Steady State Macreconomics: Housing and Degrowth

Preliminary analysis

Housing is not like burgers, shirts, cars or flights. It is essential for living, like drinking water, healthy food, energy, clean air and ecosystems. Like education and health services, leaving too much power to markets could made them unaffordable, inneficient and worse of all, a poor service.

The current treatment of housing as a commodity, a good with similar market cache as a magazine or a drink, it is not providing the efficient, decentrialized, affordable and high quality housing we all want, independently of our political spectrum.

The worldwise monetary policy and current levels of inflation are not helping. As a explained in this post monetary macroeconomics of the StSt, the excessive money creation, together with low interest rates is rewarding taking debts, particularly in high inflation times like the current. 

The almost inelastic demand for housing, the limited amount of places with opportunities due to center to periferia urbanization, and the easiness to stay in debt, are responsible for the almost uninterrupted increase in prices we see in most countries housing sector, making it a growing pie of the gross national product, and one of the responsibles of rentism, financialization of the economy, and increasing inequality.

Housing is also one of the most pollutant sectors worlwide, during construction but also during its consumption via cooling, warming, electricity and all the goods that we buy and gather there. After the car and plane, most energy consuming devices are likely going to be consume in our houses (washing machines, refrigerator...). Its importance in global warming and the climate crisis is unquestionable. It is also key to define the decentralized renewable energy economy many call but most fail to implement.

Housing is the result to the complex interaction between planning, economics, geography and cultural and human relantionships. It is a mean for living and organizing life, but also a symbol of the society, as it is the ultimate property for the so call middle class.

With very little exeptions, the following picture shows the alarming status of housing worldwide:

• House prices in most cities and towns have been increasing for decades
• Most of citizens spend between 30 and 40 years to pay their houses via  mortgages
• Most economies are driven by low interest rates and medium to high inflation, the later due to money printing and energy challenges, making debt more appealing than saving
• There is a negligible share of public /cooperative housing, and most of housing is privately financed and provided
• Renting is also becomming more expensive particuarly on turistic hot spots due to the easiness to book appartments per days at much higher rates than permanent contracts
• There is little regulation on prices for purchase or rent
• There is a tendency for build new instead of repairing
• Housing is made on short term visual and profit perspectives, many times ignoring the architecture context of the neightbouring areas, nor the energy requirements or easiness of maintenance of the house
• Houses are more expensive but at the same time show worse durability than before
• Only in those places with sufficient regulation, energy efficiency and proper insulation is implemented
• There are more and more square meters per person, despite the challenges of space
• The center is becomming the place to work, and the suburbia is expanding with big one family housing with little job opportunities, social links and services. The suburbia requires personal car, lots of land and long commutes.
• Given the amount of speculation and lack of planning, more houses are empty than people without houses, and there is little or no municipal action to ensure social rent is offer on empty houses or expropiation is performed when houses have no maintenance or are offered.

Despite those who are willing to take the gamble of buy a house in 40 years, or see their salaries double every decade, there is little hope but leaving the city, going to the suburbia, spending a lot of time commuting, and if you are lucky, manage to stay under a old, too big and inefficient roof as a pensionist.

One should ask the following questions:

• Why are we making it so hard? 
• How can we define a housing policy that makes sure that the urban and the rural provide affordable and resilient places to live, with no need for private commuting or far supply chains that are at risk to provide  basic services and goods? 
• How can we make sure that our houses have low footprint and require a very little proportion of our income, so we have more time to develop our culture, our social network, our passions?

 In this post, we will summary some of the ideas from https://housing.degrowth.net/ and some of my own to make our cities and villages a place of opportunity, inclusion, good living and low footprint. 

Changing the monetary and price ecosystem - Reducing the demand of house credit and stopping house boubles

As we said before, the current monetary policy of high inflation, low interest rates and easy of credit for housing, incentivize the housing bouble and pricing spiral we are observing. Common people try to not loss money from their savings and they have two options: try to beat inflation as an investor or get in debt to put the money in something "safe" such as house. With a simple example I showed that for one ouse owners, a forty year investment in a house is not a good idea in terms of returns, diversification, liquidity (see the Appendix 1). 

Many people are learning now that they are too old to live in a big house/appartment, but very little money is given to them as the necessary reparations to make the house energy efficient or comfortable for the new guessts is very high.  

