No worries, we all got bigass raises, right?
I did.
My income has gone up 50% since the pandemic. So did most of my friends who were working in any technical fields.
The economy is skewed. I keep telling my friends to learn to code or learn basic IT skills… and they just actively refuse and continue doing manual labor jobs and complaining about how they can’t make more money. And such is there lot.
A few peopel I know moved into healthcare, and are doing financially much better, but their jobs are very high stress due to the shortages.
It sounds like you’re describing the same thing that happened when we globalized manufacturing. Economists said everyone would retrain and go to other fields, but it just doesn’t seem to happen IRL.
people hate change. that’s why.
That is a misnomer solution telling everyone to learn how to do the same thing like to learn to code as it then creates its own market issue of too much supply for need.
Additionally it’s not diverse. Diverse jobs are still needed. They need to just pay more in those jobs. But all this is besides the point anyways.
There is no house shortage. There is plenty to house people and the issue is with capitalism being unchecked for too long over its control on living arrangements. This is something capitalism shouldn’t have a say in. Society has become beyond its required need for helping people survive as a whole and it’s become unsustainable. It was never supposed to be about sustaining a rich person’s yacht and 5th house that has nobody living in it anyways. This is not a society that is thriving.
Exactly, banning or severely limiting short-term rental housing ie VRBO and foreign land/property purchases Id wager would make a huge impact on righting the boat.
Not really, then local landlords just make more profit because the demand is the same
Without the supply of homes going into shortterm rentals like VRBO it would increase supply for people who actually live in that city, travelers can use hotels. Not a full stop fix, but it would increase supply/lower rent.
That would increase hotel prices, making hotel owners purchase more land and build hotels until the equilibrium price is reached
It’s a short term fix that eventually loses to market forces
Even if it ends in more hotels, hotels fit more people and supply more jobs than the equivalent space in houses. For temporary lodging houses don’t make sense.
Your solution does not apply to the whole society, it’s just a patch to make your life easier but globally it doesn’t fix anything. This is part of the american mindset: “fuck everyone else while I’m doing great”… don’t get me wrong, I understand your point of view but this is not how we move forward.
learn to code
Didn’t we already try this one?
even then you’re fucked. I’ve been on “the bench” at my contracting company since christmas, which led to my wages getting halved. every fucking day I read about layoffs in software development flooding the market with better programmers than me.
Bro if everyone moves to the jobs that pay enough to live decently, very important jobs will not get done. Our society needs manual laborers to keep everything from falling apart.
Also, the jobs that pay decently will start to not pay decently. And now we’re back at square one
Actually worse than square one, because in this scenario, nobody’s picking up the trash.
I make 120k a year installing carpets lol. I absolutely bust my ass but I make more than many people I know who went to college. My dad also installed carpets for 48 years before retiring at 71. I plan to retire sooner though lol but will work for many years to come and pump.up that IRA
How the fuck did his knees last that long. Are they original equipment?
We don’t use kickers much any more we use power stretchers so the wear on the knees is not that bad. Our backs hands and shoulders hurt more than our knees.
Holy wow, where are you located if you don’t mind me asking? My dad lays carpet and makes like 35k a year.
Does your dad work for himself or someone else? If he works for himself I don’t know how he’s only making 35k lol. I live in Western New York though (no where near NYC)
The more people get into it the less valuable it becomes is the thing. But others pointed out there’s a ton of other reasons it’s problematic, like the need for those other jobs to exist to actually, like, have a functioning society.
Strange argument. Yes people can swap but that might make them unhappy and we also need people to do other work than it and healthcare and they should still be able to afford a house
We need Rent Control at a federal level.
No what we need is more housing. It’s a supply issue. We’re short something like 2 million homes. The problem isn’t that we need to the government to come in and control the prices, we need the government to come in and make it so people can’t block higher density residential zones.
Heaven forbid we build Chinese style apartment buildings, though
I just want mixed zone complexes like in Europe. Shops on bottom, apartments on top. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
Bro its bad enough they got these shitty wood “luxury” apartment buildings that have like half inch thick walls, no one wants that shit on a massive scale. I’m all for more housing but fuck shared living spaces.
Do you know how many homes sit empty? There’s a lot.
Article behind a paywall
Cut the journalists some slack; ChatGPT 4.0 subscriptions can get expensive.
Okay… now they need $20,100 dollars more per year.
