The average rent increase was my entire yearly take-home.
I keep reading articles like this. Between rent being too expensive, home prices going through the roof, food prices outpacing wage growth, car and home insurance going up just because it can, utilities getting more expensive, my question is when does it just become too much. The whole thing just screams corporate greed and I’m getting sick of it. I make 60% more than I did 20 years ago and I feel like I’m barely scraping by.
Me saying fuck it and moving to Asia was one of the best decisions of my life. But the fact people aren’t willing to do it (but muh family! But muh language!) shows it’s not nearly bad enough
Where in Asia?
Korea, but if I could do it again I would probably consider China (because so many people speak Mandarin, it’s an amazing skill to have) and Vietnam (because it’s even cheaper, and software jobs are about as good) as well
It is just waiting for a tipping point to kick the whole powder keg off, basically. Like a dormant volcano as the pressure builds below the surface. At that point, people will seem irrational and random, just because there are so many vectors of fail taking place in parallel.
Random example that comes to mind, was talking to a friend and they were mentioning their employer is going to start a weekend rotation for teams. One of the shifts has 3 people, so once every three weeks, one employee will be working 7 days a week. They previously had weekend staff to cover the weekend shift. The company’s solution wasn’t to hire more, redistribute, or one of the many other ways to solve the problem. Just, Lumberg from Office Space instead.
Food prices have not outpaced salaries for more than a year now
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm
Food up 2.2%
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm
Private wages up 4.3%
I’m trying so goddamn hard not to lose all hope
Stay with us comrade. We need you for the revolution.
What revolution lmao? As soon as things get a little bit spicy all the equality hobbiest say it’s going too far
We need Rent Control at a federal level.
No what we need is more housing. It’s a supply issue. We’re short something like 2 million homes. The problem isn’t that we need to the government to come in and control the prices, we need the government to come in and make it so people can’t block higher density residential zones.
Do you know how many homes sit empty? There’s a lot.
Heaven forbid we build Chinese style apartment buildings, though
I just want mixed zone complexes like in Europe. Shops on bottom, apartments on top. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
Bro its bad enough they got these shitty wood “luxury” apartment buildings that have like half inch thick walls, no one wants that shit on a massive scale. I’m all for more housing but fuck shared living spaces.
We need both, Rent Control and more housing. Land-lording has also been invaded by capitalists looking to squeeze humans for every cent and govt needs to stem that tide too. Rent has been soaring in the biggest capitalist zones, US and EU/CA.
Cap rent rises in England and Wales, Labour-commissioned report says
public housing needs to double and the requirements to get on it need to be slashed.
public housing is the thing people hate and fear the most.
Slashed? No - removed. Then landlords can’t make us pay their give mortgages while they retire on our labor.
The rent for the fanciest apartment I’ve ever lived in (and ever will) was a little under 10k a year. New building, top floor, massive bathroom with sauna, a big balcony, a storage unit and a covered parking slot for my car all included. Oh and a lake view.
How long ago?
About 7 years ago. I bought a house since and my mortage is way less than that now.
Not the US, Canada, AU or Western Europe I guess?
Nah. A mid-size city in Finland
I want to throw up. Rent at the shittiest, drug user filled, mushroom growing out of your shower ceiling, tiny bathroom, kitchen almost non existent, 1 bedroom, view of the apartment across the “courtyard” in my city is more than 10k a year (and that was several years ago). USA
I’m paying $5500 a year for a normal (about 80 m2) one bedroom appartment 10 minutes walk away from the center of a mid-sized Portuguese city about 150km from the capital Lisbon (granted, commuting to Lisbon would be about 1h 40m each way, but that’s something I don’t have to do).
I’ve chosen to not even own a car because I can actually make that choice here and 15m walking commute to the Coworking space from were I work is actually important for my health (it’s not really poluted around here, certainly less than Lisbon and way less than London)
It would be about 3x as much in the outskirts of Lisbon with a commute to Lisbon city center of about 30 - 45 minutes.
And Portugal actually has a house price bubble (the same place would’ve been about $3200 a decade ago), though it’s especially bad around the two major cities and the touristic area on the southern coast.
There’s apparently quite a number of Americans moving over here and working remotelly thanks to the country having a Digital Worker Visa system.
I’ve actually lived in Amsterdam, London and Berlin and whilst the first two are very expensive (London is just silly), Berlin was actually not (about $10k for an unfurnished one bedroom appartment about 5 years ago) and it’s quite a nice place to live, though for those like me who are self-employed, to that adds the mandatory health insurance in Germany which about $400 per month. Oh, and you can also chose not to own a car over there because it’s cycling friendly, has great public transportation and there are also some pretty good car rental schemes.
Uffda. My better half and I are living in apartments that are priced for college students and it’s still over $10k a year. None of that fancy shit. We have shared laundry machines but that’s about it.
10k a year in my city won’t even get you a third of a basic, bare-bones, 2-bedroom apartment.
In fucking Narnia I presume
Mid-size city in Finland. I moved away after my relationship ended because 740€/month was too expensive for a single person to pay. The single room apartment in the middle of the city I had before that was around 450€/month.
No worries, we all got bigass raises, right?
I did.
My income has gone up 50% since the pandemic. So did most of my friends who were working in any technical fields.
The economy is skewed. I keep telling my friends to learn to code or learn basic IT skills… and they just actively refuse and continue doing manual labor jobs and complaining about how they can’t make more money. And such is there lot.
A few peopel I know moved into healthcare, and are doing financially much better, but their jobs are very high stress due to the shortages.
learn to code
Didn’t we already try this one?
That is a misnomer solution telling everyone to learn how to do the same thing like to learn to code as it then creates its own market issue of too much supply for need.
