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MIT's $1,000 House Challenge Yields Results
An anonymous reader writes "MIT's $1k House Project is an extraordinary challenge to provide safe and healthy homes for the world's burgeoning population. The Pinwheel House (PDF), a student project which helped serve as a catalyst for the challenge, has been completed in China by architect Ying chee Chui. Students have come up with a dozen or so designs to meet the challenge and improve living conditions for not just emerging economies but larger nations as well."
What's wrong with living in my mother's basement?
What is the point of a $1k house when land costs at least 100x that amount?
MIT epitomises the competitive, winner-takes-it-all, might-makes-right environment which is keeping half the world in poverty. Every dominant man starts forming his network at one of the elite universities, supporting research in collusion with exploitative business. When you've accepted that offer, you've already asked to be part of the system - to pretend to do something against it is ineffective hypocrisy.
This wouldn't fly in the US.
Some construction union would intervene claiming substandard construction or what-not, code violations etc, etc just to protect their jobs.
The pipe-fitters unions did the same thing when PVC piping came out--they lobbied for code changes that required copper tubing, changes that ruled out Joe-Homeowner doing the work himself. Most building codes make it very hard for the do-it-your-selfers, sometimes requiring them to actually get a contractors license. There is no reason for this if the work passes inspection--it exists simply to protect the jobs of people that need to get with the times, adapt and get on with their lives rather then holding back the rest of humanity.
Harris Rosen from here in Orlando (owner of a huge hotel chain) was trying to start a project to create $5,000 homes for victims of the Haitian earthquake. This story reminded me of that (mostly because I wanted to double check how much they thought they could build each house for).
Link.
The design in the PDF broke most of the build cheap rules. Things like if there's a kitchen and bathroom you put them back to back to share plumbing and drains saving on pipe. If there's no traditional kitchen or bathroom then why call them out in the plans as if they aren't included? There's options like Lorena Stoves that are basically built out of sand and clay so other than metal exhaust pipes and burner covers they require little money. Unless you are building what amounts to a shack basic plumbing and electrical will run more than a grand. The same with windows. A structure can be build with little cash other than for things like fasteners, as in nails and such, if there are materials like wood or bamboo on the property. You can do your basic dirt floor if you have linseed oil to stablize it but even that will run you a few hundred. You can build a basic house for $2,500 to $5,000 if the bulk of the materials are gathered rather than being bought but making one for a $1,000 that has plumbing and windows let alone basic wiring is impossible.
I understand that the project was formed with the developing world in mind, but I think that the concept is worth pursuing in the developed world as well.
The trouble is that all of the concepts that I read about sounded like ideas for a cabana on the beach. While that may work in spots where temps stay moderate year round, the rest of us could never make that work. Also, most of the ideas I read about sounded pretty light on engineering and heavier on design (architecture).
I'd like to see this project expanded into something resembling the next generation of manufactured/modular homes. We're in sore need of reasonably priced structures that are within the realm of an average person's abilities that retain style and form beyond an ugly box.
I agree that the developing world needs cheap ways to house their citizenry, but let's not forget to solve some of the problems that we still face here at home (in the US).
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
What is the point of a $1k house when land costs at least 100x that amount?
There's lots of land available in Texas (to pick the state I live in) where it's around $200-$300/acre, and an acre is enough to put a few houses on. Granted, most of this land isn't terribly desirable, but getting a 1/3rd acre plot that's not too far from a city and not too bad for $1000 ought to be doable.
Then there's the cost of getting services to your chosen site. It costs a bit to get electricity, water, and sewerage to a building site, or to provide a drilled well and septic system in a site that's too remote for municipal services. And then there's the cost of preparing the site for the structure. In much of the world the foundation would need to be much more robust (possibly with drainage, insulation, etc.) than the bare-bones arrangement presented.
This is not to denigrate the concept of an inexpensive functional structure, which is good, but to point out that the cost of making a habitable house involves more than the headline cost of the structure itself.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I know I've seen houses for sale in developing countries for $10k, including land. The houses are made of poured concrete walls and a concrete floor, which can be done in a day or two (they have subdevelopments much like we have here, but cheaper). Then they screw the roof on, which is some kind of composite. If you lock your keys out, you can unscrew the roof to get in.
