7 ms·

You Will Never Own a Home. TL:DR – Housing Is F**ked

22 points by pg_1234 3y ago

crooked-v 3y ago
The article spends a lot of effort avoiding the root cause of the housing crisis in at least the US, which is that there just aren't enough homes in major metro areas in the first place. Commodification is a symptom, not a cause.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
> In America, the crisis exposes a generational reckoning. While past generations focused on saving for starter homes, millennials now encounter bids hundreds of thousands over asking for fixer-uppers. This has not been true for at least 18 months now, and was only ever true in a few small locales of the US for a brief period of time.
- klipklop 3y ago
  I saw a condo sell in Nashville next to a water treatment plant for $825,000. Median household income for the area is about $60k USD. It was not large or fancy. Prices are still insane in cities with functioning job markets.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Provide some links to Zillow/Redfin/Realtor listings. The claim is “fixer uppers” selling for “hundreds of thousands” more than asking. Should be easy since the listing price and sale price and sale date are public history. I just looked at 10 homes around Nashville in the last 6 months, and all but 1 sold below asking price, and the 1 sold for $10k over asking price.
    - klipklop 3y ago
      Sure, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/313-Garfield-St-Nashville-TN-37221/244633536_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/313-Garfield-St-Nashville... I personally don’t know the area but the price is pretty breathtaking for what the local area earns.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Listed for sale at $900k, sold for $875k. Note the claim I said was false: >millennials now encounter bids hundreds of thousands over asking for fixer-uppers. The above house is not a fixer upper, nor was it bid hundreds of thousand over asking. Prices are high, but they definitely peaked, and at this point you can negotiate down in pretty much every market (even this summer).
Aurornis 3y ago
> As talk turns toward Housing, though, his buoyant mood deflates. Despite his business savvy, the trust of a well-established and nationally recognised VC fund, and new liquidity, the banks denied Mark a mortgage last year. > I’m not asking you to feel sorry for Mark — and neither would he. He’s comfortable, secure, and in a position that a lot of folks would give anything to have. But his story underscores how Housing — whether to rent or own — has become a ubiquitous problem for all of us, Getting a home loan as a startup founder (who presumably hasn't taken a salary or even reached significant revenue if "millions" of funding is a major milestone) has always been difficult. I don't know why they would pick an early stage startup founder as an example of why home ownership is difficult. > While past generations focused on saving for starter homes, millennials now encounter bids hundreds of thousands over asking for fixer-uppers. Bidding "hundreds of thousands" over asking for fixer uppers only happens in a small number of high demand markets when real estate agents intentionally underprice homes to incite bidding wars. This was never a common occurrence across the country. > And the upper echelons of tech offer little haven — six-figure salaries cannot guarantee smooth sailing in places like the Bay Area. The only reason someone would use the Bay Area as an example of the nationwide real estate market is if they wanted to exaggerate their point as much as possible. The Bay Area is not a typical real estate market.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > I don't know why they would pick an early stage startup founder Further down she uses the example of an NFT artist who you _are_ supposed to feel sorry for - although the topic is an important one, the thinly veiled Marxism of this article trivializes it.
7thaccount 3y ago
Home prices are crazy, but with WFH (I know not possible for everyone), you can typically work in cheap states (e.g. Missouri) and get a fairly new house for less than $200k. You just have to give up living in a big city.
eatonphil 3y ago
Hmm. You can find a nice townhouse in downtown Philadelphia for ~$500,000. Same for nice parts of Baltimore, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, DC, and so on. I mean, NYC and SF and LA are expensive, yes. But there are plenty of great, affordable cities/metros in the US. So I don't understand the premise of the article. Unless it's only talking about the SF/NYC/LA metro area.
- neilk 3y ago
  The median wage in Philadelphia is $55K USD. A $500K townhouse is a good deal for some kinds of remote workers, but not for anyone else. EDIT: I found an interesting page about a useful metric - household income versus home price. You're right that it does differ by region and there are better deals in some places. But the ratio is becoming more unfavorable almost everywhere. https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-historical-study/ https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist...
  - eatonphil 3y ago
    It's not far off from the $400k houses in suburbs of Lancaster PA where I grew up. My family couldn't afford that personally but plenty of families with two working parents did. This was 20 years ago though so of course prices mean something different now.
neilk 3y ago
The housing crisis is (in part) a transport crisis. A city is a technology for optimizing time. In North America, the car made suburbanization possible. You could live much further out, and still get everywhere you wanted. (Or at least, that was the promise; sometimes not the reality). In our most desirable cities, we have simply run out of space that can be reasonably traversed by car. At least given our current patterns of land use. We're not running out of land - most of North America is very empty. We're running out of land that's close enough to urban centers that can support the lifestyles we want. If we had some better methods of transport - flying cars, high speed trains everywhere, who knows - that might be an answer. But that doesn't seem likely any time soon. So we have to rethink land use, or rethink the lifestyles we want.
- eesmith 3y ago
  > we have simply run out of space that can be reasonably traversed by car I don't think it's that simple. There's a lot more housing that could be added with more density, and less transport needed if mixed-use zoning were more common. > flying cars, high speed trains everywhere You can get great cities with normal speed trains. Trains can carry far more passengers, for the same footprint, than a highway. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity > In North America, the car made suburbanization possible In North America, suburbanization started with streetcars, running on rails. The car changed how we built, yes, but so did Federal Housing Administration, whose standards promoted single-family homes with on-street parking and made it hard to get loans ("red-lining") for the types of housing which made streetcar suburbs economically viable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#Decline
