I was in the mountains in the days after the floods. No scene appeared more telling to me than a 30-something father of two young children (let’s call him Bob from Boone) surveying the total loss of his riverbed 1970s ranch home, where the lot was strewn with salvaged car parts, and his 20-year-old minivan was somehow perched on top of his displaced 500-gallon cistern. Bob looked shell-shocked. He had little to start with, and all of it had floated away or been left on the lot, destroyed. It was surreal—“Why is my minivan on top of my cistern?” The scene appeared hopeless. Bob looked helpless.

Much of this pain is personal to me. I love North Carolina—my adoptive home since 1984. North Carolina is humble and straightforward, exuding grace and rootedness in its frugal utilitarianism. Simply put, North Carolina is unconsumed with the image, and it’s right there in the state's motto: Esse quam videri, to be rather than to seem.

There is nothing ostentatious about the state’s housing. In the mountains, this is even truer: it’s just people getting by and living their lives. Until recently, the mountains attracted people who wanted to build their homes outside the reach of the long arm of assimilative governments. It’s a self-made place in terms of citybuilding, and that’s a big part of its charm and appeal.

But North Carolina’s small-scale way of life is existentially threatened by how property insurance works in America.

THE THREAT OF FLOOD EXCLUSIONS

The Wall Street Journal recently ran two articles on this insurance problem (both paywalled).

In The True Cost of Losing Your Home in a Hurricane (After Insurance), the article's subjects were relatively wealthy Florida coast homeowners, which created a unique set of circumstances:

The storm did more than $300,000 in damage to [Scott Townsley’s] Sanibel Island, Fla., home. Insurance covered about half of the cost of the repairs, though it took 12 months of wrangling to get most of the funds. Townsley, a consultant, picked up a few more clients and kept working to help shoulder the cost. Townsley considered himself lucky as some of his neighbors still hadn’t been reimbursed by insurers.

Townsley had insurance and job opportunities to make himself whole, but much of Appalachia has no such failsafe: no flood insurance and no consultant wages. Bob from Boone, however, cannot simply get a few more consultant gigs to get back to par. In terms of expectations and local wages, Florida is more prepared for devastation. Even those who don’t buy flood insurance in Florida, to some degree, accept the risks. Not so in Western North Carolina.

Jean Eaglesham’s article Homeowners Hit by Helene Are In for an Insurance Claim Shock highlights how flood insurance policies have become more restrictive:

“Insurers have become significantly tougher on hurricane claims,” said Rick Tutwiler, a claims adjuster for property owners based in Tampa, Fla. “We’ve moved to an era dominated by exclusions, diminishing coverages, and even harsher policy terms.” 

Helene's losses might reach $30b, but insured losses are expected to be one-third of that total. The difference is explained by exclusions; policies no longer cover flooding, and few buy separate flood insurance. According to the WSJ, less than 1% of households in the worst-flooded inland counties have flood coverage.

Contextualizing the problem more specifically to Asheville: Who the hell buys flood insurance for a home that is 2500 feet above sea level?

THE POST-DISASTER EXODUS

Property and financial losses are now forcing people to move. Are we facing a modern-day Grapes of Wrath: a slow diaspora away from inhospitable homes fueled by catastrophic environmental hardship? Where will they go? What can be done to prevent the suffering? How can we keep people in their homes?

The issue is not new to Florida, where many residents are bailing on their Caribbean paradises due to insurance rates and hurricane devastations. Many of these re-migrating Floridians hail from New York and “half-back” to North Carolina. This is ironic because The Great North State is generally considered a “receiving” region for climate change. Helene has cast doubt on that logic.

Floods pose a bigger problem in the mountains of North Carolina, where hurricanes are unexpected, wealth is lower, and practically nobody has flood insurance. Impoverished homeowners and 2nd homeowners alike may suffer because with no flood insurance, someone with an $800,000 mortgage on a $1,000,000 home who is wiped out by Helene now has an $800,000 mortgage coupled with no collateral to back the loan.

IN THE LONG TERM - POLICY CHANGES

I see three long-term solutions:

1. As we rebuild, we can flood-proof future housing. New Orleans and Charleston often build waterproof first floors, with concrete walls and floors and foamboard insulation. Once labeled by new urbanis t architect Andres Duany as “a house that can take a bath,” these structures can take 8’ of water during a storm, then be pressure-washed and back in service in a week. Lower-lying parts of Asheville, astonishingly, may need to start building Charleston-style housing.

