What will happen to all the McMansions in the 1T?

[pbrower2a]

(05-18-2019, 03:06 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(05-18-2019, 11:57 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Housing costs are way too high, obscenely high in some expensive blue areas. I don't see that when younger people inherit them that they will sell them at lower prices just because they are younger. They won't be so young then anyway.

I think the cost of housing is part of our 4T. It is part of the economic crisis, which hurts young people the most. The crisis stems from the mostly-3T neo-liberal free-market ideology, in power since 1980. Now we have a governor in CA who is trying to do something about it. And some other Democratic Party politicians. I don't know how far the prices can be lowered for how many more people. Some people have to move out because of the high prices. That may also reduce the prices, but I don't know by how much or how soon.

The last 4T also saw ongoing economic pressures on the majority of the people, until the war got going. The specifics were different, but the effect was similar. And the cause was the same: libertarian free-market economics policies of the Republican Party.

True but in the last 4T the property prices fell. The ongoing housing bubble didn't keep continuing. What were the 1920s and 1930s versions of McMansions?

Many will be torn down (they are inefficient and too shoddily constructed to be divided into apartments) for housing more typical of Japan and South Korea. The 1920s were a time of real-estate speculation, but in commercial property, much of it still in use. There was comparatively little new building in the 1930s except for temporary housing at construction sites. The commercial buildings are overbuilt by contemporary standards; the McMansions will be too weird for people to want them.  People can like 'quirky'... but turrets? Ballroom-like living rooms?

The real devaluation so far in this 4T is that of labor. What Karl Marx said of the proletariat -- people who must work for a living -- still holds true: they have nothing to sell but their labor. About a century ago the capitalist class decided to save itself from the hazard of a Bolshevik-style revolution by making consumers out of industrial workers. Consumerism saved capitalism. Today the economic elites stand for ideologies that debase the worker, and the American economic order already has most of the features of fascist political orders without the torture chambers and killing pits. The devaluation of labor is far more destructive than the devaluation of Continental or Confederate currency because people started doing things that create wealth. The great meltdown of 1929-1932 led to the disappearance of speculative activity as a means of getting rich quick and led many to start shoe-string businesses that involve people having to accept low yields, cater to nearly-destitute customers who are not much worse off than the owners, and develop long-term relationships for business entities that would not be cash cows for at least a score years if nothing happened in the meantime.

The sole defense of capitalism aside from terrorist brutality is to repudiate the perception that the capitalist system works exclusively to the benefit of economic elites -- in essence, to make the Marxist stereotype of the early capitalism in which workers toiled in sweatshops only to get near-starvation rations that low incomes allow and to 'enjoy' those rations in fetid, fire-trap slums.  In effect, a stereotype of capitalism such as this:





must be void if capitalism is to survive except as the objective of an authoritarian nightmare.