Most homes for sale in 2023 were not affordable for a typical U.S. household
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Communal apartments (Russian singular: коммунальная квартира, romanized: kommunal'naya kvartira, colloquial: kommunalka) are apartments in which several unrelated persons or families live in isolated living rooms and share common areas such a kitchen, shower, and toilet.[1] They generally lack privacy.
Well, I’ve lived in a communalka without a shower, a toilet was outside. These are bourgeois luxuries, they increase price of the house.
laughs in San Francisco
Who can afford not to have roommates living in a converted living room and in the dining room? I probably know a couple rich people who don't, but most people I can think of don't have the luxury of a dining room or a living room. Certainly not both!
Now, start dismantling the shower and the toilet - save the Earth.
You own your own house; you don't own the land around it, and you should have no right to tell other people what to do with that land.
We all have watched the enshittification of everything in the pursuit of scale and profits from everything from social networks and subcultures to appliances but somehow forget that the high buy-in either in the form of investment in the community in early stages to the extremely high price in the later stages is what makes it work. In places where there is legitimately nowhere to start a new community sure, but the loudest complainers about housing affordability in my area ignore there there are sub $300k, $200k and even a few sub $100k houses right fucking next to the $600k houses. You could break one of their windows with a stray baseball they're so close. You just think that living there is beneath you.
If you don't have dollars you're supposed to pick somewhere cheap to live and put in the work instead to make it the next good neighborhood but seems like the people complaining want good cheap and easy.
I suppose this is true, but I don’t feel like it contradicts the option of: instead of making a good neighborhood very large, building many small neighborhoods. This was the principle of the scaling of the Web back when it was agreed to be pretty good, and it is in a sense the principle of the scaling of the United States (and most governments). As an added bonus, most people would live closer to places to work and shop, since each neighborhood must necessarily have those, rather than being in the far-flung reaches of sprawl.
The only trick then, I guess, is the neighborhoods do need to be small.
In a democracy, voters are free to vote themselves in to oblivion (ie price out their children) or profit off non-voters (ie those that want to move in).
I smell hypocrisy and double standards
If the citizens of an area freely vote for legislation that aligns with their common good, perhaps over people who are not citizens of that area... how is that collusion in any sense of the word?
If my state votes for stringent data privacy regulations, is that "colluding" against foreign companies? What about banning types of mining, agriculture?
So if someone opposes a new housing development in an area where only well water is available because the local aquifer can barely support the existing houses in years of low rain, they don't get any significant input just because stopping the development would also raise the value of their house?
Present.
If you are OK with that then living off rent is a natural conclusion
Me, I am not "anti capitalist" (a silly identity many of my comrades have adopted) but I believe capitalism should be an economic theory that society restricts to where it is useful and away from where it is harmful
Possibly
If you find a car dependant market where you can rent clapped out bangers at high prices
I do not know what sort of land lord you are, but there are plenty that do exactly that
I don't believe this. What city and neighborhood?
It is very difficult to find a rental property you can buy and be slightly profitable, let alone 2.5x.
Where?
The problem is twofold - one issue is there is a lot of the real estate tied up being used only during the cold weather months from snowbirds. The population goes up by roughly a third then. The other issue is folks moving here from other states, primarily California. The influx has greatly exceeded the rate of new construction.
This already lead to a small drop in prizes at least.
AFAICT the only way they can do it is as a couple or down payments from family.
If you wonder why traffic is so bad, it's because the only places affordable are 90 minute commute
I bought 3.5 years ago, today it would be much harder, I would have sell some stock to put more in a down payment to make my mortgage payment more reasonable. It also helps that my SO works as a designer for another FAANG.
> It also helps that my SO works as a designer for another FAANG.
Thanks for confirming my point :)
Here's a million dollar, 1 bed condo, and its HOA is $600/month. I don't doubt that there are HOA's charging $3,000/mo, but that's not remotely normal. If you put $200k down, that's 20%, so you have a mortgage of $800k. At today's interest rates of 6.358% on a 30-fixed, that's $6,062+$600 HOA/month. Which is a lot higher than a couple years ago, but that's a whole other thing.
Since they're no longer saving, their take home of $209k - $6700*12, leaves them $128k/yr, or $10,700/month to pay for food and entertainment and savings. Again, maybe I'm not spending enough on entertainment, but $10k month seems a lot to me, enough to survive on, at least.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/400-Avila-St-APT-102-San-...
Of course this is San Francisco, and housing goes for over-list-price, so here's an $800k condo.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/417-Carl-St-San-Francisco...
Both of these are in reasonable neighborhoods, though everyone's got an opinion about which neighborhood is the best.
Evidence please. Very cou ter intuitive
Square footage price is thus set in accordance with the local market. The obvious issue here is then that someone has enough buying power to ransack the market, leaving most individual buyers behind.
If you were to build two or three homes in the place of a current one, that issue would remain.
1500sqft seems like a pretty obtainable size for the average American.
This is not to say that we should not build more housing so as to increase supply and thus lower prices, of course.
We have seen that over and over
Housing in most western economies is where the market most obviously fails the people
With populations declining for the first time in centuries, everywhere, over the next few years there will be a surplus not a shortage of houses.
Not much good for current twenty/thirty somethings, they have been royally screwed by the greed head baby boomers.
But it will cause all sorts of unpredictable things to happen in the property market
Because of the blindness of capitalism the property market is a big chunk of the economy
Interesting times
Surplus of houses is quite unlikely.
It’s going to take decades to get out of the system we’ve built for ourselves with sprawl and the automobile. Until it’s possible to build in volume and cheaply you won’t see prices go down because there so much pent up demand.
One more innocent question: Should our state build enough houses just for existing population or for all South America population too?
Building more SFH on the peripheries is fine for people who want that, but it's not part of the solution to lowering prices.