• SacrificedBeans@lemmy.world
    103·
    10 months ago

    Last month I had this random conversation with an old lady while on vacation. She mentioned that quite lightheartedly, that “we bought our house just on our salaries, we worked hard back then and needed to settle down”. I wasn’t expecting to have to explain to her that this is not such an easy option for us right now. She seemed genuinely surprised and disappointed at the facts and I didn’t know whether to feel enraged or amused by her true or not ignorance.

  • McNasty@sh.itjust.works
    95·
    10 months ago

    I’m solid GenX.

    My grandparents bought a house on a corner lot in the northwest suburbs of Chicago for $6000. Which was about a years salary for Grampa, who worked as a welder. This was in the late 60s.

    ETA: Their mortgage was around $50.00 a month.

    • BigNote@lemm.ee
      422·
      10 months ago

      I’m GenX as well and I will straight up admit that my wife and I got lucky, purchased a house in a “distressed” neighborhood in Portland because it was all we could afford, and now, 20 years later, the neighborhood is fully gentrifying and our house and property is worth way more than what we owe on it.

      I’m conflicted as to how to feel about it. While on the one hand we very innocently bought the place because it was in a shitty neighborhood and was all we could afford, on the other hand I now know that we were what the urban studies people refer to as “bohemian colonizers,” meaning that without knowing it, we were, by moving into the neighborhood as poor artist types, part of a much longer process of gentrification.

      Again, I am of several minds regarding how I feel about the whole thing.

      • garden_boi@feddit.de
        45·
        10 months ago

        be poor

        move to a poor neighbourhood

        I really don’t think that you should feel bad about this personally :)

      • 31337@sh.itjust.works
        26·
        10 months ago

        Meh, gentrification is the result of bad policy, not personal, individual choices (except maybe for people flipping houses and landlords). Neighborhoods, and the people in them, should not stay poor forever. Rent controls, grants for people to start businesses or coops or whatever, allowing mixed-use zoning, and stuff like that can reduce the harmful affects of gentrification.

      • trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world
        21·
        10 months ago

        Yeah, I don’t think you should feel bad. You can’t really individually control processes like this and well… you needed a place to live.

      • ioen@lemm.ee
        91·
        10 months ago

        by moving into the neighborhood as poor artist types, part of a much longer process of gentrification

        I’m over worrying about this kind of stuff. I live in the nicest part of town I can afford. It’s not my fault people think I’m cool and want to live nearby. And the anti-gentrification activists who call me a “poverty tourist” are simply mistaken about my financial position.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        I feel bad because I think the house I sold went to a landlord. At the time it didn’t really occur to me that a cash offer probably implied land lord. I put some blame on my real estate agent for pushing lower cash offers over higher loan offers but it still makes me upset. The HOA in that neighborhood only allower 10% of the homes to be rented out and when we moved in they had a ton of signs saying that. I assumed that would be the case when we were selling.

        It was one of the nicest while still being affordable townhomes in the area.

        It doesn’t keep my up at night or anything but at the same time it’s not like I’m going to be selling my current house soon. It’s an opportunity you only get so often.

    • Rhllor@feddit.de
      35·
      10 months ago

      Which would be round about $55000 in today’s money, for those interested.

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
      7·
      10 months ago

      Today a the median yearly salary for a welder is a bit less than $40,000.

      For this price you can maybe get a camper, not too big though.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        9·
        10 months ago

        So, welders today make about 30% less, while houses today cost about 5x as much.

        Progress!!

  • letsgo2themall@lemmy.worldEnglish
    75·
    10 months ago

    I live in a small town in the SE US. I bought my house for $89,900, 12ish years ago. There are 3 vacant houses on my street and they are all listed for $250,00 or more. My house is bigger than all of them. They have all been empty for over a year.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
      745·
      10 months ago

      They really should tax empty houses at 100%. You’ll see how fast they will sell, and how low the price will go to achieve that.

      • letsgo2themall@lemmy.worldEnglish
        342·
        10 months ago

        absolutely agree. It’s insane that we allow corporations to hoard housing and artificially jack up the price. I’m just outside the city limits and I see soooo many homeless people now. A lot of them have jobs too, they just can’t afford a place to live. Some local churches have opened up their parking lots for people to sleep in their cars.

      • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
        15·
        10 months ago

        Agreed, if no one is resident in the house then the taxes should go way up.

        This way any house where the owner isn’t living there and it’s not rented would see the taxes increase quickly. We can even add a multiplier according to how many years the house has been sitting there empty.

        • malloc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          10 months ago

          In a way, some states do have this. Texas for example has the “homestead tax exemption” which puts a cap on the tax burden increases when prop evals 📈. This is only applicable to one home for the family and they must reside in it. You can’t claim this exemption if you are renting it out or have a summer home in this state.

          This is what I understand anyways.

    • AstralWeekends@lemm.ee
      4·
      10 months ago

      I just bought a house in the eastern part of the Midwest in the US. The tax assessment in 2021 for the house was about 193k. In 2023, it’s 275k. That is a 30% increase in 2 years. During those 2 years, nobody lived in the house, and no improvements were made in that time. Neat! My mortgage is still about the same as my rent for a 2br apartment in Oregon earlier this year. I suspect the Midwest is about to start hating Oregonians as much as Oregonians hate Californians soon!

      • InternetTubes@lemmy.world
        23·
        10 months ago

        The real problem is that it doesn’t cost practically anything to not maintain a property like a house. It either should or the concept of a rent should be abolished for that of affordable ownership. The housing bubble is crowdsourced greed.

  • Aggravationstation@lemmy.world
    401·
    10 months ago

    I’m English so can’t comment on the situation in the US, but reading the comments in this thread it seems quite similar to the one here.

    I bought a house in 2010, just before I turned 23 and I’m very much the exception to the rule. I live in an area with some of the lowest house prices in the country. I didn’t go to University and got my first full time job when I was 19. It didn’t pay well but I lived at home and I was a stoner. I didn’t go out much, just to friend’s houses to get high. My town is walkable enough that I didn’t need to drive (I get that not driving isn’t really possible in the US, or even in some parts of the UK).

    This meant I saved up a lot of my money without really trying. The house I bought cost £41,000. I sold it in 2022 for £39,000 which should give you some idea of the state of it.

    My Dad bought a house in 1986 for £12,000. I can see that house from the one I live in now, which cost me £79,000 in 2022.

    • input@lemmy.world
      18·
      10 months ago

      That is some achievement to lose money on a house in that time period, did it fall down 😂

    • beepnoise@lemmy.ml
      English
      15·
      10 months ago

      Those house prices sounds absolutely insane to me.

      I’m also in the UK, but I’m in the South East, so house prices are very high. Still managed to find a “cheap” house recently due to the location being a bit rough.

      For comparison, my house that I’m buying is £345k (it’s 2 bedrooms with a separate garage and 2 bathrooms). I saved up a £125k deposit by living with my parents for the longest time (I think it took me about a decade). The exception being for 3 years when I house shared - the rent was £325 per month with bills included, but my room was effectively a glorified cupboard.

      I will also say that I was saving lots and lots of money with my old job. I’m a software developer, so my salary was good (started off at £22.5k, went up to £45k with about 10 years experience and being a senior dev, then our company got bought out and my salary went up to £55k). A year later and I switched jobs as the annual salary increase was £150 (for the whole year). Ended up with a £75k salary w/ bonus, private healthcare, etc etc. I really lucked out at that moment.

