The absence of affordable housing is a failure of the state. working your whole life to pay for housing is the rigging of the system.
One day my boss rolled up in a fancy new car, I had grown up in a family that did better than middle class and still I had never seen such luxury. I was reminded of how I was promised the world, and given scraps, never to enjoy the same level of financial freedom as my grandparents.
But then my boss put his hand on my shoulder, he saw the pain in my eyes, and he reassured me
“Listen, if you work hard, apply yourself, put the company’s needs before your own wants…”
My heart sang, could this be the secret to my salvation? “I’ll finally get that raise”
My boss laughed. “No, I can get a nicer car by the next fiscal year.”
When I was young, I was poor. But after decades of hard work, I’m not young anymore
I used to be poor. I’m still poor, but I used to be, too.
Home ownership in the US has hovered between low 60% and high 60% for around 6 decades now, but sure, let’s pretend that it ain’t possible no more because some people only want to post doom-and-gloom bullshit because they have ulterior motives.
The problem I see with that graph is that it tells us that 63%-69% of Americans are incentivized to make the problem worse. Homes are, by far, the biggest asset of those people. Their retirement and long term wealth is highly dependent on appreciating housing prices.
We regularly observe the effects of this in the form of all kinds of NIMBY laws. Unless you’re prepared to build a cabin in the middle of the wilderness, almost all the desirable land already has a bunch of people living there. Those people tend to be very resistant to any additional housing that has any chance of decreasing their home value. We also see it in the form of mortgage tax deductions. The more money you borrow for your house, the more the government pitches in. We’re encouraged to leverage our investment in housing which further drives up the need for housing to be a good investment. All of this effectively turns into a negative marginal tax rate (ie it’s a wealth transfer from poor people to rich people).
We, as a society, need to decide if we want housing to be a right or an investment. It can’t be both.
We, as a society, need to decide if we want housing to be a right or an investment. It can’t be both.
We already decided. We decided it’s an investment, fuck human rights.
Or did you not notice all the homelessness?
