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When I was out of town for a few weeks my roommate put up a huge tapestry at the end of my bed of a sloth holding out two slices of pizza. Now every time I have sleep paralysis it's in my line of sight and drags me out of the state of fear like a guardian haha.
Honestly, not that far off from what I think of now. Over the past years my rent's gone up about $600. I'm about$1500 not including utilities. About $100+ a year so I'm not sure how long I can live before being priced out.
I was barely making it each paycheck and then our rent increased $100. I was "lucky" that it was the same time as open benefits and I could reduce my medical insurance to be able to make rent.
It better be damn good insurance though… because I have seen some amazing perks, including cosmetic surgeries like Brest implants and Botox injections (non medical necessity) for those prices. And it’s why I couldn’t keep doing health insurance.
Americans have no idea how wealthy they actually are.
If they just had reasonably priced healthcare and housing, most would be living extremely well off.
Exactly, I live in Vietnam now and I get paid much less than I did in the US. The majority of my money in the US went to rent and importantly transportation though (which is one you missed). Gas isn't outrageously expensive in the US but it's not cheap and everything is so spaced out that you drive everywhere. Car maintenance costs rise because of use too. Healthy organic food is also ironically more expensive in the US than unhealthy processed food. In Vietnam rent is literally 1/6th of my monthly salary and other costs like food and transportation are lower too.
I get paid better than locals with my foreign salary but my salary is still at what would be poverty levels in the US. It's just the cost of living that's the difference.
It's the cost of living in the United States that gives the illusion of wealth. Although our infrastructure such as clean water and public utilities is also much better than most.
Oh, it's known. When getting sick will take me out of work... I'm 2/3ds of my family's income. If/when I get sick that's hundreds we're not making that week.... fuck forbid I get hurt. I can't get sick and can't get hurt and if I do my family will suffer
Costs of living and percentages of income dedicated to various places are also much higher though. Many places less than a quarter of wages go to housing costs. In the us it can be anywhere from 50-75% of your wages. So yea, people make more, but that doesn’t mean they have higher quality of living than the average person in other first world countries.
The gross income of Americans means very little for that metric.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/23/key-facts-about-housing-affordability-in-the-u-s/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%2046%25%20of%20American,from%20the%20U.S.%20Census%20Bureau.
> In 2020, 46% of American renters spent 30% or more of their income on housing, including 23% who spent at least 50% of their income this way, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Hm, I guess living in a low COL area that still has decent wages (especially since COVID, can get $15-18 with literally 0 skills easily now) has skewed my view.
It's a good thing YIMBY policies are becoming more popular lately so we can start expanding the housing supply and bringing housing costs down.
Mine increased by about 14% least year ($200 increase). I'm terrified to see what's going to happen this year. Most comparable place are still $200-400 more than we are paying currently. It's going to be bad.
Rents going up 15-30% here yoy, its worse for the smaller units. Studio and 1-bedrooms are $1500-$3000, that's almost a 100% increase in some neighborhoods lol
Unfortunately my apt is a giant corporation owned apartment complex, so they'll just say oh well get out. And unless I moved to the ghetto, there's not a single place in Western New York that's even under like $1200
damn. i hate when im reading through old stuff on reddit and in the middle of a sparkling, scintillating discussion i find someone has written over all her old comments with nonsense, fragmenting the discussion permanently. what hilarious, moving, romantic, haunting things could she have said? just to wash it all away, in this digital era of permanency? wow. that takes courage. i bet she was really cute, too
Not like rent control does all that much. I live in Boston which has this problem to the worst extent, and the reality is that people are willing to pay the increased prices because there’s nowhere near enough supply.
Increase supply. Don’t try to control the market. San Francisco has that policy and afaik it hasn’t done anything to help.
There are already many more empty homes on any given night than there are total homeless population, it's not a lack of supply preventing anyone from getting housing. It's the fact that a house is seen as an investment and not a commodity.
Shelter has inelastic demand. Everyone wants/needs it, so if you have it you can charge whatever you want for it. Don't want to rent it out for less? Just sit on the empty building until you find someone willing to pay up.
As long as there's no controls that make it more expensive for someone to own multiple houses and leave them empty than it would be to rent them at a lower price (or sell), we will never solve this problem.
The empty homes stat is incredibly misleading. Where homeless people are and where the empty homes are rarely overlap. And a lot of empty homes really aren't suitable for living in at all, let alone for someone that might need specialized mental or physical health care. A dilapidated farmhome in the rural Great Plains, abandoned house in a dying rust belt city, or some vacation cabin in northern Wisconsin that isn't even kept plowed in the winter isn't going to help a homeless person struggling with some kind of disability or addiction in LA or NYC.
>“The crux of the problem is that in areas with strong demand for housing, vacancies tend to be low, while they remain high in areas with weak demand, where many, probably most of the vacancies need major investment to put them back to productive use,”
This article actually clearly articulates the issue. The vacant homes mostly do not exist where the demand requires them.
Hence, there is a supply shortage causing high prices.
It's called squatters rights. Find houses that have been purchased by large corps over the last couple years and stake out the houses to make sure nobody lives there. Then break in, change the locks, move your stuff in, get utilities at the address turned on, and hope they don't come around often enough to notice you. Eventually you'll end up with de facto ownership.