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
btilly 3y ago
This looks like a good place to recycle part a comment of mine from 10 days ago. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37747936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37747936 I said: > The triangle that you're looking at is that NIMBYs lead to lack of construction, lead to undersupply of housing, which is a direct cost of both high housing costs and high homeless populations. The profit that I have as a homeowner comes from somewhere. Where it comes from is artificial scarcity that causes renters to struggle, and over 170,000 Californians to be unhoused. There is an answer. It is a simple and direct and has my complete support. It is the one issue where I completely agree with https://twitter.com/mattyglesias https://twitter.com/mattyglesias. YIMBY. Build housing. Get rid of barriers to building housing. It doesn't matter whether it is high end, low end, high density apartments, or weird condominiums. The laws of supply and demand remain true. High prices are a result of high demand and a lack of supply. And if the new housing is only attractive to the well-off, it still helps. The homes that they live in now can go to the less rich. Being for NIMBY policies is being for homelessness. Go to a homeless encampment. See people that our society has turned into garbage. We did it people wanted pristine neighborhoods to make their houses worth more. Well, the houses are worth more. Was it worth it?
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > There is an answer. It is a simple and direct and has my complete support. [...] YIMBY. Build housing. Get rid of barriers to building housing. > It doesn't matter whether it is high end, low end, high density apartments, or weird condominiums. LMAO. This "yes to everything" experiment was tried and failed-- it's called suburban Atlanta. Saying yes to everything is how you make an area completely uninhabitable. You can't "just" build housing. You need railed public transit infrastructure first, because you cannot build that shit after the fact. Even if people don't want it, if you don't have support for public transit first, don't build housing-- because once you build those houses, then it's NIMBY/FYIGM/racism on the subject of trains. The result is perpetually-clogged roads and mean commute speed of 4mph, with your "home" being nothing more than a cheaply-constructed, overpriced gilded cage you literally cannot leave at certain times of day if there happens to be a nearby accident. Solutions involve trying to run streetcars and buses over the same impassible roads. The housing situation is a problem, I don't deny it. But saying "fuck it just build" ignores all of the actual urban planning work that needs to happen. It's great for lining the pockets of developers though! They will never live in the hellscape they're being paid to build.
johnea 3y ago
The comments here are the same old usual "supply/demand" bullshit. Let's just call it what it is: greed and capitalism are what's fucking you No need to admite it, not at all, and that's why you'll remain fucked...
chrsw 3y ago
Is owning a home supposed to be an investment or is it supposed to be a place to sleep at night so you can go to a nearby job, school, etc? Maybe I'm naive, but to me, these are very different things.
- dave333 3y ago
  As things turned out it is obviously both, although the investment side was not guaranteed and most people start out just having a place to live. Some people who were first time buyers at the peak of the subprime crisis in 2007 lost out when their investment went underwater (owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth). However for 95% of homebuyers over the last 50 years it has been the best investment they made. There was a time in the mid-90s when the catch phrase was that "my home earns more than I do."
  - chrsw 3y ago
    So it is both then. My next question is: must it be?
swatcoder 3y ago
Counterpoint: You don’t actually want to own a home. The adage is that the happiest days of homeownership are the day the you buy and the day you sell. Homes are depreciating assets that fall apart while you’re standing in them, soaking up tons of your money, often in large chunks and at unexpected times. What most people actually want is a sense of security around having a place to sleep and rest and be with family. You can achieve that through individual home ownership, but it’s not the only way, and with home purchases being such a struggle for many people right now, it might just be one to let out of mind.
dave333 3y ago
For the bay area California aka silicon valley which has some of the most expensive housing the solutions are mobile home parks with space rent control and tiny houses that can now be located in the backyard of existing houses. These homes are much cheaper $100k-$300k vs $1M for a traditional home. You can save a nest egg until you have enough for a downpayment on a traditional home or simply live cheaply and fund your retirement. I moved into a 1500 sq ft 3 bed 2 bath mobile home when I retired at 65 because it was the only option I had to stay near the grandchildren and I wish I had done it 20 years earlier.
- klipklop 3y ago
  Until your mobile home park gets sold out from under you to build overpriced condos. This has been happening to many mobile home parks in the SF Bay Area.
  - dave333 3y ago
    Yes, but I would say a few parks have been sold for condo development not many. Makes it important to choose a park where either the residents own the land collectively, or the municipality supports lower cost housing and has rent control on the space rent - e.g. San Jose limit of 3% per year increase. There are also horror stories like the park at Natural Bridges near Santa Cruz where a new gazillionaire owner jacked up the space rents to $5000/month - admittedly this is right on the ocean.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Under SB9, yet put the prefab housing in the backyard of the existing home you live in. You're not going to sell your own home out from under you.
dave333 3y ago
Conceptually, the easiest way to think of this is as an "anti brake." A disc brake rotates with the wheel and a fixed caliper provides friction to slow the wheel. Similarly this device has an electric motor commutator disk that rotates with the wheel and a static magnet/electro-magnet that accelerates the wheel using power from the battery, or decelerates the wheel returning power to the battery. Seems like the simplest implementation would just have it give an electric assist or provide electrical braking to increase the vehicle mileage.
dave333 3y ago
Wondering if it would be easier to insert a motor into the driveshaft between the clutch and the transaxle on a RWD vehicle.
znpy 3y ago
Remote work could have been a solution to remove pressure from areas like San Francisco (and most other region where the same is happening). And yet... we're letting this big chance dissolve within our hands. You will never own a home... as long as you want to live in san francisco.

