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Topic 23. Overcrowding living spaces, lack of housing.

Introduction, terms and concepts.
The climate change is a great challenge for humanity, and for the planet, if we don’t do something
to solve all the problems it has, we won’t be able to survive in this planet as long as we want, our
life will be reduced dramatically, and we are going to have awful and serious consequences that
we never have imagined.
The overcrowding living spaces, and the lack of housing are just a few problems of the incredibly
big amount of diseases we will affront, and that, we are affronting right now.
By these reasons, this project has been done to try to make conscience about that problem, what
will be the worst consequences of that, and how we can try to avoid it happens, or even how to
affront this problem.
First at all, we have to define what is the overcrowding. This refers to the condition where more
people are located within a given space that is considered tolerable from a safety and health
perspective which will depend on the current environment and local cultural norms.
But also, it can refer to people’s psychological response to density, although this definition isn’t
very common because this is not usually incorporated in statistical reports.
In the other hand, the lack of housing, also known as housing shortage; is a deficiency or lack I
the number of houses needed to accommodate the population of an area.

Lack of housing-Last century 1

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Future scenario, what if nothing is done? What could be the consequences?

For the different groups of people, it could have very serious consequences. Mainly for those
whose physical status is precarious, whose home situation may be unsafe and those who are
homeless. For those altogether without housing, a double bind occurs: lack of shelter makes
health worse and makes health care harder to obtain.
This can be appreciated in a studio that a home health care institute made in the 1990 year,
showing us how was the housing quality in these year, so if we apply this in the current year, we
will find that the bad housing quality has increased exponentially, by the way, the most obvious is
that this will get worst in the next years.

The future scenario is worst if we take in account that this studio only reflects the quality of housing
of people in precarious situations, for the reason that in the future the problem of lack of housing
won’t be just of people in dangerous situation like their ages, their physical situation or something
like that.
In the future it will apply for almost people, because of the increasing sea levels, the deforestation,
the poor quality of air, and many other factors will produce that a big amount of people has to
migrate, and consequently, there will be an unstoppable lack of housing and an overcrowding of
living spaces that will produce as the problem in fact, more social, economic, and environmental
problems; including loss of jobs, fight for the water, mental problems, health problems, increase
in violence, hygienic problems, lack of food, etc.
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How Mexico will be affected by the lack of housing and the overcrowding of the living
spaces?
Mexico will be affected in an incredibly big way because of the massive migration by the south
America countries trying to reach Mexico or the United States of America to look for a better place
to live, the government of Mexico will have to affront what to do with all these migrants, because
if they doesn’t come back to their countries, Mexico will have a big problem of overcrowding, not
only in the big cities like CDMX, Guadalajara, Queretaro or Monterrey, this will affect the whole
country, there will be a lot of people looking for any place to stay and live.
But, why the south America countries will have massive migrations?
Although Mexico is like some countries of the south, people of countries like Brazil, Colombia,
Peru, Venezuela, etc., will have to move because of the deforestation, mainly of the Amazonas,
that will have therefore the lack of food, and a decrease in the air quality.
Besides, the government of these countries are not as stable as the other’s one, and it can cause
problems like the ones that are happening in Venezuela right now, that has made that Venezuela’s
people wants to move away of the country to try to have a better quality of life.
All these reasons are going to have direct and indirect consequences in Mexico, but not only the
countries of the south will have migrations, it can also happen with the united states of America,
mainly because of the poor quality of the air, the bad government, the lack of services, and the
environmental consequences of an excessive use of fossil fuels instead of use green energies,
these factors will make that a considerable part of the population wants to move to another
country, in this case, Mexico or Canada.
Obviously, this will make that the native people, the Mexican people will have a lack of food, an
increasing population that will ends in an overcrowding of the living spaces like it’s happening in
the Mexico City, that is the most overcrowded city in Mexico and one of the most crowded cities
in the world.
In addition, this will cause that the government of Mexico had to take some severe decisions, that
couldn’t be the best, because they will have to decide whether accept the migrants or reject them,
and if the government accept them, it’s a fact that the housing buildings aren’t going to be enough,
and if there are enough, these buildings won’t have the appropriate characteristics for a good
quality of life. But this only would work in the beginning, owing to the excessive amount of
population, Mexico’s government will fail, and the foreign people will enter in the country, it doesn’t
matter if the government is in agree or not with that.
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Even knowing that the overcrowding is a fact and that it is going to happen whether we do
something to try to avoid it or not, not everything is loss. This research was made with the purpose
of find some solutions or alternatives to try to solve the problem with some innovative ways.
Not all is loss.
1. Keep residents where they are.
It’s a big mistake to see slims as a problem, when in fact they are an opportunity. And it is an
even bigger mistake to locate people away from their current settlements to new government
projects. Slums typically crop up around centers of economic opportunity, however
rudimentary. And slum dwellers by their very nature understand how to mobilize community
resources and generate opportunity.
The location of affordable housing is “as important as, or even more important than, the quality
of this housing”. When residents are displaced or relocated, they are disconnected from critical
social and economic networks and livelihood option they themselves created.
Making in situ improvements to these settlements allows slum dwellers to remain connected
to their own networks and sites of economic opportunity.
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2. Repurpose existing infrastructure in urban centers.

