When I was young and living on my own in a different state from parents off of three minimum wage jobs one of the obstacles I discovered was fire codes and limits placed by landlords. 😂 I completely understand that more people use more utilities and wear and tear on the apartment but boy was it frustrating. Not frustrating enough to move to a cardboard box though. I had no car to move to since I could only afford a bicycle. The trully bad things about bike commuting is you can't sleep in them or lock up your stuff in them.

Well, I live in a place with lots of people who have mig and tig welders in their garage and yes it is a privalage. I recognize that is not available to everyone. But for some kids whose parents, relatives, employers have the ability and invest in them it is a possability. My teen was welding today in fact, building a stand for his punching bag. My oldest son wished he would have gotten his CDL. He wasn't that far from it because a guy at the shop he worked as a shop hand took the time to teach him to drive a tractor trailer. He wasn't ready to test yet when he left for college because that was just his "summer job" and college was starting. My son found this shop job when he was cleaning dog poop out of neighbor's yards and cleaned the shop msnagers yard as a high school kid and that was how he ended being hired at the shop where they taught him all sorts of stuff. Of course, I guess what my son paid in was many hours of tedious sandplasting and pressure washing for the mechanics. The low skill job he was actually hired for. I realize that where you live and who you know greatly affects the opportunities you have. Most of my children have received or earned on the job training from their employers. From Bike mechanics, to operating equipment, to office admin. 3rd child was super excited to start at a mountaineering equipment store recently. He was hired to sell skies and cold weather gear. That was what he had to offer and got him hired. He wants to learn... everything else! I do know colleges allow for a lot of testing out of classes but not entirily. There is going to school to learn (which is good) but there is also times when it feels like paying money to sit in classes and waste your time. That is what drives people bonkers. When you have to be in a classroom for x amount of hours to get a paper telling the world what you supposedly learned. You may find great teachers along the way. You may also find classes that are a waste of time for stuff you could learn faster on your own. I prefer things that allow you to prove yourself if it is the type of thing that can be proven. Oldest son is finding ways to teach himself PCB design then he hopes to demonstrate his abilities to a company designing robotic crawlers for non destructive testing of pipelines. He doesn't need the degree (though he has an EE degree, it isn't required) he needs the ability to design these things to get hired.

This might have made a good poll but not sure how to add spouses age which can affect things.

22, married, 1 kid and one on the way. Dh was 24. The little 856 ft bottom floor condo we bought for 140,000. Maybe 5 years ago I let curiousity get to me and checked Zillow and it said said it was like 550,000. 😳 I tried to check again for this thread and alas it looks like it has been turned into apartment buildings. ☹️ Tried to find one nearby the original in like condition (neither fancy nor run down) with similar square footage and the range according to Redfin is 500,000-700,000. ETA husbands age.

I agree. But I don't think it has to be married people. And I have seen your posts enough to know you recognize room mates as a good alternative. What is interesting is my 18 year old has been pricing things to move out. He would prefer not to stick around with mom and dad. I think he just wants to feel independent which is understandable. Anyway it is much much cheaper for him to rent a 2-4 bedroom home if he has roomates to fill the other rooms then it is for him to get an apartment. I think large housing is a much softer market here because we have fewer families and more singles. It does seem strange that people assume a four plex of single bedroom or studio apartments will take more infastructure than a 4 bedroom home when people are filling up every room anyway. If you can't find friends to go in with you are stuck paying trying to find an apartment because it is much more dangerous to share a home with a stranger than a four plex but that is what people end up doing. I mean they produce the same amount of feces but 🤷‍♀️. Often extra rooms, garages, all sorts of things are rented. I remember looking with him and someone was renting a bed in a corner of their living room, not even a seperate bedroom. I don't know if someone took it or not but I wouldn't be surprised. If there isn't enough housing these things will happen. My friend with 7 kids bought a home on septic. They simply know they are going to have to pump it. It isn't rooms that matter with sewage. It is the number of people.

I might live in an outlier family but honestly my siblings and I were all all out before 18. My friends who went to college had more help from parents though.

You can get certified without school. It is performance based rather than hours in a classroom based. https://www.aws.org/Certification-and-Education/Professional-Certification/Certified-Welder-Program/?step=1

I do see college graduates struggle. I also have a frustration with the fact that college isn't neccessary for many jobs that require it. That is changing somewhat with the tight labor market. There are also jobs that require masters and still pay low wages! How do they find workers for such things? Your heart really has to be into it. But housing and healthcare are the monsters that squash the low wage workers. But yes, pursuing a goal is key. Trades, some of the allied health professions that just require certifications, technicians. Many things require learning but not a full degree. Some things you can test out of.

