Grandma is on her own

Grandma is not the problem. It’s the ~800 billionaires in the US controlling sizable portions of single-family residences through private equity, artificially controlling market prices for maximum profit per sale. Blackstone alone owns 300,000 residences.

Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide. That’s 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person.

https://ips-dc.org/report-billionaire-blowback-on-housing/

I've said this before (and caught flak for it) but I think the solution to this is to apply a heavy additional tax to vacant homes (as defined as any home that isn't occupied by a permanent resident for more than 6 months a year), and increase the tax exponentially for each residence beyond the first owned by the same company or individual.
At some point, you make it so expensive to keep unoccupied properties that they're better off letting people live there for free than continuing to let them go unoccupied. Use all of the proceeds from this tax to assist homeless people or build new dense housing developments.
"But Kobold, what about soandso with their summer home?" If you can afford a second home, you can afford to pay a bit more tax on it to benefit the public good.
"But Kobold, a lot of those homes that are vacant are run-down, or are in places nobody actually wants to live!" Doesn't matter. If they're vacant, tax them. Use the money to build dense housing in the places where people do want to live. If the place is too run-down to be occupied, the owner can tear it down and do something else with it.
- One issue with the holiday home thing, they tend to be in quite remote places where there are very few job opportunities, because that's where people go on holiday.
- Neither Republicans nor Democrats would do something like this. It would be siding with the people over the stockmarket/Billionaires.
- Been shouting this for fucking ages.
- my solution is to destroy all houses, then NO ONE gets a home!!
- I say the local government gets eminent domain on any properties that aren't primary residences staying vacant more than a year and/or vacant >75% of the time over 5 years. Make it the owners responsibility to keep someone living under the roof. There will be enough loopholes that it won't be their second home, by maybe by the third and any corporately owned ones they'll start to sweat.
So you're saying granny would be fine with a 100% return on her investment at $36 for an offer? No? Shocked I say, shocked.
Granny is part of the problem. Not the biggest part of the pie, but still guilty.
- Inflation is a thing that exists. Saying that someone is bad simply because they want to update the value of their property is dumb. Also, let's say granny wants to downisze. Should she sell her home for a value way below market and then be unable to buy a smaller home for herself?
- Yeah this is honestly just an incredibly short-sighted and stupid take on the issues. Granny is in the same bucket with the young man in that they are both getting played by billionaires. Being mad at her is an incredible waste of energy compared to campaigning for fair taxes on corporation and billionaires. Anyone with less than 10 million net worth isn't really your enemy. Stay focused on winning the class Warfare and not dividing regular people.
- If you can provide her with 1960s health care and living costs, she might be willing to sell you her house for 1960s real estate prices.
  Would you be replacing her hip for an authentic 1973 mint edition Jefferson Nickel?
Grandma is not the problem.
You can't go blaming the institutions for the high cost of living when it is very clearly this one anonymous old person who isn't giving this other anonymous young person a sweetheart deal out of misplaced nostalgia.
Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide.
Okay, but a bunch of them are in the Rust Belt, where de-industrialization eviscerated the economy and caused a mass exodus to the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West in pursuit of lower wage service sector and sales employment.
I suppose you're going to claim that the wholesale restructuring of the manufacturing economy was the fault of a handful of 90s-era Wall Street bankers and Corporate Executives, rather than millions of Boomer-era suburbanites with pocket change in their retirement accounts 40 years ago?
Likely. Fucking. Story. This is just bigotry against the 1% is what it is.
- Almost bit the bait lol
- 🏆
By remaining invisible, the billionaires avoid having the finger pointed at them. We only point at each other.
I’ve never subscribed to this generational hatred, as true as it is that the boomers voted for this shit, on account of it’s clearly a deliberate psyop “divide and conquer” campaign. It’s as obvious as the crack epidemic or redlining.
- It's hard when you work with a guy like I do. He's 65 and hates absolutely everybody, including his wife, but he's a coward so he's very polite. He requires so much coddling that he spends all day sucking up to everyone for whatever praise he can get then immediately turns around and complains about them. He'll complain about everyone else to the point where they get their breaks and other privileges taken away. Those privileges are also taken from him, giving him more to complain about.
  It gets worse, but I'm about to go to bed and don't want to think about that.
  That piece of fucking shit. Sorry about the rant. But guys like that ruin everything for everybody.
- Gen X was a higher red percentage this time around, oddly.
- Nah, I'm happy to bag on anyone that benefits from a system and then pulls the ladder up behind them.
Guess what that generation bought into and voted for for decades.
- Is one really real responsible or one's choices of they were not aware of their consequences? (I personally do think so)
  But what if they had wrong information?
  And what if they were purposefully misinformed by a third party for that third party's gain?

Almost helped an old lady across the street, but then she said "I need about tree fitty" and that's when I realized that this old lady was 10 stories tall and a crustacean from the Paleozoic Era.

I gave him a dollar
- damnit woman thats why he keeps comin back, you keep givin him treefitty!
- She gave him a dollar

If you were any smarter you wpuld inherit the house from your grandma and flip it yourself for big gains

Surprise surprise, you only inherit a bunch of debt because that generation lived by "you can't take it with you".
- As someone who’s dealing with the estate process right now, I don’t think anyone inherits debt. It’s paid out of the estate and nobody else is responsible for those debts.

Ngl, $950K for a house sounds like a steal. Can’t buy a tear-down starter home around here for that cheap…

The fuck is going on where you live?
My family and I bought a 250m² house for less than 50k. (2yrs ago)
- Meanwhile, in the suburbs of DC/Baltimore you have 96m² for $414k: Local Listing
- Sounds like the SF Bay Area, SoCal, NY, GTA, VAN, or London.
- I'm currently living in a slightly smaller house that's valued at 250k. The roof leaks and the porch is falling apart, but the town has doubled in size since COVID, and so has the cost of housing.

You shouldn't help old ladies cross the street anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JESczegwk0g

Did you do the right thing and put her down?

full throttle

TKO

Yeah let's blame grondma it's absolutely her fault we had inflation and rising house prices in the last 50 years. She did it all by herself!

This inter-generational strife nonsense is the greatest deflection the oligarchs have come up with to make people forget who their real enemies are.
- Exactly if we need to blame anyone, its fucking Wall Street and investment firms. Those are the people jacking up prices and reducing quality, they are also responsible for the entire outsourcing to China etc.
- Political polarization was the greatest deflection.
- Some might suggest that most of the oligarchs are the boomers in these memes.