- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
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idk bt the phrase "starter home" makes me mentally puke a little. Sounds like the most privileged first world crap to think you're owed the idea of upgrading to a fancier house (let alone a standalone house in the first place). There is no rule of nature that says you need to own a house.
"starter home" is developer-speak for old housing stock to justify exclusively building bigger and bigger single family homes chasing profit from an increasingly small slice of the population. All I want is 1 bedroom in a giant collectively owned building where I'm paying for the shared costs of actual maintenance and not for an investor's passive income. US developers would rather die than build housing like that, because communism or whatever. The US financial system treats housing as an investment vehicle first and shelter second; you're told to always finance as big a house as you can afford, because the value can only ever go up.
idk bt the phrase "starter home" makes me mentally puke a little.
100% totally a holdover from boomers and genX professionals parroting them. people who bought some little modest house in a marginal area for a poem and pocket change in the 70s/80s and then rode the scarcity of inventory and development booms to keep converting unearned equity into larger and more high end homes in affluent neighborhoods and exclusive enclaves.
that term should have died around '08 when the bubble burst and a lot of people who levered up to some absurd mcmansion lost their entire ass.
the more common phrase i hear from homeowners these days is "with these interest rates, i'm gonna die in this house."
It feels so obviously stupid to look at a tiny condo that sold for $100k at 3% interest four years ago listing now for $300k at 7% interest and think now is a good time to buy, but my realtor keeps insisting this is the new normal, and that anything I don't buy today is just going to be exponentially more unaffordable every year forever. I need to move soon, and I know my rent will increase 50%-100% anywhere else I rent, but I just can't stomach the idea that if I empty my savings and commit to a mortgage payment that's 70% of my net monthly income, I'll eventually break even with the cost of renting after 15-20 years as long as home values continue to increase at the same rate forever. I feel like the alternative is to rent forever until rising rents eventually bleed my savings dry and price me out of commuting distance from my job. Unless the housing market spontaneously collapses in the next two years, I genuinely don't know what to do.
straight up, i can't imagine signing up along the lines of traditional financing anymore. saving up 60k to borrow 240k at 7% over 30 years is a shit deal. that's $334,821 in interest, over and above the initial $240k. the only logic to it is trying to avoid being cannibalized by landlords, essentially gambling that the housing situation is only going to get worse for working class people. i defy anyone to save up $60k and then hand it over to someone else while fully accepting "everything is going to get much worse for everyone except me".
what it tells me is that the housing market is closing off for people who rely on traditional financing to buy a home, and it's becoming the exclusive arena of larger corporate entities with their own financing / capital access (larger landlords), heirs, and very high net worth individuals who can "pay cash".
It's so upsetting that a "good job" (whatever that means to you) isn't even remotely enough to get own a home. It's so frustrating to me why people still ask "why are young people turning to "radical" poltics!?!". At least leftist theory gives us an understanding of why/how our world is as it is.
The most ghastly phenomenon is the commodification of housing. All these sick fuck have a stake in keeping the prices going up. And now there are private companies helping drive the prices up. Will this prevent a price deflation??
The prices will only continue up (compared to general inflation) over the decades unless laws are passed and enforced to actively decommodify housing ie building massive amounts of free, high quality public housing or making landlording illegal in some way. Capitalists are incentivized to push everyone to rent at the maximum price renters can afford. They're disincentivized from selling their passive income properties. So, yeah, nothing will just "naturally" change. It will take purposeful, forced action to cause change
Exactly.
Rising asset prices (housing, stocks) are a function of inequality. They're increasingly decoupled from things like interest rates and inflation because there's so much wealth at the top that all the demand is for assets, not goods and services. And that's a self-perpetuating cycle that has already snowballed significantly, because rising asset prices only benefit the very wealthy who can afford to hold assets they don't need, while impoverishing everyone else.
So you need to decommodify housing. Limit asset acquisition by the capital class. And do really aggressive taxation to start to close the inequality gap.
This can't be right? I was told for the last decade whenever I argued about the minimum wage increasing that that would cause inflation. What's the federal minimum wage in the US again? Oh right the same it's fucking been for 15 God damn years. Weird how all those econ-bros I argued with all that time can't understand basic econ 101 concepts.
