By John F. Wasik
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.
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How green building can save the housing industry
September 4th, 2009 · 1 Comment
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.
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Revive US housing by killing cars and ’spurbs’
By John F. Wasik
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.
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The unattainable home
(Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the book The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream by John F.Wasik. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.)
By John F. Wasik
Even before the home bubble burst, homes cost too much for more than four out of 10 Americans. Only 56 percent of Americans could afford a modestly priced home in 2002, the first full year of the bubble. And as Americans went deeper into debt to finance their dream, they accumulated less and less of a tangible ownership stake. Home equity as a percentage of market value peaked in 1982 — at 70 percent — after a brutal recession. More than half of American homeowners with a mortgage would owe more than they owned at the end of 2008. About 7.5 million were spending more than half of their income on housing costs.
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