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More Than One-Third of Schoolchildren Are Homeless In Shadow of Silicon Valley (theguardian.com)
Alastair Gee writes via The Guardian about Palo Alto's problem with homeless children. Palo Alto is one of the most expensive cities in the United States, yet "slightly more than one-third of students (1,147 children) are defined as homeless here, mostly sharing homes with other families because their parents cannot afford one of their own, and also living in RVs and shelters." From the report: The circumstances of the crisis are striking. Little more than a strip of asphalt separates East Palo Alto from tony Palo Alto, with its startups, venture capitalists, Craftsman homes and Whole Foods. East Palo Alto has traditionally been a center for African American and Latino communities. Its suburban houses are clustered on flat land by the bay, sometimes with no sidewalks and few trees, but residents say the town boasts a strong sense of cohesion. Yet as in the rest of Silicon Valley, the technology economy is drawing new inhabitants and businesses -- the Facebook headquarters is within Ravenswood's catchment area -- and contributing to dislocation as well as the tax base. "Now you have Caucasians moving back into the community, you have Facebookers and Googlers and Yahooers," said Pastor Paul Bains, a local leader. "That's what's driven the cost back up. Before, houses were rarely over $500,000. And now, can you find one under $750,000? You probably could, but it's a rare find." Several homeless families whose children attend local schools told the Guardian that they had considered moving to cheaper real estate markets, such as the agricultural Central Valley, but there were no jobs there. One man shares a single room with three children, in a house where three other families each have a room. Another woman lives with her partner and five children in a converted garage. Even teachers are not immune to such difficulties. Ten of the staff who work on early education programs -- one-third of the total -- commute two or more hours each way a day because they cannot find housing they can afford.
...a valley is a low point geographically. It doesn't have a shadow.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So they do have homes, even if they aren't necessarily the most comfortable ones. That's a big difference from not having any sort of a home at all, which is what homelessness really is.
I mean, where does this sort of they-have-homes-but-they're-"homeless" mindset stop?
What if a single family lives in a house, but there are only 4 bedrooms and there are 5 kids, with some of the kids sharing a room? Are the kids who have to share a room considered "bedroomless" under this strange definition of the term?
If a home only has 2 bathrooms, but more than 2 occupants, does that mean that whoever lives there is "bathroomless" because they have to share the 2 bathrooms?
"Even teachers are not immune to such difficulties. "
Teachers are paid very poorly, notably in California.The summary makes it sound like they could normally afford high priced property which they absolutely cannot.
East Palo Alto is a shithole with a lot of Latino gang and drug activity. Of course things aren't going well there, they haven't been going well for decades.
Living conditions there are awful. There are plenty of jobs in other cities and you get to have a whole house! I figure I'd have to make three times what I make now to live in Silicon Valley. Nope.
I heard a piece on NPR (which unfortunately I can't find a link for), that observed if you paid over $500k for your house 20 years ago, your house appreciated more than 100%, and if you paid less than $200k, it only appreciated 25%. Further analysis discussed that the great preponderance of such houses were on the coasts, and that affordability in those communities is a real problem . They also correlated the house price with how the people voted, noting that Trump voters were more likely to have houses in the $100k-$200k range rather than the $500k range, and that was presumed to be part of the dissatisfaction with the state of the economy.
Now putting these stories together, -I- come to the conclusion that high cost areas such as Silicon Valley are much more likely to support abstract notions of income redistribution, with the sense that "I have mine, so now I can feel bad about income inequality."
"sharing homes" doesn't mean "splitting rent", it means "crashing until you get thrown out because you can't pay rent." or "crashing until the landlord realizes there are 8 people living in a 2 bedroom apartment". You just happen to be such a pompous, entitled ass that you can't envision sharing homes as anything other than you and your buddies in college splitting rent. Go fuck yourself.
R moving into the whitehouse. So, as is tradition, 'homelessness' just became a much bigger problem.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Where I'm from, those children would be wards of the state; any parents "not providing adequate food, medical care, or shelter" get their kids taken away, and are charged with Neglect. As to the 'shelter' part, that's entirely up to the CPS caseworker, and if they don't feel that it's adequate to have two siblings sharing a room, that's enough probable cause to take the children and open an investigation (in that order.) A whole family in one room? Never.
Go ahead, ask me how I know. I had no idea Cali was more lax on stuff like that than Wyoming.
So they do have homes, even if they aren't necessarily the most comfortable ones. That's a big difference from not having any sort of a home at all, which is what homelessness really is.
TFA mentioned that some share actual houses, others are living in RVs and shelters. I guess you could call an RV a permanent home, maybe. As homes go, it's pretty close to bottom of the barrel in the US today. Living in a shelter, yeah, I'd call that homeless. Beats camping in a freeway interchange but not by much.
It would be better if they broke those out into separate categories. Maybe there's a report with more details instead of a article in a newspaper.
Bottom line, there are some very poor people in this valley. No kidding, there are poor people everywhere. In a generous, compassionate world, we would do something for them (hey, how about removing zoning rules which make it hard to build houses?). Let's also not forget that a RV is a castle compared to a shack made of scrap like the shantytowns 400 miles from here in Mexico.
That's always the problem with these sorts of statistics. Whoever is crunching the numbers is doing so with an agenda and comes up with something that strains credulity. They're just going for shock value, not attempting to convey any useful information. Ultimately it detracts from the real problem. Housing throughout the bay area is, in fact, incredibly expensive. It strains the budgets of pretty much everyone who isn't bringing home six figures, and even 100k isn't enough to afford a nice place. To get even a small condo, you need a couple people making fairly high salaries. The situation in the bay area is not sustainable, but I fail to see how a shock headline claiming 1/3 of school children are living under bridges in cardboard boxes does anything to change that.
They are discussing students, so they are likely using the definition of homelessness found within the McKinney-Vento Act. For more info see: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ecd/homelessness_definition.pdf
Moving someplace new generally requires a sizable amount of liquid funds to cover moving expenses, deposits, etc., not to mention the costs associated with finding a new job to go to. The working poor don't often have that kind of money on hand to spend.
The wealth gap is to large and no matter how one sees it it is dangerous. I once lived in an area that was well off but bordered a ghetto. I warned people that between 12/15 and Christmas day they had best not be out and about. A certain pre Christmas rage would build up in the poor area and armed robberies and the like would jump up too much in that two week period. Simply shopping or sitting in a restaurant or bar, or even being tied up in traffic became an opportunity for being a crime victim. Sometimes some horrible racist incident would occur and people would fear riots. If it happened on a Monday or Tuesday one could predict that the troubles would break out on Friday or Saturday as pay checks would enable alcohol to be purchased and the weekend would be the time to riot. Certain things are predictable and when the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor violence tends to break out.
I have lived in an RV for the past 15 years. I lived in an RV for 3 years in the 70s. The first two were only 21 feet in length. I have a nice 36 foot motor home the I live in now. I have never paid a dime for any city property taxes. It just breaks my heart that I was never indentured to a bank for 30 years paying for a regular home and then indentured to a city for my entire life paying property taxes. It has been tough, but I have managed to tough it out. It has especially been a burden watching my huge bank account grow and grow.
CA has been run by the Ds since 1959, with only one short loss of control from 1969-1970 and one split session in 1995.
Cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
>> Ten of the staff who work on early education programs -- one-third of the total -- commute two or more hours each way a day because they cannot find housing they can afford.
Bullshit. Here's your solution: move to San Jose, then commute 45 minutes to work. Here's some listings for rooms and apartments starting at just $500 if you're too fucking lazy to use one of the hundreds of "find an apartment" web sites.
https://www.trulia.com/for_ren...
Even better would be for them to find a way to make the move to San Jose, and then get a job they are qualified for locally. If enough did that, the affluent citizens of Palo Alto will find themselves freaking out that there are no longer any people to prepare or serve their meals when they eat out, sell them their overpriced coffees, clean their buildings, take care of their lawns, etc.
Oops! You fuckers just drove away the majority of your labor pool.
This space unintentionally left blank.
They meet the federal definiiton of homeless students.
https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/...
Shit, we'd have to sterilize half the corporations in the Western hemisphere! Corporations are people, right?
When I see what people other countries are doing to get away leaving California should be trivial. People are walking out of Syria with nothing more than what they own. If life in SV is that bad, leave.
If you know how to weld, swing a hammer or have any skilled trade training you can probably filter all across the US. Local shops are hiring high schoolers with training before they graduate.
Whoever is crunching the numbers is doing so
How To Lie with Statistics should be required reading in high school.
given that Act doesn't classify sharing a home with others as homeless it would seem that is not what they are using. living with others would be classified as "at risk of homeslessness"
I was an engineer in Silicon Valley and couldn't afford to live in Palo Alto. Why the fuck would any poor person choose to settle in such a high priced area?
Heck, I got out because I couldn't afford the housing and moved East to the cheaper places.
reinstate child labor. let the market decide. we need to get the government off the backs of the American people. It's the libertarian thing to do.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Good, now we know who can't trusted. HHS are the liars.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In many cases, they were there first. This is gentrification on steroids.
> 20 something amateurs compete for lying ... It's just an old boys club
I'm confused. Is it kids or is it old boys? Or are the 20 year old amateurs old?
I've never received a single dollar from the government. I just pay, pay, pay my taxes. Nothing ever changes.
Did you get paved roads? Judges in courthouses? Airports? Bridges? Fire department? An army, navy, marines, air force, coast guard?
A county hospital? Sewers? Clean water? And the EPA to keep it clean? National, state, and local parks? Etc., etc., etc.
You may have received protection from (or deterrence of - which you likely didn't notice) crime by a publicly funded police force. Perhaps assistance, maybe even life-saving assistance, from the fire department or EMS. Even if you or your children did not attend public schools, you benefited from the services of many who did. Then of course there's the armed forces protecting your country. Roads and highways that you may have traveled upon.
But I digress. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
except those skilled trade jobs cap our income at $50k for life. oh sure unions can earn more and welders can earn more. but everyone else is basically salary capped for life to an existence that is no longer able to afford a home in 70% of america.
yes everyone knows one guy who is a carpenter that earns more. that fact is those are generally the bosses not the every day workers.
leaving an area is hard especially when you have a wife with a job, so now you are not looking for one job but two. as well as kids who have friends and classes.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Why do poor people continue to stay there?
