Americans are living through the toughest housing market in a generation and, for some young people, the quintessential dream of owning a home is slipping away.
Mortgage rates surged in recent years, hitting the highest levels in more than two decades last fall. While rates have come down slightly since then, home prices remain painfully elevated and a limited inventory of housing is still failing to keep up with demand. Such conditions mean that housing has become woefully unaffordable.
Falling mortgage rates in recent weeks have helped, but home prices could remain sticky, according to economists. It’s still a cruddy time to be hunting for a home, but it’s even worse for young, first-time buyers who need to save up for a down payment and build up their credit score during a time when Baby Boomers are refusing to part with their big houses.
The situation isn’t a whole lot better for renters, with rents barely coming down from record highs and half of tenants in that market saying they can’t even afford their payments.
The uneasiness over America’s affordability crisis is captured clearly in surveys and polls, but data that outlines the sentiment specifically among young people is limited.
My mother is rich. Not filthy rich, but rich enough that I will inherit a decent sum of money and a gigantic house and my daughter will get a trust. If my mother dies before my daughter is out of school (a distinct possibility since my daughter is 13 and my mother is in her 80s), we all want to move to the town where she lives because we all like it there a lot. And if we sell her house, we’ll likely be able to afford to.
As far as her trust, it will likely cover her college education if that’s the route she wants to go down, but probably not enough to get a house for herself.
Please don’t think I’m being selfish here. She wants to move to that town with us as much as we want to move there. It’s where both of her grandparents and much of her mother’s family lives, it’s where both her mom and I were born and went to college, and it is, for now, where she says she would like to go to college. She has never lived there and every time we visit she talks about how much she wishes she did.
From what I can tell, if she doesn’t use that money for college, she would use it to travel over using it to buy a house. And frankly, I’m fine if she wants to live with us indefinitely once she’s out of high school. We have the room.