Living Ever Larger: Estates in the Sky
For more than a decade, McMansions have been a fixture on the American landscape. Now apartments are being supersized, too. On Fisher Island, near Miami, a condo developer is offering penthouses of 20,000 square feet, more than eight times the size of the average single-family house. In a Las Vegas suburb, a custom-home builder is developing high-rise condos topped by 16,000-square-foot apartments. And in New York, some luxury pads now on the market measure more than 10,000 square feet, gargantuan by Manhattan standards. "The question is not 'What do you need?' it is 'What do you want?' " said Deborah Grubman, a broker with the Corcoran Group in Manhattan, who is helping to market three 8,360-square-foot co-ops in the converted Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue. In addition to a master suite that could comfortably house a family of four, the apartments will feature seven other bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, a drawing room, a dining room, a family room, a media room, a library and two wet bars, one attached to the master suite. "So if, God forbid, you should get thirsty at night, you don't have to go all the way back to the kitchen," Grubman said. At nearly $4,200 a square foot, that yields an asking price of $35 million, not to mention the $26,000-a-month maintenance fees. (www.nytimes.com)
The New York Times (2/02/06); Motoko Rich
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Density Ranking Will Inform Growth Debate
The City of Austin has a new weapon in its arsenal to guide decisions on one of the touchiest topics in city politics — a quietly conceived ranking of the density of various Austin neighborhoods. For years, neighborhood residents, developers and planners have fought sometimes ferocious battles over how much redevelopment and population growth that established neighborhoods in the urban core should absorb. The debate, however, has largely been conducted in a vacuum, without hard numbers to bolster competing arguments that neighborhoods are either maxed out or shirking their responsibilities to a growing city. In more than 50 Austin neighborhoods, city demographer Ryan Robinson divided the number of residents into the amount of residential acreage and subtracted space for such things as streets, office buildings and parks. Neighborhoods were then ranked based on the number of residents per acre. Many longtime neighborhood activists hope the study is just the first step in determining the city’s capacity to absorb residents, a potentially paradigm-shifting number. (www.knowledgeplex.com)
Austin American-Statesman (1/14/06); Jeremy Schwartz
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Garages Go Upscale: More Space for Storage and Maybe Your Cars
The latest addition to Leigh and Carrie Munsell's home in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif. has granite-like flooring, cedar-lined cabinets and pricey recessed lighting. An elegant new pantry? A library? No — a $20,000-plus made-to-order storage space in the couple's two-car garage. With everything from fly-fishing gear to clothes now arranged in an orderly way, the garage is "pristine," says Carrie Munsell, 41, a stay-at-home mom. "No cars are allowed." Aiming for the high-end home owner with a glut of stuff, garage specialists around the country are urging customers to invest in storage space as refined as the rest of their home. Ranging up to 500 square feet, the spaces are typically created along garage walls, often with weatherproof cabinetry in woods like maple and birch. In some cases, cabinets are hung on slatwalls, or storage platforms are installed above the cars. Garage Envy, a three-year-old garage-storage company in Pasadena, Calif., offers features like retractable benches ($650 apiece) and marble flooring and granite tops for work tables for $35 per square foot. Business has been so good the firm just opened branches in northern California, Arizona and Oregon. In Houston, a typical custom job by Advantage Garage Cabinets is about $2,700, or double the amount a year ago. (www.realestatejournal.com)
The Wall Street Journal Online (1/31/06); Amir Efrati
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Boost Your Overhead; Look Up. See White? You Can Change That
Known as the “fifth wall” in architecture, the ceiling often is overlooked in design and decorating. Drywall it, paint it white and you’re done, right? Not necessarily. Evanston-based architect Donna Lee Floeter says today’s home owners are more likely to add ceiling treatments to their remodeling to-do lists than in past years — perhaps because in many cases there is simply more room to play with overhead. Nine-foot ceilings are now a standard height, up from 8 feet, according to NAHB. Yet architects and builders report a move away from soaring, two story ceilings. That’s where beams and beadboard, paint and press-tin panels can come in. Using pattern, texture, color or architectural details on ceilings, it’s possible to make a room seem larger or smaller, lighter or darker, warmer or cooler. (www.chicagotribune.com)
Chicago Tribune (1/27/06); Leslie Mann
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Home Prices Out of Sync With Pay
For Avondale Estates, Ga. police officer Tom Gillis, living where he works is not an option. "What you'd like to do and what you can afford to do are two different things," said Gillis, who earned about $43,000 last year from his police job and a side job. On that income, Gillis said, it's unthinkable to consider buying a home in fashionable Avondale Estates, with its shaded streets and a median home value of $203,500, according to the U.S. Census. Instead, Gillis drives about an hour to work from the house he built for $100,000 in Gwinnett County 15 years ago. It's a common experience for middle-income workers who can't afford to live in the pricey communities where they work. Some DeKalb County commissioners want to make it easier for public servants to live where they work. Some are pushing a proposal that would require developers to offer a percentage of their projects in unincorporated DeKalb at lower rates for moderate-income workers. The proposal is controversial. Builders say such "work force housing" measures could discourage development and should be voluntary. Builders support affordable housing measures only if they are voluntary and carry incentives, said April Atkins, senior government affairs representative of the Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association. "There must be room for flexibility," she said. "The numbers have to work." (www.knowledgeplex.com)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2/03/06); Charles Yoo
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California Proposal Aims to Control Scope of Eminent Domain
In June, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London, Conn. that the government has the right to seize homes to make way for private redevelopment, it set off fear in the hearts of home owners and lawmakers alike. A flurry of bills and state ballot initiatives have been introduced in response to concern that the court's decision can put anyone's property up for grabs through eminent domain. A state constitutional amendment by California state Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, would allow the government to continue to apply eminent domain for public uses such as roads, schools and libraries, even while potentially driving up costs by redefining "just compensation." But it would forbid redevelopment agencies from forcibly taking properties for private redevelopment, such as retail centers, condo projects or hotels. "It means you can't take one person's property and give it to another for private gain," McClintock said. "It's a fundamental American freedom in the Bill of Rights that your house and shop are secure and nobody can take them away from you against your will for private gain." He hopes to get the measure on the November ballot by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature or through the ballot initiative process. (www.contracostatimes.com)
Contra Costa Times (2/05/06); Bonita Brewer and Scott Marshall
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Professor Offers Contrarian View of Sprawl
“From every direction," complains Robert Bruegmann, "Americans are bombarded by the message of anti-sprawl reformers," whose jeremiads decry the spread of suburbia as wasteful, irrational and destructive of environmental and human values. In his provocative new book, "Sprawl: a Compact History," Bruegmann, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, takes these catastrophists to task. In the eyes of its elitist detractors, Bruegmann charges, "sprawl is where other people live, particularly people with less taste and good sense than themselves." Contrary to the anti-sprawl message, he claims, the unregulated expansion of urban space represents the highest expression of democracy, as the "choices of millions of individuals and families about where and how they [want] to live" shape the complex layouts of cities far more effectively than the blueprints and regulations of a planning elite. Bruegmann critically examines what he regards as the moralizing of anti-sprawl activists, who regard sprawl as wasteful, dependent on fossil fuels, aesthetically displeasing, alienating, homogenous and conformist. In Bruegmann's view, this reflects subjective judgments more than objective reality. For him, the patronizing attack on sprawl represents little more than the defense by an entrenched cultural elite against the encroachment on its territory by "a newly affluent or empowered part of the population" — in this case, the upwardly mobile working class seeking the good life. (www.chicagotribune.com)
Chicago Tribune (2/05/06); Alex Lichtenstein
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