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Got housing? It's more expensive because the cost of homebuilding better include climate or else [1]
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Date: 2023-07-16
Now that it seems that Climate Change is getting the attention of more and more people as something that can happen to them now where they live instead of something they hear about elsewhere or at some vague time in the future, that’s starting to show up in home designs. Via a pass through the paywall, here’s a NY Times look into the matter:
The homebuilding industry has been slow to adopt changes that can better protect against extreme weather. Some architects are showing what’s possible.
Jon duSaint, a retired software engineer, recently bought property near Bishop, Calif., in a rugged valley east of the Sierra Nevada. The area is at risk for wildfires, severe daytime heat and high winds — and also heavy winter snowfall. But Mr. duSaint isn’t worried. He’s planning to live in a dome. The 29-foot structure will be coated with aluminum shingles that reflect heat, and are also fire-resistant. Because the dome has less surface area than a rectangular house, it’s easier to insulate against heat or cold. And it can withstand high winds and heavy snowpack. “The dome shell itself is basically impervious,” Mr. duSaint said. As weather grows more extreme, geodesic domes and other resilient home designs are gaining new attention from more climate-conscious home buyers, and the architects and builders who cater to them. The trend could begin to dislodge the inertia that underlies America’s struggle to adapt to climate change: Technologies exist to protect homes against severe weather — but those innovations have been slow to seep into mainstream homebuilding, leaving most Americans increasingly exposed to climate shocks, experts say.
Christopher Flavelle explores the situation where climate shocks are becoming too common and too great to ignore. (Look at what’s happening to home insurance in Florida and California.) There’s some different approaches being tried over stick and frame construction: concrete and steel.
On a piece of land that juts out in the Wareham River, near Cape Cod, Mass., Dana Levy is watching his new fortress of a house go up. The structure will be built with insulated concrete forms, or ICF, creating walls that can withstand high winds and flying debris, and also maintain stable temperatures if the power goes out — which is unlikely to happen, thanks to the solar panels, backup batteries and emergency generator. The roof, windows, and doors will be hurricane-resistant. The whole point, according to Mr. Levy, a 60-year-old retiree who worked in renewable energy, is to ensure he and his wife won’t have to leave the next time a big storm hits.
This video from This Old House shows Insulated Concrete Forms being used for foundation walls — but ICF can be used as well to build above ground walls with openings for windows and doorways. (More about using concrete below.)
In fire country,
Where wildfire risk is great, some architects are turning to steel. In Boulder, Colo., Renée del Gaudio designed a house that uses a steel structure and siding for what she calls an ignition-resistant shell. The decks are made from ironwood, a fire-resistant lumber. Beneath the decks and surrounding the house is a weed barrier topped by crushed rock, to prevent the growth of plants that could fuel a fire. A 2,500-gallon cistern could supply water for hoses in case a fire gets too close. Those features increased the construction costs as much as 10 percent, according to Ms. del Gaudio. That premium could be cut in half by using cheaper materials, like stucco, which would provide a similar degree of protection, she said.
Bigger storms, more fires — wasn’t there some warning about those and climate a while back? /s Flavelle notes that several of the examples built for the new normal have higher costs, estimating about 10% over conventional construction. It might be better to start thinking about those higher costs as simply what is needed now. NOT building for what the future holds is what is called a false economy .
There’s No Place Like… Dome?
Flavelle looks at resurging interest in a different approach to construction. Geodesic dome houses, based on the work of R. Buckminster Fuller are getting lot of attention in areas subject to hurricanes and other high wind storms. Their shape is much more resistant to wind damage, they can be assembled from kits, and they are very strong structurally. Further, their costs can be comparable to conventional construction and they need fewer materials to enclose the same amount of space as a conventional structure. Flavelle cites Joel Veazey.
But perhaps no type of resilient home design inspires devotion quite like geodesic domes. In 2005, Hurricane Rita devastated Pecan Island, a small community in southwest Louisiana, destroying most of the area’s few hundred houses. Joel Veazey’s 2,300-square-foot dome was not one of them. He only lost a few shingles. “People came to my house and apologized to me and said: ‘We made fun of you because of the way your house looks. We should never have done that. This place is still here, when our homes are gone,’” Mr. Veazey, a retired oil worker, said.
In addition to structural advantages, domes also offer advantages in heating and cooling and need less materials to build. A search of the web for dome houses turns up more than a few. Here’s 20 of the most efficient pre-fab dome home kits, according to BuildGreenNH. Scroll down to see a quick summary of each. There’s a whole range of designs available. (They also have a roundup of pre-fab and modular houses.)
Business Insider is also looking at disaster-resistant domes, and says that they can cost no more than conventional housing, depending on the locale.