We need to change the monetary policy to avoid such as large, long and dangeorus debt taking from most of the population, increasing interest rates and forbid private/central banks to create money and hence inflation. 

Without inflation, the pressure to buy a house is less, as people do not see they hard earned savings being swipe out after few years.  The paradigm of consume now, get in debt or be part of the investment banking complex casino is no longer in people limited economic thinking without high inflation. 

People can save in low risk investments and still see little or no punishment. Keep in mind that high levels of debt push the mandate for growth.  If we stop monetary based inflation, if we regulate the cost of money for debt taking, we will reduce the demand for buying a house, an hence its price. This will stop the spiral. The main problem with that is that for many countries this is a very global policy (european, Fed...) and it will require a low of top down politics to make it happen. What can be do instead? What does Housing for Degrowth shows in terms of bottom up change?

Changing the relationship with housing, from inviduals to entire communities

Housing has become for many an investment, a way to fight inflation, to gain safety during the uncertain retirement times, an status symbol, the ultimately asset of the middle class. Such a view has failed us, and is slaving us either we pay a rent (as prices increases more than our salaries), or as future owners (with long term mortgages).

We need to need see our homes, whatever the property type, as a expressions for sufficiency, comfort, connection and sharing. Instead of more is better, we have to create definitions of enough, seeking for creating ways to reduce our private area (in square meters) and increasing sharing spaces (dinning rooms, electrodomestics, cellars, terrasses, gardens). We need to break the elitist vision of the house as the big place of isolation and superfluous consumption of energy and resources, in the highest expression having multiple residences, swimming pools and gardens with no food... we can think of our house as the place where our personal needs, including both intimacy/privacy and socilization, can live in harmony, with neighbours and the natural environment. 

It is not only to claim less is more, but also to make sure that we create spaces where the social, familiar, cultural and productive are not so divided into clusters and spread over the city.  This housing will be smaller in private meters per person, but bigger on community spaces and also in social interactions with neightbours and friends. We will go from barely saying hi to support each other in our day to day tasks and challenges, and also share more the infrautilised set of devices (bikes, electrodomestics, routers, machines, tools ...) and spaces (gardens, parking lots...). 

This reorganization of the housing, reducing the private space, the amount of artifacts own by the same person will reduce the cost of housing per person and reinforce the currently very weak link of relantionships between neighboors and close communities.

Changing our planning or towns and cities

The capacity to organize, the knowledge and capital to change our model of housing will required limited but still relevant planning in the territory. 

Cities

Currently cities do not have even the minimal capacity to provision food, energy and water on its own or close enough, and the survival of most cities in the world depend on complex, large and fragile supply chains. 

Other problems with the cities is the excessive concentration of fragmented activites such as working, industry, culture, living, services increasing the need for commuting, generating traffic jams and heavy use of private fossil fuel power transport. 

As said before, turistic spots without regulation are spreading to the suburbia local communities and creating unwanted attractions themes in the old town, lossing its original appeal and cultural heritage for locals and turists.

In order to break that cycle, cities should be planned different, instead of hubs which only look and creating productive sinnergies and economies of scale, the city should aim to:

1. Be able to produce the basic energy and food needs, as we as to ensure safe and clean sources of water.
2. Create multiple hubs and active neighbourhoods where economic, cultural, residential, social life happen in the same area.
3. Each city member should have access to work opportunities, accomodation, essential services and cultural ammenities within a 15 min reach by public transport/bike/foot.
4. There are limits on the amount of blocks in the old town used for turistic accomodation, ensuring local life remains authentic and nicely integrated to the regular but moderate flow of turists

A city, as any organism to be claimed to be healthy should be resilient to shocks, diversified in its efforts, nicely integrated in its complexity, and modular to ensure a balance equilibrium between proximity and scale. We are building cities searching for profit and economic efficiency only, forgetting the social, cultural and ultimately the wellbeing costs for the citizens of such decision making.

Villages and the rural world

The rural world faces quite some different problems as the cities and big urbs. First, in many places population shrink as there are little economic prospects, and last but not least, they are quite fragmented and less densely populated, making some basic services uneconomic and very far from the people. The result is aging towns that require heavily the usage of private transport.  

