extremegreenvillage.com

 

I’m doing a business plan for a large scale environmentally conscious and demonstration project to be replicated but improved thousands of times throughout the world.

I’ve named it the Extreme Green Village. It was originally called,  the Extreme Green Cooperative Housing Idea Project.

What will happen when a 1000 committed Green Coop Members live and work together?

It is called Extreme because this Project will do Green things other Green Housing Projects have not done. And do it at a very low cost. (With sweat equity)

It is a Green Cooperative because being effectively Green by its nature is Cooperative.

When finished, this Green Cooperative will be a great value for the Coop members. The Project will use an uncommon but very low cost and long lasting construction method called compressed earth block.

The Project will become self-supporting by generating income so that in the long run there will not be Coop fees, and extra money will be available to pay real estate taxes and to constantly improve the Cooperative.

Look at the deal here. (more on ‘The Deal’ later) Your mortgage will be much less than rent for what you will receive!!!! Vastly reduced rents for the people who start the Project from the beginning. No Coop fees, no real estate taxes and in the long run, money for new Green approaches and inventions all in exchange for putting your best efforts for a limited number of hours a week being a help to the Green Coop.

Depending on the size of the homes the Cooperative members want to make, the Project will have 300 to 450 Green-Burbia town houses and 200 to 400 Green City Living units.

The Green Coop will also have 650 or so storage units open to the public but also available to members, one unit apiece, at a reduced rate. These will be the first structures built. It might be $50 per month for one unit per member and $100 per month for non-members.

Also there will be 200+ Coop owned Green-Burbia town houses and Green City Living units that will be used as hotel rooms for the Convention Center and as rental units. 

The purpose of these rental units is as a service to the Coop members. In the beginning, the rental units will be where Coop Members can live on the property until they build their own home. (I’m looking at making this either a very low cost rent or free rent as an added incentive for the first Coop Members to thank them for being the first Coop Members.)

Building small.

Many of the Coop Members may reevaluate how large or small a housing unit they would like to live in. Many times people buy houses with extra bedrooms and yet only use them a few weeks a year if that. The rental units can be used for visiting relatives (at reduced Coop Member rates for the first number of days rental or even as a barter for hours of Coop work completed.), and also for interested visiting Professionals, Coop people from other states, artists, many different forms of advisors (social workers, business people and other experts), entertainers etc.  

There is another very important reason for Green Coop owned rental units. It can be used as rental housing for interested people who’d like to join (at market rental rates). Once the whole Project is built, new Coop Members would live in the Green Coop owned apartments as a requirement for a 90-day pre-acceptance period for Coop Membership and it gives them time to choose from the housing units for sale. 

Even though most people will work well with others on the Coop, there will be a very small percentage of those that will not be good Coop Members to everyone else. This 90-day living on the property and mutual feeling out process will eliminate most of the peoples whose personalities and behavior might damage the Coop.

Obviously, even after the 90-day pre-acceptance period, someone who is stealing, bullying other Coop Members or any other anti-social behavior won’t be tolerated.

But there is one last point I want to mention. Individual freedom and liberty should always be more important than popularity. I don’t want people to be afraid of acting like individuals. I just don’t want people dominating everyone else all work shift long.

During the contribution shift or work shift or whatever you want to call it, it may be necessary to control your personality. You’ll have to change your behavior during the work shift if it’s not positive and helpful for all the different personalities working together.

The goal is to get the work done and make it as enjoyable as possible for everyone.

When you’re not working, follow your dreams, be friends with whomever you want to be friends with and live your life. 

I’m going to say this next statement more than once.

It’s the Coop Members that make the positive Coop environment which enhance the day-to-day experiences of those living and visiting on the property.

The Coop Members must focus and work on making the experience of building and maintaining this project, an interesting and positive adventure for themselves and for each other.

The real determining factor as to whether the Coop Members are being successful or not, is when people outside the project, people who are not planning to be members, will want to volunteer to contribute their interest and their effort.

I plan to hold reunions on the Project.

In Austin and the vicinity, I will contact every gym teacher, every Scout Leader, every Trainer, every Sports Coach, every Leader and ask them if they would like to have a reunion of their old team or work group on my site. Build a house in a day. Hopefully I will learn from them. The Trainers, the Coaches and the motivators.

What kinds of people do I want on the Project?

I want artists and individualists to live on the property. I want Don Quixote’s that go after the windmills. I want eco activists to flourish here. I want crafts people, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, social workers, teachers, musicians, doctors, lawyers, web designers, jugglers, and all kinds of people that are driven by things bigger than themselves! Or people that simply like people and want to make a quality life here.

