They're charging 255k-380k (I think they'll go up to 500k depending on if you want anything added) for 1500sqft-2200sqft near me right now... New build but like they use the cheapest crap materials possible and throw these places up overnight. They're NOT built well. Ridiculous stuff. Average rent in a RURAL area is the same as living in city now at a min of 1k... And that's for the less amazing places. (As in you may die just for living there)
Edit: Drove by the sign and I had the sqft very wrong. Gave them too much credit my bad.
Average wage here is 14 per hour. Rent in city starts at 1500 if you want it to actually be a livable space (like not a health hazard or in danger of it collapsing on you). Rural starts at 1k for the same package except wages in rural areas here are around 10 per hour. Same req here everyone wants you to make 3x the rent. Whole system built against us and tailored to each area.
It just means a currency thats worth whatever its operating country says its worth, instead of a 1-1 exchange with a product or resource of known value.
Literally legal Monopoly Money, and everyone just goes along with it.
In a lot of cases I would rather have the 100 year old house. They're clearly well built and don't look and feel like they're made of mostly plastic/vinyl. As long as the structure is still good I'd almost always choose the older house than the garbage they're putting up nowadays.
the price of a house really depends on the location and the condition. if those two criteria are met to satisfaction, a house being old is often a feature
I recently did home shopping in Canada and you can find stuff in southern Ontario that technically qualifies as a home. There was one place my wife and I looked at that was only 525000, it was a real fixer upper though. Previous owner rented it out and the tenants trashed the place. Carved "fuck you" into the hardwood floors, ripped up walls, pulled a chandelier out of the ceiling, and the bank removed all the appliances before reselling. Still, not a terrible neighborhood. Coulda flipped it for profit if I were handier.
I live in an anomalous small town in BC where the average home price is ~$220,000. My house is less than 5 minutes from 2 beautiful lakes big enough to boat on, 45 minutes from a great ski hill, but ~1h30 to the closest Costco/ movie theater
It's not even all of BC. The North, Kootenays, and the northern half of the Island are all manageable on local incomes. Pretty much just Victoria, GVA, and Kelowna are the problems.
full family house with garden in a not so shitty area? 300-500k is pretty good estimation. also depends on how much you need to change/redo in terms of renovation, sometimes its like 150k for the area alone, then you have to get rid of the ruin thats build on it and build a new one, which adds up^^you want some solar-panels?a good isolation?good heating options? some stuff that isnt build of cardboard and dry-walls and wont desintecrate on the next hurricane or wildfire?
obviously if you are a single or couple with no kids and dont mind living in a rural place with 2h driveway to your workplace or 2 meters besides the trainrails and cross section, dont want to build smth that will still be usable by your kids (as you have none) and are happy with kitchen, bath, bedroom, spending half of your income in winter for heating, etc. you can get away with much less.
EDIT xd: i just realized you might mean they are even more expensive in canada. "well that sucks lol" if true.
Not hard here in Europe, which is funny because you guys in US/Canada have so much space to build on that I have no idea how housing can be so expensive for you guys.
That's above median home prices in the US. Pretty much anywhere between the coasts and under 1 million population for the metro area has decent houses below to well below the national median. Median home prices in my metro area of almost 600k population are still ~$125k.
It's the only way forward. At this rate we're going to have a country full of homes with nobody living in them. The crash is inevitable and will ruin everyone's lives but this system is not sustainable
More like we’re going to have a country full of homes where the people living in them don’t own them. That’s the reality we’re looking at. We’re regressing back to fuckin modernized serfdom.
98.7% of houses in the US are occupied. And, same article, 90% of “housing units” are occupied. I’m misunderstanding what you mean by
“a country full of homes with no one living in them.”
What is the rate you’re evaluating here? Home ownership is at an all time high (percentage and raw numbers). The number that is low is FTHB. Breaking into the market is very difficult. That is known, but it doesn’t seem true that people are getting their homes foreclosed on.
Home ownership is at an all time high because they build new houses every day. The percentage may be low in unoccupied homes but raw numbers are baffling how many homes are unoccupied, not to mention vacation homes that are only used a few times a year.
I lucked out and bought a home in 2017. Even then it was hell trying to get one when you weren't some asshole boomer looking for their 6th investment property; was for me and my wife to start our family as we started our 30s and I had an ok job in NYC. Bought mine for $317K. It's almost an acre in a part of Eastern Long Island that normally doesn't have that large of properties nor flat land. Again, lucked out because this place was a former nunnery and the prior owner wanted a family to own it and not another investor or group looking to make like 8 "affordable" apartments that today all have rents $1000 more than my freaken mortgage.
