Posted on 07/30/2015 1:38:10 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In urban centers around the country, rental prices are soaring. Cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City routinely report double-digit increases that make it nearly impossible for residents to make ends meet.
But it’s not just dwellers of those metropolitan areas who are having a hard time paying the rent. According to a report out this week from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, more than half of renters in America are considered to be financially burdened by their rent, meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their income just on where they live. High rents have become a national crisis.
And yet, when I write about poverty and debt on the Internet, there’s always someone—in the comments, on Twitter, or even in person—who will suggest that the issue isn’t so much a system that makes it hard to get ahead, but rather, the result of poor decision-making. The simplest solution, they will propose, is that people who are in financial turmoil “just move somewhere cheaper.”
That is terrible advice.
To address the cycle of poverty, we have to address increases in rent itself, not just where people choose to live. To suggest that the solution to the rent crisis is for everyone who’s being priced out is to “just move” is to derail a much bigger conversation about why people live in poverty and what can be done.
High rents are a national, not just an urban problem....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailydot.com ...
Rent’s too high! More rent control!
Stop building stuff that obstructs my view, I don’t care if its a new apartment complex!
There’s a reason for rentals being in demand.
You mean almost no one being able to afford buying a house?
Back to the 3rd world practice of the whole family living together. You see this is the guberments way of bringing us back to our roots.
Next, the cattle, chickens, sheep and pigs. Then the loom and the sewing machines.
That’s the effect and it wasn’t caused by the “Bush Doctrine”.
“Hanna Brooks Olsen is a writer, small human, and a millennial. Her interests are politics, podcasts, Pac-12 football, feminism, and Oxford commas. She is curious to a fault”
Enough said.
Credit damage due to job loss that resulted from company downsizing and astronomical income and property taxes.
thanks Obama
Property owners, this includes rental property owners, are being squeezed from rising property appraisals, and taxes, which increases insurance costs, rapidly rising costs for repairs in all areas, and increasing numbers of non-paying renters that completely erase the increasingly small percentage of balance that equates to the costs vs expenses that allow rental property to succeed. The last five hers has seen more and more renters are just refusing to pay rent. The courts are over burdened with evictions. When the property owner has to wait for as long as four months to get an eviction processed legally, there is the beginning of a death spiral in the business cycle, that has to be overcome by increasing the rent of the other renters that are paying. Eventually the cycle is broken by property owners beginning to have ever more strict restrictions on who will be allowed to rent their properties. Then the claims of Racism begin... Going back to the beginning, it is the Governing Municipality that is the real problem, unchecked and unrealistic increases in property assessments, leading to increased property taxes, are one of the root causes of rent increases. The Politicians pushing for ever more budget dollars, are causing this cycle to get out of hand.
Soaring property taxes to feed the maw of public workers is a huge part of the problem.
No, it’s insurance costs, lol.
No mention of the myriad escalating costs that a landlord must pay to support an inflated and growing local, state, and federal government.
The implication that landlords raise rent to be “mean” is amusing. A financially illiterate millenial, with no ability to ask “why are rents going up”
The blanket statement about LGBT folks in rural areas as the reason why fags have to live in places like San Francisco is also amusing. Questioning hedonism and inflated self worth has no place in this article.
What an economically illiterate article. The answer is to get the government out of the regulation and taxation business. Everything government has done for decades tends to reduce job creation and wages. Add on to that insane greenness, political correctness, mandatory this and that and its easier to take the jobs to China. Reverse that and people will go back to buying their own homes.
That was pretty much the norm here in the states too (and most of Europe) but that all changed in the USA starting in the early 20th century and really accelerated after WWII.
I knew that I would find something in the article like this: “Teaching has long been a career path with notoriously low wages,”.
There is this thing that regulates the prices of everything and it’s called “the law of supply and demand.” The more you make, the more you spend and if the market can’t afford your product or service, they won’t buy or rent it. Consequently, the price will float to the level that it can be afforded.
Our society can blame itself for the out of control price increases for everything. It’s due to a factor that came into place after the early 1960s.
It used to be that daddy worked and “brought home the bacon” and mom raised the children. Most families were single income and most only had one vehicle.
Then, later in the 60’s, women were “unchained” so to speak and threw off the burdensome yoke of being a parent and went to work because it was socially expected. Well, guess what...now the family had two incomes and could afford another car and all other types of goodies. Better than that, the kids could raise themselves...and we see how well that worked out.
Well, the market responded to the extra income by reacting to this amazing rise in purchasing power and the price of everything started to rise to the level of resistance. People howled and gnashed their teeth but still paid the higher prices for everything simply because they continued purchasing what was before them.
Now it’s reached a point that they expect the government to do something about housing and rental expenses and expect something to be done about it...never thinking the law of supply and demand ever existed. The fact is that you have to live your life with what you can afford and eventually prices will float to the level of acceptance.
Yep, AND add in the fact that now utility companies in many areas will cut off services to the property if the utility bills of previous renters are not paid up to date even though those services were directly in the renter's names. So hen you have even more money lost because renters know they can scam a few more months of free utilities working the system while they stiff the landlord for his rent at the same time.
I did the landlord thing back in the early 80’s, out of all my renters the only one I had to evict was a public school teacher. Some liberal givemedat.
Section 8 housing also plays a bigger role in inflating rent rates.
C'mon....poor girl's rent just got jacked and she strugglin'. Why, she has to stay home now and eat (and cook much worse!) to make ends meet instead of going out to meet and dine with her city elite friends.
I mean she really tried here. Teachers, police, those working servants? Threw in a LBGT's cain't move because of redneck queer haters. Threw in some gubmint BS price index data....all kinds of useless information. All but what really caused all this. Just as you said.
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