There are homes in most areas that are well under 400k. Housing obviously needs to be cheaper but it’s not nearly as bad as the fediverse memes make it seem.
My father told me with a straight face that a 3k a month apartment is ridiculous, because you can buy a house with that.
So yes, the memes are out there for a reason.
Well, you can…
But you may not like where you can buy a house for that much.
Ah very true
Because people make shit up.
That’s still nearly 7 full years of salary, in a world where people struggle to save even 10% of their take-home salary.
Not the point. It’s making shit up.
Is everyone making shit up? Or are there places with expensive homes? Do you even know where the OP in the image lives to claim that they’re making shit up?
I don’t think anyone is saying the minimum house price is now $700k. But, living in Massaschusetts, even cities besides the uber-expensive Boston have more houses closer to $700,000 at list price than $400,000.
It’s okay when my side uses cherry picked edge cases 🤷♂️
I could list the multiple cities I surveyed where capping the maximum price at $700,000 filtered more houses than capping the minimum at $420,000.
Unless you have research data that documents the median house prices for urban and near-urban locations, your $400,000 is just as much an anecdotal, “cherry picked edge case” as any other value.
You came in, gave no supported facts, but complained that someone’s anecdote is false and biased while fully refusing to engage in contextualizing the tweet.
As someone who just bought a house…
400k is nearly untouchable for most people right now.
My partner and I had to scrimp and save for years, and then borrow money from my family, and then go into a bit of CC debt to secure a house for 317.
And we’re two working professionals with no kids.
Median household income in the US ~80k. Your mortgage is supposed to be no more than 1/3rd of your income.
So that means the median household has about 2300 a month for housing expenses. My 317k house right now is running ~2700 a month (~2100 for the house, 600 for PMI and escrow).
So you’re probably only getting ~270k at most on the median income. 400k is way out of the typical buyer’s price.
30% of Gen z and 50% of millennials own homes. Stop blatantly making things up.
Homes are too expensive and should come down. Wholly agree. But majority of the population, even projected gen x will own their home. The median rate that they are selling at is about 420k +/- who you talk to.
Posts real numbers from an actual recent home purchase
Stop blatantly making things up.
Also, this…
…kalshi is a news source?
No
Kalshi is also a game if you ask Google’s Play store. It has an AO rating
Everytime I go to the app store I get an ad for it, and everytime I report it saying it violates my state’s law
Google Play store is a cancerous virus. Use f droid.
To be fair, there are far more entrepreneurial opportunities to generate wealth these days. If you’re not on Onlyfans, are you even trying?
Do you even know what I would have given to be able to make money streaming? /s
The clothes off your back?
I’m sure you’re joking, but for the record the vast majority of people on OnlyFans don’t make any money.
it’s the multi level marketing of sex!
Yeah, that’s why I drive for Uber while doing my Door Dash Deliveries. I also tie some dogs to my bumper to I can get some cash with Rover. The best part? I can also fill out surveys to eek out an extra 0.5 cents per hour!
I figure if I save it all, I’ll be well in range to make a 5% down payment on a 2 bed/1 bath house from the 40’s by the time I’m 75.
I just stopped buying Starbucks coffee and became a millionaire overnight. It really is that easy.
Damn, why didn’t I think of that one
Yeah, but now you and your significant other work so thats like 120k a year. /s
And the fact that you’re each working multiple part time jobs and gigs, well that’s the extra freedom we had lying around.
Yeah. The fact that most couples have to go dual income just to survive is a problem.
We used to have the leeway to have one of us not work and still be comfortable.
Boomers selling their homes at 10x cost and preaching about savvy investing
$20,000 in 1965 is equivalent in purchasing power to $212,776.51 today.
So it’s not about savvy investing, it’s about inflation.
The problem is the house is so overvalued, they never modernized it, and is far beyond what most people can afford for it. They’re just born at the right time to be able to retire and have a house.
nah it’s deregulation on corps buying homes as investments
like usual thank republicans and neolibs
Also, AirBnB creating a system that incentivized the purchase of homes as rentals.
