Sorry, you sort of have to watch the whole thing to get it. With Youtube you can just pit pause and let it download, and then watch.
It’s the price of housing over the last 150 years, adjusted for inflation, represented as a simulated roller coaster ride, showing meteoric peaks followed by sudden plummets, with the last 15 years represented as one of the peaks, implying that a plummet surely is to follow. Great concept, by the way, and I really recommend it, even if they do stretch the last ten to artificially pump up suspense.
And, the headache is the reason I got rid of my house. I was a homeowner and it seemed that every spare minute and every spare dollar was used in home maintenance. Plant the lawn, water the lawn, cut the lawn, plant the garden, water the garden, cut back the roses, the water heater busted, the bathroom backed up, change the furnace filter…etc. (Not to mention cleaning all of it).
It wasn’t worth it to me. And, the stigma of being a renter aside (and there is a BIG stigma for some reason) I love it. I pay my rent and all is taken care of. I have a two floor, two bedroom apartment and it’s wonderful. (I consider myself lucky with the two floor layout and the large rooms, once inside you wouldn’t know you weren’t in a single family home).
Not to mention the neighbors. At today’s home prices in my area, I would end up buying a townhouse. If I am renting and I have loud neighbors, I can move, I can complain to the landlord - I have options. In a townhouse/condo situation if I have bad neighbors I am stuck. I’d have to sell and hope I break even.
And, on a personal note, I don’t particularly care for where I am living. It’s fine and it’s close to my family, but it is not where I would want to “put down roots”.
I apologize for the hijack… Now back to your regularly scheduled Myth Bustin’ 
What the heck are you talking about? Assuming we’re not talking about a 1976 purchase of a house on the Love Canal, real property is an appreciating asset. A car is a depreciating asset.
This is not to suggest that every home purchase is wise, nor every car purchase foolish. But as a general principle, it’s wiser to live poor to support a house purchase than it is to support a car purchase.
As to your OP: the only time this phenomenon frustrates me is when I see the residents of Section 8 housing purchase these expensive cars and trick them out. Do you agree with me, or is this defensible, in your view?
I’d like to point out that just because a housing community accepts Section 8 vouchers it does NOT mean that every resident in the complex is receiving them.
AND, as I understand it, if a person who is receiving assistance happens to come into a load of cash they have 30 days to spend it or lose their benefits. Say Aunt Gertie dies and leaves them $10k – it isn’t enough to lift them out of poverty but IS enough to kick them out of the system, costing them a great deal more in benefits. Wouldn’t YOU buy a nice car, if a home was out of reach?
FURTHERMORE, my dear departed Grandmother, who had many saintly ways, nevertheless (and much to her daughters’ chagrin) sold her paid-for-but-a-PITA-to-maintain house and invested the proceeds in a Thunderbird Diamond Jubilee (sans rims). AFAIK, she was definitely white, although now that I think of it, a friend of mine recently confided that she, herself, is in fact, black (one of those unexpected genealogical discoveries), so I suppose anything is possible.
My suspicion—which may, I’ll admit, be unfounded—is that he doesn’t love driving the Viper nearly so much as he loves being seen driving the Viper. In other words, it’s all about appearances and conspicuous consumption rather than substance and actual quality of life.
Which makes it ironic that they’re being judged negatively on these very appearances that they value so highly.
But I admit, that’s just my uninformed opinion.
Sigh. See, I really didn’t want to debate this, but let’s get it on.
I understand the concept of depreciating and appreciating assets. However, when you are very poor, chances are your neighborhood is on the decline, not the incline, but I don’t want to debate that either.
I think it is crazy that some people ‘buy’ houses they can’t afford, then end up losing those houses to the bank. I also think it is crazy that we judge those that want to ‘squander’ their hard earned money on cars instead of doing the ‘smart’ thing and buying a house. If you want to do the smart thing with your money, there are other ways outside of home ownership.
