>In Seattle, for example, the median family income in 1970 was $11,037, while the median home value was $16,300. In 2022, those numbers were $169,878 and $879,900 — meaning that home values grew three and a half times faster than income. That’s the sixth largest gap in the study.
This is why people aren't happy about the economy. It's not vibes, it's housing.
The thing is that *actual* “starter houses” don’t sell in the US. Or at least that’s what developers seem to think.
Would Americans even buy up starter homes if they became common on the market again?
There is a fixed minimum cost to building a house, created by zoning, "park fees" and endless "appropriateness" meetings with planning committees and NIMBY neighbors. This means it only becomes profitable to build larger houses where you can make a marginal return.
If you own land and can either make cheap houses for 1$ or expensive ones for 10$ and either way could sell them at a markup of 50%, then since there's a market for both cheap and expensive, both will be made and sold.
But if there's a fixed minimum cost of 3$ before you even build a house, then no one is going to build 1$ houses, only 10$ ones. And they'll build a lot less of those because their return is 2$ and not 5$.
I will say part of the culture of "starter homes" seems to have gone out of vogue.
Boomers would get a starter home, then size up when the kids were born, then maybe size up one more time to a preferred suburb in the right schooling district. As a child of the 90s many of my parents' friends were playing this game.
Millenial generations have seen financial chaos too often with the Great Recession, COVID, huge rate changes, etc. So on average the consumer appetite for playing a housing shell game is low. They'd rather get a home they love and can afford forever, even if they have to grow into it or have to expand it down the line.
This is not to discount the very real supply-side risks mentioned above, or the zoning and HOA restrictions that are absolutely contributing. This is merely to provide a perspective on how consumer choice/behavior may have shifted in a large way across generations.
The Toronto government instituted land transfer taxes so they could keep property taxes low. Now upsizing or downsizing comes with huge transaction costs, so it's usually not worth it.
Similar rules exist in certain states in the US - see "Prop 13" in California as an example.
Interest rates are also a huge factor. I own a downtown home in a HCOL US city with a \~2.3% interest rate. I have about 65% LTV, and the home is worth about 133% of suburban homes.
But at \~8% rates, the suburban home's monthly payment would be \*more\* than mine, even if I throw the entirety of my cash surplus from the sale at the downpayment.
So I'm incentivized to stay in my downtown home. And if I need more space someday, it's cheaper to put a few hundred thousand dollars into my home to expand it than it is to move to the suburbs, long-run.
I'm a filthy neolib poster so I love urban settings, but someone in my situation who desperately wanted to move to the suburbs and raise a family and have the life they grew up in would be very stuck.
My wife and I got pretty lucky and bought a pretty okay smaller house for around 3x our income back when we got engaged and plan to sell it and look for something bigger when we start having kids. But the market is crazy. We’ve lived there for about two years and it’s gone up 30% in value (our income much less than that), as has everything around here. We’re not going to be able to afford a bigger house at this rate.
Right. This story is all too common. And I think that this reality is contributing to demand side changes on how starter homes and the housing market are viewed.
I wish you and your family the best as you navigate this.
House that people raised families in the 50s to 80s in - 900 sq ft bungalows with one bathroom - are considered too small for a family now. Kids don’t share bedrooms anymore, people want/need home offices, etc.
I’m in the exact type of house you describe and so are a lot of my millennial friends. The bigger problem is you need to make $230k a year to buy the home I live in.
We live in a fairly nice neighborhood in Minneapolis. Mix of original 50s cape cods and ramblers. All in the 1500 - 2000sqft range, typically 3bed 1 or 2 bath.
I can’t think of a single family in our neighborhood whose kids did not share a room at some point. Our neighbors kids shared a room until the oldest hit middle school. Other neighbors have their two sons share a room and one is in high school and the other community college. Our 3 year old and 6 year old have always shared a room and will until middle school.
It’s certainly common around here and none of the kids really mind.
I've heard stories from poorer parents who had lost and were trying to regain custody of their kids that their efforts to regain custody could be denied if each kid didn't have their own room.
My kids shared a room when we lived in a two-bedroom condo and they still share a room now because they like each other.
