Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

2. DIY painting

A bold statement wall can say the wrong thing to potential buyers if the workmanship is questionable. Streaky, chipped or low-quality paint can knock $1,700 off a homes sale price, according to Opendoor data that looked at home offers made from June 2018 to June 2019.

A good paint job is not easy, says Sarah Cunningham, a real estate agent with Ethos Design + Remodel in Boise, Idaho. It is all in the prep work, and most people dont want to do the prep work. Hiring a professional to paint can help ensure a more attractive result.

3. An expanded master suite

Knocking down a wall to create an oversize master bedroom or stealing closet space to build out a spa-style bathroom may sound dreamy. But how about as a selling point? If you go from five bedrooms to four, and you can make it work, no big deal, Arienti says. But he cautions that losing a bedroom in a smaller house could mean a lower selling price.

As for cutting into closet space, residential building codes dont mandate that bedrooms have closets. But, Arienti says, Once you take the closet out of a bedroom, to a buyer, that no longer looks like a bedroom.

4. Plush wall-to-wall carpeting

Carpet can be especially unattractive to first-time home buyers, who may be used to landlords updating carpet between renters, de Jong says.

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5 Home Improvements That May Not Pay Off When You Sell - STLtoday.com

JANUARY 26, 2020

IN 1908, HENRY JAMES pronounced that the house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, consisting of apertures, of dissimilar shape and size. About 15 years later, Willa Cather took up the metaphor again but replaced those airy, asymmetrical windows with the tchotchkes of realist description. For her, the attempt to capture real life in words inadvertently crowded it out, like the towering stacks of newspaper in a hoarders home: How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window [] all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended. Boring novels are overcrowded with cleverly worded approximations of what it feels like to live, but great ones have the good sense to leave the best bits off the page.

Though the metaphor is now a little tired, Rachel Cusks new essay collection, Coventry, flips it over to articulate her own desires for writing. In Making Home, one of the books best essays, she imagines houses to be like novels, rather than the other way around. The piece follows the psychic as well as architectural turmoil that accompanies remodeling her flat in London, a project that throws out of balance the same life that shes ostensibly enhancing by undertaking the renovation. This forces her to consider whether, deep down, the creative destruction shes enacted carries a more thorough desire to destroy. She wants a better home and garden, but what if enhancing it, dignifying it, actually exposes a deeper problem? What if what I really wanted all along was to erase it?

It, in case you didnt catch it, isnt only the hardwood floors. Any reader even vaguely familiar with the expanded Cusk universe which to date consists of 10 highly acclaimed novels; three stunning memoirs; one very public divorce; and now Coventry, a book that collects the odds and ends of her occasional essays, reviews, introductions, and forewords will recognize that her writing and biography teem with such multilayered metaphors of renovation.

This isnt the first time that Cusk has turned to household infrastructure to ponder the casualties of self-reinvention. Transit, the second novel in her Outline trilogy, follows the narrator, Faye, as she remodels a London flat eerily similar to that in Making Home. Even earlier in Outline, the first novel of the trilogy, Faye adopts the metaphor to explain how family fights often hinge on who notices the smallest infraction of household decorum: [I]t was as though everything that had been inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement. Like Cather, Cusk throws out the furniture, but instead of standing alone in the newly spacious interior she then walks to the curb and describes how everything landed. In fact, thats a workable metaphor for how Cusks novels differ from their early 20th-century ancestors: whereas the Jamesian novel is interested in the interiors of minds and family manors, Cusks works give us something like the novel of exteriority: they consist almost entirely of recounted talk and external description, so we judge the characters not by what they think but by how they look and what they say.

Or, in the case of Making Home, how they decorate. Even better, how they imagine themselves decorating, because that projection of a better future is the place where storytelling resides. Before she threw everything out, Cusk recounts how she would bring in visitors to describe what was going to be done to it and what it would look like, as though creating a home out of mere words. Later, she compares her ambivalence over creating a more comfortable living situation with the unpeopled showrooms of her childhood residence the unused drawing room, the study with its unread leather-bound volumes. Both, she concludes, are versions of storytelling: In their way these rooms were expressive works, attempts to perfect reality and hold it in an eternal moment.

