Dems say they want affordable housing, right up until someone wants to put it in their neighborhood, then they start acting like Republicans
In my experience, this isn’t the case unless someone (sometimes Republicans, sometimes just politicians) try to put ALL the affordable housing into specific neighborhoods for selfish reasons, or the place the affordable housing is going doesn’t have jobs because someone actively avoid putting them in the places with jobs because “them poor people are criminals and will hurt business”.
New Bedford, MA was a great example. It was an open secret that MA acted to ship a high percentage of projects and Section 8 to New Bedford. It’s also an open secret that budgeted commuter rail plans to New Bedford kept getting cut despite the rail running to the rural ass-crack of Western Mass, creating a job-starved desert of one of the otherwise most established economies in the state. Solely because somebody didn’t want people in affordable housing to have mass-transit access to most of the state.
I don’t blame “The Dems” for that. Neither should anyone. This isn’t NIMBY, this is “Let’s put them all in your back yard. Then put more in your back yard. Then keep it coming. Then burn the bridge. Aren’t I doing good?”
I have extended family that fall into “lower-upper class” but also know their income has an end date (comes from a lucrative career). They saved up and every time one of their kids turned 18, they bought a house to use as a rental property with a “just in case, my child will never end up homeless” gameplan. Not a huge cash expenditure for them and not a huge profit center, it bought them peace of mind a WHOLE lot cheaper overall than adding an apartment to their house for him to move back into as an adult.
I always found that reasonable, and it did in fact keep them from ending up with a basically homeless 30-something.
I’m not sure you understand how Massachusetts politics works (or perhaps any local politics). I can’t speak for the other states with in-depth knowledge, but boy can I school you about Massachusetts.
Federally, we’re a deep-blue state, but that’s just not all of how it works at the state level. With a few exceptions we usually have a Republican governor. Yeah, the rest of the US like to call them “RINO” because the’re not on board with the craziest shit the alt-right has to offer. Most (if not all) of these changes happened under Romney and Baker, both Republican. Of note, none of these changes I’m talking about have ever shown up in a bill in legislature. They’ve all be driven by the executive action upon the mandate. That is, they fall on the governor. Who was Republican.
…and yet, I didn’t say it’s The Republicans, either. Democrats could’ve stepped in by passing laws preventing that behavior. We didn’t because our Democrats like to keep peace with our Republicans and, frankly, because the Democrats don’t care enough to involve themselves in the HOW as long as subsidies are happening.
But Dems aren’t following through with what they say they want to do–affordable housing for all
Again, I can only speak for MA. With one very recent exception (and excepting the recent excessive price spikes), MA does fairly well with providing affordable housing for all as long as it’s outside of Boston. But I think I wasn’t being entirely clear. I am mostly talking about Housing Project availability. Section 8 is, as you suggested, up to the landlord. It’s worded to allow people to live basically anywhere, even in the heart of Boston, with a limited income.
BTW - section 8 should be great for a landlord. You are guaranteed payment on the 1st of every month, and you can still initiate eviction if the tenant is trashing your property or doing crime
From family experience, the issue is that “trashing your property” can cost you years of profits or even force you to sell the building. I’ve had family deal with the notorious “cement in the toilet” meme for real. People really do it and it really costs a massive amount of money to handle. Home and landlord insurance does not cover intentional damage by tenants. We’re talking up to $15,000 damage just because they’re mad you’re evicting them.
Most landlords don’t care about “not wanting poor people” with Section 8. They care about having judgement-proof tenants who can cause damage and never be held accountable due to being poor. They also have to meet certain building code and quality standards that non-section-8 landlords don’t! There’s a LOT of non-section-8 rentals in New Bedford for this reason. No, they’re not trying to gentrify Durfee Street, I promise you that!
There’s two sides to the section 8 coin. Side 1 is that the rent is slightly above-average and some of it always shows up on time. Side 2 is that the rest of it is often late, overall risk is higher, and then you actually can’t be a slumlord. I mean, look at the list of rules. Everyone I know living in New Bedford apartments have (checks list) shitty or broken HVAC, decaying building foundation, crappy interior stairs, pest issues, flaking paint, etc. Not only can landlords get away with a lot of that (and worse) normally, but Section 8 includes annual and spot inspections for all of them.
