rent is too damn high

The New “Middle Class” – Making $250,000 a Year in Palo Alto Qualifies for Housing Subsidies

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Luke Iseman has figured out how to afford the San Francisco Bay area. He lives in a shipping container.

The Wharton School graduate’s 160-square-foot box has a camp stove and a shower made of old boat hulls. It’s one of 11 miniature residences inside a warehouse he leases across the Bay Bridge from the city, where his tenants share communal toilets and a sense of adventure. Legal? No, but he’s eluded code enforcers who rousted what he calls cargotopia from two other sites. If all goes according to plan, he’ll get a startup out of his response to the most expensive U.S. housing market.

Iseman collects $1,000 a month for each of the 11 structures parked in the 17,000-square-foot warehouse he rents for $9,100. Tenants include a Facebook Inc. engineer, a SolarCity Corp. programmer and a bicycle messenger.

– From last year’s post: The Rent is Too Damn High – San Fran Residents Pay $1,000 a Month to Live in Shipping Containers

Welcome to the new normal, where in bubble communities, $250,000 per year is now a middle class income.

Nothing to see here.

From CBS News:

PALO ALTO (CBS SF) — Palo Alto is seeking housing solutions for residents who are not among the region’s super-rich, but who also earn more than the threshhold to qualify for affordable housing programs.

The city council has unanimously passed a housing plan that would essentially subsidize new housing for what qualifies as middle-class nowadays, families making from $150,000 to $250,000 a year.

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The Oligarch Recovery – Renting in America is Most Expensive Ever

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Characterizing the upward transfer of virtually all American wealth to a handful of oligarchs a “recovery,” represents a grotesque insult to the english language as well as common sense.

The writing was on the wall from the very beginning. I knew as soon as TARP passed that we as society would regret the day we bailed out the bankers who destroyed the world economy. It didn’t take long.

Bailed out Wall Street banks went ahead and paid themselves record bonuses less than one year after the bailouts. Then, in early 2013, the financial community’s next scheme to feed off the carcasses of the American public became crystal clear. They wanted to become America’s slumlord by buying millions of foreclosed homes and then renting them back to former homeowners. When I realized what was happening I published the post, America Meet Your New Slumlord: Wall Street. Here’s the opening paragraph:

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