There are some planning policies that could be implemented in the rural world, to fix the below problems:

1. Provide incentives to some economic sectors to be close to the rural world and ensure there are economic opportunities in this areas
2. Provide incentives to enterprenours and young people in the cities to access housing at very affordable prices in this towns
3. Create services hubs between rural points to ensure some economies of scale are achieved to  give high quality education, health and other public services
4. Faciliate remote working and more flexible contracts for the "laptop class" to limit the pressure on cities and facilite for those who wanted to stay in their original villages or prefer such spaces
5. Give public funding to activities of regional interest: bio agriculture, renewable energy generation, agroturism, restoration of old houses... to improve the economic conditions of those who remain activate in the rural environment and support the resilience of the region.
6. Leverage technology for transport sharing  and optimize public transport utilization, as the low density of those places required very good aligment of expensive supply and very intermittent demand 

It is sad, but very likely some villages, even with currently vividly tourism, may dissapear when the costs of flying and toursim grow. Those villages and rural places that want to thrive should aim to keep being the authentic source of legacy, goods and services that citoes cannot offer, while reducing its depedency on private transport with diversification, better allocation of public services and more populaion density.  If there is one growth that may benefit all is in some of those villages that did not reach sufficient people to build local resilience. This is an opportunity for planners and citizens to spread and ensure more density living happens in the rural world, as its survival and footprint depends on it.

Increasing usage of housing and reducing superflous consumption

As much as I like freedom of choice, land is limited, as we need to aknowledge that someone will suffer if we consume too many resources by superflous consumption of housing. There are three issues that should be deal to increase the supply of housing with little increase in production and land use.

Empty Houses

As we speak, every day tens of families in Spain are evicted from the houses they leave because they cannot pay. Several social studies (one can do their own research on this) show that with little exceptions those people are unemployed, or even working they could deal with the increasing prices of their rents or monthly mortgages (as energy cost increases, hour worked went down...) [book about housing problems in Catalonia]. 

At the same time, we have around 3.5 million of empty houses. Houses ready to be lived are slowly eroding as no one is taking care, many of them owned by banks but are neither sold nor rent. The reasons are hard to list exhaustively, but one can speculate that given the fact they were own since the crisis, they will need to be sold or rent at prices that woud damage the balance sheet of banks, who are not adjusting to the actual value of this assets to keep things looking well. Feel free to challenge me on that ; ) [spain number of empty homes most recent number of empty homes]

As they are consuming the commons of land and house is a right declared in the consitution, it seems reasonable to ensure those houses are either put into rent or sell. In the case of persistent emptyness confiscation and fines should proceed. Before we put more stress on this planet, we need to use every single house build. It is a matter of social justice and a simple way to slow down demand for currently very expensive housing materials.

Secondary, tertiary and holiday homes

Once can see the tremendous waste whie going between October and April to Coastline places or out of the snow season to mountain houses. Houses that are use in the maximum 100 days a year, and remain iddle 250 days a year.  This is for around 4 million of houses [number of secondary residence in spain ]. If we sum that to the previous figure of empty houses we have arounf 8 million of houses empty 300 days a year. The number of offical homeless is less than 100K, while there are more than a million of people in insecure houses or inadequate according to social services [Number homeless and inadequate housing]. In any case, the supply of not used housing is way higher than the number of people without shelter or adequate shelter. Is not a problem of resources, is a problem of distribution.

Superfluous Consumption

The economic crisis in Spain force many to choose to give up one home (for most of my generation, this sounds crazy that people could afford more than one by the way), so some people gave up some houses to the banks or sold it. the problem still is that most countries, including spain, have tend to increase the number of square meters per person in the common ideology than more is better. This is heavily link with the expansion of suburbia. 

Big appartments in or far from the city and the points of economic activity are problematic for multiple reasons:

• they required more energy to heat or cool
• they require more material for building, furnishing, maintenance
• they required more land
• they reduce density and increase the cost of all services and infraestructure
• they require private transport due to the low density and lack of cost effecitve public transport
• they are far from social activities and normally do not hold strong social tights with neighbours, as many keep the social life back in the city

While high density and proximity to the diverse set of activities required for a full life are necessary but not sufficient for low impact housing, but should be achieved nevertheless.

Proper regulation should be implemented in order to incentivize smaller private housing and more common spaces, higher density in general, and more multi centric city and less monocentric and suburbia prone cities. This will increae the supply of housing per square kilometer of land, reduce committing time and cost, and keep unified historical and social nets in the city.

For new buildings that should be construction requirements with that vision, and for old ones reforms to divide the space and increase the liveable units should be encourages.  From a degrowth perspective reusing old buildings for that transition are with little exemptions the prefer option.

