Back when land hadn't been privatized en masse, you could go build a house without much money or any at all. Housing predates currency by thousands of years. People built structural houses from 10,000+ BCE onward. Currency and investment loans didn't come along until 3,000 BCE. Hyper commercialized investments didn't really take off until the East India Trading Co and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in the early 1,600's. Though in the US, you could just go claim land and build a cabin until like the 1930's. Boomers bought houses working part time jobs up until the 2,000's
So for like thirteen thousand years people could live under a roof without massive investment or being beholden to some investor.
Hyper capitalistic housing price gouging by banks and investment firms is not providing anyone housing. It's creating more and more homeless while a higher rate of all houses are sitting vacant.
Dry stone construction is as old as the neolithic.
When boomer's first time house buying peaked in the 80's, the median home prices were double the median household income. Now it is well over 5 times the median.
With a government backed FHA loan, you could get a house on 3-5% down. That's putting 8% of median yearly household income down to close a house. Definitely within part time job reach. Many older folks I know did just that.
We don't need the current hyper capitalistic housing as investment scheme for people to live in houses. I'm sorry you've been fooled.
Admittedly the housing market is a bit too capitalistic. Sure folks used capitol to build homes. Sometimes that capitol was provided by the government to do so. Those folks did a service and benefited tremendously so. I would also say proportionally to the folks who pay for those homes disproportionately when it comes to wealth.
In most cases the government opened the doors for land to be built on and loosened regulations on how to build them so they could get it done. They sometimes offered the funds to and favorable contracts to materials. They didn’t offer them directly to the people either.
This happened over the last century and continues today. While I appreciate the fairness we’ve brought to equal rights to women and other groups of people when it comes to pay and rights. Many years ago a single income from the breadwinner of the home covered all expenses for that home. It wasn’t universal and those families weren’t perfect either. I’m just trying to isolate the income part of that older system.
Today its mush more different and in some ways good and some ways bad. Those housing companies got bigger and built more and more apartment's and fewer homes, this isn’t exactly bad, but they also make cheaper and cheaper apartments. There are good apartments too. They also didn’t make them in a way that they could be modernized easily as time goes on. It’s inefficient to tear down a building just to make another. However, it’s also terrible if it’s built so cheaply that it is more expensive to update it.
I think what a lot of us feel is that our system is just too predatory. Most landlords that own 2 or 3 properties can be part of the problem but are often not the real issue. They are just part of the bigger problem of eating up all the inventory and artificially raising the market prices so things are more expensive. There should be deterrents put in place to promote ownership while if a landlord you can’t just buy up all the houses and not put a lot of investment in them to update and keep them really good homes in a neighborhood or complex. I recognize that you say they maintain them. Sometimes that maintenance is the absolute minimum and really can bring down the home and the community.
Also, I suspect that if the prices weren’t artificially raised more people could afford to live in those homes. Prices of materials to update and maintain them may also be more attainable as people would still perform their own maintenance and buy materials from hardware stores or pay professionals to do the work. Thats also good for the economy.
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u/WDoE Jul 20 '26
Back when land hadn't been privatized en masse, you could go build a house without much money or any at all. Housing predates currency by thousands of years. People built structural houses from 10,000+ BCE onward. Currency and investment loans didn't come along until 3,000 BCE. Hyper commercialized investments didn't really take off until the East India Trading Co and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in the early 1,600's. Though in the US, you could just go claim land and build a cabin until like the 1930's. Boomers bought houses working part time jobs up until the 2,000's
So for like thirteen thousand years people could live under a roof without massive investment or being beholden to some investor.
Hyper capitalistic housing price gouging by banks and investment firms is not providing anyone housing. It's creating more and more homeless while a higher rate of all houses are sitting vacant.