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Nonprofits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own fun

Nonprofits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding This is unfortunately all too true. A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing. We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations.

Rinzler89 2y ago
For over 20+ years I've been hearing people and politicians talking about "affordable housing" and in that time, the gap between housing price increases and wage increases has only gone up, along with wealth inequality, that I'm tired of hearing even more talks, as I already know where this is going: nowhere. Housing will get more expensive and the rich will keep getting richer, as per usual, while the politicians will keep making vague empty political promises about housing affordability when the election time comes. I'm not holding my breath this will be solved ever in my lifetime, unless war or a violent revolution resets the monopoly board.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  Work to bring about Revolution, don't just hope for it.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    The problem with revolution is that when it comes, you won’t be in charge. The person who is willing to be the most violent and ruthless will be.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      Exactly this. It's why the former communist countries had nothing to do with Karl Marx's communism and why people say "real communism has never been tried". Those "communists" who came to power there didn't distribute the wealth to the people, but came to power to pocket it themselves by replacing the monarchies who had all the wealth and power previously to them, but still kept the folk enslaved at gunpoint. You basically switched one undemocratic oppressive regime with another and the average folk kept getting the short stick both times. So be careful when you wish for major revolutions. Doesn't necessarily mean that with new management, things will always turn out better for you this time. Doesn't mean you should stick to the status quo and never try to change things either.
      - barfbagginus 2y ago
        I endorse queer automated Revolution. The beauty of this is that we can do terror and violence to the enemy by just existing peacefully, as queer people. The enemy is literally just that cowardly, we could say "boo, I exist" at them, and we don't have to kill anyone. Automating things, making those automations queer inclusive, and maintaining control of the things that we automated, by making them open source, is how we ram that victory home. Tada! Queer automated open source communism for the win. Now you either want to work for the revolution, are terrified of it like bonkers because I said queer as if I'm proud of it, or you have critical ideas about how to improve it! And that's exactly how a revolution should be! Viva! We can be gay! We can do crimes! We can automate the things! And we can win!
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  You should migrate to somewhere that does value affordable housing.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Where would that be that's nice to live, safe, good infrastructure, good jobs AND by some miracle still allows you to buy affordable housing? Plus, if you move to a low-CoL area with a high-CoL job then you're not really solving housing, you're just moving your problem elsewhere onto other people making housing unaffordable for them. How many former cheap places to live have been gentrified into oblivion in a short amount of time? The goal is to make housing affordable AND help preserve local communities and culture(even though that might be contradictory to a degree), not to keep gentrifying and uprooting them in a musical chairs style game and then wonder why communities are dying, family units are dying, birth rates plummet, family support networks are dying, mental illnesses are up, loneliness is up, etc.
    - baq 2y ago
      You seem to assume a free market for housing, that would be at least partially incorrect. The free market is a cause of long term (timeframe of decades) housing unaffordabilty because the haves treat housing as investment while the have-nots live under bridges or in cars which puts them in an unemployment/debt spiral. The free market could work if housing was a depreciating asset like cars. Too many people in the west would be pissed off if that happened, though. It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight. Except that's not how it happens. Demographics have been collapsing in many EU countries for a while now and prices have been going nowhere but up at rates beyond wage growth. Internal migration from rural to urban, and external migration from war torn and impoverished nations also to urban centers, keep pushing demand up regardless of local reproduction numbers. Sure, you can now buy cheap properties in some empty towns in the south of Italy for example, but to what end if there's no jobs there?
- bboygravity 2y ago
  It was already solved though (in Singapore and many other places). Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >It was already solved though If people can only name Singapore, Tokyo and Vienna as examples where "housing was fixed", then it's proof that it hasn't been fixed when there's the other millions of cities worldwide left.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      it proves it's a solvable problem, so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem. The first atomic bomb was hard, because it wasn't known if it was even possible. The second one was still really hard, but once the Americans proved it was possible, everyone else knew it was possible.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs. Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same. This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".
        2y ago
- klyrs 2y ago
  Right, you can't increase wages, because that would cause inflation! Nevermind the grocers, oil cartels and landlords hiking prices year after year. That's just good business sense, hampering that would destroy prosperity!
violet13 2y ago
Homelessness, especially in places such as the SF Bay Area, really doesn't boil down to just affordability. Yes, there are some folks who just faced economic headwinds and are living in a car while trying to find a way out. But there is also a huge population of people who couldn't function if given keys to a free apartment. For one, drugs won the war on drugs, addiction is a big part of the problem, and we don't really know how to fix it; harsh punishments don't work, quasi-decriminalization isn't a success, and treatment for people who don't want to be helped is hard. We also don't like to institutionalize people anymore, so folks with severe mental illness often end up on the streets too.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Wrong on all points. The places with the most addicts (W. Virginia) have the least homelessness (W. Virginia again). There really isn't any more too it than supply and demand. The only reasons that is seems like all homeless are addicts are 1) only a small fraction of homeless are obviously homeless, and 2) addicts are less able to cope with high housing costs. But that's a marginal effect; plenty of drug abuse happens within the community of housed people.
  - zeroCalories 2y ago
