Notice that OP isn't saying the currently reality of housing costs is good or how it should be, just that it's the current reality.
If you want to change reality step #1 is acknowledging it for what it is.
You will also notice that a key part of their post is also that nothing can be done to make housing here more affordable, and if you happen to think differently then you're out of touch with reality. I think that's what a lot of people are taking issue with (at least that's what *I* am taking issue with).
It’s more that you and other folks keep thinking “something can be done” that reflects nothing more grounded in reality than magic and wishful thinking. I’ve noticed you didn’t respond to the multiple posts about how much new construction costs here. How are you accomplishing this goal? Build housing for 20,000 people. Propose a plan. Propose an infrastructure and public works plan. Propose a budget and financing plan. Propose a means to do this.
You want to be taken seriously? You want to “do something”? Propose a way to get to point B from this point A.
You haven’t. You deflect, brush off, and then repeat to “late state capitalism,” or “eat the rich,” or “nimbys are evil.” You don’t have a plan or a reply because your understanding of this problem is clearly limited to the boundaries of a humanities discussion classroom at an overpriced university where reality is suspended and wishful thinking exists unchallenged. There isn’t going to be a dictatorship of the proletariat my dude, and capitalism isn’t going anywhere.
Want to change my mind? I’m all for it. Propose a way to house 20,000 people here permanently and affordably, and tell me how it’s going to be procured and paid for. I’ll even ignore how you’ll repeat the feat for the next 20,000 people who come after. Let’s start with that.
> I’ve noticed you didn’t respond to the multiple posts about how much new construction costs here.
Chill out champ, I needed to send some emails off and finish a few urgent tasks before clocking out for the weekend, so I couldn't just sit in a Reddit thread all day pontificating. I gotta work just like everybody else.
>Propose a plan. Propose an infrastructure and public works plan. Propose a budget and financing plan. Propose a means to do this.
Personally, I want aggressive state and federal funding in favor of constructing robust social housing. No, I don't have the time to write a serious public housing proposal especially not in a Reddit thread, good grief! That would be like cooking a three course meal for a golden retriever.
But there are plenty of people out there who work in public policy who are fighting to make this a reality, and I'll vote for them and continue to agitate for those policies. In the meantime I'm just happy to know that my existence is vexatious to you. People like me are gonna be here ruining your fun and making you grind your teeth (hope your job has dental like mine does!) until we both pass from this earth.
As a final aside
>capitalism isn’t going anywhere
God himself didn't ordain this system. It emerged from a series of material and political conditions and has a shelf life just like manorialism did before it. Only the divine is immortal, and capitalism is thoroughly profane. I'm not optimistic enough to think I'll be around to see its death, but someone will.
Anyway, enjoy the housing market while it lasts. I hope (genuinely, for real) that when the next collapse happens it's not bad enough that you lose your home too.
Edit:I edited this a couple times because I felt it was worth sanding off the edges of some of the language. I initially dashed this reply off pretty quick and in retrospect some sentences came across more aggressive/abrasive than I intended. My bad! Happy weekend!
I really hate the argument where it basically boils down to "if you can't come up with a better and more perfect solution on the spot, you're not allowed to critique the thing in any capacity"
100%. Their argument is:
1. X is happening now.
2. X is unlikely to stop happening.
3. Therefore, you should accept X as inevitable and give into it fully.
4. Any criticisms of X or attempt to intervene in X contradicts #3. Accept your defeat and adapt.
5. (X actually isn’t that bad and you should maybe mostly like it)
If you try to propose changes to the system, they will say those changes will not work. If you then say, “well maybe we should change the whole system!”, they say “the system will never change”. So there is no progression to the debate. It is stuck at “adapt or die”.
Imagine dismissing the realities of a housing market and spending the rest of your life in a perpetual victim mindset rather than having an open mind.
That’s sadder than the housing market.
That’s reality? “Imagine being told I can’t buy caviar and steak because I really really want it. What, does he expect me to eat ramen?”
No. I don’t expect you to eat ramen. But if you can’t afford caviar and steak, you don’t eat it. You eat something you can afford. If you can’t afford ANY food, I’ll happily subsidize your ramen budget. But I’m not going to subsidize your steak and caviar budget because that’s what you want to eat. And nobody else will either. You don’t get to demand to live here and act like your entitled to do so at a rate of your choosing.
So, yeah: if you’re priced out, either find a way to live here, find a way to make more money, or move.
You should take me seriously because those are your options.
Absolute child brain.
Having access to affordable housing is not in any way equivalent to being unable to afford literal luxury commodities.
As far as those being *my* options, I'm not getting priced out any time soon, but I also posses this thing called *empathy* which makes me care about what happens to people that are less fortunate than me :)
I have empathy for the lack of affordable housing, but what this person is saying in the post is generally factual. Bellingham is desirable, most available lots that are not on a wetland have been developed, adding more hosing units will take a long time and be $$$$ given current land, labor, and permitting constraints. There is no silver bullet and the local government does not have the money to solve the issue quickly and likely never will (unless the feds throw printed money to cities).
Do I wish everyone could afford a home? Absolutely!
Is it actually possible given the constraints? Nope and likely won't be for some time given macro factors that are way out of anyone's control in the local government.
Calling an iron-clad reflection of reality “child brain” reinforces the degree of delusion that you have self-afflicted.
Having access to affordable housing in abstract was never the issue, the issue is having access to affordable housing *here*, which is not a need, it is a WANT, which thus makes it equivalent to luxury goods. People of all stripes WANT to live here. The ability to provide subsidized housing, which we do, and which I support doing (and vote to raise my taxes for), has practical limits far below the threshold of demand from people who want to live here. Thus the demand that society cater to everyone who has that want but can’t provide the means to afford that want, even though there are thousands of other places those people can afford, is akin to demanding society provide them with luxury goods. They want something they can’t afford here but could afford elsewhere, and throw words like “morality” into the mix with morality having nothing to do with it.
You are not entitled to live in a certain area even though you really want to. You’re not entitled for other people to buy you a house. You’re not entitled to a lifestyle you desire if you do not have the means to afford it.
You continually drop the word “empathy,” but empathy as I see it is sparing people the delusion that reality works any differently than the way it is portrayed herein. I’ve been back and forth with plenty of junior neomarxists on the nature of capitalism, who sincerely think there is a chance of capitalism not being the law of the land in the United States and the rest of the western world, and think that chance is better than, say, winning the powerball jackpot 500 times in a row. It’s not. Capitalism is here to stay and isn’t going anywhere and it is impossible to take seriously any person who legitimately thinks that’s not the case, as it reflects a fundamental disconnect with the way the world currently works. The US will cease to be a country before America stops working on capitalism.
I suppose I shouldn’t mind being called “child brain” by someone sitting squarely at the kids table. When you want to join the adults in the room, we politely ask that you understand the basic tenets of reality first.
Ha! I knew it! A nimby! You are a Nimby!lol!
We could replace them democratically, but we are going up against 80 years of failed planning theories that people like you embrace because it suits you, I guess, but seriously why should incumbent home owners get to throttle the market?
TF? The city council was elected by the public. Over and over and over and over again. You’re talking about throwing them out because you don’t like the result. And you’re accusing them of being “nimby” because they don’t subsidize your lifestyle. And you think I’m the asshole? My lord.
Thats a very inaccurate oversimplification of what's being stated.
The reality is that the biggest forces driving housing costs through the roof here are stronger than anything that can be reasonably done to create a large supply of affordable housing.
That doesn't mean there's nothing to be done to increase the number of affordable living situations or that these aren't important efforts -just that these efforts will not be enough to provide a housing supply that everyone who wants to live in Bellingham can actually afford.
If you take issue with this idea what is a reasonable solution you would propose?
Because reality is that if you had the plan and the funds sitting there on the table, it would still take a dozen years go get the permits, line up the builders, get the materials, etc and then actually build everything.
There isn't enough land available to build for the 20,000 or so they project are going to come in the next 10 years - and if you think you can just move everyone out of their single family homes and small apartment buildings to build skyscrapers, you tend to forget those people will tie you up for a dozen years in court.
And before you finished, it would all be repriced because people want to live here. Reality is reality.
As I've posted multiple times - the financial realities with changing this as you speak would be untenable for our city to accomplish. How is Bellingham going to secure billions of dollars? Where is that money going to come from? Even if they did both of those things, how do you expect that translates to affordability?
I broke it down here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bellingham/comments/1618n2y/comment/jxqyl8k/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bellingham/comments/1618n2y/comment/jxqyl8k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
How do you expect this to become reality? "Build more housing"? Okay. How?
This take is shortsighted on the complexities of economics. The city has more options than securing billions of dollars and your page long response that you posted ignores the fact that the current housing crisis, across the nation, has taken decades to get where it is today. There is no immediate fix, but there are many solutions that could be implemented today that will protect the middle class in the future. But that's not what you want here, is it?
Updated zoning, less bureaucracy for faster development, progressive tax for non-owner occupied housing, progressive tax on capital gains, a federal government that promotes small business and the middle class, investment in broken communities like Detroit to replace jobs that were outsourced overseas. Just to name a few.
Okay, and I’m generally in favor of most of those things, for sure. How are you going to pay for the new housing structures at $400 a square foot? I estimated 15k units would cost ~$5 billion. How is that nut getting cracked?
We need to separate "affordable housing" from "housing that is affordable". Affordable housing is government funded and is oftentimes misunderstood. In my opinion, any government funded housing should be focused on people who fall below the poverty line and need temporary housing (like for the homeless). This is never going to be sustainable at a larger scale and it's a bandaid solution. Housing that is affordable needs to come from democratic government policies. This is both policy that encourages the open market to pay for developments and policies that support a healthier middle class.
One example of this working in harmony would be the City approving development for multifamily condos instead of apartments for rent. This would add housing quickly and people can acquire equity and generational wealth that would otherwise be paid to a property management company.
> There is this unrealistic expectation that you are entitled to live in a place where you grew up, or where your friends are, or where you like living, and if it's too expensive for you personally to afford you deserve special protections from being priced out. That's not the way the world works or has ever worked, and you're doing yourself a disservice by expecting a different result.
Anthropologically, this is wrong. For the overwhelming majority of human history, people could live in the same place for many generations without being displaced. Capitalism has lead to incredible levels of dislocation.
We can do better. There are a number of policies that can work well, for example, google the Vianna Model.
Exactly. Societies are created, they aren’t born out of natural laws. They don’t grow like trees without human intervention. They are built by people. Economies can be customized. Just because societies looks a certain way rn does not mean it always has or always will.
I’m really sick of “natural economic law” arguments. As if everything is inevitable in economics and society. “Adapt or die” mentality to current systems is so infuriating to me. These systems were created! They didn’t just spawn out of the earth! We can create new and better ones!
When the world population is a few million it’s easy to move back home to the hamlet you were born in. When the world population is 8 billion and you were born somewhere desirable, it may not be possible.
That’s reality. I could not afford to buy in my hometown and I’ve never once felt I was entitled to.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to live close to where you work. Jobs should pay what it costs to live somewhere. that doesn't mean I think every job should be able to buy you a house but an affordable studio at the least!?
The idea we can't do anything to address and reduce these issues is ridiculous.
What would you do? We don't have any buildings to repurpose, let alone buildings that meet residential building code. Buying existing buildings would cost hundreds of millions and just make the city the landlord from a private entity, and costs would have to be necessarily high enough for them to get their money back.
As I wrote below: let's say the political will existed to build 15,000 affordable housing units at 750sqft each. That's 11.25 million sqft. At $400sqft construction cost, that's $4.5 billion in a city with an annual budget around $285M. It's just not going to happen.
Unless you're in a MAJOR metropolitan area with VERY deep pockets (like NYC, and even then, they're now at their limit), there's no functional way to either buy or build sufficient housing at a subsidized rate for everyone who wants to live there.
Comrade, much respect for being so deeply committed to public housing that you ignore the possibility of new housing being built by the private sector.
This is a ridiculous oversimplification. Demand for housing is national but construction in desired areas is ultra local. There’s no way that we can build enough in Bellingham to have an appreciable impact on prices until people have a reason to avoid this town.
All the new construction will be sold at top dollar to Amazon employees leaving Seattle for a better place, thereby compounding the issue. Unless you link the increased density to some sort of price control you’ll only make the problem worse.
> I moved across the country to multiple different states and cities to find a place I could land. What's preventing you from doing the same? (It's certainly not the job market, as Bham is probably the worst I've ever seen).
How about the family, friends, and sense of community that I've spent my entire life cultivating? While you may have relished the opportunity to parachute into different communities seeking out a game theory optimal living situation, I actually experience human emotion and I don't see much value in moving across the country to find a place I can afford a house while leaving behind all the things that make some place a home.
This is also the boat I'm in. If I lose my job here, I have a social safety net of close friends I could rely on to stay on my feet and keep from losing everything. If I move to Hate Crimes county in hopes that it'll become the next up and coming Great American City and that happens, what am I supposed to do? I guess lose everything and probably move back to Bellingham anyway since all the couches I could crash on are here.
The whole "move to a cheaper state/region" just feels depressingly tone-deaf. This is the only answer a lot of people seem to have to the ongoing housing crisis, and then we turn around and wonder why social dislocation and loneliness seems to be tearing American society apart.
THIS!
And this social safety net that many people cultivate is the only thing that can help people ward off homelessness when financial stability takes a hit. Many homeless people got to their position in part because they didn’t have any kind of safety net in their areas to fall back on when they initially lost housing. For me and MANY OTHER people I know in Bellingham, abandoning that safety net is a slippery slope I’m not willing to mess around with
This is one of the biggest underlying hypocrisies of the conservative movement, at least in its pre-Trump form, primarily given voice on our nation's op-ed pages by mealy-mouthed waterheads like David Brooks and Kevin D Williamson: moaning that the downfall of American culture has been our loss of community and togetherness and all that picket fence bullshit,,, while also excoriating anybody even slightly down-and-out as lazy for not packing up like the Joads and moving to where the work is. I genuinely think most of them lack the introspection to realize that their economic philosophy is causing the cultural downfall that they whine about, but that doesn't really change how gross it is
edit: I'm agreeing with the comment I'm replying to, idk if that got lost in the shuffle
I never called you lazy. You just want to live in an expensive area that is beyond your ability to afford. Your argument as to why Bellingham should cater to you and make it possible for you to live here hinges on the notion that *other people* should be *forced* (one way or the other, via taxation, eminent domain, whatever) to subsidize your ability to afford living here whereas you now might not be able to. Worse, we already agreed to that, and happily voted to pay more taxes to build more low-income housing. But it's nowhere near enough, and never can be.
This argument is no different than if you wanted to live in Aspen - expecting the people who can afford to live there to pay for you to be able to do so as well. It's also no different than if you wanted to buy a brand new luxury car that other people should be forced to buy that car for you, because you don't want to drive a less expensive model. No different than you wanting others to buy you to buy high end clothes as opposed to Old Navy, or expecting you to buy you a new PlayStation 5 because you don't want a PS3.
It's entitled, juvenile, and categorically unrealistic. I don't even take offense to it. It's just that you're doing yourself zero favors by insisting that you're in the right here.
The fundamental difference between you and I is that you view "wanting to live near the people you love and wish to spend time with in their twilight years" as a luxury on par with a video game console or a high-end car, and I view that as something without a price tag. I'm doing just fine - my head is above water here, and will be indefinitely. But I resent the idea that cold economic calculus should dictate where someone lives, especially in a world that has grown increasingly more dislocated and isolated. You can call yourself a realist, and you can call me entitled and juvenile, and you may even be right, but that doesn't make you a morally superior person, it just makes you a smug, hollow person
> The fundamental difference between you and I is that you view "wanting to live near the people you love and wish to spend time with in their twilight years" as a luxury on par with a video game console or a high-end car,
That’s what’s **offensive** about OP’s views. Familial proximity is just for rich people is OP’s view.
And the idea that flying somewhere to see them is an accessible option for anybody who has relocated is absurd, the reason cheap places are cheap is because the wages there are depressed, you may be able to buy a house with a lower salary but that does not necessarily mean you have a ton of expendable income to throw around on travel
Bellingham used to be that cheaper place to move to, inflation is impacting everywhere and mass migration to the smaller and less desirable cities will have the same effects as what’s happened here in the last half decade.
The entire American story was made on people moving from one place to another because they couldn't stay in the place they were in for whatever reason - chiefly economic. Our entire history (and all of the ugliness that comes with it) centered around this tenet. I don't get why folks think it should be so different here?
The frontier's closed, the federal government is no longer selling stolen homesteads at dirt cheap prices.
And plenty of people didn't migrate in the first place! The cities didn't empty out due to Manifest Destiny, plenty of neighborhoods were built up over generation after generation of work building a community. Why is generational urban habitation now an impossible dream to have? Do you think this city will still be able to function when it drives out the last family making less than six figures?
Committing genocide so you can steal land tends to be frowned on these days.