Taxation could fix all that. How many politicians own multiple housing? All of them.
And buying up all homes, then renting at high rates and making the market so scarce that the few that can afford to buy get bid up to the maximum they can get a loan for, and then stay enslaved to the mortgage banks and never fight for their employment rights, healthcare or political rights or anything else that could jeopardize their livelihood.
Not even an exaggeration. My parents bought their house in the 1960s for $14K. Their 30-year mortgage went almost to the year 2000 and their monthly payment was fucking $85 the entire time. They sold it fifteen years ago for $190K.
$14K in 1960 was $167,000 by 2010.
Average salary of a worker in 1960 was $3,700.
I paid $320K for my house in 2002 , which peaked in value to $1.6M by 2022. That was insane, it’s now worth $1.2 or less and headed downward.
It should be worth $600K. People took out HELOCs on houses now descending in value.
It should be worth $600K.
Yeah, the location was not one of those places with seriously insane housing appreciation. Small town in Ohio. 14X appreciation is still pretty good.
Damn never realized this but every boomer homeowner is actually an investment savant. Why are we all so stupid? Why can’t we just do this? ^/s
The dumbest financial mistake you’ve ever made was not going into debt immediately to buy a home the day you were born. Should have planned ahead.
Anyone using kalshi as a news source can eat infinite shit. Anyone using kalshi period in fact.
The reason housing isn’t affordable is because of:
- Price fixing for rentals
- Corporations are buying up every last bit of housing and then see number 1.
When you say “boomers,” are you meaning the people in power? Cuz yeah, they’re old and making these decisions to let this happen. Most normal people don’t have the power to stop this shit. Stop complaining and start working towards getting rid of 1) and 2).
When I say boomers and I’m talking about this, I’m talking about the retired couple still living in a four bedroom house in the suburbs refusing to sell it because it’s going to be worth just a little bit more next year meanwhile there’s a young family who can’t afford a fucking house due to none being available. Yes corporations are a problem, a big one, but the number of neighborhoods that used to be filled with kids that are now filled with retirees is also a problem.
Do you have statistics, cuz we have statistics on what I’m saying. Let’s say what you’re saying is true, why are they holding on to it for pricing? Because the fucking corporations are buying up all of the stock.
While speculators driving up prices is a problem, the bigger problem is your small scale landlords with half a dozen revenue properties 3 of which are only being used as AirBnBs, and the rest managed using price fixing software to gradually break renters backs.
We’ve known since the beginning that Rent Seeking is anathema to free markets. It’s the dirtiest word in economics, because it breaks the whole system and is accountable to no feedback mechanism on a macro-scale.
Here you go. And maybe next time try not being an asshole.
I’m being an asshole because you guys are just sitting around complaining about generations, which is a distraction from the real greeds.
Yup. Keep the left mad at the right, bottom mad at top, country mad at city, all the while shit gets worse. Well, not for the pricks starting shit in comment sections, they’ll have plenty to keep themselves distracted with.
This is Lemmy, we keep the left mad the left here.
I was just answering your question…
For each long-held boomer held household there’s a half dozen other houses that are out of reach for other reasons.
We don’t have to be advocating kicking old folks out of their homes they have lived in all their lives, and even if they freed up their housing, it probably wouldn’t help.
You would have a house for sale for almost the same money as new construction, but in need of tens of thousands in repairs and probably significantly smaller than construction done in the last two decades.
There’s stories starting to come up about inheriting from boomers being more trouble than boon. Houses that ostensibly should go for a lot being hard to sell unless they spend a lot to fix it up to make it appealing.
Either I’m not understanding you or you aren’t making the argument you think you are, you are talking about repairs that should’ve been done years ago when it was cheaper to do those repairs and it’s those same boomers who chose not to do those repairs.
And most new construction houses aren’t going to have the longevity of a well repaired older house. Shrinkflation and enshitification have hit the building market as well.
