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Do You Hate It's a Wonderful Life?

Checkerboard Strangler said:
It is that ten percent that concerns me. We have a multi-layered homeless problem all over the country.
Some are the chronic homeless...they're druggies, mentally ill, criminals, or just plain bums.
It's not like housing is what those folks need the most.
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Actually, it is. You can't solve substance abuse or mental health issues, for example, if the individual doesn't have a stable home.

Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness By 91 Percent; Here's How : NPR


A few decades ago there used to be more of what's known as "efficiency apartments", ranging from 100 to 350 SF, and they were cheap enough that even a minimum wage schlub could swing the rent on one of those.
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A 300 square foot studio in San Francisco will set you back $1900/month. In Manhattan, $1900 gets you a whopping 400 square feet.

Seriously.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/132-6th-St-303-San-Francisco-CA-94103/2092745284_zpid/
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/319-W-29th-St-APT-3B-New-York-NY-10001/2106237936_zpid/
 
Visbek said:
Actually, it is. You can't solve substance abuse or mental health issues, for example, if the individual doesn't have a stable home.
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I'm saying that druggies, mentally ill, criminals, or just plain bums are more of a law enforcement problem.
And I am not saying that they don't need housing, I'm saying that they need a lot of other things more.

Druggies need treatment, the mentally ill need mental health facilities, and bums...well, you make your own decision.

The gentleman in the article you referenced, Kim Evans, is not a bum and he's not mentally ill.
He had a serious back injury and he has had a stroke.
He says that he has "struggled with drugs and alcohol" but so have I during certain episodes of my sometimes misspent youth.
But a JOB was a diversion, and it was key to encouraging me to steer clear because I could make my own money and pay my bills.
Kim Evans seems to be economically displaced and indigent more than anything else.
He is the type who could easily fall into a category that gets him a place to live if a robust program almost was instituted anywhere.

Visbek said:
Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness By 91 Percent; Here's How : NPR
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Well aware of Utah's success and more power to them. If we can sell other localities on the straight up Utah model I certainly would not object to it.
I simply am convinced that in much of the country the political climate is more likely to respond to housing help for the working homeless and the elderly first before turning to the chronically homeless who are druggies, mentally ill and just plain folks who refuse to work.

Visbek said:
A 300 square foot studio in San Francisco will set you back $1900/month. In Manhattan, $1900 gets you a whopping 400 square feet.

Seriously.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/132-6th-St-303-San-Francisco-CA-94103/2092745284_zpid/
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/319-W-29th-St-APT-3B-New-York-NY-10001/2106237936_zpid/
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Thanks for picking out two of the absolute most expensive places in the entire country. It doesn't change the fact that there are areas nearby where it would be possible to construct subsidized housing of some kind. You're never going to be able to put trailer homes, low income apts or "tiny houses" in The Tenderloin or mid-town Manhattan, but New York City already does have a rather robust shelter program which has been in operation for several years.
By the way, my first apartment wasn't 400 SF or even 300, it was about 120 SF. It had a bathroom with a shower and a tiny kitchenette built into one of the walls, the kind that had one of those stove-sink-minifridge all in one units.
$110 a month back in 1977.
If such 120 SF units even still existed in San Francisco or Manhattan, it sounds like they'd be about 600 a month.
Well, 110 dollars in 1977 is about 450 dollars today so that is not far off from 600. A simple subsidy to help cover part of the rent would make such tiny efficiencies affordable.
 
Visbek said:
Wow. That's pretty messed up.

Landlords are not "parasites." .
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I am quite certain that 100% of the landlords I've paid rent to over the years were not parasites.
Some of them might have been first class jerks but so what? A few of them were okay.

I am quite certain that the gentleman who owned 2817 East Lake Street wasn't operating a charity either, so I suspect he was able to turn at least a tiny profit on the 120 square foot bachelor pad I had back in 1977 for $110 a month.

ApartmentEastLake1978.jpg

Thus I am convinced that tiny efficiency apts could also turn a tiny profit today as well.
(Mine was the upstairs window on the right, and yes the building is still there)
 
phattonez said:
The following is a quote from the film It's a Wonderful Life.

[FONT=&]

So all of the people on this board who support the current system of unaffordable mortgages and sky high rents, do you hate this movie?[/FONT]
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What on Earth are you talking about? Most people can afford their rents and mortgages, accept for many in the blue states.
 
Moderate Right said:
What on Earth are you talking about? Most people can afford their rents and mortgages, accept for many in the blue states.
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False.

Millennials Spend About $93,000 on Rent by The Time They Hit 30
d1c4223c2e602851a3111fea543ebbb7.jpg
 
jimbo said:
You don't have much of a grasp of economics do you?

To your question. What do I want to do about this?

Nothing.

It's up to you, not me, to better your life.
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This is what we get with individualism, and it's disgusting.
 
What if...? said:
All real estate speculation acquiring property so you can charge people to access it. Ownership of all available property is the mechanism whereby you get to collect 30% of people's gross output for their entire producitive life.
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Already told you: same can be said for food and transportation: all farming and car manufacturing speculation so you can charge people to access it. Ownership of farms and car companies is the mechanism whereby you get to collect 25% of people's gross output for their entire productive life.