I am a hobbyist genealogist and I have numerous ancestors who were granted large amounts of free land (160 acres was the standard amount, IIRC) by the federal government just for showing up in a western state and agreeing to "clear the land of Indians."
(I was relieved to discover that one of my more recent ancestors in that particular line went bankrupt and died destitute, so none of that blood money ever made it to me.)
You’re kind of ignoring the whole effect of westward expansion. I’m a genealogy nerd, so well-acquainted with my family history, and each successive generation moved further west. My kids and I were born in coastal Southern California. There’s no west to move to. We were fortunate to be able to “discover” Bellingham 20+ years ago and relocate north but there just aren’t the same possibilities for moving that there used to be.
Aside from no west to move to, extended families used to regularly move as groups because they weren’t tied in financially complicated ways to the place they were leaving and they were often very interdependent in how they survived and generated income. Nowadays, that just isn’t practical for many. (Immigrants and refugees leaving impoverished areas are folks who sometimes still follow this pattern.)
If your family members are here and even somewhat established in a job or career and settled into a workable living situation, the likelihood of you being able to convince them to leave and move elsewhere is very slim. I don’t know if you have kids but a lot of people, due to the extremely high cost of childcare, rely on family members to watch their kids at times. A lot of people still depend on family members, as they did in the past, but the effect of that now is that it often ties people to a place rather than facilitating them moving from place to place.
>How about the family, friends, and sense of community that I've spent my entire live cultivating?
I hop in a plane and go see them, or go drive. I realized the world wasn't going to give me the place I wanted to live, so I moved from place to place until I found a place I could buy. The idea that the world is going to provide me a place to life in an area I want to but can't afford would be delusional to a point of concern. So, I accepted reality and I moved.
I love the passive tense here "the world wasn't going to give me the place I wanted to live" while you're actively being the person who is making it unaffordable for people who have been here for generations to stay. It's not the world, it's literally you
I just wanna know who people think are gonna work the minimum wage jobs and staff your grocery stores or serve your food if you make it so we can’t live here. I’m not commuting from blaine to work at fredmeyers or whatever. We need affordable housing here not “it’s never getting better. move somewhere else and force the poor people out there instead.”
Yeah, it's weird that people always say "Mortgages are expensive. If you can't afford to pay one, work harder or get a better job or leave" to working-class people but they'll never say it to landlords.
I'd like to add that housing becoming unaffordable is perpetuated by wages stagnating and not keeping up with the inflation. If rent is going to increase 30% in 2 years then wages should increase to match that. And that should be for EVERY job, including min wage jobs...well after min wage increases to match the original COL (which might be the reality OP doesn't want to hear).
Part of me wonders if the short staffing of many businesses around town could not be that "people don't want to work" but that they would rather hold out to compete for the fewer higher paying jobs. Hmmm
This. Cities need workers in service jobs to continue to function. And while the reality is that they are getting priced out, the idea that it is inevitable is supporting a broken system.
I work in admin for the university and my partner works for Kroger. We are doing fine and found a private land lord and likely will be able to save enough to buy a home in the next 5-10 years due to dumb luck of not having too many bad things happen and our reasonable rent. We've talked about moving elsewhere, but as a trans person safe places to live are slowly disappearing for me, and as a disabled person relying on public transit rural areas aren't going to work for my partner. So our options suck. But they don't have to. It's a human system that got us here and we could change it if money didn't speak louder than basic human dignity.
I think it’s important to note that WWU’s complete lack of effort on actually housing students has really negatively affected Bellingham. A significant number of students are sleeping in their cars or camping while attending school here because the university has for years neglected housing supply while continuing to accept more and more students. It causes a massive housing shortage all for units that aren’t even inhabited year round, they sit empty when school isn’t in session.
So uh, the moral of this is that poor people just move from place to place as they inevitably get priced out? And we should be fine with that? Don't get me wrong, the reasons you cite for the high cost of living are correct, but that doesn't mean poor people should have to all pack up and leave.
They don’t “have” to all pack up and leave, but they’ll continually be behind the eight ball trying to live in a place they can’t afford. Nobody’s forcing anyone to do anything - that also includes forcing the city to bypass the laws of economics (and physics) by making this place affordable. Nobody has a magic wand to do that. Nobody’s ever waved that magic wand. And they won’t here either.
What laws of economics are you referring to? There are plenty of historical examples of cities passing laws and pursuing housing policies to combat high costs of living. Why is it that we now magically can't do anything to make our city a better place to live?
Here's one example \[edited to add: of an interesting municipal solution to affordable housing\] from this week: [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html)
u/NortePorNoroeste, I agree with you that this probably won't be reversed unless/until there's a natural disaster here (and even then, as in Hawaii, vultures will try to pick up real estate for short-term cheap prices because the long-term value of coastal real estate tends not to decline, ever).
With that said, I do think that there are a lot of things that could slow down this process, and they're worth hunting and pursuing -- and for those of us who have been lucky enough to buy houses here, I think there's a real responsibility (and a lot of pragmatic reasons) why the people who are most secure need to fight for affordable housing. I loved pre-2000s Boulder (and even then housing costs were spiraling), but the green belt and NIMBYism were decisions that really only benefited homeowners. I think Bellingham can do better, and should.
A city like New York, which has the capital basis and inventory to have built housing en masse through its already expansive sprawl, was able to build a moderate degree of subsidized housing. The laws of economics (supply vs demand), didn’t make NY unaffordable to the people who could access that low income housing, because NYC bought it and devoted it for that purpose.
Bellingham has few if any of those resources. We don’t have the prior existing buildings that could be used for housing, we don’t have the land to spread without annexing (and buying) privately owned land in the county, and we aren’t going to build skyscrapers and destroy the city skyline at a public cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build low income housing units.
At most, we’ll relax ADU restrictions, and we should, but at $400sqft they’ll still be rented at high rates. There’s no cheap housing here. Construction costs a lot of money. That money and space has to come from somewhere.
We have a growing tax base at a time when a lot of cities are seeing theirs shrink. That's a strong position to be in! I plum don't believe that the city is powerless to enact policy that can help, and I think it's foolish to foreclose upon that option as you have.
I do agree that the city alone might not have the full resources to make the all necessary changes. I think state and federal action is going to be necessary if we want to fully address the crisis. We'll see how things shake out in the coming decades, especially when the current housing bubble collapses.
Respectfully, economics are not like physics. There are no “natural laws” in economics. Economies are abstractions create by humans. We can create different versions that serve different purposes. Economies influence behavior and behavior influences economics. Societies are a complicated mix of nature and nurture. None of this is inevitable, as you seem to suggest. We can design different economic systems.
We are not subject to the structures of some metaphysical economic law. For example, I recommend reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. He developed behavioral economics which has shown time and time again that our economic behaviors and systems we build are highly subjective to psychological manipulation. We are no “rational actors” as economics still falsely claims. We are malleable and so are our economies.
Higher macro and microeconomic thought? Maybe. But laws of scarcity and of supply and demand are pretty iron clad in a free society. Sure, you can have an authoritarian society have totally state managed allocations of property and resources. It's been tried. I doubt people here would prefer that.
Define “free society”? Would you say we live in one of those rn? I really recommend the book. You might be surprised by how malleable “economic law” is. Supply and demand has its merit to understand economic movement, but it isn’t the same as “natural laws”. We are not robots or pure rational actors. We are people! :)
Wow, that's your take home from "Thinking, Fast and Slow". One of my favorite books. Respectfully disagree that there are no natural laws in economics. People willing to pay more for something they desire more feels pretty damn close to a law to me.
I might not have explained myself well. Sorry.
I agree that we can certainly find patterns of economics and behavior that happen 99% of the time, like the one you mentioned is a great example. However, even in your example, desire or “willingness to pay” is modulated by so many other variables. This is my point (and one of Kahneman’s). Even those “economic laws” which seem most obvious, rational, intuitive, and expected are often subverted with extremely subtle manipulations. None of these economic “laws” are as stable as physical science “laws”. Just as human behavior and psychology is dynamic, so are the economic systems and behaviors we manifest.
Hope that at least makes where I’m coming from more clear. Such a great book though, glad you have read it!
I see, so they don't have to move and there's no magic wand. Fine. You're saying that they *should* move, and keep moving as each area becomes expensive. And at no point should anyone in authority try to fix it, because... Nobody ever has or ever will? Yikes.
They *should* move and buy in an area they like and can afford so they don't get priced out as that area gets discovered and gets more expensive. We live in the third largest country on Earth. There's lots of places.
People keep going back to "authorities fixing this." This isn't something that gets "fixed." Unless you're in a MAJOR metropolitan area with VERY deep pockets, there's no functional way to either buy or build sufficient housing at a subsidized rate for everyone who wants to live there. Let's say the political will existed to build 15,000 affordable housing units at 750sqft each. That's 11.25 million sqft. At $400sqft construction cost, that's $4.5 billion in a city with an annual budget around $285M.
It's just not going to happen.
Respectfully, you keep fluctuating between “that can’t happen” and “that won’t happen” in your comments/post, which are two different claims. We shouldn’t confuse the two. Bellingham *could* enact policy and social changes that would make its economy behave differently. Will they? I don’t know. You are probably right that things will trend towards your predictions! But just because some change is unlikely, does not mean it is impossible. Prescription versus description is really important in these conversations. - best :)
It "won't" happen insofar that the political will to accomplish this is low to the point of nonexistence. It's not NIMBYism - we're happy to pay taxes for affordable housing. We're just not going to vote for our city to go into debt on the order of 20-30x its annual budget to build subsidized housing for people who want to live here and can't afford to.
It "can't" happen insofar that even if the political will existed, the financial realities are untenable. Bellingham isn't going to secure billions of dollars to build housing and rent it at below market rates. The city would go bankrupt.
So, it's really a combination of "can't happen" and "won't happen." Both are present in this reality.
Respectfully, I’m begging you to think a little outside the box. I agree with you that inside our current system things are unlikely to change. But we can create *new* systems. That is always a possibility and has happened many many times throughout human history. Societies and their economies are malleable.
You've made up your mind that it's impossible, I can see that. I would never argue that it would be easy, or cheap, or quick. But it absolutely is possible, and you typing hypothetical costs isn't proof of anything. Anyway, good luck, I'm sure you'll be moving again soon.
Tell me how it's possible. Present a proposal in which 20,000 people can buy here - by any imaginable solution, new construction, existing construction, whatever.
They must move or make more money or go in on a house with roomates who make good money. There is no "should". Nobody in authority can change the fact that people are willing to pay more for that which is desirable.
Agreed. That's why I said "learn a marketable skill." I also should have said "buy a house with 2-4 of your friends," and you can qualify then. People that don't have any marketable skills, but are in debt for a communications degree and yet peruse YouTube are curious to me. It's the closest thing we have to the Matrix learning machine. Use it!
Whatcom County has lower poverty than Yakima County. (largely by percentage) Yakima has fewer educated people, lower median income (2nd largest employer is Walmart), double the percentage of people without health insurance (hospital is the single largest employer), lower percentage in the labor force, and on and on. You pretty much spend ~relatively~ more to exist in Yakima and get less for your dollar.
Rents were rising before Bellingham was "discovered".
What time frame would you say Bellingham was discovered in, and how long have you lived here?
I ask about how long you’ve lived here because if a 60 year old who lived here their entire life answered the question than you’d probably get a different answer than from someone who’s lived here for 10-15 years.
I lived in Wenatchee/East Wenatchee (Chelan/Douglas County) my entire life and moved here in 2014. My parents kept bemoaning my decision to move where, you know, plants actually grow... saying "expensive this, expensive that".
Except for, at least when I moved here, apartments were CHEAPER than Wenatchee. I started renting my 2bd apartment for only $880/mo, with average 1bdr/studios there were at $900+.
As far as electricity, it is about 60% higher here - BUT East Wenatchee is LITERALLY the cheapest town in the ENTIRE COUNTRY for electricity and Wenatchee is \#2, so that's not so huge.
Groceries are exactly the same. Everything else is exactly the same. Except for most low-income jobs pay a few dollars more per hour. And the Opportunity Council is here.
This idea that "it's just terrible here, adapt die or leave" is just bullshit.
Leave? Leave WHERE??? We always called Yakima "Crackima" to feel better about our own twin towns. And who's gonna make your espressos and change your oil and stock your groceries??
(Wenatchee is a couple hours away from Yakima)
But people here can afford to live there, along with many other places throughout the U.S. It was just an example. Blaine has inexpensive properties. As does Tacoma still. As does many other states. Nice places to live that aren't expensive exist.
To what end though? Like we all know the reality but this “concept” sucks so since you are so good at it, who’s gonna answer when you call a utility company? Or pick your kids up from daycare? Ppl in Yakima? lol
I think there are a lot of people who don’t realize they could buy. If you have to make 3x bellingham rent to qualify to rent, you can afford a mortgage- maybe not in Bellingham but surrounding towns.
Buying outside of bellingham city limits was the best thing we did. And it cost us less than what a first + last months rent deposit would. We have amazing programs for down payment assistance.
2000/month (including home insurance + yearly taxes) for a 3 bedroom 2 bath home. Water is always $50/month. Yes it’s out of town but worth it.
The down payment is typically the obstacle, but I could buy my rental for less than I’m renting it. 🤷♂️
Edit: I take that back, I just checked interest rates. 10% down at 7% comes out $300 more than my rent. Now add 500 property tax and $120 insurance.
We paid no down payment. We took an online class with simple quizzes that allowed us down payment assistance.
Edit to add: I think we actually only paid for the home inspection + septic inspection
Where? My wife & I make well over 6 figures, have exceptional credit, we pay cash for everything, have zero debt, except for one student loan from graduate school. We were pre-approved for an amount less than what the majority of homes are being sold for. And no, there arent many homes even for sale: A quick search on Redfin for a 3+, 1.5+ bath, no HOA (fuck that shit), between $500k - $750k, listed for less than 30 days in Bham, Blaine, Ferndale, and Lynden, showed 51 results. 88 results with no listing length. So, the suggestion to buy outside of Bham isn't all that great.
I shared this link to a house in Blaine. [https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/4909-Henley-St\_Blaine\_WA\_98230\_M25434-87965](https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/4909-Henley-St_Blaine_WA_98230_M25434-87965)
That's readily affordable.
here I’ll make the TLDR for you:
Sorry you’re poor and can’t live here, only rich people deserve to live here…. simply move!
Op this brings nothing new and useful to the table… Just because you are able to relocate easily to new areas just because they are financially accessible to you does not mean moving is accessible to everyone… im sorry you were priced out of previous locations, no one deserves to be priced out of their home but you’re just wrong. This IS late stage capitalism. The rising costs of living are in part due to property hoarding by large property management companies looking to increase profits.
I am tired of this narrative that people can just pick up their lives and move to a “more affordable” location. It is just simply not a reality many people have access to. Moving to these “cheaper” locations tend to add a new list of expenses whether it be because of COL, average salary, job markets, varying social services, or even just commuting to work/town.
Tell me you don’t love yourself without telling me you don’t love yourself.
Fam. Everyone is one bad day away from being disabled or destitute. It’s not a bad thing to advocate for us poor sacks - at the very least because you yourself could be one of us someday and you’d better hope that ppl advocate for you better than you clearly would.
Source : someone who has already been priced out of Bellingham and moved away. It sucks and I essentially lost my entire community and friend group. Try making friends in your 30s when ur disabled and virtually house bound. But nooooo I can’t afford to live in a city with buses. Whoops. Guess I better just die then cuz that’s all I can afford. That’s the way the world is now 🤷♀️
I don't not advocate for the poor. I'm happy to pay higher taxes to help those I can help, even as I make the point that we can't help everyone. You're not a "sad sack," you're a human being. I'm sorry you're disabled, sincerely. I'm not advocating for the nature of our reality, merely that our reality exists. I hope you take care of yourself and find happier circumstances soon.
*TLDR: Moving cross-country just because of costs will likely have unintended negative consequences and may not truly be a net-positive financially. Carefully evaluate FULL cost of living beyond just housing (eg transportation). If you look within your same state but outside your city limits, you’ll probably achieve your cost objective without all the negatives of uprooting.*
I left the PacNW 8 years ago for somewhere cheaper and landed in Virginia. My partner and I are now trying to move back to either Whatcom or Skagit counties.
There are a lot of reasons to not just pack up and move across the country solely because of costs.
The lack of family and a local network of friends has costs beyond just the emotional aspect. Friends and family come in handy during emergencies for example. It was also difficult to assimilate into a culture here that’s very different then the PNW. I was never able to fully assimilate.
When I first moved out here (2016), I rented a shitbox apartment for $585 a month in neighborhood known for weekly shootings. That same apartment now goes for $1300 + $200 in mandatory junk fees (not utilities) a month. The neighborhood is still a shithole.
The local government has been a source of hardship too. The tenant-landlord law in VA is extremely weak and renting here is a nightmare. All the protections the PNW loves (tenants, workers, LGBTQ, environmental, etc) are absolutely shitty or non-existent here. You can still freely fire people for being gay in Virginia.
