Which is kind of my point. I think im being responsible about this by taking my time and im in a lot better position financially then many of the people they were begging to buy a home. If i suddenly got married to someone who had a second income im sure i could do it because a morgage payment is likely to be cheaper then my rent.
Rent control isnt the answer. I've rented for 11 years and while I would love to buy a home the problem isnt the morgage its the down payment and the taxes/additional fees that people with a decent but not rich income cant handle.
One thing i dont get is why they stopped the tax break for buying a home so early in the 'recovery' assistance programs. at the time i had just moved to a new city and started a new job out of college and could not consider buying, and the program ended too soon. I've changed to a slightly nicer apartment but if i wanted to buy a decent (say 180-200k) home I would need 20-40k for a down payment, which isnt trivial. If they wanted to boost the housing market they should have kept that going. Making loans easier to get for people that reasonably could not afford them is how we got in this mess in the first place and I dont understand why they thought it would solve the problem in the long run. its just kicking the can down the road.
basically there was a lot of mostly conservative hand-wringing about how homeowner incentives were getting people to buy who weren't really capable of paying their mortgages and isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place.
From personal, and entirely anecdotal, experience if you cannot come up with the 15-20k down you would need with a first time home-buyer program for a 180-200k house, you probably couldn't afford maintenance and upkeep of the property. the 15-20k is a substantial amount of money, but upkeep and repairs on a property typically number in the 1-3k a year range depending on how harsh the weather and your neighborhood is (beyond the ~1-3k annually in taxes/mortgage interest/insurance).
There are a lot of mortgage support programs still in existence, so it isn't impossible, but that down payment requirement is a good thing to have. Before you buy you should have about twice the down payment and closing costs to make sure you have an upkeep fund for when things like lightning strikes or hailstorms or neighborhood kids with shovels run amock. It's the unexpected costs that make things go to hell, not the mortgage itself. When you are a renter your landlord and renter's insurance cover most of it. But with home insurance typically your minimum costs have to breech 1,000 before insurance will kick in, and most problems are isolated cases of 3-900.
As the owner of a house built in 1952, this. A million times this.
Also pretty sure my home dropped about $8K in value the second that tax credit ended.
The moment I sold my 1907 place was one of the biggest weights off my mind ever.
Rent control isnt the answer. I've rented for 11 years and while I would love to buy a home the problem isnt the morgage its the down payment and the taxes/additional fees that people with a decent but not rich income cant handle.
One thing i dont get is why they stopped the tax break for buying a home so early in the 'recovery' assistance programs. at the time i had just moved to a new city and started a new job out of college and could not consider buying, and the program ended too soon. I've changed to a slightly nicer apartment but if i wanted to buy a decent (say 180-200k) home I would need 20-40k for a down payment, which isnt trivial. If they wanted to boost the housing market they should have kept that going. Making loans easier to get for people that reasonably could not afford them is how we got in this mess in the first place and I dont understand why they thought it would solve the problem in the long run. its just kicking the can down the road.
basically there was a lot of mostly conservative hand-wringing about how homeowner incentives were getting people to buy who weren't really capable of paying their mortgages and isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place.
From personal, and entirely anecdotal, experience if you cannot come up with the 15-20k down you would need with a first time home-buyer program for a 180-200k house, you probably couldn't afford maintenance and upkeep of the property. the 15-20k is a substantial amount of money, but upkeep and repairs on a property typically number in the 1-3k a year range depending on how harsh the weather and your neighborhood is (beyond the ~1-3k annually in taxes/mortgage interest/insurance).
There are a lot of mortgage support programs still in existence, so it isn't impossible, but that down payment requirement is a good thing to have. Before you buy you should have about twice the down payment and closing costs to make sure you have an upkeep fund for when things like lightning strikes or hailstorms or neighborhood kids with shovels run amock. It's the unexpected costs that make things go to hell, not the mortgage itself. When you are a renter your landlord and renter's insurance cover most of it. But with home insurance typically your minimum costs have to breech 1,000 before insurance will kick in, and most problems are isolated cases of 3-900.