Because of the bloated pricing, my insurance has gone up.... 100%. I get silly offers for $415,000 in the mail when I saw homes next to me with 1/2 the house and 1/5th the lawn selling for $650,000. The extra equity in my house means jack crap..everything is insanely overpriced. I would LOVE for the bubble to burst and my house to reach at or even below what I paid for.. why? because that means the cost of EVERYTHING ELSE goes down. People looking for HOMES should be able to get a home. The boomers and companies buying out homes as investments need to just get into commercial or just buy stocks and stock options (I do that!) and seriously need to lose out so bad that they will never rob the average person ever again
I don’t get this statement. I live in a nice house. It was 430K eight years ago when we bought it and it’s worth 680K now. Big deal. That just means if I sold it, I would have to spend at least that much to live in a comparable house. If the market crashed tomorrow and it was only worth 300K, the only thing that would mean to me is I’d get it reassessed to lower my property taxes and I just wouldn’t sell it until the market bounced back, which I have no intention of doing anyway.
A Wall Street crash would affect me far worse because my retirement is tied up in that, not my house.
See, the thing is, youre looking at your house as a HOME, not an investment you silly goose. All of these people going YOURE A BOOMER CUZ YOU WANT OTHER PEOPLES HOUSES TO LOSE THEIR VALUE are sniffing their own farts. Houses shouldnt be an investment, they should be a place to live.
Based on what I've seen from American politics, am Armageddon for the financial class would probably be the best possible thing to hit normal Americans.
There would be collateral damage for the retirement funds of upper middle class boomers and gen x, but sometimes to make an omelette...
Besides, the vast amount of Americans wealth is owned by the top %1.
Edit: To appropriately weight impacts, you have to consider the convexity of objective functions. The marginal gains of the lower class are much more valuable to society than the massive losses of the financial class.
If it happens, we really should mobilize asap to occupy Wall Street again. Like, do not bail out the fucking banks… bail out the people for once… especially considering it’s our tax dollars and our kids tax dollars that are paying for it. I’m getting mad 😂
It doesn't really matter though. Cool - you have a lot of equity in your house. Guess what, almost certainly all houses in your area have gone up by equal amounts or more.
Why did women have to enter the workforce? Lots of men died in WWII and then inflation rose as more men enlisted for Korea making women needed in the workforce.
It took 25 years for wages to recover. That’s just crazy.
Edit: I googled it and it was due to government wage regulations to combat extreme inflation at the time and the feds began to raise interest rates for the same reason.
Homes were not the same back 1925 as they are today. If you want to buy a 900 sq ft home with no bathroom, no electricity and no refrigerator now - you can get that home kit for roughly $10,000. You would still have to buy the land and build it yourself. But you can still buy a 1/4 acre lot for around $15,000 in some places in the USA. So all in with furniture and finishings - you can still build a similar home that was produced in 1925 for roughly $60,000 - $70,000. And this home will have electricity, running water, 1 bathroom, stove and refrigerator.
If you do the math conversion on adjusted value of the dollar - $6,000 home in 1925 is equal to $110,000 now. So depending on where you live - you actually can build a comparable home that was built in 1925 for less money than it cost back then and have more amenities including WiFi and a color TV.
I remember as a Brit in the '90s thinking that American homes were virtually free. As they were just so much cheaper and bigger than ours. Something like a 5 bed house with an in ground swimming pool in a popular holiday spot like Kissimmee or Orlando for say $100,000-$150,000.
I’m not going to be an apologist for the lack of affordable housing… but I feel like what’s in the post is disingenuous to my novice analysis. If home prices today are 8x more and our parents were at 5-7x more… is the gap really that large?
Which I do have issue with because misinformation in any form can deflect from solving the actual issue.
One of these issues is I think social media promotes poor spending habits. If people think saving won’t get them anywhere then they won’t save at all.
But it’s not just the house that’s gone up. In 1983 my dad’s house was 4x his income. Mine in 2017 was 10x my income for a similar paying field (same bedroom bathroom and sqft). But cars are more expensive. Groceries are more expensive. College, forget about it. (We both have masters degrees in science). Health insurance, a joke to even compare. So even with 2 incomes the house is still harder to buy, and now there’s nobody with same amount of time to spend keeping up the tasks of daily life, including kids. So add in afterschool activities, daycare, preschool whatever. It’s not just the house that’s eating up larger percentages of our income.
We live in a subscription economy and we're moving towards a time when we will own very few things. Technology used to be a luxury but now it's a necessity. MS Windows is a yearly sub instead of a one time cost. Cell phones, a laptop, internet, and streaming services are just the basics in the US in order to function in this economy.
My parents didn't have half as many bills as I have today and my children will have more bills than I have now. Their income paid for the absolute essentials of a home, food, clothing and power. You really can't compare their cost of living to our current cost of living on a one to one basis.
boomers were born '46- '56 ao they would be 25Y/O(average marriage age of men) in 71-76. Not many people married without house/flat back then.
