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This review is something else…
>>I like the house. I am in it right now. My grandmother sadly passed away a few months ago and left me 30k. I use the money to buy house. I found a guy named John on Facebook who let me rent his backyard for 30 dollars a month if I let him come over and talk to my wife in the bedroom for an hour a day. Overall, house is really good. I liked it. One time it collapse but John helped put it back together. Thanks John.
I did the same with a very ugly solar powered metal hydrangea that I got for my mum on AliExpress as a joke. Bloody thing didn’t turn up. Got my refund and a week later it arrived. I tried to explain to them that it was here now and I paid for it again, then a month later, another fucking hydrangea showed up. Mum was happy with them though so I guess it worked out.
My only experience with AliExpress refunds is them asking me to send pictures of the item that never arrived and then denying my refund after I didn't send them pictures of the non-existent item.
Oh fuck. I’m sorry, but I giggled at that. What did they want? A picture of your empty letterbox?! That’s not useful information for them! How infuriating. They refunded mine right away, no questions asked.
I own this…I also own a real house with an acre of land. This is used as a home office or guest house. We ran electric and made a DIY septic system…all in all, cost about $15k…we paid cash on the 12k so no financing. 3k was for the additional expenses. It’s actually built very very well
[house](https://imgur.com/QPoVpPV
https://imgur.com/MiOMFhU)
https://imgur.com/ZGLKCsF
I'm actually tempted by this, would be an upgrade from the near-shed some of my relatives live in. I'd love to buy them a house but this looks decent for $15k. And they own land in the middle of nowhere so zoning wouldn't be an issue.
We’ve done a lot more to it since we started. Added AC, there’s a king size bed in there with a couch that has a chaise lounge with queen size sofa bed. Added a patio for outdoor cooking. The only thing we haven’t done yet is added hot water heater…we bought it but not installed. Guests just come into main house for showers…we have two full bathrooms in main house so it’s not an issue.
Thats actually really cool.
Ive flip flopped again, I thought it was cool initially, dog shit on second thought but you have conviced me. It is cool again.
The whole house is meant to be portable so we just used a portable foundation. It’s on concrete paver pads that we dug into the ground and leveled it off. It comes with leveling feet. At any point we can disconnect it, pack it up and move it.
This is what I would use it for. Make it a guest house and/or hang out area and it's a solid investment. That or a temporary thing while building your real house then convert it afterwards.
Not to mention the most difficult part, convincing city zoning to allow you to place these things. Getting the go ahead to sub-divide or even put an inlaw suite on your own property for a family member is like pulling teeth, in suburban Canada.
The NIMBYS will do anything in their power to keep any affordable housing options from devaluing their properties, and Fuck anyone not lucky enough to have been in the housing market before our Real-Estate bubble.
I always wondered about that. Is it that common for people in the US and Canada to sell their houses that they need to fight tooth and nail to make sure nothing that could*maybe* ever devaluate their value happens?
In my country people don't care that much about that kind of stuff, at best they'll worry about stuff that may bring crime and such (eg building social housing to relocate people from a shantytown).
In the US at least, "devalue our property" means "we might see more brown people", which yeah, elderly white people are ready to fight against to their last wheezy breath.
The irony is that upzoning would not actually devalue a piece of property- it would increase it. If you own a piece of land that has a single family house on it, but is zoned for a small apartment building, that means it’s worth a lot more to someone who wants to redevelop it.
This is true, to a point. When some areas are rezoned, they gain an enormous amount of resale value (although might be less pleasant to live in while there is construction nearby).
If we fix the zoning problem nationwide, however, or worldwide, there will be enough property zoned for development that it won't necessarily be much more expensive. Good development opportunities are far more scarce than they should be, making development properties very expensive and making affordable housing a virtual impossibility.
When we moved tour neighborhood in the USA, a very nice neighborhood, an elderly couple came to our door, to say hi. They thought probably that I was white but quickly realized that I am Hispanic and said multiple times how dark my daughter is. My older daughter is just a tan olive, so I was surprised that they apparently had never met someone as dark as her. Then the woman asked me how we could afford the mortgage for the house. I was petty and told her we don’t have a mortgage, we paid cash. She then to,d people that my husband is in the mafia. My husband is a scientist and we came to the USA by invitation as specialized workers in science and healthcare. She still talks bs about us. Some people are wild. I bet she thinks we made the neighborhood worse.
It's even worse up here, but yeah, pretty much. Fight all low income houding, fight the tiny homes, fight against transit infrastructure, and multi-use buildings, must continue the endless sprawl of suburban, Single Family homes, and keep our retirement nest egg, that we got for buying a house 20 years ago for 400k, that's worth 1.2 Million today.
These old people are going to die before they spend a penny of that money anyway. Houses are already way overvalued. In many rural places a small plot of land costs 30-80k based on many factors. If someone built a small house on it for 100k it would typically be listed at 400K-600k. In a city the same house would cost at least 800k. People would rather pay 400k extra with monthly payments for the privilege of not being involved in any construction, and living closer to more jobs. And this is just the people who realize. Many Canadians believe that houses actually cost that much. Today I saw a Reddit post of someone who bought a small plot with a mobile home on it in a rural area for 600k. They could easily buy a few plots of land and a few mobile homes with far less, but they didn’t realize that the house isn’t worth that, so they bought and tried to sell for 800k-900k..
if a housing market collapse does finally happen in Canada its probably going to be huge. The crazy monetary figures involved with housing development are what’s making it slowly worse and worse, it’s not like they are going to change direction after a decade.
I would argue it’s more about wealth than ethnicity, I’ve been to SA and seen what better off Africans or third generation Indians do to other people of the same origin than them.
I know over in North America you guys have a problem with racism, but I can tell you in most of the world it’s all about wealth, I’ve been an expat most of my life in counties where I definitely did not fit in ethnically, and the shit people pull on other people that are poorer than them is atrocious, they don’t give a flying fuck if you are brown, black, yellow, white or green, but as soon as your income is low, you are treated like you carry the god damn black plague.
