Featured Population bomb and cars

My first was a '60 Volvo PV544 for $1k. Gift from Dad in senior year of college. I was earning in the summer andd through ROTC to cover running costs.

Not sure what HOA is cheap. I've been in three for a total of 50 years and collectively owning your own roads and drainage isn't cheap. Price paving a mile of road ...$500 to $900k.

 

I try to steer clear of properties that requires HOA. They're a great concept when managed properly and keeps the neighborhood respectable; but improperly managed ones are a nightmare. That'll affect your property value and ability to sell it, if there's leans against the HOA. You know someone screwed up when everyone has to pay a special assessment increase because something happened or a contractor walked off with the down payment on a job. Don't even get me started about contractor buddies and kick-backs.

 

I suppose Colorado had (and still has?) a lot of open space back then.
Boston was already pretty well developed.
My parents first house in 1954 was 15,000.
They both had to work to make the payments, and banks were very strict.
Our first house was 50k in 1978 (we did a lot of the work).
We had to find jobs in New Hampshire and buy there, couldn’t afford anything around Boston.
Our first child’s house cost $1.1 million in 2020, and if he didn’t have a post graduate degree in a lucrative field, they wouldn’t have been able to afford Boston either.

 

Yes they can but so can any property. Landlords can neglect upkeep. And neighbors can be a nightmare in any situation.

I have been part of HOA/POA management for 15 of my 20 most recent years. We try not to be a..h...., much prefer to be helpful.

In fact I am helping a lady process approvals for an ADA addition to her house to accommodate her husband who has ALS and they needed an significant exemption from setback requirements. Normal response time 30 days, I hustled it through the system in a week.

You do run into the situation where no one wants to vote to keep assessments up with inflation. No one wants to be on the Board and it is heck getting a quorum of lot owners so that annual budgets can be passed.

 

$15,000 was about double what the median house cost back then in the entire country. $15,000 in 2025 would be around $174,919.52 in today's money. The $7,450 home ad below (for a house from the late 50's) would be $86,876.69 today. Of course minimum wage was only 75¢ an hour (about $8.75 today). However, at 40 hours a week, that was $120 per month for a single person (before income tax), or about 2.5 times the monthly mortgage on the house below. So perhaps not possible to buy off of minimum wage, but not too far off either, and that price is for a median priced house from those days. There were cheaper ones in other places.

For reference, $50,000 in 1978 would be $318,143.00 when adjusted for inflation and was more than the median US priced home of that time too, but not by much. In 1980 the median home price was about $47,200. And you're first child's house would be $1,333,242.79 today if we adjusted it for inflation too.

Today the median home price over the entire USA is $419,200, so about 1/3 more than your 1978 home and more than double your parent's 1954 home, when adjusted for inflation. I do live in a very expensive part of the country as far as homes go, so that's part of my problem, with the median home price being $980,000 in my county.

 

Parents first house was $3,300 in 1941 from the builder. Suburbs of DC 1700 sq ft. 3 bedroom, 2 story. No TV room, no 1st floor bath. Not even AC back then. Today $1.254M per zillow. Property tax $10k/yr plus.

Or it was before the layoffs in DC which will probably destroy the housing market around there.

 

Sounds like a win times two to me. Cut government waste and lower inflated home prices at the same time.

 

Well, I hope the best for the government. But I don't get my hopes up. I'll believe housing prices will be cheaper when I see it. I just don't see how home owners, especially new ones, would allow home prices to go down without a fight.

 

It’s not up to the homeowner, it’s supply and demand

 

Yes, I understand that. But I'm sure a lot of home owners know that too, and therefore want to control the supply to keep demand up. Take a similar town nearby here (only like 8 hours away) called Steamboat Springs. I've been there and the housing situation is brutal. There are three school teachers sharing a bedroom together. I've seen mobile homes with 20 people living in them. The government bought an entire ranch and decided to make it into a subdivision. But it was met with fierce backlash from the house-owning community. They put in enough petitions that the case got to be voted on and lost. So the situation is still the same, the rich have giant beautiful mansions to live in, but the working class doesn't have a decent place to live.

