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- Majority of people own their homes. So it’s in their best interest for the housing prices at the very least not go down.
- Less, but still, some amount of people are buying houses with sky high prices. After a huge purchase, they will also do their best to ensure prices don’t go down.
- Another good chunk of people are waiting out to inherit homes from their parents.
All these people, in one way or another, will protect asset prices (e.g. voting for certain people to ensure nothing gets built). The only ways I can see it being resolved is:
- China-style benevolent dictatoresque commitment to surgical detachment of housing prices from the general economy (they’re trying, a lot of people are unhappy, but some progress is visible)
- Population collapse, to reduce the demand. But looking at Japan, metro areas will keep skyrocketing, because people will flock to the main cities even more
Any of the options will make a lot of people unhappy. A huge political no-go zone.
All the talks about allowing construction and streamlining the process have been circulated for a decade+ at this point. But incentives for people aren’t there. “I got mine, don’t care about you” is the general attitude of majority of people.
People are generally selfish and will want the best for themselves and their loved ones.
But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation).
Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.
If you could avoid a $700 car payment and still get to school/job/grocery store on time, a lot of Americans would.
But if you can't, and you are paying $700 anyways, why not at least use the fact that you're paying $700/month to travel anywhere and get a bigger parcel of land all to yourself? There's a big incentive to have single-family homes for rent as long as that math is true.
And if you can live in a dense area and get around OK, but paying $700/month saves you from $800/month in private school payments, then the math might still make renting SFH better even if the transit is there.
Meanwhile economic stratification continues and the other side finds it increasingly difficult to make the down payment.
But you shouldn’t have to make a leveraged loan-backed investment in a single asset class in order to afford shelter.
The problem isn’t ’housing is an investment’, it’s that people are long not on ‘housing’ but on their own single specific house. That’s a horrendously undiversified portfolio.
By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.
It should be super expensive to own more than one house. This by the way is what China did where Xi Jinping famous said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [1] as he quietly popped the real estate bubble a decade ago.
Increasing house prices are just enriching the already rich and stealing from the next generation. Nothing more. Houses should depreciate in value. They should not be an asset class.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
The main issue is mismanaged regulation, as always. Real estate is probably one of the best examples of that. For example, in my city of Portland, OR, it's easier to keep an existing structure and not build new housing than to build new housing (because then you can do things by right). To build new housing, you have to hire a company called 'faster permits' (seriously, that's what it is called, look it up) which promises to 'expedite' the process of having things approved. If you, like me, are skeptical of engaging in investments in which you have to bribe your government to approve housing, then you won't put your money into building housing. Portland is probably not alone in these sketchy arrangements, which is why real estate developers often seem sleezy -- due to how the government manages itself, only the sleeziest people are willing to engage at all.
If you claim that people "don't want to work" for those wages, then isn't immigration keeping our wages down?
Wouldn't business owners pay more for labor if there wasn't a stead supply of under the table illegal immigrants doing it for less?
Immigration is what made America great.
I disagree with the Ultra-YIMBYs who believe in removing all zoning and regulation. If you do that, you get Houston. Because that's what Houston is. What we need is to prioritize living over investment returns in housing. Part of this (IMHO) is to have expansive social housing like Vienna to compete private land use "honest". Also, we should really not allow rich enclaves. There should be social housing in every ZIP code.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
The statistic that doesn't compute for me is how is it possible that we're having a housing crisis while at the same time we have historically low average number of people per house.
I'd like to see the actual statistics method used to calculate that. Saying it's marriages alone just doesn't past the smell test for me. Just because people aren't married doesn't mean they don't live together and the number of unmarried people living together is higher than ever. What makes far more sense is the number of children people have has fallen off a cliff which drastically drops the number of live at home adult children.
It's basically this graph. In 60's almost nobody was living alone (less than 400k people). In 2024 about 3,3 million people live alone. When you look at the infographic, ages 30-60 add up to like 1,2 million people.
https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-...
Here we have an estimation that the country is missing like 400k houses. So if two-thirds of those 1,2 million married each other and started living together, they would nicely plug the housing crisis by freeing 400k houses.
Either way, we have a huge societal change that lots of people live alone, which did not use to be the case.
