The Fox has His Den, The Bee Her Hive, and Man Takes out Loans.
You are now reading the Bluebonnet Gazetteer, a periodical primarily to advocate for a white, Christian, and Nationalist America, but may include any subject this author finds important to speak on. This periodical is published on a bi-weekly basis, and at the time this is being written only distributed digitally. I hope that in time this periodical will be an indispensable piece of regular reading for those youth who wish to reclaim and perfect our American nation.
Often right wing circles will briefly mention the housing crisis and its effects on things like marriage and the growing incel class, but the forces that cause the crisis are rarely discussed. Today I would like to discuss just that; understanding why the housing crisis is happening will surely give rightoids a more illumined view of our, quickly degrading, civilization.
First things first, and surprisingly will constitute a very small portion of today's discussion, immigrants. Immigrants make the housing crisis worse because of course adding one-hundred-million people that all require housing makes the housing crisis worse. But notably immigrants affect first time buyers and renters the most.
The housing market is not uniform, houses of a certain type being built won't uniformly lower the price of all houses, rather, it's best to think of housing in tiers of entry, mid level, high end, and luxury, hardly hard or fast tiers. For example: building high end houses WILL affect the price of lower tier houses, since entry into high end housing will be more attainable and allow mid tier home owners to move up, thereby increasing the supply of mid tier houses, and so on downward. This same principle applies to demand in the market as well. Immigrants are poorer and, therefore, need entry level homes. This reduces entry level home supply and greatly increases demand for entry homes. This creates something I like to call the cuckoo effect, where as mid tier home owners move up the young adult natives of America cannot actually enter entry level housing since immigrants have created such high demand.
That's basically where my mention of immigrants will end for this article, they factor in to labor costs but besides that the issue is caused by browns less than you'd think, shocker I know.
One issue barely touched on is where housing shortages are. In, most nations frankly, but also in America the well paying jobs are all in major urban centers. Because of this citizens move to these population centers for better jobs, which decreases incentive to place a business outside of these centers, which then means jobs are brought to these urban centers, and it spirals so. America doesn't have it as bad as most nations on this matter, however. About seven-percent of our population lives in five or six cities, meanwhile fifty-percent of Australia's population is in Sydney and Melbourne, so it could be much worse. But I bring this up because it means housing shortages are so bad, despite us having so much land, in part from the centralization of population, a smaller area inherently has less room for real estate.
Urbanization like this explains, partially, why housing is so expensive. A city, as has been said, has less land to build houses on, this makes land more expensive. Only around half of house construction costs are from labor and materials in the United States, the other half is land cost and regulatory expenses.
Regulatory expenses, at first, sounds simple enough; regulations require this feature be built in to the house, that feature costs money, but enough to where it is comparable to labor prices? Well yes but another thing to consider is the time these things add on. Land for housing is not paid out of pocket; construction companies take out loans with interest on them and they cannot pay back these loans until the home is sold. The whole time construction companies are waiting for approval and all the extra time added by complexities, added by regulations, is time that interest builds, and this timeline can be months. Then think that everything that adds time during construction increases labor costs as well. Then the longer the construction takes the longer taxes have to paid on the property by the construction company. So every inefficiency in the process adds scaling cost, God forbid you have to wait for re-approval if something comes up during construction that requires re-permitting.
But costs don't end there, possibly the slimiest and least excusable thing that adds cost to housing are real estate agents. During the sale of houses a real estate agent steps in to act as a middleman between buyer and seller. There have been feeble attempts at justifying real estate agents, 'they help do market research!' 'they hire inspectors!' 'they take photos!', all retarded drivel. In the age of the internet there is no reason you have to lock 'market research' behind an entire profession and inspectors and what you need an inspector to look for (to weed out bad inspectors) is easily available through the power of the Web. There is no natural reason, that is. The unnatural reason is the National Association of Realtors who keep a comprehensive database of all of Americas homes and their info behind a membership fee for real estate agents. The NAR use this leverage to eliminate competition between its members by standardizing an entire six-percent cut of the home sale, this six-percent is tacked on to the price of the home.
