Slashdot Mirror
The Vicious Circle That Is Sending Rents Spiraling Higher
jones_supa writes: Skyrocketing rents and multiple roommates — these are the kinds of war stories you expect to hear in space-constrained cities such as New York and San Francisco. But the rental crunch has been steadily creeping inland from coastal cities and up the economic ladder. Bloomberg takes a look at the vicious cycle that keeps rents spiraling higher. People paying high rents have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market. Low vacancy rates let landlords raise rents still higher. Developers who know they can command high rents (and sales prices) are spurred to spend more to acquire developable land. Finally, higher land costs can force builders to target the higher end of the market. The interesting question is how long can this last before we reach a level that is not affordable to the majority of the demographic that is being serviced.
And I have the cheapest rent on a two-bedroom apartment in a 20 mile radius. I couldn't save for a down payment if I tried. Colorado's average vacancy rate is less than 5%. What is the market doing in response to this? Multi-state property management companies are buying up everything on the market. You can list your property and expect a solid offer at above-market pricing within 48 hours. Rental listings last for mere hours. Developers are building new apartments as fast as they can--luxury apartments that charge higher than market rates, further inflating the market.
I have a condo I rent out. Laws in California make it almost impossible to get rid of bad tenants. I go out of my way to find good tenants and then I go out of my way to keep them. I have not raised the rent on my current family for 5 years now. I charge $1400 and the condo next door is renting for $1900. Of course, I am not in it to make money. I am in it to break even and sell in 10 years when my boy goes to college. Gotta keep the place nice to sell well.
The interesting question is how long can this last before we reach a level that is not affordable to the majority of the demographic that is being serviced.
Care to guess what happens at that point? New construction doesn't sell, developers go bankrupt, new construction is sold at auction for lower prices. Then the new units available at lower prices push down prices of other housing, which makes purchase more affordable, which results in renters buying, which curbs rent prices.
No matter what part of the cycle you're in, no matter what part of the country, one thing can be counted to be constant: idiots proclaiming that the current trend is the new reality and will last forever!
is to build more properties for sale. In most cases, doubling the number of existing residences in most major cities.
but it will never happen because it would slaughter existing home prices.
hence the vicious circle.
Rent control makes it harder to make money offering an apartment for rent (or at least not as much as you can get by selling it out). So owners are incentivized to take housing off the rental market and sell it instead.
Sure, they try to make that harder too. But the owner can always kick tenants out to move in himself/herself. And so that's what's happening now. Owner kicks out tenants to occupy it. Then they later can sell it.
And they can even AirBNB it while "occupying" it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The problem is that we spent so long subsidizing the demand side that the supply for housing is hopelessly outpaced. The prices have skyrocketed over the past 15 years to the point where first-time buyers are largely priced out of the market. Want to drive home ownership in a sustainable way? Drive it at the supply side. That means subsidizing the whole supply chain, from land to materials to labor. Drive a massive swell of building to bring supply well above demand and watch as homeownership rates rise quickly but sustainably even as market speculators (who really just drive up prices further) get crushed under the weight of falling home prices.
Handing everyone a blank check to buy whatever they like (regardless of whether they can afford it) is the same thing we've done in the education market. The results are the same: prices soar and anyone who isn't willing to mortgage their immortal soul has little chance of getting what they're after (but on the bright side, we've made the immortal soul mortgaging a quick and simple process!) Having a higher supply than demand ensures prices drop to the point where someone other than the top 10% of the country can actually afford to live here. Steady or slightly falling prices encourages people who actually want to own a home (rather than simply investing in real estate for the sake of cashing in on a boom) to take that next step to do so. We need house prices to drop by 50 - 75% in most major markets. It'll create a much healthier, robust framework in the long run, regardless of how much hand-wringing takes place in the short to mid term.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Even a 1½ can cost you over $600 per month. This is ridiculous. We had a 7½ for that much 10 years ago.
We used to just call this "inflation".
Next up: why coffee used to be 5 cents a cup for your grandfather, and now you pay 5 bucks at Starbucks!
The answer to your question is that it can probably go a lot further than you think. Where is the incentive to build more houses when, by delaying or targeting more lucrative customers, you get more money for doing no extra work? No property company nor, crucially, any home owner will buck the market by selling cheap. There are no votes for municipalities in building enough houses which could then stabilise prices - made worse (in the US) by the likelihood of them being sued by anyone that thought they would lose out.
Welcome to a small taste of the "housing boom" in South East of England. If our experience is anything to go by, you have a very long way to go yet.
This reads like a common economic trope: A journalist (presumably not an economist) observes that A has a positive effect on B, and B has a positive effect back on A. They then proceed to assume that both A and B will "spiral out of control" into infinity, as if the only kind of effect is a proportional effect, and as if the only kind of feedback loop is a positive feedback loop.
Well as it turns out, there's a such a thing as a negative feedback loop. In fact, that's how markets work; there's this law called the law of declining marginal utility. In most cases, given the nature of geometric sums, there's a total, maximum amount of utility that a single good can ever give you, ever, no matter how much you buy.
Let's take a look at the author's argument:
People paying high rents are, presumably, living in an area with high demand, further suggesting that they have a much better ability to pay for housing than the average person as it is; they just choose to live in a high-rent place because it's more beneficial than an average city or neighberhood.
There's no special correlation between prices and liquidity; there's a better correlation between how "hot" or bubble-like a market is, though. Volume isn't the same as price.
This is a downward force on prices. See also, the Law of Supply: higher prices creates more supply, or at least forces people to use the resources more effectively. Software developers don't need a huge living area, at least not compared to (at the extreme end) farms. In contrast to farms, which can go pretty much anywhere there's halfway decent land. As a result, people (in expanding cities, for example) tend to buy out farms, not the other way around.
This may seem obvious, but knowing it explicitly is a crucial component of knowing how resources are efficiently allocated. It doesn't even matter how resources are initially allocated, if we mixed everything up and assuming low transaction costs (something not typically present in housing markets, though), then people will trade with each other back to the optimum allocations.
No, there's this thing called the law of supply and demand. Rates are set based on what the market as a whole is able to bear - where the supply and demand curves meet. And if San Francisco can find 50k buyers for 50k $10/sqft (or whatever) rentals, then that's the market price (a simplified argument, of course, but hopefully still an accurate one).
Wonder what the public key field is for?
It's a result of the fact that most local government services are paid for predominately with property taxes.
When costs scale with the number of people and revenue doesn't, it's inevitable that zoning will end up discouraging new residential construction, particularly high density residential contruction.
I've often wondered if a common practice in Asia could work here. I've seen in Japan and South Korea apartments charing $10,000 - $30,000 for a deposit. The monthly rent is much lower. Once you pay off your deposit loan, you then either get to enjoy cheaper rent or you can purchase a home with the money you've saved up. My sister lived in South Korea for a few years and came home with a ton of money saved up and was able to buy a condo for cash. All while getting a pretty modest paycheck. I don't know if it's laws there requiring this or if it's laws here preventing it or just a cultural thing but I'd love to see that happening here.
Now this is the gripping tech commentary that I come to Slashdot for.
Successful interference in the markets, by government, to correct a housing cost injustice, seems likely to be more trouble than it could possibly be worth.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Blame the Fed for ZIRP, causing the investor class to pile into property.
As soon as central banks around the world start raising interest rates again and they start returning to normal, people hunting returns will head back to conventional investments, and that'll take the heat out of the property market.
I, for one, am keeping my powder dry. Typically, when people start talking about bubbles in a given market or asset class, you know its days are numbered. Also, when property markets crash, they tend to go from being overvalued to being undervalued fairly rapidly, since the dumb money panics and sells up to try to beat the stampede out the door.
