Having spent a decent amount of time in one of these myself, I much prefer the term "trailer park" to "mobile-home community". The article uses the term interchangeably, but they explain this important detail themselves:
"The homes in the park are not as portable as its name implies; they’ve been placed on foundations, and their hitches have been removed."
In my experience, in older parks especially, there is no way to economically move the trailer. Which means you don't really own a "mobile home", you own a slot in the park with a worthless trailer on it. This allows the park to have the negotiating power. I just wanted to point out this key detail to people who may not be aware of the situation.
Fascinating. In searching on the difference between an RV and a mobile home, I came across this gem from Frank Rolfe, who's profiled in the New Yorker article:
"If it has to be pulled by an actual truck (which is what costs the $3,000 or so in the move) then it’s a mobile home. But also remember that there is a component that can only be pulled by a truck in most RV parks, which is called the “park model”. These are like mobile homes, but do not have wheels or axles on them – they arrive on a flatbed truck – and also cost $2,000 or so to move. Since we don’t want our customers to ever leave, we only consider the type of mobile home or park model that requires expensive transport to be worthy of our investment dollars. RVs can be moved for next to nothing, so there’s no barrier and that’s too risky for us."
The term I always heard is “manufactured home” which makes more sense. I grew up in a double wide. Once it’s set up you quite obviously can’t move it again without wrecking everything lol
The technical difference is a mobile home has a license plate, is registered with the DMV, and taxed like a vehicle. A manufactured home (or modular home) is built to the building code and taxed as real property at the same rates (typically) as a site built house.
But in ordinary usage people use the terms interchangeably.
I've heard that term as well, and I suppose it's useful to have a different term for that type of home vs one that is built on its foundation from the start.
But the term manufactured home seems odd to me, aren't nearly all new homes nowadays "manufactured"?
"Manufactured" means built in a factory and can be transported on a semi. As opposed to most buildings (in the U.S. at least) which are built on-site by a contractor.
Yes, it is confusing. My brother in law works in that industry, and explained the differences to me this way:
Mobile home: Factory built before a certain date in the 1970's (which I've forgotten), with no particular quality standards in place.
Manufactured home: The new name for mobile homes, indicating that they have been factory built to clearly defined standards. Considered depreciating personal property by insurance companies and lenders.
Modular home: Also factory built, but to the same standards as homes built on-site. (These are the prefabs you mention.) Considered real estate, the same as site-built homes, by insurance companies and lenders.
Edit: Wikipedia links to this archived page, which provides more specifics:
That is true. I guess what I meant to say is that mobile/manufactured are considered personal property separate from the land, while modular is considered attached to the parcel in the same way that site-built homes are. One result of this is that for manufactured, lenders have much more restrictive terms. Typically 10-15 years max, min 30% down, and a significantly higher interest rate.
Convoluted, but comprehensible.
CA let landowners legislatively lock real estate(RE) revenue down with Prop13, even as the economy grew behind tech, AND steeper-than-avg regulation slowed construction. Choked supply and growing demand exploded prices. RE became a no-brainer for speculators. LOTS of CA land is held OUT of development ... likely because development is riskier than cashing in on the RE bidding wars. NO family sells CA land because _renting_ it is so profitable with demand insanely outstripping supply. Scott Weiner has repeatedly tried to get the legislature to a) relieve the economic stress on families, b) help the environment, by building greener, ESPECIALLY near public transit, to pay back the public investment in transit, and c) to densify, for the myriad of benefits. But the same right-wing segment who gave us Warren, and Reagan has protected the RE windfall to landowners even as exploding RE prices and the salary inflation that demands has pushed many hi-tech firms out of the state.
LOCAL construction costs, and the cost of everything else not easily transported, get pushed up by the RE cost hitting _everyone_ but the land OWNERS.
Complaints of complex, costly regulations are real; but the factors noted seem bigger.
AND ... factory-built processes reduce the per/unit cost of regulation by letting regulators approve factory PROCESSES instead of individual homes.
After a cold snap recently I went out to visit an older couple in a trailer who had had their plumbing burst due to freezing.
The trailer was in really rough shape. They were huddling under blankets because heating and insulation were inadequate. And now they had no water.
Two things make me angry about the trailer park situation.
1. people living there who only get poorer from it. They own the portion of the home that decreases in value and rent the part that appreciates. If you're rich, sure. You can afford to own a depreciating asset and forgo the appreciation. But they're poor.
2. By having the lot renter own the trailer, they avoid many of the laws that protect renters with basic livability requirements. And yet those people are still paying rent alongside having to pay maintenance costs for their homes.
