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The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

moneywise.com

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Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#641

Post by Schiendelman »

wwweston wrote: post #484
BytesAndGears wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t built a “$2k rental”. You can only build a rental that someone will pay for. Landlords are building luxury housing because it’s the only thing that’s profitable right now due to the immensely ridiculous laws that don’t help people. But if an apartment building popped up in downtown SF charging $800/mo, it’s not like only the low income people would live there. Many people living in $3000/mo apartments also…

And which developers are going to build past the point of diminishing marginal returns?

Assuming you are actually interested, there are three different things that happen here in housing. Keep in mind you're describing how any commodity continues to have a growing market; you'd just never ask this about consumer goods since you're not used to thinking about how LG or Kohler or Fisher-Price stay in business.

1) Developers want to continue in their business, so they cut costs. This means factory built components, vertical integration, the same things that cut costs in every other industry. Today they have no incentive to actually compete.

2) Without zoning, any privately held land becomes available for housing, so you see completely new business models. A developer builds an entire neighborhood from scratch, for instance - this is how many of our late 1800s / early 1900s neighborhoods happened, before zoning, and they're often some of the best walkable urban centers now.

3) New entrants bring innovative solutions at scale. Modular buildings explode. People come up with shit you cannot possibly think of today.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#642

Post by momirlan »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #447
momirlan wrote: post #91

this is the generation that had it best: jobs for life, good benefits, cheap houses, etc. they also destroyed the planet with their "American dream" style consumption. what's coming for the new generations if these are suffering ?

I see this perspective a lot, and I really don't understand it. Millennials have it pretty damn good as well. And everyone wants to ignore how difficult the 80s were as far as jobs, housing, etc. Boomers got bumblefucked in the 80s. Interest rates for home loans were abysmal, small banks failed all over the place, business loans got called, etc etc. I think the only thing gen z or millennials really have to complain…

[flagged]

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#643

Post by Keirmot »

zamalek wrote: post #209
expertentipp wrote: post #3

It's "I got mine and don't care" until what you've got melts in your hand like an ice cube and then nobody cares.

Indeed, the perpetuators of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" are finding themselves short of said bootstraps.

Or that, thinking logically, if you pull yourself by your bootstraps, you either don’t move or fall down.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#644

Post by mym1990 »

beretguy wrote: post #281
silenced_trope wrote: post #122

My mom was homeless for years, thankfully she got stable housing right before covid took off. - in shelters/churches-with-cots there would be crazed drug-users, she was threatened numerous times in them and the shelter can't do anything - I wasn't financially able to help her much but managed to buy her a "clunker" of a car which she later slept in before getting housing - she's entirely dependent on getting social s…

> My mom was homeless for years > I wasn't financially able to help her much but managed to buy her a "clunker" of a car which she later slept in before getting housing Ah… So… If you had a place to live couldn’t you let her live in that same place too, instead of her being homeless? My parents lost their jobs due to covid, and even though they treated me bad when I was a kid I still let them in my house. How can you…

You are just taking OPs situation and putting your loved ones into it, that is not empathy. Family dynamics can be incredibly complex, and more so when drugs, lack of resources, or abuse is involved(that is just a few examples, and often the situation has many points of strain).

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#645

Post by rg111 »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #620
cornercasechase wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit is much safer than driving in your car. Someone skipping fare does not compare to even a light fender bender.

I think when most people use "safe" in this context, they mean "comfortable" or "psychologically comfortable". Nobody enjoys sitting beside someone tweaking and shitting themselves, even if it's perfectly safe.

Exactly.

I don't ever mind public transport. I have used public transport in multiple areas of the planet.

There are two quips:

1. You have to be there in someone else's time. You can't have 5 or 10 or 30 minutes if something comes up.

2. What you say. I don't want to rub my body with people who are wearing dirty clothes, smell, and has god-knows-what liquid on their clothes who might choose to cough without using their hands. (This has happened to me) So, I avoid public transport where there is this kind of intermingling. Fine with me where there are upper classes or similar in transport and it is enforced strictly.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#647

Post by snowpid »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #197
snowpid wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ar-right inclinations, ultra-nationalism is far more spreaded in US than just say Germany.

You know there is much more Europe to the east & south of Germany, yes? It's not just the convenient western countries of Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries, and maybe UK; it's also Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, and let's not forget, Russia.

Still there was no ultra nationalistic EU commission president (as this might comparable to the US president.) This applies also to Spain, Ukraine and UK from your list. I just have to admit, that I didnt thought about Belarus, Russia and Serbia.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#648

Post by BytesAndGears »

Schiendelman wrote: post #630
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A non-trivial amount of "property" is speculation at best and concrete money laundering at worst, especially in the largest cities It's not supposed to saleable or rentable. But it does take up land that could be used for real housing. And it also drives up the perceived value - and price - of both rentals and outright buys. Rent control may or may not be a solution. But many of these schemes are run through shady sh…

That's the case in any predictably supply restricted market. That behavior completely disappears if you don't restrict supply, because if people can build more housing, housing depreciates - and investors put their money somewhere else because they don't want to lose it.

This is the key. You can’t have a vacant building charging ridiculous rent because of “speculation” while there are 10 similar buildings nearby that charge half the price and have tenants. No sane investor would fund that

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#649

Post by [deleted] »

gavin_gee wrote: post #594

Some good commentary in this thread, however one topic thats never raised in the topic of affordable housing is fast cheap public transit. I could never imagine being able to buy a house in London. but the train network makes it possible to live in a more affordable neighbourhood and commute as needed. In the US we seem to think that cities can continue to have affordable housing in the most desireable areas. this is…

[deleted]

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#650

Post by galdosdi »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #620
cornercasechase wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit is much safer than driving in your car. Someone skipping fare does not compare to even a light fender bender.

I think when most people use "safe" in this context, they mean "comfortable" or "psychologically comfortable". Nobody enjoys sitting beside someone tweaking and shitting themselves, even if it's perfectly safe.

Well, even so, while most drivers don't mind driving, there is a significant minority who are actually kind of freaked out by driving -- big overlap with people who have experienced a serious wreck. I've met a few people like that.

And besides the ones who are so anxious about driving that the rest of us know about it, there's probably a lot of people who have mild anxiety about driving but just suppress it, get through it, and/or minimize unnecessary driving, because you can't avoid driving where they live.

And, considering the risks, it's not an irrational fear. Perhaps it's us who don't mind driving and are acclimated to it who are the strange ones.

Heck, I do find myself feeling this way sometimes. I've been driving long enough to be pretty comfortable, but I do notice feeling a lot more comfortable on safer feeling roads, eg with slower speeds, frequented by less hurried drivers. I think everyone does, to some degree, otherwise complaining about the crazy drivers from the next state over wouldn't be such a universal pastime in America :)

We pretend the risk and the associated rational anxiety of driving doesn't exist because driving is so commonplace, but it's there and it's pretty big.

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