Love this design.  I've played with it myself on Sketch as a DIY project starting with a 20' flatbed trailer.  I figured I could build it for about $30K just for the shell but not with the servo motors you wold need to make it open at the touch of a button.  Also without the bathroom and kitchen appliances and alarm and solar panels/electrics.  The $85K price for the complete unit is great.

If I was healthy, I probably would have built it for my retirement travelling Chattaqua show.  Definitely something I would recommend as a prep if you can afford it.  Take it anywhere to get out of the way of a wildfire, hurricane or flood.

Video at the web page.





https://www.foxnews.com/tech/with-press-button-tiny-house-folds-into-box-you-can-tow-anywhere

With the press of a button, this tiny house folds into a box that you can tow anywhere

Wow, I feel really bad for those poor landlords, don't you?  It's just horrible how these homeless people will go live in their vacation rental properties!  Can you imagine the nerve of these people!

Personally, I'm surprised there isn't more squatting going on.  NYC has 50% vacancy rate in office buildings.  Whole floors are empty.  Gotta be better than sleeping on the street.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/atlanta-landlords-confront-squatting-surge-in-vacant-rental-homes?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=gnews&utm_campaign=CDAqEAgAKgcICjDi7PAKMIXduwIwldrvAQ&utm_content=rundown&gaa_at=g&gaa_n=AZsHK_mtqlaZ5LtvQf4ZZ_qauf1QIEnwKSBr8xTSGblToO1idr-uzO0QeBVuPqsziVJHzMpA0qRuWM0kw0X7uPZeK_nA4w42nw%3D%3D&gaa_ts=65b2f476&gaa_sig=7JpP-n3Fn-tN4AN6Sx9FVbNDUh52r22j_SNboxcFqyFKFWzP9msQM4qZTechpkUyLxA2dIfVBawLdukdfYXPVg%3D%3D

Atlanta's Squatter Problem Is Vexing Wall Street Landlords

RE

There's a shortage of affordable housing, and the solution the Market comes up with is to build MOAR unaffordable apartments!  If you missed my Where have all the Houses Gone? blog, I wrote about this stupidity a few weeks ago.

A Goobermint that had any CFS would have put out subsidies and tax credits for builders to be putting up new apartments that would rent in the $500-1000 range a year ago, which is more in line with the prevailing wage these days which is around $20/hr.  Mickey Ds pays $18 around here, CNAs get a little more.  This grosses around $36K, $1000/mo rent is $12K.  That's 33%.  You still have lots of other fixed expenses of course, so if you are left a few hundred to keep the economy going with an occasional movie you're doing good.  $1500/mo rent leaves you nothing or negative.

The longer this goes on, the worse the crash is gonna be when it comes.  With the POTUS election and the border crisis, this summer loooks ripe for a breaking point to be hit.

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-finds

Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds

RE

Quote from: RE on Jan 26, 2024, 07:19 AMhttps://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-finds
Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds
RE

As a point of logic, if 50% of US housing is unaffordable for renters, and there must be millions of renters in the country...does it follow that the homeless population, recently measured at something like 750,000 or so....has increased to millions more? And no one has noticed?

Is it fair to theorize that a word like "unaffordable" being used when evidence doesn't substantiate its use is just more proof of everything everywhere all at once having been degraded by the Internet and Joe Averages running amuck and bringing down public discourse to the level of 2nd graders? Only because 2nd graders haven't learned the nuance of many words yet and could be expected to say silly things at their age.

Quote from: TDoS on Jan 26, 2024, 04:27 PMAs a point of logic, if 50% of US housing is unaffordable for renters, and there must be millions of renters in the country...does it follow that the homeless population, recently measured at something like 750,000 or so....has increased to millions more? And no one has noticed?

No, because unaffordable doesn't mean you don't have income enough to pay the rent, it means that once you do pay rent there's not enough left over to cover the rest of your normal bills, so you start having to choose between having a roof and having heat, or having a roof and having food.

For renters making under $30,000 — who already faced the most severe struggle to afford housing — Airgood-Obrycki "didn't think it could possibly get that much higher." But the report found it did nudge up, to an all-time high of 83% who are cost-burdened. She says the amount of money they have left over for all other household expenses has plummeted by nearly half, to just $310 a month.

Good luck paying your utilities, car insurance, phone & food on $310/mo.

Generally,rent is figured to be 30-40% of your income, but when you make $30K and rent is 80% of your income, it is unaffordable.  Not enough left over to live on.  Not the same thing as homeless.

