Arial Home Initiative

An Arial Home is constructed of highly insulated steel panels that fit together like Lego's. The home is pre-fabricated in a nearby Arial Home factory so that no on-site sawing or cutting is required. There are no construction wastes in the process. A team of 10-12 workers can assemble the structure of an Arial Home in one day and finish the electrical, plumbing and trim work in a second day.

An Arial Home provides the family with a living/kitchen room, one or three bedrooms depending on the model, a bathroom with a sink, toilet and shower, and a multi-functional sink in the kitchen area.

For most families it is the first time they have running water or an indoor bathroom. For some, it is the first time they have electricity or slept in a real bed. For others, it is the first time they have a home that has more than one room.

The Arial Foundation would love to be able to provide high quality homes at no cost to all of the families who need them in Baja, Mexico, but that is not financially possible and it would create a dependency that is not a good thing, as we have learned from experience. The Arial Foundation is changing its strategy from charity homes to "rent-to-own" homes. We will arrange low cost financing and we will keep the cost of the homes as low as possible by building entire communities at one time rather than one house at a time, thereby achieving economies of scale.

We will continue to work with YWAM and their volunteer groups to provide charity homes to the desperately poor. However, our primary target market from this point forward will be the working poor -- families where the father, and most likely the mother, have jobs, but they cannot afford the cost of decent housing. Our hope is that we can provide one bedroom, 460 square foot homes for a rental cost in the range of $200 per month, and three bedroom, 605 square foot homes for around $250 per month. We will establish a program whereby the family will own the home if they, or their direct descendents, live in it continuously for 15 years and if they pay their rent on time during that period.

The Arial Homes we will be building will be significantly different from existing housing because of the additional features we will provide:

1) A solar hot water system so the family will have no additional cost for electricity or gas to heat water

2) A solar photovoltaic system to power the hot water system, the waterless toilet, the exhaust fan, and emergency power

3) A highly efficient outdoor cooking stove that will also heat water in their hot water storage tank

4) Highly insulated walls and roof

5) Sun reflecting, polymer cover over the roof panels

6) A toilet that does not require water to flush, reducing the cost of the families' water bills

7) Sub-surface root irrigation of a garden area by recycling the grey water from the sinks and shower

8) A full size refrigerator included in the rental price

9) Two micro-processors that control and monitor the sophisticated features of the house and report any problems

The Arial communities will have common "green" areas and play space for the children, as well as convenient parking areas. The home owners will have a choice of six pastel colors for the outside of the homes.”

If the new Arial solar system works as well as we believe it will in the Baja climate, we hope to create a local industry manufacturing solar power systems for homes in Mexico, not just for Arial Homes. We will do the same thing with the waterless toilets if they work as anticipated. We have designed these systems so they can be made from local materials by relatively unskilled workers.