That's what you'd use your magic wand for? You monster.
well, it's like three weeks into having it. I've already waved off 10 pounds and got dinners pre-made and in the freezer for the next month, and cleaned the house, and solved the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and gave Trump chronic laryngitis and the shits. So next up, housing.
Entirely ex posterior: Fewer investors would be interested in being landlords, given lower returns. Might be able to recover some of that at scale and increasing management expertise (and you're still going to need management firms for e.g. large apartment buildings), so remaining landlords would be more likely to be institutional--which is already the direction we're moving in, so not necessarily a big change. Would probably mean fewer SFHs and semi-detacheds as rentals.
If you want to move house from where you're renting for whatever reason, there'd be some complexities. As a part owner, are you now entitled to a share of the rents, with the current renter eating away at your partial ownership share? Or would there have to be a buy-out option for the "real" landlord to get back your share? Probably means more lawyers or financial folks involved. But all resolvable.
I could also imagine local ownership cartels where all the landlords collectively agree to raise rent to guarantee their returns, essentially turning rent-to-own into just an enforced savings account on top of a potentially already expensive rental. Maybe that's too pessimistic.
Surely there's an additional regulatory fix for that, though.
So if you rent a house for 30 year and never miss a payment, you own it? What happens if you want to move at some point during those 30 years? Can you sell 0.1 of the house to someone else? Do you forfeit it?
There's a five year vesting period before you get to keep any equity if you move.
As a landlord, you'd certainly want to increase the rent so that it covered the lost appreciation.
If there is a 5 year vesting period, the landlord just won't rent to you for that 5th year.
So if you rent a house for 30 year and never miss a payment, you own it?
Yep, that's what I'm picturing.
What happens if you want to move at some point during those 30 years? Can you sell 0.1 of the house to someone else? Do you forfeit it?
I'm imagining that if you stay for 15 years, you've built up equity and an interest. So when you move out, either your landlord could buy you out, or you could collect a portion from the new tenant.
There'd have to be some way of allocating risk, if the space goes unrented. Does a tenant have to pay a little extra to cover the fact that they can walk away when prices plummet? Can you always sell it to the government for a base price? idk.
I'm assuming there's a front-loaded period where you accumulate 0 equity, so that first place after school with 4 other people will probably not be implicated.
But breaking up with your SO would start picking up more trappings of divorce, with agreements about splitting equity when you break up and move out.
8: The lease only allows eviction for lengthy non-payment of rent or pooping in the front yard.
I think you need to continuously acquire equity, or else it doesn't help people with unstable lives. And provides perverse incentives for landlords to evict as bright lines draw near.
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Attn Doug.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/05/a-millennial-considers-the-new-german-problem-after-30-years-of-peace/
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Mossy, I don't know what makes you think you have askance-look-immunity for breaking the 40 comment rule, but you don't, and you're getting it. Sending it your way.
You might get the behavior you see in NYC (with rent controlled apartments) where somebody moving out sublets the space and keeps their name on the lease.
In fact landlords might try to structure things so they lease the space to a relative, and then the relative sublets it to a tenant.
What are the unintended consequences?
A drag for those of us who just don't want any of the hassles associated with owning.
That's true. You could easily have a situation where a renter has equity and the house has negative value as a house (e.g. it needs torn down). Maybe not "easily" but it happened in Pittsburgh a bunch.
Well, that's where I'm picturing a management company functioning like they do for condominiums or something. I agree that it is nice to have a point person who gets everything fixed and replaced.
I'm not sure homeownership is the best thing to try to goose if the goal is security of tenure, or even equity/wealth. Currently in the US at least, fee-simple ownership in big metros has become a vehicle for about 20% of the population to clean up at everyone else's expense, making other housing scarce which grows their property value. The idea that homes are a great way to build wealth is a reflection of how broken our housing market has been for the past generation or more; without federal mortgage intervention, housing would naturally depreciate, or at least not grow in value faster than your median asset.
Some examples of other models than fee-simple: Singapore has a ton of public housing (80%+ of population), but people buy 100-year leases. So it lasts as long as you're likely to live, then reverts to the state. And of course shared-equity (CLTs) where you get equity but not windfall gains. But most of all you need abundance, so that landlords have the short end of the stick and renting is as good a deal as buying.
18: yeah. Maybe there has to be a baseline government program for buying back houses which is always available, and gets repurposed into affordable housing or community space or reverts back to greenspace or community gardens or something.
Well, that's where I'm picturing a management company functioning like they do for condominiums or something.
They don't though, precisely - my condo HOA is only responsible for common areas, exteriors, etc. If I have a problem with my plumbing I have to sort it myself.
The idea that homes are a great way to build wealth is a reflection of how broken our housing market has been for the past generation or more; without federal mortgage intervention, housing would naturally depreciate, or at least not grow in value faster than your median asset.
