Homefullness

Sustaining Homefullness: Building a Collective Future for Affordable, Regenerative Housing This special Homefullness Show episode because it is a call for collaboration to keep this show alive and the Homefullness programmes to thrive. It's also about clarity on the transition of Homefullness as a separate entity to Common Ground. Zola explains why Homefullness and Common Ground focus on “homefull...

Robin Allison is the founder of Earthsong EcoNeighbourhood in West Auckland, a 32-home, medium-density cohousing community on 1.2 hectares. It is guided by permaculture ethics, eco-building, and social sustainability, with an educational commitment to share learning. Zola and Robin discuss “homefullness” as individual autonomy plus shared belonging, intergenerational support, accountability, and p...

April Theme: Belonging and the Neighbour Connection Challenge In this episode, Zola introduces April’s theme of belonging through designing connection with neighbours, linking it to Common Ground’s focus on collective living and affordability via sharing and reciprocity, and permaculture’s people care ethic. She’s excited to share that she’s making changes to the Homefullness Show to be more pract...

Reshaping Aotearoa’s Planning Laws: Regenerative Housing, Community Agency, and Structural Affordability New Zealand’s housing crisis, like many countries around the world, stems from a system producing unaffordable homes, ecological harm, and isolated communities.  Zola highlights this “rare opportunity” as the government rewrites the planning and natural resources bills replacing the RMA. Zola w...

Zola interviews Lyndall Parris, founder and resident of Narara Ecovillage on Australia’s central, east coast (about an hour north of Sydney), about what it takes to create and lead an intentional ecovillage from vision to reality and what daily life feels like there. The episode outlines Narara’s cooperative membership model (including the $30,000 buy-in), efforts toward affordability and intergen...

In this episode, host Zola Rose interviews Zola Ndimande, a Zulu woman from KwaZulu Natal South Africa about her return to her ancestral land to build her own home using traditional earth building methods, and integrating into that community-focused way of living in relationship with people and relationship with the elements. The discussion covers a range of topics such as traditional housing cons...

Zola Rose interviews Magda Garbarczyk from Fine Line Architecture about the 'Straw Lines' project, a modular housing system using low carbon materials like straw and timber to address New Zealand's housing crisis, climate change, unhealthy and expensive building materials, and waste from the agricultural sector. The project aims to reconnect traditional building methods with modern practices, prom...

Host Zola Rose interviews Trystan and Stephanie from the Peterborough Housing Cooperative to discuss this housing model that is a rarity in Aotearoa NZ (a more common model in Europe). They explore how the cooperative structure, owned by a Trust, keeps rents affordable and fosters a close-knit community of families, young professionals, and the elderly. They talk about the cooperative's guiding pr...

Show host Zola shares her personal experience with housing instability through a creative reading of her unpublished article titled 'Homefullness: Recipes for Baking, Belonging, Connection, and Resilience into Housing Futures.' Zola details her struggles with feelings of homelessness due to the challenge of finding available, affordable accommodation and precarious short-term house and room rental...

In this episode Zola interviews Steven Liaros to discuss the importance and the roadmap to create a network of Circular Economy Villages (CEV). These villages aim to integrate private housing development with public infrastructure to alleviate stress on local governments and create sustainable, regenerative rural and peri-urban communities. Steven delves into the critical barriers that traditional...

In this episode of the Homefullness Show, Dionne Payne, founder of Women for Homes, discusses her ambitious mission to inspire 1 million women to invest $5,000 each to end homelessness by 2030.  She is inviting women to contribute to an ethical investment fund that will, when a substantial amount is accumulated, will develop affordable housing projects.   We discuss what "affordable" means in this...

In this episode, host Zola interviews Zahra Lightway about her tour of eco villages across Australia, India, and Europe. The conversation explore what made the ecovillages she visited successful, mainly a robust governance system, income-earning programmes and opportunities, a shared worldview (values and beliefs), and mission-driven activities. They cover sociocracy as a governance model, the dif...