In the end at least in my area of the country it's much less expensive to buy a modest home.
Where I live, there are many levels of quality when it comes to "trailer parks". I know of a few that are essentially slums: very low-income residents, crowded, dirty, noisy, and packed with trailers from the 50s and 60s. I don't know who would _choose_ to live in these places. Maybe it's a case of poor people being poor because they make poor choices. Or simply aren't aware that there are better options.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are communities with HOA rules, well-kept common areas, a clubhouse, etc. My mom lives in one of these. Honestly, it's not a bad place to live. I could totally live there if needed to. I tried to talk her out of buying it based on the economics alone ($400/mo lot rent plus around $60k for the house) but she went ahead with it anyway. It doesn't make financial sense to me, but maybe she sees something about the situation that I don't.
Or, because they have no money and it's all they can afford.
it's that or being homeless. In a trashy RV park, they generally get running water, electricity and a toilet that flushes. Actual homeless people are a step down from that, generally no running water, etc.
Also note, most homeless persons are effectively barred from working. (employers mostly require an address to hire you)
source: me. a formerly homeless person and have lived in the trashy RV parks before.
> In the end at least in my area of the country it's much less expensive to buy a modest home.
There's another option of course, which is to buy a piece of land and put a trailer on it. Land's pretty cheap out in "real America."
A lot of my buddies growing up lived in mobile homes but none of them lived in trailer parks. If you can afford to buy a lot (but not yet build your dream house) it could make financial sense to get a basic model and plop it there while you save up for the next few years. You might at least beat renting.
I spent my early years living in a trailer park, and to be honest, it wasn't bad at all (at least back then). We knew most of our neighbors and most people looked out for each other (like helping out people suffering from food insecurity). That place had some of the most generous people I'd ever met.
I have pretty fond memories of living there.
I got my first bike from a really, really nice single mom who noticed that I didn't have one. I mean, it was a crappy garage sale find that was rusted and had weird 1970s-stylee handle bars, but she got it specifically for me.
The neighborhood? Yeah, probably. In a trailer? No, they aren't very well built.
I actually live in a relatively low-income area now. I just like the general "realness" of working class people and don't much care if people look down at me when I tell them where I live.
How can individuals compete against institutional money?
Housing prices are skyrocketing in my area and there are stories on the news about investment firms buying up homes and putting them up for rent. What's to stop these well financed institutions from buying up more and more real estate and forcing more people into renting?
Blackrock raised billions during COVID on the idea that once the evictions kick off, lots of homeowners will lose their homes and those tenants with black marks will have to pay more and more to rent.
Every person abusing the COVID moratorium just to screw over the "landlord" who owns one property is just one more nail in the US clusterfuck coffin.
You must be talking about Blackstone, the private equity/LBO group, not BlackRock, the ETF provider. I don't think there is a Mobile Home Index ETF, not yet at least.
I think there is a lot of hate directed to BlackRock, which is really meant to be directed at Blackstone. BlackRock is an absolutely huge financial company, to be sure, but is soley in the business of ETFs and asset management, which aren't exactly abusive or extractive.
And no it doesn't help that the names are so ridiculously similar.
Edit: just learned that BlackRock started as an asset management arm within Blackstone, and the similarity was intentional. I think the operations have diverged enough since then that there's a worthwhile distinction between the two.
Here in Norway, businesses are entitled to financial aid if their income has been affected by COVID.
Meanwhile, the real-estate market is white hot at he moment, while the rental market is slow/stagnating.
People with money want to purchase, while poor people can't afford to rent.
Turns out, rental companies and investors have speculated that if they just keep their rental units vacant, instead of lowering rent and attracting new tenants, they can apply for financial aid. win/win for them - they can sit on appreciating assets, without having to deal with wear/tear, administration, etc. on their units. All while getting bailed out by the gov.
And once small landlords/owners can't cover their costs due to broke tenants going for months/years without being able to pay their rent, no doubt there are investors and REPE firms lined up to buy those units.
Localities can fight back by reforming zoning laws & applying land value taxes instead of property taxes.
In many areas of the country it is illegal to build anything but a single-family home. To people familiar with supply & demand this should be an obvious problem.
A Land Value Tax applies, as the name suggests, only to the value of land, not that of any structures built on it. Most real property taxes apply to both. Thus, the latter somewhat discourage construction for higher density. (Though in practice, zoning laws are a much bigger barrier.)
The intuition behind the LVT is that increases in the value of land, in urban areas, are mostly driven by a growing local economy; therefore the community should benefit from them. Increases in the value of structures, OTOH, mostly come from investments by the property owner.
