My friends who are double income but not tech are trying to buy a home now. Same experience as you. Cash offers always arrive and beat them.
I don't know how this ends but it's not going to be tenable for many folks to "live" in the USA as it stands.
https://old.reddit.com/user/DMAS1638/submitted/
Where you see winters homes are generally even in worse shape. Basements are leaking and eroding your foundation. Roofs are leaking and rotting your studs. Poor insulation is costing you a lot more money than in California. Chances are your water mains and sewer situation, both from your parcel as well as the municipal lines on the street, are all approaching end of life. Right as climate change brings heavier rains and flooding that stresses infrastructure where there isn't money as it is to maintain it even for old climate projections.
I have a 5 page document of bullet points making simple asks/requirements for a new home build, and most of them are focused on safety, reliability, and efficiency, and none of them would be done by default by any builder in the US, most are required by law in Europe. It's kind of nuts.
* Foundation footings set to bedrock and insulated above the freeze line
* Exterior walls framed in 2x6 or 2x8 studs w/ a preference for non-bridging stud products like t-studs
* Exterior continuous insulation
* Kitchen range hood needs to be externally ventilated with proper make-up air system
* Using an ERV (Energy Recovery Ventilator) with filtered intakes for doing fresh air distribution within the home
* No use of plastic flooring products (e.g. linoleum, vinyl, carpet, LVP, LVT, et al) which off-gas and spread plasticizers within the indoor envelope
* Consider use of alternative methods of framing vs stick framing, like using ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms)
* Natural gas on-demand hot water heaters w/ electric instant hot systems close to tap for showers
* Roof trusses and decking properly constructed to account for the weight of solar panels on the south-facing slope
* Split electrical paneling for high voltage (230V+) and low voltage (120V) circuits
* Post-meter paneling for breaking out to circuit panels w/ a space for setting up a transfer switch to support future grid-tied solar with battery backup
* All electric appliances w/ the exception of on-demand water heater and sealed gas fireplace, this provides a pathway for higher energy efficiency / lower carbon emissions by using solar
* All cabinet work should be hung using french cleats for durability
* Exterior door frames should be installed fully to the studs (e.g. use 3-4" long screws)
* Interior doors should be solid core
* All interior walls should contain sound-rated insulation to reduce noise pollution and improve climate zoning
* All interior walls should be boarded with sound-sealant and noise rated drywall-type products
* Subfloors should be insulated and there should be sound/thermal insulation underlayment below the flooring
* The final construction prior to drywall should be able to achieve a blower door test score of ACH50 1.5 or lower with the make-up air and flue vents closed.
Not all of these things would be required by code currently in Europe, but they're all good ideas for durability, efficiency, or safety. This is obviously with the intent to use rooftop solar power as well. If I do build a custom house, it'll be built to the Passivhaus standard.
Our biggest challenge was finding contractors willing to execute to plan. My wife and I ended up doing a lot of work ourselves especially around insulation details and HVAC systems.
He has featured other builders and home owners who also have websites or channels, and there I've found more information. There was one chap in central Canada that built a ~5k sqft house that only needed around 1600W to heat in the winter in subzero temperatures. That's the type of energy efficiency we need in new home construction if we're ever going to make a dent in climate change.
Not knocking it, but is this normal for single family home construction? Is it possible with reasonable cost? Is it primarily for an earthquake-prone region? The idea is cool, but I thought only skyscrapers went down to bedrock.
But yes, it's fairly common to do this if you care about structural integrity over the long term. In areas with soil type that support it, it's more common to do simple slab foundations without footings, but in most of the US footings are used and the foundation is built as part of a crawl space or basement. Sometimes excavation for a basement is deep enough to get below frost line, or to bedrock itself, it depends greatly on the region.
"Reasonable cost" is kind of a subjective thing, but I'd say starting with a a good foundation is a bare minimum of requirements for what would end up qualifying as "constructed properly", so at least as far as I'm concerned this is an absolute requirement.
In some areas, it's not actually necessary to drive piles to bedrock to get similar stability, instead piles are driven to refusal at a calculated depth based on the expected foundation load. In the regions I'm planning to build though, bedrock is nearer to the surface (or in some cases exposed above the surface as an outcropping), which means that the proper way to do things is to drive piles to bedrock.
I am not a structural engineer, and I don't know what is necessary where you live, my list was made for my specific purposes and shared because it was asked, it's not an argument in favor of any specific structural techniques, you should speak to a structural engineer in your area.
