3 ms·
I think you make a lot of good points here, but I think a little more weight needs to be placed on the "big paychecks" part. When my wife and I bought a house h
by cam0 6y ago
I think you make a lot of good points here, but I think a little more weight needs to be placed on the "big paychecks" part. When my wife and I bought a house here (in SF) a couple of years ago, we had to make offers on nearly 20 homes over the course of 18 months before we had an offer accepted, and we were coming in with an all cash offer at or above asking price every time. The problem we ran into was that there were usually ~7 offers ahead of us (also all cash obviously, but even higher over asking). The income disparity is so extreme these days, and I hesitate to say "income" because these are not senior engineers at FAANG that we were bidding against, these were people who likely earn 10s of millions a year and/or come from extreme family wealth. The wealth gap really is staggering.
- epistasis 6y agoRight, and imagine that if instead of all your money going to the profits of the previous owner, your money could be used productively to pay labor to build new housing for you! Instead of your wealth being transferred to a laborer who has less wealthy, it was transferred to somebody who is likely quite a bit more wealthy. And instead of your wealth being used to improve the city, it was all used for the profits of somebody els.
- chii 6y ago> pay labor to build new housing for you! good luck using labour to generate a piece of land to which you can build on that's near where you want it.
- epistasis 6y agoExactly, that's what I am griping about. There's more than enough land to accommodate more housing to be built, but existing neighbors to that land have forbidden that through regulatory capture of city zoning laws.