Outside of the fact that moving itself, the physical process,
Is incredeibly stressful for most peopled,
uprooting kids from schools and friendships,
leaving a community that you know and (love??) in some form,
I am not willing to accept that
"Americans not moving all the time"
is a bad thing.
I think you can also mention that with both parts of a marriage
need to have jobs to pay the bills, moving is not just one getting
a good deal in a different city, then the other part has to find
something as well and wants something better or at least not worse.
so two good offers is needed.
I also wonder what the timescale is.
I would presume this started as a factor of the industrial revolution.
when people had farms and worked farms, I think moving about was less
common as well.
I have a pet theory that this is a significant factor in why people are moving to cities: Families with two earners need a single shared location that has enough variety/density of jobs that both can work.
In contrast, a single breadwinner makes it easier to stay in a specialized company-town or to move.
It’s responsible got the deterioration of community in America overall. On the face of it a household has to spend twice as much time with adults at work so there is less time to socialize and connect. But it also means that mothers are less likely to have community and to have their children play together. Children aren’t as safe outside because homes are empty all day. Having a child cuts you off from many friends (ask any new parent) because the social net is not as strong. Even if you have friends with children, the mother is back at work after 6-12 months, so she can’t help you she is busy working to pay for her own child care.
It’s a common pattern in the US that we find a way to monetize normal human interaction. No hitchhiking, no free community gathering, no neighbors, no autonomy to children, no intergenrational housing.
It’s like we cannot fathom having a responsibility that doesn’t involve getting paid. This is good for the GDP though!
I think it's also a matter of skill and employer density, so to speak? There are some exceptions, but by and large - if you're in a typical metro area and want an IT job, you probably don't need to move. If you want a hospital job, you don't need to move. If you want a construction job, you don't need to move. You can, for some incremental gains, but it's usually not a necessity.
In the early to middle 20th century, you probably didn't have that. Most people lived in rural areas and you needed to move to get that job at Acme Steel Co.
When I was a kid in the late 60s through the 70s, we moved every 2 or 3 years. And this was generally not because we needed to move. It was because my parents decided they wanted to move somewhere different. From Seattle to the gulf coast of TX when I was 1 because my dad wanted to live somewhere sunny & warm. From TX to the Oregon Coast when I was 12 because my parents missed the PNW. Of the several moves in between I can only think of maybe 3 that were for jobs - but even then, it was generally by choice more than necessity.
Poor people will always want to move to richer neighborhoods. The advantage to their kids from this is much higher than the stress and bad effects especially as early in kids life as possible.
So, a lot of people will be looking to move as soon as they can afford it.
I presume this average includes 20-something’s that are far more mobile on all fronts except for housing costs at a higher opportunity destination. If they are not moving to seek better opportunities, it does signify a bit of a deep rot in the system.
> In 1970, one in five Americans was moving every year. It's now down to one in 13.
When I was a kid (in the late 60s and through the 70s) we moved every two or three years on average. And these weren't just the move across town kinds of moves - a lot of them were half way across the country. When I was 1 we moved from Seattle to the TX gulf coast because my dad wanted to live somewhere warm and sunny. Then to SoCal then back to TX then back to SoCal and again back to TX and then to the Oregon coast. I was thinking the other day that people don't move like that anymore - in most of those moves my parents didn't have work lined up, they just moved and found work. When I was about 12 we moved from TX to the Oregon Coast because my parents were missing the PNW - my dad had just gotten his teaching degree and he figured he'd just move up to Oregon and find a teaching gig, which turned out to be quite hard in the mid-70s. Basically, he sent out a bunch or resumes to Oregon school districts just prior to leaving. They had subscribed to a newspaper from the town they wanted to move to and then signed up for a rental house sight unseen (that was the return address for all of those resumes). We pulled into town with a U-Haul and TX plates and within about 15 minutes 3 different people screamed at us to go back to where we came from (ahh, Oregon in the 70s). I don't think people make a move like that nowadays. I thought it was fairly normal then, but there's no way I'd do that now and in fact we haven't moved in 15 years and that was just a move a few miles away.
He got a job in the unemployment office for a bit and then did a stint as a guide/counselor at a science camp. Finally after almost 2 years got a teaching job in inland southern Oregon.
The more the housing costs, the more employers have to pay in wages. And this forces employers to look for cheaper labor elsewhere: offshoring. CEOs and share holders are not going to solve the housing problem, as it is a political and social problem. However, politicians want to solve it using higher wages and 60 year mortgages, etc.
You got it backward. Outsourcing causes debt (and higher inflation) and decreases per capita earning power. Thus housing becomes practically more expensive. Framing housing as a problem for CEOs to even consider solving is just backward. Higher average wages actually would make housing more affordable, and enable more people to pay for construction. But the "good enough" jobs are getting scarce because we live in the "richest country in the world" (and the West overall is in the same ballpark).
Over the past few decades, an astonishing pattern has taken place:
Americans no longer migrate.
In 1970, one in five Americans was moving every year.
It's now down to one in 13.
For more than 100 years before, my neighborhood had been
a place for the children of immigrants, for strivers who
were trying to better their condition.
Suddenly, it wasn't doing that anymore. It was turning into
a neighborhood of young professionals.
The American heartland has been hollowed out. Almost all of mom's generation of family (cousins, distant cousins, etc) left Iowa. That left few in her generation to have new Iowans, and those few raised/taught their kids to stay in Iowa because farms, family, whatever their motivation for staying was. Lots of the remaining country folk are country for religious reasons and again aren't super likely to move (though they have started starting new religious colonies around the country).
I think urbanists should be a lot more cautious of throwing Austin around as a success story. It is still too early to say whether they've found a good equilibrium in supply/demand that limits price increases or they're cresting a major COVID-triggered speculative glut which will be very damaging to the city.
I'd bet that Miami is just a few years ahead of it (entering serious decline) and within a decade Austin will be seen as an obvious-in-retrospect cautionary tale.
I think there is no single source that shows population decrease post 2020 to a value in 2020 from the same source. But the sources do differ, so likely what has happened is that you have not performed proper data hygiene. You cannot regress across sources without compensating for cross-source differences.
In this case we have the property that 2021 onwards shows increase in ACS and that Austin Demographics shows increase from 2020 onwards but that there is difference between 2020 numbers between sources.
This means it's probably not good idea to compare 2023 ACS number to 2020 Austin Demographer number. Fortunately, we have Austin Demographer number from 2019, 2020, and 2025. From all this, we can conclude that cratering hypothesis is likely false. We must conclude that following statement of yours is unlikely:
> Austin population cratered and it still has not recovered to 2020 level.
Perhaps you shouldn't use ChatGPT without checking sources?
The purported 2025 number is actually: "Population for City of Austin Full and Limited Purpose Boundaries, 2023".
I indicated that the sources are different. And the conclusion at the very best is that Austin population had been flat for years. It's now growing back, and the prices will react with a lag of 2-3 years.
