Housing For All
If you could magic wand society what would you fix? What do you envision?
The line “and world peace” from Miss Congeniality keeps popping into my head because it’s a great movie and I grew up in the time when it seemed like war was our biggest problem, and being nice to each other was the obvious solution. But as a grown up, my ideal world looks a little more like Moving the Mountain by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, where everyone is fed and housed for free, where people only work a couple hours a day, and everyone’s needs are met. I love a good utopia, but they always leave me wondering how we get there.
With banks and land hoarders controlling our housing, and profit our most hallowed value, how do we get to a place where everyone’s needs are met?
Society, politics, community are all things we, humans, create. Every society throughout time has been a product of people coming together and creating the rules by which they would live together. Creating, aka creativity, is my favorite part of this fact. We can build whatever we can think of. As modern citizens of the countries we inhabit, we can take what is handed down to us and blindly accept the rules we live by; we can try for incremental changes based on the original values of our forefathers; or we can make wholesale changes that reflect who we want to be, how we want to live.
I do not know which is the “right” answer, and I’d posit that there is no one right way to go about change. However, I am inspired by the people of the ancient city of Teotithuacan. According to David Graeber and David Wengrow, the people of Teotithuacan came from all over the region of what is now Mexico after seismic activity made their previous homes untenable. Once a city built around monuments seemingly on its way to becoming a “classic” Mesoamerican civilization with a warrior aristocracy governed by hereditary nobles, the people instead chose to build high-quality apartments for everyone. Wild! Archeologists don’t know what steps occurred to make such a change, or what their society looked like compared to ours. but we can imagine what it might take today.
If we imagine a route without civil war (though there is evidence the Teotithuacan monuments were looted and burned, which could indicate a violent civil upheaval or could just be reusing what they had) it would take a lot of political will, which would have to come from the people. So I imagine Millennials, a rather large generation, having spent years working towards the “American dream” of owning a home (or three) and finding it’s not possible, get upset. They begin lobbying their local governments for affordable housing. But town councils can’t agree on the right solution, and without proper regulation, developers continue to only build very-low income housing and market value housing that is not affordable to the average family. With no middle-income housing, a generation of people, possibly Gen X too, get aggravated and take it to their state governments. While the two political parties fight amongst themselves and each other, the problem continues unabated. So the people take their concerns to the Federal Government. But housing is a local issue, so it does no good.
But what if one town decides to solve their housing crisis in a radical way? A small town, near a city, but not a suburb. Or maybe it is a suburb. Either way, it’s a town full of people who feel empowered to do things their way. Using federal emergency funding (because with climate change there is always an emergency) they buy up all the mortgages for all the owner-occupied homes in their city limits. They wipe away the housing debt of all those homeowners. Can you imagine the relief of not having to pay your mortgage and not losing your house? The town comes up with a calculation that sets property taxes at a quarter of each person’s income, paid monthly (less than the bank mortgages). The money is used to create a fund to be used when people want to sell their homes. Sale prices are based on years of occupancy, market value, and percent of income, so that when people move they still have “equity” to buy in the traditional real estate market in other towns. Over time, the money collected is used to buy out “landlords,” and the renters are folded into the system of paying only a quarter of their income, so that eventually no one is renting. No one is getting rich off another person’s shelter. With the town owning the “rental” properties, the tenets no longer have to worry about eviction or rent hikes. They too are gaining equity. Less people are one paycheck from homelessness. With less need for housing and food support, less people in emergency situations, the towns save millions of dollars.
So they use those funds to turn old office buildings into apartments and house unhomed people, an idea long advocated for, but previously lacking the political will.With newfound stability and more of their income freed up, the people of this radical town become happier. They spend more on things they enjoy. They create, they think, they solve other problems. They start businesses, go back to school, take jobs they love. The economy of the town thrives. The people of the town thrive. Around the county, slowly, the idea catches on. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) starts giving grants to towns to help them convert to the new system.
All over, towns put the kibosh on short-term rentals and build housing for locals in the new community owned housing model. With only a small portion of their income going to housing, people no longer have to find ways to afford their homes. Developers, now sponsored by the government and no longer in the business of quick profits, build environmentally sustainable homes. Creativity springs wild. People create new energy efficient technologies, saving billions of dollars in energy costs. The fantasies of hobbit houses and homes that fit in to the landscape abound. In tourist areas, the existing housing goes to people who live there year round, or seasonally, decreasing the need for sprawl. Forests and meadows and wetlands are saved and restored. Locals buy and build new tourist lodging. People enjoy visiting these places because the community is thriving and welcoming, and the scenery is wild and nature is thriving too.
Eventually, the towns with similar community owned housing models create a network. Now you can move to another town in the network without having to buy a home. Like any good social movement, what once seemed insane and anti-American becomes a given.
More and more towns and cities join the network. The stress of survival decreases. All that stress-free brain power goes to solving other problems. People come up with innovative clean energy and transportation. Farmers begin to think about different ways to grow and transport food. Borders seem less important. No longer are immigrants and refugees the takers. With a solid safety net, being unemployed is less stressful. There is room for everyone to find jobs and afford housing, which with higher taxes and community owned housing puts everyone’s money back in the community chest.The number of money hoarders diminishes. Second homes become socially unacceptable. Resentments against the takers rise. The homes of the last few who refuse to add to the community model are looted. Some are burned. But most are brought into the community model adding more housing. The money hoarders are pressured to put the money back into communities, back into the governments that take care of the people. Business models built on winner-take-all and resource hoarding become NIMBYs. Better businesses, GSE rated companies, draw the talent and labor and out compete the old models.
With the cultural change toward taking care of each other, and being taken care of, governments increase income taxes. The money is used to provide free education, healthcare, and retirement. And the people like it. Like modern day Denmark, most people don’t mind paying higher taxes because they can see how it benefits them.
Communities develop again, where people know each other and watch out for each other. People become healthier, happier, more creative. With less stress, parents treat their children better. After a few decades, the number of street people is down to a few thousand across the whole country. With the savings from lower general medical expenses, state and federal governments are able to put more resources toward curbing violence and abuse, addiction, and other factors in the familial environment that lead to patterns of exclusion and defeat, ending in homelessness. Those less stressed out, highly empathetic people who went back to school come up with treatments that actually work. Generational traumas are healed. Street people are brought into the fold of their communities. And in a single lifetime, we are transformed from a greed-based, hoarder society to a thriving one where everyone’s needs are met.
It might not create world peace, but it would go a long ways to creating peace between us.
From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
Simpson, Velma. CPD Specialist, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, phone interview, November 6, 2009. In the early 2000s, Velma Simpson, a Senior Community Planning and Development (CPD) Specialist at the HUD, created a complex comparative Excel spreadsheet to track details about specific services community programs. Creating a new evaluation system using computerized information, HUD discovered that chronically homeless people (homeless for an entire year, or homeless for three or more times over a period) cost communities far more than people who used the programs and got back on their feet. Studies show eacb chronically homeless person costs a city about $40,000.
Read How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney for more insights on how social movements can change the minds of a whole country in only a few years.