[lifesaviors] Re: Palaces For The People & density preferences
- From: <lionkuntz@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: novusnow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Palaces4People@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 13:31:35 -0700 (PDT)
--- Arthur Hammeke <hammekea@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I need to invest in stock in hearing aid
> manufactures. . .
<chuckle> ... always appreciate a bit of wit...
> On another note. People in the United States
> complain of crowdedness in cities, have to look how
> crowded Japan is.
Certainly the urban Japanese whom sleep in their
one-room apartment and roll up their beds (futons)
each day are not used to the kinds of space I proposed
for Palaces For The People. But many people in NYC
also have notorious small apartments, which cost them
over $1,000 a month, for their one-room. The ladies
magazines are filled with decorating tips for tiny
home spaces to make them feel larger -- there must be
a buyer's market for those tips or they wouldn't be on
the magazine's covers in your supermarket checkout
lane month after month.
In other places a quiet doubling up is going on with
roommates filling up units fuller than the American
norm. Densification is proceeding in urban places
everywhere, and this proposal is likely to find a
widespread audience who will consider this a step up
from their current situation.
One problem I have is getting architects to answer a
basic question in multi-family multi-story units:
Is there a ratio commonly used as the rule of thumb
which specifies how much interior space to set aside
for public purposes, like stairwells, corridors,
service closets, elevators? Based on my own 56 years
of experiences walking through thousands of buildings
in dozens of cities, I picked an initial working
number of 45%.
Almost half of the space under roof is public, not
private. If I am off by a large margin, I think it is
on the side of generousness to the public space, and
then some of that space can be moved to enlarge the
private spaces of the residential quarters.
My division of space are arithmatic. That is, I
divided the space by 2,000 sq feet, then divided by
11:9 ratio of private-public interior.
In every society there are private negotiations, where
one party sells off their surplus to another party
with motivation to buy.
Joining two units into one, or rearranging walling to
absorb half of a neighboring unit by a connecting
inside door will surely happen, even if illegally and
against the "management" homeowners association
bylaws. With the redundancy in strength of modern
materials, such remodelling would not usually
constitute a threat to the building structure.
Initially, I propose a limit a two units maximum owned
by any one party under every conceivable arrangement.
If Palaces units soon fall into speculator's hands it
destroys the homeownership pride and investment value.
Many condo complexes have non-renting clauses for
exactly this reason, and co-ops often buy back units
for resale to new homeowners who are selected by the
co-op (not by the departing homeowner).
Habitat for Humanity chapters sometimes (frequently?)
impose a non-transfer policy for the first ten years
-- if you move out it revert to HfH, but you can't
sell it on the market before a decade has passed.
The HfH model is ideal for an EcoVillage scenario,
where a pool of homeowners buy the land, put in their
sweat equity building as much as their skills base
allows, and only pay cash outlay for specialty skilled
trades work (licenced trades like electricians and
plumbers, etc.) and materials. The total costs
plummets. Then the homeowner's association owns the
groundfloor space and can rent/lease it to whoever has
clean, quiet purposes. The rentals of the groundfloor
represents a lifetime income to the homeowners above,
and insures excellent neighborliness from both sides.
Under this modified HfH plan, the materials outlay's
are somewhere less than a year's rent for $1,000/month
urban apartment of similar size dimensions. The units
are structurally completed with all services connected
by the group, but the interior finishing (and maybe
the exterior facia of the unit portion) are done
privately by each homeowner. The unit might not be
totally finished, indoors and out, for a period
exceeding the mortgage payoff period, which could be
as short as one year for the unit's prorata materials
and labor costs.
The Solar PV panels are by far the most expensive
object of a Palace, costing more than a residential
unit's share of material costs and specialty labor.
A credit union funding this investment loan can expect
to get paid off it's funding of the solar PV if the PV
Breeder option is added. A PV Breeder operating from
day one of completion of the systems installations,
turning sunshine into ingots, can generate salable
Silicon of Solar Grade in 80 days to break-even on the
cost of the initial panels (based on 40% of the total
value of finished panels is the sawn waferstock made
from cast ingots).
A part-time operation on a "month of sundays" basis
(that is 32 weeks), where every sunday from spring
through autumn 75% of the day's solar power is fed to
the Breeder furnace, will replicate enough solar
material to equip another Palace. One Palace equips
another 20 Palaces over 20 years. In a generation
there will be so much solar power that humans won't
need to think about other kinds of energy. The price
for solar PV panels will fall, but nobody will be
stuck still paying for last decade's prices while
seeing new installations selling at a tenth of their
original costs.
Reving up the system and letting it roll 100% into
Breeding for 3 months before people move in to start
consuming the PV power for daily living needs can
generate the payback which pays off the PV panels. In
other words, the power system costs might be repaid in
full about the time that the first resident moves in.
The cost of land is highly variable across locations.
a 10,000 square meter footprint (not counting
sidewalks, setbacks from roads, etc.) comes out to 85
meters^2 per dwelling unit share. That is less than
1,000 square feet, or 2.2% of an acre. If land is
selling for $100,000/acre, a homeowner has to raise
$2,200 to pay their share. In many places the cost of
acreage is far lower than $100K, but in urban areas
often much more.
HfH pays an average of $46,000 per house for land,
building materials and specialized skilled labor
contractors. That number goes up in dense urban areas
and down in secondary markets. This translates to
$116,380 to house 25 family units on one hectare of
land (2.53 acres = 1 hectare). The HfH average is 10
families per acre in detached single-family houses.
Palaces have a residential land use of 46.6 family
dwellings per acre of footprint -- this is a factor of
4.66 greater density. If careful analysis can tease
apart the land fraction from the remainder of costs,
the unit-cost of land for Palaces might be stated as
22% of the cost of the HFH house land price. HFH
houses typically have a larger outdoor area than
Palaces patio deck spaces, so it is not fully
translatable back and forth between the two types of
housing choices.
Palaces also come as a package with employment
opportunities on the ground floor with a commute which
involves going up and down stairs or escalators.
Palaces also comes with a $1,200 to $4,800 annual
decrease in untilities costs, every year, forever, and
this also has to be factored into the real costs of
homeownship occupancy in all of the choices.
There is still plenty of research needed to collect a
pool of reliable figures. HfH is about the only home
builder which publishes their cost figures, so I use
their figures as typical starting place to make rough
approximations.
It is possible that I stated something badly, and my
presentation is flawed and needs corrections, or it
might also be that I have error(s) in my assumptions
or math. In both cases I appreciate being informed, so
I can make the corrections required. It may also be
that someone has a lot of stock in ExxonMobil and
feels threatened by these figures and proposals. That
I cannot correct, and vocal critics should go on
record as disclosures of their financial conflicts of
interest in debating these matters.
Thanks to everybody who took the time to read all the
way down to this sentence. It takes a lot of words to
change a world, and this portion is not nearly enough
to be effective, but is more than required to annoy
people programmed for instant soundbite answers. So
thanks for caring enough to read my opinions and
proposals.
=====
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Sincerely, Lion Kuntz
Santa Rosa, California, USA
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Palaces4People/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Palaces4Japan/
http://www.ecosyn.us/ecocity/Proposal/Palaces_For_The_People.html
http://www.ecosyn.us/ecocity/Challenges/Asia_Floods/Wet/All_Wet.html
http://www.ecosyn.us/Interesting/
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