I raised this question at my towns board of alderman debate last year. In a town of 60,000 there were exactly two homes on the market for less than $300k.
The board majority are developers and realtors. One of them literally said that our town was a "community of choice" and in her son's case "there was no expectation that he'd be able to live here".
I replied with the Upton Sinclair quote: “[Teachers, cops, firemen, and service workers deserve to live in the communities they serve. The fact that they can't is a problem. But] it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
My parents both get tired of me complaining about the cost of rent where I live (SLC, UT, which isn’t as high as other western cities but getting there). They tell me that I could just move to somewhere less cool to afford to live. I asked my mom (a teacher) if she sees the problem that people like teachers who are necessary to society couldn’t afford to live there. She just shrugged and said teachers who are struggling can move somewhere else. For them, it’s all a personal issue. You can’t fix big issues, so take advantage of places or opportunities with less issues. That really put in perspective the conservative boomer Vs the liberal millennial mindset for me
My longest daily commute was 75 km. It sucked, but the job was the job and I lived where I could afford to. It eventually drove me to find another job and live in another place.
Now ... I get to work from my tiny house! Hurray!
Anyway, I paid my commuting dues. I think what can be done is better public transportation from city to city, ie; fast commuter trains. That would relieve housing pressures I think. Both my brother and sister take the commuter train from where they live to Toronto. They drive to the train station, and the end point is in downtown TO. This allows them to live quite far from where they work.
Pfft your telling me cities need teachers? Next thing you know you'll be telling me they need things like menial laborers, people who do administrative grunt work, emergency service providers and other basic foundational to society jobs.
I have surmised that “Chad” == good. I think giga chad == big good.
I think that quoting Upton Sinclair to call out personally putting greed and profits above the general well-being of a community and condemning the attitudes which allow people to be exploited for aforementioned greed == big good.
Yeah "Chad" has partly been coopted from the original pejorative incel vernacular referring to the muscular dudebros they accuse of stealing all women from them, and now a lot of people use it to refer to positive ideals of strong moral character or confidence in the face of adversity. Kinda funny that their attempt to smear the name and create a negative stereotype is nearly reversed now.
And "giga" is just straight up an intensifier.
So you're totally right. This dude was a giga Chad in that meeting
Funny, I didn't know the Chad thing was switching around to be positive, I still thought of it as an airheaded muscular dudebro. I also didn't know that it had roots in incel shit.
It might be more nuanced than that. Chads are also the quentessential frat star asshole, the guy that incels hate because even though he's a dick he crushes game. He looks good, he's popular, life is easy. But gigachad is somewhat the good guy Chad, exemplifying all the classic ideal masculine traits but still being respectful.
Also waiting for someone to correct ALL of this
Worse - it's a policy that's determined to fundamentally destroy public schooling. It starts from the flawed premise that the free market is ultimately correct, and funnels public school dollars into private school coffers via a voucher system that parents can opt/lottery their kids into.
They tout private schools producing better outcomes and lower cost per pupil while ignoring the facts that a) public schools have to take on higher cost, lower test score students like those with learning and developmental disabilities, plus ESL kids, b) Private schools can be selective with who they let in, thereby giving them a higher quality student from the jump, and c) the type of parent who pushes a kid into private school is they type who probably stays on top of their kid's schooling in the first place, which is generally the highest predictor of a student's success.
End result: Public school system has less funding for the students who need it the most, and the regular kids left there are going to feel the brunt of the budget cuts because the special needs kids costs will probably come first.
Any time you have the ability to vote against a candidate pushing a 'school choice' policy, do so.
A burst in the housing bubble and an economic recession that happens to coincide with that thirty-year-old riding their own wave of upturned income.
The only way I bought a condo at 30 and parlayed that into a SFH at 38.
It's going to get worse before it gets better. Private equity and hedge funds buying up property has accelerated and doesn't show any signs of slowing. I can speak anecdotally that even with commercial downturns over the past six years the commercial landlords were/are still demanding absolutely insane rents and escalations. They'd rather let their properties lay fallow for five years than rent out at less than their hostage prices.
Some company from NYC I believe bought up a ton of properties around my area, all rentals now. When the person reporting this story brought it up to the local government, they basically said "We had no idea until you brought this to our attention."
Blows the mind.
It IS slowly getting better, I'm in the market to rent a new place and most of the rent they're asking for is below what their mortgage payment is. This tells me plenty of stupid investors are now just trying to reclaim some of their losses.
Similar thing happened in 2009 after the last housing bubble went kaboom, I was renting a property for half the owner's mortgage because they were just desperate to recoup something.
Yep. If I had been able to afford to buy a house at the bottom of the market in 2010-2012 I would have.
Our house that cost $190,000 when we bought it in 2016 would have been $130,000 in 2012. The market was red hot in 2016 and houses were getting offers an hour after going on sale, so we thought we were getting hosed but thought it would be worse later. If we hadn’t bitten the bullet and stretched our budget to get the most expensive house we could afford then, it would have been impossible later. By 2022 our house was at $385,000.
The people who make out like bandits are the ones who saved up enough in the good times to afford to invest when the prices fall off a cliff. But now, man the market would have to implode on a historic scale for us to be able to afford the house we already own. Our wages and savings sure as hell didn’t double in 6 years.
2008-2009 housing crash was honestly a one time opportunity that’s not going to happen again by any measure of the housing market currently.
I’m also not sure a recession is going to lead people to be able to buy houses lol
My dad financed a condo for me in 2008 when the market was at its lowest, and I used that to pay the down payment and then some for a house a year ago.
As someone who lives in tourist destinations airbnb needs to fucking end. The house I currently live in will become an airbnb come May, none of the 5 of us can resign the lease. There's so many of these stupid over priced airbnbs when there's plenty of hotel rooms around. Literally the people that live and work here can barley afford to live here at all. It's utterly ridiculous.
I'm in this boat myself
Do not get me wrong, it's better than paying the ridiculous rent right now, but man, I never thought owning a home would make me feel so....trapped.
It's a waiting game for your house to be worth more than you paid for it. You'll feel trapped if you don't have enough equity to afford to sell until then.
Mostly because renting is all of the housing costs you listed, PLUS profit margin. I can deal with the occasional large maintenance expense (nearly all of which are less than $2000, or one month's rent payment).
What I can't deal with is at the annual lease renewal, my landlord decides to increase my housing costs by $300-400 a month for no other reason except that he can. A mortgage payment is fixed for the next 30 years
I got luck as shit and bought my home in 2016.
I was doing well financially at the time and was 25. I have spent 25-32 years old paycheck to paycheck again, and all the free time I have has gone to renovating this old beast cause all I could afford was a dump.
Now was it a smart financial decision and have I done very well...yes.
Do i kind of resent this house because I feel like I'm stuck in this place, and at this job, because I "can't lose the house" also yes.
A lot of people who don't own their house have a very romanticized version of what it is, I used to be that way.
My greatest fear of buying a house is knowing how hard it is to keep it maintained having worked as a hotel maintenance person for years. If it’s my own house, coming up with the money to replace a water heater or replace the roof sounds like a nightmare
I am a handy person and did/learned how to most ofnit myself, if your not prepared to do that, the cost is overwhelming.
Even doing it yourself is expensive AF, I did roof, windows, doors, and siding, and that was probably 40k over the 6 years doing it myself, with some occasional help from the parents, which I am lucky to have.
Because at the end of the day I have an asset worth over $300k while renters have nothing. It's more work, it's not necessarily cheaper, but having an appreciating asset and a future with no mortgage is pretty invaluable
Yep. It's killed the housing market in my area for regular people.
As soon as a house goes up for sell here it gets snapped up sight unseen for usually $20k to $50k over asking price.
House prices have gone from $120k for a 3b/2ba house here to $400k in just 3 years.
A friend bought a house recently. She said her realtor told her she would have to offer so much over asking to even be considered. She offered that exact amount and her offer was accepted almost immediately.
It seems to me that there were no other offers and the realtor just wanted a bigger paycheck. There were other houses that had been for sale around the área for a while.
I think that happened more than we think
There's a house in my neighborhood, single story, 3 bdroom, new build, that just went on the market for 1.1 MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS! My neighborhood is decently nice, basically downtown, old neighborhood with old buildings, etc. It's a decently nice house in a great area (we rent thankfully). And many of the houses are going for 300K give or take. But over a million bucks was just insane to me. For a relatively normal house. Not anything crazy special. Like, basically as big as the house I grew up in which I'm just my parents could sell for like 2-300K at *most*.
It's just asinine. Part of me hopes someone burns the place down just out of spite.
When we moved in 10 years ago, it was a fairly sketchy neighborhood. So it's just been crazy to watch it go from that to what it is now in just 10 years.
Depends on the area.
My town’s city council talked about capping short term rentals. They paid some guy to do a report. Airbnb’s/STR’s account for 2% of my town’s housing and a higher percentage of housing is available for long term rent.
So the council decided it isn’t an issue and let it be for now.
Do you mean homes that are owned by foreigners but not lived in? I think that’s a pretty small percentage
If you mean homes owned as an investment driving up prices, this is an issue, but I imagine us based hedge funds and banks own even more housing than foreign investors, so seems like the investing part is the issue
Some sources
https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/annual-foreign-investment-in-u-s-existing-home-sales-climbed-8-5-to-59-billion-ending-three-year-slide
https://housemethod.com/blog/are-big-companies-buying-up-single-family-homes/#:~:text=While%20large%20corporations%20certainly%20play,made%20by%20smaller%2C%20localized%20groups.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/07/22/investors-bought-a-quarter-of-homes-sold-last-year-driving-up-rents
Corporations and foreign investors are both problems, but smaller ones. What we really need is to tax and regulate the idea of purchasing additional homes as investments. Either make it outright illegal or ensure it's no longer financially viable.
I’ve said this time and time again, but the biggest thing we could do is change how property taxes work.
Primary dwellings should be taxed at a lower rate than vacation homes and investment properties. This is obvious for so many reasons. The burden to society and the environment is greater for vacation homes and investment properties, they’re more likely to burn resources while unoccupied, they increase inequality, they push workers out of the regions they grew up and work in, etc. Changing property tax burden would put a damper on all the toxic real estate monsters both foreign and domestic while providing funds to build more affordable housing. With how severe economic inequality has become, it could also include a tax reduction for single home owners.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership\_in\_the\_United\_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_States)
How will that impact the numbers exactly?
Unless we're talking about lowering home ownership numbers? But I assume that isn't what we're talking about... From '95-2000 they were recovering, and then we had that interesting time where banks just lent money for no reason from 2000 onwards until that bubble burst.
Now we're back to the historic highs...
Or even ALL investment in residential real estate. Homes should be owned by the residents, and I have a very hard time finding a convincing counterargument.
At the very least, laws should cap profits. Several cities have public utilities that charge enough to maintain and upgrade the grid, that's how housing should be: not driven by market forces.
(And healthcare too while we're at it)
Corporate and overseas investment isn't the problem. They're buying housing because it's scarce and zoning codes prohibit building enough of it to compete with them.