Changing regulation to make natural, simple and sustainable housing easier

The current regulations make any project of small, communitary and simple housing very challenging. In the countries reviewed their goal is to ensure relative safe buildings but little considerations of the environmental impacts, the cost of contruction, the dangers in case of climate schock...

Several experiences internationally showed that with as little as 10-12k euros and some community support, one can build a safe, organic and comfortable house with minimal impact for the environment, at a size that ensures both privacy but high density.

The municipalities and central goverments should support economically and administratively innitiatives that generate alternatives and safe modes of housing which required less cement, less capital and no debt.

If there is some anthropisized land with geographical potential to expand housing those should be for community based projects instead of large funds,  as the latter seek by design short term profit, increasing the price and growth driven model of superflous housing we have suffer in the last century.

Concluding remarks

Any program to achieve degrowth by design and no disaster should discuss a different approach than the mainstream for housing. Behind the current unsustainable levels of family debt, increasing inflation and poor regulation for housing, we need to implement both top down and bootom up policies measure to implement our right for housing and to do it with a decrease in the total throughput and social cost with respect to now. Those are some key measures:

1. Stop quantitative easing (printing money) and the credit based system of housing, to support a private-public model of smaller-organic- high density model of housing and urbanization (reduce demand, prices and monetization/financiarization of the whole economy)
2. Changing urban planning from monocentric capital model with fragmented social activities to a multicentral city with diversity in the activities performed and resilience for food, energy, water and climate schocks (reduce demand in city centers, reduce commuting and suburbia)
3. Activate individual and community changes to chase sufficiency in housing, with a reduction in private surface while more public ammenities and sharing is taking place (Reduce demand, reduce footprint and increase social capital)
4. Increase density in the rural world to ensure opportunity and basic services are available for all (Decrease demand in cities, reduce rural footprint via transport)
5. Apply laws to eliminate and persecuted unused housing and superflous consumption (increase supply, reduce demand, reduce footprint)

Some people love the noise of crowded cities and the high density, some others like the quiet ambience of the rural spaces. There are multiple modes of living compatible with lower footprint if we increase density, diversity while reducing superflous use and individualism.

The implementation and support of degrowth, or the steady state, require free citizens. Currently, as millions are tight to a 30 years mortgage and the mainstream ideology of growth to keep paying the debts, it will be very challenging to gain acceptance in degrowth without and audit of the housing bouble and debt crisis. 

Some people claim their freedom to drive 200km/h, eat meat every day and have as many houses and pools as they wish, while being tight to decades of unpayable debt. It sounds more liberating living with less debt, more social safety, more community, less commuting and waste. Degrowth for housing offers a way out to the current expensive, unsocial, unsustainable and ugly model of housing. We can start now to change our homes, our neighbourhoods and our economic systems by applying those principles. Our realised right for housing on a healthy planet depends on it.

Unrevised Notes

 It is fordimable our capacity to normalize stunning facts

• We are willing to get into debt to buy a house that we will own in 40 years
• We are willing to pay a third of the house value to a bank to create the money that is lend to us at almost zero cost
• We are doing the first two points on a good that is created within 6 months in most of the cases

If you do not believe me go to the bank, or walk around your neighbourhood. Maybe you agree with the facts on top, but you quicly com back and say:

• Yes but I will still make money
• Yes but I am not wasting money like you with rent
• Yes but this is how the market works

It is very interesting, because I think independently of the background and intelligence of the person in front, people tend to showcase the same ideology in favor of the current stay of affairs in the housing sector. Here my purpose is not to proove wrong most of my friends, relatives and colleagues who will be paying a house they will not own in 30 years, but rather to show how this ideology of debt, investment and commodity of a human right, is a huge blocker to transition to a steady state economy. Let me argue why.

Appendix 1 : Deep dive into buying a house in the current state of affairs

Your house may be a good business for some, but certainly not for many

Many of the people who needs to go through a decade of debt to buy an appartment or house, they do it because they lack the means to buy it in shorter time horizons, and not because they have a carefully manager portfolio of financial assets like the 1%. 

Normally people compare the monthly mortgage payments  with monthly rents, and if they pay less per month, they consider they are making a good deal. Little attention is take to the costs of owning an asset (taxes, maintenance, time required...) nor the liquidity premium of not having a debt on such a little liquidity asset like a house. 

