Comment by brailsafe

Comment by brailsafe 2 days ago

4 replies

> 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.

ramesh31 2 days ago

>"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.

  • brailsafe 2 days ago

    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.

  • ethbr1 2 days ago

    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.

  • aianus a day ago

    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.