Causes and Effects

            I have said in my writings that I am a general contractor and a Real Estate broker. It is not uncommon for people to complain about the high cost of houses today. The fact is there are politicians who complain about the high cost of housing who makes claims about us not regulation these prices. They make claims about how houses have doubled in price in the last decade. How muck has the cost of meat gone up. How about when I was a kid, I could buy a loaf of bread for a quarter. Should these items be regulated also. When the government steps in and regulates prices in stead of allowing the natural course of supply and demand to dictate the market price then things get out of kilter.

Many claim the FDR’s policies helped the U S clime out of the Great Depression. The numbers show that they were more likely to have slowed down the process. There are many things which those in office do which effect the cost of housing:

• The monetary value of the dollar:

 Do We not are rise and fall with the monetary value of the dollar in America. Our dollars are no longer backed by gold they are backed by trust. What people perceive our word and our dollar is worth. Thus, the more you have the less each dollar is valued at. To a homeless person the cost of a meal at a fast-food restaurant is expensive. For the wealthy the cost of the same establishment is hardly worth considering. The more you have the less each one is valued at. So when the government prints more money to pay off its debts it take more money to purchase the same item because more money has been introduced to the market. This rise in prices is called inflation, but hopefully you can see that governmental policies effect inflation and in doing so they effect prices.

• Government regulations:

When I began building houses blue print were a few pages deep today there are about twenty pages. I went to California to help build a project the day after the Whittier earth quake. It took me two days to drive there from Ohio. At that time foundation need to be 6” below the frost line. In Southern California there is no frost line or it is 0. We therefore built houses on 6’ wide foot deep foundations with a 3&1/2-inch slab poured.

Technology has caused our industry to change but so has governmental regulations.

I am building an Additional Dwelling Unit (ADU) beside the original home that was built in the early 1900 out of adobe. This home is on a raised foundation on piles of rocks packed with adobe.MY foundation has 24” deep footers and they are 12” wide. There are two sticks of ½ inch rebar top and bottom which is 3” off the bottom and 2” from the top and the slab has 3” of sand, a vapor barrio and another 3” of sand and the 4’ of concrete which was a monolithic pour to help reduce the cost of the anchor bolts which were pre hung every 21 inches around the perimeter of the footer.  There are Hold down STBs by Simpson in place for the 4X6s at he ends of each shear wall which has to be nailed every 4inches around the perimeter and every 6 inches in the interior studs which also are 2x6s. this is for a small single-story house. The foundation that I could have built this project on ten years ago would have cost about $6,000 dollars. Bid for this foundation came in at $40,000 plus one was $35,000.  I opted to do it myself and you know what I discovered was the reason they wanted $40,000 dollars is because that the value of the work is $40,000 dollars. Forms boards cost more. concrete cost more, the pumping cost more. The Sand cost more. The vapor barrio cost more. The steel cost more. The labor cost more the value of the finished product should cost more. When we are regulated to make certain changes to our process of building a house, and that change cost us more then supply and demand shows that the cost will increase.

I am so tired of hearing that statistics show this or that.

There are three types of lies people who want your vote use while running for office:

• Little white lies
• Big whopper lies
• Statistics

In a few days we are given the opportunity to vote. If you chose not to vote then you have chosen to not participate in the system our forefathers have given us. If you do not like the results, you have no complaints, because you did not work within the designed system.

• Note: Images on this blog site are from a free source or taken by the author. No image or group of photos is intended to represent the people the author serves. The author does not care about Race (that is a politically correct term that he does not like because we are all of the same Race, the Human Race. He prefers the term ethnicity, color, religion, sex, gender, marital status, disability, genetic information, national origin, source of income, Veteran or military status, ancestry, citizenship, primary language or immigration status.) He is a service provider for all people. We will all rise together when we band together and help one another. Joseph Erwin is a Real Estate Broker, DRE # O2131799, and a CA general contractor # B 696662. He’s a member of the CRMLS and The East Valley Association of Realtors located in the Inland Empire region of Southern California.