Re: But don't count on prices falling to "affordable" levels in areas where people want to live.
I'm not counting on that. I'm only pointing out that until/unless that happens, there's going to be huge chunks of our population in those "areas where people want to live" for which home ownership will be completely out of the question indefinitely.
I also think it's worth asking one's self, "Cui bono?" When we bought our first house in 1985, I remember looking at the mortgage papers, specifically the total price we were going to pay for our $29,000 home and nearly fainting. Take a 50 year old home anywhere in the U.S. Think about how many mortgages have been written for that home and how much in payments to banksters that property has generated. Looking at a more recent example, we built our house in 2000 for $225,000 on a raw lakefront lot we'd owned for about ten years. If we hold our tongues right and I remain healthy, we'll have finally paid off that mortgage in the early Spring of next year. I just did a quick estimate of how much we've paid the bank for that $225,000 house and it currently totals more than $350,000. That's already > 50% ROI for the bankster class in 18 years and they literally did nothing for it. Now multiply that by the number of homes on our 170 acre lake. It gets worse for those dwellings in "the places people want to live". My dad's first house in California cost $15,000 in 1964. Some banksters have written mortgages on it for up to $500,000 and collected mortgage payments for that 15K house in the past 54 years.
The amount of money banksters make from these hyperinflated home prices is breathtaking. Houses are almost continuously mortgaged and the banksters like it that way. It is their way, with apologies to Mark Knopfler, to make "Money for Nothin'".
It won't stop until we all stop living for the benefit of the bankster class. And that will never happen in this country.
I also think it's worth asking one's self, "Cui bono?" When we bought our first house in 1985, I remember looking at the mortgage papers, specifically the total price we were going to pay for our $29,000 home and nearly fainting. Take a 50 year old home anywhere in the U.S. Think about how many mortgages have been written for that home and how much in payments to banksters that property has generated. Looking at a more recent example, we built our house in 2000 for $225,000 on a raw lakefront lot we'd owned for about ten years. If we hold our tongues right and I remain healthy, we'll have finally paid off that mortgage in the early Spring of next year. I just did a quick estimate of how much we've paid the bank for that $225,000 house and it currently totals more than $350,000. That's already > 50% ROI for the bankster class in 18 years and they literally did nothing for it. Now multiply that by the number of homes on our 170 acre lake. It gets worse for those dwellings in "the places people want to live". My dad's first house in California cost $15,000 in 1964. Some banksters have written mortgages on it for up to $500,000 and collected mortgage payments for that 15K house in the past 54 years.
The amount of money banksters make from these hyperinflated home prices is breathtaking. Houses are almost continuously mortgaged and the banksters like it that way. It is their way, with apologies to Mark Knopfler, to make "Money for Nothin'".
It won't stop until we all stop living for the benefit of the bankster class. And that will never happen in this country.