I got a kick out of how you used that baseball analogy for this. Batting.500 would in fact be almost god like in modern baseball. Even.400 isn't really considered attainable anymore.
This doesn't invalidate what you're actually getting at of course, it just means your analogy is terrible.
Nice, have these idiots vehicles legally towed and let them enjoy their ridiculous impound fees that most communities have. Maybe they'll direct their far right rage towards the bullshit government attitude towards the privatization of impound lots. Your car was towed on a Friday? Good luck low income person being able to afford getting your car out of impound on Monday.
"No, it's not rent controls that have caused the housing crisis in the Bay Area."
Wow, you haven't been listening to me at all. I have never said that was the root cause. The root cause I have said over and over again is housing shortage which rent control merely contributes to. In fact I would say it's not even a primary contributor but it most certainly doesn't help.
"We have a virtual zero-growth policy down here on the Central Coast, and it has worked just fine, thanks. "
And when other communities poor growth planning finally makes it over to your doorstep I hope for the sake of your lower class your community doesn't stick to those. When it spilled over into my community North of SF nothing was done and now we're well on our way to slum style multiple families living in a single family home. Some community actually has to step and solve the housing shortage problem. It could have been mine if our "Leftists" actually cared about the working class.
"But it wouldn't be for you, because we do our best to keep out the libertarian jackoffs."
Put false labels on me all you want. It only illustrates your weak reasoning.
Socialized medicine - financially proven, effective, good on the morality scale to boot (moral and finical gains) Social security - effectiveness proven (although under funded) as people are generally poor at long term financial planning or lack the means to save (moral gains, small finacial) Poverty abatement programs - reduces crime (financial gain) and suffering (moral). Increases upward mobility potential of lower class. General net benefit when done correctly (moral and financial) Rehabilitation as opposed to mass incarceration - Strong rehabilitation shows strong rate of crime reduction. Mass incarceration has not shown this (moral and financial gains) Low income housing - Good in the context of poverty abatement. Not a solution to massive housing shortage (moral gain) Rent control - Significant evidence it exacerbates housing shortages for anyone not lucky enough to get it. Short sighted and naive in addressing housing shortages. (small moral gain offset be exacerbation of a typically greater problem, net financial loss)
Maybe I'm not as fashionably Left as you are but I guess I'm just a Leftist that likes things that work.
Oh, oh! I missed quoting the best part to quote from that research paper. "Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law"
"Well, I just gave you the simplest, most direct solution. Prices are high because of corporate concentration, which led to a high concentration of high-paying jobs in a certain area. People like to live close to work, and if you put a lot of money in one area, there will be more competition for something in finite supply. It has also led to a concentration of billionaires. Thin the herd and the pressure goes down. Not the best solution maybe, but as I said, the most direct."
By your own account there was a housing shortage and so prices went up. Thank you for validating my point.
"Loosening zoning laws and zero-growth laws won't solve the problem. First, because the rich people who live there don't want those laws loosened except for themselves, if they want to build a new house for example. They don't want poor folks moving in around them and going to their kids' school. So what you get is a further concentration of wealth and kids going to private schools and poorer areas not having the tax base to support schools."
How does rich people won't vote for them mean loosening zoning laws won't work? That makes no sense, whatsoever.
"I prefer a combination of low-growth policies, with strict rent controls. And of course, a few billionaire heads on pikes just to raise everyone's morale. Not the billionaires morale, of course, but fuck them. They're the reason we're in this mess in the first place."
Rent controls are brilliant for those who get them. Meanwhile, developers are discouraged from building because they mess with their profit margins. A high rent area will also typically have high land values. Why would some one dump the massive sum of money buying a develop-able piece of property in the valley if you can't charge a rent that is inline with your costs? In fact, rental supply actually dropped in the few years following the institution of rent control in SF. "Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings." ( https://web.stanford.edu/~diam...)
After that, I have no idea what your, "low-growth policies" are so I can't really comment on them but they do sound suspiciously nebulous.
Simple supply and demand economics is more what I'm getting at when I use the term. The patterns of supply and demand and their effect on the prices of goods, services and the like are easily observable in any economic system on the planet and when supply isn't increasing to meet increasing demand in an economy it often means something is holding back supply. This could be from a resource or labor shortage or it could be from more artificial mechanisms like government or monopolistic practices.
As this pertains to the discussion at hand, local city governments throughout Northern California have restricted housing growth in the face of a supply shortage. Of course a small family home is 600k around where I live and over a million in the valley. They're scarce commodities and are priced accordingly.
