The Standingstone Model

The old feed store, with Alice's parrots.
All photographs in this post are from
 Standingstone.

It's no secret that I live at Standingstone. In fact, if you check at Companies House, you'll see that I am the chair of Standingstone Farm Limited. So what is Standingstone?

Standingstone is a conspiracy.

It wasn't set set up to be a model of how you solve the problem of rural depopulation, and, indeed, it doesn't, in itself, serve as a model to solve the problem of rural depopulation. But it serves as a seed from which the shape of a model can be discerned.

Standingstone is a conspiracy of homeless people to house themselves; to house themselves by buying a farm. It isn't - it couldn't be - a conspiracy of just any homeless people. To join the conspiracy, you had to be

• Local to Auchencairn village;
• Unable to afford to buy a house locally;
• Unable to access social housing locally;
• Able to afford the minimum buy-in to the project, which was £30,000, so not trivial;
• Willing to agree the principles of sharing with the rest of the group;
• Unconcerned by the fact that we would not have and were unlikely to get planning permission for the homes we needed.

In other words, you needed to be to some degree a scofflaw, and to have access to at least some capital.

There were some people who were otherwise qualified to join the conspiracy who couldn't reach agreement with the rest of us over sharing; there were some people who we'd really have liked to have here who couldn't raise the buy in price. Those people are not here. That may sound ruthless, but it is what we could pragmatically achieve.

It's consequently a very select group. We were also lucky that left-wing local farmers were prepared not only to offer us the farm, but to wait almost a year while we built and negotiated a group that was able to raise the price (in the end we bought only eighty-eight acres of the one hundred and twenty we were originally offered, because that's all we could afford).

But the number of people normally resident on the farm is about twenty-five, in eight households; and there's a much larger penumbra of people who are associated with the farm, who are often in practice resident. That's an increase of more than 1000% on the two people who lived here before we bought it. It wasn't set up to reverse rural depopulation, but it has the effect of holding people in the area who would otherwise have been forced to leave. And, the farm is home to more than 10% of the children in the local school. In that sense, we're actively reversing depopulation.

We operate as a sort of hybrid between a co-op and a conventional company. Each household that bought in bought a croft (originally eight crofts, now seven). The crofts vary in size between five and twelve acres, depending on how much money was put in. But each croft, regardless of size, regadless of money invested and regardless of how many people live on it, has two votes.

We own most of the woodlands, some of the pasture, and all of the agricultural buildings which were on site at the time we bought the farm, in common.

None of these crofts provides a full household income, although two provide substantially all of the household's food with a surplus to sell. But we none of use depend on our crofts for the whole of our income; we are variously software engineers, artists, musicians, tree surgeons, joiners, nurses, blacksmiths, electricians.

One household occupy the farmhouse; they had enough income to be able to raise a mortgage. The rest of us occupy old caravans, old horseboxes, a yurt and a hut. That's changing. One household has built a magnificent barn, while another household is currently building a real house with real planning permission. Both of these buildings have been built largely with sweat rather than money - the timber for both arrived on site as logs and has been sawn here. But they're both valuable.

This represents something that needs to be learned; a weakness in our model which should not be reproduced. When we negotiated the original settlement, the deal was that the company (that's all of us) had first option to buy any croft that was sold, at a price which more or less represented the purchase price of the croft. If either of these crofts were to be sold, it would be unjust for the company to say 'we can buy this croft for the original purchase price'; but it would be simply impossible for the company to buy the croft at a price which recognised the value of the buildings. If the crofts with these buildings are sold on the open market, it will be impossible for households in housing stress to buy them - they'll be by far too valuable, and consequently they'll sell to people from outside the local economy who have wealth unavailable to people in the local economy. So while we've largely solved the problem of housing stress for us in our generation, ultimately we may just be creating buildings which will become part of the problem.

 

The problem

View over the commons

Many remote rural areas of Scotland, especially in areas of good scenery, are now characterised by house prices which are significantly higher than the local economy will support. This means that people who have jobs in the local economy can't afford housing, and that the housing that is available sucks in people whose wealth and/or income derives from outside the local economy.

While there was at one stage a lot of optimistic prediction that the internet would bring high value work to rural areas, this hasn't really materialised. There are a number of reasons for this; one is that it is and will for the foreseeable future be cheaper to deliver high bandwidth connections in urban areas; and another is that knowledge work generally is teamwork, and teamwork does not really work as well without the constant informal interactions of proximity. This isn't to say that improved digital communications can never bring higher value jobs to rural areas, but they haven't yet.

At the same time the population of rural areas has declined steeply over the past century to the point where population densities are in many places too low to support local services. In my lifetime, Auchencairn had a soutar (cobbler), a bakery, a post office, a pub, three shops, a garage, a school, a church, a police station. Even that was a sharp decline from fifty years previously. Now, one shop, incorporating the post office, remains but its future is uncertain; the garage remains, but its future is also uncertain; the school and church remain. The rest are gone. Part of the problem is the steady increase in holding size and the steady decrease in the number of people actually engaged with the land.

There are also strong factors militating against adding value to produce in the rural economy. The creamery at Kirkcudbright has gone; milk from the Stewartry is now trucked either to Lockerbie or to creameries in the central belt. A few small producers are successfully maintaining local production: Loch Arthur's cheese production, and Cream of Galloway's ice-cream and now cheese, are leveraging good produce to provide additional jobs on the farm.

Other businesses in small towns such as Castle MacLellan Foods and West Coast Sea Products add value to produce locally and retain jobs in the local economy, but these are neither strictly rural jobs nor are they high value.

Furthermore, a bureaucratic food standards regime makes life extremely hard for small food processing businesses, as the current problems at Errington's Cheese illustrate. It seems both that Food Standards Scotland are prejudiced against unpasteurised products, and that they greatly prefer large industrial production units which are easier for them to inspect. Following the Errington's debacle, it's going to be extremely hard to raise capital for new small rural food businesses.

Agriculture does generate some high value work, of course. Agriculture uses increasing amounts of capital equipment, which must be developed, designed and manufactured somewhere. In Castle Douglas, Auchencairn's local market town, the milking machine was invented; the first milking machines in the world were designed and developed here. The company which made those first milking machines still exists; I buy plumbing parts, baler twine and tractor accessories there. But it no longer makes anything. The design and manufacture has long since gone to distant factories in distant cities, and none of the wealth generated comes back.

With the lack of high value employment locally, it's inevitable that many of the people buying the housing are past employment age: people retiring from much higher paying urban economies, selling a perhaps modest house or flat in the city to buy a retirement home in a pretty village; or perhaps people in their middle years, using wealth inherited from their parents to buy a good, solid house which will stand empty for ten months of the year.

The holiday home owners are utterly parasitic on the rural economy. Typically they buy their groceries in urban supermarkets; they have their vehicles maintained in urban garages. The only local services they buy are building and garden maintenance, and those sporadically. They contribute nothing to local civic society.

Retired folk are somewhat better. They arrive at about sixty-five; for ten years they energetically involve themselves in local activities, and during that period learn something about the locality. They buy their groceries locally, service their car locally, get their hair cut locally, use health-care services locally. For ten years, they contribute. Then, at around seventy-five they become infirm. Even then they're not entirely parasitic: they're increasingly providing employment for health and care workers - but their care is being paid for out of a local budget to which they did not contribute during their earning years. At around eighty-five they die, and are replaced by a fresh wave of energetic sixty-five year olds arriving from the cities.

But there is one significant problem with retired folk. They want the landscape of their idyll unchanged the way it's always been - by which they mean how it was ten years ago when they first saw it. They're extremely resistant to changes that could bring jobs and wealth into the community, and they're completely unaware of what the local landscape looked like just twenty years before.