At the end of the day you aren’t totally wrong, but I feel like you’re missing the point that I was very specifically answering the question of the person I replied to “when you use the word boomer…“.
Yes, often the repairs should have been done years ago, but either way you slice it, the typical boomer house is not exactly super enticing stuff. A family member looked into buying a boomer house after the owner died, and before even delving deep the ductwork was shot, termite damage visible, warped subflooring, cracked foundation. On top of all this it was a 1500 square foot home when pretty nearby houses of comparable room count were about 3000 square foot and not much more expensive list price. Even if it were in mint for the era condition, the windows were single paned, the insulation thin, and various other updates you’d want.
I’m not so sure “they don’t build them like they used to” applies to houses. Shrinkflation for the yards to be sure, but in terms of the house itself, the houses tend to actually be smaller. In terms of durability, you may have bottom dollar sentiment but it’s competing with a lot of engineering advancements. They can be relatively cheap but still be a very robust structure. Even mass-market plumbing fixtures are generally better than fixtures you’ll find in 40 year old construction. That old house might have a lot of Polybutylene plumbing, for example, instead of PVC and PEX, for example. The old house probably has a higher chance of usable attic storage space versus modern trend of engineered trusses using up the space, but can probably take more of a beating structurally.
Just saying that getting all fixated on the Boomers personal residences isn’t really that big of a part of the problem. Now if you say they are tossing their retirement money toward contributing to the rental racket, I’m with you, but I’m not going to think it’s worth it to see about trying to get those boomers into apartments just to free up housing stock that isn’t generally as great as folks might think it should be.
I do not like calling people trying to afford to buy a pile of lumber and tape on a small parcel a “market”.
It removes the fact that homes used to stay flat value or go down in value before houses became a “market”.
Fuck markets. The market should be crushed.
What’s wrong with making houses out of wood? It’s renewable. It has an absurdly low carbon footprint. It’s a fantastic building material.
they probably live in an area without a lot of earthquakes so it makes sense to build out of brick there
laughs in PNW
uh
this is 7 years old, but i wanted to argue my “uh”'s point a little more
love from San Francisco. I woke up the other day to a 5.6 alarm. My love to Yreka who got the brunt of it.
Better a ton of smalls than one big one. The energy released in a huge quale is several orders of magnitude so it takes a lot…
yeah, i was in loma prieta. that was “just” a 6.9. you could see the waves in the ground, visually, dozens of miles away, until it settled. it was eerie as fuck.
I will give you an example, a notoriously large home manufacturer has continued to create waves of houses built with the cheapest materials they can find. Once people started to move into these houses they noticed something strange: insects ripping out of their newly built walls
They’re not talking specifically about the lumber being bad, they’re talking about companies building new developments cutting corners to save on cost. While they still use lumber, they are choosing cheaper lumber and their workmanship suffers as a result of the corners being cut.
Thus, a pile of lumber and tape.
My house was built in 1942 as temporary worker housing. I tore down and rebuilt one of the walls and the original studs were just astonishing: perfectly straight and not a single knot in them anywhere. Compare and contrast with modern studs from Home Despot: split, shaped more or less like a pretzel, and 50% knots.
Interestingly, these old studs were 1.75" x 3.75". I never knew there was an intermediate stage between the old-time true 2x4s and the modern 1.5" x 3.5" 2x4s.
it’s not Home Depot’s fault we cut down all the old growth wood by the 1950s. Builders should be sorting the lumber and returning bad pieces…but nothing a sheet of drywall can’t hide.
But Home Depot wood in Canada is the best quality, kiln dried. With softwood tariffs, US yards are scraping the bottom of the barrel and shipping crap that would have been shredded.
Also, older homes were built with natural old growth lumber, which is denser and more rot resistant. They also used larger dimensions for extra support.
Over the last 50 years material quality and workmanship have gone down. Now it’s a race to build a neighborhood as cheaply and quickly as possible, doing the job right be damned.
