The real estate industry is an umbrella industry of things that goes with people moving. When people buy houses a lot of hands get into that pie. But you have to keep people moving to generate that pie. They’re not making money off of that, yearly taxes and utility fees. You still have land rent in some areas of Baltimore. [The author’s ground rent was $60 annual, on a 48,000 house.]

They don’t’ want people dying and leaving their house to their kids. They want to keep people buying.

-Closing costs

-Moving fees and truck rentals

-Permit fees

-Regulatory fees

-Realtor’s fees

-Sales tax

-Interest on the bank loan—refinancing that thing!

I’m sure there is a lot of fees that I am not privy to, every piece of paper you sign at closing represents a fee. There is no benefit to the real estate industry for somebody retiring and paying their house off. The banks don’t want a house paid off, They want that interest. If they could get away with it they would do multi-generational mortgages. In a perfect world for them, everybody would be moving and uprooting their family constantly.

People like to blame it on the Dindus moving in. But they can’t move in unless a white person moves or dies. And even after that, after the old person dies, their kids have to be willing to sell the house to someone who is willing to rent it out to a pack of hoodrats who will destroy it. When you look at how these neighborhoods went down and are going down, There are a lot of decisions made based on cowardice and greed, a lot of blame to go around, before the first hoodrat ever sets foot on that block. Sure, the bankers and politicians and construction people and lawyers, they want to keep the money moving and make life a game of musical chairs. But what makes it possible is that kids don’t value what their parents worked for, what they built, what they saved for them. They’d rather cash in.

I’ve seen it too much in the construction business—with people looking at a house as an asset rather than a home so much so that it has often been the basis of my livelihood.