ShantyWorld.com - My Beautiful Shanty

Chicago has Largest Urban Solar Power Plant in the Nation

2010-01-06T07:07:00.010-06:00

Chicago Public TV Station WTTW.com reports on the Nation's Largest Urban Solar Plant in the United States.

Project Details for Chicago's Urban Solar Plant:

- 32,000 PV Solar Panels used
- 10 Megawatts of power, can power about 1200 homes.
- Located on Chicago's Pullman District (neighborhood) on the Southside on an old, abandoned industrial site
- 200 Construction Jobs, 7-8 Permanent Jobs
- Sun Power Designed Plant (San Jose, CA)
- This Solar plant will be Operational later in 2010
- Land is leased by energy company Excelon from the City of Chicago (adding tax revenue to the City)

Link to Large Format video via WTTW.com video site (Jan 6, 2010.)

Umm, what do they do about cleaning off the snow (and dirt) ??
Is the motorized tilt enough to shed the snow fall (off of the panels) ?

(From the Chicago WTTW TV Program, Chicago Tonight, aired Jan. 5th, 2010, posted online Jan. 6th, 2010.)

The Case For Affordable Housing & A National Energy Standard

2009-12-02T13:03:00.007-06:00

Certain items are needed for all people to live a decent (modern) life: decent housing, decent (safe) food, clear (safe) water & air; fair wage/job; access to health care. All other things are possible (for a people) from there.

Making a (high end designer) commodity of any of the aforementioned, makes those items inaccessible by lower income people and the poor, and now we see, inaccessible to even the middle class in America.

Behind affordable health care, Affordable Housing is the largest problem facing our nation. When jobs are harder to get, it makes it that much harder to maintain one's health, and to maintain a decent place to live. Basic, decent housing, healthcare and food are a human right.

As a practicing licensed architect, I have seen how the mortgage/banking, real estate and construction industries have artificially jacked up the cost of housing for no reason other than personal profit borne of greed.

Architects have wanted to build green for decades (and some of us have built green, in spite of obstacles, and before it was called "green". 30 years ago, we just called it "Best Practices in Design". Building efficiently with the intent not to adversely impact our clients' budget (on the lifecycle maintenance costs ) was the responsible, adult thing to do. Oh, and by the way, it was good for the environment, good for the economy and the local community.) It's the construction & development industries that lobbied for weaker energy & building standards much in the way the Big 3 Detroit Car manfs lobbied against fuel efficiency standards -- not architects.

(See NY Times: <http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/the-race-for-better-building-codes/> )

Right now, taxes, realtors' compensation, contractor's pay, property assessors pay, etc, mortgage company profits are ALL based on the so-called assessed value of a property. EVERYONE in the aforementioned interest groups HAS A BUILT IN INCENTIVE to artificially push the cost/selling price higher for a home.

Cities get more in tax revenue if homes are valued higher. (So legislators want high-end homes built in their districts.) Realtors, bankers, contractors make more if the house is valued higher (because they make more money the higher the home selling price.) Home owners have an asset they can leverage for more credit if their house is valued for more (providing they have equity in the house, etc.) Home Owners are induced into pretending to be more affluent than they are, so many get trapped into an unmanageable debt load. (Is your mortgage upside down?)

There is a dis-incentive in our current regulations/laws toward making housing affordable, and that has contributed largely to our current housing crisis.

Merely making credit (or loans) available to people who can't afford $400-900K homes doesn't solve the housing problem, when people only make $7-20/hour at WalMart (and then also have to pay for their own health care.)
The supply of affordable, sub $175K homes is shrinking FAST and still out of reach for many WORKING Americans. Rents that are over $1000 per month are unaffordable for major portions of working Americans -- let alone the unemployed and underemployed. (Barbara Ehrenreich anyone? <http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/nickelanddimed.htm> )

As an architect, I can say w/ 1000% certainty, I have had people come to me with stories of greedy Developer/Builders who build a 2400 SF vinyl clad energy-inefficient home for about $160K, then turn around and collude with Realtors and bankers to sell the very home for $600-800K.

There is nothing wrong w/ a $800K energy efficient house sold to someone who can afford it. I know what a house costs to build, and it's not $500K for a vinyl clad, vinyl window house with forced air heating, laminate floors and cheap ceramic tile and budget American made, entry-level appliances. Granite counters & stainless steel appliances do not add $200-400K to the cost of a house. The public has been bamboozled by ill-intending developers, builders/ contractors, mortgage brokers and realtors.

THE PROBLEM WITH SELLING A $160K HOUSE for $500-800K is THAT IT STILL PERFORMS LIKE A $160K HOUSE -- and THAT IS WHY IT LOST ITS VALUE BETWEEN 2008 - 2009. People should make a profit on their work, but a 300% premium on housing IS NOT SUSTAINABLE. We have our current national economic condition as proof.

The homes that are really sold at what they are truly worth, HAVE NOT lost their value by 25-30% (not even in this market.)

We also need a more National (uniform) Building Code and set of standards, so that pre-fab housing and valuation across the US becomes more uniform (in quality and price), level and fair (i.e. affordable. Although some allowances in the codes must be made for climatic and geological differences, i.e. earthquake safety, climate differences, etc.) This means, houses need to be built better, more energy efficient and costs can be controlled better because regional variables are reduced.
If structures were built to a more National Standard, then a $200K house in St. Louis would be worth about the same as a $200K house in Oregon-- and would not have a wild $200-400K cost difference for the same size, materials and features as is currently the case i real estate pricing in the U.S.A.

I recently attended a conference of one of the regional carpenters' unions in my area, and one of the presenters ADMITTED that Contractors try to discourage stick building (i.e. wood frame) over pre-fab because Contractors make more money on stick-built structures. Consumers, what more proof (of price fixing) do you need?

Standardizing building and zoning laws would go a LONG WAY to standardizing and leveling out fabrication/construction costs. If health care was affordable for all Americans, the operating COSTs to businesses would also decrease costs to manufacture and build good products-- including affordable houses.

We have to make changes to how we value, build and design structures across the entire country. Putting the product decision process (and minimum legal standards) in the hands of the industries that artificially jacked up the prices in the first place, will never make us a sustainable nation.

"No problem can be solved from the same Consciousness that Created It" -- Albert Einstein

Institutions and laws have to change. We have to de-incintivize the greed factor that lead us to building inefficient, low quality structures, sold to people who couldn't afford an over-priced home. It's the right thing to do, the American thing to do.

Pass this info on.

Also see:

- You Paid Too Much For Your House: Building Costs vs Retail Price Paid

http://shantyworld.blogspot.com/2009/09/you-paid-too-much-for-your-house.html

- Builders, Contractors Fight Against Adoption of U.S. Energy Codes (Sounds familiar? Contractors are fighting energy efficiency the way Detroit fought against more fuel efficient cars. What did that get us?)

<http://ow.ly/uOmL> and <http://ow.ly/uNX0>

- How Conspicuous Consumption is Killing the US Economy (and screwing most property Owners in Return)

<http://shantyworld.blogspot.com/2008/10/mayor-daley-calls-appraisal-system.html>

- Housing Valuation as a Social Construct (or how the wealthy build fake wealth on paper and screw working class people and people of color in the process)

<http://shantyworld.blogspot.com/2008/05/housing-valuation-as-social-construct.html>

- The Lack of Diversity in Architecture

<http://shantyworld.blogspot.com/2006/09/lack-of-diversity-in-architecture_24.html>

You Paid Too Much for Your House: Building Costs vs Purchase Price

2009-09-23T12:37:00.001-05:00

You (probably) Paid Too Much for Your House: Building Costs vs Retail Purchase Price

“Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.” - H. Minsky, Economist

From the web site http://doctorhousingbubble.com comes this graph tracking the following items for the last 100 years:

- Home Sale Prices: what people paid for their house (i.e. the retail price).

- Building Prices: cost of materials and labor to build a home or structure

- Population Growth in the USA (supply vs demand not always the factor you think it is)

- Interest Rates for home Mortgages

For me, this data is very telling. I've been preaching for the last 15 years, that U.S. housing prices are over valued. (See my earlier post on why I KNOW home prices are over often valued. http://shantyworld.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html )

Let's look at few key things this graph tells us about the last 100 years:

1. Housing prices, more or less, had some correlation to building costs until about 1943-ish. After the Great Depression and after the War, the US economy stabilizes, employment & the population increases, there's a minor spike in housing prices. Notice, however, there is no proportional correlation between building costs and actual home sale prices from 1945ish through 1980. With the exception of a few short-term blips, Housing Prices are somewhat flat between 1943 until 1977 (as a function of building costs) AND increasing population (i.e. demand). Starting in 1982, Building Costs appear to actually trend DOWN until 2002, yet the selling price of Homes rises dramatically through 2008. There is an irrational spike up in prices in 1998, while the cost of Building remains flat. (So granite counters and stainless steel appliances et al, are NOT justification for an additional 25-50% in price.)

2. Dropping Interest rates seem to serve as a catalyst for justifying housing price hikes. Perhaps, this controlled "supply vs demand" is working to almost fix prices to favor the seller (and all who benefit from housing sales) -- and not the buyer. Interest rate fluctuations mostly seem to affect the cost of building materials (probably to suppliers) -- but seems to have a deleterious affect on the sales price. One can not even argue that demand increased as population increased because for most of the last 100 years, and until about 1955, prices remain proportional to population growth as a function of demand. Between 1958 and 1978 prices remain flat, even while the population (and arguably demand) increases and interest rates rise (for the same period.) But again, even increases in Buildings Costs have no proportional correlation to Housing sales prices (after 1945.). In fact, starting about 1979-80, Building costs start to trend down, while the cost to buy a house spikes up dramatically until the 2008 financial meltdown. Interest rates are at their highest levels between 1980 - 1990, while Building Costs are dropping, and the selling price of a house is rising (over the same period.)

The Housing purchase price doubles between 1982 & 2008, while the cost to build has steadily trended down for most of the same period.

What's missing from this chart is real wage earning power for the middle class. We know that during the last 30 years, wealth for the top 2% of Americans grew at astonishing rates, while real net worth and income for the middle class actually dropped. (See Document: ).

From The New Economist, "..the richest 1% hold one third of the total wealth in the economy.. Inequity rose sharply after 1979." [end of quote] (i.e. the Reagan / GOP wealth transfer era.)

http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2005/11/wealth_inequali.html

Again, ShantyWorld.com covers some of these topics in earlier posts, but I'll repeat a few key points because too few seem to grasp the inherent conflict of interest driving this false valuation of housing over the last 30 years:

a. Developers, Contractors/Builders have a built in incentive to sell housing (or any construction) for more than it's worth. When property owners (buyers) don't have impartial 3rd party advocates (i.e. an architect, lawyer, engineers) working for them, they are more likely to over pay, and get inferior systems, inferior buildings. How do you know that the Builder you hired is installing X, Y, Z properly? Clearly the chart shows buildings costs have little correlation to the actual selling price after 1978. Building costs actually went down after 1978, yet the sales price for homes climbed dramatically. Also note, the 1980s Reagan era also ushered in the modern era of de-regulation and the dilution of consumer protection against predatory financial products. Business should earn a profit for good work. But when does that profit become excessive? at 25% over costs? 50%, 100%, 200%? 300%? as we've seen the last 15 years?

b. Realtors are generally paid as a percentage of the final sale price for a property. There is a built-in incentive for Realtors to want the price for any property to go higher, as their profit/earnings is tied directly to the sale price. The Realtors' goal is to CLOSE at the highest possible price. So, why would Realtors want to see housing prices and appraisals drop in 2009 (as compared to prices 3-5 years ago?)

c. Banks & Mortgage companies have a built-in incentive to see higher housing prices. The larger the loan amount, the more Banks can make (as long as the borrower is deemed not to be a high risk. The ability of home owners to pay more didn't really increase over the last 50 years (because real wages for the middle class have been flat), Banks just decided to take more risks. See comments (below) regarding Economist Hyman Minsky's foretelling of how risk-taking would result in a collapsed economy.

d. Cities / Municipalities and Politicians have an incentive to see property valuations increase. After all, property tax revenue is a function of retail housing prices. Increases in property values is a false measurement through which politicians measure their own effectiveness at governing and public policy. Politicians, developers and contractors exploited the American sickness of trying to keep up with the Joneses and conspicuous consumption. (Appraisals are a function of so-called "comparable" sales prices.) The industries & sectors complaining about the current appraisal levels are contractors, developers and those who overpaid for their house (and the banks who pushed these phony inflated valuations on people unable to assume high debt risk levels.)

It's my opinion that the cost to build a new house is (roughly) represented by 35-40% spent on Materials (& systems), versus 65-60% spent on labor. It's about the same (labor) cost (as averaged over the entire development costs) to install an energy efficient window versus an inefficient or lesser efficient window. It's generally NOT 20%, 30% or 40% more to use a better system. So using a better product generally doesn't add 30-100% to the budget over the cost of the entire project. Over time, the decision to use quality systems (not high-end systems) generally adds value and often pays for itself versus opting for the lower quality.

e. "Location, Location, Location" is a social construct: 30% truth, 70% faux social meme (used to create wealth via societal & cultural bias.) "Location" is a wealth apportioning method exploited by Developers, Realtors (salesmen), corporate banking, politicians, the affluent etc., to justify artificial valuation for the purpose of private profiteering at the expense of others. The topic is too expansive to cover in this post but deserves a mention.

SO, IT IS NO SURPRISE THAT THE COST OF BUILDING many U.S. HOMES HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH THE RETAIL SELLING PRICE -- at least over the last 60 years. (See chart.) The people who can least afford to lose money on a construction project (or buying a home, property) are the ones who are likely to benefit the most by hiring a team of advocates (i.e. architect, engineers, attorney, accountant etc.) to help them through the project process.

According to Bryan Bell, only about 2% of new home buyers work with an architect.

http://www.residentialarchitect.com/industry-news-print.asp?sectionID=0&articleID=517204

Yet, we know that houses designed by architects, are more likely to increase in value (over more sustained periods), cost less to operate, be more attractive, even cost less to build (for the same products & systems), are less likely to rapidly decrease in value, and will be more comfortable than homes purchased from a developer or home builder-led properties.

Many would now agree the greed of corporate banking and the major players (above) driving retail property pricing and financing largely created a structural weakness that led to the 2008 financial collapse. Of course, individual property owners have a role in the global financial collapse too: borrowing more than they can afford; running up high debt-to-savings ratios; leveraging too many of their assets; spending (borrowing) for the purpose of appearing more affluent (to others) than they actually were, etc. Perhaps the most grievous act of all: those who remained quiet (in the public & private sectors) as this house of cards was built around all of us. Many people did see the 2008 economic collapse coming -- not just economists and bankers.

No society can tolerate irrational double-digit price % increases (over a short period) in housing, health care, food, water, and other BASIC HUMAN NEEDS, out pacing real earnings for average workers, and think said price increases are sustainable over time (where the profits go primarily to a small minority.)

Economist Hyman Minsky warned of these boom/bust economic cycles and unearned profit ratios.

“Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.” - H. Minsky (d. 1996)

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/13/why_capitalism_fails/?page=full

Minsky's writings put forward the idea that patterns in economies repeat themselves, and that all Democracies MUST have some level of regulation, if they are to last-- or be doomed to catastrophic failure (and ultimately, extinction.) Apparently, Nobel Prize winning Paul Krugman often speaks of Minsky's work and insights.

The Boston Globe article also discusses some of Minsky's ideas (many penned more than 20-35 years ago) about how to correct a faltering capitalist economy. From the Boston Globe article:

quote:

...In his writings, Minsky looked to his intellectual hero, Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century. But where most economists drew a single, simplistic lesson from Keynes - that government could step in and micromanage the economy, smooth out the business cycle, and keep things on an even keel - Minsky had no interest in what he and a handful of other dissident economists came to call “bastard Keynesianism.”
Instead, Minsky drew his own, far darker, lessons from Keynes’s landmark writings, which dealt not only with the problem of unemployment, but with money and banking. Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.
This insight bore the stamp of his advisor Joseph Schumpeter, the noted Austrian economist now famous for documenting capitalism’s ceaseless process of “creative destruction.” But Minsky spent more time thinking about destruction than creation. In doing so, he formulated an intriguing theory: not only was capitalism prone to collapse, he argued, it was precisely its periods of economic stability that would set the stage for monumental crises.
Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”
As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers - what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.
Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment - what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” - would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.
From the 1960s onward, Minsky elaborated on this hypothesis. At the time he believed that this shift was already underway: postwar stability, financial innovation, and the receding memory of the Great Depression were gradually setting the stage for a crisis of epic proportions. Most of what he had to say fell on deaf ears. The 1960s were an era of solid growth, and although the economic stagnation of the 1970s was a blow to mainstream neo-Keynesian economics, it did not send policymakers scurrying to Minsky. Instead, a new free market fundamentalism took root: government was the problem, not the solution.
Moreover, the new dogma coincided with a remarkable era of stability. The period from the late 1980s onward has been dubbed the “Great Moderation,” a time of shallow recessions and great resilience among most major industrial economies. Things had never been more stable. The likelihood that “it” could happen again now seemed laughable.
Yet throughout this period, the financial system - not the economy, but finance as an industry - was growing by leaps and bounds. Minsky spent the last years of his life, in the early 1990s, warning of the dangers of securitization and other forms of financial innovation, but few economists listened. Nor did they pay attention to consumers’ and companies’ growing dependence on debt, and the growing use of leverage within the financial system.
By the end of the 20th century, the financial system that Minsky had warned about had materialized, complete with speculative borrowers, Ponzi borrowers, and precious few of the conservative borrowers who were the bedrock of a truly stable economy. Over decades, we really had forgotten the meaning of risk. When storied financial firms started to fall, sending shockwaves through the “real” economy, his predictions started to look a lot like a road map. [END OF QUOTE.. the article is much longer.]

Again, the people who can LEAST afford to waste money building, renovating a home (or any structure, space) are the ones who would BENEFIT THE MOST by hiring a team of advocates (i.e. architect, engineers, attorney, accountant etc.) to help them through the process.

How to Triple the Cost of Building A House

2009-09-12T13:34:00.001-05:00

3 Residents, 4 bathrooms: "We've Only Asked for the Barest Necessities."

Many people come to architects seeking assistance in renovating a house -- either one they've found or one they're already living in.

