Yeah of course, they put their precious sweat and blood into going to the bank to show that they own land to get some credit so they can hire people to do the rest
But that's the minority anyway, those who were born into rent extracting elites need to not lift a finger.
Your anger is blinding you to reason. I’m fine hating on landlords, but a paywall in front of an article is literally exactly the same thing: a way for a corporation to extract rent.
I'm not angry, I'm just ridiculing your inconsistent or communist beliefs. People being paid for results of their labor is fundamental. Company makes you pay for access to their work in order that they get paid and continue doing that work.
Bad analogy. Not only land is finite, journalists are not keeping you from accessing facts. I have accessed many a fact today and not one journalist tried to extract rent from me imagine that
I’ve walked many thousands of miles on land where nobody tried to extract rent.
It is when you try to move into a building that someone wants rent. Just like when you want to benefit from someone’s work to convert mere facts into a story.
And the article is about an individual who, due to a mounting debt burden, cannot afford either. This is the irony to which I refer. But I can see your perspective, too.
Subs like this encourage siloization. That $26/month is only efficient if you read NYT pretty regularly (at the expense of reading stuff from other outlets), not if you read an article or two every month.
It's a pretty sad situation that people can't afford 'rent'.
But in fact 'rent' means to tear, split, rip, etc, and that's exactly what it is. People who 'own' land, ripping money from people who don't.
But, land is common heritage like air and water, it belongs to us all, and individuals should not be able to own it, or at least not to own and 'rent' it.
Rent is a ripoff, by nature, and in it's very name.
Housing build, say, in 1920 is now illegal to build but is perfectly legal to live in. Building codes and restrictions are policy failure (in Canada definitely so).
Nobody ever blames the building codes until the either educate themselves or try to build a house.
Then you realize just how difficult it is to build. It takes just as long as the build sometimes and costs thousands and thousands upfront just to get to the point where you can start.
We need a streamlined process that allows standardized housing to be built with minimal upfront costs and on small affordable lots.
ADUs are up to 1200sq feet — for most people this is a whole dang house not an accessory dwelling unit.
Want to see how easy improvement could be made? Imagine if you could write off 50-70 percent of the total cost of an ADU over 15 years as long as it’s rented out to no more than 3 tenants during each year — and eliminated the ability of cities and counties to block their development as long as they fit on the lot. You’d have a massive increase in affordability in just a few short years.
It’s the laws and the zoning that are the problem. You’re spot on.
Background: I have built several houses, both for family and professionally. Technically, I was a licensed electrical contractor. I just recently moved from a now-condemned 1920's structure to a "modern" 1970's.
The problem with modern US building codes is that there is still too much over-regulation (e.g. AFCI's required in essentially all residential splits), combined with the dangerous interconflict of builder's EGO -vs- inspector's EGO — particularly egregious when the inspector feels a one-off homebuilder "deserves" differential treatment.
I think the dumbest jurisdictions (AHJ's) are the ones which prevent homeowners from (e.g.) installing their own electrical outlets, not even in owner-occupied structures. Homeowner maintenance becomes illegal, in certain stupid AHJ's (e.g. Chattanooga); and is thus done unpermitted by a helpless-to-stupid-regulations policy.
I have been on both sides of "inspections" and know that my own personality has often been my own greatest challenge. I am oil-and-water to/with the emissionless dieselbruh contractors.
Thanks for allowing my vent, and re-enforcing some of its basis.
Are you advocating for the abolition of apartment buildings and hotels? What would that look like? Super low density sprawl because nobody will spend the money to create a multi-unit building they’re not allowed to rent?
One option is the apartment building and land are owned by a company, and the company is 100% owned by the owners of the apartments.
But yes, it's true that many people who dislike rent may be happier owning a single family home.
After all, the apartment building will inevitably come with some sort of political process to decide things like how much this year's residents ought to put aside ready to replace the roof in a decade's time. And while such payments may not technically be rent, they'll smell very similar.
The units in a multi-unit building can also be sold; they're called condos. But of course selling a condo wouldn't allow a landlord to rent seek in perpetuity.
Not that I disagree, but that's an etymological coincidence. Very often when two quite different concepts have a similar word it's a matter of Latin or Greek vs Old English roots and this is an example. Monetary rent comes eventually from Latin reddere meaning "to give back". Back from there it's Proto-Indo-European.
Rent as in a tear comes via Middle and Old renten/renden and back to Proto-West Germanic and then it goes cold.
I'm not supporting the parasitic nature of landlords.
But the right to own land is an essential part of a functioning society. The idea that no one should be able to own land is ridiculous and does not work. There are plenty of examples of this all across the globe.
Land ownership is an important element of long term sustainability, as in farmers carrying for their soil in order to keep it viable for their descendants.
But land ownership as in subletting and sub-subletting and sub-sub who knows how many levels up, that is not a necessary consequence of the concept of land ownership. What if only personal use was allowed? Sure, you would definitely see hoarding and countermeasures would not be without their own problems, but there is definitely room between unbounded capitalism and "property does not exist" level socialism.
What’s that statement based on? Ownership doesn’t exist in nature, it’s a concept humans have invented and enforce through cultural and legal means. Ownership is just one method of providing occupation, but occupation can be achieved through other means: for example, guaranteed leases for a fixed period. There’s various countries that have models beyond just simple private ownership. Even in countries like the US where land ownership is considered sacrosanct, the government will still take it away if you don’t pay taxes — it’s not ownership in the truest sense.
Even other animals have the concept of land ownership. They might not use our words, but see what happen when you take resources from the territory of a bear or other territorial animal.
Even trees do that. Eucalyptus literally poisons land near it to kill competition.
That’s occupation, not ownership. Ownership can’t exist without a legal or cultural structure to enforce it. A human can occupy land and defend that occupation with violence but that does not mean they own the land. A society can exist without ownership.
What do you call the territorial animals then? A tiger will chase other tigers from the area it considers its own. Same as wolves and many other species. It's not exactly property in the sense that it cannot be traded but it is indeed the ownership. Without property rights humans would have had the same: the strong chase the weak off their land or force them to pay for being on the land.
