AFFORDABLE HOUSING

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BLUE GROWTH - The Blue Economy respond to basic needs of all with what you have, introducing innovations inspired by nature, generating multiple benefits, including jobs and social capital, offering more with less. Solutions are first and foremost based on the physical laws of supply and demand. Our Governments are charged with finding solutions to alleviate hardship and suffering, including breaking the renting cycle where only the richest in society profit by.

You might wonder why we have an article on affordable housing on a site concerned with Blue Growth ?

This is because there is a housing shortage, with a majority of house building being for the rich or middle classes, but very little that our unemployed might realistically occupy without becoming financial slaves. Financial slavery is an unsustainable feature of a modern balanced society, to be eradicated.

In addition, the houses that are presently being built in a building boom in the south east of England are ordinary bricks and mortar, bereft of any sustainable energy features - so - actually contributing to the cancer of poverty in society. There is no provision for electric car charging, solar heating, photovoltaic panels or wind turbines to generate electricity. What are we like?

The reason for this is that council planners are in bed with property developers to make money. Councils want to generate taxes for their empire building, while property developers want as much profit from the land they own, regardless of the environmental damage they might cause in the long term.

The point here is that between the State, the Land Owners and the Property Developers, house prices and mix are fixed, Councils will not use their powers of compulsory purchase to secure land at affordable values for low cost housing.

What we need is a cap on land values and the identification of geographical regions earmarked for affordable housing only. That might be linked to a quota system where until the necessary housing for poorer local families is met, there should be no building of higher value properties. Planning fees would be better waived until after the occupation of genuinely affordable housing. This is housing that can be bought by a person locally on a local wage. Hence, a mortgage test applies, giving us a figure for affordable housing of between £60,000 to £120,000 GBP pounds in the villages and suburbs of East Sussex. This is only one local example. The price of housing will depend on the lowest wages, or an agricultural wage.

These are the recommendations of our (volunteer) planning consultant, born from years of observations as to local development that is steered by Parish and District councils - all with vested interests. These are not the recommendations or the views of the Foundation, but we are persuaded that affordable housing will be of major benefit to relieving the strain of climate change that is causing acid oceans.

SAMPLE SYSTEM

The bedrock of an affordable housing system is the means of construction, taking into account the energy used to make bricks and cement, where wood offers a chance to lock up carbon dioxide, rather than generate it. But cost and ease of build are also considerations where man hours also generated CO2 that in turn causes global warming.

Wall and floor cassettes of timber construction would seem to be the answer. Hence the design of these cassettes is paramount.

Construction of the 12.52 (317.5mm) wall units. To this must be added the thickness of the feather-edge boarding or other external cladding, not shown in this diagram. These units slot together on the base floor units, once those cassettes have been joined.

A Utopia Tristar flatpack. An example of a modest timber mobile home 28'x18' for couples & small families. The price of the flatpack means that any local worker could afford to buy. The price of land for building is said to be controlled by wealthy developers and councils who work together as land-barons to fix values. Copyright © diagrams Utopia Tristar Partners 2013. All rights reserved.

Utopia Tristar RE flatpack timber mobile home 20'x18' affordable starter home example = 12 sq/m solar conservatory, which generates 12 kW during periods of intense sunshine. Thus if the sun shines for 6 good hours, you will capture 72kW/hrs of energy. 8 hours will yield 96 kW/hours and so on. Minus of course any losses in efficiency in conversion.  If this mobile home were adapted to be a house, you would not see the pillars. Instead the pillars would be below ground level and could be mounted on a concrete raft, or footings. All of this cost and customer preference dependent. Copyright © diagrams Utopia Tristar Partners 2013. All rights reserved.

The upstairs of a 48x18 house - 3 bedroom example with rectangular roof-lights which must be on the north facing side. You need permission for a house to use a layout like this with the floorplan above. Bedrooms 2 and 3 are small. Copyright © diagrams Utopia Tristar Partners 2013. All rights reserved.

Open plan layout for a 48x18 mobile home - compliant with the Caravans Act (staircase shown if used with a 1st floor as in a house, which is not then a mobile home). Copyright © diagrams Utopia Tristar Partners 2013. All rights reserved.

HEATING BY DESIGN - If heat capture technology is included during the original design and construction stages, significant cost and time savings are made, allied to reducing the cost of living for the occupants. We have yet to see a house with a roof that as a solar conservatory, regardless of the fact that if we replace conventional tiles, the cost of harvesting energy from nature become economically viable. Copyright © diagrams Utopia Tristar Partners 2013. All rights reserved.

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