OK, so get a load of this. Somebody is talking about how the Left has become a prison where zero dissent is tolerated:
Well, duh, one wants to say. Everybody knows all this. But guess who posted this today. It was Brianna Wu, a far FAR Left agitator.
The Lefties are human! They hate it all, too. And they hate the hideous flag, like any normal person does. That’s so heart-warming.
We can cancel the national divorce, my friends. If even Brianna Wu says the Left has become a panopticon police state, then most of them are getting fed up with all this.
Clarissa's Blog 
I can’t even care anymore. Tallied the books for March today, and came up with a $600 deficit. Didn’t buy any luxury items.
So, like, yay, they finally noticed that all their compatriots are b*tchy headcases. The problem is that they have rich parents and don’t have to live in the real world.
In another five or ten years perhaps they’ll be induced to care about the fact that nobody can afford a house anymore. By then, we’ll be living in a tent, and we won’t have internet so we won’t have any way to hear them whine about their xizters in arms.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/can-americas-middle-class-still-afford-homeownership-2024
Yes it’s that bad, and yes it’s happened since covid. That fast.
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This is why I have feelings of deep rage when people tell me that the economy is wonderful right now. And they seem to believe it. It’s not just the party line. They honestly think it’s great.
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“… perhaps they’ll be induced to care about the fact that nobody can afford a house anymore …”
Maybe they can start with being induced to care about the fact that nobody is buying houses.
So there’s this …
1) Wrap the ranch in a 1031
2) Wrap the 1031 in an REIT
3) Use the REIT to get >100% LTV “forward RE investment” payola from banks (but let’s not be too greedy)
4) Choose an arbitrary day to not pay back the loans
5) The banks take the REIT to court
6) Conveniently none of the REIT’s officers can be contacted
7) The banks get the ranch by summary judgment
8) The loan money never gets paid back
9) Dun & Bradstreet gives PNG status to the REIT’s officers
10) The REIT’s officers now have shitty credit in the US
11) … which they will never, ever use again
I wish I were joking.
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That’s actually the worst case scenario, and I was totally joking. 🙂
In actuality:
1) I don’t own the ranch anymore
2) Neither does the REIT
3) There’s this new splendid group of properties the REIT owns (via 1031)
4) Eventually the REIT gets bought out (probably) or sells off these properties piecemeal (as if)
5) As this happens, the capital gains get taxed
6) I already paid taxes on the capital gains from the ranch sale to the REIT
7) Property appreciation put the sale price above local retail financing
8) Commercial RE was the only way to get the ranch sold this year
A fun fact: “1031 exchanges require the new investment property to be of equal or greater value than the property being sold …”
So the REIT buys a ranch, then exchanges it for a small gated community, then sells those houses off …
Oh … as if.
Because at every step in this, there’s some banker issuing new paper for all of this, at higher interest rates, which means that the properties in these bundles eventually turn into rental properties because you can’t sell them piecemeal anymore via retail financing because the payments are unaffordable.
With this, you perhaps now see the other side of the problem you’ve described about housing.
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I have a vague notion what is going on, on the other side of it.
Doesn’t change the part where we are paying the lowest rent in town, our lease is up in 5mos, and I just watched a house on my not-quite-affordable (maybe the price will come down) list, sell and then go up as a rental listing the next day for $100/mo more than our current rental.
That house has a yard 1/4 the size of ours, no garage, slightly smaller sqft, little bit sketchier neighborhood, and it backs right up to the railroad tracks, in a town where the local vagrant drug zombie population uses the tracks as footpaths.
Landlord would be crazy not to raise the rent on us, and we can’t really afford what we’re paying now.
Where is the working class *living* these days??
I kind of know the answer to that, and it’s ugly. They are mostly living paycheck to paycheck, getting evicted every couple years when the numbers don’t quite line up. They have amassed huge loads of debt– medical, credit card, car loans– that they will never pay off. And they don’t get married. If I divorced my husband so I could claim to be broke and unemployed with kids, I’d qualify for housing assistance, and then I could just move my “ex” back in with us, and live same as before but paying less rent. Yay perverse incentives.
I’m really down about it this week, because I thought this was just a lower-income problem. But we’ve all been on the search trying to get my sibling settled into an awesome new job making way more money than us, with a smaller family, in a part of the country marked “affordable” on the ZH map. And it’s the exact same intractable housing situation there. Can’t find anything.
The bottom 60% of the income curve has been priced out of housing in every place where there are any jobs. How does that even happen? We’re at that spot in the roadrunner cartoon where coyote has zoomed out over the edge of the cliff, but hasn’t realized it yet.
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“Where is the working class *living* these days??”
the streets, where the left wants them……
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Maybe the ones who still have cars. VanLife, baby. But it’s hard to maintain basic employment-levels of personal hygeine when you’re sleeping on the sidewalks.
*Why* do they want us in the streets? There is no scenario where it makes sense to take every single worker who makes every system that your comfortable life depends on, from the guys who keep the electrical lines humming, to the UberEats drivers who deliver your avocado toast… and screw them out of having anywhere to live. They are sawing off the branch they are sitting on. What do they imagine happens next? Or are we seriously being arse-fracked by people who live in cloud-fairy-land and think the magical future will be there no matter what they do because Progress?
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“*Why* do they want us in the streets?”
AFAICT a bunch of reasons most of which are irrational on the surface and many of which contradict each other….
” we seriously being arse-fracked by people who live in cloud-fairy-land “
Pretty much….
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Well, s**t.
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You are at least partially right, though. For people who’ve been reduced to living in a vehicle but are still trying to maintain appearances enough for employment, a 24-hr gym membership is cheaper than a rental, and gives you access to safe, reasonably clean showers.
https://thevanabondtales.com/best-gym-membership-for-van-life/
It’s a thing.
I suspect you could track the current working-homeless phenomenon through budget gym membership numbers.
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Tangential: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAH4zGd_W1s
1.8m views.
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“I’m going to work with the Democrats who can act like adults”
Democrat detected, opinion discarded. Let’s observe their rhetoric of these “I didn’t leave the Left, the Left left me” in November. I bet my life it’ll be “Vote blue no matter who” and “Orange Man Bad.”
I mean, this was the part of the brilliance of Bernie Sanders. He shepherded an entire generation of people (zoomers and millennials) into voting for the dem establishment while being able to maintain the facade that they were somehow being edgier and cooler than their msnbc/cnn-watching boomer parents.
Everyone on the left has their function. You have the establishment and you have the “managed dissent” (AOC, Bernie, hugely popular podcasts like Chapo trap house, and so on). Not gonna fall for it this time.
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An example of this in action from the left’s favorite hollywood celebrity. Let us perform a meaningless gesture in a meaningless primary. Does anyone really think he has the courage to call for this in November?
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In a place like NY, leaving it blank just means poll volunteers can helpfully fill it in for you later.
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The Left will not disappear. But it can and should get rid of its current totalitarian streak. It can go back to what it was in year 2000 and we’ll all be better off for it. As more and more people get cancelled and hounded by their own side for departing by a millimeter from today’s orthodoxy, they might start thinking that the orthodoxy should go. They’ll never vote Republican but they won’t be completely insane anymore either.
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Pretty sure they were already totalitarians in 2000. They just hadn’t quite completed their long march through the educational institutions by that point.
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They might start thinking that the orthodoxy should go.
I wish I could share your cautious enthusiasm, Clarissa, but I cannot. You see, these people do NOT think, that is the whole problem. They ingurgitate the current dogma and then they regurgitate it when necessary. There is no cognitive activity involved.
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