Affordable Housing Institute : US

My post a few days ago observed, regarding Henry Hudson Townhouses, that some properties are more costly to fix.  Because my for-profit company has been working on Henry Hudson for four years, and is even now helping the buyer with the new subsidy reconfiguration, we’ve got photographs that demonstrate the problems.

 

Henry Hudson, as Cher memorably phrased it in Clueless, was a full-on Monet. 

 

 

From far away, it’s okay …

 

 

… but up close, it’s a big old mess.

 

 

The closer you looked, the more you could see problems, like wood rot at ground level,

 

 

Wood rot at roof line level,

 

 

And what was the culprit? 

 

 

Water.

 

Water, water, everywhere, nor anywhere to drain. 

 

A stately pleasure dome decree?

 

Water kills more properties than all other dangers combined.  (Children and pets are second and third, respectively: children, in this context, are just smarter, larger pets about whom one cannot even insist on modest proposals like keeping them on a leash.)

 

Water warps wood:

 

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;

Water rots sheetrock.  Water invites mold and mildew.

 

You’d think architects would understand that.  But then they go and build roof lines like this.

 

 

The water has nowhere to go.  It runs down that nicely pebbled sheetrock, and slides along the join lines, eventually finding an aperture:

 

 

So it can dive inside the apartment, where it warps 2×4s, softens plaster, discolors roofs and walls.

 

Even more debilitating for properties is solid water – for you southerners, we up here use the old Inuit term ’snow’ –

 

 

Winter wonderland, right?  But snow must be shoveled, and where do people shovel it?  Right next to buildings:

 

 

Whereupon, in the spring, it all melts – rapidly – right in position to sit where wood meets dirt, leaving this:

 

 

Rotted wall panels.

 

You’d think architects would understand this, but then they build roof lines like this:

 

 

Never mind the stylistic considerations, where is all the water going to go?  Why, right into those little alcoves, where it has three lovely vectors into the house and basement.

 

Even more discouraging, the site is utterly level graded.  Anybody who’s ever managed property knows you have to grade away from foundations, to allow water runoff, else the standing water will slowly dissolve your building envelope – which raises your energy costs, when you have windows like this:

 

 

Don’t get me started about energy conservation and utility costs, with roofs like this:

 

 

A property person looks at the foregoing picture and thinks, High heating bills, because there’s not enough snow on those roofs.  (You can see the melt along roof edges.)

 

Put it all together – site layout and density, grading, walls, roof lines, energy inefficiency – and you have a property that had negative physical value; the site was more valuable with the residents in place and the buildings gone.

 

So they tore down the buildings, and they started excavating to regrade the site, and they found …

 

The Ark of the Covenant?

 

[Tune in tomorrow for another subterranean discovery at Henry Hudson.]

 

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