The U.S. apartment-vacancy rate rose for the first time in almost five years, a sign that supply is starting to catch up to rental demand after a boom in multifamily construction.

The vacancy rate rose to 4.2 percent in the third quarter from 4.1 percent the previous three months, the first increase since the end of 2009, Reis Inc. said in a report. Net leasing gains of 37,233 units lagged behind the 46,055 new units completed, the New York-based real estate research firm said.

The completions were the second-most since 2002 as developers build more rentals to capitalize on demand sparked by the foreclosure crisis and younger Americans moving out on their own. The increase in vacancies from the lowest level in more than a decade is an inflection point in the apartment market, said Ryan Severino, senior economist at Reis.

We have passed peak occupancy and with the new construction coming on, occupancy is likely to decline going forward, he said.

Apartment developers are poised to finish building the most units this year since 1999, when the economy was booming, Severino said. With construction outpacing the net total of units likely to be leased over the next four years, we expect the national vacancy rate to slowly drift upward, he said.

So far this year, 113,024 apartment units have been built in the U.S., exceeding the 85,438 units completed through nine months of 2013, according to Reis.

Thirteen of the 79 largest U.S. markets had a vacancy rate of less than 3 percent in the third quarter, down from 16 in the prior three months, Reis data show. The national vacancy rate is still below where it was a year ago, at 4.3 percent.

Rents rose, partly because new units charge higher-than-average prices, Reis said. Effective rents, or what tenants pay after any landlord price breaks such as a free month, climbed 3.4 percent from a year earlier to an average $1,111 per month, and were little changed from $1,100 in the second quarter, according to Reis. Rents are at record highs on a nominal basis, according to the researcher.

The national apartment-vacancy rate is likely to remain at less than 5 percent through 2018 as demand continues from younger adults and lackluster income growth prevents landlords from raising rents more, Severino said.

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U.S. apartment-vacancy rate rises for first time in five years

Syracuse (WSYR-TV) - As flames spread through a Manlius apartment building in August, firefighters surrounding Carriage House East were cautioned to watch out for a potential roof collapse.

"Unfortunately with trusses, they are safe for construction, but they are unsafe under heat and fire. They deteriorate very rapidly and that causes collapse," explained Ken Pienkowski of the Firemens Association of the State of New York (FASNY).

Pienkowski sayscommanderswho knowwhat type of construction they're dealing with can alert crews to attack the fire from the exterior of the building, avoiding a potentially deadly scenario.

Put to the test in a lab by the Fire Science program at Dutchess Community College, trusses presented a serious dilemma. Instructor Dave Walsh says trusses are common in construction because they are lightweight, easy to install, affordable, and they can span long distances without support columns in the middle.

But, the Metal gusset plates that hold the frame together expand with heat. When one pops out of the place, it creates a domino effect.

"It stays very stable right up until the split second when it turns around and collapses. So it collapses without warning. There is no indicator, so it puts firefighters at big risk because they have no warning signs that something bad is about to happen," Walsh explained.

Once there is a collapse, there may be entrapment, increasing the risk of death for firefighters. FASNY pushed for better notification about construction methods. State lawmakers agreed. Governor Cuomo signed legislation in August.

Effective January 1, 2015, when truss type, pre-engineered wood or timber construction is used in new construction or renovations it must be indicated on a building permit application. Then, local governments need to inform first-responders.

Also, asign or symbolmust beattached to theexterior electrical box as a common, go-to source of informationfor responding crews.

For small departments with limited technology, Walsh worries that maintaining and accessing that information quickly may be a challenge. But, he calls the legislation a step in the right direction.

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New rules for home builders alert firefighters about risks

ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Ill. (Sun-Times Media Wire) - More than a dozen people are displaced after soldering work sparked a fire that spread through the walls of an Elk Grove Village apartment building Tuesday night.

The fire started about 5:30 p.m. in the walls of a first-floor unit in the apartment complex in the 900 block of Ridge Square, Elk Grove Village Fire Chief Richard Mikel said. Workers had been doing soldering work when materials inside the walls ignited.

I had been home for about 45 minutes. There were some construction workers working on the unit next door and all of a sudden I heard them yell, Fire,' said Amanda Fairchild, who evacuated safely with her dog, Smelly.

