Why Market Fundamentalists Can't Solve the Perennial Low-Cost Housing Shortage

Market fundamentalists drive up the price of housing rather than down. Capitalism does not low home costs through mass production or streamlining of design. It does not produce a two-bedroom hard shell sprayed on for $19.95. The median cost of homes increases and reflects the prevailing high-end middle class ability to pay as a maximum capacity of salary. There is no separate housing market for the poor and middle class that only the poor can buy in. If the poor can’t afford that middle class lifestyle then they must pay rent to the rich or perhaps go to a for-profit prison so the rich can collect rent on their bodies. This is an essay about finding remedies to the perennial shortage of affordable housing for the poor.

Unregulated market dynamics creating investment opportunities work against the manufacture of quality low cost housing affordable to the poor and lower middle class. Hence there is a perennial housing shortage created by capital concentration on Wall Street forever seeking new profit watercourses to flow in. If a dynamic housing developer were to create a national franchise of low cost, super-insulated, simple high-tech three-room dome homes on modest green lots for $30,000-a super value. Instead of 50,000 poor people moving in to low-interest, government-guaranteed financed homes investors on Wall Street recognizing the value would throw down money and take them for-themselves. Then the home plunderers might flip the homes for a profit or just rent them out to the poor. Concentrated capital can buy up and spoil any sort of private sector mass housing programs intended to benefit the poor or lower middle class-that’s just the way it is.

 In the neo-totalitarian corporate state theory predominates over practical democracy. In totalitarian theory no place should exist in the U.S.A. whereby a soul can exist without paying rent to the rich. They might prefer that no one breathe for free either. They want no place where the unemployed or the Son of Man could lay his head without subjugation to totalized geo-political-financial power of the corporate state. Servitude, subjugation and tyranny by the corrupt is the basic effort of the housing paradigm squeezing out the little wealth of the poor and middle class to flow upward to the rich.

A better theory would envision every American owning their home with none renting. Obviously some renting would exist simply because of the advantage in being able to have temporary housing to many. Home owning should be a basic right of all Americans and that should be rationally supported in Democratic policy. Sorting out many of the practical social difficulties created by Americans with housing problems and relieving the poor of existing in a totalized state whereby pressure to compel rent-paying to the corrupt that can even effect political liberty as pressure by the corrupt rich can be placed down the ladder to silence political opinion and free expression of it through economic and housing/ pressure would be a useful way to move from the claims of totalitarian control or all American real estate to a democratic society.

Housing for the poor that is affordable produced purely through the market is as unsatisfactory and ineffective as public housing at solving the never-ending housing problem. Because the corrupt wish to collect rents from others those with the power to end the problem don’t really want to. 

Designing practical low cost private homes easily affordable for the poor and middle class would require sophisticated sociological, environmental, urban and suburban syntegrity. New forms of contractual financing that guarantee affordability and home owning security would need to arise. The homes could not be allowed to be ‘flipped’ or even resold buy a buyer for several decades. A home owner that must relocate could trade the standard home contract to someone elsewhere for an equal home. If the home owner prospers he could keep his basic home and buy more or larger housing on the free market, yet he could not sell the home before three decades have passes although he might rent it out. So many practical problems of movement and material are created by homelessness that it ought to be avoided.

I write here from personal experience. After several years of directed public radio harassment I sold my lot at Wrangell Island Alaska intended for retirement after working down south a few decades. So with homelessness I struggled along with the standard problems of no electricity, short ours of light and so forth. Finally in my 40^th anniversary of arriving in Juneau I got a trespass-eviction notice at a remote place in the forest a mile from nice homes owned by prosperous state workers, professionals, etc. With some substantial effort I packed my stuff away and left the forest looking green and verdant as if no one had been there. This may be regarded by some as the aryan consolidation season in Juneau. In sanskrit arya means 'noble' (as in aristocrat). Perhaps I look like a nigger to the advantaged; who can say. When I was a poor member of the Alaska Army Guard I learned respect for the wild though I never got a paycheck from the state before I left the guard for active duty.

I wonder how it is possible for the poor to extract themselves from poverty with honor. My University of Alaska-Juneau associate degree was of no value in finding work here or elsewhere. I think of it as less valuable than toilet paper. Since the semester I made the chancellors list they did not publish the chancellor’s list and began the process of changing the college name to the University of Alaska-S.E. I might have guessed the degree was a substitute for Charmin.

Still, the forest tent was a good place to work on a graduate course in theology. I was writing a paper on ecclesiology when the eviction notice was posted, yet with seven days to move I was able to work through the notice and look ahead to the eschatology paper. That brief eschatology paper may lead me into an entire course in eschatology. I should stipulate that I tend to be one who believes that realized eschatology is the right interpretation of matters of the Bible. However the kingdom of God is within you while temporality surrounds you and includes your beingness as a human. One may be alive when certain prophesied real events occur in future history yet that is incidental. A Christian always has one foot in the kingdom of God as it were. Though one might need to have two dollars in a pocket to afford bus fare to move their worldly goods there is no cost for transportation to the kingdom of God. I had planned to leave Juneau later this year or early next anyway. It is a fact that when one plans to leave the devil seems to act though people to attempt a last minute trim-it’s kind of weird yet not uncommon.

Private housing should be available for all Americans at a low price. It is of course silly to expect older people or poor people to pay a quarter million dollars for a home even if given a flippy contract from the deep pocket lender flipping the contract in little pieces all over the world. Packaging high quality, low cost housing for the poor and middle class should become a standard government program that as a contract-franchise for production could be fulfilled by many builders. Profit for a builder would be very modest yet with the housing designs and land issues solved ahead of time the development costs would be lower too. It would be necessary to restrict home purchases in the program to those actually poor or lower middle class in order to deliver the product to those that need it.