- Low-cost housing doesn't have to be substandard.Lost shack image by sylvain lienard from Fotolia.com
Housing is the largest single item on many people's budgets. Particularly in densely populated areas, population pressure raises the value of land and houses and causes costs to rise continuously. Finding an inexpensive way to house yourself and your family can take a lot of pressure off your budget. The first step in this process is determining how much luxury you can live without. The smaller, simpler, and less extravagant your housing situation is, the cheaper it will be. - Straw bale building is a growth industry. Despite the negative image of straw buildings presented by the "Three Little Pigs" story, straw bale construction is in fact quite sturdy, as well as fire resistant. A straw bale house is substantially less expensive than a similar house built of wood or brick, particularly if you build it yourself and save the labor costs. In a straw bale wall, the bales serve both as structure and as insulation, needing only stucco on the inside and outside to be finished. This is a simpler and faster process than the framing, insulating, sheathing, siding and drywalling that are typical of wood framed houses.
- A mobile home is the quintessential cheap housing choice. Although accusations of ugliness are unfortunately true in the case of many mobile homes, there's no question that they are cheap in comparison to real houses. Particularly if you already own a piece of land, you can buy a mobile home and put it on blocks on your land for a small fraction of what it would cost you to build a house. If your mobile home is in a trailer park, you will be paying lot fees in addition to the cost of buying the mobile home, making trailer parks a less frugal option.
- Many innovative designers and architects are recognizing the housing potentials of shipping containers. These steel behemoths cross the seas in the millions and pile up in North America due to the trade imbalance. They can be bought and converted into anything from a primitive shelter to a modernist palace. Multiple containers can have windows and doors cut into them and then be attached in any combination. Transportation costs will add significantly to the expense of dealing with shipping containers, so this option will be less expensive for someone who lives near a port. To be comfortable, a shipping container needs to be insulated and have amenities such as electricity and plumbing installed, but a shipping container house is still likely to be less expensive than a conventionally built home.
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