#Housing Market

[animentality]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Those looking for a mortgage to buy a home got a bit of a break earlier this week when the Bank of Canada cut its key interest rate down by a slight margin. But no such luck for renters as a new report from Rentals.ca and Urbanation shows that the average asking price on rents have hit an all-time high in the month of May and Nova Scotia is seeing higher than average price increases.  According to the study, data gathered show the average rental asking price in Nova Scotia jumped by 17.1 per cent, year over year, nearly doubling the national average that increased by 9.3 percent In Halifax, one bedroom apartments are seeing an average asking price sit around $1,925, that’s up 3.8 per cent while two bedrooms saw the biggest jump at 16.3 percent to $2,489. [...]

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[ratisangy]

Realities Of RV Living

I feel this needs to be discussed as sadly it may become more of an option for many people as the cost of living increases. I want to provide a realistic look into this life. Unless you are well off with a luxury RV, what you typically see on social media is not even close to reality.

Traveling and Long Term RV Parks

Ask about rates monthly and compare multiple parks. Make sure to ask if the rate is the same all year long. Also, ask if utilities are included. You can save a lot of money by not having to pay electricity. Some parks don't have one of the main hookups, so make sure eletricity, water and septic are all available.

This is only good when you have a new properly functioning RV. When you live in something older and in bad shape, it means a broken part, packing up your entire life, and finding a new park friendly to long-term stay. I've moved 3 times in 2 and a half years.

The first RV park was $750 a month plus electricity ($100 in summer $200 in winter) and had multiple times were we were without power or had no use of our septic. Many of the times without power it was single digits or in the negatives. We got 120 inches of snow and had to make a homemade rv skirt of a tarp and pack the snow like an igloo around the rv to stay warm.

The second RV park was $350 plus electricity ($150 summer). This park was more affordable but had a lot more issues. Our neighbor had frequent septic issues and we often had it leak onto our rv space. We also were next to the septic for the whole park. So basically the smell of shit was ever present. It got to 110 F here and we basically ran the AC until it broke as heat exhaustion always felt right around the corner.

Third park arguably the nicest park is $550 utilities included only catch is $1200 a month in summer months. (No I don't live in a high value area either most of the town and houses are literally abandoned). It's a franchise park and the owner isn't even supposed to offer long term but deals with it for the insane price he gets in summer. I haven't had issues with electricity or other people's sewage here. Basically one good employment place here and my fiancé gets retirement, so that made it worth the move.

Extreme cold

Frozen septic and frozen water lines are a huge and common issue, especially in older, less insulated models. You can put insulation around the pipes and drip water all you want its going to happen if it's cold enough. So get comfortable with the idea of taking warm buckets of water and a rag to your septic pipe and pouring warm water down into your septic. A smell you will never forget ❤️.

Insulating the rv is very important from being almost 3 years in. Here's the best way to avoid hypothermia. Get R-tech insulation board and stuff it into your windows then cover it up with a blanket. Put this behind your pillows as well so heat can stay in the bed area. Find pre-owned carpets and cut them to fit in your rv so the floor remains warmer. Get socks or cozy slippers to wear most of winter. Your floor will most likely never be a comfortable warm and you may be at risk of hypothermia depending on tempature. Dress in layers put on two pants a shirt and a sweater and socks and slippers. If you need to gloves and a hat as well. Put a blanket over your door. Making a rv skirt out of a tarp and super gluing velcro to the tarp and rv can be useful. Use concrete blocks to hold down the ends. Depending on wind speed this can be hard to keep in place though.

As much as this may sound like a joke it's currently saving me. Xbox 360 consoles make ALOT of heat if you run a DVD that replays itself in the background all night it will warm your sleeping area. If I die I will fade out to the Do The Mario theme song I guess 🥲.

Extreme Heat

Just pump up your AC and have alot of ice packs and cold water. This is going to suck and may kill your AC. The smell oh god the smell will make you want to die. Your septic will boil in the heat and make BAD soup. Less things will break on your RV than extreme cold.

Mail

If your RV park doesn't allow you to get mail at the park its going to suck ass. PO Boxes are the most annoying things on earth. UPS and certain FedEx mail will not deliver to them. Most companies will not ship to them. Even if they say they do. You will often get packages shipped all the way to your post office only for them to be rejected and sent back to the seller. The crapiness is exemplified if you live in a very rural area like I do. Just ship to a family member and pay them to ship it to you in a USPS box only!

