Housing Crisis

ETA:
Oh and btw fuck JD Vance.

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CNN has made their own story about Path Home…

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More on mobile home parks and what can be done to prevent private equity buyouts and evictions:

Better state oversight sounds like a solution for issues faced by people in areas with ever-increasing rental rates, too.

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And that type of detached housing development everywhere is likely one of the leading causes of the increase in tick borne diseases.

You have to scroll down a bit to get to it, but basically forest fragmentation and more “edge” habitat leads to higher rodent populations, several of which are excellent vectors for Lyme’s and other diseases.
Likely less of a problem in large cities like the ones in the article you linked to, but an overall concern, for sure.

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This type of article is really starting to bother me, because people of all ages are struggling with housing. Seeing the same theme repeated in mainstream publications seems like intentional industry stoking of misdirected anger. Of course, pointing the finger at the banking industry, real estate developers, and speculators isn’t as dramatic as stories about generational betrayal, class, and greed leaving large groups of young people feeling helpless, hopeless, and embittered.

Renters like Ullman and Ireland are shackled in place not by a mortgage, but by the certainty that moving will mean paying far more every month.

Those older “owners” mentioned in this piece could probably say the same thing. I put the term in quotes, because contrary to the wealthy homeowner narrative described most of them don’t own anything but debt. Skip a couple of mortgage or tax payments and the bank or municipality will be quick to remind people who owns what.

a home is one of the few investments Canadians can sell without paying capital gains tax. There’s also the small fortune available to many owners in home equity credit,

Yeah, that only benefits people who can sell and find something cheaper to buy, and the author made it clear why that is unlikely. Home equity is on paper because credit implies “owners” can get equity loans. Loans require qualifying and making payments to the lender. It’s not a gift. In fact, that can be a curse to those non-“nepo babies” whose elders die in debt. The bank and healthcare providers get the wealth in that scenario.

it’s hard to imagine that very many of those households shut out of homeownership have enough money to pay rent and invest as much as they’d otherwise spend on a mortgage.

Is this an assumption that a mortgage and tax payments are always cheaper? Would like to see a comparison of rate increases, but other figures throughout the piece left me with questions.

Nearly 89,000 Ontarians left that province in the first years of the pandemic, many in search of cheaper housing,

:thinking: In a province of 13.5 million, is that high?

In the second half of 2021, more than 123,000 Canadians moved provinces—the highest rate of interprovincial migration since 1991.

I’m not gonna look up the population of Canada, but what that says to me is that folks in the US tend to change states/regions more often than Canadians. :woman_shrugging:t4:

It would’ve been nice to see links to the studies mentioned as proof that housing is driving political polarization. Older does not mean wealthy, and conflating the two using rich pols as examples just serves the goals of those who profit by pitting the have nots against those who have less than they think. It seems to be supported by folks who, for some reason, have no idea what the finances/daily struggles of older people actually are vs. what they imagine them to be.

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How some US cities support converting office buildings into apartments, cost/design issues, and why it’s not enough:

ETA related story:

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They’ve been doing it in England for a while. Bails out commercial property during downturns, delivers really shit housing.

It’s yet another play from the book of “do anything but have public sector home building”.

I guess it’s different everywhere but here in Ireland the recent census data is that renters and mortgage holders are roughly the same number with mortgages down on previous censuses but outright ownership being a bigger share than either of the encumbered occupation slices.

Was surprising to see, but it makes sense of where policy has been headed over the last couple of decades.

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https://archive.ph/99r9y

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I don’t know why Gannett is serving a photo from L.A. in the onebox of an article about Sacramento

California accounts for nearly one-third of the nation's homeless people

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Turns out that there is a new political storm brewing. For some months we have been told that the housing crisis is in part because we are all being meanie meanies to poor little landlords who are then leaving the market (I.e. realising their capital gains profits) and for some reason here when a landlord leaves the real estate stops existing. Anyway, obvious bullshit is obvious, we’ve known for some time that mortgages are declining in number as people age out of it and aren’t replaced, and that instead young people are renting.

Now the penny is beginning to drop that the number of registered tenancies is so low because poor little landlords are actually lying, cheating, rackrenting fucking tax thieves. Add this to all the criminal frauds running unlicensed commercial boarding (air bnb) and we see what is really causing the immiseration of so many people: the capitalist class abusing and exploiting a desperate market.

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:thinking:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90936692/apple-has-spent-1-5-billion-on-affordable-housing-heres-where-the-money-went

That’s an interesting update to this initial report from 2021:

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The actions by Humboldt — defended by university officials as necessary for health and safety

I can think of a more substantive way the school can help ensure its students’ health and safety. If (as is obvious) it’s not willing to do that then they should at least designate a parking area for these students.

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