And yes let's make TTL computers too because we're not about to run out of space.
The density is good because it's valuable to be near other things, and density is the only thing that allows more proximity?
Maybe it would help to realize Japan, Korea, and California are all mountainous and prosperous. Mountains helped force good land use (though lately stupidity in California has been beating it).
> Third alternative. Multi-family homes owned by co-ops of all the residents.
In theory, a manufactured home community could also be a co-op, and setting one up would be less capital-intensive than building multi-family homes.
It is worth noting that so far as land-use is concerned, MHCs are significantly denser than typical single-family home neighborhoods (even older, denser ones) due to the small lot and home size, absence of two-vehicle garages, etc. They are comparable to the lower end of multi-family housing density due to the parking lots those are typically surrounded with, though of course multi-family housing that has good access to public transit can be much denser.
I recently bought my first home in Iowa. I was only a couple years into my career and wanted to start with something small which would allow me to build up equity so I could eventually trade up for something I'd want to keep long term.
At first, I considered a few mobile homes, but I soon learned to ignore them. The houses themselves were cheap, but the association fees were outrageous. I ended up getting a town home instead, which was valued much higher but the monthly payments ended up being comparable thanks to the much lower association fees. I have more property rights, more of that money goes into equity, I get a much bigger and nicer home, and I don't have to worry as much about tornadoes, derechos, and other nasty Iowan weather so much.
With the prevalence of town homes and cheap housing here, I don't know how trailer parks keep their residents.
I'm sure different trailer park owners are a mixed bag, some good some bad.
The real issue is government limitations on the supply of housing (height, min parking, setbacks, etc).
Housing could be high quality and relatively cheap. From first principles, a 3 bed 2 bath apartment could easily be <$500/mo in any expanded metro area of the US, if you were allowed to build.
Allowing more competition for low cost housing would solve almost all of the systemic issues in this article.
But as other posters have mentioned, the US promotes the opposite - home ownership as a wealth building tool.
The Park is about 90 acres. Article claims about 400 homes on site. Much laments the living conditions and abusive corporate ownership.
Why do the concerned not facilitate affordable ownership, instead leaving it up to investment firms to provide the service (badly)?
Under 2 miles away is a >150 acre parcel available for $6,000,000. Divided by 600, that’s $10,000 per quarter-acre; paid $100/mo, rent-to-own style, it’s bought outright in 10 years (or earlier as cash flow allows).
Seems a very solvable problem for a budding social-minded entrepreneur.
You forget subdivision regulations which will require roads, curbs, a drainage system (lines, catch basins, retention ponds). You'll need an engineer.
You may need a sewer system or, if you install septic tanks, you'll have to go to half-acre lots. You'll have to file a plat in the Recorder's Office, so you can sell lots. You can't do that without planning commission approval.You'll need a surveyor.
Whether the roads are public or private, they still require the same public standards, because fire trucks have to drive on them and, because the county may have to acquire them to maintain so they'll want them to meet a certain standard.
All of these costs have to be paid upfront.
There's more but you soon begin to realize that you can't get 600 lots on 150 acres nor will your costs be limited to $6MM.
Of course there are more details and costs. Question is whether those lamenting the abuse by profiteers are willing to solve the problems (as they lament) by purchasing & developing a comparable & competitive property just 1.75 miles away ... or, by failing to, demonstrate that at least the abusing profiteers are in fact providing a competitive service vs merely lamenting.
Your reasonable complaints do raise the point that zoning laws drive the cost of housing out of reach of the poor. Having infrastructure beyond mere sewage, electric, and a gravel road is of course desirable, yet what is gained if residents can’t afford it? At what point, and how, does reality collide with objective costs of good intentions?
And yes, 150 acres divided by 600 lots is 0.25 acres per lot - plenty of room for a single-wide and share of infrastructure.
Challenge Progressives to put their money where their ideals are: crowdsource it. Buy the subdivided lots and give them to prospective residents.
Or some form of creative financing. Change the game; 1/4 acre lots for $10,000 are just sitting there waiting for someone to make 600 happen all at once.
It’s doable. Those pining for better treatment and cheaper options should step up and make it happen.
I'm going to guess on the record before reading article: debt based financing of the sale, PE firm steadily increases rent and lowers investment into facilities, bankruptcy and evictions ensue
I mean, yeah, family-owned trailer parks have been "under-utilized" for decades, and you're pretty spot on in what is involved in properly "utilizing" them. However, there's a human side to it as well.
Plus, there's a plot twist where Republicans introduce bills in a state to enhance tenants' rights.