Extreme weather driven by the climate crisis forced 3.3 million Americans out of their homes last year. So some are seeking out a new type of house designed specifically to withstand the consequences of a warming Earth: geodesic domes. And — surprisingly enough — the unique buildings cost the same as your typical American home. The total construction costs for these eccentric, newly-popular homes range from about $350,000 to $450,000 if built in rural areas, The New York Times reported. That's just $20,000 shy of the average value of a standard US home in 2023, which comes in at $330,000, The Guardian reported in May. However, construction costs can reach closer to $600,000 in urban areas. Dennis Odin Johnson, who owns a dome-home company called Natural Spaces Homes in Minnesota, told the Times his clients often aren't particularly wealthy, and instead come to his company out of concern for the threats extreme weather poses.
The video below is a time-lapse of a dome being put up for use for what looks like a weekend retreat; domes come in a variety of materials and designs that can be chosen for a particular site and intended use.
Going Three-D
The latest wrinkle is Three-D printing on the large scale. Although the home shown in the video below is promoted as being cheaper, faster to build, and constructed with less waste, it should also have advantages when it comes to resisting weather events, assuming a roof also built resistant to wind and fire. (The carbon emissions of using concrete are another matter. Instead of Portland Cement, Geopolymer Cement looks like something worth exploring.)
But Wait — There’s More!
One of the consequences of changing climate is what that means for water. Some people are now getting much more than they expected, and others are getting less.
This last week in the Hudson Valley and into Vermont has had a lot of people discovering they live in flood zones. All this week I’ve been getting daily warnings of flash flood risks where I live, outside of Albany. Thunderstorms have been rolling through every day it seems, and they drop up an inch or more of rain very quickly. Further, a small storm can pop up without warning and sit in place for a while, dumping water. It doesn’t matter how your house is constructed if it’s filling up or getting washed away in a flood.
The increasing amount of water that warmer air can carry means higher potential rainfall, and expanded flood zones along waterways and drainage basins. Quite frankly, there are a lot of homes that are now at potential flooding risks that the owners don’t realize — because we are in new territory. Insurance companies are going to stop providing flood insurance more and more, and the government shouldn’t step in to provide it if it means people will rebuild in the same spot — and get flooded again.
We’re talking about entire communities here in some cases.
The other side of the coin is water that doesn’t show up any more. Communities in the desert Southwest are facing extended drought — and a population outgrowing what water is available. Several of the comments made on the Flavelle article include people in Arizona complaining that the usual rainy season isn’t happening; instead of a monsoon, they’re getting a non-soon. Lots of humidity, but no rain or relief from the heat, which is also hitting the Southwest.
One person is saving his outdoor plantings by tapping a source of water — the condensation dripping from his AC unit. “...30 gallons of condensate water a day off an AC unit last August. If you can access your condensate discharge pipe, this water can be diverted to trees by adding a hose or piping that moves the water using gravity flow.” Strategies like this, and mandatory steps to increase the efficiency of water are going to be essential.
It’s All About The Rules in a Game That’s Changing
One of the problems with adapting to climate change is the regulatory climate and experience. To put it frankly, building codes, zoning restrictions, HOAs, tax codes, and insurance policies are a big part of the problem. Building codes are something people don’t pay attention to until they run up against an issue.
What happens if you want to put up solar panels? Will your utility help or hinder? Will your neighbors object? Can you find someone qualified to do it — and can you finance it? What if you are the first person to go with a printed house in your community — and no one in the town can figure out what’s needed to approve it? What if you want to replace your lawn with xeriscaping — plants that can get by with little water?
As Flavelle notes:
Most home buyers don’t know enough about construction to demand tougher standards. Builders, in turn, are reluctant to add resilience, for fear that consumers won’t be willing to pay extra for features they don’t understand. One way to bridge that gap would be to tighten building codes, which are set at the state and local level. But most places don’t use the latest code, if they have any mandatory building standards at all.
Back to the Future that was ahead of its time?
Most people don’t live in their dream house — they live in what they can afford. So how do we come up with affordable housing that is also going to be able to cope with the climate we’ve got coming at us? What do people do when entire communities are hit by flood or fire? Where do they go? Flavelle cites some alarming numbers:
Weather-related disasters pushed more than 3.3 million American adults out of their homes in 2022, census data shows. Of those, at least 1.2 million people were out of their homes for at a month or longer; more than half a million of them never returned, fueling a growing diaspora of domestic climate refugees.
Even without climate issues, housing is not in a good place. First-time home buyers are an endangered species. To make matters worse, hedge funds are pricing people out of the market.
So, let’s think about where we should be going with housing. For purposes of discussion we’ll skip over multi-family homes, apartment buildings, mass-housing projects, and anything intended to fit in an urban environment to focus for the moment on single-family housing, which is still the ideal for many people. What should we be thinking about? In no particular order, here are my suggestions.
It should be affordable.
It should be buildable in numbers and within a time scale that can meet demand — especially after a disaster.
It should be sustainable — made with materials that minimize impact on natural resources.
It should be energy efficient — and that includes supporting features like solar panels and insulation to minimize heating/cooling demands.
