The Great Housing Swindle
Off-Grid tells the story of Steve James and his battle to keep a planning commission from seizing his off-grid home. The Register’s description of the software designer who built his own design for a straw and timber off-grid house is a “cheap and cheerful Scottish ecogaff.”
According to The Register:
A 52-year-old software engineer has built a habitable house for just £4,000 - albeit with a lot of hard graft and a certain amount of scavenging.
What warms my heart about the Off-Grid article is how it rambles on about Quakers, Britain and Northern Ireland, unique rights of Russian Kinship domains and the recent rise of eco-villages. Yet all of this background detail is tied together by moral outrage against today’s corporate and bureaucratic gridheads:
Until 150 years ago most people built their own homes. Now we are raised and educated to be completely dependent on the ’services’ of the rigged market in housing. The obstacles to sane, affordable and sustainable housing are entirely political. If you read history, feudalism never ended, it was transformed, commuted to mortgage, disempowerment and the great urban reservations, instead of self-reliance, responsibility and fulfillment.
