I unexpectedly had to go to nyc for work on Thursday. Unfortunately I didn't even have time to hang out or anything. I at minimum had planned to swing by Muji to get some replacement fountain pen ink cartridges, but I didn't have time. With a little more notice I might have planned to stay the weekend. The funny thing was realizing I hadn't taken a taxi to or from the airport in so many years. I usually take public transport or the NY Airport Service bus. It's much less expensive.
My meeting was at the World Financial Center and I got a glimpse of the apartment complex where I used to live. I was saying it had been 10 years since I lived there and I had to correct myself when I realized it had been nearly 20 years. Suddenly I feel so old! My life was kind of a mess back then. I somehow just barely scraped by in everything I did. Now i just think very differently about things. My sense of "value" and "cost" and "enough" are way different. I still have expensive tastes, but I don't act on them as impulsively as I used to. I paid off my largest student loan last year and don't have a tremendous amount of remaining debt to pay off.
2011 is the year of saving aggressively. Actually I have a 5 year plan which should put me in a very good position, but like all plans, it assumes that certain things will not change and I have a feeling that *everything* could change. After all, 5 years is a long time. But for now, this is what I'm doing. The goal is to save $100,000. Some of it will be my emergency fund. Some of it will be to buy or build a home. The strategy is to put a ton of my income aside in savings and then assuming everything is on track, put a chunk of that into investments every 6 months. What I'm going to invest in, I haven't even thought through yet, but I'm looking forward to it!
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Architects and Beer
There's a reality TV show for everything, right? We've got chefs, fashion designers, personal trainers, hair stylists, and even "normal" people. But what about architects? Why aren't there any shows about them?
I guess the first problem is most things that architects design can't be designed, much less built in a day. Buildings are large, complex things. The second problem is architects are really teams of people. I know there are plenty that work alone, but it always takes more than one person to get something built (unless you are Dick Proenneke apparently).
I have held the job title of Information Architect in the past. I mostly work with physically intangible things (e.g. websites and applications), but it still takes a small army to build what I design (with the exception of the very small things I do for myself).
But here's something interesting I came across yesterday: A Duane Reade drugstore in Williamsburg Brooklyn is selling beer. And not just boring beer that you can get anywhere, but hard-to-find beers that even I'm willing to drink, like Chimay. This didn't happen because the residents of Williamsburg asked for it. It happened because Duane Reade looked at who lived there, what they were interested in, what they had available to them and where there was a gap.
This is important, because this is the foundation of good user experience design (the general uber name for information architecture, interaction design, etc). And I believe that before anyone, including myself, runs around saying the city of Lynn needs this and the city of Lynn needs that, we need to stop and ask "who lives here?"
I should note that I lived in Williamsburg for a few months almost 20 years ago, long before the hipsters arrived. There were Polish, Puerto Rican, Hasidic Jews and a handful of artists living there. There were few places to eat out. If you wanted a Sunday Times, you had to get up early to grab 1 of 3 issues that the newsstand had. No one would come out and visit. But the rent was cheap and it was a quick train ride into Manhattan. By the time I left, the secret was out and now it's a haven. The artists were priced out long ago. The Poles have been moving to Queens. You can't find a home that is not "luxury" and now Duane Reade sells beer.
Maybe there should be a reality tv show about gentrification...
I guess the first problem is most things that architects design can't be designed, much less built in a day. Buildings are large, complex things. The second problem is architects are really teams of people. I know there are plenty that work alone, but it always takes more than one person to get something built (unless you are Dick Proenneke apparently).
I have held the job title of Information Architect in the past. I mostly work with physically intangible things (e.g. websites and applications), but it still takes a small army to build what I design (with the exception of the very small things I do for myself).
But here's something interesting I came across yesterday: A Duane Reade drugstore in Williamsburg Brooklyn is selling beer. And not just boring beer that you can get anywhere, but hard-to-find beers that even I'm willing to drink, like Chimay. This didn't happen because the residents of Williamsburg asked for it. It happened because Duane Reade looked at who lived there, what they were interested in, what they had available to them and where there was a gap.
