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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

>"if you can rent cheaply enough for 10-20 years the boomers will start dying in sufficient numbers that if there is somehow no reversion on home prices in the mean time there should be insufficient buyers at that point and prices will eventually fall"

But that "10-20 years" is your life, and there's no getting it back. Millennials (the largest generation in US history) have entered into our prime family starting age, and the fact that most are priced out of the housing market right now and stuck renting apartments is a complete tragedy. At a 90th percentile income, I can just barely be able to afford a home and provide for a family of 3-4 like our parents and grandparents did on a highschool education with no higher skills.

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Yeah, it definitely feels like the TFR crisis where the actual problems won't show up until it's too late and we're basically turbofucked.

I doubt your parents instantly bought a house as unskilled workers at age 18. Maybe in a very few ultra cheap housing markets that would have been possible.

For example in 1980 in SF the median home was $130k and the median household income was $16k. Today it’s $1240k and $141k. So yes it’s less affordable but it’s hardly a massive difference as you imply.

In the rust belt this was the norm.

I have figured out my father working an unskilled factory job in 1970 made about $40k adjusted for inflation in order to buy a $40k starter home in early 20s.

Union job with a pension that he is still collecting right now after retiring at 55.

No college. Not even sure he has ever read a book in his life. I would say all you had to do was not be an alcoholic and you would be fine but even that is not true. Even the boomer alcoholic fuck ups I know did pretty well and retired early.

I'm assuming you adjusted his income for inflation, but you didn't adjust the price of the home he bought?

Starting? The Millenials are in their 40s! You'd better be well into raising kids by your 40s.

This might be a bit of talking past one another. The rent vs buy argument should be comparing similar housing, but your comment bakes in the assumption that renting=apartment. That may be true for your area, just wanted to point out the dissonance.

> most are priced out of the housing market right now and stuck renting apartments is a complete tragedy

It absolutely is, but as one of those myself, I just refuse to even attempt to pay their prices and will make the best of life while renting and doing other things, not having kids, not owning property unless the ratio changes dramatically. Owning at most a tiny condo for half a million where I live, or moving to the boonies to own marginally more for less is simply not appealing to me, it doesn't unlock anything but a vague sense of security and a shit ton of liability. I hope more people choose the same until the working age tranch of purchasing power isn't as available as they'd like and prices have to drop. It's a major issue, but maybe I should be thankful I never adopted the boomer/genx dreams of owning a place and having a family or whatever. It's something I'm morbidly watching from the sidelines for now (in my early-mid thirties), but there are no circumstances except a miracle side hustle that could create the circumstances for me to actually pursue a mortgage on a place in my city.

>"I hope more people choose the same until the working age tranch of purchasing power isn't as available as they'd like and prices have to drop."

You just have to remember and keep in mind that the game is rigged. Housing is far from being a completely free market in this country. The structural political forces entrenched in maintaining home prices is second to none, from the top federal level all the way down to city councils, in a completely bipartisan way. The crisis of '08 was a generational event that we're not likely to see again in our lifetimes. Flattening and dips for sure, but a crash will not be allowed to happen; they'll just print enough to fix it, and leave the burden of inflation to anyone not owning assets.

Well, if we want to be technical about it, the 2008 crash did happen because some structural forces (banks) were perfectly happy to originate highly risky mortgages in exchange for higher face value rates.

Which had the side effect of allowing a lot of people who couldn't otherwise afford homes to purchase them by allowing them access to more leverage than they likely should have had.

So wealth isn't always aligned.

Agreed on every point, except I'm actually in Canada, so it's partly because housing didn't crash here that we're arguably even more turbofucked, afaik anyway. Although our current administration would like every working age person to believe that it's solely because of your president that we're screwed economically, the writing has been on the wall for a while; too much of our GDP is made up of residential real estate sales and the rental income generated by the scarcity of them and going into the pockets of people who borrowed endlessly against them.

If they print enough money your other assets will go up (maybe enough to buy a house that has stayed flat in nominal terms)

This is basically the situation with housing in Canada actually, it's been down/flat in nominal terms since 2021 but if you owned US stocks during that time while waiting to buy then Canadian real estate is now much more affordable to you.

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