Another interesting phenomenon: last time when all this happened back in 2008 with fraudsters writing sub-prime loans, the market merely had to stop expanding to start crashing. We may find that as soon as Something Bad happens, and enough people start going into arrears, and the cowboys running many of these investment operations can't meet their obligations -- then *boom* -- game over.
AIUI, some of the bigger, smarter players have seen the writing on the wall for quite a while...
The fact that there is any class of people who "have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market" is completely inexcusable. That's like accepting that there is just a permanent underclass of people who are in perpetual debt; because rent is a kind of debt (you're borrowing housing directly rather than borrowing money to pay for one), except you're stuck forever paying just the interest on it (interest is nothing more than rent on money), so it is an inexcusable atrocity to have anyone at all stuck for their entire goddamn lives paying and paying and paying and paying and paying for housing, to someone else's profit, without ever getting a single cent of assets to their name, and no hope of ever escaping from that cycle.
Rent (including interest) is precisely what breaks a free market and causes the runaway concentration of wealth and the destruction of the middle class. Every single instant of anyone renting anything to anyone is a case of wealth being redistributed from those who have less of it to those who have more already; because you can't rent out something if you need to use it yourself, so the only rentiers are those with more wealth than they need for their personal use, and nobody would rent anything if they already had one of their own, so the only renters are those without enough wealth for their own personal use, so rental arrangements profit the rich at the expense of the poor. It is completely inexcusable and rental contracts should be simply unenforceable, period.
And before someone swoops in and says "well then all those currently renting and unable to buy will go homeless!": what do you think the people owning the rental properties are going to do with a bunch of excess property that's no longer of any use to them when they can't rent it out for profit? The only way they can benefit from it then is to sell it. But nobody's going to want to buy it unless they need a house of their own for their own use now, since there's no point in owning a rental property just for investment. But all those poor people will be looking to buy then, and will be the bulk of the market, and so what they can afford will determine what price the market will bear for those houses for sale. And they'll be the ones least able to budge in negotiations, so it falls to the former-rentiers to sell their formerly-rental properties on terms that the former-renters can afford, or else there's no deal and their "investment" properties are worthless. In other words, without the crutch of rent in the middle, the former-rentiers will be forced (by the market) to sell their properties on terms (lower prices and longer installments) that the former-renters can afford, and BAM, everyone's a homeowner.
Or, looking at it from the other direction, from a world where rent isn't already considered normal: the imposition of rent in an otherwise free market distorts that market, raising the price of housing, and causing a class division into people who already have more housing than they need for themselves (who can then profit and acquire more and more), and those who have less housing than they need themselves (who then incur a burden that keeps them from ever escaping that fate). Rent breaks the free market.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
At least around here there doesn't seem to be anyone building apartments anymore. Builders are putting up lots of condos and selling them. It probably lets them get their money back fairly quickly compared to renting out the units. Some people are buying individual units in these buildings and renting them out but the supply of apartments has remained fairly constant for the past couple of decades. I can't remember a large building going up for rental units in that time but can think of at least five being constructed for condos right now in just the parts of town that I frequent.
Here in California, this is by design. California creates fewer new housing units than demanded and has for decades. I was taught as a child that the only way to manage this is to live beneath your means when young (rent a SMALL place) so you can save for the down payment to get in on the crazy value ride. Leverage the HUD and you only need 5%. It's definitely boom and bust, but overall the housing market here rises much faster than elsewhere because we simply have more demand than capacity, and the politicians generally like it that way, so it's pretty much the norm.
It definitely isn't the entire problem and it probably varies by state but at least in some cases the government is at least part of the problem, treating rental properties like commercial properties is no doubt going to increase the costs for the owner who in all fairness is going to pass those costs right on to the tenant. An example would be a not all that special home in my area costs around $250 a month if your a homeowner but for a rental that same home costs $400 in property taxes alone. Throw in maintenance, water, sewer, etc and you're probably looking at $700 at least a month in costs to the owner and that assumes they have the place occupied 365 with good tenants who pay on time and no significant maintenance issues come up (furnace, AC, etc). And I live in a fairly reasonably priced area, I don't want to even conceive of the numbers for some areas where a unimpressive 4 bedroom house will go for $500 - $750k.
There is an affordable housing crisis in the US that has been easily ignored since 2009. Only those with real money can afford to buy any home today. I just want a home but flippers buyout with cash what I can only afford on credit. Then flip the home nearly doubling the cost. I know -now- that renting is what I will do until death. Enjoy your home.
More than a few states see the money from rent as money on the table and they want it, so they are jacking up the property taxes, doubling and tripling it. Well, guess where that money comes from? Not the people who own the land - but the people who rent, so when the states jack up your property taxes 6K for the year - that translates into higher rents.
There is no free lunch, and the liberal mindset is destroying this once great nation. But hey, I'm the guy passing it along so I'm doing well, but the people renting are having to have 2 and 3 room-mates. Of course they are too dumb to grasp simple economic principals so they vote the liberal back in with their promises of free money, but guess what? If you have a job - you are the supplier of that money. Maybe you'll wise up - but I personally doubt it.
If you pay for anything you mention in pre-1965 90% silver coins, it would end up staying the same.
0.715 ozt of silver per $1 back then is $11.37 today ($15.90/ozt spot price).
Here is your 11x dollar devaluation since it got off silver standard.
Paul B.
Here it's impossible to own a home because government let 30,000 *millionaires* immigrate in past several years (through another province, if you are Canadian you can guess which one without clicking the link :). You don't have to imagine what that number of rich people can do to real estate market, just visit this link and have a look.
Meanwhile, developers are in rush to use every inch of remaining land to build huge skyscrapers filled with shoe-box sized condos for the growing renter population and sell them to investors who then rent them for hefty monthly stash. Over 80% of Vancouver west population are renters!
If you are not millionaire and you want to live here you better be single, looking for some active life (biking, hiking...) - in other words, not really a homey family type. Who needs those for healthy demographics anyway, eh?
(Denver) And I did not buy that many years ago. The kids have get out their apartments.
This is how it happens:
It was not always so — the problem in NYC, for example, started during the WW2, when rent control was introduced as a temporary measure to protect families of servicemen from rent-increases. 70 years later, the program still exists and the rent-controlled units are subsidized by other tenants of the same building. Like lottery-winners, only participation in lottery is voluntary...
Before dismissing this post as "a troll", observe, that the problem is highest in the Left-controlled cities: San Francisco, NYC says TFA. I may add Boston based on personal experience... Meanwhile, in Houston, TX or Atlanta, GA, for example, the prices seem about half as much as in San Francisco, CA.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm sorry but if the rents are high because the apartments are built for the high end then just don't rent those! If you can't rent those apartments without sacrificing your future then don't rent those.... supply and demand will adjust accordingly. If the builders lose demand for the high end then they'll start building the entry level stuff.
When I started in Silicon Valley, I shared a trailer home with 2 other guys. After the first month of company housing I slept in the office for a month until that trailer opened up. No.. those sky high rents for the floor-to-ceiling windows didn't interest me. It took a while but I eventually built enough to get a down payment on a shack. It took several more years to upgrade that shack to something resembling a home.
I'm not blind though... these days you're probably not getting there through pure scrimping and saving but (in Silicon Valley) at least that's where the RSUs and options come in. The days of sitting on your butt in a comfy position until you retire are long gone. You actually have to hustle to make it now... evaluate your company.. look for advancement.. look for other opportunities.. be aware. Wake up.. go to work.. come home.. repeat just doesn't work anymore.