My sources show unambiguously that the population declined up until at least 2023.
There are no consistent sources for the 2019-2024 population due to the way demographics are counted, so they have to be mixed. But they still show _at_ _most_ a weak return to growth with _at_ _most_ modest increases over the peak 2019 population.
This absolutely supports my point that the reason for the property price drop in Austin was the population decrease in 2020, rather than anything to do with new construction.
And you didn't want to spend 10 seconds to look at that, and instead spammed the thread with AI slop which is demonstrably wrong.
This is not true, I don't know if you live here or why you repeat it.
Population has receded slightly in the last couple years in Austin proper, is still greater than 2020, and the metro area has not shrunk year over year at all, although growth has slowed.
So yes, the population cratered from a high in early 2020. This brought down prices with a 2 year lag, as owners started to get rid of empty units. The prices will come right back up now, that the population is recovering.
You're comparing different estimate sources and still ignoring that someone moving to round rock or ceder park is still a part of the housing pressure for the city of Austin.
A low-single-digit push to local burbs happened all over the country. "Austin" in the same way people discuss "Houston" or "Chicago" i.e. the local metro area has grown every year.
There are different sources (and I pointed that out), but they all show that the population has been at most flat.
The suburbs migration IS the point. The suburbs are a superior model when it's made possible by de-urbanization of workplaces, and it shows. The price in the suburbs of Austin has been growing.
> So no large families (to offset population challenges).
There are lots of reasons we're not having large families, but this doesn't seem like one of them. Average family size has shrunk dramatically while houses have gotten bigger. Lots of familes of 6 or more shared 1000-sqft bungalows in the past, with 2 or 3 kids in a room, so this doesn't jive.
I was born in 1964 in the midwest US, the 7th out of 8 children. The house was a two story brick structure with five bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house was less than 2000 sq ft, but that included a moldy basement with seepage and jackposts all over the place helping support the sagging joists, so the real living space was closer to 2/3 of that, so 1350 sq ft or so.
The house had been built before 1920 when expectations were less grand; those rooms were much smaller than nearly any home I've been in built after 1980. When my grandpa came to visit each summer, it meant all five boys in one room, the two youngest in sleeping bags and occasionally getting stepped on in the middle of the night when one of my older brothers would get up and forget we were there.
There was also no air conditioning, nor ceiling fans. My parents had a box fan in their bedroom window during the summer. It was a big deal when the bedroom I shared with my next older brother got a box fan too; that was in high school.
I grew up in the 90s and I agree: I shared a room with my older brother until high school.
We shared EVERYTHING. And strangely, it didn't kill us! In fact: it just motivated us to go to sports and clubs and stay out of the house.
Obviously less extreme, but I do not understand this "every child must have their own room" thing. They don't! And I grew up in an incredibly poor rural area, imagine living in a city where there was actual shit to do.
If you grew up in the zero-interest (or close to it) rates era your parents were likely to have shown you an unrealistic financed lifestyle where everyone could have a big house, several cars and their own room.
The only thing I can say (having been born in 1988, sharing a slightly smaller house with 4 siblings), is that that sounds reasonable.
We all shared rooms and had less than a few square meters to ourselves. It was fine. People these days are too attached to the idea they need massive homes to live their lives.
we had loft beds. three kids in one room. each one with a bed and a desk and a small wardrobe underneath. those 2m², or rather those 4m³ were my personal space. the whole room was no larger than 12m².
> In the 1800s, it was commonplace to have 8 children. Did they all lived in huge houses?
This is a bit of segue from where we were. To brings us more in line with the topic: In the early 20th century, large and extended families lived in commonly built row housing.
Their roomier accommodations were one piece of communities that were more affordable and an overall better fit for larger groups & families (than modern housing and communities).
A counter anecdote to all of the others: My father’s parents owned a 3 story house in Ohio, with 8 rooms and a basement. The second/third floor were intended to be rented out if you weren’t using them I guess.
I always found this extraordinary because they certainly weren’t rich. I grew up in a 1200sqft house fwiw lol
How about people who lived in igloos, tepees, and mud huts? Did they have separate bedrooms for the kids? I seriously doubt that was an issue for them.
There are, you might imagine, other factors involved. Infant and child mortality were super high, but kids were an important source of labor, so people worked to have lots. There was no real birth control or sex ed. Marital rape wasn't a concept. Cultural pressure to have children was stronger than it is now. Etc etc etc.
No but the living conditions were atrocious, dangerous, unsanitary, and probably quite psychologically traumatizing (e.g. kids growing up in households where adults would have sex in the same room have all sorts of problems)
Edit: Since HN contrarians who'd never want their children living in some particular conditions find it so confusing how others might not too:
Overcrowded living quarters is a well known vector for a huge array of problems. Academic underachievement, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mood disorders, abusive relationships, the list goes on. Even after controlling for socioeconomic status!
… traumatizing (e.g. kids growing up in households where adults would have sex in the same room have all sorts of problems
Sure, to my western/puritanical upbringing that is weird, but I suspect for the majority of human history: parents have being having sex in very close proximity to their children. Separate bedrooms, even separate beds are a modern luxury.
You can be traumatized and carry on with life. For example, your terrible arguments in this thread are traumatizing me, and I'm somehow soldiering on. Satan give me strength, oh dark lord.
Do you think that rape and slavery is also not going to affect people? Because those were both pretty prevalent in most of human history too, yet here the human race is - alive, with different views on those things as we did in the past.
You are suggesting it’s maladapted if they go and do the same thing in their own families later? Why should they care about what the majority thinks is good and normal?
Because if you need to spend time in a classroom, or a workplace, or form romantic relationships, it's important that you have attitudes that are somewhat in line with meaningful portions of the society around you. Obviously.
I would prefer to ride a Unicorn to work. This is pure fantasy. There will always be human violence. Preparing children for it is a lost art in sections of the world.
In many civilized/industrialized places, these children (sometimes already matured) are immediately traumatized or pretend it is of no consequence through various rationalizations. It's a cycle that repeats in throughout history.
Spoken like someone who lives in the least violent era of human history.
Does the fact that you can't ride a unicorn to work compel you to settle for walking 7 miles barefoot? Or is the sensible thing to do to constantly chip away at sources of badness in the world, even if you can't achieve unicorns?
It cracks me up how you try to assert the "realist" position while holding an opinion that only makes sense in a university ethics course. Public hangings don't "prepare" a child for a world with non-zero levels of violence, obviously. Living 4 adults and 8 children to a single-room household doesn't "prepare" a child for anything you'd willingly sign them up to do.
Bad things are bad. They should be avoided. You actually think this too and will take action to avoid most bad things that you can. But alas, the Internet comment box is here for you to wisely consider: Maybe bad things are not bad. Very smart, lol.
We’re currently witnessing what happens when people who know violence works encounter people who think vibes and peaceful protest are effective. I think kids would do well to understand that violence is part of life and how to handle (or use) it.
