Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but 5-10% of the value of the house a year in maintenance isn’t unheard of. I assure you I am not paying ~$30k in maintenance on my ~$400k house every year... that would be comical
Add it up and work it out; factor out the land if you must (e.g., pretend it’s a landlord business and you’re renting to yourself). Maintenance items add up, and some only happen every 20-30 years, it can hit hard. A new roof every 30 years at $10k is already noticeable.
Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
371–380 of 391 posts
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because that’s Denver’s history. Founded by land speculators after beating Indians in the Colorado War of 1865, only to become a gold rush town, then go bust, become a gang haven, bust again, then boom again with Carnations, then bust again, then boom again with industrials and nuclear waste, to go bust again when nuclear power was divested, then to boom again in the 90s with more gangs, bust again, then boom again i…
The Denver Metro Area has been booming for close to 20 years. It was one of the few localities that continued positive economic growth through the 2008 recession
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Realistically basically no one is aware of the details of zoning policy or the mechanics. Are there pitchforks in Denver or Austin? Are angry homeowners overthrowing governments and blocking homebuilding? People seem to complain that housing costs too much. The straightforward bet is that lower prices would be popular. For example, re Texas, 9 out of 10 say housing prices are too high: https://www.texastribune.org/20…
> Are angry homeowners overthrowing governments and blocking homebuilding? Yes. Go to city council meetings when new housing developments are being proposed. See the throngs of people that'll show up demanding that new development doesn't get built. See the angry people shouting about how allowing ADUs will just destroy their way of life. The amount of vitrol I saw about the Plano Tomorrow plan against past mayor LaR…
Recent zoning changes in Texas came from the state legislature and remove cities ability to block a fair number of housing types.
Did Plano itself actually enact any new pro zoning law that has drawn new protests? The article you shared it about developing undeveloped land but zoning is largely about what is blocked on existing inhabited land.
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But, the convention in the US is that people see their houses as a form of savings. Realistically, we should account for that. Why? If it makes society as a whole much poorer. The convention is fairly recent and the cause of enormous problems.
It doesn't really matter why; what matters is that they do see things that way. And I agree with you, it's a bad convention, and it causes tons of problems, and it's the result of recent decades of bad mortgage/housing/zoning policy. But we can't just wipe it away and pretend it was never there, and let the chips fall where they may. That's just heartless, and, well -- you talk about making society poorer -- that wil…
We wouldn't get richer if we blew up car factories to protect the market value of existing cars. The market value of existing cars WOULD skyrocket if we destroyed all new car production, but that would be society getting poorer, not richer, as we would have fewer cars.
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inhaling combustion products isn't great... not sure why you'd link those things? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819315/ "We found that 12.7% (95% CI = 6.3–19.3%) of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use. The proportion of childhood asthma that could be theoretically prevented if gas stove use was not present (e.g., state-specific PAFs) varied by state (Illinois = 21.1%; Calif…
In San Francisco, the housing crisis poses a far greater and more immediate threat to children’s well-being than this issue. Lack of stable, affordable housing affects everything: education, health, safety, and long-term opportunity. We can debate other problems, but unless we address the fundamental need for proper housing, everything else should be secondary.
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are angry homeowners overthrowing governments and blocking homebuilding? Yes. Go to city council meetings when new housing developments are being proposed. See the throngs of people that'll show up demanding that new development doesn't get built. See the angry people shouting about how allowing ADUs will just destroy their way of life. The amount of vitrol I saw about the Plano Tomorrow plan against past mayor LaR…
That's the local council. Local council meetings are notorious for attracting people willing to oppose any development. Not the same thing as an electoral force. Recent zoning changes in Texas came from the state legislature and remove cities ability to block a fair number of housing types. Did Plano itself actually enact any new pro zoning law that has drawn new protests? The article you shared it about developing u…
> Are angry homeowners...blocking homebuilding?
And then now:
> Local council meetings are notorious for attracting people willing to oppose any development.
So yes, even you agree there are angry homeowners doing what they can blocking homebuilding.
Yes, it's been happening at the local level, because that's where those decisions are almost always made.
> Recent zoning changes in Texas came from the state legislature
As in, this last legislative session. It took to that point because of angry homeowners blocking development. And how did they do it? By pushing out any local government that tried to enact development plans that tried to densify over and over again throughout tons of towns. The legislation didn't come from a vacuum, it came in response to these NIMBYs that have otherwise yielded significant political power at the local level.
> zoning is largely about what is blocked on existing inhabited land.
Practically all that land is currently zoned. It's not developed, but it is zoned. Almost always zoned agriculturally, as it was once pretty much all farm lands. Lots of those areas are still farms, but largely for tax reasons.
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure I get your point. If the utility of a home is largely a function of size, but the cost is largely a function of location and amenities then there’s little benefit to specifically building smaller homes rather than less expensive homes.
No one is seeking to build smaller; they're seeking to build less expensive. Building smaller (specifically reducing square footage, baths, and kitchen amenities [which are a mix of size and non-size elements], and using less land [going up, sharing walls/roofs, eliminating private outdoor space, etc.]) is the mechanism by which the goal of less expensive can be met.
Amenities on the other hand can literally 2X+ the cost of a home.
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can be an NP in as few as 4-5 years out of high school with some courses. That’s to me the definition of not knowing what you don’t know. I’m a critical care paramedic who has corrected many NPs on fairly fundamental learning. I’ve found that nurses with significant field experience do very well, but there are plenty of courses who will “zero to hero” you fresh out of high school. Meanwhile, PAs go through a prog…
Okay but what does that have to do with enshittification, as defined by Cory Doctorow, which refers to the decline in quality of online platforms and services over time, often driven by the pursuit of increased profits. This degradation is characterized by a shift in focus from user experience to maximizing revenue, typically through tactics like increased advertising, higher costs, or changes that favor business cus…
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...
Specifically:
> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay but what does that have to do with enshittification, as defined by Cory Doctorow, which refers to the decline in quality of online platforms and services over time, often driven by the pursuit of increased profits. This degradation is characterized by a shift in focus from user experience to maximizing revenue, typically through tactics like increased advertising, higher costs, or changes that favor business cus…
It's not incorrect to use this word colloquially. See this post: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi... Specifically: > The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – t…
In the days before the Internet, there was only space for a 30 second soundbite and that was the level of discourse. These days, we have Twitter and Substack, so there's slightly more nuance available to us (only slightly), and I'd like to think the "normies", as you put it, are smarter than you think, and are capable of nuance.
Re: Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's pretty normal for resale to be less than purchase price. Considering it is important! Making any guarantees as to the future worth of these items is craziness.
In the case of housing, it is generally very not normal for resale to be less than purchase price. Sure, there are exceptions to that: market downturns happen, and sometimes regional issues (like the one big employer leaving town) can cause that. But in general, no, it's normal for the resale value of a home to be higher than when you purchased it. That's dumb. But that's the reality we live in.
This is the market. So I maintain that guaranteeing outcomes is craziness.
Should something as vital as housing be a market commodity? That's a whole different conversation.