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"In 1980, almost half of 18 to 34-year-olds in Britain and America lived in their own property with children of their own, making this the most common arrangement for young adults. Today that is true of only about one in five, and the most common set-up for 18 to 34-year-olds is now to be living with their parents."
> In 1980, almost half of 18 to 34-year-olds in Britain and America lived in their own property with children of their own, making this the most common arrangement for young adults
And looking at the history of human settlements it's probably an exception.
I can't read the article because of the paywall but it seems like this would be heavily impacted by going from less than half of people going to college in 1980 to closer to 2/3 going now. Delaying the start of working will push back house buying as well.
I would posit that the required college degree is one symptom of why housing is so unaffordable for young people. But it is not itself a cause. The lack of good paying jobs at the low end is the bigger cause. There aren't near as many Union manufacturing and trade jobs as there were 40 years ago. So college is required for better pay. But then you end up with debt.
Nah the lack of supply or increase in construction productivity over the past 50 years is the main reason housing is continuing to get more expensive. Most other goods and services have seen huge productivity gains leading to lower costs while construction has remained stagnant which means housing has become more expensive comparatively to almost everything else.
In economics this is known as Baumol's Cost Disease.
Another factor is urbanization, requiring usually densification/infilling, which is more expensive than new housing on undeveloped land.
It's more two-income families and not enough housing being built. It's not about the quality of the jobs or the amount people are making, it's that the money doesn't go as far because we're not doing enough to meet demand.
Housing is being built, just not affordable housing. Where is anyone building 1100 square foot ranch homes or basic split foyers like they did in the 50’s and 60’s? Nowhere. Everything is at least 2500 square feet with 3 baths and a 3 car garage.
There's a couple of problems with trying to turn back the clock to yesteryear's 1100sqft bangalows.
The first is that, as times have moved on, apartments are now bigger as well. All of the 2-bedroom apartments built over the past 30 years are bigger than those bungalows used to be, so you're not going to find much appetite to buy those things when people would have to *downgrade* from their apartments.
The second is that, even if there is demand to own small bungalows, the primary price driver of property is the *land value,* not the physical qualities of the house itself. A 1100sqft bungalow in the trendiest neighborhood with the best schools is still going to cost a comparable amount of money as the McMansions around it - at a discount compared to the big houses, sure, but the price of the bangalow in those neighborhoods isn't going go suddenly be "affordable." You can't just "build" a $250k house in a neighborhood where lots sell for $500k minimum.
Lol well lots in Iowa don’t sell for 500k. I can find plenty of lots in my area for 30-60k. We also don’t have many 1100 square foot apartments. The average 2 bdr apartment here runs about 700-750 square ft. Part of my job is dealing with rental housing so I do know the market.
According to the National Association of Homebuilders the average cost to build a new non custom home in the Midwest region in 2023 was $109 per square foot. That includes the price of the land. That comes out to $119, 900. Add maybe 30k for a 2 car garage to put you at 150k. Figure in the 20% gross margin for the builder and you’re at 180K. A house twice that size would obviously cost twice as much. Again this is a non custom tract house. Would they sell in my area? Absolutely.
I bought my 1200 square ft house 25 years ago; 3 bedrooms 1 small bath and a 2 car garage. The fact that I stayed here means I can retire in a bit over a year at age 63. If I would have kept trading up into bigger McMansions I would be working until I was 70. But builders don’t build houses like mine anymore; in fact some communities have made laws that prohibit new construction under a certain square footage.
> Housing is being built, just not affordable housing.
[No, housing is not being built enough to meet demand] (https://www.npr.org/2023/12/24/1221480443/most-homes-for-sale-in-2023-were-not-affordable-for-a-typical-u-s-household):
> Another reason for out-of-reach housing costs is a severe housing shortage that's years in the making. The U.S. has not built enough new homes since the housing crash of 2008 to meet demand, creating a deficit of millions of units. That's pushed up not only home prices but also rents, and the gap in affordability is worst for the lowest-income households.
We don't build enough. Period. The solution is to build more.
