Investors Are Buying Mobile Home Parks. Residents Are Paying a Price
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But that's not the proper term?
>Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs that flourished in Medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries.
Unless you think removing affordable housing would bring back "the combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs that flourished in Medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries", the "proper term" isn't really "feudalism".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
Taking a quick skim at that, and the associated "English feudalism" infobox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:English_feudalism, makes me think that there's more to "Feudalism" than just "you pay rent to a landlord".
I'm sorry for being harsh, but you didn't contribute anything to the discussion, you were just being condescending. If you had been condescending, but brought something meaningful to the discussion, I wouldn't say a word to you. I promise.
I am not talking about more competition in the buyers side, I am talking about more competition in the building and selling side. If supply increases to match or outstrip the new demand, the prices of homes, mobile and otherwise, will fall.
Clearly, selling homes is profitable because home prices are so high. So why are new homes not being built? The answer is because zoning laws in our current vetocracy explicitly prevent the construction of new housing under a variety of pretexts. We have been under-building for 10 years now and it's time to pay the piper.
You can read a brief info graphic here: https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/pdf/newresconst.pdf
Note that "starts" of new buildings is close to permits, but completions are flat. There either isn't enough materials to finish these projects or there's a labor shortage to complete these projects.
edit: not agreeing with your supply and demand argument tho there's lots of reasons people can't build in certain areas (where people want to live), but house prices are going up across the board, there really is an effort by the owner class to buy everything up and flip it to rental.
With a much smaller population, we used to frequently see 2m+ monthly starts. We haven't been close in coming up on 20 years. Yet the US population is higher than it has ever been.
(image of graph)
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zYvA49j3pFA/XxGa4SdGiOI/AAAAAAAA1...
The ubiquity of the mortgage seems like it's more an enabler of corporatized property buying by turning homes into a financial vehicle.
You can blame zoning all you want, but really all zoning is is trying to ensure you don't end up with something massively disruptive to the surrounding area popping up without getting due attention paid to it. Furthermore, the big push for "high density housing" doesn't do squat to make ownable housing more accessible.
Face it. It's the incestuous relationship with the financial sector. Cut that, and you're at least not continuing to do the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result.
The real question I've been asking myself lately is "why do you need to take out a mortgage to buy a house if you (after x years of saving) can buy it cash". There is a big problem or lack of generational help. Like it should be trivial, just live with family/parents till you've saved up to buy your own, or we should be promoting and encouraging the transfer of housing to children from parents.
E.g. Get rid of inheritance tax and maybe even make it illegal for estates to sell property to pay off debts if there are children that it could be given to.
that would be bad for lenders - because it incentivizes holding the debt till you die, then get it cleared for free. No lender will lend to you if that's gonna happen.
Flint, Michigan is a "pretty poor" city in Michigan (personally, I don't know how poor it actually is, it might be a "normal" town). The city was trying to save on the cost of providing water. They decided to switch from (I think) buying water from Detroit to pumping from one of the Great Lakes. This decision is pretty benign. Except somewhere in there, the chemical are up of the water changed, so years of building up inside the pipes cleared up, exposing lead in the pipes, poisoning the residents... Except water treatment processes failed to detect amd clean the water, so it lasted for years. It made national headlines so much so that my church (in Texas) was raising money and sending it up there. Plenty of people got fired, people got sewed, politicians said grand things. Oh, right, and poor (black) people got screwed over.
TL;DR, "Flint, Michigan" is the short way of saying "the government could screw you over by poisoning your water"
2. Water and electricity are public utilities because they're a natural monopoly. It doesn't make sense for 3 different water/electricity companies to lay 3 sets of pipes/wires to serve one city, so we let one company do it. Needless to say, the same does not apply to shelter.
But very highly regulated.
Edit. I would like to provide more information but it is such a complicated and broad topic that I could do it justice but I recommend looking into it. Just the various tariff schedules are interesting to read.
An entrepreneur will develop new mobile home parks and offer them for less. God bless capitalism
An example that comes to mind are the "rent brokers" in my city - all they do is post rent ads to a local ebay-like website, answer the phones and write contracts (of questionable legal authority). Other than that, they are completely useless - they provide no useful information, and often lie just to get you to sign. And they take the first rent as payment.
I still have no idea why so many people choose to work with them.
A good one is worth every penny of that month of rent.
Having to advertise, and then deal with the current tenant+prospective tenant tours and scheduling is very much worth it just on it's own. Add in screening/background checks/credit checks and such and it's substantial. A good listing agent will also be up to speed on local laws and assist on that front as well letting you know of any recent changes.
For me, it saves a bunch of time, and doesn't disrupt my dayjob.
I still do most of my own maintenance and such, but the marketing and finding new tenants really is the worst part (other than a horrible tenant!) of the landlording experience. If I ever retire I'd likely do it myself to save the cash.
As usual in such middle-men "industries" with no barrier of entry it attracts a lot of grifters and least-effort individuals so it's kind of a pain to find someone reliable.
Every reference to that headline should be followed up with a follow up comment from that thread:
> The coding used by this survey is a joke. If 40% of an occupation says they work outdoors that's below 50% so it's bucketed into the work from home category on that criterion. I think if even 20% of a job is saying they work outdoors that's pretty strong evidence you're missing some information about what the other 80% are doing in their job that prevents it from being a work from home job. The net result of their setup is obviously a vast overestimate so take the 37% number with a grain of salt.
You know, more and more I get the feeling the Bible they gave me as a kid was different from the one that they gave everyone else.
That's great! And for people who read hacker news and can get a well paying job it's certainly an added benefit to an already great situation. Even for those in a not great situation working from home makes things easier. But the other 63% - a majority - are working in jobs that can't be remote. And if I had to guess, those 63% are the ones more likely to live in a mobile home or trailer park, which is what the linked article is about.
My assertion in my previous post and again now is for people who can't work remote and don't have a high paying job there's a limit to how far they can in practice move from their job.
Arguable all housing investment should go into new housing, not competing.
why can't it go into new housing via a chain of financial transactions, rather than directly? In other words, it doesn't matter what the "new" money is invested in - as long as new construction rate is keeping up.
So if it's not, then where's the problem? Why isn't that root cause being addressed, instead of trying to mandate how investors want to invest?
Also that would incentivise investors to build up as that improves their profit margin if it's rentals.
— Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004), pp. 67–68
A lot of this is self-inflicted (or, depending on your perspective, working as intended): https://www.npr.org/2021/12/18/1034784494/how-the-government...
and it just seems like there's a limited group of people buying things that can no longer be used as things because they're 'held money'. They won't be worth quite so much if there's nobody that can afford them. Then what will the investors spend their money on?