One day my boss rolled up in a fancy new car, I had grown up in a family that did better than middle class and still I had never seen such luxury. I was reminded of how I was promised the world, and given scraps, never to enjoy the same level of financial freedom as my grandparents.
But then my boss put his hand on my shoulder, he saw the pain in my eyes, and he reassured me
"Listen, if you work hard, apply yourself, put the company's needs before your own wants..."
My heart sang, could this be the secret to my salvation? "I'll finally get that raise"
My boss laughed. "No, I can get a nicer car by the next fiscal year."
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the main problem with this generation. Everyone is just complaining about the lack of money and all that but I hardly ever see anything about planting a money tree or two on your property. Sure, it takes some TLC to get it to grow but it's worth it come harvesting time. People are just lazy that's all.
I don’t feel secure that my state won’t pass horribly restrictive laws driving me to leave in the next 7 years which makes the financial decision to buy not necessarily worth it