The flames quickly spread up through the walls of the first, second and third floors but firefighters stopped the fire from reaching the attic, Mikel said.

Crews from several nearby departments responded to the extra-alarm fire, officials said.

No one was hurt, but between 15 and 20 people are displaced, Mikel said. The Red Cross is helping them find a place to stay.

An estimate of the damage was not yet available Tuesday evening.

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Several displaced after fire at Elk Grove Village apartment complex

Present at Emerald Heights' Trailside opening ceremony were: (left to right, left side) John Waltner, Julien Loh, Bill DeJarlais, Redmond City Council member Hank Myers, Julie Lawton, Ted Bell, Leah Diehl and Daphne Schneider. (Left to right, right side) Danna VanHorn, Lisa Hardy, Marion Northrop, Julie Lawton, Curtis Northrop (first depositor at Trailside), Mike Miller and Redmond City Council member Byron Shutz.

image credit: Courtesy photo

Redmond's Emerald Heights, a Type A continuing-care retirement community with amenity-rich offerings, officially opened the doors to its newest apartment complex, Trailside, a 43-unit independent living apartment building.

At the Sept. 24 opening ceremony, more than 250 community members celebrated the last piece of the $60 million campus expansion and one of the final phases of the Emerald Heights master plan. The community broke ground on the apartment building in June of last year.

During the ceremony, current residents welcomed Trailside residents as they entered the finished building for the first time. Ted Bell, vice chair of the Resident Council Association, encouraged new residents to take advantage of everything Emerald Heights has to offer.

Trailside is your new home and we welcome you to experience all we enjoy as residents of Emerald Heights," he said.

Current, new and potential residents attended the ceremony, in addition to the construction project team and representatives from the Redmond City Council, including Byron Shutz and Hank Myers, along with representatives from the office of Congresswoman Suzan DelBene.

Lisa Hardy, president and CEO of Emerald Communities that sponsors Emerald Heights, thanked current residents for their patience during the construction process.

We sincerely appreciate your graciousness throughout this project. Today, we celebrate a return to life without major construction as we open Trailside," she said.

Emerald Heights provides millions of dollars in economic impact to Redmond annually in employee salaries including taxes and benefits, vendor services, health-care supplies and the construction of new amenities including the completion of Trailside project.

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Emerald Heights opens doors to new Trailside Apartments building

An East Village man is hanging onto his rent-stabilized apartment for dear life.

Rory Denis has endured deafening construction and dusty conditions for nearly a year and a half, all because he cant bear to part with his beloved and cheap home at 338 E. 6th St., where hes lived for 44 years.

I was born here, Ill die here. My yellow toenails are going to be embedded in the staircase as they drag me out, Denis jokingly told The Post on Sunday. All kidding aside, Im miserable.

The five-story apartment building has been undergoing serious renovations since May 2013 and has been gutted from top to bottom except for Denis fourth-floor apartment, which still has its floors and walls intact.

The stairway is like playing mousetrap, said Denis, 65. Its a nightmare. I feel like a bathtub on a broomstick.

General contractor Esteban Vazquez griped that the lone holdout has created a headache for his workers, who have to skip 4 when theyre installing electrical wiring and plumbing throughout the building.

Hes been here for eons . . . the guy pays like $350 a month rent, Vazquez said. I dont blame him. I wouldnt move either, but youre going to live in that condition? The house is totally ransacked.

Vazquez added, Hes just trying to stop the inevitable.

Denis refused to disclose how much he pays in rent.

His landlord, Nurjahan Ahmed, is barred from evicting him because of stringent housing laws that protect rent-stabilized tenants. Denis said Ahmed has offered him $25,000 to leave, but he refuses to budge.

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Man wont move out of his apartment despite horrid conditions

D.C.'s first housing project, constructed of repurposed sea containers, is complete. SeaUA is in Brookland. (Courtesy Travis Price Architects)

WASHINGTON -- The four-story, 24-unit apartment building made of repurposed shipping containers in D.C.'s Brookland neighborhood is complete.