I don't think houses should be the vehicle for wealth accumulation either, but the rentier class just seems like such leeches sometimes.
I don't actually know what fee-simple housing means!
23: But often times landlords just use a management company to deal with the rest, no? So these management companies could continue to exist and interact directly with the individual.
I think people who live in one rental for decades and don't miss payments is almost literally no one. So all this would do is make renting more expensive because it came with a required investment account on top of renting which paid out every few years when you moved. The main upshot would be that poor people would be forced to move suddenly when they had an unexpected expense so that they could access the investment.
I tend to think of those companies as being like health insurers without the warmth and efficiency.
I think people who live in one rental for decades and don't miss payments is almost literally no one.
Except in NYC (by reputation). But I think that's broadly correct nationally.
Yeah, I almost added NYC as an exception when writing that. I'd bet even in NYC it's a low percentage, but it's certainly more common thereZ
Who pays for the new roof or elevator if the tenants don't have extra cash and have a 51% interest in the building? Can a renter borrow against their equity to make this happen? What's the lender's recourse if that loan defaults?
What about buildings whose value is going down not up? Trying to draft one set of procedures governing money and maintenance that applies to both rising and falling markets does not seem possible to me.
If this is basically public financing to turn apartments into condos, then existing laws might apply, but interim decisions about money are going to be messy. Everyone loves to hate on small-time landlords, but renting a place that you've moved out of is a part of middle-class financial life for lots of people that this would completely mess up, they'd be in the position of NYC cab medallion owners.
Management companies are not good for maintenance decisions in condos IME, active owners who can choose when to repair before complete failure do much better for themselves.
Maybe nationally. I've rented for 30 years (10 in my current place) and haven't missed a payment in I-don't-know-how-long.
Although I used to live in NY, so maybe I caught something.
If I were daydreaming, I'd just put in a land tax and give everyone a bank account and put some of the land tax money in it.
Also, I agree with 26.
The first step to making housing more affordable is to build more of it close to where people work, exclusionary zoning is the near enemy for this problem. Also financially indebted localities that need high property taxes to stay afloat in a bunch of places do not help.
32. Georgism today, Georgism tomorrow, Georgism ....
32. Georgism today, Georgism tomorrow, Georgism ....
A basic problem here is that co-owning property is literally a nightmare to be avoided at all costs. See like every family that jointly owns an inherited vacation property. Liquidating the investment and splitting the money is always the right decision.
What Minivet said in 21. I'd add that the Tories had the very conscious strategy in the 80s to encourage and subsidize public housing tenants buying their apartments, believing that property ownership would tend to make these new owners conservative -- and they were right.
We want housing to be plentiful, affordable, and secure. I'm not sure encouraging homeownership is generally speaking the right path to this. If we have the magic wand, why not rent control, mandatory multi-family and mixed-use zoning, a ban on free street parking, and massive expansion of social housing?
I don't actually know what fee-simple housing means!
Sorry, I knew I needed to define that term and must have lost the definition in a reshuffling. It's just the legal term for "traditional" ownership where you keep it forever, can sell it to anyone, and do whatever you want with it (within the bounds of property taxes, zoning and discrimination laws, etc.).
There's an interesting phenomenon in Korea where you pay a startling figure in key money and after that rent is relatively low. So it's kind of like buying in. No equity, though.
why not rent control, mandatory multi-family and mixed-use zoning, a ban on free street parking, and massive expansion of social housing?
I feel like the most conservative twerp, but I need some constraints on the scale of multifamily housing. Fourplexes, 8-plexes? Absolutely. These sprawling behemoths look like oceans of parking lots and identical buildings? And consecutive behemoths, one next to the other? Maybe I need to get over the sad feeling they give me, but they sure do give me a sad.
I am totally here for small scale complexes to be integrated into every single family neighborhood, though. Massive suburbs also give me the sads, and they're way more toxic.
39: The Vienna Model people are here to try to convince you (I share some of your concern, but that's why it's nice to have attractive pictures of big comnplexes): https://museumofvancouver.ca/vienna-model
These sprawling behemoths look like oceans of parking lots and identical buildings? And consecutive behemoths, one next to the other?
Karl Marx Hof, possibly the longest building in the world. (It's more attractive when the weather is nicer than in that video.)
I can imagine they could be done beautifully!! I hate that developers get to make so many decisions about what the rest of us have to live with.
Also, I wish that giant (beautiful) apartment buildings came with a cafeteria in the middle. Gawd I'd love to raise a family in a place where we could walk to a cafeteria.
In Pittsburgh, you can live in a kind of interesting apartment building with an Arby's on the ground floor.
Like you're living in the giant hat?
