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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

#971

Post by oooyay »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #950
oooyay wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do love Portland, but I think within the city we're too uncritical of what goes on here; maybe it's a counter-reaction to sensational national coverage but, imo, equally unhelpful. Dense housing development is being pushed to Eastside ( https://projects.oregonlive.com/maps/density/ ) which has caused the city to remove trees to expand roads because they built it on roads that weren't ready for it, East sides tree d…

Yeah that’s fair, I’m really looking forward to some positive changes from the new ranked choice voting but it’s going to take time for stuff to get better.

100%, I have high hopes for ranked choice voting.

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

#972

Post by HDThoreaun »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #476
ryukafalz wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But other than zoning it seems it would help more if the government would step in to disallow large leasing companies buying up giant swathes of the housing stock just to flip into rentals. There was a timely video about this yesterday from Oh the Urbanity: https://youtu.be/BRqZBuu_Ers?si=NlavrFpm8sNTUcYp Summary is that Rotterdam did just this, and the effect was that the price to purchase a house did not measurab…

I think a tax on vacant properties is potentially a better way to go, though checking and enforcement could be the issue (exempting one's primary and maybe secondary homes); multi-unit housing would also be exempt. This would place more downward pressure on rents and decrease the investment upside on buying. I'm sure this is a bad idea in a number of ways I haven't considered.

Vacancy rates across the country are extremely low. Generally around 4-5% when it's next to impossible to get below 3% due to structural frictions around moving and repairs.

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

#973

Post by HDThoreaun »

mikrotikker wrote: post #877
Workaccount2 wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These companies hardly exist, "evil corporations" is just super memeable and denizens of the internet will accept it as the answer to anything bad. In reality, the economy has been booming for the "haves" and those people are the ones bidding up homes and pay $50k over asking with a 6.5% mortgage. Corporations don't care much for home rentals when treasuries are paying 5% with zero overhead and zero risk. Sucks to be…

So BlackRock and Vanguard didn't buy up swathes of housing out competing individuals by offering above asking price and then rent or landbank that housing?

Not to a level that would make them one of the main culprit's for the housing crisis, no.

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

#974

Post by FrustratedMonky »

coryrc wrote: post #519
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone says its regulations. But nobody wants leaky pipes, and faulty electrical wiring. Which is what happens when you start cutting back regulations, because construction contractors will cut corners, to a really shocking degree.

1. Those aren't the regulations people are mostly referencing; it's mostly zoning. 2. The electrical regulation requiring AFCI breakers increases the panel cost from $500 to $2500+ for a negligible safety increase. This is a problem!

"negligible". Is the problem. One persons "negligible", is another persons lost finger.

Construction contractors don't really care if you die. They might shrug, feel bad for an hour.

The current regulations are for "MINIMUM" standards. And those already get pushed. If we reduce the regulations, then those will also get pushed beyond.

Then we become like third world countries were buildings just collapse.

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

#975

Post by klodolph »

wyager wrote: post #625
klodolph wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logic here is that there are two different competing concerns—the use of housing as an investment (money in, money out) and the use of housing as a place to live. There’s a lot of legislation that shifts the balance one way or the other. Things like property tax caps and zoning regulations shift the balance towards house-as-investment, and things like rent increase caps shift it the other way. If you don’t buy in…

Every physical good is a financial asset whether you like it or not. Ignoring this reality will not help achieve policy goals. I agree that you are accurately describing the economically illiterate thought process, just not that it's correct. Price controls are one of those interesting things where there's a phase transition from near-universal support to near-zero support at a certain knowledge level.

Treating everything as nothing more than a financial asset is way too reductive.

My point here is that housing is not only a financial asset, and should be treated as more than just a financial asset. Or if you want to take an economic approach here, you need to come up with a utility function that more accurately reflects what we care about—we think that two people who have housing is a better situation than one person who has two houses and one person who has none.

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

#976

Post by oooyay »

demondemidi wrote: post #854
oooyay wrote: post #100

I moved to Portland a year ago. We certainly have a lot of homeless people, many of which are people caught up in the substance abuse cycle with particular drugs. However, one day I was driving back to East Portland, I drove under an underpass that's a particularly rough place. I saw a woman that looked to be my mom's age with what appeared to be a modern suit case, she was well dressed, and sober looking. The blood…

A lot of portland's problems stem from a century of institutional racism. Do you know why single-family zoning was driven so hard for so long? It keeps out undesirables. The consequences of that policy go very deep, from preventing new development to driving up values of existing properties. Both of which are terrible for affordable housing. The shockwaves of Portland's past are still reverberating. I'm glad they fin…

My problem with discourse in Portland is that all anybody wants to talk about is the history of these issues. Nobody actually has a plan for fixing them, much less the desire. That's kind of at odds with the history of the issues on the facade, right? When you dig in deep, many groups it used to impact now benefit from those policies in some way and want them around. Those people aren't boomers; they're a more diverse group of young millennials who are just coming into their own.

So we can sit around and talk about history and pop words like boomer off, but it ignores the reality of these problems today. We have an opportunity to come together as larger, more diverse (on multiple fronts) communities and decide what the future looks like, but most people are sitting on their hands making excuses for one reason or another.

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

#977

Post by unethical_ban »

pnutjam wrote: post #809
unethical_ban wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A place to live is a base of the hierarchy of needs, but giving away $2000 to someone else for a place to live vs. putting $2000 a month into your own assets is not a red herring. Developers want equity because it is financial security and passive income for them. Regular Joes want it so they don't pay rent in perpetuity; that they may have a place to live in old age without working, among other reasons.

As if you can live anywhere without paying in perpetuity. If there wasn't an endless drive to increase the value of homes, this would all be moot.

Paying a small amount for property tax or insurance is different than paying full rental/mortgage each month.

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

#978

Post by RIMR »

bfrog wrote: post #814

Affordable living can be had, where only the citizens can buy land. E.g. the philippines has quite affordable housing. And magically only filipinos can buy land. Coincidence?

You may be onto something, but we should really draw the line between personal property, and private property more than citizenship.

We shouldn't have a problem letting a non-citizen buy a home in the USA, so long as they hold some sort of visa allowing them to be here. But there should maybe be restrictions on letting non-citizens buy properties as investments, and rent them out, especially at scale.

Countries like the Philippines also have domestic housing regulations preventing residential property from being sucked up by property management companies to be rented out for profit to such a scale that it prevents prospective homeowners from purchasing real estate.

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

#979

Post by sedawk »

yardie wrote: post #360
lolinder wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was bad, Instagram was worse, but TikTok is downright freaky. It's like each additional layer of multimedia added to social media amplifies whatever mental toxin these platforms feed people. Edit: as a sibling notes, this particular challenge appears to not actually exist: https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/10/07/slap-a-teacher-challe...

I constantly have to remind myself that TikTok is a Chinese owned company and while a video like this would be banned in China the algorithm amplifies anti-social behaviour like this in the west. When I see kids around me watching videos like this, I make sure to remind them and their parents this is deliberate propaganda. When Facebook/Insta does it the motivation is money. When TikTok does it the motivation is poli…

[dead]

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

#980

Post by Daishiman »

c_crank wrote: post #475
Daishiman wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one forced me to not try the one thing everyone says will keep you out of poverty.

Did you consider that everyone might have been making a mistake when they equated taking on large loans with getting out of poverty?

I consider a society in which people are not given sufficient information to make intelligent choices for the future to be pretty dystopian.
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