Sustainable Homes for the 21St Century

By Michael Royce and Richard Benner

The authors and their wives lived in two of Portlands beautiful, leafy neighborhoods. Their children were grown, so they no longer felt their homes were consistent with their environmental and personal values. They contemplated a different way of living, and over four and a half years, their dreams coalesced into Ankeny Row, a community with six energy-efficient homes structured for community interaction and to permit graceful aging. Sustainable Homes for the 21st Century tells the story of what they learned in the process and provides guidance on how you can make similar dreams come true.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546236474

Michael Royce

Richard Benner served in the Office of Metro Attorney from 2001 to 2012 and advised Metro on urban growth management and transportation. Between 1991 and 2001 he served as Director of the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, the state agency that oversees the Oregon statewide land use planning program. Before that, he was the Executive Director of the Columbia River Gorge Commission during the time (1987-1991) the commission developed a management plan for the new Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Prior to that, he spent 12 years as a staff attorney with 1000 Friends of Oregon. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he received a degree in history, and the University of Oregon Law School. Mr. Benner continues to serve on boards and committees and speaks and writes about growth management and sustainability. Michael co-founded the law firm of Royce, Swanson, Thomas, & Coon, where he represented workers from 1979-1995 in suits to obtain compensation for injuries resulting from toxic exposure. From 1986 to the present, he was part owner and helped manage a family companys working interest in two small run-of-the-river hydroelectric facilities. He and his wife founded Green Empowerment in 1997 to support isolated rural villages in Asia and Latin America in establishing renewable energy systems. In retirement, Mr. Royce writes and publishes fiction and creative nonfiction.

Book preview

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2018 Michael Royce and Richard Benner. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/31/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3646-7 (sc)

978-1-5462-3647-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018904061

Front Cover Drawing by Daryl Rantis Lead Architect for Green Hammer

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

33184.png

Table of Contents and Synopses of Chapters

CHAPTER 1: The Dream Touches Down

Two couples dream of living their values by building homes with three themes: co-housing, aging in place, and sustainability. They find a site and additional partners, but the Great Recession dooms their first effort. Sweeping the ashes aside, they apply lessons learned and discover an ideal site, which is eminently walkable and with good solar access. They choose a design-build firm to bridge the gap between design and construction, believing the choice will save time and money. The firm shares their values and specializes in passive house construction. They opt to self-finance construction to keep costs down.

CHAPTER 2: Shooting for Net Zero

The couples choose a site ideal for solar electricity. The combination of passive house design and solar electricity will achieve net zero, they hope, generating more electricity than they need. They imagine privations: small windows and Jimmy Carter cardigans. Instead, passive house offers choices and tradeoffs, many of which produce real quality-of-life gains. They devote hours to finding efficient appliances to close the energy demand-supply gap.

Chapter 3: Aging in Place

The couples design their project with aging in mind because they want to stay in their new homes as they grow old. Starting with a walkable location near a grocery store, movie theater and other services and with good transit, they choose a co-housing model to ensure they will have friends next door to help them age gracefully. They include a common room where they can gather, exercise and dance and pay attention to detail: ground access to each unit from the street, master bedrooms and baths on the ground floor, walk-in showers, room for wheelchairs and levers for door handles.

CHAPTER 4: Living with Friends

The couples want to live with friends, but how closely? The design process helps them a find balance between social engagement and privacy. A common room and terrace will gather partners. Sharing furniture, chores, services and subscriptions will also draw them together. A courtyard with paths connecting units, the mailboxes and the recycling barn will generate casual encounters during the day. Individual patios screened by low vegetation and second-floor decks with railings will give them time apart. In informal gatherings with prospective partners, they discover similar values. To extend their good luck they add a right of first refusal to their bylaws, providing some control over second-round partners.

CHAPTER 5: Paying for Paradise

Developers’ fees can be 10 per cent of project cost. The couples believe they can save money being their own, citizen developers. They could tell prospective partners no developer’s profit. They give Green Hammer a budget of $2.25 million and begin the search for a construction loan. Partners in the project intend to pay off their shares of the loan when they sell their existing homes or convert their share to a mortgage. The recession renders their analysis academic: no bank is willing to lend for condos due to the recession glut. The couples settle on self-finance of construction using home equity lines of credit. Worried about attracting friends to the project, they work to cut costs during schematic design.

Chapter 6: Documents, Documents

Development spawns a blizzard of documents: establishing a limited-liability corporation; the LLC operating agreement; contracts with Green Hammer; Declarations and Bylaws for the condo association. Several partners, who had practiced law for at least part of their working lives, are confident of their drafting skills, relying on models available at co-housing and condo websites. The non-lawyer partners remind them to send their drafts to a real estate lawyer. They negotiate a fair allocation of risk between owners and their design-build firm. Anxiety over their citizen developer status dissipates when the owner of Green Hammer decides to buy into the LLC to jumpstart construction. Partners add confidence by hiring a part-time owners representative.

