High-income job losses are cooling housing demand
jbrec.com
jbrec.com
At $84k average household income, assuming 1/3 going to a mortgage would give you $2.3k a month to work with. At 6% interest rate, assuming 20% down payment of $70k, you can just manage a $350k home and that is ignoring taxes, not adding other closing costs, not considering utilities, assuming an interest rate on the lower side and assuming a 20% deposit.
Add tax and that gives you around $1.7k to work with. Assume only putting down 10% and adding in $400 a month to cover utilities then you can manage around $175k home. That rules out buying a house in alot of the US.
And yes, households in more expensive areas make more but if you are buying the average house, that costs $410k you need to be making like double the national average income to stick to the 1/3 rule. How many households are earning $170k where houses are $410k?
Are people just devoting 50%+ of their income to housing? Everyone buying a house with the help of mom and dad? I just really don't get it.
It's 59 years old lol.
Boomers and institutional money are doing the home buying.
https://www.apolloacademy.com/median-age-of-all-us-homebuyer...
In 2009 the same chart shows that the median age was 39.
In the early 80s it was early 30s.
Look at congress, we live in a boomer gerontocracy. Not every boomer is wealthy and powerful, but the majority of people who are wealthy and powerful are either descendants of elites/wealthy, boomers, or a very small fraction of younger tech/finance/business owners.
The good news is - assuming there's not a big change in immigration rates - if you can rent cheaply enough for 10-20 years the boomers will start dying in sufficient numbers that if there is somehow no reversion on home prices in the mean time there should be insufficient buyers at that point and prices will eventually fall.
But that "10-20 years" is your life, and there's no getting it back. Millennials (the largest generation in US history) have entered into our prime family starting age, and the fact that most are priced out of the housing market right now and stuck renting apartments is a complete tragedy. At a 90th percentile income, I can just barely be able to afford a home and provide for a family of 3-4 like our parents and grandparents did on a highschool education with no higher skills.
It absolutely is, but as one of those myself, I just refuse to even attempt to pay their prices and will make the best of life while renting and doing other things, not having kids, not owning property unless the ratio changes dramatically. Owning at most a tiny condo for half a million where I live, or moving to the boonies to own marginally more for less is simply not appealing to me, it doesn't unlock anything but a vague sense of security and a shit ton of liability. I hope more people choose the same until the working age tranch of purchasing power isn't as available as they'd like and prices have to drop. It's a major issue, but maybe I should be thankful I never adopted the boomer/genx dreams of owning a place and having a family or whatever. It's something I'm morbidly watching from the sidelines for now (in my early-mid thirties), but there are no circumstances except a miracle side hustle that could create the circumstances for me to actually pursue a mortgage on a place in my city.
You just have to remember and keep in mind that the game is rigged. Housing is far from being a completely free market in this country. The structural political forces entrenched in maintaining home prices is second to none, from the top federal level all the way down to city councils, in a completely bipartisan way. The crisis of '08 was a generational event that we're not likely to see again in our lifetimes. Flattening and dips for sure, but a crash will not be allowed to happen; they'll just print enough to fix it, and leave the burden of inflation to anyone not owning assets.
Which had the side effect of allowing a lot of people who couldn't otherwise afford homes to purchase them by allowing them access to more leverage than they likely should have had.
So wealth isn't always aligned.
This is basically the situation with housing in Canada actually, it's been down/flat in nominal terms since 2021 but if you owned US stocks during that time while waiting to buy then Canadian real estate is now much more affordable to you.
For example in 1980 in SF the median home was $130k and the median household income was $16k. Today it’s $1240k and $141k. So yes it’s less affordable but it’s hardly a massive difference as you imply.
I have figured out my father working an unskilled factory job in 1970 made about $40k adjusted for inflation in order to buy a $40k starter home in early 20s.
Union job with a pension that he is still collecting right now after retiring at 55.
No college. Not even sure he has ever read a book in his life. I would say all you had to do was not be an alcoholic and you would be fine but even that is not true. Even the boomer alcoholic fuck ups I know did pretty well and retired early.
I imagine age of first time home buyers has also gone up but there’s no way it’s that high.
https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/first-time-home-buyer-share...
There has been a big change in projected immigration rates: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61735
You may be missing something - there's so much money flowing upwards in society that the rich/ultra-rich will simply be able to buy ALL of that real estate as it becomes available. If not ALL, then everything that's desirable.
Real estate investing in general went bananas during COVID (plenty of non-PE buyers as well) because it's one of the only ways the average citizen can access that amount of leverage.
You only need a little bit of extra demand to have an enormous effect on prices.
This is a lie fed to you by the rich lobby. Destroying zoning would launch the value of the land current owners have into the stratosphere.
1/3 of the houses bought in the US are bought by these kinds of organizations. Zoning might matter, but large capital owners are buying up a large fraction of the houses that are for sale and this is obviously driving up prices.
Excerpts:
Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025.
Institutional investors are selling more homes than they buy and have been for six consecutive quarters.
While large institutional investors continue to get most of the headlines in the single-family rental space, small investors account for more than 90% of the market. These are individuals owning 10 properties or less. The largest investors, those with 1,000 or more properties, make up just 2% of all investor-owned homes.
>Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025.
is, as I view things, what I said. You may say that individual real estate investors are not typically large capital owners, but that's a definitional thing, or a matter of assessment that isn't interesting to debate.
No matter how you choose to define it, investors buying homes are buying a substantial fraction of the homes on the market (1/3) and presumably have a substantial effect on prices.
It's entities bigger than them driving up prices. The adversarial situation might even be even more apparent with the guy buying up 'a few' rental homes.
and looking at the numbers, I see declining increaes over previous 5 year periods
39.1% increase from 2010-06 (8628.1) to 2015-06 (12004.6)
30.8% increase from 2015-01 (11787.8) to 2020-01 (15416.3)
21.0% increase from 2020-06 (18140.6) to 2025-06 (21942.4).
We don't create buyers quickly, but mobility means that a large number of buyers can show up in one concentrated area much more quickly than housing can adapt.
One piece of the US real estate puzzle is that automation and outsourced killed agriculture and manufacturing jobs. Those are the kinds of jobs that have some natural incentive to be spread across the US. Ag, because farms literally take up a lot of space and are spread out, and manufacturing because factories tend to be close to raw materials, ports, or other local resources.
When you get rid of those jobs and replace them with information work, you create a feedback loop with no dampening in it. People want to go where the most jobs are, so they move to the cities. Businesses want to open where the most workers are, so they start companies in cities.
The next thing you know, all the small towns are filled with dirt cheap empty houses because there are no jobs. Meanwhile, every metro area is bursting at the seams.
But it seems like there is a larger problem of just having tons of housing inventory that is out of reach or untenable to most people. What are the more basic numbers of how many units exist in the country vs. how many people there are? How many second, third, investment, vacation units are there, how many sit empty most of the time? (I'm mostly not talking about true "country"/vanity houses far away from economic centers that will always only be accessible to the rich)
It seems to me that rather than just "build build build" we could do a lot to reconfigure the existing supply to make it fit the people better? Why is there so much "unaffordable" stock out there and continuing to be built? It kinda feels like the affordable housing issue is just a red herring for the larger wealth inequality issue.
The problem is that housing and infrastructure is, you know, actual giant physical objects. It takes a year of planning and millions of dollars to move a road. You can't tear down a block of single family homes and put a denser apartment building in there until everyone living in them sells. You need to run sewer, power, and roads to make a new neighborhood, and even then you will still have to deal with the impact to nearby schools, traffic, hospitals, etc.