I’ll be honest with you: my house was built in the 1940s and it’s really not that great. Definitely not noticeably better build quality than my parents’ house built in the 1990s.
You should look up CyFy on YouTube. He does residential building inspection in Arizona and the build quality is appalling. Broken trusses, lacking insulation, roof leaks, stucco with exposed wire backing on top of literal cardboard for structure…
Cracks in the sinks and tubs, walls so horrifying out of square you wonder how they managed to fuck it up that badly. Unlevel floors with humps or saddles. Tiles misaligned so badly you can take a strip off your foot without realizing.
There’s always multiple things from the above in every house he posts… And it’s not just one house, it’s all of them. Literally all of them… They deny, delay, defend the shit out of warranty claims and at least in Arizona hope you close and don’t raise a fuss before hand.
Builders know most of the buyers are Boomers who will be dead in under a decade, so make everything last 11 years.
That’s because he doesn’t get called in unless the homeowner believes there are egregious problems for him to find. It’s sampling bias, not a universal trend.
He talks about this in his videos where he’ll see the same problems in half the homes in a neighborhood because neighbors talk to each other and recommend him
Edit: just watch some of his videos you won’t have to spend much time to see what I mean. It’s systemic…
“Systemic” within one neighborhood (or even one builder) isn’t the same as “systemic” in general. I mean, of course if one builder doing something wrong, he’s likely to be doing it wrong consistently. But unless that builder is, say, D.R. Horton (which, to be fair, it very well could be), you can’t really say that just because one random builder is doing it wrong that means the entire industry is doing it wrong.
We had a new subdivision in which every single roof failed in 6 years.
How could you leave out the gas leaks? In every single fucking house he inspects.
Oh yeah you’re right lol I forgot about those somehow! I laughed when he checked like 8 houses in a row and they all leaked.
I’ll add that I recently bought a house built in the last decade and the home inspector remarked how well put together it was.
Wood is fine. It actually traps carbon, but the build quality is horrendous and permit inspectors must be corrupt.
Of course, a “market” doesn’t have to mean the thing is a financial instrument. I go to the market to buy grocereries. I am not intending to resell the carrots that I bought from “market”.
And yet grocery stores are in a similar situation with prices going up while quality and quantity go down. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean the thing is a financial instrument but if it can be it will be.
But how else will we make the peasantry feel richer without enriching them?
The only reason my wife and I could afford a house is because we live in one of the lowest cost of living places in the US. Even here it’s still almost triple what it was just a few years ago.
I saved up for my house and paid cash. It only took … uh … 35 years.
Yo, who be making 60k? That sounds like Gucci shit.
And they bought a house worth at most a couple of years of income with a 25+ year loan
Not just the US, we can’t buy a house anywhere, boomer cunts stole everything from future generations and will claim to their dying breath that THEY had it rough.
So you grew up rich? Your parents had no struggles at all right? So I mean, wow, that must have been nice. They basically had infinite money to raise you with… that’s awesome. I’m happy for you
What? Where did i say i was rich? How does your brain function? And my parents didn’t have struggles?!? My mother and stepdad didn’t have power or running water for 5 years in the Balkans btw, whether that’s legal or not who knows and i don’t think the cunts that turned it off cared anyway.
You said, “boomer cunts stole everything from future generations and will claim to their dying breath that THEY had it rough.”
But then you said, “My mother and stepdad didn’t have power or running water for 5 years”
Weird, it’s almost like they did have it rough after all
You need it spelt out for you or something? My mother was born in 1966 so she doesn’t qualify as a boomer and also those boomers that you want to defend could buy a house or two with one income while having 4-5 kids while most of us today can’t afford anything with two incomes and no kids.
oh wow, so you were the first poor family? I had no idea life was a perfect utopia where nobody struggled until your parents. I always thought the story of Adam and Eve was something that took place millions of years ago but it turns out it happened in 1966.
