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Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

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Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#81

Post by mcv »

Houses in "hot" markets still stay on the market for 54 days? In Amsterdam, you can reliably sell your house in 2 weeks. Some people are willing to buy a house without a visit.

The housing market here is insane. We recently bought a house and sold our old one (we haven't moved yet, but remodeling on our new house will start in a couple of days). We sold our house for EUR 100k over what we paid for it in 2008 (just before the mortgage crisis), and 60k over what our neighbours got for their nearly identical house less than a year ago. The seller of our new house got more than 3 times what he paid for it in 1996.

If this isn't another housing bubble, I don't know what it.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#82

Post by literallycancer »

timthelion wrote: post #68
kevinburke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fundamentally I wonder if the housing supply could even be increased enough to materially affect housing prices. Yes, it can; SF built 5,000 units last year, a record, and rents and owner move-in evictions finally declined. At the very least, building more housing can prevent further large price rises. > BTW this is what's happening here in Portland OR, where a building boom has been going on for years. The area po…

In eastern europe, we have Paneláky " rel="nofollow">https://www.google.cz/search?q=sidli%C5%A1t%C4%9B&source=lnm... and the housing prices are low in the panel houses and much higher everywhere else (though no-where nere US levels). You can even buy an apartment in a panel house an hour and a halfs drive outside of prague for $5000USD https://www.sreality.cz/hledani/prodej/byty/ustecky-kraj,lib...

I suspect that people aren't talking about 1.5 hour one way commute when they say that rents are too high.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#83

Post by mcv »

jld wrote: post #55
rcpt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> building at near peak-Dubai paces in Seattle I'm curious about this - do you have some data? Not that I doubt it's true, I'm simply interested in how one would quantify this kinda thing.

I can't speak to the Dubai comparison, but Seattle is bringing 10,000 apartments online this year. http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattles-re...

Does that count as near-Dubai speed? Amsterdam is building 50,000 appartments over the next 10 years, and that's considered not enough. But there's simply no space to grow here. These are the last few empty corners of the city being filled in.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#84

Post by expertentipp »

flashman wrote: post #28
BrentOzar wrote: post #2

The flip side of this is that as the baby boomers pass, there's going to be a glut of retirement home communities available - and with my generation probably never being able to retire, that's going to be an interesting market.

Retirement home corporations are going to end up holding huge real estate portfolios because they'll take boomer houses in exchange for aged and end-of-life care. Wealth concentrates, virtually without exception.

> Retirement home corporations are going to end up holding huge real estate portfolios

...then there is reverse mortgage - pay off the mortgage for decades, and then return the property to another financial institution in exchange for better pension.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#85

Post by mattmanser »

timthelion wrote: post #68
kevinburke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fundamentally I wonder if the housing supply could even be increased enough to materially affect housing prices. Yes, it can; SF built 5,000 units last year, a record, and rents and owner move-in evictions finally declined. At the very least, building more housing can prevent further large price rises. > BTW this is what's happening here in Portland OR, where a building boom has been going on for years. The area po…

In eastern europe, we have Paneláky " rel="nofollow">https://www.google.cz/search?q=sidli%C5%A1t%C4%9B&source=lnm... and the housing prices are low in the panel houses and much higher everywhere else (though no-where nere US levels). You can even buy an apartment in a panel house an hour and a halfs drive outside of prague for $5000USD https://www.sreality.cz/hledani/prodej/byty/ustecky-kraj,lib...

In Europe and the US a lot of these were built too.

A lot of them are now being torn down.

I'm not an authority on why, but I believe they tended to be crime and drug hot spots. I have also read of various health problems being associated with them (both physical + mental).

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#86

Post by quanticle »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #59
saosebastiao wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider the fact that developers have been building at near peak-Dubai paces in Seattle for salable prices that are much lower than the bay area , I'd say you're worried about nothing of consequence. If you merely let them, they'll build until they can't cover their costs.

