Might be an unpopular opinion, especially in North America, but I think families living together is a great thing.
I have a wife and child, and we all live with my parents in a largish 6-bedroom house. They are retired and I support them financially. While they bought this house before I entered the workforce, I now pay the mortgage on this house. A few years ago we did a total rebuild of the house, and it's now a great living experience - something that neither my parents nor myself could have individually made possible. In a few years, as their health declines and they need support, it's easier for everyone that they are right here. Right now, they help a lot with childcare.
My wife and I - we just bought a second house that is fully rented out. While that one does not breakeven with its mortgage, it does end up being affordable.
My wife's parents and their son (my wife's brother) also live together. He is a doctor and supports them.
When I mention this to my coworkers or friends, the initial reaction is almost never positive. I've never understood that perspective. I don't mention it any more.
It's not a bad thing necessarily but it seldom works well practice. Dating as an adult living with your parents is super awkward. How many women want to spend the night at some guy's house and run into his parents in the hallway the next morning? Ick.
Ambitious, upwardly mobile people often have to move for job opportunities. Meanwhile their parents are often not yet retired and are tied to a different location by their own careers.
The interpersonal dynamics can be really toxic. Often the older generation has particular outdated ideas about household management, religion, cooking, and child rearing. Clear boundaries have to be set and respected or else there is constant conflict and resentment.
> Might be an unpopular opinion, especially in North America
I once had the opportunity to ask a Vietnamese immigrant[1], "What do you think the US could learn from Vietnam?" and his answer reflected this. He frankly thought it was sad that US families "fracture" when children move out early. He admired the independence and individuality he saw in the US, but the recognized the cost of it was atomized families and expressed a deep sense that his kids would relate to him differently when they become adults.
The average American doesn't have the social technology to interpret habitation with parents in any way but through the lens of individuality and independence. I have sometime to learn here too.
What do you feel like you had to learn to make your arrangement work?
A different situation but similar sentiment, I have young adult children, and they have both moved out and back in at various times and both my wife and I probably enjoy life a little more when they're here, the hustle and bustle and things going on is kind of more rewarding than just hanging out with the dogs and going on trips. We like having them here. I never really got the perspective that if they aren't moved out they aren't productive members of society. They all have jobs and friends and are doing well, having them around is not a bad thing in anyway and brings a lot of extra richness to life.
This is pretty common for people in other parts of the world (Asia, notably). IIRC, it was kind of normal in Western nations during the Victorian era. In North America today, there's this culture of independence and individualism which would rub many the wrong way to have their in-laws/parents living with them all the time.
My own in-laws stayed with us a few times for a couple months at a time. I must admit the level of shenanigans my wife and I normally get up to was much lower during that time, even though I thought it was nice having them around for a while. Relationship dynamics are probably a major factor here, as well as personality types.
Owning a house only to rent it out is part of the problem here. You're adding to the scarcity of housing while being blessed with parents who can house you.
You're blaming the symptom instead of the problem.
Given the current state of affairs, OP is doing the 'most logical' thing. If he sells his rental property, someone else will pick it up and rent it out.
The real problems are the rules that make it very difficult (practically impossible) to build high-density housing where it is needed and tax incentives that benefit owning multiple homes.
Being part of the problem is still being part of the problem. Agree that there needs to be a reduction of incentives, but folks could just stop taking advantage of the current system too. Logical doesn't mean right.
If they don’t take advantage, someone else will. That’s the entire point of what you’re responding to. You are at best attempting an ethics argument but ethics doesn’t always win.
It’s a broken system but this is akin to telling people to solve global warming by making small individual choices: it doesn’t work and we need larger action at the top to force the change.
Incentivized by low interest rates, terrible housing supply inelasticity, and a confidence that population (and therefore demand) will grow, owing to immigration policy. All of those can be adjusted. Mostly investors buy houses to sell at a higher price, not rent out indefinitely. If the property taxes and mortgage rates hurt their bottom line and if demand does not surge as high, they would sell and would stop buying.
This happened in the US when most folks lived in rural areas and did farming.
Families worked and lived together (the executive family) but this all changed due to industrialization and folks moving to cities which gave us the modern nuclear family.
Then you will see 1001 theories about why the population is declining. People in their 30's can't afford a house, let alone raising a family. A whole population inside a certain age group seems completely unable to grasp this basic reasoning.
