The Grass Roots Housing Process (Original Paper)

Preface

A house is not just a shell for habitation; it is also an unfolding of our experience.

A house is not an act or a series of acts; it is not an object but an experience; it is not a commodity to be bought and sold but an activity essential to life.

Instead of being the unfolding of our existence and the expression of our freedom, our houses have become the imprisonment of our existence, the denial of our lives.

introduction

In this proposal we are putting forward an entirely new concept in the field of housing, which covers financing, design, social structure, principles of ownership, and rate of growth. In place of houses that are completed before anyone knows who will live in them and are then sold as complete products, we propose a process in which the owner is intimately involved in the evolutionary design and construction of his own house. In place of high interest rates and ruinous mortgages, we propose a system that, with a very small initial investment, recycles the capital that it generates to begin more and more houses, without bank loans. We believe that this concept will help to solve the most fundamental problems in the housing shortage, in many countries.

The Center for Environmental Structure is a non-profit foundation based in California. We are writing this proposal in the hope that sponsors, in different parts of the world, will come forward and invest enough seed money to start a number of pilot projects. The Center, henceforward called the builder, will undertake responsibility for management, design and supervision of construction in these pilot projects - and can be paid entirely by fees generated by the process itself. If successful, the pilot projects can than be repeated, on a larger scale, by local builders.

Any local government, state government, public authority, non-profit foundation, or group of citizens can sponsor this process, by making a small cash investment, and by putting land in trust, for housing, with the understanding that it will be held by non-profit housing corporations, managed by the people who live in the houses, and cannot be bought or sold for speculation.

In return for these contributions, the sponsor will reap the following benefits:

1. On each side, a cluster of twelve houses will be designed and built by their owners. Each house will be ready for occupancy within a few month - and will then grow steadily for the next several years.
2. The process will allow people to own their own houses, without a down payment, merely in return for a monthly payment which is about the same as a typical medium-low income monthly rent or mortgage payment.
3. The project will generate enough money to seed new clusters within the community, as often as the sponsor is willing to supply one acre of land, on the delayed purchase arrangement. In these later clusters, the sponsor is not expected to contribute any further cash sums.
4. The new clusters will grow at an extraordinary rate: so great, that after thirty years, the initial cluster has seeded 70 new clusters; after fifty years, the initial cluster has seeded 1600 new clusters. In short, an initial investment of $30,000 will generate about 20,000 houses in fifty years.

Obviously, there is no form of public housing known today, which can generate such an astonishing supply of houses for such a trifling investment. But the houses are not only cheaper. They are also better, more beautiful and much more profoundly grounded in human needs.

The Housing Problem

The world--wide housing problem has three central features.

The Housing Shortage

There is a drastic shortage of houses, all over the world. At the same time, the cost of houses is rising steadily. This rising cost makes it almost prohibitively expensive for people who have little money, to house themselves; and too expensive for public housing agencies -- who must both build the houses, and then subsidize their rents -- to provide houses for everyone; and thus well nigh impossible to build enough houses to overcome the housing shortage.

The Sterility of Mass-Produced Housing

The mass housing built to solve the housing shortage is totally inadequate from a human point of view. The houses required to satisfy human needs are not mass--produced, identical tract homes and concrete box apartments, but houses so various that each house is different and unique, according to the special nature of people who live in it, designed by the people who live in them, and based on psychological principles deep enough to satisfy the full range of human experience and need.

The High Price of Housing

At the same time, the average family gets a raw deal, in purely monetary terms. A house which costs $30,000, will typically need monthly payments of about $200/month to pay for it. The person making these payments, whether he is technically an owner or a renter, will typically end up paying about $80,000 over 30 years -- almost three times the actual value of the house. This is why houses have become expensive. People are paying three times what their houses are worth. Our houses now consume three times as large a portion of our lifetime income as they rightfully should.

Faced with this three-sided housing problem, modern society has so far, invented essentially one answer to the problem: mass production: both on-site mass production of tract houses and factory mass products of package houses and apartments.

Industrialists, who control the machinery of mass production and their spokesmen, argue that more houses must be mass produced, in order to keep up with the demand created by the housing shortage. Designers and architects, in love with the idea of mass production, argue that designs of mass produced houses will be better, because more money can be invested in research and perfection of design - so that every family can have the perfect bathroom. And the industrialists again, using the analogy of mass--produced cheap goods, explain that the economy of the assembly line will make the houses cheaper.

But industrialized mass housing does not and cannot solve the housing problem.

The high rate of production, does little or nothing to solve the housing shortage, since, it is in fact the shortage of capital, not the speed of production, which is actually responsible for the housing shortage.

The standardization of large--scale components like walls, bathroom and kitchens, far from improving design, in fact, reduces the choices which people have, and contributes enormously to the monotonous and alienating sameness which leaves people feeling dead and helpless.

