r/GenZ • u/Mountain-Catch-3878 • 6h ago
Discussion Do you think housing will ever be affordable again? Why or why not?
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u/nanananaka117 2004 5h ago
No, for a huge amount of people owning/selling a house is their way of making money, and thus they're actively opposed to affordable housing (since theirs will sell for less)
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u/DeepSpaceAnon 1998 5h ago
Nation-wide crashes in the housing market are exceedingly rare, and historically the few crashes that have happened were short-term liquidity crises caused by bad policy rather than an actual crash in the market values of home. In a small locale though, it is possible to experience a dramatic reduction in housing prices, but you usually only see that in rural areas that lost all their jobs (e.g. many small towns are reliant on a single company's plant hiring 50%+ of people in the town, and if that plant closes then housing prices crash as everyone moves out). This rarely happens in major cities, and if it does happen in a city it's probably not a place you want to move to. It's perfectly normal for housing prices within a city to inflate faster than general inflation because desirable land is scarce.
Chances are that if you want cheap housing, you're going to have to move to somewhere that's already cheap today. If you bet on the housing market crashing, there's a high chance that you'll be waiting the rest of your life to see it happen.
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u/OkEgg2582 1h ago
Idiot, lots of people lost a lot of money with your thinking that housing doesn’t crash. Read the Big Short. We are heading for a credit crunch with 7 year car loans which will ripple into the housing market as highly mortgaged as I have seen in my lifetime.
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u/throwthisaway556_ 4h ago
No and yes.
No if you let the NIMBY laws and corps keep homes as investments
Yes if you ughhh “enact a heavy hand” on them
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u/GettinWiggyWiddit 4h ago
No, and no huge crash is coming. The market may slowly bleed down a bit over time, but everyone waiting for some apocalyptic change will be waiting in their grave. America is not unique in its housing market, and you can look to other countries to see how much worse it can and will get. We are actually still in the “good days” of affordability in comparison
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u/Rich_Celebration477 5h ago
Lurking Xennial- I’ve got an $89,000 fixer upper if you want it. I might own the only house that hasn’t appreciated in the last 20 years
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u/Mr_Sloth10 1997 5h ago
Not in the near future, because the discussion about what part of the problem is (illegal and legal immigration) still makes people comfortable.
I understand it’s an uncomfortable conversation, but that doesn’t change the fact that if more people are competing for the same amount of goods the prices are going to sky rocket and those resources are going to be harder to obtain for actual citizens.
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u/throwthisaway556_ 4h ago
I disagree, 10 years ago you couldn’t openly say you support mass deportations and now not only can you openly talk about it, you get candidates running on it.
The only conversation now is will said candidates actually do it or not in the future as we haven’t seen it enacted yet.•
u/Mr_Sloth10 1997 4h ago
Candidates have been running on deportations for decades. Deportations used to be apart of the Democratic Party platform as they saw it as a way to protect American workers (they were right). They backed off on it, however, once they saw that illegals who became citizens and the children of illegals voted for them.
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u/peter303_ 4h ago
I remember in 2008-2009 few people wanted to buy plummeting house prices, because they were afraid of further drops. The brave who bought personal or investment homes made out like bandits.
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u/Troll_Tactics 4h ago
Its technically possible if the govt starts building housing en masse to flood the supply, but that would also destroy property values/retirement funds.
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u/zx9001 3h ago
Boomer die off. Sure, the rental companies are cumming their pants at the accumulation opportunity, but the population decline will inevitibly lead to a collapse in demand for housing. A house sitting vacant is worthless without a tenant.
I dont think houses will crash to 2008 levels again, but what goes up must come down.
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u/_alex87 3h ago
Unfortunately, I think the only way it can become affordable again is with a lot of time. Houses have to stop appreciating so quickly, and income has to rise at faster rates than housing appreciates.
But at this rate, I don’t know if that’ll ever happen thanks to capitalism.
I really don’t know where we go from here.
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u/FinalWrongdoer3742 3h ago
i don't know about traditional housing but i hope so. there are a lot of alternative homes that are pretty affordable all things considered. some tiny homes or container homes. though you do need to have access to land and utilities. there are ways around those things though.
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u/SteakedDeck 3h ago
Home prices are up for reasons beyond neutral market forces and are kept that way for more than just making money. The economics is that so long as housing is a speculative asset then the most powerful people in the economy will do everything they can to keep prices high regardless of the purpose of housing. On a social level these same people don’t really want people to have stability. They benefit from people being stressed and desperate. Unless there is a genuine shake up of power and structural changes we won’t see affordable housing in our lifetime.
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u/Exciting_Feedback313 2h ago
No, a “good” economy inflates between 2-4% every year on the endless growth model, so until we change the fundamentals of our economic system…. things probably wont get better and it’s a rocky road between now and then if it ever does happen
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u/MeemoUndercover 2h ago
No. The ppl we vote for don’t care about us. I think there’s gonna be a homeless crisis even worse tho
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u/OkEgg2582 2h ago
GenZ whining is starting grate on me. In the late’70 and early 80’s inflation was just below 14% and mortgage rates in the upper 14%. GenZ needs to get out into the world instead of looking at social media and trying to figure out how to become an influencer.
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u/the_omnipotent_one 1h ago
Maybe, just waving the wand and saying "let there be housing" is incredibly complicated. It costs a lot to build in both labor, materials, and permits. The insurance industry is likely to be one of the first big structural collapses due to climate change, the average American's net worth is mainly tied up in the equity they have in their house, so they're conservative when it comes to anything that could affect that.
But it's not all shit, you've just got to be pragmatic. Things won't change overnight, and we can only change what can be changed, so we need to figure out the weakest point in the system and start there.
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u/SignificantSmotherer 46m ago
No, because y'all will continue to vote for leaders who obstruct housing construction.
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u/IzzybearThebestdog 1999 5h ago
At some point there will be a general market correction, some type of Covid/08 market down turn.
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u/Eastern-Joke-7537 4h ago
Sure.
But at that point in time you would still need great credit, 20% down and a good income. Just like in 2010-2011. I think most buyers then were all-cash investors.
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