Tou Lue Vang, an immigrant to the U.S. from Laos, pled guilty to having sex with a 10-year-old girl. Under Minnesota law, this was apparently not a serious offence that would justify prison time, so he never went to prison and was thus free to maximize his reproductive success. Mr. Vang was recently pardoned by Tim Walz, who very nearly became our Vice-President, so as to throw a wrench into the works of the Trump administration deportation apparatus. The New York Times says that, despite never earning citizenship, this child molester has gifted us with six children, all of whom have birthright citizenship and all of whom have inherited genes from their enricher father:
Is being a child molester heritable? Google AI: “Research suggests genetic factors may explain roughly 46% of the variance in liability for child molestation. A large-scale Swedish study indicated that the shared family environment accounts for only about 2% of this risk, with the remaining factors being unique, non-shared environmental influences (such as personal life events or biological factors).”
How did Mr. Vang become rich enough to afford to housing, food, education, and health care for six children? NYT:
Mr. Vang has held various jobs, most recently as a custodian at a Minnesota-based wholesale company.
Unless his wife is a cardiologist, it seems safe to assume that this convicted child molester’s reproductive success was enabled by the U.S. non-“welfare” welfare system (“means-tested”). In other words, we created an immigration system and then a welfare state designed to ensure that the next generation of Americans has the maximum quantity of child molester genes and the minimum quantity of middle-class conscientious worker genes.
Via a forthcoming paper w/ @CSchmert. Here are differences in TFR across race-income groups. The expected 'u-shape' of TFR by income is clear regardless of race. Birth certs don't record HH income, but we show you how to estimate TFR using pop pyramids in the paper! Pretty cool! pic.twitter.com/UZsesZqzBG
When a detective interviewed Mr. Vang, he acknowledged having had sexual contact with the girl and called it a “minor thing,” according to a criminal complaint. Mr. Vang blamed cultural norms in Thailand, according to the complaint.
AI says that, while Islamic law (the Hadiths) may allow an adult male to have sex with a female of 9 or older, Thailand’s laws and cultural norms require that a girl be 15 and there are severe criminal penalties for sex with a girl under 13. Laos has a lot of teen marriage, but again, sex with a 10-year-old isn’t legally or culturally acceptable in Laos.
I struggle to understand the basics of the U.S. immigration system, e.g., why we would want to fill the country with people who don’t have anything in common other than disliking their home country (our asylum-based system), but this case takes matters to a new level of confusion. Why would we set up a system to help low-wage low-skill child molesters produce six children when working-class and middle-class non-criminal Americans can barely able to produce and care for one or two kids?
A lot of Democrat officials have said that the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings are illegitimate and should not be followed, e.g., the recent ruling that allows temporarily protected Haitians to be sent home after 16 years in the U.S. Example from a Democrat thought leader: “it’s not something we will ever accept”.
The representative for the High-IQ (TM) crowd in Maskachusetts said, a few weeks ago, that the Court is “corrupt” (Ayanna Pressley has been characterizing the Court with this epithet for some years, according to an X search):
We know a guy in Boston who married a Honduran lady. His wife’s pregnant relatives would come to visit a few months before any baby was due. They’d show up alone at a high-end Boston hospital, e.g., Beth Israel, give birth, tell the staff “I’m undocumented”, and go home with a U.S. citizen and without ever seeing a bill from the hospital (costs covered by taxpayers). Except for three haters, the Supreme Court today agreed (Trump v. Barbara; what did Barbara do that was so bad?) that this should continue. Does that mean the Democrats who previously complained that the Court was illegitimate will now say that it is legitimate?
(Maybe there are four haters on the Court, actually. Brett Kavanaugh, the convicted rapist/murderer of Prof. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Ph.D., said that Congress could limit birthright citizenship by statute, but that El Presidente couldn’t do it via executive order. I guess that means Amy Coney Barrett was the deciding vote in favor of virtue, love, kindness, etc. Finally, given that 100% of the females on the Court voted one way and 80% of the males voted another, maybe this suggests a question for Alan Turing’s original male-female Turing Test (“imitation game”). Ask the person of unknown sex (there were just two back then) “A migrant walks across the U.S. border and pushes out a baby. Do you give the baby four generations of taxpayer-funded welfare or take the position that it is the parents’ responsibility to take care of their children and descedants?”)