    it's really hard to afford a sf apartment AND a crippling drug addiction, for several reasond
    - chrischen 2y ago
      I’m not sure if getting rid of the addiction would automatically make SF houses affordable. Certainly doesn’t help. But it’s also not SF’s job to house the entire nation’s homeless population.
      - waveBidder 2y ago
        it seems like it is if they're former SF residents priced out of their homes.
bjelkeman-again 2y ago
Finland seems to have found a method that deals with this. They have nearly halved homelessness in eight years. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-finland-solved-homelessness/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-finland-solved-ho...
- shuckles 2y ago
  Across the entire country, Finland had 3x fewer homeless people at its worst than San Francisco the city does. The problem is of such different magnitudes that it's unlikely Finland has much to teach.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Ah, the old scientific adage, "if something innovative works at a small scale, that guarantees it will not work at a large scale." I mean this guy shared something interesting and thoughtful, more interesting than the article's complaining, and your thought is really this?
    - shuckles 2y ago
      That was not the logic of my comment, and it seems like you didn't try very hard to consider what I meant. For example: the "interesting and thoughtful" article linked describes Finland's "Housing First" model adopted in 2008. Guess what: Housing First was first introduced as a policy idea in San Francisco in 1994, adopted as de facto city policy about ten years after that, and set as statewide policy in California ten years later. Ten years later, the problem is worse than ever! Perhaps Finland and California are different enough that looking to Finland as a policy playground is a waste of time. This isn't physics; it's political economy.
      - doctorpangloss 2y ago
        The bad faith reasoning in your original comment is what you wrote. You are welcome to write interesting stuff in your comments, you should.
roshin 2y ago
Lack of affordable housing may be an issue, but there is a lot of opposition to a very simple solution to that. Assist the homeless in moving to a location with cheap housing. Not everyone has a right to live in the expensive area of San Francisco. If someone can't pay for housing, we don't want to forsake those people. But giving them cheap housing in a very desirable place is hard. Unfortunately, the issue with that is that there will still be people who would prefer to live in the expensive city, even if they don't have a house.
- DoreenMichele 2y ago
  Lack of affordable housing is an issue across the US. I'm not personally talking about homelessness in SF per se.
  - jl6 2y ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homelessness-affordable-housing-crisis-democrats-causes/672224/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles... https://archive.ph/Sn6dY https://archive.ph/Sn6dY Housing affordability varies greatly across the country.
    - DoreenMichele 2y ago
      This is true. But no state has enough affordable housing. Some states have a bigger shortage than others, but all states lack sufficient amounts of affordable housing.
gigatexal 2y ago
So attack the supply side problem vs paying rent for the homeless or some other demand remediation. Hmm clever.
nytesky 2y ago
What percentage of homeless are indigent and dealing with crippling mental health and addiction issues. Maybe they would qualify for SSI but that is a completely untenable income to also pay rent out of. There is really no “affordable” housing that would work for that population.
Mordisquitos 2y ago
> We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations. Why the 'not'? Those options are not mutually exclusive and are in fact complementary. Liberalising overly restrictive zoning laws across the USA can improve supply from all three sectors: for-profit, non-profit and local government, thus encouraging market-rate affordability.
pvdoom 2y ago
> A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing. Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking
- koube 2y ago
  I'm not so sure that renting out housing is a bad thing, unless there is somehow too much rental property. Dense rental housing, which is an inherently corporate thing, is key to affordable housing for people without a lot of wealth. My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.
  - pvdoom 2y ago
    Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.
    - tpmoney 2y ago
      Rental also enables economic and educational mobility, and provides (some) shelter against severe economic losses that are risks when you own property. For my own part, renting enabled me to move across the country as an 18 year old for a higher education. Even if "affordable" housing could have been owned at that point in my life, I had no idea if I was going to stay in that area or move. And it turns out I did move, quite a lot. I moved almost every 1-2 years, sometimes chasing lower rent, sometimes to move closer to a new job (allowing me to save money and time on commuting). Having to sell a house or even a condo every 1-2 years would have been a nightmare at best. And that doesn't account for all the economic risk that comes from owning property. When I was renting there was no way I would have been able to afford the tens of thousands of dollars I've had to outlay as a homeowner for everything from water main replacements, roof replacements, plumbing repairs, mold remediation and remodels, HVAC repair / replacement, appliance replacement, tree removal etc. As a renter, all of that is mandated to be repaired by your landlord. Sure, it's possible (and even likely) that your rent will go up next renewal if your landlord is outlaying $20k+ for an emergency roof replacement, but the best part of renting is you can just leave and go somewhere else. Where as if you own property, even if you put the roof repair on credit so that you have a similar "rent" increase, you can't just up and leave if you can't afford the rent anymore. That debt stays with you, not the property, and it just got harder to sell if you used the property as collateral for the loan. Oh and that changing rent payment, yeah my mortgage payment is 50% higher than when I started. No it's not an ARM, thats just the increase from property taxes and insurance (see aforementioned emergency roof replacement and tree removals). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love owning my own home, and there have been times in the last handful of years that being in a stable location without needing to move or (mostly) worry about significant rent changes has helped me through some situations that would have sucked as a renter. But equally having been a home owner, I absolutely look back on my time as a renter and laugh at how naive I was to think that owning would have been a better deal for me. Renting enabled a degree of flexibility I no longer have. I don't necessarily need that flexibility as much as I did, but I also accept a commute that I previously would have considered moving to reduce.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
patmorgan23 2y ago
We should make it easy to build large amounts of affordable market rate housing, and build social housing/expand housing vouchers for the bottom quartile who the market may not provide for sufficiently.

