Be Careful What You Meme For

As they are wont to do, a meme's making the rounds that both grossly generalizes and exaggerates an important sociopolitical topic and does nothing but serve its antagonists. The meme claims that a home in an unspecified location cost $230,000 when it was well taken care of in 2009, and a decade later had an asking price of nearly a million after it had been abandoned and fallen into a state of disrepair.

The kicker: "EMPIRE IN DECLINE"

Let's dissect this.

Setting aside the alleged market valuation for this home in 2019, Zillow states it was built in 2007. Its current abandonment is true and can be confirmed in real estate databases. Given this was new construction built just before the housing market crash, its initial asking price could be correct, but its current state is an indictment of that housing market crash, not the current housing crisis.

In all likelihood, the original owner took advantage of pre-Recession predatory lending and abandoned the home when they could no longer make payments, or when the home's tax-value dropped below what they owed. 

If this home were in parts of the West Coast, New Jersey, or Northern Virginia, the current asking price of nearly $1M could easily be believable. But if it were in the Rust Belt, the Midwest, or smaller cities in the South, $1M is a leap. It's actually in Detroit, and it's asking price is a gross exaggeration. The current price listed on Zillow is a mere $15,000, or roughly the cost of a used Kia on Carvana.

All of that is problematic, from the cost of housing in California and Colorado to the price of a ten year old Sorento. But most problematic is the fact that the maker of this meme chose to completely fabricate the scenario, exaggerating the current cost of a home by well over 6000%, when they could have easily made their case using current listings in Portland or Denver.

This sort of false flag does two things that don't help underfunded prospective homeowners: 1) it throws chum to the naysayers who will rightfully call this out as "fake news," but for all the wrong reasons, solidifying their claim that the housing crisis doesn't exist and any reference to it is just bad Photoshop, and 2) it normalizes exaggerated home values well beyond the West Coast and Long Island; it coerces even savvy readers into thinking, "if $989,000 is fake, then $50,000 is pretty damn good," when in reality, its $15,000 asking price is already too high. Detroit's Land Bank should be offering this home for free to anyone willing to make it livable. 

Memes are a quick and easy way to make a point, but unless they're completely factual they can do more harm than good. This meme would have, and could have, been a sturdy case if it had shown abandoned new construction built in pre-Recession Fairfax, VA with a price tag of almost $1M. Instead they chose to lie, either because they were lazy or because they knew lying would make their meme go viral. 

Either way, it does nothing to quell the reality of the current housing crisis.