It’s the standard PE playbook, and you’re correct. In this case, they wait for the tenant to default on the ground rent, then seize the mobile home and resell/re-rent it. Repeat ad infinitum.
The manufactured home itself depreciates in value like a car or RV, so even if you don’t get fucked by your landlord, you get fucked on depreciation. At least in an apartment you don’t pay for maintenance or depreciation!
If the poor get their basic needs and entertainment (bread and circuses, as the Romans said) then that's generally sufficient to prevent revolutions. And western societies in general are so wealthy that people can stay (or become) relatively very poor while still getting enough so that they won't really risk their lives in a revolt. They'll complain and protest, sure, but it takes a literal threat to their lives because of hunger or violence to spark a proper revolt. The bottom decile of americans are nowhere near as poor as the poverty that sparked, for example, the Arab Spring revolutions, and very likely (and hopefully) never will be.
Resident-Owned Communities seem by far to be the best answer here, and I encourage folks to read up on it and see what you can do to help if you're so inclined: https://rocusa.org/ is one such nonprofit, but there are several.
Many countries have solved this problem by providing near zero interest loans to individuals purchasing a primary residence, while maintaining higher interest rates for investment properties and corporate purchases.
>How does that solve the problem if there is enough primary residence demand to push up prices to unaffordable levels?
That mostly doesn't happen because sid countries don't generally have California style zoning (though their byzantine permitting and regulatory compliance processes are just as good as CA or NYC's when it comes to raising construction costs).
That's how it works in the USA as well. Mortgage interest for a home you live in will be lower than for investment property. Insurance is cheaper also.
I'm not sure you're entirely correct. A lot of people plan on downsizing their housing when they reach retirement age - Move somewhere smaller because you don't need to accommodate the kids any more, and further out of an urban center because you don't need to commute any more.
This is a net positive - It frees up more valuable real estate in urban centers for working-age citizens to utilize, and extracts capital from the property for retirement-age citizens to finance their retirement.
In this way, housing has been a stable and reliable investment for many for some time, and in a way that's beneficial to society as a whole. Quite different to what we're seeing here, an evolving dynamic which also threatens this model and puts people's retirement prospects in peril.
What you are describing is 'owning your own home can be a good long term investment' which is generally true.
However, that is not really a good description of the property investment the OP was referring to.
The OP was describing the situation where one individual owns many properties for the sake of investment.
It is that scenario it is the investor demand for properties that is driving up the property price making them unaffordable.
What's worse is this situation is self-inflating.
As a property investor with a handful of properties, you're in a good position to go to the bank, get a further loan to buy yet another property.
That then drives up the property price, which drives up value of your existing property assets, which then allows you to get an additional loan for yet another property.
This also means, people without that collateral backing have a much harder time getting their first property and when they do they pay a much higher price.
That bubble will continue to grow while interest rates remains low.
that's a false dichotomy. you can support freeing up urban real estate and retirees downsizing without assuming a house is an investment. for instance, if the economic system acted to stabilize home values neutrally rather than explicitly promoting increasing valuations (through interest rates, and other mechanisms), you could still have those positive dynamics without the negative externalities.
It’s not the economic system as such that drives up real estate prices, it’s us the people who want to live in a nicer house. We bid up the prices of real estate in competition with each other. It’s not some external sinister faceless policy monster, it’s the queues of people who line up to view properties for sale - us.
I’m a Brit but we have this bad here at the moment. A house next to ours came on the market just last week, it wasn’t even listed inline yet but on day one the estate agent had a long list of people registered with them viewing the property all day and got four offers. It’s those people living in my area competing for property driving up house prices.
there's certainly fashionability, ego, and projection in homebuying that drives up bids, which can raise home prices in a given neighborhood over time, but that's largely because supply is artificially limited by things like regulatory capture and demand is distorted by economic policy promoting price inflation. for instance, low interest rates mean that more house can be bought at a given monthly payment amount (everyone seems to assume more is better), which is the economic basis of that ratcheting you're describing.
You're right. Ops position was that housing should not be seen as any kind of investment. My point was that, for retirees, housing is a valid investment vehicle and that dynamic is valuable to society as a whole. But on reflection, I'm thinking in the wrong terms here. I could better view this as housing being an important store of value for retirees, rather than an investment generating financial return for them.
exactly. i'm actually ok with a primary home being a modest investment (like 0-1%/year appreciation over inflation, but not 2+%), i'm unabashedly against naked wealth extraction via the corporatized investment mentality, leaving people homeless, or at the very least broadly overleveraged (a profoundly negative externality).
there's also the oft-mentioned japanese view that homes are a depreciating asset, though land values remain quite high, so the asset class is still modestly investible, iirc.