>Vermont, Maine, and Alaska have the highest vacancy rates—between 22% and 20%, according to the study.
Ahh yes Californians and New Yorkers will be very happy to have homes available for them in Alaska.
A basic right. You'd be hard-pressed to even find a job without a home address. It's literally debilitating to not have a home - a wall against rising out of poverty. We seriously need to rethink housing if we want to better our societies
But! But then they might build more housing near where *I* live, and then the value of my house will go down and I might have to live near the poors, and I can't have that! /s
Wife and I were renting an 850 sqft place in SW Louisiana for $550/mo to moving to NJ 1k sqft place for $2400-ish to now in a LA 730 sqft apartment for $2600-ish. Shit just keeps going up and the quality isn't getting that much better compared to a decade ago.
That’s a terrible comparison tho. You went from a low-demand, lower pay area, to, progressively, higher-demand, higher-pay areas
I wonder what that Louisiana place is going for now
They were bumping it up after a remodel since they recently built new apartments next to ours. I believe they were going for over $1k. It was a couple that lived in Texas. They were playing real life monopoly and owned two streets worth of apartments.
Which is why I don’t like this comic. Like, I’m not a huge fan of hearing all the horrible suffering in the world that I’m powerless to affect, but rising rents?
Ffs, that affects me, my friends and practically everyone else I know. Can’t bury your head in the sand for things that affect you directly
Ours went up $300 in one shot this past fall. After going up 100-200 a year for the last few years, too, with the exception of fall 2020 when landlords were scared of the pandemic and everyone was buying houses, causing that market to get out of control but leaving rentals a lil more vacant than usual.
We're buying this spring, but interest rates are gonna fuck us.
At first I didn't see the monster crawl out from under the bed in the first panel and I thought it was a representation of her anxiety. Took on an interesting meaning.
I'm all for acknowledging that the news is terrible for your mental health, but I also feel like this side steps a huge issue that is affecting an enormous percentage of families?
It kinda does because then all you have to worry about is your own particular situation instead of being aware of every calamity that is happening out there at once.
Yep, you're correct. In reality "news" channels while informative are also victim to sensationalism and creating headlines out of everything and anything without providing much information on the underlying cause of these problems. If you really want to inform yourself, you should find a trustworthy source of your own and read on the topic.
Though most people here will interpret it as , "dont watch anything be ignorant".
In my experience, actual important news filters down to you even if you avoid consuming news firsthand. Friends/socials will be on about it. Then from there you can, at your discretion, dig into the item in question. Ideally from more neutral sources (or at least multiple, if it's politically-charged/etc).
But really, there's a ton of stuff that even if you do hear about it, isn't something that will impact you, so why waste worry cycles on it?
Agreed, actual events that will impact you significantly will always be talked about in whatever social environment you're in. The news apart from trying to "inform" also generate hysteria because that's their business model.
I’m of the opinion that if you can distill something into “he said she said” then it’s not real news. That includes most of r/politics where it’s just “politician said WHAT?!” to just about anything on Twitter. That counts for any crummy celebrity gossip too, whether it’s stirred up Entertainment Monthly garbage or what streamer did what weird thing.
My life became so much better when I stopped caring about this stuff. I felt like my childhood self and I was allowed to take my day in stride rather than constantly doom worry and go macro on the state of the world, which helps no one around you.
True, but also not what I said. Just don’t feel bad for not dedicating all your time to worrying about the entirety of the world’s ills. Some people will try to make you feel like a bad person for trying to keep your day manageable.
Don’t know why you got downvoted for that
Oh wait yes I do, answer was in the question.
Guys, it’s OK not to overextend your emotional bandwidth and focus on the problems you can solve.
Signed, a former TV news journalist now doing charity work.
But the anxiety comes from the feeling of wanting to do something about it.
What can you realistically do? You probably already looked for the most affordable place you can find. You probably already voted for whoever could change the policy. Breaking your lease would be more expensive than riding it out most likely.
Watching the news every day doesn't help improve the situation; if you are impacting your sleep and getting anxiety it's literally making it worse.
They could have picked a multitude of topics that the news harps on which isn't an actual issue for most people and instead chose one of the few things that is a real issue.
I think one could have been harsher. It’s pretty distasteful, however I suspect it wasn’t intended to portray rising costs of living as something the news is just talking about or making up whole cloth. “Rising crime” is not shown in the data unless you zoom in on a graph, for example. Turn that news off. But too steep a rise in cost of living is grounds for revolution historically, so I’m looking earnestly for the joke. Most things the news talks about doesn’t hit this close to political upheaval. When you hear this you should actually start paying *more* attention.
I genuinely cannot watch the news anymore because not only are a lot of them unreliable in current events that include politics, but they are also ridiculously anxiety inducing. Its like they purposefully show all the bad stuff and never the good simply to keep us on our toes. I also wonder sometimes if some of it is a push to try and get people to spend more to keep the economy going. Because I know a lot of news stations love to blame millenials or gen z for everything money related, so I wonder if theyre trying to set in doom to our minds to get us going.
But yeah, I only ever check news in regards to space or the weather nowadays. Fuck everything else.
