The two measures are both great measures of house ownership that measure different things. The article frames the second one as better, and if you are looking to see the ownership proportion of people (for example as they note to look at the numbers of young people who live with parents) thats great. If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy you might care more about the standard owner occupancy per household.
I often see this with respect to GDP/GDP per capita vs mean income and other economic measures, but its great to see a non economic measure like this compared in this way.
Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?
Basically right now we measure "what fraction of homes are occupied by an owner" and not "what fraction of people live in their own home?". It seems bleedingly obvious that the latter is the number we should be maximizing, if either. And in particular it seems to me that a lot of argument about the former is actually using it as a proxy for the latter anyway.
No one cares about the poor homes who don't have local owners!
Incentivizing ownership is more closely aligned with objective (1) while owner-occupancy is more closely aligned with objective (2).
These don't work in the presence of capital's outsized returns though, which allows people who (for whatever reason) have access to more capital to recursively seize more of the growth in land values from objective (1) and therefore price out objective (2).
Right, so you want to know how many people own homes, not how many homes are "occupied" by an owner[1], which is at best a proxy, right? Sounds like you're agreeing with me but just getting the sides of the argument mixed up?
[1] As the article points out, a single person can in fact "occupy" more than one home!
Feels like an apples and oranges situation. The two numbers each have their own value but they’re measuring different things.
One is calculated based on the number of houses, the other is a measured based on the population of adults or households. Both measures have always existed. Trying to replace one with the other doesn’t seem right because they both have value for different reasons.
I don't feel my rental situation in either insecure or unstable. I recently moved (my choice) but previously I lived in the same rental complex for almost a decade. I took advantage of COVID to move to a larger apartment there for cheaper rent, which was a massive advantage I had over friends who owned homes at the time.
Depends on how old the kids are, because at least in most cases, daycare costs are for a very short period of time compared to the the overall life of the child. And the average in most states is wildly all over the place.
We absolutely should be focused on free childcare, or ideally ways that parents don't need childcare to begin with, but I don't think that has a lot to do with household income. Hell, at that point, why as well talk about transportation costs, as it's different in a single household vs a two parent two kid household, and different still depending on where you live.
It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately affects people's sense of content and wellbeing. Also, doesn't help that laws and government policy heavily favor home owners (perhaps because home owners vote at a lot higher rate than renters)
Maybe a way to handle this better would be to look at the size of the home because if a home can easily fit multiple generations it feels like a very different situation. Also it's somewhat arbitrary who happens to be the owner on the deed not to mention key questions like whether or not the home is truly owned outright versus largely in debt to a mortgage
As you mentioned, multi-generation homes are not the norm in the US. If there is a change in that norm, it's worth investigating why that's happening, before we conclude that we need to adjust metrics around it.
Purely anecdotal, but every multi-generation home in my (American) family is the result of disability or student loan debt - multiple generations live together, but that doesn't mean they want to.
Also remember that this new metric is meant to be more informative on wealth, generally. Those other generations living in the home don't typically share in the wealth the home confers, not until someone dies at least.
> Housing unit 1. A couple owns their home. The woman’s parents live with them.
> Housing unit 2. A couple owns their home. Their son, a recent college graduate, lives with them.
> Housing unit 3. A man owns his home. A friend lives with him.
> Housing unit 4. A couple owns their home. Their two young children live with them.
> Housing unit 5. Three roommates rent their home. The owner lives elsewhere.
> As illustrated in Figure 1, these five housing units are home to 14 adults. Because four of these five housing units have their respective owners as residents, the owner-occupancy rate—the measure traditionally viewed as the homeownership rate—on the cul-de-sac is 80 percent. However, because only seven of the 14 adults are actually owners of the homes they live in, the HPOP is much lower, at 50 percent.
I think 1, 2, and 4 should all count as “owning their home.” The new measure is also a recipe for confounding attempts to compare the metrics over time, as demographic change brings in cultures that embrace multi-generational living. So what seems to be a drop in homeownership rate could instead reflect a growing and aging sub-population where the cultural preference is for parents to live with adult children instead of separately.
Once those stop getting paid, none of those people are housed. This is tracking things that don't matter.