This alleged vicious circle is partially wrong. The rents are driven by the property prices, which are driven by the interest rates. The lower the interest rates, the cheaper the mortgages, the easier it is to afford a property. But the number of properties does not rise, so then the prices of the properties rise instead. But this will slowly pull you out of the recession. While the recession increases the ratio of renters, the rich always have enough money to participate in the game, and at low interests and low wages (due to the recession) they will start building more houses and become landlords. This will employ construction workers and start a cycle of economic expansion. Rents will come down, salaries will go up, and more people will afford a down payment and abandon the rent market, further lowering the rent levels. But increased activity combined with high property prices will set inflation in motion, driving up the interest rates. Rising interest rates will destroy the finances of the most precarious borrowers leading to series of crises and busts along the road.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
An Irish language documentary broke the news on the US Mortgage Backed Security driven property bubble back in 2005 so why doesn't it surprise me that another foreign news source is the first to piss off US real-estate corporations and reveal that rental backed securities are also teetering on the brink of disaster? Here we go again, another replay of tulip madness. In the words of Yogi Berra, it's Deja-vu all over again.
The real problem is that boom-bust cycles driven by loose monetary policy (whether it be Reagan's trickle down or Greenspan's helicopter drops) help those with deep pockets. Playing with matches around the global economic gas-tank eventually causes an explosion and as John Maynard Keynes put it, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." (unless you happen to be a corporate slumlord.)
Rents in SF are high not because of anything developers are doing but because it's a desirable place to live for many people, and many people are willing and able to pay high rents. It's desirable, not just because of its location and natural beauty, but because its infrastructure is highly subsidized by government.
If it's too expensive for you, don't live there; it's a simple as that.
I'll note that, for years, I worked on developing new financial products sold to mortgage lenders (post crisis). I've spent a fair amount of time studying trends in US housing prices. I'm not well versed on other countries so my comments are US-centric. I've left this VERY high level, but wanted to note a few concepts and why they answers aren't super easy.
There are a few fundamental flaws in the mortgage system today. The first is that banks generally don't lend their own money (almost all mortgage money in the market comes through government sponsored entities like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or Ginnie Mae). Well technically, it is their money, but realistically, the loans are purchased so quickly by the GSEs that it might as well not be their money. On top of this, the banks receive money from the GSEs for every loan they sell on to the GSEs. In short, the banks are incentivized to make loans.
Second, both the government and the the Federal Reserve seem to want a higher rate of home ownership by Americans. The Fed helps encourage this by keeping rates low (and buying huge amounts of mortgage backed securities from the GSEs). The GSEs encourage it by making loans more accessible (lower down payments, lower credit scores, higher debt-to-income ratios, etc.). The banks like this strategy because it allows them to make lots of new home loans (so they make lots of money with almost no risk) and every time rates drop they get to process lots of refinances (so they make lots of money with almost no risk). It's all good right? I mean, the banks are making lots of money.
Here's the problem: When money is easily available it creates more potential home buyers. When money is cheaper, it increases what people can afford (your $2000 per month payment now covers a 400k loan instead of a 350k loan). This is still good though right? More home for the same money?
Well, more people with more money means that demand for homes increases and, with it, home prices. Khan academy had an amazing set of videos that illustrated the home price bubble, but I can't find them. In summary, the number of homes available for purchase compared to the number of people has remained relatively constant since the 40's - even when adjusted for growth areas (things balance out in the growth areas over time). Home prices, however, have increased dramatically - especially as a percentage of total income. When did this star happening? When money became more accessible. Still good though right!?! I mean, now existing homeowners can sell their homes at a huge profit and people can get into those homes.
Ah, but there's a catch. While average income (inflation adjusted) has remained level and even trended down, home prices have sky rocketed. Eventually, even with low interest loans available, house prices reach a level where purchasing them puts people out of an acceptable debt-to-income ratio. Home prices can't go up to the point where people are spending more than 70% of their income on housing (as an example - this isn't a benchmark number or anything). Things hit a point where new buyers aren't buying anymore. That starts a chain reaction that leads to the bursting of the housing price bubble.
One way to fix this would be to make money harder to get and more expensive to get. It would have an initial downward push on prices, that would eventually level out. It would also stop the major price inflation. Why? Let's say we require a 10% down payment. Suddenly, a bunch of potential buyers are shut out of the market. Home prices stagnate. The responsible buyers (and those who advance in their career) eventually save up the 10% and can get into the market. They're actually able to save the 10% now because the house prices are stagnant and 10% is no longer a moving number. In the mid 2000', house prices were going up faster than people could save. Prices inflate, but the barrier to entry keeps them from going on a roller coaster. Banks, however, hate this because they lose out on all that sweet
For the economics experts around, how much of these high rents and gentrification are being driven by wealth / income inequality ? In the Bay Area it seems that unless you are pulling a 6 figure tech job you are just playing a waiting game to be priced out. As a grad student in the area, I find this quite disheartening...
At least some of the money would be diverted from speculators that way.
but the H1-Bs have a pretty big impact here. They're guaranteed renters. There's no way to move into a house when you can't claim residency in the country.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The banks already own literally multiple homes for every homeless man, woman, and child in the USA
Interesting figure. Where'd you get it?
It looks like Amnesty International: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Coincidentally, there are 116M housing units in the US, median size say 4-5 rooms. If you had one person per room in every house, we could house everyone easily--318 million people in the US vs. 464M rooms. But the market isn't doing that.
http://www.infoplease.com/us/c...
Shop at the back of the nearest Best Buy. Put a deposit on the biggest cardboard box there. Your new home!
... classic rent-seeking behaviour.
Buy a used RV and live in the back corner of your work parking lot. If you are lucky enough to buy a big white fiberglass one with vynal graphics, peel them all off and put an AT&T logo on it or VERIZON and a couple of yellow lights. nobody will even question it being there.
A contractor at work does this, we have had him back 3 times and I have been the only person to notice. he has a motorcycle to get around town. when fall comes he looks for contract work down south. It's actually genius.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've lived in the San Francisco area almost my entire life. In the SF area, the vicious cycle works like this:
1. Some progressive people live in an urban area, and they decide that they cannot stand urban areas, urban development, or tall buildings. They protest any construction, relentlessly, for decades. Any time anybody tries to build anything, the result is protests, lawsuits, and so on. This has been going on since about 1980. As a result, there was almost no housing development in this area for 3 decades despite steadily increasing population and prices. Granted, some construction started about 4 years ago, but it's WAY too late and not nearly enough. (Apparently, the same thing is happening in New York. The most preposterous example of this is people who've moved to Manhattan and decided that they can't stand tall buildings in Manhattan because tall buildings cast shadows).
2. When rents increase, those people who prevented housing construction decide to blame Google, blame Yahoo, and so on, not blame themselves. Remarkably, they start protesting the construction of housing again. I live in Oakland (just east of SF) and there have been protests against building new housing on EMPTY LOTS, during a housing shortage of critical proportions. People show up and start chanting "we want development without displacement!", as if displacement was caused by too much housing.
Recently I walked around the area south of market st, and saw that typical rents for a 1 bedroom are $6000-$7000 per month, and it's not a luxury area at all. Oakland is getting bad too, but not that bad yet. As a result, the progressive faction has now erupted into a fit of hysterical rage and they vomit on buses which transport tech workers to work.
A wise man says... "Bulls make money, bears make money, but hogs get slaughtered." To that I add, Brokers make a killing but own nothing. Which when you apply this to the current situation means you should be a realtor, or better yet a broker....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Last time around, it was the corrupt bankers who were and still are too big to fail, fanned this fire. Now it is the builders' turn to screw you and I, the average Joe, over. The common theme seems to be the buyers who are getting shafted. And short of a revolution, as in the sense of bearing arms and storming the government offices and banks, there is no way to stop this trend. Although, the possibility of working remotely for most of the developed countries' work force, should make the areas, once deemed inhabitable, a good possibility, and availability of modular housing components, may turn the tide over. But this sounds like pipe dream to me and I am an engineer and computer guy. I don't think I will see affordable housing which is not hundred and some miles away from my workplace(s).
