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Back on the first wave of "built in America" workers could afford to buy houses and have a decent standard of living with their salaries, so it was an attractiv

• Something1234 4y ago
  Or rent prices in general. It's absolutely obscene how expensive rent is where light rail is available near Philly. $1400+/month for a 1 bed room. I can rent cheaper inside of Philly proper.
  • RobRivera 4y ago
    sure, but then youre in Philly proper
    • akira2501 4y ago
      So, quality of location and buyer demand seem to have a large impact on this problem. I'm not sure how the government is going to solve this, other than making Philly nicer and thus more enticing to live in, or just forcing you to live there anyways.
      • samtheprogram 4y ago
        If Philly was cleaner, it would instantly compete on a much higher level. As someone who grew up in the area and loved (loves?) it I’ve never understood how dirty the city compared to other major cities. On cleanliness, it competes with New York and San Francisco but it is… Philly.
        • astrange 4y ago
          Maybe the dirtiness is demonstrating an unreclaimed lead and air pollution problem, which would explain Philly residents' reputation for violence and throwing batteries at each other.
• getcrunk 4y ago
  Real estate prices are just a symptom of our never-ending inflation due fractional reserve banking. https://workableeconomics.com/ https://workableeconomics.com/ Explains it all pretty well
  • anon84873628 4y ago
    The Georgists would like to disagree with you :-D And apparently we can thank the Petro dollar system for gutting US manufacturing.
    • nostrademons 4y ago
      Georgism is largely orthogonal to monetary policy. Georgists hold that public improvements to land & location largely have their value captured by landlords, and as a result landlords enjoy large un-earned incomes simply by getting there first. This misallocation of resources can be fixed with a land-value tax, which returns the surplus to the state where it can be allocated to more public benefit projects, up until the return from those projects is less than the cost in taxes. Inflation and central bank policy is separate from this. If you have a highly inflationary monetary policy, landowners will still reap the benefits of inflation in increased rent, and they will still turn a profit on mortgages, which are paid back in dollars that are worth less. The main difference is that they'll also have a LVT that grows with inflation, and so they face continuous pressure to keep the land is uses that generates the most economic value (rent). But unexpected inflation is effectively a discount on their purchase price, if they pay with borrowed money; this doesn't change under a Georgist system.
  • raincom 4y ago
    Despite inflation, prices of many goods are cheaper today: look at laptops, monitors, TVs.
    • midoridensha 4y ago
      That's only because the materials and labor needed for them is far less than in the past thanks to technological improvements, plus economies of scale are generally better now (population is much larger: lots of consumers in other countries like China buying the same stuff). Take a look at the hand-soldered circuitry in an old TV or radio and it's obvious why those things were so expensive.
• gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I am all in favor, and beg for a bill, that would simply declare that publicly-owned, publicly-traded companies may not legally possess housing, unless they built it themselves. Manage, yes; own, no. Never going to happen though.
  • Retric 4y ago
    It’s mostly local voters that are the issue not companies. Good luck trying to lower property prices. This is a case of what’s good for the country is rarely good for the people making these choices. People living outside a county don’t decide their policies are but still suffer from them.
    • brazed_blotch 4y ago
      You have written “it’s” instead of “its” on the last two occurrences of the word. It should be without the apostrophe, as it’s indicating possession. I used to get this wrong all the time too.
      • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    That's not going to fix anything.
    • lostcolony 4y ago
      I dunno; a lot more house purchases are being bought as investments now, rather than places to live, than ever before. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/07/22/investors-bought-a-quarter-of-homes-sold-last-year-driving-up-rents https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
      • 4y ago
• collegeburner 4y ago
  thank the stupid loose monetary policy with interest rates never coming back up and balance sheet never coming back down. the fed wanted to make sure people could buy housing and its strategy was to do that by making loans cheap but this distorts the market.
• nordsieck 4y ago
  > It's not that the factories are being cheap (at least not in all cases), but the gov has to step in and bring real estate price under control, this is often the biggest economic gap that hurts our generation. This will never happen. The only way to get affordable housing is to build a lot more housing than is currently being built. But that means: * Higher density living * A sustained decrease in residential property values Both of these would be very unpopular with voters. The second point would also probably cause some serious economic problems, as a lot of peoples' and businesses' decisions are based on property values generally going up faster than the rate of inflation.
  • anovikov 4y ago
    Bingo! Real estate prices and rents are so high precisely because this is what the majority (that is, homeowners) want: they want their home equity to go up. And they will vote for whoever makes it more likely. Want to solve it? Scrap democracy (so no one gives a damn what people want), or scrap market economy (so the Party will provide free housing to everyone). I'd much rather stick with expensive rent.
    • nostrademons 4y ago
      Or just have everybody kill everybody else. Reduce the population and you reduce demand for housing, food, energy, and all those other pesky necessities of life that have become too expensive. /s, but history shows that this is how things usually end.
