[Image description: a dining room with teal blue walls, with a pink neon sign saying “let them eat cake” written in cursive.]
[Image description: a dining room with teal blue walls, with a pink neon sign saying “let them eat cake” written in cursive.]
Watching a basic human need go unrealistically out of reach for average hard working people should radicalize just about anyone.
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Its so simple for you but for those of us that actually grew up in places like California we don’t want to move 800 miles just to afford a house. We don’t want to move away from our friends and family members just to be able to afford a house in the middle of butt-fucking nowhere.
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Well I mean some people have to live in California, New York, Ontario and other obscene high COL areas. There are also a lot of jobs that really ONLY exist in Los Angeles in any meaningful way. Doesn’t have to be 18m but go ahead and try to find a house in one of those regions within your budget and imagine having no alternative.
Plus they are nice places to live with more progressive state laws and protections some people don’t feel safe leaving. I know what you’re trying to say and I understand. Just want to point out that people are able to look at RIDICULOUS real estate to laugh at or daydream or cure curiosity, and then get frustrated because honestly all their options feel just as ridiculous and unachievable.
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Right… Leave a meaningful career that you love, and go swing a hammer in Nebraska, 2500 miles from home, friends, and family, just so you can have food and shelter.
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A mansion in Beverly Hills is now a basic human need? This isn’t exactly affordable housing…
Is the affordable housing here with us now?
The fact that we have Beverly Hills mansions when there isn’t enough affordable housing, obviously.
The mansion isn’t taking the place of affordable housing. It’s taking the place of an art collection, a yacht, or some other status symbol that rich celebrities might want. The price of mansions doesn’t affect anyone except those rich celebrities, and they want mansions to be expensive because that makes them better status symbols.
Mathematically, there is a finite limited number of resources on the planet.
Why are resources going into social status symbol when not everyone has their basic human needs met?
Why is it a higher priority that a rich person have a mansion to show off how rich they are, then have many other people get a roof over their head at night?
You have a point, but status symbols are positional goods so often their high cost doesn’t correspond to a large use of resources. If one rich guy buys a painting from another rich guy, ten million dollars changes hands but that’s it; ten million dollars worth of stuff isn’t being used up.
This isn’t always the case - I presume an expensive yacht really does take a lot of resources to build. And this mansion took resources to build too. Still, the most valuable thing about the mansion is its location - the same mansion but not in Beverly Hills might be worth ten times less. I think it’s more like the painting than like the yacht.
If the value is all about location, then by your logic, for each homeless person we can simply build a Beverly Hills style mansion out in the Midwest, and now it’s affordable housing.
You know, because the value is not in the mansion, it’s just in the Beverly Hills location.
You could certainly build a Beverly Hills style mansion in the Midwest for a lot less than you could build it for in Beverly Hills, although would still be a suboptimal use of public money…
(The problem is that the homeless don’t want to be in the rural Midwest. Even if you give them homes there, they still have no money and all the same personal problems that led to them becoming homeless in the first place, but now they can’t effectively have an income from begging.)
Plenty of homeless people get by here from begging. Biggest struggle is that summers hit a heat index of 120, winters drop to a chill of -30.
Milder climate is just better suited to a life without the privilege of climate control.
You think a mansion takes fewer resources to construct than a yacht?
It depends on the yacht. There are yachts a lot more expensive than this particular mansion.
That’s true, and you’re making an even better point for radicalization when society is creating superyachts for the superwealthy while lacking basic affordable housing.