Look up ‘Hell’s Angels’ by Hunter Thompson. He has a chapter on the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist in the early 1970s.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and save up enough to spend two years on the road. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boyfriend.
I think that’s part of the point. The system doesn’t want the majority to be able to say no to a job because they were able to save easily and can take time off whenever they feel. On top of the things mentioned here like food and insurance costs there are also other things now like being certified in a field or needing to continue education or paying for permits every year that seem way to calculated in cost which is just another way of keeping you from getting to far ahead.
My family does ok, but we were still cutting it close a few years ago. Today we are looking at new jobs that we hopefully can get and pay more because ours stopped giving raises and inflation has us stuck living paycheck to paycheck.
I wish I could take more than a few weeks off a year to do what I actually enjoy doing for once. 1 of those weeks is a cheap vacation and the other is just spent getting things done because work takes up most of our time. It’s stressful and tiring and the longer it goes on the more depressing it becomes.
Another thing to consider. Working folks used to be able to afford really nice things. In 1960, a Rolls Royce was about $20,000 and a Jaguar was about $6,000. A ringside ticket to the first Ali/Fraiser fight was $200. They want peasants scrambling for crumbs, not peers
Their current philosophy is an incredibly shortsighted mistake. You make money by having a robust consumer class with plenty of disposable income to spend on things they like. If most people are barely affording essentials, there’s way less variety in where money ends up. If I’m the executive of Samsung, I want to publicly support better pay and higher taxes, because it means more people can buy my TVs and phones.
I struggle to describe the situation because it actually goes against capitalism. The rich are pursuing the option that gives them less profit and hurts the free market.
We’ve gone so far off the rails in terms of the economy that it boggles the mind.
I was brought with the idea that the old Tsarist system of a few great land owners; a small middle class of minor merchants, tradesmen, white collar civil servants; and a sea of serfs, was always going to be unstable. That’s the idea the Right wants for all of us.
Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor. In this age of shepherds, if one man possessed 500 oxen, and another had none at all, unless there were some government to secure them to him, he would not be allowed to possess them.”
Adam Smith, “ Lectures on Jurisprudence” 1766
All states are unstable, because their function is to secure the wealth of the many in the hands of the few.
I think you’re missing it because you’re still thinking in a national frame. Capitalists do not. If US workers can’t afford their products, they’ll just sell to Chinese workers. That’s part of why they’re so desperate to get into that market. Capitalism always requires expanding markets. It’s why the web is going through enshittification, also.
There is no nation for a capitalist, they may play at patriotism when it suits their interests, but in reality they will go wherever they can to make as much as they can. If that stops being here, they’ll go elsewhere.
I’m sorry but they don’t actually want you to have money. They want you to have credit. Lots and lots of credit if possible. Because then they win twice. Once in the purchases and second in the interest.
True, but that still requires people to have enough disposable income that they’re freely buying things. To nail them on interest you want them to spend more than they earn, agreed, but it’s all a balance. Go too far, and they’ll pull back on spending, and you lose out doubly.
The mistake you’re making is thinking that long-term effects are a concern in capitalism. They aren’t. The point is for the people at the top to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible, keep milking the corpse until it rots, then fuck off with your money.
And at the time the USA was 40-50% of the total wealth of the planet. Things were better for Americans then because most of Europe’s manufacturing and industry was devastated after WWII and took decades to return.
Wealth inequality was much lower in the US after the war: …pse.ens.fr/…/Piketty2014FiguresTables.pdfEurope building back should mean the total pie is bigger. The real problem is that the wealthy parasites are sucking up more and more of a proportion that pie.
It’s mostly that we could afford to argue for higher wages because no one else could make that widget or machine.
Europe rebuilding meant Europeans could buy a toaster, car, tv etc that was local whereas before they HAD to buy from America. Shifting the business away meant America had less money to go around
I also suspect it’s an old money vs Nouveau Riche taking over society thing too but Im pulling that entirely from my ass.
