They can't. Providing supply will suffer the wrath of BANANA/CAVE/NIMBY anywhere you dream of living. Constraining demand will either get you voted out of office or devastate your political network or both, depending on which policy you attempt. You're competing with a whole planet full of people that want to live here and have more means than you.
Seek property where demand is lower and development isn't effectively outlawed. Forget any livable cities or high population states. For 99% of you that means living far away from your preferred locale among people you probably loath. If that's not acceptable then keep renting or live in a van.
The good news is many of you can work remote. That is an affordance you can leverage to great benefit.
Parent comment is vitriolic but not actually wrong. Myself, I take great comfort in the idea of huge swaths of liberal, well-educated millennials and xennials migrating out of coastal cities and into small towns across the South and Midwest. Can you work remotely? Want to own your own home on a multi-acre lot for $100k, and live in a place with sunshine and warm weather nine months out of the year?
Sure, you'll end up living in the most conservative parts of deeply red states -- but try it. Live among people you disagree with -- we're all still Americans, it'll be OK -- and if enough of your friends and fellow Ivy alumns make the jump you'd be surprised how easily you could turn Texas or Georgia nicely purple.
We've got to end the big sort, at any cost. And the hilarious difference in cost of living is probably our last, best hope.
(By the way, the county where I grew up is considered 'progressive' due to its proximity to the NOVA area)
I grew up in the American south, and migrated to California as an adult. As a Black person I can say this doesn’t work as well in practice. It’s better than the old days (when my mom was growing up segregation was still legal and the military warned her parents to be back on base before sunset.) But I’d much rather live in a welcoming area.
There's "be the change you want to see", and then there's "move to a place where you're likely to murdered in the street for pointless, intractable reasons." I can't say I blame you for getting the hell out; I just hope that in our lifetime you feel comfortable going back to where you grew up.
The weather's great (except for the hurricanes) and the barbecue is amazing (except in the Carolinas). Maybe one day you can get back here and we can all work together on fixing whatever the hell is wrong with (some of) the people.
how dare you
Living in a place with no amenities, an extremely regressive/borderline extreme social climate and a lack of economic opportunity for people who don’t have remote tech jobs and it gets depressing really fast. Also when you try to buy healthy food from a dollar general.
Certified brown person here. The only thing I think about in terms of deciding where to stop is how far I can get before needing gas, and what the odds of finding decent food are. I've travelled in rural areas all over the country: midwest (my wife grew up in rural iowa), west coast (wife's family is from the rural oregon coast), and south (worked a summer in southern virginia, my best friend lived in south georgia for a decade). I just got back from a road trip through rural Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming with my white wife, mixed kids, and Latina au pair. In all this time nobody has even looked at me sideways.
Hell, the precinct where I live went for Trump 58-34 in 2016 (the year I moved here). The precinct a few minutes away where my parents live was 57-32. Most of the ones around us were 60-30. Again, no problems.
I have to agree with the sibling comment. I have no idea how these folks would perform on an IAT (and I don't care because they're bad science: https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...). Southerners are nice to visitors and keep their thoughts to themselves for the most part. I'd rather deal with that than west coast frigidity or NYC aggressiveness.
As someone who recently made the jump to a rural area, these problems are almost entirely imaginary. The notion of backwards, ignorant, racist rednecks occupying all the rural lands is nothing but a bigoted stereotype.
Southern hospitality is real; and while rural peoples will be more likely to notice and acknowledge cultural differences, they generally are open minded and just as respectful of nonwhite neighbors as white ones. It's the city folk who don't understand the roles that politeness and respect play in southern living, necessary for the unbelievably high trust society that only really exists outside of cities.
The truth is that urbanites have been hypersensitized to so called racism, and completely mislead as to what rural/conservative culture is actually like. But I don't mind a bit, that means more cheap land for me.
Appalachian culture is extremely insular, even with respect to other white people. I once had a conversation with a (white) guy who had married into a family in Appalachian Kentucky. Folks in town regarded him as an outsider even after a decade of living there.
Culture has changed somewhat since then. I don't presume to speak for anyone's experience but my own, and I go off of the stories that my friends have told me for other things.
That said, Trump flags fly everywhere, and BLM flags get torn down/burned/vandalized. I don't think its really fair to say that its all politeness and mutual respect - in my experience that is how it is until you accidently fall into one of the cultural battlegrounds, and then its more conform or die. Lastly..
> The truth is that urbanites have been hypersensitized to so called racism
I think this can be true while the rest can also be true.