White-collar men in the 1950s often characterized their world as a “rat race”. If college-educated, they competed with only a small subset of Americans for high-paid desk jobs. Men in the 50s did not compete with immigrants because substantial importation of humans into the U.S. stopped in 1924, not to be restarted until President Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 (see below). A house in a safe suburb with good schools and A/C could be purchased, at the end of the 1950s, for about one quarter the cost today (in real dollars; see $112/month to live in a brand-new house in Bowie, Maryland). Relative to income, a house cost about 1.7X annual salary vs. over 5X today (ChatGPT table below). Partly due to this low cost for housing in a safe suburban neighborhood with decent schools ($1+ million today?), a man’s income was generally sufficient to support a wife and 2-3 children as well as himself. Sex outside of marriage was discouraged both legally and socially and, therefore, the man would usually be married before age 25. No-fault divorce (“unilateral” in research parlance) did not exist and, therefore, if the man wasn’t behaving outrageously (beating the wife, drinking heavily, failing to work, having affairs), the wife couldn’t profit via a divorce lawsuit (a divorce might be arranged by mutual agreement, of course). In addition to marital security, the 1950s man often enjoyed a lot of job security from (1) the lack of competition in the labor market, and (2) the tendency of large companies to provide lifetime jobs, which today is limited to government work.
What’s the correct term for what similar men face today? They inhabit a world in which you can’t spit in the street without hitting a college graduate. Men must compete with women for jobs and, despite women being more likely to earn college degrees, be passed over for hiring or promotion when a company decides that “diversity” is its strength. If a female or favored minority human competitor doesn’t take the white-collar man’s job, Claude is ready to replace him. The companies that once offered native-born Americans jobs for life are now home to platoons of H-1B “non-immigrant” immigrants.
A house in a neighborhood with low crime, an orderly familiar culture, and good schools, is about 10X the median college graduate’s income (5X for houses overall, but the typical suburb is no longer a white picket fence idyll). A college education for the kids, so that they can get into the “rat race” that the parents ran, is now 5X more expensive state colleges and 9X more expensive at elite Queers for Palestine-type schools . (ChatGPT on the history of federal government programs to make college more affordable: “GI Bill for veterans in 1944, first general federal student loans in 1958, major modern federal aid framework in 1965, and Pell-style direct grants in 1972/1973”)
Where in the 1950s he likely partnered with a virgin aged 20 (ChatGPT says 10-25% of 1950s brides might have had sex with someone other than their fiancé/husband), today he’s with a 30-year-old veteran of the sexual revolution. If he is persuaded to marry her, she can sue him for divorce a day later for any reason or for no reason. For men who strayed in the 1950s and got sued for a “fault divorce”, the resulting financial drain was primarily alimony and it lasted only a few years because the plaintiff would remarry and that shut down the alimony revenue stream. The risk of losing his role as a father was controllable due to the requirement that a plaintiff find a “fault” ground, such as infidelity. If a man gets sued today because the wife found someone she likes better, the man can lose his “father” role, and access to the young people who used to be his children, due to factors entirely beyond his control. The man’s biggest financial exposure in a divorce lawsuit is typically “child support” (paid to an adult female to spend on whatever she wants, not to a “child”), which can last for 23 years (Massachusetts) or 21 years (New York) even if the plaintiff has married her lover and that lover earns far more than the defendant and even if the lover is the biological father of the child (nytimes: “I pay child support to a biologically intact family, a father and mother, married, who live with their own child.”). (In the cases where alimony is the primary profit from a divorce lawsuit, the defendant might be paying for 50 years because there is no longer any social pressure for the plaintiff to remarry. She can have sex with 100 men and write a magazine article about the “single MILF” lifestyle and this has no impact on her cash entitlement.)
