• AutoVomBizMarkee [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    Heard him saying this shit at Davos live while torturing myself listening to NPR (that’s half my posts). Talking directly to the base at an international conference was a bit interesting to me.

    As someone with a mortgage, fuck this shit. I do not want to 1. Hold other people out of having the ability to secure a consistent place to live. 2. Give a fuck about my decaying homes value if it means I can never move out of it. Housing should not be a financial instrument/tool/whatever.

  • Notcontenttobequiet [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    So when no one can afford to buy the Mcmansions that Boomers are forced to sell to pay for end of life care, and the only people who can afford to buy them are the most wealthy and fucking Blackrock, that market is going to crash crash crash. Maybe around the same time the AI bubble pops. Maybe we’ll get 2008 and 2001 at once!

  • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    I own a home, or at least I’m paying a mortgage. This is me: porky-happy

    I don’t understand why I would want home prices to go up. If I sell it, it just means I pay more to replace it. I still need a house, so I don’t see how risong home prices give me any benefit. Am I missing something, or are the rising proces just good for the banks and people that speculate on properties they don’t actually need or live in?

    • Too nasty for piefed.social@crazypeople.online
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      6 days ago

      the benefit comes from treating the house not just as a place to live, but as a leveraged financial asset.

      They probably didn’t buy the house with cash; they used a mortgage. This is leverage.

      Simple Example: You buy a $500,000 house with a $100,000 down payment (20%).

      • Your initial investment is $100,000. The bank “lent” you the other $400,000.
      • If that house’s value increases by 20% to $600,000, you’ve made $100,000 in profit.
      • You just turned your $100,000 investment into $200,000 (your original down payment + the $100k in profit). That’s a 100% return on your cash.

      If you had invested that same $100,000 in the stock market and it went up 20%, you’d have made $20,000. The house gave you a 5x better return because of leverage.

      Further you can borrow against an asset which is money that is taxed at capital gains and not income.

      Speaking of capital gains, if you bought that $500k house and sold it for $800k, you made $300k in profit. If you’re married, you pay $0 in capital gains tax on that profit (A single person can exclude 250k from taxes, married people can exclude 2x that). If that had been a stock investment, you could have owed over $45,000 in taxes. This is a massive government subsidy for homeowners.

      In terms of income tax you can deduct the interest you pay on your mortgage from your taxable income bringing down your taxes.

      • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        6 days ago

        This is slightly less effective now that interest rates have come up some, but for people who bought at like 2% in the 2010s, yeah: it was basically just the bank (and government) funding the most profitable investment possible for you with no downside or risk at all. That’s how a lot of boomers see their house.

        That other half of this “trick” is to then leverage your (now more valuable) asset to buy another house and rent it out. You take your $100,000 in profit that you made from sitting on your “asset,” pull it out, and use it as the down payment on another property, then get some poor desperate person to pay the mortgage on that while you pocket the appreciation and get the property at the end. The faster prices go up, the easier it is for people who already have their foot in the door to just keep doing that over and over. It’s braindead easy if you have no soul.

    • ConcreteHalloween [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      I think the idea is you cash out when you’re old and then just live in a condo somewhere warm.

      Problem is Boomers don’t realize there won’t be anyone to cash out to if the prices inflate too much and the younger generation is too poor to buy. I mean, I guess Blackstone could buy up a lot of them but I don’t think even they have the capital to buy EVERY boomers home at it’s current listing.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    Lock in current prices and say that if anyone wants to sell in the next 10 years, the government will take the purchase at current market rate.

    Then do every single thing possible to completely crash house prices.

    Oh and limit home ownership to one per person so people don’t use the opportunity to sell their existing house to the government and buy two or three more in the crash.

    This is probably a bad idea for some reason, I just made it up right now.

    • ConcreteHalloween [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      Oh and limit home ownership to one per person so people don’t use the opportunity to sell their existing house to the government and buy two or three more in the crash.

      Eh even Cuba allows people to have a vacation home. BUT ONLY ONE!

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        6 days ago

        Yeah I don’t know if you’d do that permanently, maybe just a 10 year law for the duration of the price guarantee? The point is to prevent people from selling their existing house at a high fixed rate to the government then just buying many of the low rate houses. If average people did that at a large scale it’d be a problem.

        The main problem I can see with this is people selling to the gov, buying a cheap house after the crash, then pocketing the rest. Maybe that’s fine as an economic stimulus? Inflation could be a problem though. Fixing the housing issue might be worth it anyway given that inflation can be controlled other ways but homelessness without fixing the housing issue can’t be.

    • Mindfury [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      you’re only missing the step where you set a due date and prosecute everyone with more than one owned residential property for treason after that date

      (I say residential because working out productive real property ownership rules for worker ownership might take a little while to legislate correctly idk)

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        6 days ago

        You could just take them from the landlords and purchase them from the people who simply own too many holiday homes. But I was more thinking within the constrains of a market economy here.

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      Current nominal value of the housing market is $55 trillion. Government crashes housing prices, everyone with the guarantee sells because they can take the cash to buy a better home for less money, demand shoots through the roof, housing prices reappreciate, and the government bond market explodes in a spectacular fireworks show?

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        6 days ago

        They’re not all going to sell though… Maybe? $55 trillion is rather a lot though…

        With that said I don’t think it will reappreciate if you get rid of the landlords and limit total number that can be owned? There will be an overabundance of houses? No matter what happens under those circumstances the houses wouldn’t reappreciate to the same value.

        • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          6 days ago

          Suppose my house is currently worth $600k. The government guarantees that value, then crashes prices by 50% (presumably by some means other than creating new stock, as that would be time consuming and expensive). Now a house near me that used to be $800k is worth $400k. I could then sell my house to the government without having to bother cleaning it up, doing repairs, getting a real estate agent - all the things that add friction and cost to home selling - then turn around and outbid all the people that previously couldn’t afford that kind of house because $400k was their ceiling because I have a ton of house money (kelly ) to play with. Plus, I would be incentivized to help bid prices back up because profits on home sales are taxable unless they’re invested in a new home. Maybe there would be some sort of statutory price ceiling that prevents bidding wars from driving prices up, but that would have to come with some sort of scheme for choosing from among equivalent offers.

          In the absence of price controls, there would probably be a lot of hermit crab shell swapping as existing homeowners get a massive incentive to upgrade their current homes.

          I don’t really see the solution fitting in with the existing housing market dynamic; we’d need to fundamentally change how homeownership worked.

  • Commiechameleon [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    I did math on some boomers house that she bought way back then, came out to $43,000 of today’s dollery doos. Fuck off (and die so we can finally afford to live somewhere that doesn’t leech 60%[or more] of my paycheck, with or without roommates, to pay for some schmucks privileged child to go through private school, or I stg I’ll start romanoffing these assholes)

  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    the only way i’ll be able to acquire a home is the “dead parents/grandparents with a house” lottery. and that’s only because the price of homes where i’m from, a podunk commuter town that is near one of the cheaper large cities to live in in the u.s., have launched through the fucking roof. in the early 90’s, my parents bought their house for $50,000. the house across the street from them sold a year or two ago for like $250,000. this shit isn’t going to end well in the end.

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    How the fuck is “make homeowners feel rich and fancy” working out for California, dumbfuck?

    That philosophy turned California into a literal punchline, but sure, losers need to feel rich and we all should live in squalor because of it.

    Literally just worthless pigs