You seem to have missed the point of my post. The only reason functional poor people can’t afford to buy homes is because the government has made affordable homes illegal. Why should owning a home be synonymous with debt? In many areas, a 1/8th acre lot can be had for $500 or less. Virtually anywhere, discarded construction materials are arriving at the local dump by the truckload, but laws usually prohibit people from taking them even though it would be easy to build serviceable homes from them. Add a few hundred dollars for materials that would usually need to be bought new — roof shingles, mortar, paint, nails, etc — and for a couple thousand dollars total, anyone could outright own their own little home that they built with their own hands. Just as many thousands of pioneers did earlier in our country’s history.
>> Why should owning a home be synonymous with debt?
Purchasing a home is necessarily synonymous with debt for broke people. If they could buy a home with no debt, they wouldn’t be broke. Having the cash to purchase a home negates the label of “broke”.
>> Virtually anywhere, discarded construction materials are arriving at the local dump by the truckload, but laws usually prohibit people from taking them even though it would be easy to build serviceable homes from them. Add a few hundred dollars for materials that would usually need to be bought new — roof shingles, mortar, paint, nails, etc — and for a couple thousand dollars total, anyone could outright own their own little home that they built with their own hands.
Sounds like a third world country.
First, this seems somewhat shortsighted. There are left over building materials precisely because property values made it worth building and renovating properties. You suggest we drive values down by allowing people to erect shacks with leftover building materials ... which will make building and renovation less profitable, and reduce the availability of scrap building materials.
There is a reason thrid-world countries seem to have more damage and casualties during natural disasters. That building codes and restrictions have driven up home prices is probably true ... but they also help us avoid a Haiti-like disaster every time the wind picks up or the ground shakes.
Renting in a good safe structure is better than owning a shack with no central heating/air (because if you can only afford to steal building materials, how are you going to afford heating/cooling?), no gas, no water, no plumbing, etc. Seems like a better arrangement all around — for renters (who get to live in structures of a quality they could not afford to purchase), for property owners (who avoid having property values plummet because of a third-world scrap-material tent-city popping up on every corner) ... for everybody.
SnakeDoc
Your post won’t be popular, but it is right on the money.