Sure you can. It requires a responsible government to align incentives. There is no axiomatic problem for building enough housing. The problem is the housing-as-investment paradigm, which only works if there is a perpetual housing shortage to drive prices well above values. Housing-as-investment creates a vicious cycle of shortage and incentivized harms to society in the interest of driving prices of housing up via a lack of desirable options.
To have a decent society for our children in a growing country, housing cannot be an investment. The value of a house must generally track downward with the depreciation of its structure. You need to separate the cost of housing from the cost of land, and in cities at least, tax land in accordance with its utility, encouraging vertical development in high population density areas.
The key to this working efficiently is responsible planning and zoning. Single family dwellings / 1-2 story housing is not likely to be viable adjacent to growing urban areas. Zoning should reflect this. This disincentives building single family homes in these areas, since taxation will be based on the fact that the lot could house a.32 unit condo, minimum lot sizes also reflect that planning, so property taxes would become quickly onerous for a single family home. If you want to live in a city, you should be amenable to living in a higher population density dwelling. I would imagine that for people that like their location, development deals that include a ground floor or penthouse apartment in exchange for part of the land value to a developer would become part of the norm. That way you can step out of the way, live somewhere else for 6 months and come home to your new flat. OTOH if you are just rich and stubborn, you can just pay the taxes.. but that will curtail the value of the home to a reasonable level. The current system rewards instead of penalizes homeowners for standing in the way of progress. At least tax revenues can be useful to the community.
Yeah dude you completely missed what I said I guess - I said you can’t build with wreckless abandon which means with “responsible government” as you put it
This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time.
Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege.
Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk.
My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap.
They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since.
Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house.
By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons.
But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine.
You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month.
You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do.
Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe.
Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do.
I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand.
Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.
As far as upkeep, most of these lots are already in unimproved land, where everything around is also unimproved. Road access is usually at least there. So, no mandatory upkeep except looking at satellite photos once every couple of months. Some places have tax, I think an average would be maybe $50 a year, if any?
I don't know about little, but I regularly see plots of land (sometimes developed) in remote areas on Facebook Marketplace for really good prices. Or at least prices that seem compelling to me.
How does this land help you? What do you do with it? I'm totally lost on how a half acre in the middle of Montana does anything for you, if you already have somewhere to live. Do you just enjoy camping or something?
Well, I did mention that I’m drunk at 3 am, buying land on eBay, right?
A few places I really like and have given to my kids or other family members for a second home spot or recreational getaway.
Two are located in places that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to live in full time, I let the neighbors “rent” them (for a a few pesos a year) to use for farming or whatever. One never knows how the world will shape up, maybe they come in handy. If not, maybe a grandkid can use it.
Others I have undoubtedly forgotten about and have been confiscated for taxes, I suppose.
The value I have seen generated for others by my reckless dalliances are more than worth the cost. I mean, one of the best ones only cost $300.
I could easily spend that on a night out, and no way that is going to fundamentally improve anyone’s life. It’s like gambling for the chance to make someone’s life better.
I have also been known to midnight purchase sailboats in places I want to visit. Sometimes you can get great deals on boats that the owners have left behind. Usually I’ll go there and tinker for a few weeks, enjoying myself and sailor culture, take it out sailing until I want to go home, then sell it for (usually) much more than I paid and I get a free vacation.
A few years ago I bought a 32’ roberts (comfortable, but a bit of a pig in chop) near San Fransisco. She was $900 with a great slip and a flaky outboard. I spent a week getting her in shape, 500 dollars on a one-season racing sail and another 300 getting it recut, bought a few sandbags because she seemed a bit tender with the heavy pilot house, and sailed around the canals for a few days, then spent a week cruising the bay. After that, I spent a few days at the municipal dock, 100 feet from million dollar condos in a fantastic part of town.
Great times and great street culture back then. I hear it has kinda gone downhill?
Anyway, I used it for a “vacation home” for a few years and sold her at a fair but beneficial price.
I’m a little more settled down now, raising a new batch of kids…but if there’s a secret to life, it’s to own land outright, and avoid debt at all cost. Buy it when you’ve earned it. Until then, buy what you can afford to own, where you can afford to live. The compromises you have to make will pay excellent dividends. /grandpa rant
Also ymmv. My advice kinda assumes you aren’t trying to fit into some kind of pre-prepared slot. If you aren’t wanting to take full responsibility for yourself and your life, and the resultant outcome, my advice is probably bad.