Here's an example from the page - a couple and the wife's parents - a couple and their college grad son
In this example the two couples (4 people) are counted as home owners and the 3 others (wife's parents, the son) as non owners - so the ownership rate is 4/7 = 57%.
On the traditional metric that scenario would be 100% because roughly each family owns its home which is good.
Now look at what would have to happen for the new rate to move to 100 - the wife's parents and the son would need to move out and buy separate homes. In other words the metric "punishes" living with family even if that's what you want to do.
I find the traditional metric is more useful. If I am a renter that indicates the desire to have a separate place - so it makes more sense to "ding" the ownership metric.
It makes sense for some families to cohabitate. Family with infants cohabitating with grandparents providing some care. Elderly parents being cared for my their middle-aged "kids". Etc.
Or maybe we measure what is easiest to measure, not what is best.
I see this everywhere, though. Jobs data is really job openings not actual hires. Unemployment data is really paperwork filing not people out of work or retiring early. And now home ownership is really "count everyone in the home if the owner resides there".
It’s even worse than that, it’s not counting people at all. It’s number of houses with at least one owner living there divided by total number of houses.
I hope this number drops below 50%. Well below 50%. Maybe then we can finally vote down the NIMBY regulations and NIMBY politicians. And start rapidly expanding our housing supply. Given our current political system, it seems high homeownership rates are the root cause of the housing affordability crisis
Not what was good for young people who, for the most part, can’t afford to live in houses and these days are getting ripped off with overly expensive apartments too, so they never have a chance to buy a house and build equity.
But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation).
Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.
But you shouldn’t have to make a leveraged loan-backed investment in a single asset class in order to afford shelter.
The problem isn’t ’housing is an investment’, it’s that people are long not on ‘housing’ but on their own single specific house. That’s a horrendously undiversified portfolio.
This is an international community here on HN, would love to hear takes from other countries.
If you rent make sure you vote. Make sure you have an informed vote, all too often cities will put rules on rental units that make renting worse for you. (bad tenants and bad landlords exist - good tenants and good landlords need protection from the former). Likewise while rent obeys supply and demand, when property taxes go up that factors into supply and will make rent go up indirectly - is it worth it? (I cannot answer the later question - the more important consideration is make sure the taxes are similar for rental and owned units otherwise you are a renter are harmed)
I don't see why you think owning should only be slightly better after 10 years; if you don't want to deal with maintenance directly, you could always hire a management company as if you were the landlord and renter, but there's a benefit to you and everyone around you when you are invested in your home and community.
Management companies have a terrible reputation. While you can use them, it is likely they will be much more costly than doing things yourself. Real estate investors tend to hire their own people for management even though this seems like the perfect thing for them to outsource because they have been burned so often. If they work for you great, but beware.
Even if you find a good management company, if the roof it 23 years old (expected lifespan 25 years) you should expect the big bill to replace the roof - over 10 years this works out since there will likely be one such big bill but not many. However if you live there less than 10 years these big bills will hit you.
To maximize fraction of homes with their owner living inside, you focus on the ownership _and_ the lifestyle choice. A family living together is the best use of land in this case. A family renting a side room to a college kid is still the best use of land. If every home were lived in by its owner, you could still have 90% of your population renting and not building generational wealth.
Or they could... both own the home? Independent of the rest of your argument, this is a pretty weird hypothetical case to illustrate your point. Joint property ownership is way more common than any of the "alternatives" you're suggesting, so it's hard to take what you're saying seriously when you've dismissed the obvious way that this would work for the overwhelming majority of married homeowners.
"% people owning homes" is maximized by joint ownership, as well, but the corner cases are interesting: It is lower with big families living together or when anyone rents.
On the other hand, the "% homes lived in by owner" metric falls down in a much more realistic way: When there are fewer homes and they are lived in by owners, you can still have 90% of your people renting apartments while this metric hits 100%
What's the goal - defend A vs B?
No, if you look at the first example explaining how the two metrics are calculated, it is clear that both spouses are considered homeowners for HPOP.
Non-occupants contribute very little to the actual value of a place - they don't work here, they don't buy here. But they capture much of the value of other people trying to make the place a pleasant place to live, though rising real estate values.
Stipulate that owning a home is good.