I’m trying so goddamn hard not to lose all hope
Stay with us comrade. We need you for the revolution.
What revolution lmao? As soon as things get a little bit spicy all the equality hobbiest say it’s going too far
Headline: “5 years ago renters needed to make less than $60,000 a year to afford the typical rent; now they need to make almost $80,000”
5 years ago renters needed to make less than $60k, they made $69k. Now they need to make “almost $80k”, they make $77k. When you put numbers to it, it seems less stark.
Median household income in 2024 is $77,400.
Median household income in 2019 was $68,700.
That’s still pretty stark, but I get the point.
I keep reading articles like this. Between rent being too expensive, home prices going through the roof, food prices outpacing wage growth, car and home insurance going up just because it can, utilities getting more expensive, my question is when does it just become too much. The whole thing just screams corporate greed and I’m getting sick of it. I make 60% more than I did 20 years ago and I feel like I’m barely scraping by.
It is just waiting for a tipping point to kick the whole powder keg off, basically. Like a dormant volcano as the pressure builds below the surface. At that point, people will seem irrational and random, just because there are so many vectors of fail taking place in parallel.
Random example that comes to mind, was talking to a friend and they were mentioning their employer is going to start a weekend rotation for teams. One of the shifts has 3 people, so once every three weeks, one employee will be working 7 days a week. They previously had weekend staff to cover the weekend shift. The company’s solution wasn’t to hire more, redistribute, or one of the many other ways to solve the problem. Just, Lumberg from Office Space instead.
Food prices have not outpaced salaries for more than a year now
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm
Food up 2.2%
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm
Private wages up 4.3%
Me saying fuck it and moving to Asia was one of the best decisions of my life. But the fact people aren’t willing to do it (but muh family! But muh language!) shows it’s not nearly bad enough
Where in Asia?
Korea, but if I could do it again I would probably consider China (because so many people speak Mandarin, it’s an amazing skill to have) and Vietnam (because it’s even cheaper, and software jobs are about as good) as well
I really don’t know how people are existing in today’s hellhole of a capitalistic landscape. I’m fairly lucky with a good-paying job and a lowish house payment. I’m still paying a lot more for food and whatnot than I did before covid.
My SO and I live in a 4 bedroom house with 4 other adults in their 30’s. I haven’t had this many roommates since I was 17, but I’m finally making some progress on my ridiculous medical debt. Best country in the world.
I think at this point, all of us poors are just crossing our collective fingers and hoping the rent doesn’t go up, we don’t lose our jobs and we don’t have to move for any reason. I’m hoping my landlord turns out to be immortal right now. “Affordable” units in the hood here are going for $3,000+, and you need to make less than the equivalent of minimum wage at a full-time job each to qualify for them. We stumbled our way into a three-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood for $2,200/month, and he hasn’t raised the rent at all. The people who lived downstairs before said he charged them the same rent for close to 10 years before they moved out, so hopefully that streak will continue. Just have to worry that he’ll die and whoever inherits the house comes in and jacks up the rent once they can, in which case we’d definitely need to move pretty far away to be able to afford something.
I always think the same and can’t stop feeling bad. I used to live in an apartment the payment kept creeping up until I said fuck it and bought a house 6 years ago. My mortgage is $1000. People now pay $2000+ a month for an apartment. This is a fucked time to be a renter.
Why do people always turn these posts into opportunities to brag about how low their house payment is?
That wasn’t my intentions, and I apologize if that has stepped on someone’s toes. I’m just mentioning how things have changed. I don’t think a mortgage payment is something to brag about, not for me at least. Hell, I’m still a broke ass mo fo who’s living paycheck to paycheck trying so hard to raise two kids.
I don’t see it as that, it’s just a comparison to show how fucked up things are now.
Believe me I’m super bitter about being getting fucked on rent and being priced out of buying, but I dont take those kinds of comments as rubbing it in, just providing context.
I think Biden is giving out money for first time home buyers. I read that somewhere. An article mentioned it was like $400 a month for 2 years for first time home buyers to help them afford this shit. I mean a better fix would be stop all these corporations buying up houses and making it very expensive for others to buy, but I guess better than nothing?
Let’s flip it this way. My rent was 1500 a month, and it was going to go up 13% this year. I bought a house this year instead, 2500 a month. In 5 years, that shithole apartment will cost more than my house.
People aren’t bragging about how low their house payments are, their warning everyone about how shitty apartment price gouging is.
