Does your brother also want to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction (which probably drives up housing prices far more than Fannie or Freddie)?
They definitely drove up home prices. They definitely did not *just* drive up home prices.
Echoing 1 --- it sounds like your brother's somehow transferring a standard argument against the mortgage interest deduction (*) to Fannie and Freddie, which is odd. Their point was to help create a market in mortgages, thereby making banks more inclined to mortgage lending. This may have had a secondary effect of driving up housing prices. Of course, the same is true of, e.g., allowing houses to be used as seizable collateral for loans. On the other hand, the direct effect should have been to make house _ownership_, as opposed to renting, more accessible. I have never seen any credible econometric studies of the sizes of these effects.
Cosma - What was the asterisk for?
Whoops:
*: My father the economist's theory is that the real function of the mortgage interest deduction isn't economic but political; it helps create a class of people who think of themselves as property owners, and so supporters of property in general.
I'm giving all this "FHA loans drove up housing prices" the side eye, especially wrt the last bubble. FHA's typically have higher APR than conventional private loans, strict rules on documentation of income, loan to income ratios, limits on the size of the loan, limit to 80 percent of appraised value on a cashout refinance, can't be used for anything but a primary residence, etc. In this last bubble with private mortgages you had motherfuckers in the industry with products actually called "liar loans", people with 50K in income buying spec homes and running up total mortgage debts of like 6-10 times their income, and so on.
Fannie and Freddie drove up housing prices, sure, but that was moderate upward pressure on house prices, its not what caused the bubble. My impression is that their primary role in the bubble was was in backstopping a lot of shitty loans that the banking industry wall all too happy to dump on them. They were an important part of the shitty loan ecosystem.
But, you know, its not like they weren't exactly the kind of crummy institutions that our Capitalist Overlords wanted them to be.
FHA is different, I think. Fannie and Freddie were "government sponsored enterprises", a weird public-corporate hybrid that shouldn't exist in nature. Basically, the government tried to do a nice thing for the banking industry and the banking industry took it for a good, long joyride before just looting the thing outright.
Fannie and Freddie were (after 1970 or so) nominally private enterprises that were created by the government, and backed by an implicit, but not explicit, government guarantee that they wouldn't go under. Their purpose was to make it easier for banks to provide (conforming) mortgages to all kinds of different people, by buying up mortgages in the secondary market even when banks might have been reluctant to do so. This undoubtedly (indirectly) helped to drive up the price of homes but it was also a key underpinning of the middle class American Dream idea of home ownership, and, certainly historically, many many people were able to get home loans to purchase a house who before the New Deal would have been forever condemned to be renters. In some ways it's a subsidy (though not a direct one, since they were nominally private enterprises subject to special regulation) from taxpayers as a whole to middle and lower middle class people who wanted to buy homes. Also, both were run quite corruptly for a long time; both had large scale corporate scandals of the overreporting revenue/hidden corporate officer embezzlement kind in the past 25 years or so.
I don't know a good economic analysis of their actual overall effects, or if the argument is that the private mortgage market would (or would at some particular point in the past) done an equally good job of providing home ownership, but if you think it's a reasonable thing for government policy to favor everyone from the lower middle class to the very wealthy to own, rather than rent, their homes (and I do think there are good reasons to think that this is good government policy) the US has been very successful at getting a large portion of its population to own homes, though less of an outlier in the past 30 years or so compared to other industrialized countries, though the US has also had substantially higher population growth and so you need to finance more houses just to keep percentage home ownership the same. I doubt they've been particularly responsible for driving up house prices astronomically, especially since the US (still) has quite cheap housing relative to the rest of the rich world.
I don't know why I just wasted time as a non-expert typing into a computer everything I know about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Beats working, I guess.
Yeah, I endorse what other folks said already - F&F, and the mortgage interest deduction, caused housing to be a bit cheaper so people bought a bit more - but that's not sufficient to cause a bubble or even the sort of price inflation we saw in medicine.
The run-up on housing prices must have something to do with supply restrictions in high-wage areas. I don't know about education. Medicine's a weird case where insurers insulate consumers almost completely from costs (which doesn't make it any less shitty to be in the weird edge case), and hospitals often have something like monopoly pricing power, which combine to produce spectacularly high prices. Subsidies are again probably a pretty minor factor by comparison. It's not even a real market.