I don’t fault the state making these demands, but it leads to a lot of people not registering their rental with Section 8, for reasons that have nothing to do with Poor tenants (and in many cases BECAUSE they’re going to have poor tenants who won’t pitch a fit about a not-to-code apartment). I’ve rented from places that would have failed Section 8. And I kept my mouth shut.
I understand the idea and its great if they were able to do that but the world would look a lot different if they would actually do it differently
I don’t think anyone has demonstrated that’s true. If everyone but megacorporations stopped owning property other than the one they live in, I don’t thin housing prices or rent would go down. In fact, it would have unexpected side-effects like increased rental rates (since you’d have to jump through even more hoops). Imagine if you will, the pre-flip car lease market. Owning cars was the way of the poor, leasing a new car every few years was the way of the rich. If only owner-occupied could be rentals, rent would skyrocket and the MANY people who want to rent would have to fight with each other. Consortiums would find a legal way to buy luxury rental buildings and have a dedicated “owner” live in them. As you implied, supply and demand. A lot of people don’t want the liability of property ownership for reasons other than “being too poor to buy a house”.
There would be more houses to buy and they would be cheaper, their money would need to be put in other things to collect interest
Yeah, it would collect more interest. So long as nothing happened to them (which it hasn’t), they’d end up a lot richer. But it’s a lot more risk because if something did happen to them, it would be harder for that money to be earmarked into a trust in the kids’ name like the houses are. So they would have had to live with the real risk that their son would end up homeless, but yay they’d have a lot more money.
The problem with a lot of people suggesting real-estate reform is that they don’t understand why individuals (not big businesses, that’s different) buy rental houses. It’s rarely about maximizing profit, it’s about minimizing or mitigating risk.
To be clear: your extended family is not the problem imo and would not suffer from a law like this.
Except, it sounds like you just said they would not be allowed to do what they did, and would be stuck with riskier propositions. Those houses were purchased under little LLCs so that if they got sued into bankruptcy their kids would still have a home (they themselves are under Homestead protections like most homeowners in my state). Not that they expected to be sued, but it’s called “doing anything to make sure my kids don’t end up on the street”. That’s what happens when you grow up in poverty. And there really is no better, simpler, and more reasonable way to make sure your kid won’t be homeless than to buy them a house. And if you’re not filthy rich, that doesn’t mean buying it cash and handing it to them on a silver platter. (technically, I think that silver-platter method would still be allowed under the plan I’m objecting to because the kids would have an owner-occupied house in their name… yay rich people I guess. My family isn’t rich enough for that)
I’m not questioning your motives directly. I’m suggesting that the changes you’re looking for are still going to cause more harm than good to most people.
Is your family privileged? Absolutely! Is it fair to the others that they are able to buy homes and even keep them if they fucked up financially while most other lose everything? Not in my opinion.
Have you ever read Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut? I’m not a capitalist, but I still firmly believe you need to show your work when you want to take action that hurts the lower 99% to “even the playing field”.
As a privileged person, you might want to add some empathy to your answers in the future.
You just wrongly accused me of not having af air discussion among equals, and then you pull this? The only thing you know about me is that someone in my extended family has made enough money in their life to buy two rental properties. They don’t owe me anything. How does that make me privileged?
Further, you’re accusing me of lacking empathy. Why? I have the same problem with preventing them from buying a house as you would have if I said we needed to kick EVERYONE out of their homes because somebody out there is homeless. It’s the same thing to me. It’s obviously not the same thing to you. Do I get to say you lack empathy because of it? Because I don’t plan to. Instead, I like to engage as to why that’s a bad idea.
Most tenants are functionally judgement-proof, unless you only rent to upper-middle class people
This is fair on large damage numbers, but you can often squeeze someone making $40-50k/yr if they owe you $5-$10k in malice-caused damages… but more importantly, for that kind of damage, you’re talking about small-claims court. You don’t need a lawyer, just time, and “they poured concrete into the toilet - here’s my bill” is the kind of open-and-shut case small-claims court thrives on.
As far as not being a slumlord, I have absolutely no tolerance for landlords that don’t want to keep properties in good repair, full stop
100% agree. But even super-renter-friendly states do little to hold landlords accountable. If you want to be a slumlord, you can be a successful slumlord. Tenant holds you to task with the state? You don’t renew the lease. There’s ways they can fuck with you if they know better, but often they don’t. From someone I’m involved in a lawsuit with (can’t give details), slumlording is a no-brainer as a numbers game. 100 slum apartments, get sued once a year, huge win.
