At a guess, in our county, 20%+ of the housing is idle, owned by out-of-state companies, some of whom pay property taxes and some dont. The county isn't auctioning off because of tax default anymore, no one was buying these places at $100. Many of these places are complete teardowns now; some actually no longer exist, having burned or apparently been scrapped. The tax assessments on those have not been adjusted, for the few i checked.
I think the housing market is so fucked no one really grasps the scale of the problem.
I don't think I agree with this assessment. I live in a very rural area two hours northwest of Austin, literally in the middle of nowhere. I've studied the local economy and understand how things work here.
I think the characteristics you've identified in the rural housing supply are not unusual and also not as serious in a practical sense as you seem to be indicating. For example, in San Saba, Texas, 20-30% of the households are under the federal poverty threshold. The median household income in the town of San Saba is about $32K/yr. People just don't have any excess cash so the maintenance on dwellings is neglected. That means folks become extremely thrifty and resourceful patching what needs to be patched, very cheaply, if not for free. Some dwellings simply aren't maintained and one day won't be there anymore.
Families live on small budgets, don't require much and generally just "get by". The municipal and county governments have very small budgets but extremely resourceful staff who accomplish a lot with very little. Everyone comes together as a community when needed (see: February 2021 freeze event) and it all works very efficiently, actually.
To someone who is not from here and who doesn't understand that dynamic, they might see those properties as you described and believe a tragedy was unfolding. But that doesn't reflect reality on the ground vis-a-vis my neighbors.
Our local Craigslists always have "Property inspector" jobs listed. You go take some cell phone shots of buildings to prove they exist. The people I have spoken to who have done those say they didn't bother going to the places as often as not and took pics of some neighbors house. Even when people actually do that job and document the true state of these properties I can't help but suspect the information is buried or lost because thats not the narrative management would want.
The actual family owned housing stock got better the last two years, our population doubled for the last 3/4ths of 2020, and all those relatives did a lot of renovation and rebuilding.
I understand what you're saying. The ripple effect created by that dynamic would unjustifiably inflate local property values, reducing affordability for locals, creating synthetic demand by reducing supply as the land could otherwise be auctioned.
and (ahem) East TN is more "western Arlington VA" IMO. I said rural. I'd have to walk a half mile to get a decent rifle shot at a neighbor. It's getting too crowded here.
But there are so many abandoned places out here. People have just walked away and never looked back. We had one across the road that over the last 10 years the woods has reclaimed and unless you knew that it was there, you would drive right past it.
In your opinion, what do you think the most effective way to help these families out might be?
This is a question that I'm well-positioned to answer. I moved to this rural area in 2018 after living in Austin for 24 years. I immediately looked for ways to volunteer and help.
I developed relationships with elected and community leaders, started my own "technology incubator" to teach technology skills and classes. I explored establishing a regional technology council with my county judge and Texas state leadership. The community liked that I was volunteering but the actual uptake, expending effort to learn and implement what I was teaching, wasn't there. They didn't know what to do with it. The gap between their world and the world we know at HN was too wide to be bridged effectively.
My experience is applicable to every problem here where someone thinks they may be able to help in some way. Whether it's teaching job skills, helping those who are addicted to meth or whatever, I believe people can't be helped if they don't want to expend the effort to get from A to B themselves.
There are many reasons for this, why offering to help in an economically-depressed or disadvantaged community doesn't yield results. Locals are apathetic, comfortable living in the middle of nowhere with very low expectations, or else they have poor self-esteem and don't believe they can do better.
I don't "push" anymore. I just try to be empathetic and understand their situations. This past Thanksgiving I asked the community to tell me if anyone was unable to get a turkey for Thanksgiving and would like one. Two families responded; I was glad to help. It's little things like that which I can do to help their situation which I feel is the best approach now.
Edited to add: There is an organization here called "Mission San Saba" where a group of ~30 volunteers will pick one house per year to renovate, typically for an older or economically-disadvantaged family. That has been very successful here.
San Saba ISD is probably the best funded entity in the whole county. Every student has a laptop and home internet. The graduation rate is 100%. It's a small school; the senior class is only 50 students.
They built the new school in the middle of town, thus highlighting its position of import within the community.
Washington state does something similar, though it’s more of a subsidy. Education is still mainly funded locally, but the state kicks in with its own funding for poorer districts, so Seattle property taxes subsidize schools across the state in Spokane.
Arizona legalized medical marijuana quite early, followed by recreational marijuana. Their medicaid program AHCCCS [1] is extremely comprehensive and even pays for Uber/Lyft to the doctor's office and back. Patients are able to see a great selection of GPs and specialists, and the copay is always $0. The accompanying drug plan is comprehensive, also with a copay of $0. AHCCCS will approve expensive modern drugs like Rozeram (supercharged melatonin analog for sleep) if the sufficient documentation of reasonable need is provided.
Cactuses are protected from destruction by law, and must be transplanted when doing clearing for construction. You may find the idea of being able to own a firearm without a license to be unpalatable but the state largely remains very safe crime-wise (perhaps due to that?)
I miss living in Arizona. It's a beautiful state with very caring folk. I saw almost no homeless folks in Phoenix. Folks there seem to really care about their fellow citizens. Southern hospitality is for sure a thing, take it from a daft boy from Brooklyn!
My mom lived in Tucson and decided on a visit that I might want to go shooting with her and her boyfriend at the time. Suffice it to say, it didn't go well. BTW, Arizona does very poorly in crime rate (10th highest for violent crime, 3rd highest for property crime), especially Phoenix and Tucson (but is very urban, so there is that also). I'm not sure why you consider it safe crime wise when the numbers say otherwise. They also do very poorly in education (rank 48th). I was really surprised they could beat New Mexico and Louisiana (https://www.wmicentral.com/news/latest_news/arizona-ranks-48...).
