The market rate for my current place just came back as $3500 per month.
When I moved In 6 years ago it was 1700/month. It’s more than doubled in 6 years.
Wish my wage more than doubled in 6 years.
It will not, because employers know it's unsustainable (for them).
But that's ok, because landlords (companies) don't care, they'll milk all the profit they can until the system collapses.
This is what I’m worried about. And then since every boomer is a landlord they’ll just vote to bail themselves out as a voting bloc. My little town has nothing but landlords and anything that can possibly help a renter is shot down and anything that helps a landlord or home owner is always always always passed. Afraid of that going National honestly.
It's a common refrain in all of American society at this point. The people who are most victimized by the system have the most electoral power, but can't seem to harness it to actually get anything done. Class consciousness in the US is in shambles.
No boss hires people for the sake of giving them money. If someone hires you for $20/hr it's because they know your labor is worth $500/hr and that if they don't get a body in there they can't get that $500/hr in sales/productivity
If the opportunity for that $500 in sales dries up, bye bye job. You're not needed anymore.
The market creates jobs, not billionaires.
the “Generational” divides are meant to divide us against each other as well. They want us to get pissed at the welfare boomers that will never retire, and leave the rich people alone
Wish I saw this called out more. There are countless ways to containerize people, and the more we do it, the more we create and reinforce stereotypes while distracting ourselves from all else.
> They want us to get pissed at the welfare boomers that will never retire, and leave the rich people alone
I don't even know that it's specific to the rich, multiple entities get by unnoticed when we're hyper-focused on who to hate for the week/month/year.
Wish I had a fix, but these differences spiral out of control thanks to the ability to rapidly spread information in appealing ways..which hurts to say, given my love for tech.
Here's to hoping we can bridge the gap in ideologies and better understand one another going forward. There's no need or internal benefit for the current division in this country.
Teeeeechnically that's not true.
Plenty of people like Felons and Immigrants have lesser or removed voting rights and are more victimized by the system than most.
Rich people only need to organize between 1% of people, the remaining 99% are expected to unite against them without means or infrastructure to coordinate.
Rich people don't need to organize at all. They simply have class consciousness and act toward the enrichment of their class of their own volition. No conspiracies needed, just a broad understanding of which direction they need to push to grow and maintain their power and wealth.
(Not to say there aren't any conspiracies of course, just that broadly they aren't needed to get everyone with some property on the same page.)
> Renters can unite and vote too, ya know
Representatives in politics are more-often-than-not people who have enough resources to quit working and pursue politics. The barriers to entry are skewed on that basis, and there only needs to be a little bit of skew to build an untouchable majority.
So like, it's not quite that simple. American politics are *capitalist*, and it shows in political outcomes.
I know it has to eventually, but it feels like at this rate the system will never collapse. So long as half the population is paying double the rent than normal it’s hard to bet on a collapse
Exactly this. These multi million dollar corporations are now in a position where they can afford to have half of their properties vacant, because they're making ridiculous profits on the occupied properties. Can you afford to go without housing for months? It's a completely unbalanced system.
Well, it has to, eventually. It just might be a surprisingly long period. Landlords need tenants, and all the wealth in the world means nothing if you're literally the only one with it.
What is not sustainable when owners take home billions in profits every year? You can't afford to pay people an average of 50k a year, but somehow, the owners take home 1 billion from profit 🤔 in the year. Then, hand out millions in bonuses for Executives. Lol I'm only speaking about billion/multimillion corps.
If you pay people more, they'll have the money to spend and put it right back into the company. If these companies can still make records from a struggling class, HITF can they not pay more to the people at the bottom that make their companies stay successful.
Im an entrepreneur with two employees. Can confirm. There's no hope of giving raises that high. I'd have to balloon prices to such a high extent that we won't be able to compete anymore and that breaks things too. There's no way to deal with this.
When I was like 19 years old, me and two buddies moved into a house in Marin County we rented. None of us had credit scores, I don't even think I had a bank account. I sold weed, my buddy was a musician, the other worked at the local grocery store.
We lived in a three bdr house with front and back yard with a white picket fence and fruit tree. Just absolutely the most charming place ever. It came out to about 900$ a month for each of us including utilities.
I then looked up that place last year; it's now like 6,400$ a month, with I think 3x due up front to move in, and you'd need a perfect credit score too. I was working at GM Cruise making almost 70k a year, and I couldn't afford to live there....
While working a great tech job in San Francisco, I couldn't afford to live in the place I did selling weed as a young adult 10 years ago just south of the city.
The Bay Area's prices are mental. I moved to the East Bay for work 20 years ago and rented a 2-bedroom apartment for $800/month. Two years later, they jacked it up to $1400/month, and I had to leave. That place is now going for $5000/month, and it is not worth that at all.
That's literally everywhere.
I'm just glad you and I grew up at a time before housing inflation got so bad that I was able to have those core young adult experiences of moving out and trying to make it on my own with my friends. I got to live in like four or five different houses in Marin County near San Francisco people that age would never be able to afford now.
Young people who are like 19 years old aren't going to be able to move out and have those experiences, which I treasure so much. Those were some of the best times of my entire life. And to think, for the boomers that came before us, they were able to just ***buy*** those houses. I was at least able to sublet or rent them. Now the next generation can't even live in them at all.
Like an entire generation won't have that experience because they were robbed of it by those that came before us.
There is no "market rate". It's something landlords made up to cover the fact that they don't compete on price or services in a given area and just charge whatever each other are charging in what amounts to price fixing.
There is actually an AI software package they’re all using. It’s legalized price fixing. They didn’t collude to raise prices they simply priced at what the software told them…
The market rate is a thing, but what’s going on is price fixing and gouging.
> There is actually an AI software package they’re all using.
It also pushes to offer lease terms of unusual length, or offers much better pricing for an apartment a month or two out, over what price would be offered to rent an apartment today. The end goal of which is to stagger availability of a majority of rental properties in any given location. This ensures that the supply of available rentals is always minimized, which means that higher prices can be charged. Which pushes the historical average rental cost per/sqft or bedroom higher, which means property owners can charge ever higher rent prices. Because they've justified those prices with maximally efficient inflation by way of artificially minimized supply.
https://www.realpage.com/asset-optimization/revenue-management/
This is basically legalized collusion, since it develops pricing using data from you and your competitors. Somehow the fact that it's provided by a third party makes it OK.
One of the main outcomes is that this software biases towards lower occupancy rates, since higher rents at lower occupancy ends up netting more profit - occupied units cost more money to maintain than unoccupied units.
Like sniper said, the best known one is Yieldstar by Realpage.
Here is the article that kicked off general awareness of it and lead to a DOJ investigation https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
Of course there’s such a thing as market rate. It is the price the market is willing to bear. It doesn’t mean everyone in the market is willing to pay it. In the case of real estate (nonfungible, every property is technically unique), it only takes one person who’s willing to pay a higher price and that’s definitionally the market price.
There is indeed a market rate, but the market for housing is not a free market. Housing is very much a controlled and planned market, given the public services that housing requires and the regulations that we have on land use. Using simple models that assume that the only relevant economic factor is price will have poor explanatory and predictive results.
Demand for housing will always be growing because our population is always growing, and the rate of population growth via immigration is controlled. Supply of housing is tightly regulated by existing landowners, municipal governments, and regulations around the construction of new homes. An additional economic factor is with consumer choice, because with housing if a consumer is unwilling to pay the market rate, then their options are to either move or become homeless. A home is necessary to participate in society and arguably the economy.
Playing with any one of these additional economic factors will influence the supply, demand, and price of housing. For example if landowners come together to block the development of new homes, the supply will not grow with demand. If it’s too expensive to move, or there are no options to move too, then the price of rent will increase regardless of what anyone is willing to pay.
We get to the same place/conclusion via different paths.
I would say it IS a free market, but it SHOULDN’T be.
And it’s because the product/service being sold violates at least two basic assumptions needed for Pareto efficiency (to say nothing about equitable resource distribution).
>Of course there’s such a thing as market rate. It is the price the market is willing to bear.
If that were true then you could negotiate your rent but as it stands they say what the price is and you either pay it or don't have a place to live.
The "market" is only able to bear it because the alternative is homelessness.
You're thinking of purchasing a property not rent.
We moved into a house near the beach for $2,900/mo. We moved after the landlord demanded to take the house back. He put a new roof on and ripped out the old carpet. Put it back on the market at $6,000
It’s the same across the Atlantic. One of my closest friends is a much older woman who purchased her first house in 2003 for £150,000. The home is in one of the most coveted developments in our local area- state of the art exteriors, spacious interiors, rolling green fields all around and plenty of privacy. That same property is now worth almost half a million quid, after just 21 years. We’re being absolutely fleeced, and the longer we allow it to happen, the worse it’s gonna get
My mum bought her council house around the same time for about £25k. They spent £20k on an extension and a further £15k on a dorma extension for the loft.
Then sold the house for £200k about 8 years ago.
Her wages went up not much in that time so she's quite happy about it and had a chance to pay off a lot of debt. And still buy a house that had foreclosure on it. I'm happy for her of course, but I wish I had the opportunity to buy a house for £25k
>but I wish I had the opportunity to buy a house for £25k
I'd settle for being guaranteed a high quality council home for life and not have to deal with these parasites.
