this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Good, perhaps the boomers will recognize how impossible the current structure is to live under and actually pay attention to what they are voting for...
Who am I kidding, that's not going to happen 😭
A lot of people are in denial about the effects of policies they support.
Just look at the cost of housing. There's a ton of NIMBY homeowners who are deep in denial that zoning huge swaths of cities to be exclusively mcmansions could possibly cause house prices to be artificially high.
As a NIMBY guy...I'm going to protect my investment. There's plenty of affordable housing out there, it's just not 10 minutes walking distance from an urban center.
I can go pay 20k cash and live in a trailer across town if I need to.
Edit: If you want to do it that way, you can rent said trailer for a pittance. I'd suggest you do, you won't want to be there long.
Everyone wants low cost housing, no one actually wants to live in a low cost area.
Holy shit, you solved homelessness, good job! All we need is to have 20k in cash and then... wait.
First off, housing isn't a fucking investment. It's a human's basic need. Anyone thinking a roof over your head is an "investment" can fuck right off because your line of thinking IS the problem.
It shouldn't be an investment but the time to put that idea to bed has long since sailed.
Governments, like the one in Canada claim to want to build more purpose built rental housing and increase supply but without reducing home prices, a most contradictory statement. This kind of talk isn't unique to Canada either.
The reality is that generations of people now have their wealth from their homes. Unless we're willing to endure pain as a society from values lowering, and thus people's wealth reducing( all signs point to the fact we aren't), then the issues will only get worse.
Until we are, get ready for more variations of the same chorus "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
I mean, they described themselves as a fucking NIMBY. I'm baffled anyone even bothered responding to that type of BS.
Which brings me back to the 20k trailer...it's dirt fucking cheap. If you don't think housing is an investment, you can easily afford rent or payments on 20k over 10 years with a minimum wage job.
However...I don't see a lot of people scrambling for the "affordable" housing.
If you really want to socialize living space, there acres and acres of really empty, really cheap land in the fly over states. Grab an acre of land somewhere and you can house 100s of people on it.
Something tells me none of those options are appealing to you.
Yes, because all the jobs are in the middle of the woods somewhere.
How did you get this fucking ignorant?
You have forgotten to factor in many things.
What will these differently-housed individuals do for income? Where will they work?
If they are in the middle nowhere as you claim, how will they physically get to their job? If they have to drive significant distances to get to these civic centers, then you have grossly underestimated the percentage of their income that would be slated for transportation.
Let's do some math! Your fantasy $20k trailer with your parameters, with an estimated $1000 initial cost for service connections would wind up being a bit more than $27k after APR adjustments. Calculator That winds up being $222 per month. What a steal!
Federal minimum wage is $7.25. Taxes are a thing, so $7.25 turns into $6.52. An individual would have to work a bit more than 34 hours to afford just the dwelling.
We are assuming that this person is healthy, with nothing to prevent the individual from working.
Will this person have electricity? $122 or 18.7 hours Will this person have clean water? $18 or 2.76 hours Will this person require clothing? Will this person have healthcare?
Will this person take any prescription medication? Will this person have a dental plan? Will this person pay for transportation (the vehicle, insurance, wear and tear, gas, and incidentals)? Will this person support additional family members who are unable to work (children, elderly, injured, disabled)? Will there be air conditioning and heating in this $20k trailer?
What will this person eat?
Going beyond the absolute basics: What will this person do for entertainment? One cannot honestly expect a human to live without some form of stress relief. Will this person have access to the internet? That is required for resume submission for almost every job. What will this person save for retirement?
That's reasonable...that's around 1/4 of their income which is typically the guideline for housing if you want a savings account as well.
For reference, that's roughly what I put in to afford my mortgage.
The rest of it is fluff "what ifs" and kind of out of context. We could've had universal income and health but people keep going with the safe choices on votes instead of the things we really need.
A quarter of their income for housing.....for a fictitious $20k used manufactured home. Mind you, we never included the taxes or the rental or owned land.
And the other items are not fluff. One has to be fed and clothed.
And since you opened the door, what do you pay for your mortgage?
They are indeed fluff and out of scope for house prices. They have no impact on the house prices at all...and again...if you want to go down that road...I can get a full wardrobe for 100-150$ if I'm thrifty. Way less if I'm in a temperate climate. Food is also dirt cheap if you know how to cook.
As for what I pay on my mortgage....enough. It's not a mansion, but a nice upper middle class home.
I also spent 2 years of my life dirt ass poor...rice and beans, and missing car payments poor. I can make due on pennies if I have to...but boy does it suck.
What's your end game? Do you just want houses to be free? A 20k house trailer is as affordable as it gets.
Where do you live that trailers are only 20k? I live in a small Indiana city and the cheapest trailers here are over 30k.
Close to there actually. I see them go for that cheap all the time...It's tempting as hell to liquidate everything and go buy one and retire.
Weird how I'm not seeing any for 20k no matter where I look.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/21-Court-Rd-Richmond-IN-47374/2056027276_zpid/
There's a few over there.
You do know that's just for the home and not the land too, right? You have to pay rent for the land.