Making places for people to live is, like, many orders of magnitude more effortful than anything we do in the software world.
> It kinda feels like the affordable housing issue is just a red herring for the larger wealth inequality issue.
Yes, this is certainly another piece of the puzzle. For every 100 people who can't afford a thing, there's still 1 rich person who can, and increasingly, rich people are the primary source of profit for businesses. So businesses target them more and more and we end up in today's world where it seems like "no one can afford what's being sold".
It's because unless you're one of the wealthy minority, you're simply not a market participant at all.
Related: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-econ...
My point is that we have the physical problem of housing units per capita beyond solved already, it's just socially/economically out of whack.
Personally I think people that otherwise would be selling are sitting on their homes because of the interest rates and this is causing a strange feedback loop of low turnover causing low supply which in turn causes new buyers to accept the prices (probably with a hope that interest rates will come down and they can re-fi in the years to come). I also think a non-trivial number of houses that on the market due to the owners passing or going into retirement homes are sitting there on the market because prices are so high but the only money the family is out is taxes. Or they are being turned into rental units, since rental prices are out of whack in these areas too.
My point I guess is where I live we haven't seen a big influx of population (probably the opposite) or significant job or wage growth to make sense of the increase in housing prices. I guess at the end of the day people are just stretching themselves further and sending more money to the banks in the form of interest to get into homes that were literally half the price in 2019. Strange times.
I do also think there's a thing where home prices have risen so steeply in metro areas that even rural areas with fewer jobs are seeing prices go up because the market will allow it. Because the cities are so expensive, a house in a rural area can still be a relative good deal even if it's more expensive than it used to be.
1. Jobs.
2. Good K-12 schools.
3. Some amount of things to do and cultural amenities.
Remote work can help a lot with #1. I think people are fairly tolerant of a lack of #3 and it's a thing that can grow organically over time. People will also accept fewer things to do if the area is quieter, they can afford bigger homes, and there's more outdoorsy stuff nearby.
But #2 is really hard. You need a strong tax base to fund it, which small towns don't have. They are sort of trapped in a death spiral where if they had more people coming in, they could have better schools with the increased tax base, but they don't, so they can't, so no one moves there.
A $350k mortgage with bills, is expensive. Will eat up a whole check if you don't make more than $140k/year.
They were quite serious about destroying society as-is. Nobody took them serious
Even the author of the piece said it was not a description of her vision of the future, but intended to start a discussion about technology.
But it's been picked up by wackaloons around the world as part of some overarching conspiracy theory.
it's because it's so easy to simply blame the ills of society on some illusory few pulling the strings behind the scenes. It used to be the migrants, or blacks, or the chinese (still is apparently) or the japanese...and now, it's the rich/shadowy figures etc.
The actual truth is that the collective actions of everybody leads to certain outcomes - today's outcomes. It can't really have happened any other way.
Please don't dilute the argument by comparing racial groups with the ultra-rich.
The (ultra-)rich form a class in the classical Marxist sense - a group whose interests naturally align, and they work together to further their interests.
There is deliberate government policy behind what's going on with housing - free money for the rich, which they can in turn invest into speculative assets to make yet even more free money.
Then they ensure that their money has weight by putting said money into housing, pricing out common folk, and building new units to serve as price control to preserve the value of their assets.
It’s not a lobbying firm, it’s the same people that make our laws and decide our future.
By the way, the full title of that essay is “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better”
The strategy is everywhere now. You buy but buy doesnt mean you own. How did that happen?
‘As Hitler declared in 1934, “The German revolution will be concluded only when the entire German Volk has been totally created anew, reorganized and reconstructed” (cited in Koonz, 2003, p. 87). The “Great Reset,” announced by World Economic Forum (WEF) director Klaus Schwab, son of Nazi industrialist Eugen Schwab, attempts the same thing on a global scale, promising to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country [ . . . ] must participate, and every industry [ . . . ] must be transformed” (Schwab, 2020).’
The book is: Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State
By David A. Hughes
One recent case https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1981i3j/ubisoft_get...
But you see that everywhere. You buy the hardware but the company may block your property totally or partially.
You buy a car but pays to use heated seat? Who eats this thing that you haven't paid extra for the seats. The costs are just sunk in other parts.
You buy a movie but it can be revoked. You buy an smart tv that can have features revoked. You barely can pay your rent because now everyone needs to rent because no one has money to buy except equity firms.
There is no need for "they" to be a centralised being. It is just happening. Doesn't matter who or if there are a "they".
We live in a world where people think that the homeless man is the enemy because people are to simple minded to not understand why there are incentives to keep make it worse and worse.
Most of what the WEF discusses is how to gain more technocratic control over democracy. You know, for the benefit of everyone...
It is nothing like that. We can see how equity firms risen again buying certain types of businesses and change the structure of prices. The incentives to do it wrong are all out.
People still think that Microsoft layouts were an unfortunate unpredictable movement given market circumstances when every regulatory organisation pointed that it would be exactly what they would do.
People also think that putting their money in such companies because they have money back is an endless loop of free money and that money is an infinite resource.
Not one or two only have discussed how they should start licensing their products as a new business model. What people thought that would mean? How selling the product does not give the buyer the ownership? How is that not taxed differently?
The US has made the correct choice for the last 250 years, I hope people like you aren't able to derail it.
This strategy works so long as you're in the group of people who do indeed have "more resources," but breaks down if you're marginalized in any way, or if you don't want to support the exploitative system.
Also I'm open to critiques of capitalism, but the post I replied to didn't contain one.
That kind of income with that kind of house price should be pretty comfortable, given you don't mention supporting a family. If your non-housing bills are costing $109k a year, there's a good chance you could reign in your lifestyle choices.
Do you know how many of those are in the US?
So then it’s not what happens to them is it?
Also I think much of this problem is zoning, which coincidentally Houston has none and has some of the lowest housing costs in the nation, especially for a city of its size.
I suspect much of the housing crisis on the west coast is because of poor zoning laws and could be fixed with a stroke of a pen, at the expense of the local housing market value.
Because people generally want to live close to their jobs.
If cities have a lot of demand, it's partly because they have a lot of jobs, which means that the price of housing in cities relative to income is still an important metric.
Viewed by holding more of those things constant, the urban medianHousePrice : medianIncome is how much of people's lives we're requiring they dedicate in order to have a roof over their heads.
For example if you are 22 and just started your first job you are included in the statistics but I think we wouldn’t really expect it to be affordable to become a homeowner (nor would it be desirable from a labor mobility standpoint).
And many people prefer renting somewhere like Manhattan to buying in Topeka. So it doesn’t make sense to assume everyone wants to buy a house. I know several millionaires that rent.
It would be better to compare overall cost of housing to income.
That’s the problem right there. Even if you’re locked in on the historically low sub 3% mortgages, there is a chance you’re spending more than 1/3 of your income on housing. People with higher rates and people who are renting, spend a lot more than 1/3 of their income on housing.
I know finance influencers and older generations keep talking about 1/3 income on housing, but that hasn’t been a thing for a while now. Even before the pandemic surge in housing costs, 1/3 on housing was dream in most cities across the country.
We live in San Francisco and pay rent at about 15% of combined gross income. I think people really underestimate the value of renting.
2. What is your income and what is your rent?
While I appreciate the anecdotal data point, it’s easy to conflate personal situations to “this is what everyone else can do”. I say this because for a good 5 years I lived with my spouse in a $2k single bedroom apartment in San Francisco that was under rent control when both of us were raking in tech money. It’s doable, but not something that you can extend to everyone in the country.
