A Desirable Neighborhood: The Burn Scar Part 4

Ariel’s family and neighbors are starting to rebuild after the Marshall Fire destroyed their homes. But now new green building codes are making it super expensive. Ariel’s brother is dubious.

About a month into living in the senior living facility and Mom and Dad have had a nice time living there.  They’ve both told us about the perks of living there, like three meals a day served in the cafe.

“Yeah,” my dad says. “And there's the big swimming pool.”

My daughter Lumi is there visiting, too. “Do you know what's the special thing?” she asks her grandpa. 

“What’s the special thing?” he says.

“The houses are gonna get builded again.”

“Well, it depends,” I say. “It depends on what people want to do.” 

“Some people will get builded their house and some people won’t,” Dad says.

“Well, some of the workers built houses once the fire came in,” says Lumi.

“Yep, some people are going to rebuild their house. I'm sure lots of people will rebuild their house. In not too long, every single lot will be rebuilt.” I say.

Because there are a lot of forces pushing Mom’s decision toward rebuilding. 

“Yeah, like Paul Austin said the land is too valuable to leave it empty,” Dad says.

“Yeah, exactly,” I say. “Who knows, it might be even more valuable. After this, and people start rebuilding again, developers are going to be chomping at the bit for those parcels.”

When Mom and Dad made the decision not to rebuild, they didn’t even know if their house had burned down.  And I think it was really an impulse that helped slow everything down for them.

“Yeah, that was a pretty quick decision,” Mom tells me. “I think it's like, ‘no, I can't even think about this, so we're not going to talk about rebuilding.’ It was just too much to take on at the time, too big of a project. Because first I have to absorb what happened, and what all that means. And then what are we going to do next? Where are we going to live? And at that point, I probably didn't know about the fact that you get insurance money, you have to do something with the insurance money.”

The feeling of being squeezed is both literal and metaphorical for Mom.  She now knows she has to invest the insurance payout somehow, and, as tough as she is, sleeping on the couch and spending most of the day with my dad in one of two rooms is a bit suffocating for her. There are other Marshall Fire victims living in Balfour and she’s watching them struggle too.

“I think many others are dying because of long term effects of stress and worry and dealing with finances and insurance and everything else.” 

Mom keeps me up to date over zoom. And as she’s grappling with what to do, she sees the first lot in The Enclave get listed. “For $900,000! And I think ‘oh, my gosh, our land is that valuable?’ I'm kind of shocked by that.”

My Mom discovers that their home’s value had grown by nearly five times its original buying price, even though we now know fire could return to this area. And that’s when she really feels the trend of home inflation that has afflicted Colorado’s Front Range. To me, it seems like Mom’s decision not to rebuild is being challenged at every turn.  

“I'm thinking, I can take this insurance money and probably build something on our nice lot with the same neighbors I've always had.”

The Codes

Lots of people who lost their homes in the Marshall Fire knew immediately that they would rebuild.  The Austin’s were on the phone with a builder two days after the fire!  But what most of these people don’t know is that they are not going to be able to rebuild the home they had.  New codes will not allow it. In October of 2021, just two months before the fire, the city adopted new green building codes that can be very expensive. City council passed these new codes with future growth in mind, never thinking about the possibility of a disaster event wiping out over 500 homes. I ask our neighbor and city council member, Deb Fahey, about the city council’s process on this.

“When did those conversations first start to happen in city council?”

“Oh, they actually started just after I got on,” she says. “So we passed the 2021 IECC code right before the fire.” 

The International Energy Conservation Code or IECC sets new standards in green building codes. It basically gives builders parameters for things like how thick the walls should be and what kind of insulation to use. Louisville first adopted the IECC codes in 2009 because, as we remember, this is a community that tries to be proactive against the climate crises. They had been updating those codes every three years, as the IECC updated. They voted to update the codes again just two months before the fire happened.  City council held a public comment period over zoom where lots of people called in sounding really determined and hopeful about adopting the updated codes. Even kids were calling in asking for stricter building codes.

One kid gets on and says, “This is important to me because I want a planet where we can go outside and breathe clean air. This is the only planet that we can live on.” 

“We need laws that make sure these buildings are constructed in a manner that is safe for our environment,” says another.

“As citizens of Louisville I'm asking you, as our leaders, to take this opportunity to do the right thing,” a third kid says.

“It is so important for Louisville to take a lead in our climate solutions. City level action, especially for greenhouse gas reductions, can be so impactful, and the most aggressive strategies are implemented at a local level,” says another kid.