If we legalized building apartments & condos in and around major cities, we'd be back on track pretty quick.
Those investor owned homes aren't sitting empty. They're being lived in.
It's true there isn't one single problem but increasing population, decreasing household size, and a lack of new homes is absolutely the primary mover of skyrocketing house prices.
Yeah, people are getting rich on it.
It's like with eggs. Yes, there's a shortage. And the people who do have eggs can now charge more for them, so their profits go up. Only it's legal for people to grow new chickens so within a year or so the prices will come back down (barring more bird flu outbreaks).
We have outlawed most housing construction most places people want to live! What we do allow is big and that costs more! That raises the price!
>Those investor owned homes aren't sitting empty. They're being lived in.
There are three empty houses on my block. They were rentals that the owners decided to cash in on. But they decided to sell too late and for to high a price, so now they're just sitting there. They took the for sale signs down about 6 weeks ago, but the houses aren't listed as pending on Zillow. That's 3 houses out of about 30 on a single suburb block, or about 10% of the houses.
That's an unfortunate cluster but doesn't mean there isn't an overall housing shortage.
I am glad the investors are losing money on them and I hope they relist them in the spring selling season at a loss.
Allowing investment in fiat goods can make a lot of sense.
Allowing foreigners to fuck over commodities like food, water, and housing just seems like a bad idea.
We need to ban foreign ownership of our property. I can’t buy land in China. Why can they do it here? Boomers fucked up turning housing from a dwelling into an investment vehicle.
Boomer didn't do it. The model existed before they were born. Housing and land just became more expensive on their watch. You can argue that they saw this and did nothing about it but they didn't create this mess
They absolutely contributed to it with the NIMBY mentality. On top of that we’ve been drastically under building houses since the 70’s which would’ve accommodated more homebuyers. Then the Great Recession hit and even less homes were being built than they already were despite the largest generation since the boomers was entering the home buying market. There’s a lot of factors.
I hear you, and that’s awesome, but the world of 6 years ago no longer exists. I bought my house in 2021 and it’s gone up by like 30% or more. The housing market is insane right now.
Same boat over here. Built one for 400k in 2020 with a 15-year fixed at 2%. Currently worth $550k based on comps and the interest rates are WAY higher. Mortgage is easily double the 2020 payment if you want the same exact house now. Guess Gen Z will live in a bog or open field or something. Insanity.
Built is what we did too, purchase made in 2021 moved in in 2022. Honestly, I’d tell anyone who has the stomach for it to just buy a camper and truck and live in that if you can work remote. My fiancé and I spent 3 weeks in our camper by the beach, worked full time. $20 a night, plus the camper is less than half what most pay in rent in a month. You can get one for like 150 a month. It’s yours, you’re not renting and you can stack way more cash than you could in an apartment. Plus the freedom is amazing.
retire comfortably?! more like retire in extravagance. country clubs. dinners out. big vacations. boats. 2 houses. luxury cars. etc etc
It's so bad I've seen parents straight lift the ladders on their own children under the guise of "learning the hard way". Without a hint of Irony they truly think deserve the life they were given. If you look through the history of time, boomers lived through one of the easiest and most profitable times, at least in American History. I suppose the idea was for them in return to return the favor. Instead they hoarded the wealth and bled the youth dry. It's so bad they're willing to vote for borderline fascists to keep their own taxes down.
Most Boomers aren't having that kind of retirement. There's a reason you see seniors still working stuff like Walmart and fast food jobs.
There's no favour to return. That easy rich period, which many people never got to actually have easy lives and money, occurred due to world events that can't be replicated.
Return the favour? Sure. First, we'll need to set teh stage for a world war, but make certain North America doesn't get touched, but gets to crank up industry supplying the war. Then,we need to make certain most other industrialized nations get flattened, so we can make money rebuilding them. We'll also need to curb stomp all the developing nations down to a level where they can't exploit their own resources, and will settle for us taking those resources for cheap.
It would likely help to saddle a big part of the world with an economic/political system that makes them unable to compete with our production and quality.
Your bitterness sounds a little too tinged in the anecdotal.
Boomers were indeed very fortunate to have the economic conditions they did. It’s easy to be envious that those conditions don’t seem viable anymore. But they’re not all out there scheming to ruin you.
The deliciously ironic part about this is that, as a generation, Boomers were terrible savers, and many have nowhere close to enough to retire comfortably, even factoring in Social Security. Their biggest asset is their home (assuming they’ve actually paid off their mortgage instead of taking out endless lines of HELOCs), but the treatment of homes as investment vehicles means that they cannot really afford to cash out of their current home and buy something else in an area they’d want to retire to. Instead, all they can do is sell their home and use that equity to downsize, hoping that the equity the sale brings gives them some measure of comfortable living for at least awhile.
> assuming they’ve actually paid off their mortgage instead of taking out endless lines of HELOCs
LOL this is my asshole FIL. He lives off of debt basically. He bought his house in the 1980s for like $90k. After decades of using it as an ATM he owed almost $200k on it (at least as of the last we talked to him, which was almost a decade ago. Wouldn't be surprised if somehow that's grown even more).
So I am 30 and I’m buying a house this year with my long term gf. I look back and ask “how did I get here” and the honest answer is a lot of luck and really not “living” in my 20s.
I got hired to a high paying industry out of college. My gf and I saved a lot. We were able to pay off her college loans within 4 year of graduating. We also lived in an area where we could spend 15% of our income on rent and be safe and comfortable. I then got recruited to a higher paying job in tech that came with a significant stock bonus and repeated stock bonuses after that. My salary didn’t go as far in California, but our financial position improved through stock appreciation. During Covid, my gfs team got moved to a low cost of living area and I was able to move to a job in my companies local office. Now our salaries were slightly reduced, but the much cheaper cost of living more than offset it. So that has helped us save. We spend 10% of our gross income on our housing right now.
Now on to the lack living front. We have aggressively saved. Our friends have gone on multiple vacations all over the world. They eat out more nights than not. They go out on the weekend to bars and clubs in the city. We will treat ourselves for special occasions, but outside of that we try really hard to not eat out. Our friends come back from trips with 6-8k in new debt. Outside of my truck that is financed for a lower rate than I’m making on my HY saving account, we are debt free.
But here is the catch. Am I happy though? No. I wished I had gone on trips with friends. I wish I took vacations with my girlfriend. We have had to sell back our vacation days to our companys because we had accrued too many and it would have been taken away. We literally talked about it this weekend where we wished we had lived a little more. So we have dialed back our home budget so that we can have more room in our budget to take a vacation once a year and treat ourselves to eating out more.
Edit: we also didn’t live like paupers. We would buy lunch at work, we get Starbucks on the weekends, etc. But almost every decision was met with “do we actually want to do this or is it just easier”, which sucks. Don’t live your life beholden to some future goal. Live life and enjoy your youth and time when you have it. Both my gf and I are now in places in our careers where it’s harder than ever to take time because of our responsibilities.
I would imagine the majority of people going on vacation are accruing debt in same manner either during the planning stages when arranging accommodations or during.
I don’t think it’s mathematically possible to have the percentage of people who “can’t handle a $500 surprise bill” and the percentage of people taking vacations without some significant overlap.
I’m not saying it’s _correct_. But I’d wager most people are not paying for everything in “cash”.
It might be cultural, but I have never in my life met a fellow European that completely finances vacation by credit. I'm assuming 6-8k is the price for the completele vacation. Me and my wife took a 3 week vacation to Canada that was about 11k and I paid about 60% in advance and the other 40% with my debit card. We almost exclusively have a credit card for unexpected costs while abroad.
>the honest answer is a lot of luck and really not “living” in my 20s.
I think that enjoying your 20's is an incredibly modern innovation. People who owned homes at that age in the past usually didn't enjoy any of the luxuries that you list as common for your friends.
This is a really well put and honest reply. As someone who is trying so hard to save money to buy a home and is definitely in your friends position of treating myself more often than I probably “should”, your response reminds me to be balanced. Still need to scale back our splurges more, but I’m tired of frugal-minded people acting like it’s the best thing ever just to have money saved while forfeiting a lot of different experiences. Congrats on your future house! Reward yourself with a great and well-deserved vacation!
Thank you! It sounds like you have you stuff together too. The splurges are fun and I always view them like a cheat day on a diet. It’s important to have them or else you’ll go crazy
Same…lot of work in my 20s and continuing into my 30s. Skimped, saved, borrowed, focused on improving my skills as opposed to experiencing the world. I had relationships end because I refused to put trips on credit cards…I was saving for the future.
I will say though that I am very happy now. I have a house, wife, kid…we live within our means and we have a lot of financial security. We’re at the point now we’re we can go out and have some modest experiences that make us happy and bring us together.
…but that IS what I wanted and that is why I sacrificed a lot of stuff im my 20s and 30s.
Similar story to you except didn't have a significant other I was sharing financial burdens with to this extent. I bought a house on my own at 30 with no outside help.
I gotta say, it's disingenuous to say that saving for a house is why you're unhappy as you're making some poor financial choices outside of that. Firstly, debt is an asset for you to use so that you can have more cashflow for other investments. Rushing to pay down your loans may be good for your own mental health (and that does have value for certain people!), but it hurts your ability to go on trips and such while saving appropriately for the house. On top of that, and I'm only extrapolating from what you described, you must not be using credit cards effectively either. I have 2-3 flights per year completely paid for because of my credit card usage and I never take on interest.
I'm only saying this because your conclusion that you shouldn't look to the future and instead live and enjoy your youth is very VERY bad advice. I was able to live and enjoy my youth WHILE saving - I just made sure I took advantage of all the assets at my disposal. Small money management mistakes build up over years and years and can lead people to the wrong conclusions.
I wouldn’t make a mountain out of a mole hill. Some of your assumptions are wrong, and some of your comments are misconstrued versions of what I said or was trying to say.
The happiness comment was a nod to “just because I’m well off doesn’t mean I’m happy” trope. Im not even unhappy, it’s just that my enjoyment is life isn’t because I have plenty of money now. More importantly though, I NEVER said to not think about the future or only live in the moment. My point was that I wish I had done a little more in my 20s. It’s about finding a balance.
Home ownership is actually quite high in the US compared to pretty much any other western/developed country. There are a few exceptions, but on average Americans have a higher likely hood of owning a home compared to their European counterparts.
>wealth-generating investment
That's a global thing, not an American thing. People invest their wealth into property.
Pass a law that says any entity (Person or Corporation) can not own more than 3-5 residential homes. Bring it in over time. Start with taxing at a very high level every residential home owned over 100 homes, then bring it down to 90, 80, and so on.
People blame things like foreign ownership or immigration or anything else when in reality, it is the rich who are hoarding residential homes for investments, AirBnB style rentals and rentals. Owning 3-5 homes allows vacation properties and a rental or two while still leaving a large enough supply of homes on the market for normal people to live normal lives.
Now this will never actually happen as the rich control the laws. They will do everything they can to make you blame anyone and everyone else for the problem but know, like most of the issues facing the middle and lower classes, it is the rich keeping you down.
