Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Affordable Housing

[Brian Bartholomew (bartholomew.brian]

> Just from your list, dropping sidewalk requirements mean streets/
> neighborhoods that are less walkable.

Not really, the car traffic was very low.  I lived in the same house
growing up.  The neighborhoods with no curbs, no sidewalks, swales,
and fewer streetlights were only a few blocks away from where I biked
to school.  That's why I know those particular street construction
details wouldn't produce something awful.

> I wonder where you get your [house construction price] figures

I priced a Homefront Homes Structural Insulated Panel building shell
kit for $40K.  These were good materials, had a Florida engineering
and permitting package, and one had been erected in the county, which
I toured.  The factory claimed one week to erect with two people.  I
was approved for a mortgage, and to be the builder, because the
Homefront factory's in-house general contractor was taking mortgage
responsibility for completion.

> A lot of the costs of new housing is the costs of infrastructure to
> support growth.

The $40K Homefront House shell would include no lot, no interior
walls, water, sewer, electricity, furnace, sink, toilet, appliances;
no foundation slab, no sewer pipes in the development, water pipes,
fire hydrants, electricity, streets.  All these things need to be
counted.  I am counting the cost of expanding sewer and water
treatment plants as the monthly bills to them.

However, the city and county also demanded I not live on site in an RV
or trailer during construction, and another apartment's rent would
have cost a good fraction of the house shell.  I think there is much
similar additional expense at all layers of the system, and if this
were removed it would be easy to build a house for $50K.

> each of those permits came into our building codes in an attempt to
> stem past abuses that shortened lives and turned our environments
> into smokey, filthy, hell holes.

Here is a counterexample.  After hurricane Katrina, some people left
homeless were given RV trailers to live in.  These contained
formaldehyde in the building materials which was not all that great to
be breathing continually.  A couple years later, they were given
Katrina cottages, which were premium materials and a permanent house.
The people who had now been given a Katrina cottage were not permitted
to place that cottage on the house lot their now-destroyed house
previously occupied, because it would have lowered resale value of
neighboring homes.

Market value is the collection of opinions of third parties, it is not
something possessed by the neighbor.  Yet the neighbor voted to
prevent the Katrina victim from competing with the neighbor by
offering better house deals to third parties.  What if the victim
offered a better religion or worldview to third parties, would you
support banning that exchange, too?

> Rob said: "The reason you cannot reach consensus is that you are not
> asking a consensus question.  When you each put out your thumb, the
> question you are answering is 'Do I want to live on that property?'
> which is an individual preference question. The consensus question
> is this: 'Is it in the best interests of this community as a whole -
> would it further the group's mission & vision - to purchase this
> property, WHETHER I WOULD CHOOSE TO LIVE THERE OR NOT?'"

If you wouldn't want to live there, why would the people who do want
to live there want an outsider voting in a decision which
overwhelmingly affects only the people who will live there?  Why would
humans have empathy for the purpose of the group, the group which is a
nonthinking nonfeeling piece of legal paperwork, at all?  The open
source programming community "forks" projects when they come to an
impasse like this.  If the group no longer contains humans with
roughly similar goals, then the group has lost its utility, and should
be replaced with smaller groups containing people who mostly agree.

Brian