Coventry is organized into three sections: six long-form, generally personal essays; four shorter essays that all circle around artistry and authorship, from Renaissance painting in the Italian town of Assisi to the contemporary creative writing workshop; and, finally, a miscellany of book reviews and introductions. It is a sturdy and worthwhile collection of previously published material, but it wont change anyones mind about Rachel Cusk. It will not convert any of the haters, nor will it leave any of her fans thinking that shes flown the coop. Thats not a bad thing for those in the pro-Cusk camp, who I assume will appreciate how the essays follow in the narrative and thematic footsteps of her most recent work. They approach their main topic obliquely, like the Outline trilogy, and yet they also offer moments of raw self-assessment (and occasionally condescending assessment of others) like A Lifes Work and Aftermath, her memoirs on motherhood and divorce.

In fact, Coventry might best be read as a publishers guidebook on Cusk Countrys dominant themes and narrative strategies something along the lines of the map of Yoknapatawpha that Malcolm Cowley requested for The Portable Faulkner. At the beginning of Lions on Leashes, Cusk does a little of this work herself, creating a laundry list of her recurring topics:

[T]he difficulties of continuing to create while bringing up two small children, the conflict between artistic and familial identity, the attempt to pursue your own truth while still honouring the truth of others, the practical and emotional complexities of motherhood and recently of divorce and single parenthood all these tensions were real, so real that sometimes their causes were difficult to locate.

The tension that colors every aspect of ones own identity and shared relationships but that is difficult to locate in language: that is the meat of Cusks most riveting work. Its true of the novels, which (as Merve Emre puts it) confront the mush of feelings and cast it into a hard, gleaming image for her readers to admire. And its true of the memoirs, which invoke previous literary treatments of bodily and familial transformation such as childbirth and divorce (in such disparate sources as Greek tragedy, the novels of Flaubert, and Dr. Spocks guide to dealing with colic) only to, like Cathers ideal novelist, burn down that whole tradition with her unblinking stare. If this is what you look for in Cusk, then Coventry delivers.

The essays exhibit a familiar rhetorical tic of her previous work, which is to lay out a counterintuitive claim only, in the next breath, to take the opposing position. But perhaps it isnt like that at all is one of Coventrys most characteristic phrases. In the opening essay, Driving as Metaphor, she uses the occasion of traffic jams in her rural town to ponder how the conflict between different drivers, as well as drivers and pedestrians and cyclists, exposes a peculiar difficulty in attaining objectivity. The essays use mundane topics like traffic, or airport security, or a home renovation to inquire into the nature of subjectivity, narrative, motherhood and daughterhood and authorhood. And the process of storytelling, of stringing together details to get from Point A to Point B without seriously maiming Person C, is the only available option for giving credence to multiple competing points of view to see through all of the windows, as James would have it.

Theres also plenty of the meticulous listening and subtly biting judgments of the Outline novels. On Rudeness, for example, hinges on several encounters with airport security (some told in the first person and others recounted from acquaintances) and closes by arguing for the place of politesse and manners when the uninhabitable earth reduces us to eating rats and tulip bulbs. A long, intricate passage in Lions on Leashes reads like the trilogy in miniature. It begins as a conversation among old friends about the ambiguous power imbalance between children and parents, who fight for control of their joint family narrative. As the children roll their eyes while the parents wax philosophic, the narrative abruptly shifts perspectives as Cusk takes over the language of her friend:

What is being controlled, she says, is the story. By disagreeing with it, you create the illusion of victimhood in those who have the capacity to be oppressors. From outside, the dissident is the victim, but the people inside the story cant attain that distance, for they are defending something whose relationship to truth has somewhere along the line been compromised. I dont doubt that my parents saw themselves as my hapless victims, as many parents of adolescents do (You have this lovely child, a friend of mine said, and then one day God replaces it with a monster), but to me at the time such an idea would have been unthinkable.

Part of the challenge and fun of reading Cusk is keeping track of who occupies the various yous and Is in passages like this one, where the lack of quotation marks makes it hard to tell where the different participants statements diverge. You have this lovely child really means I have this lovely child, but the I isnt the narrator; it might not even be the other person in the room with her. And, immediately after including the sentiment, she immediately refutes it, calling it unthinkable.

All of this is to say: Fans of Cusks prose and authorial perspective, her cutting wit and inimitable turns of phrase, will enjoy these essays. But those fans might be disappointed when they read Coventry because, chances are, theyve already read everything in it. An ungenerous reading might position Coventry as an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the now-complete novel sequence to extend the Cusk brand, as the marketing department might say. If so, fair enough, but for the reader looking for original material: be forewarned.

