Americans are living through the toughest housing market in a generation and, for some young people, the quintessential dream of owning a home is slipping away.
Mortgage rates surged in recent years, hitting the highest levels in more than two decades last fall. While rates have come down slightly since then, home prices remain painfully elevated and a limited inventory of housing is still failing to keep up with demand. Such conditions mean that housing has become woefully unaffordable.
Falling mortgage rates in recent weeks have helped, but home prices could remain sticky, according to economists. It’s still a cruddy time to be hunting for a home, but it’s even worse for young, first-time buyers who need to save up for a down payment and build up their credit score during a time when Baby Boomers are refusing to part with their big houses.
The situation isn’t a whole lot better for renters, with rents barely coming down from record highs and half of tenants in that market saying they can’t even afford their payments.
The uneasiness over America’s affordability crisis is captured clearly in surveys and polls, but data that outlines the sentiment specifically among young people is limited.
The whole point is that “just move” is certainly not a silver bullet, it should not be a thing at all, and it can be literally impossible for some people. What we need is rules against people being extortet out of their money via rent. Because that is what “not being able to afford” a place that you could afford previously is.
Well, good luck waiting for that to happen.
Well with that attitude nothing is ever gonna get better
It doesn’t matter what attitude we have unless there is a massive cultural shift.
And you think sitting back and letting everything just happen is going to cause that cultural shift?
No, why would you think that?
My point from the very beginning has been to take matters into your own hands. Don’t sit around and wait for other people to solve your problems for you.
No your point was to “just move” and being less “entitled”. This is obviously a solution with a lot of flaws for a problem that is very much man made. Telling people to “just move” ignores this and dismisses the need for an actual solution, where the actual solution can only be implemented by banding together and not by individuals.
Can you think of another way to take matters into your own hands?
Right now it looks like you’re just waiting for other people to solve your problems for you.
A few actually, None of them currently legal.
Do you know why they aren’t legal? Because the whole deal with representative democracy is, in the end, to wait for the people that I elect to solve my problems. Because it is tedious and time-consuming if I have to fight every battle on my own. It’s also unfair because most of my problems exist because of unfairly distributed wealth, which makes the fights I’d have to take quite unbalanced. Acknowledging this has nothing to do with being lazy or cowardly it’s just a reality. A reality that you can run away from by “taking it into your own hands and move into less desirable regions” or you can try to change the rules that allow the problem to exist in the first place.