The fourth utility
A home is not complete, as we are reminded by a classic elementary topology problem, unless it is connected up to three utilities — heat, electricity, and water/ sewer.
No Certificate of Occupancy until you’re connected up
Just as the mathematicians assert the existence of more dimensions than three, perhaps the evolving modern home will keep adding utilities beyond the statutory three, as illustrated by this recent article from the New York Times:
WHEN Parimal Pandya, a 32-year-old network consultant at AT&T, walked into the sales office at Liberty Harbor, a mixed-use waterfront development going up in
Mr. Pandya wasn’t listening. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ve heard this a million times,’ ” he said. “Then I notice the blinds going up and down, and I think: ‘Who’s controlling that? I want to know more about that.’ ”
What captured Mr. Pandya’s attention was the home automation system.
I believe that in Jungian interpretation, the house is the self, and it’s easy enough to see why, for our mental selves live inside a hard exterior structure (the brain).
I don’t like what my subconscious is telling me about our relationship, dear
While we fear the haunted house, we cherish the nurturing house that anticipates our needs. It’s not just a deep psychological comfort, it’s also an amenity — and therefore a rental or selling advantage — because the more the house does by itself, the less we have to do to make our environment comfortable, and the more we settle into that comfort.
The automation of our homes has crept upon us unnoticed. We already take for granted setback thermostats, daily self-starting sprinklers, lights on timers (for when we fall asleep in the barcalounger or leave for vacation), and sump pumps that only pump when there’s sump to pump.
The chairs may be classic, but the televisions a big-screen!
Extend these trends at all and pretty soon you have a house that can think for itself; indeed, as early as 1950, in “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Ray Bradbury was writing stories about fully automated houses, and now, fifty years later, we’re on the verge of having them:
Residents at Liberty Harbor — 10,000 in 250 buildings when the complex is fully built out in 10 or 15 years — will be able to do this from touch screens in their apartments or from any computer with Internet access, enabling them to make adjustments from miles away.
There’s a clear correlation and synergy between automating and smartening housing and scaling it up; if you’re going to run all that wiring and broadband, a cubical array is much more efficient to serve and to repair than a two-dimensional tangle of power lines and buried clay pipes.
That’s a lot of infrastructure you’ve got swinging in the breeze
It may sound space age, but sophisticated smart-home technology is increasingly available and includes automation systems that allow residents to control lighting, raise and lower window shades and change a room’s climate, via computers. In many instances, they can manipulate a variety of audio and visual functions, allowing users to listen to different types of music in different rooms or transfer a movie from one plasma-screen television to another.
Smart also means safer, and as cities become denser, our need for short-distance security increases:
Enhanced systems with integrated closed-circuit televisions allow residents to see what’s going on inside and outside their homes from another location. Such security applications provide convenience, too: diners can see if there’s a line at the restaurant down the block, parents can receive text messages when their children arrive home and executives can admit repairmen to their homes via cell phone.
While boys love toys …
Look daddy, we’re becoming railroad tycoons!
… there’s a more serious side to smartening up a house: you can manage energy consumption:
This sort of technology may be most familiar to buyers of new houses in the suburbs, but it is now becoming the latest must-have amenity in condos at every price level that are being built in and around New York City.
Amenities typically start at the income pyramid’s apex and gradually work their way down, both because the technological cost drops (with development and also with scale), and also because much of the selling work is done by word of mouth. Eventually the technology reaches the affordability frontier:
The plummeting cost of bandwidth — the amount of data that can be carried in a given amount of time — and of home technology components and an increase in the types of applications available are making electronic amenities much more common.
I’m the price of bandwidth and I’m not happy!
“Technology is the fourth utility,” said Herb Hauser, the president of Midtown Technologies in Manhattan, a company that designs and installs systems in new and existing apartments. “We wouldn’t move into a building that doesn’t have water or electricity. Within a relatively short period of time, we won’t move into an environment unless it has good information services.”