Yeah, it’s expensive to replace a roof, but fuck you, that’s why you’re taking in rent.
Fuck yes. I’m not a huge fan of the whole “all landlords are evil” tankie rhetoric, but boy do I sympathize with them on the specific topic of slumlords.
Well that too. The real joke is that despite the fact we’ve had 10 “years of the linux desktop”, it’s still an absolute bitch to get PICK A GAME working on that shiny linux box.
My new Lenovo Legion, I’m struggling with desktop graphics tearing issues in linux (just viewing the WM, of all things). When i have time, I’ll muddle through it, but I can’t pretend that is easier in linux than windows. It’s vendor-driven, sure, but the end user doesn’t care why they waste 8 hours doing setup work, only THAT they do.
This seems to be the Windows/Linux yinyang in gaming.
If you go through the effort (or non-effort. It really seems to be luck-based) of getting a gaming rig working in linux, 99% of the time it is simply better at everything, crashes less, etc. The 1% can require hours or more of troubleshooting.
Windows runs slower and worse than linux, and arguably less stable. But you boot up, click play, and (largely) it just plays.
That’s also my recent experience with Ubuntu on a gaming laptop. Every single step of the way gives me trouble, but when I manage to run something in the linux side, boy does it run well. So I’ve got this nice “todo” since I already blew my only free day on it last weekend.
Interesting. I wish I could bring myself to like mint. I’ve typecast myself as an ubuntu-head ever since I went full “Elder Price” with the CDs back at my first dev gig.
I mean, I freaking LOVE linux. And for what it’s good for, it’s the best of the best. I’ve never had a better dev experience than in Ubuntu, mostly because WSL is a pale shadow of a good unix backend (and because Macs, while good, are still subpar for that purpose). But that means I’m already committing 40 hours a week to maintaining and using my machine!
But for gaming? For casual use? I dunno. The hardware has to be hand-picked carefully, as do the games.
Yeah, trust me, Linux Gaming used to be real shit. “When it works it works” is lightyears better than it used to be.
I remember in my linux-only years, trying to muddle through linux exclusives. Oftentimes you had to be super careful because linux doesn’t love prepared binaries
What I don’t get is how most places, people get mad at us for not being able to read an article due to the paywall. I mean, I’m not going to subscribe to 50 shitty news sites just so I can read someone’s damn random shit.
since some people are not in a position to buy land and need to borrow it.
Some people have no desire to buy land, and want to borrow it. More than half the people I know (and I’m in my 40s now) have no desire to hold the liability of needing to sell a property to be able to move halfway across the country or world. They don’t “own” their, so they see having to literally own it as a problem. And they are willing to pay more in rent than a mortgage (which happens regularly in some areas around me).
There are shit landlords, and there are decent landlords. I think half the problem is that while some areas have great protection for poor renters, they often don’t have great holistic renter protections. In my state, for example, government-subsidized rentals have the most apartment quality regulations. But after that, you’re expected to leverage your rent to force action… without actually withholding it in any way somehow. And small business rentals? Even worse. I have a buddy who runs a breakfast joint. The heating system in the building died, so the landlord said “well if you want to stay open in the winter you should fix that”. So he installed a minisplit and the other business in the building had to close for the winter. Ultimately, both businesses started withholding rent (against lawyer’s advice) and he finally caved and called his renters “cheap bastards” as he got heating installed (and it was like a comedy that the heating company walked out on him twice for his after-contract renegotiations).
I’m ok with someone owning and renting out a building. But it should be somewhere near the level of quality the renter would maintain the place if they owned it.
Apartment valuation is calculated on operations not on the market
Apartment valuation in my area spiked until the ROI crossed 10+ years. People stopped buying apartment buildings for a while except as owner-occupied with renters to assist. But in my area, none of those reach anywhere near a net-zero mortgage. The market absolutely still has an effect on valuation in most areas.
But two towns over, people are selling apartment buildings with 2-3 year ROIs, and they’re being swept up by one of a small handful of investors. Building maintenance is terrible, and there’s very little interest in the legal risk of being slumlords except those who are already slumlords over 40-50 buildings or more.
