Renters Need Not Apply

I grew up in apartments. This has almost certainly colored my view of housing in general. By way of contrast, I have found myself explaining apartment life to schoolkids who were reading Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. The kids were all house-dwellers who had no frame of reference for living in an apartment, let alone living in a big apartment building with an elevator in a crowded urban area like Manhattan.

I first became aware of a psychological condition I call “house fever” when I was about 10. This condition is characterized by an intense desire to own a house regardless of whether market conditions or personal finances make it a good idea to purchase one. Sufferers will offer all kinds of reasons for their obsession, including “it’a a place of my own,” “I can have a dog,” “the kids need a yard” (this one struck me as very silly, as the apartment complex had a big playground and a big pool and lots of other kids to play with; why on earth would I want a little yard?), “nobody can tell me what to do with it,” “it’s a great investment,” “it’s a big tax break” (if it’s such a great investment why do you need the big tax break?), and so on.

I was in my late teens when I discovered that there are some things biased against apartment dwellers. This went over and above the disdain some house-dwellers had for “apartment people.” For example, the city ran a recycling program, but only for households who were served by the residential garbage service. A more egregious example was shot down in Dallas almost 2 decades ago: a proposal was made that in order to get tax revenues from those who worked in the city and lived in the suburbs (never mind the sales tax such people paid on their lunch), they could have a city income tax, with an exemption for anybody who could prove they paid municipal property tax. Now think about that. Junior has to pay income taxes on his job at McDonalds because the house is in Dad’s name? Or worse yet, a man in Chicago owns an apartment property in Dallas; for tax purposes, he lives in Dallas and the people who actually live on property don’t!

I was in my late 20s when I realized that over the course of a 30 year mortgage, Joe and Jane Average pay double the list price of the house when interest rates are much over 5.5%. If you have a copy of Excel, you can use their templates to prove it to yourself.

I was in my 30s when I found out that the Small Business Adminstration is nothing more than a facilitator of second mortgages. Renters need not apply. Contrary to popular belief, this is even true for women and minority businesspeople. Although it is well documented that there are differences in home ownership among various groups, I will leave to the reader’s imagination what that does to business ownership.

As a result I was not surprised to read that as much as 40% of the funds designated to help Manhattan small busineses recover from 9/11 went to large corporations. Actual “small” businesses often don’t have the assets to secure a loan, outside the family home. And as Judy Blume accidentally pointed out, many Manhattanites live in apartments.

Nor was I particularly surprised to read that “Renewal Money for New Orleans Bypasses Renters.” In New Orleans, however, the problem is worse. Much rental property was damaged and most rehab funds are going to homeowners in a town where about half the population rented their housing. As a result, rents have skyrocketed, pricing out a large percentage of the former population — if you may recall 28% of New Orleans population was living below the poverty line. This page contains statistics both on poverty and home ownership in New Orleans and Louisiana in general. And “State officials acknowledged that renters were not their first priority.” Well I don’t know where they think janitors, fry-cooks, mailroom clerks, jazz musicians, and the rest of the 53% of the population of New Orleans who are not homeowners are going to live.

In closing, it turns out that cheap illegal labor does not keep prices low, low, low, so we won’t have a huge wave of inflation if we make employers follow the law; Fox intends to capitalize on the Christian community by making a dozen cheap religious films a year based on best-selling Christian novels (they will probably be collosal money-makers but What Would Jesus Think?); the Washington Post reports “Some Officials Say Voting Law Changes And New Technology Will Cause Trouble” and that’s before finding out that you can open a Diebold voting machine with a hotel’s mini-bar key; and finally why go overseas to find terrorists when we can create own very own home-grown terrorists in American prisons.