Almost 200,000 forgotten homes across the UK are being left behind in the governments digital revolution, unable to get broadband speeds deemed the minimum to meet a modern familys needs.

The telecoms regulator Ofcom has said that 190,000 mostly rural homes and offices, about 0.6% of all properties, still cannot access decent broadband speeds of at least 10Mbps.

This is the minimum speed deemed necessary to cope with modern needs, from downloading a film on Sky to streaming music or TV services from Netflix to Disney+.

Ofcoms annual Connected Nations report estimates that there are 119,000 premises in England that cannot get access to decent broadband. The figure is 34,000 in Scotland, 18,000 in Wales and 19,000 in Northern Ireland.

Last year the Commons environment, food and rural affairs select committee said rural inhabitants risked becoming second class citizens in the digital revolution, as people in urban areas benefit from next-generation broadband and 5G mobile.

Ofcoms latest report estimates that across England, Scotland and Wales more than 39,000 homes cannot get access to either a decent broadband service or good 4G mobile phone coverage indoors.

Addressing the UKs status as a global laggard in rolling out next-generation full-fibre broadband, making it available across the country by 2025 was a key promise of Boris Johnsons election manifesto. Since then, the government has watered down its ambitions to 85% coverage, including homes that can access similar gigabit speed technology via 5G network signals and copper wires as well as full fibre.

In the governments spending review last month, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, said only 1.2bn of a 5bn fund to subsidise the rollout of gigabit broadband to the hardest to reach premises would now be made available over the next five years.

Ofcom revealed that 18% of UK homes, about 5m, now have the ability to get full fibre broadband, an 80% year-on-year increase. Nearly 8 m UK homes, 27% of the total, can now access gigabit speed broadband.

For millions of families this year, life during lockdown would have been even more difficult without reliable broadband to work, learn, play and see loved ones, said Lindsey Fussell, Ofcoms network and communications director. So its encouraging that future proof, gigabit broadband is now available in a quarter of homes.

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190,000 UK properties can't access broadband speeds to meet modern needs - The Guardian

Tiny homes are all the craze now, but theyre not simply a trend, it seems like they are here to stay. Sustainability and minimal and cleaner ways of living have never been more imperative. With the COVID-19 pandemic shaking the world up, everyone is now focused on making more conscious and smarter decisions. Could tiny homes be the space-saving and sustainable living solution that we all need? I do think so!

W2 Architectures revolutionary trailer design, Romotow, the name an amalgamation of room to move contains all the usual RV features but with an innovative 90-degree twist. With the press of a simple electric button, it swivels open, rotating at 90 degrees, to reveal an open synthetic teak deck, and 70% more living space.

Smaller Architects built this tiny home in Seoul, Korea. This four-story tall vertical tiny home is called Seroro which literally means vertically. The rooms have been stacked one on top of the other, with the first floor comprising of the living room and the common washroom. The ground floor functions as a parking lot, whereas the second floor houses the kitchen and the dining area, and the third floor includes the bedroom and a private washroom. Lastly, a dressing room with a bathtub is situated on the fourth floor. Quaint, compact, and spacious at the same time, dont you think?

Design Studio Andrs and Jos designed a mobile tiny house that aims to provide shelter to homeless people. Deemed as an urban domestic object by the designers themselves, Rodar could be a major source of relief to homeless people, providing them with a simple, minimal yet comfortable living space. Its structure and build are very similar to the ambulances found in many Latin American countries. The geometric, box-like compact home does look quite intriguing to me!

Room+ Design & Build renovated an old tiny house in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Featuring translucent glass blocks, the two-story home consists of a shop on the ground floor, and a minimal living space with two bedrooms on the upper floors. The glass facade allows natural light to continuously stream into the home, creating an open and relaxed space.

Fernando Mastrangelo designed a tiny house from salt, sand, and powdered glass in Times Square. Quite literally named Tiny House, the home is built from discarded and then recycled materials such as plastic and glass. The cave-like structure showcases an ombre effect on its outer facade, owing to the use of recycled plastic. Whereas glass was used to build the walls.

Dunkin Donuts and New Frontier Tiny Homes build a mobile tiny home that literally runs on discarded Dunkin Donuts coffee grounds! The transportable home is powered by a biofuel made up of 80 percent coffee oil extracted from 65,000 pounds of discarded coffee grounds. The home includes a cedar porch, a living room, multifunctional furniture, a fully functional kitchen, a comfy bunk bed, and beautiful wooden floors.

While Vancouver has quickly become one of the most expensive cities to live in, it is not densely populated and there are a lot of vacant spaces that can be put to better use Shifting Nests sustainable tiny homes is that use! This project wants to transform empty parking lots into a community with gardens and low-cost homes. The nests are a prefabricated housing solution consisting of plywood, metal cladding, and corrugated polycarbonate on a series of simple frames.

Cube Two is a 263-square-foot home that is designed for the future and smart living. This modern compact home is a prefabricated structure that already comes fitted with the latest home appliances that can all be controlled by an AI assistant named Canny. The exterior has smooth curved corners that give it a friendly vibe and the interior offers enough space for a family of four to live comfortably with two bedrooms and an open living area. To make it feel roomier, there is a skylight that runs across the ceiling and floods the space with natural light, and also provides a wonderful frame of the night sky.

