Thrift Culture

I just need to post this before it slips back into the ether.
http://www.thriftculturenow.com/

We'll take a closer look another day.

My Ideal Place to Live

A thought provoking perspective from David Rauschenbach. I haven't read him enough to know how much of this is tongue-in-cheek, but I take it seriously...with a slight smile. Makes me think of my dear friend Vertis B.

I should like to go to bed, and sleep in perfect peace and security. And if a nuke should go off over my head in the middle of the night, I should think that I might stir a little, while dreaming about the foresight of my community, and with sadness about the ignorance and poverty of others who placed fear-mongers in charge of the whole mess. But then I should like to fall right back to sleep, knowing that my family can easily survive the fallout by taking a fast, if we are in practice, and by living through it like those Japanese nurses who only recently died at a ripe old age, in spite of all the radiation which had no effect on them, apparently for two main reasons. And I would ideally live through such times without any major lifestyle alteration, and especially without giving up any fear offering to anyone, because that would only perpetuate the whole mess, rather than steer a path through it.

Scroll to the end for this gem of a reading list:

• The Only Investment Worth Having (by John Robb)
• SovereignMan.com Notes From The Field — 2-Jul-2010 (Simon Black)
• The Ghost in the Machine (by Allan Nation, editor of the Stockman Grass Farmer)
• Doug Casey on his favorite place in the world [and phyles] (by Doug Casey and Louis James)
• The Ideal Place to Live, Volumes 1 & 2 (by Ray Swangkee)
• The Diamond Age (by Neal Stephenson)
• Living at Nature's Pace (by Gene Logsdon)

PECO Alternatives for electricity in Pennsylvania

I've been at a total loss about where to buy my electricity now that PECO's rates are going up & Pennsylvania allows some competition. This list of suppliers is a terrific head start. 

Thanks to Hugh Hyatt (software & systems engineer) for sharing this with me:

Here are the results of research I [Hugh Hyatt] did on rate code RS (not RH—to see rates for RH look athttp://www.oca.state.pa.us/Industry/Electric/elecomp/pecrh.pdf) electricity suppliers. Ambit Energy, Respond Power and Stream Energy appear to be the winners, based solely on price.  Below are all results in price per kWh, in brief, in alphabetical order:

   Ambit Energy                                8.4-8.9¢
   Anthracite Power & Light                8.69¢
   BlueStar Energy                            8.878-9.348¢
   Champion Energy                          9.78¢
   Commerce Energy                       11.55-11.87¢
   ConEdison Solutions                      8.89-9.09¢
   Direct Energy                                9.42¢
   Dominion                                      8.91-8.99¢
   Energy Coop Assoc of PA               9.28¢
   Energy Plus Holdings                      8.95¢
   Energy Savers                               9.38-9.77¢
   Gateway Energy Services               8.9¢
   GEXA Energy Pennsylvania             9.8-10.4¢
   IDT Energy                                    9.8139¢
   Liberty Power                                 9.178-10.699¢
   MXenergy                                      9.39¢
   North American Power                    8.99¢
   Palmco Power PA                           8.49¢
   PECO                                            9.92-10.06¢
   Public Power                                  9.799¢
   Respond Power                              8.4¢
   Spark Energy                                 8.93¢
   Stream Energy                               8.4¢
   Superior Plus Energy Services         9.42¢
   TriEagle Energy                              9.4¢
   Verde Energy USA                          8.99¢
   Viridian Energy                               9.49¢
   Washington Gas Energy Services      9.6¢

Prices vary according to date of service, contract length, green-ness of energy, how you sign up. Cancellation fees for contracts vary. All pricing is without any promotion codes. It should be easy to find the websites by Googling for supplier names.  Let me know if you want the extra details I have or if you have a promotion code to share with me. :-)

With regard to customer service, PECO says, "Whether you are purchasing your electricity from a competitive electric generation supplier or from PECO, we will continue to safely deliver electricity, provide billing and customer support, and respond to outages and other emergencies for ALL customers."

There are also a couple of competitors to PECO for natural gas, but PECO still has the best rate (prices per thousand cubic feet—Mcf):

   Commerce Energy    $6.82
   PECO                       $6.29
   Shipley Energy         $6.99

Timber REITs - Micro & Urban Forestry coming next?

What about developing micro-forestry projects on 'blighted' urban land, or large suburban lots and industrial/commercial campuses?  I know others have thought of this before, but I've heard that forestry can become a steady, modestly profitable business.  Now that REITs (real estate investment trusts) are entering the timber market, there could be new interest among the investing public and new investment sources for smaller timber/forestry projects.  