2. Second, rapid-response housing can be developed, which requires increased manufacturing capacity, inventory of homes in advance of disasters, and regulatory reform. Post Katrina, a cadre of New Urban architects were invited to design an affordable and rapidly deployable “Katrina Cottage”. Marianne Cusato got the most press for her work on these. Still, they are charming-looking trailers that can serve the cause of emergency needs but also become permanent long-term solutions for many affected parcels. Why couldn’t FEMA have 1,000 cottages ready to go each hurricane season? At $100,000 per, that would be $100,000,000 of inventory, which could also be sold for nonemergency purposes to help fund the program (I would suggest they underwrite and outsource to a private manufacturer).

3. Lastly, another solution is the acceptance of risk. To fully floodproof Asheville might cost trillions. Is it more important to a) plan for a 1,000-year event or b) build affordable housing? In Asheville, you can probably only chase one. We must deal with benefits and costs simultaneously and understand those costs relative to other needs. Acceptance may mean becoming comfortable with trauma on a relatively regular basis.

These events will continue to happen. The regulatory disparity between blue New England and California versus the pro-housing and pro-business South means that population growth occurs disproportionally in higher-risk regions. Whether climate is the problem here or not, we know that more people will be in harm's way, making harm more prevalent and more expensive. In the long term, we must find better ways to make buildings more resilient to destruction.

IN THE SHORT TERM - COMMUNITY

The short-term need is charity. Citizens in western North Carolina need money, temporary places to live, and places to put their kids in school. After the immediate needs of safety and shelter are addressed, the clean-up begins. I am pleased to see that it already has.

Disaster recovery is much like a barn raising—community members come together to accomplish a utilitarian task for someone else, with no expectation of anything in return. But barn raisings are about much more than raising barns—they are social events that bond citizens, forge friendships, and strengthen communities during times of stress.

While there might not be any actual barns to raise on the banks of the French Broad, there is plenty to do. If half of Asheville's 95,000 citizens spend the next twenty Sundays cleaning debris, replanting gardens, and fixing homes, then Asheville will be fine.

For all the negatives we can cite about disaster recovery, it is during times of trauma that the community shows itself. Helene is now an exercise in how to make a region Antifragile (see Nasim Nicholas Taleb’s book by the same name). In this book, Taleb asks what word is the opposite of fragile? Most people respond with “resilient.” While resilience means surviving under stress, antifragile means becoming stronger because of it.

Instead of asking, “How do we recover?” Asheville and all the victims of Helene can be asking “How do we come back better?”

Because when a community is put under stress, that’s precisely when it shows how strong it is.

tl/dr

• No North Carolina district represented human-scaled local development better than Asheville’s River Arts District.

• Like California in the 1960s, it was a land’s-end representation of dream-chasing and micro-community formation.

• River Arts is more than just physical buildings. It is one of the best presentations of Southern ingenuity for the state. It has to be re-birthed and re-built.

1 ASHEVILLE

If you identified as an artist and sought to surround yourself with like kind, there was only one place in North Carolina to go: The River Arts District.

I was in the mountains on September 27th, 2024, immediately after Hurricane Helene hit. Few areas were hit harder than River Arts. Much of the district was under 25’ of water, with the lowest terraces completely wiped out. Despite what was described as a 500-year flood, it appears that the historic row buildings—which anchor the district—survived, but with significant water damage. I pray that they are salvageable, as they are the DNA from which any hope of restoration will flow.

One of the reasons River Arts is worth studying is the third-fiddle role the district played in Asheville. It’s lesser known than the city’s two main attractions: the grand Biltmore Estate, marked with wineries and baron-worthy architecture, and the lively downtown, filled with James Beard Award-winning restaurants and world-class breweries. The River Arts District represented an organic alternative localism—undercapitalized, scrappy, and alive—all things I persistently advocate for under the broad-brush brand of incrementalism.

What is incrementalism, and why does it matter?

Despite decades of advocacy from Jane Jacobs and groups like New Urbanists, as well as the Incremental Development Alliance, incrementalism is still largely misunderstood.

