this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.

The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.

“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.

Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.

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[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.world 30 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

A median is a value at the midpoint of a frequency distribution, such that the probability of a value being above or below it is equal. A median value is going to be highly dependent on the area - cities with a boom in the building of luxury homes will have a higher median value that may not be indicative of the existence of more affordable housing but, in a larger market with an even vaguely normal distribution of home prices, it should be an indicator of a fairly average (in the non-statistical sense) home. But why take my word when we can test your hypothesis!

For example, the median home value in Portland, OR is $515K with a median household income of $78K, yielding a median home price to household income ratio of 6.60. So lets hop on realtor.com and look at the first three homes listed at that price, +/- 2%. Look at these McMansions!

$510K for 2500 square feet on 7000 sq.ft. lot built in 1910

$515K for 2,234 sqft on 6,098 sqft lot built in 1992

$525K for a 1542 sqft condo with admittedly nice views of the river

Such luxury! Oh wait, they're just average homes. The largest home in that price range is 2,624 sqft. The smallest is this guy which, while nice, isn't a McMansion. It's a very nice but not luxurious 1200 sqft apartment.

Maybe Portland is a shitty example? How about Gillette, WY? Gillette has a median home value of $390K and a median household income of $72k, yielding a median home value to household income ratio of 5.42. Let's see what's in store!

$390K 2,880sqft 7,200sqft lot built in 2010

$410k 3,002sqft 6,199sqft lot built in 2011

$410k 3,944sqft 6,522sqft lot built in 1975.

The largest in that range is actually my third result, with the smallest coming in at 2706 square feet on 0.31 acres. Check that one out, it looks like they built two houses on top of each other. It's weird looking!

Note: only the first house was close to the median. I had to bump the upper price limit to 5% above median to get more than two results.

You'll get a lot more space for your dollar in Gillette, but a McMansion? They're still lacking the ostentatiousness and cut rate luxury characteristic of the McMansion, so not really. Certainly not the best a man can get.

[–] StraySojourner@lemmy.world 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I love how they've done nothing but bitch about "no one showing facts" but they avoid the posts with citations like the plague because they already got theirs and want the poors to shut up.

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.world 19 points 9 months ago

Oh yeah, I suspect they just want their biases confirmed. Anyone who shows evidence that the premises upon which their biases are based are flawed gets ignored. It seems those that scream "it's just facts and math, you can't argue with math" the loudest tend to have arguments largely based in neither.

[–] TokenBoomer@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I’m not shaving just because your wordplay was ingenious. Thanks for the housing info though.