What if...? said:
Nobody expended almost a third of their gross effort to provide themselves shelter until the landlord came into being.
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Really? You got a link or two to prove this too?

What are you even talking about? Cavemen days?

What if...? said:
And I'm not sure where one is supposed to a new place if they can't save any money where they are. They'd just be vagrants there.
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According to some links I found (e.g. here and here), since 1900's, percentage of income people spent on housing did not increase by all that much. It used to be around 23%-27% and now around 33%. And yet somehow people survived and thrived for the last 120 years in this country...
 
trixare4kids said:
That very well may be true but it does not prove what you wrote below.

"The problem is with rent being so high that they can't ever afford to buy on their own, so high that they can't start families, and so high that they have nearly nothing leftover after paying rent."
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Rent being substantially higher across the board proves that very statement.
 
Bullseye said:
Stifling economic activity, discouraging rentals, giving away "free stuff". As I've explained to you dozens of times, there is nothing wrong with a landlord making a fair profit on his properties.
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Define fair.

Forgiving student loans is close to a trillion dollars the government - who borrowed the money to make the loans STILL has to pay back. BTW.
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We shouldn't pay it back.
 
trixare4kids said:
These Are the 50 Best Cities for Renters
"Affordable rent is within reach — in these cities."

Don't let anyone tell you differently because if they do, their nose is growing. Note, only one CA city made the list; Fresno.
With unemployment at 3.6 and consumer confidence high, right now people are living pretty well across the U.S.

https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-money/home/cheapest-places-rent/
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Median millennial income is about $25k per year. For affordability, this means that most millennials should not be paying more than $625 per month in rent. Guess how many cities in your list had rents that low: Tucson was close. Lubbock, El Paso, Amarillo, Mobile, Tulsa, Detroit, Shreveport, Topeka, Rockford, Killeen, Akron, Fort Wayne, Toledo, Evansville, and Springfield. None of these are known as job centers.
 
COTO said:
In the movie, George Bailey is talking about loaning money to people who were (generally speaking) seen as poor credit risks. His grievance with Mr. Potter was that Potter wouldn't take such risks, lending money only to the wealthy man or the man with plenty of collateral, in a sense hoarding his wealth.
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It wasn't just that. He owned all of the rental units also. So while he refused to lend them money so that they could buy their own homes, he also was happy to profit off of them by renting out his housing units.

See what George Bailey said during the bank run:

Now wait...now listen...now listen to me. I beg of you not to do this thing. If Potter gets hold of this Building and Loan, there'll never be another decent house built in this town. He's already got charge of the bank. He's got the bus line. He got the department stores. And now he's after us. Why? Well, it's very simple. Because we're cutting in on his business, that's why. And because he wants to keep you living in his slums and paying the kind of rent he decides. Joe, you had one of those Potter houses, didn't you? Well, have you forgotten? Have you forgotten what he charged you for that broken-down shack? Here, Ed. You know, you remember last year when things weren't going so well, and you couldn't make your payments? You didn't lose your house, did you? Do you think Potter would have let you keep it? Can't you understand what's happening here? Don't you see what's happening? Potter isn't selling. Potter's buying! And why? Because we're panicking and he's not. That's why. He's picking up some bargains. Now, we can get through this thing all right. We've got to stick together, though. We've got to have faith in each other.

And then there's this quote from Potter's rent collector:

Look, Mr. Potter, it's no skin off my nose. I'm just your little rent collector. But you can't laugh off this Bailey Park any more. Look at it...Fifteen years ago, a half-dozen houses stuck here and there. There's the old cemetery, squirrels, buttercups, daisies. Used to hunt rabbits there myself. Look at it today. Dozens of the prettiest little homes you ever saw. Ninety percent owned by suckers who used to pay rent to you. Your Potter's Field, my dear Mr. Employer, is becoming just that. And are the local yokels making with those David and Goliath wisecracks!

In summary, both what Mr. Bailey is arguing for and the economic climate in which he's arguing are glaring anachronisms. Neither has anything to do with "unaffordable mortgages and sky high rents" in the 21st Century.
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It absolutely does. Our young people today cannot get mortgages (your claims to the contrary notwithstanding), and are being bled to death with sky high rents. Of course, it's not just one man that's responsible, but there's not much that anyone is doing about it.
 
Lovebug said:
But that is supply and demand, isn't it? I read somewhere that, after the housing bubble, people were very reluctant to buy and rather opted to rent instead. Rent went up accordingly.
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That's a funny way of stating "lost there jobs and could not afford to buy."
 
Visbek said:
I haven't seen any indications that people marry later now exclusively because of a "failing economy..." whatever that means.

