SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
affordable housing
2024 Was a Great Year for the Super Rich, But What About the Rest of Us?
Of the world’s 15 largest personal fortunes, 14 currently belong to Americans. All these 14 will be stepping into 2025 with at least $100 billion in personal assets.
Dec 16, 2024
The good times—for America’s super wealthy—are now rolling way past good. Our richest have in 2024 enjoyed their best year ever. No other nation’s deepest pockets have watched their fortunes grow as large or as fast.
Elon Musk, of course, perfectly embodies this unprecedented surge in the personal wealth of America’s wealthiest. Musk has entered 2024’s last two weeks with a net worth spilling past $450 billion, nearly half a trillion dollars. Over the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index neatly notes, Musk’s wealth has doubled.
But Musk’s good fortune hardly rates as unique. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is sitting on a quarter-trillion personal fortune, and the Facebook-driven net worth of Mark Zuckerburg has jumped comfortably over $200 billion as well.
In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a Guardian analysis points out, the super rich of Silicon Valley alone spent almost $400 million to elect their favored candidate.
Of the world’s 15 largest personal fortunes, 14 currently belong to Americans. All these 14 will be stepping into 2025 with at least $100 billion in personal assets.
Amid the ranks of America’s up-and-coming ultra-rich, in other words, $100-billion fortunes have suddenly become eminently imaginable. For the rest of us, a personal fortune of a mere single billion remains utterly unimaginable. An American with a job annually paying $75,000 would have to labor over 13,000 years to amass enough pay stubs to equal that singular billion.
This past September, analysts at the London-based Informa research group predicted that Elon Musk, based on his then-current wealth trajectory, would hit trillionaire status sometime in 2027. Three other Americans, the researchers added, would likely join the trillion-dollar club before 2030. All these numbers, with this fall’s personal fortune figures now almost all in, appear to make for a severe underestimate.
Numbers, of course, can only paint part of America’s top-heavy picture. Where the riches of our richest end up going tells an even more disturbing story.
In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a Guardian analysis points out, the super rich of Silicon Valley alone spent almost $400 million to elect their favored candidate. Some $243 million of that total came from Elon Musk’s effort to elect Donald Trump. That huge outlay—the largest personal investment ever in a single American political campaign—amounted to a pinprick on Musk’s overall fortune.
Back in the old days—before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s Uniteddecision in 2010—America’s wealthiest faced restrictions on how much money they could invest in electing their political pals to office. Today those rich can essentially spend whatever they want on political campaigns.
Or on anything else. Take housing, for instance. In the first half of this year, elevated mortgage rates had U.S. home sales overall down 12.9%. But the luxury housing market has remained notably robust. Luxury sales rose 5.2% during this year’s first half—even in the face of a 14.2% rise in typical luxury home prices.
Elon Musk, not surprisingly, is leading the luxury way. Mansion Global is reporting that Musk may soon be buying a $100-million condo in Florida’s West Palm Beach, a little home away from home right across the bridge from Donald Trump’s spread at Mar-a-Lago. A Musk acquisition at that level would more than double the $42.6-million existing purchase-price record for a West Palm condo.
Plenty of ultra-high-net-worth individuals have of late been rushing into Donald Trump’s Greater Miami environs, and this rush has created at least one major problem these rich never envisioned: Teachers in the local elite private schools that cater to their kids can’t find affordable places to live in America’s new “Wall Street South.”
Local housing prices overall have jumped about 75% over the last five years, Bloombergnotes, “bid up by thousands of affluent families moving south with jobs at firms like billionaire financier Ken Griffin’s Citadel.” Miami now ranks as America’s least affordable metro area for housing.
At Ransom Everglades, a private secondary school that charges over $50,000 a year for tuition, wealthy parents think they’ve come up with a teacher housing solution. They’ve created a $30-million endowment that will offer each of the school’s 132 teachers a housing stipend worth at least $11,000 a year.
Public school teachers in Florida, meanwhile, are facing their own tough times. Only one other state in the nation pays teachers in public school less than Florida. The main reason? The state has no income tax and depends overwhelmingly instead on sales taxes and excise tax levies on motor fuel, alcohol, and tobacco. This rich-people-friendly approach to financing public services has Florida’s working families paying in taxes over triple, as a share of their income, what the state’s richest 1% pay.
Is Florida going to define America’s future? Could be—if Donald Trump gets his way. He’s filling his new administration, Politiconotes, “with people who learned how to throw elbows in Florida first.”
Those elbows, once in Washington, most certainly won’t be hitting too many rich people’s chins.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Seniors Like Me Need a Strong Safety Net; We Must Protect It From Trump’s GOP
The federal budget cuts the incoming Republican majority in Congress has put forward would slash healthcare, food, and housing by trillions over the next 10 years, resulting in at least a 50% reduction in these services.
Dec 14, 2024
I worked hard my whole career and retired feeling secure. Then I lost every last dime in a scam. I was left with $1,300 a month in Social Security benefits to live on in an area where monthly expenses run about $3,700.
