Major homelessness crisis on the West Coast

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the only way to make rents go down is via legal rent controls. goodwill is insufficient to overcome basic greed. if some megabucks person were to magically buy homes for all working class comers, i'm of the mind that instead of drastically lowering their rents in response, most landlords/property consortiums would just hire a hitman.

Only because of where you live & it's desirability, population, and increasing income levels.

I read an article a couple months ago about landlords in New Zealand in some city that peaked in it's crazy home valuations and then started declining and all of the sudden landlords are literally PAYING tenants to move in & offering their places for rent at $50-100 BELOW the actual cost of mortgage payments & strata fees etc because all of the sudden what WAS a hot real estate marked is starting to decline.

Rents will go down ANYWHERE that there's a real estate bubble that burst. It's happened many times in the history of home ownership around the world. Hell, it happened in the USA all over the place after the big 2008 meltdown. Think about other cities that have had their One Industry dry up. Detroit? I'm sure houses used to be a lot more expensive there than they are now. Resource towns like small mining communities.. if the prices of their minerals drop and the mine shuts down, or it shuts down after they mine it all out over decades, all of the sudden the homes that were once worth $100k there are on the market for $10k or whatever because no one wants to live there as there's no longer any incomes to be made to support those housing prices.

Sure, rents in NYC may not ever come down, but rents in ANY area that experiences any sort of downturn whether a real estate bubble bursting or local incomes disappearing, WILL go down.

DH and I came very close to losing our house in 2010 after a small business we owned a third of (and worked for) went under. We were able to hold it together long enough to do a HAMP refinance that artificially deflated our payment. Now all we have to do is sell it and retire before the refinance balloon hits...but I know we were very fortunate in the way it played out. Housing costs in the area (and I'm in unincorporated Pierce County) are hideous.

^^^there's always mason.

Belfair's a pretty little town. Something by Cady Lake, maybe.

it's at a good midway point between Bremerton and Olympia.