[RE]

In my prior post, I said the general rule of thumb was 30-40% of income goes to rent.  This based on my experience that Property Mgmt companies won't approve you as a renter if the cost of the Apartment exceeds that.  However, the FSoA Dept of Housing $ Urban Development says otherwise:

Tenants should generally allocate no more than 30% of their income toward rent, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

One of the few places I ever got that low was the place I lived longest up here before I lost my leg  which was before covid and the housing crunch, which was low income housing with rents adjusted for income and came in at 25%.  It killed me to give up that place, it was perfect for me.

I finally got some good newz from Cook Inlet Housing, run by the Native corporation up here but offers units to white folks too if you're old and crippled along with poor, and I probably am down to about 6 more months of waiting time for a building right near the SNIF here, having been on their list for a year already.  So 18 months total if it comes through of waiting.  Rent on that one will come in at about 35%, but I think it includes utilities.

It's almost impossible to get rent below the federal guidelines for affordability if you make less than around $35K, even in low income housing, which all have long wait lists now.  Past $35K, you no longer qualify for this housing and have to rent in the open market, so to get down to 30%, your income has to jump up to around $45K.  $35-45K is no man's land, you don't qualify for low income housing and open market prices are 40% of income and up.  It's not until you make around $50K that it becomes fairly easy to find places you can afford, although they are probably going to be smaller or in trashier neighborhoods than a person with this income usually would expect.  This is typical teacher salary around here or construction workers.  They make more hourly, but winter is very slow and they take lower paid work from Nov-Apr, so it drops the annual total.

Open market housing is risky, because when you rent it originally it might have been affordable, but when your lease is up the rentier jacks up the rent to the prevailing rate, which has been rising faster than inflation.  So maybe you were paying $1300 and after 2 years your new bill comes in the mail for $1600, a 20%+ hike.  Your rent is now unaffordable, although you are not homeless...yet.  At this point you cut back on going to the movies and eat more spaghetti at home.  But then your transmission goes and you put $2K on the credit card.  Add a $100 monthly payment to try and pay that off.    Now you're negative every month and on your way to homeless, though it will take some time still before you miss a month's rent.

This is the status of  a large portion of the population at the moment, right on the edge where if one thing goes wrong, the dominoes start to fall.  Once they do realize they have to find somewhere cheaper to live, they start looking but there's nothing out there they qualify for.  They're not homeless but they can't afford the available housing.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rent-homelessness-harvard-report-center-for-housing-studies/

Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report findsRecord number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report finds

RE

[K-Dog]

Calling it an affordability crisis is not dealing with reality.

Affordability crisis means let the market decide.  Build more housing, force the price down.  BUT WHATEVER YOU DO DON"T CHANGE THE SYSTEM.  Those who own do not want to be like everyone else.  Plan on keeping the owning game going.  The cretins who think this is the only way to run a society far outnumber you.

'In May, the Biden administration announced a Housing Supply Action Plan to close the affordability gap and ease housing costs. The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing and incentivizing areas to reform zoning and land use policies to build more lower-cost housing. It also calls for homebuilders to adopt more efficient construction methods.

What a crock of shit.  The cost of building housing is not the issue.  The economy is dead is the issue.  There is not enough cheap energy to keep the complexity of life going as we know it.  Jobs are not paying enough, and landlords expect to be paid regardless.  Reforming zoning sounds good and the resourceful bullshitter can find examples where it would help no doubt.  But greed, not zoning is the issue.  Zoning did not create the housing crisis.  The price of housing was allowed to inflate to obscene levels.  Everybody in for the past 50 years in America has wanted to get rich owning real estate.  And real estate is how the rich get richer.  It is their preferred method.  The system is rotten to the core.  Through the years is has been housing bubble after housing bubble.  Emphasis has never been on home ownership.

Mortgage payments are perpetually confused with home ownership.  It pisses me off that there are so many feeble minded people that can be bought off with 'affordability crisis'!  Home ownership begins when the mortgage is gone. Not when people are rewarded for refinancing.

The market destroyed things but the faithful expect a market to fix things.  This could rightfully pass as a definition of insanity.

'The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing.