It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately affects people's sense of content and wellbeing. Also, doesn't help that laws and government policy heavily favor home owners (perhaps because home owners vote at a lot higher rate than renters)
Well said. Being told that 'you should be happy without owning' to a party that can't afford to own by another party who is actively scooping up the same resource can feel extremely invalidating.
My personal take is that a lot of support for contemporary political extremism in many countries comes from the fact that a significant portion of population is pissed off and see no realistic chance of the 'settle down and thrive' life, not because they are racist/prejudiced or whatever (although labeling them as such only makes things more extreme)
It's not really coming from those though? At the same time that housing costs have ballooned, we've also had a significant migration back to cities. When a larger % of the population are living in high density locations you are going to naturally have a larger % not owning homes. Owning your own home does not align with the density required for a city to function.
At the least, narrowing down the topic to 'Why do people rent instead of own a condo?' is a much more meaningful topic over 'Why do people rent instead of own a SFH?' since a condo is a more viable option in locations where most of the renters are.
Perhaps wealthy actors (or those representing them) are attempting to distract the aggrieved—focus their anger toward some non-wealthy group.
Not all policy is easy to understand, but I feel (anecdote) that lots of folks don’t want to understand what isn’t an obvious benefit to them, especially if benefits accrue over a longer period.
That's been a long standing element of capitalist propaganda: attempt to distract and invalidate people's real, legitimate complaints about their situations by noting that not even the Kings of old had color TVs and refrigerators.
Who cares if your housing situation is insecure, getting healthcare is challenging, and politically you're dis-empowered? Look at the boob tube and rejoice at your good fortune!
BLS says housing, transportation, and food are the top 3. Insurance/pensions is #4, but that also includes car and homeowners insurance and retirement contributions.
Over the past 50 years, both transportation and food got cheaper. Moreover, clothing actually used to be one of the top categories, but that’s fallen off completely.
So clearly something is going wrong with the way we deal with our mass transit as well if Paris can do things for a fraction of NYC.
[1] https://nypost.com/2017/06/25/it-took-50-years-for-the-mta-t... [2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-cant-new-york-contr...
When reality seems to be in conflict with logic, the next step is to question assumptions.
We're currently living in a time where some of the issues are being hidden by the nature of a global market - it's friggin impossible to make any good analysis with a global market, it has just too many influences and ways to hide criteria...
Definitely true for my household. The mortgage, college for the kids, and health insurance for a family takes up a huge amount. Not to mention the housing expenses like HVAC fixes, trash collection, sewer, utilities, etc.
“You have lies, damned lies, and then you have statistics”
In every developed country two of those are basic human rights, and you get them free even if you’ve never worked simply because you don’t want to.
Every developed country except one, that is.
In Europe its only housing, and still proportionally cheaper than what US has, often in higher quality for older homes (bricks / concrete vs cheap creaky wooden houses).
The idea of saving massive amounts for my kids potential university studies is ridiculous to me. Same for any health issue. I mean any health issue as long as I can work, and then social state takes over (that is not ideal but at point nothing is).
This is also how happiness can be defined - lack of (much shorter list of) constant worries and pressures to deliver, sustain etc.
My home is rated to survive earthquakes stronger than any in recorded European history without structural damage.
You are mostly right and the structural incentives are more related at root to unsustainable national debt than any legislative choice (unless that's what you were referring to)
It's clear that there's plenty of money to go around. It's just that none of it is being spent on things that improve people's lives, mostly due to corruption.
As a driver and measure of well-being, it’s probably at least 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.
Community is IMO easier in apartments, the higher density means there’s a bigger pool of folks you might click with.
Community gathering spots are more prevalent as well: pools, playgrounds, green spaces, etc are common amenities. Especially if you get a dog, you will meet lots of people.
Of course it depends on which complex you live in. If I move I will miss my apartment and its community. I won’t miss my window aircon though, central air would be awesome.
Yes this is feasible, but respecting it as a design problem, renting is more transient than ownership and tilts the floor away from deep communal relationships.
Comparing the neighborhood I grew up in with the one I now live in is night and day. My mom has had the same next door neighbors for 44 years. Up and down the street there are many similarly familiar persons.
