Zillow projects that U.S. home prices will fall 1.7% between March 2025 and March 2026. Last month, Zillow economists still thought prices would rise this year.
The US Housing bubble has popped.
Everyone remembers how well that went last time, right?
Spokane (or, as I call it, Spokanistan). I once lived in Seattle and liked to visit B-ham with its hippies and WWU and proximity to civilization (B.C.). But it was always WAY too expensive, even back in the 90s. I considered Tacoma and that probably would have been the smart move - Old Town is pretty cool and I don’t think I’ve noticed the Aroma of Tacoma since the 90s. I lived in Tumwater for a year and Oly still has a certain charm - pretty leftie and so very close to the Olympics and all that wilderness and of course the ocean.
All those S. Sound cities have gotten crazy expensive but not as bad as Seattle and north as far as I can tell. I can kind of understand it - people getting pushed out of Seattle by gentrification but who can still find a job and afford an apartment or maybe even a house a bit further south.
I hadn’t heard that north of Seattle had gone to hell and I’ve got to wonder how the dumbass tariff stuff is going to hurt Boeing manufacturing in Everett and hurt their local suppliers (if any) too. I doubt it will be enough to cause an outright crash there - the demand always seemed to be, uh, “organic” rather than speculation, but it’s been a long time and I’m out of touch with that region.
Spokane is a cultural void for the most part, but politically it’s surprisingly purple and getting more so. The job scene, except perhaps for medical, simply blows. What’s inflated RE prices here seems to be people coming in from out of state who don’t need a job or who work remotely, and who have some kind of fantasies about “getting away from it all”. And of course the speculators and second-home buyers and developers. The skies here are full of corpo jets coming and going from Sandpoint (resorts) and CdA (resorts) and western MT (resorts) from Seattle and CA and the Southwest … wouldn’t break my heart to hear that their occupants’ RE portfolios have tanked one day.
Sorry to hear about your assault. I’d be super freaked out to have to depend on Social Security <anything> with this regime in power.
Ah, my west side bias is showing, oops.
I’ve travelled over the Cascades many times, but only really spent basically vacations or weekend trips actually out in Spokane or the Tri Cities.
Tacoma is where a bunch of the hipsters I knew went in the early to mid 2010s… but now it has largely … gentrified, and also crime and drug addiction and homelessness is now much more visible.
After I got assaulted, I ended up homeless untill the SSDI kicked in, a good part of that in Tacoma, and jesus fucking christ fentanyl addicts are basically fucking zombies, nearly got killed by a few.
But yeah, basically all of WA is just… way way way too fucking expensive to live in, unless you, individually, make at least 6 figures… and the job market for getting that kind of job is pulling in candidates from literally the entire world, competition is insane, nepotism abounds, basically all tech work treats you like or literally as a contract worker unless you have massive connections or got grandfathered in a decade or more ago.
Also Boeing is definitely gonna get fucking wrecked from retaliatory tariffs… there was already a story in the last 24 hours of a Chinese airline returning a recently delivered 737 Max because the Chinese ret. tariffs applied to it.
Just fucking flew it back to Boeing Field even after their local plant in China had just finished putting the Chinese airline’s livery on it, fuck it, nope, return it, too expensive.
It doesn’t matter how progressive WA is generally… untill it gets a state income tax, it’ll be a playground for corpos and rainbow capitalism.
My current plan is to … well, hope to god that my SSDI doesn’t get massively curtailed or cancelled, keep doing physical therapy and living off of soup and trail mix untill I’ve built up some savings (all my fucking cards got stolen, years later i am still trying to convince all the credit agencies that I am me and 90% of the rung up CC debt was not me)… and then move on up to Minnesota.
Minneapolis/St.Paul is roughly the same population as … the actual population that lives in Seattle, and just generally, way more affordable, not as solid blue, but decently so… and the risks from accelerating climate change are actually significantly lower than most of WA.
They’ve got more effective state based rental … basically tax relief for low income people, you get a subsidy each tax year cycle that offsets some of your rental costs, SNAP (if it still exists) will go further…
… and their apartments actually have heating and AC, unlike a large chunk of PNW apartments… that fucking heat dome a few years back nearly killed me.
3 days, 72 hours straight of no less than 90 degrees indoors, up to 105, even with space blankets and then blackout curtains to try to keep the sun out… had to just keep taking cold showers… and I still ended up sweating out nearly 10 pounds.
Anyway, if I can get to the point I am not in constant pain, I am just gonna try my hand at making my own videogame, solo.
If it works out as a decent revenue stream, hurray! If not? Don’t really care, I got absolutely chewed up and abused by the corpo data analyst jobs I worked, I’d rather firebomb their offices than go back to a similar job, I would literally rather be impoverished and at least mentally sound than have to deal with the hyper gaslighting corpo tech culture anymore.
I’ve got neighbs with their adult, autistic offspring living with them. The “kids” are 100% supported by SSDI+parents. When RFK comes up with an excuse for cutting their SSDI, they’re all f-cked. They’re renters, and have lucked into a much-lower-than-market rent (the owner is some weirdo who doesn’t pay much attention to the house or to the rental business and has not raised rents for a long time), but I don’t know that they can afford it all w/o the SSDI support for the “kids”. Also, the mother works for the state and is in the kind of job that the DOGE/Project-2025 scumbags would just LOVE to cut. If any of this comes to pass I can easily imagine them being at risk for ending up on the streets.
But on the bright side, thanks to Orange Diaper and president Felon, the landlord could then sell the house at some substantial multiple of what he paid for it back in the day.