Notice I have not said anything about labor or material costs, all the factors mentioned have been red tape, profiteers, or wider societal issues. But all of these assume that any of this is normal and good. As has been discussed many times current home owners vote to defend the price of their home and hold on to their property because interest rates are higher than when they bought their house. This type of behavior is inhuman, treating a basic need such as housing as an asset in an investment portfolio will inherently always create a dysfunctional society that sacrifices the youth's ability to own property for the monetary gain of those who already have it. An investment must be profitable therefore the prices must rise with every resale, a class of house owners then becomes resistant to letting anyone else in the market except at a high markup and it continues until we reach today. I say house because these people do not own homes, they own an investment they're squatting in until they think its a good idea to sell.
So how can we solve this? Well it is quite obvious we if we continue thinking of homes as investments the problem will always crop up again regardless of what we do to address the market conditions. So we must think of homes as a cost for our lives, a 'consumable' product that we need rather than a way to make profit.
House flipping must also be heavily deincentivized since it creates that very same issue as described before. But there are some things we must do still to improve the market, because there is not anything wrong with wanting to build and sell houses for a profit, it's a service and product that is good for society, so the following will be with the view that builders as a profession are good for society.
To get the most simple things out of the way a standardized list should be created by each town and city of all the information required for zoning approval, this speeds up the process. The list should also include considerations to prevent re-zoning later if such things can be figured beforehand.
There also should be made a website that contains all the information buyers need to know, so not to get scammed or buy a house worse than they thought they'd get, and a centralized catalog of home inspectors and real estate lawyers. This website should be maintained at the state level, lower levels of government needing to manage this repository would be unnecessarily taxing and at the federal level would be too cumbersome, it should be made so that users can filter easily based on a criteria of important information, such criteria should be decided on a state-by-state basis, and finally the website should be widely advertised in every city and town so that citizens are aware of it.
Approval should also be made faster, I will refrain from specifics because this thing varies county by county but generally hiring more people or a more regimented workplace could help reduce times between submission and approval. For a more radical idea towns could create a form that allows you to gain approval before buying the property if the seller is willing to let you gather the required information.
None of these require any law change but we shall now move on to fixes that do. In this section I will focus on reducing costs for builders.
For a generous window of time we could forgo taxing properties currently being developed. This window could be extended if the construction project meets certain criteria, like being in a historic architectural style or if it is going to be open for use by the public (like an office building having a publicly available plaza) or if the city does not want construction they can reduce this window or get rid of it entirely. Ideally this is applied on a case-by-case basis, but that can be time consuming and cumbersome if there are many submissions.
Prices can also be reduced by optimizing supply lines for common building materials and instituting a local reserve of these materials that buys high quantities of common building materials at low prices then stores them, if a company contributes to building the facilities for these reserves and donates money for the fund that buys these materials, they can be given access to the reserve, with approval. Further at a national level we can fund operations to produce or gather the natural resources from American land (planting tree farms, building aluminum mines, et cetera).
Short of banning real estate agents we can institute one change to make them less prevalent and therefore less inflationary. In Europe real estate agents are used less than in America and a reason for this is they charge a fee upfront instead of tacking it on to the cost of the house. If this is made mandatory real estate agents would be used less and thus their middleman parasitism would have a smaller effect on the market.
Finally if we kick out all one-hundred-million foreign born immigrants the house supply would greatly increase along with a whole host of other issues virtually disappearing.
Author's Note: I recently took a stroll at dusk and while looking around in the neighborhood I was walking in I began to think it'd be nice to live there. This thought led me down a line of inquiry whether my home was positioned in the best area in my town, and it almost is! The only spot that would be better is directly behind my home but it is inferior by virtue of my home being there, because it blocks the view of the cotton field I live near (which the current me can see!)