Most importantly, I think, the Fannie/Freddie effect, even if outweighed by advantages, would be very long-term, not in the same life cycle bubbles happen in.
Here you go, Heebie: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/housing/report/2012/09/06/36736/7-things-you-need-to-know-about-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac/
Part of the key to the rebuttal is that as the housing bubble was reaching its last stages, Fannie and Freddie were losing market share to private actors, since they were bounded in a couple different dimensions (mortgages for more money than conforming, aka "jumbo" mortgages; sub-prime and Alt-A mortgages; etc.).
Conservatives love to blame bubbles on the government. It's basically a "cooties" argument. The thing is, if the "free market" wouldn't inflate and get burned by a bubble in the absence of government intervention, then the "free market" also wouldn't inflate and get burned by a bubble in the presence of government intervention. The government would only be shooting itself in the foot with its irresponsible actions -- all the savvy market actors would respond rationally and avoid taking on the risk of artificially overvalued investments.
From 14:
Exactly four years ago, during the early days of the financial crisis, the federal government took control of mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through a legal process called conservatorship. Since then, the two companies have required roughly $150 billion in taxpayer support to stay solvent, while the government has kept the housing market afloat by backing more than 95 percent of all home loans made in the United States.
You know, that's pretty fucking important and I hadn't really known it. I can't believe I've wasted so much fucking time (I mean, even procrastination time) thinking about things like the makeup rules for some group house in Silicon Valley.
I wonder if the Fannie/Freddie effect on housing prices might actually be rather muted. Sure, they increased the percentage of homeowners as compared to home renters, but the overall demand for housing wouldn't have been changed much.
You could buy a lot of Peace as a Service for $150 billion.
Haven't read snark's link, but that's right - Fannie and Freddie basically weren't implicated at all.
Benquo is correct that the key word is "bubble." The question is not why did houses become so expensive. The question is: Why did houses become so much more expensive than the fundamentals supported.
If I give a million dollars to everybody who buys a house, then Econ 101 says that houses should sell for a million dollars, plus the value of the house. But that's not a bubble - that's fundamentals. The house really is worth that much.
He was not claiming FF/FM were responsible for the housing bubble in the past decade, just to be clear. He was making a since-the-70s argument.
So what actually happened? Securitization, basically. Home loans became a product that could be bought and sold, so private actors were incentivized to create product - to create home loans.
There's a similar argument about federal student loans driving up tuition. I'm not even sure its wrong.
20: What is he saying happened since the '70s? That lots of people bought homes who otherwise wouldn't? I think that's fair. So what? That's kind of what they were created for.
20: And we've had how many national real estate collapses since the '70s? And yet mysteriously the one we just had was triggered by non-conforming loans.
so private actors were incentivized to create product - to create home loans.
And when they couldn't get enough shitty home loans, they created synthetic shitty home loans. That's what I remember every time someone tries to blame some government policy for foisting poor people and their bad loans onto teh market. If teh market really hadn't been clamoring for those loans, there would have been no cause for Goldman to dupe AIG into synthesizing them.
Weren't the Bush people arguing that the increase in home ownership during his administration was a sign of his policies working? I think they kept that up until the pop.
OP's last paragraph is the best economics.
Gov't support or subsidy of private, not common, goods creates rivalrous and excludable goods, directly and indirectly increasing capital's share and domination.
22: yes, that's part of his argument in the OP too.
So anyway, like Bob says: what of the last paragraph in the OP and the question?
There's a big difference between "drives prices up" and "creates a bubble."
What Fannie and Freddy were able to do (NOT AN EXPERT DISCLAIMER) was to create the 30 year fixed-rate mortgage at a price that was basically affordable to anyone from the lower middle class on up. That ain't nothing and it wasn't necessarily unsustainable (they were ultimately poorly run, but).
