Transcript from video

Paul: I’m Paul Caron and I’m a resident of the Earthaven neighborhood which is called the Hut Hamlet

The reason why it’s called the Hut Hamlet… It was originally called the neotribal village, there’s a story behind all that that I’m not gonna tell right now.

Basically when we bought the Earthaven land we had an agreement not to all go off and build our own houses. First, build some community infrastructure and do a site plan and be responsible for our land. So, this started taking a lot longer than we thought it was going to take. People got antsy. They were like “but we have to be on the land how will we ever develop anything if we can’t be on the land?”

So we made a compromise with ourselves. We picked an area and decided to build a kitchen and house for everyone to share. Then build huts around that kitchen and bath house so it’s like a big house with grass and trees in between all the rooms basically. As things went on, we thought “Oh well build these huts and we’ll live in them until the community center is built. Then, we’ll move on to our all on to our personal sites.” Some people actually did that. Then the huts will be available for rental that’s what we thought. But most of the huts got bought up by other people who just wanted the hut style of life, including me.

So what it is, is it’s kind of a prototype, of a unique solution to the affordable housing crisis. That is the way that I put it. Like this house that we’re that I’m sitting on the front porch of is a is a 16-foot yurt. It was a canvas yurt and the canvas sat around for so long that it rotted off and the frame was left.  I covered the frame with insulation sheeting which was industrial waste and put some permanent windows and such in it. I’ve been living here since 2003. Basically I think maybe I spent five thousand dollars counting my own time to build this house. So that’s affordable housing eh?

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