>> 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
Renting a good quality home costs more than buying one, on a month to month basis, because a profit has to be built in for the landlord. Only way around that is massive government subsidies for renters, and we’ve got plenty of that.
Actually very few people in the US are so poor that they could only afford the sort of house I described, and most of those won’t stay that poor, and would soon be improving and expanding their modest starter home, or selling it for more that they paid for it (because of the value of their labor that went into it), and buying/building something bigger and better. Whatever sort of housing they end up staying in long term, they will OWN, and that has a very salutary effect on their own finances and that of their offspring who will inherit from them.
Most of the provisions of our building codes have nothing to do with real safety concerns, and everything to with providing employment for the contractors (mostly unionized) and manufacturers who lobbied for them, and with driving up the tax base (by driving out poor people) so the legislators who passed them can have more money for their ever-expanding list of government schemes. But *free* people have a right to take risks for themselves and their minor children, and as I noted, I’m fine with building code provisions that are really designed to protect adjacent property owners.