By comparison, from my own front door, I can only physically see two houses that are owner occupied. There are good neighbors (and friends!) in the rental houses as well, but investing in those relationships pays off with lower certainty because circumstance is very likely to uproot them at any given moment.
This isn't really how the transition to agriculture worked. Historically agricultural elites captured lands with conscripted armies and forced people to farm. There are plenty of examples where central authority collapsed and the archeological evidence shows us that people largely stopped farming.
Farming came first, and with it came larger communities and higher population density. That led to surplus, which enabled elites and other forms of existence beyond basic subsistence. And that lifestyle mostly spread organically. Not because the agricultural elites didn't try to conquer hunter-gatherer societies, but because there were so few hunter-gatherers to conquer. Conquered lands were mostly farmed by descendants of farmers from neighboring regions, because they formed the majority of the population.
With no army to protect the farm, there can be no farm. A return to hunting and gathering would occur as an effect of warfare, regardless of whether or not the farmers have any choice. But hunting and gathering is still obsolete, whereupon agriculture is possible.
Obsolescence does not by definition imply permanence.
That being said housing has gotten worse for both buying as well as renting. I think there is a case to be made that having a place you feel comfortable/home in (whether rented or owned) affects people's wellbeing disproportionately.
In the end, home ownership is more based around the kind of life you want to live than costs/benefits of the house as an asset. As a Canadian I see that many of my friends would choose to pay a lot more each month on the principle of a mortgage than they would ever save in a registered account.
N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder".
The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.
A year ago, my partner and I bought a small house a short distance (40 minutes by car) from the city, and I moved into a much smaller, cheaper, and less central apartment in the city. I still spend a large part of my time in the city, but I’m also at the house regularly, especially on weekends. I’ve been much more relaxed ever since, because I know that I can give the city’s rental market the middle finger at any time and retreat to our house.
It's probably not just homeownership, but the cost of real estate as a whole. And not even just residential. Isn't the often-lamented "loss of third places" at least in part due to those places not being able to pay rent unless they heavily monetize?
I've also heard the theory that the arts often take off in an area when real estate prices drop and it suddenly becomes possible to build cheap art studios and such. No proof or anything, just something I've heard random people talk about online, but it makes some sense.
Recently the trend in food and consumer products getting cheaper has also reversed.
Do a search for "the housing theory of everything".
It has been an idea growing in popularity over the last few years, especially in the Anglo-sphere where housing/shelter costs seem to be worse than other places. (One hypothesis I've seen for this is because of Common law, which can give NIMBYs more power to challenge (new) things.)
;-)
Certainly many would prefer to own if that’s a possibility, but easily the worst part of renting for most I think is the need to move periodically, whether that be to keep housing costs within budget, because their landlord decided they’d like to give the condo to their niece, or because the their apartment complex changed hands and the new corporate giant owner is doing a terrible job at managing it.
At least, that’s why I hated renting. If I could stay the same place for 10+ years without getting priced out, without being kicked out for the landlord’s personal use, and without corporate enshittification (which often takes place alongside rent hikes), I doubt I would’ve purchased.
Owning isn’t a perfect bed of roses but at least my costs stay somewhat pinned and I don’t need to move unless I personally decide to. It’s such a weight off my shoulders that I won’t need to go through the stressful ordeal of apartment hunting every year around renewal time just to have options in hand in case things don’t work out.
Land where people want to live is scarce. Obviously a variety of factors but one of them is that land is bifurcating the way income is. Small amounts are growing in value rapidly and the rest is declining (or growing more slowly). Urban property is skyrocketing, rural property in coal country is struggling.
No one ever thinks they're living through a Golden Age.
So you're probably wrong on all points here.
[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/SGP
[2] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA
I'm curious what people are quibbling with here? Romania has the world's highest rate of home ownership at 96% and only ranks as 34th in happiness. Or maybe Kazakhstan but I can't verify the data on that, and it's right beside Romania in happiness. Switzerland has the world's 4th lowest rate of home ownership and ranks 10th happiest. It seems like from a data perspective there is no empirical support for the idea that home ownership directly correlates to societal happiness.
which means they are happier than 35th, the France, which has double GDP per capita
So you're probably wrong on all points here by your own data
Living in the same place now for years makes it too easy to just hold on to junk, it makes it too easy to just fall into the same routine.
