housing

Victorian houses in Toronto

It's all very nice to talk about green, energy efficient housing from the ground up, but what do you do if you live in an old Victorian house with solid brick walls? As Louise Bloom of the South East England Regional Assembly told the Guardian, 'Eco design is very sexy, but it's good to see what ordinary householders can do. The majority of our housing is old, so it's important to put across the message that a lot can be done to improve it.'

One Brighton area family spent eight months insulating floors and walls, adding solar hot water and radiant heating to cut C...

Empty Houses, Buffalo, New York Times

That is what the census says. Andrew Leonard in Salon notes that it is a bit misleading, that "4.7 million are for "seasonal use" only, the Census tells us -- unoccupied vacation homes, in other words. 4.1 million are for rent, 2.3 million are for sale, and the remaining 7.5 million "were vacant for a variety of other reasons."

The census also lists the total number of homeless in America as 759,101, so there are 24 empty houses for every homeless person in America. What a shocking misallocation of resources, materials and energy.