shieldfoss:

@cactus-person

It’s less about “new housing for the rich will become affordable housing for everyone else in 30-40 years;” it’s not as if you have low-income people moving into “used mansions” in the same way that you can get a “used car” for cheap.

You do, actually! Well, not if you mean *specifically* mansions, but I have friends on welfare who live in used luxury apartments[1], and some of the houses I’ve been looking at buying are half of something that *used* to be one big house but got divided in the middle into two separate pieces of real estate with a shared wall.

[1] Well, they were luxury apartments when they were built, with all the modern amenities like “indoor toilets” and “elevators.” “On-site laundromat” so you don’t have to go to a public one like a plebe. Etc./

I mean, poor people totally used to move into old mansions in America, they were just divided up and shared out, like the beautiful Victorians on LA’s Bunker Hill

This was something “slum clearance” and “urban renewal” and to a degree redlining and residential segregation by race and the 30-year amortized mortgage and suburbanization were specifically designed to stop, because having the nicest area in town everyone invested in become the bum zone in a generation every generation made long-term stability impossible, both like “urban planning” and “homes that hold or appreciate in value as savings vehicles instead of depreciating like consumer durables”