Washington Post Urges Funding Office-to-Apartment Conversions as Downtown Workers Stay Home (dailyprogress.com) 172
"Cities across the nation face a dilemma," writes the Washington Post's editoral board," warning local leaders to respond to "the urgency and scale of the downtown crisis in many major metro areas..."
"Downtown office buildings are empty as workers prefer to stay home." Nearly all local leaders agree part of the solution is an office-to-apartment conversion boom. Cities have started rolling out tax incentives to encourage developers to begin this transformation. This strategy is straight out of the playbook that revived center city Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan in the past quarter century. But there's a problem: City leaders aren't doing enough...
Consider the nation's capital city. Downtown D.C. is more than 90 percent commercial buildings. The vibrancy and workers are largely gone. Crime and grime are increasing, while property tax revenue is quickly decreasing as building values plummet. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has put out an ambitious "Comeback Plan" that calls for 15,000 new residents living downtown by 2028. To make that a reality, the city needs developers to convert roughly 7 million square feet of office space to apartments and condos. Her team estimates about 1 million square feet is on track for conversion so far. There's a long way to go. The situation is similar in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta, among other cities....
The longer cities wait to get conversions underway, the more tax values drop and crime goes up, and the more people see no value in living in the heart of the city — or even visiting. One way or another, cities are going to pay. D.C. is already staring at $464 million in lower revenue for 2024 to 2026 mainly due to lower commercial property taxes downtown. San Francisco is facing a $728 million shortfall over the next two fiscal years for similar reasons. Buildings constructed in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s are quickly becoming distressed. It's far better to invest now than to spend years overseeing stagnation and decline. As D.C.'s Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee warned, this is "a serious long-term risk to the District's economy and its tax base."
The sooner these buildings can convert to residential, the sooner the city can generate some tax revenue again from an area that once brought in hefty commercial property revenue. Cities will have to rely much more on residential income tax revenue from downtowns.
"Downtown office buildings are empty as workers prefer to stay home." Nearly all local leaders agree part of the solution is an office-to-apartment conversion boom. Cities have started rolling out tax incentives to encourage developers to begin this transformation. This strategy is straight out of the playbook that revived center city Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan in the past quarter century. But there's a problem: City leaders aren't doing enough...
Consider the nation's capital city. Downtown D.C. is more than 90 percent commercial buildings. The vibrancy and workers are largely gone. Crime and grime are increasing, while property tax revenue is quickly decreasing as building values plummet. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has put out an ambitious "Comeback Plan" that calls for 15,000 new residents living downtown by 2028. To make that a reality, the city needs developers to convert roughly 7 million square feet of office space to apartments and condos. Her team estimates about 1 million square feet is on track for conversion so far. There's a long way to go. The situation is similar in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta, among other cities....
The longer cities wait to get conversions underway, the more tax values drop and crime goes up, and the more people see no value in living in the heart of the city — or even visiting. One way or another, cities are going to pay. D.C. is already staring at $464 million in lower revenue for 2024 to 2026 mainly due to lower commercial property taxes downtown. San Francisco is facing a $728 million shortfall over the next two fiscal years for similar reasons. Buildings constructed in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s are quickly becoming distressed. It's far better to invest now than to spend years overseeing stagnation and decline. As D.C.'s Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee warned, this is "a serious long-term risk to the District's economy and its tax base."
The sooner these buildings can convert to residential, the sooner the city can generate some tax revenue again from an area that once brought in hefty commercial property revenue. Cities will have to rely much more on residential income tax revenue from downtowns.
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
But there's a problem: City leaders aren't doing enough...
The taxpayers aren't being fleeced nearly enough to allow private corporations to reap the benefits. Every last pfenig must be extracted from the pleebs if infinite growth is to continue. Under no circumstances should private industry have to bear the costs of upgrades or rebuilding.
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Re: Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO let the owners go bankrupt or sell the old buildings for peanuts so they can be torn down for purpose build apartment high rises.
Here's my point. These building owners have two choices. They can either continue to get no leasholders for their vacant buildings which means no money in their pockets, or they can do what you said. Tear down or renovate what they have and start getting paid for their property.
