Daily Score Blog

Green building with an Oregon twist in the Sunday New York Times. The piece profiles a house near Mount Hood that's the first single-family residence in the West to win LEED certification. 

I'm especially envious of this feature:

...the solar panels pump 2,320 watts of surplus energy into the local utility grid. The wattage is recorded as a credit, then “used” to heat the house this winter.

The house is "net zero energy," which means it uses no more energy from the grid than it produces and puts back in. Pretty cool -- and definitely worth a read.

Full disclosure: the house is owned (and I think built) by Tom Kelly, who's a Sightline donor.

Fuller disclosure: the article was written by Colleen Kaleda, who's the back-up editor for Tidepool (operated, of course, by Sightline) and who contributed hugely to Sightline's recent report, Property Wrongs.

Yes, Sightline is everywhere.

UPDATE: Some readers may have noticed that the NY Times published a correction to this article mentioning author Colleen Kaleda's connection to Sightline. We'd like to clarify two points. First, Kaleda's freelance writing work is entirely independent from the work she does for Sightline. Her work for Sightline is limited to editing Tidepool, an online news service, one morning a week and writing one set of stories on Oregon and Measure 37. 

Second, Colleen had no idea that Tom Kelly was a donor when she was writing about him. (As she has no interaction with our development staff, and Mr. Kelly is not listed in any of our public materials, there is almost no way she could have discovered it.)

Finally, I'd like to apologize if my sloppy blogging gave the appearance of impropriety where there was none. I intended it merely as kudos for a job well done, and to note a coincidence. 

Property Wrongs is Sightline's new report on what other states can learn from Oregon's experience with Measure 37. It tells six stories of communities that got stuck with the consequences.

Here's another story...

Jim and Sandy LeTourneux love forests and wildlife, but they're not tree-huggers. They’re loggers. They run a timber farm in the forested Coast Range and they've been good stewards of the land -- twice winning awards for wildlife conservation.

But now the LeTourneux's tree farm is nearly surrounded by some 850 acres of forest owned by a Measure 37 claimant -- a developer who wants to build as many as 848 houses on 1-acre lots. The suburban-style houses would drastically increase the risk of fire in an area that's scarcely served with fire protection.

“I’ve put a lifetime of work into putting in a timber resource,” says Jim. “Sandy and I could lose everything from a fire.”

Read the rest of the story.

The conventional wisdom is that it's cheaper to live in the outer suburbs (ie., a long drive from jobs, stores, or schools) than closer to a town or city center.  I suppose that's true enough -- if you're looking only at the cost of housing. 

But if you live a long way from most of the places you want to go, you wind up driving a lot more.  And that, of course, costs money too -- not just for gas, but also for depreciation on your car, maintenance and the like.

Which leads to the obvious question: what happens if you combine transportation costs and housing costs into a single budget?  Is living at the urban fringe still cheaper?

There have already been a couple of attempts (see, e.g., here) to look this issue.  Now there's a new study, noted here in The Washington Post.  The key finding:  when you combine travel and housing, living in a suburban outpost can cost more than living closer to a town or city center.  According to the study's author:

"Even if you save a couple of hundred dollars a month on your mortgage, it doesn't nearly outweigh the costs of the cars you are driving."