As the owner of a house built in 1952, this. A million times this.
Also pretty sure my home dropped about $8K in value the second that tax credit ended.
The moment I sold my 1907 place was one of the biggest weights off my mind ever.
Yeah, we just put our place (built in the 60s) on the market. It's in decent shape, but we just don't have time to deal with it anymore.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
The previous owner of our home (we bought last year) lied about and "faked" his irrigation system's workings. Fixing that, plus the landscaping to keep up with the fairly loose HOA requirements, is still an ongoing expense for us. We had a lightning strike that fried most of our electronic devices. Both toilets were destroyed by a plumber who thought he could "fix" the minor leak by making it a major one.
And that's not including general upkeep costs and our desired renovations. We had a 8k slush after purchasing we thought was enough for house costs for a while. It's mostly gone 1 year later and while we are recouping that pretty successfully it was far more than any Realtor or mortgage officer would lead you to believe.
I'm on Shenzen and I just realized how the Chinese government creates affordable housing.
They build high rise towers, where all but the bottom few floors are entirely residential. Like 50 stories of residential housing. And not like 1 or 2 of these towers, but like 100 of these towers. Well, I don't know if it's actually 100 under construction, but I lost count at 20 towers under construction, because I saw too many at once.
Due to restricted movement (you effectively need an internal visa to move to a different city) and the 1 child policy, it's obvious there's an artificially high vacancy rate in Shenzen. I estimate at least a 20% vacancy, and that's being conservative. I wouldn't be surprised if it was much higher.
This leads to insanely cheap housing. I passed a rental office advertising a 51 sq meter studio apartment for ¥35 per week. To put that into perspective, I ate lunch for ¥20 at a fast food type joint.
In US terms, that's a 550 sq ft studio renting for $25 a month, in a city where a fast food lunch costs $3.
Even scaling that up to USA big mac prices, that's a $75/mo studio in a city with $9 big mac meals.
Holy cow, no wonder I don't see any homeless around here.
And Shenzen ain't some small town. It's a 3 million person city in a 15 million person region that's half the size of Rhode Island.
I think this is pretty much what should be done in a lot of crowded western cities. However there are downsides, the historical association between high rise flats and terrible council flats from the 60s and crime etc.
Also that sort of investment could only really be done by the government and no western ( well anglo) government is willing to do that sort of thing at the moment.
Antinumeric on
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
Western governments do it already. They are called projects. and they have repeatedly been proving that people who arent paying much for something dont really give a shit about it.
I was born in New Orleans. My father, when talking about the projects would mention how They would build a nice new set of project homes, and within a week every piece of aluminum on the building was ripped off to be sold for scrap metal, windows were broken, and when his job had him go inside the homes, he would find shit on the floor in all the stairwells along with other filth.
China is doing this for many reasons, very few of them having to do with reducing homelessness. For example 1) they may be cheap but this keeps people from realizing just how low wages are comparatively 2) They are artifically sustaining the economy. The Chinese government doesnt just build lots of buildings for housing, they build entire cities that are ghost towns. look it up, its friggin mindblowing whats just sitting around empty in china.
Stercus, Stercus, Stercus, Morituri Sum
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
The capitalist world-system involves creative destruction. I don't see why people should be entitled to maintain their neighborhoods in stasis any more than they should be entitled to maintain their jobs in stasis. Sometimes, we invent mechanical looms and spinners are out of luck; and sometimes development rebuilds a neighborhood and established residents may be forced out--or, if they stay, forced to put up with a different street culture, look, and so on. This sucks for them, but is great for other people.
The human costs of development are real, and a humane social policy deals with them. But it seems to me that the sane way to deal with them is not preventing the development, but rather assisting the losers. We should make sure that people who lose their housing to development don't wind up on the street; this in the same way that we should make sure that people who lose their jobs to automation and etc. don't wind up in the gutter. The way to do that is with transfers and social programs, not by trying to freeze time by legally mandating that some industries be protected from automation, some neighborhoods be protected from development, and so on.
