Home Prices vs. Inflation: Why Americans Can't Afford a House in 2024

Evey new construction home I see is a

Cracker box

The ultra rich. It's an asset economy. Housing is built to market demand, but the market isn't even people finding a place to live, it's asset acquisition and speculation.

I know an accountant whose company works for a lot of estate agents in London. Even when interest rates were sky high in the last year or two, they were still selling loads of houses and prices were increasing. The only difference was, more and more of the sales were paid in cash, not mortgages. That's not even 'rich' or upper middle class people buying homes or investment property (🤮), that's asset accumulation on a massive scale by the capital class.

Seriously, I know you mfs have one, MAYBE two kids, and you sure as shit don't have a multigenerational home, so why tf do you need 6 beds/7 baths? It's a pure dick-measuring contest. Congrats, now you get to climate control and (pay someone to) clean a ginormous house that's more than half empty.

It's already happening, the housing costs where I'm at have quadrupled in 4 years thanks to transplants from mostly CA, FL, and NY. There are barely any jobs here though, so they pay about half what they would in a big city while that half is about 20x the median wage here.

This leads to a vicious circle of them buying up even more property and converting it into short term rentals that are the equivalent of paying a mortgage that's 30x your salary.

My parents bought their first house in 1991-ish for around 50k, sold it for around 130k in 2002-2003

The same house now, largely identical save some minor remodelling and updating, is appraised at 282k

Mine would be over 17x

Waiting on a tornado or earthquake to destroy my city so property values go down.

This is just depressing as shit