Structural Change for the Public Benefit: A Lesson from Open Source Licenses

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

Forty years ago there was a political agenda in the US and much of the world that had merit:  fix the issues of ecology, control the expanding power of the multi-national corporations, regulate or phase out nuclear technologies, address the population explosion, and abandon American wars in distant countries.   Then why have we seemed to make either little progress or made progress only to see backsliding?   Change, when we achieved it, does not seem to stick.    Laws were made and then undone.   The Environmental Protection Agency was created and then undermined.  Another example is AT&T was broken apart, just to re-join again.  In the United States we have seen both major parties in power, the electorate evenly split, but little enduring progress on key issues.

I think the answer can be found when we did not achieve structural change for the public benefit.

“Structural change”, in this context, is a re-aligning of forces underlying decision-making.   It has the effect of locking in a change thereby making it difficult to undo.   Structural change to an industry changes how the actors interact and who does what.    Without structural change, things can devolve to their previous status.

“Structural change for the public benefit” would be rule changes on interactions, and these rules are typically set by governments.      But we are experiencing a problem.   Even democratic governments are no longer responding to public interest as one would expect.   This is quite noticeable in the United States.

Equity based corporations, with their unlimited lifetime, can press to restore previous privileges over the course of decades.   Politicians in the United States are influenced by those companies that fund the rising campaign expenses, thus making our laws reflect the interests of the companies that can pay the most.   Long term pressure from companies can reverse laws that were once thought of as progress on some of our agenda.

So if we can not turn to government for setting rules for public benefit, which is fundamentally their role, what can we do?   Turns out there is an example from the technology sector that can hold back some of the corporate forces.

During my career in high-technology the spread of the Internet, Free and Open Source Software, and the World Wide Web have had large scale impacts on industry and culture.    But the openness of the Internet is looking shaky based on the failure to secure government support for “net neutrality” thereby allowing infrastructure control to be dominated by a few large corporations.     If allowed to run its course, a few companies can determine what new services will be introduced on what terms.    This will mean that distribution can be controlled as in the days of the private railroad companies in the United States before Anti-trust legislation broke them up and lead to regulation.

The World Wide Web, an system based on open protocols also has implicit rules of good behavior that has allowed it to grow. In the last 6 years, Google has come to dominate a key unregulated component, search, and then break some of the implicit quid-quo pro between the search engines and websites– a balance where sites would allow to be indexed in return for search services directing users to that site.    Google will index others by “crawling” the site and keep the content on their servers for purposes beyond search, and prevent other search engines from crawling their content sites such as Google books and youtube.    Other search engines that try to download Google books automatically are locked out, and the same with those trying to index YouTube. So the World Wide Web has not effective regulation to prevent dominant players from hijacking the system.

Free and open source software, however, has an idea that might lead it to have a very long life despite corporate interests interrupting government or fair markets.

Central to free and open source software are licenses which, in turn, are based on copyright.    When copyright was expanded to envelop everything expressed in the United States in 1976 via a radical rewriting of copyright law, the effect was an enclosure of ideas.   This law granting monopolies to those that never had it, never expected it, nor in many ways wanted it.   But because everything expressed was suddenly controlled by someone, it caused communities based on sharing to break.   The first dramatic one was in software with the Lisp Machine operating system ceasing to be a community project and an object owned by MIT, which it then sold to a corporation.    The result was the software, which was the combined efforts of hundreds over the course of years, died with the short lived company, and one of the authors, Richard Stallman, set out to find a way to keep this waste from happening again.   He invented a system-within-the-system– he called it copy-left.    It as a set of sharing rules that had the effect of re-establishing some of the freedoms we had before the 1976 copyright law.    These sharing rules are fascinating and have been very successful, but the key point here is that a “structural change for public benefit” without government help.

The “structural change for public benefit” brought about by the Free and Open Source licenses and the movement were dependent on the government having made monopoly restrictions very strong.    These licenses used the system against itself in a way that a whole industry to, in effect, voluntarily rewrite law.    This was painful and slow, but showed it was possible.   This system is robust because it only depends on strong monopoly restrictions.   If these restrictions were repealed by the government, then we would have most of the freedoms that have been re-established by this scheme.    So it works either way.