You cannot build or maintain a community on the basis of a rolling population of elderly strangers, no matter how talented, well meaning and energetic. Furthermore, a population of elderly incomers provides no children to keep local schools open. Finally, of course, in a community where all the decent housing has been bought up at high prices, there is nowhere locally for the care and health workers needed to service this elderly population to live.

 

The shape of the solution

A family with four children under twelve live here

To achieve a population density to maintain local services, we need to be able to provide desirable homes for people of working age, with children, at a price that work available in the local economy can fund.

Why can't we?

In a capitalist market, the price of a good (in this case shelter) is the price which some person is prepared to pay for it. It doesn't have to be the person who needs the good; thus throughout the Irish potato famine, when a million people in Ireland starved to death, Ireland was exporting record amounts of food. Similarly in the Ethiopian famine of 1984, Ethiopia was generating foreign exchange by exporting water melons to Europe. It wasn't that food wasn't available; it was that the food which was available wasn't affordable to local people, because wages in the local economy didn't generate enough money. So it is with housing in rural Scotland.

The factors which drive prices up are high demand, limited supply. Supply of rural housing in Scotland is largely limited by planning restrictions, imposed by relatively distant bureaucracies. In some places it's also limited by monopolist landowners, who refuse to release land for housing. High demand is generated by the steady supply of pensioners retiring from successful careers in the cities.

We need to produce housing - good housing, housing which people will aspire to - which is protected from the capitalist market, and reserved for people who work and raise children in the local economy. At the same time it is essential to ensure those people can have a good life. To lead a good life on the restricted income which is available in a remote rural economy, you have to be able to get the best out of living in a rural place. You need to have access to your own ground, where you can grow food to supplement your diet and even your income; you need access to your own woodlot, from which you can extract carbon-neutral fuel from domestic heating.

And you need access to neighbours - to community. To people with whom your can share your joys and celebrations, but also your major work projects; so that raising a house, or gathering in a harvest, can become a communal event, a shared event, a celebration in itself.

 

Adapting the model

As I've implied above, there are mistakes that I believe we've made in setting up Standingstone, mistakes which will militate against it being a sustainable place for people who earn their incomes in the local economy to live beyond our own generation. Our members will, gradually over time, build legal houses with planning permission, and those houses will represent sufficient wealth that, should they or their heirs choose to sell, the rest of us will be unable to afford to buy the croft in, and anyone buying on the open market will not be the sort of people we wanted this place to be.

So to take us uncritically as a model of how to build new rural communities does not work. But relatively little change would be needed to make the model sustainable.

Rural Housing Burden

I see two ways forward. The first would be to make all houses we build subject to the Rural Housing Burden. The Rural Housing Burden is a truly estimable scheme introduced by the Scottish Government, the terms of which are as follows

"The purpose of the Rural Housing Burden title is to maintain affordability on a property in the event of future sales. The plot the title is placed on has usually been acquired at well below the market value and the title ensures that the discount is included in the future sale price. The community have 42 days in which to accept the offer. 

"If the burden is not exercised, it will lie dormant until the next sale, so it remains in the title in perpetuity."

We could have made all houses we built subject to the Rural Housing Burden. We discussed it, but we didn't agree to it. I think this was a mistake. However, a future community could make this part of their ground rules.

Liferent

The alternative is that instead of selling crofts to its members, a future community would let liferents on crofts. A liferent is a traditional Scottish form of land tenure in which someone is given the usufruct of a piece of land for their lifetime. When the tenant died, the land would return to the landowner, which in this case would be the community. To adapt the liferent model to our needs now, the liferent would probably need to be given to a cohabiting household on an 'either or survivor' basis, so that if a member died, their surviving partner would still have security of tenure to the end of their life.

Of course, in modern conditions, cohabiting households do not necessarily cohabit for life. When cohabiting relationships break down, there would need to be some form of negotiation over who would continue the tenancy, but that is outside the scope of this essay.

The liferent model means, of course, that households can't build homes on their land as heritable property, and consequently probably can't get a mortgage to build a home. But the community, to which the land will return at the end of the liferent, could borrow long term against the security of the property, to finance building.

I'm promoting the liferent model rather than an ownership model because inheritance is the primary engine which drives social inequity. If we create heritable crofts, they too will ultimately become valuable and will confer unearned privilege on the children of crofters.

The liferent model doesn't, of course, mean that the former tenants children can't take over the tenancy after the death of their parents; it only means that the community as a whole gets to choose who the next tenant will be. Of course the children of the previous tenants could, if they wanted, be candidates. It's probable that many communities might have a presumption that children would take over their parents' croft. The only principle I'm trying to defend here is that it should not be automatic, should not be a right. I'd emphasise the liferent model especially if any degree of public money has gone into the intitial acquisition of land; crofters really shouldn't be able to profiteer on the back of public subsidy.

A liferent might entail a one off payment to the community at the start of the tenancy, or might entail an annual payment; that is I think a matter for the individual community.

Residency condition

Living in a rural economy is precarious. A croft does not, and will not, in itself provide a family income. Crofters and small farmers from across Scotland have had to work away from their land throughout history, to earn cash income; as mercenaries, as herring fishers, as whalers, as oil workers. I often have to work away as a software engineer. It isn't reasonable to place a condition on a crofting tenancy that the tenant must be permanently resident. At the same time it's clearly an abuse if you hold a tenancy but in practice use the croft as a holiday home, sublet it to someone else, or leave it vacant.

I think that after some period of non-residency - I would suggest five years - the community should be able to terminate the tenancy. That doesn't mean that the tenancy would automatically terminate, just that there would be a right for the community to terminate it, which would be a means of forcing the tenant to start a dialogue with the rest of the community about what they intended.

Obviously, it should also be possible for a tenant to voluntarily give up a tenancy.

The importance of commons

My cattle in Commons Meadow

When we set up Standingstone, our original view was that all the existing agricultural buildings, all the woods and part of the pasture should be common. It didn't work out like that; two crofts (including mine) ended up with small parcels of woodland. But the buildings, the largest wood, the access roads and one field have ended up as common and I think that has positive value. Common assets and common responsibilities provide something concrete to bind the community together; having common pasture means that there is a buffer of reserve grazing for when individual crofters have more beasts than their own grazing can carry, without dedicating that grazing to a particular croft permanently. We also, of course, have to discuss who will have use of it when.

One thing we don't currently have, and would undoubtedly benefit from, is the equivalent of a village hall - a communal meeting and events space, although to some extent The Void, our former high-slat cattle shed which we use as communal industrial space and store, could fulfill this function. The Void is a very significant communal asset; all the buildings we've built so far have been partially prefabricated in it, our tractors and vans are maintained in it, and each croft has a substantial area of storage in it.

Roughly 25% of all our land is common; I think that's a minimum. Three of our crofts are five acre, one (the most productive) seven acre, two ten acre and one twelve acre. I think that a five acre croft is pretty much a minimum; it will with work largely feed a family but it won't create a great deal of surplus.

 

Financing this

Land is cheaper when bought in larger parcels. A five hundred acre farm of good grazing/reasonable arable land is currently for sale locally for offers over a million pounds, which is to say about £2000 per acre. Such a farm would support about fifty households on five acre crofts with two hundred and fifty acres of common (or rather larger crofts with rather less common, for example seven and a half acre crofts with one hundred and twenty five acres of common). A single community of fifty households may be too big to work smoothly and it might be better to split a five hundred acre block into two communities each of twenty five households, but that's a detail.

The point is, the buy in price of a community on land at this price is twenty thousand pounds per croft. Twenty thousand pounds is less than the average annual wage in Galloway, and is thus not an impossible amount for many households to raise. So it's possible - with appropriate changes to planning law - to set up communities without public money.

However, that would buy just the land. At Standingstone, the planning authorities have in effect turned a blind eye to the fact that at present almost all of us are living ilegally, in structures which do not have and would not get planning permission. Most of us aspire to build legal housing, but speaking for myself it's unlikely that I will be able to afford to do so in my lifetime.

