#headmovement!
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Yes, this is exactly right. HGTV does not sell real estate they sell Real Estate. You are very much supposed to walk away with the conviction that you too should be spending your time leveraging the idea of “home” to foment capital circulation and accumulation. As such, the show hosts must transverse a fine line - they need to exhibit talent, knowledge and expertise while making the whole process seem accessible. Viewers should walk away thinking they have learned something skillful, obscure, and profitable just by watching TV.
This carries over into the finished product as well. I made fun of the Good Bones hosts for their tacky taste, but it is to their credit that I can remember their decor at all. Inevitably the HGTV style is milquetoast, insipid, literal*, impersonal and above all, interchangeable.
(*) one of my favorite motifs from when I watched this stuff was the tendency of many hosts to place signs explaining what the room is for - “eat” “sleep” “jerk off in the shower” etc. Even better are the decorators who design an entire room around one characteristic - “Brian says he loves music so we are going to make a bedroom set entirely out of CD Jewel cases and antique saxophones. He’s going to love it!"
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To be fair, iirc most humans are over 20% plastic now anyway.
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sure, this is how it starts. happy herbivore robot harmlessly eats grass and twigs and does war, until one day a bit of blood splashes into its mouth on accident and it gets a taste for man flesh.
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The thing is, over sustained long periods of climbing real estate prices, morons that borrow a ton of money and buy house and do a terrible job of flipping them will still make money. This characteristic pops up in stock market investing all the time as well, in periods of rising stock markets imbeciles implementing all manner of objectively stupid stock picking strategies still make money. Rising markets are the fuel that stupid white people use to run their mediocrity-to-wealth machines.
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I developed a complete Bingo around House Hunters and similar shows, including but not limited to:
[x] Subway tile backsplash
[x] Clawfoot tubs
[x] Pedestal sinks
[x] OPEN CONCEPT
[x] Sneering at galley kitchens
[x] “I absolutely love this wall color.” (Me yelling IT’S JUST PAINT at the TV)
[x] Conversely: Negging some superficial aspect that would cost 0.25% of the budget to change.
[x] Agents showing properties that explicitly violate the client’s criteria
[x] SHABBY CHIC
[x] A ridiculous wall-mounted object like an antique bicycle
[x] Annoying 20s-something ordinary white couples buying lavish homes with their inheritance money
It was maybe a decade or so ago, but I remember there were episodes where you could hit all of those before the first commercial break.
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Yes but - the whole point of businesses is to accumulate capital. So, converting them to financial instruments makes sense in a way it does not for housing. The value of housing is its utility - you get to live in it! Which is pretty important imo. Also, housing is durable. Thus, you can secure funding (relatively cheaply), and still come out ahead - because houses are useful for a long time.
House flipping ideology runs contrary to that. In the HGTV formulation both the utility and durability of housing are minimized. You rarely see anyone using the house at all, and the whole conceit is that old homes are not actually valuable. They may have “good bones,” but you generate value by the application of a tile backsplash and a hideous chandelier made out of old encyclopedias. Then you get the hell out of dodge before the whole thing falls apart.
I mean, I know you guys know this, but you can’t maintain a society where housing continually appreciates. You can simulate it for a while through gentrification processes, displacement, AirBnb conversions and other spatial fixes, but eventually the shit will hit the fan.
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This strategy works well in business generally.
there’s been a very sad trend in very upscale but old neighborhoods where the land is so valuable that typically when the owners buy they’ll tear down a 75 year old home to make the house of their dreams. when the lot is $7 million alone it’s no big deal to spend $1 mill on a rebuild.
Star Trek got there first again. Except their version of the man-eating machine carved up entire inhabited planets and gobbled up the rubble for energy.
When you think about it, two of our biggest problems are high enegy prices and obesity rates. This could kill two birds with one stone imo.
I think this is the person who originally posted that video, and her twitter is completely inundated with media people asking if they can use the footage.
https://twitter.com/kristynashville/status/1549441916000825344
Hope she makes some bucks.
It’s ok. No biggie.
No one was injured when a transformer at Hoover Dam briefly caught fire Tuesday morning, officials said.
“There is no risk to the power grid and power is still being generated,” according to Jacklynn L. Gould, the Bureau of Reclamation’s regional director for the Lower Colorado Region.
The fire ignited around 10 a.m. and was extinguished about half an hour later, she said.
I haven’t checked but I think the Trump pick for AZ Gov just ripped it off.
That’s actually kind of cool.
I mean it’s not like Kentucky is a place people go to because it’s cool. The place gives you a reason.
https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1549445768683061249
Members arrested:
Dean, Velasquez, Lee, Speier, Clark, Jacobs, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Andy Levin, Carolyn Maloney, Adams, Watson Coleman, Escobar, Bush, Schakowsky, Omar & Pressley.
that post reminds me of a “shitty things for sale” group I’m in where people frequently post “cringe” or weird things like this and I’m kinda like wait I actually want to buy that…