And finally, “If we do this, it would inspire other places too. Doing something small will end up changing the world…”

As impressive as it was hearing from all these kids, there were also concerns expressed by community members about the cost of building to the new codes. 

“Wow! If our youth can speak that powerfully, for our future, one must ask oneself…” an adult gets on afterwards to say. “We heard another adult make a comment earlier about how much these improvements might cost. Who will those costs be incurred by? Current generations? Rather than costs that may also be incurred by the future generations.” 

Deb Fahey responds to the concerns about cost by talking about their family’s efforts: “I just want to point out that there are long term cost savings once you’ve done those changes.  We built our house thirty years ago, and we did put in 2 x 6 walls, instead of 2 x 4, with the additional insulation that went along with that. It did cost us a little bit more when we built it thirty years ago, but now we’ve had savings in heating and air conditioning for thirty years as a result of that choice.”   

The new codes gave builders a sort of prescription, a specific path to meeting the IECC standards.  But, this being Louisville, city council pushed their aspirations further.  

“When the code got to city council, the city council adopted the net zero appendix on top of that,” says Lisa Ritchie who was serving as Interim Director of Planning and Safety when the Marshall Fire came roaring through Louisville. “So that kind of negated the ability to use the prescriptive path because the Net Zero Appendix requires a higher energy efficiency than what our prescriptive path alone could have achieved.” 

The Net Zero Appendix would require all new structures to have a total energy output of zero.  This means that new buildings have to be even more efficient than the initial code required, and it typically means having some kind of renewable energy resource available onsite, which is also a bit easier to achieve using only electricity. 

“The 2021 code that we adopted in October was written as electric preferred,” Lisa says. “There are a lot of incentives in order to do electric only. So the state of Colorado for the Colorado Energy Office put out a $10,000 incentive for homeowners that don't do natural gas cooking or heating.” 

There are a lot of incentives for builders to try to build renewable electricity into their buildings, including the $10,000 incentive Lisa mentioned and a $7500 rebate available from Xcel, one of Colorado’s largest electric providers. This all looked like an exciting move into a renewable electric future for the city. But we know what happened just two months later.

NPR Host: Those looking to rebuild face a new set of green building codes. And to some, they are an expensive obstacle.  Sam Brash of Colorado Public Radio reports.

Sam Brash:  Families are now adding up if their insurance policy will cover the cost to rebuild.  Loo worries inflation won’t be the only thing pushing up the price. Last fall she watched Louisville’s city council pass some of the state’s most aggressive green building codes. All those fire victims are now subject to so-called net zero rules.

Before the fire, Louisville set out to be one of the greenest communities in the nation. But, when suddenly over 500 families have lost their homes to wildfire, that hopeful goal looks more like a dire future where only those with enough money can rebuild. When Mom finds out about the new green building codes it gives her another reason not to rebuild. 24-7 caretaking, plus monitoring all their financial stuff and trying to recover emotionally from disaster has maxed her out. But other victims of the fire choose to fight these requirements. A protest is organized in February outside city hall. People are livid, screaming at council members. It divides the whole city. 

“We heard a lot of concern from families who are impacted by the Marshall fire, who, as we all know, are severely underinsured,” says Lisa Ritchie. “Every dollar that they spend, there was going to be a significant amount of those dollars that would need to come out of their own funds, not necessarily from insurance.”

And, just like for Mom, the fire revealed the new code requirement. 

“I think when that got adopted, it really wasn't on the radar of the residents,” says Lisa. “I would say the majority of the residents might not have been paying attention to that code adoption.”

People who want to rebuild start researching, meeting with builders, getting quotes and the overall picture looks grim for a lot of them. Some of the costs people cite add $100,000 to the price tag of rebuilding. Plus, a lot of available builders just don’t have the personnel experience with building to the green codes. It creates so much confusion in the city that Lisa and the rest of the Planning Department decide to conduct their own cost estimate models.  “They modeled out, basically, three scenarios to build the home with respect to the costs for energy and HVAC.”

They created an average cost estimate for a home built to the 2018 codes, the 2021 codes, and the 2021 codes with the Net Zero requirement. 

“The 2018 to the 2021 was anywhere from maybe $6,000 to $8,000, which the Excel Energy rebate of $7500 should cover. And then to go up to the net zero, you're looking at anywhere from maybe $19,000 to $23,000,” says Lisa.

