Recent searches
Search options
I feel like probably 90% of the bad things about capitalism come directly from treating houses as investments and not places where people live
once someone starts to seriously think about "property values" they're going to turn into a huge piece of shit who is going to support the most fucked up public policies imaginable
do people become more conservative with age? no they become more conservative when they buy a house and start worrying about if black people minding their own business is going to fuck with their property values
an event I have burned into my brain from when I was like 12 is my stepmom throwing a fit because some black family moved into her condominium complex
according to her this was totes not about her being racist (I have serious doubts about that ofc) but because she was afraid the banks were trying to block bust her precious neighborhood
anyway ever since then I've realized home ownership takes people to some really fucked up places
@waitworry Yes, and this is precisely the point. Having a massive class of people living in permanent tenancy was a great way to have the preconditions for communist sympathy. A socialized mortgage system designed to let lots of "the right people" have their own little patch produced a middle class invested in the status quo as a matter of course. Of course, now that US politics no longer requires that, home ownership is slipping away.
@roadriverrail @waitworry it's amazing that homeownership immediately became an unattainable goal the second the Berlin Wall fell.
capitalism abhors competition, after all.
@AmyZenunim @waitworry Hm...I'm not quite sure about that timing. The median home price was on a pretty linear growth from the 70s the late 90s. Anecdotally, I don't remember cost of housing being a major topic of conversation through much of the 90s. The slope really goes nuts somewhere around 2000.
@roadriverrail @AmyZenunim @waitworry maybe home price was on linear growth but compare that to real wages
@psychictides @AmyZenunim @waitworry Comparing a historical nominal value to a historical real value doesn't make sense.
@roadriverrail @AmyZenunim @waitworry so what I mean is that although home prices didn’t spike in the 1980s, real wages became depressed and never recovered, so home prices actually did spike because housing became less affordable as real wages became more worthless
@psychictides @AmyZenunim @waitworry At least according to official statistics, real wages did fall in the early 80s (I'd guess a mixture of inflation and the anti-union practices) but had recovered by the late 80s. Since their peak in the late 70s, they've been relatively flat. But nominal increasing median home prices isn't a comparison; we'd need *real* median home prices. 1/2
@psychictides @AmyZenunim @waitworry Please understand I agree with your statement in a more abstract sense, yes, housing prices have likely risen relative to real wages. My only disagreement is about timing. I don't believe it was connected strongly to the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially since foreign policy circles saw that as dramatic but not the end of communism; the coup against Gorbachev wouldn't come for another 2 years and could have kicked the can down the road a decade. 2/2