Archive for the ‘Green Living’ Category
July 10th, 2009
Estately: Real Estate Listings Meet Pedestrian-friendly Lifestyles
Stumble it!
Not a fan of those isolated eco-mansions that require driving to get anywhere? Sure, a LEED-certified building’s nice — but not if that means you’ll be cut off from the community around you by your car-dependency, relegating you to a daily driving habit that’s hardly eco-friendly.
That isolation and carbon-intensive lifestyle’s exactly what a new website — Estately — aspires to help you avoid. Estately’s a website that mashes up real estate listings with eco-lifestyle aspirations for the walking, cycling, public transit-taking environmentalist.
Click on a listing and a Walkscore automatically pops up, showing you how amenable that neighborhood is to a pedestrian-friendly lifestyle. In fact, if only a pedestrian paradise of a neighborhood will do, you can even refine your search to only give you listings with a certain walkscore.
Public transit fans get their own dues too. Know a rail or bus line that’ll drop you off right in front of your office? You can plug in that line number into the search to find all the listings within a quarter mile to 2 miles from the route! This application isn’t yet perfect — a quick search for properties near my neighborhood Big Blue Bus line turned up no results, despite the fact that some nearby houses are definitely on the market — but works for most bus lines. Above are just some of the listings that are near Los Angeles’ Metro #33 bus line!
Of course, Estately has all the other info any home hunter would want, like listing details and histories for each property, an easy-to-use mortgage calculator, and an online showing scheduler. The website also makes great use of Google Maps mashups, showing you at a glance what schools, parks, places of interest, and transportation options are near the property.
Last but not least, LEED-certification enthusiasts can still search for “Leed” or “energy efficient” in the search boxes to seek out properties that come with must-have eco-properties. So head over to Estately to start your eco house hunt — in your new walkable neighborhood-to-be!
Screenshots via Estately
Popularity: 6% [?]
July 9th, 2009
Making The Most Out Of Farmer’s Markets
Now that it’s summer, the farmer’s markets are in full swing. The produce is beautiful, full and ripe, and going to the market often inspires a new recipe. In 2008, there were 4,685 farmer’s markets, compared to 1994 when there were only 1,755. This increase is as much to do with the local, organic and sustainability movement. Farmer’s markets also tend to have more heirloom varieties, handcrafted items and specialty varieties. Besides it’s a lot more fun to go to the farmer’s market than the grocery store. But are you getting the most you can out of your weekly trips to the market? Here are some tips and tricks to help you. (more…)
Popularity: 10% [?]
July 8th, 2009
GrassRoutes Guides: Off the Beaten Path Urban Eco-travel
Want green travel that goes beyond LEED-certified chain hotels and flight offsets? Pick up one of the GrassRoutes guides, an urban eco-travel book series put together by Oakland resident Serena Bartlett. These guides reveal the neighborhoody green knowledge that’ll let you get around town like a long-time do-gooder member of the local eco-community.
GrassRoutes: Oakland & Berkeley, for example, clues you into Frugal Foodies, a vegetarian dining society in Berkeley that’s actually accessible to visitors who want to make new foodie friends, and Lakeside Park Gardens, where you can volunteer to help build a sensory garden for the blind. GrassRoutes: Northern California Wine Country of course details the organic wineries in the area — then also lists the many places you can pick cherries in Livermore valley and provides detailed biking directions — including best spots for breaks — to inland Sonoma county.
In its listings, GrassRoutes guides go beyond simple recycling programs and vegetarian options to look at whether a restaurant or store banks locally, is known as a pillar of the community, or employs people reentering workforce. But lest you fear GrassRoutes guides are all do-gooder and little fun, rest assured that you’ll get details on the best local lingerie shop, international grocery stores, green spas, and dive bars — a number of which boast only the faintest of greenishness yet have been awarded the little “community pillar” symbol (cheap drinks will, indeed, make the locals consider your bar indispensable).
Like most travel guides, GrassRoutes guides include a brief history of the area, transportation info, plus sections specific to pet and kid-related activities. Unlike many travel guides, GrassRoutes guides are organized not by neighborhood, but by activity. Brunch places are grouped together, for example — separately from the lunch places, dinner spots, and take-out restaurants, all of which have their own categories.
