The House Beneath the Economy: Repairing Homes, Rebuilding Stability and Rethinking the Flow of Money

Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 – Justin – Co-host. The opening exchange indicates that the other speaker addresses him by name as Justin. Throughout the episode he primarily responds to the main presentation, asks questions, offers analogies, and discusses shared housing experiences.

Speaker 2 – Keno – Co-host / Primary Presenter. The opening identifies the program as being with Justin and Keno. Based on the conversational handoffs, Keno appears to be the speaker who says, “I’m doing good, Justin,” and then delivers most of the prepared material concerning housing, deferred maintenance, insurance, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and proposed housing-stability funding.

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Speaker 1 – Justin:
Hello, and welcome to Translating Heart Intelligence. You are here with Justin and Keno today. How are you doing?

Speaker 2 – Keno:
I’m doing good, Justin. I’m happy to be here with you today.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Me too. So what are we going to be discussing today?

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Today’s episode is about housing as the foundation beneath the monetary system, and we’re going to be covering housing and some of the things that I’ve been working on and sending out to different people.

In our last episode, we covered how to use AI to help write letters to community outreach programs if you needed help reaching people about things like sewer lines or water lines. Our second episode was more about reallocating money circulating in our system from tariffs and artificial-intelligence dividends to help stabilize our current financial system so it can transition to something possibly more efficient and better for everybody. Then our last episode covered how people can reach out to the Treasury if they want to start using money reclaimed from fraud to fund their own individual community projects.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Right.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
I did want to give Paul Hellier a shout-out today.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah. I really like that guy, and this is for him.

Are you ready? Our first part of this is not going to be housing, but it’s all going to tie together. I wanted to share something that I shared with Justin the other day about how money is very similar to emotion and how both, I have found, can be detrimental if you don’t know how to let them go.

Money and emotions—if you don’t know how to let them go, they can be detrimental. But the difference I found is that a person would be more than happy to say, “I have $20 million in my bank account,” while most people wouldn’t want to share that they had 20 years of repressed self-loathing because their dad never loved them.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Family issues.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Family issues. Some people like to talk about that sort of thing.

The parallel I was drawing between money and emotion is that a person could have, let’s say, $20 million in their bank account. They can have a reserve of numbers, right? That’s totally fine if people want to do that. People can also have reserves of anger or grief or guilt or shame, and that’s fine if people want to do that.

But there’s very little growth if none of that stuff can be let go—if you can’t recirculate it.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
You mean like having the money work for you?

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah, having the money work for you, because you have to be able to release it back out into the world for it to come back to you in different ways.

We’ve been working on ideas like establishing safety in a community or being able to have money restore things in life instead of being used to extract from people. I think that can also be the same with emotion. When we can let go of things that we’ve really struggled to process, we can get past that feeling of, “Well, I’ll just never recover because I can’t let this go.” Sometimes I’ve found that blocks new things from coming into my life.

Although this is not related to housing, I felt like I wanted to share a quick exercise that I’ve taught a little boy we know. He struggles with some autistic traits and has a really hard time with emotion. I’ve been able to share this with just a few other people, and even though it’s really simple, it did help.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Like Mr. Rogers: “What do you do with the mad that you feel?”

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah. It kind of works off of that.

What I did with this little guy was, when he’d get really emotional about something, I’d ask about the emotion. Let’s use anger as an example. Usually I’ll start making the face of anger, and if it’s not that, we’ll make other faces. Is it sad? And I’ll make the actual sad face. Are you happy? Are we embarrassed?

For this example, once we’ve landed on the emotion, we’ll use anger. We’ll sit and say, “Hello, anger,” and then we sit there and feel it. We feel it in our body. We feel where it is. For me, anger is usually in my shoulders and my neck. That’s where I feel it.

So we say hello to it, we feel it, and then we say how we want to feel. With him, usually it’s happy: “I want to feel happy instead.”

For me, I might say peaceful. So: “Hello, anger.” Feel it. “I want to feel peaceful. Hello, peaceful. Goodbye, anger.”

It’s pretty amazing, actually, because I don’t know if it’s letting your body know that you’re acknowledging it and then that you’re ready to let it go. Sometimes we have to do that multiple times in a row, and even over the course of a couple of days.

Recently, I was using this technique to get over the death of our dog. I was saying, “Hello, grief and sadness,” and I felt that one in my chest, my lungs, and my throat. I was sitting there with it, and I was like, “I want to feel peaceful. So goodbye, grief. Hello, peaceful.”

