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Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

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Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#151

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dragontamer wrote: post #150
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because too little has been built and little of that fits widespread need. But housing has been built and is being built. We leave it to the market, so its mostly higher end housing that gets built (more money to be made), but plenty of well to do techies are moving to the city that there isn't a shortage of people who want to live in that. > Wants to live infers worthwhile choices. The reality is that people live…

> But housing has been built and is being built. We dramatically slowed-down homebuilding after 2007, and have *NEVER* recovered. https://www.census.gov/econ/currentdata/?programCode=RESCONS... Note that our population has been growing at much faster rates than housing. So the overall trend is inevitable: fewer housing units than our population growth means that we will just have more expensive houses. There's simply…

Our population isn’t growing fast (.1% excluding immigration), but it is becoming more concentrated in fewer popular cities. Those cities of course, there is not a house for everyone, but there are plenty of houses in unpopular cities.

So we don’t have a residency system in the states, so everyone is free to live wherever they want, only supply of housing being a limiting factor in where they want to move (which we use the market to sort out).

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#152

Post by SubiculumCode »

rco8786 wrote: post #8
SubiculumCode wrote: post #2

Well...they are kinda right. 3k a month mortgage when the interest rate was low, now I imagine it would be closer to 4k per month. Housing prices might not be growing as fast but I haven't seen them dropping.

A 4k payment is a ~$580k house at 7.5%. Median home price is $387,600 as of November '23, for a payment of $2716. Not to say things aren't tough out there. Just that a $4k mortgage is still 30%+ more than what people can expect to pay at the median. This ignores taxes and insurance of course.

not in Cali

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#153

Post by dragontamer »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #151
dragontamer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But housing has been built and is being built. We dramatically slowed-down homebuilding after 2007, and have *NEVER* recovered. https://www.census.gov/econ/currentdata/?programCode=RESCONS... Note that our population has been growing at much faster rates than housing. So the overall trend is inevitable: fewer housing units than our population growth means that we will just have more expensive houses. There's simply…

Our population isn’t growing fast (.1% excluding immigration), but it is becoming more concentrated in fewer popular cities. Those cities of course, there is not a house for everyone, but there are plenty of houses in unpopular cities. So we don’t have a residency system in the states, so everyone is free to live wherever they want, only supply of housing being a limiting factor in where they want to move (which we u…

> Those cities of course, there is not a house for everyone, but there are plenty of houses in unpopular cities.

So build houses where people want to live.

As I already said earlier: the problem is that we stopped building houses at respectable rates. Its going to be a decade before we catch up to where the population wants to live.

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#154

Post by the_gipsy »

dragontamer wrote: post #153
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our population isn’t growing fast (.1% excluding immigration), but it is becoming more concentrated in fewer popular cities. Those cities of course, there is not a house for everyone, but there are plenty of houses in unpopular cities. So we don’t have a residency system in the states, so everyone is free to live wherever they want, only supply of housing being a limiting factor in where they want to move (which we u…

> Those cities of course, there is not a house for everyone, but there are plenty of houses in unpopular cities. So build houses where people want to live. As I already said earlier: the problem is that we stopped building houses at respectable rates. Its going to be a decade before we catch up to where the population wants to live.

What happens when you build houses where people want to live? More people want to live there.

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#155

Post by jemmyw »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #127
financypants wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this landlord savior complex common? I’ve never come across it. It’s a silly perspective even at face value.

It’s how liberals resolve the cognitive dissonance of getting someone poorer than them to pay for their mortgage, without seeing themselves as greedy or parasitic.

I don't really know what this means, I'm not American. I would say that all these people are more right of centre if liberal means left wing.

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#156

Post by ta1243 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #115
ta1243 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have to start somewhere. We have people who say that we can't demolish houses as investments because it's one of the few remaining holds of generational, familial wealth left. Why would we want that? My great great grandfather was luckier than yours, and that's why I live like a king and you clean my shoes?

Because historically in the United States at least, the ability to pass down your wealth to your children has been one of few reliable ways to ensure your children aren't themselves thrown into the meat grinder of poverty. Hence why huge swaths of it are called "generational poverty:" their parents didn't have shit, and they too will not have shit. That the privileged groups have leveraged this to keep their children…

How about raising the floor of poverty?

As a wealthy parents you can already afford massive leg-ups with your children by supporting their education and offering the opportunities. How does inheriting 300k when they turn 50 help?

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#157

Post by ta1243 »

rawgabbit wrote: post #129
ta1243 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry, but... as a Catholic the choice is obvious to me In the UK the 13th largest landowner is the church. If it used its lands to build at average density of Hackney it could house 2.5 million people.

The Catholic Church own land in the UK?

Globally the catholic church alone "owns" more land than the entire of France. It's total wealth is measured in dozens of billions of dollars. Obviously this is lower in the UK due to henry viii who confiscated it and gave some to his mates and formed a new church with all that land, but it's the same type of organisation.

Personally I'm of the opinion that no entity should own land, it should be rented from the people according to the value, but that's a minority opinion.

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#158

Post by sofixa »

brianwawok wrote: post #132
sofixa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that buyers want more house Is it that buyers are wanting more house or that builders make more profit selling more house due to red tape and zoning?

At least by me, 100% buyers wanting more space. Each kid gets their own bedroom. A home office. Maybe a movie room. Compare that to the 1950s boomer house, that has 2 kids in 1 bedroom, and no "extra" rooms.

> Each kid gets their own bedroom. A home office. Maybe a movie room.

With dropping fertility rates I'm sure there are plenty of people with 1 or even no kids that don't need those rooms. Home office will be entirely domain dependent (I don't see e.g. a couple of dentists needing or wanting a home office).

So the fact that the default house is pretty massive means that all sorts of people are priced out entirely.

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#159

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

atourgates wrote: post #73
beisner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t necessarily follow - it may be that the average potential buyer wants the same amount of house as before, but due to supply issues the lower end of potential buyers can’t afford to buy anything at all. And size doesn’t scale linearly with price - it’s usually sublinear. So it could be that the only homes that get built/sold are larger because nobody is building homes for middle-lower income price ranges.

I can't find it at the moment, but in the last year or so there was a really informative "why aren't developers building more affordable housing" article on (I believe) NPR. There were lots of factors, but basically it comes down to the fact that it's significantly more profitable for builders to build bigger, more expensive houses than smaller, more affordable houses. AKA, a builder will make much more profit on a s…

> significantly more profitable for builders to build bigger, more expensive houses

This is also the reason why car buying also sucks so much now. There is more profit it bigger higher trim cars full of features than smaller reliable basic cars.

Re: Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

#160

Post by rco8786 »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #152
rco8786 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4k payment is a ~$580k house at 7.5%. Median home price is $387,600 as of November '23, for a payment of $2716. Not to say things aren't tough out there. Just that a $4k mortgage is still 30%+ more than what people can expect to pay at the median. This ignores taxes and insurance of course.

not in Cali

This is simple math that is true in every state. The median price is of course different in Cali. And different in Montana. And different in every state. We're discussing "Americans" as a whole here.
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