I’m your host, Holly Noonan, and we will be discussing affordable housing for sensitive people and all aspects of paradigm-changing trends in natural building and how it relates to your health, like living in neighborhoods designed specifically for the microbiome. We’ll also explore creative solutions for affordable home-ownership like community land trusts and co-operatives, and delve into permaculture and regenerative systems design. Â
Guess what! We were expecting to wait until mid-April 2023 before hearing about approval of our 501(c)3 application and it came in the mail this week. We have no idea why it was fast-tracked, other than that the world is ready for this idea and the wind is at our backs.
We have be VERY busy working on a prototype design for a cob tiny house for a Sensitive person. Every step of this design and execution was governed by the extreme chemical sensitivity of the person who will live in the house. She muscle-tested the caulking to approve which ones we could use.
This little 240 square foot beauty was built of cob (which is a type of adobe administered in “loaves” of earth) using the pristine earth located in her clean, high desert location. The plaster is a mix of clean sand, slaked lime and screened earth. The roof structure is all metal. Standing seam roof on steel 2 x 6s with seven inches of rockwool insulation, two inches of XPS foam board, then a metal ceiling. There are large overhangs on the west for an outdoor kitchen and on the north for storage. The front of this house features a passive solar trombe wall that will generate heat, and an outdoor-loaded custom woodstove that will heat both rooms.
This prototype was completed in 2 months and came in under $60K. Want one?
One of the coolest features of this building project has been the high-vibe worksite culture. The builders cultivate an atmosphere of respect, learning and dignity in their communications. It is expressly conveyed that THIS culture is regenerative, not extractive. We design for wholeness. We understand the gift of interconnectivity. The biome protects us and we protect it and each other. The highest values expressed are integrity, unity and collaboration.
These houses are designed to last hundreds of years and are 99% biodegradable. In contrast, our city has created a new “affordable housing” initiative with manufactured homes (single and double-wide trailers) that are toxic, designed to last no more than 30 years and start at $225,000. We must do better.
We want to streamline the process of building these earthen tiny homes; Each step as a hand’s-on module in our school to develop the skills necessary to create small, safe, affordable homes. Imagine 4 house designs that are mastered and honed for efficient, streamlined production by a cadre of student builders. The byproduct of the school is HOMES! Homes the students can then buy and live in. And with the stability that comes from owning a safe, affordable home, they can go build their mom a home. Or their chemical-sensitive friend. I know 25 people who need one of these homes right now.
For me, this has been an “Ikigai” project. I lived in Japan for 2 years in my twenties. I recently was reminded of the Japanese concept of Ikigai.
After 6 years of intermittent homelessness due to extreme environmental sensitivities myself, after having two friends die from this illness in the last two years and watching many more sensitive friends get overwhelmed with unstable housing by truculent landlords and random exposures, I find within myself a very deep well of commitment to creating safe housing like this. I also experience a level of joy that I didn’t expect. This is FUN, but also one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had. The feeling of helping sensitive people find safe housing is my Ikigai.
A month has sped by since our launch party. During this past month, in addition to continuing to meet local experts in natural building, water catchment, permaculture and architecture, we have officially welcomed Anita Budhraja and Jeff Goin onto our Advisory Council. Read more about them here.
Our Articles of Incorporation have been accepted by the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office, clearing the way for the 501(c)3 application to begin.
One of our board members broke ground on a prototype cob tiny house! This house has steel door frames, aluminum windows and a metal rafter structure. The custom woodstove is designed to be loaded from the outside. So cool! (I’m sore!)
Next up comes establishing a podcast where we get to interview all the amazing people we are meeting and thereby (re)create the space between the environmental illness community and the natural building community. This is, I am learning, an old alliance. As I deepen my learning in this direction, I keep meeting people who have been deeply inspired by legendary architect, Christopher Alexander.
Lest we be mistaken for refined academics, it’s important to remember regularly that it is the lived-experience of homelessness that has us working on this topic of clean, affordable housing. It is not just the possibility that a clean-housing community may come into being, it is the mandatory nature of the increasing need that we can see developing year by year. We must create this so that people can survive…and then thrive.
The next learning curve will be about financial structures and how Community Land Trusts become funded and established. What is the process? What are the obstacles? How can we succeed? How have others failed?
I continue to seek out vicarious lessons so that our learning can build on the life lessons of others. Feel free to reach out to tell us what you know, what to look out for and who to look up.
This has been a super fun month, meeting with natural building folks, ecovillagers, board members and advisors.
We filed the Articles of Incorporation with the State of New Mexico! Tonight we are having a launch party to just celebrate the evolution of affordable housing in the state of New Mexico and raise money to file for the 501c3 (which is Federal tax-exempt status of a charitable and educational organization.)
Right now we are hoping to find the land and funding to do a Pilot Project 10-dome “Clean Pod” within the city limits of Silver City, making our fair city an affordable housing role model like Moab, Utah.
A beautiful, elegantly designed Clean Pod would attract visitors to Silver City to tour the Pilot Project! As a training center, this Pilot Pod would provide housing not for sensitive people, but for Allies who want to come for a residential training program on how to design, build, maintain, farm and optimize Clean Pods, so that they can build them EVERYWHERE.
I envision Municipal and County and State governments all around the United States becoming interested in replicating this design. They are aware of the desperate state of affairs with homelessness and the affordable housing crisis in this country and the inability of the current supply chain to meet the demand for safe, affordable housing. Low-income people are living in 50 year old trailers that are making them sick.
Local governments everywhere are also becoming aware of the segment of their population that become homeless because they are sick. They find women, men, whole families, living out of their vehicles in empty parking lots because they got sick, lost their job and job-based health insurance, and/or they had to leave their homes because the homes were what made them sick.
I’ve recently gotten to meet some of the AMAZING natural builders in our town. These are people who know how to create safe, long-lasting and affordable homes out of earth. Many of these homes have rain-water catchment water systems and permaculture landscaping that promote biodiversity and food sovereignty by cultivating food forests– even here in the high desert.
We have to do something different as a country. The free market has now become predatory. Community Land Trusts are a way to preserve land from developers and make the clean, safe housing on it affordable for generations to come.
What a week. I have had some dazzling conversations about this project and how it might fit into a larger aspiration to manifest an sustainable-building affordable-housing neighborhood here in our fair city of Silver City? Would efforts to that end be a diversion? Decidedly not, if it results in more housing options for sensitive people.
Turns out Moab, Utah has an amazing 12 year old program called www.communityrebuilds.org/ Check it out! These are beautiful, sustainably built earthen homes that are being built on a community land trust.
Although I genuinely loathe being “content” myself, I believe so much in this project that I don’t care. So stay tuned.
I got some guidance this week on how best to file the articles of incorporation for our 501c3 process. We’re moving that right along. Our board meets to sign the articles tomorrow so I can get them in the mail to the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office for filing.
Crooked Forest Institute 