The Housing Problem: Degrees of Freedom

There are so many ways to redesign the global culture of living, which one we choose?

The Problem

[Our government enforced housing culture is broken] but which way is forward for everyone?

Let's look into why we need a new way of living a.k.a. Why is this a problem?

Housing culture is observably parasitic: giving people a rent coupon to continue living in a broken system doesn't fix the inherent problems.

...[because of the elected officials who continue to turn a blind eye to the failure of housing first policy - we cannot expect anything more than the bleak status quo]...

The Status Quo Protection Cycle a.k.a. How It Has Been & How It Will Be If We Do Nothing

Higher income people, or their companies, buy property and prey on lower income people who can't buy property; the rich then use the money of the poor to buy more property and increase their financial dominance over the poor.

The dysfunction of global housing culture boils down to this, the Landlord's Gameloop (spoilers: Goals = Profit, not fair housing).

How To Landlord:

Rent out with unreasonable pricing & leasing terms;

habitually evict for petty reasons as the market inflates;

raise rent price for the new renters;

take the renter's money & buy more property;

maintain this pattern for years;

write it all off on the Schedule E tax form.

The real number is higher than this report from UNM in 2020 states.

The government approves and enforces this housing culture, as made evident by the chart below that was published to "protect" renters from unlawful evictions due to rent increases:

Delays or not, the Landlord always wins because [the law is always on their side].

Now [it's easy to see] why we need a new housing culture, but which way do we go?

Let's take a look at some design thinking methodologies to narrow down our possible paths forward.

Design Thinking

Narrowing down degrees of freedom with creative constraints.

[Design Thinking] Basic Steps:

1. Define the Problem

2. Create & Consider Options

3. Refine Options

4. Pick a Winner & Execute

There are many modes of design thinking, we're keeping to the core steps for now!

1: Define the Problem

A quick glance at current housing culture shows some [glaring global issues]:

Most people are ineligible to purchase and/or own property;

Rent is unreasonably high all around;

Leasing terms and government programs are unfair and unhelpful to renters.

These three factors make property ownership impossible for renters, so the real problem is the culture of living as a housing insecure renter and the how rapid the decent into homelessness has become.

Rent coupons aren't enough to cover the high cost of living.

2: Create & Consider Options

The new culture of living as a renter must be fair and affordable, and seeing as no opportunities like that currently exist, we must create a new way to live. Lobbying to make housing a human right, not an economic commodity, is a senseless endeavor in a country that voted against the human right to food.

This new way of living must be safe, quick & cheap to build, easy to maintain and comparatively more desirable than average rental accommodations.

Other peoples' [alternative housing ideas] are still subject to private property laws, so it stands to reason that the new culture of living we create must abandon property ownership culture and instead create & live on [non-expiring land trusts].

Expiring land trusts are privy to profiteering, so it's important to make them non-expiring to protect its humanitarian intentions.

Article 2 of [The 1967 Outer Space Treaty] declared “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation or by any other means.”

Space belongs to everyone as a global commons, and only governments recognize land ownership, so maybe the answer is moving away from Earth.

3: Refine Options

Outer space living is a stretch even for [the world's elite], so the most conceivable way out of this housing mess is eco-housing on non-expiring land trusts.

If we look at the options we have left, and take unlawful karmic justice off the table, what are we left with? [YIMBY]ism, which is fake housing justice built for the privileged, and it is absolutely making the housing crisis worse for everyone else: YIMBY's trickle-down solutions invite luxury-housing developers into working-class communities, which triggers higher rents, fuels gentrification, and pushes the hard-working people out of their homes to make room for spoiled brats.

YIMBYs started with a self-serving agenda: to force the production of more luxury housing that they could live in — no matter the consequences to working-class communities. To further their agenda, YIMBYs co-op housing justice messaging, but they’re not housing justice activists. In fact, they have a long, disturbing history of clashing with the housing justice movement. YIMBYs push pro-gentrification, trickle-down housing policies that generate obscene profits for Big Real Estate — and they’ve continually ignored the negative impacts of their policies on working-class residents.

Any way forward will involve asking governments and private owners to sign their profit generating properties over to a public land trust group to be managed fairly and indefinitely by a non-profit entity.

Before scoffing at this idea, consider the story of [Marcus Licinius Crassus], a Roman politician, mentor of Julius Caesar, and quite possibly one of the wealthiest men in Roman history. Crassus was taken prisoner during one of his property expansion campaigns (read: [invasion]) and was executed by his captors: they poured hot liquid gold down his throat - poetic justice ended his unquenchable thirst for wealth.

This cuts both ways and really hits home for me: my family came to the United States as refugees from a place where grenades were being thrown into elementary schools. The best solution to the housing crisis is most likely a non-violent one, so let's stay in that frame of mind.

Designing adequate housing for use on the land trusts is an involved process: end-user feedback is mandatory regardless of which way we go.

4: Pick a Winner & Execute

What can we really do when the housing economy and housing crisis are the [same thing]?

The way out of the housing crisis is designing a workflow to streamline the creation of non-expiring land trusts that provide adequate accommodations at reasonable terms. This way, we can shift global culture away from the status quo of predatory profiteering and bend the moral arc of the universe towards caring for the human family.

YIMBYs are not going away and politicians continue to support the mutually beneficial status quo. We cant expect people who prioritize personal profit or luxury living as their goal to support affordable housing creation, so all that's left are those of us with property who are willing to give it up for the greater good.

Imagine Ted Turner, [owner of CNN and Captain Planet], turning one of his [1,150,000 acres] he owns in New Mexico into an affordable housing land trust that would create a sustainable living situation for 60-70 people easily.

Most people don't make very good use of their backyard. Imagine home owners, struggling with a mortgage, making an extra $400 a month hosting a longterm renter on a portion of their property that they wouldn't miss anyway. Unfortunately, the housing alternatives that exist fall under regulations and taxes that make it an undesirable idea. It leads to AirB&B [problems] and [copycats]; commodification of affordable accommodation, consumed by the privileged at the expense of people in crisis.

We can create a new way of living together, but it has to be sustainable and scalable -

no sense in repeating the mistakes of the past. Next post will narrow down the scope to creating affordable campus-affiliated student housing, but will tackle the same core issues.

Let's get to work on making something new!

Final Reflection

On personal reflection of why this matter is so important to me, why it makes me so angry, is because I have been homeless multiple times in my life. The high cost of living on and off campus is why I dropped out of college and it led to being homeless. I joined the military as a way out of my situation and after ten years and two wars I became homeless again.

There is so much pressure put on students to create and innovate to fix the cataclysmic problems their forebears caused or worsened; how can we be expected to focus on saving the world when we can't make rent or feed ourselves properly? How are we not supposed to be resentful and angry about this situation? How are we expected to deal with all of that AND campaign to improve our conditions?

It's difficult to not point fingers or get emotional about this topic; keeping a logical perspective can be maddening considering nothing about why it's so hard to keep a roof over your head has ever made any sense.

-Tony