On more occasions than I can recall, I've had nearly the exact same conversation with a client as the one here in these scenes from the Cary Grant movie, "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" (1948), co-starring Myrna Loy (as Grant's wife.) The movie is as timeless and as accurate now as ever.

One of my all-time favorite scenes from the movie:

Notice, the architect's first recommended design was in line with the client's budget. Failing to take the recommendations of your architect (or attorney) is a path to financial cost overruns. Is it any wonder our nation is now in the middle of this financial housing disaster? You can lead a horse to water..

The people who can LEAST afford to waste money building a house are the ones who would benefit the MOST from working with an experienced Architect. It's a lie that working with an architect will cost you more money than if one depends (solely) on a builder. The Architect's Fees are often not more than 4-8% of the entire development cost for new home construction. More often than not, experienced architects provide a path to a better designed, more efficient, safer structure than what average developers & builders offer the public. Better designs mean higher resale value. Architect designed homes hold & appreciate in value more than Builder /Developer led properties.

Because an architect's clients have an advocate working for them, they are less likely to pay $600 for a $150 window. If there are 30+ windows in an average size house, that could represent $4k-$15K in savings on one line item alone. Considering that is but one way my clients save money building a house, it is easy to see how hiring an architect not only pays for itself, but can save you tens of thousands of dollars when building a new house.

And if you think it's better to go it alone without an architect's help when building, ask yourself how CNN Hero Liz McCartney's St Bernard Project is able to rebuild homes in New Orleans damaged by Katrina for $15K (w/ donated labor), but a contractor charges you $100-300K to do the same project on the open market.

With all the talk about green and eco-friendly retrofitting, haven't you ever wondered why the structures weren't better built in the first place? Developers and some builders build for obsolescence. Like the Detroit auto-building industry the last 35 years, the goal was manufacturing obsolesence so it would create a large repair/ maintenance sub-industry. American auto dealers make more on maintaining oil-based cars than electric cars. The same is true of the home building industry over the last 35 years. Build it cheaply, so home owners have to call the Builder or contractor back for repairs, replacements. Instead of buying a quality $300 faucet that lasts 20-35+ years, people buy the cheap $60 faucet, get charged $200-250 by a plumber to install it every 5-7 years. Which method is really cheaper?

Building "green" or sustainably is not expensive-- it's a choice and priority. We already know some the benefits that building green provides: saves operational & maintenance costs, reduces your utility bills (in some cases to zero), reduces heat-island effect (lowers temperature) in urban areas, reduces toxic run-off into our waterways, sewers, cuts down on green house emissions, carbon etc.

The homes we designed, generally don't need to be retrofitted for better insualtion in order to save money, or to be more eco-friendly. They were designed properly the first time. Therein lies the difference between buying a builder's cookie-cutter house versus a home designed by an Architect.

What are you doing to prepare for building or remodeling your next project? If you don't know where to start, consider contacting a licensed Architect for help on how to get started. Architects do much more than just provide permit plans. We design safer structures, save you money, can help you build green, can help you stay on budget --to name just a few things. Feel free to contact us if you need help with your project. We are here to help you realize the home you deserve.

Posted via web from ShantyWorld

Ted Kennedy Makes Case for National Health Care

2009-08-27T09:32:00.005-05:00

From DemocracyNow.org:

Senator Edward Kennedy makes his case for National Health Care in address he made April 2009.

His remarks start at about 21:43 minutes into the clip.

I heart DemocracyNow !

Also see ShantyWorld.com 's Semi-Big List of Info on Health Care Reform.

Posted via web from ShantyWorld2

HealthCare Reform Info & Graphics

2009-08-21T12:19:00.014-05:00

ShantyWorld.com Resources in Support of National Health Care Reform.

ShantyWorld has joined some Flickr groups posting Signs and Graphics related to supporting Health Care Reform for Americans.

Health Care Reform Graphics [slideshow]

The Graphics are "postcardware", so we would prefer if you download images, you send us a note and/or photo of you using your sign. (45 Mil Image from FreeStylee on Flickr.)

Image files can be printed out up to 11x17 inches with very good clarity. (Anything larger than that might get more blurred results.)

You can take or email the image to a local copy print shop. Places like Office Max, Kinkos, Office Depot etc., print 11x17 color prints for about $1.49. Laminating adds another $2 in most copy shops. So, for about $3.49 you can get a YARD SIGN in support of Health Care for America. If you have any architect, engineer or graphics friends, their plotters can probably spit out some copies. Images are 300dpi, so 17x22 might print out OK at your local BluePrint/ Large Format copy shop.

Get informed about the facts, before you listen to any of the talking heads on TV or radio.

For more info on the National Health Care Debate, check out these sites:

Sick for Profit - 6 of the CEOS of the largest Health Care Insurance Companies earned more than $1.5 BILLION dollars in personal compensation in the last 5 years. That's money used to deny claims for life saving treatment. Money used to make record profits the last 5 years. 33 cents of every dollar you spend on premiums, goes toward Insurance company profits, so Insurance execs can ride private jets with gold trim china. You don't really know if you have insurance until you are forced to try to use it for a major illness or accident.

HOW FIVE CAPITALIST DEMOCRATIC NATIONS PAY For NATIONAL HEALTH CARE and WHY IT WORKS. "Sick Around the World", From PBS' Frontline series. [video] In-depth view of how other Democratic Nations have solved providing National Health Care for its Citizens. It makes the other nations (and their businesses) more competitive internationally. Health Care Reform is a National Security Issue as well. The Health of our nation's Economy depends on it. We can not be competitive with other nations if we have a sick population nor can we be competitive if our businesses are handcuffed by rising health care costs. (Click on the link above to watch the FULL PBS PROGRAM.)

Proposed Health Reform Consumer Protection Provisions - A MUST READ for anyone who has ever been hassled by an Insurance Company about a claim.

Health Care for America Now - Advocacy Group

The WhiteHouse's Position on Health Care Reform - http://www.healthreform.gov/

Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) - http://www.pnhp.org/

Read the Actual Text of the U.S. National Health Care Act (H.R. 676). Don't take the word of some talking head. Read the Bill for Yourself. (Note these are preliminary, as the Senate and House bills will be refined before any final legislation will be voted on by the entire Congress.)

Former CIGNA Insurance Executive Wendell Potter discusses with PBS Journalist Bill Moyers how the Insurance Companies deny your claims so they can turn a profit- a profit used to pay high executive salaries, pay for private jets and gold china. Insurance gets rich while your friends and family get sicker and die due to denied claims. [video]

Watch the Moyer Video with Wendell Potter - potter2.m4v

10 Reasons to Support Single Payer - from National Nurses Organizing Committee (PDF immediate download link) - http://ow.ly/kzbX

SICKO Facts on How Americans are being abused by Insurance Companies - from Documentary Filmmaker Michael Moore. His BIG LIST OF FACTS and resources on National Health Care and how the USA compares (poorly) to other Democratic Nations.

Minn Nurses Association Supports National Health Plan -

AFL-CIO , SEIU and other Labor organizations Support National Health Care Plan so that American Business can compete internationally with companies who don't have the financial burden of paying for Health Care costs for their workers.

Health Care Now - http://www.healthcare-now.org/

Contact Congress (House & Senate) - It only takes about 3 minutes. Really. Tell them how you feel about How you are Treated by the Health Insurance Companies. Can you afford health care? Can your friends / family ? One person files bankruptcy per minute in America due to Health Costs.

National Health Care - What is It? How is it Different? What Happens? FAQ - Physicians for National Health Program

Health Reform FLYERS & Signs - from http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/healthreformfliers

NATIONAL HEALTH CARE IS A MORAL ISSUE. America has a PAY or DIE Class system of Health Care. You shouldn't have to be wealthy in order to be able to receive quality health care. Americans should not die from preventable illnesses because they couldn't afford the co-pay, their deductible or were afraid if they tried to file a claim, for fear they would be cancelled by their insurance company. Emergency Room care is a strategy to kill poor people. PAY or DIE Health Care is an immoral policy.

©ShantyWorld.com 2009

Posted via web from ShantyWorld

Deather Hate Mobs Mirror White Mobs of Segregated 1950s

2009-08-12T22:43:00.004-05:00

The Hate Speech and batant racism is growing with each passing week since President Obama has taken office. I remember telling people before the 2008 election, that should Obama get into office, the fringe but vocal part of racist America would become agitated, and would resort to threats, violence, harassment, and old-fashioned American hate not unlike the mobs we saw during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s in America.

What's old is new again.

Of course, hate and racism wasn't new to the 1950's. America was founded on a system of slavery-- a system many white families and corporations still benefit from today. As I work for advocacy of reforming an unjust and immoral Die or Pay [anti] American Health System in America, the threats on my various social media accounts grows. For those of us who knew Obama's election was in no way a signal of the end of racism, it just confirmed to those are grounded in reality that in spite of the advances America has made in electing Obama, the nation still has a very long way to go in the culture divide. One only has to look at the hate mail received by all progressive bloggers (myself included) to see how widespread racism is in America. We have the recent events of the Holocaust Museum murders, the murder of Dr. Tiller (who performed legal medical procedures), the false & racist arrest of Harvard Professor H.L. "Skip" Gates, the racist attacks by GOP Senators on Justice Sonia Sotomayor (during her hearing) and any number of thousands of attacks per day on progressive bloggers as proof. While a well-known Black Harvard Professor is arrested for daring to rightfully, legally demand (in his own home) I.D. from an officer, a (formerly) unknown white working class man wears a loaded gun to a Presidential event in New Hampshire (8/11/09) but isn't even arrested. (Of course now, the Secret Service & FBI will be sure to tail that guy until he dies.) Arrest disparities between whites and people of color aren't new either. Racial profiling that adversely, unjustly & disproportionately affects people of color, is an unacknowledged (unearned) benefit that white Americans routinely ignore, shrug-off.

This kind of culture war has not gone unnoticed among conscientious, supporters of democracy. The hate mobs of New Hampshire and Missouri, Pennsylvania etc., are reminiscent of the Bull Connor style hate mobs of the 1950s and 60s. See the full Spike Lee Documentary "4 Little Girls" -- a true story of 4 Black girls killed by racist whites in Birmingham, Alabama. The hate mobs remind me of the Birther, Deather mobs today. See the hate in their faces.

From Amanda Marcotte of rhRealityCheck.org

Last week, when I wrote about the birther phenomenon and its parallels to the anti-choice movement, the phenomenon was still largely relegated to email lists and mainstream media interviews with wide-eyed conspiracy theorists. It was alarming because it's so widespread and so obviously rooted in a need to express racist contempt towards Barack Obama and his parents' interracial relationship, but it didn't seem like it would grow much bigger. Well, obviously I didn't draw a strong enough parallel between the birthers and the anti-choice movement. If I'd been paying attention to my own ideas, I would have realized that as anti-choicers' frustration with their daily lack of control over women's bodies erupts into violence, so too would birther frustration over the perceived loss of control over the reins of power enjoyed by white people for the entirety of our nation's history.

There's not a formal link between the birther conspiracy theory and the mobs that are trying to shut down discussion about health care reform--and not-so-subtly sending the signal that they are flirting with resorting to violence in order to stop it--but it's not a coincidence that the birther energy rolled up into this mob scene, or that the leaders pushing the birther line are also encouraging mobs of right wingers to shut down town halls by being disruptive. Unsurprisingly, these mobs have turned violent, something anyone who's dealt with the anti-choice protestors could have told you was inevitable. Right wing mobs have broken out in violence in Tampa, FL and St. Louis, MO. Journalists, union activists, and Democrats, who are the perennial favorite villains of right wing talk radio, seem to be favorite targets for violence and threats.

Looking back over the timeline of the growing volume in birther conspiracy theories that rolled up into mobs threatening and delivering violence, it's easy enough to see what instigating issue activated the right wing, furious about its loss of power. Oh, they've been angry and right wing violence has been on the rise, with domestic terrorism incidents that include the murder of Dr. George Tiller. But there's organization and momentum where there wasn't much before, and as Sara Robinson points out, the leadership has been more overtly enabling and cheerleading conspiracy theorists and right wing disruption mobs than they have before - all in the service of hamstringing health care reform.

4 Little Girls (1997, 102 minutes, Full movie), by Director Spike Lee -

Notice the footage of the hate mobs at 21-50 mins into the film. "Keep Your Eye on the Prize. Hold On, Hold On".

However, the hate mobs -- and they are irrational mobs, are now feeling emboldened by hate speech from an enabling institutional hate culture. It's a culture defined by people who enjoy a first amendment right to lie about facts in front of TV cameras. US GOP Senators (Sessions, Kyl, Hatch, Coburn, Cornyn), lunatic TV Entertainers like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity (masquerading as journalists on the right-wing propaganda mill Fox network) and quitter Sara Palin routinely encourage and stir-up an under-educated demographic pre-disposed to vote against their own economic interests in favor of a corporate led class system that exploits poor & middle class whites too.

The same hate culture is fearful that in a truly diverse democracy (signaled by Obama's election and a growing Latino population), perhaps people of color (in power positions) will treat white people in America they way many whites have (directly or indirectly) treated people of color the last 400 plus years. That is their fear. Perhpas their fear is warranted, unless there is some kind of national reconciliation.

The Reagan, Bush (41 & 43), and even the Clinton administrations already took away the hate mobs (& the middle class') livable wage, busted unions that allowed the present day Deathers to live a middle-class lifestyle, and permitted said past GOP admins to open the doors to Free-Trade that lost millions of American middle-class jobs to overseas --- perhaps lost forever. Profits in the 1980s & 90s were privatized and now the corporate losses (born of corporate excess and greed) have been socialized (to the American taxpayers.). These same Deathers like to ignore it was Bush's Treasuray Secretary who socialized the wall Street losses, so his investment banker friends wouldn't lose their wealth. The financial debacle the USA now finds itself in was not Obama's doing -- no matter how much you yell and scream racist epithets. Much of the financial groundwork for destruction was laid before Obama even entered into politics. The hate mobs' anger is misplaced, but they're too stupid to know it, or too racist to acknowledge it. Maybe both.

If the haters get laid-off from their jobs, their factories because American companies can't compete with the lower overhead enjoyed by foreign companies, they seem unable --not just unwilling, to recognize how they too are being disposed of by the wealth & corporate classes.

The cost of health insurance, medical costs in other industrialized Democracies are spread more fairly between private citizens and public investment. These other Democratic nations band together (as a nation) sharing the costs among nearly all citizens, which results in lower costs to everyone. All these Birther fools are too stupid to realize their precious health insurance currently won't pay when they file a claim for a serious ailment. You won't know how bad your insurance is until you need it for a life and death treatment. These same Deather fools opposed to national health insurance ALREADY pay for all the expensive emergency care for the un-insured via their premiums which have more than tripled the last 10 years. (Example for the mentally impaired: you fools also pay the higher cost of retail goods because there are people who shop-lift. The cost is already passed onto you, and to everyone via the retail price.)

The USA can lower everyone's cost for Health Insurance, by spreading the cost also to those who aren't paying health insurance presently. Nearly everyone needs to pay in for the system to work. (Umm, that is the basic principle of ALL types of insurance: spread the risk among as many as possible, so as to minimize the individual, private cost to everyone.) That fact isn't left or right, it's a basic truth. No amount of yelling, or racist name calling, or shotgun buying will change those facts. BTW, your violence won't stand either, because history also shows us you are (already) out numbered.

You can either band together with your fellow Americans to keep the country strong. Or you can continue your hateful ways, dividing & weakening the country-- placing it at risk to be dominated by a larger, expanding, richer China. Change is coming. Being racist won't help you -- not now, not later.

Posted via web from ShantyWorld

Angry white Man Rips Rosa Parks Poster from Woman at Town Hall

2009-08-12T16:06:00.001-05:00

From the YouTube Site: BluePearOnline -

Mainstream media kept running image of a Black Woman being hauled out of Sen. Claire McCaskills' Town Hoall meeting 8/11/09.

But what the media NEVER reported is that the Black woman was sitting quietly in her seat, when a white man walked over and snatched her poster, ripped it to shreds and that is what provoked the commotion. The white man was charged with assault but the woman was portrayed in the Media as the hooligan.

HATE. Is this the legacy you want to promote (by not getting involved in civic issues?)

The largely white audience assumes the Black woman is a protester who started the commotion.

The video tells a very different story.

source: HuffingtonPost.com and [YouTube user:] BluePearOnline

Posted via web from ShantyWorld

CNN talks 2 Sen McCaskill abt GOP #Healthcare lies

2009-08-10T10:16:00.001-05:00

Listen!

via AudioBoo

Posted via web from ShantyWorld

Houses for Katrina Victims

2009-07-15T13:55:00.003-05:00

From the Mother Nature Network (mnn.com) Blog:

Houses for Katrina victims by Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation - http://tinyurl.com/mco7jl

These designs seem ill-conceived(?)

I know Brad didn't design them, but he doesn't seem able to marshall focus on issues affecting real working class people-- not just housing in the abstract (like it's some student project.) So Brad, keep your day job. --SM

From mnn.com,

[quote] Actor Brad Pitt has partnered with real-estate developer and philanthropist Steve Bing to create low-price, sustainable homes as part of the “Make it Right” project. A set of duplex designs were proposed by 13 of the world’s top architects to visualize and design green, sustainable houses for hurricane Katrina victims.The designs had to be flexible, with “interchangeable floor plans that allow the families to change the size and configuration of the two homes as their family size, needs or economic situation changes.”

The big name architects include Bild design, Billes Architecture, Buidlingstudio , BNIM and so on.The selected designs are under construction. More images follow…

[end of quote]

These sure aren't affordable.. They're kinda large, no? The homes seem larger than the homes they were to replace (?) Some look like townhomes, but I can't be sure. (Let's hope some designs are multi-unit dwellings, otherwise they don't appear to have employed much in the way of sustainable principles.)

I like how the deep, dark, cavernous under-bellies of these structures (presumably car ports etc.), are ripe for urban criminal activity and breaks-ins --free from the view of neighbors and passers-by. This kind of well-intended privacy & shelter approach in *urban areas* generally serves to facilitate & shield crime. FAIL. Such design considerations should have been topics covered (by most architecture students) in Residential Defensive Design for Urban Areas 101.

It appears the structures are raised to minimize destruction from (future) flooding. From the School of Unintended Consequences, we should have learned that if certain features facilitate crime, then maybe siting, site selection & civil engineering issues need to be given greater priority as part of an overall design & planning strategy.