> Without property rights humans would have had the same: the strong chase the weak off their land or force them to pay for being on the land.
That's precisely what property rights are: "the strong [...] forc[ing the weak ...] to pay for being on the land". That's what property taxes are. To "have rights" is to be paid up with a protection racket. Yet as depressing as that is, it beats the alternative! In many places it's not a bad deal!
This works, ultimately, because the frail old lady can call the police, who outnumber and outgun the strong young men.
There is admittedly also an element of magic here: People generally view property rights as legitimate, and the police who enforce them as legitimate, and so on. But when that belief system fails, it's ultimately the State's ability to deploy force that reestablishes the faith.
> Ownership is just one method of providing occupation, but occupation can be achieved through other means: for example, guaranteed leases for a fixed period
In practice, with housing, such leases are effectively ownership. The terms on these are often 100 years or more, and when they come to term, since there are often significant improvements built in the land, the terms can't be renegotiated since the lessor can't force the sale or relocation of the improvements.
so for most of recorded human history society did not function?
the only reason we're allowed to buy land is because it was commodified during the industrial revolution as the process of capital extraction from labor had moved from the land to the factories.
If no one individual or company can own land, then, by definition, the governing body that created the rule owns the land.
Since governments are in the business of governing, not real estate, they'll almost definitely outsource that work (or big parts of it) to private contractors like they do for defense.
The end result is that your landlord is now an even bigger private entity (that might be a conglomerate of smaller entities, which might or might not look like the institutional landlords that exist today) with the near-infinite financial backing of the government and the insanely slow processes that come with that (such as having to go through an intermediate to get that Tesla Powerwall you want to install approved, only to be told that Tesla isn't an approved supplier and that you should use this battery from $VENDOR_THAT_WE_DONT_HAVE_RELATIONSHIPS_WITH_WE_PROMISE).
Renting provides mobility and freedom from the burden of property "ownership" (which is really renting from the bank and state). You shouldn't be so quick to let your gleaming idealism sully judgement of otherwise reasonable and prudent financial decisions.
That's an obvious false dichotomy. If everyone who wanted had the choice between renting and owning, and the average landlord made a decent living off of providing maintenance and "deed-holding" services, you might have a point. As things actually stand, most people are squeezed into the rental market and the average landlord makes much more than a decent living through an exploitative process of raising rents on tenants who do not have choices.
It is a false dichotomy but it's instead this: people want housing to be both affordable and an investment, whereas those two goals are mutually exclusive.
I agree there are benefits to renting, but to really benefit much the landlord can’t be making incredible profits (e.g. it’s not worthwhile to rent long-term if your landlord charges you a 50-100% premium on the landlord’s cost of ownership.)
Before buying my first house in 2021, I was paying $2k / month in rent in a 2 family house my landlord bought 2 years prior for $350k. There was another person paying an additional $1k/month in the same house for a total of $3k/mo of total rent for a $350k house the landlord purchased through a LLC the year prior.
When I ended up buying a house, the monthly mortgage payments were about the same as rent except the house is 2x larger with 5x more property (on the same street as the apartment I was renting).
In other words, for mobility to really be worth the cost of renting, you really gotta be taking advantage of that benefit and moving around a lot. If you’re renting a house like I was for a long period of time, it makes absolutely no sense.
Unfortunately, I think most renters do so out of necessity (not able to afford a $75k down payment, for example).
I am getting close to affording that kind of downpayment (though my realtor tells me we can get in the market on a much lower percent down), and I'm still hesitating on buying. I dislike the inability to customize the place we live in but also dislike the theoretical lack of mobility and the actual necessity of having to do housework.
Tbf I don’t mind renting as a concept. The problem I had was ever increasing rents and walls so thin you can hear your neighbor snoring. If we didn’t build buildings with such terrible noise insulation and had better rent control, it wouldn’t be so bad.
But those are separate issues. Buying will protect you from rising rents, but you'll still be stuck with walls so thin you can hear your neighbor snoring.
At least when you rent, you can easily move elsewhere and hope for thicker walls. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in France, selling and buying a new house is a very expensive ordeal. The state gets to tax you 7% of the price of the new home. And with housing prices being absurdly high, 7% is quite a sum.
> But in fact 'rent' means to tear, split, rip, etc, and that's exactly what it is.
No it doesn't. 'Rent' in this context derives through french from a latin verb that means "to give back".
Your confusion comes from the fact that 'rent' can also be the past tense of 'rend' which has a different origin and comes from old english and germanic roots rather than French and latin.
I considered this, but it’s from a guy named “jack” and in the US we say “you don’t know jack” or “you don’t know jack shit” so that means this guy doesn’t know anything because his username is jack.
People need a place to live that's close-enough to where they work. Folks highly value shelter as a means of improving their chances of survival.
Yet we broadly refuse to dismantle a century of ever-tightening restrictions on what can be built nor simplify or eliminate processes that slow down and drive up costs for the little that's legal.
By making more supply (housing units) available in greater variety, at lower cost, and more quickly we can drive down their price and make it possible to satisfy more demand.
Unfortunately a lot of folks think that housing doesn't follow the same simple economic rules that we've observed for all other physical goods. So they don't allow supply and we continue to spiral deeper and deeper into a housing crisis.
If housing were abundant, we wouldn't be reading articles about the rise of living in cars.
I’m not sure; every time we allow people to build more unconstrained, what gets built is luxury housing and upscale office buildings. This is obvious; given a choice, this is what nets the most profit.
In a functional market where demand signal drives production the value of a thing declines as it ages. Japan has this figured out. Tokyo is relatively affordable because it is possible to build just about any form of housing anywhere.
Further, there isn't unlimited demand at every price point. When you constrain supply to the point that high-end demand can consume more than total possibly supply, of course builders only build to the high end of the market.
Finally, we've made the high end of the market the only thing which can possibly pencil out by driving up costs. Planners demand low floor area ratios, high parking rates, articulated facades, parks dedications, high impact fees - that money ultimately comes from the buyer or the renter. So by making those demands you price out increasingly large portions of the population.