This is not to say that American in the 1950s was better overall, of course. We had been starved of enrichment via immigrants since 1924 and, therefore, weren’t as strong under the “diversity is our strength” axiom. We didn’t have Internet or LLMs for personal use. A 1950s car, though beautiful in our museums today, came out of the factory as a junk heap compared to a 3-year-old Toyota today. We had three TV channels to watch on a 21″ CRT. But in terms of career security and personal life security, the 2020s are inferior to the 1950s. So, returning to the title question… if the 1950s were a “rat race” for white-collar men, how would we characterize the situation today?
Loosely related…
I really want to find a wife but man where do I even look?
All the girls I work with are whores.
All the girls from my university are whores.
All the girls I meet on tinder are whores.
Where do I even look?
Being born in Gen Z is the worst experience ever.
I’d gladly give…
— The Right Wing Patriot (@DavidRobinr0) June 22, 2026
A post on X from an offensively titled username so I’ll just copy the text:
White Americans and Europeans are the ONLY people worldwide that are EXPECTED to compete with the ENTIRE world for jobs.
50+ years ago White men with STEM degrees got good jobs. Things like engineering or applied mathematics guaranteed a good career.
Now we are required to compete against not just our own people, but the brown and black hordes worldwide that are willing to work for pennies.
It was an ECONOMIC CRIME committed against our people.
(I post this not for the truth or falsehood of what the author writes, but for the expression of a feeling of insecurity and, therefore, pressure even worse than the rat race of 50 years ago.)
Projects show that about 55 percent of Swiss voters have rejected a proposed population cap of 10 million for a mountainous territory that currently has 5X the population density of the U.S. Lower 48.
The population of Switzerland has doubled within the lifetimes of its older citizens:
Only about 5 percent of Switzerland is reasonably flat buildable land. The Swiss are already crammed in like rats by U.S. standards, about 500 square feet per person vs. 750 here. There is a term in medicine for growth without regard to available resources: “cancer”.
(ChatGPT says an American who has wisely chosen to refrain from work and lives in taxpayer-funded public housing may have a higher material standard of living than a median Swiss as measured by (a) square footage per person, (b) air conditioning (only 5% of Swiss have it), and (c) car ownership. While the American who hasn’t worked for four generations cruises around in his/her/zir/their air-conditioned Nissan Altima, the working Swiss is provisioned with a public transit bus that may not have A/C or that has only feeble A/C. ChatGPT and Grok agree that Switzerland has 1/10th the murder rate of the U.S., though that advantage falls when Switzerland is compared to the “more racially homogeneous (often White) areas” U.S. states, such as New Hampshire and Maine. Grok specifically wrote “more racially homogeneous (often White) areas tend to have lower crime than heterogeneous ones” so I asked “Does that mean diversity is not our strength?” and the answer was “No”. ChatGPT agrees that the correlation between racial homogeneity and crime is accurate and that, similarly, we cannot abandon the axiom “diversity is our strength”.)
It will be interesting if we can get some demographics on those who voted yes vs. no to the cap. U.S. immigration is mostly low-skill and benefits the elite at the expense of the American working class (Harvard study), hence the tendency of the working class to vote for politicians, such as Donald Trump, who promise to limit immigration. Switzerland has a much higher percentage of high-skill immigrants, with at least 60 percent holding at least a bachelor’s degree (compare to 36 percent of U.S. immigrants). So a Swiss with a white collar job could cast a self-interested vote against mass importation of humans.
Here’s ChatGPT’s summary of where each country gets its foreign residents (in the U.S., nearly all are “immigrants”, entitled to stay here forever; in Switzerland, nearly all are expected to go home eventually). Switzerland pulls its foreigners primarily from fully developed European countries, such as Italy, Germany, Portugal, and France.. The U.S. has chosen to bring in foreigners primarily from Mexico, India, China, Philippines, Cuba, etc.
In the coming Age of AI and Robotics, what’s the scenario in which existing Swiss citizens become better off because someone who isn’t in the top 10% of human intelligence/skill has immigrated?