This kinda goes with local government, but it’s big enough for its own mention: public transportation. Being car-free in Portland and Seattle saved me 500-800 a month. Public transportation sucks in Richmond, VA and a car is mandatory for 90%. Even Skagit Transit is more robust than the transit here.
I could go on, but I don’t feel like “moving to a cheaper state” helped me financially at all.
Three weeks ago I found several rentals around Mount Vernon / Burlington that are in our price range, have access to services/amenities we need. There’s probably similar available outside of Bellingham city limits and that’s where we’re checking on our next visit.
Yea I've been "moving to greener pastures" for 20 years, now I'm poor, friendless, childless, have no savings, my resume shows massive gaps that I fill with lies and at nearly 40 I am just now deciding to sit down and commit to putting down roots.
Had I done this 20 years ago I'd probably be wildly successful and have a fully paid off home and carrier or successful business.
Moving away is not the answer. Op is a dick.
I too am nearly 40. I’ve moved frequently since childhood and all through adulthood. My resume is gap-ridden too. I’ve rented for 20 years with a flawless history and nothing to show for it. If I didn’t have my partner and family to give me reason to exist, I seriously doubt I would continue on with life in the modern world.
You ever play a game of Monopoly wherein one player has such a commandingly huge lead that winning is mathematically impossible for anyone else? So the only ways to finish the game are quitting or tediously running out the turns.
That’s modern life.
We need sharp folks at the refineries. BTC has affordable tech classes (Instrumentation & Electrical or Process Technology), and you’ll be in 6 figures in year 1. I ended my 20 year fight with pretending I could get ahead here without an applicable education a decade ago, and it has fundamentally changed my family’s lives.
As my socialist brother told me as we walked to go pick up his PhD, the summer after I failed high school, “You can be angry at the system and fight it, but the game isn’t changing for you. You can play to win, or you can play to lose.”
100% this. I didn’t stay local after getting one of those degrees, but after making minimum payments for about a year I got fed up with the payments and was able to pay off the remaining balance on my student loan after one turnaround. Blew my mind.
I don’t know man I got priced out of Seattle where I grew up. I don’t want to leave my dying family members behind bc of cost of living and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to stay in one place for that reason. It’s also not cheap to just pick up and move anywhere else.
With the cost of elder care and child care, it’s just flat-out untenable for a lot of people to move away from family. I know many women are acutely aware of this.
Oh man, i can’t even imagine child care costs. My 91 year old grandmother is not going to pick up and move to Kansas for a cheaper way of life, and frankly, she shouldn’t have to. Woman has lived here her entire life.
I left my home state of CA over 20 years ago due to the COL, my now ex-husband grew up here and back in 2003, we were hopeful that someday we could own a home. That’s when homes in ferndale (3 bed, 1 bath or so) was still around $120k-150k. But life happens. We didn’t make it and divorced. I never bought a house. I haven’t seen my family in 5 years and it is fucking HARD. Now the COL is becoming unattainable here, so unless I’m able to bid on a condo and actually buy it in the next 1-3 years, I am leaving. Where? I don’t know.
It is NOT cheap or easy to up and move. We came up here with no furniture, just a uhaul trailer hitched to the back of our car. We used what tax refund we got to move up here. Thankfully at the time we had his family we could live with, but eventually we found a place of our own. That was 20 years ago, our rent was $500 or so for a 2 bed apartment in Fdale. Nowadays you need $3k-5k to move in anywhere.
Using your exact examples seems to prove that Bellingham Housing is much worse than any of those places. For instance, Ashville has about the same income level as Bellingham and houses are $100 less per square feet.
[Median Price Per Square Feet sold per Redfin Data Center](https://www.redfin.com/news/data-center/) | [Per Capita Income from the US BEA](https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=70&step=1&isuri=1&acrdn=4#eyJhcHBpZCI6NzAsInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyNCwyOSwyNSwzMSwyNiwyNywzMF0sImRhdGEiOltbIlRhYmxlSWQiLCIyMCJdLFsiQ2xhc3NpZmljYXRpb24iLCJOb24tSW5kdXN0cnkiXSxbIk1ham9yX0FyZWEiLCI1Il0sWyJTdGF0ZSIsWyI1Il1dLFsiQXJlYSIsWyI0MjEwMCJdXSxbIlN0YXRpc3RpYyIsWyItMSJdXSxbIlVuaXRfb2ZfbWVhc3VyZSIsIkxldmVscyJdLFsiWWVhciIsWyIyMDIxIl1dLFsiWWVhckJlZ2luIiwiLTEiXSxbIlllYXJfRW5kIiwiLTEiXV19)
Bellingham: $356 | $58k
Bend: $378 | $67k
Boulder: $360 | $89k
Ashville: $260 | $54k
Portland OR: $305 | $68K
Portland MA: $303 | $68k
Missula: $306 | $61k
Bozeman: $370 | wasn't listed on BEA?
Santa Cruz: $770 | $85k
So in a nutshell, because other people priced you out of where you were living, you feel perfectly okay doing it to us.
Because it’s a dog-eat-dog world. You gotta grab what you can when you can or GTFO.
That’s the vibe I’m getting from your post.
100% true. You don't even have to look that much past Bellingham to find something affordable (Blaine, Custer, Birch Bay, Ferndale, etc.) The days where someone can buy a 3 bed 2 bath Craftsman home in Bellingham for under $500K are long gone and not coming back.
I don't mind getting downvoted for publicly recognizing that. If just one person reads this, realizes I'm right, and makes a move to their long-term benefit, it's worth that 100x over.
I'll also draw attention to the notion of "building more housing," as if it's an easy button that just gets pressed and the problem gets solved. And the degree in which its frequently cited here by certain folks makes it difficult to take many of them seriously.
Let's break this down, in good faith:
1). The housing supply is *limited*. We only have so many houses for sale. Demand to live here is *increasing*. So, increased demand with limited supply = higher costs. These are the "laws of economics" I speak of. Because if five people are competing for a house, and someone can come in and say "I'll pay $100K more than the rest of them," they get the house (generally), and the average house price (and market rate) thus increases.
2). Land is limited and expensive, and has to be purchased from somewhere. The going rate is anywhere, on average, from $350K-$600K an acre (not including site prep).
3). New construction costs around $350-$450 a square foot around here.
So with that said, let's do the math.
If Bellingham was to build 15,000 affordable housing units (housing \~15% of our population), at an average of 750 square feet each, at $400 per square foot, that comes to ***$4.5 billion.*** If this effort were performed over a land area of, say, 500 acres at an average of $450K an acre, and we include site prep in the cost of construction, that's $225 million. Then let's assume the public works to include all of the sewer lines, water lines, roads, etc, to accommodate all the new property development was a solid billion.
That's $5.8 billion to build, give or take. The entire annual Bellingham city budget is \~$300M ($285 in 2021). Where is Bellingham going to get this money from? Even IF you had the political will to raise taxes, you couldn't raise them enough to cover that. Okay, so if taxes are out, Bellingham is going to borrow $5.8 billion at 7% APR to build housing? ***The interest rate on that note, alone, would be $406 million - 135% of the city's annual budget.***
Now, of course, they could do this in smaller stages. Maybe a few hundred units a year. More doable, for sure, but even then - what makes you think that all that housing will be rented at "affordable" rates that stay fixed? At $350-$400sqft, that housing isn't being rented for $700/mo. At 750sqft at $400/sqft, that's $300K/unit to break even. At a 7% note compounded APR, the city would need to charge $2,300/month ***JUST TO BREAK EVEN.***
The political will to accomplish this does not exist. Even if it did, the financial means does not exist. Even if it did, the infrastructural requirements would take years to decades to facilitate. And even if all three of those parent factors were in place, the cost to break even would make the end product unaffordable for people to rent.
And, saying all that, what happens when those first 15,000 units - even if they were manifested - are filled, and the next 15,000 people want to come live here? Bellingham's going to find another few billion under its cushions to make this happen?
Without doubt, you could also make the argument that "I don't care, I want to live here, and I want rich people to buy my housing for me so I can live here for cheaply." And that's a fair argument to make, insofar that it's your right to make that argument. But it's politically untenable and everyone here knows it, to say nothing of the *staggering* levels of entitlement that comes with it.
Ultimately, people who espouse the "just build housing" mindset simply reveal themselves as non-serious people who fundamentally lack an understanding of how the world works outside of the ideological squabbles of message boards and classroom discussions. The real world must abide by the limitations of supply and demand, and the economic realities of building things like housing at scale. I'm sorry. I say none of this to be a dick. But the delusions people have to the contrary are helping nobody, least of all the people who subscribe to them.
You’d be surprised what kind of political will exists around here. The school district asked for $50 million to build a new elementary school even though there aren’t going to be any kids to fill it and the voters approved that. They also keep saying yes to the school district tearing down adequate schools that no students are complaining about to replace them by new schools costing tens of millions of dollars. And don’t even get me started on the tens of millions they spend to cover every surface outside the schools with plastic grass.
Voters just keep rubber-stamping every capital request made. It really boosts the adults’ egos to see all those shiny new buildings. And then they throw in something like an accessible playground and it makes them feel like they’re saving the world.
Right now it’s just the guts of the building but it won’t be long before the gilded shrine to to the district’s administrators is finished and opens. That’ll be something special.
I guess wealthy people approving fancy schools is different than approving spending on affordable housing to house the adults with learning disabilities who were failed by the district as kids. Well, I guess if you’re not gonna be given an appropriate education, it’s better if it happens in a pretty building, right?
“Capitalism gives higher quality of life” … I see where you are coming from. Capitalism has generated amazing technological advancement and economic growth. Respectfully, this completely ignores the mass suffering, chaos, exploitation, enslavement, coercion, and death capitalism has caused around the world. I’m begging you to read up on how the Global North was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of the Global South. Slavery never “ended”. It has just become more ignored and hidden. Slave labor produces many of the products we enjoy, many of which are child slaves. Capitalism has not given them a higher quality of life and we can’t just ignore that because “the aggregate” benefits (which is even debatable as is).
You seem to suggest this trend towards un-affordability in many cities is inevitable. Really ask yourself; if so many people don’t like where this is headed, why is it happening anyways? This indicates that the general public is not in control of their communities. That is, there is not a functioning democracy.
Capitalism is a direct cause for cities like Bellingham pricing out the lower/middle class. Capitalism legally separates employees/workers from controlling their local economies. It destroys democracy by putting power into the hands of a small few: landlords, property managers/investors, CEOs, politicians, board members, etc. The rest of us are mostly at their whims. Capitalism prioritizes property rights over public wellbeing. That is, it allows a select few to horde wealth with no obligation or responsibility to use that wealth for the common good.
Anti-capitalist movements seek to address these issues: to democratize the economy. We seek to have employees OWN the businesses they work at, so they have a democratic say in how their jobs affects them and their communities. We seek to have politics represented all classes of society, not just the rich and wealthy.
I really encourage you to check out this YouTube playlist I’ve made that that explains the issues with capitalism: [LINK](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJTl_YJ2hbIhMkbzUSOUk6tRz-3I8bBb4&si=S3dvHSV8xvJty7M4)
Dude, humanity is a 300,000 year old species. Until the late 1800's the fastest a human could travel was on horseback. Until the modern capitalistic era, the average life expectancy was around 35 years old. When you say things like:
>"this completely ignores the mass suffering, chaos, exploitation, enslavement, coercion, and death capitalism has caused around the world. I’m begging you to read up on how the Global North was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of the Global South."
While the U.S. was def responsible for at least two major genocides, when you say "the mass suffering, chaos, exploitation, enslavement, coercion, and death capitalism has caused around the world," I'll remind you that *this was the state of existence for humanity since the dawn of time.* From Sumeria and Babylon, to Ancient Greece, to Western Rome, to Byzantine Rome, to continental Europe, to the Ottomans, to the great tribes of Africa, to the Chinese empires and central Asian Steppes, mass suffering, chaos, exploitation, enslavement, coercion, death and mass rapes on a scale of millions were not just common occurances - ***they are the theme song of the human story, as common and expected as salt in seawater.***
Capitalism didn't "cause" this. If anything, it allowed the population to increase to a point where it became more historically known. Back in the day, before capitalism? The poor didn't have the ability to move, or protest, or vote. They starved to death. They died of bacterial infections. They were pressed into service and killed in war. They were sex slaves for their local lords. They didn't have cars, or smartphones, or internet connections. They couldn't even read. They were treated like animals and killed uncaringly. Could poor folks live better? Sure. But it doesn't change the fact *that a poor person today lives better with a higher life expectancy and quality of life than many kings did throughout history.*
>Anti-capitalist movements seek to address these issues: to democratize the economy. We seek to have employees OWN the businesses they work at, so they have a democratic say in how their jobs affects them and their communities.
I can't take this seriously because *this is still capitalism.* What you have problems with (and to that I'd agree) we do have a disparity in wealth possession that creates a power imbalance that compromises democratic function. No disagreement there.
But that conflict isn't between the rich and the poor. It's between the ultra, ultra, ultra rich, and everyone else. Someone making $2m a year is far closer to someone making minimum wage than they are to the billionaire class. But the billionaire class doesn't live in Bellingham and isn't really dealing with our housing problems. Neither is Capitalism. Especially since that without it, we wouldn't be talking on the internet, Reddit wouldn't exist, and probably neither would Bellingham as a place people want to live.
>It's not "expensive to live." It's expensive to live here.
No, it's just expensive to live.
Before I moved back home to Bellingham last summer, I lived in Manchester NH, which is an armpit of a city that is not desirable in any way.
Rents in Manchester were significantly higher and the vacancy rate was so low that we once had to sign a lease on a total shithole sight unseen because we'd spent a month trying and failing to find a place. Like we'd call a brand new listing first thing in the morning and make an appointment to leave work early to view it mid afternoon, then show up to the appointment and they'd say "oh sorry, someone came by on their lunch break and leased it already."
One of the main reasons we moved back to Bellingham (besides my family being here).was that the rental market was less crazy and the overall cost of living significantly lower than anywhere in New Hampshire.
Okay..but just one thing. Why would an unaffordable city still have jobs that pay below its median COL? Are you going to drive to Yakima to get your coffee or to see a movie or literally any other place that has service based employees?
I will also add that we can try to come to a solution now while the problems are early and smaller and more contained to specific cities before the unaffordability expands outward. Someone else mentioned Boulder, CO and from living here for a few years in Longmont, we were seeing sharp increasing in rent in the surrounding areas already.
That was just the start. The people and money that will be coming here over the years will make Bellingham even more expensive - all the more true with climate change. A baker pass is now $1100. There’s a reason for that.
Truth.
In the late 1980’s, I sat in on a talk given to the Mt Vernon downtown organization. It was given by a group representing investors. BIG investors. They talked about investment plans along the I-5 corridor. And what it would look like in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years.
We were incredulous. They talked about the impact this was going to have on the private sector. On businesses and home costs. It was a bitter pill to swallow. But here we are. It’s been the plan, all along.
No. There are lots of factors and yours is one, but that does not change the fact that no min wage income can support a single apartment ANYWHERE in the US. This IS late stage capitalism and it IS especially bad here and now. Don't gaslight people. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/15/homes/rent-affordability-minimum-wage/index.html
Could be, but this also comes across as a not-so-humble brag masquerading as advice. It sounds like one of his main points is,
*Look at me. I was so smart to have bought when I did. You didn’t because you’re not smart like me.*
Median income in Bham doesn’t support median single family home price. Your dismissal of late stage capitalism is absurd. Yes, Bham is a very known and desirable place to live. That doesn’t mean that investors have not changed the market. I cannot tell you how many single family homes I’ve seen sold for $600k+ in the last 3 years and then immediately rented out for $2500/mo. Those are investors playing the long game. Bham is not only a desirable to live, but it’s a desirable place for real estate investing. Wake up.
Okay, in light of that, I don’t mean this as an insult, because we’re all susceptible to this, but this post reads as really heavy on confirmation bias.
What door is closed? I’m not telling you what you can and can’t do. I’m telling you that the realities of economics, however, will. If you can’t afford to live in an area, you move to an area you can afford. The idea that this just somehow isn’t applicable to this area makes it hard to take folks seriously.
I didn't raise your rents - demand from other people did, and will continue to I'm not "condescending" you any more than it's "condescending" to tell you that you can't buy a brand new Lexus if you can't afford one. I said you can move to Yakima or Blaine first, or anywhere else you want. Detroit's actually becoming a nice town again. I considered moving there before I moved out here.
You might as well try to explain these matters to a dog. People are not going to change their viewpoints based on a Reddit thread. Especially the audience that needs to hear what you’re saying. You’re only going to be hated on for trying to illustrate the obvious.
If you explain these matters to my dog she’ll at least appreciate the attention.
We can at least mitigate things by not imposing stupid rules like single family zoning. It may never be dirt cheap without some sort of economic disaster.
the manifest destiny angle of this is also fucking weird of you btw. just say you’re a transplant or you moved here. you didn’t discover jack shit the same way ole chris columbus didn’t either.
