Hurricane Resistant Houses

Imagine building a house in a region that gets frequent hurricanes, usually once every year or two.

Shouldn't you be building the house in a manner that it is resistant to hurricanes? Thus saving you money in the long term on costly home insurance premiums?

Or...

Imagine your house gets destroyed by a hurricane in 2022. Okay, you rebuild using the insurance money, but you basically just rebuild the same house. Two years later in 2024 your house gets destroyed again. Did you not learn from the first time that the design obviously wasn't working???

Using smarter architectural design we can actually fix this problem. If all houses in the hurricane prone Gulf Coast were built to a new standard the people living there wouldn't have this problem.

You start by designing the house to have round corners, so that the wind bends and moves around the house, instead of ripping pieces off of it.

You attach the roof in a more durable way, so the roof doesn't just rip off during the first windstorm.

You anchor the entire structure into the ground, so that a really strong wind cannot just lift your whole house off the foundations and throw it.

We have the technology to make houses in the Gulf Coast hurricane resistant. Why aren't more people building such houses? Yes, it is more expensive, but you ultimately save money from insurance premiums and from not having all your belongings destroyed/lost again and again.

How many times does your house have to be destroyed before you learn from your mistakes?

 

Do Skyscrapers Predict Recessions, or is it a Coincidence?

I quite enjoyed this video. It certainly convinced me that the perception that skyscrapers are a warning sign of a recession to come is really just a coincidence of a boom period.

After all, it isn't like developers are lining up to build skyscrapers during an economic downturn. Large scale construction projects are very expensive after all, so building such structures during a recession or a depression doesn't make much sense.

1 Bloor nearing Completion

The photos to the right and further below are of the new building at 1 Bloor Street East. The photos were taken around 6:30 PM on January 29th.

The condo / hotel / shopping mall / movie theatre / gym / etc will have a plethora of things for people who live in the building to do, or people just visiting the building because of the entertainment venues that will also be available to the residents / hotel guests.

The structure is being built in Toronto during a bubble in condo construction, largely fueled by overseas investors and not based on locals buying the condos. This is ever so much true about 1 Bloor, which has been embroiled in scandal and fraud since its inception the property changed hands because the original developers could not commit to building.

The prices of the condos in what has been billed as the most desirable condo to live in (in Toronto, and arguably all of Canada) however have been outrageously expensive. People buying a condo there are ridiculously rich compared to the common standards of most Canadians. Think celebrities, oil tycoons, the mafia - and quite a few wealthy foreigners - all in the same building.

I think it would funny if the condo bubble in Toronto burst right around the time people finally get to move into the finished building, and condo prices fell about 30% in the space of 1 year. People who bought an expensive condo during the years prior to the bubble bursting will be crying at the potential savings they could have had, and those who bought their condos on a mortgage may run into the problem of trying to refinance their mortgage and being denied by the banks because the value of their condos has changed so dramatically.

Accompanied by the drop in prices Toronto will also experience a recession as many construction workers are laid off, which in turn will hurt other industries as the flow of cash in the city will slow dramatically and cause layoffs in those industries. The manufacturing and services sectors will be hurt the most.

The real danger of such a recession is whether Vancouver and other cities across Canada also experience a recession around the same time. If it is just localized recession the impact and dip in the economy won't be so deep, but if it effects most of Canada then it will effect many more Canadians.

At present, judging by the current slowing of the Canadian economy, combined with the finish dates for many condos in Toronto, I expect the localized recession in Toronto to happen in 2016. If the slowing of the economy hurts other real estate markets across Canada however we may experience a nation wide recession instead.

The white blurs you see in the photo below are from snowflakes zooming down past the camera lens.

Prefabricated Skyscrapers being built in record times

Imagine if you could buy and build a skyscraper in record time - in the same manner that you build furniture from Ikea.

That is the mantra behind a growing trend in the architecture industry, building prefabricated skyscrapers that have all the parts built in a factory and then are assembled on site in a record time frame.

