The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis that directly and indirectly impacts all citizens continues to get worse. Ignorance about the root causes is making the potential for recovery less likely with each passing day.
The lack of Affordable and Accessible Housing to meet the needs of most of the Households in the economic and social Ziggurat – the three dimensional manifestation of contemporary, Urban society – is a critical and growing problem.
The latest indicator of shelter dysfunction? The 14 February WaPo front page headline: “Refinancing Unavailable for Many Borrowers. Millions Shut Out of Best Rates, Depressed Home Values, Poor Credit, High Debt Hurt Chances.”
The authors get the problem right but not the cause or the cure.
As readers of The Shape of the Future, EMR’s columns and posts and now TRILO-G know, there are three interconnected, overarching Crises preventing humans from achieving a sustainable trajectory for Urban civilization:
• The Mobility and Access Crisis,
• The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis, and
• The Helter Skelter Crisis.
None of these overlapping Crises can be solve without solving all three. More important, none can be solved without:
• Fundamental Transformation of human settlement patterns,
• Fundamental Transformation of governance structure, and
• Fundamental Transformation of the economic system.
Articulation of the third Transformation evolved between the time The Shape of the Future was completed in 2000 and completion of TRILO-G in 2010. The Dot Com Bust, the mid-2000’s consumption / housing Boom and The Great Recession document the need for this Fundamental Transformation. The other two Crises are explored in The Shape of the Future.
Readers of EMR’s work also know that the effort to expand home ownership since 1920 without regard to location of dwellings is to blame for creating and recently exacerbating the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis. Over the last decade the Crisis has been characterized as: Wrong Size House in the Wrong Location.
Over-washing the many prior contributing causes of The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis is the fact that Fannie and Freddie completely divorced the ability to get a loan from the intrinsic Value of the dwelling.
Early FHA and VA programs – and many state and municipal shelter programs – had spacial / locational and quality standards at the Unit, Dooryard and Cluster scales. There also evolved between 1925 and 1975 a professional consensus on how Clusters could best be agglomerated into functional Neighborhoods, Villages and Communities.
Driven by the greed-inspired securitization that leveraged money ‘invested’ in housing, Fannie and Freddie abandoned any shred of a nexus between size, location and Value.
In this context the cost (with a small ‘c’) is what a buyer pays as distinct from the full, true Cost (with a Capital ‘C’) that reflects a full allocation of the location-variable expenses at all six scales of human economic, social and physical activity below the New Urban Region (or Urban Support Region) scale.
‘Value’ in this context is based on the location of the dwelling and the relationship of that location to the other activities that are necessary to support a quality life in contemporary Urban society. When cost is lowered by intentional and unintentional subsidy, the Value is masked by the housing consumption bubbles.
Because residential land uses (and directly supporting Services – activities of Agencies, Enterprises and Institutions) make up 70 to 80 percent of the built environment, the flood of location-blind money transformed not just housing location but human settlement patterns at the Regional and MegaRegional scales over the past four decades.
The build environment takes up about 1.5 percent of the land area in the US of A. This hard core of buildings and pavement has been scattered across 30 percent of the total landscape and most of the accessible landscape. See PART FOUR – THE USE AND MANAGEMENT OF LAND in TRILO-G.
This scatteration has blurred the identity and crippled the functions of both Urbansides and Countrysides. Thirty percent of the land area WAS six times the area that would be required for Urban land uses at MINIMUM functional settlement patterns – even with cheap energy.
Now that the sources of cheap energy have been exhausted, Urban settlement may be scattered across ten times the area required for sustainable habitation. See David Owen’s Green Metropolis and EMR’s review of that book “Read It Now” in Chapter 50 of TRILO-G. (An earlier version of this review can be found at www.baconsrebellion.blogspot.com of 20 November 2009.)
To keep the BIG picture in mind, this irrational, subsidized and unsustainable scatteration of the daily human activities carried out by 95 percent of the population:
1) Cannot be served by Large, Private vehicles (the Mobility and Access Crisis)
2) Is the root cause of the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis
3) Results in vast Mass OverConsumption of resources – especially energy – that cannot be supported by any known economic system, and
4) Is the primary catalyst for in the disintegration of the social fabric in contemporary Urban society.
The total of these four realities IS The Helter Skelter Crisis.
Few disagree that the housing bubble – created by decades of misguided attempts to expand home ownership without regard to the commutative impact or the total cost – triggered a credit / financial Collapse termed The Great Recession. To grasp the profound level of ‘leadership’ ignorance , recall that in 2006 the recently reappointed chair of the Fed asked “What bubble?”
The rolling impact of The Great Recession and the reality that a growing population of humans – with rising expectations and a widening wealth gap – inhabit a finite planet with finite resources is not a pleasant prospect. In an era of instantaneous communications and weapons of mass destruction these factors cloud the future of civilization as it has been experienced in recent decades by those at the top of the Ziggurat.
Society is running of fumes. Political clans are doing their best to deny the role they played and are stonewalling any meaningful change, much less Fundamental Transformations.
The 14 February WaPo story makes it very clear that there is a huge problem in the area of shelter but fails to make it clear that the root cause of the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis was divorcing the cost of housing from the Value of housing.
As pointed out in THE ESTATES MATRIX – PART TWO of TRILO-G, MainStream Media consistently fails to explore the impact of settlement patterns because to do so would undermine the short-term profitability of the Enterprise that owns the media outlet.
Even those who should know – appraisers, lenders, buyers and the entire ‘real estate’ industry – are adrift. They do not have an overarching Conceptual Framework with which to comprehend human settlement patterns AND they refuse to even consider adopting a more robust Vocabulary with which to articulate a comprehensive Conceptual Framework
The general perceptions about the location of foreclosures is a perfect example. For most, the geography of foreclosures is similar to the ethereal, Myth besotted fog that clouded medieval minds concerning the cause of human diseases such at the Black Death. This same fog clouds minds concerning the importance of spacial distribution of human activities and human interactions.
Buying a smart phone or an iPad will not solve the problem. Neither will making dwellings easier to buy without regard to their size, location and relationship of the dwelling to all the activities necessary to create a quality life for the Urban humans who occupy the dwelling.
AND NOW THIS:
Again on WaPo page one for 16 February:
“U.S. Hopes Foreign Money Can Boost Housing Market [Wrong Size House in Wrong Location], [Foreign] Governments Took A Hit When the Boom Went Bust. Will They Return?; U.S. Looks Abroad to Fill a Housing-Finance Void”.)
Hoping other nation-states will make a bad situation worse must be one of the last sign posts on the way to the cliff.
EMR