Real Estate & Fertility Collapse: Exploring the Post-Apocalyptic World Our Children Will Live In

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the grim reality of housing markets in a world facing demographic collapse. They delve into the rapid decay of abandoned properties, the unsustainability of cities and suburbs, and speculate on a future where technologically advanced "havens" emerge amidst the ruins of our current civilization. This video offers a stark look at the potential consequences of population decline and technological advancement on our living spaces and social structures.

Key topics covered:

* The rapid deterioration of abandoned properties

* The unsustainability of modern cities and suburbs

* The impact of climate change on housing markets and insurance

* Speculation on future "haven" communities and their characteristics

* The potential divide between technophilic and technophobic societies

* The role of AI and advanced technology in shaping future communities

* Geopolitical implications of demographic collapse and technological advancement

Whether you're interested in urban planning, futurism, or the long-term consequences of current demographic trends, this video provides a thought-provoking look at the potential shape of our future world.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.

Abandoned for fairly short times. These are in Detroit, this stuff. I am showing you abandoned schools. And abandoned pools. And abandoned stadiums. It is Genuinely nightmarish. You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become.

And so you can see that typically by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance, you are looking at rubble.

I'm just

Simone Collins: getting increasingly nervous.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.

about one of our descendants a hundred years from now.

This person. Is hiking. They've got a drone companion flying alongside them. It's doing regular scans on the environment around them. So they don't step into like a basement that could collapse or something like that. They are having a blast [00:01:00] exploring the ruins of a dead world. And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups LARPing some version of 1950s life.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello,

Malcolm Collins: Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing one of the most misunderstood side effects of demographic collapse, which is.

Cheap housing. Oh, hooray. Everyone always says, they say, well, when the population is 5 percent of its current size, then housing will cost almost nothing. And that will be fantastic. Because then all of the young people will be able to afford houses and everything will stabilize and go back to normal.

Except that isn't what's going to happen. Talk about how quickly A house that is worth nothing begins to fall apart. And this is something that we saw [00:02:00] in Detroit. So we are going to go over timelines in Detroit of deterioration, but I also want to start a bit closer to home. So I grew up part time living on an island with my family that my family owns and now I don't inherit it or anything like that.

It goes to my sister. So it's not like, again, I get nothing, don't worry about it guys still starting from scratch here, but,

Simone Collins: Hey, I have to stop and say though, when we were first dating,

Malcolm Collins: I

Simone Collins: was like, this is a caricature of life, because no one actually has private islands, but apparently they do. But then, like, you and I learned that there's a reason why people don't have private islands. Because it kind of sucks. Well, another thing

Malcolm Collins: that people know is that my family lost all its money and was unable to maintain things.

And it is hard to sell a private island. Who wants that? Like, how can you even buy one, you know? And then [00:03:00] I'm going to go over what ended up happening to the property. Because I love when people are like, oh, islands, so defensible. So this is the living room. Of the house I grew up in. For those who are listening on the podcast it has trees growing inside of it now, all of the walls have fallen out of it well it has plate glass windows overlooking the ocean, but like, it looks like there is a forest in it now.

And as I go through this, I encourage you the listeners to not think of this in the abstract, but as what your own home is going to look like. 10 years after you stopped. Living in it or you fail to sell it because of your population is declining. Because this is a picture that we see across rural Japan right now, so much so that they're giving away free houses.

And I think that that is. , what we're going to see the future of the U S.

, I've even heard of instances as some people paying for people to take their houses. So they don't become these horrible nightmares.

Malcolm Collins: This room is, I believe, my parents bedroom right here for people who are just [00:04:00] listening, it's just debris everywhere, people took the beds, the mattresses, everything. Oh, this is my bedroom! And my brother's bedroom. This is where we Slept as little kids and it looks like the ceiling has fallen in and debris absolutely everywhere.

Here is my childhood bathroom. Completely smashed. It would literally be safer, I am now showing the inside of the bathroom, to sleep outside in the jungle than to sleep in this place. This looks super dangerous. Yes. This is the patio. It looks like a forest.

Oh, and this is the play area. Now this, the ceiling has completely caved in. It looks worse than any of the locations did in Jurassic Park for any on the podcast.

Simone Collins: No, Jurassic Park does not play a very accurate. tale of urban decay, right? Because like, you know, things just kind of, there's like a, a, a vine tastefully draped.

Oh, you know, over it. It's, it's more like, you know, the, the apartment of someone with a green thumb who likes industrial chic. It's not, this is [00:05:00] not what it looks like when buildings start to crumble. Everything's so muddy. And here

Malcolm Collins: is the forest spilling into our living room and patio here. And I'll just throw up some other pictures.

You can get an idea of what it used to look like. I, well, I guess in terms of the beach and stuff like that, So people can get an idea of just how much, you know, even a decade of not caring for something costs.

And if you haven't owned a house, if you have only rented a house, You would be surprised at how much it costs to keep the house together. You are spending a fairly large amount of money. I, I'd actually say you're probably over the course of 40 years, probably spending at least half the cost of the house on the modern market.

So for example, this graph that I pulled up here, estimates that right now, , On average, you're paying somewhere between around 15,000 and 18,000 USD. , and here is a map of how that varies state by state.

Malcolm Collins: In terms of maintenance fees and a lot of people all the time. [00:06:00]

Simone Collins: It's awful.

Malcolm Collins: And it is no longer worth those maintenance fees. If the house has reduced to zero in value, the reason why people. Spend the money upkeeping their property is because said property has value. The reason why properties historically had value was because the number of people who wanted that limited set of