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Willa Rogers posted:Taxes, and utilities. Also true. Our mortgage just went up by $100 for another tax increase.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:21
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Also everywhere I've rented where utilities were included, there was also some other scam to make sure that it only cost the owners an absolute minimum - right now our water is included, but we can't even have a loving dishwasher because "it's unfair to the association" if some units have washers and others don't because the association covers the water bill, and it's fully $4 in quarters to do one load of laundry at the on-prem coin-op machines (assuming the dryer fully dries your clothes on the first run) Renting is loving hell.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:22
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Willa Rogers posted:Heat has been traditionally & usually covered in rentals in the Chicago metro area but more landlords are switching to unit-based register heating from steam radiators, alas. Dang lol, everywhere in VA I paid electric, gas, internet, and trash, with a tossup for water and sewage or a parking spot if it wasn't just a free for all. My electric and gas costs are lower living in my house than in my last apartment, but it was a poorly insulated piece of poo poo with what I'm pretty sure now was a black mold issue in the ventilation
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Apr 21, 2022 18:22
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Yeah, it really depends on where you are how utilities play into a rental agreement. Usually, heat and water are covered. Sometimes internet. It's pretty rare for electricity to be covered. When I lived in the U.K. for a while, they covered all utilities, but their rate basically assumed I was leaving the faucets, light, and heat on all day every day and there was literally no way to pay for it myself, despite the fact that it would have cost 60% of what I was paying. It was also pretty difficult to find a place with AC in the U.K. and a lot of places charged you extra for having it.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:24
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Also, there's lots of hostility out there toward electric companies that spike their rates weekdays between 5 and 9 pm. Like, if you have kids to feed & laundry to do after work, better to take a nap, let the kids fend for themselves, & then you get up at 3 am, I guess. Also frustration with those bogus scolding smart-meter metrics along the lines of "Your neighbors are using 50 percent less electricity than you do; we need you to Do Better, M'kay?"
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Apr 21, 2022 18:25
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Lib and let die posted:Also everywhere I've rented where utilities were included, there was also some other scam to make sure that it only cost the owners an absolute minimum - right now our water is included, but we can't even have a loving dishwasher because "it's unfair to the association" if some units have washers and others don't because the association covers the water bill, and it's fully $4 in quarters to do one load of laundry at the on-prem coin-op machines (assuming the dryer fully dries your clothes on the first run) It's a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, but I was always a fan of apartment complexes having an agreement with Comcast to prevent you from going with another option for internet/cable, even in places which have competition or god forbid even municipal options. Currently we have fiber via a local competitor to Comcast, but we also have a municipal provider in town, and as soon as their fiber rolls out, I'm going back to them. Oh excuse me it's "xfinity" now because Comcast branding is far too toxic for them to say out loud lmao
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Apr 21, 2022 18:26
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Depends on what your debt to income ratio is, but you can look at some of the mid-tier exurbs in the Northeast or parts of the Midwest for very cheap housing still. I'm guessing you just picked Cairo randomly. It is a poor example of a 'mid-tier exurb' because it is a completely collapsed community in every measure I can think of (economic activity, population, income, etc.). It routinely gets described as a 'modern ghost town'. https://abandonedonline.net/location/cairo/ These are not cherry-picked photos of urban decay, drop into street view and you'll see it is a pervasive condition. https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-illinois-county-is-losing-people-faster-than-anywhere-in-the-u-s-11629883801 https://www.npr.org/2017/06/04/528650995/saving-cairo-a-once-thriving-river-town-finds-itself-on-life-support
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Apr 21, 2022 18:30