The distribution of that pie is also being skewed. Technology has brought prices slightly down (relative to income) for a lot of things that we buy, meaning that we get better prices and more variety on things like food, clothes, travel, and obviously electronics, but a couple of unavoidable things like housing prices and college tuition have exploded so dramatically that it totally overshadows the modest gains that we get. Both are things that only need to be paid for once, so anyone that went to school and bought a house before prices exploded now gets to enjoy cheap housing and cheap commodities, while anyone unlucky enough to come after is just screwed. I think that’s part of why older generations are so unsupportive of how much of a struggle it is for millenials and gen Z, the economy has gone to crap, but so far its only really hit the young
I think that’s part of why older generations are so unsupportive of how much of a struggle it is for millenials and gen Z, the economy has gone to crap, but so far its only really hit the young
Most of us older Generations though have kids of our own, and so we see how today’s life affects them, and the fact that we usually have to help them out because they have it much harder than we did at their age, so we’re aware of the situation.
What it comes down to is a human nature type of thing, where some people think “I’ve got mine and I don’t care about anyone else”, and that transcends physical age.
Yeah, it certainly isn’t everyone in the older generations, no group is ever a monolith. I was generalizing the general sentiment that I’ve seen, but I’m also in an ultra-conservative area that tends to be very “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, so my perspective is probably skewed too.
I was generalizing the general sentiment that I’ve seen
Fair enough, and I thank you for the clarification.
The only reason I replied was because comments like these tend to really bother me, because as I get older, I find I become the recipient of ageism more and more, which is a form of prejudice.
I definitely do agree though that older generations have certain opinions and ways of thinking that they can be set into, but that doesn’t mean they can’t rise above that.
Just slapping the “Boomer” or “Neckbeard” label on everything and moving on feeling victorious is never a good way of solving any society problems.
And on a personal note, as a Gen-Xer constantly being called a Boomer, it reminds me of that line in the Monty Python movie where Death comes to a dinner party and picks up all these people who just died to take them away because of some bad food that was served. Theres one guy in the group being taken away by Death, and he says “hey I didn’t even eat the salmon mousse”.
Hmm… I knew a Hell’s Angel when I was younger and he certainly didn’t work a union job. He was essentially a gangster, who made bundles of money doing illegal things.
He was a Hell’s Angel in the 70’s and 80’s, so it was during the same time period that the book was written about.the Hell’s Angels have always been a criminal organization, despite trying to paint themselves as a simple motorcycle club.
Yes, but they’re not called Hell’s Angels. There are still bikers who aren’t in the Hell’s Angels. I’m replying to someone who specifically said “Hell’s Angels”. If you’re a biker that isn’t a Hell’s Angel and you call yourself one, you’re going to have a real bad time.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and save up enough to spend two years on the road. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boyfriend.
Now post the tweet where she admits to living in subsidized housing while making $47/hr. This units were intended to get families off the street. She was stealing housing from the poor while someone in Seattle making $14/hr couldn’t qualify for a reduced-fare transit card. That’s right, she doesn’t like to talk about that.
She moved into the unit while making $47/hr as a public defender. When found out she declared bankruptcy and took a much lower paying job in order to more closely qualify for the unit. Despite having the talent and high earning potential, she would rather cosplay as the poor for street cred. Once it cost her the city attorney election she gave up the whole act.
Yeah I looked into all of this and she was gaming shit. Doesn’t negate the fact that shit’s extra fucked these days and corporate greed is ruining everyone’s lives. Fuck the rich.
I’m absolutely not disagreeing with that. I’m pointing out that she is the greedy rich who are the problem. Willing to steal from this city’s most vulnerable to increase her family’s wealth. I don’t care if I agree with the sentiment, I don’t want to hear shit from a lying hypocrite like this.
Do you have any basis for this, or are you just running your mouth? A lack of links to cite your sources makes me suspect the latter. I’m happy to be wrong, however.
Not OP, but the politics of Seattle are pretty nutty. The claims on her abusing subsidized housing usually don’t have a source, but she did declare bankruptcy in 2019 and that lends itself to the story. That being said NTK is pretty nutty. She ran for an office that she effectively hoped to abolish while the city was descending into its own form of lawlessness due to no prosecution. If she had won, Seattle definitively would have been in a worse state.
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.
Well I mean…more and more people want to live in cities, and they’re not making more waterfront apartments. Lots of people want that apartment now, so the price is higher. I don’t know what you can do about that: you can’t provide a beautiful corner apartment overlooking the water in a desirable city for $700 to all the millions of people who want one.
