391–400 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a huge cultural difference there though -- people don't trust stocks, bonds, or bank accounts. Housing is the only investment most people will consider.
Nor should they, cultural or not. Look how the government destroyed the Ant group recently. When they can unilaterally do that, how can you find a safe stock?
> While the rich are more likely to own homes, tons of middle class and poor people also bought homes and planned their lives under the assumption that housing prices would go up. Tanking housing prices would destroy their trust in the system that they bet everything on. This is pretty much the crux of it. High housing prices could be "fixed" almost overnight, but for almost every citizen of the first world, their ho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sucks is a lot of young renters with steady jobs can afford to pay off a mortgage month to month, but they just can't afford that down payment (especially the 20% needed so as to not need to get mortgage insurance)! I was in that position for a while. Every time it seemed like I could afford to put that money down, the housing prices went up! It took a handful of years of renting cheap places (with roommates), l…
Buy a "starter house" and begin to build equity. It's how people have always done it. You buy a really small house that isn't in the most desirable location and start making payments into it. Down the road you have built equity and you can sell your starter home and buy a nicer, larger house. You maybe have some family to support then and need more room. But you see young people renting for 15 years in expensive plac…
The advice is completely out of touch because there is a generic undersupply of housing in the US, especially of entry-level housing in areas where the jobs are. What starter houses exist have reached the end of their serviceable lifespan. My starter house in the Midwest (affordable because construction is happening around town, would have preferred staying in MA) has a roof issue and in the medium term 80 feet of sewage pipe will have to be replaced. I was discussing these issues with a builder, and at some point it stops being economical. But meanwhile you need a roof over the head, especially when you own a large dog.
I'm actually angry at the unserviceable advice from people. Please field-test first before opening mouth.
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> I bought my first house in the early 1990s. Saving the down payment was tough. Compare housing prices since 1990 vs. wage growth over the same period. For the overwhelming majority of people entering the workforce today, there is no way to realistically save for a down payment unless you forego saving for anything else - no 401k, no IRA, no emergency fund, no car, no family.
Don't forget that the interest rate was around 10% in the early 1990ies
> While the rich are more likely to own homes, tons of middle class and poor people also bought homes and planned their lives under the assumption that housing prices would go up. Tanking housing prices would destroy their trust in the system that they bet everything on. This is pretty much the crux of it. High housing prices could be "fixed" almost overnight, but for almost every citizen of the first world, their ho…
> every citizen of the first world Where I lived in Italy, people certainly purchase houses, but they don't expect them to have crazy returns like in the US. It's just a way to not pay rent and have something that you can hang on to even if there's inflation or other funny business (something that Italy has seen a lot of). People even invest in, say, apartments, but it's a similar story: they expect them to hold thei…
Agreed, we didn't buy house as an investment vehicle, we bought it for living expenses consistency over time. It's the speculators that ruin any market.
> Meanwhile, renters are desperate. They’re begging for housing prices not just to slow, but to fall. I have a friend who is a head chef at a decently popular bar and restaurant on Broadway in Capitol Hill, Seattle (very trendy part of town if you aren't familiar, steep commercial rent). He lives in a 400 sq ft studio and is barely, barely making it from one paycheck to the next. I am sitting on a 2.6% interest rate…
This astonishes me about the US real estate market and is something I was only educated to on HN in the last week or so. I had absolutely no idea that 30 year fixed mortgages were not only widely available but the common standard there.
If you live in the suburbs somewhere and rent from a reputable legitimate property company, you may not care about that.
> Meanwhile, renters are desperate. They’re begging for housing prices not just to slow, but to fall. I have a friend who is a head chef at a decently popular bar and restaurant on Broadway in Capitol Hill, Seattle (very trendy part of town if you aren't familiar, steep commercial rent). He lives in a 400 sq ft studio and is barely, barely making it from one paycheck to the next. I am sitting on a 2.6% interest rate…
What sucks is a lot of young renters with steady jobs can afford to pay off a mortgage month to month, but they just can't afford that down payment (especially the 20% needed so as to not need to get mortgage insurance)! I was in that position for a while. Every time it seemed like I could afford to put that money down, the housing prices went up! It took a handful of years of renting cheap places (with roommates), l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sucks is a lot of young renters with steady jobs can afford to pay off a mortgage month to month, but they just can't afford that down payment (especially the 20% needed so as to not need to get mortgage insurance)! I was in that position for a while. Every time it seemed like I could afford to put that money down, the housing prices went up! It took a handful of years of renting cheap places (with roommates), l…
Buy a "starter house" and begin to build equity. It's how people have always done it. You buy a really small house that isn't in the most desirable location and start making payments into it. Down the road you have built equity and you can sell your starter home and buy a nicer, larger house. You maybe have some family to support then and need more room. But you see young people renting for 15 years in expensive plac…
e.g. If you buy a $200k house with 20% down at 2% on a 25-year amort, over five years you accumulate about $26k in equity not counting your down-payment. In my jurisdiction, standard realtor fees on that would be about $10k, going with the 1% rule of thumb for maintenance would run you another $10k, and property taxes would be another $6k. You’re already at zero net profit before you even have to pay insurance or utilities. (All that isn’t to say that you wouldn’t have lost more money renting.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japan has plenty of societal ills, but at least Tokyo has been doing amazing on this front.
China has an enormous amount of housing. Their prices are still sky high
The buyers would have to fund ALL the infra to power, water, feed such ghost city homes, and where will they work?
I used to work with a guy in SF that had a consultancy that would bring chinese 'students' on tours of the US to various universities to have them pick where they wanted to go to school.
These were the children of chinese oligarchs - and they would land in SFO with luggage full of cash - and, not knowing how things worked in the US, would jusr bribe their way through every transaction at ~$10,000 a time...
The chinese oligarchs own more of america than you may know.