RV Common Issues

Too high of water pressure

Get a pressure gage/regulator a park with to high of pressure can cause your lines to burst

Electricity Surges

Get a surge protector a bad surge with no protector can permanently fry your eletricial system. The protector saved me on a bad surge that literally set my plug on fire 🔥.

Eletricity Constriants

Older 30 amps don't have much power. Depending on the appliances you may have to choose to use one at a time. Want to use the heater and your Ninja to cook? Well, enjoy tripping your breaker. In fact just get comfortable with your breaker you'll be spending alot of time with it as you figure out what appliances aren't friends.

Septic

You will spend way to much time with your septic. Whether it be unfreezing, unclogging, general emptying or trying to find a product that doesn't harm it but keeps the smell down during hot summers. Get Scott thousand ply tiolet paper or just cheap thin tiolet paper. It's very similar to the rv specific tiolet paper and way less money.

Water

Pex pipes are cool and easy to repair replace your lines with them. With cold your water lines of course have the chance to freeze or burst. Keep them insulated and use the warm water wash cloth method to unfreeze. Just make sure not to leave wash cloths on the pipes for to long or they will also freeze.

Propane

Please please please check your models history with propane if you plan on using it. Some were built with manufacturing issues that cause them to blow up. There's not many left of my model due to this. It also means I have no central heating or use of the oven.

Laundry

If your park has a laundry mat awesome but this not usually the case. Locate your nearest laundry mat and take that into consideration when looking for a park.

[bunhuggerdesign]

Capitalism - Yay we all lose!

[alpaca-clouds]

How we ended in the darkest timeline

I actually wanted to talk a bit more about the French Revolution, but given recent events, I fear like I need to talk about this for now. Mainly because over the weekend I had so many talks about this, and have reached the point where I just need this blog to link back to.

You know how people keep joking about how we ended up in the darkest timeline, right? Well, what can I say? It is probably right. And by now I can tell you pretty definitely why.

Now mind you, like with everything there is a multitude of reasons for this. Technically we can go and say: Yes, we are here because colonialization happened - and it would not be wrong. We can also say that it is because of Napoleon, and because the failure of the French Revolution - and that would not be entirely wrong either. And we absolutely have to also say, that a bit reason is that instead of fighting fascism everyone decided after WWII, that fighting communism would be so much more important.

But I think a lot of the stuff we deal with right now is very much linked to one specific thing: The 2008 financial crisis - and the lack of regulation that lead up to it.

This is the moment where I am gonna tell you to watch The Big Short. I know most of you have probably not done that before. Because the movie feels like Oscar bait and also, who wants to watch a 2 hour movie about the financial market, but trust me on this: The movie is actually made really well and explains what happened back then very, very well and in a way that at least hits my autistic humor very well.

But basically, you need to understand two things: For the longest time the financial market really only traded companies and investments into them. But at some point during the late 70s and early 80s someone realized that there is something they were not trading on: depts. Because obviously most credits are given out by the banks and the financial industry. Not really investments, because there is a promise this stuff gets paid back eventually. And so they started trading depts with each other.

If you do not see the problem with this, let me explain: If you buy the dept someone has with another company, you basically are just making a bet with them the long way around. If you buy a dept, you bet that the person will pay the debt back - if you sell it, you kinda are betting against it.

There is a lot of weird financial tooks for this kinda stuff, but this is what it comes down to. The financial market became more and more a big ass casino, only that other than any other gambling it was not treated as this - and the money they were using on gambling was actually money that did not belong to them.

Because here is the thing: The main players in the financial market are either banks or groups that invest for their customers. While in the second case the people at least are fully aware of the fact that the financial institution will trade with their money, a lot of bank customers are not really aware of this. Sure, they kinda know that when they keep their money at the bank they might get interest, but most of them do not understand why. Because really, it does never get fully explained to them, that the bank will use that money to trade and invest with it.

And this is kinda part of the issue.