I mean, do you have an explanation that makes more sense as to why prices are the way they are in a lot of California? Maybe something that doesn't involve "killing billionaires"?
I feel like I'm talking to the anarcho-punks I ran with in my youth. It's great you have naive dreams of impossible scenarios. Meanwhile California needs proper growth guidance and it is *absolutely* government policy that is causing the housing problems here. It's a very clear problem of supply and demand. Any Leftist that truly wants to properly serve their community needs to acknowledge the free market. When there is a housing shortage no governance will solve that problem that does not create the needed housing to fulfill the housing shortage.
As I clearly articulated it's a local matter that has spilled over onto another locality that has then spilled over to another locality and probably several others too boot. It's all communities refusing to solve their local issues, sure but it's becoming a statewide problem.
"I'm willing to discuss any reasonable suggestion for killing off billionaires. Is that "liberal-lite"?"
No, that's you're probably lying or are a psychopath. Regardless, killing billionaires does nothing meaningful in the context of this discussion.
"You're looking for a reason to say that California sucks for some reason. Here's a news flash: rents are too goddamn high all over the US."
Oh you mother fucker, you went there and I missed it in my original post. I'm California born a raised, proud as fuck, and have plenty of Leftist creds to boot. That doesn't mean our growth policies in many of our communities aren't bullshit. So called "leftists" routinely vote for zoning laws that punish their working classes. Over a million dollars for a single family house in the valley? Multiple families living in a single family home because that's all they can afford? That's where my community North of SF is headed and I hate it because it all stems from arrogance.
No proper Leftist can look at California housing prices and suggest we should maintain the anti growth policies most of our communities have had for far too long. You're just being California liberal-lite-fashionable if you think the working class can enjoy a proper level of living under our current coastal growth policies. The valley should have been building upwards in the realm of 20-30 story buildings 2 or 3 decades ago but they refused. Then the Bay Area was invaded and they refused to build enough. Now, North of the Bay all of the refugees are piling up and no one wants to build up either and so people are fleeing even farther away and my people suffer.
"You think $2k a month is high for a 2 bedroom place? That's about what it would cost you in Houston, less than Chicago, much less than New York. Do you think those places only have college-educated people living there?"
It is most certainly high for an area outside of a major urban area. First you claim Sonoma County is rural and then you proceed to compare it to other major urban areas. You can't have both my friend. 2k for a 2 bedroom in suburbia is indeed high.
"High rents don't keep people from working."
When did I ever say that? What high rents do is keep lower end workers from living in an area. An unemployment rate of.2% for non-high school educated workers (our rate here) is absurd and a gross distortion of the local economy.
Honestly I don't know what you're doing here. The parent was talking about it being too easy to spend money with plastic and I responded with a comment that I would never understand that mindset. At no point was any point relevant to what you brought up was being discussed.
Personally, I've never felt any different in spending money off a card or cash and am conservative with both. I have heard from people that some how spending money on plastic is easier than with physical currency but I really just don't get that. It's all money and there's no differentiation for me.
Maybe it's because I've always been conservative with my money. I have friends who very likely make more than me in a year but when credit card debt payments are factored in they probably make at most the same as me.
Ultimately, I just can't understand the mind set that see's money as different when it's spent off a card.
"My ideology is everything that is good and the other is everything that is bad"
I know you probably "think" you are but you are very clearly not a person who thinks.
Most of what you've said is just claiming a mantel of virtues that is supposedly contrary to an issue that has never been truly tested with no supporting data. In other words, nice lame dick opinion.
Furthermore, UBI is not universally supported by Democrats. UBI is also supported by some conservatives as a means of getting rid of all other social programs.
And it's being run like slum housing. By your own account it has 3 bedrooms but yet 22 people sleep there.
Don't delude yourself. This is the very illustration of the American Dream unraveling and it's not even something that isn't easily preventable. It's ignorant and self centered city planning that is the core of the problem. No one who owns property want's a 20 story residential building in silicon valley because they want to hold on to their precious property values. Meanwhile, their bottom 50% suffer terribly and the US loses out on what could be the formation of another major city. I mean, imagine if New York city, with all of its economic value it provides our country, wouldn't let anyone build above 3 stories during its formative period.
I live in Sonoma County, it's not that rural. This has nothing to do with what you're going on about and everything to do with sky high rents. It's $2k for a 2 bedroom place here. What service level worker can afford that even with a roommate?
"It's not that "college education causes unemployment", it's that the high-school grads that aren't able to get a long-term job with only an HS education typically continue their education, thus removing themselves from the "HS grads only" group."
