4 ms·

> We have no "landed gentry." It's just a bit less immediately tangible than it used to be. It's still there, and the market still ebbs and flows.

twblalock 4y ago
One of the things about "landed gentry", in the countries where they actually exist, is that they inherited their land. In America almost all of the homes sold today are purchased with money from income, rather than being inherited. Almost all of the people who are buying homes today can afford them by themselves, based on their income. They aren't "landed gentry", they are just successful people. To demean them by implying they don't deserve their success is insulting and wrong. That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. And it requires a different response than fulminating about how the "landed gentry will have to be brought to heel" which is total nonsense.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  > Almost all of the people who are buying homes today can afford them by themselves, based on their income. They aren't "landed gentry", they are just successful people. Almost 30% of all houses sold last year on Texas was to LCC and institutional investors. You can keep the myth going of people without help buying their house and being succesful but the reality is most people report having help from friends or family for the deposit, that most mortgages are sold with criminal variable interest rates and that the corp mass buying of houses has been growing year after year since 2016. https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-homes-in-2021/ https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-h...
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages, and variable rates are not criminal. People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. It turns out that institutional and "foreign" investors, just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay -- the price of housing is what it is no matter who the buyer is.
    - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
      > Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage. > People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. They 100% play a significant role on the problem. > Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. Not in any way that fundamentally changes the status quo, certainly not to reverse it, and also housing has been in a downspiral of accesibility for 70 years, 3 local laws in Canada is not gonna fix it. > just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay Housing is a need, overpaying or homelessness is a real junction for a sizeble part of the population. Look at singapore, they are more capitalist than the US and has banned private landlords. Their results speak for themselves, cheaper mortgages, more space per person, shorter commutes, possibilities for larger families to find enough space. If you prefer to have a building "for billionaries" empty like New York does instead of close to 0% homelessness then thats your choice, but do not pretend it is to help hard working people be rewarded for their labour. Landlords are a remenant of aristocracy, a way for rich tophs to keep living large from their estate. Adam Smith called them parasites for a reason, they are a negative GDP engine.
      - twblalock 4y ago
        > At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage. Ok, you just don't understand how mortgages work in the US. Fixed-rate mortgages, which represent 91% of the mortgage market, can be had for terms of 15 or 30 years. This is not like Europe where you have to re-mortgage every two years. You can, right now, lock in a rate for the next 30 years in the US.
        nlnn 4y ago
        > This is not like Europe where you have to re-mortgage every two years. This isn't strictly true - 2 years tends to be the shortest (with the lowest rates) you can get, but longer terms are very common. In the UK, 2/3/5/10 year fixed rates are common. Many people used to go with 2 year fixed rate (for the lowest interest rates), then at the end of the term, switch to another fixed rate for the next N years. Now people are opting for 5/10 year fixed rate a lot more than they used to, especially if they can lock in to a low interest rate deal. In France you can get a fixed rate mortgage for the entire term of the mortgage. In Germany, I've seen fixed rate mortgages for 10/20/30 years advertised. Those are the only countries I'm familiar with though, not sure how other European countries differ.
- watwut 4y ago
  > In America almost all of the homes sold today are purchased with money from income, rather than being inherited. How would you even had stats like that and what is that supposed to mean? How would you distinguish money from "income"? > That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    > How would you distinguish money from "income"? Mortgage underwriters are very good at doing that.
  - rascul 4y ago
    > Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined. It's not exactly a counter point, but there have been lots of new millionaires lately: > People got richer last year, with Americans making up nearly half of the new millionaires across the globe. According to Credit Suisse's annual wealth report, as many as 5.2 million people became millionaires in 2021; 2.5 million of those people were in the U.S. > "This is the largest increase in millionaire numbers recorded for any country in any year this century and reinforces the rapid rise in millionaire numbers seen in the United States since 2016," the report stated. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/us-gains-25-million-new-millionaires-in-2021/435759 https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/us-gains-25-milli...
- jackstraw14 4y ago
  > That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. And it requires a different response than fulminating about how the "landed gentry will have to be brought to heel" which is total nonsense. hold up. take a moment to consider that "landed gentry" might change as a demographic and we're suddenly allies.
- MandieD 4y ago
  "Compte du Whatevertheheck" and his English fellow fictional counterpart Lord Fitzwilliam, Earl of ------ (an Earl's wife is a Countess), weren't mere landed gentry - they were part of the hereditary aristocracy. An aristocrat could be rather poor if he or previous generations had mismanaged the family holdings. The Bennets and Darcys from Pride and Prejudice were the landed gentry, with the Bennets being in the middle of it, albeit very precariously for the Bennet women, as Mr. Bennet failed to father a son. Their interests very famously clashed with those of the up-and-coming merchant class, and of course, those of the tenant farmers and hired laborers. (Charles Bingley, son of a very prosperous merchant, was not yet part of the landed gentry, but would be as soon as he used his cash to buy an estate and started receiving that sweet sweet land rent from his new tenants.) We certainly have "landed gentry" in the US - have you ever noticed that auto dealerships tend to be handed down from father to son? It's a good deal of why Tesla can't sell direct in a lot of states. Also: family farms. Most agricultural workers worked land they didn't own, both now and in the previous two centuries.

twblalock 4y ago

One of the things about "landed gentry", in the countries where they actually exist, is that they inherited their land. In America almost all of the homes sold today are purchased with money from income, rather than being inherited. Almost all of the people who are buying homes today can afford them by themselves, based on their income. They aren't "landed gentry", they are just successful people. To demean them by implying they don't deserve their success is insulting and wrong. That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. And it requires a different response than fulminating about how the "landed gentry will have to be brought to heel" which is total nonsense.

