Solving Housing

OSE Whitepaper: Solving Housing

Package this like an annual report, where good graphics provide perspective, but this is very much established in a clear plan of action and visible results.

And provide testimonials from people served.

Presentation

Presented at the September 2025 Future Builders Crash Course -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxlk4BNToDk

Working Doc

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Problems

The problem with housing can be described as a mismatch of supply & demand in housing. In short: the average American cannot afford the average American house. Many Americans, especially younger ones, are locked out of the housing market permanently - locking them into financial uncertainty for life, as they will always have to pay rent. Those that can afford to get big mortgages are often settled with huge payments for the majority of their lives, i.e. 30 years or, soon, 50 years.

There are various root causes at play.

Regulatory & political:

• NIMBY mentality - "Not in my back yard". In the West, "affordable" housing means "ghetto" so city councils reject them and known policies such as redlining exist to this day.

• Central planning schemes - where city councils or county boards plan segregated communities (subtly) while they imbibe inclusivity in words only.

• Urban deserts - no trees or healthy food.

Cost & financing:

• Financing cost - mortgages that can't be paid back and banks foreclose. With 30 year mortgages, people often pay 2-4x the price of the house in total over time.

• Debt - housing is expensive. Buying even entry-level/affordable houses often settles people with 30 year mortgages, with huge monthly payments. Missing payments, or even technicalities in the mortgage, can lead to loss of the house even after decades of payments.

• Cost incentives for builders - no sane builders build affordable housing, because they can make more money building expensive housing.

• Speculation & financialization - in that economic incentives encourage spec builders to treat land like a commodity as opposed to treating it as a case for regenerative development, by prioritizing profit over innovation.

Building process:

• Disintegration of the building process - Increases building cost. The design guy does not build the house, and thus does not design it like the builder would like to build it. The engineer is not the designer, the designer is not the builder, the builder is not the materials provider, and is not the user. A fully disintegrated production chain that cannot result in closed loop production cycles. Communication overhead grows exponentially the more parties are involved in the process. What was a quick thought becomes a phone call. A phone call becomes a scheduled meeting. A meeting becomes a months-long planning process.

• Disintegration of producer & consumer - If a person built a home for himself, he'd know which trade-offs to make & where to save cost. If he built the same home but sold it to someone just like him, he'd have to spend so much more time and effort: lawyers, realtors, bank financing, insurance, guarantees, building to certain specs "just in case" that are "assumed to be valued by buyers" and so on. These added costs easily add 50-150% on top of the "time & materials" cost when building for yourself.

• Lack of skilled labor - making house cost high by restricting supply. If housing is so expensive, why has construction pay not increased to make up for it? Answer: Because the cost increase is not in the construction per se, but all the surrounding red tape.

• Lack of the practice of best practices - as the industry is not open source.

• Lack of innovation - where light frame construction has not gained much improvement since the late 19th century.

• Lack of comprehensive, digital, open design - where in the digital age, builders typically don't extract BOMs from CAD, but leave that to the builder.

Other:

• Resource sinks - modern housing is not productive, serving as just accommodation while commuting to a job during the day, or a financial investment. It is not itself productive, unlike mixed-use housing in the past.

• Access to land - land around jobs and education is expensive.

• Technological & societal changes - starting around the 1980s or so, more and more jobs went from agriculture/manufacturing, which can be rural & decentralized, to professional jobs, which are highly centralized in a handful of big metro areas like New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles. With the advent of the internet, work-from-home, Starlink, and cheap solar power, this trend seems to be reversing a bit: it is now more feasible than during any time in the last 50 years to decentralize and move back to more rural areas and live off-the-grid without foregoing all the amenities of modern life (culture, good jobs, communication, education, good food).

• Land parcel/zoning structure - land is often not structured or sold in ways or sizes amenable to affordable housing. Rural areas often have minimum parcel sizes, which can drive up the minimum required capital to purchase land.

• Specialization culture - everyone is encouraged to go to college & learn 1 job, and perform nothing else for his entire life. This leads to extremely disintegrated economies, where people call a plumber or electrician, who might as well be a wizard. Think of the Heinlein quote: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Solutions

Producer Training

The lowest cost way to build your own house consists of: 1, renting materials production equipment to produce all house construction materials including refrigerators and toaster ovens, 2, renting the necessary construction equipment, 3, lerning optimized techniques rapidly, and building your own house over a summer. This involves 1 month on site to produce materials, and 1 month on the build site of the client's future dream home. Total cost is nominally $42k. For this to be accessible, there would have to be one of these operations every 2 hours driving radius, or 100 of these USA wide.

