Buying a family-sized home with three or more bedrooms used to be manageable for young people with children. But with home prices climbing faster than wages, mortgage rates still close to 23-year highs and a shortage of homes nationwide, many Millennials with kids can’t afford it. And Gen Z adults with kids? Even harder.
Meanwhile, Baby Boomers are staying in their larger homes for longer, preferring to age in place and stay active in a neighborhood that’s familiar to them. And even if they sold, where would they go? There is a shortage of smaller homes in those neighborhoods.
As a result, empty-nest Baby Boomers own 28% of large homes — and Milliennials with kids own just 14%, according to a Redfin analysis released Tuesday. Gen Z families own just 0.3% of homes with three bedrooms or more.
They trying to distract us. I aint looking at the single home owning boomers, its landlords and corporate real estate companies hoarding homes.
Absolutely, it isn’t those boomer parents living in a house for 40 years that are driving up the costs. It’s corporations and landlords buying houses as investments so that they can rent them out while the market skyrockets.
Yeah this needs more of an upvote, take a THIS
Mostly, you’re right, IMO. But these same people will vote against affordable housing being built near them… “Not in my backyard!”
Right? Modern medicine is keeping people alive longer, and I’m not going to judge someone for wanting to keep the home they’ve probably lived in for many years.
I don’t rent, but from what I read it’s out of control, and corporations buying up homes, putting in the bare minimum to fix up (read: lazy/cheap contractors) and asking way more than it’s worth. Now, of course you don’t have to pay it, but if everyone is asking overprice, what are people suppose to do?
This post is a load of horse shit.
The reason housing prices are out of control is because investment firms are gobbling them up with cash, yet you’re blaming it on boomers staying in their homes.
Boomers are staying in their homes BECAUSE the housing market is out of control. Stop blaming older people and start blaming Wall Street.
Exactly. Where will they move to? Most older people want to stay in the neighborhood that they grew up in. It’s not like an 80 year old will be selling their house in suburban Long Island to find a cheap room in rural Alaska.
And it’s not like new houses haven’t been built since grandpa bought his house.
And it’s not like there isn’t people benefitting now on a housing shortage caused by Airbnb buying up all that new housing.
Blaming boomers for corrupt Airbnb for this is a desperate reach.
This point is literally in the article, almost word for word, and it’s being upvoted as a defense of them against this article that’s allegedly trying to blame them.
Fucking hell, it never ceases to amaze me that people will be so up in arms against something they didn’t even bother to read.
Also blame shit like Silicon Valley for coming up with these new things like Airbnb and not putting it through a proper checkpoint on how it impacts the world. Like surely that could have had some foresight on the housing shortage it was going to cost the moment people got dollar signs in their eyes.
Idgaf about the boomers who want to grow old in the homes they bought. Thats their right as a homeowner. I care about the airbnbs, unskilled flippers, and the corps trying to turn America into a “renters market”
Exactly. My parents are boomers and own one house. But my sister and her son live with them, so they are utilizing their space.
It’s the corporations that own several rentals, complexes, etc that drive rent and house prices up. Can’t compete with their practices .
I read the disaster insurance in some states are so outrageous or even unobtainable, so private citizens can’t even get a mortgage (no insurance, no loan) anymore-assuming they could afford one to begin with. The only ones who can afford to outright buy in some places are corporations and foreign interests. It’s fucking trash.
There are so many “boomer bad”, “genx vs millenniall”, “zoomers are lazy” stories lately. Seems like they got tired of just pitting races against each other and moved onto fake generational conflict. This way we don’t notice what the billionaires are doing to all of us. Meanwhile the 5 richest billionaires doubled their net worth.
GenX here. I’m shocked someone remembered us. We’re not even mentioned in the synopsis
This. it’s ok to own a home. It’s ok to rent a home. people need places to live.
What’s not ok is being a slumlord.
yeah kinda feels like the corporations trying to push a bogeyman to distract us.
No, just a writer with nothing to write about. This article is seriously summed up as “omg people are choosing to live in the homes they bought, wtf??!”
These fuckers too - price hiking people out of rentals is a policy. The encourage evictions instead of negotiation. it’s fucked.
Really tired of big news companies blaming individuals for industries ruined by the greedy elite, if I can’t afford to buy a house, then they can’t afford to move houses. My parents wouldn’t have a shot in the dark affording a new house.