The disadvantaged and the poor benefit from locating in or around the urban center, where
economic opportunities are more abundant. After all, urban centers are the basic engines of
mobilizing talent and human capabilities that provide opportunities that can benefit both
advantaged and marginalized groups. This is why some people migrate to cities in the first
place.
One way to do this is to convert underutilized urban land for affordable housing and economic
development, with realistic standards for development. This includes incremental housing
improvements, easy-to-understand planning processes that acknowledge the wide range of
market segments, and simple zoning rules and building codes. It also encourages cities to
explore community ownership, and creative solutions to revitalizing underused land, buildings,
and districts.
Providing infrastructure like streets and transit can help connect slums to economic
opportunity. The city of Medellin in Colombia famously did this by using escalators and
gondolas to connect steep hillside slums to centers of jobs and economic activity.
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3. Shift from
ownership to
rental housing.
For the very poor,
and those who lack
the documentation
to qualify for
mortgages,
homeownership is
simply not an option.
Particularly in the
global south, the
current emphasis on
homeownership
creates additional
burdens for women
and members of
minority groups in
many rapidly urbanizing parts of the world. This is because their rights are inextricably bound
to male family members, marital status, or are otherwise restricted by cultural norms. Even in
countries where property legislation is gender neutral, law enforcement often restricts
women’s ability exercise their rights to purchase housing.
So, any development strategy cannot work without a policy that supports local affordable
rentals rather than just homeownership.
Ultimately, the hundreds of millions of the urban poor who live in global slums are the key to
resolving the global housing and urban crisis. They know their communities and are doing the
best they can to mobilize resources and create opportunity.
And giving them access to resources and connective fiber is the best thing we can do to help
unlock the urban engine of economic progress. As John F.C. Turner argued long ago, it is
time we shift from seeing “housing as a noun” something that governments build for people
to “housing as a verb,” something people and communities build for themselves.
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4. Turn vacant apartments into instant, affordable housing.

In Denver, The Mile High city has become a national reference point in
conversations about affordable housing because local leaders aren’t just
proposing solutions, they’re investing significant money to meet aggressive
targets. In early 2016, Denver launched a $10 million Revolving Affordable
Housing Loan Fund to help widen the capital pool for affordable housing projects.
The initiative has had so much success bringing new projects online that the
city expanded support for affordable housing last fall, approving plans to preserve
or build thousands of units. A new $500,000 property tax increase, paired with new
development impact fees, will raise $156.4 million over the next decade. Other
cities, such as Pittsburgh, have also created affordable housing funds, but few
have been put to use as quickly as Denver’s.
And Denver is already looking ahead. The FasTracks program seeks to build future
affordable housing near stops on the city’s new light-rail line, a great example of
what Siglin calls holistic development.
In addition, Mayor Michael Hancock announced a pilot “buy-down” program that
would turn vacant high-end apartments into affordable units. By tapping into the
newly created housing fund, the flexible program can cover the difference between
market rate and affordable rent and quickly add more attainable units to the city’s
housing supply.
“This is a city putting up real dollars to create affordable housing,” says Ethan
Handelman, vice president of policy and advocacy for the National Housing
Conference. “We don’t always think of smaller cities when affordability comes up,
but they do have a serious rental problem.”
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5. Sustainable living on a budget.

