O Christmas Tree

  • Lauren and her potted tree. It will stay outdoors until Christmas Eve, when it will be brought in for 14 hours. (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

It’s the holidays… which for some
of us means time to deck the halls
with boughs of holly and, oh yeah,
pick out a Christmas tree. We sent
reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which tree is greener –
real or artificial:

Transcript

It’s the holidays… which for some
of us means time to deck the halls
with boughs of holly and, oh yeah,
pick out a Christmas tree. We sent
reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which tree is greener –
real or artificial:

Lauren Northrop and her husband Tom are big fans of Christmas.

“We love celebrating it, I love decorating, but we always have this dilemma: what do we do about a tree?”

They didn’t want a plastic tree because it’s, well, plastic. And they didn’t like the idea of bringing a live tree into their house, only to have it die and then drag it out to the curb to be recycled.

So they skipped the Christmas tree thing altogether for the last four years. But then, their son Will was born in January.

“We decided that we have to have a tree because it’s, like, his first Christmas, and we want to have those family videos of him having his Christmas morning by the Christmas tree and opening his gifts, and just the whole experience because that was important to us growing up and we always had that.”

They bought a live, baby Christmas tree with its roots still intact. That way, when Christmas is done and the ground thaws, they can plant it in their backyard.

“I was planning to keep the tree inside until December 25th so that we could decorate it and put lights on it. When we went to buy it they said if you do that, it probably won’t survive. So keep it outside so the temperature is more consistent, bring it inside only for a short period of time. (Like how short?) As in December 24th. Will goes to bed, Tom and I are gonna be up decorating that tree and bringing it inside for about 14 hours.”

That’s probably way too much hassle for 14 hours of Christmas cheer. So a lot of people go for real, cut trees. Pat Fera would love to have a real cut Christmas tree in her house.

“But I’m very afraid of them. I had a friend of mine, this was back in the 60s, and she and her mother had gone to midnight mass and her father was home and he was sleeping on the couch and what woke him up was the sound of the tree just going wooosh.”

Apparently the TV shorted, it ignited the tree, tree caught on fire and the dad just made it out of the house. Fera says the ceiling was charred black and the whole place was smoke-damaged.

“Well yeah, if you’re not careful that’s certainly, yeah, a real tree is a hell of a fire hazard!”

That’s Bob Schildgen. He writes an environmental advice column for the Sierra Club called Hey, Mr. Green. So I called him up and asked him…

Guerra: “Hey, Mr. Green. Which is more environmentally friendly? Why don’t we tackle one at a time: let’s go with plastic trees. What do you think about those”

Schildgen: “Well, I don’t think they’re environmentally friendly for a number of reasons. One is that they’re made out of materials that use petro chemicals and metals and so forth. They get eventually tossed in the landfill, they have a life of about 9 years and then they’re tossed. They can’t be recycled.”

And since most plastic Christmas trees are made in places like China, they have to be shipped a very long way to end up in your family room.

So plastic is out.

Schildgen does like the idea of live bulb trees, but their survival rate once you plant them in the ground isn’t that great. So he says – aside from the fire hazard mentioned – real cut trees are a much greener option than plastic. With a real tree you’re using a renewable resource; the trees are raised on tree farms, so you’re not contributing to any deforestation. And they’re completely recyclable.

“I think another feature that I like about them is that, and this is not exactly an obvious environmental issue, but I think it’s very good for children to see something fresh, green, real, alive, and then watch it cycle as the needles fall off and it goes into its natural demise. I think that’s good for people.”

