Monday, July 31, 2006

Status from Baton Rouge

Eh-hmm. Please pardon my recent lack of updates.

Of the ten houses we built in Hidden Cove, five are currently occupied and the other five shall be occupied soon. In fact, we are primarily waiting on electricity to be turned on at three of those houses, and the others will be closed out soon enough.

This is not to say I've really had a hand in that part, Christiaan and the other construction workers have been keeping that up. I've been doing office work. You see, it all started a few weeks ago when [start crazy flashback sequence]...

A couple of Friday's ago we lost our construction director. The next Tuesday, Christiaan, Mike and I met with a couple of members of the board and we decided that we would try to plan the thirty-two houses that we are building this fall and finish up the twenty-ish houses we currently have in development. So my part in that has been to figure out where we are, where we are going, and how can we get there. For some reason, I've felt that I needed to develop something to help do that, and I've spent the last couple of weeks basically developing a web front-end to a database where we track the status of our current builds. I guess you go with what you know, although I really don't know that much about web front-ends, or databases for that matter. Anyway, it works, for now.

The hard part really was figuring out where we are, which I believe we almost have an accurate picture. The next hard part is beginning the next wave of houses, currently scheduled to begin on September 9.

To help us, we have a new team of Americorps NCCC starting this Friday, and we have some new construction bodies that have and will start soon. Rachel joined us last week, and at least three more should join us during the month of August.

Today, I got to meet our new Executive Director, Chris. Today was his first day so I had limited interaction, but he will join us at our 7:30 construction meeting tomorrow to get an idea of what we've set as our current priorities. I think it will be nice to quit being headless, or more accurately, quit being a hydra.

In other news, the future homeowners of the last house to be built on Faith Court had a little tragedy over the weekend. The house in which they currently live caught fire, so it is now uninhabitable. We've decided to focus our efforts on getting their new house completed, so we've set a goal of getting them in their house by next week.

Speaking of Faith Court, as Christiaan and I drove by the Popeye's down the block from Faith Court, Christiaan pointed out something strange about its side door. You could tell from the Police line around the building that it wasn't going to be good, and later we confirmed that the door was indeed covered with blood. It turns out to be the blood of the manager, who was shot, stabbed and left to die in the freezer early this morning. They did catch and charge someone with the murder. Lynn pointed out to us that it wasn't the assistant manager who always calls us "baby". Instead, it was someone equally as nice. Apparantly, there was a shooting at the Piggly Wiggly parking lot (across the street from Popeye's) the day before.

The handprint on the door, visible from the road, is still lingering in my mind.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

"We believe that every family in the United States is entitled to decent shelter."

These are not the words of Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, instead they are the words of William J. Levitt, one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century. Beginning after World War II, he and his company are recognized for revolutionizing the home-building industry and building more than 140,000 houses worldwide.

After WWII, the U.S. government recognized a need for 5,000,000 houses and incentivized private industry to provide this housing by securing loans made to builders and to buyers. Five years after the war, 4,000,000 houses had been produced. William J. Levitt's company had produced over 30,000 of them.

In the tradition of Henry Ford, Mr. Levitt applied modern principles to the manufacture. He developed a stationary assembly line where the workers would move but the product remained fixed. He decomposed the construction into 26 (or 27) steps and then allocated teams of two or three to perform their unique step on each house (raising studs, red paint painters, white paint painters, deckers, sheathers, washing machine bolt tighteners, etc.). All of the material used on the site was cut to length, labeled, sorted and delivered to each slab (yes, they used concrete slabs and would trench each house in less than fifteen minutes) in identical kits. He purchased his own timberland and sawmill. He manufactured his own nails. At the height of their production they could produce 36 houses/day.

The cookie-cutter housing concept was not without its critics and controversy (would William Safire be proud?) He was himself Jewish, but would not sell to African-Americans. His argument being that while he had no room for racial intolerance, the prevalent attitude was that the large majority of his customers would not favor integration. He once said, "As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice, but, by various means, I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours." Always a capitalist, I believe he described it a little more palatably as, "We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem but we can't combine the two." I believe that Time recognizes him not only for revolutionizing U.S. construction practices, but for leading the suburbanization of America.

Does any of this sound familiar? Racial parallels aside, we've been building 10 houses since May. Once again, I'm going to write that "we're almost done", and we are. We expect to be ready for two more homeowners to move in on Friday, and hopefully a couple more the following week. But, as Christiaan pointed out in the Fortune magazine article that introduced us to William J. Levitt, he was able to complete a house every fifteen minutes and because of the amount of preparation, they only required 20% of their labor to be skilled. I believe the "15 minutes" may be a deceptive statistic, but I do believe that they understood volume and this assembly-line technique has merit.