The problem with a lot of these places like Seattle is that adding to the supply is really hard. It's not like there are a million acres of land just waiting to have houses put on them. Sure, you can build a skyrise, but first you need to get permission of the 20 families whose homes you're going to raze.
This is nonsense. American cities (especially west coast) make it extremely difficult to build anything anywhere, even on parking lots and crumbling warehouses. There are vacant lots all over SF, in some of the most expensive neighborhoods on earth. Nobody has "raze homes". The hard part is getting permission from 20 retirees who show up at planning meetings and oppose everything on the grounds of fear of change and who think that seeing the sight of a 5 story building is an environmental catastrophe.
The real estate market is driven by speculation no? So that has to be solved before building more is ever going to be a useful option. Otherwise we just pour gas on the fire of real estate speculation by expanding the size of the bubble. Building supply without any restriction in demand just scales the problem up linearly in proportion to the money put into new development.
Could you elaborate on how building apartments specifically for low income residents would do this? My county has started buying old hotels and whatnot to convert for their uses.
I disagree with this notion. Rental values are often controlled algorithmically. Given the low inventory of housing for sale, it’s possible for the monopolists to purchase the new homes and use vacancy in order to maintain higher levels of pricing for the portfolio by artificially controlling the supply levels.
If property taxes were evaluated the same way for the landlords as for everyone else, that wouldn't be feasible would it? And home maintenance and insurance for unoccupied homes is typically very high. There is also the risk of squatting or the cost of people to prevent that.
Has anyone done some math on the housing density that is most economical? My guess would be that the height limit would be close to five or six stories before the engineering to go higher was excessive, but that is just a wild guess. Courtyards down to ground level so people can have an external view seem wasteful from a heating and cooling perspective, most people don't want to live with no windows.
Yeah this fairy tale that we dont build enough because of regulation is told everywhere. Even in countries with rapidly declining population and long reign of right wing anti regulation governments.
The real solution would be to fight the speculation and accept acces to a home as a human right. So prohibit/tax unrented rentals, progressively taxes owning multiple homes.
I live in a poorer EU country where foreign money bought everything they could. They dont even bother renting it out because increase of the value of the properties is where the money is. If they started to rent the evaulations would fall.
This is clearly not true if you observe actual real estate and rental prices and as long as we continue to allow corporations to own a majority of development projects, it should be obvious this won't work. The profit incentive doesn't work this way, and they are better off just letting a home sit empty than to dilute the value of their portfolio by selling or renting low to compete against themselves.
There is not perfect price elasticity in the housing market. The demand for housing right now is pretty much infinite because of the speculation. In other words, the housing price is not based on supply, but it’s based on the demand. And the demand is being driven by speculators.
The answer is to remove housing as an investment vehicle. Also prohibiting the ownership of multiple houses by a single individual or institution.
Supply would absolutely help with the problem, but it's not sufficient.
To discourage speculation, governments should impose land value tax, but not property tax, to encourage efficient use of land. You'll also need to pair with other reform, like changing how zoning should be done, how transportation is planned, and so forth.
Land value tax has some issues as well. The zoning reform might be able to dix them, but only with some micromanaging I think. If we want walkable areas, that means multi-use zoning. Not all land uses have the same roi, so if you set the land value relative to the value that comes from using it for the highest roi case, say case A, then no one will use land for case B or C. So to take it to hyperbole, you'd end up with blocks of liquor stores and no housing, or all housing and no grocers. It is a complicated problem, and the solution will also be complicated.
Well, it is a demand, but not a supply and demand balance of housing supply, but a supply and demand balance of speculation. In other words, there’s a high demand for speculation (profit) in the housing market.
> The real estate market is driven by speculation no?
When two things happen concurrently, it can be hard to tell cause and effect apart.
In reality, real estate speculation is driven by the simple fact that prices always go up, making it one of the best investments there is for those with enough cash.
If you legalize massive housing construction, housing prices will start going down, and the speculation money will have to go elsewhere.
Which leads to the real problem. People have been treating real estate like an investment for decades now. You're essentially going to wipe out the wealth of all the middle class by doing so, so you're up against an immovable wall of political incentive for the current system to persist.
She points out many things that would help and yet I am unsure by how much. There is only so much land in and around most major cities. Anything “affordable” with access to desirable things will not remain so for long. The most likely outcome in my mind is endless tracts of poorly thought out suburban development, more reliance on cars and less on public transit, thus exacerbating other problems. Yes SF has some special and critical issues but demand to live in and around the city will always outstrip supply. There are a few places that have tried to do suburban city planning well, but even if you buy into a walkable neighborhood with jobs, who stays put at a job for more than a few years? Most people will still want new opportunities that will put them back in their cars.
I would love to think that remote work will solve some of this, but myself and many others do not find that fulfilling or sustainable in the same way as even being in the office 2-3 days a week. RTO is increasingly becoming a trend, which I personally find unfortunate but can understand.
We can and should get rid of some dated zoning restrictions and ineffective leaders but it’s not going to be a panacea by any means.
It is kinda fascinating. I just returned from US roadtrip ( UT region ) and there is a lot of unused space. Remote could help with a lot of it were it not for 'old school management'( quotation marks, because that is the current PC terms for luddites ).
Not only is there a lot of unused space, but the legislature and developer oligarchs are firmly in bed with each other. As an example, right in the heart of one of the fastest growing areas of the valley, one of the most prolific apartment building developers is being given tailor made QOZs on which to build low income units.
Building on these gives the developer a perpetual abeyance on any capital gains, they don't have to pay tax on their profit at all! These QOZs were intended to incentivize the development of land in rural areas where development is not being done by the capital class, but are being abused to put money in the pockets of the rich to ensure there's somewhere to keep the slave class close by all the tech bros so they can cook their lunch.
Heaven forbid they were actually used in rural areas and created jobs where these humans could leave the city and seek some semblance of self-determination.
