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Researchers propose a ‘circular economy’ solution to housing affordability against climate change

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A global housing affordability crisis is underway, so when the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in the U.S. released a report this year highlighting the “disastrous” state of housing affordability for 94 markets — where median home prices far exceed median wages by many times, making housing much more expensive for the current generation of first-time homebuyers than for their parents — it wasn’t surprising. About 1.6 billion people currently need adequate housing, and UN-Habitat, the United Nations’ Human Settlements Programme, says that in just a few years that number could rise to three billion. That means the world will need to build 96,000 affordable homes every day, starting now, to address this problem. Such an effort will require not just addressing the equity of housing, but the sustainable use of materials, tax incentives, zoning policy, manufacturing, and upskilling workforces to adapt to new practices. On this third episode of the Mongabay Explores podcast season on the circular economy — the effort to design goods to be less resource-intensive, from their manufacture to disposal and recycling — Louise Dorignon, a postdoctoral research fellow and housing circularity expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, details a housing reform plan to address sustainability in the most unaffordable housing market in the English-speaking world: Australia. “Our goal was to find out how implementing a circular economy approach can lead to a more sustainable housing system. And we didn’t want to juxtapose sustainability and circular economy as two different things. But instead,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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