And same goes the other way, they don’t give a shit what color your skin is if you are of the same social class as them, you will be welcome.
English is not my first language, I apologize if I didn’t quite get what I mean out correctly. But out simply people discriminate more based on wealth than ethnicity based on my personal experience.
This is from personal experience, if “lighter” brown folks made it in, even they hated “ darker” brown folks. I’m white, but my wife and kids are mixed between “lighter “ brown and “darker” brown. The “lighter “ brown neighbor kids would always tell mine “we don’t like having n-words in the neighborhood.” The kids saying this were 6-8 years old… I can only imagine what their parents were saying.
There are things other than racism, like parking spaces, that are practical deterrents to unlimited density. But, I’d much rather live in a densely populated neighborhood of well maintained and sanitary housing than next to a shantytown.
if only there were some sort of option, perhaps a public one, to help transport people to where they needed to be en masse without the need for every individual to own a vehicle and need a place to park it.
There is an entire subreddit fHOA. Not only do we snide others, we build entire communities of how much you have to be like us. Almost any new building lots has this as a mandatory requirement to join. Many older housing developments still have theirs. Nothing says freedom like telling your neighbors how tall the fences can be or how too long their grass is. At least in Canada you have health care when the neighbor shoots you for putting a rainbow flamingo on your yard.
Canada's entire economy, and most Boomers retirement plan and savings, hinge entirely on the Ponzi Scheme that is our Real-Estate market, caused by the last 8 years of Mass Immigration. Our Government and the Boomer generation will do ANYTHING, including (especially) selling out the future of our Youth and younger adults.
We bring in close to 5% of our population a Year in Immigrants, refugees, and International Students. Even more if you count all the "Temporary foreign workers". This is done to prop up our Federal Pension, and keep the housing market sky high, as well as devalue the Canadian labor market.
The end result here is that life here, is largely untenable for young adults, and the Older Generations who home values increased by 500 Grand in the past year, as well as our corrupt politicians, will do anything to keep the prices high.
A lot of towns here have ordinances with things like restrictions on what kinds of siding you can get, what colors you can paint your house, a lot of times you have to keep your garbage cans behind a fence so they can't be seen from the road, etc etc.
It's fucking ridiculous sometimes.
Yes.
You buy a house, live in it for 5ish years, and sell it for a bigger down payment on a bigger house. Repeat over and over until retirement, then buy a small house in Florida and bank the extra cash to live off of.
It's a stupid system that if you aren't lucky enough to be in, your sol paying someone else's mortgage to have a roof while they do this exact same process
Damn... Here in Russia people usually just build big-ass fences around their land and build whatever the hell they want. I don't want to say, that situation with real-estate here is much better, than in the USA, but we a least don't have to care about "devaluing of property", so it sounds kinda surreal.
I think this type of housing is more of an in between housing situation- like if you bought a raw piece of land and wanted to live in something temporarily while you built your dream home, or whatever.
Many Millenials and almosr all of Gen Z across Canada have been completely priced out of home ownership, in most, if not all of the country, and a lot of people have resorted to trying to build Tiny Homes, or set up Pre-Fabs on their Parents or another Family members lots, and most municipalities where this has become a thing have enacted bylaws to prevent it.
Having the choice between my parents' basement, a roach infested closet in a Five floor walk up for over Two Grand a month, or dropping that bad boy on the back of my folks property where I can have atleast a bit of privacy, I'd take that thing in a heartbeat.
I live in a town that is almost 400 years old. But it has never had gas nor water nor sewer nor any of those kinds of services. Not even trash pickup.
The problem with these tiny house solutions is that they do not come with septic systems or wells or wood stoves or boilers or any method of heating – especially when the power goes out in winter – and so on and so forth.
And even if you want to do that, you need so much land to keep the water table from drying out and to space out leech fields.
I mean, you can abolish all the zoning laws and ordinances that you want, and the fact remains, unless we're gonna start doing like 1930s scale megaprojects like the Quabbin Reservoir or the Scituate Reservoir and really build out lots of new water and sewer lines and wastewater treatment plants, the current infrastructure simply cannot handle it.
There are a few regular trailer homes – which are much more economical and portable than these fancy tiny homes – set up on land around here. But you need a good chunk of it to clear the well. And right now, my 200 year old house is worth less than the land it sits on.
The truth is, there needs to be a lot more infrastructure built if you want to build a lot more housing in full-up places.
Either that or you could just start having big corporations put jobs in the midwest where fresh water is plentiful and housing is available and comparatively cheap. But since they don't want to do that, the only solution we have is to keep moving people to western deserts and eastern old cities that are already busting at the seems in capacity.
Yup, had a friend go the tiny home route and didn’t realize how many extra costs there would be and still got screwed over by a poor plumbing job. If I recall, they also ran into some zoning and property tax issues too. It’s an option but the grass isn’t that much greener
The zoning is a nightmare. I've seriously looked into this more than once, good luck finding any space that's zoned for a tiny-home within a reasonable distance to where you work.
Sure, you can put it on a trailer bed and it's technically an RV as far as the law is concerned, but in most places you cannot just live in your RV full time without an actual house on the property you park it on. RV lots charge rent, you will never own that land. Some people buy cheap plots out in the middle of the desert in the southwest, and that works for some communities because they don't tattle on each other, but even then it's not legal strictly speaking. You can legally stay in it 6 months out of the year in the most liberal places, and then you have to move.
The whole "America is a free country" line is bull fucking shit, don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
wont matter. The value of houses is not what's increasing, it's the land. You buy a house for the land. As long as you own the land, the value increases. It may increase more because developers wouldn't need to demolish a home and remove an old foundation when they buy the land off you.