For a couple of days, the words wouldn’t fully come out. Then I noticed I started going through what felt like the five stages of grief a lot faster. It really did help me understand that I needed to let my body grieve and feel. I needed to feel that for a couple of days before I was even fully ready to feel peaceful again.

I wanted to bring that up because what I’ve been noticing in regard to the financial system and the monetary system is that a lot of it is very similar to that process. I’ve noticed there are so many things going on in the financial system that I would like to change. I would like it to be more reciprocal. I would like money to be able to move to people who want to start healing—to be released so that they can grow.

This is one part of one of the letters that I wrote: Systems like the financial system may also carry accumulated damage long after that damage has already communicated that something needs repair. We don’t need to keep experiencing pain in order to prove that the pain happened.

That can be kind of mind-boggling because when you get stuck in that loop of, “I can never let this go,” then nothing new ever comes in.

What do you think about that? You’ve actually tried the emotional-release thing. Do you find any similarities between the two?

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Well, it sounds like I get kind of stuck with the grief when it comes to the financial system. The way you’re talking about housing and the Treasury and all of that is how everything is going to all these different pots that have nothing to do with growth for us Americans who have paid into that system. I think grief is actually a really good descriptor.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Especially because what I wanted to go into next is this idea that we have a little bit of, but it’s never really been defined within the financial system: the idea of a minimum viable home.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Minimum viable home.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah. That’s the idea.

I’ve been working with this probably since February, when we started having a lot of problems with our house. If no one has listened to any of our other shows, we bought a new home and got the inspections done. Then, after living here, we found out that we had major sewer-line damage to our home.

We’re based in Oklahoma, and in the South many homes deal with cast-iron piping, which we’re going to go into more. Through the course of dealing with our homeowners insurance in regard to our problem, they didn’t cover it. That’s what we were told. They didn’t cover it because it was underneath the home and was due to wear and tear.

It hit me that there is no label, no name, and no definition that is consistently used to name what a minimum viable home is. For me, it would mean that you should be able to use your toilet facilities, you should have running water, you need to have shelter, and you need to have protection from the wind and the elements. That is what a person needs.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
So, a little bit more of an upgrade than just a tool shed.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yes, an upgrade from a tool shed.

The really interesting part is that I started to research the financial system. What is the foundation of it? Do you think this is a good time to explain the summary of that?

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Sure.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Okay. This is a very basic summary. I don’t want to go too in-depth because they make the language confusing.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
They make my brain hurt.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah.

The Federal Reserve isn’t literally backed by housing, but the whole financial system that the Fed supports relies heavily on housing. Here is the simple chain: Banks make mortgages, mortgages become big assets that get bundled and sold, and the Fed often buys those bundles to stabilize the economy.

So when I say housing is foundational, it is because the value and stability of homes underpin a lot of the financial system. If housing weakens, everything up the chain feels it.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Right.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
This is where I didn’t understand something, because there’s no minimum requirement for a home. I guess you could get something condemned, right? But that’s actually really hard to do.

I looked into doing that with our house because we were running out of options, and it was extremely difficult. It would have had to practically fall through its foundation and crush us in our sleep.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Which is kind of ironic, because then we wouldn’t have our house at all.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah. It’s very ironic.

As far as the minimum viable home, for us personally and in regard to homes in the South, many homes face the same problem: cast-iron sewer lines. These homes were built between the 1940s and 1970s.

The economic question regarding this shouldn’t only be, “How much does the plumbing repair cost for a home if you’re buying one of these houses?” It should also be, “What happens financially if we don’t repair it?”

Failure to repair these homes can affect habitability, property value, the mortgage itself, neighborhood values, municipal tax revenue, household displacement, and eventual demolition or replacement costs.

We’ve seen this in homes in our neighborhood.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
We see it here. You walk down the street here and there are five or six homes for sale that have been for sale for years because they’re just not habitable, or anybody looking to afford that home can’t afford all the repairs that need to be done.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Exactly.

Let’s say you’re a starter family and you’re looking to buy a starter home. You have older homes that were not maintained, and a lot of the time, if you can afford them, they’re at that price because they were not maintained.