Some of the "Build It Better" architects seem to be designing for a suburban context-- not an urban one. FAIL.

Also, part of New Orleans (and urban) working/middle class culture embraces the Front Porch and the importance of the House's connection with one's neighbors as they pass by. Some of the designs struggle to integrate that connection to neighborhood and the street. (Again, the street connection also serves a preemptive purpose in deterring petty crime.) At least one design (with a porch/deck) fails outright, in my opinion. (Just because the deck feature exists, doesn't mean it serves or facilitates the intended purpose.)

I am a big fan of modern, edgy design. However, most of these homes seem to disregard the New Orleans context. Some of the designs are just hideous for urban dwelling (which doesn't mean they won't work in the suburbs.)

How does the idiosyncratic nature of these designs facilitate affordable standard maintenance & repair for families of modest means (if they come to live in one of these units via a Grant? Among the multi-family units, are these rentals? or Co-ops? Assesments for the co-ops need to be established so maintenance in common areas can be provided AND protected.)

One last nit-picky item:

The colors used on the models: Normally, one might put the ideal/preferred color (& material) on the prototype. Some of the color choices are just bizarre (& speak more to the color selection as design exercise, and not the final intended or recommended color. In an academic setting this kind of artistic license is fine. However, the public generally doesn't "get" these kind of nuances, and can be unnecessarily turned off & distracted by this type of detail on otherwise very good designs.)

OK, two nit-picky items:

Stop putting Corvettes in the driveway, unless the icon is consistent with the demographic of the people being served. (When did Corvettes get "green creds" ? Don't answer.)

This is why the public does not understand and perhaps, even hates architects.

ShantyWorld.com

Sent from SM's iPhone

Posted via email from ShantyWorld

i-House Small Pre-Fab House

2009-07-11T20:11:00.002-05:00

From the Blog: SmallHouseStyle.com - IHouse PreFab:

i-House Small Pre-Fab House #architecture

Thanks to Clayton Homes, the “i” prefix has finally made its way into the small house market. After 75 years of mobile home manufacturing, the i-house is Clayton’s first big stab at green building. On the swankier end of things, the i-house is super stylish and slightly more expensive than some of the minimalist exemplars featured here at Small House Style, but Clayton’s new invention might yet be considered a steal.

On the inside, the i-house has all the amenities of the trendiest of contemporary homes: from flooring to faucets to light fixtures, everything looks snappy and up-to-date. On the exterior, butterfly-style roofing enables rain collection, optional solar panels account for about half of the house’s energy needs, and low-e windows contribute to making the i-house Energy Star® approved. In short, once you factor in stylishness and energy savings (according to Clayton, about $1/day can cover all electricity and heating costs), the i-house seems like a pretty good deal, all things considered. Comments on various blogs and websites suggest that the i-house might be too “Ikea” for some, but it’s definitely an exciting green prefab model, and it can’t hurt to throw it into the mix. For more on i-house configurations, square footage options, and prices, look here.

Via Clayton Homes and Jetson Green

Images courtesy of Clayton Homes

http://www.smallhousestyle.com/2009/06/19/the-i-house-is-out/

(sent with RssRunner on my iPhone)

Sent from ShantyWorld 's iPhone

Posted via email from ShantyWorld

What Michelle Kaufmann's Closing Says About Construction

2009-05-31T16:16:00.239-05:00

Last week, the news of California Architect Michelle Kauffman's closing of her Pre-Fab Housing business was met with heavy hearts in the design community. Kaufman announced the closing on her blog, where news of the closing quickly made its way through the blogosphere, the Green /Sustainable, and architectural communities. I first read the news via Twitter.

There is no doubt that architect Michelle Kaufmann is a talented designer, and has done a lot (almost single handedly) to get the world to see the potential of pre-fab construction. Kaufmann demonstrated that sustainable design need not be ugly, nor sacrifice modern conveniences in the pursuit of being environmentally conscientious. While I have often told clients that "best practices" -- at least as I learned them at Berkeley, have always been "green", environmentally conscientious, cost-saving measures, it took, perhaps, one of Kaufmann's popular designs and the costs of a war waged over oil, before "green" resonated with middle America.

In the summer of 2008, my tree-hugging friends and I eagerly went to the Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago) to see Kaufmann's Smart Home Exhibit which showcases sustainable design practices, systems and materials. (See Shantyworld.com post on the MSI/Kaufmann Smart Home Exhibit.)

ShantyWorld.com Visits the MSI Smart Home Exhibit (2008) -

However, as I read Lloyd Alter's interview with Kaufmann posted on Treehugger.com , I couldn't help but be annoyed about another missed opportunity for the country and the architecture & construction industries to take a step forward toward a more sensible way to design and build communities.

Alter makes an important point early in the Kaufmann article -- one probably missed by the majority of home owners and casual readers.

Alter says, "When times were good, Michelle could not find factories to build her stuff; they were making too much money building crap. When the crap market dried up, so did they. "

The problem I have found with many residential contractors (especially those with less than 10-12 years of business experience), is that they seldom seem to learn from their mistakes-- which are many and varied. I am fighting many of the same dumb battles with contractors that I fought 15 years ago: their refusal to follow the plans, and their continual quest to dumb down safety, performance, and long-term economies. Contractors are NOT interchangeable with Architects any more than EMTs can replace surgeons.

One would think that with the economic climate we had post September 11th, contractors would have been more open to different ways of thinking about customers & business in an effort to RETAIN and cultivate more business. But it seems many of them didn't learn much from that period. Housing contractors keep hoping the way they were gouging property owners between 1984 to 2007 (with the exception of a few months following September 11th), would NOT require they adjust the way they built structures going forward.

I had hoped that the economic climate after September 11th also would have served as a warning for the construction industry, but it seemed to be little more than an inconvenient interruption of the mortgage, real estate and construction industries' large-scale, 3-Card Monte Scam-A-Thon of the public. President Bush called on Americans to "go shopping", and a lot of Americans made no adjustments to their lifestyle, financial strategy nor their business practices. Instead, it seemd like the race was on by business to suck the most money out of the economy before another national disaster interrupted "the game".

British Prime Minister Churchill is to have said of Americans, that [we Americans] "..will do the right thing.. once all other possibilities have been exhausted." Among a major portion of the residential builder culture, they seem not to have yet exhausted all the wrong strategies. There is real contempt from contractors toward the greater public (as it relates to quality, value, price, and service rendered.) Many contractors don't seem to take pride in their work product-- they just want to "get paid" before their mistakes are noticed by home owners or the architect.

The seemingly infinite number of home contractor/builder horror stories doesn't show any signs of diminishing in number any time soon either.

While I admit my observations/opinions of "what went wrong" with Kaufmann's business are only based on the one TreeHugger.com interview, I can't help but also be severely disappointed at what appears to be some business mistakes that might have --from an outsider's perspective, been avoided. I know for Kaufmann it must be a regrettable financial mess for all those involved: for Kaufmann & her entire staff, the home owners/clients, the construction/material suppliers, and perhaps even Kaufmann's pre-fab manufacturer/s.

Here's what I am gleaning from the comments in the TreeHugger interview:

It seems Kaufmann was (on paper) acting as a design/build firm-- or at least a developer/re-seller offering these pre-fab homes to people. She essentially sub-contracted the construction to an unreliable contractor (pre-fab manufacturer/builder), who basically screwed Kaufmann, the suppliers and the would-be home owners all at once. (See, this is why I hate residential contractors !!) Even though Kaufmann had 20+/- clients (at $250-750k construction value+/- each), her mistake was in essentially vouching for the pre-fab company, verbally(?) and contractually.

She really took on too much liability for what she got in return. It's not a position most architects assume (unless they are also acting as a design/build company or re-seller in-charge of the construction accounting and all that it implies.)

Also, unless Kaufman had equity and a management control in those pre-fab construction companies (i.e. the pre-fab manufacturer), she would have no idea of how the pre-fab contractor was managing costs, nor the true cost of the product she is re-selling! So, when the contractors mis-managed their (portion of the) money, it was easy for said contractor to leave Kaufmann holding the bag.

In the TreeHugger interview, Kaufmann claims it was a tightening of available financing. Nonsense.

Because you don't start making anything (incurring more costs) until you have money or a note guarantee for the loan, imo. You don't treat pre-fab like a normal Design / Bid/ Build project with progress payments. It has upfront costs, so you have to treat it financially like a widget-- like any other "manufactured product". You need the (up-front) capital to achieve the economy of scale. (I do, however, believe the challenges of getting to the "economies of scale" part.) You can't hope the money trickles in (to cover costs), lest the financial mechanics of such a structure work more like a ponzi scheme than manufacturing-like. It's all about cash-flow, baby !

If her fabricator couldn't get a loan (to capitalize), they could have shown the bankers that the customers had the loan and/or cash. With money in hand (as a promissory note -- not just a lousy $3-5K down payment, from the customer's bank), that would be enough to finance each home-- if only home by home, one at a time (with some SERIOUS financial penalties/deposit forfeitures should the customers back out once construction/manufacturing has started.) Hey, even though it's a widget, it's not like it's got the mere cost of a toaster or something.

If Kaufmann's customers couldn't get a loan, then it's not on her (as architect) to continue the transaction, ever. No money, no sale, no start of production. She shouldn't have been on the hook for any of it, in my opinion (otherwise, she is basically guaranteeing a product be delivered as the pre-fab home retailer AND designer.)

I don't find Kaufmann's explanation about the financing difficulties reasonable either -- not because credit wasn't tight, but because regardless of the economic climate, one doesn't take on risk (and unnecessary costs) without a promissory in hand (i.e. the loan approved), cash (a sizable down payment to cover costs) or the money in escrow.

Even if the bank wouldn't finance the home owners for pre-fab, she could have gone to a more traditional build method and hired a contractor to build parts off-site the more traditional way (in a garage or warehouse). That surely would have gotten "traditional" financing. It wouldn't have been 100% pre-fab, but they could have done a "component build", which is still more-or-less "pre-fab" credible. Her contracts with her customers should have given her the latitude to do just that. And if her customers didn't have the credit nor the cash to provide such a down payment, again, you don't start the job! It's not MK's role to finance the customer's dream (i.e. assume the majority of the financial risk.)

Knowing that it only takes about $200K (or less) for a GC to build a 1900SF home the traditional way, it's not clear to me how you can burn thru $500K (avg. sales cost) PER HOME (pre-orders, promissory notes, a loan) on a system that is suppose to SAVE money and save costs to the BUILDERS (due to pre-fab, pre-purchase material agreements, factory economies, etc.). It makes no sense.

Thus, I think the pre-fab contractors lied to her. They had to have inflated the actual costs . (And frankly, I bet the pre-fab contractor burned through the money he received-- but NOT on expenses directly related to the actual projects under contract. And if the down payments or progress payments from customers weren't enough to cover initial expenses, that structural business fault (no pun intended) lies with the MK business-- not the credit availability climate.

Hell, you could still build that same house via traditional on-site means for the same amount of money (not more.) $500K?

I know from working with major national chains, when you use a repeat material en masse, you negotiate (like futures) the material cost for a set volume of material in advance. It's a way to guarantee sales for the supplier, and control costs for the builder. It appears Kaufmann may have done that with some suppliers so as to control costs. However, did she negotiate the costs, or was that task left up to the pre-fab contractor? was that under his legal obligation? or hers?

How much of the built-in costs did Kaufmann really know about? (She should have known about every piece of material down to the cost of each nail.) By negotiating many of the material costs in advance with suppliers, Kaufmann should have been able to offer incentives to buyers to stick w/ the pre-negotiated options. It appears this may have been the case, so it is even MORE baffling as to why this didn't help them control costs (enabling them to increase profitability and cash reserves).

Kaufmann's bankruptcy is a shame, because she is a great designer, but her business explanation doesn't make business sense.

This underscores MY POINTS (in previous ShantyWorld posts) that costs and reliability rests mostly on the contractor as to how well (or poorly) the home building experience goes for the home owner. I feel contractors have artificially (greedily) inflated the cost of home building -- not architects. Builders have behaved very DETROIT-like in how they market and price homes. Home pricing has a lot less to do with how architects design homes, than how much greed is inherent with the selected contractor.

Or, perhaps Kaufmann's major mistake was thinking the pre-fab companies would be as conscientious (and fair minded) as she is. Residential Builders aren't. Almost never. In fact, the factory assembly of homes SHOULD be a profit incentive for builders. Apparently, builders are too accustomed to the greedy way they marked up $160K homes and sold them for $400-800K. Sorry, boys, those days (I hope) are over.

Trusting the pre-fab contractor was Kaufmann's mistake. You don't put millions of dollars on the line without:

a) money being in escrow, enough that people won't just walk away from it, or

b) cash on hand that is verifiable (the contractor's money via bond, and the home owners' via loan approval);

c) your own cash on hand to cover the risk (because people lie);

d) never tie your business risk (and profit) as architect to the CONTRACTOR's ability to fulfill HIS financial obligations.

Guess what (?) Most residential contractors don't care (about you)!! They just file bankruptcy and move on to the next home owner who doesn't do proper due-diligence.

I know I am speculating here about the mechanics of what happened. If Michelle wants to yell at me or post a reply, that would be great. We would all be happy to have her shed some light on what actually happened-- free of spin yet (more) truthful about what could (or should) have happened differently. The closing of her venture is not what architects and environmentalists want for the nation, nor the world. Kaufmann's closing is a tremendous loss for all of us.

Yet, there is no economic reason why pre-fab shouldn't work in the USA. It is builders, mortgage companies and realtors who have been sabotaging affordable housing. This bad behavior is costing Americans quality homes-- much in the way the Big-3 auto management culture sabotaged quality, energy efficient American-built cars.

No economy can sustain a model for pricing housing as if housing is seen and treated as a luxury item available to the highest bidder. [Read ShantyWorld's post on what is wrong with Housing Valuation (i.e. costs) in the USA.]

Precisely because shelter is a basic human need, we have to discard these notions about trying to leverage our homes in a manner which will afford each owner a luxurious lifestyle and a net worth that is perpetually growing (environment be damned and debt levels be damned.) That is not the purpose of shelter and that economic model is not sustainable for any nation. Have Americans yet learned this lesson, or will we continue to exhaust all options before arriving at the proper solution: affordable, sustainable housing instead of McMansions ?

- Also read the ShantyWorld.com inaugural post (from 2006) on what is wrong with housing in America. See what we predicted would happen to the USA housing market (before it actually happened.)

Illiteracy & Fake Books

2009-01-09T19:27:00.037-06:00

Or, what You Can Learn About [Some] Americans By Looking in their Homes for 156+ Consecutive Weeks.

Funny how the timing in the cosmos converges on a topic...

Just yesterday I was chatting on Twitter about my abject horror that a Retail Store exists to sell FAKE BOOKS. I mean, how does one come up with the idea, "Gee I want to sell fake books & faux Libraries so people can appear to be literate. They can pretend to own a lot of books." The appearance of education without all the hassle and expense. Terrific. No wonder non-western nations think westerners are stupid.

Don't bother acknowledging the fact that these books do not look real -- to anyone whose vision is better than 20/70. If you walk up to the books in an attempt to pull one off the fake shelf, you'll stub your fingers mashing them into the wall.

Then along comes a story on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric (9 Jan 2009) reporting that ILLITERACY in the USA is UP !! The US is 15th-- BEHIND other industrialized nations, in literacy rates for its people. Umm, what happened to "No Child Left Behind" ?

So, in addition to botching the response to 9/11, creating a War of choice and torpedoing the US Economy, we are also falling farther behind other nations in Education-- specifically as it relates to teaching Americans how to read. Reading: a basic skill other countries apparently find necessary for a secure, safe, growing culture and economy.

8 years of leading by example, George Bush's "..is our children learning".

In three plus years of working in Naperville, IL (a so-called "affluent" suburb 25 miles west of Chicago) remodeling ugly, energy inefficient & poorly conceived bland homes, I CAN COUNT ON ONE HAND OUT OF 275+ homes that I looked at or worked on, LESS THAN FIVE HOMES HAD LIBARIES OR BOOKCASES IN THE HOME. Less than 5 -- including the bedrooms of their children ! And you wonder why the USA is 15th in literacy among industrialized nations ?

I was also stunned that very few homes we visited had much in the way of any kind of reading material. Some homes had the current, local paper. But very few even had traces of having subscriptions to magazines, hobby books, comics or magazines (especially of the news & education variety-- like Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, WSJ, NY Times etc.)

They had very little original artwork. Most times, walls had family photos or some stock looking landscape print. Their garages had cars that usually were late model -- mostly well maintained American cars. They had the latest and largest TVs, but not really any musical equipment or media in the way of CDs-- except in the kids' rooms. Furniture tastes tended to be American Country or colonial. Most homes, to my surprise, were free of clutter. (Most, not all.) That surprised me, maybe because I have more books, magazines, files & papers than I have shelf space for.
I was horrified (repeatedly) by the number of kids' rooms (including teenagers) that had few-- and in some cases, no shelves holding books (nor books stacked on the floor. Not even school textbooks.)

One of the clients -- who claims he was an attorney, actually had a faux Library (painted) on the 2nd floor wall, so it appeared (to other nimrods like himself) from the 1st floor entry that he had a library gallery overlooking the 2-story foyer. He was so proud of not actually having read a lot of books, but merely appearing to have read a lot of books. Except, the library/painting didn't look real. Whom was he trying to convince?

Is our Children learning?

©shantyworld.com 2009

Eyesore of the Month

2008-12-28T07:38:00.038-06:00

A spectacularly amusing (and simultaneously sad) web site that "features" visual examples of crimes against the built environment. Visit architect James Kunstler's EyeSore of the Month for proof that poor taste knows no bounds.
Kunstler's commentary is acerbic & funny, often sharp, and occasionally mean spirited. But he is almost always right in drawing attention to structures that actually reduce the quality of life in a community and, indirectly lower the collective cultural value in the process. Spend some time going through the archives-- especially if you need a good chuckle. [Visual Shock & Awe].