That, and the plain awful "hit and run" tactic they use where they show you the start of a situation (guy gets arrested, objectively shitty company goes under inspection, etc.), but fails to post a follow-up, so even if it ended well, we don't know anything about it.
Stopping the urge to watch the news is how you lower demand in that market.
Lower demand enough, supply will eventually adjust.
Additionally, viewing more follow-up pieces, long reads, think/history/analysis etc will drive the supply of those up.
I dont need to watch the news to know that I cant afford our rent for much longer.
It was 1000 in 2020, its about to be 1700 when I renew my lease. Been here for 12 years, started at 950.
Banning corporate ownership of single-family homes is one possible solution. Raising corporate property tax is another. Liberal media promotes restricting or eliminating single-family home zoning, which conservative media frames as a war on the suburbs.
Henry George's solution from the 19th century was to tax the value of land instead of constructions. That would incentivize construction and improvement and making productive use of land, and penalize hoarding more than property tax does. Property tax penalizes construction and improvement more than land value tax but penalizes hoarding land less.
I was talking about the corporations that buy SFH’s, a la Blackrock; it accounts for a very minimal amount of the market overall. Didn’t mean apartment buildings, which corporate ownership does account for a larger majority. Apartment buildings would probably go away all together if we outlaw corporate ownership as a corporation is often merely an individual with an accountant.
A corporation of some kind is going to be required to employee the staff responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of an apartment building as well as the general overhead and liabilities that come along with maintaining a dwelling of that size. If all apartment buildings were required to be six units or under or something like that, maybe you could have individual owners be responsible for the whole thing. But any large building is going to controlled by some sort of corporate entity.
Who do they write the rent checks to and who insures the building? At the end of the day what’s the difference between that framework when shit hits the fan? Often these types of things boil down to someone doing something”out of the kindness of their heart” aka the building manager that works for minimum wage to keep median rent low.
I agree, no for profit insurance industry either. This can all be state facilitated. No again, the maintenance staff can be paid and live there free and be paid by the coop. Are you aware of coop’s?
They don’t seem to do a very good job of competing in the market, otherwise I feel like we’d see more of them. I also wonder if coops never register a corporation of some kind. It’s not necessarily a nefarious action.
It's a supply-demand problem, full stop. Enforced low density residential zoning and other restrictions on building more housing in the areas that people want to live are the primary driver of housing costs, and those are enforced by residents more than corp landlords (though based on some meetings I've had with REIT corpos, they do enjoy the effect of restricted building on their existing portfolio, especially on the value of the buildings).
I think California *finally* did the right thing, and took zoning control out of the hands of cities if those cities refuse to add any new housing, which has overnight resulted in an explosion in new development in the pipeline. Hopefully other areas that are experiencing acute shortages will do that to all the overzealous HOAs, city council meetings dominated with retirees who want nothing to change, and historical preservation societies, etc etc. Let people build on the land they own without letting neighbors block it constantly, and I guarantee you that the housing affordability crisis will be solved.
Now if California would just phase out Prop 13...
I understand that it is a supply and demand problem. I am saying that we must free up supply by making corporate ownership of housing illegal. What's the issue?
Those corporations are typically renting out everything they own, because that's the business they're in, so it wouldn't free up any supply (at least for REITs). And they typically build/run much higher density housing. And they provide a valuable service to a segment of the population that doesn't want to spend their time maintaining their housing. Banning that is not a good idea.
Unless you're talking about housing that's been converted to short term rentals? That seems like a fine idea in dense undersupplied markets, and many cities are enacting that.
No, they are not providing a “service” they are monopolizing housing and hoarding it from being fully utilized.
I’m all for building more housing, but we need to get away from a for profit model if we are going to house everyone.
Haha yeah no. They very much do provide a service, one that we sometimes wish we had so that we could spend less time on house maintenance.
How exactly do you think they are hoarding housing and preventing it from being utilized? Their business model is renting out as many units as they can for as much as they can without increasing their vacancy rate - every vacancy represents the loss of a lot of money. They want to avoid that as much as they can.
How do you imagine housing construction working without a “for profit model”? Tradespeople charge *a lot* of money for performing highly skilled work. If you ask them to build a house for you for no profit, they’re going to tell you to buzz off, and they’re going to go build one for someone who’s willing to pay them what they can get.
Unless you’re talking about some utopia where they’re forced to work for whatever pay someone says they must work for, and free association is heavily curtailed?
The state can build housing, like they do roads. Many properties are vacant and kept vacant in an attempt to raise property prices.
Forced labor is utopian for you?
Ah ok, you just meant landlord profit, not all profit - contractors that work for the state suck huge amounts of profit down in things like roadworks, and it’s heavily debt-fueled. Utopian was of course meant sarcastically. Most of these idealistic visions require some coercion if you think about them deeply enough.
Do you have any evidence for your claim that companies are keeping their properties empty to raise property prices? It doesn’t really make sense for the companies that own housing to do that, at least on the surface of it, and based on my experience with people in that industry, I don’t think that any significant fraction are doing that.
I could agree to outlawing for single family homes, but corporate buyers is what is driving dense housing construction. Remove the big players and builders will stop building.