You have to be a complete moron (and pretty ignorant) to believe housing prices are so high because “there is simply not enough supply”. Have you lot slept through the last decades? Do you know anything that’s happening?
Loads of people want to live in cities today, and at least in the west, it’s become more and more difficult to build housing. Therefore demand far outstrips supply.
It’s speculative investments, housing as assets instead of, well, housing. In almost every major city in the west there is an astonishing number of empty apartments. In my hometown of Berlin there is essentially one large corporation that owns most of the city as investment. Also, new housing is constantly being built - but not for (average) people to live in it.
You may also recall that the whole thing came crashing down in 2008? Or have we just forgotten what happened there and the effects it has to this day.
You have to be a complete moron if you think the problem isn’t enough supply.
The population of the US is growing. And the percentage of people living in cities is rising. That’s lots of people looking for housing in cities. At the same time, single-family zoning (which account for around ~80% of land in US cities–before accounting for industrial and commercial) prevents the development of more housing. Old neighborhoods are effectively full, mostly owned by the same families that bought them in the 70s through 00s. New development is waaaay out on the fringes of the city, and expensive as hell because it’s in such high demand.
There isn’t enough new housing being developed to satisfy the growing demand for housing, so prices rise. It’s that simple! The problem is exacerbated, because the rising prices attract investors (corporate and private) and AirB&B etc. But the fundamental problem is that most of our cities are seas of already-occupied single-family homes, and at the same time populations are rising. This is obvious.
But politicians love to blame foreigners, immigration, corporations, AirB&B. You know why? Because the root of the problem is middle-aged surburban majority-white families that don’t want more people (with associated traffic, noise, whatever) in their neighborhood. And that’s their core voting base. Old white people vote like clockwork, young renters reliably don’t. If politicians go on a crusade against the single-family-dwelling suburbs, they know they’ll get voted out. So they throw you these stupid bones: “it’s the Chinese who are making housing expensive, by buying 1% of units (and mostly living in them)! It’s AirB&B, with a few thousand units for rent in a city of 6 million people! It’s the corporations, doing…things nobody can quite explain, that somehow involve buying housing and then just letting it sit there unoccupied? Or something?”
You’re a sucker, believing that bullshit. It’s the voters (the ones who actually vote) who are the problem.
The US is uniquely fucked. What the rest of the west shows though is that the housing crisis exists even without the idiocy that is American suburbanism. The consistent factor across the board is housing-as-profit.
That would be the case if it was as simple as, ECON 101: supply vs. demand.
To me, it seem to be a mixture of gov’t zoning laws (lobbied by corporations), foreign companies/people buying up land (to hold onto as an asset), and just more companies buying up the housing market to resale or rent out.
At least in the US, zoning laws and parking minimums have really restricted the ability of cities to build more housing in high demand areas. Look at how much space is wasted just for surface parking lots in downtown Denver, Houston, Austin, etc… Name almost any bigger city and soooo much valuable land is wasted on cars.
I also agree that real estate should not be used as an investment. If there was more restrictions around owning property in cities, that would certainly help. AirBnB/short term rentals are definitely not helping and should be heavily regulated/taxed.
On cars, yep, nothing will help as much as building up public transportation as much as posaible; electric/hydrogen cars are not the solution. A possible one with not too much building are increasing and improving bus routes and their frequency.
I was able to learn a bit from NotJustBikes and similar channels.
Zoning on buildings to parking space requirments are just mental.
All of it leads back to zoning laws preventing more housing being built, and of the correct types. Most of that is caused by NIMBY types worried about the character of the neighborhood, and perhaps a bit of bigotry. It IS supply and demand, and short supply is caused by bad policymaking that nobody really benefits from.
Zoning laws: yes, strong agree, but the bad guy there isn’t corporations, it’s NIMBYs. People with houses don’t want any development of any kind near them, and being residents they’re the ones who get to vote on it. They almost always vote no.
Foreign people buying land as assets is a thing. You know how you defeat that? Build more housing. If the value of the assets fails to rise, or even falls, then people won’t hold them as assets–and by dumping them on the market, they’ll further decrease the price.