Subsidized student loans lacked some of the advantages that (implicitly) subsidzed available mortgage finance did. For one thing, if you buy a house on credit, you have a house; the nominal price of the house might be inflated somewhat by the subsidy, but so is everyone else's, and if you need to, you can sell the house. For another, Fannie/Freddie required loans to be conforming (or, more precisely, would only purchase conforming loans) meaning that you needed reasonably well-tested, but still broadly accessible, ratios of income to value, money down, etc., to buy. Third, there hasn't been a great track record of truly public middle class housing that's been built, pretty much everywhere, so it's not totally obvious that running direct public housing wuold leave people better off.
Student loans, on the other hand (a) are loans where your only asset is the education itself, and the financial value of that can often be literally zero; (b) had basically no effective controls, so you could get subsidized student loans to study holistic sports basket-weaving at Corinthian Colleges and until recently the government would treat it essentially identically to you borrowing to fund your MBA at Wharton; (c) we had fully state subsidized colleges that until like 10 years ago ran as well or better than almost all private institutions. So student loans seem to me to be a pretty different case than housing. But I don't think that the sort-of debacle that the actual student loan system has been means that you should just swear off any attempt to subsidize tuition payments through government action.
Fuck it, why don't I write some more about stuff I only barely understand.
I am going to sell my medicine before the health and medicine bubble bursts.
I don't know how helpful this is and maybe this is really stupid but house prices have also been increasing in Canada since the 1970s. And there is no medical bubble from government funded healthcare in Canada. I'm pretty sure those things have occurred in other countries too.
Am I misunderstanding something?
Canada has national health care and a big guy named "Mike" who fixes everybody's houses while on the TV. That's different.
I indicated above that subsidized student loans were partially or largely responsible for increasing college tuition. That's wrong, and we should kill off the idea now and forever.
The claim that increased student aid causes tuition to rise was originated by William Bennett, the secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, in a 1987 New York Times opinion piece.19 Numerous academic studies since have tested the Bennett hypothesis, and though a few have found some link between rising aid and tuition in at most one sector of higher education,20 the vast majority have "...found not a shred of evidence of an empirical relationship," as David Warren wrote in the Washington Post.21 As Warren notes, three major federal reports in the last fifteen years have each surveyed the existing academic literature, and each concluded that no such relationship exists.
The most recent, conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2011, took advantage of a unique "natural experiment" to test the Bennett hypothesis: the substantial increases in Stafford Loan limits between 2007 and 2009.22 In 2007, the yearly loan limits, adjusted for inflation, ranged from $2,925 for freshmen to $6,125 for upper classmen. By 2009, they had risen to $5,750 and $7,825, respectively. All told, the yearly borrowing limit for all undergraduates increased by an average of $2,340. However, average tuition at public 4-year universities rose by just $540 over the same two years, in line with recent historical averages, leading the GAO to reject the possibility of a relationship between the two. Additionally, these increases in borrowing limits were the first since 1993, meaning that the inflation-adjusted value of the limit had declined for more than a decade during which tuitions rose steadily. All told, both the empirical evidence and academic consensus deem the Bennett hypothesis false.
The report I linked in 35 is really really useful for understanding a lot of higher education stuff that we talk about here.
It turns out that the idea that administrative bloat (too many deans, too much IT etc.) is also dead wrong as a cause for tuition increase. There just hasn't been that much of a rise in the dread administrative bloat.
As Figure 2 shows, the number of employees per thousand students changed little between 1991 and 2011.16 Research institutions employ just 7 more staff per thousand students than they did in 1991, and 17 fewer than in 2001. Master's and bachelor's universities employ 18 more staff per thousand students than two decades earlier, and just 2 more than a decade before. The composition of universities' staff, however, has changed dramatically. At both types of institutions, the relative number of full-time faculty has remained approximately constant and the number of executives and administrators has actually slightly decreased relative to the size of the student body. Both types of institutions are employing substantially more part-time faculty and professional staff--admissions and human resources staff, IT workers, athletic staff, and health workers--while the relative number of non-professional staff--workers providing clerical, technical, skilled craft, or maintenance services--shrank dramatically.