There's some pros and cons each way. It really depends on what you're wanting in life at the moment.
On top of that having that high mortgage or even rent hanging over your head, making sure you can't really downgrade work to something more fun but maybe less paid can be stressful too. Especially in the firing season where you might be let go and take months to find new job.
And housing taking higher and higher part of the income is also effectively getting us poorer or at least stagnate.
And that leads us to "only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income" - precarity does matter. If I am one sickness or two paychecks from not being able to pay rent, it causes a lot more actual real material insecurity then "having slower phone while everybody else has equally slow phone".
Likewise, if you have trouble to find a job, fear of loosing it makes you work 12 hours a day in a job you hate, it affects you a lot more then whether you can stream movies.
Policy doesn't "favor" favor homeowners. It screws everything else because it can.
You wanna add a deck to your home. You pay the people the government says you need to pay a grand or two and you're GTG (by which I mean, good to spend further money actually doing the project). Landlord wants to add decks to his triple decker so that he can make the place nicer (more $) while also hitting the egress requirements bird with the same stone and it's an instant 4-5 figure bunch of bullshit where half a dozen worthless interests who add nearly no value in the base case exercise their enshrined in law right to sink their teeth into what should be a petty project.
And it's not just some slum lords triple decker, it's a 10-unit condo, it's those new luxury apartments and on and on and on and on. Everything about owning property, improving property, etc, etc, is ungodly expensive and exclusionary because there's a mile long list of jerks with their hand undeservingly in the pot.
Don't get me started on the financialization that underpins all this, it's just as tileted too.
Policy "favors" homeowners by somewhat exempting them from the worst of this because the buck stops with them. When they get screwed there's nobody else to pass it on to, so they push back.
Additionally, buying a house is probably the easiest way to build some kind of generational wealth. It's easy to see this as yet another way the older generation is pulling up the ladder behind them.
Is that your intent in posting it?
Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine.
> Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine.
commonly mistaken with communism, yes.
Country having strong social services and caring about their citizens is not the same as communism.
No, Levit said that in 1948, when Americans were vastly better-connected (socially) than today, "Godless Communism" was their #1 fear, and everybody was aware of communism's easy appeal to those who felt dispossessed.
I'd read the quote as a clever way to say "let me sell millions of cheap houses to Americans, and you'll never have to worry about the commies".
But once you start digging and thinking, you start realizing that it's not true.
I understand that most hackers reading the above sentence are already raging, but were you actually there to know that things were worse in the past, or has it been hammered so strongly into you that you're now greatly offended at suggestions that it isn't true?
In general I think that nobody would be willing to go far back in time. You don't need YouTube, but would you want to live without it? How about electric lights? Safe drinking water? Flush toilets?
In a world without clocks, no electric lights are needed. The safest and highest quality drinking water comes from springs and streams, still today. Flush toilets aren't needed if you live rurally. And so on.
Not to forget, that the less you are used to comforts, the more physically and mentally fit you will be as a person.
Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value...
Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...
I'm pretty sure "stuff" in this context is mostly manufactured goods, and those have fallen in absolute price. Examples abound in the tech sector: even adjusted for inflation, a MacBook Neo is the cheapest Mac ever released, and so on...
A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. In 1970, which was when boomers were about the same age as Gen Z is today, only a third of americans had air conditioning. Today it’s almost 90%—basically only the people in very temperate climates don’t have it.
Or maybe we measure what is easiest to measure, not what is best.
I see this everywhere, though. Jobs data is really job openings not actual hires. Unemployment data is really paperwork filing not people out of work or retiring early. And now home ownership is really "count everyone in the home if the owner resides there".
It’s even worse than that, it’s not counting people at all. It’s number of houses with at least one owner living there divided by total number of houses.
The two measures are both great measures of house ownership that measure different things. The article frames the second one as better, and if you are looking to see the ownership proportion of people (for example as they note to look at the numbers of young people who live with parents) thats great. If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy you might care more about the standard owner occupancy per household.