So you get the mortgage on the house, and then this has happened to so many people: You’re looking at a minimum of $13,000 to $15,000 for an HVAC replacement, around the same or maybe a little less for a new roof. Our quote for our sewer-line repair, to fully rip the floor out and redo everything internally, was $45,000. If you do under-foundation boring to redo the piping, the total for that was about $15,000.

You have all of these maintenance cycles that went undone because, a lot of the time, the people who owned the home before couldn’t afford it either.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Right. Or they jury-rigged everything and made it even worse.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Exactly. We’re talking about individuals who have aged out of their homes to the point where the house was in such disrepair that their only course of action was to sell and get out of it.

There are always those shows on TV that say, “Oh, we’ll just flip it and make a bunch of money,” right? That’s fine if people want to do that. But what I’ve been observing, because we’ve lived all over the country—we’ve lived in apartments and we’ve been homeowners—is that there are regional problems all over the United States, especially in housing and infrastructure built around the 1940s through the 1970s. A lot of it has not been able to be maintained.

If you have an aging couple that lived in that home and paid it off, that’s awesome. But it can get to the point where they can’t afford to maintain it anymore. Or let’s just say you had a family that couldn’t maintain it. That is what gets passed down to people.

That is what I called deferred maintenance, which is the physical cost of not being able to maintain a home.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Right. So what does deferred maintenance have to do with the Federal Reserve?

Speaker 2 – Keno:
If there were a minimum viable housing standard, it could say you should be able to use the toilet, you should have adequate wind protection from your roof, and you should have running, clean water. None of that has been established in the way I’m talking about.

So when the Fed says they have all of these home assets that back the housing market, my question was: How many of those homes are actually livable?

I think I was actually able to get a response from them, but we also need to talk about homeowners insurance because homeowners insurance is required if you have a mortgage. It’s all tied together.

The Federal Reserve uses housing, in the sense I’m describing, as part of the foundation of the financial system through mortgages. When you have a mortgage, you have to have homeowners insurance.

In our experience, and in many other people’s experience, homeowners insurance is not paying out on certain claims. So essentially, in the situations I’m talking about, the insurance is not paying to maintain the home so that it can remain viable.

Does that make sense? What does that mean to you?

Speaker 1 – Justin:
I think part of that is service. You’re paying for a service, and when you pay into it for decades—kind of like our situation—and then never end up using the service, when you finally need it, there can be absolutely nothing that will be done.

I guess this is going to sound kind of bratty, but as the homeowner, it is our responsibility. However, in our case, even if we got the inspection and even if we got the scope done, we still wouldn’t have known about the problem until it was way too far gone.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
The first letter I sent out was actually to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety on March 10. The question I asked them in regard to this whole problem was: “Can we scientifically test whether targeted intervention and repair improve the survivability of existing housing?”

I asked if they could discuss things such as durability, insurance outcomes, preservation versus abandonment, and whether the property remains a functioning asset.

The IBHS—the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety—responded and indicated the concept had been forwarded internally for possible research consideration, without presenting that as a commitment that they would do it.

I just wanted to know if it was even possible for the insurance industry to understand that repairing homes matters because you have to be able to repair homes in order for homes to exist for future generations.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Right. And that was a big part of the letter that you sent.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yes.

Insurance is very good at pricing sudden catastrophic events, but what happens when the catastrophe is slow deterioration? This is where we were talking earlier about having a bunch of homes in our area that are literally abandoned.

The next part I sent along with this to the IBHS, asking if they could study repair versus abandonment, was this question: How much money are homeowners insurance companies losing out on after they’ve allowed a home to become abandoned?

You haven’t helped the people who have been paying into your insurance. You’ve been keeping that money within your business, which is a business model; I get it. But how much money are you going to be losing out on in the future from all of these homes that are likely to end up abandoned because people cannot afford the amount of money it takes to bring that home back up to minimum viable habitability?

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Right.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
And the number was staggering. I started doing research on how many homes—sorry, I’m finding my notes.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
The numbers of their losses versus the numbers of their gains, right?

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yes.

From the census data I was working with, it was 56 to 59 million homes in the South built between 1940 and 1979 that had cast iron. So using an average of that huge number of homes—about 57 million—how many were still likely to have cast-iron plumbing from the time they were built?

For homes still containing original and vulnerable inaccessible portions, like our home where we had to go underneath the foundation, I was doing all of these calculations with AI. I came up with roughly 4.9 million homes that could be going through the same kind of thing we are going through right now, based on the census data, the trajectory, and the expected lifespan of how those homes were built.

