by soulofmischief | 2025-08-02 18:50:16+00:00
Interesting anecdata, thanks for sharing that. I'll contribute some as well.

I paid $700 for a two-story, 2bed/2bath unit in a quadplex in 2013 in this city. Last year, when I moved back, I was paying $750 for a tiny 400sqft studio apartment the size of my old apartment's living room.

My landlord was lagging on getting me my new lease to sign for another year. Turns out, I was a bargaining chip. A new landlord just bought the building at the beginning of this year and raised the rent to $850, out of the blue a month before my old lease expired. This was a ~13% sudden increase in expenses, and we do not have rent control.

He said, and I quote, "I like the community you have helped build here[0], I don't want everyone to run off, so I don't want to increase rent too high, too fast." (He wanted to boil the frog)

Our immediate response was to find a home in our neighborhood and purchase it. The median price is around $380-550k in this neighborhood, and that nets you almost no yard and maybe 700-1800sqft in living space on average. This is the oldest neighborhood in the city. It has a long, colorful history, and was originally settled by ex-slaves.

Today, when a home goes on the market in this neighborhood, it is usually snapped up by either private equity or rent-seeking landlords within 1-2 weeks, renovated and either flipped for way more to a gentrifying population, or most-often leased out to younger people who are then priced out of owning their own property.

We found one which was considerably cheaper than the average, but have to put in about $50k worth of work for it to be up to code, fix the foundation, the roof, completely rewire the home, repairing and refinishing the floors, repainting, and more. It's a great home, a good deal for the area, but it is very old, badly-maintained and has a lot of serious problems.

And much of this has to be done now, right after purchasing and before we can even move in, for safety and practical and scheduling reasons, and also because our insurance suddenly dropped us without warning until we prioritize the $13k in electrical work that needs to be done, meaning we have to also maintain rent and utilities at another dwelling while also paying this mortgage and tens of thousands to contractors.

This, in addition to the large up-front deposit for such a large home price, and an insane mortgage rate, means we are paying an exorbitant amount of money, over half a million dollars to own a home in a shithole, run-down state with zero economic opportunities, compared to the local median wage. This kind of money would have bought you a small mansion out here when I was younger.

A few years ago, I moved into a neighborhood in Fort Worth. I couldn't find a house with a reasonable mortgage, almost none for sale at all, and so I rented a home instead through a corporate property management company. The sinking foundation was causing the roof to cave in and there were humongous cracks across every wall and ceiling. The fan was so loud it sounded like you were next to a jet, and there was a huge lack of insulation in the walls. The roof needed replacing. There was water damage. There were a million other issues with the place, and all in all it was a dump which I should have been able to buy for a great price if it was on the market and not being used as an investment vehicle for private equity.

I appraised all of the issues and offered to buy the place from them at a reasonable value. They wouldn't even entertain the conversation, even though I persisted. Resigned, I finally forced them to carry out the repairs anyway after making arguments about it being uninhabitable and not even close to being worth the $1800 a month in rent. They probably spent $30k repairing the foundation alone. They also replaced A/C components, replaced the roof, landscaped, did a bunch of other things. All the while refusing to just sell me the place and let me fix it up and live in it. I'm sure they put it back on the market for even more after I left.

It sure feels like late-stage capitalism is progressively getting harder to prop up. And we're seeing that it only accelerates at the very end, with a far-right, populist sentiment sweeping the globe under the guise of economic redemption, and the accompanying policies having disastrous economic effects on the middle and lower classes.

[0] I got two other people to move into other units, and am long-time friends with another dweller, and have made an effort to meet the other tenants and establish some level of social interaction between us