Quote:
Originally Posted by NYNick
It's a crock. "Unaffordable housing" has been the norm for decades. You think your parents could afford the house they bought 50 years ago? Hardly. They scrimped and saved and clipped coupons so you could eat. Remember?
BTW, I couldn't afford my first house either, so I built one in the 70's at age 28. Was I dumb and stupid? You bet. But my gamble paid off and it's worth 10 times what I originally invested. Was I trying to make a fortune? Nah. I was just trying to afford a house.
Air cooled 911's aren't affordable either. So what? Go find another fun car you can make your own. There are literally dozens of them out there, just like there's an affordable house for everybody. It's just not on the beach.
BTW, maybe if these prospective home buyers weren't driving $60,000-$80,000 cars or SUV's, they could figure out a mortgage payment.
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I'm sorry, but that is the worst sort of uninformed bullschitt I have read in ages.
Housing prices today, when expressed as a percentage of income, are many, many times higher than those of my generation. My wife and I bought in 1987. Our home is now "worth", on its worst day, twelve times what we paid for it. As very well paid working professionals in our respective fields (engineering and nursing), there is absolutely no way that the entry level salaries we enjoyed in those days - that enabled us to buy our home - have increased at anywhere near that rate. Entry level salaries have, at best, doubled, or maybe a bit more. No way in hell have they gone up twelvefold to keep pace with housing prices.
And no, these young people are not driving around in $60-$80k cars, living some lavish lifestyle, squandering the money they could be using for down payments. You clearly cannot be exposed to anyone just starting out in their profession, maybe a few years out of school, trying to start their families and buy homes. Before I retired, I worked with half a dozen young engineers in our group who quite honestly had no realistic hope of doing this. And every one of them were driving at least ten year old schittboxes of some kind, saving every penny they could. Yes, they "scrimped and saved and clipped coupons" in their efforts to get into a home. The few that did buy homes had parents helping them do so, either by covering the down payment or at least a substantial portion of it.
This situation has changed dramatically in my lifetime, in the 35 years since we bought.