Driverless cars could free up land for more housing

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Look, no hands! Big car and technology companies such as BMW, Apple and Google are investing in driverless technology.

Widespread adoption of driverless cars would release thousands of acres of land for new housing and reduce the strain on transport infrastructure, according to research published today.

The report, centred on Edinburgh, suggests that congestion is costing the city more than £300 million a year in lost time and autonomous vehicles would help to trim that figure.

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Pipe dreams: can ‘nano apartments’ solve Hong Kong’s housing crisis?

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The city with the world’s tiniest and costliest living spaces may soon convert drainpipes into homes. The aim is to get young people on the property ladder – but how small is too small?

“Both indoors and out, life in Hong Kong can feel pretty suffocating at times,” says 39-year-old finance worker Wai Li, who rents a 200 sq ft (19 sq m) “nano flat” by herself in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan neighbourhood. Li’s living area is little more than the size of two standard Hong Kong parking spaces.

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3D concrete printing market – the biggest trends to watch in the near future

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3D Concrete Printing Market – The Biggest Trends to Watch out for in Near Future 2024

3D concrete printing is a technologically advanced and innovative method used for constructing predesigned building components with the help of 3D concrete printers. The technology holds the promise of substantially optimizing the construction industry in terms of construction cost, time, error reduction, flexibility in design, and environmental impact. Past experiments have successfully acknowledged the technology’s expertise on all these fronts and the technology is being steadily adopted on a larger scale around the globe. The field of 3D concrete printing is receiving increased focus from construction companies across the globe. These companies mainly focus on experimenting with different concrete mixes and printing machines to bring about further developments in this construction technique.

With construction companies making continuous efforts to bring 3D concrete printing in mainstream construction, the global 3D concrete printing market is projected to gather significant momentum in the next few years. The report provides a 360-degree overview of the market, covering crucial market-related details about the key elements and segments of the market. The report examines the impact of the major growth drivers, challenges, and trends on the market’s future growth prospects, underlining both the most lucrative and the most unprofitable investment areas.

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This $130,000 self-deploying building can unfold in just eight minutes

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Building a home or temporary shelter by hand can be both time-consuming and expensive.

Ten Fold Engineering, a housing startup based in the UK, has created self-deploying buildings that can pop up in a matter of eight minutes. Owners push a button, and the rooms fold out like an accordion using a counterbalance system.

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Home Smart Home: The Shape Of Things To Come

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A new report predicts intelligent ‘Cognitive Homes’ of the future will be able to assess and manage our needs and desires in later life.

Almost 32 million people will be aged 60 or over in the UK by 2039. But what sort of living environment do older people face when they leave the workplace and embark on the next chapter of their lives?

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Engineering the Secret Engines of Off-Grid Living

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Futurist Thomas Frey: Having just returned from a trip to Alaska, it occurred to me that most of the 660,000 sq miles of this beautiful state will never be habitable until a more complete off-grid solution is found. In Alaska, they’ve already figured out how to turn every one of their 3 million lakes into a landing strip, so transportation is far less of an issue than power, heat, lights, water, and communications.

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Is it better to rent or buy a home? Comparing the monthly costs

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Renting vs. owning

Ever since the financial crisis left many Americans in dire financial straits, the debate over renting versus buying a home has heated up. American households’ spending on housing is on average 33% of their annual expenses, but until recently we didn’t have data to show the differences in costs between monthly mortgage payments versus rent.

 

 

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Why rent is so expensive in cities: Parking spaces

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Underground parking is extremely expensive to build.

Many factors contribute to drive up the price of rents, but parking is among the most significant, according to University of California Los Angeles professor and renowned parking guru Donald Shoup. During the CityLab 2014 conference in Los Angeles last week BuzzFeed News sat down with Shoup to talk about how parking makes housing more expensive. His point: “It’s unfair to have cities where parking is free for cars and housing is expensive for people.”

 

 

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New thinking leads to a decline in homelessness

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The National Alliance to End Homelessness sees the recent success as the “giant untold story of the homelessness world.”

Since 2005, there has been a 17 percent decline in homelessness because of a radical change in how states address homelessness. This trend has withstood financial panic, a foreclosure crisis, and the Great Recession.

 

 

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