Paving over every square inch of the country is the opposite of a solution. The more we entrench ourselves everywhere, the more we are affected by natural phenomena like forest fires and flash floods. And that is without even considering the effects on the ecosystem. Turning Death Valley or Yosemite into a parking lot with a suburb attached isn't a good idea. We need to get past the frame of thinking that every american can and should have a white picket fence for their own personal green-grassed fiefdom. That's not sustainable.
Residential skyscrapers + modern subway trains that go to suburbs made up of residential skyscrapers are the solution. I visited my friend in Kuala Lumpur. I went from downtown to outside the city in just 10-15 minutes and went direct from the metro station to the condo block, about 60 meters. These clusters of skyscrapers form mini cities with access to many necessities, and then you can just take the metro to other clusters. Or if you really want to, you can drive. Other cities have much better metro systems.
Commuting to the office wouldn’t be so bad if it just meant taking a train for 20 minutes while you read HN.
I’m lucky enough to live with my parents in a rural area, but if I ever move out to San Francisco or NYC for work I will probably try to find the smallest possible apartment. I don’t need a kitchen or table. I just need a bed, wardrobe, and lockable door. I’ve spent enough time in hostels around the world to know I could make it.
Another less infrastructure heavy option would be to build places to live with less parking, more mid rises (~5 stories), and good transit (this can just be dedicated bus lanes and traffic lights that switch automatically when a bus goes through at the cheapest)
That sounds like a pretty amazing layout. Maybe in 100 years we will have something like that in the US!
As a single person, I do not think living in a city is that big a challenge. Sure it’s expensive, you still have to hustle, but you can get a studio or roommates or even live with family, that is how people get by.
Once you are partnered and have kids it becomes much more challenging. I know someone who raised a family of five kids in a 2BR in Chicago, it can be done. But it’s a cultural issue: that is what poor people do, and nobody wants to feel poor. So we expect to have a big house that is unaffordable in the city and we move to cheaper climes and commute.
The nuclear family is a big part of the problem. Going back to multi-generational housing with little private space is not a super popular option, but Gen Z seems to be dipping their toes…
I think a pivotal part of your statement is "close". Close in time and close in distance are not necessarily mutually inclusive. There are many things we could do to to break this coupling if we had the will to spend the time and resources innovating on improving the human condition, but everyone is too busy trying to get theirs to do it. Those with the resources are incentivized to keep the status quo and often even use those resources to ensure their continued control of how and where people live to ensure their profits.
I am not from USA but it’s the same even in my country. There are too many silver snowflakes out there fantasising about a “free” reign real estate development and in their dreamy reality they imagine that somehow benefiting the “people magically. They can’t even fathom the extent to which these things are rigged and artificially projected e.g. price.
No I really believe it can get better than this. For instance, since the demand for such parking spaces will go up businesses will pop up that will charge you a "small fee™" to live there, replacing a huge rent with an "affordable" rent. More lots will be built, eventually leading to luxury/tourist parking lots appearing which will create a dynamic similar to airbnb but for parking lots, eventually leading to the separation of nice parking lots for digital nomads/tourists that are too expensive for regular working people and dumpster parking lots on the other hand that are affordable.
We should be embarrassed. And someone (i.e., so called leadership) should be held accountable. To top it off there's a rung or two below this. That is, people who can't afford a car and/or food.
And yet the lede story out of Washington DC for the past two to three weeks concerns the Speaker of the House and how that is crippling the legislative process. Who know it could get worse? Next we'll be back to budget and debt ceiling circus. And so on...
We taxpayers should be furious. Oh wait! Plenty - and growing - already are!!
the biggest drag on the west right now is the excessive amount of resources that we allocate to the elderly. We funnel capital from young people to old to pay for drastically increasing healthcare costs while putting forward minimal effort to ensure young people can start families.
Anecdotally, my family's health insurance (early 30s, 1 child; mostly paid for by my employer; 2k a month) costs more monthly than our mortgage (1600 a month). Not to mention the money that we pay into social security and Medicare.
Hmm... seems to me that the solution to that would be for you to just pay the elderly back all the money they spent on your support, infrastructure, and schooling.
I suspect that would come out cheaper, actually. The fact that the government will fund all old age care means that old age care is where the market is. Hence the famous Alzheimer’s drug with the amyloid plaque business. So you end up with spiraling costs. And I believe if we just buy back their other stuff we could easily come out ahead.
Don't forget the interest for x years, where x is your current age. You probably think student loans are bad. Student loans aren't in it. It now costs around $300,000 to raise a child to age 18, and that's just out-of-pocket expenses by the parents. That doesn't count all the schools and societal infrastructure that are paid for either by taxes on the parents (and non-parents!) or by direct payments.
What country to you think has figured out how to care for their aging population? Most of Europe has incredibly low birthrates, an aging populaton, and low growth.
The US is looking at massive social security and medicare shortfalls in a decade.
My parents, doctors in their 60s treated people through the pandemic and wrote to prioritize the lives of the young over the old.
I hope to be like they are and make room for our coming generation when my I am their age. My parents prioritized me and my generation. I will do so as well.
Other cultures will vampirically parasitize their children but mine will not.
Oddly enough, I live in an even older Ford Fusion and it's really easy. Spend time at the Library, Starbucks and get a gym membership for showering. I work full-time and don't dick around with washing dishes or anything. Got an inverter and think of my car as a generator with wheels.
I took out my front passenger seat so I can lay down to sleep. Made it through the summer in the south and it was pretty bad, but you sleep while your body sweats and you deal with mosquitos and flies on the regular.
As long as possible. Heading south for the winter so I can continue. A lot of money would be nice lol, but I wouldn't mind getting a Master's Degree and having a remote job, upgrading to a van and living in national forests and visiting family/friends; as opposed to hanging out in Walmart parking lots and yelling at loud birds (which is mostly just for fun).
Unavoidable realities include, bathroom availability, no privacy, and little control (outside of moving) over neighbors in parking lots and weather conditions; which affect the mood more than you would think - rain is a real bummer in the heat.
