Green Builder Media co-founder Ron Jones argues that the dollars-per-square-foot metric measures quantity rather than quality, and that the real value of homeownership includes pride, accomplishment, and intergenerational family wealth.
00:00:01:02 - 00:00:35:25
Ron Jones: I don't really present the facts, you know, I just sort of tell stories, right? And, so I want, I want to I want to start with the story, about I served on the board of directors for 25 years, 25 frustrating years. I, I it was like pushing a rope up hill. It was kind of like trying to paint a dirt road and, and I and I talks when you're,
00:00:35:28 - 00:01:04:13
Ron Jones: The reason I hung in there so long was like. I felt like maybe it it took more courage to take on an institution from the inside than to be on the outside throwing rocks at it. And I've benefited a lot from that experience. I will I will tell you, but after 25 years, I realized that I had, wasted a quarter century.
00:01:04:13 - 00:01:26:08
Ron Jones: And, you know, I had to move on to something else. I have a lot of memories of that time. And one of them was, was that a spring board meeting in Washington, DC? And I think it was either 98 or 99. And we had a guest speaker, who was, very prominent, state politician from New York.
00:01:26:10 - 00:01:42:08
Ron Jones: You wouldn't know who it is if I said and, He was he he was a great speaker, and he he knew his audience. He had gone to your chair, you know, and he talked about.
00:01:42:10 - 00:02:18:03
Ron Jones: The importance of homeownership in the context of personal accomplishment. He said that his his grandparents had immigrated from from Italy. And that meant because if you had enough, if you had a vowel on the end of your name, you were only qualified for pick and shovel. You didn't have a scientific job or white collar job of any kind.
00:02:18:05 - 00:02:52:25
Ron Jones: And so his grandfather had a crack up on this. Sorry. His grandfather had worked three jobs and had about four hours sleep a night. And his grandmother would massage his feet and nurse his feet and doctor them. So that he could go back to work the next day. And as he told his story. You know, I thought about my own grandparents and how during the depression, they had worked as migrant farmworkers across the southwest and.
00:02:52:27 - 00:03:10:08
Ron Jones: How at the at the moment when they were able to finally at a very advanced age, have a home of their own.
00:03:10:11 - 00:03:39:25
Ron Jones: It was probably the highest accomplishment that they had ever had. And they had a sense of pride and a sense of success. Very modest hats. But they had they had. Realized their dream. And they were, you know, the problem with the dry eye in the house. I know that, you know, I kind of teared up. But he barely got off the stage and the applause died, and we were back to business as usual.
00:03:40:00 - 00:04:13:18
Ron Jones: By God, we got to get that mandatory bathroom fan. Let me out of here. You know, it's costing us $200 a house. You know, $200 fan prevented thousands of dollars. Most. What is it? What is a trip to the emergency room with a child with asthma? Cost? We don't like those regulations. We don't want regulations. We're overregulated.
00:04:13:20 - 00:04:48:14
Ron Jones: The dollars per square foot evaluation is the lazy man's arithmetic. And all it does is talk about quantity. It has nothing to do with quality. When we talk about value, we need to talk about more than the monetary value. We need to talk about a sense of pride, that sense of accomplishment, and the intergenerational opportunity to build family wealth that that represents.
00:04:48:16 - 00:05:23:24
Ron Jones: It's a hell of a lot more important. Than what the industry would have us believe, which is that verse cost is the same as will cost we any of the keys. And as good luck is the furthest thing from the truth. That's just the first step in a very long journey. And unfortunately, I think what has happened is that the American home buyer has settled with this concept in some ways, and we don't really demand what we should.
00:05:23:26 - 00:05:32:14
Ron Jones: I will tell you, I spent 20, 20 plus years as a high end custom homeowner.
00:05:32:17 - 00:06:02:02
Ron Jones: And the criteria that I had. To measure the success of any project was whether or not when I handed them the keys, I also handed them the equity. I gave them more than they had paid for. It doesn't mean that I have to sacrifice these things. Affordability is not the same thing as profitability, and that's what the industry would have us believe.
00:06:02:09 - 00:06:37:05
Ron Jones: So what we need to do is we need to find a way to move past that metric and hopefully to re instill in the market. The suggestion that there's more to the value of ownership than you can measure in dollars and square footage. So I guess that's all. Melvin, I got to say today, thank you.