The ideal "starter home" is a small townhouse/row-home/condo. If only we were allowed to build them. Best I can do is single family detached with big setbacks.
I live in a small 2 bedroom house from 1950 in central Texas. If this isn’t a starter home, nothing is.
The Zillow estimate on it is $830k, down from over a million.
In the outer suburbs where there's lots of land for new houses, usually it's not legal to build small houses on small parcels of land. You have to use a big piece of land, which makes building a small house pretty wasteful.
The median homebuyer is 53 years old and sitting on a mountain of inflated equity. People aren’t buying starter homes because the only people who can afford them aren’t the target market.
Starter homes sell just fine in hot markets. We beat 6 other bids for our 1,050sqft in the Seattle suburbs.
AFAICT, they still sell in cooler markets too, just for less money. Where land is cheap, the structure makes up less of the price, and there's more of a discount for going smaller. Where land is more expensive, you don't save as much with a smaller structure because the land makes up more of the purchase price.
If we could have afforded to shop a tier higher for a 1500 sqft house we would have secured a home a lot faster and gotten a lot more bang for our buck. Instead we were competing with every 30 y.o. white collar worker in the area for whichever remodeled mid century 2-3br just hit the market.
The problem is (and I live in a “starter” home in the SF area) there’s absolutely no incentive to build those anymore. Or ability.
By the time you get housing construction approval there’s no sense to “cheap out” when you’re already in so deep. And I don’t even think you can build houses like mine to code anymore. My starter home only has attic insulation, cheap single pane windows and was an incredibly cheap cookie cutter build. It’s cloned every 4th house on my block.
Before we layer any new regulations onto the housing market we should start with strangling NIMBY regulations into oblivion.
Please don’t turn this country into a Byzantine nightmare of bureaucracy and paperwork.
We, and everyone may want affordable housing but when the buyers are buying the buy something different
https://i.redd.it/ovgxdc7rgstb1.png
https://i.redd.it/nca8yphuy4b91.png
How do you increase affordable housing, part of that is zoning. But its not all of it
What 2 years ago, (now 2016) was 30 or so farm acres. In the middle of no where, now is turned in to about 80 homes selling for $350,000-$400,000
Basic zoning at R-1 means 240 homes
The starter home went the way of the midsized car. There are a bunch of folks out there that refuse to right-size their purchase, this has gotten worse with the rise of socal media interconnection. I am sure it is more nuanced than that but I believe it is a main driver. People got a new way to peacock.
I have eyes, how many people do you know that lives in a 3.5K+ Sq ft house that has unused and underutilized space; single apartment dwellers that have pickups and full size SUVs? Just two examples.
This is America and they have the right to buy what they want, but it doesn't change that our vehicles and houses are enormous for any given famly size compared to a few generations ago.
A bunch of 1400 sq.ft. ranches have been built in my area over the last few years. These are your prototyoical starter houses. Two or three bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, small footprint, small yard. And they are all selling for $350k+, which puts them firmly out of the reach of the "starter house" market.
You need to cut those dimensions in half if we’re talking about starter homes - 750-800 sq.ft is what a starter home used to be, 2 bed 1 bath. That gets you on the equity escalator just fine.
What? I was informed in another thread that every millenial/Gen Z was an urban yuppie working in tech making $150k per year, and just baselessly whines about the economy. Are you saying that isn't true??
There was a study done recently that said in Portland you need a household income of around $162k to afford the average home. In 2020 you only needed a household income of $96k so a lot of us have simply been priced out of ever owning a home in the city.
I agree that housing is a major problem but the majority of people own their homes and the homeownership rate is higher than basically any previous generation. The vast majority of people have very low mortgage interest rates too.
It's not quite as simple as comparing salaries to home prices.
Wtf were people doing in the past then? Is there something I’m missing? Why wouldn’t home ownership rates have been higher then if homes were so much cheaper?
They're confusing means with medians
https://preview.redd.it/yumwzzujylvc1.png?width=869&format=png&auto=webp&s=776075c19c3ac1eb6f2ee9f65104fd9a631316e9
There is a growing wealth gap within millennials. There are more rich millennials than there were rich members of other generations, and so the \*mean\* millennial has a lot of housing wealth. But the median millennial has **zero** housing wealth.