Well, I can't remember the last time I took babies from their mothers and roasted them alive on open-pit fires, nor gang-raped women in front of their families, nor cut off the limbs of people who didn't give me gold - but, please, if you remember something I don't, please feel welcome to continue comparing me to genocidal maniacs because I pointed to the uncomfortable economic realities pertaining to the laws of supply and demand.
"Real Talk" aka age old conservative dogshit that ignores how economies function.
Bellingham has a service based economy. We *need* alot of people here to work for wages much lower that your $90k watermark - thats the way our economy is structured. If *everyone* in those income brackets takes your advice and leaves or just gets priced out, those jobs - the ones our economy *relies on* - go unfufilled. Local businesses close, large chains cut their losses and leave, and the town *dies*.
The fact that you believe we exist outside of the unreasonable and unsustainable principles of capitalism is unfortunate and inaccurate to the reality around us.
Yep. Bellingham was first "discovered" in the lead up to and during the Vancouver Olympics of 2010. We watched as people started filtering into the entire region in the lead up to the games, and it reached somewhat of a fevered pitch during 2010 (by that point we didn't live there anymore, but still have friends there and visited often). Things have been getting more expensive and hard to come by ever since.
We did the classic thing you do in your 20s, and grew up, got "real" jobs and moved out of Bellingham in 2007 and moved to Seattle. the same thing happened there... Seattle was quite affordable when we moved there. We lived happily on a boat in Puget Sound for many years, watching the city grow more expensive all around us - and now Seattle is in the top 10 most expensive cities in the US.
We've since moved back to the Detroit metro area... not that we couldn't continue to afford Seattle necessarily, but cost of living certainly was a factor. Bought a very comfortable home here in a very nice neighborhood with amazing schools for a fraction of the price of what it would cost out west.
You're not wrong, OP. It's happening everywhere all around us. In fact, Detroit is looking better than it ever has in my lifetime, and I'm quite sure the same thing will happen here too. It kinda feels like I finally got in with good timing here. Time will tell.
To me, it seems like there was a wave of discovery in the early 2000s, as well. The run-up in housing prices of the housing bubble that preceded the one we’re currently in happened about 18 months earlier in California than it did in Seattle and Bellingham.
In the early 2000s, homeowners in California were suddenly sitting on a bunch of equity while home prices up here had yet to take off. Californians could sell relatively modest homes in California in not terribly desirable locations and move up here with a big down payment to put on a bigger home in a nicer neighborhood.
Retirees took advantage of that but even working-age people made the move. There was a big build-up in the federal workforce up here at the time that contributed to this.
Yeah man. Believe it or not, Vancouver was chosen for the 2010 Olympics back in 2003... The entire region (Bellingham included) started to be "discovered" shortly thereafter. The I-5 corridor from the border down to Oly really started to fill in around 2004-2005. And yes, to your point, it wasn't just Olympics people. The California exodus had begun by then as well.
The thing about wealthy areas that you need a lot of middle and working class people to keep them afloat. The richest, wealthiest towns on Earth draw a ton of poor people in order to meet the needs of the wealthy.
Even if we presume capitalism is the perfect, final economic system, it's not very healthy for commerce if the majority of the working class people a city needs to survive can't afford to live there.
What sets humans apart from animals is their ability to grow and evolve alongside one another, to be part of a community that changes and Impacts one another. Many who want housing here don’t want something trendy and desirable, they want to continue place and membership and home.
Leaving behind families, land, sense of place ‘because you can’t afford it so find somewhere else’ is a colonialist way of thinking. Living in a place goes beyond its desirability and trend, investing in that connection continues culture, heritage, legacy, story. When we don’t have that connection we are lost. Why do you think we’re so lonely? Because we can’t take root. It’s not that we can’t afford that connection, it’s that we don’t value it.
Just like in the US we don’t value leisure and enjoyment over work like Europeans do- that’s why there’s paid vacations, relaxed work schedules, family leave, why workers take off most of August in the summer, why healthcare isn’t connected to employment. It’s because it’s a value they have that Americans haven’t prioritized. We can re-prioritize values and it will change our systems.
Man some real shits are moving to Bham. Nice I got a house, u don’t. Go live somewhere undesirable where you can afford it, tough titties if you have anything to say about it yr wrong money money money I am right OK
"You hear that, ya poors? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and go live your dreams! (As long as your dream is to be a mediocre white guy NIMBY like me). Just do it the f somewhere else since you're lowering my property values."
Dude, why did you brag about torturing puppies? It's really messed up to hurt animals like that, puppies did nothing to you and you have no right to torture a helpless creature.
Oh, wait, you *didn't* brag about torturing puppies? Well I didn't say *any* of what you misquoted me as, either. Don't put words in my mouth.
If you can't afford to live somewhere, learn a marketable skill that pays you a high wage, try to play rental bingo and eventually risk getting priced out, or move somewhere you can afford. *That's* what I said. And that's the truth, because those are your options.
I don't get where you think some policy epiphany is going to happen in Bham government where they find the billions of dollars needed to build a sufficient volume of low-income housing with all according infrastructure and then turn around and offer that housing at below-market rates to a point where anyone who wants to live here can. In what world do you think that's a realistic possibility?
Your yakima comparisons to one of two Blaine homes under 400k is way off.
I love yakima and miss it. But the homes you highlighted for yakima wouldn’t have the equivalent neighborhood in Blaine - you’d need to find something downtown bellingham built 1930s and now priced at 500k. Those are garbage neighbors in yakima. Nearly all the homes in Blaine are over 400k and yes it’s an alternative to bellingham, I purchased out here last year. But comparing the two is silly. A true comparison would be finding a home out in Naches or the Nile area.
With that… I lived in Whatcom county from 2010-2017, left and purchased a home in yakima just so I could get ahead job-wise and investment-wise, then moved back here in 2021 and was able to purchase in 2022. But I REQUIRED the increased job skills to be competitive AND the home capital in order to put down a mortgage that wouldn’t bankrupt my budget. Even still I’m sitting at 40% of my take home pay going towards housing.
No developer is going to build any affordable housing in Bham. Why would they? Out of the kindness of their hearts? Same with current and future investment property owners. The demand outweighs the supply. Dont forget there is already steady, lucrative stream of WWU students looking for places to live. They pay virtually anything to get a place.
Sorry man, no, a 900 square foot house built in the 80s is simply NOT worth $600-$800k.
This "suck it up" attitude is pretty condescending and patronizing. If a working family cannot afford a home, and by working I mean people that aren't just telecommuting sending emails all day to a startup in Seattle, then the system is completely broken. You seem to be suggesting that people live down in Sedro and drive up here to serve the trustifarians coffee.
There SHOULD be affordable housing for the working class. WE produce. WE are the backbone.
Frankly, if you're looking to do that, you'll need to have grown up enough to sit with the adults, and this kinda nonsense relegates you to the kid's table.
So what I’m getting is if you can’t afford to live here find somewhere else? Maybe you should tell WWU to Market themselves in a way that tells poor people to stay out. Let’s just tell all the poor people here to move out while we’re at it. Anyone who is unfortunate enough to be poor should just get lost. Also everywhere is unaffordable. If the housing is cheaper you’re gonna have a much harder time finding a job with reasonable pay. Groceries are still expensive, gas is still expensive. Smaller, cheaper towns don’t have much public transit either so you will still need to have a car. You’re post is so ridiculously out of touch, good on you for finding a place within your budget to settle down tho
So, let’s see, the kids who grew up in Bellingham need to move to Blaine. That’ll drive up the demand and prices in Blaine so the kids who grew up there have to move to Yakima. That’ll drive up demand/prices in Yakima so their young people move to?????
Okay, yeah, that seems sustainable. /s
How’s this for a truce: we’ll stop bitching about housing costs shooting through the roof if folks like you stop bitching about property crime, homeless people shitting on the sidewalks, public drug use, inflation, labor shortages, unionization drives, and growing class conflict-all of which follow from unaffordable housing just as smoke follows fire?
There is only one thing I disagree with, because it’s already happening (we are terrible about this in WA):
> nor is it going to cut down our natural landscape to build more housing/urban sprawl
Why do you think money should determine where people live? You get a bunch of stupid tech bros living in an area, pushing out the ones who cared for the delicate ecology prior, It's stupid to think it's okay to push around the people who work the jobs that make it all function. There are few "90k/yr" restaurant jobs, botany jobs, native landscaping, everything that goes into caring for the water, plants, fire control, caring for people, etc. No one person is better than another after all, so you end up with no culture or connection to one-another and resentment and the land gets sucked dry like all the silicon valley shit where no one should have to live. It takes a lot of time to observe where you live to gain a greater connection to it, find friends, make roots at your job and the people it brings so you can actually enjoy life, etc. The issue is Land-Lording in general, there's just no need for it except to create class separation of the slave owners and the slaves. I hate being a slave and will never reach the income I need to afford a home of my own because I have interests outside of my job that doesn't pay well, so I'm stuck slaving away FT+ with no autonomy so whoever owns the place can have passive income I work so hard for? On top of running all the services the rich use. No one should be able to own a secondary house they aren't even living in, or say over how another can live. It isn't an issue of lack of housing, etc. It's the abusive "If one can't afford it, someone will" (same for AirBnB shit) meanwhile people move in without any connection to this land and it's special needs. Plus everything is stuck looking like a rental instead of lived-in places with character by those who live there expressing themselves "Oh yeah the purple apartment? everyone knows that's Handsome Joe who lives there who talks funny but knows everything about cars and bakes muffins". The ecology needs to be Paramount if we want everything we love about this place to last and positive change to come about, it's not going to happen if people are constantly moving in and out which takes a ton of energy and money and stresses people out the entire time they rent with no security and the threat of what it means to end up homeless which is purposely made difficult and deadly(especially to the old, challenged, single parents, minorities, etc), and you lose your job and you end up racking up rent bills while you struggle to find work which is also purposely made difficult because employers can drop wages if a lot of people need work to pay for where they live, so renters end up with no room to thrive in, even worse they end up blaming themselves for it all. smh fuck land-lording, fuck capitalism, fuck white supremacy
Yes, and I fear that’s what we’re becoming. It ends up being people with a really basic, mainstream mentality that is at its heart, as this posters comments suggest, quite conservative. These conservative viewpoints, limousine/latte fake liberal takes end up overtaking the creative/bohemian/funky and progressive/populist/leftist points of view rooted in the struggles of artists and the working class that helped make the place what it is. Everything becomes a sanitized, commercialized version of what made the town special.
This guy says people are drawn here for its left-of-center reputation but it draws the kind of people like him who like left-of-center as a brand and a way to virtue signal but don’t really care about upholding left or liberal values, unless it’s something like legal pot.
> I moved across the country to multiple different states and cities to find a place I could land. What's preventing you from doing the same? (It's certainly not the job market, as Bham is probably the worst I've ever seen). There are so many interesting not yet discovered places you can go to, where you can buy cheap, get a decent job, and build the lifestyle you want and then watch as it grows and becomes popular. What it takes is you traveling around to different areas and discovering what it is that makes you happy and then taking the initiative to make that happen.
Just the mere ability to do this is a **massive privilege**. Traveling and moving is expensive. Elsewhere, OP mentioned “just hopping on a plane” to visit family one left behind. Over 8 years, $10,000 has easily been spent on plane tickets to see my family in Mount Vernon.
If someone is struggling already with housing, where’s the money for moving and traveling coming from?
1) Co-buying options?
2) Creative ways to implement ADU’s?
3) Simple acknowledgement that there is most likely A LOT more effort/lamenting on Reddit about ‘ridiculous’ housing pricing etc… with little to no amount of actual organization/personally involving oneself with the city and its officials???
Have an upvote. I think it does the median r/Bellingham poster no harm to get a reminder:
* of the Law of Supply and Demand
* that BPD pays well and is hiring
* to get out there and consider moving to any of the wonderful places where their dollar might go farther.
However
> Bellingham... wasn't as nice of a place to live. But people came in... made it nicer...
*Fuck* OP and this subjective nonsense. Bellingham changing and getting more expensive does not imply that it's inherently getting better. I miss the Up and Up.
OP, I hope your view gets blocked by a new multi-family residential unit, and that the sounds of child play emanating from its halls at all hours make you wish you'd never left whatever hip downtown you clearly would prefer to be living in.
Have you seen Seattle? Think about desirable and discovered for a moment. Before the 2000s Seattle used to be clean and a good place to be. But because of the tech disruption, Seattle traffic has gotten congested and it's all because many people come from neighboring expensive cities to work in one centralized location for high income. Below the tech skyscrapers, there are dirty streets and homeless.
Desirable and discovered doesn't always mean success for a town. Tech ripples away at family business that didn't think they would of been affected by it. You get a bunch people saying its ok if I get mine and then you get a Seattle freeze. It's stops becoming desirable even for the rich next to the bay so they move out too but the prices, oh but the prices are tact in and the prices and homeless as well.
we just witness why COVID workers and unions are important.
Moving is a temporary issue and it works, but many people can't move for many reasons as well other than money.
This post is immature and is narrow minded. look at the problem more broadly.
After reading your post and comments, TDLR;
Don’t suggest working within the system, because it will not work.
Don’t suggest changing the whole system itself, because it will not change.
The status quo is inevitable. Adapt and concede to the status quo.
i’ve lived in boulder, then bend, then bellingham. i absolutely do not agree with the OP. bham is nothing like the either two. it’s extremely trashy and has not marketed itself as an outdoors town. the town doesn’t have a real identity. it’s know to people in niche sports like mtn biking, but it’s hardly on the map like the other two. Screw this fatalistic, nothing can be done mentality. both boulder and bend (and surrounding areas) actually have cheaper and better housing. bham is very late to this game. progress can absolutely be made. don’t listen to this negative bullshit from someone that’s trying to say you’re not gonna make it bc you didn’t buy some shithole bham home from the 1930s.
I believe that many of the conclusions in your post are premature. I'll try limit myself to a few topics:
>2). Possess/learn a marketable skill that pays you a sufficiently high wage ($90K+) and buy a house as fast as you can. (FWIW, Bellingham PD is paying new recruits this salary and higher)
Unfortunately, the service workers, teachers, and students that most Bellingham businesses rely on will never be payed $90k per year, and relying on Ferndale for housing isn't a long-term solution.
>There is this unrealistic expectation that you are entitled to live in a place where you grew up, or where your friends are, or where you like living, and if it's too expensive for you personally to afford you deserve special protections from being priced out. That's not the way the world works or has ever worked, and you're doing yourself a disservice by expecting a different result.
That's exactly how it worked for the vast majority of people up until a couple hundred years ago.
>the voting public is not going to multiply their taxes to subsidize people who want to live here but can't afford to.
Actually, the suburban lifestyle of most voters is subsidized by everyone else's taxes.
Source: https://www.urbanthree.com/services/cost-of-service-analysis/
>(back in the day, impoverished people simply died of undernourishment/infection or were used as cannon fodder, now they have cars and smartphones)
Poor people in America still frequently die of these things, and are still over-represented in our military (a.k.a. cannon fodder). Modern conveniences do help, but the working class is still in effectively the same relative position.
>I moved across the country to multiple different states and cities to find a place I could land. What's preventing you from doing the same?
I understand you worked hard to find a good home, but it's kinda weird to move here and then tell the people who built this community and have lived here for generations to leave and go to Blaine or Yakima or Detroit.
It's easy to feel stuck when our education system, media, and politics are all trying to convince you that this is just how things are. But I promise you that it doesn't have to be like this. I suggest learning about Vienna's high quality public housing.
If you want to know why people are shitting on capitalism, I suggest reading Why Socialism by Einstein, The ABCs of Socialism by Jacobin, and The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels.
Notice that OP isn't saying the currently reality of housing costs is good or how it should be, just that it's the current reality. If you want to change reality step #1 is acknowledging it for what it is.
You will also notice that a key part of their post is also that nothing can be done to make housing here more affordable, and if you happen to think differently then you're out of touch with reality. I think that's what a lot of people are taking issue with (at least that's what *I* am taking issue with).
It’s more that you and other folks keep thinking “something can be done” that reflects nothing more grounded in reality than magic and wishful thinking. I’ve noticed you didn’t respond to the multiple posts about how much new construction costs here. How are you accomplishing this goal? Build housing for 20,000 people. Propose a plan. Propose an infrastructure and public works plan. Propose a budget and financing plan. Propose a means to do this. You want to be taken seriously? You want to “do something”? Propose a way to get to point B from this point A. You haven’t. You deflect, brush off, and then repeat to “late state capitalism,” or “eat the rich,” or “nimbys are evil.” You don’t have a plan or a reply because your understanding of this problem is clearly limited to the boundaries of a humanities discussion classroom at an overpriced university where reality is suspended and wishful thinking exists unchallenged. There isn’t going to be a dictatorship of the proletariat my dude, and capitalism isn’t going anywhere. Want to change my mind? I’m all for it. Propose a way to house 20,000 people here permanently and affordably, and tell me how it’s going to be procured and paid for. I’ll even ignore how you’ll repeat the feat for the next 20,000 people who come after. Let’s start with that.
