We’re living in awful, inefficient, costly houses. The more I know about building houses, the more I cringe with what we use. We have the knowledge and mastering to build houses that cost near to nothing /a year, provide excellent comfort and save the environment while costing pretty much the same. People don’t even know that! They think they have to get a big house (Americans have 3X more personal space now than they did fifty years ago) and a huge mortgage or super high rent for which they are working hard, to feel great. What if the working hard part was used for a real change, something that would make you save money and more importantly, make you happy. Healthy. Your kids.
On the side, it’s funny to me that people go from Black Friday consumerism craziness to extreme low-life tiny house weird trend. Can’t we just try to find a fucking balance instead of going all in, all the time? Shit is exhausting.
I cannot stop thinking about locally produced prefab passive houses for everybody -kind of Ikea/Lego concept but with your house- and encourage people to deploy over the territory instead of having everybody living on the same spot: almost 30% of the population of England lives around London; Los Angeles population density: 3,124/km², Paris: 25,417/km². It’s ridiculous. There is room. How can we not have allergies and shit with this concentration of people and machines and rats. You see the bad spiral we are in? Buy more stuff. More medicine and air purifier and clean cars and fixing services.
Just this business idea would change so much stuff. Create strong local networks of people building a new paradigm. Cleaning up, spreading out our cities, progressively. No centralized architecture around a megalopolis but a peer to peer network around human-sized cities. Increasing Quality of Life, a house at a time. A neighborhood at a time. Disconnecting the amount of money you make and comfort. Because we can, today. I’m so tired of seeing awesome, functional, zero net energy home prototypes at Inhabitat and just prototypes.
What if people stop thinking that they need to be the 1% to be happy? The 99% hate this 1% but would LOVE to be part of it. That’s the biggest issue to me. Building super great inexpensive houses would kill current property value and make a lot of people unhappy. I don’t give a shit. You have been happy paying and financing your giant useless home and now, after you lose some, you’ll be happy again but with more people around happy too. That would be nice, but some people really get off by seeing others not having as much as they own. I don’t have any plan for these assholes.
I bet states would go nuts, too. People getting more independent, almost off the grid? Less power to them, more to people. Homeschooling would probably get bigger. Going to school sucks, anyway.
Change is hard. But I love to make this first domino fall and watch the rest shift, one by one, at least in my mind.