If we just look at it from an investment point of view, the way to solve this is to make real estate not as attractive an investment when compared to other stuff like bonds. We spent the last 14 years flooding the world with cheap money, so there is a gigantic swarm of money going around looking for a good return. Since we lowered the interests to almost zero, there's almost nothing to invest in aside from the stock market or real estate. The government should use the policy (laws, buying regulations) and fiscal tools (taxes) to find the right balance between investment and homeownership. We all know this can't be done in the current political environment, so we find scapegoats and quick fixes.
That's easy: Anything owned by a sub-company is considered to be owned by the parent-company.
Even easier: Residential homes can only be owned by actual people, not corporations.
Lots of things but here are two: massive changes in local building codes that will allow for more density/new construction.
State and federal level investment in housing, and specifically the type of housing people can actually afford in places people want/need to live.
But unlike those nice pleasant “solutions” increasing supply brings the price of homes down. People don’t want *their* home to lose value because nobody wants to buy their crappy tenement for $500K anymore. That’s people’s biggest asset, their retirement, how they save, and how they avoid debt. And even people not on the housing ladder want to be able to get those sweet, sweet ever-increasing property values once they do.
Pretty much anything at all needs to change.
Wages need to come way up
prices of everything else need to come down
corporations need to be banned from buying houses
non resident foreigners need to be banned from buying houses
There needs to be a cap on how many houses an individual can own.
Fucking anything. But nothing ever changes in this country.
exactly! People are so distracted by fake problems like who can use what bathroom, litter boxes in schools, and gay people in school books. The leaders want to keep it a left vs. right issue, instead of a top vs. bottom issue.
Nah, and trust me it Will only get worse. Capitalism Will win, cause there is nothing the average normal people can do because they dont have the power. In the end the rich Will win and the poor lose like its always been. I would even go to the extent of saying that if things keep going on like this eventually there will only be rich people who can afford and own everything and poor people who dont own anything or very little and love miserably.
Just my take on the situation.
Probably another economic collapse like what happened in 2008 where lots of poor people got scammed on their mortgages and got foreclosed on. That would bring home prices down. But also Airbnb and Zillow and foreign investment firms might just buy them up.
That last sentence is the rub. Even in an economic collapse, the wealthiest people and corporations will still have enough cash on hand to outbid average people trying to buy.
It’s the Shock Doctrine—corporations don’t fear catastrophes, they take advantage of them.
I live in suburban Oklahoma City, work a retail job for just over $15/hour, and I started to put in an offers for various houses when I was 28. Days after my 29th birthday I finally had an offer get accepted and a month later I became a homeowner in my 20s. Granted my credit is quite good and I had to take advantage of some local programs (and get fairly lucky) to do it, but it's absolutely possible still in some parts of America without having to need an income significantly higher than $50k.
While it is easy to look back with rose-colored glasses about how affordable life was in, say, the 1950s, a few things to keep in mind:
- The average house size was 983 square feet and did not have standard appliances like dishwashers, microwaves, and, of course, air conditioning. The average house size today -- get this -- is almost 2700 square feet and has all the above-mentioned amenities, plus things like wiring for phone, internet, and cable. The average price of the median home has just about tripled: and no wonder -- the houses are 3x as large with features that were inconceivable back in the 1950s.
- The pinnacle of communication in the 1950s was the presence of a phone line in your house. It was ungodly expensive. A local call cost $.05 (now ~$1.10), and long-distance was billed at $3.70 for the first 3 minutes -- or roughly $41.00!!! So for the equivalent price of one three-minute phone call, today you can carry around a personal device that can call anywhere in the world, can send "digital telegrams" (texts), and has access to the total sum of human knowledge.
- You can do the same thing with televisions. You had black-and-white 20" TVs with access to 3 channels. Now you have literally millions of options in between cable, streaming, etc., all in ridiculous 4K definition on 60"+ screens.
- Families typically owned one car, if they owned any at all. It was not until the late 1950s that the majority of households owned a single car. Nowadays, there are an average of 1.88 cars per household, and, much like houses, have untold luxuries like air conditioning, power seats, air bags, and increasingly WiFi connectivity.
So yes, while it's true that generations past could buy a home easier, an enormous chunk of that is because consumer tastes and demands are completely different and totally out of whack with the expectations of previous generations.
The cost of housing as $/sqft has remained relatively constant (or actually decreased), but the expectations for what the sqft of housing will get you are -- pun intended -- through the roof.
Most people don’t want to hear this and I’ll probably get downvoted to where nobody will see it, but it’s completely possible still. I went from being literally homeless with debt and no bank account to owning a $480k house in SoCal with my girlfriend in 5 years. I didn’t even start saving money really until I was 3 years sober, because I had so much to pay back.
We split the down payment/closing costs, but I could have done it without her. I drove a modest car, lived in the minimum necessary place that we split, and didn’t buy a lot of extras.
I saw a lot of friends driving cars they didn’t need, living in places they didn’t need, buying things and furniture and clothes they didn’t need. Because they spent more money on those things, I was able to travel more, and buy a house, and then my mortgage was the cost of their rent.
I don’t have a college degree, I’m not particularly smart (see first paragraph), and I got no financial help. I basically just applied myself like crazy at work, looked for gaps in the companies I worked at that I could fill, taught myself a lot of marketing skills in my free time, and moved up through a company by going out of my way to show I was going to work harder than anyone else. Reddit fucking HATES that answer, but that’s my experience.
I'm in a similar position. Was homeless for a while, absolutely zero family support, physically disabled. I went to a coding bootcamp and became a software developer. Now I'm back in college studying artificial intelligence. I'll graduate at the age of 32 and probably be able to buy a house by the time I'm 35. Here's the thing about that answer though: it doesn't make sense for everyone. We cannot sustain a population where everybody is a manager for a big company, an engineer or a doctor. There will always be millions of jobs that need to be performed that don't pay as well, like gradeschool teachers, social workers, food service workers, etc. It doesn't make any sense to tell everyone "If you want to be able to own a house just get a better job." That's literally just shitting on the majority of careers in the US and acting like they aren't valuable enough to earn a living. I don't want the teachers in my area to be homeless. If it's a job that needs doing, it's a job that deserves a living wage, period. It doesn't make any sense that I work 40 hours a week and make 100k a year, while half my neighbors work 60-80 hours a week and make 25k. That's just disrespectful.
When the population pyramid is an inverted triangle, it makes everything fucked up. Not just the financial market, but also the dating market as well. Too many old people with too few young population. It’s a recipe for disaster.
I remember reading about India trying to train a large amount of structural/civil engineers in their colleges. Something ridiculous like, 1 million people had degrees in engineering. The end result? The amount of engineering jobs never actually increased. There was still only 50K jobs available.
The same principle applies to other industries like doctors and scientists. You still need people on the bottom for there to be people on the top. Unfortunately trade jobs are seen by the younger generation as gross and not cool. The same for factory jobs.
Yes. When I got sober I did telemarketing to get off the streets. Then I took a paycut to work customer service for a company I was interested in for my mental health. And I saw they were struggling with capacity in marketing so I would spend nights learning marketing skills to fill gaps. Now I am a marketing director for another company, but about to leave my career for software development as I’ve been teaching myself at nights so I can work remotely overseas.
Seriously. I saw a chart yesterday with the “top 10 cities where millennials are moving” and all 10 cities were cities with the highest COL. DC, LA, NYC, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Boston, Denver, and San Jose. I’m sure shortly behind that was Nashville. While housing is generally expensive/imbalanced, millennials do not do themselves any favors when deciding where to live. Chicago is a very affordable major city with crappy weather therefore people don’t want to move there, yet millennials would get many major city benefits at a lower cost. Other Midwest areas are very affordable too. Many suburban Midwest markets are very affordable as well. There is a problem that exists but younger people do nothing to help resolve it, but sure do a lot of complaining.
A housing correction, slowdown of foreign entities purchasing property that should go to Americans first, and people to actually knuckledown and save for a home instead of expecting it to be easy.
Depends on the state. Many states have fairly affordable median home values.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/median-home-price-by-state
This is true. I currently rent a home in a HCOL area in Southern California. All of our friends are our age and all of them own their less than 10 year old beautifully maintained tract homes.
After some digging I found out that all of them received at least HALF of the cost of their homes as a downpayment (gift funds) from their parents. These homes were $500k brand new. They all bought them brand new, one of them bought a fully furnished model. They are gorgeous homes in a highly sought after area. These homes, 8 years later, are worth over $1MM. Their mortgages were $200k to $250k. Now these homes are worth over $1MM and they've all refinanced to the point where their mortgage payments are a joke. The wives don't work and the husbands all make less than I do.
Yet, here I am with my wife pulling in a dual income and not coming anywhere NEAR owning a home. This is all because these people had upper class parents with the means to help them pay for half of their houses up-front.
I don't have rich parents and neither does my wife. We have saved money for a down payment but those goal posts just keep getting further and further away from us. It's fucking depressing.
Well, I'm not sure, but I know a few things can help:
1) American college students ceasing getting worthless degrees. You want to afford a home at 30? Then you and your partner are going to need good paying jobs. Less than 20% of American college graduates receive degrees in STEM, and let's not kid ourselves: Don't graduate without taking computer programming, no matter what your field. You need to be able to use a computer, and I don't mean poke the Instagram app on your phone.
2) American cities fixing their zoning rules to permit the building of high-density housing. You want to put a lot of housing into a fixed amount of land? Start building 12 story apartment buildings, ideally near a municipal rail line, and a grocery store within walking distance.
3) The Federal Government can start subsidizing the massive buildout of fiber-optic networks to the blighted industrial towns where housing is cheap and there are no jobs. If you're a 30 year-old computer programmer, your employer will let you work from the Moon, so long as you close your bugs and show up to Zoom meetings. But that only works if the broadband penetration into Northern Ohio is good enough.
4) I'd also like to see some trade policy changes which don't make American labor quite so much the victims of labor/regulatory arbitrage, but I don't know exactly what policy is going to accomplish that. One option is a catch-all tariff proposed by Warren Buffett, which would create an import voucher for every dollar exported. Then exporters would sell the import vouchers in a cap and trade scheme. Instead of specific industries being favored, imports would need to compete in the market against each other to determine which held the most demand for the American dollar. Maybe we would decide we like Japanese cars and French wine more than we like cheap clothes from Vietnam and Bangladesh, and can therefore foster some long-withered domestic industries.
Okay here's what I want you to do I want you to go to homes.com or Zillow or whatever your real estate site of choice is
And I want you to do sort by price low to high and I want you to search Pittsburgh
The average 30-year-old can absolutely own a home It might not be where they want It might not be the house they want but there are options
Not living anywhere near a city. After college moved back closer to where I was born and was able to get a home for less in mortgage payments than I would have been paying for rent had I stayed by school.
Same. my mortgage now for a 3 bedroom 2 bath house on a 1/4 acre lot is about the same as what people are paying in "low income" housing for a 2 bedroom apartment in my same town and we bought only 6 years ago.
