21st Century Housing: Is it Time to Scrap the American Dream?

[eridani]

http://www.thepierceprogressive.org/21stcenturyhousing

The “New” Salishan on Tacoma’s Eastside has won several architectural and urban design awards. As a federally funded Hope VI project, it has been frequently studied, though the focus is seldom on the people. The folks who live there are ordinary, working class folk - no awards for that. There is a house in the New Salishan that has been unoccupied since late April as the result of a foreclosure. A sale is pending at the time of this writing.


This particular foreclosure was avoidable. It happened against the back drop of the housing collapse, but there was no job loss, medical emergency, or shady mortgage broker or lender involved. The house, built in 2006, was overpriced and purchased based on a notion of the “American Dream” that is undergoing serious reassessment. I called that house home for more than six years.

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Now I wonder out loud if we are building the right kind of housing for the “new normal.” Or are most of us still holding our breath while waiting for the housing market to return to the seductive, hot mess it was prior to 2008? Does it still make sense to promote home ownership as the primary means for building wealth? Do we live in a city that puts the needs of its citizens ahead of the exuberant profit-seeking of big developers who just build and move onto to the next project without concern for the quality of life in the communities in which they build? What really constitutes “fair housing”?

[longship]

1. Hoovervilles!

Of course, the homeless today have less than that, but not by much.

[Warpy]

6. That was working class housing for much of the country's history

once you'd gotten outside the big cities and into mining or factory towns. Pictures one and three above look more like those than they do Hoovervilles. The second picture looks like typical housing for black workers, side by side in cities and towns where whites needed maids and porters, separate in the country where rich landowners needed sharecroppers. I grew up looking at housing exactly like this in the south. I thought it was shameful then and the years have not modified that.

Hoovervilles were much like the "housing" you see in waste land around cities, barely enough scavenged lumber and blue tarps to keep the rain off, thrift shop sleeping bags for warmth, open fires or camp stoves for cooking, the great outdoors for a latrine. They were occupied by the massively unemployed in the early 30s. Now they're occupied by the chronically underemployed, people who would likely work full time if they could find it.

Then, as now, the smug upper middle class and wealthy people tell each other that the poor have somehow chosen to roast in summer and freeze in winter, to be exhausted, afraid and dirty most of the time, and to live in a state of constant humiliation.

That is the great sin of our time: not only is it permitted, it's justified by the extremely comfortable.

[MADem]

2. Home ownership to "build wealth" wasn't the "OLD normal."

Home ownership was desired so you didn't have to pay rent to some ass who would raise the rent on you, and kick you out of the place when they wanted it for THEIR family members.

It was a way to have something that was YOURS. A place for you and your spouse and your kids. To LIVE. In stability and security.

It wasn't supposed to be an ATM machine that you could pull money out of to buy that new car, that new jet ski, that vacation. If you got a second mortgage, it used to be you got it for something DIRE--Aunt Martha's medical bills...or her funeral. Not for Hardy-Har-Har stuff.

Sure, when you got old, if you wanted to "downsize," you could count on a nice little payday from the value that the house accrued down the years, but these crazy "inflations" of house values just aren't realistic.

People should buy houses they want to live in--they shouldn't buy them with the idea that they are going to flip them or make huge sums owning them--that's not always the case anymore.

[eridani]

3. Coming to that realization cost the poster her marriage

Still, all told, she's probably better off now.

[MADem]

4. My attitude? If spouses can't agree on that kind of basic stuff, where/how to live, what one's

shared "values" are with regard to how assets are appropriated (luxury vacation or modest one and donations to good causes, or McMansion vs. "house enough" for example) then they're probably a train wreck waiting to happen.

Some folks, sadly, only hear the "For richer" and "In Health" bit. It's a big commitment if ya treat it as such!

[JDPriestly]

7. Right. Buy cheap but sell expensive.

You have to buy in a promising market and sell at the right time to do that.

But first you buy a house to live in. Make sure you are living in a place with promise.

Watch the videos of Richard Wolff if you want to figure out where those places may be in the future. They may not be in the US at all.

[MADem]

8. Buy what you can AFFORD in a place where you want to live.

If you're happy where you are at, and you can pay your bills, it doesn't matter what the appraisers say.

Some places don't have "promise" economically, but they offer benefits that have nothing to do with money. For example, northern Maine is very affordable, to the point of down right cheap, but unless you're working out of your house, running some kind of internet business, you will have trouble finding work that pays more than minimum wage if you're not farming (and that's not easy either). Despite the lack of "economic" opportunity, if you like the "sportsman's" life of hunting and fishing, lakes and rivers, hiking and camping, there's no better place to live. If you like four seasons, northern ME can't be beat. If you like great skiing, CHEAP, there's no better place to live. If you like good cooking, not fancy or frou-frou but a tasty, affordable meal, northern ME is tops. If you like nice people--they aren't real easy to get to know, but once you do get to know them, they are the nicest people in the world--you won't do better than northern ME. If you like small town life, northern ME is the place. If you like popping over the border to Canada, it's quite accessible from northern ME.

Nowadays, though, people are very mobile. Those folks might be better off not buying at all, at least not until they make a decision to light in one place for a decade or more.

If you live in any place long enough, you're going to get some money back--even if you just pay off your mortgage and sell for what you paid for the doggone thing (which can happen in places that are downwardly mobile).

I think many people are too interested in dying with the most toys, in some cases, and they sometimes do it to the detriment of their social and personal quality of life. I do think if people want to stay in their family homes, they should be allowed to do so, and that tax abatements should be made for them if their incomes are reduced as a consequence of old age. MA does this with a senior "circuit breaker" tax limit, so that old folks aren't giving all their pensions for house taxes, and it's a good thing.

[Warpy]

5. With 7 billion of us on the planet, we'd do better to think small.

My dad wanted me to get a fancy house in a "better" part of town after he died. I pointed out that living in one of those barns meant cleaning it and I had enough trouble coping with my shabby little fixer. I'd really rather be weaving than cleaning.

My favorite place to live was a trailer in a trailer park. It had a small plot of land that was big enough for veggies and flowers but not so big that I became a slave to it. The space inside was well planned, a place for everything, and a breeze to keep clean. I shared no walls with neighbors and only heard them if a fight or a party spilled outside, something that didn't happen very often. If the park hadn't gone downhill after I left, I'd be sorely tempted to go back there, albeit in a trailer that was big enough for my looms.

Perhaps future housing will be like that, separated by just enough real estate for gardens, higher density than burbs have now but not on top of each other in urban apartment blocks.

Of course, I wouldn't mind an apartment with good soundproofing. The lack of it is what's made most of the ones I've lived in miserable.

[bhikkhu]

9. Average new home size is 2500+ sf.

Which is nice to have, but certainly not affordable to buy or maintain. I think the American Dream is alive and well (or at least still kicking), even if we can't afford it in the long run.