Probably because they have job and leaving it to find work elsewhere is a huge risk without financial resources to cover the gap. However the article is defining "homelessness" as those families who share a home with another. This is not homelessness but a what a smart, resourceful person without financial means does when the housing prices are so high. Since the article mentions that many of the teachers are also sharing houses it seems that the teachers themselves are "homeless" too given the article's clearly wrong definition of the word.
I have I earn 50K a year and I can't buy a home. not when they start at $200k for a 900 sq ft condo plus hoa fees.
And that is a 30 year old home.
I suggest you look around. get out of rural america and watch how fast prices go up. if there were jobs there I could live out there but jobs are not located in rural america.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
From the article: "One man shares a single room with three children, in a house where three other families each have a room." So it's not "4 bedrooms and 5 kids" (which would indicate maybe seven people across four bedrooms), more like a minimum of 11 people across three bedrooms (given if the other rooms are single parents with a single child). If it's the "American average" (two parents, two kids), then it's 16 people in 3 bedrooms. That's 3x "population density" of your example.
:"A homeless person is an individual without permanent housing who may live on the streets; stay in a shelter, mission, single room occupancy facilities, abandoned building or vehicle; or in any other unstable or non-permanent situation." This study seems to be going off the "without permanent housing"; making the assumption 16+ people in a "single family" house isn't supposed to be permanent. The families mentioned living in RVs are also not in permanent housing.
The official definition is
Yet in a way, this is a "first-world" or "modern day" definition, since only 100 years ago (or even today in other countries) population density like this isn't out of the norm.
No they weren't. If they were there first, they would've owned the houses they live in, and the rising property price would be a good thing.
It's not that the home is 30 years old, it's that he still can't afford it. Why don't you take your own advice, you ignorant prick?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Not if they were renting.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
What a terrible article. Sharing rooms does not make one homeless and East Palo Alto is not Palo Alto, it's two different cities with different demographics and different rules. A big chunk of East Palo Alto is under rent control, so those people will be paying rent that's far below market price for years to come. I wonder how many of them are sharing rooms because it's a good source of income and not because they can't afford it.
By that same definition a work camp would be a home. You know where you throw and contain the homeless and send work details to pick them up to carry out the required duties and then compulsorily return them at the end of the work day, so they can receive their food ration and retire to their cells to rest for the next days duties. Those that don't work get half rations. Once they have paid off their accrued debts they can pay for their release from the work camp, if they can prove they have a place to go. You can call it the America is number 1 solution.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
stop having kids you cannot afford in a world that's already overpopulated
There is a whole lot of stuff in between "$200k for a 900 sq ft condo plus hoa fees", and "rural america".
Maybe you should look around some more.
1) You're a fool and no one should listen to you.
2) What about Donald Trump and those who voted for him?
The poster is posting on a network originally developed with taxpayer money. He's just another whack job libertarian Freeman on the land type.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
(1) Sharing a home with another family is not what I consider homeless. (2) Living in an RV is not what I consider homeless.
On top of that the children are going to school, so it's not like they are unable to get out of this rut. So long as they stay in school, and stay out of trouble, they can get a job, join the military, or whatever after they graduate. I hear that California universities don't charge tuition for residents, if they get good grades they can go to college.
My sister in law works at a public school, in a not so great neighborhood, and she talks about the kids getting breakfast at school now. Many of the children in her school get free or reduced lunches for being considered "in poverty". This is a federal program so they must have this in California too.
The big wealth disparity in the area is the result of a booming economy, unfortunately some people will lag in this boom. Give it time and it will correct itself. The high housing prices are the result of demand exceeding supply, with proper management this too is self correcting. I imagine a lot of young adults that just finished high school could build the houses that are in such demand.
What concerns me is how people might see this as a bigger problem than it really is and want the government to do something about it. The government is already doing more than enough, these "homeless" children already get fed and educated from the government coffers. Are we supposed to buy them a four bedroom house and a white picket fence too? What I fear is these children will grow up learning that the government will keep feeding, clothing, and sheltering them through life. I'm all for giving people a hand up but not a handout.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Unfortunately pretty much everyone uses bogus statistics because it benefits them to have shock value to the casual viewer. To make it worse, it also benefits news sites to publish these statistics because they will have high click-through thus you should never believe any statistic that benefits the surveyor even if they describe their methodology.
Your problem was thinking that voting for president would help your cause. You vote for a president to deal with other nations, make sure we're safe, and to work with Congress to help shape the path of the country on a macro level. Want to really influence your life with your vote? Then pay attention to and get involved in your local politics. As far as I'm concerned, no one who doesn't put more effort into their government than just voting has no right to complain about the outcomes.
My dad's family lived in a SoCal chicken coop when he was very young. His father was employed digging potatoes. Poor people are not a new phenomenon. In the end, it doesn't matter all that much whether we call them homeless or poor, unless you're trying to make a better headline.
We're always going to have poor people, but I don't necessarily think this is a terrible thing, nor by any mean something that can be "fixed". What's most important is making sure that people have opportunities to pull themselves out of poverty. My grandparents had literally nothing when they first immigrated, and eventually both had small businesses of their own. My father and mother took over one of the businesses and grew it over a lifetime of hard work. I started out poor early in my career, just barely able to sustain myself, and am starting my own business as well now. The American dream isn't getting rich quick. It's simply moving ahead in the race, and we need to make sure that's still possible. Unfortunately, that seems to be getting harder to do.
We need to ensure that people can take chances, educate themselves, learn new trades, move to better areas where needed. Some of this probably requires some government help, and some of it needs the government to get out of people's way. Some of it is making sure our social safety net is firmly in place so that trying and failing isn't fatal, without making it so comfortable that people just give up and let others support them. I wish I had better or more specific answers than that, though, as talk is cheap. But I guess you have to start somewhere, and we need to figure out how to fix this situation.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
And, as a Democrat, I ashamed to say he is not wrong. I am sure residents of Palo Alto would rather have some manufacturing jobs than our "great values". We need to fire demagogues and elect someone who will make people love California and trust us to govern on federal level.
The $500k homes are expensive because they're on prime real estate. The $100k-$200k homes are for the large part identical to the $500k homes, they're just in less desirable locations.
There is plenty of open land in the U.S. You can always build more cheap homes in less desirable locations (unless your city has done something like silly like created no-build open space preserves in all possible surrounding areas where new housing could've been built to ease demand). That's why they don't appreciate much - there's always more supply being created to meet growing demand. But aside from the formation of a new city, you can't create new prime real estate. Its supply is fixed, while demand is increasing. So its value appreciates a lot faster.
Renting from whom? People who were there before them? That would make them not the first people there.
I got a 10 year old 2300 sq. ft. home in San Antonio for $130k. It was a good deal, but not crazy.
Stop thinking you have to live in the most expensive cities in the nation.
HOA
What's one of those? Out here you just have to worry about the township telling you where and how much to dig.
if there were jobs there I could live out there but jobs are not located in rural america.
Tesla is hiring out here:
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/...
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/...
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/...
Lets give you a short commute. Here's a 3 bed, 2 bath for $99k Another 3B, 2B for $60k Both larger than 1000 sqft too.
Then lets swing you to a long commute and set $200k as a ceiling. This house is 4 bed, 2 bath on 2.1 acres, $125k for 1600 sqft. 3B/2B. Or if you like a really well built house 4 beds 4 baths 3,106 sqft, built in 1855 (Ask the Europeans if that's 'old'). In a town no less.
You can repeat that experiment all across the US.
We still have to pay a good amount of cash to go to Universities here. Born in California, went to a UC. There is financial aid/student loans, but those are all ways to pay for tuition, it isn't free. It may have been in the past, I know my parents didn't pay much when they went to college, but unfortunately, they'll still have to pay for something. It's just up to them to see if they can get a part time job/apply successfully for the aid to pay for it.
3 kids, 5 kids... JFC! Stop cranking out babies!
Sorry, but it's not like you need them to help with the farming, and it's not like you don't have birth control options.
Stop. Having. Fucking. Babies.
- ------ Go 'til ya know.
First, in the context of gentrification, means "before the fucking gentrification", not "before anyone fucking else". Don't be that dense.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I don't have a job and make around 20K per year from random gig's and have no credit history. I went to the bank two months ago out of curiosity and they said I would qualify for $150k house loan. I would be responsible for about $600/month.
You don't have to be the first people there to have been there long before it got so unreasonably expensive to live there that you can't even make the rent and end up homeless like these families. These kids likely belong to families who could once afford to rent there, who were perhaps born from families who also rented there, as families too poor to buy houses tend to have children who are also too poor to buy houses and over generations spend way, way more money on housing than it would have cost to buy a house (if they had been able to apply that money to the cost of a house, and hadn't had to pay it to rent instead), without ever getting any house for their efforts. Rent is a travesty that traps generations into... well, homelessness, albeit not the kind the poor kids in this article are suffering. Not always at least, but obviously sometimes, like these kids.
And even without that generation-over generation rent trap, home owners having more than one kid subject the next generation of native-born locals to the same housing challenges as newcomers. If the great-grandparents (dying off about now) owned a house there, had several kids, at most one of whom inherited an entire house to themselves, the rest (if not all) of whom maybe couldn't afford to buy (even with a fractional-house-value of inheritance, which probably went first to offsetting existing debts), but were already there and tried to make it, but just couldn't, and meanwhile those kids who spent their lives renting while trying to make it gave birth to a new generation who had only ever known renting and never homeownership (we're talking now-grown millennials), and those kids now have kids of their own, and the cost of housing keeps rising, and they've been there for generations, and now they're homeless and their kids are in these schools... it's not like these were some stupid people who decided to pack up and try living beyond their means in a place they couldn't afford. These are people trying their damnedest not to be forced out of the places their families have lived for generations.