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Willa Rogers posted:Also, there's lots of hostility out there toward electric companies that spike their rates weekdays between 5 and 9 pm. Like, if you have kids to feed & laundry to do after work, better to take a nap, let the kids fend for themselves, & then you get up at 3 am, I guess. Those reports are always fawning for me (because I live in a shoebox and 80% of my zone it counts is big single family houses lol) The power company did send me like a decade supply of LED bulbs for free so that was cool, but rates are way higher here than when I lived in Indy which ain't great though my complaining is tempered thanks to reading the UK thread as well Professor Beetus posted:It's a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, but I was always a fan of apartment complexes having an agreement with Comcast to prevent you from going with another option for internet/cable, even in places which have competition or god forbid even municipal options. The midwest is funny because in a lot of places you'll have extensive fiber networks in the exurbs and rural regions (but not SUPER rural obv) that stop right at city lines because ATT/Comcast fight it tooth and nail. Wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't a thing elsewhere too.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:31
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Basically agree with everything you said, but:Epic High Five posted:30 year mortgages with a fixed rate isn't a scam because it's what rich people and people who matter politically otherwise are all getting, and more importantly it's the vehicle that got many of them rich and politically powerful in the first place, hence the desire to pull the ladder up to keep number going up because the next logical step is to get great terms then have somebody else pay your mortgage for you with a generous bonus for your hard work of owning something. Roughly 2/3 of people own their own homes and almost all of them got theirs with a 30-year fixed mortgage. It's not an elites-only thing, it is literally the most common method of obtaining housing (roughly 50% more than renting) in America. Epic High Five posted:If you can get in you almost certainly should and you should use whatever means you have at hand. In general, on average, this is usually true. But, it is 100% not a universal truth and there are a ton of individual circumstances that change the calculus a lot. Making bad decisions and rushing into buying a house can ruin you financially in a way that renting can't. People taking this as gospel was part of the reason that everyone jumped into the largest mortgage possible with 0% down from 2002-2008 and lost everything or were stuck with mortgage payments that were 50% higher than local rent.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:32
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Epic High Five posted:Those reports are always fawning for me (because I live in a shoebox and 80% of my zone it counts is big single family houses lol) Yeah, pretty sure the reason our area is so good is because when Viacom was flailing all over the place back in the late 90s/early 2000s, iirc our City Government subsidized three different municipal options to essentially manufacture competition, and as a result our Internet infrastructure has been largely good. Dealing with Comcast during my apartment complex years was so loving onerous.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:37
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Willa Rogers posted:Also, there's lots of hostility out there toward electric companies that spike their rates weekdays between 5 and 9 pm. Like, if you have kids to feed & laundry to do after work, better to take a nap, let the kids fend for themselves, & then you get up at 3 am, I guess. I've actually had really good experience with Smartmeters. They were useful in helping me keep my bill down and realizing how much power I/certain devices use without even realizing it. Plus, with smart meters, I can have the electric company give me a fixed bill for 30 days of usage that keeps the bill around the same every month instead of them having to send a guy every fourth Thursday of the month and having my billing period be between 24 and 35 days. Tezer posted:I'm guessing you just picked Cairo randomly. No, I picked it semi-sarcastically because it is one of the areas in the Midwest (along with a bunch of places in Ohio and Detroit) where they were basically giving away houses for free from 2009 to 2020.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:38
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Basically agree with everything you said, but: Yeah, which is why I try to draw a line between the boring safe stuff and the stuff designed to prey on people, and as an added gently caress you to people you can get hurt by this stuff even if you rent if your landlord was the one who was a huge idiot. It's not uncommon but it's necessarily going to become less common over time as the natural consequence of housing prices needing to always go up becoming a central pillar of our economy. If 100% of homeowners had them now it'd still be a mortally wounded system. It's not just a strictly financial decision at the micro level because in addition to equity you're building, you're also moving up on the political ladder which is an inherently safer place to be than being a renter who as a class basically do not exist except as a pool of rubes who almost certainly cannot afford to defend themselves from the higher status predators During the great ripping off that was the oughts I was waiting tables making barely above poverty and still had people insisting I could own a home in the high CoL community I was working in. It was honestly pretty funny how nobody could answer "and what if they decide they want the house I've been paying for and maintaining all of a sudden so decide to make it unaffordable for me?" when I asked, then it turned out the lenders didn't even need to go that far
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Apr 21, 2022 18:42
