Renting is a better option for most people until the housing market crashes where they want to live. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
The soaring costs of home ownership are changing the metrics of unaffordability in important ways.
We all know that buying a house is now unaffordable, but owning a house is increasingly unaffordable, too. Gordon Long and I have laid out the sobering explosion of the costs of homeownership, a rise that shows no signs of slowing, much less reversing.
It would be nice to attribute it all to one source or one villain, but alas, it isn’t that easy. Costs are rising across the board for many reasons, none of which are reversible by enacting a policy tweak or two.
For context, let’s start with inflation since 2020 and the cost of buying a house.Truflation pegs the aggregate inflation (a.k.a. loss of the purchasing power of the US dollar in our domestic economy) at 26% since January 2020. All else being equal, we would expect the cost of housing to have risen by about 25%.
But according to the Case-Shiller national housing index, which tracks the purchase prices paid for each house over time, housing costs rose an eye-watering 45% since January 2020, as the index soared from 220 to 320.
Traditionally, the primary cost of home ownership everyone tracks is the mortgage payment, the famous monthly nut of principal and interest, which of course goes up with the purchase price and the interest rate of the mortgage.
As we all know, both the purchase price and the interest rate have gone up significantly, pushing the mortgage payment as a percentage of median household income up to levels that exceed the previous peak in Housing Bubble #1 circa 2006-08.
If inflationary pressures remain elevated and the bond market isn’t buying the “inflation is fading” story, then mortgage rates might not drop even if the Federal Reserve cuts the Fed Funds Rate.
These things happen in Bolshevik Revolution 2.0 and voting usually doesn’t work for ending it.
It’s expensive to try to bring faculty lounge bong smoke delusions to the real world.
Locally prices will only go up as hundreds of thousands of replacements pour in, you see more and more rubberneck license plates every day in my beloved Red State.
It used to be “well it’s affordable there” but not anymore.
Because I live here that’s why.
Regarding inflation, printing press uber alles, take care of the 52nd state Ukraine and COV-LARP but Trump says no CBDC on my watch?
Breaking from the great Joe Walsh:
Theme From Boat Weirdos (Instrumental)