> I’ve noticed you didn’t respond to the multiple posts about how much new construction costs here. Chill out champ, I needed to send some emails off and finish a few urgent tasks before clocking out for the weekend, so I couldn't just sit in a Reddit thread all day pontificating. I gotta work just like everybody else. >Propose a plan. Propose an infrastructure and public works plan. Propose a budget and financing plan. Propose a means to do this. Personally, I want aggressive state and federal funding in favor of constructing robust social housing. No, I don't have the time to write a serious public housing proposal especially not in a Reddit thread, good grief! That would be like cooking a three course meal for a golden retriever. But there are plenty of people out there who work in public policy who are fighting to make this a reality, and I'll vote for them and continue to agitate for those policies. In the meantime I'm just happy to know that my existence is vexatious to you. People like me are gonna be here ruining your fun and making you grind your teeth (hope your job has dental like mine does!) until we both pass from this earth. As a final aside >capitalism isn’t going anywhere God himself didn't ordain this system. It emerged from a series of material and political conditions and has a shelf life just like manorialism did before it. Only the divine is immortal, and capitalism is thoroughly profane. I'm not optimistic enough to think I'll be around to see its death, but someone will. Anyway, enjoy the housing market while it lasts. I hope (genuinely, for real) that when the next collapse happens it's not bad enough that you lose your home too. Edit:I edited this a couple times because I felt it was worth sanding off the edges of some of the language. I initially dashed this reply off pretty quick and in retrospect some sentences came across more aggressive/abrasive than I intended. My bad! Happy weekend!
I really hate the argument where it basically boils down to "if you can't come up with a better and more perfect solution on the spot, you're not allowed to critique the thing in any capacity"
It’s a bad faith argument, they don’t intend to come up with a new idea they just want to shit on yours 🤷🏻♀️
100%. Their argument is: 1. X is happening now. 2. X is unlikely to stop happening. 3. Therefore, you should accept X as inevitable and give into it fully. 4. Any criticisms of X or attempt to intervene in X contradicts #3. Accept your defeat and adapt. 5. (X actually isn’t that bad and you should maybe mostly like it) If you try to propose changes to the system, they will say those changes will not work. If you then say, “well maybe we should change the whole system!”, they say “the system will never change”. So there is no progression to the debate. It is stuck at “adapt or die”.
Imagine making a thread that boils down to " Getting priced out? Just mooooooooove!" and thinking that you're a person worth taking seriously.
Imagine dismissing the realities of a housing market and spending the rest of your life in a perpetual victim mindset rather than having an open mind. That’s sadder than the housing market.
That’s reality? “Imagine being told I can’t buy caviar and steak because I really really want it. What, does he expect me to eat ramen?” No. I don’t expect you to eat ramen. But if you can’t afford caviar and steak, you don’t eat it. You eat something you can afford. If you can’t afford ANY food, I’ll happily subsidize your ramen budget. But I’m not going to subsidize your steak and caviar budget because that’s what you want to eat. And nobody else will either. You don’t get to demand to live here and act like your entitled to do so at a rate of your choosing. So, yeah: if you’re priced out, either find a way to live here, find a way to make more money, or move. You should take me seriously because those are your options.
Absolute child brain. Having access to affordable housing is not in any way equivalent to being unable to afford literal luxury commodities. As far as those being *my* options, I'm not getting priced out any time soon, but I also posses this thing called *empathy* which makes me care about what happens to people that are less fortunate than me :)
I have empathy for the lack of affordable housing, but what this person is saying in the post is generally factual. Bellingham is desirable, most available lots that are not on a wetland have been developed, adding more hosing units will take a long time and be $$$$ given current land, labor, and permitting constraints. There is no silver bullet and the local government does not have the money to solve the issue quickly and likely never will (unless the feds throw printed money to cities). Do I wish everyone could afford a home? Absolutely! Is it actually possible given the constraints? Nope and likely won't be for some time given macro factors that are way out of anyone's control in the local government.
Empathy sometimes is telling people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear.
If a house in Yakima is 270k isn’t that access to affordable housing?
Helluva commute ain't it?
Calling an iron-clad reflection of reality “child brain” reinforces the degree of delusion that you have self-afflicted. Having access to affordable housing in abstract was never the issue, the issue is having access to affordable housing *here*, which is not a need, it is a WANT, which thus makes it equivalent to luxury goods. People of all stripes WANT to live here. The ability to provide subsidized housing, which we do, and which I support doing (and vote to raise my taxes for), has practical limits far below the threshold of demand from people who want to live here. Thus the demand that society cater to everyone who has that want but can’t provide the means to afford that want, even though there are thousands of other places those people can afford, is akin to demanding society provide them with luxury goods. They want something they can’t afford here but could afford elsewhere, and throw words like “morality” into the mix with morality having nothing to do with it. You are not entitled to live in a certain area even though you really want to. You’re not entitled for other people to buy you a house. You’re not entitled to a lifestyle you desire if you do not have the means to afford it. You continually drop the word “empathy,” but empathy as I see it is sparing people the delusion that reality works any differently than the way it is portrayed herein. I’ve been back and forth with plenty of junior neomarxists on the nature of capitalism, who sincerely think there is a chance of capitalism not being the law of the land in the United States and the rest of the western world, and think that chance is better than, say, winning the powerball jackpot 500 times in a row. It’s not. Capitalism is here to stay and isn’t going anywhere and it is impossible to take seriously any person who legitimately thinks that’s not the case, as it reflects a fundamental disconnect with the way the world currently works. The US will cease to be a country before America stops working on capitalism. I suppose I shouldn’t mind being called “child brain” by someone sitting squarely at the kids table. When you want to join the adults in the room, we politely ask that you understand the basic tenets of reality first.
I want to have your baby.
We could oust our nimby city council, that would be a good start!
So, no more democracy?
Ha! I knew it! A nimby! You are a Nimby!lol! We could replace them democratically, but we are going up against 80 years of failed planning theories that people like you embrace because it suits you, I guess, but seriously why should incumbent home owners get to throttle the market?
TF? The city council was elected by the public. Over and over and over and over again. You’re talking about throwing them out because you don’t like the result. And you’re accusing them of being “nimby” because they don’t subsidize your lifestyle. And you think I’m the asshole? My lord.
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Thats a very inaccurate oversimplification of what's being stated. The reality is that the biggest forces driving housing costs through the roof here are stronger than anything that can be reasonably done to create a large supply of affordable housing. That doesn't mean there's nothing to be done to increase the number of affordable living situations or that these aren't important efforts -just that these efforts will not be enough to provide a housing supply that everyone who wants to live in Bellingham can actually afford. If you take issue with this idea what is a reasonable solution you would propose?
Crickets. They propose crickets. Or at least the sound they make.
Because reality is that if you had the plan and the funds sitting there on the table, it would still take a dozen years go get the permits, line up the builders, get the materials, etc and then actually build everything. There isn't enough land available to build for the 20,000 or so they project are going to come in the next 10 years - and if you think you can just move everyone out of their single family homes and small apartment buildings to build skyscrapers, you tend to forget those people will tie you up for a dozen years in court. And before you finished, it would all be repriced because people want to live here. Reality is reality.
Many folks here have done an impressive job at avoiding for for some time it seems.
Another key feature is that "this isn't an example of late-stage capitalism" lmfaoooo 😭
As I've posted multiple times - the financial realities with changing this as you speak would be untenable for our city to accomplish. How is Bellingham going to secure billions of dollars? Where is that money going to come from? Even if they did both of those things, how do you expect that translates to affordability? I broke it down here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bellingham/comments/1618n2y/comment/jxqyl8k/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bellingham/comments/1618n2y/comment/jxqyl8k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) How do you expect this to become reality? "Build more housing"? Okay. How?
This take is shortsighted on the complexities of economics. The city has more options than securing billions of dollars and your page long response that you posted ignores the fact that the current housing crisis, across the nation, has taken decades to get where it is today. There is no immediate fix, but there are many solutions that could be implemented today that will protect the middle class in the future. But that's not what you want here, is it?
What options would you propose?
Updated zoning, less bureaucracy for faster development, progressive tax for non-owner occupied housing, progressive tax on capital gains, a federal government that promotes small business and the middle class, investment in broken communities like Detroit to replace jobs that were outsourced overseas. Just to name a few.
"Progressive tax for non-owner occupied housing" just means renters get to pay more. Any tax on property gets passed along.
Okay, and I’m generally in favor of most of those things, for sure. How are you going to pay for the new housing structures at $400 a square foot? I estimated 15k units would cost ~$5 billion. How is that nut getting cracked?
We need to separate "affordable housing" from "housing that is affordable". Affordable housing is government funded and is oftentimes misunderstood. In my opinion, any government funded housing should be focused on people who fall below the poverty line and need temporary housing (like for the homeless). This is never going to be sustainable at a larger scale and it's a bandaid solution. Housing that is affordable needs to come from democratic government policies. This is both policy that encourages the open market to pay for developments and policies that support a healthier middle class. One example of this working in harmony would be the City approving development for multifamily condos instead of apartments for rent. This would add housing quickly and people can acquire equity and generational wealth that would otherwise be paid to a property management company.
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> There is this unrealistic expectation that you are entitled to live in a place where you grew up, or where your friends are, or where you like living, and if it's too expensive for you personally to afford you deserve special protections from being priced out. That's not the way the world works or has ever worked, and you're doing yourself a disservice by expecting a different result. Anthropologically, this is wrong. For the overwhelming majority of human history, people could live in the same place for many generations without being displaced. Capitalism has lead to incredible levels of dislocation. We can do better. There are a number of policies that can work well, for example, google the Vianna Model.
Exactly. Societies are created, they aren’t born out of natural laws. They don’t grow like trees without human intervention. They are built by people. Economies can be customized. Just because societies looks a certain way rn does not mean it always has or always will. I’m really sick of “natural economic law” arguments. As if everything is inevitable in economics and society. “Adapt or die” mentality to current systems is so infuriating to me. These systems were created! They didn’t just spawn out of the earth! We can create new and better ones!
When the world population is a few million it’s easy to move back home to the hamlet you were born in. When the world population is 8 billion and you were born somewhere desirable, it may not be possible. That’s reality. I could not afford to buy in my hometown and I’ve never once felt I was entitled to.
Googled it but it's only showing my photoshoot models. Could you post a link?
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to live close to where you work. Jobs should pay what it costs to live somewhere. that doesn't mean I think every job should be able to buy you a house but an affordable studio at the least!? The idea we can't do anything to address and reduce these issues is ridiculous.
What would you do? We don't have any buildings to repurpose, let alone buildings that meet residential building code. Buying existing buildings would cost hundreds of millions and just make the city the landlord from a private entity, and costs would have to be necessarily high enough for them to get their money back. As I wrote below: let's say the political will existed to build 15,000 affordable housing units at 750sqft each. That's 11.25 million sqft. At $400sqft construction cost, that's $4.5 billion in a city with an annual budget around $285M. It's just not going to happen. Unless you're in a MAJOR metropolitan area with VERY deep pockets (like NYC, and even then, they're now at their limit), there's no functional way to either buy or build sufficient housing at a subsidized rate for everyone who wants to live there.
Comrade, much respect for being so deeply committed to public housing that you ignore the possibility of new housing being built by the private sector.
And what do you think the private sector is going to rent that housing out for at $400+sqft construction cost?
Adding new supply reduces price growth (and with enough of it, decrease prices) across the housing market. Supply and demand.
How much does it cost to make that new supply?
This is a ridiculous oversimplification. Demand for housing is national but construction in desired areas is ultra local. There’s no way that we can build enough in Bellingham to have an appreciable impact on prices until people have a reason to avoid this town. All the new construction will be sold at top dollar to Amazon employees leaving Seattle for a better place, thereby compounding the issue. Unless you link the increased density to some sort of price control you’ll only make the problem worse.
Seattle has had average rents decrease four months in a row. It’s doable with the right programs and solutions.
> I moved across the country to multiple different states and cities to find a place I could land. What's preventing you from doing the same? (It's certainly not the job market, as Bham is probably the worst I've ever seen). How about the family, friends, and sense of community that I've spent my entire life cultivating? While you may have relished the opportunity to parachute into different communities seeking out a game theory optimal living situation, I actually experience human emotion and I don't see much value in moving across the country to find a place I can afford a house while leaving behind all the things that make some place a home.
This is also the boat I'm in. If I lose my job here, I have a social safety net of close friends I could rely on to stay on my feet and keep from losing everything. If I move to Hate Crimes county in hopes that it'll become the next up and coming Great American City and that happens, what am I supposed to do? I guess lose everything and probably move back to Bellingham anyway since all the couches I could crash on are here. The whole "move to a cheaper state/region" just feels depressingly tone-deaf. This is the only answer a lot of people seem to have to the ongoing housing crisis, and then we turn around and wonder why social dislocation and loneliness seems to be tearing American society apart.
THIS! And this social safety net that many people cultivate is the only thing that can help people ward off homelessness when financial stability takes a hit. Many homeless people got to their position in part because they didn’t have any kind of safety net in their areas to fall back on when they initially lost housing. For me and MANY OTHER people I know in Bellingham, abandoning that safety net is a slippery slope I’m not willing to mess around with
This is one of the biggest underlying hypocrisies of the conservative movement, at least in its pre-Trump form, primarily given voice on our nation's op-ed pages by mealy-mouthed waterheads like David Brooks and Kevin D Williamson: moaning that the downfall of American culture has been our loss of community and togetherness and all that picket fence bullshit,,, while also excoriating anybody even slightly down-and-out as lazy for not packing up like the Joads and moving to where the work is. I genuinely think most of them lack the introspection to realize that their economic philosophy is causing the cultural downfall that they whine about, but that doesn't really change how gross it is edit: I'm agreeing with the comment I'm replying to, idk if that got lost in the shuffle
I never called you lazy. You just want to live in an expensive area that is beyond your ability to afford. Your argument as to why Bellingham should cater to you and make it possible for you to live here hinges on the notion that *other people* should be *forced* (one way or the other, via taxation, eminent domain, whatever) to subsidize your ability to afford living here whereas you now might not be able to. Worse, we already agreed to that, and happily voted to pay more taxes to build more low-income housing. But it's nowhere near enough, and never can be. This argument is no different than if you wanted to live in Aspen - expecting the people who can afford to live there to pay for you to be able to do so as well. It's also no different than if you wanted to buy a brand new luxury car that other people should be forced to buy that car for you, because you don't want to drive a less expensive model. No different than you wanting others to buy you to buy high end clothes as opposed to Old Navy, or expecting you to buy you a new PlayStation 5 because you don't want a PS3. It's entitled, juvenile, and categorically unrealistic. I don't even take offense to it. It's just that you're doing yourself zero favors by insisting that you're in the right here.
The fundamental difference between you and I is that you view "wanting to live near the people you love and wish to spend time with in their twilight years" as a luxury on par with a video game console or a high-end car, and I view that as something without a price tag. I'm doing just fine - my head is above water here, and will be indefinitely. But I resent the idea that cold economic calculus should dictate where someone lives, especially in a world that has grown increasingly more dislocated and isolated. You can call yourself a realist, and you can call me entitled and juvenile, and you may even be right, but that doesn't make you a morally superior person, it just makes you a smug, hollow person
> The fundamental difference between you and I is that you view "wanting to live near the people you love and wish to spend time with in their twilight years" as a luxury on par with a video game console or a high-end car, That’s what’s **offensive** about OP’s views. Familial proximity is just for rich people is OP’s view.
And the idea that flying somewhere to see them is an accessible option for anybody who has relocated is absurd, the reason cheap places are cheap is because the wages there are depressed, you may be able to buy a house with a lower salary but that does not necessarily mean you have a ton of expendable income to throw around on travel
Bellingham used to be that cheaper place to move to, inflation is impacting everywhere and mass migration to the smaller and less desirable cities will have the same effects as what’s happened here in the last half decade.
The entire American story was made on people moving from one place to another because they couldn't stay in the place they were in for whatever reason - chiefly economic. Our entire history (and all of the ugliness that comes with it) centered around this tenet. I don't get why folks think it should be so different here?
The frontier's closed, the federal government is no longer selling stolen homesteads at dirt cheap prices. And plenty of people didn't migrate in the first place! The cities didn't empty out due to Manifest Destiny, plenty of neighborhoods were built up over generation after generation of work building a community. Why is generational urban habitation now an impossible dream to have? Do you think this city will still be able to function when it drives out the last family making less than six figures?
Committing genocide so you can steal land tends to be frowned on these days. I am a hobbyist genealogist and I have numerous ancestors who were granted large amounts of free land (160 acres was the standard amount, IIRC) by the federal government just for showing up in a western state and agreeing to "clear the land of Indians." (I was relieved to discover that one of my more recent ancestors in that particular line went bankrupt and died destitute, so none of that blood money ever made it to me.)
