artificial gap between what you have and what you want. This is how some people who have much become poor, and people with very little can become rich. Learning to satisfy one’s needs and desires with less money and effort is the surest and fastest route to real wealth.

There’s nothing new here. Sages and religious leaders have been banging this drum for ages. It’s just an old truth about how to best live that is now hitting us hard once again as we witness the brutal consequences of ignoring those timeless lessons. This time, I believe the correction will stick (at least for a generation or so) because the change is needed and shifting toward frugality and self-reliance actually comes pretty naturally. There is more of Thoreau than Trump in our collective psyche.

Frugality parallels humility in the same way that ostentation parallels conceit and narcissism. The simpler life makes elegance and wealth a choice instead of a purchase. It democratizes “the pursuit of happiness.”

This brings me back to my uncle Clyde, who I wrote about in my last blog. Clyde never made more than $16K/year, but he was never poor and never deprived. (When I was young, I thought he was rich because of the big tips he left at restaurants.) When he retired, the house he could afford was too small, so he became an owner-builder, took courses in plumbing and electrical work and, with the help of a friend from his Chicago church, built an addition to make the home more adequate to his needs. What he built wasn’t fancy or elegant, but it had substance. It had exactly the qualities that mattered to Clyde and his wife. He built it himself.

I think one of the very best things that could come out of this recession is people reconnecting with the process of homebuilding. Actually, it’s the “turnkey” alternative that’s pretty unnatural. Historically, people have usually had a bigger influence on the making of their “nest.” Given the cost and the compromises, it doesn’t always make sense to simply buy a home complete and entire unto itself without personal intervention at some part of the construction or finishing stages. Over the years, we have worked with many owner-builders and those are some of our finest homes and best experiences. Their personal involvement always makes things better, less expensive and much, much more personalized to their needs and desires.

In the coming years, I see a trend where people are going to be rightfully wary of big mortgages on big houses with lots of superficial glitz and little substance at the core. To get it done right, in a way they can afford, I think many more people will be willing to get involved and manage the process directly, build more incrementally, and control the quality completely.

Best reaction to a recession? Opt out; start building!

While this is the longest hiatus I’ve had since initiating this blog about 1 ½ years ago, I have a good excuse:

That’s not me, but this guy did a pretty good imitation of my crash: wheels up, face down, ribs no doubt saying a rude hello to some rocks. If I’d only act my age!

So, finally, onward.

*****
My uncle, Clyde Allison, passed away a few days ago at age 91. In reminiscing about him, I am reminded that one of the most important functions of homes is to be a place of comfort, security and peace for people in their senior years, through retirement and, with luck, until the end. Lost in the frenzy of the housing bubble and burst is the fundamental reality that real estate value isn’t always about dollars, but it is often nevertheless priceless to those who cherish having a place of their own.

Clyde was a fine man whose wealth was in what he gave, not what he got. He was a Presbyterian minister and the founder of “Trick or Treat for UNICEF”, which has raised ten’s of millions of dollars since it was started in 1950. He also had a long tenure at the Emerald Ave. Presbyterian Church, which is in an area of the South Side of Chicago that was notoriously gang-ruled and crime-infested, especially in the racially divisive 1960’s and 1970’s. I still have no idea how he managed as a white minister in those years, but there’s a clue in the story about how he once cleared an area of the main sanctuary for a boxing ring, giving a place for neighborhood hero and former Heavyweight Champion, Ezzard Charles, to give boxing pointers to the kids. Conflicts between the Bible and boxing probably didn’t seem so important under the circumstances.

Clyde retired to Lowell, Indiana with his wife Mary Emma and had lived there about 25 years. For Clyde, his home’s value was measured in the quality of life it offered him, defined on his own terms. It frankly wouldn’t have mattered to him what it was worth “on the market,” so long as it provided some basic comforts and a place for his books, his family, his ambitions and his many memories. He was especially fond of studying about China, where he, my mother and three other siblings grew up in a missionary family. His house worked perfectly: from it, he could explore the world that mattered to him in the way he wanted to, and it was to it that those who loved him came for frequent visits and family events. Because he and my aunt lived there, it was the “family seat.” Their home has been the center of activity for his immediate family, but was otherwise a place for their personal privacy and introspection.

This is what homes are about. This is why I build. While I take pride in the fact that our homes tend to significantly appreciate in monetary value, the most important aspiration of our work is the ultimate value it brings to the lives of people who live there. So many times, our clients come to us with important intentions for their new home, expressed in terms like, “our legacy house,” or “our last home,” or even “the place I only plan to leave in a box.” These jobs are always at the same time flattering and a weighty responsibility. Will our design, engineering and workmanship measure up? It’s hard to get the testimonials that would allow us to know for sure. Occasionally, a few of our homes are actually tested by natural events like high winds or snow loads and we do revel in those success stories, but the critical, more subjective time-tests are elusive tales indeed.