I'm 34 and I live elsewhere in California somewhere not quite as expensive as SV but still subject to the same effects. My grandparents all moved out here when there was next to nothing (hell one of my grandparents' construction company build virtually half the nearest city), and they were filthy stinking rich by my standards. Most of my parents and their siblings are struggling to get by, some more successfully than others (mine are among the 'others'), but most of them don't own houses yet, though some are well on their way, and others like my parents aren't (between them they've paid nearly half a million dollars in housing expenses over their lives; where is the house for them?). I have never lived in a house that anyone in my family owned. I make more than 75% of Americans now, live in a tiny trailer to save on rent costs, save almost every other paycheck, get regularly scheduled raises, and when I run the numbers I am still not sure if I will ever be able to own a home in the place where my family has lived for three generations, or if I will eventually be forced to abandon everyone and everything I've ever known and move to what may as well be a different country to retire in lonely misery but at least not abject poverty. I'm not having kids, partly because the woman I want to be my wife doesn't want them, partly because even between the two of us we can't afford even a fucking 2br apartment without it destroying any ability to save for retirement or a real house so we can't get married or raise a family if we wanted to, and partly -- or I guess consequentially -- because if I did have kids, they'd probably end up in the kind of statistics this article is about.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You didn't offer up any of the things California is supposedly "reaping" from Republicans ether. Given that he's posting with a real name and seems to know a lot more than you about who runs California, I judge him the winner, and you a loser in perpetuity.
I'll let you have the last response since you'll just babble on without real content anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not when you don't have much to move.
When I started my first job, I moved hundreds of miles from a small Oklahoma town to Houston, with everything I owned inside my small, old car. I had no furniture but a card table and a few folding chairs. I slept on an inflatable air mattress that leaked. Because I found a job (something that's never been hard to do in Houston), I could afford basic rent for a small apartment. I had no savings and no liquid funds, just a willingness to work, and a willingness to move where there were jobs to be had.
Recently, my 21-year-old son moved out into his first apartment, also using his own money, of which he didn't have much. He too had only an old car, some hand-me-down furniture, and a willingness to work.
No, it doesn't have to cost thousands to move, even a long distance. It only costs that much when you have a lot to move.
Or there are degrees of homelessnes, as there are degrees of joblessness. If you're an engineer with a PhD working part time as a janitor, you will be counted on U6 unemployment stats because you are taking a shit job outside of your career field.
If you have to sleep on your friends floor while your kids crowd onto the couch because your other choice is waiting in line at a shelter, you might consider your family to be home-less as well.
What kind of retarded shit can't afford a $200K mortgage on $50K/year?
Close to 45% of US citizens do not pay federal or state income taxes. Instead they get yearly refunds that cover any federal or state taxes deducted from their pay check. And paying taxes does not mean you get a line item veto on the government budgets.
The kind of retarded shit that also pays 40% more for everything else they have to buy. $200k on $50k in Ohio? Sure, no problem. In the Bay area? No can do.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
If they were renting, then they purchased a temporary right to live there. Even if the rent didn't go up, the owners have a right to kick them out and move in themselves. The only people who can claim a permanent right to live there are the Native Americans (who truly were there first).
My dad's family lived in a SoCal chicken coop when he was very young. His father was employed digging potatoes.
Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in chicken coop! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us!
"More Than One-Third of Schoolchildren Are Homeless In Shadow of Silicon Valley"
Since only 1.3% of the school children in the country live in Silicon Valley, I guess you could technically argue the other 98.7% are homeless there.
Buying a house is cheaper than you think. I don't know your exact situation, but let's just say you're in East Palo Alto.
A 3 bed, 2 bath house in East Palo Alto is $3000 / month minimum to rent, with higher ones at $4000 / month. But it's only $650,000-$800,000 to buy. If you pay 20% down and the interest is 4%, the mortgage payment is only $2500-$3000 / month. Now if you're willing to squeeze a bit and rent out one room for $800 / month let's say, your own cost would only be $1700-2200, cheaper than renting even a 2 bedroom apartment.
Of course, this only makes sense if you really love the place and wants to live there for a long time, but that sounds like the case to me.
Close to 45% of US citizens do not pay federal or state income taxes.
About 40% of households do not pay income tax. But they do pay sales tax, excise tax (on gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol), social security taxes, medicare taxes, etc.
The only problem with your story is that if it is true, you know that the tropes of having a can-do attitude and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps are bullshit, because you lived it first hand.
And how long did you have to live in that car before finding a job and saving up money for first months rent plus deposit? Did you have to add on extra time to pay off a previous landlord before a new one would rent to you?
And how did that willingness work out for you when your car broke down and you had a choice between fixing it (to keep your job), making next months rent, or visiting a payday loan shark to make rent and hope you were able to pay them back. Because being working poor means trying to climb out of a dick pit but the ladder is also made of dicks. Which you would know first hand if it happened to you.
Pretty sure that increased housing prices are an inevitable consequence of economic success. More people with jobs making more money are willing to pay more for their homes and anyone who doesn't keep up has to settle for less desirable living conditions.
And California (at least, the parts that we're talking about, with housing crunches) has been spectacularly successful economically since "those liberals" took over.
Did you hear that California if considered by itself would be the 7th largest economy in the world?
People here in SV are just going to have to accept a different standard of housing than they think they are entitled to. I know I have done so.
A full 3bd 2ba house may be $3000-4000 to rent, but the cheapest possible rent (say a bedroom in someone else's house) is way less than that, like 15-20% of it. There are no buy options comparable to the low end of rent options, so if you can't afford the high end rent options, you can't afford to buy either.
And as $3000/mo is basically my entire take-home income, and more than half of Americans make less than half of what I make), most people can't afford those high-end rent options, or consequently a mortgage. And with almost all of that as interest initially, it makes much more financial sense to keep renting the land my trailer is on for a sixth of that until I can put enough down that the interest portion of the subsequent mortgage is less than my rent. Which means saving and saving for decades before I can start buying.
Even just saving up for that 20% down payment is about a decade's savings. Starting in your early 30s when your career really starts to take off enough to even contemplate it, then saving for a decade, then taking on a 30 year mortgage that will drain every last drop of your income assuming you can keep that kind of income up without interruption and don't lose it all in a foreclosure somewhere along the way, means you end up in your early 70s just finishing paying off a house and now finally, in your 70s, able to put money toward something else like, say, the retirement you're already half a decade late to.
And if I was happy living with strangers (like renting a room out would be, not like sharing the house with my wife), I'd have continued to rent a bedroom in someone else's house for myself, which was by far the cheapest option as far as not throwing away money on rent and interest goes, but meant putting up with a bunch of other fuck heads I couldn't get rid of out of financial necessity. Most of the point of owning my own home is for it to be my home; a space that's not anyone else's. With this trailer I finally have most of that as far as privacy goes (living on shared land so close to other people still isn't great, but inside my front door it's all my space), but being on rented land I still have almost none of it as far as security goes; I own basically a large vehicle that looks like a house, and I still have to pay someone else to park it at their place, at their pleasure, on their terms.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
An army, navy, marines, air force
How do I benefit from my government spending $600B on these?
How did I benefit from America's participation in the Iraq War?
Or the Vietnam War?
Would I benefit less if we only spent as much on weapons as the next 10 countries combined rather than the next 20?
Link here:
http://reason.com/archives/2016/10/01/yes-in-my-backyard
The ratio of new jobs to new building permits is 8:1.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I find it hard to believe with number of illegal immigrants crossing the border looking for jobs. I doubt they have sizable amount of liquid funds at their disposal.
$800,000 loan with 20% down would be closer to $4000/mo once you add property tax, insurance, maintenance, and repairs. Of course, you'll save a fair amount on income taxes as long as you're itemizing, which most CA homeowners do given the higher state income tax which is federally deductible.
Don't have a car?
I don't, but I still have stuff delivered, which comes along roads, and I still buy things in shops, which are stocked by vehicles driven on roads.
Don't have lawsuits?
Nope, but I still benefit in many ways from living in a society governed by the rule of law.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Strict definition homelessness:
Lacking basic shelter one can claim as recurring occupancy; sleeping outdoors or in temporary accommodation provided as a charity on a daily or weekly basis; living in a vehicle or structure lacking running water or bathroom facilities. I think fewer people meet this definition.
Non-normative homelessness: Having recurring but possibly unstable occupancy in a dwelling but in a manner not meeting normative standards for living arrangements associated with your demographic in your society. I would throw a family of 3+ people sharing a single room with bathroom facilities shared by unrelated people as meeting this kind of criteria of homelessness in the United States and would suspect it is a larger number than strict homelessness listed above.
There's all kinds of ways to define homelessness, but I would call single families sharing a room in a house designed for single family occupancy to be at least substandard if not a kind of homelessness since its clearly not desirable to them. I can't think of any family who lives in a house or typical apartment who would choose to share a typical 2000 sq ft house with other families.
I do think some of the subtext of this discussion is kind of disturbing -- "they're not suffering enough to be called homeless" or "they're making stupid decisions and deserve this outcome".
20% of $650,000 is $130,000. If you have that much spare cash lying around, you don't count as poor by most metrics.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
All of which benefit the society you live in, whether you use them personally or not.
Just because they benefit everyone doesn't mean funding them with general tax revenue is the best way. Roads should be funded with gasoline excise taxes and registration fees, not general taxes. That way the people that use them directly pay directly, and the people that use them indirectly pay for them through the prices of the goods and services they use. Under our current system, people that use few infrastructure resources are subsidizing those that use more, and the latter group tend to be richer than the former.
Much of the judicial system could be privatized. Arbitration is much cheaper, and mediation is cheaper still. Both have higher satisfaction rates from both plaintiffs and defendants.
Many airports are privately owned and operated. Prior to 9/11, security was also privatized. The TSA more than doubled the cost, without measurably improving security.
All right... all right...
But apart from paved roads and judges in courthouses and airports and bridges and fire department and army and navy and marines and air force and coast guard and a county hospital and sewers and clean water and the EPA and national, state, and local parks... What has the government done for us?
I think you're wrong. I think most people believe that at the end of tax season, if you get a refund that somehow it means you didn't pay taxes. What that often times means is that you paid too much in taxes. I'm a very generous person. So, indeed, if you give 50% of your earnings away to charity, you'd think that maybe you get achieve this "no tax" sort of status, but actually the government restricts the benefit so that you can't just "give it all away" and reap some outrageous deduction benefit (those who are highly charitable know this to be true). The goal at the end of a tax year to to either get nothing back from the government or pay very little to them. If you get a huge refund back it's because you gave the government too much and while it might seem nice to get the money back, it's without interest (well, somebody got the interest and it wasn't you). The tax code is huge. And its so huge because it tries to make sure that loop holes or some "secret" way isn't present. Not saying their isn't some kind of "magic" way to avoid paying taxes, but could be a very very very small probability. With that said, if you are reading this and if you are above the "line" where you have to pay taxes (essentially you are above low poverty levels), please feel free to let us all know how you avoid paying taxes.
