In America, we have two major problems in housing.
- We don't have enough housing.
- We have too much new housing aimed at higher income people.
What we don't have, is enough slums.
And if you look at it deeply, there is no way to build new slums. So, what can we do?
Poor people are the problem
"If poor people just made more money, then they could all afford houses"
What a factual, and simultaneously false statement. And, what a tragic, and also bigoted statement.
One big problem is that debt based, fractional reserve lent currency creates a zero sum game. Where one person gets a mortgage, it limits others from getting a mortgage. (not that it can't all be lent into existence, but each mortgage sucks up a bit more of the flowing money supply. After a point, there just doesn't exist money to pay the loan. It is mathematical that all the loans cannot be repaid, but it is a progressive function where the more mortgages, the hard it gets to simply make payments.
Rich people are better with money than middle class people who are way better than poor people. Thus, the zero sum game of currency makes it so the poor will never have enough houses.
How do the poor get houses? By getting hand me downs. Moving into areas where the houses are already falling apart. Or, in other words, moving into slums.
Can we build cheap housing?
The answer is, under today's codes, no.
The building codes make it impossible to build a cheap house.
Well, actually, the code makes all houses cheaply constructed. The bare minimum is what gets done, except for people who specifically set out to build a better house. And the bare minimum is shitty.
To build housing that the poor can afford, it has to be mass produced, and the size of tiny trailers, and without all the amenities. Things like one piece, fiberglass bathrooms, where you basically take a shower standing next to the toilet. The size of a small container, so that we already have a frame and wheels we can put under it to deliver it.
We do not have the luxury of building groups of these, each with a nice yard. Land is way too expensive. We need to pile them almost ruthlessly.
And, one of the most important things is we need to be able to pick them up and dispose of them. Poor people are notorious for not caring for their homes. The stories i can tell, and other construction people, about going into section 8 housing after the tenant is gone. Cat feces three feet deep… is not an uncommon story.
Literally, to fix this housing for the poor, problem, we need to allow there to be built, slums. Not nice places that a middle class person would want to live in, but something that allows a person to sleep without the rain falling on them, and not much more.
It always comes down to the rich paying for it
Everything is built for the rich first. Because, they have money and can afford it.
Cars were built for the rich. And you often drove around with your mechanic in the car with you. Poor people couldn't afford that. It wasn't until there was two (or more) sets of hand-me-downs that poor people got cars.
And now, Toyota is building a $10,000 pickup, and you can't buy it in The US because of… regulations.
The problem with housing is that rich people tend to take care of their houses. So, it is the middle class who have to buy cheap starter house, and then move up later in life to a nicer house.
The rich also tend to keep their surroundings nice. It is only the middle class who let things get run down, so then they move to a new area. Leaving behind a slum in the making.
Well, now that regulations say you cannot build a starter home, and even a starter home is too expensive, that there are no new slums.
Unfortunately, we are going to solve this problem by having a huge part of the population die off. There will be abundant houses available to be squatted in.
Too bad we never worked out that there are needs of the poor. And actually worked to fix that long ago. Now we have tent cities springing up in most cities.
This could have all been fixed long ago, if we had just gotten off our high horses, and recognized that the poor didn't need, and couldn't maintain nice houses. We really should have looked at what could really be done. But, we got into a mentality of "i got mine, you can go get yours". (while the banksters, and the cities, and the rich people all conspired to keep the poor, poor and without homes)
Maybe the next go-round, we may want to work these things out.
We could have made all our houses much more energy efficient. Using half the electricity we currently do.
We could have designed passive solar heating into houses, and reduced fuel usages by over half.
We could have built our houses to last a century, but instead, the new stuff is already breaking down.
And, we could have created places for poor to live, that isn't just giving them nice new houses, which the middle class can't even afford today.