Do these additional professional staff constitute bloat, or are they necessary additions to serve universities' changing needs? Though data doesn't identify the exact functions performed by these additional employees, we can nevertheless draw a few conclusions. First, the number of professional staff hasn't increased much in the past decade: just 6 more positions per thousand students at research universities, and 8 more at master's and bachelor's schools. Given the additional support services required over the past decade--more IT workers to serve schools' increased technology needs, additional staff to the growing adjunct workforce, among others--the rise in professional staff seems warranted.
In fact, a different culprit is responsible for much of the increased spending on both support staff as well as the rising expenditures on instruction: health care costs. On average, the amount spent by public universities to provide health insurance rose by nearly $2,700 per employee between 2001 and 2011, a 40 percent increase.18 This huge rise in health care costs more than accounts for the increased spending shown in Figure 2. Thus, we find that the small increase in administrative spending over the past decade rules out administrative bloat as a major cause of rising tuition. And between rising health care costs and additional necessary staff capacity, we can explain even the small rise in spending on administration, meaning that the oft-discussed phenomenon of administrative "bloat" may not actually exist.
The same report also rules out construction costs and facilities as the cause for the rise. The rise in public college tuition is, it turns out, pretty simple -- it's almost entirely caused by declining state support for education.
And, in other news, is Mr. "obesity=nbd" Paul Campos an ignorant blowhard? All signs point to yes.
36 sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. If you hire four or 5 $200K/yr administrators and then fire 5 secretaries and 5 mailroom clerks (or building and grounds workers, librarians, whatever) you've dramatically decreased your staffing, but upped your costs -- all those high-end admin positions come with cushy golden parachutes and training money and a shitload of other perks too. And what do those people do for their money? Mostly sit in meeting figuring out how to screw over students, faculty and junior staff.
Glad you could weigh in with that hot take.
Overall spending per student grew at a modest pace over the past decade: expenditures rose 8 percent and 1 percent, respectively, at research and master's/bachelor's universities between 2001 and 2011.13 Spending on "education and related expenses"--spending on the core educational mission of universities, including spending on instruction, student services, and a share of administrative and operations costs--climbed at an even slower pace, rising just 5 percent at research institutions and 4 percent at master's/bachelor's universities, as depicted in Figure 1.14 We focus on education and related spending in this brief because they are the expenses paid for by tuition revenue and state support. Other spending, including on auxiliary enterprises (including dormitories, dining services, and athletics) and federal grants and contracts, are primarily self-funded by revenue from their own independent activities and services.15 As the figure shows, increased spending on instruction and student services accounted for the majority of the spending increase; administrative/support expenditures rose just $172 and $42 per student, respectively, at the two institutional categories.
Notably, these spending increases pale in comparison to tuition increases: net tuition revenue--total revenue from tuition and fees, net of institutional aid--at research institutions rose by $3,628 per student and by $2,463 per student at master's and bachelor's universities. These large tuition increases, coupled with slow spending growth, suggest that the cause(s) must be on the revenue side of the balance sheet, and that administrative "bloat" and student aid are at most minor contributors to tuition increases. However, before we can definitively label these oft-cited factors as myths, we need to dig a little deeper into each to see whether the spending trends in smaller expense categories match the observed modest increases in spending overall.
Someone should send 35 to Paul Campos so so he can stfu about his latest "education is totally a bubble" nonsense, which appears to barely supported by cherry-picked statistics and motivated by a simplistic belief that, hey, he happened to be right when it was true about law schools.
Reading comprehension (I see you now, 38) is not my strong point.
Yeah, I have no idea why the other LGM people let Campos stick around. I guess it would be embarrassing for them to get rid of him at this point but, seriously. Among their B-listers I'd much rather see more of "takes-Game-of-Thrones-way,-way,-way-too-seriously-guy."
One thing I like about the thing linked in 35 is that it's yet another demonstration of why a priori economic reasoning out of one's butt is nonsense. Does it make sense that if the government provides subsidized student loans, colleges will just raise tuition to swallow up the benefit of the subsidy? Sure, theoretically, that makes sense. Did it actually happen? No. Why? Because the world is fucking complex and not everything you intuitively think makes sense actually happens.
I'm trying to decide if that's a plausible use of a priori or not.
I don't even fucking know. I just mean "not grounded in actually looking at what happens in the world for real."
