"100% of people who do not save money do not have any!"--Dave Ramsey

[hayden55]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

Doing some quick math, it seems for every $100,000 of home you'll have total monthly payments of around $700, which at around 25% of income (still need more for maintenance and repairs, so could eat into 30% or more) you need about $22 per hour at a full time job.

The houses around here are now at $400k and up. So that's around $2,400 per month and about $88 per hour needed to pay for that...

You know why that is? Because the banks are giving out loans for 30 years, at 2.5%, with only 3.5% down which I am assuming is just to cover closing cost. Inflation on housing or inflation in general is a lot more than 2.5% so I'm not sure how they are making money on mortgages in the long term. I assume the thinking is hardly anybody keeps the loan for the full 30 years, and it doesn't matter as long as the prices of homes keep going up and they keep getting refinanced by the new owner every couple of years. But change the loan terms where people can only buy what they can actually afford and those prices will come way down. Might crash the economy again. Change to 15 years, 20% down mandatory, and an actual apr rate ~ at least 5%. House prices would drop overnight. Same way with long boat loans, car loans, truck loans, college loans etc... Everything they touched got expensive. Its an upper hand at first until later when its not.

Also, my loan for 200k is about $1015/mo. Thats including all escrow and i don't have pmi.

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by ME_Andy

@Isaac I think the answer is, people who can't afford to live there start moving out. Then the wealthy start to realize, "Hey, there's nobody to serve my wine and caviar." Either wages will rise or the rich will start leaving. (At least that's how it works in my fantasy land.) Sucks in the meantime.

That sounds great in theory, but will never happen. The lack of employees makes businesses offer higher wages, but not high enough to live a normal life here. The thing is that as the local news has said, many people who want a piece of the higher wage pie are roughing it by either being in the working homeless class, or by craming as many buddies as they can in whatever they can find to rent. I've seen trailers with 15 to 20 people living in them.

You also have big companies out of the big city coming and slicing into that pie by paying lower wages, which they can do by furnishing hotel rooms for their employees. Of course this hurts the toursim here because now the tourists don't have a place to stay and that affects local businesses making it even harder to pay a decent wage.

Maybe if the government cracked down on homelessness and housing laws and made all the hotels only put up tourists then businesses would have to charge more so they could pay more to their employees. But that would be a feat to pull off and lots of people would probably be against the idea.

Originally Posted by hayden55

You know why that is? Because the banks are giving out loans for 30 years, at 2.5%, with only 3.5% down which I am assuming is just to cover closing cost. Inflation on housing or inflation in general is a lot more than 2.5% so I'm not sure how they are making money on mortgages in the long term. I assume the thinking is hardly anybody keeps the loan for the full 30 years, and it doesn't matter as long as the prices of homes keep going up and they keep getting refinanced by the new owner every couple of years. But change the loan terms where people can only buy what they can actually afford and those prices will come way down. Might crash the economy again. Change to 15 years, 20% down mandatory, and an actual apr rate ~ at least 5%. House prices would drop overnight. Same way with long boat loans, car loans, truck loans, college loans etc... Everything they touched got expensive. Its an upper hand at first until later when its not.

Also, my loan for 200k is about $1015/mo. Thats including all escrow and i don't have pmi.

$1015 a month would be doable. Right now, the cheapest houses on the market around here would put me at about $1,930 per month for a 30 year loan, which is not doable. And that's if I can get it for asking price, since asking for 15% over seems to be the thing.

I don't know how much changing mortgage requirements would help though since it seems the great majority of people buying property and houses around here, or who come up to rent, have very deep pockets. Lots of houses are being bought up by second home owners and by people wanting to get as many houses they can get to rent them for top dollar.

So even if things were different, they'd still have the money to buy them anyway. And if houses were cheaper, but interests greater, the difference between the two could still be a wash.

[JSH]

Something I saw years ago being done in Europe - shipping container apartments. Containers are cheap, strong, and stackable. All you need to build is walkways / stairs to access the front of them.

20 foot containers could be used for the most basic housing providing a living area and bedroom. They can be build around a common courtyard with communal bathrooms, showers, laundry.

This is one being built in Austin using 40 ft containers and each unit has it's own bathroom and kitchen.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

I don't know how much changing mortgage requirements would help though since it seems the great majority of people buying property and houses around here, or who come up to rent, have very deep pockets. Lots of houses are being bought up by second home owners and by people wanting to get as many houses they can get to rent them for top dollar.

