Home 2.0 Blog Archive

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

NOTABLE NEW BUILDS

Local Homes of Note

This past month I've stumbled across a couple local projects that have caught my attention related to future Home 2.0 projects. Coincidentally, both happen to be located in neighborhoods I previously identified as prospects for such developments. One project stood out for aesthetic reasons, while the other stood out for its method of assembly.
The first of these noteworthy houses I randomly discovered while on a Marathon Training run a couple weeks ago and is a new residence located at 5812 Bramble Avenue in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Madisonville. As far as I know, it is one of the first new single family home construction projects to go up in that neighborhood in recent history similar to the way my Starter Home 2.0 project was the first in recent history to go up in Pleasant Ridge. The exterior grabs your attention with its contemporary style (and while not my favorite design) does a nice job with scale and proportion of relating to the surrounding neighborhood. It is also great to see that the market is in a position to be able to support new construction in this part of town, which is something that would have been unheard of a few years ago.
The second project of note within the city limits consists of a series of new homes built along Morgan Street in Walnut Hills as part of the Port Authority's REACH (Rehab Across Cincinnati and Hamilton County) program. These six factory built homes were fabricated at Unibilt Industries in Vandalia, Ohio and shipped to the Cincinnati neighborhood of Bond Hill where they were staged and put on trucks that transported the modules south to Walnut Hills. Once on site, a crane lifted each section up onto concrete foundations that were poured on site and the homes were then finished out by local contractors. In the end all these homes ended up being very traditional looking and while I don't believe the factory built modular assembly method is the most efficient way to build homes currently, a shrinking labor force and rising construction prices could lead many more homes being built this way in the future, so it is good to see a local case study using this method.