I feel it is first important to establish I'm a Northern Californian liberal. While I'm from North of SF what's happening in Silicon Valley is effecting where I live and causing the same problems, albeit on a lesser scale. I also agree with many posters that the parent article is stupid in it's framing of people as homeless who are not.
With that said, I am so sick and tired of our Left wing leadership wanting to "perserve our communities". The scenarios described in the article arent acceptable even if they arent describing true homelessness as they are literally describing suburban ghettos. Working people suffer so property owners can enjoy some bygone fantasy of a community that now only serves the needs of the afluent. Silicon Valley should be all skyscrapers (thus increasing housing availability and reducing costs for potential home owners or renters) and it is only people who could care less about the working class that want to "perserve" an environment that is no longer sustainable without the oppression of those who sell them their food. With property values what they are erecting a 30 story building on any city block within 50 miles of Google or Apple headquarters would be massively profitable for the developer and if done in a widespread manner, would make housing far more affordable for all. It's only bullshit city planning that is standing in the way of solving the less afluents problems in these areas.
The Left failed to deliver for the Rust Belt and we got Trump. Heaven help us if California goes that direction and with our bullshit leadership it just might.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
The kind of retarded shit that also pays 40% more for everything else they have to buy. $200k on $50k in Ohio?
That is not true. I live in Silicon Valley (San Jose). Housing is hecka expensive here. But everything else costs about the same here as it does anywhere else. The grocery prices in San Jose are no higher than they are in Gilroy or Tracy.
If you can keep your housing cost down, you can save up a ton of money here. When I first moved here, I lived out of my van for two years, and save enough for a down payment. Plenty of other people rent a place and bunk two or four to a room while they build their nest egg. That is no worse than living in a college dorm or a military barracks. The house next door to me has 16 Filipinos living in it. It is absurd to call these people "homeless".
I wonder how I've been able to do it half a dozen times with little more than the cost of gas..
Yup. I have lived in seven states and three countries. The trick is to simplify your life, and get rid of junk you don't need, especially big bulky stuff like furniture. Buy it second hand and sell it on Craigslist before your next move.
And how long did you have to live in that car before finding a job and saving up money for first months rent plus deposit?
Here are two tricks:
1. Rather than move to some random location, move to someplace where anyone will a pulse can get a job. There are plenty of cities with unemployment below 3%, and every shop has a "help wanted" sign.
2. Get a car that is comfortable to sleep in. I recommend either a van or a pickup with a camper top. I have a minivan, and it can comfortably sleep two people with no problem.
... end up homeless like these families.
These families are NOT homeless. They are living with a lot of people per room. When I was a kid, I slept in a room with two bunk beds and a crib. It was me and four siblings. Was I "homeless"?
I live in San Jose, and the house next to mine has 16 Filipinos living in 4 bedrooms. You may consider that crowded, but they seem happy. They have a BBQ every weekend. They laugh and sing. The kids are always smiling, and are doing well in school. I know because they are my kid's classmates. They don't have any of the problems that actual homeless people have. Sleeping in a bunk bed is a hundred times better than sleeping on a sidewalk, and equating the two is absurd.
How did you benefit from not being on the losing side in WWII or WWI or the Civil War or The War of Independence.
Well, I used to live in Tennessee, so I was on the losing side of the Civil War. As for the others, none of them were preceded by high military spending. Yet we won anyway.
It seems to me that high military spending makes starting wars easy, since you already have the soldiers and weapons ready, so we do it more often, almost always with negative consequences. I don't see how I benefit from that.
Perhaps you will enjoy being a Muslim after the next WW, Sunni or Shia?
How did our meddling in Iraq make that outcome less likely?
" I lost my suspicions with that history professor's stunned silence."
Liar.
Oh, were you in the classroom with me? I doubt it.
You may have a point with the existence of public schools prior to WWII but there is no doubt that UK built more schools, extended the years that children had to attend, and imposed greater central controls on schools after the war.
Of greater importance is that the public schools will give great praise to "our" schools but those "other" schools are bad, even though there are much more similarities than differences. Even in a free nation the desire to use public schools as a means to spread propaganda is always present. You can call private schools a failure all you like but they inevitably excel over public schools. The reason is simple, private schools must compete for students while public schools do not.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The Microsoft Network. 'nuff said.
Renting from whom? People who were there before them? That would make them not the first people there.
So are you suggesting that silicon valley be returned to the Native Americans?
Perhaps, given the USA isn't (yet) a war torn, second/third world country, those in San Francisco can hope for something better than people fleeing Aleppo. Or does that have the whiff of pinko communism about it?
You would think that of all businesses, high tech software might enable its workers to work remotely from another part of the country, and sidestep the inevitable housing price bubbles.
I work in a Pacifica intermediate school about 50 minutes away from Palo Alto. For the entire San Francisco Bay area houses have been selling for $200,000 dollars over asking, and there is reported to be a growth in the supply of "high end" San Francisco apartments. The janitor and two of the ladies I work with have all moved 20, 25 and 30 miles away from their $20 dollar an hour jobs with sort of affordable health care. My 23 year old son is living at home and commuting 40+ miles to college. The class I work in is very small but one student has missed 2 weeks as the parents moved twice after November 30th.
The thing that puzzles me is what is the economy of scale that forces tech firms like Google and Apple to all pile into one small geographic area and bid aggressively for the freshly educated with specialized resumes?
Some of these firms use commuter buses to allow their employees to live in various towns on the San Francisco Peninsula. Firms like Apple and Google have central campuses. These firms are reported to have a huge inward cash flow. One of the outward local cash flows are employee wages and bonuses and new employee payments to move new employees into the Bay Area. Is this enough to drive the Bay area real estate market into very high rents, very high prices and very aggressive construction of high end housing to the detriment of low end rents and housing?
Diseconomy one: Longer drives for high expertise people as their expertise and experience make them the high pay first choice for boards of directors who want to save their challenged organization..
Diseconomy two: More kids of baby boomer families driving long distances to college due to college apartment rent increases.
Diseconomy three: More miles per driver and more drivers on the road resulting in widespread congestion.
Diseconomy four: People cannot move between homes because real estate fix-up and resell businessmen buy the used property, do repairs and resell for top dollar. The result is every house on the market is "newly remodelled and pristine in and out" for about $200,000 more.
One diseconomy happening is more and more people are driving longer commutes. There is a group of high expertise people. Their increasing experience and expertise results in high pay but the next organization that can afford their expertise is further away. An example is my wife. Sixteen years ago my wife, was a specialized non profit executive director and she started with a 12 mile commute to San Mateo. The next job was 35 miles to Berkeley, the next job after that is 45 to 55 miles.
Another diseconomy is the kids of the baby boomers now own a car and frequently drive. My son can't handle $1000 per month for a bed in a shared house. So he will try to drive 42 miles from home to college and a late night food job.
On the story of kids being homeless. I know definitely one student whose family has moved 5 or 6 times in the last few years. For other kids, easily 30% or 40% the home or apartment is a fragile relationship and the families are hanging on. Like for myself, just a little crack in the economic continuity and we would be in free fall. Out of town. Out of sight. A lifetime become carloads of stuff taken to the dump. Brave brave new world.
Your analysis would be beautiful, except that in reality, those who silicon valley and who claim to care the most about people, really don't. As a whole, you give very little to charity, minimize tax personal tax burden, and are very, very comfortable with the notion that your special snowflake tech jobs DESERVE 3x more pay than those who serve others. The corporations of silicon valley are notorious for talking the talk about social justice, but then surprisingly absent when it comes time to pay for it. I am looking at your Apple and Google.
So, I bet that you are very supportive about measures that address income inequality....just so long as it does not personally affect you. So, can you please cut the bullshit, SJW crap about how much you care. By all measures you don't. Having a "bad" feeling is nowhere near the same as actually doing something. Please, grow up or shut up.
Btw: Here is my supporting evidence.
Bay Area near bottom of nation charitable giving from SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/business...
Silicon Valley does not social give: http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2...
Lastly, there are numerous of these showing that conservatives are far more generous than liberals: https://www.rt.com/usa/193952-...
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Hmm, I'm in Europe. My home town was bombed many times in WWII, the church had to be partly rebuild I believe pretty much everything else is newer.
So it all depends. :-)
New things are always on the horizon
Strange, but true, the keyword was in parentheses.
New things are always on the horizon
Now try doing that not alone but with a wife and kids. Because that is the situation we are really talking about here.
New things are always on the horizon
You'd have to be a 100% self sufficient, off-the-grid individual born immaculately on land never touched by man to claim that tax-funded roads haven't benefitted you, the non taxpayer.
If you think voting is futile guess you were unconscious the last year.
What in the hell is "tony Palo Alto"?
Yes, I looked up the word and it's the first time in my 63 years that I ever heard of it. Is it a west coast thing?
Sounds absolutely silly if you ask me.
Note: this also assumes you're single and have no kids.
If you're two engineers without children - sure, you can afford to save that and buy. But remember - you still have that expensive morgage to pay off, even in an economic downtown. With rent you can at least move. With a morgage, you have to sell, and .. let's just say, being saddled with a black mark for needing to default on your home sucks.
If you're two engineers with children - then childcare per child from 0 -> K(indergarden) is spendy - $1400 a month upwards per child. At some point you think sure, I'll just get a nanny for two kids - but $3600 a month isn't a lot of money to be paying legit to someone who also lives local - if your rent is $3k a month, then anyone local is likely also paying that. So, finding affordable help is hard. So - one parent is effectively working full-time to subsidize childcare - why not just stay home instead?
If you're a single parent raising a child, then you get the above and no financial safety net.
Stuff is expensive out here. Raising that much cash is expensive out here. Holding a $600k or more morgage when the economy tanks - that's also an expensive lesson to learn.
In the land of $4500 a month rent for a crackhouse that is currently on fire what do they expect? People are living in VANS in the office parking lot.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A service job will not cover the cost of a home, daily travel, school, food, medical ... anywhere.
FTFY
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The original point was that the user had not received any federal benefits. The counterpoint was that he had (highways, judges, military protection, the internet). Your point addresses a point that nobody made.
Regarding the internet being invented faster, my understanding is that these prohibitions you're talking about were based on who could use arpanet. They did not prohibit companies from building their own data networks.