RE

In my prior post, I said the general rule of thumb was 30-40% of income goes to rent.  This based on my experience that Property Mgmt companies won't approve you as a renter if the cost of the Apartment exceeds that.  However, the FSoA Dept of Housing $ Urban Development says otherwise:

Tenants should generally allocate no more than 30% of their income toward rent, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

One of the few places I ever got that low was the place I lived longest up here before I lost my leg  which was before covid and the housing crunch, which was low income housing with rents adjusted for income and came in at 25%.  It killed me to give up that place, it was perfect for me.

I finally got some good newz from Cook Inlet Housing, run by the Native corporation up here but offers units to white folks too if you're old and crippled along with poor, and I probably am down to about 6 more months of waiting time for a building right near the SNIF here, having been on their list for a year already.  So 18 months total if it comes through of waiting.  Rent on that one will come in at about 35%, but I think it includes utilities.

It's almost impossible to get rent below the federal guidelines for affordability if you make less than around $35K, even in low income housing, which all have long wait lists now.  Past $35K, you no longer qualify for this housing and have to rent in the open market, so to get down to 30%, your income has to jump up to around $45K.  $35-45K is no man's land, you don't qualify for low income housing and open market prices are 40% of income and up.  It's not until you make around $50K that it becomes fairly easy to find places you can afford, although they are probably going to be smaller or in trashier neighborhoods than a person with this income usually would expect.  This is typical teacher salary around here or construction workers.  They make more hourly, but winter is very slow and they take lower paid work from Nov-Apr, so it drops the annual total.

Open market housing is risky, because when you rent it originally it might have been affordable, but when your lease is up the rentier jacks up the rent to the prevailing rate, which has been rising faster than inflation.  So maybe you were paying $1300 and after 2 years your new bill comes in the mail for $1600, a 20%+ hike.  Your rent is now unaffordable, although you are not homeless...yet.  At this point you cut back on going to the movies and eat more spaghetti at home.  But then your transmission goes and you put $2K on the credit card.  Add a $100 monthly payment to try and pay that off.    Now you're negative every month and on your way to homeless, though it will take some time still before you miss a month's rent.

This is the status of  a large portion of the population at the moment, right on the edge where if one thing goes wrong, the dominoes start to fall.  Once they do realize they have to find somewhere cheaper to live, they start looking but there's nothing out there they qualify for.  They're not homeless but they can't afford the available housing.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rent-homelessness-harvard-report-center-for-housing-studies/

Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report findsRecord number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report finds

RE

Calling it an affordability crisis is not dealing with reality.

Affordability crisis means let the market decide.  Build more housing, force the price down.  BUT WHATEVER YOU DO DON"T CHANGE THE SYSTEM.  Those who own do not want to be like everyone else.  Plan on keeping the owning game going.  The cretins who think this is the only way to run a society far outnumber you.

'In May, the Biden administration announced a Housing Supply Action Plan to close the affordability gap and ease housing costs. The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing and incentivizing areas to reform zoning and land use policies to build more lower-cost housing. It also calls for homebuilders to adopt more efficient construction methods.

What a crock of shit.  The cost of building housing is not the issue.  The economy is dead is the issue.  There is not enough cheap energy to keep the complexity of life going as we know it.  Jobs are not paying enough, and landlords expect to be paid regardless.  Reforming zoning sounds good and the resourceful bullshitter can find examples where it would help no doubt.  But greed, not zoning is the issue.  Zoning did not create the housing crisis.  The price of housing was allowed to inflate to obscene levels.  Everybody in for the past 50 years in America has wanted to get rich owning real estate.  And real estate is how the rich get richer.  It is their preferred method.  The system is rotten to the core.  Through the years is has been housing bubble after housing bubble.  Emphasis has never been on home ownership.

Mortgage payments are perpetually confused with home ownership.  It pisses me off that there are so many feeble minded people that can be bought off with 'affordability crisis'!  Home ownership begins when the mortgage is gone. Not when people are rewarded for refinancing.

The market destroyed things but the faithful expect a market to fix things.  This could rightfully pass as a definition of insanity.

'The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing.

In other words loan some rich people money to build more housing.  Make it a good investment for everybody who already has money.  Financing to the rescue.  What a relief!  After thirty years of financing destroying things, and increasing inequality it is good to know financing has a change of heart.