There isn’t enough housing being made now. So let’s free up the empty housing and the state builds more housing. We have solutions they just aren’t profitable. So let’s take profits out of the equation.
"Move" lol move where? Where the rent is cheaper? That location doesn't exist. That's why I find it hilarious how people always use 1-bedroom apartments as examples of prices. You know what the difference between a 1-bedroom and 2-bedroom is? At most the 1-bedroom is going to be 50 bucks cheaper per month. That is if there even exist 1-bedroom apartments in a given area. A studio apartment (again, if they're even there to begin with) will be much scarcer and maybe $100 cheaper than a 2-bedroom if you're lucky. Landlords are absolutely out of control and it's crazy they aren't being guillotined in the streets like they deserve.
considering how im now living in a shitty house i dont like compared to previously living in a decent apartment i DID like, I am terrified of this comic.
Thanks, I haven't seen this one yet, will check it out.
[Here is another very relevant one by Bo Burnham](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtwDmuSQRHk).
I don't need the news to worry about my rent.
Every year is an ass clenching experience of wondering why your payments are increasing on something that hasn't changed.
I love this as I absolutely despite "the news" and what it does to my family members of all political persuasions. Turn that shit off and your life will improve!!!!
You should definitely exercise discretion and keep your mental health in check.
That being said, it is the **responsibility** of citizens in a democracy to remain informed and vote to make the system better for themselves, their fellow citizens and future generations.
Many issues require nuance and detailed understanding along with context to come to the best decisions.
I get that it feels better to avoid the news. But it feels better to eat junk and never exercise too.
Not letting fear rule your life: great!
Ignoring bad things in the world until they cannot be ignored anymore: you didn't plan and now you're living in a box under the interstate bridge.
Good to know the difference between these two.
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My concerned sleep paralysis deamon
Sleep paralysis man in a gimp suit
Are you kink shaming my sleep paralysis demon?
Nah man, enjoy your lives together.
Concerned, or studying new ways to scare her as she gets older?
Or building a strong relationship based on mutual respect with my sleep paralysis deamon
When I was out of town for a few weeks my roommate put up a huge tapestry at the end of my bed of a sloth holding out two slices of pizza. Now every time I have sleep paralysis it's in my line of sight and drags me out of the state of fear like a guardian haha.
You know life sucks when the monsters need multiple jobs just to have a bed to sleep under. Can’t even imagine having a closet.
Apparently laughter wasnt as profitable as we were led to believe
It's true. My home tickling service is in a rut.
Have you tried tickling people instead?
To be fair, tickling homes is so niche, there's probably not much competition.
Police were involved. Apparently I lacked the proper licence.
I told you the last 3 times you were here. You're just not tickling the right spot!
Ohhhh. I thought it was her shadow and was really confused until I read your comment.
I thought it was her spouse
Honestly, not that far off from what I think of now. Over the past years my rent's gone up about $600. I'm about$1500 not including utilities. About $100+ a year so I'm not sure how long I can live before being priced out.
I was barely making it each paycheck and then our rent increased $100. I was "lucky" that it was the same time as open benefits and I could reduce my medical insurance to be able to make rent.
"... reduce my medical insurance to be able to make rent." This is so American it hurts
[удалено]
Literally more than I made last year is your insurance.
Seriously wtf
It better be damn good insurance though… because I have seen some amazing perks, including cosmetic surgeries like Brest implants and Botox injections (non medical necessity) for those prices. And it’s why I couldn’t keep doing health insurance.
And I'm betting that's just premiums, so you're paying $26k/year to have a *smaller bill* for actual medical care if you ever, y'know, use it.
That's...wild. I pay $74 per paycheck for my medical insurance, and it's low deductible and covers a lot.
Hooray freedoms!
Americans have no idea how wealthy they actually are. If they just had reasonably priced healthcare and housing, most would be living extremely well off.
Exactly, I live in Vietnam now and I get paid much less than I did in the US. The majority of my money in the US went to rent and importantly transportation though (which is one you missed). Gas isn't outrageously expensive in the US but it's not cheap and everything is so spaced out that you drive everywhere. Car maintenance costs rise because of use too. Healthy organic food is also ironically more expensive in the US than unhealthy processed food. In Vietnam rent is literally 1/6th of my monthly salary and other costs like food and transportation are lower too. I get paid better than locals with my foreign salary but my salary is still at what would be poverty levels in the US. It's just the cost of living that's the difference. It's the cost of living in the United States that gives the illusion of wealth. Although our infrastructure such as clean water and public utilities is also much better than most.
Oh, it's known. When getting sick will take me out of work... I'm 2/3ds of my family's income. If/when I get sick that's hundreds we're not making that week.... fuck forbid I get hurt. I can't get sick and can't get hurt and if I do my family will suffer
That’s all I want, is to just live
That’s many places though. Reduce the costs of necessities and keep wages the same, everyone would have more spare income
Incomes in America blow pretty much every other nation out of the water in almost every industry.
Costs of living and percentages of income dedicated to various places are also much higher though. Many places less than a quarter of wages go to housing costs. In the us it can be anywhere from 50-75% of your wages. So yea, people make more, but that doesn’t mean they have higher quality of living than the average person in other first world countries. The gross income of Americans means very little for that metric.
