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.
I have a friend who asks people whether they’re running Windows or Linux when we go out to eat and they come to our table to introduce themselves as our server. None of them has yet to get the (bad) joke and I die inside a little more every time I hear it.
I mean, you needed someone to crunch non-financial numbers before machines were invented to do that. A major discovery in astronomy (the relationship between period and luminosity) that’s central to how we measure distances in space was actually made by a woman doing that job (Henrietta Swan Leavitt). If she’d lived a few years longer she likely would have won the Nobel for it.
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.
During these 20 years we already had 2 major economic crisis, one occurring right now and with no sight of ending. During that time, the central banks printed a shitload of money creating a shitload of inflaction. That plus the housing crisis, a great recipe to disaster.
Adjusted for inflation, that $700 rent would be $1,242 today. Not quite enough to get it all the way to the $3,600 they are quoting today. There’s something else very funky going on right now. A lot of cities are experiencing massive population loss… yet rental costs continue to rise. I’m sure the housing crisis has a large part to play in that, but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
My two cents on this is that, the same house developers own a shitload of buildings in each city, meaning they basically up the prices quite a lot without competition to undercut them.
How we solve this goes from country to country.
In case of the US I’d say something must be done, either build more, or adjust economy in order to the middle class to be able to purchase in cities again.
In my country the issue is close to being the same, the main difference is that state regulation isn’t helping at all either, causing people who have properties to not even rent at all.
Rent incomes are taxed at 28%, plus the “IMI”, which is a yearly tax the Portuguese pay on properties, and the owner doesn’t even profit enough to pay for the damages usually caused by the renter. So they either up the prices like crazy (average rental in Lisbon is about 800€), or don’t even rent at all.
Edit: I have people in my family that inherited houses from deceased family and tried to rent it. The renters stole all the furniture, house applicances, everything, from 6 months paid only 2 and after being kicked out even came back to break into the house. Police had to be called to solve the issue but their hands are also tied so they can only give empty threats. Guess who’s never renting again.
In case of the US I’d say something must be done, either build more, or adjust economy in order to the middle class to be able to purchase in cities again.
Building more doesn’t solve the problem. There is vacant real estate already. If you don’t have a tenant for a property, you’re operating at a loss. A loss is a tax write off. With some creative accounting, it might be better to keep a place empty and increase the rate no one will pay you.
My solution is to devalue money.
A network of businesses and merchants that based on income, estate assets, and their contribution to the wield as recognized by the network, add a fee or a discount.
If you are living up to your potential doing good things, you can afford to spend less. If you have no income, but you are doing good to your abilities, potentially all basic needs are covered.
If you are hording value and causing harm, then you pay additional fees.
Combined, the fees cover the discounts. The economic gap grows smaller.
It would be massively more simple, and more profitable to government, to simply levy a colossal tax on property owners who leave their rental properties empty for more than six months or so.
Ah, they’re trying that in Portugal. It doesn’t work. They’re going even as far as expropriation the houses from the owner, forcing them to rent at state agreed rates.
My wild guess? The only solution is reducing inflation to the negative to make money more valuable.
Deflation can be even more destructive than inflation. It would basically make all kinds of debt more expensive, to which real estate is particularly sensitive. There’s a chance that could force over leveraged property owners to sell, but with more expensove debt, there will be fewer buyers and it would tend to be those who can take on the higher risk (aka the already wealthy).
All that is to say, I don’t have a solution either (especiallly if high taxes on non-dwelling properties doesn’t seem to be making an impact), but deflation is almost never good…
Taxing more isn’t the solution, believe me there are countries trying that without success. The solution would probably revert the inflation we’ve been having for decades now, to make the money more valuable.
It’s not inflation and it isn’t taxation. It would be closer to deflation. However, what I’m suggesting would be a free market program. Businesses would join it and there could be incentives for the customers to do business in this affiliated network. The point is to make it so that social and societal value is more important than bank statements.
In Canada, we don’t seem to have anyone trying to solve it. We have a housing minister who promises to make housing affordable without lowering existing home values. Can’t do one without the other…
Vancouver runs an average of 3800 for a two bedroom apt. Not a luxury suite. A standard, 90-00s era decor apartment.
I think part of it is because of pricing software like RealPage.
On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.
“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?
“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
I lived in a building that used this software. In 6-7 years, rent went from around $1200 to about $2,000. More and more apartments stayed empty. They kept raising prices during the pandemic. Surprise surprise, a tent city popped up down the street. A couple people died there.
Well, people who own lots of shit had to be properly compensated for owning lots of shit, otherwise - or so we are told - “they wouldn’t invest”.
It’s funny how we’re told to “work hard” and there’s even lots of criticism of the “workshy poor” all the while the entire economic system has been changed to maximize the returns of rent-seeking (which is the single most parasitical economic activity there is) at the cost of the returns from working AND the purchasing power of said returns (because life essentials like housing are way much more expensive).