See, what happened in 2008 was, that the banks traded with indexes (so basically bundles) of thousands and thousands of house mortgages. And in those bundles were so called sublime mortgages, which is financial speak for "dog shit mortgages we knew the people taking them out would be unable to pay, but we didn't give a fuck". And a lot of those mortgages were due in 2008, which is why those indexes failed in 2008, resetting their value to close to 0. But the banks had spend money on those indexes as if they had an actual value. Especially because it was always the common wisdom, that mortgages were one of the most secure financial tools.

So. Now, what happens when you spend money on something that you think is an investment, but turns out to be completely worthless? Eh?

Yeah, exactly, you just threw a lot of money into the wind. And that money now was GONE. The big financial companies were just out of money. The money had simply disappeared, which is always what happens when a financial bubble burst.

See, financial bubbles happen when people overestimate how much something is going to be worth. They expect something to raise in value, so that when it ultimately fails a lot of people have put money into it which will just be GONE.

Gone, baby, gone.

But again: The money the banks had been using was mostly not their money. It was the money of their customers. Some of whom understood that risk. Many of them did not. So basically, if you had any of your money on the bank, this money technically still belonged to you - but it was not there. And of course there were also literally hundred-thousands of people working for those companies, who were now out of money.

And this is where we come to the reason why we are living in the darkest timeline.

I know it sounds cynical coming from a lefty like me, but sadly... Yeah, Obama was a big, big reason of why it came to this. While this happened towards the end of the Bush administration, for the most part it was Obama dealing with the fall-out.

See, the government at the time had three options:

Do nothing. Accept that the money is gone and deal with the consequences. Build something new from the ashes.

Give out some securities for the private people who lost their money. Basically some form of check to get back up to amount X of money that you lost becuase of the banks, but prosecute the people in finance, who had messed it up. Also create laws to control the financial market and trade volume, as well as the size of banks.

Save the banks by basically paying their depts for them.

The administration decided to choose Option 3. They saved the banks to save the people's finances and all those jobs bound to the banking industry.

There were no laws. No controls. No checks and balances. And there was basically no prosecution of the people who had let this happen - partly because they did not care, and partly because they were dumb fuckers.

And pretty much everything that has happened since is in some way connected to that. Literally everything!

I mean, if you want to know what I mean with that? The MCU exists because of the 2008 banking crisis! Yeah, the fucking Marvel Cinematic Universe. The reason that streaming is fucked and your favorite shows get cancelled after one or two seasons is heavily connected to the 2008 financial crisis.

The 2008 financial crisis is also connected to the surge in right wing politics all around the world. Because the financial crisis did not only hit the USA, but the rest of the world as well. A lot of people lost their jobs because of it, and because the financial industry did not get controlled and from this learned that they could fuck up however much they liked ("too big to fail") the gap between the rich and poor got worse. Which then the right wingers used to make people angry against minorities.

And of course because all of this started with unrealistic sets for mortages, mortages were suddenly much harder to get and it ended up pretty much impossible to afford a home - just as most of millenials were leaving school.

After all: Nobody really understood, what happened during the financial crisis. Because most people stop following any explanation as soon as they hear stuff like "shorts" and "sublime mortages". So it was much easier to think that the reason that you lost your job and could no longer afford a home was because some immigrant took it, rather than that some white collar idiots at wallstreet made some trades that you could not even begin to understand.

But yeah, tl;dr: Obama decided to save the banks, put in no controls, and with this fucked pretty much both Millennials and everyone who came after us over. And everyone else - every other world leader - pretty much just went with it and did the same in their own country. Danke, Merkel, as we Germans would say.

This is also what started the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, which was trying to get SOME accountability, but in the end pretty much failed.

If I asked you to guess how many people got prosecuted because of the shit back then, I can guarantee you, that you would not guess right. Because literally everyone I have asked, said some number between 20 and 100, realizing very well that it was probably not the thousands actually at fault, but not being able to grasp the reality. One. There was one person actually prosecuted because of it.

These people destroyed our futures, they fucked us over, and they got away with it.

And you and I, we deserve to be angry about it.

Especially because it is happening again right now. There is not just one other bubble, but a couple of bubbles right now. And chances are that they will pop very soon. Fuck, I am writing this on Monday early afternoon German time. Chances are that by the time this goes online some might have started popping, because of the Trump administration's inability to deal with shit. And let's face it, the Trump administration is not gonna be capable of dealing with this, when it goes into freefall.

[lemonbombsfjl]

You can have a house someday. Vote Harris for POTUS.