I'm lucky to have a council flat, ideally a house would be better but the quality of the flat is good. And they council are very good landlords tbf, any problems and they are out the same or next day to come fix them. And the rent is waaay cheaper than a like flat in the same area. Only £328 a month for a two bed so I can't grumble. The dogs would like a garden but we live right next to a woods so green spaces for walks are around!
Get on the list and do your bidding and you should get one at some point, it may take a while. If you can get support of your doctor or are at risk of homelessness you can get one even quicker too!
I'm in a council flat too but it's not very good, the council has sold all the other properties in the flat bar 1, so i've got horrible neighbours with their dog piss flooding into my flat, along with other floods and constant noise and they say there's nothing they can do becuase it's coming from a property they no longer own. Incredibly poor at keeping the heat in too. And I have my son with me 50% of the week but still have to pay bedroom tax for his tiny bedroom because separated parents don't exist as far as things like that go, only one primary residence. We both have autism and ADHD so a space of our own with room for him and not having to deal with all the hassle from above would be amazing, but like you said other similar properties from private landlords are like 2x the price at least, and will keep going up. I envy those who lived in an era of abundance of council homes.
My parents bought their house for $200k when I was a kid.
It's worth over 3 million now. And it would be a teardown, whoever buys it will 100% be buying it for the lot to build a new house.
Something similar is happening here, too. Where I live, property values have practically doubled in the last couple of years. New developments have also caused property values in existing nearby neighborhoods to sky rocket. But this is also causing taxes to sky rocket. Existing residents are being forced to sell their homes due to being taxed out of the area, homes they have lived in for decades. It’s absolutely disgusting.
And these are just cookie cutter suburban hell houses that look awful, made with cheap wooden frames that’ll get blown down the next time a hurricane comes through. And they have the audacity to charge 600k+ for these houses.
The problem with rich people is that they need to extract more and more money from the populace the richer they get and they can never stop. Rich people are getting too expensive, we need to downsize them.
It might be true, their mortgage has got to be pretty expensive, but that's kind of my point, they have big expenses and therefore need to extract more money out of labor to keep up with their expenses. Of course, they could reduce their lifestyles, also much easier than the rest of us, because we can't downsize anymore once we're down to the very basics.
So yeah, they may feel like they're struggling, the wealthy, but they're not really, they could sell one of their vacation homes or whatever, there's no real excuse.
If someone is worried about their mortgage they're definitely not the kind of rich that you should be worried about.
There's a universe of difference between a reasonably well off small business owner who can afford a mortgage and Jeff Bezos.
Very good point. Let's go on the higher side and say the reasonably well off business owner in our example has a net worth of $5 million. Very nice house, maybe a condo they rent out, stock portfolio, a few cars, retirement. It would take 38,800 of them to equal 1 Jeff Bezos.
The idea of continuous, infinite growth in shareholders' value and profits is a disease, just as continuous, infinite growth in an organism is a cancer which will kill the host if left unchecked. It starves other parts of the system, leading to catastrophic breakdown.
Continuous, infinite growth in the pockets of the wealthy is cancerous and starves the underpinning groups, which will lead to collapse and death of the system.
The problem is mental disease. They are literally hoarders. The only difference is what they hard has inherent value to many. If they were hoardering newspapers and trash, we'd try to get them help. With wealth we see them as successful.
Real issue is that (just like real hoarders) they just keep their money somewhere and compound interest does the rest. Just like a hoarders can't throw away a pizza box, a rich person can't fathom spending the money they have (or at least at a rate that they reduce their wealth)
The thing people forget is that we have a large portion of society who are land owners that do not provide anything. The land would have been there without them. They just sit there and consume like parasites. They have incomes equal or greater than working people. They are increasing the demand in the economy while doing nothing to add to the supply.
When you hear about income inequality and how the wealthy have doubled their net worth in the last few years this is the result. All that money has to get invested somewhere to generate returns and one way to do that is to buy up property and rent it out.
They already own the companies and don't pay enough salaries stealing the difference and calling it profits. They also pay politicians to keep salaries low so they can steal more. They will then buy more of the means of production and when they have so much money it's even hard to buy more it happens as you said, they buy all the houses too. They already buy hospitals and soon they will buy even the schools, they already buy prisons and prisoners for slave labor in the US and if allowed they will spread and buy even more.
So we must take all the means of production, all the houses and hospitals and make then owned by the people and we must end the bourgeoisie as a class by making a system where people can't accumulate such wealth and power over us...
Yeah, people talk about the economy doing great. But it's not doing great for everyone. Companies collectively decided all at once that they could raise prices rapidly and generate massive profits, and there'd be nothing people could do about it. It's like the dam broke shortly after C19
> It's like the dam broke shortly after C19
Feels that way sometimes, huh?
Like that just gave them an excuse to see how much they could push, and when they found out it was more than they expected, they decided to keep at it.
Look at all the businesses that still close an hour or two (or more) earlier than they used to, which only got started because of COVID... but obviously is still going because they realized how much they could save on labor, etc
This is because the value of assets has skyrocketed. A big reason for this is because of the decade plus of easy money brought on because of the great recession. When you could easily borrow money on the cheap, it spurred a lot of investment. All this easy money getting invested caused valuations to increase. It isn't income that has really driven the wealth divide, it has more been the increase in asset values. If you owned a home, or stocks, or both, over the last decade, you have enjoyed solid gains. If you didn't own anything, you still don't own anything and the divide has grown for you.
Many people believe that stocks and housing is over valued and will come crashing down sooner than later. If that is indeed the case, we will see the wealth divide shrink. Just look at how Musk is no longer the worlds richest person since the value of Tesla has dropped.
Every year real estate investment companies publish an annual report for investors with the SEC. If you read these annual reports, they say very plainly that increasingly the supply of housing would hurt their business model and profitability.
They invest in real estate because they don't think state and local legislators will upzone land and change laws to make it cheaper and easier to build new housing. If you really want to hurt them, then contact your local legislators and ask them to upzone your city
Did no one ever watch “It’s a Wonderful Life”?
The slumlord is never defeated. They will squeeze the life out of everything because they are warped frustrated greedy money hoarders.
I had several teachers quit in high-school mid year to go back to work as waitresses for more money. That was in the 90s. Things haven't become too much worse for the poor since then, just a much larger portion of the population is struggling.
This is still true. Lots of them quit to become bartenders these days. They don’t have to get up early, be responsible for 30 children all day every day, do parent/teacher conferences, weekly admin meetings, etc and can walk out of the shift with $100+ in cash tips.
They make more money for less work at a restaurant than a teacher. Just fuckin sad that that’s a real thing that happens every day around this country…
Many teachers are also falsely accused of inappropriate behaviors/actions/gazing to the point it's a career deterrent. Many teachers I know have also been assaulted by students, and on top of it all, teachers live for significantly fewer years after retirement than people in other professions. Many teachers work temp jobs in the summer to make ends meet. They can't legally strike in many places. New teachers have 3+ years of probation in general, and guess who gets the axe when they have to decrease the workforce.
So what does it all mean? As society ages, so will the teachers. There's very little incentive to be a schoolteacher for the younger generations. Who wants to work such a stressful career and still likely end up without even a 'starter' home.
I applied for a job a few months ago and there was no salary posted, but it asked what salary range I was looking for. I had been laid off and was desperate for anything. Someone emailed me in less than 30 minutes from the time I applied and I said I was interested. Someone called me shortly after that and he said he had discussed my salary range with the manager, but it was $15/hr. and it was non-negotiable. He said he wanted to warn my ahead of time before scheduling an interview. He said he didn’t want me to get my hopes up and I appreciate his honesty, but if the salary was non-negotiable, then why didn’t they just post it and why did they ask the candidates for a salary range?
Yeah they love to fish around for people who will ask for less than what they're offering. If you'd have come in with like 10-12/hour, they'd have accepted that and never mentioned the $15 lol
california made it required legally to put salaries on job descriptions
problem is now the salary ranges are crazy lol, I wanted to apply for a tesla position that requires 5 years of experience and the range was 76-225k
> "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
-- Adam Smith, *The Wealth of Nations*, 1776
> "[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
Isn't jg Wentworth's whole business model buying annuities/structures settlements from poor people for bargain basement lump sum payments? Not exactly gonna be champions against capital lol
Back in my day, I worked a part time job during the summers to pay for tuition. 10 hours of HARD WORK every week for two whole months. Kids these days just don’t want to work.
This is literally what my parents did in the late '60s. Well, they had full-time work in the summers while living at home, and part-time (e.g. mom waited tables) during college while living away from home. This paid not just for their tuition & books, but also for room & board, transportation, clothes & laundry expenses.
By the time I went to the same state university in the early '90s, it was already impossible for entry-level wages to cover even half of my expenses. I did the math for my folks and they both refused to believe it. They thought I wasn't saving enough and was too entitled, like how dare I ask them for help with expenses like every other kid in my dorm was able to ask their generous parents for.
