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What kids today can't afford a house today? This is a joke right?

a detached home where i live is about $2.5 million. a 500 square foot condo is about a half million. so for kids today to be able to afford their own place, they need a pretty solid career early on and then save until they aren't kids anymore to be able to afford it.

the home in the first part of the video would be in the $6+ million range. the shithole at the end would still be $1 million.

Here's a thought, instead of adding $600 billion dollars to the US military budget, we could use some of that money to push broadband out to every home in the US.

When every struggling post-boom town has high speed internet, we just need to push the dinosaurs who resist "work from home" out of senior management positions in the corporate world and we'll have a migration towards the smaller, more remote communities, where property values are much lower.

It will mean that sprawl subdivisions will become the new slums...but that just provides incentive to bulldoze those warts off the map and return the lost farmland.

The paradigm shift would spark massive economic growth.

Naw...we need more tactical stealth fighters.

Wow. homes in Austin start around 150k depending on the neighborhood. Of course, we are one of the more expensive places to live now with all the taxes.

Kids that don't live in whatever backwater you're from

awwwwww snap

Not in decent neighborhoods, they don't...actually not at all according to Zillow.
My brother's shithole teardown <1000 sq ft 2 bed 1 bath 75 year old house just sold for over $500000.
Looking at Zillow, the absolute cheapest I see for a house in Austin (not condo, not an empty lot) is $199k for a 780 sq ft "home" over 80 years old. I think prices have gone up since you looked last.

@newtboy

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/4502-Glade-Line-Dr_Austin_TX_78744_M78660-46355

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/7203-Sir-Gawain-Dr_Austin_TX_78745_M85685-99830

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/Pacesetter-Mason_Chaparral-Crossing_4600-Kind-Way_Austin_TX_78725_P416123556673

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/15409-Armstrong-Ave_Austin_TX_78724_M88244-84238#photo0

There are more, and some of those are pending sale, but there are houses starting in that range. Not all are in sketchy neighborhoods either, just at the outskirts of Austin. Plus, a sketchy neighborhood in Austin is kind of like a nice suburb in a lot of cities.

Dude looks 40. I don't get it.

I stand corrected.

Some of those didn't even look horrible. I just did a quick Zillow search, obviously they don't have every listing, but I thought they were better than that.
I still can't believe what my brother got for his rat nest, but it is under 10 blocks from UT. Location, location, location.

I agree, a bad Austin neighborhood is like a great LA neighborhood. I lived in East Palo Alto for years, so I know bad neighborhoods. ;-)

LOL, East Palo Alto. I volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club there for a year when I lived in Mountain View. Two cops got shot and East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate ever that year. It's utterly insane how on one side of the 101 you have these multi-million dollar mansions and Stanford University and on the other side you have gangland.

Meanwhile, back on topic, when I moved to Mountain View in 2002 my rent was $800 a month for a studio apartment. The rent went up by $100 a year every year until I finally called it quits in 2007 when they wanted to charge me $1300 a month. I gave up ever actually being able to own a home in the Bay Area (let alone rent) and left in 2009.

In Japan now, and things aren't quite as bad as the Bay Area, but we've been house hunting recently and we're shocked at the disparity between what we want versus what we can actually afford, even with both us being full-time professionals. I know that 2nd place he goes to is supposed to be a joke but it's not that far off from the truth, at least as far as our experiences go. While the places we've been shown by the real estate agent are certainly habitable, they aren't particularly nice. So we're going to have to decide whether we want to live someplace not so great with the advantage being the mortgage will be paid off by the time we retire or just rent in a place we're comfortable with and wind up having to really budget hard after retirement since rent will consume a sizable portion of our pensions/social security.

Oh, that explains a lot. The closer you get to downtown and to UT, the rent/sale value rises exponentially on houses I wouldn't let my pets live in. I've seen crappy 1940's houses that are falling apart listed for 400k and up that close to UT.

Yeah, Austin is pretty tame. I live in one of the sort of 'bad' areas and we never have had any issues. The closest I've ever come to real trouble is when I walking away from a music venue in south-east Austin a few years back. Three guys asked if I wanted to buy a knife and I, like a total idiot, was like "Sorry, I might have but I spent all my cash inside the club."

It was only after finished walking to my car and left that I realized they were kind of attempting to mug me.

Edit: On the flip side though, unless you live in a district the city keeps the taxes artificially low in (IE, east Austin), you get reamed. Our house is from the late 50's and is valued at 215k, but our yearly property/school taxes run over 4k. Since they just took out another huge bond, I expect next years will be closer to 5.

I lived in EPA in the late 80's, and again in the early 90's. We heard gunfire nightly, but never had a serious problem.
We went to Mountain View from there. We paid $800 for a 2 bedroom apartment for years, then left in 96, ending up in far northern California where we could afford a decent house with 2/3 of an acre in a nice neighborhood.

My advice would be to buy what you can live with and afford, then sell and move out of the city when you retire and buy someplace cheap to live with the proceeds. You'll be way better off with that money still in your pocket rather than someone else's, and have far better options when you retire. Just my opinion, but it's working for me. Real estate has been the best investment I've ever made by far, infinitely better than the stock market has done for me (sadly I invested an inheritance in the stock market in early summer '08, and lost my shirt).

Ha! It's great when you foil a robbery by not noticing it! Good job.

Yikes! We're still taxed as if we were worth $125k, and at only 1%. We don't live in city or even town limits, so our tax rates are low. Willow says we're worth over $500k now, so I hope they don't catch on and reevaluate us any time soon. I can't afford for our taxes to quadruple.

