I love Memphis.  More specifically, I love the people I have met in Memphis.  Lots of heart and lots of hustle.

The video below is from an introduction lecture we gave as part of an effort to cultivate a cohort of Emerging Developers working in a number of Memphis neighborhoods.  Following the lecture Incremental Development Alliance (IncDev) held two One Day Workshops and a Two Day Boot Camp.  The folks who attended continue to get together and support each other.

I think it is vital for small developers to "find their people".  The work is challenging enough and doing alone with out friends and colleagues makes it even harder.  What we have seen in the Memphis cohort of Emerging Developers is a willingness to help each other that is inspiring.  Nobody wants to see someone else repeat the learning curve they went through.  The Emerging Developer effort has been supported by a number of local sponsors and is worth exploring if your community is thinking about how to cultivate local entrepreneurs doing small scale real estate projects.

IDAmidtown-0179

After spending a fair part of the workday on the phone or on video calls coaching small developers, it has been pretty common to find me staying up late to finish work on my own projects.

In an effort to bring more discipline to my daily work routine, my well-organized wife, Eleanor has set up the pay button on the blog (above the photo in the black menu bar) as a way for folks to buy some of my time in scheduled 20 minute blocks.

The rate is $80 per 20 minute block. If you would like to schedule a session, please email me at janderson@andersonkim.com to set up a time. You can attach information to your email that will help me understand your project. (There is no charge for any time I spend reviewing your background information). I typically use Google HangOuts for video call coaching session. Hangouts allows 3 or 4 people on the call and you can share computer screens. Please install Google Hangouts prior to the session and test it out. We can also use Facetime, but Facetime does not allow screen sharing and is limited to two party calls.

As an unexpected side benefit, upgrading the version of the Wordpress blog platform to get the pay button feature eliminated those random advertisements that used to show up in the free version.

Best, John

We (David Kim, Bruce Tolar, Will Burgin and I) are currently working on a wide range of tools for delivering walkable neighborhoods and incremental development.  After Hurricane Katrina, Bruce and a host of others put in thousands of volunteer hours producing an alternative to the awful FEMA travel trailer that came to be called the Katrina Cottages.  The State of Mississippi's Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) commissioned several thousand MEMA cottages of various sizes that were used as part of the hurricane recovery effort and eventually were sold for permanent housing.

Bruce Tolar has continued to advocate, design and build cottage housing and cottage neighborhoods over the 12 years since the hurricane.  He lives in Cottage Square neighborhood in Ocean Springs, MS. He built a place contains a number of the early prototype cottages designed by colleagues in addition to his own excellent work. As our development company started building a project in Thomasville, Georgia we started looking for manufacturers to produce cottage designs in addition to their usual mobile homes and modular houses.  We continue to find a lot of confusion that comes from not having a workable common vocabulary to talk about the range of housing that is partially or entirely built off-site in a factory.

For example; capital "M" Manufactured Homes (mobile homes) are produced to meet HUD certification that allows for their use anywhere in the US.  You can easily find yourself in a conversation where industry insiders are using "Manufactured Homes" as a term of art referring to mobile homes and lay people are using lower case "m" manufactured homes to describe anything that comes out of a factory regardless of the code or certification it complies with.  In a spoken conversation you cannot hear the capitalization of the word and this leads to needless confusion.

Site building can be quite economical and flexible if you have a good team of local trades and you are well organized. But that level of delivery does not come with a one-off project. You can also build economically if you are competent enough to self-build.

Things get complicated when skilled construction labor is in short supply as it will be for the next 10 years.  Short supplies of skilled construction labor get compounded by the needs of disaster response and recovery within a region. For example, a lot of drywall outfits from Atlanta are now down in the Houston area after Hurricane Harvey, so finding someone to install drywall in Atlanta is a problem.

We need to train folks in the trades for all forms of building across the board.

In additions to training people for site built construction and incremental development, we need to be able to use all manner of systems built housing, depending upon what the right tool for job might be:

• ANSI spec Tiny Houses.
• ANSI Spec Park Models.
• HUD spec mobile homes. (also know as capital "M" Manufactured Homes)
• IRC spec modular buildings in single box and multiple box configurations.
• IRC spec wet core modules with site built additions.
• IRC Spec Panelized Construction.
• IRC Spec SIPS construction.

The MEMA Cottages produced after Katrina were dual certified as IRC off-frame modular Homes and on frame HUD Spec Mobile Homes.  They could be placed temporarily as HUD spec mobile homes.  Once you removed them from their trailer chassis they could be placed upon permenant foundations as IRC spec Modular homes that comply with the standard local building code, while being inspected by third party engineering outfits at the factory.

Below is a 12' wide MEMA Cottage w/ 8' ceilings (one bedroom).  This cottage had its porch tuned up a bit and got repainted when it was taken off the trailer frame and set on a permanent foundation in Ocean Springs.