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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I mean, it's mostly just cheaper housing or in Europe, a larger safety net. Sure, maybe family closeness helps in edge cases, but it's actually just housing is much cheaper in China, Turkey, or many other low-income countries with no homelessness. Even accounting for cost of living and wages, there are a lot of cheaper housing options in a second-tier city in Turkey, India, or Kenya than the US.

By the same token, the larger safety net helps left-leaning support of harsher treatment of problem homeless people in Europe. You can't have just the stick, and even if you disagree with how we handle the carrot here in the US, you still need some form of carrot.

Europe, a larger safety net

Many European cities are actually far more actively and heavily policed than the U.S.

The U.S. housing market is among the most affordable in the world and China among the least.

In Taipei, a small apartment costs $1 million but typical wages are $30,000 a year. Homelessness is vanishingly rare.

It's not so simple as housing prices.

China among the least

In Taipei

The Olympics aren't for another week, at least. I wasn't expecting to hear 'Chinese Taipei' before then.

The People's Republic of China is just a recent upstart who is temporarily controlling the mainland.

Taiwan is the older country and the legitimate holder of the mandate of heaven.

Picking random big-but-not-too-overhyped cities, in Chongqing a studio (up to expat standards?) apparently costs about $250/month, to a median salary of about $21k/year. Knowing China, there are plenty of options that are much cheaper but wouldn't be considered by a website called "expatistan". In comparison, in Chicago a studio is about $1500/month, to a median yearly income of $65k (and my impression from when I lived in the US is that even putting up with inhumane levels of slumlording won't lower your rent by much). I don't understand why you would expect homeless people to be able to buy, or any bank to give them the massive collateralised loan that is a mortgage.

(I briefly looked up the situation in Taipei and it seems that there the income/rent ratio is in between, at sth like $30k/year to $450 for a studio.)

Boner mistake on my part, because yes, the purchase/rent differential is massive.

We even talked about cheap Asian apartments on this very forum a year or so ago. IIRC, there was an apartment in Osaka that was renting for like $125/month.

That's obviously impossible in the U.S. For one, the unit wouldn't be up to code.

But more importantly, an extremely poor Japanese person can still be counted on to pay their rent and not destroy the unit. This is very not true of the American underclass. So there is a dollar amount, say $1000 a month in a place like Seattle, below which it never makes sense to rent your apartment. If you get a tweaker, they can do $100k worth of damage and take 3 years to evict.

Landlords can buy apartments in a city like Detroit or Toledo for like $50k and then turn around and rent them for $750/month each. What's more, this is NOT a profitable business. How do I know? I invested in a company that did just that. They were constantly dealing with delinquents and maintenance costs. It's true that you can make a profit renting to the poor, but only by employing slumlord tactics. It's a nasty business best left to immigrants.

If you get a tweaker, they can do $100k worth of damage and take 3 years to evict.

I knows these are probably SWAG numbers, but it reminded me of the fact that the rule-of-thumb for incarceration per year is between $80k-$100k (EDIT: looks like it's about $40-$50k, though there is some large state by state variance) depending on which state (or federal) the prisoner is locked up in.

It's interesting to consider that the cost of "not an active participant of society" ($60k-$100k, to cast a wide net) outpaces the median working-age wage ($35-$60k depending on location and age).

The other way to make money renting to the poor is by not having the poor pay the bill. Section 8 is big business, and there’s nice section eight with drug tests and a strict policy on tenants paying their share of the rent(and in my area often advertisements only in Spanish, which the virtuous poor disproportionately have as a first language compared to the underclass through fault of their own), in addition to crappy section 8 which asks no questions so long as the check keeps coming from the government.

(and in my area often advertisements only in Spanish)

This is smart. I had a brilliant idea to only list apartments for rent in Chinese. But then I found out that even East Asians can grift.

The Chinese play way to hardball for that, although I guess Tagalog or Vietnamese might be a smart niche to try.

Purchase price and rental price are often strongly disjointed:

https://www.newsweek.com/real-estate-map-where-cheaper-rent-versus-buy-1896130

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/countries-with-the-biggest-real-estate-gap-between-buying-and-renting-182644895.html

There are only two countries where buying is cheaper than renting. Average mortgage payments of $1,258 in Finland are 2.1 per cent cheaper than rent of $1,285. The other is Italy. Mortgage payments of $997 are slightly lower (0.9 per cent) compared to rent of $1,006.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/realestate/buying-vs-renting-home.html

Of course there are further considerations (like mortgage payments building equity.)

Don't forget that rent is a fixed amount that you pay each month which includes stuff like repairs and home taxes etc. (in some countries, but alas, not the UK) while mortgages though are a lower bound on your housing costs because you're responsible for all the repairs and taxes etc.

It's often no taken into account that with the American fixed rate mortgages people almost always use what a mortgage today would cost rather than a mortgage entered a decade ago. You lock in a flat payment that doesn't increased with inflation like rent does.

Taxes and insurance are often included in US mortgages, in the form of escrow.

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