This package is summarized as: $27k cost for materials for a house + builder training, delivered at door of customer. Customer is trained to produce all the materials at OSE - they are microfactory participants for a month. In that month, they generate resources for their house. Then they spend a month building it on their land - 2 people = 320 hours. $10k for training for a couple, and $10k for materials + shipping. 2 week training + 2 week production. Every 2-10 houses (depending on poverty rate of a given region) we can subsidize someone else. We train you to build modules, 3D print, use sawmill, use brick press. Materials include CEBs, lumber, and waste plastic ($100/bale) - one bale is 1000 lb (see Plastic Bales). Each bale makes 5 house modules, so we need 8 bales per house. One month must make enough material - so it should take no more than 1 week to shred and extrude. Shred is at 100 lb/hr, filament making is 8-strand extruder at 2 lb/hr = 400 lb/day. This is where we go to 1/4" filament, get 3x the production rate = 1200 lb/day. But the house is made primarily of CEB - so we need 100 feet of wall, or 2000 sf of wall.That would be 12000 block. At 10 block per minute - 600 per hour - that is 20 hours of pressing. 12,000 block is 240k lb - or 5 loads. (One person can lift 1000 bricks per day easily, and much more or much less depending on their strength and ergonomics setup). This involves close to 100 cubic yards of soil. That is a basement for Seed Eco-Home - 6' deep - or a small pond. $5k for shipping if 5 trucks going at 500 mi distance at $2/mi. Foundation is $2k if you DIY. Other materials are $2k (some fittings), and then all appliances - say $3k. Then you have $27 for the house build in materials. The general principle is that it will cost you 1/2 of current materials costs, with costs internalized. There would be about $5k of materials initially that we could not produce on site.

The time spent (for 2 people) is one month of materials production, and 1 month of house construction. This is what we are aiming for, at a cost of $27k for operations and supplies, $5k extra materials, and an $10k service fee - total of $42k to produce all the building materials.

The concept here is - can an individual spend 2 months to address the #1 cost in their life - their house? Instead of having to work for somebody else - for 30 years with a standard mortgage! - to get the money for it?

To solve the latter - if $100/hr equivalent value is produced - then in 2 weeks the worth of 2 peoples' labor generates $100*160=$16000. If the person is radically efficient, even higher than $100/hr value - then the value produced can cross-subsidize their participation (if they do a 50/50 'sharecropping' model - producing their own house parts AND double that so that what they produce we can buy from them to even enable them to participate for free). That would be for very low income people, or undeveloped areas. The idea is - machines make productivity extreme, and if we run an efficient operation, we are freeing people up to pursue their dreams.

Issues List - To Be Prioritized

1. Supply chain - latest in 2022 is garage doors - [1] - such that closing is delayed or temp doors are installed. Build times of 1 year instead of 7 months reported due to the recent garage door issue.
2. Optimize existing house aid efforts - ex, If an organization that is an international travel agency charges people as 'aid tourism' and low skill level ends up not finishing a house. OSE can provide finishing school, ie, faster build time and optimized design via Extreme Manufacturing swarms. And, fix Aid Tourism in the first place.
3. Building optimized housing using Integrated Efficiency and Universal Design not requiring constant remodeling as you go through different phases of your life.
4. Producing digital housing - with a full digital model, scalability can arise via 6Ds of Disruption
5. Create a 3 month training mechanism for new builders to get up and running completely, to deliver upon orders acquired in distributed operations worldwide
6. A continuing product dev mechanism, funded by sales from the education organization. Product sales combine with apprenticeships and tuition to deliver new house builders, and houses built.
7. Open source supporting equipment, based on lifetime design, provides low cost support infrastructure
8. Creating land for new regenerative settlements, and taking land out of speculation.
9. Cooperative Housing

Facts and Figures

• 300k houses short in the USA 2020 [2]
• 8M people USA pay at least 50% of their income on housing [3]

Notes

• Sell at 'market value' ie cost comparable to what is available, but provide productive capital, not a liability. Such as microfactory production or energy production. Such as microgrids - where if we educate the city departments, we can have a flexible energy production infrastructure on the scale of communities. This takes getting past big utility lobbies or just plain resistance. Blockchain microgrids are a natural solution.
• See Selling Power Back to the Grid
• Brownsville is the most dense public housing area in the USA - [4]

Industry Standards

What are the known issues that the industry communicates as pain points?

• Digibilt - [5]

Proposed Opinions

• Proposing public-owned housing, like social security. You pay down a rent, until you 'own', but you don't really own, though you can draw value from your fund. [6]. Sold at market value. What does that solve, though?
  • Probably solves the issues of rent vs ownership etc User: Eric
• Community land trusts: a non-profit that owns land and takes it off the speculative market, creating a parallel market that is permanently affordable.

Global Perspective

1. The Communist Block - [7]. MJ verification - my Polish youth apartment had small rooms with fold-out beds for the kids. Parents still own this after provatization. However, it was a comfy apartment in the Block. Everyone from a scientist to a factory worker lived in these - and the social conditions were not the ghetto of racist American project housing.

Organizations

• Affordable Housing Institute

Example

• Finland solved housing [8]. It is called Housing First.

Links

• Nobody wants to fix housing. A house is a home only incidentally. Its essence has been turned into an asset class. Jen Gerson.
• Also - what is retirement alternative?