It is beautiful. I would love to live in Tucson someday, but with the bad schools, it would have to be after my kid was done with school and I retired.
> I miss living in Arizona. It's a beautiful state with very caring folk. I saw almost no homeless folks in Phoenix. Folks there seem to really care about their fellow citizens. Southern hospitality is for sure a thing, take it from a daft boy from Brooklyn!
When I was a kid, I took a greyhound bus from Vicksburg MS to Seattle WA via the southwest approach (I later did the northwest route, which wasn't as interesting). People would get on the bus from various prisons in Texas (the bus stopped a lot at prisons), New Mexico and Arizona...and were all going to LA. Why bother being homeless in Phoenix (when summers can kill) if LA isn't that far away? Heck, that applies to Texas as well, not just Arizona.
You know I wonder if anyone has done a study on how much of the homeless in LA are from out of state. Is it even possible? There is like 65k+ homeless just in LA country. I don't know how they are going to fix this.
What about issues like Joe Arpaio and his policies affecting the community. I can't speak for your experience but I wonder are you really seeing the whole picture?
How do you feel Arizona will cope with the coming climate change? At the rate its going Arizona may become unsafe to live in in 10-15 years.
I don't know what the future holds but thinking Arizona will become unsafe in 10-15 due to climate change is a little foolish.
> This distinction can be made because a serious review of the literature shows that there was no such “scientific verity”. There are anecdotes that can be plucked from the record, primarily from the popular media. But a rigorous review by Tom Peterson and William Connolley (with some minor help from myself) shows that, even as the planet was in a short term cooling trend in the 1970s, concerns about greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature. The paper documenting our results has been accepted for publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and Doyle Rice did a nice job summarizing the paper last week in USA Today.2
From http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2008/02/global-cooling-the-und... but there are lots of places where you can find the "we once worried about global cooling" myth debunked.
Have you look at any actual data? Have you seen the trends in the data that have been going in the wrong direction? At the end of the day, unless the direction changes, it does not matter if it happens in 10 or 15 years or may take longer. It will happen.
I have a book from the 70s that talks about the up coming ice age with data to back up his claim.
Have I seen trends going in the wrong direction? It depends on what trends and what start point you pick. Currently things are trending lower than a few years ago as carbon output is being reduced in many countries. I remember when the target was keeping it under 3% degrees than lower than 2% now it sits at 1 1/2%. Soon it will be 1% global temp increase. So things do seem to be trending in the right direction.
Note the capitalization.
It sounds like that funding decision predates the current crop of state leadership
If anything, today it is the folks in Austin (who are predominantly politically liberal) who decry their property taxes being used to fund rural school districts.
People who are actually from Texas know that we help each other out. That's how we roll.
I'm still surprised that Texas would distribute property taxes equally like that for education. Even if they were run by Democrats, they were never run by the liberal kind.
I've seen this personally, too. A house I rented until a couple of years ago was owned by a Chinese company, which also owned half of the other houses on the block. We all paid rent to the same LLC that forwarded the cash overseas, and did almost zero maintenance.
I think the housing market is so fucked no one really grasps the scale of the problem.
One thing I don't see discusses very often is the affect that large "master-planned communities" have on a city's housing prices. I've seen at least three cities where mega developers like Howard Hughes Corp own massive tracts of land, but instead of building houses, sit on that land waiting for the price of housing to go up. Sometimes the developers are very open about it. Sometimes not. But instead of allowing a free market to develop 5,000 new homes, they develop one lot here and one lot there.
Or worse — I've seen them build hundreds of homes and then sit on them, empty and vacant, waiting for prices to climb high enough to put the houses on the market. Again, a drip at a time, to keep the housing supply artificially small so they can boost their profits. Meanwhile, people have nowhere to live.
1. The property must be residential 2. If the property is commercial, a foreigner must incorporate in China 3. You may own only one property 4. You must possess a long-term visa 5. You cannot be a landlord, as a foreigner 6. You must pay a 1% deposit and an initial 30% of the purchase price to the seller in RMB, if you are obtaining a mortgage
I think there needs to be a campaign to educate the US population on how lopsided the system is. Only then will politicians start to get massive heat to enact at least equivalent restrictions. Right now its all the rich and foreigners picking away at the carcass that is America.
What's the issue with out of state companies owning rural properties nobody wants? If the market is heating up, maybe it's time to run tax auctions again.
In WA state, if there's no bidders, the county retains the land and will auction it again when someone expresses interest (or it some cases, can sell it to a neighboring land holder without auction, like for the 1930s era tax foreclosure I bought last year)
Jobs generate demand for homes. Homes cost a lot in areas where there's been more jobs added than homes. In the last decade, the bay area has added seven jobs per every unit of housing constructed.
The amount of social media content revolving around "how I became a milionaire/how I reached my first million" and the common factor is "I bought a house in 201*", then I'd say something is a bit off...
Either there's massive speculation, or 1 million isn't what it used to be, or worst: both.
The problem is that their blogging about it attracts the people that want to get rich quick and they are the ones likely to lose their shirts.
If this kind of algorithmic speculation took off, not only are we likely to see the algorithms themselves form feedback loops to push prices up far higher than otherwise, even if they don't sell directly to each other, I believe it will drastically increase the size and rate of the boom bust cycle.. and we're doing that to _peoples homes_.
The scope of human suffering possible here is huge, the societal damage massive.
This needs to be so very very illegal.