The home my uncle Clyde lived in until his final days isn’t notable or fancy in any way. What has made it their retirement goldmine was the simple fact that it is their home (they have owned it for many years) and that it could adapt to their increasing physical constraints, allowing them to stay in their own home until their last days. This is why homeownership got to be one word, and became permanently tethered to the concept of the “American Dream.” It is the essence of personal independence and freedom. It is all the comfort, self-assurance, dignity and wealth most people dare to seek.

My parents, like Clyde and Mary Emma, lived out their days in their own home. They had no secret bank accounts and no investment portfolio of any sort, but there was no sense of poverty either. They eked out the utility payments and taxes, ate inexpensively and always at home. They literally had nothing but their house, but from their perspective, that fact alone fulfilled their needs and desires and provided them with what they truly wanted year after year. It was essentially their blue-chip stock; it paid continuous dividends right up to the end. My siblings and I still marvel at how fortunate they were—and we were—that they were able to stay in their own home.

The bane of the housing bubble was that while it made some people wealthy, it made homeownership too expensive for many of those on fixed incomes and forced too many others out of their homes as their taxes skyrocketed along with the homes’ apparent value. So, affordability and lower taxes are silver linings of the housing bubble’s burst. People with no fortune but a house of their own in which to live out their days are not typically disappointed that its monetary value is diminished. The difference is hard on those paying mortgages, but a blessing to those who are only paying taxes and hoping, like Clyde and my parents, to stay in their home to the end.

On the broken fortunes of the present economic malaise, a new approach to building and achieving homeownership needs to arise. We know now that many of the other avenues to long term security are potentially ephemeral and undependable. Homes shouldn’t be like that. It is time to restore some of the old paradigms about the real meaning of house and home, while creating new ways and means for people to build something for themselves that will be the literal foundation for the final comfort and security they have worked through their lives to earn.

I will continue to write on this topic in upcoming blogs.

The great mission of Habitat for Humanity has been on my mind because its founder, Millard Fuller, recently passed away. He was a friend of my father’s, and also a friend of my sister Betsie, who lived near the Fuller family at Koinonia Farms in the 1960’s. Millard’s inspiration for the idea of Habitat for Humanity grew out of volunteer building projects in Koinonia Farm’s tight-knit community.

I corresponded with Millard a little in regards to specific building projects, but I didn’t meet him until 1998, a year after my father died. Millard told me that he and my father had written many hundreds of letters to each other. I was shocked by that, but Millard had a good explanation. He said that both he and my father always punctually answered their correspondence and neither of them knew how to stop the back and forth flow.

Millard (and his wife Linda) founded Habitat for Humanity (HfH) in 1976. Since then, one family at a time, one house at a time, HfH has made a huge impact on tens of thousands of lives throughout the world. Today, Habitat for Humanity has built more than 300,000 homes, housing more than 1.5 million people in more than 3,000 communities worldwide. Millard was the force of nature whose vision, energy and perseverance made this happen. Of course he didn’t do it alone, but it wouldn’t have happened without him.

Over the years, I have worked on a number of Habitat for Humanity homes, including several big “blitz builds” in which homes are built at an accelerated pace. The last one I worked on with our local community (almost 500 volunteers) was built in eight days from foundation to completion.

I am as proud of that home as any our company has built in the last 35 years. It was built with the same spirit of collective pride, neighborliness, and generosity that built most of the houses, barns, churches and town halls in the early years of our country. When we once again reach out to our neighbors and build homes this way, it’s a reminder of who we are as Americans, as humans. The layers of quality, authenticity, dignity and beauty built into that home—like most HfH homes--seem endless, though it is equally simple, plain and humble.

I am a builder because I know from personal experience the transformative difference that a good quality home can make to the lives of individuals and families. But in the special partnership of Habitat for Humanity projects, the builders and the homeowners seem to benefit equally. Millard knew this to be a fact and a strategy. Knowing that there were no losers in the philanthropy and volunteerism that builds homes for needy families, he was always forward and bold about asking people to give time, money or both. People don’t regret giving to help those with a need for a better place to live, but working side-by-side with others who are doing that same thing, for the same reason is pure, unmitigated joy.

Millard Fuller will be remembered. He sowed seeds of hope and human dignity that have grown, flourished, spread and now can’t be stopped. Along with tens of thousands of others, I too am in his debt.

The financial collapse is giving us a sneak-preview about what might eventually happen to many of our nation’s suburbs. Half-finished new developments have been abandoned. Waves of foreclosures on existing homes are crashing against the shoals of millions of shattered dreams. Desperate people are just cutting their losses and leaving. Most of the tragic stories are taking place in the newer outer suburbs where the deal on the mortgage loan was as misleading as the home’s actual value, which was as poorly built as its location was wrongly designed. People are leaving partially because the homes and the communities weren’t worth fighting for. Underneath the surface, there never was much real value. This was always true, but it took the complete unraveling of a hyper-connected Ponzi scheme for the truth to become so startlingly evident.

