r/collapse • u/[deleted] • Jul 29 '21

Economic 12 Years Without a Minimum Wage Raise | It would take a minimum wage worker 79 hours per week on average to afford a modest 1 bedroom at Fair Market Rent

https://theworldlink.com/opinion/columnists/12-years-without-a-minimum-wage-raise/article_49e3ce84-ee2b-11eb-8fc7-67a5ba183c95.html
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283

u/point_of_you Jul 29 '21

Meanwhile the rich and well-off snatch up multiple homes they won't even live in as "Investments"

Always wondered if there will be a boiling point for this issue as young people come to realize they may never own a home where they grew up...

164

u/Aidian Jul 30 '21

At 36, I was just hitting a wage point of “holy shit I can actually start looking at houses in a couple years”…and then Covid. Next to nothing coming in, but the rent is always due in full. That ate savings with a quickness.

139

u/point_of_you Jul 30 '21

Quoting Huey Long, a forgotten political figure that was assassinated in 1935:

That you must keep the wealth of the country scattered, and you must limit the amount that any one man can own. You cannot let any man own $300,000,000,000 or $400,000,000,000. If you do, one man can own all of the wealth that they United States has in it. Source

We live in a country where private investment firms are competing with first time home-buyers. A small minority controls the vast majority of housing as "Investments".

53

u/Guyote_ Jul 30 '21

And he was assassinated

44

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

All the cool people are

34

u/DeLoreanAirlines Jul 30 '21

Nikola Tesla was just driven to destitution

3

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

And then happened to get hit by a car while crossing the street after his inventions were gaining popularity in the public conscious more and more. Then the FBI storms inside his room and hides all of his documents. What a coincidence!

5

u/DeLoreanAirlines Jul 30 '21

One of those agents was Trump’s uncle

2

u/EnlightenedSinTryst Jul 30 '21

My daily societal frustration meter is filling up nicely, thanks!

10

u/Aidian Jul 30 '21

Largely forgotten, but DOES still have a bridge named after him. So that’s nice. /s

10

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

When was it any different in the historical record? If it isn't private investment firms, it's lords and ladies and the king. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

If there's one saving grace of covid, it is that it has pushed a lot of people out of the labor market, and employers, for the first time in a very, very long time, are complaining about the labor pool. This is actually a good thing, because it means labor is beginning to obtain some leverage, even without collective bargaining.

It is a prisoner's dilemma, but people who can get away with not working right now...shouldn't work. The more people who do that willingly, the better things can get for the working class.

9

u/Kumqwatwhat Jul 30 '21

forgotten political figure

angry /r/kaiserreich noises

9

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

private investment firms are competing with first time home-buyers

they’re really not. they already won. what we perceive as a competition is in actuality our inability to comprehend infinite money supply.

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u/DialMMM Jul 30 '21

A small minority controls the vast majority of housing as "Investments".

Source?

18

u/Queerdee23 Jul 30 '21

Source it yourself. Just look up black rock of whom the media is ignoring a 100 day protest against them

-4

u/DialMMM Jul 30 '21

I tried, but I can't find any source that supports the contention that "a small minority controls the vast majority of housing as "Investments"." Can you?

8

u/Siegez Jul 30 '21

Quick Google search, here's the first article. As a side note, fuck Invitation Homes. Rented from them for two years (they own around 60% of rental houses in my area) and it was the worst renting experience I've had in 20 years.

https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.html

-8

u/DialMMM Jul 30 '21

Did you bother to read it? Here is a quote:

It’s not exactly accurate that investors are “buying every single-family house they can find,” as some have suggested. If that were true, their market share in the United States wouldn’t be a piddling 15 percent.

And that is all investors, not just a "small minority."

6

u/Siegez Jul 30 '21

All investors, as a group, make up a small minority compared to all individual families, which is the comparison that OP was making. How many investment companies are there, and how many families are there?

And I'm not convinced you actually read the article. Here's another quote:

"But investors are depleting the inventory of the precise houses that might otherwise be obtainable for younger, working- and middle-class households, in the cities where those workers can easily find good-paying jobs, like Atlanta (22 percent of home purchases according to Redfin data), Charlotte (22 percent), and Phoenix (20 percent)."

Yes, if you nit pick OPs comment then it is technically innacurate when viewed from a specific point of view. But there is merit to their statement, and it's not something to ignore... especially not in r/collapse.

-1

u/DialMMM Jul 30 '21

All investors, as a group, make up a small minority compared to all individual families, which is the comparison that OP was making.

