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some of us knew exactly what the last panel was about… 😆
Where I’m from, the median house price has risen 600% relative to median income since the 70’s.
That means that we’re dropping more than the entire value of their home as our deposit, while we compete against capital-heavy boomers that benefited from that growth looking to downsize.
There’s a reason they could have a house and 12 kids on a single summer job income - they were handed a strong economy that they ransacked for their own benefit before blaming the poor schmucks that are inhereting the stripped wreckage they’ve left behind. Couple that with the cost of the massive environmental pivot we’ll need to make to survive as a species, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me for wanting to drive the nose of the next boomer that preaches about smashed avocado toast and bootstraps through the back of their skull.
I’m fascinated by how idioms have gone a complete 180. Now we tell people that they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but that idiom is used to describe an impossible task. You can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, it’s literally impossible. Same with it’s just a few bad apples to excuse bad behaviour. The idiom is a few bad apples ruins the barel, that one bad person or thing jeopardizes the whole thing. I don’t get it.
People are rather ignorant as a whole. Many of us here probably use our brains for genuine thought, but I find that to be the exception.
Look at the shit people focus on as important and how they mimic what they see and parrot what they hear and it becomes clear how they can’t even get simple sayings right.
Also I put my hand into a bag of apples last night and my finger dug into a rotten spot in one apple with mold in it. Thankfully it didn’t get a chance to spread… close one.
“A person is smart. People are dumb panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”
Last month I had this random conversation with an old lady while on vacation. She mentioned that quite lightheartedly, that “we bought our house just on our salaries, we worked hard back then and needed to settle down”. I wasn’t expecting to have to explain to her that this is not such an easy option for us right now. She seemed genuinely surprised and disappointed at the facts and I didn’t know whether to feel enraged or amused by her true or not ignorance.
I’m solid GenX.
My grandparents bought a house on a corner lot in the northwest suburbs of Chicago for $6000. Which was about a years salary for Grampa, who worked as a welder. This was in the late 60s.
ETA: Their mortgage was around $50.00 a month.
I’m GenX as well and I will straight up admit that my wife and I got lucky, purchased a house in a “distressed” neighborhood in Portland because it was all we could afford, and now, 20 years later, the neighborhood is fully gentrifying and our house and property is worth way more than what we owe on it.
I’m conflicted as to how to feel about it. While on the one hand we very innocently bought the place because it was in a shitty neighborhood and was all we could afford, on the other hand I now know that we were what the urban studies people refer to as “bohemian colonizers,” meaning that without knowing it, we were, by moving into the neighborhood as poor artist types, part of a much longer process of gentrification.
Again, I am of several minds regarding how I feel about the whole thing.
Meh, gentrification is the result of bad policy, not personal, individual choices (except maybe for people flipping houses and landlords). Neighborhoods, and the people in them, should not stay poor forever. Rent controls, grants for people to start businesses or coops or whatever, allowing mixed-use zoning, and stuff like that can reduce the harmful affects of gentrification.
I feel bad because I think the house I sold went to a landlord. At the time it didn’t really occur to me that a cash offer probably implied land lord. I put some blame on my real estate agent for pushing lower cash offers over higher loan offers but it still makes me upset. The HOA in that neighborhood only allower 10% of the homes to be rented out and when we moved in they had a ton of signs saying that. I assumed that would be the case when we were selling.
It was one of the nicest while still being affordable townhomes in the area.
It doesn’t keep my up at night or anything but at the same time it’s not like I’m going to be selling my current house soon. It’s an opportunity you only get so often.
Which would be round about $55000 in today’s money, for those interested.
Today a the median yearly salary for a welder is a bit less than $40,000.
For this price you can maybe get a camper, not too big though.
This is actually worse than it sounds 1 year of salary can be paid off in 2.5 paying the same amount someone pays for rent on their apartment. In 2.5 years you wont pay much in the way of interest. Over a 30 year mortgage paying the median home price of 388k means paying almost 3x the face value or roughly 1.1M or roughly 17 years of median income.
I live in a small town in the SE US. I bought my house for $89,900, 12ish years ago. There are 3 vacant houses on my street and they are all listed for $250,00 or more. My house is bigger than all of them. They have all been empty for over a year.
They really should tax empty houses at 100%. You’ll see how fast they will sell, and how low the price will go to achieve that.
absolutely agree. It’s insane that we allow corporations to hoard housing and artificially jack up the price. I’m just outside the city limits and I see soooo many homeless people now. A lot of them have jobs too, they just can’t afford a place to live. Some local churches have opened up their parking lots for people to sleep in their cars.
Agreed, if no one is resident in the house then the taxes should go way up.
This way any house where the owner isn’t living there and it’s not rented would see the taxes increase quickly. We can even add a multiplier according to how many years the house has been sitting there empty.
In a way, some states do have this. Texas for example has the “homestead tax exemption” which puts a cap on the tax burden increases when prop evals 📈. This is only applicable to one home for the family and they must reside in it. You can’t claim this exemption if you are renting it out or have a summer home in this state.
This is what I understand anyways.
We do that in Vancouver and it’s good. The fines are steep.
But it’s opened a mini industry of people being paid to visit homes so they aren’t ‘empty’.
I just bought a house in the eastern part of the Midwest in the US. The tax assessment in 2021 for the house was about 193k. In 2023, it’s 275k. That is a 30% increase in 2 years. During those 2 years, nobody lived in the house, and no improvements were made in that time. Neat! My mortgage is still about the same as my rent for a 2br apartment in Oregon earlier this year. I suspect the Midwest is about to start hating Oregonians as much as Oregonians hate Californians soon!