I suppose you could say that ruralites are more tolerant of intolerance in general, even when they individually may be welcoming. No argument about the flags around here...but I get the impression that, at least where I've settled, even if you're a little different, if you stick to your property and don't make waves nobody is likely to mess with you...and to be honest I kind of appreciate that sort of live and let live attitude, even if it requires some degree of conformity.
As far as I can tell, a somewhat rigid common culture is sort of the price of high trust living, where you can leave your doors unlocked and your keys on the porch. That doesn't justify violence against minorities/lgbt of course but... there's always the city for that I suppose. It's definitely a very different non-pc attitude around here. I certainly understand why a guy like Trump is so popular in these parts.
I think there's also an element of cultural mismatch. Trevor Noah has a great passage in his autobiography about how he could cross the intense inter-tribal antipathies in South Africa by speaking another tribe's language: https://www.josephineelia.com/power-of-language. Rural places in America are like places everywhere else in the world--you have to "speak the language" of the people in the place where you are. If you go to rural France and conspicuously don't speak French, you'll face hostility. Obviously in America we speak English everywhere, but if your mannerisms and attitudes give you away as an outsider, you might not get the same warm reaction as someone who knows the cultural cues.
Totally unviable for tech workers to live in most of the solid red areas of the country strictly due internet capabilities, or lack thereof.
This summer the phone company has been pulling fiber all over the place. I was told that it's not going to be put in use until next year, but at least they're planning ahead.
Especially after the last year and a half of distance learning and working from home, there is a big push all over the place to get faster internet connections because the people already living out here are demanding it.
I’m looking at this move myself and the final decision point is state taxes (TN, WA, FL) or fiber/cheap homes (largely Western NC and GA), both paired with some cool nature.
All ears on places with $200k and below homes and fiber, quite candidly.
Also, FWIW, I meant more rural areas than just "red states". Even in solidly republican states there is a fairly prominent urban/rural divide.
As selfish as this may sound, the last thing we need is more foreign competition on the housing market with bigger pockets.
It would be fair that if people from the US want to buy property here with their foreign megabucks, we should also get unrestricted visa-free access to the US labor market. Tit for tat. Otherwise it's just unfair to Europeans to be outspent out of their own housing market.
Just because the country is profiting from your megabucks, doesn't mean the average Joe is.
Look at Austria. The most touristic areas are profiting a lot from all that foreign tourist money, but a lot of the locals can't afford to live there anymore as all that tourist money is only going into a few pockets. Those who don't already own something or have an inheritance have been royaly fucked by that tourist money. It increases inequality between the haves and the have-nots.
If the middle class are the ones buying the properties, then they're the ones selling them. Therefore it actually injects money into the middle class, foreign capital that never existed in that country.
>he most touristic areas are profiting a lot from all that foreign tourist money, but a lot of the locals can't afford to live there anymore as all that tourist money
Those who move to a country to work and live there on anything but a very short term basis on not generally considered tourists. Most of the money flowing into the rich is a function of capitalism, not just tourism. You can examine virtually any industry and make the same statement. Yet, some fraction of money is usually better than nothing for the middle class people benefitting.
The US has your Austrian analogue, it is called Hawaii. In Hawaii most money is made from tourism. The common person there is mostly employed in tourism. Housing prices are high, because lots of people want to live there. The result when it was mostly closed off for coronavirus was that although demand for housing decreased, unemployment skyrocketed without tourism, making the middle class worse off.
Sorry but since you make no distinction between someone owning and selling a house ($500k asset in Austria) and someone who doesn't own a house and call them both middles class is just plain wrong.
The property owner middle classer is significantly better off than than the other and would benefit even more from your intention of buying while the other middle classer is worse off without a property to his name and will suffer more from being in competition with you.
Sure, one guy profits, but you can't possibly tell me with a straight face someone else doesn't get screwed from this wealth driven game of music chairs which is the property market right now.
value of house + value of rest of economy.
Now someone foreign comes into the country to live there and work in tech from abroad. They buy a house. Now the wealth inside the country looks like this:
value of house + foreign money paid for house + value of rest of country.
You can see that the wealth inside the country has increased. If it is the middle class owning those houses, then the wealth of middle class has changed by the difference in value between the value of the house and what it was sold for. The middle class then further benefits from whatever money the foreign worker spends in the country, which is a net gain for the middle class, plus the injection into the economy of the foreign money paid for the house. The only way the middle class end up worse off here is if the foreigner doesn't live and work here, and is just a foreign landlord (siphoning money out of the country) -- which is something I think we can both agree is detrimental.
