Broad Appeal Specialty Housing (BASH)

Overview

Broad Appeal Specialty Housing (BASH) is a business strategy whereby developers create homes with features that are lifechanging to a specific group of people, yet are built in ways that still appeal to a general audience.

BASH is a mutually beneficial way to help alleviate problems caused by increasingly unaffordable homeownership costs. The ultimate goal of BASH is to create a healthy, diverse rental market in which most people can find and afford rental housing that they would prefer over homeownership.

Problem

Housing costs are rising faster than wages across the globe. In the United States in 2022, home prices were the most unaffordable they have been in modern history and continue to hover near those levels. Individual homeownership is falling and corporate homeownership is skyrocketing. The situation is similar or worse in much of the Western world.

No current indicators suggest the situation will improve any time soon. On the contrary, until larger external forces change their direction, these trends will most likely continue for the foreseeable future.

For example, the work-from-home trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic means that a commercial real estate crash is all but inevitable; however, this will not magically solve the housing crisis. Turning office buildings into apartments is so inefficiently expensive that few will be converted, and of those, even fewer will be affordable.

Ultimately, as more areas of the world become uninhabitable, or at least uninsurable, regional housing supply will shrink as developed areas are abandoned without immediate replacement.

People are suffering now, but most indicators suggest that without a major intervention, these problems will only get worse, particularly for younger people. Millennials, Gen Z, and later generations will likely never catch up to their predecessors. More and more will rent for their entire lives without ever owning a home.

As economic conditions deteriorate, marriage rates and birth rates will continue to decline, increasing isolation. Depression, already at record levels among young people, will worsen. On top of these stressors, they will keep paying an increasing share of income to rent smaller and less satisfying homes. Vulnerable groups, like people with disabilities, will be disproportionately affected, and even fewer people with special housing needs will have those needs met.

As bad as these current trends are for most people, they are even more devastating for animals. When people have less disposable income, they are less likely to have a pet. When people live in smaller homes, they are also less likely to have a pet. And when people rent instead of owning their home, they are far less likely to have a pet, especially when sharing that home with others.

All these factors compounding will result in surplus animals being put to death by the millions, which will be made all the more tragic by the fact that millions of people would have wanted to give them homes had they been able to do so.

This is what will likely happen soon if we do not change course, but there is still a chance to write a better future.