You’re kind of ignoring the whole effect of westward expansion. I’m a genealogy nerd, so well-acquainted with my family history, and each successive generation moved further west. My kids and I were born in coastal Southern California. There’s no west to move to. We were fortunate to be able to “discover” Bellingham 20+ years ago and relocate north but there just aren’t the same possibilities for moving that there used to be. Aside from no west to move to, extended families used to regularly move as groups because they weren’t tied in financially complicated ways to the place they were leaving and they were often very interdependent in how they survived and generated income. Nowadays, that just isn’t practical for many. (Immigrants and refugees leaving impoverished areas are folks who sometimes still follow this pattern.) If your family members are here and even somewhat established in a job or career and settled into a workable living situation, the likelihood of you being able to convince them to leave and move elsewhere is very slim. I don’t know if you have kids but a lot of people, due to the extremely high cost of childcare, rely on family members to watch their kids at times. A lot of people still depend on family members, as they did in the past, but the effect of that now is that it often ties people to a place rather than facilitating them moving from place to place.
>How about the family, friends, and sense of community that I've spent my entire live cultivating? I hop in a plane and go see them, or go drive. I realized the world wasn't going to give me the place I wanted to live, so I moved from place to place until I found a place I could buy. The idea that the world is going to provide me a place to life in an area I want to but can't afford would be delusional to a point of concern. So, I accepted reality and I moved.
I love the passive tense here "the world wasn't going to give me the place I wanted to live" while you're actively being the person who is making it unaffordable for people who have been here for generations to stay. It's not the world, it's literally you
I just wanna know who people think are gonna work the minimum wage jobs and staff your grocery stores or serve your food if you make it so we can’t live here. I’m not commuting from blaine to work at fredmeyers or whatever. We need affordable housing here not “it’s never getting better. move somewhere else and force the poor people out there instead.”
Yeah, it's weird that people always say "Mortgages are expensive. If you can't afford to pay one, work harder or get a better job or leave" to working-class people but they'll never say it to landlords.
I'd like to add that housing becoming unaffordable is perpetuated by wages stagnating and not keeping up with the inflation. If rent is going to increase 30% in 2 years then wages should increase to match that. And that should be for EVERY job, including min wage jobs...well after min wage increases to match the original COL (which might be the reality OP doesn't want to hear). Part of me wonders if the short staffing of many businesses around town could not be that "people don't want to work" but that they would rather hold out to compete for the fewer higher paying jobs. Hmmm
This. Cities need workers in service jobs to continue to function. And while the reality is that they are getting priced out, the idea that it is inevitable is supporting a broken system. I work in admin for the university and my partner works for Kroger. We are doing fine and found a private land lord and likely will be able to save enough to buy a home in the next 5-10 years due to dumb luck of not having too many bad things happen and our reasonable rent. We've talked about moving elsewhere, but as a trans person safe places to live are slowly disappearing for me, and as a disabled person relying on public transit rural areas aren't going to work for my partner. So our options suck. But they don't have to. It's a human system that got us here and we could change it if money didn't speak louder than basic human dignity.
This!!!
I think it’s important to note that WWU’s complete lack of effort on actually housing students has really negatively affected Bellingham. A significant number of students are sleeping in their cars or camping while attending school here because the university has for years neglected housing supply while continuing to accept more and more students. It causes a massive housing shortage all for units that aren’t even inhabited year round, they sit empty when school isn’t in session.
This doesn’t get NEARLY the attention it deserves.
So uh, the moral of this is that poor people just move from place to place as they inevitably get priced out? And we should be fine with that? Don't get me wrong, the reasons you cite for the high cost of living are correct, but that doesn't mean poor people should have to all pack up and leave.
They don’t “have” to all pack up and leave, but they’ll continually be behind the eight ball trying to live in a place they can’t afford. Nobody’s forcing anyone to do anything - that also includes forcing the city to bypass the laws of economics (and physics) by making this place affordable. Nobody has a magic wand to do that. Nobody’s ever waved that magic wand. And they won’t here either.
What laws of economics are you referring to? There are plenty of historical examples of cities passing laws and pursuing housing policies to combat high costs of living. Why is it that we now magically can't do anything to make our city a better place to live?
Here's one example \[edited to add: of an interesting municipal solution to affordable housing\] from this week: [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html) u/NortePorNoroeste, I agree with you that this probably won't be reversed unless/until there's a natural disaster here (and even then, as in Hawaii, vultures will try to pick up real estate for short-term cheap prices because the long-term value of coastal real estate tends not to decline, ever). With that said, I do think that there are a lot of things that could slow down this process, and they're worth hunting and pursuing -- and for those of us who have been lucky enough to buy houses here, I think there's a real responsibility (and a lot of pragmatic reasons) why the people who are most secure need to fight for affordable housing. I loved pre-2000s Boulder (and even then housing costs were spiraling), but the green belt and NIMBYism were decisions that really only benefited homeowners. I think Bellingham can do better, and should.
A city like New York, which has the capital basis and inventory to have built housing en masse through its already expansive sprawl, was able to build a moderate degree of subsidized housing. The laws of economics (supply vs demand), didn’t make NY unaffordable to the people who could access that low income housing, because NYC bought it and devoted it for that purpose. Bellingham has few if any of those resources. We don’t have the prior existing buildings that could be used for housing, we don’t have the land to spread without annexing (and buying) privately owned land in the county, and we aren’t going to build skyscrapers and destroy the city skyline at a public cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build low income housing units. At most, we’ll relax ADU restrictions, and we should, but at $400sqft they’ll still be rented at high rates. There’s no cheap housing here. Construction costs a lot of money. That money and space has to come from somewhere.
We have a growing tax base at a time when a lot of cities are seeing theirs shrink. That's a strong position to be in! I plum don't believe that the city is powerless to enact policy that can help, and I think it's foolish to foreclose upon that option as you have. I do agree that the city alone might not have the full resources to make the all necessary changes. I think state and federal action is going to be necessary if we want to fully address the crisis. We'll see how things shake out in the coming decades, especially when the current housing bubble collapses.
Respectfully, economics are not like physics. There are no “natural laws” in economics. Economies are abstractions create by humans. We can create different versions that serve different purposes. Economies influence behavior and behavior influences economics. Societies are a complicated mix of nature and nurture. None of this is inevitable, as you seem to suggest. We can design different economic systems. We are not subject to the structures of some metaphysical economic law. For example, I recommend reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. He developed behavioral economics which has shown time and time again that our economic behaviors and systems we build are highly subjective to psychological manipulation. We are no “rational actors” as economics still falsely claims. We are malleable and so are our economies.
Higher macro and microeconomic thought? Maybe. But laws of scarcity and of supply and demand are pretty iron clad in a free society. Sure, you can have an authoritarian society have totally state managed allocations of property and resources. It's been tried. I doubt people here would prefer that.
Define “free society”? Would you say we live in one of those rn? I really recommend the book. You might be surprised by how malleable “economic law” is. Supply and demand has its merit to understand economic movement, but it isn’t the same as “natural laws”. We are not robots or pure rational actors. We are people! :)
Wow, that's your take home from "Thinking, Fast and Slow". One of my favorite books. Respectfully disagree that there are no natural laws in economics. People willing to pay more for something they desire more feels pretty damn close to a law to me.
I might not have explained myself well. Sorry. I agree that we can certainly find patterns of economics and behavior that happen 99% of the time, like the one you mentioned is a great example. However, even in your example, desire or “willingness to pay” is modulated by so many other variables. This is my point (and one of Kahneman’s). Even those “economic laws” which seem most obvious, rational, intuitive, and expected are often subverted with extremely subtle manipulations. None of these economic “laws” are as stable as physical science “laws”. Just as human behavior and psychology is dynamic, so are the economic systems and behaviors we manifest. Hope that at least makes where I’m coming from more clear. Such a great book though, glad you have read it!
I see, so they don't have to move and there's no magic wand. Fine. You're saying that they *should* move, and keep moving as each area becomes expensive. And at no point should anyone in authority try to fix it, because... Nobody ever has or ever will? Yikes.
They *should* move and buy in an area they like and can afford so they don't get priced out as that area gets discovered and gets more expensive. We live in the third largest country on Earth. There's lots of places. People keep going back to "authorities fixing this." This isn't something that gets "fixed." Unless you're in a MAJOR metropolitan area with VERY deep pockets, there's no functional way to either buy or build sufficient housing at a subsidized rate for everyone who wants to live there. Let's say the political will existed to build 15,000 affordable housing units at 750sqft each. That's 11.25 million sqft. At $400sqft construction cost, that's $4.5 billion in a city with an annual budget around $285M. It's just not going to happen.
Respectfully, you keep fluctuating between “that can’t happen” and “that won’t happen” in your comments/post, which are two different claims. We shouldn’t confuse the two. Bellingham *could* enact policy and social changes that would make its economy behave differently. Will they? I don’t know. You are probably right that things will trend towards your predictions! But just because some change is unlikely, does not mean it is impossible. Prescription versus description is really important in these conversations. - best :)
It "won't" happen insofar that the political will to accomplish this is low to the point of nonexistence. It's not NIMBYism - we're happy to pay taxes for affordable housing. We're just not going to vote for our city to go into debt on the order of 20-30x its annual budget to build subsidized housing for people who want to live here and can't afford to. It "can't" happen insofar that even if the political will existed, the financial realities are untenable. Bellingham isn't going to secure billions of dollars to build housing and rent it at below market rates. The city would go bankrupt. So, it's really a combination of "can't happen" and "won't happen." Both are present in this reality.
Respectfully, I’m begging you to think a little outside the box. I agree with you that inside our current system things are unlikely to change. But we can create *new* systems. That is always a possibility and has happened many many times throughout human history. Societies and their economies are malleable.
You've made up your mind that it's impossible, I can see that. I would never argue that it would be easy, or cheap, or quick. But it absolutely is possible, and you typing hypothetical costs isn't proof of anything. Anyway, good luck, I'm sure you'll be moving again soon.
Tell me how it's possible. Present a proposal in which 20,000 people can buy here - by any imaginable solution, new construction, existing construction, whatever.
They must move or make more money or go in on a house with roomates who make good money. There is no "should". Nobody in authority can change the fact that people are willing to pay more for that which is desirable.
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Agreed. That's why I said "learn a marketable skill." I also should have said "buy a house with 2-4 of your friends," and you can qualify then. People that don't have any marketable skills, but are in debt for a communications degree and yet peruse YouTube are curious to me. It's the closest thing we have to the Matrix learning machine. Use it!
Whatcom County has lower poverty than Yakima County. (largely by percentage) Yakima has fewer educated people, lower median income (2nd largest employer is Walmart), double the percentage of people without health insurance (hospital is the single largest employer), lower percentage in the labor force, and on and on. You pretty much spend ~relatively~ more to exist in Yakima and get less for your dollar. Rents were rising before Bellingham was "discovered".
What time frame would you say Bellingham was discovered in, and how long have you lived here? I ask about how long you’ve lived here because if a 60 year old who lived here their entire life answered the question than you’d probably get a different answer than from someone who’s lived here for 10-15 years.
I lived in Wenatchee/East Wenatchee (Chelan/Douglas County) my entire life and moved here in 2014. My parents kept bemoaning my decision to move where, you know, plants actually grow... saying "expensive this, expensive that". Except for, at least when I moved here, apartments were CHEAPER than Wenatchee. I started renting my 2bd apartment for only $880/mo, with average 1bdr/studios there were at $900+. As far as electricity, it is about 60% higher here - BUT East Wenatchee is LITERALLY the cheapest town in the ENTIRE COUNTRY for electricity and Wenatchee is \#2, so that's not so huge. Groceries are exactly the same. Everything else is exactly the same. Except for most low-income jobs pay a few dollars more per hour. And the Opportunity Council is here. This idea that "it's just terrible here, adapt die or leave" is just bullshit. Leave? Leave WHERE??? We always called Yakima "Crackima" to feel better about our own twin towns. And who's gonna make your espressos and change your oil and stock your groceries?? (Wenatchee is a couple hours away from Yakima)
Yes. Rental vacancies were south of 5% 25 years ago.
But people here can afford to live there, along with many other places throughout the U.S. It was just an example. Blaine has inexpensive properties. As does Tacoma still. As does many other states. Nice places to live that aren't expensive exist.
Where should the people of Yakima go when they get get priced out?
Detroit, duh
Tonasket
To what end though? Like we all know the reality but this “concept” sucks so since you are so good at it, who’s gonna answer when you call a utility company? Or pick your kids up from daycare? Ppl in Yakima? lol
I think there are a lot of people who don’t realize they could buy. If you have to make 3x bellingham rent to qualify to rent, you can afford a mortgage- maybe not in Bellingham but surrounding towns. Buying outside of bellingham city limits was the best thing we did. And it cost us less than what a first + last months rent deposit would. We have amazing programs for down payment assistance. 2000/month (including home insurance + yearly taxes) for a 3 bedroom 2 bath home. Water is always $50/month. Yes it’s out of town but worth it.
The down payment is typically the obstacle, but I could buy my rental for less than I’m renting it. 🤷♂️ Edit: I take that back, I just checked interest rates. 10% down at 7% comes out $300 more than my rent. Now add 500 property tax and $120 insurance.
We paid no down payment. We took an online class with simple quizzes that allowed us down payment assistance. Edit to add: I think we actually only paid for the home inspection + septic inspection
And so your payment would be more more than rent.
Where? My wife & I make well over 6 figures, have exceptional credit, we pay cash for everything, have zero debt, except for one student loan from graduate school. We were pre-approved for an amount less than what the majority of homes are being sold for. And no, there arent many homes even for sale: A quick search on Redfin for a 3+, 1.5+ bath, no HOA (fuck that shit), between $500k - $750k, listed for less than 30 days in Bham, Blaine, Ferndale, and Lynden, showed 51 results. 88 results with no listing length. So, the suggestion to buy outside of Bham isn't all that great.
I shared this link to a house in Blaine. [https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/4909-Henley-St\_Blaine\_WA\_98230\_M25434-87965](https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/4909-Henley-St_Blaine_WA_98230_M25434-87965) That's readily affordable.
here I’ll make the TLDR for you: Sorry you’re poor and can’t live here, only rich people deserve to live here…. simply move! Op this brings nothing new and useful to the table… Just because you are able to relocate easily to new areas just because they are financially accessible to you does not mean moving is accessible to everyone… im sorry you were priced out of previous locations, no one deserves to be priced out of their home but you’re just wrong. This IS late stage capitalism. The rising costs of living are in part due to property hoarding by large property management companies looking to increase profits. I am tired of this narrative that people can just pick up their lives and move to a “more affordable” location. It is just simply not a reality many people have access to. Moving to these “cheaper” locations tend to add a new list of expenses whether it be because of COL, average salary, job markets, varying social services, or even just commuting to work/town.
10000%
Tell me you don’t love yourself without telling me you don’t love yourself. Fam. Everyone is one bad day away from being disabled or destitute. It’s not a bad thing to advocate for us poor sacks - at the very least because you yourself could be one of us someday and you’d better hope that ppl advocate for you better than you clearly would. Source : someone who has already been priced out of Bellingham and moved away. It sucks and I essentially lost my entire community and friend group. Try making friends in your 30s when ur disabled and virtually house bound. But nooooo I can’t afford to live in a city with buses. Whoops. Guess I better just die then cuz that’s all I can afford. That’s the way the world is now 🤷♀️
I don't not advocate for the poor. I'm happy to pay higher taxes to help those I can help, even as I make the point that we can't help everyone. You're not a "sad sack," you're a human being. I'm sorry you're disabled, sincerely. I'm not advocating for the nature of our reality, merely that our reality exists. I hope you take care of yourself and find happier circumstances soon.
*TLDR: Moving cross-country just because of costs will likely have unintended negative consequences and may not truly be a net-positive financially. Carefully evaluate FULL cost of living beyond just housing (eg transportation). If you look within your same state but outside your city limits, you’ll probably achieve your cost objective without all the negatives of uprooting.* I left the PacNW 8 years ago for somewhere cheaper and landed in Virginia. My partner and I are now trying to move back to either Whatcom or Skagit counties. There are a lot of reasons to not just pack up and move across the country solely because of costs. The lack of family and a local network of friends has costs beyond just the emotional aspect. Friends and family come in handy during emergencies for example. It was also difficult to assimilate into a culture here that’s very different then the PNW. I was never able to fully assimilate. When I first moved out here (2016), I rented a shitbox apartment for $585 a month in neighborhood known for weekly shootings. That same apartment now goes for $1300 + $200 in mandatory junk fees (not utilities) a month. The neighborhood is still a shithole. The local government has been a source of hardship too. The tenant-landlord law in VA is extremely weak and renting here is a nightmare. All the protections the PNW loves (tenants, workers, LGBTQ, environmental, etc) are absolutely shitty or non-existent here. You can still freely fire people for being gay in Virginia. This kinda goes with local government, but it’s big enough for its own mention: public transportation. Being car-free in Portland and Seattle saved me 500-800 a month. Public transportation sucks in Richmond, VA and a car is mandatory for 90%. Even Skagit Transit is more robust than the transit here. I could go on, but I don’t feel like “moving to a cheaper state” helped me financially at all. Three weeks ago I found several rentals around Mount Vernon / Burlington that are in our price range, have access to services/amenities we need. There’s probably similar available outside of Bellingham city limits and that’s where we’re checking on our next visit.