I will say here in the US people have a lot of problems with foreign landlords and people who buy property here and don't live here. But only the most backwards rednecks have serious issue with an honest foreigner who buys a normal middle class house to live their lives, especially if they are injecting foreign capital into our economy.
>districts of Berlin were like a quarter of Bay Area housing
So what? Nothing touches Bay Area prices, even in the US. And then there's the income difference as well.
Try comparing to something more similar like Texas. Last I checked average dev wages in Austin are easily 2x more than average dev wages in Berlin while buying a house there costs the same. So who's buying power is stronger then?
Buying something decent in Germany now, in the current market is nearly impossible without an inheritance.
See this report for details: https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/675
It doesn't say that rich young people are replacing old.
It just says that wealthy & older people are leaving in big enough numbers that there's a sizeable ourmigration.
It's important to note that natural born residents have been fleeing California for a long time, and a substantial portion of the young, high paid workers are on H1B - so non-permanent.
The folks at YIMBY Action are a great resource if you're serious about making progress on this kind of thing.
TBH I would have said the same thing 5-10 years ago, but I think this notion is outdated now.
I live in a famously NIMBY city (Seattle) and things have changed a lot in the last 5 years. I would guess that single-family zoning will be gone within 5 years.
Although I don't buy it, some people even argue that SFH zoning is already gone in Seattle due to ADU/DADU reforms.
Are you suggesting we kill off part of the current population? What's your point with this comment?
Even just straight up rolling back to zoning codes that existed in 1960 without much further change would do a lot for supply. Los Angeles in 2010 had a population of 4 million and was zoned for 4.3 million homes. Los Angeles in 1960 on the other hand had a population of 2.5 million and was actually zoned for 10 million homes.
Another issue with increasing supply/density: where is every household going to park its 2-3 cars?!
(Disclaimer: I've been watching tons of City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes on Youtube)
We don't have as many skyscrapers here.
Regardless there are plenty of reasons not to want car-centric suburbian neighbourhoods. Unwalkable, outrageously expensive to maintain, encourages car ownership and usage (yay more debt and running costs), etc.
The most amazing example of this was the stamp-duty holiday to help stimulate the market for a few months during covid. The maximum you could save was £15k. The average house price increased during that time by about £16k...
The real problem isn't supply at all, it's the distribution of supply and the choices of people to live there.
I’ve said this plenty of times; America has plenty of homes, it just doesn’t have enough homes where people actually want to live.
You can get a home in my parents home town (which they left) for $60-100k right now. The issue is that there are no jobs and even fewer services. It was probably a great place to live 80 years ago when small towns were the norm, but now it’s shrinking, aging, and a long distance from any of the amenities that most Americans now demand.
Not necessarily. You can't use the overall picture data to make claims about localized or subcategories of data. Especially if the bulk of the people live in suburban and urban areas.
"... a long distance from any of the amenities that most Americans now demand."
Like what? Many amenities and services have been moving to the at-home or online model for decades - arcades, movies, shopping, car buying, telehealth, etc. It seems there should be less reliance on physical amenities now than in the past.
We are starting to movement from HCOL and high tax areas. Companies are moving for tax and regulatory purposes and most people seem happy to follow when the cost of living is significantly lower.
> Like what? Many amenities and services have been moving to the at-home or online model for decades - arcades, movies, shopping, car buying, telehealth, etc. It seems there should be less reliance on physical amenities now than in the past.
My parents town’s nearest major store is a Walmart 45 minutes away. There is a significant difference between “we need less amenities now” and “we need no amenities”. Committing to an hour and a half drive for anything Amazon can’t deliver is sub ideal.
It would be utterly impractical to live there most of the year. And yet compared to NFT's and some cryptocurrencies it's probably a great investment. There's definitely a bubble going on, I just don't know when it will end or why.
The vacancy rate may be at a low, but it is still about 10%. Sure, we still need to build more houses, but the point here is that distribution is important to both. If you build houses in a HCOL area, the cost will be higher. We should be looking at redistributing to areas with the highest rates of vacancy an LCOL.
Part of why prices are going up is inflation and cost of materials and labor. Prices in rural america are up, but I wouldn't say skyrocketing. There might be places that are skyrocketing, but I'm guessing they are in commute distance of the cities.
The housing crisis is more accurately an imbalance of houses-to-jobs in a metro area.
