You'd have to go back to around 2000 to find rates on a 30 year fixed comparable to today's. https://www.freddiemac.com/pmms
Historically we're still in a period of pretty good rates. However, the reality is who cares about what things were like more than 25 years ago. The new normal is 6ish percent, and we're over that right now. I don't think we're ever going to see rates below 5% again, not counting for some extraneous circumstance nobody can predict. But at this point any relief is going to be meaningful to a lot of people.
On the other hand, home prices are not coming down, and they probably will not come down even if there's plenty of overinflated valuations out there.
Therefore the only thing to give on affordability is increased supply to keep home values from continuing to grow in a pace that outruns incomes, and lower rates so more people can afford what's out there today.
You can’t really use interest rates to compare our current situation with recent history.
A feeding frenzy at insanely low interest rates for an extended time caused prices to skyrocket. So even though interest rates are at a historically normal rate, the housing prices have insanely outpaced inflation to a ridiculous degree (in high cost areas like California, which is my situation).
I would be very interested in seeing the change in the distribution of:
Corp owned properties (hedge funds, etc included)
Multiple investment property owners
Short term rentals
It doesnt seems like our population had some sudden boom and new housing couldn’t keep up. Instead, it seems like greedy people have bought up every property they could, and continued to parlay the rental income into additional property purchases. And hedge funds have been buying everything up, even using AI to automate it.
If the above stands up to scrutiny, then legislation should be passed to encourage owner occupation.
Tax the shit out of any properties beyond 2 or 3. This allows small time landlords, which is healthy for the rental market.
Out right ban, via heavy taxation for X years until a full ban, businesses / hedge funds from owning single family homes / individually sold condos. The only place we need corporate money in is high density living like apartments. But these should be carefully limited in favor of individually owned condos.
Of course, there should be some grace period to allow owners to sell off their existing properties. But to be blunt, it needs to be relatively short, like 3 years, to actually affect housing prices in a good way.
Being able to own where you live should be a fundamental right to the working class. Instead, housing is treated as a commodity, and the greedy have caused runaway inflation, and the working class are suffering. Morally, I’m perfectly fine with them taking a loss.
For you individuals who bought in the last few years to occupy, you have your own home to call your own, and can afford the payments even if the value goes down. You are not entitled to your “investment” always increasing in value. Society is suffering because of the current paradigm. It needs aggressive correction.
Rates are higher than the current market can bear, a result of the artificially extended period of historically low rates. The pandemic can only be blamed for some of this. The prior administration juicing the economy against sound economical principals telling us rates should have continued the rise that started around 2016/2017 contributed at least as much and hamstrung our tools to respond.
Housing stock shortages have long list of causes, as you line out. With so many things contributing to the problem it's hard to cope with, both at a policy level and for us regular folk. An average person needs an explanation that's easy and memorable, and thereby actionable in terms of throwing their support behind. That's not easy when there's not enough fingers to point, solutions to each aren't clear, and there's only so much political bandwidth that can be put towards making change.
It's going to be slow, and not everything will work, but I'm glad there is finally attention on it and it looks like the people who can do things are doing them instead of just talking.
Outright ban of hedge fund ownership of residential properties via life imprisonment for all executives of that hedge fund. Raising taxes just means the renters will pick up the tab.
Exactly the same here, we were renting up until 2018 at 900$CAD/month. Our mortgage is 950$CAD/month and our old apartment is now 1200$CAD/month. All expenses included, it’s s more expensive to rent than to own.
First time buyers can’t hardly get a mortgage now unless you were stashing cash or staying at your parents’ for a while.
I refinanced during the pandemic and went from a 30 year to a 15 year and my mortgage didn’t change. If I tried to take out a mortgage now, it would be too expensive for me, just because of interest rates. It’s a terrible time for housing
I’m in the same exact boat. I’m glad we got lucky, but you shouldn’t have to get lucky to fulfill basic needs like housing. Shits busted and I hope it gets better for others soon.
I got a VA loan and didn’t need a down payment. Only took a couple years for rent to surpass my mortgage, but I wouldn’t have been able to save the down payment with ever increasing rent.
For profit lending has always been fucking shit up, that’s why Christians forbid it for centuries. (But only if the borrower was Christian)
Of course wealthy Christians just didn’t lend money rather than lend it interest free, but it was still better than letting an 18 year old sign up for 80k in debt it’ll take their whole lives to pay back.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a similar, perhaps in some ways better system exists to this day in the world of Islamic finance. It’s far from perfect and has plenty of real-world flaws and downfalls, but it was cool to learn about the spirit and morality behind it.
I’m pretty sure Islam split when Christians still couldn’t charge interest.
It’d be kind of neat how the Abrahamic religions evolved if there werent so many people killing each other because they support the exact same god in slightly different ways.
Just checked local rentals (Boston Metro West area), cheapest 3 bedroom here in my town is $2,400 a month with only hot water included. That particular complex is a roach infested pisshole.
The luxury apartments they insist on building around here are minimum $3,200 and go up to $3,500+ with again, only hot water included.
Cheapest 1 bedroom available on apartments.com is $1,800 (again only water included) and is a converted attic. You could also rent a room in some else’s house for about $900-1,200 a month off Facebook marketplace.
City governments are like “but developers pay us for the privilege of putting up the luxury buildings, win-win, right?!” and miss that it doesn’t house any of the population that needs it. I’d rather directly build public housing with my taxes.
Youre banking 3k+/month into your asset now instead of paying someone elses off. You are making money every month instead of losing it. That alone should make you grin at the price difference.
