Broke: Kill three kids
Woke: Buy three chairs
Bespoke: Birth control 20 years ago
Public Housing broski. Take a look at Vienna for example.
We have that. It’s a little complicated in ways that Vienna probably doesn’t have.
Yes but the real difference is the scale. Approx half of housing in Vienna is publicy owned. This means rent becomes affordable for most as prices depreciate. And it costs the government suprisingly little, saving a lot on crime, homelessness etc etc. Another big part of the market is tightly rent controlled. So you only have maybe 20% of housing that is in similar market conditions to 97% of US housing.
I recently moved to Vienna and don’t qualify for the public housing (you need to have lived here for a certain amount of time)but the sheer amount of it (and relative quality) means that even in the private market, competition is much less.
Compared to other cities we have lived in, the rent is much lower and the quality much higher.
Something like 60% of the population lives in either public or subsidized housing!
I feel like at the point you phrase what you’re going to do as “mass” anything you’re doing something wrong.
Can’t think of a single sentence that starts with mass that ends well
Mass spectrometry is an analytical tool useful for measuring the mass-to-charge ratio of one or more molecules present in a sample.
Different definition of mass though.
Lol fair point. I thought of “mass adoption” since making the comment but that’s it
Neither choice is great. One is evil.
That 25k quickly becomes “oh, everyone had 25k more so we can charge 25k more”.
Don’t give rich house builders tax breaks, they’re the ones causing the problem by deliberately not building enough. You’re the fucking government. Build houses yourselves. Rent them through social housing programs.
dont allow corporations and billionaires to buy thousands of flats
Yeah, that too.
The precious “free markets” have had their crack at it, and have shown that they’re not to be trusted to either own or build them. Prices have soared and that’s 100% intentional on their part.
It was never a free market because of antiquated zoning laws. At very least free market would have driven more dense residential construction because they would have made more return on their buck. We need to allow and even promote medium rise residential zoning in more home scarcity is an issue.
Land owners be damned, the needs of the many outweigh the greed of the few.
It’s not that they aren’t building enough. It’s that they are building big luxury homes because there is a bigger profit margin than making affordable homes.
The builders have made the 16 million empty homes in this country because they were just selling them to corporations. It’s not that they are not hiding enough, it’s that the rich have engulfed the entire pipe with their gluttonous mouths and there is nothing left for the rest of us.
When will we finally slay the beasts that are killing us?
25k is for first time home buyers, not everyone. You can’t have separate prices for first time buyers and the rest of the public, and a seller won’t know how you are financed until after the house is listed anyways.
This absolutely will help, because if you’d just ask anyone trying to get a home, the down payment is the hardest part to satisfy.
The only way a house cartel can form like this is for those that own the homes. The builders don’t own the homes, corporations do. Those corporations collude and price fix to create a cartel. Focus on that.
The UK had a similar scheme for first time buyers and it’s often cited by economists as one of the biggest things fueling their housing crisis.
Its hard to take that at face value. The UK and the US have a lot of anti consumer perspectives.
Do you have anything that describes the mechanism?
Its sort of a similar arguement to food stamps raising food prices right?
In either case its on the groups abusing a rule that are the problem, not the rule. There can be well worded regulations that minimize abuse, and we can also audit things.
Sure, here’s a paper which explores the effects.
Essentially, housing prices have hugely inflated (in much of the developed world) because demand is much higher than supply. Prices in the real-estate market are generally really reactive to changes in supply or demand because each ‘product’ is unique and limited, as well as being worth a lot of money so there is more pressure to maximize the potential gains.
This sort of plan increases the resources available to the demand side without increasing the supply side. This drives up prices since there are more potential buyers.
Anyone who couldn’t buy a house without such a program is being added the the pool of people competing for a limited supply of houses. It won’t increase supply because supply is heavily limited by other factors, most notably zoning.
It’s unfortunate, because the thought behind such a policy is admirable. It’s trying to make buying a house more fair and more easily achievable for a broad segment of the population that currently is effectively shut out from owning a home.
I’ve started to come around on the 25k down payment assistance. It definitely has it’s problems, and there will absolutely be those who gouge because of it. But because it’s specifically down-payment assistance it will still help first time buyers get mortgages on houses they can afford the regular payments on, but don’t have the extra to set aside for a 10% down payment because rent is taking everything they could be setting aside for a down payment. And it’s limited to first time home buyers, with 2 years of on-time rent payments, and says “up to” 25k. Wouldn’t surprise me if it ends up being limited to 10% of the purchase price (which gets you more favorable loan terms).
My wife and I only own our home because her wealthy dad was willing to front about half of the down payment with an interest-free repayment to him alongside the mortgage. With 25k from the government we’d not have needed that, and we got an acre in California. 25k is huge.
