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Comment by fngjdflmdflg | Hacker News Reader

Current home ownership rate is 66%[0]. 1990 was 64.2% Some more rates from [1]:

  2000  │ 1990  │ 1980  │ 1970  │ 1960  │ 1950  │ 1940  │ 1930  │ 1920  │ 1910  │ 1900   
  66.2% │ 64.2% │ 64.4% │ 62.9% │ 61.9% │ 55.0% │ 43.6% │ 47.8% │ 45.6% │ 45.9% │ 46.5%

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti...

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People own homes, sure. But who lives in them? Young couples? Families with young kids? Multigenerational families? Empty nesting retirees? DINKs and prestige professionals?

Or at least: how many people live in each owned house now vs in the past?

Total ownership numbers aren't the ones that matter to people right now. If owned homes used to be populated by multigenerational and nuclear families, while elders moved in with their kids and bachelors rented apartments in the city, but are now populated by elders and high-paid professionals while families with children are generally left to rent, it's a whole different world even while your quoted figures remain the same.

Indeed. general household size has gone down over over time, with a significant increase in single people. There has been a decrease in grandparents living in multigenerational homes, and an uptick in adult children living in multigenerational homes.

Just wait a year when tons of people start to lose their property. They are already losing their cars and cards are maxed out.

People are worse off now, it just doesn't appear that way yet.

Are you sure that isn't just a meme narrative peddled by the media?

And social media amplifying the complaints and rage postings of its younger users and the lower class?

What does the data say?

Is there a market that would price in the kind of predictions/lag the poster is proposing?

There are many, but one good leading indicator is freight companies / shipping rates.

Looking at things like housing and cars directly can hide things because of can-kicking shenanigans. Melody Wright has a great substack that goes over what the homebuilders are doing to make it seem like sales are strong [0], going well beyond the "have the construction workers park in the driveway of unsold units" stuff.

[0] https://substack.com/@m3melody

Well high wealth inequality doesn’t translate directly to “worse off” but it does indicate that there’s some truth to the social sentiment.

Beyond that, it’d depend on definitions…

- data shows housing, healthcare, college costs outgrowing wages and inflation

- data shows tons of other stuff costing less over time when accounting for inflation.

Basically, data shows that (American) consumers have access to more and more cheap consumable goods, but the 3 things that are the (probably for most people) biggest purchases in life are the most expensive they've ever been.

The data says that people are spending more than they make. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/nearly-a-qua... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-economy-household-spen...

> What does the data say?

The data can say whatever you want it to say depending on which data you look at and how you interpret it and what bits you include and leave out.

"Home ownership is higher than ever" is what the data says, and this can "prove" that there is no problem. Of course, you can also point out that the average age where people buy a house is ten years later, and that house prices really have massively gone up, and that especially lower-income people are spending an ever-larger share of their income on housing.

And of course averaging out over any country (especially a huge country like the US, but also smaller ones) is a very incomplete picture in the first place, and there can be huge differences between different groups that averages don't display: if everyone stays put with old low housing costs but entering the market is very expensive then "the data says" that there is no problem.

etc. etc.

Try doing a working-class job and try to find affordable housing for you and your family. This is the data that matters.

> The data can say whatever you want it to say depending on which data you look at and how you interpret it and what bits you include and leave out.

This is what most people don't understand. Like 99% of the population. There is plenty of data that is fake as well when they want to brainwash people and there has never been more brainwashing in the US than there is today.

> Just wait a year when tons of people start to lose their property.

Even the trough of the decline started by the Great Recession was only down about 6 percentage points of the peak of a little over 69%.

> [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

"The homeownership rate is the proportion of households that is owner-occupied."

Which seems contrary to the story being told that more and more homes are owned by corporations. At least this is a reason being tauted when questions about single family housing inventories are low.

Also, that stat conveniently stops before 2007-2008 housing collapse. So maybe that's where the disagreement begins???

You seem to feel everyone else is being very tauted and convenient and air-quoted

What is being air quoted? I pulled a direct quote from the link provided by the comment I replied to, hence my use of the quotes. The question is where in all of the stats on home ownership are the homes owned by companies where it is not the primary domicile of the owner. I'm ignoring summer homes or other vacation/2nd homes, but there are a lot of homes that have become part of investment portfolios. How do these factor into the %?

> "The homeownership rate is the proportion of households that is owner-occupied."

Often overlooked and makes it possible to have a steady 'homeownership' rate while the actual proportion of young adults that own homes falls off a cliff (i.e. due to the obvious trend towards adult children living with parents longer).

Homeownership rate is very locally variable, so national averages miss a lot of nuance in the housing discussion. For example over the last 10 years its decreased in the Bay Area, and in S.F. county its only about 38%.

SF is a venture capital subsidy into real estate. It's not representative of the broader US.

I will give you data for other in demand housing markets then to demonstrate how variable this stat is. In LA county, the homeownership rate is 46%. The homeownership rate in Queens is 45%, the homeownership rate in Brooklyn is 30%, in Manhattan its 24%, and in the Bronx its 20%. In Boston its 34%. In Miami its about 31%.

Really, homeownership is quite low in most in demand markets, especially ones that have been in demand for some time now.