Now. Lemme bust the myth you got dancing in your head about fancy cars in section 8 parking lots.
I would suggest to you, based on lots and lots of people that I know personally, that the fancy cars you see don’t belong to the people that live there.
Let’s say Kisha’s gangsta man leaves her with 6 kids and they end up on welfare. She eventually gets a piddling job and qualifies for section 8 housing. She eventually meets Jayquan, and he is a hard working technical support agent and he likes fast cars. He also likes Kisha. He helps her out with some things, pays some bills, maybe puts a nice tv set in her apartment, and he parks his big fancy truck outside her door when he um…visits. That is their damn business, and none of mine. But I know it happens all the damn time.
It doesn’t bother me that someone would rather have a fancy car than own a home. Homeownership can sometimes be a major pain in the ass (as in now when we are in a major drought and my husband has to watch the lawn his dad spent over 30 years pampering turn brown and die).
It bothers me when I see the fancy car parked in front of a run-down house and the kids are dressed in rags. It bothers me when an acquaintance doesn’t get her child support on time or at all, but her ex-husband is driving an expensive new car. It bothers me that my nephew comes to us for money to pay his speeding tickets, but has $10,000 in stereo equipment in the stupid car. (Needless to say, we didn’t give him the money.)
I would never say anything to anyone else (unless they are trying to borrow money from me) about how they spend their money - but I do form an opinion. I don’t necessarily share that opinion, but I can’t help but have one.
Well, there’s a middle ground (the one we are adopting)–buy a house (or a condo, in our case) that you can afford, instead of spending every penny that a bank is willing to loan you. When we realized that by renting, we were pissing away $18,000 per year and building up no equity at all, then it made up our minds to buy a modest condo.
Some of the above posts made me wonder if it would reduce poverty in the black community if blacks were more interested in doing the sorts of things (e.g., buying houses) that result in the accumulation of wealth from generation to generation. The purchase of depreciating assets doesn’t accomplish that, obviously.
People are allowed to make whatever financial decisions they want. I’m not obligated to respect their intelligence.
Until recently, I was living in a not-so-nice part of Boston. I saw plenty of people (of all races) with Hummers and whatnot. I couldn’t help but think:“If they added their extra money to their housing budget, instead of buying that car, they could be living in a neighborhood without bars on the windows. Why the hell wouldn’t they do that?”
Fancy cars seem frivolous to me. It’s something you get after you have a decent place to live/set aside money for your kids’ education/etc.
Not sure what a welfare king is but if I see a $50,000 vehicle go by with $10,000 rims blasting music I can hear 3 blocks away I don’t get any warm and fuzzy’s about the person driving it. Whether the person is an accountant or a drug dealer matters not to me. They’re still obnoxious jerks.
Most of the window-rattling vehicles that drive by my house are pimped out SUV’s with oversized wheels. That observation makes my first impression of people driving such vehicles a poor one.
The nephew mentioned above also has the stupid expensive rims; they and the stereo are worth more than the car. The last time he pulled up in my driveway with the music blaring so loud you could hear it for blocks, I told him I wouldn’t answer the door the next time he had it that loud. If I can hear it in my living room (on the back of the house) I’m not going to the door. Since we only see him when he wants to “borrow” money, he has cooperated.
No, I wouldn’t game the system like that. Would you?
My question refers to this part of the OP:
How many completely broke ass drug dealers do you know? Seriously, I hate to break it to you but dealing drugs is actually a fairly high profit business and if you’re an addict your biggest expense is now at wholesale. I’ve met a few at the “working stiff” level and it sure ain’t like a MickeyD’s job.
I understand your frustration at working with some racist morons, but come on.
I don’t anything about the cars driven by black folk on welfare in the inner city, but I don’t really think the phenomenom is a racial one.
Around here, it’s not uncommon to see tricked out $40,000 pick up trucks parked outside of run-down trailers, or cheap rentals.
