housing market
Over the weekend I helped two families move into new apartments. It was a great joy to see how excited they where and it has made me reflect on the difficulty a lot of us in the neighborhood are having finding good rentals, affordable homes, or keeping our mortgages affordable. The two years we have lived here the biggest problem that we keep running into is affordable housing.
Often rental property that is affordable is run by slumlords. and these slumlords are allowed to continue to operate and even buy more properties.
My experience of seeing people lose their homes, others being homeless because they cannot afford a home, has led me to ask some challenges questions to the current system that we have.
Why do some own so many houses while others cannot even own one?
Is it just to make as much money as you can off a house?
Should housing be basic right, where all are able to have access to?
When selling a home what is best for the neighborhood?
I don’t have many answers and I don’t know what all the solutions are but I am convinced that the current free market system that we have is making it way too easy for some to make a lot of money off housing while at the same time exclude others from even having a place to live.
It simply is not right for housing to be the major way that people create revenue in our system. We need to have a shift in our thinking form housing being a moneymaker to housing being a right. If we keep seeing housing as simply a way to make money, we are going to continue to propitiate an unjust system.
The money in housing has to be done away and until we do there are going to continue to be neighborhoods, families, and individuals that struggle to make sense out of this system.
I heard of a house today that is being sold for $250,000 and the questions that I have are:
what did that seller buys the house for?
How much equity will they leave the house with?
Is it just to make that much money off a house?
Will the seller even ask any of these questions?
