In this sequel to our last episode (“How Can We Create Green Affordable Housing?”), we continue the conversation with Shelley Halstead, executive director of the nonprofit Black Women Build. Conventional wisdom holds that the answer to America’s housing crisis has been—how can we build new homes, build them cheaply, build them fast, and build them at scale? But every new building we put up is a carbon debt—tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We need other strategies. Metropolis editor speaks with Halstead about Black Women Build, which she founded to help Black women purchase rundown houses and learn the skills to rehab the buildings into homes they can live in. Through sheer dint of their labor, women have seen homes that they purchased for $6,000 or $11,000 now be valued at $80,000. It’s a painstaking but thorough way of chipping away at racial and economic inequity, one person and one house at a time.
Resources:
- How Recycling Buildings Could Solve the Urban Housing Crisis: metropolismag.com/sustainability/reuse-urban-housing-crisis
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Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