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Can't wait to go see 'em.
And did you read the grandparent? The supply is being constricted by billionaire fuckholes buying up all the existing properties instead of building new ones because it's _way_ more profitable to own a limited supply than to make more. Supply & Demand breaks down when you get the kinds of crazy rich we have here in America because they start actively molding the markets.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
pseudoLeftist environmental regulations and zoning got rid of trailers and trailer parks and low-end housing and also prevents new housing....oh, but it's for the animals, you see....and the fact that PseudoLeftism helps the rich get richer and the poor poorer, why, that is just a coincidence....just a little ole coinky dink
posting at http://leftistconservative.blogspot.com
what drives up home prices is lack of cheap homes....zoning and environmental regs prevent cheap homes
posting at http://leftistconservative.blogspot.com
Is this assuming there will be no new construction business would start up to fill in the void in the market. Or this will keep going till people stop renting at those prices. Instead of writing an article, start up a business and make money building something people need.
The fault lies on the people who pay the high rents. home construction just builds what makes money. Unless the government is interfering in the free market.
One of many big lies that politicians tell is "we want more affordable housing". Nonsense. Whenever we get affordable housing, everybody panics. That's what 2008 was--a very brief spate of affordable housing, and as soon as we got it, almost everybody was in a tizzy.
Why? Leverage.
Very few can buy a house for cash. Most of them are financed. By their very nature, such purchases are financially damaging to you unless the asset you finance goes up. The damage is usually bearable for smaller items such as a car, or appliances. It's too much to bear for a house, which became the overweight item in most middle-class investment portfolios.
So. We encouraged most of the country to have an investment strategy that could be summed up as "overweight leveraged real estate" and this is the natural result--everybody wants housing to keep going up in price.
Furthermore, governments rely on property tax revenue which is... proportional to assessed value. The government wants housing to go up too. Then the people that run the show have the gall to say, "we're going to create affordable housing". Nonsense.
What they call "affordable housing" usually requires you to be in some kind of welfare program to qualify. Being on welfare is, in some sense, actually a high price to pay for housing.
Another thing they called "affordable housing" was the shoddy loans that caused the 2008 crisis. Once again, that's not affordable housing. It's affordable *credit*, ie, cheap money, used to buy expensive housing.
REITs are one way for people to buy real estate without having an over-weight portfolio. They're still leveraged though, because it's too difficult to make money in this system without leverage. It's like an arms race. If we took the leverage out, it might be possible to run the system using non-leveraged REITs. You'd put a significant portion of your savings in a non-leveraged REIT. Instead of earning interest, you'd earn dividends. The possibility of the REIT going to zero wouldn't be there like it is with today's leveraged REITs. In other words, we could make housing something like a regulated utility.
Needless to say, this is a huge leap and I've been made fun of for suggesting it before. Debt finance is very, Very, VERY entrenched in this market. It'd be revolutionary to do it any other way.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
We have the same problems of high rents, lack of housing stock, builders of apartments targeting the higher end in order to maximize profits, people unable to afford to buy properties and governments that won't do anything to solve the problem (whether that be by removing red tape and increasing the supply of land, reform of planning policies so its easier to get new residential developments approved, reform of zoning rules to encourage developers to build higher density, changing tax and other laws to stop the investment property speculation bubble or whatever else)
Supply and demand only works efficiently when entities have a motivation to work towards the equilibrium price. In the event of a shortage, economic theory goes, the producers will be keen to create more supply because sales are going unfulfilled even though the entity is able to charge a higher price.
OPEC has figured out over the years that the above is not quite accurate. What we are seeing here (with rent and other goods such as new console releases) is that the producers have figured out that human behavior does not track with the economic models. If you sell your item at an artificially high cost and cause a "shortage", people will still pay it. And not only will they pay it, but they will line up and wait for their chance to pay it. Thus the producers are left with zero incentive to increase supply and lower what they can charge.
What is missing is the element of "greed", that is entities that want to get as many customers and market share as they can. If an oligargy takes over and they decide they are content with 95 percent occupancy and the current rate of return, then why would they add a lot of new capacity quickly? Doing so would just fuck up a good thing.
Part of the reason I own my house is that my mortgage and utility payments are about 1/2 the cost of monthly rent in my area. Silly, but true. It makes incredibly little sense to rent if you can own for significantly less. So get the down-payment any way you can and purchase. I wouldn't have minded renting, but what "the market will bear" in this area is a freaking joke. How in the world are they getting people to rent when you can own for less? It's madness.
I think the article is missing details that could make it more convincing. ..."
The article's main premise is that there is a "vicious circle" which is slowly making renting unaffordable for median income people.
In the article they say "In 2013, the median rent for a new apartment was $1,290, about 50 percent of the median renter’s monthly income
50%!?! That sounds like a lot... but I wonder: What percentage of the median renter's monthly income was rent back in earlier decades? Has it been rising? Has it been falling? The article does not provide that historical data.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
I live in Tokyo and have a basic understand why there is no housing shortage here.
It's because land value is not market driven. It's a fixed value, set by government appraisal.
This prevents property values from spiraling out-of-control.
Higher land value, results in higher taxes. Higher taxes, results in higher rent.
Market driven land values and land speculation will ONLY continue to drive costs higher.
In Japan, the value of a property is based on the fixed land value + the value of the structure.
In Tokyo (the city) land value is higher than other parts of the country. The higher taxes drive construction of multi-tenent structures, to spread out the tax burden.
Slavery is an economic transaction coerced by government under threat of force. [...] Renting an apartment is a voluntary transaction for both parties.
In those cities that have criminalized homelessness, such as through sit/lie laws, renting an apartment is also "an economic transaction coerced by government under threat of force."
... you're failing at life. Stop buying video games and get a down payment together.
Seems hard to believe after Ron Paul 2008 and 2012 that people still don't know that all of these rising prices can only come about due to FED increasing money supply.... You'd think the IT community who is used to always reading IT books and shit would pick this up already
As a landlord I will charge rents based on market, but I'll also lower them for a good tenant. The biggest challenge I have (I'm in Canada) is that the rents often are not even covering all my expenses. So I have to raise the rents when I get a chance. Minimum wage goes up, taxes go up, etc and now I have to raise my rents as all my expenses go up. The other option is close the doors and no one rents.
there's other ways this can play out. We've been putting all our eggs in one basket and letting the top 1% have almost all the capital. There's very few people with the money to build a sizable number of homes. Those people are part of the investor class, and they're going to put their money where it will make money.
So if you figured out that flooding the market with houses will devalue the existing properties (which they own, since they own damn near everything) what makes you think they haven't? And if that's the case what's to say they won't just skip the whole "Supply" part of "Supply and Demand"? What do we do when 1% of the population has all the capital and they decide to limit supply to increase the value of that capital? In the past it was violent revolution, but with today's military and police that's not really an option.
Now would be a good time to start doing something about income inequality and wealth concentration. Either that or get used to the idea of a new "Dark Ages"...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
God I'm sick of folks trying to fit the supply/demand crap they learned in High School into the real world. The problem is _real_ simple:
1. Real Wages have been falling for 40 years, to the point where wages for many jobs are what they were 20 years ago after 20 years of inflation. Outsourcing + lack of protectionism and free trade nonsense did this.
2. Capital has concentrated into the hands of a lucky few (the "1%" as they're called) and they have no incentive to build more houses when they're making obscene profits off the existing supply.