These well sealed houses actually have /better/ indoor air quality than a typical house designed for cross-flow from open windows. The reason is that they use powered ventilation that essentially runs all the time, so you have constant fresh air entering the house and stale air leaving, and you have specifically designed and planned exhaust points. The bonus to it is that it's much more energy efficient because the ventilation can be done using energy recovery ventilators (ERVs) which equalize the temperature between indoor and outdoor air +/- 3F, greatly reducing the cost to maintain a set temperature indoors while getting fresh air from outside, and the air can be filtered through MERV16 / HEPA filtration, reducing dirt and allergen ingress.
If done properly, the absolute best indoor air quality is found in Passivhaus construction.
We are on air sourced heat pumps. I think the US is really behind in thinking about creative geothermal like borehole heat pumps which act as a thermal battery (pump heat into ground in summer, extract it in winter.) They work but I can't imagine they are the best solution in my climate zone.
Also, for energy usage is seems appliances could use innovation. Why am I not recapturing the heat from my clothes dryer? Why do I have a separate refrigerator (heats house) and water heater (cools house) inside my house?
We tried a heat pump water heater but it was a total fail, as it is equivalent to putting an air conditioner inside your house. We had it in the ground floor of our walkout, which even in summer never breaks 70 degrees. Kids were complaining and actually turning the heat on...
> * Exterior door frames should be installed fully to the studs (e.g. use 3-4" long screws)
I'm almost scared to ask... how else would you install an exterior door?
I will agree, however, that in much of the Midwest and Northeast it's more common to see single-panel installations. Separating the panels is important for safety, though, and it also allows better circuit routing when running the electrical.
Residential power around here is delivered as 240V split phase. Meaning, the service entrance load center has a bus bar for each leg, and the neutral is 120V from either leg. So you can have 240V circuit breaker that spans both legs, or a 120V that uses one in combination with the neutral.
How does the arrangement you're describing work? I tried searching for 120V-only load centers, but wasn't really finding anything. Or, did you mean bridge together the two legs on a traditional load center and use it as a subpanel of the service entrance?
Personally, I think having the 240V circuit panel outside is dumb, and the amount of times I've seen my or other folks breakers fail due to weathering is pretty much the reason why. How I've seen this done on new builds where care was taken is that both panels are brought indoors and the only thing outside is a split out to a subpanel specifically for the A/C / heat pump unit. Everything else comes indoors, there is a smaller panel setup for 240V and a subpanel for 120V circuits.
Obviously as the power entering the home is 240V split phase, you must break out a subpanel for 120V only if that's your intention.
edited to add: the people who are really screwed are the people who need to work in a given location where housing prices are absurdly high and the housing stock is truly garbage. Silicon Valley and such.
Upthread somewhere I said my budget was $1.25M and I was having trouble finding houses that are even bordering on acceptable. I don't expect a house to exactly match my wants if it's not custom built for me, which is exactly why I'm resigned to likely needing to custom build (and surprised by how cheap it is compared to buying, when it used to be a luxury). The issue I have, and most people have, is that low-grade cookie cutter homes are MASSIVELY overpriced relative to their actual value as a place to live. Nobody in their right mind would be happy paying $850k+ for a KB Homes "starter home" in a suburb that cost less than $60k in materials to construct and was built to the absolute minimum standards they could get away with.
Seems to me that, if current trends continue, home ownership will basically become extinct; everyone will become renters. Home ownership will take the same path as music over the last 20 years, where we used to "own" music (CDs), now we just "rent" music through streaming services like Spotify. But that's just my 2-cents. I'm curious about others' thoughts.
They'll just get sold and transferred to another large REIT and the house will never hit the market.
The housing market isn't going to crash. I foresee something like Australia happening: the prices just continue to go up, for decades.
Yes, this seems to be the trend. In fact, it's not just home ownership that is now more commonly being rented, even the cloths on people's backs is up for rent. Between the rent-seeking behavior happening globally and the gig economy, it's hard to feel optimistic about the future. There's of course that famous prediction from the World Economic Forum: https://www.independent.co.uk/money/why-you-ll-own-nothing-b...
I'd love to be proven wrong, but as you say, the rent-seeking is too damn high. I live in the US at the moment, but definitely looking to leave to somewhere with an actual social safety net / infrastructure.
Nowhere is perfect, but damn if the USA isn't moving backwards. I imagine the top plan to just hide in their fortresses / go overseas if it goes to hell (as the dystopian fiction tried to foretell).
The real analogy is furniture rentals for low income people. Paying 10x what something is worth for low quality alternatives and an inability to escape a cycle of being stuck renting when people want to buy.
I was coming from a perspective of ownership erosion, precipitated through the continuous encroachment of corporate rent-seeking behavior (because that leads to consistently growing revenue streams).
So on the one hand you've unaffordable homes/apartments, and on the other automation coming at full speed.
So much uncertainty and insecurity. I'm sure civil unrest is coming.