That’s a lot of people going through a lot of hardship right now.

And it’s not just homes. We already talked about water lines and infrastructure. Cast iron is a really big issue, and it’s only one regional issue. It’s only one small portion of this.

Other regional issues we came into contact with included mold when we lived in the Pacific Northwest. We lived in old apartment buildings there, and every single one of them had ridiculous amounts of mold. In Idaho, especially North Idaho, mold was a huge deal.

Remediating that takes so much money, and if it gets too far, the likelihood of removing the mold can become very low. I used to clean homes for a rental company. Once it gets past a certain point, you have to decide: Is this viable to save or not?

Would you want to go over some of the regional things we saw in New England when we lived there?

Speaker 1 – Justin:
The biggest thing in New England was the foundations. It is the oldest place in the United States, and they used a combination of vermiculite in their foundations, which crumbles and turns into sand over time. The local governments knew about it.

They passed something in Connecticut, didn’t they?

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah, it was like reimbursement.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Yeah. In Connecticut they did, but not in Massachusetts.

The sheer fact of the matter was that we were looking at a repair of almost $250,000 just to redo our foundation. After we put in an insurance claim and all of that, I’m not kidding you, they literally told us that it had to fall down on top of us before they would do anything.

That was for our previous home in Massachusetts. That was what we were told.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Because the insurance company said it was wear and tear and that they did not cover wear and tear.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
No. Even though we did what we could for structural support according to licensed engineers—and we had several come out—it was still going to be a major issue.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
A lot of people reach that point with a home and have very few options. You could get a second mortgage if your home is paid off, or you might have to let it go. I guess you could let it go to foreclosure and walk away.

For us, once we hit that point with a home, it felt like we were trapped. We were tied to this asset that had not been maintained. There was no accountability for wear and tear. There was no help.

We either had to go to the bank and double down with almost the exact same amount as our initial mortgage and be stuck there forever, or try to remediate it as best we could, which we did. We had masons come out and build a buttress, which was going to help the foundation last longer and allowed the home to still be sellable.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
The big thing is that they want us to buy homes, make families, and keep the economy going. But what you’re talking about is that they could also work to support us so that we could stay in a minimum viable, livable dwelling of some kind.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yes. I think we would have been over the moon if we could have gotten the help.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
And we would have stayed there.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah. We wanted to be a part of that community—raising children, going to work, staying in the same area, keeping that local economy going. But we could not afford the price of repairing that home.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
No. You even did the math, right? It was actually cheaper to bulldoze it and build a new home than it would have been to try to fix the foundation problem.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
That was exactly what I sent to the IBHS too. I asked: When is a home too far gone?

We can total a car, but we can’t “total” a home in the same kind of way. Those were all questions I sent to them. They do testing for insurance companies to figure out what is actually coverable, where money can be saved, and what helps when insurers pay out on it.

What that ties into next is that we have homes that we have no way, in the framework I’m proposing, to distinguish as habitable, but they are considered assets and part of the foundation of the financial system.

This is where I was exploring how the Fed moves money around. How is it using this foundation to do what it does to influence interest rates and the money supply?

I have a lot of notes. Sorry.

If the government or the Fed can pay billions of dollars in interest to financial institutions specifically to influence business behavior or lending practices, could a monetary system be designed to influence behavior through other kinds of payments instead?

Our current approach, as I’ve observed it, is that when inflation is high, the cost of borrowing money goes up, interest rates go up, everyone feels the pressure, and demand falls for people wanting to borrow money.

If I wanted a more empathetic system, or one that was more of a container for growth, we could still deal with inflation, but have better methods to identify where the pressure is originating, constrain the destabilizing activity, protect essential capacity, and give households more time to adapt.

This is the same kind of thing we did with our home in Massachusetts, which had foundation problems. We had this overwhelming problem with the entire foundation. We were able to find a way to have buttresses installed. They’re stabilizers that hold the walls up so the home can still be livable.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Right.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
And it gave us more time to figure out, “Okay, what are we actually going to do?”

So this is just asking whether there’s a way to do that on a much bigger scale.

The other question I really wanted to convey to people with the show today is this: If public participation makes the financial system possible and valuable, shouldn’t some of the financial return generated within the system involving the Fed and the Treasury be returned to the public?