My wife grew up in a very sheltered church environment where everyone at school and in her life pretty much followed the rules. It didn’t teach her how to handle real life and the real world was a rude awakening.
Similarly my older relatives keep saying “but they can’t do that!” About a lot of what’s happening in the US without realising that they very much can. Because nobody is physically stopping them. The exception is my grandfather, who is an honest guy but says he got in some fights in his navy days and ended up better for it.
Maybe we need to bring back superheroes who beat the shit out of the bad guys.
I want my own daughters to know how to protect themselves with diplomacy-or- violence if the former fails.
I said we should want a world free of violence, and not purposely exposing people to violence as a matter of daily life (such as public hangings) is an important step towards that. Both in the direct sense that public violence is obviously violence, and indirectly in that there's good evidence that exposure to violence increases proclivity to violence.
Two simple questions:
1. Do we want a world without violence?
2. If yes, is public hanging a step towards that world, or away from it?
There will never be a world without violence. The minute such a world existed, bad people would realize they could conquer it.. through violence. And as someone who was raised by parents who were kind and goodhearted and thought flower power and peaceful protest was how things changed I discovered the real world is, in fact, a good deal more cruel than the bubble they raised me in.
1. I don't think this is possible. I think it's better to pursue a world where violence is unnecessary and aberrant.
2. I'm refusing to indulge your strawman. Let's use something like "is teaching your kid how to deal with bullies a step towards that world or away from it"
> I don't think this is possible. I think it's better to pursue a world where violence is unnecessary and aberrant.
I didn't say it was possible. I said it's worth striving for, and then you stated the same thing with different words. We agree.
Ah so you think societies that did public hangings tended to have a strong and reasonable sense of justice.
You are wrong.
Justice in the sense of "punishing people who are legitimately antisocial" tends to yield less indulgent punishments because they recognize that true justice must be dealt cold and with solemnity.
Or do you think it's only a coincidence that the most abhorrent justice systems on the planet do public executions and "civilized" justice systems do not?
Everything is traumatizing to these people. Their mother told them to hold the bottle for their baby sister. Oh no, what is this? Is this Parentification, the Source of More Trauma? Despite the fact that the elder sibling would prefer to sleep, perchance to dream-- and there lies the rub! For in that sleep, what trauma comes!
If this were the only way they would exist, then it would not stop me from bringing them into being. My ancestors made the right choice. I will not deny my genetics their legacy.
If I choose other conditions, it’s not because of trauma but because comfort is good.
Right, you prefer other conditions because they're better.
We have decades of research to show that more space and privacy is not merely a matter of comfort. Or, if it is, that "comfort" affects more things than one would expect.
I grew up in conditions you would never countenance and I’m incredibly well adjusted. What value are your systems when they lead to your trauma. You are constantly traumatized and I am not, despite facing conditions you could not believe.
Either I am inherently an übermensch or my methods are better. You have your loneliness epidemics, your PTSD, and your therapy. I don’t.
There are plenty of laws on the books that make it even harder, you can't have mixed genders of children sleeping in the same room, limits to how many can sleep in the same room, and many more.
Less than 1% of houses are accessible and that is a problem with aging boomers, SIL bought a home near parents to support them but when the stroke and dementia hit, the parents couldn't move in because no bedroom and only a powder room on the main floor, and they couldn't make it up/down the stairs anymore, and the parents house was too small to move into.
Reference please. I'm not aware of any state or federal law that prohibits mixed gender children from sharing a room in a private residence (foster care and other institutional situations do have regulations).
You can't afford a 1 square foot lot anywhere near Times Square for four bedroom house in the Midwest money. Luckily, no one was talking about raising a family in Times Square, which in 1970 was adjacent to one of the most notoriously degenerate and crime ridden neighborhoods in the Western world. People understand that's out of their reach now.
So when Appelbaum talks about "the privileged and propertied" breaking American opportunity, he should be looking at generational wealth transfer and land concentration, not at an urban activist from the 1960s who wanted communities to have input on highway construction.
Not to say something isn't broken, but I've come to view a lot of these types of articles as just a subtle form of advertising and lobbying for development firms, especially the ones that just build tons and tons of 3-4 level apartment blocks. It's reductionist to the point of absurdity to say "things just slowed down because of X" when so much has changed in the last 50+ years, it's hard to read that with a straight face.
Just allowing city hall to get their palms greased to build infinity "luxury" comblocks everywhere isn't going to change shit. Communities should have a strong say in what does or does not go, barring major critical infrastructure, and if you don't like and don't live there, tough shit. We'd be better served putting our thumb on the scale to make it possible for an average family to be able to live well off of one income and encourage resiliency by decentralizing and making it favorable to do more actual jobs locally ("efficiency" be damned).
It's a bit more nuanced than what you are saying. Here's what Yoni Appelbaum said:
> I should start by saying this: Jane Jacobs is right about almost everything. She was right about what makes cities vibrant and vital. She was right about the ballet of the sidewalk. She writes brilliantly about needing to treat cities as living things, that if you try to centrally plan them and assign all of their functions, it doesn't work very well. They need to evolve over time. They need a diversity of peoples, of uses.
She was right about all of that, and she sees great menace in the urban renewal schemes of the time, where the experts of her age looked at cities and saw disorderly places that needed rationality. In all of that, she was exactly right, but her solution was to reassert the original right of communities to define their own boundaries.
She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods. And so you get the sort of endless processes of community hearings and reviews, and she's quite explicit that the goal of these reviews is not to gauge the actual opinions of the neighborhood or to balance the good of the community, but to empower activists like Jacobs to step in and say “no.”
She wants “right-thinking people” like her to be able to stop the government from doing bad things. It is a revolt against government from the left, and it is amazingly effective. But the new rules don’t just get exercised by right-thinking people, and one of the things about right-thinking people is they're often wrong about the things they're thinking about. And so, she imagines this as the ability to veto lots of destructive changes. But in practice, it emerges as a simple collective veto of almost all change, and it has had tremendous costs for Americans as a whole.
> She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods.
That's a big contradiction in her overall message -- NIMBYism is just another kind of central planning.
Stopping the government from doing bad things with other people's property is a worthwhile goal. Enabling the government to stop people from making their own choices with their own property is not, and inhibits the very engine of vitality that Jacobs praised.
Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity. If housing is not scarce a long position on housing will lose money.
Blaming housing investors for housing affordability is like blaming gold market speculators for gold being expensive. If the price of gold comes down, the speculators lose money. Same with housing.
> Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity.
This is not true. The art market is financialized and tends to go up over time, but this does not result from art scarcity. You can make a market go up by making huge institutional cash buyers 30% of the buyer's market, and by getting even independent sellers to collude on price. Independent buyers in that market are irrelevancies, because they bought on credit borrowed against a house at an artificial value.
Also, that little property bubble we had in the first decade of the 2000s was not a result of a sudden population increase.
edit: also, it's important to mention that "if housing tends to go up over time" is within a window. It can lose all of that false value in a day, and the government will respond by directly subsidizing all of the institutional losers, and their stockholders.