I’m honored to meet the child of the first humans to ever suffer
Dont fall for the intergenerational war. The rich are sitting on all the assets and stealing from future generations
Ya but they rich are mostly boomers and boomers are actively voting and supporting policies that make this worse. It’s not universal but does hold some weight.
Correct. What all these places have in common is housing expansion after WW2 when personal automobile became a thing for majority. There is no more cheap land. We are back to 19th century and it sucks.
Meaningful change will only happen when fewer than half of all people own houses. Now, more than half owns a property, and, if the system was to change, they’d lose money. More than half the people will uphold this status quo.
It hurts homeowners who aren’t interested in ever moving as well. Property taxes are based on home value.
Ya but property taxes are still significantly cheaper than rent, and most states have some exemption for a portion of the valuation your first home. The same doesn’t apply to renters, and in many municipalities multifamily zoning has significantly higher property tax rates to begin with. Many conveniences of cities are built around homeowners since they’re the majority of voters. In my old apartment despite trash at the property being taken by the city, apartment residents did not have access to the city dump for recycling and large trash items. Meanwhile residents owning a single family home did and could even get them picked up as part of their regular trash bill, which was $5/mo less than what we in the apartment paid for trash.
Or those who do wish to move, and upgrade while doing so.
That depends on a few more factors.The fact that their home values have skyrocketed does go a long way to alleviate that.
Yeah, what may have been a $60,000 upgrade is now $250,000, but they’re also getting another $200,000 for their home when they sell it, which makes up the difference.
I don’t know how evenly houses go up or how much consistency there is, but going from $100K to $200K is easier than $300K to $600K.
Housing price increases are almost certainly making the gap wider for upgrades.
The thing is they aren’t going up evenly everywhere. A $400,000 house from a few years back in my area is now selling for $600,000, but a $100,000 house from that same time is now selling for $300,000. So the price difference between the 2 has actually stayed the same.
The institutional investors are targeting the cheaper houses, so they’re the ones skyrocketing the most in value.
Extremely few people in this country own houses. Nearly zero children do.
Wages really need to go up if prices won’t come down. Even food is unaffordable.
LOL 😂 in Canada, if minimum wage - currently $18.25/hr - was indexed to home prices starting from 1972, when median homes in my city were $16k and minimum wage was $4k/yr, said minimum wage would currently be $150/hr, or $300k/yr.
That’s an 8.22× jump in minimum wage.
I would love to see most people being faced with this fact.
I realize the Canadian dollar is weaker than the US dollar but $18.25 is a pipe dream for tens of millions of Americans. Our minimum wage is $7.25. As of today that is $10. 29 CAD. Wages in my area are a little higher, places generally pay $13-15 and maybe $20 for skilled jobs. But I know a ton of people making around $13. Even that is basically right at Canadian minimum wage after converting. Our housing isn’t cheap either.
This is how the billionaires are winning, they manipulate folks into being angry at everyone but THEM. “Boomers” didn’t buy $70k houses, your grandparents did.
Meamwhile, Zuckerberg is laughing his ass off while fortifying his Kauai ranch estate.
“Boomers” are the grandparents to most of social media posters these days. Statistically the internet stays centered at about teenager to 20 year old being the peak of the normal distribution of users. That’s the Baby Boomers’ grandchildren. Great grandchildren even.
Just pointing that out, but otherwise I agree. They’re all angry at a strawman “Boomer”. That strawman in reality is demographically a small portion of the world population who are very rich. The majority of baby boomers got fucked in their own way by the rich.
You guys are all distracted into fighting each other.
Furthermore, I’m continuously baffled at how or why people fawn over the anecdotes about those who talk about their parents having a good life straight out of college and now owning multi-million dollar homes. How can you not realize these anecdotes are from rich kids of rich boomers. You guys are so hungry to eat the rich??? That’s them right there. What are you praising and fawning over them for. Start eating.
All part of the distraction. The lesser than billionaire rich hiding in plain sight, running distraction for the richest of the rich.
