It's real when you own property.

I mean if you're wealthy enough you can just make money on interest and dividends. You can get a 5% interest rate on $2m right now and that's insured, no real risk. That's like 75k/yr without doing any work.

But that's probably not what most people mean when they say passive income. And basic income for the wealthy is kind of backwards.

It's real in the same sense that income from illegal activities is real. You have to report it to the IRS and it requires harming others in order to acquire.

Yeah screw those people being able to be happy and move to an area that doesn't bend them over almost definitely worse than you. What assholes! They should have to stay in the downtown centers and pay $15 million to live in an old phone booth with a sink.

This has the same energy of people being pissed off with student loan forgiveness or something. "If I had to deal with it, so should you! I can't be happy so you can't either blah blah"

I don't think WFH is completely to blame for that. A significant contributor to the explosion in housing prices was historically low mortgage rates (<2%) as part of the covid era stimulus plans. This triggered a wave of home buying, which in turn led to a lot of panic from people that were afraid they would be priced out of the market and fueled further home buying.

😮‍💨 I understand too well. "Average" single family homes in my area were like $400,000, now it's $820,000. Rents for single bedroom apartments went from about $800-900 month to $1,600+ per month. I live in a town of about 65,000 in the Rockies, middle of nowhere, like minimum 5 hour drive to a city with more than a million people, yet somehow, people are still flocking here from all across the country.