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Housing costs are so high that divorced couples are still living together
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://archive.today/AojlN https://archive.today/AojlN
- jeffbee 3y agoSuppressed household formation is the reason why increasing supply often doesn't look like it's working. There are tens of millions of people who want to move out of their current situation into a smaller household.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago~16% of 25-35 year olds life at home with parents. I imagine a much smaller percent prefer that if not for financial reasons.
- geodel 3y agoTrue. I feel it could slowly become cultural norm as independent household becomes out of reach for more and more people.
- Aeolun 3y agoI dunno, I like my parents. I could think of worse ways to live than with them. But to be honest I guess I'd rather have the reverse of my parents living with me. 20 years of 'this is my house and...' is enough :D
- alex_lav 3y agoI own my home and will be selling it at probably-a-loss next year because I have no use for it anymore. It's far larger than I need and I am no longer partnered. I'll be renting a studio or 1br and am very excited. I would love to sell this place to a young family or couple looking for a starter home.
- toast0 3y agoWait wait wait. Building housing is inducing demand for housing. We shouldn't build new houses nor new roads because clearly neither improves anything. /s
- nine_zeros 3y agoI know of 50 year olds living with roommates in SF Bay area.
- Eumenes 3y agoIf presented the option of living in the bay area with roommates in my 50s or living almost anywhere else but having my own place, I'm picking the latter every single time.
- lambdasquirrel 3y agoI think I was one of those roommates…
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoHow's the afterlife treating you?
- timeagain 3y agoCounterpoint: living alone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A good roommate is as hard to find as a romantic partner, but living with people you like is one of the greatest joys of life.
- jackblemming 3y agoEat the bugs, live in the pod.
- shiroiuma 3y agoSure, but living with people you don't like is absolute torture.
- kredd 3y agoSometimes we joke with my old roommate (we live by ourselves, on different sides of the country) how both of us would absolutely move into a 4-bed apartment and be roommates again. We had a very good thing going on for 6 years, but I guess, gotta do the grown up stuff and live alone. It's not serious at all, since we both enjoy our solo-life, but also...
- anotherhue 3y agoNew financial instrument idea: Husband-Default-Swap?
- henry2023 3y agoTwo-sided quote for 10m 1y puts on this. Please
- bombcar 3y agoThis is basically the remarriage market, after all.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- x86x87 3y agowould get a new husband, but the mortgage rate are so high that i'm going to have to stick with the current one!
- rokkitmensch 3y agoMarriage insurance! Pays out in case of breakup. No perverse incentives! It would be an awesome market though. I wonder if you could reasonably price the risk with a large enough pool. Tangentially, I pine for the sci-fi world where I could have signed a five year marriage instead of an indeterminate-term one. At 18 I was barely smart enough to avoid the college debt trap. At 23...
- owenpalmer 3y agoCan't wait for a talented comedian to make a routine out of this xD
- codersfocus 3y agoAccording to the article's comments, there was a movie about this exact scenario that came out in 2006. Maybe this scenario is an indicator about housing bubbles.
- willcipriano 3y agoI think we are also seeing lower divorce rates and suspect a rebound once the economy picks up and as this generation of children ages.
- geodel 3y agoYeah, this is terrible. A robust divorce rate is must for healthy growing economy.
- Spivak 3y agoThe assumption is that there is a "idealized" rate of divorce that would exist if all impediments were removed. The actual divorce rate being close to this is a signal of high economic mobility across the economy and vice versa. I like it tbh, it's a good big mac index. I would bet there's also an idealized rate of people finding their endgame that is much lower than the marriage rate and getting closer to that trends with high social mobility.
- capn_duck 3y agoI interpreted the parent comment in the inverse. A poor economy means people will stay in unhappy situations longer than otherwise.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- threeseed 3y agoUS is indeed seeing lower divorce rates. I do wonder if it's correlated to the decline in couples having children. [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statistics/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statist...