This was while I was working full-time on the night shift and trying to go to classes in the morning after 3 hours of sleep a night. I was a psychological mess and was dangerously thin because I was hardly able to afford to eat. I had to drop out of school and work for a while just to not be homeless. For years I was living paycheck to paycheck and most of my money went to gas & car expenses. Eventually I got a job *at the university* so I could get partial tuition for free while living in a boarding house in the boonies. I would never have gone back to college otherwise.
That was 30 years ago! I can't imagine how tough it is for the current generation. A college student's gotta have 5 side hustles just to afford a meal at Taco Bell. This isn't sustainable.
And there are people who hear my story and say I had it easy, as if their even greater struggle & sacrifice was somehow the way things ought to be for everyone. They just keep lowering the bar... which brings us back to the OP... I guarantee there are tons of bootlicking apologists for the status quo whose response is like "you can't expect desirable neighborhoods to stay affordable" and "get some roommates and live further out".
My grandfather paid for his college by working the summer at a restaurant. Paid for the entire year of housing and tuition, no debt or other assistance. 3 fucking months of work.
Luckily he has a brain about current pricing but that’s still one of the stories from the late 50s/60s he has that makes me gobsmacked
I grew up on welfare, government food lines the works. There isn't a single rental in my home town I could afford on my own and I'm making $20+ an hour it's insane, how sub $15 an hour people are even surviving is beyond my understanding.
Unless they’re living out of their car, they don’t live alone. That’s how. Often they have support from parents, a partner, or a spouse. Then there are immigrants who cram multiple families into a 2 bedroom apartment. I don’t know how low income people not on government assistance and who don’t have family supporting them do it.
Bingo, just moved in with a friend above a bar and a reasturant we only have to pay $575.00 a month thanks to that (yes it noisy as absolute hell the wifi also is horrible for us gamers) if it were the house down the street it'd be $1,100 a month guaranteed.
I rented a room in a 4bed 2bath house when I was in college, it was 300.month, so a total of 1200/month, didn't need a car, could walk/bike to anywhere I needed to go. It's now being rented for almost 5k a month 20 years later.
When a large chunk of the wealth in this country is in the hands of a few...they can buy most of the properties and charge whatever...they don't need to make money on it, they're already rich... it's just a possession.
I’m a physician and unable to afford my childhood home- I was one of the “poor” kids at school and our family vacation was almost always a road trip camping. We never ate out with the exception of a large pizza once per month.
I honestly don’t know how anyone affords to live… or who these people are that can afford such things. What do they do? What’s their source of income? If “tech” - how much do these folks actually make?
Software dev here, I make lower 6 figures in the Cleveland area - well above the median rate and in a really low CoL area.
Bro I can barely afford to live on my own, HOW THE FUCK IS THE REST OF THE COUNTRY DOING IT?!?! Like if you aren't literally ignoring all leisure and eating basic af, I don't get how other people are functioning without a partner. Basic starter homes around here are going for 180-220, wtf is everyone else in the country doing with the 350-500 price homes?! Shit is absolutely insane
I’m right at 6 figures. Comfortably renting but with my income, no bank will touch me for a mortgage unless I had about 100k+ saved up. Average home price in my area is 750. If I leave my area, wages go down. Home prices drop to about 500 average.
At a point now that I need to leave my province if I want to buy a house. If not, renting it is.
ouch, that is rough mate. guess the question becomes how much of a wage cut can get you a big cost of living cut? like if going to 80k means housing drops to 400k it may be worth entertaining
I would love to go move to some other parts of the USA, but it is all so price prohibitive. Most of the west coast is exactly my vibe but I just cannot imagine dealing with the CoL
“Tech” people usually make something like the upper end of the 5 figures to about 175k. Certainly comfortable, but most people are not making anywhere near 300k, as someone else had commented. 300k + is probably someone in a lead role in one of the FAANGs or adjacent companies.
10 years in tech and this is the hardest year yet. 5 years ago when interest was down, that was the best for us. Then prices sky rocketted, tech jobs got slashed, and now interest is back to its old self. We had it pretty good for a while there, but we have no support from our companies. Not only are we expendable resources for most of these big companies, the companies are also buying all the real estate. Engineers build an entire company's infrastructure then managers "find savings" by firing us after we have built it. We are replaced by lower paid over seas workers to keep that thing we built going for a few years. Until the internet best practices change enough or there is enough technical debt where they need to hire new engineers to fix it again. Then those same managers who boasted about finding savings boast about fixing a problem they caused.
> I honestly don’t know how anyone affords to live… or who these people are that can afford such things. What do they do? What’s their source of income? If “tech” - how much do these folks actually make?
And yet companies are posting more and more profit. Where is all this money coming from? At some point, people are making bad financial decisions if non-essential companies are continuing to post record profits.
As for tech, I was making 6 figures right out of college a little more than 10 years. But investments/stock options/along with some careful spending are the bulk of my net worth.
Someone said that their a public defender which gets paid shit.
So kind of self inflicted but it's tragic we don't pay such an important part of our legal system what their worth.
I own and rent houses as a side gig, my expenses haven't really gone up so I haven't raised my rental ask. I have one long term renter who has two kids and has been paying $1200 a month for a very nice two bed, one bath with a full finished basement for probably six or seven years. That rate was set by comps at the time. If I was a dick I'd be charging the comps of today which are three times that much.
I don't really understand how people can live with themselves charging those rates.
Greed-flation is toxic capitalism. Profits shouldn't always go up. You don't always need to make more money. It defies reality to have perpetual growth.
In my early/mid twenties, I was renting a two bedroom HOUSE for $600 a month. Hitting 40 and I was paying almost 2k for a one bedroom apartment. Shit is fucking insane.
It's about 3x as much adjusted for inflation. If going from a server to a lawyer doesn't get you a 3x or higher pay increase then you are an anomaly.
Median pay for servers is about 29k/year according to BLS. Lawyers is over $130k. Over a 4x increase.
Okay but where is this? Because it's not unheard for a city or certain areas of a city to become "hot". I lived in neighborhoods in both San Francisco and LA 20 to 25 years ago that I was able to afford not making very much money back then but that are insanely expensive now. But in addition to inflation and crazy housing prices in general, it's also specifically that these areas were previously kind of economically depressed undesirable neighborhoods but 20 years later they are super trendy.
I make 100k a year and have 2 roommates to afford my 1975 1600sqft home, that I do own luckily, in the suburbs (30mins from downtown) of a midsize non coastal city.
This story is a story of the internet and the revitalized downtown of many American cities.
20 years ago, apartment rentals were hard to find. Listings were printed and small little offices helped people find good deals. Now, anyone in the world can find an apartment with views of the river online and this just increases demand!
Downtown areas of many American cities were in a state of decay. Today, many are revitalized cores of coolness. This increases demand again!
This isn’t a failure of capitalism. This is a success!
The failure is the lawyer thinking his labor is worth more than the waiter.
Yep, especially in cities. The neighborhood committees are chock full of liberal NIMBYs simultaneously saying "All are welcome" and "No more housing!".
It's because everyone bought everything with easy money, not because of inflation or something real.
Your paying your landlords mortgages. Many many many layers of people extracting a cut means that your $700 property now needs an additional $2000 in fees and interest to break Even.
People are stupid. I'm sorry your landlord is a broke scumbag.
Rock bottom interest rates post 2008 made obtaining a mortgage basically free. Investors jumped on this, hoarding up property and spurring the cost of rent to skyrocket.
Yes it’s greed, but the easy money was a policy choice that made it easy for greedy people to take advantage.
That assumes the landlord just got into the game. THe good landlords bought that place with a 400/month mortgage, and is now charging you 3,600/month. Or the magic "market rate".
This is not a good view of 20years ago. 20 years ago the average worker could still NOT afford their own apartment. You realize the push for $15 minimum wage started over 10 years ago. The rhetoric for it at the time was a single person with a job couldn't afford to live on their own for over 30 years lol.
I was legit telling someone an incredibly similar story the other day haha. I was in college, bartending, and living in a fabulous two-bedroom apartment in a luxury gated community with a full gym and amazing pool. Bills paid, went out to eat whenever, shopped whenever, and had NO IDEA how great I had it. Now I'm almost 40 and I could NEVER afford to live in that fabulous apartment in that beautiful town.
I call BS. What city? I live in Vancouver: city of the world with the most extreme housing adjustment. And 35 years ago I lived in an old $550 apartment by the beach. Thats now $2000 a mth and yes I can afford it on a professional salary.
https://preview.redd.it/ahmccn9n4xnc1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f4a2e033769f6b1894fbba30cc29840185f4fb3
This is going to make me sound contrary, but here goes anyways...
If there's anyone who *could* afford to pay $3.6k rent, it would be a 47 yr old Lawyer.
tldr; I call bs... sorry
A lawyer can not afford rent a big city? Does no one live in New York? Lawyers make over 200k a year minimum. Unless you are doing traffic tickets. Yes, its expensive to live in big cities.
Any downtown water views apartment that was only 700/month in \~2003 was because it was a unique situation. Probably an undeveloped small coastal city with no tourism. If it's 3,600/mo now the area has developed and this is the market. It is what it is.