Has anyone created a working business model that owns or controls/manages many smaller woodlots (perhaps with quick-growing or high-value trees) that might be transferable to an urban or suburban setting?

In addition to the obvious timber products, a forestry business - especially a visible one in a population center - can 'sell' environmental benefits to the local community (green space, cooling, moisture & runoff retention, parks, wildlife/songbird habitat, carbon sequestration, etc.).  Such an enterprise might also be able to sell carbon-offsets or carbon credits on global financial markets.

Micro-forestry projects could be operated by community groups or community-minded environmental entrepreneurs.  Micro-forestry could be a viable revenue source for non-profits serving local communities -  and would be very interesting if they were catalyzed by land-grants from municipal governments. 

Assisted Living is Relatively Strong

Assisted Living is leading the senior housing pack according to NIC, says Matt Valley 

at NREI Online:  

The occupancy rate at assisted living properties rose to 88.3% in the second quarter, up 50 basis points from the same period a year earlier, according to NIC’s analysis of the nation’s top 31 metropolitan statistical areas. The average monthly rent at assisted living properties rose 0.7% during the same period to $3,525. That follows a 1.4% rent increase in the first quarter.

“The number one point is that the fundamentals in this asset class are holding up much better than a lot of other property sectors,” says Michael Hargrave, vice president of NIC MAP, which tracks key metrics in seniors housing quarterly and provides that data to owners and operators, developers, lenders and other interested parties. Hargrave is referring to the troubled hotel, multifamily, office and retail sectors, where loan delinquencies continue to climb as net operating income contracts.... 

Pent-up demand is a driving force in the assisted living sector today, explains Hargrave. “Assisted living is more needs-based. You can only hold off putting mom into an assisted living facility for so long,” emphasizes Hargrave. “Secondly, over the past few years the assisted living supply, or inventory, hasn’t been growing as fast the independent living inventory.”...

Construction activity across the seniors housing sector has bottomed out, Hargrave says. He anticipates the growth rate of new construction to be about 1% annually for the foreseeable future. 

Geo-location marketing: Strengthen community at neighborhood-level?

Chris Wood's recent article fits with my idea of a location-based Neighborhood Watch platform which I playfully named after Harry Potter's Marauders Map. The audience is multi-family real estate operators and developers.  I can imagine how geo-location marketing could empower real-time connectedness among neighbors and facilitate community resilience (by accident or by design, depending on how the real estate entrepreneurs want to be involved):

We’re not talking about zip code-based direct mail. Geo-location awareness—the science of marketing to consumers by matching up smart phone geographical location with user-identified browsing and purchasing preferences—opens up a virtual door to real-time customer interaction based on a locality.

...While consumers have been fairly open to sharing their geo-location via cell phone, privacy and safety concerns are beginning to push a trend towards more ambiguity in user-allowed geo-locating. And phone owners seem more comfortable reporting their presence in certain neighborhoods. Location vagueness isn’t weakening outreach to those users, however. “Neighborhood boundaries allow you to start drawing much more powerful demographic-type information that you can leverage against retail [and consumer marketing],” Clement says. “If I’m an apartment owner and I want to start driving push ads and I’m in Soho, I’m probably going to get a lot better response from people who are in Soho than people who might be in an adjacent neighborhood even if they are closer by the straight line distance.” 

...“I think local geo-marketing is a really good community relationship building tool, but as an apartment owner I’d be wary of how you deliver your message,” says Elysa Rice, emerging media consultant at Dallas-based multifamily marketing firm Ellipse. “Residents don’t want to feel like they are being constantly advertised to when they really only make a moving decision once a year...[read more]

Demand for high-end senior housing is 'elastic' - especially CCRC's

I just found this perspective (from last year) that links housing market woes to relative strength or weakness for the Continuing Care Retirement Communities in any particular region...

CCRCs and Problems: Much Ado About Likely, Very Little [click to read more]
A product that has seen its share of struggles in the economic downturn is entry-fee CCRCs.  To clarify, not all CCRC models are struggling and not even all entry-fee based CCRCs are struggling as certain regions have seen less housing market fall-out and concurrently, operators have done the right things to keep their census stable during the “down times”.  Where problems have cropped-up is in new primarily new, unstabilized developments, CCRCs in markets where housing sales are significantly depressed, and in larger suburban and urban market locations where options within the price range are plentiful.