We have made the price of a house so disconnected from reality, that future generations will look back and think of how insane we were.
Ok, so you move out into the woods, like Grizzly Adams, and you can build yourself a log cabin for about 3 months worth of work. House done, paid for, three months of your life.
In a city like Los Angles, you spend thirty years paying over a third of your salary, to "buy" a house that although may be bigger, is not as solid, not as long lasting.
And, even worse, in your standard mortgage, you pay the banks several times the price of the house, for money they pulled out of thin air. The banks didn't help create the materials, nor build the house, they just swooped in at the end to profit off the deal. And the only reason you got a mortgages is because your neighbor got a mortgage, and so bid up the price.
Our entire system of housing is bad for people. We need to get rid of the crown and the banksters. And really think of how we divvy up property. Because, right now, we are in a state that is worse than slavery. Slaves are provided places to sleep.
The price of a house
It takes a craftsman about three years for him to build his dream home, by himself. This is usually quite the structure. Details everywhere. The best materials.
To build an apartment… We take all the laborers and the time they take to build the entire apartment complex, and we are looking at about one month of labor for each apartment.
The typical condo is about three months of labor.
Even if we double these times to pay for materials too. We don't come to anywhere near the 30 years of a mortgage.
What is worse is that the 30 year price tag is for the shittiest of building materials and fastest of methods and cutting all of the corners that can be cut.
You are a slave
Corporations + Fractional Reserve Lending = Modern day slavery
Lets say that big corporations are the only place you can get a job. And so, to have a job there, you have to live near their office buildings. Which defines where you can live.
Now, if the corporations and banksters work hard to limit the amount of homes nearby, they artificially increase the houses prices.
So, if you want to work, you need to live in a city, and have to compete with other people who want to work and live in the city.
And these corporations have teamed up with the banksters to make sure there is no other place to work. (You can see this in a town that used to have a factory, and when the factory moved overseas, the town basically dies) The problem is that this has been a continuous process of destroying any small time manufacturers, killing off the mom & pop shops and making everyone dependent on the giant corporations either primarily or secondarily.
The outcome is that wages continue to go down (compared to inflation) and housing continues to go up. And this ends with all the houses being owned by the banks, and all the employees either working for the corporations, or not working at all.
So, in a very real sense, you are now a slave to the corporations, and you are not even getting housing as you would have back in the day. Even a share cropper back in time was making a better living than people are today.
If you could
If you could live anywhere, there are houses in all kinds of small towns that are abandoned, or almost so. They are for sale cheaper than you could build one.
So much of America is like this. Factories in the rust belt just abandoned. For sale cheap. But do not kid yourself, they will cost you more to repair and protect (yes, protect, as people will drive through your fence to steal whatever they can find) then it would cost to build a new one in an area that is not so depressed.
The problems of getting out from under this slavery are not easy. You basically need to make a passive income and/or make a business that is not tied to a location. And then you can move where you want, and build as cheaply or expensively as you wish. Unfortunately, most people aren't entrepreneurs. And so, this idea seems out of reach for most, although every person can invest in things that continue to pay a return, until that return is higher than monthly expenses.
The people that do make enough cash flow to live wherever they want to usually like to live near a city, a nice city, that has all the amenities, not out in tiny, dying, towns.
It is really going to take a group of people deciding to build an entire town/community together. And this will include a factory. This is the level which we need to actually escape.
And, although everything i said is true, we are aiming at a moving target. As population declines there will be a glut of houses. As cities become hell holes, there will be a lot of empty houses no one wants. As some cities become food deserts, there will be all kinds of houses that no one is able to live in.
All of these houses that we have slaved so hard for, will become abandoned. Like mining town, after the pay dirt dries up, but bigger, much bigger.
I wish we would have worked out things, and told the banks that what they were doing was illegal and immoral, and worked out how to include the next generation in home ownership. And made sure that corporations were never to big, but govern-cement loves monopolies.
So, the next generation will not support slavery. Meaning the corporations and banks will die out. Also meaning that a new way of living will be forming. I believe it will be intentional communities, or tribes, or "families". And these groups will build their homes in better ways, and ways that most importantly will be paid for when they are built.