Said it before, say it again: Globalism _breaks_ capitalism. All your left with is oligarchy and kleptocracy.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm sure this happens in a lot of "university towns". Near campus here, the "slumlords" that would rent 4-5 or more 3-4 bedroom houses, near campus, let them run down to the point they go to the city council, cry about it being a blighted area, ask for permission to tear them all down, request a tax waiver for 10-20 years to build "luxury" student housing. Well, the city goes along with it, and now we have so many student housing condo/apartments or whatever you call them within a few blocks of the campus, it's just mind blowing. And they are outfitted with gyms, pools, saunas, movie theaters, free tv/internet. The apartments are fully furnished, huge flatscreen TV's etc. They rent by the bed, 500,600, or more PER BED. This is in a smaller city, 150,000 population, 20k students. Of course with all these that popped up within the last 5 years, the city isn't really getting any tax money on the property, because of the abatement waivers. So they suck up the resources, electricity, water, (yeah, figured into the rent), infrastructure wear and tear, but the city isn't getting any money, so what does the city do? Beg and beg for sales or property tax increases. The builder got their money, sold it to a property management company most likely not local, so the money paid by the kids parents doesn't stay in the city. When the waivers run out, they will probably try to offload them onto a local developer. They got their piece of pie. It just amazes me that parents are willing to spend that amount of money on their kids to live in a place like that, when they can live in a dorm for a heck of a lot less.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
sorta anyway. The thing I hate about "inflation" is that when most folks talk about it they include luxury goods (BMWs, yachts, vacation homes, etc). Nobody ever talks about real inflation: Food, Shelter, Healthcare, Eduction, Transportation. I guess that's not 1 thing, but for the working class it's what really matters.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"People paying high rents have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market. "
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
... Rent prices get so high People move out of the area, driving rent prices back down. Wonderful thing that price mechanism.
There are all kinds of restrictions on getting credit. Not everyone is able to buy because of this.
That's one of the things driving the rental market: people who can really afford to buy a house, given their income, but who are frozen out of the mortgage market because the lenders won't lend.
--PM
We have negative gearing, a tax benefit - aimed solely at the rich. They rent out the property and get to claim the cost (interest payments, renovation, service costs, repair etc) against their taxable income.
The common man (me, you, poors, middle class) are literally subsidising the rich buying more homes. It's an ass backwards, inane scheme that often, when described to foreigners elicits a response of basically "what the fuck? You're kidding? That's backwards!?"
Our houses are artificially inflated high in cost, the only mild benefit is that rents are arguably, slightly cheaper. Furthermore the government is welcoming with very very open arms, Chinese cash. They are POURING their money out of China in to property here. You're starting to see for sale / auction / expressions of interest signs for property in Melbourne, with NO fucking English writing on the sign.
These 2 things combined, have driven buying a house into an investment, not a home. It's *finally* getting some serious media scrutiny this year and your average man is beginning to click as to WHY negative gearing as a policy is completely and utterly fucking him.
I've always been frugal and careful with money and I've saved my ass off. I get the shit taxed out of my money in the bank (interest made) but had I put it into a house, I'd be able to infact claim any losses. ... it's insane, it's fucked. an entire generation is getting basically,... fucked by the old and the rich (or the young who got in with assistance)
It's
The division between the rich and the poor and the wiping out of the middle class is beginning to kick into high gear in general, across the world and I think even your average person now, is starting to get pretty pissed about it.
Well, eventually the continuous money printing of the last few years must have an effect on the money supply.
The problem is that the governments always deny that inflation exists and is harmful to the working class.
The Wikipedia article "Coercion" defines coercion as "the practice of forcing another party to act in an involuntary manner by use of intimidation or threats or some other form of pressure or force." In cities that have criminalized homelessness, failure to own or rent an enclosed place in which to live lands a person in prison. How is threat of imprisonment not "intimidation or threats or some other form of pressure or force"? Or if you disagree with the definition, how do you prefer to define coercion?
I played that game once... never again!
Those bastards took every cent i made for 15 years... some regulators decide not to do their job & it all vanishes overnight.
Fuck home ownership, seriously. Its a trap.
"The interesting question is how long can this last before we reach a level that is not affordable to the majority of the demographic that is being serviced."
We passed that point 20 or more years ago! 25% of a persons income should go for rent, not 90%! No developers want to build affordable housing, they all want to build high end housing. The American Dream of being able to own one's own home died back in the early 80s for the average American. The situation has only gotten worse with the corporate controlled government trying to completely eliminate the middle class!
Compared with the minor hiccough of 2008, previous downturns have been PAINFUL. The many actors in the system have acted highly effectively to reduce the amplitude of the waves, not increase them. Remember that in 2008 the economy of China kept growing - as did Australia and Poland; that's in marked contrast to the past slumps.
This is why I never rented - I didn't want to be paying someone else's mortgage, and getting stuck in this rental loop.
I stayed at home longer, putting up with living longer with my parents, in order to get the down-payment and buy my own place. It was worth a few short years.
So just move back home (assuming it's possible), and then move out again the right way in a few years.
A better solution is to tax property increasingly heavily. This results in the profits from the rising rents going to the government not the investors.
the dollar may collapse. The house will retain some value.
1) Students 2) People doing a short term job in a location 3) People who have been bankrupt
That's before we get to those who will never afford their own property.
Given the existence of all these groups, a rental market must exist. The only question is what institution is going to be the owner of those properties that are up for rent.
Beyond that however is the issue of how the next generation gets to own the house that they are going to live in. The Soviet solution was to reinvent serfdom, requiring people to stay on the collective farm they were born on. Is that your solution?
Around 14 years ago.
Same problem - no solution so far.
A quick skim didn't reveal any mention of zoning laws and rent control, government restrictions that limit the availability of low-cost housing, both rental and owned.
A very quick skim, it was. Perhaps the article does not suffer these two egregious errors, after all.
But I know which way to bet.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I live in a modest home in suburban New Hampshire. I've lived here over 40 years, so my mortgage is paid off. Government in New Hampshire is mostly paid for by property taxes, so I probably pay more than homeowners do in places where government has other sources of revenue. My home is worth about $350,000 and I pay a little over $8,000 per year in property taxes. In addition, maintenance, including replacing furniture, averages about $8,000 per year, and fire insurance another $1,800. The furniture replacement cost is highly variable: the average over the last few years has been about $3,500 per year but in 2013 it was less than $1000. You get that kind of fluctuation when you have an old house.
"Suburban" in New Hampshire means you have paved roads which are plowed by the town in the winter but you are not within walking distance of stores and restaurants. "Urban" means you don't need a car for shopping, and "rural" means you plow your own unpaved roads.
We're already there. Rents are already unaffordable. When you're a single guy in your 40s and you still can't afford to live without a roommate something is seriously fucked up.
It seems like if everything was going higher and higher then at some point that would open a gap in the home market for low end "starter homes". The biggest issue I've tended to see is people overbuying on first homes, trying to get their dream home right out of the gate if they can justify the 30 year mortgage payment in their cash flow.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Poor renters also trash their home more frequently because they have less to lose.
"The interesting question is how long can this last before we reach a level that is not affordable to the majority of the demographic that is being serviced."
Seriously, this question is not the least bit interesting. There are far more interesting questions that can be asked, like when will the problem become bad enough that we have foisted upon us widespread government-mandated rent control, or some other government intervention that can never be gotten rid of, even after the problem it is designed to "fix" has come and gone?
We saw this exact problem during the housing boom of the mid 2000s. Housing prices were skyrocketing on speculation, and rental prices were rising right along with them. When I started saving for a home in 1999, fresh out of college, by the time 2004 rolled around, prices were rising faster than my saving rate. I had to continue paying rent until after the bust, and then I was able to finally buy a home, although fortunately the great recession opened up so many engineering job opportunities that I was able to get a higher-paying job in a much lower cost-of-living part of the country, and between my 10 years of savings and my signing bonus, I was able to buy a home for cash in my new town.
