#real estate speculation

[anniekoh]

The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream

by Jason Vuic (2021) @jasonvuic

Florida has long beckoned to retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but for many the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners.

For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result was Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others--sprawling exurban communities with no downtowns and little industry but millions of residential lots. As Jason Vuic recounts in his raucous new history, these communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, fifty years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

decided to scroll through seans instagram and screaming

[allthecanadianpolitics]

British Columbia is expanding the tax it created to clamp down on real estate speculation and ensure homes in rental-strapped communities don’t sit empty.

A statement from the Ministry of Finance says the Speculation and Vacancy Tax now includes the municipalities of North Cowichan, Duncan, Ladysmith, Lake Cowichan, Lions Bay and Squamish.

Starting early next year, homeowners in those areas will join owners in 40 other B.C. cities, districts and towns who are required to declare how their property was used in 2023.

The statement says 99 per cent of people who live in B.C., can expect to be exempt for the 2023 tax year, but homeowners in the new municipalities, along with those already covered by the tax, must make formal declarations in the new year.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[tanadrin]

Maybe a better analogy for exploitative social classes would be "vulture" as opposed to "parasite"? Though that's less ableist and more unfair to birbs that play an important ecological role and don't deserve the reputation they get.

idk man, do landlords form a coherent class these days? a landlord can be anybody from somebody who rents out the condo they inherited from their dead mom to an investor in a giant national property chain like Deutsche Wohnen. there are exploitative jobs, maybe, but this smacks of the urge to create a coherent category of Bad People Whomst If We Only Got Rid Of, Everything Would Be Better, which I think is kinda BS.

objectively, a lot of landlords are not very good at their jobs (this is why the phrase "the landlord special" has entered the lexicon) and some are really exploitative. but so are a lot of office managers. landlords being intrinsically tainted by sin doesn't seem like the problm. and if you think there are too many people renting out property vs owning it, and this contributes to the lack of housing, or if you think real estate speculation is a drag on the economy, there are plenty of policy levers to choose from to correct for this.

historically a lot of the animus directed at landlords came from the fact that "landlord" usually meant a literal lord of some description, like somebody who owned a vast estate with tenant farmers who acquired that wealth over generations of feudal conquest and peasant-oppression. and that's pretty shitty! but even then, the remedy for that can be anodyne and unsexy policy--big inheritance taxes dismantled most of the large landed estates in the british isles over the course of the 20th century, for instance. small time modern landlords, however lazy or exploitative, or even big evil property investment companies, strike me as fundamentally different animals. like, are they great for the economy? maybe not! but there are a lot of jobs that are not great for the economy that we don't waste time coming up with new ways of hating, and there more productive uses of our energy to correct these problems than figuring out which gross animal to compare them to.

[friezaglasiencold]

What benefits are there for working in the Frieza Force? Does it offer dental and medical care?

Dental, medical, vision, mental, emergency, the works. I like my staff to be healthy and able; you can't run an empire if everyone in it wants you dethroned. I'd have to be suppressing mutinies every five minutes if there was no benefit to working for me.

The pay is nothing to sniff at, either. Why, did you want to join?

[hasmashdoneanythingwrong]

Wait a fucking minute… Is Spriggan a fucking real estate speculator?!

[osshisan]

i know it's risky and i probably should slow my roll to not end up disappointed because this is ensemble stars but i have such high hopes for the valkyrie climax story... if !-era valk was the build-up of mika helping shu (and the unit itself) to recover from the war and regain stability, it feels like !!-era valk has been the process of shu helping mika develop his confidence in his own artwork and humanity in return-- so they can truly be equals. and since we already know the event is a shu center...... i just think there's maximum potential for this story to fuck severely if done right

[aydascomprehendsubtext]

As always I am much less well versed in policy solutions to chronic homelessness than I am options to tackle general housing affordability and they are in important ways different issues. But my extremely uninformed opinion is always if someone's life improved because you gave them a place to live when they didn't have one and you also did [second thing] I would like a very very good explanation for what exactly the second thing contributed or what barriers to the first thing the second thing resolved.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Entrance to the "Cour du Dragon" (Dragon's Courtyard) in Paris - victim of shady real-estate speculations

French vintage postcard

[vanishingsydney]

Demolition job reveals ironic ghost sign. It's a certainty a solid block of apartments will go in here, nothing surer. Enmore.

[musherum]

i wish everyone who has turned perfectly useable housing into airbnbs for wealthy tourists and deprived more people of shelter in the process a very sincere Die, Die Right Now, Die Right Now And Never Come Back

[greatpacificbooks]

Book for Sale ~ Clyde Cadwallader 1960 How to Make Money Speculating in Real Estate * Big Profit | eBay https://www.ebay.com/itm/265988277610 #money #realestate #tips #deals #profits #speculating #flipping #nothingdown #buylow #sellhigh #1960s #selfhelp #personalwealth #books #rarebooks #DIY

[orcelito]

Along the panes of the ramp up to the bridge, I counted a total of over 50 little spiders, all spinning their own little webs

I took pictures of newly growing leaves, leaned against the (not spider covered) fences to watch the river water pass, overheard a mother chastising her daughter for throwing her favorite toy off the side and into the river

As I biked, I swayed back and forth across empty sidewalks, spun circles in empty car lots, slowed and sped to whatever took my fancy

It's a beautiful day today, and I'm happy to be alive

[demimonde-semigoddess]

The people on that landlord post being like “I don’t see how it’s class warfare to buy property and then charge more than the mortgage  payment (or once paid off, property tax) for it” are actually horrible and/or insane.

[atlaslisboa]

Calm and security attract Americans buying homes in Portugal | Diário de Notícias (PT)

The Americans are certainly here, and how: “At the end of 2023, almost 10,000 Americans lived in Portugal – approximately 1% of the total immigrants in the country,” according to Diário de Notícias. We here at Atlas, most of us hailing from the U.S., plus a couple of us regularly being referenced as sources to friends and friends of friends trying to move here, believe there are far, far more…

[ecrivainsolitaire]

Fantastic Beasts is suspended indefinitely.

Musk is begging for cash because he made the stupidest purchase in internet history.

Zucky Wucky is hemorrhaging cash because the Metaverse goal of becoming the NFT successor of real estate speculation was met with the deserved mockery at how stupid it was.

Trump is finally being properly prosecuted for crimes he unquestionably and very inconspicuously committed.

Alex Jones owes a billion dollars to Sandy Hook victims.

The Tories are imploding in a schism that might actually result in the collapse of the British empire.

Putin has ran out of army and crawled pathetically to the corner a tiny insurgent army pushed him towards, decades of military propaganda burnt away in months.

Prime Minister Shinzō Abe died with no glory.

The GOP is so confused after the Trump era they don't even know how to run their grifts anymore.

Rings of Power was such a mediocre release Amazon could potentially drop Prime Video altogether.

Turns out 2022 was really the "find out" year. It took a while but I'm loving this season finale so far.