Housing is already affordable in the United States compared to other countries when you compare median house price to median income.
If you want to see where the United States is headed go look at London, Vancouver, Paris, etc.
As urbanization in the United States accelerates for many reasons, including climate change, I see house prices in desirable areas increasing even further.
Ditto. As an European I envy how affordable real estate is in the US compared to Germany for example. My US boss at the time had bought a nice big house with a garden in the suburbs of the Dallas-FW area, way cheaper than something similar would have cost in the suburbs of Munich, where our office was.
Case in point, most of our US colleagues had big houses in Texas which they owned, while most of the Munich team lived in small apartments which they had to rent. Quality of life is nice in Munich, but the real estate market there is crazy compared how good the US has it.
Ive seen many old houses for sale in Germany for ludicrous money, that you'd basically have to tear down and build something livable.
It is all about what the market can bear (and it can bear a lot these days, thanks to incessant money printing)
You're comparing apples to oranges. You're comparing one of the cheapest major cities in the US to one of the more expensive cities in Europe. According to Zillow the median home price in Dallas is just under $300,000 but the median home price in Seattle where I'm currently renting and trying to buy a home is 3 times that at $900,000. So please don't tell me how good I have it in the US with real estate. With how large and diversified the US is, a more fair comparison would be to compare Dallas real estate prices to say a city like Bucharest and compare Munich real estate prices to a major US city on the west coast (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle) or the northeast (DC, New York City, Boston).
Prices in Paris are pretty much the same as the prices of SF, but the salaries are way lower (3x lower, and the taxes are almost as high as the ones in California).
So yeah, I'd say you have it pretty good in the US :-)
[1] https://www.noradarealestate.com/blog/seattle-real-estate-ma....
Unless you made mistakes in the units of the stats you provided.
10.7 x $535 is $5,724 per square meter in Seattle.
Which is less than 1/2 of the $11,686 per square meter in Paris.
ChuckNorris89's point is that his boss is able to afford owning a large home in Dallas, a major US city, while he and his colleagues in Munich can only afford to rent much smaller apartments in Munich, a major German/European city. Telling him that a "more fair comparison" would compare Dallas to Bucharest won't change the reality ChuckNorris89 is recounting.
Strictly in terms of how their cost of housing compares to their larger geographic areas (US and Europe), yes. Both are less than the median. In all other aspects, no. I personally haven't visited any European city that's as equivalently awful as Dallas.
My point was you can't just look at Dallas and assume that all real estate in the US is affordable and that everyone in the US looking for affordable housing has it easy. The problem is ChuckNorris89 took Dallas then applied it to the US in general in their comments.
It would have been equally incorrect if someone had said, "as an American I envy how affordable real estate is in Europe compared to California for example. I have a bunch of colleagues that live in Bucharest and they can live in very cheap houses while I'm stuck in a small, extremely expensive apartment in Los Angeles. Living next to the beach is nice in Los Angeles, but the real estate market there is crazy compared to how good Europe has it."
The housing crisis is a meme basically centered around 15 locales in the states.
Yes, because that's where the people are. The housing crisis heatmap is pretty much the US population heatmap ( https://xkcd.com/1138/ ). Houses are cheap in the vast emptiness of the rural US. The EU doesn't really have similar unpopulated areas.
Manhattan, density of 70K per square mile.
Levallois-Perret, density of 67K per square mile.
Manhattan, $1.5K/sqft median price
L-P, $1,177/sqft median price
Manhattan median household income - $118,161
L-P median household income - $59,758.46
It's not even close...
Do you think people in Manhattan on a $118k/yr income are buying real estate? (They're not)
United states is cheaper compared to other countries no matter how you slice it.
Why don’t you just accept facts lol. People in other countries have to spend more of their income for housing.
Feel free to post data showing how affordable other countries are for their citizens
But I see the posters point, the US is larger and more diverse than one European nation.
But this isn't a solution, it's a tautology. If people started moving there, they'd become expensive, too. The population level interpretation is that inflows should equal outflows everywhere, which is statistically impossible unless the government decides where you can live. Who wants that?
And it very well maybe that there is no solution to the problem of people having to scrimp due to high real estate prices. People may inherently want to compete with each other and agglomerate into highly desirable areas.
In reality, as we are seeing in Idaho, despite large swaths of undeveloped land available, the homes are still skyrocketing in price due to lack of inventory.