The shocking part is that we pay 5k in rent, but mortgage on the same place would be closer to 9k. Plus the commitment part (annual lease vs 30 year debt)
Very important to do your own math on these things and not just follow common wisdom.
Yes and still can’t [responsibly] afford to buy in my locale :)
The situation is truly fucked and it’s about time Americans admit that housing cannot be both an expectation and an investment. Either everyone gets to own a house or it can be an investment. You can’t have both.
IMO housing is a consumption expense but people hate it when I bring that up at dinner.
only the building portion.
The land is not consumed when you live there. It only appreciates due to the developments around that land, making it more desirable and thus, more valuable.
And if the land is more valuable, then it makes sense for it to cost more - either as rent, or as capital appreciation.
> everyone gets to own a house
which is not a truth, but a want/desire. So housing is an investment first and foremost, and will always remain so.
if you then live in that house, you lose that rental income. That is what you are consuming. the rest of the investment remains intact.
as I like to phrase it, when you move from a rental into a house that you own, you still pay rent.
yes it is. The term is called cost of capital, and sometimes imputed rent. But it's not an "expense" per se like it is when you pay liquid cash to somebody for use of a capital good.
The strong household income is the only reason why you’re able to limit how much you spend on housing, which unfortunately is not something most people are able to do, even if they’re renting. I get that renting is cheaper than buying at the moment with the interest rates, but it’s not cheap overall.
I've been renting for the past 10 years across 5 different landlords and never had a negative experience
Can you support this claim by evidence? There are various sources [1] reaching the opposite conclusions:
> One thing is clear: renting your housing is not a waste of money, and it can even result in a greater accumulation of wealth over the long-term compared to owning
[1] https://pwlcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2017-07-07...
That is very reasonable. In Australia, 35 year mortgages are normal, and 25-30 year mortgages were normal 20 years ago. Why would your household income need to be 1/4 of the cost of the house to make it work?
This looks like a standard 30 year loan. If 100% of the 1700 went to principle and the was no interest then yeah, your 17 years works out, but then the bank makes no money.
No, it does not. You forgot the interest. Let's call it 6%, close to the current US average.
The interest by itself comes to more than $1700 a month!
Paying $1700 per month, you'll never pay off $350k, even with a 1000 year mortgage.
To pay in 17 years, you'd need to pay $2741 (plus fees) per month. Most of that will be interest at first, but it tapers down. If you want to start out not paying mostly interest, you'll need to pay at least $3500 (plus fees) per month.
That said, mortgages aren't rocket science.
1. Assume at the end of the day you want the homeowner to be paying a stable monthly amount*.
2. In order to get there, you have {loan term}, {interest rate}, and {loan amount} as primary variables.
3. Assuming {loan term} and {interest rate} are constant (in a given mortgage market, at a given time), that leaves {loan amount} as the only variable.
So how do you get a constant monthly payment for a variety of {loan amounts}?
4. You add up all the interest that would be owed over the entire {loan term}, using {interest rate}, then divide each monthly payment into some proportion of {interest payment} and {principle payment}.
5. You also front-weight the interest payments, because at that time there's more outstanding total loan (versus at the end of the loan term, when only a little principle remains to be paid back).* *
Not super complicated. Yes, there's compound math, but conceptually simple.
* For some definition of stable, even if it readjusts on some schedule
* * Point in time interest pricing like this also makes future recalculation for over/underpayments easier, as you're essentially trued-up on interest payments at all times
Are they? I was under the impressions that 25-30 was normal now.
> $1700 per month pays off a $350k loan in 17 years, does it not?
Noooo. Have a play with this Australian mortgage calculator - https://www.commbank.com.au/digital/home-buying/calculator/h...
I think you might be in for a shock.
The example rate on the calculator is 5.35, about right when the base rate is 3.6 percent (though you can get lower), using that your $350k mortgage will take 40 years to pay off at $1700 per month. A $300k mortgage would take about 30 years. Or a $230k mortgage could be paid in your 17 years.
None of these loan amounts will get you anywhere close to a house in Australia today. You're looking around $1 million for the average house in most of the capital cities, with very few available under about the $650k mark.
When did that become the rule? Why, back in my day, 25% was the max amount recommended to spend on housing. Though that was also back when no one would even think of taking out a 72 month car loan. Maybe one of those new 60 month loans, if you just don't have the money, otherwise stick to 36 months.
And like you, I just don't get it. 1/3 on the house, whatever percentage comes out for the $40K car @ 72 months (granted, one doesn't need to buy new), where's this money coming from? We live in Redmond (WA), and I'm at a loss as to how there are so many newer Teslas parked in >$1MM houses. C'mon, there's only so many of those $500K total comp jobs to go around.
Back-up cameras are required by law, so that requires a screen, but the law does not require that screen do double-duty as an infotainment screen.
But there was a time they weren't required by law, and people still managed to drive.
Income tax is progressive, so a higher income tax is probably less relevant to you if you are housing-insecure. Sales tax is regressive, but is maybe 700bp higher in places with high sales tax, so much less than the 50% bump between 1/3 and 1/2 your income. As far as food goes, if you eat out, that's way more expensive, but groceries are a much smaller difference.
That presupposes that people bought the houses with their income. Family wealth might be the missing piece of the jigsaw
So, in your example, thats 175/10/12 = 1.5K per month, leaving $200 for the mortgage. So, $175K is unrealistic.
In related news, Cal FAIR is lobbying for a 60% increase in rates this year, because, apparently 16% of rural houses in California burn down each year (it’s either that, or they’re unbelievably corrupt/incompetent, since they’re somehow losing money).
Note that people in flood planes (much of the cities) have similar issues.
With taxes included, that $1800 mortgage can easily become $2600-$2800/month --- $33,600/year --- in a high-property tax state (like many of the states that don't have income tax, which are where many of the cheap homes are). For that to be 30% of your _net_ income, you'll need to clear $112k/year _post-tax_, which is $373k/yr HHI pre-tax assuming 35% of those go to federal, state and FICA.
You'll "only" need $112k/yr HHI if, like lenders, you're assuming that this will be 30% of your gross income. However, if we assume net is 65% of gross, then this mortgage is 46% of your net income. I know that a lot of people carry that risk, but that's a little high for my comfort level.
As for:
> Are people just devoting 50%+ of their income to housing? Everyone buying a house with the help of mom and dad? I just really don't get it.
Like almost everyone else that didn't have Mom and Dad angel investors, we got insanely lucky. I had two really good years financially during which time I was able to save enough to hit our 20% down and then some. We were also lucky with our current situation, as our landlord was willing to extend our lease without increasing the rent and the place we were renting was pretty sweet.
My mortgage is around 6% of my gross, and just under 10% of my net and I feel that's high / stressful to me. I want to get it paid off ASAP.
I did find it quite tough for a lot of years to treat myself, as I would try to save as much as I can to have a safety net. But even now with a safety net in the bank, I still have in the back of my head if I purchase something that is x mortgage payments, and I could save that instead to have in the bank in case I lose my job.
Relative to that, I don’t think economic policy is likely to prioritize new home ownership, not when a catastrophic reversal of years of GDP gain is a material risk. It would be a different story in a first world country, I expect, but here trying to reset home prices would just result in a massive rent costs spike (the U.S. free market tends not to build median-wages housing if it can avoid it) and a notable fraction of those households becoming homeless, while they watch as other families benefit from the price correction’s devastation by buying up their home at auction. The best that policy can do with the restrictions the U.S. government places on itself is to issue federal funding to regional governments to build median-price housing — and since much of that funding would go to regions explicitly hostile to current U.S. leadership, that is extremely unlikely to be passed by Congress.
