“working as a server” - I have to get rid of thinking everything is about computers…
Responding to HTTP request all day is hard work.
For the last time, make the coffee yourself, I AM A TEAPOT!
I see an HTTP 418 in the wild, I upvote.
Not when every response is a 503 (taps head)!
For a second I wondered if it was an old timey job, similar to how one could be employed as a computer.
I mean, you needed someone to crunch non-financial numbers before machines were invented to do that. A major discovery in astronomy (the relationship between period and luminosity) that’s central to how we measure distances in space was actually made by a woman doing that job (Henrietta Swan Leavitt). If she’d lived a few years longer she likely would have won the Nobel for it.
I hadn’t heard of her, thanks for putting her name on my radar!
The apartment I’ve lived in for 20+ years recently got sold to a property investment firm. They gave us all 60 days notice. They are going to spruce up the apartments and then rent them. They were nice enough to offer current tenants first dibs on the new apartments. At 3x the current rent. A group of people, families, retired folk, a lady going through cancer treatment, we’re all at a bit of a loss. Can’t afford to live here, can’t afford to move. I really don’t know what where we’ll end up.
Burn it down. Honestly. Not trying to he a prick but fuck these greedy cunts. 3x. Only answer is war on our front
Yes please do- then the insurance money will build them brand new apartments and they’ll probably make a but on top of it if they use the right contractors. Then they could rent for even more as they are now new builds. Great plan. Much thought.
Your sarcasm was missing a disclaimer.
On top of that, state funded homing for the next years!
That’s fine they aren’t making rent from it though. And then you do it again. Each time they lose that much more rent and their insurance rates go up that much more.
Sure and you go to jail for arson. Oh and your insurance won’t go up that much as you’d probably just build in a less insane area. Oh and insurance will also cover the lost rent too. Oh and you dont have any more maintenance costs for the duration of the rebuild so you are making more money. Oh and you will get a break on that year’s property taxes- so even more money. Either way you still have no place to call home. Well- except your cell. Fucking dumbass grow the fuck up and learn how the world works. You listening to a podcast and thinking you know something will never bring about your commutopia.
What you’re missing is you won’t get to do it twice because you’ll be in prison, where you should be, for burning homes down.
If this is such a great idea, why aren’t you doing it?
Cause someone told him communism was the way and he never looked back.
Is there a third way, then? Because this isn’t working.
Neither is communism genius. Capitalism is alive somewhat functional. Communism is dead in ever place its attempted to be implemented. Of course there’s other ways. Pick up a book.
It’s not an answer. The problem is bigger than one company deciding to try for higher rent. This is happening because of housing supply and society-wide wealth distribution.
Things like that should be illegal. And then rich idiots complain about all the homeless people. Infuriating.
More than half of you will end up on the street.
This is what happens when the ultra rich steal $50,000,000,000,000 from the US alone in the last 50 years. It’s probably more like $150 Trillion worldwide.
More than half of you will end up on the street.
This is what happens when the ultra rich steal $50,000,000,000,000 from the US alone in the last 50 years. It’s probably more like $150 Trillion worldwide.
If everybody suddenly becomes poor then we call it a Depression or a Recession or something like that.
If everything suddenly becomes expensive then that has the same effect.
Is that what’s going on here? Are we experiencing one of those second things? A “sneaky depression”?
Housing is the thing most exploding in cost.
About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.
The other half is just moving to shittier and shittier conditions and living with roommates and family members.
Plus this is a very regional problem. Housing in shithole flyover places is still somewhat affordable.
If everything went up five times in price over the last 20 years then it might be a better argument for saying we’re in a depression.
Speaking as a fellow who lives in “shithole flyover” (and is darn glad for it) my electric bill has recently tripled and food has doubled. That’s big.
(We refer to the big cities as “insane anthills of filth” btw)
About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.
Don’t forget, many of those people won’t be alive much longer, and many of their houses will not be passed on to family, but sold off to pay off debts owed by their estates, and will end up as more overpriced rental properties.
A “sneaky depression”?
Shy depression.
Removed by mod
No, we wouldn’t be, Mr. Negative Karma Throwaway. A recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. The US had exactly two in Q1 2022 and Q2 2022 before going back to positive growth. The US had a much larger recession in Q1 and Q2 2020 before a big recovery in Q3 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-from-preceding-period-in-real-gdp-in-the-us/
If my point really isn’t crystal clear
The prices going up has the same effect on everybody’s power to buy stuff as everybody’s income going down.
