Letters: Readers respond to an article about quitting the rat race, with some saying their generation was handed an untenable position and others saying the struggle is nothing new
Sorry but for those of us not in industries where WFH is even an option, it ruined things for us.
I have to quit my job eventually and move to a completely different state because once WFH took off and everyone that could move out of the areas their jobs were in did so the housing market exploded.
I had just reached a point where I was financially healthy enough to consider buying a house and then pretty much immediately had the rug pulled out from under me… Now between greedflation and everything else, the raises I had been fighting for are equal in purchasing power as my income was like 4 years ago…
I don’t think WFH is completely to blame for that. A significant contributor to the explosion in housing prices was historically low mortgage rates (<2%) as part of the covid era stimulus plans. This triggered a wave of home buying, which in turn led to a lot of panic from people that were afraid they would be priced out of the market and fueled further home buying.
Pretty sure it was Blackrock, Vanguard, and all the shadow LLC’s from the big banks buying up homes as soon as they went on the market as well as rich pukes abusing first time home owner mechanics to buy AirBnB investment properties.
Not really normal folks buying home with low interest rates.
Case in point: There are eight houses on my block. Pre-COVID, one was a multi-unit rental and the rest were single family.
Post COVID? Now only my house and my next door neighbor’s house, and the lady’s place on the far corner are privately owned. All five of the others sold and are now either short term rentals (2) or AirBNB’s (3).
…In my shitty cracked out corner of America. Where there’s even this bastard who runs motorcycles in his driveway all the time (i.e. me). Who the fuck is going to want to travel to and rent an AirBNB here? Nobody, that’s who. There ain’t nothing here but bikes, mud, guns, dirt, and fentanyl. So they’re basically full-time empty. Some asshole or asshole(s) with capital decided this would be a great “passive income” opportunity and spent big bucks to squeeze out any private buyers. My only solace is that they’ve got to be getting raked over the coals now, because there’s no way they make enough in rentals to cover the mortgages, utilities, and taxes.
Yeah screw those people being able to be happy and move to an area that doesn’t bend them over almost definitely worse than you. What assholes! They should have to stay in the downtown centers and pay $15 million to live in an old phone booth with a sink.
This has the same energy of people being pissed off with student loan forgiveness or something. “If I had to deal with it, so should you! I can’t be happy so you can’t either blah blah”
What? That isn’t even remotely close to what I was expressing…
They mentioned wfh being a good thing from covid and I mentioned how it affected other people using my own experience. Fuck me for wanting to buy a home in the same damn state that I work in, excuse me. Only their experience is valid apparently.
The point of course is that there shouldn’t be entire towns that are on affordable. Expensive houses / condos in the city? Sure I guess. An entire city where nothing is Affordable to people working normal jobs there? No that shouldn’t be a thing anywhere and it needs to be made impermissible. We need a lot of non-market housing
Yeah, OP doesn’t get how many, many things can cause house price rises and that you shouldn’t stop a good thing just because a bad thing takes advantage.
Too many people are taking my “there’s 2 sides to this so called benefit” as “crab mentality.”
I’m happy people got to be happy, but their happiness came at my expense.
We all made decisions as to where we wanted to work, people chose cities for high incomes, I hate cities, traffic, overpopulated areas, so I chose the opposite and work in a factory far from a city, but now everyone got to leave the cities and that caused a massive increase in prices pretty much immediately. Again, good for them, I was just pointing out to OP that it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, for some WFH coming from covid ruined their plans.
I either keep the position I worked for and never own a home now or I have to start over somewhere else.
Shift your blame to the housing market for jacking prices up for well over 40 years. Yes they used wfh as another excuse but seriously housing market has been fucked looooong before wfh
It’s not “they,” I’ve been watching my local market because I had been looking to buy.
One simple, extreme example: a piece of shit shed masquerading as a house sold for 65k in 2016 then in 2021 the asshat that bought it put it on the market for 190k
In what universe is that even a reasonable increase? It wasn’t 40 years, it was a direct reaction to “supply and demand.” Real estate agents were telling my friend who actually had the money to buy “if a house is on the market for more than 5 days there’s something wrong with it.”
That’s not a normal situation affected by decades of increases.
😮💨 I understand too well. “Average” single family homes in my area were like $400,000, now it’s $820,000. Rents for single bedroom apartments went from about $800-900 month to $1,600+ per month. I live in a town of about 65,000 in the Rockies, middle of nowhere, like minimum 5 hour drive to a city with more than a million people, yet somehow, people are still flocking here from all across the country.
We need to tax big corporations and use it to fund public housing at a rate of one unit per 1000 residents in every Big City to small town in this country, and that’s the minimum amount some areas will need much more
Sorry but for those of us not in industries where WFH is even an option, it ruined things for us.
I have to quit my job eventually and move to a completely different state because once WFH took off and everyone that could move out of the areas their jobs were in did so the housing market exploded.
