For all of you savvy ‘buy and hold’ real estate investors out there, here’s a great outline of the value of improving the curb appeal for your rental property by Al Williamson of leadinglandlord.com  Al’s blog is an ongoing thesis on how landlords can be a significant force for catalyzing positive change in urban neighborhoods- and as a result become the beneficiaries of those changes on a scale well beyond the effort and investment they put in.  (Keep up the great work!)

The concept of achieving higher returns through curb appeal is intuitive enough- if you make the property look better more people will want to be there.  If more people want to be there, it will be faster and easier to rent out your vacant units to qualified tenants.

The last part of that statement, renting to qualified tenants, is very important.  Al doesn’t touch on it in the article, preferring to keep the discussion to a simple question of the return on capital invested via a reduction in the vacancy rate.  As anyone who has held and managed a rental property for any length of time knows, the quality of tenant you put into your property will be directly proportional to the amount of time, energy, and money you will have to put in to manage that property.

If by improving your curb appeal you can select future tenants from a larger pool of qualified tenants, you should see a resulting reduction in overhead management costs.  When a good tenant moves out fewer repairs and less substantial cleaning will be needed to bring the unit up back up to marketable condition.  Good tenants typically don’t cause as much ongoing wear on the property.  Good tenants typically attract other good tenants, and the upward trend continues.  I’d love to see a breakdown of some of these secondary management cost impacts in a similar form to what Al provided with the vacancy rate.

How about you?  If you own and/or manage a rental property and can provide some insight on the relative ongoing management costs of good tenants versus okay tenants or not-so-good tenants, let us know.

One of the defining challenges of implementing sustainable design to the point of ubiquity is making the technology simple enough to be easily replicable with very little training, few resources, and marginal costs.  This solution is a brilliant (squared!) solution to the problem of lighting dark homes.

Solar bottle light bulb brightens homes and lives

The process is stunningly simple.  1) Collect discarded 2-litre clear plastic bottles, and clean all labels/glue off of them.  2) Fill them with filtered water and a dose of chlorine bleach (to prevent biological growth) and cap off.  3) Carefully scribe a circle the size of the bottle in a piece of tin, and carefully cut out a hole slightly smaller than than circle.  Punch the edges so that you get short teeth to form-fit around the bottles for stability and tightness of fit.  4) Seal the edge between the bottle and the tin really well.  5) Cut a hole to fit the bottle in the tin roof of the home, set the assembly into the hole, and waterproof around the edge of the tin sheet really well.  Voila!  A daylight bulb for fractional cost that emits a lot of light, transfers very little heat, requires no power, and costs very little in money or time.

Granted, the bottle will deteriorate in time.  Light bulbs burn out too, and they have the added challenges of an ongoing operating cost, fragility, and manufacturing complexity.

The idea could easily be translated into more complex and robust forms for integration into first-world architecture.  I recently was looking at pictures of a solar tube installation Matt Piner (Pinerworks Architecture) was working on to bring light from a rooftop down two floors to a basement.  The amount of light that can be transmitted down a shiny tin tube is surprising.  A simple water-filled clear plastic container could be installed at the bottom as the diffuser, and would help to reduce the issue of heat transmission through the tube.

What other inexpensive, low-tech solutions are just a concept away from reducing worldwide energy consumption and improving quality of life?  Let me know.

Courtesy of our friends at Inhabitat comes this message from the Mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania: don’t park illegally in the bicycle lanes… or else!  The article includes the entertaining video PSA of the Mayor, determined to protect the new City bicycle lanes from obstruction by illegally parked vehicles, deciding that the only effective solution is to drive over the parked car with a tank.  “That is what will happen if you park your car illegally!” he declares from atop an 8-wheeled APV, having just ridden the vehicle over a Mercedes sedan.

Granted, the event was set up.  Who would want to deal with the legal hassles of trying to defend comically excessive enforcement of a City code?  That said, the video makes for an effective public service announcement (PSA), the more so with the ‘wink and nod’ humor inherent in the stunt.  Kudos to Mayor Zuokas for not taking himself too seriously, and making a point while having fun.

