You can still buy homes in US cities for under $150k. I just looked up my first home. I paid $37k in 1996, sold it for $74k in 2007, it’s worth about $125k now. It’s not a great location, but there are good jobs around St. Louis. If you want to live in an Instagram home in a big coastal city, I have no sympathy.
The sad part is that I make less money today than I did in 1996, not even factoring inflation. Inflation isn’t so terrible if wages move with it, but wages are completely stagnant even as prices double. I can’t afford to move. I’ve been stuck in my current home since I bought it. I just hope I’m able to pay it off before I’m no longer able to work.
Boomers (b. 1946-1966) bought houses long before they were $70k. Assuming a great job straight out of high school, the first ones would have been buying homes as early as 1964, the last boomers by 1984.
Taking the middle - 1974 - and in my neck of the woods the median 1974 starter home was about $16k CAD, and the minimum wage was $4k/yr. This put even minimum wage workers within spitting distance of the flip side of the one-third rule, which states the price of a new home should not exceed three years of income. Workers in good industries - such as framers, plumbers, and electricians - easily met this 3× rule even within a year or three of starting work.
So the better phrase would be:
boomers bought houses at $16k when they were making $6k/yr
Step 1 - make housing unaffordable
Step 2 - start crying about declining fertility rates
Step 3 - just keep whining and applying bandaid solutions that don’t do anything to address the underlying cause of unaffordable housing
Step 4 - scapegoat minorities for all of the country’s issues
Step 5 - believe it or not, somehow, profit
Step 6 - believe it or not, straight to jail
hope the boomers die because no one wants to pick up their shit in nursing homes
This is how the billionaires are winning, they manipulate folks into being angry at everyone but THEM. “Boomers” didn’t buy $70k houses, your grandparents did.
Meamwhile, Zuckerberg is laughing his ass off while fortifying his Kauai ranch estate.
“Boomers” are the grandparents to most of social media posters these days. Statistically the internet stays centered at about teenager to 20 year old being the peak of the normal distribution of users. That’s the Baby Boomers’ grandchildren. Great grandchildren even.
Just pointing that out, but otherwise I agree. They’re all angry at a strawman “Boomer”. That strawman in reality is demographically a small portion of the world population who are very rich. The majority of baby boomers got fucked in their own way by the rich.
You guys are all distracted into fighting each other.
Furthermore, I’m continuously baffled at how or why people fawn over the anecdotes about those who talk about their parents having a good life straight out of college and now owning multi-million dollar homes. How can you not realize these anecdotes are from rich kids of rich boomers. You guys are so hungry to eat the rich??? That’s them right there. What are you praising and fawning over them for. Start eating.
All part of the distraction. The lesser than billionaire rich hiding in plain sight, running distraction for the richest of the rich.
Wages really need to go up if prices won’t come down. Even food is unaffordable.
LOL 😂 in Canada, if minimum wage - currently $18.25/hr - was indexed to home prices starting from 1972, when median homes in my city were $16k and minimum wage was $4k/yr, said minimum wage would currently be $150/hr, or $300k/yr.
That’s an 8.22× jump in minimum wage.
I would love to see most people being faced with this fact.
I realize the Canadian dollar is weaker than the US dollar but $18.25 is a pipe dream for tens of millions of Americans. Our minimum wage is $7.25. As of today that is $10. 29 CAD. Wages in my area are a little higher, places generally pay $13-15 and maybe $20 for skilled jobs. But I know a ton of people making around $13. Even that is basically right at Canadian minimum wage after converting. Our housing isn’t cheap either.
Meaningful change will only happen when fewer than half of all people own houses. Now, more than half owns a property, and, if the system was to change, they’d lose money. More than half the people will uphold this status quo.
Extremely few people in this country own houses. Nearly zero children do.
It hurts homeowners who aren’t interested in ever moving as well. Property taxes are based on home value.
Or those who do wish to move, and upgrade while doing so.
That depends on a few more factors.The fact that their home values have skyrocketed does go a long way to alleviate that.
Yeah, what may have been a $60,000 upgrade is now $250,000, but they’re also getting another $200,000 for their home when they sell it, which makes up the difference.
I don’t know how evenly houses go up or how much consistency there is, but going from $100K to $200K is easier than $300K to $600K.
Housing price increases are almost certainly making the gap wider for upgrades.
The thing is they aren’t going up evenly everywhere. A $400,000 house from a few years back in my area is now selling for $600,000, but a $100,000 house from that same time is now selling for $300,000. So the price difference between the 2 has actually stayed the same.
The institutional investors are targeting the cheaper houses, so they’re the ones skyrocketing the most in value.