This is not to say it is desirable.   It is much more desirable to have a government that is responsive to public interests.   But since this seems to be receding at least in the United States, it is helpful to know that structural change can be enacted that provide relief from extreme laws by leveraging these laws.

In another article, I will suggest we can create enduring public benefit in housing by leveraging this approach to structural change.

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Housing Trust: Leveraging Free and Open Source Software Ideas to Improve Housing

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

Idea

What if an individual homeowner could designate their house to become and then remain a debt-free house and forever serve a particular community, such as non-profit workers?

Free and Open Source Software Inspiration

This is inspired Richard Stallman’s Free Software idea that lead directly to both Open Source software and Creative Commons.    His approach relies on a background of restrictive laws, in his case copyright law after the passing of the radical 1976 rewrite which made everything expressed copyrighted and effectively forever.   Stallman’s brilliant insight in 1983 was that since the government made all expressed ideas subject to ownership, those owners could put covenants on their use.    His covenant was to voluntarily give up some of the privileges of the monopoly ownership.   This was not needed before the law became so restrictive, but became needed because the community nature of writing software became precarious (the world lost the Lisp Machine Operating System, for instance, which caused Richard to invent Free Software, but this is a longer story).   His ideas spread to every nation and now a very large percentage of all software used is Free or Open Source.

What if homeowners could forever benefit in the same way that software writers were helped by Free and Open Source Software licenses and create communities where helped by Creative Commons licenses?   Here is how this could work.

The Problem with Housing Debt

At this point, most houses are put back under mortgage every time it is sold.   Since houses are sold every 6 years, on average, and mortgages are typically 30 years long, houses can stay under mortgage debt forever.   Also, the owner is mostly paying interest rather than principal in the first 6 years, so when the house is sold, the owner must pay as much money to get out of a house as they put in.  Therefore house prices must go up continually if have the owners are not to lose money.   This is not only unlikely and unstable, it becomes a burden on future generations with increasing debt on old houses.   So instead of buying and owning a house outright, most people owe a monthy mortgage payment.   This has many of the insecurities of rent, so that if a person loses their job or has a medical emergency, then they can lose their house through foreclosure.   And losing one’s house through foreclosure is more painful than moving out of a rented house.    Also, since the market adjusts to what people can pay each month and this stays fairly stable, the price of the house is largely determined interest rate.   If the interest rates go up and down from 6% (1965) to 14% (1985) and them back to 4% (2005) , then the price of houses fluxuates wildly which causes all sorts of havoc.    All in all, it seems like a bad idea to have most houses under debt.    What if we can get some houses out of this?

Using the Free Software idea, what if homeowners could voluntarily take their house out of the perpetual debt cycle and therefore secure a home that people can own outright?   This would be a sacrifice to those first owners, but some might see it instead as an investment in the future.

Possible Benefits from Debt-Free Housing

Actually, there has always been debt-free housing such as pastor’s houses, student dormitories, fraternities, and some university faculty housing.   Also, a hundred years ago, mortgages, if they existed were short, and people paid them off.   But this is now the exception.     The idea here is to make it easy to free houses from debt on a distributed and grass-roots way without requiring being part of a large institution.

  • Quality student housing, such as the cooperatives around many colleges,
  • Support teachers, non-profit hospital workers, or other public benefit workers in a community that may be priced out of living near where they work,
  • Enduringly affordable housing for low-income people that is owned not rented,
  • Housing for retirees so they can stay in their communities as their income drops,
  • Quality housing for single parents, or other needy populations.

How to Permanently Free Houses from Debt

I can think of two approaches for homeowners to create debt-free housing , one is to have a non-profit have an ownership interest in the house, and this is explored in other posts on this blog.    Another is to put binding restrictions on the title and file it with the county.  This needs more investigation, but here is how it might work:

An owner of a house can deed a house to become a “Trust House” by adding a standard document (“Deed of Trust”) the title of the house filed with the government.   A new non-profit Housing Trust organization, I believe is needed to help administer this system.  This could have a volunteer board elected from former owners of Trust Houses.