Separately, it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal, published in a country with 1/5th the current population density of Switzerland, describes the idea of limiting population density as “radical” (source):
A total of 219 people have been injured in clashes between football fans and police across France after Paris St-Germain (PSG) won the Champions League final against Arsenal.
It might have been the police who started the violence, in other words, and the only thing that we know about the non-police combatants is that they were “football fans”.
X perspective: the rioters were Muslims and/or “North African”.
The Muslim gang riots continue in Paris.
A huge fire was started at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
Notice how they chant “Allahu Akbar.” This is a religious war, and this is their way of saying “we own the place now.” pic.twitter.com/MLXSc3IEXi
Nurul Amin, a 56-year-old grandfather despondent over broken American promises … he spoke no English, and was illiterate.
As a Rohingya, he was part of a Muslim minority essentially stripped of Myanmar citizenship decades ago and subjected ever since to an increasing repression of rights, the burning of mosques, the destruction of villages, even what the United States has called genocide.
After traveling more than 8,000 miles, Nurul Amin and part of his family arrived in the United States on Christmas Eve. Faisal bent down to touch the snow that symbolized their new reality: Buffalo.
“Very exciting,” he recalled.
Buffalo has benefited from the presence of families like Nurul Amin’s. Immigrants, including a Bangladeshi wave moving up from New York City, and refugees, including people from Myanmar, have revived dying neighborhoods, diversified the culture and spurred the city’s first growth since 1950, when it had more than double the current population of 278,000.
“You can’t have economic growth without population growth,” the mayor, Sean M. Ryan, said in an interview. “And the new Americans have been Buffalo’s economic lifeblood.”
Caseworkers for one of the city’s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house.
Via the magic of federal welfare dollars, e.g., for Medicaid, SNAP, and public housing, even someone who speaks no English, is disabled, and can’t read can generate economic growth in the Rust Belt. Much of the money is skimmed off by taxpayer-funded nonprofit do-gooders:
Caseworkers for one of the city’s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house. A caseworker helped them to adjust.
Donald Trump is the bad guy here:
Even worse, the president’s executive order also meant that Nurul Amin’s three older sons and their families in Malaysia would not be coming to the United States.
(This would have been an additional 20 immigrants who didn’t speak English?)
The hero of our story had a problem with the police that might have stemmed from the police officers’ inability to speak the Bangla and Rohingya languages that the new Americans we’re welcoming speak:
The two police officers who responded found a short, stocky man in the backyard and an aluminum shed with its door yanked off. They repeatedly ordered him to drop the poles, their voices rising with each new command, but he did not seem to understand. Where he came from, people in paramilitary uniforms represented oppression. … Nurul Amin became agitated. He began walking toward the officers, swinging the curtain rods and saying words they didn’t understand. Within 45 seconds of the officers’ arrival, there came the electrified crackle of Tasers. … He didn’t understand them any more than they understood him, as he recited, over and over, a prayer for help.
The jail is fully set up to accommodate Muslims, but the jailers might not have been fluent in the Bangla and Rohingya languages.
It is unclear if he knew how to use the commissary, or had access to halal food. “Information about special diets is provided to each incarcerated individual via the inmate handbook,” a spokesman for the Erie County Sheriff’s Office said in an email. But Nurul Amin could not read.
State-paid criminal justice officials try to avoid doing anything that would result in them losing federal welfare dollars via the migrant’s deportation:
Another Buffalo February set in. Nurul Amin had spent 12 of his 14 months in America behind bars.
His son Faisal was working part-time as a housekeeper at a downtown hotel. His son Yassin was in the fifth grade. They and their mother were living now in a cramped apartment across from the old Polish Catholic church, on Buffalo’s east side, where many of the city’s 2,000 Rohingya residents had settled.
Finally, the Erie County district attorney, Mike Keane, offered to end the case if Nurul Amin pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. “My decision was the result of a comprehensive evaluation of his conduct, criminal history, acceptance of responsibility, medical condition, time served in pre-trial custody, and the proposed resolution,” Mr. Keane later said. “I also considered the significant collateral consequences that would result from a felony conviction — including mandatory deportation.”
