31–40 of 212 posts
Excluding all costs apart from material. Yeah, it doesn't cost 20k.
> How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want—while also providing a living wage for the local construction team that builds it? Material is $14k.
> How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford Why not rent a flat instead? Wouldn't that be much more economical (no property prices, lower heating costs, less maintenance work, less risk, not built on the cheap)? I don't understand the fixation on owning a house / living in a single-family house many americans seem to have.
I would be scared to buy a house that uses non-standard construction methods. Not because I don't trust the plans, but because even with cookie cutter houses, the construction people mess up a lot of things and you really have to pay an additional person to check the construction. Trying to get construction companies to build a house using novel techniques and do it without major errors is, I imagine, quite an undert…
20K? Would love to see the itemised material costs, labour cost, adminstration fees for building this. Also have a projected on-going maintenance costs as well. At the end of the day, the aim of this house is "a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford."
> How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford Why not rent a flat instead? Wouldn't that be much more economical (no property prices, lower heating costs, less maintenance work, less risk, not built on the cheap)? I don't understand the fixation on owning a house / living in a single-family house many americans seem to have.
Rent does not build wealth. Rent is the act of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. Rent is, essentially, theft from society itself, it leaves everyone poorer when most people rent. Rent in America today is identical to the serfs of old. The post-WW2 thing the Government did with getting everyone mortgages so they would be home owners that caused the eventual economic collapse 10 years ago? They had the rig…
If you rent, you pay rent. If you own, you pay interest on a loan[1] and maintenance costs. There is also a forced savings component in the form of mortgage principle payments. There are also less tangible benefits to both renting and owning. Renting is entirely flexible and allows you to relocate with ease. Owning gives more flexibility in customizing your home. Different people will ascribe different values to these benefits. Especially for someone who does not yet know where they want to settle long term, renting might be very attractive.
Because of the forced savings aspect of owning, renting will almost always be cheaper on a cash-flow basis. Therefore, if a person earns a middle class income[2] and is fiscally responsible, it provides an opportunity to put money into a diversified, low-cost investment portfolio. Eventually, that portfolio should grow to the point where purchasing a modest home is possible. What's more, it will hopefully start a habit that will continue through life, and eventually provide for a comfortable retirement.
So again, I absolutely agree with you that finding a way to better teach smart personal finance is critical. I just don't see at all how it follows that everyone must own a home (immediately).
[1] Or if you own outright, you pay the opportunity cost on funds that could be invested elsewhere.
[2] Obviously at a certain level of poverty, there simply is no additional money to put away, even after any discretionary spending is cut. That isn't an issue of affordability of homes though; it's an issue of poverty, which needs to be tackled directly.
I love things like this, but also saddened that in the UK the land to put it on would cost at least ten times that amount. The planning system here is a disgrace.
UK housebuilding companies are sitting on (by various estimates) 400,000-600,000 plots of land which have planning permission, but they haven't built on. That's about 3 years' worth of new houses. The reason is to hold up prices, and because (with "ever-rising" prices) if they build in the future they will make more profit. There are problems in the planning system, certainly, but at the moment we need an undeveloped…
Seriously, it may be hard for young people to enter the housing market. But no-one wants to go for a solution that leaves the people who do own houses today with mortgages bigger than what their house is worth on the market. You don't help 10% of people by screwing over another 70%.
Everything we take for granted could potentially be made in a much better way for a lower price. It will be interesting to see applications of this thinking in other areas.
> How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford Why not rent a flat instead? Wouldn't that be much more economical (no property prices, lower heating costs, less maintenance work, less risk, not built on the cheap)? I don't understand the fixation on owning a house / living in a single-family house many americans seem to have.
Rent does not build wealth. Rent is the act of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. Rent is, essentially, theft from society itself, it leaves everyone poorer when most people rent. Rent in America today is identical to the serfs of old. The post-WW2 thing the Government did with getting everyone mortgages so they would be home owners that caused the eventual economic collapse 10 years ago? They had the rig…
It also allows you to live somewhere without (a) tying up all my capital + credit in some super-undiversified equity[1] and (b) buying a massive amount of downside risk on the local property market.
The comparison with serfs is, I think, an example of the worst argument in the world[2], paying someone for use of their property seems fine to me on the face of it, and yes it's something serfs used to do, but the things we don't like about serfdom were the violent coercion and the idea that the nobility got their property illegitimately, on the other hand if I built an apartment building and then I rent the apartments to people neither of the elements that cause me to hate serfdom exist here.
>Instead of making everyone homeowners, make everyone fiscally responsible so that getting a mortgage wouldn't be hard for them in the first place.
>I don't entirely blame them though: building Freddy and Fannie was magnitudes easier than fixing the broken parts of American society and (lack of) education.
Well, at least you don't blame them...
Saying something like "make everyone fiscally responsible" is not actionable, but offering people better terms on mortgages is actionable.
People also have risk preferences that just don't line up owning their own home, like wanting to live in property markets where they can't afford a home (like NY or SF), and no amount of fiscal responsibility will change that for most of these people, you either need to change their preferences (by making these place less attractive) or dramatically increase the supply of housing.
[1] Even worse, for a lot of people the value of their home is somewhat correlated with their income, like if the local property market tanks it's more likely that the local job market suffered a downturn also, so that it's more likely that they've also lost their jobs, so now you might have to default on a mortgage, and also you have no income.
It's kind of hard for me to tell whether the house is nicer than mine when there's so little detail in the article on the actual house. Look, i'm more than supportive of innovative design and doing things cheaply, but for an article that was heavy on "the house is so cheap", and "its built kinda more like a airplane", and "it uses all this innovative stuff", there's a startling dearth of information. Sqm, plans, insu…
Probably nice for the US, but in much of the rest of the world, it is the price of land which dominate the price. Any system that aims to reduce house prices really need to deal with limited supply of land to build on. Even on Iceland which has vast amounts of space and tiny population, house prices are high because the areas where people want to live is in high demand. Now if you could just build your house at any a…