There is no cost of housing crisis

Being committed to place means thinking differently about your home

View of Cornudella de Montsant from the 3rd level, under construction.

I. I stood on the pile of rubble that is my back terrace, talking to my old Catalan neighbor who has lived in the house next door his entire life.

He was asking about the conditions of my property, not least because I had just punched a hole in the stone wall on the top floor, hoping to extract one of the vigas from the roof.

Do you think my house is in better condition than yours? he asked.

It was an odd question—I didn’t really know where he was going with it at first. The whole conversation I was struggling to make sure I understood the Spanish, which he spoke in a kind of slurring drawl.

Yes, I replied, confident that his full-time residence had to be in better shape than my construction zone.

No, he snapped back. He went on to describe his house, which I’ve yet to be inside, except for the garage. He told me there’s a stove to cook food, a chimney to build a fire for heat, and a small room to sleep, he said. Only what he needs to live, and live simply.

I had to give it to him. My place wasn’t too dissimilar: a small camp stove, a comfy bed, and a space heater running off paraffin. I told him it was a small heater, motioning with my hands as if it were perched on top of the heap of stone and brick I was standing on.

He asked me about the chimney—couldn’t I make a fire and heat the whole house, he wondered?

I wanted to laugh, but by now I understood where this was going. My neighbor had previously mentioned how loud I was being with the renovation, including, at times, during siesta (i.e., between 2 pm — 5 pm). He was trying to figure out how much longer I had to go and what kinds of construction I’d be doing. Would I be demolishing more floors? Taking down more walls? How much more hammering and grinding was he in for?

The problem with the chimney he was asking about is that I’d already taken it down the week before, brick by tottering, charred, unstable brick. The whole thing had been resting uncomfortably through the third and fourth levels and up through the roof. Demolishing it had been one of the egregiously expensive line items on a builder’s quote from a year earlier, the one I wasn’t willing to pay. They were going to charge €1,617 for what ultimately took me less than two hours, a testament to how unstable the whole thing was (not to my demolition skills).

So no, I couldn’t heat my home by building a fire in the chimney.

La chimenea es peligrosa, I told my neighbor—the chimney is dangerous. For some reason I didn’t have the heart just then to tell him I’d already demolished the thing. He viewed it as a tool to heat the home. I viewed it as a safety hazard.

His point, though, was that I didn’t need much to live. In this much, I agreed.

I explained in my broken Spanish that I’d be perfectly happy living in a van if that was my situation. That I could certainly live on the first level of my home as it is—I am living there as it is.

For my neighbor, though, this house isn’t some abandoned 250-year-old shell in need of a full gut renovation. It’s a home. There were people living here, albeit 25 years ago. Then he told me about his own house. There used to be five people living there, he said, all his family. All in the same exact space he’s living in on his own right now.

I had to smile. In some ways, I understood completely. I don’t need much to be happy. My kind (climbers) are perfectly happy living out of their vans. And even the most egregiously luxurious climber van doesn’t cost more than $100k to buy and build out. If I wanted, I could live perfectly well in this house just as it is. No more loud banging and grinding noises necessary.

II. All of it reminded me of a conversation some months ago on Notes about the cost of housing crisis in the U.S.

At the time, I had just decided to list for sale a piece of land I own in New Hampshire. It’s a one-acre, wooded property off a state highway, about 40 minutes from Dartmouth University and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Both are major employers in the Central Valley of Vermont.

For years, I’d been hearing about how difficult it was for the people who worked there to find housing anywhere nearby. Homes started at north of $450,000, and meanwhile, interest rates were up, boxing even more young people out of the housing market.

The precipitating Note was something characteristic about how Millennials are essentially fucked when it comes to housing, and Boomers and elites are to blame.

I thought of the land, which I had bought for $22,000. I thought of the tools in my garage, enough to build a small home with. And I thought of the YouTuber who lived in a tent in the Italian Alps right through winter while he restored an old stone ruin. And the other YouTubers who lived under a carport while they built a yurt (and an outdoor kitchen, outhouse, wood storage, and garden) in the Canadian wilderness.

Or the pioneers of New Hampshire, who built their own cabins on the frontier in ruggedly individualistic style. Or the Andalusian immigrants to Barcelona in the 70s who in characteristically pro-social style worked together to build each family a home each night until all the families had homes (there’s a movie out about this out now).

I thought about the sheets of corrugated plastic, €26 each, that I could theoretically use for a roof rather than the insulated thermochip sandwich plates the builder recommended.

On Notes, I wrote that anyone is welcome to buy an acre of land in New Hampshire for about what I paid and start building their home. No mortgage needed. No debt burden. Just a reasonable income that allowed for some tools and building materials. Even most of the lumber they could take from the property itself.

