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Why Do Fewer Renters Expect to Move?

• grapeorangesoda 2mo ago
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  • realty_geek 2mo ago
    evidence?
• cautiouscat 2mo ago
  It’s getting prohibitively expensive. Before brokers fees were banned in Boston, a $2,000/mo apartment could have cost you $8000 just to move in. That’s for first, last, security and brokers fee. That’s a worst case scenario but even just first and last months rent is $4000. It’s getting outrageous.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 2mo ago
    Way back when I started my career - I almost COULDN'T take a good job in Boston, because I couldn't figure out how I could literally live there long enough to get my first few paychecks to pay for my rent. I decided that I'd just go into credit card debt and live in the crappiest hotel that I could find until I had enough money to pay the first/last/security deposit. Luckily, I found some shady landlord on Craigslist that turned out to be pretty chill, and just let me move in without even paying until I had the money. Dude even picked me up from the airport and moved me right in. It was kind of a rip-off for a room, but it was furnished, and I wasn't going to be in a position to buy furniture for months, so it worked out for both of us for 6 months or so. I do wonder... At what point does this start to impact who can and can't even move to your area for work? Have we already reached that point?
    • the_sleaze_ 2mo ago
      Easy fix, the department of defense has been doing it for years in Southwest DC. Just build corporate housing. Then we can have little Amazon towns where all your needs are met and everyone lives in perfect harmony in downtown San Fransisco.
      • morkalork 2mo ago
        Could even include Amazon store credits in the compensation package!* * Non-transferrable, no cash value, forfeit upon separation, taxes on items purchased with credits must still be paid in USD by user
        • the_sleaze_ 2mo ago
          Toss in a robot that folds laundry and I'm in
        • BobaFloutist 2mo ago
          As long as "no cash value" means they don't get summed in topline total comp, and that they can't be used to circumvent minimum wage, I don't see an obvious problem. If it's a bad offer, it's a bad offer. If there aren't enough good offers, forbidding a weird benefit probably won't fix that anyway.
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        As long as they stick to housing it could be an improvement over the status quo. Vertical integration isn't that unethical if you religiously stick to only integrating what would otherwise suck.
      • willmadden 2mo ago
        Yes, then we can build a company store where the slav... er, "employees" can shop and discuss how to be more productive on their projects!
      • jmyeet 2mo ago
        You're so close to realizing the point but the difference is between a dystopian future and a future worth living. Corporate housing, and worker housing in general, is what we're bouldering towards. The only way to extract further wealth from most of the population is for them not to own anything. It's the Western equivalent of South Asian brick kilns. What we need instead is social housing like Vienna [1]. Americans in particular always associate such thing with ghettoes and Section 8. And here's another problem: US corporations already keep employees and pay them less with the fear of losing health insurance. That's why the system exists. How much worse would it be if it's also your housing you'll lose? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY&t=242s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY&t=242s
    • eden_hazard 2mo ago
      Reminds me when I moved to boston for a job as a young grad. Found a room available for rent on craigslist for $400 in a 2 floor apartment. Half way through living there, someone bought the vacant apartment downstairs and turns out the room I was staying in was owned by the downstairs people so I had to change rooms. I think there's always a way to make these moves work. You just need to take a risk and be ready to suffer.
  • deleted 2mo ago
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• bobson381 2mo ago
  30 year mortgage is founded partly on the idea that your house will be worth more in the future when you sell it. That you can lock in a lower price now. Number cannot always go up. We are at the top of the carbon pulse. Financialization has taken us far from the material baseline of the rock we are flying through space on. Debt will only get us so far. For this and many other reasons, why would you believe a house "as an investment" is a reasonable thing to keep hoping for, especially 30 years from now? If you have even a reasonably stable rental, it's less risk exposure if you can save some money that isn't tied up in a down payment.
  • Yiin 2mo ago
    inflation disagrees with your premise, there is no reason why number can't always go up, there are plenty of countries that prove otherwise.
    • graceful6800 2mo ago
      Mathematics agrees with you, there are in fact infinitely many numbers. Physics and reality do not. Once the number gets big enough it loses all practical value. Humans are not really built to reason about very large numbers. At some point you reach Zimbabwean inflation and your currency loses all value because everyone is paid in the trillions. Then you reset your currency back to lower numbers because that's what humans and their systems can handle. So, no, the number cannot always go up. There is a practical ceiling beyond which numbers lose meaning and value.
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        There are some countries where a thousand or a million of their currency is worth a dollar. People just start thinking in thousands or millions. Heck, the dollar is already it. What used to cost a penny now costs ten dollars. We just think in dollars and forget about the pennies.
  • mono442 2mo ago
    Even if the house is worth less, the morgage is eventually paid off. Rent has to be paid forever. I can't even imagine renting when I'm retired and have less money.