Thank you for adding this information. It shows how important it is to get granular with data otherwise so much nuance gets lost in the interpretation.

The phrase "home ownership" elides a lot of detail. What percentage of income is spent on the home now vs then? Probability that current owners will default due to major unforeseen cost, etc.

Edit: nice formatting

Last time I did the math on this using median incomes, median home prices and mid year interest rates for 1980 vs 2022 it was something like 24% vs 28%. I’ll see if I can find the math and sources

Interesting. I wonder if using medians is valid though. Incomes and prices are so localized that they may not represent what an actual human in an actual place could expect to be faced with.

There's a whole lot of anecdata over the last few years that's not accounted for by a 4% increase.

I agree, it doesn't make sense. Home prices just about everywhere in the US (including a lot of rural areas) went up way more than 4% between ~2020 and 2022, and that's with annual CPI inflation at <3%. Maybe some of that was eaten by the 2022-2023 inflation period, but I don't think either the increases in home prices or consumer prices were reflected in wages. I'm sure this can all be found in the right FRED time series; if someone has the motivation to dig for it, I'm happy to be proven wrong (but happier to be proven right).

Yeah, if urbanism/centralization (of where people live and also the economy) increased over the same period, the raw figures may give a misleading picture of what things are really like. There are a lot or rural towns that have been shrinking over that time span, and cheap housing in those places doesn’t meaningfully offset rising prices in growing cities.

Sincere question - why not? It seems like the idea is that someone owning one cheap house in a rural community is of less consequence than another higher value home owned in a higher value market. And I'm sure some math could be applied in economic terms to bear that out. But looking at it from a human perspective, I have a hard time accepting that one is better than another.

It’s one of several factors that could mean the prices seen by the median person looking for a house are worse than that 4% median house price increase suggests.

To take it to an extreme to illustrate why this may matter, if one town gets abandoned and the houses all sell for $1 to a single family, while all the former residents move to another similar-sized town that sees prices more than double… you’d be best off ignoring or down-weighting the effect of those $1 houses if you’re trying to figure out how the housing market is looking to most people.

Though it’s possible the figures used for the analysis already account for that kind of thing, in some fashion. Are they actual sale prices, or asking prices? Do they only count sales to someone who’s intending to use the dwelling as a primary residence, or all sales? There’s a lot of room for the median experienced house price for a person just trying to buy a place to live to differ from the median on-paper, depending on how it’s handled.

Using anecdata as evidence is a textbook example of information bias. There are multiple layers of self-selection bias taking place when an anecdote is volunteered.

But I agree with your first point.

Even within a single city, median house values are pretty meaningless. There is no median house or neighborhood. It’s a blend of multiple neighborhoods and housing inventory, just an artifact of recent sales history in an aggregate set. If you actually went shopping with the median value as your budget, you’d likely find a lot less desirable and a lot out of reach, not a lot at that budget. At least this has been the case where I’ve resided.

I'd love to see that if you can find it.

I'm curious what this looks like if adjusted for the % of the home that the "owner" actually owns, as opposed to the bank.

decade intervals can lose the details, like the Great Recession of late 2000s.

from Appendix Table 1 (Home ownership estimates) in https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... - (extracted columns = Year, Homeowners, Percent of total Households):

    2005. . . . . . . . 74,318,982 66.9
    2006. . . . . . . . 75,086,485 67.3
    2007. . . . . . . . 75,515,104 67.2
    2008. . . . . . . . 75,342,138 66.6
    2009. . . . . . . . 74,843,004 65.9
    2010. . . . . . . . 74,873,372 65.4
    2011. . . . . . . . 74,264,435 64.6
    2012. . . . . . . . 74,119,256 63.9
    2013. . . . . . . . 73,843,861 63.5
    2014. . . . . . . . 73,991,995 63.1
    2015. . . . . . . . 74,506,512 63.0
    2016. . . . . . . . 75,022,569 63.1
    2017. . . . . . . . 76,684,018 63.9
    2018. . . . . . . . 77,708,394 63.9
    2019. . . . . . . . 78,724,862 64.1

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_united_st..., homeownership also depends on your race. Caucasians have a much higher rate of homeownership (higher than the average rate - one guess as to the minority group with the lowest homeownership rate).

interestingly an attempt to solve the latter issue in your comment actually in part caused the former: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

Part of it is that the Americans are older nowadays, so they have longer to to save up for a home. The median age in 1990 was 33 compared to 39 today.

If median age has increased and home ownership has remained relatively constant, doesn’t that imply that it _has_ become harder to buy (ie lower rate of first time buyers per year)?

Do these numbers include homes owned by businesses like investment firms?

I can't imagine it would. I assume you're talking about rental properties? The number of homes owned for sale by investors at any given time is probably small, given that flipping a house is pretty fast (several months?), and houses in major metro areas tend to go from listing to under-agreement in a matter of days. Or is there some phenomenon of investors buying properties and holding on to them for sale, rather than for rent?

>The homeownership rate is the proportion of households that is owner-occupied.

The main cause for the increase since 1900 was the invention of the mortgage, which did not really exist until about 1950. Loans existed, but the exact mortgage structure is a modern invention. It increased home ownership rates but also housing costs due to higher demand.

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