Foreclosure is seen as a last resort for many, perhaps a reminder of mistakes made in investing or how the bank that you’ve given countless fees to over the years, let you down, lending you money for a home they should have known was risky.

The infographic below tries to cut through the emotions and gives some hard stats on what options are out there and what impact your choices might have on your future wealth and credit score. While we are continuously reminded that “things are different up here in Canada”, its a reminder that most people going through foreclosure NEVER imagined that they would be in the position of losing their house, unable to keep up with payments, or their home being worth way less than what they have left to pay.

Via: McFarlin Law

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Foreclosure [infographic]

Technorati Tags: foreclosure, Housing, U.S

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Sometimes you just need to take out your favourite pen and write.

This is how I felt at lunchtime today, so I walked to Starbucks, remembering my pens, iPhone and e-reader, but upon sitting down, I realized that I had forgotten an essential piece of technology, my journal.

So, taking a deep breath and a sip of Americano, I read. Not the outcome I was looking for, but satisfying in it’s own right. In this information-soaked age, it is almost impossible to be more than a couple of steps away from something that can rapidly deliver information and/or entertainment. And, perhaps as a result, most people have lost the art of writing out their thoughts or a letter, and even those with the skills find it hard to make the time for these soothing activities.

Almost no-one writes by hand anymore, particularly not in cursive, the very act almost counter cultural, not in some strange Winsten-esque 1984 moment, but more an act of patience and deliberative effort in an age of speed and information overload. Take some time out from your busy day, grab a nice pen and some good writing paper and write out some of your story – it could be good for your soul.

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Writing by Hand

Technorati Tags: Writing

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With the failure of the suburban experiment, rising house prices and a greater desire to be in the downtown, designers are looking to stretch the limits of materials, to satisfy changing needs. Added to this, Canadian designers are looking to find ways to use pine beetle infested timber from our forests.

But now, designers are daring to imagine buildings of 20 to 30 storeys held up by nothing more than gargantuan plywood beams. Made possible by new advances in wood technology, they will be fire resistant, earthquake proof, cost-competitive and built in a fraction of the time taken to pour a concrete building. Amid a lagging lumber market and a massive oversupply of trees killed by the mountain pine beetle, architects and developers are already sounding the news: Wood is coming to Canada’s skylines.

National Post – Designers imagine skylines of wood high-rises, made possible by new technology
In Britain, a nine story timber panel building has the following impressive construction statistics:

Constructed entirely of pre-fabricated wood panels, the building was constructed by a team of four workers in only 27 days – and generated no more than a few trash cans of construction waste.

Will Canadian housing markets accept this construction practice for tall buildings? Or will fears of safety Rule the day?

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Tall Timber Buildings

Technorati Tags: architecture, engineering, highrise, structural, structural wood, structures, tall buildings, Timber, timber panel, wood, wood panel

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The planners out there might get upset to know that an engineer has crashed their party, then again, who knows, maybe they’ll be happy to have me along. Fifty years ago, Jane Jacobs, an activist, critic, author and urbanist,  wrote the seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This is the first book to be read by the recently formed City Builder Book Club. This week, the focus is on Chapters 8 and 9. I’m sort of reading along with the group, and reading the various blog posts that are popping up across the blogosphere, and like most people who have read some of Jane Jacobs work, I am left wondering where we went wrong as a group of professionals when we let our cities deteriorate. While the book offers disclaimers as to the applicability of her thoughts, it is easy to see the concepts of public spaces, mixed uses, short blocks, and sidewalks working functionally at all scales of cities.

My favourite chapters are those on sidewalks and public spaces. As a walker, (most of us are), I’m passionate about safe walking routes. Some of us walk further than others, on my daily walks I see the regulars, kids going to school, seniors walking their dogs, and other pedestrian commuters. Now, a little off topic, for while I’m still talking about sidewalks, it is less about the social function that Jane Jacobs discusses, and more about it’s functionality. One of the biggest complaints I have in any suburban area is where sidewalks are incomplete, or difficult to navigate. Streetlight poles, power poles, sign poles, traffic light poles, parked cars and hedges narrowing the width of the sidewalk. Driveways, curb letdowns, cracks, heaving concrete, steep edges, making the terrain of the sidewalk less passable.