Most people think of incrementalism as small buildings and small businesses—built locally, one at a time, without scale. They are messy. They generally have undercapitalized builders, are often developed by non-professionals, and are subject to all sorts of crazy stories of partnership stress, entitlement snafus, loan shortfalls, etc.

Incrementalism is also where 100% of a city’s placemaking happens.

The places that matter—the places that people identify with and think of as their own, the places where people do first dates and fall in love—they’re almost exclusively incremental. You don’t take a date to a corporate Chili’s; you take them to Katie Button’s Curate.

Incrementalism is largely synonymous with localism. Wall Street has never built a James Beard Award winning-restaurant. And they never will. They can’t because, at Wall Street’s scale of financialization, risk aversion is the name of the game, pushing all development into an unambitious, predictable, mushy, mediocre middle.

The antithesis to this financialized mediocrity is localism. The one and only cure for run-away machine-like corporatism is a fierce and unbending commitment to localism.

Few cities practice localism better than Asheville, and few places in Asheville practiced incrementalism better than the River Arts District. In a sense, the River Arts was North Carolina’s micro version of the Californian Dream which, for a time, was the climax condition of the American Dream.

2 THE HAPPINESS EXPLOSION

That dream is best defined by what writer Tom Wolfe described as The Happiness Explosion. In that piece, Wolfe equates quality of life with small, hyper-focused communities. 

Wolfe identifies Los Angeles as the apex of these status groups, which we might today call an identity movement:

“Southern California, I found, was a veritable paradise of statuspheres; Beyond the customizers and drag racers, there were surfers, cruisers, teenyboppers, beboppers, strippers, bikers, beats, heads, and, of course, hippies. Each sphere started off self-contained but increasingly encroached on, and influenced, the wider world.”

In other words, no matter what weird thing you were into, no matter how out there you might be, in California, you could find your people. You could find your community. And you could belong. And, because others were doing the same, you could easily experience adjacent micro-communities, cross-pollinate ideas, and bring joy, understanding, and meaning to a broader humanity.

L.A.’s hippie surfers and Asheville’s micro-brewing metal artists are both by-products of Wolfe’s definition of community development.

I don’t know of any city in the South that captured The Happiness Explosion thesis better than Asheville. If you were a fancy wine drinker and horseback rider, Asheville had your people. If you were a mountain-biking beer snob, Asheville had your people. If you were star-struck by celebrity chefs, Asheville had your people. If you were an artist, Asheville had your people.

None of these communities were as incremental or geographically defined as the River Arts District. In many ways, it was the beating heart of the intentional community movement in the South, and one of the best 21st-century examples in the country.

3 WHY WE MUST REBUILD

In my design work, I constantly work with clients who want to build better, including micro-communities. At the extremes, these ambitious developments are an exercise in both the physical form (which we call “the hardware”) and community programming (which we call “the software”).

Hardware-wise, the River Arts was anchored by a row of historic buildings but also had lots of unremarkable infill around it. And it is adjacent to a loud and imposing interstate. The point is that great places are often developed on flawed corridors, and class-A architecture is an unnecessary prerequisite for building high-quality communities.

At the end of the day, community is a software problem- it’s about event programming, brand, pride, vision, member empowerment, and self-actualization.

The term “software” then, in this sense, is misleading because it implies you can control these things quantitatively. Communities, though, are inherently organic, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable. I have many friends (primarily Bay Area-based) who still believe you can literally “program” communities with self-learning software algorithms that can create human connection.

I’ll short any such business.

Placemaking cannot be done via an app. Technology can help, but at the end of the day, placemaking is done over coffee and drinks, and unbending local developers signing non-traditional leases with undercapitalized tenants who Greystar wouldn’t lease to in a million years. There’s no playbook for this game. You can’t learn how to do this at business school.

The River Arts District played this scrappy game better than any other. The community took decades to build, and by all accounts, the District was still growing.

It will be difficult for the River Arts to restore itself. The buildings can be cleaned and repaired, but many businesses are gone. New leaders will need to be identified, and not just any leaders, but the kinds of people who are willing to commit 20, 30, or 40 years to curate a single place. That’s rare.

The 60-year-old artist, who had operated in the district for decades, now faces the decision to fight on or close shop, and no one would blame them for choosing the latter.