There’s a whole lot of talk now about what will happen to the suburbs. Richard Florida examines the topic in much detail in an excellent article in Atlantic Magazine, How the Crash will Reshape America. In his view, the suburbs are surely doomed and will have to be reconfigured in most cases, and perhaps even abandoned in others.

Suburbanization—and the sprawling growth it propelled—made sense for a time. The cities of the early and mid-20th century were dirty, sooty, smelly, and crowded, and commuting from the first, close-in suburbs was fast and easy. And as manufacturing became more technologically stable and product lines matured during the postwar boom, suburban growth dovetailed nicely with the pattern of industrial growth. Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. This process brought the Sun Belt economies (which had lagged since the Civil War) into modern times, and sustained a long boom for the United States as a whole.
But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, and the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs.

Florida is convinced there will be a redistribution of the population, morphing toward density, coalescing toward connectedness and efficiency. It can be resisted, but it’s likely he’s right about there being certain inevitability to a transition that fits the opportunities and constraints of our era.
Allison Arieff has a good discussion on her blog, By Design, on the same topic. Along with authors Ellen Durham-Jones and June Williamson (Retrofitting Suburbia), she imagines suburban areas being essentially remodeled to increase their density and create more localized mixed-use possibilities. These are hopeful, helpful ideas. Remaking what we have is the best possible outcome.
But there will be a storm before the calm. We’re getting a glimpse of that now. We don’t change our habits easily. It takes something like a convulsive shock for us to give up our fantasies.
As fantasies go, we can do better. Suburbia is not the best definition of the American Dream.
Many years ago, I worked as a framing carpenter, helping to build suburban tract homes on Colorado’s Front Range. While I got some satisfaction from slinging my big hammer, my heart was already convinced that the suburbs weren’t a sustainable concept. I knew it because I had intimate knowledge of what little they were made of and how poorly they were put together. I knew it because I drove out to the remote construction sites in a borrowed car, burning fuel that I couldn’t afford even when it was 1960’s cheap, having come from my home in the old central city area where I could get to anything I needed to do on foot. I knew it because everything about the suburban areas I worked on were inauthentic concoctions, propped up by dreams that were hard-sold on promises grabbed from thin air at will, and inflated as necessary. With the hyped deal, all the buyers got a spectacular view, unlimited privacy, perfect neighbors and happiness that would flow as surely as cascading Rocky Mountain spring water.

I didn’t have a particular vision for how the demise of the suburbs would play out, but I didn’t have to go far to see some of the historical possibilities. I grew up not far from the very visible, but long-abandoned remains of Colorado’s gold rush era. For my parents, hauling us off to visit the ghost towns left over from the late 19th century mining boom was the perfect parental trifecta: cheap entertainment containing both fascinating history lessons and potent morality tales. I am one of eleven children, so the cheap entertainment part was critical. We went often to places like Cripple Creek, Victor and St. Elmo.

Those were mysterious and eerie. You could pretend to inhabit what was left of the houses, imagine what it was like to be in the tiny jails, or conjure the raucous crowd inside a saloon that by then had no roof and a crumbling floor. But to really get in touch with the allure that brought tens of thousands of people to make their way to those high-mountain towns; you could catch a touch of their gold fever just by poking around in the slag piles at the mouth of every mine hole. Even as I child, I could feel the urgent hope-against-hope that caused so many to suspend rational behavior for a thin dream about easy money.

In the space of about 10 years at the end of the 19th century, Cripple Creek grew to a city of 35,000 people. Victor’s story is similar and it grew to a population of over 18,000. Only a few people actually got rich in these towns; for the rest, it was usually a dreadful bust. So the fall of these mining towns was even quicker than their rise. Just like the homes being abandoned today, when the jobs disintegrated and the hope of wealth disappeared into someone else’s bank accounts, people just left.

The gold rush towns were built furiously fast because of the blind hope for heaps of money, not to enrich life with quality and beauty, and those priorities showed by the time I walked their empty streets with my young siblings. They were once big, sprawling towns with houses, barns, stores, saloons, and more (not many churches, though), but much of the physical evidence was completely gone by the early 1960’s, which was actually quite fortunate. The buildings were flimsy and mostly made of wood, and since they generally didn’t even bother with masonry foundations, thousands of buildings just moldered back to earth.

If you’re going to build badly, it’s best if the ruins are biodegradable.

As a young carpenter, I had all of this to think about as I drove nails into wood to build homes that couldn’t last. I’d seen flimsy buildings and the very same framing methods in the mining towns. What we did in building the tract homes wasn’t greatly different; they just had more finish materials to help hold them together. I tried to overcome the circumstances and do good work, but I couldn’t help but envision the fate I had seen in the ghost towns.

