Squatting in NYC in the 80's, rent approached $1/day, plus an hour/day helping out. This is not very different from some of the urban-camping ideas and ultra-low-cost shelter/microvillages happening now, in 2007, on the Pacific coast.

"Some of the apartments were beautiful--exposed brick, elegant tiling. For this the tenants pay $50 a month "maintenance fee," which covers utilities and supplies for fixing up the common areas. Fifty bucks a month, plus they have to put in twenty hours of work a month and pass the one-month probationary term. I was ready to move in. They did have a few people on welfare, but the tenants said they could only handle a few; they primarily needed people who could "pull their own weight.""

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-4713626.html

http://phlog.net/view_entry.php?entry=512032

If there ever was a strange juxtaposition of architecture and structure, thatched cgi wins.

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/conflict_disasters/pir2005_srilanka.htm

Community consultation and shelter programming in Sri Lanka
A transitional shelter being constructed in Ooriyankaddu camp, north of Batticaloa, Eastern Sri Lanka.

Photo: Howard Davies/Oxfam
A case study taken from Oxfam's 2005 Programme Impact Report

Following the tsunami, it soon became clear that one of the main problems for the longer term would be a lack of adequate shelter. Tents were used as an emergency solution, but most were very hot and too small for long-term use. They were arranged in camps where sanitation was difficult and there was little shade or security. Families needed ‘transitional shelters’ that they could use for around two years, that were durable, of suitable size, with adequate facilities, and safe to live in.

Oxfam began with a pilot project on the south coast, agreeing with the local authorities to build transitional shelters for some of the families in Tangalle, a coastal village. Many were living with friends and relatives, but the community identified a group of 17 families who had lost everything and had nowhere safe to stay. There was little land available near Tangalle, and it was difficult for the government to find enough sites for all the families who had to move out of the buffer zone. People also wanted to stay near their community, their livelihoods, schools, and families. After discussions, Oxfam agreed to build the transitional shelters in a children’s playground in the middle of the village.

Oxfam employed an engineer and a site supervisor to oversee the construction, but skilled and unskilled work was carried out by the families themselves. Participants earned a daily wage in order to replace any earnings that they could have made during that time. The families worked together as a team in full view of the village, as the playground was beside the main road. A sign was erected on-site, describing the project and listing the families.

Kaluhandadige Lalitha, mother of four, cooking in the kitchen area outside her new home in Tangalle, Southern Sri Lanka. She assisted Oxfam with choosing the design and materials for temporary shelters before being paid to build her own home.

Photo: Tori Ray/Oxfam

This project provided families with a private living space that is big enough and cool enough to carry out livelihood activities such as mending nets and drying fish. The shelters are also safe, lockable places for the families and their belongings. The specific needs of women were targeted; about a third of those involved were women. They expressed a great sense of pride and purpose in building a place for their families to live, and gained basic construction skills and an income to support their families. They will own the materials, which they will be able to re-use or sell when their permanent shelter is built. Specific gender and protection considerations for widowed and single women and girls are now made in the internal design options that are offered to families: these modifications include provision of partitioning and extra entrances.

Challenges facing this project include the relatively high cost of the shelters (around US$580, compared with UNHCR’s recommended maximum of US$400). A lower cost would allow a greater number to be built, but it is difficult to produce the same quality for a lower price. It can also be hard to justify relatively high spending on transitional shelter when permanent shelter is also required. However, staff felt strongly that these factors were outweighed by the value of providing shelter that not only met Sphere standards but also enabled people to have a safe, dignified existence.

The lack of shelter specialists proved to hamper initial progress, so there is now increased emphasis on recruiting and training teams of Sri Lankan nationals to carry on the work. Perhaps the greatest challenge is the continuing uncertainty concerning critical land issues for those unable to return to their original home sites.

People with disabilities are the most in trouble, of course. Everyone needs relief- shelter relief.

Today is one year since the 10/8 Pakistan earthquake which left in its wake three million homeless people not to mention the death toll.

"Life in the ruined town is bad enough for people who lost their homes in a devastating earthquake a year ago, but for the patients of Balakot's Leprosy Centre it's worse.

The 122-year old centre had served both as sanctuary and a place to get treatment for lepers who came from every corner of northern Pakistan. Now, like the rest of the town, it is a mess of broken walls and concrete rubble."

