If US housing is going to rebound long-term, we need to vanquish the car and stop encouraging sprawl.

First, let’s hasten the demise of the spurb, an ugly word I made up to describe sprawling, unwalkable urban-suburban areas that have no connection to public transportation and central cities.

The spurb’s time has long past. Future energy demands from the rest of the world mean higher energy prices down the road. We need homes where there are jobs, infrastructure and transportation.

If the housing bubble and bust has taught us anything, it’s probably a bad idea to build homes in the middle of nowhere, stretching along vast deserts and inland regions that are poorly served by highways. Americans are tired of wasting their lives in endless commutes.

Not only does driving everywhere waste our precious time, it ruins our health leading to heart disease, obesity, asthma and a host of other ailments. It’s bad for our individual well being and the health of the planet. Cars contribute to climate change and bad air.

As I’ve explored the extensive downside of the spurb in my book The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome, I’ve also examined what we could do about it. I traveled from the San Francisco Bay to the tip of Florida to see what works and how we could re-invent the American home and community.

The first order of this revival is to reawaken our sense of the walkable neighborhood. They used to exist in every small town in America and every established city neighborhood. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, they still exist and are thriving.

A walkable neighborhood means situating amenities such as stores, dry cleaners, libraries, bakeries and restaurants within about a three-quarter-of- a-mile walk. Not only can you abandon your car in these areas, you become healthier and start to know your neighbors. You look out for them and they look out for you. You can’t do that in the freeway-choked suburbs of Los Angeles or the ring of overdeveloped towns surrounding Dallas. You’re shackled to your car, but hey, it’s the American Way, isn’t it?

While it’s too early to tell, walkable cities may hold their real-estate values better than car-dependent areas. According to the research of urbanologist Christopher Leinberger of the Brookings Institution, with each incremental increase in walkability, property values are likely to rise.

That bodes well for pedestrian heavens like Boston’s Back Bay, Portland’s Pearl District and Chicago’s Lincoln Park. It’s bad news for sprawl-infested, foreclosure-ridden places like Stockton, Calif., Southwest Florida and suburban Phoenix and Las Vegas.

That doesn’t mean that spurbs are doomed or cities will prevail when we work our way out of this bust a few years from now. Nearly every community can be rebuilt to accommodate light rail, pedestrians and bikes. Maybe when diesel buses are converted to fuel-cell/electric vehicles, they, too, will make economic and environmental sense.

The key theme is to make communities more people-centric. The population is getting older, so this is a win-win situation. Design new communities around transit stops. Create pedestrian-only zones in suburbs and cities that ban cars.

Two of my favorite examples of “people places” are the pedestrian mall in Charlottesville, Va., and the ramblas in Barcelona. The first is a celebration of public, private and sidewalk culture. You can walk to a movie, dining, an ice rink or municipal buildings. In the Spanish city, when my wife and I were vacationing a few years ago, we walked from our hotel in the middle of the city to the beach and downtown neighborhoods. It was several miles, but we didn’t have to cross a major highway and ate, shopped and people-watched the whole way with great delight.

Life on the other side of the housing bust can be livable, healthier, more economical and ecologically sound. Think of the money you would save by not having to own a car or two (or three). You would get more exercise and help local merchants, not gargantuan chain-store operators situated in mega-shopping districts. You could patronize farmer’s markets and get fresh food instead of worrying where your food came from and what pathogens it contained.

What will it take to ensure that the spurb mentality doesn’t take over again? Demand that Washington divert most of its transportation dollars (in the upcoming transportation bill) away from new highways and into public transit, high-speed rail, pedestrian and bike paths. Demand that local and regional planners build walkable communities with affordable, energy-efficient housing near where people actually work. That may require changes in zoning and building codes, but this is America, we were founded on the idea of building something better for everyone.

Getting out of the traffic jam that was and continues to be the defining suburban experience will also give you more of the commodity you can’t replace — your time. How much is your time worth in your present lifestyle? Let your elected officials know now.

John F. Wasik, author of The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream, is a personal finance columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of several books. His most recent book, The Merchant of Power, was praised by Studs Terkel and well reviewed by The New York Times. Wasik has won more than 15 awards for consumer journalism including the 2008 Lisagor and several from the National Press Club. He has appeared on such national media as NBC, NPR, and PBS. He lives in Chicago. For more information, visit www.johnwasik.com.

