There are many things that need change, but fixing the housing prices isn’t complicated, it’s just unpopular. You just need to take make speculating on housing as an asset very expensive. This will drive down the demand from non owner occupiers (businesses). It will also reduce the value of the largest asset most people own. People who invested so much into owning a home with the expectation that it will appreciate aren’t going to support policies that do the opposite.
We should’ve been taxing homes or land that people own but are not their primary residence, from the start.
It would be super easy to implement, and flexible - if housing prices are too high for 75% of the population, you raise those taxes little by little and the problem eventually sorts itself out. If it’s no longer a problem, you reduce the taxes.
I am in my late 30s and was only just able to buy this month. It’s the cheapest place I could find in my city, and the mortgage repayment will clean me and my SO out to the point where we can’t afford to run a car. We’re both in full time employment with an MSc.
Is anyone on Lemmy doing okay? I always come to the comments of these posts and see the doom and gloom. I’m a millenniaI. I paid off my student loans. I own a home I can afford. I’m debt free besides my mortgage. I have an emergency fund. I have a 401k that’s on track. I worked hard and made sacrifices to get where I am. I can only assume there are others out there who have done the same.
There are plenty of people in your situation (I’m also one of them), but the fact is that (unless you’re at the very top of the pyramid) nearly everyone (including people like us) is a bit worse off than they would have been at a comparable stage in life 30 - 60 years ago.
I had to work hard and make sacrifices to make it, however with my qualifications my parents (and even moreso my grandparents) generation would have just walked into secure, high-paying jobs with real prospects of advancement. Instead I’ve got to constantly be switching jobs and looking out for myself in order to not fall behind. I know the rules of the game, so I do what I have to do.
Now just imagine people who 50 years ago would have been ‘making it with sacrifices and hard work’, since (virtually) everyone is now a bit worse off, their situation has shifted to ‘underwater despite sacrifices and hard work’.
TLDR: The average millennial is poorer than past generations and it’s harder to make it than before. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t large amount of individual millennials (like us) who DO make it, although even for this group (unless they are at the top of the pyramid) it’s harder than before.
The most important thing is the rich getting richer
It’s wealth inequality. Capital accumulates capital, and it actually means something because wealth is control, and things like housing that determine control over people’s lives are forms of wealth that get concentrated away from regular people along with everything else.
IMO two main things need to happen:
- redistribution of wealth
- increase housing supply
Oh but they actively took our paychecks too. This wasn’t just government welfare for the wealthy and the stock market. When they fired Janet because they only needed one worker instead of two thanks to new software? They didn’t pay Bob extra. That’s wealth just sucked up into the Executive and Shareholder realm. Then to add salt to the wound of doing two jobs they give Bob a December raise below inflation. (because of course there is still actually more that Bob has to do, the software didn’t fix everything.) So now they get Janet’s pay and the extra revenue they denied Bob, because of course their prices damn sure went up in step with inflation.
This kind of fuckery has resulted in an estimated upwards transfer of around 47 Trillion dollars.