There’s Nobody In Between
A housing bubble related issue from the Charleston City Paper. “‘Everything hinges on land,’ Celeste Albers says. She should know. Albers is one of the pioneers of sustainable farming in the Lowcountry, and she has been an instrumental figure in bringing good, local food back to Charleston’s restaurants and farmers markets. Ultimately, for Albers, it hasn’t been weather or labor or restaurant buyers that have posed the stiffest challenge. The biggest problem has been land.”
“According to a 2008 Clemson study, South Carolina has approximately 20 million acres of total land. Twenty-five percent of that area is considered farmland. But due to skyrocketing real estate prices, availability, and an expensive rental market, acquiring and actually growing crops on that farmland is growing increasingly difficult.”
“No one knows more about making sustainable farming scale than Will Harris, the owner of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Ga. Unlike many of the farmers involved in the good food movement today, Harris came to it not from the outside but the inside. Today, Harris employs 120 people to work some 2,500 acres of land, and he sells his meat through big retailers like Publix and Whole Foods. Harris had a leg up on most sustainable farmers, since he inherited 1,000 acres from his father. Since then, he has bought 250 more acres and leased an additional 1,250. But even his ability to scale is starting to reach its limits.”
“There’s plenty of arable land in south Georgia, he notes, but ‘it’s under someone else’s control.’ ‘We raise everything we process here ourselves except cattle,’ Harris says. ‘We raised about 700 calves a year, but that’s not enough.’ So he established a network of 15 other farmers to grow additional cattle for them, using his protocols and specifications, and he purchases, slaughters, and sells them under the White Oak Pastures brand. ‘We would love to raise all of them ourselves,’ Harris says. ‘The only reason we don’t is we don’t have enough land.’”
“Right now, land is indeed a limiting factor, but it’s not because we lack the raw acreage. A two-hour drive through any part of rural South Carolina or Georgia — mile after mile of farrow fields and pine timberlands — makes that clear. Clay County, where Harris farms, is the fifth least populous county in Georgia, and it has no shortage of land. The issue, Harris says, is ‘who controls the land, who’s handling the land.’”
“This problem is by no means limited to the South. In states like New Jersey, wealthy individuals find farmland attractive for its so-called ‘estate value’ — big homes with lots of adjoining land. Land prices are at an all-time high in rural farm states, too. The Iowa Land Value Survey, conducted by Iowa State University, shows the average price of an acre of farmland has more than doubled in the past decade, rising from $2,629 in 2004 to $7,943 today.”
“After the housing bubble burst, institutional investors, seeking a safer place for their money, started buying up farmland in the Midwest, effectively transforming farmland into a new ‘asset class’ seen as a reliable hedge against inflation. These investors typically lease the land back to farmers or hire farmland management companies to work the land via contract. In 2012, Brian Briggeman, a Kansas State University economist, estimated that a quarter of all American farmland purchases were made by investors, not operators.”
“Though Johns Island and Wadmalaw have traditionally been farming communities, things are different today. ‘Land values are way out of sight here,’ Celeste Albers says. ‘It’s crazy. People want to live here, which is great. It gives you a great customer base, but it also drives up the cost of buying land. You can’t buy any reasonable piece of land for less than $10,000 an acre, and you don’t have a prayer of selling enough to cover that.’”
“When Albers looks back at how things have changed over the past two decades, she is bothered in particular by the huge gap that now separates small, sustainable farming and large-scale commodity agriculture. ‘You have a lot of really, really small farms, a lot of people working on two, four, or six acres that really are producing foods for the community. Then there’s nobody in between. Where are the 20-acre farms, the 50-acre farms? There’s none of them left.’”
“‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to produce enough food to feed Charleston. Not just in restaurants but in kitchens,’ Albers says. ‘Where are the people feeding families and not just the boutique growers? It just goes straight to land, accessibility, and labor. That’s our problem, and I don’t know what the answer is to that.’”