One of my favorite things about tiny homes is the loft-style beds because they give you a little private cozy corner and that is exactly how the bedroom in Natura is set up. It has a multifunctional king-sized bed with plenty of storage under the frame. The bedroom also has a single large window that makes it more spacious and allows for a lot of natural light to flood your top floor. The space optimization goes beyond the bedroom, there are many built-in spaces for you to put the things you own like under the stairs as well as in the walls!

The Pacific Harbor is a tiny house built on a 30x8.5 triple axel Iron Eagle trailer compact, convenient, and classy. The interiors are kept light and breezy to manifest the feeling of spaciousness. The tiny home includes a downstairs flex area that can be turned into a bedroom or home office, a sleeping loft in the back, and stainless steel appliances in the kitchen.

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Tiny home setups that prove why micro-living will be the next big trend: Part 5 - Yanko Design

Elyria City Council voted Dec. 7 to rezone land for an expansion of a mobile home park.

During a Planning Commission meeting in October, Pikewood Manor representatives brought forward its tentative plans to expand and bring in new mobile homes.

The Pikewood Manor is located off of state Route 57 and has been in the city for several decades.

The property came under new ownership in 2018.

John Monroe, who represented the owners, said there will be about 160 houses and a convenient access to Griswold Road.

The company he represents, UMH, is a 50 years old and has never sold a park, Monroe said.

It owns 122 parks, mainly in the northeast United States, and have 23,000 developed home sites under its management.

A bulk of the expansion will take place behind Lowes, 646 Midway Blvd., Monroe said.

Individuals can lease the houses, he said.

However, the designs could change in the future as the company goes further into the planning and rezoning process, Monroe said.

The property owner does own the strip that goes up to Griswold," he said.

Monroe said he cautions people that these are preliminary plans because they are not final in terms of engineering or construction.

"Right now, the plan is to Griswold," he said. "We think a majority of the existing park will still go out the existing entrance.

"The expansion could go out onto Midway Boulevard and onto Griswold.

Monroe said it's common to lose pads due to stormwater, potential wetlands and other issues.

The process to expand is just continuing as Council approved the rezoning to a residential-mobile home park designation.

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Pikewood Manor in Elyria clears hurdle in proposed expansion - The Morning Journal

GoSun Inc. is a solar and renewable energy company based in Ohio, U.S., offering cooking, cooling, charging, and water purification devices working solely on solar power. This is their first tiny home and, as of last month, its available for pre-order (hat tip to New Atlas).

Solar power and tiny homes go hand in hand, especially since most people who buy these types of mobile homes do so first and foremost out of the desire to go off the grid or at least be able to in theory. The appeal of a tiny home is that, once you get past the prohibitive price, you get a home you can tow wherever you want, plop down wherever you want, and live all by yourself (with or without family/friends) for as long as you can.

The GoSun Dream aims to check all these boxes: its small enough so you can tow it, it has solar panels and batteries, separate water tanks, and its built with quality materials. It might not allow you to live fully off solar power and go completely off the grid, as GoSun claims in the video below, but you will get a certain degree of autonomy.

Meet the GoSun Dream, a solar powered, off-grid, tiny house, GoSun says. Designed to be affordable, versatile, mobile and solar powered to help you live a more independent, healthy and resilient life, anywhere. Perfect for RV resorts, off-grid, studio, rental (i.e. AirBnB, VRBO) or vacation property.Most tiny homes use height as a means to compensate for the lack of space, building a bedroom, and optionally some storage space on the second floor. The Dream doesnt do that, because GoSun wanted to keep the height down to avoid reducing the houses movability. Instead, it uses a floating bed to solve the issue of cramped space.

This makes the Dream able to sleep four adults, despite its compact size (22 feet/6.7 m in total length, with an interior floor space of 195 square feet/18 square meters). Two people can sleep on the extendable couch in the living room, which is deployed once the table is tucked out of sight, and two on the queen-size bed operated by a lift on rails up and down. This saves space and maximizes double functionality for the space available a must with all tiny or otherwise mobile homes.

On the side is a spacious kitchen with everything you need to make dinner for all four occupants: a sink, cooktop, two-burner stove, oven, fridge, and freezer. To get to the bathroom, you go through the kitchen: here, you get a small shower, the tiniest sink, and a toilet, which can be either flushing or of the composting type, depending on where you plan to be using it most.

Further amplifying the impression of more available space is the offer of a complete GoSun bundle: the Dream comes with a variety of GoSun products made for outdoor use, such as the GoSun solar kitchen and water filtration system. The automatically retractable electric awning serves to create shelter from the sun and mild rain, so you can take the kitchen outdoor with you and thus not stink up the place with all manners of cooking odors.

The Dream is move-in ready, with GoSun saying they will be offering more details and exact specs as the production date nears. A certain level of customization will also be available, at a cost, of course. Right now, GoSun is taking pre-orders on the Dream with $500 refundable reservations, with a delivery date set tentatively for 2021. Pricing will range between $69,500 and $99,500, depending on the final configuration you opt for.

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The GoSun Dream Tiny Home Solves the Problem of Cramped Space, Will Go Off-Grid - autoevolution

Every ideology produces its own brand of fanatics, but theres something special about libertarianism.

I dont mean that as an insult, either. I love libertarians! For the most part, theyre fun and interesting people. But they also tend to be cocksure about core principles in a way most people arent. If youve ever encountered a freshly minted Ayn Rand enthusiast, you know what I mean.

