Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.
The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.
“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.
Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.
Do you understand what the implications of this figure mean for housing affordability though, cuz it’s not the indicator you may think it is.
Too many people think median/average/etc house price figure is meaningful for housing affordability, but it’s a mostly useless value for people buying their first home.
You’ll notice though most doomer “no one can afford houses” content build their entire info on average and median house prices.
The median or average house is a fucking mcmansion though, not your first home.
Once you realize that, the rest of the following info clicks into place as the entire premise is built on the assumption that you wanna buy a small mansion as your starter home, and suddenly its like “ya no shit that’s not affordable”
A median is a value at the midpoint of a frequency distribution, such that the probability of a value being above or below it is equal. A median value is going to be highly dependent on the area - cities with a boom in the building of luxury homes will have a higher median value that may not be indicative of the existence of more affordable housing but, in a larger market with an even vaguely normal distribution of home prices, it should be an indicator of a fairly average (in the non-statistical sense) home. But why take my word when we can test your hypothesis!
For example, the median home value in Portland, OR is $515K with a median household income of $78K, yielding a median home price to household income ratio of 6.60. So lets hop on realtor.com and look at the first three homes listed at that price, +/- 2%. Look at these McMansions!
$510K for 2500 square feet on 7000 sq.ft. lot built in 1910
$515K for 2,234 sqft on 6,098 sqft lot built in 1992
$525K for a 1542 sqft condo with admittedly nice views of the river
Such luxury! Oh wait, they’re just average homes. The largest home in that price range is 2,624 sqft. The smallest is this guy which, while nice, isn’t a McMansion. It’s a very nice but not luxurious 1200 sqft apartment.
Maybe Portland is a shitty example? How about Gillette, WY? Gillette has a median home value of $390K and a median household income of $72k, yielding a median home value to household income ratio of 5.42. Let’s see what’s in store!
$390K 2,880sqft 7,200sqft lot built in 2010
$410k 3,002sqft 6,199sqft lot built in 2011
$410k 3,944sqft 6,522sqft lot built in 1975.
The largest in that range is actually my third result, with the smallest coming in at 2706 square feet on 0.31 acres. Check that one out, it looks like they built two houses on top of each other. It’s weird looking!
Note: only the first house was close to the median. I had to bump the upper price limit to 5% above median to get more than two results.
You’ll get a lot more space for your dollar in Gillette, but a McMansion? They’re still lacking the ostentatiousness and cut rate luxury characteristic of the McMansion, so not really. Certainly not the best a man can get.
Comparing median house price to median income is an instant “doesn’t know how housing economy works” flag.
Those properties are all a fair bit on the large side as well, and are in extremely good quality.
The first link is a smaller home but on a large property and literally dead center of Portland on highly valuable land, so that’s an instant cherry pick.
The second is absolutely a mcmansion at 3000sqft, well over double the size of a starter home which usually ranges in the ~1500 range. Substantially more than anyone needs as a starter. It’s in the suburbs but a quick glance shows you basically everyone has RVs and boats parked on their properties. The house is incredibly good condition and looks newly fully renovated. Several tiers above a starter home by a large margin, it’s bizarre you thought thus house supported your argument. This is literally a textbook mcmansion.
The third is insane that you thought to even link it. Clocking in at nearly 3x the size of a starter home, double car garage, also newly renovated, and fairly close to the center of Gillette as well. This is less a mcmansion and just a huge bilevel. At what point did you seriously think that this house did anything other than support my statement, clocking in at that kind of Sq ft and with that location?
This is exactly as I wrote and you’ve done nothing but confirm, that the “median” house prices are many tiers above a starter home and only a fool thinks these are the houses first time home buyers will be saving up for.
Next time when you wanna try and find houses that aren’t affluent, maybe take the five seconds to notice the literal sailboats parked in people’s driveways? It’s a pretty big tell lol
That’s a long response that somehow still manages to miss nearly every point previously made, plus has a hefty dallop of bullshit.
I’m forwarding your comment history to Drs. Dunning and Kruger in case they want to do a case study.
I included median income because it’s interesting and at no point make or even vaguely suggested it has any significance. It’s funny how you just make shit up to counter points that aren’t being made.
I made this post to definitively test a theory: that you’re shockingly, blatantly intellectually dishonest, someone who doesn’t care about an honest conversation but who simply wants to be right at all costs, up to and including just lying. Like you did here, repeatedly.
My point was median valued homes aren’t McMansions, homes that are defined by their size, ostentation, and luxury, which are none of these homes. But you don’t care, you just want to be right, so you lie and use your own personal definition of a McMansion, which is apparently “big and/or nice house maybe with boat”, like watercraft ownership has any bearing on the type of home. I live in a 1300 square foot home and own a $95k 5th wheel. I guess I live in a McMansion too! You even move my goalposts for me by pretending my comment was about something it was not, that I was somehow claiming a median valued home was a “starter home”. It’s easy to refute evidence when you pretend the thesis is something that it’s not, but it makes you a liar.
So now we have, for all to see, clear evidence that talking with you is an absolute waste of time. Thank you for that. Easiest block I’ve made all year. Feel free to have the last word.
I think we all know this already. We’re poking the bear because it’s fun to watch him dive past points being made and scramble to fabricate data so he can ‘win’ every argument.
I love how they’ve done nothing but bitch about “no one showing facts” but they avoid the posts with citations like the plague because they already got theirs and want the poors to shut up.
Oh yeah, I suspect they just want their biases confirmed. Anyone who shows evidence that the premises upon which their biases are based are flawed gets ignored. It seems those that scream “it’s just facts and math, you can’t argue with math” the loudest tend to have arguments largely based in neither.
I’m not shaving just because your wordplay was ingenious. Thanks for the housing info though.
The median home should not be a McMansion, this is part of the problem. Look at median household income and you will see why.
No, it truly is, because that’s how numbers work.
Median income should not be buying Median homes because that ignores the entire existence of renters markets.
You have to factor in the enter renter market plus the buyer market combined.
And if you do that then the Median price of a home suddenly plummets, as now your average home is a very nice well off apartment.
People hate on the concept of renting, but the real issue is unregulated renting.
Renting serves a critical economic role for people so it needs to exist.
But collusion and bad actors have poisoned the renting markets in many cities unhindered and that does need tackling.
Renting may serve a purpose but a permanent underclass of people stuck renting forever does not. And a big reason this exists is the increasingly wide gap between median home price and median income.
The number of people who would choose to rent in a more just society is way smaller than those who are forced into it today.
Sure.
Doesnt change reality though, homes are affordable, you just don’t get to live in a mansion on a median income which isn’t a hot take.
No one is saying everyone should be able to afford to live in a mansion. But I’m saying the median home should not be a mansion, it should be a normal-sized house that ordinary people can afford.
The fact that most homes being built today cater to the wealthy and not average people is a symptom of the same extreme wealth inequality I was discussing above.
If you factor in renting prices in the range, the median household price drops way down and is around that mark, potentially lower.
The median house price alone when you chop off the entire rental market from the graph will never be that, because you effectively bias the number heavily upward by chopping off the entire lower portion of the data, biasing it upwards.
Rentals+Owning will have a median cost of living that aligns with the median income of the area.
But on average renting is cheaper than owning, so when you chop off and ignore that entire (very large) portion of the market, it’s no surprise your median jumps up.
It’s literally slightly less than half the entire market one ignores. Don’t get fooled by it.
Yeah, and then people would say “why do people buy those useless apartments of 190 ft²?”
Because that’s the only affordable housing