It is not the responsibility of the taxpayers to prop up private industry.
Re: Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering there are so many buildings now that are owned by hedge funds and other financial parasites, they can sit and take the losses for vacancies for a very long time. Longer than the politicians can allow the city to decay around them. The property owners have all of the leverage here. Subsidize it or face the consequences.
Extreme solutions such as eminent domain seizure of property doesn't happen to multi-billion dollar hedge funds with teams of lawyers. That's just the little guys that gets screwed like that.
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A lot of institutions invest in real estate. A *lot* (banks, insurances, asset mangers, pensions, etc). That's for the demand. In the mean time local governments control the supply through NIMBY-ism, regulations, etc. Only a fraction of hedge funds invest in real estate. Why single them out?
Vacancy taxes (Score:3)
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This is about the only kind of tool the cities have, and they need to wield it very quickly... they really needed to start last year. Commercial office space, especially vacant or lower tier Class A space needs a major write-down, and mechanically that is hard to do. (The property is generally leveraged, so who ultimately holds the bag...)
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This is what I don't understand about progressive politics. Each member of the LA City council gets paid more money than the president of the United States. Not the mayor, the city council. All of them. Think about that. I don't even want to know how much the mayor makes.
You guys always talk about how you want to harm the 1%, and this is one way you intend to do so. So then why do you vote to give politicians who are decidedly far less impactful than the president, enough pay to turn them into the 1%, who y
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Actually it sounds like you understand (faux) progressive politics perfectly. A bunch of privileged people pay lip service to concerns of the poor and marginalized populations, pass legislation that purportedly helps these people at the expense of everyone else, pay themselves enormous sums of money while nobody's looking, and utterly fail to solve any actual problems so they can perpetually campaign on fixing these things.
As an added bonus, they tear down productive businesses and individuals in order to l
Re: Translation (Score:2)
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...or to the unions who would do the conversion work.
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The problem with democracy is that, eventually, the people deciding where tax payer's money goes will have closer ties with big private industries than with tax payers.
Re: Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
In the US election system, corporations are people who cannot vote, but who decide who you can vote for.
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It's the tax payers (or the voting public at least) who decide who represents them
they get to choose which of the (generally 2) options presented by the ruling elite will be fucking them over for the next few years. that you consider that to be actual decision power is so naive that's no wonder you also believe there is some sort of difference in these aspects between voting republican or democrat or whathaveyou.
you are right though in that it's people's own fault, but now for what they vote for, but for actually tolerating this rotten and corrupt system and calling it democracy. i guess
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Re: Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
Creating "modular low-income apartments" out of downtown office buildings would create ghetto housing among tax-paying office districts. It would basically repeat the experience of Detroit and Baltimore, which tried to replace empty factories with "urban low-cost housing" which very quickly became dangerous gang turf.
Re: Translation (Score:5, Informative)
Detroit failed because of too few people. It didn't need more housing, it needed the 4 million residents the city was built for. This seems like the exact opposite of the problems we have today.
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I might lack context, but an average of 460SF/person seems low unless you expect a lot of kids. For adults I would think you need closer to 550-600SF/person.
This is false (Score:5, Informative)
What you're talking about is what Americans call "the projects". They look bad until you know the history. And knowing the history should make you angry.
A very brief synopsis, large numbers of poor Americans were brought into cities into public housing with the intention of supporting them with government programs for industrialization and jobs. These were people living in the 21st century equivalent of thatched roof houses without plumbing or access to running water and reliable food.
Once the projects were built and the people were brought there there was a political change and Reagan was elected along with the raft of conservative and right-wing politicians who cut all the funding to the job's programs.
So you suddenly had a shitload of people with no jobs stuck in the city. They any worse off than they were out in the country. By the way they were desperately poor and borderline starving, but the point is we abandoned tens of thousands of Americans once again for the sake of politics and a little bit of bigotry...