What happens when we make ownership of rental-suitable property (that is, almost all residential property) less profitable? The price goes down. Good for people who want to buy, bad for people who bought yesterday. This affects all homeowners, not just those who rent out their property of the value of all homes is the potential they could earn if the property was rented out. But for people who aren't immediately planning to either rent out their property or sell, the first effect is a huge increase in mortgage cost, since the banks immediately realize that every owner-occupied house is less valuable than it was, and many are now worth less than the value of the mortgage. Foreclosures increase on both homeowners and landlords, even those who never missed a payment. Those foreclosed properties go on the market, creating further downward pressure on the price of homes.
Also, cost of rent goes up very quickly, because the renter is receiving more for their rent: occupancy plus an interest in ownership. Roughly, take the cost of rent on a house today, add to it the cost of a monthly mortgage payment on the same property.
So the general plan works: Cost of renting going up and cost of owning going down means more people will be buying rather than renting. Except at the bottom of the rental market, where tenants still can't afford to buy, so they just pay higher rent. Or they become homeless.
In the long run, since ownership of rental-suitable homes is less valuable than it used to be, there will be less construction of new homes. So the initial effect of lower home prices gradually dissipates. The increased price fo rent, though, remains.
What's the specific problem the wand waving is trying to solve? Insecurity of tenure? Wealth inequality? Rentierism?
48 is a little Econ 101-y for my tastes, but as I think about it IOTM heebie's concept has some similarities with inclusionary zoning (requiring X% of units be affordable in new developments), or even rent control, in that it is trying to redress housing inequities by extracting value only from developers or landlords, as opposed to all property owners or the whole economy. These strategies are fine as a piece of the puzzle (at least, abundance is another big piece), but there are those who think developers and landlords are hoarding so much surplus value that no other strategy is needed, and that seems wrong to me.
*at least, as long as abundance is another big piece
I'm afraid something like this would, just while people are figuring it out, make for less housing construction.
49: Rentierism. Just generally aggravated by it.
Ok, new plan. Everyone applies for an apartment. If you have the minimum qualifications (SAT scores etc), you're thrown in the pool and the new owner is chosen randomly.
There's an interesting phenomenon in Korea where you pay a startling figure in key money and after that rent is relatively low.
I just watched a k-drama where that was one of the plot points. Girl has a job and can pay rent, but has no hope of ever saving enough money for a deposit, so she enters a marriage of convenience with someone who owns his own place. Spoiler: they fall in love.
At night, they team up to fight crime.
Sorry, it's not the same as your plan. It's a literal pool, in the middle of the apartment complex.
39: I grew up in a behemoth of a housing project (Stuyvesant Town) and it was lovely: 80 acres including 110 basically identical brick towers, set in attractive landscaping with parks and sports facilities and so on. But of course it didn't have to provide parking for the residents -- I don't know how to do that without making a development hideous. (There were associated underground garages, but nothing like enough for everyone.) The only thing that makes density unpleasant is cars.
What it looks like: https://www.google.com/search?q=stuyvesant+town&client=safari&hl=en-us&prmd=mniv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiSo5uc1tbwAhWKv54KHdEOBrEQ_AUoA3oECAIQAw&biw=414&bih=715&dpr=2
I grew up in a ranch-style house on about three acres. We had a front driveway and a back driveway.
Also a nice way to live, if your primary motivation is implacable misanthropy.
The house wasn't very big. About 2,500 square feet for six people and one dog.
But while I liked living in Stuy Town, it's not necessary -- a combination of tiny-lot single-family and smallish apartment buildings gets you all the benefits of walkable density. I'm just being irritable about defending the folkways of my people.
The horse lived across the street with a farmer.
Nebraska was very live-and-let-live about that kind of thing, sounds like.
I don't think they were ever openly living as a couple.
My cousin was the pastor there for years.
2nd 60, loudly.
My vague thought on this has been just to nationalize the debt. Reasoning (1) construction is expensive, so (2) it has to be done on credit, so (3) the owner/tenant has to pay through the nose to service debts maturing in ~30 years. But the state can construct using current revenue, or failing that borrow at trivial interest on effectively infinite maturities. If you're a wealthy state since 2008 (or Japan since 1990 [?], which suggests to me this is the future for more countries) you can even sell the debt to yourself for money you just made up.
In conclusion, print 10 trillion dollars so HUD can make America look like Manhattan.
71 is a good idea. The main obstacle is that approximately everyone in America hates both public housing and HUD, for a mix of good and bad reasons.
I don't think HUD cares about people like me who have an attached carhole.
I feel like the OP is trying to address a problem, which is that renters can live in a place forever, and not accumulate any equity, even as house prices rise. But the solution, I think, is not a good one, and there's a better one.
