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Efficiency’s Mark: City Glitters a Little Less
Ken Belson, New York times
… Gone are the days when cheap electricity, primitive lighting technology and landlords’ desire to showcase their skyscrapers kept floor after floor of the city’s highest towers glowing into the night. Now, rising energy costs, conservationism, stricter building codes and sophisticated lighting systems have conspired to slowly, often imperceptibly, transform Manhattan’s venerable nightscape into one with a gentler glow.
Instead of tower after tower shining at all hours — the World Trade Center stayed aglow long after its occupants went home — the skyline is becoming a patchwork of sparsely sparkling buildings decorated with ornamentally lighted tops.
(1 November 2008)
All the comforts of a teeny-tiny home
Santa Rosa Press-Democrat (California)
Sebastopol man designs, builds fully functional, livable houses that are smaller than a bedroom
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You may think the house you live in is small, but can you push it a few feet to keep it in sunshine a bit longer as the afternoon shadows grow?
Jay Shafer sits on the porch of his Sebastopol home, which he designed and built, with another mini-home in the background. Shafer’s home measures only 8 feet wide and 12 feet long, and he spends just $60 worth of propane a year to heat it.
… “I could never live in this county if it weren’t for tiny houses,” said the Sebastopol resident, who lives in a high-quality, hand-built dollhouse he keeps on wheels in his landlord’s backyard.
… At 42, Shafer is a pioneer in a small-house movement. He built his home-ette — $18,000 in materials, 500 hours of labor — and he earns a living by designing and occasionally building homes through his two-person Tumbleweed Tiny House Co.
“We’re getting a lot more orders these days,” he said.
That makes sense. With the conventional home market in chaos, millions of people feeling financially pinched and millions more yearning to reduce the size of their ecological footprint, more people are now thinking small.
… Johnson believes modern technology — along with tight finances, high energy costs and concerns about global warming — is prompting people to consider moving into much smaller houses.
… “My house is similar to what an Amish person would live in, but my life is very high-tech,” Johnson said in a phone interview from Iowa.
In a vision he shares with Shafer, clusters of small houses are built around a communal building designed for activities that require a bit more space — dinner parties, doing the laundry, book-club meetings.
Obstacles to the creation of such affordable, efficient, eco-friendly villages of mini-homes are numerous. Among them: the high cost of land, especially in California, high per-unit fees charged to anyone who builds a home, and construction-permit regulations that may not recognize the concept of an entire house perhaps the size of a typical kitchen or family room.
(2 November 2008)
Retrofits for All!
Alan Durning, Sightline
An organizing model for neighborhood-wide energy upgrades.
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Saul Alinksy—the fabled organizer (pictured) whose approach to grassroots mobilization has informed generations of activists, including the young Barack Obama—never promoted energy efficiency, to my knowledge.
But his institutional descendants are doing so now. The Chicago-born Industrial Areas Foundation, which Alinsky founded, has a Northwest branch, and that branch—long an inspiration to me for its creative thinking and deep community engagement—has crafted an intriguing plan for boosting both good jobs and green energy at the same time. Called SustainableWorks, it’s the kind of thing that can speed both economic turnaround and recovery from oil addiction and climate change.
SustainableWorks is a plan for structuring the marketplace for clean-energy retrofits.
What? Structuring the marketplace?
More simply put, it would create a few missing institutional links and thereby allow a whole bunch of organizations with shared interests to find each other and cooperate: neighborhood groups, building owners, skilled energy auditors, reliable contractors, workforce training programs at community colleges, union apprenticeships in green construction, utilities and other public and private conservation funders.
The results would include neighborhood-wide energy upgrades that are more thorough and less expensive than what we get now, plus more—and better—new jobs with better training and better career prospects over time.
The plan starts from the recognition that, for all that’s important about energy efficiency, it’s a real hassle to save energy in existing buildings, especially small buildings like houses, duplexes, low-rise apartments, and neighborhood commercial buildings.
(3 November 2008)