For a single hard-working person, it can actually be a healthy and productive environment. I lived in my car at a FAANG parking lot when I started my career there. The money I saved and instead invested ensured my ability to afford a nice home in a good area for the family which I eventually started, and to lead the life I wanted to. It was a deliberate sacrifice, and it kept me hyper-focused on career and personal growth. But I do think being laid off and ending up in the same circumstances would produce a different perspective on the living arrangement. My point is, one's attitude and outlook on life is more important than the material foundations to it.
That sounds great. When I was a teenager my dream was to live in an RV at Google Headquarters (maybe that’s still in my future, although I think they started cracking down on that a decade ago)
A room is $1k. Over 5 years that’s about $90k at a 7% annual return compounding monthly. So that’s the opportunity cost. But over that period that’s about $750k in post tax income which if you applied same compounding is 1.1 m. So that puts you at about 9%. Significant and reasonable if your car is already paid off, I suppose, since you won’t get that much for selling it.
It completely my choice. I had a two bedroom with cheap rent, but was unhappy with what life was becoming and living in my car feels more like living; even if it's just psychosomatic. Long term is to upgrade to a van and find a remote job in data science.
No, I eat Budding Ham and Walmart cheese sandwiches + goldfish crackers and Aldi energy drinks as my 75% source + strawberries and bananas. My diet is mostly sandwiches and Taurine...
everyone should live as they want but tbh this sounds more depressing than the person in the article because the person doesn't glorify this way of living.
Perhaps you are super small and this is actually somehow comftable and you don't mind doing private stuff in a car in some parking lot (or at least you actually park in nature?) but you know you constatly live in someones else space. Starbucks, gym, library, work.
Why not take a little bit of money and do the van conversation much much faster?
It's amazing what you can get used to; the aspect of human nature despots take advantage of and systematize. Your aversion is understandable. The idea of privacy is just that, an idea. We don't really know if what we do is private anyway, as most of what we consider private can be easily spied on or deduced from observation.
Renting puts me in someone elses space too, just not in the same contextual way - but, functionally no different.
Yes we can get used to a lot of things but isn't that also an issue? People getting used to mold on a wall or someone sleeping in an unhealthy position on a car seat.
I personally also try to find a workplace were i can look outside into nature. I don't need to look outside today but i believe i have less risk of depression and more fun overall if my workplace is good.
Same thing as eating highly processed food: of course you can and than 20 years later when you are 50 and finally free, you have so many health issues that you can't enjoy it anymore.
Can you please get yourself a CostCo membership, if only for the hot $5 whole-chicken &/or $1.50 hotdog/soda combo. They also have freeze-dried 18oz strawberries for ~$13.00
I'll even let you become "my guest [FREE] membership". Get youself some tendies, bruh.
I have an older friend who lives around England in his Model S after a business partnership turned sour. He's also grandfathered on free supercharging.
It's not like it's the life he chose, but he seems to be doing all right.
I've been spending a lot of time sleeping in my truck. I have an apartment in Colorado's western slope (and a community of folks I love out there) but I've been doing a lot of sound-guy gigs in the front range, 7 hours away.
TBH, I prefer to stay in my truck than be put up in a hotel room (which happens about 1/3 of the time on these gigs). I don't have to share it with coworkers and it's very comfortable.
To be clear, that situation is way different than if I didn't have a place to go back to for a while. It's also way different in that I get paid really well for the work, and a lot of it is festival stuff where there are a lot of traveling folks anyhow.
Most of the places I have been just feel so horrifically insecure.
If I had to rate most of the places I've slept in the last 80 or so nights in my truck, the primary axis would be "how secure do I feel about not getting kicked off this spot".
Followed shortly by "how secure do I feel about not getting robbed/shot/etc".
I have only been rousted once, and that was because I was in a ski resort lot in Utah (I had a 3-day pass and was on my way to a gig). And that guy told me where in the little town I could park without getting hassled. So I might just be overly worried about getting kicked. I have a nice truck with window-less topper, so it is hard to tell there is anyone sleeping in it anyhow.
After the last week of chilling in an industrial park near Denver (near a company I work for's warehouse) I spent last night on FS land near Colorado Springs, and it was super nice to not have to worry about getting asked to leave and to know that I more or less have a right to be on that land, as much as any other person here.
All that is to say that I find this situation much easier in the west, where there is a whole lot of BLM/Forest Service land; having clearer ideas about safe places to stay is probably the best thing that would help folks who are wanting to live in vehicles. Maybe the article says that, but I don't have access.
She's been struggling with bad debt since 2001! I read this and can't help wondering _why_ she's still paying debt. Her credit score is already bad and not going to improve by paying off debts (it'll still be on her history, anyhow). I feel like she's too honest and hard working to consider bankruptcy, but she's trapped in a cycle where earning a salary isn't enough to live.
Isn't that what bankruptcy is for? We purposefully don't have debtor's prison. The founders didn't want debts to take a person's life. Here clearly is a person giving their life for their debt.
Not an expert (also not american) but your reasoning sounds too simple to me. If everyone could "just" go bankrupt then why would anyone pay debts at all?
> If everyone could "just" go bankrupt then why would anyone pay debts at all?
Because you lose reputation and assets.
It's completely fucked up that companies can bakrupt any time, but people can't. It helps nobody that people are stuck as modern slaves in barely survivable conditions. It's insane that people like you consider this better than the alternative.
About 15 years ago I had a roommate who, 8 months after successfully filing for bankruptcy in Ga, was offered a credit card with a $700 credit line - unsolicited. She was shocked. It seems that in the perverse world of credit, someone who owed ~$12k but is now 'debt free' as a result of bankruptcy, looks good to some credit outfits. Odd.
Can't file BK again (and discharge debts) for 2-8 years, depending on circumstances. Makes perfect sense to issue someone credit right after, assuming the product pricing
makes it profitable (from a predatory lending perspective).
Total cost (including an attorney) for declaring bankruptcy sits around $2500 and at one point the article points out that her bank account is $900 overdrawn. If you’re in that situation, $2500 might as well be a million dollars.