Right here is the fundamental stupidity perpetuated with housing;

The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing

"Financing" doesn't make housing more affordable.  The only things you can change with financing are the length of the loan and the interest rate.  The interest rate is determined by the federal funds rate the banks borrow money at +2% or so so they profit on the spread.  Da Fed manipulates this to control inflation, so if it's at 5%, mortgages are gonna be 7% or more for a riskier borrower.  Term lengths are already at 30 years, if you go to 40 years that's approaching the lifespan of houses, which is about 50 yeas on average.  Except in the rare cases of historic homes that have been meticulously maintained, by the time a house is this old it has accumulated so many issue with plumbing, mold, roofing and rot it's cheaper to raze it and build new than to try and fix everything up.  A 40 year term isn't home ownership, it's rental.  It's multigenerational to pay off a 40 year mortgage.


If you look at most houses built in the 70s in Wonder Years type suburbs, they used cheap materials and have been through a dozen different "owners" over their history of varying dedication to maintenance.  Nobody ever paid the house off, it just kept getting resold with new mortgages handed out at ever higher prices.  These places are now all substandard housing in the rental market as "affordable housing".  People buying a house don't want them, they want new houses with new appliances and the latest in insulation and heating systems.  Financing tricks aren't going to make the new houses any more affordable.

The only way you are going to get affordable housing is to build homes with the target rental price determined before you build it.  No idea what  the square footage and materials cost is to build something like town homes with 1-3 bedrooms, but they have to rent out at $500-1500 per unit depending on the #bedrooms.  Those were the prices at my old Creekwood apartments.



We had all demographics there from young families to old folks, all low income.  Enough safe space for the kids to go outside and play.  I don't see why we can't just put up more buildings with this type of plan instead of keep building single family McMansions.

RE

Quoteinstead of keep building single family McMansions.

The free market runs on greed not need. McMansions put the most dollars in a builders pocket.  People will generally not do anything without an incentive and the incentive to build housing that meets social needs is not there.

Unless welfare for the rich is involved the current administration will not help.  The DNC evolved to help people above my income demographic.  I am on the low end of the constituency that benefits from DNC policies.  Republicans attract the dirt poor and the ultra rich.  In other words the stupid and the stupid.  Skipping me altogether.

My analysis may be off, but claiming neither political party supports most of society is not wrong.  We only have  two parties that matter.  The Overton window moved.  Power to the people is passé.  Our parties support the rich or the ultra-rich.  If you are neither, you support one of these parties because you don't like to think.  And you do what you are told.  And you are stupid.

Seriously if you are pissed at being called stupid because you are a Republican or a Democrat I have to say:  Waiting until homelessness is in the millions, and houses cost five times what they would in an affordable society is fucking stupid. 

A society that a working man or woman can live in is an affordable society.  The only kind that is just.  And people are just starting to care about this now?


Power to the people did not happen.  Nobody ever paid off the mortgage and just lived.  Nobody meaning in a collective sense.  I am an exception.  Consequently housing inflated in a capitalist useless eater bubble.  Maybe the biggest of all time in America.  And here we are.  Sodom and Gomorrah.  This is what happens when everyone seeks unearned riches.

Tulip mania was 'bigger' but you don't need tulips to live.  They can be eaten or looked at, and that is all.

Housing is different.  People need housing and houses cost at least five times what they would cost to be affordable where I live.  This one sold three days ago.  I would bet $100 the new residents will be from mainland China. <- Seriously, in a heartbeat.

This is how conventional DNC wisdom fights global heating.  Move rich people around the world.  Somehow this stimulates the economy.  Or maybe it just moves rich people around the world?

The house is a tenth of a mile away.  At $2,145,000 it is more than five times what an average American with an average job can afford.  America is now a club and to be a proper member of the club you need to have a few hundred thousand in unearned riches.

I don't generally care where I get an image that supports what I write, but this time it is appropriate I do.  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-31/are-house-prices-falling-from-sydney-to-new-york

The article is old (and wrong), but it had the picture I wanted. 

I wonder what would happen if a rule was in place so that if you bought a home you could not sell it for a year without a serious financial penalty.  Personal need to sell being guaranteed if a person met certain 'rules'.  Rules in this case only making sure you are not a speculator.  A person working or retired living in a home and not pretending to do so but actually doing so could sell at any time.

People buying a home to live in would not care, but speculative buying and selling would end. 

And quickly.

Would the Democrats support such a plan?  The plan actually makes 'de market' more free.  Speculators do not make a market free, and the idea that speculators enable price seeking is total bullshit.  Speculative action corrupts a proper market.

Hell no, the Democrats would NOT.  This interferes with personal FREEDUM to seek unearned riches.  And this thought experiment shows the 'blue' hat is no more than a red MAGA hat in disguise.  Membership in an exclusive club.

Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 26, 2024, 10:02 PM'In May, the Biden administration announced a Housing Supply Action Plan to close the affordability gap and ease housing costs. The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing and incentivizing areas to reform zoning and land use policies to build more lower-cost housing. It also calls for homebuilders to adopt more efficient construction methods.

