171–180 of 257 posts
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I think these days high priced apartments are only affordable by the wealthy, unless people are grouping together with multiple roommates, at which point it means they can't actually afford the apartment, so is it really middle class anymore?
If 4 22 year olds making 50k each share a $3,000 4bd 2ba rental "for the rich" I'd say they're middle class and can afford it.
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Many rich people still earn a paycheck. YOu can be on payroll making 500k and have a stock portfolio worth 10mill, this is common for boomers who started investing in the 70s and 80s. A portfolio of that size will easily throw off 500k in dividends a year. My point is that a large paycheck does not mean you are not paid wages. I get your point though, billionaires probably are not taking a salary.
>A portfolio of that size will easily throw off 500k in dividends a year. Where are you "easily" getting 5% dividends? Are those mythical W2 boomers suddenly into sketchy crypto "funds"? Vanguards "Dividend Growth" fund is yielding 1.71%. Total stock 1.33%
> Rents for the poor are rising Because of the economical impact of locking down the economy and giving money to everyone. > Rents for the rich are plummeting Because they don't need to live in expensive central hubs to get their high wages and there is less demand for their luxury flats. Also, this lax definition of rich people is exactly how the richest 1% can stay hidden.
> get their high wages Wages? What are you talking about, the working class?
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Our highways are free for everyone to use and maintained using tax money. It's not inconceivable that housing could work the same way.
Gas taxes pay for roadways.
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> Since many cities currently lack the recently-aging housing that would normally be filtering down market right now Huh.... in the UK house prices go up for older houses. You'd pay a premium to get an interwar house, or a 19th century house. Do people not like old houses in the US? They're usually better built, with more character, built on more land, in my experience.
Here are some considerations: - Modern homes tend to have large kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms, and open common areas. People may prefer this over the misc-rooms approach that's more common in older places. - Old homes in the US may not have 3-pronged outlets - Old homes may have faucets that don't stick out far enough to get your hands under. Ones in the UK may have separate faucets for hot and cold. (Is the inte…
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>because with the high turnover they are sure to get a new tenant pretty soon at the higher price anyway Only if coupled with insufficient construction of new housing.
Which is pretty inevitable with our system of housing development. If you're a large property owner and you want to make more money, you have two options: A) Build more housing, to create more units you can rent out. B) Don't build more housing, and use the reduced supply to raise the rent on your existing properties. Since option B has a lower risk and a higher return on investment, is it really surprising that most…
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It's crazy that we live in an economy where you have to pay just to live somewhere, but when the eviction moratorium ends, there's going to be a huge financial reckoning as there's no way anyone is paying all that back rent. Biden is going to have to either bail out tenants or landlords and banks. I'll be taking bets on which one he does.
It's crazy that we live in an economy where all you have to do to live until 80 years is pay to live somewhere. We don't even have to hunt our own food.
Land can be parceled out using any system people can devise. Rent is completely artificial. Strangely, the people that do nothing for you charge FAR more than the people who hunt for you.
An interesting metric to consider is how much would at-cost rent would be if land was free and only construction, repairs, and utilities needed to be paid for. If you run the numbers over the lifespan of a building, you'll be surprised.
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San Francisco also has 26 skyscrapers to Chicago's 130. 80% of the Bay Area is zoned exclusive for single family, to Chicago's 41.1%. It's not landscape and it's not rocket science: it's zoning. San Francisco could build up, letting people live closer to their work & be much better for the environment than encouraging sprawl, but chooses not to. Y'all decided to make housing expensive, so it is.
doesn't it largely stem from Prop 13 which incentivizes all current land-owners to block any possibility of increasing density, at the expense of the rest of society? It's interesting to me that such a universally easy sell as, "no new taxes" can result in such a distorted and, IMO, grotesque unintended consequence.
It's even simpler than that. Had a conversation with a man who owns some tiny 60's vintage apartments on an ocean-view lot. He turns down market-rate offers from developers looking to put in family-size units because with his Prop. 13 tax tailwind, he makes out well enough despite the lower rents.
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That raises a question. How do other impoverished groups escape the poverty trap more quickly? Historically Chinese and other immigrants's needs were served by their own official and unofficial institutions. What can be done to keep dollars within a community to grow wealth within?
Not living in an environment where everything can be taken away from you through one bad interaction with say, a policeman helps. Having a stable family with positive role models, preferably one not torn apart by brushes with the justice system helps, too. These kinds of problems get inherited from generation to generation, even if (a damn big if ) the current generation were not directly subjected to any of the orig…
I think unfortunately for multi-generational Americans there is a weird stigma when you come from certain backgrounds --some people escape them, but not most. Immigrants don't usually have this stigma and burden. They come for the opportunity which they believe comes with putting in hours or work and study. If you're second generation and greater, you assume many Americanisms like you're entitled to American things without the hard work. Immigrants are willing to sacrifice a generation so that the next might succeed. Quite a few of my HS cohort didn't have it in them to put in hard work. They wanted to hang out, play, skip school, go to the mall, smoke weed, get beer, etc. Kids of recent immigrants were not like that, by and large.
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It's crazy that we live in an economy where you have to pay just to live somewhere, but when the eviction moratorium ends, there's going to be a huge financial reckoning as there's no way anyone is paying all that back rent. Biden is going to have to either bail out tenants or landlords and banks. I'll be taking bets on which one he does.
...either bail out tenants or landlords and banks. Not quite. This crisis will be handled just like the last one. No tenants, homeowners, or landlords will be bailed out. That they go bankrupt and have their property repossessed is the whole point of the exercise. Big lenders will get the bailout on top of the collateral.