The art market does not tend to go up, only specific works of art that become collectibles tend to appreciate in value. And these are the works that become financialized. This is similar to the market for automobiles, only very specific cars become collectibles while the vast majority of cars depreciate.
63 percent of US households owned the home they lived in in 1960, we peaked around 2008 at 69 percent and are about 65 today.
Home ownership is functionally an un-moveable number.
But the housing problems, corporate ownership, rent prices, young people can't afford houses....
These things aren't housing problems. They are social ones.
First, we are using housing much differently: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Lots of us are living alone, including the old. The boomers aren't moving in with the kids, or to homes, or shacking up together (the Golden Girls is a quaint bit of history that does not happen today). This has created a massive amount of pressure on the housing stock we have.
And that Corporate ownership problem: It is hyper local (Atlanta, Phoenix, Tampa are major markets). One would think that these things being a local issue would have local resolutions. Except the biggest predictor of voting is "home ownership" and the biggest predictor of turn out is "anything that harms the price of homes". There is simply no political will locally to change this.
But the bulk of Investor Owned Properties aren't corporate, they are people with 2nd homes. These aren't "places people could live" they are homes in markets that only exist as tourist destinations. The condo in Florida for snow birds, The house at the beach, by the lake or in the mountains for a weekend getaway.
One of the largest factors in run away cost is where the money is. I hate to say this but that older generation that isn't moving in with kids, or shacking up like golden girls... they have ALL the cash. You don't have to believe me but as these people pass things will change and it has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wealth_Transfer
And yes, lack of mobility, the missing middle, zoning (back to that pesky voting things contribute) aren't helping. And so do tenants rights (the parts of these that helped end shared living situations from house mates to boarding houses).
Do we have a housing problem, Yes. The real fixes are going to be unpopular because the facts are in conflict with how people feel
> 63 percent of US households owned the home they lived in in 1960
Wouldn’t measuring dynamics of home ownership using a unit “households” cause all sorts of problems? Consider two people who would get married and become a “households” except they’re too poor to live together so they each cohabitate with their parents. Every household in this example that owned a house in 1960 (the two sets of parents) still does, but the example shows a pretty serious housing problem.
> Wouldn’t measuring dynamics of home ownership using a unit “households” cause all sorts of problems?
I had the same impression at first as well. But a household is a household is a household. That massive increase in people living alone follows the same 60/40 split on ownership that more "traditional" married couples would.
The affordability of housing has changed since the 60's, 70's and 80's. And it's what your intuition is picking up on. And it does relate to what is a household, but not because it's a poor measure but because the housing stock we have no longer matches how we use housing.
If you go back to 1985, the boomers were in their prime years and housing was much more affordable than today. The greatest generation was dying off, and in their golden years they lived together (The literal plot of golden girls), in homes or moved in with kids.
The boomers are NOT doing that. They are occupying multi bedroom housing stock, as couples or alone. This has created much of their wealth and lots of price pressure on younger generations. The millennials will tell you "housing was worse for them" and it was: the two large cohorts competing for the limited supply, and one was deeply entrenched already.
Do note that boomers aren't the only ones "living alone more" its a fairly equal distribution but they have the first mover advantage, historic pricing advantage, and tend to be the ones occupying multi bedroom housing alone creating the utilization pressure.
And the Golden Girls type living situations are unviable today for legal reasons. Overly broad tenants rights have killed the concept of co-habitation (roomates/housemates) turning 2,3, and 4 bedroom houses into single family homes, and zoning + tenants rights have finished off the boarding house (there might be hand full left in the US, this was the plot of another 80's tv series).
Telling The boomers to move in with the millennials is going to be massively unpopular with both groups. Telling renters that "you get less rights" is going to be politically impossible (even if it is only for 'housemates' situations). Death or a major change to Americans political will are the only fixes that we are going to see.
Overly broad tenants rights have killed the concept of co-habitation (roomates/housemates)
how so? in austria/germany this kind of living is very common for students. and we have way more tenant rights than the US. even in the US i lived like that.
i don't see what tenant rights have anything to do with that.
The concept of "professional tenants" is a thing here. After the us's more drawn out eviction process, and then the actual delay in carrying it out, it is nearly impossible to get missing or unpaid funds back.
Great Wealth Transfer is going to be big. Because of step-up in basis, best time to sell is after you pass on property to child. Low or zero cap gains.
The primary problems are private equity buy up and rich foreign buyers. Prices would have already collapsed finally if not for the latter. Not possible to build our way out of this mess. It's a population problem in the numerical. An immigration problem. Stop the flow of high income potential immigrants and the prices will drop.
Outside of the fact that moving itself, the physical process, Is incredeibly stressful for most peopled, uprooting kids from schools and friendships, leaving a community that you know and (love??) in some form, I am not willing to accept that "Americans not moving all the time" is a bad thing.
I think you can also mention that with both parts of a marriage need to have jobs to pay the bills, moving is not just one getting a good deal in a different city, then the other part has to find something as well and wants something better or at least not worse. so two good offers is needed.
I also wonder what the timescale is.
I would presume this started as a factor of the industrial revolution. when people had farms and worked farms, I think moving about was less common as well.
When the man was
> with both parts of a marriage need to have jobs
I have a pet theory that this is a significant factor in why people are moving to cities: Families with two earners need a single shared location that has enough variety/density of jobs that both can work.
In contrast, a single breadwinner makes it easier to stay in a specialized company-town or to move.
It’s responsible got the deterioration of community in America overall. On the face of it a household has to spend twice as much time with adults at work so there is less time to socialize and connect. But it also means that mothers are less likely to have community and to have their children play together. Children aren’t as safe outside because homes are empty all day. Having a child cuts you off from many friends (ask any new parent) because the social net is not as strong. Even if you have friends with children, the mother is back at work after 6-12 months, so she can’t help you she is busy working to pay for her own child care.
It’s a common pattern in the US that we find a way to monetize normal human interaction. No hitchhiking, no free community gathering, no neighbors, no autonomy to children, no intergenrational housing.
It’s like we cannot fathom having a responsibility that doesn’t involve getting paid. This is good for the GDP though!
I think it's also a matter of skill and employer density, so to speak? There are some exceptions, but by and large - if you're in a typical metro area and want an IT job, you probably don't need to move. If you want a hospital job, you don't need to move. If you want a construction job, you don't need to move. You can, for some incremental gains, but it's usually not a necessity.
In the early to middle 20th century, you probably didn't have that. Most people lived in rural areas and you needed to move to get that job at Acme Steel Co.
> you probably don't need to move.
When I was a kid in the late 60s through the 70s, we moved every 2 or 3 years. And this was generally not because we needed to move. It was because my parents decided they wanted to move somewhere different. From Seattle to the gulf coast of TX when I was 1 because my dad wanted to live somewhere sunny & warm. From TX to the Oregon Coast when I was 12 because my parents missed the PNW. Of the several moves in between I can only think of maybe 3 that were for jobs - but even then, it was generally by choice more than necessity.
