Demonstrating Ultra Low Cost, Easy, Fast, Cheap, Self-Made Housing, Edible Landscaping, and Renewable Energy

June 6, 2009

I’m writing about a new phase in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project. We settled the case against the mobile home park.
That’s so hard to believe. I’d been working on that over three years when we agreed to settle. It would have been impossible if we had looked at what three years’ work is worth, or how do we get the demonstration we have been working for all this time, or how do we make an example of the %^&amb;*(s we have been dealing with, or other things we talked about all this time. Instead, Peter and I worked for about a week at changing our thinking to what we would do now with a certain amount of money if we were finished working on this case. It was so hard, and mainly I at first. When we seriously started considering it, Peter said he felt as if he’d been kicked in the head. I understood. I too had so much trouble with a feeling of loss.
What I came to was this year things are different from last year, so I had to like build a wall in my mind hiding everything I thought last year from consideration. Obama has stimulus programs, there are deflated industries where there are all kinds of resources, and there are sources of information like the Internet, which we can take advantage of if we stop looking at the past.
So I started listing what we would spend settlement money they were offering for. We have to pay back some people who supported us through this. Once again, if we tried to pay them as we thought we would be able to if we finished the case, there wouldn’t be nearly enough money. It would be impossible to do even that, much less start something else. So we figured out how we could pay them back over a few years if we started projects that made money. Those include an energy farm at the Home-Grown Food Network property in Desert Hot Springs. That is possible only because of the stimulus program and progress financing such projects over the last few years. Seeing how it worked in Germany really inspired me. People rent neighbors’ roofs to put solar panels on them!
There still wasn’t enough money, so we told them a higher amount. They didn’t come up that high, but we figured again, if there could be any way to accomplish all we’d need to with only that much. Still there wasn’t, but we talked a lot of things over with our family and friends and kept looking for ideas on the Internet. Eventually the Park came up a little more, and we were convinced we could do enough with that with this forward-looking attitude we had developed, we should do it. So we did.
Another thing that helped is another group from our past has sued us in the last few months, and devoting my energies to that case should result in much more money than devoting more to this one ever could have. Plus I really couldn’t do both. Looking back over the past few years, I see each case ends up paying six or seven times as much as the last one. If I devote myself to this new case and that holds, there will be enough money to pay for the time I put into this last case, after all. But the main thing was, there is enough money now from this settlement to do projects Board members wanted to do, and if we are relieved of having to work on the case, the money is enough to get started.
So we’re moving. One of the things I learned from this new case and the last one is to NEVER use a home address on anything, now that it ends up being published on the Internet by people who are malicious. So I’m not saying precisely where we are moving, but it is in this same area. Edible landscaping, renewable energy, and more under-$20,000 house demonstrations are in the works. We’ll have video and pictures of our progress, and some day when it is far enough along that we can live in safety and have an actual demonstration site as well, we will do that too.
We’re living and learning, looking forward to showing you much more as we go along.

Brenda Barnes, President Home-Grown Food Network, Inc.
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