I remember that storm too. I slept through the entire thing, despite all the damage done outside (greenhouses moved houses away, the roof of our school ripped off, trees down, and builders frantically knocking down other trees pretending that it was storm damage).
Where I am there’s been a huge increase in houses being bought for cash by equity hedge funds, like 25% of houses going on the market. Nearby Kushner bought hundreds of houses in Baltimore. The impact of this is that house prices soared because no one can compete against a multi-billion-dollar company to buy a house, which artificially pushes up prices.
Secondly, I’ve done a lot of engagement with policy makers and builders and you are not going to get affordable housing being built if you relax zoning laws (which I’m in favor of across the whole city). Instead, what is supposed to happen is that the older properties become less attractive and hence their prices (or rent) are supposed to fall. That’s the theory anyhow. Anyway, the builders all say there is no financial incentive for them to build affordable housing, they make so much more on luxury buildings. You’ll only get it if the local government does it themselves and most in America are reluctant to get involved (it’s why they like saying 15% of a complex should be ‘affordable’ because they don’t have to do anything about it, the builders do, and it’s too small an impact to fix the issue).
> Anyway, the builders all say there is no financial incentive for them to build affordable housing, they make so much more on luxury buildings.
This is only really a problem insofar as building luxury homes reduces the throughput of new supply because they take longer to build than affordable housing. In terms of overall market effect, as long as you're not allowing places to sit empty, it doesn't particularly matter if you're adding new homes at the top or the bottom of the market.
> Where I am there’s been a huge increase in houses being bought for cash by equity hedge funds, like 25% of houses going on the market.
Is this increase in absolute number of sales, or increase in the percentage? Because, if the house affordability due to high interest rates goes down, one of the only buyers with money that remain are hedge funds. So, in the past you had 1000 homes selling per year, 100 of those going to hedge funds, now you have 400 total sales, with 100 going to hedge funds. The relative percentage of houses bought by hedge funds increases from 10% to 25%, even though the absolute number remains flat.
It seems to be an increase in both absolute number of sales and increase in the percentage. Some signs indicate hedge funds purchasing consumer real estate (houses/apartments) is working towards an all time high thanks to the bottom falling out of the commercial real estate market in 2020 and it being far less reliable an investment post remote-work culture. A lot of commercial real estate investors have flipped to consumer real estate in a way they hadn't before. It may be a while before a new equilibrium happens.
(This is where investments in risky things like flipping various cities' "downtown' commercial real estate into additional consumer real estate are starting to look really interesting, especially in some of the cities that had massive corporate tower investments just pre-2020. It's also where you see some cities directly and indirectly pressuring major corporations into RTO policies in the hopes of it releasing some of the pressure on the consumer real estate market in those cities by encouraging hedge funds to reinvest in corporate real estate. It's hard not to feel those pressures are somewhat futile long term, but to feel sympathy for why they seem like necessary short term sandbagging projects.)
It's true that the current large developers will never meet the need for affordable housing, but that's where small local developers can fill in assuming zoning and regulation allows them to. All of the small projects that are profitable but too tiny to justify the time of large developers can be picked up by small, local developers who have a vested interest in incrementally improving a place.
If you want an example of an 'odd' case for your app, one thing I would never expect, is that my car dealer apparently recently titled my car in VA while I live in MD, although I bought the car six years ago (I discovered this when I tried renewing my MD tags and was told my car had been titled out of state). In effect, they have just stolen my car through sheer incompetence even though it's paid off and all the documentation show I owe it. Maryland MVA say there's nothing I can do until I get the dealer to sort it out. Needless to say trying to get through to anyone in their tags and title office, or getting a response from their manager has been difficult because I'm not buying a new car. So I think the app needs to call out bad dealers and those whose back office is incompetent (I'm never buying a car in Virginia again after this, no matter how cheap it is).
Actually, in case it's of interest to her, over at the American Institute of Physics in the DC metro area, I'm looking for a solutions architect to help support the institute and the 10 member societies connected to it. The role is to help define infrastructure standards regarding our digital experience platform (Blueconic, MailChimp, Tableau, Brightspot) as we migrate away from Drupal.
Challenging project that can help influence engagement with students, the public, and the physical sciences community for decades to come.
All this talk about debt and nothing about the main reason why: taxes are too low. By that I mean if you compare like with like, for example healthcare costs which are paid by taxes elsewhere, then in the US we're paying more for less. It's the same on nearly every basic service. Paying these items through taxes would reduce our overall bill and we'll have better services.
Also social security doesn't need to be cut, as much as the GOP would love to do so, you just need to remove the cap on the tax at $160K and suddenly it's solvent for the next 50 years.
There are very simple fixes to this, and most of them involve taxing the rich back at the rate they were taxed under Reagan and Clinton.
This is something I know a little about. Back in 2005/06 I asked Google who was doing non-destructive scanning of their books as I needed to scan our back issues to 1948 and no one would let me cut up bound volumes. They put me in touch with Kirtas Technologies that did the job for something like $20K and took two weeks (about 70 volumes). It's a lot cheaper now and the scanning quality is significantly better but the big headache is indexing.
Since then I've been collecting spare issues of the magazine and last year sent a decade's worth off to be destructively scanned for about $6K. The quality is significantly better than the originals (and they have to do clean up as part of the process).
I point this out to show what a challenging job is being attempted here and how really there is value and hard work in digitizing archives so there really shouldn't be an expectation of old stuff being 'free'.
Also missing are viable costs. If arXiv didn't have the support of some nonprofit societies and grants from foundations, it would be in significant trouble.
I think one point is that a profit margin of 40% is only viable because of the size of their platform. If they were broken up and smaller, on competing platforms, then it would be no where near 40%.
Usually it's still lighter. When I have back problems I will pick up the iPad and take it with me rather than my MacBook Pro. It has the added bonus of being easier to read pdfs and annotate them while traveling too (it's not perfect. If I'm gong to be digging around my email archives I prefer to do that on a Mac but that's partly the way our company limits Outlook on iPads.