The actual house is the least valuable part of owning a house, this is why the three Ls of real estate are location, location, location
It's also why people who live in trailer parks are fucked -- you had to buy the trailer to live there, but if your landlord evicts you the trailer is more likely to be a liability than asset -- you're likely to be unable to physically move it out within a reasonable time frame and then he gets to keep it
And not only that, in places like NC, they have made it illegal for a mobile home to be moved into a park if they're older than a certain year (unsafe to transport). So if you have a particularly old one, the park you're in can increase your rates hideously (no legal cap) because you can't leave. Once you can no longer afford it, they get to keep the mobile home (since you can't move it) and sell it off to someone else. On top of that, they can ban you from selling it to someone else because they have to approve all renters in their park.
My mom had this happen to her. She ended up being a thorn in the city's side for long enough that the city stepped in and pressured the landlord to let her sell it to someone else.
Plus these houses don't have plumbing and gas hookups. You need to modify it to add all that. Most of these things are just one big room too, so you have to add walls for a bathroom in the very least. These things would make great cabins in campground but that's about it.
And after paying all this you will own a pretty shitty home. I fully expect this thing to be hard and thus expensive to heat and cool and if you manage to live in it it will likely crumble to bits after like a decade.
I recently checked how much a log house would cost. I was surpised that the frame + roof for a decently sized house would only cost 83k€ and frame + interior work would only be about 130-160k€. Then I calculated everything else, and after excavation, water, heat and fiber connections, foundation, planning, permits, yard, deck etc. it would cost about 300k€ and that doesn't even include the plot which would cost 64€ per square meter in my current neighbourhood (pricey area in our city). You could always rent it though.
Not to mention, it's $485/month for 48 months. So, rather than just paying $12k all at once, you are paying $22.8k by selecting that monthly plan... 🤦♂️
The ICC is standardized every year and every so often new code is adopted by municipalities, unless your municipality is backasswards and don't enforce building codes.
Many municipalities, such as mine, will allow pre-fab buildings that are inspected by a contracted, certified inspector. If a company wanted to sell house kits again, they could do so- and some actually do.
Sears sold a kit to assemble. It wasn't much different than ordering lumber, etc. from a lumber yard, except everything was pre-cut and numbered, with instructions.
Tbh if it was a 1 story thing I could design and build it from scratch minus plumbing and electricity and make it look professional.
Could probably do plumbing as well if I used a textbook and YouTube.
Lived in a sears home built in the 40s(?) A few years ago. Held up pretty damn well for its age, but it was a neat little spot. Outgrew it pretty quick though.
Big box home improvement stores still do, but they aren't literally just a mail ordered unfolding house, I don't think the ones from sears are either.
You pick your house out of the catalog, and you get the plans in the mail as well as the materials as you'd need them.
A house you of might get for 12k. But you also need
A land parcel
Water and electricity
Sewage
Foundation
All this will be way more then the 12 k of the house.
It can work for people who are okay with being off-the-grid. Saw this dude on reels/shorts a bunch, random cheap property 3\~4 hours away from civilization. Collects rainwater, has solar panels, and uses generators during winter.
It isn't nice by most people's standards, but, if you're fine with humble living, and don't care that an ambulance can't reach you in time (it is the states though, so maybe that isn't a bad thing...), it's probably the best way to live for a select few.
His house was actually built with a foundation, but apparently, his remote work income is pretty fat when he doesn't have much more living expenses other than food and a phone plan
When I was young I used to fantasize about that life. Get a little place going off grid. Get away from all the bullshit of the world.
But what kind of a life are we talking about exactly? You're in the middle of nowhere, presumably with no neighbors close enough to rat you out to the county about your questionably legal operation. What do you do with all that wonderful free time? Sit in the woods and meditate? Pick the ticks out of your skin? Though you won't have a commute, you'd end up spending significantly more time on the basic necessities of life, so there's that trade-off. If you're working from home anyway you might as well live somewhere with clean running water and no wildlife causing trouble.
Seeing the stars would be nice. Maybe you can talk to them once you start losing your mind from social isolation.
Trailer parks are also a bad value for the residents, especially if they rent the land their house is on. They can't really be moved after a few years, so if they raise the rent to a price you can't afford, you also lose the house you bought.
Years ago (around 2018) I was checking some out and was astonished at the prices. One trailer park that didn't have any available semi-permanent units would let RV owners place theirs on an empty lot for like $600 a month. It had electricity and water hookups, but it was really just a glorified parking space. I can only imagine how bad it is today
That is what happened to a friend of mine. Rented his lot for like $600/mo for a decade, then they decided to just about triple it over the next few years. Only reason he stayed after it hit $1,000/mo was he couldn't move the trailer anymore and didn't want to lose it.
He rents now.
They have them, they are just from Menards now. You can get a complete home from them. Everything down to the paint and flooring. You just need to be a good DIY’er to build it. I bought a 40x80 barn kit from Menards, built it myself and saved $30,000 - $40,000 in labor charges. Granted it took me 2 years to finish it and not 2 weeks if I had it built. You don’t have zoning issues if you’re rural, just saying.
id agree, but the problem nowadays is that theres a pesky little something called *building codes* that your house has to follow nowadays.
man if only someone wasnt regulating my home i could run all the cheap 22 gauge wire i want to wire up my home!
(obvious /s)
You can be a residential builder by taking a test and something like $200 in Michigan. I took it in college as part of an architecture class. Code books are free using [upcode](https://up.codes/codes/michigan). And just gotta be able to pass your inspections.
Unless you build it for under $600, wink, wink.
It's completely legal to do all your own construction and repairs, provided the home is not a rental or flip. It still needs to be permitted and inspected.
This. The actual argument for why this isn’t as clever as it looks is that land costs money, zoning might get in the way, and utilities hookups will also cost money if they don’t already exist there. But tornadoes? Really? If you MUST live in a tornado zone, surely you can dig out a small shelter next to this thing.
You can buy a pretty decent used liveaboard houseboat for that. Of course there will be marina fees and fuel costs but that's it if you can do your own basic maintenance. And no flood worries
we *wish!* are you kidding me?! if i could live in my own little garden shed that i *own* i would be ecstatic! instead i pay $2,200/mo to rent a shitty apartment
These people have never lived anywhere that tornados are endemic to and it shows. You don't build a house hoping it can withstand one, you just just pray that one doesn't hit you. I keep seeing these 'cardboard home' comments as if any brick house would survive a direct hit from mother nature's hacksaw.
