ARES Urbanexus Update #154 /  by H. Pike Oliver

Click here for a selection of real estate and community development news assembled by H. Pike Oliver and distributed by the American Real Estate Society. Some links lead to items that are behind a paywall.

Left to right and top to bottom: Jan Sramek, Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffmann, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Patrick Collison, John Collison, Laurene Powell Jobs, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross have invested in Flannery Associates, the first that has acquired approximately 55,000-acres on the northeastern fringe of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Pushing the boundaries of wood design /  by H. Pike Oliver

When Portland, Oregon-based architect Ben Waechter acquired a property that became the site for his firm’s office more than a decade ago, it was not a foregone conclusion that they would be building in mass timber. Wachter wanted to build out of a single material that was as simple and had as few layers as possible. 

The material for initial project studies was autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC). “When we started getting serious, we realized that [concrete] is not an expertise of the Pacific Northwest,” he says. “There was a lot of energy around cross-laminated-timber (CLT), and mass timber can be a carbon sink, so it’s much more environmentally sensitive than the concrete products.”

As the general contractor and the architect, Wachter’s firm collaborated with mass timber supplier KLH. “The whole thing came as a kit of parts from the factory,” Waechter says.

Learn more here.

Source: Waechter Architecture, Portland, OR, USA

MALHEUR NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE OCCUPATION SIX AND A HALF YEARS LATER /  by H. Pike Oliver

Tom Shoup, the Editor at Large for Government Executive posted on July 29.2022, a retrospective look at the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon that began on January 2, 2016 and lasted for nearly six weeks. The article is entitled, “The Time Armed Militants Occupied a Federal Building (Not the Capitol)” with a subtitle that states, “Before Jan. 6, 2021, there was Jan. 2, 2016.” You may view the article here.

Ammon Bundy speaks to members of the media on January 6, 2016. JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY

As Mr. Shoup notes, “Those who occupied the refuge had little interest in the wildlife there or its protection. They were out to strike a blow against the very idea that the federal government should own or control land that could be used by farmers and ranchers.”

Before the occupation ended, it resulted in one death. On January 26, 2016, Oregon State Police and the FBI confronted protestors on U.S. 395 north of Burns, Oregon. By the time it was over Robert “La Voy” Finicum was dead.

Previous postings about the Malheur occupation on this blog include: