New Tiny House Neighborhood Will Allow Homeless to Rent to Own

For a reality check on just how expensive the average American home has become, even with the 2006 orchestrated mortgage crash, and subsequent housing price dump, you don’t have to look far. Home sizes and prices have become unattainable for a massive number of people, contributing greatly to the problem of homelessness. Enter – a tiny house neighborhood in Detroit that will allow the homeless to rent to own.

Detroit tiny house neighborhood will allow the homeless and low income to rent to own.

There are two superficial reasons why housing prices are not affordable for the average American. These, of course, do not factor in the Federal Reserve fractional banking system, and the entire mess that the financial institutions run by families like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers have created. Ron Paul has detailed these problems more fully in his discussion of the ‘money multiplier myth.’

The first problem is that some coastal metropolitan areas in the U.S. are generating good jobs but aren’t building enough housing to keep up with employment growth. The main barrier to housing construction in these places is local regulation — zoning ordinances, environmental requirements, even affordable-housing rules.

The second problem is that housing is just plain too expensive. Millions of Americans can’t even afford the cheapest of housing.

As Jason DeParle in the New York Review of Books writes,

“The big problem is that it costs more to build even modest housing than millions of households can pay, whether the builder is greedy or not. That’s partly because restrictive zoning and overzealous building codes drive up the price. But it’s mostly because of the inherent cost of the basics: land, interest, materials, utilities. As a rule of thumb nationwide, even an efficient nonprofit developer can’t build an apartment affordable to a household making less than about $32,000 a year. That leaves out nearly a third of American households.”

This doesn’t mean that there are not some great housing solutions out there. Of course, you have to look outside of the typical mortgage/banking racket to find them.

A nonprofit organization called Cass Community Social Services is building 25 single-family homes from 250 to 400 square feet. Each $40,000 creatively designed home is unique to itself – no two finished products will be the same.

Each building can be rented to a tenant for one third of their monthly income under a year-long lease. After three years of renewing leases, they have the ability to sign a four-year land contract under which they pay off those collected years. By the end of the total seven years paying rent, they will have essentially bought themselves a house to own.

Firstly – who among the non-ultra wealthy are able to pay off a home in seven years? Granted, these are tiny houses, but they give even individuals with the most marginal financial existence an opportunity to exit the matrix of debt that our ‘keepers’ continually try to perpetuate.

Secondly, even tiny house prices are growing significantly higher, such that low income and homeless people could not think of affording them.

Cass Community Social Services has already built the first home and expects to have 8 more completed by the year’s end. Half of the inhabitants are expected to be homeless, and the other half, people with lower incomes like college students, or single parents. Moreover, the home-owners get to vote on who moves into the neighborhood, so they can create not just a home, but a community which is based on shared values and cooperation.

Just imagine what you could do if you didn’t have to pay rent OR a mortgage after seven years of even fewer. I’m sure all the banks that participated in the largest fraud scandal in human history aren’t too thrilled with the idea – but the possibilities are truly endless.

Photo Credit: Curbed