I went out the other evening to do a spot of grocery shopping. There is a Dollar Tree store in this parking lot. As I pulled into the driveway, I paused and had to look again to be sure what I was seeing. There was a half naked man behind the Dollar Tree, using the side of the dumpster as a toilet. Then, he was trying to clean himself up with whatever he had available.
The emotions of surprise, shock, disgust all flood my mind. I went and got my items and drove out the same way. The man was still out there, doing what ever.
It is a black eye on our society where people are doing things like this public. This a middle-class neighborhood and I have never in my life seen things like this before. The homeless population grows by the day. The City refuses to fund public toilets because they ‘cost too much money.’ How much are things like this costing us in depreciating the value of our neighborhoods, creating filth, disease and mess that some unhappy worker will have to clean up?
The unemployment and housing crisis in this town is threatening to bring all of us to our knees. We need to address to cause of much of this. Covid of course is out there; however, the escalating cost of housing is outstripping most other problems. We need to try to grasp the fact that commercial real estate transactions have crippled our economy and that goes back to the recession on 2008. The fact that some people get rich while others go into the toilet is not helping. Why do you think that many extremely rich people are moving to New Zealand and remote islands off the coast of Africa? Maybe they remember their history lessons about the French Revolution and want to get out of the way. Here are more articles about the effects that commercial real estate have had and are having on our economy.
Domino Effect: Market Research
2017 – Andrew from DJA, Sacramento “…(we do) careful market research to deliver fair prices….in relation to the area.” (Retrieved from the Internet, 2022.)
What this phrase ‘careful market research’ means is that property management companies do market research for the area where their rentals are located. If you remember your statistics or math classes; the rental prices from a geographical area are gathered, (example – one bed room apartments,) the prices of all units are added and then divided by the total number of units to give the average market price for units in that zip code. This appears to be a fair system, until….one owner raises his price, then another does and another and, so on. In a domino effect, as more and more owners raise their prices, this same system therefore creates a rising average price. And this is whether or not the rise in prices is truly justified or not. For example, as seen in recently rising cost of gasoline and other inflationary costs.
Landlords are never required to give an accounting to their tenants for the increased rent and the reasons for it. They simply raise the rent and justify the cost with such market research tools that support their case.
An antidote to rising prices can be that potential renters, when they see a property that they like, when presented with the usual twenty page lease agreement containing endless Thou Shalt Not clauses, add one of their own stating “It is agreed between the parties that a rental increase of not more than (3-6%) shall attach each year.” When the rental company tells the potential renter ‘we can’t do that’ the renter can say, ‘and I can’t rent from you.’ If enough people did that, it would help curb the mad-dog escalating system that is now in place.
Recession of 2008
The Great Recession
By
Updated May 26, 2022
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What Was the Great Recession?
The Great Recession was the sharp decline in economic activity during the late 2000s. It is considered the most significant downturn since the Great Depression. The term “Great Recession” applies to both the U.S. recession, officially lasting from December 2007 to June 2009, and the ensuing global recession in 2009.
The economic slump began when the U.S. housing market went from boom to bust, and large amounts of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and derivatives lost significant value.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The Great Recession refers to the economic downturn from 2007 to 2009 after the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble and the global financial crisis.
- The Great Recession was the most severe economic recession in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
- In response to the Great Recession, unprecedented fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policy was unleashed by federal authorities, which some, but not all, credit with the subsequent recovery.
Understanding the Great Recession
The term “Great Recession” is a play on the term “Great Depression”. An official depression occurred during the 1930s and featured a gross domestic product (GDP) decline of more than 10% and an unemployment rate that at one point reached 25%.
While no explicit criteria exist to differentiate a depression from a severe recession, there is a near consensus among economists that the downturn of the late-2000s, was not a depression. During the Great Recession, U.S. GDP declined by 0.3% in 2008 and 2.8% in 2009, while unemployment briefly reached 10%. However, the event is unquestionably the worst economic downturn in the intervening years.
According to a 2011 report by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the Great Recession was avoidable. The appointees, which included six Democrats and four Republicans, cited several key contributing factors that they claimed led to the downturn.2
First, the report identified failure on the part of the government to regulate the financial industry. This failure to regulate included the Fed’s inability to curb toxic mortgage lending.
Next, there were too many financial firms taking on too much risk. The shadow banking system, which included investment firms, grew to rival the depository banking system but was not under the same scrutiny or regulation. When the shadow banking system failed, the outcome affected the flow of credit to consumers and businesses.3
Other causes identified in the report included excessive borrowing by consumers and corporations and lawmakers who were not able to fully understand the collapsing financial system. This created asset bubbles, especially in the housing market as mortgages were extended at low interest rates to unqualified borrowers who could not repay them. This caused housing prices to fall and left many other homeowners underwater. This, in turn, severely impacted the market for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) held by banks and other institutional investment companies.
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Conclusion: this country has gone through a fantastic financial drought caused primarily by the housing and mortgage lending industries. People have lost jobs, money, retirement funds, the where withal to live and some, their lives.
Once again, the tail that wags the dog, the commercial real estate industry is spreading its tentacles throughout this state. The end result will be systems in place that consistently raise the cost of living to the point it is unaffordable to the average person. People give up saving money, taking vacations, repairing their cars and teeth. The owners increase in wealth and power and exert increasing control and pressure on the economy. While sitting in their Cadillac Escalades, making appointments on cell phones that affect the lives of the ‘common people’ who they have neither a connect to nor any care for. Essential, the middle-class and our way of life rots under the heel of designer boots.
The solution to these problems is for individual cities to be given the authority to place a cap on the percent increase per year, allowed to landlords. An increase that is in line with the ordinary increases in salaries would be fair. Since most salaries increase per year by about 3 to 3.5%, so should rents. It is understandable that inflation this last year has out stripped those amounts, but why should renters be responsible for those numbers? An investment company with $20,000,000 in assets can better afford to take the ‘hit’ of inflation than the renter who has less than $2,000 in the bank. Pressure needs to be put on lawmakers in the State capital to make this a priority issue.
It is time to take back the economy from commercial real estate interests. This dog needs a muzzle.
7/17/22 cew
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