As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down (you can only occupy one home at a time). Homeownership might rise or fall while this is going on. But that doesn't matter; the number of homes going up is good, so the fact that the metric falls when it rises tells you that either (1) the metric is "evil", rising when bad things happen and falling when good things happen; or (2) the metric is incoherent and doesn't carry information about whether things are going well.
Not necessarily at all. Plenty of people rent who would like to own homes too
So why would anyone buy a second home in that scenario? Maybe as a studio or whatever, perhaps. But as homes become less useful as a rental investment, the number of non owner-occupied homes seems like it will decrease too?
You're just using it as a proxy for people owning homes. It's not a given that the two numbers are always opposed.
I don't think you can get any of these situations non-organically. But schools and worker dormitories have a lot in common. More than most seem to admit to.
Culturally, in many countries it helps with household formation (coupling, starting families), which, in an age of low birth rates, can be useful.
However if you rent for less than the mortgage you can invest the difference into something that will grow in value more than the house (which SHOULD track inflation) and in turn end up about the same in the end.
Your mortgage is the lowest amount you'll pay. On top of that you have to manage the upkeep of the house, which costs both time and money. Lots of people go through phases in their lives where they move around and owning just doesn't make sense for a few 1 to 2 year stretches.
On the other hand, rent is the highest amount you'll pay. You generally don't have to worry about upkeep, and you're free to move. The commitment is lower and that has real value for certain people at certain stages of their lives.
I rented for 6 years in different areas until I figured out what I liked, and then I bought a house. Those 6 years weren't just wasted years. Those were very valuable years where renting really made the most sense.
Well guess who has to pay for that in a house that is rented? It's the renter!
Just the same as when you rent a car, the cost for maintenance is included in your rental fee.
You're just as free to move if you own a house: Just sell it, or rent it out. Any inconvenience from doing that is easily worth the money you save by not giving it away in paying rent.
On average, over time, in a free market, yes. But not necessarily in any specific case. The rent is a cap during the lease period, no matter what the landlord has to pay for maintenance.
I don't like these 2 statements because they are only true at a starting point. If someone gets a mortgage today for $2k/month, 10 years from now it'll still be $2k/month, or even less if rates drop and they refinance. Rents OTOH will continue to rise with inflation. I had a $2k/month mortgage at my last house and the house next door rented for $4500/month.
There is a choice. We would just prefer nobody had to make that choice. We consider it a failure of the modern society that this choice is on the table. But housing consumption can be scaled, and that it can has important economic implications (such as, social housing can be made cheaper by making units smaller. It literally wouldn't be possible to pull it off if housing consumption was perfectly inelastic.)
I would loose a job, easy access to friends, access family nearby in the process. All those matter, I value all three.
Meanwhile, if I dont buy latest toy, whether phone or sports equipment or netflix subscription, I adapt and dont care in 3 days.
It is rarely the case that someone who can't afford housing in their current location can afford to move away from their support networks to a place with no jobs. Places with significantly cheaper rent almost invariably give you significantly less income, if you can even get a job without connections (which are important in general, but especially important in rural areas where everyone knows each other). That can work out for you if you have substantial savings or a comfy remote tech job, but if you have those you probably don't need to move in the first place.
Your other points are valid ways to technically scale housing down but, I think, bring with them a significant decrease in quality of life that far outweighs what is gained by being able to afford 500 big macs and 10 pairs of shoes.
And yes, it will drive your QoL to the ground, I'm fully aware of that. I'm just saying it's neither impossible nor infeasible nor unheard of. It's "merely" undesirable. Extremely undesirable. But possible.
So you're probably wrong on all points here.
[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/SGP
[2] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA
I'm curious what people are quibbling with here? Romania has the world's highest rate of home ownership at 96% and only ranks as 34th in happiness. Or maybe Kazakhstan but I can't verify the data on that, and it's right beside Romania in happiness. Switzerland has the world's 4th lowest rate of home ownership and ranks 10th happiest. It seems like from a data perspective there is no empirical support for the idea that home ownership directly correlates to societal happiness.
which means they are happier than 35th, the France, which has double GDP per capita
So you're probably wrong on all points here by your own data
> probably wrong on all points here by your own data
again, it's not my data its the data OP referenced initially, I just linked to it.
