![I’m going to by a house [Pervis]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8224d205-3e9d-4c9b-8108-a4384c30c170.webp){kind=link}
Zach M. Stafford | Website
Transcript
Comic in 4 Panels
Panel 1: A young bright-eyed man stands in front of a house.
Grandpa: I’m going to buy a house!
Panel 2: The young man is now old and bespectacled. He’s telling this story to his grandson, who is listening politely.
Grandpa: …and that was how I bought my house when I was 23!
Panel 3: Grandpa’s story turns into a yelling rant
Grandpa: I WORKED AT THE DRIVE-IN ALL SUMMER FOR THAT HOUSE!! NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE!
Panel 4: Grandpa watches as his grandson unplugs a cord from the wall with a * POP *
Grandpa: …why are you unplugging my lamp?
Grandson: I’m just practicing
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Footer:
Pervis
Zach M. Stafford
My dad bought a house when he was mid 30s and the solo bread winner for the house a couple of years after I was born. I loved that neighbourhood. It wasn’t anything too special. The houses there are 50s-90s builds, 2-3 bedrooms, maybe 2 bathrooms (our second bathroom in that house was almost an outhouse in the basement – concrete floor, exposed pipes, door that looked like it belonged on a shed, etc. My dad and a friend built a back deck which was really nice. There is a park nearby. There’s access to a nice bike path. It’s not on a through-route at all, so the only cars entering the neighbourhood are residents or guests. It’s not near shopping, not near public transit, not really near any schools. It was just a quiet, modest, neighbourhood.
I’m significantly older, don’t have any kids to support, have been saving for ages, had better, and higher paying jobs (inflation adjusted) than him. I can’t really afford any house in that neighbourhood. The only people buying there now are multi-millionaires, but they’re moving in next to families who have been there for 30ish years and know enough not to give up a good thing.
It just seems to me that a rule of thumb with housing is that in general you should be able to afford to buy in the neighbourhood where you grew up. I know sometimes that isn’t possible. Cities get denser, areas become highly sought after, etc. But, if the neighbourhood really is basically the same, and you earn what your parents did (or better), you should be able to stay nearby.
It seems like a reasonable approach. However, “decision makers” in the western world have broadly given up on making actual decisions and only being managers, and delegated this like so many other things to the power and joy of the unfettered free market.
Also, they are generally not personally too affected so they don’t have an incentive to enforce this approach.
The last time there was an unfettered free market in housing was when pioneers were driving wagons west and just claiming land and building a log cabin by hand. And the natives nearby might have had some opinions on whether that was OK to do.
In the modern world, there are lots of housing-related taxes, tons of regulations on how the house is built, the house needs to be attached to a government-controlled sewer system, electrical system, water system, sometimes a gas system too.
To some extent that regulation is a burden, but developers also see it as an opportunity, because they can pass costs on to home buyers. They choose when, where and how to built in order to make as big a profit as possible. The government sets the rules of the game, and the property developers play that game to get the maximum score possible.
If the government pretends that it’s a free market, they’re letting the property developers play the game unopposed. It’s even worse when the government creates incentives to build new housing and the property developers just find some way to pocket that subsidy and then keep playing the game the same way.