CHAPTER 7: Design-Build in Action

Green Hammer presents a site plan and floor plans and the partners launch into detailed design, expecting the design-build model will insert budget controls forcefully. Unit customization, code requirements and a recovering economy increase costs and require choices to keep close to budget. Their thousands of choices – from stovetops to tile grout – complicate cost tracking. Value engineering (cost-cutting) eliminates the hot tub, the pergola over the terrace and the entry portal. The design-build model fumbles on occasion, and tensions arise between partners and Green Hammer. Contract negotiations bog down, but construction gets underway on a limited notice to proceed. Partners learn how to make decisions.

CHAPTER 8: The Tonka Toys Arrive

Partners break ground with Dr. Wolfgang Feist, Director of Passivhaus Institute, late September, 2013. Surprises pop up: pilings are needed to support foundations in unconsolidated soils; undetected underground oil tanks appear; a survey reveals a neighbor’s wall over property lines. More value engineering and schedule delays are unhappy necessities but the buildings pop up before their eyes. Heavy insulation wraps foundations and packs walls and ceilings, triple-pane windows and doors seal the buildings. These are passive houses! Photovoltaic panels clip onto the metal roof. Cabinets, flooring and kitchen islands appear. Partners are anxious to occupy.

CHAPTER 9: Moving In? We can’t stop you

Project delays increase anxieties when partners face interim accommodations as home sales close and rentals expire. The city issues Certificates of Occupancy unit by unit, even before siding is installed. Construction continues around them. They come to a new appreciation of passive house construction: close the triple-pane Zola doors and the grinding, welding and sawing in the courtyard quiet down. Socialization begins. They invite each other to dinner and take turns driving partners to the airport. Tools and surplus furnishings pass among them and fill the common room. Plantings in the landscape emerge from the mud.

CHAPTER 10: From Partners to Homeowners

Lawyer-partners prepare for the transition from LLC to homeowners association. Documents induce sleep but spark interest over who owns what. The plat survey takes months drawing the line between inside and outside and general common elements and limited common elements. A Reserve Study tells partners the lifespan of each building material and each system; it provides a schedule for maintenance and replacement and cost estimates. The partners celebrate the transition after the Turnover Meeting.

CHAPTER 11: The First Two Years

Partners learn from their utility all six condos generated more electricity than they used. The common room and terrace serve as the scene for yoga, movies, political debates, barbecues, guitar practice, NGO fundraisers and reading the shared papers and periodicals. A good balance between privacy and social engagement settles in. Partners befriend owners and shopkeepers of the many small businesses in the neighborhood. The high quality of workmanship in their units makes it easy to let go of the exasperations of construction.

Chapter 12: Could You Do it for Less?

The partners who built Ankeny Row were motivated by values as much as cost-consciousness. That the project be replicable by others was among these values. In this chapter, they offer their thoughts about how a project similar to Ankeny Row could be built at considerably lower cost.

Appendix 1: Biographies of Ankeny Row Partners

Appendix 2: Ankeny Row Timeline

CHAPTER 1: The Dream Touches Down

Two couples dreamed of designing and living in homes representing their values and looking to the future. Over a decade, this dream progressed from a hazy vision to a plan and eventually six homes built to emphasize community, environmental sustainability, and graceful aging.

The four of us, Richard Benner and Lavinia Gordon and Michael and Francie Royce, brought years of experience and a commitment to livable communities, bicycling, and public transit to the project. Michael was a plaintiff’s attorney and ran a family renewable energy business and Francie worked for two Portland city bureaus, planning and transportation. Dick was a land use attorney working at a land use advocacy group and as director of the state land use agency. Lavinia worked as a lawyer for the region’s largest private utility and managed the alternative transportation division for the city’s transportation bureau.

We realized later, however, the most valuable experience we brought to the task was the time we had spent founding and serving on the boards or staffs of a dozen or more nonprofit environmental or service organizations. We knew how to do budgets and had suffered through countless strategic planning exercises with large groups of people while actually enjoying the process.

We wanted a walkable, bikeable neighborhood well-served by transit and retail, and homes which felt sustainable. This led us to Portland’s close-in eastside neighborhoods whose commercial cores had once been linked by streetcars. These areas were recovering from the post- war rush to the suburbs. The notion of adding roof tops and maybe some storefronts was very appealing. We also started thinking about aging in place and sought a location and living environment in which we could age gracefully.

Concept to Program

The design process started with what we knew best: a strategic plan. Each of us distilled her or his vision to a one-page set of concept elements. Then we condensed our efforts into a single set of elements and principles:

33598.png

By spring 2005, we had a concept for a co-housing, aging-in-place, green condo project at a flat, walkable site well-served by transit and bikeways on the east side, with retail services (especially a grocery store) within a quarter-mile.

Ground-floor retail remained the most challenging concept element. Michelle Reeves, a broker active in the cool districts of eastside Portland, warned of difficulty for those with no commercial experience. Many parts of these areas had enough shops. The best thing we could do was to add rooftops - customers - to one of the recovering neighborhoods.