we may respect someone's decisions, but that doesn't mean we're going to put financing behind them.

Sigh.

I am not sure if we are on the same page here with what we are trying to communicate. In some sense, you have to put money behind it in order to respect it, but perhaps not in any manner that you are meaning by that comment.

The current state of the U.S. housing situation grows out of the history of the past many decades, going back to at least WWII. During WWII, men went off the war and women got factory jobs, consumer items were rationed and car factories got converted to making military vehicles. You had a lot of de facto two income households with no kids and no means to have a child due to the man being on a different continent from the woman. During WWII, savings rates were as high as 50% during some years, just because there was no means to spend it all. Luxury items simply weren't available and people in the U.S. were being encouraged to grow Victory Gardens so that food grown on farms could be used to supply the military overseas.

The men came back home after WWII and they were entitled to VA benefits, including help buying a home. Practically overnight, the federal government put together the financial infrastructure to help large numbers of returning soldiers buy a house. There weren't enough houses to go around, in part because WWII was preceded by The Great Depression. So America also had to create the housing infrastructure overnight. This resulted in Levittowns going up all over the place, introducing suburbs to the nation.

At that point in time, the average new home was less than 1200 square feet, two bedrooms, one bath and housed a family with two adults and two to three children. By 2000, the average new house was over 2000 square feet and housed a family with two adults and only one child. We have diversified demographically and we now have a lot more elderly retired couples with no kids at home, single parents, and other non-nuclear families while at the same time having a lot fewer housing alternatives in real terms. During The Great Depression, things like SRO's and boarding houses were a lot more common. These days, if you are a single young person with not much of a paycheck, in most parts of the U.S., you wind up renting an apartment designed for a nuclear family and sharing it with roommates because there basically are no other viable alternatives.

This is all rooted in housing policy, which is very tied up in things like tax breaks and financing instruments. If you do not change policy in a way that makes money/financing instruments more accessible to people currently getting ugly labels because of their low income or lack of housing or what not -- because, in short, they fail to be what America wants to believe is some picture of success, as if that were context-neutral, which it very much is not -- then, no, you aren't ACTUALLY respecting people who are currently being screwed over royally by our current system.

Fixing it doesn't mean more government dole programs that control the lives of the recipients. It means altering national policy such that we genuinely need less of that because market solutions are more available to more people. Right now, housing policy and financing instruments tie the hands of a lot of people.

Anyway, I have work to do. I no longer get food stamps and I kind of would like to eat every day this month. So I need to excuse myself from further participating here, at least until I get some paid writing done.

Thank you.