/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

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 efficient as fiberglass. A 12-inch thick sawdust-filled wall can have an R-value of over R-20, which is high enough to be compatible with even modern air-conditioning. This method is both primitive, can be built primitively, and adaptable for modern needs, the main cost is labor, which is addressed above.

Water system: $7k for a market price well, can be driven way down with prior approaches.

Power system: Simple enough solution is a "community microgrid", A local, non-profit co-op installs a shared, community-sized solar array with a central battery bank. The cost of this one central system is shared by 50-100 homes. The "hookup" is now just a cheap, small wire running a few hundred yards from your cabin to the central community battery. The expensive transformer and high-voltage lines are eliminated. You are no longer paying for a massive, redundant, coast-to-coast grid. You are only paying for the materials for your local power source. An "old habit" we'd have to abandon is unlimited power/growth. To build a community microgrid that allows everyone to run their modern conveniences all day, we must first abandon the modern notion of sprawling, individualistic housing. The math for the shared solar array and central battery only works if the load is predictable, so the community itself is built on a standard of modest, efficient homes of a similar, limited size. Because this uniformity of housing size makes the peak electrical draw from each home nearly identical, the central system can be engineered to easily handle the entire community's AC load simultaneously. The cost is shared equally because the demand is shared equally. We are no longer paying for a massive, inefficient grid, nor are we subsidizing a neighbor's oversized home, we are simply paying for the materials to power modest, comfortable lives, abandoning architectural excess to gain true energy freedom. I'm not arguing for building a new, for-profit utility company. The $2.1 million per megawatt figure of such a project a "cartel" price. It's bloated with profit, regulatory capture, and "soft costs" that have nothing to do with generating power. Divided by 100 homes, the actual material cost for permanent energy freedom could be as low as $6,000-$7,000 per home.

"Modern overpriced systems eliminate blight and slums": You know what's worse than slums? Check out r/carliving where people without housing hang out, I was reading of someone strapping an industrial cooling system to their torso to avoid heat stroke in the summer.