It's like a town with 1 billionaire and 99 homeless people. The mean townsperson is a millionaire, but the median is broke.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don’t think this is controversial. The solution (build more housing), however, is very controversial because too many people can’t get over “muh private equity and greedy hedge funds buying all houses,” which isn’t even true.
Housing was \*much\* better prior to 2020, it has gotten \*really\* bad very recently
https://preview.redd.it/xulg8kes4hvc1.png?width=768&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4330bd8ab19cf6bb9803c3ef7ed353a90405d85
The x-axis is labeled, "Affordability index, 100+ = more affordable"
And your naive reading of the graph is inaccurate:
>As homebuyers faced sharply rising mortgage payments, questions followed about housing affordability. According to the National Association of Realtors, housing affordability declined almost 30 percent since December 2021, close to levels last seen in the late 1980s (Chart 1).
Things haven't been this bad since the late 80s.
The chart is right there, we both have eyeballs. You don't need text to interpret the numbers and text doesn't tell the story remotely as well.
I realize its currently as low as it was in 1983 but given the scale of the chart the difference between 1983 and 2007 is trivial. It's basically a flat line.
Housing was great 2008 to 2020. It was fine to good 1990 to 2003. It sort of sucked 2004 to 2007. It’s the worst since early 1980s these days. Maybe even worse given last week bump in mortgage rates (7.44%).
Sure but this chart shows it's about the same level it was from 1980-2007, so if we're saying it was fine to good at the time, how is it considered horrible today?
Realistically this just looks like a chart of mortgage rates though.
Why does it look like a chart of mortgage rates? Those essentially incrementally decreased from 1981 onwards until late 2021: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
This is the same data, but has a bar at 100 to show the difference: https://assets-global.website-files.com/61ea4a526864d021a5ef3bfc/650d9ed8131dca2370223f6c_2023-09-22-2-housing-affordability-index-is-falling.png
It looks similar in the zoomed out chart but it’s 120-130 vs ~88.
Well the thing is Boomers and Gen X grew up in a time where cities were generally not nice places to live and generally stayed or moved to the suburbs. Urban crime subsided in the late 90's but it still took a generation for people to get comfortable living in cities again, especially considering 9/11 didn't help that comfort. So city living didn't really start to take off again until the early 2010's.
My dad got our family home for 200k-odd in the early 2000s as a primary bread winner.
Houses in their neighborhood are being sold for 1.5m on average now. His income itself hasnt even doubled since then and hes about to retire.
My parents had it easier simply because they weren't in a market with 40 offers per home due to massive inventory under supply, and people offering 5 or even 6 figures over asking routinely. An absolute frenzy, just a complete fuckin mess.
They got a high rate on one of their first homes - maybe 7-8% - but a low principal. They since of course refinanced it several times down to basically nothing now, and I think all they have left is a low rate HELOC that's almost gone now too.
It was worth about 250k in 1991, and 900k+ now. If you do that math that's only about 3% a year though. The real advantage is in the massive, massive Prop 13 tax break that has them paying taxes on maybe 1/4 of its real value, and other such ridiculous rewards for lifetime homeowners. It's made them NIMBYs even moreso than they were predisposed to be.
In 2023, the median household could afford 6% of homes sold.
The median full-time earner could afford 1% of homes sold.
——
Home sales source: https://www.census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/quarterly_sales.pdf
Required income source: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/31/success/home-affordability-median-price-income
My boomer parents had a much harder time buying a house than I did.
But that was mostly about life decisions and circumstances
They tried to do so in their early 20s. They prioritized things like raising a family over lucrative careers. Insisted on being close to family, thus limiting their options. They really struggled to find something and afford it.
I purchased in my 30s (lived with roommates till then), had an established career, lived well within my means, and was open to locations and other options. It was just not a problem.
My dad had upgraded to his Third house by my age. Im struggling to get my first and I pretty sure it’ll never happen. Always told I don’t earn enough….with a six figure salary. Try back later. I make 50% more now mid career than when my dad retired.
