Affordable Sustainability Archives - Page 5 of 7

Pre-fab Fad Falls Down, Again.

July 4, 2009 by David Mark Brown

zero-house-01 I just can’t feel bad about it. Post modern luxury and hippie just shouldn’t go together, and that is what so many of the most recently reencarnated pre-fab housing gurus have been trying to do. It has been doomed to failure since the start. Now the economic “downturn” is finishing the job, and I am hopeful that it may be one more good result that comes from it.

I think Buildblog puts it best in their recent post, “Pre-fab houses don’t work.” They go on to list 10 reasons why pre-fabbers have gotten it wrong at a time when I believe that most things were in their advantage to get it right. Like so many other huge changes that are taking place across the U.S. in the way that we think and live, this time of economic malaise could have been an opportunity for radical visionaries to rebuild American housing. Instead we came up with a stupider and more convoluted way to build the same old, stupid and convoluted environs. God bless America.

Affordable Housing, Where Have you Gone?

June 27, 2009 by David Mark Brown

So the typical definition of affordable housing is less than 30% of your income. And yet, the 2007 Census revealed that over 40% of American home owners are spending at least one-third of their income on housing, and the percentage is rising. Low to moderately low income people are the fastest growing category within this stat as well.

Housing prices are falling. For people in lots of debt at the moment, this is bad. For people that own their home it is a slight bummer, but no big deal. For people that would like to be home owners this is actually good. The problem is that property prices are not falling in most areas. Most property has maintained a strong and constant value for a while. The exceptions are areas where their is little to no practical use for the land, and therefor unimportant for our discussion. So, even after the economy bottom’s out and starts to rebound (assuming that it will), there will be little help for people wanting to own a home in proximity to a place they can actually live.

Ay Caramba, IKEA!

April 15, 2009 by David Mark Brown

Oh the misery of being morally responsible in a morally corrupt world. When should a corporate entity be given a break on their sustainability policy and when should they be bypassed for the lesser of many evils? I will be the first to admit that the waters are shark filled and the fields are filled with mines today when it comes to tracking original sources for refined and fabricated materials. But some actions and policies by companies have to be held to account, right?

It has been known for years now that almost half of the timber coming from East Russia is harvested illegally and that much of what China is using in its growing factories comes fromEast Russia. It is also widely known that much of the finished products that we buy here in the United States are fabricated in China. Companies such as IKEA and Home Depot have even been visibly seen making efforts to discover and root out illegally and immorally harvested timber. But at what point do we consumers call the bluff and say enough is too much?