Fisher House (Hatboro, Pennsylvania)
The foundation of the home is built entirely of stone in, for Kahn, a traditional style of building. The stone foundation was necessary due to the home’s placement on a slope and its need for a solid anchoring into the ground of the site. The exterior and interior portions of the home are made from the same cedar wood sourced from the local Pennsylvania area. This was done to keep down costs. The woodwork of the Fisher house is often viewed as the most comprehensive of any of his woodwork during the period. Later projects were said to lack the continuity of the Fisher House, often smaller details such as interior doors were left unadorned in a way that left the project feeling incomplete to viewers. It was best in the end that Kahn was not allowed to build from all stone, because if he had the home would have been lacking in much of the great detail work that makes it so famous. The use of cedar wood throughout the interior and exterior of the home compelled Kahn to create amazing details in the building simply by folding windows into the building envelope to provide new habitable space on both the interior and exterior of the building. Had Kahn been left to build the Fisher House entirely from stone on the exterior then the details he created from windows never would have come into existence.
PACE financing
For consumers, PACE type programs have several problems. Because the financing is designed to stay with the property, eligibility is based primarily on property information rather than income and FICO scores. A homeowner’s ability to pay is currently based primarily on their mortgage and property tax payment history as well as the requirement that there are no recent bankruptcies. Most significantly, homeowners are financed for the home improvements without any assessment of whether the financing is affordable for the homeowner, though Senate Bill 242, currently being considered in California, would require PACE providers to conduct an income review. Because the PACE financing is structured as a tax assessment instead of a loan, the PACE programs historically have not had to provide to homeowners the same disclosures about the financing costs that traditional lenders must provide. In September 2016, California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB2693 into law, which required PACE programs to provide mortgage-level disclosures and some providers to conduct live recorded calls with the homeowner to confirm financing terms and obligation. In some cases, without either an assessment of affordability or these disclosures about the costs of the financing, homeowners depend on what the PACE program providers tell them when trying to figure out whether the financing is affordable. Homeowners have complained that PACE contractors are lying about the costs of financing as part of selling the program. These problems create a situation in which homeowners can suddenly owe far more in property taxes than they can afford to repay; this is especially true for retired and disabled homeowners on fixed incomes. PACE architects Cisco DeVries and Matthew Brown deny these claims as "isolated incidents."