In other words loan some rich people money to build more housing.  Make it a good investment for everybody who already has money.  Financing to the rescue.  What a relief!  After thirty years of financing destroying things, and increasing inequality it is good to know financing has a change of heart.

[RE]

Right here is the fundamental stupidity perpetuated with housing;

The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing

"Financing" doesn't make housing more affordable.  The only things you can change with financing are the length of the loan and the interest rate.  The interest rate is determined by the federal funds rate the banks borrow money at +2% or so so they profit on the spread.  Da Fed manipulates this to control inflation, so if it's at 5%, mortgages are gonna be 7% or more for a riskier borrower.  Term lengths are already at 30 years, if you go to 40 years that's approaching the lifespan of houses, which is about 50 yeas on average.  Except in the rare cases of historic homes that have been meticulously maintained, by the time a house is this old it has accumulated so many issue with plumbing, mold, roofing and rot it's cheaper to raze it and build new than to try and fix everything up.  A 40 year term isn't home ownership, it's rental.  It's multigenerational to pay off a 40 year mortgage.

2br $2150/mo

If you look at most houses built in the 70s in Wonder Years type suburbs, they used cheap materials and have been through a dozen different "owners" over their history of varying dedication to maintenance.  Nobody ever paid the house off, it just kept getting resold with new mortgages handed out at ever higher prices.  These places are now all substandard housing in the rental market as "affordable housing".  People buying a house don't want them, they want new houses with new appliances and the latest in insulation and heating systems.  Financing tricks aren't going to make the new houses any more affordable.

The only way you are going to get affordable housing is to build homes with the target rental price determined before you build it.  No idea what  the square footage and materials cost is to build something like town homes with 1-3 bedrooms, but they have to rent out at $500-1500 per unit depending on the #bedrooms.  Those were the prices at my old Creekwood apartments.



We had all demographics there from young families to old folks, all low income.  Enough safe space for the kids to go outside and play.  I don't see why we can't just put up more buildings with this type of plan instead of keep building single family McMansions.

RE

[K-Dog]

instead of keep building single family McMansions.

The free market runs on greed not need. McMansions put the most dollars in a builders pocket.  People will generally not do anything without an incentive and the incentive to build housing that meets social needs is not there.

Unless welfare for the rich is involved the current administration will not help.  The DNC evolved to help people above my income demographic.  I am on the low end of the constituency that benefits from DNC policies.  Republicans attract the dirt poor and the ultra rich.  In other words the stupid and the stupid.  Skipping me altogether.

My analysis may be off, but claiming neither political party supports most of society is not wrong.  We only have  two parties that matter.  The Overton window moved.  Power to the people is passé.  Our parties support the rich or the ultra-rich.  If you are neither, you support one of these parties because you don't like to think.  And you do what you are told.  And you are stupid.

Seriously if you are pissed at being called stupid because you are a Republican or a Democrat I have to say:  Waiting until homelessness is in the millions, and houses cost five times what they would in an affordable society is fucking stupid. 

A society that a working man or woman can live in is an affordable society.  The only kind that is just.  And people are just starting to care about this now?


Power to the people did not happen.  Nobody ever paid off the mortgage and just lived.  Nobody meaning in a collective sense.  I am an exception.  Consequently housing inflated in a capitalist useless eater bubble.  Maybe the biggest of all time in America.  And here we are.  Sodom and Gomorrah.  This is what happens when everyone seeks unearned riches.

Tulip mania was 'bigger' but you don't need tulips to live.  They can be eaten or looked at, and that is all.

Housing is different.  People need housing and houses cost at least five times what they would cost to be affordable where I live.  This one sold three days ago.  I would bet $100 the new residents will be from mainland China. <- Seriously, in a heartbeat.

This is how conventional DNC wisdom fights global heating.  Move rich people around the world.  Somehow this stimulates the economy.  Or maybe it just moves rich people around the world?

The house is a tenth of a mile away.  At $2,145,000 it is more than five times what an average American with an average job can afford.  America is now a club and to be a proper member of the club you need to have a few hundred thousand in unearned riches.

I don't generally care where I get an image that supports what I write, but this time it is appropriate I do.  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-31/are-house-prices-falling-from-sydney-to-new-york

The article is old (and wrong), but it had the picture I wanted. 