The deep level of stability and control you get with home ownership should keep that grin going.
The fact, the utter fact, that Seattle rents will return to outpacing your mortgage shortly is something that should make you don clown makeup to begin a Harlequin dance of joy that you own a home in such a high COL area.
Except for the fact that over the first 10 years of the loan, nearly 90% of that payment goes to interest. Amortization and front loaded interest is a bastard. With property tax and insurance, a $500k house will cost about $1.5MM over the life of the loan.
Not trying to dissuade anyone from home ownership, it’s just not as cut and dry as it may seem.
No amount of fundraising will make us forget what hes allowed to happen, the weapons hes provided to make it happen, and the money to ensure Israel had resources to make it happen.
I’m starting to think all the “refuse to vote Biden because genocide” folks on here are propaganda bots. Like we know we’re gonna have one of the two shit nuggets here, yall really wanna choose trump and get everything else terrible too?
I remember reading a few years ago that propaganda bots stopped even making posts, they just engage in vote manipulation (Reddit not here) because the bots were so successful that real people now parrot their points
I don’t think people who care about genocide are bots because most liberals have no actual morals and only care about their comfort being maintained and not actually fixing anything. Everyone knows Trump is worse. He is not the current President now.
Israel doesn't need any support past the US preventing the UN from actually doing anything concrete, which is exactly what the Biden administration is giving them.
With the exception of airdropped supplies into Gaza, which other countries are also doing, and that hasn't been enough to prevent famine, what would Trump even do to make things worse?
Committing US assets to a war in the middle east is one of the three things Trump's voter base won't actually support.
First of all, I didn’t name names. But how would a Republican be different? They’re all hawks. They wouldn’t pressure Israel to wind things down at all, they might even put boots on the ground
Why are you getting into weird hypotheticals? If it's a republican, it will be Trump. If it's not, because he straight up dies, they'll still be the same voter base: a voter base which isn't going to accept boots on the ground.
"Pressuring" Israel has done precisely fuck all, which is my point. Because by "pressuring" you mean "asking nicely".
And you're right: a republican wouldn't be different. That's what I'm saying.
Hilary outraised Trump by 30% in 2016. She was doing far better in polling than Biden is doing rn, and didn’t have the albatross of a country to run hanging around her neck (in fact, Democrats had basically just saved us from complete economic collapse after Bush et al engineered the financial crisis), those were far better D into D headwinds.
If money bought elections, Democrats wouldn’t lose as consistently as they do.
She also didn’t have her literal rights over bodily autonomy taken away, nazis walking around like their opinions matter, and that shithead she ran against the head nazi and reason she lost those rights in the first place.
1980s in reverse.
Biden wins in a landslide, and the dems sweep it all.
If you don't vote for him in the primaries, fine. But do you really think, Trump will be any better for Palestine than Biden? Because that is going to be your choice. Either Trump or Biden, no one else has a chance.
I expect Trump to give Israel even more weapons and push them to outright destroy all of Palestine. After all during his presidency the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem and was very pro Israel.
The most humane thing to do would be deport them, but Chicago would rather pander to liberals as a sanctuary city than do anything to improve the city.
Which is okay. You don’t need to be from here to comment on it, and you don’t strike me as someone who would modify your position much based on interacting with the actual human beings involved anyway.
But I do wonder what you think ‘pandering to liberals’ is in practical terms and how it is different from, say, acting in a way that most represents the values of a majority liberal constituency.
The values of a majority liberal constituency should still involve improving the safety and livability of the area. Having the illegal immigrants on the streets will lead to more crime and economic decline. Plus now they are wasting away on the streets and dying.
The values of a majority liberal constituency should still involve improving the safety and livability of the area.
A functioning government can do more than one thing at a time. YTD homicides are down YoY, continuing a 3 year trend, which the migrant surge is smack dab in the middle of. We know you aren’t here and are devoid of firsthand knowledge, so how do you imagine this migrant crisis actually playing out on the ground here? Because you sound ridiculous.
You’re allowed to talk out of your ass all you want, but I don’t need to stick around for the stench.
You’re right, governments can do multiple things at once, like defunding critical support systems while adding hundreds to potentially thousands of people onto the streets. The “pandering” part of the government is saying they care and being a sanctuary city while not supporting them at all and letting them wallow on the streets. The murder rate is down from the historical high in 2021 but is still higher than pre pandemic and pre illegal immigrant crisis.
My father immigrated to the US in 2001, he did so legally. My great great grandmother and great great grandfather came to Canada from Scotland in 1905. I do not know if they took a citizenship test or anything since Canada was a colony. My mothers side of the family is eigth generation American, and I am one quarter American Indian.
In 1905 there were no immigration restrictions on anyone outside of Asian countries (immigration law is and has always been rooted in racism). Your great great grandmother and grandfather just got to show up and become citizens. Same with your right generation family on your mother’s side.
Yep, Canada was a colony of the UK at the time, they didn’t immigrate so much as move. You’ve also ignored my father being a first generation immigrant and going through the process legally a little over 20 years ago. There’s no excuse to being an illegal immigrant, they should be deported.
My point is the definition of “legal immigrant” has changed. Nobody cared when it was all white people showing up. As soon as Asian people started showing up we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. We changed the rules for explicitly racist reasons. The focus on the southern border is no different. Nobody cares about white illegal immigrants.
Did you know there were a record number of illegal border crossings from Canada this year? Nobody is shouting for a border wall there. I wonder if that is because most are Asians who are the “model minority”.
vox.com
Hot