TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
The DC mess is entirely on the mayor and city council allowing developers to run rampant and price the average homebuyer (who have fucking high five to mid six figure salaries) out of the market. It’s unreal and while people try to claim the recent crime wave is bad parenting, the fact that no one can afford a house is a major part of it. Doesn’t help that property taxes can jump by 17-40% per year whenever some developer sells a house in your neighborhood for 2.5x what they bought it.
This is where I like owning property in California. Prop 13 goes a little too far, but it prevents you from being yuppyed out of your house and having your taxes jacked up because a hipster decided to start flipping houses in your neighborhood.
For those that don’t know, this is what prop 13 does (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13):
EDIT: Until the last sentence I’m pretty with them. Why push grandma out of her house? But it shouldn’t necessarily apply to commercial real estate and corporate owned crap.
Ironically Prop 13 is one of the reasons California housing market is such a mess right now.
Yeah it’s a double edged sword. It also perpetuates suburban sprawl because schools are usually funded through property taxes (which, why? But ok) older areas of cities tend to have crappier schools because the taxes remain low. In order to get around this they build new municipalities that will allow additional taxes, and then you’ve got another suburb in a fire risk area with a better school that’ll attract families.
LOL, no. The mess – in DC and every other major American city – is entirely on the zoning code not allowing developers to run rampant enough, and instead enshrining single-family houses even when demand warrants multifamily.
DC is rapidly converting affordable homes into multifamily luxury units. Developers running rampant jacked up costs citywide.
Also, the city is less than 10 square miles and built on a swamp. Just based on infrastructure it can only handle so many people before it runs into serious issues.
No, you just fail to realize that prices would’ve been jacked up even higher if developers weren’t increasing the housing supply.
How? Most individuals wouldn’t sell their house for double unless the demand is there because they can’t really afford to let the property sit while they’re trying to buy a new place. The developers buy the properties before they hit the market for more than asking, split the property, make minor improvements, sometimes make things worse, then crank up the price. Meanwhile, there was definitely someone who was willing to buy at the seller’s original price, they just never got the chance.
Ironically DC needs more developers. It’s one of the most economically productive areas of our country. The opportunities to improve your life are endless there. People shouldn’t be blocked from pursuing a better life because someone person doesn’t want to live next to a duplex on someone else’s property
Okay but the developers exclusively flip affordable properties into luxury properties. Middle income housing is rapidly disappearing, the average 3 br costs like $800k to $1MM. The big new thing is buying a single family rowhome that would fit a family of 4-6 (or more) and turning it into a 2-unit condo with an HOA where each unit is only a 2 br and charging double or more what they bought the house for (buy the house for $850k, now trying to sell each unit at $890k). It’s absurd, unsustainable, displaces the local population, and ironically decreases the number of people that could have lived on the property.
This only exists because local government has made it so hard to build housing. This is the outcome when you limit supply.
Think about what would happen if there were artificial government limits on the amount of shoes that could be made. Only luxury shoes would be produced.