Schildgen says some farmers use pesticides on their tree, so if you’re concerned about that, you should look for local organic trees.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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The Future of McMansions (Part Two)

  • The study found that differences in architectural style stuck out most, but after that, height. (Photo source: Brendel at Wikimedia Commons)

There are some ugly terms used
to describe big, grandiose homes.
Critics call them “Garage Mahals,”
“starter castles,” or “McMansions.”
These insults are flung around
in towns where people worry big
houses are sapping the character
out of neighborhoods full of smaller,
older homes. Shawn Allee
met a researcher who hopes to tamp
down the heated rhetoric:

Transcript

There are some ugly terms used
to describe big, grandiose homes.
Critics call them “Garage Mahals,”
“starter castles,” or “McMansions.”
These insults are flung around
in towns where people worry big
houses are sapping the character
out of neighborhoods full of smaller,
older homes. Shawn Allee
met a researcher who hopes to tamp
down the heated rhetoric:

Jack Nasar studies city planning at Ohio State University.

He got interested in the term “McMansion” because it was used in his own neighorhood in Columbus.

“A realestate agent was befriending older people so that when they died she’d be able to get their properties, tear down the house, and then build a much larger house. I started to wonder whether this was happening elsewhere.”

Nasar says teardowns, and the insults used to describe them, are common in many towns. And some local governments are restricting how big these homes get or even what they look like.

Nasar says, with governments stepping in to the debate, there’s more at stake than just name-calling.

“You’re talking about controlling what goes on on somebody’s private property. So, you would want to have good evidence to use as a basis for that decision.”

Nasar recently studied just what it takes for a house to get big enough or different enough for people to say, “yuck” or hurl an insult like “McMansion.” Nasar and a research partner created computer models of streets with rows of houses.

For each test, they made most houses normal, but changed up something about one of them – stuff like the architectural style, the height, or maybe distance between the house and the street. Then, they showed these models to people.

“We had them rate these streets in terms of compatibility, we had them rate them in terms of visual quality or preference.”

Differences in architectural style stuck out most, but after that, height.

“The effect started to be most noticeable when the in-fill house was twice as large as the stuff around it. So, in terms of regulations, it suggests maybe a community could get by saying, ‘you could do a tear-down replacement that’s twice as big as what’s around it,’ but you wouldn’t let it get any larger than that.”

This is a controversial finding.

Some communities keep height range much lower than “twice as big” figure and sometimes they restrict width, too – something Nasar found doesn’t matter so much.

I thought I’d bounce some of his findings off someone involved in the teardown issue.

“This also was a demolition of a small home.”

Catherine Czerniak drives me around Lake Forest, a Chicago suburb. She’s the community development director, and she gets the praise or blame about how teardowns get done.

Czerniak says Nasar’s findings make sense, especially the idea that style matters most.

“We often say height and size aren’t necessarily the key roles -it’s how the design is done.”

But for Czerniak, there’s a hot-button issue Nasar did not measure.

Lake Forest has lots of tree-lined streets and people like how the trees obscure the houses.

“And really, the landscaping really defines the character of the community. Even the estates on the east side, were not there to shout from the street, here I am, look at me.”

To make the point she drives past a mix of old homes and replacements.

I can hardly tell which is which.

“As we go down the street, take note that even though there are some big homes back here, you still feel you’re in a country lane.”

Czerniak says Nasar’s research might quiet down some debates but people will always fight over specific details. After all, Nasar’s test subjects gave quick judgements on computer models.

She says, in the real world, critics spend years nit-picking every little thing they hate about a teardown replacement home and whether it’s going to ruin their neighborhood.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

The Future of McMansions (Part One)

  • Brian Hickey runs Teardowns.com, a real-estate marketplace for teardown properties. Some communities complain that the teardown market encourages the growth of so-called 'McMansion' replacement homes that are seen as too large and out-of-place for their neighborhoods. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Your home may be your castle,
but, for some people, too many
homes are as big and grand as
castles. Critics call these homes
‘McMansions,’ and they complain
they’ve ruined neighborhoods
filled with older, smaller houses.
The McMansion fad fizzled during
the real-estate bust. Shawn Allee looks at whether it could
return:

Transcript

Your home may be your castle,
but, for some people, too many
homes are as big and grand as
castles. Critics call these homes
‘McMansions,’ and they complain
they’ve ruined neighborhoods
filled with older, smaller houses.
The McMansion fad fizzled during
the real-estate bust. Shawn Allee looks at whether it could
return:

I head to a Chicago suburb called Hinsdale to understand the hub-ub about McMansions. Over the past twenty years, one in three Hinsdale homes got torn down to make room for mostly bigger ones.