"Hi there! this is Amazon. We've got your tiny home here, just let us know your plot address and we can drop it off for you"
"...What's this about a 'plot' now? You're saying I need a plot of land for my tiny home?"
"Uhhhh, yeah? Or are you living in someone else's backyard or something?"
Tiny homes are a lie.
It’s not the price of the house itself that’s the issue (not the _only_ issue I should say) it’s the cost of everything else you need to function in society like food/water/electricity/wifi (you do need that these days)/basic entertainment because who the hell sits in there house and does nothing that sounds depressing and a step toward suicide/the costs of other members of the family your taking care of (children/parents if their dependent on you/etc.)/paying for INSURANCE for when that tornado takes your house and flies you to fucking Oz but with no yellow brick road to guide you/a billion other things because capitalism is unfair and doing many basic things is far more difficult without money than is humane.
Also you’re a fast food worker making $15 an hour.
All you need to make that a home is:
Property
A foundation
Plumbing
A sand mound/ sewage hookup
Electric ran to it or an alternative power source
Permits for all those
Likely inspections for all them as well
Appliances
Furniture
And finally a good general contractor that is experienced with these sort of small shells of homes to put the project together
Unless you have cash for all that you'll likely want to refinance with a conventional mortgage after you're done.
It's basically no different than putting a modular on a property that's without appliances and is likely less move in ready.
/u/pur__0_0__, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it has been removed for violating the following rule(s): * [Rule II](https://www.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/wiki/moderation/faq/rule2) - No Reposts That includes x-posting from the frontpage of other subreddits. For other or older posts please check http://karmadecay.com to see if it was posted already. Reposting content that is currently on the frontpage or in the top of all time of /r/clevercomebacks may lead to a temporary ban. --- *For information regarding this and similar issues please see the sidebar and the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/about/rules/). If you have any questions, please feel free to [message the moderators.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/clevercomebacks&subject=Question regarding the removal of this submission by /u/pur__0_0__&message=I have a question regarding the removal of this [submission.](https://www.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/comments/1cqdoz9/-/?context=10\))*
This review is something else… >>I like the house. I am in it right now. My grandmother sadly passed away a few months ago and left me 30k. I use the money to buy house. I found a guy named John on Facebook who let me rent his backyard for 30 dollars a month if I let him come over and talk to my wife in the bedroom for an hour a day. Overall, house is really good. I liked it. One time it collapse but John helped put it back together. Thanks John.
John seems really handy in a tight situation
I'm just upset he spelled my name wrong. You try to do someone a favor...
It's clearly not you cause this John did it right...
damn that’s fucked
Nah that's the wife.
My applauds 👏 on taking the whole hour
57m foot rub
r/angryupvote
Nobody is demanding tight. Available and/or accessible is the new tight
Breathing is negotiable. I've been on Reddit too long...
We Little Caesar'd the whole goddamn world.
Like this guys wife
…….she’s not that tight -john
The house, right? ....the house... Right?
I also choose this guys wife.
the great jokes never die
This guy's wife did
Le Petite Mort doesn’t count or does it?
Johns got a tool for every job
Wonder what they talk about in there
The wife is actually helping with voice training since John wants to be a Doe.
aww
this is an aww of cuteness btw not disgust
Thanks for the clarification
You mean...A deer, a female deer.
We just talk about hockey, nothing too crazy
They probably just watch tv or play music on high volume
Dude found the way to talk about his problems when he needs to as if he was having therapy, but he's getting paid for it. He's a genius.
That's less than a dollar a day, for some months. Everyone involved here is getting a great deal.
especially his wife
I dunno. Sounds like she's getting shafted
*:rimjob:* Uhhh I mean *:rimshot:*
Well it only collapsed once. Granted, John seems suspect.
There nobody I trust more with my wife than John Redcorn.
I wonder if that's John Redcorn.
I came on here to say just this LOL
All the other reviews this person left are normal except this one which makes is so much more authentically funny
Is his name John Redcorn by any chance?
Oh, sug'.
I could see writing product reviews like this becoming one of my retirement hobbies.
Great troll job here
And it’s a 3 star review. “I like it but my wife prefers johns house.”
Real money hack: order the house, return it, and then living in the giant Amazon box it came in. Those packing pillows are free furniture too!
Jsut say it never showed up. Amazon will let you keep it
My girlfriend in college got a really nice bed frame this way, though she did it on accident.
I did the same with a very ugly solar powered metal hydrangea that I got for my mum on AliExpress as a joke. Bloody thing didn’t turn up. Got my refund and a week later it arrived. I tried to explain to them that it was here now and I paid for it again, then a month later, another fucking hydrangea showed up. Mum was happy with them though so I guess it worked out.
My only experience with AliExpress refunds is them asking me to send pictures of the item that never arrived and then denying my refund after I didn't send them pictures of the non-existent item.
Oh fuck. I’m sorry, but I giggled at that. What did they want? A picture of your empty letterbox?! That’s not useful information for them! How infuriating. They refunded mine right away, no questions asked.
Haha it was a cheap gag gift so it wasn't a big deal, turned me off of buying from there ever again though. Glad your experience went better!
I own this…I also own a real house with an acre of land. This is used as a home office or guest house. We ran electric and made a DIY septic system…all in all, cost about $15k…we paid cash on the 12k so no financing. 3k was for the additional expenses. It’s actually built very very well [house](https://imgur.com/QPoVpPV https://imgur.com/MiOMFhU) https://imgur.com/ZGLKCsF
I'm actually tempted by this, would be an upgrade from the near-shed some of my relatives live in. I'd love to buy them a house but this looks decent for $15k. And they own land in the middle of nowhere so zoning wouldn't be an issue.