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:I've actually had really good experience with Smartmeters. They were useful in helping me keep my bill down and realizing how much power I/certain devices use without even realizing it. Yeah, any measure to be able to keep personal costs down is good, but (won't speak for Willa) my issue with that kind of stuff is that it reinforces the idea that the biggest wastes of energy are individual citizens and not like...the billions and billions of street-corner ATMs that run ceaselessly 24/7 or garish, nightmarish wastelands of energy use like Vegas and Times Square - the same kind of poo poo that companies use to push plastic responsibility off of themselves and onto the consumer. Yeah, it's good to keep individual electricity use down for a variety of reasons, but it's not The Problem With Electricity Use.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:43
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Creates more busy work for you, or makes that busy work easier if you were already doing it. Manage your own electricity manage your yard manage your own little entire fiefdom and you don't have time to do much else. Combine that with selling more appliances. and you have the modern recipe for single family zoned suburbs.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:46
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Harold Fjord posted:Creates more busy work for you, or makes that busy work easier if you were already doing it. Manage your own electricity manage your yard manage your own little entire fiefdom and you don't have time to do much else. Probably only semi-related but the most subtle "what the gently caress" commercial I've seen in this vain is the one with Keenan Thompson talking to his home appliances about how he just ordered a car online and how he orders everything online and his appliances start chanting "never leave home! never leave home!" and it's just like...why are you bragging about just buying a car online if the goal is to never leave home?
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Apr 21, 2022 18:47
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Harold Fjord posted:Creates more busy work for you, or makes that busy work easier if you were already doing it. Manage your own electricity manage your yard manage your own little entire fiefdom and you don't have time to do much else. It doesn't really create any extra work for you to get numbers. It's also really useful because a ton of people (myself included until about 10 years ago) have no idea how much energy they waste/use by keeping random things plugged in 24/7 (even when not in use), how dramatically it changes your power usage to set you fridge/freezer settings from 10 to 7, or how using the program function on your AC to turn off or change the level it kicks in at when you are at work can really use a ton of excess energy for no reason. All I had to do was turn the knob down on the fridge, plug a bunch of things I only occasionally used into a surge protector and then just unplug/plug in the surge protector when I need them, and take 2 minutes to program my AC and I saved about $40 a month and burned a lot less energy with basically no impact on my life. Plus, for people on tight budgets, knowing your electric bill is coming every 30 days or on the 1st of every month is very useful compared to "whenever we send the meter guy to check; could be 24 days or could be 35 days."
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Apr 21, 2022 18:57
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Professor Beetus posted:Well if you would like to point out who exactly is happy with the status quo, feel free. I don't think I've seen How are u weigh in this morning though. Sorry, what? Why I am I being namedropped as somebody who is in favor of the status quo w/r/t housing?
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Apr 21, 2022 19:07
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What happens to homeowners and others when the bubble pops this time? The reasons behind this bubble seem different from the subprime crisis, so I'm wondering if anyone has any good guesses what the consequences might be this time around. Sorry if this has an obvious answer, but I'm pretty ignorant in this sort of thing.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:10
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Gorsuch performing his bi-annual "make a good Supreme Court ruling by accident because I make all my rulings based on the question, 'Is this word literally in the constitution or not?'" (He sided with the liberals, but it was still only a 5-4 ruling to determine that Puerto Ricans can be denied some disability benefits because they don't pay federal taxes and are not "fully incorporated citizens" because they live in a non-incorporated territory) 
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Apr 21, 2022 19:12
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Tezer posted:I'm guessing you just picked Cairo randomly. It is a poor example of a 'mid-tier exurb' because it is a completely collapsed community in every measure I can think of (economic activity, population, income, etc.). It routinely gets described as a 'modern ghost town'. I hope it was random because oh boy was it suggesting that there is affordable housing in Cairo as if it was a simple easy fix is really what pushed me into the idea that the whole discussion was just totally divorced from real world situations.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:15