I would imagine most homeowners couldn’t afford a loan for their current house at its current value. I just ran a borrowing capacity calculator for a local large bank, and it’s well below what my house is worth.
I bought at 21 and had it paid off at 38. I earn triple what I did back then.
That’s part of the reason I bit the bullet when I did and bought a house where I didn’t want to. I started building equity and when housing prices went up I was able to roll that over into a house I wanted in the area I wanted. At some point you have to get in and start building the equity even if it’s somewhere you aren’t as happy in. YMMV.
Yeah, but I honestly feel terrible for younger people just starting out. I’m locked into a 2.35% APR loan on a house that’s valued nearly 3 times what I bought it for less than 10 years ago. I would never be able to afford mortgage payments going in at today’s rates for the full value of the house, let alone come up with 20% to get rid of mortgage insurance.
The starter townhouse my wife and I bought almost 20 years ago has gone up similarly. What kind of person in their early 20s can afford to come up with a 6 figure down payment? Or afford a mortgage payment that’s several thousand dollars a month? Shit’s crazy.
It’s starting to look like that model might be dead too. Mortgages continue to rise, but prices aren’t coming down because everyone with 2% interest mortgages are never going to move, so there’s no inventory. This means that the prices will hold, but not increase. So even if you can get a house you don’t really want now, it’s not going to appreciate much, and might even slowly depreciate as the current owners are forced to sell because of life events.
A 47 year old lawyer should be able to afford $3,600 a month without particular difficulty. I’m a software developer so I make less than most lawyers do, but I can pay about $3,400 a month for my one-bedroom in the center of a big city.
(I don’t rent. $3,400 is my mortgage plus my building fees and the building charges an additional fee to people who rent out their unit, so if I rented mine out for $3,600 then I would probably actually lose money every month. Paying my mortgage does mean that my net worth increases, but it doesn’t help me afford things now. Someone with their mortgage paid off would be in a better position to be a landlord, but they would still be getting less than 4% profit per year even if they have the perfect tenant who never costs them anything. Selling the apartment and putting the money in the stock market would be more profitable than renting it out for $3,600.)
The average yearly return of the S&P 500 over the last 30 years is almost 10% a year, so if instead of investing in the stock market, you choose to be a landlord whose yearly profit is 4%, you’re a humanitarian donating 6% of the cost of your apartment to your tenant every year.
I’m exaggerating because the average rise in real estate values is 6% so such a landlord actually gets about the same return as he would get from the stock market, as long as he never has a bad tenant and doesn’t mind his money being locked up in real estate.
Well that was in the past, but over the last 2-3 years I have lost a few thousand $ in the value of my S&P 500 index fund investments. That money would have been better off in a plain old savings account or invested in real estate (but it wasn’t really enough to buy any real estate).
You must have bought at the worst possible time. But there’s risk associated with any investment - the neighborhood you buy in could go to hell, or if you rent out your property then you could get a tenant who trashes it and takes a year to evict. I think real estate does tend to be less risky than the stock market, but it has significantly worse returns too. (Plus, the stock market lets you diversify - if you only own one property and something happens to it, you have lost everything.)
With that said, you can invest in real estate even if you don’t have enough money to buy property yourself - you can buy shares in a real estate investment trust.
30 years ago you couldn’t find a reasonable place to rent for $700 in my smaller NC city. Today the prices here are around $2000 for a reasonably nice apartment. I’m not saying there isn’t somewhere in the US where those rents can be found within that time period, but I’m skeptical there isn’t some exaggeration going on here.
Which area of NC?? I lived in Hillsborough for a time, and 10 years ago I was able to get housing for $750/m. You’re saying that 30 years ago it was more expensive? I’d like some sources, because I think you’re either misremembering at best.
Greensboro, NC. Maybe not such a small town in NC, but small on a national scale. To be honest, my comment was anecdotal and from memory. But a quick search led me to deptofnumbers.com/rent/north-carolina/greensboro. It goes back to 2005 where the median residential rate was listed as $794. So, my memory is likely colored by what I considered as “acceptable” conditions as well as expense in 1993. I ended up renting a room, with no real kitchen, but a nice enough bathroom, for $400. Yes it was cheaper, but the kitchen was basically an alcove with a dorm fridge and a microwave at the end of the hall. It was not a place you’d bring a date home to. I recall that actual “nice” apartments I looked at were around $800 or so
Edit, whoops had to change to nominal dollars. 2005 median was $635.
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.
To be fair, if you ever wanna reconsider your job, ask a server how much they make. In a city with $3,600 rent, it’s not uncommon for them to average $40-60/hr. Shit, I’m ugly as fuck and live in a cheap city but usually made around $1,000/week working part time in college a few years ago.
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.
Except everywhere is getting more expensive, not just gentrified neighbourhoods. And a middle aged lawyer should be able to afford a 1 bedroom anywhere in the world, it’s ridiculous what housing costs now.
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