Housing

One of my earliest memories is walking through an empty house with no furniture in it and plastic or paper covering walking paths on the wood floors. I had probably just turned three and it seemed HUGE to me because of the lack of furniture.

This is the house my parents bought when my father retired from the Army. It was brand new construction in a new suburb.

There was paper on the floor in part because the yard was mud. They hadn't yet installed landscaping and grass.

We were the first family to live in that house and my parents had a lot more money than I understood. The house was $16,000 for three bedrooms and one and a half baths. They had $12,000 in savings.

They put a large down payment on the house and their house payment was something like forty percent of what the neighbors were paying because of that and they still had money to get a retaining wall built to add dirt to the steep backyard so it wouldn't be so steep and a fence.

And a swing set for ME in the backyard.

It would be thirty two or thirty three more years before I would get a better diagnosis for my deadly condition than hypochondriac. I'm quite convinced that I have been as healthy as I have been in part because I was raised in a house that was brand spanking new when my parents purchased it and this helped my mother keep the house clean enough for my needs.

The Great Fire of London began in part because large numbers of buildings were made with extremely flammable materials, like tar paper and thatch. The conflagration cleared out a large part of the city and new buildings were built to a higher standard.

This led to London being the most modern city in the world and helped make England a world power.

As an adult, I've been frustrated with being unable to find housing on par with my childhood home. While the world focuses on how big a home is and how many appliances the kitchen has and similar metrics, I lament the lack of adequate cleanliness for my needs and how impossible that seems to be to find.

I'm not hoping for a great conflagration but I do wish we could rebuild and raise the overall standard globally.