Getting back on track that's not an issue in these cities because there's plenty of jobs there just isn't any housing. It's the reverse problem and turning those buildings into apartments would drastically improve everyone's quality of life. Less gasoline would be used reducing our dependence on foreign oil and less driving means cleaner air. The only people who lose here are billionaires who invested in commercial real estate and they can take the hit
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Oh for Fuck's sake, the projects were shitty and violent well before Reagan came along. Not everything is the Big Bad California Actor's fault. It wasn't lack of government funding that got rid of the urban factory jobs. It was the bi-partisan trade deals that made offshoring of industry all but inevitable.
LBJ and his "let all lower class people live off the government" policies did a lot more to destroy public housing than anything Reagan could have dreamed up.
Re: Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
But who's going to pay for that?
Whenever somebody wants to build something permanent, cities ought to require the cost of tearing down the building and restoring the land back to its natural form be deposited into an escrow account. Then if the building is never finished or it becomes obsolete or the city itself becomes deserted, there will be money to fix the problem long after the building owner goes bankrupt.
Gas stations in particular need this, because leaky tanks can cost a lot to rehabilitate the soil and make the land suitable for other uses.
A land value tax would also go a long way towards using land more efficiently. Don't tax more just because someone wants to build 4 floors of apartments instead of 2. Is there a housing crisis or not?
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But who's going to pay for that? Whenever somebody wants to build something permanent, cities ought to require the cost of tearing down the building and restoring the land back to its natural form be deposited into an escrow account. Then if the building is never finished or it becomes obsolete or the city itself becomes deserted, there will be money to fix the problem long after the building owner goes bankrupt.
Jesus focking christ, man. Then almost no building will ever be built anywhere, including housing. Are you insane?
Re: Translation (Score:2)
Do it based on bonds that payout if the development goes under. Good actors will receive very cheap rates on their bonds. Bad actors will be priced out of development.
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Do it based on bonds that payout if the development goes under. Good actors will receive very cheap rates on their bonds. Bad actors will be priced out of development.
Doing it that way would require the town to trust the bond seller to still have the money if the developer vanishes. The usual solution is to require the developer to provide a completion bond deposited with a bank of the town's choice. As the development is completed the money is returned to the developer. If the developer vanishes there is enough left in the bond to hire another developer to complete the project.
This does not penalize bad actors, but it is my understanding that the town is legally obli
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I don't think you understand. Holding the money in escrow means the money isn't paid out until the condition is met, in this case they money is held until it's time to tear down the building. Then whoever owns the building at the time uses the money held in escrow to tear it down. The value of the property is thus increased by the balance in the escrow account, which is passed to the new owner whenever the property is sold.
Increasing th
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And I don't think you understand basic economics and are shaky on simple arithmetic. Having to provide an escrow account for demolishing the building will, at the very least, double the cost of construction, especially as you're going to have to take inflation into account. Yes, you can make sure your account is invested in something that earns interest, but there's no way of knowing in advance how much your fund is going to have to grow, meaning that you'll be expected to
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Re: Translation (Score:2)
In theory it might seem smart to let them fail. But in practice, this would tend towards a downward spiral in tax revenue, services, and real estate. Failing to properly invest is what kills cities. (well, that, and the fact that city tax revenue subsidizes the suburbs).
Re: Translation (Score:2)
I live in Pennsylvania, where cities and counties assess both income and property taxes. The state assesses a flat income tax. In the event that you live in the lower tax suburbs and work in the high tax cities (Philadelphia) you have to pay Philadelphia income tax. Despite having a large tax base it doesnt provide full services too, Philadelphia still struggles financially. How can that be?
Re: Translation (Score:2)
I can't speak to PA specifically, but suburbs tend to drain urban areas through programs related to building out infrastructure to the suburbs like roads and sewage. Individual cities might have different dynamics, but the general rule is cities pay more than their fair share.
Affordable housing pretty much requires govt (Score:2)
We stopped doing all that in the 90s in favor of tax breaks for billionaires because they started offshoring all the jobs and didn't need us anymore. It took a little while to burn through that inventory but now here we are.
