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.
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.