Required Covenants in the Deed of Trust:

  • Governance:
    • Owner of this Trust House agrees to be a Trustee on nearby houses,
    • Trustees for this particular house are the geographically nearest Trust House owners, say 11 of them.  This keeps governance local and resilient,
    • The Housing Trust has the right to seize the house if the Trustees determines these Covenants are broken,
    • In case of foreclosure, or not paying taxes…  what happens?
    • Removal or modification of the Deed of Trust can be requested by the Trustees but a larger number of Trust House owners must be involved to  decide what to do, say 23 of them.
  • No New Debt:
    • No new liens may be placed on the house: original mortgage, if any, gets passed on as-is or same terms.
    • No material benefit can be derived by one owner as it passes to the next  (no “key money” as they call it in NYC as some rent control apartments are passed on)
  • Optional Covenants can be put on the property by the original purchaser such as: characteristics of the preferred futures buyer, and how often these characteristics are enforced.

Voila!   Houses shed their debt once and for all.

Questions:
Can restrictions like this be placed on titles?
Should this be done with contract law instead?
Can mortgages be transferred?  Do we need special mortgages for this?
How many people would do this?
How can this go wrong and not serve the purposes we are intending?

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Custom Schools with a Class size of 1 or 4

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

This last September, our 13-year-old boy, Logan, rather than return to his San Francisco private school began taking lessons in a custom school his mother and I created around him. I don’t use the word “homeschooling” because that may conjure images of workbooks on the kitchen table with a parent being the major teacher. Logan, in contrast, is being taught one-on-one English and history by a former school teacher, learning Chinese language and culture from a young Taiwanese woman who has tutored before, Geometry from me three hours a week, in addition to a birding class taught mostly to adults, and a science class for homeschoolers at our local science museum, the Exploratorium.

 

I don’t know what to call this educational environment, but “homeschool” does not seem to describe it.  In talking with other parents, we have found that this type of free-form schooling is not uncommon: one parent called himself a “general manager of education” as he explained that he did not teach so much as arrange, and in their case they leveraged the local community and junior colleges with one of their children taking their first college class at age 11. Whatever this school is, Logan is fully engaged, our family is closer than ever, and I am starting to think we are onto something. To put a name on Logan’s new school, I will call it a “custom school.”

 

While we just started this program with Logan, we are encouraged to continue and explore how schooling might be reorganized for some classes of students. This has gotten me thinking about how far this could spread and possibly leveraging the charter school system to build a new type of public school, one that has a class size of 4, but that is getting ahead of myself. Please allow me to explain how I have gotten here.

The rest of this post is in this pdf file, with a supporting spread sheet and article.

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Who Wins from Inflation?

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

“No one wins from Inflation.”    “We must slay the Dragon of Inflation.”  “Inflation hurts everyone.”

Call me skeptical, but I am starting to question statements that start with “everyone” and “no one”.    Let me take a couple of recent examples.    “No one could have seen it coming” was invoked by the early George W Bush administration about the events by al Queda on September 11, 2001, when we later learn that they were warned specifically about this with a major intelligence briefing just a month before.   They hid the major reporting by their department and the briefings from the previous administration and claimed: “No one could see it coming.”    This turns out to be a lie.

Another claim of “No one could have foreseen this” came from the banks when the mortgage bubble popped.    With the failures starting in mid-2007 and leading to a full-out financial crisis in 2008, there were cries of “no one could see it coming.”    Well, this turns out to not be true.    The biggest investment bank, Goldman Sachs, not only saw it coming, but sold its toxic assets to its customers (not disclosing that they were betting against them), and made sure when the bubble burst they not only did not suffer, but they greatly profited.    There were those that saw it coming.    “No one could see it coming” was a lie.

Lets turn to inflation.   The term that I see is “no one benefits from inflation.”   This should set off alarm bells in the same way as “no one could see it coming” but as best I can find it does not, at least not in main-stream public discussion.