> Two recent studies in the United States show, that in some circumstances, families whose income has increased will have more children.
There's a massive gulch between "too poor to have ubiquitous access to birth control and healthcare" and "rich enough to provide the upbringing I desire for my child". Most Americans exist in that gulch.
> But something happened to the American family over the last three decades: that downward slope became a U-turn. Women in families in the top half of the income spectrum are having more kids than their similar-earning counterparts did 20 years ago. Women from the very richest households are now having more children than those less-well off.
>>Give people enough resources and they'll have more kids.
Not sure I buy that - I know plenty of couples, each of them with good 6 figure salaries, who have no interest in having kids, ever - if they had 7 figure salaries, I don't think it would change their mind one bit.
> More and more American couples are choosing not to have children or choosing to have them later in life, according to Census data. As of 2022, 43% of U.S. households were childless, a 7% increase from 2012. The idea has become so common that the term “DINK” — double income, no kids — has emerged, often in regards to marketing and sales.
> And it turns out that going childfree is paying off: Couples with no children have the highest net worth out of all other types of family structures. The median net worth of a couple with no children is around $399,000 — over $100,000 more than it was in 2019, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances.
> Meanwhile, couples with children — who have the second highest net worth out of all types of family structures — have a net worth of $250,600, per the Survey of Consumer Finances.
> Some 44% of non-parents ages 18 to 49 say it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday, an increase of 7 percentage points from the 37% who said the same in a 2018 survey. Meanwhile, 74% of adults younger than 50 who are already parents say they are unlikely to have more kids, virtually unchanged since 2018.
> Among parents and non-parents alike, men and women are equally likely to say they will probably not have kids (or more kids) in the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, adults in their 40s are far more likely than younger ones to say they are unlikely to have children or to have more children in the future. Some 85% of non-parents 40 to 49 say this, compared with 37% of those younger than 40. And while 91% of older parents say they probably won’t have more kids, 60% of younger parents say the same.
> A majority (56%) of non-parents younger than 50 who say it’s unlikely they will have children someday say they just don’t want to have kids. Childless adults younger than 40 are more likely to say this than those ages 40 to 49 (60% vs. 46%, respectively). There are no differences by gender.
Right, low income causes kids, so what we need are more poors! We don't enact regressive policies because we want money, we only do it because we love you!
It couldn't possibly be that the causal arrow points in the other direction, that kids are an economic burden, cause hardship in an already economically strained population, and those who escape do so in part because they choose not to have kids. Nah, couldn't be.
Being economically strained is relative. Middle class people clutch their pearls at the thought of having children before they have completed their master's degree, have their 4 bedroom house in a safe neighborhood with good schools, maxed out retirement accounts, and a membership to Whole Foods. Broke people have a different idea of what necessities are so they have no problem pumping out kids.
This is not totally correct. One reason it appears that fertility is inversely correlated with income is hidden confounding variables. Among comparable populations (within the same country, as a starting point) income is positively related to income.
Wealthy nations have easier access to contraceptives and low child mortality, and women joined the workforce. It's not so cut and dry as a mere question of income. Even your source has a section for contrary findings and fertility j-curve when using HDI rather than GDP.
Yeah, well, after 50 years of policy choices between "make housing affordable" and "make housing a good investment" and always choosing the latter, they now have an enormous vested interest to look after. Even if it doesn't really make sense to blame the gays or tiktok, they're absolutely going to do it anyway because the alternative points to policy changes that could lose them their ill-gotten gains.
That makes sense, but it feels to me like the more educated and higher-income young adults are the ones delaying kids / choosing not to have kids. It feels like lower-income young adults are more likely to start families.
Seems to me very high income families have more kids, or otherwise, families with a stay-at-home mom will have far more children than in two-income households.
Among the pressures here is a lack of support from grandparents, the affordability of daycare, availability of maternity leave (and by extension, the tolerance workplaces will have for it and how often).
It's such that middle-class earners can see a dramatic change in lifestyle if they have more kids, which they don't want to compromise. In poor countries, it doesn't matter: the woman will stay at home, child mortality is high, you won't have contraceptives usually, etc. Another child is another worker (like the old days over here).