It's reasonable that the planning authorities should turn a blind eye, since they know that more than 5% of the adults normally resident in this parish live in illegal structures anyway, and we represent an attempt in the to long term address that problem. We also provide 10% of the children in the school. There's also a probable benefit to the authorities in that Standingstone concentrates most of the hippies and scofflaws of the parish into one place. But the most important factor in our favour is that, as long term local people, we have the support of the village and of our community council.

For privately financed communities to work, there needs to be some derrogation from planning law, either by formalising the 'blind eye' or by allowing a time window for legal structures to be built; there also, obviously, needs to be a presumption that planning consent will be given for a dwelling on a croft. However I think that such planning permission should be conditional on the Rural Housing Burden applying to any dwelling constructed.

The public interest in repopulating remote rural areas

We live in an economy which is governed primarily by and for urban areas. In this economy, remote rural areas are increasingly stressed. It actually does not serve the urban economy if remote rural areas become extensive ranches producing low-value commodity foods, interspersed by picturesque villages inhabited entirely by geriatrics. The rural areas then become a complex cost for the urban economy to bear. It's to the public good to have a self-sustaining population in remote rural areas.

What changes to public policy would be needed to support the creation of 'Standingstone model' crofting communities?

Changes to planning law

Two key changes are needed to planning law. The first is needed anyway, the second is desirable anyway but needed if no public money is to be made available to support the model.

Presumed consent to construct dwellings

Interior of one of the buildings we've built

The first change is that there should be a presumption that consent will be given for a dwelling adequate to house a family to be constructed on each croft, and that that dwelling should be subject to the Rural Housing Burden. That's vital. If people can't legally construct dwellings in which they can then legally live, then the scheme is one which only scofflaws like ourselves will be able to take up.

Planning departments must also not put too onerous conditions on houses to be built. My neighbours James and Vicky, the first of us to get planning permission to construct a legal dwelling, had to spend ten thousand pounds on architects and engineers fees to satisfy the planning and building control authorities. That's more than a third of the total I estimate I could raise to build myself a more permanent dwelling, and is the primary reason I'm deterred from even attempting it.

Partially this problem could be addressed with an 'open source' library of pre-approved house plans, which I'll discuss in more detail later.

Derrogation for temporary dwellings

My (entirely illegal) house.

If poor people spend all the money they can raise to buy land, they are unlikely to have money available to build dwellings immediately afterwards. If they were to be able to raise money to build in the mainstream mortgage market, then neither liferent nor Rural Housing Burden would be viable. Therefore, unless there is public money available, legal dwellings cannot be built quickly. Even with access to public money available, it's going to take some time for legal dwellings to be built. And in the meantime, the crofters need somewhere to live while they develop their crofts and build their legal dwellings.

In brief, the law of the land is that you can't live in temporary structures except temporarily, but you can live in a temporary structure while you're building yourself a dwelling for which you already have planning permission. Given that there must be a presumed consent to construct one dwelling on each croft, it doesn't seem unreasonable that there should be toleration for one household to live in temporary structures on each croft until that dwelling is built. There might be a time limit on this - perhaps ten years - but there needs to be some flexibility.

Changes to community right to buy

The community right to buy is a scheme which provides some public money for communities to buy land or fixed assets subject to some conditions. One of the conditions is that the 'community' is a pre-existing community of place: the people who already live in an existing settlement. This is more or less meaningless when the 'communities' are composed primarily of the non-native elderly. The non-native elderly don't have a long-term investment in an area, and won't be around to see longer term schemes coming to fruition. And, of course, in the most devastated areas of remote rural Scotland, there are no existing communities of place; the landscape is largely or wholly unpeopled.

Also, for new communities to work, they need to be communities of people who can agree ground rules by which they will live and work together. Such people will not necessarily all come from the same settlement or even from the same area. They will be new, intentional communities. New intentional communities do not currently qualify to access public money under the community right to buy.

I'm not suggesting that new intentional communities should be able to exercise the pre-emptive parts of current or future community right to buy legislation; they should be able to apply for public money only to buy land which is already on the market. The public money would not necessarily have to be a grant; it could be in whole or in part a long term low interest loan, because it is not unreasonable to require some financial contribution from crofters proportional to their earning power in the remote rural economy.

Such public money would have to be on the condition that all houses built on the land acquired should be subject to the Rural Housing Burden - otherwise this just becomes a new way for people to profiteer from speculative building.

I'd also like to see a scheme under which 'Standingstone model' communities, once they'd acquired their land, could borrow for finance to construct dwellings, and could do so on the basis that the labour would be provided by the community itself. This would not need to be public money, it's entirely possible that the financial services industry could lend given appropriate guarantees; but there would have to be some degree of legislative support for such a scheme, and some degree of public guarantee would also be welcome, since if private lenders could repossess crofts and sell them on the open market we'd be back to having a backdoor mechanism for building speculative retirement homes.

The minimum viable village

Hay Harvest

This blog post is occasioned by the National Council of Rural Advisers' consultation on Rural Economic Strategy. It isn't directly a response to that consultation, but I'm writing it to help formulate my thoughts in order to respond. A lot of the figures in this piece come out of my Minimum Viable Village Model.

In this essay as in other essays I treat it as axiomatic that the economy should serve the people, not the people the economy. I also treat it as axiomatic that a settled landscape is a good thing in itself. I'm not going to argue those propositions; if you disagree with either of them, then you will disagree with my argument and my conclusions, and that's just how it is.

There are a number of key problems with Scotland's rural economy. The first is population density. It takes about 270 adults of working age to produce enough children to maintain a viable primary school. Currently, average agricultural holding size in Scotland is 101 Ha and rising; increasingly, those holdings are each providing only one income. That means, given coast, forestry, and unfarmable land, there are about 40 holdings and consequently about 40 farm incomes in a 5Km travel-to-school radius.

Consequently, to sustain a viable village school you need about 200 non-agricultural incomes per village, and those incomes must be within a viable travel to work radius.

You also need affordable housing for 270 adults per village. Typically, in rural Scotland, wage rates are depressed, while housing costs are inflated by people from outwith the rural economy buying retirement and holiday homes.

This is just another example of the fact that capitalism simply doesn't work for people, and that we spend an awful lot of time and effort working around the manifest failings of capitalism to produce an economy which supports the many. What the Scottish rural economy needs is full communism now, but we aren't going to get that, so we need to keep on tinkering with the margins of a broken economy.

But one thing we can tinker with is planning law. If people are going to live in the landscape, on the depressed wages which are probably inevitable in rural areas, then they need to leverage the advantages of rurality to make their lives viable and fulfilling, and that means they need land - to grow food for themselves, reducing their costs, and to increase their amenity.

They also need housing that they can afford, and which is not subject to 'market forces'. Which means, essentially, they need housing which cannot be traded on the open market. And they need non-farm economic opportunities, which means we need more rural workplaces.

Planning policy over my lifetime has been hostile to 'sporadic development', and very hostile to village industry. Houses have been huddled together in ever expending villages of urban density, while industry has been pushed to the outskirts of far-away towns. That won't do. The Internet does allow far more folk to work from home, but rural areas typically have the worst Internet connections.

In any case, people go to work (among other things) for social contact; and Scotland needs engineering production at least as much as it needs jobs that can be done in front of a screen. But for both these things - if we are to support a peopled landscape - we need the work where the people are, and if we want the people distributed across the landscape, then so must the work be.

So: we need smaller holding sizes, not larger ones, to put more folk on the land. We need sporadic development in the countryside, because people need to live on the land they manage We need more workplaces, because smaller holdings won't necessarily provide full incomes, and in any case agriculture will only employ 20% of the population we need to sustain. And we need the workplaces where we want the people to be, which means sporadically, in the landscape.

But we don't need those sporadic homes bought up by the rich retired, or the even richer second home buyer. We need them lived in by the people of the place; people who will at some stage in their lives, have children for the school. People embedded in the landscape, who are intimate with it, who know it and care for it, and are committed to it in the long term.