Described as a “learning lab” by its

developers, the Rose, a new 90-unit mixed-
income development, takes the long view,
not just due to its unprecedented
commitment to green design principles, but
also because it sees sustainability as a long-
term cost-saver.

This revolutionary $36 million project, which

opened in 2015, features an array of green
amenities and features usually found in more
expensive buildings: locally sourced and
chemical-free building materials, a
community garden, solar panel-ready roofs,
and a super-tight building envelope (the units
are 75 percent more energy efficient than
those in traditional buildings). Why does this
matter? Developers Aeon and Hope
Community managed costs and created a healthy, energy-efficient, and low-maintenance
environment that sets a template for future affordable projects.

While it was more expensive to build than other housing developments, its developers say
it was a pioneering development that will pay off over time, as lessons learned here can
be applied to future apartments.

"The Rose can't be a one-off," says Gina Ciganik, a former Aeon executive who helped
kickstart the development and is now working with the Healthy Building Network to help
share lessons from the project. "If other people don't learn from it, we failed."
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6. Home and a healthy housing.

In Philadelphia, the Jonathan Rose Company, known for skillfully designed affordable-
housing projects, helped create a unique community-oriented building as part of the
transformational Paseo Verde project. Located adjacent to Temple University Station, a
major transit hub, and situated on a former gas-station parking lot in North Philadelphia
that residents once referred to as a “open wound,” this $48 million building offers more
than just 120 sleek, new LEED Platinum apartments. It’s a huge investment in the long-
term health of the neighborhood and its residents.

The building breaks the mold in many ways. Its connection to a transit hub, landscaped
terraces, and green roof help support a sustainable lifestyle. It’s also a center for healthy
living, thanks to the integration of numerous healthcare facilities within the building. Home
to a health clinic run by the Public Health Management Corporation, a pharmacy, and
supportive services provided by Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha (Association of
Puerto Ricans on the March), an iconic community group and partner in the project, Paseo
Verde offers a huge benefit to the neighborhood.

Other recent projects have seen similar success connecting residents with much-needed
community services. In San Francisco’s Mercy House, for example, two family daycare
centers support working parents while also providing a source of employment for
residents. In Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, developments by the nonprofit
Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH) include an in-house community resource
center for job and skills training. And in Atlanta, the East Lake community was rebuilt
around the Charles R. Drew Charter School system, connecting local children to some of
the district’s best education.

7. Energy-efficient buildings
To use resources more frugally as the world becomes crowded, we’ll need buildings that
move air and regulate their temperatures passively and that reuse waste water and even
generate their own power. Those improvements don’t need to be expensive, either.
Building with compressed-earth blocks and other temperature-regulating materials is low-
cost and it will make a difference.
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8. Restrict foreign ownership and end tax evasion.

Our governments should restrict foreign ownership of land, or limit it to those who live and
pay taxes in Mexico.

We must also work far more actively to close the tax havens since tax-avoiding housing
“investments” push up prices.

We should require any company buying property in Mexico to list the real owners in a
public register of beneficial ownership. We should punish financial professionals who help
Mexicans evade taxes. We should close the loopholes and dodgy practices that enable
tax-evaders to buy and flip property. We should enable local municipalities to impose a
hefty annual surcharge on properties owned by offshore entities.

9. Use municipal powers

Municipalities can use inclusionary zoning to require developers to make 30 per cent, 50 per
cent, or 100 per cent of new units of a development affordable and family-friendly, creating
mixed-income communities.
They can zone for increased density in single-family neighborhoods to allow more
townhouses. They can allow car-free laneway housing and secondary suites, accompanied
by good transit, safe bike-routes, and car-sharing.
They can encourage designs such as the Montreal Grow Homes, which start small and can
be added to as a family grows.
They can encourage self-building as practiced in the Netherlands, where new homes, often
in large-scale developments, are built by private individuals (some earning less than $29,000
a year helped by a local government stimulus scheme). These now account for a third of all
homes bought in that country.
They can make it easy for non-family members to buy a house together, owning it as “tenants
in common.”
They can allow land left idle for more than a year to be used for temporary tiny homes villages,
learning from Dignity Village in Portland.
They can limit Airbnb and other short-term rentals to people’s principal residences, denying a
rental license for separate apartments or houses. In Vancouver, this could release as many
as 3,000 units back into the long-term rental pool.
They can adopt the Whistler model, established in 1997 to address the chronic shortage of
staff housing. About 1,000 properties are now available only to local employees and retirees,
and the price when a property sells is based on increases in the Consumer Price Index, not
the property market. Vancouver’s Affordable Home Ownership Pilot Program works on similar
principles.
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10. New villages