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All of these big cities and their
When I saw the headline... (Score:5, Funny)
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And be paid in company scrips, accepted only at the company store!
btw, Walmart has been paying workers in company vouchers as recently as 2019 : https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
Less people == less resources needed (Score:2)
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Bingo.
I can only imagine the sales pitch it would take for me to move into a converted office building downtown.
And the reason that I can only imagine it is because there's almost nothing they could offer me that I'd find attractive enough to do it.
Don't use public funds to aid private businesses (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would we want to use public funds to fix a private business problem? That would seem to nearly guarantee that the benefits will not be spread evenly to the general pubic, but instead flow directly to those with friendly ties to government officials.
Investing the public's monies for a public building or for infrastructure used by everyone does make sense. But bailing out private investors? I think not. Especially since it's quite likely those same commercial investors were already given tax incentives to build out in the first place, so giving them additional incentives now to convert to residential would be piling incentive on top of an incentive.
The first principle of limited government is to recognize that there are whole classes of problems that are a good, natural fit for public vs. private organizations. Like good software architecture, you need to cleanly separate the concerns so that the results can be optimized.
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Why would we want to use public funds to fix a private business problem? That would seem to nearly guarantee that the benefits will not be spread evenly to the general pubic, but instead flow directly to those with friendly ties to government officials.
Because that is how capitalsim works, according to Republicans. The taxpayers foot the bill and businesess reap the rewards. That the people get no benefit is irrelevant. It's that business don't have to take on the risks of doing business.
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>Why would we want to use public funds to fix a private business problem?
To get them to do what the government wants, not what they would do without coercion.
Re: Don't use public funds to aid private business (Score:2)
Do you think an unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat on the central planning commission could do better? Just look at the difference between the US and the USSR.
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I think a local bureaucrat is under a lot more pressure and is more accountable in American government than a corporation. The bureaucrat wants to keep their job (which means maintaining a region that can afford to pay them), and there's usually ego involved too. The corporation wants to maximize short term profits.
Yes, the locals will royally screw things up sometimes, but if you let corporations do whatever they want things will ALWAYS eventually go badly for the citizens in their sphere of influence.
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Why would we want to use public funds to fix a private business problem?
Because otherwise that business with its problem will now fund your political rival instead of you.
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Spot on. A failing city is an exponential problem: the further it gets the harder and more expensive it is to solve. Tax incentives need to focus on outcomes that further the long-term goals for the community, but they are a useful tool.
Interesting counter-effects in some UK regions... (Score:2)
What some regions of the UK have seen - typically medium size towns - in an increase in footfall to high streets where people live.
Many people, before the pandemic, were often priced out of very large towns and cities in terms of housing, so moved to what became termed "commuter towns". Smaller towns on the outskirts that were cheaper or even more rural locations.
Enter the pandemic and WTF - now those smaller towns are seeing increased economic activity. They have benefitted at the expense of the city.
Of co
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Edit: "Enter the pandemic and WFH" - yeah, sort of close to WTF, one letter was correct.
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Weirdly, I read that correctly without your clarification...
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Well yes there's all this complaining about shops and restaurants in the cities losing out on business, but people still have to eat - it's just that now they're going to eat closer to where they live - and will probably have more money to spend since they're not spending so much on travel costs.
Previously where someone "lived" was just where they went to sleep, by the time they had commuted to the city, worked a day and commuted back all they wanted to do was sleep. Now people are more likely to actually s
WDYM funding? That is Bezos asking for handouts. (Score:3)
These aren't the people's offices, are they? The owners of those offices don't want to invest in them, just keep getting paid. Tax vacancy.
I'll explain, dearies (Score:2)
If you let the downtown rot and the hobos take over, your whole city will fall apart. If you convert your downtown into housing and mixed use, rich people will move in, and your city at least has a shot at thriving. SF will fock it up though, don't you doubt it, but requiring some obscene percentage of low-income and hobo housing. Then the rich people will stay the fock away and the downtown will still rot.
So kill all the focking hobos, no matter what you do.
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In Europe, some city-centers have become insanely pricy places to live because that's where all the important-looking and old buildings are. Rich people try to surround themselves with "culture", no matter if they own it or whether they just can look at it looking out the window.