Companies buying up houses to sell (usually after developing or refurbishing them) or rent is ECON101 in action.
If you can solve problem #1, the rest falls into place. But corner apartments overlooking the water in nice cities are still going to be expensive relative to other housing.
The problem is simple: in a perfect society we wouldn't increase flat prices simply so a landlord can make even more profit. There is no actual, logical reason why the flat should cost 5x as much, only made up ones that basically say "but I wanna!". There's no actual 5x increase in costs for the landlord, they pocket most of that additional rent.
Living space isn't something you should be able to profit this heavily from in a functioning society, as it's a basic necessity to life. It's alright that nicer flats cost more but nowadays we value huge additional profits to landlords higher than basic human rights, provocatively spoken.
There is of course the supposed capitalistic reason of doing so, which is to make it more lucrative for others to build additional homes. Additional homes should in turn dampen the prices again. This however hasn’t been panning out the last few decades, as the prices have kept inflating.
In my area those who decide on new building projects own a lot of property, so they of course keep additional homes being build to a minimum to further increase prices of their property... it's a rigged system, by design.
It’s not just in cities. Property prices have skyrocketed pretty much everywhere. Maybe you can point out to some middle-of-nowhere place where this hasn’t happened, but such places also tend to have no jobs which is a problem for the typical person (so entitled, needing a job to live, I know).
Like where? I know towns that will offer you a plot of land for $1, so long as you promise to develop on it.
You do get high housing costs in places where populations are rising faster than housing development can keep up, or where development makes no sense (would you build an apartment block in a shrinking town?)
But like…I can point you to a bunch of cities in the US where housing prices are still quite cheap. You probably won’t want to live in those cities. That’s why they’re cheap. Supply and demand in action.
People think I am full of it when I say that my household income (largish household with kids) is a quarter million a year and we are basically living like we are middle class. Money just doesn’t go as far as it used to.
As a millennial, I never would have imagined working my way up to this point only to find I can’t even buy a house. Oh sure, I could make the bare minimum down payment and get stuck with a super high mortgage payment, but if I lose my job or become disabled or unable to work, we would have no way to pay for it.
Groceries, housing, and insurance costs have more than doubled for us since 2019.
Same. My wife and I are in the process of trying to buy a house over an hour from town, because it’s the only way we’ll ever be able to afford one, and it’s still more than what our landlord paid for the house we’re renting. Housing prices have tripled in the last 8 years here. They doubled in the last two years alone. The house we’re renting would cost a million dollars to buy today and our landlord has a $1000 per month mortgage on it since she bought it right before the housing explosion. It’s pretty wacky that you can become a millionaire just by having been alive and financially stable a few years earlier, while everyone else is destined to be poor for the rest of their lives, even if they’re making a quarter million dollars per year.
It’s a normal-ass 1960’s neighborhood that your parents would have paid normal-ass prices for. The job market here exploded over the last 20 years, so there’s just too many people and not enough land. I’m one of those people, so it’s not like I don’t contribute to the problem.
There are neither too many people nor not enough land, but too many houses from the 60s passed down with initial property tax values and too many NIMBYs preventing new construction of large apartment buildings.
There are tons of big skyrise apartment complexes and dozens more in the works. But they all get labeled “luxury apartments”, despite basically being tiny little rectangles with no windows except for a sliding glass door at the end, and they cost just as much as a house to rent. The more traditional apartments have mostly been converted to condos and they’re also very expensive. It’s just crazy expensive here, despite your choices! Lots of people commute for over an hour each way and then it’s still a half million dollars for a decent house. You have to live at least an hour and a half in the right direction to get something for less.
People live in worse apartments they can afford, so they buy a luxury apartment. Their apartment is now open to a person who could afford that apartment, but not the luxury apartment, so theirs gets filled. This repeats down the chain of quality/desirability/cost.
Every new apartment adds supply, thus adding negative price pressure.
While it’s not quite as much, I’m in what was once the cheapest town within 30 miles in any direction, and our housing prices have gone up 800% in the last 20 years, compared to the 1000% in the other city I mentioned.
Rental prices are up about 1000% since then too. My first apartment was $400/mo in the early 2000s. That same apartment is now $3500/mo, and it hasn’t even been renovated.
