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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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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.

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