Rinzler89 2y ago

For over 20+ years I've been hearing people and politicians talking about "affordable housing" and in that time, the gap between housing price increases and wage increases has only gone up, along with wealth inequality, that I'm tired of hearing even more talks, as I already know where this is going: nowhere. Housing will get more expensive and the rich will keep getting richer, as per usual, while the politicians will keep making vague empty political promises about housing affordability when the election time comes. I'm not holding my breath this will be solved ever in my lifetime, unless war or a violent revolution resets the monopoly board.

barfbagginus 2y ago
Work to bring about Revolution, don't just hope for it.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  The problem with revolution is that when it comes, you won’t be in charge. The person who is willing to be the most violent and ruthless will be.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Exactly this. It's why the former communist countries had nothing to do with Karl Marx's communism and why people say "real communism has never been tried". Those "communists" who came to power there didn't distribute the wealth to the people, but came to power to pocket it themselves by replacing the monarchies who had all the wealth and power previously to them, but still kept the folk enslaved at gunpoint. You basically switched one undemocratic oppressive regime with another and the average folk kept getting the short stick both times. So be careful when you wish for major revolutions. Doesn't necessarily mean that with new management, things will always turn out better for you this time. Doesn't mean you should stick to the status quo and never try to change things either.
    - barfbagginus 2y ago
      I endorse queer automated Revolution. The beauty of this is that we can do terror and violence to the enemy by just existing peacefully, as queer people. The enemy is literally just that cowardly, we could say "boo, I exist" at them, and we don't have to kill anyone. Automating things, making those automations queer inclusive, and maintaining control of the things that we automated, by making them open source, is how we ram that victory home. Tada! Queer automated open source communism for the win. Now you either want to work for the revolution, are terrified of it like bonkers because I said queer as if I'm proud of it, or you have critical ideas about how to improve it! And that's exactly how a revolution should be! Viva! We can be gay! We can do crimes! We can automate the things! And we can win!
zeroCalories 2y ago
You should migrate to somewhere that does value affordable housing.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Where would that be that's nice to live, safe, good infrastructure, good jobs AND by some miracle still allows you to buy affordable housing? Plus, if you move to a low-CoL area with a high-CoL job then you're not really solving housing, you're just moving your problem elsewhere onto other people making housing unaffordable for them. How many former cheap places to live have been gentrified into oblivion in a short amount of time? The goal is to make housing affordable AND help preserve local communities and culture(even though that might be contradictory to a degree), not to keep gentrifying and uprooting them in a musical chairs style game and then wonder why communities are dying, family units are dying, birth rates plummet, family support networks are dying, mental illnesses are up, loneliness is up, etc.
  - baq 2y ago
    You seem to assume a free market for housing, that would be at least partially incorrect. The free market is a cause of long term (timeframe of decades) housing unaffordabilty because the haves treat housing as investment while the have-nots live under bridges or in cars which puts them in an unemployment/debt spiral. The free market could work if housing was a depreciating asset like cars. Too many people in the west would be pissed off if that happened, though. It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight. Except that's not how it happens. Demographics have been collapsing in many EU countries for a while now and prices have been going nowhere but up at rates beyond wage growth. Internal migration from rural to urban, and external migration from war torn and impoverished nations also to urban centers, keep pushing demand up regardless of local reproduction numbers. Sure, you can now buy cheap properties in some empty towns in the south of Italy for example, but to what end if there's no jobs there?
bboygravity 2y ago