Who is willing to do the thankless and exhausting tasks of begging for money and special permissions in an environment where thousands of others in Helene's path will do the same? Do River Arts’ leaders have time for politics? River Arts-style incrementalism is small and agile. Policy and subsidy are inherently big and dumb. The problems and solutions appear to be misaligned.

Much more will be known in the coming months. At the moment, I feel like I am at a funeral.

The loss feels more spiritual than physical. While the sheer scale of the trauma in Appalachia is overwhelming, symbols of community matter because they become the reason to build back, and the reason to fight on. The anchors of any place are civic buildings and civic districts, which serve the existential function of getting people to care enough to fight.

That’s why it is so crucial that the River Arts District build back. For Western North Carolina, and the movement of incrementalism, it’s too important not to.

I recently penned a post about how cars in garden cities ruined much of their vibe.  In addition to the NTBA’s UK Garden Cities trip, two other recent experiences bracket the consequences of sound extremes for me.  

DRINKING FROM THE FIREHOSE

I was recently at an American sports bar having dinner after a ballgame, and I am not sure the management could have made the bar louder if they tried.  There were 50 screens, and maybe 5 had audio on for their game, all different, all on full volume. The bar also had a customized music video track at full volume- Tom Petty, Tears for Fears, all that.  Orders were being called out by the kitchen- Full volume.  All of the guests had to yell to be heard.  Certainly, many would lose their voice before the night was out.  

I guess this is what “choice” is supposed to look like: all the options in your face, all at once.  

See? Luxury! Well, I am not sure it is.  

At that moment, to me, luxury would have been a scotch, a salmon, a single game on the tele (if that), and a softly-spoken conversation with a friend or the barkeep. Perhaps that’s just me.  But Everything, Everywhere, and All At Once isn’t the consumptive paradise we were told to accept it as. 

I get it; some of this is on me. I went to a sports bar. If I wanted peace and quiet, I could have chosen not to go to the sports bar. But it’s not like this extreme noise was tied to some communal event. There was no specific game on, no unifying factor to whip this all into a tizzy. This is every day.  All day, every day.  At the most basic of dinner with friends, we are being forced to drink through a media firehose, whether we want to our not.  Life is always on.  In 2024 it takes a herculean effort to turn it off, even for a little while.

Simplicity matters. In light of this bar, abundance looks like a Faustian bargain.

There is a long-lost art of consuming a peaceful drink sans noise.

5 AM CLUB

Second, this summer, I started waking up at 5 am (doing The 5 AM Club).  This has been nice on a couple of levels, none more than the fact that Durham, North Carolina (which I love) is a fiery inferno hellhole in July and August between 8 am and 8 pm.  You get about 2--maybe 3--hours to enjoy the environs before the broiler cranks your fanny. And, while I am appreciative of the pre-dawn meditation, reading, and workout, what I really love is that at that pre-dawn hour, the city is so. damn. quiet. 

I live very close to downtown. I am a block from a bar district and the university’s notorious dance club. I’ve had drunk students wake up on my front porch on a Sunday morning. As far as urbanism goes, I am all up in it. During the pandemic, we were street racing central. Buses roll in all directions a block away. It’s L.O.U.D. loud.

But at 5 am?  Not a damn thing. If it wasn't for the birds, you could hear a pin drop.  

Not only are there no cars, but there are no condensers.  In North Carolina, the AC condenser is the state hummingbird.  10,700,000 people, and from Murphy to Manteo, every single one of them is spinning a personal heat pump compressor fan—some of them two.  

But at 5 a.m.? Nada. It’s 65-70 degrees out. The AC’s off. I can hear nature. I can hear my city. I can hear what life is supposed to sound like.  

The Mews of London would rarely be possible in the South because condenser placement is so challenging. The Americanized version will feature visual and auditory clutter.

Interestingly, the Garden Cities of the UK have no compressors.  It’s never that hot in Hertfordshire (which is so far North that in the summer, the sun sets at 10 pm and rises at 4 am), and this is great for both sound and urbanism (if not your circadian rhythms). These corridors have no ugly compressors or the sounds that come with them.  If I build Garden City density in North Carolina, any quaint alleyways and gardens will be overwhelmed with AC units.  It’s a really hard design problem to solve. 