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
> Almost all of the people who are buying homes today can afford them by themselves, based on their income. They aren't "landed gentry", they are just successful people. Almost 30% of all houses sold last year on Texas was to LCC and institutional investors. You can keep the myth going of people without help buying their house and being succesful but the reality is most people report having help from friends or family for the deposit, that most mortgages are sold with criminal variable interest rates and that the corp mass buying of houses has been growing year after year since 2016. https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-homes-in-2021/ https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-h...
- twblalock 4y ago
  Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages, and variable rates are not criminal. People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. It turns out that institutional and "foreign" investors, just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay -- the price of housing is what it is no matter who the buyer is.
  - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
    > Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage. > People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. They 100% play a significant role on the problem. > Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. Not in any way that fundamentally changes the status quo, certainly not to reverse it, and also housing has been in a downspiral of accesibility for 70 years, 3 local laws in Canada is not gonna fix it. > just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay Housing is a need, overpaying or homelessness is a real junction for a sizeble part of the population. Look at singapore, they are more capitalist than the US and has banned private landlords. Their results speak for themselves, cheaper mortgages, more space per person, shorter commutes, possibilities for larger families to find enough space. If you prefer to have a building "for billionaries" empty like New York does instead of close to 0% homelessness then thats your choice, but do not pretend it is to help hard working people be rewarded for their labour. Landlords are a remenant of aristocracy, a way for rich tophs to keep living large from their estate. Adam Smith called them parasites for a reason, they are a negative GDP engine.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      > At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage. Ok, you just don't understand how mortgages work in the US. Fixed-rate mortgages, which represent 91% of the mortgage market, can be had for terms of 15 or 30 years. This is not like Europe where you have to re-mortgage every two years. You can, right now, lock in a rate for the next 30 years in the US.
      - nlnn 4y ago
        > This is not like Europe where you have to re-mortgage every two years. This isn't strictly true - 2 years tends to be the shortest (with the lowest rates) you can get, but longer terms are very common. In the UK, 2/3/5/10 year fixed rates are common. Many people used to go with 2 year fixed rate (for the lowest interest rates), then at the end of the term, switch to another fixed rate for the next N years. Now people are opting for 5/10 year fixed rate a lot more than they used to, especially if they can lock in to a low interest rate deal. In France you can get a fixed rate mortgage for the entire term of the mortgage. In Germany, I've seen fixed rate mortgages for 10/20/30 years advertised. Those are the only countries I'm familiar with though, not sure how other European countries differ.
watwut 4y ago
> In America almost all of the homes sold today are purchased with money from income, rather than being inherited. How would you even had stats like that and what is that supposed to mean? How would you distinguish money from "income"? > That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined.
- twblalock 4y ago
  > How would you distinguish money from "income"? Mortgage underwriters are very good at doing that.
- rascul 4y ago
  > Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined. It's not exactly a counter point, but there have been lots of new millionaires lately: > People got richer last year, with Americans making up nearly half of the new millionaires across the globe. According to Credit Suisse's annual wealth report, as many as 5.2 million people became millionaires in 2021; 2.5 million of those people were in the U.S. > "This is the largest increase in millionaire numbers recorded for any country in any year this century and reinforces the rapid rise in millionaire numbers seen in the United States since 2016," the report stated. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/us-gains-25-million-new-millionaires-in-2021/435759 https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/us-gains-25-milli...
jackstraw14 4y ago
> That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. And it requires a different response than fulminating about how the "landed gentry will have to be brought to heel" which is total nonsense. hold up. take a moment to consider that "landed gentry" might change as a demographic and we're suddenly allies.
MandieD 4y ago
"Compte du Whatevertheheck" and his English fellow fictional counterpart Lord Fitzwilliam, Earl of ------ (an Earl's wife is a Countess), weren't mere landed gentry - they were part of the hereditary aristocracy. An aristocrat could be rather poor if he or previous generations had mismanaged the family holdings. The Bennets and Darcys from Pride and Prejudice were the landed gentry, with the Bennets being in the middle of it, albeit very precariously for the Bennet women, as Mr. Bennet failed to father a son. Their interests very famously clashed with those of the up-and-coming merchant class, and of course, those of the tenant farmers and hired laborers. (Charles Bingley, son of a very prosperous merchant, was not yet part of the landed gentry, but would be as soon as he used his cash to buy an estate and started receiving that sweet sweet land rent from his new tenants.) We certainly have "landed gentry" in the US - have you ever noticed that auto dealerships tend to be handed down from father to son? It's a good deal of why Tesla can't sell direct in a lot of states. Also: family farms. Most agricultural workers worked land they didn't own, both now and in the previous two centuries.