D.C. is home to two other notable buildings made from sea containers, including El Rey, the Mexican beer garden on U Street, and Half Street Fairgrounds near Nationals Park. However, this is the city's first housing project made of sea containers.

Architect Travis Price started construction on the project, called SeaUA, in July after Catholic University graduates Sean Joiner and Matthew Grace came to Price for help rebuilding a property they knocked down.

The apartments are designed as "shared housing." Each floor has a large common area with a living room and a kitchen, plus six 240-square-foot bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and study. Six containers constitute a floor of the building, and they are lined up in two rows of three.

The inside walls of the containers are cut out to create the open common room; the ends of the containers constitute the bedrooms and bathrooms.

For Price, using sea containers for building construction makes sense, ecologically.

"There are over 700,000 sea containers sitting foul, going nowhere in the U.S. Remember, we imported all the stuff. All of your iPhones came in those containers, but we're not sending anything back," Price said in an earlier interview with WTOP.

The units have sustainable engineered wood interiors and incorporate other energy- conserving designs. The design is also an attempt to provide modern apartments to D.C.'s growing millennial population.

The project initially attracted some criticism from residents living in the Northeast neighborhood, which is known for its traditional bungalows and Victorians.

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D.C.'s shipping container apartment project completed (Photos)

Work to start on CdAtower

Work will begin this fall on Coeur dAlenes newest midrise, One Lakeside, a 64-unit luxury apartment building with prime views of Lake CoeurdAlene.

Austin Lawrence Partners, a development firm in Aspen, Colorado, will erect the 15-story tower at North First Street and East Lakeside Avenue, near Independence Point and CityPark.

We expect to complete the project the summer of 2016, Greg Hills, a principal with the firm,said.

The $20 million project is at the site of a 60-year-old apartment building that will be torndown.

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Work will begin this fall on Coeur dAlenes newest midrise, One Lakeside, a 64-unit luxury apartment building with prime views of Lake CoeurdAlene.

Austin Lawrence Partners, a development firm in Aspen, Colorado, will erect the 15-story tower at North First Street and East Lakeside Avenue, near Independence Point and CityPark.

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The Dirt - Sun, 28 Sep 2014 PST

The notorious cowboy of Pelham Parkway is being sent off into the sunset, and the controversial developer who landed the property is promising to replace the old paddock with something more stable.

The builder, Mark Stagg, plans to replace Buster Marengos sorry-looking shed at 1680 Pelham Parkway South with a six-story, 130-unit apartment complex on the dead-end street that has been the decades-long site of the horse grounds.

Were going to build a beautiful building, Stagg told the Daily News Thursday. The area is really a diamond in the rough, and were excited to develop it.

Stagg will combine the lot with an adjacent 13,000-square-foot parcel he bought for $3.3 million in April.

I saw a big demand, Stagg said of the area. And when I learned that someone else had bought the lot next door, I was intrigued.

Construction will begin in February, Stagg said, adding he hopes to have the building open by January 2016.

The developer said 20% of the rental units will be set aside as affordable which allows him to seek city tax breaks, a move that has riled Bronx leaders in the past.

Stagg accepted city tax abatements in 2011 and 2012, promising to build affordable housing in the north Bronx, before trying to turn those properties into homeless shelters, says one local leader.

He was trying to feed himself twice at the public trough, said Father Richard Gorman, chairman of Community Board 12.

He has to be watched very carefully to make sure he doesnt double dip like he did on me.

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Bronx horse stable to become apartment building

Sims 4 Apartment Building Construction and Design
Playing some Sims 4 and just sharing my creation. via YouTube Capture.

By: Katie Weant

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Sims 4 Apartment Building Construction and Design - Video

Photo by NordNordWest/Wikimedia Commons

Last spring, Arup, the design and engineering firm that brought the world the Centre Pompidou and the Sydney Opera House, unveiled their latest hypermodern architectural creation in Hamburg. From the outside, the surface of the 15-unit apartment building just looks like a bubbling green lava lamp stretched over an entire building. But those moving bubbles serve a function: they help to feed and order the living algae embedded within the Bio Intelligent Quotient (BIQ) buildings exterior skin. In turn, the 8-foot by 2-foot glass panels of green scuzzthe buildings $6.58 million bioreactor faadepower the entire structure, making it the worlds first algae-powered and theoretically fully self-sufficient building ever.