I had just reached a point where I was financially healthy enough to consider buying a house and then pretty much immediately had the rug pulled out from under me… Now between greedflation and everything else, the raises I had been fighting for are equal in purchasing power as my income was like 4 years ago…
I don’t think WFH is completely to blame for that. A significant contributor to the explosion in housing prices was historically low mortgage rates (<2%) as part of the covid era stimulus plans. This triggered a wave of home buying, which in turn led to a lot of panic from people that were afraid they would be priced out of the market and fueled further home buying.
Pretty sure it was Blackrock, Vanguard, and all the shadow LLC’s from the big banks buying up homes as soon as they went on the market as well as rich pukes abusing first time home owner mechanics to buy AirBnB investment properties.
Not really normal folks buying home with low interest rates.
I’m sure large investment firms did buy a lot of homes, but to pretend no normal people took advantage of the interest rates is just ridiculous.
Homes at large went from being owned by normal people to financial institutions. Yep, some people might have got lucky, but society overall lost.
Case in point: There are eight houses on my block. Pre-COVID, one was a multi-unit rental and the rest were single family.
Post COVID? Now only my house and my next door neighbor’s house, and the lady’s place on the far corner are privately owned. All five of the others sold and are now either short term rentals (2) or AirBNB’s (3).
…In my shitty cracked out corner of America. Where there’s even this bastard who runs motorcycles in his driveway all the time (i.e. me). Who the fuck is going to want to travel to and rent an AirBNB here? Nobody, that’s who. There ain’t nothing here but bikes, mud, guns, dirt, and fentanyl. So they’re basically full-time empty. Some asshole or asshole(s) with capital decided this would be a great “passive income” opportunity and spent big bucks to squeeze out any private buyers. My only solace is that they’ve got to be getting raked over the coals now, because there’s no way they make enough in rentals to cover the mortgages, utilities, and taxes.
Yeah screw those people being able to be happy and move to an area that doesn’t bend them over almost definitely worse than you. What assholes! They should have to stay in the downtown centers and pay $15 million to live in an old phone booth with a sink.
This has the same energy of people being pissed off with student loan forgiveness or something. “If I had to deal with it, so should you! I can’t be happy so you can’t either blah blah”
What? That isn’t even remotely close to what I was expressing…
They mentioned wfh being a good thing from covid and I mentioned how it affected other people using my own experience. Fuck me for wanting to buy a home in the same damn state that I work in, excuse me. Only their experience is valid apparently.
The point of course is that there shouldn’t be entire towns that are on affordable. Expensive houses / condos in the city? Sure I guess. An entire city where nothing is Affordable to people working normal jobs there? No that shouldn’t be a thing anywhere and it needs to be made impermissible. We need a lot of non-market housing
But how is that related to others working from home?
Yeah, OP doesn’t get how many, many things can cause house price rises and that you shouldn’t stop a good thing just because a bad thing takes advantage.
But I never said to stop it.
Too many people are taking my “there’s 2 sides to this so called benefit” as “crab mentality.”
I’m happy people got to be happy, but their happiness came at my expense.
We all made decisions as to where we wanted to work, people chose cities for high incomes, I hate cities, traffic, overpopulated areas, so I chose the opposite and work in a factory far from a city, but now everyone got to leave the cities and that caused a massive increase in prices pretty much immediately. Again, good for them, I was just pointing out to OP that it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, for some WFH coming from covid ruined their plans.
I either keep the position I worked for and never own a home now or I have to start over somewhere else.
Shift your blame to the housing market for jacking prices up for well over 40 years. Yes they used wfh as another excuse but seriously housing market has been fucked looooong before wfh
It’s not “they,” I’ve been watching my local market because I had been looking to buy.
One simple, extreme example: a piece of shit shed masquerading as a house sold for 65k in 2016 then in 2021 the asshat that bought it put it on the market for 190k
In what universe is that even a reasonable increase? It wasn’t 40 years, it was a direct reaction to “supply and demand.” Real estate agents were telling my friend who actually had the money to buy “if a house is on the market for more than 5 days there’s something wrong with it.”
That’s not a normal situation affected by decades of increases.
😮💨 I understand too well. “Average” single family homes in my area were like $400,000, now it’s $820,000. Rents for single bedroom apartments went from about $800-900 month to $1,600+ per month. I live in a town of about 65,000 in the Rockies, middle of nowhere, like minimum 5 hour drive to a city with more than a million people, yet somehow, people are still flocking here from all across the country.
Do you have fiber internet and legal weed?
Edit: lmao wrote free weed at first.
Yep, probably why people end up here instead of the more conservative shitholes.
We need to tax big corporations and use it to fund public housing at a rate of one unit per 1000 residents in every Big City to small town in this country, and that’s the minimum amount some areas will need much more
I hate the housing market too but it’s been going bonkers way before covid and WFH.
Sure WFH added fuel to the fire, but that fire has been growing and would have grown without WFH.