But what about the ruins? With all the concrete, plaster and synthetic materials, we’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do, or history will judge us pretty harshly. Like quality, ephemeralness ought to be a commitment.

Yesterday, I wrote that I thought the Obama housing plan is inadequate because it only proposes to lower interest rates and doesn't address the larger issue of adjusting principal, or the actual value of the asset. I was gratified to see in the New York Times this morning that their editorial board agrees with me about the deficiency in the plan:

The idea is to lower the monthly payment on a loan by modifying its terms, which is the right goal. The problem lies in the way loans will be modified. Mr. Obama’s plan emphasizes lowering monthly payments by reducing a loan’s interest rate, which certainly will allow many people to stay in their homes, in the near term at least. What it won’t do is make staying there a wise move. And it’s not the best way to guard against re-default.

A better way to lower the monthly payments for these people is to reduce the principal remaining on the loan. That way, the payments become affordable and, as equity is rebuilt, the borrower has both an incentive and the means to keep current.

They didn't describe the mechanism for adjusting the principal, but went on to say that the new bankruptcy law may allow judges to make the modification for those who must go that route. Still, for many others, a fair adjustment based on an appraisal a few years from now seems to me still a reasonable approach.

However it's done, doing something more is VERY important, as emphasized in the NYT editorial:

The Obama plan will make mortgage indebtedness more manageable, but ultimately the debt itself needs to be greatly reduced. The sooner we as a nation move in that direction, the better.

I’m disappointed in the Obama administration’s plan to help troubled homeowners. The details were announced yesterday. I expected a more creative plan because it seems quite clear that stopping the foreclosures and stabilizing housing values are among the most vital ingredients for getting the economy on the road to recovery. The Obama plan will help, but I fear it won’t be enough to make the dramatic difference that’s needed right now. It does too little, not too much.

The problem is that while it focuses on reducing interest payments, which is good, it has no mechanism for actually readjusting the value of the home for which the payments are made. Our economic crisis was triggered by the convergence of ill-conceived loans and the precipitous drop in home value when the housing bubble burst. Suddenly, homebuyers were making payments on something worth far less than their total mortgage would indicate. Simultaneous with much of their personal net worth evaporating, interest payments readjusted upward, still reflecting the previous bubble value, but also leaving behind the original, deceptively low interest rate. So, struggling homebuyers are faced with two problems: high payments camouflaged in the sub-prime loan swindle and highly inflated loan values caused by market madness.

By only addressing one side of the problem, I don’t think enough homeowners will have the necessary incentive to continue making their payments. While the Obama plan will allow a large group of them to pay less per month, in the long run, they will still be buying something worth less than its ultimate cost. Despite the better interest rate offered in Obama’s plan, I think many people will find that continuing to pay while that disparity remains will be too discouraging, if not foolish.

In my earlier post, in which I proposed a simplified plan, I suggested that payments be reduced to one-third of income, and that the time period for the loan be extended beyond thirty years. This strategy is very similar to the Obama administration’s “Plan 2.” I too suggested a readjustment after five years, as does the Obama plan, but not of the interest rate specifically, but rather to a market-corrected loan value based on an appraisal to be done at the later date. By then, the appraisals should be neither inflated nor deflated by the skewed conditions of either the past bubble or the current recession.

In my proposal, I thought it would be best to reserve the housing recovery money to pay the difference on the loan values five years from now, helping both the lenders and borrowers in a fair manner. In the meantime, the payments would be more affordable and the homebuyers would have an assurance that ultimately their home would be correctly valued. The catch, of course, is that the homebuyers would have to remain in their homes and make the payments in order to eventually benefit in a real monetary way from government support. They’d have to give to get.

I’m sure there are complications to the solution my simple mind could conjure, but I had only myself alone in the shower, not a gathering of the nation’s top economists, with all the data and statistics at hand. I wish those guys had been bolder and more imaginative. The plan that will silence all the naysayers is the one that will work. This one doesn't make me optimistic.

But I hope I’m very wrong.

I didn’t drag myself to the International Builder’s Show (IBS) this year. It was held in Las Vegas, which is a city I’ve managed to avoid so far. I’ve passed through its airport, but haven’t walked its legendary neon-lit streets. I couldn’t imagine breaking that good record by going to an annual event I also try to avoid. Hype, pretense and an unfettered pandering to fantasy are hallmarks of both Las Vegas and the Builders Show. I imagine it played out as just another lavish show in a city known for disconnection from reality and the playing-out of juvenile narcissism. So there’s symmetry in having the Builder’s show in Las Vegas, and if it stays there, it’s unlikely I’ll ever feel obligated to attend again.

One of the really fun (or funny) events at IBS is the annual unveiling of what has come to be called “The New American Home.” The basic idea is to build an actual home somewhere near the convention hall that puts on display architecture, design and technology meant to represent some kind of ideal about the state of the American home. It’s always something of a joke, though, because what actually happens is that all the manufacturers and suppliers who get involved attempt to show off their stuff at a scale in proportion to their investment, so the home always balloons in size, and becomes silly in its complexity as it is forced to take on every feature, amenity and gadget that could possibly be deployed in a single dwelling.

