I think more accurately "Nobody" is a hyperbolic proxy for "me". Given the housing supply m the number of people who can afford to live here is demonstrably n which is >> m.
This is why comparing home prices to average income of the entire population is a fallacy. Not every home comes up for sale at any given time.
What matters is the sale price of recently sold houses to the incomes of those actively searching to purchase a new home as well as how many such people there are in the market.
Older established residents in an area can be earning $80k/yr and be fine since they purchased the house cheaply and have paid it off. That doesn't mean you can afford to buy their house on an $80k income.
It looks like ~3% of the housing units in the greater Bay Area sell on an annual basis so if the top 3% of income earners can afford today's prices the liquidity cliff can hide.
What matters is the sale price of recently sold houses to the incomes of those actively searching to purchase a new home as well as how many such people there are in the market.
I agree with this statement, and as I see it, if the houses that were offered for sale were "unaffordable" then they would stay on the market for sale waiting for that special person who could afford them. Instead, what we're seeing is that houses sell, on average, in less than 30 days. So as callous as it might sound, people looking for homes are finding them and buying them. In Santa Clara county at a rate of about a 1,000 a month or 12,000 a year[1]. There are some interesting differential equations you can write that describe how quickly every home in the county will have changed hands at least once, but suffice it to say the narrative that a bunch of "grey hairs" who have bought and paid off their houses are just sitting in them is inaccurate.
As someone who lives in a home and neighborhood built in the 60's I can tell you, nothing motivates Grandma to move to Arizona faster than being able to cash out a million bucks into the savings account. We have exactly one original owner in the neighborhood and they are here because their kids (and grandkids) are also in the neighborhood, otherwise they would have moved as well.
[1] There were 482 homes sold in Santa Clara County last month. The average since 2000 is 987. -- https://urban.realtor/market-trends-report/
Well, the effective property tax rate in SF is 0.68% out of a nominal 1.19%, due to Prop 13. That indicates an awful lot of people who have held onto their houses for a long time.
The figure is from https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-property-tax-calcula...
> We have exactly one original owner in the neighborhood
This is not a good thing. Having whole extended families get priced out of a large region and only the wealthy or well-paid professionals able to move in, so that people performing all manner of support jobs need to commute from further and further away and live more and more precarious lives, is inefficient, socially/environmentally destructive, and makes the place less pleasant for everyone to live in.
The whole Bay Area would benefit from housing prices coming down quite a bit after building a whole lot more housing units and transit.
The cost of housing can be drastically different depending on when you bought a house. And ESPECIALLY with prop 13 in California.
If n people live in an area, it doesn't mean n people can afford to live in the area at the CURRENT housing rate.
I think a lot of frustration comes from how insanely different 50% of your COL can be in the course of 3-5 years.
More money is wasted on credit cycles than any other human activity. Pretending everything is demonstratably fine is a joke.