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.
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).
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!
This…is hard to believe. I’ve been looking around non-major US cities, and even some major cities, and the starter homes are around 200-500k.
That’s still fucked for a starter home but a million??? That’s the average home price in Honolulu and NYC lol.
It literally sounds super fake.
I can’t find a single major city without 200k to 350k homes lol
It takes like 30 seconds to check what starter homes cost in any city, yet people will believe this shit instead of just go look.
Edit: this is the “source” https://www.zillow.com/research/million-dollar-start-home-2025-35100/
Just 1 chart with literally zero further info, no published actual data of where these numbers came from, how they calculated them, how they gathered the data.
Why do people fall for empty garbage articles like this so easy. I wish we collectively called this out more.
If a person posts an article citing another article, instead of just the original article, they should get fuckin blasted for it and downvoted to hell.
Post. Original. Sources.
As someone who has lived in and priced out homes in major US cities, I find this article to be accurate.
Try looking in San Francisco, or any city in the entire Bay Area. You won’t find a 500sq ft shack for less than $800k.
3 seconds of looking and I found five houses under 500k. Two of them genuinely look pretty decent too tbh, not even rough looking homes.
I quite kiterally cant find anything in my city for less than 900k, and they are rare
Doesn’t sound super fake if you are looking for a place with what I think are pretty reasonable basic characteristics of comfort and security.
House that can accommodate a small family not in a higher than average crime area, does not require fix up maintenance that those of us working long hours will never have time to do or can’t afford to have done, has been well cared for and doesn’t feel gross. I’m not talking luxury homes here, I’m just talking about something that you would at least look forward to coming home to.
When I see all these people buying these homes, I’m just shocked at how they have either accrued so much wealth or are so comfortable with so much debt.
It’s pretty tough out there right now.
approximately half of homes have to be in higher than average crime areas, if there’s nothing wrong with the home it can just be purchased and rented out by a megacorp immediately, wealth accumulates over time so that selling a house will provide about enough to buy house and have lower average monthly cost than renting.
“When I eliminate all the homes that normal people would classify as a starter home, I can’t find any starter homes!”
“Wait to buy a starter homes you are telling me I can’t live in a rich gentrified white neighborhood, I might have a black guy for a neighbour? That just won’t do!”
“Sorry anything not within 5 blocks of a Starbucks can’t possibly count as a starter home”
This is what people sound like when they talk about “safety” and “crime rates” and “starter homes” in the same sentence.