It was already solved though (in Singapore and many other places). Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >It was already solved though If people can only name Singapore, Tokyo and Vienna as examples where "housing was fixed", then it's proof that it hasn't been fixed when there's the other millions of cities worldwide left.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    it proves it's a solvable problem, so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem. The first atomic bomb was hard, because it wasn't known if it was even possible. The second one was still really hard, but once the Americans proved it was possible, everyone else knew it was possible.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs. Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same. This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".
      - 2y ago
klyrs 2y ago
Right, you can't increase wages, because that would cause inflation! Nevermind the grocers, oil cartels and landlords hiking prices year after year. That's just good business sense, hampering that would destroy prosperity!

violet13 2y ago

Homelessness, especially in places such as the SF Bay Area, really doesn't boil down to just affordability. Yes, there are some folks who just faced economic headwinds and are living in a car while trying to find a way out. But there is also a huge population of people who couldn't function if given keys to a free apartment. For one, drugs won the war on drugs, addiction is a big part of the problem, and we don't really know how to fix it; harsh punishments don't work, quasi-decriminalization isn't a success, and treatment for people who don't want to be helped is hard. We also don't like to institutionalize people anymore, so folks with severe mental illness often end up on the streets too.

jeffbee 2y ago
Wrong on all points. The places with the most addicts (W. Virginia) have the least homelessness (W. Virginia again). There really isn't any more too it than supply and demand. The only reasons that is seems like all homeless are addicts are 1) only a small fraction of homeless are obviously homeless, and 2) addicts are less able to cope with high housing costs. But that's a marginal effect; plenty of drug abuse happens within the community of housed people.
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  it's really hard to afford a sf apartment AND a crippling drug addiction, for several reasond
  - chrischen 2y ago
    I’m not sure if getting rid of the addiction would automatically make SF houses affordable. Certainly doesn’t help. But it’s also not SF’s job to house the entire nation’s homeless population.
    - waveBidder 2y ago
      it seems like it is if they're former SF residents priced out of their homes.

bjelkeman-again 2y ago

Finland seems to have found a method that deals with this. They have nearly halved homelessness in eight years. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-finland-solved-homelessness/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-finland-solved-ho...

shuckles 2y ago
Across the entire country, Finland had 3x fewer homeless people at its worst than San Francisco the city does. The problem is of such different magnitudes that it's unlikely Finland has much to teach.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  Ah, the old scientific adage, "if something innovative works at a small scale, that guarantees it will not work at a large scale." I mean this guy shared something interesting and thoughtful, more interesting than the article's complaining, and your thought is really this?
  - shuckles 2y ago
    That was not the logic of my comment, and it seems like you didn't try very hard to consider what I meant. For example: the "interesting and thoughtful" article linked describes Finland's "Housing First" model adopted in 2008. Guess what: Housing First was first introduced as a policy idea in San Francisco in 1994, adopted as de facto city policy about ten years after that, and set as statewide policy in California ten years later. Ten years later, the problem is worse than ever! Perhaps Finland and California are different enough that looking to Finland as a policy playground is a waste of time. This isn't physics; it's political economy.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      The bad faith reasoning in your original comment is what you wrote. You are welcome to write interesting stuff in your comments, you should.

roshin 2y ago

Lack of affordable housing may be an issue, but there is a lot of opposition to a very simple solution to that. Assist the homeless in moving to a location with cheap housing. Not everyone has a right to live in the expensive area of San Francisco. If someone can't pay for housing, we don't want to forsake those people. But giving them cheap housing in a very desirable place is hard. Unfortunately, the issue with that is that there will still be people who would prefer to live in the expensive city, even if they don't have a house.