You still care about karma?
I actually didn’t know that I’m at negative karma. Can’t find it in this app.
How does my personal summed karma score bear in lemmyland?
I don’t know either
Source?
Interesting, thanks for the link - at the very least, things are trending upwards so fingers crossed we are through the worst of it for the time being. Which is probably 8-10 years, it is cyclical.
This is aimed at the person i originally responded to. General thoughts about about political agendas couched in loaded language below. Nothing is apolitical, and everyone has an agenda. The key is to figure out what it is.
“Worst recession since 2008” is one of those phrases that sounds almost like the economy is just as bad as 2008, but actually doesn’t mean much of anything.
For demonstrative purposes I’ll use some arbitrary numbers here.
If we rated the 2008 recession at an 10/10 on the badness scale, rated any recession between 2009-2022 as a 2/10 at the most, and rated the current recession we’re in at say, a 4 - I could say that this is the worst recession since 2008, and it would not be untruthful.
Language is deceptive.
Please retake Economics 101.
Look up ‘Hell’s Angels’ by Hunter Thompson. He has a chapter on the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist in the early 1970s.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and save up enough to spend two years on the road. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boyfriend.
And at the time the USA was 40-50% of the total wealth of the planet. Things were better for Americans then because most of Europe’s manufacturing and industry was devastated after WWII and took decades to return.
No, that’s only one of a much larger suite of factors.
Hmm… I knew a Hell’s Angel when I was younger and he certainly didn’t work a union job. He was essentially a gangster, who made bundles of money doing illegal things.
So, you’re saying you have no concept of things changing over time?
He was a Hell’s Angel in the 70’s and 80’s, so it was during the same time period that the book was written about.the Hell’s Angels have always been a criminal organization, despite trying to paint themselves as a simple motorcycle club.
And there were bikers who weren’t in the Hell’s Angels.
Yes, but they’re not called Hell’s Angels. There are still bikers who aren’t in the Hell’s Angels. I’m replying to someone who specifically said “Hell’s Angels”. If you’re a biker that isn’t a Hell’s Angel and you call yourself one, you’re going to have a real bad time.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and save up enough to spend two years on the road. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boyfriend.
The name of the book was ‘Hell’s Angels.’
The issue here is buying power is dramatically dropping which is a function of both wages and prices. Raising the minimum wage alone won’t fix that; instead, price controls will have to be implemented such that all housing is bought back down to prices that are satisfactory to consumers. That can’t happen without federal legislation.
Prices are a matter of supply and demand.
Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.
We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it’s currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.
The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live “in Boston”, “in NYC”, etc, they probably don’t want to live in a new build an hour’s drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.
Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn’t the only important thing, but it’s pretty important.
There are 25 empty houses for every homeless person in the US. There are people like Bezos who own multiple $25 million dollar mansions, that sit empty 300+ days a year. There are places with housing shortages, but that is not the case nationwide. The problem is that our government cares little to ensure adequate housing for its population. It sees absolutely no issue in allowing property to be hoarded by the rich and used to strangle the poor.
That’s one of those things that’s technically true, but quite misleading.
The number of houses you could reasonably move homeless people into tomorrow is much smaller than the number of vacant houses. Unless you suggest putting homeless people in buildings undergoing renovation, in new houses that are almost done being constructed, in houses that were sold but have the new owners moving in next week, in rental units that have been on the market for a month, or in your grandmother’s house after she dies while the estate is being settled. Or into chalets on a ski hill, into seasonally occupied employee housing, etc.
The vacancy rate includes basically everything that isn’t currently someone’s primary residence on whichever day the census uses for their snapshot. Low vacancy rates are actually a bad thing and are bad for affordability.
Do you have a source for all of this?
I might not want to put them in buildings under renovation, but those empty mansions could serve as compounds to house hundreds of people safely and securely, while having adequate space to offer necessities for transitioning back to housed life, such as on site therapy and pharmacies, and work aid centers.
Housing-first is a great way to deal with homelessness, because most of the problems homeless people have in rebuilding their lives are compounded by being on the street. I’m not saying we shouldn’t house homeless people.
I’m saying that comparing the vacancy rate to the homeless population is ridiculous, and isn’t evidence that there’s no housing shortage.
