Very same here. I delivered pizza in Atlanta in 1988 and shared a two bedroom on Piedmont park for a total of 550.00 month. I was so worried about making it too lol. Now as a person 30 years in my field and making fair money , I am paycheck to paycheck with little ability to save. To be fair, I’ve started over a couple of times , divorce etc. Starting over is expensive and takes a long leveling off but this economy is adding a lot of time on it.
The only reason I still live in Ohio. My salary is almost double the median income, and I’m still just barely staying out of the paycheck to paycheck life while paying my spouses way through school. I wouldn’t have been able to afford a house anywhere else with just my income and maintain what semblance of a life we do have.
The perks of living in the decaying rust belt I guess.
No doubt. Ten years ago, that same phrase would’ve meant I had to decide between gas and food on Wednesday.
Now it’s enough to pay the bills and tuition after we lost their income because of covid. I’m constantly teetering on overdrafts thanks to the financial obligations we have from when there was 40k more a year in the bank. Sure, it might not be for the same reasons, but it’s a similar situation. It left me with no room for savings. You can be broke and make good money, due to situations beyond your control.
I came from three generations of broke people on both sides. It’s not like I don’t get it. Just decided to prioritize the betterment of someone I care about, and not remain in crushing debt for the rest of my life. I drive a 13 year old truck. My phone is 4 years old. We shop at discount grocery stores. I’m not just blowing it.
Point being, if I lived anywhere else but Ohio or some equally inexpensive state, I would have lost everything by now.
If anything I can imagine earthquakes make it worse. I assume they’d Shock Doctrine all of that newly cleared space and build condos that they sell for ten times as much as whatever stood there before… But I don’t know, I’m not a seismologist.
Interesting, thanks for the link - at the very least, things are trending upwards so fingers crossed we are through the worst of it for the time being. Which is probably 8-10 years, it is cyclical.
This is aimed at the person i originally responded to. General thoughts about about political agendas couched in loaded language below. Nothing is apolitical, and everyone has an agenda. The key is to figure out what it is.
“Worst recession since 2008” is one of those phrases that sounds almost like the economy is just as bad as 2008, but actually doesn’t mean much of anything.
For demonstrative purposes I’ll use some arbitrary numbers here.
If we rated the 2008 recession at an 10/10 on the badness scale, rated any recession between 2009-2022 as a 2/10 at the most, and rated the current recession we’re in at say, a 4 - I could say that this is the worst recession since 2008, and it would not be untruthful.
No, we wouldn’t be, Mr. Negative Karma Throwaway. A recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. The US had exactly two in Q1 2022 and Q2 2022 before going back to positive growth. The US had a much larger recession in Q1 and Q2 2020 before a big recovery in Q3 2020. statista.com/…/percent-change-from-preceding-peri…
About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.
Don’t forget, many of those people won’t be alive much longer, and many of their houses will not be passed on to family, but sold off to pay off debts owed by their estates, and will end up as more overpriced rental properties.
I bought in October 2020 and couldn’t afford it now. I bought with a 15-year mortgage, which I feel unbelievably fortunate to have been able to do. If I was to refinance to a 30-year loan, I’d be paying $500 per month more than I am now, and that’s not accounting for the 25% increase in house value. It’s insane.
Totally. I fortunately work in a pretty stable field that is relatively open to remote work so I’m not too worried about being forced to move but I definitely didn’t buy this house with the intention of living in it forever either. I may be stuck here until it’s paid off though. But there are far worse financial situations to be in so I’m grateful to have a job and house and a little place to grow tomatoes. All in all, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
That sounds nice as long as it works out. But the fact is that most people just don’t live in a house for that long. I think the average is something like 7 years. Because, you know, life happens or people simply want to try something else in life. I don’t think I’ve live in any one place more than 3 years as an adult. I quickly get the urge to try something else, both job-wise and location-wise. And then I move, kids and everything. The whole 30-year fixed or 15-year fixed is meaningless to me.
I was just talking to my father last week about this exact thing. He built his house about 10 years ago and bought the land close to 30 years ago. He was a steel worker so not terrible pay but nothing amazing. That house today would be well over 1mil. No way he could have built it today. And we live pretty close to the middle of nowhere, Indiana. I pray I can buy my brother out one day, at this rate it’s the only chance I have of owning a nice house. Even with a STEM degree I’m looking at maybe 70k salary right now. Which I thought would be awesome when I started college but now that I graduated, I feel like anything under 6 figures will be hard to live a middle class life on. I guess I’m lucky I spent my 20s broke and homeless, I have learned to really stretch a dollar.
Gentrifying a place is investment of capital into formerly-poor areas in cities, and formerly-poor areas in cities were poor because they were ghettos, generally as a result of redlining, white flight, or both.
We should be gentrifying every inner city, subsidizing current-occupant rent as it climbs, and lifting people out of the ghettos we built.
No I think when you shove a bunch of “undesirables” into an area by literally not letting them get loans or see houses outside of that area, you create ghettos.
You may wanna give “redlining” a Google, and then search up the history of places you want to “protect” from gentrification. You’ll find the two are nearly always connected.
We owe it to the people who live there to financially apologize for the atrocities we committed upon them and their families in the past.
We should financially apologize for the atrocities and lift people up like you suggest, but that’s not what gentrification means. The other commenter was right. Gentrification means upgrading an area and displacing those who live there.
gentrification jĕn″trə-fĭ-kā′shən noun
The restoration and upgrading of deteriorated urban property by middle-class or affluent people, often resulting in displacement of lower-income people.
The process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces earlier usually poorer residents.
The restoration of run-down urban areas by the middle class (resulting in the displacement of low-income residents).
Depends on your definition of gentrification. Most Americans do not associate renovation/upkeep/modernization but undue rent increase with minor changes to the space, I feel.
Add comment