I was doing some math in my head. I've been thinking about housing prices and wanted to assess the rough value of my city neighborhood block.

Assuming the average value of a house in my neighborhood is a flat $500k, that means 2 houses = $1M.

Counting the houses on my street I estimated there are about 20 houses per-block, which means 1 block = 20 houses = $10M.

Continuing to scale that up by factors of 10, we get:

10 blocks = 200 houses = $100M

and

100 blocks = 2000 houses = $1B

I opened up a map to visualize 100 blocks and it's practically my entire city neighborhood. Billionaires shouldn't exist.

Wait until you see blackrock's real estate holdings.

Philly houses are like $100K back in the early 2010s

taxes were around $2000 ish per year...

So we moved from NYC and used to be renters... but now we own the house... (well I don't have a share, its technically my parents for the time being)

So you'd think: well great! no rent anymore! perfect? Right? RIGHT?

fast forward...

Kids were more racist in school and I got bullied a lot. (I'm ethnic Chinese)

😭

I hate Philly, I rather be in NYC. 🫠

So yes, home ownership and all... but at what cost?

Ghetto ass place :/

Caused me so much anxiety and self esteem issues and probably one of the major factors into my depression.

/endrant

Just because you have $1M doesn't mean you can afford to own two $500k houses. Maintenance, property taxes and insurance would probably be unaffordable.

I just heard a nice comparision:

• 1 USD equals 1 second
• 1 Million USD is 12 days
• 1 Billion USD is 32 years

If a standard US citizen owns 500.000 in average - this is 6 days vs. Larry Page (120 B) with 3,840 years

Once you start trying to do anything that involves employing people (e.g. running a small business) you start realising how far a million goes. 5 software engineers in an office with equipment for a year? In a European country or USA/Canada, you'll need the best part of a million. It's not just salaries. There's also employment taxes and other costs to consider.

A billion and it's now more like 750 engineers for 15 years.

You assume they are paying outright and not financing it over a couple decades. They own a significant more doing it that way.

So a billion is more than a million. Huh

You lease out one of them...

I mean you'll get lynched by Lemmy for doing this, but that's how you realistically gonna make money from it.

That's why I believe there should be a legal limit to how many houses one can own. Even if this could be easily bypassable by registering in the name of family members, it would hardly reach such proportions

Yes, big numbers are hard to conceptualise.

My favourite way to describe this is "the difference between a million and a billion is about a billion."

Rather than a hard cap, I like the idea of property tax rates that go on an exponential curve depending on how many houses you have beyond the one you live in, which are used either to subsidize building more housing or somehow redistributed.

A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is a little under 32 years.

It's easier to implement as a tax credit. You're entitled to a 90% rebate on the property taxes for the home you live in, perhaps a 50% credit for a home you own that a family member lives in, and no rebate for additional properties.

One major benefit of this is as soon as a lender initiates foreclosure proceedings, the taxes owed on the property go through the fucking roof. They are motivated to work with you on the loan.

I like to say "if a millionaire lost a million dollars, he would be broke. But if a billionaire lost a million dollars, he'd still pretty much a billionaire."

This one is my favorite for really conveying the difference in scale.

Sorry you have to deal with that.

Culture can be a real pain in the ass and it's especially egregious when the people who are a part of it feel no shame or remorse.

You, unfortunately, also get to see firsthand why some houses are cheaper than others.

You forget the part about houses being built. Housing isn't some finite resource like oil or rare earth metals.