"That's great in practice, but how does it work in theory?"
reasoning out of one's butt is nonsense
Oh sure, you just had to go and crap all over the Vox business plan.
38 might be a crap article but it's totally worth clicking on just for the borderline upskirt photo.
That is a very weird angle for a photo.
Short people got to work and some of them want to work in news photography.
Short people have slightly twisted reasons to live.
I have that Randy Newman song in my head now.
The link in 35 is really great. It's surprising to me that there hasn't been a decrease in full-time faculty per 1000 students over the past 20 years.
Sometimes I know too much about something to make it safe to post on it. Hence, detailed discussion re makeup.
Abigail Adams' real name is Fannie Mae.
I really hope 56 is a confession that you live in the Startup Castle.
That is a very weird angle for a photo.
Like you've never taped a camera to the top of your shoe while you were at the farmers market.
58 If so allow me to be the first to suggest it as the location for the next Unfoggedcon
59: I can honestly say that I have never done that.
54: My plans usually don't work so well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhCfehYJxXA
This one is more on point, I guess.
What Fannie and Freddy were able to do (NOT AN EXPERT DISCLAIMER) was to create the 30 year fixed-rate mortgage at a price that was basically affordable to anyone from the lower middle class on up.
Yeah, this is the key point, really. Without Fannie/Freddie, there is no 30 year fixed rate mortgage*. If you want to see how the US housing market would look without Fannie/Freddie, look at the UK. It's all floating rate, with some two to five year fixed rate introductory periods. If you search really hard, and pay a fortune, you can get a 10 year fix.
Also regarding the general point about government subsidies - the UK abandoned its mortgage interest relief in 2000, and housing has become considerably less affordable since.
*Unless you're Danish. They have a weird mortgage bond sector which finances the whole market.
Yeah, this is the key point, really. Without Fannie/Freddie, there is no 30 year fixed rate mortgage*. If you want to see how the US housing market would look without Fannie/Freddie, look at the UK. It's all floating rate, with some two to five year fixed rate introductory periods. If you search really hard, and pay a fortune, you can get a 10 year fix.
I hadn't realized that, because I thought that I remembered something about Labour pushing for some kind of fixed-rate mortgage policy. Canada has a big housing boom right now, but I have heard the argument advanced that people there are more cautious about home ownership in the first place because there are no fixed mortgages. I don't know whether that's true at all. The same people claim that the lack of the mortgage interest deduction contributes to the relative conservatism of Canadians. (Again, I have no data, and reports from Toronto and Vancouver make me think this is BS.)
If you want to see how the US housing market would look without Fannie/Freddie, look at the UK.
and it really, really isn't un-bubbly.
AFAIK, mortgage interest on buy-to-let properties is still tax-deductible in the UK.
Yes, but not for owner occupied.
Can you incorporate yourself and rent to you?
Only if it has a business purpose. I don't think home office counts.
Tax advantaged investment property isn't a business purpose in the UK?
Anyway, we have one of those pre-bubble adjustable rate mortgages that we were always thinking about refinancing. Fortunately, we're lazy and interest rates have stayed low. The combination has saved us a bunch.
Tax advantaged investment property isn't a business purpose in the UK?
Investment property is, avoiding tax on your home isn't.
Why don't you just buy your neighbor's house and have your neighbor buy your house and rent to each other? Sometimes a mortgage payment can be as much as $1,000 and most of it will be interest at the start of the loan. That's a big savings.
I'm such a fucking cheater. I have a conversation with my brother in which he's talking econ jargon way too fast for me to process. I go to my secret internet lair of geniuses and ask them to talk about the topic. I come back the next day, "having thought it over", and sound like a brilliant genius. The power to post on Unfogged is the most amazing superpower anyone has ever conceived of.
Only because Batman doesn't have "superpowers".
Further to 66, and to confounding your brother, there's actually a well-written (as such things go) economic sociology paper on how the FHA and co. help create a liquid market in mortgages. So, yes, it's top-down social engineering, but it's social engineering in support of markets, rather than replacing them. (And it's not like anyone had to buy the securities they were selling...)
It doesn't always work out as well as you might think.