Living in the same place now for years makes it too easy to just hold on to junk, it makes it too easy to just fall into the same routine.
There's some pros and cons each way. It really depends on what you're wanting in life at the moment.
Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value...
Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...
A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. In 1970, which was when boomers were about the same age as Gen Z is today, only a third of americans had air conditioning. Today it’s almost 90%—basically only the people in very temperate climates don’t have it.
Like the previous poster mentioned, I'm not sure that's really such a quality of life improvement.
First of all, food. I don't know where you shop, but the cost has definitely doubled, even tripled.
Second of all, the idea that it's some "good" that these things are "cheap" relative to wages - before they may have been expensive, but they were also investments. It doesn't really matter that much, because you can save to obtain them, and don't need to worry about re-obtaining them. Being in a situation where durable goods are cheap, but cost of living is high, means that you are disproportionately struggling - you can't save anything, any good that these products provide is outweighed by it being too expensive to live...
Durable goods became much less durable, too. Furniture is the biggest one I'd say - they're just not built to last anymore. Whether it's planned obsolescence or just extreme cost cutting, we aren't comparing apples to apples here.
I'm pretty sure "stuff" in this context is mostly manufactured goods, and those have fallen in absolute price. Examples abound in the tech sector: even adjusted for inflation, a MacBook Neo is the cheapest Mac ever released, and so on...
What's average income less average house price? Has that gone up or down?
Yes, but not enough to change whether you want AC or not: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/washington-dc/yea.... In DC in 1970 you had 98 days above 85 degrees. The year before was 80 and the year after was 71. Last year was 72 and the year before was 93. There are more warm days, but you wanted an AC in the DC area back in the 1970s too.
> and we didn't put as many of the jobs in places where you absolutely needed an AC
I don’t think that’s true. The south and mid atlantic was always a huge share of the population. And the midwest was a bigger share than today, while the temperate west coast was a smaller share. You need AC in Chicago too: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/chicago/yearly-da.... Even in the 1970s in Chicago you had 30-60 days over 85 every year.
You are mostly right and the structural incentives are more related at root to unsustainable national debt than any legislative choice (unless that's what you were referring to)
It's clear that there's plenty of money to go around. It's just that none of it is being spent on things that improve people's lives, mostly due to corruption.
Trump increased the national debt by $7.8 trillion in his first term (rising from ~$19.9 trillion at inauguration to ~$27.75 trillion when he left office), 39% increase (more than WW2, the Manhattan project and the Moon landing combined)
Each and every US citizen will be required to pay $22,400 for the (ahem) accomplishments of Trump's first term.
So far in his second term, Trump has added $3.2 trillion so far, if you calculate by the end of his second term it will be about $8.8 trillion.
Each and every US citizen will be required to pay $25,000 for his accomplishments now.
For comparison: you owe $9,200 for Barack Obama's last term, and $20,300 for Joe Biden's term. Oh and Clinton was by far the cheapest president since WW2, increasing the debt by a measly $600 during his 2nd term.
BLS says housing, transportation, and food are the top 3. Insurance/pensions is #4, but that also includes car and homeowners insurance and retirement contributions.
Over the past 50 years, both transportation and food got cheaper. Moreover, clothing actually used to be one of the top categories, but that’s fallen off completely.
(BLS gets this data from surveys: https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cex/home.htm )
Well said. Being told that 'you should be happy without owning' to a party that can't afford to own by another party who is actively scooping up the same resource can feel extremely invalidating.
My personal take is that a lot of support for contemporary political extremism in many countries comes from the fact that a significant portion of population is pissed off and see no realistic chance of the 'settle down and thrive' life, not because they are racist/prejudiced or whatever (although labeling them as such only makes things more extreme)
It's not really coming from those though? At the same time that housing costs have ballooned, we've also had a significant migration back to cities. When a larger % of the population are living in high density locations you are going to naturally have a larger % not owning homes. Owning your own home does not align with the density required for a city to function.
At the least, narrowing down the topic to 'Why do people rent instead of own a condo?' is a much more meaningful topic over 'Why do people rent instead of own a SFH?' since a condo is a more viable option in locations where most of the renters are.
