Community and Design When It’s Needed Most

Community and Design When It’s Needed Most
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For our final Housing 2.0 session of 2024, we’ll be digging into our most popular topics: community and design. These two subjects have always drawn the most interest and “a-ha” moments from our attendees.

I’ve said this before, but I wish real estate developers and homebuilders in my region would attend and learn from Sam Rashkin’s best-practice home building sessions. 

As I watch active commercial construction sites in 3 different areas of my community, I can see that past mistakes are being replicated to varying degrees, depending on the project in question. For instance, I’m seeing very little regard for pedestrians/non-vehicular traffic and enormous emphasis placed on parking spaces. If you like hardscapes, these are awesome projects. If you like vegetation, avert your eyes!

housing 2

 

Switching to a much more serious situation, Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc all over western North Carolina. Over 100 people perished in North Carolina alone, and over 200 died nationwide. Entire roads were washed away in the flooding and subsequent landslides. 

Discussions are underway about rebuilding. The silver lining of such a horrible and unfortunate tragedy like this is that it gives affected areas a chance to start anew. Instead of rebuilding in the same manner, there is an opportunity to marry the look of the past with the performance of today…or even tomorrow. (See our previous seminar on future-readiness for more info.)

These are some historic areas, so it’s understandable that there will be a desire to preserve the appearances of some/most of the buildings lost. However, they can also be modernized in a way that they utilize a fraction of the energy and water they previously used.

Doing so will have a positive impact on total cost of ownership and improve the health and well-being of the occupants, not to mention the many tourists who typically visit this region of the country. Finally, such improvements will help to boost the overall value of these historical properties.

Speaking of historic properties, I acknowledge there is sometimes pushback on the aesthetics of roof-mounted solar panels. However, whether it’s a re-roofing project or simply starting over on a site, I would hope that homeowners would take a long look at adding solar to the project, especially if they didn’t have it before the hurricane.