Many younger people want more than an affordable home. They also want to live sustainably
with a strong sense of community. They want to build a sharing economy, with a lighter
footprint on the Earth. They want to build their own eco-villages and tiny home villages.
An eco-village places more emphasis on sociable, pedestrian-friendly designs, habitat
protection and solar energy and Passive Homes than a conventional development. We should
train people how to become their own developers, forming eco-village development co-
operatives, raising the money needed and navigating the complex world of zoning and
development approval.
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How you as a student or your family can help solve or reduce this impact?
Due to the type of impact the overcrowding living spaces is, it is not easy to try to reduce by myself
or with my family.
The only things that we can do is to reduce our use of the different natural and artificial resources,
to try to avoid the fast decrease in the amount of these resources.
Besides, we can try to make awareness the people around us about the adequate use of these
resources to reduce our impact as a society and with this delay a few more time the fact of the
unavoidable problem.
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What is sustainable development and how its applied in your career?

Sustainability is development that satisfies the needs of the present without compromising the
capacity of future generations, guaranteeing the balance between economic growth, care for the
environment and social well-being.
Is a concept that appeared for the first time in 1987 with the publication of the Brundtland report,
warning of the negative environmental consequences of economic growth and globalization,
which tries to find possible solutions to the problems caused by industrialization and population
growth.
At the environmental level, sustainability prevents nature from being used as an inexhaustible
source of resources and its protection and rational use.

The sustainable development can be divided in some areas:

Environmental.
This includes environmental conservation, investment in renewable energies, saving water,
sustainable mobility, and sustainable construction (in the case of the overcrowding living
spaces and lack of housing problem).
Social sustainability.
In this level, it can foster the development of people, communities and cultures to help achieve
reasonable and fairly-distributed quality life, healthcare and education across the globe.

Economical sustainability.
This focusses on economic growth, that generates wealth for all, without harming the
environment.
This includes the investment and an equal distribution of the economic resources to strength the
other pillars of sustainability.
How this is applied in the computational science area?
The systems engineering has a key role in the sustainable development because this will work
and even nowadays is working as a provider of the knowledge principles and practices that help
realize the integration of economic, technological, natural resource, and environmental efficiency
and effectiveness, and support equity in fulfillment of human needs as well/
Sustainable world progress is dependent upon continued economic, social, cultural and
technological progress.
Often system engineers build relatively inexpensive models of proposed projects to refine and
test new ideas. Such prototypes can save much time and money by allowing experimentation to
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avoid mistakes that, in the “real” system, could be very expensive and possibly even dangerous.
System failures may be expensive to diagnose and correct, though they are often not difficult to
detect. Because systems engineers know how to analyze and understand complicated situations,
they are often called on to organize knowledge for executive decision-makers. In this role, they
perform systems analyses to develop and evaluate policies and programs and typically function
as consultants or as technical direction and staff support to management. Thus, in developing
and implementing large-scale systems, systems engineers must also understand and appreciate
human, organizational, and behavioral concerns, as well as concerns involving technology.

____________________________________________________________________________

What is the Earth Charter? Write five principles

The Earth Charter is an international declaration of fundamental values and principles, is a global
movement of organizations and individuals that embrace the earth charter and use it to guide the
transition towards a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world.
PRINCIPLES:
1. Respect and care for the community of life:
Respect earth and life in all its diversity.
a. Recognize that all beings are interdependent, and every form of life has value
regardless of its worth human beings.
b. Affirm faith in the inherent dignity of all human being and in the intellectual,
artistic, ethical, and spiritual potential of humanity.
2. Ecological integrity.
Protect and restore the integrity of earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for
biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.
a. Adopt at all levels sustainable development plans and regulations that make
environmental conservation and rehabilitation integral to all development
initiatives.
b. Stablish and safeguard viable nature and biosphere reserves, including wild
lands and marine areas, to protect earth’s life support systems, maintain
biodiversity, and preserve our national heritage.
c. Promote the recovery of endangered species and ecosystems.
d. Control and eradicate non-native or genetically modified organisms harmful to
native species and the environment and prevent introduction of such harmful
organisms.
3. Social and economic Justice:
Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social, and environmental imperative.
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a. Guarantee the right to potable water, clean air, food security, uncontaminated
soil, shelter, and safe sanitation, allocating the national and international
resources required.
b. Empower every human being with the education and resources to secure a
sustainable livelihood and provide social security and safety nets for those who
are unable to support themselves.
c. Recognize the ignored, protect the vulnerable, serve those who suffer, and
enable them to develop their capacities and to pursuit their inspirations.
Ensure that economic activities and institutions at all levels promote human development in an
equitable and sustainable manner.