As reported in the recent edition of Popular Mechanics, this year was no different. After reading about this year’s show house, I’m glad I didn’t see this one in person. I might have left my lunch on one of its oh-so-green floors. It is one thing to build the usual big, stupid mansion for the benefit of hundreds of participating companies to display their wares, because visitors at least get it: it’s not a house; it’s a whole bunch of product showrooms in disguise. It’s quite another thing to try to call this conspicuous sales event a green and sustainable home. That’s no longer funny. The 2009 “New American Home” is almost 9,000 square feet. No amount of green materials or ingenious energy efficient features can overcome this gaudy fact.

This one actually fails to be credible demonstration of renewable energy supply offsetting the home's demand, as pointed out by Popular Mechanics:

The bulk of an estimated $2500 annual total utility cost would come from the natural gas used to heat and cool the house, heat the water and fire up those fireplaces. In its defense, the house cools itself using 39 percent as much fuel as a comparably sized structure, but using a rough Las Vegas average of $7 per million btuin natural gas (the national average is $4.90), we estimate that this house consumes close to 300 million Btu in gas per year. At 293 kwh-per-million Btu, that's getting up past 85,000 kwh per year—three times the average American home's 27,022 annual kwh. Put simply, this house is bloated.

So you can’t, as they say, put lipstick on this pig. LED lights, photovoltaic panels, recycled flooring can’t justify the puffed-up extravagance of its raw size. As this home’s energy conservation measures and renewable energy technologies try to chase down its gargantuan energy requirements, it conjures the image of a dog in the futile chase of his own tail. So, the 2009 New American Home is the equivalent of making a Hummer into a hybrid; it wouldn’t be a bad thing to do, but that wouldn’t make it an ecological solution to be touted as the way forward.

The truly New American Home of the future will be much smaller. It will be energy efficient because of its size and sustainable because of its built-in capacity to adapt to constantly changing needs and technologies. As a country, we need to learn how to live differently and build differently. It certainly would have been much more instructive if the National Association of Homebuilders, which directs the building of this model home, would show some courage in this regard, but I don’t expect it. That would be too much like leading, and that hasn’t been an area in which the NAHB has been inclined.

The only good thing about this latest version of the New American Home is the advertised promise that what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.

In anticipation of Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," announced yesterday, I was planning to write a post with the title "Life isn't Fair," because I was quite sure the plan would be designed to rescue the worst cases, whether or not the buyers had been responsible in their judgment and motives. Such a plan, while being prudent economically, was certainly going to be criticized by those who were responsibly making their payments, despite the decreased values. I assumed the inequities would be enormous and the outcry loud.

I'm happy to report I was wrong. The plan is equally weighted to assist those who are currently resolutely struggling with their payments and the devaluation, as well as those who are at risk of foreclosure because they are no longer able to keep up the payments. A succinct summary of the plan is in this New York Times graphic. The plan is targeting as many as 9 million households at a proposed cost of about $775 billion. It's not perfect, but it's fairer, more aggressive, and more far-reaching than had been predicted—and for that, Obama and his team are to be praised. They will also be criticized, because the plan isn't perfect; it can't rescue everyone. In his remarks, Obama tried to portray some realism along with the expected picture of optimism.

"This plan will not save every home, but it will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild. It will prevent the worst consequences of this crisis from wreaking even greater havoc on the economy. And by bringing down the foreclosure rate, it will help to shore up housing prices for everyone."

There will still be a lot of pain, and we can assume there will be a great deal of inequity and chaos in the attempts to focus the assistance toward those who truly deserve it and who are also in a reasonably stable financial situation. The details are complex but the rules are intended to provide unambiguous guidelines for implementation. As it still depends on individuals and banks to do the right thing, there will no doubt be far too many who will attempt to abuse the plan for self-interest, whether personal and institutional.

So, my original thesis is still relevant. If you expect that this plan will actually separate the greedy from the responsible, it will be a disappointment. I think we can't hope for that; more realistically, we can hope it will do far more good than harm and will therefore provide a needed palliative to our very drastic financial situation.

If you were lucky, you learned while young that life isn't fair. The difference between the fortunate and the unfortunate doesn't parallel with the deserving and undeserving. There are those who achieve desired goals because of hard work and perseverance or natural capability, but there are also those who get there because of unfair privilege, unfair tactics or luck. It's an immutable fact mankind has lived with through all recorded history and before. If you can't achieve some detached objectivity about this, you could spend your life paralyzed by anger, resentment and cynicism. On the other hand, if we don't always fight back against injustice and unfairness, we become enablers. It's a fine line.

