Contain yourself
The image to the left is an interior shot of a home designed by a visionary architect named Jennifer Siegel 
I've written for the last couple of days about wasteful practices and their unsustainability over the long time. I think the modern-day housing market mess and mortgage industry debacle are a another symptom of this unsustainability. Housing fees have increased dramatically in the last twenty years. Increased to the factor where regular wage earners can no longer manage to pay for to shop for a home in a desireable part of the united states of america. The marketplace reaction to that unaffordability changed into to get innovative on the financing stop of it and the outcomes are splashed throughout the headlines every morning. Everyone seems hell-bent on fixing the hassle by bailing people out of bad mortgages on homes they can't come up with the money for. The blame appears to have settled exclusively on the loan enterprise. Oh, there may be lots of blame there, but it's not the entire tale. Building fees have soared and it's not because of greed on the a part of the building industry both. Concrete in reality does value plenty more now than it used to. Ditto lumber and finishes and exertions and all the rest. What human beings recollect to be an ok and appropriate domestic has reached the point of unsustainability, just like their water use has. It's time, high time, to take a look at what constitutes a house.
At contemporary rates of population growth, the United States will need an additional 427 billion rectangular toes of area with the aid of the year 2030. That's a whole lot of room for a variety of humans, most of whom cannot afford to spend $300,000 on a stucco break up degree on a cul de sac. So what is there to do?
The house above is made from discarded delivery boxes. The unintended consequence of our exchange imbalance with China is that every day, ships encumbered with items arrive in US ports and get unloaded. Because we buy so much more than we promote to them, for maximum of those containers, it's a one-manner experience. So they pile up in New York and LA and Miami and Tampa and San Francisco and New Orleans and they sit down there.
A growing group of visionaries is looking to them to solve two sustainability problems at once. How do you build interesting, affordable housing that will allow builders to make enough money that they will build it and what the hell are we going to do with that mountain of shipping containers along the expressway. The answer is build houses. Interesting, beautiful, sustainable houses that people can afford. There is an entire web subculture out there on the topic and two places where I've been reading up on this are a blog called Treehugger (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/01/shipping_contai.php) and an architectural clearinghouse called Fabprefab (http://www.fabprefab.com/fabfiles/containerbayhome.htm).
It is not 1945 anymore and it is time to stop searching at housing and industrial construction as if it had been.