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Eason the Fifth posted:What happens to homeowners and others when the bubble pops this time? The reasons behind this bubble seem different from the subprime crisis, so I'm wondering if anyone has any good guesses what the consequences might be this time around. Sorry if this has an obvious answer, but I'm pretty ignorant in this sort of thing. Nothing really unless you are trying to move/sell your house. If the bubble pops dramatically (probably won't in most areas, but could happen in some regions), then you could have a bad scenario where you need to move, but you mortgage is a lot higher than your house is worth. So, you are basically either: - Stuck paying an inflated price on your house for 30 years or until the market rises back to its previous levels. or - Unable to move, because any attempt to sell your house would not cover the full balance of the mortgage. That could prevent you from being able to buy another house or have you still paying a mortgage on a house you no longer own. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 19:16
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Eason the Fifth posted:What happens to homeowners and others when the bubble pops this time? The reasons behind this bubble seem different from the subprime crisis, so I'm wondering if anyone has any good guesses what the consequences might be this time around. Sorry if this has an obvious answer, but I'm pretty ignorant in this sort of thing. This is a different bubble form the subprime crisis, but it's had to tell exactly how. The 2008 crash involved a ton of people getting loans with adjustible rates and insufficient income/finances in order to feed the unending maw of securities and derivatives on those securities. I think that sector of finance is less active now than it was at that time, though I don't know if that's true on derivatives which remain almost entirely unregulated. A lot(nobody knows how much) of the demand for housing now is institutional investment and since people always need houses I expect them to ride out the bubble pop and just keep charging rent on the poo poo they own. One thing that preceeded the crash in 2008 was a bunch of foreclosures undercutting the value of the securities. Hopefully that's not happening right now.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:17
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Gumball Gumption posted:I hope it was random because oh boy was it suggesting that there is affordable housing in Cairo as if it was a simple easy fix is really what pushed me into the idea that the whole discussion was just totally divorced from real world situations. Yeah I'm not sure how it got distorted but I thought the whole "perfectly spherical cow" thing was less about getting a loan and more about "just up and move across the country" devoid of the context that people (shockingly) are invested in the communities in which they currently reside for various reasons and "just up and move" isn't realistic when you factor a lot of that stuff in.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:17
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Mercury_Storm posted:Is the US legal system really so broken that the very moment some chud judge makes an unhinged ruling it takes effect until someone bothers to go through a process to challenge it? Is there no delay to allow for challenges? In reference to the mask mandate issue that the US government is just getting around to challenge apparently. If the loser expresses a clear intention to appeal, and the appeals court thinks the ruling is imminently important and has a fair chance of being overturned, a stay can be placed on the order pending the outcome of the appeal. But generally speaking, federal judicial nominees have to be voted on by Congress (unlike local judges, which can be some random yahoo in some jurisdictions), so there's a built-in assumption that they're not going to be completely unhinged most of the time. Moreover, if there is broad national sentiment about the issue, Congress can always pass a law to resolve whatever issue the court found. The system isn't really built to handle Congress using the courts as a proxy for ideological battles against the federal government like this. Most of the COVID-related measures being struck down by the courts are because, in the face of Congressional halfheartedness and inaction, executive agencies are interpreting their legislatively-defined powers extremely broadly in order to claim the authority to take the broad public health measures that Congress is largely neglecting. There's also a risk in appeal: the higher a court case goes, the broader the precedent becomes and the more difficult it becomes to overturn later. The current Supreme Court hasn't been especially friendly to executive agencies claiming broad authority for public health reasons; they already struck down both the CDC's eviction ban and OSHA's universal mask mandate. Since the transportation mask mandate is a short-term measure that the CDC claimed it was keeping in place just to buy time to study the current wave, it could be that the Biden administration wanted to get a clearer stance from the CDC on the transportation mandate's importance before taking the risk of another court battle.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:19