It is worth readingCoventrymore generously, though, andnot just because no one wants their own criticismalchemized, inCusks next novel, into a sublime portrait of their own limitations. Bringing these writingstogether under one roof, so to speak,showcases Cusk as one of the 21st centurys great novelist-essayists,which is no smalltask considering the proliferation of that category ofwriter.As many critics have noticed, the lastdecade saw a proliferation of W. G. Sebaldinfluencedessayistic novels, as well as a general embrace of the autobiographicalin literary fiction. TheOutlinetrilogy certainly fits that mold. Butthe same period also found a wide range of early-to-mid-careernovelists, such as Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Chimamanda NgoziAdichie, Sheila Heti,and Uzodinma Iweala, who have embraced the essay as a genre with its ownhistory and expressivepossibilities separate from and even equal to the novel.WithCoventry,Cusk now clearly needsto be seen as a singular voice in thiscamp, too.

But this collection also makes some themes, such as the relationship between silence and narration, that travel in the lower registers of her fiction more apparent. In fact, in Coventry, silence emerges not as the opposite of narration but as an aggressive, and even maybe a uniquely feminine, kind of artistic gesture. Its there in the title essay: sending someone to Coventry, were told, is an English idiom for the silent treatment, and when her parents institute this punishment to her, as an adult, for the umpteenth time, she begins to understand it as a kind of cold war against her own version of their relationship: [W]ar is the end of point of view, where violence is welcomed as the final means of arriving at a common version of events. This leads her to see the variety of familial silences. Her husbands mumbling, a parent staring into the distance while her family walks ahead, her own parents cold shoulder, elderly couples eating silently at her local pub.

Initially this final silence terrified her, the thought that after all those years of joy and toil and creation, building a family story might end up running out of narrative steam: [N]othing or nothing palpable to look forward to. Thats silence as indifference to one another, as withdrawal from the common story. But, again with trademark circulation around an idea, she reconsiders: [P]erhaps what they represent is not the failure of narrative but its surpassing, not silence but peace. Its a rare hopeful moment in a collection and oeuvre to say nothing of the political and ecological season not particularly forthcoming with them.

But perhaps the most bracing and provocative version of silence arises when Cusk imagines it as a type of feminine creativity. In Shakespeares Sisters, an essay on Woolf, Chekhov, and Lessing, she hypothesizes about what womens writing (her scare quotes) would look like given the same support as men a room of ones own, total control of content and zero concern over domesticity, equal pay. Looking back at her favorite woman writers, as well as nonwoman writers who imagine female creativity, she sees that a woman writer [] is more likely to produce silence than what we would recognize as narrative. Which brings us back to that shared fiction of a house because, as Cusk tells it, those manicured, lifeless rooms of her childhood told me something about the person my mother who created them. A home is powered by a womans will and work, and [] a curious form of success could be measured in her ability to suggest the opposite. Its a vision of female writing that, as she says of Chekhovs representation of gendered silence (echoing Adrienne Richs conception of nonuniversal female writing), does not consider the female in terms of the male and hence does not expect womens writing to follow the same expressive outlets as mens writing. For Coventry to convey such resonances across its eclectic content is justification enough of its excellence. The rest is noise.

Donal Harris is an associate professor in the department of English and director of the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis. He is the author of On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines.

Originally posted here:
Renovating the House of Fiction: On Rachel Cusk's Coventry - lareviewofbooks

GOSHEN This short session of the Indiana Legislature is getting the reputation for bipartisanship and getting work done quickly. But Sen. Blake Doriot, R-Syracuse, the lone legislator at Friday mornings Advocate@8 at the Goshen Chamber of Commerce, said speed and cooperation were out of necessity.

Some longtime legislators have commented to Doriot, They have never seen anything like this, he told the group of about 15 people. It is moving so fast. Weve got pressure from the outside to finish early. Its called the NCAA. We will be without rooms if we do not get done. If youre in a hotel youre gone because the big money is coming to town.

One of the big items on everyones mind at the Statehouse is education, he said, adding legislators are decoupling teachers from iLEARN, the statewide student assessment testing.

Ill be honest, in my opinion, and probably the man in the downstairs office probably wont be happy with what Im saying, but testing is a mess in Indiana. I think there are more viable options to what we are doing. I have learned so much. I appreciate the Red for Ed people well most of them, Doriot said, causing the group to laugh. Some of them came down and talked with us. I was very appreciative. Dwight Moudy, who does a program Cowboy Ethics, he scheduled the best teacher meeting I have ever had with Elkhart teachers.