First, it's not a good solution b/c it just shifts who gets the big win. Also, it can be gamed and circumvented, and last, the ability of Americans to move in response to economic conditions has been a net positive thing, setting us apart from Europe, and I think this works against it.
So what can be done that's better? [I'm not the one who proposed this, but] I think the simple solution is to tax appreciation of land, and to tax it heavily. As they say, *capitalism* is about the deployment of *capital stock*. The -house- is capital stock. The land? That was there before and it'll be there after. If the land under your house appreciates, there's no good reason why you should get that appreciation -- what did you do to earn it? Land appreciates for lots of reasons (like a new BART station, or a better school district) that have nothing to do with capital investment. Tax away that appreciation.
That means that "houses" are no longer a vehicle of wealth creation. Gosh, I'm so sad. Instead, rents are lower everywhere, and people can sell up and move b/c hey, house prices aren't going thru the sky.
I'm a long-time renter. I never hold convince myself to buy in the too-hot DC market any time in the last 3+ decades. Plus, I like to be able to flee if need be. I'm also someone who rents at one place for a decade or more. I do wish for more housing and denser housing. There are lots if ways to do it. The public housing I saw in Vienna was impressive. I didn't see KM but I did see some long buildings. They weren't all that tall and they had nice courtyards and other public space. Bike and pedestrian routes went through some giving them more activity. Very pleasant density it seemed. Me, I live on the 8th floor of a mid-rise and haven't owned a car in six years. The building is about 50 years old and will probably get replaced by a 20 to 25 story building in the next decade. There's lots of new construction in my neighborhood. That's great (if sometimes loud)! My rent has stayed stable for two years in part because of new construction and in part because of COVID-19.
Me, I live on the 8th floor of a mid-rise and haven't owned a car in six years.
I really got that ride to the airport while the gettin was good!
You were such a bad passenger, she sold the car after giving you a ride.
I really got that ride to the airport while the gettin was good.
Indeed, you did. After my car was totalled when it got T-boned on the Pentagon reservation, six years ago, I gave some thought to getting another car. I realized that for commuting I usually took public transit. I decided to see how I did on the other stuff without a car. I could buy a car if it turned out I really needed one. But renting occasionally is all that I have needed so far. I admit that from time to time I have wanted the instantaneous nature of my own personal vehicle. But then I think about the cost of ownership and all the wasted time the car spends doing nothing awaiting my wishes.
Heebie and Ace were wonderful passengers!
77: How do you heavily tax appreciation of land without screwing a lot of homeowners by making them unable to afford their property taxes when their land appreciates through no fault of their own? That seems like such an unfair outcome that it would be politically untenable even if it were good policy.
We rent. We had a purchase lined up last year that fell through due to Covid, which was, to be honest, a total disaster for us as the prospect of us buying again any time soon is low.*
The problem that I need to solve, for us, is how we can afford to live when we retire. I already have friends who are getting close to retirement age, who anticipate a fairly comfortable life post-retirement, because their home will be paid off. None of us are going to have amazing pensions (because the old fucks pulled the ladder up behind them), but they can choose then to sell and downside (and bank the money) or stay where they are. Rent anywhere within several hundred miles of where I live is just not going to be remotely affordable.
* my wife lost her job as her place of work closed. I can (literally) afford the mortgage on my own--as I'm already paying it to some bastard baby-boomer** who owns it--but no bank would lend it to me as post 2008 the affordability criteria serve to lock in the property market to those already in it.
** I have paid half my salary to some baby boomer arsehole or other since I was 22.
I'm feeling the urge to print some more money. Like a bond restructuring: Owners might take a haircut, but hey, cash on the barrel and you don't get expropriated.
When we bought our first apartment my dad though we were crazy and the housing market was insane because he'd lived through the real estate bubble of the 80s. Thank god we didn't listen to him because we sold it at a 50% profit which enabled us to buy our current place. Other units in that building, which are all essentially identical, are now selling for almost 3x what we originally paid. The whole market in cities is a stupid combination of luck and timing.
Everyone I know who bought before 2008 is sitting on a massive property windfall. The only people I know who bought after 2008 had a relative lend them a ton of cash, or qualified for some kind of part-rent/part-buy scheme. No exceptions. Income is basically a non-factor.
I should probably be thankful my wife was so insistent on moving to Pittsburgh twenty years ago. It's not like it wasn't a huge pain to get used to Pittsburgh, but it means I'll probably have a choice about whether or not to retire when I get to sixty-five.
We should just declare that housing is a right, and so no one has to pay mortgage or rent on their primary residence. If we need more housing, we pay people to make housing.
Maybe we should cap the extravagance of the free primary residence? I'm on board with guaranteeing an apartment to everyone, though.
If I like my carhole, can I keep it?
90: Well, the idea is to allow some inequality so rich people will go along with it.