(Had Nurul Amin Shah Alam been deported, the Buffalo economy would have shrunk.)
The wife and youngest son:
The tale of a man who might have lived happily among fellow Muslims in Malaysia has a sad ending. Border Patrol picks him up when he’s released from jail, but then decides that they can’t deport him because the state officials didn’t convict him of a felony. They drop him off in Buffalo at the home that taxpayers had previously been providing.
In its telling, the refugee who did not speak English agreed to be dropped off near his last known address, though a call to his family or lawyer would have revealed that the family now lived on the other side of the city. In its telling, the agreed-upon drop-off point was a coffee shop “determined to be a warm, safe location.”
At 8:19, a white van pulled into a darkened parking lot on Niagara Street, near the Tim Hortons with only its drive-thru open. A short man got out. He had no cellphone, no identification, no English skills, no reading skills and no true understanding of where he was.
The Department of Homeland Security would answer such criticism, in part, this way: “Another hoax being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law enforcement. This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol. Mr. Shah Alam passed almost A WEEK AFTER he was released by Border Patrol.”
The refugee moved past the inaccessible Tim Hortons. Past the drifts and piles of shoveled snow. He raised his black hood and disappeared into the Buffalo mist.
Loosely related, I had ChatGPT check the above headline and our AI Overlord wasn’t happy at all.
“Disabled illiterate” is harsh headline language. It may be factual, but it foregrounds deficits and can sound contemptuous unless those facts are central to the story.
The suggested corrected headline assigns blame:
“Immigration system mishandles case of disabled, illiterate Rohingya man”
Maybe ChatGPT is correct. In our infinite wisdom we have set up a system where a Swiss physician fluent in four languages, including English, is barred from immigration while we preferentially admit people who can’t read and are comfortable only in a Rohingya- or Bangla-speaking environment in which women are covered in burqas.
California is an exemplar for what a lot of Americans want our nation to become. It is 28 percent immigrants, for example. Taxpayer-funded unlimited health care is a human right, including for the undocumented (except, bizarrely, Californians who say that they hate inequality stopped giving MediCal to undocumented new arrivals while preserving it for existing beneficiaries; of course, a newly arrived undocumented migrant disqualified from MediCal due to a completely arbitrary arrival date limit can always get taxpayer-funded care at the nearest emergency room). Any day now, California will ladle out massive quantities of taxpayer funds to those who identify as “African Americans” (a committee was formed (see below) after the legislature passed a law requiring… a committee to be formed).
The unfortunate recent shooting at a mosque in San Diego involved a diverse group of people from different cultures and ethnicities.
Americans can’t agree on the nature of the mosque. It served an entirely peaceful group of Muslims, according to the Righteous at Wikipedia. The peaceful Muslims are mostly notable for being the victims of hatred:
The mosque was the target of an attempted bombing on January 11, 1991. The attempt occurred during a period of high tensions as part of the Gulf War, and the mosque received a large volume of hateful phone calls. The bomb was later discovered to be defective
(No culprit was ever identified or arrested, according to Google AI.)
It was the home for 2 out of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers, according to the Deplorables at the New York Post and was a center for Jew-hatred:
More recently, Imam Taha Hassane has come under fire for his comments on the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
“This did not start last week or on October 7. This is the result of brutal Zionist occupation and genocide,” Hassane said in a video posted to social media days after the savage Hamas attack.
“Resistance is justified when people are under occupation and don’t let them change that narrative.”
His wife, Lallia Allali, allegedly posted graphic images of a “Jewish star murdering babies with ‘the devil is killing’” scrawl in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks
(The helpfulness of the mosque is confirmed by the National Commission on Terrorism Attacks Upon the United States (report).)
Two people who hated Jews killed another guy who hates Jews.
In other words, Californians from different backgrounds might be able to unite under an anti-Jewish political banner (perhaps, as with Zohran Mamdani, this will be styled as an “anti-Israel” banner, not too different from how German forward-thinkers rebranded crude “Jew-hatred”, offensive to middle-class Germans, to the scientific-sounding “antisemitism”, something that educated Germans could sign up for as a policy).