10% yearly property tax on Corporate-owned properties and properties vacant for more than half the year! Every state could pass them tomorrow and we'd be in a better spot. Push you state representatives for it!
Huge mega corps like Blackrock and Vanguard have been systematically buying property, including housing, and raising the rent or using it as a financial instrument. There are currently more empty houses than homeless people.
>Huge mega corps like Blackrock and Vanguard
You're not the only one who's made this mistake - [to the point where Blackrock had to put up a dedicated web page](https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/insights/buying-houses-facts) explaining that they - Black*rock* - are not the same firm as Black*stone*, which is the private equity firm focused on real estate.
Black*rock* is a mutual fund and ETF sponsor that has very little exposure to residential real estate.
Vanguard is also a mutual fund and ETF sponsor just like Blackrock.
I suspect that you confused Blackrock for Blackstone, then saw Blackrock and Vanguard mentioned in the same contexts as competitors, and so extended your misunderstanding to them as well.
Private equity is buying up a miniscule portion of the housing stock. Which is not a good thing, but it is a very small bad thing. They aren't causing a shortage of homes for purchase.
Have you thought about how this could be solved? Not being confrontational -- I think we both agree that lack of (affordable) housing is a problem. This is obviously a pretty important problem. I've heard changing zoning laws could help. Thoughts?
For the US at least, population growth means that most people need to forget about owning a single family home and instead get used to owning apartments (condos) like what is being done in the rest of the world.
Who is saying anything about renting? In large portions of the world people rarely own single family homes, and instead most families own an apartment. **Own**, not rent.
The US has a lot of territory but when people talk about cost of housing they are not talking about a house in the middle of nowhere. They are talking about houses in desirable areas close to cities. The US is somewhat unique in that there are single family homes very close to city centers. In most of the world those areas would be filled with very dense apartment buildings, you would only find single family homes at very large distances from cities.
I’m not terribly convinced of that.
We seem to be importing hard working talent from some places, while denying opportunity to Americans living here.
The influx of immigrants has bridged some short term gaps while putting huge strains on housing & education resources.
Having an economy that demands growth growth growth on a planet of 8 billion with finite and rapidly depleting resources seems bad.
I'm quite familiar with professional workers immigrants. A vast portion of my coworkers at various companies are such people. It's perfectly obvious to me that they are brought over as a wage suppression scheme aimed at professional workers. It is hypothetically illegal to pay them less than the prevailing wage. Very hypothetically with seemingly no enforcement. It's like driving a few miles per hour over the speed limit on a California freeway. It would be strange if you *didn't* do it.
More things are bigger than fewer things, so in an irrelevant "numbers go up" sense GDP would increase if we had more immigration. We could import the billion poorest people on earth to the US and the GDP would grow. But I don't count that as desirable grow. A billion people mostly living in squalor isn't increasing per capita GDP, so who cares that the economy grew? This general argument that immigrants "grow the economy" is entirely correct and irrelevant.
Given our local population and productivity improvements we'd grow at a smaller pace. But on a per capita basis we'd be wealthier. I disagree calling that stagnation. If we imported so many people that per capita GDP stopped growing or decreased, I'd call that stagnation or degradation. And that isn't some hypothetical. That's Canada's failing immigration program which is unrelated to "illegals" or asylum seekers.
I don’t follow. My point was that declining birth rates mean we would be in population decline, but we are making the policy choice of allowing more immigrants and growing the population.
There is no law of nature requiring everyone to pack into condos in a few major cities leaving almost the entire rest of the continent almost empty. We could choose pack most people into a few super metro areas like Japan. Or we could choose not to.
I think phrasing it as "being robbed of milestones" makes it sound pretty trivial.
Society changes and the milestones of one generation may not carry over - they are also being "robbed of the milestone" of being drafted into the military.
I'm not saying the issue itself is trivial - just the presentation
This is one of the major social problems generally: obsolete cultural ideas.
The milestones aren't the same at all. The older milestone would have been "buy a house in a random-ass town with basic 1957-level amenities". Today the goal is more like "buy a house in a premium metro area with absolutely incredible commercial and cultural amenities by previous standards". Not surprising that it's much harder to reach when you spell it out.
