Check out today’s real estate profile on Needham, http://www.bostonherald.com/business/real_estate/view.bg?articleid=1110363 and http://www.bostonherald.com/business/real_estate/view.bg?articleid=1110362. Needham was once a “meat and potatoes” kind of place, a “Leave it to Beaver” suburb but it’s becoming a hipper place. The town center still has the feel of the old farming village it once was but now there are great restaurants and new retail shops are moving in. The town is seeing a big influx of young families, many from neighboring Newton. As one buyer said, why pay  a million for a fixer-upper in Newton when you can buy a brand-new home in Needham. I found the town to be a really friendly place, well-to-do but unpretentious - a mix of a toney suburb and a small town. Check out the spice bar at Masala Art, the Indian eatery and the funky atmosphere of Sweet Basil, an Italian bistro. There’s funky shops like Lola Tortola,  Chrislee, a high-end women’s clothing store , and the dotted i stationery shop. And of course Harvey’s Hardware, an independent that’s still thriving.  It’s still a real family town, but it’s getting a little Eddie Haskell to go with the Ward Cleaver.

If there’s one thing that coming out of the Boston AIA convention, it’s that “green” building and zoning is poised to become the new standard across the country.

At a jam-packed forum on Boston’s green strategy this afternoon, Boston’s first-in-the-nation green zoning code was presented to a group of national architects and there was palpable excitement in the room. Boston’s green zoning code, enacted last year, requires that any building in the city over 50,000 square-feet must be LEED cerifiable, that will save up to 30 percent in energy use.

There’s credits not just for energy savings, but historic preservation, groundwater recharge snd for transit-pass programs, car-sharing and bike facilities. Jim Hunt, chief of Boston’s environment and energy-services department, says that Washington D.C. is implementing green zoning, that it just passed in L.A., that it’s coming on in New York City and it’s being proposed in San Francisco. Baltimore wants to do it as well.

These cities are all emulating what Boston has done - another first for us. Green building has evolved from birkenstock-wearing types into a full-fledged national movement. It’s obviously tied to the global warming issue, but I think Katrina and $4 a gallon gas and heating oil is putting this at the top of the nation’s building agenda.

A Herald story I’m writing for tomorrow is a about a groundbreaking first-on-the-nation green project in Boston that will go far beyond what’s ever been done in the United States. Europe, particularly Germany, is way ahead of us but we are about to take a big leap here. Massachusetts now has 60 LEED-certified buildings, tied for fifth in the country. But the next generation of Boston buildings now getting their approvals will all be green.

Blogging live from the American Institute of Architects Convention in South Boston.  If you have some time in the next few days, try to get down here.  It’s open to the public and all you have to do is register to get into the exhibits or general sessions. The exhibit floor is amazing, a  small city of companies selling every imaginable commercial building product.  And these are not booths with pasted pictures on foam boards. Each exhibitor is competing for architects’ attention with eye-catching forms, interesting lighting and booths made from the materials each is trying to sell.  Old Castle Glass constructed a two-story glass pavilion to highlight its products and it looks like a summer house in the Hamptons. Check out Bentley’s Generative Components CAD software pavilion and see how this amazing program allows architects to manipulate geometry to design the twisting and turning skyscrapers that are now being built around the world.  This booth and others by CAD companies such as Autodesk, maker of AutoCad, are packing in the architects ( and computer geeks) to show how to create 3D building designs on the fly.  This is kid’s stuff for grownups.

There’s a bookstore that rivals a Border’s with thousands of architecture books and design-y things like huge marble mazes you can construct yourself.. The sheer scale of everything at this convention  is overwhelming at first. It’s like SimCity on steroids.

My suggestion to the organizers: supply every attendee with a GPS system to get around.

Having covered financial news in Washington and New York in the 1990s, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, affectionately nicknamed “Greenie” by many business journalists.

I’ve rarely engaged in the criticism that’s been fashionable since Greenspan retired two years ago, blaming the man once lauded as “maestro” of the 1990s bull market for this decade’s dot-com and housing-market busts.

After all, I recall that Greenspan took over the Fed just days before the 1987 stock-market crash, yet helped steer the U.S. economy through not just that downturn, but also two recessions, two Gulf wars (1991 and 2003) the dot-com bust, 9/11 and more.

Still, even I found myself almost literally sickened this weekend when, watching a CNN promo for a special report, I saw a clip showed Greenspan calling the subprime-market meltdown “an accident waiting to happen.”

Alan, Alan, Alan … if the subprime-mortgage meltdown really were an accident waiting to happen, you were the 12-year-old kid who took the stop sign down from the street corner.

I’m not the first person to point this out, but Greenspan gave a now-infamous speech in February 2004 (right around the time I first started writing about risky mortgages like “payment-option ARMs”) in which he mocked traditional fixed-rate mortgage as too conservative.

“Recent research within the Federal Reserve suggests that many homeowners might have saved tens of thousands of dollars had they held adjustable-rate mortgages rather than fixed-rate mortgages during the past decade,” Greenspan said in the speech.

Although he added that “this would not have been the case, of course, had interest rates trended sharply upward,” Greenspan went on to laud risky loans like cash-out-refinance mortgages, and to call on lenders to “provide greater mortgage product alternative.”

