It's difficult to be optimistic about housing when you hear and read everything that's going on in both the rental and ownership of housing. Housing prices and rents have gone into the stratosphere, gobbling up an ever-growing percentage of net income. The sheer amount of information available on Twitter alone, as an example, is both shocking and discouraging. Building code, zoning and land use policies; complex financing/mortgage schemes; money laundering into real estate; political donations by landlords & developers; inequitable taxation in favour of the wealthy...it’s a corrupt mess on a global scale. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, Ms Leilani Farha, is a global expert on housing who has been ringing the alarm on this chaos in her reports to the Human Rights Council and in an excellent documentary currently circulating in film festivals (http://pushthefilm.com/). People of all walks of life are struggling to find or keep adequate housing and it's getting worse by the month as prices continue to soar unabated.
It wasn't long ago that the dream of many people was to land a full-time job, have a family and own a home. All of this has changed: full-time permanent positions (benefits and pensions too) disappear regularly at the sake of profits, marriages are failing at alarming levels or not happening at all, those who have children can barely afford to provide for their needs (often basic needs) in far too many cases. And owning a home is becoming a fiction, as is finding rents that aren't going to rob you of what little you have left after the various taxes and user fees (that we've all seen creep upwards and well above salary increases).
But back to housing. I said the following in an email this morning "Housing has turned into this corrupt insanity only serving the healthy and wealthy." Look through some of my Twitter activity and you'll get that message loud and clear. There's already lots of media attention about the global affordability crisis and the efforts of various governments to combat it, unsuccessfully, because we're dealing with TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS in the largest business in the world, housing. Pension funds, real estate investment trusts, big banks and organized crime, the wealth by these key players in housing is insurmountable. As is the political will by some elected officials who justify political donations from some of those sources of wealth.
Look around at prices and what's being built these days: aesthetically pleasing homes that far too often have building code violations or other unacceptable issues, at a time when prices are far out of reach to working-class and middle-class households. Even dual-income households find themselves unable to qualify for a mortgage or struggling to pay rent after all other deductions are accounted for.
My concern has always been with architectural barriers that are perpetuated in building code at a time when the world is aging/ageing and persons with activity limitations (and various disabilities) are on the rise. Again, we're putting out new inventory that applies to a shrinking percentage of buyers. If you aren't wealthy and healthy, then you're on your own with what's left out there. Or homelessness that's reached alarming levels everywhere.
The solution? The exact opposite of what's been happening in the last thirty or forty years. Some countries are far better off with their inventory of affordable and accessible housing, perhaps it's time to learn from their strategies. The elephant in the room are the lawyers, bankers and accountants (our white collar criminals) who have played a key role in creating the climate that we're currently facing and the utter lack of ethics and common decency involved, all based on corporate or selfish greed. Of course I'm a bleeding heart socialist, I've made my living assisting adults with disabilities for more than two decades and have seen first hand their struggles with affordability and accessibility but they're far from the only ones. Documentaries like Push are exposing this nightmare to the masses and fuelling a revolution in housing that's already begun.
We're heading into interesting times, I'm very curious to see what the next 24 months bring to the surface in this corrupt insanity that we call housing.
