Affordable Housing

This is what housing in many parts of South Africa looks like - tin shanties knocked together with whatever's lying around, from cardboard to wood to zinc sheeting. (image from here) It's a HUGE problem, especially for the government - who keep promising "affordable housing" for all - and end up producing little boxes of cement-brick and tin living space. All looking the same, all on bare dust-swept ground, not much better than the shacks and many of them poorly-built.

I know a couple of friends of mine who are builders, who have offered their workers the leftover supplies from a project to go build a proper house for themselves. These guys have the skills to do so, but refuse the offer - building a permanent dwelling will incur taxes, so they make do with a shack that leaks and floods and doesn't have an inch of insulation, one among thousands (millions?) of others.

But hey, government - here's a solution to your housing issues! Well, actually a couple of them, as well as a free idea to decrease certain types of land-fill thrown in for good measure.

Firstly - butt-kick the guys who are pocketing the millions you set aside in your election promises. Get rid of them, FIRE them (don't re-assign them to another department), hire folk from the needy areas to oversee building in their community. (Another free idea to cut unemployment!)

And then look at your options.

You're paying millions for labour and materials that are sub-standard and put together slap-dash. There are other ways and other materials to use.

Ever heard of slip-form masonry? Throw a foundation, then use moulds to pile up stones, fill the between-stone bits with cement, let sit a few hours, then move the moulds and do it all again. If the woman in the linked article can do it - ALONE - than surely your "workers" can get it right? Then again, maybe not. I see more of them sleeping next to the side of the road than actually working... except when the supervisor stops by, at which point frantic activity takes place!

If the workers aren't working, hand it over to the potential home owner. Give them a plot and a plan, a little instruction, a bag or two of cement and let them at it. And for goodness sake, don't try to dictate with arb construction laws how it has to look, exactly. Let them decide what they need, and how it should be laid out.

Ah, I hear you say - but we have no stones here, it's all just million-year-old beach sand from when this area was flooded by the sea!

But there, dear government, I have a solution too! Remember all those old buildings you bashed down, and all that rubble (bricks and cement) you piled into the landfills? Now, picture each clump of rubble as a stone - fill up those wall moulds with rubble, add your cement, and away you go! Just leave out the rubbish - hey, sorting rubble can be a whole new employment option...

See? Not that difficult - and it even looks good once it's done. It's unlikely to flood or be blown away by the winter winds, and you sure as heck can't burn it down easily (solving the fire-hazard problem of the current "accommodation" which kills hundreds every year)!

Not convinced? Well then there's always straw-bale building. But I realize your space is limited, land is in high demand - and straw bales do tend to make for thicker walls than the norm. Also, I suspect not much straw grows around here.

There's the sand-bag version - you WERE complaining of all sand and no stones a few paragraphs back, weren't you?

And you know all those papers blowing around in the veld? Well - use them in papercrete and get rid of them once and for all, will ya? Apparently not even the recycling companies have enough demand for them to accept our leftover papers, so here's where you can source them from.

(While you're at it - how about turning those plastic bags into something useful too?)

See? There's LOTS of affordable housing out there, dear government, if you would only get stuck into research, REALLY look at the alternatives to what you've been doing (hasn't worked, has it?) and actually START.

Let me know if I can help!

Water Crisis

The world is drying up. Drought and famine have completely taken over some countries for years already, and others simply don't have enough water handy to meet the demand.

So what to do? Well - the obvious first.

Stop wasting water! We take it for granted that when we turn on the tap, water will come out. But you learn (when the water main bursts and isn't fixed until 3 days later) that it's really not a given. There could come a day when there simply won't be a thing in the tap. But look carefully at what you do now with what comes out:

• Do you turn off the tap while brushing your teeth?
• Do you fill a glass, drink half, then throw the rest down the drain?
• Do you rinse off dishes before washing them?
• Does your washing machine work optimally - do you have a model that uses less water, or do you simply let it run on max? Where does the washing water go? We used to re-direct ours via a long PVC pipe to various parts of the garden as the machine drained.
• And what about the water in a gone-cold hot water bottle you had with you last night - can you re-use that on a plant or something else?
• Do you have a tap that drips - even if it's only one drop every few minutes? If you do - place a container under the tap for a few hours and see how quickly it fills!
• Do you flush the toilet when it really doesn't need it? Do you have a half-flush (new to us while visiting in Australia!) option on the toilet?
• Do you have low-flow shower heads? Do you spend too long in the shower simply letting water run off you? (yeah, I know it's a great feeling, but can we really afford it in this day and age?)
• Do you have a grey-water recycling system? Do you collect rainwater from your roof for re-use in the garden or elsewhere?
• Do you use a high-pressure hose when washing the car? Do you turn it off while you're soaping?

