I’m looking for a new apartment. The housing market seems grossly overpriced at the moment, so unless I inherit some unexpected wealth or else get re-married (God forbid) then I won’t be buying a house. The rental market is also pretty pricey. I don’t understand how working-class people afford these apartments, but that’s a separate issue. Here’s my question: why don’t we see minimally priced, no-frills, utilitarian apartments? I’m talking dense, rectangular, dreary concrete structures that are laid out like beehives, which is a fitting analogy given the drone-like nature of working class existence. Instead what I see is a bunch of "luxury" "apartment homes" with winding (read: inefficient) footpaths through green spaces (read: dog shit fields) with palm trees, fitness centers, rec rooms, and other wasteful extravagances. I don’t want to live in a repurposed Spanish Mission, and I certainly don’t want to live in a pretend repurposed Spanish Mission. My goals for the future don’t consider whether or not the exterior of my domicile is adorned with some ridiculous patchwork of gaudy colors and art-deco facades.
If I could rent a living space that was durably constructed with minimal decorative embellishment and wasted space, for half the price of "luxury apartment home living", then I could save up enough money to buy my own house, which is in my opinion still the most direct path to financial stability for most working class people.
The relatively new fad of using shipping containers as modular housing units is a great idea. As these containers are (relatively) standardized in terms of their physical dimensions, and are readily transportable by existing commercial vehicles, a system can be imagined whereby people keep their container modules for decades, acquiring additional modules or divesting modules as circumstances require. The family would be highly mobile, being able to load their home modules on trucks and relocate to another facility quickly, cheaply, and easily. Instead of packing everything in boxes, transporting boxes, and unpacking at the new location, one would simply need to secure their belongings in place for transit on a tractor-pulled chassis trailer. Every "apartment" facility would have the equipment on-site to stack your modules into the desired configuration, with utility hookups and stairways/elevators already in place.
This radical approach to housing may be unappealing to some, and that’s fine with me. If we could all have 4,000 square-foot detached single family homes with an acre of grass and a swimming pool, that would be great too. Unfortunately, this is not possible given our population and limited resources, not to mention the suburban sprawl and increasingly impractical commutes. If telecommuting becomes widespread, then perhaps cities will become less important, although I’m not sure how the logistics of distribution of food and goods would evolve if we all dispersed into the countryside.
I know I’m a bit of an odd duck, at least if you take the rest of society to be normal, so it would be interesting to me to see how many people would be in support of a more efficient housing system, if it meant that they could spend a lot less on rent. After all, our society (in the USA) has more than doubled real GDP per capita in the past 50 years, so does it make sense that our working class still spends about one-third of their income on housing? I don’t think the quality of working class housing has doubled since 1966.