From Kunstler's March 2004 Eyesore - He writes:

Notice how these new "townhouses" in northern Virginia meet the street. From the ground up to about the eleven foot line, you get the ambiance of a self-storage unit. The upper stories are applique Georgian, meant to signify "historic architecture here!" The real message emanating from all this investment and effort is "no real future here." What the scene signifies is the tragic resignation of ordinary Americans to cheap falsehood in the service of an entropic economy. As America slides into the post-cheap-oil clusterf--k, houses like these will lose their value dramatically, and the people who bought them will be both stranded and ruined. [end of quote]

In the December 2001 installment of Eyesore, Kunstler writes,

The supergigantic Palladian window with the pop-in muntins doubles as a neighborhood heat-exchanger. [end of quote]

January 2008 Eyesore

October 2007 Eyesore

The Years 2004 through 2006 seemed to have an inexhaustible amount of example of bad design, poor decisions & bad work.

July 2006 Eyesore
February 2006 Eyesore
January 2006 Eyesore
March 2005 Eyesore
January 2005 Eyesore
April 2004 Eyesore
December 2001 Eyesore
January 2001 Eyesore - Typical Suburban House

For all the Johnny & Janie-Come-Latelys who thought some Libertarian self-promoter predicted the current recession, hundreds of Architects (and planners) like Kunstler and myself were warning you about the impending US Housing market collapse.

The Story of Stuff

2008-10-27T17:26:00.012-05:00

The fine people at The Story of Stuff have put together a short video that ties together American consumption patterns, Environmental Waste (i.e. garbage), Worker exploitation, depressed wages, Big Box retailers, corporate self-interests and Job Losses (among other things). While it sounds like a pretty bombastic claim, video host Annie Leonard makes a compelling argument. You can watch the FULL video online or download it for distribution. Ain't the internet great ?

From the StoryofStuff.com website:

The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world.

What do you guys think of the video? (Plus, the animation is VERY clever. SOS is a good presentation on the Environment for school aged children, too.) Leave a comment. Play nice.

Again, you can watch the FULL video online or download it for distribution.

Mayor Daley Calls Appraisal System Fraudulent

2008-10-09T19:49:00.022-05:00

Today, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley called the Property Tax Appraisal system fraudulent. In one specific neighborhood (Englewood) which has a sizable percentage of low-income households, the idea of having homes appraised at $300-$400K+, proved to be implausible even for a revenue hungry politician with a budget shortfall. Daley called for the Cook County tax assessor's office to revise and reassess how they arrive at those valuations. Daley is also calling for the IL State legislature to temper the rate at which property taxes can increase from year to year.

Part of the problem with the Cook County assessment system is that the current tax bills are based on assessments taken in 2006, before the current housing slide. [See the CBS local video of Daley's news conference.]

Well, Mayor Daley is right, the property appraisal system is fraudulent. However, he-- like a lot of other politicians & municipal officials across America, created a climate that enabled and encouraged this kind of greed to spiral out of control.

See, every Chicago Alderman (along with Daley) wanted new development and housing renovation in their neighborhoods to thrive-- rightly so. If housing values and construction numbers went up in a neighborhood, so too did (in theory) the tax base of their Ward. And what politician doesn't want to be seen as presiding over growth, expansion and wealth building in their own community? The Chicago Alderman-- along with Mayor Daley, wanted to also get the credit for this regeneration-- especially in previously depressed urban areas.

Also understand, the rise in property values means a rise in taxes, fees and income for ANY City, including a big city like Chicago. Mayors (and City Councilmen) want their budgets to be balanced, but they also want to add programs that get them re-elected. This had/has the obvious potential for a conflict of interest -- if left unregulated, to create problems over the long run. Of course, we know this is exactly what happened nationwide, on a much larger scale.

But as the race to increase development (and construction) in each Chicago neighborhood moved forward, so too did the greed meisters feeding the entire process.

I have a professional friend who confessed to me the other day that when she was looking for her house (just a few years ago), she felt the Mortgage Broker, Assessor and the Realtor had grossly overpriced the property. So she asked the assessor how they had arrived at the value of the property, and the person was stupid [brazen, really] enough to admit, "..well, this is the amount we think you personally qualify for". A STUNNING ADMISSION of GREED.

Alas, here we are at a situation where REALTORs, BANKERS, Assessors et.al., are ALL COMPLICIT in not valuing the property at what its market rate is, but what they think they can milk the would-be home owner for. It's not about the cost to re-build that house-- heaven forbid, should a calamity strike. It's about what the sleeze-bag mortgage company/bank and the Realtors can pocket in the way of profit-- regardless of what the house is actually worth.

This current American Housing/ Mortgage Crisis is nothing more than a story of American GREED & THIEVERY. And that is why you now find your house values are sliding down. And THEY SHOULD go down, because it's apparent they've been over-valued from the beginning (or least since about 1980).

In the next few weeks, I'll post pics of homes that I KNOW are over-valued.
When are you home owners gonna learn, that buying an over-valued house (OR OVERPAYING FOR HOME REMODELING) is like paying $40,000 for a $19,000 car? You are the one getting screwed. Not the seller.

©ShantyWorld.com 2008

Bailout: Wealth transfer via Housing

2008-09-28T18:17:00.053-05:00

Ok, some of you know I've been predicting this Housing (and thus national economic) housing crash for years. Ok, maybe some of you don't know it-- then you should read my FIRST POST on this blog, logged some 2 years ago.

Part of the HARD TRUTH you home owners don't want to admit is that MOST OF YOU live in grossly overvalued homes, and that ALSO contributed to this avoidable economic "crisis".

The fault (for this mess) does not lie merely with the investment bankers, mortgage companies, politicians/legislators who looked the other way while they amassed cash and built fake wealth on paper -- knowing it would someday implode. Many (not all) Homeowners assisted in creating this crisis. (I explain how in the coming paragraphs.)

But by the time the middle class wised up to the chaos around them, it was too late. And as reported on CBS' 60 Minutes, 9/28/08, the charlatans who are largely responsible for this mess would have amassed enough cash to insulate themselves from the downside fallout. (Which, in a legal sense, implies premeditation-- don't you think ?)

This is a crisis completely created out of greed and selfishness. A real Regan era, "I got mine who gives a F-- about the other guy" attitude. And it's likely that the world over is smirking with glee that Americans finally are having to pay for decades of greed and selfishness-- most recently distilled in the attitudes on display during the last 8 years by Bush et al.

So, how have (some of you) homeowners been complicit in this melt down? Because greed has created a climate where ALL OF YOU want your crappy, cheap [mostly suburban] homes that were built for $140-180K (over the last 15 years) to be assessed/valued at the 275-600 PERCENT MORE THAN WHAT THEY ARE actually WORTH.

As an architect, I more than have a good idea of what it costs to build a house. Trust me, even at $200-250K for a 1900 SF house, a contractor has plenty of room to make a fair profit. In my opinion, the TRUE cost of a house is about 70/30 maybe 65/35 percent Labor to Material cost ratio. That is to say, about 70-65% of the cost of a house is in the labor. The rest is material costs. (Roughly, some variances will occur by region, etc. Land costs and professional fees are additional, but not enough to change the ratio by usually more than 5-8% for most areas.) But those hideous vinyl clad houses in the 'burbs that routinely sold for $300-425K+ for 2400 SF, were probably built for only about $160-190k.

What Treasury Secretary Paulson is NOT TELLING YOU, is that a lot of that so-called BAILOUT debt/cost is a cost (or debt) manufactured on paper.

If you falsely inflate the value of a property/building that was built for $200k, and assess it at $400-700k, then assign a mortgage (product) to the same property at $400-700K, no wonder no one can pay that mortgage note. Because municipalities, Realtors, insurance companies and of course mortgage companies all have a FINANCIAL incentive for your house to be overvalued (to some extent), such that they can charge you more.

- Property Taxes are based on the house value.
- Realtor commissions are based on the final selling cost.
(The higher the cost, the more the Realtor makes.)
- Insurance rates are based on house values, etc.

With these kind of financial incentives, who can be surprised that under-regulated industries were bound to push the limits of greed?
The middle class home owner who DID NOT get in over their head also suffers as part of the collateral damage.

If a property is over valued, then it's a FAKE valuation-- and thus a fake debt (when financed.) You should note that banks can still make money on a house sold for less-- just not as much per customer.

Real wages the last 30 PLUS years have not kept pace with these fake housing values. If the TRUE value of these houses were placed with a more modest (i.e. less greedy) amount, then this housing CREDIT DEFICIT CREATED ON PAPER, would almost cease to exist immediately too. Because the truth is a house build for $150K but sold for $425K still performs like a $150K house.

And because it PERFORMS like a cheap house, it's inevitable that it will lose money (faster)-- unless you can get Realtors, home assessors and banks to play along with the (valuation) charade. Well, that is exactly what was going on, until recently. The problem is, that kind of lie and fakery is not sustainable-- especially if REAL wages aren't keeping pace with real estate.

Another dirty part of this crisis is that a substantial part of the hard working Middle Class will be swindled (i.e. foreclosed) out of their homes (and thus, assets) due to a woefully under-regulated (Republican manipulated) financial system. This is one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the the Working Class to the well-connected & privileged since the early 1900s. It's an orchestrated financial apartheid.

Because a substantial portion of the lousy mortgage products targeted people of color and lower Middle Class citizens, can there be any doubt that the authors of these predatory financial instruments KNEW IN ADVANCE that these were the people LEAST likely to be able to fight back and hang onto their house (and money)?

Studies already show that a substantial portion of the people who were put into these lousy mortgages actually QUALIFIED for more traditional mortgage packages but were steered (conned) into these riskier products.

Again, this is a predatory, premeditated money grab to strip a portion of the population of what little money it already had. And since wealth through real estate is the primary means thorough which most working class American families build, gain and transfer wealth, taking homes from Working Class people --especially people of color-- is the fastest way to insure they remain among the working poor for the next 2-3 generations (or 50-75 years.)

It is DIABOLICAL. This reeks of hatred and real contempt not just for fellow Americans, but for all humanity.

As an architect, I can say there are indeed expensive homes that perform like expensive homes. The problem is, the average home buyer the last 20 years let their own greed get in the way of hoping their crappy $150K house would be valued at $500K in 5 years. Todays consumers wouldn't know how to spot (evaluate) a TRUE $1+ million dollar house if it built itself in front of their own eyes.

The problem is, home buyers (caught up in keeping up with the Joneses), developers, realtors, and housing contractors were just as greedy and as complicit in this mess as the bankers and investment houses.

In a time where housing values have SOARED 3-6 TIMES faster than REAL INCOME, it is no wonder that a substantial portion of the population can't and WON'T ever be able to sustain that debt repayment on a mortgage product that changes rates. (Didn't this raise any red flags for any of you? Did you really think housing valuations could increase without real wages increasing and it wouldn't have any effect? Are you kidding me?)

The suburbs are FILLED with carcinogen clad, cheap homes that were built with low-quality, environmental killing vinyl products, and other toxic materials for a fraction of what they were sold and assessed for. I've witnessed this first hand the last 15+ years. I routinely walked into homes that were built for $150-180K by a thieving (unqualified) developer, but sold to a suburban schmuck for $375-500K. And the developers and bankers laughed all the way to the bank-- until last week.

Those cheap homes are still worth something-- they just aren't worth the $425K you were hoping for. The real value is probably closer to $220-245K on one of these fake colonial 2400 SF houses. So, those of you in hock for one of these homes, would actually be better served if you could renegotiate your mortgage down to $220-245K. (This would require having it assessed for its true value-- not the false, inflated value.)

Hey, the $125-300K difference in value pre-crisis versus now was -- as the wealthy like to say-- just wealth on paper. You'll still have the same lousy cheap furniture, same bad wallpaper, and same personal effects you had before the crisis. It's just that you won't be able to get AS LARGE A LOAN against your assets [i.e. equity] as you could have pre-crisis.

But allow me to let you in on a secret:
The really wealthy folks-- the ones that truly do have $5 mil, $20+ million dollar houses that ACTUALLY ARE BUILT with quality products and are truly worth those numbers--- they KNOW your crappy vinyl/aluminum, or faux brick shack in the 'burbs is the social & economic equivalent of putting lipstick on a Chevy and trying to pass it off as a Bentley. (Sorry about the mixed metaphor, but you get my point.) That level of fakery is not sustainable over time.

Old money never would have let you into that [true] multi-million plus dollar house club anyway. It's one of the reasons your crappy vinyl house has and NEVER WILL be featured in any design magazines or on a TV show.

So, the chickens are already home and will be roosting for years --if not decades-- to come. You better hope your grandchildren aren't so saddled with debt and anger, that they hold your sunset years in their power-of-attorney hands. You better start treating them well, and better buy Long-term Care health insurance with whatever money you have left. Because some US taxpayers are about to feel some debt pain for the next several years.

And while it's true that a LOT OF GREEDY Contractors, Developers, Bankers/Mortgage lenders etc., all lied and manipulated the American middle class into falsely believing their homes were worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars, the truth is you can't get something for nothing. And that is what the middle class is guilty of trying to do. Unfortunately, only the middle class (or as Leona Helmsley use to say, "The Little People") will get screwed in the end.

Only time will tell how this will shake out. But this scenario HAS happened before. Too bad many of you failed to learn the economic, planning and urban development lessons of the past. Industries that allow greed to grow unchecked (i.e. an unregulated truly free market) has and always will produce chaos, eventually. History has shown this again and again.

For the fools out there who think you and your country can move forward, amassing stuff (and even wealth) and benefits (of any kind) without paying more taxes (or some other cost), then you are bound to again suffer the consequences of economic crises like this one.

Your taxes will go up, and they should. It's the cost of stupidity, complicity and greed.
©ShantyWorld.com 2008 - All rights reserved. No derivative works allowed. Quoting of this article requires permission in writing.

Bailout Should NOT be Another Patriot Act

2008-09-23T18:49:00.011-05:00

Wealth (motivated by greed and selfishness)
Privatizes Profits but Socializes Losses.

So What does $500 Billion Buy? What Does 1 Trillion Buy ?

From AmericaBlog.com:

A reader asked what any of the bailout numbers represent in the real world. We know $500 billion, $700 billion or now the new Paulson plan of $1.8 trillion is a lot, but put this in terms that everyone can understand. A few examples for 2007:
* Microsoft generated $51 billion in revenue.
* Citi, who has been hit hard in the credit crisis, saw $159 billion.
* Walmart's 2007 total revenue was $388 billion.
* ExxonMobil generated $404 billion.
Those are the numbers for some of the largest businesses in the US. For the US budget, here are a few examples from Bush's budget in 2007:
* Veterans' benefits at $73 billion
* Education was $90 billion
* Interest on US debt was $244 billion
* Medicare $395 billion
* Defense was $548 billion
* Social Security was $586
In total, the 2007 federal budget was a total of $2.8 trillion. The latest updates for the Paulson bailout plan are pushing $1.8 trillion. For next year, we will start the year in a pretty big financial hole and it's going to have to be made up somewhere.

What does $1 Trillion Buy ? (Hint: All those Things that Politicians Were not Willing to Extend to the Ordinary American-- precisely because "the little people don't matter" to wealthy politicians. Not only sould Americans have the opportunity to renegotiate their mortgages, but that $700B to $1T could easily have paid for Slavery Reparations and for 40 Acres and A Mule for the descendants of slaves.)

The American Public is the real FOOL if they allow themselves to be trampled over by this Bailout Legislation, while investment bankers get golden parachutes and bonus packages.. If you vote against your own economic interests (while politicians, liars & thieves get away w/ larceny and no jail time), then you deserve to have your money stolen from you.

Register for November 2008 US Election

2008-09-03T19:35:00.037-05:00

US citizens, Illinois residents, and Chicago citizens alike, be sure to register for the 2008 US Presidential Election!
UPDATE: In general, you have until about October 3rd to register to vote for the November 4, 2008 election. Most states require you be registered 30 DAYS BEFORE the Election date. BUT voter registrationDeadlines VARY BY STATE ! (Illinois deadline is Oct 7 for mail in, but you have a few extra days past that date -- in ILLINOIS ONLY-- to register in person at the Election Board offices.)

Go to the US Election Assistance Commission [EAC] website [www.eac.gov] to find out the registration deadlines for your state. (Voter Registration requirements and deadlines vary by state.) The EAC website has the deadlines and general requirements for registering to vote for the November 2008 election FOR EVERY STATE.

You can download BOTH a VOTER REGISTRATION FORM, and the requirements for registration in your state from the US Election Assistance Commission (US EAC). Mail in the completed registration form by the deadline or register in person. Some states may allow you to fax it in or you may need to take in the form in person.

MANY PUBLIC LIBRARIES (in many cities throughout the US) have voter registration forms. Or, you may be able to register to vote at your local Driver Motor Vehicle Department.
The voter registration form (usually) is less than half a page long and shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes to fill out.

Take your time filing out the form, and complete ALL required info/questions. If you fill it out incorrectly or leave blank spaces, you won't be registered. If you need help filling out the form, ask a trusted friend to help you or go to your local library for help. (Avoid letting political staffers fill it out for you.)

If you filled out the form correctly, your local voter registration (municipal) authority should send you a voter registration acknowledgment (or card telling you where your polling place is located.)

If you don't receive acknowledgment of registration (or your voter card) approximately 35 days BEFORE the Nov. 4th, 2008 election date, then go in person to register. Don't wait.

Some states may allow you to register to vote via phone-- but many states do NOT allow you to register this way. (Don't confuse this with being able to cast your vote via phone.)
Go to the www.eac.gov website to see what your state requires.

On voting day, bring at least 2 photo IDs with you when you go to vote. (Sometimes a current utility bill showing your name and address on it is accepted as additional ID.) Some states don't require ID, but many do. So be prepared w/ your ID on voting day.

Again, these ID requirements vary by state, so visit the EAC.gov site to see what is required in your state.

Citizens of the State of Illinois (ONLY) can get the Illinois voter registration form from the eac.gov site. Download the IL PDF voter registration form, fill it out and mail it in TODAY!

Once registered, if your town/city offers it, take advantage of EARLY VOTING so you don't have to worry about getting to the polls before they close on Nov. 4th.

Chicago, Illinois (only) Early Voting - begins October 13, 2008 (Columbus Day) through Oct. 30th.
Visit the Chicago Elections Board website [www.chicagoelections.com] to find out more about the Early Voting site in your Chicago neighborhood.

Tom Joyner & NAACP have joined to make getting voter registration forms easier. Call 1-800 MY VOTE1 to request a voter registration form (for any state in the Union). They will mail you the form, and you will need to fill it out and return the completed form to your city or state election board.

IF YOU ARE NOT REGISTERED TO VOTE, TAKE 15 MINS. AND REGISTER NOW !!
Mail in your Voter Registration ! Don't procrastinate !

