Affordable, high-quality housing is a key component of healthy communities, but despite significant public investment, housing is becoming increasingly hard to find for many Americans. This scarcity is the result of many, interrelated social, economic, and technical elements. The Open Home Project is an open-source research and design effort, formed with the goal of bringing together a varied group of collaborators to study and implement new approaches to housing and infrastructure development. We believe that an expansive exploratory approach can bring more players and perspectives to the table, revealing opportunities to address these interrelated challenges. All of the research, ideas, and designs we generate will be released under a Creative Commons license.
The main objectives of the Open Home Project are to: produce affordable, high-quality housing and deploy it where it is needed; test methods of integrating energy, water, and sanitation infrastructure into housing developments such that they supplement grid capabilities under normal conditions and are capable of sustained independent operations in the event of a grid-disrupting event; work with municipal partners to analyze how these developments could impact district, and eventually, city-level performance and resilience; and finally, broadly distribute the results of our research and facilitate collaboration between a wide variety of partners.
These complex issues are being taken on with perspectives from many different fields such as architecture, landscape architecture, law, and government to provide real solutions to the housing crisis. It is important to enable more people to live together, while using less resources, and it will takean equally broad set of design solutions that varies in scale from the house itself, the infrastructure that supports it, as well as changes in financial and legal structures surrounding land use and ownership to lead to a better future for all people and the environment.
