3 ms·

The whole thing is so messed up. Rates are high, so mortgage is expensive, but also prices have not really budged and so you are paying a lot in property tax co

The whole thing is so messed up. Rates are high, so mortgage is expensive, but also prices have not really budged and so you are paying a lot in property tax compared to if you had bought even just a few years ago. Moreover, you are paying so much just to live there you probably don't have much left over to make any improvements... at least until your equity increases and you can take out another loan and start paying monthly for that! It's like it's designed so you are just renting everything from the bank. Houses many decades ago used to cost like as much as a car (or two)! something you could pay off much faster and have money left over to actually do things! That being said, renters have it worse.

thelastparadise 3y ago
> It's like it's designed so you are just renting everything from the bank. Nail on the head.
api 3y ago
Housing prices are very, very sticky. If housing demand is soft people tend to just hold real estate instead of selling. The only time you see housing fall a lot is when a whole region collapses economically like Detroit in the 1980s. The only way housing gets affordable again is if the entire rest of the economy inflates while housing stands still. That would probably require a combination of inflation and a building boom or inflation with high interest rates. Housing is the great millstone around the neck of the economy. Fundamentally it’s rooted in the fact that our society treats it as both a product and an investment. Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment, placing its utility and its quality as an investment at odds and creating perverse incentives everywhere. It’s a horrifically bad system that is deeply entrenched and that tends to benefit older and wealthier people and so would be very hard to change. You can escape the worst of it by leaving high real estate cost traps like the West Coast and Boston/NYC. Telework makes this easier. If you do go to those places just go for a while to establish your career and then leave.

thelastparadise 3y ago

> It's like it's designed so you are just renting everything from the bank. Nail on the head.

api 3y ago

Housing prices are very, very sticky. If housing demand is soft people tend to just hold real estate instead of selling. The only time you see housing fall a lot is when a whole region collapses economically like Detroit in the 1980s. The only way housing gets affordable again is if the entire rest of the economy inflates while housing stands still. That would probably require a combination of inflation and a building boom or inflation with high interest rates. Housing is the great millstone around the neck of the economy. Fundamentally it’s rooted in the fact that our society treats it as both a product and an investment. Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment, placing its utility and its quality as an investment at odds and creating perverse incentives everywhere. It’s a horrifically bad system that is deeply entrenched and that tends to benefit older and wealthier people and so would be very hard to change. You can escape the worst of it by leaving high real estate cost traps like the West Coast and Boston/NYC. Telework makes this easier. If you do go to those places just go for a while to establish your career and then leave.