One reason not to go route of trying to freeze time is that it is grossly inefficient: when we do, we lose out on a social surplus that we could otherwise divide among ourselves. Another reason not to go the latter route is that, even absent concerns of efficiency, there is little reason to believe that it will be more just. I don't see any reason to think that the people who are best able to leverage the political system to protect their jobs / homes are going to be the people who are most in need of protection: rather, they seem to be the people who are organized enough to have a politically significant stranglehold on some level of government, which they then use to extract huge rents (cough, farmers, cough).
Finally, emphasizing community building through a legal regime that privileges long-time residents and punishes moving strikes me as basically insane. Labor mobility is a huge economic good for the country as a whole. It's great for high-skilled labor, which can congregate in shifting industry centers (tech in SF, government in DC, porn in LA, etc etc). But it's also great for low-skilled labor too. Nothing makes a local economic downturn more protracted and excruciating than an excess of labor which are tied to their property and cannot leave to find better prospects elsewhere. From an economic perspective, we should want people to be ready to move. There are already natural social ties that make frequent moves difficult; if anything, we should be looking for ways to ease those difficulties, rather than make things artificially more difficult.
So I have essentially zero sympathy for development policies that subsidize existing residents or which empower them to quash new development.
Posts
The moment I sold my 1907 place was one of the biggest weights off my mind ever.
Yeah, we just put our place (built in the 60s) on the market. It's in decent shape, but we just don't have time to deal with it anymore.
And that's not including general upkeep costs and our desired renovations. We had a 8k slush after purchasing we thought was enough for house costs for a while. It's mostly gone 1 year later and while we are recouping that pretty successfully it was far more than any Realtor or mortgage officer would lead you to believe.
Also that sort of investment could only really be done by the government and no western ( well anglo) government is willing to do that sort of thing at the moment.
I was born in New Orleans. My father, when talking about the projects would mention how They would build a nice new set of project homes, and within a week every piece of aluminum on the building was ripped off to be sold for scrap metal, windows were broken, and when his job had him go inside the homes, he would find shit on the floor in all the stairwells along with other filth.
China is doing this for many reasons, very few of them having to do with reducing homelessness. For example 1) they may be cheap but this keeps people from realizing just how low wages are comparatively 2) They are artifically sustaining the economy. The Chinese government doesnt just build lots of buildings for housing, they build entire cities that are ghost towns. look it up, its friggin mindblowing whats just sitting around empty in china.
The human costs of development are real, and a humane social policy deals with them. But it seems to me that the sane way to deal with them is not preventing the development, but rather assisting the losers. We should make sure that people who lose their housing to development don't wind up on the street; this in the same way that we should make sure that people who lose their jobs to automation and etc. don't wind up in the gutter. The way to do that is with transfers and social programs, not by trying to freeze time by legally mandating that some industries be protected from automation, some neighborhoods be protected from development, and so on.
One reason not to go route of trying to freeze time is that it is grossly inefficient: when we do, we lose out on a social surplus that we could otherwise divide among ourselves. Another reason not to go the latter route is that, even absent concerns of efficiency, there is little reason to believe that it will be more just. I don't see any reason to think that the people who are best able to leverage the political system to protect their jobs / homes are going to be the people who are most in need of protection: rather, they seem to be the people who are organized enough to have a politically significant stranglehold on some level of government, which they then use to extract huge rents (cough, farmers, cough).
Finally, emphasizing community building through a legal regime that privileges long-time residents and punishes moving strikes me as basically insane. Labor mobility is a huge economic good for the country as a whole. It's great for high-skilled labor, which can congregate in shifting industry centers (tech in SF, government in DC, porn in LA, etc etc). But it's also great for low-skilled labor too. Nothing makes a local economic downturn more protracted and excruciating than an excess of labor which are tied to their property and cannot leave to find better prospects elsewhere. From an economic perspective, we should want people to be ready to move. There are already natural social ties that make frequent moves difficult; if anything, we should be looking for ways to ease those difficulties, rather than make things artificially more difficult.
So I have essentially zero sympathy for development policies that subsidize existing residents or which empower them to quash new development.