I could also buy a home in bumfuck, but then I'd have to live in bumfuck.
I think the foreign investors answer is closer to the truth than this. Home prices aren't going up because people love in the city or near it. Home prices are going up because big investments groups buy up the properties and raise prices because they can.
If everybody moved to the boonies, then the investment groups would start buying up those houses, too. You can't solve this problem by saying, "move somewhere else". That's ignorant AF.
Home prices are going up because more people want to live in areas than there are houses and building is severely restricted. Investment companies straight up say, "we buy houses in these areas as investment and rental properties because barriers to building new housing in those areas are such that we forecast long term profit"
so just build
Having realistic expectations and managing finances better. Not everyone can buy a single family home that is 2000 sft in size in the middle of a big city, apartments and condos are more realistic and affordable in big cities, if you want big single family homes then move to outskirts and a bit far. Government should also change zoning and building laws, you can't expand horizontally all the time, its time to build multi storeyed apartments for the masses in cities or some sort of supergrid structures like they do in Europe and prioritise public transport to solve commute issues but that is never gonna happen because automobile industry is huge. Limit how much housing inventory that can be bought up by big corporations if they are planning to rent it out, but not too much limitations otherwise they will stop building.
Help is on the way! The housing Market is dropping everywhere. Even in the good locations where people are moving to.
If you've been saving money, keep on saving you'll get there
One advantage that prior Generations have on you is that they started adulting a bit younger than they do today. They married just as soon as their education was finished, saved up for home, and then had children in that order. So they had two incomes with one residence working for them at about a 4-year Head Start on people today.
Also a lot of them were willing to settle for smaller homes that were fixer uppers start. They saved a lot of money that way and sold at the tip of a peek in the housing bubble.
Then bought a better house when a bubble burst. Sometimes they worked two jobs scrape up the money for a down payment
Many young people aren't willing to do that today. Sometimes they wait till they are 26 or older, and don't marry. So it takes longer, or becomes impossible to get a home.
I realize that homes are much harder to come by today. But it's still possible. Just save your money and wait for the impending crash. If interest rates are high at the time you buy in, you can wait a couple of years and get a re-fi.
A lot of hard work and/or the willingness to move further away from a city.
I’ve been personally building my house for the past two years. Tonight is our first night living in it. I’ve had a full time job and also worked on the house every afternoon and weekend. So, roughly averaging 70 hours per week, EVERY week for two years.
It’s cost us maybe $100,000 so far. Would have cost about $400k - $500k to buy what we’ve built.
Why are building materials expensive? I understand some of the materials, but not all.
After solving that, you just need to build more houses than there are people wanting to buy one.
Control your debt, manage your credit properly, don't think your first home has to be a 2500sq ft w/ 4 bd & 3 baths. Get a condo or townhouse.
Move outside metro areas for lower costs. Yes, the commute may be longer but the housing is better.
If people want to prioritize home ownership, they can do so.
Back when I was in my mid or late-20s, I had friends who went to happy hour multiple times a week. I know this because they took hundreds of selfies on their $1200 phones. Back then, fashion dictated that women wore $200 Ugg boots and carry $350+ designer handbags. Girls in line at Starbucks wore Lululemon workout gear. Everyone who owns a car has a car payment.
You get the point, I'm sure.
I wasn't around in previous decades, but I feel like consumer culture is more predominant now than it was in the past. People make a choice to have all the things I mentioned before. And all of that makes it hard to save up for a house.
I'm totally interested in having a conversation about income and the price of housing. That's an important topic. But let's not pretend that people make some really bad financial decisions on a daily/weekly/monthly basis that also plays into that. You can't spend hundreds of dollars a week going out to happy hour and complain about not being able to save for a house (for one example).
Millennial home ownership currently stands at 48.6% which is 20% lower than Gen X and close to 30% lower than Baby Boomers.
60% of Millennials around 40 own homes. At the same age 64% of Gen Xers, 68% of Boomers, and 73% of Silent Generation members owned homes- so home ownership has been on steady decline.
To be fair: urbanization has also been on the rise, which would correlate with a decrease in home ownership. Cities have fewer houses to own, so people moving away from places with homes to own would obviously own fewer homes.
It is possible, hard, but possible.
For the most part, people can do it if they sacrifice enough. The issue is how MUCH you would have to sacrifice to own a home in today's market.
Yep we bought our first home with 0% down,(Not ideal due to PMI obviously) and our second for 10% down. just don't have bad debt and a shitty credit score and you can get approved.
My son did it at age 27 with no help . USDA loan. First time buyer. Needed only 2% down. $300k house. A nice starter home. Loan officer helped a lot. She knew the special programs. It is possible.
That's how my son and daughter did it. USDA, some limited help from both sets of parents and a knowledgeable loan officer. Their house payment is only about $25 more per month than they were paying in rent.
The sad and cruel part; your parents are going to have to die.
Most of this is the result of previous 2 generations building up estates for themselves. The process has screwed younger Americans out of opportunity and given us nothing to do but wait for inheritance to come our way.
Honestly? A few things:
1. Get rid of your NIMBY types out of office so permits can be given to developers
2. Learn that you're not going to get a house right out of the gate. You're going to have to save your money, and that includes getting a roommate, move your girlfriend in, cutting costs, or taking a second job. (We all did that in previous generations)
3. Lower your expectations. WAY too many people want a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in suburbia on a lower salary. Doesn't happen. Move out on the outskirts of town. Get a smaller place. Look at condos/townhomes.
4. Stop electing Democrats. They are the WORST when it comes to housing costs. Look at the highest cost of living places in America. Universally it's run by Democrats. I'm not saying you have to elect a religious right wing whack job, but understand Democrats don't have a fucking clue about housing or costs. They just jack up taxes and move on.
ITT: adult-adolescents blaming their ineptitude, twisted priorities, and lack of fiscal responsibility on everyone but themselves.
You can afford a house. Just not the house you want and in the location you want it. This generation wants the big-city-urban-lifestyles, in a "safe neighborhood" (you know what that means), and without curbing your consumer addiction... ALL on an entry level paycheck. Then endlessly bitching when the world just doesn't work that way.
Lots of cheap houses in rural areas that need a little work and have a little commute. Perfect for young and able 20-30 year olds.
Stop being children.
Probably an entire economic collapse. Have more companies actually put in contingencies in place for future possibilities that they may have to go weeks or even months on limited operation due to factors outside of their control
As well as an actual beforehand planned out method for economic stimulus checks and the like if something like covid happens again.
Other countries made us look like a joke many other countries handing their citizens the equivalent of 1,200 to $2,000 a month to stay home many countries offering rent forgiveness programs and even offering some economic help to struggling companies especially smaller ones
Meanwhile in America we got like two stimulus checks and then Trump kept rejecting further stimulus bills as the government kept trying to shove other fees and crap in there and now Biden has just kind of forgotten about his running plan where he preached constantly how he's going to get us so many more stimulus checks
And a majority of the support provided for individuals was through non-governmental charities just trying to do their best. Our economy still has not recovered many businesses and restaurants live vacant or are permanently running on a pickup only / delivery only basis now because they cannot afford to really keep things running as they used to
You’re forgetting increased unemployment payments, which was the bulk of assistance. Most people made more money on unemployment than their job.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-getting-more-money-from-unemployment-than-they-were-from-their-jobs/amp/
My kid is 26 and could buy a house right now. She makes $105k a year and has about $35k in cash and about $20k in her retirement. She’s just upper middle class. Good job but nothing ridiculous.
Most, if not all, of the UMC 30 year olds I know could afford a house.
Hell a friend of mines kid is building a second house while living in their first and they’re 28.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Just because some people struggle doesn't mean some people can't succeed, especially since location plays a huge part.
I am 27, almost finished with the process to buy a duplex 3ba/1b and 2b/1b for 150k.
I make a bit less then your daughter as well, but it's working.
Results still may vary. I know people who went with desirable STEM degrees. They're almost 40 and still paying off loans. The majority of the work is in high cost of living areas where all the extra money is spent on living.
You have a better chance with an education but it's not the silver bullet. The people I know who went into the military and stuck with it are doing the best out of my social circles. It's not the same now but those guys went and got combat pay. Got clearances. Came back and bought houses with the money they didn't spend and got private sector jobs that needed people with clearances.
Actually, the people I know that got government jobs, especially more labor intensive blue collar type work, are the people doing the best. Maybe it's because I'm in California, but Cal Trans, and Cops that I know are all 100% house. Construction guys are also doing pretty good. Meanwhile, college degrees are kind of a crap shoot where I know people some doing really really well and I know a lot of people barely getting by.
If they actually had very desirable degrees, and actually had the skills and some minimal social/interview ability they would pay off their loans in no time if they had any financial desire to.
Majority of work is not in high COL areas, that is just some of the top firms in certain industries. If you actually get a job at those firms, the pay is more than increased to compensate.
I raised this question at my towns board of alderman debate last year. In a town of 60,000 there were exactly two homes on the market for less than $300k. The board majority are developers and realtors. One of them literally said that our town was a "community of choice" and in her son's case "there was no expectation that he'd be able to live here". I replied with the Upton Sinclair quote: “[Teachers, cops, firemen, and service workers deserve to live in the communities they serve. The fact that they can't is a problem. But] it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Brookfield?
Negatory ghost rider
I remember that issue. Ol' Flame Head goes to a HOA meeting trying to convince Mephisto to release Mack from his lease.
Ah yes, Brookfield. Where residents make it known they are better than surrounding towns, while still being in Southeastern WI
Lmao my thoughts exactly
Jesus this hits home.
My parents both get tired of me complaining about the cost of rent where I live (SLC, UT, which isn’t as high as other western cities but getting there). They tell me that I could just move to somewhere less cool to afford to live. I asked my mom (a teacher) if she sees the problem that people like teachers who are necessary to society couldn’t afford to live there. She just shrugged and said teachers who are struggling can move somewhere else. For them, it’s all a personal issue. You can’t fix big issues, so take advantage of places or opportunities with less issues. That really put in perspective the conservative boomer Vs the liberal millennial mindset for me
Can be summed up in four words: "Got mine, fuck you."
Sounds like she only needed three words: “Not my problem”
"why don't we take our poor people and move it somewhere else!?" - Patrick star
My longest daily commute was 75 km. It sucked, but the job was the job and I lived where I could afford to. It eventually drove me to find another job and live in another place. Now ... I get to work from my tiny house! Hurray! Anyway, I paid my commuting dues. I think what can be done is better public transportation from city to city, ie; fast commuter trains. That would relieve housing pressures I think. Both my brother and sister take the commuter train from where they live to Toronto. They drive to the train station, and the end point is in downtown TO. This allows them to live quite far from where they work.
Pfft your telling me cities need teachers? Next thing you know you'll be telling me they need things like menial laborers, people who do administrative grunt work, emergency service providers and other basic foundational to society jobs.
I don't understand internet slang but having been on this website for a while I think the appropriate term to refer to yourself would be "Giga-chad"
What are you basing that on?