‘Right now, land is indeed a limiting factor, but it’s not because we lack the raw acreage. A two-hour drive through any part of rural South Carolina or Georgia — mile after mile of farrow fields and pine timberlands — makes that clear. Clay County, where Harris farms, is the fifth least populous county in Georgia, and it has no shortage of land.’
‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to produce enough food to feed Charleston. Not just in restaurants but in kitchens,’ Albers says. ‘Where are the people feeding families…?’
It’s amazing really. We have the need. We have the land. And the disconnect is the price. I thought this was an interesting part:
‘After Harris inherited his father’s farm, he continued the same practices for a while, but his margins were razor thin and he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the conditions of the animals he was sending to industrial feedlots. Finally, in the mid-1990s, Harris decided to take the farm back to the methods his great-grandfather had used more than a century before.’
‘He took the cows off antibiotics, returned them to an all-grass diet, and stopped putting chemical fertilizers on the pastures. He brought back heritage breed pigs and chickens, and later sheep, goats, rabbits, ducks, and geese. Today, the livestock spend their entire lives roaming unconfined through the same pastures, following what Harris calls the Serengeti Grazing Model. First large ruminants then small ruminants then birds rotate through each pasture, the animals eating grasses and naturally fertilizing the soil as they go.’
‘Over time Harris has built a highly sustainable, vertically integrated operation that includes a USDA-inspected beef abattoir and a poultry abattoir. It’s the only farm in the country with both red and white meat-processing facilities onsite. It’s also a zero-waste operation, with blood digested, bones ground to meal and used for fertilizer, and the hides tanned and sold. They raise 40 varieties of heirloom vegetables in organic gardens and even have an on-farm restaurant.’
‘Today, Harris employs 120 people to work some 2,500 acres of land…Even though Harris is running one of the most successful sustainable agriculture operations in the country — a $25-million-a-year enterprise that’s one of the largest employers in his area — his scale is still miniscule compared to the giant commodity agricultural corporations. “We slaughter 35 cattle per day,” Harris says. “Versus 6,000 cattle per day for industrial plants. 1,000 chickens per day versus 500,000 per day for industrial.”
‘In the United States, we conceivably could bump into such a land limit if we were to scale things up to the point where a significant proportion of American food was being produced through lower-yielding sustainable practices. But we are a long way off from hitting that limit right now. Harris frequently addresses this point directly when discussing his sustainable approach versus the conventional tenets of commodity agriculture.’
“I want to go ahead and concede up front to you,” Harris says, “that if the first thing that we are going to run out of — the first limited resources — is land, then your system is better than my system. You can feed more people on an acre of land using antibiotics and GMOs … You win. Your system is better than my system.”
“But if petroleum is the limiting factor, I produce more food per gallon of petroleum than you do. I produce more food per gallon of water consumed than you do. If polluting the oceans is a limiting factor, then I win. If greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is the limiting factor, then I win.”
“Serengeti Grazing Model” = “Managed intensive rotational grazing”
Wiki doesn’t have a listing for “Serengeti Grazing Model” but is does have a listing for “Managed intensive rotational grazing”, which is the same thing called by a different name.
I highly recommend HBB readers wiki-up “Managed intensive rotational grazing” and give it a good read because this, to me at least, is the type of farming that makes the most sense.
Much of the history of the west is the evolution of land use regarding farming and ranching. There was a time when cattle wandered around then to be rounded up periodically. Disputes lead to branding. Then came the big innovation; barbed-wire, privatized ranges, especially water sources. The longhorn was desirable because it was so hardy in the free range environment. Once the land was fenced, breeding created cattle more suited to the new economics. It’s also interesting that in the early days they enforced the strictest and swiftest punishment for cattle and horse thievery.
“Then came the big innovation; barbed-wire, privatized ranges, especially water sources.”
“barbed wire”, or … an electric fence. Not necessarily a whole fence but just a electrified wire or two.
