I've lived in nothing but apartments thus far my whole life, am about to move into a new one in a week, and signed a lease at the new place at a decent rate -- but am afraid that now folks dumped out of the house market will etreat into apartments, driving up rent. And that would suck for me, and for a lot of people I know.
Besides things like having a yard or garage, which I'd like (no garage band for me :((( ), home ownership hasn't tremendously appealed to me so far. It's nice to be able to call apartment maintenance and have them fix stuff (for free -- or, rather, factored into the cost of the rent, which I pay anyway) instead of hiring outside repairmen to come out, much less contractors for serious repairs. But a spike in rental rates would not be great for me when my lease is up in 6 mos.
We need better tenants' unions.
-B.
Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Mar 23, 2007, at 10:05 AM, Wojtek Sokolowski
wrote:
>
>> One thing that really defies my understanding of
this country is
>> why on
>> earth even the poorest schmuck insists of
individual home ownership
>
> Roediger has an interesting chapter on that issue in
his latest
> whiteness book - owning a house was an important
part of the
> whitening process for the southern and eastern
European immigrants in
> the early 20th century. It often meant a tremendous
financial
> sacrifice, but they didn't care.