I often see this with respect to GDP/GDP per capita vs mean income and other economic measures, but its great to see a non economic measure like this compared in this way.
Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?
Basically right now we measure "what fraction of homes are occupied by an owner" and not "what fraction of people live in their own home?". It seems bleedingly obvious that the latter is the number we should be maximizing, if either. And in particular it seems to me that a lot of argument about the former is actually using it as a proxy for the latter anyway.
No one cares about the poor homes who don't have local owners!
Non-occupants contribute very little to the actual value of a place - they don't work here, they don't buy here. But they capture much of the value of other people trying to make the place a pleasant place to live, though rising real estate values.
I don't think you can get any of these situations non-organically. But schools and worker dormitories have a lot in common. More than most seem to admit to.
You're just using it as a proxy for people owning homes. It's not a given that the two numbers are always opposed.
Stipulate that owning a home is good.
As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down (you can only occupy one home at a time). Homeownership might rise or fall while this is going on. But that doesn't matter; the number of homes going up is good, so the fact that the metric falls when it rises tells you that either (1) the metric is "evil", rising when bad things happen and falling when good things happen; or (2) the metric is incoherent and doesn't carry information about whether things are going well.
Incentivizing ownership is more closely aligned with objective (1) while owner-occupancy is more closely aligned with objective (2).
These don't work in the presence of capital's outsized returns though, which allows people who (for whatever reason) have access to more capital to recursively seize more of the growth in land values from objective (1) and therefore price out objective (2).
Right, so you want to know how many people own homes, not how many homes are "occupied" by an owner[1], which is at best a proxy, right? Sounds like you're agreeing with me but just getting the sides of the argument mixed up?
[1] As the article points out, a single person can in fact "occupy" more than one home!
Culturally, in many countries it helps with household formation (coupling, starting families), which, in an age of low birth rates, can be useful.
To maximize fraction of homes with their owner living inside, you focus on the ownership _and_ the lifestyle choice. A family living together is the best use of land in this case. A family renting a side room to a college kid is still the best use of land. If every home were lived in by its owner, you could still have 90% of your population renting and not building generational wealth.
No, if you look at the first example explaining how the two metrics are calculated, it is clear that both spouses are considered homeowners for HPOP.
Or they could... both own the home? Independent of the rest of your argument, this is a pretty weird hypothetical case to illustrate your point. Joint property ownership is way more common than any of the "alternatives" you're suggesting, so it's hard to take what you're saying seriously when you've dismissed the obvious way that this would work for the overwhelming majority of married homeowners.
If you rent make sure you vote. Make sure you have an informed vote, all too often cities will put rules on rental units that make renting worse for you. (bad tenants and bad landlords exist - good tenants and good landlords need protection from the former). Likewise while rent obeys supply and demand, when property taxes go up that factors into supply and will make rent go up indirectly - is it worth it? (I cannot answer the later question - the more important consideration is make sure the taxes are similar for rental and owned units otherwise you are a renter are harmed)
I don't see why you think owning should only be slightly better after 10 years; if you don't want to deal with maintenance directly, you could always hire a management company as if you were the landlord and renter, but there's a benefit to you and everyone around you when you are invested in your home and community.
> Housing unit 1. A couple owns their home. The woman’s parents live with them.
> Housing unit 2. A couple owns their home. Their son, a recent college graduate, lives with them.
> Housing unit 3. A man owns his home. A friend lives with him.
> Housing unit 4. A couple owns their home. Their two young children live with them.
> Housing unit 5. Three roommates rent their home. The owner lives elsewhere.
> As illustrated in Figure 1, these five housing units are home to 14 adults. Because four of these five housing units have their respective owners as residents, the owner-occupancy rate—the measure traditionally viewed as the homeownership rate—on the cul-de-sac is 80 percent. However, because only seven of the 14 adults are actually owners of the homes they live in, the HPOP is much lower, at 50 percent.
I think 1, 2, and 4 should all count as “owning their home.” The new measure is also a recipe for confounding attempts to compare the metrics over time, as demographic change brings in cultures that embrace multi-generational living. So what seems to be a drop in homeownership rate could instead reflect a growing and aging sub-population where the cultural preference is for parents to live with adult children instead of separately.
