This is Hardly a "Trend"

I don't care for articles like this one.

Realistically, few single women can ever afford a house, meaning a stick house on a lot, practically everywhere in the United States. That is because of sexism in the workplace and the outrageously inflated home prices in areas of the country where realtors, beginning in the mid-1970s, started jacking up the prices figuring all homeowners had two-incomes. That is why home prices are so totally out of whack. These "single" women typically had assets from a marriage and are either widowed or divorced, or else they are women who were born into privilege or were lucky enough to take jobs in the public sector and have careers of 20, 25, 30 years or more. Few women have "glamorous" careers where they can live a two-income lifestyle on one income. Most who do are married. Many single women have to shack up with men or take on roommates. They may have inherited a home from their parents. It is hardly satisfactory.

It's like the author doesn't truly understand that just because a handful of women are "becoming first-time home buyers" that there is any kind of trend at all. Virtually no woman alone can break into owning real estate. A man's income is essential for the vast majority of women to "own" a home. Period.
The women depicted are not typical of single women as a whole.

What homes single women can buy are either condos or manufactured housing (the latter I intend to do eventually, and I am in my sixties and never owned any real estate in my life), which are better than renting a place, but they aren't stick houses on a lot and don't hold their value as well. The article says as much about women "preferring" condos. That doesn't impress me in the least. The few who can afford a stick house on a lot are living in parts of the country where nobody wants to live. There is a reason homes in the midwest and deep South tend to be less expensive.

Nobody Can Afford a Stick House With Acreage

That is because real estate outfits back in the 1970s decided to exploit women's greater workforce participation by jacking up home prices to the point where it is completely unaffordable for most TWO-INCOME households.

It was all about lining these moguls' pockets, and not about the good of individuals, families, and communities.

Homeownership is now at the lowest rate it has been since 1967--48 YEARS.

Owning a home, meaning a stick house on a lot or acreage, has always been the cornerstone of the American Dream. It used to be one person could afford a house, whether or not that person was married and had a family, and if one had a spouse, that spouse could stay home with the kids. Single people could actually buy a house back then if they so desired, at least if they were men. Women still had a hell of a hard time back then getting credit.

But when women entered the labor force in far larger numbers in the 1970s, all of that changed. Real estate developers found a way to make a killing by jacking those housing costs up, because, after all, there were now TWO income earners, and they could "afford" to pay more. This effectively shut single people out of the housing market unless they bought condos or manufactured housing, neither of which is as desirable as a stick house on a plot of land. And because real estate ownership is the primary avenue of a financing a decent retirement, single people basically have to work until they die, especially if they are women.

And then, when unions were gutted and offshoring millions of jobs were encouraged by ruinous trade agreements passed by a corrupt Congress and White House, housing became more out of whack in price, but for the sliver of the top one percent, that was okay. All they had to do was buy out the people who could no longer afford to keep their homes and turn those places into rentals.

Can't afford rentals? Well, there are always camper trailers, tiny houses, tents along the river, and cardboard "homes" you can construct yourself. Or you can share a one-bedroom apartment with eight or ten other people, just like they do in the third world.

The third worldization of America is all but official.

Shanty Town

To read this sort of thing just burns my ass to a crisp.

Of course the well-to-do think glorified outhouses are the answer to "homelessness," but cynic that I am I KNOW this is the first step in forcing everybody except the very richest people into little one-room shacks that they would not own. It's an attempt to lower our expectations on what livable space really is while trying to use cover arguments like "helping the homeless" or "helping the environment" or "scaling back your lifestyle." This shit is going to be forced upon us so we can have the same "living standards" as those in third world countries.

The real problems here are the lack of jobs for everybody who wants a job and the outrageous cost of housing. It is NOT mentally healthy to live in a 100- or 200-square-foot space on a permanent basis. Just wait until entire families are forced into these.

I am reminded of this old ditty:




The rich will still have their palatial estates while they charge the rest of us a fortune to "live" in these shacks.

Forget THAT Nonsense

It was bad enough living in Reno in a 500-square-foot apartment as a single person without reading articles trying to sell us the concept of "micro-apartments" that are about half that size.