• philipwhiuk 2mo ago
  It's bizarre to me that this is all couched in "expect". This is a financial problem - they have the actual numbers to know whether the responses are rational.
• 129487 2mo ago
  Because you cannot pay market prices if you leave your rent controlled apartment. Once you are out, you never get one again. Apparently that is beyond the high and mighty Federal Reserve employees who wrote this speculation. The housing market needs to be socialized.
  • linkregister 2mo ago
    A socialized housing market replaces exorbitant prices with a lottery; public-subsidized housing in Stockholm has a waiting list of years. The way to stabilize the demand curve is to increase to supply.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Sounds like it also puts the incentives in the right place. Why don't you keep voting out the government until it builds enough houses?
    • greenie_beans 2mo ago
      you are correct that we need to increase supply, and socialized housing creates more supply. great idea
      • linkregister 2mo ago
        Socialized housing is a management technique. It does not inherently create housing. Read about Stockholm's situation if you are interested in learning about the topic. It is indisputable that there have been successful socialized housing schemes. It is also indisputable there are successful free-market housing systems; for example, Minneapolis.
        • greenie_beans 2mo ago
          also indisputable that market forces cause developers to not build because the ROI is not there or it's too risky
  • 2mo ago
• beezlebroxxxxxx 2mo ago
  Where I live, there's just a growing sense that rent and homeownership are wildly more expensive compared to what you get. Lack of development in the urban core has made moving anywhere else (cheaper) entail buying a car, dealing with commutes, etc. It has also made moving within the urban core significantly more expensive, especially with rent control pricing limiting availability. Basically, from a purely financial perspective, the juice (moving) is not really worth the squeeze. The promises of WFH have also not come to fruition. The dream of moving anywhere and retaining your email job are not the reality in 2026. Employers seem actively hostile to that idea or are reneging on promises or claims that that "is the future".
• hno5b8kgpg 2mo ago
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• whitelimetea 2mo ago
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  • deleted 2mo ago
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  • gedy 2mo ago
    This reads as parody, but sounds like you are serious. What are some specific examples you've seen (without doxxing yourself of course).
  • throwaway613746 2mo ago
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• burlesona 2mo ago
  Comparing to the 1980s maybe misses that the population was much younger then, and there’s still a general trend of people moving more when they’re younger and settling down when they’re older. I would have liked to see the data broken down by age cohorts.
• danvoell 2mo ago
  I feel like US is too heavily weighted on incumbant "rent seeking" through law and policy. We were just in Tokyo and Seoul, the average costs of rents in New York City: ~$3,900 – $4,200 vs Tokyo: ~$1,200 – $1,350 and vs Seoul: ~$950 – $1,100. Renters will move if there are affordable newer options in cities instead of treating boomer asset holding rent seekers as a privileged class.
  • danvoell 2mo ago
    To add, renters not moving is a renter problem. It's a real estate owner benefit.
  • Decabytes 2mo ago
    It is very common in Japan to have to pay key money when moving in, which is typically 1-2 months of rent. This isn’t like a security deposit as it is non refundable and is basically a “thank you for letting me live here” Also if you are actually getting paid in Yen then the gap narrows between NY and Tokyo. Then there is the fact that your home could be destroyed in a massive earthquake but everyone has a different price for that risk
• jmyeet 2mo ago
  So I'm Gen-X. Statistically speaking, I have more yesterdays than tomorrows. I can't even begin to describe how much of a dystopian hellscape the world has become and is becoming. Many my age describe the 1990s as the last good decade. I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment in the 1990s for $200/month 3 miles from the city center. All my other expenses were less than another $200/month. The median house price was less than $80k. College graduate positions typically paid ~$30k but that was OK. This was pre-9/11 so all those old TV shows and movies you saw of people meeting people at the airport gate were very real. I've seen younger people think this was just a trope, like the 30 seconds the trace a call bit. No, that was real. Friends of a friend lived in Iowa and split a 4 bedroom house for $180/month. Not each, total. For younger millenials and Gen-Z, I honestly wish you could've experienced this world, for no other reason than to see that things weren't always this way and don't have to be this way. There's an old episode of the Cosby Show that had the father (Bill Cosby) teaching his son, Theo, about finances. It's funny watching it back now because it has the line "an apartment in Manhattan is going to cost you $400" and I remember thinking how expensive that sounded at the time. The absolute worst thing that has happened is how hoarding housing has become a retirement plan. It's simply stealing from the next generation and it's absolutely strangling the economy. Society is fraying at the edges. For anyone interested, there's been academic work on this that falls under the label of "the housing theory of everything" eg [1]. But what I hate most is how cruel, selfish and stupid everybody seems to be getting, in part fuelled by increasing desperation to stay above the rising tide just a little bit longer. And the ultra-wealthy constantly throw gas on this fire and torch the planet for what? So they can have $200 billion instead of $100 billion? What good does that do you if there's nothing left? But what's crazy is that a third of the population will defend Jeff Bezos in this equation. What you see in a lot of economic indicators (such as those posted here) can be read as people incradsingly see themselves as having no future. Continued consumer spending is not a sign of a healthy economy or optimism anymore. It's a sign of fatalism. The entire thing is honestly deeply depressing. [1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
  • gedy 2mo ago
    While I'm not glossing over real problems we have today (I'm also Gen-X), the 90s were not that great, you were just young and unencumbered. Healthcare was cheaper and more friendly, but not better for serious issues. There was such little information available about... everything? TV, Newspapers, and word of mouth, were about it. I'm surprised I made it where I am today with the random walk most of us took in life back then.
