This is a real issue in my community (as is the case of pretty much every community). All the older homeowners and younger/middle aged middle class yuppies love to talk about how they care for the housing crisis for us poorer youth, but then anytime a plan to address it comes up it's all "muh property values, muh investment". It should be obvious to anyone that for the price to go down for buyers, the sellers must sell for less but they all want to sell absurdly high and then buy another home for low.
Anyone that tells me we are overpopulated, i i tell them to kill themselves to solve it.
Oh this isn't satire? The first few paragrapgs seemed like it lol
No it's a satire site
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/mom-help-a-drag-queen-just-broke-into-our-school
One of the questions I like to ask municipal candidates is "would you embrace policies that would decrease the price of housing?"
It's funny to ask because they all want to talk about the crisis of housing affordability but when pressed about whether they want to do anything about it they malfunction lol.
Negative Equity is a thing.
It's why the housing crisis cannot just be solved through tweaking supply and demand but a radical reconfiguration of our relationship to housing i.e. a debt jubilee at minimum.
Yes. There's a lot of flowery talk that ends in "market forces". Everyone wants to sell at market value even though there's no requirement to do so. It's in everyone's interest for that to be the case; the home seller gets the most money, the realtor gets the biggest commission, and the price is maintained for every other homeowner in the area. There's no incentive other than good will and one homeowner undercutting the market is just going to make it that much more profitable for the scalper than ends up buying it.
I just want to let my lawn die and let the wild violets take over but I can feel the hate of my neighbors. They’re out there like 10 hours a week watering, overseeding, aerating, pruning, mowing, applying pre-emergent… glaring at my yard. Their idea of their home as a financial instrument makes them extremely intolerant of my shitty lawn absenteeism.
This dude on the next block uprooted his entire lawn and now just has like 1000 garlic bulbs growing in his front yard. Shit rocks
They are slaves of the lawn while you are free. Instead of losing their chains they would rather enslave you, as well.
I support all of this except letting the wild violets take over. They get in the way of letting the blue grama take over.
owning a house in a place with a housing market aligns your material interests directly against the majority of the proletariat
cue middle class dipshits going "SoCiAlIsM iS WhEn PoOr" at me
a house is a financial asset, and like any other financial asset it is in the owner's interest for the price of it to go up
and for people who do not own a house (the majority), it is in their interest for house prices to go downand for people who do not own a house (the majority)
Not true in the US. Homeownership rate is around 65%.
Looked it up myself because this sounded inaccurate and while that figure is 65%...
The name "home-ownership rate" can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the home-ownership rate.
We love our weasely statistics giving a false impression of prosperity, don't we folks?
So that means 35% of US homes are pure investments and not places for people to live. That's pretty messed up, though, it doesn't really say anything about how hard it is to own a home.
Yeah it's helpful for measuring family units owning homes, but skews some other situations.
Say a homeowner is renting out four rooms to four different people. If we try to determine home ownership rates by asking how many homes are occupied by owners, that situation would bring the rate up (1 home with an occupying owner). If we instead ask how many people in the US own a home, that situation would bring the rate down (5 people, only one of them owning a house). Of course that last one should exclude minor children (maybe spouses? I'm no statistician) to be more accurate, but you get the broad idea
even if that was true, which it isn't, i was talking about the proletariat
There’s a very clear way to fix this in an instant.
Give people money equal to the reduction in home value. And/or a debt jubilee.
That’s it. Easy. Done.
Not if we channel Mao Zedong's brilliant solution to that problem first! Not realistic right now, but if we ever get to the point that we could realistically enact such a debt jubilee, then the working class would probably also be strong enough to play Minecraft with landlords.
They would let us do a Maoism on every landlord before they would accept a debt jubilee.
And outlawing landlordry would just mean that former renters have to take out predatory mortgages from banks.
These problems get real easy to solve when you address them both at once though.
If it is coupled with the landlord not owning the property anymore (i.e. the property is turned over to common ownership) then I don’t really see it as a problem.
Man I'd be happy if I bought a house and it basically matched inflation. All I want is a workshop and a place to put my money that won't leave me destitute.
I dunno, I want a medium sized patch of dust in a non incorporated county. I wanna go full solar punk and bury a little pyramidnof aircrete and make a little cozy hobbit cave with flowers keeping it cool.
I live in affordable housing recently built by my city. The houses around me are all still worth $800k and have not deprecated one penny since my place opened. Did see a few neighbors with anti-affordable housing signs in their yard last election so they're obviously still upset we exist here. Fuck those bougie assholes, we're just trying to live.
Doesn’t matter whether it’s affordable housing or market-rate housing, any increase in housing stock will be against the interest of existing property owners (homeowners and landlords alike).
Some markets are so tight you can build housing forever without making a dent in the prices. Vancouver, B.C. or Boston for example.
Affordable housing on the other hand has a large enough impact on prices that building blitzes do bring down the cost of housing. Vienna, Austria is a good example.
my desire to go “Boca Mode” in a South Florida condominium called “El Regalo.”