Additionally it’s not diverse. Diverse jobs are still needed. They need to just pay more in those jobs. But all this is besides the point anyways.
There is no house shortage. There is plenty to house people and the issue is with capitalism being unchecked for too long over its control on living arrangements. This is something capitalism shouldn’t have a say in. Society has become beyond its required need for helping people survive as a whole and it’s become unsustainable. It was never supposed to be about sustaining a rich person’s yacht and 5th house that has nobody living in it anyways. This is not a society that is thriving.
Exactly, banning or severely limiting short-term rental housing ie VRBO and foreign land/property purchases Id wager would make a huge impact on righting the boat.
Not really, then local landlords just make more profit because the demand is the same
Without the supply of homes going into shortterm rentals like VRBO it would increase supply for people who actually live in that city, travelers can use hotels. Not a full stop fix, but it would increase supply/lower rent.
That would increase hotel prices, making hotel owners purchase more land and build hotels until the equilibrium price is reached
It’s a short term fix that eventually loses to market forces
Even if it ends in more hotels, hotels fit more people and supply more jobs than the equivalent space in houses. For temporary lodging houses don’t make sense.
It sounds like you’re describing the same thing that happened when we globalized manufacturing. Economists said everyone would retrain and go to other fields, but it just doesn’t seem to happen IRL.
people hate change. that’s why.
Strange argument. Yes people can swap but that might make them unhappy and we also need people to do other work than it and healthcare and they should still be able to afford a house
even then you’re fucked. I’ve been on “the bench” at my contracting company since christmas, which led to my wages getting halved. every fucking day I read about layoffs in software development flooding the market with better programmers than me.
The more people get into it the less valuable it becomes is the thing. But others pointed out there’s a ton of other reasons it’s problematic, like the need for those other jobs to exist to actually, like, have a functioning society.
Bro if everyone moves to the jobs that pay enough to live decently, very important jobs will not get done. Our society needs manual laborers to keep everything from falling apart.
I make 120k a year installing carpets lol. I absolutely bust my ass but I make more than many people I know who went to college. My dad also installed carpets for 48 years before retiring at 71. I plan to retire sooner though lol but will work for many years to come and pump.up that IRA
How the fuck did his knees last that long. Are they original equipment?
We don’t use kickers much any more we use power stretchers so the wear on the knees is not that bad. Our backs hands and shoulders hurt more than our knees.
Holy wow, where are you located if you don’t mind me asking? My dad lays carpet and makes like 35k a year.
Does your dad work for himself or someone else? If he works for himself I don’t know how he’s only making 35k lol. I live in Western New York though (no where near NYC)
Also, the jobs that pay decently will start to not pay decently. And now we’re back at square one
Actually worse than square one, because in this scenario, nobody’s picking up the trash.
Your solution does not apply to the whole society, it’s just a patch to make your life easier but globally it doesn’t fix anything. This is part of the american mindset: “fuck everyone else while I’m doing great”… don’t get me wrong, I understand your point of view but this is not how we move forward.
Article behind a paywall
Okay… now they need $20,100 dollars more per year.
Cut the journalists some slack; ChatGPT 4.0 subscriptions can get expensive.
Median individual income is $47,684 in 2019
https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2019/cpsaat39.htm
Median individual income is $58,084 in 2023 a little hard to find
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm
Median individual income extrapolated from first quarter data of 2024 is $59,228
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
Rent units median in January 2024 is>
Overall $1,712
Studio $1,434
1-bed $1,591
2-bed $1,892
https://www.realtor.com/research/january-2024-rent/
2019 Total:$1,097
No bedroom:$934
1 bedroom: $953
2 bedrooms: $1,086
3 bedrooms: $1,217
4 bedrooms: $1,519
5 or more bedrooms $1,586
https://data.census.gov/table?q=B25031: Median Gross Rent by Bedrooms&y=2019
Removed by mod
Seriously?
This seems dubious, considering average rent in the US is $18k
I mean… I’m up in Canada but in one of the highest cost of living cities in the country which isn’t as bad as San Francisco or NYC but it’s bad…
20k is 1666 a month extra.
The only thing thats gone up $1666 a month more would be a larger house.
Fancy 1 bedrooms are up to 2000-2500 and they were never $334 to 734 even 15 years ago.
Something is wrong with that headline or their math
It could be including how much food has gone up as well
it’s relative to where you live, yes.
but generally rents and housing costs have doubled the past 5 years. and doubled the ten years ebfore that, so are about triple where they were in 2009. A 2 bed in my city was 1200-1500, now it’s 3000-4000 and often 3-4 people are living there to make rent. a lot of two beds were converted to 3-4 beds (remove living and dining room).
if the rent is, for instance, 40% of income then the additional income is also to offset the 60% nonrental income.
eg if you pay 400 in rent and now its 700 your overall income needs to go from 1000 to 1750 to maintain the same level of affordability.
Rent as a percentage of income. General rule (and what I’m assuming the article is using without getting around the paywall) is 1/3 of your income should be rent. So if the avg rent in 2019 was $1666 and it’s now $2000 you should be making $80k/year instead of $60K.
Just a small distinction. Not more than 1/3 of your income should be rent. Also this figure is based on the net income, not pre-tax
Ah, assuming that’s what’s behind the paywall that makes much more sense.
I’m old enough to have learned that housing should be 1/4 of your take home pay
That’s the general rule of thumb that I learned as well… try to stay within 1/4th of salary for mortgage/rent.
I guess I’m a shit landlord, because I’m still charging the same as 5 years ago.
Are you my landlord?
a stable tenant is worth more than a few rent increases.
…Got any openings? 😭
This is a risky site to admit you’re a landlord on xD
Record profits though.
