Obviously this is for both, men and women, you know, the song “if I was a rich man” and i saw the meme with…
sigh just answer the question
I’d donate to cancer research. You never know when it’s gonna hit you and I’d rather die knowing I did something to help cure it.
Hunt other rich men for sport, and have my very expensive team of lawyers keep me out of prison.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star, daydream
Think I’d buy me a football team
To me “rich” means someone whose passive income exceeds their spending.
So if I was rich I’d stop working and instead pursue my personal interests. Ideally I’d buy a property somewhere remote and close to water with a lot of land and start building a homestead of some sort.
disappear from radar
do random acts of charity
buy senators and media to support climate change and education
make a competing big cheapo pharma
redirect fame/blame to paid actors
Honestly I would only want two things, to not have to worry about money and to live where I want. So much stress and thinking goes into money that I think I would be quite relaxed if I didn’t have to think about it except for investments. I also wouldn’t have to worry about home security or how my pets are taken care of. For living where I want, my job and family takes me around the a world. I wish I had a small place in each location :)
Build a sweet ass house with a wizard’s tower.
YES! And then we ponder!
I would buy up as many apartments as possible and lower the rent below market value, this driving other landlords to compete. Since they could not maintain a “sustainable” business model with their profit driven mindset, they would sell and I would buy. I would still seek a modest profit, which would be rolled into further acquisitions to further infect the market with sanity. It would be a McDonald’s or Walmart approach to housing, positive effect by volume and low margins, but actually provide an undeniably good product.
I would also work with local businesses to offer discounts to residents of the apartments and employees of other businesses that also wish to partner, with the end goal of creating incentive to shop local and increase foot traffic, and therefore profits for those small businesses.
I would find residents who would be interested in starting a business, startup costs covered by my organization, and outcompetes with businesses who do not wish to be our partner. I would endeavor to provide free childcare and animal daycare/boarding. Ideally a pseudo private and free school system could be established to further promote the ideals of the community. Ideally provide free therapy. Ideally offer scholarships to traditional higher education or trade schools. Ideally create a system to help homeless people get back on their feet.
Overall the end goal would be to keep as much money within the local economy and maintain businesses that embody the values which create a healthy local economy, lower the costs of living, and restore the community to a healthy social state.
Or maybe I’ll just start a sex cult in the woods.
I think the housing market plan doesn’t seem likely to work. The real issue is not that current landlords are exceptionally greedy (the rules of capitalism assume and encourage everyone to be as greedy as possible), it’s that there isn’t enough housing stock to give everyone who wants one a unit. In economics, housing is more or less a commodity like everything else and thus follows the usual rule of supply and demand, i.e. insufficient supply drives up price until demand tapers down to meet it. If you buy up the city’s housing supply and then price them below the equilibrium price, the result will just be that far more people want a place than you will ever have supply for, since you are not actually creating any new housing supply, just buying existing supply from other people.
I would think you’d have more success getting into the property development and construction business, buying up vacant or derelict lots in the city, building them into blocks of flats, and then letting them out on the cheap. You’d also have to hire lobbyists to prod the council to change zoning laws to allow for this development and obtain planning permission. It takes a lot of political maneuvering to make a housing project successful, not only because of legal restrictions, but also because you’ll need amenities for your new development. Parking is a big one in the US unless you build a dense mixed-use development which is bureaucratically difficult to get planning permission for, but there’s also considerations like whether the nearby bus line can handle the influx of passengers, whether the neighbourhood school can handle a hundred more pupils, whether there’s a grocery store nearby, whether the area “feels safe”, and so on.
Kind of the reason why State-run public housing schemes are so successful is because they are a government agency that has the power to brute-force the solutions to these problems. Zoning codes? Overruled. Public transit? Ordered. Schools? Built. Private developers don’t have the power to do these things and have to beg the council for them instead.
it’s that there isn’t enough housing stock to give everyone who wants one a unit
There are >27 empty homes in the US for every homeless person.
It’s not just the homeless in need of homes. You also have the ⅓ of people aged 18 to 34 still living with their parents, and the people who have to crowd into a 4-bedroom flat with five other people. Granted, this also includes people in school or those who just like living with their parents despite being able to afford their own place, but it still represents tens of millions of Americans.
