It seems like a housing “crisis” is when people can actually afford housing
If you read between the lines, it’s a “property crisis” because it’s a problem for landlords.
House prices going down is a GOOD THING for almost everyone except those who have more housing than they need.
Things we need should be cheaper. Why is this even a slightly controversial maxim?
Because housing ownership is backwards to most assets in the US. If the value of your home goes down while you’re paying a mortgage, you’re losing massively. If it goes up, you can leverage your mortgage debt.
It’s specifically designed as a debt trap that aligns the working class with capital interests while not giving any real power to mortgage/home owners.
Even having a mortgage doesn’t make it in your interest for house prices to go up. Not unless you’re about to CASH IN by going homeless.
Yeah, but it means if you decide to sell you can get out of your mortgage. If prices go down, selling means you are stuck with whatever the drop was when/if you sell.
Yeah… you can sell and get out of your mortgage. Where are you then… y’know, going to live?
Remember it’s all hypothetical. Plus reverse mortgages, people will take those out later and they only make sense if your home value has increased.
The 30 year mortgage was such an amazing, simple, effective system of social control but they let that whole system decay so they could make some short term gains
People who live in a cutthroat society where precarity is just one unlucky event away will hold on to what wealth they have for dear life.
Yeah but it’s not wealth unless you intend to sell your own house, and then you’ll need to like… live somewhere still.
That’s still wealth, though. Just because you need to go through the inconvenience of moving to make it a liquid asset doesn’t mean it’s not worth a lot, and it’s in the owner’s material interest that it goes up in value.
It’s not like you have to buy another house when you sell it; you could move to a rental, or move in with a SO/family.
Right. It’s only wealth if you have extra housing to use or intend to choose to rent for some reason, a generally very poor decision financially.
To evict families into homelessness while paying yourself a bonus from their tax dollars is one thing.
But for the line not to go up…? Unconscionable
Literally only a crisis in a society that ties your ability to save wealth and retire to the value of your house
And to be fair, there’s no reason to be so bullish on China as to ignore certain underlying problems. Real Estate is the basis of the economy. From what I understand, leveraging price of Real Estate is partly how the chinese provinces financed their state driven investment and debt. All societies have to deal with this problem, only the president of the United States went on camera and said he’ll do nothing to improve affordability because anyone who isn’t a landlord is lazy and doesn’t deserve a home.
Yeah @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net had a long comment write up about this sometime last year, not sure if I could find it now as I don’t think I saved it. But essentially the local governments are in a deep debt crisis right now because of it
A lot of that was also due to them holding a lot that debt in dollars, at least if I remember XHS’ analysis.
A long running theory in the news mega is that the US govt has been pushing the Fed to manipulate interest rates to apply/relax pressure on Chinese local govt., usually to extract concessions on things like rare earth metal exports.
I’m talking about local Chinese authorities not central govt. They have their own debt crises going on and it’s extremely related to property price crashes. I think they basically borrowed a ton of money to build developments where no one wants to live or something
Ah i thought the dollars were held at local govt too my bad
Like I know the propaganda side of it, but it’s goofy when every instance of line going down causing some talk of “crisis” when the nature of capitalist economics is literally quid pro quo.
The same talk was being used about Trump dumping the US exchange rate as if every country must duke it out to have a “strong” currency, with no considerations to how that’s physically impossible. Moreover, how there are viable economic advantages to depreciate your currency.
Maybe, just maybe, a global economic strategy where half the world enjoys luxurious treats and the other half is churned go dust to meat some beancounting balancing act is an imbecillic method of resource management? Nah.
You’d think the fact that they use words like “global economy” they’d understand that they should probably use metrics to gauge its health beyond “the bank accounts of three dozen wretched vampire crooks” but nope, this is how they see the world
A crisis is when "the poors"TM can afford housing.
BUT AT WHAT COST?!
“It’s a property CRISIS!”
Look inside
Working people are just able to get homes and keep them.
I’ve just accepted my views are going to always be alien to the western middle/upper class, and I’m ok with that.
Bankers probably got a bonus.
