The book, " Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century," by Jessica Bruder, describes this situation in great detail. Many people are interviewed and their nomadic part-time work situations are described. The movie of the same name has some of the people from the book acting themselves as characters.
âNomadlandâ was published in 2017. The situation has probably spread since home prices are unprecedented.
The price of rent skyrocketed after Covid.
The people sleeping in their vehicles are lucky enough to be able to afford vehicles.
Record High Numbers of People Living Unsheltered, Especially Among Individuals. In 2023, a record high 256,610 people, or 39.3 percent of all people experiencing homelessness, were unsheltered. More than 50 percent of individuals experiencing homelessness were unsheltered.
Wendy
is because the cost of living has soared to unprecedented heights
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Inflation is coming down, not up.
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Salaries and wages are outpacing inflation. If theyâre not, people will change jobs.
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The stock market is at an all time high. (âBut that doesnât affect me!â âOK, so you admit that the âtrickle downâ weâve been practicing for 40 years, giving the biggest tax breaks to the already wealthy, doesn work?â â{silence}â
The rate of inflation is coming down but that still means prices are going up on a cost of living change that has already soared. My annual salary increments outpace inflation now but it will take many years of them to get back even to 2019.
It is hard to undo the damage already done
The housing shortage, crisis if youâre one of the homeless, was one of the topics covered on Slate Money today. There was a discussion of the law suit being brought against RealPage for rent price fixing. Both the podcast and a transcript are at this link.
I wonder if private equity purchasing homes is adding to the pressure.
Weâve been in our home for 42 years and a couple of months ago, for the first time, we received a written offer to purchase our home out of the blue. It was from a company and it was a lowball number.
No mortgage payment for decades. It didnât seem worthwhile to pursue. The house has been kept up and weâve made improvements. Plus, weâve been making changes for a safer environment as we age.
And, no one can raise the rent. 
What is the percentage of people living in their car, of the total population, over the last 40 years? What is the trend?
There is a pol in Michigan, running for a second term, whose campaign ads talk about him living in his car, when he worked as a janitor, shortly after immigrating from India.
A movie was made, a few years ago, about some guy that started out living in his car, and went on to make a fortune for himself.
Steve
My Great Uncle bought a pharmacy in a hotel near the US Capitol during the Great Depression. He had no money, and nobody else wanted it either, so the hotel allowed him to rent-to-own. He had so little money that he and his wife lived in the stockroom of the pharmacy for years, each working a shift so the pharmacy could be open from morning through late night. There was a public restroom off the lobby where they âfreshened upâ each day,
After a year or two he started carrying souvenir trinkets of the Capitol: keychains and plastic replicas and little flags on a toothpick and such, and made a fortune. Two fortunes, actually. He later had a lovely house, another in Florida (where he retired) and the biggest, nastiest Cadillac the dealer would sell, a new one every year.
My mom got a tiny slice for helping him in his declining years, the rest went to charity. True story.
For the past 40 plus years weâve been screwing the middle class with price gouging in health care, college costs and increased taxes, all while throwing more money and big tax breaks at the top of the pyramid. The people sleeping in their cars are the fortunate ones. There are millions more sleeping in tents and cardboard boxes. As long as racism, ignorance and innumeracy informs public policy, there is little prospect of a solution.
Case in point: a married couple with a $120,000 annual wage & salary income, taking the $29,200 Standard Deduction, would pay $8,256 in Federal Income Taxes for 2024, plus another $9,180 in FICA for a total of $17,436. A neighbor couple with a multi-million dollar investment portfolio might decide that working made little sense. Instead they draw $120,000/yr in qualified dividends and capital gains from their portfolio. Their Federal income tax liability? Zero. (See, 2024 IRS Federal Income Tax Table) Once you graduate to the Leisure Class taxation regime, life is sweet.
FICA punishes working people even more. You secure your full Medicare benefit with just 40 quarters (10 years) of work. You gain no additional Medicare benefit from FICA taxes paid beyond that. For a person with an income triggering the maximum FICA tax, you get very little benefit from working past the age where your Average Indexed Monthly Earnings (AIME) exceeds the 2nd bend point of the calculation. That would be about age 45 for someone paying max FICA starting in their mid to late 20âs. If you happened to retire right at the top of the 2nd bend point, youâd be getting 77% of the maximum monthly Social Security benefit while only paying about half the FICA taxes. Thereâs not much of a case for working beyond that. (See: Why high income 40 year old retirees still get crazy big Social Security checks at age 62 )
If you understand this arithmetic, the compounded investment returns are enormous. Americaâs large multigenerational fortures are mostly the result of the lack of taxation, rather than whatever productive activity the first generation innovators and workers were up to.
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The lack of universal healthcare is the number one reason. It is the cause of most bankruptcies.
Except for property taxes going up year after year, and labor & materials for home maintenence rising at the rate of inflation or above.
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Absolutely. True for owners and renters alike. And I pay for utilities and insurance, too. But I donât pay any mortgage (or interest) for the living space.
Makes living pretty affordable for us.
Well it depends. A large apartment complex with a dedicated maintenance staff and bulk purchases, is buying their maintenance & repair services at wholesale prices. An individual homeowner calling in a HVAC technician during a heatwave is paying top dollar for that. Of course, if youâre a homeowner thatâs handy with tools, and can do your own plumbing and electrical work, you may be able to get your costs down to the level of a large landlord, but your time in making your own repairs is worth something, too.
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Given the apparent housing shortage then this is strange (if true):
Thatâs chump change compared to the billions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Loans business owners got during the COVID pandemic.
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No, really not. If they have âa dedicated maintenance teamâ then wages go up with inflation. And to have a dedicated team that can handle electric, HVAC, plumbing, paint, appliance replacement itâs got to be some gimongous complex and you have to pay top dollar to get people with all those skills.ââ
Theyâre buying their equipment at the same supply house the other guys are, which makes it maybe 10% less. (Iâve bought plenty there. It isnât some super wholesale price.)
A company with giant complexes is also paying accountants, has overhead, and passes along any increases in property tax by hiding it in the rent. Thereâs no savings there. Nobody escapes the taxes, and companies have expenses that mere homeowners donât have. Overall itâs close to a wash, barely worth talking about much less arguing over.
It is lies. More than likely. It is an election year. Fox loves to make things up for fools.
adding
About this law from a google search
Assembly Bill 1840 would make it clear that a person who applies for a loan under the California Dream for All Program cannot be disqualified solely because of their immigration status. It passed the state Senate with a 25-14 vote.3 days ago
Thatâs basically what Fox News reported:
A bill making its way through the California legislature would make undocumented migrants eligible to participate in a program that provides down-payment assistance.
I find it odd that undocumented migrants (we would call them illegal immigrants) get the same rights as US citizens
It does not make them ineligible.
It does not make them eligible.
Fox loves to twist things. The law is not about illegals.
I do not say undocumented. They are illegal. My family came here illegally from Ireland to work in the 1980s. So what? No one cared but color me brown and youâd run me out.
Nope. Itâs done with immigrant labor. As long as theyâre working on your property, they donât have to be union plumbers & electricians. At least that was true in the large complexes I lived in Texas and California.
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At least in Houston, large apartment complexes had property tax rates that were lower than the individually-owned condos next door. Sure theyâre paying accountants, but theyâre also getting economies of scale. I ran the numbers. If buying a condo was cheaper than renting, I would have done so.
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