Lots of home owners are NIMBYs, not all are, but lots are. They don't want housing supply to go up because demand will go down and the value of their homes will go down.

We'll see what happens here. So far there are plans to put in thousands of homes both East and West of town, many of subdivisions. But so far it's be stagnating as there are many in opposition to the idea. Meanwhile I've been to many of the local apartment complexes and a lot need to be condemned. Bed bugs, cockroaches, mold, sewage leaks, etc. A lot of places can't hire anyone local so they were hiring people that didn't have a legal stay. But now a lot of those are leaving due to the new administration, so I've seen quite a few businesses apply for and get temporary foreign workers. But they get here and have to find their own place to live at. 10 guys in an infested run down tiny hotel room at $2,400 per month. No kitchen, and I'm not sure the bathroom even works. Just bunk beds all packed in there tight.

I think things might get better if they just outlaw and enforce all this worker abuse and when places can't get anyone to work at restaurants nor run grocery stores nor take care of the roads and parks, and no one that will stay and do remodels or plumbing repairs, then maybe the people with the money will start realizing that workers need homes just like everyone else, and that means there needs to be affordable housing.

 

That about sums it up for why the "population explosion" we kept hearing about years ago, has become less of an issue. As evil as globalization was purported to be, it did raise incomes for most people around the world, and as a result, they didn't need a big litter of kids to work as free labor raising food. They just cost too much.

 

We're all immigrants or descendants of immigrants. I don't recall any rule, stating "last in, first out."

 

I have my doubts. Because #1, such immigrants don't buy houses. And #2, from what I see, the companies that were hiring them are now hiring ones with temporary work visas. So the same rentals that housed the immigrants facing deportation are now housing immigrants with work visas... so the housing demand stays the same.

Unless, companies don't replace their lost employees with foreign workers, only then there would be a housing supply increase.

 

Well, like I was saying. For deportation to lower housing demand, and therefor prices, there would need to be 1) a large enough quantity of people deported, 2) as well as not have another large influx of legal foreign workers to replace the ones that were deported.

The way I see it, if a lot of people are deported and no one from outside the USA comes in to fill those jobs then housing prices may go down, but other things will become more expensive. So who knows, I guess we'll have to wait and see. I'm still not hopeful that I'll ever be able to afford a house where I live.

Basically 3% of the USA population has an unauthorized presence. If you could deport all of them that frees up 3% of the housing, but also would mean we'd lose 45% of the agricultural work force and 13% of the construction work force. So food and, ironically, housing, would potentially go up in price if such industries had to pay their workers what it would take to get USA citizens to work there, or we'd see a drop in supply so increase in demand... which is the problem we have now with housing.

 

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That's exactly what I'm seeing businesses doing now, and not just in the agricultural sector. Even McDonald's is hiring foreign temporary workers. So, if you drive out the "illegals" and bring other foreign workers in, how does that fix housing supply/demand? And it doesn't help with car prices either...

 

Sweeping statement is sweeping. Quite a few people around today descend from settlers and founders, not immigrants.

The pattern suggested isn't LIFO, but that the most recent wave encouraged to enter without visas should not remain.

I don't think immigration is a cause of expensive housing over time. Yes, there can be circumstances where the housing stock is restricted and a really large immigration wave hits that limited stock, but unless the stock is abnormally restricted, as may be the case in parts of Canada currently, that problem fixes itself as more homes are built.

I wonder how much of the current apparent expense is buttressed by people who still work but no longer commute into an urban center. There's a sort of natural limit to the distance from a city center a commuter is usually willing to live and when you get beyond that prices and demand moderate. If I can do all my business on zoom calls and with email, what keeps me from living where my nearest neighbor is a farmer? Why would I pay a fortune for a townhouse if for about the same price I can have a place with lots of room where my wife can have horses and my children are safe?