But it can be solved by waking up on a farm or at 5 a.m. 

Noise matters; it’s an underappreciated component of great cities. We should be talking more about how to control for sound in our codes, our site plans, and our vertical construction; how to sound buffer from irritants ranting from freeways to compressors; how to create little refuges from the chaos - the deafening cadence - of the modern world.

I will conclude the Garden Cities series next week. Feel free to reach out in the comments or AMA.

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My West Coast rabblerousing counterpart over at @pushtheneedle recently shared a compelling post that graded each Major League Soccer (MLS) stadium on the quality of their urbanism. The post quickly attracted over 500,000 views, highlighting the significant issue of car dependency associated with these iconic civic structures.

Inspired by Ryan's work, I've decided to apply a similar analysis to the stadiums in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

Before diving into the rankings, here are some key points to consider:

• When did our most prominent civic buildings start requiring a combustion engine to see them?

• Ryan's analysis reveals that only 3 out of the 29 cities with MLS stadiums received 'A' grades for urbanism. The final grades underscore the prevalence of car-centric planning in all but a few locations.

• Using MLS stadiums as a benchmark is particularly effective for this discussion. These stadiums are generally smaller, with all but five having capacities under 30,000—about a third of the largest football stadiums and half the size of the biggest baseball parks. This smaller scale challenges the notion that massive parking lots are necessary for accommodating fans.

• The Southern United States is the most disconnected, most populated, and least urbanized region, making it more likely to have poor urban stadium sites.

• However, the South also represents the world's biggest sprawl repair project, with professional sports stadiums as the potentially most transformative components in this exercise. Despite its sprawl, the South has numerous less-developed infill opportunities for stadium development, more so than cities like San Francisco, Chicago, or New York.

• As the South grows, it will attract more professional sports teams and see colleges relocate their stadiums. These arenas' strategic placement and development present a unique opportunity for citybuilding.

Now, let's grade the stadiums in the Triangle area on the quality of their urbanism:

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UNC Tarheels, Dean E Smith Center | Kenan Memorial

C+ (bad design is salvaged by proximity to UNC)

UNC's stadiums are only walkable because they're adjacent to a college campus. Parking surrounds The Dean Dome, adjacent to poorly designed Corbusier housing towers on bad sites. It's indicative of the 1970s-1980s when these buildings were conceptualized. There are no bars, restaurants, or private housing anywhere near.

Duke Blue Devils, Cameron Indoor | Wallace Wade

B (great site & traditional form)

Also on a college campus, Duke's stadiums are nestled in a dense traditional site plan at the edge of the primary campus, with no significant loss of place due to excessive parking (in fairness, the Dean Dome has almost 2.5x the seating). Still, there are no restaurants or bars anywhere close. And Duke alumni all have to take motorized transport to attend.

Durham Bulls, Durham Bulls Athletic Park

A (great site & adaptive execution)

Part of the world-class American Tobacco Campus redevelopment, it is walkable, near housing, and designed with excellent user experience and viewsheds. The only thing that could be better is the redevelopment of the Housing Authority parcel to the South.

North Carolina FC|Courage, Cary WakeMed Soccer Park

F (Nothing urban about it.)

It's an exurban site in the middle of the suburbs. Nothing is near. It is 100% car-dependent. Cary could develop a fantastic intentional development for soccer enthusiasts, doubling down on the world-class execution of its downtown park. But as of right now, WakeMed Soccer Park is a bunch of fields and parking. To my knowledge, nothing is planned.

NC State Wolfpack | Carolina Hurricanes, PNC Arena | Carter-Finley

D (but could be an A.)

Among the major stadium sites, PNC is the worst but could be the best. Currently, PNC is two large stadiums in an ocean of surface parking; the site is ideally located between Raleigh and Cary and should be a prime development spot for new placemaking in the Triangle. Notably, the NCRR corridor is adjacent, and should the region ever get its act together on rail, PNC would be an obvious stop on the line. If we ever got serious about citybuilding, I could see 100,000 people living and working here.

The final rankings?