The banks and bankers, who are getting bailed out of the holes they dug for themselves, and for all of us, simply do not deserve the charity they are receiving. If you think about this long enough, it will drive you crazy. But here we are, with a housing plan that now depends on these same institutions to stem their own greed and reach out to millions of desperate people. We now hope they will act in accordance with a vision that is nearly the opposite of the way they acted when they let loose these "financial instruments" in the first place. Will the foxes really shore up the henhouse?

There are lots of potential problems with Obama's plan. It will be easy to poke holes in it. In the end, though, this plan would be wildly successful if all the players can summon some human compassion and put the greater interest of the country ahead of their own. But that won't happen often enough, and the oversight won't prevent abuses. Be prepared to find fault, but place the blame where it belongs. Obama and his team have done a good job, whatever the plan's problems; it is now time for all citizens of this country--corporate and private--to buck up and do the right thing.

We received some good news this week. Here’s the lead from a press release we’re sending out today:

Bensonwood’s Unity House Achieves LEED Platinum Status

Unity, ME – Unity House, the second home designed and constructed by Bensonwood Homes as part of the groundbreaking Open Prototype Initiative (OPI), has achieved LEED Platinum designation, the U.S. Green Building Council’s highest rating for environmentally sustainable construction.

It is exciting news, and also a reminder to me that there are several facets of Unity that help to define the path of hope in these hard times.

First, unity is a noun:

u⋅ni⋅ty
1. the state of being one; oneness.
2. a whole or totality as combining all its parts into one.
7. (in literature and art) a relation of all the parts or elements of a work constituting a harmonious whole and producing a single general effect.
Dictionary.com Unabridged

You can’t fake unity. You have it, or you don’t. I’m proud to say we have it. Nothing lasts very long without unity at its core. At all scales, unity is the soul of human organization and its source of sustainability. Unity is such critical lifeblood to organized behavior, that if it can’t be engendered, it will be enforced. For our governing bodies at all levels, most of us believe the most benign and powerful kind of unity is in our democracy rather than in the subjugation associated with autocracies. On the other hand, most corporations have opted for some form of command-and-control instead.

Unity is important, but it matters how it happens.

Second, Unity is a place. It’s a small town; rather Unity is the name for lots of small towns. There is a Unity in Illinois, New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oregon and Wisconsin. Is it coincidence that most of the Unity communities have a population of fewer than two thousand and only one exceeds twenty thousand? Is small better…more unified? I don’t know, but it is well understood in democracy that unity needs local expression as well as national expression. That’s how we the people get involved.

I’ve been to three of the Unity towns and live close to one of them, Unity, New Hampshire. Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton declared peace—and unity—here.

Still, I have a special place in my heart for Unity, Maine.

Unity, ME
Location: (44.619003, -69.336696)
Population (2000): 486 (319 housing units)
Area: 1.818322 sq mi (land), 0.000000 sq mi (water)
Zip code(s): 04988

Unity (perhaps all of them) is a remote and quaint little place. You don’t go through Unity because it’s not on the way to somewhere else. Getting to Unity must be your purpose, the destination. It’s so appropriate, because unity is like that.

Third, Unity is a college in Unity, Maine. The college is uniquely focused around environmental learning, particularly sustainability and conservation biology. Not coincidentally, its curriculum unifies the left and right, hunters and vegetarians, snowmobilers and cross-country skiers, dirt bikers and bicyclists. Sustainability, after all, can’t possibly succeed as narrow ideology or divisive agenda. What they understand at Unity College is that—beginning with the education of the next generation—the pursuit of sustainability is either inclusive or failed.

As in politics, we can choose unity and do our best to control our destiny, or conditions will eventually enforce our collective behaviors to align for better or worse.



Finally, Unity is a house on the Unity campus. Unity House was built as part of the commitment by Unity College to invest in the future they are trying to educate toward. It is my good fortune to be friends with the President of the college, Mitch Thomashow, and his wife Cindy. This project was the realization of personal philosophy and vision. They were eager to build a carbon neutral, LEED platinum home, and even more eager to live in one.


Mitch is an internationally known environmentalist and educator who has authored two important books: Ecological Idenity and Bringing the Biosphere Home. Cindy is a dynamic teacher and activist with irresistible charm. One of the major themes of their work has been about building new connections and repairing the broken links between ourselves and in the world around us…in a word, unity.

Mitch and Cindy are now writing a blog about life in Unity House. It’s obvious from their posts that they are enjoying the experience and that it has become a laboratory for them about not only living with renewed awareness of the qualities of their new home, but also reflecting on their own needs, desires and habits. It is one thing to build a carbon neutral house, it’s quite another to live a carbon neutral life.

What the Thomashows already knew has prepared them for a deep understanding of this new experience: the solutions to our issues--local and global, personal and ecological--have much to do with finding the best path to Unity.

A reader of this blog, Scott, brought a significant objection in comment to my last post, Paedomorphic Lessons. It’s worthy of further discussion, so I will respond more and encourage you to do the same. Here’s what he had to say, in full:

I struggle with the idea that "sustainability means durability".