Brian Hickey drives me past one-story brick and wood houses.

Then there’s a huge one, with stucco and Spanish tile.

Hickey: “This is an example of something where someone would go, this is more Florida-like.”

Allee: “It looks like it walked off the set of Miami Vice or something like that.”

Hickey: “Yeah.”

Bigger, mis-matched homes sprouted up in Hinsdale during the real-estate boom, and for some, Brian Hickey’s partly to blame.

He runs tear-downs dot com. Hickey finds and sells homes to tear down, and maybe replace with McMansions … or ‘replacement homes’ as he calls them.

Anyway, during the housing bubble, teardowns increased … and so did complaints.

Allee: “Some of the arguments I’ve heard against the teardown phenomenon is that we’re basically tossing perfectly good houses into landfills.”

Hickey: “See, that’s not accurate. To take some of these homes and bring it up to what people in this community would expect in terms of housing amenities, it doesn’t make sense to renovate when you can build new for less.”

The big-home trend faded recently, but if the soft real-estate market improves, you gotta wonder: will people build big again, or will they keep smaller, older homes?

Hickey thinks old homes might lose.

Hickey: “At some point a buyer simply won’t pay that price to live there.”

Allee: “In that one story …”

Hickey: “In that one story, two-bedroom, small kitchen – that the land will be where the value is.”

Some real-estate pros say Hickey’s right: people want big, and they’ll build what they want, where they want.

Others say, the game has changed.

Local governments in Dallas, Denver, and other cities are starting to regulate teardowns, like Hinsdale did.

(sound of a printer)

Robert McGinnis prints me 60 pages of Hinsdale’s zoning codes.

“Hot off the press, it’s still warm.”

McGinnis runs Hinsdale’s building commission. He says the code got up to sixty pages partly because of teardown complaints.

McGinnis: “Pollution issues, the loss of sunlight in some cases.”

Allee: “Loss of sunlight? What do you mean by that?”

McGinnis: “Some of these houses are so tall they end up physically blocking out some of the sunlight.”

McGinnis says it’s hard to stop teardowns – you can just delay or improve them.

“I would like to think, at some point, Joe Q. Public says, ‘I’d really like to live in Hinsdale, but I can’t afford to heat and cool a McMansion,’ so they’re going to look at building a smaller home.”

But McGinnis says this could be wishful thinking.

So, I thought I’d ask some Hinsdale homeowners about the small-home idea.

Just outside McGinnis’ office, I find Greta Filmanaviciute. She’s stuffing official demolition signs into her car.

Filmanaviciute: “I was getting permits. We’re going to tear down old house and building the new house.”

Allee: “Are you guys looking at a house that’s bigger than what you have now?”

Filmanaviciute: “No, actually, we are sizing down, but that’s because we’re a three-person family and I don’t want to have a huge house and then we have high utility bills. This is perfection for us, actually.”

Filmanaviciute says preservationists might not like that she’s tearing down her place, but her neighbors are glad she’s keeping things modest.

She says she’d be proud to start a small-home trend.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Green-Ed for Realtors

  • Nathan Kipnis calls this condo building in Evanston, Illinois a "calendar that happens to be a home." Kipnis says he positioned windows and floor tiles to heat the home in the winter and keep it cool in the summer. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

The recent housing crisis has taught us
home values don’t always rise. So, people just
want to make sure they get what they pay for in
a house. That’s especially true with green homes
that are supposed to provide extra value – like
healthier air and lower energy bills. But does
your real-estate agent know enough about green
homes to make sure that’s the case? Shawn Allee reports says many do not, but the
industry’s working on it:

Transcript

The recent housing crisis has taught us
home values don’t always rise. So, people just
want to make sure they get what they pay for in
a house. That’s especially true with green homes
that are supposed to provide extra value – like
healthier air and lower energy bills. But does
your real-estate agent know enough about green
homes to make sure that’s the case? Shawn Allee reports says many do not, but the
industry’s working on it:

When Nathan Kipnis showed me a green home he designed – I spotted some green
features all by myself.

