“Also at risk are Ukraine’s archives. Since Putin began closing the Russian ones to all but approved researchers, Ukraine’s records have become a way into the Soviet period for historians not only of Ukraine, but the whole Soviet Union. Their closure is a blow to scholars round the world. Daria Mattingly, a leading historian of Stalin’s 1932-3 artificial famine, fears ‘archivocide’. Russian occupiers ‘might destroy everything that doesn’t fit into their narrative … That would be catastrophic; it would be the erasing of Ukrainian identity.’”
Just read the statement “in a few years Biden will be a nonentity that was in the right place in the right time” like…
I don’t know how to explain to you that the increase in monthly food stamp amounts we’ve seen in just the past year has literally kept some people alive and in their homes.
It’s just very very easy to dismiss Biden and the past year as a failure when you don’t have a family member relying on continued Medicaid coverage, or don’t think the vaccine rollouts were a big deal, or weren’t ever at risk of missing a house payment.
WE SHOULD BE IN THE MIDDLE OF A NATIONAL HOUSING CRISIS BEYOND ANYTHING WE FACED IN 2009 AND THE FACT THAT WE AREN’T PROVES DEMOCRATIC POLICIES AND PRESIDENTS WORK!
Sometimes the fact that you have the ability to complain about things that aren’t ~keeping your shelter~ means things are going better than expected!
….we are experiencing a national housing crisis, though.
Ok, so I already addressed this in another post, but here we go:
Part of the reason we’re in the middle of a housing affordability crisis that specifically spiked in the middle of a pandemic…is a direct result of all of the changes made to keep people alive and housed during that pandemic.
Normally when a spouse dies, and the other spouse doesn’t have the credit or income to refinance the home or make the payments, they lose the home. Modifications are totally possible in this situation, but they really only came into place in 2009, and if you have too much equity in the home, you may not qualify for the lower payment, the mortgage company would say “just sell the house.” But during Covid, rules were put into place to avoid that person losing the home, modifying those mortgages into something the surviving member could afford no matter how much equity the home had. Normally, that would’ve been another home entering the market and some movement. But it’s not. Times that by a couple thousand households.
Normally, when a person loses their job, they might only get unemployment for a few weeks and move back in with mom and dad, freeing up another apartment. Right now? Extended unemployment and government checks meant that person didn’t have to move, and if they filled out a CDC form and communicated with their landlord, they couldn’t be evicted either. And there was a nationwide rent assistance program put into place. As a housing counselor, I can promise you that literally never happened before. In the entire history of our country, there has never been a nationwide rent assistance program put into place to keep people in their homes.
Normally, when a young kid gets out of college, they have 6 months to find a good job before having to make student loan payments. Now? You’ve got kids who haven’t made a loan payment in over 2 years if they graduated at the right time. These kids were able to find jobs, and then saved all that money, and are able to have a down payment right out of the gate. There’s a whole crop of 20 somethings able to buy homes years before comparable graduates who left college just a few years earlier, putting pressure on the whole system.
And lastly, new home construction has been halted now for about 18 months to stop construction workers from catching Covid. That may not sound like much to you and me, but that’s a very, very long time. No new homes on the market for 18 months, to keep people safe, so all the homebuyers are snapping at each other for the same homes that already exist. Don’t even get me started on work from home peeps taking their California income and then buying homes in Des Moines.
And an “abandoned home” isn’t necessarily a home someone can just buy and move into. Take Detroit for example. Lots of abandoned homes! You can buy them for just a few thousand dollars! Here’s one example of a home listed for $1000, plus basic title fees, etc. But do you have the money to fix the pipes to make the home habitable? The roof? The floorboards that are rotted through? Once you fix it, odds are you can’t sell it when you need to move, because there are no comparable homes to actually figure out how much it’s worth and the next buyer can’t get a mortgage. Are you gonna keep living in the abandoned home that’s got another 5 other abandoned houses on the same street? Rebuilding Detroit is a program designed to make houses livable again, and even with these houses selling for thousands more than comparable homes in the area, they’re losing money hand over fist. The program that was supposed to help here, the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, was removed from BBB to get Covid aid passed.
This is what it looks like when a government prioritizes stability, housing, and safety above the economy. Prices do sometimes go up. The Biden administration did exactly what it needed to do, but the cost goes somewhere.
Now, could there still be a wave of foreclosures coming as people fall through the cracks, bringing down prices again. Absolutely. We’re already starting it. But the tidal wave that should have happened simply isn’t happening - that same tidal wave that decimated home prices after 2009 when everyone got foreclosed on hasn’t happened yet. On the other side of cheap housing is either 1) ballooning construction, or 2) evictions and foreclosures.
Literally heard a convo at the library where a guy was telling a girl that he’s an omega and the girl telling him that she’s a beta, and my mind just did not automatically connect the context to fraternity pledge classes at all and I just whispered to myself “what the fuck?? What the fuck??”
Night Hauling was painted by the twenty-seven-year-old Andrew Wyeth at
the height of World War Two. Set against the Maine coast in Port Clyde,
where Wyeth’s family summered, it depicts a shadowy lobsterman hauling
in a trap under cover of darkness, the scene lit only by the figure’s
concealed lamp and the water’s startling nocturnal phosphorescence.
