My sense of things is, that a long time ago used to be a whole lot shorter, than it is for us.

For five generations now, my family has built their own homes and both my daughters learned their skills.

Thanks to remote work, my kids just bought 60 acres of land together, where their families are building their own homes with their own hands (plus one for me and my son-in-laws’ sister, who is a single mother with four little kids).

In a nutshell, we are working to remove housing costs from our family budgets — permanently. In 18 months, we will be mortgage and rent free. Together, we will have the infrastructure, home building materials and land paid off in five years (we’re hoping to do it in three). In 30 years, long after I am gone, my home will be a rental and the timber sitting on that land right now, will pay for my kid’s retirements.

My job is restoring the pond, and developing a line of forest products. In five years, these efforts will start paying us. I am putting in low maintenance cash crops — lilacs, Christmas trees, and stone fruit. While the forest is loaded with food stuffs it will take me all summer to figure out what all is there.

This winter, a hurricane swept right through the property and pulled trees straight out of the ground. The pond is not healthy and I don’t know this property yet, but I ran across several areas where dozens of rivulets were flowing, which suggests downed trees blocked the feeder streams somewhere up the mountain. We have to get these downed trees out of there real soon or they won’t be worth a dime.

I went on about all this, by way of saying that in my opinion, one of the biggest impediments to home ownership is the way developers made it impossible for people to build their own homes. As a result, people are now dependent on developers and their disgusting profit margins, for a place to live. A $90,000.oo profit on every home, in a 500 unit development, is disgusting.