The situation is not even remotely close to either of the two scenarios you describe. The only reason why you'd even mention these two is if you are either completely ignorant in regards to California's rental and housing markets or are just not thinking at all. Service level employees are being chased out of the state in mass due to high living costs, all of which are tied to massively high property values and rents.
I own a 2 bedroom condo in the Sonoma County mentioned in the article that would sell for will over $200k if I chose to sell it. This is the price of a solid family home (that you don't have to pay condo dues on) in most of the rest of the country. Meanwhile, the average rent on a place like this is right around $2k ( https://www.rentcafe.com/avera... ). How would some one making $12 an hour afford $1000 a month to rent a place with a roommate? Their monthly before taxes income would be less than 2 grand. After taxes I'd wager that would get them about $500 a month for everything else in their lives after rent. This in an area where "everything else" is more expensive due to the aforementioned problem.
"Much of that goes into licensing the famous cartoon character that appears on an expensive Hallmark greeting card but not on the cheaper cards that Dollar Tree sells for $1.00 and Walmart sells for $0.98."
What cards are you looking at? Card at standard store: Bland holiday picture and bland well wishing. Card at dollar store: Exact same thing.
What type of expensive IPs are you seeing being applied to cards because I'm not seeing any?
There are places where one can *sometimes* find legitimately clever and/or artistic cards that I will definitely pay a premium price for. Otherwise, the holiday cards are all the same cheap crap that I only buy because it's expected that when giving gifts you have "nice" packaging.
I like to think I'm a fairly environmental conscience person but I can't bring myself to care about most plastic waste. As long as it's properly disposed of in a landfill I just don't care. We have enough space for landfill to last at least a couple hundred years and at that point we'll probably be disintegrating our trash..
So by your own account your insistence on the absolute literalness of what I had said couldn't possibly be true. It's almost as if Illegal ROMs might have been the key point and you chose to be a semantics asshole because the issue was named improperly.
Slashdot Mirror
I got a kick out of how you used that baseball analogy for this. Batting .500 would in fact be almost god like in modern baseball. Even .400 isn't really considered attainable anymore.
This doesn't invalidate what you're actually getting at of course, it just means your analogy is terrible.
Nice, have these idiots vehicles legally towed and let them enjoy their ridiculous impound fees that most communities have. Maybe they'll direct their far right rage towards the bullshit government attitude towards the privatization of impound lots. Your car was towed on a Friday? Good luck low income person being able to afford getting your car out of impound on Monday.
"No, it's not rent controls that have caused the housing crisis in the Bay Area."
Wow, you haven't been listening to me at all. I have never said that was the root cause. The root cause I have said over and over again is housing shortage which rent control merely contributes to. In fact I would say it's not even a primary contributor but it most certainly doesn't help.
"We have a virtual zero-growth policy down here on the Central Coast, and it has worked just fine, thanks. "
And when other communities poor growth planning finally makes it over to your doorstep I hope for the sake of your lower class your community doesn't stick to those. When it spilled over into my community North of SF nothing was done and now we're well on our way to slum style multiple families living in a single family home. Some community actually has to step and solve the housing shortage problem. It could have been mine if our "Leftists" actually cared about the working class.
"But it wouldn't be for you, because we do our best to keep out the libertarian jackoffs."
Put false labels on me all you want. It only illustrates your weak reasoning.
Socialized medicine - financially proven, effective, good on the morality scale to boot (moral and finical gains)
Social security - effectiveness proven (although under funded) as people are generally poor at long term financial planning or lack the means to save (moral gains, small finacial)
Poverty abatement programs - reduces crime (financial gain) and suffering (moral). Increases upward mobility potential of lower class. General net benefit when done correctly (moral and financial)
Rehabilitation as opposed to mass incarceration - Strong rehabilitation shows strong rate of crime reduction. Mass incarceration has not shown this (moral and financial gains)
Low income housing - Good in the context of poverty abatement. Not a solution to massive housing shortage (moral gain)
Rent control - Significant evidence it exacerbates housing shortages for anyone not lucky enough to get it. Short sighted and naive in addressing housing shortages. (small moral gain offset be exacerbation of a typically greater problem, net financial loss)
Maybe I'm not as fashionably Left as you are but I guess I'm just a Leftist that likes things that work.
Oh, oh! I missed quoting the best part to quote from that research paper. "Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law"
"Well, I just gave you the simplest, most direct solution. Prices are high because of corporate concentration, which led to a high concentration of high-paying jobs in a certain area. People like to live close to work, and if you put a lot of money in one area, there will be more competition for something in finite supply. It has also led to a concentration of billionaires. Thin the herd and the pressure goes down. Not the best solution maybe, but as I said, the most direct."