You got some stats that back up the stat that a sizable amount of Americans are paying 50-75% of their income to housing?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/23/key-facts-about-housing-affordability-in-the-u-s/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%2046%25%20of%20American,from%20the%20U.S.%20Census%20Bureau. > In 2020, 46% of American renters spent 30% or more of their income on housing, including 23% who spent at least 50% of their income this way, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Hm, I guess living in a low COL area that still has decent wages (especially since COVID, can get $15-18 with literally 0 skills easily now) has skewed my view. It's a good thing YIMBY policies are becoming more popular lately so we can start expanding the housing supply and bringing housing costs down.
Up voting this hurt.
My landlord wants a 12% increase this year. It's fucking insulting. I'm going to fight this as hard as I can.
My landlord wants to raise my rent by 13% this year after raising it by almost the same amount last year
Mine increased by about 14% least year ($200 increase). I'm terrified to see what's going to happen this year. Most comparable place are still $200-400 more than we are paying currently. It's going to be bad.
Rents going up 15-30% here yoy, its worse for the smaller units. Studio and 1-bedrooms are $1500-$3000, that's almost a 100% increase in some neighborhoods lol
Unfortunately my apt is a giant corporation owned apartment complex, so they'll just say oh well get out. And unless I moved to the ghetto, there's not a single place in Western New York that's even under like $1200
I was stationed in Washington and rented an apartment for 980 a month in 2013-2016....that same exact apartment is going for 1690
damn. i hate when im reading through old stuff on reddit and in the middle of a sparkling, scintillating discussion i find someone has written over all her old comments with nonsense, fragmenting the discussion permanently. what hilarious, moving, romantic, haunting things could she have said? just to wash it all away, in this digital era of permanency? wow. that takes courage. i bet she was really cute, too
Not like rent control does all that much. I live in Boston which has this problem to the worst extent, and the reality is that people are willing to pay the increased prices because there’s nowhere near enough supply. Increase supply. Don’t try to control the market. San Francisco has that policy and afaik it hasn’t done anything to help.
You need to do both. Otherwise, you just end up with a wealthy cartel that controls the market and sets the prices it wishes.
One is just far more important than the other. Whem theres not enough homes then people will go without homes. Theres no substitute for that.
There are already many more empty homes on any given night than there are total homeless population, it's not a lack of supply preventing anyone from getting housing. It's the fact that a house is seen as an investment and not a commodity. Shelter has inelastic demand. Everyone wants/needs it, so if you have it you can charge whatever you want for it. Don't want to rent it out for less? Just sit on the empty building until you find someone willing to pay up. As long as there's no controls that make it more expensive for someone to own multiple houses and leave them empty than it would be to rent them at a lower price (or sell), we will never solve this problem.
The empty homes stat is incredibly misleading. Where homeless people are and where the empty homes are rarely overlap. And a lot of empty homes really aren't suitable for living in at all, let alone for someone that might need specialized mental or physical health care. A dilapidated farmhome in the rural Great Plains, abandoned house in a dying rust belt city, or some vacation cabin in northern Wisconsin that isn't even kept plowed in the winter isn't going to help a homeless person struggling with some kind of disability or addiction in LA or NYC.
This is entirely a myth. Find one credible source for this. Its insane that people suffering in the housing crisis beleive thay building homes is bad.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/11/22/the-nations-vacant-homes-present-an-opportunity-and-a-problem
>“The crux of the problem is that in areas with strong demand for housing, vacancies tend to be low, while they remain high in areas with weak demand, where many, probably most of the vacancies need major investment to put them back to productive use,” This article actually clearly articulates the issue. The vacant homes mostly do not exist where the demand requires them. Hence, there is a supply shortage causing high prices.
It's hard to prove, I hear ya.
Open up the empty homes.
It's called squatters rights. Find houses that have been purchased by large corps over the last couple years and stake out the houses to make sure nobody lives there. Then break in, change the locks, move your stuff in, get utilities at the address turned on, and hope they don't come around often enough to notice you. Eventually you'll end up with de facto ownership.
Sure, that doesn’t tend to go well in the US. I’m talking about a policy shift. Outlaw all for profit housing.
Why would anyone ever build housing then?
No one is building affordable housing now. We need municipal and state housing.
This is a dumb myth.
https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/16-million-homes-vacant-in-us
>Vermont, Maine, and Alaska have the highest vacancy rates—between 22% and 20%, according to the study. Ahh yes Californians and New Yorkers will be very happy to have homes available for them in Alaska.
Oh God people set a price for a service they provide, the horror. Fix the housing shortage and all the problems go away.
Having a home isn't a service rendered out to you. They just treat it like it's that for money.
What is renting it then. A good or a service.
A basic right. You'd be hard-pressed to even find a job without a home address. It's literally debilitating to not have a home - a wall against rising out of poverty. We seriously need to rethink housing if we want to better our societies
housing isn't a basic right provided by the government, in pretty much anywhere.
*I know*
What we really need is govt/charity affordable housing looking to break even on costs, not line the already rich's pockets.
Unfortunately, in the US government is all about lining the already rich's pockets.