Half application of good advice is usually worse than no advice at all. I should mention that I’m basically hardcore unemployable because of my attitudes in life, and for the short periods of time that I have been an employee, I have been a poor one.
If you aren’t looking for the path of high resistance, you should probably write me off as a crackpot geezer.
He's using the ultimate geriatric investment strategy: Simply being in the way of people and obstructing them, by the virtue of being born earlier. Genius.
Ah yes, the reason that life is a struggle is that there are other people that got here before you lol. Funny thing, there were also people that got here before me, so I’m having a tough time with your logic.
It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago!
So tell me, wise one, at what age do you plan to euthanize yourself? You do know that Logan’s run was a cautionary tale, right?
Every generation builds on the scraps of the last one.
That said, uselessly being in the way is irresponsible. I do try, not always successfully, to make sure my actions are useful to people. I am pretty sure my land hobby has opened more doors for people than it has closed.
Maybe it is irresponsible to keep a boat on a slip to not be used 99 percent of the time, I’ll give you that. That’s one reason I am no longer owned by a boat.
My current hobby farm project has created 9 new homeowners and is a source of economic support and food security in the community.
Maybe stop looking to others to explain why things aren’t easy.
I love to see deserving people prosper. By deserving, I mean simply people that also love to see people prosper. That’s how we build a world. People that think that the problem with the world is that there are people in it are the actual problem.
> It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago!
Much more recently than this I would say, when abandoned land was given away for free by the government to anybody who wanted it. Almost everywhere in the world, less than a hundred years ago.
Land was not always owned by somebody. I was born in a place which is very sparsely populated. Uninhabited or unused land was considered to not be owned by anybody, until a rotten generation arrived in the 50s-60s and decided that every remote piece of land had to be owned by somebody. Then there was a scramble of which families could lie the most and bribe the most to "prove" that the land was theirs. Now young people cannot live there anymore because they cannot afford to pay 200 years of their wages to have a scrap of land. They either have to be born into the landed gentry or they have to move the fuck out from where their ancestors have lived thousands of years.
> That said, uselessly being in the way is irresponsible.
But that's exactly what you're doing with abandoned land "investment", if I haven't misunderstood? When somebody actually needs that land, you are there to say "uh-uh, pay the toll first". What other reason would there be to purchase land to leave it abandoned? I have nothing to say against productive investment.
> My current hobby farm project has created 9 new homeowners and is a source of economic support and food security in the community.
That sounds like productive investment.
You buying plots of land out in the sticks is probably not the reason for my problems or for the problems of anybody else, but buying land where people need to live and then just sitting on it for a cash out is one of the most common geriatric investment strategies and has had enormously damaging effects for humanity.
Yeah, it’s not an investment strategy for me. I give them away to people I think can use them or,rarely, leave them in the use of neighbors for some unlikely future use. I generally don’t ever sell land. Except in rare cases, to buy more land.
I had to build my own shelter security and ensure my own food security as of 16, but yes, i did have that advantage growing up, and as I saw it essential to have and possible to create myself, I did so.
Those things are achievable IF you are willing to give up luxuries that you may see as essential. (the kind of job you want, comfort, etc). But if you are willing to forgo those things for a few years , you can build a resource base so that you will never have to be worried about those things ever again in your life. You will always have a fallback.
The main thing you get from having a "place", even if you don't live there, but a place... is the ability to tolerate risk. Without risk tolerance, there are very few ways forward where you do not exist at the charity of someone or something you cannot control - a life where inherently you are forced to work for priorities that are not your own, and be placated by trappings of wealth that you do not really have.
I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that" and had to slowly break out of it as much as I could. Just knowing that there's people like you out there makes me happy. I applaud your freedom.
> I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that"
No matter how wealthy or poor your Western European upbringing may have been, being saddled with that worldview is, IMHO, the worst kind of disadvantage someone in otherwise fairly good circumstances can have because it's baked into your skull and how you see everything. I hope you've been able to overcome it.
Just check eBay. If you want it to turn out good, it’s best to go and see. If we’re talking about $1200 parcels, it costs more to vet than to buy. Just look it over and judge the best you can on the information you can gather, and accept the 30 percent risk that it won’t be what you expected in some way or another. Or, go there. Not worth paying a title agency or any of that crap. Be sure of any tax burden (easily researched) and what the annual taxes, if any , will be.
Do you have more advice for finding land to buy other than using ebay?
