Worker Numbers by Month and Crop

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Diagramming the number of workers by month and crop reinforced the idea of an explosion of workers arriving at a certain time of the year.  It was a surprise that there was a significant need for year-round work.  This is partly due to type of crops grown, and partly due to labor intensity: apples enable significant year-round work with warehouse storage and pruning, and cherries are very labor intensive.

If crops change at all there would be a major implication for workers needed and seasonal fluxes.  For example, if asparagus returns to the valley at a large scale, workers will tip heavily toward spring.

For now, major housing need is June to November, with less than half remaining in the off-season.

Yakima County Demographics

Mapping the demographics of incorporated towns in Yakima County (and the town of George in Grant County) showed possible trends in ethnicity, rental percentage, and population under 18.  

This also revealed significant Native American populations in Wapato, Harrah, and Toppenish, leading to further study of the Yakama tribe and the influence of the reservation.   The reported 45% vacancy rate in George, a town with overcrowding issues, has led to investigations into seasonal flux between harvest and off-season. 

To make observations, in Grandview, Mabton, Sunnyside, and Granger, there were both high Hispanic populations (over 80%) and very young populations (40 - 45% under 18).  Naches and Selah were largely white; Selah also had the lowest proportion of rentals in the county.   Implications and correlations will be explored in greater detail in specific communities.

Preliminary Ideas

Workforce Economics

These diagrams illustrate the correlation between employment and wages between the years of 2005 and 2011.  The top set of graphs, illustrating Yakima County’s employment as a percent of the workforce highlights the extreme fluctuation of workers during the year.  Assuming that the baseline agricultural workforce from January to December are permanent employees working in the manufacturing and processing sector of agriculture, then the summer months add an equal amount of temporary workers for the cherry and apple harvests.  One interesting observation is that the economic downturn didn’t affect the agricultural sector as much as other sectors.  The temporary workers continued to increase, because as the US population continues to grow, the food production needs to grow as well.  However, the permanent workforce likely shrunk, because less people were employed in the 2009 winter months than the 2008 winter months.

The bottom half of the diagram represents the quarterly wages paid to the workers.  Looking at agriculture, there isn’t a direct relationship between the worker increase and the wage increase.  This implies that, despite the average numbers over the course of the year, the temporary summer workers are paid a fair amount less than the permanent workers.  This makes sense, because temporary workers are paid by the amount harvested.  As more temporary workers enter the workforce for a given acreage of farmland, the overall value becomes more distributed, generating less wealth per farmworker. 

This illustrates a need for housing that accommodates both the permanent and temporary worker with the necessary adjustments to accommodate for the varying farmworker incomes.

Monthly Financial Burdens

Each month non-local migrant farm workers face difficulties paying the necessary costs of living. As the average monthly income of $1,111, the typical family must reduce its monthly costs in order to live within its allowance. The results demonstrate that many farm working families live in overcrowded housing in substandard conditions. Other families are forced to reduce grocery or utilities expenses exploiting families furthermore, jeopardizing health and comfort. Additionally, only 67% of farm worker families have health insurance, forcing families to use governmental or community health serves such as the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic.

Conceptual Diagrams

Marco_Forces

Biodiversity

Boundary study

This diagram depicts some different kinds of boundaries on a scale of visual to physical boundaries.

One of my goals it to create and take away boundaries to filter people from the public to private  spaces.

Project Thesis

Study of Flexibility

Housing Demographics by Location

Crossing the River: The Poverty Threshold

EL TROQUE ON DISPLAY
For many of the migrants, the vehicle is the only safe place to invest their money - property is neither feasible nor reliable. The vehicles are often expensive, souped up, and are a social/cultural/economic display of individuality, social status, and wealth. The structures need only integrate these qualities in order to achieve individuality at the unit level.

INCENTIVES: it's very important to understand the reasons behind which different stakeholders and actors make their decisions.

AFFORDABLE: migrant workers have stated clearly what they desire in housing - safe, clean and affordable. But what exactly does that mean?

CLEAN: without an infrastructure grid, their are limitations but also opportunities for different types of sanitation facilities. These OSHA requirements dictate the minimum, but should be exceeded in order to provide a sense of dignity and even luxury.

SAFE: scale is important - social theory suggests a limit of effective/safe group size. The camps are designed around traveling/group patterns of migrant workers.

HIERARCHY OF NEEDS: the order in which services must be met, and upon which others rest.

3D-PROGRAM ADJACENCY: understanding relationships between different spaces - which need to be PRIVATE, PUBLIC, and SEMI-PRIVATE. Spatial relationships and understandings are developed from this diagram.

A World-of-Warcraft-Style migrant camp, complete with spidery alien creatures.

UNIT LEVEL: Rainwater captured in the central membrane is transferred to individual units. The units are divided into hexagons, with removable partitions for privacy. These units can be organized around groups of 2-3 single men, or a multi-generational family.

VERSIONING: experimenting

    Temporary labor camps often are the most appropriate solution, for the greatest amount of migrant workers. Unfortunately, the paradigm for these camps has mostly been squalor and poor design. Precedents such as Burning Man's Black Rock City, and various luxury safari camps have proven that a vibrant, safe, clean, and desirable place to live can be done with a minimum of material - but careful planning.
    The goal is to achieve a camp that is safe and clean, with the dignity and personality of a luxury camp. Affordability will be achieved through a comprehensive business plan, lack of utilities/infrastructure through "off the grid" techniques (inspired by United States Marine Corps Experimental Forward Operating Bases), and super lightweight structures that reduce shipping, set-up, and maintenance costs.


The next stage of development is experimenting with collapsible, deployable tensile fabric membrane structures. Exciting!

Generally, tensile structures are composed of platonic solids (cubes, polyhedrons, etc) that are uniform. This makes it difficult to enter, as well as its connection to the ground.

The way to work around that is to alter compression and tension member lengths in the hedron, thereby being able to manipulate different members, when, for instance, one wants to create a door or a window - with very different size parameters.

In order to cope with that amount of geometric calculation, this project is using Grasshopper, a parametric design option in Rhino, to develop a voronoi pattern in the structure (Voronoi - where lengths of members are the closest - most optimal - distance between points, thereby maintaining tension and structural integrity).

These patterns are not random: there are very specific and rigorous parameters for breaking down the cellular structure, as mentioned below:

In order to be a collapsible/deployable structure, each tension unit needs to be able to telescope from a central contact point with the fabric, and freely rotate about a hub. This is an experiment in how one could use wood as a tension member.

Add caption

Adapting technology developed by the patented Grip-Clip system of Shelter Systems, this picture illustrates a possible  integration of the free hub, into a non-perforating membrane contact point

Using Piezo-electric technology in the fabric to spark a reaction in shape-memory alloys, electrical current can "inflate" dual membrane pillows between the free-hub contact points, and create a greater degree of thermal insulation.

FINAL PROPOSAL