>Deflating prices on existing housing means either the lender (ha!) or the homeowner takes the loss.
Okay.
(Expand or they're going to flag you for snark.)
The cohort that is currently at prime home-buying age (and, really, most people under the age of 50) have had the wealth that was generated by their labor and productivity systematically siphoned to mostly-older higher-earners, in order to shore up unsustainable compensation and retirement funding for the professional managerial/executive class and Silent Gen, Baby Boomer, and Gen X workers. The value of the overbuilt, low-density, transit-access/amenity-access-poor housing that they've built or speculated on plummeting would be not only economically healthy (as it would act as a stimulus for non-asset-speculation activity and finally incentivize density and transit access, while disincentivizing the socioeconomic/racial exclusion that characterizes most American suburbs and which drives so many of our objectively terrible NIMBY-focused municipal planning decisions), but also just deserts.
I tried to edit my original comment, but the editing was turned off. My comment was not intentionally snarky but based on my experiences in 2008. At that time, there were many subprime mortgages floating around that should've never been written. Those taking the risk (financial institutions) should've taken the fall, but instead, they pushed the losses onto the homeowners.
Your last paragraph needs more nuance because the real world is messy. There are many factors ranging from inadequate income for savings and personal scale disasters like divorce and medical bankruptcy that prove your claims are inaccurate. However, I think your last paragraph is a passionate disapproval of people living in ways different from you. Some of your points are valid on income inequality, power structures, and transit, but the reality is what we live with today. If you look at the practical realities, widespread transit changes and housing densification are not likely to happen any time soon.
If you want to make change now, join your city government. Promote a plan to destroy old properties and replace them with denser, more environmentally sound buildings. Fix the core of the city before you try to change the way anybody else lives.
An easier path is engineering and product development of solutions that make what we have now less destructive.
If that's too big, here is a simple change that significantly impacts people and natural life: Turn off the lights. If you can't do that, make them fainter and warmer (2800K) and point them at the ground. Light pollution substantially negatively impacts the environment and the health of people and animals.
Another small change is nudging people to rewild their lawns. This would have a huge impact on insects, birds, and small mammals. It's a simple change: change a little bit of the zoning laws to reward native plant use and punish the use of invasive and other non-native plants.
It's important to recognize that if you can't make a small change happen and stick, the big stuff is a non-starter. This is true for personal change as well as societal change. A small change is a big change.
You've given individual solutions to try to fix a systemic problem, which of course does not work. They are good ideas; they are also not enough, and don't even begin to address the issue at-scale.
What does is recognizing that the "be realistic" bluster is just that: a bluff, from people who hold real power in the status-quo, but who realize that that status-quo can be changed, if only the walls would fall and nature could take its course. The reality is that older generations have created a zero-sum situation, and the only way for the younger ones to thrive is for the older ones to give up some (many) of their advantages. The reality is that this happens when political and economic forces are finally incentivized to stop protecting them.
One last thing I feel the need to mention whenever it comes up:
>At that time, there were many subprime mortgages floating around that should've never been written.
This is true, but not because they were written for people who were financially unfit to be homeowners. It's because these loans were written intentionally to fail, knowing that banks could steal the homes back in illegal foreclosure proceedings, knowing that the mortgages would be wrapped up in financial vehicles and sold off at profit, knowing that the government would backstop them when it all came crashing down. Given fair loans, most of these mortgage-seekers would have been able to keep up their payments - but that woukd have been less profitable for banks than what ended up happening. Instead, these financial institutions were able to siphon billions from the middle class, and buy up the remains of their failed rivals for pennies on the dollar. Which is despicable, of course. But to understand this, you have to reject the notion that we're living in a just world whose past mistakes can't be corrected. It isn't and they can be.
On reading your comment, I am reminded of Planck's opinion that science advances one funeral at a time. I think that is true here too. The change you want will come one funeral at a time.
I think one fallacy in your logic is that the older generation reaped benefits uniformly. The reality is something like 40% of my generation is retiring into poverty. Another 20 or 30% will end up in poverty when they run out of assets. Does that sound like people who have advantages they can give up? How do you convince someone to give up hard-earned privilege that is not financial but makes life worth living for them?
The very real conflict you describe is, in my opinion, misattributed. It is a class problem, not a generational one. The number of people who have caused the pain and suffering you, heck, we experience would fill a very small city in our very large country. These are the people we need to take power from in order to make the change we want to see occur and stick.
When I gave examples of problems in a small, I was not telling you to be realistic. If I did, I missedited and I apologize. I gave you the examples to use as a tool for measuring your capacity to implement change. The problems you want to solve are huge and are what I consider century-level problems. However, if you put what you want to do in the context of a very small population of powerful people, change becomes a multi-century problem if nothing about the current power structure changes.
