681
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
681 points (96.5% liked)
News
21676 readers
3006 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
100% this. It's not that costs rose as much as it's that salaries didn't increase.
In the late 70s around 23% of US corporate revenues went to pay salaries. By 2012 that had fallen to 7% - in other words, just before neoliberalism really took off almost 1/4 of the money workers spent buying goods from US companies was almost directly back in workers' pockets, whilst by 2012 less that 1/14 of what workers spent buying goods from US companies ended back in workers' pockets.
All that excess money that doesn't get recycled back to workers anymore has got to be pooling somewhere.
Wow, now that's a hell of a statistic! Got a nice reference for it so I can read more?
I read it ages ago when I was still frequenting a certain finance discussion forum (whose name totally evades me now, and I did just try looking up such forums but failed to find it) back in the post 2008 Crash years, hence why the end date in that statistic is 2012.
This is the best I found on the subject. Note that the numbers are quite different from the statistic I quoted since they're not the same thing (it's about labour share of income in the whole Economy, rather than the corporate labour to revenue ratio) but you can see the very same trend I mentioned in this report and what's used there is almost certainly a better statistic to get an overall view of what's going on.
I used to frequent a few finance forums too; maybe I can help. Was it a personal finance/FIRE forum (e.g. bogleheads.org, forum.mrmoneymustache.com, etc.), or some other kind?
Nah, it started as a forum made by an ex-edge fund guy which in the beginning had quite a lot of people over there with a background in Investment Banking like me, but it kept getting more and more american goldbugs and preppers and was eventually swamped by simpleton Libertarian politics.
It's both. If the price of homes aren't reflecting an affordable price, you have to ask, who's buying them? It's not the average family - it's corps sucking up homes as investment assets, driving up prices to sell to each other and the "lucky" family or two that get to empty out their retirement fund just to have a place to live. That's not reflective of a natural, reasonable increase. That's the result of hedge funds destroying the housing market for the rest of us, just to pad their bank accounts.
That may be true in some of the lower priced Midwestern markets, but I sell real estate in Boston and I don't see big corporate interests in the single family or owner occupied 2-3 family market. as much as big corporations have ruined a lot of things in this country, I don't think we Dan just wave our hands and say "corporate buyers" and explain away our housing market problems.
We have a confluence of decades of exclusionary zoning and restrictions on building that make meaningfully adding to the supply of housing almost impossible. We have a huge deficit of qualified workers in the building trades, in part because all the work dried up after the great recession and people left the field and in part because we've pushed more and more kids to go to college. We have a mortgage system that's nearly unique worldwide that allows homeowners tremendous advantages in keeping their housing costs low, but inversely provides tremendous disadvantages to having them move around more often and free up housing stock (so lots of aging singles and couples in big houses better suited for young people with kids). We have a society that's bizarrely fixated on single family living even though we desperately need more density in most markets. And we have the problem of wage stagnation. None of those things are directly attributable to corporate ownership of large numbers of houses.
I'd love for there to be some silver bullet where we could just say "disincentivize corporations from owning small housing stock" and solve the problem, but it's nowhere near that simple.
You're right, it's more complicated than just blaming corps, and I don't want to imply an issue this complicated could be completely solved with one change. They're definitely exacerbating the issues we already have, though, and dealing with them could only help.