For all those reasons I think these houses we need should not be privately owned. They should be community owned, and let to members of the community on a life rental - a tenancy which is secure for the whole of the tenants' lifetime, but which is not transferrable or heritable. People need security; but inherited wealth is the key driver of social inequality, and, in any case, that which can be inherited can very often also be sold.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, what the Scottish rural economy needs is full communism now.

The place you call home

The place I call home

It's no secret that I live in an illegal house (you might call it a hut, a bothy, a shack, whatever). Most of my neighbours also live in informal dwellings - old vans and buses, old caravans, yurts. It's pretty common in this parish, because legal housing is unaffordable for many people. How common it is across Scotland I don't know, and I don't think anyone knows. I think it would be worth trying to find out.

So, if you live in an informal dwelling - that is, anything that isn't a legal house or flat that you legally own or rent - anywhere in Scotland, I'd like to talk to you. I've got a set of questions I'd like to ask you. Ideally I'd like to come and see you, but I can't come everywhere and see everyone, so some at least of this needs to be done by email or telephone. Ideally, if you'll permit it, I'd like to have a picture of where you live (although I understand that many people will feel anxious about this, so if you don't allow it I perfectly understand). But first, I've a web form you can fill in - and if you live in an informal dwelling I'd be really grateful if you would. It's completely anonymous.

Obviously, informal chats with self-selected folk don't produce hard, numeric data. That needs a census, and at the time of the last census, when I was sleeping rough, I couldn't even get the census people to send me a form, although I asked for one. But if we can put together at least some impressionistic data on what sorts of people are living in informal dwellings, and what (if anything) their needs are, I think that would be useful

Anything I am told, I will anonymise. I won't publish who you are, or exactly where you live (although I'd like to be able to say, for example, "I spoke to twenty people living in Galloway").

If you live in an informal dwelling (including squatting, couch-surfing or sleeping rough) and are prepared to talk to me, please let me know - either by commenting on this blog, or by emailing me.

Eco WHAT!?

I started to write a while ago about the Grauniad's 'eco-homes' competition, and then shelved it because it felt too negative; and, in any case, the competition had passed (needless to say, the worst house - from an ecological point of view - won). However, people are still blogging about these houses, and it needs to be said: they are not good enough. If this is the standard British housing aspires to, we're in even deeper trouble than I thought.

Let's start out by saying this. I don't claim to be a pioneer or an ideologue or a sage. The Winter Palace is - by the Grauniad's standards at least - a fairly extreme eco-home, and I was thinking to some extent about its impact on the landscape when I built it. But I didn't use straw and clay and softwood primarily for ideological reasons. I built of straw and clay and softwood because I needed a comfortable home, and I was broke. That's why my insulation is (recycled) glass wool, not the sheepswool I would have preferred - it's less 'green', but it was cheaper. Similarly, an earth closet does have lower environmental impact than a septic tank, but it's also - much - cheaper. Mind you, I would have had an earth closet anyway, for ecological reasons, but... What I'm saying is that deep economy, not deep ecology, drove my build. Mine is more an economic house than an ecological one.

So what has this to do with the Grauniad's competition for 'the best eco-home'? Well, the Grauniad's competition, being a competition in the prestigious end of the public press, attracted mainly architects who wanted to show off their grand designs in order to attract new customers. And these are, primarily, 'grand designs', worthy of that appalling Channel 4 programme: a third of them are bloated plutocratic mansions of the hyper-rich, tinted with a very thin coat of greenwash. A third are somewhat more modest versions of the same thing. And a third, by my standards, sort-of qualify.

Three with brazen knobs thereon affixed

Let's start with 'Underhill' in Gloucestershire. Mr Baggins would not recognise this Underhill. It's no modest, finely crafted dwelling. It's huge. But, like Mr Baggins' home, it is - mildly - earth sheltered
(although not underground) - and to achieve that, the builders have dug or blasted out half a hillside. It's then fronted entirely with glass (full disclosure, so's mine - but it's a lot less glass). The structure of the house is 'entirely concrete'.

Sorry, you cannot call this an 'eco-home' in any sense at all. Digging that hole, making that concrete, wiped out any energy savings that the building may deliver over its lifetime. And building a house on that scale for one family - spending half a million pounds on a house for one family is not in any sense sustainable. The architect said of it, "We want to bring the Italian catwalk to eco houses." She's failed. She may have brought the Italian catwalk to the Cotswolds, but 'eco'? Nonsense.

The Blackheath Pavillion is again a plutocratic monstrosity - again, built by an architect for himself, this time at a cost of a million pounds (less change). The soi-disant eco greenwash is here even thinner. My contempt for this sort of cognitive dissonance is unutterable.

Plummerswood in the Borders is similar. Yes, it's built primarily of softwood - prefabricated in Austria from timber grown who knows where. The food miles involved are extraordinary. And, again, 1.25 million pounds to house one family: you could build one hundred and eighty homes like mine for that money (or, more practically, 90 homes each twice the size of mine and housing a family).

Three wannabes

On a more modest scale, the 'Zero Carbon House' (yes, seriously!) recyles some of the same nonsense. Again, it's an architect building for himself, at least partly as self-promotion. This one cost only a third of a million pounds, or twenty-five houses worth - but that is, I think, not counting the pre-existing house onto which it was built. As for zero carbon, it incorporates a lot of sheet glass, bathroom fittings of either enamelled steel or ceramic (the pictures aren't clear enough to distinguish), glass kitchen counters, and thirty five square metres of solar panels. Low carbon it may be, but zero carbon it is not.

But it does have genuinely good features, including newspaper insulation, and a lot of reclaimed materials. It's not a dead loss. Give it two out of ten, for trying.

Slip House, in London? Look at that glass.

Let's be clear about this, transparency is a good thing. Before I had the Winter Palace, I lived six months on a platform in a tree. So long as the daytime temperature stayed above ten degrees celsius, it was actually quite nice, but when the daytime temperature fell below that - as in Scotland it often does, even in summer - it was pretty miserable. And allowing the breeze to waft through your living space may be pleasant on a warm summer day, but being unable to exclude it when it's driving a thin cold condensing mist is much less pleasant. I think that we many of us go too far in excluding the weather from our lives, but... My house has glass. Currently it has about five and a half square metres of glass; when I finally get round to glazing the front gable it will have about nine square metres.

I do keep thinking about alternative ways to gain the transparency of glass without its embodied energy, and so far I haven't found one. Friends have built their homes around reclaimed window units, and that's obviously more ecological than having new glass specially cut; but I want my house to have a formal grace, and that's not easy to achieve with odds and ends of repurposed glass. Japanese paper is not transparent but does admit light; it's a possibility for my next serious build. I'm not an absolutist about glass.

But the use of glass at Slip House is on another scale altogether. Even walls which are of solid opaque material are clad on the outside with glass, and that glass rises a metre above the roof. Where it is transparent, that glass is triple thickness - which undoubtedly has a significant insulation benefit. At what point does that insulation benefit cancel out the energy cost of the extra glass? To my shame I don't know. My instinct is that this much glass just isn't sustainable. The cost isn't sustainable, either - this fairly modest house cost two thirds of a million pounds.

Marsh House in Nottingham falls into the same category. A little cheaper - a mere half million, here - and a little better. Not a lot better, it's built substantially of brick, and it doesn't look like reclaimed brick. Like me they do use a composting toilet - which in a city is brave - and do without a fridge. It's an interesting house with some good ideas, and it's certainly better than most modern houses. But an eco house? Really?

Three to respect

Lilac Cohousing is in Leeds. The houses were prefabricated in Bristol, out of timber and straw from god-knows-where; and then transported to their site by road, and craned into place. And you do have to ask, what the holy god damned fuck?

