“working as a server” - I have to get rid of thinking everything is about computers…
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.
That’s hilarious but I would also cringe every time.
The more the tech industry keeps firing people, the more likely it is your friend’s joke will land. Give it a few more years!
What’s he going to say when they respond “FreeBSD” one day?
“Can I have your number” would be a good start
Responding to HTTP request all day is hard work.
For the last time, make the coffee yourself, I AM A TEAPOT!
I see an HTTP 418 in the wild, I upvote.
Not when every response is a 503 (taps head)!
For a second I wondered if it was an old timey job, similar to how one could be employed as a computer.
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.
I hadn’t heard of her, thanks for putting her name on my radar!
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.
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.
Burn it down. Honestly. Not trying to he a prick but fuck these greedy removed. 3x. Only answer is war on our front
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.
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.
Your sarcasm was missing a disclaimer.
On top of that, state funded homing for the next years!
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.
What you’re missing is you won’t get to do it twice because you’ll be in prison, where you should be, for burning homes down.
If this is such a great idea, why aren’t you doing it?
Cause someone told him communism was the way and he never looked back.
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More than half of you will end up on the street.
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.
More than half of you will end up on the street.
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.
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).
A rising tied raises all boats - Ronnie Regan (but if you don’t own a boat, you drown)
He meant to say “yachts” not “boats”.
*tide
This meme is so old, those prices have increased even more by now
posted 9 hours ago
Yep, that actually checks out.
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Housing is the thing most exploding in cost.
About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.
The other half is just moving to shittier and shittier conditions and living with roommates and family members.
Plus this is a very regional problem. Housing in shithole flyover places is still somewhat affordable.
If everything went up five times in price over the last 20 years then it might be a better argument for saying we’re in a depression.
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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.
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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. https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-from-preceding-period-in-real-gdp-in-the-us/
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You still care about karma?
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I don’t know either
Please retake Economics 101.
Source?
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.
Language is deceptive.
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.
The house we’re renting would cost a million dollars to buy today
Where in the world is this?
Also, is that a high-end neighborhood or a middle-class/lower class neighborhood?
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.
My family house that we sold recently, sold for $1.2 million. It was bought in 94 for $90k. Expensive town, but the cheapest neighborhood in the town.
Expensive town, but the cheapest neighborhood in the town.
I would expect that in the expensive towns, but not in all towns. Your basic supply and demand situation.
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.
in the last 20 years
Well that’s a long range of time to not expect housing prices to go up as there’s a population increase and more demand for the housing.
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.
Average SFH price in many west coast cities is approaching 1M. 990k on average for my city
But that’s only in the most expensive towns in those coastal cities.
The OP replied to was making it sound like all houses in the US was like 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.
By what definition of middle class are you considering $250,000 to be middle class? That’s greater than the 90th percentile income.
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.
It is crazy that you think this.
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”.
Yes, a software developer in the 90th percentile of household income, making a single income, is most assuredly “upper class”
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Sounds like you live in HCOL area where $250K is pretty much middle class.
250k household is not middle class anywhere in the United States.
$250K is borderlining middle class in San Francisco and Seattle.
It most assuredly is not.
Median income there is $54k or less in both of those cities. 5x median income is not middle class.
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.
People in upper class society worked even during the height of the Robber Barons, so I’m not sure why you’re pretending that’s new.
Have you just like, not read The Great Gatsby or something? Shit, wealthy landowners in colonial days worked - even those with slaves.
Your points need to be grounded in reality somewhere.
San Francisco specifically being expensive to buy a home in has no bearing on what “middle class” represents whatsoever.
The “tax the rich but oh wait not me” liberals and progressives are the absolute worst
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During that time, the central banks printed a shitload of money creating a shitload of inflaction.
The Fed increased the money supply to prop up stocks, essentially giving cash to stock owners. 90% of stocks are owned by 10% of the population.
Average PPP loan forgiven is almost $100K, and that free cash only went to those doing well enough to own a business.
Meanwhile inflation caused by this effectively lowers workers pay and the real purchasing power of the minimum wage.
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.
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.
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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.
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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…
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It’s not inflation and it isn’t taxation. It would be closer to deflation. However, this would be a few market program. Businesses would join it and there could be incentives for the customers to do business in this affiliated network.
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.
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It’s because the home owners think, if they charge too little, they won’t be taken seriously.
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.
A 4% tax on millionaires in Massachussets got free lunch for school kids in the state
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.
It’s more depressing than we weren’t paying for lunch
Because billionaires lobbied congress to reduce budget for public schools
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.
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.
The best way to reduce the viability of housing as an investment is to just build more housing.
And no, you ideally should never think of your house as an investment, because that means housing prices are rising.
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.
Prices are a matter of supply and demand.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have a source for all of this?
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.
Fun fact: homeless people can’t afford mansions.
Build them places to rent.
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.
If you build any housing at all, you are opening up “affordable housing” at the bottom of the totem pole. That’s how buying houses works.
No one is going to build a dumpster apartment to rent on the cheap. There’s no incentive there.
Let people build and the less-desirable homes will be scooped up as prices fall. It’s basic supply and demand.
Your state, like mine, has probably been kneecapping development in favor of NIMBY policies for those 20 years
No, they haven’t. They’ve been working hand in hand with developers to entice new money for them to tax, and ignoring the poor who only get poorer.
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Knocking down single-family or small unit homes to build more multi-family housing is a good thing actually.
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.
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.
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.
Rent control is absolutely not the solution. Building more is the solution.
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.
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 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
The worst part isn’t a corner bedroom going up 5 times…
It’s even a shitty hole in the wall is 1500 now.
My wife and I couldn’t afford to live in our own neighborhood if we were looking to buy now. We bought in 2019.
Same. Somehow my house has more than doubled in that time frame.
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.
I just cut straight to the pie and set up camp in the wilderness. Pretty cheap, but the HOA are a pain.
This really highlights just how subjective “paycheck to paycheck” is.
Lot of people out there who can’t afford to pay for their spouse’s school but still wouldn’t call themselves paycheck to paycheck.
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.
this isn’t funny this is just sad
server
there was that post about parking meters being $27/hr so I thought this was computer servers speaking at first
