This was originally published by me on Medium in September 2018.
A Fiscally-Responsible, Environmentally-Friendly Solution for Affordable Housing and Housing the Homeless
Subsidies make things more expensive.
Instead of subsidizing housing, costing us tens of billions per year, let’s just give everyone a home.
That’s right — give every single person receiving housing assistance a home. Taxpayer funded.
Sounds completely crazy, right?
It’s not. Let’s build them plastic houses.
It will take 5 days and cost about $7,000 per home. The process would recycle millions of tons of plastic, which need to be removed from our oceans and landfills.
HUD will spend $55 billion in 2018. That would pay for 7,857,142 homes.
There are about 5,000,000 people receiving rent subsidies. There are approximately 553,742 homeless people in the US.
We could fund another 2.3 million homes in a single year.
Giving those people a home relieves them of the monthly expense of rent, which puts hundreds of dollars back in their pockets every month.
Once the houses are built, we could stop spending $55B of taxpayer money each year and shutter HUD.
This would also make available many residences in prime city areas. When supply increases, prices decrease. Economics 101.
The vacancy of about 5M apartments and homes would flood the market with lower-priced housing options, decreasing rents across the area as places compete for tenants.
This is a huge win for the vast majority of Americans. Let’s make it happen.