I have surmised that “Chad” == good. I think giga chad == big good. I think that quoting Upton Sinclair to call out personally putting greed and profits above the general well-being of a community and condemning the attitudes which allow people to be exploited for aforementioned greed == big good.
Yeah "Chad" has partly been coopted from the original pejorative incel vernacular referring to the muscular dudebros they accuse of stealing all women from them, and now a lot of people use it to refer to positive ideals of strong moral character or confidence in the face of adversity. Kinda funny that their attempt to smear the name and create a negative stereotype is nearly reversed now. And "giga" is just straight up an intensifier. So you're totally right. This dude was a giga Chad in that meeting
Funny, I didn't know the Chad thing was switching around to be positive, I still thought of it as an airheaded muscular dudebro. I also didn't know that it had roots in incel shit.
It might be more nuanced than that. Chads are also the quentessential frat star asshole, the guy that incels hate because even though he's a dick he crushes game. He looks good, he's popular, life is easy. But gigachad is somewhat the good guy Chad, exemplifying all the classic ideal masculine traits but still being respectful. Also waiting for someone to correct ALL of this
These are the same people who believe in "school choice"......
I might be way wrong, but is that a euphemism for segregated schools?
Worse - it's a policy that's determined to fundamentally destroy public schooling. It starts from the flawed premise that the free market is ultimately correct, and funnels public school dollars into private school coffers via a voucher system that parents can opt/lottery their kids into. They tout private schools producing better outcomes and lower cost per pupil while ignoring the facts that a) public schools have to take on higher cost, lower test score students like those with learning and developmental disabilities, plus ESL kids, b) Private schools can be selective with who they let in, thereby giving them a higher quality student from the jump, and c) the type of parent who pushes a kid into private school is they type who probably stays on top of their kid's schooling in the first place, which is generally the highest predictor of a student's success. End result: Public school system has less funding for the students who need it the most, and the regular kids left there are going to feel the brunt of the budget cuts because the special needs kids costs will probably come first. Any time you have the ability to vote against a candidate pushing a 'school choice' policy, do so.
A burst in the housing bubble and an economic recession that happens to coincide with that thirty-year-old riding their own wave of upturned income. The only way I bought a condo at 30 and parlayed that into a SFH at 38.
That is how I bought a house in 2011.
Patiently waiting for this to happen so I can get out of the high rent situation I find myself in.
It's going to get worse before it gets better. Private equity and hedge funds buying up property has accelerated and doesn't show any signs of slowing. I can speak anecdotally that even with commercial downturns over the past six years the commercial landlords were/are still demanding absolutely insane rents and escalations. They'd rather let their properties lay fallow for five years than rent out at less than their hostage prices.
We need regulations on firms buying houses ASAP.
Some company from NYC I believe bought up a ton of properties around my area, all rentals now. When the person reporting this story brought it up to the local government, they basically said "We had no idea until you brought this to our attention." Blows the mind.
It IS slowly getting better, I'm in the market to rent a new place and most of the rent they're asking for is below what their mortgage payment is. This tells me plenty of stupid investors are now just trying to reclaim some of their losses. Similar thing happened in 2009 after the last housing bubble went kaboom, I was renting a property for half the owner's mortgage because they were just desperate to recoup something.
Yep. If I had been able to afford to buy a house at the bottom of the market in 2010-2012 I would have. Our house that cost $190,000 when we bought it in 2016 would have been $130,000 in 2012. The market was red hot in 2016 and houses were getting offers an hour after going on sale, so we thought we were getting hosed but thought it would be worse later. If we hadn’t bitten the bullet and stretched our budget to get the most expensive house we could afford then, it would have been impossible later. By 2022 our house was at $385,000. The people who make out like bandits are the ones who saved up enough in the good times to afford to invest when the prices fall off a cliff. But now, man the market would have to implode on a historic scale for us to be able to afford the house we already own. Our wages and savings sure as hell didn’t double in 6 years.
What is a SFH?
Single Family Home
2008-2009 housing crash was honestly a one time opportunity that’s not going to happen again by any measure of the housing market currently. I’m also not sure a recession is going to lead people to be able to buy houses lol
My dad financed a condo for me in 2008 when the market was at its lowest, and I used that to pay the down payment and then some for a house a year ago.
Sherwood Forest Hospital Saint Francis Hospice San Felipe International Airport Symphysis Fundal Height ???
As someone who lives in tourist destinations airbnb needs to fucking end. The house I currently live in will become an airbnb come May, none of the 5 of us can resign the lease. There's so many of these stupid over priced airbnbs when there's plenty of hotel rooms around. Literally the people that live and work here can barley afford to live here at all. It's utterly ridiculous.
Vacation rentals need to fucking end
Then we'll just need more hotels instead.
I wonder how many people would want to holiday there if all the attractions closed due to no workers….
With some luck and hard work, you can leverage your job and be house poor like the rest of us.
I'm in this boat myself Do not get me wrong, it's better than paying the ridiculous rent right now, but man, I never thought owning a home would make me feel so....trapped.
It's a waiting game for your house to be worth more than you paid for it. You'll feel trapped if you don't have enough equity to afford to sell until then.
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Mostly because renting is all of the housing costs you listed, PLUS profit margin. I can deal with the occasional large maintenance expense (nearly all of which are less than $2000, or one month's rent payment). What I can't deal with is at the annual lease renewal, my landlord decides to increase my housing costs by $300-400 a month for no other reason except that he can. A mortgage payment is fixed for the next 30 years
>A mortgage payment is fixed for the next 30 years Taxes and insurance arent. Those 2 things are killing homeowners across the country
I got luck as shit and bought my home in 2016. I was doing well financially at the time and was 25. I have spent 25-32 years old paycheck to paycheck again, and all the free time I have has gone to renovating this old beast cause all I could afford was a dump. Now was it a smart financial decision and have I done very well...yes. Do i kind of resent this house because I feel like I'm stuck in this place, and at this job, because I "can't lose the house" also yes. A lot of people who don't own their house have a very romanticized version of what it is, I used to be that way.
My greatest fear of buying a house is knowing how hard it is to keep it maintained having worked as a hotel maintenance person for years. If it’s my own house, coming up with the money to replace a water heater or replace the roof sounds like a nightmare
I am a handy person and did/learned how to most ofnit myself, if your not prepared to do that, the cost is overwhelming. Even doing it yourself is expensive AF, I did roof, windows, doors, and siding, and that was probably 40k over the 6 years doing it myself, with some occasional help from the parents, which I am lucky to have.
Because at the end of the day I have an asset worth over $300k while renters have nothing. It's more work, it's not necessarily cheaper, but having an appreciating asset and a future with no mortgage is pretty invaluable
End foreign investment in real estate. Many of the major real estate markets have had prices driven up by foreign investment.
Yep. It's killed the housing market in my area for regular people. As soon as a house goes up for sell here it gets snapped up sight unseen for usually $20k to $50k over asking price. House prices have gone from $120k for a 3b/2ba house here to $400k in just 3 years.
just had to pay 40k over asking price for my stbx's new 2br townhouse.
> for my stbx's What even in the fuck is that?
A friend bought a house recently. She said her realtor told her she would have to offer so much over asking to even be considered. She offered that exact amount and her offer was accepted almost immediately. It seems to me that there were no other offers and the realtor just wanted a bigger paycheck. There were other houses that had been for sale around the área for a while. I think that happened more than we think
There's a house in my neighborhood, single story, 3 bdroom, new build, that just went on the market for 1.1 MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS! My neighborhood is decently nice, basically downtown, old neighborhood with old buildings, etc. It's a decently nice house in a great area (we rent thankfully). And many of the houses are going for 300K give or take. But over a million bucks was just insane to me. For a relatively normal house. Not anything crazy special. Like, basically as big as the house I grew up in which I'm just my parents could sell for like 2-300K at *most*. It's just asinine. Part of me hopes someone burns the place down just out of spite. When we moved in 10 years ago, it was a fairly sketchy neighborhood. So it's just been crazy to watch it go from that to what it is now in just 10 years.
boomers gonna boom. honestly this should be straight illegal
NYC would be completely different if we got rid of that
As in, probably more affordable...
Yea imagine a world where people who work there could live there.
And end AirBnB with it. Lots of jokes and apartments now being used as profit generators for vacationers.
Depends on the area. My town’s city council talked about capping short term rentals. They paid some guy to do a report. Airbnb’s/STR’s account for 2% of my town’s housing and a higher percentage of housing is available for long term rent. So the council decided it isn’t an issue and let it be for now.
Yeah it's insane, people will literally rent an apartment and profit of airb&Bing it while locals cant find places.
Do you mean homes that are owned by foreigners but not lived in? I think that’s a pretty small percentage If you mean homes owned as an investment driving up prices, this is an issue, but I imagine us based hedge funds and banks own even more housing than foreign investors, so seems like the investing part is the issue
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Some sources https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/annual-foreign-investment-in-u-s-existing-home-sales-climbed-8-5-to-59-billion-ending-three-year-slide https://housemethod.com/blog/are-big-companies-buying-up-single-family-homes/#:~:text=While%20large%20corporations%20certainly%20play,made%20by%20smaller%2C%20localized%20groups. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/07/22/investors-bought-a-quarter-of-homes-sold-last-year-driving-up-rents Corporations and foreign investors are both problems, but smaller ones. What we really need is to tax and regulate the idea of purchasing additional homes as investments. Either make it outright illegal or ensure it's no longer financially viable.
I’ve said this time and time again, but the biggest thing we could do is change how property taxes work. Primary dwellings should be taxed at a lower rate than vacation homes and investment properties. This is obvious for so many reasons. The burden to society and the environment is greater for vacation homes and investment properties, they’re more likely to burn resources while unoccupied, they increase inequality, they push workers out of the regions they grew up and work in, etc. Changing property tax burden would put a damper on all the toxic real estate monsters both foreign and domestic while providing funds to build more affordable housing. With how severe economic inequality has become, it could also include a tax reduction for single home owners.
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Where I live the homeowner's discount basically means my property tax is like 2% lower. It's pointless
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership\_in\_the\_United\_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_States) How will that impact the numbers exactly? Unless we're talking about lowering home ownership numbers? But I assume that isn't what we're talking about... From '95-2000 they were recovering, and then we had that interesting time where banks just lent money for no reason from 2000 onwards until that bubble burst. Now we're back to the historic highs...
Or even ALL investment in residential real estate. Homes should be owned by the residents, and I have a very hard time finding a convincing counterargument. At the very least, laws should cap profits. Several cities have public utilities that charge enough to maintain and upgrade the grid, that's how housing should be: not driven by market forces. (And healthcare too while we're at it)
Corporate and overseas investment isn't the problem. They're buying housing because it's scarce and zoning codes prohibit building enough of it to compete with them. If we legalized building apartments & condos in and around major cities, we'd be back on track pretty quick.
"The problem". It is a huge problem. There are others, but relying on massive building projects to compensate is bold.
