Posted on 01/28/2007 11:48:56 AM PST by BronzePencil
My grandparents bought a house in Westchester County, NY, for $40,000 in 1964 or so. Unfortunately, they sold it in the 1970s, but today it's worth well over $10 million.
So true
Please link your own picture, not mine.
True. There are few starter homes being built. Most cities will no longer grant permits for domiciles of less that $100K value or under 3,000 square feet. This prices almost all new housing out of the market for those who live paycheck to paycheck and have no savings or investment income to use as capital — after all, it takes capital to buy even the least expensive house.
Members of the working class (i.e., those without capital who have no means of support other than by selling their labor for wages) today have few options when it comes to domicile. Most rent. Unfortunately, apartments fit to raise a family in are extremely expensive and are likely too expensive for working class renters. (And a good many of them don't allow kids or pets as well.) A lucky few renters find decent houses for rent, but these tend to be located in older neighborhoods where most of the properties are long since paid for. Over time these cheap rental houses will disappear as the owners die off and their kids sell to developers, who will then bulldoze the houses and build another ugly snout house monstrosity on the property. (Two examples: Oak Lawn and Lakewood Heights in Dallas — each once full of funky, quaint, cheap-rent houses populated by the young and striving, now almost completely bulldozed flat and replaced with nauseatingly ugly and extremely expensive Celotex-sheathed townhouses and condos.)
Therefore, the working class today mostly lives in slum apartments or trailer parks. Some inhabit urban trailer parks, where they at least have access to public transportation, public libraries, and the other civilizing benefits of urban life. However, like starter homes, these urban trailer parks are considered blight, and are being zoned out of existence by the local Babbitry in each city.
This leaves only the cheap land on the edge of town for trailer parks — and even these are going, as sprawl converts one after another into "exclusive country living" developments.
Developers and gentrifiers are runing our cities not ouf malice but out of a natural desire to meet the demand of the market. But why is there a market for ugly new houses and urban sprawl? There are three reasons. The first, which applies primarily to those with children, is the desire for "good schools", i.e. schools free of Negroes. Many white people fear Negroes and do not wish to encounter them in everyday life. Most people who move to the sort of bland, paved-over nighmate suburbs and exurbs that are ruining Texas and other states do so out of the desire to keep little MaKenzie and Jayden in a lily-white environment from K to 12. (This is not necessarily a criticism, by the way, but it is a fact.)
The second is presitige. The noveau riche want to show the world that they have a high personal income, and do so by moving to the newest, most exclusive, and most expensive developments on the edge of town (if they have kids), or to "hip, young" neighborhoods where children are scarce and coffee shops are ubiquitous (if they are single and/or gay). These "urban pioneers" draw developers who flock to older neighborhoods, tear down the beautiful old homes, throw up block after block of pricey, ugly townhomes and apartments, and destroy whatever environment and culture the neighborhood once had. (Then a few years later, the single hipsters will have kids and/or grow old, abandon the urban lifestyle for Edge City, and leave their former neighborhood to become a haven for drug dealers.)
The third reason is politics. The slime that bubbles to the top in a given city would rather die than have their town become known as a place with "affordable housing"? Why? Because affordable housing attracts Negroes, Mexicans, and White Trash, and drives away big-box strip centers, NFL stadiums, and the other sources of kickback money so vital to the bigwigs in every town. So, by the use of zoning laws, eminent domain land-grabs, and other forms of governmental piracy, they make it impossible for builders to construct affordable housing inside some predefined limit. Once a cordon sanitaire has been established, the remaining working class neighborhoods can be destroyed piecemeal, either by deliberate slumification (reducing their police, sanitation, and infrastructure to low levels) or by simply confiscating their land and houses, bulldozing them, and putting up the new Cowboys stadium where they once stood. Thus the Negroes, Mexicans, and White Trash are offloaded onto some other city, and "all is well".
So where are the working class supposed to live? Answer: in neighborhoods. More and more urban neighborhoods have discovered that the key to beating both the gentrifiers and slumlords at their own game is the historic preservation district. Our neighborhood association is in the process of petitionng our city to declare our neighborhhod a historic preservation district. This will prevent developers from buying out the homeowners in our neighborhood and bulldozing our great old houses to build the repulsive piles of feces that pass for houses today. The classic 1950s houses in our neighborhood are still sound and strong, and are small and cheap enough (most <1500 square feet and <$100K) to be within the price range of solid working class families, yet require enough hard work and investment to maintain that the truly trashy people have no desire to buy in.
By establishing good, solid neighborhoods in central urban areas, and protecting them so that honest people can aford to live in them, we can keep our cities liveable and strong.
And yet our schoolchildren have to pay to ride the school bus, to play school sports, to participate in school plays, to play in the school band, to take part in any extracurricular activities.
Pay to ride the bus? I've never heard of that, but if it's true, it's probably because of the same thing happening there that happened here: some woman sued the county school system saying her children were ENTITLED to a FREE education and she didn't want to pay the fees that books and labs, etc., entailed.
So guess what: now there are NO fees and crudy schools.
This was the same woman who demanded free breakfast and lunch for ALL her kids; but one day she came to school to get the girls and signed them out early.
In the place where you wrote the reason for children leaving school early, she proudly wrote, "Glamour Shots."
Ahem. Two of us live in a 4600 square foot house; don't like it, too bad.
Jealous apartment renter?
You were a real Plutocrat in 61. I enjoyed looking at the pay charts you linked to. A Fleet Admiral made less than $1000 per month in 49.
Here in Southern Oregon the hillsides are filling up with monstrosities that look completely out of place, more like the Hollywood Hills than Southern Oregon.
One such house has four stories and takes up almost the entire ridge. You drive up the road towards it and the retaining wall goes up 40 feet off the ground.
Another house was just built in a little farm community. 10 million dollars to build, two indoor swimming pools, an indoor basketball court, it looks like they tried to reproduce Blenheim House.
Oh, and the number of people living there? TWO people!
And none of these house have any land, they all are built within ten feet or so of the lot line.
Yuck.
Ed
"Ahem. Two of us live in a 4600 square foot house; don't like it, too bad."
And a neighbor of John Edwards too boot.
Edward's and his wife during the summer?
Oops Edward's = Edwards.
I bet she'd find that 70-80% of those castle-on-the-hill denizens are liberals who vote democrat.
Heck, my house would fit in his garages!
Trying to stir up class envy. A typical communist tactic.
I'll bet yours is far more tasteful.
It's relative to the current market.
$555K gets you 1096 sf, 3 bdr, l ba on a 90x60 lot built in 1952 (original price $12K) in an illegal alien overrun neighborhood in Orange County, Calif.
In southern Nevada, the same amount gets you 3200 sf, 4 bdr, 3 bath, sunroom, built in 1982 on 105x110 lot on a golf course.
yitbos
Capitalism and Communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: "No man should have so much." The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: "All men should have as much." Adams Phelps - Author
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