Americans are living through the toughest housing market in a generation and, for some young people, the quintessential dream of owning a home is slipping away.
Mortgage rates surged in recent years, hitting the highest levels in more than two decades last fall. While rates have come down slightly since then, home prices remain painfully elevated and a limited inventory of housing is still failing to keep up with demand. Such conditions mean that housing has become woefully unaffordable.
Falling mortgage rates in recent weeks have helped, but home prices could remain sticky, according to economists. It’s still a cruddy time to be hunting for a home, but it’s even worse for young, first-time buyers who need to save up for a down payment and build up their credit score during a time when Baby Boomers are refusing to part with their big houses.
The situation isn’t a whole lot better for renters, with rents barely coming down from record highs and half of tenants in that market saying they can’t even afford their payments.
The uneasiness over America’s affordability crisis is captured clearly in surveys and polls, but data that outlines the sentiment specifically among young people is limited.
i do know a young, unmarried couple that bought a house last year. but it’s an old house, a bit run down, and in a dinky little town an hour away from just about everything but walmart (20 minutes away). is cheaper to live there than it is to pay rent in the larger town (that hour away) where his job is. they did that for the year before that. they were 19 and 20 when they closed on it, and they did it on their own.
Honestly I gave up a long time ago
Brit here. I’m 43, earning more than I ever have and have basically no hope of ever owning a home.
I was lucky enough to purchase my home before it doubled in value just under 6 years ago. And at a 2 and a quarter % rate. And now I’m locked into this house now because there’s no way I’m jumping out of a rate this low.
~8 years ago here, the numbers didn’t work out for me to drop my rate over covid but I found a house at $75k at 4.125 on a va loan, I recently bumped my payment to pay it off at 50 but my base mortgage is under $500. I’m not going anywhere.
And if you do, the market is just gonna crash and you’ll be stuck with that inflated mortgage and unable to move physically or financially.
Same. 40 yo, nearing the top of my industry in salary, and every time I look at the housing market, it doubles.
And Canada has been struggling with this for something like a decade. I am not Canadian, just adding to what you are saying in how this is not a problem that is limited to the USA.
We have the same problem as the US. Vote team red team or team blue. We have a team orange in Canada, however they’re seemingly unable to find strong leadership.
We don’t have a team orange anymore, they joined team red.
Because they lack strong leadership
In the USA we get the option to allow the rich to mostly ignore us while they increase their profits, or for them to flat-out enslave us while they increase their profits. Truly the worst time-line:-(.
German here. Same shit with house prices here. Unbelievable expensive. Netherlands, Denmark, Swiss, France all the same. All out of the cheap money/ interests thanks to Lehmans & broker bros.
The only country where housing is affordable is China. They built way too many apartment buildings. Entire ghost towns. People are fucked there as well though. Standard people lost a lot of money. Crazy world.
Yup. Globalization and automation are radically altering the state of our world. Worse, most people just ignore that entirely, probably b/c they simply don’t know what to do. e.g., Bezos has his cash from destroying many brick-and-morter enterprises, but he has his rocket so he don’t seem to care?
The one beacon of hope is ironically perhaps from the EU, maybe especially Germany? But if even you guys cannot - or really I mean will not - do anything about the housing crisis, then I am not sure that it will ever be done.
Meanwhile, people in the USA are just fucked no matter what, especially with Orange Julius (Caesar) coming back for his second term.
Australia has it ridiculously rough right now, too, when it comes to housing. Maybe, just maybe, making it an investment instrument instead of a place to live was a bad idea.
The trolly problem is designed to teach us that no matter what lies in front of us, we have to make choices. So whatever THEY did then, what will WE do now?
The answer ofc is that the USA will elect Donald Trump a second time. I wish I was kidding but… we are starting to see that there’s a good chance of that at this point. We might have to find out whether a President can run the country from a jail cell, or if that acts as a “I can get away with rape” card, or what. We’ve got some tough choices coming our way…
One thing I’ve been expecting for awhile now to start seeing - just b/c it has happened before, therefore is inevitable to happen again - is corporations making some living arrangements as a “perk” of doing business. Some places do this already, but as the competition drives towards making that an option, corporations could buy out a building for that purpose, then offer an “optional” subsidized living arrangement (as in technically you could turn it down, assuming you had somewhere else to go). That way we, focusing on those in the USA for a moment, would have all of salary, medical care (possibly including preexisting conditions), and then living arrangements all tied up in your workplace. Thus if the boss says suck my… whatever, you do it, b/c you cannot afford to become literally homeless - especially with the pandemic (almost plural at this point) of the unvaccinated greatly increasing the chances of actual death. So that’s slavery in the good ole USA, but also a step towards that elsewhere in the rest of the “Western” world as well (and the Eastern world already offers that iirc).
Lmfao “we all have choices, and here’s why Trump is gonna be the next president” welly welly well
the trolley problem is designed to teach us the nature and limits of our moral framework. the first iteration tests for consequentialism. each iteration after that tests the limits of that consequentialism.