      • _carbyau_ 4y ago
        Yup. I see this as increasing pressures. What matters is the rate of increase. Everyone is competing to ensure they are not at the bottom. But: - will the pressure rise slowly enough to simply pressure those at the bottom to have less children. - will the pressure rise cause those at the bottom to explode. IE riots in the streets etc I think the second option as more likely. By definition, those in power are out of touch with those at the bottom.
    • 4y ago
• just_boost_it 4y ago
  More like step out. The biggest issue with housing today is lack of supply, and the biggest cause of that is the restriction on development imposed by planning regulation. It shouldn't be a 20 minute walk from a detached house to downtown San Francisco. It's a nice idea, but every house like that could be part of an apartment building housing 10 times as many people. US cities have jobs, entertainment, amenities and services, so demand is always going to be high; supply has to be allowed to meet it.
  • 0x445442 4y ago
    Or bring back manufacturing to the flyover states where there is plenty of land and affordable housing.
    • dylan604 4y ago
      But then where would they grow all of that subsidized corn and soy?
  • throwaway1777 4y ago
    I don’t agree with this anymore as housing prices exploded last year in areas that don’t have any lack of supply or building constraints.
    • redanddead 4y ago
      what did you see?
• MR4D 4y ago
  > but the gov has to step in and bring real estate price under control You do realize that the government created the inflation problem, right? The high amounts of stimulus spending plus years of deficit spending created this situation.
  • Consultant32452 4y ago
    Let's not let the federal reserve off the hook with insanely low interest rates for so long.
    • astrange 4y ago
      Zero interest rates also meant construction was cheap. The fact that we didn't construct anything using them was the problem. Higher interest rates are going to make that worse unless we have more public housing investment.
    • kurthr 4y ago
      It's important to realize that the GOAL of the Fed was to raise inflation, but since they can't create money (only change rates and bond terms) it affected primarily financial assets... so we have had financial asset inflation since the dotcom boom (and entry of China into WTO) because of the Fed mandate. For long term growth we should have spent money (eg on broken bridges and infrastructure), but that requires congress to allocate funds so instead it was all monetary (and tax cuts).
      • Consultant32452 4y ago
        The only thing I would add to your comment is that it was all on purpose. As you note, the inflation was on purpose. But also the not repairing our infrastructure. That was on purpose too. It was the greatest wealth transfer from the common people to the wealthy that has ever happened in the history of the planet. The biggest mistake people make is believing this was all just "incompetence." Mistakes of this magnitude are not made innocently.
  • strangattractor 4y ago
• baybal2 4y ago
• WalterBright 4y ago
  > the gov has to step in and bring real estate price under control No government has ever managed to repeal the Law of Supply & Demand. Because it's The Law. Communist countries never succeeded at that, either.
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    Denial of the Law of Supply&Demand is about as effective as denying the Law of Gravity, or passing a law that π=3. A couple of obvious examples of failure are rent control and anti-gouging laws.
  • uup 4y ago
    Communist countries did succeed because they controlled demand. Although I don’t think people would like the solution that much, e.g. three families living together in a 3 bedroom apartment, one family per bedroom.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      No, they didn't. They just had supply&demand based on how long you were willing to wait, the black market, barter, privilege, and a market of favors and counter-favors.
      • nickpp 4y ago
        Also waiting lists. Everybody gets their own apartment… in 20 to 30 years.
  • geysersam 4y ago
    Real estate prices today have little to do with supply and demand. Why else have real estate prices grown hundreds of percent all over the developed world in the last 3 decades, despite relatively low population growth?
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      Like claims of perpetual motion, if it looks like Supply&Demand is not applying, then something is being overlooked. In this case, I suspect your facts overlook the fact that population growth is not even across a country. Population growth has grown a lot in places that are more attractive to live in, and declined in areas that are less attractive. For example, in Spain, I read about many abandoned villages going for a song because the population moved to the big city. In the US, population declined in Detroit and rural areas, and grew in the cities. Housing prices followed those trends.
• landemva 4y ago
  > step in and bring real estate price under control The feds can step out of real estate manipulation by removing the mortgage interest deduction.
  • astrange 4y ago
    Don't the feds create the entire residential mortgage market in the first place through Fannie Mae? That's why we have flat-rate mortgages when other countries have ARMs. That one tax deduction doesn't matter, not when there's a shortage. It's already the most people can afford to pay.
• AmVess 4y ago
  Government is one of the primary reasons why housing is so expensive. In some areas, the cost to develop a plot of land has gone up 10x in as many years. Permit process is expensive and takes time. Laying utilities is expensive. Paying the myriad of fees is expensive. In one place I lived, the cost of developing a plot of land for single family use was almost $70k, and that was not an expensive state like California. And then mortgage rate hikes have to be considered. Buyers are walking away from contracts and homes being built because rate hikes made the homes unaffordable. Less government is the solution, not more.
