Veronika Wild

-Image generated by Microsoft Bing AI Excess Office Space: Too Little Housing I’ve been asking this question for a while now since many cities are facing not one, but two problems. The first is lack of affordable housing. The second is that - especially since the pandemic when many professional people discovered the joys of working from home, there are now many vacant office buildings . While converting them to housing looks like a perfect solution to both, it isn’t as simple as it sounds. WHY IS IT SO HARD? NOT ALL OFFICE BUILDINGS ARE CREATED EQUAL Modern Post War Office Buildings have air conditioning and glass curtain walls, many central pillars and no opening windows. This makes them poor candidates for conversion because each apartment would need its own bathroom, kitchen, plumbing, access and windows which open to the fresh air.  Because most older buildings usually have opening windows, they lend themselves more readily to this and may have more suitable floor plate...

A Tiny House on Wheels - Fixed or mobile, most are prefabricated and transportable, saving time and money in construction - This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY Still thinking about housing. This time I'm looking at Tiny Homes, not the least because youngest can’t get a place to live, nor even to rent, because there’s simply nothing affordable in his price range. In Queensland, at least one place is renting out shipping containers for $200 per week. By using standardised components, fewer materials, prefabrication and economies of scale, tiny homes   can indeed be much cheaper to build than conventional ones, but given that even wealthy people such as Elon Musk are choosing to live in a tiny home, there must be other good reasons for considering them.   Here are some of the main ones. Speed of Construction, Transportability and Flexibilty Tiny Homes come in a wide range of configurations and can usually be adapted to your specific needs. Standardised an...