• A Durham Bulls, Durham Bull Athletic Park

• B Duke Blue Devils, Cameron Indoor | Wallace Wade

• C+ UNC Tarheels, Dean E Smith Center | Kenan Memorial

• D NC State Wolfpack / Carolina Hurricanes, PNC Arena, Carter-Finley

• F North Carolina FC|Courage, Cary WakeMed Soccer Park

There is lots of work to do, and lots of opportunity to do it!

1-

Building a home, even an extremely ambitious one, should take no more than a year.

The new house was finished in 2015, more than nine years after that fateful night. Such is the recurrent motif in Durham. Things that should take less than one year often take a decade. Why? Because they just do.

In this post, you will see the end product of the design. It has a unique origin story, as do all parts of the Duke Lacrosse story.

I am from St. Louis originally. Both sides of my family have long roots there. I have not lived in Missouri since I was eight years old, but for most of my life, I have been back to visit family at least once per year.

St. Louis has the best architecture per capita in America. Mostly, this is attributable to it being built later than the great traditional cities of the Northeast and heavily influenced by the Chicago School of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Large swaths of its streetcar suburbs were constructed between 1910 and 1930, the heyday of the best American architecture.

All of this was influential on what was built at 610 North Buchanan.

Frank Lloyd Wright peddled a new approach to architecture that he labeled “Prairie Style.” Its designs are characterized by:

• bold horizontal lines

• open floor plans

• emphasis on natural materials

• low roof pitches with broad eaves

• bands of windows

• asymmetric, intentionally informal floor plans

• interior wood banding, with little or restrained ornamentation

Wright designed all over the country, most notably in Chicago, Pennsylvania, Buffalo, Arizona, and California. His disciples spread far and wide, and even today you frequently run into stories of “this house was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright”.

Being inspired by the open prairies where the Midwest turns to the West, the Prairie Style was ever present in Saint Louis, which was nicknamed “The Gateway to the West”.

So, how does it end up in Durham, North Carolina?

There is a lot of dogma in the church of historic preservation. 610 North Buchanan is in the heart of historic Trinity Park, a nationally listed historic neighborhood, mostly characterized by Queen Anne Victorians and Four Squares, with a smattering of Craftsman Bungalows.

There are no Prairies here. Prairies do not really exist in the South. They are ahistorical. In pure preservation dogma, they are “untrue to their place and time”.

But to hold to that rule absolutely is also ahistorical. Saint Louis is filled with fabulous French and German architecture, neither (quite obviously) originating from Saint Louis.

People move. People bring their knowledge and skills with them. Architecture is, and should be, an honest account of such migrations. Those migrations include information sharing and cultural evolutions. And I adamantly believe that this tradition should not have stopped in 1930 and should not stop now.

2—

One of the many talented designers I’ve worked with is Gwen Ronsick. Gwen had a deep background in historic design and preservation consulting. As it happens, she was from Washington, Missouri, just outside of Saint Louis.

We both loved Prairie Style. I told her that I believed that the Chicago School was effectively American architecture, that the Prairie Style was the residential embodiment of those values, and that (rather grandiosely) I would like to start a Prairie Revival movement.

Gwen said, “Great!” and we got to work. Knowing the project was going to pursue a LEED Platinum rating, we named it “Casa Verde” or “Green House”.

A few points on what you will see in the final photography below:

1. Casa Verde has way more natural wood than any comparable new home.

2. As detailed as it is, this is still way less detail than Wright would have ever done, even on most of his (relatively) modest Usonians.

3. We had to think long and hard about what wood to use because the budget did have limits, and (as you can see) we needed a boatload of Select #1 finished wood. We chose poplar, a relatively inexpensive softwood, which worked great. (FWIW, Wright preferred heart cypress).

4. The cabinetry was formally integrated into the base and chair railings, which is uncommon today, especially with natural wood. It gives a warm, alive feeling, ties the entire home together, and keeps the indoor occupant perpetually connected to nature. It is humanistic.

5. The stained glass at the entryway is actually a false window. This part of Trinity Park is relatively dense, with close proximity to its neighbors. This window would have been all up in the northern neighbor’s business. By bizarre coincidence, the neighbor was one of my late mother’s best friends- both of them professors of early childhood education. Partially, as an effort to be neighborly and partially because it is probably what my late mother would have wanted, we worked hard to protect this privacy through the use of this false window. From the outside, it is continuous stucco. From the inside, it is an artificially backlit piece of custom-stained glass. It works both ways.

