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(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Home ownership in the US has hovered between low 60% and high 60% for around 6 decades now, but sure, let's pretend that it ain't possible no more because some people only want to post doom-and-gloom bullshit because they have ulterior motives.
What are the statistics for those under 35 though? If I had to guess, the 65+ crowd is propping up these numbers.
The people who are 65 now, would have been 35 in the mid 90s. Home ownership in the mid-90s is within a few percentage points of what it is now.
And when it comes to home ownership of people around 25 years old, there are more of them now, than young people 20 years ago.
"Almost 30% of those young adults owned their homes in 2022, more their Gen X parents achieved when they were 25"
https://www.investopedia.com/gen-z-homebuyers-7483718
The fascists don't want facts though they just want to bitch about the state and get free things.
A similar proportion of people are buying houses, but they're paying far more relative to their income than used to be the case. People are stretching their budget more.
People are also buying later than used to be the case. "Starter homes" aren't a thing anymore. People are buying in their mid-career after saving a ton of money up. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/real-homeownership-gap-between-todays-young-adults-and-past-generations-much-larger-you
Just referencing the homeownership rate alone ignores the important context.
Interestingly your link seems to blame it mostly on declining marriage rates? It says near the end that the majority of the decline in individual homeownership rate since 1990 can be accounted for by assuming the marriage rate stayed constant, rather than the noted decline in marriages we've seen since then. So I'm not convinced things actually were better in the 90s; couples were just getting married younger and more often, and the pooled resources allowed more of them to buy homes.
Is that not the definition of better lol
But you can just look at the ballooning cost of homes, far outpacing wage growth, to see it's mathematically inevitable that it's worse.
Ignoring everything else wrong with your comment, have you considered the original tweeter might not have been American?
What do you mean not American? There's only America, what else exists in the world?
I know there is a south America also. Not sure about anything else.
But it is not the best America, so we don't care
Considering 95.8% of the humain population lives outside the USA.... It's easy for Americans to forget they're actually a minority in the world because math is hard!
Clearly you ignored the fact that I specifically stated these were US numbers on purpose because while the photo looks like the UK, they didn't call out where they were talking about.
The problem I see with that graph is that it tells us that 63%-69% of Americans are incentivized to make the problem worse. Homes are, by far, the biggest asset of those people. Their retirement and long term wealth is highly dependent on appreciating housing prices.
We regularly observe the effects of this in the form of all kinds of NIMBY laws. Unless you're prepared to build a cabin in the middle of the wilderness, almost all the desirable land already has a bunch of people living there. Those people tend to be very resistant to any additional housing that has any chance of decreasing their home value. We also see it in the form of mortgage tax deductions. The more money you borrow for your house, the more the government pitches in. We're encouraged to leverage our investment in housing which further drives up the need for housing to be a good investment. All of this effectively turns into a negative marginal tax rate (ie it's a wealth transfer from poor people to rich people).
We, as a society, need to decide if we want housing to be a right or an investment. It can't be both.
We already decided. We decided it's an investment, fuck human rights.
Or did you not notice all the homelessness?
Unfortunately it's far more complicated than that.
Many of those people who own homes aren't rich themselves. If you look at the income distribution in the US you'll see that (even if we make the assumption that only the richer people own homes) homeowners could be earning as little as $50k, for their entire household. Only about 15% make over $200k. For the rest, if their homes don't do well as an investment, they're absolutely screwed as they get older.
I do notice homeless people but it's not a good way to estimate homelessness rates. Depending on where you are, that's likely to wildly over- or under- estimating homelessness. Some cities effectively have policies of moving homeless people to less visible spots, either through sheltering or though relocation. That's part of why people think SF has a rampant homelessness problem even though NYC actually has a hire homelessness rate. Homeless people also tend to congregate in certain areas for a variety of reasons (winter weather is a big one). Homeless rates in the US have stayed pretty steady over the last few years. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-ahar-part-1.pdf Globally the US is on par with many countries that typically go through a lot of pains to protect citizens rights; eg Germany, Austria Denmark, the Netherlands.
I suspect that the bigger effect is under housing. That is, people staying in homes that are no longer suitable for them.
The upside is that there's a very simple policy that is highly likely to have an enormous impact on all variations of housing shortage, build more houses. Credits and incentives only shuffle around the existing stock. Housing vacancy rates are near historic lows. Fix that and house prices will come down. A lot of people don't like that plan because it seems to capitalist. But, as I said at the beginning of all this, we would then need to find a way to help all the people who's retirement plan we just nuked. There are fairly straightforward ways to do that too. A lot of people will hate those plans because they sound too communist. My best guess is neither will happen and we'll keep plodding along with the suboptimal status quo.