In reply to GameboyRMH :
I have not spent my life being chased around the planet. That's a dumb comment.
I made a smart decision to put down roots in a place where I could live well and within my means raise my family and enjoy a comfortable life. I now have a comfortable amount to retire on, because I made good decisions when I was young.
But if whining works for you, have at it. You do you.
z31maniac said:GameboyRMH said:In reply to bobzilla :
So your solution is just mass exodus from expensive areas? What happens when everyone moves to Baltimore and Anderson and Terre Haute and the prices there creep up to median (or likely even higher due to a sudden influx)?
It's already happening and has been for years, even more than a decade before COVID. At a previous job, 3 yes THREE people in the engineering department were all people who sold their homes in California and moved to the Tulsa metro area. Either bought or built much larger homes and still pocketed a few hundred grand when it was all said and done.
That's an understandable solution for extreme situations like California, but it can't be the go-to for the whole bottom 80% of the economy, fixing whatever's causing home prices to go coocoo-bananas seems like a more practical and sustainable solution. Again median incomes are already struggling to afford median homes, and that's a situation that's hard to run from.
GameboyRMH said:In reply to bobzilla :
So your solution is just mass exodus from expensive areas? What happens when everyone moves to Baltimore and Anderson and Terre Haute and the prices there creep up to median (or likely even higher due to a sudden influx)?
You are saying that like Baltimore only has cheap houses. That's the problem with median house prices. Here is a condo within 5 miles of the other house for $4.25M. If you use just those 2, the "median" is over $2M and Baltimore is crazy expensive....
GameboyRMH said:I think it's a bit silly to live a life being chased around the planet, being excluded from whole regions due to irrationally exploding home prices. There has to be a better solution than turning humanity into a nomadic species fleeing an insane housing market.
EXCEPT YOU'RE NOT DOING THAT.
If you have affordability challenges where you are, you find a place where your income potential and buying potential match up, and you move there.
ONCE.
Say you move to Terre Haute to take advantage of that sweet spot, and buy a house you can afford. Awesome.
Then, 200,000 other people get the same idea, and Terre Haute is suddenly not the sweet spot any more, because values have gone up.
So the VALUE of your house has suddenly gone up, but the COST of your house has not. You will not suddenly become unable to afford the house you could afford before the influx. You may no longer be able to afford a different house in the same area, true. But you will not be thrown out of your current house.
You're not being chased by anything. And, lo and behold, you have now built wealth by having an affordable house in a thriving area.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
But it's not coocoo bananas EVERYWHERE. I just gave you a list of houses for under $120k
GameboyRMH said:SV reX said:Right!
And HALF of homebuyers are under the median income level!
Why are we comparing the median house price to low wage earners?
Fair point, but I don't think there's as much variance between low vs. median house prices as between low vs. median incomes. And according to this census data, the median salary in Baltimore is $54k vs. $69k nationally:
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/baltimorecitymaryland,US/INC110221
And I showed you that someone making 67% of that median income could buy a nice single family house. With the $54k average salary they would be able to buy a $220k house.
The median house price in Baltimore is currently $210k. Amazing how that works huh?
You stated someone working full time should be able to afford a house. I showed you that, you just don't like it and want to make excuses on why it won't work for you. Some people don't make excuses.
In reply to Duke :
I know we have explained this over and over again. I don't think it's going to make any damn difference. Those that want to complain are going to complain. This notion that ANYONE should be able to live ANYWHERE is idiotic and doesn't deal in reality at all.
Steve_Jones said:GameboyRMH said:In reply to Steve_Jones :
That's good for the people in Baltimore, unfortunately that's not a common situation. That house is well under half, from what I'm hearing possibly less than a third of the current US median house price.
I chose Baltimore because that is where I am. Keep moving those goalposts.
Great minds think alike.
This is the new EV thread, since it's been drug back up.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
You and I will never agree. We are fundamentally different.