The accountancy problem (Score:2)
One of the stops on this happening is that for companies which own emptying blocks don't have to revalue them just because they are empty and there is no realistic prospect of their ever being rented out again. Instead they can leave them as an asset on their balance sheets as long as they remain empty based on previous rental values; that's what the rules say. To be fair this is often appropriate for a period...
Tax vacancy, progressively. (Score:2)
The longer it's empty, the higher the tax.
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Watch me suddenly have a lot of new homes that I live in part-time.
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But then "they can leave them as an asset on their balance sheets as long as they remain empty based on previous rental values" is no longer true, is it?
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Hand it to your tax cheat, sorry, consultant. He'll know how to deal with this little problem.
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Part-time residency generally does not count. You need the maid to declare it as her full-time residence. Not that this has anything to do with office space though, although there are financial games to lease space out to a subsidiary that then tries to sub-lease it at a loss.
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Indeed - it's a soluble problem. However your proposed solution would highlight the scale of the issue; one of the most striking features of the past year or so has been the desperate attempts of parts of the British establishment to discourage working from home and playing up the idea that it's an excuse for reduced work. The campaign has involved several of the British national newspapers as well as some members of the government; one suspects that those pushing it have large investments in office space..
Great EXCEPT DC. (Score:2)
1 exception would be to buy up a bunch of dilapidated buildings, raze them, and then build a new area just for all of CONgress, their staffs, and family to live at. Seriously, if these ppl lived in same area, they would regain respect for each other.
As to other places, it really does make sense.
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Simpler would be to change the Constitution to give residents of the Federal District the right to vote for a representative in the House who can vote on bills. The 23rd Amendment already gives them the right to vote for Electors for President.
Re: Great EXCEPT DC. (Score:2)
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Re: Great EXCEPT DC. (Score:2)
a slightly different approach would be to allow them to register to a connecting state. Do it upon registering and then allow changes every 10 years.
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1 exception would be to buy up a bunch of dilapidated buildings, raze them, and then build a new area just for all of CONgress, their staffs, and family to live at. Seriously, if these ppl lived in same area, they would regain respect for each other.
It would be better if they lived in the communities they represented and worked remotely via video link, that way they'd have respect for the people they're supposed to be working for, and would be harder to reach with bribes, rather than all clustered in one city with a bunch of lobbyists.
Cities suck but are tolerated for money. (Score:2)
The objective of urban life is to earn money to retire some place else that's much more affordable and where OWNING property is possible. Renting for life is like living in jail. The helpless who want that are welcome to it.
screw the little guy (Score:2)
So, let's see. The taxpayers need to subsidize corporate landlords, while mom and pop landlords get the shaft with eviction moratoriums. Right. The New Left.
government will take up the slack, so don't (Score:2)
One of the inevitable problems of life is that government only expands. I believe it likely that it will expand at a higher rate soon, so this office space will be in demand.
WFH (Score:3)
We have converted your old cubicle into an apartment unit. This is now your assigned residence. Be here at 8:00AM, Monday morning.
Covid Killed The Commute For Millions (Score:2)
The pre-pandemic presence of office workers in the office gave purpose to beautiful, elaborately-decorated offices, a surrounding area of shops and convenience stores that got office-worker foot traffic, and even traffic for airlines and hotels handling office visitors who came to see the beautiful building. Not to mention the workers that clean the building, replace carpets,
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Turning offices into apartments may help landlords with a vacancy crisis, but it's not going to make workers decide to move downtown so they can work from downtown. Maybe younger ones who want to be closer to the bars they frequent, but most settled people don't care about downtown life.
In my city public transport is based on a hub (CBD) and spoke arrangement. Some buses traverse between spokes, but all trains and a lot of bus routes are in this hub & spoke pattern.
When you live in the CBD you are at the hub and working elsewhere is not as bad an experience as you may think.
Having more foot traffic leads to more services entering an area, which all slowly leads to revitalisation. I've seen this in person when my old office building was turned into apartments.