Trust me, almost nobody purposefully keeps a house empty that they’d be able to let out. If a house is vacant, it’s probably because it’s subject to a legal dispute, derelict and uninhabitable, slated for demolition, for sale, or being used for short-term rentals (which should also be banned but that’s only tangentially related).
but it still represents tens of millions of Americans.
From the linked article:
According to the U.S. Census, there are approximately 17 million vacant houses across the nation.
If a house is vacant, it’s probably because it’s subject to a legal dispute, derelict and uninhabitable, slated for demolition, for sale, or being used for short-term rentals (which should also be banned but that’s only tangentially related).
What’re you basing that on? Because the US census bureau disagrees:
But the largest category of vacant housing in the United States is classified as “seasonal, recreational or occasional use,” commonly referred to as seasonal units. These vacant structures cover a wide range of housing units, from part-time residences and hunting cabins to beach houses and timeshares.
Point is, there’s plenty of housing, but greed - either people who own multiple houses and do not rent them out, or people who have them up for rent or sale but have priced out a large part of the nation, is creating an artificial scarcity.
I’m talking about vacant homes in the city. Where the housing supply is most desperately needed. There are no such things as habitable off-market ready-to-move-in vacant homes in the city.
Holiday homes at the beach or hunting cabins in the woods aren’t useful to consider and the way your article presents it as a solution to homelessness is irresponsible clickbait. All of the jobs and economic opportunity is in the city. A house in the forest or in a beach side community of 5,000 people does nothing to alleviate the housing crisis. You would do better requisitioning hotel rooms than trying to use these buildings for housing.
There are no such things as habitable off-market ready-to-move-in vacant homes in the city.
Just look at the link, man. Everything under ‘Seasonal’ is habitable and off-market.
Just looking at the numbers for Los Angeles, at the top of my list, shows that I’m substantially right.
16,889 units out of a total housing stock of 3,591,981 units amounts to less than half of one per cent. That’s quite literally a rounding error. That number also utterly decimated by the homeless population in Los Angeles County, which is 75,518.
So a commune?
Uber Landlord
That was worth reading to the end.
Well played friend. Well played.
Obligatory.
All day long, I’d biddy biddy bum
If I were a wealthy man
Came here to say this
You wouldn’t have to work hard. You could build a great big house with rooms by the dozen, right in the middle of the town. …if you were a wealthy man.
I’d have one long staircase just going up and one even longer going down.
And one more leading nowhere just for show.
Oh darling, if I had real money, I would use it to sow chaos and undermine the world’s financial markets.
But most of all, if I have to live in this bullsh!t cyberpunk reality, we might as well have shadowrunners/Edgerunners/mercs. So I’d recruit as many paramilitary mercenaries as I could find and set them on the task of sabotaging critical corporate infrastructure, kidnapping any oligarchs we could find vulnerabilities for, and doing brazen, overt terrorism kind of stuff.
The idea being if I can cause enough chaos perhaps the people of the world might finally have enough and force change for the ultra wealthy.
Buy a place in Montreal. Try to do random acts of kindness on randos where I can. You can’t generally change the world, but you can make personal impact.
I miss living in Montreal, great choice :)
We have this really cool cafe in my city where you can buy buttons when you eat there, like 20 bucks worth, and people who can’t afford to buy food can come take six buttons and use them to get a hot meal. I would subsidize the fuck out of it and hopefully open other locations so we could help as many as possible.
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Buy a house in a safe neighborhood for myself. Establish at least one housing complex for the homeless with medical, psychiatric, and general care staff as close as possible to said safe neighborhood. Repeat until all that is left is enough to keep said complexes staffed and operational for at least 5 years.
Keep at least $1,000,000 to invest into the stock market in various ETFs, REITs, and LEAP Option calls. All profits go back to maintaining and establishing more housing complexes for the homeless.
All my free time would be spent figuring out how to end the homelessness crisis. If ever accomplished, focus my efforts on the public education system, and praying I somehow have the willpower to avoid corruption.
It depends, how rich? Millions? Billions?
I would fix the gym/auditorium at my old high school (the drama club has to share it with all of the sports teams and PE, and all of drama’s stuff gets broken or stolen) so that drama has their own space.