Straw has a lot of benefits for building - I should know, I live in a straw house. But part of the point of a straw house is that straw bales are more or less like LEGO bricks. Each bale can be lifted by hand, placed by hand, if need be trimmed to size by hand; and a team of half a dozen completely unskilled people can build the walls of a house in a day. Bales are incredibly cheap: if you can't make your own from your own land, they cost about two pounds fifty each on the open market; and a couple of hundred of them will build a family home.

But, an assembled straw wall isn't easy to move. To hold them together during transport, ModCell, the builders of the straw modules used at Lilac Cohousing, build extremely sturdy wooden casements. These wooden casements then form the load-bearing framework for the houses, and to be completely fair about it, I would not have confidence to build a load bearing straw structure more than two stories high, so the wooden casements are probably not more expensive of timber than any other multi-story straw structure. And, again, the ModCell modules are fair inside and out, like a proper concrete home and lacking the somewhat rustic unevenness of my own walls. So there are some benefits.

But you lose. You lose community effort. You lose comradeship. You lose empowering people, letting people have the experience of building for themselves. You spend a lot of money on factory manufacture, on transport, on cranage, on specialist labour. And for what?

The other thing which slightly bothers me is cost. It's elided in the Grauniad puff-piece. Each resident, we're told 'pays... 35% of their net income rather than taking on individual mortgages'. Woah, that's a LOT! 35% of income after tax? For how long?

Again, for comparison, my house cost what I currently earn, after tax, in two months. OK, I was mad at the time, and consequently not able to earn, and consequently broke, but... So if I paid it off at 35% of my income I would have it paid off in six months. Because, after all, building in straw is cheap. So how long will the Lilac residents be paying for, exactly?

So I don't know. This isn't dreadful. I'd like to visit some day and have a look, talk to the folk. Five out of ten, maybe?

Edited to add: it seems I was too harsh on the Lilac scheme. Apparently (so they say on Twitter in reply to my post) their modules were actually built on a farm eight miles from site, partly with residents labour, using bales from straw grown there. So not nearly as ridiculous as I had thought. And Lilac does look like 'normal' social housing - perhaps even too much like 'normal' social housing - which will appeal to the innate conservatism of lots of British people.

The Hemp Cottage has wool insulation. I'm interested immediately. That's something I wanted to do and somewhat regret I did not do. Its walls are not straw, but a hempcrete mix made with lime; a sort of technically advanced cob. The proponents of hempcrete claim that it is carbon negative, which is clearly baloney seeing the lime must be kilned. But the render on my walls would be more durable if I had used lime, and I may yet re-render with lime. One cannot be purist. This is, all in all, a pretty nice build. Six out of ten.

Lammas feels very like home; like the Standingstone conspiracy, they are eight households. Like us, they've bought their land together. They're obviously much more right on than us, with their deliberately and consciously unsquare dwellings built with higglety-pigglety roundwood frames. Their structures have their own aesthetic, and I can admire it very much, although it isn't mine. But these people are doing it for real. They're building themselves, together, out of (mostly) the natural materials of the land on which they live. And their houses cost very much in line with mine - 'None cost more than £14,000 to complete.'

In short, this is the real deal. I hope to go there, and to learn from them. They provide one vision of what an eco-house looks like - a slightly rackety, post-punk, post-apocalyptic vision, but an authentic vision nevertheless. You don't have to live in a house like this to be eco. Eco houses are also available in square, and can even have pitched roofs. The windows don't have to be funky-shaped. The timber doesn't have to be round wood (although there's some fuel saved in not sawmilling it). But Lammas is probably as close as you'll get to ecohousing in Britain today, whether your eco is economy or ecology (and, let's face it, the two are closely related). Nine out of ten, and respect.

And one odd ball

100 Princedale Road is sort of an odd one out in this set. It's a traditional terrace, retrofitted with a lot of insulation. That has, obviously, reduced internal volume. It's also greatly reduced ventilation. A lot of modern 'eco-house' thinking seems to be about excluding nasty uncontrolled nature; I'm far from persuaded this is a good thing. And this process of reducing the space in the house has cost £180,000 (on top of its original purchase cost), or the cost of nine good family homes.

As a technology demonstrator for efficient insulation I'm sure it's a wonderful building, but this doesn't scale. We can't afford to do this to every terrace house in the country, and it seems highly doubtful to me that this degree of insulation will pay for itself either in money terms or in energy terms in the lifetime of the build.

Three out of ten, to be generous.

A paen in praise of my stove

 It's time to sing a paen in praise of my stove.

A stove is the heart of any home, particularly so at this time of year. A stove transmutes wood into heat. But heat comes in a number of forms, and we appreciate it in a number of ways. My stove provides me with toasty warm towels from my heated towel rail, when I step out of the bath. It provides me with the hot water for my bath. It provides me with my hot meals, my well cooked food. It heats my oven and bakes my cakes. And, most important of all, it keeps the whole of my house warm and comfortable. And all this for no fuel bills, save the labour of cutting the wood.

So what is this paragon, I hear you ask; how much, I hear you ask, does such a thing of wonder cost?

Well, for a start, it's not an Aga. Agas are, indeed, wonderful things (although I don't know how well they work on wood) but they're vastly out of my price league; an Aga would cost as much as my house. And, they're enormously heavy. Getting an Aga over the hill to my cabin would have been exceedingly difficult. So no, it's not an Aga. More surprisingly, it's not a Rayburn, either. I've installed second-hand Rayburns in every house I've owned until this one. Rayburns are indeed good, although they are not that good if you burn coal - it's too corrosive, and you end up having to replace the grate and firebricks every year. On wood, which is what I have, Rayburns are fine - a Rayburn would have been good. But at the time I built this house, even a second hand Rayburn was out of my budget.

Also, a Rayburn has a small hotplate - efficient, certainly, but small. A Rayburn oven does not have a window in its door, so you can't see how your cake is rising. A Rayburn's firebox is not adaptable. And, like the Aga, it's very heavy.

No, my stove is a thing called a 'Plamak', or 'Plamark' - it's Bulgarian, and in Bulgaria they use cyrillic script; it doesn't transliterate perfectly. Specifically, it's a Plamak B: B for boiler.

Back in the days of the old Soviet Union one could buy Moskvitch and Lada cars; Ural motorcycles; Zenit cameras. They were sturdy but crude, by Western standards. Simple, but very cheap, and they worked. My first car was a Moskvitch van. The Plamak is a little bit like that: honestly made, a little crude in places, but it works. Unlike an Aga or a Rayburn it's made of pressed steel - very nicely enamelled, but just pressed steel. The handles on the ovens and firebox are made of something like Bakelite. The rail across the front on which one can hang teatowels to dry isn't very sturdy and it's a little too close to the body of the stove for convenience. The hotplate is just a plate of steel sheet, and will probably, over time, corrode and need to be replaced. There's no insulated cover for the hotplate. The oven doesn't have a built-in thermometer (but it does have a window in the door, so you can easily put a thermometer inside). Unlike an Aga or a Rayburn, it doesn't have a lot of thermal mass, so when the fire goes down it cools quickly - if you're cooking something that needs a consistent temperature you need to pay attention, and feed it small logs frequently.

But, it has real good points.

The fire box has an extra, removable grate. In summer you can put this grate in, and it halves the size of the firebox, allowing you to cook more economically. In winter, obviously, you take it out. The hotplate is enormous - it will easily take half a dozen pans. There's a very simple flue control which switches the smoke path from across under the hotplate and up the chimney, to round under the oven, depending on what sort of cooking you want to do. And cleaning out that flue path under the oven is absurdly easy - you just lift out the oven floor.

