It's not a crisis because there are no poignant images, there are no famous people affected, and because poverty and eviction cut to our deepest shame. Piketty kept talking about the rentier - those whose livelihood comes from owning something and charging someone else to use it. That would be "landlords" if you aren't a French economist. Rentier made up a very large portion of the bourgeoisie in pre-revolutionary France and they make up a very large portion of the bourgeoisie in pre-postcapitalist America. WeWork has 9 million square feet of space in NYC. 2 million of that has no one paying rent on it. That number is not going to go down anytime soon. 50% of commercial rents are in arrears across the United States. I didn't really understand The Great Depression until I read Ken Galbraith's book. The problem was basically this: a whole bunch of people who were counting debts owed to them as assets had to write them down when they were forced to conclude they would never be paid. Let's say you own an 10-unit apartment building. Everyone in it pays you a thousand a month. You own a ten unit apartment building because the mortgage and expenses cost you eight thousand a month. Suddenly half your tenants can't make rent. You went from making two grand a month to losing three. I'll bet you needed that grand a month; the bank was expecting six grand, the property manager was expecting a grand, the state was expecting a grand. So now the property manager is fucked. The state's fucked but it'll take them a year to 18 months to get to you. The bank is going to get something but not nearly enough so now the bank has to cover that shortfall. And we're all shining it on and pretending that cruise ships are going to make a big comback next year because the most shameful sentence in the English language is "I can't pay my bills." Obviously the people most fucked are the ones getting evicted. Not going to minimize that in the slightest. That is a life-changing event, and not for the better. Ignore that tragedy for a minute though and contemplate the fact that on average, pressing one eviction and all it entails through the courts runs between three and six months' worth of rent. If you evict half your building you're in the hole for a minimum of 15 months even if you have people lined up to pay full price for the empty units. And you don't. My wife bought this house in 2000. Our mortgage is adorable. We'll be okay. Guys next door? ...yeah.
Cruise ships, airlines, the hospitality industry...sports...all of it. Meanwhile I can count of three local business that have announced they’re closing this week.
I’m about 300/800 pages though and every chapter I read through makes me say, oh wow that’s why this is the way it is today. The chapter on the compromises and political/legal climate that resulted in social security and unemployment insurance were incredibly insightful in explaining why the system looks the way it does. Still even at 800 pages you can tell he’s just barely skimming the surface and almost every chapter can be a book on its own, but that also makes it an easy read because you know there is so much there and you only get the important details.
I had a thought but I lost it. Which is probably good, it was probably full of frustration and such. But I feel like our country is an old house that needed some paint on the walls, some floorboards replaced, and that plumbing problem in the kitchen taken care of. Only, for some reason, even though those were obvious and simple problems, we kept on putting them off because half the people would rather play X-Box and drink Red Bull all day and the other half are too busy coming home from one job and getting ready for another job, they don't have any time to worry about plumbing. Now the house has caught fire because there was a gas leak we didn't know about, but we totally would have found out about it if we had decided to tackle the problem in the kitchen and I don't know about anyone else, but it's pretty hard for me to figure out how we're supposed to repaint some walls if they're on fire now.