Also, surely cinder-block housing is around the same price as this house, which if you read the article, cost a lot more than $1000.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Some of the houses in the UK barely have room for the bed.
... where to put the damned thing that won't result in demands to forfeit one's firstborn. For fuck's sake, if one is truly desperate one could live in a tent with a price tag far less than a thousand dollars, but who's gonna let you squat on THEIR land for free with your inexpensive tent? That's right: NO ONE. The people who own land in excess of their need for personal space own it for one reason only, and the reason ain't philanthropic nor egalitarian.
Land has always been and will always be the class divider.
They should put up more prize money than that!
So they want to use these when a natural disaster occurs, right? How well are these houses going to hold up when they get hit by a natural disaster?
Look it up.
This is a cute student project, but most would be considered "seasonal" shelter in even basic developed countries. I applaud the creativity, especially of the pinwheel house. Other houses sounded a bit more like a scavenger hunt that could have been done by any 5th year studio student in US architectural schools.
I would certainly hope that, given an entire year of studio work, there is more to the final product than the marketing brochure that came out of the pinwheel house. Part of the practice of architecture (which these students, we presume, would like to eventually be) is making buildings which are buildable. That means detailed drawings of each part which is not OTS hardware - but I see nothing. Does the robotics team get to draw a picture of a walking robot, or do they have to actually do piece drawings and wiring diagrams to actually build the robot?
To be fair, with skilled assembly, it is certainly better than most slum housing - but without skilled labor it may not be much better. None of the designs, save possibly the concrete roof, could be considered water tight for any length of time as initially reviewed, and few appear to have any chance of surviving a 50 year environmental event, much less protecting the occupants. I guess if they're cheap to build (just 6 years of the average 3rd world persons salary, by the website's count), you could see them as disposable and just build them again after each typhoon or earthquake.
From one of the linked sites:
"MIT 1K House is partnering with Skanska and Next Phase Studios to construct three exhibit 1K House prototypes in on MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. The project is moving forward, and the goal is to construct the prototypes by MIT Commencement on June 4, 2010. "
What I want to know it - if Skanska supposedly built 3 of these prototypes on the MIT campus in 2010, how much did it cost? I didn't see pictures, so I presume that the Skanska bid came in somewhere north of $3000 (or even the $6000 estimate for Philippines construction). IT doesn't appear that any of these houses has actually ever been built.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The writers created a competition, asking students, architects and businesses to compete to design the best prototype for a $300 house (their original sketch was of a one-room prefabricated shed, equipped with solar panels, water filters and a tablet computer). The winner will be announced this month. But one expert has been left out of the competition, even though her input would have saved much time and effort for those involved in conceiving the house: the person who is supposed to live in it [in Mumbai] We recently showed around a group of Dartmouth students involved in the project who are hoping to get a better grasp of their market. They had imagined a ready-made constituency of slum-dwellers eager to buy a cheap house that would necessarily be better than the shacks they’d built themselves. But the students found that the reality here is far more complex than their business plan suggested. To start with, space is scarce. There is almost no room for new construction or ready-made houses. Most residents are renters, paying $20 to $100 a month for small apartments. Those who own houses have far more equity in them than $300 — a typical home is worth at least $3,000. Many families have owned their houses for two or three generations, upgrading them as their incomes increase. With additions, these homes become what we call “tool houses,” acting as workshops, manufacturing units, warehouses and shops. They facilitate trade and production, and allow homeowners to improve their living standards over time. None of this would be possible with a $300 house, which would have to be as standardized as possible to keep costs low. No number of add-ons would be able to match the flexibility of need-based construction. In addition, construction is an important industry in neighborhoods like Dharavi. Much of the economy consists of hardware shops, carpenters, plumbers, concrete makers, masons, even real-estate agents. Importing pre-fabricated homes would put many people out of business, undercutting the very population the $300 house is intended to help. Worst of all, companies involved in producing the house may end up supporting the clearance and demolition of well-established neighborhoods to make room for it. The resulting resettlement colonies, which are multiplying at the edges of cities like Delhi and Bangalore, may at first glance look like ideal markets for the new houses, but the dislocation destroys businesses and communities.