Poor people will always want to move to richer neighborhoods. The advantage to their kids from this is much higher than the stress and bad effects especially as early in kids life as possible.
So, a lot of people will be looking to move as soon as they can afford it.
I presume this average includes 20-something’s that are far more mobile on all fronts except for housing costs at a higher opportunity destination. If they are not moving to seek better opportunities, it does signify a bit of a deep rot in the system.
> In 1970, one in five Americans was moving every year. It's now down to one in 13.
When I was a kid (in the late 60s and through the 70s) we moved every two or three years on average. And these weren't just the move across town kinds of moves - a lot of them were half way across the country. When I was 1 we moved from Seattle to the TX gulf coast because my dad wanted to live somewhere warm and sunny. Then to SoCal then back to TX then back to SoCal and again back to TX and then to the Oregon coast. I was thinking the other day that people don't move like that anymore - in most of those moves my parents didn't have work lined up, they just moved and found work. When I was about 12 we moved from TX to the Oregon Coast because my parents were missing the PNW - my dad had just gotten his teaching degree and he figured he'd just move up to Oregon and find a teaching gig, which turned out to be quite hard in the mid-70s. Basically, he sent out a bunch or resumes to Oregon school districts just prior to leaving. They had subscribed to a newspaper from the town they wanted to move to and then signed up for a rental house sight unseen (that was the return address for all of those resumes). We pulled into town with a U-Haul and TX plates and within about 15 minutes 3 different people screamed at us to go back to where we came from (ahh, Oregon in the 70s). I don't think people make a move like that nowadays. I thought it was fairly normal then, but there's no way I'd do that now and in fact we haven't moved in 15 years and that was just a move a few miles away.
Did he get the kind of job he hoped for?
He got a job in the unemployment office for a bit and then did a stint as a guide/counselor at a science camp. Finally after almost 2 years got a teaching job in inland southern Oregon.
The more the housing costs, the more employers have to pay in wages. And this forces employers to look for cheaper labor elsewhere: offshoring. CEOs and share holders are not going to solve the housing problem, as it is a political and social problem. However, politicians want to solve it using higher wages and 60 year mortgages, etc.
You got it backward. Outsourcing causes debt (and higher inflation) and decreases per capita earning power. Thus housing becomes practically more expensive. Framing housing as a problem for CEOs to even consider solving is just backward. Higher average wages actually would make housing more affordable, and enable more people to pay for construction. But the "good enough" jobs are getting scarce because we live in the "richest country in the world" (and the West overall is in the same ballpark).
Some excerpts:
Unstated here is that nothing replaced that loss.Demographics are totally different. Baby boom bulge was teenaged then
The author indicated the neighborhood's character stood defined for 100 years. That places the origins in the early 20th century.
The American heartland has been hollowed out. Almost all of mom's generation of family (cousins, distant cousins, etc) left Iowa. That left few in her generation to have new Iowans, and those few raised/taught their kids to stay in Iowa because farms, family, whatever their motivation for staying was. Lots of the remaining country folk are country for religious reasons and again aren't super likely to move (though they have started starting new religious colonies around the country).
I think urbanists should be a lot more cautious of throwing Austin around as a success story. It is still too early to say whether they've found a good equilibrium in supply/demand that limits price increases or they're cresting a major COVID-triggered speculative glut which will be very damaging to the city.
I'd bet that Miami is just a few years ahead of it (entering serious decline) and within a decade Austin will be seen as an obvious-in-retrospect cautionary tale.
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Austin is a success story in the same way Detroit is.
Austin population cratered and it still has not recovered to 2020 level. That's why the housing costs there decreased.
In other words: force citizens out of your city, and the price will fall.
ACS, the Decennial Census, and the Austin Demographer has the data we need. Let's take a look https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2023.B01003?q=B01003:+T... and https://data.census.gov/table/DECENNIALPL2020.P1?q=P1:+TOTAL... (no ACS in 2020 because of COVID, but we got the Census) and https://demographics-austin.hub.arcgis.com/
You'll see that the ACS 1-year was not performed and released in 2020 due to data quality
I think there is no single source that shows population decrease post 2020 to a value in 2020 from the same source. But the sources do differ, so likely what has happened is that you have not performed proper data hygiene. You cannot regress across sources without compensating for cross-source differences.In this case we have the property that 2021 onwards shows increase in ACS and that Austin Demographics shows increase from 2020 onwards but that there is difference between 2020 numbers between sources.
We also see that Austin Demographer has higher number in 2019 than ACS sample https://demographics-austin.hub.arcgis.com/documents/cf1519a...
This means it's probably not good idea to compare 2023 ACS number to 2020 Austin Demographer number. Fortunately, we have Austin Demographer number from 2019, 2020, and 2025. From all this, we can conclude that cratering hypothesis is likely false. We must conclude that following statement of yours is unlikely:
> Austin population cratered and it still has not recovered to 2020 level.
Perhaps you shouldn't use ChatGPT without checking sources?
The purported 2025 number is actually: "Population for City of Austin Full and Limited Purpose Boundaries, 2023".
I indicated that the sources are different. And the conclusion at the very best is that Austin population had been flat for years. It's now growing back, and the prices will react with a lag of 2-3 years.
You claimed cratering but you mixed sources to produce result. Now trying to deflect with claims about ChatGPT. I did this manually. No LLM involved.
It is embarrassing to be this antagonistic when proven wrong. As the kids say these days: “take the L”.
My sources show unambiguously that the population declined up until at least 2023.
There are no consistent sources for the 2019-2024 population due to the way demographics are counted, so they have to be mixed. But they still show _at_ _most_ a weak return to growth with _at_ _most_ modest increases over the peak 2019 population.
This absolutely supports my point that the reason for the property price drop in Austin was the population decrease in 2020, rather than anything to do with new construction.
And you didn't want to spend 10 seconds to look at that, and instead spammed the thread with AI slop which is demonstrably wrong.
This is not true, I don't know if you live here or why you repeat it.
Population has receded slightly in the last couple years in Austin proper, is still greater than 2020, and the metro area has not shrunk year over year at all, although growth has slowed.
> This is not true, I don't know if you live here or why you repeat it.
Population by year:
2019: 978,763
2020 high estimate for Jan 1 (996,369) - https://austin.culturemap.com/news/city-life/01-15-20-austin...
2020: 961,855 (Census, low mark)
2023: 979,882
2024 (estimated high mark): 986,928
So yes, the population cratered from a high in early 2020. This brought down prices with a 2 year lag, as owners started to get rid of empty units. The prices will come right back up now, that the population is recovering.
You're comparing different estimate sources and still ignoring that someone moving to round rock or ceder park is still a part of the housing pressure for the city of Austin.
A low-single-digit push to local burbs happened all over the country. "Austin" in the same way people discuss "Houston" or "Chicago" i.e. the local metro area has grown every year.