I have long lived in tiny spaces, or, in my current circumstance, being forced to live with relatives with no privacy to speak of, and it sucks big time.

I hope the project fails.

Disgusting

The day NYC's mayor Mike Bloomberg and his other billionaire ilk get rid of all their fancy mansions and penthouses and live in a jail cell-sized "living space" is the day he has any credibility on this issue.

I have lived in small spaces, and it is not fun or healthy to be forced to do it.

On those same lines, those assholes who peddled "tiny houses" as a "socially responsible" way to help the environment are just as bad as Bloomberg.

Tiny "living spaces" is what these people have in store for us. We would never have the opportunity to own our own places but be renters for our entire lives making somebody else rich.

I KNEW This Was Going to Happen

Feudalism is about to make a huge comeback:

In a similar spirit, apparently, Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) has proposed a solution to America’s foreclosure problem (i.e. there are too many of them) and its rental problem (i.e. prices are too high). We should, Reed says, simply put renters in some of the available foreclosed homes.

How about encouraging homeownership with houses below 100k in the vast majority of areas in the country?

I knew this was going to happen with the rich buying off everything, being the parasites that they are, and force everybody else to be renters.

The neolib in chief apparently thinks this is a good idea.

link

It Is Certainly a Record to Be Proud Of

Of course I am talking about the record number of households that are now financially underwater thanks to the outrageously overpriced real estate in the past decade. People were brainwashed to believe their homes were "investments" that would only appreciate rather than regard them as places to live.

The price of houses is still at least double what it should be in order to be in line with the average wages and salaries of working people. One shouldn't have to have two incomes in order to go into debt; in fact, one should be able to save enough money to pay cash for a place to live, like my parents did.

Something Drastic Needs to Be Done

regarding the housing/foreclosure crisis, but naturally Obama, being the neoliberal shill he is, doesn't plan to do anything constructive about it.

The problem of course is some years ago the banksters and their ilk began peddling the propaganda of buying houses as  "investments," instead of as  places to live, and therefore if one could buy at the "right time," the "owner" could sell it at some outrageously inflated price later on and thus pay for his or her retirement.  The trouble is it didn't take long for housing prices to become completely out of whack of what wages and salaries were.  It got to the point where even having two adults working fulltime would not pay the mortgage.

And why in the hell are people stuck with 30-year mortgages and in most cases never actually own their own houses?  In my parents' day, they saved until they could afford not just a down payment on a house, but they could be able to pay cash for a house outright.  We need to go back to those days where one average wage earner could save enough money to own a house free and clear.  Mobile homes don't count because most of the time one has to pay space rent.

Houses for $150,000 or more are way out of line for what jobs are paying for a single wage earner.  No house in the country, save for a tiny number of communities and those grotesque mansions or houses with significant acreage, should sell for more than $50,000 or $60,000 tops, including the lot.

I Am Really Surprised

entire communities can discriminate against children, but I suppose if mobile home parks can have age restrictions on residents, typically those 55 and older, then this is legal.

The Situation With the Section 8

housing applications in Georgia demonstrates just how bad the economic crisis is in this country, but our politicians seem hellbent on forcing people to sacrifice even more.

Here is a Clip

from The Ed Show about the Atlanta Section 8 housing scandal where thousands of applicants waited in the 90-degree heat and high humidity to get applications for housing these people may NEVER get:



All the applications were for was to get on a waiting list. There were NO housing units available.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the local housing authority began taking applications early today.

News Briefs

A dumb couple wastes a pile of money on an "apartment" which is not even half the size of dinky place.

For that money one could buy a much larger condo or manufactured home (and then some) in just about any place in the country, not to mention stick houses in the South and Midwest.

The Economy

The jobless rate continues to go through the roof.
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Speaking of roofs, this developer couldn't pick a worse time to build and peddle "high-end" apartments in a city which is losing people in droves, including probably yours truly in the very near future.

The Economy

While people who can are leaving Reno in droves, those who are homeless are finding it attractive for some damned reason.

Speaking of homelessness, "Hoovervilles" are making a comeback:

But the Hoovervilles are back.

