| One problem that’s unaddressed is that there isn’t a house building, pricing and mortgage model for people making 50K or less. One piece of data I’ve found is that 65% of Americans are homeowners (meaning American families, not rentals or investments), which is also about the percentage of Americans who make $50K or more per year (~68%). For people with a middle class networth (not income, I mean networth, which is about ~1M-9M when compared with the top of US society), homeownership currently works as a wealth-building mechanism because of scarcity. There’s also the desire to live close to certain areas, but why not make more neighborhoods or areas worth living in? Regardless, if the goal is to maintain scarcity for wealth building, then I think the scarcity mechanism will remain intact if homeownership is increased to a high rate while balancing the cost of materials and labor, and building houses specially for certain income levels, as mentioned already in other posts. But no one seems to be doing materials innovation, or construction innovation. I don’t think 3D printing is there quite yet, and might be more expensive. Where’s the push on automating construction? Why not build with a genetically engineered bamboo that’s cheaper and more sustainable than wood? Seems materials innovation will help with both housing and sustainability goals. |
None of this is really allowed anymore and it's very hard to find a piece of land to do it with. Enabling this sort of construction and forcing or incentiving small plots of land might open up options for people on the lower end.