Get off your ass and get 50+ full time jobs you lazy fucks!
If I keep paying the current $1200 a month to my landlord it’ll eventually trickle down to me. No doubt!
Then with that revenue, I’ll buy my first house!
In reality, I’m almost 28 and I have no delusions about home ownership. Just like retirement!
That’s the going rate for renting a room in someone’s house in my neck of the woods.
Guess it’s a nonstarter.
A starter home?! This home is a finisher home! A shelterer of gods! The GOLDEN GOD!
I am untethered, and my rage knows no bounds!
Just don’t live in a city geez
Edit: Yes, my quest for downvotes is successful.
I aim to be karma neutral on the fediverse and had a pretty good day I need to counteract.
A couple years ago this was the “just don’t live in California” argument.
That’s where the jobs are.
Not much for good paying work in podunk towns.
Just commute for an hour to work every day. Ew, no, we don’t want to fund buses, that’s for poors. Pay for it yourself.
At which point, Id have to spend the money saved on housing on buying, fueling, maintaining and insuring a car, if I was even able to drive one in the first place.
Zillow is a part of the problem. With all the data collected and only a few companies, prices are conveniently increasing at extreme rates. It is not just cities; land and rural areas are increasing at high rates.
The real issue is the commodification of housing. Houses shouldn’t make people money; they are supposed to be homes to live in.
Why not guarantee the basic necessities to all citizens? They pay taxes, after all; it’s just that those tax dollars mostly go to bombing people overseas, funding multiple genocides, overmilitarization of police, corporate subsidies and bailouts, etc.
We can very easilly redirect at least some of those tax dollars to pay for everyones’ basic needs, including, but not limited to: housing, healthcare, food, water, waste, sewage, high speed internet, public transit (like a bus/train pass).
And if we still don’t have enough tax dollars for that, we can very easilly make more than enough by taxing billionaires and corporations at their appropriate rate, getting rid of all loopholes by ensuring there is a tax floor that all corporations have to pay.
Now, the system I am actually in favor of expands upon this idea of social democracy that I described above by forcing all corporations to become worker-owned coops after splitting them up into small businesses (by city, county, or rural region depending on what the locals prefer). This would also have the effect of abolishing the stock market, as the workers would have exclusive ownership of their company that they work for. This would functionally transform the workplace into a democracy. Imagine being able to hire/fire your boss with a vote, or having a say in what your company will be producing. This already exists, and they’re called worker-owned coops.
I would also like a hard wealth cap of $50 million tied to inflation. Nobody needs more than $50 million to have more than a happy retirement, regardless of age.
I believe that money = power, and power leads to inevitable corruption. Therefore, the only logical way to prevent corruption is to prevent people from ever being able to have that kind of power.
Check out Professor Richard Wolff if you want to learn more about this stuff. He’s a doctor and professor of economics with a focus on macroeconomics.
Nothing wrong with houses as individual investments. Why the hell else would you dump that kinda money and pay ALL the upkeep for decades?! You write the interest off your taxes, have something to show for 30 years of payments when you retire.
Also, nothing wrong with a landlord owning a few homes. He likely ain’t making shit and is taking huge risks. Yes, it’ll pay out someday, hopefully.
The issue is corporate home ownership and, to a lesser extent, B&Bs. Yes, a bank can easily “own” hundreds or thousands of homes. After all, they provide loans and sometimes have to foreclose. But banks renting homes?! Fuck no.
This is easily solvable with legislation, not even “devil is in the details” complexity. We drop the hammer on these corporate landlords, tax the fucking snot out them and run them out of the game. Same goes for entities sitting on real estate, waiting on prices to go up. Tax the hell out of empty homes that have been on the market X days.
The issue is corporate landlords. Rent didn’t used to be like this, it was competitive. My first place was a shithole in college, $250/mo. (I’d happily live there again were I a bachelor.) Same place should be $630. Anyone seen rent that low for anything outside renting a single room in a house?
Housing as an investment leads to real estate speculation which pushes up prices. It creates a class of people who stand to gain when property values, and downstream of that rent, go up.
This class of people are very wealthy and tend to oppose any action that will decrease there property value. That includes things like building dense affordable housing, especially close to them, as that increases the supply of housing and thus decreases there property value.
This is true especially for land lords, even small “mom and pop” landlords. There goal is to raise rent and the value of there investment. Anything that will lower rent or even stabilize it like rent control they will oppose, no matter their scale.
Tl;dr: housing speculation creates a wealthy class of people opposed to housing affordability.
Speaking of which, zillow’s stupid “zestimate” is worthless. Any assclown can put their house up for way too high a price and the zestimate will automatically jump up to match.
Apparently the value is whatever the seller says it is, even if the home has been on the market for over a year (either continuously or repeatedly taken off and put on, I guess to reset the time on market).