usually prices dont go down. the cost does relative to inflation. what usually happens is a new investor will do the analysis and build new units that are even more expensive but only slightly. now all the current tenants that can afford it will leave the current landlords and the current landlords wont be able to increase prices because there is a better product at that price level.
It does depend on where you are and how elastic supply is. In Austin for example there has been a recent decrease in rent (even relative to inflation) despite continually growing demand.
austin had such an insane explosion of supply. but they also have a price explosion just a couple years ago. probably going to see something similar with respect to GPU rentals in a couple years
I prefer using kubectl than any other method so i have plenty of functions to help with that. I'd never consider using python or go for this although I do have plenty of python and go "scripts" on my path too.
im not sure how youre getting around the physics of white lint on dark clothing. and i separate plastic clothing from cotton or wool clothing because cotton usually just gets machine dried but i dont want to put my wool or plastic clothing through that process because its not necessary.
I'm not sure it's possible to expand the housing supply. Inflation has made the cost of constructing new housing almost impossible. In fact he even has a graph comparing cpi to case shiller. I would argue that case shiller correctly models inflation where as CPI has been neutered and is no longer an effective model of inflation.
Basically we're at a point where used housing is actually far more valuable than list price because it would be absolutely impossible to rebuild any used house for anywhere near the amount it sold for.
In major high cost of living American cities, the majority of cost is in land and regulatory uncertainty especially in California - years of lawsuits and public comment hearings etc for any changes to the built environment, zoning restrictions, large parking requirements causing more land to be needed, inability to produce dense housing (and therefore more units to rent out) on any parcel of land, and so on.
It’s hard to change these policies in part because the basis of American wealth for most people IS the value of their real estate, so anything that would reduce the cost of a house will also reduce the wealth of a large swath of society. And rent control warps thing, by making existing renters also benefit from the status quo by locking in their rents, leaving only new renters as those who demand cheaper housing - the very people with the least electoral influence given that they’re usually younger and not established in the communities they’re moving into.
We need ways to align incentives so that these people can clearly understand their personal benefit from the good that densification would bring, alongside a reorientation to base their wealth on something that isn’t shelter.
USA is not the only place with inflation, but it still ends up with housing far more expensive than other countries. That’s because of policy primarily, material costs secondarily.
I don’t know what inflation you mean but imo most of the cost increase is due to increased code requirements, labor shortage, and permit fees. These are quite fixable without any macroeconomic tricks
I really want to do this but like any hobby it takes too much time. My biggest frustration as a youtube music user is that the app doesn't appreciate that it might not always have a good internet connection and takes forever to fallback to your downloads when loading the library.
If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(
If you just want independence, just start collecting MP3s or CDs or whatever. I've been collecting physical music since the mid 90s and my whole MP3 collection is still under 128GBs, so I just copy it anywhere I want it now. Unless you really put some effort into it, storage will probably grow faster than your collection will.
Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.
The large flac/mp3 collect I have from my ripped CDs is the reason I even consider it. I just find the toil to be not worth it over minor foibles I have with streaming music. It would sure be nice though to have the time.. I operate software at work for a living. I don't want to come home and operate it too :( Was all about it in HS and college though.
If you've already got it, I'm not exactly sure what you think the toil is? You just copy it places. Maybe just the MP3s for things like phones. Then use an MP3 player.
If you mean the inaccuracies of the metadata, again, you just peck at it as it bothers you. You don't have to fix it all at once. Any decent MP3 player can do searches for specific songs. Nor do you have to do a hard cut from streaming services.
I do have it all hooked up on Syncthing so my changes stay in sync but that's not exactly a hard thing. It's only marginally harder than a straight copy, and sometimes honestly even a bit easier given how dodgy phones can be about large normal copies.
I did this to a 500 disc colection in fits and starts and it was a bit of drudgery for the final push with three drives running at once. the biggest issue is ensuring metadata is up to snuff. Lots of CD-text has garbage capitalization. Cover art can be crappy or unavailable. Musicbrainz hashes have occasional collisions forcing you to manually enter titles.
I want to do this too, and have a feeling that it's not as hard or time-consuming as it seems. 15 years ago, all my music lived in a /Music folder and I could play anything in there, instantly. It should be easy to just move that folder to a networked drive, get some sort of mp3 player app on my phone/devices, and point it at that folder. If the app is allowed to download files as well, that's even better. Otherwise, plugging in my phone/mp3 player and uploading songs manually was never particularly difficult, even back then.
