- Global Housing Crisis and the Demand for Shelter Capital
- Overview of Early Shelter and Its Financing
- Economics of Housing
- The First Housing Finance Innovations
- Industrial Revolution and Housing Finance
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Overview of Early Shelter and Its Financing
Before the rise of modern civilizations and coincident with the agricultural revolution during the Neolithic period, human settlements began to take on more permanent structural forms as the means and methods of constructing dwellings emerged throughout the world.4 The earliest homes, from pre-Roman British dwellings, to African roundhouses, to Mesopotamian reconstructions, have some remarkable spatial and construction similarities that resemble a modest three-bedroom home for a family today. Simple technology combined with minimal mobilization of resources enabled a sedentary culture to develop.
Design innovations contributed to the evolution of housing as human inventiveness and vision worked to overcome the scarcity of shelter. From the earliest permanent dwellings; to urban homes in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Civilization, and China; to the convergence of industrialization and urbanization in the modern city, the diversity of housing designs has led to increasingly complex patterns of human settlement that can now be explored from Google Earth. In the twenty-first century, as the world has finally achieved majority urbanization, the need for financial innovations for housing continues unabated.
Perhaps not surprisingly, innovations in housing construction have not always been successful. This has been the case even when some of the world’s greatest inventors tried their hand at reinventing housing. More than a hundred years ago, for example, Thomas Edison patented a cast-iron system for mass-producing concrete homes, but it never gained critical mass. Even though Buckminster Fuller’s steel hexagonal homes in the 1920s were nearly half the cost of a conventional bungalow, they attracted no customers. Walter Gropius, father of the Bauhaus movement, was part of a failed effort in the 1940s to package and deliver prefabricated homes.5
As the demographically driven demand for housing and housing finance increased over the years, the lack of major production and financial innovations challenged the ability to meet growing needs.