• thechao 2mo ago
  Housing values skyrocketed due to low interest rates. The prices are sticky and won't correct just because mortgage rates have gone up. That means no one can move. What we need is a large number of small houses (or owner owned multitenants) and a population willing to move into them.
• gwbas1c 2mo ago
  Moving is a pain in the ass, especially in today's world where we just have a lot of stuff. I moved a lot in my 20s, and really grew to hate moving. One year I moved into a place that I hated (because I could just move again) and when I moved out of that place into a place that I loved, I really grew to hate moving.
• mindcandy 2mo ago
  Maybe my feed is biased. But, I’ve been seeing good arguments lately that “The rent is too damned high!” is largely a problem created by voters. And, I don’t know how we’re going to fix that. Ex: https://youtu.be/yoT76zITRx8 https://youtu.be/yoT76zITRx8 TLDR: 60% of both left and right wing voters like rent control. 98% of economists oppose it. Even liberal lefty economists. Even though they support price controls elsewhere like utility monopolies. Rent control feels good in the short term, but is detrimental to the vast majority in the long term in a large variety of ways. The actual solution, to the surprise of no one, is to increase supply. Unfortunately, there was a paper I don’t have a link to showing that not just old NIMBY homeowners, but largely everyone consistently vote against measures that increase supply. It’s part of a larger effect where people measurably bias their voting against policies that sound like they will benefit rich people. Very similar policies in similar areas will get different votes depending on how the wording makes it clear the rich will benefit. Well guess who almost always benefits immediately from real estate construction? So… we keep voting to prevent construction and then complaining that the rent keeps going up.
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2mo ago
    > It’s part of a larger effect where people measurably bias their voting against policies that sound like they will benefit rich people. Blaming this on voters gives up the propagandists' game. A statement like "we'll make sure more houses are built to lower housing costs" does not sound like "we'll let business owners do business they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to do", even if they happen to describe the same policy.
  • deleted 2mo ago
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  • salemh 2mo ago
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  • archagon 2mo ago
    Rent control doesn’t “feel good” — it allows for housing stability in a volatile economic environment. Without rent control, I would be de facto evicted from my home with a 50–100% rent increase from the recent AI boom. (This is literally happening to other folks in my neighborhood.) Why on earth would I vote against it? Because some economist said so? (And no, it’s not 98%, you made that figure up.) Fortunately, you can have rent control and incentivize housing construction. These things are not mutually exclusive.
• tamimio 2mo ago
  This is just the surface of the issue, housing market problem is far deeper, and even home “owners” aren’t actually owning with their perpetual property taxes, which is unlike rent, uncontrolled. To solve housing for everyone, the solution is simple, it’s not building new units, that’s temporary, it’s not more regulations on whatever, that doesn’t solve the root cause, you need to solve that root cause and that is houses are considered an investment, not a shelter, and investments are always expected to go up, obviously it will reach a point that having a few walls of plywood is like owning a merchandise, it doesn’t take a genius to find this. So the steps to solve the toot cause as follows: - making housing as a depreciated asset, like a car, TV, whatever, it’s NOT an investment. Go invest and start a business that actually contributes to the economy instead of leeching on other’s wealth. - ban interest rates on mortgages, so banks aren’t incentivized to pour fake numbers into accounts and deducting fake numbers from other accounts as debt all while enjoying the sweet real money from interest. Once that is ban, they won’t give loans based on speculated prices, ending the daisy chain of using another house to get a bigger loan to buy a bigger house based on fake speculated market value. - relax the permits and regulations on owning and building houses, which is a big topic on its own. Among many other points that goes after the root cause, not some duct tape solution, housing is a shelter not an investment, look up any human needs diagram and you will find shelter is at the bottom of it, you can’t be creative or do great things when you are not settling in a house, you can’t think about making a business and contribute to economy if you are paying most of your income to landlord who take that to pay a mortgage so the bank can take the interest. Things now seem calm but most the new generation don’t own a house or ever thinking of owning a one, these soon will be the majority of voting and decision making, and it will be a brutal reaction on boomers and the overall selfish system that do anything to make their lives more miserable.