The trend is growing quickly - and building quickly - in major cities around the globe, including New York and London, where the realization that such buildings can be built faster, cheaper and better by using prefabrication.

For example in the video below you can watch a Chinese construction crew building a new 30 story skyscraper in 360 hours - just 15 days.



And what is more...

Prefabricated buildings are cheaper to build - thanks to saving $$$ on construction workers who often spend half their time on the job standing around waiting for cement and materials to arrive - and then waiting for the cement to dry.

Prefabricated buildings are better quality - because factories have higher quality building standards whereas construction crews sometimes make mistakes and have to use a quick fix to solve a problem.

But the biggest change is SPEED, because prefabricated buildings are really fast to build. All the materials are built in a factory on production lines (which is more time efficient) and the construction crews just need to assemble and attach the final pieces.

What this means is that people could build whole new cities in a hurry if we wanted to, by using factories to build the parts.

The biggest delay is building the foundation of the structure, which would be unchanged from the current methods - but maybe in the future a genius will come up with a faster and more effective way to build foundations too.

Lastly, prefabricated buildings don't have to be boring. They're like Lego. You can make them look like any number of shapes and the technology is there to modify how you want a structure to look. We are only limited by our imaginations to design something better.

I think this is a trend we will see a lot more of in the future.

Antoine Berthelet Avenue in Montreal / The Mafia in Canada

The photo you are looking at above is a Google Street View photo of Antoine Berthelet Avenue in Montreal.

The reason why is because the homes on this quiet looking street are home to many of the Sicilian mobster families in Canada - which incidentally make a lot of interesting real estate deals thanks to corrupt government officials and dirty politicians.

The street is basically Canada's mafia headquarters - and they are filthy stinking rich, so they should have some pretty interesting houses right?

The Sicilian families who live there - all part of the Rizzuto family syndicate - own the whole street. So lets look at some of the nicer houses on the street and see what kind of houses known criminals live in. (You can do this yourself on Google Street View sometime, it is really fun.)

So I shall post some photos of the houses I think look best and then we can talk about their houses and later the role of the mafia in Canada's real estate industry later.

Interesting Factoid - Montreal Godfather Nicolo (Nick) Rizzuto was shot and killed with a sniper rifle through the kitchen window of his house (I don't know which house is his, but I am guessing it is one with nice big kitchen windows). The hitman whom the police believe did it was Toronto's Salvatore (Sam) Calautti, working for a rival family, was gunned down by a hitman working for the Rizzuto family in Toronto in July 2013. [Read more, Toronto Star article.]

Note - Vito Rizzuto, Nicolo's son and the Montreal Godfather since his father's death, was released from an American prison in October 2012 and has since ordered a killing spree of hits on the family's enemies. He is currently living in a very high security apartment in Montreal because Antoine Berthelet Avenue is now considered too dangerous for enemies to just waltz into and start shooting at him.

I was surprised there was no walls around the homes. Canada's mafia likes to blend in.

I like the hedges and its castle-like qualities.

Not very wheelchair friendly, but impressive never the less.

Very small windows on this house, and it looks scary.

I like the different architectural styles. You can definitely feel some Italian architecture slipping in.

The bars on the windows are interesting, as is the gardener carrying a large bag of something to his truck.

Some of them are even really modern looking. A surprising change.

Feels a bit like the White House, complete with gardener's truck. I have a hunch he gardens for the whole neighbourhood.

Kind of boring looking, and those windows are freaking huge. If anyone wanted to shoot through them it would be easy.

There is no doubt a lot of history on Antoine Berthelet Avenue in Montreal. And I am not just referring to the assassination by sniper bullet on November 10th 2010 through the kitchen window.

I would not be surprised if the RCMP had agents lurking around the neighbourhood regularly trying to get surveillance footage and audio evidence which could help lead them to major busts. If you ever wanted to see a mafia hit happen, you could just hang out near this street and wait to hear gunfire.