We’ve only ever had trouble with this mortgage once, and it was trouble we could have managed without help had we just tightened our belts for a while (just don’t go to the ER. Even if you have insurance. Even if you’re dying on the floor and an ex first responder demands you to for your safety: die instead. I am not joking, had it not been for familial help we’d be paying it off for the next 5 years and it would eat almost all of the little savings we’ve finally started managing to build up, so one more bump and we’d lose fucking everything), so it looks like all those “well sure you can afford rent that’s 1.5x the cost of the potential mortgage, but how do we know you can afford it on the job you’ve had for 8 years?” Pricks were wrooooooooooong
Most builders are already fully booked for work. The one’s that could work faster generally aren’t the ones you want building your house.
I don’t know how it is in the USA but here in France we kinda have the following issues:
- People leave the countryside and small cities en masse
- Houses rot empty anywhere that’s more than a commute away from a big city
- There’s a huge shortage of housing in the cities
We need people coming back to the countryside and small cities but all the employment is bundled away in big cities…
it’s sorta like that but with way more opioid deaths
edit: and instead of rotting empty, megacorporations buy the empty homes and turn them into airBnBs to keep the house prices high. maybe that happens in france too?
Airbnb seems to be more of an issue in cities than here.
WFH, better communications, give benefits to anyone opening business in a small town, …
And financial support for non chain shops. We need a small locally owned economy too.
Also we used to have a very dense train network that we let rot because iT wAsN’t PrOfItAbLe (and then we spent hundred of millions on roads ajd highways of course)
I’m here in Georgia, USA. The small towns in my state, those well outside the major metro suburbs, are either emptying out OR the state is bringing in non-union factory and data center jobs to dominate the local economy with the promise of jobs and economic revitalization. These companies are given huge tax incentives to build (or relocate) and thus contribute nothing to local coffers directly (necessitating higher property and sales taxes on locals). Currently, there’s a car plant being built near where I live. The locals in the rural areas were shocked to find out after construction began that their water wells might stop working as the factory and it’s subsequent suppliers setting up in the area will be draining the county dry… the state said they could. They’re out of pocket to drill deeper wells and the state doesn’t care… at the state level, they’ve actually made it harder (legally through environmental review) for local municipalities to direct the development of water infrastructure but easier for private developers (who have fewer reviews to go through) to just build whatever water infrastructure they see fit. Meanwhile, back in town, a handful of out of state multibillion dollar corporations are buying up any and all real estate that isn’t nailed down and renting it back to us at exorbitant prices.
I’m curious how many houses/apartments are unused in the US, acting as a speculative asset and if building more is even necessary.
Building more is necessary if the available housing is not located where appropriate employment is located. Thus, the gross number of available homes isn’t a good metric to use for determining the actual need for new construction.
If enough more houses are built that prices stop increasing faster than inflation, housing will no longer be valuable as a speculative asset. Building more houses BOTH makes housing immediately available, and changes the market forces in a way that pushes out investors squatting on un-lived-in units.
thinking that homeless illegal immigrants are the root cause of home shortage where a single corporation or a billionaire buys thousands of flats to rent them to people for exorbitant prices.
in one way it works because if you kick out many homeless people out of the country, you can say that in one year you cut homelessness by half.
Thats currently already done with jail. The main problem is homeless people don’t pay their jail bills. In my state 15 years ago it was 30$ per day you had to pay to be incarcerated in jail, not prison.
Okay america is sounding more and more like a joke. You have to pay to be in a processing facility? When you have no choice. And you’ll be incarcerated there during trial so before you are proven guilty of anything.
Fun fact! The Constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery also legalized slavery!
Yeah! And until right now, this very minute, as you’re reading this, some Americans didn’t know that.
Right now some americans don’t know they have items in their house produced by slave labor.
I have one “weird” and “radical” proposal: public housing to rent. Not to but. At affordable price. That would lower the price of every house, flat, …
Those who live in apartments, and only they, should collectively and equitably own the building entirely.
Put the squeeze on the landlord and then collectively make a low-ball offer.
In the SF Bay Area, it costs over $1 million just to build one “affordable” housing unit.
It’s sold at that price. I’m sure it doesn’t cost that much.
That same article says it clear: the lion’s share is the taxes part, not the house. If there was a public program, the taxes should be far lower. After all, that project wouldn’t be a for profit one.
No it doesn’t say that at all.
Good thing the fucking country is bigger than the SF bay area then, isn’t it?
I still can’t get over the other lack of journalistic integrity for CBS to put that up there. To concede that point. Like it’s a fact. Utter bollocks.
Post-2016 Journalistic Integrity is a cruel joke.
With some few, rare, exceptions.
Wouldn’t you want 5 more chairs, so the parents could sit too?
Donald John Trump comes from a family of real estate speculators.