Doriot met with the teachers in the library and talked about how they have students who are coming in January in shorts or ragged sweatpants and Crocs or flip flops. Its terrible, he said. The teachers are ending up having to be parents to these kids.

Doriot said there was an option for teacher pay this year that was shot down over one simple reason: they were taking money from the teachers retirement fund for older retired teachers and wanting to move it over to fund the pay raise. In the meantime, he said, the state is trying to pay down the debt and get the retirement fund more solvent.

Were not going to jeopardize the retired teachers retirement fund to do this, he said. We will be looking at teacher increases in the budget year, where we should be.

In this short session, Doriot has proposed nine pieces of legislation.

Senate Bill 187 would relocate all of Elkhart Countys courts into one place, but it would not have to necessarily be in the county seat as state law mandates. This legislation would allow Elkhart County to build the courts building outside of Goshen if the County Commissioners so decide. Currently the courts are located in downtown Goshen and Elkhart. That bill passed out of the Senate by a vote of 48-1 and will now be considered by the House of Representatives.

Senate Bill 146 concerning sexual assault victim rights creates the right for a sexual assault victim to have a counselor present before and during a forensic medical exam or an interview with law enforcement or defense attorney. This has been referred to the Senate Committee on Corrections and Criminal Law.

Doriot said this bill is a result of activism by actress Mariska Hargitay, who is making a nationwide push. It gives victims more rights during the process, he said. Legislators talked with prosecutors and believes they have made the bill better so victims of sexual assault dont feel so alone in the process. I cannot imagine the trauma [being alone] puts on an individual. There will be a hearing on that bill next week. So hopefully we can get that passed and get these victims some more help as they go through this traumatic time, he said.

Railroad crossing safety is another issue Doriot is addressing this session.

Currently Senate Bill 54 has been referred to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Transportation. Doriot said his bill would require additional lanes and signs to be constructed at dangerous railroad crossings on state highways.

Senate Bill 100 would protect property owners whose homes are nonconforming to local zoning regulations and are then damaged by a disaster. He said, those homeowners could then rebuild their homes on the same footprint with less hassle with this bill. Building codes would still need to be observed.

Senate Bill 148 would protect housing affordability by limiting local regulation of modular homes in mobile home parks, according to information provided by Doriot. This just basically says that modular homes are a viable construction, he explained. The bill passed out of the Senate Committee on Local Government and will now move to the full Senate.

Senate Bill 55 seeks to reduce the cost of public works projects by allowing competitive bidding on piping materials for construction. This was referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce and Technology. There were groups lobbying against this, Doriot explained. Its probably not going to go this session, he said. It will probably come back next year.

A number of residents had questions and comments for the legislator.

Moderator Vince Turner asked if there was any action on transparency in hospital billing.

Doriot, who is not in health, has not seen any of those bills yet concerning that issue, but they are moving through.

He and Sen. John Ruckelshaus have filed bill SB 232 that eliminates the property tax exemption for property owned by an Indiana nonprofit corporation and used by that corporation in the operation of a hospital.

Doriot said that when nonprofit hospitals buy private practices, those practices can become part of the nonprofit system. Then, if a city is jammed up against tax caps, its losing money. Maybe next year, he said, the legislators will look at the effect of expansion of nonprofits on local government.

Goshen Mayor Jeremy Stutsman addressed the issue of trains parking in Goshen.

What were seeing in Goshen now is weve become the parking ground for the Elkhart rail yard, he said.

Aware that no one can put a stop to trains parking and blocking intersections after a federal ruling, Stutsman would like to see the railroad contact Elkhart County dispatch to tell them which roads are being blocked. That would allow dispatchers to give an alternate route to people or ambulances that are trying to get to the hospital.

Doriot said he thought that was a great idea. Although it would be impossible to write an amendment to a bill at this point, he would contact the railroad to see if they would be on board with the idea.

Continued here:
Bills quickly making their way through short session - Goshen News

Over 50% of our members provided detailed financial information to support the MPBAs survey report commissioned through the University of Salford. Using this market intelligence from 20182019, turnover in the modular and portable building sector exceeded 2,956m.