Anywho.

The Role of the Mafia in Canadian Real Estate

Did you know that quite a few politicians are easily corruptible and take bribes from "re-election donations"? No! Say it ain't so! That can't be true!

It is like a complete stereotype that politicians - and also civil service government workers - take bribes on a regular basis. Bribing a civil service employee is a crime after all, but it is one that rarely gets caught.

Lets say for example that you want to build a whole new suburb in the north end of a city. You bought the land already, but you need to get city approval to start building and then selling the properties. And if possible, you can also get city funding - and overcharge them a lot for "unforeseen costs" that balloon easily. And if anyone refuses to play, you bribe them, intimidate them, or arrange an accident for them. After all, when you have hitmen at your disposal you can make a lot of money off perfectly legal land deals by making illegal bribes, coercion, death threats, and making examples of people who don't play along.

And the city is stuck with funding part of a land development designed to make the mafia lots of money, it is all legal on paper, and the spending problems are handled by local taxpayers.

So yes, if you live in a city that sees a lot of land development going on and there is an organized crime presence in your city, guaranteed you are being robbed via your municipal land taxes by the mafia.

And if you live in Ontario or Quebec, a lot of that is controlled by the Rizzuto family in Montreal - whom many of them live on Antoine Berthelet Avenue. How quaint. Your taxes helped pay for those houses you saw above.

Now the beauty of the mafia in Canada is that they rarely get caught. As in practically never get caught.

Their money-laundering is often done via bogus charities and other sophisticated and unsupervised outfits - and sometimes even government run operations, like the recent Canada Revenue Agency cheque for "Nick Rizzuto" for $381,737.46... even though he owed CRA $1.55 million at the time (for legitimate business deals, which is often real estate in the case of the mafia because real estate deals are often a good way to launder money). [Read more about this story from the CBC.] The cheque is labelled "income tax refund" and is dated Sept. 13, 2007.

Events like people noticing a CRA cheque for $381,737.46 to a now deceased mafia godfather are certainly a rarity.

Now if you read the CBC article you will note the cheque was noticed by a veteran auditor and that he couldn't figure out how such a big cheque, made out to someone who was a known mafioso, let alone someone who owed CRA $1.55 million managed to get past the internal controls which monitors large cheques like that.

It means that someone at CRA was definitely on the mafia payroll and probably got a chunk of money themselves for arranging that rather large fraud.

So it isn't just real estate deals that the Canadian mafia is stealing money from the general public via taxes - they are evening robbing the Canada Revenue Agency, which is Canada's largest tax collector. Which means you are also getting robbed via the HST and income taxes.

Now admittedly Canada's population in 2007 at the time of the theft was approx. 33,115,000, so stealing $381,737 is only about 1.15 cents per person in taxes that the rest of us pays... but if you add in the $1.55 million Nick Rizzuto owed in taxes, it is really more like he stole $1,931,737.46 - roughly 6 cents per person.

But hey, why quibble over pennies and nickles right?

Well, did you know the mafia is deeply invested in real estate construction companies too? Including those that build nuclear reactors in Canada... and now you know why the building or refurbishing of nuclear reactors often costs 10 to 20 times more than what the estimates are. If the estimate for construction is $10 million, by the time it is done it will have ballooned to $100 to $200 million - and guaranteed the mafia took a cut during the process because they own a construction companies in Canada. Legitimate businesses everyone, but the difference is that once they are a government payroll all they have to do is bribe the right people and costs can be inflated dramatically.

Here is a fun article to read... Inside Montreal's Mafia Wars. In it you will see the following lines.

A top city hall engineer has admitted to taking almost $600,000 in kickbacks from construction companies. And the city’s former manager has been accused of pocketed $300,000 in bribes.

And lots of other interesting details about the mafia in Montreal and their role in construction companies, city bribes, etc.

Here is the shortened version, narrowed down to real estate related items (with my notes in parentheses).