And yet one of the things that makes political philosophy so amusing is that its mostly abstract. You cant really prove anything its just a never-ending argument about values. Every now and again, though, reality intervenes in a way that illustrates the absurdity of particular ideas.

Something like this happened in the mid-2000s in a small New Hampshire town called Grafton. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of a new book titled A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, says its the boldest social experiment in modern American history. I dont know if its the boldest, but its definitely one of the strangest.

The experiment was called the Free Town Project (it later became the Free State Project), and the goal was simple: take over Graftons local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community. Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did! (I promise Ill explain below.)

I reached out to Hongoltz-Hetling to talk about his book. I wanted to know what happened in New Hampshire, why the experiment failed, and what the whole saga can teach us not just about libertarianism but about the dangers of loving theory more than reality.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

How would you describe the Free Town Project to someone who doesnt know anything about it?

Id put it like this: Theres a national community of libertarians that has developed over the last 40 or 50 years, and theyve never really had a place to call their own. Theyve never been in charge of a nation, or a state, or even a city. And theyve always really wanted to create a community that would showcase what would happen if they implemented their principles on a broad scale.

So in 2004, a group of them decided that they wanted to take some action on this deficiency, and they decided to launch what they called the Free Town Project. They sent out a call to a bunch of loosely affiliated national libertarians and told everyone to move to this one spot and found this utopian community that would then serve as a shining jewel for the world to see that libertarian philosophies worked not only in theory but in practice. And they chose a town in rural New Hampshire called Grafton that already had fewer than 1,000 people in it. And they just showed up and started working to take over the town government and get rid of every rule and regulation and tax expense that they could.

Of all the towns in all the world, why Grafton?

They didnt choose it in a vacuum. They actually conducted a very careful and thorough search. They zeroed in on the state of New Hampshire fairly quickly because thats the Live Free or Die state. They knew that it would align well with their philosophy of individualism and personal responsibility. But once they decided on New Hampshire, they actually visited dozens of small towns, looking for that perfect mix of factors that would enable them to take over.

What they needed was a town that was small enough that they could come up and elbow the existing citizenry, someplace where land was cheap, where they could come in and buy up a bunch of land and kind of host their incoming colonists. And they wanted a place that had no zoning, because they wanted to be able to live in nontraditional housing situations and not have to go through the rigamarole of building or buying expensive homes or preexisting homes.

Wait, what do you mean by nontraditional housing?

As the people of Grafton soon found out, a nontraditional housing situation meant a camp in the woods or a bunch of shipping containers or whatever. They brought in yurts and mobile homes and formed little clusters of cabins and tents. There was one location called Tent City, where a bunch of people just lived in tents from day to day. They all united under this broad umbrella principle of personal freedom, but as youd expect, there was a lot of variation in how they exercised it.

What did the demographics of the group look like? Are we talking mostly about white guys or Ayn Rand bros who found each other on the internet?

Well, were talking about hundreds of people, though the numbers arent all that clear. They definitely skewed male. They definitely skewed white. Some of them had a lot of money, which gave them the freedom to be able to pick up roots and move to a small town in New Hampshire. A lot of them had very little money and nothing keeping them in their places. So they were able to pick up and come in. But most of them just didnt have those family situations or those 9-to-5 jobs, and that was really what characterized them more than anything else.

And how did they take over the local government? Did they meet much resistance?

When they first showed up, they hadnt told anyone that they were doing this, with the exception of a couple of sympathetic libertarians within the community. And so all of a sudden the people in Grafton woke up to the fact that their town was in the process of being invaded by a bunch of idealistic libertarians. And they were pissed. They had a big town meeting. It was a very shouty, very angry town meeting, during which they told the Free Towners who dared to come that they didnt want them there and they didnt appreciate being treated as if their community was an experimental playpen for libertarians to come in and try to prove something.

But the libertarians, even though they never outnumbered the existing Grafton residents, what they found was that they could come in, and they could find like-minded people, traditional conservatives or just very liberty-oriented individuals, who agreed with them on enough issues that, despite that angry opposition, they were able to start to work their will on the levers of government.

They couldnt pass some of the initiatives they wanted. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. All of these things were cut to the bone.

Then what happened over the next few years or so?

By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a towns success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The towns legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.

So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldnt put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didnt have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.

Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.

When did the bears show up?

It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then youre essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.

One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didnt want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.

As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.

It was an absolute mess.

Were talking about black bears specifically. For the non-bear experts out there, black bears are not known to be aggressive toward humans. But the bears in Grafton were ... different.

Bears are very smart problem-solving animals. They can really think their way through problems. And that was what made them aggressive in Grafton. In this case, a reasonable bear would understand that there was food to be had, that it was going to be rewarded for being bolder. So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up.

There are lots of great examples in the book of bears acting in bold, unusually aggressive manners, but it culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in the town of Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but, in fact, New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. So the whole state had never seen a single bear attack, and now here in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear.

And then, a few years after that, a second woman was attacked, not in Grafton but in a neighboring town. And since the book was written and published, theres actually been a third bear attack, also in the same little cluster and the same little region of New Hampshire. And I think its very clear that, unless something changes, more bear attacks will come.

Luckily, no ones been killed, but people have been pretty badly injured.

