3 ms·

I want to use your question as a jumping off point to talk out some thoughts I've been having in this area. > When was [housing as a human right] ever the case

I want to use your question as a jumping off point to talk out some thoughts I've been having in this area. > When was [housing as a human right] ever the case? North and South America before the coming of the Europeans. Let's start in the far North. Here's the classic scene from "Nanook of the North" where Nanook builds an igloo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F0G3IZA6OI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F0G3IZA6OI It takes two hours to make an overnight shelter, and a day or two to make a semi-permanent dwelling. In the desert people built homes using earthen bricks (adobe) or dug into the sides of cliffs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_dwellings_of_Pueblo_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_dwellings_of_Pueblo_pe... In between there were tipis and lodges of all kinds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan The point is that in every part of the land the materials and methods to build a new home were freely available and widely known. There were no homeless people, no economic destitution. - - - - Then for a long time there was the colonization phase, where anyone who wanted to could grab some land and start farming, provided they were willing to fight the Native Americans, and weren't imported as slaves. > The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than 160 million acres (650 thousand km2; 250 thousand sq mi) of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts There were also abundant natural resources (and here I would cite the usual: flocks of birds so thick they eclipsed the sun and turned day into night; rivers so swollen with fish you could walk across them without wetting your boots; herds of bison so vast they took more than a day to pass by; etc.) - - - - Eventually the frontier closed: > Virgin farmland was increasingly hard to find after 1890—although the railroads advertised some in eastern Montana. Bicha shows that nearly 600,000 American farmers sought cheap land by moving to the Prairie frontier of the Canadian West from 1897 to 1914. However, about two-thirds of them grew disillusioned and returned to the U.S.[11][314] The Homestead Acts and proliferation of railroads are often credited as being important factors in shrinking the frontier, by efficiently bringing in settlers and required infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier#End_of_the_frontier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier#End_of_the_f... - - - - I feel like there is still a lot of open, unused land that could be made into homesteads, but the political and economic realities have shifted.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
This is a noble savage error. Shelter was still a valued commodity and not guaranteed human right. Tribes fought over land, and dwellings required labor. They often had many people to a dwelling because of this specifically. If you wanted to build an igloo or adobe building today, the land is cheap as are the materials. No one is interested in doing this exactly because the conditions would be considered economic destitution.
- carapace 4y ago
  > This is a noble savage error. You said that last time ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224977 ) I promise I'm not fantasizing about magic elves. :) However, it's clear that Native American lifestyles were preferable to European-American lifestyles. Graeber and Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything" quote at length a letter from Ben Franklin on the subject: > When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness. Anyway... > Shelter was still a valued commodity and not guaranteed human right. Tribes fought over land, and dwellings required labor. Sure, but there weren't homeless people. I mean a fire, flood, or enemy attack might leave people destitute, but there wasn't a perpetual destitute class, eh? Dwellings didn't require a lot of labor. > They often had many people to a dwelling because of this specifically. Are you sure? I am not an anthropologist (nor a Native American for that matter) but my impression is that that would have had more to do with family structure? - - - - Really the point I'm making isn't specific to the New World, it was common all over the world for people to build their own houses. In economic terms it wasn't very expensive to build a new dwelling. > If you wanted to build an igloo or adobe building today, the land is cheap as are the materials. No one is interested in doing this exactly because the conditions would be considered economic destitution. A lot of places won't let you build and live in an igloo or adobe building today. But I'm not really advocating that. There are modern low-embodied-energy and high efficacy home designs (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship ) that would be much more comfortable for the modern sensibilities. Imagine if a modern home could be had for $10k instead of $100K ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house )?

s1artibartfast 4y ago

This is a noble savage error. Shelter was still a valued commodity and not guaranteed human right. Tribes fought over land, and dwellings required labor. They often had many people to a dwelling because of this specifically. If you wanted to build an igloo or adobe building today, the land is cheap as are the materials. No one is interested in doing this exactly because the conditions would be considered economic destitution.

carapace 4y ago
> This is a noble savage error. You said that last time ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224977 ) I promise I'm not fantasizing about magic elves. :) However, it's clear that Native American lifestyles were preferable to European-American lifestyles. Graeber and Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything" quote at length a letter from Ben Franklin on the subject: > When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness. Anyway... > Shelter was still a valued commodity and not guaranteed human right. Tribes fought over land, and dwellings required labor. Sure, but there weren't homeless people. I mean a fire, flood, or enemy attack might leave people destitute, but there wasn't a perpetual destitute class, eh? Dwellings didn't require a lot of labor. > They often had many people to a dwelling because of this specifically. Are you sure? I am not an anthropologist (nor a Native American for that matter) but my impression is that that would have had more to do with family structure? - - - - Really the point I'm making isn't specific to the New World, it was common all over the world for people to build their own houses. In economic terms it wasn't very expensive to build a new dwelling. > If you wanted to build an igloo or adobe building today, the land is cheap as are the materials. No one is interested in doing this exactly because the conditions would be considered economic destitution. A lot of places won't let you build and live in an igloo or adobe building today. But I'm not really advocating that. There are modern low-embodied-energy and high efficacy home designs (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship ) that would be much more comfortable for the modern sensibilities. Imagine if a modern home could be had for $10k instead of $100K ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house )?