Addressing the Housing Shortage with Project EcoDome with Applications to Colorado Innovative Housing Incentive Program (IHIP), DoE, and Colorado OEDIT Advanced Industries Grants
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.
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.
The fact is that housing can be affordable, safe, easy to build and design, and environmentally friendly - the incentives just run against this. 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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