Why There Are No Affordable Homes

Affordability Issues

Affordability is a matter of perspective. Are people dying from not having a house? Not really. But they may be paying more or live in poor conditions.

How many people in the USA live in substandard housing? Apparently 6 million. [1]

Data

First, are there affordable homes?

First, there are plenty of $100-150k homes on Zillow: about 100k+. Buy maybe not in desirable locations? [2]

So what is the housing shortage of 5 million homes all about? [3] It is that more people want to buy homes than there are homes. So that means people either rent (from places that are typically owned by a large group, and thus the conflict of intrest (profit over affordability) leads to unreasonably high payments (see Rentier Capitalism / Rent-Seeking )) ), or go into less favored options.

Links

• Authoritative book - [4]. So then: is policy the way to go for regenerative solutions at scale, or is it done through entrepreneurship, where clever entrepreneurship solves all business problems, which include policy deficits? The grand debate: enterprise or policy?
• Housing Without Debt. Critique:
  • In the USA, land is much cheaper than in the UK, so the gravity of the issue is less.
  • Still, that doesn't solve house affordability.
  • Construction: what if people developed the land that they live on? That's a great idea, but the reality is that very few people want to or can build their own home, according to OSE data. From the OSE workshops that people attended - zero built the Seed Home 1 so far.
  • Thus, we need to solve for an assisted construction model. 25% of overall population builds their own home. We can bring that up to much higher, with lower costs. To get there, we will need to provide the general contracting as well.
• Seed Home 2 Operations