Of course all of the demand directed all at once without adequate supply will result in price increases. But people incorporate the fact that some places will never have enough supply simply due to lack of sufficient land. In that sense, a house in a popular part of Idaho will always be more than a house in Iowa.
This isn't a solution to the cost of living, and in fact it would make it much worse. If people were spread out evenly over Idaho, the cost of shipping goods and driving to work would explode, not to mention power transmission, broadband, sewers, etc. Ascribing the current situation to some "desire to be competitive" which somehow appeared in the past three decades and was absent in 1900, is not compatible with comparisons to our past or other countries' present.
Paris has roughly five times the population density of Washington, DC. We're not out of space. We're using it badly.
Meanwhile, there are parts of coastal California that aren't even expensive:
Idk why people keep thinking it’s a cheaper way to do things when we know that it isn’t. It’s like no one here has read any of those strong towns articles.
Also the rate of increase is not fixed. Areas with more propensity for development will see smaller price increases compared to areas with less propensity for development.
It’s more complicated than simply supply and demand, though it does reduce down to that in the end
That's clearly untrue. You're claiming there isn't a systemic problem, I'm claiming there is.
>It’s more complicated than simply supply and demand
It's never more complicated than supply and demand; it's just that supply and demand are, themselves, both very complicated. If housing was just determined by such factors as climate and price, everyone would move to Silver City, New Mexico. Despite fantastic weather, relatively low prices and a beautiful mountain setting, it has seen a sharp population decrease over the last decade.
This isn't a matter of people being irrational, or "wanting" to live in "desirable" areas. It's a matter of people needing to live in productive areas. Denial won't make it go away.
>>>> Housing is already very cheap in places no one wants to live in.
>>> But this isn't a solution, it's a tautology
>> No one said it’s a solution, I’m simply describing reality, as you’ve also concluded.
> That's clearly untrue. You're claiming there isn't a systemic problem, I'm claiming there is.
I have no idea who you’re even responding to.
The fact is, in 2014, I was planning to move to Portland, which, in 2014, was much more affordable than it is today. But I found a job in San Francisco before I found anything in Portland. That didn't happen because I thought San Francisco was desirable, it happened because people, except for the very few who make a lot of money working remotely, do not move somewhere simply because they want to. Otherwise, I would have moved to Costa Rica.
"Housing is already very cheap in places where there are few jobs, poor services and little infrastructure." See the difference?
Studies actually show the exact opposite.
"Rapid urbanization is making people more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, according to a new UN report" [0][1]
[0] https://unfccc.int/news/rapid-urbanization-increases-climate...
[1] https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2017/sbsta/eng/inf03.pdf
"The frequency of torrential rain and storm surges is on the rise in big, densely populated cities like New York, Mumbai and Jakarta, hitting those living in marginalised, informal settlements like slums the hardest."
Also, large cities tend to be on the coastal regions -- that's how they first became large cities, by being accessible to ports in many cases.
Why would climate change force people out of the Omaha suburbs to Manhattan? I just don't understand the logic here at all, but maybe I'm missing something.
Maybe make those places more attractive to live, to take the pressure off the high-demand places.
How? This is a catch-22 that every run down city is trying to solve and can't. People don't move in because the places have no good jobs, investments, infrastructure, teachers and doctors, while the investments, jobs, doctors and teachers don't come there because there's nothing waiting for them there.
I've seen the same in Europe. Most good jobs, schools, doctors, etc, are all coming only in the big cities where all the talent is, and all the young talent is moving into the big cities, where all the good opportunities are. Catch-22.
The "build it and they will come" fallacy has failed way more times than it has succeeded. Companies know it and employees know it. Only governments and politicians seem to think otherwise when their election is on the line.
I've seen it numerous times in my city. Every now and then there's big PR from the mayor and the university rector about how they'll turn $SMALL_EUROPEAN_COLLEGETOWN into a major tech hub, and years later down the line, no major tech companies have shown up. Rinse and repeat every ~4 years, while most grads and companies are moving to the capital city.
>There probably needs to be some sort of guarantee that they will.
Nobody can guarantee you anything for the future, neither governments nor companies. The only truth is the present we live in and that's why most migration, public and private investments mostly happen in big cities that were already popular and wealthy, while the smaller cities with no investments are dying a long and slow death. It's a rampant and often unfair inequality but that's the sad reality.
I don't work for a company that can sponsor me. I'm not running a business that employs other people.
I'm just a person with a sufficient income, who wants live in small town USA and pay into the local economy for stuff I use.