This figure excludes the turnover from the major players who have recently entered the volumetric modular arena, including banking giant Goldman Sachs investing 75m into modular housing business TopHat, as well as Japans biggest housebuilder striking a multimillion-pound deal that will see Sekisui House partner with Homes England and Urban Splash. This agreement will also see a 55m investment into Urban Splash but the largest deal by far was revealed by ilke Homes involving a 100m agreement with Places for People.

As volumetric modular systems make up 60-70% of offsite construction, these solutions arguably form a Modern Method of Construction (MMC) that is experiencing entirely different growth trends than other offsite approaches.

Respondents to the lack of government contracts with offsite components awarded in 2019 included Miles Rowland, chairman of the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), who stated that government departments must align with offsite construction methods if we are to improve productivity, overcome the skills shortage and reduce carbon footprint.

Despite the research, there is balancing evidence to suggest that that the government remains supportive of Modern Methods of Construction. For instance, Mark Farmer, who leads the governments MMC plans, has announced the upcoming launch of the hi-tech construction corridor, which is set to generate 40bn annually and employ 80,000.

Esther McVey, the minister of state for housing and planning, has emphasised that its vital that we invest in new technology to get Britain building. Homes built using modern methods can be of higher quality, greener and built to last.

The MPBA report shows that the volumetric modular industry is thriving across all sectors. For example, at the heart of the education sector, the Priority School Building Programme (PSBP) requests 450 new school facilities per annum. Modular construction has proven to be best-suited to meet such a demand due to its repeatability of units, environmentally conscious methodology and minimal disruption to existing school facilities.

Meanwhile, complex construction projects throughout the leisure sector require developers to cut costs, improve timelines and reduce onsite risks while maintaining building quality and durability. Modular construction is again best positioned to achieve this through its high performance, timeline savings of up to 25% and net savings of circa 7%.

Perhaps most challenging, the housing sector relies on modular and volumetric construction to work towards solving the housing crisis. Law firm Pinsent Masons reports that 15,000 modular homes are already built every year. The Guardian reports that the government proposes to make modular construction key to the build of 300,000 new homes per year by the mid-2020s. We can see that volumetric modular is already core to government plans for the future.

Many contemporary architects are embracing volumetric modular to achieve striking facades with bespoke designs hugely beneficial across all sectors. If we take a wider viewpoint on the adoption of Modern Methods of Construction, it is clear that many project developers are already making good use of volumetric and modular technologies to achieve productive, successful outputs and only plan to build on this.

Jackie Maginnis

Chief executive

Modular & Portable Building Association

Tel: +44 (0)870 241 7687

mpba@mpba.biz

https://mpba.biz

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Limited offsite take-up? The modular industry is thriving - Planning, BIM & Construction Today

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) announced financing of 793 new affordable homes in the Downtown Far Rockaway area of Queens.

The homes add to the 590 new construction units financed in the area since the New York City Council voted in favor of a neighborhood rezoning in Far Rockaway in September 2017.

The newly financed affordable housing units will be spread across three projects RadRoc, Beach 21, and Rockaway Village Phase II. Upon completion, the units will be affordable to households earning a wide range of incomes, including the formerly homeless, extremely low- to moderate-income New Yorkers.

Downtown Far Rockaway has been overdue for strategic investments and careful planning for far too long. Today we announce the coming of nearly 800 new, true affordable housing opportunities. This is in addition to the 590 affordable homes weve financed since 2017, and will go hand in hand with economic and structural developments led by EDC and informed by the community, said HPD Commissioner Louise Carroll.

I want to thank Council Member Donovan Richards for his enthusiastic leadership, as well as our colleagues at NYCEDC for their partnership, and I look forward to seeing a new future in the Rockaways unfold.

The RadRoc development will be constructed on a private site and will include a total of 253 new affordable apartments across two 10-story buildings in Downtown Far Rockaway.

Financed through the Extremely Low- and Low-income Affordability (ELLA) program, 10 percent of these units will be set-aside for formerly homeless households. 133 units will be affordable permanently.

19-38 Cornaga Avenue will be a steel and plank building with a total of 173 rental housing units, including one superintendents unit, and over 14,400 square feet of commercial space.

10-18 Beach 20th Street will be a modular construction building that includes 80 rental housing units, approximately 5,600 square feet of commercial space, and 3,400 square feet of community facility space.

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HPD hails rezoning that will add over 1000 homes to Rockaways - Real Estate Weekly

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Four burglaries in four years have cost a few their small housing company and they have struggled to finish their clients houses.

