Political Memes

But if you actually own one, the cost of everything maintenance wise is through the roof, contractors are difficult to get in a saturated commercial market, basically you can go from able to afford the house to struggling in a few years, housepoor just because things declined faster than you could account for. But you can't sell it because rent is now way more expensive than the mortgage, even divided in half.

I have this strong desire to move somewhere that land is still very cheap and become a crazy hermit who lives in a shed or something.

Any time I have a piece of this feeling I'm reminded of the most underappreciated technological and society development: the flush toilet.

Its freakin' magic that usually requires a functioning municipality to run dependably and cheaply. I just don't think I can live a life long term without it.

So long as there's gigabit internet and a hospital not too far away....

Well it's telling that all of the rich investment banker types always eventually quit and start a hobby farm in the country.

The general feeling seems to be that agriculture was a good idea, but we took things too far with this whole civilisation thing.

Luckily I was earning 40k in 1999, and I'm now earning 400k!

The house I own now has sold six times between 2000 and now. Mostly because it's been in a possession of elderly people who've lived in the house for 2 or 3 years after downsizing from their original house and then either dying or have to enter care.

As a result the house has basically had no work done on it for 20 odd years and it shows, the person I bought the house off of was one of the first non-elderly people to live in the property and she did do quite a number of important maintenance, but not a lot because she only lived in the house a year and then got married and moved in with her husband, so between me and her we've probably added untold value to the property. However had we done none of that and just held on to the house as an investment, we did probably been able to triple our investment in about 5 years.

Not that it'll do me any good when I finally sell it.

The only reason my partner and i could is we lucked out and bought our house at the bottom of the housing market during COVID. Interest rates hit the lowest point just as we began financing but people hadn't quite started buying yet so prices had bottomed out. It "appreciated" by over 50% within two years, like fucking magic.

If we had waited until now, we could not afford to buy our two bedroom, one bath, <1000 square foot, old-as-fuck, not fancy house. The monthly payment would be almost 2.5x higher and the FHA minimum down payment nearly killed us already at the lower price.

My partner and I both have advanced degrees and now make over $200k a year (disclaimer: we live in one of the top 5 highest cost of living areas in the US). We still don't make enough to adopt kids. The market, economy, and country in general are just super fucked.

This is inflation

I can't find it now because I'm on phone and not a computer and I can't really search for it l, but I'm sure that there was a post a while back where someone worked out that if minimum wage had actually kept up with inflation it would be around $80 USD an hour now. Which seems ludicrously high for minimum wage job, but apparently the math works out.

Obviously American employment protection laws are probably the worst in the western world, so probably not a great baseline, but it still demonstrates how badly off people are in general, compared to their parents and grandparents.

I'm sorry about the stress but to be fair one of the reasons that house prices got so insane was people like you who were buying to rent. That puts pressure on the housing market because if you buy to rent you can own multiple properties, so more and more housing stock gets taken out of rotation so it gets to the point where even if people could theoretically afford to buy a house, there are none available.

Renting brakes the supply and demand system. If there were more houses than there was demand, the value would go down and would open up home ownership for more people, this would increase demand and stabilise the market. If there was insufficient supply, housing prices would go up which would incentivise companies to construct more properties, thus increasing availability and stabilising the market. But the want to be landlords come in and buy up all the available homes and now there is high demand but low supply, so construction companies build houses and sell directly to landlords (because landlords have no chain), demand has increased but supply has remained the same, despite construction having happened. Repeat that for 50 years and you get our current housing market.

It's really really really easy to have this outlook, if you consider a house to be more a thing you live in, and less an investment opportunity.