Which lenders did — inventing crazy mortgages like “no-documentation subprime loans” and other “exotic” mortgages that directly led to today’s crisis.

So I still love ya, Alan, but when it comes to telling old war stories, stick to the 1980s.

Everyone agrees you did a great job calming markets after the 1987 stock-market crash — and free online content rarely goes back that far, so no one can check what you said.

Made an interesting trip out to Hingham Square this week and looked at ”The Samuel Lincoln House” right off the downtown. The current owners did a fine a job of restoring and transforming this 1700-built house into a showpiece that kept the best of the old with a seamless transition to the new. For you history buffs, Sam Lincoln was the great-great-great-great grandfather of Abe Lincoln. Yes, this illustrious family which spawned a president, three governors and a Revolutionary War general, first emigrated to Hingham in 1637.  For $1.3 million, you can buy this historic gem, added to in 1869,  that has four bedrooms and 4,100 square feet of living space.  It’s great to live in the city (I do), but I’ve seen new construction cookie-cutter condos in Boston for the same price and this house sure has those beat. It has all new systems, a chef’s kitchen with a 400-bottle wine cooler, even a two-car garage unobtrusively added out back. The original living, dining and sitting rooms with pumpkin pine floors and leaded 12-over-12 windows have been left intact, but all seven of the house’s fireplaces have been converted into gas. The Adams family’s Peacefield is not for sale, but you can buy Sam Lincoln’s place, one of several Lincoln family houses in Hingham’s downtown area, for $311 a square foot.  Look for the Home Showcase on this house on Saturday.

Took a tour around Hingham and there’s a lot going on. The old shipyard project is underway, an urban village of apartments, condos and retail on Hingham Harbor where the ferry boat from Boston lands. A development across the street, Back River, near Bear Cove Park, has already sold 50 percent of its 45 units for an average price of $900,000, developer Tom Hastings told me. Not bad in this market, and a testament to the pent-up demand of empty-nesters who want to downsize but remain in Hingham.

Hingham Square, a quaint historic village with many clothing boutiques and some nice restaurants is also seeing some new townhome development now that “The Little Big Dig,” i.e. the Greenbush commuter rail line tunnel under the square is completed.

I was walking through the Greenway by Broad Street yesterday on my way to a Home Showcase and have to say that even with the completed parks, it feels lifeless to me. We all have strong hopes that the area will become a new focal point for the city, but all I saw in the  area around the Harbor Towers are bland park spaces with lots of unanimated hard surfaces. It reminds me of dead spaces like the City Hall Plaza. Wasn’t the whole idea to avoid this and create something that has the pulse of the city?  There were a few people having lunch on the benches, but no food vendors and no feeling that this was a place you wanted to be. Contrast this with Post Office Square Park a few blocks away, which is the definition of a great urban park - lively with activity on all sides. And that’s due to the density of uses around it. The area around South Station is a little more lively because people have a reason to cross there on the way to and from the station.  The city needs to get the museums and other development going. It’s not happening yet on the Greenway because it takes more than parks  to create a vital urban place.

A new Reuters/Zogby poll may be an early sign that the real estate market is close to bottoming out.

The poll finds 53.8 percent of Americans think now is a good time to buy a home, vs. 41.6 percent who say it isn’t. (The rest of respondents aren’t sure.)

That’s good news for the millions of U.S. homeowners who want to see the good times return to the housing market.

Experts have been telling me for a long time that the pent-up demand only grows as the housing market stalls, and that all it’ll take to turn things around is a decision by would-be buyers that it’s finally time to “take the plunge.”

Perhaps the Reuters/Zogby poll shows more and more first-time home buyers are getting close to getting off of the dime.

Check out  the story today on a Fenway condo complex with studios geared toward students. This is a trend that is bigger in other parts of the country, where land costs are lower. In the Boston market, you see more  parents helping their already-graduated children buy their first place. There were many young buyers who got their parents’  assistance buying in complexes such at Brighton Landing andParris Landing in Charlestown, where prices were reasonable.

Hello and welcome.  Hope to keep our blog readers up to date with the latest in residential real estate. One recent project that I toured that really impressed me with its style and value was The News in Jamaica Plain. This five-unit complex, each with three levels of living space plus a large wraparound roof deck, is a first-rate transformation from an old printing plant to the kind of stylish condos you’d find in a downtown or South End.  They have professional-grade appliances and silestone countertops in the kitchen, two-level living rooms with tall windows, oak and glass staircases and marble baths, two bedrooms and 1,600-2,600 square feet of living space and garages. Beautifully done, and the price per square foot is in the high $300s. Less than half of what you’d pay in the South End.  But what about location? You can walk to JP Center, which may not have as many fashionable bistros but has great restaurants and enough shops and bakeries to keep any urban dweller engaged.  Don’t just take my word for it.  The open houses are packed. And they’re selling fast.

In today’s story, we looked at a lawsuit filed by a group of local landlords seeking to scuttle City Hall’s crackdown on rowdy student renters. A new city ordinance bars landlords from renting apartments or homes to more than four students at a time. A group of building owners in Allston and Brighton who rent out to students are now seeking to overturn the new rules, calling them “unconstitutional.” Stay tuned.  This is not likely to be the end of this story, which pits one of Boston’s largest and fastest growing demographic groups - student renters - against long-time city residents struggling to make ends meet.