Copyright © 2009 John F.Wasik, author of The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream.

There’s something glamorous about a couple of bright souls in an American basement or garage. They tinker around a bit, apply their imagination and creativity to a project, and voila, they’re the next Stephen Jobs or Bill Gates, reinventing the way the world works. Are those days over? Can America still foster the culture of innovation that helped it launch the second industrial revolution, land on the moon and seed the information age? Is President Obama’s “Green Deal” going to foster this kind of growth?

Durable small companies that do everything from manufacturing forklift parts to specialty contracting have been creating the bulk of new jobs in recent years. It’s these “high-impact’’ firms that have been generating employment at a surprisingly robust pace over the past decade. As defined by the U.S. Small Business Administration, these companies generally have less than 20 employees, are 25 years old or less and represent about 3 percent of all firms.

As I discovered in researching my book The Audacity of Help: Obama’s Economic Plan and the Remaking of America, it’s the small shops, factories and firms that are producing new jobs, accounting for 33.5 percent of employment growth for firms of their size from 1994 through 2006. In contrast, during the same period, firms with 500 employees or more accounted for nearly all of the job loss in the U.S. economy. Yet the stimulus plan and budget do little for small businesses; they didn’t get the kind of cheap-credit bailout that the largest mismanaged financial institutions received.

Obama’s stimulus program will benefit specialized contractors in the building trades, alternative power and energy efficiency. While the initial plan will not be a substitute for a comprehensive climate change policy, national green building standards or a renewable energy portfolio mandate (required use of clean energy by a certain date), it will likely seed thousands of businesses and create jobs. Here’s a breakdown of the nearly $42 billion that will be made available:

• $11 billion for smart-grid research and development
• $6.3 billion for energy efficiency and conservation grants
• $6 billion for loan guarantees for electricity generation and renewable projects such as wind and solar (bringing them online and feeding clean power into the grid)
• $5 billion for weatherization assistance (for low-income residents)
• $4.5 billion for making federal buildings more energy efficient
• $3.4 billion for fossil energy research and development (carbon storage and “clean” coal)
• $2.5 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy research
• $2 billion in grant funding for advanced batteries systems (making them lighter and store more power over time)
• $1 billion for other energy efficiency programs (alternative fuel trucks and buses, smart appliances)

There’s little doubt that the stimulus package will be the largest portion of seed money ever devoted to remaking the economy in a more sustainable mold. Provided the general economy doesn’t collapse, there will be reasons to be optimistic about the green sector. Renewable energy/efficiency industry grew three times faster than the general economy in 2007.

Mostly creating jobs that can’t be outsourced, this employment boom buoys states that have already embraced alternative energy such as California, Oregon, Colorado and Washington. Ironically, the biggest consumer of solar panels is Germany, which has a long-term tax incentive program in place for residents and businesses to buy and install them. Green-collar jobs in the U.S. will never grow substantially without a comprehensive policy that funds a smart grid with net metering, a national renewable energy standard (Al Gore would like to see all electricity generated from renewable sources in 20 years), job training and national building mandates that directs owners to do energy-efficient retrofits.

While the number of new business start-ups (around 600,000 annually) will not be directly effected by the Obama plan, it may spur new growth in companies specializing in creating a green building industry. Even traditional jobs (see below) will flourish if Obamanomics funds a multi-year construction or rehabilitation or maintenance boom.

There’s one other small-business linchpin that the Obama plan leaves out: Cheap and available credit. Small businesses are still being pinched by the credit crunch. They should be able to garner interest-free loans and get the same kind of deals the big banks got during the bailout. It’s also essential that Congress pass a universal, affordable health care plan. Such a national program would immediately make small businesses more productive and profitable.

John F. Wasik, author of Audacity of Help: Obama’s Economic Plan and the Remaking of America (Bloomberg Press), is a personal finance columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of several books. Wasik has won more than 15 awards for consumer journalism including the 2008 Lisagor and several from the National Press Club. He has appeared on such national media as NBC, NPR, and PBS. He lives in Chicago. For more information, visit www.johnwasik.com.

