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"Bare Minimum Mondays" sounds exactly like the kind of thing a "gospel of productivity" would promote. If the article had to be boiled down to one thing, it wo
by asdajksah2123 4y ago
"Bare Minimum Mondays" sounds exactly like the kind of thing a "gospel of productivity" would promote.
If the article had to be boiled down to one thing, it would be the fact that housing is too expensive. Which is frankly a derivative of the fact that for decades the US has promoted wealth building on the backs of real estate, which is unsustainable for obvious reasons.
Also, replacing work, which even if it doesn't pay as well as it did earlier, is shown to largely have a positive impact on the mental health of people, with TikTok is a horrible trade-off.
Building wealth through housing means the cost of your house goes up relative to inflation and for it to be an actual good it has to go up relative to alternative safe investments like investing in an index fund, which obviously means that for people who don't already own homes, housing is now relatively more expensive than it was for people before them...run these obvious choices for half a century and housing will naturally get prohibitively more expensive, especially when you throw in the fact that available land will only get more scarce and therefore more expensive, and zoning, and NIMBYism).
- helen___keller 4y agoThe ill effects of poor housing policy are deep and insidious Gentrification, and backlash against it is the most obvious societal outcome of failing to keep prices under control. But it goes further House prices drive out low income workers(gentrification). Loss of lower income families in turn raises the cost of doing business for any business that deals with unskilled or otherwise cheap labor. In turn these businesses must raise prices, which feeds back into housing prices among just about all other industries. Meanwhile, poor citizens learn to hate new condo buildings, gnash their teeth at the Starbucks that opened in their neighborhood, and fantasize about shooting guns at nothing in the night to keep the yuppies from moving in. After all, having wealthy neighbors is demonstrably destructive to your way of life. In fact, having an improved standard of living, can be seen as destructive. After all, if they clean up the local park and add universal pre-K, does that mean the yuppies will move in and drive up rents? These things would be obvious community wins outside the lens of housing prices. Under the specter of housing as investment, it is in the rational interest of all renters to make their city as least attractive and unpleasant as possible to live in as possible, with as few high paying jobs and businesses, except for ideally one good job for the renter themself. On the flip side, for homeowners, housing-as-investment incentivizes the kind of exclusivity you might otherwise only find with diehard bitcoiners. Ideally housing production should be 0 or negative. Construction and development is no longer viewed in the lens of whether it is good for the city, nor good for the people involved, but if it is good for my personal investment. And thus, at a societal level, we have built for the young a culture of loathing wealthy companies that bring high paying jobs and the yuppies who work those job; and for the old, a culture of loathing any change, any construction or development at all, that might interfere with the life built through homeownership We are truly not in it together, and have not been since exclusive zoning became the norm
- hifromLA 4y agoI agree and it actually gets worse… The other alternative to gentrifying a neighborhood is moving to a LCOL city and watching prices rise there. So now Americans want to keep other Americans out of their cities. And on top of that we are so car dependent that we can’t hope to build the kind of infill housing we need because there is literally not enough road capacity and transit options == lol. Too bad the US has some of the worst transit construction costs in the world and tons of local opposition to boot. If I was a betting person I would bet against the US figuring this out and guess that renting for your life will increasingly become the norm even in previously LCOL cities.
- Out_of_Characte 4y agoWhat does LCOL stand for?
- Nasrudith 4y agoLow cost of living.
- la64710 4y agoWhy should house prices in USA be any different than any other country? Adjusting for the current different real estate prices are much more in many other major cities around the world than that of in USA.
- missedthecue 4y agoI agree. For all the bellyaching about US real estate prices (and I realize they have gone up a lot) it still one of the more affordable countries for a local resident to buy their own home. https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/gmaps_rankings.jsp https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/gmaps_rankings.js...
- maxlamb 4y agoIs that including property tax and the fact that there is severely inadequate public transportation so you need to own a car?
- lotsoweiners 4y agoWho knows but alot of us wouldn't take public transportation if it stopped by our front door.
- presentation 4y agoI live in Tokyo, I do not get this sense here.
- mcdonje 4y ago"Others have it worse" isn't a compelling argument for maintaining a status quo that isn't working for most people.