Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007Personal Update
This site has suffered much neglect owing to work since my move to Santa Fe. The textbook business I began on arrival carries on but, as grateful as I am for any form of work after decades of being disabled and jobless, I tire of the constant stress of its roller-coaster fortunes, the endless parade of flakes, the constant paranoia, and the threat of total collapse at the whim of a corporate monopoly. If American college students knew half of what I do now about this industry and how its market works they'd be rioting on every campus and torching their school bookstores...
I've grown quite frustrated with the lack of progress in my pursuit of sustainable/non-toxic real estate development in this area. Day by day, as I see the news of the increasingly dramatic impact as a consequence of todays accelerating global environmental change, I feel an ever greater imperative for new architecture. Millions around the world will soon be in forced migration. The face of civilization is about to change forever and there's a chance my long-term goals with this could ease the pain of that change in at least some small way. And yet here I sit struggling to get a single project off the ground. Maybe I should be more concerned for myself but I can't help feeling like a hand-cuffed lifeguard forced to watch people drown.
I've sought out the help of more experienced real estate investors, but found them elusive -with the exception, of course, of the countless purveyors of foolish real estate scams and get-rich-quick 'programs' that have contributed so much to the housing market tribulations of late. Much of the problem relates to the difficulties my disability imposes on travel. I've been able to explore little of the region since moving to New Mexico. But it may also be that the essential situation of this region, with runaway gentrification in the cities, a half million dollar median home price, construction costs outrageously inflated, minimum parcel sizes overly large due to water management issues, simply has no practical solution, making it impossible for all but the very wealthy to get a start in this here. I don't want to have to resort to building the typical toxic suburban crap just to get a start at this. I'd rather not do anything at all than contribute to that insanity. Sustainable building really has some critical problems at the low end of things a lot of people in the field seem to be ignoring and which contribute to its tortuously slow pace of progress.
But I have found some encouragement from the building techniques I've learned about from my landlord. A long time sustainable builder, he's curiously had little call to analyze his building costs because most of his past clients -owing to the reluctance of banks to support sustainable building- paid for projects out of pocket and simply gave him a general target budget to work within. But recently he's gotten project offers that compelled him to very carefully itemize his costs, and the results have been quite interesting. Conventional stick frame construction starts at $200 per square foot in the Santa Fe area. Sustainable construction -despite this being a world center of sustainable building- starts at $300. My landlord has perfected techniques of soil-cement construction he learned from the legendary Ken Kern (whose book I mentioned below) and now projects a construction cost in the area of $125-$150 per square foot while producing structures completely indistinguishable from hand built adobe -and in some ways superior in performance. This is also a very flexible technique, offering potential for the use of textured formwork to eliminate the expense of adobe rendering (since the material is so stable, it needs no covering like adobe brick), textile block systems, and stacked stone inclusion facing. Combined with simple design, the potential exists for the construction of sustainable and non-toxic homes at drastically below-market costs. But, again, I run into trouble for lack of any architects in the region who will give me the time of day and the problem of traveling around to track down prospect properties.
Similarly, I've been frustrated by an inability to find anyone who will collaborate with me -or even casually discuss- my concepts of pavilion and skybreak architecture, as I've been planning to employ for my own permanent home. This seems like such an incredibly rich area for novel design ideally matched to the emerging 21st Century trends while having long precedent in Modernism and yet you'd think I was proposing making homes out of jell-o given the response I've seen. Generally, this site has seen remarkably positive feedback for which I'm quite grateful. But for some reason these ideas elude most readers. Maybe it's just my crude writing, or maybe it's just very hard for people to visualize, though I've had little luck interesting area architects in the concepts either. It often seems as though I frighten these people in some way. It looks like I'll simply have to shelve these promising ideas until I can somehow build the necessary wealth to demonstrate them entirely on my own.
On a more positive note, things have been looking up for prospects of giving the remarkable TomaTech building system a try. Since the real estate situation in the Santa Fe area has proven so difficult, I've had to broaden my range of prospects, though this makes me even more dependent upon the aid of others. Recently a colleague of mine expressed an interest in moving to Hawaii and aiding my search there. Hawaii is well known to have a real estate situation largely identical to what I found here in Santa Fe -if not much worse in many respects. But it's climate and cultural aesthetics are perfectly suited to the Tomahouse designs that can't be used here in this high-desert climate. We've learned there is a peculiar situation on the islands that seems to offer a great opportunity for the use of TomaTech,
Most of the rental housing market of the islands is dominated by vacation rentals. But I've learned there is a steadily growing dissatisfaction among tourists to the islands because of the nature of this housing. It seems that tourists from around the globe are beginning to notice that they can travel from Florida, to the Caribbean, to Latin America, and to Hawaii and all the vacation rental homes look virtually identical. It's all the same old suburban American crap. Nothing looks appropriate to the locations. It's really difficult to take a vacation in Hawaii and find any place to stay that communicates an impression of an island aesthetic -at least outside of resort venues that look like a set from Gilligan's Island. Lenders and builders, with their perennial obsession for quick and easy sales through lowest-common-denominator design, have systematically homogenized the community aesthetics all over the world. But this works against those hoping to invest in vacation rentals. No one wants to go to Hawaii and be left feeling like they might as well still be in New Jersey.
Similarly, resident Hawaiians are becoming increasingly frustrated by the declining quality of housing the market is dumping on them at increasingly high prices. They don't like this suburban homogenization either but are even more troubled by the truly terrible quality of construction they are being forced to spend outrageous sums for. I've been hearing story after story of people paying half a million dollars or more for veritable shacks -not counting the cost of land!
It would seem that TomaTech could offer an excellent solution to both of these issues. With such low labor and great speed for their construction they can come in far below market in square foot costs despite their relatively high materials cost. Yet their quality couldn't be matched by local builders for less than thousands per square foot. These are whole buildings crafted with the finish of fine furniture and some of the most sophisticated in European technology. They are like luxury yachts you can build yourself. At the same time their designs, blending Asian, Indonesian, and Modernist aesthetics, are ideally matched to the island environment without resorting to looking like some cartoon cliche. These really do epitomize a kind of contemporary island aesthetic. So it's possible I've clued into something very powerful here. Everyone I have ever shown the Tomahouses sites to have responded with jaw-dropped amazement. But it will be some time still before my colleague can make his move to the islands and his experience in this area is not that great. We'll just have to see what happens.
I really wish I could find more experienced people to collaborate with. I've practically lived the life of a hermit because of my disability for decades. I need mentors -especially when it comes to a field like real estate development where so very little of the available literature is even legitimate. Yet everyone in this nation is so self-absorbed or afraid of each other -and the Internet's current reputation as a virtual jungle devoid of any practical mechanisms for trust-building certainly isn't helping matters.