Register to VOTE today !
Illinois deadline to register to vote is October 7, 2008 for the November 4, 2008 election. (Other state registration deadlines will vary.)

Vote for Change.
Obama YARD Signs via barackobama.com or ShantyMinister's Flickr page.

RTA Olympic Stadium to be Recycled ?

2008-06-01T09:09:00.028-05:00

Ready to Assemble (RTA) meets Ikea Mondo. Stadium beta v. 0.9a

The Guardian is reporting that the 2012 London Olympic organizers are in talks with the City of Chicago to re-use the Stadium from the upcoming 2012 London Olympics for the 2016 games here in our beloved city. [See computer rendering of stadium above.]
Since the games in 2016 haven't been awarded to the host city as yet, these are just preliminary talks. The design has received some criticism for its lack luster aesthetics, but people seem intrigued by the idea of recycling a building-- especially one as large as a 60-80K seat stadium.

Apparently the idea is to design key components of the stadium so that they can be readily disassembled, shipped, then reassembled in the new location.

Usually prototypes cost MORE to build the first few units (because the design costs and engineering are all front-loaded). Add to that the cost of labor to disassemble, pack and ship across the ocean. It's nice to know Chicago will be inheriting someone else's bugs -- beta version 0.9a. Beta / version 1 items are always buggy.

Plus, if anyone has tried to assemble any flat-pack/ RTA item (like those from Ikea), you know you always have a part or two missing. And let's hope there's no particle board involved, because you know once the threads are stripped, good luck getting the parts to hold tightly together... [ just kidding.]
Just the same, watching this kind of Stadium go up in Washington Park might be quite entertaining.

I would imagine London will ask Chicago to "share" some of the upfront costs. I doubt it will actually be cheaper to recycle this stadium. Nonetheless, Chicago will garner more "Green Cache" for even attempting it. Afterall, Chicago is America's "Greenest City".

Speaking of GREEN... The Chicago Museum of Science & Industry is currently featuring a Green Pre-Fab Smart Home. They've actually assembled a full-size modular home on the grounds of the Museum. So visitors can walk-thru and around the house. The exhibit is open until early January 2009. The MSIChicago.org website has additional info on the exhibit.

Read more about the "Flat Pack Stadium" at the Guardian website.

Housing Valuation as a Social Construct

2008-05-31T12:32:00.028-05:00

I changed the name of the Flickr.com Photo pool from "Home Inspection Nightmares" to "Home Construction Nightmares". I didn't want to confuse this with the This Old House (TOH) website, nor limit it to existing [older] homes -- as a considerable amount of new construction is also equally (if not) more horrific in its poor execution.

A perfect example of the kind of builder incompetence in "new construction" is shown courtesy of a fellow Flickr member: Shutters to Think. [click on the photos for a jaw dropping close up view.]

Home owners and would-be owners should be aware that just be house is newer, doesn't mean it has fewer defects or is built to a better nor safer standard than much older homes. Just because a house costs more, doesn't mean it's a better home (or even a better place to live.)
In fact, in many ways, I am convinced now that much of the new housing stock (built in the last 25 years) is of a lower quality than anything seen in the last 100 years.

I feel the "HOME Construction Nightmare" Flickr photo forum is a good way to prove that thesis. I am working on building the visual evidence of what I have seen the last 15 years: that the quality and visual appeal of homes is in decline (in the USA), because (in part), the design of houses has been given/taken over by unqualified builders and money grubbing developers at the expense of safety and without any substantive consideration of end user's long-term needs.

Housing quality and safety won't improve until consumers demand it and place their money where their concerns are. This is one reason why I know the housing bubble had to burst, and why I believe housing is currently as much as 60% over-valued in much of America. It's actually in the nation's (and consumers') long-term interest that the value of housing come down from the present irrational levels.

It's a fallacy to equate high cost of housing with quality or safety. And not unlike social issues surrounding race, property values based on LOCATION is a social construct [bias], often not based on economic costs or even true value in any objective, democratic measurable means.

Human valuation of commodities like housing/property, jobs/salaries, objects, time, expertise etc., is a strange, interesting and constantly changing phenomenon. For example, we all know that water is far more valuable than diamonds, yet the retail cost of acquiring small diamonds far exceeds the retail cost of acquiring drinkable water (in most industrial nations). And while that may be an imperfect example, you get my point.

[A few notes about these photos (with thanks to Intangiblearts): Notice the window/shutter problem in the top photo. Also notice the fake applied "brick" on this building facade. There's no drainage for moisture that gets behind the soon-to-be mortar or fake brick-ettes. The doors and windows don't have drip caps and are already rotting and peeling. Lastly, can we all agree this kind of visual foolishness is beneath what our communities deserve?]

How a cheap vinyl-clad (carcinogen laden) house in one suburb is worth $475K while it's worth $225 in another area as close as 50 miles away (allowing for size, amenities, lot size, view, environmental issues, access, etc. all being equal), is nothing more than a sham and a social and economic lie.
And we are beginning to see the corrections of a system that recognizes the inequity and the COSTS of such an obvious imbalance.

It's a thesis I'm flushing out.. but I hope you will all begin to consider the questions I'm raising.

More on this issue to come.
copyright ©2008 shantyworld.com
All rights reserved. This post may not be used or re-posted without permission.

My Corrupt Condo Association

2008-05-23T19:09:00.035-05:00

There are a few fellow bloggers here in my Hyde Park Chicago neighborhood who regularity cite tales of crazy neighbors, thieving contractors and asinine developers. Who needs reality TV when our own neighbors and foes provide so much material & entertainment? And I often think, there but for the grace of God goes my dysfunctional community. Except, my own Condo community is [already] filled with liars, cheats and fools. And that describes the majority of the makeup of our Condo Board the last 15 years.

But my Condo Association has now hit a NEW ALL-TIME LOW.
(And it's really too bad, because we have a nice building/complex and a wonderful view of the Chicago skyline & Lake Michigan. See photo above.)

Now for the drama:
As it turns out, a former Board President and past Board member for our Association (who still lives in the complex), has not been paying her assessments for the last, oh-- 6 to 12 [freakin'] years- - as far as the property management company can tell !

While this broad was on the CONDO Board, SHE WASN'T PAYING ASSESSMENTS !!! WTF!!??

The Property Management company is claiming they can only VERIFY the last several years have not been paid-- but that it could be more. Since the present Board is made up (in part) of crooks, liars, incompetents and pansies, it's not even looking as if the Board feels any compunction to sue this liar/thief for the money. It seems as though SOME of the current Board members have KNOWN about this "issue" for months-- if not years, but FAILED to take action until a more recent manager made it a PUBLIC issue.

Come the F--- on !?!!

In a somewhat relevant side note: last year, our Condo Board decided not to renew the contract with the Property Management Company-- D&K-- under whose watch the overwhelming majority of this corruption occurred. In my opinion, both the Board and the past Property Management company are culpable AND complicit. Severing the relationship with D&K was long overdue. Unfortunately, ending the management contract last year was way too little, way too late.

Now getting back to the crooked former Board member ---
One of the current Board members-- whom I believe is a co-conspirator [to the deadbeat former Board member] and whom I believe is also a thief-- is trying to spin the situation and talk her fellow nimrod Board members into RAISING the assessments in order to cover the shortfall (and not suing the past president for the money). WTF??!

The Condo Association's attorney has recommended trying to settle out of court and suggested placing a lien on the property-- in case the broad dies first or tries to skip town. The fear is that a protracted lawsuit would cost the Assn. much more (in attorney's fees, discovery, audits, etc.) than the amount to be collected-- about $24,000 [that we know of.] And I would agree w/ that analysis, except it would give me much pleasure to see this thieving wench with a theft and/or embezzlement conviction on her record. (The spectacle would be great. I think I would attend the trial.. I say pay the cost of the investigation and trial and throw the bitch in jail.)

Unfortunately, the now VP of the Board is trying to get this thing to go away, without a lawsuit, without collecting the money, and without doing any kind of audit or investigation. WTF ?!!

It's not clear if the newly elected & current Board president has a mind of her own, or if she will be easily manipulated by the long-time Board members.

Hhmmm.. sounds incredibly fishy-- doesn't it? Now you know what kind of "people" I am dealing with.

Now before you start to feel sorry for the master liar under scrutiny, understand her husband (who died several years ago) owned a Hardware store chain and probably left her a considerable amount of money. She has family, so she's not broke and destitute. It's not a hardship situation. She's just a lying, thieving, selfish crook (and that was the nicest thing I could think of to say.)

As for the current Board, I think the primary reason the now VP of the Board wants to give this crook a pass, is because I think the long-serving, do-nothing, know-nothing Board members are fearful that during Discovery (and a true audit of the Association's finances), that some OTHER BOARD MEMBERS will be outed as having pilfered funds from this 730+ unit, multi-million dollar complex too.

My theory is that the present Board is not looking to show mercy for the crook, so much as it's an effort to save their own sorry asses.

I also know specific [current] Board members have used their Board position to gain favors, preferential treatment by maintenance/repair staff, outside contractors, etc. So the thought of a trial (under oath) & Discovery is probably this Board's worst nightmare-- next to being convicted for their crimes.

Thus, it's not clear what will happen to this thieving broad. I am trying to bring this issue to the attention of my neighbors. Unfortunately, my neighbors are an apathetic bunch of dullards who are more concerned about whether or not their cable TV is working than the idea that the Board they ALLOWED to take office has been stealing money from them FOR YEARS --perhaps DECADES !!!

Of course, the current Board has been working very hard to keep this issue under wraps. Some of the current Board members are pals of the [former] Board member under scrutiny. It would be an understatement to say that the current Board has a vested interest in NOT seeing a full audit of payments and financial dealings for the last 10-15 years. (And I must add that I have caught some Board members lying to me and others regarding Association business. So, there is a culture of lying that pervades this Board and many of its past and present Board members.)

But a full and extensive audit is exactly what needs to occur. The Board has a history the last 8+ years of REFUSING to release copies of audits and other pertinent financial info to Association owners when requested in violation of the State of Illinois Condominium Act. I know.. you are shaking your head.. but it's true. And not a single person in the complex has the backbone to sue or to make it an issue. It's totally disgusting what has happened the last 20 years with this Assocication... I've tried blogging and getting the word out to neighbors, but it's difficult when less than a handful of people are interested in pursuing these issues out of a community of over 1000 people.

But like most crooks, the people behind this coverup are stupid and it was inevitable that they would trip themselves up. Stupidity, selfishness and arrogance are the three primary traits of thieves.

If there are any lawyers out there interested in taking this case pro-bono for me, please email me. I have a limited budget, but maybe something else can be worked out. I've been trying to solicit my neighbors to pool money to sue the entire Board.
We need to weed out the thieves.

Oh, and I'll have to also tell you guys about the current Board member who is (supposedy) a University of Chicago Grad, who TRIED TO OPEN FLAME BAR-BE-QUE INSIDE her carpeted apartment (complete with charcoal briquettes). F---ing amazing, isn't it? And this fool won re-election to the Board. WTF??

There's a lot more to the story, I just can't post it all in one sitting.

[Coming soon, my commentary on the Federal Indictment of Chicago Building Department staff for bribery. What took the Feds so long?]
©ShantyWorld.com 2008

Developer MIA

2008-05-12T23:11:00.010-05:00

Hmmm, the chatter & number of Blogs documenting the shadiness of the Construction/Development world (in the USA) seems to know no end...
Horror Stories surrounding Contractors, Developers and low-quality residential construction are abundant.

As I told my brother-in-law 5 years ago, "you can't keep building houses for $170K, then sell them for $800K to people making $85K, and not expect this whole thing to blow up. At some point, market forces are going to realize that a $170K house is not worth $800K-- almost regardless of location."

Read how one Bentley driving Northside developer has allegedly fled the country -- owing money all over the place [ChicagoBubbleBlog.com]

Personally, I don't think developers and contractors should ever be given the benefit of the doubt. Experience tells me they almost always lie.

(Also, Please consider posting your horror story photos to the Shantyworld Flickr.com "Construction Nightmares" photo group.)

New Housing Development, Not!

2008-03-08T11:02:00.016-06:00

Clever Concept Meets Public Performance Art

This photo has been shooting around the internet. It created quite a chuckle in architecture offices around the country. I thought it was something some wacky Californian came up with (notwithstanding the obvious earthquake danger).

Thankfully, it is NOT some moron's idea of Adaptive Re-Use, nor some hillbilly condo development scheme. It turns out this House Truck cousin is part of a theatrical set for the Openluchttheater outdoor Theatre Company located in Amsterdam.

The original production was back in 2005 for the play "Ivanov" by Tsjechov. Clever set design. You can see more photos of this set at the SonnyRadio website. (But don't use their website button to forward the photo link to your friends. It it could be a vehicle to gather email addresses for spam..)

Funny. Pheeww. Close one.

Siemens Eco Solar Phone - Be Green, Recycle

2008-03-08T08:24:00.032-06:00

The Home Electronics Saga Continues..
(updated 3/16/08)

Before my TV started to die, my Siemens cordless phones started to show signs of an impending expiration as well. I have to say, my 8 year old cordless Siemens Gigaset phones performed well. For a cordless phone, the clarity was equal to any corded phone, imo. But apparently, several cycles of re-charging these things has taken a toll.
Now, in addition to looking for a new HD TV, it appears I am inching closer to being forced to buy new phones for home use. (People are complaining my phones are starting to sound static-y. Not good.) Since we all know that electronics equipment isn't always environmentally friendly, I try not to buy products that once disposed, cause harm to the environment.
This is where Siemens comes in..

A ShantyWorld FIRST !
The Siemens Solar Phone (Cordless phone).

This is one gadget that neither Gizmodo nor Engadget have listed first. Since I love my Siemens 2420 Gigaset phones, I decided I would first give their new phones a look. (I like the Siemens phones in part because they are not only the clearest cordless phones I've ever used/owned, but Siemens engineering is consistently solid.)

Siemens also has a line of phones that use SIM chips, so you can pop your mobile phone SIM card into your home phone and have access to your mobile's calendar & phone book. Nice. Siemens also has a line of phones that work as intercoms, which let you see a live pic on your handset of who's at your front door.

Anyway, I surfed over to the Siemens site (3/3/08) and saw that they've introduced the "SOLAR" -- clearly an iPhone knock-off in the style department. According to Siemens, it's a "self-charging solar phone". Interesting.

From the Siemens website:

Solar, the high-end phone in the design study “Gigaset Eco Visions” uses all-over solar cells for a self-sustaining energy supply. It recharges naturally in the sun. The eco-index indicates the renewable energy use. Made of pure, separable materials (metal, eco-plastics, glass) the Gigaset Solar is truly state of the art high-tech inside and out. OLED touchpad technology allows a function-depending key indication on the Solar’s transparent display.

According to the Siemens Gigaset blog, the Solar is the second in a Trio of Eco-Friendly Home/Office Communication (SHC) devices to be rolled out over the next year by Siemens. (Errr, EFHOC is a posh way of saying "phones"...) From the Siemens site, "The phones have been engineered to be eco-friendly in terms of design, technology, materials, and characteristics throughout the entire product lifecycle – from manufacturing to recycling." [UPDATE 5/31/08, see new photo of Solar prototype above.]

The Leaf and Stone are the other two models that make up the SHC Trilogy. I've been eyeing the Gigaset S675 & S450 DECT phones & to replace my 2420 system, but consistent with my early adopter ways, I might have to wait until the Siemens Solar comes out. Too many gadgets, too little time (and cash).

Recycling of Electronic Equipment (in the USA) -
A lot of big box office supply and electronics retailers will recycle your old electronics equipment for you. Just call your local store in advance to make sure the location near you will take your old stuff. Some locations offer FREE recycling services. Others charge a small fee ($5-10 depending on the type of equipment.) Many of these stores have drop-off boxes/ spaces in their stores for old equipment. Either way, it's a good idea to properly recycle your old electronics.

electronicsrecycling.org - Database of places to recycle your old electronics equipment.
eCycling - US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) web page listing Electronics recycling info, for computers, old TVs, cell phones, etc.
There are plenty of other places that can direct you to recycling programs, but at least you've got a few places to start.

Be GREEN, recycle those old gadgets.

Building Performance Art

2008-03-04T18:14:00.038-06:00

I want my COLOUR HDTV!
Ok, so my 18 year old Sony TV is slowly dying... and I figured I'd start looking for a new HDTV to replace it. If you want a good starting point from which to assess tech equipment, you have to seek out geeks who spend their time doing the analysis.

Looking for more info on the subject, I turned to the podcasts of Leo LaPorte at TWiT.tv . LaPorte, along with Scott Wilkinson (UltimateAVmag.com) have done the most due diligence & have the best recommendations , imo, on how to select a good HDTV. With their "help", I have my selection narrowed down to either a Sony Bravia or Sharp Aquos-- only because for the size I'm looking for (26" max.), those were the best two units with the features, ports etc. that I need. (I also want to hook the HDTV up to my computer and I want more than 1 HDMI port..)

As I'm madly Googleing prices on the Sony unit, I stumble upon this HD ad for Sony HDTV units via one of the bit Torrents, Azureus. Through the Azureus client, you can (legally?) view a High Definition (HD) version of the Sony PAINT Commercial. (The commercial supposedly aired back in 2006, but I never saw it...) The "Paint" commercial is but one in a series of clever Sony commercials done in Europe highlighting the Bravia HD technology.

With the backdrop of a soon-to-be-abandoned (?) Urban High-Rise residential complex, the filmmakers shot a Fireworks-style Performance Art piece utilizing exploding paint bombs/cans, resulting in quite the colorific visual. It's part Performance Graffitti and Reality Voyeurism in one. My favorite shots are the ones from inside the building, as the color is exploding. The architectural landscape is an interesting backdrop to the performance.

You have to see it for yourself.

I'll resist the temptation to describe it in detail. Try to find the HD version though-- it's much better than watching the tiny YouTube clip.

It's a great blend of good Art Direction, High Concept and fantastic film editing. No CGI (computer graphic imaging) was used to create these images. That's what makes it all the better as a snippet of film art.

The YouTube version (below) is OK, but you've REALLY got to see this in higher resolution and at a larger size.. preferably with surround sound. YouTube also has a "making of" film clip summarizing the set-up for the shoot, the materials used, etc.

