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Jacob Medure / Jacob's Blue

How to make high quality and cared for housing that's still affordable?

Jacob Medure / Jacob's Blue

The natural inclination, I'm sure, is to fix affordable housing problem by making cheaper homes. We can make cheaper homes by scaling designs, buying cheaper materials, doing more labor ourselves. But this approach has historically resulted in homogenized and uncared for homes.

Jacob Medure / Jacob's Blue

My ideal home aligns with some of the principles of Christopher Alexander. Homes should: - Respect the land - Respond to the environment - Provide simple joys - Be a living part of the environment - Embrace imperfection Is this possible to achieve at scale? Probably not.

Jacob Medure / Jacob's Blue

But then what is the right balance? If scale is our lever of reducing costs, what is the most amount of homes one could make while keeping integrity? 100? 50? 10? 1?

Laura 🦄
Replying to @jacobs_blue

I mean people might hate hearing this, but getting rid of single-family homes & focusing on building housing that is more communal? Having shared spaces?

Jacob Medure / Jacob's Blue
Replying to @alicetragedy

A good thought! As a parent, I’m curious if there’s an in between. Like if having better third spaces results in single family homes needing to provide fewer functions, thus creating a smaller floorplan/footprint?

Gregory Cotton
Replying to @jacobs_blue @alicetragedy

Single family homes are more intensive/expensive to maintain from an infrastructure perspective so even without better third spaces (which is still good) mixed use/dense neighbourhoods will have a smaller footprint.