House generally refers to a shelter or building that is a dwelling or place for habitation by human beings. The term includes many kinds of dwellings ranging from rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to high-rise apartment buildings. The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, though households can be other social groups, such as single persons, or groups of unrelated individuals. 

Wikipedia EN

We begin our lives at our parents where we share most rooms and have most of the times our own bedroom. As we grow up we tend to rent a room inside some student appartments and scale up along the way to our own house or apartment. At the end of our lives some choose to live in an elderly home, with their children or in their dream house somewhere gone in a nice climate. We are in a constant flow of moving to a new place which is adapted to our needs. This was not always so, a few centuries ago it was normal for many people to pass a house to each new generation of siblings.

Bigger & bigger, quicker

The house became the ultimate status symbol. The larger and the more beautiful, the better. It shows your wealth and also your style.

With the changing needs of people whole neighbourhoods of old buildings need to be demolished or renovated and whole new neighbourhoods need to be built. We live in cities which are constantly changing. Whole neighbourhoods can now be built within a few years. Many homes are built in the same style out of prefab parts. As this industry matured the more rules where formed and the more uniform our homes became. On the maps of our cities the new neighborhoods tend to be the most boring by their regular spacious patterns.

Cocooning

As times progressed technology has created our home as a place where we can do everything: cook, wash, watch, socialize, sleep, work, entertain etc. In earlier days we needed to go out to wash our clothes, watch our movies, play our games and talk to people. Everything is at our home now and people tend to cocoon.  More and more people are alienated from their direct surroundings and only know their own home, workplace, friends places and pub/restaurant in the city. It is not surprising more and more people tend to become conservative and fear anything different even in their own neighbourhood. Gone are the small communities where people kept an eye on each other.

Over the years we also more and more alienate from our elderly. They tend to get lonely in elderly home as their children concentrate more on their own lives. We have huge problems the coming years with the babyboomers becoming a grey wave. Multiple countries can’t pay anymore for this flood of need for healthcare. Were are the times where gramps lived with the family? The same can be said for our criminals with their faulthy social environment and other social outcasts like tramps.

Object of our savings

More and more people tend to buy homes. Houses are expensive and society has made up a nice system of making you able to do so by closing a mortgage. The bank lends you some value many times bigger than you earn and in return they keep the interest on your home. 

You get the home because you promise to pay that interest. Houses are essentially built by future money you are worth to earn. And since a growing number of people does this, better and more expensive houses can be built from this future money. Most of the times people never pay for the real value of the house. This value system seems like one big bubble.

And recently this went haywire with banks giving loans to people who couldn’t afford the interest on the homes. While interest was low on the beginning and the people thought they could afford their new home it was unpayable later on. The banks used this mortgage to sell it to other banks for profits because the buying bank thought it was worth lots of future interest money…

Challenges

We are on a road of alienation of our direct surroundings and on our way to the ultimate cocoon that needs to sustain your own families needs. Having your own palace payed out of a strange system of promising future interest money can’t be sustained. I think we need to rethink our cities and form more shared resources. Then we need much less so they can be built much more diverse. We need to go back a step and be more social, better for our elderly and keep a better eye on our social outcasts. This can’t be sustained indefinitely.

Creative Commons photo of the houses in Ypenburg, The Hague Holland by Michplay