For example, it was hard to miss the solar water heater.

But it turns out, I missed stuff.

The architect had to show me the living room tile.

“What you’re seeing here is the dark grey slate. This is set to take sun in the
winter, fall and spring that comes in here. As the sun gets lower in the sky,
more sun comes in here and it heats up the floor with that.”

“What’s striking about this is that you have these little placards that read,
‘floor absorbs sun, creating thermal surfaces’. These are green crib notes so
to speak?”

“Yes. We definitely needed these because there was the chance that of
course realtors would come through here unaccompanied.”

Kipnis sweated over this solar tile, but at first, real-estate agents were like me – they
missed it, or they didn’t get how it worked.

Kipnis says, it’s likely some potential buyers went home clueless.

Still, he doesn’t blame the agents.

“They’re just kind of used to here’s the crown molding and here’s the
fireplace trim and here’s the pantry. That’s what we call, their expert
knowledge base.”

Some realtors are expanding their knowledge base to include green homes.

There’s a certification program that gets agents up to speed on energy conservation,
water use, and other green home features.

It’s called EcoBroker.

John Beldock runs EcoBroker.

He says it trains agents to protect home buyers.

“Many people stay in their houses longer than five years. If you’re really
watching out to make sure a consumer is buying a house that she can afford
to buy but afford to operate, you’ve really provided a valuable service to
society.”

Four thousand people have EcoBroker certification.

That sounds like a lot, but there’re more than two million real-estate license-holders
in the US.

So, most home buyers will encounter agents who are not trained, or ones who
mostly trained themselves – like Celeste Karan in Chicago.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to the table with some high-level people in the
industry who’ve been kind enough to explain things to me over coffee.
They’ve become part of my network and through that I’ve learned more
than anything else.”

Karan says formal certification is great, but when it comes down to it, buyers should
press agents about a home’s green claims.

And when possible – ask for numbers.

“There are certain properties where I know it’s been computer modeled and
the claims are likely to be true because they’re based in performance
testing rather than somebody just coming up with a number that sounds
good.”

Karan says there’s a lot at stake in getting green housing claims right.

The trend’s young, and it’s vulnerable to realtors who over-sell green features.

“Building better quality buildings has to be the norm. In order or that to
happen, the claims about them have to be honest, and people have to
continue to buy them. If buyers want it and builders build it, the market will
expand and move forward.”

Karan says it’s not like realtors are trying to screw people over.

There’s room for trust.

It’s just that for now, it’s best to back up that trust with a bit of skepticism.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Green Conscience vs. Green Consumerism

  • This first report in the "Your Choice; Your Planet" series looks at the difficulties of being a "green" consumer.

Most of us are conflicted when it comes to the environment. Polls show the majority of us consider ourselves to be environmentally-friendly. But, our day-to-day decisions often don’t measure up to an earth-friendly lifestyle. Part of the reason is that there’s lots of confusion about what’s best for the environment. Another reason is that being earth-friendly is pretty darned inconvenient. In the first report of an ongoing series we’re calling ‘Your Choice; Your Planet,’ the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham explores the dilemmas we face when we attempt to do right by the environment:

Transcript

Most of us are conflicted when it comes to the environment. Polls show the majority of
us consider ourselves to be environmentally friendly. But, our day-to-day decisions often
don’t measure up to an earth-friendly lifestyle. Part of the reason is that there’s lots of
confusion about what’s best for the environment… Another reason is that being earth-friendly is pretty darned inconvenient. In the first report of an ongoing series we’re
calling ‘Your Choice; Your Planet,’ the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
explores the dilemmas we face when we attempt to do right by the environment:


It’s tough, trying to be green, or earth-friendly or whatever you want to call it. I mean…
most of us aren’t interested in always trying to find the eco-friendly clothes or trying to
figure out the differences between the “all natural” and the “100-percent real” juice. And
then there’s stuff. There’s all kinds of stuff we need… alright… maybe we don’t NEED
it… but – hey – everybody else has one. Why shouldn’t ?


