You must log in or register to comment.
good 🫡 I hope nobody is able to afford so the prices of homes plummet and tens of millions of speculators lose their “investment”
That’s not how it works at all. How it works is: the bourgeoisie are buying up the houses and renting them to the proletariat. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-single-family-homes-and-put-them-up-for-rent.html
-
Housing prices and rents always go up, because it’s mandated by state policy. Rents == Prices because home values are tied to expected rents.
-
“Institutional Investors” own at most 4% of SFH rental housing, this is not total SFH just the 15% that are rented out. Corporations are a minor factor of homeowners, whom nearly all are bourgeois. No matter who is speculating, the result is the same. Rents have always risen and rises are not at all tied to the % of corporate investors involved.
-
Of all SFH, less than 10% is owned by “investors” 8/10 of those are “mom and pop”.
“Corporations” are a red herring in the housing question, the fault is the bourgeois structure of US housing culture which empowers tens of millions of people to surplus value and property rights.
Y’all need to read Engels on the Housing Question, don’t tail the petty bourgeoisie on this.
- Housing prices and rents always go up
Except when they go down, as in the Great Recession. I saw even rents go down then.
I think you’re minimizing the real changes in recent behavior by institutional investors, who really are buying up housing lately. The thought that they’d buy single family homes to rent out is novel to me at least; I’d never heard of such a thing before. Just because it’s a small percentage today doesn’t mean it necessarily will be tomorrow.
Y’all need to read Engels on the Housing Question, don’t tail the petty bourgeoisie on this.
What would it mean for us to “tail” the petty bourgeoisie on “this”?
For tailing it’s falling for the 80% of landlords that are “small” crying about corporate competition in their little dictatorships: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6510977/5686588
The thought that they’d buy single family homes to rent out is novel to me at least; I’d never heard of such a thing before.
They started getting involved in SFH after the foreclosures of 08, because they did not lose much relative net worth compared to people who own 1-10 homes, who lost net worth on all their assets at that time. They didn’t get involved before that because not many people were renting SFH in the 80s and 90s and prior, those homes were only for the middling strata and up. Also, by just financing homes in the past while prices continued to rise, there was no reason to get their hands involved to add more work when they can just seek interest on all development. When hundreds of thousands of homes suddenly became available, that’s when they took the opportunity to turn it into a business. And yeah I’m minimizing them because they are indeed a minimal (0.6% of all SFH stock) component of the market and concentrated in a few markets, but that is not tied to the overall indeces of those markets whatsoever. Any investor who owns the home would have the same position as any other, corporate or “mom and pop”, the resulting market will be the same.
Liberal/Petty Bourgeois media is taking advantage of the novelty of corporate investors in SFH to use us to fight for protections backing “small investors” worth millions against competition.
Housing costs (and building) are raising extra fast post 2009 because they received basically 0% interest rates to finance more homes to “recover” from the financial crisis. That corporate investors got in at that time is a simultaneous symptom of the crisis, which always benefits the highest bourgs as they eat up small capital owners (good riddance).
There is finally the last aspect that SFH cities or neighborhoods have become the “standard model” of US housing culture since the early 2000s, this is related to the eventual financial crisis too.
Except when they go down, as in the Great Recession. I saw even rents go down then.
the '08 mortgage crash was a blip in the general trend of US housing prices. prices declined for a relatively brief time because of mortgage conditions that don’t exist anymore, then rebounded within a few years and continued rising. prices spiked in 2020 considerable faster and more than they fell in '08.
In fact you can think of much of the way the state and bourgeoisie has acted since 2008 has been to ensure that line recovers to where it should have been if no collapse. Yes, Obama foreclosed on people (mostly “new wealth” Black and Latino people), but he “saved” hundreds of millions of (mostly white) portfolios.
The Bourgeoisie knows that line is necessary to deflate class struggle, they know they’ll struggle with military recruitment if soldiers can’t expect to own a home at the end of their service.
-
like what happens in the US with healthcare costs where all the insurance companies went bankrupt because no one can afford medical care, right?
Home-ownership is hardly related to healthcare costs besides both being financialized sectors that seek rent, I’m not sure what your connection is.
housing and medical care are things people need to live. prices being inflated beyond what most people can afford hasn’t resulted in market corrections bringing down prices. the people who can’t afford the minimum shelter and medical care required to live simply die. prices remain inflated because wealth inequality in the US is such that there’s no price so high that a tiny minority of the population won’t pay it as long as artificial scarcity keeps making it profitable.
Artificial scarcity isn’t real in the housing market
There has never been more houses to workers in the US than ever before, supply and demand is hardly a factor in the price of ground rents, those are directly tied into Imperialism’s health.
Corporate investors cannot raise prices above the whole market, and if they do, all homeowners (the majority of which are “proletarians”) benefit the same, so they all engage in price raising politics.
Housing prices == rents and vice versa. If housing prices collapse so will rents, because they are the same thing. As long as someone or something is able to purchase at an ever increasing price, housing costs will continue to rise.
This battle over purchasing houses, is between the petty Bourgeoisie and the haute Bourgeoisie. The only difference between mortgaging out and paying rent is whether a so-called worker can profit from their investment in years time, it’s a class transition into the petty Bourgeoisie. You can look at historical charts that the price differences for renting vs loans is most often favorable towards renting, but the differences are slight.
These are also SINGLE FAMILY HOMES, 15% are rented out, 4% of those are rented out by corporations, so 0.6% of all SFH are owned to rent by corps, that 0.6% of landlords is raising the prices of all homes country wide? Besides, SFH should be for the most part destroyed for climate reasons when Socialism comes.
Housing prices == rents and vice versa. If housing prices collapse so will rents, because they are the same thing. As long as someone or something is able to purchase at an ever increasing price, housing costs will continue to rise.
this is all correct. US homeowners bear more blame than corporate investors for the current environment. my point is that, given that housing prices == rents and people need housing to be able to live and work, anyone who doesn’t already own their primary residence (presumably with a locked in 3% interest rate forever) is going to be priced out of being alive before prices could theoretically get high enough to destabilize profitability.
I probably used the wrong term when I said “artificial scarcity”. I know more housing exists than people. what’s kept artificially scarce is housing that is sold/rented for prices that can be afforded by most people on the wages paid by most jobs. Bourgeois economists describe this as a problem of “overconsumption” as though minimum wage workers have the option of “reducing their consumption” of things like housing or medical care below the minimum required to be able to continue working.
SFH should be for the most part destroyed for climate reasons when Socialism comes
agreed
This is all cool and big brained theory crafting and what not but I currently live in a 150 square foot shack and just want to
I think more and more people are going to start thinking like this and it is our duty as communists to guide them to the correct conclusions. 
Oh, believe me, my urge to
increases as the impeding size of my shack decreases. As an ML I know the extremely limited systemic utility of individual , but it’s tough to see a better solution when the people around me in real life are maybe 60% 
, 39% 
, and 1% 