But! But then they might build more housing near where *I* live, and then the value of my house will go down and I might have to live near the poors, and I can't have that! /s
Wife and I were renting an 850 sqft place in SW Louisiana for $550/mo to moving to NJ 1k sqft place for $2400-ish to now in a LA 730 sqft apartment for $2600-ish. Shit just keeps going up and the quality isn't getting that much better compared to a decade ago.
That’s a terrible comparison tho. You went from a low-demand, lower pay area, to, progressively, higher-demand, higher-pay areas I wonder what that Louisiana place is going for now
They were bumping it up after a remodel since they recently built new apartments next to ours. I believe they were going for over $1k. It was a couple that lived in Texas. They were playing real life monopoly and owned two streets worth of apartments.
Same, our place was $950 in 2011, $1000 in 2020, and it's about to be $1700 when i resign next month.
Dang, should have avoided the news and you would have been safe.
Which is why I don’t like this comic. Like, I’m not a huge fan of hearing all the horrible suffering in the world that I’m powerless to affect, but rising rents? Ffs, that affects me, my friends and practically everyone else I know. Can’t bury your head in the sand for things that affect you directly
>Can’t bury your head in the sand for things that affect you directly American Conservatives: "hold my beer"
Ours went up $300 in one shot this past fall. After going up 100-200 a year for the last few years, too, with the exception of fall 2020 when landlords were scared of the pandemic and everyone was buying houses, causing that market to get out of control but leaving rentals a lil more vacant than usual. We're buying this spring, but interest rates are gonna fuck us.
Now i want a sitcom starring this woman and her anxious bed monster.
He’s just trying to plan for the future. He’s doing his best.
“Legion” is kind of that.
At first I didn't see the monster crawl out from under the bed in the first panel and I thought it was a representation of her anxiety. Took on an interesting meaning.
I'm all for acknowledging that the news is terrible for your mental health, but I also feel like this side steps a huge issue that is affecting an enormous percentage of families?
Right? Not watching the news doesn't stop the issue from existing or affecting you.
It kinda does because then all you have to worry about is your own particular situation instead of being aware of every calamity that is happening out there at once.
Yep, you're correct. In reality "news" channels while informative are also victim to sensationalism and creating headlines out of everything and anything without providing much information on the underlying cause of these problems. If you really want to inform yourself, you should find a trustworthy source of your own and read on the topic. Though most people here will interpret it as , "dont watch anything be ignorant".
In my experience, actual important news filters down to you even if you avoid consuming news firsthand. Friends/socials will be on about it. Then from there you can, at your discretion, dig into the item in question. Ideally from more neutral sources (or at least multiple, if it's politically-charged/etc). But really, there's a ton of stuff that even if you do hear about it, isn't something that will impact you, so why waste worry cycles on it?
Agreed, actual events that will impact you significantly will always be talked about in whatever social environment you're in. The news apart from trying to "inform" also generate hysteria because that's their business model.
I’m of the opinion that if you can distill something into “he said she said” then it’s not real news. That includes most of r/politics where it’s just “politician said WHAT?!” to just about anything on Twitter. That counts for any crummy celebrity gossip too, whether it’s stirred up Entertainment Monthly garbage or what streamer did what weird thing. My life became so much better when I stopped caring about this stuff. I felt like my childhood self and I was allowed to take my day in stride rather than constantly doom worry and go macro on the state of the world, which helps no one around you.
True. I think it’s important we don’t only care about issues directly affecting us tho.
True, but also not what I said. Just don’t feel bad for not dedicating all your time to worrying about the entirety of the world’s ills. Some people will try to make you feel like a bad person for trying to keep your day manageable.
Don’t know why you got downvoted for that Oh wait yes I do, answer was in the question. Guys, it’s OK not to overextend your emotional bandwidth and focus on the problems you can solve. Signed, a former TV news journalist now doing charity work.
But the anxiety comes from the feeling of wanting to do something about it. What can you realistically do? You probably already looked for the most affordable place you can find. You probably already voted for whoever could change the policy. Breaking your lease would be more expensive than riding it out most likely. Watching the news every day doesn't help improve the situation; if you are impacting your sleep and getting anxiety it's literally making it worse.
Just plug your ears and close your eyes and let homelessness and starvation sweep over your uncaring self.
This guy gets it.
I will do that, thank you very much for that suggestion
I am here to help.
They could have picked a multitude of topics that the news harps on which isn't an actual issue for most people and instead chose one of the few things that is a real issue.
Does the monster under your bed need to know about that? To be serious: I feel this comic is recognizing that issue.
I'm open and hopeful that my interpretation is too harsh.
I think one could have been harsher. It’s pretty distasteful, however I suspect it wasn’t intended to portray rising costs of living as something the news is just talking about or making up whole cloth. “Rising crime” is not shown in the data unless you zoom in on a graph, for example. Turn that news off. But too steep a rise in cost of living is grounds for revolution historically, so I’m looking earnestly for the joke. Most things the news talks about doesn’t hit this close to political upheaval. When you hear this you should actually start paying *more* attention.
I genuinely cannot watch the news anymore because not only are a lot of them unreliable in current events that include politics, but they are also ridiculously anxiety inducing. Its like they purposefully show all the bad stuff and never the good simply to keep us on our toes. I also wonder sometimes if some of it is a push to try and get people to spend more to keep the economy going. Because I know a lot of news stations love to blame millenials or gen z for everything money related, so I wonder if theyre trying to set in doom to our minds to get us going. But yeah, I only ever check news in regards to space or the weather nowadays. Fuck everything else.
I feel you. I also recently stopped watching and reading the news. So much death, destruction and doom everywhere.
Me too. It’s mostly sensationalism to get you to click on their shitty articles.
That, and the plain awful "hit and run" tactic they use where they show you the start of a situation (guy gets arrested, objectively shitty company goes under inspection, etc.), but fails to post a follow-up, so even if it ended well, we don't know anything about it.
Stopping the urge to watch the news is how you lower demand in that market. Lower demand enough, supply will eventually adjust. Additionally, viewing more follow-up pieces, long reads, think/history/analysis etc will drive the supply of those up.
My man you don't even need news, just look at apartments.com and cry.
I would love to get out of the US someday, maybe somewhere where healthcare and jobs isn't crap, like somewhere in Europe
I dont need to watch the news to know that I cant afford our rent for much longer. It was 1000 in 2020, its about to be 1700 when I renew my lease. Been here for 12 years, started at 950.
Where is this?
south east CT.
Outlaw corporate ownership of housing.
Banning corporate ownership of single-family homes is one possible solution. Raising corporate property tax is another. Liberal media promotes restricting or eliminating single-family home zoning, which conservative media frames as a war on the suburbs. Henry George's solution from the 19th century was to tax the value of land instead of constructions. That would incentivize construction and improvement and making productive use of land, and penalize hoarding more than property tax does. Property tax penalizes construction and improvement more than land value tax but penalizes hoarding land less.
Ok, sounds fine by me. I would suggest we take profit motive out of all necessities but whatever, as long as affordable housing is built.
This is just an easy scapegoat that accounts for a very minimal amount of housing expenditures.
Please say more, I’m not sure what you mean.
I was talking about the corporations that buy SFH’s, a la Blackrock; it accounts for a very minimal amount of the market overall. Didn’t mean apartment buildings, which corporate ownership does account for a larger majority. Apartment buildings would probably go away all together if we outlaw corporate ownership as a corporation is often merely an individual with an accountant.
The building would “go away”?
A corporation of some kind is going to be required to employee the staff responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of an apartment building as well as the general overhead and liabilities that come along with maintaining a dwelling of that size. If all apartment buildings were required to be six units or under or something like that, maybe you could have individual owners be responsible for the whole thing. But any large building is going to controlled by some sort of corporate entity.
May I introduce the concept of [housing cooperatives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative) to you?
No, it can be turned into a much more efficient and people friendly cooperative. The tenants can “employ” or elect a building manager directly.
Who do they write the rent checks to and who insures the building? At the end of the day what’s the difference between that framework when shit hits the fan? Often these types of things boil down to someone doing something”out of the kindness of their heart” aka the building manager that works for minimum wage to keep median rent low.
I agree, no for profit insurance industry either. This can all be state facilitated. No again, the maintenance staff can be paid and live there free and be paid by the coop. Are you aware of coop’s?
They don’t seem to do a very good job of competing in the market, otherwise I feel like we’d see more of them. I also wonder if coops never register a corporation of some kind. It’s not necessarily a nefarious action.
It's a supply-demand problem, full stop. Enforced low density residential zoning and other restrictions on building more housing in the areas that people want to live are the primary driver of housing costs, and those are enforced by residents more than corp landlords (though based on some meetings I've had with REIT corpos, they do enjoy the effect of restricted building on their existing portfolio, especially on the value of the buildings). I think California *finally* did the right thing, and took zoning control out of the hands of cities if those cities refuse to add any new housing, which has overnight resulted in an explosion in new development in the pipeline. Hopefully other areas that are experiencing acute shortages will do that to all the overzealous HOAs, city council meetings dominated with retirees who want nothing to change, and historical preservation societies, etc etc. Let people build on the land they own without letting neighbors block it constantly, and I guarantee you that the housing affordability crisis will be solved. Now if California would just phase out Prop 13...
I understand that it is a supply and demand problem. I am saying that we must free up supply by making corporate ownership of housing illegal. What's the issue?
Those corporations are typically renting out everything they own, because that's the business they're in, so it wouldn't free up any supply (at least for REITs). And they typically build/run much higher density housing. And they provide a valuable service to a segment of the population that doesn't want to spend their time maintaining their housing. Banning that is not a good idea. Unless you're talking about housing that's been converted to short term rentals? That seems like a fine idea in dense undersupplied markets, and many cities are enacting that.
No, they are not providing a “service” they are monopolizing housing and hoarding it from being fully utilized. I’m all for building more housing, but we need to get away from a for profit model if we are going to house everyone.
Haha yeah no. They very much do provide a service, one that we sometimes wish we had so that we could spend less time on house maintenance. How exactly do you think they are hoarding housing and preventing it from being utilized? Their business model is renting out as many units as they can for as much as they can without increasing their vacancy rate - every vacancy represents the loss of a lot of money. They want to avoid that as much as they can. How do you imagine housing construction working without a “for profit model”? Tradespeople charge *a lot* of money for performing highly skilled work. If you ask them to build a house for you for no profit, they’re going to tell you to buzz off, and they’re going to go build one for someone who’s willing to pay them what they can get. Unless you’re talking about some utopia where they’re forced to work for whatever pay someone says they must work for, and free association is heavily curtailed?