You believe that socialist economic approaches can cure the world's ills and make everyone content. You only post graphs and data that you think appear to support that position. You believe there is a big bad greedy capitalist out there somewhere who is stealing from you and making your life miserable.
I don't believe that. I believe that socialism has damaged far more people than it ever helped, destroyed economies, robbed people of opportunity to succeed, and made a few powerful people fantastically wealthy and disgustingly powerful. Most of the people I know have done fine without it. I believe you are one of the privileged few in the world with tremendous capacity to succeed and have been gifted a charmed life that you are not taking advantage of.
Now we understand each other.
You know what? I think I deserve to live in a penthouse in Miami and shouldn't have to pay $2 Million. We should make them give it to me because I want it. Or maybe a beach front house on Maui. I should be allowed to buy this house for $200k.
Duke said:GameboyRMH said:I think it's a bit silly to live a life being chased around the planet, being excluded from whole regions due to irrationally exploding home prices. There has to be a better solution than turning humanity into a nomadic species fleeing an insane housing market.
EXCEPT YOU"RE NOT DOING THAT.
If you have affordability challenges where you are, you find a place where your income potential and buying potential match up, and you move there.
ONCE.
Say you move to Terre Haute to take advantage of that sweet spot, and buy a house you can afford. Awesome.
Then, 200,000 other people get the same idea, and Terre Haute is suddenly not the sweet spot any more, because values have gone up.
So the VALUE of your house has suddenly gone up, but the COST of your house has not. You will not suddenly become unable to afford the house you could afford before the influx. You may no longer be able to afford a different house in the same area, true. But you will not be thrown out of your current house.
You're not being chased by anything. And, lo and behold, you have now built wealth by having an affordable house in a thriving area.
Unless you can *buy* a house as soon as you move, you ARE doing that. Otherwise you can never save up for a house because what you might've put toward a house is instead going into rent, which is affected by increased home prices, which again are probably constantly increasing in the background. And cost-of-living increases which tend to coincide with housing price increases can indeed chase people away from places they've settled in, so staking your claim with a home ownership is no guarantee that the chase is over.
When I moved to Ontario before the pandemic, home prices were...significantly less insane. Now I'm just supposed to move again, supposedly out of the province, which is bigger than Texas (I'm sure there are some cheap houses in the ass-end of nowhere way up north though). Across the whole first world, median prices are still growing against median incomes as they have for decades. You can only run from that with international migration or a time machine...but we're just supposed to accept that?
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I'm not sure what you think is supposed to be done? At the end of the day, you've got control of your manifest destiny. Don't like the costs associated with where you are? Well, then you need to do something about it, either by doing something that changes your income positively, or moving to somewhere that's less expensive that you hopefully like as much as where you are now.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Well, wasn't that the POINT of moving to a given area? To find a place you could afford to buy a house relatively feasibly?
If you're buying AFTER the prices get high due to popularity, you're doing it wrong. See also: my post about cost vs. demand.
As I've admitted before, I certainly don't propose my ideas to be something that should be adopted nation wide, but rather an option that cities could take with a voter-lead referendum.
The problems facing San Diego might be different than those facing Baltimore, and it'd be silly to use the same solutions to fix problems that may or may not exist in one or the other.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
You moved to Ontario because there was more opportunity there vs where you were. You were full of ideas and hope and wanted to grab your piece.
I miss that guy.
In reply to docwyte :
Generally I think discussing and implementing solutions to get prices back to something resembling a normal should be done, rather than taking a "no problem here, this is fine" approach to it and recommending workarounds. Moving and increasing income aren't solutions to the problem, they're temporary workarounds only available to people who can afford them. SF went with the "increase income" approach and now people with ordinary jobs can't afford to live there at all and are facing increasingly impractical commutes from outside, and a city can't run on just tech workers as they're discovering.