Our homes, the homes that we live in and the money that we pay, are part of the entire foundation and basis for the monetary system as I’m describing it. What portion of financial return represents compensation to Americans for their actual risk, service, and time? What portion arises because everybody collectively maintains the monetary container? Where is this money coming back to us?

What do you think?

Speaker 1 – Justin:
You brought up taxes. That’s how it was supposed to work, right? You pay your taxes and then it goes into fixing roads and paying firefighters, which is all very important.

But here, correct me if I’m wrong, you’re talking about setting up another system of monetary distribution for people to be able to stay in one place and fix their homes.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
People don’t have to stay in one place. But if they do, they should be able to fix and repair their home. Or a new family, a starter family, should be able to come in and have a home.

Everybody should be able to have a home, I think, and there needs to be accountability for what minimum viability should be for habitability.

It’s already difficult enough when you have to save up for a $50,000 down payment and then sign a 30-year mortgage at, say, 6 percent interest, which can dramatically increase the total amount paid over the course of 30 years.

That’s my idea.

I sent the material regarding homeowners insurance and minimum housing viability to the IBHS to start asking about research in that area. What I did next was start working on how to communicate all of this information to the Fed and where money could come from within the system we’re already using to give back to people so they can repair their own homes and, essentially, repair our financial system—make it more reciprocal and less extractive.

This isn’t something I want to be controlling. My intention is that all of this money is being used in ways that normally are not directly for you.

We made a joke about that last show, where they always talk about all these millions of dollars being sent for crazy things to other countries. It’s similar, if you look at it that way, to getting guilted by your family to go to some event you don’t want to go to, but you still go anyway.

So all this money gets sent to other countries anyway, and it’s like, “Wait a minute. Hold on. Maybe we can slow down a little bit and figure out whether we can use some of this money to fix our country and our homes.”

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Instead of sending the $200 million for South American dance lessons, for example.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah. Well, I’m going to try to explain the summary of how money moves between the Fed and the Treasury. That’s where a lot of these funding questions come into the conversation.

The Treasury is the government’s bank account in the simplified way I’m describing it. It collects taxes, pays bills, and issues Treasury bonds to borrow money.

The Federal Reserve isn’t a piggy bank for that. It’s basically part of the financial stabilization system. It buys and sells things like Treasury bonds or bundles of mortgages to keep credit flowing.

So money flows in this big circle: people, banks, housing, markets, Fed operations, government spending, and back again. It’s not literally that the Fed simply sends money to the Treasury and then it comes straight back. But if we picture it as a loop, it can be easier to understand.

Using some of those funds, I wanted to propose a housing stability reserve funded from a defined portion of Federal Reserve net earnings and what they call remittances, or from a multi-year average or fixed share of eligible Fed-Treasury monetary revenues.

If the monetary system earns a public-system surplus, part of that surplus should maintain the minimum physical stability required for citizens to participate in the economy at all. It should be that simple.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
You would think.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Just as an example—and this was pretty eye-opening to me—I was using AI to help me figure these numbers out.

Between 2020 and 2024, the average amount the Fed remitted to the Treasury was, according to the figures I was working with, about $54.6 billion. In the calculations in my notes, I then estimated that 25 percent for a housing stabilization fund would be about $22.5 billion annually. Those are the figures I had in the material I was working from.

Looking at starter homes and deferred maintenance costs, the financial debt—the mortgage—is recorded in the banking system. But the physical debt, the deterioration accumulated in the structure, is not being covered.

There is all of this money being sent to other things that could potentially be used to help people repair their homes and restabilize our financial system in a cyclical way.

This doesn’t have to be just a one-time effort and then it’s done, because, as we talked about before, different regions in the country have different problems. There are ways to stair-step and triage where the worst problems are, because those are the areas where starter families—the future—are going to have a really hard time flourishing.

Another thing I brought up with the Fed was: How do we expect people to be able to keep participating in this if we can’t maintain the foundation underneath them?

If people don’t want to use a financial system, okay. But the reality I feel and look at is that everything we do is tied to it: our security, our comfort, our food, and our survivability. We’ve talked about that before.

Our survivability, and that of our children, is intertwined with it. So before it completely falls apart, I wanted to try to offer a bridge to somewhere better—somewhere people can actually receive reciprocal care simply for existing and participating in these systems instead of allowing those systems to keep extracting from people.

How do you feel about that?

Speaker 1 – Justin:
I’m thinking of a different type of analogy because we were talking about emotions earlier.