Changing loan terms will not fix housing affordability. The 30 year fixed mortgage is pretty much a US specific but affordability is not a confined to the USA.

Reducing loan terms just means that fewer people can afford to own a home and you have a much higher percentage of renters.

[Piotrsko]

Ive seen those doublwide and triple wide. Triples are actual house sized @ 1300# ft. We even have a bar downtown here made from them, only they aren't cheap and easy to come by any more

[Xist]

I lived in containerized housing units in Afghanistan. They were basically 2" rigid foam floors, ceilings, and walls flat-packed on a trailer, and then assembled into the shape of a conex with all wiring screwed into the walls and an AC unit next to the door, below the window. Ours were 20' long, but we didn't have our own plumbing. There were latrine CHUs and, of course, we ate in the dining facility if we weren't on missions.

I have looked into converting conexes into tiny homes a few times and each time what we had in Afghanistan sounds better.

[redpoint5]

Someone point out where my understanding is incorrect.

• Shipping containers become surplus because they fail some quality making them unsuitable for shipping and cannot be affordably repaired
• That failed quality does not disqualify their use as living quarters
• It's cheaper to convert a failed shipping container into living quarters than to purpose build a housing unit

Do I understand this correctly?

My assumption about the affordability of turning shipping containers into living quarters is that it only makes sense when they need to frequently be shipped.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Someone point out where my understanding is incorrect.

• Shipping containers become surplus because they fail some quality making them unsuitable for shipping and cannot be affordably repaired
• That failed quality does not disqualify their use as living quarters
• It's cheaper to convert a failed shipping container into living quarters than to purpose build a housing unit

Do I understand this correctly?

My assumption about the affordability of turning shipping containers into living quarters is that it only makes sense when they need to frequently be shipped.

Shipping containers become surplus for two reasons:

A. One-way trade. Depending on steel prices and shipping rates it sometime is cheaper to sell the container after a one-way trip instead of shipping it empty back to Asia.

B. Damage to the container - most commonly to the door and door seals. It isn't economical to fix a door or try to straighten frame around the door to make it water tight again. This doesn't matter for using a container for housing because the doors are generally removed and framed for windows and a normal door.

[Xist]

The corrugated walls make things complicated. Unless they also insulate the outside, then requiring siding, but sheet metal on a metal box should be acceptable.

Kevin posted that Zillow is selling houses for pennies on the dollar.

I have never seen a claim about pennies on the dollar being true. They bought billions of dollars' worth of houses to flip, but encountered labor shortages:

A report from Vox cites research that investors only made up about 20 percent of the home-buying market in 2020, and Zillow says that it and its competitors made up around 1 percent of the housing market in Q2 2021. In some ways, those numbers are both terrifying and reassuring — a fifth of the housing market is a massive and influential chunk, but it also means that it likely wasn’t a private equity firm (or Zillow) that outbid you on your dream home.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/1/2...rs-real-estate

That small house that was posted on Saturday sold by Monday.

[freebeard]

Someone point out where my understanding is incorrect.
...
That failed quality does not disqualify their use as living quarters
...

Do I understand this correctly?

The disqualification is on other grounds. If every shipping container were designed from the start to be convertible, the situation might be different.

Intermodal containers are not strong enough for conversion to underground bunkers without additional bracing, as the walls cannot sustain much lateral pressure and will collapse. Also, the wooden floor of many used containers could contain some fumigation residues, rendering them unsuitable as confined spaces, such as for prison cells or bunkers. Cleaning or replacing the wood floor can make these used containers habitable, with proper attention to such essential issues as ventilation and insulation.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_containeren.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container

Interior contamination aside, they share the same failing as a A-frame structure. Accessible from the ends only without major surgery.

Xist's example is more reasonable. Flat-pack pop-ups.

Permanent or semi-permanent placement of containers for storage is common. A regular forty-foot container has about 4,000 kg (8,818 lb) of steel, which takes 8,000 kWh (28,800 MJ) of energy to melt down. Repurposing used shipping containers is increasingly a practical solution to both social and ecological problems. Wikipedia

Maybe the best use would be to tear it down to the floor, and use the walls for fencing material.