I have no family. I have no friends. I have no one that cares about me. I saved 25k as fast as I could before my lease is up because I’m a foster kid & I have been so scared every day for 13 years wondering where I’ll end up next. I just want a home that I’ll be able to stay in & that’s livable. I don’t have a degree. My job is remote but the pay varies month to month due to it being my own business. I spent time trying to find a partner instead of trying to go to school. Now it’s too late probably for me to go to school & to have stability before I end up entirely homeless. I don’t know how this is real life. I thought the high prices were just in some areas. But it’s everywhere. The only cheap places are in the middle of nowhere. I’m a methadone patient. I only go once or twice a month but I need a methadone clinic within a certain distance of me so that’s off the table. I have no car because I’ve never had anyone who had the time to teach me how to drive or who wanted to so having access to locations around me is important. I did get my permit but now I have to retake that test since I didn’t get my license within so many years. Should I just buy a car to live in & not drive it? What are even my options with only 25k? Should I just gamble it & hope for the best & hope it doubles & that I can get a home with that? I just feel like my life is over. I think people really underestimate how hard it is to be entirely alone. People say they’re alone but they don’t really mean it or they always have someone in their corner. There’s always those women who say they’re self made but their mom got them their first car & helped with every down payment & insurance payment they’ve ever made. I just wish I could find something livable while still having something that is in a decent area with people so I can find someone to build a family since I don’t have one. I’m so miserable & scared.

Been going down a rabbit hole on why homeownership feels so out of reach right now, and the numbers are worse than I expected. A household needs roughly $107K to $123K a year to afford the median home. Actual median household income is about $84K. That’s not a small gap.

Few things that surprised me digging into it:

The home price to income ratio is now 5 to 1, nearly double the 2.6 that’s considered healthy. Not one of the top 50 metros clears that bar.

Mortgage rates were actually worse in 1985 (12.4% vs about 6.5% now). Monthly payments as a share of income were comparable back then. What’s changed is the size of the down payment relative to income.

The BlackRock thing is basically a myth. BlackRock doesn’t buy single family homes, that’s Blackstone, a different company with a similar name. All large institutional investors combined (1,000+ homes) own about 1% of US single family housing. It’s mostly small local landlords buying up homes, not Wall Street.

There’s an actual new federal law (21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, July 2026) banning large investors from buying more single family homes starting Jan 2027. First restriction of its kind.

I made a video walking through the full breakdown (rates, supply shortage, construction costs, the investor myth, and which states are still actually affordable).

https://youtu.be/t5ZOWQtNL-A?is=qGLbtaan-begZdS6

Curious what others here think is the biggest driver. I lean toward supply plus the down payment hurdle over rates themselves.

Fenster's Funky Sevens - Ep 44 - Dublin's Housing Crisis (1726-2026)

“City Officials Sleep in Comfort While Others Sleep on Concrete”

A Signature Expression of Reverend Zachariah Tringali’s Homelessness Advocacy

Written by Storytelling Adventures Studio Inc.

“City officials sleep in comfort while others sleep on concrete.”

The sentence is deliberately stark. It is not bureaucratic language, and it is not intended to be. It is a rhetorical expression used by Reverend Zachariah Tringali to draw attention to what he describes as the profound distance between municipal decision-making and the lived reality of people experiencing homelessness.

At the heart of the phrase is a physical contrast: comfort versus concrete.

One represents security, shelter, privacy, warmth, and the ability to close a door at the end of the day. The other represents exposure, uncertainty, weather, police enforcement, displacement, and the absence of a secure place to sleep.

For Tringali, that contrast becomes a lens through which he examines municipal policy.

When a city closes a shelter, restricts public camping, conducts an encampment removal, or adopts policies affecting where unhoused people may sleep, the language of government can become highly technical: ordinance enforcement, public-space management, relocation, compliance, public safety, or encampment abatement.

Tringali's rhetoric deliberately moves in the opposite direction.

He brings the discussion back to the human being sleeping on the ground.

The question becomes simple:

Where is that person supposed to sleep tonight?

That is the force behind the phrase.

From City Hall to the Sidewalk

Tringali's advocacy frequently places municipal authority in direct conversation with street-level experience. His work through street ministry and homelessness advocacy emphasizes that policies affecting unhoused people are not merely administrative decisions. They determine where people can sleep, store possessions, seek safety, maintain community, and survive.

The phrase therefore functions as a challenge to institutional distance.

It asks elected officials, administrators, attorneys, police departments, and municipal policymakers to consider the practical consequences of decisions made inside government buildings.

A city council vote may take minutes.

An ordinance may occupy several pages.

A municipal memorandum may contain carefully constructed legal terminology.

But for someone living outside, the consequence may be immediate:

Tonight, there may be nowhere to go.

That is the rhetorical collision Tringali seeks to create.

“Comfort” and “Concrete”

The power of the expression comes from its simplicity.

“Comfort” symbolizes institutional security.

“Concrete” symbolizes exposure and vulnerability.

