It’s getting prohibitively expensive. Before brokers fees were banned in Boston, a $2,000/mo apartment could have cost you $8000 just to move in. That’s for first, last, security and brokers fee. That’s a worst case scenario but even just first and last months rent is $4000. It’s getting outrageous.

30 year mortgage is founded partly on the idea that your house will be worth more in the future when you sell it. That you can lock in a lower price now.

Number cannot always go up. We are at the top of the carbon pulse. Financialization has taken us far from the material baseline of the rock we are flying through space on. Debt will only get us so far.

For this and many other reasons, why would you believe a house "as an investment" is a reasonable thing to keep hoping for, especially 30 years from now? If you have even a reasonably stable rental, it's less risk exposure if you can save some money that isn't tied up in a down payment.

It's bizarre to me that this is all couched in "expect". This is a financial problem - they have the actual numbers to know whether the responses are rational.

Because you cannot pay market prices if you leave your rent controlled apartment. Once you are out, you never get one again.

Apparently that is beyond the high and mighty Federal Reserve employees who wrote this speculation.

The housing market needs to be socialized.

Where I live, there's just a growing sense that rent and homeownership are wildly more expensive compared to what you get. Lack of development in the urban core has made moving anywhere else (cheaper) entail buying a car, dealing with commutes, etc. It has also made moving within the urban core significantly more expensive, especially with rent control pricing limiting availability. Basically, from a purely financial perspective, the juice (moving) is not really worth the squeeze.

The promises of WFH have also not come to fruition. The dream of moving anywhere and retaining your email job are not the reality in 2026. Employers seem actively hostile to that idea or are reneging on promises or claims that that "is the future".

Sounds about right

If the Canadians finally leave and go back home the prices would drop.

They all get TN visas then only hire other Canadians (just like Indians, Canadians do the exact same thing).

They are 1000% responsible for driving the costs up in San Francisco.

Comparing to the 1980s maybe misses that the population was much younger then, and there’s still a general trend of people moving more when they’re younger and settling down when they’re older. I would have liked to see the data broken down by age cohorts.

I feel like US is too heavily weighted on incumbant "rent seeking" through law and policy. We were just in Tokyo and Seoul, the average costs of rents in New York City: ~$3,900 – $4,200 vs Tokyo: ~$1,200 – $1,350 and vs Seoul: ~$950 – $1,100. Renters will move if there are affordable newer options in cities instead of treating boomer asset holding rent seekers as a privileged class.

So I'm Gen-X. Statistically speaking, I have more yesterdays than tomorrows. I can't even begin to describe how much of a dystopian hellscape the world has become and is becoming. Many my age describe the 1990s as the last good decade.

I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment in the 1990s for $200/month 3 miles from the city center. All my other expenses were less than another $200/month. The median house price was less than $80k. College graduate positions typically paid ~$30k but that was OK. This was pre-9/11 so all those old TV shows and movies you saw of people meeting people at the airport gate were very real. I've seen younger people think this was just a trope, like the 30 seconds the trace a call bit. No, that was real. Friends of a friend lived in Iowa and split a 4 bedroom house for $180/month. Not each, total.

For younger millenials and Gen-Z, I honestly wish you could've experienced this world, for no other reason than to see that things weren't always this way and don't have to be this way.

There's an old episode of the Cosby Show that had the father (Bill Cosby) teaching his son, Theo, about finances. It's funny watching it back now because it has the line "an apartment in Manhattan is going to cost you $400" and I remember thinking how expensive that sounded at the time.

The absolute worst thing that has happened is how hoarding housing has become a retirement plan. It's simply stealing from the next generation and it's absolutely strangling the economy. Society is fraying at the edges. For anyone interested, there's been academic work on this that falls under the label of "the housing theory of everything" eg [1].

But what I hate most is how cruel, selfish and stupid everybody seems to be getting, in part fuelled by increasing desperation to stay above the rising tide just a little bit longer. And the ultra-wealthy constantly throw gas on this fire and torch the planet for what? So they can have $200 billion instead of $100 billion? What good does that do you if there's nothing left? But what's crazy is that a third of the population will defend Jeff Bezos in this equation.

What you see in a lot of economic indicators (such as those posted here) can be read as people incradsingly see themselves as having no future. Continued consumer spending is not a sign of a healthy economy or optimism anymore. It's a sign of fatalism.

The entire thing is honestly deeply depressing.

[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...