Among the thousands of useless whiz-bangs and comfort enhancers, these gadgets raise the sustainability bar.

IN MY THREE DAY SOJOURN through the thundering carnival of CES, a few products and services cut through the clutter to offer real problem solving. Some save energy. Others help seniors stay in their homes longer. Still others prevent damage to homes or optimize entire apartment buildings so they can "talk" to utilities. Some simply encourage more cooking at home. All warrant a second look.

At CES, the company is promoting Alexa-enabled faucets, vanity mirrors and water guzzling showers over performance and efficiency.

Perhaps I expect too much. But in the more than two decades I’ve been attending trade shows and writing about building products, Kohler has consistently been one of the good guys. They always seemed to be making forward strides to reduce water waste, educate the public about conservation, and tighten up their vast manufacturing facilities.

The latest hybrid electric model from Toyota "talks" to the Align Project house in real time, triggering off-the-wall routines.

As part of the Align House exhibit at CES in Las Vegas, this Toyota Avalon Hybrid bridges the "missing link" between home and mobility. The concept has been around, but Toyota is leading the curve in actual execution. The vehicle has a heads-up display screen called the Entune App Suite, with many built in bells and whistles.

The Align Project opened Tuesday at CES2019, beginning with an international media event.

Visitors so far have included Google subcontractors who oohed and aahed about the home's austere yet complete interior.

From sightline rules about solar panels to preservation of antique windows, historic district watchdogs do measurable harm and negligible good.

Portland, Maine is a great city, for some.

Known for its food, working waterfront, and to a lesser degree, historic buildings, it’s a place many people would like to retire.  But hand in hand with these pleasant daguerrotype fantasies, are the challenges. Perhaps Portland has always been two cities: the affluent one and the other one--Halfway houses number well into the double digits. Shuffling heroin addicts roam the streets, and public alcoholism often ends in a collapse on the sidewalk. But on the East and West Ends of the peninsula, where many of the oldest homes are, cash-rich newcomers have clashed with entrenched residents. Teardowns are causing an uproar. People are afraid the city will be “Bostonized.”

Use commons sense and math to get a quick read on whether the site you've chosen will be quiet enough to satisfy your client or your family.

Some people love the sound of train horns and the rumbling sound of wheels on the tracks. Others quite literally hate the noise. Perceptions of "acceptable" noise levels are often arbitrary and subjective, especially in the "middle" range of 40-60 decibels or so. One person's pleasant white noise in the background is another person's source of endless unhappiness and complaints.

Tiny homes are cool, but right now, they’re caught in code limbo.

I recently attended the Tiny House Jamboree in Austin, Texas, where I spoke on the topic of conforming tiny homes to site-built IRC codes while retaining the light weight that guarantees their mobility. My construction effort proved to be a daunting challenge. I managed to knock about half the weight off a typical 12,000-plus-pound tiny home. But it’s hard to get much lower. It’s also not the direction the new Tiny Home Industry Association (THIA) is moving.

A short time ago, Hurricane Florence bore down on North Carolina. Coincidentally, the North Carolina Home Builders Association’s conference had just started—but builders left the conference early to prepare their job sites and businesses for the deluge.

A Bloomberg report cited Metrostudy data that indicates builders in the Raleigh-Durham region have about 7,500 new homes in their inventory, approximately 600 of which are under construction in coastal Wilmington.

Flash back six years: The same builder association helped bankroll conservative state Rep. Pat McElraft, who put forward a bill rejecting predictions about the state’s vulnerability to massive flooding and damage—made more dire by climate change. 

Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, let the legislation quietly become law by doing nothing. Bad policymaking is not always partisan.

Competition to impress potential partners results in some of our worst environmental impacts, according to a new documentary starring Jeff Bridges.

"If we didn't have sex, we wouldn't have competition," says documentary filmmaker Susan Kucera. "A lot of what we do [that's destructive] is showing off to get a mate. If we want to save ourselves, and other species, we need to change the cultural story.

Kucera has recently premiered Living in Future's Past, a thought-provoking documentary that she directed—hosted by Jeff Bridges. The film takes a fresh approach to solving the challenges of human-accelerated Climate Change.

The old reality seems to be collapsing around us. Can business-style planning convert Neros into Heroes?

It’s easy to give up on our fellow humans these days. We’re killing off most of the other large life forms on Earth. Heat waves, spurred on by runaway climate change, have nearly reached a temperature in Las Vegas where composite plastic decking begins to melt.

Most building professionals—builders, small architect firms, designers and so on— don’t have enough time left in the day to impact political events, regulatory changes and employee standards on their own. We know, for example, that about half of homebuilders have fewer than 10 employees, and about 80 percent have receipts under $1.5 million. Unlike their big builder brethren—Lennar, Pulte and Toll Brothers, for instance—the little guys don’t have marketing divisions, lobbyists or even HR departments that can spend a week chasing down new labor pools, sending their trades to update classes or even securing better insurance. 

The optimal square footage of our homes and apartments is subjective yes, but key variables influence how low you can go.

A RECURRING QUESTION (and criticism) of right-sized, or tiny house, living is whether people can really live comfortably in 88, or 399, or 700 square feet.  What metric should be used to estimate this magic number? An obvious answer is “happiness,” but, surprisingly, it's rarely considered directly when planners and pundits talk about how much living space a person needs..

Bridging high and low technology is what today’s innovation looks like.

This year, we had more than twice the number of submissions to our annual “Hot 50” editors’ choice products issue. That’s very encouraging. The building industry has a reputation for being slow to innovate. There’s good reason for that, of course: Builders have been burned many times by adopting new products too quickly, only to find out that they have major flaws.