Partially, that’s because vacant houses aren’t all habitable, or able to be sold/rented immediately. But also, it’s because having some number of empty units on the market ready to be moved into is a good thing. You don’t want to have to find someone who wants to move out the day you want to move in. That creates a sellers market, causing high prices.
Fun fact: homeless people can’t afford mansions.
Build them places to rent.
Fun fact: Every mansion or luxury condo built is 100+ affordable units not being built.
We’re building at record rates in many places, but just building housing does nothing but line the pockets of developers, because they will always choose to prioritize more profitable ventures, and current methods of requiring a small single digit percentage of their units to be “affordable” aren’t cutting it.
We need to be specific in what we’re building, and who we’re building it for. People moving in from out of state with high paying jobs are often prioritized by city and county governments because they increase the tax base, but this simultaneously raises rents for all of the current residents in crises as the market is dragged up. If we’re not specifically building affordable housing for local residents within each effected community to the best of our ability, then we’re only going to exacerbate the issue further. I’ve lived through “just build more” in my state for 20 years, I know how it goes.
If you build any housing at all, you are opening up “affordable housing” at the bottom of the totem pole. That’s how buying houses works.
No one is going to build a dumpster apartment to rent on the cheap. There’s no incentive there.
Let people build and the less-desirable homes will be scooped up as prices fall. It’s basic supply and demand.
Your state, like mine, has probably been kneecapping development in favor of NIMBY policies for those 20 years
No, they haven’t. They’ve been working hand in hand with developers to entice new money for them to tax, and ignoring the poor who only get poorer.
In my area they’re knocking down the “affordable” homes to build luxury and everyone is also trying to do everything to stop “affordable” housing. I say “affordable” because everything is still beyond what today’s “middle class” can even fathom to affordable and what they’re knocking down to build on is already pricing people out.
Knocking down single-family or small unit homes to build more multi-family housing is a good thing actually.
I live in the north area of the San Francisco Bay Area and there is a shocking number of new builds happening right now. Soooooo many apartment complexes and housing developments. It seems like every day another one has begun. Just on the street I work on there have been three very large apartment complexes put in where there used to be businesses within the last two years. On my 8 mile commute home I pass four more, where there used to be pasture land. This area is known for it’s NIMBYs but laws have been passed (by voters) requiring more housing and it’s happening.
Also don’t forget that people don’t like housing built near them because it “drives down housing prices.” Homeowners themselves are more a problem than corporations are.
Then we need master lists of who currently lives in an area and for how much, and who wants to live in an area based on housing bids, homeless populations, etc., like with an application or something.
Or, hear me out on this, we could build more housing.
We could do this by upzoning basically the whole city, and by disempowering NIMBYs. Make it so that every location can build just a bit more densely, by right (i.e. where the approval is automatic).
Make it so you can build triplexes by right in what was an exclusively single family zoned area. Take areas with apartments and let them build a few stories taller. Let neighborhoods evolve into density over a decade or two.
Price controls cause shortages. The solution is plain old taxes - take money away from the rich. Housing will be cheaper to buy up front when recurring taxes are higher. Your dollar will go farther when other dollars are removed from circulation.
A 4% tax on millionaires in Massachussets got free lunch for school kids in the state
Is this actually true or just post hoc ergo propter hoc?
It seems like we shouldnt need a tax on millionaires just to pay for lunches. It’s more depressing than we weren’t paying for lunches more than it is inspiring that we are now.
It’s more depressing than we weren’t paying for lunch
Because billionaires lobbied congress to reduce budget for public schools
IMHO it’s not just to pay for lunches (or whatever else); the primary goal is to limit price inflation and housing speculation. The fact that it generates revenue is an added bonus.
We need more housing in general too, to be honest, and to stop people buying it and directly distribute the housing to families looking for a primary residence.
Rent control is absolutely not the solution. Building more is the solution.
Only for it to be snapped up by corporate interests and not handed to the families that actually need it.
We need a list of all of the families and single people looking for a primary residence, build new housing, and just give it to them first. No buying allowed.
Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
you forgot that most country which has this house price problem actually build houses and apartment more than enough for all the homeless hence you would see lots of ghost town everywhere, economy now doesnt work as intended, you can build more house but without regulation despite the supply the price would still skyrocket like now
My wife and I couldn’t afford to live in our own neighborhood if we were looking to buy now. We bought in 2019.