      As to why I didn’t buy a house earlier with my deposit, there was two reasons:

      • I had saved up about £100k before for personal savings, then that money went to help a sibling (call this sibling A) with their property. My parents sold a property aborad to effectively give me back the money, but the money was split between me and another sibling’s bank account (call this sibling B) because of financial advice given by my uncle. What then happened was sibling B didn’t give me back the money and was being incredibly difficult about the money, and since they have a history of being difficult in general, I decided I was going to save that money instead.
      • Sibling A wanted to start their own business, but it effectively flopped for all sorts of reasons. They had amassed a loan of £15k, and I helped pay that off. This was while sibling B was being incredibly difficult.
      • Main reason: At the time, I didn’t know if I really wanted to stay at the job for so long, and if I did want to stay, I didn’t want to move into the area where my job was - despite the convenience, the area was incredibly rough - almost GTA like (and that is no exagerration). I didn’t know where I wanted to live, and the places I would be interested in, I effectively had no clue as I was living with my parents at the time.

      So yeah, buying a house in the South of UK isn’t easy at all. It requires a ton of patience and luck.

      • Aggravationstation@lemmy.world
        6·
        10 months ago

        Jesus, that’s insane.

        My house has 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom and no garage. It is, I’d say, in the second worst part of town but crime rates here are still fairly low. I paid over 4 times less for it than yours just 17 months ago.

        TBF house prices here have increased since then and you’re looking at around £100k minimum for a place like this now, but still, that’s mental.

    • drathvedro@lemm.ee
      21·
      10 months ago

      Which city is it? I would very much like to move in. The housing market is so ridiculous now that even in my crappy city, in a terrible country that lost millions due to COVID, and is now at a goddamn war losing thousands of people by day, the prices are still skyrocketing. Currently, even the cheapest 12m² room inside an ex-USSR barrack costs like 20 grand, and the situation is even worse outside the cities.

  • insomniac@sh.itjust.works
    38·
    10 months ago

    They’re so dense. My conservative uncle gave me a bunch of shit for taking out student loans. He worked at McDonald’s over the summers and paid his rent and tuition for the whole year! Meanwhile I was working full time year round going to school, barely making enough to pay rent without enough leftover to make a dent in tuition. Obviously that world doesn’t exist anymore. This was over 10 years ago, I’m sure it’s way worse now. At least I was able to find “affordable” rent.

  • Transcriptionist@lemmy.world
    7·
    10 months ago

    Image Transcription:

    A four-panel comic called Pervis by Zach M. Stafford.

    The first panel shows a young man in a brown button-down shirt and orange tie standing in a street with a house in the background. The young man is saying “I’m going to buy a house!”

    The second panel shows a much older man, now bald but still wearing the brown shirt and orange tie, speaking to a man in a green button-down shirt and green tie. The elderly man is saying “…and that was how I bought a house when I was 23!”

    The third panel shows a close-up of the older man’s face, he looks agitated, his eyes scrunched up and his mouth open wide as he yells “I worked at the drive-in all summer for that house!! Nobody wants to work anymore!”

    The fourth panel shows the elderly man and the green-shirted man again, this time both are facing away from the viewer and the green-shirted man is holding the end of an electrical plug that he’s just pulled from the wall. The older man is saying “…why are you unplugging my lamp?” To which the green-shirted man responds, “I’m just practicing”

    [I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]

      • Crul@lemm.ee
        2·
        10 months ago

        I was having issues adding this one to my RSS Reader. It worked on my browser, but commafeed said Connect timed out.

        I tried a different instance (nitter.cz) and it worked. So I edited the links in my comments. Thanks for noticing.

  • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
    558·
    10 months ago

    Wait until Zoomers and Millennials find out that the house grandpa bought was probably under 900 sq feet, didn’t have any AC, had one bathroom and if he was lucky had 2 bedrooms for the 2 adults and 3 kids. And when he furnished it, at most the family had one 13" B&W TV (if they were lucky), the tiniest fridge and the washing machine probably had a handle which you needed to crank by hand and the dryer was the clothesline out in the tiny backyard.