Speaking of Pittsburgh, apparently Nigel Farage had an event here. Only 14 people came.
A true thing that is happening right now near where I live. To the east of me there is a parking lot that a developer wants to buy and build market-rate housing. 300 units! Of course the usual anti-gentrification brigade is up in arms. At the exact same time, to the west of me, another developer wants to buy a parking lot and build affordable housing. About 40 units. This has the yuppies who live there all wound up. Imagine waking up and thinking it's your job to prevent hundreds of people from moving into your neighborhood. I just can't stand it. It's not clear yet if the pushback will actually work. But even the fact that it is happening enrages me.
93: In the US, there probably isn't much overlap between the people who would like Nigel Farage and the people who know who he is.
94: I've come to think of it as the paradox of development: Developers have a way-outsized voice in local government, but if they didn't, nothing would ever get developed because incumbent homeowners have a direct financial interest in keeping the housing supply low.
I'm picturing his staff like assuming they have a big American following, like Spinal Tap.
ISTR housing is in fact a right under the UN charter, to which you are party.
98: How about the Secretary General sends UN troops into US cities to enforce the Charter?
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control
Wow, that Universal Declaration of Human Rights is some radical shit! Did the US sign this? Did we have our fingers crossed?
Only 14 people came.
Only 14 people showed up, Moby. We don't know how many came.
The problem of high taxation on relatively poor landowners whose property has massively appreciated has a few solutions. One is to structure the tax as a transfer tax, set at something like 50% of the capital gains that can be traced to land appreciation. In practice, this means restructuring the way that capital gains tax applies to housing.
Alternatively, set income-based caps on property tax. Many places already have some form of this going on. Ideally, fine-tuned so that you don't have a lot of wealthy-but-technically-low-income retirees holding on to 5 bedroom houses in the city center indefinitely just because the property taxes are low, but even a blunt instrument would be better than nothing. You can also link this to the income of residents rather than owners. UK council tax does something vaguely similar--flats are exempt from council tax if residents are all students, for example, or at least that was the case in 2004). That has the benefit of incentivizing rentals to lower-income populations.
the ability of Americans to move in response to economic conditions has been a net positive thing, setting us apart from Europe,
I don't see how the way Americans move can possibly support the Viennese model, is one thing. We leave places instead of maintaining them at every scale.
It must needs be remarked that even the Vietnamese model is not very copyable even across the rest of Europe, being the idiosyncratic result of its brief Communist government that ended up with a huge portion of urban land owned, and the city somehow retaining it ever since.
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On a complete swerve. I have a 2017 macbook pro, from the generation that had really shitty keyboards -- so shitty, in fact, that Apple eventually organised a free replacement service. So, about 2019 when my keyboard had become really hard to use, I took advantage of this. Shortly thereafter, the battery began to die, and yesterday it lost 60% of its power in an hour of very undemanding web browsing and writing.
So I took the thing into the nearest Apple store and the genius bartender was a middle-aged bearded man, a little tubby, and not at all like the wiry hipsters marshalling the queue. He said to me that the battery was glued in, soo the replacement involved swapping out the whole of the top half of the machine. In fact, he said, that was the same operation has replacing the keyboard had been, and the keyboard replacement was still covered by the wonderful four year Apple warranty against parts and labour. Had I, perhaps, had any troubles with the keyboard since it had been changed. Why, yes, I remembered. The cursor keys had been misbehaving. Ah, he said: in that case the repair won't cost you anything. So we agreed.
As I was signing the agreement to Apple's terms and conditions, I noticed that they reserve the right to replace defective parts with used, if working ones. It seems to me quite likely that the battery swapped into my machine with a keyboard had been pre-loved, as it was shortly to become pre-hated.
In that case, the morality of the transaction becomes a bit more complicated. Apple was not just screwingme on principle -- and who can walk into an Apple store without a suspicion that this is all a tad overpriced? -- but in practice. The dud battery really was a flaw in the repair. And I suspect the genius bartender believed this, too. I wonder what the story was which led to him working there.
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94 -- My valley has a single entry/egress road. Mostly 2 lane, but a four lane at the choke point. There are currently 630 units total in the valley. Developer buys a tract down at the entrance currently zoned for 500 units but says no I want 1,000. All market.
Grocery stores, schools, nearest bus stop are miles away.
From time to time, folks in the upper valley have to evacuate because of fires. We're luckier down at my end, and also spend some money cutting down trees etc to lessen fire danger. But if everything goes to hell, we just might need to all leave at the same time.
I don't think anyone thinks that the difference between 500 and 1,000 units just inside the choke point will have any kind of impact on property values.
That the developer was kind of a jerk about the whole thing made opposition easier and much more effective.
