The House That Must Not Fall — Meat Draft
By Rocky, in collaboration with ChatGPT. Inspired by an article by Kyla Scanlon in The New York Times. Podcast provided by Google’s NotebookLM.
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In my life I have owned four homes; all of them were in New Jersey. For foreign readers, New Jersey lies between New York and Pennsylvania, with the Delaware River forming much of its western border. On Christmas night, December 25–26, 1776—the year the colonies declared independence—General George Washington and his troops crossed that river and attacked the Hessian forces stationed at Trenton the following morning. The victory revived a revolution that had begun to look terminal. With the British occupying New York, New Jersey became a breeding ground for spies and plots involving Loyalists, Rebels and those sensibly waiting to see who won.
My first home was a trailer that I co-owned with my ex-wife. My second, in the same town, stood on four acres and contained roughly 2,500 square feet. The third was a condominium of around 2,200 square feet with a tiny backyard—hardly any land at all. The fourth was a 2,300-square-foot house on one acre. You could say that I have experienced several varieties of American homeownership. I have also rented many places in different parts of the country. If you look at my long-term credit statement, you will find many different addresses. I am about to move yet again in August, this time to a nearby apartment.
Am I a rambling man? Or have I simply not found a home? I think it is too late to classify my robotic lifestyle. It is what it is, propelled by tides of control, fortune and circumstance whose movements I remain blissfully unaware of—or, as I have said, simply clueless about.
Perhaps I am precisely the person to write about housing. I have owned four houses, rented many others and am preparing to move again, yet I still hesitate before saying that I have found a home. Kyla Scanlon published an article about housing and retirement; I brought it to Chat, and we discussed it for a while. Here is what we found.
America does not have one housing crisis. It has several systems occupying the same building and demanding opposite things from its price.
A house must be shelter for the person who lives in it, an appreciating retirement asset for the person who owns it, dependable collateral for the bank that financed it, and a durable source of revenue for the local government and school district surrounding it.
Each obligation is understandable by itself. Taken together, they produce a country that says it wants affordable housing while depending upon housing never becoming substantially more affordable.
This contradiction is usually hidden beneath the language of supply. There are not enough homes in the places where people need or want to live; land-use rules obstruct construction; infrastructure is slow; labor and materials are expensive; interest rates discourage builders and buyers. All of that is true. It is also incomplete. The shortage persists not only because building is difficult but because scarcity performs valuable work for people and institutions that already possess property. Scarcity supports prices. Prices support equity. Equity supports retirement plans, inheritances, consumer borrowing, mortgage portfolios, municipal assessments and the reassuring conviction that thirty years of payments amounted to progress. Housing scarcity is therefore condemned as a social failure and defended as a financial necessity, often by the same government in the same week.
The numbers reveal how much has been placed upon the roof. The Census Bureau found that home equity and retirement accounts together represented 65.2 percent of American household wealth in 2019. Nearly two-fifths of households owned no home, while a similar share had no retirement account. By 2022, the Federal Reserve estimated that the median net housing value of homeowners had climbed from $139,100 to $201,000 in only three years. For the owner, this appeared as wealth creation. For the nonowner, it appeared as a larger down payment, a larger mortgage, a longer wait or permanent exclusion. The same price increase produced security and insecurity simultaneously.
This is the first fact the housing debate routinely avoids: the price of an existing home can rise without the nation becoming proportionately wealthier. The house does not gain a bedroom when its market value increases. It does not shelter another family, improve its plumbing or move closer to the owner’s workplace. What grows is the owner’s claim upon the future income of whoever comes next. The seller receives more purchasing power; the buyer assumes more debt; the excluded household pays rent for longer. A higher price is wealth to the person holding the deed, but at the level of the society it is also a transfer between those already inside the market and those attempting to enter it.
America gradually converted that transfer into an unofficial retirement system. Traditional pensions weakened or disappeared for much of the private workforce. Individual retirement accounts placed responsibility upon workers whose wages were already being consumed by housing, health care, education and debt. Social Security prevented destitution for millions but was not intended to finance every version of a secure old age. The home filled the gap because it could be used and accumulated at the same time. It became a pension with a front door.
Yet the home is a peculiar pension. Many older owners do not sell it, substantially draw down its equity or move to a cheaper property. They remain because the house contains family, familiarity and community; because moving is difficult; because the equity may be needed for illness or long-term care; because it will become an inheritance; or simply because a large number on a statement creates a sense of safety. The asset may never be liquidated, but its valuation still governs political behavior. A decline in home prices is experienced not as cheaper shelter for society but as the erasure of years of prudence from the owner’s private ledger.
That feeling is neither imaginary nor contemptible. Most homeowners did not design the system. They were told that buying a home was the responsible act, the entrance to the middle class and the reward for working steadily. They borrowed, maintained, repaired and paid taxes under that understanding. An abrupt collapse would punish recent buyers, destabilize lenders and damage retirees who have little besides their equity. It would replace one broken promise with another.