This is important, because this is the foundation of good user experience design (the general uber name for information architecture, interaction design, etc). And I believe that before anyone, including myself, runs around saying the city of Lynn needs this and the city of Lynn needs that, we need to stop and ask "who lives here?"
I should note that I lived in Williamsburg for a few months almost 20 years ago, long before the hipsters arrived. There were Polish, Puerto Rican, Hasidic Jews and a handful of artists living there. There were few places to eat out. If you wanted a Sunday Times, you had to get up early to grab 1 of 3 issues that the newsstand had. No one would come out and visit. But the rent was cheap and it was a quick train ride into Manhattan. By the time I left, the secret was out and now it's a haven. The artists were priced out long ago. The Poles have been moving to Queens. You can't find a home that is not "luxury" and now Duane Reade sells beer.
Maybe there should be a reality tv show about gentrification...
Friday, January 7, 2011
Shhhh
Winding down for the evening. About to jump in bed with a book. I crave an evening where I come home and I don't hear my neighbors. I dream of a parallel universe where I only know of my neighbors as people who live in the building and not the woman from upstairs whose bed bangs on the floor and who was waiting in the lobby for her drugs to be delivered very early one morning (I had an early flight) or the guy from downstairs who hasn't improved his bass playing skills despite the hours and hours and hours he sort of practices and makes my walls and furniture vibrate.
If I were more of a writer, perhaps this would be good source material for a novel. The thing that amazes me about all this is for all the years I've lived in apartments, this is the first time that I've had such a horrible noise problem. The exception is the last apartment I had in Brooklyn where the super of the building felt it was okay to have his band perform, complete with cowbell, all night Saturday nights. I called 311 several times. I don't know if they did anything with the information. I remember coming home one night and hearing loud music from 2 blocks away thinking I'd hate to live in the noisy building on the block, only to discover I did live in the noisy building on the block.
Of course part of the source of the noise is the poor construction practices of whoever hung the drywall and the total lack of insulation between the floors. Yes, loft living means the apartments are in a somewhat raw state, but at these prices... I wonder what the situation would have been if these had been sold as condos after all? Certainly such lame workmanship would be grounds for some sort of lawsuit.
Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of comparable options for rent in Lynn. If I move, I'd have to live in another town and most likely pay more money. And the idea of doing that, I find completely offensive.
If I were more of a writer, perhaps this would be good source material for a novel. The thing that amazes me about all this is for all the years I've lived in apartments, this is the first time that I've had such a horrible noise problem. The exception is the last apartment I had in Brooklyn where the super of the building felt it was okay to have his band perform, complete with cowbell, all night Saturday nights. I called 311 several times. I don't know if they did anything with the information. I remember coming home one night and hearing loud music from 2 blocks away thinking I'd hate to live in the noisy building on the block, only to discover I did live in the noisy building on the block.
Of course part of the source of the noise is the poor construction practices of whoever hung the drywall and the total lack of insulation between the floors. Yes, loft living means the apartments are in a somewhat raw state, but at these prices... I wonder what the situation would have been if these had been sold as condos after all? Certainly such lame workmanship would be grounds for some sort of lawsuit.
Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of comparable options for rent in Lynn. If I move, I'd have to live in another town and most likely pay more money. And the idea of doing that, I find completely offensive.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Why Not
I have these periods of real estate obsession. I think it's leftover from my nyc days when i was continuously afflicted with envy of other people's apartments. It doesn't matter how nice or how good a deal your apartment is, there's always someone with an even better place. Lately I'm obsessed with the Macallen Building in South Boston and also with the handful of mid-century modern homes in Lexington and Lincoln, MA. Actually, the homes in Lexington and Lincoln were the among the first mid-century modern homes built in the country. Strangely, now there are so few modern homes in and around Boston at all which makes acquiring these homes very, very expensive.