This evening is the 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue at the AIA Central Valley Chapter Office at 1400 S Street in Midtown Sacramento.  This evening a group of architects and landscape architects from LPAS will be sharing their experiences from working on the new Cal Lottery building, and specifically the green roof.  This case study will provide the basis for a broader discussion on the potential value of and/or challenges for implementing green roofs in the Central Valley.

Green roofs and living walls have the potential to be far more than simply an attractive feature of a building.  When properly integrated into the overall design they offer potential benefits for stormwater management, reductions in cooling loads for internally dominated buildings, additional recreation/amenity space, and even secondary productive uses.

For a primer of green roofs, check out the American Society of Landscape Architects Green Roof website.  Come out this evening to the 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue and join in what should be a very interesting discussion.

Posted today on Inhabitat: Super Futuristic Noain City Hall is a Plant-Covered Building That Boasts Passive Energy Saving Systems | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World

Deciduous vines are trained on a metal exoskeleton around the building, providing shading and passive cooling while allowing a varying amount of light to reach the core depending on time of year.  This is an impressive example of utilizing landscape elements as an integrated part of the building structure and energy systems.  It reminds me of some of the points Matt Piner of Pinerworks Architecture made at a past 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue, where he talked about integrating a ‘skin’ for buildings that could change with the seasons.

As an added bonus it looks cool.  Using the lower weight ratio of the vines/metal screen Zon-e Arquitectos was able to form an amorphous outer shell that pleasantly hides the simple rectangular box forms of the basic structure.  Check out the article and let me know what you think.

Sacramento Press / Launch 2011: see video here.

For those of you who won’t be able to make it out for the Launch 2011 event, Sacramento Press has just announced they will be posting a live video stream of the event starting at 5pm tomorrow evening.  Check out the link above for the post.

Seriously though- find a sitter, throw on something casual/chic and check it out.  The event runs from 5pm to 1am at the Greens Hotel in Del Paso Heights.  The hotel is one block from the Arden Way & Del Paso Blvd light rail stop (Sac RT Blue Line) so you can forget parking and just have a good time.  For a tasty alternative, shuttles will be running to/from Hot Italian in Midtown.

See you there. 

Last night at the City of Sacramento Design Commission the infill project at 24/T Streets in Midtown Sacramento took a significant step forward as the Commission forwarded advisory conditions and a recommendation for approval to the Planning Commission.  The project has been through an extensive public review process, resulting in a 5-unit apartment project in a craftsman style.  Mark Groen, Senior Architect with Vrilakas Architects is lead architect on the project.

Several neighbors who had been actively involved in the review process came to express support for the project and for the efforts of the applicant, neighbors and City staff in reaching an agreement that would allow the project to move forward.  The next step for the project is to gain approval by the Planning Commission on Thursday, July 28th.

During the hearing the applicant requested a number of modifications to the proposed conditions for the project, in order to limit potential problems on the alley and to have the option to use newly available window technology that is high-quality and energy efficient.  Commissioner Todd Rudd, who holds the contractor/builder position on the 7-member profession-based commission, was instrumental in helping to clarify the details of the applicant’s requests and allow the Commission to approve the two requested items.

Below are elevations for the project, pulled from the meeting Agenda.  The full agenda and recording of the meeting can be found here.

Launch 2011 is on this Saturday evening up at the Greens Hotel in North Sacramento!  Looking forward to a great evening of design across media, swimming through a crowd of stylish folks from Sacramento and beyond.  This is gonna be good folks…

Doors open at 5pm, tickets are available online, and shuttles are available from Hot Italian in Midtown.

In case you missed it, here’s a link to the Inhabitat article on the opening of section 2 of Highline Park.  This park is a stunningly effective adaptive re-use of formerly defunct infrastructure to create valuable public space, in this case an elevated rail line running for several miles through Manhattan.

A walk through the treetops