Market-rate construction purposely, continually raises prices & rents. Market-rate developers, and their investors, stop building when prices stabilize. So, increasing market-rate supply does NOT make housing affordable: quite the opposite. At the same time, we're destroying livability, and nature.

Lookout Eugene-Springfield@lookout-es.bsky.social · last yr.

‘Construction should be shaped around existing trees’ By Greg Bryant buff.ly/tYpTfoJ

Local self-sufficiency is an important part of an ecological civilization. The Urban Farm at the University of Oregon in Eugene has survived 50 years. Its students learn to grow food in an urban setting. Here's the project's founder, Richard Britz in 1995: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix86...

The Urban Farm - some history

YouTube video by Rain Magazine

youtube.com

Saint Kelp Forest.

This DeepSeek moment is NOT like Sputnik. That's a narrow nationalist perspective. This is more like the late '90s LoBoS moment (Lots of Boxes on Shelves), where small startups with free software (GNU/Linux on cheap PCs) could compete with tech giants and their impossibly expensive racked servers.

Adaptive building includes sensitivity to local materials, in this case flint & brick. This was the closest thing to a short explainer that Christopher Alexander and I filmed in 1995. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTfl...

Adaptation - with Christopher Alexander - part one: Adapting to the Environment or "Flint & Brick"

YouTube video by urbanology

youtube.com

A corollary to this video short: protect buildings that have survived a long time. Put them in trusts or public ownership: for their history, their embodied carbon, and to keep places out of the hands of the rentier class, so they're genuinely affordable. www.youtube.com/shorts/lNsn4...

Christopher Alexander on lowering student housing rents

YouTube video by urbanology

youtube.com

A new lecture by architect Christopher Alexander from 1995, now shown for the first time. 90 minutes of philosophy in action, as he wrestles with complex issues on a real building site, and with questions from an audience of mostly students. www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8wP...

Christopher Alexander Lecture 1995 London

YouTube video by urbanology

youtube.com