And #3 - redundancy so a family member doesn’t end up homeless. I have family that does fairly well for itself. When their first kid turned 18, they bought a rental house in case she needed it someday. When their second kid turned 18, they bought a rental house in case he needed it someday.
So they own two buildings “for the purpose of renting it out”. Building number 2 is now perma-“rented” to kid number 2 because he needed it.
Also, bullet point #1. The NDQ typical long-term return is approximately 11%. Due to recent bubble bursts, it’s down to 10.4%. Importantly, that’s almost exactly 1.3mil in 10 years from 500k. Everything I’ve ever read and learned from investing or investors repeats that rental real-estate is a stable investment, not an aggressive one.
One can get place renting for $2k, but can’t get approved for that mortgage amount even with tons of history showing it’s paid
I think the issue there is that there’s more risk to mortgage companies than “tons of history showing it’s paid”. There’s a reason they use complicated equations instead of interviews to make decisions related to risk. Questions that don’t directly relate to someone being unable to pay mortgage:
Will they take action that reduces the property value enough to put them underwater
If they choose to walk away for some reason, what percent of our investment do we get back?
And with the rest of the equation, home ownership is higher risk than renting because a tenant isn’t responsible for damage and repairs. If, for example, peeling asbestos gets discovered and you have to move out to fix it to the tune of $10,000 or more, will that homeowner be able to afford it? Will they just walk out and start renting somewhere? There’s a lot of things not covered by homeowners insurance that can financially devastate a homeowner, and the mortgagee (bank) might notice an income disruption that a renter would not.
It’s the free country thing. Typical rental leases renew every year (and typically, renters like that freedom). A landlord can simply decline to renew if you’re “too much trouble”.
So you could challenge the illegal rent increase in court and win, but then he declines to renew. You could refuse to pay the illegal increase (doing it the right/legal way) and/or even just stop paying rent. But then he eventually evicts you, or just declines to renew.
In the end, rent is supposed to be temporary. And when it is temporary enough that moving out can be your leverage, it works. If you are settling down somewhere, it really should be owned.
Around here, it’s not really linked. The heat of the apartment market is directly tied to the projected ROI, based on the demand of rental properties and the demand of rent itself. Like Bitcoin mining, sometimes the ROI gets really low or even negative in the short- or medium-term. The friction between the two factors tend to warm or cool one of the markets, but it takes times.
Consider/remember this. Many landlords aren’t paying a mortgage, and don’t need to tie rent to “a house’s value at the time of purchase”. They still profit when rent is below the average mortgage, or if rent is well above it. The only thing they care about is maximizing profits regardless of how full/empty their units are. Similarly on the renting side is lifestyle renters. They don’t rent “because I can’t afford a mortgage”. They rent because they don’t want to be tied down. They aren’t ready to settle and might or might not move 1000 miles next year.
Those two categories are fairly numerous, and both present forces that influence the rental market independently from the purchase market. It means that places with less long-term demand like Detroit, Philly, or Houston have ownership TCO far lower than rent rates. Flip-side, there are just as many cities on the other side of the spectrum. The average rent in Austin is $2000/mo cheaper than mortgage payments on a starter home. In San Francisco, that difference is almost $3000/mo.
My tool experience is limited, but with Makita you seem to be describing the same anachronism principle you find in espresso machines.
Arguably the best espresso machines in a class are reminescent of the same model you found 40+ years ago. If you’re looking for the B+ range, everything worth buying has a big metal E61 grouphead with manual levers. In the S-class range, you tend to have more manual levers as often as bells or whistles. My new machine that cost more than I deserve (wife bought it) is basically an oldschool machine with nothing modern in it but a PID controller. Legend has it, it will be passed down in my family for generations to come (exaggeration, but not much).
I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.
In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.
I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.
What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.
I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.
What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.
I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.
No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.
Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.
It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.
And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.
There has apparently been historical disagreement over whether 6÷2(3) is equivalent to 6÷2x3
As a logician instead of a mathemetician, the answer is “they’re both wrong because they have proven themselves ambiguous”. Of course, my answer would be RPN to be a jerk or just have more parens to be a programmer
Just sayin (mander.xyz)
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I'm really getting over the enshitification of the internet. (lemmy.world)
The system is broken (lemmy.zip)
The four houses dads belong to. (lemmy.world)
Linux reaches new high 3.82% (gs.statcounter.com)
6÷2(1+2) (programming.dev)
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