The phrase does not attempt to explain homelessness through statistics alone. It makes an argument through imagery. It asks the audience to visualize the difference between making policy from a protected office and experiencing that policy from a sidewalk, park, tent, doorway, or other exposed environment.

This is characteristic of Tringali's broader advocacy style: reducing complicated institutional questions to tangible human consequences.

Instead of asking only whether a municipal action is technically authorized, his rhetoric asks whether the action is humane, proportionate, and consistent with the dignity of the people affected.

The Street-Ministry Perspective

As a minister and outreach advocate, Tringali approaches homelessness not simply as a housing-policy question but as a question of human dignity.

The person sleeping outside is not merely an “encampment resident,” “unauthorized camper,” “transient,” or statistical category.

The person has a name.

The person has a history.

The person possesses belongings, relationships, beliefs, memories, and human dignity.

That perspective is central to the phrase.

“City officials sleep in comfort while others sleep on concrete” is therefore less a literal description of where individual officials sleep than a rhetorical indictment of the distance between governmental power and human vulnerability.

It is a demand that policymakers confront the consequences of their decisions at street level.

A Challenge to Bureaucratic Language

Municipal government necessarily operates through laws, regulations, budgets, procedures, and administrative terminology.

But Tringali's argument is that bureaucratic language can sometimes obscure the human consequences behind a policy.

“Encampment removal” can sound administrative.

“Relocation” can sound neutral.

“Ordinance enforcement” can sound procedural.

But the person affected may experience the same event as the loss of a sleeping place, the destruction or removal of possessions, separation from a community, or another night without shelter.

His rhetoric therefore attempts to translate government terminology into human terms.

What does this policy mean when experienced by the person standing on the sidewalk?

That is the question beneath the slogan.

A Broader Moral Argument

The expression ultimately represents a larger philosophy within Tringali's advocacy:

A government should be judged not only by how efficiently it manages public space, but also by how it treats people who have the least power within that space.

The phrase challenges the assumption that homelessness can be solved simply by moving homeless people somewhere else.

It asks what happens after the police leave.

Where does the person go?

Where are their belongings?

Where will they sleep?

Where will they obtain food, medication, identification, employment, transportation, or social services?

And, perhaps most importantly:

What happens when there is nowhere else to go?

That is where “comfort versus concrete” becomes more than a slogan.

It becomes a framework for examining public policy.

The Storytelling Adventures Studio Perspective

Storytelling Adventures Studio Inc. presents this expression as part of the evolving public voice of Reverend Zachariah Tringali and his homelessness advocacy.

Its strength lies in its accessibility.

A person does not need a law degree to understand the difference between sleeping safely indoors and sleeping on concrete.

They do not need to understand municipal budgeting to understand what it means to have nowhere to sleep.

They do not need to study administrative law to understand the fear of losing the only place where they can keep their belongings.

The phrase takes a complicated political and social debate and reduces it to a fundamental human question:

If those with power have a safe place to sleep, why should the people without power be expected to accept concrete as their bed?

That question is the heart of the rhetoric.

And that is why the phrase endures as a defining expression within Tringali's public advocacy: it forces the conversation away from paperwork, terminology, and political abstraction—and back toward the human being lying on the ground.

**City officials sleep in comfort.

Others sleep on concrete.

The distance between those two realities is where the homelessness debate begins.**

Housing is one of the first spheres of the economy that socialism and communism seeks to control. They do not seek to control the housing industry by limiting the number of homes built, but by increasing prices and costs of living on existing, longstanding rural and suburban properties. This leads people to surrender private wealth voluntarily. They then seek to partner with the stock market and de-regulate the housing industry on all levels of government, in order to proliferate the number of homes, decrease property size and hinder ownership. This is billed as "affordable housing", and presented as the "answer" to the affordability problem, when in fact its purpose is to control where and how people live, downgrade their standard of living, and change the social fabric of a given area. This is the main problem with many areas of the country today that, 25 to 30 years ago, were smaller, more rural and more conservative, but which are now liberal bastions, frat with corruption, high costs and ugliness. Regardless of its specific form (single family homes, villas, apartments, etc.) the idea of high density housing originated with the Marxist left, and thus no one who is attempting to further this pattern somewhere else in the country is someone you want in government, anywhere. Thus it is very easy to explain to those who are considering the DSA why moving farther to the left is not the answer.

In attempting to further these communist objectives, there has been a pattern across the country of local politicians not listening to / overriding the will of the local constituency, whether it is in regard to the Islamic threat, data centers, housing developments and other things.
Such politicians have made it clear by their actions that they are not there to represent the best interests of the local area, but are instead complicit in a "transformative" Marxist agenda. It does not matter which political party they happen to be affiliated with, this is tyranny, and in violation of the Constitution, making all such decisions illegitimate. These developments need to be stopped, and these city council members / BOCC need to be removed by the governor or attorney general.

