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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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I'm italian and here in 800k dollars is a very big house in a very good place. Or a good apartment in a big city. Your salaries are so good? I mean here median salary is like 1.9k dollars/ month ( after taxes and health insurance ). Your salary after taxes and insurance should be 6-8k dollars/month for a normal job. You have such high salaries?
No, we probably have a bigger gap between housing cost and worker pay. In my area:
Median household income $61k/year last year (per household not person)
Median price of a house that same year was apparently $400k. Including those way far away from the city. In my average but in the city neighborhood new builds are going for close to a million and older houses about 400k.
Median rent monthly here is an eye watering $2,350.
In italy is 30k, median price of one house is , i think between 100k and 200k ( apartment ). One million here you buy a 4000 sq.ft. indipendent house with garden in one of the best city places near downtown. ( btw we have a greater people density, so land here costs much more than in usa ).
2350 month... You rent a mansion. Btw we have no so much new houses. The cities are way older. The maximum price is for ancient reinessance palace with ancient frescoes or roman ruins included. They are selling a palace ( 10000 sq.ft. ) with reinessance frescoes that need a lot of work ( so i think 1 million more to renewate it ) for 2 millions.
Yes, the pay is an half. But the house prices are quite cheaper ( but the houses are smaller , 1800 sq.ft. apartment, 270k $. But if you need less space you can find for less than 100k.
Yes I think the big problem here (right here, maybe not USA as a whole) is there is no more little cheap places to buy, and the apartments for rent, they do not care if vacant - if they have 100 units and could rent them all out for $1k/month or rent half for $3k, they raise rent to $3k and leave half of them empty.
I think median pay for one worker is around $40k but many households have more than one worker.
You have really high property taxes, they cost as much as a rent in my country ( we have property taxes here, too, but not so high ) , it is impossible to rent something 1k/ month if fixed taxes are 400 or 800 / month. Your corporation have too much money to settle ( cause over evaluation of stocks ) and you goverment taxes too much houses ( cause corporations pay too low taxes ).
I'm in Florida and sales tax is high (not as high as most European VAT but high) and property tax high because they like to say "no state income tax" . Though if the house is your home, not an investment, it's lower and the yearly increase capped at 3% no matter the value assessment . And yes we bought a house and about 1/3 of the monthly cost is taxes and property insurance. And yes - corporations here and the richest families pay not enough. But with property taxes at least corporations & landlords do pay higher rate than homeowners (that is a part of why rents have increased, the skyrocketing property values. But most of that increase is greed, profit). So if one actually can buy the apartment the property taxes will not be so bad over time, even if the value shoots up, and will come down if value drops.
It's complicated but I think the main issues are greed and to some extent zoning & land use patterns - not so much inside the city - we have a good mix of houses, apartments, businesses, but so much land used for sprawling suburbs not more compact development, and that's expensive in a lot of ways.
So with your rent you pay income taxes for the richest...
This is the reason in italy a lot of people oppose the transfer of taxation from income to property. If i gain a lot of money i will pay more taxes, but if i have a bad moment , i will be able to not sell my house or pay a rent. And my capital in real estate will be not slashed by taxes/expenses.
I'm moving to Italy!
800k is a pretty damn nice place unless you live in a super high cost of living place where it may only get you a decent place.