Sell your 1 million dollar house that you own and pay $6000 on taxes for just to land back on the market and realize that you can afford a small condo for that and a jumbo loan 😜.
Boomers shouldn’t have to part with their homes. They, too, need a place to live.
The issue is not Boomers owning the house they live in and refusing to leave it (even if it might be larger than they require) The issue is in particularly large corporations owning thousands of properties and taking them away from the housing market.
We should tear them from their homes and send them back where they came from.
This is a fucking bullshit article. Between Airbnb and filthy scum investment companies buying up homes to rent, actual owners are nowhere near the biggest problem
Stop upvoting shit like this. CNN = Clearly Not News
In support of your argument.
Report: 44% of all Single-Family Home Purchases were from Private Investors in 2023
edit: see corrections below
If you click through to the Business Insider article you can see that it’s a misquote. Private investors accounted for 44% of the flips in 2023, not 44% of all single family home purchases total. That’s still a problem, but it’s a huuuuuge difference. Flips are a small minority of home sales.
Thanks for the correction. I remembered seeing that number but didn’t analyze it in any depth. A more detailed analysis of the market, by Freddie Mac, concluded that there were four main drivers for the recent surge in prices, and investors weren’t on the list.
- record low mortgage rates in 2020 and 2021, and the race to beat future rate increases;
- limited supply from underbuilding and below average distressed sales;
- an increase in first-time homebuyers due to favorable age demographics; and
- increased migration from high-cost cities to areas that already had a housing shortage.
Institutional investors apparently even reduced their purchases in 23 - some of them were even net sellers - because of prices and interest rates. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still villians in this scenario. I don’t think big investors should own single family homes at all. But still they aren’t as big a force as my previous comment indicated.
Fucking hell that’s shocking
It’s not even close to true. Here’s an article about it
Not only are corporations buying up houses to rent, they’re actively preventing new houses for purchase from being built through “build to rent” schemes. They use the already scarce construction resources and divert them to building housing with the sole intention of renting them out.
So they’re keeping the supply houses available to own down, and then preventing new supply from being created. It’s a giant fuck you from corporations and shitty local government for letting it happen.
Article makes it sound like an old people problem. It isn’t. It’s a systemic one. People can’t afford houses.
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Not that weird. The corporate media has been pushing this narrative for a while. They realize that younger people don’t respond to the old racism or anti-lgbtq. But “evil old boomers are stealing your house/money/whatever” seems to work like a charm. It’s just another distraction.
The actual solution is to build more and reject the idea that homes should be a monetary investment (because that requires limited supply, which requires that somebody who needs a home in an area can’t get it in order to make demand drive the price up)
It really isn’t the solution.
I would totally agree with you if it weren’t for the fact that there is an abysmal amount of vacant homes.
Investment companies buy up entire neighborhoods leaving them empty allowing them to jack prices up in the area for rentals.
This has nothing to do with there being not enough homes. The issue is investment companies turning housing into a monopoly.
Building more won’t do shit because investment firms will gobble those up too. New homes are mad expensive too so the only people affording them are rich people or investment firms.
Remove Wall Street from housing and the problem is solved.
Investment companies does make it worse, but they wouldn’t be able to cause a crisis if homes were built in such volumes that they can’t be investments. They’re buying expecting value to go up. Build enough and that can’t happen.
Right, we had the same issue before investment companies got big, and before airBnB. They just made it worse and the jump in interest rates made houses suddenly even less affordable
As someone who does have a house, I wanted to start pre-paying my mortgage so that’s not hanging over my head so long. However with interest rates as low as they are, I’m much better off even just dropping but I to a savings account …. Anyhow, my point is that even if I wanted to sell, such as to downsize, that’s a bad deal given interest rates
You don’t understand. You must be angry at old people, not rich people or companies.
Well, try to build high density housing near them and see what happens.
“Rich people hate this one simple trick”
my older in-laws are hoarding all the wealth after grandmother passed and they finagled their way into the inheritance they were not in and inherited the vehicles as well
now we have ask them for anything if we get in a bad way and my side of the family did something similar
older people do be hoarding
with home prices climbing faster than wages, mortgage rates still close to 23-year highs and a shortage of homes nationwide, many Millennials with kids can’t afford it. There is a shortage of smaller homes in those neighborhoods.
The article mentions both cost and availability as factors.
Well gee it’s almost like after decades of being told they should treat houses as investments to be collected instead of sold, they listened.
The problem isn’t boomers. It’s people buying more than they need during a crisis.
Don’t let them make you forget that 44 percent of homes were bought by corporations in 2023. In cash, above asking, no inspection.
I agree with most of what you said but that 44% number is wildly wrong. Article about it
Also, anecdotally, I’ve gone through a couple of houses in hot markets the last 5 years (had to move for work) as both buyer and seller. The vast majority of people looking weren’t corporate or institutions. Most were couples looking for a place to live. Cash buyers above asking are a real thing though and they suuuuuuuck for the poors like myself.Your right, I shouldn’t take my news from Medium headlines. So here’s the actual study results from Business Insider.
However the Medium article wasn’t wrong. When you have reporting from NYT to CNBC agreeing, and a glorified industry blog splitting hairs as a defense then it’s pretty clear what the situation is.
“ When combining closings between both larger, private equity and smaller, independent operations, investors accounted for 44% of the purchases of flips during the third quarter”
That figure is talking about only flipped (i.e. remodeled) houses bought in a specific quarter, October 2022. Most people (myself included) can’t afford freshly remodeled homes and brand new cars.
That figure also lumps small landlords together with big investors which really isn’t the same thing in my opinion but some people around here think that all landlords are evil so that’s somewhat subjective I guess.Institutional investors “purchased 25% of the homes flipped” “as soaring mortgage rates push traditional buyers to the sidelines,”
That still sucks but it’s not 44% of all homes being bought by big corporations throughout 2023.
Here’s a recent Business Insider article that goes in depth on who’s been buying houses over time
Idgaf if they own 10 houses or 10,000. They’re hoarding houses and people are being hurt by it. It needs to stop.
So no rental properties at all? You either buy or you’re homeless? That doesn’t sound great to me. Owning is a lot of work, risk and commitment. If anything goes wrong, you better have thousands of dollars ready to dump into getting your roof fixed or your plumbing fixed or whatever. If you decide you want to go to a different school or accept a better job offer in another city, you’re probably gonna lose tens of thousands of dollars to the real estate agents when you sell. It’s not the right choice for a lot of people.
I’ve lived mostly in houses owned by landlords with less than ten properties and they were all pretty cool for the most part. Way better landlords than apartment complexes or property management companies. The biggest annoyance was surprise visits by them early on the weekend to plant flowers/bushes in the front yard, water the tree, replace edging, typical homeowner crap like that. I guess worse than that, a couple of times their situation changed and they decided to move back into the house, so they didn’t renew our lease and we had to move out. That kinda sucked but it’s their house, if they want to live in it and your lease is up, that’s the way contracts go.
All that said, property management companies and large landlords can get fucked. Regardless of housing cost, they’ve always been scumbags to deal with.
We could do market rate non profit apartment buildings. But yeah other than that it needs to go die in a fire. We are living in a crisis of our own making.
Truts me a single individual owning a home is not a problem and it isn’t what is causing housing insecurity.
It’s corporations that own thousands even millions of homes
Similar in principle to carbon emissions: yeah, people individually have a carbon footprint, but corporations and industrial activities dwarf that.
I love this community, seeing through the generational conflict bullshit.
Makes me wonder if the corporate propaganda networks are going to be in trouble because this seems to be one actual generational trend: younger generations don’t seem to trust the media like older ones did.
I’ve seen CNN as basically Fox News but with a different target audience for over a decade now. They can’t say as much stupid shit because that audience isn’t as dumb as Fox’s, but it’s pushing the same divide and conquer shit.
CNN got bought by some other Republican asshole, I forget the name. They are basically FOX News now without actually using the N word.
I like Scripps News
I’m shocked! Is this yet another article that tries to blame the average American for the housing market problems instead of residential real estate “investors” buying up all the properties to rent or use as airbnbs?
Or what about the foreign investors who are buying up land and homes with what seems to be zero oversight?
But obviously it’s the boomers who just want to live in the house they bought.
Also, y’know just the overall lack of houses. It’s not all greedy investors
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/ 10% of homes in 2022 in the US were empty
That stat by itself means nothing because
- Second homes/vacation homes of wealthy individuals
- Natural vacancy in between buyers/renters/airbnb/refurbishment etc.
- There’s no point to a vacant house in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Populations are constantly moving.
Second homes/vacation homes of wealthy individuals
The GOP’s constant gigantic tax cuts for the rich are a huge force inflating costs of houses for everyone.
It disproves the idea that there aren’t enough homes. When i was homeless person I didnt care where the house was. Second homes of the wealthy are vacant. landlords are part of the problem and are scum.
It’s the scapegoat to try and avoid the legislation that needs to happen to put a stop to this bullshit.
“Shortage of homes” created by a parasitic class of people and corporations who gobble up all the available homes
Baby boomers aren’t some evil monolith hiding in the closet waiting to steal your bag of Oreos.
Where do you propose they move to? Even if we wanted them to vacate homes, there’s an assisted living shortage (heads up, article is kind ehhhhhhhh overall) so we can’t just shove them somewhere.
Baby boomers aren’t, but capitalists are.
They’re the ones who gobble up all available real estate to manipulate everyone else with for their own benefit.
I assume that was Karashta’s intent, not Baby boomers as you deflected to.
The plan was that they sell their home and downsize into an easier to maintain condo.
Sure, if this hyper-abundance of condos exists. Unfortunately it doesn’t.
It existed 15 years ago, when millennials were starting to move out of their parents’ home.
Sure, but that’s 15 years ago and homebuilders drastically slowed down since then. Now the Boomers can’t sell their house and move somewhere cheaper screwing up a source of money for their retirement.
We’re all fucked in this mess, it doesn’t matter which generation you’re in.
What everyone is saying is that boomers were greedy. They held on to everything. Jobs, homes, they voted away our social safety nets because they wanted to keep their tax money and voted for conservatives and neo liberals.
Now the younger generation had a late start in life because of this. They got an education but couldn’t find jobs. They wanted to get a house to raise a family but they had to forfeit that whole idea because of the little savings they could make. And because raising a child in a one bedroom 500sqft apartment, or condo unit at best, isn’t ideal.
You’re directing the blame at the working class when the political system created these problems.
Who did you vote for in 2008? The neoliberal or the neocon?
2012? Neoliberal or neocon?
2020? The neoliberal or the alt-right lunatic?
2024? The neoliberal or the alt-right lunatic?
As a millennial I have a pretty bad track record by voting for all these neolibs
Bunk beds in assisted living, pack them in tight so they briefly get to experience a taste of the consequences of their generation’s gluttony before shuffling off this mortal coil. The rich won’t be affected, of course, so significant opposition isn’t likely. Through their votes and actions, they made their bed so now they get to climb up and lie in it.
Yeah? And if a person from the third world whose island is half under water because of your ‘luxurious’ lifestyle comes to you for some of that sweet justice? The average American emits 15 times the CO2 compared to someone in Tuvalu. Would you like to be put in the bed you made?
Oh you’re not the one that made the system the way it is? Well neither did the majority of “boomers”.
Whatever ailment you’re going through life right now, I hope you find a way to get through it.
This take is not from a healthy mind.
Thanks doc.
Corporate propaganda.
Obviously fuck boomers.
But we can’t afford housing because of corporations. Not other people.
In general when other people are being blamed for your problems, it’s corporate propaganda. They don’t want us working together.
Funny how corporate strategy of encouraging us to squabble with each other is the same as the predominant political strategy.
What’s funny is that some people still think there’s a meaningful difference between government and business.
Why fuck boomers? Hating a whole generation seems a little extreme
Boomers should have housing. And we shouldn’t ignore the idiosyncratic attachments that people develop to their homes. Saying “the boomers need to move so I can have a home” is no different than saying “that people group needs to move so my people group has living space.”
We can all have homes. The problem is that the corporations are incentivized to buy residential property and rent it to us. Fuck them.
Around me there are strata neighborhoods (HOA) with 3 bedroom houses with restrictions saying you have to be 55+ years of age to live there. There’s no reason other than it makes the housing cheap to purchase for older folks. Younger folk get screwed yet again. There’s no reason a 3+ bedroom house should be reserved for older people.
I could understand it if there were handicap accessible bathrooms and whatnot but they are just regular homes. Also many luxury condos with the same restrictions.
And many cities make it illegal to build smaller housing units in the areas that older people who own the larger houses live.
There is no limit to the amount of housing we can build. Investment in housing is good for everyone.
Investing in new construction and ‘investing’ in hoarding existing real estate are not the same thing.
Almost no one builds their own house.
“Old people to blame for not selling their houses or dying sooner!"
Seriously, WTF? It’s my house. The entitlement of some people…
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