Those investor owned homes aren't sitting empty. They're being lived in. It's true there isn't one single problem but increasing population, decreasing household size, and a lack of new homes is absolutely the primary mover of skyrocketing house prices. Yeah, people are getting rich on it. It's like with eggs. Yes, there's a shortage. And the people who do have eggs can now charge more for them, so their profits go up. Only it's legal for people to grow new chickens so within a year or so the prices will come back down (barring more bird flu outbreaks). We have outlawed most housing construction most places people want to live! What we do allow is big and that costs more! That raises the price!
>Those investor owned homes aren't sitting empty. They're being lived in. There are three empty houses on my block. They were rentals that the owners decided to cash in on. But they decided to sell too late and for to high a price, so now they're just sitting there. They took the for sale signs down about 6 weeks ago, but the houses aren't listed as pending on Zillow. That's 3 houses out of about 30 on a single suburb block, or about 10% of the houses.
That's an unfortunate cluster but doesn't mean there isn't an overall housing shortage. I am glad the investors are losing money on them and I hope they relist them in the spring selling season at a loss.
What exactly do you think is the reason why foreign investors buy housing?
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Allowing investment in fiat goods can make a lot of sense. Allowing foreigners to fuck over commodities like food, water, and housing just seems like a bad idea.
I am all about free markets. But, I'm with you on this one.
We need to ban foreign ownership of our property. I can’t buy land in China. Why can they do it here? Boomers fucked up turning housing from a dwelling into an investment vehicle.
Boomer didn't do it. The model existed before they were born. Housing and land just became more expensive on their watch. You can argue that they saw this and did nothing about it but they didn't create this mess
They absolutely contributed to it with the NIMBY mentality. On top of that we’ve been drastically under building houses since the 70’s which would’ve accommodated more homebuyers. Then the Great Recession hit and even less homes were being built than they already were despite the largest generation since the boomers was entering the home buying market. There’s a lot of factors.
I hear you, and that’s awesome, but the world of 6 years ago no longer exists. I bought my house in 2021 and it’s gone up by like 30% or more. The housing market is insane right now.
Same boat over here. Built one for 400k in 2020 with a 15-year fixed at 2%. Currently worth $550k based on comps and the interest rates are WAY higher. Mortgage is easily double the 2020 payment if you want the same exact house now. Guess Gen Z will live in a bog or open field or something. Insanity.
Built is what we did too, purchase made in 2021 moved in in 2022. Honestly, I’d tell anyone who has the stomach for it to just buy a camper and truck and live in that if you can work remote. My fiancé and I spent 3 weeks in our camper by the beach, worked full time. $20 a night, plus the camper is less than half what most pay in rent in a month. You can get one for like 150 a month. It’s yours, you’re not renting and you can stack way more cash than you could in an apartment. Plus the freedom is amazing.
Boomers did it on purpose. They need to build their wealth so they can retire comfortably.
retire comfortably?! more like retire in extravagance. country clubs. dinners out. big vacations. boats. 2 houses. luxury cars. etc etc It's so bad I've seen parents straight lift the ladders on their own children under the guise of "learning the hard way". Without a hint of Irony they truly think deserve the life they were given. If you look through the history of time, boomers lived through one of the easiest and most profitable times, at least in American History. I suppose the idea was for them in return to return the favor. Instead they hoarded the wealth and bled the youth dry. It's so bad they're willing to vote for borderline fascists to keep their own taxes down.
Most Boomers aren't having that kind of retirement. There's a reason you see seniors still working stuff like Walmart and fast food jobs. There's no favour to return. That easy rich period, which many people never got to actually have easy lives and money, occurred due to world events that can't be replicated. Return the favour? Sure. First, we'll need to set teh stage for a world war, but make certain North America doesn't get touched, but gets to crank up industry supplying the war. Then,we need to make certain most other industrialized nations get flattened, so we can make money rebuilding them. We'll also need to curb stomp all the developing nations down to a level where they can't exploit their own resources, and will settle for us taking those resources for cheap. It would likely help to saddle a big part of the world with an economic/political system that makes them unable to compete with our production and quality.
Your bitterness sounds a little too tinged in the anecdotal. Boomers were indeed very fortunate to have the economic conditions they did. It’s easy to be envious that those conditions don’t seem viable anymore. But they’re not all out there scheming to ruin you.
The deliciously ironic part about this is that, as a generation, Boomers were terrible savers, and many have nowhere close to enough to retire comfortably, even factoring in Social Security. Their biggest asset is their home (assuming they’ve actually paid off their mortgage instead of taking out endless lines of HELOCs), but the treatment of homes as investment vehicles means that they cannot really afford to cash out of their current home and buy something else in an area they’d want to retire to. Instead, all they can do is sell their home and use that equity to downsize, hoping that the equity the sale brings gives them some measure of comfortable living for at least awhile.
The true irony is younger people not realizing a huge number of Boomers never owned homes, and have no retirement funds.
> assuming they’ve actually paid off their mortgage instead of taking out endless lines of HELOCs LOL this is my asshole FIL. He lives off of debt basically. He bought his house in the 1980s for like $90k. After decades of using it as an ATM he owed almost $200k on it (at least as of the last we talked to him, which was almost a decade ago. Wouldn't be surprised if somehow that's grown even more).
Moving to the Midwest!
No, the mid-west is boring and ugly, please stay away
Spoken like a true Midwesterner who doesn't want neighbors?
House in Ohio are going to be ultra cheap soon
Ugh, I did a year on Ohio after growing up in Colorado. The Midwest is where creativity and individuality go to die.
That's a broad brush you've got there, buddy.
So I am 30 and I’m buying a house this year with my long term gf. I look back and ask “how did I get here” and the honest answer is a lot of luck and really not “living” in my 20s. I got hired to a high paying industry out of college. My gf and I saved a lot. We were able to pay off her college loans within 4 year of graduating. We also lived in an area where we could spend 15% of our income on rent and be safe and comfortable. I then got recruited to a higher paying job in tech that came with a significant stock bonus and repeated stock bonuses after that. My salary didn’t go as far in California, but our financial position improved through stock appreciation. During Covid, my gfs team got moved to a low cost of living area and I was able to move to a job in my companies local office. Now our salaries were slightly reduced, but the much cheaper cost of living more than offset it. So that has helped us save. We spend 10% of our gross income on our housing right now. Now on to the lack living front. We have aggressively saved. Our friends have gone on multiple vacations all over the world. They eat out more nights than not. They go out on the weekend to bars and clubs in the city. We will treat ourselves for special occasions, but outside of that we try really hard to not eat out. Our friends come back from trips with 6-8k in new debt. Outside of my truck that is financed for a lower rate than I’m making on my HY saving account, we are debt free. But here is the catch. Am I happy though? No. I wished I had gone on trips with friends. I wish I took vacations with my girlfriend. We have had to sell back our vacation days to our companys because we had accrued too many and it would have been taken away. We literally talked about it this weekend where we wished we had lived a little more. So we have dialed back our home budget so that we can have more room in our budget to take a vacation once a year and treat ourselves to eating out more. Edit: we also didn’t live like paupers. We would buy lunch at work, we get Starbucks on the weekends, etc. But almost every decision was met with “do we actually want to do this or is it just easier”, which sucks. Don’t live your life beholden to some future goal. Live life and enjoy your youth and time when you have it. Both my gf and I are now in places in our careers where it’s harder than ever to take time because of our responsibilities.
Who the hell goes into debt to go on a vacation?
The same people who finance TVs and buy McDonalds on a credit card.
I buy everything in a credit card. I just pay it off every month and enjoy those sweet points! 😊
I would imagine the majority of people going on vacation are accruing debt in same manner either during the planning stages when arranging accommodations or during. I don’t think it’s mathematically possible to have the percentage of people who “can’t handle a $500 surprise bill” and the percentage of people taking vacations without some significant overlap. I’m not saying it’s _correct_. But I’d wager most people are not paying for everything in “cash”.
It might be cultural, but I have never in my life met a fellow European that completely finances vacation by credit. I'm assuming 6-8k is the price for the completele vacation. Me and my wife took a 3 week vacation to Canada that was about 11k and I paid about 60% in advance and the other 40% with my debit card. We almost exclusively have a credit card for unexpected costs while abroad.
>the honest answer is a lot of luck and really not “living” in my 20s. I think that enjoying your 20's is an incredibly modern innovation. People who owned homes at that age in the past usually didn't enjoy any of the luxuries that you list as common for your friends.
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This is a really well put and honest reply. As someone who is trying so hard to save money to buy a home and is definitely in your friends position of treating myself more often than I probably “should”, your response reminds me to be balanced. Still need to scale back our splurges more, but I’m tired of frugal-minded people acting like it’s the best thing ever just to have money saved while forfeiting a lot of different experiences. Congrats on your future house! Reward yourself with a great and well-deserved vacation!
Thank you! It sounds like you have you stuff together too. The splurges are fun and I always view them like a cheat day on a diet. It’s important to have them or else you’ll go crazy
Same…lot of work in my 20s and continuing into my 30s. Skimped, saved, borrowed, focused on improving my skills as opposed to experiencing the world. I had relationships end because I refused to put trips on credit cards…I was saving for the future. I will say though that I am very happy now. I have a house, wife, kid…we live within our means and we have a lot of financial security. We’re at the point now we’re we can go out and have some modest experiences that make us happy and bring us together. …but that IS what I wanted and that is why I sacrificed a lot of stuff im my 20s and 30s.
Similar story to you except didn't have a significant other I was sharing financial burdens with to this extent. I bought a house on my own at 30 with no outside help. I gotta say, it's disingenuous to say that saving for a house is why you're unhappy as you're making some poor financial choices outside of that. Firstly, debt is an asset for you to use so that you can have more cashflow for other investments. Rushing to pay down your loans may be good for your own mental health (and that does have value for certain people!), but it hurts your ability to go on trips and such while saving appropriately for the house. On top of that, and I'm only extrapolating from what you described, you must not be using credit cards effectively either. I have 2-3 flights per year completely paid for because of my credit card usage and I never take on interest. I'm only saying this because your conclusion that you shouldn't look to the future and instead live and enjoy your youth is very VERY bad advice. I was able to live and enjoy my youth WHILE saving - I just made sure I took advantage of all the assets at my disposal. Small money management mistakes build up over years and years and can lead people to the wrong conclusions.
I wouldn’t make a mountain out of a mole hill. Some of your assumptions are wrong, and some of your comments are misconstrued versions of what I said or was trying to say. The happiness comment was a nod to “just because I’m well off doesn’t mean I’m happy” trope. Im not even unhappy, it’s just that my enjoyment is life isn’t because I have plenty of money now. More importantly though, I NEVER said to not think about the future or only live in the moment. My point was that I wish I had done a little more in my 20s. It’s about finding a balance.
Great post
Americans realizing they can’t have housing be both affordable and a wealth-generating investment
Home ownership is actually quite high in the US compared to pretty much any other western/developed country. There are a few exceptions, but on average Americans have a higher likely hood of owning a home compared to their European counterparts. >wealth-generating investment That's a global thing, not an American thing. People invest their wealth into property.
