Fernie's Blog

Smart Growth

elfernie — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:01:34 +0000

Smart growth covers a range of development strategies that make growth more compact to help avoid urban sprawl and encourage more sustainable life styles. Smart growth focuses on small areas of a city or suburb and develop a sort of village using principles like;

Transportation – encourage people to walk, ride bicycles or public transportation and not rely on their personal car.
Housing – providing different choices- SF detached, condos, apartments, etc.- for a variety of people to live.
Compact development – create environments closer together in an aesthetic way to encourage walking, biking, and public transit.
Use existing assets – intensifying development of underutilized land, or refurbishing historic buildings.
Mixed land use – mix-use development.
Natural resource conservation – use methods and create spaces to ensure healthy and attractive natural environments.
Quality design – the functionality and look of the development.

Since 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has helped developers with growth management and environmental challenges. Even though smart growth is all about taking care of the environmental issues, it is also involved in solving transportation and housing issues. So now, in this article, I found that, for the first time ever, the U.S. Departments of Transportation (DOT) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will join the EPA in its new Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities. This will definitely help and encourage more communities to implement the principles of smart growth.

http://www.northwesthub.org/epa-smart-growth-388

Cumulative Causation

elfernie — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:31:08 +0000

There are three major centripetal forces that trigger cumulative causation and help the creation of a city. They are; Economies of Scale, Economies of Agglomeration and Positive Locational Externalities. In this article, Mr. Sabeer Bhatia, the co-founder of hotmail, wants to build a new city in India called Nano City. In order for this city to be created and grow, the planners and developers have to use the three major centralizing economic forces to their advantage. Economies of Scale basically means that it is cheaper and more efficient to produce in large quantities. Then we have Economies of Agglomeration which are cost or productivity advantages to the clustering of firms or worksites physically near each other; this is one of the project’s main focus because they want to create a new more modern version of Syllicon Valley. Finally, they need Possitive Locational Externalities which occurs when one firm benefits from the nearby location of another firm without the first firm being able to fully profit from this benefit; in this case once the googles and the amozons are settled there and population starts to increase new markets for goods and services will be created.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/10/MN9S120S1G.DTL

Property Subsurface Rights

elfernie — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:00:06 +0000

When you own Real Estate property, you basically own the rights on a piece of land. You own the right to the surface and anything attached, the air above your land, and the area beneath the surface. So, if get lucky and discover that there is gas, oil or something valuable underneath your house, you actually have a very good chance of making good money. In this article, I read of a deal that was made this past weekend where a man found gas in his property and is now leasing the property while they drill the gas out and the he will get 20% of the royalties.

http://www.evesun.com/news/stories/2009-09-14/7844/Southern-Tier-gas-deal-signed-over-weekend/

Buyers Market

elfernie — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:25:28 +0000

Today’s residential real estate market is definitely a “buyers market”. This means that there is a lot of supply and not very much demand, so the buyer has more options and thus has more power at the time of negotiating a price. This article from reuters shows a real estate market report generated by Zillow (a real estate listing website) that gives us some idea as to how much negotiating power the buyer poses’ in a buyer’s market. One of the main reasons that the demand for homes is low right now is that in most cases the buyer needs some kind of debt to purchase a house, but due to the financial crisis that we are all facing today, banks are not giving as many loans as they were in the past, thus less people can increase the demand for homes.

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS113152+10-Sep-2009+PRN20090910