Is 1000% a reasonable increase to you over 20 years? If wages had gone up similarly, I might agree. It’s pretty clear to me that communities prioritize high earning tax bases over their existing citizenry in nearly every situation, and in doing so, purposefully or not, they impoverish those citizens and disempower them from the possibility of advocating for change, as now they have to work so much there’s never any time to go to city council meetings or engage in active governance.
The average Gen Z, nationwide, pays over 50% of their income to rent. Its unsustainable, as evidenced by the insane increase in people experiencing homelessness over the last 5 years. My state had a nearly 40% increase last year alone, and a majority of our unhoused people work full time jobs, and a larger majority have lived here their whole life, contrary to the perceived narrative of people “moving here to be homeless”, which is absurd.
You’re getting argumentative with me like I’m the one who invented Capitalism.
Is 1000% a reasonable increase to you over 20 years?
Depends in relation to the prices of everything else over that same 20 years time frame.
All I’m saying is that prices go up over time, if for no other reason than just inflation. But supply and demand has a big part of raising prices even higher, more quickly. To act surprised that properties in high demand areas are more expensive now than before just seems unrealistic/uninformed to me.
Now what the solution to this is I don’t know, I’m not an economist. A conversation can be had as to if the government should enact laws of price control for the sale of homes and attach that to some floating marker like the rate of inflation, etc. Or to pass laws to make sure minimum wages offered by any company to their employees can allow someone to afford the purchase of a home with unregulated sales pricing. But you got to vote people in office who would want to pass those kind of laws to get that.
Most houses in desirable parts of the US are that bad. The cheap housing is in places that people don’t want to live, be it for location, job opportunities or culture/local laws.
And it’s not just the expensive towns. It’s any town. My childhood home an hour away from a major city has exponentially gone up in price, just as the ones in the city have done.
And it’s not just the expensive towns. It’s any town.
I don’t want to defend corporations that use real estate to gain profits, but at the same time, it’s not just any town, and I know this for a fact, as I started out by buying a very low price but very nice house that required a very long commute to my workplace, for low pricing.
They’re definitely needs to be an adjustment in salaries to match everything that is purchasable today, but to say that every housing in the country, no matter where it’s located, is not affordable is just not true.
$250,000 a year is middle class and has been for a long time - it’s about how much a doctor (who isn’t in a particularly high-paying specialty) makes. But DINKs with that household income could afford a million-dollar house.
They’re saying that someone that makes $250,000 today lives the lifestyle that would have been considered middle class 20 years ago, not that that salary is at all a median
They absolutely do not live remotely like middle class people from 2003. I graduated high school in 02 and my parents were mailmen. The difference in living standard is not even close.
I wasn’t saying that I thought that, I didn’t give my take at all, I was trying to be helpful in explaining what the other commenter meant. But since you’re calling me crazy…
To give my take on it, you’re right, there’s all sorts of ways that the lifestyles aren’t at all comparable, many things haven’t had the insane inflation that real estate has, so a person making 250k can obviously take a lot more vacations, go out to dinner more, buy more tech, etc than a middle class person from a few decades ago. But when it comes to buying homes, it gets a lot more comparable. Homes where I grew up have increased 4-5x in price over the last 25 years, so a family with a household income of 60k-ish (which is solidly middle class) buying a house that’s 3x their annual income would have been pretty typical in the early 2000’s. Now, if those same houses are being bought by households making 250k, it would be basically the same ratio of 3-4x their income.
So in home purchasing power (and that area only) low 6 figures is absolutely middle class, and anyone making under 6 figures has the home purchasing power of what used to be lower class
My personal definition of “upper class” excludes anyone who actually has to work. Wikipedia seems to agree, putting “CEOs and successful business owners” in the upper middle class. And the New York Times considers the 90th to 99th percentile of earners upper-middle-class.
I do see some places defining “upper class” as those earning at least twice the median household income (so about $150,000) but I don’t think that matches common usage. Is a software developer right out of college upper class? Or a nurse practitioner? I would say “clearly no, unless they happen to be from a very wealthy family”.
