REALLY Low Cost Homes

I’ve been thinking about housing much of my life. Simply put, one of the big problems with housing is that most people in the US cannot afford to own it. We are not given much that’s useful in school about how to manage money or how to think about it, so the majority of us have little stashed away for emergencies or retirement and cannot come up with even the down payment on a conventional home. That’s sad as it makes us slaves to the lack of money. For most folks, a home is the biggest investment or indebtedness they will ever take on. So, I’ve been thinking about how to “do” housing in a way that costs far less yet still meets our needs. We have lots of expectations around housing, but to drastically reduce the cost of it, we’ll need to adjust some of those expectations. The “standard” expectation is to have a nice, stick built home on a nice lot. What I’ll propose here is to have some sort of manufactured housing in a small development. There are many other ways to chip away at the cost of housing, but this way has so many benefits, I thought I’d start with it. The recent interest in tiny homes just might be helping to do that.
I just did a search on my local Craigslist for Recreational Vehicles, (RVs) at up to $10,000. There were lots of them!  I imagine it will be pretty much the same across the country. Certainly many will need work, but even if it doubles the cost, things could be worse. Mobile homes are another place to look. It’s not uncommon that people owning mobile homes in parks fail to pay their space rent for any number of reasons. One main reason is they up and die and no relatives can be found or the relatives have no interest in the mobile home. These homes can sometimes be had for free or just for the back space rent. Another thing that happens with mobiles is they sit on private land which gets sold or changes in some other way and the home needs to go.  These homes will be cheap or free. The costs of ownership are in having a place to move one to, and then moving it.
If you step back and think about it, these two types of dwellings (RVs and mobile homes) are the tiny home of yesteryear. But think about the cost. These homes may be had for very roughly $40 or less per square foot and in livable condition. Note that the $40 number comes from one of those $10,000 RVs, that looked to be in great shape. It’s easy to find older mobile homes for ¼ that amount per square foot. Tiny homes are often over $500 per foot.
None of those costs include land. The normal approach of owning a lot and putting utilities on it isn’t cheap. How about changing things up a little and following the cohousing model? Here’s an interesting primer on cohousing: https://www.aarp.org/home-family/your-home/info-2018/cohousing-community-fd.html  And, here’s another link that will take you much deeper: http://www.cohousingco.com/ A good cohousing development has up to about 35 homes. Let’s imagine something between a mobile home park and co-housing. If the development were designed following cohousing guidelines; like being people-centric rather than car-centric and if it had a main building that housed a kitchen, room for gatherings, laundry facilities, maybe a shop and even some guest bedrooms, that building would get a lot of use and help eliminate the need for those functions in the private homes, which could then be simpler and smaller (read less expensive!). Buying into a development like this could cost far less than your normal single family home. Also, you get a community where people know and learn to care for each other, making things safer and potentially far more enjoyable. It’s normal that when a cohousing community is built, property values around it go up, so neighbors are happy too. Splitting infrastructure costs 35 ways does help cut the individual cost of owning.  I’ll add that if the “tiny home” idea just sounds too small to be comfortable in, there are ways to create inexpensive transitional spaces that bring the outdoors inside and give you more real living space that can change with the seasons. It’s a fun and interesting approach that blurs the line between inside and outside. I hope to discuss this more in a future post. But back to the benefits of cohousing; other things like a community garden, playground, teaching classes based on the skills of the residents, and sharing responsibilities, like child-sitting or elder-care could be woven into the fabric of life at such a place. These things all add up to the potential for a richer life than the usual, semi-isolated single family home can give.
Unfortunately, many of the biggest hurdles to overcoming expensive housing are baked into our regulations and how they are enforced. Many places discourage manufactured housing of all sorts because they think it’s substandard or will bring adjacent property values down… or will not yield as much property tax as conventional construction! Still, public officials decry our lack of affordable housing. Perhaps they need to encourage, rather than put up barriers to novel thinking about low cost housing, so that we can test and learn what really does work in the real world.
Yours, Larry

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