How Has San Francisco Run Out of Money for Affordable Housing?
Housing, like healthcare is one of the 3 pillars of a successful community.<p>The current &quot;affordable housing&quot; is the &quot;subsidized housing&quot; mantra that gets votes at the expense of taxpayers but does very little to solve the real issue: SUPPLY<p>For a successful community EVERYONE should be allowed to live happily regardless of their income. If I were to get used to paying $300&#x2F;mo rent for an apartment that has a $3300&#x2F;mo market rent, I would probably reconsider improving my situation - the classic case of good intentions keeping people down instead of pulling people up.<p>There is no easy way to improve these but a long road paved with hard and focused work.<p>They only kind of people willing to do that would be the actual owners of the house, so empower them. Remove and reduce power&#x2F;authority from any other party that gets in their way to improving the community because of lobbying by external forces.<p>My suggestion is this: instead of messing around with cheap politics and vacuous social signalling, let&#x27;s petition the government to let you and I build houses ourselves.<p>That&#x27;s right - we build houses ourselves.<p>If that sounds crazy, maybe it is: It&#x27;s just like starting a business. Requires dedication, planning and the most important glue - hard work. Literally sweat off every inch on your body.<p>Right now, it&#x27;s REALLY hard to get good quality construction workers.<p>Like people who give a shit about the house they are building and even care to know if they are doing something wrong let alone going back and fixing the mess they left behind.<p>Learning construction takes time and finally there is no money you can pay someone to care about what they are building if they just don&#x27;t care about what they are doing.<p>You and I building our own houses WOULD care.<p>Because it&#x27;s in our interest to do so.<p>After having seen hundreds of garbage new construction where the water runs the wrong way of the drain in a bathroom, badly done framing, wiring, crooked doors and all that telltale sign of a developer trying to turnaround property as quickly as possible so that they can recoup their investment, I feel very sad when these glorified barns sell for millions of dollars because there is limited supply.<p>When the only two options for food are rotting potatoes grade 1 and rotting potatoes grade 2, rotting potatoes can sell for quite a lot of money.<p>That&#x27;s SoCAL realty right now.<p>Very unfortunate.<p>I&#x27;m not saying we build everything up from the dirt and studs. I&#x27;m not saying this would even work for everyone. This would not make financial sense for the $300&#x2F;hr software architect or lawyer. This would not make financial sense for the physically challenged who cant work with their hands and feet. This would not make any sense for those who think building a house is something very magical like maintaining a car or cleaning the furnace filter.<p>However, it would work wonders for those who are truly desperate for housing. Those who are willing to put in most of their spare time and effort into building a home for their family.<p>Let the government&#x2F;developer do the really, really hard stuff - the foundation, the core plumbing, the sewer connections, the mainline electrical.<p>Maybe a studio minihouse next to a plot of land on a foundation where we can eat, sleep, commute to work from as we build the rest of the house.<p>Leave the rest to the owner of the house and property to build over time as time and money allows without requiring them taking out million dollars upfront in loans and hope it all works out in the end.