5 ms·

Consider building a home in Fremont, CA. As of early 2018 you'd pay about $155,000 in fees to build a single-family home, or about $75,000 for a unit of multi-f

Consider building a home in Fremont, CA. As of early 2018 you'd pay about $155,000 in fees to build a single-family home, or about $75,000 for a unit of multi-family. Building a cheap home would be silly. The fees might be several times the construction cost. With the fees already so high, you might as well make the house fancy. We've also added expensive required features. It seems the voters and/or lobbyists can't bear to see a person living without the latest fancy stuff. I mean things like arc fault interrupters and wired-in smoke detectors, and maybe even solar. That too adds to the minimum price, so you might as well build a bigger and fancier home for a modest extra percentage increase in cost. You can see it in cars too, and in every other sort of product design. We've decided to put our cost of living out of reach of many people. I'm not saying it isn't nice to have airbags, 3-prong power cords, catalytic converters, and chainsaw brakes... but we're paying for it or failing to pay for it, making the country less competitive (need higher pay) and making people more likely to be homeless.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
California has really serious problems. Their housing policies are an issue statewide. I ultimately left the state get back into housing. I spent over two years in Fresno which has housing costs more in line with the national average than is typical for most California cities. I still couldn't find housing that worked for me. And that's partly because low end housing in Fresno is often a trailer in a trailer court. For health reasons, I'm unwilling to ever live in a trailer again. I lived in a trailer for a few months in my twenties. It was horrible and I was deathly ill in it. We no longer want SROs in the US and the reality is this means a lot of poor Americans are living in trailers which are such lousy housing that you have trouble financing them because their value goes down, not up, over time. The widespread use of trailers is testimony that if you try to zone "affordable housing" out of existence because poor people shouldn't exist or something, it just slips through the cracks in the system and calls itself a vehicle or whatever to get around that. In fact, the Tiny House movement probably goes back to some guy who literally put his tiny house on wheels and called it a "trailer" to get around housing regulations because it's not legal in most parts of the US to build a really small house. And these rules go bad places on a regular basis. Apple Valley, California is full of mansions with crazy large yards because the town set some crazy large minimum lot size intended to "preserve the character" of the rural small town surrounded by farmland and not have it become suburban sprawl. It became suburban sprawl anyway, just on steroids. The real way to preserve farmland is to create multifamily homes and set aside actual farmland. There are institutions that have studied this. A lot of well-meaning policies don't do what they were intended to do. They all too often do the exact opposite. Policies have to be more than well intended. They gave to also be well researched and we'll designed.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

California has really serious problems. Their housing policies are an issue statewide. I ultimately left the state get back into housing. I spent over two years in Fresno which has housing costs more in line with the national average than is typical for most California cities. I still couldn't find housing that worked for me. And that's partly because low end housing in Fresno is often a trailer in a trailer court. For health reasons, I'm unwilling to ever live in a trailer again. I lived in a trailer for a few months in my twenties. It was horrible and I was deathly ill in it. We no longer want SROs in the US and the reality is this means a lot of poor Americans are living in trailers which are such lousy housing that you have trouble financing them because their value goes down, not up, over time. The widespread use of trailers is testimony that if you try to zone "affordable housing" out of existence because poor people shouldn't exist or something, it just slips through the cracks in the system and calls itself a vehicle or whatever to get around that. In fact, the Tiny House movement probably goes back to some guy who literally put his tiny house on wheels and called it a "trailer" to get around housing regulations because it's not legal in most parts of the US to build a really small house. And these rules go bad places on a regular basis. Apple Valley, California is full of mansions with crazy large yards because the town set some crazy large minimum lot size intended to "preserve the character" of the rural small town surrounded by farmland and not have it become suburban sprawl. It became suburban sprawl anyway, just on steroids. The real way to preserve farmland is to create multifamily homes and set aside actual farmland. There are institutions that have studied this. A lot of well-meaning policies don't do what they were intended to do. They all too often do the exact opposite. Policies have to be more than well intended. They gave to also be well researched and we'll designed.