#1. The article starts off by how the mafia rigs construction bids for government real estate projects, which led to costs being 30% over what they should have been - an extra cost paid by Montreal taxpayers.

#2. The RCMP ignored the real estate fraud, because they wanted to catch Rizzuto for drug smuggling operations. (The RCMP have forgotten that mafia members can be much more easily be caught for simple tax evasion. Which is how Al Capone was caught in 1931.)

#3. The construction companies under Rizzuto received approx. $500 million worth of city contracts during the four years of 2006 until 2009. (That is roughly $125 million per year, and assuming that they are jacking the price up 30% regularly to gouge the city, that means the mafia was robbing Montreal taxpayers by roughly $37.5 million per year. Montreal's 3.6 million people were getting robbed for roughly $10.42 each - every year.)

#4. Then the bit about the top city hall engineer admitting to taking almost $600,000 in kickbacks from construction companies. And the city’s former manager being accused of pocketed $300,000 in bribes. And then the mayor's assistant Frank Zampino taking at least $500,000. (With a name like Zampino, do you think he might be connected to the mafia? Not to get into profiling, but his name sounds like a James Bond villain...)

#5. And then there is the allegation that there is 3% kickback on all construction contracts went to the mayor himself, via a scheme that used construction workers union as a way to funnel cash back towards the personal coffers of the mayor.

#6. One of the people deeply involved in the real estate scandal and accepted bribes managed to get away with it and now works as a policy adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Ha!

With Montreal Godfather Vito Rizzuto released from American prison in October 2012 he has since gone on a killing spree using hitmen - killing many of the enemies of the Rizzuto family who harmed his family during his 5 year stay in the US prison system. When he is done killing his enemies and resecuring their family's supremacy in the mafia underworld, he will no doubt turn more of his attention back to making lots of money via real estate construction fraud.

I would argue that real estate construction fraud might actually be more profitable than drug smuggling. Think about it.

Drug smuggling there is lots of competition and the smuggler really is only the middle man. So while the cartels make money, the smugglers make money, the bribed cops make money to look the other way, the low level drug dealers on the streets make money, and there is really only a small percentage going to the kingpins demanding their cut. How much? Who knows.

But if there is so much competition from rival drug smugglers (who are a dime a dozen) then it probably isn't going to be that profitable. After all there is all the different gangs running their own smuggling operations, and they don't need to go through the Italians at all. They can get it from the Russians, the Irish, whatever gangs they happen to work closely with.

In contrast the Italian mafia owns many of the construction companies in major cities across Canada - Montreal and Toronto are the two big cities that the Rizzuto family controls. There is no competition. Some of their business is even legitimate, which means they can pass easily as being unimportant and stay under the radar.

Which is just how the mafia in Canada likes to stay. Low key. Unobtrusive. Stealing from your pocket when you don't even know they are stealing from you.

If you asked the average man from Montreal what they would do if someone punched them in the nose and then stole $40 from their wallet and give them three options.

#1. Punch the thief back and get back your $40.
#2. Let them go.
#3. Call the police and by the time you finish the call the thief has gotten away.

Most Montreal men would probably say #1.

Next you tell them that between 2006 and 2009 the Rizzuto family stole over $40 from each Montrealer (man, woman and child) via their land taxes then they would be upset.

And they should be. Because Canadians are being robbed blind.

Not just in Montreal either. Toronto and many other cities across Ontario and Quebec are being defrauded on a regular basis. And not just cities either. Road works, bridges, hydroelectric dams, nuclear plants, basically any kind of construction work is vulnerable to jacked up prices and real estate construction fraud.

And you might think "Oh but I don't pay land taxes because I rent." But your landlord pays land taxes, so it amounts to the same thing.

So trust me, unless you are living homeless on the streets (not paying any land taxes at all) then you are getting robbed via your taxes by the Montreal Mafia.

Capiche?

Slow construction at One Bloor

I swear construction crews spend 70% of their time standing around for equipment to arrive or city staff to sign documents.