Ask Lemmy

Mod notice: This post is kinda in the grey area of being in breach of Rule 6, but it's a good question with decent answers, so it gets to stay.

Stay classy.

No. The auctions wouldn't happen in person but online. Some reit or foreign money or both will bid more than the locals could afford.

No.
50% of voting Americans deify a pathological lying pedophile rapist treasonous traitorous insurrectionist diaper-wearing convicted felon.
So, "No".

California was populated by desperate people losing their farms and homes. See: grapes of Wrath.

Penny auctions happened, but they weren't the norm nationwide. The banks did forclose and people did lose their homes and sometimes abandoned them because the land was worthless during the dust bowl.

If America gets that desperate again, you will see pockets of solidarity and community and other examples of heartlessness and tragedy. We can't know how much unless it happens.

They wouldn't have penny auctions. They would be virtual so they couldn't be bullied into not bidding and the bidders would be global so they wouldn't give a shit about the person whose land it was.

The real question is: would they be allowed to do the same these days?

Spoiler: they won’t.

Unequivocally no.

We live in an era of being able to buy things, sight-unseen. In that era, there was no way for an investor to bid without physically showing up, so if they did, and aggressively outbid everyone else, then they already have a noose set up for them.

Now? People don't need to be at the auction in person, there probably wouldn't be an auction to begin with. The Bank would hire a real estate agent, who would pass it off to whomever makes the highest bid. Simple as that.

I'd like to think we would, as communities, as a society, but in this society is also money hungry, faceless corporations that will do whatever they can to make a dollar. There are so many layers of obfuscation between the person who is buying the property, and the person who ultimately owns it.

I just can't see it happening with the Internet.

...dude half of my neighbors want to see me killed because of things like me refusing to worship that dead neonazi that recently got himself shot in the neck.

They'd buy off my possessions just so they could see my reaction as they set them ablaze.

No, not in my country (US). People will not band together like that again, possibly ever.

It absolutely could not happen again, regardless of how organized the community was, because banks simply wouldn't sell the foreclosed property in an auction of community peers if they weren't getting good money for it, they'd auction it to REITs and corporations without them needing to set foot in an auction house.

Banks have auctions remotely now to prevent this sort of class solidarity.

That noose only worked because it was a legitimate threat.

Penny auctions could happen today, but only combined with a similar legitimate threat. That’s the obstacle.

blackrock would be there with their own paramilitary buying them up for the pennies

No chance if possibly only because the government would immediately crack down and boot lickers would refuse to stand up to the capitalists and government.

Private equity will buy everything with no public sale.

People also sold unwanted children, we going back there too? I know a lot of Trump voters are salivating at the thought.

I would imagine they just auction them on online nowadays :/ cutting out any sort of human interaction.

Nope. There's no solidarity in America anymore.

Absolutely not. Americans are now scumbags to each other. Especially after how they monetized homes and turned them into reality tv shows. About how the take an affordable home and make it unaffordable. Scumbag Americans will fuck each other over.

Nope. Capitalists would be frothing at the mouth, dick in hand in this situation. Hell they're doing it now.

Not in the same way. There is still some anti-eviction resistance that goes on today. It's rare and never successful in undoing evictions though. For the most part, I think the US is too individualistic, and the methods of preventing and breaking solidarity too refined for broad action to be successful. I imagine that during a depression, most desperate people would rather join the feds to feed their family by committing violence against others. Even now, ICE received 150k applications in a single week, and people aren't anywhere near as desperate as they'd be in a depression. The government would have to basically collapse, and even then we'd probably end up more like the poor countries ruled by gangs and warlords that dangle the possibility of escaping poverty in exchange for extreme violence.

Labor solidarity decreased under Hoover, and only started increasing under FDR with a lot of government support. I'm skeptical we'll ever have free and fair elections again, so I don't envision a pro-union government anytime soon.

Damn y'all are cynical. I'm on the Hurricane Coast and people come out the woodworks to help one another after storms. It's an awe inspiring thing to see so many come to mutual aid.

Two minutes after the wind dies down, dudes are roaming the streets with chainsaws, rolling in pickups, dragging trees with chains. Those that didn't get sniped are actively searching for people to help. After Hurricane Ivan, men were going door to door, cutting trees off houses and cars. Power was out so people were cooking up their food before it went bad, grills hot, signs in the yard, "Come and get it!"

Another great example is NYC after 9/11. I'd visited Manhattan in 1992 and was utterly freaked out by how unfriendly everyone was. (Yes, I know, that was partly culture shock on my part.) After 9/11 they pulled together strong.

I've written about what all went on in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Skipping that tonight as I don't want to cry, but it was awe inspiring.

And all of those events, even in your example, were before we had the organizational abilities and reach of the modern internet.

I don't think any of this is political, cultural or otherwise dependent on the times. I wouldn't spit on my MAGA neighbor if he was on fire, but I'd work by his side if shit hit the fan. The vast majority of us jump after disasters, we evolved that way, one of the finest points in our favor.

I don't think the same mechanism would work these days, but we have seen people standing up to authorities on their neighbors' behalf already; often people they don't even know. Look at all the videos of people driving ICE away.

It doesn't happen every time of course, but neither did the penny auction solidarity.

Absolutely not, there'd be some TikTok influencer that would be like "Broooo you can get land so cheap!" and buy it all and sell it for massive profit.

We've had worse depressions already. In 08 entire neighborhoods in Reno were totally abandoned, the whole economy seemed to be house construction and repair. At night whole neighborhoods would vanish, not a single light turning on. I knew guys in construction that suddenly couldn't get work and went around in crews and stripped foreclosed houses of materials to resell or use on lowball job bids, I knew a pretty well off contractor with an adult disabled son who turned to pushing pyramid schemes to try and stay alive basically. I ended up living in an abandoned house for months looking for work. Between the dot Com crash and the housing market bubble my family went from poor to middle class to hoping to survive winter. I remember my dad telling me in an interview they asked him why he changed careers twice and him just laughing like ''you haven't been in town long then'' boom and bust. That's been the nature of things. I still have health problems from getting pneumonia that year when I was basically homeless, I had a friend drag me to a clinic to get penicillin, the doctor had me wait around a few hours so he could have multiple med students come examine me, he had never seen anyone with that advanced of a case in his whole career. And I'm lucky, I know multiple people in their 20s like me at the time that died that winter because they refused to go to the hospital. They knew they couldn't pay and didn't want collections. I ended up getting a medical debt bankruptcy a few years later. You live through this and on the news they say things like ''economic recession'' and ''down turn'' maybe ''soft raise in unemployment'' like they guys who used to sign my paychecks were calling me asking if I heard about any work, standing next to me in the clinic line with sunken eyes.

I will say, at that time people were very open handed, you never needed to call someone to help you get your car out of the road, people would jump out and push you to the side, even put some gas in your tank to get home, I used to drive around with gas cans and a tow line especially in the snow, I used to have sand bags too, people would bend over backwards in a second when they saw your situation, it was a time of a lot of social closeness. And no one ever asked in you had a damm job. My god. No one ever said that shit. ''Get a job?'' Someone might shoot you for that.

After decades of pushing individualism, not a chance.