In the past, we’ve given more and more space to the automobile, with the net effect often being little more than increasing the speed of vehicles on streets. While that’s happened, the pedestrian has been pushed to the very extremities of the right of way, along with the various and sundry poles and signs that litter the urban and suburban realm. For every fixed object or obstruction such as a drop-off (or curb and gutter), the effective width of the sidewalk should be decreased by about 2 feet (0.6m). In designing new road cross sections, every effort should be made to ensure that a function 1.5m wide sidewalk exists – this allows two pedestrians to pass, or one with an umbrella to navigate the obstacles without fear of bumping.

In many cases, reclaiming the sidewalk should take priority over parking or potentially even additional traffic lanes – what good is a street that has a level of service A for vehicles, but F for pedestrians? Making our environments more pedestrian friendly will bring more people onto the streets and hopefully out of their cars.

Some resources:

• Sidewalk Design Guidelines and Existing Practices
• Strong Towns – Shared Space
• Walk Denver – NY Times
• Walk Friendly Communities

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Sidewalks

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Over Christmas my family and I traveled back to Australia for the first time in five years. There had been several reasons for our not returning sooner, high on our list was the cost, and a close second was the actual ability to take a month off to make the trip worthwhile. In a new job, with a gracious boss, I was able to take this time off over the holiday season, swapping rainboots for flipflops and skis for a beach towel.

Having been heavily involved in the sustainability scene over the past 5 years, I know full well the environmental consequences of our decision to travel, (just under 30 tonnes of CO2 equivalent for the family of four if you are interested), and because it was a trip to reconnect with family, I feel justified in using up many of the “credits” we’d saved through our more sustainable lifestyle over the past five years. What interests me more about this trip, like many holidays, is how much it was an artifact of the current age; even just a couple of generations ago, when you left the homeland for a foreign country, it was unlikely that you would ever return, regardless of who you had left behind. Long distance travel was typically a one way affair, occasionally dangerous, and it might be the last time you ever saw your family again, even in photographs. My grandfather left Ireland at the age of four – he never returned. Communication was limited to letters, telegrams were an expense reserved for the most important of messages, even the birth of a child was often announced by letter, as money was simply that tight.

While we were in Australia, we visited the Blue Mountains, one of my favourite destinations close to Sydney, (about 100km from downtown). Many of the tourist type facilities up there were developed in the 1880′s at a time when only the wealthy could afford to take a holiday, travelling on primitive roads in horse drawn carriages on a journey that could take days. It wasn’t until after the great depression, and the start of the age of the automobile that the average person could make the trip up to Katoomba to enjoy the mountain air and scenery. The simple act of driving out into the country to visit a beautiful place was impossible for the average person without oil and the industries it created.

Society has forgotten how to wait. Opportunities to exercise patience are limited to consumer purchases, when we yearn for the next iDevice, even though there are a dozen devices that could perform similar functions. The age of cheap, plentiful oil has spoiled our expectations, making simple pleasures mundane through excess; shrinking distances to the point that almost all trips can be taken in hours not days, weeks or months. There are of course benefits to these advances in technology, but too often we forget what we’re sacrificing and what we’ve lost – not attempting to glorify a past that was harder than our current situation.

Is there a moral to this narrative? Not one in particular, but I would say, “Go out for a walk”, “Slow down”, and “Be thankful”. This weekend I did all three and feel quite refreshed.

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Be Thankful

Technorati Tags: Australia, oil, patience, thankful, Transportation, travel, waiting

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Wishing all of our readers a happy new year. Things have been a little slower around the site than planned for 2011, but we will still be writing into 2012. We’ve moved closer to the action of the lower mainland, and miss some of the luxuries of login in the Kootenays, as well as friends there.But wherever you live there are adventures to be had and new friends to be made!

