Trying to follow

From The Suburban Christian

American houses are larger by far than those in other societies - the average size of an American single-family home has increased from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,329 square feet today. The typical American has 718 square feet of living space per person, compared to 442 square feet in Canada and just 170 square feet in Japan.

I currently live in a house (2 units in a triplex, think of it as a big house with an outdoor hallway) with 9 other people. Our home is about 2100 sq. ft. total space, averaging 233 sq. ft./ per person. Two of the 9 are small children, you decided if that’s more or less impeding on others space.

It’s interesting because a lot of people who come to visit and see our place often comment that we have a lot of space, and there is some truth to that. 2100 sq. ft. is much bigger then any apartment we’ve lived in. Even just the common areas are much bigger then our old apartments, however, on a square feet per person basis, we have much less then most people. Do we have more space or less?

I wonder if people often respond with the comment that we have a lot of space because their idea of community is being trapped in a small place with no room for privacy. That seems to be one of the common response people give to us when we talk about community. “I could never do that, I need my privacy.” “We need our family time.” “My alone time is important.” The responses and excuses go on and on.
It’s funny because you often want to reply, “I value privacy, alone time, and family time too!” Community isn’t as evasive as it’s made out to be.

I’ve said before that it’s all a matter of boundaries. We are taught by our culture that appropriate boundaries for a married couple is their own front door, bathroom and kitchen. Families might even need their own fence, with a yard and play things. Yet, the majority of the worlds couples and families are lucky if they even have a separate room! It’s time we consider changing our expectations of appropriate boundaries. I feel blessed we can have our own private bedroom, but I’m totally open and fine with sharing a bathroom, living room, kitchen and front door with others.

What are your boundaries? How much space do you really need?

The Conversation about housing got my wheels turning and I started thinking about different ways we might live creatively outside the box of what we are currently used to in our culture. I’m gonna write a few things this week about just ideas I’ve had of ways to live out our convictions creatively. This is the first.

Instead of taking out huge Mortgages and taking years to pay them off and effectively paying three times the cost of our houses, we should pay each others mortgages. I’m not quite sure how this would work as traditionally we all want a house and we want it now, not later. But really think about it.
If you could pay cash for your house today, then over the course of the next 30 years you could take what you would have spent in interest to the bank and give it to some wonderful cause you believe in. As one person or family this doesn’t quite seem possible, but collectively it’s not as difficult.
What if five or ten families got together and decided that each year they would take all the money they could muster and pay off one persons mortgage (assuming they already have one). Over that time the pay-off would speed up exponentially as a persons house is paid off and they no longer have a monthly payment themselves. By the end of the time (maybe ten years max) everyone has a house completely paid off and they are able to do a world of good with the rest of the money.

Or, what if folks lived communally in a house, that was fully paid off. And then they pooled their resources and were able to buy one house a year, which a family would move into and start a communal living opportunity for others to follow a similar pattern.

There are some assumptions I’m making here. You can’t be living paycheck to paycheck, nor can you be living just below your income, you need to make some radical life changes. Of course, those are things you should have done even before you bought a house to begin with.

Here’s a brief (I didn’t have much time) example…

So you’ve got five families, with differing incomes. The goal is for each to buy a $100,000 house. If they all contribute 25% of their income to a pot it would take 11 to accumulate $500,000 (enough for each family to have a house). If they lived on just $16,000 a year they’d have enough in 5 years.
The “5 Year House” column is just showing what cost of a house they could pay off in five years if they were putting 25% of their income to the house.
And the “Years to 100K” column shows how many years it would take each family to actually accumulate $100k if they were doing it themselves (by which time their house cost would be double if they were doing their own mortgage).

Of course these are simple numbers not taking into account other housing costs, inflation, etc, but hopefully you get the idea (or maybe your totally lost).

Any math geeks out there want to help me make more sense of something like this?

Today is Anti-Slavery Day.

I’ve begun a collaboration with Josh Brown to raise some awareness on Corporate Responsibility. Josh started out last Monday by highlighting the perils of L.L. Bean and giving some reasons why you don’t want to make that your favorite clothing store. One critique from commenter’s was that Josh hadn’t provided an alternative of a “good” company. Enter Good Cop. Each Monday, Josh and I will post about companies in related fields, he’ll post the bad company, I’ll post the good one.

This week we are talking Tech. There aren’t a lot of outstanding companies out there currently, so I’ll be highlighting a handful of areas and different companies. Head over to iamjoshbrown.com for the other company.

This is not primarily to highlight Dell, but it’ll get some airtime at the end of the post. The truth is the technology industry has a lot of shadiness going on when it comes to ethical production. You thought sweatshops were just for clothing and coffee, sorry. Most of the big names have received some heat for some sort of ethical issue, but amidst all of it, there are a few small companies that are branching out in the niche of “eco-friendly.”

• GreenISP is a UK based (and available, sorry USA) Internet Service Provider doing things differently:
  

  We travel to our solar powered offices on public transport and we plant trees to offset Co2 emissions

• Community Mail is attempting to provide free email that supports the same values you do.
• Another area a lot of companies have carved out an eco-friendly niche is in the area of web hosting. A number of companies are choosing to power their servers and power stations by wind and solar power. TreeHugger provides a nice list.
• There is one company, NEC, who seems to be leading the way in making eco-friendly computers.
• It’s not a product you can buy, but I’ve got to mention the One Laptop Per Child project since we are talking about technology.
• And supposedly LG has a gas powered laptop of sorts.

But that’s enough about eco-friendly options in technology, and time to talk about what to do when it comes to buying computers and other gadgets. This is tough because a lot of companies have bad raps from HP, Toshiba, Sony and on. But from my research, the best way to go is Dell.
First, let me quickly explain how to choose companies in a bushel of bad apples. If you can, buy used. This goes from thrift stores to ebay, if it’s a corrupt industry, try and remain in the second tier. But, if you must buy new, then it’s best to buy from the company that you feel is ethically doing the best, even if it’s not great. Especially when your intentional about it (write a letter or tell a manager), you send the message that when you hear about bad business you won’t shop there, but you will support efforts to ethical business.

Dell is a good candidate to support for two reasons.

1. Dell has been one of the leaders in the computer industry at addressing the e-waste problem. Dell adopted the Computer TakeBack Campaign in the summer of 2004. They haven’t done the best job of using more disposable material for their computers, but they are ahead of many of the competitors.
2. Dell’s rap sheet is less long then it’s competitors. When compared to Sony, Toshiba, Apple, and Microsoft, Dell seems to be doing quite well.

Responsible Shopper gives this as their bottom line for Dell:

take action to support the work of the Computer TakeBack Campaign, the work of which contributed to Dell’s recycling commitments. Keep the pressure on Dell to fulfill its newly stated sustainability goals.

Sources: Responsible Shopper and Knowmore.org

Don’t forget to stop by Josh Brown’s website for the other half of Corporate Responsibility Monday’s look at Tech.

Richard turned me on to a great comic that presents in a fun way a Consistent Ethic of Human Life.

Check it Out.

I wish there were more people of all trades, who would begin to use their creative to promote the values they believe in through positive outlets.