Why the companies are moving from California to Texas is exactly because Texas' local zoning laws aren't as stringent allowing for cheaper housing.
The fix really isn't that complicated, it's allow more houses to be built where jobs are demanded. Not quite sure why people always twist and turn justifications for why only 1-story houses should be built.
Or move jobs to areas where housing is cheaper and easier to build. Just allowing more houses to be built doesn't solve it entirely. For example, labor will be more expensive in HCOL areas.
"Why the companies are moving from California to Texas is exactly because Texas' local zoning laws aren't as stringent allowing for cheaper housing."
Not really, although it might be a secondary component. The main part is taxes and regulation.
Labor increased cost is really nothing compared to the zoning barring new construction. If labor was truly the barrier then when upzoned no construction would take place. Additionally a large reason why labor is so expensive is from the constrained housing in the first place -- again stemming from the zoning.
> Not really, although it might be a secondary component. The main part is taxes and regulation.
Zoning is regulation.
Business regulation.
"If labor was truly the barrier then when upzoned no construction would take place."
Not a barrier, but a factor. You seem to be misunderstanding me. It's not that it can't be done in the populated area, but that it's better done in areas not already in a precarious situation.
"Additionally a large reason why labor is so expensive is from the constrained housing in the first place -- again stemming from the zoning."
So we have circular logic here. If the labor is expensive, you aren't going to make it cheaper (at least short term) by building more houses because the labor cost to build those houses will still be high. They have to pay their existing mortgages.
Are you really not aware that when people are mentioning Texas' easy regulation many times they are literally often talking about zoning?
> You seem to be misunderstanding me. It's not that it can't be done in the populated area, but that it's better done in areas not already in a precarious situation.
No I completely understand you, and find the "too many dense already" line of logic ludicrous. Most of these American cities have zoned over 80% of their land at one story buildings only. American cities are already at the lowest density compared to European or other countries density. They can accommodate plenty of housing fine.
> So we have circular logic here. If the labor is expensive, you aren't going to make it cheaper (at least short term) by building more houses because the labor cost to build those houses will still be high.
No there is no circular logic here. As I already noted the larger burden of the cost of housing comes from zoning restricting the amount of buildable land. And yes you will need to build lots of housing -- thats what happens one restricts building housing for decades.
Source? The ones I have seen say "business-friendly regulations". They also mention companies moving their headquarters to the state, which means taking advantage of incorporating there, which extends to out of state worker, for which zoning does not apply.
The cheaper housing is why many individuals are moving to TX.
"They can accommodate plenty of housing fine."
If the infrastructure is only set up for single family homes and the land is covered in them, then you would need massive infrastructure updates which the cities can't afford, and you would also have to demolish many existing homes to make room - what a waste.
"No there is no circular logic here. As I already noted the larger burden of the cost of housing comes from zoning restricting the amount of buildable land."
Do you have an economics background? Can you explain how the labor cost suddenly decreases as the demand for labor increase and their costs stay the same?
"... and find the "too many dense already" line of logic ludicrous."
My position is more nuanced than that. It seems you've already made up your mind and dont care to explore my position. Good luck.
Zoning also is for businesses too. For example Elon's relatively fast approvals for their new factories
> the infrastructure is only set up for single family homes and the land is covered in them, then you would need massive infrastructure updates which the cities can't afford
Again another ludicrous claim. Seriously every country around the world can build this infrastructure for supporting beyond 1 story tall. America is not some special snowflake here. Yes it'll cost some money to upgrade it -- not it's not rocket science nor some giant cost.
You're just working backwards justifying why American cities couldn't accommodate anything beyond 1 story tall then grabbing any reason to block it.
> Do you have an economics background? Can you explain how the labor cost suddenly decreases as the demand for labor increase and their costs stay the same?
I could ask the same to you do you have an economics background? But in any case yes I do.
Regarding the labor cost, I was responding to why you think labor costs are a barrier to housing and while it's true, the root cause to solve it goes the other way around. Aka even if labor costs were flat it wouldn't solve the housing crisis.
> My position is more nuanced than that. It seems you've already made up your mind and dont care to explore my position. Good luck.
It can be as complicated as you want but as the end of the day if it's stemming from blocking housing it really isn't that special.
The Midwest and the South are both way ahead of California on the whole "just build more housing" thing, for example, and have been for many years. And yeah, it makes us somewhat cheaper than a coastal city if you have California dollars to burn. But our Price-to-Income-Ratio's are still in the high 5-7+ range too, just like everywhere else.