Property and housing has always been an investment. However, I do agree that the terrible yield on risk free assets have significantly inflated housing prices.
I also agree that interest rates need to rise, but there unfortunately doesn't seem to be any political or monetary will for that to happen.
I'm not done and it's a pretty grim read but I definitely got a smile from this about halfway through.
'A video of the speech went viral, prompting an Australian writer, Chloe Angyal, to publish a piece for the Web site Feministing titled “Marry Me, Zach Wahls.” In 2013, Angyal and Wahls met in New York; they are now engaged.'
The dystopian future is towers of sleep boxes that the poor rent to sleep 8 hours a day (so 3 persons per day). Something in the Matrix style. The sleep boxes are poorly built, but thanks to the laws limiting the supply, the workers have to pay thru the nose to rent those boxes. These towers are built on compact lots of land and around it there are 1 sq mi lots with proper houses for the rich 0.01%. This is essentially the exponential growth turning inwards.
> The financial industry[...] is undermining one of the country’s largest sources of affordable housing.
1. Yeah, I made an opinionated omission there. Sue me :D
2. That last part (the country’s largest sources of affordable housing) is even more damning than the rest. :(
In a country that big, and that rich, with a frontier ethos like that, how the f*k does anyone think this is acceptable?
Building a basic house is pretty simple. Larry Haun put out a great book with Habitat for Humanity to do it for about $40,000, and irishvernacular.com/ outlines how to do it for €25,000. But we induce scarcity in the housing market because if everyone had a comfortable, decent home, they might not work so hard, would they? Imagine how much less value would be created for assetholders, how much less stuff we would make, if families felt free to survive on one income.
> Building a basic house is pretty simple. Larry Haun put out a great book with Habitat for Humanity to do it for about $40,000
Sure, if you have free labor. I’d guess 99%+ of houses were built by a paid crew, so uh, it does not cost just 40k for a house. It costs $200/sq ft to build a house (in a midsize metro area of 3 million), without buying land.
There are certain aspects of building a house that I would have no problem doing myself. Besides the steps that would require more than 2 hands, there are also other tasks that I would rather have someone else do. Proper grading of the area the house is to be situated would be one. Digging the trenchs for the foundation or drilling the holes for the pier & beam posts would be another. After that, I have performed all of the other steps in various stages.
I think it's a a convenient accident more than an intentional outcome, but one that established homeowners and assetholders benefit from so it's encouraged.
If nothing else, can you actually imagine a politician celebrating houses going down in price? Picture yourself walking up to a podium and announcing that the average 3 bed 2 bath in San Jose is now only $200,000, and what a fantastic achievement this is and how it will help people who have struggled to afford a home. What reaction do you get?
Homeowners would be crying for blood because, whether they care to admit it or not, when it comes time to sell they want 2+ other people working their asses off and saving every penny they can to just _barely_ be able to put in a bid.
I _am_ a homeowner, albeit of a cheap house, but I'd love to see prices fall because I wouldn't mind a second one. A spot on a couple acres near Portland might be nice, and some of them don't look too bad...
> If nothing else, can you actually imagine a politician celebrating houses going down in price
This is a big part of the problem imho - its a treadmill that you can't get off. With an ageing population that all own houses and getting generally more conservative, I can't see it changing any time soon. It strikes me as odd that everything is getting cheaper except houses - and you may say its land, but if thats the case apartments should be getting cheaper.
> Like, you think that people are plotting how to induce scarcity in the market so that they will work harder?
Yes. Believe it or not, there are lot of people (especially people in positions of authority/power) that believe this type of scarcity drives labor, ambition, society, etc.. forward. I mean just look at the current discussion about minimum wage and/or stimulus checks.
But with real estate, I kind of agree with you, It can be a little far fetched to extend that mentality to housing scarcity. Housing scarcity is just because current owners want to have the value kept in real estate increasing. Hard to do when there's no scarcity. Only wannabe owners complain about housing prices.
Land you can build on is scarce, but if we made it easier to demolish existing structures and change use from, say, parking to housing, this would be ameliorated. If you try to buy a single family home in San Francisco and demolish it in favour of 8 apartments you'll find people opposed to this, though.
Of course trailer parks are (hopefully) always among the most affordable housing options.
However, living in one should be a choice of the individual, and the fact that there is a notable population in these places tells me that these are not exactly free choices à la "I shall live frugally" but rather a systemic problem.