Not everyone wants a giant house, and plenty of people like a small one. It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it.
So when we talk about small and affordable we're talking more like 100 sq ft. Large compared to that is what most would call a modest home.
In Europe its only housing, and still proportionally cheaper than what US has, often in higher quality for older homes (bricks / concrete vs cheap creaky wooden houses).
The idea of saving massive amounts for my kids potential university studies is ridiculous to me. Same for any health issue. I mean any health issue as long as I can work, and then social state takes over (that is not ideal but at point nothing is).
This is also how happiness can be defined - lack of (much shorter list of) constant worries and pressures to deliver, sustain etc.
My home is rated to survive earthquakes stronger than any in recorded European history without structural damage.
“You have lies, damned lies, and then you have statistics”
In every developed country two of those are basic human rights, and you get them free even if you’ve never worked simply because you don’t want to.
Every developed country except one, that is.
Definitely true for my household. The mortgage, college for the kids, and health insurance for a family takes up a huge amount. Not to mention the housing expenses like HVAC fixes, trash collection, sewer, utilities, etc.
As a driver and measure of well-being, it’s probably at least 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.
This isn't really how the transition to agriculture worked. Historically agricultural elites captured lands with conscripted armies and forced people to farm. There are plenty of examples where central authority collapsed and the archeological evidence shows us that people largely stopped farming.
With no army to protect the farm, there can be no farm. A return to hunting and gathering would occur as an effect of warfare, regardless of whether or not the farmers have any choice. But hunting and gathering is still obsolete, whereupon agriculture is possible.
Obsolescence does not by definition imply permanence.
Farming came first, and with it came larger communities and higher population density. That led to surplus, which enabled elites and other forms of existence beyond basic subsistence. And that lifestyle mostly spread organically. Not because the agricultural elites didn't try to conquer hunter-gatherer societies, but because there were so few hunter-gatherers to conquer. Conquered lands were mostly farmed by descendants of farmers from neighboring regions, because they formed the majority of the population.
No, there are signs of habitation. If you look at the evidence from the alluvial plain around ancient Babylon and similar cities from the early history of cities in the region you see people returning to fishing, hunting, and sort of opportunistic planting on river banks. These cities had a tenuous grasp, and people would often just leave, or the city would collapse and people would stop doing intensive agriculture. People would abandon irrigation channels which they had been forced to dig and simply just go fishing. James C. Scott's Against the Grain covers the archeology nicely.
Community is IMO easier in apartments, the higher density means there’s a bigger pool of folks you might click with.
Community gathering spots are more prevalent as well: pools, playgrounds, green spaces, etc are common amenities. Especially if you get a dog, you will meet lots of people.
Of course it depends on which complex you live in. If I move I will miss my apartment and its community. I won’t miss my window aircon though, central air would be awesome.
Yes this is feasible, but respecting it as a design problem, renting is more transient than ownership and tilts the floor away from deep communal relationships.
Comparing the neighborhood I grew up in with the one I now live in is night and day. My mom has had the same next door neighbors for 44 years. Up and down the street there are many similarly familiar persons.
By comparison, from my own front door, I can only physically see two houses that are owner occupied. There are good neighbors (and friends!) in the rental houses as well, but investing in those relationships pays off with lower certainty because circumstance is very likely to uproot them at any given moment.
Land where people want to live is scarce. Obviously a variety of factors but one of them is that land is bifurcating the way income is. Small amounts are growing in value rapidly and the rest is declining (or growing more slowly). Urban property is skyrocketing, rural property in coal country is struggling.
Do a search for "the housing theory of everything".
It has been an idea growing in popularity over the last few years, especially in the Anglo-sphere where housing/shelter costs seem to be worse than other places. (One hypothesis I've seen for this is because of Common law, which can give NIMBYs more power to challenge (new) things.)
Recently the trend in food and consumer products getting cheaper has also reversed.
That being said housing has gotten worse for both buying as well as renting. I think there is a case to be made that having a place you feel comfortable/home in (whether rented or owned) affects people's wellbeing disproportionately.
N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder".
The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.
In the end, home ownership is more based around the kind of life you want to live than costs/benefits of the house as an asset. As a Canadian I see that many of my friends would choose to pay a lot more each month on the principle of a mortgage than they would ever save in a registered account.