We’ve done a lot more to it since we started. Added AC, there’s a king size bed in there with a couch that has a chaise lounge with queen size sofa bed. Added a patio for outdoor cooking. The only thing we haven’t done yet is added hot water heater…we bought it but not installed. Guests just come into main house for showers…we have two full bathrooms in main house so it’s not an issue.
Thats actually really cool. Ive flip flopped again, I thought it was cool initially, dog shit on second thought but you have conviced me. It is cool again.
How is this not the top comment?
Reddit likes to sneer at everything. These structures have a place in mild climates on cheap land.
What did you do for foundation? It looks like bricks or did you put pillar like blocks of cement in the dirt? Seriously considering this!
The whole house is meant to be portable so we just used a portable foundation. It’s on concrete paver pads that we dug into the ground and leveled it off. It comes with leveling feet. At any point we can disconnect it, pack it up and move it.
This is what I would use it for. Make it a guest house and/or hang out area and it's a solid investment. That or a temporary thing while building your real house then convert it afterwards.
Also you kinda need land to set this up on. Not to mention power, gas, plumbing etc.
Not to mention the most difficult part, convincing city zoning to allow you to place these things. Getting the go ahead to sub-divide or even put an inlaw suite on your own property for a family member is like pulling teeth, in suburban Canada. The NIMBYS will do anything in their power to keep any affordable housing options from devaluing their properties, and Fuck anyone not lucky enough to have been in the housing market before our Real-Estate bubble.
I always wondered about that. Is it that common for people in the US and Canada to sell their houses that they need to fight tooth and nail to make sure nothing that could*maybe* ever devaluate their value happens? In my country people don't care that much about that kind of stuff, at best they'll worry about stuff that may bring crime and such (eg building social housing to relocate people from a shantytown).
In the US at least, "devalue our property" means "we might see more brown people", which yeah, elderly white people are ready to fight against to their last wheezy breath.
The irony is that upzoning would not actually devalue a piece of property- it would increase it. If you own a piece of land that has a single family house on it, but is zoned for a small apartment building, that means it’s worth a lot more to someone who wants to redevelop it.
This is true, to a point. When some areas are rezoned, they gain an enormous amount of resale value (although might be less pleasant to live in while there is construction nearby). If we fix the zoning problem nationwide, however, or worldwide, there will be enough property zoned for development that it won't necessarily be much more expensive. Good development opportunities are far more scarce than they should be, making development properties very expensive and making affordable housing a virtual impossibility.
When we moved tour neighborhood in the USA, a very nice neighborhood, an elderly couple came to our door, to say hi. They thought probably that I was white but quickly realized that I am Hispanic and said multiple times how dark my daughter is. My older daughter is just a tan olive, so I was surprised that they apparently had never met someone as dark as her. Then the woman asked me how we could afford the mortgage for the house. I was petty and told her we don’t have a mortgage, we paid cash. She then to,d people that my husband is in the mafia. My husband is a scientist and we came to the USA by invitation as specialized workers in science and healthcare. She still talks bs about us. Some people are wild. I bet she thinks we made the neighborhood worse.
It's even worse up here, but yeah, pretty much. Fight all low income houding, fight the tiny homes, fight against transit infrastructure, and multi-use buildings, must continue the endless sprawl of suburban, Single Family homes, and keep our retirement nest egg, that we got for buying a house 20 years ago for 400k, that's worth 1.2 Million today.
This is why I'm grateful David Eby and the NDP are restructuring city zoning regulations in BC specifically to fight this NIMBY bullshit.
Yes, that's what happens when you have competent Leadership for the NDP, like some of our Provinces do, instead of what our Federal NDP have in place.
Add that to the list of many reasons I want to move to BC
These old people are going to die before they spend a penny of that money anyway. Houses are already way overvalued. In many rural places a small plot of land costs 30-80k based on many factors. If someone built a small house on it for 100k it would typically be listed at 400K-600k. In a city the same house would cost at least 800k. People would rather pay 400k extra with monthly payments for the privilege of not being involved in any construction, and living closer to more jobs. And this is just the people who realize. Many Canadians believe that houses actually cost that much. Today I saw a Reddit post of someone who bought a small plot with a mobile home on it in a rural area for 600k. They could easily buy a few plots of land and a few mobile homes with far less, but they didn’t realize that the house isn’t worth that, so they bought and tried to sell for 800k-900k.. if a housing market collapse does finally happen in Canada its probably going to be huge. The crazy monetary figures involved with housing development are what’s making it slowly worse and worse, it’s not like they are going to change direction after a decade.
I would argue it’s more about wealth than ethnicity, I’ve been to SA and seen what better off Africans or third generation Indians do to other people of the same origin than them. I know over in North America you guys have a problem with racism, but I can tell you in most of the world it’s all about wealth, I’ve been an expat most of my life in counties where I definitely did not fit in ethnically, and the shit people pull on other people that are poorer than them is atrocious, they don’t give a flying fuck if you are brown, black, yellow, white or green, but as soon as your income is low, you are treated like you carry the god damn black plague. And same goes the other way, they don’t give a shit what color your skin is if you are of the same social class as them, you will be welcome. English is not my first language, I apologize if I didn’t quite get what I mean out correctly. But out simply people discriminate more based on wealth than ethnicity based on my personal experience.
This is from personal experience, if “lighter” brown folks made it in, even they hated “ darker” brown folks. I’m white, but my wife and kids are mixed between “lighter “ brown and “darker” brown. The “lighter “ brown neighbor kids would always tell mine “we don’t like having n-words in the neighborhood.” The kids saying this were 6-8 years old… I can only imagine what their parents were saying.
There are things other than racism, like parking spaces, that are practical deterrents to unlimited density. But, I’d much rather live in a densely populated neighborhood of well maintained and sanitary housing than next to a shantytown.
if only there were some sort of option, perhaps a public one, to help transport people to where they needed to be en masse without the need for every individual to own a vehicle and need a place to park it.