The sad fact of the matter is that some people are poor because they make stupid decisions, and are unable to defer gratification. I judge them and I judge them harshly for it.
I have also personally seen people buying lobsters with food stamps. When I see something like that, I am resentful, because to me it looks like those people are gaming the system to the detriment of the genuinely needy, and to those of us who subsidize that kind of parisitism with our tax dollars. I judge those people harshly, too.
However, I think the OP has a point. Oftentimes these specific example are used to generalize about poverty and the poor in general, and this is fallacious.
That being said, I have no reason to think that welfare kings drive Escalades, but the OP has done nothing to rebut the argument he brings up that they do other than to make an assertion otherwise. From a rhetorical standpoint, why should I accept his unsupported assertion over his coworkers?
I think it’s more about bang for the buck. The amount of money a poor person can scrape together to make their car look nice is a lot less than the money required to make your house look nice. Also, your car is what most people are going to see. Richer people will piss money down the toilet for their home, they aren’t actually smarter at vanity consumption - it’s just easier to think so while lying back in your heated all-leather la-Z boy.
Of course, there is a nifty tax deduction associated with buying a house. Take two people with identical incomes, one paying rent on an apartment and the other paying the exact same monthly amount in a mortgage. At the end of the year the person buying the house is going to be several thousand dollars ahead. Food for thought when considering which is the wisest use of your money.
And I’d like to point out that I said “the residents of Section 8 housing” and not “the residents of a housing community which accepts Section 8 vouchers.” My ire is directed at the RESIDENTS OF SECTION 8 HOUSING – that is, the persons receiving a reduced rate on their rent by virtue of government subsidy. Not their next-door neighbors.
I’ve never heard of that rule. 24 CFR 982.201 addresses the eligibility for Section 8 housing, and it says clearly that eligibility is based on income. Period. There’s no “spend it in 30 days and it doesn’t count” clause. Perhaps you might provide a citation for this rule you’re claiming exists.
So what? My ire is not based on race. Unless your dear departed grandmother sold her house and moved into Section 8 housing before buying her Thunderbird, then I have no beef with her. If she did, then I do.
Are you kidding me?
I never said I know drug dealers who are completely broke, although I do know a couple. I said most of them would be glad to get up enough money to buy a 1990 Honda, which is what half of them are driving.
I know lots of drugdealers. They are family members mostly…family, extended family, friends of family, brother in law, tons of friends from childhood, school and the “hood”.
Of all the groubs I have just mentioned, about 2 or 3 individuals could afford a freakin’ Escalade. Those are the ones that have somehow figured out how to not get killed, long term incarcerated or paralyzed.
Most drug dealers are out on the corner, freezing through the cold and snow, catchin’ licks from the crack heads and suburbanite coke heads that come down the block. The have wads of money in their pocket and *all 14 guys on that one corner * have to turn most of that money over to the same guy in the fancy car. Half of them get around on foot, or by ‘rent a fiend’, which is when a new crack head loans you their car for a hit.
This is neither here nor there, but I just thought I would mention it sense you brought it up; Most of the drug dealers I know do not smoke their product, (I’m talking coke dealers here, not weed dealers. )
They simply hustle up enough money to buy gold chains and new sneakers and maybe kick out some money to the young mother of their kids. Sometimes, they make enough ‘smart’ moves to cop a used Acura at auction, but very rarely do they end up in a Navigator.
'Cause I said so? Seriously. I’m not being a smart ass here. I am straight up saying that I live in the heart of the back breaking ghetto. I work very hard to scratch out a living, I’m not doing too badly at that. I work amongst many, many others who are doing the same thing, and some of them like to buy fancy cars with their money. I really didn’t intend to debate this at all. I was just straight up telling anyone who would listen that the myth is false. When someone says, “Yeah, you see them going around in their fancy cars? Drug dealers! Why don’t they get a real job, and stop making babies for our tax dollars to feed”, I hope someone will speak up and say, “I don’t think that is true at all.”