Since the layoffs, I’ve taken a sizable paycut (~$75k TC) to make ends meet with whatever I could find, but kept a pulse on the market in case things turned around. Locally, rents have gone down by ~$100-$500 a month (depending on when you renew) with one to two months free rent, while home prices have finally stopped rising. Homes are staying on markets longer, and bidding wars have dried up. I get about one to three price cut messages a day from Redfin, though nothing in my area or price range post salary cut.
Unfortunately, I don’t expect this trend to continue. My landlord just introduced a new RealPage-alike to keep rents high, local developers have put a hold on new housing construction as resources get consumed for AI datacenters, and the same old red tape blocks meaningful progress in addressing availability gaps. The only real bright spot is that renters are pushing for statewide rent caps and controls with better progress than ever before, so there might be some relief in sight next election.
It’s bad out there, ya’ll.
This monopolistic pricing is a massive part of the issue. Hopefully the case the DOJ brought against them is progressing well. They've essentially created a cartel of landlords trying to squeeze you for every single penny.
They reached a settlement with the DOJ last week [0].
0: https://www.realpage.com/news/realpage-reaches-settlement-wi...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-r...
Though I think the likely dynamic that you're seeing here is rent growth of new build apartments is stalling and reversing, and on renewal with new tenants rents are being revised downward as there is more competition.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/rent-prices-falling...
I expect that amongst apartments with long term tenants rents are still creeping upward. But that's fine. The point of rent control is to smooth out volatility. Rents can still go up, but the goal is to avoid sudden 150% increases etc.
Is it? I mostly see rent control maximum increases below the inflation rate, suggesting a different goal (appealing to voters?). If it were just to eliminate extreme volatility I think we'd see more 5/10/20% increases and less 1/2/3% increases.
I have a friend who argued in public forums (local newspapers+blogs) for denser housing being more walkable and sustainable (in a wealthy small neighborhood we both lived in.) "Small towns" was/is the nationwide name for the trend.
Unknown opponents dug up and published dirt on him that even his wife, friends and employer didn't know. It was quite sobering.
It sucks that your friend had his closet ransacked for skeletons. This is why I’m completely honest with mine.
Rent has been cooling off in Austin because the amount of people moving there has heavily gone down and tech companies have either stopped opening new buildings there or have outright started to leave. The huge rise in rents was effectively due to a 'tech speculation' bubble as a result of every major tech company saying they were going to move to Austin and it was going to be the new tech capital of the US.
One of the problems with rent control is that it pushes the class politics so that renters with housing act more like landowners than they do new tenants, and they conspire to also block housing. People are change averse, even if they don't mind the change after they see it; before the change it's a big threat. This hurts any tenant that needs to move due to things such as becoming an adult, finding a new job, starting a family, getting a divorce or ending a relationship, etc.
Rent control is great as a tenant protection to prevent evictions via rent increases, but it is only a short term protection for tenants otherwise, and can hurt tenants greatly if there's not enough building.
Prices spiked during the pandemic, and in response a shit ton of housing was built, much of it multifamily residential. Rents went down significantly and home prices are down 20% since the peak.
> [A]ccording to the studies examined here, as a rule, rent control leads to higher rents for uncontrolled dwellings. The imposition of rent ceilings amplifies the shortage of housing. Therefore, the waiting queues become longer and would-be tenants must spend more time looking for a dwelling. If they are impatient or have no place to stay (e.g., in the houses of their friends or relatives) while looking for their own dwelling, they turn to the segment that is not subject to regulations. The demand for unregulated housing increases and so do the rents.
If there is some incentive toward development in non-rent control jurisdictions I suspect it's strongly dominated by other factors.
(ie. Montreal probably has the most restrictive rent control in Canada but it's also seeing the strongest apartment development growth)
it's the "credibility revolution" and someone has won a nobel prize for it.
rent control causes limited mobility (read: displacement out of town) by 20 percent; it causes reduced rental housing supply by 15 percent:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20181289
rent control causes reduced property values:
https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/h...
Courts actually need to do their jobs here for an optimal solution - e.g. it should be easy to punish shitty landlords AND easy to kick out shitty tenants.
It shouldn't take a 1+ year wait (as during COVID) to get a landlord-tenant court date to resolve issues.
The housing issue is multi-faceted however, so that's only 1 piece of the puzzle. But thanks to NIMBYs and building code overreach, it's literally impossible to build affordable housing that would rent at its own depreciation schedule.
That doesn't need to be true. In post WW2 UK the government built lots of rental property. That increased the housing supply and hurt private landlords at the same time.
"Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law."
Rent control on the other hand has mostly local effects.
Which means, rent control can push prices down and keep them down. There is indeed a supply reduction, and prices on average will go up—but not in the rent controlled area.
It’s still a poor idea, but it requires centralised planning to avoid.
Edmonton recently outpaced Toronto in housing development on an absolute basis with much lower housing prices and less than 1/5th the population!
Those are the two factors explaining the housing starts, not the ineffectual rent control that exists in Ontario.
Toronto has a cumbersome permitting process that runs from months to years, while Edmonton's process is mostly automated and grants permits within weeks.
Regardless, the other relevant factor here is the actual price of housing, which is substantially higher in Toronto... and yet Toronto struggles (by design) to build anything.
The same cannot be said of Toronto (or everywhere else in the nation that isn't the Prairies for similar reasons), for landed interests and the bureaucracy and corruption that comes with them are a lot more entrenched in that area.
A wonderful city like Montreal can drive enough demand for housing to overcome red tape, and still be building far far less than what would satisfy demand. A less attribute city with lower demand for housing may build less due to lower demand, despite having less red tape.
Trust the economists on this one.
I've even see a rent controlled apartment in manhattan being used as a storage unit !!!
Rent controlled apartments being held by tenants no longer using them as primary residences is pretty common. A famous case of this was Cleve Jones in San Francisco who tried to make it a huge political deal when his landlord raised his rent to market because he was 1. living in Guerneville full time and 2. subletting the apartment. The media environment is one where it's ok for a master tenant to be a de facto landlord and make money on real estate, as long as it's not the landowner themselves!
Doesnt this happen now because we're all so tethered to HCOL cities? With UBI presumably people would be geographically free, and there is a lot of inexpensive land and housing around the country. Doesnt the capture problem only happen due to scarcity in HCOL cities and thus not an issue?
This is false. People will want to build more on the margin, but that doesn't mean they want to build. If the profitability requirement (hurdle rate for getting investment from institutions) is greater than the the market rent, people will not build even if market rent is high. Indeed, that's what's happened in the last 5 years as costs have increased much faster than rents.
People have been knocking down doors to build in SF for decades, but do not because regulatory capture by homeowners, landlords, and those with below-market rents are happy to keep out new people.
Where and when housing gets built in the US is not merely a market driven decision: you also need to get local permission to build.
From my understanding, European countries tend to have restrictions on what lease renewals can look like and with declining home ownership (and ownership being priced out for many), I think we should look at European models for real solutions to our housing crisis.
But the worst/most aggressively laws are always used as the examples, skewing the conversation to edge cases and ignoring the fact that these laws can and do take hundreds of different forms.
You can put your right to stable housing next to your right to internet, healthcare, and every other meaningless positive right.
Increasing regulation does the opposite of making it easier to build new housing.
I do agree that current residents should be able to prioritize their own needs, but that rarely results in additional housing stock being built.
State/National government are far more likely to stomach lower ROI than the private sector because they can arguably have a more holistic view of what their investment is. However, to be able tod that you also need robust finances in government which has certainly not been the case in most developed western economies since the 80s
It is exceptionally rare for new construction to be subject to rent control laws, unless they utilize special tax breaks or government subsidies. It does nothing more than slightly inconvenience the investor class, who usually aren't thinking past 15-20 years anyway, when rent control laws might theoretically impact their investment.