Quick "Sony Bravia Paint Commercial" facts:
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Filmed: June 2006
Prep: 4 months to plan, 250 people over 10 days to set-up film shoot
Material: 70,000 litres of paint
622 Bottle Bombs used
455 Mortars
Clean up: Dozens of people over 5 days to clean up paint
Paint: was supposedly environmentally friendly
Sony Bravia site: www.bravia-avert.com

No NIMBYs were hurt during the filming of this commercial (so I understand..)

Construction Nightmares

2008-02-24T16:27:00.015-06:00

The ShantyWorld Flickr Construction Nightmare PHOTO Group is now alive and active.
If you thought YOUR contractor was stupid, take a look at these other guys..

The Flickr group is free, and I hope it will be informative and fun for visitors and members alike.

Special note to Licensed Home Inspectors, please post your photos of bad construction.

Home Owners & Realtors: Please post your photos of bad construction & repair work.

Please do not post Full nor company names of these crummy "contractors" !
DO NOT post specific addresses, but the city and neighborhood location would be OK. We don't want people (especially not me) to be sued.

Flickr Group name: Home Inspection Nightmares
Flickr Adminstrator: shantyminister (no spaces)

If you want to view or share your own photos with this group, you'll need to sign up for either a (free) Flickr account, or you'll need to use your Yahoo mail (or SBC Global or ATT DSL) account to post to the group.

This Flickr group will be monitored.
Let's Post !

© 2008 ShantyWorld.com

Construction & Home Inspection Nightmares

2008-02-24T12:27:00.060-06:00

As Americans tighten their belts with respect to their own disposable income, you can be sure more property owners will move to repairing and renovating their existing properties instead of trying to upgrade to new digs. As a result, more home owners are bound to find themselves face-to-face with the reality that their existing property may have (existing) defects that need to be corrected. It's also likely that these same property owners will also encounter a contractor that may (or may not) actually complete the renovation work correctly.

Coincidentally, as I listened to the rebroadcast of Tavis Smiley's, the State of the Black Union (2008) on C-Span, a displaced New Orleans resident spoke about her experience with contractors who promised to do repair work to her New Orleans home, took her money, but never showed up to finish/complete the work. I have said (even here) many times, that that is not a problem unique to the victims of Katrina. [ See my post on Mike Holmes, Contractor.]

So when I stumbled on (yet again) Home Inspection Nightmare examples on the This Old House website, courtesy of the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI) , it reminded me that I need to post examples from right here in Chicago. The "Home Inspection Nightmares" section on the TOH web site is their MOST visited section. Most visited! Amazing. On a positive note, it does point out that anyone who owns or is looking to own property, should learn how to avoid (financial) disaster by learning from the mistakes of others.

There were a few patterns that appeared as a result of this "worst of" American homes...

1. That the states with the most lenient Home Inspection (HI) laws (i.e. laws regulating the selling of property), tended to have a significant number of dangerous construction problems. The states having more lenient HI laws included California, many southern states, and yes, my beloved Illinois. (Illinois came in the lower 35% percentile. Calf. was one of the worst in the nation, followed by many southern states.)
2. Communities with more relaxed building codes, tended to have high incidences of shoddy construction, and a high percentage of homes with dangerous existing conditions. [Makes sense, doesn't it?]

Unfortunately, there were fewer correlations between location and the number (or severity) of construction. Shoddy construction seems to know no real demographic. (Even well prepared property owners experience fraud.) While it is true poorer households do suffer a high rate of contractor fraud, middle and upper income households experience a significant rate of contractor fraud as well. In fact, some of the most egregious construction practices occurred in homes valued over $750K. (The primary difference between the rich and the less rich, has more to do with resources available to the household to later seek out a remedy-- to sue the contractor. Of course, suing a contractor usually comes well after a breach of contract or trust, when the damage is already done.)

Let's dispense with the chit chat, and get to the examples..

This contractor seemed to think no joists and no sub-floor were required under the bathroom. They just went ahead and installed new drywall over a wall that had no joist and no sub-floor supporting it. The GC is being rightly sued. Unfortunately, in the 4+ years when this work originally was done, this group of Contractors have worked on many other homes and will probably continue to work on other homes in the Chicago area. What is so sickening about this is, none of the trades involved in the job (the plumber, the dry waller, painter, etc.) did anything about trying to get this situation corrected. How do they sleep at night?

Photo of this same area from below.

Notice how the floor joist was totally cut away by the moron that is the plumber. (Actually two floor joists were completely cut out, but it's hard to see that in this picture.) The white dashed lines show where the joist material SHOULD have been. This contractor later came back and instead of correcting the problem, covered it up with a mudset coat, and literally painted the area (to disguise water damage, the old areas from the new, and the fresh cut wood. )

From the same moron Contractor..

This same house (photo below) was suppose to be undergoing repairs as of a result of damage sustained by a fire. The General Contractor didn't think anyone would notice that the sub-floor should have been replaced--even though it was in his written contract that the sub-floor be replaced. (Uumm, how do you replace a sub-floor AFTER all the new drywall and walls have been installed? This GC repeatedly ignored directives to install materials in the proper sequence.)

In the photo below, why remove, clean & reinstall the radiator, when your position [as the GC] is that the home owner is too stupid to care about the details of how things get installed ? Just cut out the new wood floor AROUND the radiator leg. This "method" saved some dumbass floor contractor the hassle of having the GC's HVAC contractor move the radiators. Notice how that wretched sub-floor (above) shows through under the "new" wood floor. Almost too stupid for words.. Disgusting work, yet typical.

I hope the rest of these photos speak for themselves...

Electrical outlets and switches in wet areas (including showers) are abundant.

And just in case you new homeowners are feeling secure... It appears that a large share of these kinds of mistakes are present in a considerable portion of NEW HOME CONSTRUCTION as well.

So, those of you buying a NEW HOME should ALSO hire a licensed Home Inspector (and/or hire an architect) to help you during the buying process.

I am starting a public FLickr pool of Home Inspection Nightmare shots. I'll post a link to the FLickr pool later. We can share photos and learn from one another. (Or send me your shots. Photos need to be UNDER 1 MB in size if you email them to me.)
- © 2008, ShantyWorld.com

Tesla Update - Video Test Drive

2008-02-04T19:26:00.002-06:00

I was surfing for my usual Mac Podcasts several weeks ago, and came across Revision3.com's video podcast (April 2007) where they managed to get a test ride in the new TESLA (all electric/green) Sportscar. (It's not your mother's Prius.) You can download the HD video from iTunes or can view the stream from the Revision 3 website. (For iPod and iPhone users, the file is video iPod-ready.)

Tesla has been plagued by personnel changes in the company, battery and other technical delays. Tree Huggers & motorheads alike can hardly wait 'til the Roadster hits the market. Read my earlier post (11/9/2006) about the Tesla Roadster.

They're From Around the Way

2008-02-02T17:57:00.000-06:00

Shanty "Pre-Fab Quickies"
Work has been crazy, but I wanted to post a few quick items so my 2 readers won't think I've fallen off my drafting stool and have forgotten about the blog. I'll call these quick posts, "Pre-Fab Quickies." Corny, I know..

Not unlike former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, I've always loved Chicago. Once you get to know the City, it's easy to see why visitors and natives alike can list-- with considerable ease, those items, places and people that shape why Chicago is fabulous. Over the last few months, I've added a few reasons to my list. (I'll share a few of those reasons in later posts..)

For those who want a quick visual slice of Chicago, I encourage you to visit the Flickr pages that have "Chicago" as part of the tag. This designer is particularly fond of the fabulous amateur (and pro) photos posted of Chicago Architecture on the Flickr site. The photos are just fabulous. (This one reason why I love the internet..) What makes Flickr.com so great is not just that images are there for all to see, but that Flickr has a way to search for images by topic, subject, interest. One such example is a photo by "Menlo" on FLickr of Marina City (shown above left).

Crooks Don't Go Away, They Just Find New Chumps

From the continuing saga of "Lies My Contractor Told Me" , come more contractor horror stories. (You can also substitute the word "Developer" for "Contractor". ) My friends and clients know that I've been warning them for 15+ years that it's not a matter of IF, but WHAT your contractor will lie to you about. (The "when" starts almost immediately..)

That is why I was so glad to stumble on a really good Cable TV Construction show from Discovery HOME Channel called, "Holmes on Homes". The entire premise of the show is about lying, incompetent contractors, and the damage and danger they've been leaving behind. The show takes place mostly in Canada, although one episode was recently shot in the US.

Enter this burly, Canadian Alpha male contractor named Mike Holmes to the rescue. In each episode Holmes breaks down (for some unlucky homeowner) how and why the previous contractor's work was wrong/unsafe/not code-compliant, etc. Then, Holmes and his crew rip out the crummy work and do it the right way (more or less).
Apparently, there are a lot of incompetent, lying contractors and developers in Canada too. (Pheeew --it's not just the Chicago area that has its share of lousy contractors. Again, feel free to substitute the word "Developer" for "Contractor".)

While the designs are builder-esque, the craftsmanship of the work seems very solid. Check your local listings for air times. (In Chicago, the show is on cable TV daily, with several repeats during the day. How did I miss this show the first 6 years ??) Alternatively, you can buy the DVDs from the previous 6 seasons from Amazon.com.

A lot of people think I'm crazy when I tell them I've never NOT had a contractor lie to me about some aspect of a project. And it doesn't matter [to the contractor] the client demographic, location, project size, complexity, dollar value (of the project), nor project type: public vs private, commercial nor residential.. I have found that nearly all contractors lie -- at least here in the state of Illinois. It must be a genetic requirement for being a contractor. Nonetheless..

Newbie homeowners (and those looking to work with a contractor) really need to educate themselves before they buy into a development or hire a contractor. When you don't, this show explains just how badly a project can go when an incompetent contractor is hired by an unprepared homeowner.

SouthSide Blogger

I stumbled on a fun blog that Chicagoans and Condo owners (regardless of locale) should check out: "I Hate My Developer".
(found at ihatemydeveloper.blogspot.com)

"I Hate My Developer" chronicles one southside Condo Owner's trials with her Condo Association's developer, city officials, contractors and neighbors. It's smartly written, and very funny. It's both comedy and tragedy (in a good way.)

See, I too, live in a Condo.. and I've often thought the story of the shenanigans in my not-so-little condo community would make a great 21st century reality TV show. If we could get Hollywood to document (and pay us) for all the drama we get to live through as residents, all of our Association's financial problems (and special assessments) would be alleviated in the first season's airing.

Think: Melrose Place (the 1990s TV Dramady soap opera) with all the racial conflict of a Clinton / Obama Democratic primary battle, set in Chicago's multi-cultural Hyde Park. This show could be good stuff, people.

First, you have to understand that I live in a LARGE, 700+ multi-unit complex-- which makes consensus gathering nearly impossible. Competing agendas and wide-spread incompetence makes for lively Association meetings. Don't get me wrong, as an architect, I love the architecture of the building. The complex is done in a sort-of International, Miesian-lite kind of style.

It's a late '50s modern high-rise with a largely glass facade, and NewYork styled, tiny galley designer kitchens without the starchitect pricetag.
Who needs to live in the high-priced Mies van der Rohe 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments when you have Meisian-lite here on the southside? All the drama, but none of the property tax, gawker tourist problems. The southside is such a bargain.

Secondly, we have all the cliche reality show storylines that make for a hit show. We've got generational, race and class issues, prostitution, comic relief (from incompetent Board Members, employees and residents), we've had murder, suicide, domestic violence, and the occasional resident celebrity siting.

As a prequel to the series, we'd have to re-enact the episode where a 50+ year-old Board member tries to open-flame bar-be-que in one of the apartments. (Did I mention we don't have balconies-- and this person was cooking on a carpet and claims to be a Univ. of Chicago graduate ?) That episode would probably earn high ratings, ala the Jessica Simpson Chicken-of-the-Sea Tuna type humor. So many story lines are possible...

Our "building" is home to a cadre of D-list (mostly local) celebs, authors, TV/radio personalities, and we even have a few "has-been" national celebs. Our building is often used for TV/ movies shoots, and we have some of the best lake-front views of the City of Chicago. (I have a wonderful view of Lake Michigan.) We're a stones throw from the University of Chicago campus, the World famous Museum of Science & Industry, the DuSable Museum, and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama lives in the neighborhood.

I have episode outlines...I just need someone to option the show. Takers?

©2008 ShantyWorld.com. All Rights Reserved.

Rural Studio's $20K House

2007-11-25T23:10:00.001-06:00

For many years, the architecture students at Auburn University have been exploring planning and Design/ Build issues up close via hands-on experience through work done as part of Rural Studio (RS). Rural Studio examines the many facets of planning, affordablity and the challenges of providing real-world replicatable architectural solutions. As part of its project for 2007, Rural Studio (RS) has completed an interesting housing prototype for Hale County (Alabama). The target cost: $20K (labor and materials). Rural Studio (at Auburn's School of Architecture) was the brainchild of architect/educator Samuel Mockbee & D.K. Ruth. Mockbee passed away a few years ago, but the program is still operational and has produced an interesting student project for 2007: an affordable residence built for about $20K for some of the areas' low income residents.

Very much borne out the southern shot gun vernacular, this structure is all about utility and fulfilling basic [housing] needs. The Katrina Cottages (designed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, $30-100K each) share some of the same (albeit abstract) vernacular as the $20K House in a direct response to the problem of readily erected & affordable housing. After all, the lack of affordable housing is probably the single most under-reported and oft ignored socio-economic problem facing the US -- moreso than even health care or exaggerated threats to our national safety. (The US housing market should undergo further, perhaps even more dramatic corrections in the months head, imo. But I digress..)

The students & faculty have briefly documented the project, posted photos on the process, etc., on a blog devoted to the project. Surf over to Auburn's School of Architecture to read and hear more about the $20K House. Also, Public Radio has done a piece featuring this project entitled , "The Architecture of Decency", (airing November/Dec.). Visit speakingoffaith.org to hear the broadcast (mp3 format).

I'd like to see the ledger on the cost for this particular project, as the number of workers and the time invested if calculated at fair market (or even minimum wage) seems as though it would have pushed the true cost well beyond $20K --even adjusted for regional cost differences. (Info & photos on the blog suggest that about 40 or so people have contributed their work, money and/or time to the project.)

Perhaps RS will publish a data accounting and a more detailed outline of costs, labor supplied, man hours, challenges, etc. Publishing that data would prove far more useful than keeping it limited to the interested participants and sponsors. I mean, if you are really concerned about affordability, you help others make affordable housing a reality in other communities by sharing data, methods, experiences. Otherwise, you create the proprietary mess that surrounds the human genome industry.

Strida Folding Bike - Pedal, Coast

2007-10-27T17:58:00.002-05:00

[See 6/08 update, scroll way dooown.]
With former V.P. Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for work relating to Global Warming awareness, it only seemed appropriate to post a little info about a product squarely in the "Green Transportation" class: the Bicycle. One of my favorite bikes is the Strida Rida [www.strida.us]. Invented [at least] some 22 years ago by British inventor/designer Mark Sanders, the Strida Folding Bike is a great little transportation device that hasn't received enough attention here in the States. [Click on the photo left, to open animation in a new window showing how the bike folds.]

The Strida sports an aluminum frame, so it's very light and portable at 19.4 lbs [9kg]-- unlike MOST steel folding bikes. Not only that, but the Strida goes from compact to full working size in literally seconds unlike its cumbersome (and over priced) competitors. (It really is the easiest bike to fold and unfold without the need for special tools or anything.)

The light weight and quick assembly make the Strida easy to ride to the local commuter train/bus station, then fold up the bike and board the train/bus for the trip to work or out of town. (See the photo in the folded position, below.) The Strida folds down to the size of a large tennis racquet sports bag. It's also light enough to throw into the back seat or trunk of the car, so you can unload the bike and take a nice ride along Lake Michigan or your other favorite waterway path.

For apartment dwellers, the compact size makes it easy to store in a closet (instead of a remote common locker room where it might get stolen. You can buy a duffle-sized bag from Strida for storing & toting your bike. )
My Strida has no greasy chain (it's some kind of space age Kevlar or something), so handling the bike doesn't get you (or your clothes or car) exceptionally dirty.

The center of gravity on the Strida is a bit different than a traditional bike. But after an hour or two of riding, you adjust as you would to any new bicycle.

The latest version of Strida has two price levels: Strida 3.2 (starting at $499 USD) and Strida 5.0 (starting at $799). The Strida comes in 12 different colors / finishes -- depending on model. I "tricked-out" my Strida with a saddle bag, some lights & a bell which makes it safer for city riding.

I bought my Strida about 4 years ago and it's still working fine (although I admit I don't ride it as much as I'd like to.) See the web site for videos on its folding action and for more specs and photos...

The Strida comes in basically one size. (So very tall or short persons might not find the Strida comfortable to ride. Strida is not a bike for smaller children. ) It works best for persons over 5 feet tall and under 6'-3", less than 230 lbs.

But, if you live in an urban area & don't want to lose your parking space because you need to run out to get a newspaper, or you just need a quick ( green) way to get to the train/bus station, consider getting a Strida. They're a lot of fun and it beats paying $3.40/gallon for gas.
[UPDATE: gas in Chicago is now $4.80/gal for super a mere 8 months later. Read how I cut my gasoline cost by over 32% at practically NO COST, without buying a new car & without driving less. I just changed my driving habits. Read my upcoming post on how I did it. ]

© Shantyworld.com 2007

Uber Wind Turbine

2007-09-25T22:34:00.000-05:00

From NewConsumer.com, "UK's Hottest Ethical Lifestyle Magazine" [their words, not mine], comes an Uber Wind Turbine located in Swaffham, Norfolk. The Wind Turbine stands some 219 Feet [67 meters] tall and boasts an observation deck that is open for public access /viewing. According to Ecotricity (the turbines' operating electric company), the Turbine can power about 1000-1500 houses.

Visitors can climb the 300 steps inside the Turbine's structure to get a view of the town and see the MASSIVE 3-ton, 30 meter long Blade span up close. (30 meters ?? Holy Cow!) The Turbine was made in Germany in 1999. Ecotricity has plans to roll out at least 6 more Turbines throughout the UK. Get a load of the hum made by 9 tons of blades spinning by !

Click To Play - Turbine

You'll need Flip4MVW or Flash to view the movie, or go to
Green.tv who also has posted clips (in various video formats) of this report.

Home owners should note, space allowing, smaller scaled Wind Turbines can be utilized to help power a single family home. Wind Turbines are a good alternative power source (when solar panels are not feasible.) I'll have more info on Wind Power in coming posts-- including info on a Chicago based Wind Turbine company that is making headlines with their innovative technology.