Youre fair, even sympathetic, to the libertarians you profile in this book, but I do wonder if you came to see them increasingly as fanatics.

You know, libertarian is such a weird umbrella term for a very diverse group of people. Some libertarians are built around the idea of white supremacy and racism. That was not the case with these libertarians. Most of the libertarians that I met were kind, decent people who would be generous with a neighbor in any given moment. But in the abstract, when theyre at a town meeting, they will vote to hurt that neighbor by cutting off, say, support for road plowing.

So I guess what I noticed is a strange disconnect between their personalities or their day-to-day interactions and the broader implications of their philosophies and their political movement. Not sure Id use the word fanatic, but definitely a weird disconnect.

Theres a lesson in this for anyone interested in seeing it, which is that if you try to make the world fit neatly into an ideological box, youll have to distort or ignore reality to do it usually with terrible consequences.

Yeah, I think thats true for libertarianism and really all philosophies of life. Its very easy to fall into this trap of believing that if only everybody followed this or that principle, then society would become this perfect system.

Did any of the characters in this story come to doubt their libertarianism as a result of what happened in Grafton? Or was it mostly a belief that libertarianism cant fail, it can only be failed?

One of the central characters in the book is a firefighter named John Babiarz. And John had the distinction of running for the governor of New Hampshire on the libertarian platform, and did better than any other gubernatorial libertarian candidate has ever done in America. And he invited the libertarians to come in and begin the Free Town Project. He was their local connection.

But by the end of the project [sometime in 2016], he had really drawn some distinctions between himself and many of the extremist libertarians who came to town. He still considers himself to be a libertarian, and a very devout one at that, but by the end of the project he was at odds with most of the other libertarians. And it shows that until you actually have a libertarian-run community, its very hard to say what it is or what it will look like.

In the end, do you think these people bumped up against the limits of libertarianism, or is this more about the particular follies of a particular group of people in a particular place?

I think they bumped up against the follies of libertarianism. I really do think that there is a hard wall of reality that exists thats going to foil any effort to implement libertarianism on a broad scale. And I think if you gave a libertarian the magic wand and allowed them to transform society the way that they wanted to, it wouldnt work the way they imagined, and I think it would break down just as Grafton did.

Maybe thats the lesson.

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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: Author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling on the Free State Project - Vox.com

Jessie A. Nelson, 45, of 405 Juniper St.; and Heather Michelle Dickens, 34, of Marley Drive; were charged Tuesday morning by sheriffs deputies with methamphetamine possession and possession of drug paraphernalia. Deputies went about 9:15 a.m. Tuesday to the 1900 block of Brittontown Road in Afton to assist a stranded driver. Nelson said the vehicle ran out of gas the night before. A records check showed Nelson and passenger Dickens both had active arrest warrants issued in Greene County, Deputy Andrew Long said in a report An inventory before the vehicle was towed turned up a clear plastic bag containing suspected methamphetamine in the middle console accessible by both parties, the report said. Another plastic bag containing suspected meth was found on the passenger side floorboard. A plastic bag in Dickens purse contained syringes and a glass pipe. Nelson had a cut straw in his pocket. Nelson and Dickens were held without bond pending a first scheduled appearance Wednesday in court.

Michael T. Stanliand, 57, of 870 Sinking Springs Road, was charged Tuesday afternoon by sheriffs deputies with domestic assault. Deputies responded to a disturbance call at the Midway address and spoke with Staniland, who said he and a relative had gotten into a dispute. Stanliand had physical contact in a manner that caused the alleged victim to fear for his safety, Deputy Joe Harness said in a report. Staniland was held without bond pending a first scheduled appearance Wednesday in court.

Two necklaces and a pistol were stolen between Monday and Wednesday from a house in the 100 block of Keller Road in Afton, sheriffs Deputy Eric Cutshall said in a report. The victim told deputies that two suspects named in the report was staying with his family when the jewelry and gun went missing. A car described in the report was seen leaving the driveway Monday morning and a bedroom window was open. The silver and gold necklaces have a combined value of $280. The .22 caliber pistol is valued at $166.

A catalytic converter was stolen from a van between Saturday and Tuesday from the parking lot of Ragon Wholesale Warehouse, 4765 E. Andrew Johnson Highway, sheriffs Deputy Joe Harness said in a report. The victim told deputies that when he started the van Tuesday morning, the exhaust sound was excessively loud. An inspection of the exhaust system showed the catalytic converter was missing. A camera security system had notified the victim there was motion detected about 1:30 a.m. Monday on the property and after looking at video footage saw a man and woman acting in a suspicious manner, the report said. The catalytic converter was apparently cut from the exhaust system with a power tool. It is valued at at $350.

Water lines at a Springbrook Park property were vandalized, Greeneville police were told Tuesday by a contractor doing work on the property. Workers cleaning the property at the address bulldozed four mobile homes but left the water lines intact, the crew supervisor said. He told police an unknown suspect is coming onto the property after they leave and is busting the water lines, Officer Derek Casteel said in a report. Broken water lines have flooded the property and workers cant get any equipment on it to continue cleanup work, the report said. Repairs and equipment rentals had cost $2,500 as of Wednesday.

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It Happened Here | It Happened Here | greenevillesun.com - Greeneville Sun

By Stefanie Jackson An Alabama professor of architecture introduced a different way of thinking about what makes housing affordable when he spoke at the Eastern Shore Regional Housing Coalitions second annual housing summit held online Sept. 25.