But there are winners  when there is inflation:   Debtors win.   More specifically, those with fixed-interest debt win.    If your net worth is negative, in other words, you own more than you own, and the debt is at a fixed interest rate, say now at 4.5%, and then inflation goes up to 12% as it did in the 1980’s for a number of years, then it is a good deal for you.    Granted there are rocky paths and there not everyone’s wages go up, but on the whole prices and wages increase during inflation.  After a few years your cost to replay the debt decreases relative to wages and after several years the debt burdent is largely washed away.   Paying the interest and principle on the loan is then relatively easy as wages increase.

This is what happened with my parents.    They mortgaged themselves to the hilt in the 1960’s with a 6% mortgage, then inflation came back up, and the price of the house went from $65,000 to many hundreds of thousands.   Paying the mortgage became easier, and better yet, they sold the house to make hundreds of thousands of dollars.   My father told me that he made more money on the houses he lived in than the pension he got for from his fortune 500 company.

So inflation does help people, it helps debtors.     And there are many debtors.    If inflation came back now, then everyone with a mortgage would be helped with that debt, at least those with fixed-rate mortgages.    This is most of America.

Why is this not proclaimed?   Well, because there are some losers:   creditors.    So creditors would like there not to be inflation because it would devalue their asset: a loan portfolio.      But who are the creditors now?   There are banks, but more on this in a minute.   There are also individuals: those with fixed savings.   Many of these are those that made money off of real estate when the last round of inflation came through.    So this arguing against inflation comes across as knowing hypocrisy from this segment.

A major creditor would be the banks that made many of the loans in this country: mortgage banks.   But it turns out that those banks now sell over 90% of those loans to a couple of tax-payer backed banks:  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.    These special banks, it turns out, now own most of the mortgages in the United States, so they stand the most to lose from an increase in inflation.    But since they are owned by the taxpayers, and most taxpayers have mortgage debt, and since taxpayers vote for those that control Fannie and Freddie…  Wouldn’t it be in American’s best interest to increase inflation therefore lower their debt burden?  Since the private banks  passed off the inflation downside to the taxpaper by passing on credit risk, the banks would not be against this.

So why has it not happened?   Well, when it does, I am sure there will be a major cry:  “No one could have seen it coming.”

 

 

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Pay it off once, and never again

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

From a house's point of view, it must seem odd to have to be paid off again and again as if it were being rebuilt anew every few years.    A house could be built and then paid off, then enjoyed by those that get to live in her and take care of her– maybe passed down, maybe sold to new owners.    But this is not how it works.

A house is built, slapped with a 30 year mortgage (at least these days), and the owners generally move out before the 30 years (seems on average after 6 years, so they do not even get beyond paying interest).  The new owner then gets to start again– take on a new 30 year mortgage to pay it off.    But again, they don't get to pay much beyond the interest, and the house is not paid off as it is passed to the new owner.

But even after 30 years of this, the house should be paid off, but it isn't– because the mortage keeps getting renewed.    Even houses that are 100 years old, they are not paid off.  From the bank's point of view, the full principle now has to be paid yet again.    Kind of a Ground Hog Day, but a nasty one.

I do understand the counter argument– the owner gets to try to get as much as they can from the next owner, and this is what the market will bear.

But maybe, we have orchestrated “the market” in a perverse way.    “The market” is just made up.  It is a human artifice.   It is buttressed with government subsidies (like the home mortgage deduction and Fannie Mae) to make it what it is.   Thirty year mortgages are just made up, so we can make up something else.

I propose we create incentives to pay off a building once and keep it paid off.   If we did this, then used houses would cost much less than they do now.    The original owners get to live in a new house and slowly pay it off.

At least we can start this without a radical reshifting of our tax and banking system by creating debt free housing.     I believe we experiment in the small, but create a model that could catch on.    It would really be embraced when we get tax and law structures to reinforce the idea of Debt-Free Housing, but at least we can get started now.

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Can the Home Mortgage Deduction Help our Public Benefit Housing System?

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

The idea of our Public Benefit Housing system is to have a apartment blocks bought by non-profit organizations which take out mortgage on the property which it then pays off and never refinances.   Then the units are rented and some are subsidized to help benefit employees of non-profit entities.   What this seems to leave out is a tax benefit that is offered by the United States federal government to those households paying interest on mortgages.