How can I explain to you the kind of people I don’t want to be on the project? As an example I’ll use someone famous. Simon Cowell from American Idol. Most of you probably know of him from the American Idol Show. He is that acerbic judge that makes the contestants cry. Imagine he was working on a shift with a group of you when you are building the Project. He may be right that someone is doing something wrong but for this project its foolish to make any of that personal or hurtful.

This project needs Leaders that understand the direction we are going in and who can be supportive when they are teaching others to go in that direction.

What will happen when all these Green people that is truly living Green; lives together, works together and is motivated to be Green together. It boggles my mind.   

I mention that being EFFECTIVELY Green, by its nature is Cooperative. That’s why I chose the Cooperative structure.

Being Green to me is to do the same things in life that you want to do before being Green, but to do them in a way that doesn’t hurt our environment.

We all know the goals of building Green, lowering the energy requirements for home heating, transportation, electricity, the cost of heating water and water usage etc. Or creating off the grid energy through Solar, wind or Brown’s Gas or hydrogen from water generation, oil from Algae etc.

(The Extreme Green goal is to provide an excess of Green energy to sell to the local grid at a low rate.)

(The Extreme Green goal is to look at the Coop’s transportation needs and to create a simple solution to provide big savings.

Example-Solution-One. The average household goes shopping for staples 2 to 3 times a week. Assuming an 8 mile round trip, and 90% Coop participation, that’s over 10,000 miles of individual driving in exchange for 7 large truckloads preordered to be picked up at the Town Center a week!!! That’s 500,000 miles saved a year!)

(The Extreme Green goal is to buy local and in bulk to save transportation costs, to save money and to support and develop other Green businesses.)

(The Extreme Green goal is to grow green for green. The Project should be able to grow almost all of the fresh herbs and much of the vegetables the Coop Members eat. Low cost to all Coop Members and market price for the surplus.) 

Building Green means lowering water usage and finding ways to reuse water. Compost toilets, grey water for grass and gardens, taking the final rinse from a clothes washing machine run and using it for the first soak in the next washing machine run. (saving 30% of the washing machine water usage!) Collecting rooftop rainwater and storing it in expensive individual buried water storage. 

(The Extreme Green goal is not to have rooftop rainwater collection but entire Project acreage water collection and a much lower cost entire Project water storage (compared to individual rainwater and gray water collection and storage and reuse). The Extreme Green goal is to have 100% water recycling on the property and to produce a large surplus of water to sell to the city at a low rate.)  

Note: Another cost of our inefficient and wasteful normal method of water and sewage treatment that most people don’t know about and is electricity usage. The leading cost of electrical energy for the city of Austin, Texas is for treatment of water and sewage.

 (In addition, the Extreme Green goal is to develop 100% water recycling low cost Coin Laundry and Laundry service at the Town Center (also available to the public).)

(Don’t like washing dishes? In addition, the Extreme Green goal is to develop 100% water recycling Dish Washing service at the Town Center.)

(The Extreme Green goal is not to have reduced flush toilets or to have a shallow, contained, plant growing black-water cesspool system, but instead a waterless urine divergent, feces collection system.)

The Extreme Green Cooperative Housing Project is low cost. 

The Extreme Green Cooperative Housing Project is low cost.  All the other large Green projects, except mine, are not low cost. Or if the per unit cost is low, the size of the units are dollhouse small and with a high square foot cost.

(Note: If you know of a large scale (over 280 units), low cost Green housing project that I’ve missed, please get me an interview with them.)

The reason that my project is going to be low cost is because the construction methods use Compressed Earth Block and because of the sweat equity contributed by the Coop members.

How the Project can save money. How the Project can be lower cost than you imagine!

If enough of the people who want to become Coop members have the construction experience we need, then the project may be built solely from the expertise of Coop members and the cost of building will be lower.

If I can get the Gary Job Core to use the project as a training site, a lot of the work can be done a lot less expensively. And if you didn’t know, the Gary Job has 1500 participants living just 25 miles away in San Marcos and they teach construction fields.

If the Coop members have friends, family members, members of Church groups, members of Clubs, Gym Club memberships, Green organizations, etc. The question to the Coop Members is, ‘How can we interest those people into coming to the site and working just for the experience?’

 It is the responsibility of the Coop Members to make the experience of building an interesting and positive adventure, not only for themselves, but also for those who are not planning on becoming members. Their contribution will be an incredible savings and a way to promote the project.

Again, let me underline that comment.

The Coop Members must focus and work on making the experience of building and maintaining this project, an interesting and positive adventure for themselves and for each other. The real determining factor as to whether the Coop Members are being successful or not, is when people outside the project, people who are not planning to be members, will want to volunteer to contribute their interest and their effort. 