You are trash.
"Low Income." "20k Cash." Pick one.
That’s kinda the problem, don’t you think? Your material interests have been set in opposition to people who want affordable housing in the area.
Sure, but let's say you build a section 8 settlement next to my house. I'm moving...immediately, and so are all the neighbors.
The entire market there plummets and you end up with Detroit.
So great, you solved the problem for a decade. Now what?
Wow, you're selfish.
It's a safety issue rather than a selfish one.
Why don't you just come right out and say you hate poor people?
Saying poor areas are crime ridden is not controversial, nor does it imply one thing or another about said people. It's just a fact of life.
I have lived in poor areas more than once. They were not crime ridden. So yes, that is controversial.
But I do love that your solution is for for poor people is to buy a home in what you say is a crime ridden area. Yeah, you really don't hate them.
Lol...no...no you haven't lived in a poor area. Nice try though.
I lived in South Gate, California, which borders Compton and Watts. Where have you lived?
I would love for the market to plummet where I'm at. Housing as an investment that outpaces wage is a primary problem here, if it crashed maybe half my income wouldn't go to rent, and more and more people wouldn't be pushed to the streets while people's "investments" sit around empty, as they search for the perfect petless, 6 figure making tenant.
I should clarify...this is my only home. I'm anti-corpo buying property. It's not like my 2nd home or I'm renting something out.
I have one house...I saved for 20 years to buy it, and I'll be paying another 10 on it...it would destroy me if it lost 1/2 it's value.
But because of that you are against the idea that it just shouldn't take 20 years of saving and 10 years of payments for someone to have a decent home?
Honestly, that would be great news, and I hope you know many Americans would support deregulation of zoning laws for exactly this effect. A drop in housing prices is exactly what we need. People treating home ownership as an investment are the problem, home ownership should be more like owning a car: it's a commodity, not an investment. We should not be subsidizing poor financial decisions, I feel bad for everyone wrapped up in it, but ultimately the system we're in has been broken for a long, long time
loooool so you don't know what's going on in Portland, OR huh.
And then the people across town need to travel somehow, so they need a car, and then they're spending more on a car (lots more), and then they fill up the roads, and then we need to pay for more road infrastructure, and then we have more cars to replace with BEVs because we can't possibly continue having gas cars around.
Or we can try to get more housing near to where people work and get the things they need, and we avoid every single problem above.
Your momma is a hoe.
A concise rebuttal.
I do want to point out that no one is actually complaining about price of just building per say. Trailer is fine and all, but does that 20k cover land and basic utilities like water and heating/cooling (Is it well insulated?) in reasonable price and effort? Is Trailer Park actually located close enough to jobs (I don't remember gas and time being free) and it is secure from natural disaster?
That aside, NIMBY mindset is generally dumb stance when everyone is taking it. So there's that.
Utilities are really up to your usage, but all in would be maybe 500$ a month. That includes all the above plus lot fees.
The walk from there to downtown is 20 minutes...the walk to the two major employers in my area would be 30-ish minutes.
You have to work 76.7 hours to afford utilities.
Assuming that these individuals are able- bodied to walk.
Which again...those are out of scope. Even if the house were free, they'd still have to pay those things.
It sucks, I agree, but the price of housing doesn't really matter in the face of our energy crisis.
NIMBY isn't even a good financial position. Think about it. Say your area is rezoned for mixed use and you start getting apartments and condos on top of store fronts. Land value will skyrocket and all likelihood, you will come out ahead. Ever wonder why Manhattan and DC real estate is so expensive?
So then the apartments and condos become more expensive due to skyrocketing land values, not solving the problem of affordable housing? You can expand current low density zones with limited medium density without impacting values too much, but NIMBY concerns aren't completely crazy. Either new zones are created for multifamily high density and medium density housing instead of opening single family low density zones for these projects, or we accept that as a society we are fine crushing a percentage of the middle class to solve housing for the lower classes. The top 10% may take a hit on real estate dips from rental properties, but not crippling. We can spread the damage slowly, but houses losing 10-30% value will cause a miniature 2008 wherever that happens.
This was caused by housing becoming a cornerstone step into and for remaining in the middle class instead of being a commodity like it was pre 1970/80. That probably wasn't a good idea, but changing that removes the largest remaining leg of the middle class. All options moving forward will suck I think, and it will take a lot of work to resolve.
Now look at home prices next to low cost areas...
Let me tell you a story, when I was looking for my house we found a gorgeous 6 bed 4 ba all brick house with like 3500 sq feet for around 250k...it's an insane price for that house.
I looked at it and found out there's a section 8 unit next door. After asking around it ends up the place gets robbed every 2 months and the sellers are trying to give it away.
It ended up going for 175k.
That's should have been close to a million dollar piece of property...now it's a mom and pop tax firm.
Normally, the meaning of an investment is that they take a measure of effort, and sometimes, they don't pan out.
But houses will always pan out, because everyone wants them, because they're usually expected to go up in value, because everyone wants them, because they're expected to go up in value, because...
Someday, mark my words, it'll be a gold-buying bubble that bursts.