22 points by pg_1234 3y ago

The article spends a lot of effort avoiding the root cause of the housing crisis in at least the US, which is that there just aren't enough homes in major metro areas in the first place. Commodification is a symptom, not a cause.

lotsofpulp 3y ago

> In America, the crisis exposes a generational reckoning. While past generations focused on saving for starter homes, millennials now encounter bids hundreds of thousands over asking for fixer-uppers. This has not been true for at least 18 months now, and was only ever true in a few small locales of the US for a brief period of time.

klipklop 3y ago
I saw a condo sell in Nashville next to a water treatment plant for $825,000. Median household income for the area is about $60k USD. It was not large or fancy. Prices are still insane in cities with functioning job markets.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Provide some links to Zillow/Redfin/Realtor listings. The claim is “fixer uppers” selling for “hundreds of thousands” more than asking. Should be easy since the listing price and sale price and sale date are public history. I just looked at 10 homes around Nashville in the last 6 months, and all but 1 sold below asking price, and the 1 sold for $10k over asking price.
  - klipklop 3y ago
    Sure, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/313-Garfield-St-Nashville-TN-37221/244633536_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/313-Garfield-St-Nashville... I personally don’t know the area but the price is pretty breathtaking for what the local area earns.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Listed for sale at $900k, sold for $875k. Note the claim I said was false: >millennials now encounter bids hundreds of thousands over asking for fixer-uppers. The above house is not a fixer upper, nor was it bid hundreds of thousand over asking. Prices are high, but they definitely peaked, and at this point you can negotiate down in pretty much every market (even this summer).

