Green Options

Frank McKinney, known as the real estate “artist,” according to his Web site, has built a 15,000-square-foot “eco-mansion.” Is that possible? I am not sure whether to look in awe at all the sleek green that money can buy, or to recoil from the notion that 15,000 feet of excess is environmentally friendly.

Photos of the inside and outside of this $29 million Florida mansion are as wild for their “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” vibe, as for anything else. McKinney calls the property Acqua Liana, and has more plans in the works:

(He) will soon commence another masterpiece, “Crystalina,” a $30 million green home reflecting South Pacific influences.

He has designed and obtained permits for the world’s most magnificent oceanfront spec home with a 9-figure price tag, that’s right, Mr. McKinney’s new creation, The Manalapan Residence, will carry a price tag of over $135 million.

A Silicon Valley real estate agent told her clients, “There is no radon in California. You don’t need to worry about it.” The couple purchased a home in Sunnyvale, CA, which has some of the higher radon levels in Santa Clara County. Another home in Sunnyvale had 29 picoCuries/liter (pCi/L), more than 8 times the EPA action level (4 pCi/L). A home in Los Gatos had 56 pCi/L, which is 14 times the action level.

I interview a green real estate agent about the real estate market, what’s it like to be your own boss in an unstructured setting, and how great the walkability index is.

If we dared to complain about the stratospheric price of houses, we were told, “Hey, it’s just the natural law of supply and demand!”  

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski has proposed a program where every building sold in the state will have an energy audit performed. What does this mean to new and existing buildings in the market?

A new report says that global warming could cost the Californian economy billions of dollars each year, through a combination of rising sea levels, and the increased frequency of wild fires and extreme weather events.

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When the award-winning film The End of Suburbia was released in 2004, it was considered by some to be an amusing but exaggerated view of what Peak Oil will do to the suburban way of life. As gas prices approach $5/gallon, it doesn’t seem quite so shocking.

As a passionate enemy of suburban sprawl, I listened intently to an interview this morning on NPR with Brookings Institution demographer William Frey in which he notes that housing prices are falling faster in the areas outside cities. Is this a permanent correction that is making “exurbs” less desirable overall? And how are gas prices influencing this loss of home value? Mr. Frey was cautious in his answer, saying “the jury is still out” and that Americans have a history of moving outward from cities in order to buy more housing for less, seeing long commutes as an acceptable trade off.

However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that, when a commute costs more than one is saving on housing, while sucking up hours of one’s valuable time, (and as the saying goes, “They aren’t making more of that”) why would one buy a home in the far suburbs? Why, indeed?

Sperling’s Best Places did a survey two years ago when gas prices were at $2.90 a gallon. The following were the most expensive cities in which to commute and listed the average annual commuting cost:

City Annual Commuting Cost (2006)

1. Atlanta $5,772
2. Birmingham, Ala. $5,464
3. Orlando, Fla. $5,404
4. Jacksonville, Fla. $5,360
5. Pensacola, Fla. $5,173

So, if gas prices reach $6.00, Atlanta’s commuting cost would be over $10,000 per year. Yikes.

From Environmental Graffiti:

Severe flooding has affected four counties, four hundred thousand are without water, thousands have had to abandon their homes, and the cost will no doubt run into hundreds of millions of pounds.

Yet the housing minister, Yvette Cooper, doesn’t see a problem with building thousands of new homes on flood planes. Announcing a massive house building programme, she warned critics not to “play politics” with the flooding and attack building on flood planes. She told Radio 4’s Today Program that development had always taken place on flood planes, and the key was proper planning.