Comment on Rent is theft
SickofReddit@lemmy.world 3 days agoUnfortunately as that would gain votes. It would also prevent votes as it would be basically announcing to anyone that owns a house that their retirement nest egg is going to shrink drastically. One of the perks of owning a house right now is it’s worth a lot of money and is going to be worth more in the future. So I don’t see anyone who currently owns a house voting for this . It’s a shitty situation but i don’t know the solution. Well government housing is the solution but they’re going to have to sneak it in somehow and it’s going to piss off a whole lot of people. I think 99% of millionaires are millionaires by real estate or some crazy number like that.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Rising home prices have driven retirement nest eggs for generations. People would own a house for a few decades, and it would steadily rise in value.
Today, people expect to speculate with their houses. They expect the value to double every decade. That’s not good for anyone. If you own a house whose value has risen dramatically, who is going to buy it? And if they do buy your house, where are you going to live, when presumably all the other houses have also risen?
All this speculation has done is drive the price of housing up so only the wealthy and investment groups can afford houses. That means that all those Middle Class people who used to grow their net worth by buying a house when they were young, and holding it for life, are now priced out of participating, leaving a few lucky people with expensive houses that nobody can afford to buy or rent.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You buy another house that’s cheaper and you pocket the difference in value.
That may not be in the town you want, or the size you want, or etc. but that’s life. Where I live people make 500K a year whine there are no houses, but that’s because they want to live in mansions in the most expensive towns and won’t settle for the 1.5million dollar ‘dump’ they can afford.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Simply WRONG. Companies like Blackstone (and many others) are buying up single family homes as fast as they can, with an eye on controlling the rental and purchasing market, and they are already having an effect on prices. Even MAGA is considering regulating it.
And of course you can sell your home in a HCOL area, and buy a new one in a LCOL area, but what if you don’t want to leave the area where you grew up, raised a family, made friends, where you family still lives etc.?In order to access your retirement fund, you have to leave your home and go somewhere far away, to place that isn’t nearly as good, away from everything you built in your life.
And where are those LCOL places anyway? Florida used to be the big one. Sell your expensive house in the Northeast, and buy a nice house in the Florida sun for a quarter of the price, and all your relatives and friends will come and visit often.
Except Florida housing is as expensive as NY now, so that doesn’t work. Perhaps you can find a reasonably priced house in a small town in Alabama, or Mississippi, where the nearest movie theater is an hour away. That should be fun. I’ll bet your relatives can’t wait to visit you in Buttfuck Holler, Kentucky.
And yeah, it’s simple economics, except you forgot the part of the equation where housing prices have skyrocketed, while decades of harshly suppressed wages, and crippling student loan debt, have made it increasingly impossible for people to afford housing. We have now entered an era where your “simple economics” have led to living in your vehicle being considered a viable housing option.
Employ some Critical Thinking Skills, and don’t just parrot empty Conservative talking points.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 days ago