There are plenty of affordable places to live. People just don't want to move there. Buying a house in a hip U.S. city/suburb isn't a human right.
There’s a growing attitude that if they’re already paying exorbitant amounts for housing and have a large amount of student debt, why not go all-in and buy a house that’s an extra $100-500K more than what they could find in a cheaper location?
There’s also a lot of FOMO from people who watched their friends over-extend themselves on expensive home purchases and then be rewarded heavily for it by rising home values. I’ve talked to a lot of younger people who have feel a severe sense of urgency to buy the most expensive house they can afford before they miss out on future gains or get priced out of the market entirely.
If you think house prices only go up rapidly and your entire adult life has confirmed that idea, you also wouldn’t be interested in moving to a boring location and buying a cheap house. You’d want to move somewhere exciting and get the most expensive house the bank will let you buy.
Getting a mortgage in the country, for a tech worker, is basically a bet that either home values will stay high enough you can back out or that you'll be able to stay remote for the length of the mortgage.
Meanwhile even shithole houses go for $250k+ in part because affordable housing is simply irreplaceable due to that housing being built before such onerous regulations being implemented.
A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers
I see you interchanged the words I actually used "onerous regulations" and instead addressed "onerous safety regulations." Nowhere in the comment you replied to is the word "safety" found.
But it is true a lot of regulations are made in the name of "safety." What these fail to account for, is that many of these regulations increase expense, so there are tradeoffs such as those who lose healthcare or education opportunities by instead spending it making housing more safe (thus, they may actually become less safe by having a safer house). Or even worse, people who end up homeless because although they could have built an "unsafe" shack, the regulations in all their wisdom deem it's better to be dead of the elements on the street than to live in a sub-par structure.
> Its a well documented phenomenon that housing policy is driven to protect past buyers over future ones (NIMBY, using zoning laws to limit density of housing, minimal acreage in cities etc).
>A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers
Agree on all accounts here, the stars really align against new entrants.
I know it's allowed, but is this what we want for society? I hope not.
But watch the rent to home price ratio. There is definitely a point where renting just makes more sense, like when I was paying $1000/month on something that the landlord was trying to sell for a $1 million. Ya, buying in that case would be purely for speculation.
In Japan, houses generally depreciate over time, yet the home ownership rate is still 60% because the other benefits of home ownership are so attractive.
If you know you want to live in a particular area for a long time, and you can afford it, home ownership is usually an attractive move.
Buying a house just so that at the end you own it is not an investment, that's just a purchase with a loan.