  • socialismisok 4y ago
    Investors owning real estate has done more to move prices up than permits. Investors buy a quarter of all stock and have an incentive to lobby for keeping supply low. The solution is more government regulation reducing the number of units big investors can own, building small public housing units throughout their cities (not big projects), and making investing in property less appealing for big players via rent control, landlord tenant laws, zoning up, etc.
    • cuteboy19 4y ago
      Isn't Amazon cheaper than your local electronics store? So therefore, won't big players be able to be cheaper than smaller ones? So then what is the logic behind stopping big investors? Also don't understand the thought process behind not having big government projects
      • socialismisok 4y ago
        Big projects are considerably more specialized to maintain. You don't just need a guy with a pressure washer, you need someone who can get a whole rig hanging over the edge of the building. The plumbing, elevators, fire suppression, trash collection, heating and cooling, and electrical systems require specialists. They also centralize poverty, which has effects on the local area. The workers in those buildings need to travel all over for their work. Small, two to four story apartment buildings can largely be managed by handymen. They can be distributed throughout a city, placing them in communities that can support them. The people who live there can work in their local communities. Beyond that, their initial capital costs are lower, and it's easier to find land that is zoned for 4 story buildings than 40 story buildings. > Isn't Amazon cheaper than your local electronics store? Cheaper? Maybe. Better? Absolutely not. Amazon might save me a couple bucks, but the hassle and time dealing with quality control issues, poorly managed inventory, lack of local experience, etc makes the dollars I save disappear I into increased headaches. The thought of renting a home from Amazon vs the local bookstore is nightmarish to me.
• barbariangrunge 4y ago
  Isn’t the actual problem competition from factories overseas they have lower safety standards and wages? Just because there’s more housing doesn’t mean you suddenly have a good wage. You still have to save up for retirement, and some people invest in mutual funds instead of buying property
  • herbst 4y ago
    Overseas European here. Our safety standards are likely on par or even higher in many cases. Wages for factory workers surely are higher on average as well and you don't save up for your retirement here as this is already deducted from your wage or partly funded by the government.
• MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  I saw a commercial today from Greg Abbott in Texas claiming that he wanted to pass a law that made income tax permanently illegal in the state. Meanwhile, people are getting gouged with almost no positive movement in income year over year at the same time that properties are appreciating about 15% a year in value.
• Pmop 4y ago
  I will never understand how today's industry productivity is the highest it has ever been, yet workers wages/purchasing power hasn't followed, it even got reduced. What the heck is going on?
  • nadagast 4y ago
    Isn't it because there's a ton of new supply of labor from around the world?
  • qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    The west defeated the socialist alternative lurking behind the iron curtain and all bargaining power of unions went to hell. Rollback started right after the discovery what a brittle giant the Sovjet Union really was (about 1970s-1980s) and kept going ever since. Stand alone, with no gun to its head, capitalism auto decays into the neo-feudalism of the guilded age. And alot of the gullible citizenry supported this return to nothing.
    • badpun 4y ago
      Without the politics angle, just adding a new ~two billion poor people to capitalism, over the course of mere ~10 years, will depress wages (imagine US took in a a couple hundred million very poor refugees from Afria and Asia, that are happy to work for half the US minimum wage or less - that's the equivalent of what happened thanks to globalization and free trade). Things might stabilize now, as we enter into de-globalization and the wage levels in Asia will not influence wage levels in the US as much.
  • perryizgr8 4y ago
    Cheap labor, easily available. People willing to work for lower and lower wages, since it is still better than the conditions in their home country.
  • mschuster91 4y ago
    Simple: A lot of the productivity gains of the last decades is thanks to globalization, automation and digitalization - basically, many high-paying manual jobs were eliminated by machines, a lot of lower-paying manual jobs (or environmentally problematic production that would have needed expensive adjustments in the US/EU) was shifted off to China, and digitalization eliminated or vastly improved paper-pusher jobs. Additionally, the standing of unions went down over time, as a combination of legitimate unions-gone-rogue scandals, anti-union legislation being enacted and union-protection enforcement being reduced. The result was that the capitalist owner and leadership class enjoyed absurd amounts of net worth gains, and the worker class was left unemployed or with stagnating wages at best. To prove that: CEO payments exploded 940% since 1978, S&P went up 707%, while average worker pay went up only 12% [1] in the same time frame. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  > the gov has to step in and bring real estate price under control I wouldn't assume the issue wouldn't be resolved better by the local/state/federal government stepping out of this area more.
  • ReptileMan 4y ago
    It's complicated... the fed should manage the economy in such way so people are not forced to move in a couple of megacities to find jobs.
    • robertlagrant 4y ago
      That sounds like an interesting thing for the government to mess with. No one is forced to move to specific places; there are jobs everywhere. Certain types of jobs, e.g. acting or tech, are best done where the money is, which is Hollywood/Silicon Valley respectively, but huge numbers of jobs are not.
• dapf 4y ago
  The government has to step in by stepping out. 1. There is a problem. 2. Government steps in to fix problem. 3. Government creates two new problems by fixing the first one. 4. Repeat x 2