“This past month 34 high school students volunteered to build a house for women at Her Farm. Previously, one volunteer from Colorado had spent two weeks putting in the foundation for the first “earthbag” house to be built in this part of Nepal.
low cost housing
Dirt Cheap Housing: Escape the Matrix
Richard’s and Maggi’s blog post the other day about rice hull houses could become one of our most popular articles. It reminds me of a simple strawbale house that someone built 20 years ago to “get through university”. It worked so well that the owner/builder ended up living there about 10 years.
Appropriate Technology Sourcebook: Housing and Construction
“It is not so much ‘how to build’ as ‘how to choose techniques and materials appropriate to a given situation.’ ”
—letter from a volunteer in Papua New Guinea
What’s the Real Cause of the World’s Housing Problem?
Over a billion people in the world lack decent housing even though there are dozens of low cost housing methods that could eliminate this problem. Possibilities include building with earthbags, adobe, cob, pallets, bamboo and other locally available materials. These affordable, sustainable housing options are described on our blog in good detail. Additionally, the Internet has thousands of websites, blogs, online journals and forums with even more information about these building methods. There are thousands of low income housing groups working on this cause. And, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of information on how to build affordable housing, and yet the lack of decent housing persists. So what’s going on? What’s the real problem here?
Emergency Earthbag Shelters for Pakistan
Two clever examples out of many possible solutions.
“We ended 2005 with a project in the earthquake-stricken district of Bagh, Pakistan to provide Improvised All Weather Rapid Shelters (IRAS). Your strong funding of dZi this year has allow us to jump on this project with oversight from dear friends on the ground in Pakistan. Dr Neena Jain and her husband Bill Rohs are strong supporters of the dZi Foundation and were instrumental in helping us open our girl’s safe house in Sikkim, India. They are now volunteering for Austrian Aid International in Bagh for the next six months.
Our Green Home
“The process of building our green home – A Photo Journal.
This is a big post with very few words except for the captions. The idea is to have a sticky post at the top of the page for any visitors to the blog to get a snapshot view of the progress of the house from since the start in 2009. We will keep updating the progress as we near completion of our home.