Post your thoughts -- Shanty Minister

Designing A Green Thumb

2007-08-19T19:19:00.000-05:00

Landscaping and the design of outdoor spaces is just as important as designing structures and their interiors.. So, it's always a challenge finding simple solutions to introduce a bit of greenery into busy urban lives. Who doesn't enjoy a lovely garden? Well, these two products are a long way from being the perfect garden, but they provide a good start for the [good] design conscious among us.

From the UK, the self-watering WET_POT for plants (for those who travel a lot or otherwise kill their plants by watering them too much or too little.) The manufacturer says the special glaze on the outside of the pot allows --through capillary action-- the water in the surrounding reservoir to slowly be used by the plant as needed.. Kinda like nature, I suppose... (Altho' I can see that clear reservoir getting cloudy and yucky if you don't wipe out the water stains regularly..) Pots come in 3 sizes and I think they'll ship to North America. It's cool looking just the same...
.............................................................

And from RephormHaus (Germany), the Steckling Balcony Flower Pot. it straddles the railing for all you urbanites who need a little green on your balcony. The "Steckling" comes in 3 colors and they even have a Trellis prototype that makes for vertical climbing greenery. At least the pots won't be swept off the balcony by a gust of wind. Sweeeet!

Designed to Love

2007-05-03T21:09:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the great abundance of bad design and poor taste can give fans of [good] design the blues. With the pedestrian lakefront housing designs proposed for the Chicago 2016 Olympics, it's easy make the case that poor taste will never go out of style. Then one day, you flip a magazine page and stumble on a beauty -- relieved that some structure or item other than the local Starbucks is NOT the best designed thing in your city or neighborhood. (OK, that might be overstating things, but the beauty of blogging is being bombastic.)

So, from the "Designs I Love" files, I'll be introducing (or jumping on the bandwagon) in presenting some items for creative consideration.

Let's start with the Pedro and Ines Footbridge (November 2006, Rio Mondego) in Coimbra, Portugal. A collaborative design by Cecil Balmond and Antonio Adao da Fonseca. (Thanks to Hugo for the pics.. Check out his site at Flicker.)

VM Housing - Orestad, Denmark

2007-03-04T10:41:00.001-06:00

I was surfing e-architect.co.uk, , and came along this project near Copenhagen. At first glance, the project looks almost hostile-- like steel and glass shards ready to cut passerbys. (That's probably my urban/public housing background bias talking..) After a more careful investigation, the layout shares little with the large American multi-family layouts from the 1950s. Considerably more attention is given to light, air, views (from the units), unit privacy, and even some personal outdoor space (via balconies) for some of the luckier inhabitants.

VM Housing (Orestad City, 2006) was a collaborative design by PLOT Architects (no longer in business). It's got interesting massing and interior layouts, an exterior that channels abstracted Rietveld, and the requisite modernist glass and steel curtainwall vocabulary. This project is part of a larger master planned multi-use development underway in Orestad over the next 17 or so years.

A brief description from the architects' website:

"The manipulated perimeter block is clearly defined in its four corners but opened intrenally and along the sides. The vis-a-vis with the neighbour is eliminated by pushing the slab in its center, ensuring diagonal views to the vast open fields around...All apartments have a double height space to the north, and wide panoramic views to the south. The logic of the diagonal slab utilized in the V house is broken down in smaller portions for the M house. In this project the typology of the unite d'habitation of Le Corbusier is reinterpreted and improved: the central corridors are short and get light from both ends, like bullet holes penetrating through the building."

PLOT Architects is now divided into two different firms: JDS Architects and BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group)--both of whom have more info and photos on the VM project on their respective websites. A quick Google search yields some photos from the forum group "Skyscraper City - The Big Huge Copenhagen Orestad Thread Part 2", showing the complex under construction. Check those photos out as well.

Looks to be partially pre-fab, huh? Can anyone tell me if this is rental or affordable housing? And what is the cost per unit (monthly in comparable USD) ?

Be sure to also check out Buildings All Over the World Photo Pool. (A Flicker photo blog)

Too bad the high-rise condo boom in downtown Chicago isn't as interesting.

Safer Sawing

2007-01-28T20:00:00.000-06:00

I saw this saw a few months ago and knew I had to include at least a brief mention of it. I've built my own share of cabinets and other wood furniture, and "Saw Stop" represents a breakthrough in shop safety. Table saws are notoriously dangerous (even for experienced wood workers), and at least one company has introduced a feature that minimizes one kind of table saw injury.

Enter Saw Stop table saw that automatically stops the saw blade -- preventing the chopping [off] of fingers when it senses something is being cut other than wood. The machine does this in a matter of milli-seconds, virtually leaving the user with little or no injury. Of course, safety comes at a cost-- about $2800 plus accessories to be exact. But woodworking companies might find it well worth the investment versus the cost of insurance claims, worker's comp costs, and productivity slow downs.

Check out the SawStop web site, and the demo videos. (SawStop Demo videos are also posted on YouTube/Google Video.)

WorkBench also has a video which explains how the saw works.

If only pneumatic nailers could be as safe.

Massive Change

2006-12-18T19:50:00.001-06:00

I am happy to report that I had the chance to visit the "Massive Change" exhibit currently running at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, IL (USA). I knew that the exhibit would be a kick for local tree huggers and advocates for sustainability, but was surprised by its lack of (a more pronounced) narrative on what steps individuals could take beyond thoughtful acts of recycling, using sustainable goods, conserving energy (in all its forms), and general support of communities, endeavors and organizations which promote a more humanist approach to living and commerce.

Don't get me wrong, Massive Change is an exhibit that is more than worth going to see-- especially if one has done little or nothing to examine (reflect, really) how our western lifestyle over the last 75+ years needs to adapt to not only environmental changes, but how the global industrial community should address changes (and needs) the world over. We can't (as humans) afford to worry just about our own personal circumstances at the expense of everyone/everything else around us. At least-- that is, in part, my analysis of what Massive Change is trying to get people (in particular, Americans/Westerners) to consider.

For those of us who have sought out green products (whether it is green vehicles, energy saving light bulbs, etc.) or those for whom sustainability has been a conscientious choice, not too much in the exhibit will be new. But to those who might just now be getting started in understanding the sustainability "movement", and how technology and social choices ADD or detract from the "greater good", this exhibit is a solid starting point. (I especially liked the multimedia exhibit area where everything from WalMart's low cost goods made by low-wage workers, to commentaries on how corporate greed actually works to quell innovations that could bring resources & technology to poor and grossly under-served communities at a fraction of the price and hassle of current systems and models.)

I was encouraged that the exhibit highlighted innovations which seek to assist and improve the quality of life, and to eradicate curable diseases whose solutions languish not from a deficiency in technology & science but are due to a deficiency of political & social will. Massive Change highlights the POTENTIAL for initiatives that could afford us our current lifestyle (or better) without sacrificing resources and human capital in the process.

Some of the items from "Massive Change" of particular note include:

- A section on innovator Dean Kamen (Deka Research) and his many ground breaking systems, including a portable energy and water purifying system called "SlingShot". The device is about the size of a washing machine, making it very portable and attainable. Unlike some of the NASA derived water purifying technologies that take a lot of electricity to run (and are 10-15x larger in size), the Kamen device is self-contained, self-sustaining and could make even raw sewage completely safe to drink. The NASA systems are nearly useless in an emergency situation where power, access to petroleum (to run the generators & engines) and portability are issues. (Think of how the Deka device singularly could change life in parts of India, Africa or even how it could have helped Katrina victims in the Gulf area. Then ask yourself who is behind the blocking of products and innovations like the SlingShot, and who stands to benefit from the SlingShot's absence.)

Dean Kamen is probably best known for his invention of the Segway Human Transporter and for the wheelchair that can climb stairs. (The TV cable channel Sundance is running a great program highlighting Kamen's work, called "Iconoclasts".) [ Update 8/19/07: Visitors to the Chicago area can rent Segways and tool around the beautiful lakefront downtown during the non-winter months. A neat way to try out a Segway !]

Kamen's water purifier reminds me of the product LIFESTRAW which, for about $2 to 3 (USD), can make otherwise bacteria laden water drinkable. (I don't recall if Lifestraw was in the exhibit or not...)

- A Section on the City of Chicago and its Green Building initiatives (i.e. use of roof gardens, energy codes & policies, wind power technologies, etc.)
- A display on Alternative Fuel Vehicles & Electric cars: including the Gem Car (an electric, low-velocity vehicle) and other cars and prototype technology. (I don't recall any mention of the Tesla Motors car--even though Tesla is scheduled to have [correction] a showroom in the Chicago area.)

It would have been great to see visitors come away with (more specific) resources as to where and how we could be active participants in moving the technology and initiatives forward, instead of waiting for it to be served (up) to us as goods (and services) to be consumed. However, I realized that having a sense of "initiative" is not a thing that is innate to the majority of contemporary society. One can only hope, tho'..

Massive Change is only at the MCA through December 31, 2006. So, hurry on down there ! The exhibit is set to travel around the nation. Check the web site for exhibit dates and locations.

© ShantyWorld.com 2006
Topics: Green Issues, Sustainability, Technology, Science, The Arts

Volkswagen Dresden Factory

2006-11-19T16:10:00.001-06:00

Volkswagen's Transparent Factory (Die Glaserne Manufaktur)
For all you Diecast / Matchbox car collectors, check out this Volkswagen automobile factory in Dresden, Germany. The VW management team and marketing department made the right call when they chose the architectural firm who designed this showcase. The glass display tower where the newly fabricated cars are stored recalls Matchbox hobby display imagery in no uncertain terms. The factory was opened a few years ago and tours are open to the public. Volkswagen's luxury car, the Phaeton, is manufactured at this plant.

With VW's sagging US sales, and high US VW price tags, it's easy to see why VW's overhead might be a bit bloated (as compared to Japanese manufacturers.) I don't know what the Detroit Ford and GM plants look like, but I am guessing they are nothing like the VW plant in Dresden.

But style does count for something (in my book). And the design for this factory is quite impressive on first glance (for those who admire good industrial design).

Although the plant has been open a few years, I thought I'd post the photos here because like my beloved Mac[intosh], I know VW enthusiasts are a (relatively) small group here in the States. (I sure do miss my VW...)

The VW enthusiast forum has posted several high quality photos of the plant and has more information on the plant's design, the manufacturing process, tours, etc. (Be forewarned, there are several photos, so it may take awhile for the VW Forum page to load.) The Dresden plant even has its own website where you can learn more about the factory and see more pics.

Check out both websites. It's a lot of fun -- even if you don't drive a VW.

Open Source - Freedom to Innovate

2006-11-16T21:22:00.000-06:00

Now that the "World Rock, Paper Scissors" competition is settled for the next 12 months, there's no better time than now to use the RPS metaphor in proclaiming that Apple [Computers] cover, smashes and cuts Windows [OS]. My friends and family members know I'm a Macintosh user (23 years and counting), and that I avoid all things Windows-related when possible. With the intention of providing a public service, I am taking this opportunity to tell the handful of tightwad internet surfers who have never heard of Open Office software (www.openoffice.org) that they would do well to sign on to the Open Source movement and ditch the crappy Windows Office Suite of mediocre programs in favor of OpenOffice.

Open Office software has gone through several incarnations the over the years (and has been published under other names). Only more recently has it gained a reputation as a feature packed, stable, comprehensive alternative to Microsoft Office software.

Oh, and did I mention Open Office software is FREE?

Open Office is a suite of Business and Productivity software apps that include: a word processor, presentation, vector drawing, spreadsheet and database programs (replacing MS Word, Excel, Power Point, etc..) No need to worry about compatibility. Open Office can open existing MS Suite documents, and works on various platforms and operating systems, including Windows XP, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris. I've created documents in OO and then opened them in MS Word or Excel without problems. The programs are available as a free download. If your internet connection is slow, you can buy a copy on CD or DVD for about $4.95 (plus shipping) from one of the official OO distributors. That beats paying $265-325+ (USD) for a program that often crashes.

For more on the "Open Source movement", check out the GNU / Free Software Foundation (FSF) website.

If I've got to work on a windoze machine (from time to time), at least I don't have to use the equally crummy MS software.

Topic: Technology, Macs

Green Machine: Tesla Motors Electric Car

2006-11-09T21:05:00.001-06:00

Not Your Daddy's Electric Car

From the Green Files: Tesla Motors has rolled out its first 100 all-Electric vehicles and is quickly approaching the 200th. Thank goodness someone with engineering know-how is taking a stab at the archaic petroleum based automotive business model. Treehuggers have known for years that electric cars have been a viable reality in spite of sabotaging efforts from Detroit and petroleum companies worldwide. (Google the 2006 Documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?")

Enter California based Tesla Motors' (teslamotors.com) all-electric sports car that goes from 0-to-60 in 4 seconds with a top speed of around 130 MPH. (That 0-60 stat beats a Lamborghini..) It's a 2-seat, open-top, rear drive roadster. It puts those aardvark looking Priuses to shame. The car is designed & engineered in the USA, but built by Lotus Motors (under a contract agreement w/ Tesla) in the UK.

Quoting from the website,

"Because it has no clutch and a very wide, flat torque curve, the acceleration of the Tesla Roadster is much more available to enjoy: just step on the accelerator and go - no matter what speed you are driving, no matter what gear you are in, the acceleration is instantaneous."

Other Tesla highlights include:
- 248 HP; 13,500 RPM
- Zero Foreign oil requirements; Zero Emissions
- Goes 250 miles on a charge
- 2 Speed Transmission; 4-wheel Disk Brakes w/ ABS
- Has a Solar Panel option (for charging), Neat !
- Soft or hardtop option
- Has a port for your iPod (it better at that price !)
- available in 12 colors
- the car can't be hot-wired (so they say..)
- Lots of standard features like Heated Seats & AC, Alloy wheels; Air Bags, Cruise Control, etc.
- Meets Federal DOT requirements for Insurance & Registration

Tesla Motors Service Centers/Showrooms include: San Carlos, CA (corporate headquarters), New York, Chicago, Miami. If anyone sees one around Chicago, email me !

The Downside: These cars go for about $100,000 USD (or about 1-7/8 Hummers). Hey, but remember when the basic calulator back in the 1970s set you back about $250 and only added, subtracted, divided and multiplied?

Time to go get a lottery ticket..

Topic keywords: Green Issues; Design; Electric Cars.
©2006 ShantyWorld.com

HouseTrucks

2006-11-02T20:39:00.000-06:00

As a grad student, I had a chance to study a fair amount of vernacular & iconic architecture. But I have to admit that this particular nod to the "built-environment" slipped by me. While surfing some of my favorite design websites (and I'll be posting those links here soon too), I came across the site Housetruck.com. It's the brainchild of a guy named Roger D. Beck who has built, lived-in and researched the topic for the last few decades. He's amassed hundreds of photos of these mobile domiciles dating back to the early 1970s and has self-published a book with almost 400 photographs of various mobile bus and truck homes. This gives new meaning to the term "Mobile Home "-- don't it?

I found myself unable to look away, not unlike gawking at a roadside accident. It speaks less to architectural design, imo, than it does to the need for some among us to have the ability to move about freely. It's interesting stuff (from that viewpoint), just the same.

I'm including a link here not so much to encourage like projects, but for the mere spectacle of it all, and as a way to consider how sense of place [home] reconciles with human wanderlust. My Beautiful Shanty, indeed.

There is so much to post.. Hang in there with me people... I've got some interesting stuff coming.

The Ultimate Gated City: What Happened to Black SF ?

2006-10-07T12:32:00.003-05:00

The "Golden Gates" to the City of San Francisco (by Shanty Minister)

Having lived in California's Bay Area when I was a student at UC Berkeley, I always knew (as an outsider) that the so-called progressive culture in a city known as the home to hippies, was anything but welcoming to different cultures. Afterall, the larger context is still that of an America where issues surrounding race affect all aspects of daily life.

My experience with SF included the observation that a substantial portion of SF's poorer citizens seemed concentrated in high rise public housing complexes, and not so much diffused (nor concentrated) in other neighborhoods (as is the case in other major cities). I didn't see much economic diversity within the SF city limits as it related to African American neighborhoods (in the plural being the key distinction)-- not like one experiences in other urban centers, like Chicago, Atlanta, or smaller cities in the south and southeast. There was an obvious socio-economic segregation in SF-- often by race. In a pseudo politically correct Bay Area, no one (in polite society) dared call it segregation. But that is what it appeared to be, most noticeably shaped by race.

There was always an uneasiness (for me) about San Francisco. The fact that a major international City like San Francisco rolled up its welcome mat around midnight, always seemed to me a not-so unintentional way of controlling who came in and out of the City. In the early 1980s, public transportation shut down (more or less) between San Francisco and just about all of its surrounding communities. For people without a car (and cab fare), it amounted to a curfew. One had to be out of [SF] town by a certain time, lest you be stranded (literally) on the streets of San Francisco.

Even when accessing San Francisco by car, it always struck me as odd one had to pay a toll to get past the "gates". I always viewed this as the price of admission to the city and all its implied connotations. It's not like one can easily walk into SF. For a City whose major industry is tourism, why wouldn't access into the City be encouraged, as a means to encourage new visitors and as a means to stimulate economic vitality? If one lived in or were visiting Oakland or Berkeley, there was no easy way to walk across the City limits from parts outside of SF. Surely, this was by design.

The limited schedule for BART [Bay Area public transportation] did not provide 24-hour access. San Francisco was no city, it was a sun-down town. San Francisco was a sun-down town for those who had not yet achieved '80s yuppie-dum, and to those had no trust funds. As a native Chicagoan (and frequent visitor to a 24-hour New York city), there was something very un-democratic about this. This was SF in 1987. But these were only gut feelings of mine. I never bothered to actually check the actual (census) demographics. My mistake. I left the Bay Area in 1987 in part, because I knew SF did not welcome all people after dark, and I resented it as an urbanite and as a city planner.

Fast forward to August 2006, when I came across an article published in "San Francisco Magazine", written by Jaimal Yogis.

An excerpt from "What Happened to [B]lack San Francisco?"