For residents who are looking at being $150,000 to $200,000 underinsured, an additional $23,000 seems like the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back. Lisa says that her department was getting angry calls from residents about how low their projections were, while also getting pressure from the state government to lower the projected costs even further.

“We really wanted to just try and do an independent understanding of the code impact, recognizing that there were pressures from both sides to get these numbers to say something different. So I feel good about the report at the end of the day,” Lisa says.

I nod and say, “Interesting how quickly everything becomes political right?”

“I did not see that coming!” Lisa says with a nervous laugh.

Mom becomes pretty familiar with Lisa as a helpful voice in the community. She holds meetings to talk through the reality of the codes and costs with residents continually, and Mom finds a lot of answers during these sessions. But that’s not true for many of the fire victims. After the backlash, Louisville City Council starts talking about relaxing the new codes, maybe letting people build to the 2018 codes instead.  In the spring after the fire, they hold more public hearings and people are calling in from  both sides of the issue.

“I thought the insurance company was going to come and save the day,” someone says at the meeting. “They didn't. We're half a million dollars short of rebuild. We need help.” 

“The estimates are really obfuscation,” another person says. “That's the word I can think of. When you come out, and you tell us that it's going to cost $20,000 for us to rebuild, that is so inaccurate that it's insulting. And when people are struggling to just rebuild what we had. It feels like you are not listening to us, you are adding insult to injury.”

“It's hard to imagine a world where we are advocating to change building standards to allow climate damaging, and ever more expensive fuels over the safety of our community,” yet another resident says. “Whilst we all hope that the Marshall Fire will never happen again, we are denying reality if we think it won't. Climate change is real. Resilience and energy efficiency are the only way we as individuals, and as a community can impact what's happening.” 

A city with over 500 families looking to rebuild is an opportunity to rebuild greener, right?  What if every home that was lost was replaced with a new net zero, fully electric house? My mom and I are both kind of excited about this prospect. But it’s not really a prospect at all when so many people aren’t sure if they can afford it.  People are really facing the very real possibility of having to leave Louisville.  Council member Chris Leh points out that, even if people build to the old codes, not all is lost with their efforts. “Building as many homes as will be built under the 2018 code with many of them, I think it's going to be a wonderful gift to sustainability in our area, and I think we can be very proud of that.”

Even if everyone built to the 2018 codes, councilmember Leh believes the community will still be achieving a big step toward making a sustainable community.  They are still better than the ones used before that. Because, remember, many of the homes that burned were built in the 80s and early 90s, when green building standards were nonexistent and people were still building bigger kitchens with elaborate gas stoves, central gas heating and AC, and poorly rated floor to ceiling windows. In April, city council takes a vote on an ordinance that will relieve the new code requirements. 

Mayor Stolzman: May we please have a roll call vote on the motion. 

City Clerk: Councilmember Les?

Chris Leh: Yes. 

City Clerk: Councilmember Brown? 

C.Brown: Yes. 

City Clerk: Councilmember or Mayor Pro Tem Maloney. 

Mayor Maloney: Yes.

City Clerk: Councilmember Fahey. 

Deb Fahey: Yes. 

City Clerk: Councilmember Dickinson 

C. Dickinson: Yes. 

City Clerk: Mayor Salzman?

Mayor Slotzman: No.

City Clerk: Councilmember Most.

C. Most: No.

Mayor Stolzman: Thank you, everyone. I move we approve ordinance 1826 series 2022.

Selling Green

The aggressive new green building codes are rolled back. People are allowed to build to the old 2018 codes. But there’s nothing that says victims can’t rebuild to the even stricter codes. Remember, this is a community that really supports green initiatives, and Louisvillians really see themselves as leaders in the world of green energy.  I know Mom does. And there’s still those incentives from Xcel and the state of Colorado. And though my Mom doesn’t know anything about building a house, much less a net zero house, everything in her life is pushing toward rebuilding.

“Early February, I decided, we need to really look at the possibilities of rebuilding,” she tells me. 

A local church hosts an event that Mom decides to attend. It’s a decision that changes Mom’s trajectory.  

“They hosted a builders expo,” she says. “And that really did change things for me. I walked in and they talked about what was there, which was about 20 or 30 different builders from around the state. They also had representatives from the city of Superior and the city of Louisville and some agency or organization called Energy Smart, which is like a green building, or it's a resource for understanding some of the energy saving things you can do for your house. 

Representatives from municipalities around the Front Range set up tables displaying all their products for supporting the green building initiatives. 

