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Comment by trident5000 | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing this but home ownership percentage is comparable to past generations when you actually look at the data.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

Also gen z has surpassed millennials and genx in home ownership (with comparable timing).

""In 2022, 30% of 25-year-olds owned a home. At the same age 28% of millennials, and 27% of Gen Xers owned homes, according to real estate brokerage, Redfin.""

https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/14/how-are-gen-zers-buyi...

Im more inclined to believe the lazy mentality is from lifestyle and cultural stemming. Its cool to not care or try. And according to instagram if you're not a millionaire by age 25 then you're a loser. So why even try?

That being said I see nothing wrong with a 4 day work week.

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The homeownership rate is the percentage of HOMES that are lived in by their owners, not the count of PEOPLE that own their own homes. Given a shortage of homes, the homeownership rate will not show you that there is a crisis.

For example, if you homeless you do not count. If you live with your parents even though you would prefer to rent if you could afford it, that is a home-owned household. If the owner lives in their home and they rent out a room, that's a home. If you used to rent with 4 people and now live with 8, that's a single rental. If you own and live in multiple homes, you count multiple times.

Without more analysis, you can not use this rate to come to any conclusions.

> If you live with your parents even though you would prefer to rent if you could afford it, that is a home-owned household.

But not owned by you… so it wouldn’t end up in the 30% of "X own their homes" statistic. I’m not really sure what you’re going on about here but none of it makes any sense.

It would not. You have been misled.

Here's backup from wikipedia, or are they also not making sense?

> The name "homeownership rate" can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the homeownership rate. Many households that are owner-occupied contain adult relatives (often young adults, descendants of the owner) who do not own their own home. Single building multi-bedroom rental units can contain more than one adult, all of whom do not own a home.

> the home ownership rate is created through the Housing Vacancy Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is created by dividing the owner occupied units by the total number of occupied units.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...

Im more inclined to believe the lazy mentality is from lifestyle and cultural stemming

If this generation is on a par with previous generations, or even surpassing them, wouldn't that indicate they're less lazy? You can't have it both ways - either they're lazy and that explains why they're behind, or they're not behind and that has to mean they're not lazy. How can they be both lazy and ahead?

I think its bifurcated. Theres ambitious and lazy people in every generation.

The data is completely unambiguous: housing prices are (and have been) rising much, much, much faster than wages.

The financial aspect of owing a home, as we know, is more complicated than wages and home prices. Theres also the debt aspect and juxtaposed interest rate.

In any case, the home ownership hasnt budged much in over 50 years. People just like to complain like they always have.

Well, this is simply not the case. Inflation adjusted housing prices per square foot has been flat for the last 50 years with slight fluctuations. Houses increased in footage, so inflation adjusted house prices have been flat vs wages (that grew).

Perception of things being different is simply because everyone and their dog is trying to fit into the few most attractive areas where prices have indeed skyrocketed.

U.S. is by far the cheapest in housing prices vs salaries of all developed countries and nearly the cheapest of all large countries in the world. 5th cheapest to be precise, those 4 above are oil petrocracies plus South Africa, that's fucked in so many ways it doesn't need to be discussed.

Urbanisation is a trend across the entire globe for many more reasons than just wanting to live in a few attractive areas.

And it's absolutely necessary for us to urbanize instead of the wasteful way we use our land, in order to avoid the impending climate, biodiversity, and energy crises.

Anyway --- with this square footage argument. End of the day, I'm still priced out of a house, whether it'd be a big one or a small one. I don't really care about the price per square footage, I care about the ability to get a roof over my head.

Edit: Actually, can you provide sources for this? From what I can find, home prices have been anything but flat, even adjusting for inflation: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ I have a hard time believing that in ~12 years we grew the entire housing stock square footage by 33%

I also found some data that strongly disputes your claim that the US is the 5th lowest house price to salary ratio: https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-r..., in fact it seems to be comfortably in the top 10 _highest_

https://infogram.com/1pqdpn20vkmlelcq6qx7jzwz9pf00g9xnq5

https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

as for your link - easy, what's understood by "house" in Luxembourg is usually a "Soviet style apartment block". You need to be a billionaire to own a typical US-sized single family house there, these are passed down the generations from the people who were rich 100+ years ago (but granted, they are usually not built of shit).

https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...

This rating assumes same housing everywhere, not just "average house in a given country". In this case, easily U.S. can be among top 5, because being very rich, and as people say here in the same thread "everything apart from housing and healthcare is cheap anyway", a bigger chunk of expenses can go there.

By another metric - "mortgage vs income" - U.S. is 6th best out of 106 large countries. 50% of the countries (that is, omitting 1/4 worst and 1/4 best) are between 1.7x and 5x worse.