Power the wire by a car battery and - presto! - you now have portability; You now have a fence that is easy to move from one section of land to another section of land. This is done to keep the cattle in.
And once the cattle are kept in, leave their deposits of cow flops, then are moved out, then come the chickens, who do not need to be forced to stay because they will willingly stay because this - the maggots that spring forth in the cow flops - will give them the incentive to stay. All they need is a chicken coup of some sort that will give them a place to say during the night (and a place to lay their eggs, of which you will get to harvest) and this chicken coup is something that can be put on wheels and moved into a section of land after the cattle are moved out.
This, I believe and as I understand it, is the gist of the Serengeti Grazing Model.
Neat stuff, IMHO.
Labor Force Participation Rate At Record Low
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
Meanwhile, those lucky souls who find themselves in the labor force and employed find themselves working more evenings and weekends for roughly the same pay.
“You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn’t it?”
- George Bush
except gov workers- 395 s of dc is packed at 4pm
ask Oxide
raises ,colas,step increases
maybe you should say something
http://polobserver.wix.com/cutspending
You’ve been serving up the standard Republican Party propaganda line here about the outsized federal workforce for years, going back to when your blog handle was flat.
Do you have any data to back up your claims?
gop loves big gov
how many agencies are there?
since 2005 gov pay up 20% and private sector 2%
BUSH was big on raises
I spent about 6 months working for an army contractor. They deliberately prevented us from doing anything productive… only rationalization I could come up with was that it was welfare for men, but they didn’t want us competing with private industry.
Miserable existence.
It appears the federal workforce shrank over five decades while the US labor force more than doubled.
Year FedGov USLaborForce FedGovEmploymentShare
1962 5,354 70,189 7.6%
1972 5,225 85,978 6.1%
1982 4,972 109,089 4.6%
1992 4,931 127,261 3.9%
2002 4,152 143,883 2.9%
2012 4,312 154,445 2.8%
FedGov = Total Federal personnel (thousands)
I wonder how federal pay raises in recent years stack up against the 0.1% Ownership Society members’ standard 5%+ raises?
Good news for federal workers: You’re getting a raise. Bad news: It’s 1 percent
By Leada Gore
December 15, 2014 at 7:30 AM
Here’s the good news: Civilian federal employees will receive a pay raise again in 2015.
And the bad: It will only be 1 percent, an amount that employees’ unions say doesn’t go far enough to make up for past pay freezes, furloughs and shutdowns.
The $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill includes the 1 percent pay raise for civilian government workers and military personnel. The amount of the raise is the same as recommended by President Barack Obama but less than the 1.3 percent raise civilians would receive and the 1.8 percent for military personnel if standard cost-of-living adjustments had been used.
…
“raises ,colas,step increases”
Nothing like empty rhetoric with no statistical evidence to back it up, is there?
census fed pay up 20% since 2005 to 2013
how about you
and db pension and 70% HC
Funny, my private sector pay is up 80% during the same time period.
Maybe you should try to be good at what you do, and quit being jealous of the govvies.
Nice strawman.
I’m sick of paying for the worthless schmucks. And so is Taxpayers.
“ask oxide”
Many agencies set working hours are 7:30 - 4:15. Many of them come in at 7:00 am so they can leave at 3:45 - 4:00pm and beat the traffic. They aren’t taking off early. Saw it a lot in private sector too.
mlk day ,vets , presidents etc you won’t taking those off in the privcsec
Sellers Slash List Prices 20% In Monterey Co, CA As Housing Correction Ramps Up
http://www.zillow.com/monterey-county-ca/home-values/
“Wealthy individuals find farmland attractive for its so-called ‘estate value’ — big homes with lots of adjoining land…. Institutional investors…started buying up farmland…as a reliable hedge against inflation. These investors typically lease the land back to farmers or hire farmland management companies to work the land via contract.”