It’s obvious we will contact every organization I’ve mentioned above. Every Church, every Green Organization, every Club, but we won’t stop there.

There are many people all over Austin who are interested in new and different forms of physical exercise. Do you know how many people in the Austin area are members of walking clubs, hiking clubs, running clubs, kayaking, softball, golf, camping, hunting, adventure? Thousands! Just surfing on the Internet, I’ve found two full time organizations that do a fitness boot camp and they both have over ten meetings a day! That’s approximately 600 people in the Austin area just doing fitness boot camp!

What about the colleges? Architecture schools. Psychology and Sociology. What is the Psychology and Sociology of work? Fraternities, Sororities.

Boy scouts, girl scouts, high schools.

What experience are we offering them?

Build a house in a day!!!

Building with compressed earth block is very labor intensive but it is mortar-less! If the foundation blocks are level, all the other blocks are just placed on top, coated with a brushing of a slurry of the same earth and water and fitted closely with a rubber hammer. It only takes a few seconds to lay a block.

A rule of thumb for the compressed earth block construction is that it takes within 20% plus or minus of 10 blocks per square foot of house. So a house that is 1000 square feet would take 10,000 blocks. If it takes 12 seconds to lay a block (and that is slow) and 3 to 5 people to supply the block and move scaffolding and do whatever was necessary to support the layer. 4 to 6 people teams can lay 200+ blocks an hour. Depending on the level of physical fitness and experience of the people directing the work, sometimes it would be faster and sometimes it will be slower, but the point is that many teams could be working on the house at any one time. If 10 teams were working on the house at the same time that would be over 2000 blocks an hour, 5 hours to lay the entire house! Add 3 more hours to make up for breaks and lunch and slower times around windows and doors and adding the roof and 40 to 60 people could build the outside of a townhouse in a day! Remember there are two common windowless walls on each unit.

A High School Football team could build at least three townhouses in a day. I’m sure of it.

Any male or female gym class from a high school could build a townhouse in a day. 

One Coop Member with their extended family could build the outside of a townhouse in a day.

If just 10% of the members of your Church came out to help you, maybe 10 townhouses could be built in a day!

The point is that its up to the Coop Members to use there imagination to work with each other and see how to get people together.

I want the Coop Members to think of this project and getting people excited about it to be like the old-fashioned barn raisings. This Extreme Green Cooperative Housing Project can be a barn raising for the Twenty-first Century!

Years ago a barn raising in some areas of the country would be the social event of the year. And for years after people would go by a house with a barn and they would tell their wife or kids or grandkids, “I helped build that.” And when those people would say, ‘I built that’, they would say it with pride for the rest of their lives.

So it’s not just getting people to work for free. It’s giving them a gift of accomplishment they’ll never forget.

What happens to all the money that will be saved? 

What happens then? The cost of building goes down. That means more money for a better Town Center, with more services for the Coop Members. More money for Solar Power, Wind Power, electric Coop owned vehicles, more for Green education and Green businesses.

One business I want to be on the project is a “Build Your Own Furniture Business”. Making two purpose furniture, like a Murphy Bed. It’s a bookcase or a desk in the daytime and it’s a bed at night. Building kitchen pantries and work tables on wheels so that the kitchen can be moved outside in the summer. Building wardrobes on wheels and breakdown furniture so that moving is quick and easy. You go into the business, and just work for them, doing simple things if you’re new to furniture making and woodwork, slowly learning the skills and being double-checked by a professional.

It can cost thousands to furnish a home but this process using recycled wood and standard fixtures will be much cheaper and it’s designed by you for you.  Don’t trivialize that point. Someone comes into your home and compliments your furniture, you say with pride, “I built that.” “I did that.”  I want that for every Coop Member and even the people who rent on the property.

The Greatest Green Value

I am not trying to build the lowest cost housing project that is possible. Big picture, I’m trying to create the greatest value for each and every future Coop member and make a model for the next project and the next until millions will be benefited.

And on top of this I need to have working on this site be fun! I want people to want to come here and do this work! I want them to work hard, make friends, enjoy themselves and think of their contribution with pride. “I built that.”

Crops for sale.

We will be experimenting, growing different crops for sale, using rooftop gardens and hydroponics. For example, microgreens can be grown in a greenhouse all year long. Each season less than 21 days! In less than 3 inches of compost! 14 to 20 seasons each year! Selling for $3-$5 a pound. That’s 2 square feet per pound! (Coop members would get it for 50 cents per pound or less.)

ANYWAY. I hope this gives you a taste for what I want to do.