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.

All images in this post are my own original creations.