Ya but property taxes are still significantly cheaper than rent, and most states have some exemption for a portion of the valuation your first home. The same doesn’t apply to renters, and in many municipalities multifamily zoning has significantly higher property tax rates to begin with. Many conveniences of cities are built around homeowners since they’re the majority of voters. In my old apartment despite trash at the property being taken by the city, apartment residents did not have access to the city dump for recycling and large trash items. Meanwhile residents owning a single family home did and could even get them picked up as part of their regular trash bill, which was $5/mo less than what we in the apartment paid for trash.
Do all the math please.
Home ownership includes property taxes and maintenance. New roof, new furnace, new water heater, etc. These are big bills every 12-15 years. Boomers did this with HELOCs, but HELOCs are gone as housing values in my region are going down from the peak in 2022.
Another big problem is contracting is unregulated and out of control, before 2020, contracts were typically materials x2 for labor, now they have no upper guidelines, just a rolling scam and they learned in 2020-22 that it’s better to work less and charge more.
I’m not saying homeowners are in a worse position. Just that increasing values also hurt them.
My parents had to move out into the country into a smaller house because their taxes got so high they couldn’t keep up after retirement when they quit getting raises.
And of course they’d taken out extra mortgages on their house to try and keep up with the increasing costs so they could stay in the town they’dlived in for 60 years, so they didn’t actually have a ton of equity despite their home having massively increased in value.
And with all the other old people moving out into the country, the property values where they moved are skyrocketing, so they’re already getting upside down and I’m already having to pitch in to help them pay the mortgage on the smaller home.
Not just the US, we can’t buy a house anywhere, boomer cunts stole everything from future generations and will claim to their dying breath that THEY had it rough.
Dont fall for the intergenerational war. The rich are sitting on all the assets and stealing from future generations
Ya but they rich are mostly boomers and boomers are actively voting and supporting policies that make this worse. It’s not universal but does hold some weight.
Correct. What all these places have in common is housing expansion after WW2 when personal automobile became a thing for majority. There is no more cheap land. We are back to 19th century and it sucks.
So you grew up rich? Your parents had no struggles at all right? So I mean, wow, that must have been nice. They basically had infinite money to raise you with… that’s awesome. I’m happy for you
I do not like calling people trying to afford to buy a pile of lumber and tape on a small parcel a “market”.
It removes the fact that homes used to stay flat value or go down in value before houses became a “market”.
Fuck markets. The markets should be crushed. And American home builders should be ashamed of the quality of American homes.
A pile of lumber and tape.
home builders should be ashamed of the quality of American homes.
Friends let us stay in their new house in Ellicottville NY across the border from Ontario. Holy shit are there no codes and inspections in NY state? Explains all those youtube videos where people slip on a porch and take out the entire fence and stairs.
Of course, a “market” doesn’t have to mean the thing is a financial instrument. I go to the market to buy grocereries. I am not intending to resell the carrots that I bought from “market”.
And yet grocery stores are in a similar situation with prices going up while quality and quantity go down. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean the thing is a financial instrument but if it can be it will be.
What’s wrong with making houses out of wood? It’s renewable. It has an absurdly low carbon footprint. It’s a fantastic building material.
Wood is fine. It actually traps carbon, but the build quality is horrendous and permit inspectors must be corrupt.
Over the last 50 years material quality and workmanship have gone down. Now it’s a race to build a neighborhood as cheaply and quickly as possible, doing the job right be damned.
I’ll be honest with you: my house was built in the 1940s and it’s really not that great. Definitely not noticeably better build quality than my parents’ house built in the 1990s.
You should look up CyFy on YouTube. He does residential building inspection in Arizona and the build quality is appalling. Broken trusses, lacking insulation, roof leaks, stucco with exposed wire backing on top of literal cardboard for structure…
Cracks in the sinks and tubs, walls so horrifying out of square you wonder how they managed to fuck it up that badly. Unlevel floors with humps or saddles. Tiles misaligned so badly you can take a strip off your foot without realizing.
There’s always multiple things from the above in every house he posts… And it’s not just one house, it’s all of them. Literally all of them… They deny, delay, defend the shit out of warranty claims and at least in Arizona hope you close and don’t raise a fuss before hand.
Builders know most of the buyers are Boomers who will be dead in under a decade, so make everything last 11 years.
How could you leave out the gas leaks? In every single fucking house he inspects.
Oh yeah you’re right lol I forgot about those somehow! I laughed when he checked like 8 houses in a row and they all leaked.
That’s because he doesn’t get called in unless the homeowner believes there are egregious problems for him to find. It’s sampling bias, not a universal trend.
We had a new subdivision in which every single roof failed in 6 years.
He talks about this in his videos where he’ll see the same problems in half the homes in a neighborhood because neighbors talk to each other and recommend him
Edit: just watch some of his videos you won’t have to spend much time to see what I mean. It’s systemic…
“Systemic” within one neighborhood (or even one builder) isn’t the same as “systemic” in general. I mean, of course if one builder doing something wrong, he’s likely to be doing it wrong consistently. But unless that builder is, say, D.R. Horton (which, to be fair, it very well could be), you can’t really say that just because one random builder is doing it wrong that means the entire industry is doing it wrong.
