You must log in or register to comment.
The 800 lb gorilla in the room they’re not addressing is all the homes private equity has bought up as investments. Which both gouges people on rents for the ROI, as well as killing would be buyers ability to be competitive in their offers because they don’t have the pockets that Blackrock has. The solution is building more public housing, and prevent corporations from being able to buy up single family homes, co-ops and condo units.
Ehh. I don’t think private equity is the main issue. I think that private equity firms would prefer to fund the construction of new housing if they could, but they can’t, because of zoning laws. So they opt for the next best thing which is buying up existing housing stock and renting it.
The crux of the problem is zoning laws, single-family zoning in particular. We either need to allow a bunch of undeveloped land to be developed, or we need to allow already-developed land to be converted into more dense forms of housing. I think the latter option is preferable.
Idk in most cities they’ve now bought more than 50-70% of the houses to rent. The game is to get rid of ownership so you have a captive audience. It’s only really possible to get something reasonable out in fuck nowhere
This is happening where I live, and surprise, it’s still not fixing the problem. We need rent control.
Zoning changed in Minneapolis and there hasn’t been a boom of new construction AFAIK. It’s a combination of factors but I think the current situation is maximally beneficial to the capitalist rent seekers so working backwards from that assumption maybe we can’t intuit some other causes. Maybe intra class conflict? We’ll give it another half decade and see what the housing situation is in places that have updated zoning laws before we can rule that out, I guess
There’s some new construction in Minneapolis, but I think a big issue is that a lot of other regs haven’t been updated to really enable lower cost apartments. e.g., I think the insane parking requirements still exist? From a red tape point of view it’s just so much easier to build a single family home, even if the location makes more sense for a small apartment building or a quadplex.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen a lot more construction happening in Minneapolis in the last few years than I did 10 years ago, so I think there’s at least some movement in a positive direction. It’s still an insanely sprawling metro, with miles upon miles of single occupancy detached houses right next to downtowns. I think the only thing that controls the price of housing here is just that the bad winter weather puts the breaks on the influx of new people.
it will never be a good time to buy a house, but I bet renting gets relatively worse year over year as we continue into neofeudalism
I don’t have the link anymore but there used to be a good effortpost here on how neofeudalism doesn’t actually have the same material base as feudalism and that what we’re really witnessing is the reproletarianization of the American working class. The slave labor is drying up. The stolen land is drying up. The capitalism-saving policies a la the New Deal which were feasible because they excluded various PoC and other minorities? They’re being gutted and will not be replaced. There are a lot of PMC folks and a lot of white folks and a lot of “middle class” folks who are starting to experience what others have experienced for decades: what’s it like to be a worker under capitalism.
I would love to read that post. I don’t think people are claiming feudalism has the same material base… I could be wrong… but my understanding is that neufeudalism is an expression of a highly financialized economy during reproletarianization. I think the point is just that what is developing during that process isn’t completely different in terms of changes in social economic relations, than like what it was like, say, when the commons was enclosed.
Like, the tendency of the rate of profit to fal, and the decreasing exploitability of the global majority, has pushed many of the imperial core’s precariat into new categories of jobs where their own belongings (like cars, homes, and phones… often acquired with debt) are essentially used as the overhead for “tech companies” that are actually rube-goldberg-like financial instrument that extracts value out of the belongings of working class people while forcing them to “rent” it: subscription services, planned obsolescence, debt service, or publicly financed asset-inflation (ex: quantitative easing). Does that seem like a change in the basis of relations? Maybe?
@ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider@hexbear.net
I found the post, here’s the link https://hexbear.net/post/208134?scrollToComments=false
PSA: Hexbear has a pretty good search function, I just found this by searching “neofeudalism”
why the fuck am I awake
why the fuck am I awake
Because you must post
There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.
From Friedrich Engels’s 6th of January 1892 letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
Institutional investors like Blackrock can afford to buy up the properties and the rent everywhere else goes up to supplement the increased mortgage rate. This is how wealth flows from the working class to the landlords, serving no productive purpose at all along the way.
Honestly shit like this is making me a bit of a doomer about my personal life. I’m already a doomer politically but I was hoping to embrace grill-pill, but it turns out grills cost money.
I’m in my 30s now and most of the stuff I really want to do with my life requires some degree of financial stability, but the job market sucks and will likely never get better, housing market sucks. If it really keeps up like this Wtf am I supposed to do with my life? Drink and play pirates video games (that’s assuming booze stays affordable)? I’m not offing myself, I got too loving of a family for that, but what do I got to look forward to besides another 30-40 years of being broke in retail?
And before anyone says “ORGANIZE!” No. I have about as much faith in the American Working Class as I have in an expired egg salad sandwich from Food Lion to not give me diarrhea. Every leftist org in my area is a joke and I don’t have the charisma or energy to personally remake it into the Bolsheviks 2.0.
Mood
Get out of retail.
Be open minded to anything that isn’t retail or food service but the trades are a great thing to get in to for a few years. That skill can be carried over into public works of various kinds so then you’re actually doing something useful.
Trying to, but the industry I was trying to get into is now having layoffs. Most of the job growth in the economy right now is in retail and service, engineers and computer programmers are getting laid off.
I think they meant construction. Retail and services will always be ‘growing’, but thats due to turnover and seasonal hiring.
If you learn a trade you have a skill you can take anywhere and essentially be your own boss. Electrician, hvac, framing, plumbing are always needed and aren’t readily replaced by a computer.
When i travel I take my tools with me. I can save the people who let me stay at their houses money by doing work they need done, and I can fetch myself work from neighbors and friends to make extra money. I think of it as always having a way to make money on the road.
There are stores that supply every trade in your area. eg. Plumbing supply, electrical supply, hvac supply. Just go to one and ask whos hiring.