The exchange on Notes didn’t go well. I believe someone told me to read the room, or something like that. I was on the wrong side of that conversation.

III. There are more than 3.8 million empty homes in Spain, including 500,000 empty new homes.

This is a fact I’ve now mentioned three times in this newsletter, but somehow it keeps sticking with me. Because I keep seeing news stories about the cost of living crisis in Barcelona. And the U.S. And the U.K. Pretty much anywhere there are a lot of reasonably ambitious, well-educated young adults wanting to go live.

It was my friend Nate Murphy who eloquently tipped me off to the fact that I don’t actually have to accept the “housing crisis” idea as being true (he also wrote about it in his book). Nate had already done what I was suggesting on Notes—bought an old property in a small town and made it his own, all for less than the cost of the cheapest dump of a one-bedroom apartment where he comes from in the U.K. Oh, and there’s a stunning view of some climbing cliffs from his front terrace.

The other day I was taking another look at the ebook Nate put together about his renovation process, and this section jumped out:

Everyone tells you that it is ‘a lot of work’. It is fairly undeniable… but it also depends on what is ‘a lot’ of work. Some people spend decades in labs developing drugs that never make it to market, some people spend years building a business, some people spend years studying to complete a qualification - but other people don’t tend to primarily tell them that it is going to be ‘a lot of work’ from the offset. When it comes to houses - literally everyone does.

In reality, who cares? It’s just work. The same with any project that takes time; a lot of work is just a little bit of work every day. It is not a big deal. Your back will hurt, yes, probably but your back will hurt if you sit at a desk for 10 hours a day for years too.

Just then my back was hurting quite a bit from working with an angle grinder above my head all day long. But he was right, of course. My back would also hurt if I chose to spend my days sitting at a desk.

Which of those hurts I prefer should be clear enough.

The point is, I can live in this home that cost me a small fraction of what those Central Valley Vermont homes cost. I can spend my days doing physical work to make it nicer. Or, I can just live in this home as-is, just as my neighbor would. Either way, there’s no cost of housing crisis.¹

IV. Of course, it depends on your goals, I told my neighbor.

It’s possible I might want to eventually sell this house, for instance. In which case, the camp stove and teetering (now destroyed) chimney probably wouldn’t cut it.

I watched as his expression changed slightly—until now, I don’t think he had considered the idea that perhaps I was only here temporarily, whether that meant one year or five years. That one day I might choose to sell the property and move on.

Not only has he lived here his whole life, his parents and grandparents lived here as well. Last Spring, he told me the story of how one of his relatives died right there in that house of the Spanish influenza, more than a hundred years ago.

My neighbor is a Somewhere, a term I wrote about in what is arguably this newsletter’s defining post—not an Anywhere. He wakes up, he takes his tractor to his land where there are his olive trees. He harvests the olives and carries them to the local cooperative to be pressed.

Today, I happened to be signing for a package as he was coming back from his land for lunch and siesta. The tractor’s engine hummed in the narrow street as he opened his garage. I watched as he folded down a metal bar, backed the tractor in under the 250-year-old entryway, through his ground floor all the way to his own back terrace, and into a shed behind his house.

I don’t imagine he’ll be doing any renovations on his property any time soon.

But I still fancy myself as having a large project in front of me. A total gut renovation. I am gentrifying his neighborhood before his eyes.

For a moment, I thought of mentioning that my renovation would increase the value of his own property, but quickly thought better of it. A house worth more on paper counts for nothing if you never plan to sell.

Perhaps that’s why so many young people think there’s a cost of housing crisis. They’ve been taught—told, perhaps—to view their home as an investment, one they will one day sell. And why not? It’s not like they plan to stay there forever. Most of my generation aspire to be Anywheres, or at the very least unbound by the structures and constraints of past generations. They plan to move on. Bigger and better things.

And all should be able to have their American dream house, we think—and not have to build it ourselves.

1. The main objection to this line of argument is always something like “But what about jobs!” But the same thing about homes applies to jobs—there are jobs in small towns and rural places where housing is cheap, just not jobs Millennials want to do. I’m speaking mostly of the trades, but there is always the possibility of starting one’s own business, opening a store, a food truck, anything. In New Hampshire, there is an acute shortage of electricians, who also by the way happen to be on the front lines of solving the climate crisis. But people don’t want to become electricians so much as to write white papers or hold conferences about how we need permitting reform to get more electric lines. Here in Cornudella, we could really use a commercial bakery; there was one that opened, but it closed apparently due to bad management. Now, all the shops get their daily baked goods and croissants from the next town over. There are big, untapped needs everywhere you care to look.