Housing
So much of housing is exclusionary policy to uphold power structures. We can, and should, house everyone. How can we empower innovating housing solutions? Promote housing co-ops? Flexible co-ownership? Is there a way we can make distributed networks of living (DAOs?) Community Land Trusts? How can communal living triumph over zoning, lobbying and financial issues?
US is facing housing affordability problem: a brief history
Steep rise in housing costs and record low inventory
Housing value and prices are skyrocketing
More multigenerational living and remote work affecting the way we love
Zoning regulations have prioritized nuclear families/single-family homes and limited the availability of affordable housing
Single-family zoning was used to control who exactly lives in a neighborhood
Zoning made these alternative group living illegal to keep undesirables out: POC, lower-income extended families, groups of friends, and single laborers.
Today it's because of immigration, LBGTQ families.
Alternative, more flexible housing options for house-stressed, intentional communities, add density to neighborhoods, and housing to those without traditional job security:
century-old tool: boarding houses
In the 19th century, they use to house 1/2-1/3 of urban residences in the 1800s, fueling walkable affordable urban living
California allows for backyard cottages
Co-living is now trendy with affluent younger base
Of course, lots of organizations and good people trying to fix these problems- shout out to CAAAV, where who is doing important things in my home NYC, with a focus on marginalized, low income Asian immigrants.
The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake
We need to shift away from understanding housing as an investment and towards treating it as consumption.
Homeownership is one of the few ways that the middle class has financial leverage to build wealth, and the government has sunk a lot of policy and subsidies to design it so.
Homeownership is not always the beneficial enterprise it claims to be though: homeownership doesn’t always work out, for everyone equally, and its gain in value is predicated on losses for others
Homeownership is not the most financial secure investment: vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks, and lots of luck. Relying on a single asset isn’t smart.
Wealthy Americans rely on housing wealth the least, investing in corporate equities, mutual funds, private businesses and other assets.
More importantly, this system is predicated in inequity: appreciating home values are tied to scarcity for other people.
Homeownership works for some because it can’t work for all. If housing is a wealth-building vehicle, we can’t make it cheap and widely available.
Home values don’t increase uniformly.
The most affordable areas are riskier, meaning the worst potential outcomes are concentrated among people with less wealth to begin with.
Value is socially constructed, and the way we value homes are based in racist belief systems that mean that black homeowners suffer from undervalued houses, less returns, and economic downturns hit their net worth harder.
This system enforces generational inequality: pits incumbents against newcomers.
“It is, in other words, a massive up-front transfer of wealth from younger people to older people, on the implicit promise that when those young people become old, there will be new young people willing to give them even more money.
We need to abandon policy focused on property value, and encourage households to diversify their investments.
We also need to fix renting: increasing oversight, providing right to counsel in eviction court, advancing rent stabilization policies, public investment in rental qualities, and building new housing.
A Landlord ‘Underestimated’ His Tenants. Now They Could Own the Building.
limited equity co-op, called a Housing Development Fund Corporation co-op, where tenants buy their apartments at prices set by the city, and can sell them for a limited profit.
Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, a nonprofit that supports H.D.F.C.s and also helps convert them
Retained life estates exchanges allow “house-rich, cash poor” tenants to live the remainder of their years in their homes in financial comfort, in exchange for selling their house to a philanthropic partner at a deep discount
Land trusts and philanthropy partners are using this method to provide more affordable housing in the future
In a Divided Country, Communal Living Redefines Togetherness
co-housing (distinct units on a compound) vs. co-living (sharing more space) vs. co-ops (more deeply enmeshed)
Examples of nontraditional living arrangements
Other co-living companies such as Common and the flopped WeLive don’t design for intentional community living but a “scarcity model based on a lack of time or money”
Supernuclear- newsletter guide to coliving
When it comes to bridging differences, in-person contact is crucial
“What makes you rich? An environment to call your own. It doesn’t have to be all mine. It can be yours and mine.”
What is required to make communal living sustainable?
It's important to have a wide range of identities represented
constraints of physical space > big ideas or intention
the space we interact and move in changes us
cohesion is from accepting the “peculiarities of their paths as seen through each other’s eyes”