I really don’t think that’s a good metric given that the average house cost in San Francisco is 1.12 million dollars. Someone making $250,000 a year isn’t affording that house any more than someone making $54,000. They’re both priced out. That’s the point everyone else is making. That and the new idea what anyone working for a living is not upper class.
The apartment I’ve lived in for 20+ years recently got sold to a property investment firm. They gave us all 60 days notice. They are going to spruce up the apartments and then rent them. They were nice enough to offer current tenants first dibs on the new apartments. At 3x the current rent. A group of people, families, retired folk, a lady going through cancer treatment, we’re all at a bit of a loss. Can’t afford to live here, can’t afford to move. I really don’t know what where we’ll end up.
Yes please do- then the insurance money will build them brand new apartments and they’ll probably make a but on top of it if they use the right contractors. Then they could rent for even more as they are now new builds. Great plan. Much thought.
That’s fine they aren’t making rent from it though. And then you do it again. Each time they lose that much more rent and their insurance rates go up that much more.
Sure and you go to jail for arson. Oh and your insurance won’t go up that much as you’d probably just build in a less insane area. Oh and insurance will also cover the lost rent too. Oh and you dont have any more maintenance costs for the duration of the rebuild so you are making more money. Oh and you will get a break on that year’s property taxes- so even more money. Either way you still have no place to call home. Well- except your cell. Fucking dumbass grow the fuck up and learn how the world works. You listening to a podcast and thinking you know something will never bring about your commutopia.
Neither is communism genius. Capitalism is alive somewhat functional. Communism is dead in ever place its attempted to be implemented. Of course there’s other ways. Pick up a book.
If you seriously think having 2/3 of the working population living paycheck to paycheck, even people with desirable degrees and traditionally well-paying jobs, is “somewhat functional,” I don’t know what the fuck to tell you besides you’re really fucking wrong.
It’s not an answer. The problem is bigger than one company deciding to try for higher rent. This is happening because of housing supply and society-wide wealth distribution.
This is what happens when the ultra rich steal $50,000,000,000,000 from the US alone in the last 50 years. It’s probably more like $150 Trillion worldwide.
This is what happens when the ultra rich steal $50,000,000,000,000 from the US alone in the last 50 years. It’s probably more like $150 Trillion worldwide.
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.
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.
The issue here is buying power is dramatically dropping which is a function of both wages and prices. Raising the minimum wage alone won’t fix that; instead, price controls will have to be implemented such that all housing is bought back down to prices that are satisfactory to consumers. That can’t happen without federal legislation.
Price controls cause shortages. The solution is plain old taxes - take money away from the rich. Housing will be cheaper to buy up front when recurring taxes are higher. Your dollar will go farther when other dollars are removed from circulation.
We need more housing in general too, to be honest, and to stop people buying it and directly distribute the housing to families looking for a primary residence.
Tax the shit out of the businesses that are holding onto these houses. Extra penalties for letting them sit empty. Special tax for companies with more than x% of purchasable inventory within certain regions. A lot of this could be fixed by taking money away from the people hoarding it.
We need to tax holding property as an investment if you aren’t living there or using it for your business. I’m not sure if it’s already taxed as capital gains or not, but it sure as hell should be. There’s nothing wrong with property being an investment – you should think of your house as an investment – but there’s a significant problem in treating property like stocks.
There’s fairly few units that people are just letting sit unused and empty.
In 2022, 23% of vacant for-rent units were vacant for less than a month. Only 26% were vacant for more than 6 months.
There’s more vacant housing “held off market”, but keep in mind that includes housing occupied by people with usual residences elsewhere, housing that’s currently held up in legal proceedings, housing currently under construction or repair, or in need of repair. The amount that’s being held off market by Blackrock to keep prices high is tiny at best.
Vacancy taxes have been tried, and their effect is generally fairly small. That’s not to say that they’re bad, just that they’re only a small part of a larger solution.
Is this actually true or just post hoc ergo propter hoc?
It seems like we shouldnt need a tax on millionaires just to pay for lunches. It’s more depressing than we weren’t paying for lunches more than it is inspiring that we are now.
I think you misunderstood my question. I was genuinely asking if it was directly from this tax that the program was expanded. The articles I read on it said that this tax would help, as it’s allocated to public schools and transportation. But they also said part of it would be coming from federal grants.
