The US system rigged to push home ownership away from working people. To keep them renting and to inflate “fake boomer wealth” by keeping property prices soaring.
The New York Times reports that hardly anyone is building “starter homes” anymore in the US. Homes that people need and might have been able to afford.
Instead, they build huge homes that are built for large families people can no longer afford to have.
The media questions whether we’re in a housing bubble. We are. They know it. Everyone knows it. New home startups are down and prices are finally collapsing as the Fed hikes rates and a wave of layoffs picks up.
Having a bunch of empty houses that are meant for families with 2-3 children isn’t going to help anyone except landlords.
The people who should be buying houses will be forced to keep renting forever because it makes no sense to move into a house like this when you’re a child-free couple or only have one child.
My landlord came out and handed us the rent increase I was gritting my teeth over. It was not as bad as I thought it would be. He’s listing the other units at 23% higher than our expiring lease cost. Ours “only” went up 5.8% in the end.
I fear if we had to move, we’d be priced out of the city we live in because the only reason it hasn’t happened already is because our landlord isn’t screwing us as bad as all of the similarly sized units in the city are listed at by those landlords.
And it’s not even a good city, it’s a ghetto with the most corrupt police department in the state. If we had any children, I’d be horrified to send them to school here because they’d be more likely to get shot or raped than graduate.
The most horrific thing is that hipsters will succeed in gentrifying this place and send rents through the roof, doubling in a matter of five years, like the neighborhoods I live in, in Chicago. The gang murders I can live with. Rent at 60% of our income, not so much.
BaronHK's Rants 