So: "acceptable that trailer parks are more than a mere curiosity of vanishing proportion in the story of housing in the US in 2021."
Who exactly is benefiting? I'd love to have this card in my back pocket for debates. Are there specific politicians we can draw-and-quarter over this? Or was your statement just a generic "all politicians bad" rant with no real citations?
"In the past decade, as income inequality has risen, sophisticated investors have turned to mobile-home parks as a growing market. They see the parks as reliable sources of passive income—assets that generate steady returns and require little effort to maintain."
Man, this is just... gross. I realize mortgage bond trading has been a ~$100 trillion dollar windfall since the mighty 80's under Volker (and Liars Poker), but the "little effort to maintain" just cries foul.
Granted, these are marketed toward retirees, which is why they are in Palm Springs, but it nonetheless shows that with a little investment in design and materials (which doesn't have to be very expensive), the format of manufactured homes can be separated from their historical associations with low quality.
Some parks are resident owned meaning they own the land in common so have control of their future. Some cities have rent control e.g. San Jose where it's about 3% max increase per year. The space rent is roughly the same as real estate taxes for regular homes and the price per sq ft is about a quarter. For seniors on limited fixed income a rent controlled mobile home park makes a lot more sense than paying rent or moving into the boonies. Some parks are horror stories e.g. the one next to Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz where the space rents went through the roof (like $5k/month) when a billionaire investor (one of John Oliver's "assholes") bought it. Admittedly they are on the ocean.
“Mobile home parks are the hottest sector of real estate right now, due to the endless decline in the U.S. economy.”
The site points out that thousands of baby boomers are retiring each day, and that they will receive around fourteen thousand dollars a year in Social Security income:
“Mobile home parks are the only segment of real estate that grows stronger as the economy weakens.”"
The US are such a weird country... on one hand, Silicon valley et al, producing the coolest tech & the shiniest toys, and on the other hand... people who can only afford to live in trailer parks, even with a full time job.
It never ceases to amaze & depress me simultaneously.
The United States is the land of high variance. We let people crash and burn, but we also let people soar. A society that permits the former is unremarkable — letting people suffer is the default in poverty, and most countries are relatively quite poor. But the latter, letting the tall poppies stand proud with not much more than heckling for their height, is something special, and it's a big part of how we've become such an outlier nation in terms of success.
We don't so much let people soar by design, as have systems in place to capitalize on fame that end up earning more for the entrenched plutocrats than suppressing it would. That is why you hear the term "kingmaker" in the music and television industries, and why people were willing to put up with so much abuse from people like Harvey Weinstein. Find the most marketable thing you can and use all your money to shove it down people's throats as hard as your can. This is also why mainstream American culture has been mostly shit for the last 20-odd years.
In non-cultural areas, letting people "soar" is just the result of whitewashed bribery through campaign finance and lobbying.
maybe a and b are connected? You can't have the ultra rich or at least such a discrepancy between the top 10% and the bottom xx% without built-in systemic inequality. Nonetheless, it wouldn't hurt the US at all if the poorest had more support.
The poorest have tremendous support. US poverty line is at 80th percentile of world incomes, and welfare options ensure nobody has to live under that line. The ultra rich do a great deal (and got there) by making much affordable for lower incomes (Walmart, Amazon for high profile examples).
For that matter, world abject poverty has been largely eradicated. Increasing customer productivity (both individual and aggregate) increases customer buying power - favorable to capitalism.
This is blatant capitalist propaganda. Basic access to things like housing and education make for a tangibly wealthier society. Every dollar we invest in preschool education, for example, nets out $6 in terms of return throughout the course of the child's life.[1]
The nation continues on its "high variance" trajectory because it is structurally incapable of acting democratically. Two of the four major deliberative bodies are anti-democratic. The Senate is elected in extreme disproportion and the Supreme Court is ridiculous 9 unelected seniors deciding outcomes for an entire country.
It was set up this way intentionally, to entrench and structurally favor wealthy Southern slaveholders and established Northern merchants that traded on their commodities.
Of course you can't argue with the substance of my point. All it goes to show is how willing you are to write off half a million dead Americans for continued profits and power. Power to do what, exactly?
It's not just the communist countries like Vietnam and Cuba, even capitalist countries with newly minted leftist leadership like South Korea, have weathered this crisis with orders of magnitude less loss.
The systems for rending economic value from the value of human life are deeply entrenched here. Always have been[1]. That we can divorce the success of firms from the success of the people providing the value on the ground doing the work is a testament to it.