I am all for taxation, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a failure of our government that this took a millionaires tax to accomplish. And I don’t think this goes far enough in either the taxation or the allocation of funds for our school children.
IMHO it’s not just to pay for lunches (or whatever else); the primary goal is to limit price inflation and housing speculation. The fact that it generates revenue is an added bonus.
Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.
We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it’s currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.
The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live “in Boston”, “in NYC”, etc, they probably don’t want to live in a new build an hour’s drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.
Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn’t the only important thing, but it’s pretty important.
Then we need master lists of who currently lives in an area and for how much, and who wants to live in an area based on housing bids, homeless populations, etc., like with an application or something.
Or, hear me out on this, we could build more housing.
We could do this by upzoning basically the whole city, and by disempowering NIMBYs. Make it so that every location can build just a bit more densely, by right (i.e. where the approval is automatic).
Make it so you can build triplexes by right in what was an exclusively single family zoned area. Take areas with apartments and let them build a few stories taller. Let neighborhoods evolve into density over a decade or two.
I live in the north area of the San Francisco Bay Area and there is a shocking number of new builds happening right now. Soooooo many apartment complexes and housing developments. It seems like every day another one has begun. Just on the street I work on there have been three very large apartment complexes put in where there used to be businesses within the last two years. On my 8 mile commute home I pass four more, where there used to be pasture land. This area is known for it’s NIMBYs but laws have been passed (by voters) requiring more housing and it’s happening.
There are 25 empty houses for every homeless person in the US. There are people like Bezos who own multiple $25 million dollar mansions, that sit empty 300+ days a year. There are places with housing shortages, but that is not the case nationwide. The problem is that our government cares little to ensure adequate housing for its population. It sees absolutely no issue in allowing property to be hoarded by the rich and used to strangle the poor.
Fun fact: Every mansion or luxury condo built is 100+ affordable units not being built.
We’re building at record rates in many places, but just building housing does nothing but line the pockets of developers, because they will always choose to prioritize more profitable ventures, and current methods of requiring a small single digit percentage of their units to be “affordable” aren’t cutting it.
We need to be specific in what we’re building, and who we’re building it for. People moving in from out of state with high paying jobs are often prioritized by city and county governments because they increase the tax base, but this simultaneously raises rents for all of the current residents in crises as the market is dragged up. If we’re not specifically building affordable housing for local residents within each effected community to the best of our ability, then we’re only going to exacerbate the issue further. I’ve lived through “just build more” in my state for 20 years, I know how it goes.
That’s one of those things that’s technically true, but quite misleading.
The number of houses you could reasonably move homeless people into tomorrow is much smaller than the number of vacant houses. Unless you suggest putting homeless people in buildings undergoing renovation, in new houses that are almost done being constructed, in houses that were sold but have the new owners moving in next week, in rental units that have been on the market for a month, or in your grandmother’s house after she dies while the estate is being settled. Or into chalets on a ski hill, into seasonally occupied employee housing, etc.
The vacancy rate includes basically everything that isn’t currently someone’s primary residence on whichever day the census uses for their snapshot. Low vacancy rates are actually a bad thing and are bad for affordability. Very high vacancy rates are also bad, but you want there to be a decent number of vacant houses.
In particular, vacant housing is either for sale, for rent, rented or sold, for occasional use, or held off market.
Categories for held off market include forclosure, personal/family reasons (which includes e.g. units where the owner moved into assisted living or is currently living elsewhere with family), legal reasons (e.g. divorce or code violations), preparing to rent/sell, held for storage of household furniture, needs repair, currently under repair, specific use housing (e.g. dorms), extended absence (e.g. prison), abandoned/possibly condemned, and ‘don’t know’.
Their data tables are broken up kinda weirdly, and each table is its own sheet which is unfortunate to look at on mobile. A ton of things are reported as percents or rates, and I kinda wish they had the detailed raw numbers broken out better.
I might not want to put them in buildings under renovation, but those empty mansions could serve as compounds to house hundreds of people safely and securely, while having adequate space to offer necessities for transitioning back to housed life, such as on site therapy and pharmacies, and work aid centers.
Housing-first is a great way to deal with homelessness, because most of the problems homeless people have in rebuilding their lives are compounded by being on the street. I’m not saying we shouldn’t house homeless people.