And the mass production does not, in the end, even reduce cost. First of all, very few means of housing production can actually reach the volume of sales needed to bring about the economies of scale. But, much more important, the industrialized houses, even when they are sold in great numbers, are more expensive than the houses they replace because of the fact of mass production itself has brought with it spurious standards, which increase the costs. Does anyone really want, or need, wall-to-wall carpeting, or streamlined kitchen cabinets, or plate glass picture windows? These very expensive items have become necessities, under conditions of mass production, because they are the only ways that mass production can make up for the pitiful sterility of mass housing. In a simpler house, which you have made yourself, you just do not need these gimmicks -- because it fits you, and you love its individual character. And because it does not need the gimmicks, it costs less per square foot.

But above all, mass-produced housing fails entirely to change the cost of houses, to any significant degree, because like all our other current forms of housing, it is based on the mortgage system.

In a simple society, people do not borrow money to make their houses: they build what they can afford. When they are young, they have a small hut; gradually, as they grow older, and have children, they are able to make their house larger to keep pace with their needs.

But mass production changes that. Since a house created by mass production is, inevitably, a commodity, an object -- you have to buy it as a package -- and to buy it as a package, you have to borrow money. But the borrowed money costs far more than any conceivable savings which the machinery of mass production can create.

The cost of a mortgage is higher, far higher, than any other cost. A mortgage, spread over twenty--five or thirty years, almost trebles the cost of the house. Two-thirds of the money which a buyer, or a renter, pays for housing, goes in the form of interest to the banks. No solution to the housing problem, which accepts the mortgage system, can possibly make any serious contribution to the price of housing, nor to the housing shortage, and that is why, at bottom, mass-produced housing fails utterly to solve the housing problem.

So long as we view houses as commodities, which can be bought and sold like cars, the processes which will then, inevitably, govern ownership, financing, building, and selling of houses, will make it quite impossible to solve the housing problem.

Let us begin by understanding the nature of housing as a commodity.

It hinges on the fact that people who live in houses do not really own them, in any significant sense; it hinges, in short, on the fact, that the idea of ownership, as it exists in modern society, is different from rental only in a rather trivial legal and financial sense. True ownership cannot exist so long as the house is seen as a commodity.

To begin with, there is a gross unfairness in the distinction between renters and owners. This distinction depends, in many cases, on the accident, that some people happen to be able to afford a down payment, and some don't. Beyond that, both renters and owners pay comparable monthly rents. But the owners have control over their land, and build up equity; the renters have no control, and after twenty years, they still have no equity, or money, built up.

But even those people who are lucky enough to call themselves owners, are not owners in any very significant sense. The housing market that we know does not allow people to design and participate in the construction of their houses; they are built for them and, except in unusual cases, have no input at all. In addition to this, even the ability of people to buy their own houses is being eroded. Costs of material and labor, increasing at rapid rate, are compounded by the cost of money which, in the long run, dwarfs the construction cost of the house. Under typical mortgage terms, a $30,000 house will cost as much as $80,000 by the time it is completely amortized.

In short, about two-thirds of the total money spent on housing in any one month, now goes to the banks (either directly, in the form of mortgages; or indirectly in the form of rents, which help to pay off mortgages). This means that less than one-third of the money spent on housing, in any one month, actually goes towards the task of improving the housing, or improving the environment. And, of course, when the owner decides to sell his house, he finds that most of his investment is lost to him. He can only get back about one-third of what he has put into it, because the other two-thirds has gone to the bank.

Thus, the critical advantage of ownership, stemming from deep personal involvement with one's dwelling and living environment, are wasting away. A person finds himself buying a house that someone else designed and built. He has to have a lot of money to buy it in the first place. He gets rather little of his monthly payments back, when he decides to move. And, for all that, in any important psychological sense, the house is hardly his. It looks just like a hundred other houses, down the road. The space outside, the street, is not in his control -- it is a public wasteland, looked after by some impersonal agency.

We see, then, that the heart of the housing problem lies in the mortgage system -- or, if you will, in that interaction between houses and money, which treats a house as a commodity. People are persuaded that they must borrow money, huge sums of money, to get this house which someone else has built. Since they have to borrow so much money, most of their own money flows out of their packets in the form of interest, instead of flowing towards the land and houses themselves -- where it could actually help to make the houses better: so, by accepting the idea that he must have a house that someone else built, and must borrow money to get it, the house owner also condemns the house itself, to receive one-third of the resources -- in labor, care and materials -- which it ought to get -- so obviously the houses themselves get worse and worse with time.

There is no way to cut this cycle of cause and effect, except at the root. It cannot be cut by making more houses which are commodities; nor by making better houses which are commodities; nor by making cheaper houses which are commodities. It can only be cut when we stop treating houses as commodities altogether, by our refusal, our total refusal, to treat houses as commodities -- and by our consequent refusal to accept the monetary side conditions which come with the house, when it is seen as a commodity.

To solve the housing problem, we must learn to look at a house as an activity.