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"You will own nothing and be happy"
A lot of people - Americans in particular but true in many other countries as well - are only under an illusion of property ownership. Most Americans who call themselves "homeowners" are seeing only their optimistic reflection of the actual situation; they are more likely owned by their property than the other way around. The cost of maintaining a house and yard is climbing faster than most people realize, and the selling prices of houses is not matching. This ultimately means that more and more sellers
Re:Modern Day Serfdom (Score:5, Insightful)
You ignore the fact that in your alternate case, the people putting their "money into a good money market account" still have to live somewhere, and if they aren't homeowners, they are renting something.
A better way to look at it is that your taxes and the interest component of your mortgage payment is your effective 'rent' for your house. Compare that to actual rents for a comparable property and you'll find that buying a house is usually (but not always!) the better option .
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This.
Everyone has to live somewhere and op doesn't account for that cost.
The 30 year loan is still the most common. Once locked in, that's it. You can refi lower if rates drop but it'll never go higher.
Unlike rent which can increase every year.
I've moved a lot and thus owned several homes over the years (not at same time). I do the full math every time of rent vs buying. It has -always- been dramatically better to own and pay the mortgage (even when it was over 8% back in the day) than rent. Always. H
Re: Modern Day Serfdom (Score:2)
I also do the math and I've never found owning to be worth it in California.
The amount of money my investments make far outstrips real estate. Every dollar going into a home or mortgage interest is a dollar with less future value than if it goes into the stock market. Since my rent is about $1500-2000 per month less than ownership, that adds up a lot over time.
I can just look at my coworkers with houses and how fast their equity is growing compared to mine. Sure, they've outperformed me this last year. But
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All but one of my houses was in California.
Dunno what to say about the differing math. It is what it is. We'd have to do a side by side to see why it came out different.
What period of time we talking? The last 10 years was a huge and very long up market. Very unusual. This last year was more typical with ups n downs.
Re: Modern Day Serfdom (Score:2)
More specifically, I'm living in San Diego, and a condo for $850k is about equivalent to my apartment for $2500. I think I was looking at 3.75% interest rates, but I haven't looked since the pandemic. I also added in some Google-able averages for maintenance and association fees and my 20 years of living in SD for an idea of how fast rents grow. My investments vary, but 25% is my benchmark over longer periods of time.
Like I said, it would have made sense to buy pre-pandemic with perfect future knowledge, bu
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I was in the SF Silicon Valley area. I bought that house 2-3 years before Covid and sold it last year. I don't know anything about SD area real estate or rental prices but in my old area rental prices were as outrageous as houses. The last rent I paid was around 2016 for $4500/month. Yes my mortgage was much higher but the house went up 50% in ~4 years and I got to live in it. I was happy with that math.
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It is an oldie but goodie: NY Times "Is it better to rent or buy" calculator [nytimes.com] The end result is that it really depends on your situation and how long a house that is financially justifiable relative to rent will meet your needs.
Anecdotal example: I bought a condo to renovate and have as a long term place in the city for when my more rural home is no longer viable for me. In 18 months I decided that the cost of renovation made it a hopeless project, after putting in about 7% of the purchase price on design f
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If you live below your means and save and invest at a higher rate of return then renting is often a good idea. If you are single or have a growing family renting might be better. If you are bad at saving money owning might be better.
I was with you entirely until this part.
To provide my own anecdote, I was in an apartment that was barely meeting my then-needs so that I could bank as much money as possible for a down payment and other savings. When I bought my home in 2013, it only cost me $100/mo. more for mortgage + insurance + property taxes + utilities compared to the apartment’s analogous costs. I refinanced in 2016, bringing those monthly costs to parity with what I had been paying as a renter. That price has remained stable
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I guess my perspective is that as your needs are changing the risk that you will need to sell too soon to come out ahead is too high. When you buy a bigger house for what you project your needs to be in 10 years you can strand a lot of money. Reality of renting might have changed now as well; I always rented from small landlords and never saw the kind of annual increases that the corporate entities had.
