Does Your American Dream Include Owning a Smart Home? Now You Can Build One Yourself

Back in May, we got pretty excited about the Honda Smart Home, an experimental house that’s currently sitting on the campus of the University of California, Davis that’s so energy efficient that it pumps out more power than it uses. Translation? This means a homeowner could potentially make money off the energy it sold back to the power company.
Naturally, the public (and many of our own readers) wondered how they could get in on this prime piece of green real estate. Well, guess what? Honda has gone and pulled a Tesla (so to speak), opening up its smart home plans for all.
“Honda is publicly posting the building plans, architectural and mechanical drawings, furniture specs and materials associated with the project, including the raw 2D and 3D CAD data,” the carmaker said in a company release to NationSwell. “Our hope is that interested individuals across the world are able to use these plans as a starting point to create their very own sustainable homes.”
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So what’s so amazing about this house? As we mentioned previously, the home draws its power from renewable sources such as solar panels and has geothermal heating and cooling — so wave bye-bye to sky-high air conditioning bills. The Honda home slashes water consumption to a third of most American homes and the amount of CO2 that it releases annually is 11 tons less than conventional homes with cars. And because Honda is behind it all, there’s garage space for a Honda Fit electric vehicle that gets charged from the house’s solar power.
“Many of the people and companies we’ve met with wanted to know how they could incorporate what we’ve demonstrated into their own projects, or build upon what we’ve learned in their own research,” wrote Honda Smart Home project leader Michael Koenig in a blog post. “We want nothing more than to facilitate this effort, so today, we’re releasing a batch of files the get the process rolling.”
Those interested should visit the Honda Smart Home website to download the complete mechanical and architectural drawings.
Looks like the house of tomorrow will come sooner than we expect.
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Which Celebrity Is Building Green Homes For Native American Tribes?

When Brad Pitt isn’t jet-setting from one exotic movie location to another and being a dad of six, he actually has some time to run a non-profit.
His organization, Make It Right, is most notable for building 150 sustainable (though slightly controversial) homes in Louisiana’s Lower Ninth Ward post-Hurricane Katrina.
Now, they’re making it right at Fort Peck, Montana, home to the Sioux and the Assiniboine nations. According to an announcement, the non-profit has partnered with the tribes to build 20 super green homes for residents whose income levels are at or below 60 percent the area’s mean income, with a percentage of the homes reserved for seniors and disabled veterans. Additionally, through a Low Income Housing Tax Credit Rent-to-Own program, residents will actually buy their homes after 15 years of renting.
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These LEED Platinum, solar-powered homes will have three or four bedrooms and two or three bathrooms each, and built with certified Cradle-to-Cradle vendors, which means they’re developed responsibly and use reclaimed materials. It’s certainly a big improvement from some of the current homes on the reservation, which are rife with black mold and structural problems, resulting in high utility bills due to inefficient design.
The design team includes Make It Right staff, architects from Architecture for Humanity, Graft, Living Homes, Method Homes, Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative and William McDonough + Partners and low-income homeownership experts from Neighborworks America.
During the planning stages, organizers met with family members and community leaders about their needs and vision for these new homes, as well how the builders can preserve the culture of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes (such as doorways that face the east or north and using tribally significant colors).
“We are enthusiastic about these home designs that reflect traditional life ways while exemplifying deep green public-impact architecture,” said Architecture for Humanity architect Nathaniel Corum.
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Fort Deck, America’s ninth-largest Native American reservation, has more than 6,000 tribe members living on the 2-million-acre reservation. Currently, more than 600 people are waiting for housing, which means overcrowding is all too common.
“We hear stories from people who have nine families living in a five bedroom home and take ‘sleeping shifts’ to share the limited beds,” writes Make It Right communications director Taylor Royle. “Most homes are smaller, one or two bedrooms. We [met] a woman who shares a two bedroom home with her elderly mother and her brother’s family — she and her three children sleep on the floor in the living room.”
Besides the housing shortage, the Washington Post reported that the unemployment is more than 50 percent, about three out of every four children live in poverty, and there are widespread problems with alcohol and methamphetamines in the community.
It will take much more than building these green homes to fix the reservation’s problems, but it takes steps like these to “make it right.” The project, which will start construction this year, will also include a sustainable master plan for the entire reservation.
DON’T MISS: Here’s a Team of Students Who Built a Green Home That Can Take On Tornadoes

Want a Free House? Write Two Paragraphs to Win It

It’s like a writer-in-residence program, only permanent. A clever new nonprofit called Write-a-House is giving away homes in Detroit to a select few writers, in the hopes that it’ll entice them to come to the city and stay.

The goal is to support writers in need and, ultimately, to bolster Detroit’s growing creative community. At the same time, Write-a-House hopes to revitalize Detroit’s neighborhoods: it purchased abandoned homes in a high-vacancy part of town and it’s working with another nonprofit, Detroit Young Builders, which gives at-risk youth training in construction, to renovate the houses before giving them away.

Low-income writers of any stripe — journalists, authors, poets, etc. — and from anywhere are eligible to apply for the residency. The winners, chosen by a panel of literary types, will be asked to finish the renovations, live in their house for two years, blog about it for Write-a-House and actively participate in the local literary community. Then, they’ll get the deed.

The first three houses under renovation are all within walking distance of each other in a working-class, mostly Bangladeshi and African-American neighborhood north of Hamtramck. If all goes as planned, Write-a-House will fix up another three homes in another neighborhood the following year and then do it all over again the year after that.

“Our long, long term goal involves building a literary colony in Detroit,” Write-a-House says on its website. Who knows? Maybe years from now kids will be studying the Detroit Literary Renaissance in English class.

Treehugger’s Nirvana Opens in Washington State

If your idea of paradise is a close-knit, carbon neutral, bike-sharing community, I’ve got a deal for you. A new planned community on Bainbridge Island, Washington called Grow Community has it all built in from the get-go.There are apartments and single-family homes, community gardens, and all the pleasures of Seattle just a short ferry ride away—even a community car-sharing program. Of course, most of us live in places that weren’t built green from the ground up, but Grow Community gives us a working model of what’s possible with time, knowledge and intention. Every town can be a little greener in ways that add up to big quality-of-life improvements. If you like what you see, check out the One Planet Living program that helped shape Grow Community.