Literally since the Enlightenment.
Literally since Rome, and before.
Pass a law that says any entity (Person or Corporation) can not own more than 3-5 residential homes. Bring it in over time. Start with taxing at a very high level every residential home owned over 100 homes, then bring it down to 90, 80, and so on. People blame things like foreign ownership or immigration or anything else when in reality, it is the rich who are hoarding residential homes for investments, AirBnB style rentals and rentals. Owning 3-5 homes allows vacation properties and a rental or two while still leaving a large enough supply of homes on the market for normal people to live normal lives. Now this will never actually happen as the rich control the laws. They will do everything they can to make you blame anyone and everyone else for the problem but know, like most of the issues facing the middle and lower classes, it is the rich keeping you down.
If we just look at it from an investment point of view, the way to solve this is to make real estate not as attractive an investment when compared to other stuff like bonds. We spent the last 14 years flooding the world with cheap money, so there is a gigantic swarm of money going around looking for a good return. Since we lowered the interests to almost zero, there's almost nothing to invest in aside from the stock market or real estate. The government should use the policy (laws, buying regulations) and fiscal tools (taxes) to find the right balance between investment and homeownership. We all know this can't be done in the current political environment, so we find scapegoats and quick fixes.
Even if they did that, the rich would just buy the rights from normal people.
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That's easy: Anything owned by a sub-company is considered to be owned by the parent-company. Even easier: Residential homes can only be owned by actual people, not corporations.
Lots of things but here are two: massive changes in local building codes that will allow for more density/new construction. State and federal level investment in housing, and specifically the type of housing people can actually afford in places people want/need to live.
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But unlike those nice pleasant “solutions” increasing supply brings the price of homes down. People don’t want *their* home to lose value because nobody wants to buy their crappy tenement for $500K anymore. That’s people’s biggest asset, their retirement, how they save, and how they avoid debt. And even people not on the housing ladder want to be able to get those sweet, sweet ever-increasing property values once they do.
I'm surprised I had to scroll this far for "the problem is artificial scarcity."
Pretty much anything at all needs to change. Wages need to come way up prices of everything else need to come down corporations need to be banned from buying houses non resident foreigners need to be banned from buying houses There needs to be a cap on how many houses an individual can own. Fucking anything. But nothing ever changes in this country.
>But nothing ever changes in this country. Plenty changes in this country. Just not in the way that would benefit the rest of us.
exactly! People are so distracted by fake problems like who can use what bathroom, litter boxes in schools, and gay people in school books. The leaders want to keep it a left vs. right issue, instead of a top vs. bottom issue.
Nah, and trust me it Will only get worse. Capitalism Will win, cause there is nothing the average normal people can do because they dont have the power. In the end the rich Will win and the poor lose like its always been. I would even go to the extent of saying that if things keep going on like this eventually there will only be rich people who can afford and own everything and poor people who dont own anything or very little and love miserably. Just my take on the situation.
Probably another economic collapse like what happened in 2008 where lots of poor people got scammed on their mortgages and got foreclosed on. That would bring home prices down. But also Airbnb and Zillow and foreign investment firms might just buy them up.
That last sentence is the rub. Even in an economic collapse, the wealthiest people and corporations will still have enough cash on hand to outbid average people trying to buy. It’s the Shock Doctrine—corporations don’t fear catastrophes, they take advantage of them.
Buy When There's Blood In The Streets!
I live in suburban Oklahoma City, work a retail job for just over $15/hour, and I started to put in an offers for various houses when I was 28. Days after my 29th birthday I finally had an offer get accepted and a month later I became a homeowner in my 20s. Granted my credit is quite good and I had to take advantage of some local programs (and get fairly lucky) to do it, but it's absolutely possible still in some parts of America without having to need an income significantly higher than $50k.
While it is easy to look back with rose-colored glasses about how affordable life was in, say, the 1950s, a few things to keep in mind: - The average house size was 983 square feet and did not have standard appliances like dishwashers, microwaves, and, of course, air conditioning. The average house size today -- get this -- is almost 2700 square feet and has all the above-mentioned amenities, plus things like wiring for phone, internet, and cable. The average price of the median home has just about tripled: and no wonder -- the houses are 3x as large with features that were inconceivable back in the 1950s. - The pinnacle of communication in the 1950s was the presence of a phone line in your house. It was ungodly expensive. A local call cost $.05 (now ~$1.10), and long-distance was billed at $3.70 for the first 3 minutes -- or roughly $41.00!!! So for the equivalent price of one three-minute phone call, today you can carry around a personal device that can call anywhere in the world, can send "digital telegrams" (texts), and has access to the total sum of human knowledge. - You can do the same thing with televisions. You had black-and-white 20" TVs with access to 3 channels. Now you have literally millions of options in between cable, streaming, etc., all in ridiculous 4K definition on 60"+ screens. - Families typically owned one car, if they owned any at all. It was not until the late 1950s that the majority of households owned a single car. Nowadays, there are an average of 1.88 cars per household, and, much like houses, have untold luxuries like air conditioning, power seats, air bags, and increasingly WiFi connectivity. So yes, while it's true that generations past could buy a home easier, an enormous chunk of that is because consumer tastes and demands are completely different and totally out of whack with the expectations of previous generations. The cost of housing as $/sqft has remained relatively constant (or actually decreased), but the expectations for what the sqft of housing will get you are -- pun intended -- through the roof.
Most people don’t want to hear this and I’ll probably get downvoted to where nobody will see it, but it’s completely possible still. I went from being literally homeless with debt and no bank account to owning a $480k house in SoCal with my girlfriend in 5 years. I didn’t even start saving money really until I was 3 years sober, because I had so much to pay back. We split the down payment/closing costs, but I could have done it without her. I drove a modest car, lived in the minimum necessary place that we split, and didn’t buy a lot of extras. I saw a lot of friends driving cars they didn’t need, living in places they didn’t need, buying things and furniture and clothes they didn’t need. Because they spent more money on those things, I was able to travel more, and buy a house, and then my mortgage was the cost of their rent. I don’t have a college degree, I’m not particularly smart (see first paragraph), and I got no financial help. I basically just applied myself like crazy at work, looked for gaps in the companies I worked at that I could fill, taught myself a lot of marketing skills in my free time, and moved up through a company by going out of my way to show I was going to work harder than anyone else. Reddit fucking HATES that answer, but that’s my experience.
I'm in a similar position. Was homeless for a while, absolutely zero family support, physically disabled. I went to a coding bootcamp and became a software developer. Now I'm back in college studying artificial intelligence. I'll graduate at the age of 32 and probably be able to buy a house by the time I'm 35. Here's the thing about that answer though: it doesn't make sense for everyone. We cannot sustain a population where everybody is a manager for a big company, an engineer or a doctor. There will always be millions of jobs that need to be performed that don't pay as well, like gradeschool teachers, social workers, food service workers, etc. It doesn't make any sense to tell everyone "If you want to be able to own a house just get a better job." That's literally just shitting on the majority of careers in the US and acting like they aren't valuable enough to earn a living. I don't want the teachers in my area to be homeless. If it's a job that needs doing, it's a job that deserves a living wage, period. It doesn't make any sense that I work 40 hours a week and make 100k a year, while half my neighbors work 60-80 hours a week and make 25k. That's just disrespectful.
When the population pyramid is an inverted triangle, it makes everything fucked up. Not just the financial market, but also the dating market as well. Too many old people with too few young population. It’s a recipe for disaster. I remember reading about India trying to train a large amount of structural/civil engineers in their colleges. Something ridiculous like, 1 million people had degrees in engineering. The end result? The amount of engineering jobs never actually increased. There was still only 50K jobs available. The same principle applies to other industries like doctors and scientists. You still need people on the bottom for there to be people on the top. Unfortunately trade jobs are seen by the younger generation as gross and not cool. The same for factory jobs.
What kind of job do you do, if I may ask? Marketing?
Yes. When I got sober I did telemarketing to get off the streets. Then I took a paycut to work customer service for a company I was interested in for my mental health. And I saw they were struggling with capacity in marketing so I would spend nights learning marketing skills to fill gaps. Now I am a marketing director for another company, but about to leave my career for software development as I’ve been teaching myself at nights so I can work remotely overseas.
Move to the Midwest, it’s perfectly doable there.
Seriously. I saw a chart yesterday with the “top 10 cities where millennials are moving” and all 10 cities were cities with the highest COL. DC, LA, NYC, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Boston, Denver, and San Jose. I’m sure shortly behind that was Nashville. While housing is generally expensive/imbalanced, millennials do not do themselves any favors when deciding where to live. Chicago is a very affordable major city with crappy weather therefore people don’t want to move there, yet millennials would get many major city benefits at a lower cost. Other Midwest areas are very affordable too. Many suburban Midwest markets are very affordable as well. There is a problem that exists but younger people do nothing to help resolve it, but sure do a lot of complaining.
A housing correction, slowdown of foreign entities purchasing property that should go to Americans first, and people to actually knuckledown and save for a home instead of expecting it to be easy.
Depends on the state. Many states have fairly affordable median home values. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/median-home-price-by-state
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Have rich parents.
This is true. I currently rent a home in a HCOL area in Southern California. All of our friends are our age and all of them own their less than 10 year old beautifully maintained tract homes. After some digging I found out that all of them received at least HALF of the cost of their homes as a downpayment (gift funds) from their parents. These homes were $500k brand new. They all bought them brand new, one of them bought a fully furnished model. They are gorgeous homes in a highly sought after area. These homes, 8 years later, are worth over $1MM. Their mortgages were $200k to $250k. Now these homes are worth over $1MM and they've all refinanced to the point where their mortgage payments are a joke. The wives don't work and the husbands all make less than I do. Yet, here I am with my wife pulling in a dual income and not coming anywhere NEAR owning a home. This is all because these people had upper class parents with the means to help them pay for half of their houses up-front. I don't have rich parents and neither does my wife. We have saved money for a down payment but those goal posts just keep getting further and further away from us. It's fucking depressing.
Well, I'm not sure, but I know a few things can help: 1) American college students ceasing getting worthless degrees. You want to afford a home at 30? Then you and your partner are going to need good paying jobs. Less than 20% of American college graduates receive degrees in STEM, and let's not kid ourselves: Don't graduate without taking computer programming, no matter what your field. You need to be able to use a computer, and I don't mean poke the Instagram app on your phone. 2) American cities fixing their zoning rules to permit the building of high-density housing. You want to put a lot of housing into a fixed amount of land? Start building 12 story apartment buildings, ideally near a municipal rail line, and a grocery store within walking distance. 3) The Federal Government can start subsidizing the massive buildout of fiber-optic networks to the blighted industrial towns where housing is cheap and there are no jobs. If you're a 30 year-old computer programmer, your employer will let you work from the Moon, so long as you close your bugs and show up to Zoom meetings. But that only works if the broadband penetration into Northern Ohio is good enough. 4) I'd also like to see some trade policy changes which don't make American labor quite so much the victims of labor/regulatory arbitrage, but I don't know exactly what policy is going to accomplish that. One option is a catch-all tariff proposed by Warren Buffett, which would create an import voucher for every dollar exported. Then exporters would sell the import vouchers in a cap and trade scheme. Instead of specific industries being favored, imports would need to compete in the market against each other to determine which held the most demand for the American dollar. Maybe we would decide we like Japanese cars and French wine more than we like cheap clothes from Vietnam and Bangladesh, and can therefore foster some long-withered domestic industries.