Sometimes a mortgage payment can be as much as $1,000
Moby Hick humour? Or Dr Evil style 'one meeelllion dollars' error?
Anyway, to buy the average house in my neighborhood, you're now paying over $1,000/month even if you have 20% down and very good credit.
82: Black bile, I think, autumn, earth, spleen, melancholia
One of my favorite things is seeing a moderately nice three-bedroom house list for over $250,000 and hear locals talking about the housing bubble. I've been here long enough, I almost believe them.
86: We were in the market for one of those in our neighborhood. They get snapped up insanely quickly.
In Switzerland they have infinite-year fixed-rate mortgages, but they'll only cover 60% of the cost of the house.
But after making infinite payments, you own it all.
re: 83
In my neighbourhood, probably more like $4000, although if we owned our place, it'd be less, as it's in a cheapish building, more like $2000-$2500.
Chicago prices, both mortgage payments and purchase prices, are about 2 1/2 times what Moby's quoting, and I'll bet other places are even higher, as TRO was saying just last week.
81, 83: I wonder if Moby is misreading ttaM here. I think ttaM was being incredulous that a mortgage payment could be so low, while Moby is explaining how it can be so high.
Nope. I'm pretty much straight-up trolling people from places with expensive housing.
"Pittsburgh!" is the new "aristocrats!"
92: Moby only pretends to be a naïve hick.
One thing with buying someplace cheap: it's hard to decide to move to a bigger, more expensive place if you decide you don't like it, or if the best employer in the cheap place becomes worse. Basically everyone moving to the bay area or Manhattan runs into this I think.
93: Ah, okay. I can see that now!
Moby has the good fortune to live in a place where nobody wants to live.
There's a weird strain of conservatism likes to talk about how intolerable big, dense cities are, and how people really want to live in suburbs with big lawns where you can't walk anywhere.
While conservative Econ 101 is ridiculous (see the OP), it might be even worse when the rightwingers ignore Econ 101. Saying "Nobody wants to live there, it's too expensive" is the rough equivalent of saying "Nobody wants to go there, it's too crowded."
For the record, I don't even have a lawn and I can walk or take the bus nearly everywhere.
We sort of lucked into the best of both worlds; my wife's employer is based in $expensive_place and pays a salary commensurate with that.
Single family home? Impossible here- $1.2M median. Condos are around 500-600k.
Moby has the good fortune to live in a place where nobody wants to live.
Enh, it's changing. Prices have increased significantly on this side of town, and there's been a lot of new construction as well. I wish my wife and I had had stuff together enough to buy a house five years ago; some of the sales then were amazing. So Moby has the doubly-good fortune of living somewhere that people increasingly want to live at.
On that note, our property assessment was appealed by the county. Probably because it was assessed at about 60% of the sale price.
That will happen. It's better now after the reassessment. It really sucked to be assessed based on the price of your recently purchased house while all the old people on your street were assessed at what your house was assessed at before you bought it. The old people got all screamy because of the reassessment.
I wish we would have bought in Lawrenceville when we did buy. Those prices are through the roof.
As in $50,000 for a townhouse that might go for $350,000 today if you put in $100,000 worth of renovation and didn't have shitty taste in how to renovate.
Yeah, it's annoying. I got a highfallutin Shadyside property lawyer to represent us at the hearing, so hopefully that'll take the sting off of it a bit.
As for Lawrenceville, ha, wow, you aren't kidding.
That will happen. It's better now after the reassessment. It really sucked to be assessed based on the price of your recently purchased house while all the old people on your street were assessed at what your house was assessed at before you bought it. The old people got all screamy because of the reassessment.
The vaguely equivalent system in the UK is insane. My new build flat is assessed for council tax purposes, not on what I paid for it, not on what it is worth now, not on what it cost to build, but on the basis of what it would have been worth in 1991 had it existed then.
105: We just went in and begged. It worked a bit.
106: That's not even half as fucked up as it was here. The court stepped in because people who lived in declining neighborhoods (the ones where houses went from $50,000 to $10,000) were paying as much tax as people whose houses had gone up into the six figures.
I linked that news story about the guy trying to sell his private island for $45 million arguing in a tax appeal that it was only worth $10 million. He lost. There ought to be a mechanism where he'd be forced to sell at or near what he says should be the assessed price.