6. The house has too many green features to name. LEED Platinum does not give you much flexibility and choice, and you end up having to chase points (I suspect it is better now, but this was done in the very very early days of LEED). The home has geothermal heating and cooling and a large PV solar system. The PV panels, which preservationists prefer you hide, are barely noticeable from the street because of the low slope roof natural to Prairie styles.

The final product is below. I sure am proud of it. I hope you like it too:

Above is the false window adjacent to the entry.

photo links

How it’s going:

Well, this one is a doozy of a story. The story of what happened in the old home is well documented. Accusations. Community rage. 13 months of hell. Exonerations. Yada Yada.

What was not widely published is that Duke University owned the house at the time of the alleged events. This was the result of a strange but creative deal to purchase 15 of Trinity Properties’ student rentals, mostly in an effort to reduce de facto fraternity partying on the campus wall and improve relations with surrounding neighbors. The intent and ultimate plan was to sell these houses back to the community, with a preference for faculty and staff to turn them into owner-occupied homes, making the problem disappear.

Then the lacrosse team hired a stripper, and that stripper had a few issues, and things descended from there.

After 13 months of Durham facing daily coverage in national news, Roy Cooper came out and told the world that we were done here. Mike Nifong was disbarred in disgrace, and a few years later, lawsuits were settled between the accused, Duke, and the city, including claims of violations of civil rights and due process.

You have never seen a house demolished more quickly. The sun came up, they were demo-ing. By sundown, the lot was graded and covered with hay. It came down on July 12, 2010, more than four years after that night.

What was an effort to make amends with the community quickly turned into the biggest of PR nightmares. Durham runs on optics more than reality, a truism present throughout the community’s throwing of the (rich, white, northern, etc.) lacrosse players under the bus.

Duke facilitating more owner-occupied housing and reducing nuisances in the neighborhoods were both valid goals. And those genuinely had nothing to do with the March 13, 2006 events. But college towns being college towns, the two were conflated in the community. No good deed goes unpunished, especially near a university.

Scott Selig, Director of Real Estate at Duke, approached me about building a home here.

Selig oversees massive real estate deals. Every lease signed by the university goes through his desk. 10-15 years ago, much of that was getting the Duke Chinese Kushan campus out of the ground, underwriting downtown Durham’s rebirth through letter-of-credit leases, and expanding the Duke Health System across the Triangle.

That’s to say, Scott doesn’t have time to build a one-off house at 610 N. Buchanan. Duke doesn’t really do residential, and this is just wrong-sized for the controlling entity. It’s too small.

It was massive for me.

Our practice at Trinity Design | Build had grown fast from the moment we opened our doors in 2003. And while we had done a few major projects (by our standards, not Duke’s), they were almost exclusively in the world of historic restoration. New construction was a different animal. In many ways, it is easier, but it is definitely new. And it was not what we were set up to do.

Selig asked that we bring him a proposal, which we did. And it was an odd one. Universities are odd housing partners. Money doesn’t really matter. Purpose does. I mean money does matter, but it’s not the prime mover. Selig could have just sold the land for top dollar. He didn’t want to do that.

Something better could be done here. Something better needed to be done here.

Our challenge was creating a mutually beneficial structure for all parties. That’s easy in the private world, where it is mostly about money exchanged for products and services. But in the non-profit world, there’s a narrative. Narratives are hard to price. It's impossible, really.

So here’s what we proposed.

It’d be $100,000 for the land; at the time, that was really expensive. It was the smallest lot in Trinity Park, and whatever would be built would have practically no backyard, a major red flag in desirable neighborhoods where people expect yards.

Then incentives were added for achieving each of the following goals, with a maximum incentive of $50,000.

Essentially, we had a pool of 9 incentives to choose from and could receive a maximum subsidy of $50,000 for accomplishing them. We ultimately received that maximum incentive by 1) achieving LEED Platinum, 2) selling to a Duke employee, 3) developing coursework around the project, 4) certifying Energy Star, and 5) achieving a HERS rating of less than 50.

We hit ‘HERS Zero’, a net-zero energy home.

And we believe it was Durham’s first Net-Zero Energy Home.

More on that, and this crazy story, in part 2.

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