This is actually an older news story, and it does appear as though she recovered from this before her death.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14389544
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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...How does that work? Who pays for the lumber, cement, electrical, plumbing, etc?
The price to build a house is nothing compared to what it will sell for. The selling price is mostly speculation. Housing used to be something you just owned, like a car, we as a society decided it had to be an investment and everything has gone to hell since.
Tell that to my home insurance. Replacement cost is more than what my home has ever been appraised.
Insurance is a government mandated scam. Are you surprised that a scam is in fact a scam?
What?
I fail to see what is confusing. Insurance is a scam. You have it because the government makes you have it. So of course a grifter is going to grift.
Housing insurance how it is is a scam you're right but the insurance itself is not. If they could operate ethically (they cannot) then everything would be fine.
I'm confused because I'm unfamiliar with any governments in the US that require homeowners or renters insurance. The closest I can think of is that FNMA or FMAC backed mortgages would surely require insurance to cover their collateral, but the government doesn't require that you have a mortgage backed by either of those.
So.. what are you talking about with "the government makes you have it"?
Also, how is it a scam? If you want to insure against a risk, you can choose to purchase an insurance policy against that risk. Sure, the insurer wants to make some profit off of that, but government insurance regulations and competition both help to keep that profit in check a bit...
There’s a lot of not understanding how financial vehicles work itt
We're taking about house insurance not car insurance, keep up 🙄
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but google financial vehicle
There are many stories about people having home insurance but the insurance company refusing to pay because their inspection team didn't approve the claim for some bullshit reason.
Oh sure, it will be hard. But we have done lots of hard things. Maintaining a road system is very expensive. The government has built aircraft carriers. We went to the moon.
Being hard and expensive has never stopped the government before. It's just a matter of whether or not we want to do it.
Well, why do you think the price of houses goes up while most other commodities go down. Except for... education, healthcare, and cars in the past 20 years. It feels a little like to me the government backed lending(among other things) has something to do with it. Something something- taking a low interest loan means you're less concerned about a 20% higher price, and so is everyone else- or something.
What commodities go down? Inflation ensures that that's not common.
Cars, new ones at least, depreciate in value the second you drive off the lot in one. This depreciation will slow down after about five years, and stop after 10, after which the car is essentially worthless. At that point the value of the vehicle is dependent upon your care and maintenance of it, the equity you put into keeping it pristine, until eventually the vehicle reaches "classic" status and is worth more as a museum piece. Of course that won't be until long after you've died and left the vehicle to your children, who leave it to theirs, who leave it to theirs, and so on. So, you will never get to enjoy the money of the sale your once-new car after about 50 years of appreciating in value after it becomes a "classic" car.
Maybe, mabye not. If you buy the worst car that is for sale today...and keep it in good running condition by do frequent maintenance, in 30 years you'll have a very interesting classic.
For example if you bought a Dodge Omni in 1990, or a Chevrolet Citation in 1985, you'd have a very interesting and unique car today.
Yeah, but it would only have value to collectors.
Education went up in cost because nothing was stopping it from going up and everything else is so broken it took the place for it. Kids need therapy and they can't get it, so schools hire therapists. Kids come into higher ed unready so schools has to hire tutors and offer basic classes. No walkability so here comes a campus bus system. Systematic racism so here comes 8 offices of diversity. A nasty combo of unlimited money and mission creep. Want to stop it? Limit the salary of all uni employees to no more than say 110k a year, stop subsidizing the NFL, and fix all the shit that isn't working around the ages of 18-23.
Healthcare went up because insurance companies. They are a useless middlemen.
Cars really haven't gone up that much.
You left out the parallel police and court systems that can only inflict academic punishments but have greatly reduced due process rights and rights of the accused in general. To the point that they had to lose lawsuits over things like the accused being allowed to know what evidence will be brought against them or what the procedure is supposed to look like or what training those involved in conducting the procedure had on it.
Biden's changes to the policy actually rolled back the idea that maybe the people whose roles are analogous to prosecutor, judge and defense in a "real" court should not all be the same person, but then he basically rolled back to the Obama-era version of the policy, except where the changes were just spelling out something from a court judgement.
Well yeah, that's my point? Why do you think their customers are able to pay any amount? Because they're taking government loans.
How did insurance companies increase the cost of healthcare when their goal is to decrease it so they can profit more?
New and used cars definitely haven't gone down in price despite increased mechanization, improved shipping, etc. But yeah out of these things they have the lowest infinite free money behind them.
No it is because stuff around it was broken.
Expensive for us not for them. Given that insurance doesn't actually payout the cost doesn't matter to them.
Where this type of lending is less frequent, like mobile homes, prices haven't risen as much. But as that lending has gotten more common, they're starting to.
Ideally the governnent with our tax money instead of using it all to bomb nations that aren't a threat to us and lining the pockets of politicians and their friends.
Man it's always govt with you people. I challenge you to codify your feelings into actual policy with facts and figures rather than loaded emotional imagery like 'govt should pay for housing for everyone.'
