The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor in America

Re:The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor i... by zdragnar on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @01:12AM (#34077286)

Believe it or not, people exist who don't want to own a home and would rather rent. There are also plenty of times where it is a better idea to rent than buy a home- plenty of people who bought right before a housing market crash then needed to move for a job can attest to that. Generally, if you aren't sure that you're going to stay in a home for several years, you're not getting any equity back out if you need to sell... Especially if you had to do any big repairs or maintenance.

Landlords are a necessary part of a functioning society.

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Re:The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor i... by riku_iki on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @02:37AM (#34077744)

There are incentives were produced which put people who didn't buy into significant disadvantage:

- refinancing on low interest

- significant leveraged appreciation of housing pricing because of fiscal policies

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Re:The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor i... by pasquinelli on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @03:22AM (#34078060)

imagine you lived in a world where roads were all private and it was just how things are done that you pay fees to use them, fees set by the roadlords to keep them confortable. you'd say roadlords are a necessary part of a functioning society, but you'd be wrong, wouldn't you? you'd be confusing how things are with how they must stay.

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Re:The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor i... by yanderekko on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @04:07AM (#34078317)

>you'd say roadlords are a necessary part of a functioning society, but you'd be wrong, wouldn't you?

Not really, given that something is apparently different about this world such that the existence of roadlords represents a stable equilibrium.

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Re:The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor i... by bm3719 on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @11:11AM (#34082543)

Private road owner here (I have a 1/8th share in the road that goes by my property). We pay for maintenance of the road, yet we don't charge people to use it because we value the access it provides for others to come to us. For example, if we charged for use, then UPS wouldn't deliver to our doors.

The situation is different for highways, bridges, and tunnels of course, but we already have pay-per-use for some of those, and it seems to work okay.

Not saying roads should all be private, but I see this argument sometimes, and it misses the reality of the incentive structure of the owners of private roads.

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Re:The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor i... by zdragnar on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @12:30PM (#34083648)

It's an interesting point. There are private roads, and most that I've used have been on par with public roads of equivalent traffic patterns (mostly because people who put in private roads are the same ones hired by the government to put in public ones).

What's more interesting is if you take that extreme and flip it back to housing.

Imagine a world where:

You are banned from owning land or housing. There's a variety of options to live in, but limited by what the government decides is fitting. Then, a popular movement within government decides that a particular type of housing is not appropriate for society, and starts destroying all of those houses. Instead, they decree, the best and only type of housing that should be available are communes where everyone gets a bed but zero privacy. You're not allowed your own four walls, you have to share space with everyone.

It's so much more efficient! they decree.

Well, that's exactly what is starting to happen to roads in some major cities. Parking spaces are being removed in favor of expanding public transportation. Entire blocks are being declared off-limits to private cars to make them "walkable".

I'm not really advocating one way or the other here- my point is that it's kindof silly to compare roads and housing at such extremes, because the benefits and consequences of various polices are not directly analogous to each other.

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