Aurornis 3y ago

> As talk turns toward Housing, though, his buoyant mood deflates. Despite his business savvy, the trust of a well-established and nationally recognised VC fund, and new liquidity, the banks denied Mark a mortgage last year. > I’m not asking you to feel sorry for Mark — and neither would he. He’s comfortable, secure, and in a position that a lot of folks would give anything to have. But his story underscores how Housing — whether to rent or own — has become a ubiquitous problem for all of us, Getting a home loan as a startup founder (who presumably hasn't taken a salary or even reached significant revenue if "millions" of funding is a major milestone) has always been difficult. I don't know why they would pick an early stage startup founder as an example of why home ownership is difficult. > While past generations focused on saving for starter homes, millennials now encounter bids hundreds of thousands over asking for fixer-uppers. Bidding "hundreds of thousands" over asking for fixer uppers only happens in a small number of high demand markets when real estate agents intentionally underprice homes to incite bidding wars. This was never a common occurrence across the country. > And the upper echelons of tech offer little haven — six-figure salaries cannot guarantee smooth sailing in places like the Bay Area. The only reason someone would use the Bay Area as an example of the nationwide real estate market is if they wanted to exaggerate their point as much as possible. The Bay Area is not a typical real estate market.

commandlinefan 3y ago
> I don't know why they would pick an early stage startup founder Further down she uses the example of an NFT artist who you _are_ supposed to feel sorry for - although the topic is an important one, the thinly veiled Marxism of this article trivializes it.

7thaccount 3y ago

Home prices are crazy, but with WFH (I know not possible for everyone), you can typically work in cheap states (e.g. Missouri) and get a fairly new house for less than $200k. You just have to give up living in a big city.

eatonphil 3y ago

Hmm. You can find a nice townhouse in downtown Philadelphia for ~$500,000. Same for nice parts of Baltimore, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, DC, and so on. I mean, NYC and SF and LA are expensive, yes. But there are plenty of great, affordable cities/metros in the US. So I don't understand the premise of the article. Unless it's only talking about the SF/NYC/LA metro area.

neilk 3y ago
The median wage in Philadelphia is $55K USD. A $500K townhouse is a good deal for some kinds of remote workers, but not for anyone else. EDIT: I found an interesting page about a useful metric - household income versus home price. You're right that it does differ by region and there are better deals in some places. But the ratio is becoming more unfavorable almost everywhere. https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-historical-study/ https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist...
- eatonphil 3y ago
  It's not far off from the $400k houses in suburbs of Lancaster PA where I grew up. My family couldn't afford that personally but plenty of families with two working parents did. This was 20 years ago though so of course prices mean something different now.

neilk 3y ago

The housing crisis is (in part) a transport crisis. A city is a technology for optimizing time. In North America, the car made suburbanization possible. You could live much further out, and still get everywhere you wanted. (Or at least, that was the promise; sometimes not the reality). In our most desirable cities, we have simply run out of space that can be reasonably traversed by car. At least given our current patterns of land use. We're not running out of land - most of North America is very empty. We're running out of land that's close enough to urban centers that can support the lifestyles we want. If we had some better methods of transport - flying cars, high speed trains everywhere, who knows - that might be an answer. But that doesn't seem likely any time soon. So we have to rethink land use, or rethink the lifestyles we want.

eesmith 3y ago
> we have simply run out of space that can be reasonably traversed by car I don't think it's that simple. There's a lot more housing that could be added with more density, and less transport needed if mixed-use zoning were more common. > flying cars, high speed trains everywhere You can get great cities with normal speed trains. Trains can carry far more passengers, for the same footprint, than a highway. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity > In North America, the car made suburbanization possible In North America, suburbanization started with streetcars, running on rails. The car changed how we built, yes, but so did Federal Housing Administration, whose standards promoted single-family homes with on-street parking and made it hard to get loans ("red-lining") for the types of housing which made streetcar suburbs economically viable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#Decline

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

btilly 3y ago

This looks like a good place to recycle part a comment of mine from 10 days ago. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37747936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37747936 I said: > The triangle that you're looking at is that NIMBYs lead to lack of construction, lead to undersupply of housing, which is a direct cost of both high housing costs and high homeless populations. The profit that I have as a homeowner comes from somewhere. Where it comes from is artificial scarcity that causes renters to struggle, and over 170,000 Californians to be unhoused. There is an answer. It is a simple and direct and has my complete support. It is the one issue where I completely agree with https://twitter.com/mattyglesias https://twitter.com/mattyglesias. YIMBY. Build housing. Get rid of barriers to building housing. It doesn't matter whether it is high end, low end, high density apartments, or weird condominiums. The laws of supply and demand remain true. High prices are a result of high demand and a lack of supply. And if the new housing is only attractive to the well-off, it still helps. The homes that they live in now can go to the less rich. Being for NIMBY policies is being for homelessness. Go to a homeless encampment. See people that our society has turned into garbage. We did it people wanted pristine neighborhoods to make their houses worth more. Well, the houses are worth more. Was it worth it?