Owning a home is expensive; old rule of thumb is you need to reinvest 1% of its current value every year
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The cost of maintaining a house and yard is climbing faster than most people realize
I keep hearing this, but I'm at a loss to figure out what it means. Unless you have regular water leaks or electricity issues, or are continualy repainting your rooms or replacing appliances, maintaining a house is no different than maintaining an apartment. Sure, paying for fuel or electricity for your mower is an added expense compared to renting, as are any flower gardens (though from what I've seen, people don't have th
'inflation is much higher than being reported' (Score:3)
Really? Source please. Getting a realistic value for inflation is a complex problem, but it's simplistic to make comments like that. Yes, some things have got a lot more expensive than inflation indexes indicate, but that's by no means true of everything.
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The cost of maintaining a house and yard is climbing faster than most people realize
I keep hearing this, but I'm at a loss to figure out what it means.
Things break down all the time in a house that require money and time to fix. Even if you consider yourself really handy you still need materials. Appliances die, furnaces need replacing, A/C needs replacing, exterior siding only lasts so long, driveways need to be redone, roofs start leaking, etc etc etc.
but most of the "cost" of maintenance is sweat equity.
Until something big happens. Furnaces are thousands of dollars and last on average less than 10 years, same with A/C. Refrigerators aren't cheap either and last about the same. Dishwashers are a lot
My family has done well out of housing investment (Score:2)
My half brother became a minister in the Church of England some 55 years ago and let the house he had bought. By the time he retired, it enabled him to move into a very attractive house.
My father was also a minister in the CofE. He only bought after his retirement, but on the death of him and later his wife, I inherited a large pot of money. I've bought a two premises to rent out, and they've earnt me large capital gains.
The interesting question is whether the same process will be repeated going forward; th
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Re: Modern Day Serfdom (Score:2)
My mortgage all is around 1200/mo and in another 12 years it will be fully paid off, leaving only the property tax. Meanwhile an apartment of around 900 sq feet is around $1400/mo. Rent can rise by any amount at the end of the lease. My mortgage is fixed. It takes me 30 minutes to mow my lawn and another 30 minutes to pull weeds. I made smart decisions about what I planted so its very low maintenance. I have a 50 year roof and I drive a low maintenance car. I can save that $200/mo and Iâ(TM)ll be bett
Re: Modern Day Serfdom (Score:2)
Well at least the "socialism anything bad" shit sandwich that Americans eat is keeping the commies away.
Hmmm, a cot and a cubicle, sort of like in the Soviet Union...
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Citation needed. Probably deserves some favorable moderation, too.
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For the corporations that own those real estates, it is about property values. Why else do you think they try to herd people back into offices? No workers in offices, nobody to buy food at the food court, nobody buying food at the restaurants in those office buildings, nobody going to rent those restaurants.
Turning that into apartments isn't going to have the same effect, because you can't cram 100 people into 200 m apartment space, something you can easily do with offices. And even if you could, those peop
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Well, there are other perks densely packed urban centers have. Lots of restaurants and shops in walking distance, because there are enough people to support a large variety of them, for example.
That's one of the few perks I miss from my time living in the middle of our capital. All sorts of delivery services at my fingertips and a shopping mall pretty much in walking distance because there are enough people around to warrant building one there.
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I moved, funny enough, for a job.
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Convenience of life is the most important reason. For me, it matters little where I plant my cadaver, back then there was an office I had to go to, so I went. Now I'm mostly too lazy to move into town again.
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Silicon Valley moved from the suburbs to the "City" because the kiddies wanted the nightlife. Once they had kids, they moved back to the suburbs. The tide goes in, the tide goes out.
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Then why is everyone so up in arms and against it, from corporations to cities, if "they" want that?
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Then I guess you should have that office. But why should the rest of us suffer?
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Again: Have the people who want to socialize at the office get there and socialize. I prefer working to socializing while on the clock, but people are different. I understand that. Go to the office, socialize there with the like-minded people and be happy.
Also, have you considered choosing a job that requires you to interface with other people in person? There is a reason I chose the job I picked, and a non-trivial part of that was that I would not have to have more human contact than absolutely necessary.