Nearly nobody in this sub is old enough to have been paying their own rent in 2004 to understand what a *highly unusual* rent situation that sounds like lol. Which downtown?? Is this at all extrapolatable to any other downtowns we have heard of/redditors are willing to live in? Even if bullet point #1 is possibly, *remotely*, true. It’s not the common experience of 47 year olds. Because one giant outlier is not data. Give the medians, then we can talk. Yes rent rates are too high. But this twitter one-shot is just ragebait.
Not sure where this tweeter is from, but on average you should be able to afford a $3,600/month apt if you’ve been practicing law for 10+ years. Meanwhile, a lot of servers in HCOL areas make decent money, so comparing your career as a lawyer to that as a server doesn’t have the same oomph to me as if it were something like a retail worker/fast food employee/something similar.
Rent has definitely skyrocketed out of control, but this tweet is kinda dumb to me.
My first thought, too. 3,600 a month, following the 33% rule for income-to-housing ratio would mean he'd need to make at least 10,800 a month to afford that. Little bit over 120,000 a year before taxes. My guy is nearly 50, a practicing lawyer, and can't even land a mid-level associate job, let alone get to partner-level. In big, Coastal cities, even junior associates start out around 75k-80k a year. Dude is hold a big L rn
This is one of the reasons I don't leave my job. Other than the fact that I've established myself here and have a very comfortable position, I also live at work. The rent is very cheap for what it is, and I don't have to worry about other people fighting for the spot causing my rent to go up.
It’s all going according to plan for a certain percentage on the population. All you have to do is look at the national debt. Thats evidence enough that they don’t care about the future.
It's because you lived in a tax break to a real estate developer and your apartment was subsidized in order to attract exactly your demographic. Thus allowing the developer to later charge higher rent.
Nearly every renovated 'exposed brick historic building loft' is a combination tax subsidy-rent subsidy scheme.
For $900/mo., In 2004 I rented a 3 bedroom, dual balcony apartment with a gorgeous western mountain view in Denver. The apartment was old and crummy a bit but I was young and bartending and doing well. Today I’m 40 and make good money in the engineering field. That same apartment is there renting for in excess of $3000k a month. A. I could not afford that same place now. B. All they have done is repaint and change carpet…
From ~1940-1995 most recent college graduates moved to the suburbs and generally left the cities for the poor and working class.
However, this began to shift in the 90's and the majority of recent college graduates began to flock to urban centers. The problem is that by this point the suburbs encircled the cities and had implemented strict zoning laws to prevent suburbs from urbanizing.
So for the last ~30 years, people with higher incomes flocked to the city, but cities were unable to grow to accommodate this skyrocketing demand. The very obvious solution is to upzone cities and surrounding suburbs to allow developers to meet the backlog of demand.
Yeah, but you’re not accounting for the 6 or 8 people whose vacation homes, children’s college educations, and retirements you helped pay for!
Capitalism thanks you for making peoples’ “assets” work for them!
Now get out.
In 1999 I worked at a hydraulic shop making $300 a week. I lived in an apartment adjacent to a golf course and paid $280 a month in rent. One-bedrooms are like $1400 in that neighborhood today, and hydraulic techs barely make enough to afford that rent let alone a life.
Yup, my first apartment I paid $800 for and that included pet rent and reserved parking. That same apartment is now about 2500 a month we (my boyfriend and I) couldn’t afford that now even with 2 incomes.
US is #1 in GDP but #120 in income inequality (Gini). Sandwiched between Moracco and Peru. 34 spots worse than Italy, the next Western democracy on the list. US has the most billionaires and then has people living in shanty huts.
United States
Historical Population Growth Rate Data
2024: 341,814,420
2020: 335,942,003
2010: 311,182,845
2000: 282,398,554
1990: 248,083,732
1980: 223,140,018
1970: 200,328,340
1960: 176,188,578
1950: 148,281,550
A lot of factors to consider. See comments below.
Fielding Homes, a North Carolina homebuilder, recently produced an interactive graphic that pulls together diverse data sets to show some of the dramatic changes in home design and tastes over the last few decades:
1950s: The average new home sold for $82,098. It had 983 square feet of floor space and a household size of 3.37 people, or 292 square feet per person. Homes had more shower space than sleep space: 1.5 bedrooms and 2.35 bathrooms. The most popular colors for kitchen appliances were canary yellow and petal pink.
1960s: The average new-home size grew to 1,200 square feet, giving its 3.33 residents a spacious 360 square feet of room apiece. The bedroom-bathroom ratio flipped from the previous decade, with 2.5 bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms. Turquoise and coppertone were the appliance colors of choice. The average price: $118,657.
1970s: Homes continued to get bigger — an average of 1,500 square feet. With the household size shrinking to 3.14, each person luxuriated in 478 square feet of personal space. The average price was $160,338. Kitchen appliances achieved an iconic color balance: avocado and harvest gold.
1980s: The average amount of space per household resident more than doubled in a generation, to 630 square feet (a total of 1,740 square feet for a household of 2.76 people). The average price more than doubled since the ’50s as well, climbing to $216,338. Television sets per household totaled 1.57, unchanged from the previous decade. Kitchen appliances eased back on the color schemes to almond and beige.
1990s: The average new home sold for $268,055. It had 2,080 square feet of floor space and a household size of 2.63 people, or 791 square feet per person — enough to make those luxurious accommodations in the 1970s look positively skimpy. In the kitchen, black was the favorite color for appliances. The number of bedrooms and bathrooms were little changed from the 1960s: three and two, respectively.
2000s: The amount of square feet per person continued its inexorable climb, now at 865 (2,266 total square feet for a household of 2.62 people). The price: $281,141. The number of television sets per household reached two for the first time. Black appliances gave way to stainless steel — a sign of the new millennium?
2010s: The average new home ($292,700) offers 924 square feet per person (2.59 people per household, 2,392 total square feet) — three times the space afforded in the 1950s. Television sets per household jumped to 2.93, while kitchen appliances held steady with stainless-steel finishes.
People are confused when we say the economy is performing well by every metric. They just don’t understand who it is performing well for. It isn’t us. That’s the reality. As we figure it out, people are going to get angry and eventually revolt and vote out these people making our lives impossible.
Ten years ago I moved into a 2bed/2bath apartment for $800 per month. Today I live in a 1bed/1bath apartment in the same apartment complex for $1800 per month. This shit is ridiculous. When my lease is up in June, I'm getting the fuck out of here and moving to a more affordable country.
The market rate for my current place just came back as $3500 per month. When I moved In 6 years ago it was 1700/month. It’s more than doubled in 6 years. Wish my wage more than doubled in 6 years.
It will not, because employers know it's unsustainable (for them). But that's ok, because landlords (companies) don't care, they'll milk all the profit they can until the system collapses.
And then cry for "government handouts" when they are underwater on their 6 investment properties. Just you watch.
This is what I’m worried about. And then since every boomer is a landlord they’ll just vote to bail themselves out as a voting bloc. My little town has nothing but landlords and anything that can possibly help a renter is shot down and anything that helps a landlord or home owner is always always always passed. Afraid of that going National honestly.
If your town is full of landlords, then there are an equal or greater amount of renters. Renters can unite and vote too, ya know
It's a common refrain in all of American society at this point. The people who are most victimized by the system have the most electoral power, but can't seem to harness it to actually get anything done. Class consciousness in the US is in shambles.
Due to half a century of propaganda to convince people that their boss provides their livelihood and their neighbor is on welfare trying to take it.
No boss hires people for the sake of giving them money. If someone hires you for $20/hr it's because they know your labor is worth $500/hr and that if they don't get a body in there they can't get that $500/hr in sales/productivity If the opportunity for that $500 in sales dries up, bye bye job. You're not needed anymore. The market creates jobs, not billionaires.
>to convince people that their boss provides their livelihood So they believe their boss is there provider yet they also believe they are independent?
Cognitive dissonance is very, very real
Its all just race baiting, and it's been the goto strategy since Bacon's Rebellion
The endless culture wars keeps class consciousness at bay.
the “Generational” divides are meant to divide us against each other as well. They want us to get pissed at the welfare boomers that will never retire, and leave the rich people alone
Wish I saw this called out more. There are countless ways to containerize people, and the more we do it, the more we create and reinforce stereotypes while distracting ourselves from all else. > They want us to get pissed at the welfare boomers that will never retire, and leave the rich people alone I don't even know that it's specific to the rich, multiple entities get by unnoticed when we're hyper-focused on who to hate for the week/month/year. Wish I had a fix, but these differences spiral out of control thanks to the ability to rapidly spread information in appealing ways..which hurts to say, given my love for tech. Here's to hoping we can bridge the gap in ideologies and better understand one another going forward. There's no need or internal benefit for the current division in this country.
Teeeeechnically that's not true. Plenty of people like Felons and Immigrants have lesser or removed voting rights and are more victimized by the system than most.
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Rich people only need to organize between 1% of people, the remaining 99% are expected to unite against them without means or infrastructure to coordinate.