Is that your intent in posting it?
Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine.
No, Levit said that in 1948, when Americans were vastly better-connected (socially) than today, "Godless Communism" was their #1 fear, and everybody was aware of communism's easy appeal to those who felt dispossessed.
I'd read the quote as a clever way to say "let me sell millions of cheap houses to Americans, and you'll never have to worry about the commies".
> Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine.
commonly mistaken with communism, yes.
Country having strong social services and caring about their citizens is not the same as communism.
Additionally, buying a house is probably the easiest way to build some kind of generational wealth. It's easy to see this as yet another way the older generation is pulling up the ladder behind them.
It's probably not just homeownership, but the cost of real estate as a whole. And not even just residential. Isn't the often-lamented "loss of third places" at least in part due to those places not being able to pay rent unless they heavily monetize?
I've also heard the theory that the arts often take off in an area when real estate prices drop and it suddenly becomes possible to build cheap art studios and such. No proof or anything, just something I've heard random people talk about online, but it makes some sense.
;-)
But once you start digging and thinking, you start realizing that it's not true.
I understand that most hackers reading the above sentence are already raging, but were you actually there to know that things were worse in the past, or has it been hammered so strongly into you that you're now greatly offended at suggestions that it isn't true?
In general I think that nobody would be willing to go far back in time. You don't need YouTube, but would you want to live without it? How about electric lights? Safe drinking water? Flush toilets?
Policy doesn't "favor" favor homeowners. It screws everything else because it can.
You wanna add a deck to your home. You pay the people the government says you need to pay a grand or two and you're GTG (by which I mean, good to spend further money actually doing the project). Landlord wants to add decks to his triple decker so that he can make the place nicer (more $) while also hitting the egress requirements bird with the same stone and it's an instant 4-5 figure bunch of bullshit where half a dozen worthless interests who add nearly no value in the base case exercise their enshrined in law right to sink their teeth into what should be a petty project.
And it's not just some slum lords triple decker, it's a 10-unit condo, it's those new luxury apartments and on and on and on and on. Everything about owning property, improving property, etc, etc, is ungodly expensive and exclusionary because there's a mile long list of jerks with their hand undeservingly in the pot.
Don't get me started on the financialization that underpins all this, it's just as tileted too.
Policy "favors" homeowners by somewhat exempting them from the worst of this because the buck stops with them. When they get screwed there's nobody else to pass it on to, so they push back.
No one ever thinks they're living through a Golden Age.
Certainly many would prefer to own if that’s a possibility, but easily the worst part of renting for most I think is the need to move periodically, whether that be to keep housing costs within budget, because their landlord decided they’d like to give the condo to their niece, or because the their apartment complex changed hands and the new corporate giant owner is doing a terrible job at managing it.
At least, that’s why I hated renting. If I could stay the same place for 10+ years without getting priced out, without being kicked out for the landlord’s personal use, and without corporate enshittification (which often takes place alongside rent hikes), I doubt I would’ve purchased.
Owning isn’t a perfect bed of roses but at least my costs stay somewhat pinned and I don’t need to move unless I personally decide to. It’s such a weight off my shoulders that I won’t need to go through the stressful ordeal of apartment hunting every year around renewal time just to have options in hand in case things don’t work out.
A year ago, my partner and I bought a small house a short distance (40 minutes by car) from the city, and I moved into a much smaller, cheaper, and less central apartment in the city. I still spend a large part of my time in the city, but I’m also at the house regularly, especially on weekends. I’ve been much more relaxed ever since, because I know that I can give the city’s rental market the middle finger at any time and retreat to our house.
And that leads us to "only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income" - precarity does matter. If I am one sickness or two paychecks from not being able to pay rent, it causes a lot more actual real material insecurity then "having slower phone while everybody else has equally slow phone".
Likewise, if you have trouble to find a job, fear of loosing it makes you work 12 hours a day in a job you hate, it affects you a lot more then whether you can stream movies.
On top of that having that high mortgage or even rent hanging over your head, making sure you can't really downgrade work to something more fun but maybe less paid can be stressful too. Especially in the firing season where you might be let go and take months to find new job.