Higher incomes tends to correlate with better long term planning, and better controlled risk taking. Having a higher income also correlates with having grown up in a higher income household, and thus having more expensive ideas of what table-stakes childrearing looks like.
So, as some well paid techbro, I probably had a relatively well-off childhood, and my perceived cost of having a kid is going to include A) paying for their entire college education B) paying for childcare, because I met my SO through my similar socioeconomic social circle and thus they also have a career C) moving to the suburbs where I can own a house large enough to house a family and D) still maintaining a level of wealth such that I can smooth over any unexpected expenses/life events.
And with our medical system, children are like a reverse lottery ticket (to borrow a term I saw elsewhere on HN) - if they're born with a medical issue, they may take millions in care - something I've seen personally happen to coworkers. I've got enough anxiety trying to maintain my own health insurance.
couples with two generous 6 figures salaries are not generally the people worried about unexpected huge medical expenses - they have good jobs, and good insurance.
Tech jobs have had massive layoffs in the last few years. I've literally seen couples at the same employer laid off together. Certainly I've seen many colleagues with young children laid off and scrambling. My coworker literally told me a few weeks ago that her husband was laid off and as a result they had had to switch to our company insurance which was less generous. Tying your family's healthcare to the whims of your employer is one more risk that Americans are expected to endure.
It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
Why would you attribute decreasing fertility, something that affects every western nation on the planet, as something to do with US health care? It even affects Russia, China, Japan, literally every "modernized" nation.
People have had condoms and other methods to prevent pregnancy, but no one ever cared about the cost of kids before the last few decades. This is merely an excuse, for what is really happening...
Lack of fertility due to some environmental factor.
If it was cultural, Japan and China ... nations most divergent from US and Western cultures, would not be affected the same way. It doesn't matter about access to the pill, or other measures, nations with or without the pill in wide use have low birth rates. Nations strong on women's rights, and more "traditional" views on women, also have reduced fertility and births.
It's not cultural. It's not choice. It's not cost. It's not conscious.
There is, quite literally, something affecting a drive to procreate, which is entirely different from the drive to have sex.
Given that it's not cultural, and that it's not access to contraceptives, one has to wonder what it could be. Microplastics? Electricity? The types of food consumed, eg preservatives in modern foods seen in all the above countries?
There can be guesses, but no one is even doing any substantial research into this. Meanwhile, the planet's population is set to halve within 30 years. And if this trend continues, if fertility / birth rates continue to decline as they have been, we will likely be down to 500M people worldwide before the 2100s.
That is an immensely alarming trend, which leads to human extinction by the 2200s, due to "whatever it is" completely blocking all attempts to have offspring.
This trend also doesn't take into account a global plague, or re-emergence of world war, or devastating health issues due to global warming. Should that happen, with "loads of our current, younger offspring" killed in war, or by plague, the trend is astonishingly scary and disturbing.
Sorry to be a bit excessive in my reply, but the whole fertility thing is greatly disturbing to me.
What makes you think China and Japan have cultures "most divergent" from western cultures? Have you ever even been to these countries? I live in Japan and it's very much like a western country, though a couple decades behind in some ways (like smoking rates), and a lot safer (compared to the US where half the population is armed); the main difference is language, and that it isn't so individualistic. Birthrates are down just like other western nations, because of many of the same factors: contraception is readily available, women are educated and have careers which are incompatible with being full-time mothers (what I mean here is that a woman, anywhere, having a career is generally incompatible with parenthood).
If you want to see a highly-divergent culture, go to Afghanistan or parts of Africa.
The fundamental "problem" I see is that, in developed nations, women have rights and agency and are able to make decisions about their lives and bodies. This is fundamentally incompatible with a high birth rate. In traditional and religious cultures, it isn't this way. So I think we have 3 choices:
1) Continue on our current path, where women are allowed to be full and equal citizens, and see continued drops in birthrates, though some policy changes (financial assistance for parents etc.) might help a little bit.
2) Revoke women's rights and make them second-class citizens. Ban contraception and abortion. Don't allow them to go to college or have real jobs. Adopt a state religion that promotes having lots of children, and force everyone to follow it, or else. Basically, emulate the Taliban.
3) Adopt some rather radical change to society (and maybe human biology) that avoids #2 and allows for equality and freedom while still having the effect of birthrates over 2.1. I'm not too sure about what this might be, though I have some ideas that have variously appeared in sci-fi.
