[MCN] How a 'Right-Sized' 1950s Home Became a 'Tight Fit' in 2012 == Forest and Finance fall on a popular dream

[Lance Olsen]

How a 'Right-Sized' 1950s Home Became a 'Tight Fit' in 2012
https://patch.com › pennsylvania › hellertown › bp--ho...

In the 1950s, the size of the typical new home increased to 950 square feet, and "by the 60's 1,100 square feet was typical, and by the 70's, …

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Have American Homes Changed Much Over the Years? T
https://compasscaliforniablog.com › have-american-home...

1960s: The average new-home size grew to 1,200 square feet, giving its 3.33 residents a spacious 360 square feet of room apiece. The bedroom-bathroom ratio flipped from the previous decade, with 2.5 bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms.

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This Was Considered a "Huge House" 50 Years Ago - Best Life
https://bestlifeonline.com › huge-houses-50-years-ago

In 2018, the average new construction single-family home spanned more than 2,600 square feet and sold for nearly $378,000. However, in the 1960s ...

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COUNTERPUNCH  DECEMBER 1, 2007

Of Forests and Finance <https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/12/01/of-forests-and-finance/>
By L <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/lance-olsen/>ance Olsen
https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/12/01/of-forests-and-finance/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/lance-olsen/>
 <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/lance-olsen/>
Extended excerpt

In one of the most ironic twists of logging booms over the past couple decades, many people believe that the end result was construction of homes to satisfy the needs and dreams of ordinary people. There’s only one problem. It hasn’t been working out that way.

The consequences of this mistaken perception are still not widely reported. But they’re certainly no secret. 

In 1995, for example, Winton Pitcoff summed up the state of housing in America for March/April issue of Dollars & Sense. Pitcoff reported that,  “Thirty years ago the nation boasted a surplus of housing affordable to low income people. Today there is a shortage of more than four million units.” 

The loss was no secret. It was actually a matter of public record. By 1995, the U.S. Census Bureau's American Housing Survey would report a "43 percent decline over the last two decades in the number of low-rent units in the private housing market." 

This decline continued under Democrats as well as Republicans. Pitcoff  explained that the supply of affordable housing declined by 900,000 units just from 1996-1998 alone.” 

LOGGING FOR THE WEALTHY

Meanwhile, Congress and successive US administrations, Democrat and Republican, backed tax breaks that were subsidizing large and expensive homes for buyers in the top fifth of America’s income distribution. 

Tax allowances under the Mortgage Interest Deduction let affluent homebuyers deduct interests costs of borrowing for high-end homes, including second homes/vacation homes, in many cases demanding the toppling of old growth forests to get logs big enough to impress.

These tax breaks, according to Dollars & Sense magazine, amounted to $82 billion in 1999 alone. Cushing Dolbeare, founder of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, was cited in a Dollars & Sense interview saying, “ If we were willing to spend as much on low and middle income housing as we do on the Mortgage Interest Deduction, we’d have more than enough to solve the housing crisis.”

A PROBLEM THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE SOLVED

It’s not that Congress had not passed law to offer housing for the nation’s unrich. Indeed, the Federal Housing Administration was set up for that purpose. FHA even had an insurance fund to cover banks' losses if poorly paid borrowers couldn’t meet their loan payments.

However, in June, 1990, Associated Press business reporter John Cunniff disclosed that the program had been twisted to reward those who didn’t need it and deny loans to those who did.  That twist, according to records examined by Cunniff, was causing “ incredible losses” for the program’s insurance fund. 

It turned out that 100 percent of the government-insured loans intended for the needy were going to the well-off. And the bigger the loan, the more likely it was to end up in foreclosure. An expert Cunniff contacted for an explanation told him that, while the government might lose money on these bad loans, the brokers who set up financing made more money on the larger ones than they would on smaller loans needed for the nation’s poor.

UNECONOMIC BOOMS

During booms, the Wall Street Journal would report in early 2000, homes get bigger.  Like Americans’ waistlines, the Journal observed, the new American home was getting much bigger, and more extravagant. While affordable housing was uncomfortably rare for the Americans who most needed it, the fortunate were demanding homes with “more bedrooms, more bathrooms, and more flourishes than ever before.”

An architect told the Journal that the trend was “appalling.”  He said that the bigger-is-better trend was about showing off to neighbors.  In his opinion, people buying luxury homes were saying, “I can be a 1920s tycoon like anybody else.”

One homebuilder interviewed by the Wall Street Journal was quoted as saying,“ Does anybody need all this? No.”

Indeed, the Journal observed, “Need is hardly a consideration these days.” 

Given the number of tall old trees toppled for a then-booming market in luxury scale housing built from old growth logs, it would be hard to find a forest conservationist who would disagree. Then too, big and old as the trees might have been when taken down, they may have served as CO2-devouring allies for decades -- even hundreds of years — if left alive.

REFORMING THE FOREST SERVICE

Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, would stand angrily from his grave if he knew of all this. “The rightful use and purpose of our natural resources,” Pinchot wrote in 1947,  “ is to make all the people strong and well, able and wise, well-clothed, well-housed, with equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none.”

Back then, America’s political leadership was listening. In 1949, America passed its Housing Act, which stated that it is the policy of the United States to provide “ a decent home and suitable environment for every American family.”

At that point, Americans could feel reasonably confident that the nation’s logging policy was aimed at meeting real need.



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“The recognition that things that are not sustainable will eventually come to an end does not give us much of a guide to whether the transition will be calm or exciting.”

Timothy Geithner, 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. He was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2003 to 2009, following service in the Clinton administration.


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"Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes 
immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive."

Attributed  to Thomas Hobbes

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“Making connections is the essence of scientific progress.”

Chris Quigg, “Aesthetic Science,”

Scientific American, April 1999

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“The structural relations within and between human societies and their environments form the most complex systems known to science.”

Charles D. Laughlin and Ivan Brady, editors, Extinction and Survival in Human Populations. Columbia University Press, 1978

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“Teleconnections can be defined as linkages between climate anomalies at some distance from each other. The large distances in space and the differences in timing between these anomalous events make it difficult for one to believe that one event (El Nino or La Nina) could possibly have influence on the other (e.g. drought in southern Africa or hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic). Nevertheless, physical and statistical research has shown that such linkages do exist.”

Michael Glantz. Currents of Change : Impacts of El Nino and La Nina on Climate and Society. Cambridge University Press, 2001

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"We linked 25,000 Animalia species threat records from the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List to more than 15,000 commodities produced in 187 countries and evaluated more than 5 billion supply chains in terms of their biodiversity impacts. Excluding invasive species, we found that 30% of global species threats are due to international trade. In many developed countries, the consumption of imported coffee, tea, sugar, textiles, fish and other manufactured items causes a biodiversity footprint that is larger abroad than at home."

M. Lenzen, D  & A. Geschke.International trade drives biodiversity threats in developing nations. Nature  7 June 2012 doi:10.1038/nature11145

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