A recent (PBS-affilliated POV) film, Good Fortune , expands further on the damage that can be done via good intentions when it comes to rehousing folks.
... it wasn't something they would have wanted. I helped vaccinate kids, which was something they wanted, and everyone won.
Many economists, journalists, physicians, and so forth have written extensively about the aid industry, and the White/Educated/Western/Elite-knows-best mentality. I certainly am no exception — I moved to Ghana with notions of making solar lights in my spare time, so that persons without grid-access could see at night, only to come to understand that this was a product that most people in the place I was living would have little interest in. It didn't matter that I'd spent months figuring out how to cram solar panels and LEDs into wire-bale jars, media blast them with garnet to diffuse the light better, and so on
For some more literature on this sort of thing, I'd recommend William Easterly's
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/
This is the trick to get around the obtuse American building laws. Make it a trailer. Still a lot more than $1000.00 if you go nuts, but you could build one for around that price if you were good with scavenging and built it yourself.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You're missing the point. What I meant was that when compared to say, my parents' generation, my generation clearly has to compete on a different level.
The world did get a lot smaller in the meantime, while the number of competitors surged to twice what the entire population of the world was back then.
That's what happens when former ideological enemies become competitors - particularly when the guiding philosophy of the winning side is that "it's a dog-eat-dog world".
Your parents probably had to "compete" with only the local population of your state, or even only the local population of your town.
You, me, the next generation... we now have a whole world to compete with.
And that is a losing battle for any individual.
Which is why the god invented teams. Or was that one of those Marxists? Groucho possibly?
Problem is, when your underlying philosophy is one of competition and individual-hero worship, your teams are only good for breeding leaders and team-commanders through in-team competition.
Which is great for everyone, cause as soon as you have someone above you to command you - you don't have to think for yourself anymore! No... wait...
Which is great for everyone cause it breeds an ideology of permanent leader-climbing, making all your team members (and everyone else you know) just another stepping stone on your road to your personal happiness... Hmm...
Which is great for everyone cause it's neater to remember just one man than the entire team of people and simpler to ascribe the accomplishments to hard work of many to "the genius" or "the leadership" of one... No... that's not it either...
I GOT IT!
Which is great for everyone cause it validates individual greed as the core driving force of the society making it a perfectly moral motivation!
Yes! That's got to be it!
Cause we all know that any commie-pinko motivation for the greater good of the team, community, society or the world and the human race leads to all of us speaking Russian and eating borscht.
In the snow. Lots and lots of snow. But no Christmas.
There is no Christmas (or presents) in the GULAGS!!!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
...an extraordinary challenge to provide safe and healthy homes for the world's burgeoning population...
We don't need more homes; we need a smaller population.
Treating this symptom will only make the disease worse. Give people a "safe & healthy home" and they are more likely to have more kids in it.
The smart kids at MIT should be working on global birth control education instead.
Which is a funny way of writing $1000.
Second, that is slightly over a $1.5k more than the Chinese per capita GDP of about $4,382.
Compared to the average US per capita GDP that is about as much as a $60k house.
Do I really need to comment that?
And all that is before even getting a building permit.
Which is often the greatest single expense when building a house in the third world and other "growing democracies" due to inefficiencies of the bureaucracy and the built-in culture of bribes and corruption.
Now... as this is apparently hailed as a "low-cost home for the poor", let's go see what the really poor make.
You know, countries where that imaginary $1000 is approximately around or over the per capita GDP.
Even at a $1000 per house an average Nigerian could not afford it - regardless of the picture all those CNN commercials for Nigerian banks are trying to paint.
At $5,925 he might as well start making plans for a house made out of gold.
I just like house the house can be infinitely expandable, building larger pinwheels around the outside until it becomes insanely difficult to reach the center.
See? This is why Lex Luthor is such a brilliant criminal mind.
He knows (as did his father) that the land is the only resource they are not making more of.
