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Miguel Carpio
Pragya Trivedi
Writing 39B
6 June 2019

RIP Project: ​https://wdestates.weebly.com/

The Housing Crisis: A Take on Affordable Housing

One of the big issues facing society today is the housing crisis. New college graduates are

finding themselves struggling to find affordable housing by themselves. According to Aalbers,

“... many young households…now simply cannot become homeowners… the alternatives are

private rented housing… but it is often under-maintained, overpriced or both.” The housing

options for these college graduates are becoming increasingly expensive, unappealing, and

utterly pathetic. My RIP project aims to bring light to this issue by creating a mock-up real estate

agent website that shows fake unappealing and inexpensive listings in San Francisco which is

notorious for its high cost of living.

The audience for this RIP project would be recent college or university graduates wanting

to look for affordable audience. The demographic facing the housing crisis is mainly recent

college graduates and or young adults. The reason for their inability to purchase, mortgage, or

rent a home is due to “student loan debt and jobs that pay relatively low wages.” (Dickinson).

This bars an entry to the housing market for this demographic and it makes it incredibly hard for

them to find an inexpensive property that they can reside in. Therefore, the people in this

audience that may find themselves having trouble looking for affordable housing may be able to

relate to this piece. I know this is my audience because one of my family members are one of
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these recent college graduates facing this issue. They have had trouble finding roommates to find

a living space and is currently living with my aunt and uncle.

The message I want to convey to the audience is that the reality of the situation in modern

times is that housing is becoming diminishingly affordable. In areas such as San Francisco, New

York, and Los Angeles, the cost of living is relatively high in other areas. In fact, this housing

crisis is not just geographically limited to the US, but it is found worldwide. According to an

article titled, “The global urban housing affordability crisis”, ​cities that are prosperous, affluent,

growing, and economically viable (such as the ones listed before) are affected and that “…The

evidence is thus becoming overwhelming that this urban housing crisis is ​global​ in scope.”

(Wetzstein). ​People all over the world have to undergo insufferable and tedious acts just to be

able to afford a place to live in these areas and I feel my audience would be able to relate to that.

The cold hard truth headlining the homepage, “Don’t look elsewhere because you probably

won’t find anything else more affordable!” will hit the audience hard and make them understand

that this is the world that they have to live in compared to many years ago when a house was

relatively easy to buy in a person’s twenties.

Ever since I was a kid, I was always looking through house listings under realtor.com and

imagining what life would be like if I were to live in that particular house one day. I would take

into account the visuals, the pricing, the location, etc. and see if it was fit for me. As a result of

this weird hobby of mine, I have a good understanding about what I need to create this RIP

project. I decided to use a gothic house to make an unappealing listing. From ​The Haunting of

Hill House,​ I learned how the architecture of Hill House is unappealing with all its weird

intricacies like how everything is angled unusually. So, I created https://wdestates.weebly.com/.

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I took inspiration from the Sheerin Feizi Group and their website at

http://sfeizigroup.com/. I noticed how their website includes a page dedicated to agents,

properties, buyers/sellers, communities, resources, and contacts. Their page also shows pictures

of beautiful communities, interiors, and houses that are visually appealing to the audience. From

this model, I decided to create a mock up of this website.

The components of this website include a home page, agents page, listings page, and

contact page. Under the homepage, I include a section dedicated to this fake company’s purpose.

The “Our Purpose” section aims to appeal to my targeted demographic by stating how difficult it

is to find affordable housing in modern society for recent college graduates. To convince my

audience that this real estate agency is suitable for college graduates, I included a review section

on the same page to include testimonials from young adults and recent graduates and their

mediocre experience with the agency. Under the agents page, I further this credibility by

showing how the agency was created from the founder’s troubling experience of finding housing

as a college graduate. The contacts page is included as it is necessary for all real estate websites.

The listings page is the main focus of my website. The listings are so unappealing that no

person would be sane enough to buy them. These listings are located in laughable areas: a

cemetery, the middle of the forest, and the infamous Alcatraz Island. Furthermore, their living

spaces are completely hideous and hazardous. One of the listings does not even have a bathroom!

All of these are to mock listings on similar websites. Listings on other websites such as Zillow

and Realtor show listings that are way too expensive for recent college graduates with

surprisingly somewhat similar living conditions. Although my listings page exaggerates this

issue that listed housings are under-maintained and downright laughable in terms of price, these
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issues are staggeringly similar to the ones listed on other websites. From this comparison of my

fake listings page and real listings, the audience is able to strike a resemblance between the two.

Both show expensive housing that is downright laughable in terms of quality. The only

difference is that my fictitious website exaggerates these issues, but these issues still remain in

the real world.

During the development of my RIP project, one of my goals was to create a fake housing

agent. I did not really see how I would be able to do that since websites that mainly focused on

selling houses like zillow.com did not show any of the agents. After looking up other various

house listing websites, I came across sfeizgroup.com which was a real estate group that listed

both house listings and real estate agents. Through that, I was able to create a fake housing agent.

My second problem was to find a way to target my audience of recent college graduates. I was

able to solve this problem by looking at sfeizgroup.com. They talked about their target audience

under their home and agents page, so I did the same.

The gothic part of this piece is to bring light to this cultural anxiety to this problem of

unaffordable housing. It’s not a problem that is limited to the United States either, but it is a

problem on a global scale. Housing in modern times is becoming increasingly challenging to

acquire, inadequate, and expensive. Through this RIP project, I aim that the satirical tone of this

website is able to bring to the cultural anxiety of our society: the housing crisis.
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Works Cited

Dickerson, A. Mechele. "Millennials, Affordable Housing, and the Future of Homeownership."

Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law,​ vol. 24, no. 3, 2016,

pp. 435-466. ​HeinOnline,​ https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/jrlaff24&i=483.

Jackson, Shirley. ​The Haunting of Hill House.​ Viking, 1959.

Manuel B. Aalbers (2015) The Great Moderation, the Great Excess and the global housing crisis,

International Journal of Housing Policy, 15:1, 43-60, DOI:

10.1080/14616718.2014.997431

“Sheerin Feizi Real Estate Professional Delray Beach & Boynton Beach.” ​Sheerin Feizi Group.​

http://sfeizigroup.com/

Wetzstein, S. (2017). The global urban housing affordability crisis. ​Urban Studies,​ ​54(​ 14),

3159–3177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017711649