In California (and SF in particular) rent control applies to housing older than 15 years and owned by corporate entities.
How does rent control applied as it is in California disincentivize building? I would think that building would be incentivized by rent control because newer housing stock would be exempt from rent control.
While the ROI would be lower compared to allowing rent to increase uncontrolled, in a rent control zone there is more incentive to build (and renovate) to take advantage of market rate leases for (in California's case) 15 years.
Does the argument that rent control (as in California) disincentives building reduce to the argument that uncontrolled rent yields a higher ROI than rent control?
Such an argument is a refusal to allow public good for the benefit of landlords.
There is no silver bullet solution. Rent control can be a big part of that solution, but what’s ultimately needed are a combination of policies that disincentivize the hoarding of housing as an asset class, promote home ownership itself for stability and community rather than fiscal nest egg, mandate denser housing in areas served by mass transit, tax land properly by removing caps on yearly increases, protect renters from unnecessary evictions (lack of renewals, no-fault evictions, etc), removing zoning laws on residential and commercial space (essentially reducing zoning laws to industrial vs non-industrial) to speed up approvals for construction, and get the government more active in meeting the needs of its populace through public housing programs (like Singapore does).
It’s highly complex and nuanced. I’ve long since stopped entertaining smug clapbacks from armchair economists who aren’t involved in the boots-on-the-ground issues at hand, and you shouldn’t parrot them around for them.
Once any of those multitude of variables aren’t equal, however, the market can and will exploit it. This is the reason why the housing crisis is global, but the solutions are variable. In New England for instance, there’s a glut of available property currently being hoarded and vacant as an investment hedge, because we have no more land to expand onto. Combined with vacant towns that were former industrial hubs, and there’s an awful lot of available real estate to be clawed back for better use - except markets have been tailored to specifically promote a hoard-and-hedge strategy that harms the working classes (renters and homeowners both), and keeps depressed communities from rebounding. Remote work had a real shot of revitalizing those towns and shattering the vice grip of Capital on land or housing through the relocation of workers to cheaper markets, but the RTO mandate essentially amplified existing crises that much more and robbed them of the chance to rebound.
So no, it’s not as easy as building more housing, it’s also about ensuring those who need housing get access to it first, rather than those who simply seek to extract rent or hold it as an investment hedge.
Again, there’s no silver bullet to this problem.
It is impossible to have a constructive conversation with people who refuse to accept basic facts, and I don't think they have any idea how counterproductive it is.
I would say progressives in the US are anti-wealthy first, leading to poorly thought out policies with obvious second or third order effects that harm the people they so passionately advocate for, but I wouldn't call that anti-poor personally.
This makes no sense, the battle is ultimately between renters and owners of low density housing. Those owners don't care about rent control, they only care about zoning disallowing construction of new rentals. If anything, they're probably happy to see rent control if it means the pressure on cities to upzone is removed.
The benefit of rent control would be turning up the pain on the PE people and driving them out of the market.
To me it seems the opposite: Rent control means supply goes down, so available building & land prices go up. These prices going up means an opportunity for builders who are good businessmen because they are going to make a margin on their investment, the bigger the investment the bigger upside.
Another intuition is with rent control it's hard to extract new value from an old building, so that also incentivizes tearing it down and squeezing more units into the land.
In SF, rent control exists on all buildings built before 1979. It appears to me that people who prioritize new builds pay a huge premium for them. I think this particular rule also incentivizes tearing pre 1979 structures down, vs the no rent control newer buildings can continue to have growth in the value extracted from them.
Land is something the government can help with if they choose to do so.
The rent is tied to the price of the apt, and since housing has become and investment category, has increased exponentially.
By controlling rent, you control real estate prices as well, as investors will find it a less attractive asset.
In a free market economy, the cost of things should be controlled by a market equilibrium, so building shouldn't cost more to buy than it is profitable to build tem.
But supply is often restricted by artificial means, meaning prices go up, that's where rent control comes in.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but saying not having rent control while clamping down on construction isn't true to the spirit of the free market.
EDIT: I am seeing a nephew comment that says rent control could make NIMBY politics even worse because it makes renters' interests more like homeowners'. Hadn't thought of that.
Some people get bit by a dog and are afraid of dogs their whole lives. It's irrational.
Also, socialism and communism are not synonyms.
Who is making that claim here? It seems ingenuine to bring that up when no one's said anything to that effect in this comment chain.
Mismanagement of resources is bad no matter what system is used. Just because some under one sort of ideology and corrupt leaders failed doesn't mean that folks can't take the bits that were good, adapt and improve them, and see good results.
Other counterexamples are the other European countries with the same safety net which are not petro states (they do have colonial wealth though).
A lot of this was possible because of high corporate taxes and high marginal taxes on high incomes, so in theory this model could apply in most places.
You see this with healthcare in different places: Details change and sometimes it is lacking, but lots of places offer healthcare to its citizens that is low-cost to free when you need it. There is a lot of variation in what countries can do. Some places are poor but still manage to a point. Some places just refuse, like the US - heck, the US has oil and could have funded things for its citizens and keeps bragging about being rich, but they aren't gonna use it for the immediate welfare of its citizens.
Look wha happened to rent prices in Argentina when they removed rent control.
Instead of rent control, I propose a forced buy-out model: if the current tenant can manage to buy the home they're currently living in, the landlord is not allowed to refuse the sale. And banks are not allowed to deny such a mortgage if the monthly installments amount to less than the current rent.
Now adding more supply is not trivial in many cases, but at least people can work on the correct problem to solve once it's identified.
Which is? Lot's of people are happy to rent, want to rent, will never want to own a home, want mobility, etc. I rented for nearly 20 years and only past few years went into situation where I want to buy a house. Should I be denied renting?
There's obviously premium to be paid while renting too. There should never be a situation where rent is cheaper than mortgage.
Rent control is just one tool that can be used to regulate housing, and it works in conjunction with other tools (e.g. rent control exceptions for new construction).
The U.S. already has an excessively de-regulated housing market, and it clearly has not worked for most people. Anyone that says regulation is bad here is almost certainly protecting their self interests.
CA has a similar issue with prop 13 for housing which I also oppose.
Also it’s silly to say the US housings market doesn’t work for “most people” considering the home ownership rate is above 60%
All that means is that a majority of the population was able to buy a house at some point in time under some conditions. The recent data is clear: people who already have homes, are staying put in them. And a growing portion of people without homes are joining a fairly new class of "forever renters".
The median age of first time home buyers was 33 in 2020. In 2025 it is 40.
That's truly incredible if you think about it. In just 5 years, the median age has increased by 7 years.
Here's another interesting statistic: the percentage of homes bought by first time buyers is down 50% since 2007.
> Rent control is fundamentally unfair and socially undesirable.
I think this is an incredible claim to make. Unfair to who? Undesirable compared to what?
Rent control at it's core is a redistribution mechanism. It favors existing tenants at the expense of property owners.
If you care about low income renters getting displaced by a 40% rent increase, then it is a desirable mechanism.
That said, I also think that city policymakers have a responsibility that extends beyond just what will make life better for the current residents of their city. I wish rent control had better data supporting it, but everything I've seen suggests that while it might make things better in the short-term for some, it makes things worse in the long-term for everyone.
You should get in touch with your state AG, and point to the precedent for this being considered illegal.
So I would say anyone in the present is out of luck here
I suppose this is just a long winded way of saying that there appears to be a ton of friction and cost by renter friendly polices that are ultimately passed on to renters rather than owners.