Not all "crises" are crises. They are just circumstances that require that we change the way we think, and let go of our comfortable routines. Every time I hear some young kid out of college complain about not being able to afford to live in DC or New York or San Jose, yet refuse to consider moving somewhere else, I immediately lose any sympathy I may have had for their plight.
"Not being allowed to live in a cardboard box" is against the U.S. Constitution, and all manner of decency....and anyone who would pass such illegal and immoral laws ought to be dragged out behind the barn and shot in the face.
And/or hung from the tallest tree.
Exactly.
And to insure that this broken version of reality is not just accepted as the only sensibly way, but belligerently so, the oligarchy install the serves-them philosophy in higher education institutions so that society factory-produces legions of free-market Moonies who, thus programmed, thoughtlessly argue with the Great Wall of Ignorance erected in front of their faces, fighting for the elitist gutting of society.
We see that shit all the time, right here on Slashdot.
Sad fact: the first time and place people "learn" something is in most cases the last word they're willing to hear on the subject.
Updating and expanding one's knowledge structure, killing sacred cows when they turn out to be sacred rats, is apparently a superhuman feat beyond the grasp of the masses.
Welcome to #crapitalism.
These problems are not little items you can put in separate boxes.
This pattern is why you cannot trust any established system. Power and money aggregates into the hands of people who are willing to sell your well-being for profit.
Some are doing it with mustache-twirling evil laughter, but most are just followers with no further interest than seeking pleasure while avoiding pain.
But this exact system is not just replicated, but complicit in every other area of established human endeavor.
This is why government is full of psychopaths, why wars are for-profit lies, why I won't vaccinate my kids, or trust public education, or eat GMO foods, or trust that cell phone tech is safe.
The Free-Market Moonies are wired in the same way as the people who will argue without pause or thought against me on any of my unpopular stances, and they're still wrong. Of course they're wrong. They're choosing to side with a fundamentally broken system, using the sales points given to them by IT; products of a system which creates its own willing slaves.
The only difference with housing is that because it's not a choice, (you have to live somewhere), nobody has bothered to come up with a bunch of lies and corrupt academia in order to convince us to buy into the product.
Sure it affects everyone, but how is this tech/nerd news?
How is this site different from any other site at this point? It used to be unique. It's trying to become something that already exists and ultimately kill the site.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
the transaction between landlord and tenant is voluntary, there is no coercion involved.
You're making the argument that criminalizing homelessness involves "coercion", which is something different.
It's different yet related. A person isn't coerced into renting from a specific landlord but is coerced into finding some landlord in the first place.
When conditions exist that are technically "voluntary" but do not lead to meaningfully different/better choices, force exists in a subtle form.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
the transaction between landlord and tenant is "voluntary", coercion can be involved when another reasonable choice would be preferable, if made available.
FTFY for truth
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Absolutely true! This isn't just for personal residences either. I've seen business spaces that have been empty for years (usually with an out-of-town number to contact for "leasing/buying opportunities). Hell, there's a restaurant in my old neighbourhood that has been empty for a decade. The old appliances are still in there.
With all those places, the rents are still high, because they'd rather fix the market at a high rate than rent out the empty space. This is stupid because un-used buildings inevitably suffer from age-related maintenance issues, and become a lot harder to sell/lease/rent the longer they're unused without a price-cut.
Prime land is fundamentally scarce and it is niether created or destroyed. Virtually every ownership of a location is a monopoly over the rights to do what you please with that location, allowing this sort of behavior. The iron law of rents, a historically accurate and causally well reasoned law states that rents will always be maximized to as much as the market can possibly bear, eating up all disposable income because of this market structure, and in fact it does. But even worse, the ultramobility of modern times and real estate as investment means that the wealthy are spending huge amounts of money on property they will never live in which simply sits empty. The market builds to these investors but fundamentally those units are only worth anything because the wealthy tolerate having large numbers of empty apartments and houses under their ownership. The economist Henry George, and many of the more intelligent economists of modern times advocate a Land Value Tax, which captures the rents charged on a location from the private sphere to the public sphere, thus removing the most horrible source of profiteering and allowing rentiers to earn profit only on the renting of the improvements buildings) upon that land. LVT also reduces the purchase cost of land, as it removes the rental income from the land, so the cost of acquiring property becomes equal to that of the improvements on the land, lowering the barriers to property ownership entry and thus lowering the demand for rentals. LVT makes holding abandoned or empty properties expensive and makes holding properties off the market to capture the increase in value of the community and location provided by the public an impossibility, all public infrastructure investments gains are captured by the tax (incentive's smart spending) and preventing private capture of government investment. Property holders will have a very high incentive to maximize the improvements on land in order to charge rents on those improvements enough to pay for the land rent they pay to the government which depends on the value of that land. Thus more apartments get built and all of that improves for renters. Charging rent on land privately is a theft from the common resources of our nation, it allows people to become landless and their very existence to be illegal and unjustified unless they meet whatever infinite demands the rentiers make. Several conservative commenters above reinforce exactly that set of ideals that people owe their lives to the rich and should meet whatever demands are made of them, that they must justify their existence while the great land owners have no need to produce anything for society whatsoever and are justified in existening just by existing, the ultimate and most horrific of hypocrisies. If nothing is done, if we do not impliment an LVT, if we do not fight wealth inequality, I don't think America can last without major political upheaval.
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
1. Live in your work cube. 2. Buy an RV and or school bus and park it at Wallmart I believe they let campers park in their lots for free over night. 3. Live in your car. 4. Live in a tent. 5. Move out of CA as there are already too many people living there and and the land cannot support that many people and it's a natural and man made disaster in the making.
Paul E. Bahre
My town, Portland Maine topped the list of rent increases in that article. What isn't mentioned is the constant costs heaped on landlords by inept, inexperienced politicians. For instance in Portland next year, a new "Rain Tax" goes into effect. Supposedly to upgrade storm drainage systems, this new tax is based on the amount of impermeable surfaces like roofs, parking, etc. Now there's talk of a $35 per unit "fee" to fund an inspections department that will inspect for code violations in all city rentals. If you're at all familiar with "codes" you know that this will be a huge and expensive burden placed on landlords to meet this new requirement. Especially considering many buildings are a hundred years old or more. Also the political climate is such that in many cases there are so many roadblocks (historical boards, planning commissions, nimby groups) that developers eventually just give up and go elsewhere to build. There has been a large scale apartment development that has been on the drawing board for years now but it's such a moving target for the developer with the lists of demands from differing groups that it may never be built. Portland also has this wonderful ordinance that requires a $50,000 per unit "fee" be paid to the city for each "housing unit" that is removed from city housing stock. IE: Say a developer wants to either rehab or replace an old dilapidated building containing 8 tiny substandard apartments and create say 6 livable units. They would have to pay the city $100k for the privilege and receive NOTHING in return. In trying to "preserve" housing stock in the city this law is having the exact opposite effect. Only empty lots are desirable and as such the price of build-able property has skyrocketed. Bottom line here is simple and the underlying reason for skyrocketing rents, at least in Portland: If you make it more expensive for the property owner then the property owner is going to make it more expensive for the tenant.
...the biggest reason middle-class rentals are disappearing is because there's no money in it. At best, you might cover your costs, but more likely costs will exceed income, by as much as 50%. Who in their right mind would own middle-class rentals when they're so likely to be a financial loss??
It is far, far cheaper to rent. Yeah, you don't build equity, but you also just pay rent. You don't pay tax, insurance, and maintenance that exceeds the value of a middle-class home, and which can bring your total outlay to half again more than the mortgage payment.