Yeah I heard about the Chinese saying “take your damn plane back” to Boeing. If only there was Some Other manufacturer of well-made, sophisticated passenger aircraft somewhere in the world. Maybe in Europe or Brazil? A manufacturer that foreign airlines could buy from without having to pay US tariffs? If those foreign airlines find that manufacturer …welp, lots of layoffs in Seattle and Everett and S. Carolina. With that, and all the professional-class government and tech layoffs, and the resulting personal bankruptcies, and mortgage delinquencies and rental eviction/vacancies, Zillow might just have a point here.
Re: tech, I hear you, tech culture sucks and has sucked for at least the past 20 yrs. I’ve only been in small companies/startups and consulting though, never megacorps. It’s mindblowing to me that even after all the tech layoffs in SV and elsewhere, and all the RTO chain-yanking, techies still refuse to recognize themselves as the blue-collar salarymen that they are. Entirely disposable, and if you step out of line there’s someone or something (AI) to take your place.
It sounds like you might have a viable riches-to-rags story to write! Something like this: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a62875397/homelessness-in-america/ (everyone should read - it’s a great essay) . Podcast interview with the guy: https://youtu.be/Oq8ulw5yEuw?t=95 . But good luck w/the project if you’d rather write software. MN sounds like a good Plan B (to the PNW). Had a GF from there once, and thanks to her influence I still issue the occasional “uff-da”.
… Yeah…
Ironically, the last job I had… before becoming homeless…
Was the Co-Lead of the Data Team… for Mary’s Place, the largest non profit network of shelters and other programs … assisting the homeless… in and near Seattle.
About 24hrs after the assault that crippled me, I dragged myself into the main office… for a sandwich.
They handed me my papers on the spot.
I told the HR guy to go fuck himself, as he was crying.
… Fuck Seattle, at this point.
They are almost certainly still using my databases, my online, public facing intake forms, my process flows and documentation…
Anyway, I was literally the expert on exactly how fucked I was, as a single white cis male, in terms of getting housing or shelter assistance in Seattle.
We shared at least shelter capacity and eligibility info with almost every other shelter in or near Seattle… and almost all of them prioritize families, minorities and/or female domestic abuse victims.
Made more sense to head pretty far east to lower CoL areas and stay in roach motels than to drag my crippled ass around trying to find a working path to housing, given how often I was being mugged, assaulted, held hostage by a psychotic fentanyl addict for a week at one point, missed being shot in a drive by by about 100 feet at one point…
Anyway, all our the widely publicized PIT headcounts of homeless people in any given city or nationwide… basically need to be multiplied by about 4 or 5. So that’d be about 3 to 4 million, not the almost 800k of the last nationwide PIT count.
If you compare the demographics of living situations people are in who requested our help… to the demographics of who actually gets counted by those PIT count methodologies…
Yeah, you need to multiply the PIT count by roughly 4 or 5 to make it actually representative of all the people who are requesting help, but are not counted by the PIT.
… And that will easily balloon up to 10, 20+ million … fuck, probably within a year from right now given how utterly fucked the economy is about to become, and how many governement assistsnce programs are getting cut.
…
But uh, back to things I can now just laugh at…
yeah, Boeing is fucked. They were fucked before the tariffs, and now they are turbofucked, and all the right wing anti union asshats that work for them will just retreat further into delusion and a sense of enraged, denied entitlement as they all get exactly what their AM talk show radio hosts have told them they want for 30+ years.
… and of course who can forget about the liberal tinged, smug, self serving, fake ass corpo tech shitheels who all don’t realize they’re basically dressed down Patrick Batemans because they go to Pride marches… yeah, a whole lot of them are fucked as well as they get laid off, their 2nd and 3rd homes can’t generate AirBnB rents anymore…
Oh no, who could have forseen that working for giant tech megacorps that have explicitly stated they want to automate everything for 20 years… are now automating their own jobs, and that they are not actually special?
…
I dunno if I qualify as a rags to riches tale…
I got maybe halfway through that article before I had to stop.
… Too similar to what I went through, too … way too similar. Its not just that basically no one gives a fuck about it, its that almost everyone assumes the absolute worst about you, all the time, unless you ‘perform’ perfectly for them.
I was recently diagnosed with PTSD. I actually cannot handle reliving, or apparently even reading about those experiences.
They fill me with rage and terror.
Make me double check and make sure my knife is in the spot it ‘lives in’ in my motel room.
…
The teeth thing is real. Somehow I have been insanely lucky with baffling infection resitant teeth… I have never had a cavity in my entire life, despite literally being homeless for over a year.
But I’ve seen the immense agony of other homeless people with bad teeth. Seen people bite into a sandwich and 2 1/2 broken teeth come out in bits…
… Seen people with fucking gangrene, massively infected feet and other wounds…
… For a while I was able to trade my rudimentary first aid skills for respect, cigarettes and food, became kind of a defacto medic at some encampments and shelters I ended up at.
Seen people OD and die in front of me, stumbled upon the bodies in the back alleys, either OD’d or beaten or stabbed or shot to death.
… I can’t believe I survived it. I can’t make sense of why I did.
… Just a skinny, out of shape, Autistic tech dork, streets should have eaten me alive.
… At least I was able to eventually get connected to Physical Therapy, and … not a very good one, but at least at newbie Social Worker.
Solid Snake may wanna go over the basics of CQC… I wanna go back over the basics of CBT.
Physical Therapist has me in aquatherapy. Too many torn and otherwise fucked up ligaments in too many places, have to have the bouyancy and water resistsnce to do any useful stretches without extreme pain.
… sorry. rambling. yay trauma.