It doesn't make us awesome, it makes us abhorrent. The people that you claim "soar" are not randomly distributed, they are frequently born into favorable economic situations that allow them to develop the talents that make them super rich. In our lifetimes those islands of stability have degraded entirely in the service of ensuring the super rich can get even richer.
So true. This is why the US is so much better than Asia.
What worries me however is how there are more and more laws and regulation to not let people crash and burn - like forcing people to have health insurance. Stupid code for building houses - etc
EDIT: and I'm not being sarcastic. I admire how by taking the correct decision to apparently sacrifice the poor, we have made the pie bigger for everyone including the poor (unfortunately, as noted by a comment below about Des Moines, building code is quickly changing that)
Wait, what? You're against building codes? A lack of building codes is in no way why the US has been successful. They prevent people from literally burning.
GP frames it wrong but building codes make make affordable housing very hard to create in ways unrelated to safety.
>most homes built in Des Moines will be required to have a full basement, a single-car garage, and a driveway. Minimum lot sizes for single-family houses will range from 7,500 to 10,000 square feet. Building codes meant to guarantee residents’ safety will now decree their comfort
This conflates zoning with building code. Building codes are things like requiring that your wires be properly attached and connected so that you don't get electrocuted in the shower as your house burns down, or that you have to build enough beams to support the weight of 4 people and all their possessions.
I suspect we gutted our middle class with globalization. Any jobs that could be exported overseas for cheaper were, and management was rewarded for saving investors so much money by outsourcing those jobs. If we had a stronger collective identity (as with many European countries) we might've felt a kinship or patriotic duty to protect those jobs or otherwise redistribute the wealth garnered by outsourcing. And I'm not optimistic that this will get better given how much Americans are being primed to reject any collective national or even human identity and instead identify with their race and party.
Globalization and other factors didn't help, but the continued refusal to pay people a reasonable wage for full or part time work is a huge part of why the middle class is struggling and the class below is failing to move up into the middle class over time. The minimum wage hasn't budged in decades, and in general wages have not remotely kept up with increases in productivity and revenues. If the minimum wage had been going up middle class wages would have had to increase to stay ahead and likely everyone would be doing a lot better. There's a lot of paranoia about possible negative impacts of wage increases, but it's been tested in many municipalities at this point with no major issues, and virtually every other western country has a much higher minimum than us.
> in general wages have not remotely kept up with increases in productivity and revenues.
Isn't this because of globalization?
> There's a lot of paranoia about possible negative impacts of wage increases, but it's been tested in many municipalities at this point with no major issues, and virtually every other western country has a much higher minimum than us.
I don't think this is true? I'm pretty sure when we raise wages, jobs move overseas except for those jobs that are fundamentally local (fast-food employees, agricultural workers, construction, sanitation, etc). I'm not opposed to raising wages, but I think we also need to keep jobs from flowing overseas.
> I suspect we gutted our middle class with globalization.
It's not about middle class. In other rich countries, everyone, incl. the lower class, can afford to live in apartments, and doesn't have to resort to living in trailers.
I lived in a trailer growing up. They tend to be lower end, but "affordable housing" apartments are going to be comparably low-end. I'm guessing the reason they're more common in the US than in Europe is because land in the U.S. is so much more abundant, not because 500 sq ft apartment is inherently more dignified than a 1000 sq ft trailer.
This applies to cities and suburbs. For example in lost of NYC and SF, most buildings would be "illegal" if they were built today.
If you can't change "supply" a "free market" that relies on balancing supply and demand won't balance. It's crazy. And a building issues in US politics.
There's practically no visible crime in Poland. The worst you're going to get in the shittiest districts of shittiest cities (we're talking places where you can get a studio in city center for $10000) is potentially some obnoxious drunks for neighbors. No one is going to break in into your car or mug you on the streets.
For what it's worth my in-laws specifically chose to buy a second home in a mobile home park. I don't know all their reasons but the low cost of the land was part of it. I've seen their "trailer" and it's quite nice, so I wouldn't necessarily assume everyone who lives in one of these places does so out of desperation or lack of choices. People have different needs and wants.
A lot of the California ones are pretty decent. I dated a girl who lived in one. I also stayed in an Airbnb that was in one. The owner, who lived there, was a woman with a Stanford degree. They're cheap and reasonable places to live with a lot of stigma. The ones I saw around me growing up in Virginia were... shitty.
I visited my friend a couple years ago who lived in a shipping container in a trailer park. tbqh it was super nice and everyone was super friendly. Seemed like a really solid place to live. My friend loved it to: he made a good salary as a software engineer but just really loved the trailer park vibe.
