Following on from my rather angry post yesterday, I thought I would elaborate on a possible solution to the housing problem.
By the housing problem, I refer to the fact that house prices continue to climb above inflation and therefore become more and more unaffordable. A contributing factor to this is the inability to match housing supply to demand – that is to say, we simply don’t have enough houses.
But actually, we do. Go for a walk around Clarence Dock or City Island and you’ll find them a ghost town. Nobody lives there.
A significant contributing factor to this is that a lot of people bought second homes to rent out and then the property market collapsed and so all of these people were left with properties they couldn’t rent out nor could they sell and nor did they really want. But of course people refuse to sell them at a loss, so house prices don’t go down to an affordable level, and so they continue to be unaffordable.
One way to resolve this problem is to ban the practice of buying a second home to let. Just make it illegal. This might sound crazy at first but it’s actually more common than you would think – in Japan, for example, you can only rent out a property that you own in its entirety (without a mortgage).
Because, when you really think about it, buying second homes for rent is really just taking advantage of the younger generation, or poorer strata of society. If you weren’t allowed to do this, housing companies would be forced to sell to people who actually want to live in the house and so they would have to be affordable for people – no more fat landlords buying all the properties and forcing people to pay rent to pay off someone else’s mortgage.
One of my friends was recently screwed over by an agency he was contracting for who refused to pay him a rather large amount of money they owed him. This caused all sorts of problems, including a rather late rent payment, and as a consequence he soon found his letting agent moaning about how they had had the landlady (who owned their house) on the phone screaming that she couldn’t pay her mortgage.
This was something that really resonated with me. Because, it’s nonsense.
As if it’s our job as tenants, to pay their mortgage. That is the risk you take when you choose to rent your second house out, and it’s not our job to cater for your bad financial planning. Don’t buy a house unless you can afford it.
If I wanted the stress of having to make sure I could make a mortgage payment every month, I would buy a house. I rent, because I don’t want that stress.
But much more than that, it is a problem with the inequality in society. These people are so wealthy that they can afford not just one house, the one they live in, but at least a second one, the one they rent out to you.
What do we receive for the privilege of helping these people build their property empire? We get to pay their mortgage for them, keeping them rich and us poor. And we’re supposed to give a shit if they can’t pay the mortgage on their second home while the tenant struggles to find the money to feed his child? Fuck off.
I would have written a guide on how I did this, but the blog post over on If Not True Then False covers it perfectly, so just go over there and follow their guide.
Why do all these days come at once?
I’m a man who can deliver on his promises – last year I promised I would be booking the morning off to watch the Super Bowl and for Super Bowl XLVI, I delivered! You could of course argue that my willingness to take a day off because I was planning to be up very late isn’t really evidence of an ability to deliver to tough deadlines in any field of working life, but you would be wrong 😉 .
With the New York Giants having knocked out my beloved 49ers, who I have supported ever since I decided to pick a team to support and buy an appropriate shirt, I was firmly behind the New England Patriots and their very handsome quarterback Tom Brady. After all, there comes a point in life when you have to choose – are you a Patriot, or are you a Terrorist?
Unfortunately, with the Giants scoring a reluctant touch down with only a minute remaining on the clock, Brady couldn’t quite deliver a response. And that’s how I lost my housing deposit gambling on American Football…
February 16th, 2012 |
Life
Having decided it had been far too long since we last had a house warming, there was really only one thing we could do to fix this – move. So this is our new place. Actually, it isn’t, but ours is almost identical to this one, but with nicer carpets and air conditioning.
If you’re wondering why the photos are rubbish quality, it’s because they were compressed into GIF accidentally and then re-compressed to JPEG. I could redo them, but I have more important things to do.
If you need super quick access to a file, for example a log file which isn’t going to be too big but it being used by a script which is time critical, then rather than writing it to disk, you can mount part of your file system in memory and write to it there.
This has the disadvantage that when you restart your system, you will lose the data. But for test scripts, logs or other temporary files that you don’t mind getting lost, it can really speed up performance.
Luckily, most systems come with a an area mounted in memory already – so you don’t even need to configure it!
cd /dev/shm
If said directory exists, you’ll have a memory mounted directory already and can start using it immediately.
It had been a while since the last meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds – we didn’t have a January meeting due to conflicts with New Year and the week after, so this meeting was our first since the start of December. It was cold and icy outside, so big thanks to all those who made the effort and braved the freezing temperatures.
