Housing for the masses?

This is something that I want to come back to soon, but as we face the specter of climate change we will be facing some serious challenges of housing lots of people.

It goes like this:

• Most major cities are in areas very close to coasts. 
• Sea level rise, due to global warming, thermal expansion, and storm surge, as well as ground water inundation is going to make living close to the seas and oceans more difficult. 
• Other people who live in arid areas will find there is not enough water available to sustain them and will need to move. 

These simple facts will result in mass portions of the population on this planet moving away from where they have lived for hundreds of generations to safer, more secure places. 

We see the problems  across the Middle East and in Europe with this with Syrian refugees today fleeing the horrors of their homeland. In Kenya, in Haiti, in refugee camps around the world, thousands of families are barely managing to survive the elements under plastic tarps, with no insulation or protection. The structures that are built are designed to be temporary. 

But when Miami is under water, when New Orleans has slipped into the Gulf of Mexico, or when London is awash in waters over people's heads, where are all those humans, those families going to go?

The horrors will be different from Syria today, but the same questions remain:

How do we house people? 
How to we make sure they are safe and even improve the environment of the area? 
And do we quickly build homes are more than "temporary"?

A friend of mine in Sierra Leone shared this with me on Facebook. 
I'm not sure it's THE solution, but it could be a start.

http://www.boredpanda.com/hobbit-holes-eco-friendly-houses-green-magic-homes/

I'm a huge fan of sustainable, low cost "green" building. I'll spend more time on this issue in the near future, but for now, we all need to start thinking about solutions to the challenges we will be facing. 

For more information on these structures, visit: http://www.greenmagichomes.com/main.php

(yes, I know, these would need to be mass produced, low cost, made from sustainable materials, have appropriate zoning, and infrastructure design and support, etc. - but it is a start, and that's what we need to start working on now. Plus hey, build one of these in your yard and you know your neighbors will all be super impressed - and building social capital is very important too.)


And if you want to learn a bit about my own green building project check out the blog I wrote about 8 years ago, as I was building my own environmentally friendly office space: 
http://greened-house.blogspot.com