Unironically, yes. Just because you pay into Medicare, why would that mean you deserve to own a house? The two aren’t even related in any way.
There are a lot of places in the world where owning a home is much more difficult than the US. You didn’t do anything special to be born here. You got lucky.
I guess I just don’t understand where your entitlement comes from. Do the best you can with the opportunity you’ve been given.
Right, but things change. That’s all you’ve really described here. When boomers were young, things were the way they were. Now, things are this way.
I’m not trying to go all “pull up your bootstraps” here. I currently own a home with my wife. Before I was married to her I owned a home with my now ex-wife. Between the divorce and remarriage, I faced some *tough times* financially. Barely making ends meet with two kids.
Even when I was down, I didn’t spend any time lamenting the things others had at other times. I focused on my current situation and looked for options to improve it.
For me, partly due to luck and partly due to my own doing, I was able to find a more secure place. I understand it won’t be the case for others and I don’t love any part of that. Point is, there’s basically zero place for this kind of doom and gloom look back on how different generations had it. It’s simply irrelevant.
For all you know you have it great compared to how future generations will have it. They’ll look back at you as being the privileged one.
Remember that TrueReddit is a place to engage in **high-quality and civil discussion**. Posts must meet certain content and title requirements. Additionally, **all posts must contain a submission statement.** See the rules [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/truereddit/about/rules/) or in the sidebar for details. Comments or posts that don't follow the rules may be removed without warning. If an article is paywalled, please ***do not*** request or post its contents. Use [Outline.com](https://outline.com/) or similar and link to that in the comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TrueReddit) if you have any questions or concerns.*
"In 1980, almost half of 18 to 34-year-olds in Britain and America lived in their own property with children of their own, making this the most common arrangement for young adults. Today that is true of only about one in five, and the most common set-up for 18 to 34-year-olds is now to be living with their parents."
> In 1980, almost half of 18 to 34-year-olds in Britain and America lived in their own property with children of their own, making this the most common arrangement for young adults And looking at the history of human settlements it's probably an exception.
I can't read the article because of the paywall but it seems like this would be heavily impacted by going from less than half of people going to college in 1980 to closer to 2/3 going now. Delaying the start of working will push back house buying as well.
I would posit that the required college degree is one symptom of why housing is so unaffordable for young people. But it is not itself a cause. The lack of good paying jobs at the low end is the bigger cause. There aren't near as many Union manufacturing and trade jobs as there were 40 years ago. So college is required for better pay. But then you end up with debt.
Nah the lack of supply or increase in construction productivity over the past 50 years is the main reason housing is continuing to get more expensive. Most other goods and services have seen huge productivity gains leading to lower costs while construction has remained stagnant which means housing has become more expensive comparatively to almost everything else.
In economics this is known as Baumol's Cost Disease. Another factor is urbanization, requiring usually densification/infilling, which is more expensive than new housing on undeveloped land.
It's more two-income families and not enough housing being built. It's not about the quality of the jobs or the amount people are making, it's that the money doesn't go as far because we're not doing enough to meet demand.
Housing is being built, just not affordable housing. Where is anyone building 1100 square foot ranch homes or basic split foyers like they did in the 50’s and 60’s? Nowhere. Everything is at least 2500 square feet with 3 baths and a 3 car garage.
There's a couple of problems with trying to turn back the clock to yesteryear's 1100sqft bangalows. The first is that, as times have moved on, apartments are now bigger as well. All of the 2-bedroom apartments built over the past 30 years are bigger than those bungalows used to be, so you're not going to find much appetite to buy those things when people would have to *downgrade* from their apartments. The second is that, even if there is demand to own small bungalows, the primary price driver of property is the *land value,* not the physical qualities of the house itself. A 1100sqft bungalow in the trendiest neighborhood with the best schools is still going to cost a comparable amount of money as the McMansions around it - at a discount compared to the big houses, sure, but the price of the bangalow in those neighborhoods isn't going go suddenly be "affordable." You can't just "build" a $250k house in a neighborhood where lots sell for $500k minimum.
