Yes--driving down the cost of housing is one of the things I think about the most. It seems so critical to the whole equation.
In the UK women going to work saw banks change their lending criteria from:
* 3 times primary income
to:
* 3 (or 4) times household income
voila prices double, the rentiers get more interest and the govt sees more money printed via mortgage lending and call it "growth". Meanwhile the man on the street hands over all his labour to the money creation monopolists.
I wouldn't say want to live as much as have to live. I live in London, but trust me I do not want to live there, I have to.
This is theoretically the one of the easiest big problems to solve - just stop preventing developers from building new housings and they will gladly build as much if not. Ore than we need.
Unfortunately in practice it would take something like a revolution. Are there any examples of this happening? I only know of examples where we make the problem worse and worse.
It's kind of a modern take on boarding houses. Actually, I think that the optimal situation is much closer to a boarding house.
Take 10-15 units, remove the kitchen and laundry entirely. Use the savings to pay a full time cook and laundry staff (2-3 people) to cook at-cost meals and do laundry.
In many apartment buildings in southeast asia (especially those that cater to foreigners/wealthy immigrants) there'll frequently be a shop and a small restaurant at the first level that mostly caters to the people who live in the building. No reason we couldn't have something like that here, though admittedly the cost of running both those types of services are probably pretty high given regulations. Expect a lot of politicking at the condo boards though.
The math may well work out differently for a family of four.
Tax land. Tax capital gains on land. Untax labour.
On-site construction consists of a concrete foundation pad, steel racks, and an outer weather shell appropriate for the region. Utility hookups are provided for each berth.
When a new housing unit is needed, it arrives in an intermodal shipping container, rolls into an open berth in the rack, is anchored in place, and the utilities are connected. If anyone needs more space, the internal doors and modules can be reconfigured to join multiple units internally.
Current manufactured housing in the US is premised upon hauling the pieces to the site by truck. If housing could also be moved by container ship and stacktrain, it is more easily importable and exportable.
A size standard for home modules opens up a huge aftermarket. Don't like the factory-installed kitchenette or don't cook? Swap it out for an exercise room or workbench or hydroponics garden or nursery or whatever else you may want in its place. It fits. The utility connectors are in the same place.
The number of berths in a rack and the size of the outer weather shell can be different for different housing markets. One near a city might have multiple levels, cramming dozens of units into a single shell with a fashionable brick facade. One far out in the country could have space for as little as just one unit--and it might not even be filled all the time--but it might also have a tornado-resistant outer concrete shell.
If you change jobs, rather than pack up your possessions, you could just secure all your loose items inside and ship your owned housing units to an empty berth in a new rack, across town or in a different city.
The major problem is lack of elbow room. You just can't cram very much living space inside a shipping container, so even if you connect many units, your home still consists of a maze of doors joining a bunch of 48 sq.ft. rooms.
A home that can be moved post-construction can also enable arrangements where the home itself is owned, but the installation site is rented, which can make housing more affordable in places where property area is very expensive.
We also have a problem in the US where all the good quality and low cost lumber has already been harvested. The 2x4 studs typical of stick-built construction are now cut from fast-growing trees of relatively small diameter, such that you can see the curvature in the grain at the end of the stud, the grain is mostly parallel to the longer dimension, it's full of knots, and it changes shape whenever the humidity level changes. You just can't squeeze a good 2x4 out of an 8" diameter log, no matter how you try to cut it.
And yet the overwhelming majority of new single-family homes are still built with wooden 2x4 studs. This is one reason why doors start sticking in their frames after only a few years since a new house was built.
A lot of this is driven by local building codes that will not adapt to newer building methods. There are better, more cost-efficient ways to build houses, and people are literally forbidden from using them. Manufactured homes are instead ruled by the HUD building codes and inspectors, so building something off-site and trucking it in may be the only way to get a home with a particular construction method in a given place.
From the outside, it would look like an ordinary apartment building, which seems more palatable to most folks than a row of slightly angled transportable manufactured homes.
First I would say It is not only "critical", I argue it "IS" the problem of basic income.
For those who has been crying out about property pricing in your area, you should take a look in Hong Kong. The most ridiculously expensive location on earth.
http://www.scmp.com/property/article/1905261/hong-kong-most-...
A lot of people here are going on about Health Care, and Education System. But to me, those are different part of the equation. Do you ever see poor people buy insurance for health care or get a book to read to "enrich" themselves? Poor People only cares about a few things, whether they have enough money left this month, How long will these savings last them to pay for food and rent.
There are 3 things that is what I think should be needs of basic income, Clothes, Food, Housing.
Clothes are commodities these days, you can get all the clothes you need for a tiny amount of money. As long as you dont care about fashion. What needs to be done here is clothing for extreme weather, namely Cold weather.
Food, at one point in my life i spend average less then $2 USD per day on food. For nearly 12 months. People here claiming their Basic Income should cover their meal for McDonald or other outgoing dinning. ( May be in US only ) But that is not the point, real poor would care about savings. You can buy your food in bulk for extremely cheap prices, pasta or spaghetti, then get some Hams or Vegetable. As long as you go to supermarket and watch your pennies, there is no reason why you cant feed yourself for less then a Fiver a day. You just have to cook it yourself. Nutrients being another problem on $2, you should get by ok with $5.
Even without such thing as basic income, it is not hard to see as long as you get a Job today, as a hard working labor intensive job or part time, you can can enough for clothes and food and not worry about starving to deaths.
The problem then, lies down to Housing. Renting leaves you with the feeling you may get kicked out any day, and you will spend hopeless amount of hours trying to find a place that fits your budget. I suggest anyone who has never been through living on the streets to watch the "Pursuit of Happiness" by Will Smith. Although most people would had an different ending then the movie. Rent also cost you the largest percentage amount of your income. Where you can save a lot on Clothing and Food, there is no such thing as saving on Rent. Food and Clothes as commodities, it happens the most expensive out of the three is not a commodities but instead an Monopoly.
For Example what is the point of having $1000 basic income when $800 of it goes to Rent? And rental prices is being driven up by lots of factors.
Therefore as long as Housing market remains an investment asset, susceptible of being driven up by insane amount. ( Think about Rent in 2008 and now ), it will remain an unsolvable problem no matter how you price the Basic Income. Germany and some other European countries has rule to protect tenants from rent price hike. Some even take % of Housing Market profit as tax on top of the tax in place.
Government needs to provide basic housing, small even 15-20 meter square will do, with basic such as hot water, electricity and Internet ( Soon to be a basic need ), at rate that relate to their basic income percentage. And a promise they wont be kicked out unless they do things silly.
And if all these are too government related, we need technology to built public housing cheaply, and efficiently in short space of time. And open up the cost structure to let people know they are not being ripped off. Property market is an monopoly that derails much of our society.