In reply to Steve_Jones :
Again, same guy. I was still pissed with most of the same issues. Although I must admit I didn't move because I had hope in where I was going so much as I lost hope in where I was. Maybe that'll happen again.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Fine all houses everywhere must be the same price. Right? That's the logical conclusion you're proposing. If all houses are the same cost, then there's no need for jobs to pay different right? So everyone gets the same pay everywhere.
see, I've been alive long enough to see those things at work and let me tell you, they don't. We have watched the collapse of the ussr, the biggest proponent of communist/socialist ideals. We watched China move its economy to a more western model because it knew they would never be able to compete globally without the ussr as a partner in crime. We've watched little banana republics come and go, usually bloody trying to pull the same things.
reality is telling you that this is how things work. You don't want to live in reality apparently so I don't think there is really any more to discuss here. You believe we should all be able to live where ever we want on any job and not have to work at it. I believe nothing in life that is worth having is easy and that nothing in life is free. Am I wrong on any of this?
GameboyRMH said:In reply to Steve_Jones :
Again, same guy. I was still pissed with most of the same issues. Although I must admit I didn't move because I had hope in where I was going so much as I lost hope in where I was. Maybe that'll happen again.
That's a mistake you made. Leaving sone place in anger and not moving to someplace that you researched and found hope was your mistake not ours.
GameboyRMH said:In reply to Steve_Jones :
Again, same guy. I was still pissed with most of the same issues.
That speaks volumes. Maybe it's your fault, not everyone else's fault then. Stop blaming others and go get yours, many people do it every day.
bobzilla said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Fine all houses everywhere must be the same price. Right? That's the logical conclusion you're proposing. If all houses are the same cost, then there's no need for jobs to pay different right? So everyone gets the same pay everywhere.
see, I've been alive long enough to see those things at work and let me tell you, they don't. We have watched the collapse of the ussr, the biggest proponent of communist/socialist ideals. We watched China move its economy to a more western model because it knew they would never be able to compete globally without the ussr as a partner in crime. We've watched little banana republics come and go, usually bloody trying to pull the same things.
reality is telling you that this is how things work. You don't want to live in reality apparently so I don't think there is really any more to discuss here. You believe we should all be able to live where ever we want on any job and not have to work at it. I believe nothing in life that is worth having is easy and that nothing in life is free. Am I wrong on any of this?
Some variance is understandable, it's totally understandable for an apartment overlooking Central Park to cost some multiple of one overlooking a refinery in Cleveland. But the level of variance, the speed of the increase, and the length of the increase we're seeing are not normal or healthy. People in this thread are speaking of those issues as if they're immutable laws of nature or at least an inherent feature of capitalism when it's a problem that started after Star Trek TOS ended production (Edit: In fact you could argue that things didn't really go off the rails until around the time the first Terminator movie came out). Some things are badly broken to cause this and I'm confident they can be fixed without abolishing capitalism.
In reply to bobzilla :
I didn't have much choice considering the size of the place I was leaving and the places I could legally work and reside in. The choices were to move to Ontario where I had family, or some other place in Canada where I didn't, likely with less jobs. As many have pointed out the property is more expensive where the jobs are. Even if the second option was better, the first still looks like a good intermediate step.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
And we are showing you over and over that you are not correct. That there are a lot of places very cheap and affordable all over the country. Yet you refuse to acknowledge that. You've made up your mind that rich people are at fault and your anger that should be directed at your own decisions is bleeding out to a situation that just isn't really there.
and what is your solution? You've bitched about it but I've not seen any solutions from you. You refuse to acknowledge that the solutions that have been in play since mankind learned to walk work so what is yours?
SV reX said:In reply to Duke :
Forcibly moving money from one group to another will make the poor people more wealthy, then THEY will be the ones buying the more expensive stuff.
Dr Suess understood..., "The star-bellied Sneetches had bellies with stars, the plain-bellied Sneetches had none upon thars..."
All we need is Sylvester McMonkey McBean to solve the problem! (He was a great capitalist)
Almost. Trying to move money from the wealthy to the poor more commonly results in everybody being poorer, except the government and friends of people in the government.
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