There’s a gap between being a flower-sniffing, hemp-wearing, tree hugger… and a
regular person trying to be a bit more environmentally friendly. The Executive Director
of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope, says if you’re struggling with that gap… you’re not
alone…


“We haven’t solved the problem of linking up our values and our consumption. Most of
us consume out of habit and convenience. We don’t consume out of our deepest values.”


So… we BELIEVE that we ought to save the earth for future generations. And most of
us have a few habits that make us feel a little better about ourselves. Maybe we bring a
coffee mug to work instead of using Styrofoam cups. Or we might take the bus or the
commuter train once in a while, you know, to save the earth from our bit of car exhaust.


But the real challenge comes when we start buying stuff. You know… like groceries,
and cars, and appliances. Stuff. Joel Makower is the founder of GreenBiz-dot-com. It’s
website that bills itself as a “The Resource Center on Business, the Environment and the
Bottom Line.” He says the big impact on the environment takes place in how we spend
our money…


“I think consumers know intuitively that every time they open their wallet they cast a
vote for or against the environment. But, doing that’s a very complicated matter.”


(grocery store sound up)


It’s complicated because even if you walk into a store determined to buy only the
products that are the most environmentally friendly… you’re bombarded with conflicting
claims. Say you’re looking for trash bags. Are the bags claiming to be made of 80-
percent recycled plastic any better than the ones over here called ‘enviro-bags?’ I don’t
know. And that’s the problem. Most of the time we really don’t know which products
are the safest for the environment. And don’t even get me started on the whole paper or
plastic grocery bag question.


Joel Makower says we care, but we’re confused.


“There’s a huge gap between green concern and green consumerism. And that’s
everybody’s fault.”


Makower says companies don’t know how to market their products’ environmental
attributes and when they do try, he says, they often do it poorly or misleadingly. And
we’re afraid to try new things… not knowing if we’re being suckered into a poorly
performing product that SAYS it’s more environmentally friendly.


So, often, rather than deal with all that confusion… or instead of spending hours and
hours researching everything we buy…. we figure… “Well, it can’t be that bad; can it?”


Charles Ballard is an economist at Michigan State University. He says, really, there’s
only so much you can ask of us…


“Keep in mind that people can’t be expected to become saints just because they’re
interested in the environment.”


He says most of us see being environmentally friendly something like extra credit… or
something we do when we’re better off financially… kind of like a luxury item that we
can feel good about. Ballard says most of the time we’re more distracted by the glitz and
glamour we see on TV or read about in magazines and want just a little bit of that good
life for ourselves…


“What we have is a situation where immediate gratification, where grabbing for all the
gusto you can right now is the thing that’s driving our decisions.”


And when you’re going for the gusto… you tend to forget about the environmental cost
of your lifestyle. We buy the wrong things… and we buy too many things. We just plain
consume too much. But, then… sometimes our conscience starts eating at us… and
before you know it, we’re being a little more careful about recycling at work… or some
other little contribution to the earth’s well being.


The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope says environmentalists… or those of us who like to think of
ourselves that way… keep trying to do better…


“The American people’s values and ideals are ahead of their own habits. That’s actually
why we have religions, is because people want to be better than they are. And one of the
reasons we have an environmental movement, I think, is because Americans want to be
better than we are.”


And so… we sin in all of our consumption… and then make restitution by trying to be
better, more earth-friendly consumers. The problem is… as one writer put it… you can’t
really buy your way out of consumption. When you get right down to it…. you really
just have to buy less. That’s a tough one.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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