A front-page article in Thursday's New York Times ("Cities Deal With a Surge in Shantytowns") describes the reemergence of itinerant encampments on the American cityscape. The most widely reported of these lies near Sacramento, California. About 125 people now reside in this Hooverville, in the capital city of America's richest and most populous state.

Yet the Hooverville is far more widespread than the media attention on the tent city near Sacramento implies. It has reemerged in Phoenix, Arizona; Olympia and Seattle, Washington; Reno, Nevada; Portland, Oregon; Nashville, Tennessee; St. Petersburg, Florida; and Fresno, California; among others.

People in these encampments live in tents, or else shacks built of old wood, scrap metal, cardboard and other waste. They live without running water, electricity, plumbing, or garbage removal.

Cities are trying to deal with the "problem," when in fact the "problem" could be fixed by drastically changing economic policies in this country. Unlike times of yore, more and more people in these shantytowns are not alcoholics or the mentally ill:

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

In Seattle, homeless residents in the city’s 100-person encampment call it Nickelsville, an unflattering reference to the mayor, Greg Nickels. A tent city in Sacramento prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to announce a plan Wednesday to shift the entire 125-person encampment to a nearby fairground. That came after a recent visit by “The Oprah Winfrey Show” set off such a news media stampede that some fed-up homeless people complained of overexposure and said they just wanted to be left alone.

The problem in Fresno is different in that it is both chronic and largely outside the national limelight. Homelessness here has long been fed by the ups and downs in seasonal and subsistence jobs in agriculture, but now the recession has cast a wider net and drawn in hundreds of the newly homeless — from hitchhikers to truck drivers to electricians.

“These are able-bodied folks that did day labor, at minimum wage or better, who were previously able to house themselves based on their income,” said Michael Stoops, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group based in Washington.

And in my neighborhood, people are leaving in droves because of no jobs. Many of these are from Mexico, and lots of them are returning there, while others are moving out of state because of no opportunities. Vacancies abound in rentals, but of course my landlord, who never paid into Social Security for the entire time he had the guesthouse (37 years), continues to charge ridiculous rent here. He won't be able to charge it if one or both of us tenants moves out.

Miscellaneous News

I can't believe the situation is so bad economically, people resort to turning their horses loose in the wild, where they will almost certainly die.
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A woman dies in a climbing accident on Mt. Shasta in California.
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For less than $100K, you can actually buy a house in the Bay Area.
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Phil Spector's lawyer doesn't have a lot of good things to say about his client.
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The WSWS

concludes its two-part series about the mortgage crisis.

It was a disaster waiting to happen, considering companies were slashing wages and salaries, outsourcing jobs whenever possible, and insourcing illegal labor to further depress the wage base:

Median home prices in the US have nearly doubled over the past ten years, from $109,000 in 1995 to $206,000 in 2005, outpacing the growth of the consumer price index by over 33 percent during this period. As median-priced homes have moved out of reach of median-income earners, homebuyers have sought to use riskier mortgage instruments to bridge the gap.

Despite the increase in prices, however, the past 15 years have seen a five percent increase in the home ownership rate. Considering that the median wage has been stagnant since 1999 and incomes of low-paid workers have been declining for decades, it would follow that this change has come about through increasing indebtedness.

Indeed, overall household indebtedness climbed drastically during the housing bubble, just as mortgage debt constituted a greater section of overall household debt. According to figures from the Federal Reserve, outstanding household debt as a percentage of disposable personal income grew from 88 percent in 1994 to 117 percent in 2004. The Washington Post reported that this statistic reached 126 percent in 2005—a 45 percent increase in the course of 11 years. According to a 2006 report in Harper’s Magazine, almost half of first-time home-buyers paid no money down on their mortgages in 2005.

"Homeowners," a misnomer if there ever was one, were and are cash poor.

Our Dictator Clearly Proved

he cares more about Wall Street than he cares about millions of homeowners.

After all, it was their fault they got into the mess they are in, and it is not the administration's fault for encouraging faulty lending practices, etc.

The Mortgage Crisis

has had major social costs, all in the reckless pursuit of more profits.

The Housing Boom

has gone bust, and therefore the economy isn't doing so great.

The Mortgage Industry

has engaged in practices that have left the housing market in a terrible mess.