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL285931.htm

Even though most of us probably have some understanding of how big the global shelter problem is, I find this article extreme and am archiving it here. The interesting thing is the town solution, a 2m x2m corrugated iron house.

link to article

Cape Argus

Forced to live in hole in the ground

June 15, 2006
By Murray Williams

"In the middle of the beauty of the Cape winelands, a De Doorns grandmother has been living in a septic tank for three years. Marieka Wiese, 58, is just one of the millions in the Western Cape who yearn for a proper home.

And although the Breede River municipality recently became aware of her rodent-like existence, and provided her with a 2mx2m corrugated iron shack, it has not been erected on a proper site yet and so she remains in her hole. She has no income and survives on hand-outs from her daughters in the town."

"What about her children - could they not provide a home for her? "They are full," she said quietly.

So in late 2003, or thereabouts, she found herself a shelter - a bricked-up hole in the ground, the old septic tank behind a council house. It measures, perhaps, 1.5m by 2.5m, a metre-deep coffin in the ground."

This article belongs in this emergency-shelter section of the forum because the article highlights the fact that emergency shelter solutions apply to NYC as well as they do to Katrina, 10/8 and 12/26. If we are to help shelter destitute-SS-Earth-shipmates, then we need to have real estate where this is legal. I read about tent villages shuffling between church property and town property and back again in the US North West.

In my own county, Waldo, Maine, it may be easy and legal to turn someone's 10 acres into a "campground." I'm looking into that. That's one idea that could work in many US cities.

Also, town farms were common in Maine not to long ago were families could go for emergency shelter.

I think one lesson from Katrina was that new campgrounds were shunned in most areas. And I've heard fema doesn't want anything to do with what might look like a tent village.

City Limits WEEKLY
Week of: May 30, 2006
Number: 537
CORRUGATED CRIMINALS
Court says law is clear: sleeping in a cardboard box
is a crime. > By Gabe Ponce de Leon
In a quiet May 18th decision, a federal appellate court ruled that a controversial Giuliani-era policy that made it a crime for homeless people to sleep in city parks was constitutional.

By a 1" margin, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the city's policy of arresting homeless people for sleeping in cardboard boxes in city parks. The suit revolved around the question of whether the city's use of an obscure ordinance originally intended to prevent illegal dumping provided a clear standard for police to follow.

'We are pleased that the court recognized that the city must balance its need to keep public order with the needs of homeless individuals,' said Alan Beckoff of the New York City Law Department.

The case was brought by Augustine Betancourt, who was arrested in Collect Pond Park in Lower Manhattan on February 28, 1997. Betancourt, an Army veteran, had been sleeping in a tube assembled from three cardboard boxes. He was held for 24 hours before prosecutors dropped the charges against him. When he met a lawyer at a soup kitchen's legal clinic, Betancourt decided to challenge the law under which he was arrested. His suit contended that the regulation-which mainly prohibits abandoning or stripping cars in public streets-was improperly applied to punish the homeless as part of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's 'quality of life' initiative, launched in 1994 to combat a wide range of street crimes including prostitution, panhandling and drug sales.

'Any reasonable person reading the law in its context cannot help but think it was misapplied to the homeless,' said Douglas Lasdon, executive director of Urban Justice Center and one of Betancourt's lawyers.

The dispute pivoted on whether Section 16-122(b) of the New York City Administrative Code, which makes it unlawful 'to erect or cause to be erected...any shed, building or other obstruction' in public places, was unconstitutionally vague.

Judge John S. Martin Jr. of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York heard the original claim and found that the statute was not vague. Second Circuit Judges Amalya L. Kearse and Ralph K. Winter upheld his ruling. Citing the dictionary definitions of 'erect' and 'obstruction,' they affirmed that a citizen could reasonably ascertain that sleeping in a cardboard box was against the law.

In dissent, Judge Guido Calabrese described the code as an 'impenetrable law that could be read to allow police officers to apply the ordinance almost however they want against virtually whomever they choose.'

'Betancourt's cardboard tube placed on a park bench,' he added, 'was no more of an obstruction than his prone body alone.'

Lasdon suggested that the issue may now be moot because city seems to have stopped aggressively targeting the homeless. 'I have no evidence that the Bloomberg administration is using this provision today,' he said. 'Giuliani was doing whatever he wanted with homeless people, regardless of the law. I think Bloomberg has been more sensitive to the rights of the homeless.'

But other advocates were not convinced. 'Our sense is that there have not been dramatic differences [between the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations] with regard to the street homeless,' said Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, though he conceded that the Bloomberg Administration's public tone was 'less aggressive.'

The New York City Police Department refused to provide City Limits with statistics on how many people had been arrested using the anti-dumping ordinance.

Before mounting the appeal, Betancourt reached a $15,000 settlement with the city over an unreasonable strip search claim stemming from the same arrest.

Betancourt, who now lives in supportive housing, has not yet decided whether he will seek to appeal the case to the United States Supreme Court, Lasdon said.

-Gabe Ponce de Leon

As is often the case in virtual groups, the discussion can degenerate into a quagmire of relativistic opinions that obscure the original truth. Ultimately, what one is left with is nothing but a remnant of falsehood. My first experience of the BFI has been pretty wierd! I was contacted personally, replied, then found my dialectic thrown back, albeit under a different name. What on earth is going on? Ah, who cares? Curses, like chickens, go home to roost. So let's talk about geodesics...

I think Dick Fishbeck's Randomes are amazing. They have an organic quality that is imediately apealing. Using the law of angular defect in this manner is IMVHO, very clever. I'm no expert, but I think this lateral aproach to geodesic construction is definately worthy of a patent and I hope Dick gets it. Best wishes Joshua,

Nicholas

"...in the battle between the world and the mind, it is the mind that is destined to win." Colin Wilson.

Here's a gallery of an A-frame made out of cgi.

http://www.medair.org/en_portal/medair_programmes/programme_pakistan/

I also found this statement from a relief agency press release. I'm looking for more pictures of "demonstration shelters."

"...galvanised steel and corrugated iron sheets. This material has a multi-purpose use as insulation for shelters, windshields, flooring and cover for livestock.
Over 30 demonstration shelters are now complete, and information leaflets have been distributed to households which have constructed their own shelter. These outline possible improvements which can be made to basic shelter to make them more comfortable, and foul weather resistant using basic cheap and available materials. "

The CalEarth.org site was quite interesting! Thanks for sharing this. Dick is actually working dilligently on prototyping some useful structural alternatives to the standard and very flimsy structural methods that are most prevalent in the shanty towns in which a 1/3 of all those living in cities now inhabit. What I find noteworthy is that Dick is experimenting with sheet metal dome systems. If a simple system offering greater structural integrity as well as protection from the elements could be introduced into an existing sheet metal supply and distribution chain then the possibility of improving the quality of emergency shelter and its future use in a viable transition to permanent and dignified housing might very well become a more real possibility.
See these two links for how Dick's work is under research and development:
http://www.freewebtown.com/randome/index.html
http://synergeticists.org/snec.announce.meeting.2006.08.html#schedule

While I think its safe to assume that constructive criticism is welcome by all I think it would be even more constructive to give folks the benefit of the doubt in the BFI forums instead of assuming first that they are simply harping on problems without taking the initiative to develop innnovative solutions.

?

I can't see any connection between this stuff and Buckminster Fulller, or even rational emergency shelters.

We KNOW what the problems are but we spend time over and over and over and over and over on what the problems are instead of what the solutions are. WE live in the dark ages because WE can't get to the solutions part and are still on the problems part.

The problems are identified fully, sufficiently.

NOW, let's talk about solutions?

What part of your share of the solutions are you volunteering to do, and what part of your share are you expecting I'm going to do for you?

I already did my share. I expect these people living in their squalor to do their share too, both before and after the emergency comes. Did you see even one of them come help me when I had an emergency? Where were you?

Http://CalEarth.org can put these people in better shelters with nothing more than plastic tubes and some barbed wire. It probably doesn't take a lot longer than building the crap they've got there in those pictures. The next step is permanent housing befitting of human dignity, and joining 21st century civilization as full participating members, with indoor plumbing, hot clean water 24/7, electric lighting, etc.

When can I expect that you will stop looking for problems that prove things are bad, and sit down and take the lessons you require to be a teacher-builder of 21st century lifestyles fit for the 3rd millenium?

Sincerely, Lion Kuntz, Sonoma County, California, USA.

http://www.ecosyn.us/Ecovillage/ Ecocities, Palaces For The People, Octet Truss Updated, Ecological Synergy Microfarming, H2-PV = 26,280 kg H2 from an acre of PV per year.