What a crock of shit.  The cost of building housing is not the issue.  The economy is dead is the issue.  There is not enough cheap energy to keep the complexity of life going as we know it.

How does the current dead economy compare to the one you lived through in the late 70's? The economy was dead, stagflation and inflation were the theme of the day, Carter was pitching America as The King Of Coal because US peak oil had happened in 1970 followed by global peak in 1979, there was no more cheap energy imagined. That decade ended up immediately followed by the go go 80's.

Remember the Charlie Daniels song trying to stop everyone from being depressed, In America?

I agree completely with you about housing and what the markets have done it with, and we certainly deserve a decent correction or outright rearrangement but it just isn't showing up in the numbers in exepcted ways yet. 2008 certainly did, and was another great year to proclaim the economy dead. Same with Covid. And yet it just...won't...die.

Quote from: K-DogThe market destroyed things but the faithful expect a market to fix things.  This could rightfully pass as a definition of insanity.

Or just the way the world works nowadays. I fully expect it to break, and am more prepared for it then most, and often in the breaking of a thing there is opportunity. Just as there was during 2008.

I say everyone should stop voting for any politician above the age of 45 and hand off the leadership baton to the younger generation. Older farts won't like it, but I'm betting those more subjected to a future based on the present have more of an interest in their generational opportunity than what all the old farts want in their twilight years.

Yes, I grasp the system and why it developed and who wants to perpetuate it.  My recent blog on housing detailed how it works.  What I find hard to understand is why not a single politician of any age will stand up and propose what is a common fucking sense response to a problem that is so huge and out of control it's in everybody's face at this point.

We have plenty of wicked problems that have no solution.  The current housing crisis is not one of them.

RE

QuoteThe problem has been growing for a long time due to how housing has been viewed in our society, not as a fundamental need that all people have but rather as an economic investment used for profit and as a store of wealth.

As a store of wealth it was fine.  But stores of wealth are stable.  Any commodity that is appreciating or depreciating is not a store of wealth.  Regulation of housing to maintain it as a store of wealth vanished when housing was financialized.

If you don't think it should be a store of wealth than we disagree that owning a house or two is the ultimate expression of personal or private property.  Property that a worker can translate legitimate earnings (earned by selling personal time) from labor into.  That is different from common or public property.  Capitalists think all property is private.  What else do you think owning the means of production means.  Capitalists make no distinction between private and public property.  To them all things can be private with enough money.  The end result or limiting case of their line of thinking is a return to slavery and 100% exploitation.  This happens when rich capitalists have everything. 

You know you are talking to a dumfuck when they start talking about privatizing things.  And when Bezos buys the Luxor in Las Vegas we will be at 100% exploitation.  To him it will be Fair-Oh.

Socialists are not against the elimination of personal property.  That is madness.  Translating earned labor into personal wealth is a human right.  To do other is to endorse slavery.  There needs to be a way to store personal property, and stable housing can provide a means for a person to save the fruits of their labor.

Which can still happen in a mythical soft collapse.

QuoteRemember the Charlie Daniels song trying to stop everyone from being depressed, In America?

Not the one you mean.  But I like this one.

Do you mean this one?

I think we agree that there needs to be housing people can afford if they earn whatever the min wage is for their locale.  Now, let's do a thought experiment starting from this premise.

We'll set the min wage at $15/hr for $30K/year.  Using the federal guideline of <30% as affordable, we'll make the annual mortgage payments right at 30% for 9000/yr, or $750/mo.  We'll now do this as private property so they can store the money in the house resale value.  So the mortgage monthly payment is $750.  We'll set a fixed rate of interest at 5% (historically very cheap) and make the term 20 years as it was before around 1970.  Prewar, mortgages were even shorter, 15 years was common.  Using an online mortgage calculator, the house would sell for around $125K.

Now, you buy this house in Podunk and you have a job in the local paper plant and work for 20 years and pay it off.  You want to sell it to someone else for $125K. But then the plant closes and the town loses population, and lots of the workers with these houses want to sell them.  Except with no work around, they are lucky if they can sell for $50K.

You see how making housing a commodity and trying to use it to store wealth are at odds, even with very fair banking practices.  The commodity is subject to supply and demand pressures, and you can't count on what the value will be at the end of the mortgage term.  You could also be lucky and the neighborhood will get a high paying Battery plant in town, and your house might sell for double what you paid.

Of course, you can pretty much forget buying a McHovel anywhere these days for $125K, even a total slum.

RE