Retrofitting Housing
Most approaches to constructing housing are contributing to the climate crisis. In response, there are a range of efforts to reduce the environmental impacts of housing, including agitating for legislative changes, demonstrating the feasibility of rural off-grid communities, ensuring that the new-apartments being built for higher-density living are constructed in sustainable ways, and living more collaboratively. For some detailed examples, see the case studies Anitra Nelson has offered to help demonstrate that “small is necessary and, with sharing, feasible”.
As part of this broader movement, we need to be using the housing stock that is already available. The construction of these houses consumed massive amounts of energy and water when built, so replacing them with new eco-builds may create more problems then it solves. Fortunately, there are compelling arguments that retrofitting suburban houses can offer some of the best bang-for-buck actions for reducing house-level climate emissions. For examples of this argument, see the range of examples of retrofitting houses in the temperate suburbs of Naarm, detailed by David Holmgren in Retrosuburbia.
In the context of housing, retrofitting takes what already exists and revives it in response to the changing conditions, such as adapting our built environment and technologies to make them fit for new purposes. For example, double-glazing the windows, adding more insulation to an existing house, and increasing the space for gardening, are ‘retrofits’ that can dramatically reduce the energy required to heat or cool the house.
Given that most existing housing was constructed in ways that are not fit for the purpose of providing shelter from the increasingly extreme weather conditions, retrofitting also offers an avenue for improving the housing options of more people. For example, if done in consultation with existing communities, retrofitting existing suburban properties may also reduce the risk of contributing to gentrification and displacement associated with expensive new builds.
The potential impact of retrofitting can be illustrated by comparing it to the likely alternative that most suburban houses will be demolished and rebuilt. In a some areas re-building may be needed to help increase housing-density, ideally by creating more environmentally sustainable that support more people to live in smaller personal spaces by sharing more of the resources needed to meet collective needs.
Unfortunately, given the profit-driven motivations of developers, the most likely replacement build for most suburban houses will be a small collection of single-family townhouses. While this may help increase the suburban block occupancy from the ~3 people in the stand-alone house to ~10 people across 4 town-houses, the expectation that each town-house is self-contained has significant environmental impacts. For example, most townhouses provide each dwelling their own garage off a shared driveway - covering the ground in paving. This paving is likely to have multiple negative impacts: it can reduce ground water absorption which can increase the severity of flash floods; it will increase the urban heat-island effect by replacing tree-cover; and it tends to reduce space for gardening which might otherwise have contributed to networks of urban food security.
Rather than duplicate facilities for every household, RAD housing encourages sharing key resources in ways that reduces the space required to increase occupancy. For instance, in addition to the baseline retrofits, RAD housing encourages adding additional living spaces to the main house during the retrofit stage and building a secondary dwelling on the property. This approach can increase the occupancy from the ~3 people of a typical household to 8-10 people across 2 dwellings that are built to maximise the land available for gardening and support a range of different approaches to living collectively.