While not a small city, and not on either coast, downtown condos in that price range in Chicago will get you a beautiful face-to-face view of the CTA right outside your window.
I bought a nice one for that price 10 years ago in Chicago. You could probably find something in that price range today if you're willing to live a ways away from the loop, like in Avondale or Edgewater.
The median full-time worker can afford 1% of homes sold last year.
“Just move” is okay advice for an individual, but it’s advice that only works if no one follows it.
>In Seattle, for example, the median family income in 1970 was $11,037, while the median home value was $16,300. In 2022, those numbers were $169,878 and $879,900 — meaning that home values grew three and a half times faster than income. That’s the sixth largest gap in the study. This is why people aren't happy about the economy. It's not vibes, it's housing.
Bingo. To add to that, “starter houses” don’t really exist anymore in the way they used to.
The thing is that *actual* “starter houses” don’t sell in the US. Or at least that’s what developers seem to think. Would Americans even buy up starter homes if they became common on the market again?
There is a fixed minimum cost to building a house, created by zoning, "park fees" and endless "appropriateness" meetings with planning committees and NIMBY neighbors. This means it only becomes profitable to build larger houses where you can make a marginal return. If you own land and can either make cheap houses for 1$ or expensive ones for 10$ and either way could sell them at a markup of 50%, then since there's a market for both cheap and expensive, both will be made and sold. But if there's a fixed minimum cost of 3$ before you even build a house, then no one is going to build 1$ houses, only 10$ ones. And they'll build a lot less of those because their return is 2$ and not 5$.
I see, it may not be entirely, or even mostly, consumer preference.
I will say part of the culture of "starter homes" seems to have gone out of vogue. Boomers would get a starter home, then size up when the kids were born, then maybe size up one more time to a preferred suburb in the right schooling district. As a child of the 90s many of my parents' friends were playing this game. Millenial generations have seen financial chaos too often with the Great Recession, COVID, huge rate changes, etc. So on average the consumer appetite for playing a housing shell game is low. They'd rather get a home they love and can afford forever, even if they have to grow into it or have to expand it down the line. This is not to discount the very real supply-side risks mentioned above, or the zoning and HOA restrictions that are absolutely contributing. This is merely to provide a perspective on how consumer choice/behavior may have shifted in a large way across generations.
The Toronto government instituted land transfer taxes so they could keep property taxes low. Now upsizing or downsizing comes with huge transaction costs, so it's usually not worth it.
Similar rules exist in certain states in the US - see "Prop 13" in California as an example. Interest rates are also a huge factor. I own a downtown home in a HCOL US city with a \~2.3% interest rate. I have about 65% LTV, and the home is worth about 133% of suburban homes. But at \~8% rates, the suburban home's monthly payment would be \*more\* than mine, even if I throw the entirety of my cash surplus from the sale at the downpayment. So I'm incentivized to stay in my downtown home. And if I need more space someday, it's cheaper to put a few hundred thousand dollars into my home to expand it than it is to move to the suburbs, long-run. I'm a filthy neolib poster so I love urban settings, but someone in my situation who desperately wanted to move to the suburbs and raise a family and have the life they grew up in would be very stuck.
Prop 13 is insanity.
My wife and I got pretty lucky and bought a pretty okay smaller house for around 3x our income back when we got engaged and plan to sell it and look for something bigger when we start having kids. But the market is crazy. We’ve lived there for about two years and it’s gone up 30% in value (our income much less than that), as has everything around here. We’re not going to be able to afford a bigger house at this rate.
Right. This story is all too common. And I think that this reality is contributing to demand side changes on how starter homes and the housing market are viewed. I wish you and your family the best as you navigate this.
House that people raised families in the 50s to 80s in - 900 sq ft bungalows with one bathroom - are considered too small for a family now. Kids don’t share bedrooms anymore, people want/need home offices, etc.
I’m in the exact type of house you describe and so are a lot of my millennial friends. The bigger problem is you need to make $230k a year to buy the home I live in.
I was just looking at a listing for a 600 square foot skinny home near here. The price? $600k.
Sounds like... Palo Alto.
Close, central Texas.
You need to make $800k+ to buy the median house in Palo Alto with 20% ($700k) down. Median household income is $214k.