Paul and Pascale Hennessey founded Park Homes five years ago. They make small houses and modular houses with three employees of buildings in Kainga, just north of Christchurch.

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While the couple took a five-day vacation with their toddler son Kye, burglars escaped for $ 75,000 worth of goods from their buildings.

ALDEN WILLIAMS / STUFF

Pascale Hennessey and her husband Paul were shocked when they discovered that locks were broken and that containers in their Park Homes company were stripped of valuable things.

The trek included specialized tools and equipment, interior design and equipment, and items for their own home that they hoped to finish.

READ MORE:* Why we took out a $ 55K loan to build our own little house* Small houses score high on comfort, quality and value* Women admit to tidying up vacation homes in Christchurch * Fraudsters who target Facebook users who want small houses

At the same time, neighboring buildings of another construction company were broken into, while the shooting of an animal in an adjacent paddock was linked to the same offenders.

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Park Homes makes small houses and larger modular houses.

Although insured, the Hennessys will only be paid a third of their loss, partly because the goods were stored in sealed transport containers.

Pascale Hennessey said they would finish the two houses they are working on, but then they would close the doors despite the fact that they were ready for a year. She described the events as heartbreaking.

Since the start, we have been burgled at least once a year. We hope to cover the loss ourselves without corporate debt we will sell what we can to ensure that we can finish the houses we started.

ALDEN WILLIAMS / STUFF

One of the padlocks broke during the last attack.

But we realized that we just could not continue with the company without getting into a difficult financial situation.

This meant canceling the work that would have supported them and their staff, which they had to let go, Hennessey said.

Thats the worst part. Our employees all have to find work, and they have their own families. We both also have to find new work.

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A completed little cottage from Park Homes.

There is a lot of fall-out and many people have been affected. We hope that these people (the burglars) can be bought in court.

The couple received a lot of support from current and former customers and was also crowdfunding to finish the houses, she said. They also have a completed little house that they can sell.

The police said they had no clues, she said.

ALDEN WILLIAMS / STUFF

The Hennesseys were cleaned up when their Park Homes company was broken into at Christmas.

A police spokeswoman confirmed that break-ins of both properties were reported around Christmas time. She said the investigation continued after officers visited the scene and conducted forensic tests and asked anyone with information to contact the police.

Hennessey said the company had been a labor of love in many ways, and after three decades in the industry, her husband wanted to keep costs and margins low to deliver an affordable product.

They had managed to refine their product and she was doing very well, she said. The previous burglaries had been smaller, but this time they took everything they could.

We had security cameras and a secure garden and locked gates we really couldnt do much more.

Hennessey believed that the burglary was a professional task because the thieves could dodge the security cameras and had to make several trips.

We put our heart and soul into it and we loved it.

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Pascale Hennessey is preparing a house for display.

But we have experienced earthquakes and all kinds in this city and we will be fine as a family. If the worst comes, we can live in a caravan, so we still have a roof over our heads.

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The 'heartbreaking' loss of the small home business after a burglary - magviral

As more investment continues to come to Leeds, there are increasing property investment prospects in the city and wider region.

Leeds is slated for more investment and development in a range of areas, opening up opportunities for property investors. With transport improvements coming to Leeds, more businesses relocating and expanding there, and demand increasing for new homes, Leeds is set for an especially strong year in the property investment sector.

The first phase of the Institute for High Speed Rail and System Integration being established at the University of Leeds has been given planning permission. The proposals include theconstruction facility Centre for Infrastructure Materials and the Infrastructure Test Facility.

This is part of a wider plan to place Leeds as a centre for rail engineering, job creation and inward investment. The institute is expected to improve transport in the city, which will further boost the local economy and property market.

Leeds was recently named the best place to start a business in the UK. Following Channel 4 and Sky making the move to Leeds, more creative and digital jobs have followed suit, which is further opening up more investment opportunities and bringing more people to the city.

There is a growing confidence in Yorkshires commercial property sector, especially in Leeds, as more businesses are expanding and relocating there. Even with a substantial amount of commercial development already in the pipeline in Leeds, many are expecting demand in new office space to grow.

Legal & General has even recently signed a long-term lease for a modular housing factory near Leeds, which is expected to initially employ between 400 and 500 people locally. As additional businesses open their doors in Leeds and Yorkshire, more people are likely to move to the city and region.