Oh I think it's ultimately modernity that's the cause; the "Death of God" as Nietzsche put it. As religion recedes around the world, humans have found no real replacement for the meaning it provided and perhaps no reason to continue things. I think that's ultimately why I never had any desire to have children myself; I see no reason to put them through the same suffering I went through to no real purpose and then presumably go on to face their own philosophical (and other) struggles.
That's me; I don't really know what reason everyone else has (though increasingly I find I'm not really such an outlier), but the more practical stuff like health insurance, cost of education, housing, childcare, etc... sure looks like death by a thousand cuts. Perhaps as you say they are excuses. I've been told that I must be bitter when I point out all the money I saved since I never wanted children, but really the main thing I've felt is relief - I have plenty of anxiety over the state of things, and knowing that I don't have to try and provide for dependents for a few decades is one of the things that keeps me from over-worrying. I've literally known people to kill themselves over such pressures, and I don't think I'd handle them that well either.
I don't want to tell you not to worry (when has that ever helped anyone?); you have the right to your feelings, but I think your timeline is quite a bit more aggressive than most current population projections.
Back then in those times, children were also your social security. Expectation and very strong one was that they will help you in the old age. Including when parent was abysive or conteolling. Expectation now is that you care yourself and kids have zero responsibility. Living with parents shameful, giving money to parent signifies lack of boundaries.
Plus back then, anticonception available to everyone was simply not a thing. Sex meant kids.
Nothing is more primal than procreation. Nothing. It predates religion, cities, agriculture, and humanity itself.
You cite a cultural thing, religion, but birthrates are down exclusive of culture, it is why I mentioned cultures quite foreign to the West.
You mention costs, which is why I mentioned historical birth control, for example, plenty of children were born during the great depression!
Let me put this another way. We know that tiny changes in the chemical balance of the brain, can turn a calm, cultured person into a raving lunatic. Just see what happens with an excess of calcium in the blood, for example!
We have a myriad of treatments for depression, for psychosis, for other issues often derived from more than pure genetics.
We know that levels of testosterone in males have declined.
Yet when I mention that the problem could be biological, most scoff. I find this, in my opinion, delusional stance to be quite concerning.
People love to believe that their actions, in their entirety, are the outcome of their rational thought.
But this is procreation, the most powerful, primal drive a species has.
Oh, I'm not all that dogmatic or sure of anything in life, so I don't think it's crazy to suspect some sort of environmental/biological factor. But I think the "Death of God" is reality; it's true across all cultures and people eventually realize it. My understanding is that religiosity is the biggest predictor of fertility.
What environmental factor would correlate with fertility? My understanding is that Africa and Israel as examples still have high fertility rates - what environmental factor are they missing that affects most of the rest of the world?
The healthcare costs issue is infuriating, because it's one that has an obvious, well-tested solution, that could be implemented tomorrow, if the gluttons in power chose to.
Financial instability will do that to ya. You finally achieve a somewhat comfortable lifestyle but that requires DINK status to keep up the mortgage payments and then you look at having kids and it pushes you over the edge because daycare alone is half your mortgage.
But when you thrive in financial instability and have a lifestyle that works with a parent that's out of work or not having stable income having kids doesn't add much to that.
Mmm-hmm, and the same group will jump at the opportunity to wag their finger and blame those lower-income young adults for the consequent economic hardship.
Somehow it works fine literally anywhere else in the world. My parents, who were both engineers, had me when they were living in a 500sqft flat shared with my grandma. Then they moved out to a 700sqft flat and had my sister :)
Of course, people in their 30ies could easily afford a house pretty recently, too - before post-covid-printing spike (when the fertility was already low), price-to-income ratio was only slightly higher than it had been historically; before even accounting for increased sqft of the new houses.
And until they see it they'll never work to increase their value and move on to a stage where they can afford a house. It's a self-fulfilling cycle destroying multiple generations at this point.
We have friends in their late 30's and early 40's who still live with multiple roommates. They're "well educated" but can't seem to hold a job, or stay in a relationship, or pay for anything. They've got subscriptions ticking away that they didn't remember they had, and then they're shocked to learn about an overdraft fee or a big credit card bill.