As an aside I'd also say that renter friendly policies were also highly correlated with higher regulations around zoning/building so this may account for a meaningful portion of the above.
Everyone is paying for the costs to evict a non-paying tenant in jurisdictions where it can take 12+ months to regain control of a unit.
More friction = more costs, and more regulation = more friction.
I'm not advocating for gutting renter's rights either, but it's not a coincidence that the places with the highest rents also have the most protections for renters.
edit: I hear someone now, "If that happens to you, sell the house!"... I'd like to stick with one career, thanks.
A career change may be earlier than expected with the LLM craze.
This is pretty laughably false. Sure, the CEO has a lot of power and I've certainly seen companies relocate so they are basically within walking distance from the CEO's house.
But "execs" covers a lot of people, and nobody gives a shit where the CIO or VP of engineering lives. If anything, these folks are more career driven and are expected to up and move at the drop of a hat if business conditions warrant.
Millennials are a large cohort, too, so it may stay steadily high for a good long while after that, after perhaps a small dip for X. Depends how much money they have for the healthcare sector to scoop up. Savings-at-same-age has been really bad for them relative to boomers, so we’ll see. May see healthcare employment shrink even as need (sans the dollars to back it up) grows, next time a demographic “lump” gets old.
But, yes, the plan does seem to be that we all go broke attempting to get health care.
It’s bad.
It sucks.
“Spray Foam Specials” - gobs of sprayfoam insulation and a fresh coat of paint.
“Gap Properties” - because who needs floorboards to actually meet?
“Skatepark Schemes” - for when the floors are so bowed you can do lip tricks at the room edges
“Flashpoint Fixers” - surface-level flip jobs that kept the knob-and-tube wiring alongside newer Romex
“Oil Derricks” - any home with an oil tank on a foundation of compacted earth or otherwise lacking a groundwater barrier
After I switched it over to a rental listing I was able to rent it out within 3 days at a significant profit. Another unit in my building rented similarly fast at a similar price. I know it's just anecdata, but it doesn't feel like the rental market is cooling down at all.
> When there are corporations keeping swaths of housing empty to raise rent rates the real issue is market manipulation not small participants.
curious where this is happening? would love to learn about that.
Also, selling for significantly under the appraised price decreases likelihood of qualified buyers because it may be a red flag.
Renting until spring is a logical option when there's no buyers, since that's when the supply of buyers is much larger. I don't want to be a landlord but I also don't want to pay money to part with my house. One home in my neighborhood finally sold for 60% of what they bought it for after 6 months on the market. I think only rich people or people who've been in their homes 20 years can afford that.
It doesn't feel as dire as the subprime mortgage crisis, but maybe that's because renting out your property for at least breakeven is a lot less damaging than defaulting on a mortgage.
However, I keep thinking about how someone I know was laid off last year only two months after buying their first home.
I'm a SWE making OK money here but not FAANG/unicorn-level, so it's tough to imagine buying and then being on the hook for a mortgage without a job even with some savings.
Sure, but doesn't really help if the job is in the Bay Area.
Absolute hell. Now, thankfully we didn't over-extend, and live by the at-least-6-months-of-savings.
We made it through, but just writing this down makes my heart rate spike.
Of course I say all of that and it's good to know what could happen if a terrible downturn does happen like in 2008 (even the nicest Bay Area hoods prices dropped 25%+).
Last thing, single family houses, especially in the Bay Area, are typically more insulated from price drops (insulated not immune). If you can afford a small single family then it might be worth it, especially if there's expansion potential (either for yourself or the next buyer if you decide to move on). And even better if there are some cosmetic problems that are tractable because let's say you do get laid off there's nothing like building some sweat equity in the downtime.
Just my two cents having gone through similar in the past.
If someone reads this thread once there's been another 2008-level reckoning in 2026 I'm not surprised the reckoning occurred.
Reading all this from distant Europe, its interesting (and logical) how in US the swings in prices are so extreme in both directions. In fact, most things in any regard are way more extreme in US compared to Europe. May be good for the lucky ones but long term stability or dependability this ain't.
But if that's not what you meant then there are few things we as people can do for "stability and dependability" that better accomplish those goals than owning property that you actually want to live in. Most importantly it puts a permanent roof over your head, which we all need in some way, shape or form to survive (no exaggeration there I don't think). And it makes the cost of that necessity predictable, especially in California where property taxes are almost perfectly-predictable. It pretty much de-risks the largest expense most people will have in their lifetimes. That's not to say that you don't lose something in the proposition, but calling that FOMO seems inaccurate.
I know its a typical US mindset (and far from US only) to have a house on your own, but its still an emotion in same vein what you describe. Mixed with rationale of course since proper social net in US is nearly non-existing, if you fail out with you on the street.
Also a rationale would be about very high chance of good return on such investment so don't take this as some sort of attack. I also own my place (apartment) but took it as a location & social bonds stability point for kids mostly, whether it will earn something compared to inflation is not that important to me, it probably won't or very little. Good bigger apartment close to nature trumps a crappy house in my view but thats personal opinion. Even when owning, its almost impossible to retire here in Switzerland, the costs are prohibitive even on Swiss pensions. Unless you want to live as relatively poor, same money gets you much further almost everywhere else. So that stability is always temporary.
This is a frustratingly uninformed take. You are comparing apples to oranges by equating your decision-making process with that of someone in the US. The drive to own a house in the US is not just mediated by “emotion” - the calculus is fundamentally different than in many nordic countries. For instance, very few places in the US have rent control, which means that renting represents substantial risk of either experiencing a large increase in cost, or being forced to move at irregular intervals. On the other end of the spectrum, the US is one of the only places that offers 30 year mortgages, which means that (taxes and repairs aside) buying a home on credit still offers a high level of predictable cost over the long term. Also, at least historically, there are very many places in the US for which housing is very affordable, given that the USs overall population density is so much lower than the average European country.
This is of course not to suggest that buying is always a good call - but it is often a logical and financially sound one.
But even having said that, people will buy houses or condos in SF today and make a profit in spite of any broader market conditions. But that seems dumb for someone who has a full-time gig that's anything other than identifying underpriced residential investment opportunities given how crazy both housing prices and equity (tech in particular) prices are.
Honestly, this is not a hardship but a nice problem to have. I grew up chronically poor and I feel fortunate and grateful that we have a comfortable home that is ours with equity while a lot of people have housing insecurity.
I agree on the windfall part but selling to get that money is not that simple in the current real estate market and political climate. ie you got to live somewhere... and everywhere you desire is expensive.
So yeah nice on paper that the house is worth a lot more than we bought it... but that value matters if we sell and move. There is a lot more to that decision than just the property tax, however it sort of putting a time limit to it.
Key thing to remember here is that you always have to live somewhere, even if you're laid off. Unless you're ready to head out to BFE to save a few hundred bucks on rent, it doesn't get much better than owning in that situation. Plus you could potentially have equity to tap, get a hardship forbearance, or worst case scenario foreclosures take much longer than evictions. This was the lesson COVID era taught me; if you're losing your home it's considered a tragedy, and there are tons of resources to help you. But if you're being evicted from an apartment it's considered a personal moral failure, and you're treated like a criminal.
Lots of advantages to owning and having a mortgage too: deduct mortgage interest from taxes, use equity as a line of credit, you can actually make substantial changes to your living space, and so on.
Posting this anon. At our last office, executives purposefully encouraged home ownership because it made people desperate, risk-avoiding, and easier to control.