There are different sources (and I pointed that out), but they all show that the population has been at most flat.
The suburbs migration IS the point. The suburbs are a superior model when it's made possible by de-urbanization of workplaces, and it shows. The price in the suburbs of Austin has been growing.
Down 4% is not "cratered". Detroit is "cratered".
"People would like to have a house that's large enough for their family and access to good employment."
"Over the last 50 years, America has kind of told them, 'You can't have both'."
I'd go past that and say you probably can't have a home over 3 bedrooms without already being in an upper income bracket.
So no large families (to offset population challenges). No extended families to help the existing family. No space to help relatives relocate.
No homes for four income earners in a 4-income economy.
> So no large families (to offset population challenges).
There are lots of reasons we're not having large families, but this doesn't seem like one of them. Average family size has shrunk dramatically while houses have gotten bigger. Lots of familes of 6 or more shared 1000-sqft bungalows in the past, with 2 or 3 kids in a room, so this doesn't jive.
In the 1800s, it was commonplace to have 8 children. Did they all lived in huge houses?
I was born in 1964 in the midwest US, the 7th out of 8 children. The house was a two story brick structure with five bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house was less than 2000 sq ft, but that included a moldy basement with seepage and jackposts all over the place helping support the sagging joists, so the real living space was closer to 2/3 of that, so 1350 sq ft or so.
The house had been built before 1920 when expectations were less grand; those rooms were much smaller than nearly any home I've been in built after 1980. When my grandpa came to visit each summer, it meant all five boys in one room, the two youngest in sleeping bags and occasionally getting stepped on in the middle of the night when one of my older brothers would get up and forget we were there.
There was also no air conditioning, nor ceiling fans. My parents had a box fan in their bedroom window during the summer. It was a big deal when the bedroom I shared with my next older brother got a box fan too; that was in high school.
I grew up in the 90s and I agree: I shared a room with my older brother until high school.
We shared EVERYTHING. And strangely, it didn't kill us! In fact: it just motivated us to go to sports and clubs and stay out of the house.
Obviously less extreme, but I do not understand this "every child must have their own room" thing. They don't! And I grew up in an incredibly poor rural area, imagine living in a city where there was actual shit to do.
If you grew up in the zero-interest (or close to it) rates era your parents were likely to have shown you an unrealistic financed lifestyle where everyone could have a big house, several cars and their own room.
The only thing I can say (having been born in 1988, sharing a slightly smaller house with 4 siblings), is that that sounds reasonable.
We all shared rooms and had less than a few square meters to ourselves. It was fine. People these days are too attached to the idea they need massive homes to live their lives.
bunkbeds is how I grew up
we had loft beds. three kids in one room. each one with a bed and a desk and a small wardrobe underneath. those 2m², or rather those 4m³ were my personal space. the whole room was no larger than 12m².
> In the 1800s, it was commonplace to have 8 children. Did they all lived in huge houses?
This is a bit of segue from where we were. To brings us more in line with the topic: In the early 20th century, large and extended families lived in commonly built row housing.
Their roomier accommodations were one piece of communities that were more affordable and an overall better fit for larger groups & families (than modern housing and communities).
A counter anecdote to all of the others: My father’s parents owned a 3 story house in Ohio, with 8 rooms and a basement. The second/third floor were intended to be rented out if you weren’t using them I guess.
I always found this extraordinary because they certainly weren’t rich. I grew up in a 1200sqft house fwiw lol
How about people who lived in igloos, tepees, and mud huts? Did they have separate bedrooms for the kids? I seriously doubt that was an issue for them.
There are, you might imagine, other factors involved. Infant and child mortality were super high, but kids were an important source of labor, so people worked to have lots. There was no real birth control or sex ed. Marital rape wasn't a concept. Cultural pressure to have children was stronger than it is now. Etc etc etc.
No but the living conditions were atrocious, dangerous, unsanitary, and probably quite psychologically traumatizing (e.g. kids growing up in households where adults would have sex in the same room have all sorts of problems)
Edit: Since HN contrarians who'd never want their children living in some particular conditions find it so confusing how others might not too:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01452...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3805127/
Overcrowded living quarters is a well known vector for a huge array of problems. Academic underachievement, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mood disorders, abusive relationships, the list goes on. Even after controlling for socioeconomic status!
> but I suspect for the majority of human history: parents have being having sex in very close proximity to their children.
Putting aside how true such a claim is... just because something was a thing for most of human history doesn't mean it doesn't cause issues.
> just because something was a thing for most of human history doesn't mean it doesn't cause issues
I suspect they had far more important things to worry about - like getting enough food.
One can have more than one problem.
If children were traumatized by witnessing their parents having sex, I expect the human race would have failed millennia ago.
You can be traumatized and carry on with life. For example, your terrible arguments in this thread are traumatizing me, and I'm somehow soldiering on. Satan give me strength, oh dark lord.
I am well pleased that my arguments are traumatizing you!
Your boos mean nothing; I've seen what makes you cheer! :p
I'm not sure I follow your logic.
Do you think that rape and slavery is also not going to affect people? Because those were both pretty prevalent in most of human history too, yet here the human race is - alive, with different views on those things as we did in the past.
Are you really comparing rape and slavery to seeing your parents having sex?
Are you really comparing a living arrangement where adults regularly have sex in front of you due to overcrowding to "seeing your parents having sex?"
The issue is that we raise kids into this world, and not a different time and place. They grow up to be maladapted to this world.
You are suggesting it’s maladapted if they go and do the same thing in their own families later? Why should they care about what the majority thinks is good and normal?
Because if you need to spend time in a classroom, or a workplace, or form romantic relationships, it's important that you have attitudes that are somewhat in line with meaningful portions of the society around you. Obviously.
i always drag this one out: For a lot of modern history, public hangings were a family affair. Pack up a picnic and go downtown to watch a man hang.
> then exposing people to violence in their daily life is bad
Oh my god yes, and we’re doing such a great job of that aren’t we? We have gratuitous violence on demand now.
Public hangings are fine compared to what I see on TV/Netflix.
Have you ever seen someone die in real life? Please let us know if it felt similar, psychologically and emotionally, to watching Netflix.
They don't care about people being desensitized to violence. Need a new generation of soldiers, after all.
But sex? Other people being able to see sexual depictions literally gets people's panties in a twist.
Yes, and that was bad. If you prefer a society free of violence (I do), then exposing people to violence in their daily life is bad.
> If you prefer a society free of violence
I would prefer to ride a Unicorn to work. This is pure fantasy. There will always be human violence. Preparing children for it is a lost art in sections of the world.
In many civilized/industrialized places, these children (sometimes already matured) are immediately traumatized or pretend it is of no consequence through various rationalizations. It's a cycle that repeats in throughout history.
Spoken like someone who lives in the least violent era of human history.
Does the fact that you can't ride a unicorn to work compel you to settle for walking 7 miles barefoot? Or is the sensible thing to do to constantly chip away at sources of badness in the world, even if you can't achieve unicorns?
