Yes I did math, our mortgage at 2% interest is $1700, to rent this condo from a landlord would be $3500. In 5 years the property value has gone up $200K. So our equity is now close to $300k after 5 years. I could sell this year and have 300k cash. What would you have at 3500 a month to a landlord?

Yeah HOA in USA often seems like the current HOA owns the property sale rights, and can block a sale. Strata has no say in the sale, it is an owner to owner deal.

A lot of people complain about strata being restrictive, but guess who doesn’t show up to vote at the meetings; Same people who don’t want to join council when the new one is voted in each year.

you usually get a lawn…

Fish don’t need bicycles, and we don’t need to hoard greenspace when it can be consolidated very well into something useful by so many more people.

At larger scale, consolidating greenspace surrounding clusters of effective dense mixed-use residential cuts land-use tremendously, re-wilds a lot of other space or returns it to agriculture, and achieves the density required for better transit and savings on infrastructure costs. The housing has to be effective, and I think the new “mixed-use consolidated over a transit stop” configuration is a definite winner … as long as it’s not wood (aka Fire’s Favourite Food).

There’s a certain threshold at which I won’t bother. Saying that renting is loosing money instead of equity building is the real estate equivalent of being a flat earther.

Carney was actually just asked about the housing crisis, here it is at 20:30 into the video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q_C9a5BWiTE&pp=ygUQY2FybmV5IHF1ZXN0aW9ucw%3D%3D&start=1227

I’ll have to trust you that you live in a place with bizarre market dynamics where mortgage is cheaper than rent for the same unit, or maybe you’re the king of real estate deals or got lucky with a panic seller. Even in that situation, there’s a whole lot of numbers missing from that calculation. Property taxes, maintenance, opportunity cost of investing the downpayment, insurance, whether your investments would be taxable or tax sheltered, expected RE growth, a time horizon of 20 to 60 years etc. You will be better off using a proper calculator made by a CFP.

Captalist democracy is not real democracy

Can you really have ‘true democracy’ in a species that has such a strong herd mentality as humans do? True democracy depends on ‘free will’, ‘independent thought’, and ‘knowledge’. When the population in general can be so easily swayed to go along with one person’s dogma or another, willfully ignorant and politically unintelligent, what is the meaning of ‘democracy’ except that it is about ‘best at intimidating, charming, or marketing’? In a herd species, the ‘election’ is all about ‘who do you want to be the dictator?’

I don’t want true democracy, I want people to not starve to death because they have no money to buy food, I want people to not have to die by cold because they don’t have money for buying clothes and a afford a place to live.

It’s very funny you’re asking for a perfect democracy when the problem is we don’t even need a “true democracy” for things to get way better than they’re right now, the worst socialism is hundreds of times better than any capitalism

You misunderstand my post. I am not in any way asking for a perfect democracy, I am clearly stating that a ‘perfect democracy’ is undefinable in a herd species. Humans are just not neurologically, evolutionarily, and hormonally suited for ‘pure democracy’.

What a person wants, and what is best for them, are often contradictory. Any species that can suffer from addiction will never form a workable ‘perfect democracy’. Nor can it work effectively and efficiently in any species that the personality trait of narcissism can be expressed in the population .

However, one of the best examples of a workable ‘consensus governing structure’ historically is the Iroquois Confederacy.