#i feel pretty safe in my cinderblock house
Something I don’t think gets talked about enough is that the house-flipping trend has not only resulted in ugly, poorly laid out houses, it’s resulted in houses that are literally already falling apart by the time they’re sold. There are vast numbers of new houses that are being built with the explicit expectation that they’re going to be torn down and rebuilt in ten years or less to keep up with contemporary trends, so they’re only designed to last five to ten years before falling to pieces. Like, I live in an ugly little house that hasn’t seen major renovations since the 1970s, and it’s in better physical condition than a lot of newer houses that were built last year.
I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal if you think of it in terms of ha ha, rich people overpaying for shitty houses, but flip it around and consider: what does our ostensible housing surplus actually mean if an increasing number of those houses will be functionally uninhabitable within a decade?