If anything, it's a result of decades-long social changes, where women are working more and spending more time focusing on their careers, and thus delaying marriage; more people are going to college, which also delays marriage; couples want to know each other much better than they did in the past, before marrying; and expectations about when and and what age people will marry are changing.
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And I'm sure women working more and delaying marriage has NOTHING to do with falling male wages. :roll:
We also don't see marriage rates plunge during recessions, and recover along with the rest of the economy. Why would that be the case, if the primary impetus is economic?
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We actually do see it.

chart_7_GreatRecession.png


Or, it's "charging what the market will bear."

Since you apparently never took any Economics classes: Markets are usually highly efficient, and don't care about morals. Markets do not judge; their function is only to find a common point between buyers and sellers. As a result, whenever you try to inject equity (fairness) into a market system, you're going to generate inefficiencies. The classic example is rent control. In theory, the rent-controlled buildings are more fairly priced, because the current residents won't be driven out by escalating rents, and rents will remain reasonably low. In practice, it causes all sorts of problems such as incentivizing landlords to abuse their long-term tenants (e.g. refusing to do repairs; or, engaging in disruptive repairs; or, installing a relative in the apartment to drive the renter out; or, illegal actions like turning off heat or electricity etc), or discouraging developers from building affordable housing (as the future returns will be low). It also incentivizes renters to set up black markets, e.g. subletting the apartment at market rates, and pocketing the difference.
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Lol, housing bubbles, stock market bubbles. This is hilarious.

By the way, on average Americans spend 37% of their income on housing, which is not far off the 30% target. Less than 10% of households are spending 50% of their income on rent. While the problem is serious and getting worse, exaggerating it is not warranted.
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We should see close to 0% of households spending 50% on rent, and note how you're not factoring in the falling household formation rate.

Household income is the standard measure for these types of economic factors. So yes, there is no question that it can be used as a "fair comparison."
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Garbage and you know it. When household formation is down because wages are low, you cannot only look at households and thus exclude a significant portion of those with low wages.
 
phattonez said:
Define fair.
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Not going to play that game with you again. Let's just call it a return that continues to encourage the owner/landlord to come offering the property for rent.


phattonez said:
We shouldn't pay it back.
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And destroy the credit rating of the country?
 
Trump said:
I've watched 2 owners attempt to build on this land over the last 20 years.....never broke ground...suspect you are correct

Some idiot from Facebook might try it for his 4th home someday.
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The guy who hired me to restore and produce the 1972 Leon Russell concert video ultimately couldn't afford to pay me because a very similar plot of land he owned in Malibu was sucking him dry, and he made me a 50% partner instead and I got the lion's share of the gross from distro.
Then he ultimately committed suicide over his real estate nightmare, which of course left me as the sole owner of the film and all rights.
 
Slavister said:
Are you sure?
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$69000 is at or near the upper and and if you break that down to millennial individuals it settles out around...surprise...
somewhere between $25000 and $35000. Sorry but that is not that great of a figure.
The big joke down in Dallas was about a phenomenon called "Thirty thousand dollar a year millionaires" back in the 2000's.

And that was in Dallas, which is arguably MUCH MUCH cheaper to live in than either West or East Coast.
But not so much anymore because home prices are shooting up once again in DFW.
It is still cheaper but the differential might not be so huge in the coming years.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
I'd much rather see a graph in order to take stock of how many millenials are at the upper end of that.
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Not sure why you want to see that. We are talking about median, not averages. So 50% will be higher and 50% will be lower. Nowhere close to $25k median. So yeah, this completely destroys phattonez's argument with just that one factoid.

Checkerboard Strangler said:
$69000 is at or near the upper and and if you break that down to millennial individuals it settles out around...surprise...
somewhere between $25000 and $35000. Sorry but that is not that great of a figure.
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Guess what, when you rent a place, it's the household that rents it, whether that household is 1 individual or more. So, the whole point of how rent should be 30% of income applies to household income, not individual income.

Side note: where did you get 25k-35k range? You did not provide a link. Either way, it does not change my argument.
 
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Slavister said:
Not sure why you want to see that. We are talking about median, not averages. So 50% will be higher and 50% will be lower. Nowhere close to $25k median. So yeah, this completely destroys phattonez's argument with just that one factoid. If you want more details, you can look for it but it won't lead to any different conclusion.
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I did and it breaks down to millennial individuals being still somewhat locked into the $30K a year category.
Households are two millennials, yes?

Back when I was growing up, and my own Dad was the age of a millennial today, the household consisted of the breadwinner, who could carry a mortgage or rent singlehandedly. Not asking for women to be chained to a stove today, just pointing out that it now takes TWO breadwinners to do what a single one used to be able to do.

"The rent is too damn high."
 
Slavister said:
Not sure why you want to see that. We are talking about median, not averages. So 50% will be higher and 50% will be lower. Nowhere close to $25k median. So yeah, this completely destroys phattonez's argument with just that one factoid.



Guess what, when you rent a place, it's the household that rents it, whether that household is 1 individual or more. So, the whole point of how rent should be 30% of income applies to household income, not individual income.

Side note: where did you get 25k-35k range? You did not provide a link. Either way, it does not change my argument.
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I didn't provide any link because most households are couples. Can you dispute that?
I just chopped the figure in half, that's all.
One millennial, two millennials...
 
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