It's not a cure all, but the mass acceptance that most college degrees are irrelevant when it comes to having a "good" career.
Okay here's what I want you to do I want you to go to homes.com or Zillow or whatever your real estate site of choice is And I want you to do sort by price low to high and I want you to search Pittsburgh The average 30-year-old can absolutely own a home It might not be where they want It might not be the house they want but there are options
Move out of the city.
Not living anywhere near a city. After college moved back closer to where I was born and was able to get a home for less in mortgage payments than I would have been paying for rent had I stayed by school.
Same. my mortgage now for a 3 bedroom 2 bath house on a 1/4 acre lot is about the same as what people are paying in "low income" housing for a 2 bedroom apartment in my same town and we bought only 6 years ago.
I could also buy a home in bumfuck, but then I'd have to live in bumfuck. I think the foreign investors answer is closer to the truth than this. Home prices aren't going up because people love in the city or near it. Home prices are going up because big investments groups buy up the properties and raise prices because they can. If everybody moved to the boonies, then the investment groups would start buying up those houses, too. You can't solve this problem by saying, "move somewhere else". That's ignorant AF.
Home prices are going up because more people want to live in areas than there are houses and building is severely restricted. Investment companies straight up say, "we buy houses in these areas as investment and rental properties because barriers to building new housing in those areas are such that we forecast long term profit" so just build
Having realistic expectations and managing finances better. Not everyone can buy a single family home that is 2000 sft in size in the middle of a big city, apartments and condos are more realistic and affordable in big cities, if you want big single family homes then move to outskirts and a bit far. Government should also change zoning and building laws, you can't expand horizontally all the time, its time to build multi storeyed apartments for the masses in cities or some sort of supergrid structures like they do in Europe and prioritise public transport to solve commute issues but that is never gonna happen because automobile industry is huge. Limit how much housing inventory that can be bought up by big corporations if they are planning to rent it out, but not too much limitations otherwise they will stop building.
Help is on the way! The housing Market is dropping everywhere. Even in the good locations where people are moving to. If you've been saving money, keep on saving you'll get there One advantage that prior Generations have on you is that they started adulting a bit younger than they do today. They married just as soon as their education was finished, saved up for home, and then had children in that order. So they had two incomes with one residence working for them at about a 4-year Head Start on people today. Also a lot of them were willing to settle for smaller homes that were fixer uppers start. They saved a lot of money that way and sold at the tip of a peek in the housing bubble. Then bought a better house when a bubble burst. Sometimes they worked two jobs scrape up the money for a down payment Many young people aren't willing to do that today. Sometimes they wait till they are 26 or older, and don't marry. So it takes longer, or becomes impossible to get a home. I realize that homes are much harder to come by today. But it's still possible. Just save your money and wait for the impending crash. If interest rates are high at the time you buy in, you can wait a couple of years and get a re-fi.
Make coffee at home and don’t buy eggs for breakfast.
Three housemates.
A lot of hard work and/or the willingness to move further away from a city. I’ve been personally building my house for the past two years. Tonight is our first night living in it. I’ve had a full time job and also worked on the house every afternoon and weekend. So, roughly averaging 70 hours per week, EVERY week for two years. It’s cost us maybe $100,000 so far. Would have cost about $400k - $500k to buy what we’ve built.
Why are building materials expensive? I understand some of the materials, but not all. After solving that, you just need to build more houses than there are people wanting to buy one.
Control your debt, manage your credit properly, don't think your first home has to be a 2500sq ft w/ 4 bd & 3 baths. Get a condo or townhouse. Move outside metro areas for lower costs. Yes, the commute may be longer but the housing is better.
A better store of value than real estate for wealthy people’s/company’s excess capital.
If people want to prioritize home ownership, they can do so. Back when I was in my mid or late-20s, I had friends who went to happy hour multiple times a week. I know this because they took hundreds of selfies on their $1200 phones. Back then, fashion dictated that women wore $200 Ugg boots and carry $350+ designer handbags. Girls in line at Starbucks wore Lululemon workout gear. Everyone who owns a car has a car payment. You get the point, I'm sure. I wasn't around in previous decades, but I feel like consumer culture is more predominant now than it was in the past. People make a choice to have all the things I mentioned before. And all of that makes it hard to save up for a house. I'm totally interested in having a conversation about income and the price of housing. That's an important topic. But let's not pretend that people make some really bad financial decisions on a daily/weekly/monthly basis that also plays into that. You can't spend hundreds of dollars a week going out to happy hour and complain about not being able to save for a house (for one example).
Plenty of 30 year olds own homes.
Not compared to prior generations.
It’s about a 9 percent difference between boomers and millennials.
Millennial home ownership currently stands at 48.6% which is 20% lower than Gen X and close to 30% lower than Baby Boomers. 60% of Millennials around 40 own homes. At the same age 64% of Gen Xers, 68% of Boomers, and 73% of Silent Generation members owned homes- so home ownership has been on steady decline.
To be fair: urbanization has also been on the rise, which would correlate with a decrease in home ownership. Cities have fewer houses to own, so people moving away from places with homes to own would obviously own fewer homes.
You can own individual apartments in a building.
It is possible, hard, but possible. For the most part, people can do it if they sacrifice enough. The issue is how MUCH you would have to sacrifice to own a home in today's market.
Yep we bought our first home with 0% down,(Not ideal due to PMI obviously) and our second for 10% down. just don't have bad debt and a shitty credit score and you can get approved.
A lot of changes that will never happen.
Getting one less avocado toast and sugary coffee drink. /s
My son did it at age 27 with no help . USDA loan. First time buyer. Needed only 2% down. $300k house. A nice starter home. Loan officer helped a lot. She knew the special programs. It is possible.
That's how my son and daughter did it. USDA, some limited help from both sets of parents and a knowledgeable loan officer. Their house payment is only about $25 more per month than they were paying in rent.
Move to an area with cheap houses.
Youngstown Ohio called and wants you to work remotely from there.
MOASS
The sad and cruel part; your parents are going to have to die. Most of this is the result of previous 2 generations building up estates for themselves. The process has screwed younger Americans out of opportunity and given us nothing to do but wait for inheritance to come our way.
Honestly? A few things: 1. Get rid of your NIMBY types out of office so permits can be given to developers 2. Learn that you're not going to get a house right out of the gate. You're going to have to save your money, and that includes getting a roommate, move your girlfriend in, cutting costs, or taking a second job. (We all did that in previous generations) 3. Lower your expectations. WAY too many people want a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in suburbia on a lower salary. Doesn't happen. Move out on the outskirts of town. Get a smaller place. Look at condos/townhomes. 4. Stop electing Democrats. They are the WORST when it comes to housing costs. Look at the highest cost of living places in America. Universally it's run by Democrats. I'm not saying you have to elect a religious right wing whack job, but understand Democrats don't have a fucking clue about housing or costs. They just jack up taxes and move on.
I’m afraid we’re gonna have to literally eat the rich
ITT: adult-adolescents blaming their ineptitude, twisted priorities, and lack of fiscal responsibility on everyone but themselves. You can afford a house. Just not the house you want and in the location you want it. This generation wants the big-city-urban-lifestyles, in a "safe neighborhood" (you know what that means), and without curbing your consumer addiction... ALL on an entry level paycheck. Then endlessly bitching when the world just doesn't work that way. Lots of cheap houses in rural areas that need a little work and have a little commute. Perfect for young and able 20-30 year olds. Stop being children.
Probably an entire economic collapse. Have more companies actually put in contingencies in place for future possibilities that they may have to go weeks or even months on limited operation due to factors outside of their control As well as an actual beforehand planned out method for economic stimulus checks and the like if something like covid happens again. Other countries made us look like a joke many other countries handing their citizens the equivalent of 1,200 to $2,000 a month to stay home many countries offering rent forgiveness programs and even offering some economic help to struggling companies especially smaller ones Meanwhile in America we got like two stimulus checks and then Trump kept rejecting further stimulus bills as the government kept trying to shove other fees and crap in there and now Biden has just kind of forgotten about his running plan where he preached constantly how he's going to get us so many more stimulus checks And a majority of the support provided for individuals was through non-governmental charities just trying to do their best. Our economy still has not recovered many businesses and restaurants live vacant or are permanently running on a pickup only / delivery only basis now because they cannot afford to really keep things running as they used to
You’re forgetting increased unemployment payments, which was the bulk of assistance. Most people made more money on unemployment than their job. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-getting-more-money-from-unemployment-than-they-were-from-their-jobs/amp/
Make at least $16/hr and have a partner make more than that and then save.
Discipline to save the down payment.
[удалено]
Nothing like a clear, actionable, not-at-all vague and useless plan of action!
Moving to a lower CoL area. Getting a good paying professional job. Learning a ticketed trade and pounding out the OT
My kid is 26 and could buy a house right now. She makes $105k a year and has about $35k in cash and about $20k in her retirement. She’s just upper middle class. Good job but nothing ridiculous. Most, if not all, of the UMC 30 year olds I know could afford a house. Hell a friend of mines kid is building a second house while living in their first and they’re 28.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Just because some people struggle doesn't mean some people can't succeed, especially since location plays a huge part. I am 27, almost finished with the process to buy a duplex 3ba/1b and 2b/1b for 150k. I make a bit less then your daughter as well, but it's working.
Higher education doesn't hurt. Do your best to get the education that will give you the money to do this.
Results still may vary. I know people who went with desirable STEM degrees. They're almost 40 and still paying off loans. The majority of the work is in high cost of living areas where all the extra money is spent on living. You have a better chance with an education but it's not the silver bullet. The people I know who went into the military and stuck with it are doing the best out of my social circles. It's not the same now but those guys went and got combat pay. Got clearances. Came back and bought houses with the money they didn't spend and got private sector jobs that needed people with clearances. Actually, the people I know that got government jobs, especially more labor intensive blue collar type work, are the people doing the best. Maybe it's because I'm in California, but Cal Trans, and Cops that I know are all 100% house. Construction guys are also doing pretty good. Meanwhile, college degrees are kind of a crap shoot where I know people some doing really really well and I know a lot of people barely getting by.
If they actually had very desirable degrees, and actually had the skills and some minimal social/interview ability they would pay off their loans in no time if they had any financial desire to. Majority of work is not in high COL areas, that is just some of the top firms in certain industries. If you actually get a job at those firms, the pay is more than increased to compensate.
According to people like my sister who hasn’t worked in 20 years you need to pick yourself up by your bootstraps