Regarding ISS benefits see https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def... . They're not going to list two benefits I think we have from ISS: They give (some of) us hope for the future, and it brings us closer to spreading our civilization to other planets some day.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
libertarians don't believe in those things.
they are the epitome of the "freedumb" loving conservative:
Joe Conservative wakes up in the morning and goes to the bathroom. He flushes his toilet and brushes his teeth, mindful that each flush & brush costs him about 43 cents to his privatized water provider. His wacky, liberal neighbor keeps badgering the company to disclose how clean and safe their water is, but no one ever finds out. Just to be safe, Joe Conservative boils his drinking water.
Joe steps outside and coughs–the pollution is especially bad today, but the smokiest cars are the cheapest ones, so everyone buys ‘em. Joe Conservative checks to make sure he has enough toll money for the 3 different private roads he must drive to work. There is no public transportation, so traffic is backed up and his 10 mile commute takes an hour.
On the way, he drops his 12 year old daughter off at the clothing factory she works at. Paying for kids to go to private school until they’re 18 is a luxury, and Joe needs the extra income coming in. Times are hard and there’re no social safety nets.
He gets to work 5 minutes late and misses the call for Christian prayer, and is immediately docked by his employer. He is not feeling well today, but has no health insurance, since neither his employer nor his government provide it, and paying for it himself is really expensive, since he has a precondition. He just hopes for the best.
Joe’s workday is 12 hours long, because there is no regulation over working hours, and Joe will lose his job if he complains or unionizes. Today is an especially bad day. Joe’s manager demands that he work until midnight, a 16 hour day. Joe does, knowing that he’ll lose his job if he does not.
Finally, after midnight, Joe gets to pick up his daughter and go home. His daughter shows him the deep cut she got on the industrial sewing machine today. Joe is outraged and asks why she doesn’t have metal mesh gloves or other protection. She says the company will not provide it and she’ll have to pay for it out of her own pocket. Joe looks at the wound and decides they’ll use an over the counter disinfectant and bandages until it heals. She’ll have a scar, but getting stitches at the emergency room is expensive.
His daughter also complains that the manager made suggestive overtures towards her. Joe counsels her to be a “good girl” and not rock the boat, or she’ll get fired and they’ll be out the income.
His daughter says she can’t wait until she’s 18 so she can vote for change or go to the Iraq War.
They get home and there’s a message from his elderly father who can’t afford to pay his medical or heating bills. Joe can hear him coughing and shivering.
Joe turns on the radio and the top story is a proposal in Congress to raise the voting age to 25. A rare liberal opinionator states that it’s an attempt to keep power out of the hands of working class Americans. The conservative host immediately quashes him, calling him “a utopian idealist,” and agreeing that people aren’t mature enough to make good choices until they’re at least 25.
Joe chuckles at the wine-swilling, cheese eating liberal egghead and thinks, “Thank God I live in America where I have freedom!”
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The counterclaim to the argument that use taxes on networks (like highways) will be passed on to those that indirectly benefit is that the indirect benefits are not just based on getting goods to markets.
Roads are used to get to hospitals, schools, and the like, which means you're now heavily taxing investment behavior (not ideal).
Roads are used to help reduce food insecurity by making it cheaper to get access to food and to distribute a variety around to various places. Lower food insecurity in a population has indirect benefits for everyone. Less crime tops the list. How is a use tax passed on to the safer citizen? Not to mention that social investment in individuals tends to bear fruit that everyone eats. Your teachers might be happier and teach your kids better, your neighbors might invent more, your doctors might save more lives, your service workers might give better service, etc. In each of these cases, use taxes will not necessarily be passed onto you.
Consumption taxes are naturally anti-progressive, in the sense that they hit the poorest the hardest since the wealthier you are the less your income tends to be used for consumption. This results in widening inequality, as the gravity well of poverty gets suckier. Dramatic inequality of wealth is widely regarded as a social ill by economists and sociologists.
Our success is interconnected. You do not have to use highways or to even consume goods or services brought to you by highways in order to benefit from their existence. The wealth generating nature of them is better spread by a general income tax than by a use tax. The latter is a way to hurt the poor which in turn degrades our entire society because success is interconnected.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
I was born in Texas and I think the southern people were the real winners of the civil war because the confederacy lost.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
This same argument is being used to try to suggest all the rural people should move to cities because it's now too difficult for most people to run a small family farm and earn a reasonable income.
There's just few places left for unskilled labor to go and get reasonable jobs and housing.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
personally I'd rather get a refund than have to pay, simply because a refund has no impact on a monthly budget.
whereas a payment means having to find money not already in my budget, usually by raiding the bit of money we set aside for things like movies and games.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I sincerely hope you are not saying the Space Shuttle and ISS never resulted in anything of value.
And a big reason why things do end up being done by government is because other methods already failed to do so.
History, much as libertarians like to ignore it, is full of such examples.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Much of the judicial system could be privatized.
Congratulations.
You managed to say something even dumber than the notion that the ISS or the Space Shuttle were wastes of money.
Also, no, most major airports are not privately owned, they are either owned by the city/state, or a public/private partnership between the city/state and the airlines (or FedEx/UPS) wishing to operate there. small general aviation airports are another story, but even then they are more often owned by the county/city than privately.
And also no, security was not usually privatized, but was provided by local law enforcement, whether it be the local sheriff's department, local PD, or state troopers.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So long as they stay in school, and stay out of trouble, they can get a job, join the military, or whatever after they graduate.
Their ability to get a job after graduation depends very much on the local job market after graduation, doesn't it?
Also, the 'just join the military' argument is not nearly as strong as it used to be. None of the branches are accepting new recruits at the rates that they used to. Their ranks are bloated. I know plenty of people that were discharged before they had completed their contract because the military just doesn't need them right now. That military training really didn't necessarily ensure them a future job either. Results vary, of course, but that's true for any social statistic.
You don't. we can pick out examples ot stupid mistakes all day long.
But the counterargument to the idea that you benefit from the military is NOT the idea that we should spend less on the military.
That's a wholly separate discussion.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Those would be services, not money. Don't have a car? You still pay for roads. Don't have lawsuits? Still pay for judges. Don't fly? Still pay for airports.
Yeah, and yet you still benefit from those things. Roads allow trucks to deliver the goods you buy at the store (that you walk to). Likewise, the airports facilitate commerce that you take advantage of. You may not have a lawsuit now, but if you ever are involved in one, the courts will be there. The future is uncertain, you know. You could be sued or require restitution.
There are good services that government can provide, but that has little or no relation to the question of whether governments should be in the business of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
How do you figure? Everything requires money in this world; it's the way it's set up. So how would a state or local government provide those services without "robbing Peter to pay Paul"? I really don't get this Libertarian viewpoint that a person should be able to be an island, completely independent and paying only for what they are immediately using. We are all interconnected and cannot live independently of all others. Fire departments used to operate on a subscription basis. They don't anymore. There's a reason for that.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
the people walking out of Syria are already facing the almost certainty of death, violence, or starvation.
they do it because they have no hope otherwise.
its a desperation play that cannot be compared to the difficulty of chasing economic mobility in the US if you live below a certain income level.
to make the comparison is rank foolishness.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
When I see what people other countries are doing to get away leaving California should be trivial. People are walking out of Syria with nothing more than what they own. If life in SV is that bad, leave.
Yeah, and a lot of those walking out of Syria are going to die. Are you seriously saying the problem with poor people in Silicon Valley is that they're not as desperate as those fleeing from a war zone? Maybe we should start shooting at them and blowing up their homes. Give 'em some proper motivation!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
maybe if youre single.
not if youre married and have kids.
year round day care costs average about 14k per year until you can get them in school.
even once they are in school, you still have to deal with summer vacation, so daycare costs haven't gone away entirely (unless you do like I did, and marry a teacher whose work schedule matches your kids)
saying he should just get training is very vague and open ended too. its easy to make an absolutist statement like that when you keep it so vague.
but getting into the persons actual reality, the nitty gritty of his situation might show you why that's not actually possible for him, or a great many people.
and as for "life"....past a certain point, yeah you pretty much are going to be doing it for life. agism is real, and not entirely unfounded, especially in the lower income working class type jobs. unless the company is new and rapidly growing, they cant afford to move everyone into the office as they get older. there has to be a winnowing of people as they move up the chain. cant bump every private up to sergeant major. and as you age you cant lift as much, you cant move as fast, plus the toll those jobs take on your body even without age as a factor. retraining gets exponentially harder the older you get, and you cost your company more in terms of medical/insurance costs, days off for doctor visits, etc, too.
yes, theres lot of cheap ass houses around the country.
that doesn't mean there's jobs there for you.
you seriously show a real disconnect from the reality many people face, and think because you made it, anyone can.
but reality is that everyones situation is different.
we all face different challenges, and not all are overcome so easily as just saying "just move and retrain".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
No he's not wrong, remember the controversy when Romney was illegally taped saying the same thing at a fund raiser? 45% of Americans pay no federal income taxes, and for the most part if you pay no Federal, you likely pay little or no State income tax as well.
The tax codes have become insanely complicated, mostly due to the codes being used for a social engineering carrot and stick, and if this doesn't get fixed, things will get ugly and it will be uglyist for those on unearned entitlements.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Exactly. ...where you have to plan on sleeping in your car to get started in a new place, when youre young and single.
And then these libertarian idiots try to tell us that Europe is a socialist hellhole, and America is better....
and if you aren't, you can forget it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
you are not describing a poor person or working class individual but someone in the top 10% of earners or close to it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So, indeed, if you give 50% of your earnings away to charity, you'd think that maybe you get achieve this "no tax" sort of status, but actually the government restricts the benefit so that you can't just "give it all away" and reap some outrageous deduction benefit (those who are highly charitable know this to be true).
What charitable giving does is simply reduce your income -- at best. If you make $100,000 and give $40,000 away, then you pay taxes as though you had only made $60,000. This doesn't allow you erase your tax liability, it just means that you pay the same taxes as someone who made $60,000.
There are some limits. In general, you can only deduct charitable contributions up to 50% of your income. If you make $100K and donate $60K, only $50K of the donation counts. So you have $40K left after your donation but pay taxes on $50K. Also, there are some charitable institutions which have a 30% limit. There are some other limits if your giving is in the form of property with long-term capital gains.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In states that have sales tax. Which is not all of them.