History buffs, help me out. Does this resemble pre-Renaissance feudalism or antebellum South?
It resembles dumb borrowed money chasing a return that isn’t there.
What makes you think this has ever happened before? Here we have people willing to work the land, in a different way, to produce food. It doesn’t matter if you believe in sustainable agriculture or not. Let the market decide. But why should millions of acres of land sit while the economics can’t work for people willing to try? Meanwhile, if you can pump steroids into the animals, keep chickens in little pens their entire lives, there’s an ‘acceptable’ percentage of profit. Where does the waste go? IMO, all you have to do is drive downwind of these operations to know that isn’t where food should be coming from. It doesn’t have to be this way.
“Where does the waste go?”
Into trucks.
Farms, waste hauler fined for manure spills
Peter J. Devlin, Advocate correspondent 8:37 p.m. CST January 16, 2015
(Photo: Samantha Hernandez/Door County Advocate )
5 CONNECT 8 TWEETLINKEDIN 1 COMMENTEMAILMORE
Penalties have been assessed and cleanup continues on wells contaminated last September when liquid manure entered a sinkhole in a town of Jacksonport farm field.
Staff from the Door County Soil and Water Conservation office and from the County Health Department investigated an incident in which a worker for Bonduel-based Waste Control Services accidentally spread manure into a sinkhole in a field controlled by Haberli Farms, headquartered at 6945 Memorial Drive, Egg Harbor.
The incident occurred on about Sept. 8 or 9 — immediately following two days of heavy rainfall — on a field near the intersection of Elm Drive and Maple Place.
The manure contained bacteria that quickly entered the aquifer, contaminating more than a dozen wells and sickening 16 people, Door County Public Health Director Rhonda Kolberg said at a meeting last month in Jacksonport.
“The DNR is issuing a citation to Haberli Farms and to the hauler in this case,” Door County Conservationist Bill Schuster said at this week’s bimonthly meeting of the county Land Conservation Committee (LCC). “And these are second violations, because they did something similar the year before.”
…
If you had a poly culture farm you probably won’t have a manure problem.
One model of such a farm allows overgrazing by cattle in one section of land and then, after a period of tine, the cattle are moved to another section of land and then chickens are then brought into the overgrazed section where they feed on the fly maggots that spring forth in the cow flops.
When the chickens search out the fly maggots (which they love to eat) they disperse the cow flops and spread the manure around and this eases the recycling of the manure back into the soil.
The end result: Less flies, well fed chickens, and soil that retains its nutrients.
“…the cattle are moved to another section of land and then chickens are then brought into the overgrazed section where they feed on the fly maggots that spring forth in the cow flops…”
That’s far too much land for chickens. They should be jammed into some tiny pen where they can barely turn around- you know, maximize every square inch.
“That’s far too much land for chickens. They should be jammed into some tiny pen where they can barely turn around- you know, maximize every square inch.”
One of the economic benefits of having the chickens stay on the land rather than in a cage is the cost of infrastructure for housing the chickens is minimized AND so is the cost of feeding the chickens - a cost which should approach zero.
A portable roost of some sort needs to be provided for the chickens but it shouldn’t have to be elaborate - elaborate as compared to cages. Al it would need to do is provide a shelter - a home - for the chickens to roost.
Regarding the cost of infrastructure …
To keep the cattle confined you will need some sort of confined apparatus. Barbed wire is one way (a rather permanent way and an expensive way) and an electric wire is a cheap and portable way.
And then there’s the cost of housing infrastructure for the chickens which, as mentioned above, doesn’t have to be all that elaborate thus it can be cheap.
So this means that the cost of infrastructure can be minimal which means the cost of the land can take up the slack - can take up the slack and still allow the enterprise to turn a profit.
From what I remember reading, the chickens aren’t allowed to roam totally free in the fields. They are housed in a portable pen, sometimes a roost built over a cage basement of sorts, and are wheeled around to fresh sections of the field every other day. Either that or they are supervised. If the chickens weren’t enclosed or protected, they would be taken by foxes and hawks. Image-google for “mobile chicken coop” for pix.