jstarfish 3y ago
> There is an answer. It is a simple and direct and has my complete support. [...] YIMBY. Build housing. Get rid of barriers to building housing. > It doesn't matter whether it is high end, low end, high density apartments, or weird condominiums. LMAO. This "yes to everything" experiment was tried and failed-- it's called suburban Atlanta. Saying yes to everything is how you make an area completely uninhabitable. You can't "just" build housing. You need railed public transit infrastructure first, because you cannot build that shit after the fact. Even if people don't want it, if you don't have support for public transit first, don't build housing-- because once you build those houses, then it's NIMBY/FYIGM/racism on the subject of trains. The result is perpetually-clogged roads and mean commute speed of 4mph, with your "home" being nothing more than a cheaply-constructed, overpriced gilded cage you literally cannot leave at certain times of day if there happens to be a nearby accident. Solutions involve trying to run streetcars and buses over the same impassible roads. The housing situation is a problem, I don't deny it. But saying "fuck it just build" ignores all of the actual urban planning work that needs to happen. It's great for lining the pockets of developers though! They will never live in the hellscape they're being paid to build.

johnea 3y ago

The comments here are the same old usual "supply/demand" bullshit. Let's just call it what it is: greed and capitalism are what's fucking you No need to admite it, not at all, and that's why you'll remain fucked...

chrsw 3y ago

Is owning a home supposed to be an investment or is it supposed to be a place to sleep at night so you can go to a nearby job, school, etc? Maybe I'm naive, but to me, these are very different things.

dave333 3y ago
As things turned out it is obviously both, although the investment side was not guaranteed and most people start out just having a place to live. Some people who were first time buyers at the peak of the subprime crisis in 2007 lost out when their investment went underwater (owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth). However for 95% of homebuyers over the last 50 years it has been the best investment they made. There was a time in the mid-90s when the catch phrase was that "my home earns more than I do."
- chrsw 3y ago
  So it is both then. My next question is: must it be?

swatcoder 3y ago

Counterpoint: You don’t actually want to own a home. The adage is that the happiest days of homeownership are the day the you buy and the day you sell. Homes are depreciating assets that fall apart while you’re standing in them, soaking up tons of your money, often in large chunks and at unexpected times. What most people actually want is a sense of security around having a place to sleep and rest and be with family. You can achieve that through individual home ownership, but it’s not the only way, and with home purchases being such a struggle for many people right now, it might just be one to let out of mind.

dave333 3y ago

For the bay area California aka silicon valley which has some of the most expensive housing the solutions are mobile home parks with space rent control and tiny houses that can now be located in the backyard of existing houses. These homes are much cheaper $100k-$300k vs $1M for a traditional home. You can save a nest egg until you have enough for a downpayment on a traditional home or simply live cheaply and fund your retirement. I moved into a 1500 sq ft 3 bed 2 bath mobile home when I retired at 65 because it was the only option I had to stay near the grandchildren and I wish I had done it 20 years earlier.

klipklop 3y ago
Until your mobile home park gets sold out from under you to build overpriced condos. This has been happening to many mobile home parks in the SF Bay Area.
- dave333 3y ago
  Yes, but I would say a few parks have been sold for condo development not many. Makes it important to choose a park where either the residents own the land collectively, or the municipality supports lower cost housing and has rent control on the space rent - e.g. San Jose limit of 3% per year increase. There are also horror stories like the park at Natural Bridges near Santa Cruz where a new gazillionaire owner jacked up the space rents to $5000/month - admittedly this is right on the ocean.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Under SB9, yet put the prefab housing in the backyard of the existing home you live in. You're not going to sell your own home out from under you.

dave333 3y ago

Conceptually, the easiest way to think of this is as an "anti brake." A disc brake rotates with the wheel and a fixed caliper provides friction to slow the wheel. Similarly this device has an electric motor commutator disk that rotates with the wheel and a static magnet/electro-magnet that accelerates the wheel using power from the battery, or decelerates the wheel returning power to the battery. Seems like the simplest implementation would just have it give an electric assist or provide electrical braking to increase the vehicle mileage.

dave333 3y ago

Wondering if it would be easier to insert a motor into the driveshaft between the clutch and the transaxle on a RWD vehicle.

znpy 3y ago

Remote work could have been a solution to remove pressure from areas like San Francisco (and most other region where the same is happening). And yet... we're letting this big chance dissolve within our hands. You will never own a home... as long as you want to live in san francisco.