The number of US cities where first-time homebuyers are faced with at least a $1 million price tag on the average entry-level home has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to new research.
A Thursday report from Zillow indicates that a typical starter home is now worth $1 million or more in 237 cities, up from 84 cities in 2019, underscoring America’s ongoing home affordability crisis.
“Affordability has been strained across the board,” Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow, said. “We see the largest number of million-dollar starter homes in expensive coastal markets. We see them in markets with very low homeownership rates and we see them in markets with more building regulations.”
That’s just how life is in a society. Don’t fall for the stupid Prop 13 trap that ruined so much in California.
Edit: how TF does this get downvoted to heck but my reply one down is upvoted even higher even though they say the same thing. Are you all just bandwagoners here? I thought I got away from redditors but I’m having second thoughts now.
People aren’t selling, because their tax bill will 10x at whatever place they downsize to. The older generations are all living in 5+ bedroom homes with 1 or 2 people while young people are raising families in 1br apartments. It means that across the state communities are dying out and young people just aren’t having families anymore. On top of this, suburban sprawl is completely out of hand because all the people who bought before prop 13 was passed were living in the metropolises since they were working age. Now that they are retired they still live where the jobs are, and the young working people have to commute 2+hrs each way to get to their jobs.
The people with a 5 bedroom house could sell for so much money they wouldn’t care about the tax bill at the new place. Going from 5 bedrooms to two bedrooms means you could outright buy the new place and have 2 million dollars left over. At that point you’re crying into your Scrooge sized bank account about property taxes.
And if you’re worried about the people who bought condos or other small city homes staying there until they die, that’s the point. The entire point was to prevent people being pushed out of their homes.
It never stopped people from buying a smaller house or moving for new jobs. Not building enough housing to cover the natural rise in population is the reason we are here. Insisting that all new housing be single family detached housing in suburbs is why we’re here. Those are far more impactful things than the people who just never move.
Literally cannot downsize. By that I mean people will be in a house that’s 2500+ sqft and their mortgage might double moving to literally any house in the city regardless of size. Most people don’t actually want a (poorly made cheap pos) mansion twenty or thirty minutes further from civilization, but that’s all that’s legal to build.
You’re just wrong. Even the worst places for housing allow for downsizing. There’s always the possibility that someone couldn’t pay the higher monthly amount for another reason, like having structured debt payments. But generally speaking downsizing is easy. The windfall from selling covers the new house, in the same neighborhood, and literal decades of taxes and maintenance, longer than you will live unless medical science makes a breakthrough.
