Another group of women are building a Habitat for Humanity House, this time in Martinsville, IN. Our own South Bethlehem, PA, is home for a similar project, also built by a team of women last year. They did a wonderful job, dressed up the neighborhood nicely!
US Bank has announced a new "Anti-Flipping" policy that calls property flips "a threat to the integrity of the residential real estate industry" and institutes a 90-day seasoning requirement on new home purchases, according to Behind the Mortgage blog.
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Thanks to Behind The Mortgage for this little tidbit of investigative real estate reporting: In Cincinnati a couple is suing their home builder, NVR, Inc. (doing business as Ryan Homes), for
"allowing workers to habitually urinate within the home while it was under construction. Said habits were sufficiently pervasive to generate pools of urine within a linen closet never conceived to house a toilet,"
Though the fact that the "habitual urination" did occur is not disputed, the builder refuses to release the buyers from their purchase contract.
We are told that these hygiene lapses are quite common. Site foreman often share stories about various "gifts" they've found in bathtubs, sinks, and all manner of places in under-construction homes.
A "contour crafting" machine that will use robotics and be able to build a house in less than a day, at 20% of the cost of traditional building methods, is slated for its first trial run by the end of this year at the University of Southern California. Applications include low-cost housing, emergency housing in areas hit by natural disaster, emergency military housing, and eventually lunar housing. The following is from The New York Times (March 11, 2004):
"Our goal is to completely construct a one-story 2,000-square-foot home on site in one day, without using human hands," said Dr. Khoshnevis, the lead scientist on the project, a joint effort by the university's engineering school and its Information Sciences Institute. With a hoped-for budget of about $5 million, it has been financed so far mainly by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.
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