Conceived in 2009 as part of Hamburgs International Building Exhibition, Arups BIQ building is part of a European movement to design carbon neutral, self-sustaining, and renewably powered structures. (Germany, for example, is pushing to achieve 35 percent national energy reliance on renewables by 2020.) Alongside a series of houses demonstrating solid timber carbon-locking constructions and greywater recycling systems, the BIQ was funded in large part by the German government as a means to incentivize the development of new adaptive, smart construction materials. Of all the technologies on display, though, algae power has perhaps the finest pedigree and greatest potential.

Research on the energy potential of algae, once just considered a slimy pond nuisance, began in earnest during the gas crisis of the 1970s at Americas National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Producing about five times as much biomass per square foot as soil grown plants, and thriving on carbon dioxide, algae have the potential to grow almost limitlessly and produce oily lipids and gases that can be transformed into relatively clean energy. But official research largely ended in the 1990s as scientists concluded that the benefits of feeding, fostering, and harvesting algae were not yet competitive with then-low oil prices. Still, many independent research groups kept the dream of algae power alive over the next couple of decades, slowly improving the efficiency and cost effectiveness of proposed systems. From 2009 onwards, at least a few plans for algae bioreactors have floated around the design community and academic circles, although few very have become reality.

Photo courtesy of IBA Hamburg

The BIQ is the first residential structure to fully realize the dreams of algae power advocates. The building is coated on its two sun-facing sides with glass-plated tanks of suspended algae. Pressurized air is pumped into the system, feeding the organisms carbon dioxide and nutrients while moving them aboutcreating the lava lamp effectto keep them from settling on the glass and rotting. Scrubbers clean off any sticking biomass, freeing up more sunlight for the remaining algae to perform photosynthesis. Periodically, algae are culled, mashed into biofuel, and burned in a local generator to produce power. Excess can be sold off for food supplements, methane generation to external power providers, or stored for future use. The result is a building shaded from summer heat by algae foliage, insulated from street noise, and potentially self-generating the power to sustain its own harvesters, heat, and electricity.

Critics of the design and of algae power in general argue that transforming algae into biofuel requires energy, as does manufacturing and pumping in nutrients. They also take issue with the fact that the BIQ is not totally self-sufficient and that algae technology is more expensive than solar power. They claim that these points make the technology more of a novelty than a useful solutionor at least that its potential has been over hyped.

Even Arup will concede to most of these points, admitting that the BIQ has only achieved 50 percent energy independence thus far. However they believe that total independence is within reach, especially by integrating solar into the design. The costs$2,500 per square meter for the bioreactor system aloneare astronomical, but the developers hope that as the technology evolves, prices will decrease, while the savings of fuel reduction will offset the remaining extra costs. They hope that soon high-energy consuming businesses like data centers will help pilot their tech in the search for grid independence, and that algae power can take off in residential homes within a decade.

The Arup team is made up of futurists. The same year that they unveiled the BIQ, they released the Its Alive report, envisioning a 2050 with mega-skyscraper vertical farms, jet-powered maintenance robots, and photovoltaic paint, a classic wish list of quasi sci-fi tech. So its probably reasonable to question how realistic their optimism about algae power is. But theyre no longer the lone nuts on the road to mass algae power. Grow Energy of San Diego, founded in 2012, has produced two home algae bioreactors and hopes to be able to manufacture, deliver, and install its first systemsgenerating 35 percent of the average homes energy with minimal maintenancefor $12,000 per system starting next year.

Meanwhile, in late 2013, scientists developed a very simple techniquebasically a specialized pressure cookerto turn algae into cheap, competitive, biodegradable, non-toxic, and relatively clean oil in just an hour, and believe they can mainstream the technology within 25 years. And just this year, the state of Alabama launched the worlds first algae-powered wastewater treatment plant in the town of Daphne, cleaning water, generating fuel, and serving as proof of concept that the technology is improving, gaining widespread support, and proving itself on larger and larger scales.

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Hamburg Now Has an Algae-Powered Building