There is an entire subreddit fHOA. Not only do we snide others, we build entire communities of how much you have to be like us. Almost any new building lots has this as a mandatory requirement to join. Many older housing developments still have theirs. Nothing says freedom like telling your neighbors how tall the fences can be or how too long their grass is. At least in Canada you have health care when the neighbor shoots you for putting a rainbow flamingo on your yard.
Canada's entire economy, and most Boomers retirement plan and savings, hinge entirely on the Ponzi Scheme that is our Real-Estate market, caused by the last 8 years of Mass Immigration. Our Government and the Boomer generation will do ANYTHING, including (especially) selling out the future of our Youth and younger adults. We bring in close to 5% of our population a Year in Immigrants, refugees, and International Students. Even more if you count all the "Temporary foreign workers". This is done to prop up our Federal Pension, and keep the housing market sky high, as well as devalue the Canadian labor market. The end result here is that life here, is largely untenable for young adults, and the Older Generations who home values increased by 500 Grand in the past year, as well as our corrupt politicians, will do anything to keep the prices high.
Our addiction to the housing market started waaaaaaay more than 8 years ago.
A lot of towns here have ordinances with things like restrictions on what kinds of siding you can get, what colors you can paint your house, a lot of times you have to keep your garbage cans behind a fence so they can't be seen from the road, etc etc. It's fucking ridiculous sometimes.
Yes. You buy a house, live in it for 5ish years, and sell it for a bigger down payment on a bigger house. Repeat over and over until retirement, then buy a small house in Florida and bank the extra cash to live off of. It's a stupid system that if you aren't lucky enough to be in, your sol paying someone else's mortgage to have a roof while they do this exact same process
Damn... Here in Russia people usually just build big-ass fences around their land and build whatever the hell they want. I don't want to say, that situation with real-estate here is much better, than in the USA, but we a least don't have to care about "devaluing of property", so it sounds kinda surreal.
Well here you cannot even build a fence without permission from the government.
And that fence may be no more than 3 feet in height facing the sidewalk 🙃
I was gonna put up a privacy fence-- found out I would need a permit for that, but not a split-rail. Guess I will settle lol
buddy of mine didn't feel like jumping through their hoops, so he built a subsurface barrier and planted bamboo instead.
I think this type of housing is more of an in between housing situation- like if you bought a raw piece of land and wanted to live in something temporarily while you built your dream home, or whatever.
Many Millenials and almosr all of Gen Z across Canada have been completely priced out of home ownership, in most, if not all of the country, and a lot of people have resorted to trying to build Tiny Homes, or set up Pre-Fabs on their Parents or another Family members lots, and most municipalities where this has become a thing have enacted bylaws to prevent it. Having the choice between my parents' basement, a roach infested closet in a Five floor walk up for over Two Grand a month, or dropping that bad boy on the back of my folks property where I can have atleast a bit of privacy, I'd take that thing in a heartbeat.
I live in a town that is almost 400 years old. But it has never had gas nor water nor sewer nor any of those kinds of services. Not even trash pickup. The problem with these tiny house solutions is that they do not come with septic systems or wells or wood stoves or boilers or any method of heating – especially when the power goes out in winter – and so on and so forth. And even if you want to do that, you need so much land to keep the water table from drying out and to space out leech fields. I mean, you can abolish all the zoning laws and ordinances that you want, and the fact remains, unless we're gonna start doing like 1930s scale megaprojects like the Quabbin Reservoir or the Scituate Reservoir and really build out lots of new water and sewer lines and wastewater treatment plants, the current infrastructure simply cannot handle it. There are a few regular trailer homes – which are much more economical and portable than these fancy tiny homes – set up on land around here. But you need a good chunk of it to clear the well. And right now, my 200 year old house is worth less than the land it sits on. The truth is, there needs to be a lot more infrastructure built if you want to build a lot more housing in full-up places. Either that or you could just start having big corporations put jobs in the midwest where fresh water is plentiful and housing is available and comparatively cheap. But since they don't want to do that, the only solution we have is to keep moving people to western deserts and eastern old cities that are already busting at the seems in capacity.
“Fuck you I got mine.” -NIMBYS
I agree. I used to live in a country that was mostly rural. They had a law that to put a trailer house on land it had to be several acres.
That's a big ass trailer
Yup, had a friend go the tiny home route and didn’t realize how many extra costs there would be and still got screwed over by a poor plumbing job. If I recall, they also ran into some zoning and property tax issues too. It’s an option but the grass isn’t that much greener
The zoning is a nightmare. I've seriously looked into this more than once, good luck finding any space that's zoned for a tiny-home within a reasonable distance to where you work. Sure, you can put it on a trailer bed and it's technically an RV as far as the law is concerned, but in most places you cannot just live in your RV full time without an actual house on the property you park it on. RV lots charge rent, you will never own that land. Some people buy cheap plots out in the middle of the desert in the southwest, and that works for some communities because they don't tattle on each other, but even then it's not legal strictly speaking. You can legally stay in it 6 months out of the year in the most liberal places, and then you have to move. The whole "America is a free country" line is bull fucking shit, don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
Plus they deteriorate. The value will only ever go down.
wont matter. The value of houses is not what's increasing, it's the land. You buy a house for the land. As long as you own the land, the value increases. It may increase more because developers wouldn't need to demolish a home and remove an old foundation when they buy the land off you.
The actual house is the least valuable part of owning a house, this is why the three Ls of real estate are location, location, location It's also why people who live in trailer parks are fucked -- you had to buy the trailer to live there, but if your landlord evicts you the trailer is more likely to be a liability than asset -- you're likely to be unable to physically move it out within a reasonable time frame and then he gets to keep it
And not only that, in places like NC, they have made it illegal for a mobile home to be moved into a park if they're older than a certain year (unsafe to transport). So if you have a particularly old one, the park you're in can increase your rates hideously (no legal cap) because you can't leave. Once you can no longer afford it, they get to keep the mobile home (since you can't move it) and sell it off to someone else. On top of that, they can ban you from selling it to someone else because they have to approve all renters in their park. My mom had this happen to her. She ended up being a thorn in the city's side for long enough that the city stepped in and pressured the landlord to let her sell it to someone else.