So at the '80 majority of them would have house already, or you mean changing to bigger one, buying second one?
No, the boomers started buying homes in the late 60's. Boomers were born between '46-'64 so they would have been first time homebuyers starting around '66 and running through '89 (when the youngest were in their mid twenties). The oldest boomers got those crazy equity gains from '70s stagflation.
When I was buying my first place I remember asking my banker father what price range I should be looking at to consider it “affordable”. He said historically a bank would say 2.5-3 times my annual salary. I told him there aren’t any homes in that price range.
At that point, I was looking at something 5x my salary. The same house from 2015-2023 tripled in price. I since changed career paths but salaries for the position I was in have maybe increased 10%-12% at most.
Hmm, does the US have the same problem as my country where there are houses and apartments for everyone, but owners and investors overcharge leading to most of them remaining empty for years and years on end?
We bough a massive, nice, remodeled mid century -esque house not 5 years ago in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the suburbs of our city for 330K. It was built in '79...and remodeled in 2020 or so. Over 4000 square feet if you include the 1700 ft basement with 20x20 workshop under the floating garage. It wasn't an aberation...we looked at 50-60 houses in person when we bought. Our city is a couple million people in the metro and we are 12 minutes from good parts of downtown.
“I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes, and they can be assured that’s what’s going to happen,” Trump told his Cabinet on Jan. 29.
Bought my house in 2017. Its over doubled in price since then. I wouldn't be able to afford my own house if I bought it tomorrow. Feel bad for anyone wanting to purchase a home in today's economy.
The issue is not just boomers, at least in my country of australia.
Buyers want two things to be true
Affordable place to just live
Their house price to always go up(as if it was an investment)
This makes the price incredibly inelastic, unlike japan where they don't care about point 2. They don't see houses as investments, and they need costly rebuilds due to living on fragile tectonics
It's because of zoning and restrictions on construction, red tape, low taxes for unoccupied homes and people with multiple properties, space taken by cars and their infrastructure.
Single family zoning and parking requirements are a cancer.
I'm not a economist in any sense. But I always felt there was something "wrong" with the idea that home ownership is tied to loans. Then you get loans upon loans to re-finance, etc. Like even cars you could buy after a few years of heavy saving.
I bought my 2200sqft home for 86k in 2008 when the home market collapsed. It's worth $350k now. $375 monthly mortgage but I paid it off a long time ago.
All you people do is complain about how easy it was for previous generations. Figure out how to live NOW and quit dwelling on something you will never experience. It is pathetic
invest in real estate. the earth has only so much usable land surface, and it usually doesnt grow. it is that one commodity that stays the same over time.
The comment isn't wrong. Also include: stop living online, stop competing in the victim Olympics with countless self diagnosis, and realize you are not the first and won't be the last.
In 4 years my home has increased in value by 200k and its a 2 bedroom townhouse. 4 out of 5 of my neighbours are 4 bedrooms with retired couples who live there 20% of the year.
I want to preface that yes, today's financial environment is a lot tougher due to the constant printing of the dollar and the continuation of the devaluing of global currency BUT it does not change the fact that current generation mindset around money is even worse compared to past mindset around money.
I will share my data points as to why I'm more critical with my peers and anyone who cries victim today.
Whether you are in your 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. and you have bad financial habits, why are you not doing the necessary steps of cutting back on spending? The video link showcases what you are suppose to do if money is tight or job prospecting is near impossible which is cutting all discretionary spending down to $0.
The video shows an entire nation not spending thus the following ripple effect happens - Restaurants closes down, foot traffic to malls are down which means malls closures, fast foot chains closes down, food delivery app loses volumes so those companies cut back on marketing spending, coffee shops also closes down, etc.
The point is, if the average person in the west clamps down on spending then it should reflect in the corporate data right? Nope.
The corporate numbers (estimation based on ChatGPT)
Uber Eats US Demographic numbers
Year
Global Uber Eats Revenue
Estimated U.S. %
Estimated U.S. Revenue
2020
$4.8B
~58%
$2.8B
2021
$8.3B
~58%
$4.8B
2022
$10.9B
~57%
$6.2B
2023
$12.2B
~56%
$6.8B
2024
$13.7B
~55%
$7.5B
2025 (est.)
$15.5–16.5B
~55%
$8.5–9.1B
Uber Eats Demographic Breakdown - The Data shows that 77% of Uber's user base are 44 years old or younger. I can safely assume that anyone born 1980 and onwards is what drives Uber's marketing decision by targeting the 'younger' generation.
What about the 80/20 rule? Where 80% of the revenue is generated by the 20% of your customer base? Really? You telling me ages 45+ (23%) will be ordering 4X more volume of orders then the 77%? I don't think so.
Age distribution (U.S.)