It also burns exceedingly well. Frankly it's too big a stove for this little house - until I installed the big radiator and my heated towel rail, I couldn't effectively use the oven because if I ran the stove hot enough to cook in the oven the hot water tank would boil. Now I can control that, by pumping heat out of the hot water circuit though the radiator (at cost, sometimes, of making the house too cosy - it can easily reach thirty degrees in the bedroom), and so I can bake. It does go through wood fairly quickly - two bucketfulls of logs in an evening - but in two hours it will heat enough hot water for two long, deep, hot baths.

All in all I'm enormously pleased with it. So, you ask, what does this paragon of a stove cost? Amazingly, three hundred and eighty pounds. Honestly, if you want a stove that cooks and heats water, get a Plamak B. It's a bargain.

A staggered cantilever house

 I'm back to worrying again at the structural design of a house to fit into the natural hollow in the north-east corner of my croft, a house to fit organically into the landscape. It isn't that I've fallen out of love with the Winter Palace, I haven't. I like it very much. So long as I remain single, and remain fit enough to climb its stairs, it suits me very well. But it is my ambition some day to cease to be single, and within the next twenty years the stairs will probably become beyond me. So in the long term another house is necessary. And the view from this house is very restricted; from the hollow in the north east corner I could see out to the Isle of Man.

So let's go over the options for that hollow. The first option I designed was the design I called Sousterran: four tessellated concrete domes, supported by beautifully sculptural flying buttresses. The merits of that design remain that its irregular, sculptural shape would fit very well into the landscape, that it is iconic and would be beautiful; and, in so much as the design is modular, extending it would actually be easy. The demerit is that it uses a lot of concrete, a lot of embodied energy. An eco-house it is not. A further technical problem is that if the waterproofing of the back wall were to fail, it would be extremely expensive and difficult to fix.

So the next design was the design I called Singlespace: a mostly-timber conical roof over a single large, circular room, later (in the Longeaves variant) with some sheltered external storage and the possibility at a later stage of adding an earth closet attached to the building, which one could use without going out of doors. Again, the design is elegant. But for me the major demerit is that the regular cone, even if turf-roofed, would look significantly unnatural. It would draw the eye in the landscape, immediately announcing something artificial. Also, if the back wall were not to suffer the same waterproofing issues as with Sousterran, there would have to be a significant walkway round the back, which firstly wastes space and secondly interrupts the continuity of the walking surface between the natural hillside and the roof. There would be, in effect, a chasm to be stepped over, or fallen into.

It was in thinking about that gap that I came up with the new design. The issue about the gap is that, if the earth of the hillside presses directly against the back wall of the house, that wall has to be very efficiently waterproofed - 'tanked' - to prevent damp. That's complex in itself, but it it fails, a great deal of earth has to be very carefully removed to expose the wall for repair, which would be expensive. Also, the wall needs to be inherently strong enough to resist the thrust of the hillside - not a problem with the hexagonal concrete cells of Sousterran, but much more problematic with a lighter weight wooden or straw structure.

The thing is, soil affected by heavy rainfall will not stand in a vertical cliff without substantial, expensive support. There is a natural angle of repose - the angle of a natural talus slope - at which it will safely lie. The use of modern fabrics, well pegged, or a dry-stane retaining wall, can steepen that slope a bit, at cost, but fundamentally the gap between the wall and the slope will be much wider at the top than at the bottom...

If the wall is vertical.

If the wall is vertical? Of course a wall is vertical.

Yes, but what if it isn't?

If it isn't, if it lies back parallel to the slope, you still get an air gap behind the house, eliminating the penetrating damp problem. And you can still - if rather less comfortably - get in to do any necessary maintenance. But you save that wasted space, you get more volume inside, and you close up the chasm between the hillside and the roof. Good!

Of course, you could have an angled back wall with the conical Singlespace roof, using a yurt like structure. But in thinking about how you support an angled-out back wall, I thought of a W shaped cantilever truss. However, if you have a triangular truss supporting a principal rafter from a point which is fairly central under that rafter, there should be no significant thrust on the roof tree. So the trusses supporting principal rafters on the back and front sheds of the roof don't need to line up with one another. So I came up with a sketch in which the trusses are staggered, and that's actually rather interesting in terms of the interior space. The space is continuous, and you can walk through it, but the trusses naturally break the space up into smaller spaces with a degree of visual privacy.

Of course, the staggered trusses could be built symmetrically to a straight rooftree supporting rectangular plane roof sheds. But actually they need not. A curved roof tree supporting sheds with simple, not compound, curvature would fit much more naturally into the landscape. I think this could be reasonably simple and easy to build - but of course the roof tree and purlins would need to be laminated, which is a little more complex than simply straight beams.

This design is at a fairly early stage. It has three times the space of the Winter Palace upstairs, but only about twice the space downstairs (and the need for a staircase limits the amount of usable room upstairs). Obviously, of course the basic design could be significantly bigger, either by increasing the span of the trusses or by adding an extra bay (or two bays) to the right hand end. There are some details which are not yet worked out. I've shown storage space (for e.g. firewood, or sheddy things) at the left-hand end of the building, but I have not yet thought through the right hand end.

I also haven't decided what to do about a staircase. In order to get two reasonably private bedrooms upstairs, the staircase needs to go up the middle of the building. It could go up the sloping back wall, at the left hand end of the sink unit in these drawings; or it could go across the middle of the space, dividing off the kitchen; although that would be a bit wasteful.

Ultra-low impact housing and public policy

Politicians are once again talking openly about how to reduce the cost of housing. I know how to do this, and have a genuinely modest proposal.

This house, as I've described earlier, is almost entirely bio-degradable. Without maintenance, it would fairly rapidly collapse into a pile of rotted timber and straw on the forest floor, marked only by the stove, the bath, the water pipes and the glass; and, as these things are inherently valuable and recyclable, I would imagine someone else will rob them out long before the house gets to that state. With reasonable maintenance, I believe the house could last - and be comfortable and habitable - in the long term. Sixty years at least, perhaps twice that; as long as a conventional modern house is designed to.

This house would not pass building warrant, and there are some good reasons for that. It has no foundations; it is (intentionally) very close to trees; it has some fire safety deficits. Notably, it would be impossible to get a fire engine to it in the event of a fire, but also there is no fire separation between the walls and the roof structure, and I have not yet fitted the fire ladder which I intend to fit from the rear window. And it seems to me that it would be very hard to draw up building regulations which this house would pass which would not allow very unsatisfactory buildings also to pass.

But those things don't matter to me: I built this house myself to my needs, and I'm comfortable with it. I've chosen the risks and assessed them; I'm happy that it is safe enough for me.

Obviously, if you allow people to build houses without building warrant and then let them to tenants, you will get slums, and grossly unfit and unhealthy housing. And that suggests a compromise.

Suppose you were to legislate that a person did not need building warrant or full planning consent for a low-impact building which they had erected themselves, and in which they lived themselves; but planning consent and building warrant would be required before that building could be sold or let? There would be a couple of problems with a scheme as simple as that. Such a house would have to be built more than a safe margin from the edge of its plot, so that if it caught fire, fire would not spread to other properties. I imagine three metres (i.e. a 6 metre gap between adjacent buildings) should be enough, but there are people better qualified than I to make that judgement. So this sort of development could not provide very high density housing. And while an earth closet has very low environmental impact, for public health reasons, in urban areas, there would have to be some regulations about the disposition of shit, and sewerage.

But if people are responsible for their own houses, they will build houses to meet their needs; and if the houses they build don't meet their needs, that is their problem. And in any case, if a low impact home does prove unsatisfactory, it is cheap enough that the owner would be able to pull it down and start again.

Campaigners for rural amenity will also claim there's a need for planning consent - they don't want to see people building houses in pretty places. But farmers can, within broad limits, erect huge ugly sheds without much in the way of planning regulation, and it seems to me that homes for people are more urgently required than sheds for tractors. So I would like to see no more onerous planning regulation - simple notification - for self build dwellings than for tractor sheds.

