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A house that costs $20k

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Re: A house that costs $20k

#41

Post by gozur88 »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #20
Ao7bei3s wrote: post #7

> 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…

>Rent does not build wealth. Rent is the act of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.

That's not a general rule. It really depends on rents, interest rates, and the cost to purchase housing. In a functioning market rents bring in just a tiny bit more than the monthly mortgage payment, including taxes and fees. There have been times in my area where you came out ahead renting, and times when you came out ahead owning.

The government makes a terrible mistake when it pushes home ownership for people who cant afford it. In the US home ownership is a characteristic of the middle class, not a cause. It's as much consumption as it is savings.

Re: A house that costs $20k

#42

Post by yitchelle »

Already__Taken wrote: post #34
yitchelle wrote: post #26

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."

The article pretty clearly states it's just material costs.

My point is what is the real cost of living in this house, can the folks living under the poverty live really afford to live in it?

Re: A house that costs $20k

#43

Post by efaref »

jernfrost wrote: post #28

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…

Indeed. My house is 20 minutes away from the centre of one of the financial capitals of the world. You couldn't buy enough land to build one of those houses on for half a million. You wouldn't get planning permission anyway, and I doubt it meets the local building regulations.

Re: A house that costs $20k

#44

Post by kriro »

It doesn't look very sturdy, which seems to be a wrong assumption on my part [1], but 20k for a decent house is nice...assuming you own the land already. For comparison, how much do the Amish-houses cost (materials) and how long do they take to build them? I only know them from movies but they seem like low-cost/quickbuild type houses, too.

Edit: Building instructions for this could be a good application for a VR-based tutorial :)

[1]: "They're built more like airplanes than houses, which allows us to have them far exceed structural requirements. ... We're using material much more efficiently. But the problem is your local code official doesn't understand that. They look at the documents, and the house is immediately denied a permit simply because the code officials didn't understand it."

Re: A house that costs $20k

#45

Post by reustle »

jernfrost wrote: post #28

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…

The nice thing about a cheaper house is you then have more money to spend on a better plot of land.

Re: A house that costs $20k

#46

Post by huuu »

Material cost of houses is already 'cheap'.

But you also need a place to build it. In The Netherlands ground prices range from $100 - $500 per m².

Then you need sewage, electricity, gas, labor, and so on. I don't think you could make those much cheaper.

Re: A house that costs $20k

#47

Post by luisramalho »

raggiskula wrote: post #40
jernfrost wrote: post #28

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…

Icelander here, I'm more concerned how well does this house work in icelandic conditions? Does it handle earthquakes well? What about regular storms? Being wet for months end? Constant freezing and thawing? Can you put it in an active volcano? Does if float on magma? There are lot of questions here!

Does it float on magma?

Do houses in Iceland really do that?

Re: A house that costs $20k

#48

Post by seanmcdirmid »

SwellJoe wrote: post #25
_s wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It falls down to the value of your proposal, eg: Land: $25,000 Resale at $20,000 to $30,000 Tiny House: $25,000 Resale at -$5000* to $35,000 Normal House: $100,000 Resale at: $75,000 to $125,000 * Next owners may want it removed A $50,000 loan doesn't make sense / is too risky. I know the above is grossly over simplified, and there's hundreds to thousands of factors going into a risk / valuation but currently banks a…

"Land: $25,000 Resale at $20,000 to $30,000" I think you're assuming I was trying to get a loan to build the house. The loan was for the land itself, and I planned to self-fund the house construction. So, I was looking at property that cost around $75k, and was hoping to get a loan for $50k of that (with $25k down). The tiny house was not at all part of the equation on the loan (except in the sense that had I been pl…

Building something on land that isn't standard reduces the value of the land because it has to be removed as annoying.

Undeveloped land is risky to finance because you have no idea how the borrower will develop it. There are a lot of whacky people out there.

Re: A house that costs $20k

#50

Post by mseebach »

rwmj wrote: post #12
ascorbic wrote: post #3

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…

The link does not support your assertion that there is planning permission on those plots. After the hand-waving about profits, there are nearly identical quotes from developers explaining that the bottlenecks are planning permission, skilled workers and building materials.
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