Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/21/bamboo-gone-wild-and-neighbors-from-hell-redditors-share-homeowning-nightmares.html
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Around here the number one question is ‘where does the water go’. If it doesn’t have very clear answers walk away quickly. If the realtor tries to downplay that issue (90% will) drop them like the hot garbage they are.
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Well, thank goodness older generations have made sure most of us will never be able to own a house, I guess.
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While it’s of course an unpopular opinion now, renting does have its advantages. Until relatively recently in the UK, home ownership wasn’t very popular. Most people in the past (including I think the likes of Oscar Wilde, Disraeli and Churchill) rented for most of their lives because owning your house was rightly seen as a pain in the arse.
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Good look with that now, the 3 bed semi opposite me in a tiny town in the north of the uk, is now £900 a month! to rent a tiny home…
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Yes, I think there are various theories about why and how rents became so huge in the UK from about the late 60’s when those in Europe were comparatively very low. Something to do with banks making money from mortgages rather than lending to businesses as they did there?
Our problem is we want to be America no Europe, and the Torysand some other mps won’t accept that empire is over, we really need all new mps under 40, who were never educated with a pink map, I was born in 80 and we still had pink empire maps when I was in primary, but some of our mps still think and act as if the maps where still pink.
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Nah, it’s the neoliberal ideas espoused by Thatcher and Reagan which screwed the 2 countries so thoroughly. Housing is not an essential need, but an asset (neoliberal thinking, not mine), and landlords are the reason rent is so high. Landlordism had almost been eliminated in the Uk in the 60’s-70’s, as they had made owning a second home really expensive, loads of taxes, and regulations to follow, and loads of landlords had sold their properties to councils who were then able to offer them as housing for the large portion of the population who didn’t want/couldn’t afford to purchase their own.
Unfortunately, Thatcher got in, instituted the possibility of being able to purchase the council house you lived in, and stopped the councils from building more housing, or taking loans to purchase it. This drove the housing supply into private hands, and increased the demand for private rentals as the council housing stock shrunk, meaning landlords could raise rents, earn more money, and purchase additional houses to rent.
We need to re-implement the policies that brought rented housing under the council remit (taxes which scale, IMHO logarithmically, with each additional property owned by a landlord or their LLC), fund councils better, and start treating essentials like clean water and housing as something that capitalism cannot do best.
Good luck getting the Blairites running the current Labour party to do anything like that though…
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Yes, I was born in 1966. Thatcherite policies from the late 80’s essentially used the prospect of lower taxation and public spending to gain votes at one end, only to dump a decimated infrastructure, wealth disparity and hopelessness on the next generation at the other. We have a 23 year old son and are resigned to him living with us until his mid-30s unless leaves the country because London rents and mortgages are a complete non-starter.
All this makes it hard to escape the idea that literally all party politics comes down to tax and whether you think tax is some kind of theft, or the rightful responsibility of government to collect it for the public good. I think history is showing us that it’s firmly the latter.
Tax the rich.
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One slight correction, tax the everloving fuck out of the rich.
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Can confirm about bamboo. My neighbour planted some a few years ago and now one corner of my garden is dominated by the stuff.
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Easy enough to fix with an FM transmitter and your own playlist. 
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Those are the people that Adam Smith warned against. I won’t say that they’re No True Capitalists, but it’s definitely not their end game.
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At our previous house the messy, start-all-the-projects-and-never-finish-any, but otherwise friendly and accommodating neighbor started “re-landscaping” his yard and mentioned he was thinking of planting bamboo. I told him I absolutely forbid it, if he did it anyway I would consider it a declaration of war, I would immediately rip it out and/or douse it with the worst herbicide I could find, and he could go ahead and file trespassing charges. He didn’t plant bamboo.
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Seems reasonable. I don’t mind it as it looks quite nice and blocks off the houses behind mine (plus I have an endless supply of stakes) but it’d be great if it just stayed in one spot.
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It wouldn’t have occurred to me at the time, but if I ever buy another house in the future, I will ask “was this neighborhood built on top of a spring?”
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Because of the way it spreads, I think it’s illegal to plant here.
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Get a panda.
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And now you have two problems!
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