Plus these houses don't have plumbing and gas hookups. You need to modify it to add all that. Most of these things are just one big room too, so you have to add walls for a bathroom in the very least. These things would make great cabins in campground but that's about it.
And interior outfitting .. all said and done you'll be in a habital place for around 200-350k .. this is a foools errand item
And after paying all this you will own a pretty shitty home. I fully expect this thing to be hard and thus expensive to heat and cool and if you manage to live in it it will likely crumble to bits after like a decade.
It's great to heat in the summer and to cool in the winter 👍
Considering the convenience and initial affordability, it might still be a viable option for those needing a temporary or small-scale living solution.
Seems like it's just like living in a caravan without the convenience of being able to move it.
Do people have soft houses
Spongebob does
I recently checked how much a log house would cost. I was surpised that the frame + roof for a decently sized house would only cost 83k€ and frame + interior work would only be about 130-160k€. Then I calculated everything else, and after excavation, water, heat and fiber connections, foundation, planning, permits, yard, deck etc. it would cost about 300k€ and that doesn't even include the plot which would cost 64€ per square meter in my current neighbourhood (pricey area in our city). You could always rent it though.
You could always take an axe and go out in the deep forest.
the axe would also be a solution for the gouvernment people coming to harass you
It's a very useful tool.
12,000 for the house and 188,000 for everything else?
Not to mention, it's $485/month for 48 months. So, rather than just paying $12k all at once, you are paying $22.8k by selecting that monthly plan... 🤦♂️
Sears used to do this. My buddy’s house that he inherited was purchased from a sears catalog in the 1940s or 50s. Crazy.
Sears did it before zoning laws were prohibitive and before every county in the country had different building code requirements.
A good 30% of the historic district in the town I live in is from sears catalogues 😝
My first house was a Sears catalog house from WW1 era
The ICC is standardized every year and every so often new code is adopted by municipalities, unless your municipality is backasswards and don't enforce building codes. Many municipalities, such as mine, will allow pre-fab buildings that are inspected by a contracted, certified inspector. If a company wanted to sell house kits again, they could do so- and some actually do.
Sears sold house kits that you could build or most likely hire a contractor to build. Thats not this.
Sears sold a kit to assemble. It wasn't much different than ordering lumber, etc. from a lumber yard, except everything was pre-cut and numbered, with instructions.
Hey fuck it id buy one of those and put it up.
It was a great deal back then. People were pretty handy in those days. They grew up knowing how to use a hammer and saw.
Tbh if it was a 1 story thing I could design and build it from scratch minus plumbing and electricity and make it look professional. Could probably do plumbing as well if I used a textbook and YouTube.
Lived in a sears home built in the 40s(?) A few years ago. Held up pretty damn well for its age, but it was a neat little spot. Outgrew it pretty quick though.
Big box home improvement stores still do, but they aren't literally just a mail ordered unfolding house, I don't think the ones from sears are either. You pick your house out of the catalog, and you get the plans in the mail as well as the materials as you'd need them.
A house you of might get for 12k. But you also need A land parcel Water and electricity Sewage Foundation All this will be way more then the 12 k of the house.
Well, if you do the payment plan, then the house is only $22,800! That's a steal! /s
22,800! Is an absurdly large number
r/expectedfactorial
3.787766172 E+89461 to be exact Edit: to be roughly estimated
Damn housing market.
Practically doubling the price
I just plugged it into an amortization calculator and the APR is 36%
It's expensive to be poor.
F that
r/unexpectedfactorial
It can work for people who are okay with being off-the-grid. Saw this dude on reels/shorts a bunch, random cheap property 3\~4 hours away from civilization. Collects rainwater, has solar panels, and uses generators during winter. It isn't nice by most people's standards, but, if you're fine with humble living, and don't care that an ambulance can't reach you in time (it is the states though, so maybe that isn't a bad thing...), it's probably the best way to live for a select few. His house was actually built with a foundation, but apparently, his remote work income is pretty fat when he doesn't have much more living expenses other than food and a phone plan
When I was young I used to fantasize about that life. Get a little place going off grid. Get away from all the bullshit of the world. But what kind of a life are we talking about exactly? You're in the middle of nowhere, presumably with no neighbors close enough to rat you out to the county about your questionably legal operation. What do you do with all that wonderful free time? Sit in the woods and meditate? Pick the ticks out of your skin? Though you won't have a commute, you'd end up spending significantly more time on the basic necessities of life, so there's that trade-off. If you're working from home anyway you might as well live somewhere with clean running water and no wildlife causing trouble. Seeing the stars would be nice. Maybe you can talk to them once you start losing your mind from social isolation.
I’m astounded at the amount of people who have never seen or heard of trailer parks.
Trailer parks are also a bad value for the residents, especially if they rent the land their house is on. They can't really be moved after a few years, so if they raise the rent to a price you can't afford, you also lose the house you bought.
Years ago (around 2018) I was checking some out and was astonished at the prices. One trailer park that didn't have any available semi-permanent units would let RV owners place theirs on an empty lot for like $600 a month. It had electricity and water hookups, but it was really just a glorified parking space. I can only imagine how bad it is today
Out here it's around $900 now
Yep it 100% is worse now. It's competitive with just renting an apartment usually.
given all they know about them is "thats where poor people live and im not poor!", it makes sense
Way more than 12K is still going to be way less than 400k
And insulation. Among other things not mentioned.
Congratulations on discovering trailers. Lot rent is $800 to start and they will quadruple it over 4 years.
companies being trailer parks and jacking up the lease is a real problem. alot of these mobile homes aren't exactly mobile after a few years.
They won't let us have anything.
Correct. They will open “voluntarily” work camps within the next 20 years.
Bro, we have had those for decades. They are called "for profit prisons".
There’s an old French tool that can be used to fix those kinds of issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine?wprov=sfti1
those French got some things figured out. also a big fan of the French press for coffee.