Well... other than time. They are making even less of that one. But time-travel is not really his thing.
You expand UPWARD - not outward.
Expanding out wastes space. That is why all those big population centers, I think they are called cities, have all those tall buildings.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
While some of these designs are brilliant (and I haven't read all of them), what I would want as a poor rural homeowner is expandability and repairability. Sure, you can a cheap/easy from-the-factory solution today but what happens in six months when you need to patch a hole in the wall? To be a truly transformative force, the ideas behind the design should be easy to apply with local materials/labor even if the final cost goes above $1000 eventually.
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
So let's say you go to haiti, and offer these to the government where they can spend money to help rebuild their houses..the problem is once all the houses are rebuilt, you are left with a sh*t load of these lying around....unless they were to evolve it further, and allow connections between multiple houses, making them bigger and one unit....that would then let some of the people just use these full time instead of rebuilding their houses, in a country that cant afford anything right now.
The problem is not $100 rents, or even $1000 rents; the problem is that some can afford such rents, and some cannot.
Interesting. From that angle the $1000 houses start to look like homeless shelters or subsidized housing. (If people can't afford housing, then *obviously* the solution is to lower the price they pay.) In this case, the goal is to actually drop the cost rather than make up the difference between what people can pay and what housing actually costs. That's fine and good, but it doesn't get to the root cause.
This doesn't take into account the plumbing, or the electrical wiring. Are they not considered esential?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
There is a program at MIT where the students develop low tech and appropriate technology for the developing world. I guess that teaching locals to make their own biochar that burns cleaner than wood or cow dung and will reduce air pollution inside people's homes so they don't die of lung cancer is an evil plot to support the establishment?
Same goes for water purification systems, grain mills I guess too?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/gonzo/4273674
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/smith-talk.html
There's the Hexayurt Project, which is basically an updated geodesic dome and can be built up to 450 square feet for each module using only hand tools and a screw gun and the Wikihouse which is a fablab style design which relies on a router.
A typical deployment for a family home would be three hexayurts made out of polyiso foam and then sprayed with ferrocement. Cost is probably around $1500 for that approach, but that's first-world costs. With hand-plaster rather than sprayed ferrocement, I think a developing world unit could well hit $1000.
And, of course, a simple plywood hexayurt for disaster relief is $100 per family, half the price of a disaster relief tent.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Thanks for your thoughts. I've also lived in a poor country (Ecuador) and concur with everything you said.
Ghana is not nearly as bad off as many other sub-Saharan African countries, and yet still there is much poverty. People living in the region (their equiv. of a state/county) where I used to reside are finding themselves pushed out of their houses as rents rise from $25-40/month to $100 or more per month due to an influx of oil contractors (now that Ghana has offshore oil pumping as of 2011). The problem is not $100 rents, or even $1000 rents; the problem is that some can afford such rents, and some cannot. In short, the problem is inequality. I am not so naïve as to expect the world will be perfectly fair, but surely we can strive for some basic assurances for all humans — adequate food, water, medical care, social productivity, and basic economic security.
Excellent post. But I would like to point out that if I can build the $1000 house in Ghana for $5000 and rent it out for $40 a month, I am getting a 9.6% annual return on my investment. That is a great return these days. I wouldn't claim to know how to solve the problems of inequality, but a stable home at what appears to be an affordable rental rate is surely a good start. Why not start a benevolent landlord NGO that matches capital looking for a good home with residents looking for a good home?
Given the high demand and inequality, dropping the cost won't drop the rent, nor solve the "homeless" problem.
With cheaper houses the landlords will just pocket the profit and continue to kick out the ones who can't pay the higher rents.
What you need is a safety-net for those who lose in the game of Capitalism and Monopoly. Unfortunately many countries cannot afford to pay for that safety-net.
Obviously two very different scenarios...
I'm going to pull out the big one again. But why didn't the poor of Ghana want to buy your lights?
