My Built Environment: Good, Bad, and Really Ugly

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis recently reported on a historically designated home that has fallen into foreclosure. That is bad enough, but apparently thieves have broken in and pretty much stripped the place of all the cool details that made it historical. This is really sad, and is something that preservation forces should be on watch for happening in other areas. However, this isn’t limited to just historical homes. In many parts of the country, such as Detroit, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, vandels (or the foreclosed owners themselves) are stripping homes of anything of value such as sinks, toilets, light fixtures, cabinets, even furnaces. I remember when I was looking for my first home during that last real estate meltdown in Denver in the late 1980’s, I found some places with the same thing…no cabinets, light fixtures, etc. Pretty sad.

In Suprise, AZ though, they are beginning to prosecute people for this, as reported by Jay Thompson on his blog, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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