My Built Environment: Good, Bad, and Really Ugly

As a small business owner of Vignette Studios, I am amazed at all the money being thrown into the financial systems, banks, markets, and possibly the auto industry now. All this is supposedly to keep a huge meltdown of the system from happening, with the original theory of helping out main street. Well guess what? The meltdown happened anyway. But I often ask myself, where is my bailout? I have tried hard to keep my debt down, have refused to mortgage my house to the hilt, have always managed to pay my bills even in tight times, and have tried hard to keep people employed. In spite of all this, my industry, which has been slowing down for the past few years, has collapsed the last six months. I am worried that everything I have worked hard for, might all be lost. So why isn’t the feds coming to my aid? Instead of handing out billions upon billions to a few key companies, where I will never see any of that money, and they are still shedding thousands of jobs anyway, which makes the economy worse, and we just continue to spiral down, why not send each small business owner a hundred grand or so? That would keep millions of people employed, keep small business doors open, and keep us from defaulting. I think the feds, if they want to throw out money, need to truly help Main Street.

That being said, I am optimistic that we are closer to the end of this mess than the beginning. My business is directly tied to the residential market, and the residential market will come back first and help to lead the country out of the mess. All markets are local, and many will come back before the national market will. Our market, in Northern Colorado, did not get the massive buildup and runup in prices that California, Nevada, and other places did, therefor we did not fall as bad. All the indicators are out there that we have reached bottom, and will start climbing our way out. All we need is some confidence.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I have been working on a small 10 unit development, where our goal has been to create a sustainable community from the ground up. This development called Midori (see the sustainable development post below) has only 10 homes on 5 acres. While this is not an aggressive density by any means, it is all that is allowed per the zoning code. One of the big goals was to reduce our impacts on stormwater management. We were able to do this somewhat, by reducing our amount of hardscaping, and having plenty of open space. However, some of my other ideas were shot down by the reviewing jurisdiction. One of my thoughts was to use permeable pavement in our private driveways. I would be allowed to do it, but would not receive any stormwater credit because of fears that it could become clogged, or that the homeowners may choose to pave over it in the future. These are reasonable concerns, but this line of thinking does not allow any kind of creativity, especially in light of todays views of trying to leave a light footprint on the planet. To add insult to injury, in turns out that when the adjacent roadway was rebuilt a couple of years ago, an outfall pipe for the property was not installed, so now we have to account for double detention on our property. As a result we have gone from a barely noticeable detention area of only a foot or two deep, to a hole in the ground that is 6 feet deep.

At least I was able to achieve one of my goals and minimized the amount of piping, with most of the stormwater being carried in open swales. Oh well, maybe we can still make up for it in the landscaping and the homebuilding.

Recently Standard Pacific Homes of Colorado opened a new project in the heart of Lowry, within the City of Denver. We worked with Standard Pacific for almost 18 months on this project, from initial conception, to project approvals and finally construction documents. We were responsible for the entire site design, streetscape renderings, and landscape design. At only 20 homes, this community is sure to be a quick sellout. Indeed it opened to strong reviews.

This is a project of small homes on small lots, designed for low maintenance living. The lots are approximately 36 feet wide by 85 feet deep. The lots can be small for this front, since they are accross the street from a community park. A driving design feature, was the desire to create outdoor living spaces. We incorporated use easements, where one homeowner gets the use of the side yard of the adjacent home. Careful attention was paid to the design of the homes themselves to ensure that windows do not face onto adjacent courtyards. We are proud of this design, and look forward to repeating it in other infill developments.

My daughter and I took a trip through Windsor last weekend to see how the progress was coming from the Tornado that wiped out the east side of town last May. I was pleased to see how much progress has been made in the last couple of months. It also occured to me, that even though this tragedy is awful for the homeowners and businesses that were damaged or destroyed, it is also providing much needed jobs for the construction industry right now. From carpenters, to drywallers, to painters to roofers, all are able to make some money and put food on there own tables in a time period that has not been kind to construction personal.

My hats off to Windsor for rising to the occasion and recovering from this storm!

We have been working with Ecosphere Investments on a sustainably driven residential development. This development is featuring 10 homes that will all be built to meet or exceed built-green and/or energy star standards. To complement this, the site plan has been designed to foster community, reduce hard scape, and to be environmentally focused. We are incorporating things such as bio-swales, native plant materials, community, and very limited turf grass. Each home will be carefully sited to provide private outdoor living space in a tightly packed development. The developers are also exploring a community wide geothermal heating and cooling system, Photovoltaic power, and many other ideas. We created some graphics for them to use in the sustainable living fair where they are giving there first marketing exposure to the community. This is indeed, an exciting community that we believe will be the future of development.