Buzzfeed: Gentrification & Rising House Costs

[Shiranu]

Say what you want about Buzzfeed... but honestly, this is a really solid (basic) video on the issue. Though racial gentrification is generally the one looked at, I live in an area that is currently going through cultural gentrification as rich Californians, New Yorkers and tech people move into the "different, alternative, weird" culture where I live and making it too expensive for the people who actually made the area special in the first place and is destroying the artistic culture... so the concept of gentrification, regardless of who it targets, is always important to me.

[PickelledEggs]

It was a decent video.

I still say Buzzfeed is the cancer of the internet. I was actually just saying that 20 min or so before I logged on to this site and saw this thread

[Munch]

It was a decent video.

I still say Buzzfeed is the cancer of the internet. I was actually just saying that 20 min or so before I logged on to this site and saw this thread

Totally, them making one good point among the sea of shit they produce doesn't absolve them.

On subject, my mums lucky in that when dad retired, he brought and paid for their home, and now he's dead, she doesn't have to worry about those kind of bills. That said, owning your own home doesn't mean it's cost free, you need to end up covering the cost of repairs and DIY yourself, such as when her boiler broke down and she feared it could cost thousands to have a new one installed.
Thankfully my brother had a friend who set her up with a new installation for just a couple hundred, but really if you own your own place and need repairs, you better hope you know some good people who can do it for you.

[Baruch]

Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village aren't what they used to be.  Generally cultural avant guard forms in poor urban areas ... when the poor are driven out, the starving artists are driven out.

So OP ... are you missing the passing of what once was?  Pretty normal when you get to my age.

[SGOS]

It's too bad how expensive houses are.  It's hard on young people.  I remember when I was buying my first house.  I built it myself, but the materials still cost enough that I had to float a mortgage to the absolute limit of my ability to pay, but then, salaries were going up and to some extent kept pace with inflation.  So in a few years that grinding mortgage got proportionately smaller adjusted for inflation.  And eventually, I was paying essentially a pittance for a home that was worth much more.  Now that isn't the case.  It might be again sometime, but it's not right now, so it seems to me it is more difficult for young people (that is poor people) to buy homes.

As pointed out in the video, the solution is more homes, not just cracker box shelters, but the kind of homes you would want to live in.  Or so it would seem like the solution, but maybe that's just a superficial need based on expectations which are no longer valid.   I would have thought that the problem was solved after the housing bubble burst and millions of homes were sitting empty on weedy lots.  Supposedly prices on homes fell drastically, but still no one was buying them, I think mostly no one was willing to sell them at the drastically low prices.  They just sat there unused, while people needed them.  The banks repossessed them, and they continued to sit there unused.  The banks were getting bailed out, so had no real need to unload them.  They were like money in the bank to the banks themselves.

The narration in the video was mostly by contractors, developers, and realtors.  One even admitted that his solution wouldn't solve the expense problem, which obviously is not his concern.  He wants to sell them for the highest price he can get.  What he wanted was more land and less restrictions.  The realtor in the video wasn't complaining either.

The real state market is a funny thing.  House prices are determined by what buyers are willing to pay and sellers are willing to sell.  I have no idea what the value of a house is these days.  Are they really worth that much, or are we living in some bizarre economy based on heady dreams or the manipulations of the Illuminati?   Or maybe they are worth that much?  At one time, a decent house was around double the cost of a luxury car, not something absurdly exotic, just the average luxury car.  Today, you couldn't trade two Cadillacs for a good home.  It's a whole different standard.

My brother-in-law in Chicago pointed out that young people in the city were no longer buying homes.  They weren't even buying cars.  They were using bicycles and public transportation and seemed happy enough.  I don't know if this was typical or if he perceived it correctly.  But things can and do change.  Maybe the new American dream is not to acquire material worth, but just to be happy and content.  It would certainly be different expectation than my youth.

[Baruch]

The ending of the post WW II bubble ... grandparents didn't own a house, they rented.  It's A Wonderful Life is the greatest add for Savings & Loans ever.  And they died in the 1980s due to corruption.  This is why FannieMae and FreddieMac got so big, the Feds nationalized the housing market.  The banks were primarily for business loans ... they are dying since 2008.  But we don't need housing or small businesses, as long as business and housing (both bubbles) are boiling in China.