I will add as a traveler with family, hotels are prohibitively expensive because I am required to get multiple rooms. Well, my children are mostly adults but back in the day when we traveled as a group. I do know people who simply didn't fess up to the number of people sleeping in a room but those of us rule followers, conscience about even unspoken lies had to pay for multiple rooms.

It doesn't make sense. Not only that but just adding multifamily without commercial will invariably create traffic congestion because people can't do a darn thing without a car if every single business must be far away in the "commercial zone" I can understand factories but why can't you have a coffee shop in the middle of a neighborhood. Wouldn't people want that? And then we cancel all home based businesses and require people to have space in two buildings when one would do and then say "there's no room" while we use up as much space as possible and mow down houses for more roads. Zoning can be such a nightmare. If people are going to cling to zoning than at least try not to zone things as stupidly as possible.

My best buddy in elementary school could do a ton of pull ups but she was tiny. She weighed very little and also the leverage on shorter arms makes a difference. Don't believe me. Use a stick to hold a weight straight out then try it with a longer stick. It is why short compact people have an advantage in certain sports and long limbed people have an advantage in others.

I used to do lots or plain old fashioned push ups but age and a recent injury has changed that. I will probably have to ease back into it. Often the weak point for women is arm and especially chest muscles so the knee push ups will help with that but to increase core strength planks would help a lot. Women can often plank and not do push ups so I don't think it is all core. I could see a combo of planking and knee push ups getting someone to the point of full push ups in a more gradual way.

Regardless of number of listings I do think they should be taxed as hotels as mentioned above but I did find the article confusing. For one focusing on people with only one listing doesn't take it out of average joe territory. I know an electrician with 6 kids. When they moved out of their home they turned it into 2 listings because the layout allowed them to do so. Then in the summer they camp out at her sister's property and rent out their own home. Yes, they move out of their own home in the summer so they can make money since they are raising 6 kids on an electricians salary! So they would be people mislabelled by the article since they have three listings. Since they are moving out of their own home and camping they are not decreasing the number of homes available for long term living except for one house they could have sold instead. So the being super focused on making sure people have a single listing is weird. Everyone I know that does it air b&b has multiple listings not one but they still aren't big corporations. I am curious. Does the article writer not consider a homeowner worried about management and fees giving the reigns over to a property manager an individual host? Should an elderly person for example be able to manage the bookings and such themselves or they are classified as a corporation then because they hired someone to take care of it for them? I could see vacation rentals in a ski town owned by a variety of people using one property management company for their individual places for example since they aren't there. If you classified that property management person as an owner then it will look like one corporation owns them. Those types of vacation homes are more likely to be owned by wealthy people so maybe not average joes (though some may be) but it still seems a slight of hand article. It is probably some local who needed a job in a jobless ski town and realized he could manage other peoples property for a buck. I mean managing 20 some properties isn't reaching amazon proportions so I just don't honestly know what to make of it.

Different thread but I am happy with the newer federal scoring system that takes into community impact on transportation intiatives. We had people wanting to mow down lots of older more affordable housing to save 2 minutes on their commute. Would have lost federal funding though. I can see the difference it is making locally but once again different thread other than to say it kept my local community from displacing a bunch of people by destroying more housing for little gain.

States restricting health care expansion is another horror. We have hospitals competing for allowed expansion for x number of beds. I remember advertisements from two hospitals that were competing for state medical board to approve their expansion and it all felt like an egregious waste but that is a problem that will exist regardless if expansion is not allowed. In fact, the homeless use more medical resources then I do from frost bites, hypothermia, substance abuse and taxpayers pay for it but that really is it's own topic. Infastructure was handed to all the familes that bought earlier. Unless you are like my husband and I that own acerage where there is no electric, water, sewer, or even a road but that is unlikely. Like our home intown you probably all bought in places with established infastructure. Someone had to originally build that. Someone had to upgrade it. Infastructure always needs upgrades. When you double the number of people in an area you will double the tax base paying for said infastructure. There are strategic ways of lowering costs. A local example would be the town center where I live going multi family would be dramatically cheaper than putting city and sewer up the mountainside where people are all on well and septic. Saying that you can't have multi family on a septic based system for health reasons and the taxpayers don't want to pipe water and sewage up and down a mountain does make sense, especially when many more families can live where the city sewer system already exists. What doesn't make sense is saying there is no way to upgrade systems in general especially for increased density. And kids getting hit by cars is a whole nother thread I will spare you my thoughts on driver entitlement and pedistrian safety because you are probably tired of hearing from me. 🤣

That isn't how it works in my city. We do have community feedback and it can get really nasty. Even if the developers work with the comnunity to change different aspects the long drawn outprocess makes things costly. Time is money after all. They have shut down reasonable projects. They wanted to shut down the housing project I spoke of earlier in this thread but it made it through and actually made the whole neighborhood nicer.

