https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5
"Home ownership is the American dream: not only do you get a place to live,
free from the high-handed dictates of a landlord, but you also get an asset
that appreciates, building intergenerational wealth while you sleep —
literally.
Of course, you can’t have it both ways. If your house is an asset you use to
cover falling wages, rising health care costs, spiraling college tuition and
paper-thin support for eldercare, then it can’t be a place you live. It’s gonna
be an asset you sell — or at the very least, borrow so heavily against that you
are in constant risk of losing it.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: when America
turned its back on organized labor as an engine for creating prosperity and
embraced property speculation, it set itself on the road to serfdom — a world
where the roof over your head is also your piggy bank, destined to be smashed
open to cover the rising costs that an organized labor movement would have
fought:
https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5
Today, we’re hit the end of the road for the post-war (unevenly, racially
segregated) shared prosperity that made it seem, briefly, that everyone could
get rich by owning a house, living in it, then selling it to everybody else.
Now that the game is ending, the winners are cashing in their chips:
https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9
The big con of home ownership is proceeding smartly on schedulee. First, you
let the mark win a little, so they go all in on the scam. Then you take it all
back. Obama’s tolerance of bank sleze after the Great Financial Crisis kicked
off the modern era of corporations and grifters stealing Americans’ out from
under them, forging deeds in robosigning mills:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-breaks-down-93-bln-robo-signing-settlement-2013-02-28
The thefts never stopped."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
