new homes building ramble

//Content warning: rambling leftist housing politics// This blog is going to be an effort to get away from big platform social media for me. There are several reasons for this: I like to be able to write a few pages at a time and expand on thoughts when I'm sharing and insta is not at all conducive to this, fb is worthless on all fronts, generally insta also just makes me and plenty of people I know just feel bad about themselves half the time. Constantly comparing yourself to the cherry picked, idealized versions of other people's experiences is never going to end well and it just deepens the hold that Capitalism has on us by encouraging everyone to consider each experience they have as a commodity to be sold. And finally, every image shared on any of these platforms immediately leaves your hands and becomes property of the corporation operating the service. These images are used to gather data about you and your life, to sell information about you and people like you to advertisers and 'other interested parties', to predict and to actively shape your behavior and also pretty plainly to manipulate markets of all kinds through proprietary consumer information. No person can avoid trafficking with amazon services or google at this point, and simply stepping back by one degree does almost nothing to lessen their stranglehold on communications, but trying to have some consistency of morality in deed is always important and raising the issue of surveillance capitalism higher in the awareness of anyone that might read this is important too. My whole life style for the past few years has revolved around building a house with / for my partner (@crowwytch) and I, which has led to me shifting from welding into carpentry as a full-on career and moving into the fast-paced, sharky and cynical 'construction scene' in Southern Maine. Some of the first fallout of the 2020 pandemic was the gross speculation in the housing market and building materials market that has enormously inflated prices on complete homes, lumber and other materials as well as caused most builders to be booked out 2-3 years into the future. Aside from cementing the domination of a rentier class of property owners over young people seeking to build wealth by buying a home, it has also made building a home harder and harder as costs are driven up and wages remain the same when checked against global inflation. As has been revealed in the past few months, zillow the online realty corp played a huge role in driving up the valuation of houses through algorithmic buying operations. The enormous tax bailouts that were a feature of 2020 have saturated corporate holdings (which were already awash with money) with an ocean of liquid assets (cash or bonds) that needs to be invested into something, or else penalized through taxation later. This situation leads to many bizarre investments in useless and scammy tech start-ups that offer nothing of value to society, but also massive real estate buy-ups. Corporations like zillow, invitation homes, maa, morgan properties, starwood and a host of others have strong incentives to buy up properties at above asking price and sit on them, buy land and have entire neighborhoods of rental properties built or tear down apartment buildings and replace them with "luxury" condos. All of these things are predictable actions that follow the logic of Captialism, but this fucks lower income people who want to own their own home and there isn't much hope in new home construction either. The average price of a new construction home in the US right now is $443,000 and with the general backlog of work for excavators / well drillers and the supply short (real or manufactured) on lumber, it is also predictable that builders are going to focus on building high-end, high value properties to maximize returns on the few homes they are able to build per year. There is no longer any political economy around making multi-unit housing financially enticing to construct or even around providing public transit that would make living further from cities in more economical zip codes a more viable option for working class people. It is lame and unfortunate, but there is no actual Left in American politics at all and therefore no public advocate for affordable housing. I feel really lucky we were able to find the land we did when we did, even doing all of the work ourselves and paying out of pocket for 80% of the costs (we had to take on about $25000 in loans / credit for material so far), it still comes in around $100 per square foot for the house. This is far below the average of paying someone else to do it of course, but it has taken us 31 months of on and off work spread over 3.5 years to get where we are and we still have probably 12 months of work to go until it is what most would consider complete, all while both working full time jobs for the most part (with a few breaks here and there to push construction through critical phases). The entire rentier economy is really repulsive to me from the vantage point of having built a home. What makes a city excellent, interesting, creative and beneficial for society is making a community where many creative people can affordably live in close proximity and freely associate in public venues. Affordability is key to this because even the most driven creative person will have nothing to offer and no time to create if they have to work two jobs to pay rent. Landlords in general do nothing but collect other peoples money and keep a keen eye on when public perception starts to consider the neighborhood their buildings are in to be desirable, at which point they will either raise rents, evict tenants to look for more affluent ones, sell the building to a developer, or any combination of those actions. Building maintenance, at least in almost any city I have visited in the US, is usually a last resort. In asserting the right to collect rents in exchange for virtually nothing, landlords repay this by destroying communities at the first possible opportunity. It is the logic of capitalism to commodify everything, to tend towards a monopoly of control and to decrease services over time. Anyways, this has been very rambling and probably boring to read, so here are some pictures of the house I have been helping to build. It's for some part of the Sprague family (wealthy oil tank farm company owners) in Cape Elizabeth, ME. They paid an architect some tens of thousands of dollars to design the house, which is always fun but kind of pointless. His plans seem lacking in quite a lot of detail, but you pay for the name and that's what it is really all about when you have too much money. I think the final value of this monstrosity will be around $1.5 million, not counting the land (which I am sure would be exorbitantly expensive if sold outside the family). Also this house which is around 3000 sq. ft. plus maybe 1700 sq. ft. barn / garage we have yet to start is for a single couple with one baby on the way. So you know, right sized :)