And housing taking higher and higher part of the income is also effectively getting us poorer or at least stagnate.
How does the multi generational preference living theory work given the correlation to rent to income ratio? Is multi generational living preference a cause or a symptom?
Meanwhile economic stratification continues and the other side finds it increasingly difficult to make the down payment.
The statistic that doesn't compute for me is how is it possible that we're having a housing crisis while at the same time we have historically low average number of people per house.
When reality seems to be in conflict with logic, the next step is to question assumptions.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...
- Disappearance of cheap new cars: You can get entry level Chevys, Kias, and Hyundais for < $25k, which is about $14k in 2001 dollars and many more of those cars will last until 200,000 miles and have safety features only available on luxury cars in 2001.
- Massive supply reduction of used cars: I actually don't have good data on this, but it seems like there's pipeline is still borked from COVID era irregularities. That said, cars these days have much better quality and last longer. A car with more than 100,000 miles in the 90s was near the end of its life. That's a typical listing Facebook marketplace these days.
- Repair costs of old cars: Repairs can be expensive, but again, cars today are much more reliable than they were in the 90s or earlier. Even simple things like recommended oil change frequency changing from 3k miles to 10k miles for most models makes a huge difference in total cost of ownership.
- Gas prices: Gas prices have certainly spiked recently (gee, I wonder why), but the cost of gas in real dollars has been higher several times in the past 25 years (see the second chart here: https://www.macrotrends.net/4453/us-gasoline-prices) It peaked in 2008 over $6 per gallon in 2026 dollars.
For comparison, an entry level car in 2001 was <$9k. That's <$18k in today's dollars.
The extra safety features is part of why transportation has become less affordable, yes.
> I actually don't have good data on this, but it seems like there's pipeline is still borked from COVID era irregularities.
That, plus Obama-era Cash for Cars, plus engines becoming so complicated and expensive to fix that 10+ year old broken cars are scrapped rather than repaired at much higher rates.
You used to be able to buy a car for literally less than $1000 that would last you a few good years with minimal maintenance.
> Repair costs of old cars: Repairs can be expensive, but again, cars today are much more reliable than they were in the 90s or earlier.
Not 5x more reliable, as in requiring 5x fewer engine renovations over 15 years now that it costs 5x more to do so.
So clearly something is going wrong with the way we deal with our mass transit as well if Paris can do things for a fraction of NYC.
[1] https://nypost.com/2017/06/25/it-took-50-years-for-the-mta-t... [2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-cant-new-york-contr...
That's for a three unit building. Now scale that to a twenty or one hundred unit building. At some point, it makes sense for a single entity to handle the common maintenance through outright ownership and rent. Individual families have the flexibility to leave if things suck without being financially tied to the building long-term and subject to changes in housing prices. Yes, moving as a renter is expensive. It's still lower cost and friction than moving as an owner.
Source: rented for years in cities. Now happily a homeowner in the hinterlands of Vermont.
Rural homeowners and people with single family homes in streetcar suburbs or cities don't, but most new developments already have an organization with dues for shared maintenance.
It should really be city that is building the new housing (even if in the end it gets subcontracted, at least the top level have vested interest in keeping the quality and cost in check). Maybe even offer some rent-to-own programs where part of rent gets put into savings that can be used to either buy it after few years of use or be withdrawn when moving so renter have nice lil bit of money to put forward for buying new apartment/home.
Then the city can actually plan for it, rather than hope housing developer that bought the land does something good for city and not just their own pocket.
I live in one of those used-to-be-commie countries, and we somehow manage to keep cornfields in prime locations, and in many areas, the most the local government allows you to build is a two-apartment two-story house, but none of the non-built land is actually buildable, so you need to demolish something else first. Here and there someone is able to build something with maybe 6-8 apartments (probably with an envelope switching hands), but that's it.
It's as if some rich people connected to the government managed to get a lot of realestate in the 1990s when communism fell, and now they don't want prices to drop. But hey, we're building office buildings without any issues and making airbnb even easier instead... so yeah... the situation is pretty bad.
If we modeled Spain, we could have more condos. That would require good, safe transit, condos with green space and multiple rooms at a SFH price point, and a cultural change among the older generation to view cities as having less crime.
