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Cheaper houses and no more transphobic
bathroom laws? C'moooon Rapture!
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So sometimes I like to torture myself by--huh? Wait, where are you going? I just--oh, no, I don't mean that literally. Ok, so what I mean is that I, as member of a generation for whom the only paths to home ownership are the death of a wealthy relative or some kind of rapture situation freeing up some houses, like to pop onto Zillow from time to time to see how the non-renters live. And I was struck by--wait! Not literally! Come back! Ok, I was
figuratively stuck by a particular listing.
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| Above: a regular-ass house. |
It was in my home town of Rochester, New York and cost $4,725,000. As in four point seven two five
million dollars. Of money. And no, I'll never in my life be able to afford something like that, but I was, you know, curious. The pictures were confusing, the first was a regular-ass house, which it self should only be a hundred and fifty grand in that area. And just to be clear, I also don't have enough money to say the word "grand" instead of "thousand." That's for riches, but I'm already pretend house-hunting, so why do you care? Grand, grand, grand. Anyway, like I was saying, the other pictures were of completely other houses, all of which were in the--and I'm guessing here--a hundred and fifty thousand dollar range?
Reading further, it became clear that this listing was aimed at people who buy up houses as investments. Of course, by people I mean kajillionaires, because this was twenty-nine houses being sold as a "bundle." And not to flex my arm-chair real-estate acumen, $4,725,000 divided by twenty nine houses is about a hundred and sixty grand.
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"Look, I don't care how many grans it costs. A hundred, two
hundred grands. Doesn't matter, I'll take it. I am rich after all."
-how riches talk, one presumes |
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Pictured: the moment Ronald Reagan
ruined everything forever for us. |
What'd I win? Revolution at the way the housing market works. Twenty-nine houses all owned by one person or organization whose aim is not to house people, but rather to extract rent. I'm beginning to think that maybe, just maybe what's wrong with America is not all the avocado toast-eating or the not wanting to work-ness of millennial (and
xennials, thank you very much).
Maybe it's this runaway, unfettered, and deranged version of capitalism that allows someone to own twenty-nine homes in the middle of a housing crisis.
But that's just business, right? If someone invests wisely and is successful, who are we to say there's anything wrong with that? I don't know, I'm not an economist. But it's just...wrong. Here, check out the text from another listing that both caught my eye and reinforced my rapidly deteriorating hope for the future:
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| "Rockin. The kids still say that, right?" |
"Another Rockin' Rochester Investment Opportunity! Single family colonial in the Beachwood neighborhood. Three bedrooms and two FULL (sic) baths! Hardwood throughout, some thermal windows. Newer furnace and hot water tank, two car garage. Currently tenant occupied generating an annual gross of $22,200."
-an actual listing, almost certainly
by someone who remembers typewriters
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I dream of a future in which we all come
together in a common hatred of billionaires. |
So, couple of things. Actually, several. Firstly, the writer's use of the word
Rockin' in combination with the extra space at the end of each sentence (what? It's a thing you had to do on typewriters. See? I wasn't being rude before) is leading me to make certain assumptions about the generation into which the person who wrote this was born, which is not constructive. Squabbling between age groups is divisive and distracting us from the real enemy: the offensively wealthy. Secondly, it's a house, not an investment opportunity.
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And not for nothing, but for $22k/year the
landlord can damn well fix those cabinets. |
And lastly, the current occupants (one of whom is likely a child based on the be-training wheeled bike in one of the shots) are described as
generating an annual gross of $22,200. Like they're a feature of the place and not people who live there. The sentence alone is
gross alright, but given that the median income in Rochester is twenty-eight thousand dollars per year, the ad is enticing potential buyers with the promise of squeezing seventy-eight percent of the average renters income out of them. And I know that's not exactly how math and percentages work, but I think my point stands.
What point? Great question. I think it's that this whole idea of housing as a way to exploit people's need for, you know housing, sounds an awful lot like that scene in The Matrix where Keanu wakes up and realizes that the robots are keeping people in goo so they can suck their energy out or whatever. Look, it's admittedly a preposterous and I believe a flawed plot for a sci-fi movie, but it's a decent allegory for the housing market.
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I'm just suggesting that the electricity generated by humans doesn't seem like it'd be enough to power the simulation much less those robot squid things. But it doesn't matter, because it ultimately ends very badly for the robots. So like, look out, landlords. |