Rusty Smith, of Auburn University in east Alabama, is a director of the Rural Studio program for college students studying architecture, who design and build practical but attractive, affordable homes and community buildings.

Students leave campus for at least one semester and up to two years to live and work in rural, west Alabama, building everything from single-family homes to a church and a fire station.

Their work is done in the U.S. southern Black Belt that is troubled by persistent poverty, a federal designation meaning 20% or more of the population has lived in poverty for 30 years or more.

The Rural Studio program was founded on three ideas: learning by doing, working together to solve problems, and access to safe, decent housing as an inalienable human right whether or not one can afford it, Smith said.

The students donate their time and efforts to people who in no circumstances, would ever be able to provide housing for themselves, Smith said.

The program is funded by donations from individuals and private foundations, as well as regional, state, and federal grants and research contracts.

Funding partners include the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Energy, financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Wells Fargo, and faith-based organizations like Habitat for Humanity.

Living in poverty looks different than it did nearly 30 years ago when Rural Studio was founded. Tar-paper shacks have been replaced by decades-old mobile homes.

The students, who range in age from 19 to 22, work to design and build better, safer, more durable homes for their clients, who are housing providers and homeowners.

All the work is real real clients with real budgets, real sites with real context and hopefully with real impacts, Smith said.

In Rural Studios nearly 30-year history, students have designed and built more than 200 projects in a five-county area.

In that time, Rural Studio has learned the four basic elements of a good housing project. The home must be buildable, weatherproof, durable, and secure, Smith said.

If the house is not designed with these four characteristics in mind, you may be doing good things, but youre probably not addressing housing affordability, Smith said.

Those elements are the foundation of a good home, but the house also should be well-crafted from locally available materials, accommodate the occupants needs, promote health and wellness, have a presence, and foster the surrounding community.

Rural Studios Front Porch Initiative seeks to widen the impact of the programs applied research and help more housing providers deliver high-performance, dignified homes in their own service area.

Rural Studio offers four basic home designs, each around 500 square feet, which are extraordinarily efficient.

It seeks to provide technical assistance on topics including building codes, zoning, universal design standards, lending and insurability requirements, industry-standard construction, energy performance, and indoor air quality.

Rural Studio also emphasizes the total cost of owning a home. Factors to consider when designing and building a house that is truly affordable housing include efficiency, resiliency, wellness, and community.

Our homeowners dont lose their houses because they cant afford their mortgage, Smith said.

Its an unexpected expense that usually causes a rural, low-income Alabama homeowner to have a personal financial crisis and lose a home.

Typical unexpected expenses include high energy bills (monthly energy bills in the area can vary widely from $50 to $350), home repairs needed due to hurricane or tropical storm damage, major healthcare issues, or disruptions in a familys community network (if, for example, people are working part time and sharing resources like shelter, food, transportation, childcare, or elder care.)

Acknowledging these issues gives Rural Studio a different perspective on what affordable housing means.

For example, a Habitat for Humanity house built to conventional standards might have a mortgage payment of $250, a $150 energy bill, and a $60 insurance payment, for a monthly homeownership cost of $460, Smith said.

By building the same house to high-performance standards, the mortgage payment was increased to $343, making the house unaffordable to the buyer.

But those high-performance standards resulted in a more efficient, durable home that brought the energy bill down to $35 and reduced the insurance bill to $48, for a total monthly cost of $426, a savings of $34 a month.

Smith left his listeners to consider this question: Which home is more affordable? The home that costs less to build, or the home that costs more to build?

Read more from the original source:
Eastern Shore Gets New Perspective on Affordable Housing - easternshorepost.com

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The Sandusky County Sheriff's Office and Ohio State Fire Marshal's Office are investigating Wednesday's fire at Keegan Enterprises on Ohio 101. Firefighters from 17 departments were called in to contain the blaze.(Photo: Daniel Carson/The News-Messenger)

TOWNSEND TOWNSHIP - Russ Zimmerman has been involved with firefighting for 52 years.

The Lindsey Volunteer Fire Department chief said he's never seen anything like Wednesday's fire at Keegan Enterprises on Ohio 101, with billowing black smoke that could seen for miles across Sandusky and Erie counties.

"That looked like an oil refinery fire in Texas," Zimmerman said.

Firefighters from 17 local departments, including Lindsey's,were called to put out Wednesday's fire at Keegan Enterprises on Ohio 101.

Now, the state fire marshal's office has joined the investigation, Sheriff Chris Hilton said.

"We're kind of looking into it jointly," Hilton said Thursday.

Hilton saidthe fire broke out at Keegan Enterprises, in the 7400 block of Ohio 101, around 4 p.m.

Firefighters from 17 local departments battled a pallet fire at Keegan Enterprises Wednesday. Police closed off Ohio 101 for several hours as firefighters attempted to contain the blaze.(Photo: Daniel Carson/The News-Messenger)

He said two people left the business around 3:30 p.m. and then the fire started 25 to 30 minutes later.

Neighbors said the blaze started toward the back of the business' property and quickly accelerated.

Hilton said wood and plastic pellets, as well as cardboard, went up in flames as black smoke filled the air.

Zimmerman said the property's plastic materials generated the ominous black smoke from the fire.

He said it was about 8 p.m. before the fire was what he considered "manageable."

"It took three or four hours before the guys could take a breath," Zimmerman said.

Zimmerman said there was some damage to a field just east of the Keegan property, but the fire did not spread to any of the adjacent mobile homes.

Pallets and cardboard at Keegan Enterprises on Ohio 101 caught on fire Wednesday, causing extensive damage to the property and sending black smoke into the air.(Photo: Daniel Carson/The News-Messenger)

The Ohio Highway Patrol closed off Ohio 101 near the Keegan property for several hours to allow fire trucks to access the site and drop off water for fire crews battling the blaze.

By around 10 p.m. Wednesday, the fire was contained with no threat of spreading to neighboring properties, Hilton said.

He said the fire wasn't completely put out until Thursday morning.

Motorists driving west on Ohio 101 in Erie County and past the Keegan property Thursday around 9 a.m. could still see black smoke in the sky left over from the fire.

Hilton said there were was one minor injury to a firefighter who strained his back.

The sheriff said he did not have an estimate on how much property damage there was at the Keegan Enterprises site.

He praised the collaboration between departments in containing the fire.

"It was awesome to see them work together and get it done," Hilton said.

Firefighters from 17 departments helped to battle a towering fire at Keegan Enterprises Wednesday near the intersection of Ohio 101 and Ohio 412. The fire was finally put out Thursday morning, according to Sandusky County Sheriff Chris Hilton.(Photo: Daniel Carson/The News-Messenger)

dacarson@gannett.com

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State fire marshal's office joins investigation into Ohio 101 fire - The News-Messenger

TALENT, Ore. Late morning on Sept. 8, forest scientist Dominick DellaSala sat at the desk in his home office to do a final edit on a newspaper opinion piece. The topic: The need to better prepare for catastrophic wildfires or "black swan events" that can rampage through neighborhoods.

His computer screen went dark. The power had gone out.

He went outside to investigate the outage. Looking south, he spotted a dense cloud of smoke.

"This was totally black. It was huge. And it was heading in our direction," DellaSala recalls.

DellaSala spent the next few hours up on his roof, cleaning out gutters and hosing down the asphalt shingles before evacuating. His home was spared as the fire veered away from his street, but more than 2,800 structures and three people were killed in one of the most destructive wildfires in Northwest history.

This one had nothing to do the management of thickly forested Northwest mountain slopes. It started in a patch of grass by a dog park in the north end of Ashland on a hot day with fierce, dry winds. The fire raced through a county greenway park, chewed through roadside brush and jumped into the heart of two communities Talent and Phoenix, with a combined population of more than 10,000. Then houses, trailers and commercial buildings became the fuel that fed its relentless advance.

In the immediate aftermath of the historic early September fires, people here and in other ravaged Pacific Northwest towns such as Malden, in Eastern Washington, are primarily focused on the need to find short-term shelter for those suddenly without homes. But already, amid a warming climate when wildfire is forecast to be a greater force, an urgent question arises: How to rebuild in a way that is more resistant to the flames.

"Thinning trees in the backcountry, that won't make the difference. We need to spend the money to fire-harden our communities," says DellaSala, who is chief scientist for Wild Heritage, a forest conservation project of the Earth Island Institute, an environmental nonprofit.

In Talent and Phoenix, the post-fire challenges include building a new generation of affordable and safer housing for those who lived in trailer parks decimated by the fire.

Many of these residents are lower-wage workers who pick fruit in nearby orchards, tend to vineyards and labor in service and other industries. Long before the fire, they struggled to find shelter in a southwest Oregon region that faced a severe housing crisis as prosperous retirees and other newer arrivals pushed up real estate prices.

Manufactured and mobile homes are often aging and sometimes rundown but have offered affordable alternatives to renting or owning a place in nearby Ashland, site of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a big tourist destination.

With entire mobile home parks leveled by fire, developers could try to move in and build upscale residences on that land. But there is plenty of support for helping lower-income residents find a way to return.

In Talent, city officials say they are considering a new ordinance to ensure that the mobile home and trailer parks are not replaced by high-priced housing. "Those are the most vulnerable communities, and we need to make sure that development doesn't displace them," said Zac Moody, Talent's community development director.

In a region of Oregon with plenty of out-of-the-box thinkers, some are working to develop a broader vision for rebuilding communities. A Southwest Oregon coalition group, My Valley, My Home, proposes to work with government agencies, foundations, builders and others to design more sustainable housing. The group also wants to find a way for more people to take an ownership stake in their homes and also provide more dwellings for the southwest Oregon's homeless.

"Just like COVID, this is shining a bright spotlight on existing inequities. So, this is a moment where we could potentially do something different," said Charlie Bauer, a Southern Oregon Education Service District employee who works with migrant children and has participated in some of the group's meetings.

Most of Talent and Phoenix did not burn. But the fire struck hard in downtown corridors of both towns. Those returning to see what's left of their homes found painfully few remains in neighborhoods that looked like they were bombed into oblivion.

Renee Durgin said she spent 32 years scrubbing floors in a nursing home to pay for her 1979 two-bedroom trailer that she found on her first return Sept. 18 to be reduced to ashes and twisted metal roofing.

"I lost everything," Durgin said as she searched for a pair of treasured earrings among the wreckage.

Julio Flores, a mobile automotive mechanic, said even his tools and stockpile of vehicle parts were wrecked by the fire, along with the cash savings he kept in his fire-destroyed trailer home in Phoenix.

