The Rise of Renting in the U.S

Property taxes are what keeps housing affordable. Look at California for an example of what happens when they go away.

To be precise, property tax increases the liability of holding a house as an investment relative to other investments, so higher property taxes make capital that was invested in real estate move to other sectors. That means that fewer properties are owned by speculators, so more are owner-occupied. This is why California has one of the lowest homeownership rates in the country (alongside New York and Nevada, which are much more urbanized than Cali):

http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/rates.html

(Homeowners don't like to believe this, because the economic reality is basically that investors can buy whatever they want and the middle class picks up the scraps; that's sort of undignified, but true, so people should get used to it)

I can't help but wonder: what proportion of the population has a place that they can truly, and with love, call home? Somewhere they feel alive in, and grow in, and feel confident raising a family in. Somewhere that persists. How about 30 years ago? 2000 years ago? 20,000 years ago? I think the visualization of this data would be very interesting indeed, albeit impossible to create.

It's my impression that it gets harder and harder to create a place called home for the average person, as wages go down, available jobs are more competitively sought after (especially the ones where you feel like a human doing humane things from day to day), and real estate & rent around urban centers goes up.

Count your blessings if your field of work is amenable to being done remotely, and start building out the skills, habits, and resources needed that go along with it asap.

I think you should write a book, but don't go through the vanity press ripoff. Publish it yourself.

I have known people who live out of a van/truck camper until cops realize what's going on. They will harass you to no end. The tickets are expensive. The days of " Just move on." are over.

That said, in most counties, there is nowhere to park a vechicle overnight. We need to desiginate areas, in commercial areas, where people can legally sleep.

They have pretty much made it illegial to sleep Anywhere, without paying. Even Parks have time restrictions. I'm ashamed of what America has become.

If Jesus Christ reappeared, he would be hit with multiple municipal fines within a few days. It's just not right.

(If I seem mad-- I am. I had a friend who tried to live in the back of his truck, and take showers at a local gym. Cops harassed him nightly. Once the gym found out he was just using the showers--they made his life difficult. The one slime ball manager would time his workouts in order to use the facilities. Wonderful world we've got? Oh--yea, he was doing non-union construction. The last thing he wanted to do was workout at 6:30 a.m. in order to take a shower.)

Yes and that is welcome, but take another look. They go further to say that since 2000 that trend is no longer a big reason. Even stated in the first paragraph that incomes are falling as the new big reason.

The middle class, if defined as households making between $35,000 and $100,000 a year, shrank in the final decades of the 20th century. For a welcome reason, though: More Americans moved up into what might be considered the upper middle class or the affluent. Since 2000, the middle class has been shrinking for a decidedly more alarming reason: Incomes have fallen.

'67-'99 there weren't stagnant wages as much as post 2000, where we have seen a sideways market, massive recession, 15+ years in horrible economic conditions worsen for lower and middle. Costs rising way faster than wage increases eventually crushes the lower/middle.

The CNN article also mentions money locked up in the upper class and so does an associated video [1]. The lower/middle spend in downturns, the rich do not. Eventually demand is depressed and noone can buy anything. It is bad for lower/middle and upper when noone is gaining in income and has no consumer power gains to grow on. People buy less, people sell less when consumer power is locked up.

For decades, the middle class had been the core of the country. A healthy middle class kept America strong, experts and politicians said. But more recently, these residents have struggled under stagnating wages and soaring costs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeCfq-9l_b8 (around :30)

Why is owning a house the "American Dream" in the first place? Why should our primary investments be houses?