I live in Portugal and we currently live a dreadful scenario.
In developed countries a house shouldn't take 40 years to pay
If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
861–870 of 1001 posts
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#862Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully, I think calling "The Great Reset" a 'crank subject' is itself a sign of conspiratorial thinking, or in the least, misleading/false information. I often see people label discussions of "The Great Reset" in this way, but that ignores the reality that the World Economic Forum literally branded their 2020 meeting as "Great Reset" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset ). If the WEF isn't a familiar nam…
"Crank subjects" are not subjects that are themselves fundamentally outlandish or unreal: they're subjects picked up by cranks and integrated into conspiratorial worldviews. Davos is a real summit that happens every year; it's also a crank subject because cranks integrate it into their NWO and similar theories. Your own Wikipedia link says this neatly: > According to The New York Times,[1 1] the BBC, The Guardian, Le…
I'm trying to understand what specifically makes a worldview conspiratorial for you. Are you disagreeing that the "Great Reset" involves implementing particular ideological views and political positions? Would you agree that people are allowed to disagree with those positions? And that those who disagree with those positions are allowed to call attention to powerful people pushing those positions? Personally I don't see any of those as being "cranky" or "conspiratorial" as much as just regular political engagement.
Regarding the quote from Wikipedia - I don't agree with how that portion of the article is written or sourced. It is debated on the Talk page, and is a reflection of a growing bias in Wikipedia (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). That section starts off by mentioning QAnon, then says Trump amplified QAnon, and never makes a connection between all of that and "Great Reset" (it's a sort of "guilt by association" argument). Additionally, it lists out a number of right-leaning TV personalities and claims they were pushing a conspiracy theory, but none of the source articles they reference show any false claim from those same people. From those sources, it looks like these people complained that the pandemic is being exploited as a political opportunity to introduce and push various left-leaning political positions. That seems not only very reasonable to me, but also easily provable.
From my perspective, I am seeing people take the very small number of people who are suggesting the pandemic was a planned crisis with certain political goals in mind, and using that to discredit others who are not claiming it was planned but just disagree with the political opportunism and the political goals.
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#863Earlier quoted context omitted.
A neighbor was complaining just the other day about a developer want to build two houses on a sliver of land in our small historic town. I've got no reason to support this. There's space to build an apartment building near me but no one want to do that (a building, in fact, burned down a while back and hasn't been rebuilt). Neighbors want no development. Developers want to build more of the ubber expensive houses the…
Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…
Density brings in more tax revenue to pay for expanding the sewers and can support more mass transit to reduce traffic -- no street widening needed.
In many cities, it's the poorer denser neighborhoods that subsidize the more affluent less dense neighborhoods.
Scroll down to red and green map here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/5/10/lafayette
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#864Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every now and then I watch one of these Japanese "video walk" channels on YouTube and find myself despairing at how wildly better their land use is than in the US. Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. And yet, so much of Tokyo seems like it's built at the scale of a small-town main street: Between the major roads with their skyscrapers sit networks of pedestria…
> Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. It has little to do with "island nation", most nations use mixed zoning, it's certainly the standard in europe (and recent developments are gravitating towards more mixed zoning e.g. Amsterdam's eastern docklands). It could have to do with being an old nation, but even then that's not actually true, the US existed for a wh…
In the US, we invented zoning, mostly to exclude black people from white neighborhoods. And now we use it to prop up property values and continue to keep poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods.
Now I'm speculating, but I wonder if Japan, being mostly Japanese people, didn't have such a large group to exclude from certain neighborhoods? So they didn't entrench the institution of local control and exclusionary zoning?
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#865Earlier quoted context omitted.
It probably didn’t hurt that Japan has a declining population, so supply > demand
> so supply > demand Nope. Japan has a declining population, but the population keeps urbanising. So while there's hefty supply (literally millions of unoccupied housing inventory) in places nobody wants to live in, there is not in places where people are moving to (large cities). There's very regularly news and posts about unoccupied houses ("akiya") being literally given away by government and local authorities bec…
>>>Some prefectures are nearing 20% vacancy rates, but they're places like… well basically all of Shikoku which is largely mountainous and rural, and has been bleeding population at a rate of 5%/decade since 2000.
That's crazy to me, Tokushima in Shikoku was on my short list of "ideal relocation spots". With just a few hours of scenic driving, you can be in Kochi, Takamatsu, Matsuyama, Okayama, or Wakayama. All with populations of 300,000-700,000 (so decent mid-tier cities). So you could easily geographically distribute 4-5 girlfriends across those towns and combine them with some awesome driving experiences in-between.
Osaka and Kobe aren't much further if you really want a big-city party nightlife occasionally too.
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#866Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…
I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick…
States with this amount of obstructive ossification, such as the Byzantine Empire or Austria-Hungary, don't generally stand the test of time. Just before Austria-Hungary's collapse following WWI, the collection of taxes in Dalmatia (now Croatia) cost twice as much as it raised [0]. We still use the word Byzantine today to describe systems that are "complicated, secret and difficult to change" [1].
I don't know what this could mean at the city or county level. Keep an eye out for wayward Sultans and Allied powers?
[0] https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-and-late-austrian-empire
[1] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#867Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick…
There is lots of ag zoned land around me. nobody wants it rezoned to residential as that means more people and most people don't want more people around. People always buy the ag lots cause they are cheap and have low taxes if you have ag activity, and then want to build more housing on them than the zoning allows, because that is lucrative. just use a septic field instead of the sewer hookup if the county won't play…
Unfortunately, the health district won't issue a permit because of the existence of the "will serve" letter from the city. So this is turning into quite the ordeal to get sorted out. I'm really hoping to keep things out of the courts, but that is a very real possibility. And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY.
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#868Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/... Norlidger v. Hahn (worth a read https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html ) didn't make it but also didn't address the Fair Housing Act. Prop 13, especially the extensions that preserve tax rates through bloodlines, disparately impacts minorities even though that wasn't the explicit intent of the law. Turns out that intent doesn't matte…
It's also a huge grant to older generations, which violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment, IMO. But I'm not a Supreme, so I dunno.
I agree with Justice Stevens that it's a violation of equal protection, and the state supreme court of Delaware recently did to when they struck down their version of Prop 13, but as you'll see in my Cornell link above the rest of the court upheld the law.
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#869Earlier quoted context omitted.
A neighbor was complaining just the other day about a developer want to build two houses on a sliver of land in our small historic town. I've got no reason to support this. There's space to build an apartment building near me but no one want to do that (a building, in fact, burned down a while back and hasn't been rebuilt). Neighbors want no development. Developers want to build more of the ubber expensive houses the…
Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…
You've got it exactly backwards. Density is cheaper and more sustainable than running miles and miles of brand new sewerage, roads etc into spread-out suburbs.
The big difference between Japanese and American cities is that Japan is built for trains, which scale up really well, and the US is built for cars, which don't.
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#870This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low. All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well. Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Eve…
> Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives For homeowners, it is the most expensive thing, but homeowners are winning on it because they get the value of the asset appreciating. For non-homeowners, the reason CPI isn’t going up is that rents aren’t rising with purchase prices, its the purchase:rent ratio going up. So it isn’t hurting them, either.
but homeowners can't actually access that value because they would need to immediately use the money to buy another house. They don't let you continue to live in the house after you have sold it.