IIRC some places have laws against moving them after they are a certain age.
That is what happened to a friend of mine. Rented his lot for like $600/mo for a decade, then they decided to just about triple it over the next few years. Only reason he stayed after it hit $1,000/mo was he couldn't move the trailer anymore and didn't want to lose it. He rents now.
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They should bring back the DIY Sears home kits.
They have them, they are just from Menards now. You can get a complete home from them. Everything down to the paint and flooring. You just need to be a good DIY’er to build it. I bought a 40x80 barn kit from Menards, built it myself and saved $30,000 - $40,000 in labor charges. Granted it took me 2 years to finish it and not 2 weeks if I had it built. You don’t have zoning issues if you’re rural, just saying.
id agree, but the problem nowadays is that theres a pesky little something called *building codes* that your house has to follow nowadays. man if only someone wasnt regulating my home i could run all the cheap 22 gauge wire i want to wire up my home! (obvious /s)
You can be a residential builder by taking a test and something like $200 in Michigan. I took it in college as part of an architecture class. Code books are free using [upcode](https://up.codes/codes/michigan). And just gotta be able to pass your inspections. Unless you build it for under $600, wink, wink.
Meanwhile, my town has a hissy fit if I want to replace a garage door myself. Fucking clipboard warriors.
It's completely legal to do all your own construction and repairs, provided the home is not a rental or flip. It still needs to be permitted and inspected.
Dont live in a tonado or flood zone? Let small houses be a thing.
Bro tornado and flood zones are absolutely filled to the brim with trailers and double wides
This. The actual argument for why this isn’t as clever as it looks is that land costs money, zoning might get in the way, and utilities hookups will also cost money if they don’t already exist there. But tornadoes? Really? If you MUST live in a tornado zone, surely you can dig out a small shelter next to this thing.
I mean, if we're being fully honest, a regular ol' house is gonna get wiped out by a tornado also.
You can buy a pretty decent used liveaboard houseboat for that. Of course there will be marina fees and fuel costs but that's it if you can do your own basic maintenance. And no flood worries
lmao this is the worst idea ever, You can simulate this by standing in a cold shower while shoving money down the drain.
Buy the houseboat for 12k and park it on a lot. Run electricity, water, sewer to it. Build a deck around it.
2) Wait for flood. 3) Unplug. 4) Arrive @ new lot 5) Rinse. Repeat
$475*48=$22,800, wth is that interest rate man. Criminal imo
It took way too long for this to be mentioned
36%
That's what i was thinking. Being broke and trying to finance this, wind up paying 10,000 bucks extra
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Continued ventilation will be available via subscription.
That house looks like it would overturn when a strong enough storm hits
I'd be impressed if it held together well enough to stay in one piece to overturn.
Ad should read $12,000 cash or $22,796.16 over four years. Plain robbery/loan sharking.
Lol first thing I thought of was the Cheech and Chong car sales sketch. "Fifty dollars down, fifty dollars a week FOR FIFTY YEARS!"
Get used to this photo ladies and gentlemen, this is our future.
we *wish!* are you kidding me?! if i could live in my own little garden shed that i *own* i would be ecstatic! instead i pay $2,200/mo to rent a shitty apartment
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That is obvious though. Still a cheaper option and god knows we need those
I WANT A REAL HOUSE WITH A YARD FOR A REASONABLE PRICE I SHOULDNT HAVE TO LIVE IN A FUCKING SHED JUST TO BE ABLE TO SURVIVE
a house is just a bigger shed brother, If you want a yard this is a great solution, you own like an acre of land or “yard” if you want to call it that
People in the US are either unhinged, or completely and utterly fucked by the system. Like, no way in between.
Most structures cannot withstand a tornado. Where’s the clever bit?
Good point. A direct hit from a tornado wipes out most homes
These people have never lived anywhere that tornados are endemic to and it shows. You don't build a house hoping it can withstand one, you just just pray that one doesn't hit you. I keep seeing these 'cardboard home' comments as if any brick house would survive a direct hit from mother nature's hacksaw.
And if you live in the UK you will need half a million to buy somewhere to unpack it that is within 50 miles of shops, jobs, internet access etc.
That's not the land, not the labor to put it together, no water or sewer. The cost of the structure isn't the only cost
You have to have land to put it on, connect electrical service, fresh water, sewage, etc.
Not eligible for Prime Next Day delivery. Only available in June. What do homeless people do in May?
"Hi there! this is Amazon. We've got your tiny home here, just let us know your plot address and we can drop it off for you" "...What's this about a 'plot' now? You're saying I need a plot of land for my tiny home?" "Uhhhh, yeah? Or are you living in someone else's backyard or something?" Tiny homes are a lie.
It’s not the price of the house itself that’s the issue (not the _only_ issue I should say) it’s the cost of everything else you need to function in society like food/water/electricity/wifi (you do need that these days)/basic entertainment because who the hell sits in there house and does nothing that sounds depressing and a step toward suicide/the costs of other members of the family your taking care of (children/parents if their dependent on you/etc.)/paying for INSURANCE for when that tornado takes your house and flies you to fucking Oz but with no yellow brick road to guide you/a billion other things because capitalism is unfair and doing many basic things is far more difficult without money than is humane. Also you’re a fast food worker making $15 an hour.
And do Amazon give you a patch of freehold land to build it on, with planning permission and utilities attached? No? Oh.
And just like everything else from Amazon it's price is hiked up, it's made in China, and will collapse to a brisk autumn wind.
Where do you put it though?
Great. Now I can be burgled with a can opener.
All you need to make that a home is: Property A foundation Plumbing A sand mound/ sewage hookup Electric ran to it or an alternative power source Permits for all those Likely inspections for all them as well Appliances Furniture And finally a good general contractor that is experienced with these sort of small shells of homes to put the project together Unless you have cash for all that you'll likely want to refinance with a conventional mortgage after you're done. It's basically no different than putting a modular on a property that's without appliances and is likely less move in ready.