By your own account there was a housing shortage and so prices went up. Thank you for validating my point.
"Loosening zoning laws and zero-growth laws won't solve the problem. First, because the rich people who live there don't want those laws loosened except for themselves, if they want to build a new house for example. They don't want poor folks moving in around them and going to their kids' school. So what you get is a further concentration of wealth and kids going to private schools and poorer areas not having the tax base to support schools."
How does rich people won't vote for them mean loosening zoning laws won't work? That makes no sense, whatsoever.
"I prefer a combination of low-growth policies, with strict rent controls. And of course, a few billionaire heads on pikes just to raise everyone's morale. Not the billionaires morale, of course, but fuck them. They're the reason we're in this mess in the first place."
Rent controls are brilliant for those who get them. Meanwhile, developers are discouraged from building because they mess with their profit margins. A high rent area will also typically have high land values. Why would some one dump the massive sum of money buying a develop-able piece of property in the valley if you can't charge a rent that is inline with your costs? In fact, rental supply actually dropped in the few years following the institution of rent control in SF. "Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and
redeveloping buildings." ( https://web.stanford.edu/~diam...)
After that, I have no idea what your, "low-growth policies" are so I can't really comment on them but they do sound suspiciously nebulous.
Simple supply and demand economics is more what I'm getting at when I use the term. The patterns of supply and demand and their effect on the prices of goods, services and the like are easily observable in any economic system on the planet and when supply isn't increasing to meet increasing demand in an economy it often means something is holding back supply. This could be from a resource or labor shortage or it could be from more artificial mechanisms like government or monopolistic practices.
As this pertains to the discussion at hand, local city governments throughout Northern California have restricted housing growth in the face of a supply shortage. Of course a small family home is 600k around where I live and over a million in the valley. They're scarce commodities and are priced accordingly.
I mean, do you have an explanation that makes more sense as to why prices are the way they are in a lot of California? Maybe something that doesn't involve "killing billionaires"?
I feel like I'm talking to the anarcho-punks I ran with in my youth. It's great you have naive dreams of impossible scenarios. Meanwhile California needs proper growth guidance and it is *absolutely* government policy that is causing the housing problems here. It's a very clear problem of supply and demand. Any Leftist that truly wants to properly serve their community needs to acknowledge the free market. When there is a housing shortage no governance will solve that problem that does not create the needed housing to fulfill the housing shortage.
And guess which category of gift recipients are going to care the least about the card they get? Children.
Every single time I've seen a young child open a card I've seen the parent have to direct them to pay attention to it.
"Sounds like a local problem to me. "
As I clearly articulated it's a local matter that has spilled over onto another locality that has then spilled over to another locality and probably several others too boot. It's all communities refusing to solve their local issues, sure but it's becoming a statewide problem.
"I'm willing to discuss any reasonable suggestion for killing off billionaires. Is that "liberal-lite"?"
No, that's you're probably lying or are a psychopath. Regardless, killing billionaires does nothing meaningful in the context of this discussion.
"You're looking for a reason to say that California sucks for some reason. Here's a news flash: rents are too goddamn high all over the US."
Oh you mother fucker, you went there and I missed it in my original post. I'm California born a raised, proud as fuck, and have plenty of Leftist creds to boot. That doesn't mean our growth policies in many of our communities aren't bullshit. So called "leftists" routinely vote for zoning laws that punish their working classes. Over a million dollars for a single family house in the valley? Multiple families living in a single family home because that's all they can afford? That's where my community North of SF is headed and I hate it because it all stems from arrogance.
No proper Leftist can look at California housing prices and suggest we should maintain the anti growth policies most of our communities have had for far too long. You're just being California liberal-lite-fashionable if you think the working class can enjoy a proper level of living under our current coastal growth policies. The valley should have been building upwards in the realm of 20-30 story buildings 2 or 3 decades ago but they refused. Then the Bay Area was invaded and they refused to build enough. Now, North of the Bay all of the refugees are piling up and no one wants to build up either and so people are fleeing even farther away and my people suffer.
"You think $2k a month is high for a 2 bedroom place? That's about what it would cost you in Houston, less than Chicago, much less than New York. Do you think those places only have college-educated people living there?"
It is most certainly high for an area outside of a major urban area. First you claim Sonoma County is rural and then you proceed to compare it to other major urban areas. You can't have both my friend. 2k for a 2 bedroom in suburbia is indeed high.
