Too Close for Comfort

Seattle Visit, Plymouth Housing Group

The first part of our visit to Seattle, Washington was with Paul Lambros, Executive Director of the Plymouth Housing Group. Paul spent over two hours with us on Wednesday afternoon (September 23) on a walking tour of Plymouth Housing’s developments in downtown Seattle.

The tour was very impressive. Plymouth Housing Group owns eleven buildings serving almost 1,000 formerly homeless persons scattered all over the downtown area.

Many of the buildings were rehabs of former “fisherman’s hotels”—places that in the past were rented by fisherman as a land base, even though most of their time was spent at sea. As the number of fishermen has declined, these buildings have become surplus and Plymouth Housing Group has acquired a number of them.

As those types of properties have become scarce, Plymouth Housing Group has become more creative and is now acquiring and building on properties that for one reason or another (usually lack of parking) aren’t suitable for other types of development. The picture here is of their newest development under construction with the Space Needle in the background.

How has Plymouth Housing Group accomplished so much? One answer is that it’s been at it for thirty years. By now it has a reputation in the community and an unquestioned expertise that lets its go forward without community opposition for the most part.

Second, Plymouth Housing Group has a model. All of its projects are 100% formerly homeless, have approximately 100 units and feature ground floor retail (which is required by code in downtown Seattle). Sticking with its proven model let’s Plymouth Housing Group build a project about every eighteen months—a breathtaking rate of development by most standards.

Third, and probably most importantly, Plymouth Housing Group has a sufficient and reliable funding stream. That fact applies equally to its rival homeless organization in Seattle, Downtown Emergency Service Center, so I’ll wait until I’ve talked about DESC before describing how Seattle funds housing for the homeless.

What Can We Learn From Seattle? Part I

I’ve been back from the trip I took to Seattle for a week now, and every day I’ve been meaning to write about what we learned. It’s taken a little longer than I wanted to get to this discussion, partly because I needed to digest what I had seen, and partly because the valet at DFW wrecked my truck in a freak accident upon my return—that’s thrown me a little off my stride.

First, I need to provide a little context. Seattle is a very different city than Dallas; older, more dense, more urban and different culturally and politically. Downtown Seattle is vibrant. Not just Peak Place Market, but the downtown streets as well.

The available real estate is constricted by Puget Sound, Lake Washington and other bodies of water. The terrain is hilly.

As a result, land use is more dense—and of course the views are more spectacular.

Seattle’s downtown has more than 20,000 residents, as opposed to the 5,000 people now living in Downtown Dallas, and there are four adjacent neighborhoods, which you couldn’t tell weren’t part of downtown unless someone told you, with another 10,000 residents.

The zoning requires every downtown building (except for some few grandfathered in) to have ground floor retail. The downtown retail market seems strong with Macy’s, Nordstrom’s, every outdoor retailer you can imagine, all the normal chain stores and a plethora of trendy looking restaurants and bars—and a of course a Starbucks, or two, at every corner.

Larry Hamilton, of Hamilton Properties, led our intrepid group of seven (four of whom are pictured below) to learn what we could in twenty-four hours. Besides Larry, there was Mike Faenza from the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, myself, a cameraman, two representatives from the Cedars Neighborhood Association and Paula Blackmon from the Mayor’s office. We wanted to see what Seattle was doing right, how it might apply to Dallas, and establish a baseline for fruitful discussion.

Over the next week I’ll try to describe what we learned.

Why We Can’t Build Co-Housing

Today I want to address a question I got from Joshuadf on September 15, after I wrote about New Hope Housing’s visit to Dallas. Joshuadf asked:

John, I’m wondering if you discussed the importance of relationships between residents and the community with New Hope. The carfreeinbigd blog recently had what I thought was a really insightful post “The Naughty Building Catablog” (I can’t seem to link here) that really hits this. I know they weren’t excited about the re:vision designs, but I wonder if cohousing would be a viable option there.

Here’s the passage from Living Car-Free in Big D that’s under discussion:

But, these are still physical examples that while good IMO, don’t address the social issue of the vertical cul-de-sac. One idea that I have put forth in the past for an idea for mid-to-high rise co-housing, is that there are hierarchies of social, public, or semi-public space based on the size of the community.

This stems from the idea that any one person’s community, the amount of people they can ever really “know” at one time is approximately 150. I probably need to track this back to source the info, but something tells me it was one of those tidbits that stuck with me from a psychology class in college. In this case, the vertical co-housing would be the person’s “community”. Whether they choose to know everybody within their building is beside the point, but the opportunity is there.