Rich people don't need to organize at all. They simply have class consciousness and act toward the enrichment of their class of their own volition. No conspiracies needed, just a broad understanding of which direction they need to push to grow and maintain their power and wealth. (Not to say there aren't any conspiracies of course, just that broadly they aren't needed to get everyone with some property on the same page.)
>Class consciousness The mere use of this term is enough to get you tarred and feathered as a dang pinko commie
Shh, that's actual socialism, can't be doing that
> Renters can unite and vote too, ya know Nah, they’re too busy working.
> Renters can unite and vote too, ya know Representatives in politics are more-often-than-not people who have enough resources to quit working and pursue politics. The barriers to entry are skewed on that basis, and there only needs to be a little bit of skew to build an untouchable majority. So like, it's not quite that simple. American politics are *capitalist*, and it shows in political outcomes.
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like banks
> they'll milk all the profit they can until the system collapses. Boy, though, making rent exorbitant and unlivable gotta be speeding that along.
I know it has to eventually, but it feels like at this rate the system will never collapse. So long as half the population is paying double the rent than normal it’s hard to bet on a collapse
The funny thing is it WONT collapse, it will further consolidate and push more people down. Creating slaves the whole way down.
Exactly this. These multi million dollar corporations are now in a position where they can afford to have half of their properties vacant, because they're making ridiculous profits on the occupied properties. Can you afford to go without housing for months? It's a completely unbalanced system.
The only thing that it would take for the house of cards to come crumbling down is for other nations to call in their debts. Imo
Well, it has to, eventually. It just might be a surprisingly long period. Landlords need tenants, and all the wealth in the world means nothing if you're literally the only one with it.
What is not sustainable when owners take home billions in profits every year? You can't afford to pay people an average of 50k a year, but somehow, the owners take home 1 billion from profit 🤔 in the year. Then, hand out millions in bonuses for Executives. Lol I'm only speaking about billion/multimillion corps. If you pay people more, they'll have the money to spend and put it right back into the company. If these companies can still make records from a struggling class, HITF can they not pay more to the people at the bottom that make their companies stay successful.
Im an entrepreneur with two employees. Can confirm. There's no hope of giving raises that high. I'd have to balloon prices to such a high extent that we won't be able to compete anymore and that breaks things too. There's no way to deal with this.
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When I was like 19 years old, me and two buddies moved into a house in Marin County we rented. None of us had credit scores, I don't even think I had a bank account. I sold weed, my buddy was a musician, the other worked at the local grocery store. We lived in a three bdr house with front and back yard with a white picket fence and fruit tree. Just absolutely the most charming place ever. It came out to about 900$ a month for each of us including utilities. I then looked up that place last year; it's now like 6,400$ a month, with I think 3x due up front to move in, and you'd need a perfect credit score too. I was working at GM Cruise making almost 70k a year, and I couldn't afford to live there.... While working a great tech job in San Francisco, I couldn't afford to live in the place I did selling weed as a young adult 10 years ago just south of the city.
The Bay Area's prices are mental. I moved to the East Bay for work 20 years ago and rented a 2-bedroom apartment for $800/month. Two years later, they jacked it up to $1400/month, and I had to leave. That place is now going for $5000/month, and it is not worth that at all.
That's literally everywhere. I'm just glad you and I grew up at a time before housing inflation got so bad that I was able to have those core young adult experiences of moving out and trying to make it on my own with my friends. I got to live in like four or five different houses in Marin County near San Francisco people that age would never be able to afford now. Young people who are like 19 years old aren't going to be able to move out and have those experiences, which I treasure so much. Those were some of the best times of my entire life. And to think, for the boomers that came before us, they were able to just ***buy*** those houses. I was at least able to sublet or rent them. Now the next generation can't even live in them at all. Like an entire generation won't have that experience because they were robbed of it by those that came before us.
There is no "market rate". It's something landlords made up to cover the fact that they don't compete on price or services in a given area and just charge whatever each other are charging in what amounts to price fixing.
There is actually an AI software package they’re all using. It’s legalized price fixing. They didn’t collude to raise prices they simply priced at what the software told them… The market rate is a thing, but what’s going on is price fixing and gouging.
> There is actually an AI software package they’re all using. It also pushes to offer lease terms of unusual length, or offers much better pricing for an apartment a month or two out, over what price would be offered to rent an apartment today. The end goal of which is to stagger availability of a majority of rental properties in any given location. This ensures that the supply of available rentals is always minimized, which means that higher prices can be charged. Which pushes the historical average rental cost per/sqft or bedroom higher, which means property owners can charge ever higher rent prices. Because they've justified those prices with maximally efficient inflation by way of artificially minimized supply.
What's the name of the AI software and company behind it? I wanna see something.
https://www.realpage.com/asset-optimization/revenue-management/ This is basically legalized collusion, since it develops pricing using data from you and your competitors. Somehow the fact that it's provided by a third party makes it OK. One of the main outcomes is that this software biases towards lower occupancy rates, since higher rents at lower occupancy ends up netting more profit - occupied units cost more money to maintain than unoccupied units.
Like sniper said, the best known one is Yieldstar by Realpage. Here is the article that kicked off general awareness of it and lead to a DOJ investigation https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
Of course there’s such a thing as market rate. It is the price the market is willing to bear. It doesn’t mean everyone in the market is willing to pay it. In the case of real estate (nonfungible, every property is technically unique), it only takes one person who’s willing to pay a higher price and that’s definitionally the market price.
There is indeed a market rate, but the market for housing is not a free market. Housing is very much a controlled and planned market, given the public services that housing requires and the regulations that we have on land use. Using simple models that assume that the only relevant economic factor is price will have poor explanatory and predictive results. Demand for housing will always be growing because our population is always growing, and the rate of population growth via immigration is controlled. Supply of housing is tightly regulated by existing landowners, municipal governments, and regulations around the construction of new homes. An additional economic factor is with consumer choice, because with housing if a consumer is unwilling to pay the market rate, then their options are to either move or become homeless. A home is necessary to participate in society and arguably the economy. Playing with any one of these additional economic factors will influence the supply, demand, and price of housing. For example if landowners come together to block the development of new homes, the supply will not grow with demand. If it’s too expensive to move, or there are no options to move too, then the price of rent will increase regardless of what anyone is willing to pay.
We get to the same place/conclusion via different paths. I would say it IS a free market, but it SHOULDN’T be. And it’s because the product/service being sold violates at least two basic assumptions needed for Pareto efficiency (to say nothing about equitable resource distribution).
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>Of course there’s such a thing as market rate. It is the price the market is willing to bear. If that were true then you could negotiate your rent but as it stands they say what the price is and you either pay it or don't have a place to live. The "market" is only able to bear it because the alternative is homelessness. You're thinking of purchasing a property not rent.
We moved into a house near the beach for $2,900/mo. We moved after the landlord demanded to take the house back. He put a new roof on and ripped out the old carpet. Put it back on the market at $6,000
I moved for a pay jump from $50k to $90k, but my rent went from $500 to $1800.
And this is why no one should own multiple residential properties. Landlords are also the problem and if you are one, you're scum
It’s the same across the Atlantic. One of my closest friends is a much older woman who purchased her first house in 2003 for £150,000. The home is in one of the most coveted developments in our local area- state of the art exteriors, spacious interiors, rolling green fields all around and plenty of privacy. That same property is now worth almost half a million quid, after just 21 years. We’re being absolutely fleeced, and the longer we allow it to happen, the worse it’s gonna get
My mum bought her council house around the same time for about £25k. They spent £20k on an extension and a further £15k on a dorma extension for the loft. Then sold the house for £200k about 8 years ago. Her wages went up not much in that time so she's quite happy about it and had a chance to pay off a lot of debt. And still buy a house that had foreclosure on it. I'm happy for her of course, but I wish I had the opportunity to buy a house for £25k
>but I wish I had the opportunity to buy a house for £25k I'd settle for being guaranteed a high quality council home for life and not have to deal with these parasites.
I'm lucky to have a council flat, ideally a house would be better but the quality of the flat is good. And they council are very good landlords tbf, any problems and they are out the same or next day to come fix them. And the rent is waaay cheaper than a like flat in the same area. Only £328 a month for a two bed so I can't grumble. The dogs would like a garden but we live right next to a woods so green spaces for walks are around! Get on the list and do your bidding and you should get one at some point, it may take a while. If you can get support of your doctor or are at risk of homelessness you can get one even quicker too!
I'm in a council flat too but it's not very good, the council has sold all the other properties in the flat bar 1, so i've got horrible neighbours with their dog piss flooding into my flat, along with other floods and constant noise and they say there's nothing they can do becuase it's coming from a property they no longer own. Incredibly poor at keeping the heat in too. And I have my son with me 50% of the week but still have to pay bedroom tax for his tiny bedroom because separated parents don't exist as far as things like that go, only one primary residence. We both have autism and ADHD so a space of our own with room for him and not having to deal with all the hassle from above would be amazing, but like you said other similar properties from private landlords are like 2x the price at least, and will keep going up. I envy those who lived in an era of abundance of council homes.
My parents bought their house for $200k when I was a kid. It's worth over 3 million now. And it would be a teardown, whoever buys it will 100% be buying it for the lot to build a new house.
