Affordable housing and homelessness are major problems facing many communities. These communities usually focus on finding ways to raise funds to subsidize the building of more affordable housing to fix this problem. However, in spite of their best efforts and no matter how much additional income is raised, the problem never seems to go away. The CSS housing plan proposes a way to permanently fix this problem.
A hundred years ago a Sears House package could be ordered and shipped with all the materials precut and numbered for local assembly. Many different types of homes at different quality and cost levels were offered. The building process was relatively straight-forward and relatively fast. People are still living in some of these Sear’s homes today.
The current building process is generally a long and complicated business. Each municipality sets its own zoning rules, permitting procedures, inspection requirements, and construction standards. Many steps and approvals are needed before actual construction can begin. The physical building process is usually done on the job site by different contractors working at different times using skilled labor. Delays and additional costs are common problems builders must deal with.
But what if high-quality homes, at much lower cost and in much shorter time frames, could be ordered from a modern version of a Sears home system provider without all the regulation hurdles that now exist. We certainly have the technology to build automated factories that could do this. So why are the vast majority of homes still built by on site using traditional methods? The answer is surprisingly simple.
People living in local municipalities want to control where housing is located, what kind of housing is built, and indirectly, the characteristics of people that will be moving in. Each project must be individually reviewed to verify that it meets local zoning, permitting, inspection, construction standards, and community wishes which vary from community to community. Hence no mass market exists to justify the expense of building automated factories that could produce different types of high-quality standardized housing.
The CSS housing plan starts with the creation a set of national standardized zoning, permitting, inspection, and construction standards. It is hoped that enough local communities would voluntarily adopt these standards to create the demand needed to justify the creation of automated factories. Different factories would supply different kinds of housing modules at different cost levels. These housing modules could be shipped anywhere in the country and assembled on-site to create the finished housing.
Local communities could adopt the national standards with adjustments to meet local conditions and wishes. All adjustments would be listed in a permitting and construction database. Factories would use this database to finalize housing designs to meet local requirements.
The building process might start by going to a computer to select the factory, design, options, and pricing levels desired. The system would generate and submit a standardized set of forms to your local community to get the needed building permits.
The permitting process should be fast as all local issues and wishes have already been specified and addressed, unless variances are needed. If variances are needed, the permitting process would be much slower and very similar to what now occurs.
Once approved, the factory would build, ship, and certify that construction standards and inspection requirements for prebuilt housing modules, have been meet. Only local inspections would be needed to verify that the assembly of the prebuilt housing modules and site-specific issues were done correctly. Site-specific issues include such things as foundations, water, and sewer hookups.
If community’s permit micro-apartments to be built as part of larger projects and the negative income tax proposal is adopted, no American should ever need to be homeless for economic reasons. All Americans would always have enough income to afford one of these micro-apartments. In addition, governments should not have to allocate funds to build these units since the rent charged should be enough to warrant commercial investments in them.
If enough communities voluntarily adopt the CSS housing plan, different kinds of high-quality housing may be built faster and at significantly lower costs than what is currently being done. However, it should be noted, that communities will always use their zoning and building codes to effectively exclude some groups for perceived behavioral, economic, or quality of life reasons. For instance, communities might fear that crime rates will rise if to many low-income people where to move in. Or housing prices might fall if high-quality but lower cost housing could be built near existing homes. Or the character of a community might change without restrictive housing and land use codes. Communities will always want to include requirements in their specific zoning and building codes to effectively limit how much such issues will affect them.