Bad economic news is pretty much inescapable these days. You can’t turn on the TV without hearing about another round of layoffs or shaky consumer confidence. The stock market is unstable, retirement funds are shedding value, the housin…
Tag: Jim Douglass
In today's harsh economic times, maintaining a healthy reserve fund is more important than ever. A community association’s reserve fund can be used to cover any number of emergency expenses from sudden repairs to legal costs. In additio…
Fresh from hoisting up the banking and automobile sectors, a newly muscular Uncle Sam is now turning his attention to putting the skids on the real estate meltdown. The Obama Administration earlier this year rolled out two major housin…
Unfortunately, what was fun for us at the time was also pretty dangerous. Children often fell off the teeter-totters, slides and monkey bars onto rock-hard asphalt or concrete surfaces, jacket strings got entangled on slides and merry-go…
One irony of modern life is that being in close proximity to your neighbors doesn’t necessarily make you closer to your neighbors. Often people live near each other and don’t know each other well. At best, people might know just a handf…
Why not cover the roof with plants? It’s such a simple idea; no wonder it’s been around for millennia. The United States, of course, has developed an architecture that exults in its mastery of Mother Nature. We build bridges ac…