The single important thing to know about 21st century homeownerhip in the USA is that it's a suckers bet for 90% of Americans. Paid-for house or not. The housing bubble/crash shows that fewer Americans
today own equity in their homes than during the Great Depression
when there was no middle class in this country worthy of note. Said equity being
the sole source of wealth for a middle class, we have arrived at that juncture again. Rich, or poor, with no one in between. Have any of you ever read up on the Gini Coefficient? Societal outcomes versus narrow income stratification?
This oncoming Third World status for the USA may be shadowed by so many living in single-family homes (appears prosperous), but where are the buyers? Real estate valuations are meaningless if one cannot sell. When opportunities are increasingly confined to fewer cities (megaregions) it may mean one needs to move
just to keep up if one values opportunity for ones children or their children if not for ones self. For todays American children, en masse, will not achieve the same educational level or live as long as their parents generation. Much less will they move up in socio-economic status.
With the retirement of the post war baby boom and needing to sell, home prices will decline in real terms for at least two decades.
Toss in climate change just for a
single wild card factor (of potentially many): care to stay in Phoenix when the water runs out, or the temps don't drop below 120F day or night for months (and electrical power is worse than simply unreliable?) Who'll buy? So if the jobs move elsewhere (not just chasing labor cost/tax advantage; now to distance themselves from disincentives), how will one follow if one owns a home?
Better to rent, overall. Ready to leave.
This is obvious to Wall Street: why else would they have overhauled the nations bankruptcy laws; are bidding for privatization of state and municipal tax collection, are already administering welfare benefits, and are bribing legislators to bring back debtors prison . . and achieving same? Matt Taibbi has an easily-digested series of articles for the ignorant on both the history of financial bubbles in this century, and more yet to come. (Or, if one had a better education, what Galbraith, Beard and others wrote of years ago in re '38, '93 and '29; this society bailing out bankers since Day One of the Republic).
With home equity gone,
the only thing left is to put the screws to those still in homes, barely employed and fearful of losing even that.
So this should be obvious:
Every cost associated with home ownership will rise. The extractive potential through taxes, insurance, utilities, etc, is the only thing left. The top 10% now account for 42% of domestic spending, and their tax breaks will continue to accrue. The "invisible" are unemployed, underemployed and homeless thus with no extractive potential worthy of notice. Only in private prisons and the military do their lives have value. Home ownership is the last low-hanging fruit.
And the internalized, self-imposed costs of homeowners on themselves, are the ones where one does not know whether to laugh or cry: HGTV and other forms of mass propaganda about the "importance" of granite kitchen countertops, et. al.
Gee, the house won't sell, let me spend more money I don't really have on unnecessary accoutrements to entice a buyer to my suburban sprawl, cookie-cutter McMansion.
Good thing that the other highly popular TV shows are about job training in the new America: money to be made on the abandoned goods of others (storage unit auctions); in pawn shops; and on sifting trash for art to sell to the rich (pickers). Video games as education will suffice for the unamibitious/unintelligent as robots replace McDonalds jobs. Persons who will not ever be able to afford decent homes.
Anyone had a look at
Abogo or
Walkscore ? Expect that the latter-day "redlining" will incorporate this sort of analysis for dwelling valuations.
It won't be about l
ocation, location, location near the latest Bible-beater academy, or to suburban "better" taxpayer-supported daycare (the largest architectural firm responsible for Texas public & for-profit private prisons is also that for "public schools"; one can tell the one from the other by the presence of razor wire), since the ignorant progeny of the wilfully illiterate won't be able to tie their own shoes intellectually. Blue collar workers saw their jobs go to the fascists and communists. Now it's the turn of public employees to get the shaft. Last to go are the lawyers, doctors, engineers and other so-called professionals.
If the job can be offshored, it will be.
Ones house value (and local tax bond packages), therefore, will be almost entirely about short major utility runs and transportation access. (Or Walmart).
Reliability. In a few regions, favorably.
The smart money [!] will be in building Japanese-style
capsule hotels near these "intersections". Transnational corporations no longer hire permanent American employees, only project-by-project, increasingly. The life of a temp: Cubicle at work, cubicle for home, and cubicle-ette to get around. And a final tiny cubicle in which to be disposed.
In the meantime flatly illegal mortgage foreclosures by the thousands continue. Millions tossed out already. The use of a gun to be dispossessed of ones' home by the bankers would not be one of difference in principle. Not when the courts and legislatures accede. The rule of law is over. Unemployment is now higher -- for longer -- than in the worst of the Great Depression. More prisoners in the US today than ever in Stalins gulags. And a civil war in Mexico worsening by the day.
With the nations wealth -- 54-cents of every Federal dollar -- thrown away in the expanding and futile wars of late Empire.
The only "home" worth owning hereon would be the one that is income-offsetting (in a serious manner) or income-producing. And only in the right geographical locations. Expect that barriers to achieving this will be strengthened and extended.
Another suckers bet is that Internet access & cell phones will remain reliable and affordable.
Thus crying about ones personal tax rates is as unintelligent as not looking to the outcomes of said taxation.
Who benefits? And why? The future passed this country by already. We didn't build one. We financialized the tax base and gave our future away.
And whining about
Services I Don't Use is the kind of infantile Ayn Rand claptrap excuse for "thinking" that underscores the past thirty years of decline. As if there were some difference between
selfishness, per se, and
virtuous selfishness that would bear scrutiny. This is right up there with believing we have a Federal budget "deficit" as a problem in and of itself. Or, nearly as comical as "the Debt". It misses the point entirely.
It matters little if I am "doing fine" if all else around me is falling down. The sheer weight of numbers predicts my fate, relative or worse.
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