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Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

It seems regrettable that after having endless subsidies and encouragements to buy a family home, that people are insisting on keeping them long after there's any point in having a large house. Given the housing shortage in so many markets, this seems like another nifty way for the Boomers to pull the ladder up after them.

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I don't have a strong opinion on the subject but I recently read an article [0] that tells another story. You might find it interesting.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.de/millennials-vs-baby-boomers-b...

The article also says “Millennials buying their first home today are likely to pay 39% more than baby boomers who bought their first home in the 1980s”.

Real estate inflation has been dramatic over the last several decades. If there were really a glut of old people attempting to offload their paid-off homes on the market, the prices might drop to more historically normal levels...

I’m not sure how the statistics actually work out but if single or married people are staying in oversized homes for longer without kids, it does seem like that could affect the supply of homes for families with children. I know the UK had a controversy over a “bedroom tax” that tried to address this issue.

There’s a glut of homes for sale, in places with either no economic prospects or low desirability to live. More and more higher income people competing with each other in less and less land area = higher sale prices.

This. My Dad's home in a lagging industrial town in the Upper Midwest is probably only worth about 1.5x what he paid for it 40 years ago. He has well over an acre and the house is in great shape. No one wants to move there though, so housing prices are depressed.

He'd like to move, but would have to take on a mortgage in his 70s, so he'll stay put and my sibling and I will sell it for whatever we can get when he passes.

The "bedroom tax" only applies (applied? - I don't know what the actual status is) to state-subsidised/social housing.

>The article also says “Millennials buying their first home today are likely to pay 39% more than baby boomers who bought their first home in the 1980s”.

Interest rates were much much higher in the 1980s. So it's probably a wash and/or even less now.

Interest rates can be refi'd at a lower rate, but the amount you paid on the day you purchase it can never be bought down (there is inflation, which can reduce your debt load, but only if wages go up as well. We're seeing real estate and consumer goods increasing and most non-tech wages stagnating. Don't even get me started on the gig economy).

I plan on keeping my large house long after the kids leave. I need my space.

Do you really? Have you ever had the pleasure of trying to sell the house of a recently deceased relative? More often than not they are absolutely filled to the brim with literally tons of useless junk. Entire rooms, garages or even floors that nobody has set foot in for years which only serve to store things that were bought and never used.

It seems that once you reach a certain age, a house is primarily for storing all the clutter that accumulated in a lifetime, not for living.

Seniors should plan ahead and build a warehouse next to their house.

I bought mine without any subsidies, grants, etc. I have no desire to give it up, nor any good reason. There's new houses being built all the time, so no one must live in mine specifically.

> I bought mine without any subsidies

So you didn't deduce your mortgage interest on your taxes?

What mortgage interest?

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