This unorthodox structure makes the guides actually seem best suited for local residents eager to explore their town — or for newcomers who’ve moved into the neighborhoods. The Oakland & Berkeley guide, for example, includes rather detailed profiles bike shops in the area, big ups welding classes offered at The Crucible, and plugs a tool lending library — information that’s not going to be particularly relevant to a visitor.
And some of the information a visitor might want is missing. The Oakland & Berkeley book’s very bare bones maps will require that you find a separate map or fancy phone to help you get around — and walking tours of neighborhoods will have to be self-concocted since none are included. The extremely brief details lodging options — ghettoized to a few pages at the very back of the book, no less — may also leave you turning to web resources to find a place to stay.
That said, the Northern California Wine Country guide’s more helpful for the average tourist, with expanded lodging info and details on bike-fueled wine tours, olive tours, docent-led winegrowing hike and more. All this means that like the quirks of these NoCal areas the guides cover, the guides too have their quirks, with everything from a short glossary of Oakland lingo (do you know what joog means) to a sociological critique of Napa valley, about which Serena writes:
I am acutely aware of the lack of diversity, the assumption that paradise can be bought, the lavishness enjoyed on the backs of unnamed others. I wriggle and struggle to find something real in this land of façades.
For this kind of personal, locally-oriented, in-depth look at discovering the real place-ness of these tourist spots, pick up a copy of GrassRoutes guides. Both the Oakland & Berkeley and the Northern California Wine Country guides cost $16.95 each; a San Francisco guide is due out next month.
Popularity: 5% [?]
July 7th, 2009
Affordable Shipping Container House in Quebec
Shipping containers are at the forefront of a new era of usefulness. Traditionally used to carry goods via cargo ship, train or truck, these steel boxes are capable of withstanding huge amounts of pressure and weight. This makes them structurally stable, fireproof, mold-proof and weather-proof. Unfortunately each has a lifespan of only 20 years for its original purpose. That means when their work is done hauling stuff, they get retired and sent to junk yards or landfills even though they are still structurally solid. Now architects and designers recognize their usefulness as building blocks for homes, offices, apartments, schools and more. This home in Quebec was built by a couple intent on reducing the amount of wood that goes into building homes and also saving money. (more…)
Popularity: 100% [?]
July 5th, 2009
California Architect Thinks About White Roofs
Written by Susan Kraemer, courtesy of GreenBuildingElements.com
If every building had a white roof, we would be able to cool the surrounding areas. That is the reasoning behind a California law about to go into effect next month requiring light reflective roofs on all new buildings. It is already the law for new flat roofs here.
Here, architect Richard Meier and his partner Michael Palladino have apparently created a design to go one further. It’s entirely white; roofs, walls, and interiors.
So this luxury design of a cool and airy Southern California beach house is glamorous and climate friendly.
Well, no. The McMansion-sized size of the thing at 4,280-sq.-ft is not so planet friendly; because it takes more energy to heat and cool a larger space. But this house would be well suited for a ground heat exchange to passively heat and cool itself with 55 degree air cooled from 10 feet under the ground.
As architects in California get closer to 2020, they will need to think more about passive cooling and heating and zero energy houses, as that will be the law by 2020. All new building must be zero energy by then.
Incorporate solar roofing on the white roof, and this could be a zero energy house.
The blue of a solar roof would visually extend right out to the ocean. (And conceal that horrible mess of mechanical contraptions on that roof.) White elastomeric cool roof paint under the solar panels would help cool the modules making them more efficient on hot days.
But are architects thinking about these things?
With 2020 almost upon us: “The beams at the roof, located above the horizontal framing, express the structural rhythm and layering of components,” explains the architect. “This cadence is repeated with the joinery of the painted aluminum exterior wall panels and modular windows. The mass of the exterior plaster walls are juxtaposed to the transparent glazed facades, creating a mosaic of layered materials.”
Blah, blah, blah.
Popularity: 20% [?]