Ah yes, the REAL (meta-)reason for it - yeah I just said it super poorly there, as in it “is often used for the purpose of illustrating that”.
Correction: Parts of Canada. It’s a big country with a lot of places in between Vancouver and the GTA.
That’s odd, i bought a house in 2001, sold it in 2005, went kinda transient for 15 years, here there and everywhere, and bought another house 2 years ago. This is probably because i didn’t give up in the early 2000s.
I thought about this recently and realized -
Alot of it is because retirement is effectively a thing of the past. People are working longer and longer, many until they pass. Pushing-40 millennials are still “the youth” because the people calling us that are used to their parents retiring at 55-65 even though they’re that age now and NOWHERE close.
Plus, many of us can’t “move up” in our careers BECAUSE those older folk aren’t retiring anymore and giving up the “good” jobs (those that aren’t being eliminated entirely of course.) They call us kids for not having big baller positions that we can’t get cause they’ve held it for 25+ years. Same with housing - we’re kids for not buying, but they won’t sell and move on like they used to anymore while they fight new development tooth and nail.
TLDR they see 30-40 year Olds as “kids” because they see themselves as 30-40 when comparing their progress to that of their parents generation.
I am 53 and live in DC. I bought just as the pandemic was starting when nobody knew what was going to happen and the rates were low. The market has since exploded and I could never have afforded the home I am in.
Some? Lol
We really need to hurry up and push more renter protections and figure out a better answer to retirement.
Renting is a perfectly acceptable option, this narrative that everyone must own or they’re somehow losers or something is just insane.
The problem is that renting is just pissing money away to the wind, and you are at the mercy of your landlord as far as how acceptable and affordable your situation is over time.
Renting is fine if you are looking to stabilize and (hopefully) accrue some savings, but renting anywhere halfway decent is often more expensive than a mortgage is in the same area.
It’s completely insane that rent is more than a mortgage.
If you live with someone and pay towards their mortgage, you can rightfully claim a share in the equity of their house. Yet, if you rent somewhere and pay your landlord’s entire mortgage, and then some, you get nothing.
Renting should be far less than mortgage rates. You get something out of a mortgage - ownership of a property.
This is entirely location dependent.
In my area it is generally cheaper to rent a house than buy. It has been that way for at least a decade.
Renting is literally paying for someone else to own a house or apartment or whatever. It guarantees that the landlord will always be able to make a killing by commoditizing a need for shelter. It’s sinister, and no matter how you paint it it remains sinister.
Renting isn’t sinister. You’re paying for a roof over your head without any large up front investment or maintenance costs. But it should be affordable, and owning should also be affordable. Neither are at the moment.
Not just that but we also need better tenant protections and ways to mediate tenant/landlord issues.
For example, a number of states only mandate availability of heat in the winter without any mandate for A/C in the summer.
I’ve had landlords get pussy about portable AC unit exhaust hoses sticking out of the window. That needs to be banned, and AC needs to be mandatory in new rentals (new builds and new leases on existing housing units.)
Aren’t portable AC units very inefficent?
Yes, espically one hose models, bit sometimes that’s all you can use
You’re paying someone else to deal with the bullshit of owning a property. You assume you actually will build wealth owning a house. This just isn’t true for everyone and everywhere.
If the foundation cracks, I can move as a renter and go somewhere else. As an owner, I’d be completely fucked.
If the house is in the way of a hurricane, I can pack up the stuff I care about and not give a shit about what happens to the house or anything else.
If the property value plummets for whatever reason, it just isn’t my problem to deal with.
It’s absurdly silly to think renting is entirely bad.
Renting isn’t bad. Being a landlord is bad.
And the majority of those who haven’t given up yet are simply delusional.
Is there any hope that it might get better in a few years, like downswings & upswings kind of a thing?
Nope. If you don’t already own a house you very likely never will.
W-w-well, I n-n-never wanted one a-a-anyway!
In Canada, the average person working full time makes about $37k a year. The average house price in Canada is something like ~$900k. We’re all super fucked.
Wait, I heard this one before…
Just gonna skip the sunset years myself and am gonna retire on a .38
Synonyms for capitalism:
commercialism industrialism mercantilism competition democracy individualism free enterprise private enterprise private ownership free market laissez-faire privatized industries laissez faire economics private sector free-enterprise economy free-enterprise system free economy capitalistic system economic sector self-regulating market
Not really, but go off queen?
You can still buy a house in rural America. A simple ranch house is still $150k in many small towns here in Kansas. Jobs do not pay as much, and there are few amenities, but normal people buy a house, get married, and have kids.
What are you saying right now lol
I’ve gave up. Now it’s just racing the clock to make sure I get something for my kids to live in. Even if it’s a bit of a commute.
I never dreamt about owning a home. For me, living in the same place for decades is boring. I want to live spontaneous and free. If I would get something for free, i could rent it to someone else after moving? I’m no wannabe landlord.
You can sell your house before the mortgage is paid off. The longest I’ve ever lived anywhere is ten years and I’ve owned three houses.