[K-Dog]

I wonder what would happen if a rule was in place so that if you bought a home you could not sell it for a year without a serious financial penalty.  Personal need to sell being guaranteed if a person met certain 'rules'.  Rules in this case only making sure you are not a speculator.  A person working or retired living in a home and not pretending to do so but actually doing so could sell at any time.

People buying a home to live in would not care, but speculative buying and selling would end. 

And quickly.

Would the Democrats support such a plan?  The plan actually makes 'de market' more free.  Speculators do not make a market free, and the idea that speculators enable price seeking is total bullshit.  Speculative action corrupts a proper market.

Hell no, the Democrats would NOT.  This interferes with personal FREEDUM to seek unearned riches.  And this thought experiment shows the 'blue' hat is no more than a red MAGA hat in disguise.  Membership in an exclusive club.

[TDoS]

'In May, the Biden administration announced a Housing Supply Action Plan to close the affordability gap and ease housing costs. The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing and incentivizing areas to reform zoning and land use policies to build more lower-cost housing. It also calls for homebuilders to adopt more efficient construction methods.

What a crock of shit.  The cost of building housing is not the issue.  The economy is dead is the issue.  There is not enough cheap energy to keep the complexity of life going as we know it.

How does the current dead economy compare to the one you lived through in the late 70's? The economy was dead, stagflation and inflation were the theme of the day, Carter was pitching America as The King Of Coal because US peak oil had happened in 1970 followed by global peak in 1979, there was no more cheap energy imagined. That decade ended up immediately followed by the go go 80's.

Remember the Charlie Daniels song trying to stop everyone from being depressed, In America?

I agree completely with you about housing and what the markets have done it with, and we certainly deserve a decent correction or outright rearrangement but it just isn't showing up in the numbers in exepcted ways yet. 2008 certainly did, and was another great year to proclaim the economy dead. Same with Covid. And yet it just...won't...die.

The market destroyed things but the faithful expect a market to fix things.  This could rightfully pass as a definition of insanity.

Or just the way the world works nowadays. I fully expect it to break, and am more prepared for it then most, and often in the breaking of a thing there is opportunity. Just as there was during 2008.

I say everyone should stop voting for any politician above the age of 45 and hand off the leadership baton to the younger generation. Older farts won't like it, but I'm betting those more subjected to a future based on the present have more of an interest in their generational opportunity than what all the old farts want in their twilight years.

[RE]

Yes, I grasp the system and why it developed and who wants to perpetuate it.  My recent blog on housing detailed how it works.  What I find hard to understand is why not a single politician of any age will stand up and propose what is a common fucking sense response to a problem that is so huge and out of control it's in everybody's face at this point.

We have plenty of wicked problems that have no solution.  The current housing crisis is not one of them.

RE

[K-Dog]

The problem has been growing for a long time due to how housing has been viewed in our society, not as a fundamental need that all people have but rather as an economic investment used for profit and as a store of wealth.

As a store of wealth it was fine.  But stores of wealth are stable.  Any commodity that is appreciating or depreciating is not a store of wealth.  Regulation of housing to maintain it as a store of wealth vanished when housing was financialized.

If you don't think it should be a store of wealth than we disagree that owning a house or two is the ultimate expression of personal or private property.  Property that a worker can translate legitimate earnings (earned by selling personal time) from labor into.  That is different from common or public property.  Capitalists think all property is private.  What else do you think owning the means of production means.  Capitalists make no distinction between private and public property.  To them all things can be private with enough money.  The end result or limiting case of their line of thinking is a return to slavery and 100% exploitation.  This happens when rich capitalists have everything. 

You know you are talking to a dumfuck when they start talking about privatizing things.  And when Bezos buys the Luxor in Las Vegas we will be at 100% exploitation.  To him it will be Fair-Oh.

Socialists are not against the elimination of personal property.  That is madness.  Translating earned labor into personal wealth is a human right.  To do other is to endorse slavery.  There needs to be a way to store personal property, and stable housing can provide a means for a person to save the fruits of their labor.

Which can still happen in a mythical soft collapse.