Guest articles will be considered, as well as suggestions for topics of interest. Thanks for reading, and best wishes to you and your families.

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Happy New Year!

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Educational engineering books that are fun to read and informative are sadly few and far between. A new release from Kate Ascher, the author of The Works: Anatomy of a City, called The Heights – Anatomy of a Skyscraper provides a detailed insight into the planning, construction, operation and maintenance of these most urban of structures. From the table of contents, (which starts at the bottom of the page and goes up), this book succeeds in getting you to think about the thousands of individual decisions that make up the design of a skyscraper, and how all of the pieces are put together to make a building that functions safely and silently behind the scenes. When you think of anatomy, it typically describes how an organism was made, the various systems that allow it to survive and the way that these systems interact to allow the organism to perform tasks. In that sense, much like a book on human anatomy, Kate Ascher has delved into the structure and systems of the skyscraper, from the skin which protects the structure and functions from the elements, to the defense systems, protecting against corrosion, fire, earthquakes and explosions.

Have you ever wondered how elevators work, or how water is supplied to the top floors of a tall building? Or maybe your kids ask questions like these and you mutter some answer before heading off to Google to see if you can find a reference that is easy to explain. Well this book should satisfy all but the most technical of questions on the full range of questions that might be asked of a building, how it is built and how it functions.

One of the challenges in writing a reference book is ensuring that it has a shelf life, that it is current, yet timeless. Kate Ascher does a wonderful job with this through a clear understanding of the history of design elements and a strong grasp of the current state of technology. The diagrams provide a wonderful context to the text, and the layout offers a pleasurable reading experience, with, in most cases, less than half of any page dedicated to text. This is a topic that requires graphics to engage the reader, and this is an example of a book that has truly mastered the art of communicating technical information to lay and technical readers.

While not specifically a children’s book, this book has been a regular request from our elementary aged kids, and it is clear that they are able to soak up the details of the text being read through the excellent pictures, some of which are shown below. As one reviewer of The Works wrote, I’d second this assessment, as being equally applicable for The Heights:

Reviews suggesting that the text is for teenagers may be accidentally misleading. “The Works” by no means is for teenagers either *primarily* or *at the exclusion of* adults. Yes, the book–especially its more heavily-illustrated sections–will no doubt fire the imagination of many teens who have engineering, design, line drawing, architectural, historical analysis, or problem-solving aptitudes. (Have a teenager who loved Legos as a kid but has outgrown them? This book will probably make a good gift.) Just because the book is broad in scope and doesn’t examine each urban work it covers with the detail of a textbook for electrical engineering students at M.I.T. doesn’t make it merely for adolescents.

Source: Amazon.com Review of The Works

Ascher ends the book with a chapter on the future of skyscrapers, describing the dreams of visionary architects of the past, Le Corbusier, Hugh Ferriss, and Frank Lloyd Wright; mile-high towers, multi-use skyscrapers as centres of all facets of urban life, and a Utopian belief in the skyscraper as a solution of overcrowding and  land use constraints. She leaves us with glimpses of how high skyscrapers might go, how green they could be and what shape they might be. From my perspective, some of the statements in this last section of the book are fanciful, not because these are technically impossible, but rather because they appear financially impossible. We can scarcely look after what we’ve already built, let alone what we might plan to build. Will we have the energy in the future to pump water to the top of a skyscraper? Will we have the ability to re-skin these buildings at the appropriate times in their lifespan? Will we be able to demolish these buildings without damaging those surrounding buildings? Will we be able to reuse the materials?

Skyscrapers have grown from a humble beginning of 300 feet high in the 1870′s to the Burj Khalifa in Dubia at over 2600 feet, relying heavily on technological innovations for every height increment over these years. If you want a book that will provide a facinating read, combining accurate details of these technologies and how they all work together in a highly readable format, I recommend this book, it would make a great Christmas present for a teenager with a technical mind. Also check out The Works: Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher’s first book.

