I hate these articles.

Please tell me more how that down payment assistance program will help you buy that $1m house you mentioned, Mr dude.

(Narrator: it doesn’t. I don’t mean to rip dpa’s cuz it’s a good idea, but there’s little way it can help people in locations with crazy housing markets. If you make a salary that qualifies, there is still no house you can afford that’s not a tear down. If you make more, you don’t qualify so you still can’t afford it.)

😡

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiegold/2023/08/08/heres-how-gen-z-can-become-homeowners/

@Beanc Give it a few months. The apartment market is beginning to soften. Housing is probably next.

https://fortune.com/2023/09/18/rental-market-softening-lardlords-offering-deals-says-redfin/

@Coctaanatis I appreciate the optimism, but the improvement required when median houses are 10-20 times median salary is….. if solved by softening.

As the author notes, the house he grew up in , accounting for inflation whatnot, would be about $250k and sold for over $1M.

It’s untenable.

@Beanc There's a mean trendline. We're currently well above it. Historically, that means prices will drop quite a bit.

@Coctaanatis

Sure, but that chart proves my point (although CA specific, the issue isn’t).

The price index is the baseline.

Houses are five times more expensive than one (or two) generations up *at the baseline*

Said differently, that house that is $ 1m + in the article will *never* drop to the 258k it would be just accounting for inflation, that older generations saw the joy of.

@Beanc Older houses really aren't comperable to modern houses. Most were much smaller, lacked air-conditioning and building materials were lower grade. Fortunately, most of the really bad houses, think coldwater shotgun shacks, tiny capes, etc., are gone.

Also location makes a huge difference. As cities and suburbia have grown, so have median house prices. But in many rural areas houses are, even at today's inflated prices, relatively inexpensive.

@Coctaanatis @Beanc: The home I sold in 2016 for $145,000 because that was what it was appraised at then was on the market again earlier this year for $235,700. It's a 2,010 sq. ft. ranch style house on one acre and with a nearly matching rental house less than thirty feet to its west. The house is a modular built in July of 2001. There are 1.5x as many houses within two miles as there were in 2001.

The house is NOT worth $235,000.

@thedisasterautist @Beanc Prices are very high now, but if you see my earlier comment, real estate prices regress towards a mean trend line.

(And, yes, I used one for California, but it applies more broadly.)

Prices well above the trend line are a good sign not to buy as historically they tend to peak and then fall back to the line.