- brailsafe 3y agoIn the same paragraph it's also stated that there's a proportional decline in marriages, each declining by ~2 per 1000
- fatbird 3y agoThis is actually not an uncommon situation among the lower classes. Even without high housing costs, the working poor often continue living together while divorcing because they can't afford to physically separate. My employer worked on an e-divorce webapp for the provincial government and had to include this scenario in generating the self-filing paperwork: you essentially attest that you're maritally separated but still cohabitating for financial reasons. Of my several divorced friends, all have agreed that divorce is the most expensive way possible to become a two-house household.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- latency-guy2 3y agoThe Tantone's situation really weakens this article for me, rate hikes were entirely telegraphed by Powell, and they bought during the beginning of that spree. Further, you were always going to lose money, there are very few situations in which anyone could come out better in 1.5 years into a mortgage, their plan was essentially wait at minimum 3 years (ride up, -some time passes- , then the ride down, however long this process takes) hoping for an event that has only happened once in the fed's history. If their situation was removed, I think this would be a decent article.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoReal estate agents always have a narrative about why you should buy now. For example, if rates are rising, a good story is that other people are holding back from buying due to rising rates, therefore buyers are sitting out, there is pent-up demand. This was your last change to get in before prices explode when the fed tapers. We know this is wrong with hindsight but it was widely believed. You can’t expect people to predict the course of the bond market.
- latency-guy2 3y agoReal estate agents don't wrap your brain in a plastic bag and throw it out the window over the course of days/weeks/months into a search for what is likely to be the single largest purchase you will probably make in your entire life. Hindsight is not relevant. > You can’t expect people to predict the course of the bond market. If you can't "predict" fed fund rates, then why make predictions on the housing market? The thing that the governments both state and federal is heavily vested with. I think your reasoning is quite flawed. The Tantone's situation is one of unpreparedness and shortsighted to say the least, which as an insurance salesman looks pretty terrible.
- marifi 3y agoThat's all good and well, but people have been living together after divorce for a long time. This article seems to be nothing but anecdotal data. You almost had no choice but to do this before the '60s. Divorce has always been expensive, and people choose to cohabitate for financial reasons. Perhaps people have been cohabitation after divorce at higher rates since the Fed has raised interest rates, or perhaps not. But it would be nice if this article would show some statistical data over the long run on this. Do we even have any reliable data on rates of cohabitation after divorce?
- janalsncm 3y agoIt probably shouldn’t go without stating that many separated women couldn’t establish credit on their own or open bank accounts. Banks weren’t required to lend to women until the 70s. My grandmother had this issue after she divorced.
- chrisco255 3y agoWomen could most certainly establish credit and open bank accounts and own real estate, even as far back as the 1800s. My great grandmother raised three children as a widow in the middle of the Great Depression. Being a widow was quite a bit more common in those days as war killed a lot of young, married men with children. And disease took quite a few others. At any rate, she worked a factory job, and owned her own house. And ran her own checking account. There were even programs available to women (and men) for obtaining a mortgage, such as the FHA program established in 1934: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FHA_insured_loan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FHA_insured_loan (this program is still around)
- janalsncm 3y agoThe point is that discrimination against women was widespread enough that it required a federal law against it in the 70s to rectify. That doesn’t mean discrimination always happened or it was impossible to get a loan or open a bank account. Just like the 1964 civil rights act. It’s not that discrimination against race or sex or religion always happened, but it happened enough.
- hodadawod 3y agoHousing prices have the potential to be infinite due to the infinite cost of producing redundant land. The land on which houses sit can't be produced. Someone owning all the existing land would ask for any payments and couldn't be refused unless the consumers wouldn't want to live anymore. So when we are talking about housing, we have to be careful about qualifying the price as a bubble. There's underlying value underneath that can warrant any price.
- tssva 3y agoWhen we 1st separated in 2011 my ex-wife and I along with our young daughter stayed in the same house for about a year. It was definitely not the most comfortable of situations but I've had worse living arrangements in my life. After selling the house we both rented town houses. We should have done more communicating about that because we unknowingly ended up renting 2 doors down from each other. That was the living situation which couldn't end soon enough.
- climb_stealth 3y agoWhat gets me is that this wasn't even your worst living arrangement. I hope things have been moving up for you since.
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoIt could work well for some people. One of my father's cousins swapped wives with his best friend. They were quite amicable about it and continued to be friends including going on holiday together.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoVariable > enum ;)
- tomcam 3y agoJust write the sitcom already ;) I find the situation to be in equal parts discombobulating and fascinating
- tssva 3y agoMy worse living arrangements were before this happened. The severely bi-polar girlfriend who stopped taking her meds and the alcoholic roommate who would become violent come to mind. I currently live in a refurbished and expanded 19th century farm house on a 209 acre property with a horse farm which my fiancee owns. I retired in August at 54. I spend my days taking care of the property, horses and our daughters while my fiancee is off to the city during the week for work.