Wait, wait, what? 50k buy a house in the US? For real?
Fuck, life's cheap across the pond!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, ya know, people from Aleppo didn't really start hitch-hiking across continents before their houses were returned to rubble either...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pretty sure that increased housing prices are an inevitable consequence of economic success. More people with jobs making more money are willing to pay more for their homes and anyone who doesn't keep up has to settle for less desirable living conditions.
Well, I wouldn't say that your reasoning follows a good track, as it defines economic success as spiraling upwards for some, but treats others in a manner that is a bit condemnatory when it does not lift them. There is a difference between not keeping up, and being kept down. Which is the implication being made with the assertions of liberal housing policies. That there are people being kept down instead of uplifted.
Unfortunately, the real question is...what liberal housing policies?
And California (at least, the parts that we're talking about, with housing crunches) has been spectacularly successful economically since "those liberals" took over.
Did you hear that California if considered by itself would be the 7th largest economy in the world?
Well, there are certainly people who look down upon and condemn California unfairly, but I'm not one of them, so this is a different discussion, making this point less contributory.
People here in SV are just going to have to accept a different standard of housing than they think they are entitled to. I know I have done so.
I think you're confusing the issue with something else. This isn't about what people think they are entitled to or not, this is about alleged "liberal housing policies" none of which have been identified.
Whether or not people should accept anything or not, is a question with many answers, but it is not quite what I was trying to discuss here. We'd have to start on a different foundation for that.
Sorry if I seem dismissive, I think you have some much more interesting thoughts than other contributors to the thread here, but it's still getting away from what I was saying, and it's important to recognize that.
I thought conventional wisdom capped the mortgage at 2-2.5 times salary? On $50k, they shouldn't have a mortgage greater than $100k or $125k. Someone realizing that their limit is $125k and not stretching to $200k and bankrupting themselves seems pretty sensible to me.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
That's not including taxes, closing costs, etc. There also aren't many working poor families I'm aware of that can swing a credit score on a jumbo, nor even a small percentage of a down payment required for a property like that. Worse, now the bank own's their ass if they somehow can't make the payment, which can include long term garnishment, 7 years of even worse credit, so on and so forth.
None of that is cheap, especially for a family that's living paycheck to paycheck.
~X~
I've never received a single dollar from the government. I just pay, pay, pay my taxes. Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever gets better.
Is that you Bob? You sound just like my buddy Bob. Nice guy, tea partier, hates the guvmint with a passion. He's never gotten a dollar from the guvmint either.
Enlisted in the army, stayed 4 years
Went to college on GI Bill
Has all his medical bills taken care of
Worked for the guvmint for 30 years
Retired and collecting Social Security.
I don't begrudge him any of it, but its kind of a stretch to say he never took a cent of tax money.
Way too many people seem to think that all of the stuff around them just somehow happens, that if no one paid taxes, everything would be kept up some how.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I've never received a single dollar from the government.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...you've never received any benefit, except for stuff like a standing army, the FDA, the EPA, clean, drinkable water coming from every faucet, 24-hour emergency rooms, fully-staffed hospitals waiting to give you life-saving care, fire departments, child-abuse investigators, controls on what toxic chemicals can be poured into your drinking water, a national highway system, social services, drug treatment centers, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, community colleges, public schools, water and sewer systems, parks and recreation services, food inspection, electrical utilities, gas service, a National School Lunch Program, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, foster care services, School Breakfast Programs, State Children's Insurance Programs, Unemployment insurance, Worker's Comp, Senior Community Service Employment Programs, street lights, mass transit, zoning, planning, building permits and inspection, housing and development programs, road maintenance, the State Board of Health, building inspections, building and fire codes, disaster relief, FEMA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the FBI, flood mitigation, pollution inspections, drug treatment centers, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the Library of Congress, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and on and on and on.
Aside from all that stuff and more, you've never received a single dollar from the government!
Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever gets better.
Yeah, none of that stuff makes anything better. You fucking hypocrite.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Close to 45% of US citizens do not pay federal or state income taxes.
Because most of those people don't work. They're retired, they're students, they're disabled, they're infants, etc.
But hey, don't let any fucking FACTS get in the way of your "everyone but me is a free loader" rant!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Close to 45% of US citizens do not pay federal or state income taxes.
You mean citizens like Donald Trump?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The tax codes have become insanely complicated, mostly due to the codes being used for a social engineering carrot and stick, and if this doesn't get fixed, things will get ugly and it will be uglyist for those on unearned entitlements.
Wait - you mean the lazy shiftless poor, or do you mean the job creators who depend on their employees collecting social benefits from the government to enhance their service of the stockholders?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Actually having an RV is nothing like having a home, as it is illegal to camp in your RV just anywhere outside of a campground, plus the lack of running water and basic sanitation (how long is your black water tank going to last before it's full, not like you can legally dump that anywhere). This means the police can force you to move when ever they want and nothing is there to stop them from confiscating your RV if they find you to be a nuisance.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Sure there are RV's that are palaces. They cost about the same as a palace too. Those are not the RV's homeless people would have.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
$50K can go a long ways in most of the "Fly-Over" states, you can get a nice double-wide, a heated pole barn garage that you can actually entertain a serious hobby in while still being able to park 3 cars, on 2 acres of land in the $75 - $150K range. Top it off with property taxes in the $2K range, your effective wealth may go up, especially if the Wife adds in another $35-45K.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Moving someplace new generally requires a sizable amount of liquid funds to cover moving expenses, deposits, etc., not to mention the costs associated with finding a new job to go to. The working poor don't often have that kind of money on hand to spend.
Exactly. And I would actually happily support using some of my tax money to subsidize these economic prisoners moving to more sane markets. I'd much rather do that than subsidize their housing, which just makes the problem worse. If all of the people doing those low-paying jobs suddenly are able to leave, it will reduce housing pressure, lower prices, and also force those jobs to actually pay a living wage to get people to stay and do them.
personally I'd rather get a refund than have to pay, simply because a refund has no impact on a monthly budget.
I prefer to break even. I typically owe federal income taxes but get a small tax refund from the state. So I file my state tax return first, wait for the refund, and then file my federal tax return with a check.
They are living with others, sharing homes that isolated Americans would try to make work with only one or two adults.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
People with money can barely afford to live there, so what chance do they have?
I live and work in Silicon Valley on $50K per year by living a modest lifestyle. If you want to live the American Dream of having it all and keeping up with the Joneses, Silicon Valley can get expensive in a hurry.
If you cannot afford to raise your child, THEN STOP HAVING CHILDREN. Yeah, won't prevent them all, yes something might have caused them to be "homeless" but, you know good and well that some people, have children because the women won't keep their legs together, and the men are horndogs. (hope by including BOTH sexes, the "women's rights" types won't be completely offended, not that I care)
Based on the logic of the parent's assertion that having income tax deducted from your paycheck means that you, yourself, are not paying taxes, the answer to your question is simple: hire an accountant to pay your taxes for you.
No they weren't. If they were there first, they would've owned the houses they live in, and the rising property price would be a good thing.
My brother bought an $800,000 house in a new development at the top of the real estate market in Morgan Hill, and borrowed the down payment from his wife's 401K plan. The Great Recession came and went. His mortgage is still underwater. He can't refinance or afford to sell at a loss. Home values aren't rising fast enough for him to retire anytime soon.
And what is the country's reaction? They put a multimillionaire into the White House who plants other multimillionaires into cabinet positions for the sole purpose of this group to change laws and regulations so that they and their cronies can make more millions. Is anyone still so naive to think that these children will get proper housing, their parents find jobs that generate an income that secures their outcome, and that the rich stop getting richer while the poor get prison (with more and more prisons under private operation generating millions for companies there is a necessity to generate need for more convicts). And for good measure, lets remove any and all restrictions on guns so that the rich can make sure things go their way. Don't like any of that? Well, you got your chance in November and you all blew it.
When most people hear the word 'homeless' they imagine people living outdoors, maybe spending some nights in homeless shelters, but the majority of 'homeless' children described in this report have home to return to, they are just sharing their home with another family...
Is a 30 year-old living in his parents house 'homeless'? By the standards of this report the answer is 'yes', but to most people the answer is 'no'.
Ken
Don't worry about it, with the punitive business climate in California, your job is moving to Austin any time now anyway.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'm sorry you feel this way about libertarianism, and, to an extent, there is truth in some of these accusations. We are not all alike, though. The core of libertarianism is limited government. We stand against things like the war on drugs, which is one of the most racist and wasteful policies in America. We believe in equal justice for everyone. We are generally not in favor of trying to police the world, starting unnecessary conflicts. We believe everyone who wants to work should be able to work, and that wage levels should not be set so high that the uneducated are unable to find employment. TLDR; at least some libertarian ideals are good.
No, you are wrong, more than 45% of federal income tax filers either pay zero taxes or receive refunds in excess of all monies withheld during the tax year. Low income workers with numerous dependents can actually profit from the tax code, getting back not only every penny paid in, but even more besides.
Ken
Built in 1855? I know for a fact now that you are one of the most knee jerk ignorant fucksticks around here
Yeah who in there right mind would want a place that could qualify as a historical landmark tax break!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
He didn't claim that.
He claimed the price should be worked into the goods delivered.
I think there's a valid point to funding roads with some type of tax based on driving, it's also a large part of how it's done.
Long commutes have external costs that society carries as a whole, a reasonable thing to tax. So to car vacations.
I'm not for private roads, but I'm very much for them being almost totally funded by usage tax.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
... and yet those people also receive EITC, which is an income tax "refund" on money they never paid in taxes - IOW, a direct transfer of wealth. It was supposedly meant to cover SS taxes.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The problem with your argument is that the wealthiest people do pay more in taxes - way more, just less as a percentage of their incomes. It's true that sometimes people pay themselves like a dollar a year from their corporations because we tax income and not wealth. But even people making high six figures or seven figures are paying huge amounts of the taxes, and you don't save anything by donating because you just don't pay tax on the amount you donated - you never come out ahead. People don't understand what a "deduction" is or does.
But it's true - most people don't understand the difference between their tax burden and the amount they need to pay or receive as a refund.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
What if my X chromosome traces back to Neanderthal? I'm a descendent of Homosapien rape on my greatest of grandmas!
