Guy I worked with retired from the Navy as a captain and got whatever very generous pay came with that. Then used his veterans preference to get a job in my agency, did that for 20+ years, retired as a gs 14 so he gets that annuity plus his TSP savings plus social security in a few years. He’s still barely 60, so he is working as a consultant. I’m guessing he’s pulling down $200k with all the various incomes and maybe working 20 hours a week, and he’s got the Healthcare and other benefits for life. People trash talk the military and government but if you work the system right it can be worthwhile. Hell, I wish I’d joined just so I could get USAA.

That may be true in some of the lower priced Midwestern markets, but I sell real estate in Boston and I don’t see big corporate interests in the single family or owner occupied 2-3 family market. as much as big corporations have ruined a lot of things in this country, I don’t think we Dan just wave our hands and say “corporate buyers” and explain away our housing market problems.

We have a confluence of decades of exclusionary zoning and restrictions on building that make meaningfully adding to the supply of housing almost impossible. We have a huge deficit of qualified workers in the building trades, in part because all the work dried up after the great recession and people left the field and in part because we’ve pushed more and more kids to go to college. We have a mortgage system that’s nearly unique worldwide that allows homeowners tremendous advantages in keeping their housing costs low, but inversely provides tremendous disadvantages to having them move around more often and free up housing stock (so lots of aging singles and couples in big houses better suited for young people with kids). We have a society that’s bizarrely fixated on single family living even though we desperately need more density in most markets. And we have the problem of wage stagnation. None of those things are directly attributable to corporate ownership of large numbers of houses.

I’d love for there to be some silver bullet where we could just say “disincentivize corporations from owning small housing stock” and solve the problem, but it’s nowhere near that simple.

Chances are they’re long dead.

Chase sapphire reserve. $595 annual fee seems crazy at first but if you use the perks it pays for itself multiple times over.

Pizza in Boston delivered by door dash is routinely right about $30 before tip. My credit card offers free door dash premium whatever it’s called and I usually choose places offering a promo and tend to order early when there are also promos. That brings things down to the $20s. But it’s generally about $30 with tip even doing all that. If I’m not paying attention it’s easy to order a $45 pizza.

To be fair I don’t eat from pizza Hut or Dominos or other chains. Those might be a few percent cheaper.

Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google

Or as I originally heard it, “going to bed is going to work.”

Step 1: astroturf on lemmy

Step 2:?

Step 3: profit!

I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.

But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.

Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?

I miss that man

Besides the face unlock, the 12s and newer have magsafe charging and it’s a delight.

Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.

As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?

There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.

I mean, lots of people do. Just not the ones here on lemmy. But thanks for the compliment!

I’m probably somewhat unique here inasmuch as I’m a real estate agent and landlord and I have made an attempt to get into commercial real estate. But I’ve also been homeless in my adult life and grew up with very unstable housing, so I get the angst of many people here and don’t discount it. Their feelings are completely valid.

I think the two things that people who are concerned about housing prices get wrong consistently are housing supply and the importance of financing.

Left leaning people are forever fighting against landlords and simultaneously yelling about gentrification and development. Here’s the thing. Housing was affordable when we let people build densely with relatively few restrictions. Housing today is still most affordable in places where it’s easy to build more. If that means the neighborhood character changes, oh well. Anywhere you get liberal people (and I count myself as very left wing) making rules about housing, you limit supply, prices go up. In the immortal words of pogo, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Take a look at Tokyo, the NYT did a great story about it recently, they have no problem destroying old neighborhoods to build more housing. As a result, it’s remained shockingly affordable, and has a huge percentage of small businesses because rent is cheap for small non residential spaces, too. We need to stop clinging to our old buildings and allow growth. And I say that as a man who lovingly restored a 175 year old house. It is dumb. There should be 6 families living on the plot I own, but the neighbors would never allow it.

The other thing is financing. Commercial owners have a completely different borrowing structure from owner occupied housing. They don’t have 30 year fixed rate low interest loans with low down payments and government programs to help them for x, y and z. Most commercial loans require refinancing every 5, 7, or 10 years. They also cost more than residential loans, both in up front costs and interest. So my personal residence is locked in on a 30 year note at 3%, but my rentals are in the 3.75-6% range and will require me to refinance in a few years at much higher rates. I have one that resets in 18 months. My interest rate is likely to go from 3.75 to 7.75. I owe about 100k on the house. My mortgage payments will go up $4000/year when that happens (on top of a $1000/year insurance hike last month). There’s no possible way I can raise my rent enough to cover. So I would be in the hole every month. But the bank won’t lend on a property that loses money every month. So either I come up with $100k cash or I sell the house. Sorry tenant, but you’re getting kicked out at lease expiration next year because I have to sell the house to py back the lender. If it won’t cash flow for me it won’t for anyone else, either. So the only possible buyers are home buyers who want to live in it and it needs to be vacant. Yay for a home buyer, sad for my tenant (and for me, now I am out a cash flowing property that I’d prefer to hold). The tenant will yell about greedy landlords when I tell him to get out, but I literally have no option.

Same thing with how all big developments look the same now. All driven by lenders. They won’t lend to a developer who wants to take on mom and pop businesses and quirky startups. The building is valued as a multiple of its rents, and so all the money chases national credit tenants or strong local chains that have proven they can oy high rents, and lenders all want to see recognizable name brands in those ground floor retail spaces. Developers hands are tied. Lots of developers would love to do something different but nothing different can get financed.

I could keep going but the text wall is long enough and my thumbs are tired.

Banks don’t buy properties, they foreclose on them. They will unload as fast as possible and take a write down.

Big hedge fund and other similar large investors don’t hold onto money losers, and they care about maximizing their return. If the spread between rent and sales price is this high, I’d expect some of the ones that bought a while ago to be considering selling and taking their appreciation gains vs holding onto a cash flow that is multiples lower. Plus corporate lending is a completely different animal than homeowner loans and many of these properties will soon be needing to refinance into a much higher rate. Their owners will sell rather than take a huge hit to cash flow. And many of these bought properties 5-10 years ago and did capital upgrades that are now aging. They’ll be looking to exit before the next upgrade cycle.

Smaller investors can get pretty badly burned in these markets and may not be able to hold on.

Not saying a crash is inevitable or even likely, but real estate is cyclical and we are almost certainly near the top of our current cycle.

The general populace? No. The state government? Yes.

I used to love Florida, but it’s doomed. Between climate change and fascism we just need to write off the state entirely and build a wall along the Georgia border. Best we can do is try to control the insanity and let those who have decided to stay down there burn themselves out. Better for you to get out than for us to come down.

They literally stole the doors and windows

Don’t invest in Detroit real estate

Sounds like a challenge. I’ll bring the Cuervo, you bring the Beam, let’s get drunk and sing God Save the Queen!