- WheatMillington 3y agoThis is not a new phenomenon.
- threeseed 3y ago> Housing Costs Are So High They left out the "in the trendy, inner city areas we want to live in" part. Because whilst housing prices are rising in cities we are also seeing major declines in populations for smaller towns. And whilst our parents were willing to sacrifice and embrace these towns which in turn became gentrified it doesn't seem current generations feel the same way.
- robjan 3y agoThe work is in the cities
- ethanwillis 3y agoEven if it is it doesn't invalidate the argument. Outside my "city" you can get housing for much much cheaper and have the same commute as if you lived in the city itself. But at some point you're going to have to give up this notion that population density can be made infinite. At some point you can't simply cram more "work" into a city.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago> But at some point you're going to have to give up this notion that population density can be made infinite. Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore would like to have a word with you.
- mlinhares 3y agoOr any big city in Europe? Sometimes I wonder if Americans travel out of the US at all.
- RestlessMind 3y ago> Or any big city in Europe? Many big cities in Europe are having housing crises of their own - Lisbon, Amsterdam, London etc. Just today, there was this thread bemoaning the housing situation in Netherlands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444948 > Sometimes I wonder if Americans travel out of the US at all. Sometimes I wonder if people know real facts about Europe or just have some rosy imagination or generalize some tiny corner to the entire continent.
- yieldcrv 3y agoOne of the homeless studies in San Francisco several years ago found that of first year unhoused people, 20% of them were people that simply broke up with a partner they were living with. The bigger realization was thinking about the not depicted complement of that graph: these were the proverbial strong ones that actually left I could see that reality spreading across the country.
- freetime2 3y agoThis is actually a really bizarre concept to me. To me, the reason to divorce someone would be that you are so incompatible that you can't bear to live with them. And this would come after a period of separation where you test out the waters and make sure that divorce is definitely the correct path forward. If you still get along well enough that you can live together peacefully, you might as well just stay married!
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoThe issue would be when people want to be monogamous with someone else, I would guess. New partners might have issues with that living arrangement.
- financltravsty 3y agoYou would be flabbergasted to know the lifetimes of Las Vegas weddings.
- markwkw 3y agoI sometimes wonder how people managed in the 19th century. Many went from villages to increasingly crowded cities. With no savings, minimal or no education. Industrial production was ramping up, but with crazy demands on workers, long hours, no safety standards. Couldn’t get a mortgage and wait for a nice corporation to build an apartment for you. Couldn’t look for a place in suburbs (how would you commute). Somehow our grand-grand-grand ancestors managed. Seems astounding. On the other hand, in coming times of global depopulation, what will housing situation look like?
- newsclues 3y agoDrunkenly
- RestlessMind 3y ago> I sometimes wonder how people managed in the 19th century. In very harsh conditions. Looking at the history of the 19th century with all the wars, financial crises, social upheavals and whatnot.
- tropicalbeach 3y agoThey were just less sheltered. I mean many people in countries across the world live in worse conditions. To be honest most people in America have become so comfortable that they just look for problems to make there lives seem harder than they really are now days. I would be willing to bet people were also happier back then too.
- greenhexagon 3y agoIf you're genuinely curious, I'd highly recommend the book "The Road to Wigan Pier" to get an understanding of working class life was like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
- faeriechangling 3y agoIsn’t this just a return to the historical norm? The details of how assets are split up, how many kids there are, and the attitudes towards “infidelity” are different but two grown opposite sex adults cohabiting to shelter themselves with less resources all seems extremely normal. If anything we’re leaving a bizarre point in history where maintaining two residences is seen as easier compared to working things out amicably. If anything it should help with the birthrate and demographic issues.
- toasted-subs 3y agoSeems like we need actual marriage counselors.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoRule 0 of life: Choose a spouse carefully. Don't get divorced because it's financial suicide.
- sagarpatil 3y ago[flagged]
- ddmf 3y agoEx and I tried it until we were at a point we could sell, but then things got worse and I moved out after about 3 months. It's really tough when you add conflicting emotions and that feeling of limbo into day to day living - especially when there are now blurred lines of how you used to interact vs how you should interact.