Can this tax structure be of benefit to those living in this public benefit housing system?    I don't know, this would take a tax attorney or something, but here is how it could work.

If the people in the units were actually those that owned the mortgage, then part of the “rent” they were paying would go directly to paying the mortgage interest.    Indirectly this is what is happening– the fees paid by the residents is going into a pool and much of that is going to pay the mortgage.    But if it were structured such that the occupants were actually on the mortgage document for as long as they were an occupant, then that part of their rent might be able to be applicable to the home mortgage deduction system.

As I understand how the home mortgage deduction system works is that a person can deduct from their income the amount they pay on interest on their home mortgage.   This means that if you make $50,000 a year and pay $10,000 a year in mortgage interest (and it is mostly interest most of the 30 years), then your new income from a federal tax point of view is $40,000.    Thus the difference in taxes paid might be 28% of the $10,000, or $2,800.   Thus the government is offering a subsidy to mortgage holders of the incremental tax rate or currently about 28%.   This can be seen as a decrease of the cost of holding a mortgage by almost 28%.

Can we fashion our Public Benefit Housing system to take advantage of this?   Can people that live in the apartment system be on the mortgage for the purposes of getting this deduction?    This might take a flexible credit union, or it might take flexibility on the part of Fannie Mae, the quasi-government entity that buys most mortgages from the banks.    But if this is possible, then this has the benefit of making the “rent” in the apartments be less expensive to the tenants that pay taxes.      Unfortunately it also makes it more beneficial to keep a mortgage going by remortgaging even if it is not needed, which will benefit competitors that do not have a mandate to escape debt when they can, but at least there might be some benefit.

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Debt Free Housing

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

Debt free housing would cost a fraction, and probably a small fraction, of what most of us pay now, whether we own or rent.   As I argued before, most of the monthly cost we pay for our housing goes to finance fees rather than maintaining our houses.   Even if our houses or apartments are over 30 years old, and therefore should be paid off, they come back to be be refinanced, resold, second-mortgaged, or just profitable for the owner because they the prevailing rent assumes a debt burden.

How do we get to debt free housing in this current circumstance?   We now have houses that have artificially high prices because of the debt system , and we have people not paying off their mortgages because of 30 years is longer than they stay in their houses.   And furthermore, owners want to cash out because it is probably their largest vessel of their wealth.

So we have a puzzle– the tax and pricing system is built to support chronic and risky debt burdens that are perpetuated from generation to generation.     I will propose a system that breaks this cycle, one house or one apartment building at a time, that can permanently remove housing units from a debt burden and hopefully spread.    But it take some investment and patience, but mostly it requires wanting to give a gift to the future.

The fundamental idea is to pay off a house or apartment block once, and then keep it from being burdened with debt ever again.    This requires building long term entities that have at their mandate to have this long term view, then find low cost way to build these entities, and finally find people that would find this desirable to do.   This is not a new idea, and there are variations, but I will outline one way through this thicket that has some advantages.

Lets take an existing apartment block in a city that already has tenants, but is for sale.   Lets create an non-profit entity that has a specific charter to be a “public benefit organization” with certain covenants in it that ensure that it will stay on track.   This entity then buys and mortgages the property with a fixed rate 30 year loan with a 10% down payment.   I will get to who would be motivated to extend this money in another post, but lets examine the financial case for those that might want to.    Since prevailing market apartment rents are generally set to pay for such expenses, the rents can approximately pay for the mortgage.   If there is inflation, then the prevailing rents would rise relative to the fixed mortgage payment and then there is latitude to either lower the rents in our apartment block, or use the money for something else.    If there is deflation and rents fall, then there is a possibility of defaulting on the mortgage and losing the 10% down payment.  This a risk of default assumes we do not have an external source of money and lets assume in this case we do not, so this is a risk.    Since deflation is linked with all other housing there is great interest on the part of the government to not have this happen, as we are seeing in the housing crisis of 2007-2011– and they take efforts to prop up housing prices at taxpayer expense.   Without a major round of deflation, in 30 years, the mortgage would paid off and then there is an ongoing revenue stream that can be used in some way.   It is interesting to note, that this revenue stream would then be available forever after.

