I wonder how much higher it would be if medical costs were taken out. Housing is the biggest problem for my generation, but it gets almost no traction nor solution.
Housing is largely a problem to do with interest rates and mortgages inflating the land. The actual construction materials themselves (at least here in Canada) aren't too bad.
I keep wondering why someone doesn't kickstarter a town. It has all the right incentives. Make guidelines that enforce density in the core and do common sense things from day 1, like wire fibre to every domicile.
Because a collection of homes and buildings isn't a town. You need the buildings to be occupied by employers offering jobs and relevant services and you need the people in the homes to have those jobs. That's not something you can kickstarter.
I think it could be done, but you would need to have a lot of pieces come together the right way.
For instance: having a partnership with a University and/or several employers that want to setup a new campus, a large enough number of people willing to move, adequate funding to buy several square miles of wilderness and install some initial roads and infrastructure, a favorable local government that's on-board with the plan and doesn't want to throw up administrative roadblocks, a neighboring pre-existing community that can help bootstrap the infrastructure that doesn't mind another town moving in next door, and someone willing to run the whole thing as a non-profit rather than a money-making endeavor.
The upside if it attains critical mass is that the profit on the sale of buildable lots could finance a lot of the necessary infrastructure.
More than 50% of companies have positions that could telecommute and 24%+ of people telecommute fully or partly now.[2]
People do want to live in large cities because of all the cool shit there to do, and that convenience costs money.
You can afford a two-bedroom house in the south-eastern part of the US on $15/hour, which wouldn't even cover the costs of being homeless in SF or NYC.
I understand people want convenience and people want to be close to friends and family, but many of them (not all) could easily solve this problem by simply moving. People seem to think they are "owed" affordable housing regardless of where that housing is -- which is absurd!
So, in order for that 24 percent to be free to move where they please, that needs to be a figure where they can telecommute full time or where going to the office occasionally from farther away costs less than the amount saved by moving farther away. On top of that, all other household members would need to be equally portable, such as a working spouse or children attending school.
I got myself off the street in part by developing portable earned income and moving someplace cheap. It is something I am willing to recommend as a method. But my entire household was free to move. That isn't always the case.
That's not really the way to build TechTopia (or if thinking of fantastic (and sometimes silly) videogames, New Tesla City).
Mostly because all the places with good water / land areas have already been selected and are occupied by existing cities.
Logically the thing is to kickstarter/etc buying out some /tiny village/ that has good natural resources in the area and doing something more useful with the area. I also wouldn't mind if there were a modern (Gen IV) nuclear plant there with open-published safety monitoring / procedures. (Only shipments of the stuff to/from the site should be security concerns, and I'd appreciate a military escort for them anyway.)
> Housing is largely a problem to do with interest rates and mortgages inflating the land.
Interest rates and debt impact the value of a property, but do not impact the willingness to pay (i.e. the rental market). If rates were 10%, people would still be willing to pay $3k/month for a 1 bed in san francisco. The only difference is that buyers would have to adjust their offering prices due to the additional interest expense.
Please feel free to look up my bio in my profile. Then go play around with a basic mortgage calculator online. You will find that as you extend the length of the mortgage, the payments will approach the interest only payment level.
Also, in the late 80s, early 90s, interest rates were 15%. 10% is just slightly above historic norms.
It is 100% possible to reimburse a mortgage at 10%. Millions of people have done it.
Any basic mortgage calculator would show you that the mortgage is not viable, the interest would accrue faster than it can be paid back. The duration or the rate must go down.
In the 80s, the interest rate was higher and the duration was lower. People didn't make a 30 or 40 years mortgage to buy a flat.
It's a single equation with 3 variables. The monthly payment, the rate and the duration.
The payment is about 50% of the typical salary in the area. The rate is set by the economy. The duration is determined by the two other variables, it's not adjustable on its own.
If you raise rate, and assume pmt, fv constant you must increase n or decrease pv. My original point was that pv (loan value must come down) secondarily, n increases.
Pretty huge developments happen all the time. People generally want there to be jobs though, which I think is the bigger problem if you tried to do it in an undeveloped region.