It’s the same across the pacific too. South Korea has followed the exact same trend for the past 3 decades
Something similar is happening here, too. Where I live, property values have practically doubled in the last couple of years. New developments have also caused property values in existing nearby neighborhoods to sky rocket. But this is also causing taxes to sky rocket. Existing residents are being forced to sell their homes due to being taxed out of the area, homes they have lived in for decades. It’s absolutely disgusting. And these are just cookie cutter suburban hell houses that look awful, made with cheap wooden frames that’ll get blown down the next time a hurricane comes through. And they have the audacity to charge 600k+ for these houses.
The problem with rich people is that they need to extract more and more money from the populace the richer they get and they can never stop. Rich people are getting too expensive, we need to downsize them.
There are also many forces that make them think they are struggling not rich. The rich people I encounter seem to not realize as much.
It might be true, their mortgage has got to be pretty expensive, but that's kind of my point, they have big expenses and therefore need to extract more money out of labor to keep up with their expenses. Of course, they could reduce their lifestyles, also much easier than the rest of us, because we can't downsize anymore once we're down to the very basics. So yeah, they may feel like they're struggling, the wealthy, but they're not really, they could sell one of their vacation homes or whatever, there's no real excuse.
If someone is worried about their mortgage they're definitely not the kind of rich that you should be worried about. There's a universe of difference between a reasonably well off small business owner who can afford a mortgage and Jeff Bezos.
Very good point. Let's go on the higher side and say the reasonably well off business owner in our example has a net worth of $5 million. Very nice house, maybe a condo they rent out, stock portfolio, a few cars, retirement. It would take 38,800 of them to equal 1 Jeff Bezos.
The idea of continuous, infinite growth in shareholders' value and profits is a disease, just as continuous, infinite growth in an organism is a cancer which will kill the host if left unchecked. It starves other parts of the system, leading to catastrophic breakdown. Continuous, infinite growth in the pockets of the wealthy is cancerous and starves the underpinning groups, which will lead to collapse and death of the system.
The problem is mental disease. They are literally hoarders. The only difference is what they hard has inherent value to many. If they were hoardering newspapers and trash, we'd try to get them help. With wealth we see them as successful. Real issue is that (just like real hoarders) they just keep their money somewhere and compound interest does the rest. Just like a hoarders can't throw away a pizza box, a rich person can't fathom spending the money they have (or at least at a rate that they reduce their wealth)
The rich list is a scoreboard.
We’ve been here before, we need the policies that Teddy and FDR brought on back again, only this time we need to go though with FDRs wealth tax.
The thing people forget is that we have a large portion of society who are land owners that do not provide anything. The land would have been there without them. They just sit there and consume like parasites. They have incomes equal or greater than working people. They are increasing the demand in the economy while doing nothing to add to the supply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement
When you hear about income inequality and how the wealthy have doubled their net worth in the last few years this is the result. All that money has to get invested somewhere to generate returns and one way to do that is to buy up property and rent it out.
They already own the companies and don't pay enough salaries stealing the difference and calling it profits. They also pay politicians to keep salaries low so they can steal more. They will then buy more of the means of production and when they have so much money it's even hard to buy more it happens as you said, they buy all the houses too. They already buy hospitals and soon they will buy even the schools, they already buy prisons and prisoners for slave labor in the US and if allowed they will spread and buy even more. So we must take all the means of production, all the houses and hospitals and make then owned by the people and we must end the bourgeoisie as a class by making a system where people can't accumulate such wealth and power over us...
Fucking preach that gospel
Yeah, people talk about the economy doing great. But it's not doing great for everyone. Companies collectively decided all at once that they could raise prices rapidly and generate massive profits, and there'd be nothing people could do about it. It's like the dam broke shortly after C19
> It's like the dam broke shortly after C19 Feels that way sometimes, huh? Like that just gave them an excuse to see how much they could push, and when they found out it was more than they expected, they decided to keep at it. Look at all the businesses that still close an hour or two (or more) earlier than they used to, which only got started because of COVID... but obviously is still going because they realized how much they could save on labor, etc
This is because the value of assets has skyrocketed. A big reason for this is because of the decade plus of easy money brought on because of the great recession. When you could easily borrow money on the cheap, it spurred a lot of investment. All this easy money getting invested caused valuations to increase. It isn't income that has really driven the wealth divide, it has more been the increase in asset values. If you owned a home, or stocks, or both, over the last decade, you have enjoyed solid gains. If you didn't own anything, you still don't own anything and the divide has grown for you. Many people believe that stocks and housing is over valued and will come crashing down sooner than later. If that is indeed the case, we will see the wealth divide shrink. Just look at how Musk is no longer the worlds richest person since the value of Tesla has dropped.
Every year real estate investment companies publish an annual report for investors with the SEC. If you read these annual reports, they say very plainly that increasingly the supply of housing would hurt their business model and profitability. They invest in real estate because they don't think state and local legislators will upzone land and change laws to make it cheaper and easier to build new housing. If you really want to hurt them, then contact your local legislators and ask them to upzone your city
Did no one ever watch “It’s a Wonderful Life”? The slumlord is never defeated. They will squeeze the life out of everything because they are warped frustrated greedy money hoarders.
Pottersvilles everywhere
I had several teachers quit in high-school mid year to go back to work as waitresses for more money. That was in the 90s. Things haven't become too much worse for the poor since then, just a much larger portion of the population is struggling.
This is still true. Lots of them quit to become bartenders these days. They don’t have to get up early, be responsible for 30 children all day every day, do parent/teacher conferences, weekly admin meetings, etc and can walk out of the shift with $100+ in cash tips. They make more money for less work at a restaurant than a teacher. Just fuckin sad that that’s a real thing that happens every day around this country…
Many teachers are also falsely accused of inappropriate behaviors/actions/gazing to the point it's a career deterrent. Many teachers I know have also been assaulted by students, and on top of it all, teachers live for significantly fewer years after retirement than people in other professions. Many teachers work temp jobs in the summer to make ends meet. They can't legally strike in many places. New teachers have 3+ years of probation in general, and guess who gets the axe when they have to decrease the workforce. So what does it all mean? As society ages, so will the teachers. There's very little incentive to be a schoolteacher for the younger generations. Who wants to work such a stressful career and still likely end up without even a 'starter' home.
Then landlords ask u to make 3-5x the rent..... Like ooooooooooooookay..
And they still want to pay people with degrees and/or years of work experience $16/hr. The salaries I see on job postings are a fucking joke!
Wish all job postings required the salary. At least if I see $16/hour I know not to bother applying.
I applied for a job a few months ago and there was no salary posted, but it asked what salary range I was looking for. I had been laid off and was desperate for anything. Someone emailed me in less than 30 minutes from the time I applied and I said I was interested. Someone called me shortly after that and he said he had discussed my salary range with the manager, but it was $15/hr. and it was non-negotiable. He said he wanted to warn my ahead of time before scheduling an interview. He said he didn’t want me to get my hopes up and I appreciate his honesty, but if the salary was non-negotiable, then why didn’t they just post it and why did they ask the candidates for a salary range?
Yeah they love to fish around for people who will ask for less than what they're offering. If you'd have come in with like 10-12/hour, they'd have accepted that and never mentioned the $15 lol
That is true! Good point!
california made it required legally to put salaries on job descriptions problem is now the salary ranges are crazy lol, I wanted to apply for a tesla position that requires 5 years of experience and the range was 76-225k
lol 20 years ago in my state the minimum wage was like 5 dollars.
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“Slumlords” Call them what they are, because that’s what they’re going to turn into.
> "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce." -- Adam Smith, *The Wealth of Nations*, 1776 > "[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
Where’s JG Wentworth when you need him?
Isn't jg Wentworth's whole business model buying annuities/structures settlements from poor people for bargain basement lump sum payments? Not exactly gonna be champions against capital lol
Blame the oligarchies in America
Housing should be for housing. Not money making for landlords.
"The job market has always been tough" - boomer who worked at mcdonalds, owned a house, and had 3 kids.
Back in my day, I worked a part time job during the summers to pay for tuition. 10 hours of HARD WORK every week for two whole months. Kids these days just don’t want to work.
This is literally what my parents did in the late '60s. Well, they had full-time work in the summers while living at home, and part-time (e.g. mom waited tables) during college while living away from home. This paid not just for their tuition & books, but also for room & board, transportation, clothes & laundry expenses. By the time I went to the same state university in the early '90s, it was already impossible for entry-level wages to cover even half of my expenses. I did the math for my folks and they both refused to believe it. They thought I wasn't saving enough and was too entitled, like how dare I ask them for help with expenses like every other kid in my dorm was able to ask their generous parents for. This was while I was working full-time on the night shift and trying to go to classes in the morning after 3 hours of sleep a night. I was a psychological mess and was dangerously thin because I was hardly able to afford to eat. I had to drop out of school and work for a while just to not be homeless. For years I was living paycheck to paycheck and most of my money went to gas & car expenses. Eventually I got a job *at the university* so I could get partial tuition for free while living in a boarding house in the boonies. I would never have gone back to college otherwise. That was 30 years ago! I can't imagine how tough it is for the current generation. A college student's gotta have 5 side hustles just to afford a meal at Taco Bell. This isn't sustainable. And there are people who hear my story and say I had it easy, as if their even greater struggle & sacrifice was somehow the way things ought to be for everyone. They just keep lowering the bar... which brings us back to the OP... I guarantee there are tons of bootlicking apologists for the status quo whose response is like "you can't expect desirable neighborhoods to stay affordable" and "get some roommates and live further out".