DoreenMichele 2y ago
Lack of affordable housing is an issue across the US. I'm not personally talking about homelessness in SF per se.
- jl6 2y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homelessness-affordable-housing-crisis-democrats-causes/672224/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles... https://archive.ph/Sn6dY https://archive.ph/Sn6dY Housing affordability varies greatly across the country.
  - DoreenMichele 2y ago
    This is true. But no state has enough affordable housing. Some states have a bigger shortage than others, but all states lack sufficient amounts of affordable housing.

gigatexal 2y ago

So attack the supply side problem vs paying rent for the homeless or some other demand remediation. Hmm clever.

nytesky 2y ago

What percentage of homeless are indigent and dealing with crippling mental health and addiction issues. Maybe they would qualify for SSI but that is a completely untenable income to also pay rent out of. There is really no “affordable” housing that would work for that population.

Mordisquitos 2y ago

> We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations. Why the 'not'? Those options are not mutually exclusive and are in fact complementary. Liberalising overly restrictive zoning laws across the USA can improve supply from all three sectors: for-profit, non-profit and local government, thus encouraging market-rate affordability.

pvdoom 2y ago

> A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing. Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking

koube 2y ago
I'm not so sure that renting out housing is a bad thing, unless there is somehow too much rental property. Dense rental housing, which is an inherently corporate thing, is key to affordable housing for people without a lot of wealth. My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.
- pvdoom 2y ago
  Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.
  - tpmoney 2y ago
    Rental also enables economic and educational mobility, and provides (some) shelter against severe economic losses that are risks when you own property. For my own part, renting enabled me to move across the country as an 18 year old for a higher education. Even if "affordable" housing could have been owned at that point in my life, I had no idea if I was going to stay in that area or move. And it turns out I did move, quite a lot. I moved almost every 1-2 years, sometimes chasing lower rent, sometimes to move closer to a new job (allowing me to save money and time on commuting). Having to sell a house or even a condo every 1-2 years would have been a nightmare at best. And that doesn't account for all the economic risk that comes from owning property. When I was renting there was no way I would have been able to afford the tens of thousands of dollars I've had to outlay as a homeowner for everything from water main replacements, roof replacements, plumbing repairs, mold remediation and remodels, HVAC repair / replacement, appliance replacement, tree removal etc. As a renter, all of that is mandated to be repaired by your landlord. Sure, it's possible (and even likely) that your rent will go up next renewal if your landlord is outlaying $20k+ for an emergency roof replacement, but the best part of renting is you can just leave and go somewhere else. Where as if you own property, even if you put the roof repair on credit so that you have a similar "rent" increase, you can't just up and leave if you can't afford the rent anymore. That debt stays with you, not the property, and it just got harder to sell if you used the property as collateral for the loan. Oh and that changing rent payment, yeah my mortgage payment is 50% higher than when I started. No it's not an ARM, thats just the increase from property taxes and insurance (see aforementioned emergency roof replacement and tree removals). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love owning my own home, and there have been times in the last handful of years that being in a stable location without needing to move or (mostly) worry about significant rent changes has helped me through some situations that would have sucked as a renter. But equally having been a home owner, I absolutely look back on my time as a renter and laugh at how naive I was to think that owning would have been a better deal for me. Renting enabled a degree of flexibility I no longer have. I don't necessarily need that flexibility as much as I did, but I also accept a commute that I previously would have considered moving to reduce.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

patmorgan23 2y ago

We should make it easy to build large amounts of affordable market rate housing, and build social housing/expand housing vouchers for the bottom quartile who the market may not provide for sufficiently.

Non­profits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own fun

Non­profits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own fun

Nonprofits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own fun

Nonprofits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own fun