Affordable Housing
By the end of the 21st century, cities will be in need of more than 2 billion housing units. Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, the fastest-growing city in Asia with a current population of just over 100,000, will need to produce 1,000 units of housing every year until 2030.
This glut of global building, which considered from an environmental standpoint is simply a massive form of resource consumption, has truly tragic implications for our terrestrial systems. The forests, peat- and wetlands, marine environments, and atmosphere that provide natural capital and ecosystem services—the fresh air, clean water, and stable and biodiverse ecosystems that are essential to the creation of healthy living environments, if not human survival—are the increasingly finite sources of the material and energy we extract and the ultimate repositories of the waste we generate over the full building life cycle.
Rather than simply asking how to create housing that is affordable, perhaps we should ask what we can and cannot afford as a society. Can we afford to provide insufficient housing for our neighbors and community? Can we afford to rely on conventional construction practices that have proven incapable of producing reliably affordable, livable, and durable housing?