One of them recently got a high paying job at a medical office and then abruptly quit because "there weren't any photos of black people on the office walls." They like to remind everyone of how broke they are, but they have new cars or new car leases, a new iPhone every other year, and seem to have plenty of money for weed. Lots and lots of weed.
When they do get a job, they're always the victim, nothing is ever their fault. Or they'll complain about how much work they have to do, or how fast they're expected to move. But they do nothing quickly, it's like their neurons don't fire. They'll spend 30 minutes in a dazed state trying to figure out how to arrange groceries in a single bag.
And they're always late, to everything. They're late to dinner, to gym class, to the movies, to important events. It doesn't seem to bother them at all. Being late is part of their "woe is me" disposition.
They're all good people, but their brains are a gelatinous mess and they exist in a perpetual state of helpless confusion. Lights are on, no one's home. They got a master's degree but didn't learn anything about how interest works?
We've tried to help in any way we can. We've helped them with job applications and basic communication skills, taught one of them about credit card statements and due dates, and helped another pay down and close out 15 rewards cards.
Yeah yeah, there's lots of nuance that I've left out, lots of reasons for the current condition of a large demographic, lots of reasons for families to live and stay together. I'm just saying, I am constantly surprised (especially when hiring) at how careless and sluggish some people are about...everything.
So now what? Now that you realize that the majority of people are not high performers, which is totally fine by the way, what are you gonna do? No amount of neglect, shame, coercion or otherwise is going to change that. People aren’t dumb (I mean some are) they are reasonably hopeless. And that’s perfectly OK, so what are you gonna do about that? I hear lots of people say we need fewer people or those people just didn’t need to not have kids. OK who? I’m not sure how you make this claim without landing at some kind of insane system which rank values people.
In fact, there is a singular solution, and only one solution. A healthy community that cares about people individually and finding the right place for them in society as their full selves.
There are more than enough people on this planet for us to all take care of each other. The fact that our resources are put primarily towards self gratification is an indictment of the structures that have been created, not a reflection of some foundational natural order.
The people you describe do not sound like the vast majority of people I know. The couple of people I know like this are on the "wake and bake" plan, so of course they can't understand interest or plan ahead or really any of that normal adulting.
same here - some people just have a 'peasant mentality' mindset that will cause them to make bad decisions/self-sabotage themselves their entire life because they identify themselves as someone that struggles to survive, even though they wouldn't have to if they just got with the program even a little bit.
Every single part of this is a red flag for the "failure to launch" crowd. Welcome to professional victimhood.
> They got a master's degree but didn't learn anything about how interest works?
I don't know where and when it started, but the advanced degree is the cherry on top-- people with no need for them seeking advanced degrees to delay adulthood another four years. They rarely have jobs in the interim, because someone else is footing the bill.
> But they do nothing quickly, it's like their neurons don't fire. They'll spend 30 minutes in a dazed state trying to figure out how to arrange groceries in a single bag.
Nah, their neurons are firing. They got a Master's, remember? Or are advanced degrees actually that worthless that we give them out to people this braindead?
They're quick to respond to "triggers," and very quick to point out anything you do that could be problematic to someone in a remote region of Laos. They don't miss a fucking beat to detect transgressions of others.
Bagging groceries isn't as exciting as scrolling Instagram, so they put as little effort into it as possible. If they get fired, they get unemployment, or can try to make a discrimination claim for someone not respecting which pronouns they were wearing on Tuesday.
You'll find these types on /r/illnessfakers and /r/maliciouscompliance deliberately sabotaging anything they're expected to do for themselves so they can throw themselves into their safety net (usually parents, other times e-begging).
Provocation and lying by omission (crybullying) is the name of the game. See also the "parents threw me out for being gay" crowd. Never get involved until you've dragged the kid back to their house (they will fight and resist, hard, alleging violence, but you as a witness should only help their case, right?)-- you'll often find their room intact and worried parents waiting for their return. Anyone who legitimately hates their kids will throw them and every memory of them out into the street, like dogshit-- and be quite transparent about why. That's what hatred looks like.
The precursor will have been being asked to stop bringing up the subjects of enemas and anal prolapse at the dinner table, at which point they cried oppression and ran away.
For 60 years, the machinery of our society has been laser focused on assuring people that they are victims in all avenues of life. Why should we be surprised when they and their children and their children’s children start to believe it?
