One system builds communities, another destroys them. Take your pick, but choose wisely.
 | Everyone is for solutions to housing unaffordability that don't diminish the value of their house. But the price is the problem. As I explained in Housing: The Foundations of the Middle Class Are Crumbling, turning housing into just another table in the financialization casino has inflated a bubble of unprecedented proportions that has distorted not just affordability but the fabric of society. www.zerohedge.com |
The choice is simple: housing is either shelter for citizens, or it's just another interchangeable speculative asset in the global financialization casino. It can't be both.
We tend to think of housing becoming unaffordable as a matter of land prices, zoning and the cost of 2X4s, but it's fundamentally a matter of values. Subscriber John summarized this in an insightful comment on Substack:
"For me, this issue is a reflection of the values of our culture.
1. Lack of value placed on community means that a house is primarily a financial asset, not a home.
2. Lack of valuing community, means that we have not supported local business / industry and allowed these to be centralized or outsourced.
3. Lack of valuing self-sufficiency means that the only way we can view a house as an asset is when it increases in value. How much income does your house generate every month? (even if you count that income in tomatoes).
Most of the housing being built is nothing more than boxes with a roof no matter how fancy the box. There is no awareness of how that housing is a part of the ecology that it is built in."