I appreciate the idea you are trying to convey, but is it true? What is the reason to advocate design life for a building that is "hundreds" of years? I'm not saying that we shouldn't build high quality long lasting buildings, but why is this a "new house rule"?

You've likely run across McDonoughs cherry tree analogy ( the idea that nature often creates more than she needs, and often designs things that are NOT durable on purpose).

In Japan, where houses can be purchased more like autos, families often renovate by "starting over" ... and I've been on more than a few renovations where the owner would have been better served by NOT working with what they had!

Lets also ask if we believe that a sustainable car is a "durable" car, or if a sustainable telephone is a durable telephone?

It seems to me that industry and technology legitimately challenge the idea that a sustainable thing must also be a durable thing.

My short paragraph explanation of the points wasn’t enough in this case, and I therefore agree that it does leave the argument unconvincing. It might have been better stated more completely: “In modern homebuilding, sustainability means durability.”

I too have been on renovation projects in which the existing building wasn’t worth improving, but those situations represent the problem, not the solution. These buildings weren’t worth saving because they were so poorly designed and built. Razing them is expedient, but it’s also ecologically harmful. It’s filling up the landfills and not realizing the potential of the energy expended to build them in the first place. As for the trend in Japan to tear down and start new, I can’t account for that. It makes no sense, especially in a country that so reveres its tradition of craftsmanship and building quality. Some of the oldest wooden buildings on the earth are in Japan.

McDonough’s cherry tree analogy points to the natural abundance of nature. If we could imitate the way in which nature restores itself in an endless cycle of renewal, there would be no shortages and no waste and we’d live in a much better world. While I’m a fan of McDonough’s philosophy, I’m not a fan of his apparent inability to see that there remains a distance between the ideal offered in the lessons from the natural world and the current state of our processes, habits and cultural expectations. Talking about it doesn’t get us there, and all of the attempts (including McDonough’s) to achieve real “cradle to cradle” constructions have fallen short. It’s an excellent goal and the right path, but we can’t base any assumptions on having achieved, in our human-directed manifestations, the miracle we take for granted in a simple tree.

But to take the cherry tree analogy more literally, in construction, the closer you get to nature, the more durability gets decoupled from sustainability. A cloth tent need not be terribly durable to be sustainable, for instance. Cabins made of logs and boards would need to be more durable because of the resource use, but 40 or 50 years might be a sufficient goal for a simple building made of locally available, natural materials.

The durability calculation changes, however, as the construction becomes more robust, thereby using more materials and consuming larger amounts of energy in its creation. The more we expect from a construction, the more it takes to create it, and the longer it needs to last to justify its proportionate consumption of material and energy inputs.

If we built a bridge over a river and it was made with only a couple of logs and some planks, we would be well aware that it would serve some limited pedestrian and light-load purposes only. We’d also know it wouldn’t last very long and could be replaced quite easily. This is the bridge version of using a tent for a home, which many people do throughout the world. But if we built a bridge for four lanes of heavy vehicular traffic, it would likely consume very large quantities of concrete and steel, and it would require a complex construction process to put it all in place. To be sustainable, this bridge would need to last a very long time. This is a bridge version of the contemporary American home.

As we are now trying to make homes better in many respects, they also must last even longer. Hurricane and earthquake resistant homes have more structure and better foundations. High performance homes have thicker walls and roofs, with more insulation. The imperative for improving building performance comes with an imperative to equally improve building durability to amortize its increased embodied energy. As in my example of a bridge, the sustainability/durability ratio is related to our expectations. The average American home (not to mention the better ones we should be building) is expected to be a thermal cocoon, a theater, a restaurant, a lounge, an internet café and a spa. It’s a lot different than a tent and not even close to being like a naturally eco-friendly cherry tree.

These are reasons why the life expectancy of the modern house, and the components used in its construction, can and should be measured in centuries.

In a recent post, I wrote about the concept of paedomorphosis and its relevance to the timberframe revival. Here, I'm adding a postscript to that discussion by giving a brief account of some of the important discoveries and lessons derived from three decades of attempting to develop a new approach to design and building.

1. The discipline of off-site fabrication of exacting building elements is a solution in itself. Contemporary timberframers have become masters of prefabrication. One of the significant decisions made in the early days of rediscovering the craft was to move the cutting and shaping operations indoors, where efficiency and quality could be better controlled. The specific manner in which the work happens greatly defines our businesses and our competitive differences. We are learning that the same skills and procedures that allow us to assure highly precise fits in timbers, miles and miles from where the assembly will take place, are easily transferred to other building units, such as panelized floor, wall and roof sections. Step-by-step, we are getting the entire construction process out of the mud.