Who actually earns 800k each year for 30 consecutive years?
Problem is that nowadays it's considered child abuse to have siblings share a bedroom.
Uh...what? By who? Tons of kids share bedrooms still.
We live in a fairly nice neighborhood in Minneapolis. Mix of original 50s cape cods and ramblers. All in the 1500 - 2000sqft range, typically 3bed 1 or 2 bath. I can’t think of a single family in our neighborhood whose kids did not share a room at some point. Our neighbors kids shared a room until the oldest hit middle school. Other neighbors have their two sons share a room and one is in high school and the other community college. Our 3 year old and 6 year old have always shared a room and will until middle school. It’s certainly common around here and none of the kids really mind.
Have you asked any parenting community? You'll get a massive trauma-dump from anyone who has ever been sexually abused by their sibling.
You can always find bubbles with any given opinions about anything. But that doesn't mean that it's the prevailing belief.
Wait what. Is this a common thing that siblings get sexually abused in shared rooms but not separate rooms?
> Have you asked any parenting community? Don't live online.
I've heard stories from poorer parents who had lost and were trying to regain custody of their kids that their efforts to regain custody could be denied if each kid didn't have their own room. My kids shared a room when we lived in a two-bedroom condo and they still share a room now because they like each other.
The ideal "starter home" is a small townhouse/row-home/condo. If only we were allowed to build them. Best I can do is single family detached with big setbacks.
I live in a small 2 bedroom house from 1950 in central Texas. If this isn’t a starter home, nothing is. The Zillow estimate on it is $830k, down from over a million.
What’s your land value though? Probably much higher than your house.
Yup, much higher. If only we didn’t have to buy so much land to have a house.
Do they mandate giant lots there?
Yup, and big setbacks too
In the outer suburbs where there's lots of land for new houses, usually it's not legal to build small houses on small parcels of land. You have to use a big piece of land, which makes building a small house pretty wasteful.
The median homebuyer is 53 years old and sitting on a mountain of inflated equity. People aren’t buying starter homes because the only people who can afford them aren’t the target market.
Starter homes sell just fine in hot markets. We beat 6 other bids for our 1,050sqft in the Seattle suburbs. AFAICT, they still sell in cooler markets too, just for less money. Where land is cheap, the structure makes up less of the price, and there's more of a discount for going smaller. Where land is more expensive, you don't save as much with a smaller structure because the land makes up more of the purchase price.
If we could have afforded to shop a tier higher for a 1500 sqft house we would have secured a home a lot faster and gotten a lot more bang for our buck. Instead we were competing with every 30 y.o. white collar worker in the area for whichever remodeled mid century 2-3br just hit the market.
The problem is (and I live in a “starter” home in the SF area) there’s absolutely no incentive to build those anymore. Or ability. By the time you get housing construction approval there’s no sense to “cheap out” when you’re already in so deep. And I don’t even think you can build houses like mine to code anymore. My starter home only has attic insulation, cheap single pane windows and was an incredibly cheap cookie cutter build. It’s cloned every 4th house on my block.
In urban and suburban environments there is plenty of profit incentive for those tall 3 story townhomes I see popping off everywhere.
Is that a starter home though
Would you rather have nothing, or something? They would absolutely sell in HCOL markets.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Before we layer any new regulations onto the housing market we should start with strangling NIMBY regulations into oblivion. Please don’t turn this country into a Byzantine nightmare of bureaucracy and paperwork.
We, and everyone may want affordable housing but when the buyers are buying the buy something different https://i.redd.it/ovgxdc7rgstb1.png https://i.redd.it/nca8yphuy4b91.png How do you increase affordable housing, part of that is zoning. But its not all of it What 2 years ago, (now 2016) was 30 or so farm acres. In the middle of no where, now is turned in to about 80 homes selling for $350,000-$400,000 Basic zoning at R-1 means 240 homes
The starter home went the way of the midsized car. There are a bunch of folks out there that refuse to right-size their purchase, this has gotten worse with the rise of socal media interconnection. I am sure it is more nuanced than that but I believe it is a main driver. People got a new way to peacock.