I've been looking for a while for a few acres of unimproved/secluded/wooded land within an hour or two drive away from me here in Kansas, mostly just for bushcrafting or tooling around. The only place I really know to check is Zillow, and while there are a few listings in my distance range, they're typically upwards of $10k/acre. I just checked ebay and saw parcels priced much closer to what I'd expect for unimproved land out in the middle of nowhere, but I couldn't find any in my middle of nowhere, just several states away.
I'm pretty sure there's tons of completely unused land all over the place here that people would be willing to get rid of for cheap, but I have no idea how to find those people. I've considered just going to every small town within an hour of me and posting a "will buy" ad on whatever bulletin boards I'm allowed to post stuff on, but for now I'm still holding out hope that there's a better way. Tips?
Well, the trick to finding it cheap is to not look for anything/anywhere specific, so I doubt I can help with that. It’s not that I am good at it, it’s that when I’m momentarily bored, I’m not in a picky mood. If it’s cheap and I can imagine a life there, no matter how humble, and it makes me smile, then my wife is probably going to be asking me questions I don’t have good answers for and I’m going to have to work on a reasonable explanation that doesn’t sound like I’ve finally gone off the deep end.
It’s pretty much all eBay for me or local equivalents in other countries. So many rabbit holes.
An absurd amount of land is held by people that don't even know it. They aren't looking to sell generally. Lots of inherited and placed in trusts over generations.
Use q public, or whatever is in your area and search for land recently acquired by an estate. Pretty much that means the owner died, there was no clear line of inheritance do typically a distant relative or random person is selling the estate. Try to buy it.
The other is legal notices and government bid sites. You can buy tax owed land, laws vary by state.
It beats playing the lottery. And it makes a fun excuse to go places. Low expectations are your friend, that way you get pleasant surprises instead of disappointment.
All part of my strategy of success through lowered expectations. Im finding that this decade has made me an accidental optimist lol, but these days I can pontificate well insulated from the outcome.
You could run a 3B model on 200 dollars worth of hardware and it would do just fine, 100 percent of the time, most of the time. I could definitely see someone talking it out of a free coke now and then though.
With vending machines costing 2-5k, it’s not out of the question, but it’s hard to imagine the business case for it. Maybe the tantalizing possibility of getting a free soda would attract traffic and result in additional sales from frustrated grifters? Idk.
I’ll second this. I often use a “research assistant “ and skeptical“department head” personas working together/against each other as a research team. It works well and is occasionally hilarious, replete with the occasional HR complaint when things go off the rails. ( I typically use local uncensored models)
For those rare companies that are trying to create a market out of nothing for a truly innovative product where there are no competitors or self identified customers, I can sympathize with the hollow allure of firehose marketing - but not only is this kind of startup vanishingly rare (and extremely risky), it’s also the wrong approach even for them.
If you are trying to build stairs into thin air, you need to have a constantly evolving “customer hypothesis” until you can nail down who your customer is. The only way to do that is with founder-led personal marketing, preferably F2F and on-premises. You must meet your customers at the place and time of need. If you are truly solving an unsolved problem, literally no one will know how to solve that problem with your product except you, or maybe even why the problem needs to be solved.
This is more market research than business development.
Depending on your market, moat, and vertical alignment with your customers, it -may- also be important to build brand awareness or “buzz” aside from customer contact, and this often will be non-personalized. For this, as well, firehose approaches like email are ineffective or even counterproductive. Keep in mind, this is marketing adjacent PR, not marketing. Don’t get carried away.
If you just need validation to feel “real”, stick to cheap office swag. It makes great memorabilia for the inevitable swag graveyard that successful founders usually create on their way to becoming successful founders. It also helps to combat hubris if you keep the graveyard on subtle display in your office.
I can only imagine the difficulties facing technicians and engineers black starting a nation-scale grid.
I operate a microgrid facility in Hispaniola and have wonderfully cooperative users backed by a separately powered communications and control system. Even for us, a facility serving a small neighborhood and farm, a black start must be performed as a careful choreography of systems and loads…and we can just pick up a radio and tell people to turn the main breaker of their house on or off, and to leave their AC units off until we finish bringing everything up. In 12 years we’ve only had to do it twice, but even for us it’s a tedious process.
Honestly, I suspect a true blackstart would fail, too many desperate people trying to survive, keeping the people who need to get places from getting to those places. We already see the roads fail when people are fleeing wildfires.
To have a decent society for our children in a growing country, housing cannot be an investment. The value of a house must generally track downward with the depreciation of its structure. You need to separate the cost of housing from the cost of land, and in cities at least, tax land in accordance with its utility, encouraging vertical development in high population density areas.
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