In this episode of the Homefulness Show, host Zola Rose engages  with Jo, the chair of the Hemp Builders Association in New Zealand, and Barbara, a resident of a hempcrete home, to explore the benefits and potential of hempcrete as a sustainable building material. Jo discusses hempcrete's ability to sequester carbon, its role in mitigating the housing crisis, and its use in community-driven, regen...

Zola explores the concept of regenerative real estate with Neal Collins, founder of the Regenerative Real Estate Podcast and Choose Latitude. The discussion delves into transformative housing models that prioritize sustainability, community engagement, and affordability. Zola shares her personal journey of finding a suitable site for her tiny home, emphasizing the importance of shifting from an ow...

In this episode, host Zola Rose discusses what creates successful community-led housing (CLH) with guest Thomas Moore, a senior lecturer in Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool. They explore the concept of Enabling Hubs, a practical form of advocacy infrastructure, and why these Hubs are so important for overcoming the challenges communities face in achieving affordable and sustai...

In this special episode of the Homefullness Show, host Zola Rose sits down for an engaging interview with her daughter Oriah, a law student at Otago University in New Zealand. They explore Oriah's unique upbringing in an off-grid homestead in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Topics include their unconventional home setup with indoor and outdoor 'loos,' the transition from a suburban lifestyle to a sel...

Sophie, a public works advisor at Land Information New Zealand, discusses her PhD in law, focusing on achieving housing affordability through collective housing, and cooperative housing in particular. The conversation covers various aspects, including the lack of research and public awareness on collective housing in New Zealand, her personal experiences with different housing systems in Europe, a...

In the latest episode of the Homefullness Show, I interview Trypp West, the founder of an urban community called Springfed in Boulder, Colorado (USA).  He describes the founding of Springfed, a community that started as his thesis project and has continued for the past three years. The community operates on a non-residential model with the meeting place being his rented farmhouse where they hold f...

 Gentle density is a term in Australia for infill housing development in urban areas, to create more housing within existing neighbourhoods, also known as incremental development in the U.S.  In this episode, I interview Mark and Lynda Utting on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland Australia.  They share about their way of developing housing in their backyard to give a great place to live to the futur...

The Sharing with Friends housing model was born out of a burning desire for housing justice for single older women who are in the "missing middle"--who do not qualify for social housing but also can't afford market rental or to buy their own home and who are living on the edge of housing insecurity.  The unique co-housing model provides an affordable, secure, and connected way of living where five...

In our latest Homefullness episode, I interview Chloe Howorth on the HomeShare for Her program located in the Nelson-Tasman region of Aotearoa NZ. The program addresses the lack of affordable housing and the lack of available housing for single women. Because in our region, according to a Stuff article in April 2023, it says “low wages and expensive housing make the Nelson Tasman area unaffordable...

If you're frustrated by the amount of rates that you pay and the increasing rates that many councils are doing, you are not alone.  Many people complain, “councils, all they care about is money.” And yet, they have increasing expenses & responsibilities to pay for with less income--a gap that's been widening over decades.  The amount of income that they're able to generate through rates is not...

In this interview with Greer O'Donnell of The Housing Innovation Society (THIS) and The Urban Advisory (TUA), I speak with her about a growing demographic in housing--the missing middle--as well the increase in people who wish to have more say in the kinds of housing that they want to create and how they want to live in that housing. The New Zealand Housing Survey was created to be able to capture...

The fastest growing demographic who are vulnerable to housing insecurity and unaffordable housing is older women.  Many of these women have been valuable contributing members of their communities and working professionally yet find themselves in housing precariousness later in life due to a range of systemic societal and economic factors.   The Housing Older Women Movement believes these women sho...

In this interview with Aksel Bech, we are tackling housing unaffordability and the levers within legislation, policy, and at the local government level that are available to be able to create better outcomes for housing. I reached out to Aksel because he and I care deeply about addressing this housing unaffordability problem in Aotearoa NZ and he is leading the way on housing reform in his local a...