Northwoods Sustainable Housing Project – Exemplary Homes in and Around Cook County
Presenter and Partner: Northwoods Sustainable Housing https://northwoodssustainablehousing.weebly.com/
Join the Northwoods Sustainable Housing Project to learn about exemplary homes in and around Cook County. With overlapping affordability and climate crises looming, something about the way we build needs to change. We toured diverse homes to identify strategies, materials, and features that make homes sustainable, healthy, resilient, and affordable. A discussion and roundtable will follow to explore how to create practical paths forward for expanding this type of housing in Cook County.
Notes:
- Ideas: Community Financing (How to fund a build)
- Ideas: Encourage companies to market and bring to our region.
- Ideas: Work sharing building
- Duluth lime plaster – creating a line of people that want to work with the plaster
- Ideas: loaning out a sensor for air quality
- Ideas: Source of trained labor & financing
- Lots that are set for specific type of building, funding, and trained labor for those projects
- Homes insurance – challenge
- Ideas: Just one house starts more opportunities for more
- Big building, insurability, – how much it costs (more or less), does it take more time (or less), etc
- Scale up
- Teach people here – people want to do it for their own home or explore it as a trades skill
- Learning from people that already have developed this skill. – so labor intensive
- creating a workforce
- ideas: plaster as a workshop – especially when going on a real house people would want to attend
- show the cost and community support
- Low hanging fruit – small things that could be used on different projects – entry level
- ideas: monitor the air quality for a couple of weeks – how to interpret and what to do after you found out that data. What different solutions might be.
- Where – how could people sign up to get a plaster wall
- Build something small in a land trust