As an electrician, its obviously the superior trade.
I don’t think construction is good for me, my body is taking a tool as it is just working at a hardware store. Hence why I wanted to do software shit.
Coding and alot of software work is very similar. I guess my main point is find a job where you are gaining a skill that you can use independently from your employer. I feel that service and retail work is admirable but your not gaining a skill that is useful on its own. Im a jerk.
I did what I was told to do since I was a kid to be a “good, responsible adult”. I went to college and got a degree. Went right into a career and have worked for the last 10 years non-stop with no gaps longer than a month or two. I make above the median income in our country but nothing crazy, but it’s a sturdy job and one that would be considered middle class in previous generations. However, I keep getting pushed back to entry level or just one step above it and there’s never any upward movement.
I had to sell my house after 2 years because I couldn’t afford the mortgage payments, I was always just barely clinging on and it was the cheapest starter house in my somewhat suburban/rural small town. Now I’m renting and rent is now almost as high as my mortgage was anyway, and the houses in my town have basically doubled in value over the last 5 years.
There’s zero hope I will ever be able to afford a house on my own. There’s zero hope that I can ever retire. There’s zero hope I could have kids and put them through college or pay for anything. I budget and am thrifty, I barely eat out or buy anything. I wear 5 year old clothes and hand-me-downs.
I DID WHAT EVERYONE SAID TO DO AND I GET NOTHING
Yup
There were two moments in recent history when it was actually an ideal time to buy a house- the two years immediately after the '08 crash and the summer of 2020. That combination of fear and panic in the marketplace coupled with historically low interest rates only occur during black swan events though. But with escalating global conflicts and increasing severity of climate crises on the horizon we may get another sooner than expected. So keep your chin up, aspiring homeowners!
60 year mortgage when?
Terf Island has 40 year mortgages so we’re on the way
It Will Never Be a Good Time to Buy a Horse 🐴
You wouldn’t download a horse…
i’ve torrented 180 horses just this year. my pastures are overflowing
I read it as “horse” and clicked on it thinking “come on, it can’t be that bad”
it will never be a good time to buy a horse
have archive.is links just not been working on firefox for anyone else? it just takes me to an endlessly repeating captcha page
Works with me fine with ublock origin
Same. I have to give up and use Chrome to open it.
TheCaconym’s post here has a fix
TheCaconym’s post here has a fix
Perfect! Thank you! ( And thank you, @TheCaconym@hexbear.net )
Works for me
All my homies use ghost archive
i just fixed mine earlier today after running into the same problem for months… change from using 1.1.1.1 to my isp dns servers
It’s been pretty decent in parts of Upstate New York. Only problem are people from out of state buying multiple properties that they then rent out.
im sorry, but this article is someone who moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn, and is mad about the housing prices in the two most expensive places in the fucking country. Hilarious. Sounds about white.
housing prices are dogshit everywhere though.
New York, in housing as in many things, is an extreme example. But the brutal mathematics is much the same across the country.
Literally the first sentence in the second paragraph
deleted by creator
Structural issues outside any individual’s control are forcing me out of home ownership. Also, you are causing inflation with your spending.
Bruh.
“Earlier this year, I moved from San Francisco to New York with my dogs, kids, and husband. My family rented an apartment. And once we figured out that we liked it here and wanted to stay, we looked to buy a place”.
There has been like a 20 year delay on the media even acknowledging the insanity of where neoliberal economics has taken us, because it’s taken that long for it to start inconveniencing the upper middle class
‘My God - I can’t even afford to take my family on a round the world cruise once a year anymore - what is happening in this country?’
Is it the case in the US that an enormous amount of petit-bourgeois boomers are small landlords? Because this is the case in the UK and Aus. And so the centre-left/soc-dem parties will not do anything about housing (and all you really need to do is build public housing en masse) because that will crash house prices. Since Boomers own their own homes and often extra homes they rent out, and their wealth is tied up in this, any policies that could significantly lower house prices is a no-go, even though it’s obviously a bubble that has been getting more and more insane for like two decades now, and no-one can even afford to live in cities anymore.
Other major problem is foreign investment - it totally distorts the market relative to the income of actual citizens - in China for example, rich Westerners can’t just come in and buy up housing, but Western countries will let Rich Chinese do that to them. Of course this gets distorted by the media into anti-immigrant sentiment even through it has absolutely nothing to do with immigration.
Then there is the kind of perception a lot of people have of public housing being ghetto’s, which is sort of still true in some cases (massive inner city housing blocks full of drug use and violence and so on) but is obviously not a difficult problem to fix if the bare minimum of serious effort is put into it. But it does make people suspicious of any suggestions to build more public housing.
Personally I think the housing bubble will be allowed to crash once the Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil - thus preventing a transfer of wealth to their children/grandchildren - instead the housing will be bought up by private companies in accordance with the ideals of rentier finance capitalism.
Now that neoliberal economics is starting to cannabilise the middle class there is actually a lot of media attention on housing costs, although of course the narrative is relentlessly focused on immigration rather than economics. Apparently there just isn’t enough room to build houses anymore, or something.
But anyway I’m not sure about how different or similar the US situation is? Interested to know.A Clinton era law has prevented the expansion of public housing beyond the number of units in 1999. The US population has grown significantly since then.
The act effectively capped the number of public housing units by creating the Faircloth Limit. This limited funding for the construction or operation of all units to the total number of units as of October 1, 1999. This requires public housing agencies to remove or consolidate existing units in order to receive funding for construction of any new units.
The Faircloth Amendment states that the Department cannot fund the construction or operation of new public housing units with Capital or Operating Funds if the construction of those units would result in a net increase in the number of units the PHA owned, assisted or operated as of October 1, 1999.