Housing is much more accessible in the U.S. than in just about any country, even if you correct by per capita GDP, that is, it is more accessible than the per capita GDP would imply.

Did you by chance look at the charts in this?

For example, the western part of the country's $/sqft going from $140 to $220 from 2012 to 2022 -- including inflation adjustment?

Sorry but, "housing prices have only gone up by 20% in the last 10 years in areas that are hemorrhaging job opportunities and education!" is not a good counterargument.

I see. This article compares GDP vs housing prices, which isn't a surprise that US fares very well because the US is stellar at GDP growth.

But GDP is _absolutely irrelevant_ to the average citizen's purchasing power / income.

The particular chart i posted a separate link for, uses inflation adjustment, not GDP adjustment.

And sure, every country has a growing segregation between attractive, expensive areas and unattractive, cheap ones. That's normal. Fitting into attractive ones is a matter of competition and only the best few will - there can't be a place for everyone there no matter how the economy is doing and how high/low are the taxes "for the rich" (because it's not the rich who are buying up the housing).

Oh duh, why didn't I think about purchasing just a quarter of a unit? Just need to decide if I want a bathroom and a bedroom, or a bedroom and a kitchen, I suppose. Maybe a bathroom and kitchen is the optimal move and then I can sleep inside a kitchen cabinet and charge my next-room neighbors to use my kitchen.

> Im more inclined to believe the lazy mentality is from lifestyle and cultural stemming. Its cool to not care or try. And according to instagram if you're not a millionaire by age 25 then you're a loser. So why even try?

I'm assuming this is why you're being downvoted. It sounds like you're calling the new generation lazy, though I see now that it wasn't necessarily your intent.

Personally I fully understand those who don't want to spend most of their time and energy at work. Most jobs aren't fulfilling. Some even downright encourage a dysfunctional system.

I was impressed by tech companies in the late 2000s only to realize that they're not trying to "make the world a better place" and that they're just trying to make more money for their shareholders like every company before them.

So why would anyone sacrifice their family time, friends and hobbies just to work on another app that puts scooters on cities' sidewalks and build more hardware that'll end up in a landfill?

It has nothing to do with being cool or being a millionaire. It's just a generation that had their basic needs taken care of and are now getting their priorities straight.

>It sounds like you're calling the new generation lazy, though I see now that it wasn't necessarily your intent.

I think there is a lot of data that says the latest generation is the most cynical and jaded yet. There is some crossover between cynicism and motivation. Of course if you ask them, it isn't cynicism, it is realism.

>It's just a generation that had their basic needs taken care of and are now getting their priorities straight.

I think there are is a bit of wanting to have the cake and eat it too. A desire to live a dense urban life, but also have a quaint country home. A desire to be financially independent, but also follow their passions.

In short, I think they have been taught and sold a contradictory set of ideals and desires.

I'm sure you'll find some overly idealistic people in the mix, but the article mentions clear trade-offs that young workers are willing to take.

Some of them are willing to take a pay cut in order to work less, and they're being called lazy for it. My argument is that it's not laziness, it's the belief that they're better off fostering their personal relationships and passions than adding the extra money in their bank account.

I don't disagree. My comment was more about the general malaise and Outlook in Generation Z. That said, I don't think the article really supports the idea that they would readily trade time for money. Only 13% of the respondents said that, which is pretty Slim. I wonder what the crossover is between those respondents and the top 10% earners.

> but also have a quaint country home I have never heard a human being complain about wanting "a quaint country home", or pose any permutation of requirements that might approximate that.

Perhaps the closest concern I have ever encountered on that front is "where do I put my stuff?" because US culture on average certainly does a lot more hoarding than nearly anywhere else in the world. But that's less to do with square footage of living space and more to do with square footage available to store hoarded items.

EG: such folk (now narrowing perspective to anecdotes of room mates I've had) often wind up placated by access to space in the garage plus a rented storage unit that they literally never visit between when they move in with us and when they move back out perhaps a year or two later.

Our place is a three bedroom unit within a triplex building built in the late 70s and falling apart. Its' rent has recently increased to close to half of all of our net incomes combined. We would like to live somewhere within walking distance (a mile?) of basic necessities, that we can afford, and if its not too much to ask perhaps also is not falling apart.

Number of square feet holds no interest to us but number of bedrooms would be nice so that each adult can have one to sleep in.

My apologies if that strikes you as too "quaint" and you'd rather force us to live 50 miles from the nearest store beyond the reach of basic utilities just because then the rent and/or mortgage payments would be half what we get here.

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