But all is not lost. Remember, it's "if nothing about the current power structure changes". The question then becomes how to change the power structure, and I think the fastest way is to increase rent-seeking opportunities in your desired future.
My logic is that people in power are motivated by money as a proxy for power. After all, who needs more than three or four times basic expenses to have a good life? In today's economic realities, rent-seeking is the dominant method of wealth accumulation. You want to change the attitudes of the rich and powerful, change where rent-seeking is rewarding.
This has been a good conversation, and I thank you for it.
>You have to ask why housing prices doubled, and ask how easy or likely those underlying conditions are to reverse.
Massive monetary expansion via QE and low interest rates. Resolved by raising interest rates and taxes on wealth holders (and particularly those holding unused or underutilized real estate) to deflate the asset bubble.
Strongly disagree. That is an additional factor, but doesnt change most of the factors I mentioned. It doesnt change population or urbanization. It doesnt change the cost of labor or materials.
Underutilized RE is a red herring.
As long as construction costs remain high, supply remains low, and there are enough buyers that afford the price, you wont see changes.
Monetary expansion underlies and significantly influences if not drives, everything you mentioned (save the nature of US mortgages, which is still related in the sense of it being a part of financialization of as much of American life as possible). The QE boom drove immigration, and low interest rates drove hiring and wage inflation; the COVID bust dampening immigration, and the extremely low interest rates driving a hiring frenzy that was itself followed by mass layoffs when the FRF was raised, essentially proved this.
>Underutilized RE is a red herring.
So you've stated. Please prove it, at the very least showing how RE isn't underutilized (this is going to be difficult, because it is).
I agree expansion is an influence, as it impacts just about everything. It you look back to my core point, it is that the factors driving real-estate prices are unlikely to reverse in the short term, and certainly not enough to cut prices like the proposed 50% of price.
You would have to have major declines in the first 4 factors I mentioned. good luck unwinding worker salary, population, cost of materials to that degree.
Continuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring order to freedom, while we nominally tout our "opportunity" while actually limiting it to a degree such that conversations like the one we're having take place. (Your argument's only refuge is in casting your opponents in this debate as hysterical, which is ironically a hysterical position to take in-and-of-itself. Measure the actual merits, please.)
Oh please. The whole "no one is free anywhere, but at least those other people are honest about it" garbage. There should be a logical fallacy named after this sort of argument.
People in the West are measurably, significantly freer than people in China. That doesn't mean the West is perfect. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors in government and in the private sector who want to introduce more systems of control and propaganda.
But the difference is that we're allowed to speak out, protest, and fight against these people, and that allowance is enshrined in the lowest level of laws in most Western nations. Again: not perfect, and the worst of the bad actors will try to bend those laws to find loopholes to silence dissent. And sometimes they'll even succeed at that.
That is wildly different from an authoritarian censorship state like China where you get immediately deplatformed if you say things the government doesn't like. And that's the lucky outcome; annoy the government too much and they'll do far worse to you.
You're comparing ideal to ideal, not practical reality to practical reality. Here's a fact: the Chinese middle class is the size of the US's entire population. The whole thing. Citizens, residents, undocumented immigrants. That's an economic freedom that Americans would - and sometimes do, if you consider law enforcement and the downstream effects of the actions of financial, medical, and industrial professionals - kill for. Which is actually a part of the way American censorship works: empower a buffer class who is preoccupied with maintaining (and lecturing the rest of us about) their political freedoms while most can't access any practical benefits from those freedoms because we can't afford to, in this society where money is speech. This isn't even getting into the more overt and baldly authoritarian ways Americans have their nominal rights infringed upon, simply speaking to the way economic/class-shaping does much of it for us.
Meanwhile, Winnie the Pooh memes say that you're ironically buying into the overstated projection of Chinese control.
But to get back to the crux of the issue: "bad actors" in America (like Google) are not unlike Chinese censors in kind, only degree. That is the conclusion an honest assessment and comparison has to come to. And however much you may want to turn this into some sort of geopolitical pissing match, my message is not, "Let's be more like China," it's, "Let's be what we say we are instead of becoming more like China."
Recently: Google refuses to turn up old pages. I was recently searching for a person who used to have a notable web presence before passing away about a decade ago. I had to dig to find a few links, through DDG and Yandex.
Google and Bing (so DuckDuckGo as well) seem to like searching for synonyms of search terms and returning the most popular results, thinking popular means relevant. I remember looking for something where I remembered the exact terms and not getting anywhere with them, but on Yandex it was the first hit.
Again, some things aren't worth fixing, and they build up. The fabric on my headliner detached. Quickly went from "foam slightly exposed" to "sagging across the width of the backseat". Car is worth less than 5 grand, would be almost 1 to fix. It's a good thing I didn't, because brake troubles cost about as much and were necessary to fix.
I think a lot of waste goes into maintaining cars cosmetically.
It would be nice if I could "work with" a mechanic. Pay 1/4 the labor cost and she guides me (I also rent tools and shop time from her so it's more like 1/2).
Exactly. Its failure was a self-fulfilling prophecy imposed by PE (and other malicious financial actors). Like Toys R Us and many others, it was a stable but unremarkable business that might have been in dire straits at some point in the future if changes weren't made to update its approach. It was not, as others allege, "failing" - at least, not until PE came along and forced it into an untenable position. But that's what they do.
>Property values keep increasing because demand is exceeding supply.
Not quite. Property values keep increasing because the monetary supply keeps increasing, one effect of which is that large property owners can corner markets by buying up properties and warehousing them until they see the prices they want to sell for. This appears as a lack of supply (not enough houses) when it's really a lack of market forces forcing sales (not enough houses on the market). The remedies to these two situations are very different.
It should be noted that "told they must" is not simply bad Boomer advice, but a reflection of the reality that the vast majority of white-collar work (even work that must mostly be trained on-the-job, due to the particular policies and protocols of any given business) requires a Bachelor's degree be on your resume if you don't want your application binned immediately.
Excellent point. I work in IT and for years there weren't IT specific degrees from state universities. My degree is completely unrelated and it never was really a factor in hiring because a BS in IT wasn't a thing. Until the last few years it is now. And every young aspiring IT professional with one of those degrees I've spoken to or worked with had a similar experience. Its a useless degree that doesn't prepare you for the industry. I was expecting they would walk out with a good, broad foundation and some good industry certs to match but that's not the case. Its all theory, little to no application and huge knowledge gaps. They were scammed. I feel like my history degree is more applicable. At least it taught me how to write decently. Why do these IT BS's exist? It must be just to sell kids another piece of paper. Tech got big enough that the education cartel decided they needed to gatekeep it.
If these "industries" seem unaffected to you, it's probably then simply a matter of time.
Who knew veterinarian clinics would be the next to fall to VC? And I am hearing that independent senior living is being raided by VC, perhaps cemeteries as well....
VC and PE are distinct. You can't just interchange the terms.
VCs invest with the hope the investee will grow quickly. PE firms do not have that hope. This distinction has a large effect on the strategies available to the investor. A PE firm for example will usually be averse to investing if they will not end up with managerial control over the investee, but a VC fund routinely makes such investments.
In my area I live near a Fred Meyers, a QFC and a Safeway. Soon enough, those are all likely to be owned under the same umbrella, so what real choice do I have if they're all under the same ownership?
Similar things have been happening to mechanics as well.
Right, and that's exactly the problem we run into that causes comment sections to go endlessly in circles.
If and when I ever write my Highly Opinionated Guide To Comment Section Ettiquette, my #1 rule would be about Dennett's Principle of Charity, but #2 would probably relate to the thing you've identified here. Namely, to the extent possible, try not to resort one-off examples to represent systematic processes.
Are your specific shops PE backed? There are lower barriers to entry so your local restaurant, super market or car mechanic can still exist alongside PE-backed chains. One can't just on a whim decide to become a doctor.
I'm pretty Libertarian myself... the issue, to me, comes from treating companies/corporations as "people" in terms of political speech, etc. I don't think collective groups should be able to donate to political campaigns or non-profits unless they have open books and only take contributions from individuals or orgs that likewise have open books.
I also think that politicians should have to pre-declare by a day or more any financial trades.
Corporations are allowed to exist in a state beyond what an individual can, and as a balance should be very limited in execution and through the past century in particular are anything but. Their power is a grant of govt, and should also be limited. In the end, that's where I stand on it. I'm all for maximizing personal liberty, and even small business allowances. Major companies should be focused on stability with growth or divestment. Foreign owned companies should be more limited even. That just isn't the case today, and it's a shame.
Okay.
(Expand or they're going to flag you for snark.)
The cohort that is currently at prime home-buying age (and, really, most people under the age of 50) have had the wealth that was generated by their labor and productivity systematically siphoned to mostly-older higher-earners, in order to shore up unsustainable compensation and retirement funding for the professional managerial/executive class and Silent Gen, Baby Boomer, and Gen X workers. The value of the overbuilt, low-density, transit-access/amenity-access-poor housing that they've built or speculated on plummeting would be not only economically healthy (as it would act as a stimulus for non-asset-speculation activity and finally incentivize density and transit access, while disincentivizing the socioeconomic/racial exclusion that characterizes most American suburbs and which drives so many of our objectively terrible NIMBY-focused municipal planning decisions), but also just deserts.