shieldfoss:

kontextmaschine:

shieldfoss:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

st-just:

I hear advice from the older generation that “buying a house is an investment”.

On one level, I get that. Buying a house is a better way to spend money than renting, because at the end, you have something. You have a whole frigging house.

On another level, I think that the idea that home prices should outpace inflation is insane and maybe has broken modern society.

-Andre Cooper, Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment was a Colossal, Society-Shattering Mistake

This entire article is “a-HYUK, why would we expect homes to appreciate when the building’s obviously a depreciating asset? We’ve simply stumbled down a nonsense path that I just realized because I r so smart!”

Because even as the structure depreciates the property claim on the underlying land appreciates because it’s a finite good facing rising demand, dipshit.

This points at the question they really haven’t had to confront since the legal form was established in the 1970s: what are condominiums for?

…they’re for living in?

Are you asking why it is legal to purchase only a partial ownership in land/building, or are you asking why anybody would want to do that?

Well I suppose in the sense of condo towers, like anything built in 1981 Miami or Manhattan seemed like already the maximum units you could put on that site so it didn’t matter if all you ever had was the title to one with no provision for anything else

But like, if you can’t sell the option to redevelop the property what do you have beyond the one we’ve-only-seen-sub-40yo-of-these-buildings-in-America-and-remember-that-one-that-collapsed-in-Florida?

I guess your transferable title gives you one vote towards a condo board that could dispose of the whole property for redevelopment.

Well the reason I bought a condo unit was because I wanted to buy, not rent[1], I wanted to live in the center of town and didn’t (and don’t) have the casual millions necessary to own a house in the center of town.

[1] And the buy-not-rent idea does make sense: My current condo is better than my old apartment, financing costs me less than rent used to, and of course it is me rather than my landlord that gains the accumulating home equity)

Well if we’re disclosing our personal investments here mine is kinda that my childhood cul-de-sac home was a condominium, built in the late ‘70s before it was clear that was not the proper form for subdivisions, and the city is actually densifying out to it now (this was for a while “average, good people” houses being bought and inhabited, maybe un-duplexed, maybe torn down and rebuilt to lot lines by rich people. who were often sympathetic greyhairs.)

And I am going to inherit that house in the next 20 years, and have to take that seriously, and also am displacing here some emotional intensity I think I’m supposed to feel about that but can’t now, now that I can’t feel loss I’m not sure how I’m going to process my parents’ inevitable upcoming death and it fucks with me.

kontextmaschine:

Now that I can think about my hometown in 3D I realize that the way the “downtown” only makes sense if it was once the intersection of two important regional roads, but then with automobiles half of one got shifted a block over to avoid a turn too sharp for motorized speed and then the town got reoriented around an L-bend from the other leg of that one of the crossed roads to one of another.

Some of this may actually have been from the pre-automotive “interurban” electric streetcar era

Now that I can think about my hometown in 3D I realize that the way the “downtown” only makes sense if it was once the intersection of two important regional roads, but then with automobiles half of one got shifted a block over to avoid a turn too sharp for motorized speed and then the town got reoriented around an L-bend from the other leg of that one of the crossed roads to one of another.

He was born in my hometown, and the art museum is named after him!

P. O.V., I brought you to my hometown for the weekend and am showing you the weird concrete castle museum about turn-of-the-century daily life

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

I actually saw Driving Miss Daisy (1989) in the theater, a restored Art Deco single-screen (they split it to 2 in the 90s then took over the building next door to add a third lately) in the heart of my hometown.

Field of Dreams (1989), and Memphis Belle (1990), too.

The other nearby theater was “The Barn”, which was 5 screens when I was a kid and became 14 but in my dad’s day was apparently movies projected in a literal barn

Also that brick building to the right was the biggest one on the intersection that was the pre-automotive center of town and it was three stories tall, so that gives you a sense of the place. As the county seat of the county north of Philadelphia since that was the #2 city in America it was more cosmopolitan than you might think, though

kontextmaschine:

I actually saw Driving Miss Daisy (1989) in the theater, a restored Art Deco single-screen (they split it to 2 in the 90s then took over the building next door to add a third lately) in the heart of my hometown.

Field of Dreams (1989), and Memphis Belle (1990), too.

The other nearby theater was “The Barn”, which was 5 screens when I was a kid and became 14 but in my dad’s day was apparently movies projected in a literal barn

Thinking about how there is a location in the heart of Doylestown that has had a new restaurant every year or two my entire life because it is the lightest fare visible from the courthouse, which guarantees it a solid lunch trade and leaves it in a location where no one thinks to get dinner

Went back to my hometown (Doylestown, PA) over the holidays and it just – doesn’t have a working class anymore.

It was a county seat founded on a hill in an age when industry was riverside waterpower, so it was always kinda professional and middle class when that was only 10% of population, but back then a huge chunk were farmers and as the market town of a farm region it had a few factories to use surplus farm population as proletarians – the dairy and fish sticks plant were gone by the time I was born (I broke my collarbone riding off a gravel jump on the lot!), the rivet factory across the street (so primal!) became a parts warehouse for a dealership, I think the place down the street still charges fire extinguishers. In more outdoor labor, the seed company Burpee had fields on the edge of town.

All the working-class duplexes by the factories are getting combined into one unit now, but that was all kinda baked in by my day anyway. What’s new is the absence of any service class or anything – bank tellers, shop clerks, hairstylists. The area was built out in my childhood as a “favored quarter” sub/exurb of Philly and I guess still relied on its job market – there were things to do building the area out (::raises hand:: son of a lawyer who went from land deals to school district work to estate planning, right here), but at steady state not much in the way of local careers past the school district/social services and a few office parks. Everyone I know who “never left home” has in fact relocated to Philadelphia.

if this literally comes down to my hometown I will scream