    Every prospective homebuyer under 35 these days would turn their nose to a house that small and with such few amenities. And god forbid it actually needed some work done to it. With how mechanically inept (and lazy) younger folks seem to be these days, they aren’t even willing to look at cheap fixer-uppers to save money in exchange for sweat equity.

    • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
      363·
      10 months ago

      Hahaha, you’re hilariously out of touch.

      Zoomers and Millennials would be lucky to find a small home for sale, as greedy real-estate and construction industries have pretty much decided that building starter homes isn’t profitable. My local 900 ft sq home costs just 20k less than a larger home, and they’re all over 300k

      Kids? Who can afford kids? Zoomers and Millennials aren’t likely to be in the position to have multiple kids.

      And its a lot easier to live without A/C pre-2000, you know, before people polluted the fuck out of everything we depend on to live

      But go on claim a worldwide housing crisis is due to a generation of lazy people and definetly not due to giant investment industry that 's squatting on top of housing. Did you have to fight airBNB to get a bid in in your day, grandpa?

        • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
          212·
          10 months ago

          Hahaha the participation award line! you are old!

          You’re projecting grandpa. You were the participation award generation. You had it all handed to you and you preserved NONE of it for the next generation. And thats going to be the legacy of your generation.

          Societies grow great when old men plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit, not when you raze the forest to the ground for ‘as seen as TV’ garbage from China, you asshole.

          • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
            424·
            10 months ago

            I wish I was old, but good luck using that an an insult. Clowns like you think anyone old enough to drink is just a few short years away from needing a cane.

            Come up with more excuses for all your generation’s failures. You’re going to need a whole hell of a lot of them because those failures keep on coming.

            • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
              122·
              10 months ago

              Don’t worry, when you come up with elders like yourself who start blaming the sins of the parents on the children by 5 years old (who really made participation awards happen? The kids or the parents?), you get pretty impervious to bullshit blame games.

            • Zombiepirate@lemmy.worldEnglish
              42·
              10 months ago

              I love the Gen X’rs who spout boomer “back in my day” lines with zero self-awareness that they’re in the same boat as the rest of us.

              They forget that they were the OG slacker generation, but maybe if they shit on millennials and zoomers enough the boomers will finally let them drive lmao!

        • Soulg@lemmy.world
          151·
          10 months ago

          Ah yes the classic blaming the children for what their parents did re: participation awards. No wonder you’re so fucking stupid. I’m sure you had literally everything handed to you by your parents to have those views, because there’s literally no fucking chance that someone who is actually working from nothing could possibly think like that. I refuse to believe that level of stupidity exists.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
          12·
          10 months ago

          And who were the ones giving out participation awards?

          It certainly weren’t the Millenials nor Zoomers, we didn’t care about those things.

      • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
        327·
        10 months ago

        I’ve heard that before, then you tell someone they might have to add 10 minutes to their commute, or you tell them the closest Starbucks is 15 minutes away, or Gb internet wasn’t offered, or some other lavish luxury that people are spoiled with these days wasn’t available, and all of a sudden it is a dealbreaker.

        Used to be in the /realestate sub on Reddit and the number of spoiled buyers who would endlessly complain about not being able to find a house was infuriating. And when you’d point out to them that with their budget maybe since they were single and had no kids, they might not actually need a 3 bedroom house, they would get all snippy.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
          8·
          10 months ago

          All those things I would gladly give up if it meant I don’t have to burden my parents anymore.

    • mrpants@midwest.socialEnglish
      102·
      10 months ago

      You truly have no idea how zoning, home construction, or really anything works today and this very ignorance is informing your biases.

    • AstralWeekends@lemm.ee
      3·
      10 months ago

      Man, I saw houses in Portland that were smaller than 900 sq ft, did not have central AC, no appliances, and had water damage and wires ripped from the walls above $200k. That’s not the case in all markets, but it is for a great many. Get on Zillow and start looking around as if you were in the market. Ask yourself if you’d be willing to offer some of these asking prices.