“I think they also had a representative from the Green Building Guild, which is a Boulder County organization. So I learned a lot about things like solar panels and heat pumps and how to build an energy efficient house.That was a real eye opener.”

But as Mom wanders around the expo getting an education about energy efficiency, she’s kind of taken aback by some of the price tags. Even though she’s got a good pot of money and good insurance coverage, she’s feeling a little below the target market.

“There were some that were there that, right away, said we build high end houses, and it'll cost $450 per square foot to build the house. And that was about all I said was, ‘Okay, I'm not gonna spend that!’ That's gonna be millions.” 

My brother Andrew had a much less rosy introduction to green building. Well before my mom attends this expo, just weeks after the fire, the city organized a call for residents with experts in the field of green building, and, as my mom’s chief financial advocate, my brother went and checked it out.

“Let me lay out a timeline of a series of events. So fire happens, house is gone. I want to say it was two weeks later, there was a kind of virtual meeting. It was a collection of people who were experts in green building in general.  From our perspective, it was this call for a bunch of people who just lost their homes, and they need to rebuild. And there's these codes that everyone keeps hearing about and you need to rebuild to these codes. So then you got on this call, and they started getting into it, and they're talking about all of this state of the art technology that is out there, about if you want to build to a certain standard and have solar panels and use hardly any electricity, be completely self sustainable, this is how you do it. But how that came off was, obviously, this stuff is extremely expensive,” Andrew says.

I haven’t mentioned yet that my brother is the financial manager at the firm he works at, so I trust his reading on what seems lavish.

“They're talking about geothermal pumps, and it costs an insane amount to drill down into the earth to install geothermal,” he continues. “They were talking about heat pumps and stuff like that. And all of these examples that they're showing us, a lot of them are custom built model homes, millions of dollars, right? So there was a huge breakdown, I think, somewhere, between how this call was going to come off and the audience that you're talking to. It kinda just came off tone deaf. You're talking to this audience of people who just lost their homes and they say, ‘Okay, well, we're here to support you to rebuild. By the way, it's going to cost you ten times as much as it could, because this is the standard that you have to build to.’”  

When my parents bought their house in 1988 they paid less than $200,000 for it, so yeah, some of the custom home examples my mom had seen were priced at ten or 20 times more than my parents initially paid for it.  However, 33 years later, the market had changed. The Front Range had grown. 

“This was just one other factor that was going to make it harder for people to rebuild,” my brother says. “This was in the middle of the pandemic. There's supply chain problems so it's going to cost you a lot more money to even get the materials. It's going to cost you more to find a builder because everyone's buying homes and the market’s going up. And now there's these codes. There's lots of people who have lived in Louisville for 30 years. They didn't have enough insurance to rebuild. Now you're adding this on, and they can't afford to stay in Louisville. So it gave me a very bitter feeling and attitude towards these codes”

My brother starts to touch on something here that I’ve felt since I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of the Boulder bubble.  

“The intention is to get net neutral, is to be sustainable, right? It's to get away from non-renewable sources of energy. But what ends up happening is you're just propping up the people who can afford this and it's really elitist.  It's saying, ‘if you can't afford any of this, you're not going to live here,” Andrew says with a very dry chuckle.

Colorado has become so expensive in part because it’s a place where people with money and resources have come to invest. To be perfectly honest, I wrote off any possibility of moving back years ago. Even though I’ve yearned for decades to return, it’s just not a place where someone in my line of work can ever afford to live nowadays, much less raise a family. As my brother pointed out, here is another instance in which policy plus market availability is squeezing the middle income earners even more. But Mom is a former anesthesiologist with a wad of insurance money burning a hole in her pocket so, for her, the city’s efforts to get people on board with the green building codes…well, they work. 

“I came in thinking, I don't know how to rebuild a house at all,” she says. “I came out thinking yeah, this is really possible. That really did help me feel so much more confident that this is something that we could do without killing ourselves, really.”

I have doubts about what the neighborhood could become with all these new custom homes, it’s getting further and further out of reach for people like me. Some people in the neighborhood also have fear about what it could become. What if someone wanted to build something different than the single family homes that were there before? So they decide to do something about it. 

Covenants Define a Neighborhood

The Enclave was a neighborhood built on a hill. It attracted young professionals, like my parents, as well as local families with a lot of wealth. As a kid, I remember wondering about why everything looked so similar. And today, I am just starting to find an answer. It may have had to do with the covenants, the rules that govern this neighborhood. A few months after the fire Mom starts working on revising these covenants with a group headed up by another neighbor, Beth, who also lost her home. This is an unexpected collaboration to see because they’re kind of on very different sides of the political spectrum, and have a very different understanding about the effects of climate change.