So after 30 years, and probably much sooner, the Public Benefit Organization that owns this apartment block can either charge under-market rent or spin off money for some purpose.    With a covenant to never get into debt again, and to never sell, this revenue stream or under-market rental properties can be available forever.

Who would be interested in investing in this way?   Who would benefit from creating debt free housing?    I suggest that there are groups of people, those doing the public good, those that have long term interests, that have these motivations.    Key to understand in this system, is that it does not cost much up front (maybe 10% of a housing unit), does not cost anything as we wait out the mortgage or for inflation to diminish the mortgage cost, and then the benefit is perpetual.

I will show examples of this system in action already, and how we can create a movement to do much more of this in future posts.

 

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Mortgages can make our houses cost 500% more

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

I have been looking for evidence of what mortgages do to housing prices in the United States, which is not easy since mortgages are so widespread they effect almost all houses.  Finding an example to compare how much our houses would cost if we just did not have our mortgage system is therefore not easy.   But I think I have found one:  Atchison Village in Richmond, California.    This housing development is absolutely amazing for many reasons, but for now I will just focus on this one aspect.

Atchison Village is former defense housing made up of 450 housing units.   The whole village was purchased from the Department of Defense as a single parcel in 1956, financed with a mortgage that was paid off 20 years later (and the residents had a party and a mortgage burning).    The residents “own” their houses, but can not get mortgages from Bank of America and the like because Bank of America can not then resell the mortgages to Fannie Mae.    Therefore the houses cost between $30,000 and $70,000 according to wikipedia, but my investigations found they currently go for a bit above $70,000.      The reason they go for that much, we were told, was that was what the local credit union would lend a resident to help them pay for the unit.   It is not quite a mortgage, as there is no lien on the property.  It is more like an credit card loan– it is tied to the person.    (Interestingly they have had very few defaults in the 50 years of making these loans).

Therefore the price of these houses are based on what you can borrow to buy them.    This is an interesting result.

Houses just outside the gates of Atchison Village sold for between $400,000 and $500,000 during the housing bubble and they the neighborhoods are considered by many to be dangerous and worse.

Houses outside of Richmond did not get any better from 2002 to 2007, this had always been a dangerous and undesirable location.    What did change was what commercial banks would lend on a house because of the change in rules that Fannie Mae would accept for income to support the mortgage.

Therefore, it appears that houses will change their price based on what mortgages are available.   If interest rates go down, and therefore mortgage payments should drop, it seems that housing prices rise so that the mortgage payments stay the same.   Further, if people are permitted to dedicate more of their monthly income to mortgage, then, they housing prices will rise to assume that this is what is available.    Housing prices then would be correlated with interest rates and mortgage rules.   And this is what we saw during the 1990’s and 2000’s in the United States.

Since Atchison Village residents were denied commercial bank mortgages, then the house prices did not fluctuate anywhere near as much.   Further, the underlying price of the house was kept at a fraction of the houses in the same neighborhood.

Mortgages can make comparable or inferior houses cost 500% more than ones at the same time and same neighborhood.     This is an important result.     This disproves many of the assumptions of prices just being a factor of the market.    It really is a matter of policy of a poorly regulated government-guaranteed for-profit entity, Fannie Mae, and its risk-avoiding for-profit partners, the commercial banks.

Therefore prices are set based on the availability of mortgages and the monthly payment not based on worth of the house.    As interest rates go up, then prices will fall, and the tax payers of the United States will pay the price as they fall because we back Fannie Mae when disaster hits.   But when interest rates fall once again, then it will be others that make the profit as home prices once again rise.   Since there are so much money tied up in housing debt and this game is now well known and can be counted on, there are many standing to win the next time.

Monthly mortgage payments are the important factor then.    This does not seem very different from rent, in many ways, from a resident’s point of view, especially when the most common length of a mortgage, 30 years, is substantially above the average of 6 years that people stay in a house.   Some estimate the that mortgages are renegotiated less than every 3 years on average, so that means that most people are, in effect, always in debt and paying monthly payments.   A funny story on the lack of people paying off their homes was published by National Public Radio.

