Living in China is getting cheaper. Because rents in my neighborhood in central Beijing are dropping, my wife and I pressed our landlord to reduce ours by $140 a month in a new lease that we signed last month. He wasn’t too happy about it, but he’s lucky that we didn’t move out. Given the desperation of local landlords, we probably could’ve saved another $500 a month had we switched to a comparable apartment nearby.
BUT AT WHAT COST?
Tbf I don’t know how to square the contradiction, the value of houses needs to drop sharply but we’ve organized our society and retirement system around the idea that the value of a house will always increase. If home value drops 90% like it should, a lot of people no longer have money for retirement.
I guess the answer is just “triple the payout of social security”
Hand the deed over to their person living there
Forgive all mortgage debt
Forbid ownership of housing you don’t live in
Nationalize excess housing
Construct housing based on needs of people living in an area/protected growth etc. Planned.
I think just forbidding owning houses you don’t live in would be a huge start
Legitimately, what is their retirement plan if the value is stored in the house? Sell it and live on the streets?
sell the house, pay a few years’ rent to the assisted living prison where they go to die
Ah, so sell the house to some private equity company and fuck over their kids/family/the local community by creating another rental. We need multi-generational households back already.