[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

[RE]

SROs are BACK!

Back in the 1970s in NYC, Single Room Occupancy apartments were the definition of Urban Blight, and they were basically all gotten rid of due to endless health code violations, insect and rodent infestation, needles in the hallways, and of course as hubs for prostitutes.  Basically, an entrepreneurial Pimp rents an apartment and has a half a dozen flat backers working for him, clocking in a few times a day for a 1 hour slam-bam-thank you m'am liason.  In the 70s, a streetwalker whore cost $20/ fuck, you could get a blow job for $10.  Depending how generous the Pimp was, he would take somewhere between 10-90% of the retail price and pay the rent and have 1 of the girls bring the sheets to the laundry once a month, if they needed it.  lol.  So average $5/hour used 10 hours a day, the room brought in around $1500/month.  In those days, you could rent such a place for $100/mo or even less.  This was of course entry-level pimping and whoring, these were not the guys driving Lincolns and Cadillacs and the hos didn't look like Julia Roberts.

Fast forward to 2024, and it should be no surprise that bringing back these hell holes and re-branding them as "Micro-apartments" is being touted as the "market solution" to the affordable housing problem.  It's really the same concept as the Tiny Home, just putting 100s of them into 1 by providing the absolute minimum amount of space necessary to fit a bed and a toilet/sink to wash up and excrete.

Now, what exactly is the minimum space necessary?  Well, the WHO  has guidelines on this stuff which is supposed to be followed with Prisons, and it's generally considered to be 18 meters², or around 250 sq ft.  This takes into account respiratory issues, sanitation, psychological factors, etc.  Do prisons adhere to this standard?  With the exception of Federal Penitentiary Country Club prisons for white collar criminals in the FSoA, I doubt any country follows these guidelines for prisons.  Any cell that big is going to be shared by 2 people.

So, essentially what we are saying to people is hey, if you get a job and obey all the laws and pay your taxes, you can pay for your own Prison Cell to live in!  Which if it was in a nice, safe, well-kept building might be better than prison, but the slumlords who own and rent such places out aren't known for making sure the elevator works, the building access door lock works, all the hall lights work, etc.  As you might expect, besides the prostitutes, even you regular renters have a rapid turnover rate, they're in town for a seasonal job or just moved from another state to start a new career or of course, just got let out of prison.  Or for old folks and cripples like me, been informed by Medicare after 100 days in a SNIF to recover from some illness or operation they won't pay anymore and you gotta leave IMMEDIATELY.  Fortunately for me, I have so far been deemed sufficiently crippled by Medicare to warrant approval for Long Term Care and not told to GET OUT YESTERDAY yet, which has happened to me on 2 prior occassions, neither of which worked out too well.  In one case I was sent back home to the apt I had continued paying rent on, but without sufficient home health care assistance to take care of myself yet, Ii got worse againg quickly and then lost my leg.  The 2nd time, I gave up the apt because I was hospitalized too long, and they pitched me into an Assisted Care Home which as long time readers know was Dante's 7th Circle of Hell.

In my current SNIF, my room size just about makes the WHO guidelines, but in this type of facility besides your own room, there are 1000s of sq ft of common areas to roll around, and outside garden areas in front and back to sit outside in the good weather.  In most SROs, there are no common areas, just a long narrow hallway with doors to each cell on either side, and a stairwell at both ends and elevator in the middle.  The apartments usually do not have a porch or patio to sit outside and relieve the claustrophobia, and due to fire laws if you have one you're not allowed to smoke or BBQ on them.  There's no relief from the constant state of claustrophobic, and they are too small to have friends over, except perhaps 1 friend to have sex with on your twin bed mattress.  Actually sleeping together ends with one of you on the floor sometime during the night.

If you do have 200 sq ft and it's got windows and you set it up right  with a murphy bed or loft bed with a desk under it, you can make such a place somewhat liveable, but if this is what you are gonna be stuck with living for the rest of your life, it can become pretty depressing even so.  A modern society that can't at least provide a 500 sq ft 1 bedroom apartment for young single workers and old retired ones is not living up to the myth that living in a 1st world industrialized nation is a better life than rural poverty.  Shacks in the Favelas in Rio are bigger than 250 sq feet.

For the recent migrants however who currently are either out on the street, on church floors or in army tents or warehouses with 200 beds laid out on a 10'x10' grid, getting your own SRO with heat and running water is of course a big improvement as a temporary living arragent for a few months-year while you find a job and become assimilated into the rat race.  The thing is, these places aren't going to be temporary for many, they'll be there for years.  In a couple of years they'll be drinking heavily and using drugs.  The lights in the hallways won't be replaced and the eevator won't work half the time.  Same as it was in the 1970s.

https://www.goskagit.com/news/nation/homelessness-affordable-housing-shortage-spark-resurgence-of-single-room-micro-apartments/article_d7124a2c-99ad-58f1-b803-621280ffc64b.html

Micro-apartments are back after nearly a century, as need for affordable housing soars

RE

[RE]

As usual, a combination of Goobermint zoning laws and the desire of RE developers toprop up the cost of housing is the major stumbling block in converting unoccupied commercial buildings into affordable housing.  Much more than office buildings which don't have plumbing to support separate bathrooms for all the office spaces converted to apartments, strip malls have plumbing that puts bathrooms in each storefront that could be adapted to make residential bathrooms and kitchens.  There are 1000s of square feet of empty mall space in just about every city inn the FSoA with the transition to online shopping.

This would also put housing for workers in commercial districts, making fr shorter commutes and more "walkable neighborhoods.  Will such conversions start to happen?  Not if captalists and hedge funds with a large portfolio of residential housing have anything to say about it, and they do.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24075581/housing-conversions-stripmalls-affordable-supply

America is full of abandoned malls. What if we turned them into housing?

RE

[K-Dog]

Which strip malls where?  Seattle and areas nearby areas actively convert old strip malls into housing.  Malls are ripped down and high end apartments go up where they were.  Strip malls may not have been built on the best land, but they all are connected to infrastructure and flipping them into apartments is very profitable.

Then end result is more crowding and the malls had been originally placed where they were for a reason.  Now you have neighborhoods miles away from grocery stores  with apartments built where the neighborhood used to buy groceries.

[RE]

I haven't been down in the  lower 48 in quite a while, but last time I was in Springfield there were several abandoned strip malls around town.  Right near where my mom lived there was an abandoned food superstore that could have easily been converted to a dozen or more apartments of 1 or 2 bedrooms.  It was right across the street from another food superstore, which was why it went out of biz.  Kroger vs Safeway, and Kroger won.

Here in Anchorage we have the Northfield Mall which has been abandoned for a decade, while at the same time every year the city struggles to find shelters for the homeless.  The rental market is so tight I have been on 2 waiting lists for affordable housing for over a year.

I don't know what the reason is the Seattle market is different, perhaps there it's because they are able to completely raze the mall and put up profitable market rate housing instead of affordable housing units.  There's enough rich people around  they're not only short of affordable housing, they're short of land to build more new Condos for the young IT programmers or boomers selling their McMansions to the Chinese to downsize as they retire.

RE