"... Census figures show that from 1990 to 2000, while San Francisco’s overall population increased more than 7 percent, the number of people who listed their race as African American fell from 76,343 to 58,791, a decline of 23 percent, more than any major city in the country has experienced. The black population has been decreasing steadily since its peak of 96,078 in 1970; since then, the percentage of San Franciscans who are African American has dropped from 13 percent to 8 percent. Local residents swear that Bayview–Hunters Point was about 80 percent African American in 1970. Now, the percentage has dropped to 45, which means there is no majority African American neighborhood in San Francisco at all.

Partly it’s the city’s extraordinary real estate market, which is pushing nonwealthy families of all races out of San Francisco. In a city with little room to expand, median home prices hovering around $800,000, and an affordable housing quota that lags 5,000 units behind official state and local targets, it is only natural that residents who can never expect to afford a home—or those for whom the only way to make any real money is to sell a home they bought cheaply years ago—are leaving. San Francisco has also become a city where manufacturing jobs have steadily been replaced by professional jobs requiring high levels of education, which low-income African Americans are less likely to have. The resulting stats are disturbing. The median household income for blacks in San Francisco is about $30,000; for whites, it’s $63,000. But the streets of Bayview–Hunters Point teem with alternative theories. This is ethnic cleansing, some people say. ..."

The Lack of Diversity in Architecture

2006-09-24T11:28:00.004-05:00

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) released its "Demographic Diversity Audit Report" for the profession back in December of 2005 . However, because the report didn't seem to get the kind of attention it deserves (and because this kind of information isn't published annually), I am reposting highlights here. (See the AIA website for more information on this topic.)

Holland & Knight, LLP (a diversity counseling company) prepared the audit for the AIA. You can read more about the methodology and findings as prepared by Holland & Knight (H&K) and issued to the AIA. I'm making the link to the H&K Report available, because I think it sheds even more light on the topic (and its implications for the profession.)

The American Institute of Architects Summary and Review 2005 Demographic Diversity Audit Report DECEMBER 2005 (report)

"According to the United States Census 2000 Special Tabulation, there are 192,860 architects in the United States. Of that number, 20.3% are women, 2.7% are Black, 5.6% are Hispanic, 6.3% are Asian, and .3% are American Indian.

The major limitation to the value of the data collected by the Census Bureau is that the Census Bureau relies on self-identification (emphasis added) in determining whether a person is an architect, and given the 192,860 figure compared to NCARB's 2004 figure of roughly 101,179 architects, the Census numbers are grossly inflated. The inflated numbers are likely due to unregistered and unlicensed design professionals referring to themselves as architects.

The AIA's membership includes approximately half (52,000) of all registered architects in the United States, and the AIA collects and maintains demographic information on most of them.

[ShantyMinister's Note: It is actually illegal for a person in most US states to refer to themselves as an "architect", and to use the term with/to the public in marketing materials, business cards, letterhead, etc. unless the person holds a State license to practice architecture. Violators can (and often are) charged with Class 4 felony if they misrepresent their licensure status to the public.]

Other, and .45% identified as American Indian, versus the demographics of the profession based on 2000 Census data, which are 85.1% White, 2.7% Black, 5.6% Hispanic, 6.3% Asian, and .3% American Indian.

There were notable differences in the rates of AIA membership between the various racial/ethnic groups and across gender. Thirty-five percent of Blacks, 30% of Hispanics, 32% of Asians, 38% of American Indians, and 39% of Others were not members of the AIA.

Highest degree attained. The vast majority of respondents had either a B. Arch. (45%) or M. Arch. (36%). Only 5% of respondents had an accredited pre-professional architecture degree as their highest degree attained and 4% had a graduate degree in another field of study.
Female respondents (42%) were most likely to hold a M. Arch. as their highest degree attained, while male respondents (48%) were most likely to hold only a B. Arch.

State of Practice: Based on the number of respondents, the states with the highest overall representation of practicing architects were California (12%), Texas (8%), the D.C. metropolitan area (encompassing the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia) (8%), New York (7%), Illinois (5%), and Massachusetts (5%). This geographic distribution is consistent with the geographic distribution of architects generally according to the 2003 NCARB Survey of Registered Architects.

Licensure/Registration: Overall, nearly two-thirds of respondents (64%) were licensed/registered. Of those survey respondents who were not licensed/registered (36%), 84% said they intended to seek licensure/registration. However, whereas 69% of White respondents were licensed/registered, only 45% to 48% of respondents of every other racial/ethnic group were licensed/registered, with no appreciable difference among the various racial/ethnic groups.

Primary Reason for Not Practicing: Over one third of overall respondents (35%) not practicing or not intending to practice architecture as a career identified "other" as their primary reason for not practicing. The second most commonly cited reason for not practicing was "professional dissatisfaction" (20%), comprised of "lack of job satisfaction" and "erosion of the architect's role in the building industry," followed closely by "compensation" (18%)."

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) published an article (July 2003) on its findings regarding the drop-out rate of women architects from the profession. The survey responses from practictioners in the RIBA research has some parallels to the AIA findings. (See the RIBA web site for more information.)

Olympic Washington PARKing Lot

2006-09-21T21:52:00.001-05:00

On Wednesday (Sept 20, 2006), Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley announced that Chicago's Washington Park would be the site for the proposed Olympic Stadium for the 2016 Olympics. YIKES !!

Washington Park is on Chicago's southside, just southwest of The University of Chicago. (Chicago Crain's photo)

Apparently, the announcement came as a total shock to the City Councilmen whose district(s) will be largely affected by the plans, in particular Ald. Arenda Troutman (20th ward). (Chicago Tribune story.)

Daley's staff contacted the aldermen only a few hours before the Wednesday afternoon press conference. What's more disappointing is that the Aldermen didn't seem to take offense at being left out of even the most preliminary of planning meetings as it relates to Olympic development and their constituency. Business as usual in Chicago.

I'll reserve my final judgment on the Stadium plans until Daley's committee presents them publicly, but I'm not hopeful nor encouraged by this announcement. To this planner, it just doesn't seem to fit. I don't think PARK space should be developed into stadium space. A park ceases being a park when it has concrete/steel/plastic or otherwise large man-made elements introduced where greenery use to exist.

The proposed 91,000+ seat Stadium is suppose to be a "temporary" structure. After the 2016 Olympics, the Stadium would be converted into a permanent 10,000 seat multi-use venue. Of course, Chicago has to first convince the Olympic Committee that the games should be held here in 2016.

However, should The Games come here, I see Washington Park turning into Washington Parking Lot. The parked cars (and buses and cabs) will be the only "PARK" in Washington Park.

- Who will be able to see any of Washington Park's landscaping after a 91,000 seat stadium, all the parking, and nearby support services are built around the stadium?

- How do you build a temporary parking lot that accommodates tens of thousands of people ?? (You close all the streets leading up to and through all nearby neighborhoods, and pave over all the grass and green space, and you don't tell the neighborhood residents nor the Alderman how you're going to do it --that's how. )

- And just how many 50-75 year old trees are going to be cut down to erect this "temporary" stadium? No such thing as temporarily cutting down 50+ year old trees.

Consider the massive concrete and paved areas required to service the existing 61,000 seat Soldier Field in nearby Downtown Chicago. Chicagoans are familiar w/ the sea of concrete paved parking lots surrounding Soldier Field. Just where are 30,000+ plus cars/visitors going to park in Washington Park? --which is bound to have substantial nearby (semi permanent) parking. Are multi-level parking structures consistent w/ a "Park" setting ?

Not to mention that fact that the arterial streets surrounding and traversing the area are woefully tight/under-sized for the traffic volumes that would be generated by such an international event like the Olympics. Just ask Hyde park / Garfield / 55th St residents..

If you think the Dan Ryan construction has fouled up the commute, Southside residents can start to look forward to the Olympic Washington PARKing lot starting in 2011.

And Southside residents should worry about eminent domain issues and PUBLIC land being grabbed for private development and private profiteering. I mean, this is a public park-- not private land that can be sold (or even leased long-term) to well-connected developers and fat cats for private gain (i.e. profit). Southsiders, be forewarned.

Let's hope that The Washington Park Advisory Council (led by President Cecelia Butler ) has substantive input during the entire process. Chicagoans and Southside residents need to speak up loudly about this one.

Parks provide a release from dense(r) urban life, man-made forms, and provide some modicum of tranquility for urban dwellers. Once the "Park" is gone, you won't get green space and the openess back. Some things should not be for sale (or lease).

[ And after the Dan Ryan project, does anyone think that this will open up opportunities for Chicago's non-majority business community ? ]

A World Without Shanties

2006-09-16T13:42:00.000-05:00

Wow, so much to talk about...

Topics I'll try to tackle in the coming months (in no particular order):

Architecture News - potpourri of all things architecture related.

Like check out this fabulous wood viewing perch structure in the small town of Aurland, Norway. (photo, above left) The Aurland Look-Out, designed by Architects Todd Sanders (Canada) and Tommie Wilhelmsen (Norway). A marvelous example of great design & engineering. Visit the sites for more photos.

Great Design Finds - this might include fabulous industrial design, a great new building/structure; a product or innovation; things that might make life easier; and fun stuff. If you know of a great find, send me a note !

Hideous House of the Month (a.k.a. Latest Real Estate Scam of the Month, or Over Priced Building of the Month) - self explanatory. Something that's new(er), that's poorly built or is unsafe. Basically, this includes something otherwise insulting to the senses.

Feel free to send in/post your recommendations (include a photo). I'll need help compiling this one. Let's learn from mistakes made by others. Since poor taste is something that is prevalent the world over, this blog will never run out of examples and laughs to share.

Which leads me to a secondary topic under this heading: The need for Appraisal/ Real Estate pricing reform. I am always surprised that a significant portion of a house is valued (in our American system) based primarily on its location than the true (current) value of the labor and materials to erect the structure.

It seems to me, there ought to be two prices listed for American real estate:

1) the actual replacement price to build a like structure --should disaster hit, and
2) the cost to be in that location (which includes a social valuation for the size and type of lot). Hmm, maybe if broken out in such a manner, this could lead to all kinds of constitutional challenges. I could be on to something...

I suggest this because, I've seen plenty of buildings that if located in an "urban" area, might only be appraised at $120K. But then place the EXACT same structure in a predominantly white community and the value is three fold. Same shanty, different street. At its core, this seems spectacularly unfair (and ripe with discrimination of all kinds).

Similarly, I'm always baffled by people who pay $300-400K for a small, dilapidated shack in the suburbs. If people want to pay more to be in a certain location, the real cost should be tied to the location (as a line item identifiable cost)-- not the actual cost to build the structure. [Fat chance getting rich people to buy into this approach.. but I thought I'd put it out there for others to consider..]

Under this system of valuation, you'd have one price for the land (and by inference, its location valuation), and another for your insurance and taxes upon which the structure is to be appraised. Oh no, such an approach might actually lower the premiums paid to the insurance companies and lower your taxes. Rats !

All this to say that the wealthy have hoodwinked & manipulated the working classes for centuries with this perverted western system for real estate valuation. (Hey, our system of laws were devised by land owners -- not the common working man.)

Lies My Contractor Told Me - As an architect, I haven't had a single project where the Contractor hasn't lied about something. Contractors always lie. It must be part of their DNA. Sometimes the lies are small, but annoying just the same. Other times, they were HUGE lies that could have compromised safety (or even destroyed the structure completely).

Basically, I'm talking about contractor nightmare stories. This is the side of construction HGTV and DIY networks don't like to focus on. I will post true construction stories here for all to learn from. Feel free to send me your construction nightmare stories. Maybe we can get a contest going...(more on that later. But don't post proper names, phone numbers and addresses.. I'll have to delete those so we don't all get sued.) If you want to complain about a contractor, please do so to your local State's Attorney, Better Business Bureau and to Angie's List. Let's avoid lawsuits stemming from this site. )

Chicago & the Big Box Ordinance - which is really all about working people needing a liveable wage and the lack of affordable housing (the world over). It just so happens that some Chicago Aldermen decided to heap their general discontent with the aforementioned on an easy target: WalMart. Wal-Mart, for many, represents the corporation that most completely represents bad corporate behavior (bad choices, really) when it comes to fair treatment of workers (here and abroad), true diversity (across all job positions), and slave-wage pay scales for product suppliers located outside the USA. ["Slave wages", a true oxymoron.]

See the AFL-CIO's take on Wal-Mart. The secondary issues (which by no means are unimportant) include: Corporate largesse-- Growing corporate influence, control, wealth & greed; the general lack of US corporations feeling a greater responsibility to the communities and customers who made them profitable; monopolies & corporate consolidation.

Katrina / Gulf Coast ReBuilding Efforts - Check out CorporateWatch.org's Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast Fact Sheet. The Federal Response to Katrina: A National-- but predictable disgrace.

Plus, more to come! I've got so much ground to cover.. I can't post everything in the first month. Post your suggestions !

It's A Brave New Shanty World

2006-09-10T14:04:00.004-05:00

Welcome to My New Blog...
Created on this day, 9/10/2006 because:

a) I have wanted to post architecture/planning/ design/social commentary and info for years, but (like many others) was too lazy/unmotivated/overwhelmed to know when and how to start.
b) because for years, I've been waxing on to my friends, clients and family members on various design, environmental and social issues with preacher-like fervor.
And lastly, c) created because I had some time to kill one Sunday. (This seemed like a moderately better use of my time... or maybe not. Time will tell.)

Anyway, pick whatever lame excuse you want.. I'll have plenty of excuses to try to slip past readers in the coming months and years. Mostly, I want to discuss and share info related to Architecture, Urban Planning & Design -- perhaps with Socio-economic factors included for context. That allows for a pretty wide ranging discussion.

After 11 years on the internet, with membership in various Usenet groups, I figured I might as well try to spread my Shanty propaganda to a broader audience. (Architects are performers, you know..) Hey, I can ramble on with the best of 'em. I predicted various architecture/ construction / housing trends long before all the Johnny come-lately social pundits-- but had only my (half-interested) friends and family as corroborating parties to my insightful rants and late-night predictions.

Of course, some "predictions" aren't really so insightful. They are there for the taking by anyone with common sense (and an understanding of American culture, economics and the human condition. Ha !)

For example, take the Go-Go Housing Boom of the 1990s (pre - 9/11/01).
What goes up, must come down.

OK, so that's not that tricky a trend/outcome to predict. But what many people failed to recognize was that the grossly inflated (over valued, really) housing prices of the last 15 years actually will have a long and destructive impact on not just the real estate/housing & construction industries, but on the long-term economic health of the affected communities and the nation in general. (I'll provide more facts to support this thesis in future posts, including links to data, economists, planners and others who share my opinion on this subject.) Anytime a house built for $180,000 sells for $850,000 (to a couple that earns a total of $110K per year), while real wages remain essentially flat (or decline in some cases), a housing bust has to follow. (That was one of my predictions that I was referring to..)

But how do you you convince yuppie dot com stock purchasers who have as-yet to sell high, that what you are saying is true (prior to the dot com stock collapse)? Saying, "I told you so" has such a sore loser, wish I had-your stock options tone to it. You just hope that your friends and family members who spent $400K for a $185K house don't have the need to liquidate/sell when the value goes through the downswing. On the other hand, for a community and a nation to right itself and get back on course, the correction HAS to happen--even to your friends and family members.

Typical Imagined Ditto Head reply: "Hey, who cares about that socialist/communist crap, Minister Shanty? I got mines. So, it's your problem if you are too stupid to figure out how to get yours. A society that ensures its CITIZENS have decent housing and health care would be too much like the welfare state of the pre-Reagan years, or worse, like a "failed" Cuba or the former Soviet Union."

Well, no shanty is an island to itself.

The problem w/ the Go-Go Housing boom of the 1990s has more to do w/ the growing income/wealth gap between the upper and the working middle classes, and the lack of affordable housing than not wanting a portfolio to appreciate. We can't all afford to drive BMWs in a capitalist society-- at least not in the present American system, can we?

It's hard out here for a Maryland (or worse, Washington, DC) white collar pimp to buy a $450,000 house (median house price in a decent area) for a family of 2 or more on $75,000/year. Before the recently proposed minuscule raise in the Minimum [slave] Wage, the rate will have remained at $5.15/hour since 1995 -- an outrageously immoral rate (and duration) for a nation as wealthy as the USA.

What do you expect from a nation that built it's public and private wealth largely on slave labor?

It's not What You Make, It's What You Keep
Sins of Omission: Over last 15 years, the mainstream press, construction & real estate media kept reporting that Housing starts were up, yet failed to notice/report/investigate the corresponding trends affecting household wealth and real earning power for the average American remained largely flat, or declined. Instead, the year 2000 saw a new era in social, national and foreign policy: The Happy Talk Era. If you don't hear bad news, did anything really bad happen (to us or to the nation)? In my region (the Midwest), home foreclosures were at an all time high (per capita). If housing starts increase by 1-3%, while home foreclosure rates double or triple in a region, what really is happening is a (re)distribution of wealth -- not just now, but perhaps for a generation or more. (And don't forget-- the bankruptcy laws were also changed in the last year.)

...but then, as one family member keeps telling me: a substantial portion of Americans are stupid and thus, cannot connect the dots on this nor most any other complex issue. Are we so doomed?

Since one's home/real estate is the primary way (most) Americans build family wealth (and pass it on to younger generations), do laws that shift/change/alter who and how wealth is accumulated affect the long term social fabric of a community, its economy and of a nation? Of course, I say they indeed do-- for the worse.

Yet few (in architecture, planning, finance, government, etc.) seemed willing to actually push an agenda which would serve to avert or quell the affordable housing shortage and the lack of real income growth among the working class and the working poor.

Instead, over the last 15 years, the top 2% of American households increased their net worth, while the American middle-class grew smaller and foreclosures, personal debt and bankruptcies reached an all time high for many Americans in the modern era.

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina served to expose many social, private sector and governmental policy shortcomings -- at least expose them more plainly to those who have been uninterested and unwilling to look at what has been there for quite some time. Surely folks who drive imported luxury cars and who live in their suburban starter castles didn't think poverty in America had been eradicated or that all social economic ills can be solved by the introduction of a Starbucks in every neighborhood?

Perhaps this blog will serve to document any future predictions, trends, remedies or concerns-- at least as I see 'em. I'm not a good typist and admit to being a so-so speller (even after all these years online and a few degrees.) So, I'll give you a pass on typos, and you need to extend me the same courtesy.

I will delete racist, hateful and untruthful posts from visitors to ShantyWorld.com as I see fit.

©copyright ShantyWorld.com 2006 - All Rights Reserved