I think these kind of individual experiences are not useful to explain the overall issue, there are a statistically relevant amount of people who can’t move out and so don’t have kids, if countries want to remain relevant and not suffer from a demographic decline, the issue need to be solved, now someone can’t hold a job, someone might he smoking weed, it’s irrelevant, the solution has to be found at scale, without focusing too much on single cases
According to Census CPS which I consider a better primary source than "BlobStreaming dot org" the fraction of 25-to-34-year-old Americans living in their parents' household bottomed out in 2000 and went up about +50% since then. 2020 dislocation was just a little blip on a larger long-term trend. Another blip of similar magnitude happened in 2011 after the financial crisis.
Florida CoL is driven by out-of-staters (specifically New England snow birds and retirees). earned money out of state and then buy vacation properties or primary residences.
No-income tax attracts people living on a fixed income (gained by being employed out of state via Social Security, Pensions, and traditional retirement accounts).
Florida income cannot compete with NYC income, even if there is no income tax.
You just end up paying more sales tax and/or property tax in states without income tax. If you don’t directly pay property tax, your landlord does, and they pass the cost onto you.
States need money to operate, and they’ll get that money through taxation.
I’d actually be curious to see a table that shows ‘tax revenue per citizen’ by state, which includes all personal (non-corporate) taxes.
Take your pick. Rents from Monroe to Alachua are sharply higher (from 2019) (>2x higher for us). I've no reason to suspect different for Panhandle counties but they don't make the news often. No counties have been spared from home & auto insurance increases (+80% for us).
I'm in my mid 30s and have always had a decent job with relatively decent income, but the cost of living has always made it impossible to save enough fast enough to get a down payment on a home. Now I finally have one, but with interest rates it seems like a poor financial decision to buy a home when I can rent the same quality of home for half the price. I feel for kids starting out today, I can't see how they will ever thrive in this world unless they work in big tech and have a really high income. Inflation has crushed everyone but the most elite workers.
Renting makes sense for many reasons. Sounds like it makes sense in your situation. Some people are too quick to buy a house for the wrong reasons. Also. remember that you can refinance if the rates drop.
you might be able to refinance if rates drop - it is not a guarantee.
If you overpay for a house, and then you owe more than it appraises for around the time you want to refinance, you are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of lower interest rates, unless you are also in a position to also pay down the mortgage as part of the re-fi.
You never actually own a home anyway. The property taxes rise relentlessly every year (the rent you pay the government). Then there's all the code and zoning laws to greatly restrict what you can do with it.
Ownership is a legal fiction. You "own" something as long as you can stop other people from using it. Property taxes are just what you pay the government to enforce your claim.
> Property taxes are just what you pay the government to enforce your claim.
Around here the endless new levies have nothing to do with enforcing the claim. They're all for various social programs. I think the latest one was to fund free dance classes and other art projects.
That depends almost entirely on local ordinances and, if you have one, your HOA. The far side of the spectrum where you actually have significant control over your own property is great, I'm just not sure it's very common.
All those things stack up though; if you rent a house in an HOA neighborhood you’re still accountable to the local government and the HOA, it’s just that you’re also accountable to your landlord on top of that.
I've never seen a house as restricted by HOA or local ordinances as the Internet would lead me to believe, so I'm on the side that it very common to have a lot of control over your house.
Property tax is something you have leverage with the government on. You don't have to just deal with what they say you owe them.
You can sue the county to get your fair assessed value lower, in order to lower your property taxes. The HOA of a condo I once owned had to do this, because values plummeted, and the county just insisted values kept going up and we owed them more and more tax.
I know a guy who somehow pays 0 property tax on a $500k USD house (don't ask me how he finagled that, but he comes from a rich family, married into a richer family and is quite shysty).
There's also more esoteric techniques like getting some parcels rezoned as farmland (which carries little to no tax burden).
But to your point (and another commenter's), there's a variety of ways a government can assume ownership of your land, even if you own everything free and clear of any debts or owed taxes. (See: Imminent Domain) In this world, you only really own something if you have the might to defend that ownership.
My prediction is N-plexes will be built, allowing homeowners to rent out portions of their property, but still give them privacy and flexibility in the future.