I ask Beth, “Do you have anxiety about the future and where the climate is headed?

“Nope,” she answers. “I don't think this had anything to do with the climate. We were having a typical, Colorado windy day. I grew up in Colorado, for 50 years, we have had the occasional 70 to 100 mile an hour wind. It just happens. It's part of our climate system in our region of the United States. We had left the day before to go spend New Years in Iowa with friends and family that live there. We were watching the news and seeing what was going on. The fire was kind of over in Superior, and as scary as that is, we still felt like it was so far away from us that it really didn't occur to us that it was going to be a problem in our neighborhood.”

Just like everyone else I’ve talked to, Beth and her family were in disbelief when learning that their home burned down. The Marshall Fire wasn’t the only natural disaster Beth’s family had to come back from.  Nine months after the fire, their Florida home was flooded as Hurricane Ian swept ashore.  

“Do you feel like the flooding in Hurricane Ian was climate related?” I ask again.

“I really don’t know enough about that to answer accurately,” she says. “I would say probably not just because hurricanes are a thing here. There’s always been potential, and it just happened to be the right conditions, the hurricane coming and then the tide being a certain level. Yeah, I feel like that’s a risk you accept. But I guess I feel lucky that this isn't going to devastate us financially. There are other people that are not in that position.”

The covenants are neighborhood guidelines that were written back in the 80s. Most neighbors had kinda forgotten about them, including Mom. But just what to do with these covenants after the fire became a common question in neighborhood meetings.   Many of the guidelines were out of date.  For one thing, they still required cedar shakes on roofs.  Something the city of Louisville has pretty much banned for the purpose of fire mitigation.  

“Well, obviously, that's illegal now,” Beth says with a wry laugh. “Nobody will be having a shake roof.” I laugh too at the mere idea.

But even more, there is concern about what the neighborhood might look like as it is rebuilt. Will the character change?

“There were, on my part and some other people’s part, a concern that if the whole neighborhood was starting from scratch, that maybe they did serve a renewed purpose,” Beth says.

Beth and Mom are afraid the neighborhood could get built back into something they don’t recognize. What if this fire that wiped out almost every house could also wipe out the neighborhood identity forever? The group starts going through line by line, crossing a lot of stuff out and updating to match city codes.  They get input from a lawyer and the City of Louisville on the rewrite, and there are a few things in the new document that I wonder about, like the line that requires only single family homes.  

“This is what the city told us, is, ‘Hey that one is probably worth keeping.’ Let’s say a developer brought forth a proposal, like, to build these multi-family structures.  The city could side with the developer and allow that to happen,” says Beth.

This expectation of sameness, of only one family per roofline, makes me cringe.  I’ve lived in all kinds of neighborhoods since leaving home.  The Kentucky neighborhood I’m currently raising my family in looks totally different.  Homes are all different sizes and colors. Some houses are one family, some two or more, and I like it that way.  But for Mom and Beth who have lived in this same neighborhood for 30 years…

“It was just trying to make the neighborhood stay desirable,” Beth says. “What you're seeing today is how we expect it to stay.”

The group works through the covenants for a few months, getting some feedback from neighbors. They present it to the neighborhood, “and then all of a sudden there was this huge backlash!” Mom tells me. 

Turns out a lot of people don’t want these guidelines anymore. The covenants were ok when they were forgotten about.  But now that they’ve resurfaced, not so much. Our neighbor, Amy Austin, expresses her frustration with the whole thing. “Oh, I have so many feelings about that.”

“Really?” I say. 

“We don't have a homeowner's association. There is no governing board of our neighborhood. And I want to keep it that way.” 

There’s a perception among neighbors that this might be an effort to implement something like an Home Owner’s Association (HOA). And for lots of people whose homes still sit in ruins, this is a strange time to be bringing this issue forward. It’s seen by some as another thing that people in The Enclave may have to navigate to get their lives back. The effort divides the neighborhood.  And Mom is a little taken aback. 

“A lot of people just got really upset and I’m just trying to explain, I was just there trying to help,” Mom says with a nervous laugh.