Grass fed chickens?
IIRC the chickens WERE allowed to roam freely and came and went as they pleased, which includes coming-and-going in and out of the roost as they pleased. At night they invariably went into the roost and this was the time they were moves, meaning this was the time when the portable roost-on-wheels was moved - chickens and all - to the next section of land.
The whole idea of free-ranging the chickens is so the chickens can gather for themselves their own food rather than having to depend on food being brought to them.
“The whole idea of free-ranging the chickens is so the chickens can gather for themselves their own food rather than having to depend on food being brought to them.”
And this makes them cheap and easy to raise and calling them “Free Range” makes them easy to market because free range is “The In Thing” - and people will pay a higher price for those things that are dubbed The In Thing.
Hence, a double-win.
HA, the chickens didn’t rally eat grass, they eat seeds and every bug they could find. They still have to be fed in the winter. They need more land. And all that chicken-moving and rounding-up costs labor, plus the costs of running a labor-intensive farm in general. This makes free-rangers more expensive to raise than chicken-house chickens. If it chicken houses were more expensive than free-range, why would they have developed them in the first place?
LOL.
Donk…. I raised livestock for the first 16 years of my life. Good Google U perspective though.
“If it chicken houses were more expensive than free-range, why would they have developed them in the first place?”
Perhaps the chicken houses were originally sold as cheaper, but were really a vehicle for big Pharma to sink their claws into livestock agriculture and extract delicious profits by way of expensive antibiotics, etc.; kind of like how Monsanto promised higher yield crops with Roundup Ready Corn seed, but failed to mention the disastrous pitfalls?
If I’m ever back in DC, I want to meet you, Oxide. Say, where’s Polly been?
” and people will pay a higher price for those things that are dubbed The In Thing.”
People will pay a higher price not to have animals unnecessarily tortured to save a few cents.
My hypothesis:
It resembles the pre-Great Depression farmland bubble of the Roaring Twenties.
I’ll be interested to see what evidence anyone can provide to either support or reject my hypothesis.
Markets More: Great Depression Real Estate Bubbles
The Great Depression’s Farmland Bubble Looks Eerily Like Today
Ashley Lutz
May 3, 2012, 12:36 PM
The housing bubble during the Great Depression was caused by overvaluation of properties and easy access to credit.
Sound familiar?
Greater credit availability makes the economy more sensitive to any shocks, according to a recent study by Raghuram Rajan at the University of Chicago and Rodney Ramcharan of the Federal Reserve Board.
In the 1920’s, anyone could get a big loan for a farm or a house. But when the markets tanked and people lost their jobs they found they couldn’t sell their property for the same value they bought it.
…
The Dust Bowl was the end of many farms back then.
Unusually wet weather followed by normal dry weather
Unusually wet credit followed by unusually dry credit.
It took Google less than ten seconds to find a recent (2012) article that corroborates my conjecture.
Except farmers aren’t borrowing and buying land to let it sit fallow. The prices have been driven by investors buying and hoping for appreciation. For years.
My parents were little kids at the tail end of the depression, living in west Texas. Their biggest recollection of that time was the dust bowl. There probably would have been a collapse if the dust bowl hadn’t happened. My mom told me once, that people could work, they could sell food or make things. But in her words, ‘nobody had any money.’ It would seem the problem now is too much money.
Ben, thanks for sharing your family’s experience. My folks were lived farther north (MO/IL) but also out in the rural countryside; they have shared similar stories with me over the years. Dad’s dad, a country school teacher, took a second job selling tombstones to make ends meet. Mom’s dad, also a country school teacher, spent his weekends hunting for ducks and squirrels to put protein on the table. My favorite story, from my mom, is how the resourceful families in her community would fashion undergarments out of the burlap sacks in which flour was delivered back in the day; these earned the nickname of “flour-sack drawers.”
