[quote=“lava, post:38, topic:78818”]
the 90% of us that are in a position to buy a reasonably priced home
[/quote]Excuse me? Pretty sure I’m not alone in saying I won’t own a home until I inherit one…
[/quote]I think that’s lava’s point: You don’t own a home, so you’d be in the market for a reasonably priced one. Lava is implying that there are not enough homes priced reasonably enough for 90% of the population, many of whom would want to buy one if they were affordable, rather than rent.
We bought our house in Cambridge during the crash, and now Mr. Zillow claims that it is worth almost twice what we paid seven years ago. Which is pretty nuts, and clearly an unsustainable trend. Rents are high here but price/rent ratio is increasing, which is a bad sign. There’s still a lot of biotech money flowing in, but who knows if that will last?
Medford is seeing some overflow from Somerville now (and I can remember when Somerville was the cheap option), esp. since the long-awaited Green Line extension into Medford is finally underway. Curiously, other North Shore towns like Everett and Revere have as yet seen limited gentrification.
Maybe we can buy Hearst Castle. An idea which only occurs to me because one of my ex’s grandiose and completely impossible plans was to someday be wealthy enough to buy a National Historic Landmark.
Exactly. Things would be so much better if builders tried half as hard to deliver good value to 90% of us, instead of bad value in the form of their high profit to 1% of us.
Architect, architect, contractor. You just need to hire the right people and then give them moneys and you can save yourself a lot of worry about time and attention, because we all know if you’re putting down over fifty million on a house you’re certainly not doing any of the effort.
Renovations are stressful because you don’t know what’s behind the wall and costs escalate quickly. New construction is a cakewalk in comparison when you scrape it clear and start anew.
And since we’re talking about an outer wall, you’re talking - on the inside, about 2x4s and gypsum board, fibre-glass insulation and vapor barrier. And someone to mud, tape, sand and paint it. On the outside you’ll have a layer of plywood protected by sheathing and housewrap, a layer of rigid foam insulation, and then aluminum siding, plaster or brick veneer. Lots more labor there too. And then windows and window frames.
Which helped fuel an economic meltdown in Japan around 1988-89. One which they still haven’t recovered from. Corporate lending got ridiculously out of hand as well as incestuous relations between mega conglomerates. My father in law was caught in the middle of it. He ran a auto parts distributorship in Osaka. When the “bubble burst” the small business operations loans were called in and he couldn’t keep things running.
Japan’s economic slide pretty much killed the expectation of lifetime corporate employment for anyone under the age of 50. Unintended side effects were it drove women into white collar workplace in greater numbers than before, as well as a spike in divorces.
Korea came close in 1997 with the Southeast Asian currency crisis. When currency speculation in Thai and Indonesian currency created a ridiculous bubble.
Korea managed to re-energize their economy with some heavy government regulation and breaking up its Japan style conglomerates (called Chaebols). There is a lesson there for the US we haven’t learned yet. The larger and more all encompassing the corporate entity, the higher risk of economy tanking monkey business.
Taiwan skirted it altogether since its economy had far fewer large actors affected by the downturn.
China is an opaque and corrupt economy. More likely than not it is primed for a major meltdown (if it isn’t going on under our noses as we speak). Oligarchs there are already starting to move large amounts of money into US real estate to shelter it from what may be coming. Ironically this is causing a major housing bubble in the Northeast which is likely to cause mayhem in the luxury market there.
Whenever I start to succumb to the insidious mind-fuck that is the unrealistic expectations which our society has been inundated with most of our entire lives, I stop, take a deep breath, and go look at my shoes.
Any time I feel crushed under the burden of being the working poor, anytime someone tries to make me feel “worthless” or that I don’t matter because I don’t live a certain (mostly unattainable) lifestyle, I look at my shoes.
Flat dress shoes, athletic shoes, high heeled boots; each and every pair is a reminder that somewhere in the world there are literally millions of people who are not nearly so fortunate as I am, and they would probably give anything to walk in a single pair of my shoes.
Are you a shoe fetishist, just like me? But maybe, unlike the standard idea about that fetishism. Not the one with many, unworn. But the one with just a few pair, precious, taken care for.
Or the one with a few pairs and feeling the richness of it? It’s not mutily exclusive.
Not per se, but I do come from a long line of pack-rats, which means that I still own shoes from 20 years ago.
I don’t think I own any pairs that I’ve never worn even once, but it is probably time to donate some of the pairs which I have not worn in more than 5 years.
I donate to Out of the Closet, Goodwill and other charitable collectors regularly.