We have basically zero population growth, and every single stray piece of land is getting built on right now (record high construction, record high new housing starts, for the past three years straight) and housing prices still rise 10% to 15% every single year like clockwork, with no end in sight.
"Just build more" sounds really pretty, but that alone will never get housing prices back down to a real-world-affordable figure for most people.
You are partially right that Econ-101 doesn't explain it well, but if you take Econ-201 it does explain how housing supply/demand works. Why it doesn't work as easy as 101 is that the location matters for the 'good' unlike say cars which can be shipped in from anywhere. And also zoning artificially constrains land from being used for housing.
NYC on the other hand is a good example of what you’re talking about - it’s expensive to live there and pretty dense already. But Tokyo for example had 150k housing starts on a recent year, which is more than LA, NYC, Boston, and Houston combined (source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/what-h...) - amp link to get around paywall.
I think there’s tons of evidence that we just don’t build enough myself. In bangkok, another market, they’re throwing up more new tall buildings every year than almost the entire USA does.
Seems fitting that in the 21st century we flip that on its head. Cost of living in SF or Seattle got you down? Go East, young man! Head down to Texas or east to Ohio, and register to vote when you get there.
Be the change you want to see.
The solution is, and always has been, to increase supply, specifically in the form of increased density.
Since you asked, another idea would be to slap a vacancy tax on top of this.
It's the same equation as crypto mining, as long as there's a return on investment they will continue to buy up GPUs.
It is more financially and emotionally rewarding for me to prep leetcode, solve software problems, etc. than it is to deal with home renovations, plumbing repair, etc. on a home.
Plus the flexibility of location is huge. I can follow the job market much easier if I am not locked into an address.
In the current NIMBY climate, my neighbor is struggling with the red tape to repave her driveway. Building a new home around here seems about as improbable as a hobbyist making the first human Mars landing.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/05/700432258/the-...
I do agree on the problem of NYMBYism though. There's a funny-if-not-so-sad dispute here in Berlin at the moment, where the leftist state government is desperately trying to build public housing while the leftist local government in the district of Lichtenberg is blocking a major developing due to local concern. Sadly I can't find an article in English, but I am sure there are dozens if not hundreds of examples for that.
Or just not very fun to be on. The beach cities of Southern California are blessed with having some of the most accessible beaches.
You’ll find that historically speaking “freedom” and “property rights” are treated as synonymous for some political theorists, including the ones that founded the United States. This is one of the foundational aspects[0] of liberalism that has come to rule the western world; the idea that property rights are sacred and must have an exceptionally high bar for the collective to intercede on.
Whether or not that equivalence is true is a debatable matter. One of the unfortunate outcomes is the ability for the individual to withdraw their property from public use, often to the detriment of the whole (such as the beach example you provided).
Also, the fact that the founding thinkers of liberalism and America itself tended to own slaves or trade in them doesn’t necessarily disprove the basic argument, but it’s a pretty strong counter point at least.
0 - There are of course other tenants to liberalism that I’ve not included here, due to their irrelevance for the subject at hand.
Rent control won’t work for the same reason a price control for food or cars won’t work.
No, they aren't. Assuming no increase in property tax rate (which is a good assumption, since your local taxing jurisdiction almost certainly already charges the maximum nominal rate of 1% allowed under Prop. 13), your property taxes will increase only by the amount your assessed value for taxation increases, which is capped to the lower of 2% or the actual annual (trailing) rate of inflation.
For 2021/2022 the actual cap is 1.036%, based on the actual California CPI for October 2019 through October 2020.
However keep in mind there's two kinds of rent. You can rent a house, or you can rent money and buy a house.
Historically and across countries there's been some willingness to restrict mortgage LTVs and interest-to-income ratios. At least in some European countries the interest ratio depends on a fixed interest rate (eg 5%) rather than the current interest rate.
We can create and destroy money more easily than we can create and destroy homes, maybe that's a worthwhile lever to try.
Price controls for medicine are proven to work, based on single payer European systems. They cost cheaper and provide better outcomes than the US system.
Yet here we are.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/free_rider_problem.asp
Outcome differences are due more to public health and social factors like obesity. Expensive drugs or lack thereof have only a tiny impact at the population level.
Europeans aren’t free riding; they’re paying a reasonable rate for these goods while Americans are shouldered with extraction of revenue for pharma profits and those inefficient (and arguably unnecessary) sales and marketing expenses.