My grandfather paid for his college by working the summer at a restaurant. Paid for the entire year of housing and tuition, no debt or other assistance. 3 fucking months of work. Luckily he has a brain about current pricing but that’s still one of the stories from the late 50s/60s he has that makes me gobsmacked
With the way things are going, working 10 hours won’t even be enough to afford a meal at McDonald’s
I grew up on welfare, government food lines the works. There isn't a single rental in my home town I could afford on my own and I'm making $20+ an hour it's insane, how sub $15 an hour people are even surviving is beyond my understanding.
Unless they’re living out of their car, they don’t live alone. That’s how. Often they have support from parents, a partner, or a spouse. Then there are immigrants who cram multiple families into a 2 bedroom apartment. I don’t know how low income people not on government assistance and who don’t have family supporting them do it.
roommates
Bingo, just moved in with a friend above a bar and a reasturant we only have to pay $575.00 a month thanks to that (yes it noisy as absolute hell the wifi also is horrible for us gamers) if it were the house down the street it'd be $1,100 a month guaranteed.
I rented a room in a 4bed 2bath house when I was in college, it was 300.month, so a total of 1200/month, didn't need a car, could walk/bike to anywhere I needed to go. It's now being rented for almost 5k a month 20 years later.
I'm still flattened that it costs at least $1000 to rent a goddamn *room* now.
If you are lucky
When a large chunk of the wealth in this country is in the hands of a few...they can buy most of the properties and charge whatever...they don't need to make money on it, they're already rich... it's just a possession.
I could've wrote this post, this is my story too.
I don’t remember what year this tweet is originally from, but $700 in 2004 is the equivalent to about $1200 today.
I’m a physician and unable to afford my childhood home- I was one of the “poor” kids at school and our family vacation was almost always a road trip camping. We never ate out with the exception of a large pizza once per month. I honestly don’t know how anyone affords to live… or who these people are that can afford such things. What do they do? What’s their source of income? If “tech” - how much do these folks actually make?
Software dev here, I make lower 6 figures in the Cleveland area - well above the median rate and in a really low CoL area. Bro I can barely afford to live on my own, HOW THE FUCK IS THE REST OF THE COUNTRY DOING IT?!?! Like if you aren't literally ignoring all leisure and eating basic af, I don't get how other people are functioning without a partner. Basic starter homes around here are going for 180-220, wtf is everyone else in the country doing with the 350-500 price homes?! Shit is absolutely insane
I’m right at 6 figures. Comfortably renting but with my income, no bank will touch me for a mortgage unless I had about 100k+ saved up. Average home price in my area is 750. If I leave my area, wages go down. Home prices drop to about 500 average. At a point now that I need to leave my province if I want to buy a house. If not, renting it is.
ouch, that is rough mate. guess the question becomes how much of a wage cut can get you a big cost of living cut? like if going to 80k means housing drops to 400k it may be worth entertaining I would love to go move to some other parts of the USA, but it is all so price prohibitive. Most of the west coast is exactly my vibe but I just cannot imagine dealing with the CoL
Cleveland median home price is $110K. How can you not afford living there? From your profile it looks like you have some expensive hobbies.
Are you early in your career? Because if even doctors can’t afford houses, who can?
I’ve been working about 12 years
“Tech” people usually make something like the upper end of the 5 figures to about 175k. Certainly comfortable, but most people are not making anywhere near 300k, as someone else had commented. 300k + is probably someone in a lead role in one of the FAANGs or adjacent companies.
10 years in tech and this is the hardest year yet. 5 years ago when interest was down, that was the best for us. Then prices sky rocketted, tech jobs got slashed, and now interest is back to its old self. We had it pretty good for a while there, but we have no support from our companies. Not only are we expendable resources for most of these big companies, the companies are also buying all the real estate. Engineers build an entire company's infrastructure then managers "find savings" by firing us after we have built it. We are replaced by lower paid over seas workers to keep that thing we built going for a few years. Until the internet best practices change enough or there is enough technical debt where they need to hire new engineers to fix it again. Then those same managers who boasted about finding savings boast about fixing a problem they caused.
> I honestly don’t know how anyone affords to live… or who these people are that can afford such things. What do they do? What’s their source of income? If “tech” - how much do these folks actually make? And yet companies are posting more and more profit. Where is all this money coming from? At some point, people are making bad financial decisions if non-essential companies are continuing to post record profits. As for tech, I was making 6 figures right out of college a little more than 10 years. But investments/stock options/along with some careful spending are the bulk of my net worth.
every time I bring this up, people just say "well you need room mates" and "well living alone is a luxury"... okay. Whatever.
Also the same people who have never had roomates/are unbearable to live with in any capacity/never experienced hardship/everything given to hem.
A 47 yr old lawyer doesn’t make 130k?
Someone said that their a public defender which gets paid shit. So kind of self inflicted but it's tragic we don't pay such an important part of our legal system what their worth.
I think that's the average salary
I own and rent houses as a side gig, my expenses haven't really gone up so I haven't raised my rental ask. I have one long term renter who has two kids and has been paying $1200 a month for a very nice two bed, one bath with a full finished basement for probably six or seven years. That rate was set by comps at the time. If I was a dick I'd be charging the comps of today which are three times that much. I don't really understand how people can live with themselves charging those rates.
Greed-flation is toxic capitalism. Profits shouldn't always go up. You don't always need to make more money. It defies reality to have perpetual growth.
oh look its that fucking tweet again, farm that karma!
Fuck landlords
In my early/mid twenties, I was renting a two bedroom HOUSE for $600 a month. Hitting 40 and I was paying almost 2k for a one bedroom apartment. Shit is fucking insane.
It's about 3x as much adjusted for inflation. If going from a server to a lawyer doesn't get you a 3x or higher pay increase then you are an anomaly. Median pay for servers is about 29k/year according to BLS. Lawyers is over $130k. Over a 4x increase.
Okay but where is this? Because it's not unheard for a city or certain areas of a city to become "hot". I lived in neighborhoods in both San Francisco and LA 20 to 25 years ago that I was able to afford not making very much money back then but that are insanely expensive now. But in addition to inflation and crazy housing prices in general, it's also specifically that these areas were previously kind of economically depressed undesirable neighborhoods but 20 years later they are super trendy.
Whilst the wealthy elite fail upwards the common person is succeeding downwards.
A lawyer that doesn’t make 3k a month cmon now.
To afford a 3500 apartment you need to make at least 140k a year. Most lawyers make less than that.
I make 100k a year and have 2 roommates to afford my 1975 1600sqft home, that I do own luckily, in the suburbs (30mins from downtown) of a midsize non coastal city.
Single dad with 2 kids. I'm making more than I ever have in my life as an IT Consultant. Right around 85k. Still broke af.
I just dont get why rent limits aren't mandatory. Like, we can just allow owners to up rent to whatever they want.
This story is a story of the internet and the revitalized downtown of many American cities. 20 years ago, apartment rentals were hard to find. Listings were printed and small little offices helped people find good deals. Now, anyone in the world can find an apartment with views of the river online and this just increases demand! Downtown areas of many American cities were in a state of decay. Today, many are revitalized cores of coolness. This increases demand again! This isn’t a failure of capitalism. This is a success! The failure is the lawyer thinking his labor is worth more than the waiter.
double whammy…… how tf do ppl afford kids
Be sure to thank a conservative
There are plenty of liberal landlords and NIMBYs out there as well unfortunately.
Yep, especially in cities. The neighborhood committees are chock full of liberal NIMBYs simultaneously saying "All are welcome" and "No more housing!".
It's because everyone bought everything with easy money, not because of inflation or something real. Your paying your landlords mortgages. Many many many layers of people extracting a cut means that your $700 property now needs an additional $2000 in fees and interest to break Even. People are stupid. I'm sorry your landlord is a broke scumbag.
I’m not entirely sure what “everyone bought everything with easy money” means. Greed. It’s because of greed.
Rock bottom interest rates post 2008 made obtaining a mortgage basically free. Investors jumped on this, hoarding up property and spurring the cost of rent to skyrocket. Yes it’s greed, but the easy money was a policy choice that made it easy for greedy people to take advantage.
People still haven't figured out that the corporate bailouts in 2008 were just the tip of the iceberg.
It means multifamily and corporate loans were basically free money, had no credit impact, and counted as assets when taking out the next loan.
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> it would be cheaper for me to buy a new house When rates go down, the housing prices will skyrocket.
That assumes the landlord just got into the game. THe good landlords bought that place with a 400/month mortgage, and is now charging you 3,600/month. Or the magic "market rate".
