The Housing Crisis

Finally, a practical solution.

If you've been keeping up with the news — which I do NOT advise — you're probably aware that we're having a Housing Crisis, caused by the fact that there aren't enough houses. I don't know why there aren't enough houses, although it wouldn't surprise me, as a longtime subscriber to The New York Times, if the culprit turned out to be Global Climate Change, which has been linked to basically every bad thing that happens, including autotuning and reality television.

But whatever the cause, there aren't enough houses for all the people who want them. The result is that housing prices are insanely high, because of what economists call the Law of Supply and Demand, as illustrated by this graph provided by the distinguished London School of Economics:

The law of Supply and Demand, which was discovered in 1966 by the Bobby Fuller Four Distinguished Economists, states: "I fought the law of supply and demand, and the law of supply and demand won."

What does this technical "lingo" mean in simple layperson's terms? It means that today's young people cannot afford starter homes. This is a tragedy, because having a starter home has been a cherished American tradition dating back to the frontier days, when young pioneer couples looking for "a place of their own" could simply set off into the wilderness, find a plot of land, whack down some trees and build a rustic log cabin to call home. Granted, the vast majority of these pioneers died within weeks from lethal wilderness hazards such as raccoon bites. But during those weeks they were living the American dream.

That dream — the dream of owning a starter home — remained alive for generations of Americans. But because of the insane cost of housing, the dream is now dead, and the victims of this tragedy are the younger generations, especially Gen Zers, who are stuck living in their parents' basements Instagramming their TikToks, or whatever it is they do down there. To make matters worse, Gen Z has to listen to older generations, especially the Boomers — who bought their first homes in 1976 for $875 and paid the down payment in quarters — lecture them about how the problem is that they're lazy and unserious and they waste their money on needlessly complex Starbucks drinks and their music sucks.

For the record, their music does suck, but that is not their fault; it is the fault of Global Climate Change. We cannot, however, blame Gen Zers for their inability to afford houses. There is simply no way that even a hard-working and frugal Gen Zer can save up enough money to buy so much as a small starter home at the current average price of a three-bedroom home in America, which I am too busy to look up right now but I bet it's crazy.

What can be done? How can we, as a society, revive the dream of home ownership for our young people? One idea I had — you're going to wonder why you never thought of this — would be to develop some kind of technology that would physically extract basements from under the homes of older generations and move them, with Gen Zers still inside, to currently unoccupied land. To avoid legal complications, this would ideally happen without telling the older generations about it. If, at some point down the road, Boomers start noticing that their basements have gone missing, we can tell them it's Global Climate Change.

But this is a long-term solution. It could take months, even years, to develop the required Stealth Basement Extraction (SBE) technology. Until then, what do we tell our younger generations yearning to own a house of their own?

We tell them the truth.

We explain to them that a house is not just one thing, but an elaborate contraption consisting of many, many parts, called "house parts," and that all of these house parts are in a constant state of decay and breakage, and whenever you repair one house part another one will break and IT NEVER EVER ENDS.

For example, as I write these words, my wife and I are waiting for a handyman named Mauricio to come to our house to fix a bathroom "pocket door." This is a kind of door, invented by Nazi scientists, that builders install in homes to insure that the handyman industry will always have work.

This particular pocket door stopped working because the wood swelled up. The wood swelled up because it got soaked when another house part, the toilet, which traditionally is supposed to suck water down, was instead disgorging large quantities of water into the bathroom. And I mean large quantities, as we can see in this unretouched photograph of the incident:

Why was the toilet doing this? It was doing this, according to professional plumbers who for the record do not work for free, because yet another house part, the "septic tank," was backed up, because yet another house part, the "drain field," is "saturated," whatever that means. Actually, I know what it means, because I have received an estimate: It means we are going to have to pay men with large roaring machines a hefty sum — and let me just say a sincere "Thank you!" to you paid subscribers for your help — to uproot our entire front yard.

And of course when these parts of our house have been fixed, another house part will break, then another, and another, and so on forever.

I'm not complaining, here. (This is a lie. I am complaining.) I'm just saying that maybe, if we old people explain to the younger generations, in explicit detail, what's involved in home ownership, they won't feel so bad about their situation. Meanwhile, we, as a nation, need to come up with a long-term solution to the Housing Crisis, considering all possible options, including a massive federal commitment, like JFK's Moon mission, to develop SBE technology. And I don't say this just because it was my idea. I say this also because here in Florida, we don't have basements.

And now for a scientific poll of you generous paid subscribers.