MSBGA!

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Hi,

As the LR denizen at Ground Zero, here are some thoughts on this thread:

• The Sunnyvale price is a joke. My realtor friends here are laughing at the stupidity of that sale. An obvious outlier, more valuable properties sell for less all over the place here.
• Definitely owners have been winning, and renters losing for decades. That is the primary source of inequity here, along with....
• Working couples vs. single income households. Single income is difficult/impossible here, unless one of them is a CEO. The norm is two professionals working full-time, easily earning over 200K. Such high-income brings us to....
• Taxes. While low-tax conservatives rant, math is not on your side, as long as the jobs picture is bright. We may or may not complain about tax rates (many do), but getting taxed 10% on 250K beats getting taxed 5% on 150K EVERY SINGLE DAY.
• When the jobs go, that is when the bubble will pop. Happened in 2001, a couple hundred thousand hard-working folks had no jobs, and packed up. Which leads to...
• The chief benefit of a high cost of living is a high work ethic as a matter of survival. One generally can't live here on the dole nearly as easily as one can in many other cities. That is the core paradox of many liberal enclaves. They are more capitalistic than many "conservative" areas with a low cost of living.
• The tax plan (if it passes) MAY bring some balance to the area, but probably at the cost of a recession in several economic sectors.

Then again, this is just a supply and demand issue. If you add 10x number of jobs and only add x number of housing units you're obviously going to have an issue with housing outpacing incomes.

Long as they don't all move to Cen Cal.

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I'll be what I am
A solitary man

California: 16% of the USA's Population, and 33% of the USA's Poor. But in a few years we'll have High Speed Rail from Stockton to Bakersfield!

This graph would be more meaningful on a sqft basis. Surprised to see Tokyo so far down, as it's a place I'd love to live in. But I also know that$400k would probably get you a 200 sqft place.

With a station right in my town!

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_________________________________
I'll be what I am
A solitary man

Long as they don't all move to Cen Cal. //

Ha!! Ya they are all going to move to Bakersfield, I hear the oil industry is poised for a comeback!! (-;


By the way, have you guys gotten into the solar farms up there yet, they are popping up like poppies in the antelope valley. Actually replacing the poppies...

Awesome thoughts, my friend. Keep that up. :-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I think mostly it's the lucrative job market.

Sounds like my own special version of hell. Working endlessly to pay for something I can build myself for 10 times less.

Huge solar farms all over. In 20 years All the crops will replaced with solar panels and a giant pipeline shipping our water to So Cal.

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_________________________________
I'll be what I am
A solitary man

No mention of housing policy in the various cities in the valley and especially in SF? Primary reason for high prices is lack of supply brought by atrocious housing policy up and down the valley and SF. NIMBY on steroids. I’ve got mine, fuck the rest of you.

With a strong job market, stock options and enormous real estate appreciation, it is an extremely gilded version of capitalism... hell.

That water resource thing in California is going to be what starts a war between it and the other states. There was some talk several years back by some states farther west of us here in Michigan about getting water, via a pipeline, from the Great Lakes. I don't know if state governors can activate their National Guard units to make war on another state, but if they can, that's what'll do it. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

You can build land in prime locations? That's amazing!

The house part is easy, it's the land cost that's insane. See thing is happening in my city. My property is assessed at $680k. The house is only worth $80k....

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Long Chile was a silly place.

You just brilliantly explicated the essential value of real estate (the land, because the so-called "permanently affixed buildings" can always be torn down and carted away). There's only so much land, after all.

California's compounded that reality, though, with a menu of land-use restrictions and environmental policies that can make real estate development fairly costly, which helps drive up the price (along with high wages and scarcity of available supply, of course). And then you get these insane bidding wars and above-asking-price offers by people with more money than common sense.

Those folks are truly the half-educated "elite." By that, I mean they're what's being called a "half-educated tech elite." And they've delivered us into chaos, as the linked article below explains:

"One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?” angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences."

How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into evil | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian

I can say that previous older generations (excepting, maybe, the Boomers -- who were about as self-indulgent as could be), might not have allowed themselves to be sucked into this real estate, as well as social, miasma. Partly, that would be due to the fact that even the middling of the middle classes in the day had a basic grounding in the humanities, especially in history and philosophy, which gave them a perspective on things that the tech-y "elite" today don't even come close to possessing.

These brainy, tech-filled elites today don't stop for a second to consider what their Silicon Valley wealth and "get it at all costs" mindset is doing out there in California and in many other parts of the country. They're crowding out people in their own state who are slowly but surely being pushed farther down the ladder, with nary a prospect of ever being able to purchase "affordable" housing in the $300,000 to $450,000 price range (those figures make me laugh, being a denizen of the metro Detroit area ;-).

Are we going to turn into the tech-fied version of "A Tale of Two Cities?" Because the half-educated tech elite either doesn't seem to care about that trend or it's just too poorly educated, at base, to realize that that's precisely what may happen because of them.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

If it was a bunch of people earning $100K-$200K buying up $200k - $400k ranches and bungalows, that would be one thing.

But not everyone there is making $500k - $1mm, to drop on a $2mm bungalow that would be < $200k in just about any other part of the country.

Please BK, you have called forth a nostalgia from a virtue that never truly existed and created a fantasy hellscape out of misplaced condemnation. (Good ole capitalist robber barons/slave traders/conquistadors/etc.) To what purpose? Do we endlessly rant about real estate, yet give a free pass to Wall Street? Do we simply live out zero-sum populist policies which diminish opportunity for all? People are the same ALL the time. The situations change, and they may require different policies. The true constant of the human condition is a need to scapegoat. In the end, solutions are almost never a part of the picture.

Regarding "The Tale of Two Cities" our present situation is far from dire (in fact the world is wealthier than ever before, ... perhaps ;), but it is primarily due to the extraordinary success of pro-capitalist ideology for the past 35 years, with continuous reliance on monetary policy to continually prop up growth and a refusal to acknowledge that this would lead to economic displacements. In prior centuries this led to instability and revolution. There are several possible peaceful paths forward, but we seem unable to articulate actual policies.

Aren't you the same dude who never misses an opportunity to slag those as being loser/financial sinkhole fields of study? Better be more careful next time, lest you slip up again and come off as some sort of closet Liberal Artiste...