Only two countries in the world permit marketing directly to consumers to promote pharmaceuticals: the United States and New Zealand.
But in general the traditional drug development approach of finding small molecule drugs to treat specific diseases is running out of steam. Most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.
It's like Private hospitals, we have them, but very few people use them as the public system is better equipped and paid for by the tax payer.
Since medicine is mostly a technological good, it lets the rest of the world freeride off America paying for much of medical R&D.
But you are correct that in those cases it can work well. Same with other monopolies like utilities.
Housing, OTOH, is always local. Low rents will discourage development which will make the real, underlying problem worse.
meanwhile people are very much homeless, whether they are millenials or not, whether they react strongly or not.
2. Only actual Americans can own property in America. Single-fam, multi-fam, land,etc. doesn't matter.
Exactly no one needs to rent houses if mulit-fam exists and actual houses aren't speculative instruments or places where foreign nationals hide their money.
1. Everyone is forced to sell their lakehouses, cabins, ADUs? Detached mother-in-laws? (wtf is "Exactly one house?")
No one is ever able to rent a single family home ever again? Right now 14.5 million households / 44 million residents rent single-family homes in the United States. They're... out of luck? On the street? Gotta save for a down payment? If those houses are force-sold, don't you think people-other-than-the-current-inhabitants will come in and buy them?
Actually, can anyone ever rent ever again? Or is it a buy-vs-homeless dichotomy here? Or do towns have to become miniature companies and play landlord? Or states?
2. Timber companies are forced to give up their land, bankrupting all of them and driving the cost of wood sky high. Mobile home land must now be sold, except no one can buy it. Farms except for sole proprietors are forced to give up their land (sorry partnerships, amish, people with discontiguous lots, and everyone who wants to eat this year, you're out of luck)
IMO you should focus on laws that let people build more (eg, ADUs, duplexing) rather than getting out the stick and hoping there won't be huge side effects.
For your first proposal, I wonder about folks buying a house through an LLC or trust as folks often do to protect their privacy. Are we banning that? I also wonder about inheritance - if I own a house and my parents die, leaving me their house, how long do I have to sell one to be "in compliance?". Maybe their house needs work and I'd like to spend a few months or a year fixing it up to maximize what it'll sell for. Is that ok? And speaking of timing - I remember during the wave of foreclosures after the last housing bubble, banks kept a lot of houses off the market for a while to moderate prices, rather than listing everything at once and panicking the market further. Seems like banks ought to have some leeway to maximize their return (e.g. if a house has a pool and is foreclosed on in the late fall, maybe they judge that waiting until spring would get a better response from buyers).
okay, but what if I have (an opportunity for) positive cashflow, minimal savings, and want to move away from my parents' house? does it just suck to be me or what?
2. Can corporations still own commercial property? And can foreigners own corporations ?
What about people who want to live in cities? How do they come together to build say a small condo building? Do we only allow co-ops? How is that financed?
When you say "Americans", do you only mean citizens or permanent residents? Where do temporary residents live?
How do people move to new cities/states? Where will the new housing come from?
I really think a lot of the problem is our generation grew up watching too many movies and they just think it's normal to live in some high end condo in Manhattan while working for Enterprise Rent-A-Car. That's not realistic.
But it has got out of hand. I earn 90% more than most full time workers. And like 50%+ of "households" out there, it's just me, so no dual income. And I don't think it's appropriate to expect 40 year olds to still live with a bunch of roommates like they did when they're 22.
Forget the 2K ft^2 apartment in Manhattan or Mission District, I can't even afford the starter home out in Jersey or East Bay or Beltway DC. These aren't the mythical "McMansions" that everybody always uses to deflect from the affordability crisis - these are the exact same properties on tiny lots that a single-earning non-college-educated factory worker or postman or paper pusher could easily afford for his family in previous generations.
And if I - earning 2x-3x more than most workers - can't afford these basic homes, how the hell does everyone else who earns the median income of $60K do it?
By living in a rural area or not on the coasts.
>And I don't think it's appropriate to expect 40 year olds to still live with a bunch of roommates like they did when they're 22.
I guess that depends on your culture. It's pretty normal to have multiple families or roommates in other countries.
The only legit way I can see to fixing some of these issues is to ensure you do not let investors outside of your country buy up property. China is notorious for this. Secondly maybe you limit companies like Blackrock as well. I really dislike the idea of rent control. I don't think people that own a few properties should be punished and pushed out of the market. This just leads to larger corporations owning everything.