False. The homeownership rate is about 66%. Most people can afford a home here.
More people are in more significant debt bondage than in the past, that’s not an improvement.
The proportion of owned outright homes has been declining in the western world for 30 years.
So long as you make your payments on time, the lienholder cannot confiscate your property to make the pie whole. The money might be theirs, but the property is yours.
Correction, most people have been able to afford a home in the past in the US.
Homes used to be affordable, now they aren’t.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/21/ge...
> Roughly 30% of 25-year-olds in 2022—the oldest of the Gen Z (born between 1997 to 2013)—owned their home in 2022, a slightly higher percentage than the 28% of Millennials (born between 1981 to 1996) who owned homes at that age and the 27% of Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980)—but lower than the rate for Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), 32% of whom owned homes at age 25.
If anything, such numbers indicate to me that homeownership rates haven't meaningfully changed and the only thing that did change is the advent of noisey narratives.
Isn't it in fact the opposite? The bigger population, the easier to find a significant signal? Those are variances of millions of people. We wouldn't treat a 5% swing in unemployment as a rounding error, would we?
If unemployment keeps hovering around 29% +/-3% over basically a century, that variance is a rounding error.
“rounding error” isn’t typically used to describe double-digit percentage changes. You might say within normal variation but it’s a significant change and, ignoring the fact that those numbers are much greater than the actual unemployment rate, it’s well over the measurement precision and real shifts of millions of people are going to be scrutinized.
What? We're talking about a 5 percentage points variance, that is a single digit percentage point change. This is regarding a 29 percentage points average over a span of like 80 years concerning millions if not billions of people.
That is a rounding error, whether it's home ownership or unemployment or whatever you want those numbers to be.
At the moment, that’s a change of 16 million people. A century ago, it was 5 million people. Both of those numbers are large enough that they absolutely would get attention and public discussion.
If something trends give or take 30% for 80 years or more, a +/-3% variance is a fucking rounding error. I don't care if it's home ownership or unemployment or whatever the number is, it is a rounding error not worthy of concern.
It's like the lowering and rising of the tides. It goes up and down, but the sea level remains basically the same overall; thus, nobody cares about the exact tide at an exact time for figuring out sea level because it's a rounding error.
Put more bluntly: The trend has not changed, what is there worthy of my concern?
The other thing is remembering that cost of living varies significantly. Even 25yo FAANG engineers struggle in San Francisco but there are other parts of the country where someone with middle class income can buy if they live modestly and are thinking along the lines of a basic condo in a non-luxury neighborhood.
And declining.
Homeowner vs. renter statistics reflect a decline in homeownership