"High rents don't keep people from working."
When did I ever say that? What high rents do is keep lower end workers from living in an area. An unemployment rate of .2% for non-high school educated workers (our rate here) is absurd and a gross distortion of the local economy.
Honestly I don't know what you're doing here. The parent was talking about it being too easy to spend money with plastic and I responded with a comment that I would never understand that mindset. At no point was any point relevant to what you brought up was being discussed.
Personally, I've never felt any different in spending money off a card or cash and am conservative with both. I have heard from people that some how spending money on plastic is easier than with physical currency but I really just don't get that. It's all money and there's no differentiation for me.
Maybe it's because I've always been conservative with my money. I have friends who very likely make more than me in a year but when credit card debt payments are factored in they probably make at most the same as me.
Ultimately, I just can't understand the mind set that see's money as different when it's spent off a card.
"My ideology is everything that is good and the other is everything that is bad"
I know you probably "think" you are but you are very clearly not a person who thinks.
Most of what you've said is just claiming a mantel of virtues that is supposedly contrary to an issue that has never been truly tested with no supporting data. In other words, nice lame dick opinion.
Furthermore, UBI is not universally supported by Democrats. UBI is also supported by some conservatives as a means of getting rid of all other social programs.
"The 3 bedroom house is worth at least $1.5M."
And it's being run like slum housing. By your own account it has 3 bedrooms but yet 22 people sleep there.
Don't delude yourself. This is the very illustration of the American Dream unraveling and it's not even something that isn't easily preventable. It's ignorant and self centered city planning that is the core of the problem. No one who owns property want's a 20 story residential building in silicon valley because they want to hold on to their precious property values. Meanwhile, their bottom 50% suffer terribly and the US loses out on what could be the formation of another major city. I mean, imagine if New York city, with all of its economic value it provides our country, wouldn't let anyone build above 3 stories during its formative period.
I have no interest in even looking up data on what you're telling me because nothing you're saying refutes my high rent and property value rebuttal
I live in Sonoma County, it's not that rural. This has nothing to do with what you're going on about and everything to do with sky high rents. It's $2k for a 2 bedroom place here. What service level worker can afford that even with a roommate?
Nice, so live adjacent to slum housing.
"It's not that "college education causes unemployment", it's that the high-school grads that aren't able to get a long-term job with only an HS education typically continue their education, thus removing themselves from the "HS grads only" group."
The situation is not even remotely close to either of the two scenarios you describe. The only reason why you'd even mention these two is if you are either completely ignorant in regards to California's rental and housing markets or are just not thinking at all. Service level employees are being chased out of the state in mass due to high living costs, all of which are tied to massively high property values and rents.
I own a 2 bedroom condo in the Sonoma County mentioned in the article that would sell for will over $200k if I chose to sell it. This is the price of a solid family home (that you don't have to pay condo dues on) in most of the rest of the country. Meanwhile, the average rent on a place like this is right around $2k ( https://www.rentcafe.com/avera... ). How would some one making $12 an hour afford $1000 a month to rent a place with a roommate? Their monthly before taxes income would be less than 2 grand. After taxes I'd wager that would get them about $500 a month for everything else in their lives after rent. This in an area where "everything else" is more expensive due to the aforementioned problem.
"Much of that goes into licensing the famous cartoon character that appears on an expensive Hallmark greeting card but not on the cheaper cards that Dollar Tree sells for $1.00 and Walmart sells for $0.98."
What cards are you looking at?
Card at standard store: Bland holiday picture and bland well wishing.
Card at dollar store: Exact same thing.
What type of expensive IPs are you seeing being applied to cards because I'm not seeing any?
There are places where one can *sometimes* find legitimately clever and/or artistic cards that I will definitely pay a premium price for. Otherwise, the holiday cards are all the same cheap crap that I only buy because it's expected that when giving gifts you have "nice" packaging.
Yeah. That was my point, dickhead.
He's not in our government either.
Idiot.
Well the two of us can certainly agree on that but there are plenty out there who have very strong feelings about plastic going into landfill.
I like to think I'm a fairly environmental conscience person but I can't bring myself to care about most plastic waste. As long as it's properly disposed of in a landfill I just don't care. We have enough space for landfill to last at least a couple hundred years and at that point we'll probably be disintegrating our trash..
So by your own account your insistence on the absolute literalness of what I had said couldn't possibly be true. It's almost as if Illegal ROMs might have been the key point and you chose to be a semantics asshole because the issue was named improperly.