Leeds is seeing a significant amount of redevelopment and regeneration across the city centre, especially in South Bank. Many new housing developments will be brought forward through these regeneration projects. More than 8,000 new homes are expected to be created in the South Bank area alone.

In a report last year, Leeds City Council even suggested there is room for 20,000 more homes in the city centre, showing theres the potential for extensive growth. As Leeds sees more investment, demand for high-quality rental properties is expected to increase even more.

2020 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Leeds. With more investment, growth and demand coming to the thriving city, its expected to be a lucrative time to invest in Leeds, especially in buy-to-let properties.

If youre looking for your next property investment, check out BuyAssociations exciting investment opportunity in Leeds.

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Three reasons why Leeds is becoming a property investment hotspot - BuyAssociation

Hill, the family-owned developer, is to donate 200 homes for the homeless - a financial commitment of more than 10million - to mark the companys 20th anniversary.

The extraordinary donation, which is beginning with up to 20 modular homes in Cambridge, is borne out of the personal experience of Hill CEO and founder Andy Hill.

In 1999, when he had a young family, he was made redundant. The family feared they would lose their home.

Instead, he set up and began growing the business, which has flourished, and now has more 10,000 homes currently under construction or in the pipeline, including the Athena development in Eddington, Ironworks in Mill Road in Cambridge, and Marleigh, the new community being created on Marshall land off Newmarket Road.

Andy said: Homelessness is a growing crisis which I feel very passionately about and it is particularly bleak at this time of year.

Life-changing events affect us all in different ways and over the years I have learnt to appreciate it can affect more than those who come from deprived backgrounds in the first place.

After celebrating our 20th year of building homes at Hill, I want to give something back and create real opportunities for people who are living on the streets, to help turn their lives around.

The whole business is taking huge pride in delivering these initiatives, and while we will not solve the problem today, we are taking a big step in the right direction which we hope others will follow.

The pods being prepared to help tackle the homelessness problem in Cambridge are a kind of modular micro-home, or pod, which come factory-made and fully furnished, with white goods, soft furnishings, bedding and even plates and cutlery.

Other homes will be sited in London and Oxford, where Hill also operates.

The company will work in partnership with local authorities or housing associations, which will assume responsibility for maintenance and repairs, and with homeless charities on its initiative. Once ready, Hill will hand over the properties to one of the partners to manage the rehoming process.

Emma Fletcher, a director at Hill and lead for the delivery of the Foundation 200 homes project, said: Our pledge is to help rehome the homeless we are stepping up to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Gifting homes in this way has never been done before, so we are currently in the process of creating the blueprint and working out all of the details on a site by site basis with local charities, housing associations and local authorities on how to deliver these homes.

At last Wednesdays Cambridge City Council housing scrutiny committee, 140,000 was approved to facilitate the legal and practical arrangements for up to 20 pods, which can be relocated if required.

Potential sites for the pods have been identified in Abbey, Arbury and Kings Hedges wards, the council said, but precise locations have not been given.

The council said they are very small sites that have proved difficult to develop to date.

Mr Hill added: While we are only at the initial discussion stages of this initiative, conversations with Cambridge City Council are progressing well and the council have now put forward two suitable sites.

We are currently reviewing the number of homes which can be delivered on these sites and planning applications will be submitted shortly. We have been really touched by the amount of goodwill this project has brought in; everyone wants to help and get involved.

A council officer said an awful lot of work has gone into the design of the pods. Discussing the size of the pods, the officer explained that engagement with people who have slept rough suggested in some cases as a stepping stone from a hostel or a difficult environment towards independence, a smaller unit is sometimes what people are looking for.

A support network and pathway to a permanent home will still be provided, the officer confirmed.

Claire Flowers, the head of the councils housing development agency, said: We see this as an opportunity to meet housing need and provide more housing in the city relatively quickly, and at a lower cost to the council than providing them ourselves.

Hill, which is delivering the initiative through a newly-formed charitable trust called Hill Group Foundation, intends all 200 of the homes to be completed and inhabited within five years.

They will have a 60-year life expectancy and be arranged in small groups, with no more than eight on one site and none higher than two storeys.

Additional reporting: Ben Hatton, Local Democracy Reporter.

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Hill CEO: The personal experience thats driven me to donate 200 homes for the homeless in 10million gift - Cambridge Independent

FOREST LAKES The Forest Lakes Metropolitan District Board of Directors will ask voters to weigh in on moving the districts office from Bayfield to Forest Lakes, one of La Plata Countys largest subdivisions with about 800 homes..

