How To Fix The Housing Problem? Is It a Financial Issue?
We don't need affordable housing, we need houses that are affordable
This was said and repeated on Twitter/X
And, it seems sorta meaningful, but it isn't really. However, it is better than govern-cement paying money to "provide" "affordable housing" when they are a big part of why housing is not affordable.
One big problem with capitalism is the tendency to want to keep prices high. And then greedy forces to use the govern-cement and manipulate financing to achieve this.
We should never have allowed competition on living necessities.
We should have made sure everyone has a house to live in.
However, limiting competition, or limiting price means there will never be enough houses.
What a pickle to be in…
Under socialism / communism
Everyone is given a slum house in a slum neighborhood.
If there is no competition to make better houses, then no one makes better houses.
If there is no profit incentive then there is very little incentive to make better houses.
Under capitalism
There is no money in making things for the poor.
The poor get the hand me downs from the middle class (this is the way slums are made)
The middle class get the hand me downs from the rich.
The rich pay for houses to be built.
However, under capitalism we bid up the price on a necessity. We bid it up till only the rich can afford it.
What a pickle we are in.
Huge incentives to not build enough houses
If you want to keep something expensive, you need to keep supply low. Forces have worked to keep things that way
- Changing building codes to make minimum house sizes ever larger
- Limiting the number of new building permits
- Breaking up the family. So, now we need two houses instead of one.
- NIMBY - Not in my back yard. We don't want low costs houses around here, they will attract the trash.
- Use big corporations with almost free money to buy up the excess inventory in areas.
Again, we blame the boomers. The boomers got into housing when everything was much more affordable, and then they fell for the line "we need to keep house prices high" (to protect their "investment") which meant, lets screw our children out of every owning a house. But the boomers were sold on "their house is their biggest investment" and "we need to keep home prices high". With these two big lies believed by the boomers, the political class could write all kinds of codes that made it harder and harder to buy a house.
And that is what the real estate moguls wanted. Build less, sell for more.
Good for profit, bad for the poor.
What if…
What if everyone got a house before anyone got a second house?
The middle class of the boomer generation often had a second, vacation house.
All the rich, well, the ones who travel, all have a second house, a third beach house…
So, if we made a rule that everyone gets a house before anyone gets a second, we might easily see everyone housed.
The rich wouldn't waste money. They would build small, efficient houses, and probably build them all for less than their new mansion.
If you gave the same money to the govern-cement, they would build middle class sized houses, cutting every corner, and then broker deals with the contractors to get kickbacks. So, you would end up with a quarter of the houses built.
What if we didn't allow large corporations to get better financing deals when it came to housing? Or, had to pay more interest if they were going to do anything but live in that house. (airBNB, rental, let it sit investment).
The financial industry loves to finance people to make houses more expensive. You buy an apartment complex, fix it up, raise the rental rates. Sell it to an apartment investment corp, who raises the rent…
And so, the incentive is to buy and refinance, then sell and refinance. But all this does is raise the rents on the poor and middle class.
The banksters love this because they get to keep issuing loans (new money) and the corporations love this because there is no down side. If the endeavor fails, just give it back to the bank. No one in this process is actually looking at the economy, or the people.
What if we built a tiny house for everyone. Every boy builds a tiny home in highschool shop class. If the community/city provided the land this would get the young men quickly into the community. And there would be an abundance of houses. These young men would get married and want a bigger house, which they may build or buy. And that leaves a tiny house for someone else.
The problem with this is that it is the exact same rhetoric to build 15 minute, open air prisons. We build a tiny house for everyone, which you get to live in for free… the difference is in the fine print. (you don't own the house, and you can only stay as long as you have a high social credit score)
Well, this is all going to be a mute point.
So many forces are going to increase supply, and decrease demand.
Such as, they are going to try to retrofit commercial office buildings into apartments.
And all the baby boomers are going to be selling their houses.
And…
There will be so many empty houses soon, that we will be working on the opposite problem. What to do with all these empty houses that are falling into disrepair.
And the real problem is that we don't have enough jobs, and enough housing near those jobs.
A bigger problem is we do not have land near our house to grow vegetables and chickens to feed ourselves.
But, what we focus on is people not being able to afford a tiny house on a tiny lot.
I have no idea what you're thinking, except some kind of Communism. Is there some system that enables necessities to just erupt from the vacuum when we need them?
We did. It's called prison.
I read that cancer has risen by >140k% since the jabs were mandated. If so, that's going to happen.
No one gives bears a den to sleep through the winter in. No one hands birds a nest to lay eggs in. The world works the way it does for real reasons. The laws of physics matter. Capitalism is embedded in the natural world. Lyre birds build a fancy lek where they work hard to attract mates with shiny objects. The ones that get the best shiny objects breed. That's capitalism, and it's how the universe works. It's got nothing to do with money, corporations, or governments.