It cracks me up how you try to assert the "realist" position while holding an opinion that only makes sense in a university ethics course. Public hangings don't "prepare" a child for a world with non-zero levels of violence, obviously. Living 4 adults and 8 children to a single-room household doesn't "prepare" a child for anything you'd willingly sign them up to do.
Bad things are bad. They should be avoided. You actually think this too and will take action to avoid most bad things that you can. But alas, the Internet comment box is here for you to wisely consider: Maybe bad things are not bad. Very smart, lol.
We’re currently witnessing what happens when people who know violence works encounter people who think vibes and peaceful protest are effective. I think kids would do well to understand that violence is part of life and how to handle (or use) it.
I think this is about as well as this can be said--failing to teach kids about bad stuff about humanity isn't protecting them, it's failing them.
My wife grew up in a very sheltered church environment where everyone at school and in her life pretty much followed the rules. It didn’t teach her how to handle real life and the real world was a rude awakening.
Similarly my older relatives keep saying “but they can’t do that!” About a lot of what’s happening in the US without realising that they very much can. Because nobody is physically stopping them. The exception is my grandfather, who is an honest guy but says he got in some fights in his navy days and ended up better for it.
Maybe we need to bring back superheroes who beat the shit out of the bad guys.
I want my own daughters to know how to protect themselves with diplomacy-or- violence if the former fails.
> Maybe we need to bring back superheroes who beat the shit out of the bad guys.
Superheroes don't exist and never have. People who work tirelessly to chip away -- often imperceptibly -- at sources of badness exist. That's it.
I meant the fictional characters.
Is public hanging "teaching kids about bad stuff?"
No.
There's at least a little space between "a world free of violence" and "public hanging".
I said we should want a world free of violence, and not purposely exposing people to violence as a matter of daily life (such as public hangings) is an important step towards that. Both in the direct sense that public violence is obviously violence, and indirectly in that there's good evidence that exposure to violence increases proclivity to violence.
Two simple questions:
1. Do we want a world without violence?
2. If yes, is public hanging a step towards that world, or away from it?
There will never be a world without violence. The minute such a world existed, bad people would realize they could conquer it.. through violence. And as someone who was raised by parents who were kind and goodhearted and thought flower power and peaceful protest was how things changed I discovered the real world is, in fact, a good deal more cruel than the bubble they raised me in.
1. I don't think this is possible. I think it's better to pursue a world where violence is unnecessary and aberrant.
2. I'm refusing to indulge your strawman. Let's use something like "is teaching your kid how to deal with bullies a step towards that world or away from it"
> I don't think this is possible. I think it's better to pursue a world where violence is unnecessary and aberrant.
I didn't say it was possible. I said it's worth striving for, and then you stated the same thing with different words. We agree.
Ah so you think societies that did public hangings tended to have a strong and reasonable sense of justice.
You are wrong.
Justice in the sense of "punishing people who are legitimately antisocial" tends to yield less indulgent punishments because they recognize that true justice must be dealt cold and with solemnity.
Or do you think it's only a coincidence that the most abhorrent justice systems on the planet do public executions and "civilized" justice systems do not?
I think we're talking past each other so I'm bowing out.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/deterren...
Sounds good
Everything is traumatizing to these people. Their mother told them to hold the bottle for their baby sister. Oh no, what is this? Is this Parentification, the Source of More Trauma? Despite the fact that the elder sibling would prefer to sleep, perchance to dream-- and there lies the rub! For in that sleep, what trauma comes!
Do you want your kids to grow up in a single-room household with 4 adults and 8 children?
If this were the only way they would exist, then it would not stop me from bringing them into being. My ancestors made the right choice. I will not deny my genetics their legacy.
If I choose other conditions, it’s not because of trauma but because comfort is good.
Right, you prefer other conditions because they're better.
We have decades of research to show that more space and privacy is not merely a matter of comfort. Or, if it is, that "comfort" affects more things than one would expect.
I've already linked to them above.
I grew up in conditions you would never countenance and I’m incredibly well adjusted. What value are your systems when they lead to your trauma. You are constantly traumatized and I am not, despite facing conditions you could not believe.
Either I am inherently an übermensch or my methods are better. You have your loneliness epidemics, your PTSD, and your therapy. I don’t.
Or to put it evocatively:
https://x.com/pjayevans/status/1612904509575139328?s=46
This would be an excellent rebuttal to the claim that everyone who experiences a specific type of hardship later has a specific outcome.
But for the claim you're responding to, this appears to mostly just be some cringey self-aggrandizement?
There are plenty of laws on the books that make it even harder, you can't have mixed genders of children sleeping in the same room, limits to how many can sleep in the same room, and many more.
Less than 1% of houses are accessible and that is a problem with aging boomers, SIL bought a home near parents to support them but when the stroke and dementia hit, the parents couldn't move in because no bedroom and only a powder room on the main floor, and they couldn't make it up/down the stairs anymore, and the parents house was too small to move into.
Lots of ways to get money from the table.
Reference please. I'm not aware of any state or federal law that prohibits mixed gender children from sharing a room in a private residence (foster care and other institutional situations do have regulations).
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You can't afford a 1 square foot lot anywhere near Times Square for four bedroom house in the Midwest money. Luckily, no one was talking about raising a family in Times Square, which in 1970 was adjacent to one of the most notoriously degenerate and crime ridden neighborhoods in the Western world. People understand that's out of their reach now.
So when Appelbaum talks about "the privileged and propertied" breaking American opportunity, he should be looking at generational wealth transfer and land concentration, not at an urban activist from the 1960s who wanted communities to have input on highway construction.
Not to say something isn't broken, but I've come to view a lot of these types of articles as just a subtle form of advertising and lobbying for development firms, especially the ones that just build tons and tons of 3-4 level apartment blocks. It's reductionist to the point of absurdity to say "things just slowed down because of X" when so much has changed in the last 50+ years, it's hard to read that with a straight face.
Just allowing city hall to get their palms greased to build infinity "luxury" comblocks everywhere isn't going to change shit. Communities should have a strong say in what does or does not go, barring major critical infrastructure, and if you don't like and don't live there, tough shit. We'd be better served putting our thumb on the scale to make it possible for an average family to be able to live well off of one income and encourage resiliency by decentralizing and making it favorable to do more actual jobs locally ("efficiency" be damned).
Villains*
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It's a bit more nuanced than what you are saying. Here's what Yoni Appelbaum said:
> I should start by saying this: Jane Jacobs is right about almost everything. She was right about what makes cities vibrant and vital. She was right about the ballet of the sidewalk. She writes brilliantly about needing to treat cities as living things, that if you try to centrally plan them and assign all of their functions, it doesn't work very well. They need to evolve over time. They need a diversity of peoples, of uses.
She was right about all of that, and she sees great menace in the urban renewal schemes of the time, where the experts of her age looked at cities and saw disorderly places that needed rationality. In all of that, she was exactly right, but her solution was to reassert the original right of communities to define their own boundaries.
