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Add to that California's very high cost of living and tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to fall from employment and housing to homelessne
by KennyBlanken 3y ago
Add to that California's very high cost of living and tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to fall from employment and housing to homelessness, coupled with the country-wide massive drop in home ownership, skyrocketing housing costs, near total stagnation of wages for lower classes, and unprecedented concentration of wealth.
I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent on solidifying a peasant class.
Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't already own, but even keeping a house within a family might soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being to rent from a giant housing corporation.
And everyone thinks HOAs are bad...just wait.
- JohnFen 3y agoI don't personally mind the idea of not being able to buy a house. That's not a thing I'm interested in anyway. But only being able to rent from large corporations? That's nightmare fuel right there.
- throwaway049 3y agoThe two things are fairly tightly connected. If ordinary citizens can't buy house, how does some other citizen (not corporation) buy one and offer it for rent to you?
- JohnFen 3y agoYes, absolutely true. I wasn't really saying that not being able to buy a house is a good thing, but I did speak before thinking here.
- dragonwriter 3y agoThere are things besides individual citizens and corporations that could, in theory, own and rent housing.
- ajmurmann 3y agoThere are a lot of individuals who buy investment properties. I have friends who use this as their primary retirement vehicle and own a bunch of rental properties. They are just successful small-business owners and the properties are their private property, unrelated to the business. From last time I saw statistics on this, most rental units were still owned by small landlords.
- throwaway049 3y agoYes quite. But we were contemplating a future where small scale landlords were extinct.
- ajmurmann 3y agoWhy would they go extinct though? This makes no sense.
- aidenn0 3y agoI live in SoCal, and in the 20ish years I've lived here, it's gone from "Reasonable rent, but you can only afford to buy if you're a professional who's saved up for several years" to "Horribly expensive rent and you can only afford to buy if you are independently wealthy" I bought during the transition to this state, and made (on paper at least) almost as much money on housing appreciation in the past 10 years as I did from my software-developer job. It should be obvious that houses can't go up an average of 6-figures per year indefinitely. If I had rented for about 5 years longer, I would have been priced out.