The vertical co-housing was based on the idea of eliminating excess inefficiencies of excess individual plumbing lines, savings on sharing of electricity and appliances, and all but eliminating inefficient floor space, meaning, no hallways. The elevator opens directly into a shared kitchen/dining area that would be shared by 4 to 8 units per floor and potential two floors per kitchen area. This would be organized as a tenants “nuclear family”.

The rest of the common amenities would be structured similarly based on the amount of people to use it. Meaning every four or so floors there is a common gathering area, be it a workout facility, a pool, a game room, home theater, etc. These areas would be the “extended family”.

The whole blog from September 8, 2009 can be found here: http://carfreeinbigd.blogspot.com/. It’s worth reading.

I’m afraid I’m going to give a pretty simplistic answer to a very complex and sophisticated discussion: We won’t build it because nobody will finance it.

The concept is interesting. I don’t know whether or not it would work. But it’s not going to be tried any time soon, except at a very small scale, which I don’t think is the idea here.

There is unknown market acceptance. There are no comparables to support an appraisal. It probably violates half a dozen provisions of the building code and the rules for every applicable or possibly applicable government subsidy.

Our mission is to create diverse housing, so no matter how beautiful the idea, if we can’t actually build it, then we won’t spend much time thinking about it. I’m afraid (until someone else proves up the market for co-housing) that co-housing isn’t on our horizon.

But the minute someone else shows that it’s viable we’ll be there.

Bill Gates Walked into a Bar

Capitalism without Capitalists: You don’t need to outrun the bear

When a Nobel Laureate weighs in an issue, then you really ought to at least listen and think about whether their thoughts have some merit. Well, the Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krygman has weighed in on the issues of compensation for the financial industry and I think you need to look at what he says.

What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? IN a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits–but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: Some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.

The whole article is here:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-krugman_22edi.State.Edition1.259a4e0.html.

This is nothing more complicated than understanding that when you play with Other People’s Money (OPM is the inside term), that the rules are “heads I win, tails you lose”.

It doesn’t take a financial genius to understand this principle. Give me $1,000 to gamble for you in Vegas. I’ll only ask for 10% of any winning. I am a bad poker layer and even worse at craps or blackjack, so I’m just going to put your money on the roulette wheel. In fact, I’m going be number 22 in honor of Casablanca. If I win, then we get $36,000-$3,600 for me and $32,400 for you. But if we lose then you’re out a grand and I’m out nothing. Given the house odds, we will always lose if we play long enough. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but we will always lose.

I don’t care because when we win I get my money. When we bet then it’s only your money at stake. When we lose then it’s your money.

During the financial crisis of the late 1980′s and early 1990′s I worked for a law firm representing the FSLIC and FDIC — the entities that guaranteed your deposits in savings and loans and banks. I know more than a half dozen ways to create big short term profits (that would generate big bonuses), while making long-term losses almost inevitable. I know as many more ways to simply gamble on the economy that may or may not work, but when they do work would make profits that would justify big bonuses. All my incentives are to gamble with OPM — if I win then we both win, if I lose then you just lose.

My level of financial expertise is really pretty rudimentary. I know a lot of people that are more sophisticated than I am — and I don’t even know many many people at the top end of this spectrum. Unless you trust each and everyone of us to deal with perfect fidelity with your money (and we have it, in mortgages, checking accounts, savings accounts, 401ks, money markets, the stock market and everywhere else), then you need to worry about regulation of compensation for people in the financial industry. My Dad taught me to trust everyone but always cut the cards.

People thought Bernie Madoff was a financial genius. The truth is that no one can out think the market, but making money doesn’t require beating the market, only finding investors more gullible than yourself. It’s like the old joke:

You’ll Never Outrun that Bear

Two lawyers walking through the woods spotted a vicious-looking bear. The first lawyer immediately opened his briefcase, pulled out a pair of sneakers and started putting them on.

The second lawyer looked at him and said, “You’re crazy! You’ll never be able to outrun that bear!”

“I don’t have to,” the first lawyer replied. “I only have to outrun you.”

If we don’t put controls on compensation for people working at financial institutions, then they don’t need to beat the market. All they need to do is find a way to make short term profits, at least some of the time that beat the market. Risk doesn’t matter to them (or at least that percentage of people that are more interested in making money rather than doing right), after all it’s OPM.

Capitalism only works when people have just as much to lose as to gain. That’s not the case when you are playing with OPM.

Mass Transit

Today I was without a vehicle, so I decided to take mass transit home. A number of people offered me a ride (most people in Dallas still look at getting around without driving as something that only the destitute resort to), but I like to make my own way whenever possible, so I refused as politely as I could.