On top of that, they assume that price will go up forever, like they have done before. This is the same kindish thinking we see on economists expecting economic throughput to quadruple this century, with little regard to the energy, material and environmental limits of our economic activity. The past maybe a good guide for the immediate future, but for long terms is a pretty poor guidance. The crisis of 2008 in US and Spain in the housing sector are good examples, and wait for what will happen with Sweden, Germany, UK and other countries gaining excessive leverage on the housing bouble. There is no difference in the patterns and structural problems of the housing sector in Spain or Sweden, despite many suprflous thinking that Spaniards privately are more prone to irresponsible debt.  In both cases, low interest rates, excessive easy of debt and a social acceptance on the market conditions of housing are leading to an spiral of price and debt increase that is too sweet to miss. Who want to leave the party too early? Only those with large housing funds will do so, an in case of lossing we will all pay their losses, as always have happened.

Even in times of prices growing faster than population, salaries, productivity or any other reasonable variable to explain an increase demand not based on debt, the profitability of housing is not so great in the long term. Hope you find those numbers reasonable too, without greeding into details and small gaps:

Let's assume I buy a house for 300.000 euros, paying a 1% fixed rate for 30 years, considering taxes, insurance and the like you will end up paying 450.000 euros (used Los Angeles data as an illustration).

If you are lucky and the state of things remain for another 30 years, and you manage to made the house look exactly as new as it was when you buy it, you will end up (extrapolating spanish house index) with 450.000 euros before taxes, while having lived in the house 30 years. But let's consider after taxes (30% in many places and maintenance 1% per year) that will cut the pie to 300.000 euros. Let me remind you you convince someone your at least 30 year or more house is worth in 30 years 900.000 euros.  

This is like giving to someone 450.000 euros today, in exchange of a return of 300.000 euros in 30 years. Using the rule of 72 (you can infere the return rate per year, in our case we will get less than 2.4 per year as we are not even doublling our wealth, rather increasing it 66%). Adding how much you saved from rents (750 per month, current average by the historical inflation ~2.5% will give you around 200.000 euros of saving, assuming around 2.5% inflation per year which will be something close to the 2.4% of doubbling your wealth). You may fine tune the calculations a lot, but many ways to look at the problem gives returns less than 4% a year, which is way less most shares /funds which offered ~10% with much more liquidity (you can sell them almost any time).

My point here, is that the almost trippling in price observed historically may not hold in the future as the amount of debt hold by the system is anything but sustainable. As I share in my post of the monetary economics of the steady state, the current inflation is a symptom of a economy which has printed too much money, who is struggling and should not grow, and which will struggle to keep motivating debt taking while moderating inflation. The cost of debt will grow, and with that the capacity of the housing bouble to hold. No one knows how much goverments and big companies engage into that gambling at scale will be able to keep pushing this fairly tale of housing as a investment and permanent growth. I cannot tell you when, but you better not leave the part at last.

To close here, it is not only the liquidity, the bad health of the financial system and the debt spiral, but also the required compromises to engage into something as human an animal to have a home, independently of the ownership form.  My indebted friend, I hope you at least agree with me that we are doing something very wrong, in the mission to make housing affordable, safe and comfortable to the society. In the next section I explain the problems of treating housing as a commodity and the current financialization of the economy as a result of housing boubles.

Should housing be a market good? Is the regulation appropiate?

 Despite the fact that in many places in europe population growth has stagnate or even decline, it is getting harder and harder to find affordable housing, whether is renting on buying none can be claim to be easy for most of the people. 

We are in an interesting dicotomy where there are more empty houses than homeless, when some people cannot pay the rents or mortgages, while others have secondary, tertiary or even more houses. In the already damage coastline and many other natural spaces, one can see that beyond high season, we can see kilometers of empty houses used a holyday resort, or leave untouched by the banks that own them because adjusting the price in the balance sheet would show an unconvenient truth, we pay way too much for each house.

