Gold & Silver Forum - Radical Simplicity and the Fourth Step(free online book)

Nice! It covers many topics from homeschooling to z. This bit on building your own I particularly like.

Quote:

The Institutionalization of Housing

The process of taking one of our basic needs out of our hands and commercializing and industrializing it, and then selling it back to us, happens in all parts of our lives. Drive through any community, and it is filled with contractor-built, bank-financed homes and apartment buildings. We literally don�t get to own our own homes unless we are lucky enough to survive physically and financially long enough to pay off our mortgage on our house. Then later on the same building usually gets sold to someone else who starts the whole process all over again. In such a system many people can�t afford their own homes at all, and most of us spend a disproportionately large part of our income buying homes or renting. Someone else is in charge of the whole process from start to finish, telling us what we can build, how to build it, and what materials to use. Even when kind-hearted people build low-income housing, the costs remain high despite the final price being subsidized from money coming from elsewhere. We have created a web of rules and regulations and economically self-interested institutions that get between us and having our own homes. If we give this housing industry a grade on how well it meets the nation�s need for healthy, inexpensive, nurturing shelter, it would have to be a failing one.

Building codes exist for our own good, or so we are told. They protect us from mistakes or shoddy workmanship which could result in our harm. But they have the effect, as well, of accelerating the institutionalization of housing. The same rules applied to a contractor building a house for resale are applied to an owner-builder building a little house on a remote piece of land. The codes end up intimidating people from building their own homes, sometimes forcing them into contortions in which they massively remodel their home from within to avoid the codes when it would be cheaper and faster to build a new building. The codes make people feel that they cannot lay their hands on their own homes, that they somehow need permission from someone else, that someone else actually owns their home � which, unfortunately, is too often true. It is ironic, but not surprising, that codes actually promote bad housing by keeping on the market old, often toxic, buildings built before the codes went into effect and now valuable because of the difficulties placed in the way of building new homes.

Zoning is also imposed as something for our own good, and it can do some good, but it is often applied in a unilateral and unreflective way that brings in its wake bad consequences. We then have forest zoning that excludes people, but does nothing about the destruction of the forests. We have marginal land of no agricultural value that now needs special and expensive hearings to determine whether it can be lived on. Then the codes step in and demand conventional flush toilets and septic fields, or in jurisdictions where composting toilets are allowed, they still demand somewhat smaller leach fields to treat grey water. Again the result is to discourage people from building their own homes.

With institutionalization comes the monetarization of housing which expresses itself, for example, in what is a common investment strategy of buying up homes and renting them out. A reasonably priced home that comes on the market goes, not to the first-time home buyer, but to one of these investors who is primed to move quickly and has the financing in place because he or she already owns 5 or 10 houses or more, and is sometimes connected to the real estate world, as well. And the houses we do purchase are usually bought on credit so that the bulk of the money we spend on them goes to the mortgage lenders in the form of interest.

Instead of this kind of institutionalization, home building should evoke another whole set of images: finding a piece of land that we can really care for; spending time there to get to know it, finding a house site on it where we can have sunshine, drawing up our designs and digging in the earth, and watching the building grow from the work of our own hands. The home that results from such a process is truly ours, and we have grown in creating it. It speaks to us in a different way than buildings built by others for profit. It is an act of economic liberation whose repercussions will echo down through our years living there.

But why is there so little of this kind of liberative housing in this country? We have been sold another whole view of housing: big house with lots of wasted space, homes with no one in them, elaborate kitchens where no one has time to cook, workshops where nothing gets made, houses that are meant to proclaim that we have somehow made it, and achieved the American dream, as if we can truly realize the dreams that matter by purchasing them. And since we lack the imagination for truly radical housing, we have structured our society accordingly. We tolerate the high price of land, and the layers of bureaucratic rules that convince us that even if we want to build our own home out of natural materials, the way would be strewn with obstacles.

Thanks 79.