I cover mortgages, title insurance and real estate services for Inman News. Have a story idea or comment? Please call or drop me a line at matt@inman.com.
John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods in Atlanta has another spin -- they say they'll pay you the difference if, five years from now, your home is worth less than you paid for it. Since even the most pessimistic forecasts see prices bottoming in 2009 or no later than 2010, and Atlanta has been a growth region, seems like a pretty safe bet for them to guarantee you'll at least be breaking even by 2013... http://www.jwhomes.com/protection.aspx
The U.S. Green Building Council has created Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating standards that local governments can adopt if they want to ensure that developers and builders are using the latest green building techniques. There are varying levels of compliance to give cities flexibility in how tough they want to be. If I recall correctly, Pleasanton was requiring commercial projects to meet an intermediate LEED rating standard and was looking at applying the standards to new residential developments.
Green building practices and environmentally-friendly developments probably won't take off in a big way until A) There are obvious economic benefits for consumers B) The public (and politicians) give planners the powers they need to make it happen. I used to cover an affluent city east of San Francisco, Pleasanton, where residents routinely opposed any high density housing project developers brought to the city. As a result, a ton of McMansions got built on huge lots, often on land that used to be ranches or farms. Pleasanton sits at the end of the Bay Area's awesome regional train line, BART. While property owners wanted approval to do mixed-use, high-density housing near the BART stop -- a plan environmental groups were behind -- residents were afraid of impacts on traffic and schools. During the boom, with places like Pleasanton running out of room to develop and resisting high density housing, developers built a lot of housing on farmland in places like Tracy -- 60 or 90 miles away from job centers and without easy access to public transit. Now those newly-built communities are some of the hardest hit by the housing downturn. You can't blame people in places like Pleasanton for wanting to preserve what they've got, but there is often little logic and tremendous waste in the way development takes place in many parts of the country. Does it matter? Here are some statistics I noted last year when writing about a proposal by Michigan Democrat John Dingell to cut greenhouse gas emissions by raising gasoline taxes by 50 cents per gallon and eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction for homes 3,000 square feet and up (If that sounded far-fetched last year, imagine how it would go over right now!). From my post, which has links to statistics cited: "The National Association of Home Builders predicts that while average home size will remain around 2,400 square feet for the next decade, the typical "upscale" home will be 4,000 square feet by 2015. According to the U.S. EPA, the energy we use heating, cooling and lighting our homes (and running all those appliances) accounts for close to 17 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions."
