Earlier quoted context omitted.
Penalizing landlords would lead to greater shortages and mass homelessness of would be renters. The houses simply would not be built. You can't have a right to housing without taking away the right to property. Renters are a Group that are already unprofitable to lend to, so banks would reject most and hike rates higher for the rest. Your proposal only makes sense if landlords provide no service, but this isnt true.…
I'm sorry, but selling the landlord's literal rent seeking as a value to anyone but themselves is just blatant antisocial shilling.
Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
141–150 of 167 posts
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we could just abolish representative government that was created to work around limitations in the predominant communication tech at the time, horseback. The corruption does feel inevitable here as we sit and watch the federal gov rob the country blind while shamelessly enriching their families. No, I wouldn't take a rep's job for even $500k/year, and neither will anyone with the moral mettle to make changes, exac…
> More money is not a solution to greed and self-dealing. Less money causes self-dealing behavior though. Because now there's widespread acceptance that the only way a $180k wage is worthwhile for our leadership class is if they take widespread bribes. Drop the wages enough, and even FBI agents are going to have to self-deal to make their positions worthwhile taking. Be glad its only on the leadership class for now.…
Contracts are gigantic and allow people to make great salary at a very low bar (because the bar is set by the low skill GS workers). What if I told you developers writing stuff like jquery, excel, ms access are making between 200-300$/yr. and I wont even get into what experienced people make. Basically the "official" system the one people see in public is extremely broke. What is crazy is I will see people say how high those GS salaries are, and then just chuckle if they ever really knew.
What is the alternative though? These orgs can't fall back to their GS paid workers, because they don't have the skills..so they are stuck. GS really does have to get a massive bump, and I fear anyone who thinks otherwise just lacks the experience in the matter, and I wouldn't expect them too because there's so many details that are unseen.
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why are rents going up drastically all over texas, even in small towns where damn near anything can be built?
Never mind the small towns. Houston has no zoning laws at all, yet: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/housing/2023/07/...
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The $150K number for a family of 4 sounds about right, but $100K for one person in NYC seems pretty far off. I have a lot of friends living in desirable neighborhoods making half that. (The disconnect here is always around expectations: it will invariably be revealed that this includes a 1/2BR with no roommates within walking distance of the person’s workplace, when in reality much of this city has roommates and uses…
I don't think it's unfair to expect adults to be able to afford a 1 bedroom with no roommates
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Housing supply is perfectly adequate. The prices are not, however.
If that were true, then many units would be empty. In my city prices are high but vacancy is low. So, how are the prices too high? People are paying them. If there were more supply, prices would drop, but laws prevent increasing supply.
This is literally true. In SF as of 2023, there's roughly 60,000 vacant units. In New York as of 2021, apartments listed as available and unavailable for rent but also vacant was around 89,000.
To contrast, there was around 7,700 unhoused people in SF in 2023.
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s also worth noting where the money is going. It isn’t evaporating into the air. Everyone talks about increasing numbers of parents helping their adult children from the angle of a moral failure by the children. Why doesn’t anyone stop to wonder why so many older people have so much money in the first place?
Older people have more money because they 1) Lived longer to accumulate wealth. 2) Housing was cheaper relative their income 30 years ago. It's also worth noting that 50% of homeless people are over 50 [1] [1] https://www.governing.com/urban/the-nations-homeless-populat...
This wasn’t some cosmic accident. It was a result of policy choices.
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also caused by the idea that housing should be an asset to make someone else money, rather than solely a place in which a person/family can live. This leads to the AirBnB culture, the landlord culture, and compounds inequality whilst driving unaffordability. I'm sure the idea is abhorrent to the USA, but perhaps removing incentives to be a landlord at every step should be considered... mortgages should be puniti…
To be honest, the opposite is also bad. Communist Poland had no landlords, all housing was built either by the state or by the people who wanted to live there, and apartments were basically impossible to get. If private parties have no incentives or possibilities to build, you're left with government housing, and governments are prone to overpaying and underdelivering. The only way to ensure a right to food and shelt…
Come nineties, oughts and today and the huge majority of housing units made are for tourism and speculation and are just empty most of the year. Landlords appeared too, some of those accumulating wealth from renting/Airbnb'ing their previously built summer houses, a lot came from money laundering/extraction. Housing itself has very little if any taxation so it became a wealth store and its just a big circle of socially bad incentives. Usually when there is a big political arrest it would turn our that the person had like 20 houses/flats/boutique hotels. Nothing usually comes out of it, but thats a different problem.
In the last 20 years the young people got totally screwed by lack of housing and many people emigrated unable to afford even to rent a flat and have some leftover money. Or to put it in the scale, more people emigrated than at any point in the last 150 years. People don't emigrate if they're fine with what they have. And politicians care even less because people who emigrated won't vote in the elections. And did I mention that most of them are landlords too?
My point is, a political system be it "communism" (quoting you), "socialism", "democracy" or whatever has very little with how they deal with the problem. The reality is usually much more complex than applying easy labels.
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should check out what China did about landlords in the 20th century! It turns out that a lot of what you’re suggesting isn’t nearly as true as you might think. However there solution was a bit “break some eggs to make an omelet” but it seems like it worked out pretty well.
It is also worth noting that Maoist policy lead to nationwide starvation, and nearly all of it ended up being backpedaled. What part do you think worked out well?
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense. Capital simply regulates labor competition to be low. Whether it's by increasing migration of cheap labor, policing worker organizing, company towns, regressive taxes, or many other strategies. There was one single period in history when this changed for a brief moment and capital learned its lesson to always use its power to keep the workers down. It has done so ever since.
I think it is more accurate to say that there is simply a larger supply of labor than demand for much of history, resulting in relatively lower wages, and favoring capital holders. You see much higher wages in sectors where demand for workers outstrips supply. AI architects and neurosurgeons don't need labor organization to capture high salaries.
By exactly your logic, technology has always increasingly displaced demand for labor. This isn't new at all. So-called "reskilling" is always outsourced to the responsibility of labor. The professions you describe are regulated into scarcity on an ongoing basis by capital. Any exception to this rule is simply that. In the aggregate, capital accumulates.
Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is more accurate to say that there is simply a larger supply of labor than demand for much of history, resulting in relatively lower wages, and favoring capital holders. You see much higher wages in sectors where demand for workers outstrips supply. AI architects and neurosurgeons don't need labor organization to capture high salaries.
Also nonsense, but irrelevant regardless. By exactly your logic, technology has always increasingly displaced demand for labor. This isn't new at all. So-called "reskilling" is always outsourced to the responsibility of labor. The professions you describe are regulated into scarcity on an ongoing basis by capital . Any exception to this rule is simply that. In the aggregate, capital accumulates.