Addressing the Housing Shortage with Project EcoDome with Applications to Colorado Innovative Housing Incentive Program (IHIP), DoE, and Colorado OEDIT Advanced Industries Grants
Updated: Sep 28
I've recently had a discussion with a number of retirees about the housing shortage, and how zoning laws and other restrictions have created a shortage that has priced out new home buyers and locked out new construction ideas. They asked me how they could do it and their ancestors could do it, but why my generation struggles with it. The fact of the matter is this is not sustainable and will have to be addressed.
US housing affordability has reached a crisis where now 74.9% of households cannot afford a median-priced new home, the average first time homebuyer is around 40, and average homebuyer is 59. That is completely unacceptable. This must be addressed at the root of the problem rather than solely through rent controls or incentives for conventional builders. The affordability crisis starts with housing.
In the 1800s housing was affordable because a typical person would be able to claim a plot of land under the Homstead Act which provided any person with the land for free under the agreement that they would develop it for at least 5 years. Home ownership was decentralized. Fast forward to the 1970s and this law ended - now the land is all owned, zoned, and any development requires things done a certain way with so many permissions that it becomes prohibitively difficult and expensive to even begin. It's designed as a form of control where every person is saddled with decades of debt for what generations ago was just given for free and could be built in a single year.
The 30-year, highly regulated, permit-first American house is a historical anomaly, and structurally, restricting and controlling housing supply to prop up housing valuations is the most foundational mechanisms that is used to control people and coerce them into dead end low wage unstable jobs. Housing was never supposed to be an asset that one works to save up for with a 50 year mortgage. Housing should be where life begins and the base one owns fully and returns to throughout life. The way in which housing is built and financed is fundamentally an unsustainable paradigm.
Keeping the population in an intentionally anxious and precarious state is a method to keep them working and compliant to prop up the economy, and is also one of the primary reasons people are not comfortable having children. Any alternative forms of housing or dwelling - especially any which undercut overvalued real estate - thus is seen as a kind of threat.
There is a crisis in morale that is at the heart of all the others and that is the collapse of the American Dream. Rather than to labor with a 50 year mortgage for the possibility of one day owning a home that one had no part in designing, it should be every person's birthright to see themselves in the design of their living space.
If we would like to deal with society's ills it has to start with cost of living which begins with housing. A restriction on housing supply and the autonomy of inhabitants to only make a living through conventional wage labor to pay rent, a mortgage, or an architect, is a historic anomaly that also strips people of any sense of creativity or ownership over their most basic living arrangements.
When it comes to housing, large portions of the building cost comes from outdated building methods, the complexity of approval and logistics, NIMBYism designed to protect property values, and labor costs. If this can be simplified and streamlined such that any person can design a home in a weekend and then build it out in less than a month at 1/10th of the cost, I would venture to say a majority of societal ills would be eliminated - and that is exactly the goal of the ECODOME Project. This may undermine fundamental assumptions about how much real estate should cost, which is an incentive which developers might not want to cross, but ultimately we need new forms of architecture that will seamlessly integrate with nature. The status quo cannot continue.
There should be more thought going into the creative design that the average person can access with their own homes than in the processes and approvals to make it happen. One's own home should be a form of self expression rather than as something to labor for for 50 years and just buy. Housing should be a place that one returns to as a baseline throughout their life, not something to be saved for across one's entire life to afford.
ECODOME architecture has many advantages to contemporary architecture including better insulation in a variety of climates and fares better than conventional housing in extreme weather conditions like hurricanes and earthquakes which could save billions of dollars.
The fact is that housing can be affordable, safe, easy to build and design, and environmentally friendly - the incentives just run against this. Single family homes can be built at around $30k within a month with the right tools - so that is why I have spearheaded Project EcoDome which aims to create easy design software and the coupled manufacturing capability for the average person to design a reinforced EPS foam structure, cut panels, plan logistics and budgets, and design shells or earth coatings to build structures along with all the utility hookups to either live on-grid or off-grid.
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