I want to live in a modern home. Most of the homes in this region are definitely not modern. The ones I have found are waaaaaaay out of the realm of possibility for my financial resources. So I'm forced to settle for places maybe I don't like so much and just dream.
As I've started exploring options for my next home and even briefly considered buying, I began to wonder what would happen if I built a modern home in the middle of some neighborhood steeped in Victorian, Cape Cod and Triple-deckers? What if I just decided to buy a house around here, tear it down and build something modern in its place? And then what if a few others decided to do the same knowing that the city of Lynn was friendly to a variety of architectural styles?
There has been much discussion about how can Lynn revitalize itself and in my view this is the way: through modern and improved design of residential housing. I think efforts in new housing have to come first- before street-level businesses will come. Go to the website of any major chain store and look in the franchising information section and you will see that companies are very specific about the population and per-capita income of areas they are willing to do business in. It makes sense. It's easy to get caught up in chicken and eggs discussions about how to revitalize a city, but in the case of Lynn, it has to come from real estate first, and that's a tough place to be in. Let's face it, people aren't exactly beating down the doors to move to Lynn and the real estate market is still a mess. But the right design approach can attract specific kinds of people to the area. For all its flaws, that's how I ended up at MV24. It was mostly the right design for my lifestyle and price range. (Unfortunately, this building has an assortment of problems that may ultimately force me to move which I've detailed in another post).
Before I moved to Lynn, I lived in Austin, TX. Austin has a variety of older bungalow style homes, McMansions, ranch style, split level, cookie cutter gated communities - just about everything you'd expect in the suburbs. There are also mid-rise, high rise and lofts (new construction) and a significant number of modern homes in a variety of price ranges, many of which have been designed by local architects. There's even a subdivision of very colorful modern homes called Agave that with the downturn probably hasn't performed as well as its developers might have hoped, but it got built and people are living there!
View Larger Map
My point is, if you want new people, you have to build something new (and new can be recycled when done smartly). It will take time. It will be painful for some people and if enough risks are taken it will be awesome.
I want to live in a modern home. Most of the homes in this region are definitely not modern. The ones I have found are waaaaaaay out of the realm of possibility for my financial resources. So I'm forced to settle for places maybe I don't like so much and just dream.
As I've started exploring options for my next home and even briefly considered buying, I began to wonder what would happen if I built a modern home in the middle of some neighborhood steeped in Victorian, Cape Cod and Triple-deckers? What if I just decided to buy a house around here, tear it down and build something modern in its place? And then what if a few others decided to do the same knowing that the city of Lynn was friendly to a variety of architectural styles?
There has been much discussion about how can Lynn revitalize itself and in my view this is the way: through modern and improved design of residential housing. I think efforts in new housing have to come first- before street-level businesses will come. Go to the website of any major chain store and look in the franchising information section and you will see that companies are very specific about the population and per-capita income of areas they are willing to do business in. It makes sense. It's easy to get caught up in chicken and eggs discussions about how to revitalize a city, but in the case of Lynn, it has to come from real estate first, and that's a tough place to be in. Let's face it, people aren't exactly beating down the doors to move to Lynn and the real estate market is still a mess. But the right design approach can attract specific kinds of people to the area. For all its flaws, that's how I ended up at MV24. It was mostly the right design for my lifestyle and price range. (Unfortunately, this building has an assortment of problems that may ultimately force me to move which I've detailed in another post).
Before I moved to Lynn, I lived in Austin, TX. Austin has a variety of older bungalow style homes, McMansions, ranch style, split level, cookie cutter gated communities - just about everything you'd expect in the suburbs. There are also mid-rise, high rise and lofts (new construction) and a significant number of modern homes in a variety of price ranges, many of which have been designed by local architects. There's even a subdivision of very colorful modern homes called Agave that with the downturn probably hasn't performed as well as its developers might have hoped, but it got built and people are living there!
View Larger Map
My point is, if you want new people, you have to build something new (and new can be recycled when done smartly). It will take time. It will be painful for some people and if enough risks are taken it will be awesome.
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