There's a lot one can do at home to conserve water, collect it and re-use it. I'm sure you'd be able to make your own list in addition to this one!

But that's just a small piece of the water puzzle. Most of our water is used up by industry and business - everything from production to the local car-wash.

With recent water restrictions, hefty fines were introduced to anyone exceeding their limit - including the car-wash. At least one business ended up in big trouble. But it's not enough.

What if government imposed a few strict regulations? Things like:

• All industries limited in their water use. Any water used has to be recycled for re-use within the industry, not pumped off polluted to the nearest river system. Strict monitoring of this.
• Every business, home, office tower etc. has to have a water-collection system from their roof. Fed either into their own tanks or a communal one.
• Blogger Sweet Violet suggested a while back that unused land be reworked similar to a system used in the USA (I've trawled her archives and for the life of me can't find that post!). She says a 50 acre dairy farm was converted into a storm-water storage lake, which was open for recreational purposes to the public, but also acted as an emergency source of water if needed. There's plenty of land lying around that could be used for that! Instead of watching shack-towns and low-lying areas flooded by seasonal rains (only to be dry-as-a-bone out of season), put in a drainage system to one of these areas - and for goodness sake keep the darned drains clear of junk! (fodder for a whole other post....) Brilliant!
• Impose hectic fines for any water found leaking down the drains from any area - be it business, industry, home or farm. No taps left running or dripping, no hoses left half-on while someone does something else. (Fixing leaking taps/pipes could provide employment for the unemployed - again, fodder for a whole other post on the unemployment situation!).
• Implement aggressive education of everyone and anyone regarding water use - once it's in your brain, you're more likely to notice if you're doing something wrong (like littering - ANOTHER whole blog post! :) ). Start at babyhood and work on up from there so that every citizen is completely aware of the need to conserve water.
• Butt-kick a couple of government departments that are more concerned with paperwork and filling their pockets than actually doing something useful. I'd make a grand department butt-kicker, if anyone's hiring! Streamline top-to-bottom implementation of regulations, so they don't get lost half-way down the organizational structure.

There's also a few environmental things we can do:

• Get rid of invasive, water-sucking vegetation. For example, here in the Cape (South Africa), pine and gum trees are alien and use up more water than they're worth. As much as I hate to see full-grown and beautiful trees cut down, getting rid of them and re-planting with indigenous varieties will help restore the natural balance and retain soil moisture.
• Green the blank spots. Plant (indigenous of course!) in places that have been stripped of greenery. Leafy places prevent over-evaporation of the soil, roots help trap moisture, and of course the plants are busy cleaning our air for us at the same time. If indigenous is hard to come by, make it edible landscaping or forest-food plantings (agoroforestry) - providing a source of nutrients for human, animal and bird, as well as shelter etc etc etc...
• Green the cities - turn concrete wastelands into cool, green spots. From rooftop gardens, deserted plots, balconies and office areas to housing developments, you name it! Anywhere you can put a pot, you can plant something. Any bit of ground can grow a plant.
• Clean up the water-ways. Most have turned into stinking pools of toxic waste. Follow their path on Google Earth and see just how far out to sea the pollution flows... A recent tv programme here had government officials admitting they wouldn't touch most of our rivers with a ten-foot pole! Again, education regarding litter, recycling and common-sense logical water use would be an excellent starting point. Clean-up teams (using the unemployed, of course!) would help too. If we can just get through the red-tape of local government...

A few folk have had the idea of a system of pipes between areas of summer and winter rainfall. When it rains in one place, fill up a couple of dams (or disused mine shafts, or converted land), and pump it to where it's needed. Flooding? Great! - we can use that water elsewhere. Just send it up or down the line!

I'm pretty sure I haven't said all I wanted to say on this one. There's more - lots more. But it's a start - and implementing even a few of these ideas might start to reverse the drying up of our lands.

If you'd like to add something that won't fit in the comments, email it to me and I'll put it in here.

Not like this!

"Feed the Homeless to the Hungry" is NOT the kind of solution we're looking for... :)

(test post, just to get the blog going)