The McMansion Nears Completion

 

The House As Of March 4th. As I watch the storms of the new era make kindling of stick houses, their time may be coming to an end. In the Philippines where natural disaster is a part of life, concrete is the material of choice to hold up to earthquakes and typhoons.

 

The house under the big mango tree In Abra, Philippines before renovation in 2018. We don't yet have good photos of the addition because the trees effectively block where it sits over the car bay on the right side of the house.

 My wife who hails from the Philippines and owns a house and land there asked me why it is so hard to buy a house in the U.S. While we are building a house in the U.S. we are also renovating her home in the Philippines. For about the price of a small bathroom in our U.S. house, we are renovating and building on to the one in the Philippines. The Philippines is easier, cheaper and has very little red tape compared to the byzantine process here. By juxtaposing the two types of home ownership the way we do it in America looks insane.

Why so many documents, fees and hands in the pie, just to get a place to live compared to the Philippines? I wonder that also as the invasive surgery of shadowy entities into our finances continues and I get tired of providing documents to mortgage companies that already know full well the financial details of my life through their access to the datasets that control our lives. It is a convenient fiction that I am providing them with things they don't already know. I wonder how long it will be before AI is employed to tell us more about ourselves than we know?

I feel gross about moving into a new single family house, even though it is exciting to move into a house. It is exciting because it is the best of the few bad options available to us. The bad options are keep renting and be at the mercy of corporate landlords that change the deal, own a trailer and be in an even more precarious situation at the whims of landlords and no prospect of owning your lot, purchase a flimsy overpriced townhouse and share a thin wall with neighbors or purchase an oversized and overpriced house on an oversized lot. The problem of the "Missing Middle" and smaller house options is never more apparent than in Williston. Why can't I buy a sub 1000 square foot house as was the norm 70 plus years ago in a new build? If you want to know why I feel so gross, watch this short doc by German public television DW that lays out the basics of why the single family home is a bad deal.