Home buying benefits realtors and mortgage lenders a whole lot more than it does home buyers.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The analogy is correct but you missed a piece. The people are not "pushed out", they are in-slaved. The analogous country is monitor by other countries which set a standard for how the "rich people" should behave in/towards it. However, you cannot live in the same place as your slaves. Therefore, what is the mayor of said city making as a salary? The governance should is monitored by our other governance to ensure that everyone gets a say. If the mayor/governance is making too much money, it will bee seen as a problem. After that, corruption is the only route for the wealthy people to take to have their agenda (and we all know how that ends). P.S. Many governing job positions in America have upwards of $180,000/year salaries and then requesting raises to it. But, they are in charge of wealthy areas, not doing a "superb job" which deserves as huge salary.
He is crazy if you think about it; I am not.
Is Santa Claus Moderating today?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
High demand creates increasing supply. Land is finite but we are not anywhere near bounded by land supply. 350 million people can't live within 2 miles of a city center, and prices will take care of that too (and they have been for decades; google urban sprawl). Sprawl will make new transportation modes and work models viable. It already has.
No need to run around telling everyone the sky is falling. Markets are very resilient, especially when not heavily distorted.
Well, if that is how you define "coercion", then the term has nothing to do with slavery, forced labor, or injustice anymore.
So, if that's how you define "coercion", I have no problem with you "coercing" me that way, and I have no problem with people "coercing" you that way.
Have you heard about housing in Brazil?
the answer: fewer people. You think rents are bad, wait until climate disruption really hit. The entire western US is virtually a desert that depends on snowpack which is in sharp decline. Sounds harsh, but no more immigration and we all need to restrict family size (ZPG - zero population growth). This isn't some localized, temporary phenomenon.
The featured article discusses why "a cheaper apartment" doesn't exist, and at some point "a less expensive car" means no car. No car in turn can mean drastically cutting your hours to fit the bus's schedule, which rules out "a night job" in cities whose buses stop running for the evening or weekend.
California's going to get REAL fun when the water really runs out.
All those high property values, and people fleeing to live where they can actually take a shower. . .
In a lot of markets, that isn't actually what's happening. Most cities have zoning laws that prohibit raising supply (tearing down houses to build higher-density housing, for instance) or require construction permits to do anything (SF in particular is really bad at this). Sure, you could expand outwards, but then people have to commute farther, which means those places are worth less.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Minor hiccup and not PAINFUL? FUCK YOU! Asshats like you took my house and my job. Go to hell!
You can't tell me that living with a friend would be a crime. I'm not talking about a lease, I'm talking about charity.
Then how does one go about finding such a friend willing to offer such charity? Perhaps it appears easy to you, but a lot of people remain homeless because they lack certain social skills. This could result from autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, past abuse, or any of several other conditions.
So, kind of like "no one stays in shelters; there's too many people there."
Yeah, obligatory Yogi Berra, I know, but let me rephrase: No one can rely long-term on staying in shelters because it is too likely that on a given night, there are too many people there.
Setting foot in a different country is a crime? You'll need to explain that one a little more.
The Wikipedia article titled "Illegal immigration" should serve as a convenient starting point.
I was assuming, though, that one could find another city with different laws. Where I live, there are sit/lie laws. There are a half-dozen cities in the region that don't have them, and they become known as places with lots of homeless people around.
And I was assuming that the lack of sit/lie laws in those half-dozen nearby cities would not last forever because those half-dozen nearby cities would want to try to shake that perception.
In the U.S. at least, there aren't national laws outlawing being homeless; those are usually left to cities, and those laws vary place-to-place.
Then how should somebody who is already homeless go about researching which nearby cities both A. lack a sit/lie law and B. are highly unlikely to adopt one in the next twelve months?
is I have to be OK myself before I can help out others. Like that Bruce Springsteen song "We take care of our Own". The correct response is to take care of things back home then worry about the rest of the world.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Denver metro has plenty of open land. Denver in particular could easily build to the east. The real problem is that cities here are deliberately not building on open space and forcing close in, packed developments. People may argue quality of life, but sky-high rents really impact your quality of life.
Thank you for reminding of what should be the ideal in the property world; as a major in Economics I've spent too long looking at the current situation and lost sight of where we should be aiming. It's interesting to note that the Hebrew Bible has the concept of 'Jubilee' when all productive land is returned to its original owner, though not houses. Tony Benn, the maverick left wing Labour MP and even cabinet minister in the 60s and 70s later proposed a replacement of all freehold property rights with a 50 year lease; strangely enough it's not an idea that has been picked up by anybody ;)
As ever with law and economics, the problem is that any rules you introduce will be gamed to the benefit of the seriously rich and the wider general interest tends to get lost; the problem is that most people who think like you propose solutions that have very negative consequences in practice. I suspect a steady increase in property taxes combined with a move towards a citizen's income may be the right solution, but the pain of such a property tax probably makes it impossible to impose.
See subject & LMAO @ U, boy -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
* Gonna go "cry in your cereal" now, boy?
(You ought to for being STUPID enough to use OR SUGGEST a blatantly INFERIOR solution! See below... it's fact & truth!)
APK
P.S.=> FACT: "AlmostALLAdsBlocked+" is INFERIOR vs. hosts - hugely so!
AB+ doesn't even DO what it's supposed to fully anymore being BRIBED http://finance.yahoo.com/news/... not to!
AB+ doesn't do a FRACTION of what hosts do for more speed, security, reliability, + anonymity online!
AB+ EATS 128mb of RAM (vs. hosts @ 11 *maybe* tops via my program with CURRENT data, the important kind vs. current threats + ads) http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte...
AB+ adds messagepassing overheads!
AB+ operates in SLOWER usermode (vs. hosts in PnP kernelmode)
AB+ creates huge CPU consumption!
I use what you already have that works & does more with LESS, no less - you by way of comparison? Pile on "MoAr" that doesn't do as nearly as much & what it's supposed to do, massively inefficiently no less (see above)? It NO LONGER DOES!
AFTER ALL THAT?
AB+ = "better", Coren22?? LMAO - NO f'ing way!
If you say it is, you are *TRULY* stupid & I'd reply saying "argue with the numbers" & facts above, from reputable sources & analysis proving my points for me... apk
The subject says it all. The only invisible hands in a world run by corporate capitalism will be the one up your ass or lifting your wallet. Once removed from the scale of the township, the sick, ravenous greed of capitalism's sociopathic structures and leaders is unconstrained by concerns for the community good.
Alice gives Bob some stuff. In exchange Bob gives Alice a thing. Then Alice has to give back the thing, and Bob gets to keep the stuff. Bob has profited at Alice's expense; Alice lost some stuff, and didn't get any thing for it. Why the hell would Alice put up with this? Because she has no choice; Bob has the thing that Alice needs to survive, so she either gives up her stuff and accepts the loss in order to buy herself a little more time, or she dies. (Or gives up the stuff to Charles instead, or Doug, etc, but same difference there).
It's not quite literal theft, but it's close enough.
As a somewhat ancillary point, how do you feel about renting things other than land? For instance, a pressure washer? I have absolutely no desire to own a pressure washer for good; I might need one once every 2-3 years, if that, and it's ridiculously inefficient for everyone who needs one once every 2-3 years to own one. So when I need one, I go down to the local hardware store, which has a couple that it rents out, pay them something like $20 for an hour of its use, and then give it back when I'm done.
I've gained nothing tangible from that save the use of the pressure washer (and the products of my labour with it—to wit, a clean deck/house/whatever). In the absence of the ability to rent, presumably if I wanted such a thing, I would have to either pay the full purchase price of the pressure washer with the understanding that I would be paid back almost all of it when I returned it—which ends up amounting to exactly the same thing, with the added burden of needing to have enough money to purchase a big-ticket item like that—or I would have to pay significantly more for an actual person from the hardware store to bring the pressure washer and use it to wash my deck/house/whatever, in which case I'm paying for a service.
So what's your thought on that sort of rent, and how does it—or does it not—differ fundamentally from renting land?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
So, if people don't want to see "ruined skylines" and refuse to build up, then I think the obvious solution is to build down. Its the obvious solution, and would hide all the peasants living quarters safely underground, site unseen. And, you could advertise the wonderful view of the local geology outside the bedroom 'window' as a perk.
Yes, it's more expensive, but we have the technology to build 50 stories down, easy peasy.
I welcome my new underground apartment hole. Then the management overlords can really be OVERlords as they live comfortably on the 4th floor, while I grovel in my abode on the -46 floor.
Here's a fuller illustration of that toy model of a market to more completely illustrate how the existence of rent breaks it.
This market consists of two identical people, one kind of consumable good (food), one kind of capital (land), and one kind of labor (working the land to produce food). There is exactly enough land to produce enough food for normal consumption for two people. The two people agree on what the rules of acceptable behavior (laws) and division of property are, so we don't need to worry about external law enforcement here. We will explore a couple of different scenarios of different laws and different divisions of property.
If the land ownership was evenly divided, the normal state of affairs would be for each person to work his land to produce food for his own consumption. Trade between the two people could be possible still -- one could give the other some of his food in exchange for the other taking over some of his labor, or they could divide the labor up into different types (planting, watering, harvesting, etc) and each do that for the other in exchange for some quantity of food -- and if the law includes laws against violence, then neither can coerce the other and all their trade would be free. Sounds wonderful.
But now, say one of the people (Alice) only owns 1/4 of the total land, while the other (Bob) owns 3/4 of it. Alice now cannot produce enough food for her own normal consumption, whereas Bob could produce an excess. Of course that means Alice is also working half as much as she would, and Bob is working one and a half times as much, so maybe that seems fair, but there are now pressures at work that will quickly make it unfair. Alice isn't eating enough, and Bob has more land than he really need to provide for his consumption, so Bob offers Alice a deal: "I'll let you borrow my extra land to work, in exchange for just half of its normal yield." So Alice gets some more food, and Bob gets more food too so he has to work less, and they both win right? So this is an obvious no brainer for both of them, a totally voluntary, free market transaction, right? Everything's great?
Except that now Alice is working a normal full work load but only getting 75% of a full crop from it, and Bob is getting a full crop but only working 75% as much for it. And this will continue indefinitely, and never end. Just because Bob started out with more than Alice, Alice is now stuck permanently getting less for her work than Bob, and Bob can permanently live a life of leisure on the back of Alice. Not because one of them did anything to win this position, not because one of them is better than the other, because remember we stipulated that they are identical; it's just because one of them began with more capital than the other.
But wait, it gets worse! Alice is still not eating enough, and desperate for anything that she can to get more. And now that Bob only has to work 75% of his land to meet his own consumption, he's got another quarter-field now lying around that he could lend out to Alice as well... in exchange for part of its normal yield again, of course. Which means Alice is now working even more than a normal full load and still not getting a full crop, and Bob can work even less and still get a full crop. Which means Bob now has another portion of his field he's not working anymore, and Alice still isn't eating enough, so she'll gladly work that too, in exchange for a part of it's yield sure, she needs the food so it's better than not. The endgame of this progression is that Alice has to work both fields in full if she wants to get a full crop to herself, meaning Bob doesn't have to work at all, still gets a full crop to himself, and Alice is his slave.
(Worse still, if Bob was really smart and Alice was desperate enough to fall for it, Bob could keep working full time, trade the excess he gets from Alice back to her in exchange for her land -- bought, not borrowed -- and gradually own even more and more of the land and make the whole scenario above worse and
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Can ab+ do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:
1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (beyond ads)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stops C&C communique
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stops C&C communique
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stops C&C communique
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phish
10.) Protect vs. caps
11.) Get you past a dnsbl
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up surfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on anything webbound (ie email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily controlled data
16.) Do all that & block ads (better than addons) more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage
* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on ab+ doing it + hosts = already on every device natively.
APK
P.S.=> Ab+ does less than hosts & less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):
Ab+'s 128mb memory inefficiency -> http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte... (hosts consume 3-11mb using my program initially).
+
ClarityRay defeats it detecting it by dumping addons in use in a browser via native browser methods to do so!
+
Ab+'s paid to not do its job http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...
Ab+ adds complexity from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).
What's better?
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...
MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...
&
It's GUARANTEED safe & clean per it being checked by 57 antivirus programs recently in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
In its 32-bit model also https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
... apk
Like healthcare and wall street, real estate is kind of a protected industry.
We still build houses pretty much the way they were built 100 years ago, and people are indoctrinated into the McMansion mindset -- supersized, 4,000 sq. ft. homes and five car garages for two people with a cat.
If some brainiac were turned loose on primate habitats, we could probably make some pretty decent stuff, like an econo-home, and just sell them like cars. Everything from a used econobox to an expansive home, parts custom built, on very expensive land. Maybe even stack them like legos, as we've seen parts of the micro-home industry.
But there are a few reasons we can't do this. One, people judge each other by the area and home they live in, they've been psychologically manipulated to keep up with the Joneses; Two, a lot of people have invested in real estate, and they would absolutely freak out at any taxpayer funded interference in their safe havens; Three, a home is no longer considered a "buy once and live there forever" purchase -- it's considered a "flipper" -- sell for a profit and buy up every so many years.
Psyops is a huge part of marketing. There are probably huge opportunities for disruption throughout the social hierarchy, changes that would rapidly improve affordability across the spectrum of markets -- food, housing, healthcare. Entrenched interests would really fight it tooth and nail. Just look at the Affordable Care Act -- IRS monitored healthcare purchases? Fixed service levels? Limited insurance providers? Somehow, we've forgotten how to utilize innovation and free markets. It's kind of strange, considering the crash of 2007 -- a strong indicator that housing and investments are being managed incompetently.
Some people are pushing for easy credit again, just about the worst possible way to increase the affordability of a home.
We need big changes, but We the People have become timid and risk averse. One basic thing we could do is form a board of CBO, NASA, DoD, and National Academy mission and oversight specialists, and run them though all 17 executive level cabinets, with the goal of creating a report and list of recommendations. Even if the Legislature and President refuse to implement the reforms, at least We the People could read about the situation, as analyzed by our best and brightest.
Most of the tax and spend hierarchy was created in the time of our grandparents or greater. The application of the scientific method and modern management techniques to the federal hierarchy would probably find a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse, but on the other side of reform would be a healthier, more nimble, and responsive service entity for We the People -- and that goes for every last one of ya, regardless of your race, color, creed, configuration of yer erectile tissue, or how ya like to rub it.
Well, if that is how you define "coercion", then the term has nothing to do with slavery, forced labor, or injustice anymore.
Except that it does. When a choice is made of the least of the worst, force exists. It means that one is only able to mitigate an undesirable situation, not remove it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
:-(
The fact that you starve unless you work doesn't mean that you are anybody's slave.
Coercion is the threat of force by one person against another.
Nobody has any responsibility to protect you from undesirable situations.
That's not a bubble, it's a glut; a bubble involves speculation.
Why can't the gubment just lend the money directly @0% interest to the people buying homes? They already have offices in every town and extensive collection experience. Why give a bank a free 4.5% interest for filling out some papers(for an origination fee)? What's the whole point of all this anyway? Admit it, you are all slaves and you always will be