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COXSACKIE -- When former Coxsackie Mayor Henry Rausch looks out the back porch of a model home of a planned community he manages here off Van Dyke Street, he sees a lot of potential. Rausch is property manager of Mountain View Estates, a community of 280 modular homes planned for a 108-acre tract of land owned by UMH Properties Inc., a New Jersey real estate development company. .
A long-running effort by the Person County school board to find a site to replace an archaic bus garage could be coming to a conclusion. After months of searching for an alternative location to the one along Leasburg Road, school district leaders are eyeing the old fairgrounds along Virgilina Road. Schools Superintendent Ronnie Bugnar was asked the chances on a scale of one to 10 that the site is going to be the best place. "I would say at this point it's certainly an eight," he replied. "I don't see any problem with it," school board Chairman Gordon Powell said. "It all appears to be going well and we don't anticipate any major problems there." County Manager Steve Carpenter said he believes light is at the end of the tunnel now. "We're always optimistic," he said. "They'll eventually get it worked out." The school board last month agreed to a 90-day option to buy from the landowner, Bernard Fogleman.
With soaring real estate prices, many Americans are looking to alternative home options. Modular homes are one of the popular affordable housing options. Modular Homes Modular homes represent almost 8% of all new U.S. home sales, with nearly 43,000 of them built in 2004 alone. In the Northeast today, 10% of the houses constructed are modular. It is primarily the states of North Carolina, Michigan and New York that make up the most popular locations for modular construction. Modular homes are manufactured in several sections at a factory. The factory environment allows protection against harsh weather and vandalism during construction. The quickness of the process also significantly decreases building costs. Even though these homes are factory built, it is possible to have these homes customized.
The garage and first level floor of the Lakeview Villa senior housing facility are in place on schedule, and construction of the housing levels is slated to begin Dec. 18 or 19, according to Good Samaritan Center administrator Jim Wolf. "We plan to be open in June of 2007," he said. The 28-unit complex will be available for both independent and assisted living. It will have an underground parking lot, above which will stand the three-story residential structure, looking out over West Battle Lake. "We've got 95-percent of the infrastructure complete," he said. "The sub-floor, including the 2-inch leveling slab which covers the tuck-under garage, was completed on Friday," The construction of the housing floors will begin in earnest next week.
With an ever-increasing amount of technology intended to "improve", "augment", and/or "add convenience" to our busy lives, there seems to be less of an emphasis on creating devices to reflect or comment on our natural or built environments. Taking this challenge as a starting point with her work, Chicago-based artist, Sabrina Raaf, examines the seemingly "invisible" elements of modernized and technologically equipped spaces by re-interpreting this covert data through mechanized objects that create feedback in the form of sound or other visual outputs. From exploring live data sets in the immediate gallery space with "Translator II: Grower", a robot that measures carbon dioxide levels and draws corresponding blades of grass on the wall, to exploring the tension between humans and adaptive or automated systems with "Dry Translator", Raaf's work exposes the unspoken conflicts between society's push for technological autonomy and the struggle to retain human emotion and sensibility.
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