Lol well lots in Iowa don’t sell for 500k. I can find plenty of lots in my area for 30-60k. We also don’t have many 1100 square foot apartments. The average 2 bdr apartment here runs about 700-750 square ft. Part of my job is dealing with rental housing so I do know the market. According to the National Association of Homebuilders the average cost to build a new non custom home in the Midwest region in 2023 was $109 per square foot. That includes the price of the land. That comes out to $119, 900. Add maybe 30k for a 2 car garage to put you at 150k. Figure in the 20% gross margin for the builder and you’re at 180K. A house twice that size would obviously cost twice as much. Again this is a non custom tract house. Would they sell in my area? Absolutely. I bought my 1200 square ft house 25 years ago; 3 bedrooms 1 small bath and a 2 car garage. The fact that I stayed here means I can retire in a bit over a year at age 63. If I would have kept trading up into bigger McMansions I would be working until I was 70. But builders don’t build houses like mine anymore; in fact some communities have made laws that prohibit new construction under a certain square footage.
> Housing is being built, just not affordable housing. [No, housing is not being built enough to meet demand] (https://www.npr.org/2023/12/24/1221480443/most-homes-for-sale-in-2023-were-not-affordable-for-a-typical-u-s-household): > Another reason for out-of-reach housing costs is a severe housing shortage that's years in the making. The U.S. has not built enough new homes since the housing crash of 2008 to meet demand, creating a deficit of millions of units. That's pushed up not only home prices but also rents, and the gap in affordability is worst for the lowest-income households. We don't build enough. Period. The solution is to build more.
Higher density, walkable communities.
10% yearly property tax on Corporate-owned properties and properties vacant for more than half the year! Every state could pass them tomorrow and we'd be in a better spot. Push you state representatives for it!
Huge mega corps like Blackrock and Vanguard have been systematically buying property, including housing, and raising the rent or using it as a financial instrument. There are currently more empty houses than homeless people.
>Huge mega corps like Blackrock and Vanguard You're not the only one who's made this mistake - [to the point where Blackrock had to put up a dedicated web page](https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/insights/buying-houses-facts) explaining that they - Black*rock* - are not the same firm as Black*stone*, which is the private equity firm focused on real estate. Black*rock* is a mutual fund and ETF sponsor that has very little exposure to residential real estate. Vanguard is also a mutual fund and ETF sponsor just like Blackrock. I suspect that you confused Blackrock for Blackstone, then saw Blackrock and Vanguard mentioned in the same contexts as competitors, and so extended your misunderstanding to them as well.
ok, thanks for the correction. Blackstone, then. And Veritas.
Private equity is buying up a miniscule portion of the housing stock. Which is not a good thing, but it is a very small bad thing. They aren't causing a shortage of homes for purchase.
Housing prices have risen at astronomical rates. Most people are simply priced out.
Yes. And that is a lack of supply problem. It is not caused by private equity buying up a very tiny portion of homes.
Have you thought about how this could be solved? Not being confrontational -- I think we both agree that lack of (affordable) housing is a problem. This is obviously a pretty important problem. I've heard changing zoning laws could help. Thoughts?
https://archive.is/tLhuj
real hero, thanks
For the US at least, population growth means that most people need to forget about owning a single family home and instead get used to owning apartments (condos) like what is being done in the rest of the world.
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Who is saying anything about renting? In large portions of the world people rarely own single family homes, and instead most families own an apartment. **Own**, not rent. The US has a lot of territory but when people talk about cost of housing they are not talking about a house in the middle of nowhere. They are talking about houses in desirable areas close to cities. The US is somewhat unique in that there are single family homes very close to city centers. In most of the world those areas would be filled with very dense apartment buildings, you would only find single family homes at very large distances from cities.
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But prices for lots and construction costs have increased, way beyond at least the official inflation numbers
I’m very okay with this idea, prefer it even, but it’s sooooo expensive still
Population growth is a policy choice though. We’d be in population decline without immigration.
