The real crisis behind the housing crisis | Daniel Murphy | TEDxWorthing

In the last 15 years, I've lived in a variety of different places around the world. Been in a lot of different housing types. Some actually affordable and some not. Some I wanted to go home to at night, some I didn't. One in particular, I can remember that there was icicles in the morning coming from the top of the window and that some of the carpet would be frozen as well. You see, I started off like most people my age, diving straight into the private rental market. And let's be honest, renting off private landlords absolutely sucks. You at the mercy of someone else's decisions on their second, third, or in some instances their 14th property. I was really frustrated by this. Now, at the time, I was building homes in New Zealand, and I noticed that all around me, the skips were full, full of amazing building materials, offcuts of cedar and oak, chunks of insulation, all destined for a hole in the ground. Landfill. I started researching online and found that people were taking out these one-of-a-kind beautiful windows and replacing them with new ones and they were also destined for the skip. I started talking with people who were about to demolish their homes and they said, "Come and take what you want, a full kitchen, even a roof. " So I did. [gasps] And rather than complaining, I started collecting waste from skips. I gathered materials and I started to build my own solution. And with the support of my incredible wife, who just had a young baby and the remarkable community around us, I designed, built, and lived in a tiny house on wheels for about 20 grand. Now, some of you here might be thinking, I've seen those ones online, on social media, right? You know the ones parked up in the middle of nowhere somewhere beautiful and you think how can they live in a space that small? Turns out pretty well actually. And it was great for those first few years. You know when you're just starting a young family, you just need somewhere simple to live that's safe and actually affordable. But yes, we did grow out of it and we did need a little bit more space. Fine. What are the options now? back to the private rental market or the big one, the mortgage. You see, growing up in Ireland, this is what we were taught success looked like. Get a big house, get a nice car, get a mortgage, get on the ladder. I tried not to. I really did. But it turns out the options out there, they also suck, too. And the mortgage was the best worst choice. Now, here I am with the mortgage. I'm wondering, why am I getting to the last week of the month and digging into my savings again? And what happens if the interest rates go up? Something doesn't add up here. Maybe we are in a housing crisis. Or are we in a priorities crisis? Now, I'd like to take you back about 10 years. I was studying a green building solutions program in the capital of Austria, Vienna, a city often ranked among the best places in the world to live. And while we were on the course, we had to study and research what is it that makes this place so special to live in. And what it was we discovered was that it was because they prioritized public housing. You see, in the 1920s, Vienna was in a crisis. They were rebuilding its city and economy after the First World War, and they chose to build beautiful houses that still work incredibly well today. These aren't just homes like high-rise flats. They're places that have nurseries, clinics, libraries. They even have their own swimming pools. These are places and homes with dignity. And within 15 years, they built 64,000 homes for the people of Vienna. And what struck me most was that they weren't just for the rich and poor. They were for everyone. You see, Vienna didn't just build for its next political cycle. They responded to a crisis and built for the next generation. Now, fast forward to today. What modern

innovations and opportunities are out there that we might be missing out on here? Surely, some pretty cool stuff has happened in the last 100 years, right? How about homes that cost nearly nothing to run? Better yet, what about homes that give you money in your pocket at the end of each year? Imagine that. No gas bill, no electricity bills. This isn't science fiction. These homes exist in Austria, Australia, Brussels, across the sea in Dublin, just down the road in Exit. Groups of people have got together to make building this way just the norm. How did they do it? And how could we do this here in wording? We can build homes that are to the standard of the passive house premium standard and renovate homes to the Enerfit and the Enerit Plus standard. Okay, in simple language, that means that homes generate more electricity than they will ever consume in a year. Imagine that. No gas bill for us here. No electricity bills. So what is it that's keeping this innovation from coming here to this place? Is it the technology? Is it the lack of ideas? It's the skills. Skilled people. People who are passionate about the built environment, who don't just dream of a better future, but create it, who are ready to roll up their sleeves, grab their tools, and build. Now, just a couple of weeks ago here in the UK, a young guy named Oscar posted online and got a lot of attention about the frustration he's had trying to find an apprenticeship opportunity and struggling to find one because, in his own words, it was surrounded by a maze of jargon. Oscar's packed his bags. He's off traveling the world. So, we're here in a perceived housing crisis. Yet, we've just exported our future talent. We need homes, but we need skilled people to build and maintain them, not just skip abroad. We've not set up our priorities right here so that young people like Oscar can just step into them. Now, that's not just a missed opportunity. It's systemic failure. Do we expect our people to find housing solutions by diving into a skip to find them? Or can we create our own skips of opportunity? I'm going to keep this really simple. The skip acronym, skills, innovation, priority. So skills. Can we build a center of excellence in high performance buildings here where skilled people, most of them who are about to retire, can go and speak with young people like Oscar and inspire them to have a career in the built environment. innovate, train young people here who can go out and build homes that have zero energy bills and that produce little to no carbon and priorities. Can we get our planning reform right just like all the other councils have already done? Can we make the passive house standard the standard that we build and retrofit all of our homes to? By doing this wording can be a national example of what happens when a town rewrites its priorities. Listen, I've tried all of these things and I'm still oppressed by a lack of choice. This is a systems failure and I am not a system. So to those in power or who are planning to be in power. Can you study the planning, study the policy and implement them here so that we can grow economies and help young people. Now to those of you in the audience that this might resonate with. Yes, we're oppressed by a lack of choice, but it doesn't mean you don't have any. So, while we're waiting, what can you do? Can you roll up your sleeves, get the tool belt on, maybe rumage through a skip, and make your own solutions?

solutions? Thank you. [applause and cheering]