A brief history of housing

Since the beginning of time, humans have been creating spaces in which to shelter themselves from the elements, animals, and insects. Some prehistoric groups sought caves for refuge. Others built clever spaces from materials that were readily available, such as bone, rock, animal hide, sticks, straw, soil, snow, and ice. These people were familiar with weather patterns and built shelters that would interact with their environment to gain all the benefits that Earth and her solar system could offer. They were using passive solar design eons before it became a catchphrase for “green” building.

The Inuit used ice and snow to build igloos, which could be small and temporary or multi-room structures. With the snow as an insulator, the temperature could be as warm as 20 degrees Celsius inside. The Mongolians traditionally lived in yurts built with wood, which they often obtained through trade, and felt, made from the wool of their flocks. The Indigenous people of the prairies used a similar structure, the teepee, which was a carefully designed, easily transportable home usually built by the women of the tribe. In ancient Rome, builders managed to construct complicated networks of running water and even built apartment complexes, despite lacking equipment that contractors today can’t go without.

Those people thought about their buildings. They didn’t have natural gas and cheap electricity brought to their front doors. They learned how to use the sun’s energy to warm their houses, natural bodies of water to cool them, and the terrain of the environment to achieve other goals. As time went on, pivotal events such as the Industrial Revolution, gradually changed the way we built. Soon building homes was simply a matter of generating a profit.

The collision of capitalism and construction

After the Second World War, men came flooding home from the European front, and the housing market in North America exploded. Entire subdivisions were created almost overnight, with homes being framed in as little as a day. Practices such as passive solar design and careful planning were abandoned to push productivity to the max. These homes gave people a place to live, but at a great cost to their health, and ours. Just the way these buildings were positioned on their lots put them, in most cases, at a huge disadvantage. The sun’s energy is abundant and free and is being tragically wasted.

To make matters worse, the trend of cheap, quickly built homes continues. Production builders are interested in selling their homes, period. Cheap materials such as vinyl siding, thoughtless building practices, and poor design have created huge challenges for us. Houses built in the ‘80s and ‘90s got larger and larger, often resulting in homes of 3,000 square feet or more for only two inhabitants. The envied McMansion has become a symbol of wealth, prosperity and environmental irresponsibility.

Modern mainstream construction materials contain such contaminants as formaldehyde, arsenic, and other chemicals that can cause illness to the inhabitants of the structures that incorporate them. Kitchen cabinets, carpets, paints, adhesives, and other materials are manufactured with cost and production as the main priorities, leaving you with a home or office that is actually harming you. The industry has a term for this leaching of poisons – off-gassing. Many laypeople call it the “new house” (or car) smell. This off-gassing can cause serious health problems, especially for young children and people with respiratory illnesses. With North Americans experiencing cancer at near-epidemic levels, one can only wonder at the role played by our poisonous houses.