There is, of course, another issue: people will fear that urban margins and rural areas will become littered with the wrecks of abandoned self-builds. And that's where 'ultra-low impact' comes in. If these self builds are built mainly of bio-degradable materials - timber, straw, wool - or of materials sourced in the local environment - fieldstone, clay, sand - then the buildings, if abandoned, will not litter the landscape long. They will be transient.

So that's part one of my modest suggestion: building warrant and full planning permission is required to sell or let a low impact dwelling, but not to build one. Now onto part two.

Local government could prepare sites with sewer, drinking water, electricity and telecoms connections, and could lease these on sixty year lets to people. The people could build their own houses on the plots. When the lessor chose to move on then, if the house passed building warrant, the council would buy it at a pre-agreed but fairly nominal price covering the basic cost of construction, and let it or sell it as social housing; if the house did not pass building warrant, the council would demolish it at their cost and relet the site to another self-builder.

Obviously, commercial companies would come into this market with kits or house designs. It seems to me reasonable that there should be some sort of building warrant type-approval for kits and designs - if build correctly as specified, they should pass building warrant. You should not be able to sell a kit which definitely would not pass building warrant.

The cost of building a house is mainly down to two things: planning consent (and therefore scarcity, and windfall profits for landowners), and labour. If you take those elements out of the equation, housing becomes very cheap indeed: the basic materials out of which perfectly good houses can be constructed need not be expensive. As I've argued before, the total cost of building a house can be less than the deposit on a commercially built one. Encouraging and facilitating self build of low impact housing would solve Britain's housing stress problems at a stroke.

Turbine economics

Last week I had one of those experiences which felt at the time like small defeats but which actually are steps forward - although not necessarily in the direction I really want to go. Call it a tactical withdrawal. I moved my computer from the Winter Palace up to the Void. In the Void - the huge old cattle shed which forms the hub of our community-that-is-not-a-community - it can use mains power, rather than depending on my wind turbine. Also, it can use the landline broadband, rather than using my satellite connection. The truth is that at this time of year my wind turbine is not generating enough power for my day to day use, and as I am now running low on the money I earned last year and need to start looking for employment again, I need to use my computer (and the Internet) more.

So this is a post about the energy economics of living off grid.

Let's start by saying that electricity isn't necessary for life. It isn't even necessary for a good, comfortable life. Candles, oil lamps and gas lamps all work perfectly well for lighting, although candles aren't particularly bright, and to get a bright light from oil you need some sort of pressure system. All the other things we use electricity for are nice to have, but not necessary. When I lived in the Summer Palace I had none, and when I built the Winter Palace I thought that it would be a long time before I could afford electricity.

But electricity - particularly electric light - is very nice to have. Electric light comes on at the flick of a switch and is a much less significant fire risk than any kind of flame. I greatly enjoy Radio Scotland and Radio 4; my life would be impoverished without them. The condition of my teeth has improved significantly since I started using an electric toothbrush. And so on. Finally, I am something of an Internet junkie - a great deal of my life, particularly of my intellectual life, is lived online. Electricity is very nice to have.

But, here's the rub. All my lights together consume nineteen watts, and they are very rarely all on together. Charging my phone, my my toothbrush, my radio are each small loads - twenty-five watts at the very outside, but probably more like five (yes, I should check this). All these things I can afford.

My wind turbine is rated at 750 watts but only generates this amount in absolutely ideal conditions, which means a steady force four wind. Also, it depends on the wind direction. Here, the prevailing wind is from the southwest, so I have sited my turbine to be in clean wind from the southwest. But because the turbine needs to be reasonably close to the house and the house is in the wood, the turbine is close to the wood; when the wind blows from the north west, the turbine is in turbulent air off the wood and does not run efficiently. Finally, in winds stronger than force six, the turbine automatically shuts down to avoid damage. As the energy of the wind varies with the square of the wind speed, the amount of electricity generated falls off very sharply as the wind drops. My estimate is that the long term average is that my turbine generates less than 10% of its rated output, which is to say I get between 1 and 2 KWh per day.

But my internet connection comes via a satellite, which is about forty thousand kilometres away. To communicate via that satellite I need to shine a light (OK, it's radio frequency not light frequency, but it's effectively the same thing) that's bright enough not only to illuminate it but to be visible to it against all the background clutter of all the other radio emissions from Earth. That costs me 43 watts, and it seems to me that's remarkably efficient. My laptop consumes 45 watts, but currently it's away being repaired. My desktop computer - the one I've moved to the Void - consumes about 250 watts peak and about 180 watts average during normal working. So to do serious work and use the Internet I currently need about 300 watts.

In theory five hours charging at average of 60 watts should give me one hour of use, so in theory you'd think that I'd get about four hours use a day. But it isn't like that. Lead-acid batteries - which is what I use for my power storage - are fairly inefficient, and get more inefficient as they are depleted. Also, in summer, there are many days on which there isn't a great deal of wind and charging is negligeable. Once the big storage battery has been depleted, it takes a very long time to bring it back.

Wind is great in winter to provide power when there isn't much sun, but as soon as I have some spare cash I shall invest in solar panels. For a given rated output solar is now substantially cheaper than wind, and I believe that on long term average solar panels will produce a higher proportion of their rated output.

Finally, because wind turbines have moving parts they require maintenance. My guess (but it is just a guess) is that for similar investment, solar panels have a longer working life expectancy than wind turbines.

In brief, if I was starting again now I would install solar first and wind later. I didn't, because when I first built my house I was very concerned to keep it hidden, and consequently I built it where the sun don't shine; I've now built a wood shed out in my orchard, where it will catch the sun, precisely so I can install solar panels. But even if I had chosen solar panels first, I would still install both, because I believe that they are complimentary: when you have no wind you tend to have more sunlight, when you have less sunlight you tend to have more wind.

Oh, and, if I had a stream of any consequence running through my land, I think I'd prefer a water turbine to either wind or solar - it's more predictable, more continuous, and easier to get at for maintenance.

Having said that, none of these solutions are cheap electricity. To the cost of the turbine or panels must be added the cost of the tower, of the cabling, of the controller, of the battery, of the inverter. The total cost of my installation so far is £4,000. At 1.5KW/h a day and an expected lifetime of ten years, that's around 5.5GWh total, or at least 70 pence per kilowatt hour (more, if I need to do significant maintenance). If you're on grid, you're probably paying about 16 pence per kilowatt hour, or a quarter of what I'm paying. However, going off grid may well be a cheap lifestyle choice over the longer term because it does make you think seriously about the energy you use, and consequently you use less. It's also, arguably, on balance, better for the planet.

Savings, and loans

This morning I got an email from a woman in the United States of America. She designs 'infographics', and does marketing. She's done an 'infographic' (left) about the size of homes in the USA. She has obviously done a quick web search to find people who blog about housing, and so she's mailed me. I don't think she's actually read my blog, if she had she might not have chosen it. But her 'infographic' does raise interesting issues. Note - I haven't verified her data is correct, but whether it is or not, the issues raised are the same. Before I go on to discuss these issues, I'd like to write a little about the text and subtext of her graphic, as I see them.

The text is obvious. Homes in the US are big - really big. Everyone has a big home. They're big in city centres, bigger in the suburbs, simply huge in the outer suburbs, still big in remote rural locations. They're also, claims the graphic, growing rapidly - the last panel claims the median home has grown in size by 50% in just twenty five years - interestingly, up to 2007, a date we'll come back to later.

The graphic shows, but doesn't explicitly say, that they're also staggeringly expensive. In New York, where the median size is apparently around 1500 square feet, the price is given as US$1295 per square foot, or about 1.9 million US dollars for an ordinary family house. That's not the extreme - Phoenix, Arizona is shown as even more expensive (why?!?). At the other end of the scale, housing in Dallas, Texas is stated to sell for US$59 per square foot, with a median size of 1650 square feet implying a price of just under a hundred thousand US dollars.

