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The house I was born in sold for $4000

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Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#131

Post by wnight »

cletus wrote: post #44

This is going to be an increasing issue and it's something that Western nations in particular just haven't had to deal with until now. The West came out of Europe. Europe is small. To put it in perspective, the distance from SF to NYC is ~2900 miles. The distance from London to Baghdad is ~3100 miles. So abundance of land is not a problem the West has traditionally had (not until colonization anyway). Added to this,…

> Our entire society seems premised on both population and economic growth. What exactly do we do when the population starts shrinking?

Our population is shrinking because it's what happens when the education level (specifically of women) gets high enough. So we use those smart people and build high-tech manufacturing facilities, etc.

Low-tech is fleeing our shores because nobody wants to do it and it doesn't pay well. If you want it to stay here, import foreigners from poor countries but instead of keeping them foreign, make them citizens and keep their wages here.

This stuff is trivial. It's only made hard because we don't want to share. If we try for a team victory it's almost inevitable.

> I believe one of the largest fallacies of the Twentieth Century was that the idea set in that everything was going to keep growing

Yes. Not that we shouldn't expect progress, which comes from increased understanding, but expecting unlimited growth is crazy.

> [The idea that the] institutions you grew up with would last a life time. [...] Cities come. Cities go. Nations come. Nations go. To think that the USA or Europe will exist as they do today a thousand years from now is the height of hubris and/or naivete.

Can you imagine thinking, after a thousand years(!!) of history and conquest, that Rome would fall? Madness!

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#132

Post by rdl »

dfc wrote: post #129
rdl wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be within a medevac flight of Seattle or Austin.

Rotor wash destroys shantytown after dotcom mogul is medevaced to Seattle. News at 11.

I lived in a GP Medium tent next to (100m) a medevac HLZ. Even a Chinook isn't a big deal if you set it up properly. You don't land right on top of the tents. Any kind of terrain feature helps, or just distance.

I don't see why people assume "can have your own housing in a high density area" is inherently shoddy construction; 4 x 20' containers and about $20k in work could build something quite nice.

"Writer's cabins" are exactly this model (although you don't get the option of building your own workspace; maybe something where you get space, or a shell, or a furnished cottage). I'd trust an engineer to build something a hell of a lot more than a YA fiction writer or particularly a postmodernist. :)

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#133

Post by nitrogen »

sliverstorm wrote: post #125
waterlesscloud wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only need a couple of trained architects to oversee the whole deal.

So we just cross our fingers a couple good architects want to live in our shantytown, whose main proposed draw is proximity to fiber?

Sure, cross your fingers, and offer them a competitive reason to participate (i.e. pay them). Who says they have to live there if they don't want to?

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#134

Post by waps »

napolux wrote: post #108

Maybe it's just a stupid statement made out of tv shows like 'extreme makeover home edition', correct me please if I'm wrong.... In US most of the houses seems to be made over a wooden structure, making them more fragile, easy to be renovated / customized / moved / rebuilt and, most important, cheaper. Here in Italy (and AFAIK in the whole Europe) there's nothing like that: full concrete and a proper basement, basica…

Well you can find houses like that : the ones that have to be demolished (often in relatively nice locations too), and rebuilt. Of course, buying the property means that after that there's still 300k to be paid to build a new house.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#135

Post by waterlesscloud »

nitrogen wrote: post #133
sliverstorm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we just cross our fingers a couple good architects want to live in our shantytown, whose main proposed draw is proximity to fiber?

Sure, cross your fingers, and offer them a competitive reason to participate (i.e. pay them). Who says they have to live there if they don't want to?

There are plenty of architects with an interest in experimental communities. And not a lot of opportunities for them. You'd be able to find someone. Probably have your pick, actually.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#136

Post by dagw »

jluxenberg wrote: post #15

Homeowners of HN: how do you justify tying up a large percentage of your net worth in a home?

Nothing that I felt was even vaguely worth renting was available. This is a huge one. Most buy/rent arguments seem to assume that for any given area and type of property you will always have the choice of renting or buying an equivalent property. This has not been my experience at all. Being willing to buy opens up a much bigger and better selection of property to choose from. Any other argument is pretty much secondary to that one.

Also having crunched the numbers for our particular scenario, buying made financial sense. There is also a perceived feeling of security and stability that comes from owning. But really all of this is very much secondary to my first point.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#137

Post by YokoZar »

actuary wrote: post #57
jluxenberg wrote: post #15

Homeowners of HN: how do you justify tying up a large percentage of your net worth in a home?

This is an excellent question. First, note that you will always need a place to live. If you rent, you have no option but to pay market rents forever. Another way to put this, in the language of finance, is that you are "short" housing. Purchasing a home covers this short position - a homeowner must pay their mortgage, but need not be exposed to market fluctuations in the cost of housing. In this sense, the purchase…

This cannot be right. Buying a house surely increases your risk, because the price of your house now affects a majority of your wealth. If you didn't spend all that money taking on debt to purchase a home, you could have your assets spread across a far less risky portfolio.

That's not even counting all the risk you expose yourself to by being locked into a particular house in a particular neighborhood, such as not being able to switch jobs due to the expense of relocation.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#138

Post by lostlogin »

rdl wrote: post #128
dfc wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the sandpaper part that sounded funny to me. Speaking of framing, you know that aisle of 2x4x8s you walk past at home despot? They are not all 96 inches long. If you look close some are labeled "framing studs." They are precut to 92 5/8 precisely so that you don't need to cut down every stud when you are framing a wall.

I personally kind of hate stick-built stuff; my dream home is concrete and steel and glass, with textiles and strategic wood for sound and aesthetics.

You might not like New Zealand then - its 95% stick built (well, wood) and has a minimum of concrete. That was changing, but after seeing the Christchurch earthquake, this wobbly island isn't going to be allowing heavy stuff that isn't braced like a battleship anytime soon.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#139

Post by lostlogin »

rdl wrote: post #59
redblacktree wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real-life SimCity?

I may be influenced by living from 2004-2010 in either bombed out wrecks or "camps" in warzones, where this kind of stuff is routine.

Wondered if you were going to fess up and admit that you see anything better than a war zone as luxury. Out of curiosity, what's your ideal home?

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#140

Post by rseymour »

gridmaths wrote: post #65

I zoomed in on google map, was hoping for streetview [ in which I fantasized seeing Jack Reacher walk past for some reason ] From the OP, I assumed this would be literally 100 miles from the nearest drugstore/711.. but its bang in the urban grid of a small town. Shouldn't some of the bailout money be towards loans for people to do up cheap homes like this? It would seem a good investment for the future at low cost to…

Plenty of CDBG money has gone into Jamestown. Mostly in different parts of town. At its peak the city was 50k people. Now more like Imagine manhattan before Central Park.
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