The market
The capital required for social housing and affordable worldwide is estimated at $ 3,000 billion. Investments in housing for people with special needs in 2010 varied between 300 and $ 500 billion. Although the data remain dispersed and difficult to compare on a global scale, the market is growing and investment performance is greater than that of most commercial loans. As social housing benefits from both subsidies and public guarantees, its financial performance has attracted private investments.
Social housing programs in Brazil give an overview of the extent of demand worldwide. By 2014, Brazil will build 2 million additional social housing units at an average cost of 15,000 euros, which represents an injection of public funds of 30 billion euros. However, demand in Brazil is estimated at 5.6 million housing units, so that even with this extraordinary effort, more than 60% remain without housing. This creates a lot of space for private initiatives in addition to government action. South Africa, at the end of apartheid in 1994, was declared to build one million additional dwellings, today meeting only 14 % of housing needs, which also leaves a long way to go.
Investment in social housing is the only real estate construction sector which is characterized by global growth with an attractive return on investment (king). While a commercial real estate promoter would expect an invested capital return of 25 to 35 %, the housing programs supported by the general state offer only 10 %. However, this yield far exceeds that of other low -risk investments and, therefore, these construction programs attract a flow of investists in search of stable and safe yields. The Brazilian government derives its injection of funds into social housing. The state’s commitment to alleviate demand, combined with the significant subsequent increase in the value of land thanks to the conversion of slums and marginal land into new communities, makes it possible to pay generous dividends to external investors. Real estate capital gains allow local communities to become "bancables" while the yields offered to foreign investors exceed all market standards.
Innovation
Affairs is defined as the median price of a house divided by median income. A multiple of 3 or less is considered affordable, and a multiple of 5 or more is unaffordable. Hong Kong is the most expensive city with a multiple of 11.4. Architects and urban planners have spent a lot of time and efforts to the design of affordable houses, mainly focusing on the following elements the reduction in costs, in particular the elimination of labor through systems of prefabricated construction. In Brazil, social houses still cost 15,000 euros per unit, while in India, capital investment in a house can be as low as 4,500 euros. This minimum house for an Indian government stands next to the slums, but it is unlikely that it will meet the basic requirements tolerated by a Brazilian. One of the main problems is that social housing consumes enormous volumes of concrete and cement, while the roofs are generally made of zinc sheets. In addition to doubtful comfort, this is a major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Simon Velez, Colombian architect, and Marcelo Villegas, a remarkable engineer, both benefited from the great pioneering work of Oscar Hidalgo, master of bamboo architecture. They realized that when the Spanish colonized the high Andean highlands of Colombia and Ecuador, they did not meet rainwife, but rather discovered massive forests of bamboo dominated by Guadua Angustifolia, a giant herb which could produce for seventy years up to sixty poles of 25 meters per year. Bamboo is an excellent building material, as evidenced by hundreds of colonial houses of +200 years, which is still minor compared to the oldest Chinese bamboo structures called 3000 years old! So Simon and Marcelo studied how to make bamboo junctions to "dance to the rhythm of the earth". They go on a trip to combine beauty and safety. Simon understood that bamboo needs to be protected against the sun and rain, while Marcelo designed an ingenious assembly technique, filling the bamboo connected by an iron rod with cement injected by a small hole. When Professor Dr ING. Klaus Steffens of the German Institute of Studies of Non -Destructive Stability, attached to the Technical University of Bremen, carried out the same trials on the Zeri pavilion built in Manizales, as he did for the Reichstag (German parliament) In Berlin at the request of Sir Norman Foster, it was so impressed that he signed up to obtain a building permit for this natural material and this innovative technique. The Zeri pavilion of the Universal 2000 exhibition has shown that bamboo is not only a vegetable steel that dances with the earth, it is as beautiful at the same time as it fixes carbon dioxide. These are multiple advantages that resemble those of the blue economy.The first cash flow
Simon quickly converted the success of his drawings into social housing programs in response to the earthquake that struck his native coffee region (EJE CAFERO) by donating drawings to local government for free use. Sixty-five bamboo posts are enough to build a house of 65 square meters on two floors with a huge balcony and a large overhang. This building costs less than $ 15,000 to build, and while the majority of the population would consider bamboo as a symbol of poverty, this house with a balcony - symbol of the upper middle class - transformed the model construction into a very house desired. Ten years after these pioneering buildings scattered throughout Latin America, bamboo houses have become one of the most promising breakthroughs in the design of neutral carbon buildings, both for the rich and for the poor.The opportunity
Simon and Marcelo never took the trouble to patent their inventions, they have rather shared their ideas freely, while spending a lot of time with workers who often cannot read or write, to transfer their knowledge to pragmatic techniques to build . The 41 bamboors who built in five months with their hammers and their chisels The Zeri pavilion in Germany, all returned home with a master or apprentice diploma in carpentry. As this bamboo pavilion was a first in Germany, and such a masterpiece, it must have had its masters. During the following decade, thousands of buildings emerged worldwide using this open source technique as a tool for architectural innovation summarized in the book "Grow Your Own House".
The Japanese company Taiheiyo Cement then added a roofing and wall system to this sustainable design portfolio based at 75 % on bamboo and 25 % on cement, pressed together to form bamboo/carbon caps which are now Widely used in high -speed rail stations in Japan. Today, more than a billion people live in bamboo houses and, for the first time, social housing does not have to replace natural building materials with concrete, cement and zinc. Rather, there is a competitive option to engage in social housing which is a net carbon well thanks to another invention (see case 45) which gives structural bamboo a long functional life. Better still, these conceptions have led to major reforestation programs.
The Taiheiyo Cement bamboo sheet project required the planting of 2,000 hectares of bamboo in the surrounding high lands of Jakarta, in Indonesia, which are continuously harvested to provide the 2.5 mm long fibers. According to recent estimates, 500,000 hectares of sterile lands have already been reforested in bamboo, without any subsidy being necessary. Although this adds jobs to the market and carbon to the equation, few people realize that bamboo forests temperate the heat island effect with temperatures up to ten lower degrees (pandas and pandas Tigers know where to hide from heat), and contribute to hydrological cycles with the spontaneous appearance of coves that reform. A social housing program that provides additional drinking water and lowers earth temperature is proof of the power of the blue economy.