We now have an example of the price we are paying for our current mortgage system– much higher housing prices, tax payer bailouts, and perpetual debt payments.

So should we have mortgages on our homes?   If we want to encourage owners, that are not in perpetual debt, then we should not have the current system of mortgages.     We can do better.   Lets.   More on that in another post.

 

 

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Used Houses

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

I remember being shocked by the phrase “used house” as in “who would want a used house” since all houses where I grew up with were 60-100 years old– they were all “used”.    But it did get me thinking– why do used houses cost so much.  Once a house is paid off, either through waiting out a mortgage or inflation making the house payments essentially free, then why is it that one can sell the house again at a price as if it were new?

I don't think it should be a strange question to ask:  Once a house is paid off, why does it go to another buyer as a debt burdened property?

The answer is, because people will pay.   That people are willing to buy many used houses for the price of building a new house plus the land.   It is what the market will bear.     But why will the market bear it?

The price is largely set by the monthly mortgage that people in the area can afford, rather than the worth of the house.   In the 70's and 80's in the United States the mortgage payments were set at a maximum of 28-29% of income to be guaranteed by the government.

“Prior to the mid 1990s the federal housing enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) would not purchase mortgages unless the principal, interest, tax, and insurance payment (PITI) did not exceed 28 percent of the borrower’s income for a conventional loan and 29 percent for an FHA insured loan.” US Census Department

This effectively set the price of the house.    And it was highly leveraged on the interest rate.   If the interest rate fell, then loan payments on a set amount would fall, but since people paid 30% of their income, this meant that the price of the house would go up to compensate for the lower interest rate.

This got even worse, when in the 1990's the 28-29% rule was relaxed.   “The mid to late 1990s ushered in many less stringent guidelines.”    Therefore housing prices were allowed to increase further as interest rates stayed very low.

So the price of a used house stayed very high independent of what the house and property was worth.      How much higher than it would have without the mortgage system I will attempt to estimate in another post.

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Welcome to the Real World, You are Now in Debt

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

There has been a focus on the exploding problems of student debt, which are sinking a large population a critical point in their lives. But even if you are not under student loans, once you move out of your parent’s house you are effectively in debt– housing debt. The way this works is that if you buy a house it is usually for a mortgage, but if you rent, you are also paying off debt, and you dont even get the apartment once it is paid off. The landlord is either in debt or acts like it by setting the rent to cover the equivalent of the mortgage (because that is the norm in the competing rental market). Therefore, even if the apartment is 100 years old, it is not paid off, or at least the renters are paying as if it is not.

I believe that over 1/2 of someone’s rent is paying debt as opposed to paying for the upkeep of the house. Here is how this calculates out. In San Francisco, apartment buildings cost between $250-400 per square foot in reasonable neighborhoods. Rent in these apartments is $2000-$3000/month for 1000 square foot. At the current 5% mortgage rate (just the interest, not the principle) and a 1000 square foot apartment, the cost, just for interest on borrowed money is $1,350. Therefore in this circumstance, half of rent is for interest payments.   (Why the principle is also so high, is also because of debt, but that will be covered in another post.)

So paying renting is the equivalent of being debt, but without some of the advantages. For instance, after 30 years, you do not own that apartment. Also, if the value of the apartment goes up, you do not get to sell it for a profit, much to the contrary, your rent goes up to match those that are buying apartment buildings at the new higher rate. Now it is true that you can move out more readily, and if the price of the apartment building goes down, you are not as stuck, so there are some trade offs, but it is important, and in some ways
surprising how often we are really paying off debt when we think we are buying a good or service.

Even if the house is over 30 years old and would have paid off the original mortgage, the debt goes on. This is an effect of the commodification of objects– the ability to sell them to someone that is willing to go into debt based on the possibility of future earnings– means that house may never pass on the benefits of being paid off.

Some say that this is just the “will of the market”, but this “will” is just a made up human artifice that is now built into our institutions, government guarantees, advertising programs, and tax laws. It does not have to be this way. But undoing it will take being clever. More on how this might work later. But the key here is to see that debt is woven into more prices than just repaying loans.

Welcome to the real world, kid, you are now in debt.

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