I was actually thinking about this recently, as I have noticed those that had parents able to either give them a down payment or just purchase a home outright have such a huge advantage compared to their peers within the same jobs.
Back when I was saving money for a down payment a coworker told me to “just ask my parents for some money for it”. I made more than my parents by age 30 and my wife’s parents are way, way worse off. With housing prices rising those who have parents who can afford to help out will be able to still get in. Those without wealthy parents spend years and years renting (at higher monthly prices than a mortgage typically) and losing that money forever. No savings with it, no equity built up. Housing prices increasing only helps those who already have, and hurts class mobility.
Maybe I don’t realize how common this is. To me, the idea of asking my parents for money for something like that is completely foreign to me. Like MA, by my mid 30s I was making more than both of my parents did and unlike MA I’m not married, so I didn’t have a second income to help me buy a house.
The only thing I can remember my parents helping me pay for was college. They helped with a couple of thousand in tuition (it was well under $10k). I was extremely grateful for the assistance. Maybe others have more affluent parents that helped them along the way. I don’t know.
I totally agree. The system is broken and needs to change but neither major US political party will make any significant change to address the inequities.
My previous point was only to mention that those parents who are able to help their kids financially should do so as early as they can rather than wait until they’re dead! But this is only going to help those with parents who have such resources. It does not address greater problems such as income inequality and concentration of wealth.
Like yourself, I was making much more money early in my career than my parents ever did so I would not have dreamed of asking them for a handout. However none of my kids will ever make as much as I did (none of them are in high-paying jobs) and they face much higher housing costs than I did. Of course, I am going to help them any way I can but they will still have a lower standard of living than I did.
This doesn’t match my family’s experience at all, but I’m like your wife, I’m not leaving this house before death if I can prevent it.
I went to 3 different elementary schools and two different high schools between K-12 (my younger brothers had more), and my oldest kid went to 8 different elementary schools between K-4 (two cross country moves), and then stayed in the same school from 4th-8th, and then had a single high school. My middle one had 4 different elementary schools between K-3 (one cross country move), and my youngest only had 2.
I’ve moved somewhere between 20 and 30 times. It’s never happening again.
Well, I didn’t go super nuts or anything. A 1900 sq ft 3 bed / 2 bath house in the burbs.
When I married my ex we bought a 5,000+ sq ft monstrosity. It was awful… never again, no matter how rich I am. (It did have a great kitchen though… that kitchen in a 2,500 sq ft house would be perfect.)
I think of NIMBY as applying to things that are pretty much universally considered undesirable neighbors, such as a nuclear power plant or Section 8 housing or a pipeline or strip club.
Are you saying that people object to additional housing near them even in a similar price range?
I think it also has to do with the parents’ willingness to give money to their kids.
Asian parents are quite willing to do this. Sacrificing their own happiness for their children’s happiness. American parents less so I think.
My husband wants to die in our house. It’s not feasible, unless we get full time help and have food brought up to us and never leave the home, as we have one bathroom and it’s upstairs, no first floor master, and no room to add on.
But we will stay here until our kids move out. He’s sad that our kids won’t necessarily have their childhood home to come back and visit, but maybe one of them can have it to live in I guess.
I was one of those kids who had parents to give them a down payment. And as a young adult, i was keenly aware that i was effectively much wealthier than my peers who had the same job and the same income I had. We just had a cushion that many of my friends didn’t have.
It gave me the ability to be pickier about what jobs i was willing to take, too.
When my mother died, i immediately passed my inheritance to my kids. It’s worth so much more to them than to me. (The details are more complicated, and I’m not going to go into them.)
But yeah, a whole generation of millennials are screwed because they can’t break into the housing market, and that matters so much. I think our system is seriously broken.
This assumes that the “future buyer” is the “younger generation”.
I’ll agree that current market and social expectations can be disproportionate for some buyers; but it’s not an inherent aspect of real-estate-as-wealth-building.
The buyer has to agree to the sale price and all other related conditions for the sale to be complete. The buyer also has the power to set some of those conditions for the sale to be complete. So I fail to see where disparity has to be present for any sale.
How many properties turn into rentals instead of continue as owner-occupied dwellings? I have a source for this (close relative) that indicates that in many localities, demand for (quality) rentals is starting to exceed supply.
An increase in supply, all things equal, will tend to lower the prices of said items.
I think that’s page one of the text for Econ 101.
Now, if the increase in supply is a reaction to an increase in demand, then no problem. But, people building houses to sell are not all that interested in the equilibrium. Not only that, but since the builders are competing with existing houses, they are in a much better position to make better (to sell) houses, which will tend lower the prices of existing homes, which cannot keep up with the changing market as well.
Sure, I’ve just never seen people up in arms about new housing developments in similar price ranges to their own. Like maybe they’ll grumble about the dust from construction or the noise or worry about the impact to traffic, but not like up in arms trying to prevent it from happening angry, or certainly not actually successfully blocking the development from actually being built.
I think a big issue with NIMBYism is with the preponderance of single family zoning in the inner suburbs of cities. Most cities in Europe, Asia and Australia/New Zealand will have medium density housing in the inner suburbs and if you want to have a house with a decent sized backyard you need to move further out. This makes for more efficient traffic as the bulk of the population lives closer to the city.
North America suffers from the missing middle. Compared to other countries there is a relative lack of medium density - duplexes, rowhouses or 2 to 4 storey apartment blocks. Often these are in desirable inner city neighborhoods in other countries and is not seen as slumming it.
That I agree with. Is that due to NIMBYism though? Or just the way homes were built as cities expanded? Back when the neighborhood was built it was the edge of the city, but now it’s considered a close-in suburb.
I think this is where I’m in agreement with part of what J0EBL0W is saying: In America, there is an “expectation” to own “your own home” that isn’t shared.
It also doesn’t help that many here also don’t care to (adequately) maintain what is theirs if it cuts into their “enjoyments” (either financially or time-resource).
NIMBYism does lead to voters voting against any change to their neighborhood from single family households to mixed use (single family home/condos/apartments). There have been a few articles about it being an issue in California lately, especially in San Francisco and LA. City center neighborhoods are close to single family neighborhoods with not much in between.
Contrast this to Sydney, Australia, where in some directions you can travel 10-15 train stops from downtown before you start to see regular quarter acre single family blocks.
Fair enough; I’m not familiar enough with those markets to know that level of detail.
I wonder to what extent the objection is what I’d say are legitimate concerns over things like traffic and impact to schools (which isn’t what I’d consider NIMBYism) vs a general disdain for different types of housing.
If you start with horrendous traffic and have no plan for making it better, then small wonder people object to adding hundreds more housing units. And one thing I do recall about both San Francisco and LA is that the traffic is atrocious and the schools are very crowded.
So is the issue NIMBYism or poor urban planning? I don’t know enough (anything) about why people are blocking developments to say, but my gut instinct says it’s the latter.