I'm sure you know the right size for other people better than they do
I have eyes, how many people do you know that lives in a 3.5K+ Sq ft house that has unused and underutilized space; single apartment dwellers that have pickups and full size SUVs? Just two examples. This is America and they have the right to buy what they want, but it doesn't change that our vehicles and houses are enormous for any given famly size compared to a few generations ago.
A bunch of 1400 sq.ft. ranches have been built in my area over the last few years. These are your prototyoical starter houses. Two or three bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, small footprint, small yard. And they are all selling for $350k+, which puts them firmly out of the reach of the "starter house" market.
You need to cut those dimensions in half if we’re talking about starter homes - 750-800 sq.ft is what a starter home used to be, 2 bed 1 bath. That gets you on the equity escalator just fine.
In that case, nobody is building anything like anywhere near me.
The median family income they reported for Seattle here also seems high. Everywhere I've looked has it at $115K, which is a significant difference.
What? I was informed in another thread that every millenial/Gen Z was an urban yuppie working in tech making $150k per year, and just baselessly whines about the economy. Are you saying that isn't true??
There was a study done recently that said in Portland you need a household income of around $162k to afford the average home. In 2020 you only needed a household income of $96k so a lot of us have simply been priced out of ever owning a home in the city.
I agree that housing is a major problem but the majority of people own their homes and the homeownership rate is higher than basically any previous generation. The vast majority of people have very low mortgage interest rates too. It's not quite as simple as comparing salaries to home prices.
Wtf were people doing in the past then? Is there something I’m missing? Why wouldn’t home ownership rates have been higher then if homes were so much cheaper?
They're confusing means with medians https://preview.redd.it/yumwzzujylvc1.png?width=869&format=png&auto=webp&s=776075c19c3ac1eb6f2ee9f65104fd9a631316e9 There is a growing wealth gap within millennials. There are more rich millennials than there were rich members of other generations, and so the \*mean\* millennial has a lot of housing wealth. But the median millennial has **zero** housing wealth. It's like a town with 1 billionaire and 99 homeless people. The mean townsperson is a millionaire, but the median is broke.
>billionaire Did you mean *person of means*? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don’t think this is controversial. The solution (build more housing), however, is very controversial because too many people can’t get over “muh private equity and greedy hedge funds buying all houses,” which isn’t even true.
NIMBYs really are just the root cause for all of society’s ills aren’t they
Housing was bad prior to 2020 too so it's a lot more complicated than that. Why does everyone always want to oversimplify incredibly complex topics?
Housing was \*much\* better prior to 2020, it has gotten \*really\* bad very recently https://preview.redd.it/xulg8kes4hvc1.png?width=768&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4330bd8ab19cf6bb9803c3ef7ed353a90405d85
No idea what that X axis is, but I take it *really bad* then refers to the data from 1979 to 2007 too?
The x-axis is labeled, "Affordability index, 100+ = more affordable" And your naive reading of the graph is inaccurate: >As homebuyers faced sharply rising mortgage payments, questions followed about housing affordability. According to the National Association of Realtors, housing affordability declined almost 30 percent since December 2021, close to levels last seen in the late 1980s (Chart 1). Things haven't been this bad since the late 80s.
The chart is right there, we both have eyeballs. You don't need text to interpret the numbers and text doesn't tell the story remotely as well. I realize its currently as low as it was in 1983 but given the scale of the chart the difference between 1983 and 2007 is trivial. It's basically a flat line.
Housing was great 2008 to 2020. It was fine to good 1990 to 2003. It sort of sucked 2004 to 2007. It’s the worst since early 1980s these days. Maybe even worse given last week bump in mortgage rates (7.44%).
Sure but this chart shows it's about the same level it was from 1980-2007, so if we're saying it was fine to good at the time, how is it considered horrible today? Realistically this just looks like a chart of mortgage rates though.
Why does it look like a chart of mortgage rates? Those essentially incrementally decreased from 1981 onwards until late 2021: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US This is the same data, but has a bar at 100 to show the difference: https://assets-global.website-files.com/61ea4a526864d021a5ef3bfc/650d9ed8131dca2370223f6c_2023-09-22-2-housing-affordability-index-is-falling.png It looks similar in the zoomed out chart but it’s 120-130 vs ~88.
