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New US homeownership measure puts people first

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Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#381

Post by cpburns2009 »

jimberlage wrote: post #378
cpburns2009 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No body is forced to have a $700 car payment. That's a luxury financing $30k+ on a brand new or nearly new car.

True (I certainly don't!) but I chose it because I had to do some research a while back and that was close to the average for Americans. [1]: https://qz.com/average-car-payment-by-state#average-car-paym... [2]: https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/

That's actually shocking. I've been in tech for 15+ years and have a good income. I've only recently purchased a new car instead of used, and with a monthly payment right by my state's average. Prior to this I never had a payment more than $250/mo.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#382

Post by BeetleB »

CalRobert wrote: post #363
BeetleB wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, window AC's are really effective at cooling the single room they're in. In the wooden house I have, I just can't get the room that cool if the temperature is in the 90's, because the internal walls provide very little insulation. It was trivial when I lived in concrete buildings. It's a ridiculous waste to have to use central air conditioning to cool a whole house when I really just need to cool 1-2…

OK, but window AC and also mini and multi split systems, which are also like this, work just fine in wooden houses, so I don’t see the connection. I had multi splits in a wooden house in Ireland. Edit: re-reading… I guess it depends on the house but I definitely have had a substantial temp difference between rooms in a wooden house

We may just have different standards on what "cold" means :-)

Let's say it's 35C outside. Just using a window AC alone, I want to cool the room to where I'm uncomfortably cold (not quite shivering but close) - within about an hour of turning it on (2 hours max). I can't do that with my wooden house in the US when the outside is that hot. I can make it comfortably cool, but no cooler.

(I had better experience in a wooden apartment building, but that's likely because the walls between apartments have insulation).

Actual numbers: If I leave the AC on at max cool all night, I can get the temperature down to 20C. Keep in mind that it's cool outside at night (and actually will dip below 20C at some point at night).

I've never gotten it below 20C.

When I lived in a concrete place, we would never set the thermostat on the window AC to the coolest setting - it would get too cold!

(Yes, I clean the filter and have even replaced the AC - the unit wasn't the problem).

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#383

Post by jltsiren »

ch4s3 wrote: post #380
jltsiren wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available. There was nothing else available. If you were born in an agricultural settlement, that was probably the only lifestyle you knew. Even if you knew other ways to sustain yourself, all land was already taken. Settled regions were too densely populated, and the lands beyond them were claimed by indigenous peoples. If you w…

> If you were born in an agricultural settlement, that was probably the only lifestyle you knew All of these societies would have had headers and hunting/foraging people on their periphery who they traded with. People regularly fucked off to go join those groups. This is well attested to in written records.

There is a difference between what anyone can do and what everyone can do at the same time. Some people could always choose alternative life paths, but that option was not available for the majority.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#384

Post by xnx »

krackers wrote: post #367
xnx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly referencing the "Chart of the Century": https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

This may not account for enshittification. Clothes are "cheaper" in both senses of the word. Same for furnishings.

Possibly. The source data does include hedonic adjustments.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#385

Post by BeetleB »

em-bee wrote: post #375
BeetleB wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind the differing ways they calculate home ownership percentage. The ones you are looking at likely are calculated using the "older" method, which is 80% in the US.

can you elaborate please? how do the methods differ? do you have some links to explain that?

This whole submission is about a new way of calculating home ownership. The "standard" way puts it at 80% in the US. The new way is about 50%.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#386

Post by lemoncucumber »

pfisherman wrote: post #358
ecshafer wrote: post #192

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't r…

I think land value tax is misguided. Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases? Are they forced from their home to lower priced area? Regardless of how one might feel about the morality of that it is also worth asking whether this might create perverse incentives to become landlords?

> Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases?

That’s not specific to a land value tax, the same thing can happen with traditional property taxes when the property is re-assessed.

California tried to “solve” exactly that scenario with Prop 13 limiting how much the assessed value of property can increase without a change in ownership and it’s been a disaster (and a contributing factor to the housing crisis, albeit far from the only one).

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#387

Post by hollerith »

rayiner wrote: post #89
smallmancontrov wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Durable goods have deflated compared to wages while health care, housing, and education soared. If you are given the job of spinning this (or take it upon yourself in a bid for access), focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter is how you do it. "Think of the iPhones! Never mind that rent in a mid-rate city is 1 iPhone and 2 big screen TVs every month!"

It’s true there’s a spin in that direction. But I think there’s also a tendency to take things for granted in the other direction because they have become so cheap. Food and clothing used to make up significant line items for ordinary people. I remember in the 1990s seeing ads for discount cereal (“it comes in a bag on the bottom shelf but it’s just as good as the branded stuff!”). When was the last time you saw a co…

Most working-class and many middle-class American women made their own clothes until the 1960s. It was too expensive to buy ready-made clothes.

A company named Simplicity prospered by selling patterns: the woman would tell the company what style and size she wanted, then the company would send her a package consisting of instructions and pieces of paper in the precise shapes needed to make the garment. The woman would attach one of the pieces of paper to fabric with pins, then use lines and symbols printed on the paper to know where to cut, then attach the next piece of paper, etc.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#388

Post by [deleted] »

carlosjobim wrote: post #371
bluGill wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literature only happened in agricultural societies and mostly by the elites. While it gives us a picture historians have to work really hard to read between the lines to figure out what life was really like for most people. If you were the elite in any time your life is much better than typical. Many would say life is a constant struggle. However few have any clue what others experience is like. Even the filthy rich…

> Literature only happened in agricultural societies and mostly by the elites. How far are you going back now? I'm not for groping in the mists of pre-history, when we can read literary descriptions from the last 500 years. That is a more relatable past than the little we can know from ancient days. > If you were the elite in any time your life is much better than typical. Yes, and that is just as true today.

[deleted]

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#389

Post by xyzzyz »

Xirdus wrote: post #162
rayiner wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s true there’s a spin in that direction. But I think there’s also a tendency to take things for granted in the other direction because they have become so cheap. Food and clothing used to make up significant line items for ordinary people. I remember in the 1990s seeing ads for discount cereal (“it comes in a bag on the bottom shelf but it’s just as good as the branded stuff!”). When was the last time you saw a co…

The food also became qualitatively different over the same period. We're not eating the same meat, bread, fruits, cheese etc. that our grandparents did at our age. Durable goods became much less durable, too. Furniture is the biggest one I'd say - they're just not built to last anymore. Whether it's planned obsolescence or just extreme cost cutting, we aren't comparing apples to apples here.

Yes, the furniture became less durable as it became much cheaper. You can still buy durable furniture, but people just aren't interested in it for the most part.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#390

Post by Xirdus »

xyzzyz wrote: post #389
Xirdus wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The food also became qualitatively different over the same period. We're not eating the same meat, bread, fruits, cheese etc. that our grandparents did at our age. Durable goods became much less durable, too. Furniture is the biggest one I'd say - they're just not built to last anymore. Whether it's planned obsolescence or just extreme cost cutting, we aren't comparing apples to apples here.

Yes, the furniture became less durable as it became much cheaper. You can still buy durable furniture, but people just aren't interested in it for the most part.

But the durable furniture you can still buy is now several times more expensive than 30 years ago, much more than the inflation. Apples to apples, they became less affordable, not more. If you add up the cost of replacing everything every so often, the downtime caused by the replacing, and the periods where your possessions are a little broken but not enough to replace them - there's a strong argument that lower prices caused our quality of life to go down, not up.
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