I’ll add that I recently bought a house built in the last decade and the home inspector remarked how well put together it was.
I will give you an example, a notoriously large home manufacturer has continued to create waves of houses built with the cheapest materials they can find. Once people started to move into these houses they noticed something strange: insects ripping out of their newly built walls
They’re not talking specifically about the lumber being bad, they’re talking about companies building new developments cutting corners to save on cost. While they still use lumber, they are choosing cheaper lumber and their workmanship suffers as a result of the corners being cut.
Thus, a pile of lumber and tape.
My house was built in 1942 as temporary worker housing. I tore down and rebuilt one of the walls and the original studs were just astonishing: perfectly straight and not a single knot in them anywhere. Compare and contrast with modern studs from Home Despot: split, shaped more or less like a pretzel, and 50% knots.
Interestingly, these old studs were 1.75" x 3.75". I never knew there was an intermediate stage between the old-time true 2x4s and the modern 1.5" x 3.5" 2x4s.
it’s not Home Depot’s fault we cut down all the old growth wood by the 1950s. Builders should be sorting the lumber and returning bad pieces…but nothing a sheet of drywall can’t hide.
But Home Depot wood in Canada is the best quality, kiln dried. With softwood tariffs, US yards are scraping the bottom of the barrel and shipping crap that would have been shredded.
Also, older homes were built with natural old growth lumber, which is denser and more rot resistant. They also used larger dimensions for extra support.
they probably live in an area without a lot of earthquakes so it makes sense to build out of brick there
laughs in PNW
uh
this is 7 years old, but i wanted to argue my “uh”'s point a little more
love from San Francisco. I woke up the other day to a 5.6 alarm. My love to Yreka who got the brunt of it.
Better a ton of smalls than one big one. The energy released in a huge quale is several orders of magnitude so it takes a lot…
But how else will we make the peasantry feel richer without enriching them?
Boomers selling their homes at 10x cost and preaching about savvy investing
$20,000 in 1965 is equivalent in purchasing power to $212,776.51 today.
So it’s not about savvy investing, it’s about inflation.
Not even an exaggeration. My parents bought their house in the 1960s for $14K. Their 30-year mortgage went almost to the year 2000 and their monthly payment was fucking $85 the entire time. They sold it fifteen years ago for $190K.
Damn never realized this but every boomer homeowner is actually an investment savant. Why are we all so stupid? Why can’t we just do this? ^/s
The dumbest financial mistake you’ve ever made was not going into debt immediately to buy a home the day you were born. Should have planned ahead.
$14K in 1960 was $167,000 by 2010.
Average salary of a worker in 1960 was $3,700.
I paid $320K for my house in 2002 , which peaked in value to $1.6M by 2022. That was insane, it’s now worth $1.2 or less and headed downward.
It should be worth $600K. People took out HELOCs on houses now descending in value.
It should be worth $600K.
Yeah, the location was not one of those places with seriously insane housing appreciation. Small town in Ohio. 14X appreciation is still pretty good.
The problem is the house is so overvalued, they never modernized it, and is far beyond what most people can afford for it. They’re just born at the right time to be able to retire and have a house.
nah it’s deregulation on corps buying homes as investments
like usual thank republicans and neolibs
Also, AirBnB creating a system that incentivized the purchase of homes as rentals.
Taxation could fix all that. How many politicians own multiple housing? All of them.
And buying up all homes, then renting at high rates and making the market so scarce that the few that can afford to buy get bid up to the maximum they can get a loan for, and then stay enslaved to the mortgage banks and never fight for their employment rights, healthcare or political rights or anything else that could jeopardize their livelihood.
Yeah, but now you and your significant other work so thats like 120k a year. /s
Yeah. The fact that most couples have to go dual income just to survive is a problem.
We used to have the leeway to have one of us not work and still be comfortable.
And the fact that you’re each working multiple part time jobs and gigs, well that’s the extra freedom we had lying around.
…kalshi is a news source?
No
Kalshi is also a game if you ask Google’s Play store. It has an AO rating
Everytime I go to the app store I get an ad for it, and everytime I report it saying it violates my state’s law
Google Play store is a cancerous virus. Use f droid.
Yo, who be making 60k? That sounds like Gucci shit.
And they bought a house worth at most a couple of years of income with a 25+ year loan
The only reason my wife and I could afford a house is because we live in one of the lowest cost of living places in the US. Even here it’s still almost triple what it was just a few years ago.
I saved up for my house and paid cash. It only took … uh … 35 years.
Anyone using kalshi as a news source can eat infinite shit. Anyone using kalshi period in fact.