This particular thing is happening in my city as well where the government has zoned for single-family housing. Because the builder is restricted to one type of housing, the builder will make the most money off a large home. Many basic costs stay the same whether I build a 1000 sq foot or 3000 sq foot home. They are called fixed costs. Why would I not build the biggest home if that will give me the most profit? But that is because the parameters set by the government. Would a duplex or 4 plex make me more money under the same parameters? I cannot tell you under your local conditions but I know here people would jump at a piece of that property and you cannot say that is what the market is dictating if that is controlled by the gov. The builder knows anything he builds will sell under current conditions.

Yes, it isn't useful for the individual but aggregate measures call for aggregate data. Hopefully, within individual circumstances people would adjust for very personal circumstances. My husband and I would always laugh at the mortgages we were offered by banks. No where on the form was a box asking how many children you had 🤣 or if any of them or you had special health circumstances or disabilities (which would be illegal) but both those things cost an incredible amount of money and drastically alter what a person can safely afford.

I agree profit is definitly the motive but I disagree that it is a bad motive unless they are not providing a good or service for it. But if there were plenty of homes they couldn't control the market. Also are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to own homes even if they build them? Would that not decrease incentives to build in places where we definitly need more building? What about foreclosures? Would banks quit loaning money at cheaper rates if they have no collateral? I am just not sure I understand all the ramifications of not allowing corporations to own homes. I am not even sure what it would entail or mean. I have a lot of questions on how that would work.

Totally agree that about the tax structures and they should be treated like hotels to level the playing field. Our city discounts primary residences in the tax bill. I also recently supported an increase in that. What do you think incentivizes corporations to buy homes? If they are putting them up for rent would it not decrease their profit margin to simply have enough other homes for people? The reason homes are a great investment is because their supply is restricted. I do agree about the tax dollars supporting corporations of various kinds. It is maddening but that is a whole thread in itself.

Well, it isn't allowed to work at all in this particular circumstance. Yes, there are costs imposed on neighbors when someone builds next door. We have decided that the neighbor has more say than the property owner or buyer. We need a more nuanced way of dealing with those costs. It sucks to have bought a place with a view on the 14th floor and then a larger building blocks that view. Perhaps payouts to current owners for the loss of their view is in order? But our current situation is that it is a constant battle to develop. Things like noise ordinances, smells, or traffic should be considered and perhaps rules like that would be better than neighbors getting to control what others do.

Well, honestly, in my opinion, what we need is for the supply to not be artificially restricted by local government and for it to adapt to the needs of the local population using prices. There will be a lot variety in a healthy housing market that isn't totally restricted by gov't.

"Low income housing" is the typical designation for specialized homes with rules regarding Federal income limits etc. Affordable housing is just affordable for the general population. It is often looked at from a fairly broad range around the median income of the city.

I am not a big fan of bans. It is more complicated than that. Many air b&bs are just average joes trying to make a buck. They also provide rentals near family and such where hotels may not exist. We are a tourist destination so I understand the frustration. I think I mentioned in the last thread that 3 hotels have been converted to housing. The compactness of a hotel plus water to every room (unlike an office building) makes them great for converting to low income housing if you need a lot of homes quickly. We need space for both tourists and locals. More options is better than taking away options.

My husband worked for a non-profit with a similar model. Percentage is for low income, others are market rate. They do try to make nice units, landscaped and well designed but are certainly not as fancy as what is in those pictures. We had a lovely complex in our neighborhood(looks way nicer than surrounding homes) and got a lot of flack from people worried about the neighborhood going to trash because "low income people". I had to respond once that if his home was vandalized I am sure he could chase the person down since it is senior housing project and they couldn't run that fast. 🙄 Anyway, it has lovely green spaces despite the density and I hope they build many more around the city. The tallest building is senior housing and the surrounding townhomes are private and paid for the development.