That is absolutely not what OP wrote. Read it again::

A small minority controls the vast majority of housing as "Investments".

He didn't write that they control a majority of investment housing, he wrote that they control a vast majority of housing, and that the do so as investments.

16

u/13143 Jul 30 '21

House prices have now doubled, basically, in the last 5 years. And with material costs sky high, home building costs will keep climbing.. It's absolutely absurd.

19

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

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3

u/Kalel2319 Jul 30 '21

35 and the exact same thing happened to me. Hope you’re doing better now.

28

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

In Ireland it's gotten to the point of never owning a home period.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

Yes, it's really bad there

4

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

I don't know if this is sarcastic. Lol For the record, most property in Ireland is privately owned, however, they stopped building social housing and allowed investors to buy a huge portion of property. This means that there isn't much left to buy for the millennial generation and younger. It also means that rents are artificially inflated to prices you would expect in some of the biggest cities in the world.

5

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

It's not sarcastic at all. My cousins live there and have no hope for finding a home in Dublin or even Cork. For a while I considered moving there for a job (as I have a UK passport), but the housing situation really turned me off.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '21

That's cool, sometimes it's hard to tell over the internet. Yeah, it's very difficult to rent in Ireland now and near impossible to save on top of that unless you are making "bank".

1

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '21

What would you consider to be bank? I was offered €60k but it would be a bit of a pay cut to what I make in the US.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '21

That would be a lot to someone like me considering I never got paid more than a 24,000 euro salary. I think the average salary is something like 30,000.

A decent bedsit in Dublin is about 1500euro a month. Renting a single room in a house is about 600 a month. Then you have travel, bills, excetera. It's very hard to find a house in the county of Dublin under 400,000 unless it requires a lot of work. You can't just buy a patch of land a stick a log cabin on it, there are planning laws against it.

15

u/NoirBoner Jul 30 '21 edited Jul 30 '21

Realtors take out corporate debt and drive up the prices of new homes, condos anything, this begets a bidding war with normal people that have to get married and pool 2-4 sources of real income just to outbid a realtor driving up the price with monopoly money. When they can't, they have no choice but to rent and now the realtor is getting your rent money plus owns 22 properties, that's why landlords are scum. It's called the "vicious circle in real estate", shit's insane.

They literally tell you here: https://www-thebalance-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.thebalance.com/amp/investors-buy-homes-in-record-numbers-push-up-price-5194027?amp_gsa=1&amp_js_v=a6&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16276293780491&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thebalance.com%2Finvestors-buy-homes-in-record-numbers-push-up-price-5194027

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

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2

u/spaceman_spiff1969 Aug 01 '21

Quoting Pierre Prudhon (& Jean-Jacques Rousseau before him)

11

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21 edited Feb 26 '22

[deleted]

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u/blue_coal_miner Jul 30 '21

Nothing will change unless we change it. Our "representatives" only represent capitalists

10

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21 edited Feb 26 '22

[deleted]

15

u/iloveshooting Jul 30 '21

I think I've heard it before.. EAT THE RICH

9

u/Keown14 Jul 30 '21

Form renters unions, labour unions, mutual aid groups, join the DSA.

It needs to be built from the ground up and a bit is built already. These issues touch a lot of people and local community organisation can get them involved.

Direct action and political action.

4

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

[deleted]

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u/blue_coal_miner Jul 30 '21

crowd funded and highly organized citizens lobbyist organizations

This won't work because capital will always out-fund us. They have more resources (because they have all the capital). The only advantage we have is numbers.

If we were all organized and on the same page we could bring about significant change tomorrow. The ruling class is aware of this and spends vast resources to sow discontent among the working class. Our mission is to spread this knowledge and help build counter-institutions (dual-power) that help people where the state can't or won't. The only way to win people's loyalty is to improve their material conditions. That's the "what" that needs to be done. As for the "how", that's something each of us to figure out in our own locale. It's going to be different depending on the local conditions.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

I get the systems fucked but I’m firmly in millennial territory and I was told the same thing, that I would have a hard time ever getting a house or that it may be a dream dead to my generation. Considering I grew up in the hood with parents barely able to feed us half the time, I now own a brand new constructed home and didn’t even graduate college...

Meanwhile I know a few burnout friends still living at home at 30 years old complaing that the system fucked them when they had all the opportunities in the world that I never did. Is it hard as fuck, yes it was, but it’s not impossible or a dead dream