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Eason the Fifth posted:What happens to homeowners and others when the bubble pops this time? The reasons behind this bubble seem different from the subprime crisis, so I'm wondering if anyone has any good guesses what the consequences might be this time around. Sorry if this has an obvious answer, but I'm pretty ignorant in this sort of thing. A great investment opportunity for private investors to lock in a bunch more rental properties for their portfolios?  I think just about everyone in this thread would support severely restricting to outright banning corporate ownership of single family homes, cracking down on investment properties, especially past the first and then fall somewhere on the range between supporting significant public owned housing projects to provide a base level of housing all the way to the liquidation of landlords. But considering every old with a house has an absurd amount of their savings tied up in it, any of that is such an electoral non-starter you might as well be talking about letting poor minorities immigrate.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:20
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Can someone explain to me, after Citizens United, how directly and purposefully punishing Disney for saying they disagreed with a bill isn't an infringement on free speech? Or how the government retaliating isn't cancel culture? Or is the answer just Republican hypocrisy doesn't matter.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:28
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Yawgmoft posted:Can someone explain to me, after Citizens United, how directly and purposefully punishing Disney for saying they disagreed with a bill isn't an infringement on free speech? Or how the government retaliating isn't cancel culture? Republican hypocrisy doesn't matter and it would be an incredible trick if they walked people into defending the free speech of corporations as a gotcha against them when gotcha doesn't work.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:30
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Yawgmoft posted:Can someone explain to me, after Citizens United, how directly and purposefully punishing Disney for saying they disagreed with a bill isn't an infringement on free speech? Or how the government retaliating isn't cancel culture? I might proffer that the answer for some is "it's good when the bad guys accidentally do a good thing, even if it's for the wrong reasons" Sort of a "don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake" kind of thing
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Apr 21, 2022 19:30
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Gorsuch performing his bi-annual "make a good Supreme Court ruling by accident because I make all my rulings based on the question, 'Is this word literally in the constitution or not?'" I read it was 8-1 with only Sotomayor dissenting
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Apr 21, 2022 19:33
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Edit nevermind.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:37
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DeSantis and the other Republicans are probably expecting (and hoping) courts strike down the Disney law because it’s so blatantly retaliatory so they don’t have to deal with the fall out and get to use ACTIVIST JUDGES SIDING WITH THE WOKE GROOMERS as a fundraising point. Cause if this goes through the counties surrounding Walt Disney World are about to get seriously hosed hard having to suddenly take on the burden of the public roads and utilities Disney had been handling up to this point
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Apr 21, 2022 19:38
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Dr. VooDoo posted:DeSantis and the other Republicans are probably expecting (and hoping) courts strike down the Disney law because it’s so blatantly retaliatory so they don’t have to deal with the fall out and get to use ACTIVIST JUDGES SIDING WITH THE WOKE GROOMERS as a fundraising point. Cause if this goes through the counties surrounding Walt Disney World are about to get seriously hosed hard having to suddenly take on the burden of the public roads and utilities Disney had been handling up to this point I live here. I have no idea how this culture war garbage is so appealing, to the point we're talking about a Democratic bloodbath in a few months, when absolutely nobody can afford rent or housing. A governor spending weeks fighting Mickey Mouse!? I'm stunned. What the hell is going on? I mean Charlie Crist is gonna lose because he's Charlie Crist. But how do we help ourselves?
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Apr 21, 2022 19:43
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Lib and let die posted:Yeah I'm not sure how it got distorted but I thought the whole "perfectly spherical cow" thing was less about getting a loan and more about "just up and move across the country" devoid of the context that people (shockingly) are invested in the communities in which they currently reside for various reasons and "just up and move" isn't realistic when you factor a lot of that stuff in. On the other side of this, I've lived in three states inside of five years. Moving blows rear end and I hate it every time but it's the only realistic way to get a raise. Living in a home in one spot for 30 years is a laughable joke. Also means whenever I think about community organizing and working local I get to ask "What does local mean to me, and what community should I work with? The one I'm leaving soon or the unknown one I will be joining at some point?"