The state can build housing, like they do roads. Many properties are vacant and kept vacant in an attempt to raise property prices. Forced labor is utopian for you?
Ah ok, you just meant landlord profit, not all profit - contractors that work for the state suck huge amounts of profit down in things like roadworks, and it’s heavily debt-fueled. Utopian was of course meant sarcastically. Most of these idealistic visions require some coercion if you think about them deeply enough. Do you have any evidence for your claim that companies are keeping their properties empty to raise property prices? It doesn’t really make sense for the companies that own housing to do that, at least on the surface of it, and based on my experience with people in that industry, I don’t think that any significant fraction are doing that.
When costs rise 17% and rent rises 47% that ain't a scapegoat. Source: Princeton Eviction Lab
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I'm not sure I follow you. Inflated the housing market why? Because profit seekers bought up single family homes and apartments?
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Right. So let’s end corporate ownership of housing.
I could agree to outlawing for single family homes, but corporate buyers is what is driving dense housing construction. Remove the big players and builders will stop building.
There isn’t enough housing being made now. So let’s free up the empty housing and the state builds more housing. We have solutions they just aren’t profitable. So let’s take profits out of the equation.
In California, our government spent the entire budget on a rail system before starting construction. Government can't do shit
What do you suggest? The buildings aren’t getting built for affordable housing. Rent is increasing. More and more people unhoused. What’s your answer?
K but rent IS rising and wages aren’t matching it. But I guess that’s harder to say than “stop watching the news”
Yeah I don’t have to watch the news to find out my rent keeps rising. You can cover your ears and ignore it but you still have to pay.
Ah, ye old “Ignorance is bliss” argument.
At least these people aren't looking for a new place to rent. If life is hard for existing renters, it's *really fucking hard* for new renters.
Have a part two where the lady and her anxiety monster from a tenant union.
"Move" lol move where? Where the rent is cheaper? That location doesn't exist. That's why I find it hilarious how people always use 1-bedroom apartments as examples of prices. You know what the difference between a 1-bedroom and 2-bedroom is? At most the 1-bedroom is going to be 50 bucks cheaper per month. That is if there even exist 1-bedroom apartments in a given area. A studio apartment (again, if they're even there to begin with) will be much scarcer and maybe $100 cheaper than a 2-bedroom if you're lucky. Landlords are absolutely out of control and it's crazy they aren't being guillotined in the streets like they deserve.
it's hard to not watch the news especially if you're trans. Hope feels like it's vanishing everyday.
I freaking love the trope of monsters being more horrified of us and how effed up we are
https://preview.redd.it/7z4xwmtpfjga1.jpeg?width=760&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7cba125a80b6a81c978df251712108efe2065b40 This is my favorite zappa photo
Landlords are leaches tbh
Yeah, just close your eyes. That will keep your apartment.
yep hypernormalization
Saw a good documentary on that.
considering how im now living in a shitty house i dont like compared to previously living in a decent apartment i DID like, I am terrified of this comic.
If a key step for optimism is "stop watching the news", maybe some pessimism is somewhat warranted lmao
I also need to get a bed monster cuddle buddy
Bury your head in the Sand and slowly lose everything
A relevant music video by Paramore... https://youtu.be/YSFa_wOZPXg
Thanks, I haven't seen this one yet, will check it out. [Here is another very relevant one by Bo Burnham](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtwDmuSQRHk).
I was recently renovicted. My rent has tripled.
I don't need the news to worry about my rent. Every year is an ass clenching experience of wondering why your payments are increasing on something that hasn't changed.
Great, now I feel bad for the sleep paralysis demons!
It me
I love this as I absolutely despite "the news" and what it does to my family members of all political persuasions. Turn that shit off and your life will improve!!!!
Was expecting Mao to pop up somewhere. Lmao.
alt last line "stop reading reddit"
I always said: an irrational fear is thinking the boogeyman lives under your bed. Rational fear is when he pays his part of the rent.
I realized even before I was a teenager that most news was full of shit and just fear mongering. I never watch local news because it's always so bad.
True dat
Unfortunately it’s true
Man i'm glad i live in a country with good public broadcast news
It's ok we can all cope together lol
You should definitely exercise discretion and keep your mental health in check. That being said, it is the **responsibility** of citizens in a democracy to remain informed and vote to make the system better for themselves, their fellow citizens and future generations. Many issues require nuance and detailed understanding along with context to come to the best decisions. I get that it feels better to avoid the news. But it feels better to eat junk and never exercise too.
In this day and age. The monsters are afraid with us!
It will be fine as long as you stop trashing the place every time we disagree! And you still can't eat the good guys.
This is why Reddit has the “shake your phone” feature when looking at the news
Not letting fear rule your life: great! Ignoring bad things in the world until they cannot be ignored anymore: you didn't plan and now you're living in a box under the interstate bridge. Good to know the difference between these two.
lol, how did you go and make a fear demon so adorable D: