Living small

According to a recent article in the Metro small houses are becoming more and more popular, especially the Katrina cottages. Katrina cottages http://www.katrinacottagehousing.org/index.html were invented for the victims of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. They can be used as guest house, cottage, for affordable housing projects, for every day living.  The reasons for this trend are the recession (high unemployment versus costs for a large house e.g. for energy), the desire "to live more ecologically and less wasteful", demographic changes (more singles). Also, with the population growing older there's plenty of people willing to downsize and lots of widows and widowers. Whatever the reason I like this trend. I would not have wanted the former trend to continue where in 55 years since 1950 the average square footage of a home went from 983 to 2,340! I know people get bigger and bigger but we can't expand forever and put concrete infrastructure up all over the place. 

The Katrina Cottage can be delivered in pre-manufactured elements or be built on site. It's designed to withstand hurricanes.   Pre-manufactured sounds good to me, too. Smaller houses will already have a smaller ecological footprint for using less material, consuming less space and energy, but pre-fabricated does all that again compared to the house built on-site that needs all materials delivered separately. I just found this article about "green houses" Green Prefab Homes - Prefabulous! on a website called Low Impact Living. 

And I just had another thought. Cities, or all communities, should have a set percentage of houses that are allowed to be empty within the community boundaries before any other house gets erected. I don't know if such a rule exists anywhere but it certainly would stop the unnecessary expansion of suburbs while more central areas, more mature neighbourhoods, empty out. As well, it would be better to support home owners or potential buyers to renovate a house instead of just building a new one somewhere else. Neglect is not only ugly it will also contribute to the deterioration of a neighbourhood as it expands from one building to the next.