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Affordable Housing: An Idea Whose
Time Has Past
By Stephen Simac
Still keeping
the New Year's resolution: write about solutions, not problems. Eliminate the
Negative News. It's just that there's so much bad news. The grinding you hear
is not my teeth. I've got my TMJ mouth guard on. That's the gears in my head
cranking out solutions.
It's lovely to have so much energy again since the meds ran out. The TV has
stopped talking to me since it's gone to the landfill. This is no time to
listen to critics, when you're solving the un-affordable housing situation.
Tackle the biggest problems first. Last month I solved the health care mess.
It wasn't easy but someone had to do it. The biggest problem with un-affordable
housing is that there's so much of it. Un-affordable Housing owners want to
keep it that way on their property, in their neighborhood, even in their
watershed. Poor people are always going to be screwed by the wealthy. As Jesus
said, that's insoluble, so we'll leave
that alone.
Pick apart the biggest problem, break it down into smaller tasks that can be
accomplished. Stategize. Then delegate those tasks to others. Right now,
zoning regulations and government bureaucracy are the single biggest impediment
to building affordable, healthy, safe, communities for po' people.
It's in the vested interest of zoning and government officials whose jobs
depend on property taxes, to protect property values, inflated or not.
An idea man like me is never going to outsit those iron ast bastards to
change bureaucratic regulations. That's like watching cement crumble.
Houses Built On Sand
Never fight with your weakest asset, unless it's your only one, as old Lao Tsu,
or Sun Tsu or Who Tsu said. I'll delegate the zoning issues to whoever has the
hardest ass.
It's not just the actual costs of housing that creates unaffordable
housing, although that's part of the problem. There's also the 30 year
mortgage, which quadruples the price paid for a structure to the banks, which
technically own it until it's paid off. At four to one, thanks to the miracle
of compound interest. If there was a scam to have gold roll downhill into
banker's vaults, that's the one. I can't solve that problem, if Marx couldn't.
Americans' medical costs and insurance to prevent economic catastrophe from
illness or injury, drain dollars that could go to housing expenses. My proposal
to outsource those costs for a dime on the dollar will change that and fix
social security, too.
There's maintenance to keep the place up and insurance to protect the investment
in case it burns down, is eaten by bugs, collapses in earthquakes, mudslides,
tsunamis or hurricanes, or is carried off by floods or tornadoes. There's
heating and cooling costs, ever increasing for most unaffordable housing. Water
and waste removal fees and expenses. Lights, frig, stereo/TV. Furnishing and
renovating. Tools, materials and equipment to maintain it and the grounds it's
piled on.
There's the transportation costs to travel from house to market,
employment, recreation, services and health care. The less money you make, the
greater percentage you spend on transportation. Just as true for the cost of
food and beverages.
That's too much bad news already, even with my improved mood swings. Let's
just focus on the actual construction of affordable housing. Putting up a
pile. After all, if you build it, they will come. But if you think about
building it, and scatter ideas like grass-seed, they may also come to hang out
on the lawn, and might even do some work, if you provide drinks. It's all about
delegation, as Tom Sawyer told Huckleberry Finn.
This Piggie Built With Straw
Okay, humans have had affordable housing since time immemorial, as they
say. In many parts of the world they still have it, because they build it out
of available, cheap, local materials. In America there are often rules against that. There's a pretty clear correlation
between number of rules in an area and lack of affordable housing.
There are good reasons for zoning laws around health and safety issues.
There should be certain structural integrity standards for both affordable
housing and unaffordable housing. Basically fire/quake/flood/wind resistant
with waste disposed of in a sanitary manner. Health and safety standards that
are open to new ways to meet them would allow the American pragmatic spirit to
create solutions, where before there was only a problem.
I started with the existing situation. There's the homeless, of course.
Most of them would be happy to live like the Boy in the Box. A warm, secure,
dry space, that they could sleep in, store some essentials and not burn it down
by falling asleep with a cigarette.
So they could be put up quite cheaply. Little hexagonal cells stacked like
circled wagons, with a methane generating shitter fueling their campfire,
running water and a solar shower would make most of them ecstatic, for a
while. Naturally there'd be some fighting like fort injuns on firewater. You'd probably have
to hire somebody to keep order and sell em sixpacks.
But the homeless are only the open wound of the affordable housing
situation. There's people who live in their vehicles. Technically they aren't
homeless, merely nomads. At least while their vehicle is running. But that can
be expensive, then your next bed is pavement.
Living In Glass Houses
The fear of that final solution to the unaffordable housing problem, resides
even in the American middle class, like a dark succubus in their nightmares.
They are in debt financially because of unaffordable housing, childcare,
transportation, food and health care.
An injury, illness, or getting downsized and they could end up squatting
alongside those people begging on the sidewalk. Sleeping in a cardboard box.
The homeless are the flip side of the American dream, failures in the struggle
to stay housed. That cottage with the picket fence was only an illusion, as
Horatio Alger said.
There's always trailer parks, where for a reasonable sum you can actually
buy or rent a large aluminum box to live in. Lots of poor and struggling
people live in them. I've done so myself.
Except for their unfortunate tendency to attract tornadoes, this is not a
bad thing. Often, trailer parks charge rent and fees for the space that
aluminum box is propped up on. Still it's usually more reasonable than living
in a wooden box. Yet no one would want to take shelter in a trailer when a
hurricane is coming.
I first thought of a way to turn a trailer into a wind/flood/fire resistant
structure. Reinforced concrete can provide more protection than aluminum and fibre-board.
Trailers can easily be jacked up high enough off the ground to avoid most
flooding or waves. Drive up with a cement truck and a framing system, pour a
concrete foundation with some flying buttresses or whatever, a concrete shell
with window recesses and shade awnings to keep it cooler, maybe a nice flat
roof with some drainage/storage devices for a rooftop garden, Vitamin D
accumulation and solar cell or two. For like a few thousand dollars apiece, far
less than the cost of a single Hurricane Warning evacuation, every trailer
could be a refuge, instead of landfill material afterwards.
That's fine for trailers, but why would you even need them with all that
concrete around them, a shipping container would do just as well. Maybe if you
could use the trailers like a lost wax sculpture. Still, there's not enough
landfill space to trash every trailer out there. So that's a keeper, if only
to deal with old problems.
Castles Built Of Air
To an idea man like me though, old problems are boring. I started thinking
about concrete. The Romans created it, although Egyptians and the Chinese have
probably claimed it, since Latin died. Basically an aggregation of gravel,
sand, lime and water- with other materials optional for special-effects, which
becomes agglutinated into an agglomeration through some alchemical magic.
If shredded paper is mixed into this blend to make paperkrete, it has
similar strength with less weight and cost. It seems like styrofoam pellets
could be added to the mix for the same effect.
Although the main ingredients of concrete are plentiful, they still add up to
unaffordable housing, if you're pouring walls thick enough to hold off a
tornado. The weight of concrete increases the costs of reinforcement, even if
you're using old bedsprings and scrap metal.
It came to me late at night, or early in the morning depending on whether
your glass is half empty or half full. There oughta be a way to make a
concrete light enough and strong enough for load bearing walls, roofs, even a
geodesic dome or two. Using cheaper materials than the same stuff the Romans
did. We're not in Rome, anymore.
What is there way too much of? Currently going into landfill mountains,
that theoretically could be agglomerated. Diapers, plastic and styrofoam,
destruction rubble, juice boxes, Kerry campaign buttons, cigarette butts,
broken toys and stuffed animals, out of date electronics, music/ video discs,
old clothing, important papers, the ends of glue tubes and toothpastes, greasy
TV trays, scented candles in glass jars, without enough wax to light.
All that stuff could be ground together, zapped with sonic waves, shot
through with bubbles as a carbon dioxide sink, transmogrified through some
mercurial allembration.
And emerge from a Gran Cloaca as a pourable, light, strong, load bearing
concrete. The PeoplesKrete, for affordable housing. So easy to work with even a
single Mother could pour her own free form style house, like a coiled clay
creation. You might have to claim it's an art project to get it through zoning,
anyways.
I hate it when people say, but that's never been done before. If Cristobal
Colon had thought that way, the Native Americans would still be scalping each
other with stone tools. Americans love doing what hasn't been done before, by
God.
Naturally that has led to trouble, but PeoplesKrete should be safe enough.
Layer a styrofoam and rubber mix on the inside to make it child/elderly/clumsy
safe, and hose washable. Clad it with solar electric nanotechnology using cast
off CD/DVD's and broken glass, hooked into the grid so these houses would earn
money, not burn it.
Don't tell me it can't be done. As Nike says, Just Do It!