I know Mom’s intentions were to help.  But, this whole thing brings out something I’ve been kind of sore about since moving away.  Amy brings up a rule about home sizes that is in the covenants: they can’t be any smaller than 1800 square feet. “People have said things like, ‘Well, I don't want someone building like, some 1800 square foot house next to my 58,000 home.’ You're so fucking entitled!” Amy says and we both laugh. “Sorry for my language.”

It’s a comment that rings true for me on several fronts.  First, there are so many people who are underinsured and might be forced to rebuild a much smaller house than they had before.  Second, if people are going to rebuild a truly firewise neighborhood, with the minimum of 30 feet of separation between structures, smaller houses would make this easier. So maybe smaller houses would actually benefit this neighborhood more than they know. And finally, these kinds of neighborhood guidelines serve to keep out middle and lower income families.  People like me.  Sure, my parents can still afford this neighborhood, but for a lot of my generation, it's just not affordable. The whole Front Range is already incredibly expensive and short on housing, and these covenants are just one more barrier to affordable housing.  I talk about my concerns over the covenants with Mom.

“Maybe I can ask you some specifics and see if you remember,” I say to her. 

“Okay.”

“One of them was called ‘finished living area,’ and it says the finished living area of a dwelling shall not be less than 1800 square feet. So was that already in there? That 1800 square feet minimum?” I ask. 

“Yeah, that was part of the original Enclave document. You couldn't build a house smaller than 1800 square feet.”

“Did anybody ever bring that up? That was in your little group?”

“No, we all felt like that was reasonable,” Mom says. “I think we all wanted that to stay there so we could be pretty much assured that somebody would not come along and build a really tiny house that was like a little shack or something.” 

OK, I know this is an upscale neighborhood with some of the most coveted properties in Louisville, the ones that abut the open space with wide open views of the Front Range. Any hope of making a house affordable for me to buy one day, even at 1800 square feet, is foolish.  It’s silly to even dream. But it’s also a little hurtful to know that Mom also thinks that’s silly. There’s other stuff in the covenants that seems to describe my lifestyle as undesirable. 

“What Beth was saying is, ‘well, we don't want something like somebody restoring an old car and having the old car disassembled and sitting in the driveway for six months at a time.’ That's it was something like that, that she defined as a nuisance,” Mom says. 

“I mean, think about what you just mentioned, about somebody who wants to work on their car, like an old car, it's like their project and their garage or their driveway,” I say. “You'd see that in my neighborhood in a second here in Kentucky, right? Which is a very mixed class, mixed race neighborhood.  And like my husband who's like working on this years-long playhouse project, but we have heaps of trash around the yard because that project is going on and other projects are going on. I think about those requirements in the Enclave neighborhood, and then I compare them to what I see here, and it's just such a strange, stark difference of ways of seeing what a nuisance is. The reason for the covenants is originally to say, ‘what you see now is the way that it will always be and it will never change,’ which is also a really scary thing to hear if you're part of a class or part of a population of peoples who…that's like saying, ‘Well, you're not welcome here.’” 

“Yeah,” Mom says.

Colorado-Shaped Hole In My Heart

I really like Kentucky, the house I live in now.  The playhouse I mentioned to my mom is still under construction, there are piles of construction materials around my yard, and I like it like that! But I still have a Colorado-shaped hole in my heart. I think you just can’t leave behind the place you grew up.  Just like my mom’s need to surround her house with trees, I need to be able to see the sunrise and sunset every day, like I did in big sky country.  But I will never be able to recreate the feeling I get when looking at the majestic Flatirons. It’s something I try not to think about because, living there again, just isn’t in the cards for me and my family.

Then one morning, I’m sitting in my bedroom and talking with Mom on the phone about her decision to rebuild. She’s found a floorplan she really likes and she’s explaining what it will look like on their lot.

“Looking from the street toward the front of the house, on the left side is a three-car garage, which we've never had before, but I always wanted…,” she’s telling me. 

She describes a five-bedroom house with a single main floor and a finished basement.  

“There's a long corridor. It looks like a corridor but it's really kind of like the main part of the house….”

And she mentions that this house could more easily accommodate all of us, my girls, husband and me along with her and Dad, during the holidays and whoever else. I cautiously ask what she means by that.  Does she mean for long periods of time? She says, sure.  And if any of the kids ever needed to live there for a while.  

Then, over a drawn out conversation with lots of beating around the bush I ask her, “What would she think about us creating a multigenerational home? Me, my husband, my girls and our dog, all moving in with you? Maybe, if we all move into your new state of the art, net zero electric home, this is how we move ourselves into a green future!”

And she says… “Sure!”