Do you remember the movie Yes Man with Jim Carrey?

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yes.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
He was a—was he not a bank teller? He was the guy who approved loans.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
[Brief response unclear.]

Speaker 1 – Justin:
I guess the emotion tied to the scene is what I’m thinking about. He thought he was about to be fired because he approved so many microloans. But it turns out that the customers were so happy to receive those microloans that they paid everything back in full.

It’s that emotion I’m thinking about.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
When I wrote all of this to the Fed, I said I don’t think people should be charged interest to fix what I’m calling the foundation of the financial system for whatever money they would receive.

But I think that’s a great example. I think people would be more willing to participate if they were actually able to get something in return that helped them stabilize their life so they could continue growing.

That’s what Jim did in the movie, right? He was helping people stabilize their life so they could keep growing.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Yeah.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
That’s the whole point of this.

With all of the deferred maintenance, there have been a lot of things where the intention was not to leave it better than when you found it. How do you repair that?

That’s essentially what’s going on here. How do we give people a shot at repairing their own communities, their homes, and their world? Is there money there? Is there anything already existing that can do that or serve that purpose?

With the sheer amount of money out there, it’s absolutely mind-boggling.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
What you’re talking about here is reallocating.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yes.

In my main letter to the Fed, I also brought up the idea of minimum viable habitability and how that is a financial-stability issue.

I asked about preservation-versus-abandonment economics, mortgage-collateral deterioration, and the effect that will have on our future.

The more homes that are abandoned, the more insurers may lose out on money associated with those properties and continuity of repair. Banks can also lose future mortgage activity connected with those homes, and all of that moves upward through the broader system.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
And I think that leads into part of what you have discovered: that it may actually be more cost-effective for insurance companies to pay for certain fixes that support the longevity of homes than to let everything go into disrepair.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yes. That was a huge part of what I sent both to the homeowners-insurance research side through the IBHS and to the Fed.

I gave different examples, mainly the cast-iron example involving all of these homes. The point I was making was that it can be cheaper to take the time and repair it now.

I made a whole table using the example we shared at the beginning about cast-iron sewer lines. A lot of the time, in the framework I was analyzing, it appeared cheaper to repair the home than to let it be abandoned or eventually have to be bulldozed and rebuilt.

I did get a response back from the Federal Reserve. When I sent it to the Federal Reserve Board members, I got a response asking me to reach out to some of the Federal Reserve institutions in the South. So I reached out to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and to some economists there so they could start asking these questions and doing the research.

I think once you see something like this—the continuity of the whole structure relying on something that hasn’t been repaired—you start to see the issue differently.

The physical homes haven’t necessarily been repaired; they’ve just been labeled as assets. But what actually makes an asset valuable, from the perspective I’m talking about, is being able to contain life within it.

I really hope people get something out of this, because asking these big questions is possible. Translating your ideas is possible. Being able to voice your opinions to people who might feel completely out of reach is possible.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
It is. And keep bugging them too. You’ll get a response eventually.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah. Do you want to finish with this one?

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Yeah.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Okay.

We don’t have to preserve every emotion forever in order to honor what it has taught us. We don’t have to preserve every physical component of a house forever either.

Sometimes the pipe gets replaced. Sometimes the roof gets replaced. Sometimes an old system gets replaced.

The goal isn’t preservation of every piece. The goal is continuity of the living container.

Maybe sustainability is learning what needs to be released, what needs to be repaired, and what is valuable enough to keep carrying forward.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Yeah.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
I feel like that was our goal today for the show.

Before asking a household to produce, borrow, consume, save, or participate in the economy, there has to be a viable physical container underneath that participation. I feel like everybody deserves that.

So, awesome. I feel like that was good for housing today. That was a lot of information.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Yeah.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
I want to thank you for being here with me, Justin, and thank the listeners out there and BBS Radio for hosting our show today.

Our next episode, I wanted to talk about some of the ideas I sent to the Department of Transportation regarding infrastructure changes and transportation.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
And your idea that we sent to the Department of Aging of Oklahoma.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
Yeah. I’ll try to be nice about that one.

And then right to repair. I also sent a bunch of things to automotive companies and to Home Depot about people being able to have the right to use what we have available to repair what they own, and not always having to reach outside themselves to other systems or companies to do that.

So thank you for being here today.

Speaker 1 – Justin:
Thank you.

Speaker 2 – Keno:
And, as always, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.