He's building 3 story instead of 4 story apartment buildings on the part that's zoned for that, and will be back with a new proposal to build something other than single family on the remaining part of the parcel. Says he plans to 'solve' the issues that led to the denial last year, but he's really just hoping to get to a city council vote on a day when we're not all ordered to stay inside because of wildfire smoke, watching video of houses burning in California and Oregon.
Not a lot of apartment buildings get taken out by wildfires -- the wildland urban interface is a single-family houses problem.
110: Possibly because city councils don't let you build apartments in wildfire zones.
cosigning 94. But there is a further twist in this country ttaM's problems are the result of our democracy. When I was a young man, I read and digested the public choice economists, who said democracy was unworkable because you would always get a majority coalition of the have-nots to take away from the haves. That was the traditional conservative view. The genius of Thatcher -- and, perhaps, of British conservatism more generally -- lay in realising that you could instead organise a majority of the haves to take still more away from the have-nots.
The two trademark housing policies of her years were the sale of council houses and the restrictive planning permission regulations, both of which enlarged the coalition of the house-owning haves at the expense of the renting have-nots. And the haves are the ones who vote. The house price bubble around London, which everyone knows is absurd, cannot be punctured without the government responsible being smashed to bits at the next election. Everyone also knows this.
The result is the huge generational and class unfairness that leave me living in a nice house which Ume and I almost own -- we could, at a pinch, pay off the mortgage -- and ttaM and his family stuck where they are. There is no possible justification for this in terms of relative hard work, or value to society. It is pure luck, or privilege if you prefer. But it also is absolutely what a majority of voters in swing constituencies want to preserve. Whether an absolute, nationwide majority might want the present arrangement is entirely irrelevant question, since the system ensures that their opinion need not be taken into account.*
Obviously this is not going to be stable in the long run. The crunch will come with generational change and the need to fund social care. But it will cause a hell of a lot of distress and injustice before then.
The only medium term solution I can imagine -- and it's at best an incremental improvement -- is ubiquitous fast broadband. There are still cheap houses in places where there aren't any jobs. Remote working on a sufficient scale could provide some jobs there. But most of those places have plenty of other disadvantages as well as unemployment.
* representative democracy is usually a good thing: see Brexit, or, for that matter, capital punishment.
112: From the way Charley described it, this apartment complex isn't itself in a high fire-danger area, it's just positioned to inconvenience people who live in single-family houses in a high fire-danger area. Obviously, I don't have a map of the area, and there's plausibly a better place to put a big apartment complex. But wherever that better place is, I would bet a fair amount of money that the single-family homeowners nearby are opposing building there too.
113: What's weird about that public choice argument is that the Thatcher strategy is obviously viable from the theory. Take the idea that the winning coalition will always have the median voter in it. The theory doesn't say which end of the distribution will end up with the median voter.
Agreed. It's obvious now. But it wasn't from the way I remember the original framing.
114 -- People in my valley do not oppose building apartments out by the airport -- any more than the average city resident. There's massive mixed development going on on the west side of town, between the city and the airport, and no organized opposition from up here (even though the new folks will be in our little rogue school district). The people doing those developments are operating at a completely different level that the guy who wanted to develop here -- adding in parks and commercial strips, bike lanes, and all the rest. The contrast between our guy's shitty presentation and the much better much slicker presentation by the other guys was quite the contrast at the meeting where they voted. It was a different regulatory framework, yes, but also I suppose he had gotten the impression from the city administration that the fix was in, so he didn't spend the money to do a good job.
WRT wildfire, I guess the proposed apartments would only really be a problem if they had to evacuate too, and that would probably be more a matter of air quality than danger of the buildings burning down, since they'd be surrounded by massive parking lots. One side of the lot abuts a steep hill that's just grass, another is an apartment complex, another is a strip of motels and a Cracker Barrel, and the last is my sfh neighborhood. There wouldn't be road access between them and us, we'd just share the only way out.
We're having a crisis right now driven by in-migration. It's not your tired, your poor, your huddled masses migration, it's people with a whole lot more money to spend than local folks can earn and they're pricing people out of rentals and homeownership. https://www.businessinsider.com/missoula-montana-residents-forced-out-real-estate-prices-skyrocket-2021-5
113 In our situation, I suppose you'd also say that people who live here get to vote in municipal elections, and people who live in Houston, Seattle, and Los Angeles and think they might like to move here don't.
People in your valley only oppose the building of apartments in your own back yards, not in other people's back yards? I can't say that I'm surprised.
I obviously don't know the details, this might be a bad development. But single family homeowners reliably represent any dense development near them as a huge problem unrelated to any generalized distaste for density generally, at which point it's hard to take that kind of criticism at face value.
The other area is farmland, so not in many people's back yards. Hence easier approvals.
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As a Micronesian who spent her formative years reading books JUST so I could get a free pizzaSomeone explain this please.