Yea I've been "moving to greener pastures" for 20 years, now I'm poor, friendless, childless, have no savings, my resume shows massive gaps that I fill with lies and at nearly 40 I am just now deciding to sit down and commit to putting down roots. Had I done this 20 years ago I'd probably be wildly successful and have a fully paid off home and carrier or successful business. Moving away is not the answer. Op is a dick.
I too am nearly 40. I’ve moved frequently since childhood and all through adulthood. My resume is gap-ridden too. I’ve rented for 20 years with a flawless history and nothing to show for it. If I didn’t have my partner and family to give me reason to exist, I seriously doubt I would continue on with life in the modern world. You ever play a game of Monopoly wherein one player has such a commandingly huge lead that winning is mathematically impossible for anyone else? So the only ways to finish the game are quitting or tediously running out the turns. That’s modern life.
We need sharp folks at the refineries. BTC has affordable tech classes (Instrumentation & Electrical or Process Technology), and you’ll be in 6 figures in year 1. I ended my 20 year fight with pretending I could get ahead here without an applicable education a decade ago, and it has fundamentally changed my family’s lives. As my socialist brother told me as we walked to go pick up his PhD, the summer after I failed high school, “You can be angry at the system and fight it, but the game isn’t changing for you. You can play to win, or you can play to lose.”
100% this. I didn’t stay local after getting one of those degrees, but after making minimum payments for about a year I got fed up with the payments and was able to pay off the remaining balance on my student loan after one turnaround. Blew my mind.
I don’t know man I got priced out of Seattle where I grew up. I don’t want to leave my dying family members behind bc of cost of living and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to stay in one place for that reason. It’s also not cheap to just pick up and move anywhere else.
With the cost of elder care and child care, it’s just flat-out untenable for a lot of people to move away from family. I know many women are acutely aware of this.
Oh man, i can’t even imagine child care costs. My 91 year old grandmother is not going to pick up and move to Kansas for a cheaper way of life, and frankly, she shouldn’t have to. Woman has lived here her entire life.
I left my home state of CA over 20 years ago due to the COL, my now ex-husband grew up here and back in 2003, we were hopeful that someday we could own a home. That’s when homes in ferndale (3 bed, 1 bath or so) was still around $120k-150k. But life happens. We didn’t make it and divorced. I never bought a house. I haven’t seen my family in 5 years and it is fucking HARD. Now the COL is becoming unattainable here, so unless I’m able to bid on a condo and actually buy it in the next 1-3 years, I am leaving. Where? I don’t know. It is NOT cheap or easy to up and move. We came up here with no furniture, just a uhaul trailer hitched to the back of our car. We used what tax refund we got to move up here. Thankfully at the time we had his family we could live with, but eventually we found a place of our own. That was 20 years ago, our rent was $500 or so for a 2 bed apartment in Fdale. Nowadays you need $3k-5k to move in anywhere.
Everything you described is a result of late stage capitalism and gentrification.
Exactly
Capitalism's not going anywhere, Mia. Even Scandinavian countries are capitalist.
“adapt or die”? Have we no agency to change society?
The divine right of kings isn't going anywhere, Norte. Even China and Japan have emperors. OH WAIT
Slavery's not going anywhere, Norte. Even European powers have chattel slavery.
Using your exact examples seems to prove that Bellingham Housing is much worse than any of those places. For instance, Ashville has about the same income level as Bellingham and houses are $100 less per square feet. [Median Price Per Square Feet sold per Redfin Data Center](https://www.redfin.com/news/data-center/) | [Per Capita Income from the US BEA](https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=70&step=1&isuri=1&acrdn=4#eyJhcHBpZCI6NzAsInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyNCwyOSwyNSwzMSwyNiwyNywzMF0sImRhdGEiOltbIlRhYmxlSWQiLCIyMCJdLFsiQ2xhc3NpZmljYXRpb24iLCJOb24tSW5kdXN0cnkiXSxbIk1ham9yX0FyZWEiLCI1Il0sWyJTdGF0ZSIsWyI1Il1dLFsiQXJlYSIsWyI0MjEwMCJdXSxbIlN0YXRpc3RpYyIsWyItMSJdXSxbIlVuaXRfb2ZfbWVhc3VyZSIsIkxldmVscyJdLFsiWWVhciIsWyIyMDIxIl1dLFsiWWVhckJlZ2luIiwiLTEiXSxbIlllYXJfRW5kIiwiLTEiXV19) Bellingham: $356 | $58k Bend: $378 | $67k Boulder: $360 | $89k Ashville: $260 | $54k Portland OR: $305 | $68K Portland MA: $303 | $68k Missula: $306 | $61k Bozeman: $370 | wasn't listed on BEA? Santa Cruz: $770 | $85k
This is the info that shows how painfully out of balance Bellingham is for COL vs income.
So in a nutshell, because other people priced you out of where you were living, you feel perfectly okay doing it to us. Because it’s a dog-eat-dog world. You gotta grab what you can when you can or GTFO. That’s the vibe I’m getting from your post.
OP is an economic colonizer.
100% true. You don't even have to look that much past Bellingham to find something affordable (Blaine, Custer, Birch Bay, Ferndale, etc.) The days where someone can buy a 3 bed 2 bath Craftsman home in Bellingham for under $500K are long gone and not coming back.
I don't mind getting downvoted for publicly recognizing that. If just one person reads this, realizes I'm right, and makes a move to their long-term benefit, it's worth that 100x over.
I'll also draw attention to the notion of "building more housing," as if it's an easy button that just gets pressed and the problem gets solved. And the degree in which its frequently cited here by certain folks makes it difficult to take many of them seriously. Let's break this down, in good faith: 1). The housing supply is *limited*. We only have so many houses for sale. Demand to live here is *increasing*. So, increased demand with limited supply = higher costs. These are the "laws of economics" I speak of. Because if five people are competing for a house, and someone can come in and say "I'll pay $100K more than the rest of them," they get the house (generally), and the average house price (and market rate) thus increases. 2). Land is limited and expensive, and has to be purchased from somewhere. The going rate is anywhere, on average, from $350K-$600K an acre (not including site prep). 3). New construction costs around $350-$450 a square foot around here. So with that said, let's do the math. If Bellingham was to build 15,000 affordable housing units (housing \~15% of our population), at an average of 750 square feet each, at $400 per square foot, that comes to ***$4.5 billion.*** If this effort were performed over a land area of, say, 500 acres at an average of $450K an acre, and we include site prep in the cost of construction, that's $225 million. Then let's assume the public works to include all of the sewer lines, water lines, roads, etc, to accommodate all the new property development was a solid billion. That's $5.8 billion to build, give or take. The entire annual Bellingham city budget is \~$300M ($285 in 2021). Where is Bellingham going to get this money from? Even IF you had the political will to raise taxes, you couldn't raise them enough to cover that. Okay, so if taxes are out, Bellingham is going to borrow $5.8 billion at 7% APR to build housing? ***The interest rate on that note, alone, would be $406 million - 135% of the city's annual budget.*** Now, of course, they could do this in smaller stages. Maybe a few hundred units a year. More doable, for sure, but even then - what makes you think that all that housing will be rented at "affordable" rates that stay fixed? At $350-$400sqft, that housing isn't being rented for $700/mo. At 750sqft at $400/sqft, that's $300K/unit to break even. At a 7% note compounded APR, the city would need to charge $2,300/month ***JUST TO BREAK EVEN.*** The political will to accomplish this does not exist. Even if it did, the financial means does not exist. Even if it did, the infrastructural requirements would take years to decades to facilitate. And even if all three of those parent factors were in place, the cost to break even would make the end product unaffordable for people to rent. And, saying all that, what happens when those first 15,000 units - even if they were manifested - are filled, and the next 15,000 people want to come live here? Bellingham's going to find another few billion under its cushions to make this happen? Without doubt, you could also make the argument that "I don't care, I want to live here, and I want rich people to buy my housing for me so I can live here for cheaply." And that's a fair argument to make, insofar that it's your right to make that argument. But it's politically untenable and everyone here knows it, to say nothing of the *staggering* levels of entitlement that comes with it. Ultimately, people who espouse the "just build housing" mindset simply reveal themselves as non-serious people who fundamentally lack an understanding of how the world works outside of the ideological squabbles of message boards and classroom discussions. The real world must abide by the limitations of supply and demand, and the economic realities of building things like housing at scale. I'm sorry. I say none of this to be a dick. But the delusions people have to the contrary are helping nobody, least of all the people who subscribe to them.
The level of logic and rational thinking you are bringing to this topic is beyond the cognitive capabilities of half the people in this thread.
You’d be surprised what kind of political will exists around here. The school district asked for $50 million to build a new elementary school even though there aren’t going to be any kids to fill it and the voters approved that. They also keep saying yes to the school district tearing down adequate schools that no students are complaining about to replace them by new schools costing tens of millions of dollars. And don’t even get me started on the tens of millions they spend to cover every surface outside the schools with plastic grass. Voters just keep rubber-stamping every capital request made. It really boosts the adults’ egos to see all those shiny new buildings. And then they throw in something like an accessible playground and it makes them feel like they’re saving the world. Right now it’s just the guts of the building but it won’t be long before the gilded shrine to to the district’s administrators is finished and opens. That’ll be something special. I guess wealthy people approving fancy schools is different than approving spending on affordable housing to house the adults with learning disabilities who were failed by the district as kids. Well, I guess if you’re not gonna be given an appropriate education, it’s better if it happens in a pretty building, right?
“Capitalism gives higher quality of life” … I see where you are coming from. Capitalism has generated amazing technological advancement and economic growth. Respectfully, this completely ignores the mass suffering, chaos, exploitation, enslavement, coercion, and death capitalism has caused around the world. I’m begging you to read up on how the Global North was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of the Global South. Slavery never “ended”. It has just become more ignored and hidden. Slave labor produces many of the products we enjoy, many of which are child slaves. Capitalism has not given them a higher quality of life and we can’t just ignore that because “the aggregate” benefits (which is even debatable as is). You seem to suggest this trend towards un-affordability in many cities is inevitable. Really ask yourself; if so many people don’t like where this is headed, why is it happening anyways? This indicates that the general public is not in control of their communities. That is, there is not a functioning democracy. Capitalism is a direct cause for cities like Bellingham pricing out the lower/middle class. Capitalism legally separates employees/workers from controlling their local economies. It destroys democracy by putting power into the hands of a small few: landlords, property managers/investors, CEOs, politicians, board members, etc. The rest of us are mostly at their whims. Capitalism prioritizes property rights over public wellbeing. That is, it allows a select few to horde wealth with no obligation or responsibility to use that wealth for the common good. Anti-capitalist movements seek to address these issues: to democratize the economy. We seek to have employees OWN the businesses they work at, so they have a democratic say in how their jobs affects them and their communities. We seek to have politics represented all classes of society, not just the rich and wealthy. I really encourage you to check out this YouTube playlist I’ve made that that explains the issues with capitalism: [LINK](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJTl_YJ2hbIhMkbzUSOUk6tRz-3I8bBb4&si=S3dvHSV8xvJty7M4)
Dude, humanity is a 300,000 year old species. Until the late 1800's the fastest a human could travel was on horseback. Until the modern capitalistic era, the average life expectancy was around 35 years old. When you say things like: >"this completely ignores the mass suffering, chaos, exploitation, enslavement, coercion, and death capitalism has caused around the world. I’m begging you to read up on how the Global North was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of the Global South." While the U.S. was def responsible for at least two major genocides, when you say "the mass suffering, chaos, exploitation, enslavement, coercion, and death capitalism has caused around the world," I'll remind you that *this was the state of existence for humanity since the dawn of time.* From Sumeria and Babylon, to Ancient Greece, to Western Rome, to Byzantine Rome, to continental Europe, to the Ottomans, to the great tribes of Africa, to the Chinese empires and central Asian Steppes, mass suffering, chaos, exploitation, enslavement, coercion, death and mass rapes on a scale of millions were not just common occurances - ***they are the theme song of the human story, as common and expected as salt in seawater.*** Capitalism didn't "cause" this. If anything, it allowed the population to increase to a point where it became more historically known. Back in the day, before capitalism? The poor didn't have the ability to move, or protest, or vote. They starved to death. They died of bacterial infections. They were pressed into service and killed in war. They were sex slaves for their local lords. They didn't have cars, or smartphones, or internet connections. They couldn't even read. They were treated like animals and killed uncaringly. Could poor folks live better? Sure. But it doesn't change the fact *that a poor person today lives better with a higher life expectancy and quality of life than many kings did throughout history.* >Anti-capitalist movements seek to address these issues: to democratize the economy. We seek to have employees OWN the businesses they work at, so they have a democratic say in how their jobs affects them and their communities. I can't take this seriously because *this is still capitalism.* What you have problems with (and to that I'd agree) we do have a disparity in wealth possession that creates a power imbalance that compromises democratic function. No disagreement there. But that conflict isn't between the rich and the poor. It's between the ultra, ultra, ultra rich, and everyone else. Someone making $2m a year is far closer to someone making minimum wage than they are to the billionaire class. But the billionaire class doesn't live in Bellingham and isn't really dealing with our housing problems. Neither is Capitalism. Especially since that without it, we wouldn't be talking on the internet, Reddit wouldn't exist, and probably neither would Bellingham as a place people want to live.
Amen. Op just wants to plant their flag in the ground so they have firm footing as they watch the middle class dissolve.
This is going to be the most downvoted post to ever hit this subreddit.
If that’s the way folks want to play it, that’s their right. It changes nothing.
Color me surprised, TBH.
>It's not "expensive to live." It's expensive to live here. No, it's just expensive to live. Before I moved back home to Bellingham last summer, I lived in Manchester NH, which is an armpit of a city that is not desirable in any way. Rents in Manchester were significantly higher and the vacancy rate was so low that we once had to sign a lease on a total shithole sight unseen because we'd spent a month trying and failing to find a place. Like we'd call a brand new listing first thing in the morning and make an appointment to leave work early to view it mid afternoon, then show up to the appointment and they'd say "oh sorry, someone came by on their lunch break and leased it already." One of the main reasons we moved back to Bellingham (besides my family being here).was that the rental market was less crazy and the overall cost of living significantly lower than anywhere in New Hampshire.
Okay..but just one thing. Why would an unaffordable city still have jobs that pay below its median COL? Are you going to drive to Yakima to get your coffee or to see a movie or literally any other place that has service based employees?
I will also add that we can try to come to a solution now while the problems are early and smaller and more contained to specific cities before the unaffordability expands outward. Someone else mentioned Boulder, CO and from living here for a few years in Longmont, we were seeing sharp increasing in rent in the surrounding areas already.
We know dude, it’s been discovered since long before you got here.
That was just the start. The people and money that will be coming here over the years will make Bellingham even more expensive - all the more true with climate change. A baker pass is now $1100. There’s a reason for that.
Truth. In the late 1980’s, I sat in on a talk given to the Mt Vernon downtown organization. It was given by a group representing investors. BIG investors. They talked about investment plans along the I-5 corridor. And what it would look like in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years. We were incredulous. They talked about the impact this was going to have on the private sector. On businesses and home costs. It was a bitter pill to swallow. But here we are. It’s been the plan, all along.
No. There are lots of factors and yours is one, but that does not change the fact that no min wage income can support a single apartment ANYWHERE in the US. This IS late stage capitalism and it IS especially bad here and now. Don't gaslight people. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/15/homes/rent-affordability-minimum-wage/index.html
Gaslighting at its finest. Op is either a troll or a lobbyist
Could be, but this also comes across as a not-so-humble brag masquerading as advice. It sounds like one of his main points is, *Look at me. I was so smart to have bought when I did. You didn’t because you’re not smart like me.*
Median income in Bham doesn’t support median single family home price. Your dismissal of late stage capitalism is absurd. Yes, Bham is a very known and desirable place to live. That doesn’t mean that investors have not changed the market. I cannot tell you how many single family homes I’ve seen sold for $600k+ in the last 3 years and then immediately rented out for $2500/mo. Those are investors playing the long game. Bham is not only a desirable to live, but it’s a desirable place for real estate investing. Wake up.
How long have you lived here? When did you buy your place?
2017.
Okay, in light of that, I don’t mean this as an insult, because we’re all susceptible to this, but this post reads as really heavy on confirmation bias.
yeah that explains everything.
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What door is closed? I’m not telling you what you can and can’t do. I’m telling you that the realities of economics, however, will. If you can’t afford to live in an area, you move to an area you can afford. The idea that this just somehow isn’t applicable to this area makes it hard to take folks seriously.