Technology could offers us the option to increase housing usage and sharing, and therefore decreasing its price, reducing land/material/energy requirements. Instead of sharing (with our without charge), renting appartments is seen mostly as a turistic lucrative enterpreise rather than a way to make more affordable housing. As a result of that, house owners that reconverted the houses and turist appartments see an opportunity to increase their income, and therefore the value of such houses. Contrary to the utopian vision of a high use dense and democratize house park, our city centers and cultural capitals have seen the commoditization of the right of living in our cities, pushing out locals for the more lucrative business of experience seekers. Cities like Venezia or Barcelona are way beyond the amount of turistic apparments we should allow per area, eroding the reason why people go on the first place: its culture, personality, and local life. Any intend to regulate and protect local neighbours from an spiral of prices is called by the main media and its propaganda kings as an unacceptable act against development and private ownership. Are they protecting the people from those cities or the holdings owning and increasing share of the buildings of Barcelona, Berlin, Prague...?

If there is speculation with cars, planes, clothes... we can easily switch to other means of transport or be more constraint on following fashion trends... but if the water we drink, we food we eat, the energy we use, or the houses we live are subject to commodification and speculation, we are in a different situation. It is not only our price elasticity of those goods very low, it is also one of the key elements defining the spirit, history and community evolution of our cities and towns. Pushing out locals from city centers into urban dwells is much more than increasing commuting time, is breaking the remaining of the decades long network of communities made in our neighboorhoods and parks. It is creating an urbaniation that is more exclusive and elitist, keeping further and further away those typically living and working in the popular cities for those who can afford to enjoy them. Who wants to travel to just be sorrounded by turists and the sames stores, restaurants, music than everyone else? What is the point of taking a polluting flight, paying five times more than our own rent if not to discover new cultures, people, language, music, food...? Is it not on the interest of both locals and turists to have several times more locals than turists? Are we travelers indefferents of the impact of the communities we are trying to visit? Are we blind investors or consumers who do not care if by actually going in mass to a spot, we are actually destroying its heritage for the future travelers to come? What happened to the pristine Balli my parents used to visit? What happens to the so called wild Costa Brava? What happened to the big glaciers in Switzerland? Is there not another way?

Housing should, above all, follow the properties stated in many Constitutions: affordable, safe and comfortable. There will and should not be luxus for all, but we are very strongly defending our country borders againts illegal immigrants, while letting foreign speculative capital and superflous consumption destroy our cultural heritage, our communities and wellbeing. We need to reconsider our vision of a house as a private good such as a football, a sweet drink or a toy. Housing it is, as with water, energy and food, an strategic good/service that we need to protect from the flaws of the market and the undemocratic use of the limited land for short term profit or superfluous consumption. Yes you are free to drink a coke instead of a local tee brand, but the fact that you are speculating in the housing sector, or just accumulate multiple houses is contributing to the precarious housing reality we are facing, and this is limiting the freedom and rights of the others. 

Any countries which aims to be grounded on resilience, prosperity and the diversification of its economy and cultural expression, should make sure housing is not part of the financialization and monocultural based globalization some claim we cannot /should scape. A solid nation is sobereign in their strategic provisioning of basic goods and services, and should aim to fine the right amount of private and public enterprise to make sure innovation and efficiency can drive affordability, while speculation and indebtness does not trigger an spiral of price increase and deindustrialization of the economies towards the housing sector.  It does not matter where in the ideological spectrum you are, no one wants to have short term boubles and an economy that is too depending on a moderate to low value sector such as construction or turism. Those who carry their country flag very often, tend to forget that their water, soil or energy that they use to drive big and fast cars is comming from those countries they tend to repudiate due to differences in religion, but no on the lack of democratic instutions they suffer from. There is not better proof of love for the nation, as to make sure the country is able to thrive despite challenges in global supply chains, climate changes, international conflicts. Selling our oldtowns to open more hotels or to allow hedgefunds to speculate with the life our the people of our country is to say the least the pures form of traition I can think of. I do believe those who vote to parties such as Afd in Germany or VOX in Spain, should learn they are not voting the defense of their nation, rather to servers of the very few elites who do not hesitate to be profit from the suffering of their citizens as long as they can profit from it. 

It is an almost universal trend the process of urbanization and concetration in cities, where job opportunities, services and enterteinment are concentrated. Mass tourism, speculation and the excessive concentration of the city center as the place where business happen pushes out everyone who cannot afford to stay. From elder people, to the mid class, are pushed away to the suburbia, where many engage into several hours per week of commuting, isolation and dependency on private an increasing ways of transport such as the car. Everyone is forced to go from the suburbia to the center at the same time, collapsing trains, highways and the like, consuming more fossil fuels than ever, while making a very poor, business first type of urban planning that is inefficient, expensive, non inclusive and very extensive.