Like a claiming stakes.
How about this: for real property not your primary residence, you get to set the assessment, but anyone can buy the property for that amount with 90 days notice. (And if you don't want to sell, during the 90 days you can change the assessment by at least 30% and pay 5 years of back taxes).
106: Presumably the relevant council is staffed with Time Lords.
107: We don't have any real argument beyond "we are idiots who paid too much." Except I don't think we actually overpaid much if at all. The lawyer thought it would be a hard case, but we have it so that most of their fees are a fixed percentage of the tax savings, so why not?
That's why people who own lots of property like the base-year system. If your assessment is based on what your place was supposed to have been worth in 1978, it's a great deal easier to argue stuff like that without making people laugh.
Some people haven't even heard of Prop 13.
I pay laughably little in property tax because of a historic preservation credit, but not as little as my neighbor who pays property tax based on assessed value in 1985, maybe $30,000 on a house now worth 20-30x that.
I mean the house is assessed for tax purposes as being worth $30,000.
||
Looters!
I'm sure Fox News will be all over this.
|>
We close on our house in about 3 weeks. I never want to move again. What a pain in the ass.
Yeah, my next move I'll be in the box.
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Treating this as an open thread:
I was recently looking at the wikipedia entry on "Blue-eyed soul" and I saw this note (emphasis mine), "On 1 February 1975, Tower of Power became the first white/mixed act to appear on Soul Train. Also in 1975, David Bowie, another early white artist to appear on Soul Train, released Young Americans, a popular blue-eyed soul album. It featured the funk-inspired "Fame", which became Bowie's first #1 hit in the US."
As it turns out, YT has video of this performance and it is hilariously awesome!
He is amazingly un-soulful and yet, it works. The audience seems supportive, and he's a charismatic enough performer (and used to playing a persona in which he's alien and doesn't really fit in) that it isn't uncomfortable, but it is very odd.
|>
Not really that sure why it's uncomfortable, except that that was in his peak 'skinny coke addict' phase. His music from that period is pretty funky and soulful.
Another oddly incongruous one is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsezr0qiFIc
[Todd R]
Not really that sure why it's uncomfortable
It isn't uncomfortable, it's just incongruous.
His music from that period is pretty funky and soulful.
Yes, and I think his appreciation for soul music was sincere, he was still an outsider. Even he called it, "plastic soul" at the time. (wikipedia: "In a 1976 Playboy interview, Bowie described his then-recent album Young Americans as 'the definitive plastic soul record. It's the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak, written and sung by a white limey.'")
115: Did you sell one house, and then buy another?
That's what we'd like to do. But holy crap! the standards for "staging" one's house for resell are a bit ridiculous. You can't have a toaster out on the kitchen counter, because prospective buyers "have to imagine themselves in the space" (in a kitchen without a toaster?).
I'm convinced a lot of that is bullshit that real-estate agents use to justify their commissions.
115,116: Right? Helping my sister move a couple months ago did nothing to dissuade me from the idea that staying in this house until I die is the way to go.
If the real estate person doesn't want the toaster in the kitchen, just put it by the bathtub.
120. I have recently been looking at a bunch of houses to buy. Everything that is OK and that has been professionally staged, multiple offers on the same day.
Rumpled-looking normal place that might need paint, could benefit from a few thousand dollars of touching up ssoner rather than later, languishes.
I have two ideas:
a) Families with little kids rationally do not wish to introduce the time sink and possible danger of even minor construction. Mostly understandable.
b) Many buyers would also like to furnish with this, and basically think of a house as a large fashion and lifestyle accessory.
115 is killing me. I really wanted to stay in this house until I die, but I'm starting to consider other options and getting all angry and angsty about it. Ugh.
James Brown steals the 'Fame' bass line.
Speaking of music/rnb, Tweet's 'Oops (Oh My')'was on in a bar last week. Mainstream pop and rnb just doesn't have that combination of odd -- the beat/loop -- and catchy anymore. Timbaland's productions from the early 2000s still sound fantastic.