The subtext is less obvious. This is my interpretation, and my interpretation is subject to my own biases - which, if you've read this blog, you know. But the infographic was designed for, and advertises, a business called 'Quicken Loans'; their business is selling mortgages. The subtext seems to me to be, everyone else has a really big house. If you don't have a really big house, you're missing out. Borrow lots of money from Quicken Loans, and you too can have a really big house, like everyone else. And that seems to me, for most people, a really bad idea.

Of Size

OK, let's step back a moment, and talk about size. How much room do you need to have housing which is spacious and comfortable? This house (I've just measured it, to be certain, because I normally think in square metres) has 308 square feet of floor space. Of course, part of its feeling of spaciousness comes from the relative lack of internal partitions - the only one is the water tank cabinet that screens the bathroom - and the relative height: as I sit here typing this the ceiling is sixteen feet above the floor. Finally, of course, the latrine is outside, and adds effectively another sixteen square feet of floor space, or 324 total. Furthermore, this is Scotland. It isn't warm, and it isn't dry. You can't usefully use outdoor space - yard, patio, terrace, decking, whatever - to extend living space for many months of the year, as you can in much of the US. So that 324 square feet is not extended by any significant outdoor living

space.

This is, of course, strictly a one person house. I don't think I could comfortably share it, long term, with anyone else. But to produce a comfortable two person house, you wouldn't need to double it; for three or four people, you certainly wouldn't have to treble it. 

However, according to the graphic, the median home in the US has 800 square foot per person. That's more than twice what I have. More than twice what I need. Bigger homes? Really? What do you plan to put in them?

Of Energy

For equivalent levels of insulation, for an equivalent target indoor temperature, a bigger house needs more heating than a small one. Yes, of course you can do things with passive solar gain and so on to mitigate this, but they all scale with size - or rather, strictly, with surface area. A small house can have just as efficient solar gain and just as efficient insulation, area for area, as a large house, and if you double the floor area of a house, you substantially more than double the surface area - the area through which heat can be lost. So smaller houses are not just more efficient to heat because they're smaller, they're also more efficient to heat per square foot.

Of course the geometry of a house influences this. A circular house has less surface per unit area than a square one, and a square one has less surface per unit area than a long narrow one. But that's detail. The big picture is that a big house consumes proportionally more energy to heat than a small one.

And energy, for heating homes, is still primarily from fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels introduces fossil carbon back into cycle, increasing the atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide and accelerating climate change. The alternatives are passive solar gain - but that works less well in winter, when it's needed most - or in-cycle carbon, which means firewood. Heating the average US home, according to Oklahoma State University, takes the production of about nine acres of hardwood forest. The USA has 313 million people in 114 million households but only 745 million acres of forest, so there simply isn't enough firewood to go round. So, in summary, bigger US homes inevitably mean more climate change.

Of Money

Which brings us around to money. The graphic doesn't give us a median price for a home, perhaps deliberately, but the US Census Bureau quotes US$186,000 as the median value of an owner-occupied home.  The median household income is quoted by the Census Bureau as US$52,000 (Ibid). That implies that the median house value (according to the census) is 360% of the median household income.

I said, earlier, that the date 2007, the date used as an indicator of median size increase in the graphic, was significant. Why? It's the year the subprime mortgage collapse really got going. What's a subprime mortgage? It's a mortgage where the borrower is under extreme financial stress - where any worsening of the financial conditions means that the borrower will not be able to repay. Of course, if one borrower  can't repay, their house is dumped onto the market, lowering the market price for housing locally and consequently increasing the negative equity, and consequently the financial stress - on neighbouring householders. Consequently, there tends to be a snowball effect - as the first borrowers fail to pay, and are foreclosed, more stress is placed on the next most vulnerable tier, who fail to pay and are foreclosed, and so on. 

This is what happened in 2007-2008. The collapse of the US subprime mortgage market lead to the collapse of major banks first in the US, but then, progressively, across the world. This had two consequences.

First, the whole world was tipped into a recession which we still, five years later, have no prospect of getting out of.

Second, governments around the world bailed out failing banks with simply vast sums of taxpayers' money. Enormous sums. Trillions of US dollars. Money taken, effectively, from ordinary taxpayers, and ending up, largely, enriching the already super-rich - including the same people who had profited from selling imprudent home loans in the first place.

What this boils down to is the fact that the whole economic crisis we're now living through, which has cost ordinary people across the world dearly, has ultimately been caused by people buying houses they can't afford.

Of Madness

You'll know, if you follow this blog at all, that housing isn't the only thing I write about; I also write about madness. In researching for my recent post on the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, I came across a startling fact. There is an extraordinarily high statistical correlation between borrowing and mental 'illness'. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, 'one in two adults with debts has a mental health problem, [and] one in four people with a mental health problem is also in debt'. There's particular evidence of strong links between mortgage debt, especially foreclosure, and madness.

Of Cost

I've shown evidence, in this essay, that housing debt is enormously costly to us all, both in terms of the larger economy and in terms of health. I've shown that larger houses are more costly in environmental terms than smaller houses. I've claimed - and reading through other articles in my blog will I hope persuade - that living in a well proportioned smaller house is perfectly comfortable.

The question is, what need a house cost? Well, I can answer that. I can answer that with confidence, because I've recently built (this) one. In its initial form, habitable but not yet comfortable, it cost £4,500; altogether, as it stands now, less than £7,000, or US$10,700 - and about three man months of my labour. A family home would cost about twice that, both in money and in time. Of course, that doesn't include the land. Land in an urban area with mains services inevitably costs. But, for example, it didn't take me much web searching to find a plot in Dallas, Texas for US$4,000. Interestingly, I was easily able to find plots in upstate (not urban) New York for much the same price. Very nice plots are available for around US$30,000. So the reasonable cost of a family home, including land, is somewhere between US$25,000 and US$50,000, and about six man months of labour.

Of Savings

There's a very big difference between the median price, according to the graphic, of US$100,000 for a comfortable house in Dallas, Texas, and the reasonable cost of US$50,000 for a comfortable house in Dallas, Texas. If you build your own small house simply and economically, that's a saving of at least US$50,000. To put it differently, for a Texan on median income, it's a saving of two whole years salary.

That's a lot.

It's even more in more highly valued areas of the US, since the price of 'building lots' doesn't vary nearly as much across the country as the price of completed houses.

If you can save that much, you may not need a loan. If you do need a loan, you'll need a much smaller loan, which you'll be able to pay off much more quickly and with much less stress. Furthermore, because your house cost less you are much less exposed to the risk of  rising interest rates, and, if house prices around you fall, of negative equity. You're at much less risk of foreclosure in the event of unemployment. Because you're under less stress, your health is likely to be better. And finally, as your smaller house is cheaper to heat and cheaper to tax, not only do you save on mortgage interest but you also save on other running costs. Win, win, win.

Of Reason

So if people in the US (and the same very much applies here in Scotland, too) could live comfortably in far cheaper houses than they do now, under far less financial stress than they do now, why don't they? The old myth - which I suppose some people still believe - is that a house is a safe investment, that buying a house is a good way to get richer. The other certain issue is status, the display of wealth, conspicuous consumption. People want to be seen to be successful, to be doing well, and I think this is perhaps especially so in the US. A big house is at least partially a way of advertising your success, and choosing a noticeably smaller house would perhaps be seen as 'being a failure'. That certainly seems to be the angle that Quicken Loans, sponsors of the 'infographic', are playing on.

But the housing crash of 2007-2008 should surely have shaken people out of the belief that houses are a safe bet. Of course, salesmen will be saying, now, that after the heavy falls of the past few years, they're bound to rise. They aren't. As I've shown, the current prices are about 200% - or more - of the reasonable cost. Ultimately, the price must fall to the reasonable cost, especially in the US where land is not inherently at a premium. That's the nature of the capitalist market. If you thought the crash of 2007-2008 was bad, baby, you ain't seen nothing yet.