Property is always potentially a commodity

On markets and the birth of "housing"

On his channel Primitive Technology, an anonymous Australian man documents himself carrying out building projects and survival experiments in the bush of Northern Queensland. In the first three minutes of a recent video, the viewer watches as this man builds an A-line thatched hut from scratch.

Watching him toss up this shelter hit me differently than it normally would have, I think, because I spent some time this morning poring over the inspection reports for a property that my father-in-law and I were looking at purchasing.

The reports contained pictures of broken seals, moisture inside, funky electrical arrangements, and observations of dry rot and termite damage. The list of recommended repairs ran long. (We’ve since decided not to pursue the property further)

Going from reading housing inspection reports to watching a lone individual build a shelter from nothing but small trees and fronds sparked a thought for me — shelter could be abundant, but we’ve turned it into a commodity we call housing. The regulations around building are a direct result of the market’s pressures to standardize private objects with the expectation that they will become commodities again someday.

A common misconception about markets is that they naturally exist. Human beings create markets by clearing and organizing a space for exchange to take place. Fixing someone’s chainsaw in exchange for raw milk does not make a market, but milk which hasn’t been inspected or treated in certain ways defined by government agencies can’t “go to market.” So, what’s happenings?

A key principle in the creation of markets is an organization of artifacts into a species or class of objects which become identifiable as a certain commodity. In this article, I’m referring specifically to housing — a thatched hut provides shelter, an RV provides shelter, a mansion provides shelter, and an adobe hut also provides shelter. But you can’t have a market for shelter when everyone is making their own shelter according to their needs, abilities, and preferences.

To create a market, you have to gradually generate a uniform object which can be interchangeable with other objects within the market — shelter becomes housing, because housing is a term for a regulated artifact subject to legal definitions, codes, obligations for buyers and sellers, and a whole financial infrastructure for assessing and exchanging these commodities.

Markets necessarily have a homogenizing effect because now an object which may have been originally built to stand on its own or only serve a private use must come into a relationship with a broader pool of objects which it can be compared to. This results in a re-definition of how we understand these private objects.

A house is not simply shelter, but always a potential commodity which could be sold. Its status as ‘always potentially sellable’ because of an existing market for objects to which it can be compared invites the market’s concerns into the every day creation and use of private objects. Eventually, our very conception of these objects is transformed by the market’s structures for representing objects.

The property my father-in-law and I were considering provides a perfect example of this phenomenon — the ad for the property noted that there were “unpermitted improvements” to the property, which indicates that the previous owners had carried out work for which they had not sought permits. In this case, neither the government nor the agent facilitating the transaction could speak to the safety of occupying the property in absence of the permits.

But why should someone need a permit to modify a property they own and occupy? Precisely because that property could pass into the hands of another person someday through the market, and the negligence of the prior improver could pose a hazard to the unwitting purchaser. Thus the existence of the housing market exerts a host of visible and invisible influences on how private objects are handled.

The code of Hammurabi had a different way of dealing with this — if someone built a house for someone else, and that house fell down and killed them, the builder of the house would be put to death. If it killed the house owner’s son, the son of the builder would be put to death. If the collapse killed the owner’s slave, the builder would have to replace his slave. You’d probably think twice about doing a shoddy job, right?

Today we impose building codes, zoning, permits, licenses for contractors, real estate agents, lawyers, and on and on to organize a space in which each of this singularities we call a “house” can be assessed and represented as a commodity which is in theory of such a type that it could be compared to any other in the housing market. Otherwise, the market couldn’t produce any pricing signals.

We see this problem clearly when we encounter properties which are so unique that agents have difficulty pricing them — in industry terms, these properties have no “comps.” There are no other “comparable” properties to use as a possible gauge to determine their market value. In these cases, the singularity of the property makes it such that pricing it involves a high degree of interpretation and negotiation for both parties in the transaction.

Once you see this move from a “need” (shelter) to a “commodity” (housing), you will start to notice it everywhere. In fact, this precisely what I’ll be presenting on at

Theory Underground

‘s 2024 conference — how schooling substituted the subjective and dynamic process of “learning” for the objective and standardized commodity of “education.” Markets are born by taking something you do and transforming it into something for you to consume.

But what sort of terms are we accepting when we invite these types of controls and dependencies into our households? Uncovering these structures and their effects will requires us to renew a “sociology from below.”

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