Yes and no. She's trying to be honorable in a world that doesn't optimize for it.
I was in a similar position once. My attorney couldn't reconcile why I was filing for bankruptcy when I was still actively paying my debts. The expectation is that you should have long ago stopped paying the debts you're trying to discharge, because it conveniently frees up more than enough money to pay bankruptcy fees.
These people should be paid, they have a low carbon footprint. Instead of carbon credits, its so much beneficial to pay people directly for living a low carbon footprint lifestyle.
When we have autonomous cars, I expect this to increase, probably even become the dominant lifestyle. You sleep in your car, car takes you to your favorite scenic spot. By the time you wake, your car is already at gym or work (if work has bathrooms, unlikely). Then it drives you to work, takes you to favorite healthy eating places and takes you back 'home'. Cars will be built with specific features to make this a bit more comfortable. But, of course, there will be in-app payments. Want a pillow - purchase $2.99/hour. BMW is already doing this. [1]
Homes become so costly that most can't afford them. The super rich will own all of them (directly or indirectly via luxury cruise lines) and they are all available on airbnb. People rent these homes for a few days, because they have to share pics on instagram. Home stay is just like going on a cruise.
Similarly to a sibling poster, I also live in my car. It's a $3000 hatchback. I work full time and my income is in the 95th percentile nationwide, so while I appreciate the savings, it is not a major factor. I decided to try it this summer and continued, among others, for the following reasons:
- I wanted to try something I haven't done before
- My former house didn't qualify for a residential parking permit. I found it annoying that all residents aren't equal in this regard
- Coping with the death of a close relative who had been homeless by choice for decades
- It makes it easier to reach my financial goals
- I learn a lot of things I wouldn't learn otherwise and get to explore my surrounding area; it's been easier to avoid dull stereotype so far (but I realize that even this could become repetitive, at which point I will likely find something else to entertain myself)
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadBut that's the minority anyway, those who were born into rent extracting elites need to not lift a finger.
Land is not result of anyone's work.
It is when you try to move into a building that someone wants rent. Just like when you want to benefit from someone’s work to convert mere facts into a story.
You can also take facts from paywalls article and use them to write a story, same thing.
Subs like this encourage siloization. That $26/month is only efficient if you read NYT pretty regularly (at the expense of reading stuff from other outlets), not if you read an article or two every month.
But in fact 'rent' means to tear, split, rip, etc, and that's exactly what it is. People who 'own' land, ripping money from people who don't. But, land is common heritage like air and water, it belongs to us all, and individuals should not be able to own it, or at least not to own and 'rent' it.
Rent is a ripoff, by nature, and in it's very name.
Then you realize just how difficult it is to build. It takes just as long as the build sometimes and costs thousands and thousands upfront just to get to the point where you can start.
We need a streamlined process that allows standardized housing to be built with minimal upfront costs and on small affordable lots.
ADUs are up to 1200sq feet — for most people this is a whole dang house not an accessory dwelling unit.
Want to see how easy improvement could be made? Imagine if you could write off 50-70 percent of the total cost of an ADU over 15 years as long as it’s rented out to no more than 3 tenants during each year — and eliminated the ability of cities and counties to block their development as long as they fit on the lot. You’d have a massive increase in affordability in just a few short years.
It’s the laws and the zoning that are the problem. You’re spot on.
I built more than one house, not alone of course.
The problem with modern US building codes is that there is still too much over-regulation (e.g. AFCI's required in essentially all residential splits), combined with the dangerous interconflict of builder's EGO -vs- inspector's EGO — particularly egregious when the inspector feels a one-off homebuilder "deserves" differential treatment.
I think the dumbest jurisdictions (AHJ's) are the ones which prevent homeowners from (e.g.) installing their own electrical outlets, not even in owner-occupied structures. Homeowner maintenance becomes illegal, in certain stupid AHJ's (e.g. Chattanooga); and is thus done unpermitted by a helpless-to-stupid-regulations policy.
/rant
Thanks for allowing my vent, and re-enforcing some of its basis.
But yes, it's true that many people who dislike rent may be happier owning a single family home.
After all, the apartment building will inevitably come with some sort of political process to decide things like how much this year's residents ought to put aside ready to replace the roof in a decade's time. And while such payments may not technically be rent, they'll smell very similar.
Rent as in a tear comes via Middle and Old renten/renden and back to Proto-West Germanic and then it goes cold.
But the right to own land is an essential part of a functioning society. The idea that no one should be able to own land is ridiculous and does not work. There are plenty of examples of this all across the globe.
But land ownership as in subletting and sub-subletting and sub-sub who knows how many levels up, that is not a necessary consequence of the concept of land ownership. What if only personal use was allowed? Sure, you would definitely see hoarding and countermeasures would not be without their own problems, but there is definitely room between unbounded capitalism and "property does not exist" level socialism.
Even trees do that. Eucalyptus literally poisons land near it to kill competition.
What do you call the territorial animals then? A tiger will chase other tigers from the area it considers its own. Same as wolves and many other species. It's not exactly property in the sense that it cannot be traded but it is indeed the ownership. Without property rights humans would have had the same: the strong chase the weak off their land or force them to pay for being on the land.
That's precisely what property rights are: "the strong [...] forc[ing the weak ...] to pay for being on the land". That's what property taxes are. To "have rights" is to be paid up with a protection racket. Yet as depressing as that is, it beats the alternative! In many places it's not a bad deal!
There is admittedly also an element of magic here: People generally view property rights as legitimate, and the police who enforce them as legitimate, and so on. But when that belief system fails, it's ultimately the State's ability to deploy force that reestablishes the faith.
Indeed, the law is ultimately based on force but it still does allow physically weak to have rights, unlike a natural law.
In practice, with housing, such leases are effectively ownership. The terms on these are often 100 years or more, and when they come to term, since there are often significant improvements built in the land, the terms can't be renegotiated since the lessor can't force the sale or relocation of the improvements.
so for most of recorded human history society did not function?
the only reason we're allowed to buy land is because it was commodified during the industrial revolution as the process of capital extraction from labor had moved from the land to the factories.