> The Bay Area continues to lose jobs across high-income sectors (-0.4% YOY), driving modest overall employment declines. These job losses have slowed compared to a year ago but remain negative YOY. Despite generating substantial spending and wealth, the AI-driven tech boom hasn’t added meaningful employment to the region.
K-shaped economy and all that I suppose.
Looks like shipping is also an industry that you probably don't want to track on this search. Other than that, places that saw modest wage growth saw similarly modest housing cost growth. And haven't seen it fall back, yet.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/make-it-count-measuring-o...
The housing shortage was created by regulation and it's foolish or selfish to pretend otherwise.
Austin is unique in that most of the harmful self-serving conservatism-as-in-block-and-deny-all-development that city people usually to do is constrained by the rest of the state, and as an obvious result arguably has the highest standard of living in the entire world.
regulation /tends/ to be introduced because builders are misbehaving (bad materials, bad workmanship, building in flood zones, etc), but the bigger problem is NIMBY who then use those laws to prevent other people building in "their" neighbourhood
But yeah, we built a LOT of housing and that means buyers and renters have a lot of choice.
It's hard to argue that's a bad thing unless you're a property owner who's upset their house didn't appreciate 20% in 5 years.
I want money for nothin', and chicks for free
One theory says that either lower employement causes lower demand and therefore lower interest rates OR lower employement causes the FED to lower interest rates to stimulate spending, and in EITHER case the response to your premise of "low employement + high interest rates" should be "interest rates will come down", and separately "low employment implies low demand implies house prices will come down".
If my house is worth less than what I owe then moving (selling short) can make sense.
Houses are not just an investment for most people. There are investment factors, but they are also the place you live. Thus most people cannot just sell or not - they also have to consider where will they live next if they sell. Even if I knew exactly where the bottom would be odds are I'd still not sell because I don't have options to live elsewhere.
Delistings Jump 28% as Sellers Pull Homes Off Market Rather Than Settle For Low Prices - https://www.redfin.com/news/delistings-jump-sellers-pull-hom... - November 25th, 2025
Foreclosures Rise for 8th Straight Month—These States Have the Worst Rates - https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/foreclosure-increase-att... - November 14th, 2025
Pending Home Sales Slip As Would-Be Buyers Wait For Lower Rates and Economic Clarity - https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-market-update-pending-sa... - November 13th, 2025
(real estate market participant)
They died. That's why some people aren't in the market: They are deceased. And new people enter the market because they have been born.
The reasons are not important for this discussion though - all we need to know is some people have other pressures such that the one I listed isn't compelling to them.
I believe this varies by state but I thought in some states the lender can come after you for the difference and in others you can just walk away (albeit with a credit ding).
https://www.financialsamurai.com/non-recourse-states-walk-aw...
(have walked away from underwater fha mortgage from 2008 gfc in a recourse state, ama)
And then they stop building new stuff while prices are low, so demand will keep prices stable, and when the interest gets lower again prices will probably skyrocket since it's not been built enough in the meantime.
The town I was in saw prices for something that was ~175-200k 7-8 years ago peak at around $425k in 2023/2024 and now "cratering" into the low to mid $300ks. Median income hasn't changed, just people with 2nd/vacation homes and wanting to offload them due to the economy.
Also, its possible that the market thinks job losses are good (aka that AI is replacing jobs)
Stocks go up, wages and income go down, things keep on keeping on because AI has quietly replaced you.
The problem is that this recent equities run has been extra terrible for more conservative 60/40 portfolios [0].
[0] https://www.morningstar.com/economy/6040-portfolio-150-year-...
There's an intermediate option: sell high P/E stocks and buy lower P/E stocks with dividend paying history. There are ETFs designed for this purpose too.
In particular bulking up in EM, EU, and small cap. And slimming down in us large cap.
That's crazy.
I have a blog post about the inverse TSLA position here: https://bagelpour.wordpress.com/2025/11/30/taking-an-inverse...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/24/sp500-sto...
We can’t time the market, but we can protect the scraps we’ve accumulated at least.
I can't find the blog post from the last major recession where people were talking about all the crazy flavors you only see when the economy is REAL bad.
Couldn't believe how many people would go to the sushi restaurant at the base of the building and spend $25 on lunch a couple days a week. Yikes.
Getting lunch with coworkers once in a while doesn’t hurt
Also there's fairly wide variance in calorie count brand to brand for the same size square, not sure why.
https://www.heb.com/product-detail/15219522?shoppingStore=79...
Edit: The last time I worked in an office building, I had a limited time for lunch. I could have brought in ramen, or purchased something from the decently-stocked break room coolers. I could have sat at my desk or gone outside or eaten in the break room.
And sometimes, I did do those things.
But what I quickly discovered was that what I wanted on my lunch break was primarily a break.
I wanted to get the hell away from that place, surround myself with something completely different, and spend time relaxing my brain before getting through the second half of the day.
So I often went out to get lunch.
But because time was limited, it had to be nearby, and my options were thus very limited.
So I ate a lot of bargain-menu Wendys and tacos from Qdoba because I could get there, and eat, and relax a bit, and be back on time.
If there were instead a sushi place right downstairs, I'd have probably hit that once or twice a week, too. It would have had a higher monetary expense, but my brain would have thanked me for the extra time to unwind and I'd have had a better and more-productive rest of my day and come home in a better mood than I might have otherwise.
That was the same year where I was homeless while technically having a "tech" job.
At the very least you should consider steaming some vegetables (also very cheap), slice them up, and mix'em in to get some moderate nutritional value from it.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/whats-your-daily...
The problem with ramen is the amount of carbs and little nutrition which only spikes your insulin and makes you hungry 2 hours later if your metabolism is not great, not saturated fat in a vacuum. I wish popular knowledge about food had moved on from the misguided research of Ancel Keys already.
Nothing fresh in them, high sodium, freeze-dried ramen or noodle bowls were originally survival food and should be treated as such.
Not saying don't eat them, and I don't know your socioeconomic background or anything, but if you want to eat them or have to eat them, try to add a little something extra into them.
A cup of shredded cabbage and/or a few cherry tomatoes and/or a half cup of onion slices and/or an egg, things like that should be cheap and easy to add and will help dilute the sodium and add a healthy component to the meal, and your kidneys and heart will thank you for it.
It sounds like a habit drawn from poverty, but frankly, you'd have to be really poor to reach for something like this daily (I'm talking extreme survival situations that even the homeless don't typically face). Those with low income can still get much better food at a reasonable price. They don't need to shop at Whole Foods.
I'm not sure you can even eat like this for very long either. The malnutrition is that bad. Expect high medical care costs or an early death down the line.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
But, odds are, the person who eats instant ramen 5 lunches a week isn't going home to a balanced dinner and likely eats fast food or frozen dinners most nights, which is why I suggested adding a few inexpensive extras.
A cup of pre-shredded bagged cabbage would add ~$0.50 to a ramen meal. If they do 30 minutes of meal prep on a sunday they could pre-portion a full portable soup container with all of the extras for the week and be ready to go for maybe an extra dollar a day.
Until my blood sugar (A1C) and blood pressure numbers started climbing...
Why do people cheap out on food, but spend that money on less important things? We're talking about your health here! It's even worse when people with high incomes do it.
At WalMart, they're now 47¢ (and I swear low-30s within the past year)... which actually helped me not purchase any this last visit (too expensive for all it is).
The problem here is some waited for too long to be told we are now in a recession, then some politicians tried to redefine it.
But that is nothing compared to what will happen in the next 5 - 10 years. Nothing goes up forever. The only hint is that we need to prepare before 2030.