All told, my parents’ communities provided themselves with a subsistence living off the produce of local farms and a minimal level of consumer goods and services, but cash was definitely scarce.
My dad told me that sometimes, when his father would get off work, the whole family would go out on the roads around cotton fields and pick up scraps left after the harvest. That couldn’t have yielded more than a few pennies. My mom’s father was more fortunate. He was a skilled boiler plumber and highly in demand as steam was a key power source. He had money and bought some apartments. Mom said he would go to collect over-due rents and end up buying the tenants groceries.
Here is what I know. A profitable livestock operation won’t be profitable very long paying $2500 for tillable dirt. I have a few close acquaintances on both sides of this very bottleneck. The owner is convinced his dirt is worth a kings ransom(for sale since 2004) while leasing it to farmers to cover the property taxes. The taxes are $6/acre/year. Lopsided like a sinking ship right there.
I know which end I’d be on in this arrangement.
My mom told me once, that people could work, they could sell food or make things. But in her words, ‘nobody had any money ?
My mother told me the same thing Ben….She was probably 9-10 years old when the depression hit so the hard times lasted well into her teens…
My folks grew up in the thirties, north of Waco on cotton farms. They’d pick cotton after school. My dad’s dad was a farmer but bootlegged on the side. Sold to the sheriff among others before he died at 47.
It is fascinating to hear those stories and how they made due with what little they had. If one has to live through a depression, a small farm is not the worst place to be.
Whatever the case, you do not want to have any debt at all during a depression or deflationary spiral. Debt is what caused the depression and made it far more severe.
Debt is also what fuels the Fed’s “hair-of-the-dog” hangover cure for the 2008 financial crisis.
I wonder how that is going to eventually pan out?
“Except farmers aren’t borrowing and buying land to let it sit fallow. The prices have been driven by investors buying and hoping for appreciation. For years.”
This is what happens when the big money controls government and corners the commodities and real estate markets.
Or, this is what happens when big money has so much money that they have to put it somewhere. It’s like they ran out of assets to buy and so have to buy land robbing land from farmers who actually want to use the land to farm.
And these farmers aren’t the ones getting the subisides.
My mom told me once, that people could work, they could sell food or make things. But in her words, ‘nobody had any money.’
This came from the book “The Worst Hard Times”. A local schoolteacher in the Dust Bowl worked for over a year in the local public school, for no pay, simply to keep the system going. Fortunately she had some support from other family members. Don’t recall if she was married.
“It’s like they ran out of assets to buy and so have to buy land robbing land from farmers who actually want to use the land to farm.”
And now theyre stuck with it with no way out.
“Or, this is what happens when big money has so much money that they have to put it somewhere.”
Same thing.
It’s ironic. We all have stories of the Great Depression. Mine is Santa Fe Trail small farming town central Kansas. No harvest for three years. Grampa in-law made it through working as an auto mechanic. Grandma in-law went to work at the bank and later became its president. She did financial counseling, for free. It was basically get out of debt and stay out of debt.
The irony is how few of us received this as our family motto in subsequent generations.
This is the main flaw of capitalism. It’s all about the money, an abstract number, and has nothing to do with what people want or need.
Works great up to a point, but we passed that point 30 years ago.
I agree and when that bubble burst , it took until today for those land prices to regain their value.
Actually land conservation easements can be a way to preserve farmland.
….. and not a buyer in sight at that grossly inflated price.
Brilliant.
“After the housing bubble burst, institutional investors, seeking a safer place for their money, started buying up farmland in the Midwest, effectively transforming farmland into a new ‘asset class’ seen as a reliable hedge against inflation. These investors typically lease the land back to farmers or hire farmland management companies to work the land via contract. In 2012, Brian Briggeman, a Kansas State University economist, estimated that a quarter of all American farmland purchases were made by investors, not operators.”