4. Democracy, nonviolence, and peace:

Strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and
accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision making, and access to
justice.
a. Uphold the right of everyone to receive clear and timely information on
environmental matters and all development plans and activities which are likely
to affect them or in which they have an interest.
b. Support local, regional and global civil society, and promote the meaningful
participation of all interested individuals and organizations in decision making.
c. Protect the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, peaceful assembly,
association, and dissent.
5. advance the study of ecological sustainability and promote the open exchange and
wide application of the knowledge acquired.
a. Support international scientific and technical cooperation on sustainability, with
special attention to the needs of developing nations.
b. Recognize and preserve the traditional knowledge and spiritual wisdom in all
cultures that contribute to environmental protection and human well-being.
c. Ensure that information of vital importance to human health and environmental
protection, including genetic information, remains available in the public
domain.
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Imagine you are a world leader, a prime minister, a president, write 10 recommendations
for your country or choose a country in the world.
1. Implement the use of green energies instead of fossil fuels.
This will allow the country to save costs and to reduce the impacts of climate change, trying
with it to delay the lack of housing. This can help to avoid the lack of housing because if the
resources aren’t used as much as in the normal way, there wouldn’t be so necessary to
migrate for the people with poor resources (economic and natural). The migration many times
occur owing to the lack of basic services, like water, food, and even electricity, people are
always looking for better life conditions. So, implement the use of green energies means more
clean energy, saving resources means the delaying of the depletion of these resources, than
therefore makes possible a better-quality life.
2. Reduce the excessive use of the soil for agricultural and business purposes.
An incredibly big extension of the soil is being used in an excessive measure, this is
depleting the extension of soil available for buildings, but obviously, the construction of
these buildings is also depleting the soil.

3. Make the culture of a green agriculture, avoid at all the use of agrochemical products.

4. Reduce the permissions of large building enterprises to make a mass production of

condominium.

5. Create a program to promote the build of worthy houses.

6. Divide the land extensions destined for building worthy houses in equal parts.

7. Not allow the monopolies and forbid private enterprises to use excessively the soil and its
resources, they will have only the necessary space to their infrastructure, and they will
have to respect the flora and fauna of the place where they are stablished.

8. Invest in research to look for better and innovative ways to make houses, condos, and
apartment houses.

9. Modify the current buildings to adapt to the overpopulation, try to host more people,
without losing the worthy.

10. Make a law to put a limit in the number of sons per couple, to stop the exponential
increasing of the population around the country.
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Final analysis of your solutions.

The solutions are very useful, and it can help to reduce the impacts of the lack of housing,
unfortunately, it is not very easy to make it fast.
The solutions mentioned in this document must be implemented as soon as possible to see the
results, to be able to see the difference in the quality life of people.
And, it is well known that the solutions can hurt the interests of many people, but this is in order
to avoid the big impacts of overcrowding, that in the end will finish with the human way to live like
we now nowadays.
If nothing is done, the consequences will be incredibly severe, so we must make a change in our
way to think and act to reduce the possibilities of affront an apocalyptical age, with many problems
and no solutions.
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Bibliography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcrowding
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/housing-shortage
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1809779/pdf/bullnyacadmed00016-
0143.pdf
https://www.acciona.com/sustainable-development/#
http://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c15/e1-28.pdf
http://earthcharter.org/discover/the-earth-charter/
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/07/solving-the-global-housing-crisis/533592/
https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/25/16020648/affordable-housing-apartment-urban-
development
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/10/Eight-Solutions-Canada-Housing-Crisis/
https://hbr.org/2014/12/the-worlds-housing-crisis-doesnt-need-a-revolutionary-solution