Much of Europe would like a word. I grew up in a block of flats where everybody owned. 16 apartments, around 60 people, lived on the footprint of a typical American house. All our parents were homeowners, together they owned the building. Two buildings actually and the land they stood on.
So a total of 32 apartments, 120 people, a small parking lot, and a bit of green lawn owned by the people who lived there and self-governed through a sort of HOA. Little communities like this were extremely common in the city.
Nowadays with my generation homeownership is becoming a little more rare. Still people own apartments in these self-governed buildings, but many have become priced out. Too much demand not enough build.
Perhaps wealthy actors (or those representing them) are attempting to distract the aggrieved—focus their anger toward some non-wealthy group.
Either there is explicit collusion where they meet and discuss how to do these things, or there is implicit collusion where they all act in their own best interests and the results is the same. Neither of these mechanism seems particularly likely to me.
I would be happy to hear some thoughtful explanation of how other people approach this issue
There is historic precedent for blaming immigrants (as an example, or just others, if you like) for one's woes. So on one hand you have well-known "playbooks" that don't require some secret meeting of a cabal.
That aside though, even if actors don't collude, if they're each throwing a lot of things at the wall, they may well all arrive at the same things that seem to "have stuck". It's as though there are universal fears and even prejudices among populations of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Reconstruction_in_Americ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://belonging.berkeley.edu/new-southern-strategy
My small eu country has in the recent years started importing workers from asian countries, and people are against that... of course it's branded as 'racism' in the media.
The reality is, that some businesses have been having troubles with finding workers to do hard work for minimum wage (which is easily solvable by paying people more and creating better working conditions, but hey, think of the profits), and importing foreign workers means that wages can stay down. We're talking about AI and how we'll all lose jobs,and at the same time, importing new people, and that doesn't compute for many, especially those underpaid who can't negotiate for better options because the government approved new foreign workers in their field.
Then you have the more on-topic problem of importing thousands of "outsiders" into a relatively small city (~300k pop), without building any housing, neither for them, nor for locals, who want to move out their 30+yo "kids" out of their childhood bedrooms, nor for others living a bit further away who'd like to live closer to work. Sure, you can fit 8 "poor foreigners" into a 2-bedroom apartment with 4 bunk beds for 200/month each, and it'll be cheap for them, but for a young couple wating a child, 1600eur for such an apartment is around 1/2 of their combined income, so nope, no apartment and no kids for them, since they have nowehre to put them, and "we need foreigners, because our people are not having enough kids".
Then the third problem is integration... and the government does nothing about it, no language courses, no nothing... the laws say that businesses must use our native language, but in some areas, you can interact even with waiters or shop clercs (so, first line of interaction with customers) who can't speak a word of it.
But hey, it's easier to say "racist people hate foreigners", than to solve the issues.
Not all policy is easy to understand, but I feel (anecdote) that lots of folks don’t want to understand what isn’t an obvious benefit to them, especially if benefits accrue over a longer period.
That's been a long standing element of capitalist propaganda: attempt to distract and invalidate people's real, legitimate complaints about their situations by noting that not even the Kings of old had color TVs and refrigerators.
Who cares if your housing situation is insecure, getting healthcare is challenging, and politically you're dis-empowered? Look at the boob tube and rejoice at your good fortune!
My current place would sell for say $1.4M or so.
The lot itself is worth around $600-700k if it was empty.
A similarly sized home would cost well over $1m to construct to similar quality levels - normalizing a bit for modern construction techniques and all that.
So about $2.4m to build new, or $1.4m to buy a fairly similar 25 year old home next door. New construction here costs more than the older structures on the land in most cases. This ignores permitting and financing costs which throws a light wrench into those calculations, likely making it a bit more expensive on the build side.
That is using numbers I would pay a custom builder for, but even if you add in 20-30% profit for the builder the math isn't super great for the new build end of things.
For scale, in much of the country it is possible to build a new home for well under $200/sf. New detached homes retail for <$175/sf, which includes the builder's profit.
Someone needs to tell the big developers. They keep turning out McMansions (and somehow selling them?).
There's no profit in building smaller.
bell-cot•3h ago
(Yes, I saw the reference to dorms, nursing homes, & prisons.)