"I have no insurance. And there is nothing left," said Flores, who has been able to resume some work with the aid of donated tools.

In such firestorms, many buildings are doomed by embers, which may be lofted for hundreds of yards then fall like snowflakes. These burning bits of debris find ways to penetrate interiors, which are typically filled with furniture, rugs, paneling and other volatile materials.

"Embers will exploit any vulnerability in a home and once they get inside and ignite, it is very unlikely to survive," said Kelly Pohl, a researcher at Headwater Economics, who co-authored a 2018 paper on fire-resistant homes.

California fire codes put into place in 2008 are designed to protect buildings from such assault. And a McClatchy News analysis of homes lost to the 2018 fire in Paradise, California, indicates such codes can make a big difference.

The analysis found that 51% of the 350 single-family homes built after 2008 in the path of the Camp fire were undamaged, according to Cal Fire data and Butte County property records. Only 18% of the 12,100 built before 2008 survived.

Other communities in the Northwest also are developing tougher codes to construct more fire-resistant homes.

In Southwest Oregon, Medford has adapted new standards, Ashland this fall is expected to update construction standards, and a push to enact similar measures is expected in Talent, Phoenix and other communities.

In Washington, east-of-the-Cascades Kittitas County has fire-resistant codes in place for new construction. Legislation passed in 2018 has set the stage for changes in building standards in other parts of the state. The law called on the Department of Natural Resources to map areas where homes and other development are built near or within lands at greater risk of wildfire. In those zones, which cover more than a third of the state's residences, local governments must now adapt building standards that require more fire-resistant roofs, siding and decks, and driveways able to accommodate emergency vehicles.

"We just completed the map this past month and have published it," said Ashley Blazina, who serves as community wildfire preparedness coordinator for the Department of Natural Resources.

The Almeda fire offers stark evidence of how flames can completely consume entire blocks of urban homes. But a walk through the Talent burn zone also offers clues on what can be done to protect buildings from fire.

A recently erected church, for example, emerged largely unscathed. Built on a concrete slab, it had a metal roof to fend off the embers, fiber-cement siding that can resist flames, and metal doors. There were double-paned, tempered windows less likely to shatter in the heat, and narrow recessed vents outfitted with fine mesh screens to keep out ash.

The church's architect, Ray Kistler, said it was one of three buildings designed in similar fashion that ended up in the path of the fire and did not burn. Kistler said they were built more with the goal of long-term durability than fire survival. Yet he was pleased with how they fared. One mistake, he said, was using bark chips in the landscaping, which smoldered the day after the fire as he drove by the church for an inspection.

"Flames were starting to lick up the walls, and I just happened to be there," Kistler said. "So, I drug my boots along the ground and put the fire out."

Trees also told a fire story.

When planted close to houses, they are typically viewed as a fire hazard. And some volatile pines and other trees did indeed get torched in the Almeda blaze. But some that were green and leafy survived. A few appeared to take the brunt of fiery embers, and thus helped shield nearby structures.

A child's treehouse, nestled inside a lush maple, was intact even as the homes around it were leveled. And an old wood-sided house shielded from oncoming flames by a scraggly border of deciduous trees made it through the fire.

"This house had every opportunity to burn, and it did not burn. I saw the fire go up these trees, and just disappear," said Scott Balcom, a builder who stayed in the burn zone for much of Sept. 8 in a losing effort to save his own home a short distance to the south.

The Almeda fire was caused by humans, but who started it and whether they did so intentionally or inadvertently remains under investigation, according to Ashland Police Chief Tighe O'Meara. The destruction was boosted by a second fire started later that day in Phoenix, and a suspect in that fire, 41-year-old Michael Jarrod Bakkela, has been charged with two counts of arson, 15 counts of criminal mischief and 14 counts of reckless endangerment.

The main fire's route passed through portions of a 20-mile-long greenway and bike path that follows the tree-lined course of Bear Creek.

This year, the fire risk in the greenway had both county fire and law enforcement officials on edge. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with space in short supply at homeless shelters, some 150 people were asked to remain sheltering in place in the greenway, where handwashing stations and bathrooms were set up. Earlier this year, dozens of small fires had to be put out. Officials feared a bigger blaze, and four fire breaks were scraped down to bare earth this summer in hopes of helping to stop the advance of flames.

"The greenway has just been a nightmare," Jackson County Sheriff Nate Sickler said.

But it does not appear likely that the initial Almeda blaze, which started sometime before 11 a.m., originated from a campfire.

The ignition point was well outside the greenway, in an open area by the dog park that was not a typical camping spot for people experiencing homelessness. And Kernan Turner, a retired Associated Press reporter who lives nearby, said he saw no slow burn from a campfire. The fire came up suddenly, with big flames that torched a border of blackberry bushes by his house, then swept across a grass field to reach the greenway fuel.

"It just roared. The flames were 20 feet high," Turner said.

The fire, fed by more berry brambles in the greenway, rapidly moved north, overtaking a person who has yet to be identified and is likely to have been homeless. "They had nowhere to go," said Chris Chambers, chief of Ashland Fire and Rescue Wildfire Division.

As fire reached Talent, Balcom, the builder who lost his home, could hear a series of explosions as propane tanks next to many homes emptied and the fuel ignited. He could also make out the short, staccato sounds of ammunition stored in people's homes as it went off.