The main problems, as I see them, are the protectionist limitations on new supply, unfair importation of immense overseas' and out-of-state wealthy individuals' wealth causing gentrification, and the absurd inequality of wages into extreme power law distribution by the cheapening and decline of labor due to under-restrained capitalism.
That's a record and it's vastly more than years past. We live in a world where people with vast assets are beating out people who rely on job income for things like housing.
The stock market exploded the past year, and there's your bifurcation: those with assets and those without - getting worse.
Are other developed countries firing people in the same way rn?
"Luxury homes", $3M+, are hot right now with prices risings. Whereas lower cost non-luxury homes are seeing less growth. It's a weird world.
On the one hand, less high earning employees seems to logically indicate that large purchases would also go down.
And on the other hand, a program to give everyone a little eating money would never have been able to pay for a house, anyway.
If UBI were national, it would work beautifully, because depending on the UBI amount, it could allow people to finally untether geographically. You could spur a rebalancing of irrational demand in HCOL cities due to jobs away from HCOL to LCOL
That said, even if housing prices drop materially and eventually bottom it will provide little opportunity for "normal" folks to buy in if they're jobless. Will be interesting to see if Fed interest rate cuts translate to mortgage rate cuts, and whether those rate cuts lessen any price drops.
I've said this before on here, but the historical price-to-income for housing has been something like 4x. Today it's 7x (that is as insane as it sounds). A long way to revert to the mean unless you really think "this time is different."
This has been so weird to see over the last couple dips.
In the ‘08 crash, banks were sitting on houses that were developing mold issues because they had been sitting vacant so long. These houses were getting more damaged and less desirable by the day, and before long would require hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix (up from the low-tens already evident) but they still preferred to sit on them. They weren’t listed, or were listed but at too-high prices and they were just ignoring offers, not even responding.
Then you look at “depressed” housing prices that are still way over historic norms, so you’d think builders would keep going… but no, they totally halt all work, no new houses until prices are heading up again.
Something’s super messed-up about the housing market in ways that it wasn’t in the last millennium. Recessions don’t even fix it, they just make everything pause.
The expected return is considerably higher now, this should mean that houses should be traded at PR at around 20 again (as opposed to upwards of 30 when there was no better investments to be made).
Investors will likely not be an issue as long as we don't go into zirp again.
Isn't it only bad news for people who are selling their homes?
People borrow money against their house to buy a car or a boat because rates are much better. The bank tells them to borrow a few ten thousands extra while they are at it, since the rate is so good. Why don't you take a vacation or get that new thing you wanted to buy?
From where do you think everybody has so much money to spend, while you are working full time and have nothing? It's not only credit cards...
As housing prices are tied to the property tax it is a good thing for people who are not planning to sell anytime soon. Remember a home is a place you live, not an investment. People who treat homes as investments cause a lot of problems for people who just want to live somewhere that isn't propping up some middleman landlord.
The key of course is that the downturn isn't so massive (hello 2008!), where the blood flows so freely that the layoffs/foreclosures/etc. overwhelm the eligible buyer pool in absolute numbers. That can for sure happen, but is atypical historically.
Also pretty disgusting to me that healthcare is "growing faster than normal" across the board. You'd think it'd be "growing the normal rate" at least somewhere. It's not like population is growing faster than normal across the board. Isn't 20% of the GDP enough for an industry that's fundamentally a cost center of society? Wars have been fought over less.
Which is to say I expect spending to go up just for demographic reasons of large numbers of people starting to care. Don't confuse this for thinking all is well with health care costs.
Answer this question, and you’re on the journey to the solution to the problem you are talking about. Tell me some BS why the question doesn’t matter or is wrong or whatever, and discover why “Dunning Kruger” is at least part of the answer.
I posit that the people who hold an ideology, moral compass, world view, or whatever else you want to call it, that permits the question to even be framed in this way are a root problem exacerbating many other problems in society, healthcare likely being one.
I don't know what the "solution" is but the fact that ~1:5 dollars in this country is spent on maintenance of the human body is just wild and likely unsustainable or indicative of some gross error in how we measure such things.
You're free to downvote, it won't make it less true. Genetic testing is all the rage in my social circle. No parent want's "dies basically immediately after birth" disease which is a surprising about of genetic conditions and way more people than I expected were silent carriers of at least one.
$40,000 cap would exclude all the therapeutics targeting rare disease being developed today. not just pediatric. all. it would exclude tirzepatide, which costs $250,000 to $400,000 for most people. if you want to cure obesity. and by the way, congress expressly banned paying for all weight loss treatments from medicare.
> Newly pregnant friends are spending $$$ on tests in utero to weed out children with such things.
do you think pregnancies at age 40 compared to pregnancies at age 20 are more expensive, or less expensive? define expensive, yes? and what price should the government pay? should it pay 40 year old mothers different than 20 year old mothers?
it's too bad that i'm being downvoted, since you're engaging with the question and hopefully it is really illuminating why there are no easy answers to capping healthcare costs. it starts with people, especially people who think of themselves as being very smart, being unable to specify a max price they are willing to pay, which is conceding that a market-based solution can exist but be very deeply flawed.
And I think what makes it so that we're resistant to caps is because it's not just rare diseases you could write off as unlikely to ever get that are ruinously expensive and it's likely that in everyone's social sphere they know multiple people personally who've had "blown out their out of pocket max by factors of 5-10x" medical issues. It's a this really can happen to you thing.
So I think if your goal is to reduce healthcare costs on a nation scale your only option is make it so your people develop health problems less and tackle the smaller but much much much more frequent expenses. Things like ending the caps on the number of doctors, giving nurse practitioners full prescribing rights, moving more medications OTC, ending drug patent loopholes or for critical medications or "buying out" the patient so it can be immediately be made generic, adding more restrictions to testing so doctors have to actually think before ordering every test under the sun because it's not their money, massively reducing the regulations on medical devices, I could go on forever.
Stupid unnecessary expense times your population is way more money than the treatment for some rare disease.
You're claiming to predict that-- for particular branch of response types-- all respondents will be low ability. There are a lot of ways I would characterize that claim, but none of them would be "Dunning Kruger."
In fact, my gut tells me that some significant number of flame wars I've read over the years were due to this confused heuristic.
When I went to the doctor about fatigue, the advice given to me was to stop exercising and take a break.
When my father went to the doctor about fatigue, they gave him a full blood panel and scheduled a cardiologist and respiratory therapist visit.
People should not make the unqualified statement that Medicare is free, which is what "the government is picking up the tab" sounds like. Medicare isn't free. Some people, not all, can qualify for free Part A but Parts B, C and D have premiums no matter what.
Housing is essentially a bottomless pit when the economy is good, it can sink any amount of money because it is an absolute necessity. So when people have money they'll use it to bid against each other for a scarce resource. But when the economy pauses or even starts to shrink then that surplus evaporates and one of the first indicators that this is happening is the demand for housing. Usually the result will be some price adjustments and after that it is business as usual. But if the cuts go deeper then there may be more substantial effects.
The only thing that is holding the US economy afloat right now is the fact that there are still a couple of levers of power that Trump hasn't gotten his fingers on. When and if that happens I fully expect things to go into freefall.
why am I getting more "403 forbidden" responses from websites as time goes on? at some point "website protection" stops adblocking users.
The government does nothing but lie to our faces.
As far as housing goes, if we do managed to deport 20 million non-citizens, that should at least help some. Oh yeah, yeah, it's so inhumane to disinvite all those folks whom the NGOs and mega-church charities took advantage of and trafficked here. Every one of those people had dollar signs on their backs for someone else. Now we have an affordability crisis caused by government fiat printing and these never-ending scams moving people around the globe. Good times.