>I FIRST met Larraine when we both lived in a trailer park on the far South Side of Milwaukee. Fifty-four, with silvering brown hair, Larraine loved mystery novels, “So You Think You Can Dance” and doting on her grandson. Even though she lived in a mobile home park with so many code violations that city inspectors called it an “environmental biohazard,” she kept a tidy trailer and used a hand steamer on the curtains. But Larraine spent more than 70 percent of her income on housing — just as one in four of all renting families who live below the poverty line do. After paying the rent, she was left with $5 a day.
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>Under conditions like these, evictions have become routine. Larraine (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) was evicted after she borrowed from her rent money to cover part of her gas bill. The eviction movers took her stuff to their storage unit; after Larraine was unable to make payments, they took it to the dump.
>Those of us who don’t live in trailer parks or inner cities might think low-income families typically benefit from public housing or some other kind of government assistance. But the opposite is true. Three-quarters of families who qualify for housing assistance don’t get it because there simply isn’t enough to go around. This arrangement would be unthinkable with other social services that cover basic needs. What if food stamps only covered one in four families?
>America stands alone among wealthy democracies in the depth and expanse of its poverty. Ask most politicians what we should do about this, and they will answer by calling for more and better jobs. Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House, thinks we need to do more to “incentivize work.” Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, thinks we should raise the minimum wage. But jobs are only part of the solution...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opinion/sunday/the-eviction-economy.html
America's housing situation is pretty much garbage right now. I just finished my degree, so I have a real place now, but I had some really close calls to homelessness. Landlords just have so much power it's insane. I had a roommate duck out without paying the last month's rent and I was sued. Successfully. I was evicted from an apartment that we had been trying to leave.
Fuck landlords, seriously. If there's a good one out there I've never met them.
>>27302
My mom's a landlord.
You have to realize, the majority of tenants are also shit, so most landlords are used to dealing with them.
>>27302
It's bad in Canada as well. People who work trades like flooring are needing roommates to get by now.
The apartment i rented in 2006 for $370 a month is now just over $900. Min wage might have went up some since then, but if you were making $13 an hour in 2006 you are lucky to be making $15 now.
>>27303
If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into an asshole everywhere you go all day long, you are the asshole.
>>27218
"If you are white in America you have no idea what poverty is"
t. Bernie Sandbag
Real Americans you know, the Native ones, they believed you can never own the land, of course look what we did to them.
>>27352
Chippewa here.
You're full of shit.
>>27302
Hotel owner here, thanks to tenant laws, niggers and scared as fuck police officers. I have to do evictions over people staying in my damn rooms if they stay over 30 days. I dont even know how someone can claim a hotel room with no basic amenities comes anywhere close to the definition of a home and requires eviction.
Fucking eviction laws.
>>27354
Other tribes here
Quit being a warmongering piece of trash and come smoke some weed and a maybe down a little peyote on the side
the lack of price fluctuation in real estate is the primary negative symptom of wealth concentration. when you see constant new development, both residential and commercial, but there are simultaneously still massive vacancies/availability across all the existing developments, this is not a free market at work. competition has failed, we've got monopolies with no motivation to drop their rates/prices. they'd rather go try and build a new development and sucker in some people for the insane rate than 'devalue' any of their older developments.
>>27420
This is a free market at work.
>>27427
>America
>free market
Lay off the meme for a bit and actually look at the existing regulations for once.
>>27218
Wanna know what you're supposed to do to keep rent low? Roommates. I know, what a weird concept, splitting the rent.
Obviously the answer is more free trade and foreign investments so that rich Chinese that made bank off of us can come in and drive up housing prices so that Americans can't find good homes around industrious areas.
Yeah let's do that.
>>27428
I love feudalism
>>27315
Most tenants are shit. It's not the man keeping you down kid.
>>27420
They're the same type of people pushing for more immigration. They're playing the long game.
>>27218
Bitch should have got a fucking job and had roommates instead of leaching on to our tax money until the very last second possable
>>27710
but the trouble is there's just no one who can afford this shit. there isn't going to be some influx of saudis or israelis or chinese or whatever to buy/rent all this overvalued real estate. it's just going to crash again, as it always has. basically we (they) are just incapable of learning from history.
the fact that their getting greedier and greedier every time and always pushing the crashes closer and closer together ('market contractions', how fitting), is perhaps actually a silver lining here. to continue the analogy, the question is what this is going to birth, once we get to some critical point.
probably informed firstly by what that critical point will actually be - actual mass homelessness? we've already moved to 'renter society' with shocking speed. alternatively one of the crashes could end up just sticking, as a true market correction. but it seems like the general financial institutions are still too closely tied up in real estate for that to be anything but generally catastrophic ('too big to fail', actually failing - ie. HAPPENING).
