How to Help Fix Housing in America

 No offense, but if you're one of the Brightest Minds, with an Ivy League degree and thinktank financing, and you've ... "dedicated your life" to housing issues and helping build affordable places for people to live, the newcomers being admitted daily especially?

You're not doing a good job.  Finally, it looks like, the East Coast and news media are recognizing we have a national problem.  Because they are "built up" and there's no places for people without established family ties, or tens of thousands for "down payments", you're at the mercy of the market.

The free market, except... some people our East have "fixed" rates.  They locked in years ago, below market rate.  Think they care much what current rental stock is priced at?

The fellas feeding their families, and making millions pushing their policies?  The don't much care if we throw up substandard cheap homes.  Being in off the streets in some type of shelter, they think, is better than being unhoused.  Damn the building regulations, throw up some shit!

No.  Stick with making safe homes, for when the weather disasters come.  If we build it, and it won't shelter people when the storms hit, we really have just pushed our problems down river.  We've built up our banks, and the mess will move on to others who haven't properly "prepared".

People have to live in safe homes.  Maybe the answer is:  instead of admitting newcomers, both rich and poor, to compete with Americans for same home at "market rate" earned by worker dollars only (not their parental inheritances, not investment venture capital, not for their overpaid "journolism"/entertainment or public policy expertise salaries.

If we stopped admitting so many alleged refugees and those fleeing poverty in their native lands without saving up and educating themselves at how to legally become American citizen-workers, we would let our own citizen-workers compete more fairly in capitalism, keeping and saving some of what they earn.

Instead, anything the honest worker-citizens make goes right back out the door for non-subsidized food and shelter and childcare.  Those go at market rates, gasoline to fuel you vehicle taking you to work too, and money to maintain it to keep it running for a long time.

The "experts" don't ever cook that into their models. The rapid price increases when more and  more warm bodies are competing for spaces.  Instead, we hear about the "jackpot winners", those the elite pluck from the depths of the capitalist system, call them a genius or some such, hand them a big payoff and...

Nothing much changes that way really.

If we had housing activists who bundled up their children, and sheltered them in a government-run Newcomer Housing Village, bunking their own children in beds alongside the newcomer children, women and working-age men being welcomed under the Democratic (now slowly evolving... give them that!)  -- then I suspect we might see concern for proper building regulations, more union tradesman being asked the best way to throw up shelters under current zoning laws...

It's a national problem.  It has been for decades.  People are here now, the US Congress pretty much has failed us with all the ongoing wars and refugees we are helping to create daily.  Now comes the Great ReBuild.   The wealthy are not going to take newcomers in their backyard;  they've bought into the system and prepared a place to live out their lives safely in comfort.  They've earned their keep.

The government workers, and investors who are creating the changes in society will have to own the Changes their work has produced.  The grafting of the "experts" who cannot lead and whose ideas are untested will stand in practical times.  Best get them out their in the fields, with their families, learning more about the importance of the work left undone...

It's not just entertainment America needs now.  Put on your work boots -- not the rubber-soled soft shoes of comfort that look like they've never touched the earth and seen life outside a corporate office -- and keep your toes protected.  We've got work to do and the workers are gonna need safe places to rest their heads too.  #Monday