Except for agreement regarding the pernicious nature of Jews/Israelis, however, what do the people who currently live in California have in common? At one time, the answer might have been a shared economic interest. This was strained a bit during the early Silicon Valley boom, but the chip and electronics companies built factories in California as well as design labs. In the current AI boom, some people with IQs of 160-200 in the SF Bay Area work at desks and all of the high-value manufacturing happens in Taiwan. The data center construction and operation jobs that AI creates will nearly all be in states (and countries) other than California, which has a high cost of electric power. Absent state government confiscation and redistribution, it isn’t clear how profits from AI will reach Californians outside of the Bay Area (or even most of those who don’t work in AI and who live in the Bay Area).
Pew regarding the shift in data centers away from California:
The chart does a simple count, but because new data centers are much larger than ones built 20 or 30 years ago, California’s #3 position is misleading. ChatGPT says that California is a “legacy market” that has already been reduced to irrelevance:
If the shooters hadn’t killed themselves, in other words, they might have grown up to receive a state transfer of some wealth earned by Jensen Huang, but otherwise it is tough to see what connection or common cause they might have had with Jensen Huang or anyone else at NVIDIA. Same deal with the victim. Amin Abdullah, the security guard who perished in the attack, was a Muslim who worked at a mosque and was a father of eight children. What was his shared cultural or religious connection to a childless atheist working at a tech company and spending weekends at Pride events in San Francisco?
Note that with our asylum-based immigration system, I don’t think that the rest of the U.S. is far behind California in terms of being a random assemblage of humans with nothing in common. By design, the only thing that asylum-seekers have in common is that they didn’t like where they used to live. But California is a little ahead of the national trend.
As part of my April 2026 move-out-of-Cambridge experience, I went to the Home Depot in Somerville, Maskachusetts. Four “youths” were riding full-size e-bikes around the aisles. The checkout lady appeared to be a Somali and was in full Islamic attire. One of the young clerks was white and Following Science (wearing a surgical mask to protect him/her/zir/theirself against an aerosol virus), but mostly it was an environment that would have been alien to a working-class native-born American.
I remember Somerville as a white working-class suburb when I arrived at MIT in 1979 and we would head over to Somerville Lumber in Bennett’s station wagon to buy loft-building supplies for my dorm room (I don’t think MIT ever charged me for the wall damage done by the toggle bolts!). ChatGPT says that it was 95 percent white in 1980 vs. about 60 percent non-Hispanic white today.
Malden was another bastion of the white native-born working class. Today is at least 43 percent immigrant, as shown on this January 2019 PDF (perhaps Malden is up to 50% by now; MA was at 17% in 2019 (below) and today is closer to 20%).
The transformation seems to have occurred well prior to the Biden-Harris open borders period. Here’s some 2016 data on “newly diverse places” (as of 2016, non-Hispanic whites were already a minority in Malden):
Some specifics regarding Malden from the above, again using 2016 data:
Note that the newly diverse communities don’t include places where the decision-making high-income elites would be likely to live (Cambridge might appear to be an exception, but the city maintained an Underclass of Color even in the old days). It seems that the white working class in Massachusetts (voters without a college degree) actually voted against a continuation of the Biden-Harris open border policy by voting, in a narrow majority, for Donald Trump 2024. Naturalized immigrants are more likely to vote Democrat than native-born Americans. So it seems that the native-born white working class of Massachusetts voted solidly against this transformation and yet it was imposed on them.
Consider the effect on someone who grew up in Somerville or Malden and was 20 years old in 1980. This person is now 65 years old and, if still in his or her hometown, part of a literally alien society. Here’s old white guy/Senator Ed Markey at the Malden Islamic Center:
Maybe this particular old white guy wants to talk about the “victims of Gaza”, which the mosque seeks to support, but does the average native-born white person want to do that? In order to live in a society that resembles that one in which the Somerville or Malden Boomer grew up, he or she would have to move to The Villages (NW of Orlando), which is roughly 95 percent non-Hispanic white and only 5 percent foreign-born. (Moving to Florida isn’t as much of a financial win for a Maskachusetts peasant as it would be for an elite. Social Security income isn’t subject to state income tax, for example, and the state estate tax exempts the first $2 million in assets.)
