Green Options

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Do you long to live in an attractive green home with the latest and greatest in green building technologies, but know you can’t afford to build one? Then you and I have something in common.

But do you know about all the amazing green condo developments cropping up across the country? There are gorgeous, cutting-edge eco-friendly condos available or being built now in cities all around the U.S. We can’t possibly cover them all in this post, but we’ve selected a good sample. I will cover green condos in the West next week. Read on to find what might become your dream green home!

In Chicago, eco18 is an interesting development currently underway. Located in Chicago’s South Loop area, it provides access to plenty of public transportation options and also green spaces. eco18 is striving to attain a Gold Certification under the LEED program of the US Green Building Council. This is a lofty goal and we hope they make it! Their plans include a massive green roof, solar water heating, geothermal heating and cooling, rainwater reuse, energy-efficient lighting and much more. You can get a 1 bedroom/1 bath unit for around $285,000 or a 2 bedroom/2 bath unit for about $430,000. Learn more about eco18 here.

When is a housing bargain not a bargain? When you add in the costs of getting from home to work, school, the stores and elsewhere.

Seems logical, right? But knowing how your transportation costs can affect your decision on where to live isn’t easy. Fortunately, along comes a new online tool that makes it considerably easier.

The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index lets you see which parts of the U.S. are truly affordable when you factor in both housing and transportation costs. The index lets you zoom in and explore 52 metropolitan areas across the country and, to be honest, it’s both fascinating and a little addictive.

Your urine could be the answer to a cheap, sustainable way of putting up shelter in poor areas of the world, without the need to cut any tree for timber or use precious water otherwise needed for drinking to make bricks.

You see, in many poor countries of the world, as it were in ancient Egypt, Sumeria, China, Japan and India, it is not uncommon to use animal waste and other by-products to build houses. Or plant materials like straw bales, bamboo, grass, reeds, sedges, and rattan, as well as plant fibers and leaves. Cow dung and goat skins are very valuable building materials, but human waste!

In ground-breaking findings by Sheffield University’s School of Architecture Professor, Jeremy Till, it has just been discovered that your urine is good for green building. Urea, the main ingredient of urine, has been known as an excellent binding agent, working even better than water. “They are sustainable in literal, temporal sense…some answers are found in unexpected places. Like the bladder. But are effective in their simplicity”.

Wow. Try convincing the zoning regulators to give the OK for more density let alone allow beer cans, car tires and water bottles be your tools of choice to produce thermal mass and energy-independent housing.

Not a chance you could pull it off unless you’re renegade architect Michael Reynolds, Garbarge Warrior.”

Communities full of “McMansions” seem to be everywhere these days, and they have plenty of buyers standing at the ready. Many of these oversized suburban homes are considered starter homes, making it easy to forget that the majority of middle income Americans will never be able to afford such a house in their lifetime.

This fall, the City of Portland sponsored the Portland Courtyard Housing Design Competition, which solicited ideas for urban infill housing that would appeal to families with children. In the face of rising housing costs, Portland has identified shared courtyards as offering similar lifestyle benefits to detached housing, while remaining affordable and increasing urban density.

The competition brief requested that entrants pay particular attention to the potentially conflicting roles of the courtyard space itself. Could a recreational space share turf with automobiles? Could the courtyard offer homeowners some privacy while still being connected to the larger streetscape? And could it fulfill all of these criteria while still functioning sustainably?

William McDonough and Partners is teaming up this year with a list of other local and international architecture, engineering, and design firms to form Greenbridge Developments LLC, a new company focused on implementing and designing sustainable mixed-use development. The group was actually founded in 2006 by six local families with strong connections in the area whom were all influenced by sustainable development. This years first project will be in the

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