In this case, the life history of the house, and its relation to the people who live in it, and pass through it, is entirely different. The house is not produced at one time, and then used, unchanged, for years; it is created gradually, as a direct result of the living which is happening in it and around it. Building takes place in increments, day by day, year by year. The people who live in the house do not borrow money, ever; they spend only what they can afford. The people who live in the house are the ones who design it, as they go. They don't necessarily build it with their own hands; but they may build parts of it with their own hands, to help the builders. Each house is unique; it is the unique expression of a particular way of life, and of the particular history of all the people who have ever lived in it. Ownership of the house, is not merely a way of making money, or a form of legal control; it is a vehicle for involvement, in the process of creating a suitable, beautiful environment. Above all, to repeat it, there are no banks involved, nor mortgages, because the houses are built at a pace which makes it possible to build them without borrowing money.

It turns out that this simple change of attitude, has the power to solve the housing problem totally, because it goes to the heart of the financial system, and changes the way that money flows.

1. It can solve the housing shortage.

   It can create a vast number of houses, in a very short time, and therefore alleviate the world housing shortage.

2. It can solve the sterility of mass housing.

   People can create housing which is adapted to their needs, under conditions where each family will have a unique house whose plan and functions are unique to them -- though in construction and materials they are the same as all the neighbors' houses. The process overcomes the sterility of mass-produced housing, by increasing the labor content, human craftsmanship, and workmanship in each individual house, without requiring unfeasibly high labor costs. The land between the houses, is itself also controlled by the house owners, and is therefore as rich and beautiful as the houses themselves: there is no uncared for public wasteland outside the houses.

3. It can solve the high price of housing.

   It does not make heavy financial demands on its participants, and allows everyone to own his house, without any need for down payments. It allows everyone to build up equity, as he pays money into his house. Each person can get back 100% of the amount he has put into it, when he sells it, instead of the one-third which he gets back when his house is mortgaged to a bank. All the money which people spend on housing, every month, goes to improve the houses -- instead of the one-third which now goes into houses, because the banks take two-thirds -- so the environment has three times as much money flowing into its improvement as it does today.

It is, of course, true, that houses were built under these conditions, by people all over the world, for all the thousands of years which preceded the industrial revolution -- in short, for most of human history. In fact, the very richest members of society now struggle to buy up the few remaining thatched cottages, redwood log cabins, Georgian town houses, Greek Island houses, Elizabethan farmhouses -- because they recognize, intuitively, that these buildings, built by the very process under discussion, are the only ones which really satisfy the needs of the human soul -- and they are therefore prepared to pay vast sums of money for them.

The grassroots housing process, which we now present in this proposal, will create houses as beautiful, as organic, as uniquely personal, as these traditional houses. and, as we shall show, it can produce them fast enough, and cheaply enough, to solve the housing problem. It is feasible in terms of money, and feasible in terms of labor. In short, it is immediately practical today.

The Project Proposal

Our solution to the housing problem, hinges on the creation of two new legal entities, both non-profit corporations, which we call the cluster and the builder, on the existence of a sponsor for their activities, and on a system called the pattern language, which provides the medium of communication between the cluster and the builder.

The sponsor may be any organization which has an interest in the provision of housing, and which has land that it can put in trust for the purpose of housing. It may be a group of private citizens, a local government, a private industry, an institution like a university, or a non-profit foundation. This report is addressed, principally, to potential sponsors, or to individuals or institutions who are considering the possibility that they might decide to become sponsors.

The cluster is a group of ten or twelve families, legally constituted as a non-profit corporation. The families will design their own houses, and help to build them if they want to; and together they will design and build the common areas between the houses. The houses will grow rather slowly -- it will take at least five years for a house to reach its full size; but the houses will be made in such a way that people can live in them from the very beginning. In return for monthly payments, and without a down payment, the families will own their houses, and will be able to sell them, when they leave, for 90% of the payments which they have made.

The builder is a non-profit foundation, which helps the group of families design the public land between the houses, supervises all construction on the site, provides instruction for those families who wish to build for themselves, controls the monthly payments from the families, handles the seed money needed to start other similar clusters, and in later years, as the cluster reaches maturity, helps the families and the cluster diagnose those deficiencies in their surroundings which need to be repaired by new construction.

The pattern language is the instrument which makes it possible for members of the cluster to design their own houses, and for the builder to help them take their rudimentary sketches and make a building out of them. It is a system of instructions based on the most fundamental psychological necessities of buildings, which gives the individuals who use it unexpected creative power. We shall not describe it in this report, since it has been fully described in other publications.

However, it is essential to understand that this pattern language is the instrument which gives the members of the cluster the power to design their houses for themselves, and the medium through which they can communicate their ideas to the builder. Without this instrument, the productive interaction of the cluster and the builder which we describe on the following pages, could not be accomplished.

Within the framework of the pattern language, and with the backing of a sponsor, the builder and the cluster can, as we shall now see, create conditions under which ordinary families can house themselves. We first go into detail about the activities of the cluster; then examine the overall flow of money, to see the feasibility of the project from year to year; then examine the growth rate of the clusters, as one cluster begins seeding others, in later years; then describe the activities of the builder in detail; and finally explain the sponsor's contribution.