Sustainable housing and renewable energy”

BANTAY GOBYERNO
Ramon ‘Ike’ Villareal Señeres
(Fourth part of a series)

SHARE is the new acronym that I am proposing to signify the revival of the basic needs approach, this time modified to incorporate the “green and blue” convergence. Just like the old basic needs approach, it will have sustainable housing as the centerpiece component, but along with it, renewable energy will also be given equal importance. Aside from energy, water and transportation will be the other two critical public utilities that will be prioritized.

It is a generally known fact that many housing projects fail or are abandoned because there is no clean water and there is no affordable transportation available. This is a problem that should already be corrected in new and future housing development projects, and I believe that
the solution to this problem lies in the cooperative approach, and by that I mean the ownership of the community water system and the community transport system by the cooperatives that will be formed among the new homeowners, possibly organized as a parallel to the legally mandated Homeowner Associations (HOAs).

Depending on where you live in the Philippines, the quality of water varies. In some places, water on tap is safe to drink, but in other places, it is not, forcing people to buy bottled filtered water instead.

This is an extra drain on the budgets of our people who are already burdened with heavy expenses. The technology for water filtration is already commonplace. It is just plain and simple reverse osmosis, a technology derived from the business of filtering water for dialysis purposes.

The technology is so simple, such that water filtering stations are now in every street corner.
It would really spare residents a lot of money if filtered water could be supplied by the cooperatives on tap already, meaning to say that it is already pumped into the residential units as part of a centralized plumbing system.

Just like buying LPG in canisters, it has become the practice to buy filtered water in bottles, and everyone now takes it for granted that it is something that we have to live with, something that we could no longer change. That is really very far from the truth, because anything in
liquid or gaseous form could be pumped directly into residential units by way of centralized plumbing systems.

Just to stress my point, I will also say that if we could pump gas and water in, we could also pump liquid soap and cooking oil in, an idea that could also add more savings to the household budgets of our people. Just the same, the business of supplying liquid soap and cooking
oil on tap could be a service provided by the same cooperatives that would also supply the gasses and the water.

More than just in a symbolic sense, the production of biogas on site by the cooperatives and supplying the gas into the homes could be a service that will functionally implement the “green and blue” convergence. On one hand, it will be “green” because it will produce energy from waste. On the other hand, it will be “blue” because it will supply a renewable form of energy that will not only solve the problem of waste disposal, it will also solve the problem of rising energy costs. This is a combined opportunity of earning and saving that we should not miss.

Perhaps it is providential that electric powered vehicles are now in the market, not just tricycles but four wheeled cars as well. What this means is that if the coops could produce their own renewable energy efficiently, they could also own and operate an electric powered
transportation system economically, thus adding to their ways of making money and saving money. It would be more advantageous for local residents to have their own transportation system that is not purely commercially driven, because commercial systems would tend to “disappear” when the passenger traffic goes down.

Even if food is essentially a commercial commodity, there are still a lot of opportunities for coops to produce their own food locally, especially if this is done in the context of livelihood generation.
This is an idea that housing developers should consider in their designs, because the inclusion of livelihood production areas could impact significantly on the land use planning and the layout of the home sites. This concern is not only applicable to rural housing, because even the urban housing projects could also have their own livelihood components.

Health, education and recreation are the other basic needs that coops could provide commercially, but intentionally with a social purpose. The social purpose is to provide these services at lower and more affordable prices, something that only coops could do, because of their tax-free status, and because of their unique ability to reward their members with the
unique combination of discounts, rebates and dividends.

Just to set the record straight, I am advocating the adoption of SHARE not as a project or a program, but as a standard that will be adopted by the government in general, and by the housing developers in particular.

My apologies to those who might see political color in the idea of reviving a development approach that is associated with past regimes, but I assure everyone that my intentions are purely developmental and not political.

My wish is that everyone will not see political color in what I write, but will see instead the color of money that could be saved or earned as we give more business to more people, using the cooperative approach.