I am fortunate enough like most HN users to be working in tech, and although I can't speak for everyone in this field, we seem to be better off than most. Inflation's hit me hard but knock on wood if anything was to happen, I'd be okay.<p>However, my brother, who is just starting his career works in IT and has a $50,000~ a year salary. He lives in a Tier 3 city in Florida and the median rent for a studio there is $1,500, up from $600 five or so years ago. After taxes, car insurance, car payment, food, and a night out here and there, he barely can save anything after his student loan payments.<p>This is ridiculous. I can't imagine what others are facing when it comes to the cost of living crisis that is ongoing here. (And for other folks across the pond in England, it's even worse from what I hear.)<p>Throughout my travels of America, anecdotally, I am seeing more families making long term accommodations out of motels and we seem unwilling from our governments to even address this. I think it's going to get much worse until it gets better unfortunately...
I think one of the cause is we don’t tax the landlords higher for the investment property. That’s why lot of upper middle class and HNIs have lot of investment properties around the country. It’s so easy to buy and rent out properties without even seeing them ever. One of my friend who works at Microsoft in Seattle, owns 4 properties around US(3 in WA and 1 in TX). It was so easy to get cheap mortgages between 2017-21 if you had 100-200k lying around.
This seems like it’s due to a triple threat of at least three things:<p>- Real estate speculation driving up prices<p>- Lack of new housing being built<p>- Wage stagnation<p>Each of those also having multiple underlying causes. And that’s without even getting into things like drug addiction.
I tried to go lower on the price of a house once because nobody else was bidding on it during the pandemic. The owners decided to just leave it empty and move to another country. They probably made 400k by leaving the house empty.<p>Every time I look at houses, I hear the same story: There's a lot of people who have been waiting to buy houses from the previous year, so there's a lot of competition now. The problem is this will always be true if there's more people looking for houses than houses.<p>This is not a left-right problem. The right and left will equally say we should not build housing. NIMBYism is common across the political spectrum. The most left places like New York have let the housing situation get so bad that now anyone that arrives there is instantly homeless because there is simply nowhere to live[0]. This is New York, the place everyone thinks of when you say "the land of opportunity" and the location of the statue that everyone cites whenever Trump says something about migrants.<p>A lot of stories I read these days I think about The Housing Theory of Everything. Why is everything so expensive? Why are employees so expensive? Why are these expensive employees not able to pay their bills? It seems like a large part of this is that we have structured our economy to pour all of our money into land. Not landowners, land. When you're working for a faang but paying a 5-10k mortgage for a condo, how rich do you really feel? How would it feel to be the ones that didn't get a place to live? How can there ever be a middle class when those that don't make above a certain amount just end up homeless?<p>When there is more housing than people, then people have freedom to ask for better or cheaper housing. Until then, we will be like crabs in a barrel, pulling other people down for a place to live.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/nyregion/migrants-homeless-asylum-nyc.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/nyregion/migrants-homeles...</a>
Hotel California. You can check out but you can never leave. The policies of the state hollow out the middle class so you get the very rich and the desperately poor.
The devil's advocate here!<p>One would think there isn't enough land in America for people to build houses (of any type?). Or, are you going to tell me that laws made by men (and women, but mostly men) make it illegal to be housed and poor at the same time, no matter the amount of land? And, that changing the laws it's an uphill battle? I understand the concept, America is not the only country like that. But if memory serves me right, America is the result of people from Europe (and Asia, and Africa, and South America) escaping from exactly the same problem?<p>So, here is my proposal: build new nations people can escape to. There is Greenland[^1], Svalbard[^2], Antarctica, the Sahara[^3], the oceans, the Moon, the space habitats and Mars[^4]. We have the technology to build livable spaces[^5].<p>[^1]: Which is Danish, but can be rented from them for a (high) price.<p>[^2]: Ident, but from Norway. Rent is going to be more expensive.<p>[^3]: Rents and labor are cheap.<p>[^4]: A bad idea, even according to my client.<p>[^5]: Anybody who has been in Las Vegas knows that humans are perfectly adapted to live in big dens of concrete with no vegetation nor walking spaces[^6]. Anything better than that.<p>[^6]: Yes, there are golf curses.
There's a lot of comments about building more homes.<p>That's only part of the problem. Another part is the fact that rents are a <i>thing</i>. Make it <i>unprofitable</i> to rent and you'll find a lot fewer people forced to rent.
After capitalism comes Rentism (Feudalism 2.0): the rent economy.
The rich hoard the resources and means of production and instead of creating new value, they rent it to the rest (Landlords, etc). You'll own nothing and you will be happy.
Remember that this is a policy choice: we chose to enrich Boomers who own houses, at the expense of these people.<p>We could build more homes on golf courses, we could build affordable housing, we could build up, we could get rid of parking mandates. All of that would cost The Boomer, and so is forbidden.
People keep arguing about the left without thinking that this degree of income inequality is unsustainable. Liberals should be ashamed of what they have become. There’s no liberty when there’s a de facto Royal class, which are the extremely wealthy.
When the government shut down the country for a few years and started sending out "covid pandemic checks", economists warned that the economy would crash. I'm not sure about the true cause and effect here, but the economy sure has crashed.