Since governments are in the business of governing, not real estate, they'll almost definitely outsource that work (or big parts of it) to private contractors like they do for defense.
The end result is that your landlord is now an even bigger private entity (that might be a conglomerate of smaller entities, which might or might not look like the institutional landlords that exist today) with the near-infinite financial backing of the government and the insanely slow processes that come with that (such as having to go through an intermediate to get that Tesla Powerwall you want to install approved, only to be told that Tesla isn't an approved supplier and that you should use this battery from $VENDOR_THAT_WE_DONT_HAVE_RELATIONSHIPS_WITH_WE_PROMISE).
Before buying my first house in 2021, I was paying $2k / month in rent in a 2 family house my landlord bought 2 years prior for $350k. There was another person paying an additional $1k/month in the same house for a total of $3k/mo of total rent for a $350k house the landlord purchased through a LLC the year prior.
When I ended up buying a house, the monthly mortgage payments were about the same as rent except the house is 2x larger with 5x more property (on the same street as the apartment I was renting).
In other words, for mobility to really be worth the cost of renting, you really gotta be taking advantage of that benefit and moving around a lot. If you’re renting a house like I was for a long period of time, it makes absolutely no sense.
Unfortunately, I think most renters do so out of necessity (not able to afford a $75k down payment, for example).
At least when you rent, you can easily move elsewhere and hope for thicker walls. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in France, selling and buying a new house is a very expensive ordeal. The state gets to tax you 7% of the price of the new home. And with housing prices being absurdly high, 7% is quite a sum.
No it doesn't. 'Rent' in this context derives through french from a latin verb that means "to give back".
Your confusion comes from the fact that 'rent' can also be the past tense of 'rend' which has a different origin and comes from old english and germanic roots rather than French and latin.
Yet we broadly refuse to dismantle a century of ever-tightening restrictions on what can be built nor simplify or eliminate processes that slow down and drive up costs for the little that's legal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/20/housing-s...
Unfortunately a lot of folks think that housing doesn't follow the same simple economic rules that we've observed for all other physical goods. So they don't allow supply and we continue to spiral deeper and deeper into a housing crisis.
If housing were abundant, we wouldn't be reading articles about the rise of living in cars.
Further, there isn't unlimited demand at every price point. When you constrain supply to the point that high-end demand can consume more than total possibly supply, of course builders only build to the high end of the market.
Finally, we've made the high end of the market the only thing which can possibly pencil out by driving up costs. Planners demand low floor area ratios, high parking rates, articulated facades, parks dedications, high impact fees - that money ultimately comes from the buyer or the renter. So by making those demands you price out increasingly large portions of the population.
If more houses are built, prices will go down.
Has anyone done some math on the housing density that is most economical? My guess would be that the height limit would be close to five or six stories before the engineering to go higher was excessive, but that is just a wild guess. Courtyards down to ground level so people can have an external view seem wasteful from a heating and cooling perspective, most people don't want to live with no windows.
The real solution would be to fight the speculation and accept acces to a home as a human right. So prohibit/tax unrented rentals, progressively taxes owning multiple homes.
I live in a poorer EU country where foreign money bought everything they could. They dont even bother renting it out because increase of the value of the properties is where the money is. If they started to rent the evaulations would fall.
The answer is to remove housing as an investment vehicle. Also prohibiting the ownership of multiple houses by a single individual or institution.
To discourage speculation, governments should impose land value tax, but not property tax, to encourage efficient use of land. You'll also need to pair with other reform, like changing how zoning should be done, how transportation is planned, and so forth.
No, it's driven by supply and demand.
When two things happen concurrently, it can be hard to tell cause and effect apart.
In reality, real estate speculation is driven by the simple fact that prices always go up, making it one of the best investments there is for those with enough cash.
If you legalize massive housing construction, housing prices will start going down, and the speculation money will have to go elsewhere.
I would love to think that remote work will solve some of this, but myself and many others do not find that fulfilling or sustainable in the same way as even being in the office 2-3 days a week. RTO is increasingly becoming a trend, which I personally find unfortunate but can understand.
We can and should get rid of some dated zoning restrictions and ineffective leaders but it’s not going to be a panacea by any means.
Building on these gives the developer a perpetual abeyance on any capital gains, they don't have to pay tax on their profit at all! These QOZs were intended to incentivize the development of land in rural areas where development is not being done by the capital class, but are being abused to put money in the pockets of the rich to ensure there's somewhere to keep the slave class close by all the tech bros so they can cook their lunch.
Heaven forbid they were actually used in rural areas and created jobs where these humans could leave the city and seek some semblance of self-determination.
Commuting to the office wouldn’t be so bad if it just meant taking a train for 20 minutes while you read HN.
I’m lucky enough to live with my parents in a rural area, but if I ever move out to San Francisco or NYC for work I will probably try to find the smallest possible apartment. I don’t need a kitchen or table. I just need a bed, wardrobe, and lockable door. I’ve spent enough time in hostels around the world to know I could make it.
As a single person, I do not think living in a city is that big a challenge. Sure it’s expensive, you still have to hustle, but you can get a studio or roommates or even live with family, that is how people get by.
Once you are partnered and have kids it becomes much more challenging. I know someone who raised a family of five kids in a 2BR in Chicago, it can be done. But it’s a cultural issue: that is what poor people do, and nobody wants to feel poor. So we expect to have a big house that is unaffordable in the city and we move to cheaper climes and commute.
The nuclear family is a big part of the problem. Going back to multi-generational housing with little private space is not a super popular option, but Gen Z seems to be dipping their toes…
It's weird that this is such a common thought in a world where Tokyo exists.
You can build an almost unlimited number of floors on that limited land, and it has been done with brilliant results!
Trust in capitalism, it gets better
And yet the lede story out of Washington DC for the past two to three weeks concerns the Speaker of the House and how that is crippling the legislative process. Who know it could get worse? Next we'll be back to budget and debt ceiling circus. And so on...