The human race is truly fucked ain’t it? We are all out for ourselves. Nothing will ever change.
What single contributing factor would you say carries the most weight? Throughout history there has been inequality, but never like this.
Source?
Thanks, the medieval worker put in much longer work hours, which is interesting
I think it’s our survival instinct to hoard. I don’t think we’ve evolved to live in such a massive civilization. We weren’t meant to live this way.
I do think this level of equality would exist in older times if they knew they could get away with it.
However the scale at which we live (the global economy) is so much larger that it’s easier for them to extract and hoard wealth. In older times our communities were much smaller. The consequences for fucking around were a lot higher because it was easier for the poors to hold them accountable.
Agreed. Sign me up for one of these $1000 a month houses please
I feel the same way. Our mortgage is $2K/mo for over 3K/sqft. Apartments around here start at $1500 for a studio … poor bastards indeed.
Of course you’re paying more, it’s called inflation. You also have a higher income than you did before COVID, but you didn’t mention that
public housing needs to double and the requirements to get on it need to be slashed.
public housing is the thing people hate and fear the most.
Slashed? No - removed. Then landlords can’t make us pay their give mortgages while they retire on our labor.
No War But The Class War
Aren’t wars fought by both sides? This seems like something other than “war”
Yes usually they are, but in this particular case one side has rock solid solidarity among people of their side and is very honest and aware of the class war going on and the other (i.e. the 99%) is largely composed of people that get upset and annoyed at you if you point out we are in a war, we both are on the same side, and we are losing the war bad like catastrophically bad.
Seriously?
This seems dubious, considering average rent in the US is $18k
I mean… I’m up in Canada but in one of the highest cost of living cities in the country which isn’t as bad as San Francisco or NYC but it’s bad…
20k is 1666 a month extra.
The only thing thats gone up $1666 a month more would be a larger house.
Fancy 1 bedrooms are up to 2000-2500 and they were never $334 to 734 even 15 years ago.
Something is wrong with that headline or their math
It could be including how much food has gone up as well
Rent as a percentage of income. General rule (and what I’m assuming the article is using without getting around the paywall) is 1/3 of your income should be rent. So if the avg rent in 2019 was $1666 and it’s now $2000 you should be making $80k/year instead of $60K.
I’m old enough to have learned that housing should be 1/4 of your take home pay
That’s the general rule of thumb that I learned as well… try to stay within 1/4th of salary for mortgage/rent.
Just a small distinction. Not more than 1/3 of your income should be rent. Also this figure is based on the net income, not pre-tax
Ah, assuming that’s what’s behind the paywall that makes much more sense.
if the rent is, for instance, 40% of income then the additional income is also to offset the 60% nonrental income.
eg if you pay 400 in rent and now its 700 your overall income needs to go from 1000 to 1750 to maintain the same level of affordability.
it’s relative to where you live, yes.
but generally rents and housing costs have doubled the past 5 years. and doubled the ten years ebfore that, so are about triple where they were in 2009. A 2 bed in my city was 1200-1500, now it’s 3000-4000 and often 3-4 people are living there to make rent. a lot of two beds were converted to 3-4 beds (remove living and dining room).
I guess I’m a shit landlord, because I’m still charging the same as 5 years ago.
a stable tenant is worth more than a few rent increases.
Are you my landlord?
…Got any openings? 😭
This is a risky site to admit you’re a landlord on xD
Record profits though.
And just for context, if you work 40 hours a week for $15 (well above minimum wage), your annual pre-tax income is $31,200.
The workers of the US really need unionize. Here in Scandinavia the average pre-tax income is closer to $84,000 with a 36-hour work week. We do however have a higher tax-rate, so that ends up at around $45,000 after taxes. Cost of living is also generally higher that the US. Of course that higher tax gives us free health care and education.
That’s definitely not a solution. You just made the argument against it. The U.S. government is the primary reason why our economy is effed.
Nah, it’s because we don’t tax the wealthy and corporations as the average individual, and let the “market” dictate the price of inelastic sectors ie Healthcare, Food, and Housing.
Housing is elastic. I lived with my dad until I was like 30 because of housing prices.
The extra fun thing is that Americans don’t have that much lower of a tax burden. Only the wealthiest and those with investment-based income really pay appreciably lower taxes than in countries such as yours. However, the populace in the US gets far, far lower return on investment for their taxes (which has been continuously being reduced since Regan).