Anyway, their houses were 750 square feet, one level, two bedrooms with an attic. Our houses are 1150 square feet, one level, three bedroom houses with an attic. I hope that we could at least keep up with practices from 50 years ago.

(Thanks to Google, I was able to do a good amount of research while another Project Runway marathon was on Bravo. Most of this information was gathered from The Capital Century, Wikipedia, and Time.)

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Thoughts on Independence Day

[Watch out, he's talking politics again]

It's raining in Baton Rouge, I'm surfing through web sites of organizations that provide aid and relief while watching a 'Project Runway' marathon. It occurs to me that while I've provided a link to the Millennium Development Goals, I've not listed them for those that didn't want to follow the link.

The eight specific recommendations of the UN Millennium Project are:
  1. Eradicate Extreme Hunger and Poverty
  2. Achieve Universal Primary Education
  3. Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
  4. Reduce Child Mortality
  5. Improve Maternal Health
  6. Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases
  7. Ensure Environmental Sustainability
  8. Develop a Global Partnership for Development
The report from which these goals were produced is available online.

It is widely accepted that over 1 billion of our world's population live under conditions of extreme poverty - a condition defined by people that do not have access to the basic human necessities of food, water, shelter, education and health care. There are not extreme poor in the U.S. Extreme poverty is a condition of the developing world. This is not to say there are not poor or people in need in the U.S. I can look around my neighborhood and you can look around yours, and we'll both find there are people who are in need, but not to this extreme degree. I have spent the last eight months helping people in need, and it has been rewarding.

Sub-saharan Africa and Asia are the two regions most affected by this condition.

The G8 has pledged to cancel debt and increase aid to these nations. In the past week, Bono's group Debt, AIDS, Trade and Africa Group (DATA) reported that the G8 was collectively off-the-mark in its pledge to increase aid to Africa. There was some good in the report, but there was much room for improvement. It seems he even left his audience with a lightly veiled threat. From the article, "Next year when we get to Germany and we're not back on track we won't be talking pop concerts ... we will be demonstrating in very different ways."

Anyway, to bring this back to the 4th... I'm a child of the seventies, and was raised watching School House Rock. In addition to learning that three was indeed a magic number, and finally learning what the functions of conjunctions were, I also learned the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, in song. In it, is described domestic tranquility, general welfare, and blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity while striving to create a perfect union. Don't the Millennium Goals sound like implementations of these principles? Or at least vaguely parallel? What better way to promote those principles and our 230 years of maturity than to help the greatest number in the greatest need. This would be a foreign policy that I could embrace, wholeheartedly.

Monday, July 03, 2006

first resident

I think we've almost got this one right. The owner of Lot 59 (a.k.a. the Sue Gunter House, the one on the right) moved her belongings into the house on Friday, June 29. That's only 26 days after the blitz ended. Her electricity and HVAC unit were installed on Friday, and I believe she spent her first night in the house on Saturday. This is such an accomplishment for us, and by comparison to the Thanksgiving 2005 blitz, we are much improved.

Of course, we had several things in our favor this time compared to last: the number of volunteers, the amount of preparation, it probably doesn't hurt that I know more about what I'm doing now, the number of NCCC teams that helped us, and even that we have Christiaan working with us now is a great benefit compared to last time. Note that in the photo, Christiaan is installing two of the two-hundred or so shelves that needed to be installed. I believe he installed a total of six shelves. To be fair (and I don't really want to be), Christiaan is much more valuable doing other things than installing shelving - that's where I fit in, and why I make the big bucks.

Other good news from Hidden Cove is that I installed the last wire shelf on Saturday! The flooring has been installed in a number of houses, so I think we just need to put shoe mould down in those houses and they'll be complete. Hopefully, the remainder of the floors will be installed in the next few days, and then we'll follow behind them installing the moulding. This can still be completed in a week or so, and maybe then we'll get some more homeowners to move in.

There will still be a bit of exterior work to complete. Many of the houses have problems with the siding that needs to be corrected, but we can work on that once we've completed all of the interior items and not prevent people from moving in.

Today I went to lunch with all of the ladies in the office. I stopped by the office as they were leaving for their new monthly event, and they invited me to join them. I think they could tell that I was lone..., err, bored (why else would I go to work on my day off) and offered me a distraction.

Anyway, Happy Independence Day.