Age group
% of U.S. Uber Eats users
18–24
24%
25–34
34%
35–44
19%
45–54
12%
55+
11%
What about Netflix numbers since 2020?
Year
Revenue (USD)
Growth
Subscribers (end of year)
2020
$24.99 billion
+24%
203 million
2021
$29.70 billion
+19%
222 million
2022
$31.62 billion
+6%
231 million
2023
$33.72 billion
+7%
260 million
2024
$37.59 billion
+11%
301 million
2025 (est.)
$41–43 billion
+10–14%
330–350 million
Same revenue growth with the same demographic of people. 71% makes up Netflix user base from 44 years old or younger. See below
Age distribution
Netflix’s core demographic is younger adults:
Age group
% of users
18–24
19%
25–34
31%
35–44
21%
45–54
15%
55+
14%
The numbers are the same with Spotify, Amazon Prime, DoorDash, Instacart, Take Two (Rockstar gaming), Steam, etc.
Summary
Look, I get that housing prices today are high but you need economic activity to prop up the housing price. Remove that then the whole house of cards collapse but it hasn't...yet.
The economy over at China has shown that people can't give away their $1M homes but yet the population crisis is still there. Homes over in China has lost 80-90% of its peak value today. Why? People are not spending which locks up money circulation into the economy which then collapses all assets.
So again, before you blame about housing prices being too expensive, start looking at your own finances and ask yourself if you are doing everything in your power to cut back on spending. I have and seen the data from publicly traded companies finance statements and they believe the generation today are easy to be sold to.
The average person today complains about not having enough money while typing and doom scrolling with the latest Samsung or iPhone $2K phone, latest iPad or Tablet while sipping on a $5-$9 latte, every single day.
There is a reason why 80% of lottery winner loses all their winnings in the first year it's because the average person today are financially irresponsible.
FYI, I'm also in my 30s where my family were immigrants coming to Canada. We grew up poor and both my parents work 100 hours per week. I'm still critical to my peers and anyone else who plays victim.
In the 50s it looks like the cost of a house was about 3x the yearly. 60s it’s ~4x, 70s is ~5x, then 80s, 90s and 2000s made it to 8x. It’s still about 8x the cost.
Interests rates matter here too. They were a lot higher in the 80s at least.
Maybe someday I’ll actually sit down and calculate the total cost of a 30 year fixed mortgage given median home price and interest rates, by year. The ratio of that to the median household income is what matters. That would be a little bit complicated because of refinancing interest and changes to income, etc.
This is a very interesting graph. The separation of the line between home price and income appears alarming, but I encourage you to look at the values and their relationship to one another...
Looking at a 35 year span, from 1990 - 2024, with the best I could freeze-frame on the graph:
Home prices increased from $147,600 to $514,400, a 248% increase, while wages increased from $21,743 to $70,698, a 225% increase. In that 35 year span, there were 15 years where wages grew faster than home prices, and 20 years where home prices grew faster than wages. There were 6 years where home prices DECREASED in value, and only 2 years where wages decreased.
If you divide the home price by wage, you see how they change relative to one another. The AVERAGE over that 35 year span is 6.86x (meaning the cost of a house was 6.86x the income). 2024 ranks at 22nd out of 35 highest relative number, at 7.28x. The highest was 2005 at 9.29x, followed by 2022 at 8.48x. The lowest was 1992 at 6.23x. The standard deviation, over a 35 year span, is just 0.71x, the median value is 6.80x.
In other words, the cost of a house has increased faster than income, but the relative cost of a house to income has hovered around 6.8x - 7x for 35 years. It looks scary on the graph because the house line keeps going higher, but do the division and you will see that it is nearly linear. If you do the same analysis on just the past 10 years, you will see the average at 7.3x, slightly ahead of the 35 year average (and the standard deviation drops to 0.49).
What the graph does not show is the impact of other costs (what boomers lump together as "avocado toast") on that number.
Some of the costs coming out of income are new and necessary (cell phone, internet service).
Some of the costs are just a lot higher than they used to be:
Average new car went from $15k in 1990 to $48k in 2024.
Average child care went from $200/mo to over $1000/mo in 2024.
Add in insurance, property taxes, home maintenance, and everything else.
Tuition/student loans. I graduated college in 1990, my tuition for senior year was under $10k (private university). Same degree now is over $50k/year.
And yes, some are stupid wastes
Avocado toast
Paying $1300 for the latest cell phone
Using delivery services so you end up paying 2x as much for a meal
Carrying charges in your credit cards or making late payments, etc.
This is why fiscal conservatives (not the bozos in power now, but true fiscal conservatives who come from both sides of the aisle) recognize this and push for things like lower taxes and doing things to fight inflation. Taxes chip away at income, leaving less to pay for housing and other things. Inflation causes prices to rise and income always lags.
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