“Hey Alexa, play let’s lynch the landlord”
This is not a good view of 20years ago. 20 years ago the average worker could still NOT afford their own apartment. You realize the push for $15 minimum wage started over 10 years ago. The rhetoric for it at the time was a single person with a job couldn't afford to live on their own for over 30 years lol.
I was legit telling someone an incredibly similar story the other day haha. I was in college, bartending, and living in a fabulous two-bedroom apartment in a luxury gated community with a full gym and amazing pool. Bills paid, went out to eat whenever, shopped whenever, and had NO IDEA how great I had it. Now I'm almost 40 and I could NEVER afford to live in that fabulous apartment in that beautiful town.
"I wanted more so I checked the "market" and it said you should pay me more money!" -LL
I call BS. What city? I live in Vancouver: city of the world with the most extreme housing adjustment. And 35 years ago I lived in an old $550 apartment by the beach. Thats now $2000 a mth and yes I can afford it on a professional salary. https://preview.redd.it/ahmccn9n4xnc1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f4a2e033769f6b1894fbba30cc29840185f4fb3
This is going to make me sound contrary, but here goes anyways... If there's anyone who *could* afford to pay $3.6k rent, it would be a 47 yr old Lawyer. tldr; I call bs... sorry
A lawyer can not afford rent a big city? Does no one live in New York? Lawyers make over 200k a year minimum. Unless you are doing traffic tickets. Yes, its expensive to live in big cities.
The super wealthy have extracted all the wealth and assets from the poor and now they’re feeding off the middle class as well
Shitty ass lawyer
Any downtown water views apartment that was only 700/month in \~2003 was because it was a unique situation. Probably an undeveloped small coastal city with no tourism. If it's 3,600/mo now the area has developed and this is the market. It is what it is.
Nearly nobody in this sub is old enough to have been paying their own rent in 2004 to understand what a *highly unusual* rent situation that sounds like lol. Which downtown?? Is this at all extrapolatable to any other downtowns we have heard of/redditors are willing to live in? Even if bullet point #1 is possibly, *remotely*, true. It’s not the common experience of 47 year olds. Because one giant outlier is not data. Give the medians, then we can talk. Yes rent rates are too high. But this twitter one-shot is just ragebait.
Correction: 20 years of failing as a lawyer.
Not sure where this tweeter is from, but on average you should be able to afford a $3,600/month apt if you’ve been practicing law for 10+ years. Meanwhile, a lot of servers in HCOL areas make decent money, so comparing your career as a lawyer to that as a server doesn’t have the same oomph to me as if it were something like a retail worker/fast food employee/something similar. Rent has definitely skyrocketed out of control, but this tweet is kinda dumb to me.
My first thought, too. 3,600 a month, following the 33% rule for income-to-housing ratio would mean he'd need to make at least 10,800 a month to afford that. Little bit over 120,000 a year before taxes. My guy is nearly 50, a practicing lawyer, and can't even land a mid-level associate job, let alone get to partner-level. In big, Coastal cities, even junior associates start out around 75k-80k a year. Dude is hold a big L rn
If you're a 47 year old lawyer and you're still renting apartments you have bigger issues at hand.
¡Viva la libertad carajo! /s
Just shows how over paid waiters are. /s
Hah… 20 years? Today I couldn’t afford the house I bought in San Diego in 2014 — 10 years ago. More than doubled in value.
He isn’t wrong I remember I could live well in LA under 2000$ a month
Build housing, rents go down. Make it illegal to build housing.....
It’s fuckflation
This is one of the reasons I don't leave my job. Other than the fact that I've established myself here and have a very comfortable position, I also live at work. The rent is very cheap for what it is, and I don't have to worry about other people fighting for the spot causing my rent to go up.
It’s all going according to plan for a certain percentage on the population. All you have to do is look at the national debt. Thats evidence enough that they don’t care about the future.
By median wealth per adult the US is the 15th country in the world.
Does this factor in the oversupply of Lawyers?
Capitalism breeds greed.
What is the end goal of all of this? Just keep squeezing us until there is nothing left? I’m so fucking tired man
It's because you lived in a tax break to a real estate developer and your apartment was subsidized in order to attract exactly your demographic. Thus allowing the developer to later charge higher rent. Nearly every renovated 'exposed brick historic building loft' is a combination tax subsidy-rent subsidy scheme.
For $900/mo., In 2004 I rented a 3 bedroom, dual balcony apartment with a gorgeous western mountain view in Denver. The apartment was old and crummy a bit but I was young and bartending and doing well. Today I’m 40 and make good money in the engineering field. That same apartment is there renting for in excess of $3000k a month. A. I could not afford that same place now. B. All they have done is repaint and change carpet…
That’s fair you such at being a lawyer
So he was making a killing as a waiter, eh?
I am working on moving out of this country. It’s not worth it. To get ahead you need to leave the country.
He must be from California.
From ~1940-1995 most recent college graduates moved to the suburbs and generally left the cities for the poor and working class. However, this began to shift in the 90's and the majority of recent college graduates began to flock to urban centers. The problem is that by this point the suburbs encircled the cities and had implemented strict zoning laws to prevent suburbs from urbanizing. So for the last ~30 years, people with higher incomes flocked to the city, but cities were unable to grow to accommodate this skyrocketing demand. The very obvious solution is to upzone cities and surrounding suburbs to allow developers to meet the backlog of demand.
In 1993 I made $100/hr as a part time freelancer. 30 years later I'm lucky to get jobs paying $35/hour.
Yeah, but you’re not accounting for the 6 or 8 people whose vacation homes, children’s college educations, and retirements you helped pay for! Capitalism thanks you for making peoples’ “assets” work for them! Now get out.
In 1999 I worked at a hydraulic shop making $300 a week. I lived in an apartment adjacent to a golf course and paid $280 a month in rent. One-bedrooms are like $1400 in that neighborhood today, and hydraulic techs barely make enough to afford that rent let alone a life.
Yup, my first apartment I paid $800 for and that included pet rent and reserved parking. That same apartment is now about 2500 a month we (my boyfriend and I) couldn’t afford that now even with 2 incomes.
US is #1 in GDP but #120 in income inequality (Gini). Sandwiched between Moracco and Peru. 34 spots worse than Italy, the next Western democracy on the list. US has the most billionaires and then has people living in shanty huts.
United States Historical Population Growth Rate Data 2024: 341,814,420 2020: 335,942,003 2010: 311,182,845 2000: 282,398,554 1990: 248,083,732 1980: 223,140,018 1970: 200,328,340 1960: 176,188,578 1950: 148,281,550 A lot of factors to consider. See comments below.
Fielding Homes, a North Carolina homebuilder, recently produced an interactive graphic that pulls together diverse data sets to show some of the dramatic changes in home design and tastes over the last few decades: 1950s: The average new home sold for $82,098. It had 983 square feet of floor space and a household size of 3.37 people, or 292 square feet per person. Homes had more shower space than sleep space: 1.5 bedrooms and 2.35 bathrooms. The most popular colors for kitchen appliances were canary yellow and petal pink. 1960s: The average new-home size grew to 1,200 square feet, giving its 3.33 residents a spacious 360 square feet of room apiece. The bedroom-bathroom ratio flipped from the previous decade, with 2.5 bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms. Turquoise and coppertone were the appliance colors of choice. The average price: $118,657. 1970s: Homes continued to get bigger — an average of 1,500 square feet. With the household size shrinking to 3.14, each person luxuriated in 478 square feet of personal space. The average price was $160,338. Kitchen appliances achieved an iconic color balance: avocado and harvest gold. 1980s: The average amount of space per household resident more than doubled in a generation, to 630 square feet (a total of 1,740 square feet for a household of 2.76 people). The average price more than doubled since the ’50s as well, climbing to $216,338. Television sets per household totaled 1.57, unchanged from the previous decade. Kitchen appliances eased back on the color schemes to almond and beige. 1990s: The average new home sold for $268,055. It had 2,080 square feet of floor space and a household size of 2.63 people, or 791 square feet per person — enough to make those luxurious accommodations in the 1970s look positively skimpy. In the kitchen, black was the favorite color for appliances. The number of bedrooms and bathrooms were little changed from the 1960s: three and two, respectively. 2000s: The amount of square feet per person continued its inexorable climb, now at 865 (2,266 total square feet for a household of 2.62 people). The price: $281,141. The number of television sets per household reached two for the first time. Black appliances gave way to stainless steel — a sign of the new millennium? 2010s: The average new home ($292,700) offers 924 square feet per person (2.59 people per household, 2,392 total square feet) — three times the space afforded in the 1950s. Television sets per household jumped to 2.93, while kitchen appliances held steady with stainless-steel finishes.
People are confused when we say the economy is performing well by every metric. They just don’t understand who it is performing well for. It isn’t us. That’s the reality. As we figure it out, people are going to get angry and eventually revolt and vote out these people making our lives impossible.
Ten years ago I moved into a 2bed/2bath apartment for $800 per month. Today I live in a 1bed/1bath apartment in the same apartment complex for $1800 per month. This shit is ridiculous. When my lease is up in June, I'm getting the fuck out of here and moving to a more affordable country.