Akira Toriyama once said he based the character of Freeza on Japanese real estate speculators, who he called “the worst kind of people.” (Source)
Am I saying Trump is Freeza? No, Freeza is several orders of magnitude more competent on his worst day than Trump was when he peaked in 1951. But I think it’s important to underline, for the people in the back, what level of cartoonish evil we’re dealing with, because for some reason people will read stuff like this and it won’t sink in. Maybe DBZ will help.
I don’t know. I’m tired, y’all.
https://clearinghouse.net/case/15342/
He was found by a court of law to be a racist slumlord.
They ban abortion and then don’t want those babies/future adults housed. Classic.
Because being poor, uneducated, and unloved with a chip on your shoulder makes you a likely Republican voter. I would bet the whole farm that unwanted children are far more likely to grow up to vote Republican, and I think that’s one of the primary reasons they fight against abortion, and any other policies that increase education and security for children.
Down payment assistance is just going to drive prices up.
Didn’t happen last time and that’s not how the housing market even works.
Yep, the big fix is to tax the hell out of single family housing owned by corporations. But no politician would dare run on that platform.
Or just build more public housing. It can be nice. It doesn’t have to be dystopian blocks in the sky and it should target all price ranges so that poverty isn’t just entrenched into public housing blocks.
I’d settle for breaking apart the housing cartel personally. Its already illegal.
It’s the perfect solution for the democrats because it sounds good but also won’t actually cause housing prices to go down, so homeowners won’t feel like they are ‘losing’ money.
It’s not intended to make prices go down you utter doughnut
Trump’s sucks, but just giving people money will make all of the housing $25000 more expensive on average over time. There are so many better things to do with that money, like better public transportation and schools. She just wants to throw it down a hole and make housing more expensive, in exchange for some short-term support.
It’s assistance not giving. I think it’s just a fund you can borrow from to get enough to start a mortgage.
It would also only apply to people who can’t afford the mortgage.
So it’s not going to impact house prices in the sense you say it would. Except slightly increasing demand to buy and thereby decreasing demand to rent.
It’ll make the bottom of the market more expensive.
The increase in demand will a little. But not near the amount the aid is helping. We are talking a different order of magnitude.
In the UK a similar scheme just led to the entry-level segment of the real-estate market inflating faster than the rest.
It also led to a rise in more ‘luxury’ entry-level properties being built.
Again, it’s not exactly the same concept, but in the case of the UK, most economists agree that most buyers actually would have been better off if the policy had never been introduced, since the price rises ended up outpacing the value of the assistance.
$25k down payment assistance where one bed one bath houses are routinely nearly half a million is a joke tbh.
it’s down payment assistance, and down payment is typically around 20% of the value of the house. $25k would fully cover the down payment of a $125k [probably trashed] house, or 1/4th of the down payment of a half-million house
That’s not everywhere in America. That’s not even most of America.
And while it’s an interesting discussion, it’s not the point of the post.
it’s not the point of the post.
Yes we know the point of the post is “Democrats good” so it sounds off topic to you when people push back against that. But $25k of down payment assistance is fucking pathetic and we need to be calling this shit out.
The democrat solution isn’t “get 3 more chairs” it is “provide the 7 kids who are already in chairs some extra materials to build more chairs for themselves”
Bullshit. Not that you would know.
Try using your words. What the fuck are you even trying to say?
This post is seriously sad though. Here you are enthusiastically disseminating propaganda for some of the most soulless, most evil humans who have ever lived just because they pretend that they’re better than their buddies from two doors down the hall
Try using your words. What the fuck are you even trying to say?
You’re fun. We should hang out more.
Honestly I really don’t think that’s effective either. Giving people more money to buy something generally just means the market will respond by charging more money for that thing. The assistance will effectively get “priced in” given time.
It’s honestly the weakest part of the Harris/Walz platform for me. Trump plan is utterly insane top-to-bottom though, and they’re just using immigration as a scapegoat here, which is… something.
I do think it can help those that are prepared and on the border of approval. But those that aren’t it ain’t gonna do shit.
Yeah, I don’t think the idea is a total non-starter, but I’d definitely like some details. How will this be limited to ensure it’s not being used by investors and house flippers? How will this be ramped down once the housing market settles to avoid it being permanently “priced in”? How will this be paid for and how much will it cost?
Unfortunately American political debates right now are more of a pissing contest about rally turnout than they are about actual policy details, because that’s what sways the voters on the fence for some reason.
I started getting tons of calls because I was approved last year when she announced this. So if it can get me into something I want to know. But it just might be bullshit.
Makes sense to me. 25k is an incentive to buy a home, not an incentive to build one or sell one.
Make owning multiple homes more expensive. Fine landlords for unfilled housing, and make the fine is proportional to maximum advertised rate for the unit. Now they have an incentive to keep their units filled, and keep from jacking up rent.