Mostly just hay, though, and pasture. Lots of farmers happily cashing out.
Here's a picture. https://www.google.com/maps/@46.9119466,-114.0292724,4935m/data=!3m1!1e3 Development that's being built with 500 units rather than 1000 is just north of the interstate, that huge disturbed area.
Farmland out to and beyond the airport is pretty obvious.
123:. Does it have something to do with Pizza Hut's Book It program?
You have to post the rest of the sentence! Does she decouple the experience of reading from the taste of pizza? Does she publish a middle-grades SF novel about a girl who passes through a magical bookshelf to find a lost world of sentient pizza? I will explain nothing until I know.
125 must be correct. Pizza Hut ran a promotion called Book It through elementary schools where if you read a certain number of books (20?), you got a coupon for a free personal pan pizza. It was kind of funny, because whole families would go out to dinner to claim their kid's reward, so it drove families to spend money at Pizza Hut. (This brought to you by my one experience eating at a Pizza Hut courtesy of the Book It program.)
None of the Pizza Huts by me accepted giant stone coins.
I was going to say Book It (I read the books, but we never went, because we would have had to go out to dinner.)
We used to go to Pizza Hut every Friday, books or not.
Two questions remain - are there Pizza Huts in Micronesia?
And, what is so incriminating about this that the question can only be raised anonymously?
They unscrewed the cap on the pepper flakes before they left.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that my daughter is now really into anime. After watching "Death Note" and "Attack on Titan" with her, I saw that "Neon Genesis Evangelion" was on Netflix. I've never seen it, but somebody recommended it to me once. Has anyone seen it? It is fucked up. It's not just fucked up as a kids' show -- it's fucked up as an adult show. It's like season 3 of Hannibal levels of fucked up.
NGE is an amazingly weird show. It's great on some levels, and sometimes transcendently beautiful, but definitely disturbing. Also the sexual politics render it nearly unwatchable.
The sexual politics are deranged, but mercifully I think my daughter didn't get all of the implications. It helps that the only sane character on the show is Misato, so her problems with intimacy (which are clearly spelled out) pale in comparison to the rest of the characters, who should be locked away for their own good (and also so they don't accidentally exterminate the human race). She and I were joking about what the show looks like from her point of view -- she's just going to her day job, trying to save the human race, while relying on a bunch of people who are too self-involved to care.
Like the cake for a gender reveal party.
That image would fit right into NGE.
It's now the standard cake for a baby shower.
I think NGE was made in response to mecha anime like Voltron and Robotech, in which kids battle alien invaders to save the world from destruction, and which are framed as celebratory hero stories. NGE is about that too, but focuses specifically on how young these kids are, the pain and terror that they must experience, and the psychological damage of having to bear so much loss and so much responsibility at such a young age. It's a real weird show. I mean -- good point, kind of, but Voltron and Robotech are fictional fantasy universes, so it's not like there's an actual need to address the fact that they gloss over the trauma experienced by entirely invented robot-piloting-children. It's as if mid-century American animators made a show about roadrunners and coyotes and the physical and emotional harm that they experience when they are forced to maim each other over and over again.
I still love NGE, sort of. I thought it was incredible when I was a kid, and a year or so ago when it came out on Netflix I got all excited to see it again, and ... I just couldn't. It's just really hard to watch.
Voltron could have been really creepy if it explored the whole thing about how exactly the lions hook together.
Not that the producers ever answered my letters.
There's exactly one person unmasked in the Whole Foods. She's about forty with a teenager (masked). I'm assuming the deal is to wait for someone to tell her off and then she records it.
140 seems very right on about NGE, which I haven't seen in 20 years and really don't know how I would take now. Will not be watching that one with the 9yo in any event. We're currently in the middle of Fruits Basket, which is not itself devoid of weird sexual politics (hello, anime) but has more lightness in between the trauma, and 9yo sure does love it.
The show is a bunch of ideas crammed together. Deconstruction of mecha anime is in there, so Asuka and Tohji illustrate the "trauma of child soldiers" theme. Shinji is already a broken person, and Rei would take a paragraph to describe. But even Asuka is pre-broken, since her backstory is something Charles Dickens would reject as too Dickensian.
I'm just fascinated by its existence, and that it had such a big impact. It's like the Star Wars trilogy, where you get Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and then instead of Return of the Jedi you get the last ten minutes of 2001, but spread out to feature length. But instead of ruining the appeal of the series, this somehow made it more popular. My daughter's reaction to the original ending, with all of the characters congratulating Shinji, was the purest look of WTF I have ever seen on a human face.
144: I knew nothing about the show, and Netflix age-rates it 12, so I initially let my 11-year-old watch it. I had him stop right when it started to get really dark (episode 18), and in retrospect I stopped just in time.