I own my home. If I let a friend stay with me for unstated terms(friendship, charity, money, sex, whatever) then I no longer should be counted as owning my home?
How does the multi generational preference living theory work given the correlation to rent to income ratio? Is multi generational living preference a cause or a symptom?
Once those stop getting paid, none of those people are housed. This is tracking things that don't matter.
Here's an example from the page - a couple and the wife's parents - a couple and their college grad son
In this example the two couples (4 people) are counted as home owners and the 3 others (wife's parents, the son) as non owners - so the ownership rate is 4/7 = 57%.
On the traditional metric that scenario would be 100% because roughly each family owns its home which is good.
Now look at what would have to happen for the new rate to move to 100 - the wife's parents and the son would need to move out and buy separate homes. In other words the metric "punishes" living with family even if that's what you want to do.
I find the traditional metric is more useful. If I am a renter that indicates the desire to have a separate place - so it makes more sense to "ding" the ownership metric.
It makes sense for some families to cohabitate. Family with infants cohabitating with grandparents providing some care. Elderly parents being cared for my their middle-aged "kids". Etc.
This is an international community here on HN, would love to hear takes from other countries.
Depends on how old the kids are, because at least in most cases, daycare costs are for a very short period of time compared to the the overall life of the child. And the average in most states is wildly all over the place.
We absolutely should be focused on free childcare, or ideally ways that parents don't need childcare to begin with, but I don't think that has a lot to do with household income. Hell, at that point, why as well talk about transportation costs, as it's different in a single household vs a two parent two kid household, and different still depending on where you live.
(Yes, I saw the reference to dorms, nursing homes, & prisons.)
Maybe a way to handle this better would be to look at the size of the home because if a home can easily fit multiple generations it feels like a very different situation. Also it's somewhat arbitrary who happens to be the owner on the deed not to mention key questions like whether or not the home is truly owned outright versus largely in debt to a mortgage
The article links ownership to costs. Attributing diminishing ownership as "norm float" needs some justification. I suspect multi-generational norms seen elsewhere are rooted in poverty and a lack of opportunity.
Suppose I told you I am losing weight because I cannot afford food, I don't think you should speculate I chose to go on a diet.
As you mentioned, multi-generation homes are not the norm in the US. If there is a change in that norm, it's worth investigating why that's happening, before we conclude that we need to adjust metrics around it.
Purely anecdotal, but every multi-generation home in my (American) family is the result of disability or student loan debt - multiple generations live together, but that doesn't mean they want to.
Also remember that this new metric is meant to be more informative on wealth, generally. Those other generations living in the home don't typically share in the wealth the home confers, not until someone dies at least.
Not what was good for young people who, for the most part, can’t afford to live in houses and these days are getting ripped off with overly expensive apartments too, so they never have a chance to buy a house and build equity.
Feels like an apples and oranges situation. The two numbers each have their own value but they’re measuring different things.
One is calculated based on the number of houses, the other is a measured based on the population of adults or households. Both measures have always existed. Trying to replace one with the other doesn’t seem right because they both have value for different reasons.
Your mortgage is the lowest amount you'll pay. On top of that you have to manage the upkeep of the house, which costs both time and money. Lots of people go through phases in their lives where they move around and owning just doesn't make sense for a few 1 to 2 year stretches.
On the other hand, rent is the highest amount you'll pay. You generally don't have to worry about upkeep, and you're free to move. The commitment is lower and that has real value for certain people at certain stages of their lives.
I rented for 6 years in different areas until I figured out what I liked, and then I bought a house. Those 6 years weren't just wasted years. Those were very valuable years where renting really made the most sense.
I don't feel my rental situation in either insecure or unstable. I recently moved (my choice) but previously I lived in the same rental complex for almost a decade. I took advantage of COVID to move to a larger apartment there for cheaper rent, which was a massive advantage I had over friends who owned homes at the time.
I hope this number drops below 50%. Well below 50%. Maybe then we can finally vote down the NIMBY regulations and NIMBY politicians. And start rapidly expanding our housing supply. Given our current political system, it seems high homeownership rates are the root cause of the housing affordability crisis