I’m saying that comparing the vacancy rate to the homeless population is ridiculous, and isn’t evidence that there’s no housing shortage.
Partially, that’s because vacant houses aren’t all habitable, or able to be sold/rented immediately. But also, it’s because having some number of empty units on the market ready to be moved into is a good thing. You don’t want to have to find someone who wants to move out the day you want to move in. That creates a sellers market, causing high prices.
Also don’t forget that people don’t like housing built near them because it “drives down housing prices.” Homeowners themselves are more a problem than corporations are.
In much of the country, even smaller towns, the problem is that supply and demand is being artificially manipulated by corporations from outside the area coming in, outbidding locals, then putting what we’re owner occupied homes on the market for jacked up rent prices. This encourages other local landlords to charge more, because they can.
Corporations are able to do that because housing is a good investment.
Part of the reason it’s been a good investment is due to things like exclusive mcmansion zoning. Just imagine if it were easy to build net-new houses in those communities. Developers could make a killing building new housing, and extorting corporations into buying it.
There’s only so many people willing and able to pay sky high rents. At some price, people move into their parents basement, double up, become homeless, etc. So corporations have two options: either they continue to outbid average Joes or they don’t. If they don’t, then people won’t be forced to rent from them. If they do, at some point the new housing will just go vacant unless they lower prices.
Owning vacant housing has costs, but little upside. As a larger and larger percentage of their portfolio becomes vacant, housing becomes a worse and worse investment for them. At some point, it’s unsustainable, they have sell, the market collapses, and rent becomes cheap. They literally can’t sit on an unlimited amount of vacant housing and remain solvent.
That’s a fair assessment and I agree with your prediction at the end. I think the problem is that, in the meantime, there massive real-world harm being done to people by these practices that have potentially generation spanning consequences (much like redlining).
The point more is that corporations jacking up rents is more of a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem isn’t corporations. It’s that we’ve normalized NIMBYs artificially inflating their home value.
There are more direct solutions, like building deed-restricted affordable housing, public housing, etc.
Only for it to be snapped up by corporate interests and not handed to the families that actually need it.
We need a list of all of the families and single people looking for a primary residence, build new housing, and just give it to them first. No buying allowed.
Ehhh, you’ve got the right spirit, but that won’t happen lol.
What would be useful is banning, or at least limiting, speculative real estate ownership. A liveable home being unoccupied for no productive reason is a massively arrogant thing for a society to allow.
“prohibit sitting on apartments to raise rent” which idk what it even theoretically means, and limiting AirBnBs, are both means of constraining housing.
Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
You cannot say it is not about lack of supply in the same sentence you mention housing being an investment and expect to be taken seriously.
Housing is a good investment specifically because of lack of supply.
Most of the problem isn’t even big companies, but existing neighborhoods/local gov being pressured not to change their existing neighborhood, and passing zoning ordinances that prevent building.
I think the point he is trying to make is that basic needs being conflated with investments is bad, which is a fair point. If rentseeking behavior was much more heavily regulated we would see a sudden spike in housing supply as it wouldn’t be an investment in a passive income source anymore.
In my area of the country (mid-south), home prices were pretty low until the last couple of years. I bought a 3000 ft² house in 2020 for <100k in a city. Now, a similar sized house is going for >500k. A lot of homes were bought by individuals and property management companies who did some cosmetic renovations then raised rents sometimes by >200%.
Other properties are bought and left vacant on purpose to make sure the renters don’t have other places to go.
I’m not sure what you’re missing. Speculation only happens when a market is already tight and profit can be basically guaranteed. Build more and this incentive goes away.
No one is keeping houses vacant to turn away paying renters. That’s nonsense.
you forgot that most country which has this house price problem actually build houses and apartment more than enough for all the homeless hence you would see lots of ghost town everywhere, economy now doesnt work as intended, you can build more house but without regulation despite the supply the price would still skyrocket like now
I didn’t forget anything. If we had an excess supply of houses, prices would be trending down, not up. “Ghost towns” aren’t really relevant because houses need to exist in places people want to live or they have no impact on demand.
The housing market isn’t black magic. It’s just a market.
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.
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.
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.
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