The cost for my DART pass was $1.75 for a twelve-mile trip. According to the IRS the reimbursable cost per mile is $.55, so the trip was a bargain—I saved $4.85 over the IRS’s estimate.

My driving time to and from work is 24 minutes, so to begin with it looks like I lost 36 minutes. I managed to get some things accomplished during the trip, so I think you have to subtract some of the time I spent from the total. Here’s how I see the overall result:

Now I think my time is valuable, but if those two minutes saved me $4.85, then my time would have to be worth more than $145.50 per hour to make driving worthwhile.

I don’t know how to evaluate whether or not that is a good deal. I get paid a lot less than that at Central Dallas CDC, but when I was practicing law my hourly rate was significantly higher than $145.50 per hour. So at least to someone, my time is (or used to be) more valuable than the money I saved by taking mass transit. I could have been working.

But the real savings went to my wife, friends and co-workers, one of whom saved about an hour of time by not driving me home and then driving back to wherever they needed to be. I may not know exactly what my time is worth, but I know that two minutes of my time is not worth as much as an hour of their time. Even though they would have gladly made the trip for me, I would have felt that it was a moral failing to use so much of their time to save so little of mine.

Every action we take affects other people for good or for bad. Turn off the light when you leave the room and a child somewhere probably breathes just so slightly easier. Make a place for someone to live and their life becomes worthwhile again. Build a business; make jobs; and families flourish and the community improves. Many times these choices are abstract and difficult to understand, but I’m sure that no matter how willingly the sacrifice is made, my time is not worth thirty times as much as that of anyone else I know.

2009 A Night to Remember

Are You Offended?

Lately we’ve been inundated with discussions of rude public behavior. You all know the controversies over Rep. Joe Wilson, Kanye West and Town Halls. I don’t approve of any of their behavior, but I don’t want to see our public discourse become boring and without passion either.

Today I was thinking about what makes speech offensive, and the difference between colorful, passionate speech and rudeness, when I ran across a gem from Jim Schutze, commenting on Unfair Park:

We have been here so many times before. The Dallas Plan. The Expanded Vision Plan. Somebody falls in love with a star planner. The star comes in, goes to parties at the art museum and does a bunch of drawings and walks with a fat fee. And none of it ever turns into reality, because none of it came up out of the democratic community process that is the only system capable of producing solutions every body will live with…You know, if somebody around here really believes in planning all of a sudden, they could begin by lobbying the city council to kick the city manager’s ass and make her give the city planning department back its teeth. But you couldn’t really have parties at the museum for that, could you? What a city – - worse streets than Mexico but run by debutantes.

The whole discussion is here:
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2009/09/on_tuesday_the _dallas_city.pho.

I know some of the people involved in the Dallas Urban Design Studio, which is under discussion here, and they weren’t offended, but amused by Jim Schutze (a fact that might offend him). Some of the difference might be the recipient of the speech, but I think most of its is style.

I’m not sure why, but a clever and colorful insult is a lot easier to take then a bare accusation. It’s why we all love Mark Twain, and almost everyone likes a conservative humorist like P. J. O’Roarke or a liberal one like Molly Ivins, regardless of their politics. When an insult reaches a certain level of artistry, than you have to agree with Aristophanes:

“To be insulted by you is to be garlanded with lilies.”

In short, I don’t think the problem is too much confrontation, but too little creativity.

Straw Bale Building, Part II

Until recently, there have been two main approaches to building with straw bales. First, the straw bales can be the major structural element of the building—“load-bearing”—or a post and beam structure can be built and the straw bales used then as insulation.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each method of construction. Load-bearing straw bale walls are sufficient for residential construction, at least for smaller houses, but aren’t sufficiently strong for commercial houses.

Post and beam construction is strong enough for most types of structures (as strong as the posts and beams), but is more expensive to build.

In both types of construction, it’s important to have a good foundation and a good roof, preferably with wide overhangs, to prevent moisture from invading the structure. The straw bales are covered on the outside with stucco or plaster, usually on both the inside and outside of the building.

So far, straw bale houses are mostly a novelty and have mostly been built in the arid Southwest, but there are some new developments on the horizon that may lead to building more straw bale houses. Researchers, like the University of Bath who designed and is building the two story home pictured below, are working with prefabricated straw bale walls.

It’s sort of like tilt up cement construction, but lighter and with better thermal qualities.

I don’t know whether prefabricated straw bale homes will prove to be practical, but it’s an interesting idea.

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