OP here, replying AC. To be honest, I'm not totally sure (also my plan was to give them away; something I now see might also be a bad idea for tangible goods). I think the basic explanation I would give is that living in the dark isn't that big an annoyance to them. I am wary of generalizing here, so I want to be clear that I am speaking only for my own experiences, in a portion of (southwest) Ghana. This is like saying Californians wouldn't want X; it may or may not hold true for those in Arizona, and especially for those in, say, Texas. So there may be plenty of places in sub-Saharan Africa or other poor countries where solar lights make sense and are highly valued by the folks living there ... but in Ghana I didn't find that to be the case.
... had they really thought it was awesome, I think they would have told me so much earlier, and much more definitively. Again, maybe her perception of Chinese crap colored her beliefs about my lantern (which actually cost me like $85).
Basically people in the area I was living do have electricity in proximity to their home, if not in their own exact home. So at night, between the occasional streetlamp or other home with lights on, plus a lot of outdoor vendor stalls (which are basically flimsy wooden tables people sell stuff off of, and at night they have oil lamps on them), you can more or less see where you're walking well enough.
Again, oil lamps are bad, the fuel costs money. The disease burden from breathing cooking smoke and oil lamp smoke is a big deal. But it's a big deal to me [Western-educated guy with interest in global health], not necessarily to some people in Ghana. So my overall sense is that people are happy with their oil lamps, and if offered the chance to buy a solar lamp to replace it, most wouldn't. If given a solar lamp, they would probably take it, but if it was made out of a jar, I'd say there's half a chance a month later you'd find them using the jar for something else, and the lamp guts repurposed or given to a kid/neighbor/whatever.
Also, 99.9% of their electronics are cheap Chinese crap that put the cheap-Chinese-crap Americans get to shame, as far as flimsiness. I cannot convey how crappy the Chinese-made products there are. So when *I* think about a solar lamp, I think a rugged REI-type product; when a Ghanaian thinks about one, they probably picture a flimsy plastic thing that will break in a week or two.
I had a Coleman-brand LED lantern, and the family I spent most of my time living with did, at one point, remark that it was pretty cool. The kids were always enamored with it, as they would be with any gadget, but the mother did actually say the equivalent of "you should mail us one of those for Christmas." But it was said in passing, as a sort of 'hey this probably only costs $5 and I guess we might use it' comment (was my sense)
So in conclusion, I think it's a combination of crappy Chinese products coloring their view of all electronics, their own perception of who does and doesn't use these sort of products (fancy solar gadgets are for Obruni [white people]), and a lack of dissatisfaction with existing technologies and methods (however dissatisfied I may be on their behalf means little!).
When I look at a project like Bogolight (linked above), I think "cool!" But, honestly, I have no idea if the average Haitian even wants a Bogolight. I would think yes, but my experience in Ghana tells me not to trust my American-calibrated barometer, that you need to know how Ghanaians, or Haitians, or Angolans think, before you can understand if this is something they will want and ultimately benefit from, regardless of how it may look from a straight up s
What have you done for me lately?
Try wearing them when looking at the present, I find it helps calm the nerves..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
$5925 house is the only house from the MIT's $1K house project - THAT ACTUALLY GOT BUILT.
The goal of the MIT project is to produce designs that can be built for only $1000.
I have a goal too. Mine is to be fabulously rich, healthy and immortal while making little or no effort to achieve any of that.
Still haven't figured out all the kinks in the plan, but that is my goal.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You clearly didn't read the article, or at least didn't pay much attention to it. Let me repeat: the pinwheel house is not from the MIT project. It inspired them to start the project. Other than that, it has no connection to the MIT project of any sort. Their goal is to produce even less expensive houses: ones that can actually be built for $1000.
How are they doing on that goal? Well, if you had followed the link to their web page, you would already know. They have developed 13 designs so far. And the cost? Here's what they say:
Chang said that the project's biggest success so far is in China. "We can build a house for $1800. In the Philippines the cost is closer to $2000, but that's still pretty good. Our progress is similar to what's happened in the $100 Laptop project. The cost of the actual laptop is closer to $200, but even so, the cost is impressively low. If we build a house for $1800, it'll still be the most inexpensively designed house in China."
It sounds like they're making pretty good progress. How's your project to be rich, healthy, and immortal without effort coming along?
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."