[K-Dog]

Remember the Charlie Daniels song trying to stop everyone from being depressed, In America?

Not the one you mean.  But I like this one.

Do you mean this one?

[RE]

I think we agree that there needs to be housing people can afford if they earn whatever the min wage is for their locale.  Now, let's do a thought experiment starting from this premise.

We'll set the min wage at $15/hr for $30K/year.  Using the federal guideline of <30% as affordable, we'll make the annual mortgage payments right at 30% for 9000/yr, or $750/mo.  We'll now do this as private property so they can store the money in the house resale value.  So the mortgage monthly payment is $750.  We'll set a fixed rate of interest at 5% (historically very cheap) and make the term 20 years as it was before around 1970.  Prewar, mortgages were even shorter, 15 years was common.  Using an online mortgage calculator, the house would sell for around $125K.

Now, you buy this house in Podunk and you have a job in the local paper plant and work for 20 years and pay it off.  You want to sell it to someone else for $125K. But then the plant closes and the town loses population, and lots of the workers with these houses want to sell them.  Except with no work around, they are lucky if they can sell for $50K.

You see how making housing a commodity and trying to use it to store wealth are at odds, even with very fair banking practices.  The commodity is subject to supply and demand pressures, and you can't count on what the value will be at the end of the mortgage term.  You could also be lucky and the neighborhood will get a high paying Battery plant in town, and your house might sell for double what you paid.

Of course, you can pretty much forget buying a McHovel anywhere these days for $125K, even a total slum.

RE

[TDoS]

Do you mean this one?

That's it.

[RE]

I put up an article a while back about a foldable tiny house that sells for $85K with lots of bells & whistles.  Here is another one from Amazon more stripped to the basics for $26K!!!!  With cities spending $80/day for hotel rooms for homeless people, they could buy one of these in less than 1 year!



https://www.the-sun.com/money/10288696/foldable-tiny-house-amazon-easy-to-build/

I bought a foldable tiny house on Amazon for $26,000 – it's so easy to build but does need an addition to function

RE

[RE]

Bets on which way the SCOTUS goes on this one?

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/20/1230140189/supreme-court-homeless-camps-grants-pass-case-housing

How far can cities go to clear homeless camps? The U.S. Supreme Court will decide

RE

[K-Dog]

Seems like a no brainier to me.

There is a park over by I-5 we can stay at

This does not have to do with unusual punishment because homelessness is not a crime.  There is no punishment for being homeless.  The court should rule that there is no crime, but they could decide that restricting access to public land by local government is legal and that fines are not unusual punishment.  A persons' housing status being irrelevant.  And being homeless is just the shits.

The court pays their maids well enough that their maids don't sleep under bridges.  Might be some sympathy there, but the US Supreme court's primary purpose is to defend inequality so I give it a 50 / 50.  That is not a misprint.

[RE]

Here's some great Propaganda from the Real Estate industry to convince Amerikans from the Boomer And Gen X generations who already got their piece of the Property Ownership pie that building Affordable Housing will RUIN THEIR QUALITY OF LIFE!  Yes folks, you heard that right, trying to do something proactive to reduce the swelling population of homeless people living in tents will MAKE THINGS WORSE!

More people will move to their state, lift lines at the ski slope will get longer and their PROPERTY VALUES WILL GO DOWN1  Oh, the horror!

Not only do they want to close the FSoA border to immigrants from overseas, they wanna close the border to Colorado to keep people from the East Coast from moving there too!  Their water supply will be stressed out and they won't be able to water the lawn or maintain their golf courses either.  Unthinkable!  The new people who move in might be terrorists, or even worse, Democrats. lol.

Now, granted it's true there is about no place left you can keep increasing the population and not stress out the water supply, but if people are going to keep migratintg here and you want maids and landscapers and barristas and home health care aids to wipe your butt in another couple of years if you don't need one already, if you don't build some places to live they can afford, they'll be pitching tents on your golf course anyhow.

How can people be this stupid?  It boggles the mind.

https://www.denverpost.com/2024/03/21/colorado-housing-affordability-transit-quality-of-life/

Opinion: We can't build our way out of this "housing crisis" without dramatically reducing quality of life

RE