I was in SF until the pandemic and now live in another area of Northern California, but it's now just as expensive as SF was when I left in 2020. The catch 22 is that remote jobs may not last forever and the trade off is the cities near jobs have high cost of living and the cities with low cost of living have no/low paying jobs. Hard to know what the right thing to do is. Do my wife and I buy a house in a lower cost of living area and hope our jobs stays remote permanently? It's really just hard to know since there's no precedent for this. And if in 5 years everyone is now back in the office either full-time or part time, doesn't that mean prices will crash in those towns that went up in the pandemic?
That's true, but jobs outside of metro areas are nearly non-existent, or pay peanuts. Moving out of a metro area typically puts you in, maybe, a bigger home, but the pay is drastically lower. Food costs, internet, phone, vehicle, etc all cost nearly the same (if not more expensive), so you're probably doing even worse moving out of a metro area.
Beginning with the first setence on your first link:
"Over the past several years, the housing market has become increasingly unaffordable to families. Mortgage rates have skyrocketed while wages have remained flat, and then sprinkle in supply shortages, the pandemic, and inflation."
I didn’t say outside of a metro area, I said outside of the West Coast metros. The rest of the country does exist and many of us own homes and have jobs. If you live in San Francisco it’s probably easy to get the impression that everyone who isn’t a multimillionaire either pays $6000 a month to rent a studio apartment or lives in a tent and poops on the sidewalk, but that’s not what the rest of the country is like.
It's a situation that is affecting all metro areas, both West and East Coast. For sure, the West Coast is on a whole other level. But I live an hour and a half outside of a southeastern metro area where the average salary is $17/hr with 1-bedroom apartments going for $1,400/month and minimum wage is still $7.25/hr. Which $17/hr doesn't even qualify for.
Just stating that this is heavily affecting East Coast non-metro areas, largely due to a fear of change in these communities and a refusal for any local or state governments to take any actions.
This study was also done during 2020 which may have had some other confounding factors with it, of course I can't think of what that could be.
Part of the squeeze is that we have the largest age demographic, the boomers, in a stage of life in which they are highly unlikely to move, whilst still living in their homes. This issue will sort itself out shortly.
At the same time you had incredibly low interest rates which led to many people who already had established credit and assets the ability to borrow against it and move it to real estate in order to find a stable vehicle that would hedge against inflation.
The final, and I consider biggest, factor is the fact that the government start indirectly subsidizing housing, which means there was now a massive pool of money that could only be spent on housing available, and the economically predictable thing happened, which was the price of the thing increased substantially because now there was a large portion of money that could only be spent on that thing. As evidence of this the 3 things that seem to be increasing in cost the fastest, and that people complain about the most, Healthcare, Education & Housing are all heavily subsidized by the government.
My point being that people have short memories, this housing crises, will eventually pass given time, as long as we don't do anything stupid to make it last longer.
I initially wanted to disagree with you, but I think you're right.
One unmentioned consideration is why the gov wants people to own their home:
Put simply: homeownership (and home value appreciation) results in better end-of-life outcomes compared to self-managed cash.
People are bad at saving, but they understand if they don't pay their mortgage, they will lose their home. Tapping into that equity isn't as easy as accessing money from a savings account.
isn't it almost always true that older people - people who have been working for 30-40-50 years will have more money, on average, than people that have just entered the workforce?
Once the boomers are all gone, will we just start blaming the next oldest generation for all of societies problems?
> Part of the squeeze is that we have the largest age demographic, the boomers, in a stage of life in which they are highly unlikely to move, whilst still living in their homes.
These days we have the millions of people crossing the border into the US. They'll all want houses, too.
Many border-crossers can't afford to buy houses - probably most of them - but they do put pressure on the lower cost apartments and are competing with low-income citizens, which drives up the price of the lower cost apartments, which has the effect of increases demand and prices all-the-way up the food chain.
That's true. It also happens the other way. Building more luxury homes will reduce the price for non-luxury homes. This is because the wealthy will not be bidding up the prices of the non-luxury homes because there will be luxury homes available.
This effect is not recognized by people who decry the building of luxury homes.
Saving for a down payment is largely a fool's game, at least in many areas of the country. Prices tend to rise faster than you can save thus putting you further and further behind.
