Build your own eco-community!

Do you ever feel like you are never going to buy that dream house of yours? What is your idea of a dream house, an isolated mansion on a hilltop somewhere with amazing views?

Lately, I have been thinking that it would be great to gather a few close friends and try to make something together. We could all pitch in to make it come to life, the cooperation of many minds and some sweat.

I had set myself the goal of owning a house by the age of 30. As the deadline draws closer (my birthday is in two months), and after looking around a bit in the San Francisco Bay Area, this goal seems almost impossible! I could get discouraged (which is easy), or I could get even. Well, not really even - but I could think outside the box a bit.

Most people my age who can afford to buy a house are earning a ton of money or their family helps them out by co-signing. I sadly fall into neither of those categories. I will just have to make it happen by involving other people. And that could lead to some amazing things, including having fun in a dynamic environment!

Communes, you say? This may sound like a “back to the earth” hippy idea, but so what? Maybe the hippies had some ideas right. It’s not the idea, but the execution of it to meet your OWN needs, that is important.

I sense a deep unsettled feeling in my generation that something is askew. It is very hard to put this into words, let alone speak for a whole generation, but I think we are all searching for something that we haven’t quite found yet: a real sense of community. You may say, “but, we have facebook.” I don’t mean community in the sense of an online world, but a REAL community of people who support and care for one another in our local environment on a day-to-day basis.

I challenge everyone out there thinking of buying a dream house to change their paradigm of what a perfect living situation is. We are already separated so much by technology and cars, shouldn’t our homes be a nourishing and social place? For a lot of us, the home become a reclusion, where we hide away.

For the past few months, I have had my eye on the affordable, high-quality and attractive designs of pre-fabricated modular homes, like Michelle Kaufmann Designs [http://www.mkd-arc.com/]. The benefits are many, including quick construction, higher quality building techniques and the most cutting-edge green technology already integrated into the design. It is as fun as Lego as the houses practically “snap” together.

MKD has a product called the mkLoft ™, a 2-bedroom 1350-2115 ft2 loft space that would be perfect for -but not limited to - more dense living areas. These big, semi-detached lofts simply fit together in a line and the more you put together, the cheaper each one gets. Each mkLoft ™ costs only $372,845 installed, including foundation preparation and everything. Not bad for a cutting-edge green building that will save you tons of money in the long-run, not to mention high resale values in the future.

This is only one idea.

The main point is that we need to start thinking differently about what we aspire to in our lives and how we structure our future. Our generation will perhaps see some of the biggest changes ever in the history of modern society. It is up to us to reconfigure the status quo more in line with our values. The key word of the next century is going to be: LOCAL. No longer can we live side by side in obscurity. We need to get out of our comfort zone and foster the communities in our direct vicinity.

For a cool blog about green living, visit Michelle Kaufmann's blog [http://blog.michellekaufmann.com/].