Disaster Housing: Solutions Conceived by the Hexayurt Project

Vinay Gupta of the Hexayurt Project has done much work in the area of emergency housing, something I have explored in some postings here at Bubbleconomics — see “MSF’s ‘Plug and Play Hospital’ in Haiti,” “Haiti Disaster: Housing for When the Bubble Pops,” and “Where will people live after the Big Bubble pops?“ Gupta articulates [...]

MSF’s ‘Plug and Play Hospital’ in Haiti

Yesterday I was discussing the potential value of rapidly-deployable emergency housing in disasters — see “Haiti Disaster: Housing for When the Bubble Pops.” Today, BoingBoing published a fascinating interview with Laurent Dedieu, logistics supervisor for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, aka Doctors Without Borders), about the inflatable hospital the organization has deployed in Haiti. (See “Haiti: [...]

Haiti Disaster: Housing for When the Bubble Pops

Seeing the devastating effects on the lives of the people in Port au Prince, Haiti, in the wake of the recent earthquake emphasizes the potential value of emergency housing solutions for recovery. In such a disaster, survivors are thrust into chaos and forced to live in unstable, unsanitary conditions, seeking out housing any way they [...]

Heartlessness in Hard Times

Naked Capitalism ran an interesting item today about a family who was looking for help dealing with unreasonableness they encountered in dealing with Bank of America. Today’s post was actually Part 2 of an account of this family’s problems since the main wage-earner lost his job — you can read it all at “Debt Stress [...]

‘The whole economy is a pyramid scheme’

That was a quote I picked up from the recently-posted trailer for a documentary called Collapse, which features the ideas of Michael Ruppert, an independent journalist who predicted the current financial crisis in his newsletter From the Wilderness. The movie opens in theaters Nov. 6, 2009. From the trailer I picked up an interesting quote [...]

Where will people live after the Big Bubble pops?

If the Big Bubble proposition turns out to be true, the world could be faced with hundreds of millions or even billions of people homeless or under-housed. Where might people live if they lose their incomes and can’t pay rents and mortgages? Some might have the ability to live off the land, join with relatives, [...]