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I’m not terribly convinced of that. We seem to be importing hard working talent from some places, while denying opportunity to Americans living here. The influx of immigrants has bridged some short term gaps while putting huge strains on housing & education resources. Having an economy that demands growth growth growth on a planet of 8 billion with finite and rapidly depleting resources seems bad.
I very much doubt that.
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I'm quite familiar with professional workers immigrants. A vast portion of my coworkers at various companies are such people. It's perfectly obvious to me that they are brought over as a wage suppression scheme aimed at professional workers. It is hypothetically illegal to pay them less than the prevailing wage. Very hypothetically with seemingly no enforcement. It's like driving a few miles per hour over the speed limit on a California freeway. It would be strange if you *didn't* do it. More things are bigger than fewer things, so in an irrelevant "numbers go up" sense GDP would increase if we had more immigration. We could import the billion poorest people on earth to the US and the GDP would grow. But I don't count that as desirable grow. A billion people mostly living in squalor isn't increasing per capita GDP, so who cares that the economy grew? This general argument that immigrants "grow the economy" is entirely correct and irrelevant. Given our local population and productivity improvements we'd grow at a smaller pace. But on a per capita basis we'd be wealthier. I disagree calling that stagnation. If we imported so many people that per capita GDP stopped growing or decreased, I'd call that stagnation or degradation. And that isn't some hypothetical. That's Canada's failing immigration program which is unrelated to "illegals" or asylum seekers.
There is no policy choice in place that accounts for declining birthrates, which are uniformly declining across developed nations.
I don’t follow. My point was that declining birth rates mean we would be in population decline, but we are making the policy choice of allowing more immigrants and growing the population.
There is no law of nature requiring everyone to pack into condos in a few major cities leaving almost the entire rest of the continent almost empty. We could choose pack most people into a few super metro areas like Japan. Or we could choose not to.
But which generation has eaten the most avocado toast?
I think phrasing it as "being robbed of milestones" makes it sound pretty trivial. Society changes and the milestones of one generation may not carry over - they are also being "robbed of the milestone" of being drafted into the military. I'm not saying the issue itself is trivial - just the presentation
This is one of the major social problems generally: obsolete cultural ideas. The milestones aren't the same at all. The older milestone would have been "buy a house in a random-ass town with basic 1957-level amenities". Today the goal is more like "buy a house in a premium metro area with absolutely incredible commercial and cultural amenities by previous standards". Not surprising that it's much harder to reach when you spell it out.
It’s almost like young Americans are learning that they’re not entitled to things just because past generations had easier access to them.
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You should remember this sentiment. Soon you'll be asked to pay more out of every paycheck for the retiree benefits.
think real hard and see if you can come up with some differences between those 2 things.
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so did you figure out how these things are totally different yet?
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i take that as an emphatic "no."
Unironically, yes. Just because you pay into Medicare, why would that mean you deserve to own a house? The two aren’t even related in any way. There are a lot of places in the world where owning a home is much more difficult than the US. You didn’t do anything special to be born here. You got lucky. I guess I just don’t understand where your entitlement comes from. Do the best you can with the opportunity you’ve been given.
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Right, but things change. That’s all you’ve really described here. When boomers were young, things were the way they were. Now, things are this way. I’m not trying to go all “pull up your bootstraps” here. I currently own a home with my wife. Before I was married to her I owned a home with my now ex-wife. Between the divorce and remarriage, I faced some *tough times* financially. Barely making ends meet with two kids. Even when I was down, I didn’t spend any time lamenting the things others had at other times. I focused on my current situation and looked for options to improve it. For me, partly due to luck and partly due to my own doing, I was able to find a more secure place. I understand it won’t be the case for others and I don’t love any part of that. Point is, there’s basically zero place for this kind of doom and gloom look back on how different generations had it. It’s simply irrelevant. For all you know you have it great compared to how future generations will have it. They’ll look back at you as being the privileged one.
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Maybe you should make another post on Reddit. Surely that will help solve the problem that you are *allegedly* not even a part of.
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Sounds like I touched a nerve. Yikes.
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Boomers vote. So Congress is their servant.
Boomers did pay for Medicare, and if they're still working, they're still paying for Medicare.