When you decommodify a thing the state takes a role to ensure the good or service is provided to all. You can have a mixed system with private and public construction. But as long as there is a robust public housing sector, prices for all houses will be much lower than in the current system where we have scarcity.
I read something recently analyzing what tends to happen when there's tons of artificially cheap public housing. Market forces determine housing prices regardless of government interference, so when the govt rules by decree that their public housing will be cheaper, the price differential doesn't go away, it just changes form. And more importantly, it changes hands. The price difference changes form from money into power, and it changes hands from the landlord into the govt agency or official in charge of determining who gets to live there and benefit from the lower cost. Make sense?
I don't disagree that housing costs are out of control. I think everyone is missing the point though, and the cause. It isn't mean rich people being evil bastards charging people too much. Right now what we are seeing is the natural result of decades of exponential economic growth. Real estate is an asset like any other with prices strongly positively correlated with other asset classes. If everything is growing exponentially like equities, of course real estate is going to grow along with them. I don't know what the solution is, but it certainly isn't anything suggested in this thread.
So instead of having people spend 60% of their income on housing we will have some slightly annoyed people who aren't in the neighborhood they want to be in, spending <20% of their income on housing. Sounds like an improvement to me.
No, all you're doing is shifting power from the big bad mean rich landlord into the hands of the government agency or agent in charge. How do you not understand that? No matter what there's going to be an asshole with too much power/wealth.
I don't understand how comments like this are made. Is the status-quo so deeply ingrained in people's minds that they literally can't even think of any alternate method, or was there not even any consideration put into it to try to?
Does literally every action, in your mind, come back to profit? Have you never helped a friend just because it was the right thing to do? Why should our system of focusing on profit be the only consideration when regular people can obviously consider more noble goals, such as good or happiness, as end goals to chase themselves? Clearly the system that promotes profit over these more noble ideas is the issue, right?
You didn't answer the question.
But I did? Profit shouldn't be the goal ideally, so "who pays" isn't a valid question. Whatever system is in power incentivizes it. Either the community supports them for their good work or the government gives them whatever for it.
Assuming we don't actually change the system though, we can incentivize it using tax money. Pay people to do the right thing, instead of making the most profitable thing doing evil. As long as profit is the goal, and we don't correct it with some external force at least, we get assholes trying to benefit themselves instead of trying to help other people. Why should we accept that that is how things need to be?
Who pays is a very valid question because right now you guys are all saying the owner should pay instead of the squatter. Then you go on to talk about tax money which implies the govt should pay. We live in a world of finite goods and resources which is why things are the way they are. These comments are like letters to Santa.
They're like letters to Santa if Santa were alive and perfectly capable of delivering the presents if he just did what he should. There's finite resources, but there's still far more than enough to go around.
Right, if only this mean rich person would go against their best interest and do something stupid. But they didn't because there's zero incentive to do so, because what you and everyone in this thread is suggesting is a bad decision to make of one's own free will. So other folks are arguing the gov should step in and, what, force the owner to rent their unit to the squatter for free just because she's old I guess?
I challenge you to codify your position. Meaning, if someone is over X years of age they get free rent? Or the gov pays their rent? Or if someone is over such and such net worth they have to give free rent to people? Or something? You're just not making any sense and you're arguing out of pure pathos, emotionally laden incoherent thoughts that you can't build a functioning economy out of.
I'll codify my position: housing should be a human right. Either the government should pay for rent (up to some value) or the government should control the property and not charge rent. It's not that hard to understand. We easily have enough money in this nation to do this.
Check out "What is Property." Land is something that all humans need to live, whether that's for shelter, food, or water. How did these people come to own land? It'd be absurd to suggest they could own air and charge rent for it, right? Why can they do so for land? Land ownership was made up by governments by saying they control it and selling it, removing it from the commons into private control, giving the people nothing in return.
Yes it is hard to understand because we are having this conversation despite it being a ridiculous idea. If the gov controls the property and doesn't charge rent, it doesn't lower the cost. The value of that property doesn't go away. It just changes hands from the private owner into the gov agency (or worse, agent) who controls who gets to live there. Imagine a neighborhood where everything costs $10k/month to live there, but you control who gets to live in that one place that costs $1,000/month. Think of how powerful a position that is. The value of that rental property didn't magically disappear just because the government waived its magic wand and said so. Economics doesn't work that way, and it's really frustrating talking to people who don't get this. You can't solve these issues by decree.
the US had a fairly successful public housing program until the 1980s when it was defunded then the coffin was nailed shut with the faircloth amendment passed in the 1990s.
What's the faircloth amendment?
It bars the government from increasing the amount of public housing anywhere beyond 1999 levels.
The state, via taxation.
One way would be to stop enforcing private property privileges for one's second house. We already have more housing than people, and thus don't need to subsidize additional construction.
The government. We could afford it if we weren't always causing chaos around the world.
We can afford it with all of the Imperialism we commit, our rent is much higher than it would need to be if profit wasn't the motive.
The billions and billions of our tax dollars we spend on our military are largely used to make weapon manufacturers more wealth.
You could easily provide healthcare for all and housing for all with that money and still have a huge surplus of cash.