Mike received a copy of The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper as part of a TLC Book Tour, check out some of the other great sites that are part of the tour.

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Anatomy of a Skyscraper

Technorati Tags: anatomy, architecture, buildings, Cities, city, Construction, skyscraper, The Heights, urban

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While listening to this podcast, I was struck by how similar the discussion sounded to what I had experienced while living in Castlegar, a town of around 7,500 in rural BC.

The Pending Financial Implosion of Small Town America – StrongTowns Podcast. (link to site here).

Strongtowns is a blog and podcast that has packaged a couple of core themes together in the hopes that the discussion on the web and in communities will move towards a greater understanding of the flaws in the current models of community planning and development, and some of the answers to our predicaments of infrastructure deficit and obese streetscapes.

What struck me was the absurdity of a small town (Castlegar) with four separate commercial zones (three existing, and one proposed at the airport), each effectively taking something from the others. There is little to blame for this but poor land use planning that led to the zoning of lands outside the downtown core for retail and commercial purposes, which led to a cascading disinvestment in the downtown. The latest such venture is the airport lands, held up as, “the only flat commercial land left in the Kootenays”. But for a community that wqas so interested in sustainability over the past couple of years, the decision to invest in development of utilities to these lands represents a huge departure froma plan for a walkable, compact community, and instead dilutes the density of commercial space. In Castlegar, the only recent example of a major retail business moving closer to downtown was Lordco, an automotive parts retailer, who located their new building in the new and used car core of Castlegar.Fundamental to what Strongtowns sees as the challenges to the financial sustainability of small towns, (and yes Castlegar is a small town folks), are the following practices.

• Developing the outskirts while investment in the core declines
• streetscapes that reflect auto-centric madness
• parking lagoons and single storey developments

All of these are issues that Castlegar faces, and were brought up during the community input to the OCP process, yet the Airport Lands remains a priority of the current Mayor and Council.

As the City of Castlegar pushes forward with extensions to the water and sewer utilities to the proposed development of the Castlegar airport lands, several questions are raised in my mind:

• what is the existing commercial floor area to population ratio in the City of Castlegar, even treating the commercial district as a regional one.
• what is the expected tax revenue for the development when fully built out vs the cost to service.
• what is the expected funding to the water and sewer utilities vs cost to maintain and replace assets in the lifespan.
• has the City determined the cost of maintaining and operating the water, sewer, streetlights and snowplowing for the proposed development, will this cost be covered by taxes and user fees raised?
• has the City determined the lifecycle cost of the assets gained through the development and provided a clear roadmap for funding these liabilities?
• has the City conducted a market study to determine what businesses may choose to locate in this development and which existing businesses may be impacted by the change in competition?

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Small Towns – Big Appetites

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If nothing else, this Remembrance Day, take a moment to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, for the hope of peace, and the security of future generations.

Or brave the weather on Friday and show your support in your local community. This image is where we’ll be, at the newly dedicated Cenotaph in downtown Langley.

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as We Remember

Technorati Tags: Langley, Remembrance Day, Veteran's Day

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It seems as if we are commonly told that the answer to whatever problem our communities are facing is more density, more houses, better transportation networks and more opportunities for consumerism. In other words that we must keep growing to keep feeding the machine that our society has become. I don’t know about you, but when I look around, I see some cracks in the facade and many people questioning whether the powers that be are making decisions that are in the long term best interest of all people. Are we, as the following clip suggests, “addicted to growth”?

This movie aims to put the theory of “growth as the only viable solution” to task.

Check out the website Growthbusters, and see if there are screenings in your area. If not, maybe you want to buy a copy and host a movie night? Even if you don’t see eye to eye with the premise presented here, it would offer a great night of discussions and probably open up your friends to the decisions we need to be aware of as society changes.

For more information on the ideas presented, you could check out the following books: Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience and The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality.

This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com ©2010.

Originally posted as Growthbusters

Technorati Tags: community, growth, growthbusters, ideas

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