For months, the board has been mired in debate. The office relocation has sparked disagreements over budget priorities in the district, board statues and relocation project planning.

In my mind, (the vote) is the totally right thing to do, said Keith Roundtree, district manager. We are using the publics money, and they should have a say on how their money is being used.

The district currently rents office space in Bayfield. Last year, the Feasibility Study Committee found a modular building and foundation would cost about $265,000 to be paid over 15 years. Rent over 15 years would cost $359,000, the committee said. The new office would be at the entrance of the neighborhood.

If approved, the board plans to fund the project through a loan. The issue must be on the ballot because the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, or TABOR, says voters must approve any indebtedness that goes beyond 12 months, according to the district attorney. The measure would go on the ballot during special district elections, May 5.

Discord on the boardDuring recent months, the board and community members have disagreed over how to plan and fund the project.

Last year, the board voted to move the office based on a rate analysis, then disagreed about whether the analysis provided enough information.

During meetings, board members disagreed on vote outcomes and which statutes they were following to make decisions. In one meeting, residents and the board debated the project for 45 minutes.

Board members Dave Sheetz and Robin Kissell said residents will save on overall costs by building a new office in Forest Lakes. We put facts, figures and a cost analysis together and proved that it would be cheaper to own than it would be to rent, Sheetz said. Also, the current landlord kept his option to sell the property and did not guarantee the district a long-term lease, he said.

Other members, including Shauna Unger, Toby Schrier and Brien Meyer, have questioned the project. Unger said it would be irresponsible to tie up funds in the relocation project while Forest Lakes has other large capital projects to consider, like replacing dam infrastructure and aging snowplows, or funding a sewer system project that could cost millions.

Im not opposed to moving, I just dont think this is the right time, she said.

Meyer, board treasurer, said he would consider the idea if he had enough information. The initial cost analysis did not include moving expenses, utility expenses, maintenance expense, a line-item budget explaining the modular building cost estimate or other financial information, he said.

I find it very unfortunate that were making these big decisions and our manager doesnt have the information, said Meyer, who voted against the ballot measure and was absent for the boards first vote approving the project.

Race against timeNew district staff members are racing to learn their roles, get the district organized and provide information to the board.

Roundtree said the staff is working to establish a detailed cost estimate for voters before ballot language is due in March. The initial cost estimates were based on a floor plan, but those estimates did not reflect requirements for office sizes, architectural standards or the building site, he said.

He has requested proposals for conceptual designs for stick-built and modular buildings. The district will review the proposals, conduct cost comparison and negotiations, then use the final cost estimates on the ballot.

This is going to be speed-tracked in order to get this done, Roundtree said. I feel what were doing now is the proper way to do business.

smullane@durangoherald.com

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Forest Lakes residents to vote in May on office move - Pine River Times

EVAC CENTER. The evacuation center at the compound of the Old Tanauan City Hall houses hundreds of locals affected by the recent eruption of the Taal Volcano on Friday (Jan. 17, 2020). The Quezon City government has provided the evacuees with modular cubicle tents. (PNA photo by Joey O. Razon)

MANILA Families affected by therestive Taal Volcano has climbed to 103,443 or equivalent to 394,094 persons in the four Calabarzon (Region 4-A) provinces, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) reported.

In its 6 a.m. update Monday, the NDRRMC said 38,377 families or around 137,447 persons from the provinces of Batangas, Cavite, Laguna, and Quezon, are temporarily sheltered in 532 evacuation centers while the rest are staying with either friends or relatives and being aided outside.

NDRRMC executive director Ricardo Jalad on Sunday said residents living outside the 7-kilometer danger could return to their homes after the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) on Sunday lowered the alert status of Taal Volcano to 3 from 4, two weeks after it erupted on January 12.

The lowering of the alert status enabled local government units to allow some of the evacuees to return to their homes.

Batangas Governor Hermilando Mandanas has given residents of towns and cities in the province, except Agoncillo and Laurel which are still under lockdown, an option to return to their homes or work.

Towns, where residents have an option to return, are Alitagtag, Balete, Cuenca, Lemery, Lipa City, Malvar, Mataas na Kahoy, San Nicolas, Sta. Teresita, Taal, Talisay, and Tanauan City. The volcano island remains under permanent lockdown.

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Number of families affected by Taal eruption now over 103K - Philippine Canadian Inquirer