2. "Virtual before actual" is the modern equivalent of “Measure twice, cut once.” Advanced CAD software improves quality and efficiency. One of the challenging skills of timberframing is visualizing the individual pieces in the context of the entire framework. It can require some fairly high-level mental gymnastics to be able to properly lay out an individual timber by looking at 2D plans and elevations. Before 3D software was truly helpful in conventional building, it was a great boon to timberframers. Now that we are lead users of 3D architectural software, we have the tools in our hands to not only model the frame, but every other detail in the building, from finishes to mechanical systems. In other words, we build it before we build it, with great advantages to the owners and the construction team. These software tools are improving quality, reducing errors and increasing efficiency.

3. Applying advanced tooling to the building process can help to make buildings better and more affordable. Twenty-first century manufacturing technologies and processes make it possible for many industries to improve overall quality and lower costs. The secret to this apparent magic is technology, much of which is focused on eliminating repetitive and dumb work. Since timberframers usually ply their trade from off-site facilities with the opportunity for fixed tooling, they are also prone to invest in systems, jigs and tools that help to improve production and enhance quality. Everything, from large, automated tools to basic Lean Manufacturing strategies is being employed to keep the quality in and get the wasted efforts out. This wouldn’t be notable if the industry were not so behind in adopting the methods and innovations other industries have long taken for granted.

4. Buildings are better when there is evidence of well-executed and visible craft. Not all buildings can have a hand-crafted timberframe, nor should that be the goal, but we know that good work matters. Whether drywall or tile or stair building, there’s broad territory between craft and hack that, for better or worse, infuses the building with its standard. Architecture and the crafts and trades of building should not be separated. Out of mutual respect and sharing of intentions, ideas and capabilities, the best possibilities emerge. Usually, timberframers and designers are usually closely aligned out of necessity, and the experience has given us a deep understanding of both the problems that can arise from lack of integration, and the opportunities that are possible when designer and builder work in concert. We have learned that both designing and building involve teams––not individual efforts or egos––to the benefit of all. Good workmanship can help to heal bad design, but bad workmanship ruins anything.

5. Sustainability means durability. The design and construction goal should be projected in centuries, not decades. One of the inspiring aspects of timberframing is the certainty of a very long life. Two hundred years is not an uncommon age for existing timberframe buildings in this country and, overseas it is not at all hard to visit buildings 400 or 500-years-old. With better knowledge of materials and engineering, we ought to attempt to do at least as well. It’s not possible to know whether a building will do well over time, but just the intention of longevity tends to have a powerful effect on quality. The absence of any such intention does, too.


6. In sustainable buildings, shell and infill are respectively static and dynamic. These elements should be designed and built accordingly. Timberframers commonly know a lot about old buildings because surviving structures often contain unique information and inspiration. If you know the history of old buildings, it becomes evident that the pace of change to the building’s exterior shell is quite different from the occupant-initiated churn that happens to the interior. Two examples: an Internet café I visited in Italy turned out to be in a building constructed in the late 1300s; the home I grew up in was built in 1895 for a gold magnate’s sister, later became three apartments and later still housed 11 raucous children and their saint-like parents. Both buildings obviously have been reconfigured and remodeled and have absorbed various mechanical systems and technology, yet both belie these changes on the exterior. One of the biggest ideas we can bring to the conversation of improving buildings is to develop ways in which shell and infill can be designed and built to respect and facilitate both the stasis and the change we intend.

7. With a more symbiotic relationship between structure and insulation, all homes can be energy misers. Structure and insulation can be separated, with benefits to energy efficiency and potentially, building durability. One of the most urgent aspects in the early days of rethinking timberframing was insulation. If we simply copied the old buildings, our attempt for viability would have failed. It needed a new approach. The first step was to separate the structure from the insulation, which had inherent construction efficiency, as well as thermal benefits. The second step was to use rigid foam insulation and insulated panels (originally known as stressed-skin panels) to eliminate thermal bridges and structural redundancies. These developments have made timberframes among the most remarkably energy-efficient structures being built on a regular basis. While we do not expect that all buildings will be built in exactly this manner, what we know for certain is that a much better standard for all buildings is possible. There's a fundamentally simple solution: develop systems that complement and support one another, rather than cause conflicts and compromises.

8. A beginning of the definition of a better way to build is more challenging and uplifting work. The central part of the mission statement of our company is, “Through process and product, to improve people’s lives.” It has double meaning. By our work, we are striving to improve the lives of our clients. It is our fervent hope that they and future generations will deeply benefit from a building with deep attributes. But it is also about us. Through the work and the manner in which we do it together, we are trying hard to also ensure that our lives are made better also. These are two sides of the same coin. Whether the work is done in a shop setting or on site, we have an imperative to develop entire processes that engage the head, heart and hands of those who are doing the actual building. When all work is blind compliance, the soul of it is lost. There is no better building industry and no hope for consistently better homes unless we conceive of a system in which the process lifts the practitioners of its crafts and trades, so that the product can lift its occupants.