Same. Somehow my house has more than doubled in that time frame.
this isn’t funny this is just sad
The only reason I still live in Ohio. My salary is almost double the median income, and I’m still just barely staying out of the paycheck to paycheck life while paying my spouses way through school. I wouldn’t have been able to afford a house anywhere else with just my income and maintain what semblance of a life we do have.
The perks of living in the decaying rust belt I guess.
I just cut straight to the pie and set up camp in the wilderness. Pretty cheap, but the HOA are a pain.
This really highlights just how subjective “paycheck to paycheck” is.
Lot of people out there who can’t afford to pay for their spouse’s school but still wouldn’t call themselves paycheck to paycheck.
server
there was that post about parking meters being $27/hr so I thought this was computer servers speaking at first
Welcome to crony capitalism
What community am i in?
Boston
lemmyshitpost
Yeah I didn’t notice in what community we are, but indeed this post should not be here…
When I was 25 working at a grocery store, I could buy myself a new car for $300 a month.
If I tried that now it would be closer to $700 a month…
And you’d be paying it off for 6 years.
Just bought a used compact van with 36,000 miles on it. Gonna be paying $453/month for 78 months.
With the miles I drove monthly, it’s gonna have over a quarter-million miles by the time it’s paid off.
You spent $35k on a used compact van? Fam you got scammed
No. After 6.5 years of making payments with compounding interest I will have paid 36,000 for a used compact cargo van. The list price was around 26k for a 2020 model with 36,000 miles and a clean record.
Look up cargo van prices right now. I actually did really well on both the price and the interest given today’s market.
Depends on what you mean by new car. I just bought a car at $350 a month for 20k. 20k is definitely “new car” range for many vehicles.
Wow perfect. The house I stayed in two years ago for 800 TL is now 8000 TL. I’m in Turkiye
800tl two years ago? where exactly are you in Turkey? 3 years ago I paid 3500 tl in antalya, now it’s like 15k
Gentrification even affects the rich. Welcome to the 1st world and it’s problems.
and its* problems.
Gentrification is a good thing and being anti-gentrification is being pro-ghetto.
Wait, so you think the only two options are ‘gentrification’ or ‘ghetto?’
What does this even mean?
Gentrifying a place is investment of capital into formerly-poor areas in cities, and formerly-poor areas in cities were poor because they were ghettos, generally as a result of redlining, white flight, or both.
We should be gentrifying every inner city, subsidizing current-occupant rent as it climbs, and lifting people out of the ghettos we built.
Dude, you need to google gentrification, it’s specifically a negative thing. You’re just using the word wrong.
Gentrification comes from the root word “Gentry” referring to the upper or ruling class.
It’s literally the upper class moving in, displacing the lower or middle class. The word is classist by definition.
👆
So you think every neighborhood with poor people in it is a ‘ghetto?’
No I think when you shove a bunch of “undesirables” into an area by literally not letting them get loans or see houses outside of that area, you create ghettos.
You may wanna give “redlining” a Google, and then search up the history of places you want to “protect” from gentrification. You’ll find the two are nearly always connected.
We owe it to the people who live there to financially apologize for the atrocities we committed upon them and their families in the past.
We should financially apologize for the atrocities and lift people up like you suggest, but that’s not what gentrification means. The other commenter was right. Gentrification means upgrading an area and displacing those who live there.
gentrification jĕn″trə-fĭ-kā′shən noun
-
The restoration and upgrading of deteriorated urban property by middle-class or affluent people, often resulting in displacement of lower-income people.
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The process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces earlier usually poorer residents.
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The restoration of run-down urban areas by the middle class (resulting in the displacement of low-income residents).
Displacing people isn’t a requirement, it’s an externality, and one which I addressed very specifically.
Worth noting that even displaced people end up wealthier when gentrification happens.
-
Now you’re suggesting every black neighborhood is a ghetto. Wow.
You literally could not take this in worse faith if you tried.
Frankly you’re coming across as pretty racist.
Way to purposely take it wrong. Not obvious at all.
Gentrification doesn’t improve the lives of the people that already live there - it displaces them as wealthy individuals move in. While the idea of improving a poor or ghetto neighborhood is nice, it’s not so great when the people living their are just priced out of their homes and forced to relocate.
Imagine responding to my comment so passionately without reading it at all, and ending up arguing for poor people to stay poor.
What a fucking bizarre worldview.
Depends on your definition of gentrification. Most Americans do not associate renovation/upkeep/modernization but undue rent increase with minor changes to the space, I feel.