Housing For Good
From WikiForGood
Contents |
Cohousing and Intentional Communities
Cohousing Association of the U.S.: "Imagine living in a community where you can get to know your neighbors and share resources, walk to see friends and leave your car at home, let your children run free and schedule fewer play dates, spend less time in the kitchen and eat healthier meals, overcome the challenge of "plugging in" to a new city or town, cope with spiraling housing costs, shrink the size of your footprint on the planet, watch less TV and live more fully." Excerpted from the cohousing.org brochure.
Global Ecovillage Network provides information on ecovillages around the world.
Community Land Trusts
There are essentially two types of land trusts: conservation trusts, which acquire and protect open space and agricultural land; and community land trusts (CLTs), which tend to focus more on housing and community development. This article will introduce you to CLTs (Summer 1996).
Fabulous Prefab
Modernist Prefab buildings are attracting attention, as describe in this article in Business Week (NOVEMBER 1, 2005). Let's hope they include passive solar and other green building features.
Here's a blog called Fabprefab covering modern prefab construction.
Greener Buildings
Passive Houses "No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’" via the front page of the New York Times (December 27, 2008). “The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”
Environmental ratings of plastic lumber (and recycled plastic lumber) from a long list of manufacturers is available from the Healthy Building Network. Some of the bigger players don't rate highly.
New Urbanism
California Infill Parcel Locator is a free "tool for pinpointing potential [real estate] 'infill' sites throughout the state of California. Such parcels are located in areas that have already been urbanized, but the sites are either completely vacant or have structures assessed at extremely low valuations, relative to the land itself." The goal is to make it easier for developers, urban planners, and the public to find urban land for development. This is a brilliant idea, and I hope similar tools are available in other states.
Solutions For Homelessness
New Campaign Shows Progress for Homeless: Housing First (June 7, 2006) ...it is cheaper to put the chronically homeless right into apartments, and provide medical and addiction treatments there, than to watch them cycle endlessly through shelters, soup kitchens, emergency rooms, detoxification centers and jails." via the NYT.