I’m a smart woman, but scams against older Americans are increasing in number and sophistication. Whether through scams, strained savings, or costs of living going up, half of older Americans—that’s 27 million households—can’t afford their basic needs.
And suddenly I became one of them. The experience has taught me a lot about the value of a strong social safety net—and why we’ll need to protect it from the coming administration.
We have the tax dollars—the question is whether we have the political will to invest in seniors, workers, and families, or only for tax cuts for the very rich.
I was ashamed and frightened after what happened, but I scraped myself up off the floor and tried to make the best of it.
I’d worked with aging people earlier in my career, so I was familiar with at least some of the groups who could help. I reached out to a local nonprofit and they came through with flying colors, connecting me to life-saving federal assistance programs.
I was assigned a caseworker, who guided me through applying for public programs like the Medical Savings Plan (MSP), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), subsidized housing, Medicare Part D, and Medicaid.
It’s hard to describe my relief at getting this help.
Before receiving the MSP, I’d been paying for medications and health insurance—which cost about $200—out of my monthly Social Security check. With MSP, that cost is covered. I also found an apartment I liked through subsidized housing, and I have more money for groceries through SNAP. Now it’s easier to afford other necessities, like hearing-aid batteries and my asthma inhaler.
But I’m worried about the incoming administration’s plans to cut programs like these, which have helped me so much. They’re proposing slashing funding and imposing overly burdensome work and reporting requirements. Studies show that requirements like these can cause millions of otherwise eligible people to lose critical assistance.
President-elect Donald Trump has also indicated that he favors increased privatization of Medicare, which would result in higher costs and less care. And his tax promises are projected to move up the insolvency date of Social Security.
All told, the federal budget cuts the incoming Republican majority in Congress has put forward would slash healthcare, food, and housing by trillions over the next 10 years, resulting in at least a 50% reduction in these services. And they plan to divert those investments in us into more tax cuts for the nation’s very wealthiest.
I want lawmakers of each party to know how important these social investments are for seniors and families. Older Americans—who’ve worked hard all our lives—shouldn’t be pushed out onto the streets, forced to go without sufficient food or healthcare due to unfortunate circumstances.
We have the tax dollars—the question is whether we have the political will to invest in seniors, workers, and families, or only for tax cuts for the very rich. If we do the latter, that’s the real scam.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Congress Must Repeal Its Cap on Public Housing Now
The Faircloth Amendment and the consistent underfunding of public housing has caused the number of public housing units to decline 40% from 1.4 million in 1994 to 835,000 in 2022 while the need has steadily increased.
Dec 13, 2024
Randall Irvin has been waiting for public housing in Chicago for six years, and his situation is not that unusual. For example, there are over 100,000 families on San Antonio’s waitlist for public housing. In Chicago, there were more than 200,000 families on the waitlist in 2023. Public housing waiting lists are extremely long because there is an inadequate supply—and a 1998 amendment to federal housing law is a significant barrier to building new housing.
Table 1 lists the average number of months households waited before they were able to receive public housing in selected metropolitan areas according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It ranges from a low of 11 months in San Antonio to a high of 84 months (seven years) in Miami. These numbers hide the wide range of variation around the average. In the city of Chicago, families can wait for as few as six months or as long as 25 years depending on the specifics of their situation and their family size. Households that are still waiting for housing or that never receive housing are not included in the calculation of the averages, so these average wait times do not fully capture the difficulty of obtaining public housing.
The families remaining on public housing waitlists for housing for years are in desperate situations. They are people who are homeless, who are living in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and who are struggling to afford their housing. In Washington, D.C., Rosalynn Talley, who waited 14 years for public housing, described her overcrowded housing situation as being “smashed up like sardines.” Her neighborhood was also unsafe, and there was mold in the house.
Congress is to blame for the low supply of public housing. In 1998, Congress passed the Faircloth Amendment which put a cap on the number of public housing units. The cap and the consistent underfunding of public housing has caused the number of public housing units to decline 40% from 1.4 million in 1994 to 835,000 in 2022 while the need for affordable housing has steadily increased.
Public housing is one of the most affordable forms of housing, but affordable housing policy has shifted to relying on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). LIHTC goes to private developers and investors and creates “affordable” housing that is often more expensive to renters than public housing. The Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that “LIHTC [housing] does not necessarily protect a renter from [housing] cost burdens.” While the Faircloth Amendment has been a benefit to the for-profit real estate industry, it has hurt low-income renters.
Thankfully, there are some in Congress working to undo this bad law. The Homes Act, introduced by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), if passed, would repeal the Faircloth Amendment and provide the funding needed to address the maintenance and repair backlog in public housing. Currently, the bill has 40 supporters in the House of Representatives and two supporters in the Senate. Repealing the Faircloth Amendment would open another channel to address the affordable housing crisis.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular