Since June 15th, we’ve been working on moving to a new house in Arizona and getting the land in Joshua Tree ready for a new Home Grown Food Network under $20,000 demonstration house. Sometimes I think I’m amazed at how much we have gotten done. Other times I’m embarrassed how little we’ve done. All the time I’m quite overwhelmed how much there is left to do.
My son’s father Floyd helped us by finding a motor home in Arizona for $1,200, and then helping Peter get it to the Joshua Tree land (after updating the title and registration in Arizona). It’s an old motor home, so we’re not planning on driving it, really. I learned while looking for something with a toilet and shower (plus a stove and refrigerator, but that wasn’t as important to us since we like outdoor kitchens), that old motor homes are the cheapest way to go. They get terrible gas mileage, and besides they’re so old that they can’t be relied on to travel in, so there isn’t much of a market for them. That fit our needs just fine. We just needed someplace to be in out of the weather and have privacy so we can stay there overnight if we want to every once in awhile, while we are building our compound that substitutes for a house and a yard.
Floyd learned he had acute leukemia last week, just a few days after he was driving on Highway 62 with Peter. Pray for him. He’s in UCLA Hospital now, the best teaching hospital there is around here, so I’m sure he’s getting the latest treatment. They say people live with that now for 10 years, compared to four months if they don’t get treated, so it’s lucky he kept pushing himself and finally got so dizzy my son and his wife took him to the emergency room in Joshua Tree, where the tests they did showed his Santa Monica doctor he had leukemia or some other serious illness, so she had him admitted right then. I saw him Saturday, when he’d had transfusions for days so he had his energy back and looked good.
Peter is going on with putting up the welded wire fence around the area where the compound will be. We’ll post drawings soon.
It’s going to be a California indoor-outdoor living space, 4,200 square feet “under roof,” as the real estate ads say. For less than $20,000 including the land and off-the-grid utilities and water tanks, and plants, with some animals like chickens and talapia, growing all our own food. Of course I bought the land at a tax sale years ago when Joshua Tree was the cheapest really nice place around, so one could not duplicate that now. Nonetheless, the concept is valid: if people want to build their own houses and not have any mortgage, utility bills, or food costs, they can, for less than $20,000 total cost, and for the amount as they go along that people on Social Security or welfare, or workers on minimum wages, can afford. The per square foot cost of the under-roof living space is less than $5! I’ve been reading and watching shows lately on House Hunters International about houses in third-world countries for 100 times that much. To say nothing of Santa Monica.
Last Saturday I drove to Santa Monica and back, to see Floyd and to take things and do some errands for my son, who had gone quickly from Joshua Tree the day before when he heard his father had been admitted to the hospital. I was tired at the end of it, but it cost less than $30 in gas, round-trip, and took less than half a day. So I don’t see any sense in living there in a condo for $375,000 plus more in monthly homeowners’ fees than it will cost us for living here, with yards where we can have pets and livestock if we want to, and where we can experience what people drive from Santa Monica to see, the National Park and amazing sunsets, plus have five full-service casinos and 200 golf courses within an hour’s drive. I spent 35 years “living” at the beach, but really working all the time to pay the expenses of being there. Now I’m happy to see it once in awhile and have a real life here. All I miss is an El Pollo Loco and some restaurants that stay open after 9 p.m. right in town. The closest place for that is Palm Springs or Cathedral City, 30 miles away.
The fence Peter is putting up is going to have a row of tall nut and fruit trees inside it, then a wall 10 feet high and three feet thick, made of tires stuffed with earth. These walls last 1,000 years or longer, through earthquakes and floods, and are fireproof. Those plus wind and sun damage—to which these walls are also impervious—are all the natural hazards we have to worry about here. Therefore, there is no reason to follow any uniform building codes covering snowloads or hurricanes or tornadoes.
I have written before about how difficult it was to learn we could actually build a house this way without permits and grow all our own food here, legally. That makes me think it may be possible to do the same kind of thing—adapted for different conditions–a lot more places than people think. 99 people out of 100 would have given up at the third planning office I went to, after I already had done enough research to see the idea, where the third set of planners told me we would need a conditional use permit (read: forget it) to do what I said we wanted to do. I am sure if I had not been a real estate lawyer myself I would never have either had the original ideas myself or found a lawyer who would have suggested it is possible, even, so I wouldn’t have tried the first planning office. I spent literally 200 hours in three months back at the first planning office after I went to the third one, hanging around, asking my same questions one more new way, until finally a planner told me the last key to the puzzle, just to get rid of me so he could go back to his online Solitaire game in peace.
Regardless, though, of how hard it was to figure out and get through the maze of government regulation, the fact is that Peter and I are the perfect people to have figured this out, and we are going to do what we figured out how to do, and tell everyone along the way. Housing does not have to be the ridiculous mess planners and the rest of incompetent, elitist governments have made it. I read today in the New York Times that estimates are there are now a million absolutely homeless people in the United States. Some of them are living in flood drainage pipes under the Las Vegas Strip, where they could be drowned by flash floods, rather than be hassled by police and killed by sport-killers above ground. Besides truly homeless people there are over 30 million renters who will never even have their name on a mortgage for a house, the way things are now. There may be another 200 million who will never pay a mortgage off, so they truly own a house. I think all those estimates are far too low, but whatever the number, there are many, many people out there being preyed upon by landlords, real estate speculators and developers, and governments, besides police and sport-killers, when the fact is all those people could build their own houses and be free.
It’s an exciting life. More on our and at least 231 million other people’s progress later.
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