It's the same reason those same Silicon Valley companies hire security guard companies at $15/hr and have the security guards take the food to the dumpster, and lock it.
That security guy probably could use that food more than the dumpster.
Why bother with $15/hr security guard when you can get replaceable temp workers to feed, pamper and wipe $150k white-knight social-justice "engineers".
The oddest part about it is how much of a mess the Bay Area is. Typically you’d expect centers of wealth to be excessively clean, filled with expensive architecture and monuments, etc. to the point of being boring. Dubai, for instance.
Somehow SV just decided to not bother with that at all.
California has such a mild climate, that you can build a house out of ticky-tacky, skip the insulation, and people won't care because they have a lemon tree growing in their yard.
Nowadays code won't allow you to skip insulation (or solar), but with earthquakes and high land prices you still aren't getting stone or brick homes.
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Nowadays code won't allow you to skip insulation (or solar), but with earthquakes and high land prices you still aren't getting stone or brick homes.
Structural stone and brick homes aren't really a thing in the US that much any more.
Beyond seismic issues, when it comes to insulation and efficiency and air/water leaks, homes built using bricks and stone are terrible, because those materials are very difficult to seal.
Most newer homes that have brick or stone exteriors use it only for aesthetics, and do not rely on it for structural integrity or resistance to the environment. Their actual skeletons are wood frames, and the weather resistance is provided by layers of materials over that.
You can build incredibly sturdy homes with wood - not ticky-tacky at all.
This may literally be the first time in history someone recommended San Francisco be more like Dubai.
Genuine question - when you're in the bay, do you spend time in any of the following: Pac Heights / Presidio Heights / Seacliff / Woodside / St. Helena / West Palo Alto / Stanford's Campus / Saratoga?
I think the reason you have the perception that you do is that the bay area is one of the least tourist-friendly locations in the world, frankly because the class you talk about loathes outsiders.
EDIT: A great microcosm of this is Sand Hill Road. Looks like less than nothing from the street, but it's home to some of the most expensive and nicest office real estate in the world. Apple HW stands out as another great example.
Of course there are nice neighborhoods in the Bay, but I'm referring more to the area as a whole. There is a gigantic amount of wealth concentrated in such a small place, yet you almost wouldn't know.
Most of the housing was built in the 1960s and your average 3 bed 2 bath 1500 sq ft ranch is worth $1-2 million depending on school district. Most other places in the country these houses would be worth $100k-$300k which is why it all looks a bit shabby.
Prop13, NIMBYs, local political control and anti-housing politics.
With RHNA (and state law attempts like SB50) this may be starting to change, but the people responsible for the economic success are not the ones with the political power to fix housing policy.
Most of these issues stem from bad housing policy and incumbents restraining supply.
I read that the world needs both types of economies. The US is a dynamic, freewheeling sort with the most extremes. You can get incredibly rich, but the bottom has no floor. It's easy to amass capital and to pay workers. Or have western Europe, which is a relatively painful climate for businesses. Taxation for extensive social services is stifling, but at least most of the middle people are OK.
With the problem of western Europe having massive braindrain. A doctor in France who decides to work in China will easily quadruple his salary. likewise in pretty much any country. An engineer in France, working in the US will also triple his salary.
Of course, there's less safety nets, less benefits but for educated people who are part of the upper middle class (doctors, teachers, engineers, etc...), the increase in salary is such that it really makes no sense from an economic standpoint to stay in France.
I'd say it's better only for working class to lower middle class.
One estimate is that about 22% of state government is spent on public welfare:
>...Another 22 percent of expenditures went toward public welfare. Public welfare includes spending on means-tested programs, such as Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Supplemental Security Income.
>...Americans give around 3 percent of our collective income to charity — more than the citizens of any other country. Better yet, these are individual Americans, not the government, who are generating the lion’s share of the contributions.
The US is a vast country with a vast population and its economy has been geared towards high end services. Those with the relevant education are able to thrive while those without education or wealth get cast aside. Urban centers thrive in this economy while rural ones fade away and decay; most people don’t want/ can’t move to where the opportunities are.
There’s also a multitude of socio political issues. From the relative independence of States to set social benefits policies, to the phenomenon of convincing people to vote against their own interests when race or culture war is involved.
"The homes in the park are not as portable as its name implies; they’ve been placed on foundations, and their hitches have been removed."
In my experience, in older parks especially, there is no way to economically move the trailer. Which means you don't really own a "mobile home", you own a slot in the park with a worthless trailer on it. This allows the park to have the negotiating power. I just wanted to point out this key detail to people who may not be aware of the situation.