The Dirt Lawyer's Blog Archive

I haven't written about anything green in forever (a recession will do that to you), but I was intrigued the other week while driving through a rural windmill farm in Indiana. Now I can combine windmills with my blog! Real Estate Ancillary Revenue has posted a story about the WindCube, a 22-foot high urban windmill of sorts designed to serve a single property. Its $300k cost can apparently be absorbed in part through tax credits and the like, with a relatively short estimated payback time. In an day and age where you are trying to look for possible revenue sources and technologies that might make your building more green, I guess it is worth a look. I"ll also bet there will be some interesting counterparts in Las Vegas in two weeks.

A Trump Tower Chicago resident is apparently complaining that Jenner & Block's lights are on 24/7, and that this is disturbing her sleep, not to mention that Jenner's wasting energy. Not very green, I guess, but yhey are a BigLaw firm, and that's the way many of these folks operate. (When I was in BigLaw lights went out around 9 as I recall; after that you had to work them manually in your office.) OK, so this buyer never bothered to check out a million dollar-ish condo at night for the views or other issues? She's apparently using eyemasks now (uhhh, yeah, a good idea), but that's not good enough. But at the end of the day I don't understand why the Tribune story failed to catch a key issue here, one that hopefully makes this story a non-story soon. As I recall, Jenner is moving to new digs later this year. Hopefully that solves this "problem."

If I were still working at a law firm, I would demand to be able to work at home whenever I could. Why? Energy prices and recaptured hours. The main reason I created my own gig was because I needed that flexibility. A 120 mile commute was not working for me. But what if, instead of 1-2% of people working from home, that number went up to 10-20%? What would happen to the commercial real estate market? That's one of the thought-provoking questions in this post by Lisa Michelle Galley . I have two observations: First, prices would take a dip for sure. Supply -- demand, blah, blah, blah. But then developers would stop building until demand caught up with supply. So there's an additional lag and no new construction for a bunch of years. People in Chicago know all about that -- how many years did we go without a new high rise? Second, not everyone can do this. Certainly my wife as to go to the office and the hospital and people have to come to her (although when I was a kid...