881–890 of 1001 posts
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I'm just not sure that is true. Have you been seeing what is happening in German politics recently? And Germany is a fairly moderate country all things considered. There are plenty of European countries where 'alt'-right ultranationalism is very prevalent
I am aware of Germany as I live there. I am not sure what you are referring to.
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> housing the middle class is always going to be more profitable than housing the poor You could make this argument for any product. Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich. That doesn’t mean nobody poor has ever eaten. About one percent of Americans are poor on a global scale [1]. Unaffordability of housing is a political choice. It is driven by an alliance between cynical and ignorant interests.…
> You could make this argument for any product. Yeah you can, because the vast majority of products are built and priced for the middle class, including > Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich Food, which is why we have vast areas in the USA where it is impossible to buy groceries without driving 40 minutes or more, which means fresh food is basically out of the question, which is fine anyway bec…
> And Americans being rich on a global scale doesn't mean shit when median expenses for said "rich" Americans are getting more expensive all the time.
This is a political choice.
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Yes. They literally have to or they’ve got no chance at competing in the job market. They’re screwed either way, might as well get 4 years of college out of it.
Anecdotally, I can name plenty of people near me who hold full time jobs without needing a four year degree.
Sure, some will be alright. However, looking at statistics, the best way of not falling behind in terms of income is to get a good degree. Because that’s what we are talking about: average wages have been increasing more slowly than inflation for quite a few decades now. So we are talking about a generation falling behind, not a greedy generation.
It’s less and less the case that a degree is the best path forward (depending on the field), but still.
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In 2010, I had a $600/month rental with a kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, in apartment washing machine/dryer and a fairly large walk-in closet. With 13 years of inflation, that'd be $850/month. That apartment now goes for over $1200/month (Almost certainly hasn't been renovated). [1] The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever…
> The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever they like to rake in the profits. Even if it's true that a few large businesses own most rentals, that kind of oligopolistic behavior should be undercut by new people entering the market by building more apartments - unless there's a big barrier to entry, like the difficulty in building thin…
You're missing the forest for the trees here. The 'new people' entering the market sell the apartments and buildings they create to the big businesses in question. I've lived in apartments for my entire life, eventually they all get acquired by Greystar. Even the smaller ones.
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…
Available transit needs to include safe transit. The current bus and light rail situation has turned off swaths of the working class to support the dredges of the drug-addict class by their lack of fare-enforcement and other low-end enabling schemes that sound great on paper, but lead to complicated downstream chilling effects on the entire region.
Tell me you never use public transit without telling me you never use public transit. This is so out of touch it reads like a rant from the chronicle.
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What specific government policy is causing developers to only build $2k+/mo rentals? You can't just vaguely say "government" is at fault without connecting the dots. This seems more like the market's fault. If homes in a particular area are going for $2k/mo, then that's what they are going for. If this is the government's fault, are you proposing price controls?
There are a ton of requirements placed on what can even qualify as housing. To stick close to the example, rooming houses (SROs) are effectively illegal in most cities these days. You simply can't have a commercial venture that rents out cheap barebones bedrooms with shared bathrooms. That's due to regulations that were designed to get rid of rooming houses. Bedrooms are also required by law to have a window and clos…
Where's Adam Neumann when we need him!?
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In 2010, I had a $600/month rental with a kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, in apartment washing machine/dryer and a fairly large walk-in closet. With 13 years of inflation, that'd be $850/month. That apartment now goes for over $1200/month (Almost certainly hasn't been renovated). [1] The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever…
It is government policy. Specifically, it is restrictive zoning. Landlords do not get to set prices to whatever they want, they set prices to what the market will pay. If rent has gone up faster than inflation it just means that demand has increased or supply has decreased in that time. You can build apartments for ~$250 per sqft. The issue is that local governments make it really hard to build more apartments. If yo…
Not quite. Landlords have the ability to fake demand in order to raise prices. One of the ways they do so is by leaving units intentionally empty (as they've done in NYC), which artificially restrains supply and allows them to raise prices on the units they own much higher than they'd normally be if they were releasing all units to the public. They can do this because these large apartment units are all owned by a small number of companies.
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I feel like it should just be "Humans are and have always been characterized by their failure to plan for the future". All of history is just a rise and fall of empires due to unforeseen or unexpected consequences, followed by an advance in technology. Who are you to say that gen X or any other generation will correctly plan for the future(as we currently navigate some of the biggest hurdles to humanity and the Earth…
There's also a lot of selfish, and "I want to win" or "I want my sport team to win", and I don't really want to have children (except I want my sport team to win), or pay for anything, or build any infrastructure, or let the other team accomplish anything, cause that's not winning existence. I don't really want to live here, I want to win (and go to the next level). The UK is stilll talking about "leveling up" this and that. So existence has become this terrible place where a lot of people mostly fantasize about existing anywhere else. Cause you can't leave, but you can't stay here.
In a horrible Machiavellian interpretation, I want to score a lot, and keep other people from scoring (gender interactions also obviously have a "scoring" idea).
There are five workers supporting every retiree, and this is still happening. If you are approaching 40, there will be about two workers supporting you when you retire. I’m thinking this is the start of something much bigger.
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This kind of zoning also builds desireable neighborhoods. The neighborhood I live in has six-ten unit apartments on the same streets as six-to-ten bedroom mansions. In some places, you can see where the owner of the mansion had an apartment building constructed in their front yard. I could never imagine this happening today. Yet everyone in the region knows of this neighborhood as being prestigious, with the best sch…
> But for some reason, local politicians can't seem to enact zoning laws that allow them to be built in modern times. People show up at the city council meeting and scream at them that the construction will destroy the neighborhood.