It should have minimal impact on the land — not need a large footprint.
It should be designed to minimize water use.
It should be able withstand the kind of climate than can be expected where it is located.
People should enjoy living in it — of course.
There’s no perfect solution, no “one size fits all” answer — but there is more that can be done.
R. Buckminster Fuller, cited above, did a lot to popularize the Geodesic Dome but he had more ideas on the subject that resulted in a concept called the Dymaxion House. Fuller was tying to address the criteria listed above, and he was way ahead of his time — but perhaps not ours?
What appears to be a model of a Dymaxion House, circa 1946
He went through several design revisions; none were ever completed according to his plans. What remains of his prototypes ended up at the Henry Ford Museum. You can see the exhibit here.
Fuller planned for the Dymaxion House to be built in factories on a mass production basis. This would not only help with quality control, it would take advantage of Wright’s Law, bringing costs down by a certain percentage every time production doubles. The house would be shipped as components to be assembled on site.
Rather than needing extensive site grading and a foundation to support the house, Fuller came up with the idea of emplacing a central shaft from which the structure would be suspended. The house would be assembled around the shaft and winched into position to be suspended from it.
Fuller based the design on aluminum, which despite the energy costs of creating it, is corrosion resistant, easily shaped for mass production, light weight which minimizes transportation costs, can be recycled — and because after World War Two America had a lot of airplane factories and a work force experienced in building airplanes out of aluminum. (This is the kind of experience that gave us Grumman aluminum canoes — which can be still going strong after decades of use.)
Other innovations included natural ventilation. A convection driven rotating ventilator on top of the structure lets fresh air in but keeps wind out; Fuller estimated a complete air change every 6 minutes. This can be managed to minimize heating and cooling costs.
Fuller was very concerned with water use. To quote from the wikipedia article,
..It was a prototype proposed to use a packaging toilet, water storage and a convection-driven ventilator built into the roof. It was designed for the stormy areas of the world: temperate oceanic islands, and the Great Plains of North America, South America and Eurasia. In most modern houses, laundry, showers and commodes are the major water uses, with drinking, cooking and dish-washing consuming less than 20 liters per day. The Dymaxion house was intended to reduce water use by a greywater system, a packaging commode, and a "fogger" to replace showers. The fogger was based on efficient compressed-air and water degreasers, but with much smaller water particles to make it comfortable.
The packaging toilet idea was dropped because the plastic needed to collect it for eventual composting was not available, so a conventional septic system was used instead. However, given current interest in composting toilets and restrictions on water use, that might be implemented again in an updated design. As for the bathroom,
The inhabitants of the much-modified version of the house said that the bathroom[4] was a particular delight. The bathroom consisted of two connected stamped copper bubbles, built as four nesting pieces. The bottom piece is fully plated in tin/antimony alloy and the top half is painted. Each bubble had a drain. No area had a radius of less than four inches (10 cm), to aid cleaning. The commode, shower, bathtub and sink were molded into the structural shell in one piece. One bubble contained a step-up ergonomic bathtub and shower, high enough to wash children without stooping, but just two steps (16 inches / 40 cm) up. The oval tub had the controls mounted on the inside left of the entrance to the oval tub. The other bubble was the bathroom proper with commode and sink. The ventilation for the bathroom was a large silent fan under the main sink, which kept odors away from people's noses. All lighting was totally enclosed. To prevent fogging, the mirror faced into the medicine chest, which was ventilated by the fan. A plastic version of the bathroom was available intermittently until the 1980s.[5]
The Dymaxion House went through several iterations from an octagonal version initially to the round one he eventually settled on. Fuller was attempting to come up with design that minimized the use of materials for the space it created, and wasted as little space as possible, including some ingenious storage spaces and other ideas. While the only surviving prototype is of a limited size, the wikipedia article reports he also designed a ten story version that could be airlifted into place by an airship. (And we might just have the airship to do it now.)
All in all, Fuller was aiming at something we could use today: affordable, comfortable housing that could be mass produced and installed relatively quickly. It would have minimal energy usage, would maximize the use of available water, and would have minimal impact on the landscape. Include features like solar panels, some kind of energy storage, and something like a modern heat pump for heating and cooling, the end result would be an house that would be nearly autonomous.
Using modern manufacturing techniques and new materials like composites, a 21st Century Dymaxion House would be a game changer. It’s possible its modular construction would allow a certain amount of customization internally and externally so they needn’t all be identical.
Fuller was certainly designing for the world we live in now.
Conventional buildings and building methods are not going to go away, but it’s clear they will increasingly be reminders of a world that no longer exists. The need to meet demand for new housing, the need to replace housing lost to climate disasters or the passage of time, the need for housing that puts less demand on energy and natural resources, the need for housing that can stand up to what’s coming — all of this is going to lead to change. Is the Dymaxion House at the end of that road? Perhaps — or something like it in part.
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