In nearly half of metro areas, buyers must make more than $100,000 to afford a median-priced home, a Harvard University report finds. And home prices this year reached a new all-time high.

Millions of Americans are already shut out of buying a home, and the cost of buying one continues to rise.

In past decades, it was common to find a house that cost roughly three times a buyer’s annual income. But that ratio has skewed sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic, with home prices up a whopping 47% since early 2020. Median home sales prices last year were about five times the median household income, according to tabulations in a newly released report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, and there are signs it could get worse.

The double whammy of high prices and high mortgage rates has “left homeownership out of reach to all but the most advantaged households,” says Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the center.

  • @[email protected]
    37•5 months ago

    It’s really a global problem and I do think it’s an inevitable problem of capital saturation.

    After decades of economic growth and peace, the developed world has an overabundance of wealth.

    Some of that wealth chases the stock and bond markets and private equity and things like art and crypto and that’s fine. Those are proper channels to act as a sponge to absorb wealth.

    But some of this wealth is chasing real estate and commodities, which makes the basic necessities of life unaffordable.

    • @rockSlayer
      17•5 months ago

      We’re reaching a point of having multiple “everything” problems. Housing is one of them. An everything problem is when several different socioeconomic crises result in it’s own specific crisis, and can likely only be solved if the solution also addresses the other issues too. Capitalism plays a huge part in the housing crisis, but so does climate change, wealth inequality, systemic discrimination, the opioid crisis, and so much more. All that to say, shit’s complex and addressing any of these other problems will give some amount of relief for the housing crisis, and vice versa.

    • Refurbished Refurbisher
      10•5 months ago

      Absolutely. The only way to fix this issue once and for all is to decommodify basic human needs (housing, food, water, utilities, healthcare) and have a guaranteed necessities government program.

      When basic human needs are treated as commodities, it is inevitable that people will be priced out of survival in order for a wealthy group of people to make more short term profits.