Oh jeez. Pokey reads a ton of manga, unsupervised. Jammies semi-monitors it, but neither of us really have much idea. Is there a shortcut to monitor what he's getting into?
123 was me. I believe the Micronesium in question was Guam. So I'm guessing yes, Pizza Hut.
145.2 is a great comparison. Did you show her End of Evangelion? You may see even more WTF.
Misato might be sane, but she's also an alcoholic with PTSD. Whereas Fuyutsuki is sane, stable, steady, and humane, and has decided the right thing to do is help Gendo Ikari blow up the world.
Also, the Netflix dub is terrible for several reasons, not least that part of the original greatness was having those four episodes happen twice, with different voice actors.
We watched End of Evangelion first, and we found it confusing, so we watched the original ending, and it didn't help.
Misato has the most normal reactions to things, so being an alcoholic with intimacy problems seem pretty low on the list of pathologies on the show. The pattern is established early on, when a nuclear-powered robot is going to explode, and Misato's reaction is "we should shut it off before it explodes and kills lots of people", which she does. And then it turns out some of the other characters rigged it to explode. It's like she works on a team, where everyone else on the team is a mad scientist (or a 14-year-old whose mother died horrifically, or a J. J. Abrams mystery box). Fuyutsuki was going along with Gendo because Yui asked him to, or something? It was very unclear to me.
147: I can ask my daughter about specific titles. She's 16 and I'm sure thinks everything is suitable for her, but the question of what's suitable for her brother is something we talk about a lot.
That would be great!!
Right now his favorites are Naruto and Dragonball.
Naruto gave me so many headaches. That fucker shouts too much.
Walt, did you watch AoT on Netflix? Did it have English subs/dubs available.
And speaking of anime, GITS:SAC is as good as everyone always said. (I'm in season 2, no spoliers.)
It's on Hulu. The first three seasons have dubs, but the first half of the fourth season only has a sub so far.
The child soldier trope also appears in at least recent Gundam iterations. Which postdate NGE, but I gather the metaseries has had common themes from the beginning?
150: My daughter said they should be fine.
155: awesome, thank you both! Are there any particular serieses that should have a big red warning flag?
I was thinking about the three anime series I've now watched with my daughter, and something that stands out is that while they can be pretty trashy, they all make me think actual thoughts. The first one we watched was "Death Note", whose main female character is basically dressed in lingerie for the entire length of the show. But still, it's hard not to think about the basic premise of a "death note" -- a magic book that can instantly kill anyone by just writing their name in it. Contrast this with "Guardians of the Galaxy", say, which is high quality entertainment. I had no thoughts after it, other than "that was pretty good".
The rest of anime could be terrible trash that my daughter watches without bringing to my attention, of course.
Death Note, Attack on Titan, and Neon Genesis Evangelion are all too adult. I think "My Hero Academia" is fine? I haven't watched it myself. My daughter watched "Sword Art Online" when she was 13, and she hasn't killed anyone or turned to drugs, so maybe that's fine? Though I looked at Common Sense Media, and commenters say it gets increasingly adult.
I think manga is less traumatizing than anime, just because it's static.
156: It's truth. Unless I've gotten it confused with a different series.
He mostly isn't watching anime, except some little kid stuff with Rascal - Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh. But he does read a ton of manga, and in my head they're the same genre? I don't know if that's right, but 160.last makes sense.
I think of Misato less as the only sane character and more as the only truly humane character. I guess that might amount to the same thing.
Coincidentally started watching the End of Evangelion last night but didn't finish (watched the Snyder zombie flick and Reign of Fire first so didn't finish). It doesn't hit the same as NGE.
Can recommend Cowboy Bebop and FLCL (the latter has messed up sexual politics but is truly sublime.)
162: Most anime have a manga associated with them (which can come first or second), so kinda? But a still image is less likely to give them nightmares. Plus, you can't hear the yelling, which I hear helps with Naruto.
They aren't genres! They're media! !!!! Where there is a pedant, there is wailing and a gnashing of teeth.
Last Exile and Mobile Suit Gundam Seed I'll recommend, though probably too stressful for geeblets.
Also disagree with Barry, I think most of the kids at Shinji's school are also humane. They step out to comfort and support the pilots, which Misato isn't able to do.
165.last I agree with that, I was just thinking of main characters.
Misato is the only adult who cares about the pilots, but she has to fend off her boss, her boss' boss, her best friend, and the aliens who are attacking Earth, while also investigating who murdered her boyfriend and why, which cuts into her comforting time.
Also Full Metal Alchemist and Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood are excellent.
Are any of them inappropriate for a 16-year-old girl?
Both FMA and FMA:B should be fine for a 16 year old girl or boy and even younger. Cowboy Bebop too. I'd hold off on FLCL though.