Dave Robinson is the "anti-flipper." Credit: Tom White
I'm in Kansas City at the annual national meeting of Affordable Comfort, Incorporated, (ACI) an organization that helps train weatherization technicians, energy auditors, and other home performance contractors. It's an exciting time to be in the field. While new housing is stalled in the United States, there is lots of funding-in the billions of dollars-on the way for weatherization, residential energy efficiency, and renewable energy through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But economic relief is not coming fast enough for the cab driver, a native of Nigeria, who drove me to the convention center from the airport. "What's this I hear about a bailout?" he complained. "The bailout I want is for a rich banker to leave his wallet in my cab!"

The cab driver is a renter, and when I told him that the conference he was driving me to was about residential energy efficiency, health, sustainability, and affordability, he complained that his landlord is not interested in making his rental home energy efficient, since the landlord doesn't pay the energy bills. We call this a split incentive. The split incentive facing the imaginary bankers in the back seat of my driver's cab-he wants to keep the bailout money for himself but he's supposed to use it to help people struggling in a down economy-may not end up putting a fat wallet in the cabbies back seat.

I met a man here who can handle a split incentive pretty well. David Robinson is a retired contractor who recently started doing what he calls Energy-Wise Renovations of foreclosed homes. He is buying clusters of homes in rundown neighborhoods in the South Bay, and retrofitting them with measures such as R-50 insulation in the attics, air sealing, and Energy Star appliances. But he is also creating some pretty stylish kitchens, redoing hardwood floors, and installing granite countertops, crown molding, and wainscoting in these homes. "You can't sell a home on energy efficiency alone," says Robinson.

Robinson is having no problem selling these houses for 20% above market prices, and he's still giving the homebuyers, and the neighborhood, a very good deal. "I believe that there is a wonderful and huge opportunity in bank-owned foreclosures-millions of them-and we must rescue all those wonderful opportunities from the normal house flippers who would turn them into a rental and lower the values and miss the opportunity for deep energy reduction. I buy all foreclosed homes and don't feel bad about beating up the bank to get the really good deals."

Robinson is looking for former or current realtors, and financial backers. He wants to teach them his method and therefore accelerate the process of converting our housing stock to affordable, efficient, and sustainable housing, and to make a good living doing so. If you want to know more, call him at (605) 475-4800.

I haven't talked about the elderly in my blog entries so far, but they make up a growing segment of the U.S. population. Those my age– 50-ish– who don't like to think of themselves as baby boomers, will be in that demographic in no time. And many of us worry, sometimes a lot, about finding the best place for our elderly parents to spend their last years.

Research shows that to be healthy physically and psychologically, when we grow old we should stay connected to others. My father moved into an apartment that he had built next to my sister's house in Maryland. My mother and father-in-law are still able to live in their home in Orinda after more than 40 years there. My grandmother on my mother's side lived for nearly 100 years. She spent the last 20 or so years of her life in a community, where everyone had their own apartment, but everyone was responsible, according to their ability, to see to the safety and well being of the others. She rode with three other elderly women to daily Mass and shopping in a big blue Cadillac.

Recent research results published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives shows that the buildings we live in influence whether we stay connected– and stay healthy– or not. Researchers from the University of Miami, the University of Maine, and Lehigh University in the departments of medicine, education, human development, and architecture, studied a community of mostly elderly, Hispanic, and low-income people in a place called East Little Havana, a neighborhood in Miami. They gathered information about the health and lifestyles of more than 250 people over the course of two years, as well as the buildings they occupied.

Here is a summary of their findings:

1. People who live on blocks where there is a high percentage of porches, stoops, and with buildings built with windows overlooking sidewalks were healthier and happier than those on blocks with fewer of these architectural features. Interestingly, people in buildings with low windowsills out front (less than about a meter between the bottom of the window and the main level of the first floor) were more likely to feel isolated than those with higher windowsills. The researchers speculate that residents felt a lack of privacy with the low windows that made them feel vulnerable, and therefore less likely to interact with people outside the home.

2. People in East Little Havana who lived on blocks with a high level of first floor parking garages did worse physically and psychologically than those living on blocks with more buildings that had people, not cars, living on the first floors. Since newer buildings tend to have the first floor parking, it seems that buildings built before cars became widely available, say pre-1945, are more conducive to the health and well being of their elderly occupants.

The Cadillac my grandmother rode in? It was parked in a parking lot.