The winds brought embers to a single-story home across the street, and upwind, from Balcom's house.

Fire engine crews arrived to try to save the building. Then they shuttled off to deal with other emergencies on that frantic afternoon. Another structure an apartment complex caught fire. Balcom tried to use his own hose to save that building, but the stream from his would not reach a corner of the roof that began to burn.

"My heart sank when I saw that. The wind was blowing really hard my way, and I figured the chance of my house being saved was really remote," he said.

In the aftermath of the fire, DellaSala feels fortunate to live in a neighborhood untouched by the flames.

With his electrical power restored, he is now back at his desk and writing more emails.

Politicians in Congress and state legislatures are once again calling for more efforts to thin and conduct controlled burns for "fuel reduction" in forests.

This fire season has demonstrated, yet again, that many fires in the West burn largely in shrub and grasslands, which can easily and rapidly carry flames into housing developments. And, DellaSala is urging post-fire legislation be narrowly targeted. He wants more public funds spent and tax credits offered to build communities better able to survive such fire.

When he takes a break for walks, DellaSala heads four blocks east to the fire zone. He wrestles with his emotions a mix of grief and anger as he gazes again upon the bleak tableau of loss in the heart of his town.

"We've been warning about this for years," he said. "It's in my face every day."

(c)2020 The Seattle Times

Visit The Seattle Times at http://www.seattletimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Urban wildfire: When homes are the fuel for a runaway blaze, how do you rebuild a safer community? - The Bakersfield Californian

By Pepper Trail

Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2020 | 2 a.m.

In early September, the Almeda Fire ignited at the edge of my hometown of Ashland, Ore., and roared through the nearby towns of Talent and Phoenix, pushed by hot south winds.

More than 2,800 houses, mobile homes and apartment units were destroyed, representing much of the low-income housing in our increasingly expensive valley. Three people were killed. The story was repeated throughout Oregon this fire season, and at its peak, almost a million acres burned across the state. Some 500,000 people were forced to flee or were under evacuation warnings.

These fires became so widespread because strong, dry winds sent flames racing to devour fuel wherever it could be found. And fuel could be found everywhere this year: in mountain forests parched from a winter of drought and a summer of record-breaking heat, in eastern Oregons sagebrush country, and in mobile home parks and residential neighborhoods. Under these conditions, any fire seemed ready to explode into a major disaster.

As a member of the southern Oregon community, I felt stunned and heartbroken by the devastation these fires left behind. But, as a conservation biologist, I was not surprised. For many years, scientific modeling predicted a future of reduced snowpack, hotter summers and drastically increased fire danger in Oregon. The present we are now enduring is the climate-change future that we have been warned about for decades.

Tragically, a different kind of conflagration also smoldered in Oregon, one fanned by hatred and division.

Two weeks before the fires, my valley experienced an ugly racial confrontation. Like most of Oregon, the Rogue Valley is overwhelmingly white. Still, we have Black Lives Matter support groups, and one of them, the Southern Oregon Coalition for Racial Equity, planned a community forum in the tiny town of Rogue River. The purpose of the event was to invite local residents of color to share their experiences and educate the community on systemic racism. It was to be followed by a family-friendly barbecue, to which everyone was invited.

Unfortunately, in the toxic atmosphere of social and racial division that is daily fanned by President Donald Trump and right-wing media, this community event was seen as a threat by local patriot groups, which descended on the town heavily armed. For hours, these angry people screamed curses and threats at the small group of coalition supporters, while some tried to provoke physical confrontations. Coalition supporters, fortunately, had the discipline to remain calm while resisting.

Then, in the aftermath of the Rogue Valley fires, this social pathology flared again. Rumors began to fly on social media that the fires were deliberately set by antifa, which is not an organized group, feeding more fear and paranoia. These rumors tied up 911 lines and interfered with critical fire-response activities.

After forceful denials by local law enforcement, the antifa rumors died down, and the Rogue Valley seemed to unite in response to the tragic fires. A spontaneous brigade of bicycle riders ferried supplies to victims in the burn zone. Dozens of local organizations mobilized to offer shelter, food, water, clothing and emergency funds to displaced families.

But conspiracy theory-fueled paranoia is not so easily overcome. Its next target was a tent city that sprang up in a park in Medford, the valleys largest town. Residents of the tent city included low-income people burned out of their homes and homeless people who formerly camped along Bear Creek, another area consumed by the fire.

In short order, a Medford City Council meeting was packed with outraged citizens, with some spouting ugly theories that many of the tent-dwellers had been bused in from other towns with help from antifa, according to the Medford Mail-Tribune. Some of the protesters threatened vigilante action to take care of the problem. A week after the city council meeting, Medford police dismantled the encampment and evicted the residents.

Who benefits from this trumped-up rage? Only those whose grip on power is served by fomenting fear and chaos. The future will challenge us all. Those who work to divide us are simply fanning the flames.

Our valley has plenty of divisions, but also incredible strength and generosity. Community spirit is shining through as we begin the hard work of recovery. The only way to survive wildfire, to survive COVID, to survive climate change, and to survive vigilante hatred, is to work together for the common good. Let us hope that this terrible year teaches us that lesson at last.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.com, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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In Oregon, it's been a year of fanned flames both literal and figurative - Las Vegas Sun