I don't have the data at my fingertips, but IIRC Seattle housing prices were historically lower than SF, but higher than Portland OR. I think that could make it hard to assess the effects of bringing more housing on line in Seattle, at least comparing to SF would be misleading. However the history of housing costs in Seattle might be informative. > If you merely let them, they'll build until they can't cover their co…

>The problem in the building industry is that financial commitments are made years in advance

>Overbuilding can and does happen and it can take many years, even decades for a property to finally break even.

And in that, the building industry is no different from airlines, oil refineries, auto makers, chip fabs or any other capital intensive industry. Why should we privilege the building industry over the others?

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#87

Post by falsedan »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #58
kevinburke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fundamentally I wonder if the housing supply could even be increased enough to materially affect housing prices. Yes, it can; SF built 5,000 units last year, a record, and rents and owner move-in evictions finally declined. At the very least, building more housing can prevent further large price rises. > BTW this is what's happening here in Portland OR, where a building boom has been going on for years. The area po…

You might be right, possibly housing prices could be higher. If in fact prices have stabilized or leveled out (it's sure hard to get up to date info of that kind), it suggests there's an equilibrium between increasing population and housing availability. The more housing the higher the population will go for any particular average housing price point. Simplistically, price = population/amount of housing. I think an i…

> building new housing attracts an influx of population

You got this backwards: we build housing for the influx of population. People don't move to new places just to get a new house. They move for economic reasons, like they got a $150k software dev job in SF & don't want to commute 90 minutes each way, or they got evicted so the landlord could double/triple the rent.

Regardless of whether SF builds now housing stock or not, the population influx is already happening and has been happening for the last 10 years. The issue is, new, wealthier residents are pulling the market up and forcing existing, lower-income residents out to the periphery of the Bay Area.

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#88

Post by literallycancer »

kevinburke wrote: post #52
scythe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to increase the housing supply "significantly", you need to increase zoning limits in >10% of the relevant population-weighted land area. However balkanization makes it impossible to do this through a single political entity. The solution IMO is a "trigger" law that will increase zoning heights in a suburb when the nearby suburbs pass similar laws. This prevents any one town from becoming gentrified if they…

The biggest impediment to building in CA isn't zoning laws; most areas are zoned for way more density than they are built to. As an example, Habitat for Humanity wants to build 6 stories of below-market-rate condos in Redwood City, which complies with zoning codes, but are being opposed by a lawyer who lives on the block, because it's "out of character" with the other buildings in the neighborhood. It's a byzantine a…

>Zealous Planning Commission boards who consider things like shadows and wind when making decisions, EIR (environmental impact report) appeals, CEQA lawsuits, a constitutional housing amendment (Prop 13) that incentivizes existing homeowners to oppose new development, and more...

On the other hand, you don't want to end up with this[1], so considering things like shadows and/or view obstruction has some merits.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Coking#/media/File:View_o...

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#89

Post by mattmanser »

mcv wrote: post #83
jld wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to the Dubai comparison, but Seattle is bringing 10,000 apartments online this year. http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattles-re...

Does that count as near-Dubai speed? Amsterdam is building 50,000 appartments over the next 10 years, and that's considered not enough. But there's simply no space to grow here. These are the last few empty corners of the city being filled in.

But 50,000 / 10 = 5,000 per year, half the rate?

Re: Baby boomers are making it harder for millennials to buy homes

#90

Post by falsedan »

coolspot wrote: post #61
kevinburke wrote: post #23

I'm going to sound like a broken record here but there are policy and other decisions being made in the Bay Area that are restricting the housing supply and driving up the price of existing housing. You don't have to be a bystander in this process, you can help lobby for more supply. A list of propositions and legislation to support (SF, Brisbane, Mountain View, the CA state legislature) can be found here: https://ne…

Not all cities must be made into overpopulated ant colonies. People love SF as it is, and if you increase density it would be not SF, it would be something else. If you like dense cities - there are plenty of them - LA, SD, NY...

> like dense cities - there are plenty of them

> LA

what

> SD

wut

Until jobs start spreading out & not get concentrated in small geographic areas, we are doomed to support the high-density metropolis or urban-sprawl-commute-hell.

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