If you want to own your own home (and not everyone does or should) then a better approach is to take advantage of one of the various low down payment mortgage programs. Focus on credit score and cashflow rather than down payment. This is somewhat risky in that a temporary reduction in income can quickly put you into a foreclosure and bankruptcy situation, but it works out in the end for most consumers.
I understand that from a social policy standpoint it doesn't make sense for governments to encourage rapid residential real estate price inflation or high levels of leverage. But from a personal finance standpoint we have to work with the system as it exists rather than expecting it to change.
If I had done that in 2015, sure. Doing it now when the Case Schiller index is at an all time high seems like a bad idea. I just don't know how many years it's going to take for things to correct--so it might end up being a waste of years I could have been building equity if prices don't drop more than the amount of equity I could have built in that time.
Last time we had an article about this sort of thing (a few months back?) the difference wasn’t big between generations, at similar ages. Under 5% difference between current 20-somethings and the Boomers, IIRC. Up, but not that much. This could be a different dataset though, I dunno.
This article has a graph going back over a century. The percent of young adults living with parents in 1960 was only 29%, so I'd say the current value is pretty significant.
Based on how much I read about loneliness in America these days, and the lack of dating/sex, especially among men, it seems like extreme isolation is increasingly common in the US.
My parents were of the kind who believed that children should be out of the house by 18 but a decade later with current economic situation, they've agreed that I can move in. Unfortunately there are no tech jobs where they live and my partner doesn't like the town so that's a challenge.
My life is a constant struggle against 'the culture' aka 'the brainwash'. I would live in a tent on some island if it was purely up to me.
My wife had highly expectations, especially when we met so the fact that she is willing to live with me in poverty today is already stretching my persuasive capabilities. Convincing her to live in a tent is outside of my capabilities as she hates camping.
That's a pretty important confounding factor. I wonder if there is anything that happened in 2020 that would've made acquiring new housing more difficult.
Seriously any "social science" that was done during the pandemic should probably be thrown out, because of the massive unprecedented alterations to all of society. Even if you found something out not impacted by the pandemic how would you know?
Relying on information about social behaviors and societal changes during 2020 without acknowledging the massive impact of the pandemic is like studying mortality in young adult men between 1940-1946 in Europe without acknowledging that there was a world war going on at the time.
We actually have built more housing where the population has been growing. 2006's wild speculation really killed the builders. But overall population growth is going down to nearly meet new construction.
We need before, during, and after studies. There's no reason to throw out the ones made during the pandemic, they just need to be put into a greater context and compared with what happens next.
Europe was like that. Your primary and only real social security was a familly. You had property, but not much savings. Kids were expected to provide for their parents in old age. Secondary was a village.
It was like that in 19century too, I am not talking about some ancient history.
The US Social Security surplus will be depleted in 2033 (https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html), after which point Social Security will be paying back the same amount that people paid into it. People of my generation who are becoming parents now will receive few social security benefits over their lifetime.
As the program currently exists, my generation is being robbed of money that we could invest ourselves.
It's useful to everyone because as soon as more than 2 people sit down to discuss fixing it everyone has their pet thing that absolutely cannot change under any circumstances. So you end up with half the room saying "you can't cut benefits 1 penny" and the other half saying "you can't raise taxes 1 penny" with 80% of people saying you can't raise the retirement age 1 day. It's a classic stalemate where whoever gives first ends up giving up most of their side.
The reality is that if we're going to keep this type of ponzi scheme around through the death of all the boomers we need to raise the retirement age 5 or 10 years, cut benefits by 20-30% and raise the SS taxes by 20-30% in addition to eliminating the income cap on those taxes. But imagine trying to get something that comprehensive passed that pisses off both sides that much.
I have a wife and child, and we all live with my parents in a largish 6-bedroom house. They are retired and I support them financially. While they bought this house before I entered the workforce, I now pay the mortgage on this house. A few years ago we did a total rebuild of the house, and it's now a great living experience - something that neither my parents nor myself could have individually made possible. In a few years, as their health declines and they need support, it's easier for everyone that they are right here. Right now, they help a lot with childcare.
My wife and I - we just bought a second house that is fully rented out. While that one does not breakeven with its mortgage, it does end up being affordable.
My wife's parents and their son (my wife's brother) also live together. He is a doctor and supports them.
When I mention this to my coworkers or friends, the initial reaction is almost never positive. I've never understood that perspective. I don't mention it any more.