I feel like all sorts of problems flow from treating homes as fungible commodities. As “a house, not a home,” as it were. Independent of residents’ schools, nei

I feel like all sorts of problems flow from treating homes as fungible commodities. As “a house, not a home,” as it were. Independent of residents’ schools, neighbors, transportation, jobs, culture, churches, family compositions, duties to others, and spectacular variety of lifestyles. One flavor of that ill is treating homes as financial investments, another flavor haunts social housing schemes over the years; this proposal is a different flavor of the same ill. > Anyone can take an available plot, pay to build a house on it, and live there for life So they can either pay an enormous amount to build their own one-off (but make a decision they’ll have to live with forever, no matter the changes in their future circumstances); or they can scrap over secondhand “free” housing stock via lottery? How is a plot created and made available in the first place? Since these don’t have homes on them, presumably they’re carved out of farmland way outside the exurbs, right? When is it 1/4-acre subdivisions, when is it larger or smaller? I’d invite the author to bend a New Yorker’s ear about the pleasures of affordable housing lotteries… or about NYCHA living. Speaking of which, how does this work as far as multi-family dwellings, and renewal? Or is the housing stock frozen in time at the moment these SFDs are built, save for the policed “maintenance”? What’s the penalty for somebody who doesn’t “maintain” to the cops’ standards—uprooted and then what? Moved to punitive housing, if they don’t have a few hundred thousand dollars to fund building a new house on an available plot?