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Apr 21, 2022 19:43
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Dr. VooDoo posted:DeSantis and the other Republicans are probably expecting (and hoping) courts strike down the Disney law because it’s so blatantly retaliatory so they don’t have to deal with the fall out and get to use ACTIVIST JUDGES SIDING WITH THE WOKE GROOMERS as a fundraising point. Cause if this goes through the counties surrounding Walt Disney World are about to get seriously hosed hard having to suddenly take on the burden of the public roads and utilities Disney had been handling up to this point right i get the impulse to go "good, gently caress giant corps and gently caress their special private fiefdoms" but the RCID was run as a transparent public agency that quietly, boringly, handled roads and sewers and so on for the magic kingdom. reverting all this stuff to the local counties is going to be a massive financial disruption - residents of the district are going to have to pay a special assessment to handle RCID's bond debt, which means big property tax bills and rent hikes for all residents meanwhile, the law itself is on shaky ground. its not very clear that florida is allowed to dissolve this district without the consent of the residents (about a hundred people live in the cities of lake buena vista and bay lake, and they are ALL disney employees). it is also very much a no-no to pass laws to gently caress with specific people or organizations, which this law clearly is because desantis keeps saying so in public. it will likely be struck down Lib and let die posted:I might proffer that the answer for some is "it's good when the bad guys accidentally do a good thing, even if it's for the wrong reasons" its not really a good thing to dissolve RCID, unless you consider it good to mildly annoy a giant corporation at the cost of sticking every single resident of the local county with a surprise $2k bill for their house or apartment Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 19:43
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turnip kid posted:I live here. I have no idea how this culture war garbage is so appealing, to the point we're talking about a Democratic bloodbath in a few months, when absolutely nobody can afford rent or housing. A governor spending weeks fighting Mickey Mouse!? I'm stunned. What the hell is going on? I mean Charlie Crist is gonna lose because he's Charlie Crist. But how do we help ourselves? There may not be much of a connection between the culture war and the incoming bloodbath, that's being caused primarily by federal inaction DeSantis is pushing the culture war because he thinks it gives him far-right cred in the 2024 presidential primary, and it's getting a lot of airplay because it aligns with the goals of the conservative movement writ large
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Apr 21, 2022 19:47
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Yawgmoft posted:Can someone explain to me, after Citizens United, how directly and purposefully punishing Disney for saying they disagreed with a bill isn't an infringement on free speech? Or how the government retaliating isn't cancel culture? The latter. The game for politics these days is firing up your base. The people yelling on Facebook comments are all fired up about how Desantis has already "stuck it to Disney". It's already done.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:49
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Yawgmoft posted:Can someone explain to me, after Citizens United, how directly and purposefully punishing Disney for saying they disagreed with a bill isn't an infringement on free speech? Or how the government retaliating isn't cancel culture? At a minimum, they have the pretext that the text of the bill doesn't mention anything about retaliation. CU's also a pretty different context and case specific to campaign spending, iirc. I don't know what sort of posture would come into play with a free speech infringement argument on this set of facts. edit: Fall Down Terror's explanation gives better legal color.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:50
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Jaxyon posted:The latter. and then later, when this law is overturned by a republican judge because it is a pretty obvious punitive law, desantis will be able to yell about woke activist judges its just red meat for a base who wants to see big corps suffer, even if the people really suffering are the local taxpayers who now suddenly have to pay for the upkeep of the magic kingdom
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Apr 21, 2022 19:50
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turnip kid posted:I live here. I have no idea how this culture war garbage is so appealing, to the point we're talking about a Democratic bloodbath in a few months, when absolutely nobody can afford rent or housing. A governor spending weeks fighting Mickey Mouse!? I'm stunned. What the hell is going on? I mean Charlie Crist is gonna lose because he's Charlie Crist. But how do we help ourselves? I'm not saying this as an endorsement of the status quo. It's just that I see a lot of of incredulity in D&D that we don't have some kind of imminent revolution, but it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider that most Americans have a lot to lose. Like LT2012 pointed out, two thirds of American households are occupant-owned. Another reason for Republicans to focus on culture war poo poo is that they have no interest in solving actual problems, and aside from Trump in 2016 (not 2020) they have never even pretended to have any interest in it, so it's culture war, the massively unpopular Rick Scott platform, or nothing. And their lack of attention to economic problems absolutely does cost them a lot - they are extremely unlikely to capitalize on the unpopularity of Democrats to the extent they would if they were actual functioning political party.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:51
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I’m seeing discussion that under existing Florida statutes the legislature can’t actually dissolve a special district like this
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Apr 21, 2022 19:52
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