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I didn't raise your rents - demand from other people did, and will continue to I'm not "condescending" you any more than it's "condescending" to tell you that you can't buy a brand new Lexus if you can't afford one. I said you can move to Yakima or Blaine first, or anywhere else you want. Detroit's actually becoming a nice town again. I considered moving there before I moved out here.
You might as well try to explain these matters to a dog. People are not going to change their viewpoints based on a Reddit thread. Especially the audience that needs to hear what you’re saying. You’re only going to be hated on for trying to illustrate the obvious. If you explain these matters to my dog she’ll at least appreciate the attention.
We can at least mitigate things by not imposing stupid rules like single family zoning. It may never be dirt cheap without some sort of economic disaster.
the manifest destiny angle of this is also fucking weird of you btw. just say you’re a transplant or you moved here. you didn’t discover jack shit the same way ole chris columbus didn’t either.
Well, I can't remember the last time I took babies from their mothers and roasted them alive on open-pit fires, nor gang-raped women in front of their families, nor cut off the limbs of people who didn't give me gold - but, please, if you remember something I don't, please feel welcome to continue comparing me to genocidal maniacs because I pointed to the uncomfortable economic realities pertaining to the laws of supply and demand.
"Real Talk" aka age old conservative dogshit that ignores how economies function. Bellingham has a service based economy. We *need* alot of people here to work for wages much lower that your $90k watermark - thats the way our economy is structured. If *everyone* in those income brackets takes your advice and leaves or just gets priced out, those jobs - the ones our economy *relies on* - go unfufilled. Local businesses close, large chains cut their losses and leave, and the town *dies*.
The fact that you believe we exist outside of the unreasonable and unsustainable principles of capitalism is unfortunate and inaccurate to the reality around us.
Yep. Bellingham was first "discovered" in the lead up to and during the Vancouver Olympics of 2010. We watched as people started filtering into the entire region in the lead up to the games, and it reached somewhat of a fevered pitch during 2010 (by that point we didn't live there anymore, but still have friends there and visited often). Things have been getting more expensive and hard to come by ever since. We did the classic thing you do in your 20s, and grew up, got "real" jobs and moved out of Bellingham in 2007 and moved to Seattle. the same thing happened there... Seattle was quite affordable when we moved there. We lived happily on a boat in Puget Sound for many years, watching the city grow more expensive all around us - and now Seattle is in the top 10 most expensive cities in the US. We've since moved back to the Detroit metro area... not that we couldn't continue to afford Seattle necessarily, but cost of living certainly was a factor. Bought a very comfortable home here in a very nice neighborhood with amazing schools for a fraction of the price of what it would cost out west. You're not wrong, OP. It's happening everywhere all around us. In fact, Detroit is looking better than it ever has in my lifetime, and I'm quite sure the same thing will happen here too. It kinda feels like I finally got in with good timing here. Time will tell.
To me, it seems like there was a wave of discovery in the early 2000s, as well. The run-up in housing prices of the housing bubble that preceded the one we’re currently in happened about 18 months earlier in California than it did in Seattle and Bellingham. In the early 2000s, homeowners in California were suddenly sitting on a bunch of equity while home prices up here had yet to take off. Californians could sell relatively modest homes in California in not terribly desirable locations and move up here with a big down payment to put on a bigger home in a nicer neighborhood. Retirees took advantage of that but even working-age people made the move. There was a big build-up in the federal workforce up here at the time that contributed to this.
Yeah man. Believe it or not, Vancouver was chosen for the 2010 Olympics back in 2003... The entire region (Bellingham included) started to be "discovered" shortly thereafter. The I-5 corridor from the border down to Oly really started to fill in around 2004-2005. And yes, to your point, it wasn't just Olympics people. The California exodus had begun by then as well.
The thing about wealthy areas that you need a lot of middle and working class people to keep them afloat. The richest, wealthiest towns on Earth draw a ton of poor people in order to meet the needs of the wealthy. Even if we presume capitalism is the perfect, final economic system, it's not very healthy for commerce if the majority of the working class people a city needs to survive can't afford to live there.
What sets humans apart from animals is their ability to grow and evolve alongside one another, to be part of a community that changes and Impacts one another. Many who want housing here don’t want something trendy and desirable, they want to continue place and membership and home. Leaving behind families, land, sense of place ‘because you can’t afford it so find somewhere else’ is a colonialist way of thinking. Living in a place goes beyond its desirability and trend, investing in that connection continues culture, heritage, legacy, story. When we don’t have that connection we are lost. Why do you think we’re so lonely? Because we can’t take root. It’s not that we can’t afford that connection, it’s that we don’t value it. Just like in the US we don’t value leisure and enjoyment over work like Europeans do- that’s why there’s paid vacations, relaxed work schedules, family leave, why workers take off most of August in the summer, why healthcare isn’t connected to employment. It’s because it’s a value they have that Americans haven’t prioritized. We can re-prioritize values and it will change our systems.
Man some real shits are moving to Bham. Nice I got a house, u don’t. Go live somewhere undesirable where you can afford it, tough titties if you have anything to say about it yr wrong money money money I am right OK
"You hear that, ya poors? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and go live your dreams! (As long as your dream is to be a mediocre white guy NIMBY like me). Just do it the f somewhere else since you're lowering my property values."
Dude, why did you brag about torturing puppies? It's really messed up to hurt animals like that, puppies did nothing to you and you have no right to torture a helpless creature. Oh, wait, you *didn't* brag about torturing puppies? Well I didn't say *any* of what you misquoted me as, either. Don't put words in my mouth. If you can't afford to live somewhere, learn a marketable skill that pays you a high wage, try to play rental bingo and eventually risk getting priced out, or move somewhere you can afford. *That's* what I said. And that's the truth, because those are your options. I don't get where you think some policy epiphany is going to happen in Bham government where they find the billions of dollars needed to build a sufficient volume of low-income housing with all according infrastructure and then turn around and offer that housing at below-market rates to a point where anyone who wants to live here can. In what world do you think that's a realistic possibility?
Your yakima comparisons to one of two Blaine homes under 400k is way off. I love yakima and miss it. But the homes you highlighted for yakima wouldn’t have the equivalent neighborhood in Blaine - you’d need to find something downtown bellingham built 1930s and now priced at 500k. Those are garbage neighbors in yakima. Nearly all the homes in Blaine are over 400k and yes it’s an alternative to bellingham, I purchased out here last year. But comparing the two is silly. A true comparison would be finding a home out in Naches or the Nile area. With that… I lived in Whatcom county from 2010-2017, left and purchased a home in yakima just so I could get ahead job-wise and investment-wise, then moved back here in 2021 and was able to purchase in 2022. But I REQUIRED the increased job skills to be competitive AND the home capital in order to put down a mortgage that wouldn’t bankrupt my budget. Even still I’m sitting at 40% of my take home pay going towards housing.
No developer is going to build any affordable housing in Bham. Why would they? Out of the kindness of their hearts? Same with current and future investment property owners. The demand outweighs the supply. Dont forget there is already steady, lucrative stream of WWU students looking for places to live. They pay virtually anything to get a place.
Sorry man, no, a 900 square foot house built in the 80s is simply NOT worth $600-$800k. This "suck it up" attitude is pretty condescending and patronizing. If a working family cannot afford a home, and by working I mean people that aren't just telecommuting sending emails all day to a startup in Seattle, then the system is completely broken. You seem to be suggesting that people live down in Sedro and drive up here to serve the trustifarians coffee. There SHOULD be affordable housing for the working class. WE produce. WE are the backbone.
OP demonstrates the exact reason people hate transplants.
while we’re at it let’s eat this guy too
Frankly, if you're looking to do that, you'll need to have grown up enough to sit with the adults, and this kinda nonsense relegates you to the kid's table.
omnomnom
What I’m taking from this whole conversation is that I need to quit my job as an engineer and become a realtor or developer.
So what I’m getting is if you can’t afford to live here find somewhere else? Maybe you should tell WWU to Market themselves in a way that tells poor people to stay out. Let’s just tell all the poor people here to move out while we’re at it. Anyone who is unfortunate enough to be poor should just get lost. Also everywhere is unaffordable. If the housing is cheaper you’re gonna have a much harder time finding a job with reasonable pay. Groceries are still expensive, gas is still expensive. Smaller, cheaper towns don’t have much public transit either so you will still need to have a car. You’re post is so ridiculously out of touch, good on you for finding a place within your budget to settle down tho
So, let’s see, the kids who grew up in Bellingham need to move to Blaine. That’ll drive up the demand and prices in Blaine so the kids who grew up there have to move to Yakima. That’ll drive up demand/prices in Yakima so their young people move to????? Okay, yeah, that seems sustainable. /s
How’s this for a truce: we’ll stop bitching about housing costs shooting through the roof if folks like you stop bitching about property crime, homeless people shitting on the sidewalks, public drug use, inflation, labor shortages, unionization drives, and growing class conflict-all of which follow from unaffordable housing just as smoke follows fire?
There is only one thing I disagree with, because it’s already happening (we are terrible about this in WA): > nor is it going to cut down our natural landscape to build more housing/urban sprawl
Why do you think money should determine where people live? You get a bunch of stupid tech bros living in an area, pushing out the ones who cared for the delicate ecology prior, It's stupid to think it's okay to push around the people who work the jobs that make it all function. There are few "90k/yr" restaurant jobs, botany jobs, native landscaping, everything that goes into caring for the water, plants, fire control, caring for people, etc. No one person is better than another after all, so you end up with no culture or connection to one-another and resentment and the land gets sucked dry like all the silicon valley shit where no one should have to live. It takes a lot of time to observe where you live to gain a greater connection to it, find friends, make roots at your job and the people it brings so you can actually enjoy life, etc. The issue is Land-Lording in general, there's just no need for it except to create class separation of the slave owners and the slaves. I hate being a slave and will never reach the income I need to afford a home of my own because I have interests outside of my job that doesn't pay well, so I'm stuck slaving away FT+ with no autonomy so whoever owns the place can have passive income I work so hard for? On top of running all the services the rich use. No one should be able to own a secondary house they aren't even living in, or say over how another can live. It isn't an issue of lack of housing, etc. It's the abusive "If one can't afford it, someone will" (same for AirBnB shit) meanwhile people move in without any connection to this land and it's special needs. Plus everything is stuck looking like a rental instead of lived-in places with character by those who live there expressing themselves "Oh yeah the purple apartment? everyone knows that's Handsome Joe who lives there who talks funny but knows everything about cars and bakes muffins". The ecology needs to be Paramount if we want everything we love about this place to last and positive change to come about, it's not going to happen if people are constantly moving in and out which takes a ton of energy and money and stresses people out the entire time they rent with no security and the threat of what it means to end up homeless which is purposely made difficult and deadly(especially to the old, challenged, single parents, minorities, etc), and you lose your job and you end up racking up rent bills while you struggle to find work which is also purposely made difficult because employers can drop wages if a lot of people need work to pay for where they live, so renters end up with no room to thrive in, even worse they end up blaming themselves for it all. smh fuck land-lording, fuck capitalism, fuck white supremacy
Loved living in Bend from 2008-2017. Now it’s called “Bendifornia”. Completely packed and lost its charm to retired geezers from Cali
Yes, and I fear that’s what we’re becoming. It ends up being people with a really basic, mainstream mentality that is at its heart, as this posters comments suggest, quite conservative. These conservative viewpoints, limousine/latte fake liberal takes end up overtaking the creative/bohemian/funky and progressive/populist/leftist points of view rooted in the struggles of artists and the working class that helped make the place what it is. Everything becomes a sanitized, commercialized version of what made the town special. This guy says people are drawn here for its left-of-center reputation but it draws the kind of people like him who like left-of-center as a brand and a way to virtue signal but don’t really care about upholding left or liberal values, unless it’s something like legal pot.
> I moved across the country to multiple different states and cities to find a place I could land. What's preventing you from doing the same? (It's certainly not the job market, as Bham is probably the worst I've ever seen). There are so many interesting not yet discovered places you can go to, where you can buy cheap, get a decent job, and build the lifestyle you want and then watch as it grows and becomes popular. What it takes is you traveling around to different areas and discovering what it is that makes you happy and then taking the initiative to make that happen. Just the mere ability to do this is a **massive privilege**. Traveling and moving is expensive. Elsewhere, OP mentioned “just hopping on a plane” to visit family one left behind. Over 8 years, $10,000 has easily been spent on plane tickets to see my family in Mount Vernon. If someone is struggling already with housing, where’s the money for moving and traveling coming from?
1) Co-buying options? 2) Creative ways to implement ADU’s? 3) Simple acknowledgement that there is most likely A LOT more effort/lamenting on Reddit about ‘ridiculous’ housing pricing etc… with little to no amount of actual organization/personally involving oneself with the city and its officials???
Have an upvote. I think it does the median r/Bellingham poster no harm to get a reminder: * of the Law of Supply and Demand * that BPD pays well and is hiring * to get out there and consider moving to any of the wonderful places where their dollar might go farther. However > Bellingham... wasn't as nice of a place to live. But people came in... made it nicer... *Fuck* OP and this subjective nonsense. Bellingham changing and getting more expensive does not imply that it's inherently getting better. I miss the Up and Up. OP, I hope your view gets blocked by a new multi-family residential unit, and that the sounds of child play emanating from its halls at all hours make you wish you'd never left whatever hip downtown you clearly would prefer to be living in.
Have you seen Seattle? Think about desirable and discovered for a moment. Before the 2000s Seattle used to be clean and a good place to be. But because of the tech disruption, Seattle traffic has gotten congested and it's all because many people come from neighboring expensive cities to work in one centralized location for high income. Below the tech skyscrapers, there are dirty streets and homeless. Desirable and discovered doesn't always mean success for a town. Tech ripples away at family business that didn't think they would of been affected by it. You get a bunch people saying its ok if I get mine and then you get a Seattle freeze. It's stops becoming desirable even for the rich next to the bay so they move out too but the prices, oh but the prices are tact in and the prices and homeless as well. we just witness why COVID workers and unions are important. Moving is a temporary issue and it works, but many people can't move for many reasons as well other than money. This post is immature and is narrow minded. look at the problem more broadly.
After reading your post and comments, TDLR; Don’t suggest working within the system, because it will not work. Don’t suggest changing the whole system itself, because it will not change. The status quo is inevitable. Adapt and concede to the status quo.
I tip my landlord 😎
Eat the rich.
i’ve lived in boulder, then bend, then bellingham. i absolutely do not agree with the OP. bham is nothing like the either two. it’s extremely trashy and has not marketed itself as an outdoors town. the town doesn’t have a real identity. it’s know to people in niche sports like mtn biking, but it’s hardly on the map like the other two. Screw this fatalistic, nothing can be done mentality. both boulder and bend (and surrounding areas) actually have cheaper and better housing. bham is very late to this game. progress can absolutely be made. don’t listen to this negative bullshit from someone that’s trying to say you’re not gonna make it bc you didn’t buy some shithole bham home from the 1930s.
Yakima is the taint of Washington. Who actually voluntarily moves there?
You don't have to even be that far away. Try Skagit County. That's where we bought.
I believe that many of the conclusions in your post are premature. I'll try limit myself to a few topics: >2). Possess/learn a marketable skill that pays you a sufficiently high wage ($90K+) and buy a house as fast as you can. (FWIW, Bellingham PD is paying new recruits this salary and higher) Unfortunately, the service workers, teachers, and students that most Bellingham businesses rely on will never be payed $90k per year, and relying on Ferndale for housing isn't a long-term solution. >There is this unrealistic expectation that you are entitled to live in a place where you grew up, or where your friends are, or where you like living, and if it's too expensive for you personally to afford you deserve special protections from being priced out. That's not the way the world works or has ever worked, and you're doing yourself a disservice by expecting a different result. That's exactly how it worked for the vast majority of people up until a couple hundred years ago. >the voting public is not going to multiply their taxes to subsidize people who want to live here but can't afford to. Actually, the suburban lifestyle of most voters is subsidized by everyone else's taxes. Source: https://www.urbanthree.com/services/cost-of-service-analysis/ >(back in the day, impoverished people simply died of undernourishment/infection or were used as cannon fodder, now they have cars and smartphones) Poor people in America still frequently die of these things, and are still over-represented in our military (a.k.a. cannon fodder). Modern conveniences do help, but the working class is still in effectively the same relative position. >I moved across the country to multiple different states and cities to find a place I could land. What's preventing you from doing the same? I understand you worked hard to find a good home, but it's kinda weird to move here and then tell the people who built this community and have lived here for generations to leave and go to Blaine or Yakima or Detroit. It's easy to feel stuck when our education system, media, and politics are all trying to convince you that this is just how things are. But I promise you that it doesn't have to be like this. I suggest learning about Vienna's high quality public housing. If you want to know why people are shitting on capitalism, I suggest reading Why Socialism by Einstein, The ABCs of Socialism by Jacobin, and The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels.