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The article talks a lot about mortgages. How does the math work if you pay in full at the time of purchase?
Renting could never compare to owning, as Equity is the biggest source of wealth for the middle class in the US. Not owning equity to pass on to your kids is one of the worst mistakes you can make. IF you can afford that sort of thing.
How have we screwed up as a society, much less species, when shelter is seen as a financial investment rather than what it is, a thing we literally need to survive?
Well, as houses don't magically appear out of thin air, I guess it has been like this since we started building permanent shelter.
Until relatively recently, it wasn't that uncommon to just go and find some unused land and build a house on it. No intergenerational wealth required.
Unused by white people?
Equity is pointless when your $30,000 roof and $20,000 HVAC break at the same time and you're taking out a 20 year home equity loan to replace them. (And good luck with the $70,000 windows.)
2-4x reality, but yeah…
Not at all, these are (roughly) prices for 2-3 bedroom single-family homes. If curious, check AIs for any reasonably successful region around the country like Raleigh, San Jose, Austin, etc. Prices are about the same. I looked up the cost for a dual system for a larger home (that would have 2x AC, 2x furnace) and that jumped to $30k-40k for HVAC. Water heater install (gas, tank) can run $800-3000 depending on the market.
Asking others for prices for windows, I think the spread was somewhere between $50k-90k, although it's been a while since I asked peeps. That's before actually going after specialty windows.
Prices have skyrocketed since the pandemic.
I don't know about that - I had my roof replaced (by insurance thankfully) about a year ago, and it was ~26k. HVAC out of pocket a couple years ago was about 15k. Not fun!
It depends on how big your house is.
I paid $10k for a 4 ton 15 SEER AC this summer (this depends on location I suppose). I paid $13k for a normal roof replacement last year.
1600 sqft house.
the homeowner could have an industrial HVAC system and a wooden roof
"Oops, I guess I made the 'mistake' of not making enough money to afford the outrageous price of real estate. I guess my children deserve to be poor."
Or maybe we should treat housing as an public resource rather than an investment, and encourage the market to keep prices low for the sake of maintaining a healthy society.
Leaving out the last sentence in your quoting does a disservice to what they were pointing out.
They weren’t saying anyone deserves to be poor. They weren’t saying that real estate being an investment is ideal or how it should be.
The housing market is historically, currently, and prospectively an investment, and one of the only high-return, low-risk investments available to the middle class. If you can play that game and don’t, then you are making a mistake, especially if you have kids.
Raising your kid(s) right is better than passing any monetary wealth on to them. If they grow up knowing that they're set and will inherit your money/house, they may get lazy and just depend on that wealth. That money will be gone after the 3rd generation.
Kinda shitty that people are downvoting this. Raising your kids right includes giving them the education they need to live and acquire wealth as well, so it's not like this is wrong.
Kids? I'm not a fan of parasites
you divide the amount of money that it costs by the amount of dollars you would pay to rent something like that per month and then figure that's how long it'll take for you to look at a duck instead of a chicken
Then add a few years, since you'll be the one paying to replace wear items like roof, carpets, and appliances.
insurance and property taxes and a very large HOA fee that looks almost like a rent payment if you're in a good city
That's true in general. And if you assume a perfectly efficient market, yes, renting would never be cheaper than buying. On the other hand, if markets were perfectly efficient, no company would ever be able to make a profit at all.
One market distortion is that in certain times, people will actually pay a premium for renting. People aren't perfectly rational actors. Or moreover, they prioritize things beyond just simple cost. Even if buying is more expensive that renting, all costs considered, often people will pay more just for the stability and certainty that comes with home ownership.
The housing market is also distorted by all the present owners with locked-in 30-year mortgages. This has suppressed the supply of existing homes on the market. Rental companies don't get access to federally-subsidized 30 year mortgages, so they are less subject to this interest rate lock-in.
I pointed out a few things, but these are a few of many. The key thing to realize is that housing is highly illiquid, and its production, ownership, and sale is heavily regulated, taxed, and subsidized. It's a heavily regulated market. This means that the market will not always follow basic econ 101 behavior. Yes, in theory, rentals will include all costs. But that is rarely the case.
In fact, in a perfectly efficient market, it's likely that neither buying nor renting would be beneficial. If everyone acted perfectly rationally all the time, the cost of renting would exactly equal the cost of buying. And in that world, buying would never be worth it, simply because it wouldn't be worth the extra hassle to safe not a single penny.
The cost of renting or buying would be negligible if we prioritized human needs over the human want to hoard wealth
Not the scenario this article talks about. Most people need mortgages, especially first time buyers.