Name: Why It's Harder Than Ever to Buy a House
Uploaded: 2023-09-28T14:00:20.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why It's Harder Than Ever to Buy a House' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why It's Harder Than Ever to Buy a House' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-28. Transcript available.

When we were trying these cases, we were trying one after the other.
So I ended up spending like the better part of a year in San Francisco.
And every morning when I was in San Francisco, before court,
I would go down to the court, to the gym in Union Square.
Union Square is the center of San Francisco, and it's the center of commerce.
It has all the big, you know, American, iconic American stores like Macy's and
Bloomingdale's.
And Nordstrom and Gap and Old Navy and Levi.
And then it has all the foreign stores like Prada and De La Valle and Gucci and
Hermes.
Yeah, Ferragamo and Burberry and all of those.
So it's like Fifth Avenue.
It's the Fifth Avenue.
And people come from Asia all over to do their shopping there.
So, you know, I went back three weeks ago, and it was astonishing.
Those houses or those stores are all boarded up.
Every one of them is closed.
Wow.
And they're closed because all of the homeless on the street,
the chaos that's going on in the street in San Francisco makes people feel
unsafe.
Here's what, you know, my son actually, because I had a lot of assumptions
about why people are homeless.
And it's, you know, there's 525,000 homeless people in this country.
But 50% of the unsheltered homeless are in California.
But California only has 12% of the population, but it has 50% of the unsheltered
homeless.
And unsheltered homeless means homeless that don't have a place to sleep at
night?
Yeah.
It's people who are, you know, on the sidewalks.
Like freelance, yeah.
Right.
Or they're in shelter, you know, they're...
Yeah.
Like free range.
Yeah.
So, here's my assumptions.
That homelessness is linked to drug addiction.
It's linked to mental illness.
It's linked to, you know, poverty.
And that people are in...
One of the reasons there's so many homeless in California is that everybody
knows that San Francisco
has this very generous kind of giving attitude towards social services.
And so, if you're homeless anywhere else in the country, you, you know, you'd
like to move with good weather.
Yeah.
You know, you don't want to be in New York sleeping on a grate in the middle of
winter when it's snowing.
Get on a greyhound and come out to San Francisco and, you know, and celebrate.
Yeah.
And I also had heard this, which turns out not to be true, that in some cities
like Dallas or Nashville, if you are homeless, that they, instead of putting
you in jail, they give you a bus ticket to San Francisco.
Oh, wow.
So, I don't know if it's true or not, but anyway, so my son turned me on to
this writer called my son, Connor, who you know, Matthew Desmond.
And Matthew Desmond has written these books on homelessness, and he's done
these studies on homelessness.
And they, in San Francisco, they actually went around and interviewed thousands
and thousands of homeless people.
And what they found is that the people who are homeless in San Francisco are
from San Francisco, and they're from California.
And they weren't, they didn't come from somewhere else.
So, it's not a lot of people yet bust in or transplants or whatever.
Right.
He also says this, that it has very little to do with drug addiction.
You know, the states like West Virginia has much more drug addiction than San
Francisco, and yet it doesn't have a homeless problem.
So, West Virginia has much worse poverty problem than San Francisco.
San Francisco, actually, I think it's the richest city in the country.
I may be wrong, but I think it's the richest.
And, and it doesn't, so, and in terms of mental illness, you have to assume
they're the same.
Yeah.
You know, there's no reason.
But, but also Detroit.
Detroit has much higher drug addiction, much higher poverty, and it doesn't
have a homeless problem.
And what Matthew Desmond says is the reason for homeless, one reason, one
reason is housing prices.
It all has to do with, with housing prices.
And in California, you know, we have the highest housing prices in the country.
Um, here in LA, where we are, the average home costs $815,000, which means you
have to earn $250,000 to be able to pay, to be able to pay for that.
And why do they get so high?
Like, is it demand that makes them so high?
I'm going to tell you this, the average home in our country two years ago was $215,000.
The today's $400,000 and the interest rates have gone from three to 7%.
So kids today, like your kids and my kids are never going to buy a home.
You know, it used to be, but if, so if they're not going to buy a home yet, and
the median price of homes sold by realtors has risen sharply since the
beginning of the pandemic.
Yeah.
And here's why this is happening.
If there's three big companies, uh, Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, these
are the biggest companies, you know, and they have a monopoly on a lot of the
housing market.
Right.
Well, what they do, they, they own everything, including they own each other.
So it's really just one big company and, and Blackrock that it has $10 trillion
under management.
The GDP of California is three or 10 trillion.
The GDP of California is $3 trillion.
And so there are three times the size of California.
California economy is the fifth largest in the world of all nations.
So when you have that much control, can't you just make your own universe?
They can't.
Yeah.
Well, so they own those three companies own 88% of the S and P 500.
So they basically just own everything.
And now that what they've decided is they want to own every single family home
in our country.
So they're that, and, and they're now on track.
There's now on trajectory.
If we continue it on this trajectory, they will own the corporations.
We'll own 60% of the single family homes in our country.