Copyright © 2009 John F.Wasik | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Michelle Kaufmann's "Smart + Wired Home"

By John F. Wasik

Green is gold. Why didn’t homebuilders get this idea? They could be building new homes again, employing millions, making inner cities and suburbs habitable and bring down the cost of housing for everyone.

Homebuilding needs to join the 21st century and apply the best, efficient technologies to lower costs and reduce energy and resource consumption. But the vast majority of homes have been built using the very best 19th-century, stick-built/balloon frame methods. That’s got to change if we want to revive the bedrock of the American Dream.

As it stands now, while you may have the most up-to-date flat-panel TVs, computers, cellphones and audio equipment inside your home, the basic way that most homes are built hasn’t changed much in more than 170 years.

That’s right. As microprocessors double in speed every 18 months, cellphones are becoming just as powerful as laptop computers and you can connect to nearly anyone on the planet through the Internet, the box you live in is antiquated beyond belief and costs you more every year to heat, cool and maintain.

To change this deplorable situation — and revive real estate, building and banking — it will require a change in attitude. Think of your personal living space as ecodynamic. It could adjust to the exterior environment cybernetically, tell you when the cheapest electricity is available and program the entire house to use less energy.

Is this something out of the new Star Trek movie? Hardly. Ecodynamic homes are not only being built, they are being assembled. That’s an important distinction.

Rather than building everything on site with framing and two-by-fours, modular units are pre-made to exacting specifications in factories, then loaded on flat-bed trucks and assembled on site. This not only cuts the construction time and cost from one-third to one-half, it eliminates tons of waste that end up in landfills. The end-result is energy-efficient, low-maintenance and will produce energy and conserve water.

An ecodynamic home is always working for you to reduce costs. It saves water in cisterns, prevents heat from leaking out in the winter and keeps a breeze flowing in summer. You use less energy because the house’s computer is constantly monitoring conditions and directing resources to where they are needed. Don’t need to heat or cool a spare bedroom? The system will know and cut your bills.

Sounds good so far, but aren’t these homes really ugly trailers? Throw that image out of your mind. They are loaded and secured onto permanent foundations and can be stunning.

Take a look at architect Michelle Kaufmann’s “Smart + Wired Home,” a house so innovative it’s now on display at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. It’s an elegant example of a modular, green home that was factory built and constantly monitoring itself with its own eco-computer system. A flat-panel display in the living room can display a graphic that shows the cost of energy that moment, how much of it the house is consuming and the amount of electrons being produced on rooftop solar panels. If it makes more energy than you consume, you sell it back to the power company.

The Smart + Wired Home costs nine times less to heat and three times less to cool than a standard home of the same size. The gorgeous, spacious interior is full of low-voltage lighting, fixtures made of recycled materials and lets in generous amounts of light.

But this is not just a home for museums as Kaufmann hopes to mass produce these homes. If she succeeds (I’m rooting for her), she could become the Henry Ford of homebuilders. Make houses on assembly lines and their costs will come down as economies of scale will be realized. And because they are modular designs, you can easily change the layout or add on extra modules if you need to expand at a cost much lower than stick-built contracting.

What will it take to make green modular homebuilding a major industry? Policymakers will need to implement tax incentives over the next two decades, reward new home-energy technologies with grants and shift tax dollars away from wasteful road building projects into places like the inner city where decent, affordable housing is in short supply.

Some of this is already being seeded through the Obama stimulus plan and budget, although a comprehensive, long-range plan is needed. The upcoming energy/climate change bill would be an ideal place for these ideas. If we get really good at ecodynamic design and manufacturing, we’ll be able to export these products to places where durable, inexpensive and green housing is desperately needed: China, India, Africa.

Back in the US, homes needn’t be so capital intensive and push people into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They can be clean, green and affordable. They can pay us back when they produce energy. To accomplish that, we will need to re-envision the American Dream. Home is where the heart is. Now the political will needs to follow if we’re to make homeownership widespread and sustainable.

John F. Wasik, author of The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream, is a personal finance columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of several books. His most recent book, The Merchant of Power, was praised by Studs Terkel and well reviewed by The New York Times. Wasik has won more than 15 awards for consumer journalism including the 2008 Lisagor and several from the National Press Club. He has appeared on such national media as NBC, NPR, and PBS. He lives in Chicago. For more information, visit www.johnwasik.com.

Copyright © 2009 John F.Wasik, author of The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream.