We need both, Rent Control and more housing. Land-lording has also been invaded by capitalists looking to squeeze humans for every cent and govt needs to stem that tide too. Rent has been soaring in the biggest capitalist zones, US and EU/CA.
No what we need is more housing. It’s a supply issue. We’re short something like 2 million homes. The problem isn’t that we need to the government to come in and control the prices, we need the government to come in and make it so people can’t block higher density residential zones.
Bro its bad enough they got these shitty wood “luxury” apartment buildings that have like half inch thick walls, no one wants that shit on a massive scale. I’m all for more housing but fuck shared living spaces.
Headline: “5 years ago renters needed to make less than $60,000 a year to afford the typical rent; now they need to make almost $80,000”
5 years ago renters needed to make less than $60k, they made $69k. Now they need to make “almost $80k”, they make $77k. When you put numbers to it, it seems less stark.
I keep reading articles like this. Between rent being too expensive, home prices going through the roof, food prices outpacing wage growth, car and home insurance going up just because it can, utilities getting more expensive, my question is when does it just become too much. The whole thing just screams corporate greed and I’m getting sick of it. I make 60% more than I did 20 years ago and I feel like I’m barely scraping by.
Me saying fuck it and moving to Asia was one of the best decisions of my life. But the fact people aren’t willing to do it (but muh family! But muh language!) shows it’s not nearly bad enough
Korea, but if I could do it again I would probably consider China (because so many people speak Mandarin, it’s an amazing skill to have) and Vietnam (because it’s even cheaper, and software jobs are about as good) as well
It is just waiting for a tipping point to kick the whole powder keg off, basically. Like a dormant volcano as the pressure builds below the surface. At that point, people will seem irrational and random, just because there are so many vectors of fail taking place in parallel.
Random example that comes to mind, was talking to a friend and they were mentioning their employer is going to start a weekend rotation for teams. One of the shifts has 3 people, so once every three weeks, one employee will be working 7 days a week. They previously had weekend staff to cover the weekend shift. The company’s solution wasn’t to hire more, redistribute, or one of the many other ways to solve the problem. Just, Lumberg from Office Space instead.
The people in charge are either landlords themselves or on the side of the landlords, so this is will never happen without a massive political paradigm shift.
My income has gone up 50% since the pandemic. So did most of my friends who were working in any technical fields.
The economy is skewed. I keep telling my friends to learn to code or learn basic IT skills… and they just actively refuse and continue doing manual labor jobs and complaining about how they can’t make more money. And such is there lot.
A few peopel I know moved into healthcare, and are doing financially much better, but their jobs are very high stress due to the shortages.
The more people get into it the less valuable it becomes is the thing. But others pointed out there’s a ton of other reasons it’s problematic, like the need for those other jobs to exist to actually, like, have a functioning society.
Edit: Also arguably a lot of the low hanging fruit coding positions aren’t as lucrative as they once were. People with experience are doing well. New people are having a tougher time getting their foot in the door compared to 5-10 years ago.
Strange argument. Yes people can swap but that might make them unhappy and we also need people to do other work than it and healthcare and they should still be able to afford a house
even then you’re fucked. I’ve been on “the bench” at my contracting company since christmas, which led to my wages getting halved. every fucking day I read about layoffs in software development flooding the market with better programmers than me.
It sounds like you’re describing the same thing that happened when we globalized manufacturing. Economists said everyone would retrain and go to other fields, but it just doesn’t seem to happen IRL.
Bro if everyone moves to the jobs that pay enough to live decently, very important jobs will not get done. Our society needs manual laborers to keep everything from falling apart.
I make 120k a year installing carpets lol. I absolutely bust my ass but I make more than many people I know who went to college. My dad also installed carpets for 48 years before retiring at 71. I plan to retire sooner though lol but will work for many years to come and pump.up that IRA
Does your dad work for himself or someone else? If he works for himself I don’t know how he’s only making 35k lol. I live in Western New York though (no where near NYC)
We don’t use kickers much any more we use power stretchers so the wear on the knees is not that bad. Our backs hands and shoulders hurt more than our knees.
Ahh. My dad was briefly in the trade in the 70s/80s and still has the tools (kicker included) from the era.
Watched him install a carpet once as a kid (as DIY, not a job…he had long moved on since then) and I couldn’t believe people could put that much trauma on their knees day in/day out for decades. Then a few years ago he installed another and just decided to rent the damn power stretcher. World of difference, he said.
That is a misnomer solution telling everyone to learn how to do the same thing like to learn to code as it then creates its own market issue of too much supply for need.
Additionally it’s not diverse. Diverse jobs are still needed. They need to just pay more in those jobs. But all this is besides the point anyways.
There is no house shortage. There is plenty to house people and the issue is with capitalism being unchecked for too long over its control on living arrangements. This is something capitalism shouldn’t have a say in. Society has become beyond its required need for helping people survive as a whole and it’s become unsustainable. It was never supposed to be about sustaining a rich person’s yacht and 5th house that has nobody living in it anyways. This is not a society that is thriving.
Exactly, banning or severely limiting short-term rental housing ie VRBO and foreign land/property purchases Id wager would make a huge impact on righting the boat.
Without the supply of homes going into shortterm rentals like VRBO it would increase supply for people who actually live in that city, travelers can use hotels. Not a full stop fix, but it would increase supply/lower rent.
Even if it ends in more hotels, hotels fit more people and supply more jobs than the equivalent space in houses. For temporary lodging houses don’t make sense.
Your solution does not apply to the whole society, it’s just a patch to make your life easier but globally it doesn’t fix anything. This is part of the american mindset: “fuck everyone else while I’m doing great”… don’t get me wrong, I understand your point of view but this is not how we move forward.
Rent as a percentage of income. General rule (and what I’m assuming the article is using without getting around the paywall) is 1/3 of your income should be rent. So if the avg rent in 2019 was $1666 and it’s now $2000 you should be making $80k/year instead of $60K.
but generally rents and housing costs have doubled the past 5 years. and doubled the ten years ebfore that, so are about triple where they were in 2009. A 2 bed in my city was 1200-1500, now it’s 3000-4000 and often 3-4 people are living there to make rent. a lot of two beds were converted to 3-4 beds (remove living and dining room).
The workers of the US really need unionize. Here in Scandinavia the average pre-tax income is closer to $84,000 with a 36-hour work week. We do however have a higher tax-rate, so that ends up at around $45,000 after taxes. Cost of living is also generally higher that the US. Of course that higher tax gives us free health care and education.
Nah, it’s because we don’t tax the wealthy and corporations as the average individual, and let the “market” dictate the price of inelastic sectors ie Healthcare, Food, and Housing.
The extra fun thing is that Americans don’t have that much lower of a tax burden. Only the wealthiest and those with investment-based income really pay appreciably lower taxes than in countries such as yours. However, the populace in the US gets far, far lower return on investment for their taxes (which has been continuously being reduced since Regan).
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