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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

The SoCal housing market is insane, especially San Diego where the pay to mortgage payment ratio is completely off-kilter. Don’t know how this city is going to function in 10-20 years.

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The weird thing is that you could have written that same sentence 20 years ago. I remember around 2005 the Union Tribune ran a map of San Diego showing the percentage of household income spent on housing, with the entire coast red even in the rich neighborhoods where people were getting interest-only mortgages on multi-million dollar homes. At the time I remember being amazed at how many people would take such risky loans but now I’m more impressed by how often that worked: unless they couldn’t make it through the 2009 collapse and had to sell right then, they probably did clear a good profit from that strategy.

I was interviewed by the Union Trib in the late 80's about home affordability.

Between the Sunshine Tax and thin strip of land that everyone wants to live in, and there is no solution to affordability. (Except the usual go So Cal go east until the price drops)

Yeah, you can’t even use density all that well near the coast since everyone will sue if you block their view by building higher and coastal erosion/earthquake safety increases the cost a lot. The best idea I’ve had is more inland density paired with bike highways and transit so people can go to the beach without spending 40 minutes inching around PB looking for cheap parking.

All I can suggest is that SoCal prices can and do crash... but the cycles are so long as to skip parts of generations who would/should normally be able to buy homes. I lucked out and bought 14 years ago (after seemingly "priced out" for 10+ years)

How long do US people typically fix their mortgage? Are there many people that will refinance their home and have to pay a higher rate or does this just happen if you move house? Can refinancing be avoided if you just move house and transfer the debt to the new property but keep the same rate? In New Zealand you can fix for 6 months, 1 year, 18 months, 2, 3, 4 or 5 years with 2/3 being most common but recently 6 months to 1 year becoming popular due to the expectation that rates will fall. The flip side to that is a lot of people on a historically low < 3% 3 year mortgage had to take a 6%-7% mortgage so a lot of money gets taken out of their pockets and the economy.

It’s quite common in the US for homeowners to have their rate fixed for the full fifteen/thirty years of the loan.

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