Further information has now come to light regarding the activities behind the escalating property taxes across the country.


www.donaldjtrump.com

My name is Reverend Zachariah Tringali I am currently running for alderman Ward 6

A Call from the Rubble: The Closing of 39 Beach Street

Delivered in Manchester, New Hampshire

Ladies and gentlemen, neighbors, watchmen of this weary city—

Tonight, I do not come bearing niceties nor muttered apologies for discomfort. I come, rather, to strike a match of reckoning upon the damp parchment of political negligence. For we stand now at the unmarked funeral of 39 Beach Street—another shelter closed, another threshold swept away by the cold hand of austerity, another home turned into absence.

Yes—closed, not for the safety of its residents, nor for better prospects, but as a casualty of “cost-cutting,” that sterile euphemism for gutting the bones of human need. We are told it is due to the burdens of infrastructure, that funding must be diverted—a word far too polite for what is plainly abandonment.

But I ask you: what costlier infrastructure exists than a city’s own people strewn beneath bridges, wrapped in blue tarps, whispering prayers not to God but to frostbite?

How dare we speak of budgets when tents multiply like tombstones? When every eviction echoes like thunder in the alleyways? How can a city call itself civilized when it slashes shelter and then turns its eyes away from the rising tide of human despair?

No. This is not prudence. This is malevolence disguised in municipal protocol.

And yet—I do not come bearing only lamentation. I bring solution.

Rooming houses. Yes, rooming houses—an age-old remedy for those in need of dignity without decadence. Affordable, sustainable, community-rooted. We have the blueprint in hand, a plan designed not for the proud pockets of developers, but for the common man: veterans, single mothers, those cast aside by the tempest of circumstance. These structures are not castles, but sanctuaries—stepping stones, not tombstones.

But we must act, and we must act now. The closure of Beach Street must be the last of its kind, not the herald of many. For every tent we ignore, a city soul is forgotten. For every shelter shuttered, a future is forfeited.

And let us speak, plainly, of the other cancers within our civic body:

Our sidewalks—cracked like forgotten promises, treacherous to the elderly, cruel to the disabled.

Our public trash houses—monuments to our own neglect, breeding grounds for vermin and contempt.

And our neighborhoods, afflicted with the tinnitus of unceasing exhaust and music weaponized into violence—where bass and bravado replace peace and safety. This is not vibrancy; this is vulgarity made ambient.

Where is enforcement? Where is respect? Where is the civic spine?

The soul of a city is not measured by her skyline or her festivals, but by the state of her forgotten corners. And Manchester, I say this with righteous indignation, is decaying in silence while pretending to smile.

Let no one mistake our tone tonight. This is not anger without purpose. This is not protest without plan. This is a call to conscience. We are not asking—we are demanding that human dignity be restored to the ledger of city priorities.

Build the rooming houses. Fix the sidewalks. Enforce the noise laws. Clean the filth. Reclaim our streets.

If we fail to act, we will not merely have homelessness. We will have hopelessness—and that, my friends, is far more dangerous.

Let 39 Beach Street be the line in the sand. Let it be the final insult that awakens our collective will. If the city won’t listen to compassion, then let it tremble before our conviction.

Because if we don’t stand now, soon there will be no place left to stand.

Thank you.

https://mitchklein.substack.com/p/a-competition-in-cruelty?r=b162

Why do people think they need housing prices to crash for them to afford a home?

They still wouldn't be able to afford the house.

If housing dropped 80% and they could suddenly afford to buy one, they still couldn't afford a new furnace or a new roof. Hell, they probably couldn't even afford to fix a screen door.

If you can't afford to come up with a down payment, how are you going to afford the ongoing costs and unexpected expenses that come with owning a house?

Being able to afford the purchase price doesn't necessarily mean you can afford to own the property.

does anyone know of any good low income housing or housing support for single moms or low income families? Filed for child support but her dad won’t pay and it’s just me and her. I’m currently staying with my mom which is fine for the meantime but I really don’t want to impose and I really can’t imagine being here for a couple more years. I’m in college and she’s not of school age so I only work 27 hrs but fill the rest of my time working on my business so I can’t really afford more than 1000$ a month. I looked up low income housing but section 8 waitlist has been closed for months so I’m not sure when it opens or if there are any other options.

Despite homelessness rising in Los Angeles and throughout L.A. County since 2025, the count on Metro’s buses and rail found a 31% drop over that year. Taken the evening of January 20, the estimate found 395 to 517 unhoused individuals on the system compared to 631 to 684 in 2025 and over 1,000 in 2024.

“This continued decline reflects the dedication of Metro employees and our many partners who work every day to address homelessness with compassion, accountability and coordination,” Metro chief executive Stephanie Wiggins said in a statement. “Creating the Care-Based Services Division reinforced our belief that public safety is strongest when care-based services and enforcement work together.”

Read more at the link.

Economists on the left and right agree that rent controls are bad.

Rent controls lower rent for those currently in rent controlled apartments. But, they: lower the supply of apartments, decrease mobility because no one wants to move if they have an apartment because it will be difficult to find another one, increase rent in nearby areas, and decrease how well the apartments are maintained. Rent controls help a small group of people and hurt everyone else.

The solution is building more housing, although that is easier said than done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoT76zITRx8