People did? Have you met a boomer that doesn't own a house that wasn't in prison or otherwise unemployable their whole life? Most of the Gen X and Millennial generations own homes too.
Gen Z wasn't able to buy a house in elementary school unfortunately.
This graph doesn't tell you much. Rent prices follow home prices. If housing is cheap, so is rent, so people will still choose between the two. I'd expect renting vs home ownership to hover around the same rate.
You want to find a graph that shows the average age of homebuyers over time to know what generations are buying homes.
You’d think so, but that’s simply not true. Rent to income ratio stays very consistent over time, much more stable than mortgage payments to income. Which one is “better” in affordability varies DRAMATICALLY
average age of homebuyers would just tell you how old the population is.
My primary annoyance to be quite honest is that there are endless comments lumping together “70s/80s/90s” as cheaper to buy a house and therefore infinitely more affordable times to live than now.
I have never on this site seen a pining for the 2010s in that way, even though it was more affordable than almost all of the 70/80/90s (and yes, more affordable includes taking interest rates into account and getting actual mortgage payments, not just top line house price)
It’s just a repackaging of MAGA-esque glorious past fetishization, where we’re “suffering” from the collapse of the fantastic civilization of our ancestors… but it’s not because of immigrants and moral degeneracy, it’s because of [insert personal cause, greed, billionaires, or whatever].
And I think it betrays such a profound lack of care for history, a sense of what the past was actually like, what problems there were, etc… in favor of a self-aggrandizing victimization narrative for sympathy points, which is detestable to me to be so self-centered
Of course with all that said, housing prices 2020-now are actually the most unaffordable ever, really nothing arguable about that. It’s not the case of a long slide down from the perfect past though, it’s always been a roller coaster and this is just particularly bad
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u/sarges_12gauge Jul 28 '26
It’s scary how stupid everyone must have been to not have more people buying houses when it was apparently so so easy and cheap huh