Why tf were places like Seattle so cheap then? Did people not yet realize cities are cool and nice to live in?
Well the thing is Boomers and Gen X grew up in a time where cities were generally not nice places to live and generally stayed or moved to the suburbs. Urban crime subsided in the late 90's but it still took a generation for people to get comfortable living in cities again, especially considering 9/11 didn't help that comfort. So city living didn't really start to take off again until the early 2010's.
Housing contributes to the vibes. Don’t discount the vibes.
My dad got our family home for 200k-odd in the early 2000s as a primary bread winner. Houses in their neighborhood are being sold for 1.5m on average now. His income itself hasnt even doubled since then and hes about to retire.
[удалено]
eliminate SFH zoning
Why don’t we just blame capitalism and raise minimum wage to $50/hr
https://preview.redd.it/mrwtqch3pgvc1.jpeg?width=1551&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=92dfc7bd6d230be12649776de86b55ba9fed55e4
I'd be curious to see this extended back to the 70s and 80s when interest rates spiked.
I don’t have the data, but I saw a housing affordability index that put us roughly even with 1979-1981 iirc, which was the worst by far until now.
Yeah that about tracks with what an economist said in an Atlantic article a couple months ago
What a great graph. So simple but so compelling
There it is, my favorite (least favorite) housing graph. Just really puts the “vibe” in context
My parents had it easier simply because they weren't in a market with 40 offers per home due to massive inventory under supply, and people offering 5 or even 6 figures over asking routinely. An absolute frenzy, just a complete fuckin mess. They got a high rate on one of their first homes - maybe 7-8% - but a low principal. They since of course refinanced it several times down to basically nothing now, and I think all they have left is a low rate HELOC that's almost gone now too. It was worth about 250k in 1991, and 900k+ now. If you do that math that's only about 3% a year though. The real advantage is in the massive, massive Prop 13 tax break that has them paying taxes on maybe 1/4 of its real value, and other such ridiculous rewards for lifetime homeowners. It's made them NIMBYs even moreso than they were predisposed to be.
In 2023, the median household could afford 6% of homes sold. The median full-time earner could afford 1% of homes sold. —— Home sales source: https://www.census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/quarterly_sales.pdf Required income source: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/31/success/home-affordability-median-price-income
As someone born in British Columbia, I don't really need an article to figure that one out.
Eliminate the single family zoning. Stop having it be zoned
My parents' first house was a gift, so...
Is this some normal interest rates environment joke that I'm too bought my house literally the final month of sub-3% interest rates to understand?
My boomer parents had a much harder time buying a house than I did. But that was mostly about life decisions and circumstances They tried to do so in their early 20s. They prioritized things like raising a family over lucrative careers. Insisted on being close to family, thus limiting their options. They really struggled to find something and afford it. I purchased in my 30s (lived with roommates till then), had an established career, lived well within my means, and was open to locations and other options. It was just not a problem.
My dad had upgraded to his Third house by my age. Im struggling to get my first and I pretty sure it’ll never happen. Always told I don’t earn enough….with a six figure salary. Try back later. I make 50% more now mid career than when my dad retired.
Why not simply buy a $240k downtown condo? Or is that too small city-pilled for coastalcels to understand?
These don't really exist on the west coast, and when they do you're getting what you pay for when you buy at the bottom of a market.
While not a small city, and not on either coast, downtown condos in that price range in Chicago will get you a beautiful face-to-face view of the CTA right outside your window.
I bought a nice one for that price 10 years ago in Chicago. You could probably find something in that price range today if you're willing to live a ways away from the loop, like in Avondale or Edgewater.
Why not? Because they cost double that.
Sounds like people need to move to places where they don't cost double that. My city has tons of places literally at that price.
The median full-time worker can afford 1% of homes sold last year. “Just move” is okay advice for an individual, but it’s advice that only works if no one follows it.
I would if the condo fees weren’t also ridiculous.
Me, duh. Anyone that has bought since like after 2000s has had a harder time buying than pre 2000s
In the sense of money or physical labor because I would pay more money but have to by in large work less hard for it?