Finally, a New England senator says that the U.S. is short by hundreds of hospitals for the existing population. At the same time, it makes sense to continue bringing in 1-2 million legal immigrants every year to add to the population that is facing the hospital shortage:
In the United States we need hundreds of new hospitals and health clinics.
We need thousands of new child care centers.
We need millions of new units of affordable housing.
We do NOT need to spend another $500 billion on the military for endless wars.
More recent new construction hasn’t replaced America’s graying housing stock, meaning the age of the median home is a record 44 years, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
The cost of home maintenance, even after accounting for broader inflation, has jumped. Structural repair costs grew by about 14.1% in real terms between 2022 and 2024, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Plumbing jumped by 23.6%. The increase reflects the rising cost of individual parts and labor, and the larger size of necessary repairs.
This is on top of the rising costs of home insurance, property taxes and homeowners association dues, which are making it prohibitive for many to simply own a home, not to mention buy one.
The newspaper says “it [is] prohibitive for many to simply own a home, not to mention buy one” and at the same time tells us that the U.S. should have increased immigration, i.e., more demand for a relatively fixed supply of houses.
Our shabby/old house by Palm Beach County standards is 23 years old and that puts us in the top 25 percent of home youth:
Getting close to my 4% number:
Financial advisers traditionally suggested setting aside 1% of a home’s value annually for upkeep, but many now argue that isn’t enough. While 1% may cover routine upkeep, 2% to 3% provides a more realistic cushion for expected maintenance, home-improvement projects and unexpected repairs, particularly for older homes, said Angie Hicks, co-founder of home-services company Angi.
The Americans who were most eager to lock themselves into their homes during coronapanic will now bear a heavy burden:
Forty-nine percent of all improvement spending is now for necessary replacements like HVAC that owners can’t delay, said Rachel Drew, director of Harvard’s Remodeling Futures Program. The financial burden is particularly heavy in regions like the Northeast, where homes tend to be older.
Speaking of old, the article highlights the inability of folks in the Northeast to adapt to changed circumstances:
Mindy and Joseph Mevorah own an 88-year-old colonial [“more than 3,500-square-foot”] in Sands Point, a New York City suburb with plenty of old homes that is often considered an inspiration for “The Great Gatsby.” The house is due for a new coat of paint, a task they know to approach with caution. … “A new brick next to an old brick would look terrible,” said Joseph, 66. … The Mevorahs have stayed in their home for 29 years … They have a pool that could be a draw for future grandchildren. … When replacing their copper gutters a few years ago, they considered switching to aluminum, which would have been cheaper, but ultimately stuck with copper to preserve the home’s integrity. After all, they expect to be there for many years to come.
A 66-year-old in Florida whose kids were grown wouldn’t stay in a 3,500-square-foot wreck of a house. The Floridian would recognize that different kinds of real estate are suitable for different phases of life and likely move to a condo or small new house.
Circling back to the immigration theme… how can end-of-career financially comfortable Americans who struggle to afford house maintenance imagine that the U.S. can afford to house tens of millions of additional welfare-dependent low-skill immigrants?
Kansas wildlife officials have removed more than 100,000 pounds of invasive Asian carp from the Kansas River over the past four years … They are known for growing quickly, consuming massive amounts of food and crowding out native species that rely on the same resources.
#Science: Immigrant animals make us worse off by “growing quickly, consuming massive amounts of food and crowding out native species that rely on the same resources” while immigrant humans make us better off (don’t breed, consume food, or crowd out natives from resources such as health care).
Sad to say, but it seems that the haters in Kansas hate Asians almost as much as the Harvard admissions office (deemed racists by the U.S. Supreme Court, a rare distinction!).