[fly-the-pattern]

[hyperlexichypatia]

I’ve been seeing a few viral posts like “You don’t have to move out of your parents’ house when you turn 18; multi-generational homes are good.” And I agree – multi-generational homes ARE good, and cultural stigma on living with one’s parents as an adult IS wrong! Personally, I’ve lived with my parents for most of my adult life, first by financial necessity, and later by choice. If you’re fortunate enough to have a good relationship with your parents, spending time with them can be great.  BUT.  While you don’t necessarily need to move out of your parents’ home when you’re 18, you DO need to start thinking of yourself as an adult and making your own choices, and your parents will need to respect that. If you and your parents can seamlessly make the transition to viewing you as an adult housemate rather than a child under their care, that’s great. Sometimes, though, even the most respectful parents will have a tendency to Meddle, and even the most self-assured young people will have a tendency to Revert to old roles and habits. If this is a problem, you may in fact need to get some physical distance to reinforce the psychological distance. And even more importantly, every young adult deserves the living wage and affordable housing to live on their own, whether or not they ever choose to use it. I’ve been shouting into the wind for years that the “young adults are still children” narrative is an excuse to normalize the low wages and high costs of living faced by Millennials and Gen Z, and “Multi-generational homes are good” seems hardly better in this respect. At best, it’s tonally mismatched to the cultural and economic moment. At worst, it’s normalizing the conditions of abusive control of young people. Somewhere in between, it’s propaganda reframing being unable to afford housing as a wholesome family lifestyle. In fact, I think the demographic this demographic is nominally targeted to – 18 year olds who are freely choosing between two options, having both the financial resources to live on their own, and supportive parents who would willingly share a safe and respectful multi-generational home – are a relatively small segment of the population.  “Multi-generational homes are good” does nothing for the 18 year old living with their controlling parents because they can’t afford to move out, let alone the 18 year old moving in with an abusive partner because it’s the only way xe can escape xyr even more abusive parents, or the 18 year old living on the streets because her parents kicked her out and she’s ineligible for any benefits because she’s assumed to be supported by her parents (who have no legal obligation towards her). And as always, young people most likely to be controlled, abused, rejected, or involuntarily “helped” (which is also abuse) by parents and family – queer young people, disabled young people, young people who’ve made different reproductive or philosophical or religious or life-path choices than their family approves of – are most harmed by having no economic options to live on their own. So can we get universal housing, universal living wages, and universal healthcare and student aid for young people which doesn’t require the involvement of their families FIRST, and THEN, once everyone has the option of living on their own, remind them that multi-generational homes are also good as one option among many?

[brainpukeblog]

[animentality]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

As housing affordability and skyrocketing rent prices remain top of mind for many renters, a map reveals that there are millions of empty bedrooms throughout Ontario — a figure some say is high enough to relieve the province's housing crisis.  According to the Canadian Census Mapper, the number of empty bedrooms throughout Ontario has only increased over the past several years, with the current number sitting at roughly five million.  The map, which uses 2021 census data, assumes an idealized view that couples share a bedroom and single folks sleep in separate rooms. It was created as a complement to the map of overcrowded dwellings to help identify underused housing throughout the province.  Based on the map of overcrowded dwellings, it's clear that there are households with more than one person per bedroom, not counting couples. [...]

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @vague-humanoid

[the-political-one]

Honestly that price seems low for a Californian house of that size, I mean, c'mon it should be at least 850k.

If you pay 1.2 million, you may even get walls to come along with it, imagine that?

1.5 million if you want the roof.

And 2.8 million if you want plumbing and running electricity.

[the-ugly-ly]

“tiny home culture”, “van culture” isn’t cute it’s fucking tragic. no i don’t want to live in a fucking shed. thanks but i already lived in a fucking vehicle. MAKE ACTUAL HOMES AFFORDABLE AGAIN. social media is trying to glorify *PAYING* for what is essentially homelessness. NO. STOP IT.

[knoxrobbins]

"Affordable housing, right?" This piece is based on the work by Jenn Strickland an outstanding artist and animator. Been a fan of her style since encountering her portfolio ages ago and as of recently she's been a co-director and artist on Amphibia.

[vtrealty]

Price Improvement! 202k 3Bedroom 1.5Bathroom Home