Can you see where the Greenspan Doctrine has led? Land is an asset which is subject to ‘wealth effects,’ not ‘inflation’; hence there is no problem of inflation if farmers can’t sell the food they grow on the land for a high enough price to cover land purchase costs.
I also have to wonder how much of our farmland is in the hands of foreign owners. Does it seem prudential to entrust ownership of the soil which supports our Nation’s breadbasket in the hands of foreigners? (I’m hoping, but doubting, that there is a law against this contingency…)
You mean you don’t want to find out that China owns thousands of acres of Midwest farmland which they are producing and exporting pork and beef from?
That would be quite disturbing, albeit unsurprising.
The upside is that if a large enough share of U.S. farmland is foreign owned, then FedGov, Inc could pop the farmland bubble with no homeland political backlash to worry about.
fannie mae and yahoo have an ad saying buy now? no risk for fme (government) ,but yahoo could be going Brain Wms w this ad
Brain Wms is the worst possible condition.
English, please.
http://www.gereports.com/post/91250246340/lettuce-see-the-future-japanese-farmer-builds
Humans have spent the last 10,000 years mastering agriculture. But a freak summer storm or bad drought can still mar many a well-planted harvest. Not anymore, says Japanese plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura, who has moved industrial-scale farming under the roof.
Working in Miyagi Prefecture in eastern Japan, which was badly hit by powerful earthquake and tsunamis in 2011, Shimamura turned a former Sony Corporation semiconductor factory into the world’s largest indoor farm illuminated by LEDs. The special LED fixtures were developed by GE and emit light at wavelengths optimal for plant growth.
Cute. Block out the sun and then use an expensive lighting system, in a country that has to import all its energy. Another distortion of cheap credit.
wow, Zillow has mineapolis off 2
5 next year
I’ve seen few negative predictions from them
Any bets on when an actual housing correction will occur? I’m just not seeing it, which is surprising and disappointing… I feel like I’ll never be able to afford anything in my price range, particularly where I live (Denver, front range area). Housing prices are absolutely nuts here, and rents are even worse! A 2100 SF house down the street here in North Denver has a rent sign up, for $2200/month! How do people afford this?
Just looked at the flyer again, it’s a freaking duplex!
A 2100 SF house down the street here in North Denver has a rent sign up, for $2200/month! How do people afford this?
By doubling up? Or maybe by moving to Aurora or Longmont?
Sit tight and enjoy. Major price declines just showing up in and around Denver.
Denver, CO Sale Prices Plummet 15% YoY; Plunge 16% MoM As Oil Bust Crushes Housing
http://www.zillow.com/denver-co-80220/home-values/
It doesn’t matter what people can afford, it’s what the infestor NEEDS. I smell a future foreclosure.
“A 2100 SF house down the street here in North Denver has a rent sign up, for $2200/month! How do people afford this?”
My sister rents a 70’s 2bd, 1ba apartment a couple of blocks north of Stanford University for $2800/month, IIRC.
“After the housing bubble burst, institutional investors, seeking a safer place for their money, started buying up farmland in the Midwest, effectively transforming farmland into a new ‘asset class’ seen as a reliable hedge against inflation. These investors typically lease the land back to farmers or hire farmland management companies to work the land via contract. In 2012, Brian Briggeman, a Kansas State University economist, estimated that a quarter of all American farmland purchases were made by investors, not operators.”
Is this level of institutional investment in farmland normal? Or is it historically high, as in housing?
Colorado Renter,
That would be an affordable SFH rent here in the SF bay area. This is why so many kids are still living at home. You would think the prices would not be maintained for much longer.
With the way CA housing market is falling apart, expect to see that price and lower very soon.
I am watching but all I see is dwindling inventory. When an over-priced ugly house comes on the market I think to myself “surely no one will buy that one.”
With 4.4 million excess empty houses in CA, I don’t think you have to worry about “dwindling inventory”.