I think folks often confuse "I can't afford a home" with "I can't afford the house I want".
Americans especially have a very skewed expectation when it comes to housing. Many people here are like "I have an upper middle class professional income, my family should have no problem affording a 3-4 bedroom single family house on a quarter acre lot with a big backyard for our dogs to run around in right in the middle of one of the most desirable metropolitan areas on the planet! Oh btw the free public schools should be excellent too!".
Saying something like that would make you sound insane in pretty much all developed countries. U.S. is a big exception due to historical reasons, but people really need to adjust their expectations going forward.
I have neighbors who bought their $3m homes when they weren't even $800k (adjusted for inflation). And since salaries + stocks have grown much faster than their property tax burden (basically frozen) - they're all retiring early.
People have expectations based on what they grew up with or what their parents grew up with or what they saw people achieving as they grew up. Can't blame them when they get out into the market and finally start saving that they're gonna be 10 years behind for the rest of their life...
And 150 years ago you can probably buy a few acres of land in SF Bay Area for less than the inflation-adjusted price of a townhouse in Mountain View these days.
Real estate is one thing that does not scale infinitely. Population grow, things change.
>can't blame them when they get out into the market and finally start saving that they're 10 gonna be 10 years behind for the rest of their life...
That's the thing about Americans. The speed of change in this country has finally increased after decades, especially when comparing to many fast developing countries. A lot of people just don't know how to adjust for that.
There are a ton of people who are interested in living in densely populated big cities but the issue is that there isn't enough high rises or tall residential buildings to offset the demand.
There's definitely policy that could be done but it'd destroy the existing value for homeowners and landlords. That's why it doesn't get passed - obviously.
3x national median income would actually mean something if real estate costs the same nationally, but obviously it doesn't. Many areas in the country costs far more than 3x in terms of real estate prices.
If you make the 3x the median income of the area you live in, then it would be a stronger argument.
Every time I propose this people think I’m on another planet but the lifestyle is really great tbh.
Probably the easiest way to find out before buying is to just stand in the lobby and ask the next person who walks past what they think.
My in-laws lived in a mid-height (4 floors) concrete-and-brick building that went up under Salazar. An equivalent building in the US would be built in wood and sheetrock pretty much everywhere. Even 5000 square foot doctors' palaces that go for half a million dollars are stick-and-cardboard. Solid construction you'd only find in highrises in urban centers, and even then it's not guaranteed that the walls aren't made out of cardboard.
You see these sprawling neighbourhoods of SFH's with 1.50 m separation between buildings and very much the whole lot paved over. Everywhere else there would be mid-rise multifamily buildings, but the American insists on an SFH, because soundproofing.
To find out what the quality of a building is you are best off just asking people who live there what they think. Apparently you can also request that strata give you information like owner complaints which may bring up noise disputes.
But what's the appeal of a high-rise? It requires too much space around it, it's not made for the human scale.
When they aren’t considering the rest of their finances or what they would do if our of a job for multiple months, etc. Not unrelated, the number of first time home buyers that buy a new car within 3 years is like 75%.
We do a really really bad job at teaching finance in schools.