I'm not too popular with my landlord either Maybe bullet will have something you can use when he pops up, he's a surveyor so he's got blueprints, buildings and if he's allowed to share them is a different story. But I've basically been running around with a measuring tape to get the proportions right. You can do ok though without blueprints as long as you have enough photo references and start of with a very clear idea of what you're setting out to do. In the end of the day accurate scale would be done in Autocad not in Maya. I find it very difficult to model larger areas without having a basic light set up and assigning some shaders for things like glass and water as well, just can't see it come together in all gray.

For modeling realistic destruction I think it's covered better in 3ds atm and modeling transfers over a lot easier than other things when you move between them. If I come across something useful I'll send it to you, hopefully one of the good modelers here would have a clue on how it's done.

I'm more of a shading and lighting person, so I'm looking into things like dirt maps and constructing shading networks to try masking off areas and get the destructive dirty rougher look that way instead. There's a lot on this topic if you dig a bit and it's really interesting. But I now get why you rarely see dirty socks on the floor and buildings about to fall apart in CG renders, it's just so much more difficult to do

Another thing you should really watch Mike's tutorial in the free section if you haven't already it's really useful. I guess since you're moving towards games you already know all about normal mapping, but I liked his technique for modeling the arched brick wall and I picked up a few things from it. And when you get an environment light set up going, it's crucial to cut the rendering times. What's the full project you're working on btw? If you give me some details I might find something specific that's useful, I'm searching a lot on this topic right now.