And they're, you know, they, they pay nothing for money.
So they're like, if you're the richest person in the country, their Blackrock's
cost of money is 30% lower than you.
So you, you know, when, so they're competing against our kids and your kids.
Why is it so different?
They want it now.
They want to own everything.
So why is the percentage of the cost of the value of, of borrowing?
Oh, because they, their credit is so impeccable.
Oh, I see.
They have like a 900.
Yeah.
So they, they got the better than the best credit rating.
I think I got 670 or something.
I don't know.
What's okay.
I don't know.
Yeah.
But isn't that like privatized communism or something?
That's what it feels like.
Well, yeah.
It's like socialism for the rich.
And you know, this, this barbaric, merciless, ruthless, savage capitalism for
the poor.
Yeah.
Do you think there's some trickle down effect to that?
That makes people feel like, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I was talking, we had this guy, John Vervecki on, and he talks a lot
about meaning
and stuff like that, you know?
And he said that people feeling like they're part of a country or they're, they
have like
a part of a home, you know, part of a group.
It, it, it creates a lot of meaning for them, you know, just in their life.
Yeah.
And I think I noticed even with my own, like, probably like our parents and
stuff, I think
a lot of them were very like pro America and like, you know, they had family
members that
died for our country and they, you know, it meant something to them to be part
of America.
And then now I think a lot of them see this kind of unfolding or like kind of
the flag
kind of like fraying at the stitching, you know?
And I think it's very scary because if you don't, if you start to feel like you
don't
have your country, then I think, then you start to feel like, okay, it's every
man for himself
in a way.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah.
And, you know, and you're absolutely right.
There's a poll that came out three weeks ago that showed that in 2013, kids
between 18
and 35 years old, that 85% of young Americans said they were proud of the
United States.
And then another poll, the same poll came out three weeks ago that showed that
only 17% of
kids say that they're proud of it to be, you know, I said it was really, you
know, devastating.
But one of the things that you are saying, I think is true that if you own a
home, you care
more about your community, you care about the schools, you know, you care about
the police,
you care about the hospitals, you take care of your garden.
You know, you make it look nice.
Yeah.
You might be more likely to help your neighbor.
Exactly.
Cause you're there, you're part of the community and turning us all into, you
know, and you, you
also are, are a participant in the capitalist system because if you own a home,
you have
equity, which means like, let's say you want to start a business, even like a
tiny business,
like buying, you know, buying a sewing machine.
Yeah.
Doing sewing.
What else can we do?
You can do, or, you know, if you want to start a restaurant, some corn, like a
caramel
corn, exactly.
Something like that.
That's a great idea.
Yeah.
Thanks.
And, um, but you can get a loan on your house.
You can get a loan on your house.
And so you, you have an entree into the capitalist system.
Yeah.
And you make you, cause then you're always pop, everything's possible.
You could sit down with your family at night and be like, Hey, mom and dad are
thinking
about doing this business.
What do you guys think?
And maybe your son's proud of you and it creates excitement in your house, you
know?
And even if like, I remember my mom went to law school and she couldn't do it
because
she had too many kids and it was too much work, but I was still always proud of
her that she tried to do it.
You know, like I think, yeah, having the, the financial ability to do stuff
like that
is just so important, man.
And then otherwise you feel, yeah, if you're just a renter, if everybody's a
renter, you
don't care, nobody, you just feel like you're like a renter by force.
Like you don't even have a choice to be a renter, you know?
Um, yeah, that's kind of scary.
How do we battle against that?
And is it something that a president can do or a political official can do, or
it's
something that, how do you, how do we turn reverse that?
Um, well, I dunno, I mean, there's, there's parts of their, um, of, of what
they're doing
that, yeah, a president can deal with it.
For example, they own all the packing companies.
So there's only four meat backing companies and, and those companies have a stranglehold
on
farmers and consumers and they should have been prosecuted a long time ago for
antitrust.
But because BlackRock is so powerful, nobody will touch them.
Wow.
And so it's a dark arts, huh?
Yeah.
I mean, they're just, you know, what they're doing is they're just, they're
just strip mining
the wealth and equity from the American middle class.
Yeah.
And you see that, you know, yeah, it's sad.
And how do we, how do you, who is it?
Who is BlackRock?
The head of it is, uh, is the CEO is a guy called Larry Fink.
He's also on the board of directors of the world economic forum.
So the, in the world economic forum, you know, is meets in Davos, it's a
billionaires, boys
club.
They meet in Davos every year and they try to figure out what, um, their plans
are for
the rest of humanity.
Are they greedy?
I would say they're, they, they have a bad reputation for very self-serving
policies.
Their big policy is called the great reset.
And what here's Klaus Schwab says, famously, he says, under the great reset,
you will have
not, you will own nothing, but you will be happy.
So that's what they're doing.
That's what they believe.
Yeah.
So they do have a belief.
Their belief is that you will own nothing, but you'll be happy.
All of us will own nothing, but they will, because they will own everything and
they may
be a little happier.
Who knows?
Wow.
Thank you.