Why can't it be both?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It is like a steakhouse where each item on the plate is a separate food, and saying "Steak is only 5% of the food we sell". No, you sell steak, and everything else on the plate is part of the Steak Dinner. They aren't there for the Mash Potatoes or the Ice Tea you're drinking.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Indeed. Walmart and Target are probably the biggest welfare queens in the world.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's two problems here. One is that the figure is not for "citizens" but "households." The second is that all those people you mentioned - most of them have incomes and file tax returns. Retired people still pay income taxes on their pensions and retirement plans (with some exceptions, but those are usually in conjunction with sources of income they do pay taxes on, like a combination of 401k and Roth IRA). They still need to file. So if you read up in the thread a little, it's households filing tax returns - 40% of them aren't paying taxes. Add another 5% for people not filing tax returns at all... that's the percentage you're ranting about.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
No they weren't. If they were there first, they would've owned the houses they live in, and the rising property price would be a good thing.
How's that workin' out out for ya, Tonto?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I was homeless when I went to college.
I lived with 12 guys in a five-bedroom Victorian house when I was in college. Rent was cheap at $200 per person. But everyone had to pay $500 in unclaimed long distance phone calls every month. It worked out quite well until the city decided that three garbage cans per household was enough when we put seven trash cans. No one wanted to pay for dumpster service. We had 300+ people at our moving out party. Good times!
The only people who can claim a permanent right to live there are the Native Americans (who truly were there first).
You say that like there was only one group of "Native Americans" and they were always sitting around the campfire withe their neighbors every night.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
How do you figure? Everything requires money in this world; it's the way it's set up. So how would a state or local government provide those services without "robbing Peter to pay Paul"? I really don't get this Libertarian viewpoint that a person should be able to be an island, completely independent and paying only for what they are immediately using. We are all interconnected and cannot live independently of all others. Fire departments used to operate on a subscription basis. They don't anymore. There's a reason for that.
Because, again, that's not what the poster implied - he never received "a dollar," not he never received "any kind of benefit whatsoever."
Mock libertarians all you want - I get it, it's not practical for everything to be privatized, it's NOT practical for most roads, it's not practical for defense, it's not practical for legal protection of your rights. That makes government (and the expense therein) a necessary "evil." Those things are not what most people complain about.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Since that's not what he said, I guess it's all good.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I would say it makes sense that the media highlight problems that they believe are going to be exacerbated by a president over ones they're fairly confident will not be. In fact, the media tends to highlight problems that are likely to be changed by a president over status quo ones. It's not unreasonable, but it is why sometimes an issue lingers out of sight for a long time. Hence, one reason 'issue candidates' run on fixing them - in no small part to raise media attention/awareness of their issue.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
As long as you have access to a full hook-up, there is nothing really wrong with an RV, depending upon the circumstance. With kids, far from ideal. For one or two people (especially in an area without harsh winters), it can be just fine.
Some of us want to live in an RV once we can retire and get the kids to move out.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
As an Ohio transplant to the Bay Area, I can tell you things are certainly more expensive here than in Ohio; the two California cities you are comparing to are irrelevant. It may not be 40%, but it's not 0, either and it is a significant amount. About the only things I don't pay more for here than i did there are my phone plan (nationally priced) and car insurance; and the latter is more the result of California's annual rate reduction law, a younger friend of mine pays more than double what I was paying at his age for a similar vehicle.
The median home value in Tracy is $438,000, averaging $211 per square foot. In Fairfield, where I currently reside, it's $399,800, averaging $220/sq-ft. Cleveland? $59,900, averaging just $48/sq-ft. That roughly falls in line with what I paid for rent there vs what I pay today; I pay 3-1/3x as much rent for 5sq-ft more than I had in Cleveland.
However, I make more than 7x what I made when I lived in Cleveland, but am barely any further ahead financially as a result. If my spending habits and lifestyle haven't changed substantially (they haven't) and things aren't more expensive here, what's the explanation?
Well, I'll tell ya, since I was just back in Cleveland for a week last month and, save for the cost of the hotel room and rental car, I lived for that week, same as I live here, on what I spend on the average day here.
Yes, shit's more expensive in California, doesn't matter the city, than it is in Ohio. Now that you've made me reflect on my recent trip, I see that my 40% figure was way off; it should have been much, much higher.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
While true and sad, eminent domain seizing one little house in the middle of a whole bunch of houses (or punishment for failing to pay the comparatively trivial cost of property taxes, which if absent would have to be replaced with comparable use fees for infrastructure connectivity anyway) is much, much less of a practical threat than foreclosure for failure to pay your mortgage or eviction for failure to pay rent or just because the landlord doesn't want you there anymore.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I get the point you're making, I really do - but there's something incredibly wrong with your story about "Bob." He took a job that was very dangerous (not knowing when you'd get deployed, even in times of peace you never know what will happen), possibly for a sense of duty to his country (not his government); got underpaid for four years in return for educational benefits - i.e., he worked in a life and death job for his college money. Got a job, was forced to pay social security taxes (I hate SS - I'd rather have put all that in my own IRA instead, I'd ultimately have a lot more - and lot more to leave to my kids, but you force me to pay into and of course I will collect it).
There's this false dichotomy out there that you either love the government and think what it does is great, or you hate it. Most people claiming one or the other don't actually mean it - they mean there are parts that they love or hate, they rarely actually think the local government is all that bad (and there's a reason for it, but let's not digress). Hardcore libertarians will complain about things like roads and paying for schools, but most people (even a lot of small-l libertarians) are not like that - but they can still "hate" much of what government has done outside of the realm of basic infrastructure.
I can "hate' social security, but I will collect it after paying my whole working life into it. I could even hate publicly funded schools (I don't), but if you're forcing me to pay for it with my taxes, then yes, I will put my kids there. It's not hypocritical, it's dealing with the system you have no choice about.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
That's similar to what I experienced.... I live near Atlanta. If I wanted to live in Atlanta, in a decent area in a decent home, it'd cost too much.... simple fact. I live near Atlanta, and the cost of my home was similar to yours. And I have no HOA fees. You don't HAVE to move into a neighborhood with an HOA.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
If you pay 20% down...
...then you're not poor because you had $130,000-$160,000 laying around for a downpayment on a house.
and the interest is 4%...
...then you've already got a couple car loans and at least one mortgage, all paid off already, on your credit report and are, likely, not poor.
Most people who rent, rather than buy, already know it's roughly the same cost (factoring in upkeep and property taxes) to do either; it's typically not idiocy or ignorance that leads to them choosing to rent. Typically, it's not even a choice; I don't know anybody with enough money to put even 5% down on a house who has chosen to continue renting, but I do know a lot of people who rent, myself being one of them, given that my grandparents (and, now that they've passed, my mother) have managed properties for longer than I've been alive.
These aren't people who can just write a check for $130k, sign a few papers, and boom there's a house.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Why can't it be both?
Because people should be able to support themselves, and a person working full time should not use Government handouts.
We have had a shift in recent years, where the old higher paying jobs have been moved to other countries - leaving people who might otherwise had one of those jobs in competition for the jobs at WalMart and McDonald's. Now we can say what we want about the overpaid American worker, but soon laid off IT workers will also be competing for those jobs at minimum wage, and getting on the dole.
This is not s sustainable situation, for either the people with those jobs, the Governments, and eventually the businesses who reaped the benefits of the Government support of the business. It is one of the great mysteries of how people in favor of free market Capitalism, are communists when it benefits them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why the fuck would any poor person choose to settle in such a high priced area?
Because they were already there, and they're poor, and moving is expensive?
(2) Living in an RV is not what I consider homeless.
After my mother passed away from breast cancer, my father sold everything and bought a trailer home for $10,000. His lot rent with utilities was $400 per month. He lived there for eight years before passing away. I had no problems with his modest lifestyle and the quirky neighbors he had in the trailer park. My older brother was embarrassed that our "poor" father lived in a trailer home. That didn't stop him from driving off with the truck and leaving me stuck with the bills after the funeral.
I'm not worried about my job, I freelance. Primarily, I work for a client in Florida, on a permanent contract paying more than I could find anyone willing to pay me in the valley. It helps that I had a hand in writing the software their business runs on; it also helps that they tried several other contractors before coming back to woo me away from the company that wrote that software and all of them failed miserably, even with my hand-holding to get them up to speed. They don't want to risk dealing with another incompetent dev, so I didn't even have to ask for my current rate, it's what they offered me at the onset of the contract; if I ever need more, I'll negotiate it.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I have I earn 50K a year and I can't buy a home. not when they start at $200k for a 900 sq ft condo plus hoa fees.
And that is a 30 year old home.
I suggest you look around. get out of rural america and watch how fast prices go up. if there were jobs there I could live out there but jobs are not located in rural america.
See, this is the thing. In America, we think that we must own property to live. This is not necessarily the norm, even in developed countries.
In particular, we hold onto the idea of owning a property because we think renting is a money pit. But as a homeowner, owning a home is an expense. Whatever it might accrue in appreciation, it gets sunk in repair and maintenance. Not to mention that it is really hard to turn a home into liquid assets for you have to have money for closing costs for a sale.
There have been real cases of people that cannot sell their homes (be them by bad times or bad financial planning) because they do not have the capital to kick off and complete the selling transaction.
Owning a property is a luxury (one that I'm engaging at the cost of my cash flow, and one that I doubt its wisdom regularly), not a requirement to live a good life.
If you can rent a place of your liking for you and/or your family, sure you won't own the place, and you might lose more money in 20-30 years. But it gives you flexibility without sacrificing your savings and cash flow up front.
Owning a home should be seen as one of the many options, not as "THE ONE AND OMFG ONLY" option.
What kind of retarded shit can't afford a $200K mortgage on $50K/year?
Who would try to own a $200K home on a $50K salary? Dude, learn some personal finances. Any bank analyst would tell you that you should cap your purchase to 2.5 your salary (unless you have ample savings to make a big down payment.)
Perhaps, given the USA isn't (yet) a war torn, second/third world country, those in San Francisco can hope for something better than people fleeing Aleppo. Or does that have the whiff of pinko communism about it?
Fallacy of extremes. The point is not to wait till shit hits the fan to move. The point was to demonstrate that sometimes you need to start from near zero, and that although difficult is not impossible.
I've known of people who left family behind with relatives to trek to work in ND, sharing dinky hole in the wall with other co-workers and saving as much as possible for months or years before bringing the family in (or pulling a "Mexican" and sending money back home.)