We taxpayers should be furious. Oh wait! Plenty - and growing - already are!!
Anecdotally, my family's health insurance (early 30s, 1 child; mostly paid for by my employer; 2k a month) costs more monthly than our mortgage (1600 a month). Not to mention the money that we pay into social security and Medicare.
Would you be willing to do that?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/cos...
Also don't forget that you, too, will be old. A lot sooner than you probably think.
I hope to be like they are and make room for our coming generation when my I am their age. My parents prioritized me and my generation. I will do so as well.
Other cultures will vampirically parasitize their children but mine will not.
Oddly enough, I live in an even older Ford Fusion and it's really easy. Spend time at the Library, Starbucks and get a gym membership for showering. I work full-time and don't dick around with washing dishes or anything. Got an inverter and think of my car as a generator with wheels.
I took out my front passenger seat so I can lay down to sleep. Made it through the summer in the south and it was pretty bad, but you sleep while your body sweats and you deal with mosquitos and flies on the regular.
What would be some nice-to-haves, and what would drastically increase your experience of living in a car?
What are some unavoidable extremely difficult realities that come with this lifestyle?
Unavoidable realities include, bathroom availability, no privacy, and little control (outside of moving) over neighbors in parking lots and weather conditions; which affect the mood more than you would think - rain is a real bummer in the heat.
In light of the manageable struggles, the image of you yelling at birds made me chuckle real good.
True!
That said, the material foundations are a bit different when building a safety net vs spending it.
Is that because you have an income that enables you to purchase meals assembled by someone else?
Perhaps you are super small and this is actually somehow comftable and you don't mind doing private stuff in a car in some parking lot (or at least you actually park in nature?) but you know you constatly live in someones else space. Starbucks, gym, library, work.
Why not take a little bit of money and do the van conversation much much faster?
Renting puts me in someone elses space too, just not in the same contextual way - but, functionally no different.
I personally also try to find a workplace were i can look outside into nature. I don't need to look outside today but i believe i have less risk of depression and more fun overall if my workplace is good.
Same thing as eating highly processed food: of course you can and than 20 years later when you are 50 and finally free, you have so many health issues that you can't enjoy it anymore.
Good luck anyway
I'll even let you become "my guest [FREE] membership". Get youself some tendies, bruh.
It's not like it's the life he chose, but he seems to be doing all right.
Or maybe a dream...
Starlink is $150/mo and full-hookup campgrounds with long-term rates are $600-1500/mo.
That is an excellent question.
TBH, I prefer to stay in my truck than be put up in a hotel room (which happens about 1/3 of the time on these gigs). I don't have to share it with coworkers and it's very comfortable.
To be clear, that situation is way different than if I didn't have a place to go back to for a while. It's also way different in that I get paid really well for the work, and a lot of it is festival stuff where there are a lot of traveling folks anyhow.
Most of the places I have been just feel so horrifically insecure.
If I had to rate most of the places I've slept in the last 80 or so nights in my truck, the primary axis would be "how secure do I feel about not getting kicked off this spot".
Followed shortly by "how secure do I feel about not getting robbed/shot/etc".
I have only been rousted once, and that was because I was in a ski resort lot in Utah (I had a 3-day pass and was on my way to a gig). And that guy told me where in the little town I could park without getting hassled. So I might just be overly worried about getting kicked. I have a nice truck with window-less topper, so it is hard to tell there is anyone sleeping in it anyhow.
After the last week of chilling in an industrial park near Denver (near a company I work for's warehouse) I spent last night on FS land near Colorado Springs, and it was super nice to not have to worry about getting asked to leave and to know that I more or less have a right to be on that land, as much as any other person here.
All that is to say that I find this situation much easier in the west, where there is a whole lot of BLM/Forest Service land; having clearer ideas about safe places to stay is probably the best thing that would help folks who are wanting to live in vehicles. Maybe the article says that, but I don't have access.
Isn't that what bankruptcy is for? We purposefully don't have debtor's prison. The founders didn't want debts to take a person's life. Here clearly is a person giving their life for their debt.
Because you lose reputation and assets.
It's completely fucked up that companies can bakrupt any time, but people can't. It helps nobody that people are stuck as modern slaves in barely survivable conditions. It's insane that people like you consider this better than the alternative.
Total cost (including an attorney) for declaring bankruptcy sits around $2500 and at one point the article points out that her bank account is $900 overdrawn. If you’re in that situation, $2500 might as well be a million dollars.
I was in a similar position once. My attorney couldn't reconcile why I was filing for bankruptcy when I was still actively paying my debts. The expectation is that you should have long ago stopped paying the debts you're trying to discharge, because it conveniently frees up more than enough money to pay bankruptcy fees.
When we have autonomous cars, I expect this to increase, probably even become the dominant lifestyle. You sleep in your car, car takes you to your favorite scenic spot. By the time you wake, your car is already at gym or work (if work has bathrooms, unlikely). Then it drives you to work, takes you to favorite healthy eating places and takes you back 'home'. Cars will be built with specific features to make this a bit more comfortable. But, of course, there will be in-app payments. Want a pillow - purchase $2.99/hour. BMW is already doing this. [1]
Homes become so costly that most can't afford them. The super rich will own all of them (directly or indirectly via luxury cruise lines) and they are all available on airbnb. People rent these homes for a few days, because they have to share pics on instagram. Home stay is just like going on a cruise.
You'll own nothing and be happy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21311332/bmw-in-car-purcha...
- I wanted to try something I haven't done before
- My former house didn't qualify for a residential parking permit. I found it annoying that all residents aren't equal in this regard
- Coping with the death of a close relative who had been homeless by choice for decades
- It makes it easier to reach my financial goals
- I learn a lot of things I wouldn't learn otherwise and get to explore my surrounding area; it's been easier to avoid dull stereotype so far (but I realize that even this could become repetitive, at which point I will likely find something else to entertain myself)
- I enjoy spending the saved commute time outside in the nature
I just wish I had a bigger car that would accommodate a bike