She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods. And so you get the sort of endless processes of community hearings and reviews, and she's quite explicit that the goal of these reviews is not to gauge the actual opinions of the neighborhood or to balance the good of the community, but to empower activists like Jacobs to step in and say “no.”
She wants “right-thinking people” like her to be able to stop the government from doing bad things. It is a revolt against government from the left, and it is amazingly effective. But the new rules don’t just get exercised by right-thinking people, and one of the things about right-thinking people is they're often wrong about the things they're thinking about. And so, she imagines this as the ability to veto lots of destructive changes. But in practice, it emerges as a simple collective veto of almost all change, and it has had tremendous costs for Americans as a whole.
> She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods.
That's a big contradiction in her overall message -- NIMBYism is just another kind of central planning.
Stopping the government from doing bad things with other people's property is a worthwhile goal. Enabling the government to stop people from making their own choices with their own property is not, and inhibits the very engine of vitality that Jacobs praised.
@tptacek
Later Jacobs would have been okay with financialization of housing, tho'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival
It ironic that the further she goes from experience & data, the more she ought to be taken seriously... but isn't
I didn't down-vote you, but your comments could adhere closer to the guidelines (kindly page down to the "In Comments"section).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity. If housing is not scarce a long position on housing will lose money.
Blaming housing investors for housing affordability is like blaming gold market speculators for gold being expensive. If the price of gold comes down, the speculators lose money. Same with housing.
> Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity.
This is not true. The art market is financialized and tends to go up over time, but this does not result from art scarcity. You can make a market go up by making huge institutional cash buyers 30% of the buyer's market, and by getting even independent sellers to collude on price. Independent buyers in that market are irrelevancies, because they bought on credit borrowed against a house at an artificial value.
Also, that little property bubble we had in the first decade of the 2000s was not a result of a sudden population increase.
edit: also, it's important to mention that "if housing tends to go up over time" is within a window. It can lose all of that false value in a day, and the government will respond by directly subsidizing all of the institutional losers, and their stockholders.
The art market does not tend to go up, only specific works of art that become collectibles tend to appreciate in value. And these are the works that become financialized. This is similar to the market for automobiles, only very specific cars become collectibles while the vast majority of cars depreciate.
Im getting sick of hearing about the "housing problem".
As a percentage, how big do you think the home ownership problem is? Guess: 10? 15?
If I told you that home ownership is un-moveable would you believe me? That the percentage is less that 6 from peak to trough?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
63 percent of US households owned the home they lived in in 1960, we peaked around 2008 at 69 percent and are about 65 today.
Home ownership is functionally an un-moveable number.
But the housing problems, corporate ownership, rent prices, young people can't afford houses....
These things aren't housing problems. They are social ones.
First, we are using housing much differently: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Lots of us are living alone, including the old. The boomers aren't moving in with the kids, or to homes, or shacking up together (the Golden Girls is a quaint bit of history that does not happen today). This has created a massive amount of pressure on the housing stock we have.
And that Corporate ownership problem: It is hyper local (Atlanta, Phoenix, Tampa are major markets). One would think that these things being a local issue would have local resolutions. Except the biggest predictor of voting is "home ownership" and the biggest predictor of turn out is "anything that harms the price of homes". There is simply no political will locally to change this.
But the bulk of Investor Owned Properties aren't corporate, they are people with 2nd homes. These aren't "places people could live" they are homes in markets that only exist as tourist destinations. The condo in Florida for snow birds, The house at the beach, by the lake or in the mountains for a weekend getaway.
One of the largest factors in run away cost is where the money is. I hate to say this but that older generation that isn't moving in with kids, or shacking up like golden girls... they have ALL the cash. You don't have to believe me but as these people pass things will change and it has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wealth_Transfer
And yes, lack of mobility, the missing middle, zoning (back to that pesky voting things contribute) aren't helping. And so do tenants rights (the parts of these that helped end shared living situations from house mates to boarding houses).
Do we have a housing problem, Yes. The real fixes are going to be unpopular because the facts are in conflict with how people feel
> 63 percent of US households owned the home they lived in in 1960
Wouldn’t measuring dynamics of home ownership using a unit “households” cause all sorts of problems? Consider two people who would get married and become a “households” except they’re too poor to live together so they each cohabitate with their parents. Every household in this example that owned a house in 1960 (the two sets of parents) still does, but the example shows a pretty serious housing problem.
> Wouldn’t measuring dynamics of home ownership using a unit “households” cause all sorts of problems?
I had the same impression at first as well. But a household is a household is a household. That massive increase in people living alone follows the same 60/40 split on ownership that more "traditional" married couples would.
The affordability of housing has changed since the 60's, 70's and 80's. And it's what your intuition is picking up on. And it does relate to what is a household, but not because it's a poor measure but because the housing stock we have no longer matches how we use housing.
If you go back to 1985, the boomers were in their prime years and housing was much more affordable than today. The greatest generation was dying off, and in their golden years they lived together (The literal plot of golden girls), in homes or moved in with kids.
The boomers are NOT doing that. They are occupying multi bedroom housing stock, as couples or alone. This has created much of their wealth and lots of price pressure on younger generations. The millennials will tell you "housing was worse for them" and it was: the two large cohorts competing for the limited supply, and one was deeply entrenched already.
Do note that boomers aren't the only ones "living alone more" its a fairly equal distribution but they have the first mover advantage, historic pricing advantage, and tend to be the ones occupying multi bedroom housing alone creating the utilization pressure.
And the Golden Girls type living situations are unviable today for legal reasons. Overly broad tenants rights have killed the concept of co-habitation (roomates/housemates) turning 2,3, and 4 bedroom houses into single family homes, and zoning + tenants rights have finished off the boarding house (there might be hand full left in the US, this was the plot of another 80's tv series).
Telling The boomers to move in with the millennials is going to be massively unpopular with both groups. Telling renters that "you get less rights" is going to be politically impossible (even if it is only for 'housemates' situations). Death or a major change to Americans political will are the only fixes that we are going to see.
Overly broad tenants rights have killed the concept of co-habitation (roomates/housemates)
how so? in austria/germany this kind of living is very common for students. and we have way more tenant rights than the US. even in the US i lived like that.
i don't see what tenant rights have anything to do with that.
It used to be very common in the US.
The concept of "professional tenants" is a thing here. After the us's more drawn out eviction process, and then the actual delay in carrying it out, it is nearly impossible to get missing or unpaid funds back.
Great Wealth Transfer is going to be big. Because of step-up in basis, best time to sell is after you pass on property to child. Low or zero cap gains.
The primary problems are private equity buy up and rich foreign buyers. Prices would have already collapsed finally if not for the latter. Not possible to build our way out of this mess. It's a population problem in the numerical. An immigration problem. Stop the flow of high income potential immigrants and the prices will drop.
knock knock - you also said private equity buy up.