If your situation is that dire (as for those folks in the article), the worst you can do is to stay put. Shit won't change for the better just because you stay in the same place complaining about it.
You benefit from federal spending saving Tennessee from being part of a dirt-poor agricultural slave state, like a North Mexico.
When I was a kid, I slept in a room with two bunk beds and a crib. It was me and four siblings. Was I "homeless"?
Could be, the proper term is "Homeless or sub-standard housing", it's probably a HUD term and effects community grants and such, especially if two bunk beds means two sets of bunk beds rather than 1 set of two beds, bunked.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The tax codes have become insanely complicated, mostly due to the codes being used for a social engineering carrot and stick, and if this doesn't get fixed, things will get ugly and it will be uglyist for those on unearned entitlements.
The tax codes have become insanely complicated, mostly due to the codes being adjusted to allow the rich to retain income at the expense of the common good, and abandoning progressive taxation because 'fuck you, I've got mine' is the rich's motto.
There, ftfy.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
I was under the impression that there were places where no "full hook-up" is available for miles for months at a time. For example, a campground can close for the season.
You have it backwards. The bay area is absurdly expensive. Around here, $550,000 gets you a 5 bedroom house with 4,000 sf on a multi-acre lot.
How did you benefit from not being on the losing side in WWII or WWI or the Civil War or The War of Independence.
A helluva lot of tax-payers were on the losing sides of those wars. I don't get your point.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
That capital gains taxes are so low is a sign of significant malaise, at best, casuistry in our tax argument.
Capital gains taxes being low incentivizes rent-seeking behavior, and that is not good for anyone but the rent-seeker.
It contributes *nothing* to the country as a whole, and sucks value out of the economy where it becomes static - it's not being spent - which further slows down the economy.
We call it 'currency' for a reason - it flows in currents, and when it doesn't, trust in it fades.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
then its a good thing your opinion wasnt considered in the writing of the article.
If liberalism is supposed to protect us from inequalities and poverty, why is it so prevalent and bad in a state that has been continuously run by liberals?
+1
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
Yes, most of those sound good. However, the problem with libertarianism in general is the prisoner's dilemma: any situation where the best solution requires nobody to "cheat", will always devolve into everyone "cheating" if there is no external regulation. And the sad fact is it's very common -- health care, treatment of workers, pollution, education, banking... they all fall victim to this phenomenon.
R moving into the whitehouse. So, as is tradition, 'homelessness' just became a much bigger problem.
Oh yeah, the people living in this Artist's Colony were so much better off under President
Obama and Governor Brown's more permissive leadership.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The only people who can claim a permanent right to live there are the Native Americans (who truly were there first).
WTF? Who said anyone has a permanent right to live anywhere? I think the point that was attempted before you got on this, "Who set foot there first?" rant was that it's sometimes difficult to escape the area where you are first - The first place you are - Where you're born. A lot of people run into this - For a variety of reasons, they can't get their shit together well enough to escape the place where they start.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Sometimes people do go from homed to homeless in one step.
Sometimes it happens in steps.
The fact that this occupies a continuum rather than a binary status makes it more difficult to classify homeless vs homed as well as provide and (more importantly) justify services to them. There's a whole contingent of people who think that sleeping in a room under a roof == homed. Sleeping indoors in a situation where a person lacks stability and can be un-homed again at someone else's desire is not homed....not necessarily homeless, either.
There are multiple issues.
Housing supply
Housing cost
Housing stability/security.
I tend to think that public studios, like a small version of UK Council Housing, would help at least get people roofs over their heads for a sliding-scale cost, looking at it as a public good (e.g., homelessness is bad for many reasons, at least one of which involves epidemiological and other public health concerns). Once people have at least some stability, they can start building something - but lots of mentally ill homeless are too fragile to do that.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
Even if moving is expensive, it can still be less expensive than not moving.
Based on what 'they believe' and 'they're fairly confident will not be', the very definition of bias.
Particularly when it hasn't be true historically.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's livable homes in reasonable neighborhoods (like in "Don't Breath"), if your not picky and wait for the tax foreclosures to go to auctions, you can drop a zero. Crime has even gone down, not enough left to support a predator population.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The top 1 percent (1.3 million filers) paid a greater share of income taxes (38.1 percent) than the bottom 90 percent (122.4 million filers) combined (29.8 percent).
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
And with almost all of that as interest initially, it makes much more financial sense to keep renting the land my trailer is on for a sixth of that until I can put enough down that the interest portion of the subsequent mortgage is less than my rent.
Good point. The interest is no different from the rent you're paying now, it's money that goes to somebody else that you won't ever see again. But that interest does go down over time, whereas the price for renting the land is probably going to rise, even assuming there's no immigration, inflation by itself is sufficient to drive up the price.
Compare yourself to someone who'll be arriving in your area 10 years in the future, what advantage do you have over them? The only thing I can think of is that you can lock in the price of your housing at the current amount. Otherwise they'll be able to push you out of the area with their higher incomes.
... you end up in your early 70s just finishing paying off a house and now finally, in your 70s, able to put money toward something else like, say, the retirement you're already half a decade late to.
At that point, your house is your retirement savings. You can rent out the house and get a smaller apartment yourself, the difference being your retirement income, or alternatively, sell the house and move somewhere with 1/4 the cost.
And if I was happy living with strangers, I'd have continued to rent a bedroom in someone else's house for myself, ... putting up with a bunch of other fuck heads I couldn't get rid of out of financial necessity.
There's a big difference though. If you own the house, you can kick out the shitty ones and replace them with better ones. And since they know you can kick them out, they'll try to behave when you're around.
There are some real assholes who have did nothing other than being born and inherited their millions or billions.
Those people usually don't retain the wealth past the third generation.
The minute the masses start punishing success is the minute the whole system fails.
That train left the station a long time ago
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
especially if two bunk beds means two sets of bunk beds rather than 1 set of two beds, bunked.
I meant 2 sets of bunk beds, equivalent to 4 twin beds. Plus a freestanding crib. It didn't seem crowded to me. It just seemed normal. I remember going to a friend's house when I was about 8, and I found out he had his own room. I couldn't imagine the horror of waking up in the middle of the night and being totally alone in the dark.
All of which has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand: being able to afford a house.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
year round day care costs average about 14k per year until you can get them in school.
A single head of house hold earning $50k/year will be just fine in large swaths of the country. Have your wife stay home with the kids.
agism is real, and not entirely unfounded,
The only people I've seen complain about agism are the ones that don't keep their skills up to date. If you're 60 and have had the same skillset that you had in 1980 it's going to be impossible to find a job.
There are a lot of 'old' people employed in all industries. The ones that know their stuff are always employed.
that doesn't mean there's jobs there for you.
In this area VocTech high school students are graduating with jobs lined up. Tesla is buying small tool and die shops and hiring CNC machinists to make their vehicles or make tools to make parts for their vehicles.
You may have missed the "900 sq ft condo plus hoa fees" part. It's not just a $200K mortgage on (probably) a 1-bedroom apartment, but there are HOA fees (sort of like "rent") on top of that, I'll guess around $1K/month or so here. So it would be Mortgage+$1K/month. Plus utilities. Plus additional $200 or so per month for a parking space if it's not close to public transportation.
Predicting the future actions of another person is not the very definition of bias. They can be accurate or not, but in general its required to do anything involving a second party. And usually it is based on beliefs - ideally grounded in reality.
I mean, whatever else you want to say about him, Trump has not had a problem with making people homeless to achieve his larger aims. So, is it crazy to assume he will continue to in the future?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
"it's" It's a good thing your grammar wasn't used in the writing of the article.
Nobody said it would be easy. I have good friends who had to live in a tent for a while--with a small child--until they could get back on their feet again. These days, they are doing just fine, living in a decent house with a lawn and a dog.
It all depends on how determined you are to go for that better life. It can be done, and there ARE answers that do not involve government handouts.
No, it's not like this in the US these days, just in socialist "paradises" like Silicon Valley. In most of the US, one can still make a decent living, even without a college degree.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/21/moderately-cold-weather-more-deadly-than-heatwaves-or-extreme-cold
There are always winners and losers. But in California the winners have outnumbered the losers when compared to the results in most other areas, and the winners have won more spectacularly than they have in most other areas. The net result is a huge GDP.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but CA is doing really well. Whether or not the "liberal policies" have anything to do with that, I really don't know, but the implication that CA has suffered under liberal rule is absurd.
Good post.
Off-topic: We already have one overloaded word (hella, which sounds a bit too much like "hell of") that is apparently the responsibility of the SF Bay area. We don't need another (hecka). TIA.
Hella is more of a Southern California thing.
The trick is to simplify your life, and get rid of junk you don't need
Like relatives!
The top 1 percent (1.3 million filers) paid a greater share of income taxes (38.1 percent) than the bottom 90 percent (122.4 million filers) combined (29.8 percent).
And yet, they are somehow richer than ever. The wealth disparity is immense, and the haves directly control exactly how high or low the wages are on the have-nots. Convenient how that works.
Even if the government had never funded the Internet, it is possible that something similar would have been developed
The federal government didn't prohibit other services. There were BBSes. Compuserve. Prodigy. Even AOL a bit later. They SUCKED. The government option's way was far superior. I have no problems with the way things turned out, except for the whole "ISPs own the local lines." We've gotten screwed over by that, but otherwise things were pretty good.
Are you complaining about being on the loosing side of the Civil War?
Do you really miss slavery that much?
You are a real piece of shit.
He didn't say he did, so don't put words in his mouth, mister strawman.
Wow, that is the strawest straw-man I have ever seen.
You sure that's a strawman? We hear that nonsense spouted by the Libertarians on Slashdot all the time. And most of it are real things that America did dabble with at the end of the 1900s. That was real life back then. Don't think it can't happen.
lol. I was thinking the exact same thing.
The poor people have identified djinn6 as likely worth a million dollars or more. How else can $130k not seem like a huge hurdle to get over?
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
That's right, they were conquered. They don't have a right to any land.
I'm so tired of that brain dead MEME too!
My housing cost reduced 75% by moving out of Silicon Valley to the Sacramento area.
Read that back, with a mental flip of who is on what side?
Do you see how wrong you are? It's not often that someone basically writes: 'white is black, when my side does it'. You just did.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'