There is no actual material reason for rent to be more than $250. There is also no material reason for full price housing that fits 2 people to be more than $16-20k. Zoning laws, inefficient power delivery systems, and developer/landlord profit seeking aren't 'counterarguments', they are what enable the ridiculous prices.
A post-and-Beam frame using a double wall infill system takes 5 days to build, and yet any kind of "small home" of this kind or similar is disallowed in most of most American counties which only permit them as ADUs.
Let's dig into arguments by the housing cartel and debunk them:
Land cost: No one actually ethically owns exclusive rights to land lmao, it's just threats of violence on a natural commodity like water.
Septic cost: It's called "composting". For legal composting in USA you must apply, meet multiple unecessary criteria, and then use an NSF-Certified unit that runs into the thousands. The crucial point here is that the NSF-certification is a permission slip, not the actual cost of the materials, which are basically negligible.
Greywater: A composting toilet is a millennia old solution, and we know greywater wasn't historically sewage and is perfectly fine as water for plants and soil. The modern solution costs a few hundred bucks and is called a "mulch basin" or a "branched drain system".
Labor and skill: Often quoted as "hundreds of man hours". How much do single individuals work to achieve the "American Dream" of actually owning their home instead of pretending through purposefully patronizingly, misleading laws that allows an illusion of semi-ownership while the bank actually gives permission to reside? Usually takes their whole lives if they can even manage to do it, most can't. Tens of thousands of hours of work in a lifetime without actually achieving the kind of freedom built into the American Dream. This mortgage model is clearly inferior to reserving time in people's lives for dedicated house building. It's been estimated that without data centers, our GDP growth would be less than 0.1%. Therefore most of our economy isn't even contributing to growth, so instead of pretending to grow our economy we invest some time in teaching youngins how to build a home?
Housing structure costs. Local trees can be used to mill a simple post-and-beam frame. A natural byproduct of the milling is sawdust or wood chips. Sawdust or wood chips with borax is just as thermally effi
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