this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
1489 points (98.8% liked)
Microblog Memes
7059 readers
2673 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's a house on my way to work that's vacant. I saw an ambulance there about two years ago; I'm betting that the owner died, because it's now entirely overgrown, with weeds and grass completely overtaking the yard and driveway.
How many of the 'empty houses' are places that were abandoned and are in such disrepair that they're not safe for habitation, and how many of them are places that are second houses and/or bank-owned rentals?
For reference, the house I live in right now was repo'd around 2010, and my partner and I bought it in 2018; it had been vacant for almost a decade, and required a lot of work, almost as much as it cost, to get it safe. And it still needs work; I need to shore up the floor that's sagging, and the exterior walls need to be opened up from the inside and be fully sealed b/c I can feel breezes inside when it's windy outside.
There's no reason to believe that a formerly homeless person wouldn't put in the effort on a house restoration project if given the chance to live in it permanently.
Ever renovated a house? Shit's expensive.
Depends how you do it. If you get professionals to do it, yes, it gets very expensive very quickly. I know some people that renovated their own place. Took upwards of a year on what would be a 1 month job if they had hired professionals, but it got done slowly but surely at a fraction of the cost.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here, that you really believe this. But the problem is that you're missing a huge cost: tools. If we assume that, as you say, a house is given (?) to a formerly homeless person, that person is going to need to come up with money for materials, yes, but also all of the tools. When a professional does the work, they are amortizing the cost of equipment over many, many jobs, so that the cost may be fairly negligible for any single job. When you're only doing one job, you need to include that in the final price.
I've done a number of the repairs and renovations on my home, but I've also spent likely somewhere north of $20k on tools since I moved here. Some get used quite often, like the table saw, miter saw, the Makita cordless drill set. Some are used very, very rarely, like the framing nailer (esp. since I switched to using structural screws and hangers instead of toe nailing). Some have been used for a single job, and never touched again, like the flooring nailer (I still want to tear up the shitty carpet and do hardwood flooring, but I want to use unfinished cabin grade and sand/stain/varnish myself, but my partner wants something that's about 5x the cost but faster to install).
Not only that, but if you don't already know how to do a thing, you're very likely to end up doing it wrong, e.g., putting flashing under shingles instead of on top. Until you have a degree of proficiency--and you'll need to be proficient in a lot of things--you are also more likely to have more waste, which raises costs again.
I'm currently renovating my home myself and while sure, it's less expensive than hiring professionals, it's still more than any homeless/jobless person can afford.