But compassion for homeowners does not require pretending that perpetual appreciation is a natural right. Other assets fluctuate. Businesses lose value. Bonds rise and fall. Currencies move. Only housing is regularly discussed as though a decline were simultaneously an economic emergency, a moral injury and an offense against the national character. The asymmetry is revealing. When rents rise, the tenant is advised to move, economize or earn more. When home values fall, governments search for tools, banks search for protection and newspapers search for the word “crisis.” America has become willing to let people fall so long as the house does not.
This is why homelessness and housing affordability must be separated even though they grow from some of the same conditions. Homelessness is an immediate failure to provide a place where a person can safely exist. A person sleeping in a car does not first need an appreciating asset, a mortgage or a lecture on neighborhood supply. That person needs a room, sanitation, security, an address and, where useful, services that make the housing sustainable. Homelessness can be reduced rapidly because the first requirement is occupancy, not ownership. Treating it as merely the most dramatic point on the homeownership spectrum delays an answer that is conceptually simple even when administration is not.
Affordability is a different problem. It concerns workers and families who can pay a reasonable amount for housing but cannot pay the amount demanded by a market in which scarcity has been capitalized into land values. Their difficulty cannot be solved by emergency shelters, nor will it be solved by waiting for incomes to catch up. At a national median existing-home price of roughly $440,000, reproducing the purchasing burden of a $13,000 home for the same earner would require the price-to-income ratio to shrink by about 97 percent—or incomes to rise roughly thirty-fourfold relative to the house price. Even if home prices, measured in today’s dollars, froze and real incomes grew by three percent every year without interruption, the convergence would take about 120 years. “Let wages catch up” is not a transition plan. It is a polite description of permanence.
The false choice is therefore between preserving the present system and deliberately destroying household wealth. There is a third possibility: build a substantial housing sector that is affordable by design and does not participate fully in speculative appreciation. Its properties could be publicly, cooperatively or nonprofit owned; the precise legal mechanisms may differ by state and locality. What matters is the governing principle. Eligibility would be based upon the relationship between local incomes and local housing costs rather than a single national definition of poverty. A household able to live independently but unable to afford ordinary housing in its own labor market would qualify for housing priced according to use, cost and income rather than the maximum scarcity will bear.
Such housing would form a parallel market rather than an emergency annex for the poor. It would include different incomes, ages and household types. It would be built near employment, schools, medicine, transportation and ordinary civic life. Residents might rent, hold cooperative shares or possess restricted ownership interests, but the properties would remain permanently affordable when occupants changed. The resident could build stability and perhaps limited equity without being required to find a more indebted successor in order to prosper.
The purpose would not be to freeze the existing housing market or guarantee homeowners an uninterrupted gain. Market prices would continue to fluctuate, as they do in other countries and as prices are supposed to do in functioning markets. The purpose would be to prevent an affordability program from producing a disorderly collapse while gradually reducing the nation’s dependence upon scarcity. Existing homes could continue to satisfy the financial obligations already attached to them. New public and permanently affordable homes would be relieved of those obligations from the beginning.
This distinction permits a vision without requiring a fictional legislative blueprint. The first goal is that, within five years, the United States should be capable of offering safe indoor accommodation to every person who would otherwise remain involuntarily unsheltered. That is a homelessness goal. It requires urgency, low barriers and the recognition that a room is not a reward for prior stability; it is often the condition from which stability becomes possible.
The second goal is that, within ten years, every high-cost metropolitan area should have a permanently affordable housing sector comprising at least one home in ten, with a binding path toward one in five within twenty years. Eligibility would be calibrated to local income and local prices. That is an affordability goal. It would not abolish private ownership, erase home equity or turn the country into Vienna. It would establish that an American may obtain a decent home without being required to purchase a retirement asset from the generation before and sell it at a higher price to the generation after.
The percentages and deadlines can be debated. Their function is to replace aspiration with an obligation against which failure can be measured. “Build more housing” is a direction. “End involuntary unsheltered homelessness within five years, create a permanently affordable alternative comprising ten percent of housing in high-cost regions within ten years, and expand it to twenty percent within twenty years” is a destination. A country may miss a destination and still be forced to explain why. It can wander indefinitely in a direction while congratulating itself for movement.
The political objection is obvious: the United States may no longer possess the governing capacity or patience required to create such a sector. It struggles to enact housing policy at the necessary scale, coordinate levels of government, overcome local vetoes or sustain a project beyond the next election. But incapacity is not an argument against defining the necessary work. It is part of the indictment. If a wealthy country can understand that shelter, retirement, banking and local finance have become dangerously entangled yet cannot act because every remedy disturbs an incumbent claim, then the housing crisis is not primarily a shortage of plans. It is a crisis of permission.
The nation has given the past a deed, a pension expectation, a tax assessment and a bank lien. The future arrives with an application. The task is not to confiscate the past, nor to ask the future to wait 120 years. It is to create a form of housing in which one generation’s need for shelter is no longer the raw material of another generation’s security.
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I ate meat again today. My vegan diet was starting to grind down the support team I share breath and energy with. I also bought eggs and dairy. I do not quite know how it all works. What I do know is that this is not my preferred diet.
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C’est une tranche de vie, non? Both literally and metaphysically. Or perhaps metaphorically. I can no longer tell the difference. I mean, I can, but it is a chore.
If you want to understand the System’s Economics of Artificially Created Scarcity the videos below provide interesting watching material.