Once upon a time, the census didn’t count indoor plumbing. Then it was the telephone, which for decades was a luxury and is now a necessity. In the next decade, the next utility will be bandwidth and a pervasive endoskeletal nervous system.
That poses a challenge for older properties. English houses, as anyone who visits notices, often have their plumbing snaking up and down the exterior, because the building carapace is a single layer of brick or stone that is ruinously expensive to penetrate. Older houses stuff their interwall spaces with lath and plaster; older apartment complexes use sheetrock over two-by-fours. Opening up these spaces and then drilling holes through which to snake broadband lines is both expensive and a structural risk.
“I think housing and technology are synonymous,” said Peter Mocco, the developer of
Enhancing quality of life with technology: Peter and Lorraine Mocco
The generation that has grown up starting in about 1950 is unlike any in previous human existence; before 1950, the norm was stability, and change was infrequent. In our world, such is the place of change we sometimes forget how rapidly we embrace text-messaging, wi-fi, and GPS car navigators that talk to us. We are all living in the future, and the future is arriving ever faster.
Housing, being not only immobile but long-lived, is among the last frontiers of the broadband evolution. And affordable housing, being less price-sensitive and generally less frequently financed, is lagging behind.
“The bar has risen in terms of people’s expectations of home entertainment systems,” said Cyrus Claffey, the president of Clareo Networks in
Rising expectations are critical; you compete only as you meet or exceed those expectations. Functional obsolescence is a major challenge.
Walk an older affordable apartment today and you will be struck by how small the corridors are and the children’s bedrooms. There’s often only one bathroom for five people. Sinks are tiny. Electronic amperage is minimal. Blown fuses and circuit breakers are a constant problem in older properties, as home systems, computers, microwaves, air conditioners all drain amperage.
Think about what this means for older affordable housing, properties built in the 1970’s, or — even more challenging — public housing. There comes a point where it is no longer economic to rehab the building, you are much better served by ’subsidy portage,’ demolishing entirely and rebuilding on the same site.
“No luxury developer would build a kitchen without a Sub-Zero fridge,” Mr. Claffey added. “It’s the same thing with technology. Our model is to align ourselves with real estate developers. Our goal is to help them sell units using technology.”
Even allowing Mr. Claffey his upmarket focus, his larger point is valid. I can remember when microwave ovens were an upmarket amenity; today you can’t enter an affordable apartment without seeing them. Better things for better living …
I have seen the future, and it sits around in its underwear
Today’s gadget is tomorrow’s renting advantage and next week’s functional necessity.
As Mr. Hauser of Midtown Technologies put it: “It’s all application-based, which means that a problem is all inside the computer software. Correcting the problem is usually a matter of reloading the software or finding a virus. They’ll never have to tear up the wall — the plumbers will do far more damage to your walls.”
If you buy this reasoning — and I do — it means that every new home or apartment should be built with a series of wide tubular conduits snaking throughout the walls. Anyone who’s ever groped around an obsolescent road-warrior hotel late at night trying to find a plug and then dragged his laptop cord over to the undersized desk appreciates that if the building’s walls don’t have electronic apertures, you can have lovely large rooms that are totally non-functional.
Just as you can never be too rich or too thin, in home renovation you can never have too many plugs, too many amperage, too much broadband.
And darling, I knew rich and I knew thin
“All the developers are doing this type of stuff,” said Jon Ecker, the president of Peace of Mind Technologies in
There’s also a cost-reduction/ environmental vector. Better bandwidth reduces the need for physical travel (as Isaac Asimov demonstrated in his mystery novel The Naked Sun), which reduces energy consumption.
The more mechanical I get, the less I need to move
And at the Archstone-Clinton, a rental building on West 52nd Street, a high-tech laundry room allows residents to log on to a Web site to see if a washing machine is available; it will also send an e-mail or text message when their washer or dryer has stopped. (When residents log on, the machines being used are shown in red and even vibrate a bit.)
You don’t want to see this icon on your Web-based washing machine update
As I’ll explore in future posts, smarter also means greener, which also means cheaper.
“Thankyouverrymuch”
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