I live about 5 miles inside the city limits, just enough to get taxed good and proper. I told my wife that once she retires from UT we are moving out asap. I'd move now but the traffic is horrible and they keep trying to fix it by adding more buses and screwing around with light rail that only goes to a few places in the city. That and turning roads we already paid for into toll roads.

It's not on par with really bad traffic like in New York or LA, but for a town this size it is brutal. Traffic in Houston moves better than it does here.

You have got to be kidding me! That's some old bullshit, turning public roads into toll roads. How do you get to own one, because it sounds like a sweet plum.

I grew up in Houston, and that traffic was insane in the early 80's and only got worse. More than once I rode my bike completely across town, +-15 miles, faster than my mom could drive.
I love where I live. Rush hour means slowing down to near the speed limit...we simply don't have traffic except at accidents and road work. It's bliss.

In terms of the UK, your average house price was under £10 000 in the 70s. If wages had increased at the same rate as house prices have increased, which is not an unreasonable request, especially if you're mocking them for not having the money, then the average wage would be £87 000. Alternatively, if house prices had increased at the same rate as wages have, the average house would be worth around £60 000. It's no good talking about people buying iPhones when that disparity exists - if anything, the iPhones help distract them from their poverty.

It's been rigged for 40 years now, bob. Who do you think a landlord/renter economy benefits more - the young or the old? You are blind to the reality of life for people just starting out.

Sooner or later, civilisation is going to have to change to account for this. You can call me a lefty all you like, but the numbers don't lie - this isn't sustainable, the cost of living does not match full time pay for a huge number of people, including necessary and skilled jobs like nurses and teachers (in the UK).

It's no longer about aspiration, or working harder at school. Average people are struggling and that should be a concern to you if you care about society at all. In fact, if you're a die-hard, card carrying, flag waving capitalist it should worry you. Landlords aren't wealth creators.

Cali real estate prices are whack, If you gave me a house out there I wouldn't move there, I'd rent it out and live somewhere else.

Decentralization is the key. To almost everything city wise..... housing, transport, modern farming etc.

Especially with cars driving themselves soon and the interwebs.


But that will never happen when your president is a real-estate agent lol. The more people you can squeeze into cities the more Trumps buildings be worth.

Driverless cars and AI in general. AI is capable in the very near future of kicking off a revolution to rival the industrial one we all learned about. Huge increase in productivity and a reduction in expenditure for large corporations that currently rely on human labour. And AI that can fix and monitor the robot workers.

Which also means unemployment without a new job to go for. But if 50% of people don't have an income, who is going to buy the stuff the robots produce? That's where universal basic income comes in. Tax AI to fund UBI which would allow people to pursue their own goals in life. Fully automated luxury communism ala star trek! Credit to Aaron Bastani for that idea.

I await someone mocking the idea of UBI, calling me a lazy idiot, saying people will turn to drugs and crime, without providing a single alternative solution to the certainty of automation and what it will do to the economy. If boardroom jockeys find out that they can get robots to do the work of 1/2 of their staff for 1/100th of the cost, 1/100th of the errors, none of the stress, illness, holiday or sleep time, do you honestly think they won't? This IS going to happen.

Meanwhile RE: housing prices - if roast chickens had increased in price at the same rate houses have, each would be £50 - it would be unacceptable. Having a place to live is equally necessary for life, so why is it acceptable and even encouraged, celebrated by some?

Educated younger people want to be where the action is, meaning places where they can advance quickly in a career they are passionate about while having a high take-home pay. They also want what their parent's generation had, which was often a home in the suburbs or at least a condo or townhouse they owned outright, to comfortably start a family.

The two things are mostly incompatible, because the work they are passionate about is typically around the cities and their parent's generation is still occupying any and all affordable dwellings in the area, including the surrounding suburbs. This wouldn't be a problem except property owners feel an incentive to actively prevent new developments which might lower their home price plus make the area more crowded/disrupted. This is partly a result of the sprawl in areas like Silicon Valley reaching its physical boundaries, so the price of land just keeps increasing to these crazy numbers like '$2mil median home sale in 2016'.

These young people can afford to rent in these areas, so they see how comfortable it is, but don't see how they could own there without a windfall of money. So they are kind of stuck hoping to make it big, but in reality just putting off either buying property where they can't follow the career they want or choosing to follow their career but watching their rent increase. This isn't a new problem, its just become more exaggerated in the last decade, and is pushing a lot of younger people to not have kids and to carry a lot of anxiety about their place in the world.

There are a lot of potential ways forward, like massively increasing government investment in transportation infrastructure to move people more efficiently by bus/train/etc., and massively scaling up internet speeds to make telecommuting more commonplace.

Anyhow, its really just younger people wanting what their parent's had, struggling really hard towards it, settling for much less, and complaining a bit to each other about it. Its just a newer problem for Americans (and places like Australia as well), where there very recently was all this space, and now its all old people's investment properties, available for rent at 400% what their mortgage is.

dud

really?????????

sounds like people are being raped.

Find a job in a decent place to live.

It's not that easy. It's pretty simple economics. If there are jobs in an area, the people have more money, therefore the house prices go up.

If you move away, you're faced with the prospect of either not working or having a commute that is both a time and money vacuum.

@TheFreak, "work from home" isn't always a solution either. I'm a software developer... I should be the poster child for work from home, and after the earthquakes in 2011, I did for a year while we had no offices. But after a while, we realised that with all the technology in the world, there's no substitute for being in a room with other people to discuss things.

i have an awesome career in an awesome place to live. it's just expensive. i got lucky whereas many are not. also, i'm not a millennial. also, almost all the places i can work are expensive metropolises (london, NY, vancouver, LA, SF).

but i still can't can't afford to buy.

I can't afford to live in the area for the council I work for! Fucking brilliant.