When I was four (in 1986), my parents moved for my Dad’s job (he was transferred), and ended up accepting the company offer to buy their house at not a great price because they couldn’t find a market buyer. At least from my experience, buying and selling forty years ago was just as fraught as now.
Do you have examples of specific practices that have become common and make house sales more difficult?
Housing should not be a speculative asset in the first place. Houses are for living in- and before you tell me about how they are a valuable store of wealth, you shouldn’t need to do that either to get by. Your net worth and therefore your class standing should not be a factor in whether you can have access to the basics of life. That’s why it’s called capital-ism, because everything revolves around capital. It’s designed to self-perpetuate by exploiting the inequalities it produces. There are other ways of life, and they aren’t as pie-in-the-sky as they would seem. You just have to get out of the capitalist frame of mind to understand how they work and what exactly is holding us back from achieving them.
I agree with everything you wrote up to the point of claiming all the US housing problems are inherent to capitalism. Japan is a capitalist country, but Japanese houses are for living in, and Japanese houses depreciate like cars - which is way more sustainable than the US train wreck. There are other ways of housing even without leaving capitalism.
Japanese houses depreciate like cars - which is way more sustainable than the US train wreck
This is almost entirely not due to policies but almost entirely to Japanese economy being stagnant for the last 20 years whereas the US economy has grown almost every year for the last 20 years.
I also live in a stagnant country, and it’s not great that you have to sell the house you bought 10 years ago with the same price or cheaper to get it off your hands. And also it’s not great that the general wealth in the society is not growing.
When people from where I live visit USA, even when they go to not so rich states, they notice that everything and everyone is more wealthy.
I think the biggest issue is that the price of homes proportional to income isn’t what it used to be. And that causes things to keep getting worse.
Homes cost more and people have less money so less homes are sold. This allows institutional investors to buy up larger portions of the available housing, and they prefer to rent those out.
So that along with other factors makes home prices keep going up causing less people to be able to buy. People being forced to pay a larger portion of their income to housing causes the spiral to get worse and creeps into other industries that people won’t patronize if they need to save money.
Landlordss being allowed free reign historically does this to countries. It happend in England and China and probably a lot more countries i am ignorant about.
Neighborhoods fighting densification tooth and nail make housing scarce, and people who want housing having to outbid each other for (proportional to population) fewer and fewer houses makes them unreasonably, unsustainably expensive. Which attracts investors and adds icing to the problem, but at root it’s the homeowners who got theirs and then pulled up the ladder after driving the scarcity of housing in the locations where people want to live.
If people demanded governments really invest in densification and new houses where the jobs are - including sharply limiting the ability of noisy impacted neighbors to drag the process out - the availability of houses would force prices down, which would cause the predatory investors to lose interest and add icing in the other direction, to affordability.
When I was four (in 1986), my parents moved for my Dad’s job (he was transferred), and ended up accepting the company offer to buy their house at not a great price because they couldn’t find a market buyer. At least from my experience, buying and selling forty years ago was just as fraught as now.
Do you have examples of specific practices that have become common and make house sales more difficult?
Housing should not be a speculative asset in the first place. Houses are for living in- and before you tell me about how they are a valuable store of wealth, you shouldn’t need to do that either to get by. Your net worth and therefore your class standing should not be a factor in whether you can have access to the basics of life. That’s why it’s called capital-ism, because everything revolves around capital. It’s designed to self-perpetuate by exploiting the inequalities it produces. There are other ways of life, and they aren’t as pie-in-the-sky as they would seem. You just have to get out of the capitalist frame of mind to understand how they work and what exactly is holding us back from achieving them.
I agree with everything you wrote up to the point of claiming all the US housing problems are inherent to capitalism. Japan is a capitalist country, but Japanese houses are for living in, and Japanese houses depreciate like cars - which is way more sustainable than the US train wreck. There are other ways of housing even without leaving capitalism.
This is almost entirely not due to policies but almost entirely to Japanese economy being stagnant for the last 20 years whereas the US economy has grown almost every year for the last 20 years.
I also live in a stagnant country, and it’s not great that you have to sell the house you bought 10 years ago with the same price or cheaper to get it off your hands. And also it’s not great that the general wealth in the society is not growing.
When people from where I live visit USA, even when they go to not so rich states, they notice that everything and everyone is more wealthy.
I think the biggest issue is that the price of homes proportional to income isn’t what it used to be. And that causes things to keep getting worse.
Homes cost more and people have less money so less homes are sold. This allows institutional investors to buy up larger portions of the available housing, and they prefer to rent those out.
So that along with other factors makes home prices keep going up causing less people to be able to buy. People being forced to pay a larger portion of their income to housing causes the spiral to get worse and creeps into other industries that people won’t patronize if they need to save money.
Landlordss being allowed free reign historically does this to countries. It happend in England and China and probably a lot more countries i am ignorant about.
Neighborhoods fighting densification tooth and nail make housing scarce, and people who want housing having to outbid each other for (proportional to population) fewer and fewer houses makes them unreasonably, unsustainably expensive. Which attracts investors and adds icing to the problem, but at root it’s the homeowners who got theirs and then pulled up the ladder after driving the scarcity of housing in the locations where people want to live.
If people demanded governments really invest in densification and new houses where the jobs are - including sharply limiting the ability of noisy impacted neighbors to drag the process out - the availability of houses would force prices down, which would cause the predatory investors to lose interest and add icing in the other direction, to affordability.