When Mrs OfTheBlue and I were newly married in the mid 70's we almost bought an old but livable house in Lawrenceville for $10,000. We bought a Bang & Olufsen instead. It died in the Loma Prieta quake. Feh.
Re: 126
From the YT comments: this article is good.
Here's more on the riff. I guess it isn't a bass line.
Never mind. (131 is the same link as 130.)
If this is the old-school pop music thread, I submit this guy's hair.
6, 22: Yup. We had a discussion about it in TFA.
My beloved has repainted our bedroom and it is wonderful. Also he's giving me free reign with new things to put on the wall, I'm having a lot of fun.
Did you sell one house, and then buy another?
Yes, both sales scheduled to close on the same day, back to back. Getting it to the showing stage was kind of draining, but then it was only on the market for 12 hours before we had a full price offer and a backup one, so that was easy enough. Now that most of our stuff is in a 10x30 storage unit, I like this house a lot better (but am still ready to get into the next one).
10'x30' worth of stuff is a great deal of stuff.
Do tiny house owners have tiny storage units too? A 10" x30" storage unit would qualify.
135: That's such a nice feeling! We painted our dark apartment nice light colors a couple years ago, and it felt so great.
i'm skeptical that you could have long-term price increases in most of the country since there is always the option of buying an empty farm lot on the edge of town and building a new house (or 20). For the very NIMBY locations or really any unique, old-style walkable location, less financing cost could feed back into the price.
The staging/flipping stuff is ridiculous. i have started to browse houses in the neighborhoods we would like to be in and almost everything has had a layer of generic crap slapped on it. It is pretty annoying to realize we may have to pay for a whole house full of HGTV-taste stuff. I'd would be much nicer have the 30 year old cabinets, floors, etc and be able to buy stuff we actually like.
Oh I got home just in time to see the new paint in natural light and it is wonderful. Unfortunately I let on some of my thinking why one of the photos I want to put on a wall is so great ("see, it's just like Erec and Enide could canter out of the woods at any moment and ask the lady milking the goat a question -- and the goat would respond!"), and sort of caused the whole free reign thing to go somewhat sideways. But I think I can get this back on track!
Holy shit, Todd Rundgren is great! One of those familiar names I've never gotten around to listen to.
137 I've probably mentioned before that the female half of the nice couple who bought our Bethesda house kept dropping by with friends between acceptance and closing -- it was her first house -- and on the third or fourth visit asked me where we kept all our stuff.
Storage unit so it staged better.
We didn't have anything added for staging, but a whole lot got deleted. Well, I guess we did have new flowers planted outside.
On the subject of unusual Sould Train guests, this one ranks pretty high:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0Ytic5OMfg
The interview at the end is totally charming and great.
134: And Heebie was really mean! I'm shocked and dismayed, Heebie.
re: 143
Stone cold song-writing genius, and brilliant player of multiple instruments. Good producer of albums for other people, too.* Sadly, somewhat shitty quality control, in the manner of Prince, and others. But the classic early 70s run of albums before he went too prog -- Runt, The Ballad of Todd Rundgren, Something/Anything, A Wizard and a True Star, etc -- yields a couple of dozen fantastic tracks.
* Sparks, New York Dolls, XTC, Patti Smith, Meatloaf**, etc etc.
** he's the lead guitarist on the Bat out of Hell album, as well as the producer.
The songs on that album are just way too fucking long.
Todd Rundgren hugely disappointed a crowd here a month or two ago by playing more or less his whole new album*, then did like a 3 song encore of his old hits. IIRC, he didn't have a rock band setup at all - he was on a keyboard, and maybe there was a drummer? - which meant that even the hits didn't sound like him. Hardcore fans were ecstatic, but this was a mid-size venue, so many more casual fans than hardcore.
I make no judgment on his choices, I just think it's interesting.
*which apparently isn't at all rock?
he's the lead guitarist on the Bat out of Hell album
and, famously, did all of the (lead) guitar on the title track in a single take, with all sorts of effects pedals and such to create the various sounds.
re: 149
That sounds entirely plausible. I'm not a super-fan, I just like a lot of his 70s stuff, but he is wildly inconsistent, and songs from gigs on Youtube are often quite different from the original.