If I remember correctly, all my playlists were really just text files used by Windows Media Player or iTunes, so it should be easy to support that type of functionality as well.
You can more or less do this with apps that will stream your library off Google Drive. The one I tried demanded permissions to read everything in my Google Drive which seemed too dangerous, but if you had a separate cloud drive somewhere you could set it up pretty easily.
Not sure what platform you're using youtube music on but there are a few open source third-party apps for android that may have better offline functionality (though I have not either of them, I just came across them while searching different streaming music options)
It’s been a long time since I used it but an iOS subsonic client I used to use (I think it was iSub) had better local-first / offline behavior than Apple Music or Spotify.
Navidrome is really simple to set up in a Docker container, if you already have some kind of system for self-hosting. If not, it's a good opportunity to start!
In-N-Out has a huge footprint in DFW btw. I agree with you on their commitment to quality but as I understand it their growth is slow because they don't take outside investment or loans and they need enough capital to open a regional footprint of stores because they do their own distribution.
i hope the next part of his article covers the zoning issues. because I'm certainly not seeing the zoning issues making the homes be on bigger lots or requiring things like 3 car garages? If anything the lots in new tract developments in dallas fort worth are smaller and have less land using features like they don't have alleys. and then in Dallas city limits any small slice of land that can possibly be used for new houses have way smaller lots than any neighboring decades old homes.
the only instance I can think of that I know of is there as a historical black neighborhood near love field airport where Dallas changed the zoning to make redevelopment less profitable by requiring the houses take up less of the lot. This way developers can't build huge houses to offset the fact that the land is expensive or they can't build duplexes big enough to make them worth selling either. In fact there were a few duplexes going in to replace detached SFH and the developers were left in the lurch. I think even had to tear them down? I never followed up on the story. This was basically a policy to prevent gentrification by making the land less valuable by policy. Unfortunately gentrification and yimbyism seem like they go hand in hand because if you can develop bigger or more dense the property value goes up and people scream.
Where I can see regulation getting in the way is in the new codes. You can't build a house like you could in the 50s-70s anymore The code today is insanely expensive. Now those 70s houses weren't great. But they aren't didn't cost $200-300+/sqft at the low end.
in my view new single family housing can never be affordable because the cost is just so high. in fact. generic home ownership is as unaffordable as ever due to inflation. call a plumber to fix a leaky faucet? That will be $300. A new fence? $10k. A new HVAC system? $20k. A roof? $12k. These are all real costs for "small" homes. At least in the rental scenario the costs are controlled because not every single thing is a one-off. There are efficiencies at scale. If it's a housing rental company your maintenance guy is on a route, if it's an apartment you have building maintenance, etc.. The roof repair is a contract worth a million bucks where every roof is only $8000 instead of $12000.
It's absolutely a zoning issue. The Texas legislature is literally overriding large cities to force them to allow smaller lot sizes. Most of Dallas, for example, is R-7.5, which drives up cost because land is expensive and it requires you to dedicate a lot of it to your yard (max 45% coverage). Only a few areas, like some PDs in old east Dallas, have been rezoned to allow the smaller lots, though you seem to believe its all of Dallas city limits.
He just did a podcast episode about envelope restrictions and how they're pushing the market for housing out of the sun belt. The subtext of all this stuff is ultimately zoning.
Increasingly, we're seeing home services companies like plumbing and HVAC owned by private equity. This is how you end up paying $300 an hour for the plumber (plus a $300 service fee just for showing up). The technician isn't getting the majority of that money.
Good rule of thumb is that if you see a home services company with billboards, or branded vehicles, they are going to be super expensive.
I feel lucky in the sense that I have both the physical ability and the skill to do almost all of my own maintenance myself. With what I saved on landscaping alone I was able to buy all the tools I needed for almost any project.
Long permitting processes also encourage construction of larger SFHs. The permitting cost is largely fixed whereas three profit margins scale with the value of the home which mostly scales with the size of the home
yes bigger houses to an extent are way more profitable because there is a somewhat linear relationship between sqft and value but houses have a lot of fixed cost. there's probably a sweet spot around 2500sqft in suburban/exurban Dallas Fort Worth to maximize the market for the house and still generate low $/sqft such that the guy building something bigger next tract over isn't crushing you on $/sqft.
that 2500sqft house is still $200-250/sqft way out in the middle of nowhere where the land doesn't really even factor in much.
All this is why I believe our best bet is allowing density. Even if one doesn't want to live in a busy city center, making this an option for those who want it, reduces demand and thus prices for people who want SFHs