Thanks!
I guess it could be called communism. What do you call it when the Amish get together and help to build a new couple their house?
What is the term used when everyone divvies up all the land, and so the next generation has to outbid all that have come before them, or literally wait for someone to die? Do people really own all the land, just because they were born first?
Prison doesn't have enough places for everyone.
Something that i didn't put in here is like, houses should cost what they cost to build, instead of being bid up and up and up.
Basically, house prices are how much can a borrower pay each month. Then worked through the banking system into an amount they can borrow. And then we allowed families with two incomes to bid against families with one income. This is just an upward spiral that destroys people's lives.
Social cohesion and tight knit community. It is not institutionalized, so it is an entirely human, personal, social activity, which is completely distinct from codified institutional rules and regulations, which are often abused by bureaucrats in inhuman and inhumane mechanisms to profit the corrupt executives of institutions. Actions of communities of human people are distinct and often the utter reverse of acts formal institutions take even when they are codified for the very purpose such communal actions undertake. The reason for this dichotomy is that institutions are not human, and can be corrupted because they are hierarchies controlled from the top executives, while each of the people in a community is immune from corruption to act contrary to their own interests, and feels affection and obligation to their kith and kine, which institutions, being inhuman and therefore inhumane, cannot.
You should have a look at ecosystems, because this isn't something only happening in human society. These principles regulate every species that exists, because habitat suitable to species is competed for without exception. Creating formal institutions to manage human habitat is simply handing that process to corruption, because institutions are inhuman and cannot be humane, do not feel, do not care, do not love, do not suffer, and are infiltrated by corruptors without fail, which utterly perverts their stated purpose inevitably.
If you want to give the banksters all real property, then promote formal codification and create institutions to handle probate, taking it from communities of real people that love and care about one another - although that is often in short supply when inheritance is in view. However, that competition for resources is a natural process all species feature, and princes killing each other off to inherit is a feature of almost all living species on Earth. We can bewail it, call it evil, and be sad for the less fit that are robbed in such competitions, and we do.
But giving that power to institutions is more evil yet, because even princes are people and have been granted some human connection to their brothers they murder, while institutions have no such humanity, whatsoever.
That's the central purpose of the Awful Reset (it's not going to be great at all). The communities of the West are being redesigned to feature universal, 24/7 surveillance, just like prisons, private transportation is being eliminated from plebs, leaving us afoot in 15 minute communities, and massive gangs of thugs to enforce institutional rule are being created and armed, all exactly methods used in prisons. We'll all be living in prisons if we allow institutions to manage our affairs.
You are in charge of that, @builderofcastles. Build houses and sell them as you prefer. The litany that follows this last quote above is about problems that come from institutionalizing the process of managing property, and all the complaints you have about it derive therefrom.
As a human person, who proudly proclaims you build homes in your chosen appellation here on Hive, you have the sole and exclusive authority to deliver your creations per your personal whim. If you choose to do things one way or another, involving unholy, inhumane institutions in your exclusive authority to part with your creation, that is on your immortal soul. Don't blame it on them.
I own a home I paid $100 cash for. It was a fixer, as you might imagine. When I inspected the roof (after the purchase) my foot went right through the ceiling below. There was a sheet of plastic attached with lath to the ceiling below that channeled the leaking water towards the front door. Being handy, I have fixed all that, and today the roof doesn't leak and the ceiling has been repaired. No loans were required, and all transactions and repairs necessary were undertaken by individual people.
Do your business per your personal preferences, and be the change you want to see in the world.
Having every boy build a tiny home for high school shop class is an interesting concept. Maybe they do a van conversion so they can roll away with it and do some road trips.
One of the only hopes I have for the younger generation is when I see a boss like this. What he was able to do in this video was absolutely amazing to say the least. It even somewhat exhaust me but he is a skilled builder at this point and has been doing it for several years now so he knows how to hook up the systems and what needs to be done.
In a lot of ways I like the premise of the vanlife or tiny houses but it blows my mind when people have such an insane amount of money dumped into those setups. That's why I like he did this one for $10,000.
At the end of the day there are a lot of vacant and dying communities in rural areas but suddenly when you look at the situation I always ask myself "what am I actually going to get if I went there and lived like Ted Kaczynski?"
It all goes back to the women. I talk about this all the time to my friends. We are the lucky ones and when it boils it down there aren't any actual long term prospects. As sad as that sounds that is just the reality.
A lot of people would just hunker down and pill out to get High AF to deal with it or delete themselves. We see this in Japan. Dudes just going to the woods to hang themselves. It's sad.
Then just yesterday I got this advertisement for at home Ketamine treatment on Instagram and was once again thinking in my mind how this is another reason why we won't have a civil war. People with just pill out and veg out.
https://www.instagram.com/mindbloom