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If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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??? In what economy do most people not have to pay just to live somewhere?
Our highways are free for everyone to use and maintained using tax money. It's not inconceivable that housing could work the same way.
Because by definition rich means “can buy house”, and poor means “no choice but to rent”. What sort of rich person rents a house, except whilst between selling old and new? It’s a strange question to ask .... who doesn’t see this as self evident?
In some markets, e.g. San Francisco, it does not make financial sense to buy and renting is a better option.
Rents only ever go up, whereas a mortgage can only go down (in a refinance). A mortgage ends and so do the payments, but a renter will pay ever increasing rents forever. It gets particularly painful after retirement on a fixed income.
Things to consider!
While the article is interesting, there is one dynamic it missed: tech debt. Starting around 1975, housing supply stopped keeping up with the growth of housing demand. It picked back up fifteen years later, around 1990: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-goldilocks-problem-of... (But that is on a national level: in the West, in comparison, housing growth hasn't been sufficient to house the new households formed a…
> 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.
It is a huge risk right now to take on someone that is poor as a renter because of the moratorium. It is completely unsurprising to me that landlords have priced this risk factor in.
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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.
I lived in a country where housing (at the time) was provided by the government. It's not as great as it might sound. Want to move? Do the paper work and wait for a few years. Want a bigger place? too bad. Not to mention single room for the whole family, shared kitchen and washrooms.
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I know the exact article you mentioned. The real story is actually more nuanced. The guy off course got laid off and could no longer afford the rent. But he racked up rent also because even if he moved earlier, his contract would have made him pay a ton of fines to even get out of it. So he decided to stay.
Yeah it’s not like it was really that much of his fault or anything (though I found it a bit fishy why he couldn’t get another job). Everyone’s mentality up until ~September was “oh just another month or two then everything will be back to normal”. But my point is how could you expect landlords to rent to anyone without a very stable income? They could be out tens of thousands of dollars.
What line of work was he in? If he lost his job during the pandemic, is it possible there simply were very few jobs available that he was qualified for?
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Have you ever seen people talk about how the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution outlaws slavery "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", leading to the modern prison-industrial complex that overwhelmingly targets black Americans with arrests for petty crimes and traps them in The System? https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/civic/2020/09/17/slaves-of-the-sta... The ECOA makes it il…
> The exception is that discrimination is still totally legal if the person just can't afford the home. It's also important to remember how this applies to school districts. If you exclude the poor from your neighborhood, you also exclude them from your school district. (This explains part of the otherwise unexpected opposition to school vouchers by college-educated affluent Democrats and the support for them by rura…
I'm aware of wealthy families wanting the voucher to throw toward private schools (they were never going to send their kids to public schools regardless). Wealthy families are of both political leanings.
Then there are the conservatives that dislike public schools because the teachers are in a union, or they believe teachers are liberals, or that they indoctrinate their kids into anit-Capitlist thinking, etc....
Really unfamiliar with the scenarios you paint.
> You can clearly see the "give mortgages to everybody regardless of whether they can afford it" policies
Or was it the de-leveraging of the banks, credit default swaps, derivatives and other shady practices by Wall Street?